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Author's Note: It's been quite a while since I uploaded something here. Basically, discovered AO3 and Tumblr, found uploading to those sites much easier and engagement with my writing to be much more common.
(I currently have 120 stories and counting on AO3, so if you like my work, I highly recommend looking at the URL in my profile to find me on there)
Enjoy!
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The flight Mulder had gotten them from D.C. to London was a red-eye that left at two in the morning. Mulder claimed that he wanted to get to England bright and early. Scully didn't mind that much. She planned to sleep on the flight.
Mulder, however, had other ideas. He started to talk about the Sanctuary. Scully had never heard of it before he had told her about it, she didn't care about it, and she wanted to sleep. Mulder, on the other hand, seemed to be hopped up on caffeine and enthusiasum.
"Just imagine it, Scully." he said, skimming through the file he had in his lap. "If these beings actually exist and there's a place for them, it's no wonder people have been able to deny their existence for-"
Scully tuned him out. She wished that she had brought earplugs with her. She was sitting by the window. Mulder was in the middle and the seat beside him was empty. There were plenty of empty seats on this flight. Scully wondered if she could get away with moving.
Mulder talked about the Sanctuary for an hour or so before Scully had finally had it.
"Mulder, you can tell me all about this when we get there, all right? For now I want to sleep. If you want me to go around Oxford with you, you have to let me."
Mulder didn't seem to mind this too much and kept to himself for the rest of the flight. Or, Scully at least thought he did. She didn't know. She slept.
Going through customs was easy enough. Scully was still feeling a little tired, but she was certain that Mulder had actually slept at one point or another. Mulder hadn't rented a car for them, which led to a debate about trains and their current proximity to Oxford as they first took a train into London itself and then a taxi to their hotel.
Scully looked out the window on both rides. She had never been to London before and a part of her wasn't very impressed by what she saw. Since she had started working with Mulder, she had traveled all over America and occasionally gone out of the country. After a while you stopped getting impressed with cities or towns.
The hotel Mulder had chosen was what Scully thought of as the English equivalent of the motels they were always staying in. It was in East End, near White Chapel, which Mulder seemed interested in. Scully remembered what he had said about Jack the Ripper before and wondered if he was going to investigate that as well. Mulder had told her several years before that he was convinced there were supernatural elements to the serial killer no one had thought of before.
Scully had barely put her bag in her room when Mulder came in.
"So. Ready to go to Oxford?" he asked cheerfully.
Scully sighed and looked around. She hadn't thought this out very well, other than Mulder had offered her a much more interesting vacation than the one she'd had planned.
"Mulder, I want breakfast first." she said. "And coffee."
"No tea?"
Scully gave him a look.
After a quick breakfast they were on a train to Oxford. Mulder sat beside her. He hadn't talked about the Sanctuary or Helen Magnus or anything related since she had woken up when they had landed. Scully thought he may have been saving it up. Mulder did offer her some details about where the train was passing through and making comments on what had changed since the last time he had been here.
Scully realized that she didn't know much about Mulder's college days. Just what he had studied and the fact he had gone to school with a beautiful woman that had liked mocking his fear of fire. So she let him regale her with stories from when he had been at Oxford.
Something occurred to her about eight minutes from their stop.
"Mulder."
"Yeah, Scully?"
"You want to look around the university."
"Yeah."
"Are they just going to let us stroll right in? In the middle of July?"
"No, of course not. I have a buddy who works in the archives. I already called ahead and talked to him before I booked our flight. He's going to let us look around. And it's the archives I'm interested in more than anything else."
"Ah."
Scully said nothing more until they were in Oxford and close to the university. Then she let her curiosity out a little bit. She also knew that she would get the answer either way, so there was no harm in it.
"What's so signifigant about this school group, Mulder? Other than your Helen Magnus was a part of it? You said that they made themselves immortal, but even if Helen Magnus is still alive, Tesla and Druitt are long dead. That's not immortality."
Mulder looked at her as they walked down the sunny, crowded street. It was hot and the tourists were out with the locals. Scully let Mulder's taller, larger form break a path through the crowd, staying about half a step behind him so that they could still properly hear each other.
"Just because you're immortal, it doesn't mean that you're immune to things. Disease, accidents, suicide, murder. All of those could plausibly kill you, even if you have an indefinite lifespan."
An argument could have started on that one. Scully was a doctor after all. She knew about the human body and lifespan and how immortality just wasn't truly possible.
"What about Tesla, then?"
"Who says he really died?"
Scully rolled her eyes.
"Everything?" she suggested.
Mulder didn't respond, looking around as if he wasn't quite sure where they were, though it would have been rather hard to miss the huge college that was the point of the whole area.
"Who else was in this group? You said there were five."
"The entire group included Helen Magnus, Nikola Tesla, Montague John Druitt, James Watson, and Nigel Griffen."
The last two names meant nothing to Scully. The name Helen Magnus wouldn't have meant anything to her if Mulder hadn't already mentioned it.
"Are you going to make me ask?" she asked.
"Who do you want first?" Mulder asked. He seemed cheerful and Scully thought that was good to see.
"Nigel Griffin." Scully said as they turned a corner.
"Nigel Griffin is actually dead."
"The immortal man died." Scully stated.
"Yeah. I don't know how, exactly. But some rumors say he was the inspiration for the character in The Invisible Man."
"I never read that." Scully said.
That made Mulder stop and he looked at her, eyebrows arched slightly.
"You've never read The Invisible Man?"
"No." Scully held up a hand before Mulder could say anything else. "And I don't need you to tell me all about it right now, Mulder. How does this relate to your urban legend?"
That brought Mulder's enthusiasm back and they started walking again. They were close to the college now.
"Nigel Griffin could turn invisible."
Scully wasn't very impressed with this.
"So your immortal man could turn invisible, too. How?"
"I don't know." Mulder admitted. "But weird things are associated with all of them. There are plenty of stories surrounding these five."
Of course there was.
"It's hard to know what might be true and what might not be."
"Really."
Mulder was used to this from her and didn't even bat an eye.
"Yeah. As for James Watson-"
"He died, too?" Scully guessed.
Mulder ignored this.
"James Watson worked for Scotland Yard as a consultant for a long time. He helped with the Ripper investigation and plenty of others-I found his name in the old files. And he's still alive."
"Oh? And how do you know?"
"Because he's working at the London Sanctuary for Helen Magnus."
"Of course he is." Scully muttered.
Mulder didn't go into more detail, because they reached the university. A man was waiting for them. Scully could immediately see why he and Mulder were friends. He had the same look Mulder had had when they had started working together, though he was a little shorter and had huge glasses that magnified his eyes. Mulder smiled as they shook hands.
"Ben. How are you doing?"
"Fox. It's been a long time." the man said in a British accent. "Who's your friend?"
Mulder gestured Scully forward.
"Ben, this is my partner at the FBI, Dana Scully. Scully, this is Ben Smith, a friend from college."
"It's a pleasure to meet you, Dana." Ben said as they shook hands.
"It's a pleasure to meet you as well." Scully said.
"Fox said that he would be bringing a friend that found the story fascinating."
"Really."
Scully slanted a look at Mulder. He smiled at her. They began to walk.
"Do you believe in the story?" Scully asked Ben.
He looked thoughtful, considering the question.
"I believe that there is truth in it." he said at last. "Just like every story. Do I believe that it has been greatly exaggerated? Yes."
"Oh, Ben, you're breaking my heart." Mulder said, tone a touch sarcastic.
"It isn't a well known story on campus and those who hear it don't believe it or waste much time on it."
They talked a little more as they walked, Ben and Mulder catching up. Scully thought about grilling the man about Mulder's college days, but restrained herself.
The archives they were shown to were subterranean and Ben turned on the lights.
"Follow the rules on the signs and put everything back where you found it. If something says no touching, don't touch it, Fox." Ben glanced at Mulder.
"Who, me?" Mulder said innocently.
"You're not staying?" Scully said in surprise. For some reason she had thought that Mulder had roped the friend who worked in the archives into helping them.
Ben shook his head.
"I have restoration to do. I would prefer it if you didn't disturb me unless it's very important."
Ben left them there, staring down the rows of shelves and drawers. Scully felt almost dizzy looking at them. Mulder actually rubbed his hands together, looking very eager.
"All right. Let's get started."
He started off at a brisk pace. Scully, wondering why she had bothered agreeing to this, followed him.
After some hunting-Mulder was prone to getting distracted by things-they found some old records from eighteen eighty-six, which Mulder insisted was the pivotal year in the story.
"Are you expecting someone to have written 'Tesla was here' or something?" Scully asked him as they sat at a long, old wooden table with some of the records.
Mulder chuckled.
"Not anything that dramatic, Scully. But some references to the group, yes. Helen Magnus might not be in these files, considering she wasn't enrolled, but I swear that I came across some things when I was a student here."
Scully didn't say anything. She could very easily imagine Mulder down here as a student, pursuing an urban legend no one else believed in. Probably because no one else believed in it. She wondered what it said about her that she was helping him now, as she always did.
They were down there for at least three hours, making comments on some of the things they found, until Scully was inspired to pull some records from the winter of late eighteen eighty-five.
"Mulder."
"What?"
"Look at this."
Mulder immediately joined her where she was sitting, carefully looking through old photographs. Both she and Mulder were wearing rubber gloves, as one of the signs instructed.
Scully lifted one up and they both looked at it. The photo was of five people, four men and one woman. The woman and one of the men were sitting on a bench, the other three men standing behind it. To Scully it looked like something for a high school year book, though such a thing hadn't existed at Oxford in eightteen eighty-five. Scully couldn't help but think it would have been helpful if they had, because a caption would have been useful.
"Look. Helen Magnus. I knew I saw this picture before." Mulder said, touching the woman in the picture with his fingertip.
Scully had to admit that she looked very much like the woman in the newspaper pictures Mulder had shown her yesterday. Though the Helen Magnus in the picture had long, curly blonde hair, in no way contained by the ponytail she was wearing it in.
"And Tesla." Mulder added, giving her a satisfied smile as he pointed at one of the standing men.
"Mulder-" Scully started.
"Scully, you've seen pictures of Nikola Tesla. Look at that man. That's Tesla."
"It..." Scully was reluctant to agree, despite what was right in front of her. "It does look like Tesla."
"Druitt." Mulder pointed at the tallest man. "Watson." This man had a large amount of dark facial hair, just shaggy enough to make Scully think he looked like a werewolf, though Mulder would probably love it if she said that. "Griffin." That was the man sitting beside Helen Magnus on the bench.
Scully thought that they looked happy in the picture. But then she frowned and leaned closer to it.
"Mulder, do you have that file you showed me?"
"Of course."
"Can I see it?"
"Yeah."
Mulder was clearly pleased with the question as he dug in the brief case he had brought with them. He pulled the folder out and handed it to her. Scully took it and flipped through it until she found the picture that Mulder had shown her, the picture from Tesla's funeral. Scully stared. She had thought maybe she was wrong, but the two men beside the woman in the picture, who she had thought were just random mourners, bore a striking resemblance to the men Mulder had labeled as Watson and Griffin. And the woman looked like the one sitting on the bench, though her hair was shorter and darker.
"See?" Mulder said, pointing between the two photographs, looking extremely pleased with himself. "They didn't age."
"Mulder, there could be a-a hundred explanations for this. There's-There's no way that those could be the same people. People look like each other. You probably have a twin walking around out there somewhere."
"And three clones of Tesla's friends just happened to attend his funeral, Scully? How do you explain that?"
Scully faltered for a moment and looked at the pictures again.
"I-I don't know Mulder. But there has to be some explanation. People don't just live to be one hundred and forty-five years old. I don't care if these people look like the people from the school picture. There's no way. Helen Magnus and James Watson can not still be alive."
"How can you not believe, Scully, with all of this evidence in front of you?" Mulder asked.
Scully looked down at the pictures and information they had spread out in front of them.
"What evidence is this, Mulder? People in pictures that look like each other is not evidence. People with the same name is not proof. The human body is-is not capable of surviving a century and a half, especially not in a state of apparent youth."
Scully had no idea why she was arguing this like it was a case. It wasn't. She could walk away from this any time that she wanted. But Mulder had a way of pulling her into things, whether she intended to be caught up in them or not. And this might have been more interesting if any of the things Mulder was showing her was solid fact, not a coincidence.
"Immortality, Scully."
"Did you ever think that these could be the children or grandchildren of Tesla's friends? People who were paying their respects to a family friend?" Scully asked.
"Records-"
"From that long ago can be unreliable, Mulder."
Mulder made an exaggerated exasperated noise at her words.
"Every time, Scully. Can't you just for once maybe consider the possibility that this is possible?" he said, looking at the other pictures in the stack that she had set aside.
"Isn't this why you bring me along to these things with you? So that I can contradict you? So that we can argue about it?" Scully said, tilting her head at Mulder.
Mulder chuckled, moving on to papers instead. He didn't respond, so Scully went back to looking at the pictures. There was a very strong resemblance, but the quality of the pictures-taken in the eightteen-eighties and the nineteen-forties-was not the best. She couldn't say for certain that these were the same people. Though she had seen things like this throughout the X-files, a point that Mulder was probably going to bring up.
"It says here that these five had exclusive use of a classroom here." Mulder said.
That did interest Scully, if only because it seemed unusual.
"For what?" she asked.
"Some sort of experiment."
Scully stood to peer at the paper too, though she couldn't get a very good angle on it because Mulder was holding it closer to his own face and she wasn't able to look over his shoulder.
"Does it say what kind of experiment?"
"No. Nothing about it was ever reported. I guess they were just...using the space or something."
Mulder was clearly getting excited. Scully knew that look.
"Mulder..."
"This must have been what they did to make themselves immortal."
That seemed to be jumping the gun on things, even for Mulder. Scully said nothing.
"You know, I found records of Helen Magnus's father."
"Is he immortal, too?" Scully asked sarcastically.
"No. His name was Gregory Magnus. A well-known scientist of his time. I couldn't find much on him. Apparently he was shunned in the scientific community in the later years of his career."
Scully had no idea where this was going or how it connected to the urban legend. Mulder was jumping through years of research without giving her all the details.
"Uh-huh."
"He had radical ideas. About 'monsters'. I wonder if he helped them with the experiment."
Scully left Mulder to his musing as she skimmed more of the files. She didn't understand what she was seeing. She wished that she had access to more records, because there had to be a better explanation to this than immortality. She knew that Mulder thought she was being far too cynical. She felt that he was believing an urban legend far too easily.
Mulder was still talking, but Scully had tuned him out.
By the time that Ben came to kick them out of the archives, Mulder was in a very good mood. Scully would admit that she was confused more than anything. Ben invited them to come to a nearby pub with him later that evening. Mulder immediately accepted for the both of them, but Scully didn't mind. She didn't have any plans for the evening.
Before they left the university- they had been there for hours, but they had some time before they had to meet Ben- Mulder insisted on looking at the classroom that was mentioned in the records.
Scully thought about just walking out then, but she had a feeling that if she left Mulder alone, he was going to wander around where he shouldn't have been. She also suspected that Mulder didn't take into account that they had no authority here, should he get himself into trouble.
So she followed him, as she always did, and was duly unimpressed with the classroom. It was empty, except for some chalkboards pushed against the walls. It clearly had not been used in quite some time. Scully had no idea what Mulder was expecting to find in here and she didn't ask.
But Mulder was in a cheerful mood as they left the university and Scully didn't want to ruin that. He was really into this, even if she thought it was completely far fetched. And she had agreed to this in the first place. She pulled her sunglasses on as they walked back out into the sun and the heat.
"We're not going to stop by every place they supposedly hung out, are we, Mulder?"
"No. Of course not. I don't have that information anyway."
"What are we going to do with the time, then?"
Mulder squinted against the sun and then looked at her.
"We could just look. We are tourists, after all. Unless you're too embarrassed to be seen with me."
"Mulder. I'm always embarrassed to be seen with you."
Mulder dramatically clutched his chest, like she'd shot him there.
"Everyone keeps taking shots at me today. Why?"
Scully just laughed a little as they set off down the street together.
Hours later, after spending some time drinking with Ben at the local pub, they were on a train back to London. Scully was feeling pleasantly buzzed, but not drunk. This part of the train was mostly empty. Mulder was laying across the seats beside her, looking at her. He wasn't drunk, but he seemed relaxed and satisfied.
"Scully?"
"Yes, Mulder?"
"Do you want to go on a Jack the Ripper tour with me?"
Scully laughed.
"What? What is that?"
Mulder sat up.
"A tour guide takes you around White Chapel at night, to all the places where Jack the Ripper killed and gives you details about the murders. I went once, when I was a student. On Halloween."
"Of course you did."
"Yeah." Mulder smiled.
"And you want to go because this relates to your urban legend?"
"No. I thought it was fun."
Scully smiled at him.
"No."
Mulder heaved a sigh, but one that made it clear that he had been expecting that answer. They were quiet the rest of the way back to London.
Author's Note: This is one of my favorite stories I've written, so if you liked it, please leave me a review and let me know! Fanfic authors live off of them. :)