EPISODE 2: THE SIGHT
Chapter 1.
Wayfield, Virginia.
August 3, 2010.
He woke in the middle of the night to the sound of a child crying. He stood in her doorway for a little while, waiting to see if she would calm herself and fall back to sleep, but it was slowly turning into a wail. He had to intervene before the furniture started flying around. He sat on the edge of her mattress, running his hand along her back, only partly awake himself. Half of his brain was still back on the beach, watching Scully try to befriend a wayward sea turtle with a bottle of Corona tilting out into the sand. When his little charge finally awakened, she pulled the sheets over her face to wipe the tears away, and turned to him, eyes as glassy as ever, with that trembling lip. She sat up and wrapped both arms around his neck, doing everything she could to get closer to him. She was shaking despite the warm, humid air flowing in from the open window.
He did what he could to comfort her, but his words were the same every night. He was uncertain of his impact on the situation, and yet he still came. He still tried. "It was just a dream," he assured her, stroking down her wild hair. "Was it the same one again?"
Perhaps in a sick symmetry with his own recurring nightmares, his tiny friend had the same dream every night, and though she expected it, and loathed it, and spoke about it in detail when the sun was up, it always chilled her to the core. It produced this reaction every time, and every time he was here with her to try and calm the storm. He knew the story well by now.
She saw an abandoned building, and within it, she was running for her life. She was pursued by an figure she always described as small, but sinister, and there was no way to shake it. She entered a room that was painted bright yellow, and then she was caught, held up, and thrown over the railing to her death. She woke up when she hit the ground. She drew pictures of it and posted them on her walls. She wrote stories about it and slipped them under his door. She told the dog about it over their afternoon tea. She lived and breathed this narrative, trapped beneath the weight of it, much like Mulder had recounted and suffered the memory of his sister for years after the fact.
Only her story had not happened yet.
Iden was psychic. She had successfully predicted an attack on one of the local girl months ago, and that prediction allowed Scully to save a life. If she saw something, it was very likely to happen.
She nodded to his question, whimpering.
He urged her to lay back down, tucking the covers up to her chest. "Look around. We're in your room. Nobody is going to hurt you here."
"But…" Iden murmured, her eyes fogging with tears.
"No buts," Mulder said, glancing at the window. "If anyone tries to hurt you, they won't get far, okay? Frankie is right here with you, and Scully and I are in the other room."
She stared at him, looking like she wanted to object again.
"Why don't you think about what we're going to do tomorrow? Do you remember?"
She smiled slightly. "Yeah."
"Think about that, okay?" He brushed her hair away from her face, giving her the best reassuring smile he could. He went for a softer tone. "And go back to sleep."
Mulder dragged his feet all the way back to his own bedroom. He collapsed on his side of the bed, making his partner stir. She grumbled at him and slid further away. Scully was not happy with him at the moment – she thought his excursions with Iden were too dangerous, and that he was taking unnecessary risks left and right. She was convinced he was going to get them both killed, or get Iden taken away from them. Their custody of her was flimsy at best.
But her anger didn't bother him. She still kissed him goodbye in the mornings and curled up with him at night. If those things stopped, he would have cause for concern.
He was barely back in his dreams, just walking along the edge of a sunny beach, when he heard the front door open. It was a distinct sound, amplified by the blinds banging against the wood, and the old hinges creaking like they hadn't been used in years. His skin prickled with a sudden rush of adrenaline at the prospect of someone invading his home.
He got out of bed, stepping into the hall to stare at the front yard. He was right. His front door was wide open, and he could see nothing in the yard. Frankie had just started in that direction, growling.
His first thought was that the ghosts from the caves had returned. Since his excursion into the troubling story of two dead siblings from centuries ago, Mulder had had a hard time forgetting his encounter with them. It still weighed heavily on his mind. He still wondered where they might be. Beyond that, he thought the Gunmen, who had made a habit out of trying to convince him that they were not his imagination, were just messing with him again. But in the back of his mind, in the most basic, primitive part of his brain, he imagined a foreign entity was about to attack, and that the first thing he should do is defend his home, and his girls.
He took his gun from his underwear drawer – a new hiding spot now that Iden was in the house – and crept along the hallway. He sighed when he looked into Iden's room. Her bed was empty. Once or twice a month she would go out to catch fireflies.
He tucked his gun into his pajama bottoms and went outside, stopping at the front steps. Iden was standing in the yard, staring up at the moon. She had a habit of looking up into the sky, just like he did, but when she did it there was always the possibility that she was having a vision. Whenever she was still for such a long time, he wondered what she might be seeing. It could be something as harmless as a delay in the mail delivery the following morning – or something as consequential as a child falling into a river unsupervised.
Mulder went to join her, frowning at Frankie, who was sitting across the bottom step. She was awful at babysitting. "What are you doing out here?" he asked, trying to follow her eyes. It was impossible to tell which constellation she might be looking at.
"I just… I like the sky."
When he had taken his own custody forms to the courthouse the other day, the social worker who had worked with Iden since her mother's death had warned him about her issues. According to the state of Virginia, she was a problem child who often disobeyed, snuck out, and questioned authority. When they saw someone as intelligent and brave as this, they hastened to print out a label for her and stick it on her permanent file – their categorization only served to make him more determined to keep her safe. It made him more enchanted with her, to know that she was misunderstood, to know that they were kindred spirits in that respect.
"You know, Scully would kill you if she saw you out here all alone."
Iden looked over at him, starlight in her big brown eyes, and shrugged. She was the stark opposite of her older sister, Deloris, in every way that he could imagine. Where her sister had white skin, blue eyes, and scraggly blonde hair, Iden had pale brown skin, brown eyes, and curly black hair. Iden was smaller, and prettier, and gentler in every way.
He wished he could have met her father, or her mother, to figure out why the siblings were so different, and so vastly separated in age. Deloris had once told him that her mother had had her when she was only fourteen, and thirty years passed before she woefully discovered that she was expecting again. Iden was never meant to happen, and she was almost put up for adoption, but something about the little girl had caught her mother's eye.
Iden was looking at the stars again, captivated by them, but her mind was elsewhere. She took his hand and leaned into his side. "I wish I couldn't dream."
He knew that feeling very well. Since his trip into the caves, he had experienced vivid nightmares about the cabin, the meadow, and the forest from his visions. Scully had told him it was a form of PTSD, a violent recalling of the events of his abduction, stretched to fit whatever weird canvas his mind came up with, but he thought it was something else. It was his very own haunting, a sort of punishment for some perceived wrong he had committed.
But Iden was just a kid. Hearing her sadness struck a chord in him.
He stepped behind her, wrapping his arms over her shoulders. He turned her toward the big dipper, which took up a big portion of the skyline, and pointed it out for her. "Check that out. We're so far out that the constellations actually look like constellations."
"What do you mean?"
"In the city you can't tell what they are," he said.
She started gazing around, thoughtful. "Do you think aliens are looking back at us?"
He smiled. "No."
"But I thought aliens were real. You said-"
"They are real," he cut in. "But they're not looking back at us. They live pretty far away. Our galaxy – the one that holds our solar system – is just one of millions, of billions of galaxies, in a possibly infinite number of universes. Other galaxies have other solar systems and other places that are kind of like Earth. None of them are particularly close."
"But you said aliens were on Earth already."
"Some are, but I imagine there are millions of species that have never given Earth a second thought. The ones that come here usually have ulterior motives."
"What do you mean?"
"I mean they want to hurt us." He crouched down, lining up her head with the brightest light in the sky. He pointed to it, making sure she was looking at the same one. "Do you see that?"
"The north star?"
"Yeah. When I lost my sister, I had dreams about that star, kind of like your nightmares. I saw it as a comet coming down to Earth. I thought it would land on my house, and every night I woke up and went outside to watch it, to make sure it stayed where it was."
"You were a weird kid."
He smiled, wrapping her in a bear hug. "Yeah? Well you are a weird kid. Get back to bed."
"I don't want to. Tell me more about the aliens."
"Tomorrow, on our expedition. But that's only if you sleep through the night." He marched her up the stairs. "Sleep deprivation makes you more prone to illness, and your illness makes Scully more prone to make me sleep on the couch, so it's time for all the little girls in the house to lay down."
"But I'm the only little girl in the house!"
"I was including Frankie."
Iden sat up on her bed, patting the comforter. "Come on, Frankenstein. Come on!"
Frankie whimpered and leapt up to the bed, curling up next to the wall. Instead of sleeping at the foot of it like a normal dog, she shared the pillow with Iden.
"I want you to go to sleep this time," Mulder said, pulling the covers up to her chin.
He went for the door, but her voice stopped him. "Fox?"
He turned, frowning. "Yeah?"
She rubbed her eyes, yawning. "Do all aliens want to hurt us?"
"No. Some of them just want to live in peace, like we do." He cracked her door. "Get some sleep. We have a long day tomorrow."