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“You gotta help me keep the devil
Way down in the hole.” – Tom Waits
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They shouldn’t have ceiling fans in places like this, John thinks. The motion of the shadows on the bar are enough to make a man dizzy.
Five blades, he deduced when he first noticed the intermittent shadow cutting across the glass in front of him. They’re moving too slowly to create much of a breeze. They must be dirty from cigarette smoke, though he assumes that rather than sees it, because the wood they’re made of is dark enough to cover a lot of sins. One of the fan blades has something irregular stuck on it, and he couldn’t figure out what it was until he looked up.
Even then, it took him a minute to place it: a broken string of plastic beads, stuck on with masking tape, surely a remnant from some past event. St. Patrick’s Day, maybe—the beads are green—or Mardi Gras. New Year’s. Something.
John knows when Monica arrives without looking. Sometimes, it’s like his skin prickles when she walks in the room.
He can’t explain it. Doesn’t try to. Sure as hell doesn’t tell her about it, because if she tries to explain it, she’ll come up with some bullshit theory that’ll make his head hurt for a week.
“I’m Monica Reyes,” he hears her say, halfway down the bar. Her voice is light, like she’s smiling. Not pissed off, then, or at least, not pissed off enough to show it to a stranger. “I’m here for him.”
Out of the corner of his eye, John sees the bartender pass her something black. A wallet, John thinks, until he remembers handing over his cell phone. Speed dial #2.
He could’ve called her himself—he’s too drunk to drive, not to speak—but with the room spinning, there’s always the chance he’d choose the wrong number. There’s no one else on his speed dial list that he’d want to see him like this, #1 least of all.
She feels sorry for you.
Monica pockets his cell and slides onto the barstool next to him. He doesn’t look at her straight on, but he notices that the skin around her fingernails is rough, like she’s been picking at it. No nail polish. She used to wear red nail polish back in New York.
She taps her index finger on the bar, splashing into a little puddle of liquid. “It’s been a while.”
It has been less than seven hours since he left her in Agent Scully’s classroom, but he knows what she means.
“Wasn’t sure you were coming this time,” he says, but he only started to doubt it because it took a while for her to arrive. He treated her like crap on the case, then he ditched her at Quantico, but still, just like he knows his own name, he knows—
“I’ll always come.” The warm constancy in her words makes his chest hurt, a thick mix of gratitude and guilt. Montana. D.C. A dark, wood-paneled bar off the 95 at quarter to midnight.
She’ll always come.
“I got my cab driver turned around. I don’t know this part of the metro at all. Well, I guess I know it a little better now.” She taps on the bar again, this time with purpose. “Coffee, please, for both of us, and a pack of Morley Lights—on his tab.”
The bartender smiles, and that makes John finally turn to look at Monica to catch the answering look on her face. She’s pretty when she smiles. Pretty in general.
The echo of that expression is still there when she turns back to him. “What?”
“Thought you quit.” He hasn’t seen her light up during her few weeks in D.C., or smelled smoke on her.
“I thought ‘old vices’ was the theme for the evening.” She raises her eyebrows like she’s asking a question. “Unless there’s another topic on the agenda I should be aware of.”
She thanks the bartender by name, somehow. John watches as she taps the top of the pack against the bar five times before unwrapping the cellophane. Her eyes slide closed when she inhales the smell of raw tobacco.
Real pretty. Yeah.
“Don’t smoke that,” he says, as she pulls out a cigarette, because it feels a little like he’s taking her down with him.
She smiles at him again. “Pack’s already open.” She lights a match, and the flame bends in the faint breeze from the fan above them.
Agent Reyes may have feelings for you, Kobold said, on the way to far more damning things. But you for her?
Mind games. A psychopath shooting in the dark until something hit. A master manipulator, the puppeteer, the only guy in the damn game who could see the whole board.
The coffee is acrid, like it has been sitting in the pot for hours, and it’s not doing much to clear his head.
Her cigarette is halfway gone when Monica asks, “Are you going to tell me why we’re here?”
“I called you.”
“My new friend Frederick called me,” she corrects. “You could have gotten a cab.” She states it as a fact, not like she’s fishing for an apology. If she wanted one, she’d ask for it.
She doesn’t play mind games, not even the little social ones that would probably help her get through life without everyone thinking she’s nuts. She could’ve talked around her demonic possession questions at the mental hospital, gotten her answers without alienating Doctor Sampson, but that wouldn’t even occur to her. Monica plays her cards face-up.
He assesses himself with that same spirit of honesty, and with whatever investigator logic is left to him after what she used to call “a whiskey night”—the kind of night he doesn’t have anymore, the kind he left behind in New York when he put his life back together.
He could’ve called a cab. He could’ve drunk himself under his own table, in his own damn house.
He’s here because he wanted her to come and get him.
She feels sorry for you. They both do.
Jesus. The game is over, Kobold won, and John is still playing the pawn with a flawless performance.
“Why don’t you tell me why the hell we’re here,” he says, with more bitterness than she deserves. This is the week, after all, for crazy people to tell him why he makes the choices he does. “You’re the one with all the theories.”
Monica lights a second cigarette off the ember of the first. “Okay,” she says, and swivels on her barstool to face him.
She looks at him like she’s opening a book, like she can read him just that clearly. His skin prickles, and he feels a sick turn in his stomach that’s not entirely about the mix of whiskey and bad coffee.
“You shot an innocent man last night,” she says. “It wasn’t your fault, but Kobold used you to do it.”
John feels his fist tensing around the handle of his coffee mug, and forces himself to let it go before he breaks it. “How the hell did he do that? And don’t tell me…” He lifts his hand toward his head, then drops it. “Not tonight. Not now.”
She mercifully skips over whatever mind-bending lecture she has at the ready about demonic possession. “I would have fired, too. So would have Agent Scully.”
He’s not sure he believes her. She was there too, and armed, but he was the one who took the shot.
The bureau will review it, like any fatal shooting, but the cards will fall in his favor. He had every reason to believe the guy fleeing the scene was Kobold, and he provided a warning before firing. He did everything right. Textbook.
Everything right, except it was the wrong damn man, and John wonders now if Monica and Dana could have seen that setup for what it was.
He thought he was the only one in this case with his eyes open. The whole time, he thought Kobold was taking those two for a ride, dazzling their vision with parlor tricks, but it turned out that John was the blind puppet at the end of the string.
He says, “He had two kids, you know that?”
“Custer?”
He takes another swig of disgusting coffee, then pushes it away.
Monica waves down her bartender friend—Fred? Frank? “Can we get some water, too?”
Two kids.
Two gunshots.
And the hell of it is—
“… is what?” Monica prompts gently, and John wonders how many things he has said aloud tonight by mistake.
The hell of it is, that’s not even why he’s here.
In this bar. In the basement. On the X-Files.
“What did Kobold say to you?” She’s wearing that expression she gets sometimes, like she’s trying to look under his skin. “I’ve never seen you like that before. I was worried.”
“He said a lot of things.”
“You can’t take them in, John.”
“Why? Because he was ‘possessed by Satan’? Because I’m letting the devil in—is that what you’re going to say?”
“No.” Monica sets her cigarette down in the groove of the ashtray. “He’s a master manipulator. You said that yourself. Whatever he told you was for his own benefit, not yours.”
A glass of water appears on the bar in front of him. John spins it around instead of drinking from it—a quarter-turn one way and back again, making the ice clink.
Monica prods, “He was trying to separate you from us. Is that it?”
“We’re already separate. All this crazy stuff…” He feels a rush of sweaty heat under his collar. “You and Agent Scully. I’m just here slowing you down, isn’t that right? Isn’t that what you think?”
“Of course not. Is that what you think?”
He can’t look at her anymore. “I don’t know what the hell I’m doing here. Damn it. He said…”
Long moments pass in silence, and he doesn’t want to fill them. He watches the slow pass of shadows crossing over their hands, the water glasses, Monica’s cigarette turning into a column of ash.
She touches his arm, and her fingers are so warm against his skin it feels like she’s burning him. “All right. Why did he say you’re here?”
Dana. Agent Scully.
Clearly you have feelings for her.
He can’t tell Monica that. He won’t be able to stand seeing that knowledge in her face the next time the three of them are in a room together.
He can’t stand to give her one more reason to feel sorry for him.
“He said I’m chasing ghosts because there’s one I’ll never catch.”
“Luke.”
He takes a drink. The water tastes like chlorine, and it’s so cold it hurts his teeth.
“So what?” Monica asks.
That surprises him enough that he looks at her again, straight on.
“No, really. So what? We all act from personal reasons, even when we don’t realize it. What better reason is there to do something than out of love?”
The room is still tilting around the edges, but she’s solid and clear. “That simple, huh?”
She shrugs. There’s a worry line between her eyebrows, but a gentle smile on her lips. Sympathy, not pity. “You’re doing fine, John.”
She has said that before. When he was grieving, and she kept stubbornly showing up—in his voicemail, at the precinct, at his house. When his marriage fell apart because he couldn’t stop chasing Luke’s ghost, and Monica fished him out of other bars. She has been #2 on his speed dial for a long time—after Barbara first, now after Agent Scully.
When she called to check up on him, his first month at the Academy, and he said, Jesus, Monica, they’re a bunch of kids. How the hell am I supposed to keep up with them?
When he called her, his first month on the X-Files. Jesus, Monica. It’s a shop of horrors down here. How the hell am I—?
She asks, “Are you sober enough yet to give me directions?”
He decides that he is. She retrieves his credit card from the bartender and signs her own name on the receipt.
The fresh air outside helps revive him further. His steps are steady, but she keeps her arm looped in his anyway until they reach his truck and she holds out her hand for his keys.
It’s strange, being in the passenger seat. In the four years he’s had it, no one else has ever driven his truck. That feels like too lonely a thing to admit out loud.
He gives her directions, cueing her into the turns too late for her to make them smoothly. Once, she has to circle to the next block. He wonders how long he could get her to circle down wrong streets and alleys, how deep into the night he could keep her here with him before she catches on.
Agent Reyes may have feelings for you…
He has never called someone else from that bar, or from any other in the D.C. area. He hasn’t done this once since he moved here. Sure, two or three times a year he’ll get too deep into a handle of whiskey on a bad night, but always at home, never with a witness.
She was in New York, and then in New Orleans. She couldn’t have come, if he’d called her, and he thinks that would’ve hurt them both.
She says, out of the blue, “I never thanked you.”
It’s an absurd statement, given the circumstances. “For dragging you out in the middle of the night to take my sorry ass home?”
“No, John.” She tosses him a look. In a passing streetlight, he catches her expression, the one she gives him when he’s being intentionally difficult and she knows it—except this time, he genuinely doesn’t know what she’s talking about. “For getting me assigned to the X-Files.”
He knows she’s telling the truth, but that doesn’t mean it’s not nuts. “It’s a career-ender.”
“Not for me. It’s my dream assignment. This is exactly where I want to be.” This time, when she looks over at him, she’s smiling. God, she’s pretty when she smiles. “And I get to do it with you.”
A knot rises up in his throat, and it takes him five blocks to swallow it down.
… but you for her?
Maybe he’s not still down in that basement just for Dana, or for Luke.
He knew she would come.
She slows to a stop in front of his house. “Door to door service,” she says, still smiling. “Are you going to be okay?”
He thinks about saying no, so she’ll follow him in, but he can’t lie to her. They’ve had enough of mind games for one week. “Yeah. You can find your way back to the highway?”
“Sure. Call me tomorrow when you’re up, and I’ll bring the truck back. You can buy me breakfast.”
He can already feel the headache brewing. He’s in for a rough morning. “Might be a little late for breakfast.”
“Brunch, then.” She reaches across the bench seat and covers his hand with hers. Warm, like before. It doesn’t burn this time, but he feels it all the way up his arm, that sensation he doesn’t try to explain.
“Thank you for coming.” He hopes she knows how broadly he means that—for all the times in New York, for the X-Files, for everything in between. He never thanked her, either, not like she deserves.
The light in the cab comes on when she pulls the key out of the ignition. He watches her as she fiddles around with his keychain, separating the key to his truck from the rest of it.
“Oh,” she says once she’s finished, “and this.” She digs around in her coat pocket and hands him his cell. “I almost forgot.”
He runs his thumb over the number keys. He should probably change some things around.
She starts the ignition when he gets out, but doesn’t drive off until he opens his front door. He feels something, watching her drive away.
Something. Like she’s taking a bit of him with her, more than just his truck.
She’ll be back, though, for brunch. Next time, when some other crazy thing in this unit gets to him, maybe he’ll skip the whiskey night and just ask her out for that instead.
He has just enough energy to dig out a bottle of aspirin and pour himself some water. He’s too tired to shower.
Yeah, he thinks, as he lies down, still smelling like smoke. Brunch tomorrow, and her smile, and that prickling on his skin when she’s around that he can’t explain.
He puts aside Kobold’s mind games, replacing his words with hers.
You’re doing fine, John.
Her voice is the last thing in his head before he falls asleep.
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