Title: Quick Bright Things Category: V, Sc/P UST, angst, genfic Rating: PG (I refuse to rate anything G) Summary: Pendrell's moment in the light. Coffee, Shakespeare, Knights of the Round Table. Spoilers: Well, you know about Scully's cancer, right? You didn't? Oops, sorry. Archive: Why not? Just *please* ask first (like I'd say no? ) Disclaimer: Uh...the waitress is mine. Everyone else: sadly, CC, 1013, and Fox won sole custody. I'm not making a red cent off this, y'know. Author's Notes: This puppy is kind of a departure for me, but one I enjoyed a great deal, nonetheless. Written in one extremely...uh, *focused* afternoon shortly after de-lurking for the first time on the Pendrell-fic list :). This would be set shortly after 'Memento Mori', and shortly before 'Tempus Fugit/Max'. Be on the alert for the odd British spelling or two. Big hugs to Kristy, for being honest , and to EPur and jerry for the usual wondrousbetas. Have I mentioned lately that I love you three ? This is for CiCi, whose Pendy-madness is inspirational (ask and ye shall receive, ma'am ), and for Jesemie's Evil Twin, who taught me the importance of writing what scares you. Thank you, ladies: you're treasures, the both of you :). ------------------------------------------------ 'Quick Bright Things' (1/1) by Caz "Swift as a shadow, short as any dream, Brief as the lightning in the collied night... .So quick bright things come to confusion." 'A Midsummer Night's Dream', Act I Sc I, William Shakespeare ------------------------------------------------ "Would you like to go somewhere?" he asks suddenly, turning on his heel to face her, balancing carefully on the edge of the curb. Around them, chattering, laughing, murmuring, their fellow theatre-goers stream out into the night, swirling around them. They are two rocks sitting quietly in a river of people, biding their time. She doesn't answer straight away. At first he thinks she will say "Home, please." That scenario unfolds instantly in his head, like a flower blooming and dying in time-lapse photography. The silent ride home, the quick, dry, dutiful kiss on the cheek at the door of her building, the graceful "Thank you, I had a nice time, see you at work," as she slips inside, alone. Then she tilts her head slightly, biting her lip as she looks out at the steady current of humanity, and the light slips like a thief into her eyes, showing him what she's really wanting to say, which is "Away, far away, anywhere that isn't here, that isn't this. Over the hills and far away...". As she shifts her weight from foot to foot on the cracked, dull sidewalk, he sees this one unfold, blossoming in his mind also. He would take her hand, take her away, wherever she wanted to go, wherever she didn't know she always wanted to go. They would get in his car, his boring, sleek, grey government worker-drone car, and just go, over the hills and far away. No packing, no explanations, no hurriedly scrawled notes or apologies left behind. Just him and her and a car, no explanations owed, and a continent of empty roads unravelling before them. Who knows where they would go, with the whole world lying within their reach, bright and bursting with possibility? Mexico, he think suddenly, with certainty. He has never been, but he can picture it perfectly now. They would drive, all night, all day, watch the country spreading out before them. Crossing the border at dawn, the sun so dazzling... "Coffee," she says suddenly, and it's as if she's speaking in code, expecting him to figure out the real meaning lying behind the word. Tell me what coffee is, and the treasure, the three wishes, the hand of the princess, might be yours. He does not know what coffee is. He was thousands of miles away, on the hot white sands of a Mexican beach, anointing her pale back and strong shoulders with sunscreen. She would smell of coconut and salt water, and taste of it too, and she would be healthy, so healthy and so alive... "I'm sorry...what?" "Coffee...would be good. I mean...if you want to..." "Oh, of course, yes. Coffee." His brain finally escapes from the heat and glare of Cozumel, and gets back to the task at hand. "I know a nice little place a couple of blocks away...we could walk down there, if you'd like..." "Yes," she says, suddenly decisive, "I'd like that very much." She offers him her arm, and he lets it slip through his, and together they slide into motion, into the swirling, speeding current of Washington's citizens at play. They stroll down the sidewalk, the sound of her heels clacking echoing through the unquiet chambers of his mind. She is silent, gaze trained straight ahead, flicking across the people in their path with the practised eye of a field agent trained to see danger everywhere. She should never have been trained for the field, he thinks, with a rush of anger, dull and hot: she ought to have some innocence left. She should be able to walk down a street and not look for the hidden gun, the glint of the switchblade, the faces of the killers. Enough, he scolds himself. Enjoy this for what it is, and for what it will never be, while you have the chance. Tonight, as far as all these people know, she's yours, and why not pretend that she is, just this once? So he enjoys the slight weight and pressure of her arm linked through his, the sensation of walking in rhythm with her, the odd admiring look another man casts at her, the slight traces of her perfume that drift his way on the gentle night breeze. He revels in it, because she is walking with *him*. He enjoys it, and he does not think even once of the way her step lengthens to match her partner's as they stride down the hallways of the Hoover. He does not even consider the way she permits her partner to place the weight of his hand (so heavy, too heavy a weight for her to bear, certain to crush her in the end) at the small of her back. He does not even entertain a thought of how he has seen her partner looking at her on occasion when her back is turned, the way his eyes travel so longingly over her body as she leans over the centrifuge or peers at a PCR result. No, he does not think of any of these things, not once. He never does. Far before time, they are there, and he entertains mad thoughts of carrying on down the street, each time they pass a cafe telling her "No, not this one, not this one, just a little farther." They wouldn't get very far before she figured him out, though, he suspects. So he steers her gently towards the door, into the warmly-lit oasis of the coffee-house. They take a window table, and sit facing each other across the small, scratched expanse of wood. Beyond the glass the river continues to stream past, the flow a little slower here, further from the theatre, but still making him itch to knock on the glass, to yell "Look at me, yes, me, Brian Pendrell, having coffee with Dana Scully." It's like being swept into a backwater, swimming slowly in the still, calm shallows with her. "I'll have a non-fat decaf tall latte, please," she says, favouring the waitress with a quick, reserved smile. "I...uhh, I'll have the same," he says, with no idea what he's just ordered. If he drinks coffee, it's usually the evil, black, caffeine-charged brew cooked up in the corner of the SciCrime Lab, the kind that helps him keep his eyes open when poring over a set of fibre analysis results for the fifth time at 1am. He's only been here twice before, usually alone after another disastrous date. He has imagined bringing her here, though, sitting with her like this, the smoky jazz washing softly over them. The waitress, young, round-limbed, innocent-faced, jots down their order and disappears behind the counter. He looks down at his hands, lying pale and flat on the table. He's afraid to look into her eyes, in case he fully loses his mind and ruins everything by saying what keeps running through his mind tonight: come away with me, come away from here, from him, from everything. Just come away. "I...Agent Pendrell," she begins, before trailing off into silence for a second. "I'm sorry, I don't even know your first name." No, he thinks, no, it's alright, why should you? It's not as if they've had a chance to talk much tonight: she met him at the theatre two minutes before the curtain went up, breathless and full of apologies, something about Mulder, a casefile, phonecalls that had to be made and working late. He might have expected as much. "Brian, it's, uh, it's Brian. I never liked it much anyway, really. I think I was destined for MIT from the day my parents picked that one out of the baby-name book." "It suits you," she says kindly, far too kindly, and he thinks desperately, no, no it doesn't, if you could only know me, you would know that it doesn't. It doesn't suit me anymore than Fox suits *him*. He should have been called Lancelot, and I should have been Arthur. No, not even Arthur. Kay, perhaps, or Gawain, or one of the nameless spear-carriers in Camelot who faded into the shadows cast by Lancelot's flaring, dark-hearted sun. There is no question, of course, of what her name should be. Not Guinevere. She should have been named Elaine, the strong, enchanting Lady used and abandoned by the flawed hero. Elaine, the original Lady of Shallot, floating downriver, beautifully dead in her barge, to remind Lancelot for a brief moment of what he left behind, what might have been his. "Pend -- Brian? Are you alright?" "What? Oh..." Her pale hand with its deft physician's fingers lies over her his, her skin cool and smooth, so smooth. "I'm sorry, Dana, I...I must've zoned out for a moment." "I was just going to say that I...I had a really nice time tonight. This was fun, really...fun." She shapes the word carefully, as if trying out her skill at speaking a foreign language. "I've always loved the theatre, I just don't get the chance to go much these days, working in the field. I wanted to thank you again for thinking of me." "It was my pleasure," he says quietly, willing his voice not to crack. Their coffee arrives, and he watches her stirring hers, watches her staring down at the tiny whirlpool forming in the cup. He remembers trying to push his heart out of his mouth and back down into his chest where it belonged as he rode the elevator down to the basement that morning, the way she'd taken the test results from him with a quick thank you and already begun to turn away when he spoke. It had been easier to do in the end than he could have ever imagined, to say "Agent Scully, if you're not busy this evening, I have tickets to 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' at the Folger Theatre. Would you care to join me?" As she gazes out of the window into the descending darkness, cradling her cup in her hands, he remembers how Mulder stiffened, kept his back to them, leant over the files he was inspecting as if nothing could fascinate him more. The way Scully's eyes flickered to one side for a second, as though trying to see behind herself, before she laid a hand on his arm, smiled, accepted. She sips gingerly at the steaming coffee, tongue flicking out to wipe the traces of it off her lips, and he remembers the voices he heard as he retreated down the hallway. Mulder's voice, dry, crackling with banked fires as he casually said "You know, Scully, in Shakespeare's day that play was probably considered the equivalent of the perfect date movie." Her muffled reply, cut off as the elevator doors closed. Jealous much, Agent Mulder, he wonders? You shouldn't be. Oh, you shouldn't be. He shakes off the memories, determined instead to indulge himself for once, while he has the chance. He traces the line of her lips with his eyes as she begins to speak again, remembers this time to listen to the sense of the words as well as the sounds, so that he can come up with sensible answers to her gentle questions. They talk of this and that, of his MIT days, of Quantico, of the more polite items of Bureau scut currently doing the rounds (he courteously omits the various choice rumours about the X-files division, of course, and she knows it, earning him a warmer smile), of some of her less sinister recent cases. Her disease sits between them on the table at first, squat, black, heavy, whispering to him to look, look right there, between her eyes, at where the tumour hides under the skin and bone. Presently, though, tired of being purposefully ignored, it slinks away, heading back to her apartment to wait for her in the lonely darkness of her bedroom. It's gone, at least for now, and a quiet, warm wave of gratitude washes over him. Later, though, as the last dregs of coffee cool and film over with milk in their cups, he looks at her, incandescent, glowing, quietly radiant. She gestures one-handed, laughs a little at some idle remark of his, and he cannot keep the thought away: such brightness is very close to burning out. Now his merciless memory dredges up the day he heard about her cancer as it became the latest message in the Bureau's horribly efficient rumour mill, the news creeping along hallways, hopping from desk to desk in the bullpens. Was it really only two weeks ago? It feels like a lifetime. He remembers entering the lab and the sudden fall of silence, the way Agent Linden finally approached him, her black gypsy eyes big and glossy, and whispered the word to him, the name of the beast. The way he coughed, fought for breath for a second, and then ordered them all back to work, diving for the comfort of tox screens and blood typing, pretending he didn't feel their painfully sympathetic stares. She came by later that day, as chance would have it, and he looked up as she entered the lab to see, and marvel, at how high she held her head, how straight her spine was, daring them to pity her. He had stuttered through five minutes without mentioning the c-word, when she leant in close to him and said quietly, for his ears only "Yes, Agent Pendrell, I have cancer. It is inoperable, but I'm receiving treatment. And contrary to what you may have heard, I'm not dead yet. Now: breathe." They have never mentioned it again. In his eyes her cancer is coloured, the dull, scratchy black of a dead raven's wing. It's a lump of coal, in which are fossilised hazel eyes and long, lean limbs, bewitching matinee idol good looks and incomprehensible quests, journeys that were never hers to take. He is not a violent man by nature, not in the least, but he's never wanted to hurt anyone this much, as badly as he wants to hurt Mulder. He can't say why, but he knows, deep in his bones, that Dana Scully would not be dying were it not for Fox Mulder. He tries not to imagine his fist smashing into Mulder's face, the brightness of blood and the crunch of bone. It would solve nothing, of course, but...it might bring a little justice to it all. He drinks the coffee without even tasting it, focused instead on the movement of her throat as she swallows, the way the light lies like a lover's touch on her full, wet lower lip, the rise and fall of her voice like a warm sea as she talks of Shakespeare's heroines, entangled in night-magic. Eventually the cups are hollow once more, and the waitress leans heavily on the counter, filing her nails and looking meaningfully at the clock. They should go. She has to get home to her cancer and her loneliness and her rapidly disappearing store of life, and he has to go home, try to sleep, and hope to forget. He holds the door for her, and they emerge, blinking, onto the quiet, dark sidewalk, the rush and chatter of people having long since faded away. She hails a cab, and he steels himself for the quick peck on the cheek and the awkwardness of goodbye. Instead, she surprises him, leaning up to brush her lips against his, chaste, and yet warmer than he could ever have imagined. Her mouth smiles a little against his, so quickly that it's gone when she pulls away, and he might have thought he imagined it, except for the tiny crinkles at the corners of her eyes. In the endless, liquid depths of her pupils, he sees a little of his own amazement at her gesture reflected back at him. "Thank you for a wonderful evening," she murmurs, beginning to turn to get into the cab. "Dana, wait," he calls, suddenly, reaching out to take her wrist. "Tell him, he whispers, inhaling the scent of her as he breathes the words into her ear. "Tell him he has nothing to be jealous of, and make sure he understands why, Dana." Make sure that he understands that I can't steal what doesn't want to be stolen, he pleads silently. She searches his face for a moment, her own inscrutable, and then, for the first time that night, treats him to a quick glimpse of that thousand-watt, full-blown smile. She nods, reaching up for a split second to cup his cheek with one hand, and then turns, and in a whirl of copper hair, white skin and black trenchcoat is into the cab and gone. Mexico will remain forever a treasured dream, then, something to indulge in bitter-sweet dreams of behind the dark of his closed eyelids, late at night. He would never have dared to ask her, and she would never have gone with him: that much he is certain of now. There is only one man she would take that beautiful journey with, only one man who would be permitted to share with her the sight of the blazing sun rising over the Pacific, the star-filled, flower-scented nights, the life remaining in her heart. Even the knight un-named in epic, unsung by bards, has his defining instant of nobility and sacrifice. His moment in the light is ending, quick and bright as it was, but there may be a little light left in the sky yet for someone else before darkness and confusion falls. Lay down your arms, Lancelot, he thinks desperately, raising a hand to his lips in the dark. Lay down your arms and ride back to the lake while you still can. FINIS