Character: Dana Scully
Fandom: The X-Files
Rating: PG-13
Prompt: John Adams: It doesn't matter. I won't be in the history books anyway, only you. Franklin did this and Franklin did that and Franklin did some other damn thing. Franklin smote the ground and out sprang George Washington, fully grown and on his horse. Franklin then electrified him with his miraculous lightning rod and the three of them - Franklin, Washington, and the horse - conducted the entire revolution by themselves. (1776) Vol4.7.2011 on scifi_muses on LiveJournal
Setting: X-files: Fight The Future
It was the same dance they always engaged in, point and counterpoint, he took the lead, and she followed, pulling him back from the edge he so loved to balance on.
"Mulder, there isn't anything in the animal kingdom capable of this ferocity."
He studiously ignored her as he perused the living room of he victim. Blood still stained the fabric of the couch he had sat on and the fibers of the carpet below. Scully glanced again at the crime scene photo, the victim with his body cavity torn wide open, then down at the brown stains, rusty and dried for days.
"Has an autopsy been performed on the body?"
"Not one I've been able to get my hands on," Mulder admitted as he wandered across the room the entertainment center. He thumbed on the large television briefly, it flickered on to SportsCenter, discussing that weekends football games and rattling off baseball scores.
"A man after my own heart," Mulder murmured, flicking the television off. "Wonder what his porn collection was like."
He ignored Scully's frown of disapproval as he wandered through the rest of the living space, keen eyes flicking over it. There were places where clearly the police had been, dusting, fingerprinting, searching for clues. Very little of it looked as if it had been part of the actual crime committed.
"You want to insist that this was a murder by a violent killer, Scully, but note everything in the house is in order…alphabetical order even." He paused at a shelf filled with what looked like organized graphic novels. "This man was a nerd, Scully, he like sports, he liked comics, I bet if we look in his bedroom we'd find Star Wars collectibles lining the walls. And none of it, nothing was touched."
"Your point?" She bend down to study the blood spatters on the floor, the spray of fluids that radiated across the victims coffee table and on to an armchair across the way.
"This isn't the sort of guy who a violent criminal would just randomly attack. This wasn't a home invasion, nothing was taken, and frankly, nothing here indicates the type of person who would make the kind of enemy that would do something like this."
"So thus it has to be an alien?"
"Scully, the description of the body fits." Mulder turned, holding up the strange claw in front of him. "You don't find this on anything I know about in nature. Look at this place, is it this the sort of person you would expect to be murdered by a violent killer? And let's just say, for arguments sake, this was a wild animal attack? How many violent animals do you know of in the deserts of the Southwest who would hide in a house heated up like a sauna in the middle of Phoenix in summer?" He brandished the nail yet again. "And then leave this embedded in the wall? Scully none of this makes any rational sense under any explainable context?"
"I'm not disagreeing with you on that score, Mulder, what I am disagreeing about is your conclusion that this is an alien attack. How did you go from creatures in Antarctica to one hanging out in the desert?"
"Who did the first victim work for?" Mulder demanded, working the strange claw between his fingers as Scully flipped through the paperwork.
The words on the page made Scully's mouth go suddenly dry. "Roush Technologies."
"Yeah, ring any bells. That was the company that Scott Blevins was taking kickbacks from, the one that Michael Kirschgau implicated as the one behind the conspiracy regarding the medical testing on you and countless others. They've had government contracts with the DOD and the CIA for years, and the Phoenix facility, I discovered, specializes in bio-medical research."
"I still don't understand how you go from what was done to me, to this?" Perhaps she was deliberately being obtuse, but nothing about bio-medical research screamed anything about bees, viruses, or Antarctica to her.
"I did a bit of leg work after I got the file, had the boys do a bit of snooping into the work Roush was doing in this facility. Most of it looks fairly straightforward, but Byers noted that there was a contract put our in June with FEMA for research to be done. A week later FedEx tracking info has Roush in receipt of several packages from guess where?"
It wasn't hard for Scully to see the thread of where Mulder's line of thinking was going now. "Dallas?"
"Strange, don't you think, that they would be getting shipments from the FEMA office there a week before it was blown to kingdom come."
"Mulder, hundreds of packages go through Dallas, it is a major shipping hub in the Midwest."
Mulder waved off her admittedly week protests, glaring down at the paperwork in her hand. "Why do you refuse to see this, Scully? The man who sent me to you, he told me what they found in Dallas was not anything that they had expected. They needed to study it, to analyze it. My guess Roush has been doing a lion's share of the testing on this virus for decades. They sent it to the Phoenix facility to be studied. My guess it is because of the temperature. The reason they sent you to Antarctica is because the virus lays dormant when it is cold. The minute I raised the temperature in the spaceship, those creatures burst out. They can't study the virus in the cold, it won't react, but they can in the heat."
The scary part is that there was a rational sense to Mulder's theory. The problem was that so far there wasn't a shred of evidence to support it. "So this guy, an average person working in the labs, he gets infected somehow? This is Roush, Mulder, they likely take every precaution against contamination."
"Which is why no one was prepared for the first victim to be infected." Mulder had moved back into the hallway, where the deep gouges cut into the hardwood, as if it had been butter. "The first body died a significant time before the second one. I think that when the victim's friends dropped him off, he likely died within hours. The virus had incubated and started gestating by then, and within hours he was dead, and the creature was loose in the home. When his friends came to pick him up on Monday, they didn't expect to find what they did."
"The police reports said no one saw what attacked these men, Mulder."
"The people in the van likely didn't. But let's be honest, here, Scully, do you know of a creature big enough to do that sort of damage that can hide well enough to not be noticed by a van load of people?"
In reality she didn't. "Mulder, what you are talking about here is a virus that acts in hours, nothing gestates that quickly." Let alone gestates to do something like this. "This is something out of a movie, aliens birthing themselves out of living human chest cavities."
"So what, you think that my story is science fiction too, just like OPR this morning?" His hazel eyes glittered dangerously, his voice deceptively calm.
He had her dead to rights. Damn it. "Mulder, I'm saying you are making a giant leap of assumption here based on what you believe happened down in Antarctica. I can't confirm or deny what you saw or the events that happened. But you are determined to chase down this lead in the hopes that it will prove your right, and I'm simply saying you might be wrong."
"As always, playing to safe, aren't you Agent Scully?"
What did he mean by that comment?
"I'm done here," he spun towards the door, expecting her to follow. "Whatever happened here, Scully, you have to admit it isn't as cut and dry as a coyote attack."
"Is that what local police are calling it?" Not that Scully was well versed in animal attacks, but even she could tell that no coyote could manage the level of damage revealed in the crime scene photos.
"I think the local police are happy to call it whatever it takes to sweep this under the rug. Go send out some hunters, shoot a few coyotes, make a scene of sending them to Arizona State for study, and call it a day." Mulder scowled absently at the giant gouge marks that bit deep into the dry wall.
"Mulder, whatever happened here…I don't think this was your aliens." He wanted so badly to prove this, she knew that, his work, his career, what was left of his reputation, all hung on this. How often had he been right in the past? And yet she had gone over the tests results from her own bloodwork herself. Nothing in there supported his thesis. She had been infected, yes, but not with anything that caused the level of damage she saw in those crime scene photos.
"I don't see that there is any arugment here," Mulder shot back, opening the door to step out into the stifling, dry heat. "You admit yourself that the crime report is a lie."
"Mulder, that doesn't mean I can just accept your theory," she argued once again. He didn't like hearing that, not from her of all people. And Scully hated to admit it stung even saying it, to see the look of hurt and mild betrayal in his eyes.
"What does it take," he snapped back, almost viciously. "For this to come up and bite you in the ass? I saw these creatures. I saw them burst to life. You would have seen them too, but you were infected with the virus, you were passed out over my shoulder."
It was a sideways reminder of why he had even witnessed this, of why he held these theories, because he had risked everything to come and save her. Scully flushed slightly, guilt tempering the words she refused to back down from. "Mulder, I know what you did. I know what happened to me, but without ignoring the science….I can't…" She sighed in frustration, not knowing what to say that would make any of this better with him.
"Listen, Mulder," she reached for his hand, willing him to understand what she meant. "You told me that my science kept you honest. That it made you question your assumptions. That by it I made you a whole person." She remembered well his speech out in the hallway in front on his apartment, his impassioned words were seared on her memory, burned into her conscuousness. They were the words that she had repeated over and over as she considered whether or not to stay with Mulder or to leave him, to walk away and become a doctor.
"If I change now, it wouldn't be right or honest." He had to see that. Her strict adherence to science was what made her who she was, it was what made her the asset that she was to him. To be otherwise, would make her no better than a yes-man…it would make her no different than Diana Fowley.
But clearly Mulder was in no mood for honest and thoughtful contradiction. "I'm talking about extraterrestrial life alive on this planet in our lifetime, forces that dwarf and precede all human history. I'm sorry, Scully, but this time your science is wrong."
His words cut as he turned from her, disengaging himself from her grasp, and stalked away to the car. Scully stood, briefly rooted to where she stood, surprised to silence by the gesture. Just two months before he had begged her to stay, had assured her that her presence, her insight, her dogged refusal to blindly follow was important to him, was necessary to him to do his work. He couldn't go on without her, he had said, and he wouldn't want to. And now he seemed more than willing to do just that, walking way from her and her scientific insistance.
Would Diana Fowley tell him he was wrong?
What had happened in the months since she had tried to flee from him, when he had pursued her into the hallway and made his heart-felt declaration? Neither of them had mentioned it or discussed it, let alone what had nearly precipitated from it. Mulder had carried on, business as usual, as if he hadn't poured out his heart to her in front of his apartment, as if he hadn't pleaded with her not to leave him…as if he hadn't nearly brushed her mouth with his in the briefest of kisses, threatening to take them both into and area that was both unsurprising and yet dangerous. Mulder hadn't mentioned any of that. And now, as he stood impatiently by the car, answering his cell phone, he seemed as if he never would, like that was all forgotten in the wake of a flying saucer, an alien virus, and the loss of his precious X-files to Diana Fowley.
Why had she stayed again, Scully wondered darkly as she wandered slowly to the car, catching only the tale end of Mulder's brief comversation.
"That was Skinner, there has an attack earlier today, similar to this one, in a nuclear power facility not far from here."
"Does he want us on it?" Mulder was already climging behind the wheel, and Scully scrambled to follow.
"He wouldn't call us if he didn't," he replied vaguely. "Though Diana and Spender left DC for here an hour after we did, so they may already be at the scene."
"If they are on the case, Mulder, why are we here again? We are no longer on the X-files."
He remained silently stoic as he pulled away from the curb, ignoring her question outright. He was stewing for a fight, she suspected, and had every intention of deliberately crashing their party, not caring if it broke protocol or not. And once again, Scully would be expected to clean it up.
She hadn't come back to the FBI….to him to do this.
