based on @i-didnt-do-1t’s post about katherine falling through a frozen lake as a child
cw; nightmares, unreality
· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·
Katherine is standing at the edge of the world.
The wind is cold against her face, hair swaying in it, and the vague thought pulls at her that she shouldn't be out here. She was told not to, in no uncertain terms, in her father's hard, cold voice. There's a warm light glowing from somewhere far behind her, up the hill that feels miles away, and she knows she should be there — she was told to stay — but she only steps further away from it. Utterly calm, a hypnotic rhythm of her bare feet in the snow. Out into oblivion, an endless expanse of silvery blue, shining beneath her soles.
She shouldn't be barefoot, she thinks. Not out in the snow like this. Not out on the ice. She wasn't barefoot, she's sure, but she is now, and her hair is long and loose around her shoulders, and she can't stop walking even as a panic she doesn't understand begins to pound in her chest. Something bad is about to happen, she knows. Something bad, something terrible, something she could stop if she could only—
The ground falls out from under her. Like it had never been there at all, never will be again. The water rushes up to meet her, and it's sharp — like blades, like being suddenly engulfed in broken glass. Burning, nothing at all like water she knows — a warm bath, swimming pools at summer homes — and it rushes into her lungs as she gasps like it's seeking its home there. Like it knows it was once there. Like it's desperate to be there again. She can feel it in her chest, suddenly lit up beneath her ribcage like a roaring fire, and though she tries to exhale it the way she'd breathed it in, she finds she can't. She can't breathe at all.
She can't move anymore either.
She's floating, she's dimly aware. She can feel her nightdress floating around her, the long skirt of it in great wisps like smoke — she's burning, she's on fire — and when her legs begin to kick, instinct, not her, they only tangle in the fabric. Tangle tangle tangle until she can't kick anymore, tied from knee to ankle, bound like something sacrificial, sinking into oblivion.
Freezing, burning, breathless oblivion.
She opens her mouth to scream. A lungful of water and she tries to howl. "Father!" dies in her throat, useless and silent, won't even echo into the water around her, so she tries again. Her throat burns. Her father isn't coming. There's water in her nose, in her stomach, in her head, in her heart, all of it curdling into ink as she sinks deeper and the sunlight fades above her.
It's dark. It's dark, it's dark, it's dark —
And then suddenly it's not, and she's staring up at the sun-bright moon with her face burning and wet, throat burning and raw, and there's rough, warm hands holding her.
Her first thought, ridiculously, is that someone's pulled her out of the water. Someone came to save her. Her nightgown is tangled around her legs and her skin is wet with cold sweat, hair clinging to her face, and she's sure she can feel the water still sitting at the bottoms of her lungs. She coughs, but nothing comes up.
"Jesus, Kat," Jack's rough voice says from somewhere behind her. He's breathless, panting warm and wet against her shoulder, and she elbows him clumsily away. He goes. "Fuck. Fuck. You okay?"
Even as he shuffles away to give her her space, his hand stays, big and warm across Katherine's back. He smells like — himself. Like smoke and dirt and sandalwood. She can't smell the water. The ice and snow and empty air. She can smell the city, all dust and warmth and grime. Her hand clutches a fistful of her skirt and it's bone dry, crumpled. Solid, not smoke. Not water.
"I'm okay," she says. Her voice is quiet and raw. Her tongue tastes like lake water.
"Shit, Kathy," Jack exhales. "I didn' know you had nightmares like that."
She coughs again. She's starting to shake, she notices — or perhaps she's been shaking this whole time.
She turns, and crawls into Jack's arms, and he wraps around her like a blanket. His skin is warm.
this one likely isn't going to make it into the final fic as it's much too close to the source material (highly recommend watching the original scene/episode), i just thought it was a fun exercise in davey and katherine's relationship to the truth, lies and belief.
“Plumber, this is it,” David says breathlessly, pacing around their shared desk like a stag walking in circles. Katherine only hums quietly as she tries to hold the magnifying glass steady. “It’s – It’s the greatest piece of evidence I’ve ever seen – look at the color-grading, the shading, the film grain, it’s all consistent! Nothing like those blurry things you see in magazines, no, this is real, inarguable proof, everything I’ve been trying to show people-!”
“It’s fake.”
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.
“But you didn’t,” he says firmly. “And now we know they’re hiding something.”
Once again thinking about Jack Kelly, the guy who’s always looking out for the newsies, who is so terrified of anything bad happening to them, running off after the strike to go and spiral by himself and Davey and Kath being the ones to chase him down when he’s at his lowest and tell him that he doesn’t have to carry this burden alone and that they’ll be there to pick up the slack and keep it going when he can’t do it anymore
Hear me out. Davey's more reckless than people think, and Jack's the careful one.
Yes, Davey did grow up in a more sheltered life, and yes, he is mildly awkward in his first scene, but ever since "WE GOT A UNION!" You see him smiling a lot, partaking in the Newsies' silliness, and particularly in Watch What Happens Reprise, he literally says, "Lighten up, no one died." He hasn't seen the hardships of living on the streets, so he's not as cautious.
Jack, on the other hand, has been raised like this. He saw The Refuge; he's seen how the world treats people like him. He ran away from the cops, and going back to Watch What Happens Reprise, he's the practical one. He doesn't want to put the newsies or himself in danger again. And in Pulitzer's office, all his replies are prepared. He uses his sharp tongue to deflect, while Davey's over here yelling, "AND WHAT'S THAT MAKE YOU?"
My new Jack Kelly name headcanon is that he inherited Kelly from the last leader of the Manhattan newsies who inherited it from his predecessor and so on
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