Character: Dana Scully
Fandom: The X-Files
Rating: PG-13
Prompt: Cameron: He'll keep calling me; he'll keep calling me until I come over. He'll make me feel guilty. This is uh... This is ridiculous, ok I'll go, I'll go, I'll go, I'll go, I'll go. What - I'LL GO. Shit. (Cameron-Ferris Bueller's Day Off) Vol 3. Week.31 on scifi_muses on LiveJournal
Setting: Season Five Episode: Chinga
AN: Sorry for the delay, y'all, between school, and a wedding, and finals, and strep throat…yeah, had to take a bit of a break. This story I think is a product of that in many ways and perhaps speaks more to my mental state at the moment than I like to admit.
Personally she was more of a Chopin fan, but Debussy was nice in a pinch.
Her bath was a froth of foam, frost white as she soaked and scented of lavender. Her head coached against a folded washcloth. By the bath lay a book, bookmarked and unread. She lacked the candles she would normally have in her bath, and she didn't have a good glass of wine, but for what it was worth a nice long soak in a bath was precisely what the doctor ordered.
Good thing she had that fancy, Stanford medical degree to order herself to do such things.
When was the last vacation she had that didn't involve a family event? Scully couldn't remember one. Had it been since she joined the FBI? She took one trip with Jack once right after she went to work at Quantico, the two of them spending their shared birthday weekend in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey. It had snowed fourteen inches that weekend, and she had spent most of it shivering under a blanket with him, with occasional bouts of languid lovemaking in somewhat successful attempts to keep each other warm. But Jack was dead now. And it had been a long time since she had a weekend that allowed her to stay in bed naked with anyone, let alone soak in a bath.
Seven years without a vacation was a long time.
Scully wanted to feel guilty about the fact. She hated to admit it, but a small part of her brain did feel guilty that she had taken off for a long weekend away. It was the sick, strange part of her that felt it was necessary to dance attendance on her phone and wait for Mulder to call her from wherever he was with whatever strange information or half-brained theory that came to mind. Even now she considered grabbing her cell phone just to keep it near…just in case.
No…no, she wouldn't do this. She wouldn't give in to the Catholic part of her soul, chastising her for not giving away even this. How many weekends had she given the man, how many sleepless nights had she had while he knocked at her door, dragging her off to Timbuktu? No, she could have this weekend; she would give herself this weekend, even if it killed her.
Why did it take her nearly dying anyway to convince herself to take any time off? Perhaps she should look into that with Karen next time she had a therapy session? Seven years since her last vacation, and all it took was her nearly losing her battle with cancer and the death of a daughter she didn't know she had to convince her that the time was right for a little R&R by herself. There was a reason she chose Maine. It was close enough for her to drive to, and yet far enough away she couldn't talk herself out of it. She needed this after everything, after all the lies and half-truths, after suffering yet more devastating losses. She needed to do this.
And yet she was still rationalizing this to herself? What in the world was wrong with her?
Exasperated, Scully lifted one toe towards the faucet, flipping on the hot water to heat the cooling suds around her, determined to think of something other than work or Mulder. That was hard, she was the one who decided to pick her partner's home area to vacation in, filled to the gills with the sort of strange, weird, crazy people and stories that set Mulder's imagination going. No wonder he believed in aliens when he grew up in an area where people believed that towns up the coast were inhabited by vampires and neighbors assumed that eligible, young, attractive women were witches. Scully snorted as she sank deeper into the suds. What if she mentioned she was a doctor and an FBI agent? Perhaps they would pull the stakes out and light the barbecue? It was an unfair assessment to be certain, and she chided herself at the cynicism of the thought. But honestly, no sooner had she driven into town than an X-file smacked her square in the face. All she wanted was some provisions for her room, nothing more, and she stumbled onto crying people and a man with a knife in his face.
If Scully didn't know better, she would have said Mulder planted it. But he had been the one to warn her about the strangeness of Maine. It had seemed so bucolic on the website, so nice, so relaxing and inviting. It was as far away fro the traffic, noise, and hectic pace of Washington as she could imagine. She had come there wit the idea that for four days she would have no paperwork, no frantic phone calls, no dead bodies, no strange mysteries that defied any logic laid before her. And she still did. Yes, she still did, if she chose. She wasn't on this case, she wasn't even consulting, and Scully had done what she could the day before with the sheriff. She had answered his questions, consulted with Mulder, bid him farewell, and had spent a pleasant evening dining alone at a small, intimate restaurant. And today she was going to soak. And when she was done with that, she was going to dress in clothes that nowhere close to resembled one of her business like suits. And then she was going to take a walk along the beach, perhaps take her book, find a nice place for lunch, and settle with a sandwich and iced tea and while away the afternoon hours doing nothing at all.
She would leave her cell phone. And she would pointedly ignore any overture made by any man in a black and white vehicle concerning any strange case of hysteria at a local grocery store. She was going to enjoy this vacation if it killed her.
As if the world could sense her determination in enforcing her own relaxation, in the outer room she could hear fate mocking her. The hotel phone by her bed began to clang with shrill rings, with the sort of insistence that bespoke of a bored partner somewhere down in Washington, curious as to what her brand new sheriff friend had turned up on the "case" the two of them were on. It would likely be followed by a casual discussion on ideas he had pondered sometime during the night while watching busty women do things that she was certain Mulder hadn't done in years, and then a nonchalant suggestion that he come up there on the next flight to help her out.
No…she wasn't going to do this. And she certainly wasn't going to give him the satisfaction.
From out of the mountain of bubbles Scully raised one foot and with as much firmness as her small toes could manage slammed the bathroom door on the insistent ring. Feeling satisfied, she smiled and hummed as she drifted back into the warmth. She was going to enjoy this vacation, she was going to like it, and she was going to do it come hell or high water.
Why was there a little voice in her head laughing at her right now?
