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

"You're lucky," he says, and the waitress comes back with a mug for each of them. It occurs to him that he doesn't know what chamomile tea tastes like - but it looks pale and kind of bland to his eye. He takes a sip of his coffee, grimacing at the burnt flavor of it. "You're really lucky."

Easy to say when he's known her for ten minutes and met no one she's ever associated with, but Fox Mulder's used to making snap judgments. More importantly, he's used to shooting his mouth off without any consideration whatsoever.

"I know," she admits. Which-- what else can she say? They have the normal kinds of disagreements, she thinks, her parents. It could be a lot worse. At least she knows they love her no matter what.

She takes a sip of her tea, eyeing the fries but not trying to steal one. (Yet.)

"Though I don't think they'd be very happy with me if I ran off trying to solve murders."

"No," he agrees, letting himself be led back to the subject they're ostensibly here for. He squeezes a blob of ketchup out onto one corner of the pile of fries as he goes on. "It's dangerous, it's stupid, and it's getting in the way of the police. But if you don't -"

And here, he meets her eyes again, utterly intent.

"- then a kid's going to die. She was taken from her own home, while her mom was in the basement. She should have been safe." It's been months now, and he's still never quite shaken that sick feeling he got the first time he saw Sarah Lowe's picture on the news. Not when he really thinks about the stakes. "And the cops don't know how to find her. You'd look for her then, wouldn't you?"

You'd think, having been the one to raise the topic, that she'd be better steeled to talk about it. But she isn't. Though the truth is it's not the words that give her a chill-- it's the look in his eyes. He isn't bragging, though you might imagine someone who-- allegedly-- stopped a serial killer would. It's more an echo of--

Of some desperation, the way he must have felt to go off and do that.

She lifts her chin, trying not to seem too shaken.

"I don't know," she admits, softly. "I can't imagine what I could do that the police couldn't."

He shrugs. Maybe she'd be as lost as the cops - but maybe not. There's no reason to think she wouldn't try; she's interested enough to ask about it, and she's watching him steadily, looking at him like she's trying to puzzle out whether he's telling the truth or not.

The fact that she's even trying puts her ahead of plenty of real authorities. She's giving the story a chance, even though he knows it sounds crazy.

"If you found a clue they didn't understand," he says, drawing the thought out as he bites down on a fry, "and they wouldn't listen to you. What would you do?"

It's hard for Dana to picture herself in that position; she just can't imagine how she'd stumble into an inscrutable clue that way. Her life is fairly boring, and this sounds like a mystery novel.

"Honestly, I don't know," she muses. Wouldn't she-- well, if the police wouldn't listen, who could she go to? Her parents, maybe? But if they didn't believe her, either?

"What did you find?" she asks, instead, a little uneasy at the idea of being the only thing standing between an innocent life and a tragedy.

He can see it in his mind's eye again: A little boy lying on his back, his skin already discolored from all the things that happen to bodies after they stop living. The bird, just as stiff and dead, resting on his chest with its halo of arrows.

"I saw things," he says quietly, because he's not sure how she'll take it if he starts describing a corpse in detail to her. A lot of people wouldn't be able to handle hearing about the details; there are nights when he can't handle the things he's seen. "One of the bodies. I knew the stuff they didn't tell the reporters. And that's why I knew that one dead kid was related to a living one who was kidnapped. But the police wouldn't listen to me. So -"

This is where it starts to get hairy. "I got their case file. I read what they had about the murder."

The lack of detail is probably for the best; she can read between the lines, at least enough to follow. She's terribly curious about it, actually-- not about the body, but the specifics. What he could possibly have noticed.

That last bit, though, makes her eyebrows shoot up with surprise... and a little suspicion, admittedly.

"There's no way someone just let you read a case file,"

She's so straightforward about it - enough so that it dissipates some of his dark mood. He smiles, just a little sheepish. "I never said I asked permission."

"Now I'm not sure if you're a detective or a spy," she says, fixing him with a deeply skeptical look. But he's got her hooked.

"So how did you do it?"

"My friends distracted the police long enough for me to find it." When they're basically a step up from Keystone Kops, it's not that hard to get around them - just a little nervewracking. He picks up another fry without actually eating it. "Then we started looking into the crime scene - a stone that was left there, and a poison. And we needed a New Age shop, which is what brought us to Craiger."

Which reminds him of her earlier question - why Maryland? Why not Massachusetts? "Beyond Beyond's only an hour and a half from D.C. That's where I live right now."

"You're definitely a spy," she teases, and tries not to feel self-conscious about doing it. She leans back, considering him as she takes a packet of sugar to add to her tea.

"That almost makes showing up here the most plausible part of it." Stealthily-- not at all stealthily-- she steals a fry.

"Double-oh nine," he says, nudging the basket of fries closer to the middle of the table. He could polish off the whole thing, if he wanted, but he's more interested in talking; there's plenty of opportunity for Dana to get her fair share. "The weird thing is, we weren't the only ones who found Beyond Beyond. The killer did, too."

"No," she gasps. That idea, genuinely, shocks her; Beyond Beyond is more or less her favorite place in Craiger. (Don't tell her mom.) The idea that going there could mean rubbing elbows with murderers is...

"Okay, just... tell me everything."

"Okay." He leans in a little, arms resting on the table. "I don't know if they still meet there, but there were these people who did chaos magick. They invited us to sit in - and I recognized their flag. The killer was...he used the symbol, too."

He still can't quite bring himself to explain the bone arrows or the dead magpie to her. Dana seems nice, and she seems like the kind of person who's never had anything really bad happen to her; most people seem that way to him. She shouldn't have to imagine what happened to Billy, or what almost happened to Sarah.

"The chaos magick people thought he was a creep, so they kicked him out - but they still had his name and address on file. So we drove out to his house." Which, in retrospect, sounds exactly as insane as everyone said, back when everything happened. He glances down at his hands. "It was pretty stupid of us."

Unconsciously she mirrors his action, coming closer, though she (primly) keeps her elbow off the table. It feels appropriate, given the seriousness of the matter, to keep it quiet.

He doesn't give details-- she's glad for that-- but something in the way he pauses gives her a hint of the magnitude of whatever it was he saw.

"It sounds... dangerous," she says carefully. It does sound stupid, but she wants him to keep talking.

"It might not have been," he says, and he's torn between feeling self-conscious and proud. It's going to impress her, he's certain of that. He's just not sure whether it'll be for good or bad. "If I hadn't gone inside, it probably would have been fine."

Personally, he still thinks it was the right thing to do. He's still proud of himself: finding him, getting in there, getting out again. Saving Sarah from Billy's fate.

"You didn't try the police again?"

If they'd turned him away, she understands why-- kind of-- but still.

"But.... you made it out okay," she says, unsure. Obviously he lived to tell the tale....

He hesitates a moment. "We tried some stuff between point A and point B. But the long and short is that he caught me there. So technically a serial killer caught me before I caught a serial killer."

That makes it sound like it wasn't a big deal, and like he doesn't have nightmares about it still. Telling a girl about walking up gasping, feeling like your chest's compressed, isn't going to impress her. "But my friends got the police. And we got the guy before he could kill again."

"I guess that's the important part," she says softly. Of course she's curious-- how could you not be?-- but not enough to make her ask for details. It's the kind of thing you want and don't want to know at once. Dana wouldn't be surprised to hear it left him with nightmares. (At least his have some explanation. Hers just have the Devil to blame.)

"I can't believe I've never heard any of this," she adds, the slightest frown creasing her face. "Did Carinda know him?"

"It was a couple months ago," he says, shrugging. Privately, he's a little surprised she hasn't heard of it, either - if Craiger's anything like Chilmark, people probably talk about it in veiled terms now, but you'd think she'd have heard about the incident or something similarly euphemistic. Maybe Craiger's part in the whole thing was disguised well enough that it hasn't made an impact. And it'd probably be terrible business for Carinda and Sunlight to tell people about the serial killer who used to hang out there, so maybe that has something to do with it. "It's old news now, I guess. I don't know if Carinda knew him. She must have seen him, but that doesn't mean they were friendly."

It probably doesn't help matters that as of now, Dana has basically no friends here. There are the kids she sort of knows in the neighborhood, enough to maybe wave when they're walking by, but it's hard to ease into the summer lawlessness of a small town. Beyond Beyond is probably her social hub right now, and even then she's got her nose stuck in a book half the time, and the rest of it she's shyly people-watching, if she's not talking to Carinda.

"She must have been devastated," she murmurs seriously. She can't imagine it's the kind of thing anyone would take in stride, but especially not someone so deeply invested in helping people better themselves.

"I can't believe it."

"Yeah." She let someone into her store - into her life, considering how things seem to run at Beyond Beyond - only to find out that they were the worst kind of person living. Willing to do evil for the sake of incomprehensible beliefs. Taking advantage of Beyond Beyond's community and destroying lives.

If it were him, they'd have to hold him back from the murderer - he knows that much. If he'd taken Samantha, Mulder would have found a way to get back at him. He's not sure if he should be scared of that part of him, the part thirsting for the most brutal kind of justice available, but he's not about to figure it out at a diner table.

"If you go to the library, they can probably look it up for you." Believe it, Dana. "I even talked to the FBI about it."

"Obviously I'm going to the library about it." Probably later today, but she's not going to tell him that-- partly because the eagerness feels unseemly, mostly because she's well aware that she lied about being picked up and doesn't want to acknowledge that isn't true.

"And now you're back here," she adds, musing. Not quite asking the question about why-- what he's so interested in now, when presumably he's not hot on the trail-- but leaving space if he wants to tell her.

"Yeah." They got through the whole thing without mentioning cages, which Fox is going to count as a win. Nobody wants to hear about how you were locked up like a dog, especially not when they're eating. "I'm interested in remote viewing. And I got lucky last time."

QED, here he is, shrugging through a sip of coffee.

[ 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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