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

"Religious books," Bill says, in a tone that manages not to be a question but still demands an answer. Dana, to her credit, does not wince and also does not kick Fox in the shins.

It's not exactly a secret that the girls hang out at Beyond Beyond. The yoga classes are completely sensible, after all. But it's enough to chafe at traditional Scully superstition, and Bill probably objects more than the rest of them, since he thinks as the eldest he ought to be in charge.

"I'm helping Fox with a research project-- he's from out of town visiting relatives and he doesn't know his way around our library."

He shrugs - poor, poor pitiful me - and gives Bill a smile that's only going to get him into hotter water. There's no saving him, though; none of this seems like a big deal to him, and he's utterly incapable of pretending it is. It's a free country, after all, and Dana can go wherever she wants with whoever she wants. If her probably-brother doesn't like it, he can tell the nearest hole in the ground.

"It's actually my first time here," he says brightly. His gaze shifts Dana's way, over and down, and he says a little quieter, "So who is he, Dana? Your brother?"

Bill can still hear. Of course Bill can still hear. Fox just can't bring himself to care.

Indeed, Bill can hear, and he does not like your tone, Fox. Maybe it's the way he says Dana. Maybe it's the simple fact that a boy who Bill hasn't vetted is saying her name at all.

"This is my brother Bill," she introduces unnecessarily, but in a friendly tone, like being aggressively normal can fix this.

What it gets her is Bill's heavy gaze focused on her.

"Does Mom know where you are?"

She finally starts to look annoyed.

"I'm at the library, Bill," she snaps back. "Not some-- some dive bar or something."

"Nice to meet you, too," he mutters. It's easy to figure things out from here: What are your intentions with my little sister? And they're entirely honorable - frankly, he doubts he's smooth enough to parlay sad conversations into heavy petting - but try telling Big Brother here that.

(Would he be like this, if Samantha were home? Unequivocally yes, but that's because any stranger talking to his sister after half a decade missing would raise alarm bells. If she'd never disappeared, Fox would like to believe he'd be normal. Normal-ish. At least willing to hear a guy out, probably.)

"I thought we'd hit the dive bar after we researched the devil and listened to Led Zeppelin," he adds dryly. If they're under this much suspicion just for being seen together, he's not going to waste his time trying to get on Bill's good side. It doesn't sound like he has one. (Maybe that's true of all Bills.) "I hear if you play "Stairway to Heaven" backwards, they praise Satan."

Really she has nothing more racy than psychic phenomena on her mind. He's cute, sure, and there's a part of her that finds the sad story endearing. But they're on a mission, here. And it's not like she expects anyone to be looking at her that way-- Bill's concern, she figures, is entirely misplaced-- and thus doubly overstepping.

"You think you're funny?" Bill is saying, and she slides in between the two of them-- not that she's tall enough to block their line of sight. She shoots a withering you're not helping glare over her shoulder.

"He's joking." She doesn't add the obviously but the tone says it. "We're just looking at books, c'mon."

In the distance the librarian is stirring; Craiger is a sleepy little town more often than not, and the opportunity for a good shushing seems nigh.

"Hilarious," Fox shoots back, just before Dana gives him that shut up, stop it kind of look. It's reasonably convincing, if only because failing to listen will mean the end of the search. He might as well walk right over to the librarian on duty and ask for help.

So he crosses his arms and waits, awkward and a little sullen, while a girl a foot shorter than him tries to make peace. His gaze doesn't move from Bill's stupid, angry face.

Honestly, what are boys even good for?

When it comes down to it, though, she thinks-- probably-- she can get away with this. Bill is trying to throw his weight around, but when it comes down to it he doesn't have any actual authority to punish her, and she hasn't done anything to punish. Maybe, barely, vaguely at odds with the spirit of the law, but certainly nowhere near violating the letter.

"We're just looking at books," she repeats, standing her ground. "Are you really going to tattle on me, Bill?"

It infuriates him. But also, he doesn't have a good response. Bill's jaw work and he glances back and forth between the two of them like he's looking for something cutting to respond with.

Fox can't help it. He snorts at the question - and especially at the reaction it gets. This is a jab that lands, judging by Bill's face.

"If that's a no," he says, with a smile that could probably be described as shit-eating, "I'm still waiting for the grand tour. Nice to meet you, Bill."

It's undeniably a dismissal, one that's probably going to piss the guy off. But consider: Who gives a damn?

Unsurprisingly, Bill looks a bit like he wants to throw Fox out the window. Dana manages not to wince, mostly because she's had a lot of practice staring her brother down over petty nonsense. She can practically see the impulses warring-- how incredibly pissed off he is, vying with his desire to seem Above All That as the eldest.

Finally the tension breaks, or at least redirects.

"You can tell Mom about it yourself," he promises coldly, and shoots a final glare Fox's way before stalking off, clearly looking to at least have the last word on the matter.

She takes a breath and turns, still looking a little ticked off.

"Did you have to antagonize him?"

He's satisfied with the whole conversation, right up until he sees Dana's face. His easy smile evaporates into something more affronted. "I didn't antagonize him. He started out that way."

If there was a way for Fox to win her brother over, he doesn't know what it is. Even if he'd stood there silently, he'd have been public enemy number one just for being there. It had seemed obvious enough in the thick of it, and to be honest, it still does now.

"That's Bill," she admits. "But the Satanic message stuff didn't help."

Nothing would help exactly, but it could have... hurt less. He could've done a better job seeming like he doesn't know her-- especially considering the fact that he doesn't know her.

"It doesn't matter," she decides. She'll deal with it later.

If it doesn't matter, he's off the hook.

(For now, anyway. He's going to have to figure out where this conversation fits into the larger picture of who Dana is. Someone who definitely doesn't want Fox Mulder to make jokes around her older brother. Concerned about what he thinks about her? Concerned about what people think about her, in general? Obviously some kind of Christian, judging by the necklace, so probably not a big fan of Satan.)

He clatters down the steps when they reach them, taking them two at a time. The floor they come out on is somehow even more stuffed full of bookshelves. Fox gapes at them, openly admiring. "Whoa."

Religion is only half of it; she might be less touchy about the Devil if he wasn't so buddy-buddy in her dreams. They've been worse since arriving in Craiger; more frequent, somehow more ominous. More significant in feel, even if the things she 'predicts' are vague nothings.

It's weird enough that she hasn't wanted to mention it to him, even though he's expressly here to dig into weird things. This feels different; and anyway, it's not like it helps with his real question.

The mood lightens when they make it down to the lower level, and she can't help but grin, feeling an odd pride.

"Told you!"

"You told me," he agrees, utterly delighted. Whatever frustration Dana might have had, it seems gone now. Back to what matters most: Looking for books on the strangest parts of the human experience. There are enough down here that he can almost believe one holds the key to finding Samantha. "Let's split up and see what we find. Anything related to psychic phenomena is fair game."

The idea of splitting up is not nearly as fun as looking together, but it makes sense. And it's probably a good idea, she reminds herself; this isn't actually a Hardy Boys book, he's trying an admittedly odd, unlikely thing in pursuit of a terribly real goal.

So she just nods, inclining her head toward the far end of the room.

"I'll go that way."

"I'll be over here." And fortunately, they won't be split up for long.

A few minutes into the search, he manages to wander into a set of bookshelves that cover everything from tarot cards to encounters with angelic beings. For a moment or two, he just stares, taking it all in. And then he turns and calls over his shoulder, just a little louder than he probably should. "Dana! Come look at this."

It's harder to put Bill's disapproval out of her mind when she's out on her own; she wanders down the room, between shelves, looking for-- anything.

When he calls her name, it's a relief. She hurries back-- just a little faster than she probably should. It's not technically running. Not if there's no one to see.

"What-- oh, wow." Her face lights up at the selection-- there's potential here. Something, maybe, to help find what Fox is really looking for. She grabs a title, more or less at random. Maybe intuition will guide her.

"Remote viewing, right?"

"Remote viewing." He can't help it: he's excited by the options. They're pretty varied, ranging from dime store horoscope books to thick, serious-looking discussions of the occult. Fox pulls one, glances at the cover, then reaches for another. "Or anything related to distance. If astral projection will get me where I want to go, I'll try that, too."

It sounds stupid, saying it out loud - but it's true. No one's been able to solve Samantha's kidnapping through conventional means. Why the hell would he not try the crazy stuff? Just to see.

She nods, and lapses into quiet as she starts paging through the book-- checking the index, flipping around. The first book has nothing more than brief mentions so she tries another.

"Do you really believe in all this?"

She can't help but be curious. She's never quite sure how much she believes, herself.

Prophetic dreams, reads a random page she lands on.

"I don't know," he admits, scanning the spines for any other relevant titles. When he spots one, he pulls it. They can take a big stack over to a table and start digging, he figures. "But if it's all fake, there sure are a lot of books about it."

Not that that means anything - there are a lot of books about the Bible, too, right? It doesn't feel like a good enough answer. "And I think...there's more to the world than what we know, right? There was a time when we didn't know what stars were made of, or that the Earth went around the sun. What if psychic powers are just one more thing we don't yet understand?"

"Sure," she muses, and flips away from the section on dreams without much more than skimming it. If it means anything, she isn't sure she wants to know. And it's not what they're here for.

"I mean-- why not?"

Dissatisfied with the offerings, she shelves the book, tries another. Certainly there's plenty of writing here, trying to understand it. That's a good sign, maybe? Even now she can't shake the sense that Carinda would know-- could point them so easily in the right direction-- but there's a part of her that desperately wants to figure it out on her own.

Fox pages through one book, and then another, but nothing quite hits what he wants. Even one with an entire chapter on remote viewing doesn't quite get where he wants it to go; it's about seeing places, projecting some part of yourself out into the world so you can visit Paris or something. And that isn't what he's looking for - he doesn't know where it is he's supposed to be looking.

Twenty minutes pass, and he doesn't find anything. Which isn't reason to give up, he knows - but maybe they aren't going to get what they want out of the Craiger library. With a sigh, he puts his latest book back on the shelf. "Think Carinda's back at Beyond Beyond?"

It's hard not to feel disappointed by that. Though she's not sure what she was hoping for. A treasure map? This way to Samantha Mulder scrawled in code? She's fifteen, how can she really help with a missing person?

"Probably," she says, sliding her last book back onto the shelf and trying to stay optimistic. Carinda can help if anyone can-- at least, so Dana wants to believe.

"I'll walk you back."

It's probably for the best, he tells himself. He couldn't check anything out anyway - and even if he could, returning the books would be a bitch. Besides, Dana's willing to come back with him, and that feels like a plus right about now. Every time he fails to turn anything up, it sucks to be alone with his thoughts.

"If you need a ride," he says, on the their way back upstairs, "I can get you home. So you don't have to spend another dime on it."

Otherwise, he assumes, she'll be calling around for her sister and waiting around for her to show up. It's a small town, but there's plenty of countryside around here; they might live out in the sticks.

It's a kind, chivalrous offer on his part, but she can't help a little laugh. Bill had been so suspicious of seeing her visit the library with a stranger, she can't imagine the drama if they caught her getting out of Fox's car.

"I'll be fine-- I can walk. It just would've been on her way. We don't need to give Bill something else to complain about."

[ 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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