#davetherine

[we-are-inevitable]

really it’s not davey OR katherine it’s davey AND katherine. jack kelly is a man of two hands after all

[pigeonwit]

X-Files AU - Scene Rewrite [S1E17: EBE]

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.”  

[honeyywoods]

fav Jack/Davey/Katherine dynamic is that Jack is dating both Davey and Katherine but Davey and Katherine aren’t dating, but they’re not just friends either. They’re a secret third thing and if anyone asks they just say “oh well that’s a long story…” and they change said story every time. it’s a running bit that they are both so proud of bc NOBODY knows what their deal is (not even Jack)

[we-are-inevitable]

for your finals stuff!! (cause I'm also in the same boat) maybe jathrid study session where all they're doing is flirting instead of actually working?

i think i’ve seen this love before // jathrid

It isn't fair, really. Nothing about the situation is, and Jack Kelly is sick of it.

The situation at hand? The fact that he's on the floor, sketchbooks and pencils strewn about, while David and Katherine share the bed. It's not fair, because it's torture, and it's not fair, because they look so pretty sitting high atop a dorm room bed, the light flittering in past Katherine's thin lace curtains, and it's not fair, because Jack wishes he could have just that: the comfort of being next to them.

Maybe that’s a little too dramatic. He is dating them, after all.

Author’s Note:

this has been sitting in my drafts for AGESSS but i love them so much i had to finish <3 hope u love it !!

Read on AO3!

[pigeonwit]

The Truth and Other Mysteries

[WIP, X-Files AU]

Katherine had been in her first year at the Academy when she first heard the rumor of the monster under the Duane building.

It dwelled in the basement, hidden amongst cabinets upon cabinets of old files. It feasted ravenously on mysteries the FBI had never solved, gorging itself on the unknown. It was long. Thin. Starving. Desperate for information, and to pass that information on. While most human beings had a face, the monster had only one long grotesque mouth that spanned from ear to ear – and if it caught you in its lair, it would trap you in a barrage of information, rants and ravings about things that barely sounded like language. You should never speak the monster’s name – if it heard you, it might come running. It was best to refer to it by title alone. The Walking Mouth. Lest it find you and trap you in its insanity.

“But if you really want to know its name…” Ogden had whispered haggardly into the dark. “I’ll tell you.”

He checked over his shoulder, swallowed, checked again, and leaned forward.

“David Jacobs.”

After a beat of silence, his serious expression dropped, and he burst into a fit of laughter. The group of young Academy students had all found this remarkably funny at the time. Ogden was one of the younger instructors, but he was still at least thirty, and he took a strange amount of enjoyment in entertaining the young twenty-somethings after hours at the Academy. Katherine had always found him mean, and a little slimy, so she’d paid the silly story no mind at the time. Whoever this David Jacobs was, she was sure he wasn’t worthy of such a spiteful joke.

But then Katherine got older. She graduated, took a position teaching at the Academy between her role as an intelligence analyst. A class taught by Katherine Plumber was something covetable. An analysis report signed by Katherine Plumber was even more so. She’d hoped the FBI would be a place where she could establish herself, and it seemed her hopes were rewarded. But the further she got, the name David Jacobs never seemed too far away.

He's brilliant. Everyone can agree on that. His profiles were so thorough that he had once predicted a suspect’s stutter, and his work on the relationship between serial killers and the occult had led to the direct capture of several. The other thing everyone can agree on – including Katherine – is that he’s weird. Where the name David Jacobs was once synonymous with a prodigal young agent with a bright future ahead of him, it now described a paranoid recluse whose sole obsession was that of the unsolved. Not your regular cold cases, mind you – no, Jacobs was chasing something bigger, and he’d let anyone who’d listen know about it.

“E.T.,” Bill Hearst had whispered to her over lunch, in a spooky sing-song, “extra-terrestrials.”

The ‘Walking Mouth’ nickname and the tasteful ghost-story attached to it wasn’t exclusive to Ogden and his fans. It was one of those in-jokes where it didn’t really matter who started it, because everyone had already been thinking it. The way Ogden and Bill and every other agent told it, it seemed that on the rare occasions that one of Jacobs’ connections pulled him out of his dingy basement office to consult on a case, he’d find a way to connect an average spree killer to aliens, or vampires, or cryptids, oh my! Granted, he got results. He always found the guy, and he’d always be thanked for it, but he’d never be pleased about it. To Jacobs, the case was always closed too soon. He’d pester and wheedle his superiors about unfollowed leads that went nowhere, irrelevant details, flimsy connections to cases dating back fifty years or more. And one fateful day, when he delved back into his dingy basement office, someone must have turned around one fateful day and said, ‘geez, real Walking Mouth that one, huh?’.

Katherine had always refuted the nickname. Fine, Jacobs was a kook, but at least he was good at what he did. He put the bad guys away, and wasn’t that the job? At least he had beliefs – heaven knew she’d met enough agents without them. Still, when her Division Chief told her she was going to be assigned to him, to David Jacobs, the UFO hunter, she couldn’t help her flustered splutter of, ‘The Walking Mouth?’.

“Ah," Bunsen purses his lips at the nickname, but doesn't bother correcting her. "So you know him."

Katherine smiles weakly.

“Only by reputation.”

[kesteral]

[Poorly timed declaration of love]

this didn’t specify a ship so i’m just writing a scene i had planned for a davetherine au i’m working on. haven’t got a name for it yet but i call it ‘projecting all my internalized ableism onto a character i like: the fic’.

putting this under a cut cause it got waaaaay longer than i intended

“Okay, see,” Davey cleared histhroat and shuffled on his feet. He hoped it didn’t scuff Katherine’s hardwoodfloors. She didn’t need Davey fucking up her nice perfect home with his dirty old converse. He was stalling. Fuck. “The thing is – I loveyou.”

The words turned solid as he spoke them,freezing the air around them and making everything stand still.Katherine was frozen stiff. Davey wasn’t even sure she was breathing.Her face was stuck in some sort of horrified gape that Davey just couldn’tbring himself to look away from, no matter how sick the shock inher eyes made him feel.

“So.” He mumbled, bouncing on his toes, as ifthat would somehow make time start again and get him out of this frozenspace he’d trapped himself in. “Yeah. Love you.”

Katherine didn’t respond. Davey did another awkward shuffleand coughed into his fist.

“I, um. I know that’s weird. It’s why I’ve been weird lately,because it’s so weird.”

Jesus fucking Christ he got A pluses in every Englishassignment he’d ever been given, why was he saying ‘weird’ so much?!

“’Cause, like. I know I’m just yourautistic friend and, and I’m not saying that, like, you think justbecause I’m autistic I can’t have crushes ‘cause you’re cool likethat but I think it just might have been some sort of… I don’t know, addedfactor? To why you might be surprised?”

Oh, ‘might be’, yeah, that’s the face of someone who ‘mightbe’ surprised. Is that even what a factor is? God dammit, he’s smart, he shouldknow what a factor was, why does he just throw large words around whenhe doesn’t really know them no one’s impressed David-!

“Okay.” Davey nodded jerkily. His wholebody felt stiff. His muscles were ice, his joints were frozenstiff, but his blood was carbonated water and if he had to stand hereand say stupid words he didn’t even have the headspace to understand right nowwhile Katherine looked at him with that face he was goingto burst and die all over her nice hard wood floors.

“I’ll just…” His arm moved upwards likehe was the fucking tin man from Wizard of Oz and pointing awkwardly overhis shoulder. “Bye.”

He manages to force his stiff legs to walkout of Katherine’s foyer (Jesus Christ, he’d known Katherine since he was fiveand only now was it dawning on him that she had a foyer?Fuck.) and all but sprinted back to the shitty stationwagon he’d borrowed from his dad, parked next to Katherine’s pristine white mini (rich girland poor boy, polite girl and autistic weirdo, nice girland charity case, beauty and the motherfucking beast-).

He wasn’t sure if it was actuallyKatherine yelling after him or just his fucked up brain fuckingup even more, but he was already too far away to check, and even if hewasn’t, he really didn’t want to right now.