a breath of the morning, I keep forgetting the smell of the warm summer air [OPEN]

[starbuckaroobanzai]

WHO: Dana Scully and YOU
WHERE: Around Heropa. Feel free to assume a particular location if desired.
WHEN: August 7th
WHAT: Soul-searching has to be done. Plans have to be made. All of these things should absolutely be intruded upon.
WARNINGS: None at the moment. Will update if necessary.

[The humid heat that hangs heavy in the air dredges the sense-memory of bare feet in damp sand. Not so very long ago, Dana Scully was standing on a beach in Côte d'Ivoire, waves lapping languidly at her ankles, staring down at the impossible. There, in the tidal pool, an expanse of gleaming metal, intricately inscribed with secret truths she'd never for a moment anticipated. Now she's here. There is a weight suspended between these two facts, a pendulum thought: she's tried so hard to craft the discipline necessary to avoid drawing hasty conclusions, but all the same she sees a significance in the temporal proximity of these events. If nothing else something grand, arch, universal -- she resists the term supernatural on the grounds that it's nothing but the yet-to-be-explained natural, but then, what else could serendipity be judged?

It's too soon to gather threads of intention and frankly too improbable to even bother trying. There are bound to be better angles of approach, she's just got to position herself such that she can see them.

At the moment the task seems insurmountable. Standing on this street, here and now, she can't discern a starting point, much less a path to follow. Her feet carry her along the sidewalk. Then as now there are some things that don't change, at least: walking has always helped to clear her head.

Some things remain clear: she'll have to play the game. She's always had to play the game, ever since the pieces began to fall into place, ever since she walked into that basement office and decided, at a glance and on principle, to become the challenger and the defender. She wouldn't destroy Fox Mulder's career out of hand because she had respected him, in the distant way one respects a reputation. Regardless of what he'd believed and how absurd she'd thought it to be, she respected his drive and his integrity and it had lead her into dark places. It had lead her to learn, out of necessity, how to fight the FBI from within. She'd clung to her position for so long after so much had been taken from her, fought for it tooth and nail, and much as it chafes her, she recognises that she has to do the same thing now. She has to establish her integrity to the point at which it becomes unquestionable, and that means taking the bit between her teeth.

It's abhorrent. The thought brings a frustrated tightness to her chest, keeps her head high and her shoulders tense. She's tugging at the reins already. She'll need the resources, all the same. That's how it's always been.

If this thing can be unwound, based on all she's seen thus far, it'll have to be from within. Even with the resources provided to her by the FBI, the Consortium was nigh unto impenetrable, and they didn't have -- to the best of her knowledge -- the ability to steal people away across... what? The boundaries of universes? Questions she hasn't pondered for years swim to the forefront of her mind. She had, as Mulder is so fond of reminding her, once upon a time written her senior thesis on the subject of time travel. The possibility of paradox necessitates a branching of universes. Maybe some of those universes exist anyway.

Her feet, unfortunately, don't carry her quite as far as her thoughts. She still finds herself here, in this new city, tracing a meandering path through unfamiliar places, as though she might find some spark of inspiration here, buried like the ship was buried in shifting sands, revealed only for her to read and understand.

Some truths are not meant for you.

As she passes the steps of a church, Scully pauses, gazing up at the unassuming building in contemplation, as though drawn. The pull is harder to resist when she's already considering kneeling.

Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been a year since my last confession.

When asked, as she would be asked, what she had carried in with her to confess, there would only be one crime to reveal, buried beneath the cross that rests on its fine gold chain at her scratched, bruised throat: that she has seen the incredible, that she has watched dead men rise and immortal, self-evident truths slowly die, but her most egregious failing, of all the weaknesses she has shown in the face of impossible things, is that she did not fight these people who stole her here to the last of her. Given that, if it's true, what does it matter if she says as much aloud?

Slowly, Scully turns away and walks onward.]

Comments

[mmiab]

[ there's something to be said about the length of days in this place. time ticks by as ever it has, of course it does, and universal time remains unchanged, steady and constant and churning and pressing and that's fine, that's all fine, but these days are long and growing longer. it's something undeniable, something he's absolutely certain of - the longer he stays, the longer the days. this city is quiet and dull when safe outside of emergency: the technologies were quirkily interesting to begin with, but in the end 22nd century science in a 20th century backdrop with a 21st century timestamp still only covers him for a few centuries. it's nothing compared to the everything he's used to having, and it's small.

the Doctor doesn't do small. limit, rather, that's what he doesn't do. were he alone he might fly, disappear off across the world at least, even if this one planet at this one time is as microscopic as an atom in the scheme of what he could be seeing, and he'd do it government be damned... but he's got ties now. biggest of all, he's got a responsibility now, a responsibility to not leave her alone in a universe not her own without her choosing. for once it wasn't him who brought her here, but it is him she looks to for getting out, and he hasn't done that yet, has he?

he should be able to do that. he can always do that. but this place saps at the spirit just as much as it saps at the ability and he hasn't got them out yet, the TARDIS hasn't found her way through, and he's beginning to think they're lost.

one day soon he'll have to start doing something about that. for now, it's likely safer he doesn't. (is it complacency to wait for your guardian angel to sweep you up out of the depths of— hah... this place is no hell. then again, he's had better fun in hells.)

days have been a bit of a jumbled blur of trying his best to eat up the time and musing over the impossible indigestion it gives him. today is one of the latter days, or perhaps an interlude in one of the former, and it finds the Doctor wandering in search of something to do, someone to save, a cat in a tree, anything. instead, what he finds is someone else thinking just as hopelessly as he himself is (you know the signs of a working mind when you yourself have been living them for centuries), and the sight of her brings a little leap of something not far from hope.

and so the lost flock.

never, never has he been anything better than "poor" in regards to the art of helping himself. he just can't do it, not in any sense, but especially in the sense of holding back. and so, as per his pattern, he just can't help himself when his feet pick up their dreary pace and take him in a purposeful walk towards the woman he'd seen, looking to be headed right by her until—

his sonic "slips" out of his pocket, crashes to the ground just a metre or so ahead of her intended course, and the Doctor drops into a crouch to pluck it up, head lifting immediately to train eyes in on the approaching woman, grin already in place. ]

Hah. It's official. I get clumsier on any day ending in a Y.

[starbuckaroobanzai]

[Scully notices his approach, noting him in the absent, habitual way in which she keeps track of all passers-by. It's not something to which she's always been wont, this slant-watchfulness, but time -- slow, ticking ever onward, dragging her along with it -- and experience have changed that. Any given person might be, is, capable of too much. It's too soon here, in this strange place, to worry about the likes of Phillip Padgett, about the kind of person who is more stranger to her than she to him, following and watchful, imagining... she'd read his manuscript, his novel, and felt the hand of its serial-killer antagonist wiggling its way past her sternum towards her heart.

This isn't like that. She doesn't suspect these sorts of things, or in truth much of anything at all of the man who approaches. It's only the possibility that has her slowing her step as he kneels, watching with a distant, detached curiosity as he picks up a device she doesn't recognise, a trinket. It doesn't quite pique her curiosity -- it isn't a hovering automobile. Normally, in fact, she'd be perfectly content to move on, and so says the small, practiced smile she adopts in response to his words. It's polite, clearly something she's studied, which implies a familiarity with the politics of professionalism, and she knows it. Her encounter with the aforementioned Padgett had taught her exactly how much of herself she reveals without meaning to.

Something stops her from stepping neatly around him and carrying on her way, from drifting back to her thoughts so neatly. Maybe it's the half-familiar hint of scapegrace, even if the stranger's long limbs are more ungainly than Mulder's, less given to endurance runs and basketball or the pursuit of a suspect through darkened streets. Maybe it's the accent -- he must be nearly as far from home as she is. Or maybe some part of her, buried beneath the faint annoyance, would like someone to talk to, even if it is just small talk.]

Far be it from me to suggest that that you've been anything less than rigorous, but you looked just fine to me, up until you didn't.

[The smile becomes slightly more genuine, and though it hasn't been cold, it's still not excessively warm.]

Might be too early to establish a trend.

[mmiab]

[ and just like that, easy as pie, he's in - and the pretence drops. you don't need it once you've broken the ice, do you? that's the great thing about a white lie: nobody minds them, many see through them, and it doesn't matter if you shed them like a second skin a second later since there's no real confidence to shatter anyway. the Doctor makes a habit of wielding white lies, he's a being of white lies, and this one isn't anything he's got any intentions to drag out.

his wide grin widens further, his shrug emphatic, and the sudden artful flick of his wrist that sends the former object of his butterfingers flipping up into the air only to be snatched quite cleanly out of it puts an easy lid on the whole thing. ]

I don't know. I've had a lot of Y-ending days.

[ tongue in cheek: for as many as he's had, that trend absolutely hasn't been established, no.

successfully shoehorned in, the Doctor's brows raise and his head tilts in the direction she'd been walking (shall we?) and he doesn't bother waiting for any signal of assent before starting onwards, still half turned so he can halt if she doesn't follow, words an idle chatter as though they hadn't just met for the first time less than thirty seconds ago. ] As they go, in my experience, Thursday isn't a bad one for a walk.

[starbuckaroobanzai]

[At the feat of minor dexterity Scully finds her suspicions hardening, narrowing to a point. She's not as receptive as most to white lies, though the open and playful rejection of one here might normally put her more at ease, here, where she's already off-balance, it doesn't quite. What about her attracted his attention? She's accustomed to the ill-intentioned and the annoying at best, the actively dangerous at worst. Donnie Pfaster tried to pick up a woman in his night class by feigning forgetfulness. Hardly two days later Scully was tied up in his closet listening to him run the bath in which he was going to kill and dismember her.

This, again, isn't like that, but it does grate on some unconscious nerve. Her heartbeat, however fractionally, quickens. She still follows him. If she hadn't had an attraction to things that might be bad for her she'd certainly never have been drawn to the FBI.

He still gets an askance look as she quickens her pace to meet his, an almost unconscious gesture that engenders no visible irritation, as though she's quite simply used to tagging along after someone much taller.

Whether or not she can trust him has already been established as suspect, but there are a number of ways to test the water and a bit of honest venting is hardly the worst of all of them.]

I'm more concerned with what happens when I stop walking.

[For a moment she entertains the idea of never stopping, purchasing a pair of functional shoes with what money she does have and walking until she can't. Taking food and shelter where she can. A place is best assessed by the kindness of its strangers, but also the brutality of its murderers. She is, if she chooses to stay, to accept the offer made, in a position to see that, too. Maybe a lot more.

There's a long pause in which she seems to want to say more, but instead gives the middle distance a hard stare. She swallows.]

I'm afraid of what happens when I stop walking.

[If he's from here, a native of this world, she wants him to know that. He wants him to know her anger, her hurt, how much she aches not just for herself but for the people left behind. Mulder, poor Mulder, must be searching. Blaming himself, as he always does. Her poor mother, who has lost one daughter already to the darkness Scully has taken it upon herself to occupy. She wants him to ache for them too, if he's implicit in this, and if he isn't, maybe he'll understand.]

[mmiab]

Ah. [ he knows. he knows that one, knows it well, has known it for far longer than he's been in this place - but he understands it in the context of here, too. it's frightening. the very act of carrying on becomes a survival instinct to protect against whatever it is that might be present in the absence of carrying on. Giving Up isn't an option, not when there's anything worth walking back to, and motivations might differ (the Doctor knows well enough his life stands outside of the norm, that his desire to return is exclusively his own, his own need--) but the fact remains that in the inbetweens, those tentative dips of his toes he's taken into slowing down and testing the pace of life in a pocket, all that happens to be waiting for him in the absence is... well.

absence. ]

I'm afraid there's not much to be afraid of.

[ sorry. the silence here, the radio static between worlds is absolute, but worse is the monotony of entrapment. there's a whole globe waiting, of course, but a whole globe is nothing and he doesn't have the patience to go hunting, not when it's all still one minuscule corner. life here is just life. occasionally odd things happen and that's grand, but there'll be no explosions or leaked notes of concern from faraway friends when feet finally decide to slow. there's no finality, no closure and no confirmation. settling into life here is just like settling into life anywhere else. like downing tools, telling nobody and moving away from your home town to a place nobody knows your name, just starting over.

there's nothing here. it's just the world. it still turns, wars still rage, people still do the best and the worst things. we go on, neither remembered nor forgotten. cogs.

one thing it does tell him, one common ground found: ] Been here long?

[starbuckaroobanzai]

[That reminds her of Mulder even more profoundly, and she gives him a disapproving glance out of the corner of her eye out of habit, lips pressed reflexively together in unspoken exasperation. One isn't supposed to want to have things to be afraid of. That's half what it had been about, that time in the car, in the vastness of the Nevada desert, nighttime spread above them across the sky. Didn't he ever want to stop driving? Step out of the car, leave it to run dry on the side of the highway and walk off to a home, a real home, a place to settle, a real life? She'd wanted it so badly sometimes, even while knowing that it had eluded her, slipped out of her grasp not the moment she had stepped into that basement office but certainly the moment she'd decided to protect that impossible creature from the whole of the world. She'd kept her seatbelt buckled because even after all that time he'd still seemed, in his way, an impossible scapegrace, some quirk of nature, never to be found elsewhere. Certainly never to be kept in boxes.

Sometimes Scully hated him for it.

She'd hated herself more. She had, after all, sympathized, and she's doing the same now.]

That's a paradox. Not having anything to be afraid of is terrifying. Isn't it? Here, isn't it?

[It's easy to fall back into the questioning, into the way in which They think, the pair of them, her and Mulder. They approach as many impossible questions as solveable ones, both in need of the sort of answers that can never be got, only grasped at. One comes to terms with the unknown by feeling out its shape until it becomes familiar, comfortable.]

There's a reason for it. There's a cost. They stole us. That should be terrifying, and if it isn't, if I -- if we -- choose to accept it then we've lost, something has been lost.

[There's a quiet vehemence in her words, contained and simmering but old, clearly old. She's been stolen before. She's lost time. Things she'll never get back. The moment she chooses to no longer be afraid of those things, she'll have given up on the parts of herself to whom those long lost things meant anything. She'll have lost herself.]

Doesn't that frighten you?

[Doesn't that make you sad, Mulder? It makes me sad. He's lost too, and that scares the hell out of her, and so much the better. So much the better that she aches for all of them, so much the better that she's angry. It gives her purpose. Without that, without those things to fear and to fear for, what is there for her? What is she? And isn't that thought frightening too? She wants him to agree. She wants him to be afraid, this stranger, but he's not Mulder and he can't possibly intuit all the things she means, all the things she wants to say to absent friends, who should be sharing this with her.

Her gaze softens, and though her expression is still troubled, she looks more sad and weary than confrontational.]

I'm sorry, that was...

[She looks down, shaking her head, and swallows.]

No. No, I've just arrived.

[mmiab]

[ oh.

it's sudden and vehement, and the strength of it from this previously forceful but nonetheless acceptably polite stranger has him look at her with wide eyes, brows raised. and he listens. he listens closely because she has something to say, something important that's caught like a plug in her chest and it's good to get it out, means something to air it, even if at the end of the day the plug's still attached to the sink still attached to the water supply and it won't be going away, even if everything else drains past it, even if life drains past it. he listens closely because she deserves to be heard in this strange, unwanted corner of a universe not her own, and because this is after all what he stopped her for, isn't it? what he decided to search for in her. something. something to make nothing a little more interesting.

she's a fighter. good. she's a fighter. so many of the people here are content to sit and wait, but not her. no, she's a fighter, and she still has her denial. not denial of reality, but her will to deny this reality its grip on her. she knows it's happening but her willingness to passively accept it is... well, nonexistent. good. good. there are surprisingly few of those here. time takes the wind out of peoples sails, and perhaps it will take the wind out of hers eventually, but she's new and the breeze is still blowing in from the world she left behind.

the Doctor's sails are empty. usually that doesn't matter, usually he's motorised... only he's low on fuel, and he's left to blow about catching other people's breezes and using the last of his stores in quick, short bursts for fear of what might happen if he blew it all at once. and he does so desperately crave to blow it all at once but there's no telling what he'd be when finally landlocked. there's no telling and he doesn't want to know.

the spill of her words fades, dwindles into apology, and along with it his wide eyes into a distant, knowingly sad smile. ]

I did say "I'm afraid". [ which is an expression, yes, and that's the tone it had been spoken in, but it doesn't make it any less true.

the quiet of his expression doesn't last long. one full pause and that quiet smile cracks into a grin, the whole of him brightening as he stretches out his arm to shirk his sleeve away from his wrist, cupping a hand around the place the tattoo waits just beneath the skin so it can glow for her, final confirmation. ] Well! Since I've been around for a while, I suppose that makes me your official guide. Welcome to Heropa, we hope you'll enjoy your stay.

[ dropping both arms, twisting so he's sidestepping along beside her - ] -- However hopefully brief it may be.

[starbuckaroobanzai]

I am sorry.

[Thus comes the response after a few puzzled seconds have passed. Scully considers it safest to take the abrupt change in subject as evidence of this stranger's having taken offense, or at least having been sufficiently startled as to want nothing more to do with that particular train of thought, for which she wouldn't blame him but still she feels a pang of largely irrational guilt at having been so... fervent. If he's as trapped here as she is, then he's not among the demographic she'd like to terrorize.]

You reminded me of someone else.

[As though that's any excuse.]

I haven't had the best...

[Day? Obviously. Week? The dead were rising and now she's here. Month? Too much death and too much mystery, and Mulder locked away from her in the maddening confines of his own head, slowly dying of too much life. Year? Years? Life?]

...time. Lately.

[And she's not going to go spilling her heart to this stranger, she's not going to tell him her life story but she knows that she can't help it showing in the quiet, sad smile she echoes back at him, the smile of a woman who's seen too much even in the eye-blink that has been her lifespan next to his. She doesn't know enough to make the comparison, but she doesn't have to. The anchors of her own past weigh on her heavily enough. Her own personal losses are marked out in scars and the memories of bruises, the faint scratches now left around her throat only one of dozens of little marks, shrapnel and broken glass, surgical knives and bullets. She is a collection of deaths never consummated, and the memories of deaths not her own: her father, who spoke to her by the grace of God as he slipped away in a hospital bed dozens of miles away. Her sister, shot in her own apartment with a bullet meant not for Melissa Scully, but Dana. A daughter she never bore, her flesh and blood but an absolute stranger who had taken no part of her barren body, simply the handful of cells scraped out of it. Dana Scully could easily be a hollow thing, older and more worn than her years should permit. Sometimes she is. Right now is one of them.

She's more than that, though. The things debrided away from the insides of her have only left room for more. She struggles for grace and kindness. Anger comes easily. Love comes helplessly, and eats away at her. Most importantly of all she has found a flexibility in herself she's never have anticipated before this journey began, and the amplification of a lifelong unwillingness to be defined by what is desired of her. And so this unfortunate recipient of her ire, old and new, though he may not be the focus.

Apologies are necessary. Friends, she doesn't have friends anymore, isolated by circumstance from anyone who might possibly understand the things she's seen and experienced, but to have humanity is important. To have allies equally so.]

[mmiab]

[ ah. not letting it go that easily - and that in itself says something. most people confronted with a sudden switch would take it and run with it, whether out of embarrassment or vertigo or relief, but she's hitched onto the wagon they'd been riding and she'll follow it all the way to end point, because...? brown eyes swing around to settle with sudden intent, searching her, searching for her secrets and finding— finding a smile. soft, absently sad.

she hasn't had the best time lately.

the manic energy drops away, tempered back into its tweed container, and he smiles. properly, openly, not too wide and not tinged with anything it oughtn't be. hope, perhaps, waits in its creases. ]

Stolen things aren't lost. There are universes forgotten and sealed away, places built like black holes, corners of space and time into which things fall only never to have existed at all— and this isn't one of them. We might be caught in a box trap, but we aren't lost. [ oh, no, we aren't lost. we still exist, we still go forward and speak our minds and think our thoughts and are met and are known and remembered and the point of all that, the very important point of it being - ] You'll get back to your bad time.

[ it doesn't negate the problem. it doesn't wipe away the fury of abduction, doesn't even do anything to calm the fact of absence. there's no timescale on the return, there are no promises to be made... but it is true, all the same, that this isn't the end. they are not inevitably doomed. there is a way out, just as there was a way in, and if nobody's out there looking for the stolen things gathered here then, well. those stolen things will just have to find that exit by themselves.

despite all that, despite the nebulousness of it, the dependence on the struggle of those within pushing out, he speaks with every certainty. you will get back. ]

[starbuckaroobanzai]

A tour guide and a poet. Must be my lucky day.

[It doesn't sound sincere, more teasing than anything, but it doesn't sound unkind either. They process their reassessments of one another in different ways. In her case it's visible: she smiles, and then that smile wavers, and she looks away, eyes on the path ahead. Places she has to go, easier than places she's been. Not much could be harder.]

I do hope you're right.

[There's a long pause, and she swallows, before a sudden thought strikes her and she huffs a laugh, a soft sound of acknowledgment, a nod to all the places and the things Dana Scully has been before.]

Even if it would destroy my senior thesis.

[Einstein's Twin Paradox: A New Interpretation, as Mulder was unceasingly delighted to remind her. You were a lot more open-minded as a youngster. Maybe it's time to get some of that back. Rewrite the paper.]

'Although multidimensionality suggests infinite outcomes in an infinite number of universes, each universe can produce only one outcome.'

[And the only reason she remembers writing it is because she remembers his earnestness as he'd quoted it back to her. Only Mulder, because only Mulder would bother to memorise his prospective partner's nearly decade-old senior thesis anyway. She looks back at the stranger almost shrewdly, and offers her hand.]

Dana Scully. How about you? Have you got a good time or a bad time to be getting back to?