Nothing hurt worse than having your fanboy crush burst your bubble. Scully empathized with the crestfallen Mulder as they made their way out of the Hartwell Psychiatric Hospital, his jaw working hard against the disappointment she knew he felt.
"So much for your hero, eh?" She tried to be gentle. In the many years she had known Mulder she had rarely heard him speak with awe about anyone who wasn't a baseball player. Frank Black's dismissiveness cut him. Whether he wanted to admit it or not, the man had obviously been something of a hero to Mulder.
Mulder's long strides ate up the tile floor towards the door. "Man obviously has no interest in helping us."
"Interest. He out right ignored us. He paid more attention to the football game." Not unfamiliar behavior from the men folk in her life, but it nettled Scully all the same that Black did it.
"Not that close attention, he didn't know that Notre Dame was on a third and long." Mulder's hand punched at the long, metal handle across the door out of the hospital, allowing it to swing open. "He was paying attention, he just chose to ignore our questions."
"Why?" That was the part that had confounded Scully.
"Because whatever the Millennium Group was, he is scared of it." Mulder's long, wool overcoat flapped in the cold, Virginia air. "Because he knows what is happening and doesn't want a part of it."
"If he had experience with the Millennium Group, then you would think he would want to out it before something bad happens."
"What if it already has?" Mulder stopped mid stride, turning to face her. His frown flickered back to the cold, gray building, chilly and institutional in the Mid-Atlantic winter. "Think about it, he checked himself into a thirty day stint in this place. He's retired. Something had to happen to him."
"What? Who was this Frank Black, Mulder? And why would he hold out on us?"
Mulder sucked in his bottom lip, chewing it thoughtfully while stuffing his hands in his pockets as a cold breeze whipped by. "Frank Black was everything I said he was. He was a legend before I even came on board. Bill Patterson used to hold him up as some genius, and from everything I could tell, he was. Like I said, the greatest criminal profiler that ever came out of Quantico."
A descriptive she had heard to describe someone else. "You mean, outside of you."
Mulder shrugged, clearly uncomfortable with the comparison. "I don't know, likely better than me. He had this talent…he could put himself in the criminals mind. Patterson used to say that he could imagine himself as the killer. It's why Patterson loved him so much, he was completely by Patterson's book."
"And I thought you disagreed on Patterson on that way of profiling." Scully well remembered that was part of the reason that Patterson and Mulder had their falling out, even if Patterson praised Mulder behind his back.
"We disagreed because it wasn't how I operated, it wasn't me. I feared what that sort of thinking could do. Case in point, look at what happened to Patterson."
Scully couldn't disagree with that. She shivered slightly in the cold, remembering all too well the parable of Bill Patterson and what had become of him when he lost himself in trying to profile a criminal. He had become the monster himself.
"What made Black different was that he didn't have that problem. He could step into the mind of the killer, could nearly become him, but he could always step away. He never lost himself in that mind. He never forgot who he was, that he was Frank Black. That was what made him so…amazing."
"What if it started getting to him, though? Face it, Mulder, the man just checked himself into an asylum, voluntarily." She wasn't so sure Mulder at times shouldn't be in one.
Mulder shrugged, turning sadly to glance up at one of the windows into the building. "I don't know, Scully. Maybe something. I don't know what happened to him once he left. He was gone by the time I was in on the unit, and he had retired completely before I even took the X-files. Something could have occurred."
"Possibly with the Millennium Group?" For all of his seeming ambivalence, she had noticed the look in his eye when she had passed him the pictures. "He admitted to knowing the men who killed themselves, Mulder, but it was more than that. He knows what the Millennium Group is up to."
"I noticed that." Mulder looked thoughtful for a long moment. "Look, the Millennium Group has been little more than an FBI spook story. But just like the X-files, there's often a kernel of truth in every tall tale. Obviously there's enough of one here that it makes the FBI higher ups nervous. What if Black found out the truth about the Millennium Group? What if he discovered what they were really trying to do, and he got caught up in it? Only…something happened. Something that pushed him over the edge."
"You said it yourself, Mulder, what made him amazing was that he got into the killer's heads. What if he got into these people's heads and found something he didn't like." Scully wondered what that could be. Frankly, if it involved raising the dead and necromantic magic's she likely didn't want to know.
"Which would explain his surly attitude right now. He doesn't want to discuss it because he is afraid of going there, afraid because he knows how they think and what they have done." Mulder dug in his pocket for his car keys. "And if that's the case, I need to know exactly what our perpetrator is up to."
"How? Black gave us nothing on the group."
"I'm not without resources of my own, Scully, and at its heart the Millennium Group is an apocalyptic, whack job cloaked in Judeo-Christian ideas of the end of the world." He glanced casually at his watch. "We have two days till that's supposed to be happening, so I suggest we hop to it and see if I can throw on my profiler cap."
"What in the world are they even plotting?" They still knew next to nothing on this group.
"I don't know, Scully, it's the end of the world," Mulder mused speculatively, leading the way to his car. "Could be anything, rain of frogs, a cloud that brings plague…oooh, a zombie apocalypse would be interesting."
"Maybe to you," she snorted, marveling about Mulder's ideas of what an interesting end of the world might be. "I would just settle for them being a bunch of crazies digging up graves that don't amount to much and leave it at that."
"How many times in all of our cases has it ever been that simple, Scully?"
She had to admit, he was right. It was never that simple.