01. [The transitions are dizzying, lights and shapes pushing through the fog of confusion but barely registering at first as real. Dana Scully is a doctor; she recognises, dimly, the aftershocks of trauma, even if she can't place the initial event, or gauge its intensity. The symptoms are even more familiar in light of her work on the X-Files; that she has, over the years, had the opportunity to grow familiar with this disorientation and confusion is not something she recalls with fondness, though strangely she detects in herself a sliver of pride, and uses it to keep her head up.
At first she thinks it might save her, but then it seems that maybe it won't have to.
Her jaw is set in preemptive intransigence as she faces down the woman approaching her. Military fatigues, and for a moment she wrestles with sparring impulses. Her childhood tells her to respect the uniform, but more recent experience tells her to mistrust it. Suspicion wins. Lately, suspicion always wins.]
What the hell is going on here? Where's my partner?
[Her voice isn't calm, but she's not shouting. An angry front covers her profound insecurity, but only if it isn't excessive.]
02. [Frankly, Scully thinks dragging people out of their lives and depositing them here, leaving them to their own devices, is at best excessively optimistic. She doesn't put much stock in the idea that it's because the military has no right to detain her; in her experience, that doesn't mean much as long as nobody's watching, and sometimes even then. To the credit of the locals, they are watching, if not for the reasons that they should be.
As she'd wandered, taking stock of her surroundings and letting the initial shock of the forced relocation abate, she'd done her best to hide her new branding from prying, curious eyes. Now she examines it herself as she sits on a park bench, wearing an expression of unhappy concentration as she stretches the skin above it, running her thumb over the new marks. It doesn't feel like the tattoo she'd chosen. It doesn't commemorate anything, mean anything. She'd opted for hers when she thought she might be dying, to reclaim a body that had already begun to fail her, and still these new markings set her more on edge. They make her feel watched, and she's disgusted at how familiar that feeling really is.
Maybe that's why she fixates on it, to start. The rest is so strange, so near to the edge of unbelievable that that thread of familiarity calls to her. Or maybe, maybe it's that now, even given the unlikely chance to start over, she hasn't been afforded autonomy over herself.]
Dana Scully | The X-Files
[The transitions are dizzying, lights and shapes pushing through the fog of confusion but barely registering at first as real. Dana Scully is a doctor; she recognises, dimly, the aftershocks of trauma, even if she can't place the initial event, or gauge its intensity. The symptoms are even more familiar in light of her work on the X-Files; that she has, over the years, had the opportunity to grow familiar with this disorientation and confusion is not something she recalls with fondness, though strangely she detects in herself a sliver of pride, and uses it to keep her head up.
At first she thinks it might save her, but then it seems that maybe it won't have to.
Her jaw is set in preemptive intransigence as she faces down the woman approaching her. Military fatigues, and for a moment she wrestles with sparring impulses. Her childhood tells her to respect the uniform, but more recent experience tells her to mistrust it. Suspicion wins. Lately, suspicion always wins.]
What the hell is going on here? Where's my partner?
[Her voice isn't calm, but she's not shouting. An angry front covers her profound insecurity, but only if it isn't excessive.]
02.
[Frankly, Scully thinks dragging people out of their lives and depositing them here, leaving them to their own devices, is at best excessively optimistic. She doesn't put much stock in the idea that it's because the military has no right to detain her; in her experience, that doesn't mean much as long as nobody's watching, and sometimes even then. To the credit of the locals, they are watching, if not for the reasons that they should be.
As she'd wandered, taking stock of her surroundings and letting the initial shock of the forced relocation abate, she'd done her best to hide her new branding from prying, curious eyes. Now she examines it herself as she sits on a park bench, wearing an expression of unhappy concentration as she stretches the skin above it, running her thumb over the new marks. It doesn't feel like the tattoo she'd chosen. It doesn't commemorate anything, mean anything. She'd opted for hers when she thought she might be dying, to reclaim a body that had already begun to fail her, and still these new markings set her more on edge. They make her feel watched, and she's disgusted at how familiar that feeling really is.
Maybe that's why she fixates on it, to start. The rest is so strange, so near to the edge of unbelievable that that thread of familiarity calls to her. Or maybe, maybe it's that now, even given the unlikely chance to start over, she hasn't been afforded autonomy over herself.]