From: "dlynn dlynn" Date: Mon, 17 Sep 2001 11:25:24 -0700 Subject: NEW: September 12, 2001 Source: xff Reply To: dlynn1550@visto.com Title: September 12, 2001 Author: dlynn Feedback: dlynn1550@visto.com Category: vignette, angst, MSR, AU Distribution: Gossamer... Anyone else, please link to the story from my site. Spoilers: None for the show. Rating: PG ****Summary: Obviously, just as everyone else, I've been affected by the terrorist attack on Tuesday. When I'm under stress, I write. My prayers are with the victims and their families; I cannot imagine the horror you must be going through. ***** Disclaimers: As always, I don't own Mulder or Scully or anything else 1013. Additional Author's notes at the end. ~*~*~*~*~ September 12, 2001 ~*~*~*~*~ September 12, 2001 Eight-thirty p.m. "Mulder, where are you?" Scully swiped her hand against her brow as she growled out her second phone message of the morning. She flopped into the hardback chair and tossed her cell phone onto her duffel bag, which lay on the floor beside her. Decorum be damned, she swiveled in her seat until her legs hinged over the chair's wooden arm. She kicked off her shoes, watching one sail several feet into the air and land with a clatter against the garbage can. She stared at the blood spattered on the shoe's white leather and closed her eyes. "Dr. Scully?" "Hmmm..." "Did you reach Agent Mulder?" "No ... not yet, but I'm not surprised." Scully refused to open her eyes. The past twenty-four hours rarely afforded anything but grim sights, and she needed just a few minutes to decompress. Shoeless. Mindless. Mulderless ... moments. Scully pried open one eyelid and squinted against the harsh florescent lights. Amy Bentley, a twenty-seven-year-old lab technician whose biggest worry last week was whether to have a small rose tattooed above her left breast or her bikini line, scrunched up in a vacant seat. Scully pushed hard against the chair's cracked vinyl, raising herself upward into a seated position. "Don't move on my account," Amy said, grabbing Scully's left foot before the Agent could swing her dangling legs out of Amy's way. "My dad always tells me I have the touch." "You sure he didn't mean you were tetched?" Scully said, groaning out the word as Amy's hands kneaded her instep. Scully closed her eyes again and dreamed of warm, soft bread dough and the natural, earthy smell of yeast. "You've been talking to Ziad," Amy chuckled, digging her knuckles into Scully's heel. "Uh...huh. Your fiance told me about the snake." Scully felt the muscles in her neck relax as Amy's hands securely grasped the Agent's upper foot. Amy's fingers massaged each toe, and a deep, therapeutic pain inched up Scully's calf, thigh, and into her lower back. Behind her closed eyelids, she felt she could almost see the brilliant highway of flared neurons. "You know better than to believe everything you hear, Agent Scully. I thought you were the skeptical one." "Yeah, well let's just say that-" "Agent Scully, your partner's on line two, and he wants to know, and I quote, 'why the hell you aren't picking up your voice mail messages.'" Ziad Rehan pushed open the break- room door. He indicated the phone, situated on a conference table beneath the poster: Pathologists are such cut-ups. "He says if I don't track you down, he'll introduce me to some fluke ... man?" Scully wrenched her feet from the bliss of Amy's ministrations and stood upon the cold linoleum. She grabbed the phone and punched the second line. "Mulder, have you or have you not received two messages from me this morning?" Scully retrieved her lab shoes and sat down to put them on. She placed the phone's receiver in the crook of her neck. "I'd appreciate it if you wouldn't bully the staff." "Damn it, Scully, I've been trying to reach you for the last four hours. And I didn't bully the kid-" "Threatening him with Flukemen?" Scully loosened the shoestrings on her left shoe. Her foot was slightly swollen, a regrettable leftover from her pregnancy. "I didn't threaten, Scully. Just ... offered to introduce him, that's all." Mulder's voice dipped a notch, into that hot-buttered rum range. "Scully ... I just needed to hear your voice. Can you blame me?" Scully's gaze focused on the quiet tableau enfolding before her. At the other end of the break room, Ziad and Amy sat in the same chair, Amy curled up on Ziad's lap and her head nestled into his shoulder. His hand tenderly stroked her hair as though she were a small child. "No, Mulder. I don't blame you. I need to hear you, too. I want to ... hold you. I need ... I. Just. Need." "I went to your mom's about an hour ago, took a shower, grabbed breakfast, and changed clothes. Grandma and Will seem to be doing reasonably well." Mulder paused. "She gave him carrots." "Oh, Mulder ... how is she?" Scully couldn't help but chuckle. "Grandma knows better than to ever give Will carrots again. He threw up all over her, and while she was cleaning him up ... well, let's just say the shit hit the-" "Mulder! Poor Mom. Didn't you warn her about carrots when you took him over yesterday?" Scully turned her chair to the wall; Ziad and Amy seemed to forget they weren't alone. "Scully, I remembered the diaper bag, the stroller, the walker, the car seat, the swing, and the baby ... I remembered his teething ring, his baby thermometer, formula, and the yellow blanket. I forgot about the damn carrots. I forgot ... I just forgot," Mulder hushed and Scully could hear the heated voices behind him in the bullpen. "How are you doing, Partner?" "Other than the fact I've only been re-instated because of a terrorist attack, you mean? Just fine ... although I'd hate to calculate the standard deviation with regards to the statistical anomaly of those who fear standing too close to me because I might speak in tongues and those who can't get close enough because they need a resurrection miracle for their loved ones." Scully glanced up at the television, mounted and hung from the ceiling, tilted above the table. The cameras panned ground zero at the World Trade Center. The firefighters - clothed in their black and yellow-striped bumblebee coats - swarmed across the wreckage. Heavy machinery, dinosaur-like, with gaping maws and enormous teeth, bent and scooped up mangled debris alongside the worker drones. Hell had visited earth. "Mulder, any chance we'll see each other today?" Scully asked, glancing at her watch. Her twenty minutes were almost over, and she needed to return to the morgue and give another doctor a few minutes break. Forensic pathologists from all over the bureau had been called in to begin the odious task of body identification. "I don't know, Scully. I'm heading back to the Pentagon with Skinner. He has a meeting with the new Deputy Director and General Flagherty. After that ... I'm supposed to go through some of the documents pulled from one of the Boston apartments." Amy and Ziad disentangled. With a final kiss on his bearded cheek, Amy slipped from the room, softly closing the door behind her. Ziad sat in the chair, bent at the waist, his elbows laid upon his knees, and leaned his forehead into steepled hands. Scully whispered into the phone. "Any news on Captain Bentley, Mulder. Was he at the Pentagon?" "I'm still trying to track down information. Apparently, Captain Bentley was involved in some matters of national security. We're having trouble connecting all the dots. But Scully ... scuttle has it that it doesn't look good." Scully stared at the closed door and thought of the young technician who'd worked tirelessly since the call for help had gone out, who wouldn't even consider the fact that her father might have been in the Pentagon. And she turned her head and glanced at Amy's fiance, Ziad: an Arab-American, who'd fallen in love with a soldier's daughter in the several months before a world went mad. "Keep me posted, Mulder." "I will." Mulder's voice caressed her soul. "I love you, Scully." "More than sunflower seeds?" she asked, attempting to play, something they'd started doing lately - an attempt at normalcy that they still seemed to wear like an ill-fitting suit. "More than a haunted house with a two hundred- year-old specter, Scully." Scully placed the receiver into the cradle and stood. Her hand on the doorknob, she heard Ziad's muffled voice. "Anything about Captain Bentley, Agent Scully?" "Not yet, but Mulder's still looking." Scully opened the door and stepped into the bustling hallway. "And I'm still praying, Ziad." "Me, too," Scully heard as the door swished closed. "Me, too." ### Morgue Eleven forty-five p.m. Scully tilted the overhead light. She grabbed a scalpel from the battered tray and began the gruesome task of cutting the charred clothing from another corpse. More important that determining what killed these poor souls - as if anyone had any doubt of that - Scully and the forensics team needed to provide identifications. A step towards closure for the grieving families. "Dr. Scully, do you need anything?" Amy asked. "I'm going to grab Dr. Ferrante a soda and a sandwich." "No, Amy ... I'm fine, thank you." Scully peeled back a small corner of fused material, splaying open a trouser pocket. An ID badge slipped to the floor. Scully heard Amy's gasp as the tech recognized the Pentagon's seal, surprisingly intact. Scully ripped off her latex gloves and hurried around the table, dropping to her knees beside the startled girl. Amy huddled in on herself, forming a tight bundle of grief. Scully gently pried the badge from the girl's fingers and turned it over. The photo had melted, the colors smearing together into a mosaic blob. "Lt. Michael Freedman. It's not him, Amy. It's not him," Scully murmured, wrapping herself around the tortured girl like a downy comforter. Amy pushed against Scully, until the girl sat cross-legged on the floor, her face streaked and dirty from her tears. She held out her hand, requesting the ID. She touched the smeared blob that once was the photo of some son's face. "Did Ziad tell you the whole story about the snake, Agent Scully?" Amy asked, hiccups shaking her shoulders. "No, just that ... you were an incorrigible child." "Incorrigible, yep ... that's me. I gave my dad fits. My mom, well she died when I was very little - cancer - so mostly it was just Dad and I. I was the kid parents pray they don't get: always into trouble, scrapes at school, at the mall ... piercing things better left un-pierced." "An army brat." Scully laughed. "I seem to recognize the symptoms." "Yeah, bratty ... that was me. Well, my dad ... he had some bigwig thing going on at home. A bunch of military muckey-mucks were scheduled for dinner, and two of them would be spending the night. With me so far?" Amy asked, gently laying the badge on top of the table next to the body. She stood, and Scully stood with her. "My best friend, Hank, raised snakes. Nothing poisonous or too scary, just your garden- variety black racers, rat snakes ... that's all. Well, I decided I thought it would be funny to watch these guys squirm. You know? So ... I snuck a couple of snakes into their beds, right before they were to go to sleep." "You didn't?" Scully asked, thinking of her own encounters with snakes and already feeling creeped-out. "Yep. I placed half a dozen snakes in all these beds. You should have heard the yelling ... and the language. I learned more great swear words in that night ...and um, several of them were directed at me. Two of the guys nearly had heart attacks; they changed some glorious shades of purple. But my dad ... even as he was giving me hell and grounding me 'til I turned thirty', had this twinkle ... this, 'that's my girl' kind of look. And one other guy, well he thought it was so hysterical I thought he'd bust a gut because he laughed so hard." Amy grabbed a clean white sheet from a stack beside the sink. She unfurled the linen and watched it flutter over the body. It sank as softly to the gurney as new fallen snow. "Lt. Michael Freeman was the man who appreciated my sense of humor. Dad appreciated his sense of comedy, and Lt. Freeman became my dad's aide. They are always together; Michael is ... was Dad's right-hand man." The morgue double doors behind them whispered open. Scully knew that Mulder stood behind them, and she knew that he didn't bring good news. Amy reached for her hand and they turned in unison. Mulder and Ziad stood side by side. Dog tags looped over Mulder's palm. Amy fell to her knees, practically pulling Scully down on top of her. Mulder had said nothing. Nothing needed to be said. Scully watched Mulder's face cloud over in pain, and she observed Ziad, struggling with his own emotions. Amy's fiance took one, hesitant step forward, and then stopped. Hurriedly, he turned and began to push open the double doors. Mulder's hand clasped his shoulder and forcibly turned the young man. "Where are you going?" Mulder asked. "I need ... I should leave." Ziad's voice broke with the agony of forcing out the words. "She doesn't need to see me around, to see a reminder of what's been done to her and so many every time she sees my olive skin." Mulder squeezed the young man's shoulder. "Did you do this, Ziad? Are you in any way responsible for this terrorist attack?" Ziad yanked his arm away; fury flamed his features. "You think I could, that I would-" "In ANY way, Ziad, do you condone the actions of these extremists? Do you believe that they were righteous in their actions?" "No, oh God, no ... Agent Mulder. As Allah is my witness, I do not believe in what these cowardly jackals have done." Scully stood from where she'd been wrapped around Amy. She left the girl - inconsolable in her grief - and approached Mulder and Ziad. She burrowed into Mulder's opened arms. "Then, Ziad, don't let these terrorists destroy what you and Amy have. Don't let them take any more joy from the world than they already have," Mulder said. "Don't let bigotry and hatred win." Mulder clutched Scully more tightly to him and steered her out the doors. He handed Ziad the dog tags that gleamed bright in the florescent lights. "Stand united, Ziad. Don't let them tear you apart." Scully said. She grasped Mulder's hand and they walked from the room, leaving the grieving couple to themselves. ~~~ the end ~~~~ I needed to write something, and this is what came to me. Twice since Tuesday's tragedy I've been in contact with Arab-Americans: once at a restaurant, as we passed a young family having dinner, and at Church on Sunday when a man, wearing a turban came in and sat on one of the back pews. I must admit, each time I was momentarily startled. And I realized I didn't like that feeling in myself. As a Christian, I cannot condone hatred and violence from anyone towards anyone ... and I pray that our country is able to recognize that these terrorist extremists do not speak for the whole Arab community anymore than those Christians who bomb abortion clinics speak for all evangelical pro-life Christians. As I pray about my own response, I hope others are cognizant of actions and words that become and grow into hatred and bigotry. ~~~ dlynn, September 17, 2001