He raised his eyes to look at her. Almost immediately, he realized that he didn't have to look up quite as far as he'd thought. She was… short. Before he had time to digest anything else, though, she had taken two quick steps forwards and was standing directly in front of him.
"Agent Mulder." She smiled, her voice coolly professional as she held out her hand. "I'm Dana Scully. I've been assigned to work with you."
He took her proffered hand and shook it energetically, risking a quick once-over as he did. She was small, so small that closing the distance between him and the door hadn't helped, not by much, anyway. Bright blue eyes met his squarely, framed by shoulder-length hair of a colour he couldn't quite identify and therefore assumed was some shade of red. Momentarily fazed by the quiet confidence in those eyes, it took him a second to realize that she, too, was looking him up and down.
"Oh, isn't it nice to be suddenly so highly regarded?" he said easily, making a mental note to delay standing up for as long as possible. He had, throughout his thirty-one years, met people who were to varying degrees touchy about their heights. On several occasions, he had discovered that the hard way. Until he knew a little more about Dana Scully, he wasn't going to chance doing so again. "So, who did you tick off to get stuck with this detail, Scully?"
She looked at him strangely. Did she not realize that working in the basement wasn't exactly a step up the ladder of success? "Actually, I'm looking forward to working with you." Oh, she didn't. Either that, or she was being extremely diplomatic. "I've heard a lot about you."
Mulder took that in his stride. He knew the talk that went round in FBI circles about him and his work. Spooky Mulder. Thinks there're little green men living on Mars. Did you hear what happened to his sister? What happened, or what he thinks happened? "Oh really?" He eyed her warily. "I was under the impression…" He paused, then threw caution to the wind. "… that you were sent to spy on me." He leaned back in his chair, waiting to see how she would react.
One immaculately made-up brow lifted. "If you have any doubts about my qualifications or credentials," she began heatedly, but he cut her off mid-sentence.
Now that she was already upset with him, he supposed he could go ahead and stand, so he did. He winced. It was worse than he'd thought. Even in those impossibly high heels she was wearing, he towered a good eight inches or so above her. Did she even reach his shoulder? He didn't know, and he didn't think that now was the time to find out. He had put her thesis with a pile of unfinished paperwork on his desk after reading it and perched his telephone on top of everything to hold it together. Reaching over, he lifted the makeshift paperweight and extracted the document.
"You're a medical doctor," he recited. "You teach at the Academy." It was amazing how much information one could glean from a morning spent in frantic phone calls. "You did your undergraduate degree in physics." Taking off his glasses, he gestured towards the sheaf of papers in his hand. "'Einstein's Twin Paradox: A New Interpretation. Dana Scully, Senior Thesis.'" He looked up from the title page in honest admiration. "Now that's a credential, rewriting Einstein."
She crossed her arms, looking slightly mollified. "Did you bother to read it?"
"I did," he assured her. "I liked it." Crossing the room, he picked up his slide canister and fitted it carefully into the projector. "It's just that in most of my work, the laws of physics rarely seem to apply."
Both her eyebrows shot up this time, and he felt rather than saw her glare. Unperturbed, he walked past her and turned off the lights, plunging the room into a darkness only marginally relieved by the weak sunlight filtering through the high windows.
"Maybe I can get your medical opinion on this, though." Making his way back to the projector, he switched it on, and the first of his carefully arranged slides flashed onto the view screen. A young woman lay face forwards on a forest floor, her light blonde hair tangled with dirt and leaves. "Oregon female, age twenty-one, no explainable cause of death." He glanced over at Scully, who was standing beside the screen, her face dimly illuminated by the pale blueish light. "Autopsy shows nothing. Zip." With a click, the second slide moved into place, showing a close-up of the girl's back. "There are, however, these two distinct marks on her lower back. Doctor Scully, can you ID these marks?"
He watched as Scully stepped closer to the screen and surveyed the two small, raised bumps on the girl's back with a practiced eye. "Needle punctures, maybe." She tilted her head slightly, as if scrutinizing the marks from a different angle. "An animal bite. Electrocution of some kind." Her voice was confident. She was not asking questions; she was offering explanations.
"How's your chemistry?" Mulder switched over to the third slide, which showed the intricately crossed lines of a molecular diagram. "This is the substance found in the surrounding tissue."
She hesitated. "It's organic." A troubled look flickered across her face. "I don't know, is it some kind of synthetic protein?"
Mulder shrugged honestly as he changed the slide again. "Beats me, I've never seen it before either. But here it is again in Sturgis, South Dakota." This time it was a boy, sprawled facedown on a railroad track, his plaid shirt lifted to expose the tell tale bumps on his lower back. "And again in Shamrock, Texas."
Scully looked at him. "Do you have a theory?"
He smiled. "I have plenty of theories." Whether or not she would accept any of them, to be sure, was an entirely different matter. He had known Dana Scully for all of ten minutes, but he was already fairly certain that she would match him blow for blow, argument for argument. Assuming, of course, that she didn't leave his office and head straight for Kersh's to demand instant reassignment to some other, less deranged, partner. In all honesty, he wasn't too sure which to hope for. Either way, though, it was time to test the waters a little bit more. "Maybe what you can explain to me is why it's bureau policy to label these cases as 'unexplained phenomenon' and ignore them. Do you believe in the existence of extraterrestrials?"
He allowed the last few words to taper off in an eerie whisper, and she smiled in spite of herself.
"Logically, I would have to say 'no'."
Mulder nodded, undisturbed. She was a medical doctor, a scientist; he hadn't expected her to agree.
"Given the distances needed to travel from the far reaches of space, the energy requirements would exceed a spacecraft's capabilities--"
For the second time, Mulder cut her off, although not without some vestige of regret. He knew it was rude, but he had heard the argument a few too many times. "Conventional wisdom. You know this Oregon female? 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 met his eyes fiercely, apparently undisturbed by the fact that she had to tilt her head back in order to do so. "The girl obviously died of something. If it was natural causes, it's plausible that there was something missed in the post-mortem."
Mulder watched her, torn between amusement and exasperation.
"If she was murdered," Scully continued, oblivious to his quandary, "it's plausible there was a sloppy investigation. What I find fantastic--" she looked at him severely "-- is any notion that there are answers beyond the realm of science. The answers are there. You just have to know where to look."
Surrendering to amusement, Mulder smiled. "That's why they put the 'I' in 'FBI'," he quipped. Walking back to his desk, he sat down. "See you tomorrow morning, Scully, bright and early. We leave for the very plausible state of Oregon at 8 a.m."
If she could take potshots at him, so could he. To his surprise, she didn't retort. Instead, she smiled, albeit somewhat enigmatically, then turned and left, closing the door behind her. He listened as the brisk click-clack of her high heels echoed and faded down the hallway. How she could even move in those things, he had no idea.
Shaking his head, he leaned over and turned the projector off. Working with Dana Scully was going to be interesting, very interesting indeed.