Character: Dana Scully
Fandom: The X-Files
Rating: PG-13
Prompt:
John Smith: We have an unusual problem here, Jane. You obviously want me dead, and I'm less and less concerned for your well being. (Mr. and Mrs. Smith) Vol 3. Week 2 on scifi_muses on LiveJournal
Setting: Season Four Episode: Never Again

Jesus, it was cold outside.

The Vietnam Memorial just barely kept out the cold, icy blast from the Potomac, ruffling Scully's red hair as she glanced out across the expanse of winter dead grass and black, reflective marble. Why did Mulder pick this place to meet? Why couldn't he have chosen a nice, warm coffee shop somewhere, or even a McDonald's. Who the hell would notice them at a McDonald's? Then again who the hell would notice them at all?

"Our contact is late." Mulder paced the sidewalk, his reflection wavering against the names etched in stone, hardly noticing the cold. Damn New Englanders, they never seemed to flinch when the temperature dipped. Scully hadn't seen snow on a regular basis till she moved to Baltimore, and while she was now much more acclimated to winter than she had been as a Southern California girl, it still could get into her bones at times. Mulder, with all of his frenetic energy hardly seemed to notice.

"I'm sure he'll be here," she murmured, more as a way to get him to stop fussing than to reassure him. "Who did you say this was again?"

"Russian immigrant who says he has information on KGB knowledge of a downed alien aircraft."

"Mmmmm." It was all the response Scully could manage as she huddled further into her coat against the January blast. Just the other day she'd been stuck in New York in the freezing rain, now she was back in DC in the cold. Scully was tired of feeling frozen, wet, tired, and overworked. Her head ached at an alarmingly frequent rate now at days, her feet were sore, and she didn't remember the last time she had a vacation just to relax. She needed someplace warm…Hawaii maybe, away from the cold and dark. They needed a case in Honolulu, at a resort hotel, where she could lay by the pool….

"Here he is," Mulder's fingers at her elbow shocked her out of her revere as in the distance a man came across the expanse of grass towards them, eyes flickering nervously over his shoulder. Not that he had anything to be nervous about. Who in their right mind would be out here this time of night in January anyway? Did they expect dark, shadowy men to be hiding in the leaf bare trees and bushes with cameras, hanging off of light poles like demented squirrels? Even the squirrels had sense enough to be hibernating this time of year. Scully wished she was hibernating and not out here chasing yet another lead to another dead end regarding some other hypothetical alien aircraft somewhere. She wondered cynically if an informant came bearing green cheese he swore was off the moon if Mulder would buy it? He just might. Hell, most of the cheese in his refrigerator at home was green…if it was cheese at all, she couldn't be sure.

Mulder greeted the newcomer with wary caution, the same, careful dance she had seen him do countless other times. This would lead into a tedious "interrogation" as Mulder called it, she usually said it was leading the witness. For the next hour she would be stuck here, listening to some other half-remembered information about some other mysterious vessel that would invariably end up sounding like a Frisbee on steroids, and she would be drug into yet another half-baked case with Mulder, drug to some other ungodly part of the world. She hadn't even had a chance to write up her notes from the Isaac Luria case, and the Civil Rights division was waiting for those. Never mind what anyone else wanted or needed when Mulder had an idea in his head.

The Luria case….poor Arial. Scully thought of the sad, broken hearted girl. Her father had been released from the hospital finally, shaken up and bruised but he would survive, like he always had. They were both survivors, Jacob and Arial. Today would have been the week anniversary of Arial's religious wedding to Isaac, married not just in law as they already had been, but in faith and in love as well. But one moment, one singular period of time, and Arial was a widow before she was even a bride. How fleeting it all was, her future, her life now altered forever by the acts of one group of misguided teenagers.

How fleeting life always seemed to be. One moment and everything could change in an instant. Just like in this place, she realized, glancing around the dark, cold slabs around them, the silent testament to the thousands of lives lost in Vietnam. Men like Nathaniel Teager and even her boss AD Skinner, who had joined the military out of duty and honor and one moment changed everything. Some were captured and never seen again. Others were left crippled and maimed, or scarred in psychological ways that still rippled through them even now, twenty years past the end of the war. And then there were the ones who had names inscribed on the walls around them, the ones who never made it home. One moment and all the promise of a generation were lost in the jungles of Southeast Asia.

How fleeting life was.

"And these unknown craft?" Mulder's droning monotone carried over the chill breeze. "Where were the majority sighted?"

They would be here a while, Scully sighed, sensing that Mulder was just hitting his stride with his so-called informant. Her attention drifted, snagged away from the thread of Mulder's meanderings towards the monument once again. All along it's length she could see, scattered here and there, small tokens and gifts left by visitors over the months since she had last visited. Teddy bears and photographs, tiny American flags, hand written notes and wilted flowers huddled on the cold pavement, tribute to those fallen. Scully couldn't even remember much of Vietnam; her happy childhood eclipsed what memories of it she did have. The families and friends of these men hadn't forgotten. Their memories clung to the black granite, visual reminders to everyone who passed by here of just who these people were, the faceless names on black granite.

Scully meandered away from Mulder and his conversation, towards the closest wing of the memorial. Her face shown pale and drawn in the blackness, and her eyes drew down to the base. A hand-written note sat propped against the wall, a simple yellow card held down by a tiny toy car. A memento of a childhood now long gone, she wondered as she read the card. A letter from a sibling to their brother now dead twenty years, the love and pain so evident in the simple word and the quiet confidence that the loss was for the greater good. And beside the message, dried, broken roses, left behind, now withered with the bitterness of the freezing, winter wind off of the Chesapeake.

The wind caught the edge of one of the crumbled petals, skittering it briefly against the sidewalk as she plucked it up between her fingers. The soft, silken smoothness of it was not leathery and fragile, the brilliant red faded to a dim brown. What had been the most lovely, brilliant of flowers had now had the life leeched out of it, the vitality was gone, passing away quickly was the fate of most flowers. Life passed and faded in moments, singular moments that changed everything, moments that passed without notice. Life that seemed to pass by without a chance for her to even catch her breath, to stop, to see what she was missing.

What was the phrase….gather ye roses while ye may? Time was flying away, and she was letting it, buried in the basement with Mulder in a morass of his personal flights of fancy, waiting for him to leap off that precipice yet again so she could drag him back up. There would be some other report to file, some other case somewhere he would want to check out, and she would go and watch life's moments pass her by.

"Scully!" She turned at Mulder's irritated call, frowning up at his impatience as his contact scuttled away into the darkness. "You done over there?"

She blinked, turning back to the small display, fingering the card left behind. "Yeah," she sighed, standing slowly as she pocketed the rose petals, slipping them carefully into her coat. Gather ye roses while ye may, indeed.