Letonia - 4/10

Letonia
4/10

Robert Drake, Bobby to almost everyone who wasn’t at the time screaming at him for some trick he’d played, sat silently in a tree. He was so still that the animals, who had only just begun returning to the scarred clearing, forgot he was there. From his perch, he could see the entire meadow, but he took in only the small area where grass refused to grow. Even at that, he wasn’t really seeing it as it was now, but as it had been a little over two weeks ago.

Guilt ate him.

*

John Doggett gathered his briefcase closer under his arm. The walk from the car to the clearing had been longer than he’d remembered.

“I’m getting too old for this,” he muttered. “Don’t even know why I’m back here in Sherwinigan. It’s been almost two weeks, any evidence is long gone by now. I can’t possibly do any good.” Doggett suddenly stopped short. The most important question of all had just occurred to him.

“Why am I talking to myself? Next thing I know, they’ll be calling me Spooky too.” Shrugging his shoulders slightly, Doggett continued on his way. He could almost see the clearing. He caught himself just before he could comment on that fact. He paused when he reached the edge of the meadow where he’d been while Skinner had been trying to contact to tell him about Scully. This case had drawn him back for some reason. Surveying it, he realized a very important fact.

There was someone else in the meadow.

A young blonde Caucasian sat in one of the trees, his eyes fixed on the spot where the blood had been when Doggett had first come out here to investigate. Doggett cleared his throat loudly and waited for a response. Getting none, he tried again. When he still didn’t get as much as a blink, he strode into the clearing and hollered. “Hey, you!”

The man fell out of the tree.

Doggett quickened his step, hurrying over to the young man. “You ok?”

Doggett’s concern seemed uncalled for. The man lay on the ground for less than a second before springing up into what looked to Doggett like a kick boxing pose. He seemed to be preparing for a fight, deciding if force would be necessary. Doggett took a few seconds to marvel at the man’s reflexes. Most people at least paused after falling out of a tree.

“Who are you?” Doggett asked, hoping that if he got the man talking, he could avoid a potentially tough situation.

“I could ask you the same thing,” the man shot. His eyes were hard, harder than the eyes of a boy that age should be. He seemed to pause for a second. “Let me guess. You’re Special Agent John Doggett with the FBI.”

“You seem to have me at a disadvantage. You see, you know who I am, but I don’t know who you are, or how you know me. Or why you were sitting in a tree looking at a crime site.

“Care to fill in the blanks?”

The man looked strait at Doggett. The agent, who now was closer to the boy, could see the boy’s eyes had taken on a strange look. He appeared to be in his mid twenties, and he was right now evaluating Doggett, judging him. “My name’s Bobby. I know who you are, because I pay attention to what’s going on around me. FBI investigations are the kind of thing everyone in these parts would end up knowing about.”

“So Mr. Bobby, are you from around these parts?”

The boy paused. “That, Agent, is part of the answer to your last question. Even though this isn’t marked as a crime scene anymore. But this is a story that will take awhile to tell. And just call me Bobby.”

Doggett felt a strange wave of compassion sweep over him. A few weeks ago, he would’ve just sat this kid down and forced the story out of him. But that was then. Everything had been so strange lately. Looking at Bobby again, he saw that the boy’s eyes weren’t hard, they were numb and sad. This was someone who was as bereaved as he.

Ah, heck, what’s one more strange thing?

“You want to tell me about it over drinks?”

*

“So Mulder thinks that he should be Evan’s guardian. He hasn’t said it outright, but I can tell. That kid is everything to him since Scully.....” Doggett trailed off. He still wasn't comfortable saying ‘since Scully’s death’. Shaking it off, he continued.

“He has Evan right now, while I’m looking after this case. He really loves that kid, I have to give credit, but he’s throwing too much into it. Mulder’s always looking for a stop gap solution, something to focus on. He’ll pick one thing that’s wrong, and decide that if he can fix that, every thing will be ok. He’s done it before, with his sister, with the conspiracy. It never ends, he flits from one obsession to another. When he’s made one thing right, and finds out that it hasn’t put everything in order, he just finds another fixation. It’s always the next thing for Mulder. For now, it’s Evan. And with me in the picture, he can’t fix him.

“I know what you have to be thinking. What am I so worried about if I know what’s going on? I should be able to stop that. I am Evan’s legal guardian.

“What I’m worried about is that Mulder doesn’t just want to be a glorified babysitter. He wants Evan. I think that he might be planning on taking me to court over my guardianship.

“It’s not that I think that he’ll win. The courts will take one look at his record and dismiss his claim that Evan would be better off with him, just because he’d known Scully for longer. They’ll see the year where he was MIA, not contacting anyone to let them know that he was even alive, they’ll see that he can’t really bring any people to then to vouch for his character, since he never had much of a life, and no real friends outside of Scully and the Lone Gun Men. That in an of itself will prove to them that this is a man who is totally focussed on his work. He doesn’t even have any outside interests.

“On top of that all, he’s a single male. These judges are conservatives for the most part. They don’t think that a single man is capable of looking after a child, especially not one Evan’s age.

“That’s what I’m worried about, their bias against the single male. What if they decide that I’m not a suitable guardian either? I’m a single man in a line of work that frequently takes me away from home, and which can be considered dangerous. Not exactly the ideal enviroment in which to raise a son.

“They could take Evan away from me, put him in a foster home till they decide which member of Scully’s family would be most suited to caring for them. They could even award guardianship to Bill, which, believe me, is not something that Scully would’ve wanted.

“So I’m stuck between a rock and a hard place, if you’ll pardon the cliche. Mulder’s going to go for it, I can see it in the way he looks at Evan, in the way that he looks at me. Maybe not today, but sometime soon, before Evan’s been with me for too long. I don’t want to say anything for fear of setting him off. I think that it would only make things worse. He’s not going to listen to reason on this one. So all I can do is let him look after Evan whenever I need to go out, and hope that spending that much time around the kid will be just what he needs, instead of just convincing him that he needs to have Evan even more.

“I guess that that’s probably part of why I’m here. I have no chance of solving this case, not after all this time. I guess that I wanted Mulder to have some time with Evan, without it seeming like I was time sharing the kid. I don’t want to get into a court battle, I don’t want to take even the slightest risk of loosing Evan. I’ve lost too much already.”

Doggett took a sip of his beer, then made a face. It was warm. Grimacing, he chugged the rest of the thing. He and Bobby had entered the Sherwinigan Tavern and Hotel over an hour ago. They’d sat down in one of the booths. Doggett had ordered a beer, Bobby a scotch on the rocks. They’d sat in silence for awhile, sipping their drinks. Then, driven by the same impulse that had prompted him to ask the other man for a drink, Doggett had began to talk about Scully. From there, it had moved to Evan, and how everyone was dealing.

“Agent Doggett, you said that that was probably part of why you were here,” Bobby said, speaking for the first time since ordering his drink. He’d just been sitting there, listening, for all the time Doggett had been talking. His Scotch was still in his hand, but it didn’t look as if he’d drunk much of it.

Doggett started slightly at that. “I guess I did.”

“Agent Doggett,”

“Just call me Doggett. None of this Agent crap,” Doggett interrupted

“All right then. Doggett, is it possible that you’re really here because this is something that went wrong at the same time that your partner died? This is something that is bothering you from the same time frame, but you can at least try to fix this. It’s intertwined with Scully’s death in your subconscious.”

Doggett started to refute the younger man’s statement, then paused.

*God, I hate pop psychology.*

There was a period of silence, then Bobby began to speak again. “You know, I really admire how well you’re dealing. From what you’ve said, you’re still grieving, but it’s not taking over your life.

“I could probably take a lesson from you”

Doggett motioned the bar tender over and asked for another beer. When it came, he settled back into the seat, and waited. Bobby stared into the depths of his still almost full first drink for a few seconds, then he started to speak.

“We were both there from the beginning, you know. Back then, we never dreamed that we’d be left after the others were dead or gone.

“Hank’s dead now too. I’m the last of the first.

“Mr. Doggett, I can tell that you’re itching to ask me who we were, but I didn’t talk while you told your tale, so you’re not going to interrupt me. I’ll try to make things as clear as possible, but sometimes I’ll forget the things that you don’t know.

“We were what you’d call a gaggle of X-Files. The Professor brought us together, made us a team. We learned to control that which had brought us to him, and we tried, I guess, to make the world a better place. At the time, it was this grand gesture. It was romantic. We believed in it.

“My friends died for it.

“It’s not to say that I’m the only one left. Far from it. We gathered more people over the years. Some came to us, some we sought out. We lost a lot of them too. Hank McCoy and I were the only ones who were steady. The Professor too, of course, but I don’t know if he counts. He’s just mentor guy.

“We’ve been fighting a lot lately. There are other groups like us, and let’s just say that we have differences of opinion about very important things.

“We should be allies. Instead, we’re enemies. Our rivalry in some cases is older than our team. It goes back to the Professor’s younger years. We just kind of got stuck with it. Some sort of warped inheritance.

“But this isn’t what we’re here to talk about. We’re here because you have an incident scene on your hands that defies rational explanation, and you caught me surveying it. You think that I can tell you what happened there.

“Let me just warn you, you’re not going to like what I have to say. It’s outside your box.

“We were fighting again, this time with Magneto, a man who spent some time on our side. He and the Professor used to be very good friends. Magneto has different friends now. They can give us a run for our money, and they were in on this scuffle.

“Now, I can’t even remember what it was about this time. All I remember is the battle itself, and that’s beginning to blur. When you fight for long enough, it all starts to seem the same.

“That night, emotions seemed to run deeper than usual. We normally work as a team. We all look out for each other.

“That time it was different. There must have been something in the air. We were all viscous, out for blood. It was like a bar room brawl almost, every man for himself. We weren’t watching out for each other at all. There were a few times I almost got hit by my own team mates. We fought forever, I think. I mean, I know that it couldn’t have been more than forty-five minutes, but it seemed....

“When the dust settled, we saw that we’d won, but that the price was something that we never wanted to pay.

“I look around, and I see Sarah standing over Hank, still ready to fight. Sarah’s technically on our side, but she’s not the most trustworthy person. She claims that she doesn’t care about any of us, and usually, we believe her, but she comes through when it counts.

“Hank had gone down hard, not even half way through the fight. He took a blow to the stomach. It didn’t kill him right away. Sarah was the only one who saw it, the rest of us were too caught up in our own struggles.

“I was too caught up in my own struggle. Hank and I’ve always looked out for each other. We count on the other person to watch our backs.

“We counted on each other to watch our backs.

“The last half of the fight, Sarah was making herself vulnerable. She was protecting him, because he was too badly hurt to protect himself. She couldn’t move too far away from him, so she lost most of her mobility. She made sure that not even one more blow reached him. That’s where that bone came from, by the way. Sarah has a very rare condition which causes bones to grow out of her body.

“But the damage had already been done. Hank was still alive when everything was over. He joked about it, quoted Shakespeare. He was our doctor though. He knew how bad it really was. We were afraid to move him, and he was badly enough off by then that nothing he could tell us to do would help. If it was one of us, he could’ve saved us, I think.

“He was our only doctor, and he couldn’t treat himself. I remember crouching there with Ororo, using Remy’s coat to try to stop the bleeding. He’d lost so much blood. We just sat there till the end, holding his hand. The others, those who were there, kind of kept their distance. They didn’t know what to do, and they found that a bit hard to deal with. When he died, it wasn’t anything spectacular. His next breathe just never came.

“We had his funeral the next day. We buried him among our people, right next to Scott, the man who led us in the beginning. Scott’s interred beside his wife. We lost her a long time ago.

“I know that he didn’t blame me. I know that he wouldn’t want me to put myself through this. But the fact of the matter is, I didn’t have his back. He needed me and I let him down. If I hadn’t been so caught up in my rage.....

“So I come here, and I replay the battle in my mind, trying to pinpoint all the chances I had to change to outcome. It’s not as if it’s not something that I do anyway, back at the mansion, but I feel closer to him this way. The others are seriously starting to worry about me. They think that I can’t let go, that I’m going to get stuck in the past.

“I’ve lost so many others, and this is the first time that I’ve been struck this way.

“I’m the last of the first, Doggett. You have no idea what that means.”

He fell silent, his ghosts not eating at him quite as much as they had been earlier.

“I’m going to go home now. There’s nothing here for me but reflections of pain.”

Bobby looked up out of his glass then. All the time that he’d been speaking, his eyes had never left the whirling of the scotch and ice cubes. Doggett wanted to think that the man was crazy. Bobby’d left so many things unexplained, and a lot of what he had imparted made no sense at all. He’d left things blurry.

But still Doggett found himself sympathizing with Bobby. Even if he had made the entire story up, he’d suffered some severe loss. *Either that, or the boy deserves an Oscar. He’s suffering.*

Crazy or not, lying or not, he was going to let Bobby go, without questioning him.

*Geez, what’s wrong with me?*

The other man spoke again then. “Can I ask you something, Doggett?”

“I guess.”

“Just tell me if this is too personal, ok?”

“All right.”

“Would you be happier if you found out that Scully was alive, but somewhere from which she couldn’t return, never to see her loved ones again? Would the thought that she wasn’t dead comfort you, or would the idea of her forever just outside of the reach of the people she cared about bring you more grief?”

Doggett paused before answering. “Well, that one came way out of left field,” he said, falling silent again before continuing. “I guess it all depends on whether or not she was with people who cared about her, and would look after her.”

The two men sat in silence for another while, both busy with their own thoughts. Bobby smiled at Doggett and threw a bill on the table. “It’s been really good talking to you, Doggett.”

Doggett nodded in mute companionship. Bobby offered him his hand, and they shook. The young man started to leave, then hesitated. He turned back to Doggett. “If it comes down to a court thing with Mulder, you’ll have support. You have my word. And where ever Dana is, she has people watching over her, you have to believe that. You have my word on that as well.”

He strode out of the bar then. He was almost at the door before Doggett realized something. He got up and started after him. “Hey! I never told you Scully’s first name. How do you know her first name?” Bobby’s gait didn’t alter, he didn’t look back. He just pushed the door open and stepped outside.

When Doggett reached the door, he was fairly sure of himself. The bar was in the middle of an empty street. Bobby hadn’t had enough of a head start to have gone far. Opening the door and stepping out into the cool early evening air, he stopped short.

Except for a mongrel dog sniffing at the curb, the street was deserted.

*

Bobby Drake sat crouched on the roof of the tavern, watching the FBI agent search the street. He wondered if the other man would notice that there was still ice in his glass when he went back in, despite the fact that Doggett had gone through two beers, both of which had ended up warm.

He probably shouldn’t have kept his drink cold, but he hated warm scotch. Then again, he probably shouldn’t have talked to the agent at all, and he definitely should have left that last part about Doggett’s partner out.

*I can’t believe I slipped and called her by her first name. If he was paying attention, he has enough unanswered questions to make him want to try very hard to find out what’s really going on, and more than enough information to at least take him a long way towards finding out the truth.*

But amongst all the uncertainties, one thing was clear in his mind.

The Professor was going to kill him.

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