Chapter Text
Her eyes followed it, watching, calculating, seeing down the long chains of meaning to the level where the truth lay.
— Philip Pullman, The Subtle Knife
With Julienne perched on her arm, Dana Scully exited Section Chief Scott Blevins office quickly, her new heels clacking sharply on the laminated floor as she did. A week prior, she had been notified that she was being reassigned from her place at the F.B.I. Academy in Quantico to the J. Edgar Hoover F.B.I. headquarters in D.C. Until five minutes ago, the nature of this assignment had been unknown to her. Dana Scully, M.D., had been transferred away from her post as a forensic pathologist in the Quantico teaching laboratory to work with Fox Mulder, the famed psychological profiler turned man with a mission.
That mission was, apparently, using Bureau resources to hunt for extraterrestrials. At least, that was what the gossip said, though Section Chief Blevins words in the office had nearly confirmed it. Dana wondered how large the purview was of the aforementioned area “outside of the bureau mainstream”. Though Agent Mulder was renowned for his skill in profiling and his additions to criminal psych literature, he had a less than charitable reputation in F.B.I. spheres. Called “crazy” by some and “spooky” by most, he had established his own department in hopes of explaining unexplained cases that he called X-Files—the department to which Dana and Julienne were now headed.
Dana walked to the nearby elevator and pressed the button on the wall with her free hand. The doors slid open to reveal a dismal old box with orange lighting that smelled faintly of cigarette smoke. As she boarded, the doors slid shut, and the elevator thumped as it descended.
On her arm, Dana’s daemon Julienne, a golden eagle, ruffled her feathers upwards and swiped her beak over the tip of her wing. She was a regal bird with bright tawny feathers crowning her head and a massive dark auburn body. For a daemon of her form, Julienne was on the larger side, and towered to nearly a third of Dana’s own height. Her wings, though folded, alternated between a white patched pattern and a deep mahogany brown. Her beak was colored a black-tipped ivory and her eyes were sharp and golden. As Dana’s daemon, she was Dana’s complement and most trusted friend. Julienne looked over her curiously, inclining her head.
“Are you nervous?” asked Julienne. She was perceptive to her companion’s feelings, as all daemons were.
“I’m not nervous," replied Scully.
“There’s a humming feeling. Dana, are you sure you’re not nervous?”
“I’m not nervous. Nervousness implies apprehension, and I’m not apprehensive.”
Julienne whistled a light tone in her equivalent of a considering hum as she looked over her partner. “Are you excited, then?”
Scully shifted on her feet. “I suppose so. Blevins implied that I should contribute a scientific viewpoint, but he hesitated to describe any specifics about our roles or the type of cases we might be facing. Mostly I’m curious as to the nature of this assignment.”
“I guess we’ll have to wait and see."
The elevator dinged, and the door opened into the basement hallway. The hall was dimly lit and bordered with metal shelves and old boxes of files. At the very end of the hall was a door to a basement office bearing a placard saying: Special Agent Fox Mulder. Like the sound of her heels on the basement tile, she knocked on the office door.
“Nobody down here but the FBI’s Most Unwanted,” said a voice.
Scully pushed open the wooden door with one hand and took in the revealed room. The office was covered wall-to-wall in papers about space exploration, UFO sightings, the unexplained, mysterious disappearances, and cutting-edge scientific developments. Various paraphernalia covered the desks and shelves around the office. There was a large bookshelf in one corner and a skylight above the main corner, where Special Agent Fox Mulder, she presumed, was seated. In profile, he was hunched over a rotary slide deck and inserting slides into it.
Julienne cocked her head and looked around as well, shifting her weight on Scully’s arm. Julienne suddenly launched and took to the large bookshelf, settling atop it with her particular dexterity. Though she was graceful, her large wingspan and size meant that she had landed loudly. Though Mulder must have heard her, he didn’t look up from his slides. It was only when Scully spoke to him directly that he pushed back from the desk and turned to face her. He was wearing glasses and well-fitting suit ensemble, though the suit jacket had been abandoned somewhere. Scully extended her hand and introduced herself.
“Agent Mulder. I’m Dana Scully, I’ve been assigned to work with you.”
“Well,” said Mulder with an amused twist to his expression, “isn’t it nice to be suddenly so highly regarded?”
They shook hands.
“So, who did you tick off to get stuck with this detail, Scully?” Mulder’s tone bordered on teasing.
Scully shifted. “Actually, I’m looking forward to working with you. I’ve heard a lot about you.”
“Really?” said Mulder. He glanced to Julienne on the bookshelf, who returned his gaze with a golden eye. Mulder’s own daemon was nowhere to be seen. He said wryly, “I was under the impression that you were sent to spy on me.”
Scully had heard tell that he was antisocial. The words that he was saying to her certainly aligned with that, but his jovial demeanor was contrary to what she had heard. She pressed on.
“If you have any doubts about my qualifications or credentials—“
“You’re a medical doctor. You teach at the Academy. You did your undergraduate degree in physics.” He pulled out a thick stack of bound paper from one of the many piles on his desk and displayed it to her with a smile. Her name and the title of her undergraduate thesis were printed in large writing black on the off-white paper. “‘Einstein’s Twin Paradox: A New Interpretation, by Dana Scully’. Now that’s a credential, rewriting Einstein.”
“Did you bother to read it?” She asked. Across the room, Scully heard Julienne rouse her feathers.
“I did,” Mulder said. “I liked it. It’s just that in most of my work, the laws of physics rarely seem to apply.”
He crossed the room, flicked off the lights, and illuminated the set of slides that he had been assembling. The machine whirred and hummed with heat, and the image of a young woman appeared on the projector canvas. Dust motes floated in the air.
“Maybe I can get your medical opinion on this. Oregon female, age 21, no explainable cause of death. Autopsy shows nothing. Zip. There are, however, these two marks on her lower back. Dr. Scully, can you ID these marks?”
The image projected on the screen changed to the next in sequence. Tempted by the challenge, Scully rallied. If Mulder was going to test her, fine. She’d bite. Scully examined the image closely, stepping closer to the screen to see it more clearly. She turned back to speak to him.
“Needle punctures, maybe. An animal bite. Electrocution of some kind.”
Mulder took her through an unidentified substance that had appeared in three different unexplained deaths. She offered a plausible explanation, and he offered her further mystery. Neither had answers—although, Scully assumed, that’s why she was assigned down here in the first place. With the shaft of projector light between them in the dark, Mulder moved to face her. Again his words seemed confrontational, but his manner was anything but.
“Maybe you can explain to me why it’s Bureau policy to label these cases as unexplained and ignore them.” Scully didn’t think that she imagined the twinkle in his eye when he asked her his next question. He asked, “Do you believe in the existence of extraterrestrials?”
“Logically, I would have to say no.”
As she explained her rationale, Mulder nodded along. “Conventional wisdom. You know, this girl, Karen Swenson? She’s the fourth person in her graduating class to die under mysterious circumstances. Now, when convention and science offer us no answers, might we not finally turn to the fantastic as a plausibility?”
Scully set her jaw. “The girl obviously died of something. If it was natural causes, it’s plausible something was missed in the post-mortem or that there was a sloppy investigation.” She emphasized, “What I find fantastic is the notion that there are any answers beyond the realm of science. The answers are there, you just have to know where to look.”
Mulder smiled at her.
“That’s why they put the ‘I’ in F.B.I.” He turned and walked back to his desk, continuing to address Scully as he did.
“I’ll see you tomorrow morning, Scully, bright and early! We leave for the very plausible state of Oregon at 8am.”
She watched Mulder return to his desk, and then ducked her head and smiled. She was pleased to have disproved the rumors of Fox Mulder’s antisociality to be not entirely true. In truth, she was excited for this next case of theirs, she thought as she made to exit the office. She held out her arm for Julienne to return to. Julienne descended from the tall bookshelf to land on her elbow. Scully took one final glance around the office. As she did, she caught a glimpse of some kind of canid or felid disappearing into the darkness beneath Mulder’s desk. A fluffy tail was the only sign that another daemon had been there at all.
Scully arrived at the airport the next morning and met Mulder at the terminal at a sharp 7:45am. When she arrived, Mulder was already waiting for her, dressed in a long black coat with his luggage and daemon at his side.
“Morning, Mulder,” she greeted.
“Morning, Scully,” he said.
“They weren’t kidding,” said Scully, looking at the pair. Mulder’s daemon was a red fox with tufted ears and white patches along its chest. The red was a beautiful shade mottled with hazel and the distal lengths of its limbs and the points of its ears and nose were darkly colored. Scully could feel Julienne, this time on her shoulder, assess her partner’s daemon with her own senses. Striking to Scully were the fox’s deep brown eyes, which portrayed an obvious intelligence.
“Who?” Mulder asked.
“The people who call you Spooky Fox.”
“What, did you think they were pulling your leg?” Scully did not want to admit this and so said nothing, while Mulder continued. “My friend here and I are the same. The name is just a coincidence. It’s funny, right?”
The fox yawned, curling his tail around Mulder’s leg. Scully looked at him with interest, but he returned her look impassively. Though Mulder seemed to regard the reason for Scully’s placement on the X-Files as suspect, he was nothing but talkative and cheerful. The fox was quite calm. Scully wondered if the fox had a stoic temperament or if he indicated a calmer side of Mulder that had yet to be displayed. Granted, she had only known him for half a day.
“How are you going to fly with—“ Mulder trailed off, with a nod of his head to her companion on her shoulder.
“Oh, she’ll be fine. She has her own seat.”
“The joy of federally subsidized flying,” said Mulder, as the loudspeaker calling them to their gate chimed above them. Scully picked up her bag, and with Mulder’s hand at her back and Julienne on her shoulder set out to confront her first case with the X-Files.
The flight to Oregon was long, and Scully spent the hours poring over the case file that Mulder had assembled for them. Julienne asked Scully for the window seat and spent most of her time on her perch quietly staring out at the clouds while Scully examined the file. Mulder lounged on the seat row over, with his fox having tucked itself beneath one of his seats. As they neared their descent, a moment of turbulence suddenly shook the airplane cabin, and Scully white-knuckled the seat armrests while Julienne squawked in alarm. Mulder leaned over to speak to them.
“This must be the place,” he said.
It was almost like he was enjoying this.
The rest of their descent, though mildly turbulent, was uneventful. Scully let Mulder pick out their rental vehicle but insisted on carrying her own luggage, and soon enough they were traveling down the highway at a decent 65 miles per hour. Large Oregon pines whipped by as Mulder caught her up on the case. He teased about the local salmon and snacked on sunflower seeds, offering some to both Scully and Julienne. His fox daemon was curled up into a sphere on the backseat behind the driver’s side, and alternated between sleeping and winking one eye open at them. Julienne, on a portable perch to prevent damage from her talons, was settled behind Scully on the passengers side, next to Mulder’s fox in the back seat row. As far as Scully knew, Mulder’s daemon and her own had not exchanged any words so far. They seemed to get along, however.
As they got closer to their destination roadsigns advised them to drive slowly as a recent windstorm had knocked down trees and branches into the road. Mulder continued eating his sunflower seeds, and Scully eyed the dashboard speedometer. If they were going slowly enough, Julienne would enjoy following them from the air. Sensing her partner’s intent, Julienne spoke.
“Dana, can I go out?”
“Sure,” said Scully. “Mulder, would you slow down for a moment?”
Mulder glanced at her, then back at the road, lightening the pressure on the gas pedal. “Sure.”
Scully cranked down the window of the passenger’s seat and reached for her complement. Julienne, knowing what she would do, delicately made her way onto her hand. Though long trips on American highways passed at speeds too high for Julienne to adequately keep up with, the speed and landscape of the Oregon backroads would be fine for her. If there was the chance, Scully always liked to let her fly. Julienne liked to follow her on her runs at Rock Creek Park, following amongst the trees and flying in the fresh air.
With Julienne on her fist, Scully extended her arm out the window with the strength of someone who has carried her dearest companion her whole life. Julienne immediately unfolded her dark wings, twisted and adjusted them to catch the air, and then launched suddenly as Scully assisted with a throwing motion to help her into the air. She swiftly took to the sky and ascended, becoming a darkened shape against the bluest sky. Scully watched from the window as she did. Julienne’s joy was infectious, and it brought a feeling of exhilaration to Scully, too. Julienne’s strong wing beats coincided the beating in Scully’s own chest. Scully grinned.
Mulder glanced at her again. He was smiling at her, apparently having seen the exchange between Scully and her daemon.
“Do you always let her out to fly?” he asked.
“I try to,” replied Scully. “It’s good for her, and we both love it.”
“It doesn’t pull too much?”
Scully shook her head. “We just have to be careful.”
Mulder nodded in understanding. There was a physical limit to how far a person could be separated from their daemon. For those with bird daemons, that limit was larger than most, but even then caution was a necessity. Symptoms of distance that was too great ranged from a slight squeezing feeling in the chest to borderline agony. By practice, she and Julienne had become very good at judging their distance away from each other and at keeping it within a safe margin. Even as their bond was pulled at by their separation, the exhilaration they both shared was incomparable. Scully watched Julienne travel parallel with them, content to see and feel her companion’s happiness.
Julienne remained in the air as Mulder and Scully traveled down the road. Suddenly, a burst of static emitted from the car radio, and it scanned for frequencies with an oscillating tone without having been touched. Scully frowned at it as Mulder pulled the vehicle to a stop, and followed Mulder as he got out of the driver’s seat, while Julienne rested in a large tree nearby. Scully and Julienne watched as Mulder headed to the rear of the car and opened the trunk to pull out a can of spray paint. He shook it firmly before marking down a large orange “X” on the asphalt. Scully stared at it, bemused.
“…What was that about?” Scully asked, standing nearby with her arms crossed.
“Probably nothing,” said Mulder dismissively, shaking his head, and returned the can to the rental car trunk with a dull thud. Scully resisted the urge to sigh, and got back in the car. They said nothing until they pulled parallel up to the cemetery where Mulder had arranged to meet the point of contact for the case. Where Mulder’s fox daemon hadn’t twitched when he had left the car earlier, this time Mulder made sure to open the door behind his, and the vulpine figure jumped down to trot at Mulder’s side. Julienne, still having followed from the air, settled again in a nearby tree as two figures approached them. John Truitt, County Assistant Coroner, introduced himself and his associate to Mulder.
“How soon can we get started?” Mulder asked after introducing his partner and returning Truitt’s greeting.
“We’re ready,” answered Truitt. Mulder and Truitt continued speaking about logistics as the party began ascending a small hill, but were interrupted by a large pickup truck puling up behind the agents’ rental car. A blustering man stepped out of the driver’s seat, an upset coonhound hot on his heels. An anxious young woman watched onlooking from behind the passenger side door with her badger daemon pacing to and fro just in sight.
“I just don’t know who you people think you are,” said the man accusingly as he strode up the hill to meet them. “You just think you can come up here and do whatever you damn well please.”
“I’m sorry, you are?” said Mulder.
“I’m Dr. Jay Nemman, County Medical Examiner.”
“I’m Agent Mulder, this is Agent Scully. Surely you were told of our intentions,” said Mulder.
“No, no. We’ve been away.”
“Oh, well, that answers a question we had as to why you didn’t conduct Karen Swenson’s autopsy. You’re aware of the tissue sample that was taken from that examination?”
When Mulder mentioned Karen Swenson’s autopsy, Nemman bristled. “Yes, I—What is the insinuation here, exactly? That I missed something in those other kids’ exams? If you’re planning on making an accusation, you better damn well have some evidence to back it up.”
“We’re not insinuating anything, sir,” said Scully.
“Daddy!” said the young woman, apparently Nemman’s daughter, having watched on at the entire exchange. “Let’s just go home. Please, let’s go home!”
Nemman turned away from them with a final glare at Mulder. Mulder and Scully watched the doors slam shut and the truck peel off. As soon as it did, Scully and Mulder climbed the hill to see the opened grave at the top. As the cemetery machinery worked to unearth the casket of Ray Soames, Scully illustrated his history and the circumstances of his death. Post-adolescent schizophrenia, state mental hospital, an unsubstantiated confession to two unexplained murders, and an unusual cause of death: exposure, on a warm Oregon night.
The large creaking of the machinery as they raised the casket made Scully look up, and as she did, the strap carrying the casket frayed and snapped. Mulder and Scully watched in astonishment as the casket tumbled down the hill, and raced downwards after it as it stopped in front of a headstone. The casket’s lid was ajar from the impact, and the smell made the agents and county staff cover their noses. Scully peeked inside.
To her horror, the cadaver inside the coffin was not the body of Ray Soames, a 20 year old male, but that of some long-limbed primate. Mulder cracked a joke about high school varsity basketball teams, and then abruptly turned serious in demeanor. Speaking to Truitt, he ordered the county staff to close the casket immediately. Mulder’s daemon, standing nearby, had flattened its ears.
“Seal this up, now!” Mulder demanded. “Nobody sees or touches this!”
Scully looked at Mulder, hoping that he would explain what the hell was going on, but knowing that he had no answers. The next Scully knew, she and Mulder were in a county medical examiner’s surgery suite. Her examination passed by in a blur while Mulder snapped photos, the bright flash in her eyes and the whine of the camera high in her ear. Scully recited the results of her examination into the microphone above the table, while Mulder ordered for a barrage of tests to be conducted.
“Oblique cranium indicates subject is not human,” finished Scully, setting aside her scalpel.
“If it’s not human,” Mulder prodded her, “then what is it?”
“It’s mammalian. Possibly a chimpanzee or orangutan.”
Mulder looked at her, obviously in disagreement. She could see on his face that he had something else to say.
“Tell me what you’re thinking,” she said.
“I don’t believe that this is an orangutan.”
“Then what do you think it is?”
He launched right into it. “Either you’re right, Scully, and those tests will come up with monkey DNA, or this is evidence of something greater than us.”
“‘Greater than us?’” She parroted.
“Scully, do you think that this fellow here,“ Mulder said, glancing at the simian figure, “could possibly be the daemon of one Ray Soames?”
Scully looked down at the cadaver, and then back at Mulder, who was looking at her seriously.
“Mulder, that’s impossible,” she said. “Daemons are expressions of the soul. They only remain in their physical form until the death of their partner, upon which they dissolve into Dust.”
“So says the Christian interpretation,” he said. “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.”
“Naming convention aside,” she pressed on, “all daemons vanish. It is thought that the disappearance of a daemon coincides with the death of the partner’s consciousness. Though we have yet no explanation for the mechanism of their deaths, it is well documented that daemons do not persist after life.”
“As we humans do, bound to this mortal coil, yes, yes,” said Mulder dismissively. “But what else could this be? It’s plain that this isn’t human, which means that it’s either daemon or...”
“You’re not serious. You don’t honestly believe this is some kind of an extraterrestrial,” Scully said. Mulder had nearly evangelized to her about the significance of their discovery, while Scully was plainly angered at how a young man’s grave had been disturbed and desecrated. “This is just somebody’s sick joke.”
“You think that someone put a chimpanzee, or an orangutan, into Ray Soames’ grave in the hopes of doing what? What do we tell the townsfolk? What do we say to Ray Soames’ family?"
Scully mulled it over, setting her jaw in frustration.
“Even if that were true, that a daemon’s form could somehow persist after death, it was documented in Ray Soames’ file that his daemon had the form of hare.”
“It’s possible that his daemon was mutable and hadn’t yet settled into its form—“
“At 20 years old? Mulder—“ she stopped herself. “That would have to be an extreme case, Mulder. Settling that late is extremely rare.”
Mulder looked to the simian corpse.
“I don’t know, Scully. I don’t know if it’s human, or alien, or what. But I’m not crazy, Scully,” Mulder said, entreating her. “I have the exact same doubts as you do.”
She glanced away from him, processing her own thoughts. Her gaze happened to land on the daemon at his side. Canid in nature, the daemon looked as open and imploring as any dog she had ever seen, advocating for his friend in his silent way. She glanced back to Mulder, her decision made.
“Ok,” she acquiesced. “We can do those tests, but I’m not sure what you’re expecting we’ll find.”
“Thank you,” he said. He huffed out a breath and stepped away from the exam table, tension wiring his figure. They had both gotten caught in the revulsion of their discovery. The only hard fact that they had was that a young man’s body was misplaced.
“Mulder,” she said, catching his attention. “If this is going to work, we need to be on the same page. At the least, know that we’re on the same team.”
Mulder nodded at her.
Later that night, Scully worked on her exam report as she listened to the wound-back tape she had recorded earlier. Julienne, on her perch block, preened and groomed herself in her ritual manner after a stressful day. Scully held up the implant they had discovered to the light, the sound of her own voice tinny and muffled surrounding her. A knock on the door interrupted her introspection.
“Who is it?” She called.
“Steven Spielburg,” Mulder joked, eliciting a smile from her. She stood to answer the door, and when she did, he asked if he wanted to go for a run. When she declined, he asked after the metal “alien” implant that they had found within the cadaver’s nasal cavity.
“No, I don’t know what it is,” she yawned, “and I’m not losing any sleep over it. Good night.”
Mulder bid her good night, and she smiled as she closed the door. For all Mulder’s out-there ideas, he was difficult not to like, even for as shortly as she had known him. She returned to sitting on her bed. Picking up the small implant, she examined it in the lamplight.
“I thought you weren’t losing any sleep over that,” Julienne said.
“I’m not,” said Scully. “It’s fascinating, though.”
“Of course it is,” replied Julienne, running a claw over the tip of her beak. “This case is unlike anything we’ve ever done. Is this what you expected?”
“I really have no idea what I expected.”
Silence reigned for a moment in the room.
“Have you spoken to his daemon?” Scully asked Julienne.
“I have,” she said. “You’ll have to wait until Mulder introduces you, though.”
“I know,” said Scully, though she was curious. There were certain rules of manner that humans and daemons had to navigate. Though the rules were dependent on the culture, they were etiquette and were followed as such. For Scully and Mulder, this meant that each of them would not know the name of the other’s daemon until they were introduced by their daemon’s partner. Scully recalled how the fox had looked at her earlier that day. The look it had given her was intelligent and supportive of Mulder, but separate from him. Being part of one whole, a daemon and a human were distinct individuals, but they were never too different from each other. Rather, it was aspects of their personality that shone in varying amounts. Scully wondered how Mulder’s fox was different from its partner. She wanted to converse with it, if given the chance.
Unexpectedly, she felt that she trusted Mulder, and she wondered if that feeling was returned on his part.
Scully moved to finish her nightly routine. When she did, she set the small jar of the implant inside her overcoat pocket and turned off the lamp. She felt more than saw Julienne settle her head beneath her wing as she unfolded the covers and climbed into her bed. She whispered goodnight to Julienne and leaned against the headboard. Still her mind raced in the dark.
Mulder knocked on her door early the next morning. He told her that he had arranged to meet with Dr. Glass at the Ramon County Psychiatric Hospital, as the good doctor had been responsible for the care of Ray Soames during his stay at the state hospital. On the lawn of the state hospital, Dr. Glass recalled Ray Soames’ case and medical history as the two agents asked about the doctor’s previous patients in hope of finding a connection between the four deaths. Dr. Glass’s coyote daemon followed closely at his side, while Julienne and Mulder’s daemon followed further behind. Distantly, Scully could feel them murmuring to each other. She focused her attention more sharply to the conversation at hand as Dr. Glass continued.
“Ray had an inability to grasp reality,” said the doctor. “He seemed to suffer from some kind of post-traumatic stress.”
“Is that something you’ve seen before?” asked Mulder.
“Yes, I have,” said the doctor. “I’ve treated similar cases, some of those cases being those of Ray’s classmates.”
“Are you treating any of these kids now?” asked Scully.
“Currently? Yes, I’m treating Billy Miles and Peggy O’Dell,” said Dr. Glass.
“Would it be possible for us to talk to them?”
“Sure,” said the doctor, shrugging a bit. “But you might find it a bit difficult, especially in Billy Miles’ case.”
Mulder and Scully exchanged a meaningful glance. Dr. Glass escorted the pair upstairs to the eastern ward. Julienne, outside, followed the pair from window to window, while Mulder’s fox and Glass’s coyote followed the group to a room at the end of the hall. They entered the room.
Inside, Peggy O’Dell was reading a book in a soft murmur. She was seated in a wheelchair and had mousy hair and a skittish demeanor. At her feet, her spotted linsang daemon licked its paws slowly with its pink tongue. Billy Miles, reclined in the hospital bed next to her, was entirely unresponsive to their entrance and wore a glassy expression.
“Billy is experiencing what we call a waking coma,” Dr. Glass said to Scully and Mulder. “His brain waves are flat and he’s persistent vegetative.”
Scully looked the boy over as the doctor recalled the car accident that had occurred out on the state road four years ago. These circumstances were uncommon and unfortunate, but not unheard of. Billy Miles’ unresponsive demeanor was mirrored by the empty-eyed bulldog daemon laid on the floor at the end of the bed. Its breathing was harsh and audible. Scully watched as Dr. Glass approached Peggy beside the bed, and, like the boy, the daemon didn’t even glance upwards at Dr. Glass as he approached. Peggy continued murmuring to Billy as Dr. Glass spoke.
“Peggy?” He asked quietly. “Peggy, there are some people here who would like to see you. Would you like to talk with them?
Peggy kept her gaze askance as she replied. “Billy wants me to read now.”
“Does he like it when you read to him?” Mulder asked softly, approaching the girl as if she was a skittish dog. Her linsang daemon had its haunches lowered and its ears twitching constantly, with its long tail curled tightly around its small body as it tried to make itself seem even smaller. Its large dark eyes contributed to its fearful look.
“Yes,” Peggy said, only then meeting Mulder’s gaze, and then glancing to Billy. “Billy needs me close.”
Mulder nodded as if he understood. He then turned to the doctor. “Dr. Glass, I’m wondering if we can do a cursory exam—“
Suddenly, Peggy slammed her book onto floor and shoved the bedside desk over. The linsang began screaming, a high-pitched but not very loud noise, as Peggy wailed in distress. The orderlies and doctor rushed over and attempted to calm Peggy and right her wheelchair. Scully watched as Peggy tumbled from her chair and clutched at her suddenly bleeding nose, overcome by distress. Mulder, under the guise of assisting Peggy, quickly revealed two distinct marks on her lower back. Mulder met Scully’s gaze meaningfully. Scully stared back at him, stunned by the discovery, and then looked right past Mulder to Peggy’s daemon. Before Scully’s eyes—and now Mulder’s, as he must have seen something on her face that caused him to look behind him—Peggy’s daemon unnaturally changed its shape.
The linsang daemon was still wailing in a high-pitched, soft-volumed shriek, and as the daemon screamed, it contorted, lengthening in size and deforming in nature. The daemon shifted this way and that, changed color and size and vocal tone, screaming the while, before abruptly it stopped. The daemon was suddenly quiet, panting and breathless, but aside from its belabored breathing and a glassy expression in its eyes, it was as if nothing had happened at all. The doctor and orderlies had shown no sign that they had that witnessed any change in Peggy’s daemon had occurred, so preoccupied were they with caring for the girl that they had written off the daemon’s quiet shrieking as symptom of the girl’s overwrought distress. The daemon blinked its large black eyes at Scully and Mulder, its left eye following the closure of its right.
Deeply unsettled, Scully turned on her heel and strode quickly into the hall, Mulder following after her. He caught up to her on the stone steps of the hospital.
“Whatshisname—Billy, he said he was sorry he didn’t get to say goodbye,” Mulder said flippantly. Scully ignored him.
“How did you know that she’d have the marks?” She demanded more than asked, stepping furiously down the staircase. Mulder had no issue keeping up with her in perfect pace.
“I don’t know. Lucky guess?”
She eyed him contemptuously. Still he was keeping details of this case from her. If they wanted to solve this case, they needed to level with each other. They would get nowhere otherwise.
“Dammit, Mulder, cut the crap. You saw exactly what I did. What are those marks?”
“I don’t think you’re ready for what I think.”
Scully stopped abruptly, whirling to meet him.
“I want the truth! I’m here to solve this case, just like you.”
“The truth?” Mulder replied. He paused, deliberating for a moment. He glanced down at his daemon partner at his side, and then looked right back at Scully. “I think those kids were abducted.”
Scully thought she knew where this was going, but wanted to see it to its end. “By who? By aliens?”
Mulder simply nodded once.
“Mulder— you can’t really believe that,” she said.
“Do you have a better explanation?” He asked flatly. When Scully said nothing, he continued. “Lack of evidence does not mean lack of causation.”
Scully exhaled, half in frustration and half in disbelief. “I’ll buy that that girl is suffering from some kind of pronounced psychosis. If it’s a result of those marks, I could be convinced of that, too. But you’re not really saying that they were riding around in flying saucers? There is nothing to support that!”
“Nothing scientific, you mean. Yes, I think the marks are related, and if we checked Billy Miles, I believe that we would find them on him as well. No matter how unscientific or ‘out there’ it might seem, we have to consider all possibilities.”
Scully didn’t refute him. She paused, considering, momentarily exhausted by the day’s events. She turned to find Julienne perched atop a nearby ornate lamppost, watching her with concern. Speaking in an undertone, still unsettled by what she had witnessed, she turned back to her partner. “Mulder, what happened to that poor girl’s daemon?”
“I don’t know.”
She crossed her arms around herself. “I thought that it might be an effect of the psychosis, or maybe her accident had caused her conscious mind to lose stability, but Mulder—I’ve never even heard of anything like that. Children’s daemons change shape, but not like that, not in that manner.”
“I have,” he said. “Heard of it. But I’ve never witnessed it.”
“Is there any way we can help her?”
Mulder shook his head. “If there is, I haven’t heard of it. But we can help solve this case.”
Scully nodded, determined. Already her mind was running through the possibilities, charting the routes for the next leads for them to follow. She wanted to interview each of the victims’ families and to explore the woods where each of the kids had been found. With luck, new leads would be quickly unearthed.
“Scully,” he said. “If we find evidence of flying saucers, would you be willing to believe me then?”
“Mulder, I think my presence here is evidence enough that I’m willing to hear you out,” she said evenly to him, but meant it genuinely. “In the case that we find incontrovertible evidence of U.F.O.s, I would be willing to consider the idea. For now, I want to explore the woods where they found Karen Swenson’s body.”
He smiled at her. “Okay. We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it. Hike, then find definitive proof of extraterrestrial life. Got it. Lunch beforehand, though? I’d kill for a slice of pie.”
Scully didn’t resist the urge to give him a small sideways look, but her eyes crinkled at the edges. Julienne fluttered down from the lamppost as Scully walked back towards the car, Mulder’s right hand steady at the small of her back and his fox trailing just behind them.
Mulder and Scully spent their afternoon speaking with the relatives of each victim, finding nothing out of the ordinary or contradictory to what the previous collected statements had conveyed. They stopped at a roadside diner for their lunch, where Mulder had an alarmingly large slice of black cherry pie, before returning to their motel to drop off the statements they had collected and to change into their hiking clothes. By the time they reached the forest out on state road, darkness had descended fully. At the edge of the woods, Mulder pulled the crime scene tape up over his head and held it there for Scully, who followed behind.
They entered further into the forest. With the exception of their pair of flashlights and passing light from cars, the forest was pitch black. A misted rain wetted Scully’s hair and Julienne’s plumage. Mulder was just ahead of her, with his fox leading the party. It put its nose to the ground and shuffled through the loamy undergrowth. Mulder scanned the tree line with his flashlight as Scully crouched to inspect a patch of dry earth.
She ran her fingers through it. It felt remarkably ashy, and had kept its dry quality even though the soil surrounding it had absorbed the mist and rain. Julienne, at her side, cocked her head at it as Scully examined it. She took a handful of the substance and put it in her jacket pocket.
A whirring noise, faint at first, startled her. She called out for Mulder, to no reply. What she had thought was the light of an approaching car had not yet faded, and the whirring noise grew louder and louder. She drew her gun. A figure rose up over the hill. Mulder arrived at her side, drawing his gun as well. The figure declared that he was from the County Sheriff’s Office, and that Mulder and Scully would have to leave or they would be escorted from the property. His mountain lion daemon, its fur limned in the rain and bright light, growled in response to Mulder’s fox. Julienne mantled over Scully’s left shoulder, her wings and tail feathers flaring.
“We are Special Agents Scully and Mulder, F.B.I.,” declared Scully. “We are conducting an active investigation.”
“You’re trespassing on private property, here. Leave, now.” The man hoisted his shotgun over his right shoulder. To her right, Scully heard Mulder’s fox growl again, but she didn’t take her eyes from the man.
“Hold on! This is a crime scene,” protested Mulder.
“You’re trespassing,” repeated the officer. “I won’t tell you again, or I’ll have to arrest you. Get in your car and leave!”
Scully exchanged a glance with Mulder, and moved to climb the hill. As she walked past and Mulder followed, Julienne’s gaze didn’t stray from the officer, her gaze still fierce and piercing even in the dark. Mulder’s fox brushed her pant leg as they returned to the car. Again Mulder raised the crime scene tape for them both, and slammed the car doors closed as they climbed in.
“Wonder what’s his problem,” Mulder said, as the doors slammed shut. Mulder started the car, and they moved out onto the road as the rainfall increased. “What’s he doing out here by himself? And how did he know we were out here?”
“Maybe it has something to do with this.” Mulder flicked the light on as Scully showed him the dirt she had collected. His fox daemon, sitting in the rear, stuck its head over the center console to see what she was holding. “I found it all over the ground out there. I think some kind of sacrifice or cultist activity is going on out here, and maybe that officer that we met knew something about it.”
The idea of an officer colluding to hide cult activity and the death of four young victims made Scully angry. It was the best explanation they had so far however, for why were those four young victims in the woods in the first place?
“Maybe,” said Mulder. He was acting erratically, glancing at his compass, the side mirrors, and his digital watch. Lightning flashed. The windshield wipers thumped on the windshield. Limited by the visibility, the Oregon pines of the national forest passed by in a blue blur of rain and darkness. Mulder glanced at his watch again.
“Mulder, you okay?” Scully asked, glancing over him.
Suddenly, the radio burst with another bout of static, and the car’s field of vision was obscured in a bright blur. The median lines passed in a monochrome haze. In what felt like seconds later, Scully’s vision returned to normal and the car rolled to a stop.
Dazed, Scully glanced back at Julienne, who blinked at her, and then at Mulder as he clambered out of the car. She reached for the radio knob to yank down the volume as Mulder yelled at her over the rain. Mulder’s fox clambered over the console and chased him out of the car, slipping through just as the door closed. Scully opened her door and rose to follow.
“Mulder?” she hollered.
“We lost nine minutes!” Mulder whooped.
Over the cacophony of the rain, Scully hollered. “We lost what?”
“Nine minutes!” Mulder shouted back. “I looked at my watch just before the flash—it was 9:03, it just turned 9:13! Look, look!” Mulder raced to the large orange “X” he had painted on the road just the day before. He thrusted his hands up into the air. “Gone, just like that! Oh, yes! Abductees—people who have sighted UFOs, they’ve reported flashes of light and periods of missing time.”
“Wait, wait a minute,” said Scully, trying to keep up over the deafening rain. By this point, they were both soaked through their hiking clothes. Mulder’s hair fell into his eyes, but his delight was clear. Scully waved her hand as she attempted to understand him. “You’re saying time just disappeared? Time can’t just disappear! It’s a universal invariant!”
“Not in this zip code,” said Mulder, grinning. At his side, the fox shook rain off of his pelt. The car lights suddenly reignited and the engine sputtered as it turned over. Mulder ran back to the car. Scully took one more look at the “X” on the pavement before chasing after him.
Back in the motel, a small candlestick was the main source of light as Scully typed out her report. The liquid crystal display flashed blue and white as she recounted her experience on the road into the written word while it was still fresh. Scully had no way to refute Mulder’s claims of their shared lost time, but no way to substantiate them, either. Whether they had lost time or not, it was now nearing 10:00pm, and still Scully felt the exhilaration she and Mulder had shared in the forest and out on that state road. She tried to settle herself as she ran the shower. What did the “X” mean? Had they really lost time? Her thoughts raced with the possibilities, trying to find connections.
The motel showered sputtered. Disrobing, her thoughts suddenly screeched to a halt as she felt two raised bumps on her back just above the hem of her underwear. She turned in the mirror, grasping at the bumps, struggling to see them in the dim light. Her heart raced furiously.
“Julienne?” she called, her voice abnormally loud and high. She dashed out of the room to where Julienne was dozing on her perch, and set her candle in front of her. “Julie, what’s this? What do you see?”
“Dana?” Julienne replied, confused and aroused from a state of near-sleep. “Dana, what’s—“ She quietened as she spotted the marks on Scully’s back. Scully felt her panic ignite between them, becoming shared through the bond. Julienne roused, anxiously raising her feathers. “They’re marks, but I can’t see—“
Scully rushed from the room, just remembering to grab her red robe. Julienne hopped from her perch onto the floor and followed her panicked friend out the door.
Outside, Scully knocked on the next door furiously. Mulder answered nearly immediately.
“Hi,” he said, then saw the expression on her face.
“Can you take a look at something?”
“Okay,” Mulder said seriously. He swapped the candle he was holding to his other hand and let Scully into the room. “Come on in.”
Scully did so. She began removing her robe, and Julienne hopped onto a nearby desk, cooing and cawing softly. Scully could feel their shared panic, but appreciated her friend’s attempts to soothe her in her own way. She looked at Mulder over her shoulder, hoping that he would take her as seriously as Julie did.
“What are they?” She demanded. “Mulder, what are they?!”
Mulder crouched and held the candle close to her lower back, where just earlier that day he had guided her with a courteous, if presumptuous, hand. Now, she was grateful for it. Heat flickered at her skin. Mulder’s fox paced anxiously around their feet, wending this way and that.
“They’re mosquito bites,” he said. When Scully further questioned him, he reassured her. “We were out in the forest for a while. I got eaten alive myself out there.”
“Oh!” said Scully, and rushed right into him. Her heartbeat thundered in her ears, and she tried desperately to calm herself. Mulder wrapped one arm around her and she clung tightly to him. She heard him huff a breath into her hair, but was too relieved to loosen her grip. He held her warmly. She relaxed as moments passed, feeling safe in his hold.
“Are you alright? You’re shaking.” Mulder spoke to her softly, mindful of their proximity. Suddenly aware of what she was doing, embarrassment crept in, stymied before by her alarm. She slipped from his embrace, and wrapped her robe back around herself and tied it off.
“Yes,” she said quickly. “I just need to sit down.”
She sat in a wicker chair next to the desk by the door. Julienne immediately leaned in and began stroking her with her beak and preening her hair. Scully ran light fingers over Julienne’s head and wings in return, mirroring her affections. This was a method by which they soothed each other, as old as Scully and Julienne were themselves.
“Take your time,” said Mulder, taking the seat next to her and saying nothing more until she spoke minutes later. Somehow, she ended up on the bed with Mulder’s spare tan vellux blanket. She curled her feet and propped herself up on her elbow, as Mulder sat on the floor next to the end of the bed. He spoke softly to her, alternately looking directly at her and examining the slants of light splayed on the floor from the window’s blinds. Near Scully’s feet on the bed, Mulder’s fox flicked its tail back and forth in unrest. Its deep brown eyes, black in the room’s dim lighting, glinted in the dark.
“I was twelve when it happened,” he started. His tone was one of unmistakable vulnerability. “My sister was eight. She just disappeared out of her bed one night. Just gone, vanished. No note, no phone calls, no evidence. It tore my family apart.”
“You never found her,” said Scully, more of a statement than a question, led by his demeanor. Mulder nodded. “What did you do?”
“I went off to school in England, came back, got recruited by the bureau right out of school. Seems I had a natural aptitude for applying behavioral models to criminal cases. My success allowed me a certain amount of freedom, and that’s when I came across the X-Files.” Mulder explained how he had discovered the X-Files as a series of shuttered and unexplained cases stored away from the public eye down in the F.B.I. basement. “I read all the cases I could get my hands on, and then I eventually petitioned to open the department. Now, I’m closer than I’ve ever been to concrete proof. There’s more I need to know, information that’s available to the higher ups, but someone has been blocking my attempts to access it.”
“What?” asked Scully, sitting up a bit. “What do you mean? You’re saying that someone at a higher power in the Bureau is trying to mitigate your work?”
“You’re a part of that agenda,” he said, with a tinge of regret in his words that he had to say them. “You know that.”
“I’m not a part of any agenda,” she emphasized. She hoped that he saw her honesty on her visage. “I want to solve this. Just like you.”
Mulder looked her over, and seemed to make a decision. “As I opened the X-Files department, I worked closely with a Dr. Heitz Werber. He helped me to undergo hypnosis to recall my memories of the night my sister was taken. I can recall a bright light and a presence in the room, as my sister screamed my name for help.”
As Mulder spoke, Scully was surprised to find the red fox crawling into her lap. It circled twice before curling between her folded legs, its chest rising and falling softly. She resisted the urge to run her hand through its red pelt, respectful of the unspoken boundary between a person and a daemon that wasn’t their own. This was a show of great vulnerability from Mulder, and while the red fox was not the same as him, they were of the same mind. It was exemplifying its own vulnerability in its wordless way, welcoming Scully into her place as Mulder’s partner and confidante. Mulder looked as honest as she had ever seen him, dropping all pretense.
“I’m telling you this because I think you need to know, Scully. I need to find the truth of what happened to my sister. Nothing else matters to me.”
Scully looked down at the fox, and then back upwards to him. “I understand now, Mulder. But you have to trust me if we’re going to solve this. I’m here, just like you, to find the truth. Believe me.”
He nodded, considering her once more. He glanced at his daemon, and then at her, the same as she had just done. “In your lap, that’s Reynard.”
Reynard, the red fox, looked up at Scully and thumped his tail like a dog. So close were they to the startling intimacy of a human touching another person’s daemon, so extreme it was nearly verboten, and yet Scully was touched by the display of vulnerability. Her faced warmed. Before, she had trusted Mulder naturally, and now with the kindness and vulnerability he showed towards her it was easy to return the sentiments to him.
“On the desk over there, that’s Julienne.”
Mulder turned his head to face Julienne, who considered him with a cocked head, her yellow eyes seeming bright in the low light. “It’s nice to meet you, Julienne.”
“You as well, Mulder,” she returned.
Reynard, instead of introducing himself to Scully, licked her hand once with his small tongue, and then slipped from her lap atop the blanket and onto the floor. Exhilaration ran up Scully’s spine. Reynard dropped from the bed and proceeded to push his head into Mulder’s chest as he climbed into his lap and settled there, brushing one of his paws over his ear. Mulder absentmindedly stroked him as he settled.
“This thing exists, Scully. The government knows about it. And I have to know what they’re keeping from us.”
She nodded at him. Internally, she was still reeling, trying to settle the pieces Mulder had revealed to her into a shape that made sense. His motivations, made clear, revealed a depth of character that was astonishing to Scully. The actions of his daemon, Reynard, were even more so. It was highly unusual for a daemon to come so close to someone it had just met. It was even more unusual for a daemon who had just been introduced to extend itself and make physical contact with someone it hardly knew. Scully thought that Reynard was just as bold as Mulder was. Where Mulder shared with her exactly what he thought with no regard for norm or convention, Reynard had told Scully exactly what he thought of her and Mulder’s decision to place his trust in her with one bold and wordless motion.
She stared at the pair in the dark, her mind made. As long as Mulder wanted to share and uncover the truth, she’d work with him and Reynard.
A phone abruptly rang, its sound startling in the their momentary silence and the muted quiet of the rain. Mulder reached for the receiver.
“Hello?” He said into the handset. “What? Who is this? Who is this—”
“What is it?” Reynard asked, angling his head in canid curiosity.
“It was some woman… who said that Peggy O’Dell is dead.”
“The girl in the wheelchair?” gasped Scully, recalling immediately Peggy’s distress earlier that day.
“C’mon,” said Mulder, standing up and gathering his things. “Let’s go.”
The next hour passed by in a blur. Soon enough, Scully and Mulder were back on that rural highway inspecting the late Peggy O’Dell’s body and wristwatch. At the word of one of the sheriff’s deputies, they rushed back to the motel to find their two rooms aflame. Mulder punched the air in frustration, as their collected evidence, respective reports, and the unearthed corpse vanished in the period of one short night.
Out of the crowd watching the motel room flames die, a young woman came to speak to Mulder and Scully and introduced herself as Theresa Nemman. Inside a dingy 24-hour diner, Theresa Nemman recounted the events of the last four years. Her badger daemon sat at their feet and licked its paws in anxiety. She confessed to Mulder that she had the marks, too, and that she was scared that she would die like her friends had. Through a series of gentle questions, Mulder and Scully learned that her father, Jay Nemman, was aware of what was happening to his daughter and her friends. Theresa Nemman’s nose began to bleed profusely, and her badger daemon placed its paws over its long muzzle and whined, as if shying at some deafening, inaudible noise.
Mulder was just about to ask whether she knew if her daemon had ever been affected when Theresa’s father, Jay Nemman, and the now-named Detective Miles arrived. The two men swung the diner door wide open and escorted Theresa Nemman away. The two agents watched from just outside the diner as the sheriff’s car pulled away. Mulder and Scully exchanged a long, charged glance. Scully sighed, concern for the girl and frustration at their treatment by the local authorities beginning to mount. She spoke to her partner.
“They know, Mulder.” Scully said, gesturing firmly. “They know who’s responsible for the murders. Dr. Nemman has been hiding medical evidence since the beginning. He lied on the autopsy report, and now we meet the detective, who tried to scare us away from the crime scene. Who else would have any motivation to destroy evidence?” She insisted.
“They know something, that’s for sure. Why would they destroy evidence? What about the corpse?” Mulder wondered aloud. “Makes you wonder what’s in those other two graves.”
By the time they arrived at the cemetery on the hill, the deluge from earlier had returned. The scene was cast in blue through the bright moonlight and the falling rain. Mulder and Scully climbed the hill, Mulder’s flashlight and fox leading the way, as Scully’s boots squelched in the mud. Water dripped into her face, obscuring her vision, and her socks were thoroughly soaked inside her hiking boots.She had given up on being anywhere close to dry for the time being. Julienne, looking fairly miserable and bedraggled from the weather in a nearby pine tree, seemed to feel the same way. Scully’s flashlight cast light over the headstones. The sounds of the graveyard were eerie, as there was no other noise besides their muddy footsteps, heavy breathing, and the never-ending fall of rain.
Up ahead, the two graves came into view. They were empty. Detritus and soil were strewn about the scene. Whoever had taken the corpses was long gone. Mulder exhaled firmly in frustration next to her. Reynard nosed at the soil and whined.
“What is going on here?” Scully demanded to herself, speaking more to the falling rain and the universe at large than to her companions.
“Scully,” said Mulder, speaking just over the rain. He was soft in his distraction. “I think I know who killed Karen Swenson. It was Billy Miles.”
“The boy?” asked Scully incredulously. “The one in the hospital who’s been in a coma for four years came out here and dug up these graves?”
Mulder nodded, now speaking more loudly. “Peggy O’Dell was in a wheelchair, but she ran out in front of that truck. Look, these kids keep being summoned to the forest by some sort of waking compulsion. I think that Billy Miles, asleep though he might be, could come out here and dig up these graves. Peggy was killed right around nine o’clock. That was around the same time that we lost nine minutes on the highway. I think that something happened in those minutes. I think that time, as we know it, stopped.”
Scully was at a lack for words, and looked at him dubiously.
“You think I’m crazy, don’t you?” said Mulder, turning away from her. He reached for a nearby tree, where Julienne sat watching them in the high branches, and snapped a twig off in frustration. Reynard dove for the twig and snapped it between his teeth, as Mulder walked back to her, waiting for a response. Her thoughts whirred, trying to fit pieces together that didn’t seem like they belonged to one puzzle in the first place. In the tree, Julienne roused water droplets off of her plumage, letting the heavy droplets fall and seep into the soil. As Scully ordered her thoughts, Reynard circled back and forth between them.
“What?” Mulder asked her, seeing her expression change as her thoughts shifted. In response, Scully had nothing else to give him other than the hard facts, which she gave without hesitation. She gestured as she spoke, nearly hitting him in her insistence and her desire to be heard.
“Peggy’s watch stopped just after nine o’clock. I made a note of it when I examined her body.”
“Yes!” Mulder shouted. “Scully, I think there’s some kind of force, and whatever force caused us to lose time on the highway is the same force that summons these kids to the woods. Don’t you see? And the marks, I think they’re the result of some kind of testing that was performed on these kids that makes them susceptible to whatever force is summoning them to these woods.”
“And the force summoned Theresa Nemman’s body into the woods tonight?”
“Yes, but it was Billy Miles who tried to lead her there tonight, summoned by some alien impulse. That’s it!”
Beside herself, Scully laughed. It was a deep belly laugh, one borne of adrenaline, bone-deep curiosity, and incredulity at the state of things. Here they were, she and Mulder, Julienne, and Reynard, out in the middle of nowhere in the rain and the mud, staring at two empty graves while Mulder proposed vanishing time and invisible forces of extraterrestrial origin. She laughed and laughed, and Mulder joined in. Soon enough, the two were laughing in unison, and their incredulity was transformed into something genuine and mutual and irrevocable. Mulder howled at the moon in a poor, wettened imitation of a werewolf and Scully, in her elation, howled with him. Julienne took to the air and flapped in the wind, Reynard howled at the moon and bayed as Mulder had done, and Scully laughed, and laughed.
“C’mon,” said Mulder when their mutual laughter had died down. He had ducked his head, not in any effort to hide his amusement, but as if surrendering to it. He grinned wildly still, hair wet and dripping. Scully mirrored him. Still her elation echoed through her. “Let’s go and get some sleep.” He leaned in closer to Scully, and she didn’t pull away.
“Where are we going?” Scully asked. She lifted her elbow for Julienne to return to it, and Reynard wound his way between their legs as she and Mulder walked down the hill.
“To find a new motel. Then, to pay a visit to Billy Miles.”
Scully and Mulder returned to the state psychiatric hospital the next morning. Mulder spoke with the nurse about Billy Miles while Scully inspected Billy Miles’ comatose figure for any sign that he had walked into the woods the previous night. As Mulder stalled the nurse, Scully pulled out her pocket knife and wrapped it in a white tissue and, with a gentle touch, lifted dirt from beneath the boy’s toenails. Scully then reached for his bulldog daemon. She was hesitant to touch another person’s daemon, but any medical setting blurred normal boundaries, and neither the boy nor his daemon would react due to the boy’s comatose status.
Carefully, Scully wiped a second tissue between the toepads of the dog, and pulled it away to find the same substance. To her eye, the dirt in the tissue was the exact substance she had collected from the forest the evening before. In her revelation, she rushed from the room to speak with Mulder in the hall. As she relayed this to him, he didn’t seem particularly surprised, and instead proceeded to press her further. For a moment, she wondered why he was suddenly so skeptical towards her suggestion, until he reminded her that it was who would have to write it down in her report. Slightly regretting her excitability, she more calmly proposed running a comparison test with a second sample before doing anything else.
When darkness fell for the night, they returned to the forest in hopes of retrieving a second sample from the scene of the crime. They had hoped that coming at night would let them evade the disagreeable (a kinder word than Mulder had used) Detective Miles, but to Scully's irritation, the detective’s white truck was parked on the road at the forest boundary.
“The detective’s here,” said Scully, as she slammed the door to the rental car. Mulder said nothing, but she was certain that he had heard her. He stalked into the forest, and Scully followed him. Again, they waved their flashlights and followed each other into the woods. The night was dry, though low mist clung and curled amongst the ferns. The scent of the forest was loamy and thick, and a clouded sky filtered moonlight into a haze. Suddenly, they heard Theresa Nemman’s voice in the dark. They bolted deeper into the forest.
Scully’s hiking boots sank into the forest floor with every step. She sprinted to where she thought she had heard the scream from, with the beam of her flashlight waving back and forth erratically. Julienne followed close to her head, dodging this way and that between the dense pine, but never more than a foot from her partner. Detective Miles suddenly turned from behind the trunk of a tree.
Detective Miles rammed the butt of his rifle into Julienne’s chest, and, in agony, Scully dropped to the forest floor. She could feel the both of them each gasping for air. Scully keened in pain, a feeling of static and a sharp ache stretching between her and Julienne. Julienne hissed and chirped weakly in pain, a signal to Scully that she was hurt, but okay. As bonded partners, their emotions, pain and happiness both, were split and shared.
Scully rolled in the dirt for a few moments, awaiting the moment when the static and pain had decreased enough for her to reach to her partner. When it did, she grabbed Julienne and gently palpated Julienne’s chest. Nothing seemed to be broken, and Julienne had pulled away when the detective had turned from the tree, so the swing of the rifle hadn’t hit her at full force. Still, Scully would prefer if her partner didn’t fly for a while, and so she set Julienne onto her shoulder after standing to her feet. Scully turned in a circle, blinking the rest of the dull pain away, and called out for Mulder.
After a sudden thunderclap and burst of light, she heard Mulder calling her name, and he came bounding out of the forest to embrace her.
“Mulder,” she said. “What happened? There was a light.”
“It was beautiful,” said Mulder. He looked over her and held her gently. In his amazement, he tried for words, and finding nothing, smiled at her in beatification.
Billy Miles recited some cold memory to Dr. Werber, surrounded by a team of scientists and medical professionals. His return to wakefulness, in the Oregon national forest of all places, had been nothing short of remarkable. To Scully, however, still there were unsolved murders not yet resolved, evidence buried, and justice not sought that needing addressing, no matter how miraculous the boy’s instantaneous recovery. Mulder, wrong or right as he might have been, shared her convictions. In their final case file reports, they had separately requested that Dr. Nemman and Detective Miles be indicted for obstruction of justice. Under hypnotic suggestion, Billy Miles continued his sparse recollection in a removed monotone. Scully watched the proceedings through a two-way mirror. Mulder, through the glass, somehow unerringly found her eyes.
Soon, they would talk. Scully pushed past the smoker, and exited into the hall.
Scully lay in the dark, letting her mind drift. She could tell by sense that it was nearing midnight. She retraced the past days’ events in her head. Mulder and Reynard, running in the forest, came to her mind. She remembered the rising light of the forest, so distinct from the light of the car, flashlights, or moon. The phone at her bedside table rang. Julienne, half-awake, inclined her aquiline head to watch her friend as Scully answered the phone. Somehow, Scully had known before speaking who had called.
“Hello?”
“Scully? It's me. I haven’t been able to sleep. I talked to the DA’s office in Raymond County, Oregon. Scully, the paperwork we filed is gone. There’s no case file on Billy Miles. We need to talk.”
“Tomorrow,” she agreed, and returned the handset to the hook. She reclined back in bed.
Fleetingly, Scully’s thoughts returned to the deluge in Bellefleur. Julienne rustled on her perch. Julienne had felt her memory drift and had recalled her own experience. Scully sometimes felt as if they were a two-way mirror, reflected back at each other. She and Julienne had always echoed their emotions between themselves—soul and consciousness, split and shared. That night in the rain, it had felt as if Mulder and Reynard had suddenly joined with them. She and Mulder had been washed of all pretense. Laughing in the rain, they had been nothing but equals, she and Mulder, his fabular Reynard and her beloved Julienne. All soaked to the bone and exhilarated with wonder, the four had created a closed loop between themselves, and Scully had felt as if something had locked into place. It had felt fragile and fleeting, and for all that the unknown had surrounded her, it had all felt right.
She drifted to sleep, still wondering what the truth might have been.