Character: Dana Scully
Fandom: The X-Files
Rating: PG-13
Prompt
: Narrator: We knew the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love, and even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them. (The Virgin Suicides) Vol 3. Week 16 on scifi_muses on LiveJournal
Setting: Season Five Episode: Post Modern Prometheus

Smoke still lingered in the damp air, filling it with ash and cinder, swirling around the red and blue lights that danced in the window of their rental sedan. Scully stood beside it, watching as the county sheriffs officers spoke to Mulder, all looking about as confused as she felt. How in the hell were they even going to begin prosecuting a case like this?

Quietly Scully looked in the back of their car, towards the huddled, snoozing figure, his ruined face pressed against the light-spangled glass. Mutato…or whatever his real name was…was fast asleep, curled in a ball of weary grief as he waited what his fate would be. He'd dropped off despite the fascinated gazes and pointing fingers of the local towns people who all wandered by to gawk and stare as they were herded from the Pollidori farm. Even the sheriff's deputies had taken turns, before meeting Scully's icy glare and turning back to the matter of Dr. Francis Pollidori and his dead father.

What a mess.

There was much gesticulation and hand waving, and a sworn epithet or three from the local men as finally some decision was made. They turned from Mulder to their own black and white where Pollidori sat, watching the proceedings with a proud, disdainful air that bespoke the fact that he still didn't believe he had done anything particularly wrong. Scully had seen that look many times in her career, especially from scientists. She would never deny the hubris that existed in the research community, the belief that through sheer human reason and ability that they could create all that God had wrought. How many had looked at the cross at her throat with that slightly upturned eyebrow and the patronizing look in their eye. Pollidori was one of many who thought they could beat God at his own game. Poor Mutato happened to be a sad byproduct of such backwards thinking.

Mulder loped across the grass as in the distance fire engines worked on the charred remains of the elder Pollidori's destroyed barn. He looked grim and sad, soot smudging one cheek as he wandered up. Scully resisted the urge to reach up and wipe it away for him.

"Well the sheriff's office has Pollidori at least for the murder of his father." Mulder glanced back at the squad car where the scientist sat. "They aren't sure what to make of the rest of it, the work he was doing or Mutato." He paused, grimacing. "Does he even have a real name other than that?"

"None that he's given," Scully sighed, cringing at the title Izzy Berkowitz coined for the poor, deformed man in their car. "Just looking at him, Mulder….it's heartbreaking. You see deformities like this only occasionally in nature, when embryonic division doesn't finish completely. It's almost as if Pollidori was trying to force monozygotic twins and failed, creating an incomplete, conjoined twin instead."

"But even conjoined twins look…more normal than that." Mulder looked pained as his eyes flickered to the sleeping figure in the car beside them.

"We won't know until they can run some tests on him, see what it was Pollidori was doing with his genetics in the first place and determine how he ended up this way." The testing alone could take years, and that wasn't speaking to the more immediate concerns of what to do with Mutato. All his life he had been hidden, secluded on his adopted father's farm. He had next to no human contact, no skills for living in the real world. The one constant in his life was now dead. And his only home was nearly destroyed. What was to become of him now?

As always Mulder seemed to presage her thoughts, "The DA will want to have him for investigative purposes, but the sheriff believes that before that they will want an evaluation of him, to make sure his story even checks out, let alone fit to serve as witness." This idea clearly didn't please him. "Kid's been through enough in his life already, now he has to be drug through that."

"And it's only going to get worse, you know. He's got no means, Mulder, unless the elder Pollidori left him the farm. And there will be people knocking on his door wanting to test him and study him to see what the doctor did to him to make him that way."

"The rest of his life as a test rat." Mulder grimaced in clear distaste, watching the sleeping form quietly. "It's not right, Scully, he didn't ask to come into this world, to exist. He's been ripped from the comfort and safety of his existence and now we are booting him into a cold world full of more scientists, more experiments, more questions? No matter how he got here or why he looks this way, he's human. Science always seems to have forgotten that about him."

"I know," Scully agreed, her heart aching for the unfortunate soul as well. "What about Shaineh Berkowitz and Elizabeth Pollidori? Any thoughts and their attacks?"

"My guess is that it was old man Pollidori the whole time," Mulder nodded towards the smoking mess that had been the Pollidori barn. "Remember when we ran into him in the woods and he brought up his son's work. I asked him if it was animal husbandry. And judging from his own livestock, I would say it wasn't totally unfamiliar to the old man himself. I think he just wasn't as well versed in it as his son, he knew the basics to produce a pig that hunts mushrooms, or a large, healthy cow, but not enough to create the same sort of creature that his son made and discarded. But I think he was trying."

"But he was a farmer, Mulder, where did he get the ova and sperm to even begin producing those types of experiments? And who is the father of Izzy, or these new babies?"

"Scully, you know I respect you as a scientist, I appreciate you as an investigator, but I have to say there are some questions you ask that I really just don't care to know the answers to." Mulder's pained expression spoke to the fact that this was one of those rare occasions where her partner couldn't even begin to wrap his head around the idea and a part of his didn't even want to. "There are so many questions I ask and want to know about, but you know…this really isn't one of them."

Scully wisely decided to let the idea lie for now. Perhaps, if she admitted it to herself, she didn't want to know the answers any more than he did.

"So where do we take him for tonight," Scully asked finally, looking to the immediate problem at hand. "All his things were in that barn from what best I can tell, his belongings, his clothes…he's lost everything."

"We can't take him into town, not with the uproar that will ensue there if he shows his face." Mulder pulled thoughtfully on his bottom lip before sucking it between his teeth and looking to the farmhouse, ablaze in the darkness, untouched by the mob-set fire that had destroyed the barn. "We could just shack him up here. I can stay out here with him so he's in some sort of police custody till he DA in the morning, make sure no one else comes out here to bother him tonight."

"Leave you alone on some farmstead with crazy townsfolk about. They've already showed up here with pitchforks once tonight, wait till they get more beer in them." No, Scully didn't like the idea of Mulder being out there alone. And she really hated the idea of going back into town the face the curious looks of the already nosy townsfolk, recording every move she made to provide fodder for their small-minded gossip. "How about this, you get him inside, I'll run into town for our things. We'll just stay with him for the next few days to get him processed with the locals, and then head back to DC."

"You are willing to face the wrath of Skinner on this one, wasting government resources on babysitting a suspect on a local case." The idea that Scully was suggesting for once that they ignore protocol for the good of someone else surprised and amused Mulder.

"Yeah, don't gloat, for once I'm making you call it in and explain it to him." How many times had she been the one stuck in that position? "Besides, like you said, I think the poor kid has been through enough. It's the least we can do, coming in here and upsetting his whole world." In a way they were just as responsible for the losses Mutato had suffered. If Mulder had never responded to Shaineh's letter, perhaps his father would still be alive today.

"Right." The consequences of their work weren't lost on Mulder, who watched the sleeping Mutato thoughtfully for long moments. His mind was racing again, he had the ever-so-familiar, distant look in his eye, the one that either meant something brilliant was soon to occur, or something that Scully was going to heartily regret.

"Mulder," she cautioned suspiciously as he continued his speculation, a small smile tugging at his mouth.

"No, you run into town, I can handle things here with him," he replied, not even hearing the warning question in her tone.

"Do I even want to know," she breathed, shaking her head, suspecting that the answer to that was probably in the negative.