From: Maureen B. Ocks Date: 19 Apr 2001 01:38:35 GMT Subject: NEW: The Club Car Lounge (1/2) by Maureen B. Ocks Source: atxc The Club Car Lounge by Maureen B. Ocks Maureen_B_Ocks@yahoo.com Disclaimer: Fox Mulder, Dana Scully and all other familiar X Files characters belong to Chris Carter, 1013 Productions and FOX. No copyright infringement intended. Archive -- Spookys and Ephemeral OK, everyone else, sure, just tell me and keep my name with it. Spoilers: Sixth Extinction, all things and a very passing (very, very passing) reference to a previous story of mine called "Office Politics". You don't need to read that story to get through this one. Keywords: No, I'll pass. Author's notes at the end. ----- The secret of health for both mind and body is not to mourn for the past, not to worry about the future, or not to anticipate troubles, but to live the present moment wisely and earnestly. - Buddha ----- The Club Car Lounge Georgetown April 14, 2000 11:30pm I didn't see much of her this week. Monday was her day to do a guest lecture at Quantico. At least I hope that's why she ran out of my place at 5am. She needed her notes, Powerpoint slides and her "I'm Dana Scully and you're not" business suit and four inch heels. None of those were at Casa de Mulder, even if it was closer to Quantico. Tuesday was budget meetings. She left early -- Daniel died just after lunch. Wednesday was my day as instructor at Quantico. It was a trade off with Skinner last year -- I wanted to get Scully a better office than my guest chair, he wanted us to show some positive "face time" with the bureau higher ups. If Scully would give a general overview of forensic science in field work to the Quantico trainees and I'd do the same with profiles, Scully would have a nice office on the fourth floor. Seemed like a no-brainer to me. Speaking of brains, Thursday had me requalifying. Miraculously, I'd been back to work for six months since my "viral infection". At least that's what it says in my personnel file. Skinner and Scully made damn sure that my "illness" was not defined as neurological -- not one mention of hearing voices and passing ESP tests. When I proved to the FBI that not only was I sane but I could fire my weapon properly, I returned to Hoover to find that Scully was gone for the weekend. A memorial service for Daniel was being held at the National Cathedral Friday morning. No, she didn't want company and yes, she planned to take the day off. But she did want company tonight for a nightcap -- out on the town on a Friday night. We could almost be a normal couple. Well, except for my presence in the relationship. I took a cab over -- if I'm lucky she'll take one with me to my apartment tonight. If I'm really lucky, I'll take one home from her apartment Sunday afternoon. Since I didn't see her when I arrived, I found a nice corner of the bar with my own bowl of pretzels. Just as the bartender returns with my Sam Adams, a waiter approaches me. "Fox Mulder?" I nod. He hands me a business card. Scully's business card to be exact, with her doctor's scrawl on the back: "Some investigator you are." I ask the waiter, who seems far more interested in the female bartender than a quality patron like me, for directions to the card giver. He points down the row of booths. God, I hope she didn't tip him for this service. As I walk down the bogus train car setting, I see a black leather jacket and a pair of clunky black heels. Sadly, they belong to a brunette with a henna tattoo around her neck and a bad smelling Indian cigarette. I find Scully, with the same black leather jacket and clunky black heels in the second to last booth. I wonder for a moment how she would look with that henna tattoo. "I was supposed to find you back here?" "When I first met you I was told you could find anything." "It's hard to live up to the legend." I notice she's nursing a scotch. "How was your day?" "I could have lived without the phone message on my machine from Assistant Director Skinner, left at 4:20pm, warning me to watch your back on Monday." I shrug my shoulders. "You are out of my sight for one day. One day. When you are away from the office, I'm sure Assistant Director Skinner does not have to leave messages about my behavior." She is making fun of me. Mock anger is one of her more appealing ways of teasing me. "It wasn't my fault." "It never is. Mulder, when you were a little kid, did your report card ever say 'works well with others'?" "No. The teachers were afraid of me." "Not surprised." "What did Skinner say? By the way, did I mention this is all his fault?" "He did mention that he made a tactical error." "No, Assistant Director Kersh made the tactical error." "What did he want?" "One of his agents was hand picked by a friend on the Hill to work on a case. The guy was getting nowhere so Kersh contacted several other A.D.'s asking for help. He wanted each A.D. to bring an agent that could add something to the case." "And Skinner brought you." "Only after Kersh wrote on Skinner's memo that he would prefer you and I be left out of this." "Mulder, the last time you were excluded from a meeting, we lost..." "I mentioned that to Skinner who assured this was pulling a well connected idiot, I mean agent, out of the fire. That said, I did check the smoke detectors before I left." "What happened?" "Well, Skinner and I were a little late to the meeting...." "..because you can't be thrown out if you're the last one in." "See, it is that kind of spot on analysis that was missing from the meeting. By the way, you never asked who the well connected agent was. You worked with him once." I could see her thinking and decided to toss in a hint. "If I wasn't on such thin ice at the time, I think I could have gotten him fired. Or at least transferred to background checks." "Peyton Ritter." "I told them at the meeting we could have used you there." I take a long swig of my beer. "Several times as a matter of fact." "Mulder." "Ritter, it seems, is the godson of Senator Peyton from Kentucky. Even named after him." "So how did you endear yourself to them?" "I noticed something that any first year investigator would have caught." "Did any of the other investigators -- first year or other -- on the case notice it?" "Well no, but that's neither here nor there." "Skinner told me he was putting you in for a commendation. I'm guessing they caught him." "I made a logical suggestion and although Kersh thought it was a monumental waste of time, he was going to prove what a liability I was to the meeting by assigning a man to my course of investigation." "And they caught him." "Karma is an amazing thing." Scully smiled a little and toasted me. "Congratulations, Mulder. Another six months of stares and whispers in the cafeteria." "Food sucks there anyway." The waiter obviously dragged himself away from the bartender long enough to check on us. Scully orders another scotch, I ask for a bowl of pretzels. "So now that we reviewed my day, how was yours?" "Maggie called just before I was leaving this morning. Her mother made a surprise appearance at the funeral home last night. She reacted badly to seeing a woman Daniel was dating five or six years ago and another one she suspected he had an affair with after we..." she waved her hand dismissively. "Maggie was concerned what my presence would do." "So she asked you not to go." "She asked me to do the right thing. I sat in my car until I saw all the family arrive. I ran in just before the service began and sat in the back." "I would have gone with you." "No, I needed to do this. It was a nice service. Daniel kept teaching all these years. There were doctors from all over the country, all over the world really, offering condolences, reminiscing about how they were inspired by him. He was a great teacher and a terrific doctor." "Were you able to make..." I want to say clean get away but that was wrong. Married teachers and doctors shouldn't be dating on their students. I rephrase my question, "Were you able to avoid his ex-wife?" "Yes, as the ceremony ended, Barbara and Maggie left through one door. I saw a few people from school near another and went to say hello." "Was that OK?" The waiter returned with a bowl of trail mix and Scully's scotch. "Did you enjoy seeing your old classmates?" And please, I hope they were all women or if one of them was a man, he was fat, bald, married and had like six kids. "Yes. Shockingly, there was a Starbucks nearby so we all went there for a post-mortem, so to speak." "Is everyone still in medicine?" "No. Shelia Murphy went to law school right after med school and is now the chief counsel for North Georgetown. She knew I was with the FBI because, well, she was made aware of my presence after you disappeared from there last fall." "Fear of lawsuit?" The waiter returned with our drinks. "Just didn't want have a class reunion while I was reading the riot act to anyone I could get to listen." She picked up her new scotch. After a small sip she said, "Tim Gibson and Pete Russo are both practicing in the area, Arlene Roberts was the surprise." "Moved from medicine to fortune telling." "No. Arlene was a house on fire in school. She was first in our class, brilliant. I figured she'd be the head of pediatrics at Hopkins or Children's in Pittsburgh by now." "No?" "No. Married an ophthalmologist just after graduation, had twin boys two years later, a girl eighteen months after that. She lives on one of those big places a few miles from you." "She happy?" "I think so. She seems to have channeled all that energy and ambition into her family. Her home is actually a farm house and sounded like something Martha Stewart would envy. The kids were in every school activity imaginable, she baked her own bread, made her kids' costumes for the school's Passion Play next week and is trying to decide whether her folks' summer home in Rehoboth Beach or renting a place of their own for a few weeks in Cape May was a good vacation." "What do you think of that?" "Well, I've been to Rehoboth and liked it a lot. I'm not even sure where Cape May is." "It's in Jersey and that wasn't my question." "Well Dr. Mulder, what is your question? And am I going to be charged for this session? And that time you spent not being able to find my table shouldn't count against my fifty minutes." "Excuse me?" Busted. "'What do you think of that Scully?', 'Was that OK Scully?', 'That wasn't my question Scully?'" I have to admit she was less cute mocking me now. "I am really OK with this." "It couldn't have been easy and I would have liked to have been there for you." "It wasn't easy, but it wasn't that hard Mulder. And yes, you being there would have been nice but I needed to do this." "You've said that twice." "Thanks for noticing, Sigmund." "I'm not a Freudian." "If you have a question, Dr. Mulder, ask it." "Last weekend seemed like a major event and we haven't talked." "We never talk. We're famous for our non-talks. You and I have volumes of things we never talk about." I think she's playing with me. I hope she is. "I just...are you happy?" The waiter, who gives a new meaning to bad timing, comes back to check on drinks. I order another beer since this is probably going to be a long night. Scully is at least happy with her scotch. x-x-x Continued in part 2 x-x-x Part 2 x-x-x "Happy with my career or just happy?" "Either, both." "Happy with work, yes, mostly. I know you were disappointed that I didn't want to look at crop circles but Mulder, even you've said that's crap." "Agreed." "Then why did you want to go?" "We were talking about you being happy." "Answering my question would make me happy. Mulder, why did you want to go?" Part of me is shocked that it took Scully this long to figure this out but we haven't been around each other much this week. "Tell me if you are happy, with your work, with your life and with me and I'll tell you about crop circles." Scully is saved again by the waiter with my beer. The waiter wanted to know if we wanted anything else but I thought telling him to go away for an hour was ultimately inappropriate. "In order, I'm happy at work though I'm lost about where we are going. Since you got back to work last fall, we have taken every case, we've done everything Skinner asked even if there were good reasons not to. We spent as much time in California in February as we did in D.C. I just don't understand why we're not even taking a breath between cases anymore." She looked at me for an answer but I still wanted her to talk, "Your life? You happy there?" She took a hand full of trail mix and popped it into her mouth. She washed it down with about half her scotch. "I've been cancer free for two and one-half years, I was shot fifteen months ago and was out of the hospital and back at work in six weeks. I survived an attack in your apartment, survived one in my mine. I can think of a half a dozen times I've been in danger and yet, I'm still here." "While I assume you are happy with your survival, you didn't answer the question. Are you happy with your life?" "Daniel asked me if I had everything I wanted." "Do you?" "I told him I want the things I am supposed to want." "Is there anything you could have..." "Are there things I want, Mulder? Yes. Are they things I can have? I'm not sure." I'm not quite sure what to say. I fiddle with my beer for a moment. "What would you like that you can't have?" I already know the answers to some of these questions, most of them go back to all she's lost with me. She stares at the bottom of her scotch glass, "You know that answer." "The 'can't' can change there. You have other options." "And I think about that. But in the last year and a half I almost lost my life three times, almost lost you and I'm not up to losing that right now." "Where does Daniel fit in with those near losses?" "When I met him..." she shifts a little in her seat and waved her hand, changing direction midstream. "You're like him, the good part of him." "OK, I think." "When I was in high school and college, if I had a boyfriend, they were smart, but I was the better student. And that's the way it was treated -- here's Dana the future doctor, this is Dana, she pulled a 4.0 this semester. It was..." "Being put on pedestal." "Absolutely. And my parents, Bill was the good son, Charlie the cocky good son, Melissa the flower child and I was the student." "There are worse reputations you could have." "Oh agreed. But with Daniel, for the first time in my life all that was challenged. The assumption was that I was a smart girl, now prove it. Everyone before that took it as gospel fact, Daniel made me prove myself." Scully finishes her drink, "You make me prove myself." "Is that a bad thing?" Her eyes narrow. "Not asking as Dr. Mulder, asking as myself." "It is exhilarating, frustrating, annoying, difficult sometimes, easy other times." "But not bad." "No." She signals to the waiter for another drink. "And I think maybe that's one of the things I learned from this. Another is that maybe it isn't fate, or God, or anything, maybe I'm where I am because this is where I want to be. And with who I want to be." I smile, since I'm hoping I'm the who. Glad I took the cab over after all. "If I'm like the good parts of him, what about the bad?" "Daniel or you?" "Either, both." "After we, after it ended, I found out there was someone like me every year when he was teaching. A bright young doctor in training who adored the brilliant and charming Dr. Waterston as much as he loved being adored. You are almost the complete opposite." "I'm all for being adored." I joke as the waiter returns with a fresh scotch. She chuckles, "No, you're exactly the opposite. You are the brilliant and occasionally charming Fox Mulder who loves being mocked and scorned almost as much as he loves to mock and show scorn for his detractors. I'm sure you were beaming in that meeting today, not because you were smart and you were right, but because they all were wrong." When did she become the shrink here? "Anything else?" "You both are selfish but not in a cruel way. Great men, great minds, great contributions to be made. Daniel was a brilliant doctor, an inspiring teacher, there are probably a thousand terrific doctors out there because of him. So if he has his little affairs with a few of his women staffers, students, acquaintances, isn't he owed?" "And me?" "You're brilliant, your mind works in ways that even those who don't like you respect. You've found missing kids, stopped serial killers, saved who knows how many people. So if you are snotty to superiors and blow off meetings, break protocol, dump what the FBI wants to do for what you want to do, well, you're Mulder." She takes a long sip of her drink. "Not a bad thing, you're a good man, maybe after my father the best man I've ever known, but ..." The odd thing is I really don't disagree. "But..." "Actually, no but. Wait, there is one. When I was with Daniel I knew on some level that it would end and probably end badly. And it did." "But?" "But I don't think that way about you, about us. When I was worried about getting involved with you before, I thought because if it ended, I'd miss you. Miss being, working with you." "Now?" "I can't imagine not being with you, not working with you." Scully raises her glass in another little mock toast, "So, now that we've reviewed my reason for being here, would you like to explain why we were going to go to London seven days ago?" "There was the whiff of a case in a place where I actually have some good memories, where I had some fun. I thought..." "You thought it would be great to have a weekend in London on the FBI." "I never put in the expense report." "Mulder!" "It was the only way I figured I could get you to go." "Excuse me?" Scully is whispering now. That's not good. "You could have asked." "Scully, would you like to take a weekend trip to London?" I lean in. "Be honest, your answer would have been no." "You don't know that." "Fine, I know next week is Easter but week after that, let's go." "Mulder, I don't..." "No Scully, you won't. That's why I presented it as a case. For Christ's sake I think I told Max Fenig crop circles were crap, did you honestly think I wanted to go alone?" "I thought if I said no, you'd stay." "All the volumes of things we don't say to each other." "You want to go to London with me?" "Someday." "Any other plans I should know about?" "I'd like to see the Orioles get their asses handed to them by the Yankees in a couple of weeks. We're going to LA next month for that movie disaster, I want to have some fun out there." "Then?" "Take it from there. Figure out what fate, God, karma, Skinner or anyone else with a little juice has in store for us." She signaled for the check with a smile. "Sounds good to me. You doing anything tonight?" "Maybe taking a cab home" "How about taking me home?" Lucky me. # # # The End x-x-x Author's Notes: This story has been sitting on my hard drive for over a year. Scullyfic had a day of bringing out your half-written stories and showing them. I looked at this story for that but never posted it since I finished it while I was proofreading it. Thank you to the person who suggested "Resurrection Day". This one is for you if you like it; if you don't, it is all my fault, I'm sorry. Some of the topics --plans, babies, Kersh, etc. -- were all written before Mulder took his interplanetary tour, Kersh was brought back and Carter retrofitted Scully's pregnancy into seasons six or seven. The Club Car Lounge is actually a bar in NY's Lower East Side. I saw the name (and perhaps stopped by for a beverage) and thought it just sounded cool. Sadly, it isn't set up like a train car. Finally, a Club Car beverage for Shari, a wonderful woman and a joy to know. Shari did a great job once again following the dancing tenses and reminding me that contractions are our friends. And remember kids -- keywords bad, feedback good. Maureen_B_Ocks@yahoo.com ---------- Scully: "I just came up with a sick theory, Mulder." Mulder: "Ooh, I'm listening!" ---------- My hideous little corner of the web: http://members.tripod.com/~Maureen_B_Ocks/mobocks.html --------- To reply, remove "spamsux".