disclaimer: I own nothing
This is my favorite fanfiction that I've written and I've decided to finally share it. I wrote this in 2022 and am finally posting it here. I can't remember if this was beta'd, unfortunately.
Spoilers: If you haven't watched Sanctuary, be advised this does contain some spoilers for the first season.
Enjoy!
XxXxXxXxX
July, 1997
It was a normal day at the FBI. It was midsummer and hot already, though an early morning rain was currently cooling things down. Special Agent Dana Scully walked through the last bullpen before the hallway that led down to the basement office where she had worked for the past few years.
Agents answered phones and talked to each other, suit jackets already stripped off because the air conditioning this far down in the building was spotty at best, especially in summer. Some greeted Scully as she walked through. She returned the greetings, though her mind was elsewhere. 'Normal' wasn't really the right word, she had decided. Normal didn't cover the fact that today was her last day of work for two weeks.
Both she and Mulder had ignored vacation days for quite some time and were now being forced to take them. Scully wouldn't have minded so much-she didn't mind, not really-if she'd actually had something to do. But her mother was out of town, quality time with either of her brothers wasn't really something any of them wanted to deal with, and the blind date a mutual friend had set up for tomorrow night had already cancelled. So her vacation plans consisted of cleaning and rearranging her apartment, with or without-probably with, if she was being honest-the help of alcohol.
Mulder, for his part, hadn't told her much of his own vacation plans. Scully hadn't really thought to ask. She had seen Mulder checking his passport, so she assumed that he planned on going out of the country. Though Scully couldn't imagine Mulder relaxing on a beach somewhere, even for two weeks in summer. Mulder did not do well on vacation and she was certain that he was hoping some spectacular X-file would make itself known before the end of the work day so that they would have to stay. But, come hell or high water or X-file, by the end of the day, they would be on vacation, whether Mulder liked it or not.
Mulder was already in the office when she opened the door. His feet were up on the desk and he had been tossing pencils at the ceiling again, if the forest of possible death was anything to judge off of. He threw another one as he looked at her.
"Morning, Scully."
"Mulder, you do realize that one day one of those is probably going to kill you, don't you?" Scully asked. A pencil fell from the ceiling and bounced off his shoulder as if to prove her point.
Mulder smiled at her and leaned back in his chair.
"Only if an X-file doesn't first." he said easily.
Scully resisted the urge to roll her eyes. She sometimes felt that was how Mulder wanted to go out-in the hot pursuit of an X-file. Though he would probably be pissed if he didn't figure it out before he died. He was watching her, as if wanting her to ask a question. Scully dropped her coat on the back of the chair and eyed Mulder back.
"What?"
"I was just wondering if you wanted to hear a story."
Mulder looked pleased with himself and Scully thought to say no. Then she wondered how badly this was going to screw up her not very exciting vacation, which she was looking forward too. Somewhat.
"I am not going anywhere with you, Mulder. I don't care if there's a horde of-of werewolves running around Seattle or Dallas or some out of the way town I've never heard of. We're on vacation-we only had to show up today because it's Friday."
"It's not work. It's a story I heard during my Oxford days."
Scully still thought a trap may lay in this. She had gone into things with Mulder for years, whether she should have or not. He knew how to get her.
"A story?"
"Well, I think it may actually be an X-file, looking at it now."
"Of course." Scully muttered under her breath, but Mulder didn't seem to hear her.
Mulder smiled at her and swung his feet off the desk. She had a feeling he had been bursting to say something for days.
"You know how urban legends always float around college campuses?"
"Yes. The real question is whether or not I believe in them. And I don't."
"Well, when I was at Oxford, there was one that really got my attention. It was about a group of students at the school in the eightteen eighties."
"Were they all abducted by aliens?"
Mulder either didn't notice her sarcasum or ignored it.
"There were five of them. And get this-one of them was a woman."
This caught Scully's attention, if only for its historical inaccuracy.
"Mulder, Oxford University didn't start enrolling women until well into the twentieth century."
"Oh, she wasn't enrolled. She was auditing classes. But that's not what I'm getting at. If you believe the urban legend, this group included Nikola Tesla." Mulder paused as if for dramatic effect. "And Montague John Druitt, better known as Scotland Yard's prime suspect in the Ripper killings in eighteen eighty-eight."
Scully nearly heaved a sigh. She hated bursting Mulder's bubble-well, sometimes-and she was going to do just that.
"Mulder, your urban legend is just an urban legend."
Mulder's expression fell, just a little. He had clearly expected her to be interested in this.
"What do you mean?"
"Mulder, Nikola Tesla never went to Oxford."
"How do you know?"
"There are records. Tesla didn't go to Oxford at all, let alone at sometime in the eighteen eighties."
"But how do you know? How do we really know? We can't know where everyone in history was one hundred percent of the time, Scully. And that's not the point of the story."
"Then what is, Mulder?"
Mulder gave her the look he gave her when he chose not to smile but clearly wanted to.
"The point of the story is that they made themselves immortal."
Oh boy. Immortality wasn't something a lot of X-files brought up, but it did occur from time to time. And none of them had been proven as true. At least, not conclusively, though Scully wasn't comfortable in admitting to that.
"I hate to tell you this, but there's proof that's not true."
Mulder looked faintly annoyed by her interrupting the dramatic climax of his very short story.
"How?"
He clearly wanted the argument. Scully suspected he enjoyed their back and forth, as long as he was convinced he was right.
"Tesla died in nineteen forty-three, Mulder. And your Ripper? Montague John Druitt killed himself in the Thames River in December of eighteen eighty-eight."
Mulder stood up and started rifling through a filing cabinet.
"I'll let that go for now, but mostly because that's not what I find the most interesting about this."
Scully propped her cheek on her fist.
"More interesting than Nikola Tesla and Jack the Ripper being college buddies?"
"The woman? Her name was Helen Magnus. She's still alive."
Scully didn't even bother arguing at this point. It was still early. She was going to have to pace herself. Mulder would tell her what he wanted and then she would have time to say what she wanted after that. And they had all day. This was clearly going to be the subject of it. But she still wasn't going to just let Mulder run with it.
"Mulder..."
Mulder continued to dig through the filing cabinet, as if he hadn't heard her mild exasperation.
"Now, I know what you're going to say. 'But, Mulder, that's impossible. You can't prove it.' But I do have proof, Scully. I don't think even you can deny it. Ah-ha!"
Mulder pulled out a file folder. Scully noticed that it was old and that it didn't have an X-file stamp on it. He stood at the desk, setting the file on it as he opened it.
"Now, this isn't an offical X-file. It's more of things I've been compiling over the years since I was in college. A hobby."
"You have time for a hobby?" Scully asked, though she supposed Mulder had no limit of hobbies. This one shouldn't have surprised her.
Mulder smiled.
"Come on, Scully. Aren't you going to ask me why I think Helen Magnus is alive?"
"Mulder, I'm not going to play this game with you. Either tell me or don't. And I know you're going to."
"I've done some digging on that school group. Now three of them I haven't been able to find much on. But Helen Magnus..." Mulder chuckled. "Now, Scully, this woman, if she is who I think she is, has lived, across history. It's amazing."
"Mulder-" Scully started, warningly.
"Helen Magnus was born in August, eighteen fifty-one, according to records I checked when I was in school. There are records of Helen Magnus attending classes at Oxford until late eighteen eighty-six or early eighteen eighty-seven, after she was rejected for studying medicine. She inherited a property in London and still owns it to this day. A Helen Magnus also graduated with a medical degree in nineteen twenty-three."
"Mulder, that's not immortality. Though a seventy year old woman getting a medical degree, let alone in nineteen twenty-"
Scully had no idea why she was bothering to argue, but she never did seem to be able to help herself. Mulder brought that out in her.
"I'm not done, Scully. She crops of multiple times. Look at this."
Mulder gestured at the file and then held two pieces of paper out to her. Scully took them.
They were newspaper clippings. She frowned at them. Both were old. Very old. The dates stated they were both from the forties.
One was a funeral. In it, a woman stood flanked by two men, one holding an umbrella to shelter the three of them. The picture must have been taken close to them, because their faces were in view. The woman looked extremely unhappy with whoever had taken the picture.
The second was the same woman, wearing what Scully thought of as a rather ugly dress and hat, standing with men in uniform.
"You're claiming this is Helen Magnus?" she asked.
"Well, yes. But so do the articles. One was at Tesla's funeral."
"Mulder, your Helen Magnus would have been in her nineties in the forties."
"Hence strength to my immortality theory."
"How can you prove that that woman is the same Helen Magnus? It can't be that uncommon of a name. These two pictures are close together too. It might be the same woman here, but it can't be-"
"There's no death certificate on file for a Helen Magnus born in eighteen fifty-one. I checked when I was at Oxford. She crops up other times too-I even found a picture of the same woman in those photographs with J. Edgar Hoover in the archives of this very building."
Scully said nothing this time, letting Mulder continue. She glanced at the pictures one more time, admitting that it did look like the same woman, though her hair was lighter in one than the other. She handed them back.
"I'm not going to bother you with every detail right now, but the name Helen Magnus crops up most often with the Sanctuary."
Mulder said the last part as if it were common knowledge. Scully arched a brow at him.
"And?"
"Now, Scully, don't tell me you've never heard of the Sanctuary."
"No, Mulder, I haven't. Not in the way you clearly mean. What is it?"
"The Sanctuary is supposedly a private medical group, owned and operated by a Ms. Helen Magnus."
Scully saw where this was going.
"And you think this is the same Helen Magnus that attended classes at Oxford over a hundred years ago." She said it as a statement.
"Yes. Like I said, Scully, I've been compiling this stuff for years. Helen Magnus owns nearly two dozen properties around the world. Almost all of them are Sanctuaries."
"So a woman named Helen Magnus runs a medical group and is apparently very wealthy. That's not proof that's the same woman. Have you ever heard of descendants, Mulder? People name their children after ancestors all the time. There's no reason why this family wouldn't have."
Mulder smiled.
"That's just it, Scully. Helen Magnus has no descendants. Her name appears in connection to the adoption of a foundling boy and on the birth certificate of a girl born in nineteen eighty four. Both in London. That's it."
Scully felt that this was shaky at best.
"Mulder, I don't know whether or not to be appalled by how many women's private lives you've dug into for this."
"It's only one woman. But back to the Sanctuary. I've tried to dig into it and the Helen Magnus that runs it. Do you know what I found?"
"What?"
"Nothing."
That did catch Scully's attention.
"Nothing?" she echoed.
"Nothing. Not one article about the group. Nothing in any medical journals. No papers or research. Nothing on Helen Magnus. It's like someone has been purposefully wiping the information."
That sounded too much like a conspiracy for it to be true, but Scully said nothing on that matter.
"Then what have you found out?" she asked, a little interested despite herself. She told herself that it was because she had a long, slow day ahead of her.
"All I've really been able to find are rumors and stories. Some are actually connected to X-files. The stories say that the Sanctuary is just that. A sanctuary. Where people who can't live freely go. Some people in the X-files that have just vanished and there's been a whisper about the Sanctuary. And some scientists and doctors that have been the top of their field have just upped and dropped off the face of the Earth. And people say that they went to the Sanctuary."
Scully nearly rolled her eyes at this.
"Mulder, this doesn't have anything to do with that Dr. Jackson you told me about that disappeared, does it?"
"Aw, Scully. You do listen to me." Mulder said, smiling at her reference to the disappearance he had mentioned to her the previous year.
"Mulder..."
"No. It doesn't. Not that I know of. Interesting theory, though."
"So people just disappear and they go to this 'sanctuary'?"
"Yeah. Men, women, children. Monsters, supposedly. All over the world. For over a century."
Scully suddenly wondered if Mulder was considering this as a new possibility of what might have happened to his sister. She didn't dare ask. She didn't like bringing that up unless Mulder had already brought it up himself.
"And you're telling me all this because?"
"I'm going to England for our forced vacation. I'm going to investigate the school group and the Sanctuary."
Mulder pulled a plane ticket off the desk and held it up as if to offer her proof.
"If they're global, why do you have to go to England to investigate it?"
"Well, there are three facilities in America." Mulder admitted. "But London is the oldest and close to Oxford. And besides, Helen Magnus and her two minor children are on record as having gone to Britain at the beginning of the summer."
"So you're planning on harassing this woman?" Scully asked in disapproval, wondering how much he had abused his power to follow this woman's activities.
"Not harassing. And I'm going by Oxford first."
Mulder closed his file.
"Wanna come with?"
"Mulder..."
"You don't have to come everywhere with me if you don't want to, Scully. But it could be fun. And I'll pay for the hotel. Unless you already have plans."
Scully thought about her pathetic plans. She thought about how it could be interesting to go to England, even if she did just ditch Mulder. She thought about the fact that it would be a lot easier to bail Mulder out of jail if they were in the same country. She heaved a deep sigh.
"Fine."
"Great. I already got you a ticket."
Mulder fanned what turned out to be the two tickets he was holding. Scully stared indignantly.
"You were planning on this the whole time."
"Maybe."
Mulder smiled and held out the ticket. Scully, eyes narrowed, took it. Mulder dropped back into his chair, swinging his feet back up on the desk.
"Cheer up, Scully. We're going to England."
Author's Note: Really, this was spurred by a desire to cross these two shows and finding out Mulder attended Oxford seemed like a really good way to introduce the two to each other. Update will be irregular because it's a pain to divide up the document into smaller pieces to upload here.
One of the pictures of Helen was inspired by the webisodes.
There was an Easter Egg in this chapter! See if you can spot it!
Let me know what you think!