Pocatello 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 -- Sure, as long as my name stays with it. Spoilers: Through the movie with a U.S. Season 6 rumor. Keywords: Mulder musings/stream of consciousness "R" for language === AmeriTel Inn, Room 316 Pocatello, Idaho 9:45pm I smell like shit. "Cow pies" is what Scully called them. Nice term for cow shit. I smell like it. Scully smells like it. Our rental car smells like it. Ah, that next lucky traveller in the red Ford Taurus from the Pocatello Lariat tomorrow. So, we are here in the middle of Bumblefuck running after Jethro Bodine's idiot northwest cousin because he tried to buy anthrax on the internet. OK, I'm sounding a little like a northeast snob but we're in Pocatello, chasing Jimmy John Davis into his barn after he ordered anthrax from some medicine supply house. We got him, alright, but not after running into a stall with a very well fed heifer. I did not join the FBI to catch morons who use their real names and secured Visa cards to buy illegal chemicals. I did not join the FBI to go tiptoeing through the manure to find Jimmy John's secret stash. I did not join the FBI to watch a unit I built get turned over to a green agent with no interest in it. I did not join the FBI for any of this. And neither did Scully. Scully. I watched her today read the riot act to Jimmy John about screwing around with chemicals he could barely pronounce. She was in rare form. She got to use some of her vast medical knowledge to explain to Jimmy John what Anthrax would do to him, his well fed heifer and about half of Pocatello. She does angry really well and its nice to see it turn on someone else for a change. I take that back. She doesn't do angry with me anymore. I'm trying to be good, she's trying to be more open to "extreme possibilities". We're getting there. After we jailed Jimmy John, it was back to our hotel. Scully got us booked on the first flight out tomorrow, bless her cell phone wielding heart. So I sit here, fresh from a shower with a nice new Hugo Boss suit in a Glad trash bag, and she sits in her room, probably figuring out how to bag her smelly suit without wrinkling it. Our forced move to the bureau mainstream has us in better hotels. Granted this isn't the Plaza, but the hotel has a pool, a gym, a coffee machine, cable -- a real step up for us. I miss the dirty, dingy hotels of the past. Those hotels made me feel like a gentleman. I'd always insist Scully get the better room, she deserved it. It also gave me an excuse to spend more time with her since my room was such a dump. Now we are in identical rooms, not even with an adjoining door, looking at clean carpets and Geraldo Rivera on CNBC without a "Vacancy" sign flashing missing a letter anywhere to be found. Somehow it isn't an improvement. Of course there is little reason for me to spend any time in Scully's room during cases like this. What am I going to do, argue with her that Anthrax isn't really bad for you? That Jimmy John is the product of alien genetics? I kinda hope he is -- we may stand a chance. Scully is enjoying some of this work. Real cases -- beginnings, middles and ends -- no reports like Alex Krycek swooped in at the end and f-ed everything up. No calls from EAP asking why I needed to "rest" for overnight in a mental institution because I was seeing giant bugs. No calls from accounting asking why the FBI had to reimburse one Ringo Langly for the use of his vehicle to transport Esther Nairn. No calls from human resources asking the reason Scully and I never made it to a "team building" seminar. Well Betty Beancounter, we went camping instead since we are one hell of a team. I'm not much of a camper. Window dressing with Dad in Indian Scouts aside, my idea of roughing it is our usually crappy hotel. Scully though was nature girl. My guess is Starbuck over there tagged along with her father and her brothers whenever the "boys" wanted to get back to nature. She could light a fire, find berries to eat and sing campfire songs at night. Me, I could curl up in a ball and try to stay warm. We all have our talents. We talked a little there. About her brush with death, my ideas about death -- the usual happy talk that makes us the Regis and Kathie Lee of the Bureau. Actually, we've been talking a lot, for us, since her brush with death. In the hospital during her illness, in the Florida woods, in the hospital again when she nearly burned to death, my hospital visit complete with five point restraints-- all those things we would never tell each other, we are beginning to. Now if I could only tell her... But I won't. Won't because she deserves better. Won't because it is all wrong. Won't because I can't. I do, you know. Somehow, somewhere, she began to mean something to me. Later, she became everything to me. How the hell did that happen? Oh, I know -- she had faith in me. She listened to me. She gave as good as she got. She respected my opinion. She treated me well. And what did I do? I was suspicious of her, didn't listen, was insulting, disrespectful and at times, snotty. Yes, I am a day at the beach. But I had to do those things. I didn't want to care about her -- I had work to do. A family to repair, a sister to find, a conspiracy to uncover. If I wasn't happy it was only because my work wasn't done. If I was lonely, it was because my sister was missing -- because since my sister went away, I was never loved. Mom crawled into a Valium bottle and missed most of the '70's. Dad crawled into a Scotch bottle and missed everything from Nixon on. I was good at being alone until this woman, this beautiful, brilliant, exquisite woman, comes along and rocks my world. Scully isn't my type you know. Phoebe was. Diana was. Susan was. Phoebe treated me like "cow pies" and left. Diana treated me better until a LEG-ATT job came along and left. Susan, well Susan said I do until I do included living with me, so she left. It was an interesting eight months of marriage -- I would try it again. I would just insist one of us be sane. Scully isn't Phoebe, isn't Diana and isn't Susan. All four are extremely intelligent. But whereas Phoebe was mean, Diana was ambitious and Susan was "high strung", Scully was different. She is tough enough to put up with me without being mean. Scully is ambitious, but not enough to do the wrong thing to advance herself. Scully is the antitheses of "high strung". And Scully never left. My six years with Scully is the longest relationship I've had with anyone. Relationship. I almost kissed her once. Told her what she meant to me, sort of. Begged her not to leave me, sort of. She stayed. We don't talk about the kiss -- though I think she's game if I wanted to try again. We don't talk about what she means to me -- though I think she's known that for years. We don't talk about her leaving -- because I'd last about ten minutes left to my own devices. So I am sitting here, wearing a towel and a smile because the woman I love -- I can say it if pressed -- stayed and ran around in cow shit because it meant working together. The only question now is why am I here in 316 when she's in 312. When we had connecting rooms, I use to dream about her coming in one night, like she did that first night, in her underwear and throwing herself into my arms. Of course she was just doing that because she was relieved it was bug bites. It was still nice. I remember what she looked like in her underwear. Nice to find the upside to the eidetic memory. I remember what we had that night. Sitting in the dark with a prefab Dominos Pizza, learning about each other. I take that back -- Scully learned about me. Self-involved shit that I am, I asked her little about herself. Then again, I never thought she was staying. I'd like to spend another candlelight night alone in a hotel room with Scully. No pizza though. No cheesy hotel room either. Maybe the Four Seasons in New York with champagne and caviar. Or the Ritz Carleton in Chicago, or the Beverly Hills Hilton in Los Angeles. Or the AmeriTel Inn in Pocatello. And I'd learn everything about her. I know a lot -- who she is, what makes Agent Scully tick. I want to know the non-Agent Scully. The woman in jeans not in Donna Karan. The woman wearing Reeboks, not Kenneth Coles. The woman who every now and again, if I look closely, is laughing at my jokes. The woman who means more to me every day. I want to memorize every inch of her and test my memory nightly after that. As I said before -- she's game. But tonight, I'm a little gamey and she deserves better. If I go there, however, I realize that she deserves better than me. But she stays, and I like to think she enjoys some of the madness I've brought her. The woman who threw herself into my arms all those years ago wouldn't have seen a giant bug in my room, wouldn't have yelled at that CIA dirtbag who poisoned the money, wouldn't have mentioned raining sleeping bags in the Florida woods. Of course if she left when we were split up, she'd have never disappeared, never see her sister die, never have cancer and never watch a child die she did not know she had. As I said, she deserves better than me. But maybe, just maybe, one night I will tell her what she means to me and she'll know. Know that I'm here because she's here. I'm here because she's saved me from myself a million times, saved me from our enemies a thousand times and gave me a life without loneliness and self loathing. And maybe she'll tell me why she stays. --- End --- Feedback would be greatly appreciated Maureen_B_Ocks@yahoo.com