maskormenace | [ Video ]

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[ Hey look it's Clem! Hi Clem! Only she looks a little ... guilty, and sheepish today. She's curled up on a chair by the window, with a book open in her lap, and a look of concentration on her face. Occasionally she glances up and around at a sound of the apartment settling, or a bird chirping - any noise she wasn't expected she jumps a bit in surprise. ]

.... I kind of messed up at work today. I think the man I work for is mad at me.

[ Or just a little concerned, Same thing. But uh... what exactly she did to make him concerned in the first place ...well, she knew she screwed up badly there. ]

Is Thane still here?

[ She hopes he is, but...wouldn't be surprised if he was gone - that tended to be the norm; people leave. At least he hasn't died right? After an awkward pause, she decides to offer another question. ]

And... um..What's a tibisp? I can't find it in the dictionary.

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[Jesus. Jesus, she's just a kid... Scully hesitates a moment, brow furrowed, but anger wins out and the video feed flicks on. She's not comfortable with putting her face out on the network, on the one hand, but on the other, she'd rather put the girl at ease -- and so, wearing an expression of concern, here she is.[

May I ask what happened at work?

[Child labour. Jesus.]

Someone got hurt because of me. [ She shuffles a little, uncomfortably. ] They came up behind me to ask me something.

[Scully's brow furrows again as she listens to the response, eyes moving over the picture. Body language is something a person learns to note as a law enforcement agent, and she's had entirely too many opportunities to work with children since she's taken her current assignment. It's not a job in which one ever wants to have to encounter children, but she has, and it's changed a few things about how she approaches them.

The horrible mess with Emily, too... well, she'd rather not think about that. About how she'd be the same age as this girl here by now.]

How did they get hurt?

[Not what did you do, regardless of the phrasing of her initial message. Even if she were inclined to blame the girl without all the information -- and she doubts she'll be inclined to even with it -- it's better to prod gently than to scold.]

[ It's the phrasing of the question that makes Clem more willing to answer. She still stares at the floor, not willing to meet the other woman's eyes, uneasily, hugging herself uncomfortably. ]

I ..stabbed him in the arm with a screwdriver. I stopped when I realized who it was.

[Rather than anger or shock, Scully's expression simply takes on a vague, quiet hurt. The reaction speaks of trauma, of unconscious expectations and equally helpless reactions, of a sort of damage that time might be able to lessen but which can never be wholly mended. Of course it hurts, God, of course it does; the idea that someone would frighten a little girl to that point, hurt her to that point... her lips part around silence a few moments before she tries, as kindly as she can manage:]

Sometimes, if there's something we're frightened of and we're startled, we act on that fear without thinking first. That doesn't make us bad people.

[Us. Dana Scully may never have reflexively stabbed anyone, but she certainly looks at the world differently now than she used to, reaches on muscle memory for her gun at loud noises, at times in response to things as innocuous as an unexpected knock on the door. That this girl should have a much stronger reaction to being startled than she does is only evident of a greater trauma. After a pause, she takes a breath, as though to stretch the dull ache out of her chest.]

My name is Dana. Is it alright if I ask yours?

[ Clementine relaxes a fraction, almost half expecting blame to be thrown her way. It was surprising and a breath of fresh air to get the opposite. But more than that, there's just something about the way Scully responds that strikes a chord in her.

Lee. Lee would tell her the same thing, if not the same way too. And it hurt, even two years later, to think of him, missing him that much. It took her a moment to answer. ]

C... Clementine.

Clementine. That's a lovely name.

[Again she feels a pang of angry disbelief that anyone would want to hurt a little girl like this.]

You can call me if you need someone to talk to the man you work for, okay?

[She'd like to have a few words with the man, regardless of whether or not it turns out that he's taking advantage of her for cheap labour.]

If you need to talk about anything else, too. I used to work for the FBI. The police. I've heard about a lot of scary things. I've seen a lot of scary things.

[You won't surprise me is what she means, and more fervently than she can begin to express here and now.]

...thank you. [ She manages a slight smile. Though, a former cop? ... she wasn't going to get in trouble right? ]

You have? [ ... she might be a little skeptical. ] ... like what?

Well, like...

[Scully pauses, worrying at her lower lip as she thinks over the question. The answers that come to mind are myriad, but none of them quite appropriate for speaking to a child, half of them hardly even sane... she gives the girl enough credit not to believe her if she were to speak, for instance, of the dead man, rising from his slab in the autopsy bay to carve gouges in her throat which have since (but not long since) healed over, leaving no mark. And that is hardly the strangest thing she's ever seen. It's not even the most frightening.]

A gigantic alligator ate my dog once.

[But that falls flat and she knows it, and so she takes a breath, letting it out again in a sigh.]

I once met a man who could hypnotize people into doing whatever he wanted, just by talking. He tried to make my partner shoot me. People come to us for all kinds of things. Monsters. All the awful things people sometimes do to one another.

...

[ A gigantic alligator? That's it? ... wait, that still kinda sucks. ]

I'm sorry. [ Poor doggy. She pauses at the latter though, tensing. ]

What happened to him? The man that could do that.

[ In a way she equated monsters to people that were horrible to each other - thought people were worse in some cases. At least with monsters you knew what to expect. People were..different. They could pretend to be nice, and then stab you in the back. ]

[If the sentiment had been voiced, Clementine would find Scully in agreement -- every inhuman thing she's ever encountered had simple, straightforward drives, particular needs. But humans, humans could go bad in ways wholly unexpected -- like Robert Patrick Modell, who talked people into killing themselves.]

He's dead. He... another agent shot him and he died in the hospital.

[Modell had died to save his sister. That much she doesn't bother to add -- it complicates the issue, but only insofar as it was, at the time, unexpected. Murderers were still human; failing to account for that was dangerous.]

Sometimes people would rather risk dying than being caught.

[ She's quiet for a moment. ]

... that's stupid.

[ The part about people who would rather risk dying than being caught, that is. Not that he died at all. ]

No, it doesn't make much sense to me either.

[She presses her lips together and gives a faint, eloquent shrug of the shoulders. It's not quite true. Modell was dying either way, his brain eaten away by a cancer that was slowly sapping away his vitality. Scully understands in a more visceral, personal way than she'd like to discuss what it's like to know that time is short, to want to do something spectacular before it runs out. The difference between them is what that something was meant to be.]

But those, those are bad people. They know from the start that what they're doing is going to hurt people, and they do it anyway. Some of them are scared, but it's not the same sort of scared as what made you do what you did, okay?

[ Clem was silent for a moment, thinking about that. ]

Yeah... I think I get it. [ Still she told herself she should try to be more careful - but at the same time, reflexes like that would really keep her alive anywhere else. ]

Thanks.

It's alright. Just remember what I said. I'm here if you ever need help with anything.

[ She's a little hesitant to agree to that. On the one hand she liked working with other people, and she knows she can't really get by without help from someone else - but adults have a habit of ... leaving. Or dying. ]

.... yeah I'll... keep that in mind. Thanks, Dana...

[ She'll probably take the other woman up on her offer at some point - if she comes across something she absolutely can't do on her own. ]

It's alright. Nobody should have to take care of everything all on their own.

[Especially not a child, but having spoken with her, Scully doubts the girl would appreciate that addition, and so it remains silent.]

[ It's appreciated, yes. ]

Yeah. You can't get by on your own for long. [ Although trusting other people is another matter. Even though she kept telling herself it wasn't like the way things were back there, it was hard to act otherwise. ]

What about you? Do you have a group... people you work with here?

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