A protest is half on her tongue that it wasn't LSD; she can still visualize the chemical structure of the drug in her mind, which should be impossible. It had been more or less meaningless at the time, but in the aftermath she'd come to understand what she'd seen in the incense was the same thing found in the dead teen's bodies. At the time she'd set the fact aside because it was impossible, unprovable-- a little too spooky for the worldview she was building. Enough of the rest of her trip had been easy to discredit, but to imagine she'd dreamed up what turned out to be a plausible molecular structure for a drug she didn't know she was on-- inexplicable. Her bread and butter, these days.

Instead she smiles, wets her lips, taking an extra beat to figure out what to say. Or maybe only how to say it. Maybe it's contrariness, that makes her suddenly want to defend an experience she's stubbornly disbelieved for twenty years. Or perhaps it's the fact that Mulder finds it easy to laugh off the Devil in spite of everything they've seen.

"It wasn't really the Devil." That admission isn't a concession. "I think-- in a a way it was how Sunlight saw himself, and maybe part of me had already picked up on that, subconsciously." She looks away, at nothing; her gaze unfocused as she tries to find the right way to say this.

"But I wasn't totally honest," she settles on. "About how I got involved with any of it. Mulder, I saw something-- before the drugs, before I knew what I was getting into. Something I couldn't explain-- I still can't."