maskormenacelogs | [closed]

WHO: Dana Scully, Saul Goodman
WHERE: Heropa
WHEN: Mid-November
WHAT: Maybe not exactly a meet-cute.
WARNINGS: N...one that I can think of offhand, will update if necessary.

It's warm this far south, warmer than D.C., warmer than home and Scully hasn't settled in to it yet. It makes her want to linger in the evenings, anticipating a sudden downturn, anticipating snow and ice that will probably never arrive and certainly not linger if it does. This isn't the only thing about her which hasn't settled. Months in now and still everything about her screams law enforcement. Hundreds of subtleties come together — a particular straightness of the spine conspires with the dress-code economy of her attire to whisper her history, that information amplified by the restless wariness that clings to her like a perfume, and the particular sillage is of gunsmoke. And the less dramatic — coffee, paperwork, a life spent in the in-betweens: automobiles and airports, weekends in the office and weekdays on surveillance, waiting for something to happen. She's doing the same sort of waiting now.

Sundown approaches with a marginal increase in rapidity, only a handful of hours into the future now as she leaves work, scrubbed clean of lab and morgue smells but still carrying thoughts of work along with her as she walks, eyes turned heavenward. There that thoughtful expectation, though what she's waiting for even she doesn't know. Something. Anything. A sign.

As usual, nothing comes. No burst of insight, no lights in the sky. Nobody calls out for help on a frequency she can hear. Nothing draws her onward to some hidden place, to some secrets heretofore unspoken. Nothing and less than nothing, just a shape in her periphery which in her distraction and frustration she ignores, at least until the collision of shoulders, the force of her stride and whatever wistful grasps at imagination she had been entertaining shattered. Maybe that's the sign in and of itself -- a reminder to keep her head out of the clouds.

"Jesus, I'm sorry," she offers, stopping to prove her regret is genuine and looking up (it's always up) at the interloper, a stranger, if a halfway familiar one. The face rings some kind of bell, anyway, which is enough to give her still more pause.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

This is what Saul gets for trying to text while walking. He fumbles with his phone and nearly drops it — which is less Scully's fault and more his own for not holding it tightly enough — but is quick to recover and, once it's secure in his grip, shifts his attention to the redhead. Then comes the wave of a dismissive (if slightly flustered) hand.

"Don't worry about it — that was my bad, I think." He gestures to his phone. "Don't text and drive. Or walk, apparently. You okay?"

He's not the tallest person he knows and she's certainly not the shortest, but if he were in a hurry, he's almost sure he could've knocked her over just then.

"Fine. Yeah, fine." A pause, in which she reaches up and brushes a stray strand of hair away from her face, tucking it behind her ear, and fixes him with a gaze that's almost fierce, lips pressed together, clearly not ready to absolve herself of all responsibility just yet. "Thank you."

God, but he does look familiar. There's something, tugging at the back of her memory. She's probably seen him on the network somewhere, something... something. "I still should've been paying more attention."

There's nothing up there. Plenty of things down here. People, anyway. She's got to remember that. Try to be more... maybe not more anything, maybe just less, less like she used to be, less like she still has that life to lead. Less like she's trying to be Mulder. And that would be enough to convince her to leave this chance meeting at that, except...

"Sorry... you're an imPort, aren't you? I swear I've seen you somewhere before." Which normally wouldn't mean anything, but normal doesn't seem to apply anymore, not even her own particular brand of normal.

Saul waits what feels like an eternity while she stares at him, tension gathering in his shoulders. All the attention he's gotten recently has been fine, for the most part, but sometimes he gets suspicious — sometimes he forgets where he is, sometimes he thinks someone's found out his dirty little secret.

So he waits, and nods, and waits, and then nods again. "Ah, yeah — you must've seen my mug on the network. I posted about my upcoming show a couple of weeks ago. The one with the bad name?"

He smiles, a little uncertainly. He knows the name sucks.

"Either that, or you're from my world, but I'm pretty sure I wouldn't forget a face like yours."

And with that, his smile is confident once more. Always hiding behind the cockiness, this one.

There's a smile, accompanied by an amused, disbelieving huff, whether at his gall or the implications of that last statement isn't immediately clear to anyone involved. Best not dig too deeply there.

"The name isn't that bad," she tries, mostly managing to sound sincere. Any doubt arises more from personal questioning than an outright lie; it's just that she isn't certain how much working with Mulder has skewed her perception of these things. Suffice it to say: "I've heard worse."

Vastly less tasteful, too, but she refrains from adding that much, not being overly eager to spill her life story to a stranger, particularly the less than glamorous, probably less than sane aspects thereof -- which, as she's been discovering in her time here, consisted of most of it. That's the downside of tying oneself to an idea, to a person: the loss thereof leaves one feeling equally as lost.

Much of that, of course, is entirely her own fault, and so she offers her hand though she has no cause to keep this man any longer -- nearly no cause, anyway. "Dana Scully. Looks like we're in similar straits, barring the TV show."

She sounds sincere, but he's not sure he buys it. He figures she's maybe just trying to be nice. Which, to be honest, is still something he's trying to get used to.

He refrains from raising the point that someone raised in his post — that if she's heard worse, she's likely seen a bad porno or two in her day. But that, Saul knows, is not polite conversation, and he'd rather not finish his walk home with a sore cheek (or worse). So instead he just laughs a little, nodding at her last statement.

"A fellow ImPort, eh? It's nice to meet you, Dana." He takes her hand and gives it a quick but firm shake. "Saul Goodman. Have you been here long? I'm usually good with names I've seen on the network, but I'm not sure I've seen yours."

Scully shakes her head with a wan smile. "A few months, but I..."

She winces, just faintly. "This is going to sound... paranoid, but I prefer not to put myself out there."

It does, in light of how much the government already knows about them, sound more than faintly ridiculous — but then this recent leak of those files suggests that maybe it isn't. Scully could reasonably go either way with this, but prefers to err on the side of caution all the same.

"I used to work for the FBI," she offers concessionally, by way of explanation, which given the scale of her experience with paranoids, conspiracy theorists, and ardent believers in all other kinds of things, she feels she has to do. "You tap phone lines for long enough and you stop trusting that any conversation is really as private as you might want it to be."

A shrug. It's probably best not to get too detailed, lest the nature of the work she really was doing with a far greater frequency than tapping phone lines detract from what she's trying to say here, which is that it's hard to go back to the other side. Not, of course, that she'd trusted telecommunications with any real fervency before. Mulder had tried to groom that out of her, and the frequency with which their home and office phones had been bugged or tapped had done the rest of the job for him. Maybe it's not a problem here, but she seriously doubts that, not given who brought them here, whose hands they find themselves in. Who helpfully provided their primary means of accessing the network, at that.

"Having been kidnapped doesn't exactly endear me to the idea either."

Much as Saul hates relating to law enforcement, he totally understands Scully's thinking. He may be on the other side of things, but — he's tapped phone lines, too, and he's never been the type to trust in things like privacy, so his job sometimes brought out the worst in him. Sometimes. Not always, thankfully.

But sometimes. Especially recently.

"Nah, I get that. I've heard some wild stories about the FBI," he says, voice dropping slightly. Like they're listening, or something. It's Scully's last point that ruins any of his attempts at being quiet, though; he coughs out a laugh, then covers his mouth, looking sheepish.

"Ah, sorry, sorry — I didn't mean to laugh like that. I just — the thing is, I wish I couldn't relate to you 100% with regards to the kidnapping thing. But I can. Did you get thrown in a trunk, too?"

[closed]

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