Work Text:
The basement floor carries the clicking steps of her heels down the hall ahead of her, an echoing harbinger in the dim passage. The lights are always muted down here, a sickly yellow from the ancient fluorescents they keep trying to use up from the musty stockroom. Somewhere in the distance, there’s the dripping of a pipe— condensation from the ventilation system, no doubt.
It irks Dana Scully just a little bit that she’d missed it, even after only a week away. It had been a good vacation, but just long enough to make her remember that she liked being busy and having work in front of her. Even travel isn’t that exciting anymore, now that she works with Mulder. Their office isn’t much more than a coffin, with windows just tall enough to pass the fire safety regulation code, but he has some sort of ability to endlessly siphon travel funds into their tiny department.
The familiar thunk of pencils hitting the ceiling greets her before she pushes the door open.
“Scully!” Mulder says, looking up from where he’s reclined in his chair, feet propped up and crossed on the desk. Another pencil bites into the ceiling tile and sticks. “You missed a lot.”
“Mulder,” she returns, adjusting the strap of her bag on her shoulder. Her tone is dry and not at all faked. “I doubt I missed much.”
“Oh, but you did,” he insists, dropping his feet to the floor. He fishes a folder out of a pile and throws it down on the desk. “Left this one out just for you to catch up on. I know how much you love Delaware fishmen.”
“I hope you don’t mean mermen,” Scully says, pressing two fingers on the folder just hard enough to drag it towards her, despite her better judgement.
His grin would be infectious if it wasn’t so damned self-satisfied. He shakes his head. “Nope. Fishmen.”
“I’m not even going to ask what the difference is.” Scully sighs.
“It’s pretty fascinating,” Mulder says anyway, rifling absently through his desk. “The Delaware tribe had a legend—”
“Mulder,” Scully interrupts.
“—about a fish person who would—”
“Mulder,” Scully says again, staring at the stranger sitting with unnaturally perfect posture at a makeshift desk set up beside hers. “Who is this.”
“Oh, that’s our intern,” Mulder says, off-handedly. “He’d come from the ocean on nights when the—”
“An intern,” Scully repeats, stupidly, blinking at the young man. He stares back at her, and then stands smoothly and offers a hand.
“No, don’t be ridiculous. The fish man,” Mulder says, somewhere between irritated and amused. He always sounds amused when he suspects she might be struggling to accept something. It’s one of the things she did not miss while on vacation.
Or she did, but now she’s remembering why she shouldn’t have.
“Would you mind telling me why we have an intern?” she asks Mulder, shaking the intern’s hand.
At the same time she asks, the intern says, “Hello. I’m John Thaddeus.”
He’s taller than her, taller than Mulder even, and manages to make his broad shoulders look hunched in his ill-fitted jacket while he dwarfs her. She frowns up at him and he pulls his hand back after she shakes it. His too-long black hair and thick mustache together make him look more like a misplaced grad student than an agency intern.
“Dana Scully,” she says, a little belatedly. “How did we get an intern?”
“I just walked in one day and told them I wanted to work with Agent Mulder,” John says with a straight face.
“Ha,” she replies, without humor. “Mulder?”
“Hey, intern,” Mulder says. “Go get me some sunflower seeds.”
“Sure thing, boss,” John says, nodding. He edges carefully past Scully and leaves the room, shutting the door softly behind him.
Scully points after him, eyebrows shooting up. “How’d you convince Assistant Director Skinner we needed an intern?”
“Didn’t,” Mulder says, with a smirk. “He just showed up. Had all his papers in order, too. We had a great time in Delaware.”
“What are you not telling me?” Scully asks, eyes narrowed. “There’s something you’re omitting.”
“Scully, I’m hurt,” Mulder says, with a feigned pout. “I always share pertinent information with you as soon as possible.”
“Mhmm,” Scully says, instead of arguing about that. “Fish men, huh. What was it, really?”
“Bruce Wayne,” Mulder says, coming around the desk to lean his face close to hers. He’s dropped his voice to little more than a whisper. She pulls her head back and comes dangerously close to snorting dismissively. It catches in her throat instead, a little noise that’s all skepticism.
“The fish men were Bruce Wayne.”
“No, no,” Mulder says, shaking his head. “Don’t be ridiculous,” he says, for the second time she’s since walked through the door, as if that’s often something she’s the one guilty of. “Our intern.”
“He said his name was John,” Scully says. She shouldn’t have taken such a long vacation, if Mulder has gone so off the rails he’s inventing conspiracies in their own office to entertain himself. Or, maybe she should have taken a longer one. “Mulder, I highly doubt that a young man with billions of dollars at his disposal would willingly choose to spend his time following you around for no other reason than to amuse himself. It just doesn’t make sense. Not to mention the layers of security he’d have to go through to even begin to attempt access to the building.”
“You didn’t hear,” Mulder says. He says it as if he’s genuinely surprised, the way he might before launching into the background of a vampire cult in Nevada, as if the things he knows are things any reasonable person would know. “Bruce Wayne flunked out of Quantico last year. Couldn’t pass the firearms field test.”
“See?” Scully retorts, filing that detail away to wonder at it later. It was an odd enough piece of information in its own right. “If he failed to pass the necessary tests at Quantico, then why would he be here now? And under an assumed name, as an intern, no less? If he wanted authority, why not simply go straight to agent? There are multiple field offices that could possibly be deceived that way.”
“It’s concerning how much it sounds like you’ve already thought about that,” Mulder teases. “But I’ll tell you why. It’s exactly what he said. He wanted to work for me. I’m teaching him profiling.”
“Then, why the pretense?” Scully frowns and puts a hand up, a motion to cut off whatever he’s about to say. “Not that I’m agreeing with your theory.”
“I don’t know. Didn’t ask. Figured he had reasons.”
“You didn’t ask,” Scully said flatly. “You expect me to believe you, Fox Mulder, didn’t ask someone an invasive question after assuming something outlandish about them. Do you have any evidence to support your claim that he is Bruce Wayne, who is, by the way, in his early twenties at the most if I remember correctly.”
“Twenty, exactly, actually,” Mulder says. “My evidence is eyewitness account.”
“You’re telling me you watched the intern, John, make plans or conceal his identity in some—”
“I asked him,” Mulder says, sounding and looking far too smug. She should have taken a longer vacation. “The second day he was here, while we were driving to Delaware.”
“And what did he say?” Scully asks, curious despite her better judgment.
“I said he was right. I’m Bruce Wayne,” John says from the door, a packet of sunflower seeds in his hand. He sets them on Mulder’s desk, the bag precisely lined up with the corner of the desk surface. “The vending machine on the first floor is out. I had to go to the third.”
“And then he threw himself out of the moving car,” Mulder says. “I had to slam on the brakes and go back for him. He was making good time the opposite direction.”
“He what,” Scully exclaims.
“I had anticipated him figuring it out, but I hadn’t expected it to happen so soon,” John-not-John says, sitting behind his makeshift desk. He rubs at his shoulder. “I…may have panicked.”
“I told you,” Mulder says, when Scully looks at him with a bit of shocked horror. “We had fun in Delaware.”
“Mulder, can I talk to you? Privately?” Scully asks, an hour into trying to work. Just getting through Mulder’s report of the Delaware trip is not helping. She hates not having her own judgment of the situation to compare it to. The tension headache— another thing she did not miss— is mounting and she’s had enough time to process and think through and tell herself she was going to stay out of it.
The problem is, her job is technically, and specifically, not staying out of it.
Mulder looks up from the stack of papers he’s sorting through; she’s beside his desk, close to him and her voice pitched low. She can make out some of the headings. They’re essays and articles on profiling, some of Mulder’s own unpublished work. He’d set them aside at some point with the intention of collecting them into a book instead, and then promptly ignored them.
“What?” Mulder asks. “In the hallway?”
He says it like he expects her to reveal that she’s joking. She raises an eyebrow.
“Alright, alright,” he says, standing and pointing. “Hey, intern. Alphabetize that bottom filing cabinet.”
“Sure thing, Boss,” John says, moving in that direction without a second of hesitation or question.
It’s only been an hour and Mulder already seems prone to delighting in his newfound power just a little too much. She doubts the files even need to be alphabetized.
Out in the hallway, Mulder follows her until she stops abruptly a dozen feet from the door, right where the hazy glow of one ceiling light fails to quite reach the cast of the next one. It leaves a shadowy gap that they stand in.
“What could possibly be so urgent, Scully, so private that you’ve forced me to leave the comfort of my own office for a clandestine—”
It’s still a joke to him.
“Mulder,” she says, a little sharply.
Instantly, his expression turns serious and concerned.
“What is it?” he asks, voice lower. “Did something happen during your time off?”
“Yes!” Scully exclaims, incredulous. “You acquired an intern! One who is lying about his identity, has confessed as much to you, and you don’t seem to have a problem with this! Who knows what kind of information he’s seeking?”
“An hour ago you didn’t believe he was Bruce Wayne, and now he’s trying to steal classified information?” Mulder asks, daring to sound baffled. “Make up your mind, Scully. I’ll admit he’s a little…unorthodox, but wanting to learn profiling isn’t a crime.”
“No, Mulder, lying about your identity to gain access to secure government offices is a crime,” Scully says, crossing her arms. “I can’t believe it didn’t occur to you that this would be something to take to Assistant Director Skinner.”
“Assistant Director Skinner sent him to me,” Mulder says defensively.
“What?” Scully demands, arms dropping. “Do you mean A.D. Skinner knows?”
“Of course not,” Mulder scoffs. “I mean he did exactly what he told you he did. He walked into Skinner’s office and told him he wanted to work with me as his internship placement.”
“He doesn’t have an internship placement, Mulder, that’s the point.” Scully is now definitely thinking she should have taken a longer vacation or not left at all.
“I don’t know about you, Scully, but I don’t relish the idea of going to the Assistant Director to tell him he was deceived by a kid, much less a young man that could complain to the Director— a friend of his late father’s, if I remember correctly— and cause trouble.”
“Are you…” Scully blinks. “Are you telling me he’s blackmailing you?”
“Of course not,” Mulder says, as if she’s just suggested something outlandish, like the existence of sentient pond scum. Or, the way she’d react if he’d suggested that— he probably does believe in the existence of sentient pond scum. “He’s not blackmailing anyone. He’s been very kind and helpful, honest even, aside from the matter of his own identity, which is frankly his own business.”
Scully is so stunned by this claim, that the intern’s identity is somehow a private matter that she’s being rude for even questioning, that she stammers and gestures with one hand. She clamps her mouth shut and crosses her arms again. The only thing keeping her from actually exploding is the suspicion that Mulder doesn’t genuinely believe it’s a private matter, and simply likes having an intern.
“What do you suggest we do?” she asks finally, feeling resigned.
“Do? I’m going to teach him,” Mulder says. “And enjoy the delivery service. You should try it.”
“This could get us both in a lot of trouble,” she says, feeling like she says this far too often for it to have any impact anymore.
“Since when do we not?” Mulder challenges. “We’re just as likely to be called up to get chewed out for reports we’re being entirely forthright in.”
He does have a point, and as someone who hates being accused of falsehood while also having to set aside her own doubts in the face of seeing things beyond her rational explanations, she can’t blame him for being a little bitter.
Still.
“Mulder, I cannot and will not knowingly collude with you to conceal the identity of a person who may or may not have ulterior motives,” Scully says firmly.
“So don’t,” Mulder shoots back. “Nobody is asking you to lie in any of our official reports, or even if you’re asked directly. If he starts poking around where he shouldn’t be— behavior I have an incredible amount of personal experience with, as you frequently like to remind me— I’ll put an end to things myself.”
“He’s already poking around where he shouldn’t be, Mulder!” Scully frowns but she knows what he means, even if she’s reluctant to let it go.
“You know what I mean,” Mulder says, as if reading her thoughts. “Do you trust me?”
Scully says nothing.
Mulder bends his head closer to hers, with that intent look in his eyes. Damn him. “Scully, do you trust me?”
“Yes,” she says, grudgingly, with a huff. “Yes, fine, I trust you. But I’m going to be watching him, too.”
“That’s what I was counting on,” Mulder says, with a grin. “I knew you’d have my back. I’m glad you had a nice vacation.”
“I’m wishing I was still on my vacation,” Scully says dryly.
“You’ve got more time off,” Mulder offers. “I’ll confess I have selfish motivations in encouraging you not to use it right now.”
“Mulder,” Scully says, “don’t tempt me.”
When they go back to the office, John is at his makeshift desk filling something out in pen. He glances up when they enter but doesn’t stand.
She had guessed the filing cabinet was already alphabetized and she guesses that’s exactly what he found out when he opened it. It’s intriguing that he’s not complaining about it. She’s also guessing he’s not used to people taking advantage of him or wasting his time.
Thirty minutes later, John sets a thin stack of papers on her desk. It’s his version of the Delaware incident, in neat cursive, closely following the format of Mulder’s own typed report. His false name is at the top.
“Mulder, I can’t submit this,” she says, pointedly ignoring any reaction the intern has, if he has one at all.
“You’re not going to,” Mulder says. “I told him to do it for practice.”
She sighs, rolls her eyes, and sets it aside.
“Hey, intern,” Mulder says. “I’m thinking pizza for lunch. Scully?”
“I had planned on eating in the cafeteria,” Scully says, refusing to participate by agreement.
“Pizza,” Mulder says. “Pepperoni, New York style.”
“Sure thing, Boss,” John says. He pauses only long enough to glance at Scully, and decidedly not at the discarded handwritten report.
“Why not,” she says, surrendering. She really doesn’t want to waste her time in petty battles over this if she can’t sway Mulder directly.
When he leaves, Mulder has the audacity to look completely absorbed in a newspaper he’s reading. Scully, her curiosity just a little pricked, slides the intern’s report over in front of her and reads it.
Mulder folds the top half of the newspaper down and gives her a direct and knowing smirk.
“Oh, stop it,” she complains, annoyed. “I just want to know how far backwards he’s willing to bend to accommodate your fish men fantasy.”
“I’m proud of you, Scully. That’s the meanest thing you’ve said since returning,” Mulder says, flipping the top of the newspaper back into place. “I was starting to think you’d been the victim of body swapping.”
The report, she’s intrigued and surprised to find, is at least as hard on Mulder’s theory and account as her own would have been. It is thoroughly reluctant to claim anything as concretely true unless it’s provable by rigorous examination and repeated occurrence, and is tonally frustrated in the open-ended conclusions.
“What do you think?” Mulder asks, after several minutes. “Can I keep him, Mom?”
“I think, Mulder,” she says, “that you’re in over your head.”
She leaves it at that for now.
After several days, it stops feeling surreal to walk into the office and see Mulder and John sitting at opposite sides of Mulder’s desk discussing profiling tactics and cases. She no longer doubts, (as she occasionally did at first) that he’s Bruce Wayne, but it’s a fact that fades into the background while he’s just John, the intern. Mulder, for his part, never calls him anything other than, ‘Hey, intern.’
John never fails to respond immediately to the summons, never flinches at the title or the lack of an actual name. Despite being built like an actual tank, he’s quiet and unassuming and seems to shrink into himself whenever he wants to shake off attention. Any concern she should have about that is lost in the disruption of their usual routine. It’s easy to forget he’s a pampered rich kid in another life, when he’s keeping Mulder busy with the ins and outs of psychology that Mulder knows, and loves, and loves to talk about knowing.
The intern, to his credit, doesn’t do anything remarkably suspicious in addition to the initial lie. If she comes in early enough, she finds him sitting in the hallway with his back to the wall, outside the office. The few times she follows him after work, he doesn’t linger in the building or try to gain access to other offices. At least one of those times, he’s aware he’s being followed— he doesn’t even attempt to shake her.
He does strange things for someone with his background, things that don’t seem to mesh with her idea of him. Things like never sitting with his back to a doorway, scoping the room automatically when they enter anywhere together. He barely even tries to hide this behavior, despite the fact that he must know how it will appear. He seems paranoid, which sets her on edge, until one day she’s listening to Mulder discuss a common flaw in assuming complex motives in serial offenders with basic demands. Mulder names a specific criminal that evaded capture for a prolonged period because of this.
“He really just wanted the money when he kidnapped me,” John agrees, in a calm, detached voice, as if he’s discussing something textbook. Mulder starts a little at that, and meets her gaze across the room with mirrored lifts of brows.
“This guy?” Mulder asks. “He was arrested in ‘88.”
“I was thirteen,” John says, in that same tone. “He hid in the bathroom during a charity ball. He was paid.”
“The police didn’t file—” Scully says, joining the conversation from the other side of the office.
“My guardian didn’t call the police,” John says evenly. “Aside from one, who advised him not to. If you knew the police in Gotham, you’d understand.”
“That still seems ill-advised,” Scully says. “Surely they’re effective enough to be trusted with basic parts of their job. The danger that put you in, to cooperate with a desperate man…”
“My guardian is retired SAS,” John says, something hard and sharp in his face for the first time since she’d met him. He usually looks bland, in a practiced but total way. Clearly, criticizing his childhood guardian crosses some line that undoes that. Then he adds, with less steel, “Cooperating was the best option for ensuring my safety. He only wanted the money.”
She drops it, and lets Mulder go on. He might ask other questions but she tunes them out. She stops being concerned about John’s paranoia as a sign of ill-intent. Or, at least, she stops being concerned about it primarily for that reason. He has reasons to be paranoid and she doesn’t especially feel like playing therapist long enough to unravel all of them, even if he’d allow her.
In the days after, Scully feels a little selfish and a little jealous at once, because she hadn’t realized how much she’d grown to count on her duo dynamic with Mulder during the work day and it’s now disrupted. Mulder thrown into a project is a Mulder who eats, sleeps, and breathes that project. Some nights she goes home while they’re still huddled over something, and when she comes back in the morning, they’re either still there or there already again. She’s not sure which is worse.
At least Mulder is eating sunflower seeds. John fetches them at a moment’s notice, and she suspects Mulder has already forgotten that the vending machines take actual money because John never asks for any and never returns change. She isn’t sure what John eats, if anything, because she never sees him eat at all. Maybe he’s buying snack crackers from the machine and wolfing them down on the way back to the office, maybe he’s weird about eating in front of others. Rich people can be eccentric like that and John, if he’s anything that she can define, is eccentric.
He’s also young. Younger than most are admitted to Quantico, so the fact that he flunked out over guns of all things a year ago is a bit astounding. He hedges whenever she brings up why he’s there, giving vague or non-committal answers about the future or personal interests. Mulder, inexplicably enough, is content to leave this topic entirely alone (at least when she’s in earshot). Maybe it’s the thrill of having someone trailing after him with such obvious hero-worship. Maybe it’s his reluctance to find out anything he’d have to intentionally hide when Skinner discovers this disaster.
If she feels a bit left out while they bury themselves in psych papers and profiles, she can at least keep herself from scoffing or rolling her eyes at the hero worship because John does two things she respects, one of which is something the actual agents fresh out of Quantico are always guilty of when they hunt down Mulder for a brief brush with fame:
John never calls Mulder “Spooky,” not once.
The other is more something he is than something he does: John is more of a skeptic than she is.
They’ve had an intern for two weeks when Mulder’s attention is pulled away from the shifted atmosphere in their office, which has become less like an investigative unit and more like a constant cram session for a finals exam.
She knows something is up when she comes in for the day and Mulder is at the filing cabinet, flicking through folders with alternating fingers.
“I sent the intern for coffee,” Mulder says, just as she opens her mouth to ask. “Have you ever heard of volkodlaks?”
“Not to my knowledge,” Scully says. “Why? What’s come up?”
“They’re a Serbian variation of the lycanthrope,” Mulder says, sitting on the edge of his desk and slapping down a folder with a newspaper clipping on top. “There’s a little town in Pennsylvania that’s been dealing with some strange incidents. Disturbed graves. A strange animal attacking livestock. Trees mauled to pieces. Houses broken into by a wild beast.”
“You’re talking about werewolves.” Scully narrows her eyes. “Why, precisely, do you think the activity in this town is connected? Those are all things that could have perfectly rational explanations.”
“Except for paw prints and claw marks in the earth around the disturbed graves and house break ins, ones that match no known animal, at least none native to the region. People have said for years the town is haunted but this is the first real evidence we have.”
“This is hardly evidence,” Scully retorts. “It could be as simple as an teenager’s prank. Anyone can make tracks in the mud.”
John returns with two cups of coffee— nothing for himself, as usual.
“Hey, intern,” Mulder says, looking at her. “Pack your bags. We’re going to Pennsylvania.”
After weeks of watching him stick to Mulder like glue, it’s a little gratifying to see John look as put out by this news as she feels. Maybe there’s hope for him after all.
“This…volkodlak,” John says in the car, from the backseat, where he folded himself after insisting he’d be fine. Scully had tried to offer him the front, with the extra leg room that he clearly needed and she could live without. He’d declined, saying he was just the intern. She couldn’t tell if he was joking or not. “The Serbian legends say they hunted, or lived, in packs. But this is the work of a single creature.”
“They did live in packs,” Mulder says for emphasis. He’s getting a little flustered and Scully smiles at the passing trees, enjoying the moment. He hadn’t been braced for so much resistance from the intern. “My theory is that they’ve lived in America for so long that their pack is dying out.”
“Why not recruit more members?” John asked. “It doesn’t make sense.”
“Mulder likes wild goose chases,” Scully says, glancing over at Mulder with a fond tilt of her head. “Sometimes, they end up turning something over.”
“I like finding the truths that are too uncomfortable for others to face,” Mulder says in his own defense, with the air of a professor imparting something.
“Do you find it uncomfortable when truth ends up being ordinary and you’re left aligned with the people you consider blinded?” John asks, while reading something he’s holding. He asks like he’s not aware of how cutting it might be, as a question.
“Hey,” Mulder says, pretending just enough offense to mask the real twinge of hurt Scully can see in his gathered brow. “We haven’t gotten to that lesson in psychoanalyzation yet. Don’t skip ahead.”
Scully is caught between defensive of her partner and a bit I told you so, even though she hadn’t actually directly told Mulder this— that indulging a rich kid with a weird penchant for disguises and a displaced interest in profiling work— was a bad idea. She twists in the passenger seat to look back at John and he glances up, as if aware that he’s being studied the moment her eyes fall on him.
His cuffs are rolled, shoved back to the elbow. There are scars peppered all over his forearms. She’s dissected enough bodies to recognize some of them immediately— electric and heat-based burns, the straight incision of a reduction surgery for a broken limb, the bunched lines of cable-tie restraints.
“What happened?” she asks, when she knows it’s too late to pretend she wasn’t staring. Some of them look far too fresh to be from a kidnapping seven years ago, not to mention he’d more or less implied that he was returned physically unharmed.
“I travel a lot,” he says, as if this explains anything.
“The way you addressed Agent Mulder was uncalled for,” she says, flat and matter of fact. No-nonsense. She doesn’t say that it’s exactly the sort of thing she might have asked Mulder, and has asked in the past. Scully is mostly just a little angry on Mulder’s behalf and she can’t quite put her finger on why.
“Oh,” John says, blinking. He looks at his arms and rolls his cuffs back down, fastening the buttons with sharp and precise movements. “My apologies, Agent Mulder.”
“Scully’s just giving you a hard time because you’re taking her job,” Mulder says easily, shooting her a sideways look. “She’s the one who usually gets to make me squirm.”
“I do not,” Scully protests. “I merely ask the necessary questions. It’s my job to make sure you examine all the possible explanations for a situation and don’t leap to conclusions because it suits you, or reinforces a narrative about the world that you desperately want to be true.”
“That’s how you do it,” Mulder says. “Hey, intern. Take notes.”
Scully scowls out the window, feeling foolish for trying to defend him.
“Nanda Parbat,” John says.
“The volkodlaks?” Mulder asks. “Serbian mythology seemed to fit but I’m open to other suggestions for lycanthropy histories.”
Histories, instead of mythologies. Scully twists again in her seat to meet John’s steady, serious gaze. He looks down at the papers in his hands as if he’s reading them. It’s almost like he’s offering something, an olive branch of sorts, by sharing.
“Nanda Parbat is where I got most of those.”
Those, meaning there are others. They’re driving toward potential werewolves and it feels like the bigger mystery is right in the car with them. The mustache— she still doesn’t know if it’s fake or not— twitches. John rubs his wrist with the other hand and Scully straightens in her seat to look out the windshield.
“Which did you not get there?” she ventures to ask, expecting to be shut out with an excuse, or just ignored.
“Which what?” Mulder asks, craning suddenly as if he’s missing something urgent in the back seat.
“Eyes on the road, Mulder,” Scully says, and after finding John staring at papers, he does look the direction they’re driving.
“The chemical ones,” John says, as if it’s difficult to say, and he doesn’t offer anything more.
Scully is every inch as inquisitive as Mulder, even if she often draws different conclusions, and for the first time since walking in to find an intern in the office, she understands why Mulder would have stopped asking some things and been content to leave them alone. Sometimes, it wasn’t the questions, but what they did to the person answering.
She doesn’t ask about the scars again.
Slovan is a strange little town in every sense of the word. The case goes by quickly, while they take up three rooms in the tiny eight-room motel. Mulder continues to use (abuse) his power and breakfast and dinner both appear at their doors in John’s hands whenever they’re at the hotel instead of out talking to people and investigating.
The locals are tight-lipped, as usual. The physical evidence is bizarre and sometimes contradictory. They piece together the information in the way they usually do, which means that for most of the first few days it looks like they are assembling entirely different cases. John doesn’t offer interpretations of anything unless Mulder asks him, but he watches everything with hawkish attention.
They find child’s torn clothing, a house that looks empty from the outside but probably isn’t, and a strange mound of ashes. Scully thinks there’s likely abuse, and murder; Mulder spends time explaining to John that the ashes are likely part of an important volkodlak ritual, to free hereditary members from the lycanthropic curse.
The grunt work that they tend to end up splitting— climbing down into the earthen room hidden beneath a tree on the property of a local family with a history in the area, and many recently dead members over the past twenty years— goes to John. It’s late at night, completely dark out, and all Mulder says is, “Hey, intern, look for anything unusual,” as if the room itself isn’t unusual, and in John goes without a word.
“There’s a cage in here,” John calls up. “Iron cuffs. A bloody towel.”
Mulder and Scully both end up going down inside anyway, all three of them crammed in the low-ceiling space that’s about the size of a prison cell. It feels even tighter since a third of the space is taken up by an upright cage made of steel rebar welded together, with a makeshift door tied far too many times with thick chain and padlocked. Some of the rebar is bent, and Mulder whistles at it, and makes significant eye contact with Scully in the beam of the flashlight.
There’s a noise above them, outside, that has Scully drawing her gun on instinct. Beside her, John perceptibly flinches, even though he hadn’t balked at going underground first, and hadn’t sounded at all unsettled by finding legitimately disturbing things in the room.
“—the last one, Milos, I promise,” a thick, deep voice says.
“You said that last time,” a child’s voice whines in return. “I’m tired and it hurts.”
“Do you dishonor our family?” the voice booms, stopping suddenly, almost directly above them. Even the earth doesn’t completely muffle the rage in that voice. “Do you think so little of being the last of our kind?”
“No, Uncle Jakov,” the child returns, immediately contrite. Scully can barely make out the words, they’re so small and faint. “I’m sorry.”
Mulder motions with a hand and they creep forward, and Scully has the sudden, terrified thought that if anything happens to the intern— the illegal intern who is actually a young billionaire— that their careers are basically over. More than that, she can’t in good conscience allow him to be hurt when he likely had no idea what he was getting himself into.
That’s why, when Mulder sneaks up out of the room and is almost immediately discovered with a shout of alarm, she grabs John’s arm and fiercely shakes her head when he swivels to look back at her. His gaze falls on her, and the still-drawn gun, with equal attention. She puts a finger to her lips and switches places with him, and then waits.
It kills her to hear Mulder struggling, yelling, and then falling silent. She’s furious at being put in this position, at protecting this young idiot, and she’s currently ripping herself a new one for allowing this nonsense to go on as long as it has. Even if she’d overlooked the situation in the office, there was no reason for him to tag along now.
When she checks on him, fighting to keep the outright fury off her face, his scowl is dark and fierce enough to make up for any show on her part. He’s angry. Good. Let him be angry. As long as he shuts up and lets her get her partner out of this alive, he can be as angry with her and with himself as he wants. Maybe he’ll go home.
Above them, the pair sounds occupied with restraining a now (likely unconscious, if experience is anything to go by) unprotesting Mulder. Perhaps they think he’s the only one idiotic enough to be trespassing close to midnight, because neither of them come down to investigate. They move away, the adult barking an occasional order at the child.
The orders are…weird.
“Lift him, no, like that, Milos.” There’s a swear in another language, something Slavic. “He’s asleep, he won’t fight. This way. To the barn.”
Once the stillness settles around them again, Scully holsters her gun.
“We have to get him,” John says.
“I have to get him,” Scully corrects sharply. “I do. You have to stay put and out of danger, so I don’t have to explain to my superior how I let Bruce Wayne get injured or killed, right before he takes my badge and arrests me.”
John positively glowers at that. Scully couldn’t care less.
“Get inside the cage,” she says, after a moment.
“What,” he demands.
“If there is something dangerous, then that buys you time,” Scully says. “I’ll phone local police and they’ll be here shortly, and we can make something up then.”
“I think you trust police too much,” he says acidly. His eyes flick to her holster and then back up at her face, and with a growl of frustration, he complies. He sits in the dirt, arms crossed like a petulant child while she snaps the padlock and hopes with every fiber of her being that she’s not making a massive, terrible mistake. Or, not more of one, anyway.
“I don’t have an extra flashlight,” she says, apologetically. She does feel a little bad, even if she maybe shouldn’t. They wouldn’t even be in this position if it wasn’t for his presence.
He brought her a maple cream donut this morning and she wonders, briefly, if she’s putting too much of the blame here on him. Mulder is frequently incapacitated by suspects all on his own. She shoves that thought out of her head before she can feel too bad.
“I don’t mind the dark,” he says, his tone short and crisp. “Don’t worry about me.”
That is the opposite of what she’s doing, what she has been doing, and any wisp of feeling guilty about the flashlight issue is vanished.
“I’ll be back as soon as I can,” she says. “Or the police will be. Don’t give them a hard time, they aren’t the bad guys.”
“I’m not five,” he snaps. She hasn’t seen this much obvious irritation or….emotion at all, really, in the almost three weeks she’s known him. “They don’t think they’re the bad guys, which is why they’re a problem.”
“We can discuss the demerits of local law enforcement later,” Scully says. “I have a partner to rescue.”
“I was fine in Delaware,” he says. “I helped in Delaware.”
She leaves without replying to that.
The barn isn’t very well lit, but there’s a single security light on the side that illuminates just enough to make out a large man at least as big as John, Mulder tied with rope to some sort of rusted hitching post, and some breed of large dog.
Or, not a dog, she realizes, when the thing rears up on hind legs and tries to back away from the man throwing water in Mulder’s face.
“Milos,” the man snarls. “Stay here.”
Her mind refuses to fully process the image at first, and it takes a moment to comprehend that the child’s voice murmuring a reply of fearful consent is coming from the hairy dog-bear creature.
Mulder comes to with a jerk when the water hits him. He sputters a moment, shaking it out of his eyes and hair, while Scully hesitates to approach if they aren’t obviously harming him. It would be too dangerous to try to shoot at either the man or the beast while they’re moving so much, and so close to him, and she can only keep a bead on one of them at a time.
“Who are you?” the man demands, as soon as Mulder is clearly conscious.
“Not your prom date anymore,” Mulder replies and Scully has to actually bite her tongue to swallow the swear that wants to spring out of her throat. “Not with treatment like that,” he continues. “Sorry, sweetheart, but I’ve got standards.”
“Shut up,” the man says gruffly. “No funny games. Why did you come here?”
“Did he hide your skin?” Mulder asks the creature, and it rears back, twisting its paws together fretfully, looking from him to the man.
“Don’t answer him, Milos. He’ll confuse your mind.”
“You did, didn’t you, you son of a bitch,” Mulder says, and he sounds pissed. “What’s he been making you do for him? What was his price?”
“I bring him things,” the creature says, in that same plaintive, young voice. “Uncle Jakov takes care of me.”
“Care of you? You mean he keeps you trapped, just like he kept the others trapped, until he thought they’d turn on him and he killed them.”
There’s a shotgun in the man’s hands now and Scully tenses and draws her gun for a second time. Another one for the report.
“Quiet! Of course I care for him. He’s family!” the man shouts. “Milos, he’s not of us. He doesn’t understand.”
“Is that…true?” the child-beast asks, looming over the man. “Did you kill Petra? You told me he was sick.”
There’s a dangerous glint of fangs, of flashing claws. Mulder somehow sees her across the waist-high field grass, because of course he does, and right before the beast lunges on the man, there’s a flash of motion beside her and Mulder yells her name.
It’s chaos for a second, when the shotgun goes off with a boom and there’s a high-pitched scream of animalistic terror and rage. Scully’s running toward the disaster, where Mulder is struggling against the ropes and the beast is rolling on the ground with a keening cry. The man with the shotgun has been disarmed and the struggle he puts up bare-fisted against John is barely even a real fight. With remarkable efficiency, John dodges a few swinging hits and drops the man with a nasal crunch. Three or four more hits pound into the man from John’s fist before he staggers back, not even breathing hard, and turns to the writhing, snarling beast.
Scully holsters her gun just long enough to hastily untie the ropes binding Mulder.
“You okay?” she checks, and he nods. She’ll have to check him for a concussion later but he seems alert enough. She follows his gaze to the tangle of John and beast, where he’s got the thing in some kind of safety hold to keep his arms away from the white, razor teeth. Blood soaks the ground, and his clothing, and the beast’s matted fur while he murmurs to it.
“It’s okay. You’re okay. It’s over now. It’s okay.”
The beast struggles with renewed rage once more, and then sags limply like an exhausted dog. It’s panting, sobbing, and he relaxes his grip.
“Where did he hide the skin?” Mulder asks.
“In his room,” the child-thing cries. “In his room in the closet.”
Mulder disappears without a word and Scully makes quick work of cuffing the man in case he wakes up, but he doesn’t look like he’s going to be very capable even if he does wake soon. From a preliminary once over, Scully estimates that his nose and jaw are both broken, his shoulder dislocated.
With an incredulous kind of stupor, she looks over at John after the handcuffs are secured. He’s sitting in the gravel next to the beast, stroking its fur while it cries, almost like he’s comforting a family pet.
“How…” she starts to ask.
“Picked the lock,” he mumbles. “Thought you might need help.”
“Huh,” she says, dusting her hands off on her pants.
Mulder comes out of the house with something brown and leathery in a knotted bundle. He’s fumbling with a lighter from his pocket.
“Hey, intern,” he says. “Go get the blanket from the trunk of the car.”
“I can’t,” John says, refusing an order from Mulder for the first time in her hearing.
“I’ll get it,” Scully says. The child-beast is clinging to John’s hand with its paw, half-foot claws digging into the skin of his wrist through his dress shirt.
When she returns with the blanket from the car only a hundred yards away, Mulder is toeing at a smoldering pile of ash on the ground, and John is sitting on the gravel holding a shivering, naked child with a rapidly healing splatter of buckshot on his tiny hip. She hands John the blanket and the final two pellets fall with a clink to the gravel, like coins tossed into a dry fountain, leaving nothing more than a smear of dark blood on the otherwise unmarred skin.
“I hate to say I told you so,” Mulder says, rubbing the back of his head. “But I told you so.”
“You don’t hate it at all,” Scully mutters. “I’ll call the Sheriff and we can try to think of some way to explain this.”
“The truth, Scully,” Mulder says, swaying slightly on his feet. She grabs his arm and points at the ground.
“Sit,” she orders. “We need to have your head checked. Again.”
“You lied in Delaware,” John says softly, when Mulder sits down. The child is now wrapped in the blanket and cuddled against his chest, wide-eyed and quiet. She’s going to have to make sure he ends up in a place with adequate access to trauma counseling.
“Oh?” Mulder asks.
John’s gaze lands on her, not Mulder, when he clarifies. “You said things don’t usually go that badly.”
“It was your second day,” Mulder says. “I was trying to make you feel better.”
“I would have preferred the truth,” John says. His eyes are on Scully’s holster again.
“Hear that, Scully,” Mulder says, clapping John on the back. “A man after my own heart. I knew I liked you, intern.”
“He saved your life, Mulder,” Scully says flatly, because it’s how she can keep from insisting she would have been fine on her own and how she’s tamping down the adrenaline before it drops on its own.
“We have common interests,” Mulder says. “I am very fond of saving my life.”
“Sometimes, I wonder,” Scully says, because she does.
“Where am I going to go?” the child interrupts, and if she’d had any doubts about some sort of master-minded beast and child switch in the time she’d gone to the car, it’s gone now. It’s that same little voice.
“Somewhere safe, Milos,” John says. “I promise.”
Scully would caution not to make promises one can’t keep, but she has the stark impression that he probably means it, and can.
“Next time,” she says. “Warn me before you rush into the path of a drawn gun.”
John, again, flinches. Otherwise, his expression— stony and calm— doesn’t change. “Noted. Next time, don’t lock me in a cage.”
“Scully did what,” Mulder exclaims. “Scully. Do you mean to tell me you locked my intern in a cage?”
“I thought he was our intern,” Scully says instead of denying it.
She could be wrong, but even if it’s small and brief, she’s pretty sure it’s the first time she’s seen John smile.
“I’m going to get an ice pack for your head from the first aid kit,” she says. “Don’t get up. The Sheriff’s department is sending an ambulance.”
“I’d argue with you,” Mulder says, “but I’ll save it for breakfast when I can think again.”
The drive back to DC is quiet.
She drives, because despite Mulder insisting he’s okay, the number of tylenol he took with his coffee says otherwise. He sleeps most of the way, with another ice pack pressed to the back of his head.
John sits in the back and stares out the window, except once he jolts so suddenly that it’s not until their eyes meet in the rearview mirror— hers questioning and his startled, then immediately blank— that she realizes he must have fallen asleep. She can guess, from his reaction, that he had a nightmare.
Scully doesn’t ask about what, but she does unclip her firearm and reach across Mulder’s lap to put it in the glovebox, where Mulder’s own piece is stored while they drive. John doesn’t directly acknowledge this, by visible relief or by thanking her, but it’s fifteen minutes after that when he pulls a thick folder out of his bag next to him on the seat and starts reading.
In the office, all three of them write reports. Hers and Mulder’s are filed, John’s is not. She finds him copying the number for the Pennsylvania county’s social service office down after he hands her his report, but if he calls them, it’s on his own time and not in the office. It makes her feel slightly better about the shivering boy, anyway.
He continues to work with Mulder and accompanies them on several more cases over the next six weeks. A few of those are actual dead ends, two are frustratingly beyond scientific explanation, and none of them go quite as badly as the Pennsylvania trip. They’re all close though, which is pretty par for the course.
Then one day, John simply doesn’t show up.
Mulder is worried, even if he doesn’t say it, and he paces for a while. A dozen more pencils end up in the ceiling tile, and she has to call maintenance and have them come put in a new one after office hours. The worry persists but they have work to do, and no way to track him down short of trying to call a number connected directly with Bruce Wayne. She would advise against it, but Mulder doesn’t even bring it up.
One day, a full month later, she comes in to find Mulder sitting at his desk turning a postcard over in his hands. He holds it up to her, and with a curious frown, she takes it. The postmark is international, Air Mail, and the picture on the front is of a yurt and a horse. “Beautiful Mongolia” is on the image in block font, and on the back, there’s a single phrase in a now-familiar neat cursive:
Thank you.
Then that’s that. Mulder grumbles occasionally about having to go get his own sunflower seeds or coffee, and jokes once or twice about getting another intern, but she can tell he doesn’t mean it. Whatever it was is over, and she can tell he doesn’t miss having an intern as much as he misses specifically John, or Bruce, or whoever he’s supposed to be.
Scully doesn’t think of him often, but she does think about him occasionally. A year later, strange reports of creatures start pouring out of Gotham, and she wonders. They’re about to go investigate when other reports pour out of Metropolis, and then New York, and then San Francisco.
Aliens.
Not hidden ones, not government lackeys with ill intent, but a single extraterrestrial in a red cape stopping runaway trains and falling airplanes.
She and Mulder disagree about the purity of his purpose, but alien tech springs up all over the place, like a floodgate’s been opened. There are accounts everywhere now, and more and more frequently Skinner calls on them for second opinions on the work of other agents and less and less frequently does he give them that hard, disbelieving look when they report something outlandish.
The rules of the world change around them and like a blink, their own small part of the world changes with it. The basement office is moved upstairs, young agents seeking their advice without scoffing undertones becomes the norm, and life goes on. Mulder throws theories at her, and she dismisses the crazier ones and holds the viable ones against a rigorous standard. Science has shifted but it’s still science, it’s just a matter of learning the new rules. They adapt.
Then one day, Gotham calls.
The midnight setting is too familiar. The shadows are like old friends that came along with them to a new city. In all their years of work, they’ve only been in Gotham a few times. Gotham has a reputation for handling its own problems, and usually, everyone is content to let it do so, because Gotham itself is normally enough of a problem that nobody wants to tangle with it.
Some of the early rumors and myths have solidified into facts, others are still hazy. Scully doesn’t know quite what to expect when the Commissioner asks for their assistance with a case, one they’ve been tapped specifically to come in to deal with because someone asked him for them by name. It’s an old, old demon (not a literal demon, though they’ve dealt with those, too), one Mulder had profiled years before on one of the very rare cases when Scully had suspected something supernatural and Mulder had insisted it was the work of an ordinary human.
He’d been right, of course.
An ordinary human with telekinetic powers, that is.
She’d been right, too.
The massive floodlight with a cut-metal shape throws a huge signal against the night clouds. They wait, Mulder chatting with the Commissioner, for almost half an hour before there’s a gravelly voice behind them.
It’s followed by two younger voices, bickering.
“Enough,” the hard, rasping voice says. He sounds borderline exasperated.
He landed behind them, and Scully isn’t even surprised because she’s heard that he does this. The Batman of Gotham never approaches from an easy vantage point if he can help it, and most accounts of eyewitnesses never even claim to have seen him in whole— just in moving, silent parts, with a fluttering whoosh of cape. There are conflicting opinions on whether or not he’s even human.
“I don’t see why we need the interference of—” the younger, higher voice of the other two says in a haughty whine.
“—because he said we did, miscreant,” the other interrupts.
“Enough,” the Batman says again, and this time both of the teenagers (they look like teenagers, anyway) in red, green, and yellow suits with their own hooded capes or masks, immediately fall silent.
“You brought a crowd tonight,” the Commissioner observes.
“Hn,” is all the Batman says to that.
“I pulled in the people you asked for. I suppose I should introduce you, since they say they’ve never met you.” Commissioner Gordon flicks the toothpick from his mouth to the ground. He seems like a nice guy, an honest man, if a little old and tired.
The Batman is silent.
Scully glances at Mulder just in time to see the gleam in his eye, the curve of a delighted smile before he forces it away.
“Hey, intern,” he says casually. “Go get me some sunflower seeds.”
The entire rooftop goes quiet and still in a deeper, more focused way, if possible. Every Gotham eye is staring at Mulder with disbelief, even the teens through their masks, as if they can’t believe he’d spoken. Except, that is, Scully, who turns instead to stare at the Batman.
The Batman isn’t looking at her until he is, with an intense flicker of attention, before it goes back to Mulder. He nods, once.
“Sure thing, Boss.”
A grappling line fires from his hand, somehow entirely noiseless despite the velocity with which it shot from the device he’s holding, and before anyone else can speak, he’s gone in a swirl of black cape that unfolds against the sky. The taller of the two teens scuffs his boot on the rooftop.
“So, uh,” he says, catching the younger one’s shoulder to stop him. “I guess…we wait. He, uh, had the stick with the information…so…”
“We wait,” the Commissioner decides, while looking very hard at Mulder.
Mulder grins, unrepentant.
Less than ten minutes later, the Batman materializes behind Mulder. She’s not quite sure how he does it, except that one moment there’s nothing but dim shadow behind Mulder and then the next moment he’s there, holding out a brightly colored plastic package of sunflower seeds.
Then he’s with the teens again, and Scully would say he moved faster than she could track, but she suspects it was only that she was distracted by the sunflower seeds. Mulder tears them open and shakes a few into his mouth.
“So,” he says to the crowd on the rooftop. No, not to the crowd. Directly to him, to John. Bruce Wayne. The Batman. Whoever he is. Mulder spits a few shells out and ignores the dirty look from the Commissioner. Mulder chews, and then swallows. “What do we got?”
“Are you going to allow this….this man, to order you around, Father?” the smaller costumed boy demands.
“I was just wondering that myself,” the Commissioner throws in. “I’d like to be able to do that sometime.”
“They think it’s a copycat,” the Batman says. “It’s not.”
“It’s not,” Mulder agrees. “I read the files.”
“Then you know what we’re dealing with,” the Batman says, looking at her again.
Scully, despite herself, smiles at him. The younger boy looks at her like she’s lost her mind.
“Yeah,” Mulder says. “I think I do.”
Scully, for once, doesn’t disagree with him.