Story 199: "Dance Card" by Sab (Sabine)

[wendelah1]

After reading "Five Things That Never Happened to Dana Scully" last week, it seems appropriate that this week's offering is also about a "road not taken." Since three members separately expressed some interest in reading it, and because Sabine is an accomplished and entertaining writer, "Dance Card" is now on our dance card.

SUMMARY: The road not taken.
NOTE: This is a true story, sorta. I mean, it happened to me, not Scully, but I figured I'd plug her in to the game and see how she played it out. So that's where it stops being a true story, but those little snowy highways and dogwoods and mistakes do exist, ten, fifteen years later. Oh, and in answer to your question, yes, I did write another story with another guy Scully meets named Paul. It's a good all-purpose name; whatcha gonna do? Album and book publication dates verified with Borders.com, Amazon.com, and Cdnow.com, so they should all be correct. German translations c/o Altavista's Babelfish; let me know if they got it wrong. All "chalking" quotes copyright J. Wilson Kello, with whom I spent four years of college chalking. He is not Paul.

That will all make sense after you read the story, I promise. "Dance Card" has two sequels: "What Happened After That" and "Moonshine," which could be subtitled "What Happened After What Happened After That." The links are all to Gossamer under "Sabine" if the links get broken; the first and third are also at Fugues Fiction Archive. Discussion on any and all of the three is welcome. Sab is iamsab here and Sab at AO3, but alas, these stories have never been re-posted to either location.

Leave feedback, leave suggestions, and come back for discussion, which is still ongoing for the last two fics we read, by the way. You guys are awesome.

Read "Dance Card".

Read "What Happened After That".

Read "Moonshine".

Comments

[amyhit.livejournal.com]

Yet another tag-along comment to say I agree with you completely on this.

Plus, a very prim, young Scully rolling her eyes and saying her parents considered it an act of rebellion when she joined law enforcement does not make her a "rebel", although that idea has somehow become fanon.

I've always thought of Scully's rebellion, when it occurs, as quite an inward thing. It's about Scully getting to the point where internally she says, "No, they're wrong, this is wrong. No, I won't do this or that. No, I don't agree. No, regardless of who they are and what authority they have or claim to have, they're lying or they're being hypocritical or they're just mistaken." And of course there's the inverse as well, "Yes, this is right. He's right, we're right, I'm right. Yes, I will do this, despite their opposition."

Even the bit about her smoking her mother's cigarettes as a kid wasn't outwardly rebellious. She did it in secret and as far as we're told she never got caught, which tells us she didn't want to get caught, which suggests that the defience was the point in and of itself - doing something her parents had undoubtedly told her was bad, something that it would be very wrong of her to do (and yet they did it anyway).

What does seem in-character for Scully at least in Dance Card is how much she follows people around, but in a way that makes her seem really distant. Hard to explain.

I think of this as being an aspect of that same inward rebellion, like a division of the self. In the case of DC's Dana, it's like she needs to be amenable and to be approved of, but she also doesn't want to give herself, especially to anyone who thinks she should. She wants Paul and lets herself be lead and projects flexibility, yet she never really cedes anything to him, and the more he sits there expectantly with his sexual subtext and his bossiness, expecting her to say, "yes paul, take me now," the more she refuses to be there, in the moment, with him.

With canon Scully I think it's more a case of her wanting to be the "good little soldier" (to always do a good job, and the right thing) and yet her superiors are not trustworthy, so she constantly has to fight to figure out what the right thing is for herself, even when it means disobeying direct orders, which her "good little soldier" mentality tells her is a very bad thing to do. In both cases there's a similar division of self, though. Her impulses are divided between capitulation and negation, which gives the character a feeling of reserve, or as you put it, distance.

Incidentally, when I first read Dance Card five years ago I connected really strongly with that distance in her character. In fact, I think it was why the fic originally made such an impression on me, though I no longer feel much connection with the Dana character now.

[wendelah1]

I've always thought of Scully's rebellion, when it occurs, as quite an inward thing. It's about Scully getting to the point where internally she says, "No, they're wrong, this is wrong. No, I won't do this or that. No, I don't agree. No, regardless of who they are and what authority they have or claim to have, they're lying or they're being hypocritical or they're just mistaken." And of course there's the inverse as well, "Yes, this is right. He's right, we're right, I'm right. Yes, I will do this, despite their opposition."

I agree. I think her rebellion against authority begins very early on in the series, when she shows us she is willing to face down the US military to get Mulder back. Yes, he's her partner and that's what partners do, but more than that, she knew on some level that what they were doing was wrong. For her, there is always a higher moral authority, the individual conscience, that guides her actions.