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

[faithfulskeptic]

[ 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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[faithfulskeptic]

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."

[bigfootfetish]

"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?"

[faithfulskeptic]

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."

[bigfootfetish]

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.

[faithfulskeptic]

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."