TITLE: IT'S ALRIGHT, I'M ONLY BLEEDING (1 of 1)

AUTHOR: DAVID HEARNE

CLASSIFICATION: Post-ep for "Patience"

RATING: R

SPOILERS: Patience, Within, Without. Minor references to Squeeze, Eve, Die
Hand die Verletzt, Pusher, Leonard Betts

Send feedback to ottercrk@sover.net

Website is located at http://members.dencity.com/hearne

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You may not like me, but you ought to respect me.

I guess that's the marine in me talking. Or the NYPD cop in me. Those can be
tough jobs. An FBI agent can be tough work, too.  I like to think that
entitles me to respect.

Or maybe I sound like Eric Cartmen. "Respect my authori-ta!"

Whatever.

I've picked up these kind of jobs because I believe in the work. It's what
I'm good at. I'm here to protect the innocent and preserve our democracy and
all that grand shit. If I can be a bit ruthless when I'm doing it, then that
comes with the territory.

No, I'm not about to confess to shooting up an Asian village or beating a
suspect. I'm talking about being ruthless, not evil.

For instance, back in New York, I once investigated a murder of a
four-year-old boy. It didn't take me and my partner long to suspect the
father. So we take him in for questioning. We did the standard
"bad-cop-good-cop" routine. My partner got to scream, "You sick bastard!"
That's the easy part. After pushing him out of the room, I sit down with the
father and act sympathetic. It's a tough world, right? It's not easy to
raise a kid. Sometimes, you just don't know what to do...

Twenty minutes later, I had a confession. I pat the sobbing father on the
shoulder and said, "You did the right thing." Once I leave the interrogation
room, my smile disappears. My partner who has been spying through a one-way
window looks at me and says, "Jesus, John, you could really fuck with a
guy's mind if you wanted to."

Well, not just anybody's mind. I found that out when I met Agent Dana
Scully.

After being assigned to investigate Agent Mulder's disappearance, I tried so
me psychological techniques on her. I approached her in a casual setting
without giving my name. Then I started talking about Mulder's relationships
with other women, claiming that he confided in them.

It must have taken her ten seconds to see through me. And I got a wet face
for my troubles.

Of course, I was talking shit. Nobody in the FBI had a tighter-knit
partnership than Mulder and Scully. I don't think they confided in anybody
except each other. Maybe Skinner was included in their private circle, but
that would be it. Mulder and Scully were an unit to themselves, literally
the entirety of the X-Files division.

Maybe a bit more than that, too. What am I supposed to think when I walk
into Mulder's apartment and find her asleep on his bed while holding one of
his shirts? On the other hand, it's none of my business. I was only
interested in what she knew about Mulder and how it could help my
investigation.

Then, again, when I suggested that she didn't know him as well as she
thought, she gave me the kind of look that made me wish I was wearing a cup.

This friction turned out to be the least of my difficulties. Eventually I
find myself in the middle of a desert, trying to find a boy Mulder had
believed to be part-alien. I run into...well, a guy who looks exactly like
Mulder. Then the guy survives a fall right off a cliff. And another Agent
Scully pops up and nearly tears out the larynx of one of my agents.
Everything concluded with me finding Scully next to a pile of noxious green
slime.

Right. I know. None of it makes sense. Unless you believed that the slime
was the remains of an alien bounty hunter with the ability to change its
shape.

Do I believe that?

No comment.

The only thing I knew for certain when I found Scully was that she had been
hurt. Not just physically, but emotionally. Just a few minutes ago, she had
been barking orders at me like a Paris Island drill sergeant. Now she
was crying and allowing me to hold her wounded body. Up until then, I had
been pretending that I wasn't out of my depth. At that moment, I realized
that I was the late-comer to a drama I hadn't begun to understand yet.

To top it all off, I learn that Kersh had been trying to sand-bag me. He set
me up with a case he knew was going to blemish my reputation.

Damn flyboy.

The upshot of all this was me becoming Scully's new partner. You can well
imagine how pleased she was by the news.

How do I feel? There are questions I want answered. The X-Files might be the
best place to find those answers. Then, again, I wasn't planning on becoming
the government's ghost-buster. Nor did I necessarily want Agent Scully as a
partner.

Let me amend that. Scully is the kind of a partner I would want under any
other circumstance. She's smart, she's determined, she doesn't take shit.
She doesn't want me around, though. How can I work with someone like that?

The best you can. I could stamp my foot and try to go over Kersh's head, but
what good could that do? At the risk of sounding like a New Age therapist, I
decided to turn a negative into a positive.

First, I did my homework. I read up on past cases Mulder and Scully had
investigated. It turned out that aliens had only made up part of their work.
There hadn't been a weirdness conceived that they hadn't picked up.

How weird? How about a liver-eating guy who can squeeze through air vents?
How about two little girls who had born in a cloning project and ended up
murdering their adopted fathers? Would you like to hear about the parent's
group made up of Satanists? Or the man who could control people just by
speaking? Or maybe a man who can grow back his own head interests you?

Perhaps I should tell you about what Scully and I found together in Idaho.
Long story short -- some half-man, half-bat creature was tearing up people
and I was one of the people who got attacked. Scully and I both shot the
thing so it's most likely dead.

Probably.

I would rather not think about it, especially since it reminds me of claws
and teeth. Again, to make a long story short, I ended up in the hospital.
Scully stopped by while I was recuperating. She had brought a "Get Well"
card.

"Thanks," I told her.

"I'm sorry for what happened," she said.

"How so?"

"Our first case together and you get hurt."

"I've been wounded in the line of duty before. And I should have expected
this. You and Mulder have got the highest records of work-related injuries
I've seen."

She slowly nodded. "Yes. We did. We do."

I looked at her sad face and I reminded myself of what she's been through.
If the situation has been uncomfortable for me, it's been a nightmare for
her. Ontop of everything else, she has tried to do the same kind of work
Mulder did -- making the same kind of wild-ass leaps. Actually she's been
doing a pretty good job of it, but it feels awkward for her. (It's not any
easier when cops start playing "boy's club" games with her. When that
sheriff from Idaho started treating me like I was in charge of the X-Files,
I thought, "Oh, man, he's gonna get the look.")

Where does that leave me? Do I try to be the missing player of a routine
she's been performing for seven years?

No. I can't be Mulder. Or Scully, for that matter. I can only be the best
partner possible. I have to watch Scully's back.

I can deal with that. And maybe Scully can deal with that, too. Two weeks
after the case finished, I saw her put Mulder's nameplate inside his desk --
which was now her desk. This was after she told me that this was "Mulder's
office." She even promised me a desk of my own, even though I didn't ask for
one.

Funny. She never had a desk in all those years at the X-Files. Why?

Maybe there was always the possibility that she would leave. Maybe Mulder
intentionally kept that possibility alive. Maybe he didn't want the X-Files
to become her life.

Well, it is now. And, for the moment, it's mine as well.

That suits me just fine.

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