Character: Dana Scully
Fandom: The X-Files
Rating: PG-13
Prompt: Angela: Everybody starts out as strangers, Ted. It's where we end up that counts. (Four Rooms) Vol4.9.2011 on scifi_muses on LiveJournal
Setting: Season Six Episode: Tithonus

The car had the same rental smell. Her hotel had the same foreign yet lived in feel. And yet everything about this case was off, different, wrong. Scully scowled at the bed in the middle of her room and tried not to wish that Mulder was draped across it, his aquiline nose shoved in case files as he scattered sunflower seeds all across the nylon comforter.

This was a chance for her to get out of Kersh's hell. She should take it.

She could hear Peyton Ritter in the room next to her getting settled in. She wondered how long it had taken him to put down his suitcase, dig out his phone, and set up his connection to Kersh to inform him of every movement Scully made on this case. How old was he again? Perhaps twenty-six, if that, and that was giving him enough credit to allow him a few years to suck his way up to the position that Kersh saw him in. Suddenly Scully felt the weight of her nearly thirty-five years. Nearly ten years older than this kid, and he was the one telling her that Alfred Fellig was a dead end. Didn't the man have eyes in his head? If he had been Mulder…

But that was the point, wasn't it. He wasn't Mulder. And Kersh wanted her to remember that, to recall that she had been an agent before she knew Fox Mulder and that she had been promising once. Perhaps could be promising again, if she learned how to divest herself of the dead weight. For no real reason at all she glared at the wall between her room and Ritter's. Did he think he could hold a candle to Mulder? Like as not, she admitted with sad honesty. Ritter likely thought he was better. After all, he was young, he was asked personally to take this case by Kersh, and he wasn't circling the doghouse like Mulder was. In Ritter's eyes, Fox Mulder was a cautionary tale, a man who had every chance in the book and threw them all away. Of course he would find himself superior to him.

Superior to Scully….that remained to be seen. Ritter respected her just enough to acknowledge she wasn't an idiot, but clearly didn't think much of the things she noticed. And what was with him calling her "Dana"? The first time he had uttered her given name it had startled her so much she didn't correct him. And now he seemed to take full license of it, as if he had the right to. It was rare in the FBI that first names were used, a holdover from a time period when it was still the good, old, boys' club, and men always referred to each other by their last names. It just felt more professional that way, to be honest, their last names as shields against making the work too personal. Hell, Scully could count on two hands the number of times she could recall Mulder using her name. And she hardly, if ever, used his. So where did this…kid get off? It was as if he had waltzed into her life and invaded her personal space. Thank God he hadn't done that yet, or he might have lost a hand.

It was all horribly unsettling, blatantly wrong, and she found herself itching the skin under her suit coat and wishing she was back in the hated bullpen watching Mulder make buzzer beater shots at his trashcan in his own imaginary game of paper wad basketball. He would chastise her for it, she knew, even if the envious part of him would be happy she was back. He would want her on this case if for nothing else to have someone capable on it not mucking it up.

As if on cue, her cell phone rang.

"What do you got," she answered without even a greeting. Her ID had tagged Mulder's desk phone at the Bureau, and while it was late she knew he was prodding in areas he wasn't supposed to. It was what Mulder did.

"How is life with the boy wonder?" Mulder sounded disgustingly cheerful for a man she knew wanted to be on this case desperately.

"I'm wondering hw long it took for him to place a discrete phone call to the Assistant Director telling him I had focused on the strangest thing about the case." Something about being able to chatter with Mulder about the case put her at ease as she flopped on the bed, toeing off her shoes.

"When did you get into your hotel?"

"Half-an-hour ago. Why?"

She could hear Mulder's long fingers fly across his keyboard. "Took him exactly ten minutes. That's impressive."

"Ten minutes…how did you…."

"I might have set up a little something to take a peek at Peyton Ritter's email correspondence."

"Mulder, you're in enough trouble.'

"Clearly he has some relationship issues with this girl named Jessica, poor kid, maybe you can cheer him up, buy him a beer or something."

"Mulder, that's none of your business," she scolded, even if a part of her was hardly shocked and hopelessly amused at the gall he had. "What did he tell Kersh?"

"Nothing important that I can see, only that you had been debriefed by the locals. Who is Alfred Fellig?"

"No one important," she replied with more conviction than she felt. "A crime scene photographer, works freelance for the city, nothing more."

"You thought he was important enough to bring up to the locals."

"Yeah, well I thought he might have some information. He's been at all of these crime scenes."

"Could be something. After all, photographers see a lot of things."

"Maybe," she drawled, debating on what else to tell him. Should she mention the renewal forms, or the photographs, or the face that the man hadn't aged once in over forty years?

"Ritter doesn't seem to think that there is much to go on there."

"Yeah, well Ritter is also convinced he's the next J. Edgar Hoover."

This earned a snort out of her partner on the other end of the line. "Ouch, Scully. One afternoon together and already the bloom is off the rose?"

"What Rose, Mulder, he's young enough for me to have babysat him once in his life." She knew she sounded like the irascible, older agent, shaking her fist at the kids playing their music too loud down the street. "He's got his bright and shiny badge from Quantico and he knows how to use it. Let's ignore the fact I've been a field agent for nearly six years, and worked at Quantico for three before that."

"You are pulling credentials, now, he must have gotten under your skin."

Scully flushed guiltily, staring up at the ceiling. "Mulder, it's not that the kid isn't good. He is good. He's just…" What could she say? Just not "him"? "It's as if the most obvious things slip by him because he's been told what proper procedure is, and knows whatever I'm suggesting, it isn't it."

"That's likely what he has been told, by Kersh perhaps, or someone else who warned him about working with Spooky Mulder's partner." He sounded bitter and apologetic about that. "Give him some time, Scully. He might come around. You did."

From Mulder that sounded like a decided compliment, and Scully found herself smiling. "Well I don't know if I have that sort of time with him."

"Maybe…maybe not."

"What's that supposed to mean?" Mulder was sounding evasive, and Scully didn't like that, didn't trust it. She could hear the gears turning in his brain, far faster than her own leaps of logic worked.

"Don't you see what Kersh is hoping he can do?"

"Yeah, he's hoping that if I do a good job he can convince me to drop you for the sake and health of my career." The insinuation insulted Scully, the idea that she would use her helpless partner as a stepping stool to get out of the mire her job had stalled in. If she hadn't betrayed Mulder once in nearly six years, what was going to make her start now?

"It's worse than that, Scully. If you do well on this, I have a feeling I won't be your partner for very long."

His sad but fatalistic words hit her in the middle like a wrecking ball, winding her for several long moments. When she could breath again, it was to merely gasp out, "What?"

"Look, Ritter is an up and comer and he'll need an experienced hand. That's where you come in. It's an ideal situation, Scully, one you can't pass up. It's a chance to get you a new partner, to utilize your skills, and most of all to separate us for good. Assigning you to a different department did them no good the last time. Assigning you a different partner might."

"Never," she snapped, as if she could stop the FBI powers-that-be from doing whatever they wanted. They always seemed to ignore her anyway.

Her angry retort brought a chuckle out of Mulder. "Your loyalty is amazing, Scully, but I'm just warning you."

"Then I'll drop the case," she replied, suddenly mulish. "I'll go back home, get yelled at, and go back to background checks."

"No, you won't," he replied firmly, so much so that it caught Scully by surprise. Before she could lodge a protest he continued. "This is an X-file, I feel it, and someone who doesn't have their head up their ass needs to do this. It's got to be you. I'll just hang back here and poke around and help with whatever background information I can get. I'll play your wingman for once."

"When was I ever your wingman," she snorted. "Mulder…"

"Scully, trust me on this. If you leave it to Ritter, it will go to hell. Show them that you are a class agent with good skills and who understands this work. And maybe they might just take you seriously enough that someone will give some of this credence."

"Why didn't they just pass this off to Diana Fowley?" The words escaped her even before she registered them, and for once she wished she hadn't said them.

"Cause they don't see it as an X-file," he replied as if he hadn't heard the snippy suggestion. "You see the truth though. Stay on this case, Scully, if for nothing else because they need you on it."

How could she argue with the weight of Mulder's mission in life? The truth was out there, and she was the only one who could get it. She sighed, sinking into the pillows and wishing that she had never agreed to this. "Are you going to behave yourself on your end?"

"Define 'behave'?"

It was no use. "Right, just don't let Kersh catch you snooping in Ritter's email, okay?"

"That is assuming Kersh cares enough to pay attention. Give me a call if you need any information, I can spot the things that Ritter will overlook."

"I will," she assured him and found herself desperately missing him in that moment. Six years he had been her partner; there hadn't been anyone else. He had at least had Krycek for his brief stint as Mulder's partner, for better or for worse. And he had other partners before Scully. But Mulder had been it, her one and only investigative partner. And it felt odd being with someone else.

The same idea seemed to occur to him too. "Be careful while you are up there, Scully. I'm not there to watch your back."

"Yeah, I will."

"Grab a hot dog for me while you are there too, the kind with extra onions and mustard?"

So much for the moment, "Sorry there's no baseball now, else you'd have me go to a Yankees game too."

"Don't mock me, Scully, one day I'll get you there."

"Right," she chuckled; realizing that one of Mulder's beloved, New York hot dogs actually did sound good at the moment. "I'll keep you posted. Now go home."

"Yeah," he muttered before hanging up without a goodbye. Scully sighed, clicking her phone off and staring at it mildly. She hadn't considered what this case meant beyond the obvious. She had only thought of it being another assignment from Kersh, another way for him to irritate her and drive a wedge in between her and Mulder. She hadn't really considered that it could lead to something so drastic. She glanced at the wall between rooms again, knowing Ritter was on the other side. Was that why he felt himself able to be so familiar with her? Did he expect that at the end of the day the two of them would be partners after all?

"Not likely," she muttered as she tossed her phone on the bed, staring up at the blank ceiling above her.