PART TWO AND A HALF:
HOW I SLEPT WITH MY PARTNER (WITHOUT REALLY TRYING)
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Still on The X Files:
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STILL 1995
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(STILL working, but not agreeing on any one damn thing:)
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Drag Queens Have All the Fun
(Or Why Mulder Likes Pina Coladas)
-----“Ow ow ow ow ow ow…Scully get it out get it out---”
Everything in my world narrowed down to blinding, gut wrenching, twisting pain. Horrible, terrible, miserable, put me out of my misery pain. In my back. Oh GOD, in my back. Stupid undercover shit, I thought. If not for Skinner’s increasingly bad moods, and if not for Scully’s getting to “run the official operation from the van,” I’d have been at home eating beans out of a can in front of the TV. I wouldn’t have been standing in a sequined dress, groaning in pain with a goddamned sword of SOMETHING sticking out of my back, while the mad Doctor from Hell, Ms. “I wasn’t the one who gave the orders,” tried to fish it out with sharp fingernails.
Let me tell you, I just wanted to pass out. I wanted to faint like a motion disturbed kid coming off a Ferris Wheel.It was bad enough that for this idiotic undercover assignment, I’d been forced to wear a silver cocktail dress that frayed in long, gray strands of silver beads at my ankles. And it was even worse that I’d had to run in these goddamned high heels (with a gun strapped to my –well, you don’t even want to know where) with the strain of stilettos sending waves of agony up my ankles. All that would have been just dandy if not for the fact that something was stuck deep in my back like an ice-pick, and now it was trying to rip me in half.
“He okay?” Someone randomly asked. I stared out the corner of my left eye and saw silver haired, Agent John Cromwell watching me with embarrassment stark in his old, gray eyes. He was a quiet guy, a sturdy member of the FBI old guard who was about five months away from retirement.
“He’s fine,” Scully answered in clipped tones, and as if to reassure Cromwell of my health she patted my shoulder. I made a loud hissing noise. Scully sighed into my neck, her hands working on my upper back. Crazy doctor, I thought. Mad, psychotic--
Cromwell nodded. “Well… Okay. But please just let me know if you hear from the Assistant Director, Agent Scully.” Cromwell cocked his head to the side as if he were staring at something with five arms –and not a seasoned agent wearing a drag queen outfit. He backed away from me slowly, as if he were afraid I might hit on him or kiss him or something, and he threw perplexed sidelong glances at me over his shoulder.
“Cromwell looks like he’s seen a mutant,” I muttered.
“Nah,” Scully answered. “I’ve seen mutants before. I’ve never looked at them like that.”
“You would if you had enough time to think about it.”
The block behind Scully and I was bathed in the harsh glow of red and blue flashing lights. The aura of flashlight beacons bounced back and forth between night-camouflaged police officers, and the drone of radios and commotion waltzed into our ears. A group of agents decked out in jeans, t-shirts and navy blue, FBI emblazoned windbreakers milled around with their cell phones glued to their ears. Exhausted looking groups of men clustered near the APD (Atlanta Police Department) squad cars and kicked at some overturned garbage cans.
At least the night hadn’t been a failure, I thought, and I was sure everyone else was thinking it, too. We’d had virtually no solid leads, no evidence of guilt, no anything when we’d gone in, and in the end we came out with our man in custody. Mr. "I swear I can turn invisible" Grimes. It so could have gone the other way and everyone knew it. If not for me spotting the gun and getting the handcuffs on Grimes before he could turn… well, WHATEVER... and of course my knowledge of occult obsessed personalities…. Well, let’s just say that I was the reason the perp had been followed and apprehended. I was the reason the evening went so well. I showed all those self-absorbed, self serving, doubtful agents, showed them all ---
--
“Oh, give me a BREAK, Mulder.”
“What?”
“You and what drag queen army?”
“Can I help it if I’m just THAT good?”
“Uh huh…A little accuracy would be nice.”
“Picky, picky.”
--
AND BACK TO YOUR REGULARLY SCHEDULED PROGRAM:
Okay, so Scully was the reason that the asshole had been caught successfully. She lead the surveilence and apprehension team; nearly thirty men under her control. You get the idea. But of course, ninety percent of the coordinating agents hated me and they hated “Mrs. Spooky” for being my partner and for being the woman in charge (official ASAC, my hard-headed Scully was,) and so nobody said anything congratulatory to either of us.
Basically, the night was over. Everyone involved –FBI and APD alike, was tired, irritated, and just waiting around for the go-ahead to take off for home. The problem was that Scully had no jurisdiction to officially “wrap” the assignment and Assistant Director Skinner (who DID have the authority) was nowhere to be seen. He was… somewhere. Somewhere far away, probably spearheading the whole fucking operation from a Starbucks while drinking a Latte and eating Biscotti and making me do all the crap work. Of course.
Another sharp pain resonated in my back. Higher this time, almost as if the object had moved. Or maybe there were two of them. Fucking wonderful, I thought. OW OW OW.
“Scully, do you think you could –“
“Quiet, Mulder.”
“Scully –“
“Give me a second.”
“But Scu—“
“Not now.”
“You didn’t even hear what I was going to say!”
“I didn’t need to.”
Scully stood directly pressed to my back, one finely muscled arm covering my neck, the other arm draped across my shoulders. Her slender upper body swam beneath an extra large, FBI emblazoned windbreaker and I could feel her breathing on me as she worked with deft fingers. – OR, should I say, EVIL fingers… She was acting like the queen of fucking Egypt -- of course, because I was injured AGAIN and she was in charge of the situation. Scully liked being in control of things—especially medical things. That was her specialty.
I blew out a small puff of air. “Can’t I just –“
“Quit whining, Mulder.”
I narrowed my eyes, wanting to turn around and thwonk that invisible crown off her head. I so would have. I could have. But then again, I was very much in pain and mostly immobilized by it. And Scully had her hands all covering the affected area and stuff. She could very well have used her advantage to kill me –errr… not that she would have. But you know, Scully was tired and she got pissed off easily when she got tired, and I had my health to think about.
“You know something,” I said, watching random agents mill restlessly from place to place, “Sometimes, you’re a real pain in the–“
Scully pinched me in the arm. Hard. I winced, sucking back a stream of obscenities that I promised to keep to myself.
“Shut up, Mulder, or I walk away and you can hobble home.”
I sighed. “Oh gee, oh yes, ma’am, Ms. ASAC special agent ma’am,” I mumbled under my breath.
Why was it that Scully seemed perfectly content to back out of the conversation when the unexplained was presented to her, but she felt it necessary to take my head off otherwise? If we could just agree on something, like ONE thing, like ONCE, I thought I might pass out from the intense surprise of not being second guessed. Then I’d need to be electro-shocked back into coherency.
Anyway.
On top of the intense pain in my back and Scully’s ATTITUDE, I was acutely aware of being gawked at from all sides. Agent McCarthy, a tall, class of 89 man (who never hid his contempt for me nor intentions towards Scully) stared at me with a twinkling of what appeared to be delight in his eyes. He bit his lip and turned to the man next to him, “fatboy” Agent Joe Laherty. Both men shared a snicker as they whispered a few words and pointed oh-not-so-inconspicuously at me. Then they turned and walked away towards Cromwell, both men waving their arms and shaking their heads.
I pursed my lips, forcing a dozen expletives down my throat. Yes, I’m wearing lipstick, I thought. Yes, I look like a jack-ass. Thanks for noticing. Pictures are available in the lobby.
“McCarthy’s in his glory,” I said, squeezing my eyes shut as Scully probed my back and finally found the source of the pain. “Maybe you and I should place bets on the half-assed rumors that’ll circulate about Old Spooky this week. I wonder what the going rate is for me in a dress.”
Scully poked at the object in my back and the motion drew yet another a hiss from deep within my chest. She sighed. “McCarthy’s an asshole, Mulder.” I couldn’t see her but I could feel her frowning. “Besides, whatever bets circulate about you, they almost certainly include me in some form or fashion.”
I glanced down at my sized thirteen, blindingly silver old-maid evening gown, and my silver, high-heeled pumps. As it went, half the bureau already thought I was fucking Scully. Whether we truly were biblical (which we WEREN’T) didn’t matter to them. Male-female partnerships were just good office fodder. Always had been, always would be. But then, the sight of me in drag would probably send those “Mr. And Mrs. Spooky sitting in a tree” theories to a whole other level I just wasn’t prepared to think about.
I blinked a few times to clear my head. “That supposed to make me feel better, Scully?”
“No. It’s supposed to shut you up so you’ll stand still long enough for me to help you.”
I shifted my weight to stretch my torso and groaned with the effort. “I AM standing still---“
A pair of slender, firm hands latched onto my shoulders and I was steadied in the other direction. Tiny shards of twisting agony ripped holes through my nerve endings.
“What the motherfucking hell, Scully? God damn it, don’t fucking do that!”
Scully’s fingertips brushed my skin as she wrapped her hand around the sharp, horrifyingly murderous object. Whatever it was.
“Am I going to have to wash your mouth out later?” she asked.
I tried twisting my head to leer at her. “If you want something to wash, partner, I’m sure there are other places on my body that wouldn’t mind some immediate attention.”
Scully let out something that sounded like an annoyed snort and she dug her knuckles into the base of my shoulders. “I said stay still,” she muttered. “I have to--“
“You have to what?” I asked, clenching my fists and cursing my life, my partner and my hideous job, “Maim me? Kill me? Where’d you go to medical school anyway, Dr. Madness? I think—“
In one quick motion Scully yanked—hard, and white-hot, scalding, boiling pain followed her fingers as she pulled something short, sharp and thin out from my upper back.
“Jesus, What the hell—“
Scully sighed and moved away from me with a firm pat to my back. Another moment and she walked around to stand in front of me, dangling something impossibly tiny and silver in front of my nose. “A safety pin,” she said dryly. “All that fuss over a miniature safety pin. You must’ve gotten it in the back while you were chasing the perp. You’re not dying, you great big baby, although I’d like you to get a Tetanus shot.”
Great. Big. Baby, huh? Thanks a lot partner, I thought. See what I mean? AT-TI-TUDE.
All I could do was shrug and try to rub my back where I’d been jabbed. It still hurt, although not as piercingly as it had just seconds earlier. “Yeah, not NOW, no thanks to you,” I groaned. At that Scully smiled, although I didn’t know exactly why. Maybe it was because I was sporting her Coral colored lipstick -- smeared now onto my cheeks, or because I had silver-blue eye shadow caked on above my lids, or perhaps because I was wearing a dress that a disco ball could have been buried in, silver heels that were two sizes too small, and a kinky, curly brunette wig.
All this combined and I made the ugliest damned woman you ever saw. I looked like an ass with a face painted on it.
“My feet hurt,” I somehow managed, my arm still draped across my lower shoulder, my fingers kneading into my sore back.
“Aw, poor thing,” Scully said, her smile growing wider. She glanced down at the hemline of my hideous, solar panel of a dress, and then she ran her eyes up, up and up until she reached my face again. Her sparkling blue irises twinkled with mischief and she rocked back and forth on her heels. “I must say, Mulder, you ah, you make quite a….a large woman. NBA worthy. And glaringly ornate. The whole ensemble is just spectacular in its opulence.” She stole a quick glance at my feet. “Gee, can I borrow those when you’re finished with them?”
I pursed my lips. “The shoes or the breasts?” I asked, wiping off some of the red lipstick with the back of my hand. I grinned at the change in Scully’s expression and folded my arms smugly across my chest. Finally, I thought. The queen comes down a peg.
Scully shook her head and smacked me hard in the shoulder. “I’ll put the safety pin back in,” she muttered.
“Just go ahead and try it, Mrs. Spooky.”
“Maybe I will, Dame Edna.”
We smiled at each other for a moment, staring, reveling in… something, I didn’t know what. Familiarity? Comfort? Between us, the air seemed to crackle with warm, sticky intensity despite the black hose I wore that bunched at my ankles. I cocked my head to one side, watching Scully with possessiveness, feeling suddenly as happy as a little gir—
Well, anyway.
All I knew was that Scully was playing with me. She was teasing me, flirting in a ‘Scully’ sort of way. And I liked that side of her. I liked it very much. (Certainly better than “evil bitch doctor woman” Scully.) A crooked streetlamp flickered on and off directly behind her, and the angle of the bulb threw dancing patterns on Scully’s rust colored hair. Her arresting blue eyes were a fascinating shade of sapphire in the dim light and her shiny, pink lips curved into a grin meant only for me. She was beautiful, I thought. Quite beautiful. Even as an evil doctor, she was bewitching in every way. How many times had I really, honestly looked at her?
Not enough.
I couldn’t help but wonder what Scully was thinking in that moment, watching me with those intelligent eyes, seeing me dressed like a lunatic. Did it really matter how silly I looked? I liked to think that Scully only saw what she wanted to see; she saw me in a tender, uncompromising light that nobody else ever bothered with. We argued, yes, but we understood how important the journey was. We were like two halves of a coin; we were opposing sides meant to argue, but we always came together in the end.
But…
Did Scully know how I really felt about her? That I cared very dearly for her? Did she hear it in my voice? Perhaps she did. Or perhaps the heels and the whore paint had thrown her for a loop.
“Meet me in five,” Scully finally said, breaking the silence by pivoting away from me and sauntering off in the opposite direction. With one hand she felt at her waist to (probably) make sure her gun was still securely holstered, and with the other hand she tossed the safety pin to the ground and reached for her cell phone. She walked and talked for about twenty seconds, then paused in mid step and threw back over her shoulder, “The Five and Diner across the street. Skinner’s meeting us there. He says not to get changed yet.”
Eh? I thought. Skinner said what? Why?
I narrowed my eyes at this latest job perk. And to think, I’d just begun to give myself reconstructive breast surgery. Scully looked at me for a moment with a raised eyebrow. I sighed, dangling one foam-rubber breast precariously over a muddy puddle that rippled on the pavement.
“Don’t you dare, Mulder.” A challenge seemed to shine in her eyes. “Skinner gave me specific orders.”
“Ah, that’s right,” I said, lowering my arm and sticking my right breast back in my borrowed control top. “Orders are orders and we have to follow orders. But just where is the Skinmanator anyway? Working a TV camera somewhere? How do I know that Agent Kamron isn’t waiting in that diner with a Polaroid that you’re going to use to –“
“Save it, Mulder.”
She walked away without another word.
When I looked down I noticed that my right breast was misshapen and slightly perpendicular to the other. “I look like an abstract mound of sequined clay,” I said to myself, dragging along on poor, dead, stiletto-wounded feet to try and keep up with Scully. “I call this piece… ‘sucker in a dress.”
Scully turned in mid-step, her cell phone lodged under one ear. “What was that, Mulder?”
I blinked, pulled a matted cord of brunette hair out of my face and smiled. “Nothing, dear.” Scully rolled her eyes at me, turned around, and kept on walking.
--
The Five and Diner was a large, square, pink and blue building situated directly next to the Overpass for the Ninety-Five. From the outside it looked like a pastel checkerboard with a blinking white, neon sign. Inside it wasn’t much better. Dark pink tables, light pink walls, and sparkly blue vinyl seats that crunched when you sat on them served as decor. On the walls were pictures of various celebrities: Cher, Barbara Streisand, Ru-Paul, Anne Heche. None were autographed, but all were framed in blue, sparkly frames and hung at odd angles beneath fake-looking, plastic forty fives and silver music notes.
No Polaroid cameras though. And nobody staring at me either. Apparently this whole situation was normal round these parts. A big, scary looking woman with an adam’s apple walking in, that is.
I sighed and stared around, feeling tired and used and very cheap. I finally spotted Scully situated at a table with a file opened in front of her. She had her cell phone pressed to her ear just as she’d had it when she walked in. I could hear her authoritative voice issuing orders as I approached:
“Yes, that’s Fox Mulder. M-U-L-D-E-R. I’m sending him in for a Tetanus. Yes. Approximately…” She looked at her watch. “Thirty, maybe forty minutes. Uh huh. Yes, I know. Special Agent Dana Scully. Do you need my badge num—what? Oh, okay.”
I stopped at the head of the table and stared at Scully with a plea in my eyes: Get me out of here, please, oh please, or get out your gun and shoot me. I sighed, bunching my shimmering dress in messy clumps at my hips, my black tights ripped in about five places,. The hair on my legs was seeping through the cracks of the hose. Attractive. Really.
Scully finally hung up the phone and looked at me. Really looked at me. She bit her lip and placed a hand over her mouth in a bad attempt to hide her amusement. “Problem?” she asked.
“Of course not,” I said, and flopped down next to Scully. A whooshing noise in the vinyl announced the arrival of my big, fat ass in my big, fat dress.
“You look…” She stared at me with scrutiny in her eyes. “Like you just broke up with your boyfriend.”
I shook my head and let my neck droop until my face plopped miserably down upon my arms. Scully was playing again, I thought with a sudden second wind. “Unnghhh,” I groaned, the sound muffled by beads, silk and lace. “I was too good for that bastard anyway.”
At that, Scully giggled. She actually giggled. The sound was like happiness, like sheer, unadulterated happiness, and I wanted to hear it again. Scully rarely, if ever, giggled.
I picked my head up and stared at her with eyeliner streaming in black streaks down my face. My eyes were rimmed above and beneath with blue shadow that made me look as if I’d gotten the bends. My lips and cheeks were smudged with pink and red and splotches of caked foundation. I looked like the thing that crawled out from under a rock. We both knew it.
Yet we couldn’t stop staring at each other with these idiotic grins on our faces.
The rainbow colored jukebox in the corner kicked on and the faint strains of Doo-Wap and “One Fine Day” grew unnaturally loud in the small diner.
Through the static and the crackles I heard: “One fine daay-ay-ay…. you’ll look at me-ee-eee. And then you’ll know our love was… meant to Bee-ee-ee.”
Okay, so the situation was priceless; too good to pass up, I admit it. And as you know, I am never one for passing up good situations. Especially since, at that moment, I felt like an idiot and it seemed rather unfair and selfish to hog that feeling and keep the embarrassment for myself.
So I stood and fixed my dress rather unattractively; with my legs stiff and wide, I yanked the bodice up by the shoulders of the dress and shook my lower half. My face scrunched in concentration. Scully raised a disgusted looking eyebrow at me and stifled yet another giggle. I held a sparkling arm out to her. “Come here, Scully.”
Scully leaned back slightly in the booth, darting her head around with what looked like either nervousness or embarrassment. She cleared her throat. “For what purpose?”
I sighed. “Just come here.”
One thing you should know: There are times when Scully doesn’t talk at all. During those moments she’s usually contemplating the situation or thinking about her best course of action. Sometimes she can be downright infuriating with her thoughful silences. But when Scully does talk, she doesn’t shut up. Ever.
“Mulder, this is completely inappropriate, what I believe you’re insinuating we do, and I don’t think the assistant director will approve of his two senior agents loafing around this diner when--”
So I grabbed her (not too hard, mind you) by the arm and literally dragged her out of the booth. Her right foot caught on her left foot and she tripped most ungracefully into my arms, steadying herself quickly with two hands pressed firmly against my chest. In return, I wrapped an arm loosely around her waist. Scully stared up at me with her eyebrow raised, her expression screaming "this doesn't at all demean my presence as an agent."
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“I feel like dancing and I’m all dressed up with nowhere to go.”
I grinned and slipped the other arm, beads and sequins and all, around Scully’s middle to join my left hand. Then I squeezed her suddenly and briskly, and I whipped us around, forcing Scully’s arms to instinctively wrap around my neck. My blood thrummed as I looked back down at her, a lopsided grin on my face. Scully smelled like honeysuckle. It was all I could think of. Jesus Christ, she smells like honeysuckle.
Scully just stared at me, her arms still wound around my neck. “You can’t be serious.”
I grinned widely, winking at my partner in a way that I KNEW partners were not supposed to wink at each other. I didn’t care. “I am extremely serious. You look hot in your little ‘safe-in-the- FBI-van-jacket.”
Scully narrowed her eyes.
“And you look like a shmuck in a dress.”
“Your point?”
She sighed and unwound her right hand to draw her thumb over my cheek, slowly smudging away the bleeding mess of colors on my face. “Mostly? That this is completely inappropriate.”
I clucked my tongue. “Really? How UN P.C of you.”
“You know what I’m talking about.”
“I do, I do… but Scully… you wound me. Can’t a good natured transvestite dance with his best girl to—“ I paused and cocked my head to listen to the music. The song had changed. I grinned at the newest selection “-- the Pina Colada song?”
Raised eyebrow. Scully’s fingers tickled patterns around my neck. We were almost nose to nose now. Her eyes were a soft blue shade under lids that had somehow fluttered half closed. Her head was nearly tilted to one side and we were watching each other with an intensity that seemed to drown out the entire restaurant. Oh God, Oh Christ, I thought. That Honeysuckle. She smelled so damned good. And she was breathing with her mouth opened in this small, delicious looking “O” shape. She looked like she wanted to be kissed. She looked like she NEEDED to be kissed. Lord knew I needed some kissing.
I cleared my throat to try and distract myself. “Oh, I see,” I said, my voice slightly higher than I would have liked. “It’s the dress, isn’t it? I knew I should have gone with lace. Sequins just make me look so bloated this time of year…”
“Mulder?“
I want to kiss you, I thought to her. I want to kiss you so badly that sometimes I can’t breathe. I want to drag you home with me and make love to you and just… look at you, talk to you until the sun comes up. Whatddya say? That okay with you, Scully? Today’s Friday and we can sleep in tomorrow.
I didn’t say that out loud of course. Instead -- “Hmmm?”
A much more banal but acceptable response.
Scully smiled, blissfully unaware that her shampoo was driving me to come up with stark raving mad thoughts.
“You have actually managed to surpass bizarre,” she said. “Do you know how frightening that is? I mean, for you?”
I pretended to think about it. “About as frightening as Skinner and his fancy towards Absolute Vodka?”
I was rewarded with another giggle –throatier this time, and with something odd and husky fogging her voice.
“Almost…” she agreed, “but not quite.”
I licked my lips and pulled her closer, spinning us around one last time for effect. We looked utterly ridiculous, me in my old-lady evening gown and Scully in her sensible suit and FBI jacket, both of us swaying to the Pina Colada song. In all honesty, it wasn’t a romantic set-up. We looked like a couple you’d see in a prison movie.
But when our eyes met (mine lined with blue shadow like a Racoon prostitute) we were both breathing hard and fast, although neither of us had done anything to provoke breathlessness. I could still smell that damned shampoo of hers wafting over me and it drove me NUTS. Briefly, I wondered if there was chemical poison in female shampoo that fucked with male pheromones.
“So tell me something,” I said, swaying us to the right and then back to the left, “Does dancing with you like this make me one of those healthy heterosexual males who’s over compensating for his inadequacy to…” I ran a dangling, red -polished, Lee Press-on over her cheek, “to touch…beautiful women by compulsively reaching out for his feminine side—“ I brought my finger back down and stared at her lips. She stared at mine. “Or am I just a big scary lesbian trapped in a man’s body?”
Scully closed her eyes and giggled softly, her head lowering for a minute tso that her chin rested against the front of her neck. When she looked at me again her eyes sparkled.
“I’m going with shmuck in a dress.”
I shook my head. “Ouch,” I said, smiling.
We both laughed, our bodies still swaying with the music. It was like magic, like magic in a pink and blue diner with gum on the floor. And God, I just wanted to hold Scully like that for as long as the world would allow me to. If time could have stopped and everyone would have just disappeared, I would have turned my face and kissed her for as long as she would let me. Scully was the only person in the world who bothered to know me, who bothered to care. She had a good heart, a beautiful interior that spoke of loyalty and conviction. She was one of those people you could pass on the street and never know, NEVER understand that you'd just bypassed the most incredible person on the face of the planet.
I would’ve said something else to her, but someone interrupted our quiet little soiree with the loud clearing of his throat. And goddamn it, I knew that “throat clearing” anywhere. Scully knew it, too.
We both whipped our heads around in unison to see a very stern looking, very bald looking, very tired looking Assistant Director Skinner staring at us like he wanted to shoot us. Next to him stood poor old Agent Cromwell, who looked like he wanted to die right where he stood.
Flustered, I pulled away from Scully quickly, my arms falling listlessly to my sides as if I’d been burned by Scully’s waist. Scully’s hands ripped away from my neck and she gave me a shaky, forceful shove in the chest –not really hard, but just hard enough to knock me off balance in my silver stilettos and send my arms pinwheeling out of control in large, uneven circles. Scully’s eyes widened and she gasped my name, reaching forward to grab my arm to steady me, to pull me upright, to do ANYTHING. But it was too late. Way too late. And I was too heavy anyway.
I fell like a sequined sack of shit, crashing to the pink and blue checkered floor on the boned part of my ass. “Ow,” I muttered.
“Sorry,” Scully whispered.
“Agents,” Skinner said simply, clearing his throat again with the back of his hand. He looked for all the world like he was trying to keep a straight face.
I looked up at Scully. She stood ramrod straight, her shoulders back, her face as even and as composed as if nothing at all odd had happened: I wasn’t in a dress. She hadn’t been dancing with me. We weren’t standing in a diner that looked like it owned its own theme park. How Scully managed that complete professionalism, (or how she ALWAYS managed that) I didn’t know.
“You’re relieved, agents,” Skinner said after a beat, his expressionless face trained first on Scully, then on me. “I just wanted to see for myself…” He cleared his throat again. “Anyway, unless of course, you’re busy. Do you have something to add?”
“No, sir,” Scully said.
I yanked the left breast out from my chest and tossed it to the floor. “Everything’s just peachy down here, sir,” I said.
And that was that.
---
2002:
"Mulder?"
"Hmm?"
"Did you know that I asked 'Special Assignments' if I could keep that dress? They were going to throw it out, so I took it and kept it in the back of my closet."
"You... what? You kept the dress? Why? That ugly thing? Why?"
"Well--"
"Besides the fraying material I doubt it would fit you, Scully. Unless you found an unbelievably good seamstress and ripped out the sequins, and then of course, took up the hem, in which case --"
"I'd never danced with you before."
"Wh... what?"
"I'd never danced with you before, Mulder. When I tripped and you caught me... let's just say I'd never before felt anything like what I felt when when I looked up at you. It was intense and blinding and so... There were no conspiracies at that moment, no pretenses, no arguing about science and aliens and how to handle the investigation.. There was just you and I, existing in a place where none of the world's 'Cancermans' could ever touch us. Suddenly, I felt safer than I had in awhile. It was as if I had found a reason to keep on going. So I kept the dress as a souveneir."
"You mean you still have it?"
"Well, I thought we'd never dance again. At least, I never imagined --"
"That a few years later we'd be doing the horizontal Mamba? --OW! Scully!"
"I'm TRYING to have an adult conversation here, Mulder."
"So am I. You want me to put it on right now? Because I can. I think I've got some Chubby Checker albums lying around here somewhere. We could do the twist."
"No, Mulder."
"Or YOU could put on the dress."
"No."
"Please?"
"No."
"One time, Scully. One time. We can look deeeeeeeeply into each other's eyes and---"
"Oh, Shut. Up. Jesus, I don't know why I tell you anything."
"Oh come on, it was funny."
-----