#pigeon scribbles

David stops so suddenly his ankles get caught in a knot. He stumbles, leaning heavily on their desk, shoving his head over her shoulder with little regard for how close to her the movement has drawn him.

“What?” The word trembles in the air between them. His voice is so feeble that she almost wants to lie.

“The shadows don’t match,” Katherine sighs, because David values the truth above all else. “The soldier’s shadow is supposedly being cast by the lights from the UFO, but the shadows underneath the truck don’t line up with that light-source.”

“That – come on, Plumber, that’s barely anything, there could be an off-camera light-source causing the discrepancy – look, you can see the red light bouncing off the truck-!”

“If the lights of the UFO are red,” Katherine says firmly, “then why are the lights reflected in the windshield white?”

David blanches for a moment, his eyes desperately flitting over the page.

“… Tint in the windshield, atmospheric conditions,” he mumbles, grasping at excuses like rope on a cliff. “Plumber, you know this is a weak excuse!”

Too late. If only for a second, the Walking Mouth was speechless. That was proof enough.

“We should at least get it analyzed.” Katherine says finitely, and David looks at her like she’s threatening him.

“We can’t risk this being exposed, Plumber, they’ll know we’re onto them!”

 “They? Who is they? An imaginary enemy given to you by a man who smuggled you a fake photograph marked ‘Eyes Only’?”

David tightens his jaw and folds his arms over his chest like a straight-jacket.

“Denton has never lied to me.” He says firmly. “Never.”

“And polygraph tests get cheated every day,” Katherine rebukes, “because the best place to put a lie is in the folds of the truth. Jacobs,” she says sternly, forcing him to meet her eyes. “This is textbook propaganda, and you know it.”

[…]

“You were a journalist,” he mutters furiously towards the cedar desk. “You of all people should know how important-”

Katherine slaps her hand directly on top of the hole he’s burning into the wood. The force jolts his gaze upwards, as though he’d been harpooned through the neck.

“As an investigative journalist,” Katherine seethes, “and an FBI intelligence analyst – positions, I will remind you, that you yourself have never held and therefore will not explain to me-“ David at least has the decency to look cowed at that, guilt pooling like blood in his eyes, “-I know firsthand how easily someone can manipulate the truth to falsify a narrative. We see it every day, Jacobs, it is common practice at this point – hell, as a self-proclaimed conspiracy theorist, you of all people,” she chews those words in her mouth and spits them at him, bitterly savoring the way he flinches away from them, “should be aware of our government’s legacy of twisting the narrative to suit a preferred outcome.”

“Don’t.” David churns out through gritted teeth. “Use my work against me. Don’t tell me I don’t understand how the truth gets covered up when I’m the one trying to uncover it!”

“How can you not see that that’s precisely my point!”

Katherine’s hands fly to her head and force her to look at the ceiling – if she has to look at the set of David’s jaw any longer, she’ll punch it. She forces a breath in through her nose, out through her mouth. Now, now, Katherine, don’t make a scene. History burns bad-tempered women.

“Jacobs,” she says, slow and even – and then she huffs, screws her eyes shut and casts that porcelain veneer away. “David,” she sighs, “I have never in my life met anyone as dedicated to his beliefs as you are. In those first few moments I knew you, I found it ridiculous… Frustratingly so. You put so much faith in what looks like nothing at all. But the more we saw, the more we got beaten down, I realized just how… Admirable it is.”

She tries to spit the word out like a sunflower seed, but it trips on the way out, stumbling on her lips and making the admittance all the more embarrassing. David only looks at her. It’s not his usual stare, the one that’s always trying to puzzle her out, to arrange her shuffled pieces into the real picture – he just looks. Katherine swallows.

“I find you,” she says, keeping her voice steady, “to be dedicated, earnest and just. Unwaveringly, blindingly so. You have no idea how much I value having a partner – a friend – with these qualities. But David… You are too smart to think there aren’t men in this world who love those qualities, too. Because those are qualities they can exploit. The truth is out there, David. We agree on that. But no one wields the truth better than a liar.”

David breathes slowly. The tension in his shoulders doesn’t dissipate. His fingers twitch restlessly at his sides.

He sets his jaw and takes the picture.

“Noted.”

The office door slams behind him.

oOo

Katherine doesn’t know how long she sat there.

She told him everything. Well, perhaps not everything, but she told him the truth – her truth. The thing he’d been demanding since the beginning. Why, Plumber? Why won’t you listen to me? Why do you always deny what’s right in front of us? Why, why, why won’t you believe? This is why. That stupid picture is why. Because when you go into life looking for the answer, someone will always be standing two feet ahead of you, dangling the answer you want on a stick for you to chase.

She always doubted the X-Files. She won’t deny that. But she always believed in David. She’d just expected – hoped – that he’d do her the decency of believing in her, too.

Well, fuck him.

She grabs her bag and marches towards the office door. She’s going home. She’s running a bubble bath. She’s not going to think about Jacobs, or his stupid theories, or his fake evidence or his strange friend or his determination to get himself killed just to prove that he was right all along. And then, when she reads about his arrest in the news, she’s going to request a transfer. Somewhere where her work actually matters. Somewhere where her partner believes her. Somewhere where her partner believes in her.

She reaches for the handle – and it swings away from her in one swift pull.

David holds the picture in his hand the way a dog brings its master a bird. Ashamed of the blood, but desperate for their approval.

“I ran it through the bureau computers,” he says quietly, “and I thought I was right. Everything appears consistent, just like I said – the density and film-grain alone… But look,” he taps the wing-mirror of the car. “The newspaper. It's dated correctly, and headline matches, but if you look at the wing-mirror, you can just barely see-"

"Herald." Katherine murmurs. "As in the New York Herald Tribune. Which the Trib has not been titled since the forties."

David’s eyes turn round and soft.

“You were right, Plumber.”

He doesn’t say it spitefully. He says it as David says everything – with the utmost belief.

Katherine swallows, sighs. She rests her hand on David’s, their shared grip creasing the counterfeitted paper.

“I’m sorry your friend lied to you.”

David looks away and nods. He allows himself one single moment of grief – then he clears his throat, flattens his mouth into a hard line, and when he casts his gaze back to Katherine, all softness is gone.