what_wings_dare | 🅧 Please explain to me the scientific nature of 'the whammy'

It is straightforward, if not quite in the way she might imagine. Mulder's getting drawn in, the way he'd like to think he wouldn't be for anyone but her; as easy as it is to fit imagery to memory, Scully's half the appeal here. Her carefully chosen words, the flick of her slender fingers as she turns each card over, the knowledge that all of this is happening while she's wearing one of his oxfords - how's he supposed to resist any of that?

"I'd tell you if it's a literal sword," he says, warmth suffusing his voice, "but I'm not helping you cold-read me."

Besides, it's not hard to read in what he needs to here. Three allies drinking together is easy to fit into his memories, not least because he would have been ecstatic back then if they could score anything better to drink than a jug of Carlo Rossi. The Hierophant, he understands as a priest of sacred mysteries, which could be something, or it could be nothing. And then the knight - but she explains that one.

When she looks up at him, he can't help but smile. "There I am. This -" tapping on the three of cups - "doesn't look like trouble, though."

"No," she agrees. She can dismiss this as cold-reading and chance all she wants, but it's impossible not to look at this row of cards and tell a simple story; one that makes her feel impossibly fond of her partner. There's no clear reason for it, but it makes her picture him as a gangly teenager trying to take on the world.

"Think of this row as before, or maybe-- what you had at hand. If this were the present I might read that as representing the Gunmen-- three friends. But with your father, and the Knight-- I think this is an older story." She shifts so she can watch him, which is maybe cheating; Mulder has a magnificent poker face but she's better than most at reading him.

"Reversed, the Hierophant indicates some sort of rebellion-- the way it's positioned makes me think it's linked to the conflicting viewpoints, so I'm going to guess you were a teenager, maybe. With-- three friends? No-- two friends, and you're the third. Fearless, a little reckless. You shouldn't have been involved-- the Emperor wouldn't have wanted you diving into chaos-- but you couldn't be dissuaded. You wanted to seek the truth, in... perhaps unorthodox ways."

It's not magic, after all. It's just Mulder. Anyone who knew him could come up with that.

She has a lot of it right, right down to imagining some lanky teen lashing out at anything that makes sense to him in that moment. It's incredibly charming - though at the moment, she could tell him that the next card represented a sea monster he vanquished, and he'd be charmed.

"You think that's my father?" he asks, keeping his voice as neutral as possible. Back in the 80s, James Randi asked the psychic fraudster Inga Pachanko to demonstrate her ability to do a reading on a group of photos he brought to her, all of them featuring a handsome man with brown hair. What he hadn't mentioned, of course, was the man's name - Ted Bundy - and Pachanko's purported ESP hadn't allowed her to pick up the reason he became a household name. This feels like a kinder version than that, letting her spin a tale without letting her know what he thinks of when he hears order and chaos put head to head.

(Besides, there's no denying that the Emperor makes an excellent card to stand in for his father. Just like a teenaged Dana Scully, maybe this reading contains multitudes.)

"I'm not telling you one way or the other," he adds. "No commentary from the peanut gallery at all over here. So the three of us went recklessly out on our faithful steeds - and if you guess the car, I'll make sure I tip you more than ten percent for this. What kind of truth were we looking for?"

She tips her head to the side, regarding the cards now.

"He's your father, but maybe not only your father. Some of it is the philosophical level-- though I think your father's presence is relevant. The other man-- the hermit-- maybe a teacher? Another adult; not a relative. Someone who offered you another explanation for the things that bothered you. But they're in the background, not part of the action."

She offers a wry smile.

"Some of it's easy to guess, admittedly. Of course your father didn't want you getting involved in... whatever this is. Who would? Some of it-- I think you must have been staying with your father at the time, because most of the spread has been so patriarchal." She looks at the cards again, considering. "Your friends could have been girls; Three of Cups often is, though not exclusively. But it's not exact."

With a shrug, she turns over the next row. Eight wands against a blue sky on the left; a woman weeping beneath nine swords on the right. In the center, a joyous child rides a white horse beneath a brilliant sun.

Scully peers at this trio of cards with the sort of intensity usually reserved for unidentifiable substances at crime scenes, her brow furrowed.

He's so tempted to interrupt, to build the story with her - but it'll be more fun to hear her tell it. A little close, a little further off, but so far, it's not bad. For the first time in years (decades?), he thinks of the Major, and he wonders if the guy's still out there, still watching the same UFO videos over and over.

The next row of cards gets a weird look out of her, a hiccup in what's so far been a smoothly delivered reading, and Mulder can't help but seize upon it. "What's wrong?"

"This should be the meat of the story-- it's just... disjointed."

For all her breeziness before, she's focused now; Scully reads tarot the same way she does anything, with a ferocious need to fit it into a comprehensible framework. When they'd started this with a more casual air, she could have brushed it off-- see, it's just random-- but even without his confirmations this is starting to feel too coherent to simply abandon.

"Here--" she indicates the wands-- "action, motion, snap decisions. It follows naturally from the last row-- you felt you needed to act, so you did." Easy enough.

She skips over the center card. "The nine of swords, you can almost just see it. Grief, trauma, fear. I think-- something happened and you ended up separated and vulnerable." Her brow furrows again. "Or-- a woman? A girl, alone and frightened. Not one of your friends."

Slowly, blinking like she's trying to clear her mind, she picks up her head to consider him.

"I... don't have a lot of justification for what I'm about to say," she says carefully. This is rarely-trodden territory for Scully-- fully unscientific speculation.

"You know just how to sweet-talk me." Scully going out on a limb might be the sexiest thing he's had reason to ponder in a while, and he's had no shortage of options lately. She's thinking over it hard, looking at him like maybe he'll have the answer to whatever's troubling her about the cards; if he weren't so interested in what comes next, he'd lean over and kiss her.

He probably does have the answers, all the connective tissue, but right now, he doesn't have enough to know what context she lacks. His best guess is something to do with the victims. This far from the experience, having seen far worse in his time as a federal agent, he can think of those poor kids with a little more distance than he could back when he was seventeen. It makes it easy to nudge her along. "Tell me everything."

There's not much left that can make her blush, but she feels her cheeks heat up just a little. The way he's looking at her while she's doing something so patently ridiculous-- well it's a lot.

"I think it's both," she says decisively. "There was a girl-- a young girl, and you got involved because you wanted to save her. But you did something reckless and ended up in danger yourself-- so this is for you, and for her. I keep thinking the swords look like bars-- maybe you were caught? And the wands--"

Her hand drifts across the spread, skipping the still-mysterious sun, and she touches the eight of wands softly.

"There's something else significant here. Eight... sticks? pipes?" She frowns at it. "Arrows, maybe? Eight and nine both seem like significant numbers."

But she can't tell him why. This is where her explanations fall apart-- she's doing this by feel rather than according to rules, not even nonsensical rules.

"And then there's this." She taps on the Sun, as though her irritation will transform it into a more sensible card.

Mulder's brows rise, but they've already come this far. Just a little further, and she'll get the whole truth - though he's not sure he'll need to elaborate too much.

It occurs to him briefly that she spent some of her youth on the East Coast. Could she know about the case? Under other circumstances, maybe he'd suspect her of fashioning a narrative based on something like cold reading - but she's just too convincing here. He knows her too well, probably; while she's not beyond trying to pull a fast one on him, that's not what's happening here.

"What does the Sun represent?" he asks. Guessing isn't hard - there's a palpable joy in the artwork - but where it fits in with sacrificed children, he's not sure.

"Happiness, plenty, success, joy. Even reversed it doesn't really have a negative interpretation-- it's always a ray of light," she muses, brows drawn. "It's completely at odds with the rest of this."

From the start she'd expected a difficult story, but this current row is darker than she'd wagered... except for the sun.

She reaches for the deck, thumbs a card off the top.

"I need more context," she explains, and sets it face-up, overlapping the edge of the wayward Sun. The High Priestess, serene and-- judging from Scully's perplexed expression-- not very helpful.

She regards it with a low, puzzled huh.

It does make sense, if in a roundabout way. Maybe it's only here for the symbolism of it all: a child under the sun, dead but - in someone's mind, at least - happy. Or maybe it represents something more selfish, Mulder glorying in closing a case at seventeen. But that would be someplace in the after, wouldn't it? They're still in the during.

When she turns over the High Priestess, with the moon at her feet and a scroll labeled TORAH in her arms, Mulder's got no idea what it might mean. "So, what's our context?"

"Not very helpful," she murmurs. "I would generally read this as-- intuition. Inner wisdom-- that I should trust my gut. And then in the context of this reading, it could mean.... well, me, since I'm the one doing it. But that doesn't make sense either."

She's treating this as deadly serious as a crime scene; like there must be a correct answer here, buried under symbolism and misdirection. Like these are clues.

"Which-- if I take that to mean, what do you think of the Sun and the High Priestess, I have a strong personal association for that, but I don't see how that could tie into what we're talking about."

"Couldn't it?" This is, perhaps, even more interesting a twist than hearing her explain his past to him, without realizing just how close she is. "These are your cards, Scully. For decades, by the looks of them. Maybe they're responding to you as well as me."

Maybe their lives have been so densely intertwined at this point that one of them can't help but bleed into the other, psychically speaking. If he's willing to believe in the validity of tarot cards - and she's making a convincing argument here - then he needs to be willing to believe that her hands touching them matter as much as his.

(Or maybe he's just in the kind of mood that responds well to Scully's involvement in anything, including a serial killer incident from a time when they probably lived thousands of miles away from each other. She's never more beautiful than when she's trying to puzzle something out. He's not sure he's ever loved her more than he does in this moment.)

Of course Mulder is willing to make the leap of faith there. She's not sure if she's more annoyed by the prospect that he could be right, and there could be something here, or by her inability to put the pieces together as they're laid out before her.

"Actually, it's where the cards are from," she murmurs, almost offhandedly, like it's just a little bit of trivia. With everything that happened it's a wonder she didn't throw the cards away-- certainly it had been years before she could touch them again, and always with a certain mistrust. It's all far enough in the past now; now, they just make her think of Melissa. As terrible as what happened was, they'd been so close that summer; that part she doesn't mind remembering.

Of course Melissa would want her to follow the thread of intuition, even if it makes no sense.

"There was a little store Missy and I used to go to-- the sun and the high priestess, to me that means Carinda and Sunlight," she murmurs, leaning back a little to better regard the spread as a whole.

"Carinda and Sunlight," he repeats, brows going up. "Out of a town in Maryland so small, they don't even bother putting it on maps."

Carinda's name wouldn't ping him on its own, but it's hard to forget the kind of guy who'd call himself Sunlight on purpose. He doesn't remember much else of them, beyond the fact that they'd existed, and that he and his friends had a major breakthrough at their little New Age shop. Like Gimble, Phoebe, and the rest of his life in the 70s, they'd faded away into obscurity for him.

It's not surprising, Mulder supposes, that Scully'd be familiar with that shop as well. Maybe Annapolis wasn't a hip and happening spot for palm-readers and tarot freaks, and from what he knew of Melissa before her death, she would have needed a place like that. And Scully got dragged along with, probably. It's still a little eerie to realize that their paths nearly crossed, though, long before they ever worked before. The Eastern Seaboard isn't that small.

That catches her attention, her head snapping up and her eyes wide.

"You were in Craiger?"

It sounds a little closer to panic than is perhaps justified by a teenaged near-miss. That couldn't mean--

She looks at the cards again from that perspective, but can't fit them into the story she knows, not really. The things that felt significant don't match up to the facts as she remembers them-- though, she reminds herself ruefully, you apparently spent half that autumn high.

"That puts this-- Summer of 1979 at the latest," she murmurs. "You met them?"

"Guilty as charged." But that's not a normal reaction to oh, you're familiar with my old stomping grounds. Mulder watches her quizzically, trying to read her the same way she's trying to read her spread: looking for the little details that could unlock a mystery whose details are tantalizingly out of reach.

For a moment, he reviews what he remembers of the shop. Beyond Beyond, was that the name? Your bog-standard occult shop, the kind that was mildly interesting when he was seventeen and a tedious parade of overpriced crystals now that he's not. "I took a...class, I guess you'd call it? It felt more like a support group, if you ask me. I'm probably damaging the scientific validity of your results by telling you this, but we learned about chaos magic."

"Oh my God," she murmurs, looking back between the cards and him. At least that provides some context for the rest of it. "Not one of his private classes? Just--" She shakes her head. "It doesn't matter. It explains the sun, but the spread isn't really about him, I don't think."

She can't entirely ignore the question of why, though. Melissa would say she should tell him about it-- about all of it-- that maybe this whole idea of reading his cards was an excuse to open up about it. After what happened with Daniel, it's harder to dismiss than it ought to be.

"Wherever you went from there, you ended up in trouble." She bites her lip. "Should I keep going?"

The last row should be easier; he clearly made it through his misadventure.

"Open to the public," he assures her, though now he's got questions to ask as well. That's not something people ask when the follow-up is they were so insightful, nothing bad happened there. Especially not when little signs of tension keep showing up in her face and body.

But first, they have another row of cards to get through. "Keep going. Maybe that'll give you the clarity you're looking for."

With a nod, she moves her hand to the next row, leaving Sunlight and the High Priestess where they are. Little chance she'll get away with not explaining it, but she wants to see this through to the end.

The seven of pentacles, six of wands. This time she's considerably more relaxed, turning over the last card-- four of cups, facing toward Mulder.

"There isn't any detail on how you got out of it," she muses, almost apologetically. "You were diligent and focused and worked hard. Whatever you were trying to do-- you succeeded. There was recognition-- you impressed people." Slowly, she's relaxing, puzzling out the happy ending. "It was a formative experience, actually-- you weren't sure what you wanted from life before, but it helped set you on the path you're still on."

Her composure regained, she offers a shrug and a small smile.

"I told you-- you don't really read specifics, most of the time."

Just coincidences, cold-reading, and the collection of background knowledge you forgot you had.

Easy.

The cards are all the little ones, the minor arcana, and he's never been able to keep those straight. But they provide a cheerful wrap-up to the story, which fits the facts of the case - and hopefully it'll make up for the part where he has to tell her what actually happened.

"So that's that." Mulder gives her a knowing little smile, marking points off on his fingers as he continues. "I'll give you points for the balance of chaos and order up here, because you justified the two fathers theory. Points for my two best friends. For the sword, your New Age store owners, the symbolism of eight arrows, living with my father, rescuing a young girl, being trapped - behind bars, no less - and figuring out what I wanted to do with my life. Which comes out to an A+, but I wouldn't expect anything less from you."

You overachiever, you. He leans over the cards to kiss her, because the luxury of doing so whenever he wants is still novel. "I hate to break it to you, Scully, but I think you might be psychic."

This part, she likes. The part where he looks at her like he still knows her, and where he still wants to kiss her, and where he does. They could do with a lot more of that-- now that it's a thing they do. A person can only hold back for so long, and she's done trying to pretend she doesn't want him.

And he says that, and she can't tell whether it's a joke or not. But it doesn't sting the way it might have, back then. Maybe that's what growing up does for you. Or maybe that's what an epiphany does.

When he pulls back, she scoops the cards together, messily dropping them back onto the deck.

"Would you believe you're not the first person to say so?"

"After this? I'm surprised more people don't." Once the cards have been put away, he stretches out in their place, lying on his side with his head propped against his palm. It's comfortable, and it's also an offer to let her ogle him; he hasn't lost the taste for her undivided attention since they let things turn physical. "Do you want all the other details, or do you want to tell me how you know Sunlight and Carinda?"

In fact she is very happy to feast her eyes on him; really she might never give back the shirt.

"Fill in the bits I missed," she suggests.

"A series of murders," he says, taking in the sweep of her gaze. She can keep that shirt as long as she wants if it means she's hanging on his every word; even if her rapt attention is for the shape of his chest rather than what he has to say, he'll take it. "Spring of 1979. I was on spring break in D.C., and my best friend came down from the Vineyard for it. Children - eight, nine years old - were being murdered and left in crypts near my father's apartment. Each one of them was found holding a dead magpie pierced with eight arrows made of human bones.

"The thing that got me...aside from seeing one of the bodies, that is...was the latest victim. Eight years old, abducted from her living room after the lights went out. Her mother was home at the time, but there weren't any clues besides an open front door." His expression clouds, perhaps inevitably. "I think you can see where that led me."

[ n a m e ; ]	Dana Katherine Scully
[ c a n o n ; ]	The X-Files
[ g a m e ; ]	spicy times in noctiumrp

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