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

Jesus, high school. The idea of Mulder diving into danger, chasing serial killers at, what, seventeen?-- well, it checks out, to be fair. But that doesn't mean she has to like it.

So the sword was at least semi-literal; she can't help but be fascinated by the parallels between the story he's telling and the one she wove out of the cards.

"I can't imagine anyone other than you took the Major seriously. Honestly-- how did you even make the connection?"

In retrospect, it was one of the worst things he's ever done; he went in unprepared and only barely survived to tell the tale. But back then - and even now - the fact that he did survive means it was fine, basically. Not his worse experience tracking down serial killers by any means.

"The Major was following deaths of adults - cases that had been ruled accidents and suicides, mostly. There were arrows near them all, and there was reason to believe they might have been the sources of all the hand-carved arrows left with the children." They had fit together in his mind, perhaps inevitably. "We thought there was an occult angle - and so did the cops. Serial killers were everywhere, and ritual murders like these had to have to do with cults, or sacrifices, or Satan."

Mulder laughs a little at the memory. Idly, he reaches over to pull a hanging thread from her collar. "You know what the 80s were like - and we were right on the cusp of them. Preschools were about to be turned upside-down with claims of Satanism. So we found a New Age shop in Maryland - for research purposes - and it turned out our killer had been there, too. He got some of his symbolism from their chaos magic group,and we managed to pull his name and address out of their records. After that, it was a piece of cake - up until he caught me in his living room, anyway."

It's a wild story, the kind she might doubt from anyone else. The kind she might doubt if she wasn't sitting on the tale of Sunlight, even now.

"And you hadn't told anyone where you were going?"

It's the obvious next step, she figures, though it leaves her puzzled as to how he escaped. That part had been left a mystery, or perhaps she just couldn't see it in what they had. (Perhaps, she chides herself, because tarot cards are not actually magic, and magic is not real.)

(She can almost smell the incense. She can still picture the chemical structure of the drug.)

"Who would I tell? My father?" He feels a little pang of guilt, saying it like that, but only a little one - and it dissipates a moment later. "The police? They didn't believe us when we tried."

Not surprising, Mulder suspects. It's a patently unbelievable story, from his cemetery run down to his time spent in a dank basement, struggling to survive.

"I ended up in a dog cage for a few hours, but - actually, we never found out who called the cops. Someone did, and they came out to the house. Turns out they'll believe it when it comes from someone else. The little girl was alive, we both got rescued, and I ended up interviewed by the FBI. I'm pretty sure John Douglas read the transcripts of that."

You can't tell a story like this without some sore spots; she can imagine staying with his father wasn't easy for Mulder, and she's primed herself to see this as a story about not doing what Bill Mulder wanted, anyway.

She can't help wincing at the idea of him in captivity-- but maybe all's well that ends well. Maybe it was a nosy neighbor or something. Whoever called the cops, Scully is grateful to them.

"And here you are, G-man."

"Here I am." He can't resist any longer, putting an arm around her and pulling her over to him. She's right here, touchable and kissable and incredibly attractive, and he doesn't have to spare a thought to what others might think. Of course it means he reaches for her. "Serial killers and UFOs, that's everything."

It is not, but it's not a bad way to tie things up. "I didn't think you were a customer there, too."

It's the most natural thing in the world to slide closer to Mulder, her gaze rising to meet his, her hand set on his bare chest in a way that feels slightly possessive. Surely, it will stop feeling like such a novelty, to be able to touch him, but she intends to enjoy it thoroughly for the moment.

"We moved to Craiger that summer-- some special assignment they needed my father for. Melissa found Beyond Beyond, of course, but we'd go together, practically every day." She smiles at the memory, soft but faintly pained; it's hard not to feel that way when she thinks of her big sister, all the more when she thinks of that time in their lives.

"Carinda-- I think she genuinely believed in that kind of thing, and meant well." It's taken her a long time to come around to feeling that way; it had been easier at the time to brand her a liar, to blame her for some of what happened. "But Sunlight-- Mulder, he was a psychopath. He was using the store to try and build a cult, and killing anyone who had second thoughts."

And look, he's not about to complain about a little possessiveness. Who wouldn't want Dana Scully to claim them as her own? He's utterly smitten, and now that he has no reason to hide it - outside of their professional lives, anyway - he doesn't bother.

That look of lazy adoration evaporates as she tells her story, though. Scully and her sister getting tarot cards at a New Age shop is cute. Scully interacting with a murderous cult leader isn't. Staring openly, the face of someone who believes and doesn't want to, he says, "Sounds like we dodged a bullet. What happened?"

Before agreeing to read the cards she should've thought it through, that all this might come out. It's not quite the lighthearted party trick she promised.

"We'd moved over the summer and since we really didn't know anyone in Craiger, Missy and I spent a lot of time together. We were taking yoga at the store, and-- well. You know Missy; she was listening to Rhiannon on repeat back then, convinced both of us were reincarnated sorceresses." Again, she can't help a small, sad smile, biting at her bottom lip.

"Carinda encouraged that kind of thing-- the idea that any of us might be psychic, or special, you know. I do think she genuinely meant well by it. But we spent a lot of time there-- they had a little cafe, if you remember. It was... nice."

It's not hard to imagine: Melissa graceful and willowy and aware of it, wanting to be something more exciting than a Navy brat in a new town, and Dana tagging along. What else would there be to do? Craiger was tiny; it must have felt like the middle of nowhere, coming from California.

"You got there after the case was wrapped up," he murmurs, carding his fingers through her hair, "and I was probably out of the country by the time teens started dying. So it's you, your sister, and Carinda. Where does Sunlight come in?"

He's there, of course, lurking in the background. They both encountered him. But he clearly flew under the radar enough that no one looked askance at him, even when the deaths started piling up.

If not for the deaths, it might have been a nice story-- youthful foolishness and a stretch of strange dreams.

"Sunlight lead some of the classes-- more advanced ones, which he'd use to identify victims. People he believed had strong psychic abilities-- he'd invite them to his one-on-one classes and drug them. It was in the incense. He'd tell them the trip was an out-of-body experience and use it draw them into his cult."

She frowns, looking away.

"If they refused, or if he felt threatened, he'd kill them and stage the bodies to look like car accidents. The first I heard about it was one of the seniors-- Melissa knew her a little, I think. I'd never met her."

It's not hard to picture, when he really looks back on it. Sunshine had been the hippy-dippiest kind of guy, a particularly impressive feat when you considered that most of his brethren had moved on to greener pastures by the time Mulder had been old enough to drive. Anyone who went by "Sunshine" in 1978 was in it for the long haul. But at the same time, he'd come off harder than the woman there - Carinda? Carinda, Scully'd said. Neither of their names had made an impression at the time. What little Mulder remembers of the guy was prickly. Two-faced, apparently, if he'd seduced so many teenagers into a cult.

"And after you first heard about it?" He has the beginnings of a guess, too delicate an instinct to put into words just yet It seems likely in the worst possible way: Scully might have read all this in the paper, but if she and her sister had been regular customers at Beyond Beyond, it seems far more likely that the two of them got some first-hand experience.

What it really comes down to is whether it was Melissa who got snared, or if it was the woman he's currently got an arm around.

It's hard to answer that question with anything other than I saw a ghost. And she doesn't want to think-- she doesn't know what to make of it anymore, honestly. As earnestly as she'd believed back then that the experience was real, she'd convinced herself since that it couldn't have been.

"I... became convinced there was more to it," she says, because that's true. "The rash of deaths, the unlikely excuses-- and if you looked beyond the staged accidents there were ritualistic aspects, injuries meant to mimic the deaths of saints. I don't know what I was thinking, honestly, except that no one seemed to care and it was all too strange to be that simple."

There's a faraway look in her eyes as she tries to navigate the memories. She's moved, ironically, from belief to skepticism to a sort of questioning that's inherently uneasy. There are things she never did manage to explain-- and for most of her life she'd decided it meant they couldn't be true. But she has to admit-- she could never disprove most of it, either.

"Carinda thought-- well, I think she thought everyone was psychic, really. She had no idea what was going on; but she was so welcoming, it meant there were always people around for Sunlight. And I guess... It was a confusing time," she says carefully. "I think I was grasping at straws, anything that might help make sense of it, so when he offered me a session to better understand my alleged abilities..."

She grimaces. Foolish, and so unlike her that she half expects Mulder to chide her. Lord knows she's chiding her younger self.

He should be horrified, and he is - in the same way he supposes I was drugged and caged by a serial killer is horrifying, distantly and with the knowledge that he survived it. Look what they've each come through, how close a call they each had. His arm tightens around her in a little squeeze.

But the thing that overtakes any sense of worry for her, eased along by the fact that she's here and apparently fine, is where she trails off. "Your alleged abilities. Have you been holding out on me this whole time, Scully? I could have been getting my psychic readings for free."

Everything else, they'll come back to. Her suspicions regarding ritualized death aren't unfounded; it's the right time period, if a strange choice of subject for a New Ager. He'd always held the assumption they eschewed Christianity for the most part. But there's time for that, and for digging into the details.

It's all so far in the past that it feels safe to talk about; like a story that happened to someone else. Sunlight is presumably still rotting in jail somewhere, and she's far away and for the moment safe. Older, wiser, and better able to take care of herself-- in no small part due to the lessons learned that autumn.

"Anyone would have had a 'psychic' experience in that room," she murmurs, rolling her eyes. But it's not an answer to his question. If you'd asked her a year ago-- six months-- maybe even a week-- she'd have laughed it off so much more easily. Right now-- on the heels of that eerie reading, knowing Daniel is healing in part because of what she saw in the temple-- it feels less straightforward.

Of course I'm not psychic, she wants to say; but she can't say nothing real happened back then. Of course Sunlight hadn't been an avenging angel, ready to bring about the world's rebirth in blood-- but maybe Maisie in the locker room had been more than an overactive imagination.

(It's not as though she's never seen a ghost since then.)

"I thought I could see the molecular structures of the dye in the carpet, the oxygen combusting around the candle wick-- I saw the Devil, and then I spent the next day swearing to everyone that of course I wasn't stoned."

"Only you," he says, all affection, tracing shapes idly on her hip, "would geek out on an LSD trip."

Mulder'd like the answer to be you're psychic, Scully, anyone can see that, but even he can admit that what she's describing sounds less like a vision and more like she was high off her ass and doing the scientist equivalent of staring at her hand. "What was the Devil like?"

He, after all, is the only real connection to psychic possibilities. She'll tell him that Satan was a hallucination, too, and none of it actually meant anything, but if any of it was ESP, some message from beyond Beyond Beyond, a devil could have been. Mulder's far more willing to allow for demons within his cosmology than anyone on the other side.

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."

"Sunlight knew the monster he was." On some level, whether conscious or not. Maybe he'd wanted to frighten Scully with an image of evil lurking, but his control over what Scully saw couldn't have been such that he'd orchestrated the details of the vision.

And then she speaks again, and it's everything he never would have expected. Mulder looks at her, taking in that momentary distance in her gaze as it sharpens into the here and now. "What did you see, Scully?"

That gets a hum of more or less assent. It's more complicated-- whatever Sunlight believed he was, he thought he was a necessary force of brutality. He thought he was an angel, but as her grandmother saw things-- angels were generally monstrous. Her experiences have not dissuaded her of that view.

It takes her a moment to answer. This is-- a secret? No, not exactly-- but she's buried it, denied it, tried in so many ways to forget.

"Maisie," she murmurs, finally. "The senior who'd died-- I saw her in the locker room, like she was any other girl. And then she wasn't."

Exactly the kind of experience she flatly refuses to entertain in cases until forced. She has been holding out on him, if not - he assumes - on purpose. This can't be something a person simply forgets, but maybe she'd found ways to excuse the experience. Weird trips, stress about the murders, all kinds of strange little pieces of her life coming together to make her hallucinate. It's a thin explanation to cling to, but it sounds reasonable on the face of it. Scully loves reasonable, and as a kid with no prior experience with the supernatural, she must have needed to find a way to explain to herself what had happened.

"What happened?" He's not convinced that seeing a flash of a dead girl would be enough to burn the experience into Scully's memory; anyone could imagine that by accident, thinking of a death when everyone else is thinking of it, too. Something more must lie beneath her explanation.

Without really meaning to she shuts her eyes, trying to remember the details. Ironic, really, considering how long she spent trying to forget-- or trying to tell herself she misremembered it, she imagined it, she dreamed it.

"We were the only people in the locker room-- the period hadn't started yet," she says softly. "And she seemed sad. I asked her if she was a friend of Maisie's-- I'd never met her, I didn't recognize her-- and she seemed confused, and I rambled something about the accident and..."

She can feel an echo of the inexplicable burning sensation; without thinking about it she draws her hand to her collarbone, clasping it around her necklace.

"She screamed, not like anything I'd ever heard-- and then she started bleeding. It was like her body was just... tearing itself apart, reliving her death. Begging someone to stop. I knew it wasn't an accident because I saw her die again there."

And she knows what it sounds like-- the kind of ghost story she'd roll her eyes out on a case.

"I ran to get help-- I didn't understand, couldn't think what else to do-- but of course when everyone came there was nothing. Not a drop of blood. They thought it was some kind of prank."

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

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

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