Author's Notes will be at the bottom from now on. -CJ
The conversation the night before that he had with Agent Albarn can only be described as intense. He regrets not being calm enough to put her at ease about the whole fiasco, because she was absolutely and irrevocably horrified. He thanks whatever cosmic force willed her to stay in the rainy state with him instead of high tailing it back home.
They had made arrangements to excavate two bodies when they woke the next morning. Both had the same wound pattern as the female in the photo, both from the same class and high school. They might actually find something substantial.
"Earlier you mentioned not to call you by your first name," she comes up from behind him as he watches the workers pull both caskets out of the ground, "Do you have something else you would like me to call you or should I stick to Agent Evans?"
"You can call me Soul," he feels her confused gaze on his back, "It's what my brother used to call me."
"Ah," she pauses for a moment as if she understands, "feel free to call me Maka, even though you already have."
She leaves him be after that and he's thankful. Maka respects boundaries, which is more he can say for his previous partner. She's, in many ways, leagues better than his previous partner, who was rude and loud and full of himself.
She's talking to the man who shouts orders to everyone else, making said man quake in his boots with her menacing glare and too-large windbreaker. A car pulls up behind Soul and almost immediately he rolls his eyes. He mumbles something about the fuzz and giggles to himself before squaring his shoulders and being a bit more serious about all this business.
"I'm going to need to see some credentials." The police officer glares at Soul.
"Sure thing." he says and flips out his badge, awful picture and all.
The other man continues his glare and stomps off to where Maka stands, still talking to the director of the excavation, and asks for her identification too. She produces it, smirk evident on her face, before directing her conversation towards the police officer.
"How may we help you, mister-" she trails off.
"Deputy Wilson," he still looks so mad, "I would like to see the paperwork for this, you FBI folks always think you can uproot whatever, whenever."
"Do we now?" Maka asks before pulling out the signed paper.
"I don't know what you two are looking to find," the older man growls, "but you're making a big mistake digging up those bodies."
"Thanks for the warning," Soul says as he walks by the man and waves him off.
The officer is gone in a rush, even going as far as to turn on his sirens. Soul side eyes Maka as she chuckles at the fact an officer of the law was acting like a child.
"Agents," the director calls, "We're ready to open the caskets when you are."
The first casket is what she had expected, but apparently not what Soul had. As soon as the stench of a partially-decayed body hit the air, his hand flies to his nose and his body visibly tries to make him wretch. It smelled bad, so bad, but it's nothing Maka hadn't dealt with before- hell, it wasn't even the worst!
When the second coffin was opened, they weren't so lucky. It was Maka's turn to feel queezie. The rate of decay made no sense. she smelled that off the bat. There was so much wrong with this body, like it had changed. The girls' eyes, if they can even call it that, were dried and sunken to the bottom of the sockets which were large, too large for any human. The skin was almost mummified and the body was coiled and curved in unnatural angles. Maka was really going to be sick, this thing was so obviously tortured before it was put in the ground.
"We need both bodies transferred to the local morgue as soon as possible," Soul demands, straight faced, "We'll meet you there in thirty minutes."
Soul makes eye contact with Maka, who's face is between shocked and disgusted, and she knows this is what they needed to get a leg up on the case. She nods to an unasked question, of course she'll do the autopsy, how could she not?
"Soul, we need to drop by the motel first." Maka says as she's signing the work order for transporting the bodies.
"I'll drive," He shoots a look at the team of men, "do not leave those bodies- no matter what."
After grabbing Maka's tape recorder from her room, Soul had high tailed to the morgue.
The body smelled only partially less horrible after being aired out the passed half an hour, but Maka's stomach still wanted to heeve when she walked into the room. Both bodies lay on metal slabs in the middle of the room, perfectly positioned on either side of a central drain on the floor. If she wanted to get out of there by sundown, she'd better get to it.
She hadn't been in scrubs in quite some time, especially not the rubber apron used for especially gruesome cases. Soul chokes back a laugh as she walks out with her full garb and starts her tape recorder.
"Agent Maka Albarn, case number forty-two thousand, five-hundred and sixty four. September tenth, nineteen-ninety-three. I will begin my autopsy on Herald, Macy." Maka speaks as if she's in an empty room, Soul forgotten. She rattles off more useless information before burying her scalpel into the girl's sternum.
No blood pools from the incision, being as she was bled for the burial, but Soul still finds himself wincing as if she could feel sound her ribs make as Maka cracks them away from each other is unnerving and he thinks it's insane how this small FBI worker is not phased at all by it.
"Why are you even looking at this body, the other one is far more important." He glares at her as he paces the room.
"Agent Evans, will you hand me the forceps." Maka points at the spindly-looking handled things among her armory of chrome. He does as she asks and she still ignores him.
"Rate of decay coincides with date of death. Her organs seems to be mostly in-tact, leading us to believe the cause of death was not poison or organ-failure." Maka flips the body carefully after closing up it's chest.
The wounds on her back look shiny and black compared to the rest of her pigmentless body.
"The two marks on her lower back seem to have had a faster rate of decay, unknown reasoning." Maka adds in.
It takes her about fifteen minutes to finish that one body, Soul grows impatient, antsy as she finishes with the mostly in-tact girl.
"Maka, come on." He rolls her eyes which is returned with a fiery glare from her.
"Moving to the next body excavated," Maka says and glares at Soul as he bounces in anticipation, "presumably Woodward, Ella. Though there is no way to identify the subject, as the body has either been tampered with or put through a enormous change since last identified. Weighing fifty-two pounds in extremus."
She starts with measurements; first, the body, which seems to have shrunk and measures to be four feet and six inches. Second, the hands, which digits are elongated curled at the ends. Then, the eye sockets,
"They seem to have been stretched, there are small notches on the top and bottom of the orbit. The diameter is sixty-nine millimeters." For the first time, Maka scowls.
'What's the average?' Soul mouths to her, careful not to get his voice caught on the tape anymore.
'Twenty-four, give or take.' she whispers back.
If this is the body of that girl, something god-awful happened to her.
"Body could possibly belong to the primate family, explaining the larger ocular cavities and primitive body structure."
The examination proves that the organs inside the body decayed rapidly upon being buried, as if a catalyst had been administered before hand. The wounds on the low back were pink instead of the leathery-rotten skin everywhere else on the body. Samples were taken to see if there would be any residue left.
There were x-rays performed both of the bodies, revealing small, tube-like metallic objects that were seemingly implanted in their nasal passages. Maka and Soul share a glance; if anything, this autopsy raised more questions than gave answers.
"I want blood tests done on both bodies, a full toxicology, CT scans, the works. What we can't do here we can order to go, send back to home base. We should make sure that this is a need-to-know case, no loose ends or extras that could ruin evidence." Soul lists off in a flurry.
"Wait, Soul," Maka starts, "What are you even expecting out of those? Obviously someone replaced the body, I don't know why but toxicology, blood tests and CT's won't do anything. We should be getting warrants for the arrests of the sheriff and be looking into who killed these girls."
"Do you think that I am not skeptical, Maka? I doubt things just as much as you do, but you saw the implants, you saw the notches in the eye socket- something is going on." His eyes meet hers and she can't bring herself to tell him no.
Maka pulls strings in the higher tiers of the FBI to get both bodies flown back to Quantico for more analyzing. She writes all of her previously recorded musings on the clunky electronic typewriter she brought along. This will take some time, she had told Soul. It did, it took damn near three hours.
Now, he knows they are not and will most likely never be friends, but he wants to offer as many olive branches as he can. He hasn't seen her eat all day and decides it's about time to knock on her door and tell her food and the next four coffees she needs to wolf down are on him.
He's glad she says she'll come with him to the local diner.
"You're saying it disappeared?" Maka sits across her partner, "Time just- can't disappear! It's a universal invariant!"
"Honestly, I don't know the mechanics of alien abduction," he slouches and leans on his hand.
She barks out a laugh and takes a sip of her soda, "What made you join this line of work?"
"Are you sure you want to know?" He waggles his eyebrows at her and she nods, "When I was ten, my older brother disappeared." He sighs, suddenly serious.
"He was twelve and my best friend, it destroyed the family. I was lost and tried to figure out what happened and what I had seen," he sits back into the booth. "I graduated college and found out I had a knack for applying criminal profiles to current killers and wound up here, which is a place that I can try to find out what really happened to Wes."
"That's-" She looks at him sadly, "I'm sorry you had to go through that."
"What about you?"
"What? Oh, my mother is a medical doctor and my father is in the military. I went through medical school and got recruited by the bureau right away," she pushes out a laugh, "they still think it was an act of rebellion but I thought the agency was a place I could make a name for myself, away from them."
Soul just nods in understanding and munches on his fries before they head back to the motel.
"Maybe we should start talking to some of the surviving class, look into what has happened to the other students." Maka says from the passenger seat.
"I'm five steps ahead of you," Soul smirks and pulls some files from the center console, "Sandra Cunning and Rob Willson are currently under watch at Saint Vincent's Mental Care."
"Wait, Rob Wilson as in Deputy Wilson?" Maka turns her whole body towards him.
"I sure as hell hope so, then we might have an actual case."
They get to the motel with no issue, Maka goes back to typing up her autopsies and Soul goes back to research. The power goes out, which isn't much of a surprise because they're in some podunk town that's constantly bombarded with electrical storms. So, she lights candles and gets ready for a shower.
Then she feels it, right as she's getting undressed, and it sends her into the more intense state of panic she's even experienced.
No, please no.
She can barely remember throwing on her robe before tearing out the door to Soul's room. All of her is scared and hoping it's not what she thinks it is, it's not those same marks all those kids have, please let it not be.
She pounds on his door until he opens, bleary eyed and bewildered.
"Maka, is everything okay?"
"I need you to look at something for me," her eyes plead him.
He nods and opens the door further, letting her in. Almost immediately, she turns her back to him and undoes her robe, letting it settle under the marks.
"What are they, Soul?" Her voice is pure terror.
For a beat, he just looks at her back, his temporary partner's mostly bare back. Why is she trusting him? He's the crazy one that practically lives in the bureau's basement, both literally and figuratively. He holds a candle up to the small of her back, and sure enough there's three protrusions, two close together and one towards her spine.
"Soul, what are they?" She demands.
He lets a chuckle escape, "They're mosquito bites, I got eaten alive out there too."
She quickly pulls her robe back on, tying it tight and almost embarrassed. She then turns on her heel and buries her face in his chest. He awkwardly pats her head and shoulders as she quakes,
"Hey, now, it's fine, everything is okay."
Okay, so I'm kind of busy with college things right now, but I'm really going to try to update at least once a month. On top of that, I'd love to thank all of you that followed! I wasn't expecting that and it definitely made me want to write more! Also, thank you so much to Professor Maka for leaving a comment, it means a lot.
Hope you all enjoyed, thanks for reading! - CJ