Character: Dana Scully
Fandom: The X-Files
Rating: PG-13
Prompt :
Well you know I have a love, for everyone I know
And you know I have a drive, for life I won't let go
But sometimes this opposition, comes rising up in me
This terrible imposition, comes blacking through my mind
I See A Darkness (Johnny Cash) Vol 2. Week 37 on scifi_muses on LiveJournal
Setting: Season Four Episode: Teliko
No pituitary gland…Scully blinked at the PET scan, studying it again. This wasn't possible. How could Samuel Aboah be alive and functioning to the capacity he was without one? Any other human being would be crippled with hormone problems by this point, if they were even alive, and certainly wouldn't have reached the height of Samuel Aboah without some series course of hormone therapy throughout their life. How had he survived?
"I can't even begin to explain what we're seeing here, sir." She was as confused as the doctor working on Samuel Aboah. "I just hope this patient can…can provide us with some of the answers."
"You'll have to find him first." She turned as Mulder rounded the corner, grimly meeting her confusion.
"What are you talking about?"
"I was looking for you down in quarantine. Samuel Aboah's gone…disappeared."
"That's not possible…how?"
"I don't know, what does your science say?" Mulder's insolent eyes flickered to the PET scan on the light board in front of them. It had the effect he wanted, Scully felt her face flush as the doctor next to her cleared his throat and quickly excused himself. He murmured something about speaking to security as he moved through the door.
"My science, Mulder, has proven the man has no pituitary gland." She reached up to the ghostly image on the screen, finger encircling the small, pea-sized area where the pituitary gland should be. "That is the gland that controls many major functions within the human body…without it most people suffer from a range of massive health problems, from growth problems to blood pressure issues. For Samuel Aboah to be as healthy as he is, he'd require extensive, expensive hormone treatments, something I doubt he's ever had access too."
"What if he did?"
"I don't see how, Mulder, the man is barely making it as an immigrant."
"Not through conventional treatment." Mulder's mind was racing again, and Scully found herself blinking as she tried to keep up with it. " I spoke to someone in the Burkina Fasso Embassy today, the area that Aboah is from. He told me a folk tale from his childhood, about a teliko, an air spirit."
Scully bit back the immediate retort, swallowing it hard, slamming up the composure almost on instinct now. She had known the moment Mulder stepped onto this case that somehow, someway he would make this and X-file. "You are seriously trying to suggest that Aboah is an air spirit?"
"Well, I think that every folk tale has a seed of truth…just like the Jersey Devil?"
He had a point. "What made you go and speak to the ambassador?"
"Followed up a hunch." He was being maddeningly evasive, and she supposed she deserved that. Mulder's first reaction to being hurt was to push anyone and everyone away, and she had hurt him on purpose, and for no good reason she could understand at the moment.
"I went and spoke to someone regarding the bodies, and they referred me to the ambassador. He'd seen that very condition before, on an international flight three months ago, right before the bodies started turning up in Philadelphia."
"Did he know the cause of the loss of pigmentation, what could be causing this?"
"Not exactly. He remembered a nightmare from his childhood, the teliko. It's a sort of air spirit that prowls at night, almost a vampire, attacking mostly children and young men. The ambassador swore he had such a visitation as a child, but instead of it attacking him, it attacked his cousin. The young man was found dead in his cow pasture, looking exactly like that."
"An air spirit?" Scully had behaved herself this long, she couldn't help the incredulity that oozed out, rolling her eyes at the seriousness in Mulder's face. Of course he believed that, because it couldn't be as simple as pathogens or infections for Fox Mulder, it had to be folk tales and vampires. "Did it occur to you that perhaps the young man died of the same thing that's killing these others, and that the victim on that international flight could very well be Patient X? Hell, Aboah could be the carrier, with his pituitary malfunction perhaps he's immune to whatever it is."
"That's what I'm saying, Scully, Aboah is the link."
"You think he's a wind spirit…who hides up pipes?"
"Can you explain how he got up there?" His eyes glittered. He knew she couldn't. Biting her tongue, she subsided with her argument, allowing him to continue.
"What if the teliko folk tale is based on something factual, just like the Jersey Devil? What if there was a group of people in Africa who genetically had evolved without a pituitary gland? This defect allowed them to do things others couldn't, hiding in places others would never think, but it also comes with a draw back."
"They need those hormones to survive." This was starting to make a strange sort of sense at last, Mulder's slow, steady grin spreading as she began to see what he was seeing. It was unnerving, sometimes, how he viewed the world. And even worse was that she was starting to understand it.
"What if these 'spirits' were nothing more than human beings who had evolved to hunt down and process the hormones they needed off of other human beings?"
"It's not unheard of in science, animals do things like this all the time, creating specialized apparatuses and abilities to make up for deficiences, and this is why evolution works." Which would mean something so very, very different here than what they were expecting….and so very much worse. "Samuel Aboah then isn't a carrier of a disease."
"It means we need to find Aboah and arrest him for murder, Scully."
There was an almost audible click in her mind as the last piece synched, her eyes flying to Mulder's knowing ones. He'd put this together already, away from her microscopes and blood tests, following his own hunches and out-of-the-box thinking. Damn it, she breathed, how did he do that every time? The once case she should have had the leg up on, the one her science should have explained…
"The truth is, Scully, it was your finding here that brought it all together." Mulder's fingers reached up to the light board, to the small spot on the film where Aboah's pituitary gland should be and wasn't. How did he always know exactly what it was she was thinking, even when she tried her damndest to hide it? "If he's searching for the hormones he needs, that could cause the discoloration, right?"
"Possibly, I'd have to check with an endocrinologist." How did he do this, every time? Scully didn't want to resent him, not really, it was by far not the first time Fox Mulder had ever made this sort of leap in logic. But it upset her…perhaps galled her a little. Perhaps she would have discovered this eventually, if she had given enough research and thought to why the gland was missing, more tests, more results. But not in half of the time Mulder had done it on hunches, assumptions, and African mythology. And it shamed her in a way, made her resentful. Was this how others felt when Mulder swept in, stirring up their cases, turning everything upside down with his theories and proving himself right in the end?
It used to amaze her when he did it. Why was she so pissed off?
"Mulder," she breathed, gathering the results, include the PET scan off the board. "Did anyone ever tell you that you were spooky?"
"Only a few hundred times," he grinned at her, pausing, a flicker of concern rising. "Scully, I didn't come in here and pull this out of my ass and find myself suddenly right. You know that. This was a team effort, I'd have never figured out the science behind the story if it weren't for you. And it's that science that is going to be how we prosecute Aboah when we get him."
"I don't know, Mulder," she didn't meet his eyes. "Something tells me that you might have figured it out all on your own, with or without me in the picture."
What would he do without here, she asked herself as she breezed through the door. Clearly he would still dazzle the world. Who needed a scientist when you were Fox Mulder?