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Mulder nearly laughs the first time he meets Dana Scully. He manages not to, but it’s a close thing.
She’d probably take it as his derision toward a small, round-faced doctor being tasked to spy on him. He’d have to explain that it’s more to do with the men who sent her down here, the ones who probably took one look at the daemon riding Dana Scully’s shoulders and couldn’t ignore the symbolism of a massive golden eagle beside the rangy, gray hare perched on Mulder’s desk. Mulder supposes that reading meaning into daemons isn’t below these people. He hopes they got a kick out of it.
“Agent Mulder,” the doctor says. She holds out a hand. “I’m Dana Scully. I’ve been assigned to work with you.” She has a strong handshake and warm palms.
On the desk, Vae pricks her ears and thrums with alert curiosity. Mulder can feel her attention focused on the eagle shifting his weight in response to Scully’s movements. His claws look wickedly sharp, and Mulder wonders how a daemon who has chosen the shape and temperament of a large bird of prey will fare in a basement office.
“Oh, isn’t it nice to be suddenly so highly regarded?” Mulder says. He jerks his head toward Vae, who has loped forward a few paces. “This is Vaerida. Vae.”
Scully blinks, and her daemon cocks his head. Mulder supposes that they come from more conservative circles where bandying around your daemon’s name is considered unusual if not outright inappropriate. Maybe she’s the type who considers talking to another’s daemon about as acceptable as giving them a pat on the head.
“Odran,” Scully says after a long moment. She says it like a challenge, and Odran ruffles his feathers. Mulder and Vae spare one another a glance. A pure Irish name; not the traditional Latin or ancient Greek. That’s something to consider.
“So,” Mulder leans forward in his chair, and Vae returns to scrutinizing Odran. “Who did you tick off to get stuck with this detail, Scully?”
***
“I understand the ‘hare-brained’ jokes now,” Odran says that evening while Scully fishes her keys from her purse.
“It’s a little cruel,” Scully says uncertainly. She grinds the sticky knob open and reminds herself to ask the landlord about changing out the lock. Odran flaps from her shoulder as soon as they enter the apartment and settles on the back of the couch. Scully dumps her purse on the front table but keeps the reports in hand.
“Did you think of anything those bumps could have been?” Scully asks. She frowns at the files. “I didn’t have a good answer at all.”
“And neither did Mulder,” Odran says with the bird equivalent of a shrug: a ruffle of feathers and quick shake of the head. “I think he was teasing us.”
“Sure he was,” Scully says. She walks toward the bedroom and trails her fingers through Odran’s primaries as she passes him. He flutters to the floor and follows her with a clack of talons against hardwood. “He’s that type,” Scully adds.
Odran is quiet, and Scully can tell that he’s formulating his take on the hare daemon. Vaerida. Scully hadn’t been expecting Mulder to offer that name so readily, and she wonders now whether he did it on purpose to throw her off. Just like he dumped this strange case in her lap and asked about extraterrestrials. Trying to disarm her, to test her. It’s a new take on an old game, as far as she’s concerned.
Scully hangs up her suit—newly bought; she went out and purchased handfuls of professional attire when she heard that she’d been officially assigned—and after slipping into rattier clothes goes to the kitchen to pull together dinner. Something easy; she and Odran will want to spend the evening poring over the case files, and with any luck they’ll have a satisfying explanation for Mr. Mulder by the plane trip tomorrow.
“Curious,” Odran says from the back of a kitchen chair. Scully looks up from the spinach she’s washing at the sink.
“What?” she asks.
“Vaerida,” Odran says. “She was very curious. They haven’t completely dismissed us, I don’t think.” Scully dumps the spinach in the colander and pulls another bunch from the dewy plastic bag.
“If you say so.”
***
“Well, I like them,” Vae says.
“You like everyone,” Mulder replies distractedly. His gaze drifts around the airport terminal, to where tired couples lean against one another and children scramble over chairs to watch the planes take off on the tarmac. “Wonder if she’ll show up at all,” Mulder says. “Maybe we scared them off.”
“We’ve got ten more minutes,” Vae points out. She settles down in Mulder’s lap. “How do you think he’ll fit on the plane? Odran?”
“Uncomfortably.”
A pause. “I wonder whether he likes to fly. But he couldn’t get very far. What do you think his wingspan is? Nearly two meters, I think.”
Mulder looks down to where Vae is curled in his folded coat. “Does it matter?” he asks. He regrets saying it almost immediately; he can feel Vae’s sting of annoyance.
“I’m curious,” Vae says stiffly. Mulder rubs at the bridge of his nose.
“Look,” he says. “They’ll probably be gone within a month. Scully’s too smart for basement work; she’ll get new assignments soon and then we can be left to ourselves again.”
“Assuming that she doesn’t shut us down,” Vae says rebelliously.
“Assuming that,” Mulder says. He crosses his arms, leans back in his chair, and closes his eyes. Arguing with your own daemon never ends satisfactorily. Instead, he lets the airport’s chatter turn into a low buzz and once again calls up the facts from each abduction case. He sifts through them one by one, trying to find patterns, places where he can tie concepts together.
“See? Not late,” Vae says. Mulder peels his eyes open to find Scully clacking toward them, Odran bumping along on her shoulder with his wings slightly open for balance.
“Good morning,” Scully says when she nears. She has a neat, black rolling suitcase behind her and a suit that looks like the exact make and model of the one she wore yesterday. Mulder is struck with the mental image of a closet full of identical, frumpy suits. Navys on one end, tan on the other.
“Figure out parking okay?” Mulder asks. “Long-term parking at the airport is a nightmare.”
“It was fine.” Scully takes the empty seat beside Mulder; she pulls out the case files while Odran hops onto the back of the chair and starts preening. Vae shifts in Mulder’s lap to watch. Mulder thinks to be embarrassed by this, but maybe Scully won’t notice.
“I read over the case files last night,” Scully says and flips through a series of photographs. “I was trying to identify the substance found in the tissue surrounding the bumps.”
“Any luck?”
Scully’s lips thin slightly. Behind her, Odran’s tail feathers flare. “It’s not anything in any of my medical textbooks, let’s go with that,” she says.
“Don’t get down,” Mulder says around a small grin. “None of the egg heads in the labs could give me good answers either. Kept insisting some error or contamination had been made in the analysis.”
“And…you don’t believe that?” Scully glances over. “That has to be the most logical conclusion.”
“Passengers in group 3, we will begin boarding,” the woman at the terminal’s desk announces.
“Sure,” Mulder says as he stands, scooping Vae up in one arm. “But what are the chances of the same error happening in three different analyses, in three different labs?” Scully narrows her eyes, and Mulder turns toward the swiftly forming line. He can all but hear her forming a rebuttal.
This is going to be a fun one.
***
It’s simultaneously everything Scully thought FBI work would be and nothing like it at all. Interviews and working with the PD; that sort of thing she learned about at the academy. None of her classes gave guidelines for finding shriveled humanoids in a high school boy’s coffin. When Mulder comes by her hotel room that night asking about a jog, she decides to take it as confirmation that he’s finding this case as utterly bizarre as she is. She supposes that’s some kind of comfort.
“Maybe a run would be good idea,” Odran says after Scully has shut the door behind Mulder. He’s perched on the back of the water-stained couch. He shifts his weight from foot to foot while she crosses the room and pick up the x-ray, as if she’ll find something that she missed the last dozen times. When Scully spends too long squinting at the fuzzy image, Odran flaps across the room and dishevels her hair when he lands on her shoulder.
“There has to be a good explanation for this, Ran, doesn’t there?” Scully asks.
“There’s always a good explanation.” Odran leans his weight against the side of her head. “Just a matter of us being able to see it.” Still, she can feel his flicker of uncertainty. It echoes somewhere inside her.
***
The flicker explodes into a full forest fire the next night when Scully finds the bumps on her lower back.
“What are they?” she asks Odran, trying to keep her voice in check. “Ran, tell me.”
“I can’t see, I can’t see,” Odran snaps. He flaps his wings in frustration, and Scully doesn’t think before she tosses on her robe, scoops Odran and the candle up, and speed walks to Mulder’s room.
Mulder is still damp from what must have been a shower when he opens the door. “Hi,” he says, blinking a little.
“I want you to look at something,” Scully says in an impressively steady voice.
“Come on in.” Scully steps into the room, and Odran flutters to the carpeting in a thick rustle of feathers. Scully slips off her robe and stares hard into the darkness.
“What are they?” she asks.
She can feel Mulder move behind her; she feels the heat of his candle and the bare touch of his fingertips. Somewhere to her right, murky in the darkness, she’s aware of Odran and, beside him, Vaerida. Both watch her and Mulder with an intensity that Scully thinks to be disconcerted by.
“Mulder, what are they?” she says again.
“Mosquito bites.” She hears him straighten, and she turns to look at him.
“Are you sure?” she asks.
“Yeah, I got eaten up a lot myself out there.”
The relief rushes through Scully like a dam has been broken. It’s enough to make her fall forward into Mulder. He catches her with a small laugh.
“You okay?” he asks.
“Yes,” Scully says. She blinks and pulls away slowly.
“You’re shaking,” Mulder says.
Scully looks up to him and, finally, her brain catches up with what just happened. Mosquito bites. Of all things, mosquito bites. Scully can feel the burn of embarrassment start to creep in.
“I need to sit down,” Scully replies. She considers what this situation looks like: she in her bathrobe, having just had Mulder inspect the bare skin of her lower back, she hugged him, both of them in a ratty motel room with the power out. But Mulder acts like it’s all perfectly normal (maybe it is in his world), and that somehow gives Scully the impetus not to retreat to her room in a mild panic.
Instead she sits stiff-backed in the chair and lets Odran flutter up to her lap. She digs her fingers into the familiar warmth of his feathers, and he presses himself against her torso.
“If it makes you feel better, my first X-File case, I broke my nose,” Mulder tells her. At his feet, Scully can see a dark, rounded shape that represents Vaerida. Once in a while the candlelight falls on her in such a way that Scully can see the tawny gold of her eyes.
Scully takes the bait and says, “How’d that happen?”
Mulder grins, and the sheer boyishness of the expression throws Scully off. “I barged into a guy’s trailer and he thought I was a robber. Punched me in the face,” he says. “I’ll be fair, though, I did it at like one in the morning.”
“What was the big emergency you had to come into this guy’s trailer at one in the morning?”
“Evidence—” Mulder pauses. “A certain interpretation of evidence suggested that this man would be abducted again that night, at that hour. I wanted to be there to try to see it happen.”
“What evidence?” Scully asks.
“Well, this guy was a repeat abductee, and his abductions happened on a more or less regular schedule.”
Mulder says it so matter-of-factly; that’s what gets to Scully. It’s the same way people say, ‘He was a dentist,’ or ‘He was a Democrat.’ He was an abductee. Of course he was.
“Okay,” Scully says, leaning forward. “Why did you think he was an abductee?”
Mulder blinks at her. “He said so.”
“And you believed him? Of all the possible explanations for his claim, you jumped to the one that involved actual aliens?”
Mulder shifts on his feet, and the candle sends dancing shadows across his face. He studies Scully like he’s trying to find something in her expression. She presents a smooth, blank canvass of a face in return. “You’re asking why I believe in all this,” he says. “That’s what people always want to know.”
Scully bows her head a little. “Sure.”
“Because the evidence leaves no alternative.”
Scully leans back again and lifts her chin. “I think that any so-called evidence supporting UFOs leaves plenty of room for alternative explanations. Nothing but alternative explanations.”
“And I suppose you’ve given that evidence your full attention and consideration before you dismissed it, right?” Mulder’s tone comes off just sharp enough for Scully thinks that he’s stung by her words. That doesn’t seem right. She glances at Odran as if to find his opinion, but his attention is on Vaerida.
“Okay,” Scully says slowly. “Fine, I personally have never investigated the evidence for aliens, not until now. But I can’t help but think that if there was solid, irrefutable support for what you claim, then others would have found it and the field as a whole would be…” she trails off and he shrugs one shoulder as if to say, Go ahead. “Taken more seriously,” she finishes.
Mulder cocks his head. “You know that most geologists used to laugh at the theory of plate tectonics?”
“Mulder, that’s not—“
“What, not the same thing? A theory with mounting evidence behind it that is seen as ludicrous by most, but only because people don’t like the idea that their most basic assumptions are wrong? So they ignore it and push it down and make working with that theory professional suicide?”
“The evidence for plate tectonics is both copious and sound,” Scully says, bristling. “Of course there have been theories that were hard to swallow at first, but at a certain point, the science of the matter can’t be denied. Like evolution or Einstein’s theory of relativity. The evidence for little green men in flying saucers simply has too many holes.”
“Gray men,” Mulder says, then purses his lips. “So if you came across solid-enough evidence positing the existence of aliens and alien abductions, you’d be okay with believing it?”
Scully squares her shoulders and makes herself look Mulder in the face. “I’d have to,” she says.
Mulder’s head tilts, and Scully has a hard time seeing what his expression is doing in the unsteady light coming from the candle. But she suspects that he looks gratified.
Epilogue
The drive back to the airport is quiet and reeks of smoke. Behind them, the police car transporting Billy Miles keeps up a good pace.
Scully rests her temple on the cool glass of the car window and tries to sift through what she’s witnessed. Odran has opted to perch in the backseat where he has more room, and sometimes she glances back at him as if to silently ask for his advice on how to process this. Each time he looks back helplessly.
Mulder starts a few lines of conversation, but they always die out. She’s sure that his brain is as overworked as hers is right now. Vaerida is nearly disappeared in his lap, only visible by the occasional twitch of an oversized ear.
About a half hour into the drive, Vaerida suddenly rises from Mulder’s lap and crawls toward the center console. Trying not to be obvious about it, Scully watches her maneuver to the backseat, to where Odran is huddled in on himself. A second later, Scully hears a low murmur, and after that a small burst of sensation from Odran. Something bright and curious; something good.
Scully cuts her gaze back to the dark highway and doesn’t dare look in Mulder’s direction.
The low voices in the back seat don’t stop the rest of the trip to the airport.