Chapter Text
Scully has never been one to bitch or moan or backseat drive. But right now, she’s teetering on the edge of doing all three.
It’s a sweltering summer day in the middle of July and they’re in the middle of seemingly butt-fuck nowhere, smack bang in the centre of Alabama. Fields have been rolling for miles, rising and sinking into the horizon like waves, occasional half-dead trees bent to decades of the wind’s command. The air is thick and humid, hanging sticky on her hair, undoing all that morning’s hard work to flat-iron the strands into place. They’re curling towards her neck now and it tickles, and combined with the viscous sweat coating her entire body, it feels like a form of torture. Alabama’s form of torture, perhaps: the summer here is hotter than anywhere else they’ve ever been before.
The sun-cracked roads are deserted, stretching empty for miles, and Mulder has taken to wiggling the car between lanes. Usually, she wouldn’t mind, because he’s a good driver and she trusts his judgement, so it’s not fear that has her close to flying off the handle- it’s her headache. It has been pounding incessantly for hours, and the car’s non-linear course is doing nothing to help it. The last of her painkillers are stuffed in her overnight bag in the trunk, buried under his bags and boxes of god-knows-what, so it’s not worth the labour to extract them from the puzzle, especially in the taxing heat.
Worse, the AC is broken- this particular rental car is at least twenty years old, she thinks- so the sweat is clinging to her clothes and is running down her forehead. It’s not fair. For Mulder, it is easy- he can simply unbutton the top of his shirt and loosen his tie, while she is confined to her pantyhose. She has considered taking them off, because at the end of the day it’s only her legs, but doesn’t think that she can deal with whatever sarcastically flirtatious quip he’ll make in response. She thinks that she’d probably yell at him or launch herself out of the door onto the tarmac. Either way, not ideal.
With great effort, she resists the urge to make friends with the floor and resigns herself to the agony. Her hands wander, bored and aching, to the singular, nearly empty water bottle sitting on the console between them. She presses it to her sweat-slicked forehead but it brings no relief, the liquid inside having turned lukewarm and muggy. Everything has been overrun by the oppressive heat; she sighs discontentedly, for once longing after the basement office. At least it stays cold down there, spooky label be damned.
Though she must sigh louder than intended- it feels inwardly quiet, but his eyes are immediately all over her, studying.
He smirks before opening his mouth. “Tired of tallying yet?” He probes, grinning like the Cheshire cat. “It’s certainly hard work. Brimming with life out here, don’t you think, Scully?”
She rolls her eyes. They’ve been tallying up various things over the hours: towns, people, cars, birds. It’d started as a half-sarcastic joke only half an hour into their drive when they had realised that they were essentially looking for Timbuktu, and were stuck in it for the long haul. Though this game had devolved fast- signs of human life were seldom and so now, she found herself counting birds. So far, only two blue-jays and a crow. Even nature seems to have rejected life out here, and she can’t find a reason to blame it.
“Well, are you tired of driving like that?” she retorts.
He shrugs. “Are you offering to swap over, Scully? My legs ache.”
Good, she nearly says, but instead unfurls the crinkled map across her lap, the torn edges scratching at her arms. It’s an obscenely large map from an obscenely dingy gas station, so large that it nearly stretches across the console between them, and she struggles to confine it.
“It's not far now, Mulder. I'm sure your legs can hold out a little bit longer.” Her finger traces the sparse webs of roads and dotted lines, while her mind does the mental math. “If I had to guess, I’d say that we’re about an hour out.”
An hour is fine. It’s certainly no miracle, but it will do because it’s not long enough for her headache to devolve into a migraine. This last hour- at least in her eyes- is the home stretch for fresh water and Advil. And a hot meal, maybe, she wants the real kind of food- not the pre-packaged granola bars and sunflower seeds that she’s been living off of all day at Mulder’s courtesy. The salt from the seeds has only intensified her thirst; she imagines that this is what it would feel like to survive off of seawater while adrift in the middle of nowhere. Rural Alabama, definitely, is the middle of nowhere. She silently prays that they’re heading in the right direction.
They should be: her map reading skills are second to none. Understanding them feels like speaking a native language, as a result of years of acting as Mulder's satnav- all it takes is a single look to digest the directions. Though, she’d be lying to say that this navigation hasn’t been more difficult than usual. Sugar Hollow is puny and insignificant compared to some of the other suburban sprawls on the paper, depicted to be only the size of a little pinhead.
“Keep your eyes peeled, then. It’ll be nearly as hard to spot as those birds you’ve been counting,” he quips.
“Oh, I’m sure,” she replies sarcastically. She resists the urge to throw the map at him and then feels immediately guilty for even having the urge in the first place. It’s not his fault that the drive is so long or that it’s ridiculously hot or that she has a headache. In all honesty, it's the bureau’s fault- the director specifically, who had set in place a number of budget cuts that conveniently targeted the X-Files.
Consequently, they had been relegated to the tin can of a car for the entire twelve hour drive. It better have a damn decent pay-off, at least- Mulder had promised ghosts and missing daughters, so there should be some room for an intriguing investigation.
Mentally, she runs over the case details to familiarise herself with what they’re walking into (it also passes the time pretty swiftly, she finds). Three girls have disappeared from Sugar Hollow in the past year- Theresa McCue, Hannah Crellin, and Delilah Murphy. The latter had vanished only two nights ago, which is what had brought Mulder to her apartment in the small hours after he'd received a desperate call from the town's sheriff. His knuckles assaulting her front door had awoken her, much to her agitation- he often acted as if he didn’t have a key, for some reason. The noise had roused her from sleep fast, but her rush to achieve some level of presentability had been even faster. Come on, Scully, we should leave now if we want to make it by nightfall, he’d chanted like a mantra as she rushed through her morning routine. Now, in retrospect, she realises that she’s left her concealer on the bathroom counter. Freckle-faced it is for the foreseeable future, then.
“I think I see it.” He points into the distance, squinting. Following his finger under the glaring sun is no easy feat, but she manages and to her satisfaction, he’s right. There, in the distance, is a speck of civilisation in the form of what looks like a church spire.
“Can we stop at a motel before we speak to the Sheriff?” She stretches her hands against the dashboard, arching her spine like a cat to relieve the hours of cramping. “I think I’d like to change.”
“Sure, I wouldn’t mind doing that myself,” he agrees, yawning.
Her mind short circuits and she nearly splutters before she realises what he means. The fatigue is so overbearing that her nerve endings are frayed, and for a moment she had thought that he meant that he wanted to change her clothes for her. For the first time in eleven hours, she’s grateful for the heat, because otherwise there would be no way to account for the redness that rises up her cheeks like a fire. She files that mental image away for later, willing the scarlet to retreat below her skin.
As they encroach on the town, it becomes increasingly obvious that it may as well be deserted. She can imagine some low-budget cowboy movie being shot out here- it’s the perfect scenery to have tumbleweed blow across before a shootout, the land barren and dry. The houses that they pass are sun-beaten and weathered, their white painted slats stripped back to their bare wood bones, and for every two inhabited ones, there’s at least one abandoned one with its windows blown out.
“I think I might put down a deposit for a house here, Scully.” He glances around and then points to one particularly decrepit dwelling with a large for sale sign plastered across its collapsing front porch. “What do you say? Wanna take a tour of that one together?”
She ignores the ‘together’. Maybe because she’s not in the mood for his half-assed flirtation attempts, or maybe because she fears that any thoughts of unity or togetherness, in general, will raise her inappropriate thoughts back to the precipice of her imagination. She truly isn't sure of which one it is.
“I think I’ll pass,” she finally concludes.
Evangelical billboards rise from the ground as they approach the church, preaching for the repentance of sins. The church itself, in comparison to what they’ve seen so far, is well-kept and fairly appealing. Its spire makes a feeble attempt to brush the clouds but it’s not entirely underwhelming, at least for a tiny town. Then they breach the town centre which, much to her relief, shows some signs of life. A few people are mulling between the family-owned stores, their plastic shopping bags stretching under the weight of milk bottles and bananas. Scully notes one grocer, one butcher, one baker and one general store. Not bad. There’s a laundrette, a tailor, a cinema with sun-bleached posters, a singular school (she thinks that it surely goes K through 12), a few cheap-looking cafes, and the police station that had called Mulder the night before. But despite all of this, there’s a frightening lack of a motel.
She sighs. “I’m not seeing a motel.” With great effort she cranes her neck to look further, as if somehow one is going to magically rise from the dead grass.
“Neither. Hold on.” He pulls the car into a parking space near the grocers and waves his arm through the window to attract the attention of a shopper. She shuffles over out of the shade, and Scully squints to get a good look. It’s a middle-aged woman with her hair scraped back taut into a bun, which stretches on her temples and makes her look warped and plastic-ish, like a Barbie that went wrong on the assembly line. She’s chewing on a burnt-out cigarette. Odd.
“Excuse me,” he calls out, smiling politely. “Can you tell me where the nearest motel is?”
The woman stares.
Silence stretches.
The woman still stares.
"Maybe she's deaf," Mulder whispers.
The woman narrows her eyes, and they look like daggers. Not deaf, Scully surmises, but now definitely agitated. She keeps staring.
Scully’s hackles rise, and for the first time since that morning, she feels a chill.
Mulder swiftly rolls the window back up and reverses out of the parking space. The woman still stares.
“I don’t think there is one, Scully.” He drives ahead, eyes piercing into the bleak horizon. “I’ve got a feeling that they don't like visitors to stay.”