Chapter One - The Strange Death of Mister North

Morgue
Washington DC
August 16th, 2000
11:28 a.m.

Scully's stomach roiled suddenly as she looked down at the body of Philip North. It wasn't that the blond twenty-seven-year-old had died in some spectacularly gruesome manner, because his method of death had been nearly pedestrian - a single gunshot wound to the heart. The police thought perhaps it had been over a dispute over a girlfriend. Nothing out of the ordinary there.

No, the reason that her stomach was suddenly in revolt was Mister North was looking at her with a shocked expression on his face. The queasiness only increased when he opened his mouth and spoke. "Hey, that's me." He pointed one tanned finger at the body that lay flayed open before them.

"Well no," Scully denied.

"Looks just like me, though." North suddenly looked more interested than stunned. "If I didn't know that I was standing here, I'd of thought it was me, too."

She looked from the corpse to the man standing beside her. "Who let you in here?"

"The morgue attendant. My mother called my roommate in hysterics, saying that she was called to ID my body. But I was home, so I talked to her and calmed her down before deciding to come here and ID myself."

"But it's not you," Scully reiterated wearily.

"I know, it's just..." North trailed off, looking down at his dead double. "Odd."

"In a word, yes." She nodded her agreement. "While you're here, would you be willing to submit a DNA sample?" She didn't add that she could get a warrant for one if he declined, since he looked like the agreeable type.

"So you can prove it's not me?" he asked with a faint smile. "I thought you already established that."

"It's not me who needs convincing."

"Okay."

They didn't continue their conversation while she swabbed his mouth for DNA, which was probably just as well given that it'd have garbled his words. He gave her a quizzical look while she sealed the sample. "You're a doctor. Do you have any idea what the odds are for there being someone who's the same age as me, and looks just like me, turning up in the same city?"

She shrugged. "Astronomical."

When North left a few minutes later, she returned her attention to the other Philip North, whom she supposed was technically a John Doe, given that he wasn't who the police had originally identified him as from the identification he carried.

She wished she hadn't agreed to come at the police's frantic summoning an hour ago when the other mister North showed up. Even more she wished she had some Maxloxx.

Hoover Building
Basement Office
4:50 p.m.

"You know this makes no sense at all, Mulder," Scully said with a frustrated sigh.

Mulder was tempted to hug or tickle her to distract her, but he decided not to. They hadn't had the discussion yet about how "public" they ought to be about their new relationship; he half suspected that she just didn't want to deal with all the "it's about time" comments, and frankly, he could do without them too. So he kept his hands on the desk.

Instead he let amusement infuse his voice. "When did you begin to assume that our cases would make sense, Scully?"

She gave him a wry look. "I've been around you too long, I guess. But you have to admit, this case is stranger than most. Philip North is dead, in the morgue at Quantico-"

"Where you've sliced, diced and julienned him-"

"Julienned?"

"It was on my word-a-day calendar."

"Where I've autopsied him, and he's dead. Dead-dead."

"Dead-dead is a scientific classification?" Mulder wondered aloud.

Scully ignored his digression. "Yet he's alive, and wandering the greater DC area."

"I agree that is troublesome. Especially since the DNA checked out."

"Of course it did. This isn't like that case we had with the false Micah Hoffman." Her fingers toyed with the edge of a folder, and he wondered if she realized that she was fidgeting. "Fortunately we weren't the ones to notify the...dead gentleman's family this time."

"No, the police made that blunder all on their own. Which means our butts won't be in a sling this time with Skinner."

"That's not the point, Mulder. The point is that mister North's claim that he never had any siblings, let alone an identical twin checked out too. I just got off the phone with the hospital where he was born, and their records clearly show that his was a singleton birth. There's no twin, so it's not possible for the dead man to have identical DNA as mister North."

"Yet he does."

"Yet he does," Scully repeated. "What's your take on this?"

"What makes you think that I have a take on this?"

"You always have a theory, Mulder. No matter how implausible it is, you always have one."

He didn't know if he should feel complimented or insulted. "I think that the dead mister North and the living mister North have a family connection we just haven't figured out yet. Maybe his mother was drugged during her delivery, and unwittingly delivered twins, one of which was kidnapped without her even knowing that he'd been born. Or perhaps she herself is an identical twin, as is her husband - there's a theory that two pairs of identical children who married might produce children that are identical cousins-"

"Patty Duke? I expected you to come up with a theory about North being the victim of some Consortium cloning project, and you bring up identical cousins." Mulder rolled his eyes when she began to sing off-key. "Still, they're cousins, identical cousins and you'll find they laugh alike, they walk alike, at times they even talk alike..."

"Short of mister North turning out to be Kurt Crawford's brother, I think it's safe to leave the Consortium out of this one."

"Ruling that out, what does it leave us with?" Scully asked, her eyes suddenly serious.

"I don't know," Mulder admitted.

Mulder stared off into space, turning the issue of the two mister Norths over in his mind. There had to be something he was missing to account for the existence of the dead double. Perhaps the fairytales about fairyfolk abducting children and leaving changelings behind had some element of truth to them. In that case the trouble would be convincing Scully and devising a method of figuring out which North was the real one, and which the lifelong poser; a poser who might not even realize, or have realized if it were the dead man, that they weren't human. Would a more meticulous DNA analysis pick up on some subtle genetic marker that-

"Mulder?" Her voice brought him back to reality. "It's time to go home."

He checked his watch in surprise. "So it is. Home to where?"

Although it had been about a month since she first spent the night, they'd yet to fall into any sort of predictable pattern, which lent itself to anxiousness and queries like this one. Not that it seemed to bother her as much as it did him. She seemed a lot more mellow about all facets of their budding relationship, now that he thought about it.

"How about my place?" she asked. "We're spent so much time at your apartment this week that I'm sure my plants are wilting from lack of watering." A small smile crept across her face. "Besides, there's a movie I want to inflict on you, and you said last week that I could when we were at my apartment."

Last week. The genie case still had Mulder reeling a little when he thought about it during quiet moments while his mind was otherwise unoccupied. The question he came back to time and time again was whether or not he'd used his third wish wisely. Although it had made him feel good to magnanimously use the wish to free Jenn, he suspected that it had been subconsciously motivated by the terror he'd felt when he'd accidentally wished Scully, and the rest of humanity away - he'd wanted more than anything to keep from screwing up by letting her trick him into screwing up again. Now, though he wondered if perhaps he should have used the wish to make Scully happy in a more tangible way. But it was too late now.

On the other hand, when he'd alluded to that to Scully, she'd said, "Well, I'm fairly happy. That's something," which had filled him with a warm glow. It made him feel foolish that an off-hand remark had meant so much to him, but he couldn't deny that it did.

They had begun their day at his apartment, so as a result they'd taken his car into the office. As Mulder unlocked the passenger side door for Scully he found himself idly wondering if that raised any eyebrows at the Hoover building, or if people who noticed thought they were especially environmentally conscious and carpooling to help Mother Earth. He glanced at Scully, wondering if she wondered.

He decided not when a minute later she looked up from buckling her seatbelt and said, "I don't feel like going straight home. There has to be more to life than home and office."

"Where do you want to go?" he asked gamely.

She shrugged her shoulders. "I don't know. You decide. Be impulsive."

The thought that it was some sort of test like his ex-girlfriends had been fond of crossed his mind, but he dismissed it. Scully wasn't the testing type. "Are you sure you want *me* to be impulsive?"

She smiled at him. "Yes. I'm sure we won't end up bored."

As he drove he kept an eye out for some place interesting to stop. He was mentally dismissing a bar - remembering the speech he'd given a waitress a couple of years earlier- when another establishment caught his eye.

"Weee'rrrreee heeeerrrreee," he announced as he parked the car near the curb.

"Mama Zulu's?"

The raised eyebrow that accompanied her question made him doubt his choice. "Too impulsive?"

"No, it'll be fun."

"You're humoring me."

"Does that bother you?" she asked sweetly.

"No, I just wanted you to know that I knew."

A small set of wind chimes jangled as Mulder pushed the front door open. He wrinkled his nose, not liking the sound, but as a woman bustled into the room, he realized that the sound acted as a doorbell for her.

"Welcome. Sit," she invited with an expansive sweep of her arm. Mulder and Scully took their seats in two red velour flocked chairs while the woman settled herself in a fancier chair across from them. "I am Mama Zulu."

Mulder hid a smirk. She was dressed for the part, wearing wispy peasant clothes in garish purple and green, her hair tied back with an even less substantial scarf, and large golden hoop earrings, but…Her skin was as fair as Scully's, she had blonde hair bestowed by nature rather than a bottle, and vivid green eyes. In short she looked as much like a Zulu as he did a Fox. It made him wonder if she was the product of mixed heritage as he was, or if her name was as invented as her business.

Scully's nudge made him aware that he was staring, so he smiled and said. "We were interested in palm readings."

"Ah. Both of you, I presume?"

"Yes," Mulder said with a nod, then turned to Scully. "Ladies first."

"No," Mama Zulu corrected. "In this thing only, it's polite for the man to seek his future first. If there is bad news for the lady, he can put his whole heart into comforting her without being preoccupied about what his own fortune holds."

"So you give out bad fortunes as well as good?" Scully asked in a skeptical tone. It was clear that she didn't think that doing so would be good for the woman's business.

"I do not give fortunes." Mama Zulu sounded faintly insulted. "I merely make people aware of them. The fates give us our destinies, all."

"I can't argue with that," Scully said. She, unlike Mulder, did not bother to hide her own smirk.

Mama Zulu ignored the slight. "Your left hand, please." She asked Mulder, holding out her own. "Unless you're left handed."

"Nope. I'm not sinistral." Mulder gave her his hand.

It stuck him as a little strange to have his hand be the subject of intense scrutiny. To distract himself from the slight tickle as she ran a light finger over the lines of his hand, he tried to guess how long it took her to memorize what each line of the hand meant. It wasn't as though she could just make things up off the top of her head, since people who came here as more than a lark probably would know a fabrication when they heard one. That kind of fabrication, anyway.

"This line here indicates that you will encounter a lot of danger," Mama Zulu said while gently touching a long line on his palm. "But you will mostly get through it."

Mulder glanced quickly at Scully, and was not surprised to see her roll her eyes. He turned his attention back to the palm reader. "Hmmm."

"And this here indicates that you'll have a family reunion." To his surprise she clucked her tongue. "It will not be a happy one, however, and will ultimately lead to you leaving this world."

He bit his lip, mostly to keep from laughing. "My family is going to kill me then?"

Mama Zulu shrugged. "Our hands leave us signs, but do not tell a complete story."

"I see. Is there anything else, or is it Scully's turn?"

She peered down at his palm again. "You will find much happiness. If you stop fighting it."

"Thank you for the...enlightenment."

"And now, the lady."

For a moment Mulder worried that Scully was going to refuse, but she held out her hand to the other woman. Mama Zulu's face took on an air of concentration, and she seemed not to breathe as she looked down at Scully's small hand.

"For someone so young, you've suffered much loss." The palm reader's voice was oddly gentle. "A parent, a sibling, a child...I wish I could tell you that that was of the past, but it's clear here," her index finger pointed at a spot in the middle of Scully's palm. "That you will lose again. But take heart, this loved one will come back to you."

Her face brightened a little. "And here it indicates that you will have a happy family with wonderful children. They will be your joy in times of trouble."

Over the next few minutes Mama Zulu told Scully other things, but Mulder didn't hear a word of it. He was concentrating too hard on Scully's stony face. It had been a mistake to stop here. It wasn't the palm reader's fault, since most young women wanted to hear of family and children, but it had been the exact wrong thing to say to Scully. She hadn't said much in the weeks since they'd learned that the IVF had failed, but he knew her well enough to know that it weighed heavily on her heart.

So heavily, in fact, that it had compelled him to return to the lab in Lehigh Furnace, Pennsylvania where he had once liberated a vial of Scully's ova under the watchful eye of a Kurt Crawford. It had been his wildest hope that there would still be more ova there under lock and key, and even if it was dangerous to go in there, especially considering how close he'd come to disaster the last time, he'd break in and get them… but when he got there the building had been razed, and only a sign hung cockeyed on a fence indicated that he had found Center For Reproductive Medicine. The only thing to do after that was to slink away with his tail between his legs.

He'd spent the night alone then.

"Would you like to have your cards read?" Mama Zulu asked hopefully.

"No, I think we're all set for one night." Mulder pulled out his wallet. "Thank you for your time."

"You're welcome, Child. Do come again, Mama Zulu will be here."

"I'll bet," Scully muttered as they walked out to the car.

After closing the car door, Mulder turned to face her. "Are you okay?"

"Why wouldn't I be?" she asked evenly.

"That stuff she said about kids..."

"I'm okay, Mulder. She didn't know I can't have children. It's just a parlor trick anyway. None of it means anything."

It was on the tip of his tongue to bring up the things the woman had gotten right, Scully's losses, his penchant for danger, but he knew that she'd come up with rationalizations for both, and he didn't feel like having a half-hearted argument." Yeah…Still, maybe you should be the impulsive one next time. But please, no home and garden shows."

She smiled, and looked happy enough, but still he wondered what was going on inside her head. They were closer now, but he still couldn't read her mind.