by Justin Glasser and Pares
1. Skinner
Food Lion Grocery Store
Bent, North Carolina
5: 34 PMThe punk in the Volkswagen gave her the finger as he swerved into *her* parking space. Little prick. He must have been sixteen and three minutes by the look of him and he had taken *her* spot, the spot she'd been waiting for. With her blinker on.
Vivian MacElvey parked on the far end of the lot, and debated keying the kid's car as she walked past it. Sun glinted off the new Bug's mirror-dark hood. Not only a prick, but a spoiled brat. She sighed. At least it wouldn't rain on her when she lugged her groceries back out to the car.
Only January and already too warm to be wearing her winter coat. Hello, Greenhouse Effect. Or El Niño, whatever.
The pneumatic doors of the Food Lion whooshed open, enveloping her in refrigerated air fragranced with deli meats and floor wax.
All she wanted was a few things, enough to get her through tonight and tomorrow, but with this crowd she'd be waiting half an hour at least. For an instant she considered ditching the whole idea and picking up a burger on the way home, but she was trying to lose her last ten pounds before summer. She might as well get this out of the way.
Ten minutes later, waiting in an obscenely long deli line after claiming the last cart (featuring a squeaking wheel), Vivian was reconsidering her decision. This was so typical of her life: when she was up, she was way up, like that day she got hired in at the office, and fit into her good blue dress, and found a twenty crumpled on the pavement near her car. Today was obviously her karmic payback for that day.
Reaching for a jar of artichoke hearts, Vivian snagged her new pantyhose on a shelf of baby peas.
Perfect.
"Dammit," she muttered, leaning over, lifting her hem a little to see how bad the damage was. She was pushed off balance by the idiot who slammed his cart into hers. It smacked into the display, knocking three tiny silver cans to the floor. Sighing in exasperation, she reached for one of the dented cans and found it pressed into her palm by the other cart's driver. His fingers brushed hers briefly, and she looked up to see his face.
"I'm sorry," he murmured.
A dark haired man with large, expressive brown eyes. Kind of cute.
She smiled at him.
"I hope you have insurance," she said. "I'm pretty sure I would have knocked them over without your help. It's been that kind of day." He wasn't bad looking at all. Not too tall. A sweet face. Nice shoulders. She felt her smile widen.
"Oh, no, it was my fault entirely," he said. He fumbled with the can he held, rolling it back and forth between his hands.
Well, Viv, she thought to herself, make a new friend.
"Well... I'll let it slide this time." She hoped she wasn't batting her lashes; Eileen was always warning her about excessive eyelash batting. "I'm Vivian MacElvey. I work in town." She extended her hand.
"My name's Harold," he murmured, taking the offered hand in a gentle grip.
Vivian had her eyes trained on his left hand, looking for a wedding ring, when she realized that she was shaking her possible Mystery Date's wrist.
Her hand had closed around his, and then... just kept going.
Harold was missing his right thumb.
She tightened her grip rather than fling his hand away in horror, and *made* the smile stay on her face.
"I hope we bump into each other again some time," she heard herself say. Smile. Smile, Vivian. You can die a thousand deaths later on, in the car, far far away from your latest humiliating experience.
"So do I," Harold replied, his voice low and even.
At last, she let go of what was really the beginning of his forearm and fled down the frozen food aisle.
Sure her face was still scarlet, even after a half-hour wait in the checkout line, Vivian wished for a scarf and some Jackie-O sunglasses. She was too old to be this silly. So she goofed, made a little faux pas. The guy, Harold, he hadn't noticed, she was sure. She should just--
"Get over it, Vivian," she commanded herself, shoving the cart with the squeaking wheel up onto the curb so it wouldn't roll away as she unloaded it. By the time she'd climbed behind the wheel of her '85 Chevy Cavalier, she was coming down from her mini- nervous break down.
Sweat beaded her upper lip, and for the millionth time she wished she could afford a new car, or at least get the air conditioning fixed on this heap. She'd meant to have it looked at, but it was only January-- she thought she'd have until the beginning of March at least.
Vivian stared at her cracked dash, her coat heavy and too tight around her shoulders. She didn't have the energy to struggle out of it now that she was already in the stuffy cab of the car, and she flicked the AC/Heat/Fan dials idly, pretending she could feel a little chilly breeze, despite the heat. Her head was beginning to hurt, and she could feel the sweat gathering on her back. She bet that kid in the Bug had air.
Little prick.
A shadow fell across her lap, a sudden bar of darkness.
The thumbless man from the supermarket was resting his forearm on the lip of her rolled down window.
"Oh! God-- Harold. You startled me." Her heart stuttered in her chest, and a wave of unease splashed her head to foot. Harold's gaze was focused and intent; he seemed a different man from the gentleman in the store who'd helped her pick up fallen vegetables.
"I just wanted to..."
Perfect. He was going to ask her out. Just what she needed. The sun was too bright in her eyes. It made her brain throb. She felt a little dizzy from the glare.
"You wanted to..." She prompted, hoping he'd say what he had to say and leave her alone; god, she needed three ibuprofen and a nap. And before the nap, what the hell, a shot of Stoli.
"I wanted to say thank you."
How nice, Vivian thought sourly.
The headache buzzed in her skull like a chainsaw.
Thank you.
thank you
when did it get so dark?
Crystal City Apartments
Washington DC
Early MorningHe was in the parking lot of a grocery store pushing a cart full of stuff that he didn't usually buy: yogurt and grapefruit and bean sprouts. Sunlight glinted off the cars, making his head throb. He wanted to get home and take his shoes off, put a cold cloth on his head. Have a shot of Stoli maybe, and a nice grilled chicken breast for dinner, which was strange because he didn't like chicken, really. He was more of a steak man.
He kept feeling the urge to look over his shoulder, to push the cart faster, to bolt, but he didn't. That was foolish. He had nothing to fear. Instead, he put his hand under his left arm, groping for the gun, feeling the sweat trickle down the center of his back, although it was only the middle of a sunny afternoon in a crowded parking lot. Then it wasn't.
Time changed, and it was dark and he was alone, hands clasped behind his back, in the dark, alone, and afraid. Afraid. And then he wasn't alone.
And that was worse.
Walter Skinner woke with a start, jerking up against the bedclothes, choking against them as if he were drowning.
Still dark.
Sighing, he collapsed against the pillows, turning his head to see the blood-red numbers of the clock.
3:47
He groped for his glasses on the night table, pushed back the blankets, and set his feet on the floor. Skinner never felt more like an old man than he did in these morning hours, when he woke smelling of fresh fear, tired, dragged out, and fed up.
The dreams had started about two weeks ago, and they always started the same. He was shopping, then it was dark, then, sometimes, there was a voice dancing around the edges of his brain. A woman's voice or a man's-- it varied. He hardly heard it before he woke up, damp with fear. At first he would get up, get a glass of water and go back to bed, but the dreams had started to come back every time he closed his eyes. He hadn't slept a night through in six days and he was starting to feel it.
After brewing some coffee, he retired to the recliner, file folder in hand. He'd almost enjoy these early mornings if it weren't for the sleep deprivation. His head starts were helping him get an amazing amount of work done, and he liked the slow shift from night into day. It was oddly peaceful to listen to the dim sounds of his building waking up, drink a first cup of coffee prior to a leisurely shower. The yellow light of the sun reflected off the building across the way; it made him wish his own windows faced east. And, despite the fact that he spent most of his time this way, he liked to be alone. He'd rather be asleep, but overall, alone wasn't bad.
What was bad was the exhaustion that would come later, during the staff meetings or the boring paperwork. His afternoons were wars with sleep, but even if he lay down on the leather couch and had Kim hold his calls, he wouldn't rest. He'd stopped trying to take naps. The afternoons were murder.
The mornings, though, when he could tell himself a new day had started and there was nothing wrong, when he could almost believe that getting up at a quarter to four was just getting a jump on the day... well, the mornings were fine.
J. Edgar Hoover Building
Washington D.C.
8:01 AMHe stepped out of the elevator, eyes already grainy from weariness, and shouldered impatiently through the usual assortment of bureaucracy and administrative assistants. Kim sat at her desk as always, fingers flying over the keyboard. She got in at 7:30 everyday, because, as she had chirped to him at one Secretary's Day lunch, she was a morning person.
"Morning, Kim," he said, pausing open his office door.
She spun in her chair. "Mr. Skinner--" she began, but he had already seen them, the thorns in his side, the banes of his existence, the two people he liked more than anyone else he knew in the FBI.
Scully sat in a chair like a normal human being, but Mulder prowled, investigating the photos on the shelves.
"--pretty impressive--" he was saying, and Skinner knew from the frame that Mulder was holding the picture of him with Susannah Bilkes, his former partner's daughter.
"She's like a daughter to me, Mulder," he said. "To what do I owe this honor?"
"I didn't know you had a niece, sir," Mulder said, setting the picture down and folding himself into the chair next to his partner.
Sinking into his own chair, Skinner felt like a bag of wet sand. "God child," he said, waiting for the explanation, for the story, for the bullshit rationale that Mulder was going to unravel on him so that the federal government would pay for this next phase of the Great American Alien Hunt.
Mulder stretched forward and handed him the omnipresent manila file folder.
"What'm I looking at?" Skinner asked, skimming the police reports.
"As of yesterday police have found four women--Janine Graham, Gloria Arguilez, Kara Stoddard, and Teresa Honeywell--each strangled, eviscerated, and left in empty warehouses or storage facilities in Bent, North Carolina."
Mulder's hand intruded on Skinner's field of vision and flipped to the photos. His fingers were well made and reassuring and out of place next to pictures of the dead.
Skinner felt the hair at the back of his neck rise as he looked at the series of broken women, and he remembered the populated darkness of his dreams. This was the stuff of nightmares. Shrugging, he re-focused on the pictures in front of him.
"This seems pretty straightforward, Mulder." He looked up into the younger man's eyes. "Why are we interested in this case?"
Scully answered, her voice like silk in his ears. He thought briefly that he might be able to sleep if Agent Scully would come and read to him.
"Agent Mulder believes that we have a lead traditional investigators may be overlooking."
Skinner waited.
Mulder stepped in. "Police were contacted by an Eileen Bridgeton, a housewife from Bent, who claims to know when a woman is about to be taken or found."
"Really?" Skinner couldn't disguise the sarcasm in his voice.
"She's been able to tell us details about the victims known only to police. Local talent hasn't even bothered to question her, for obvious reasons, and--"
"And you want to go down and run a separate investigation."
"We want to aid an ongoing investigation by using alternative methodologies," Agent Mulder said. The man was a walking bullshit machine.
"It does make sense, sir," Scully interjected. "Considering Mulder's background with VICAP and our experience with this kind of phenomenon both real and feigned... "
"Fine." Skinner pulled a pen out of his desk drawer. "You're going. Have a good time."
Mulder almost smiled on his way out, but Skinner didn't even have the ambition to be amused. Mulder and Scully were off on another wild goose chase at government expense. He hoped they helped catch a killer while they were down there, but he couldn't even summon up the energy to care.
On Flight 247
from Washington DC to Raleigh, NC
9:40 AMAll was not right in the world of AD Skinner, although Mulder couldn't quite finger what it was that made him sure of the fact-- the strange look on Skinner's face during Scully's recitation of the facts, maybe, or the weary way he'd shoved the 302 into Mulder's hand after he'd signed it.
"What do you think, Scully?"
She looked up from her book, amused.
"About Skinner," he added by way of explanation.
"He's got a nice set of shoulders. Elaborate, Mulder."
"Did he seem strange to you?"
She closed her book, marking her place with her index finger. "He seemed tired. But Mulder," she said, eyes twinkling. "He might just be tired of you."
"Us."
"No, just you, Mulder," she said, reopening her book. Conversation closed.
"So," he said, hunching down in his seat to peer at her book. "You're into the AD's shoulders?"
She glared, but she didn't mean it. She also refused to be drawn back into idle speculation. Later, when he woke up from his in-flight nap against her shoulder, he refused to feel remorse for the drool.
He brought it up again in the rental car. She was driving, which made it that much easier to grill her: she couldn't devote all of her energy to defending against him.
"Skinner's shoulders, hmm?" he said.
She sighed. "Mulder, what exactly is this about?"
"I'm not sure." That was true. He wasn't sure what kept bringing him back to Skinner's image, to the man sitting at his desk handing over the 302, arm extended in resignation. He wasn't sure why the Skinner in his mind's eye seemed so... forlorn. "Maybe it's just that we got here too easily," he said.
"Too easily." Her eyebrow lifted.
"He just signed the form."
"You're complaining because Skinner let us come down here without making us jump through flaming hoops first?"
Mulder shrugged. When she put it that way it sounded so... stupid.
"All I'm saying, Scully, is that it was not standard Skinner behavior."
"Granted, Mulder."
She seemed content to leave it there, and she had conceded his point, so he was forced to fall back on color commentary to entertain himself.
"Look, Scully." He pointed at the billboard in front of an old factory. It skipped past before she could have seen it, had she made an attempt to look. Scully had a lead foot. "Grace Dairy. Grace Cream, Grace Yogurt, Grace Butter... 'Amazing Grace, how sweet the taste.' Made right here in Bent, Scully. Whattaya know."
"Hmmph," she said.
"Tell me Scully," he said, turning to her. "Has your butter been saved?" He pointed a religious and accusatory finger at her. When he opened his mouth his voice came outslow and loud, coated in a sloe honey accent. "Has your butter been SAV-ED?"
She tossed him a glance, eyes barely leaving the road. "I'm Catholic, Mulder. My dairy products don't have immortal souls."
Mulder was still grinning when they pulled up in front of the motel.
Motel 6
Bent, North Carolina
12:52 PMWandering back and forth through the hotel room's connecting door, they engaged in idle banter until Scully's shoes lay beside the chair in one room and Mulder's suit bag had collapsed on the bed in the other.
"What's our itinerary?" he asked, sprawling on the polyester bedspread and stretching for the remote control.
"We meet with the ASAC at two and Mrs. Bridgeton expects us at three. I'm going to go take a shower."
"Let me know if you need any help," he called after her, through the half-open door. She shouted something back that was probably "in your dreams."
He clicked on the TV and started flipping channels, clicking through them while he worked through the facts of the case mentally, performing what Bill Patterson had called the "sift"-- the culturing of fact into information that could be used. This was what he had always been best at, psychology degree aside. He could hold all of the facts in one place and run his brain through them like running fingers through flour.
Four women, similar in appearance and age, sexually assaulted, strangled. Bodies mutilated post-mortem with a single cut from sternum to pelvic bone. Lack of fluid at the scenes indicates victims are killed then moved to a public location, found usually within twenty-four hours of death... it all lead up to a likely conclusion: the killer was murdering women because they represented something or someone to him, an influential person, perhaps a mother, or a woman who had rejected previous sexual advances.
Far away, he heard Scully's shower go off, and a minute or two later she appeared in the doorway, fresh and damp, her naked face improbably young.
"Mulder," she said. Mulder didn't answer, shifting his gaze to his own folded hands. In his peripheral vision, Scully glowed in her white robe, and he was paralyzed with tenderness. His chest was tight with it; he stored such moments in his intricate eidetic memory, these times when she was most at her ease with him. Now; when she smoothed her hair, or more rarely, when she touched up her lipstick on their way to an interview or a meeting with Skinner. Instances that assured Mulder that Scully trusted him with more than her life; she trusted him with her *self*. He wondered what had been bothering her enough to bring her to him before her hair was dry. "Please tell me that this story was a facade designed to get us into the case."
"Why would I tell you that, Scully?" he asked.
"You don't really believe that this woman is psychic, do you?"
He turned his gaze to the TV, squelching a smile. "Won't know 'til we get there."
"I should have known," he heard her mutter.
"Did you say something, Scully?"
The slam of the bathroom door and the roar of the hair dryer were his only answers. It was good to be on the road again.
2. Eileen
FBI Field Office
Bent, North Carolina
2:10 PMFrom vast experience, Mulder knew that each FBI field office was different. Some, like those in New York and Chicago, were made up of dozens of agents, all swimming in a sea of cases, surrounded by the best in technology and support staff. Others, like this one in Bent, were outposts in the federal government's war on crime, made up of two or three younger agents who made their own coffee and typed their own reports. No matter how different the decorating was though, or how pretty the secretaries, Mulder knew that each office had one thing in common: each was full of agents looking for that elusive gift, the Case, the one that would get them out of wherever they were and up to the next rung of the ladder. The Case that would give them a Name.
And Mulder also knew that acting ASAC Jonathon Christley thought he had found his Case, and he was hanging on to it the way a terrier will hold on to a piece of meat, all teeth and snarling.
"Look," Scully was saying, "--we're here because you don't want to interview Mrs. Bridge--"
Agent Christley nodded, blond head bobbing like a cork. "I understand, Agent Scully, I do." His accent was slow and drawn, reminding Mulder of Foghorn Leghorn. "All I'm sayin' is I don't understand why Washington sent two more agents. VICAP just got here--" He pointed vaguely. Mulder tapped on Scully's shoulder and headed off in that general direction.
"Where's he goin'?" Agent Christley asked, and Scully said something in reply. "I *know*," Christley said, "but I *told* you--"
Mulder didn't hear the rest.
The VICAP guy must have been fairly new because Mulder hadn't ever seen him before. He stuck out his hand as the man looked up.
"I hear you're VICAP," he said, smiling. No sense in causing trouble right away.
The man stood and took his hand. He was tall and thin, a light-skinned black man whose eyes reminded Mulder of Gregory Hines.
"James Robertson."
"Fox Mulder."
Agent Robertson paused. "Really? Fox Mulder?"
Mulder smiled again, waiting for the joke, the story, the questions about what was true.
"What are you doing here?" Robertson asked.
"Excuse me?"
"I thought I was the only profiler assigned," he said, sounding flattered instead of insulted.
"My partner and I are checking out some random leads. You got anything?"
Robertson sighed. "Not much. Standard. White male, 35-45, no record, anti-social, blah, blah, blah. And we've got all the victims. You want a copy of the file?"
"Got one, thanks."
Robertson stared at him for a moment, smiled, shook his head.
"You're a fucking legend, man. It's an honor."
"Yeah, well." Mulder was acutely aware of the heat in his face. "There's a fine line between famous and infamous, you know?"
Robertson laughed a laugh surprisingly low and rumbling.
"I hear you, man. Let me know if you need anything."
By the time Mulder got back to her, Scully had disposed of Christley, and stood patiently by the door.
"Who's that?" she asked.
"Robertson. VICAP. Nice guy."
"Lemme guess," she said. "He's heard of you?"
Home of Eileen Bridgeton
337 Grant Street
Bent, Carolina
3:01 PMEileen Bridgeton was an indifferent gardener, Scully thought, if her patchy lawn and wilting flowers were any indication, but her house was in good repair, and the front door looked freshly painted.
Mulder gave her a consoling glance before knocking, and she quelled the sudden desire to kick him by trying to decide what this "psychic" was going to look like.
No gypsy was she.
Mrs. Bridgeton was a pale, freckled woman, with broad hips and a soft mouth. Her hands were nervous and her eyes were brown. She waved the two of them in without asking their names or their business, and when she turned to close the door behind them, Scully could see the woman's shoulder length hair was pulled back with an elastic band.
"I know why you're here," she said.
Well, then you're one step ahead of me, Scully sighed to herself. She was careful not to look at Mulder at times like this. It would be too easy to roll her eyes at him.
A wary looking boy in a baseball cap was shrugging an athletic bag over his shoulder in the hallway.
"I got practice," he informed his mother.
"Don't be late," she replied. "My son, Brian," she said by way of introduction. The boy, maybe fourteen, nodded diffidently in their direction and shouldered past Scully towards the front door.
When Brian had left, Eileen led them to a sitting room and then offered to make tea.
Mulder took an easy chair across from where the woman stood.
"We're fine, Mrs. Bridgeton. If you don't mind, I'd like to ask you a few questions about these dreams you've been having."
"Oh, of course." She sank onto a flowered couch, and toyed with the hem of her blue chambray shirt. Her face was tight, and she threaded her fingers together in her lap. "They started not long after my... My husband died. He was a firefighter, and... and he..."
Scully settled beside the woman, her voice solemn and sympathetic.
"We understand that he was killed in a training accident."
Eileen nodded miserably.
"He fell... from a roof. They still haven't been able to really explain it to me. It... it was just so... so pointless."
Mulder leaned forward then, his eyes warm and dark with concern.
"I know it must have been very painful for you, Mrs. Bridgeton. Before he died, did you ever have visions, like the ones you described to the police about Vivian MacElvey's disappearance?"
The woman shook her head.
"No. Never. But now that Frank's gone, I just don't feel... safe anymore." Her damp eyes focused earnestly on Scully's face. "Do you know what I mean? Having Frank here... I mean, I knew that his job was dangerous, but I always thought he'd be here..."
Eileen unknitted her fingers and closed one hand on Scully's sleeve, in the desperate, scrabbling grip of a woman drowning.
"But then he was gone, and Brian was so upset. He hardly said a word for a week after his father died. Then he seemed to perk up a little... and that's when the dreams started."
Mulder nodded, encouraging. Scully was always surprised by the intensity of his gaze when he was questioning a suspect or a witness, as if he expected to draw the information out of them solely with his desire to know.
"At first... at first I thought I'd just been watching too much television. After Frank... well, I started staying up real late, flipping channels, not really watching anything, just... I don't know, really. But when I had the first dream, I just thought maybe I'd fallen asleep with the television on, and maybe picked up on 'Cops' or something."
A small, fleeting smile made her years younger and much more like the pretty bride Scully had noted in the photograph over the mantle. Frank Bridgeton had had a kind face and a mustache.
"Then I just thought I was crazy, especially when I realized I'd been dreaming what came on the news the next day."
Eileen let Scully go in order to rest her hands in her lap again.
"Mrs. Bridgeton, what made you decide to come forward and report these visions?"
Mulder's voice was kind, but not appeasing. Scully could hear the sincerity of Mulder's True Believer. Oddly, she found herself wanting to protect Eileen from it, from Mulder's coaxing tone, and his terrible understanding. Scully wasn't sure the woman was ready to believe herself psychic any more than Scully was.
Eileen glanced at her before answering, as if asking permission to continue.
"I didn't want to. I thought everyone would think I was crazy. Vivian disappeared, and then those other poor girls..."
"Vivian?" Mulder interjected.
"Yes, my neighbor, Vivian MacElvey. We used to..." She smiled faintly. "We used to waitress together at the truck stop when we were in high school. She disappeared a few weeks ago. I reported her as a missing person. And that night, when I had that dream, I was just *sure* she'd been killed... But, but it was some other woman, from across town."
Mulder nodded, and penned something in a small notebook he'd produced from his jacket pocket. Scully wondered if he was actually taking notes or just appearing to for Mrs. Bridgeton's sake.
"And then... then I thought I should come forward, if I could help. I had to." Her desperate look made Scully glance at the picture over the mantle again, see the strong face of a younger, braver woman. Eileen's reverie faded, though, and her face crumpled. "When I saw it on the news about that first girl... I had to tell the police that I'd known that already. That I'd dreamed it." Her eyes, dark and pleading, sought Mulder's.
"Do you think I'm crazy, too?"
"No, Mrs. Bridgeton. I don't. Scully?" He'd gotten to his feet and, Scully nodded at him. Turning to the tearful woman beside her, Scully squeezed her hand before standing up and following Mulder out of the room.
Mulder barely let the door close behind them before closing a hand on her shoulder and saying, "Scully, she could be the real thing." His breath was hot in her ear.
"Mulder..." She let exasperation flavor her pause. "I believe that *she* believes she's psychic. That doesn't mean she is."
"How can you explain the dreams? She's known things about the murders, about the victims, that haven't been released to the media."
"Yes, the visions she's described have a startling similarity to the crime scenes, but when you come right down to it, many of her details are vague."
"Vague or not, how could she know them at all?"
"Mulder, this woman has recently experienced a traumatic loss in her life. Grief can do strange things to people. Maybe she's sleepwalking, or driving around in a trance state following police cars..." Scully hated it when her explanations sounded less plausible than Mulder's.
His eyes *twinkled*. Scully also hated it when he had her and he knew it.
"'Trance Driving'? Scully, you're reaching here, admit it."
"I'll admit that I'm not sure how Mrs. Bridgeton knew details about crimes she obviously did not commit, but I won't admit that she's psychic."
"Then prove to me she's not." He was leaning forward, eyes alight, mouth curving into the grin that always made her want to pinch him.
"Fine, Mulder. Fine." Scully re-entered the sitting room and asked Mrs. Bridgeton's leave to search the place.
"I'd like to start with your son's room, if that's okay?"
Eileen surprised her by blushing.
"Oh, I wish you wouldn't. It's such a mess. It's embarrassing. He's pretty good about keeping all his junk in his room, but once it's in there, most of it ends up on the floor."
Scully found herself smiling.
"I have two brothers Mrs. Bridgeton. Believe me, I know how boys live."
Still faintly pink, Eileen nodded.
Mulder let her lead him up the stairs, and to the door hung with a sign that read BioHazard. She arched a brow at Mulder, and turned the doorknob.
Drifts of clothes and stacks of Sports Illustrated littered the floor. One wall was apparently a shrine to Pamela Anderson, another to the Chicago Bulls. Mulder admired a poster of a gravity defying bottle blonde, and Scully found herself irked for no good reason.
"Are you picking up psychic vibrations, too?"
"Not with all the negative energy in the room... " He grinned at her.
She prodded at a pile of tangled sweats with the toe of her navy slingbacks, and uncovered a broken CD case.
"I think I'll check out her bathroom. Maybe she's been taking Psychic Vitamins."
Scully ignored him and continued to sort through piles of unwashed laundry. Her brother Charles had sometimes worn the same socks three days in a row, and bragged about it. Brian seemed to have an endless supply of underwear, however.
Probably, he'd inherited all his father's athletic socks.
She'd uncovered nothing unusual, or even interesting, until she'd opened the closet.
A predictable amount of ski and camping gear was crammed behind the doors, and on the floor was a flashlight, a writing tablet and a pen.
She crouched down and picked up the tablet, finger tapping the open page. The words "Dear Dad" had been engraved into the page in pencil. The paper was worn and rough in places where it had been erased again and again.
Then she saw the dull gleam of a metal box, and knew she'd found what she'd been looking for.
*
"What is it?" Eileen sounded confused. "Is it a radio?"
Scully set the thing on the counter and glanced at Mulder.
"It's a police scanner, Mrs. Bridgeton. It was in your son's room, in his closet. His closet is on the wall of your bedroom. This is the reason you've been dreaming about crime scenes. You must hear the scanner in your sleep."
Mrs. Bridgeton looked equal parts shocked and relieved, but Mulder's face was creased with disappointment. Any desire Scully may have had to say 'I told you so' died when she saw the way his mouth tightened.
"Oh, how could I have been so stupid! It's Frank's! He used to keep it in the garage. He used to listen to it on his days off. Why on earth would Brian keep it in his closet?"
"Mrs. Bridgeton, you're not stupid, you've just been preoccupied. And Brian probably just misses his father."
Nodding, Eileen fingered the dials of the police scanner and then turned her eyes to Scully.
"Thank you, Ms. Scully. I don't know what I would have done if I'd kept having those dreams."
A rare sense of well-being filled her chest as Eileen's eyes brightened, and lost their haunted look.
"I'm glad we could help," Scully replied, feeling obliged to mention Mulder's hand in it. Without his interest in her possible psychic abilities, Eileen Bridgeton may have been plagued by nightmares for years.
"Thank you for your time, Mrs. Bridgeton," Mulder intoned. He no longer looked disappointed; he flashed Scully a brief, proud smile.
"Oh, it was no trouble. No trouble at all."
All in a day's work, Scully thought.
*
"Jinkies, Scooby," He murmured under his breath
Scully indulged in some eye rolling, now that they were safely in the car.
"For a minute there, Scully, I thought you were going to unmask Mrs. Bridgeton for the fraud she was. I was ready to swear she was actually Jeb Parker, the foreman for the old lumber mill."
"Mulder, your love of Hannah Barbara cartoons aside, I hadn't planned to 'debunk' Mrs. Bridgeton. I just happened to find the reason behind her supposed psychic abilities."
"So did you identify more with Daphne or Velma?"
"Just drive, Mulder."
Motel 6
Bent, North Carolina
5:35 PM"So, what do you want to do?" Scully was crashed in the uncomfortable lounge chair, her feet freed from her high heels wiggling against the thin carpeting. She had pretty little toes.
"Is that an invitation?" He sat on the floor at the foot of the bed, head tilted back so he could see her. Her stockinged feet made swishing sounds on the floor.
"The way I see it, Mulder, we've got two choices: stay here and muck up Christley's chances at promotion by working his case, or catch the next plane. This isn't an X-file."
He nodded an upside-down nod. "You wanna stay?"
She looked up over his head at the TV, the virulent curtains, the cheap oil painting of a hunting dog with a duck in its mouth.
"Scully?"
"What would you give me if I told you I might have something?" She held up a warning hand. "And I'm telling you now, if you say Red Wings Tickets, I'll take my secrets with me to the grave."
"I've got a gold mine in The People's Republic of Congo that I've been holding out on you," he answered expansively. "Now come clean."
She flopped the file open and pushed it toward him. "I was reading the M.E.'s report and I noticed this." She indicated a line with one manicured nail.
"'... victim has two diagonal cuts across the palm of the hand... defense wounds... '" He looked up. "So?"
"So she calls them defense wounds. But Mulder--" Scully flipped pages rapidly, to another M.E.'s report, and another. "All of these women have the same marks."
"That's textbook," he said, holding his hands up at her, palms out.
"Sure, for victims killed by knives or other implements. These women were *strangled.* They have no knife wound, no other cuts. The exam shows that they were eviscerated *after* they were already dead. Mulder, what were they defending themselves against?"
They sat for a moment, staring at each other from across the expanse of bedspread.
"Do we have photos?"
Nodding, Scully turned more pages.
"Jesus, Scully! They're the same-- he's marking them!"
She nodded again, reaching behind her for her cell phone. Wordless, she pressed the buttons and held it out to him.
"Christley? Mulder. Get Robertson and get your ass to the office. We've got something."
3. Christley
Crystal City Apartments
Washington D.C.Normally, the phone ringing at five 'til midnight would have woken him up, but Skinner hadn't been normal for a while. He'd taken to going to bed later and later, hoping to sleep through until morning. It wasn't working-- all he seemed to be doing was cutting into his sleep time even further-- but he refused to give up. To do so would mean that this was something he couldn't master.
The last time had been worse in so many ways. The dreams, the old woman, and that poor... the woman he'd found dead beside him. He hadn't known if he'd killed her or not: there were nights he knew he was responsible for her death, regardless of whose hand had wrung her neck. He'd woken up with her body still cooling beside him, and for the next two or three days he'd done nothing but try to forget her, forget all of them: the prostitute, Mulder, Scully, Sharon. The last time had been like a short trip to hell. This time it was just a couple of nightmares, just a little sleep deprivation. Nothing he couldn't handle.
He was standing in the fluorescent light of the bathroom considering a box of Nytol when the phone rang.
"Skinner."
The voice on the other end was unfamiliar and irate, a Southern voice made nearly incomprehensible by its rapid annoyance. Not surprisingly, it was talking about Mulder. Skinner should have known better, the voice said. What was he trying to do, derail a flawless investigation? Skinner looked at his watch. Ten hours. Mulder had pissed off the field office in ten hours. That had to be a record.
He let the voice run on and on, finally tuning back in when the pitch and speed told him that the agent on the line was almost done.
"--and what are you going to do about it?"
What was he going to do about it? He looked around his apartment, at the sterile light, too bright in the surrounding darkness, and the dented cushions of his armchair. He thought of the immaculate expanse of his kitchen and the too-familiar heat of his bed. He thought of the darkness in the dream and he thought of Mulder's cool implacable gaze.
"I'm on my way," he said, and hung up before he heard an answer.
FBI Branch Office
Bent, North Carolina
2:33 AM"I don't understand what the problem is!" Mulder shouted, slamming his hand down on the conference table. "You need a viable suspect; we're telling you how to get one."
"You're not tellin' me *shit*, Agent Mulder! These are defense wounds, pure and simple." Mulder had six inches on the guy, but he bet little Darrel Christley had twenty pounds on him, and all of it muscle. Strangely, the other Agent was beginning to remind him of that Taco Bell chihuahua, only puffy with bench presses and hot air.
"Robertson?" Mulder demanded, but Robertson just shrugged.
"I told you-- they could go either way."
"LOOK AT THESE!" The photos he threw arced up and out, a fan of blood and pale skin. Several of them hit Robertson in the chest.
Scully grabbed Mulder's wrist in a loose grip. "Mulder," she murmured. He panted with rage, glaring at them all. He wanted to take a swing a Christley's smug face, but the moment had passed, leaving him with just the dregs of anger, draining away rapidly.
The phone on the table beeped.
"Christley." Agent Christley listened for a moment, then raised his head. Narrowing his deceptively soft brown eyes, he gave Mulder a vulpine smile. "Send him in."
The door opened, and Mulder leaned over the table toward Agent Christley, palms flat, gritting his teeth.
"You unbelievable pussy," Mulder murmured.
Christley beamed at him.
"You mind telling me what's going on here, Agent Mulder?" Skinner asked. He sounded calm and mildly interested, the same way he sounded in his office in D.C., a fact that reassured Mulder. Skinner may have been called to rein them in, but apparently he wasn't going to do it with an iron hand.
He took in a deep breath. "I was just explaining to Agent Christley that our guy is marking the victims in a way that may help us ID him."
"And I was just--" Christley began, but Skinner held up his hand, palm out, directing the flow of words the way a cop directs traffic.
"Mulder," he said.
"He's marking them on the palms... " Mulder began, turning to accept the photos scooped off of the floor by the ever-amiable Agent Robertson. He leaned over the table, almost inclined on it, pointing out the details to Skinner who came to the edge of the table and stood over him, hands on his hips. Mulder finished with a flourish, leaning back in his chair and folding his arms over his chest. Take that, you fuck, he thought, watching Christley's face.
"Scully?" Skinner asked.
"I agree with Agent Mulder's analysis, sir. I was the one who questioned the marks as defense wounds in the first place."
Mulder noticed Christley's fish face of astonishment with genuine pleasure. He smiled. For once, he and Scully were on the same page, and it had to happen in front of Agent "this is my case even though I can't investigate my way out of a wet paper bag" Christley. Sometimes, life was kind. Skinner, in the meantime, was eliciting Robertson's opinion.
Again, Robertson shrugged.
"Besides this, we've got nothing," he said. "I'm not entirely certain, but if Mulder thinks it's right, I'm willing to go with it."
"I see," Skinner said. "Agent Christley, may I have a word with you in the hallway please?" He held the door open with one arm, his gaze as serene and objective as a clear pane of glass. Christley slunk out into the hall. The door eased shut, and Robertson let out a low whistle.
"Guess who's about to get his ass chewed," he said, almost laughing. "Think he'll ever recover?"
"Not unless he's wearing Kevlar underwear," Scully answered, and Mulder, surprised, choked on his cold coffee.
Motel 6
Bent, North Carolina
3:41 AMThe only thing Skinner wanted was a nice quiet room of his own and a solid night's sleep. He knew he probably wouldn't get the latter-- he didn't figure that this night would be any different from any of the last two weeks-- but he hadn't thought the former was too much to ask.
The motel office wasn't open.
They stood there, three agents of the federal government, outside a locked screen door, dumbfounded by a simple hand-lettered sign. "Please call again," it said.
Skinner scowled at it.
"You can share my room, sir," Mulder offered. Skinner nodded, knowing he should be grateful, knowing that the idea of sharing a room with Mulder should be value-neutral, neither exciting or troubling. He was dismayed to find it was both.
He watched the hem of Mulder's coat swaying as the younger man walked. He would have to know. Somehow, Skinner was going to have to come up with some segue into the fact that he would not be sleeping the night through. Sighing, he stepped past Mulder into the orange and yellow hotel room.
Laying his coat over the threadbare lounge chair in the corner, Skinner shrugged out of his suit jacket, draping it neatly over the top of the overcoat. Mulder still stood in the doorway, keys jangling in his hand. Skinner heard the TV come on in the next room and looked up at the connecting door that hung slightly ajar.
"Convenient," he said, precisely at the same moment as Mulder blurted "Sir--"
They stared at each other in awkward silence for a second. The keys had stopped moving in Mulder's hands.
"Sir," he said again. "I... what does that mean?" Skinner saw anger flare in Mulder's eyes, and realized he had made a mistake.
"I'm sorry, Mulder. You were saying?"
Mulder pushed the door shut with his foot and removed his coat, apparently freed from paralysis by Skinner's apology. "Sir," he began. Skinner turned his back to the agent and began unbuttoning his shirt. "Sir, Agent Scully and I app--"
"Can it, Mulder," Skinner interrupted, glancing over his shoulder. "I was told you were going off the deep end again. It's not Christley's fault he couldn't recognize a lead if it bit him in the ass."
"Yessir."
"I'm only sorry I didn't get here in time to prevent you from acting like an idiot, " Skinner remarked. "The next time you feel like going off half-cocked, I expect to hear from you first. Is that clear?"
"Yessir." Mulder nodded. His swearing of obedience was a ritual, a form. They both knew it was also a lie. Skinner went into the mildewed bathroom and poured a glass of water, letting the faucet run for a second to clear the tap.
The noise of Scully's television drifted through the open door: Mulder must have re-opened it. Skinner recognized that for what it was: a signal that she was awake and willing to talk. She'd want to know how badly he'd chewed Mulder's ass after flying all the way down here and catching him in the aftermath of an assault on a fellow agent. He stepped out of the bathroom and approached the side of the bed closest to the bathroom door.
"You always do this?" he asked, waving his hand at the open door.
Mulder, who had taken a seat at the pressboard table by the window, glared at him.
"It's not like--"
"I'm sure there's a perfectly rational explanation I'm not interested in hearing, Mulder. Will she come in?"
"Sir?" The look on his face was openly hostile.
"Never mind. I'm going to get some sleep," Skinner said, shucking his shoes and pants in one smooth motion. "I suggest you do the same."
"I'll be up for a while. Will the TV bother you?"
"I doubt it. Good night, Agent Mulder," he said, setting his glasses on the Formica nightstand. Mulder became nothing but a white and fleshy blur on a field of orange. He lay down and turned on his side away from the light.
For a long time he heard nothing but the click of Mulder's fingers on the keys of his laptop, and the faint reassuring hiss of the television turned down low. He knew that Mulder sometimes stopped typing and looked at him: he could feel eyes on his back as surely as he could feel the scratch of the sheets. He was considering giving up for the night, just sitting up and opening up the files and admitting to himself if not Mulder that there would be no rest for him tonight when he heard the words.
"Good night, sir."
It was a murmur, almost a whisper, accompanied by the hush of movement: Mulder collecting some papers, shucking his shoes, and slipping through the adjoining door. Skinner didn't fall asleep for a long time after that, wondering what he was doing in a motel far from his own bed.
For a while he'd heard low conversation back and forth, unintelligible, Mulder's low mumbles and Scully's slightly higher responses. That had stopped, but Skinner was certain that if he burst in on them now he would find two mildly shocked agents gazing up at him from at least three feet apart. Mulder's reaction to his earlier comments had told him that no matter what the rumors, Mulder and Scully's behavior was totally within FBI guidelines. The thought almost disappointed him.
He had wondered about Mulder and Scully's relationship. Skinner may have been a man with secrets, but he was also a man with ears, and office gossip had been circulating about the two agents almost since they'd been partnered. He would almost envy Mulder if he'd somehow convinced Scully to share his bed. He would almost envy Scully for the same reason. It would be nice to have someone there, any someone, and as close as they were he couldn't see--
Nice.
The last time he'd entertained the idea of that kind of comfort, he'd woken up at the heart of a murder investigation.
He was surprised to find the murmur of CNN soothing, the consistent hum of the announcer's voice, the intermittent commercial jingle, the polite interruptions of the correspondents... It was comforting in its predictability. He wondered how many times Mulder had fallen asleep with the television on.
He wondered how many nights Mulder had fallen asleep with someone in his bed.
With Scully's door open, probably not many.
Empirically, Mulder was certainly attractive, and even his pariah status didn't keep the newer agents from throwing the man admiring glances. Skinner had even witnessed Kim flutter a time or two, on one of the few occasions Mulder was in the office for reasons other than to be called on the carpet yet again. That wasn't why he was here, though. His presence in North Carolina had nothing to do with the way Mulder looked. He had stood in his apartment with the phone receiver in hand and... he was here because there was a job to be done. Nothing else.
This wasn't a productive track of thought.
Skinner punched the pillow twice and ordered himself to rest. Surprisingly, sleep came when he called it, but it brought dreams in its mouth.
4. Elvis
It's dark.
But it's better, the dark is better than the pitiless glare of the naked bulb. The light shows him things he doesn't think he'll be able to forget. The dark is better.
A yellow bar slides under the door, unrolling like a mat, and he closes his eyes, tries to call the dark back. He can already hear her. A new one. She sounds so young...
"Look what I brought for you. Isn't she pretty? She's just for you."
Can't look a gift horse in the mouth, but you must look at the gift. That's the rule here. Look at the gift and the gift looks back.
He cringes: the light is like a slap in the face, he tries to hide his eyes, but the yellow dazzle spears behind his lids and he feels a hand in his hair, jerking his head back and he has to look at her.
Elvis has left the building.
She's shivering, jerking hopelessly against her captor's iron grip, her back to both onlookers. Her eyes are blacked, her nose is bleeding: fat drops spatter on the warped boards of the floor. She's the first one he's seen bleed... before. Before the others. Before the others had bled. The gift looks back.
There's a picture on her T-shirt, her shirt has a face, a wide face, with a helmet of hair, a smear of blood. His own hair is released and he hangs his head, but not before the girl is turned for him, arranged like a mannequin.
Elvis has left the building.
"Look at her. *Look* at her! She's for you." And then he sees the hood, and he sees the way her hands whiten, how she clutches at him, and he feels his gut lurch, feels the burn of bile, hears her guttural click when she should be screaming.
Elvis has left the building.
The noise was so familiar that Dana Scully was out of bed and through the connecting door before she was really awake.
She had heard it countless times before: the restless stirring, the murmuring that followed no speech patterns, the accumulation of small sounds that meant Mulder was having a nightmare. Sometimes she went in and woke him; sometimes she went in and simply sat by the side of the bed, waiting for him to wake, watching his body roll through the motions, pulling the sheet back over him when he fell back into REM sleep. It had become just another feature of their relationship. Typical.
But what she saw when she pushed open the door with one sleep-heavy hand, was anything but.
Skinner sat upright in his bed, face smothered in his hands, making a low animal noise in the back of his throat. Mulder sat next to him. One of Mulder's hands moved rapidly over Skinner's back in patterns that Scully assumed were meant to be soothing. She thought, moving to crouch by the edge of the bed.
"Sir," she asked. One of her hands rested on Skinner's blanket covered knee. "Sir, are you okay?"
"Nightmare," Mulder said. He seemed embarrassed. She didn't blame him. Sitting on your boss's bed while both of you were in your underwear had to be a pretty embarrassing situation. She was glad for her men's cut pajamas.
"Sir?" She moved her hand on Skinner's forearm. "Are you all right?"
Skinner shrugged away from their hands.
"I'm fine, Agent Scully. It was a nightmare." He got out of the far side of the bed, stalked to the bathroom, and Scully noticed that his T-shirt was soaked through in a triangle pattern over his shoulder blades. She tried not to notice his underwear. Briefs.
Instead, she looked at Mulder, who still perched on the edge of the bed. He, too, was in his T-shirt and underwear (boxers, she noted), his hair poking up in crazy patterns. She did not reach up to smooth it.
He shrugged. "I was asleep," he said. "He started yelling."
She was about to ask what exactly Skinner had yelled when the man himself returned with a clear plastic cup of water. "Was there something else you needed, Agent Scully?" he asked, sounding more like her boss than any man in a pair of briefs and a snug T-shirt had a right to. She realized she was still huddled at the edge of the mattress and leapt up before she allowed herself to feel too much at home.
"What was it about?" she asked.
He sighed, slumping back onto the bed. "Why does this matter?"
Scully looked to her partner for a second. It mattered because they had never understood this man as anything other than controlled. As in *in* control. Acted on, maybe, acted against, definitely, but always-- somehow-- in control of himself if nothing else.
He had even been in control when he had woken up with a dead woman in his bed, acting under his own impulses, refusing to conform to their expectations, dodging their questions... Skinner had controlled his response even in the face of his impending divorce and an imminent murder charge.
She had doubted him then, wondered if her impression of Skinner as strait-laced and wrapped tight was mistaken. The memory made her blush with shame. She had been wrong that time, she knew now. Skinner *was* strait-laced and upstanding and virtuous and honorable and all of the other cliches inspired by his starched and formidable form. The call girl had been an anomaly on his part, one born of loneliness, or isolation, or simply one too many scotches and a sympathetic ear. Skinner was everything she and Mulder had believed him to be, and their realization that he had been set-up with that prostitute had reassured them of Skinner's innate reliability. And now Mulder was right--something was wrong with A.D. Skinner-- and she needed to know what that was.
That's what she said to Mulder after they'd shut the door between the two rooms, leaving Skinner to his bed.
"Well, Mulder, you were right."
"Why am I not as happy about this as I should be?" He lay prone on the opposite bed, his hands under his neck.
"On the plus side, at least we know it's nothing serious." That wasn't necessarily true. Skinner had been taciturn after returning to the bed. He would not describe the dream and had refused to answer specific questions until she had given up, offering him no more assistance that another glass of water. He had refused that, too.
"Sure, " Mulder said, rolling onto his side and setting his feet on the floor. "You don't have to sleep with him."
Scully slid her legs underneath the anemic motel blanket, watching as he stretched, fingertips brushing the ceiling.
"You don't have to either, Mulder. Unless you're bucking for a raise... " she deadpanned.
"Ha ha," he said, but she thought there was something like panic in his eyes as he left the room.
Scully was yanked from sleep by the conviction that everything was all wrong. Her room was too light, too quiet. She could hear the rumble of the cleaning lady's cart as it wheeled past her door. Damn it!
Late.
She leaned into Mulder's room. Mulder and Skinner were two softly breathing lumps, sleeping the solid sleep of the exhausted. She hated to wake them; like a toddler, Mulder often became goofy or cranky without enough sleep. After last night, she could only guess at what Skinner's response would be.
"Mulder," she whispered. He stirred. "Mulder."
"'M'up," he said, and she knew he was telling the truth because he threw back the blankets.
"We're late," she whispered at him, and pulled the connecting door closed. Skinner could be his problem.
They managed to be at the IHOP for Christley's breakfast meeting before he and Robertson arrived. Mulder's hair stuck up damply: he had been forced to shower second because of rank, he had told her while they were waiting for Skinner near the car. She could only guess how that conversation had gone.
Skinner looked like he always looked, solid, stern. His shirt hardly had a crease in it. Scully wondered where he had them laundered: her shirts always seemed to get wrinkled on the road. He hadn't said a word to either of them except "good morning" and he hardly acknowledged the bored aproned waitress who'd slopped coffee in front of them. It was beginning to worry her. She wondered if he was simply embarrassed.
When Skinner left to use the rest room, Mulder, who'd been biding his time, seized his opportunity.
"Well, well. Late this morning, huh? The boss must have kept you up *all* night. Adjoining rooms... People will talk, Scully."
She knew it-- goofy.
"I'm not the one who shared his hotel room, Mulder. Any thoughts on why the AD is being about as communicative as a piece of furniture?"
Sighing, Mulder tipped creamer into his coffee.
"Hey, he shared *my* room. Chances are good he dreamed again. And he's not exactly Miss Congeniality on a good day." He shrugged and wrapped his long hands around his ceramic mug. "After last night, the less he says, the less likely it is he'll lose his temper."
Scully felt her mouth soften.
"You think he's angry. At you."
Mulder shook his head. He left his coffee mug to smear grape jam on the biscuit the waitress had brought him, took one bite and then fell to reducing the rest of it to greasy crumbs.
"I just don't think he appreciates an audience to his vulnerability."
"And I don't think your friend Christley will appreciate the silent treatment," she said, watching Christley and Robertson climb out of their car in the window behind Mulder's head.
Mulder smiled a wolf's smile.
"Won't that be too bad?"
As much as Scully could understand Mulder's dislike of Christley, she also wondered if it wouldn't be wiser to try and stay on his good side. It was his case, after all. Mulder wasn't doing them any favors by acting like a prima donna. Then again, she reflected when Christley's pinched face came into view, no sense in making an annoying bastard like Christley the exception to Mulder's rule.
They were saved the dubious pleasure of breakfasting with the man by another break in the case.
"We got another corpse," he informed her, studiously ignoring Mulder. "Found it behind the grocery store about fifteen miles from here."
"It's pretty bad, Mulder. They've already ID'd the body. She was only a kid." Robertson's expression told her just how bad. He looked as if he'd already seen his breakfast twice.
Mulder nodded, not looking up. Skinner, returning from the bathroom, caught Scully's eye. He frowned.
His eyes were dark and unfocused, and a small vein throbbed at his temple. It was all she could do to keep from reaching out to take his hand when he leaned down to pick up his coat from the vinyl seat. Surreptitiously, Scully brushed his fingers with her own as she followed him out of the restaurant, and his skin, while cool, was not the icy touch of a man in shock.
Nevertheless, once in the backseat of the rental, Skinner stared dully out the window, wordless for the entire drive. Scully found herself stealing glances at him in the side view mirror, and tried not to want to hold his hand.
Behind Food Lion
Bent, North Carolina
11:13 AMMulder could feel his knees pop as he dropped into a crouch beside the first corpse he hadn't initially seen in a coroner's photograph since he'd gotten to Bent, NC.
He hoped, faintly, that it was also the last.
The victim's hair had been combed out to lie around her head, a dark halo. She had been arranged, as had the other victims, like a body laid out for viewing at a funeral. Her arms were folded across her T-shirt.
His partner knelt beside him, and sighed. This girl's nose was swollen, bulging grotesquely, her upper lip contused and tacky with blood. This victim had most certainly been alive when her nose had been broken--
"Ten or twelve hours. Maybe less. It's cold back here." Scully shivered, despite her trench coat. Scully pulled a pair of latex gloves out of her pocket. The unseasonably warm weather had evaporated during the night: Mulder could see her breath cloud as she leaned down. He wondered if it smelled the same as it always did-- coffee, peppermint, Scully-- or if it too had taken on the tang of the salt air. Bent was an hour from the beach, but the chill, clammy air still smelled of fish and salt and sand. It reminded him of home. Well, the Vineyard, anyway.
Mulder saw the dim gray of frost on the body near Scully's searching fingers. She checked the sides of the girl's throat: ligature marks standing out like an amethyst necklace on the pale flesh.
He felt Skinner approach, stand behind him. The AD murmured something, his voice distracted, flat in Mulder's ear, but it was liminal-- he couldn't really make out what the older man had said. He turned and looked up, waiting for repetition, but Skinner merely kept his level gaze on the corpse.
Mulder let it go, watched his partner lean over the body.
"What's up, Doc?"
"Probably the worst joke you've made in a long time, Mulder." She didn't bother to make a pretense of either amusement or annoyance. Hooking a finger in the wrist of her latex glove, she shucked it like a snake peeling. "This is our guy. Same M.O., same markings across the palms. This victim seems to have put up more of a fight: her nose is broken. But other than that, there's nothing new here," Scully asserted, directing her final comments over his shoulder, toward Skinner.
"Mulder?" Skinner asked.
Mulder looked down at the girl lying there, her arms folded over her baggy T-shirt. She looked like a joke. A rude imitation of the peace that should come with death. Clyde Bruckman, for all his cynicism, had seemed quiet.
"Who found the body, Officer?" The senior officer, a heavy, balding man, kept adjusting his gun belt, looking dazed. Mulder had heard him confer with Christley, admit that he'd known her, Josie Wilkes, how he bowled with her dad in a league. His partner, maybe twenty, with a buzzcut and a wispy attempt at a mustache, answered smartly, although he looked ill.
"I did, sir. I usually pass this way two or three times on a shift. The guy--" The young man gulped noisily. "He couldna been here until maybe seven or so. Real close to full daylight. Pretty bold, you want my opinion."
Distractedly, Mulder ran a hand through his brown hair.
There were times, like today, when Scully was pale at a crime scene, that Mulder was glad he was red/green color blind. In his field work, he had read and heard many descriptions of the color of blood... How red it was when it first welled up. He was familiar with the brownness and blackness of blood, but he was fervently glad that he did not know its color as a shade, because other colors could not therefore remind him of it. He understood that hospital walls were green so that the afterimage of bright arterial sprays would not haunt the patients or the staff as ghostly stains. Tricks his own eyes could not play on him.
Small mercy. There wasn't even much blood. She'd definitely been murdered somewhere else.
Killed. Jesus. This girl was so fucking *young*.
Mulder, reluctant veteran of countless murder scenes had still had to fight to keep his breakfast biscuit and coffee down; Wispy Mustache had not been so lucky, according to the still steaming puddle against the uneven bricks.
For a moment, Mulder steepled his fingers and rested his fingertips against his lips. He glanced at Skinner, and then the body. Nodding to himself, Mulder got to his feet.
"Scully... do me a favor. Roll her over."
Scully gave him her usual speculative look before carefully shifting the girl onto her shoulder.
A suggestion of lambchops and a helmet of hair, the signature curve of full lips.
"Elvis has left the building," she reported.
"I guess we're done here," Skinner said suddenly, and *fuck* if he didn't look like someone had rattled his cage.
Mulder hauled Scully to her feet and directed her to occupy Christley while he had a chat with a man about a crime scene.
"Sir?" He actually reached out to grab the man's coatsleeve, but Skinner brushed past him without comment, mouth a tight line. Mulder watched his boss stride through the gray air, his dark coat flailing like crow's wings behind him. For a moment, Mulder just stood there, watching Skinner's retreating back.
Elvis has left the building.
He came around the corner and Skinner grabbed his wrist in a grip so tight Mulder swore he could hear the bones grind together.
"Did you take care of Christley?"
Mulder shook his head. "I sent Scully. Sir, what you said back there, near the body--"
"Agent Mulder..." Skinner's voice sounded as if it were being ground in his throat. "I... I'm not sure how to explain this to you... "
Suddenly, Mulder no longer felt the grip on his wrist, or the cold snap of air in his nostrils. Suddenly all he could see was A.D. Skinner. "You knew that she had Elvis on her shirt. You said it, before Scully moved her."
"Mulder, I'm not..."
"You have information about the case."
Skinner looked down at his shoes. "I'm not sure."
Mulder leaned in. "Tell me."
Skinner shot him an annoyed glance.
"I recognized it, Mulder. Her shirt."
"You've seen it before?"
Skinner shook his head, frustrated. "From my dream, Mulder. I saw it in my dream."
Mulder felt his mouth fall open.
"Sir?" he said.
"I know how it sounds, Agent Mulder. But I also know what I saw. I dreamed of that shirt last night."
"Do you think--"
"Do I think that my other dreams may also be related to the case?" Skinner tucked his fists into the pockets of his coat. His shoulders slumped. "I don't know."
"Other dreams?"
Skinner looked at him, his expression that of a child that has been caught in a lie. Then he nodded. "They seem to be connected."
"Have you ever seen the shirt before?"
Skinner shook his head, his face grim in the cold. "I thought they were just nightmares."
Unable to answer, Mulder reached out and put a steadying hand on his boss's shoulder. He was torn between the desire to grill Skinner about the dream and the feeling that he should be kinder here, different, but Skinner just squinted at him until he removed his hand. Mulder watched as Skinner walked away, through the stray refuse in front of the dumpster. He looked just as he always did, head up, shoulders back, a calm and solid presence at the scene of the crime. He looked no different, but he was having nightmares, screaming into the darkness, watching women die.
Mulder sighed, shoving his hands in his pockets to warm them. Either A.D. Skinner was flying down to North Carolina to kill young women in his spare time, or he had just described a precognitive dream about the victims of a serial killer. Mulder wasn't sure which answer he preferred.
5. Grace
Susie's Diner
Corner of Main and Raleigh
Bent, North Carolina
5:32 PMThey sat across from him, shifting on the vinyl seat like two kids. Mulder gulped his food; Scully toyed with hers. Both of them tried not to stare at him. Both of them probably thought he was crazy.
He wondered if telling Mulder had been a mistake.
It suddenly felt as if this whole thing had been a mistake, from his impulse to come down here to his sharing of Mulder's room to his frightened confession of recognition at the crime scene this morning. He should have kept his mouth shut, if this was the reaction he was going to get. Suddenly, he had a lot more sympathy for Scully, and all she must have had to put up with over the last six years.
After the waitress brought coffee, Mulder excused himself to use the restroom. Skinner watched his rapidly retreating back and felt his own heart speed up in his chest. He'd been a field agent long enough to recognize a set-up when he saw one. Scully had been left alone to figure him out or open him up. He glanced at her. She gazed into her coffee cup.
"I know you don't believe me," he said.
Her eyes met his, wide and blue. He wondered how Mulder had ever kept a secret from this woman.
"It's all right, Agent Scully," he said, trying to smile. "I'm not sure I believe it myself."
"What are you doing here, sir?" Her hand came down on his forearm. Her nails were pretty-- manicured half-moons painted a neutral beige color. Once, on a whim, he had gone to the Jefferson Monument at night. He had stood on the dais and looked up at Jefferson, looking up, a lone figure against the black night sky, and at that moment he felt sadness overwhelm him. Jefferson alone. For some ridiculous reason he did not want to puzzle out, Scully's pretty nails made him think of that moment. They reminded him of Jefferson's circle of light and the darkness that surrounded it. They made him feel lonely.
"Mulder," she said. Skinner looked toward the door, but Mulder wasn't there, wasn't striding back through the aisle, unbuttoned suit jacket flapping. They were still alone.
"Excuse me?"
"You came because of him."
He sat back, pulling his arm out from under her hand. "I was called here, Agent Scully."
She was craned over the table, eyes locked on his, voice pitched low. "I'm aware of that, sir. But there's more to it than that, isn't there? I've seen him do this before--with Lucy Householder, Marty Glenn, Max Felig. With you. When you were being framed for that woman's murder. And he's doing it again."
"What are you saying, Scully?" He felt his arms cross over his chest. Walter Skinner in charge. It felt like a lie.
"I'm saying Mulder believes, and it makes you feel better to be near him."
He looked into her eyes and fought the urge to confess, to tell her everything. Maybe to cry. You, too, Scully, he thought, although he didn't know what he meant by that.
"I just want to know what's happening to me."
"That's how you're different, sir. None of them did. None of them wanted to know what Mulder knew, but he believed them, so they listened."
Skinner looked at her, wondering if she realized how sad she sounded, how hopeless. Was this supposed to be encouraging? "What *is* happening to me, Agent Scully?" he asked.
Scully sat back, picking up her fork. "There are many possibilities. Dreams which seem to foretell events are a common occurrence. Almost everyone has what appear to be psychic dreams at one point or another." There was a flicker in her blue eyes, and Skinner wondered if she spoke from experience.
"So this is normal."
He saw her answer in the blank expression that took over her face.
"Jesus," he whispered.
"I'm sure we can figure this out, sir."
They could figure it out. They usually did. Sure. And Skinner could only hope that they would this time too, Mulder and Scully to the rescue, but Skinner had read those reports, the ones on Householder, and Felig, and Glenn, and he knew that when Mulder came up with an answer, that answer didn't usually help the person in question. In fact, the people Mulder believed tended to end up dead.
Night
Bent, North CarolinaHe knows where he is although he can't name it. He's been here before. Once, in the second grade, he'd come here with his class to take a tour that was crushingly dull, even for second graders, but when you grew up in Bent, there just weren't that many places to take field trips to.
*But I grew up in Wisconsin.*
He's been here again after that, in the adolescent heat of his teenage years, during one of the recession layoffs that preceded the plant's shutting down for good. The workers had been gone, the machinery silent. He and his date and three or four other couples had come and run around in the dark risking tetanus and a billion other stupid things so they could scare the shit out of each other and grope in the dark. He distinctly recalls kissing someone who hadn't been his date, someone illicit. That had seemed dangerous at the time.
Now, it only makes him want to laugh, or weep.
There is no heat anywhere; everything is clammy and cool to the touch. He is surrounded by tiles and one of the faucets leaks and leaks and sometimes it makes him think he will start screaming and never stop. There are no lids on the toilet tanks, nothing he can wrench up and swing as a weapon, nothing he can do but feel his throat clench when the next present comes along.
Something in the rhythm of the leaking faucet reminds him of the facile commercial jingle that used to play almost hourly on the local radio station, which in turn reminds him of the summer he'd spent helping old Mr. Clay teach the Sunday School kindergarten when he'd been fifteen. *Redbriar, Wisconsin. I had *football* practice on Sundays.* He remembers the stuffy whitewashed room and the bored five-year olds, refusing to even attempt to remember their verses for the Fourth of July Pageant. The entire Sunday School had smelled like paste and sweaty toddlers; the very walls had been warm to the touch.
Here the walls are cold. He imagines sometimes that they are paved with bone, but he knows, he *knows* it's only porcelain tile, small and even and shining like teeth when the lantern light hits them. They're too small to do any damage, and they refuse to sharpen. His fingers sting from the time he's spent picking at the grout.
The mirrors here are brushed steel-- he can't use them to slash out his life and flush it down the drain. He approaches them warily nonetheless, wanting to see and not wanting to know.
He takes only a glimpse, but he's shocked by his reflection. Surely his hair should have gone white? He looks so normal, pale, but so much like he was before, two weeks ago, before he started to dream... dark hair, dark eyes, smile lines...
Tears stripe his drawn cheeks, and there's a song he heard in church a hundred years ago, when he and Sharon used to go to church, words he knew when he was young and wore patent leather shoes with his best yellow dress and taught Sunday school... Words that were once a comfort but are now an empty litany, a cruel joke. Once was blind, but now he sees, sees everything, sees too much. His lips are numb, but he can see them move, knows the mouth belongs to his reflection.
In the mirror, he meets the black eyes of a woman going mad.
A wretch like me.
Motel 6
Bent, North Carolina
3:03 AMShe woke to Mulder's urgent whispers near her ear.
"Huh?" she groaned, realizing he was in the middle of a sentence. Mulder sat on her bed, one hand on her shoulder.
"--got to see this," he was saying, shaking her.
"Okay, okay." She shrugged his hand off, annoyed. Another night of sleep down the drain. She wanted to crawl headfirst under the cheap itchy bedspread and not come up until ten or eleven in the morning.
"Mulder," she said. She yanked back the blankets. "Is Skinner all right?"
"Shh." He put his finger to her lips. She resisted the urge to bite it. "C'mon."
Skinner lay on his back, sheets tangled around his hips. He wasn't sweating or moaning or tossing: in fact, he appeared to be asleep, as she should have been.
"Mulder," she whispered. "Why--"
"Shh," he repeated. He grabbed her wrist and pulled her alongside the bed. "Listen."
Scully listened. The sound was faint at first, inching around the edges of her hearing, a dull murmur like airport conversation heard through glass.
The sound was coming from Skinner.
She could hardly see his lips move in the shadow cast by her body. She bent near his head.
"What's he saying?' Mulder whispered. She shushed him with a flap of her hand.
"...wretch like me... "
Mulder moved as if to say something else, but Scully reached back and yanked on his shirt.
"...lost, but now I'm... " Skinner said. Scully straightened, holding her palm firm against her mouth. She dragged her partner to the end of the bed.
"Mulder," she murmured, choking back a laugh. "Amazing Grace."
"What?"
"It's 'Amazing Grace,' Mulder. The song."
Mulder stared at her for a moment, eyes blank. Then he too clapped his hand over his mouth, shoulders heaving with silent mirth.
"I guess he's fine, then," he whispered, eventually, voice thick with swallowed amusement.
But he was wrong about that.
Motel 6
Bent, North Carolina
3:24 AMThey'd woken him from something at least charading as solid rest twenty minutes ago. Scully sat across from him, leaning forward, the picture of solicitude. He could feel her wanting to touch him, to check his forehead or scan his pupils for a clue as to what had gone wrong with him. He wished it were that simple-- that he could just take a pill and put an end to this whole thing.
Mulder sat beside him on the bed, leaning towards him, a reflection of his partner's concerned expression on his face.
"Let's go over it again, sir," he said, his voice low.
"Mulder, we've gone over it three times. I fail to see how going over it again is going to help anything." Skinner reached up and rubbed his face with blunt fingertips. His eyes felt crusted over with sand.
"Are you absolutely sure that you dreamed of the crime scene?" Scully asked. "That it wasn't some form of deja vu?"
He scowled at her. She was trying to help, he understood, but trying and actually helping were two different things.
"How am I supposed to know? You wake me out of a sound sleep, consult me like I'm some kind of goddamned oracle, and now you want me to--" He sighed noisily, pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes, more for effect than anything else. "I saw... probably some kind of warehouse. I couldn't tell you where it was. It had an industrial bathroom-- there was a woman looking into a mirror. What I want to know is *why* this is happening to me. What's going on?"
"When did you say this started?" Mulder asked.
"A couple of weeks ago. I'm not sure exactly."
"And the dreams are always different?"
Skinner shook his head, and his head felt so heavy he wondered if it would snap his neck. "This one was new."
"Is this the first time you've seen her face?" Scully asked.
"Yes. It looked like the victims-- all of them."
"What do you mean 'all of them'?" Mulder asked.
"All of them. Dark hair, dark eyes, pretty-- like all the victims."
"It could be an amalgamation--" Scully said, but Mulder was already tripping over himself, a manila folder in his hands.
"Mulder?" Skinner asked.
"Photos of every missing woman in a hundred mile radius-- Robertson got them for me."
"And you want me to look at them." Skinner said. His voice sounded dead in his ears.
"Mulder, the chance of some dream woman... " Scully began, but her voice faded into the background. Skinner had opened the file.
The photos were all different shapes, different sizes, photos of women laughing, eating cake, posing for the camera. A few of them were mug shots, some of them were women who Skinner knew had never seen the inside of a police station, let alone been booked. Many of them had children with them in the pictures, or men.
Skinner leafed through them slowly, aware of Mulder's neck craned over his shoulder, of Scully's slightly annoyed pacing, but he only saw the women, one after another, all different, none of them--
He felt his blood turn solid in his veins, saw the folder fall from fingers suddenly numb, watched the photos arc out: a fan of lost lives on the carpeting. He held onto one.
"It's her. This is her."
Dark eyes. A woman at a picnic, teeth shining like bathroom tiles, her arm around a friend.
"Sir? Are you sure?" Scully crouched in his line of sight, looking up at him. He wanted to touch her face and smile, admit he *was* kidding, because he couldn't be telling the truth. This was not happening.
"I'm sure," he said.
Then they were talking about him again, looking at the label on the picture, the fact sheet on the desk, while he sat and stared into the picnic world of the picture, at a woman who right now might be staring at the same face in a brushed steel mirror, waiting for her next gift.
Once, before, Mulder and Scully whispering about him would have made him feel nervous, or awkward, or lonely. Once, he would have wanted to join them, to stand in between them and feel the thrill of their electric current pass through him. Once, he had wanted to know them, to be part of them, to declare himself their ally. Once, the thought that Mulder and Scully were concerned for his well-being would have made him feel happy in a thin and second-hand way.
Once, five minutes ago.
Before he knew the name of Vivian MacElvey.
"Scully... " he began.
"Mulder, I can't help him. I don't even know if there's anything wrong with him. He's been sleeping erratically, he's probably operating under enormous sleep debt, he's down here on a *whim*, and he says he recognizes this woman as our next victim. What am I supposed to do?"
"Believe him?" he suggested, keeping his eyes on the carpet. She was already worked up enough.
"Do you, Mulder?"
He shrugged. "I don't know. He seems convinced."
"We saw him like this before, Mulder, when that prostitute was murdered, when he thought he was having visions. He's been to a sleep treatment clinic for just these types of things."
"All of that says nothing about the truth or falsehood of his claims."
She looked at him for a long moment, then sighed.
"Mulder, whether it's true or not, whether we believe it or not, this isn't getting us anywhere."
"What do you recommend?"
"That he get some sleep, Mulder. Uninterrupted, if possible. He's tired-- we all are."
Motel 6
Bent, North Carolina
4:13 AMSkinner raised his head when he heard Mulder hang up the phone.
"I told Robertson what we got," Mulder said. "He'll get started on it."
Skinner nodded. "What'd Scully say?"
"She thinks you're crazier than I am."
Skinner thinned his lips in what he hoped would be mistaken as a smile.
"She thinks you should get some rest."
"That's a surprise."
They sat in the dim and silent flicker of the television for so long that Skinner could feel Mulder itching to move, just to ignite an answer. Skinner remained motionless. He felt like a sculpture in thin cotton, his own skin cold and detached.
"It might help if you lie down," Mulder offered.
"Mmmm." Skinner lifted his legs and slid them under the sheet.
"Mulder," he said, after he had turned away, the white sheet like a shroud over his shoulder. He didn't want to ask, but there was no denying the question. Mulder, at least, would not tell anyone but Scully. Mulder would not laugh.
"Yes?"
"What *is* going on?"
Mulder had no answer, and he knew he wasn't expected to give one. As if there was one to give...
"I'm going to be up for a while anyway," he said, hoping Skinner would interpret this as an invitation. He knew he wasn't good with people-- only victims and Scully. Even his conversations with his mother were ragged around the edges. The world he lived in was divided into two categories-- victims and Scully-- and Skinner fit into neither.
Skinner flopped over onto his back.
"There's nothing you can do, Agent Mulder. It was a mistake even to bring it up."
Mulder heard the lonely note in Skinner's voice. "You don't think it has something to do with the case?"
"I think it was a coincidence, Mulder, nothing more, nothing less."
"Mmmm." Mulder nodded, sitting down on the edge of his bed, facing his boss. He'd always known how physically big Skinner was-- he'd been on the receiving end of more than one tackle-- but seeing him spread out there, glasses off, looking ragged and worn in the TV light, Mulder thought Skinner seemed not only big, but dense, thick with isolation.
"You know, when I was younger," Mulder said, "I was convinced that dreams were real, that they were a parallel universe that we went to at night."
Skinner snorted lightly.
"I never understood why I couldn't just go back to the place where I left off the night before."
"You remember your dreams?" Skinner turned his face toward the younger man.
"Don't you?" Mulder asked, and Skinner's expression closed.
"Sure," he answered. "The bad ones."
"Are there any other kind?" Mulder asked, and was shocked when Skinner's low laugh rumbled in his ears.
"We need to get out of this town, Mulder. It's fucking depressing."
"Yes, sir." Mulder said, slipping under the covers. "Good night."
"Don't let the bedbugs bite."
Mulder glanced over at his boss. "Sorry?"
"That's what my mother used to say to us--'don't let the bedbugs bite.'"
Raising his head slightly, Mulder looked askance at the man in the bed next to his.
"Wish she'd been on hand when I was staring at a giant vampire cockroach hanging from my ceiling..."
Skinner was quiet for a while, and Mulder felt faintly vulgar for having mentioned the episode. Just another reminder of how at odds he and Skinner often were.
Perhaps trying to make amends, Skinner's low, smooth voice met his ears again.
"My mother used to leave a flashlight on the nightstand. My brother Daniel was afraid of the dark. She'd kiss us good night and check under our beds with this big square red flashlight, must have been my father's once, and then leave it for us, just in case. To keep the monsters away."
"She had a monster spray. My mom. A plastic spray bottle," Mulder explained, "with water in it and some of her perfume. She would spray it in our rooms to protect us."
"Did it work?"
"I'm still here, sir," Mulder said, smiling in the dark.
"That you are. Good night, Mulder."
"Night," Mulder murmured. He didn't say it, but the phrase kept circling, running around and around, chasing its own tail: don't let the bedbugs bite, don't let them bite, don't let the bedbugs bite. The giant, bloodthirsty, fanged, wall-crawling bedbugs...
He dreamed of his mother that night, of perfume.
6. Vivian
Stringer's Warehouse
Outside Bent, North Carolina
9:07 AMAnother day, another crime scene. Skinner stood back and let his agents work, surveying from a short distance away, hands in his pockets. He had expected it to be warmer here, down south, but his breath came out in plumes. He could smell the tang of salt on the air although the ocean was almost an hour away, and the smell reminded him of a beach vacation he and Sharon took in their third or fourth year of marriage. He had still been human then, still able to talk to his wife. He wished idly for his gloves.
Christley was surveying the scene like a proud dictator, and Robertson was dutifully reporting the details he hadn't imparted on the phone that morning.
"... was Carolyn Escher, bank teller, mother of two..." Skinner tried to look like he was paying attention; he suspected, from Robertson's frequent, nervous glances at him, that he was making a hash of it.
"Sir?" Scully gestured for him to come closer. They wanted him to look at her, the victim, to see if he recognized her. Scully hadn't said anything of the sort over breakfast, but he got the feeling she was going with Mulder's theory for now. The thought did not comfort him. He would look, regardless-- he had to-- but he knew he wouldn't know the girl. The dreams weren't about knowing, they were just dreams. Just a way to torture him with his own ineptitude. He couldn't help her. He didn't know why he even bothered to try.
But he stepped forward and looked anyway. Dark hair, dark eyes, bruising around the neck, evisceration, no shirt this time, just socks and a pool of blood almost as black as her hair; she was just like the others. Dead.
"A wretch like me," he muttered. Mulder and Scully both turned to look at him.
"What?" Mulder asked.
Skinner shrugged. "Amazing Grace. I woke up with the tune in my head this morning." Scully was staring at him, her brow crinkled in a way he recognized from seeing her scrutinize autopsy reports. He felt like a specimen on a slide. "Amazing Grace, how sweet the taste," he chanted rapidly, waving his hand. "The hymn. You've heard it."
"How sweet the sound," Scully corrected softly.
"What?"
"The lyric goes 'how sweet the sound', sir." She shared a look with Mulder, and then returned her warm gaze to his. Skinner had no wish to interpret her concern as pity.
"And this is important because...?"
Scully was standing up, shucking her gloves.
"What is it, Scully?"
By way of answer, Mulder peeled off his own gloves, shoving them in his pockets. Scully turned, her eyes on Mulder, her voice tired but somehow amused.
"My dairy products don't have immortal souls."
There was a brief, urgent conference with Christley and Robertson. It ended with Christley looking stubborn and irritated, and Robertson looking dubious yet strangely impressed. Skinner could tell by the set of Mulder's shoulders that Christley had dismissed whatever it was he'd told the shorter man out of hand.
He wasn't surprised to see Scully bristle at Christley; the last words spoken were low and cool and unmistakably Scully's.
Together, both his agents returned to him, looking intent and full of terrible purpose. They walked shoulder to shoulder, and Skinner felt himself obscurely comforted. He ignored the odd impulse to salute when Scully held the car door open for him.
Mulder started the rental, and Robertson followed them with his large, thoughtful brown eyes as they pulled away.
"We saw it on the way into town," Scully said, twisting in her seat to face him.
Skinner shook his head, not believing her. It simply wasn't true. This was not happening. "And what do you think this has to do with our case, Agent Scully?" he asked. His voice sounded exactly the same as it always did.
"You were mumbling the song in your sleep last night," Mulder said, eyes locked to the flashing lights of the patrol car in front of them.
"Amazing Grace is a popular song, Mulder."
Scully nodded. "But the verse you sang today isn't in the song. 'How sweet the taste.' It's from the billboard."
Skinner fought the urge to chuckle. If Scully was buying this bullshit, she would be offended. Nevertheless, the explanation was obvious. "Maybe I saw the billboard on my way in, like you did."
Scully nodded again. "You're right, sir. You could have."
"I still don't understand how this billboard is related to the case."
"Mulder has a theory... " Scully began. She turned to look at her partner.
Skinner waited. She wouldn't postulate herself, he knew. When it came to cockamamie theories, Scully let Mulder do the talking. He was almost relieved. Hearing it from Scully would make it real.
"I think you've been dreaming Vivian MacElvey's experiences," Mulder said. "I think you're linked to her telepathically, somehow."
Skinner nodded. This was familiar: Mulder had explained it last night after Skinner had found the photo. "What does that have to do with the billboard?"
"She was the first of all the women to go missing, " Scully explained. "We didn't put her together with the case because we never found the body."
"Until yesterday. Until your dream," Mulder added.
"You aren't answering my question. You think I'm telepathically linked to one of our victims, fine. But how--"
"She's not a victim, not yet," Mulder murmured.
"Mulder, that's not--" he began, but Scully interrupted, her smooth voice gliding over his.
"If Mulder's right, sir, then your dreams are not about Vivian MacElvey, they're *from* her. We think she's at Grace Dairy, the dairy on the billboard."
Skinner knew his face must have reflected his skepticism when Scully smiled apologetically. "It's the only lead we've got," she said. "This guy's not giving us much to go on."
"I'm right," Mulder said, shooting her a look.
"Mulder, if you're right--" Skinner began, then stopped, horrified. The dark, the cold bathroom, the pale face in the mirror. From a hundred miles away, he felt Scully's hand on his forearm.
"She's still alive," Skinner whispered. "She's alive." He closed his eyes. This whole time, two weeks, almost three weeks now, he'd been having dreams and Vivian MacElvey had been alive, living the horrors that woke him in the night. The whole time. He felt like screaming.
"You believe this?" he asked, surprised by the coarse rasp of his voice. He flicked his eyes to Scully. She looked away for a second, to Mulder's focused profile, then back.
"I'll tell you when we find her," she said.
For a while after they became partners, real partners not just teamed up on the FBI's say so, Scully had wondered how long it would be before Mulder's belief stopped outranking hers. She had wondered when she would build up a callous disregard for forever playing the disproved skeptic to Mulder's confirmed believer, how long it would be before she was taken seriously. Sitting in the car watching Skinner's pale, shocked face in the mirror, she realized she had stopped waiting for that moment.
"Do you believe this?" he'd asked her, and she'd told him the truth. She didn't know whether or not Mulder was right. Scientifically, there was nothing to back her partner up-- no serious studies of telepathy or precognition through dreams, no documented evidence to demonstrate that the future or the present could be divined by the dreamer, no way to know whether Skinner was really seeing Vivian MacElvey or if he was haunted by personal demons.
She'd know if and when they found the killer.
Now, as the rental pulled into the broad, circular drive of the Amazing Grace Dairy, the windshield was spattered with fat drops of rain. The sky was gray and opaque-- it gave the squat, metallic building a wavy silhouette, an appearance of being already underwater. And then the sleet began. Appropriate, she thought, glancing at Skinner. His face looked old in the rainy light.
Through the windshield, Scully could see the thick splash of water congealing with frost, the messy clouds of slush at the heart of each heavy drop. She shivered, tugging at the collar of her overcoat.
"Hey," she heard Mulder say, and he sprang from the car, coatless, before they'd even pulled to a complete stop.
"FBI!"
Skinner was on his heels, weapon drawn, and Scully had a moment of unreasonable jealousy before she, too, caught sight of the small man in a the transparent hooded rain poncho who was scrambling for the door of the building he'd just exited.
Skinner heard Scully's cardoor slam behind him, and was reassured. Mulder would corner the suspect, Skinner would cover Mulder and Scully would then shoot the homicidal little fuck. The idea gave him a steadying sense of satisfaction as he entered the dark hallway, Mulder's running steps loud in Skinner's ears, and echoing in the dark.
If the day had not grown so overcast, there would have been plenty of light inside the abandoned dairy, a warehouse lined with thick bottle glass windows. As it was, Skinner had the feeling he'd suddenly lost the ability to see in color. The milking room was faded and warped in his vision, a nonsense jumble of pipes and machinery that sorted itself only into varied grayness, a gloom as stark and leering as a noir film's, or a dream's.
He could hear Mulder's panting, and that of the fleeing suspects, and his own harsh breaths as well. He tried to remind himself that his tripping heart was a result of two people's panic-- his own, and Vivian MacElvey's.
Where was she?
Mulder called Skinner softly, his footsteps slowing down as he remembered caution. That was good: they didn't know who this fleeing suspect was, no matter what he had dreamed. They could be walking in on a meth lab or a gunrunner's lair for all they knew, and Skinner didn't want to have to jerk Mulder out of the line of fire.
He heard the subdued click of Scully's heels, felt her warm hand light on his shoulder.
"Which way?" She whispered. He looked at her for second, then jerked his head in the direction that Mulder had gone. She nodded and leaned back, letting him lead.
Mulder eased through the swinging metal doors into a room yellow with lantern light. The floor was sticky and dark, and the smell hit him before recognition did. His feet slipped in it; the stench old blood and fresh terror brought tears to his eyes.
But out at the edge of his peripheral vision he saw them.
He had her by the hair.
She was bleeding, gasping for breath, trying to keep her feet on the gore-slicked floor as the man dragged her towards him and locked his elbow around her throat.
Before Mulder could remember his voice, Skinner spoke for him.
"Let her go!"
Yellow light flickered in the whites of the man's eyes, but his movements were curiously languid. A knife appeared in his hand as if placed there by a continuity error in a bad kung fu film. The man held it between his forefinger and middle finger like a baton. It wavered back and forth, a snake of silver edged by the lantern light.
No thumb, Mulder thought, eyes glued to the virtuoso performance. He felt his profile fall into place. The marks on the hands... no thumb... He wanted to kiss Scully, but the man had traded the knife to his good hand and dented the skin of the girl's throat just behind the point of her chin.
"Drop it," Skinner commanded. Mulder glanced back. Skinner and Scully both stood just inside the door, legs apart, weapons raised, elbows slightly bent. They looked like a textbook illustration, and Mulder felt a wave of wholly inappropriate laughter.
"Release her, or we *will* shoot," Scully assured.
The man looked to Mulder, as if expecting confirmation of this. Mulder nodded slowly, trying to meet the terrified woman's eyes, to promise her she'd live. His promise was for her, but his words were for her captor.
"This ends. Now."
The gunshot thundered in his ears and he knew, as the man flung his victim to the floor and fled, that Skinner had shot into the ceiling.
"Scully," Mulder barked, and leapt for the man in the rain poncho.
Scully was leaning over the injured woman before Skinner even thought to look for her. Already Scully's hands were rouged with blood, as she tried to find the more serious injuries, tried to hold the woman's matted hair away from her throat to see if she'd been cut there.
Scully's eyes were laser blue behind the curtain of her hair.
"Mulder," she reminded, and Skinner nodded curtly, the world suddenly in color again, suddenly in motion.
Red hair, blue eyes, yellow light, black blood curdling on the floor, every breath laden with thick copper rot.
Skinner followed his agent, again lead by his breath and his footsteps.
Then a crash, followed by a sudden wash of gray rain, pale enough to see by.
Elvis has left the building, Skinner thought randomly, as he followed the suspect, followed Mulder back outside.
Mulder's hair was flat with rain, and the shoulders of his suit black with it. The other man was a slick blur, running wildly as Mulder slid to a halt and steadied his gun.
"Halt, or I'll shoot!"
The suspect spun to face him, and scrabbled underneath the clear plastic shell of his raingear, searching for something. The sun came out, even as the rain continued, and the water that glazed the man's poncho glittered: he looked as if he'd been studded with rhinestones.
Mulder's eyes were dark, the side of his face Skinner could see was glossy with streaming water and improbable sunlight.
Skinner thought he'd heard thunder until the suspect's eyes widened, until his clear poncho was a smear of red so bright Skinner had to close his eyes against it.
When he opened them again, he found he'd turned his head toward the doorway he'd followed Mulder out of, and saw Scully, pale as doves in the doorway, her eyes fastened on Mulder, one bloody hand holding the collar of her coat closed.
"His shots," Skinner told her, and his voice was low and relieved. Together, they watched Mulder stalk towards what Skinner presumed was the suspect's corpse, and prod it with his foot, gun still trained on the fallen man's chest.
And then something occurred to him.
"Did you find her?"
Scully blinked at him for a moment. Then her eyes widened, and she shook her head.
"I was with the victim. She's going to need an ambulance. I haven't--" and then Skinner shouldered past her, back into the darkness.
*
He found her, shuddering and blank eyed, huddled beneath a sink in the vast and comfortless bathroom that opened onto the square room with the blood dark floor. There was light enough to see by-- even if there was nothing Skinner wanted to see.
Kneeling, he shrugged out of his coat and held it towards her.
"Vivian," he called, careful to keep his voice low and soft. It was the first time he'd spoken her name.
Her dark eyes opened, sought him, studied him for a moment, widened with something akin to fear as he gently, gently settled the coat around her hunched shoulders.
"A wretch like me," she whispered, and one scarecrow hand reached out for him. Skinner held still as her fingers skittered across his face as if seeking purchase. "Like me," Vivian MacElvey breathed.
"I didn't think," she said. Her voice was brittle and hoarse. "I didn't think I'd live to see..." She stopped again, hand trembling against his cheek.
Then Scully was blocking the door, the lantern light making her red hair glow.
Vivian reached for her with a wordless little bleat that made the back of Skinner's throat sour with pity. The woman was curling on her side toward Scully, toward someone neither male nor brunette with pretty brown eyes. Toward safety. Skinner understood.
Grace Dairy
Outside Bent, North Carolina
2:48 PMShe was brought out on a stretcher as a matter of form, flanked by Scully and Mulder with his gun still drawn. The last abductee, Elizabeth Prade, was already on her way to the hospital, paramedics having pronounced her badly shaken but essentially unharmed. Skinner had watched her shiver under the orange wool blanket, telling her story to the medics and the cops who clustered around her. He hadn't gotten close enough to hear what she was saying, but he knew the story: the tears, the relief, the obsequious thanking of God and rescue workers over and over again. He didn't want to hear it. Elizabeth Prade hadn't been saved by God. She'd been saved by dumb luck, or poor timing: she had been taken last.
Vivian MacElvey, on the other hand...
She lay thin and trembling under Skinner's coat on the stretcher, her filthy stockinged feet pressed together like a little girl's. Skinner stood by the doors of the ambulance, holding on to the cool metal frame, not craning his neck to see her.
He saw her anyway-- his position predicated it, and maybe that's what he had wanted when he stopped there, leaning against the ambulance like a boy at a school dance. The woman in the picture had been pleasantly round, her smile buoyed by cheeks and the soft, smooth flesh an extra twenty pounds will give a woman. That woman was gone. This woman, *this* Vivian, was gaunt and pale, her collarbones jutting out of the frayed neck of a too-large white collared blouse that had long since had the buttons worried off it by restless, frantic hands. Her hair lay matted like dog fur against the stretcher.
After her initial seeming recognition, she had then ignored him. She'd kept her eyes on Scully as the agent examined her, repeating the same lyric of "Amazing Grace" until Skinner thought he would go mad himself. She'd finally quieted when the paramedics came to set her on the stretcher, and Skinner had made himself a place beside the ambulance because he couldn't just walk away.
"Vivian," he whispered when her stretcher paused next to him. Scully, still holding the victim's hand, shot him a look of such compassion that he nearly gave in to a rising desire to cry.
The woman on the stretcher turned her head when he called her, but there was nothing there, this time, neither fear nor recognition; she'd been sedated.
Skinner felt a pang of something he couldn't put a name to, followed by a moment of gratitude when Scully joined Vivian in the bay of the ambulance to take her hand again.
The vehicle pulled away, lights flashing, and Skinner watched it go.
Grace Dairy
Outside Bent, North Carolina
5:47 PMOn TV shows, the important cops always got to go home right after the bad guys were caught, Skinner thought, sipping at a cup of old coffee. Once the victim was rescued and carted off, and the standard witticisms were exchanged, the principals got in their cars and drove off into the sunset of a good meal and a good night's sleep. Skinner thought it was a pity real life didn't work that way.
Instead, he stood here in the gloom of a January dusk, watching a swarm of local law enforcement gather evidence. The man, Harold Bloomfeld according to his driver's license, was dead, so there would be no trial, but there would be an enquiry for Agent Mulder, and, more important than that administrative formality, there would be the studies of Bloomfeld, psycho- and sociological investigations, profiles and conclusions, and probably a true-crime novel that, if Mulder had any sense at all, he would write himself.
In other words, the evidence had to be gathered and Skinner got to oversee the gatherers. It was either this or talk to the press who had begun to arrive in droves not five minutes after Vivian was taken away. As senior officer on the scene, Skinner was technically the one who should have handled the wolves at the door, but what was a sycophant like Christley good for if not dealing with the press? Skinner had bowed out, citing Christley's familiarity with the local press, and ducked back into the warehouse with a sigh of relief. Later, when he found out that Christley had been the one to name Harold Bloomfeld the CopyCat Killer, that relief would turn to annoyance.
Copying was what Harold had done, Skinner would think, setting the report down on his immaculate green blotter, but instead of copying other killers, he had tried to copy his principal victim, seeking out women as much like Vivian MacElvey as possible, then raping, strangling, and eviscerating them as she was forced to look on. The marks that Scully had found on the victims' hands, cuts drawn straight across the base of the thumb, would turn out to be another form of copying-- Harold's way of copying his mother's accident with her young son and an electric carving knife. However appropriate, Skinner would find 'CopyCat' too childish and deceptively simple a moniker for such a monster.
Blissfully unaware of Christley's blunder at this point, Skinner watched as Mulder came up next to him, hands in his pockets, head down. It was nice to know that he was still the alpha dog, not that he particularly cared to be at the moment. He wanted someone else to take the responsibility, to be in charge, but there *was* no one else.
"Congratulations, Mulder," he said.
He felt the other man's heavy gaze, but did not meet it.
"Thank you, sir."
"I would prefer it if you made... if my involvement in the case was downplayed in the report."
Mulder nodded. Skinner did not look toward him, but he felt Mulder move, come so close that their shoulders were almost touching. "Sir, I just wanted you to know that--"
"Thank you, Mulder," he said. He met Mulder's gaze without wavering or blinking. Thank you, he thought, but did not say it again. He looked into Mulder's concerned face and understood what Scully had been saying in the diner. Mulder believed. He believed that what you were experiencing was real and honest, even if it was so crazy you didn't believe it yourself. With Mulder, it wasn't you but the world that was insane, and that thought was so tempting, so reassuring, that Skinner's hands itched with the desire to grab Mulder and pull him close.
"'scuse me," said Robertson. He stood in front of them, shifting from one foot to the next like a second grader who had to pee.
"What can we do for you?" Skinner asked, almost relieved to be interrupted.
"I was wondering you would be willing to work the room with me, you know, sort of spot me on the follow-up," he said, talking to Mulder. Mulder glanced at Skinner, who shrugged. No harm, no foul. Robertson would benefit from hearing Mulder's mind in action. With a dead perp, there was no need to do a profile immediately, but it didn't hurt to let Robertson work it now, and it didn't hurt Mulder to have his opinion respected.
Mulder moved to the corner of the room near the sink Vivian MacElvey had hiding under, watching with a slight smile on his lips as Robertson paced in a circle, hands flying. So Robertson paced and Mulder watched him and Skinner watched Mulder, and when Mulder looked up and caught Skinner's eye, he smiled. Skinner tried to smile back.
7. Walter
Motel 6
Bent, North Carolina
2:49 AMScully was out of her taupe suit almost before she got through the hotel bedroom. The thick, too-sweet stench of old blood was in her clothes, in her hair. She was in the shower before she'd turned the tap. Her phone rang, and she ignored it, turning up the stream until its low thunder drowned out the shrilling. She'd call him back; Mulder no doubt had some details he was anxious to share with her. There would be time for that later.
After using what seemed like half a bottle of shampoo, Scully rinsed her red hair for the third time and finally felt clean. Getting a little compulsive in my old age, she mused. The stream of water dwindled to a staccato trickle and she drew on her robe. She bent to pick up her slacks and frowned at a long maroon stain at the hem of one trouser leg; she'd have to switch dry cleaners again, she reflected. The counter help had been giving her weird looks. She wondered where Mulder had his suits done, and then where Skinner got his shirts pressed, before sitting on the hotel bed and drawing the bedspread around her knees.
Mulder had probably called her from the road; after Vivian MacElvey had been admitted, met at the hospital by a red-eyed but excited Eileen Bridgeton, and finally allowed to slip into a troubled sleep, Scully had taken her leave, returning to the crime scene to bring Skinner his coat.
When she'd found him, he'd been leaning against the doorjamb, eyes on Mulder as the agent patiently explained the significance of the wounds on the victims' hands to a chagrinned Robertson.
"Your coat, sir." He'd grunted something non-committal before turning to face her.
"Agent Scully," and he'd sounded glad to see her. Whatever was left of the teeny-bopper she'd been in junior high fluttered in her belly. The AD with the broad shoulders was back, erasing any hint of the frightened, aging man she'd seen that morning in the back seat of the car.
He smiled at her then, a slow, pleased smile she'd never seen before, and she wondered if she was up to blushing at two AM in twenty degree weather. Decided windburn and cold would render the point moot.
"I'm going to stay in town for the night, sir. I'd like to speak with Vivian in the morning."
Nodding his approval, Skinner touched her coatsleeve near her wrist, only briefly. Then he took the coat she'd slung over her other arm and turned again to watch Mulder, showing no sign he felt the cold.
Later, sipping instant noodle soup from a paper cup that a uniform had handed her, she heard Robertson make his last goodbyes, and felt Mulder approach.
"Is that chicken?"
"Shrimp," she replied, and he wrinkled his nose, as she'd known he would.
"Skinner's driving back tonight." He handed her the car keys he'd fished from his pocket. "He says you're going to interview Vivian in the morning?"
Scully resisted the impulse to raise her eyebrows. Mulder wasn't staying, wasn't following up. She wanted to ask why.
Then she saw Skinner leaning against his own rental, fingers drumming the roof absently. He was still coatless.
The impression of strength had faded again; Skinner looked weary and ill-used.
"Still bucking for that raise?" Regretting the comment even as she said it, she waited for Mulder to be angry or amused.
But he'd turned to watch the AD as well, and showed no sign of hearing her.
"He looks like he could use the company," she suggested.
"Yeah. I'll call you when I get in."
"With any luck, I'll be asleep by then," but she wasn't trying to dissuade him.
He grinned at that, lifted a palm and let it drift around her face and shoulders, as if he were polishing an imaginary monument.
"Catch up on that beauty rest, Agent Scully."
She'd taken another sip of her cooling soup rather than smile at him.
The chill creeping into his skull woke him up. Mulder blinked, and opened his eyes. He felt like he'd had his head in the crisper of a fridge. His forehead hurt where it began to warm. He fingered the skin on his face, wondering whether he could get frostbite from glass. He'd have to ask Scully.
It was almost dark: smudgy gray light just crept over the horizon, hardly visible over the green glow of the radio. The faint reassuring voices of the NPR announcers murmured about the fall of the Yen. There was no sign of Skinner aside from his trench folded on the driver's seat, and that bothered him. The fading halo of his profile was melting from the window. It was undoubtedly *cold* out there. Wherever they were.
Then Mulder heard the cry of a gull, and recognized the crust of salt in the cold, humid air.
A thin curve of white at the edge of the grayness; the sun would rise soon.
Mulder rubbed at his stubbled jaw, flipped the visor down to make sure he'd wiped the trail of drool off his chin, and then opened the passenger door.
"Sir?" His voice got lost in the rush of the waves. Nothing. He peered into the darkness, but no shape was recognizably human. Mulder shrugged his coat up over his shoulders and buttoned it, turning up the collar. He pushed up and out of the car, his legs as stiff and unwieldy as a new colt's from too much car travel.
They'd left the crime scene around two. Mulder had no idea why they'd ended up here. It shouldn't have taken more than four hours to get back to D.C., and the debriefing, and the start of the paperwork, late hour aside.
But Skinner had been quiet, even for him, on the ride back, and the car had been stuffy and overheated, and Mulder hadn't slept in maybe 36 hours, and he'd lost consciousness fifteen minutes into the ride.
Scully had stayed behind with the surviving witness, a woman so pale she'd seemed translucent to Mulder.
Vivian MacElvy had shuddered visibly any time any man had approached her; Scully had suggested the escort herself, and Mulder had agreed easily. He could tie things up back in D.C., and Scully was waxing translucent, too. Better to let her stay, and follow up on Vivian in the morning.
And now an empty beach, and a frigid wind that licked his bones even through the coat, and Skinner, just ahead of him, dim, a different shade of gray in the dull predawn.
"Sir?" he repeated, but it was too soft for the older man to hear. Even if he'd been shoulder to shoulder with Skinner, he'd doubted the man would have been able to make it out.
He felt the cold grit of sand burrow into his socks, through his thin Italian shoes.
He reached out to touch Skinner's shoulder, but at the last moment decided against it, and tucked his hand back into his coat pocket. "Skinner," he muttered. He could feel the salt wind already making his hair stiff.
The other man stood with his arms crossed against his chest. Mulder couldn't tell if he was shivering, but he should have been. The light was too poor to see if the bare forearms were marbled with gooseflesh.
Apparently he'd left his suit jacket in the car as well, or else dropped it somewhere, because he was standing on a January beach in his shirt sleeves.
The lost jacket worried Mulder; Skinner was nothing if not practical, and Mulder saw nothing practical in waiting for hypothermia to turn your bones brittle on a frigid strip of sand.
He found himself unbuttoning his own coat and hanging it around Skinner's shoulders.
Skinner turned his head and looked at him for the first time; for a disconcerting moment, Mulder was sure the older man hadn't recognized him.
"Mulder?" he said, finally. His voice sounded rough and unused.
"You'll freeze to death, sir. Come back to the car."
"Wait," the other man replied, and turned his face back to the horizon, and the widening band of light, now tinged with pink.
Mulder nodded, and watched his breath plume white and stream away as he exhaled, inhaled, exhaled again, the air bitter in his lungs, hard as glass. He tucked his hands in his armpits and tensed against the cold, but he, too, now wanted very much to watch the sun rise and paint this secluded beach with warmth. Give the sand some gold, the sky some blue, Skinner's ears raw coral. Color.
"She told me she didn't think she'd live to see another day," and it was flat, and it was apropos of nothing, but Mulder smiled. He understood.
"But she did," he answered calmly, and for no good reason his smile grew wider. He was glad to think of Vivian MacElvey waking up in a warm bed. Even shivering awake from a nightmare, but waking. That was the important part.
"What he did to those women, Mulder..." and for the first time, maybe the first time ever, Mulder heard a tremor in the other man's voice. Maybe it was just the cold.
Mulder stepped in front of the Assistant Director, and although his fingers were already clumsy with the relentless shear, he buttoned his coat. The arms hung empty at Skinner's sides, and Mulder was mildly surprised that he'd been able to button it at all across a chest so much broader than his own.
"He won't do it again," Mulder told him. The sway of the empty sleeves disturbed him somehow so he tucked them into the pockets of the coat. It was good to be the voice of reason once in a while. Good to be the one who could offer some sort of reassurance.
"Vivian has you to thank for that," Skinner intoned, and there was light enough to see the other man's eyes.
"Well. You can tell her he got in the way of the bullet. His bad luck."
Something that wanted to be a smile lightened Skinner's expression.
"You did a good job, Mulder."
"Thank you, sir." Mulder felt his face warm and was glad that his cheeks and ears had already been rouged by the salt wind.
"The sun's up," Skinner added conversationally, and Mulder realized it was more than a strange flood of gratitude that had warmed the back of his neck. He turned, and was dazzled by the sun, casting diamonds on the sea and staining the sky with gold.
For a moment he was blinded, and he held a hand up to shield his eyes. Skinner's glasses glimmered with sunlight, making his face bright and his expression closed at once, as Mulder couldn't see the other man's eyes through the reflected light.
He put his gaze out to sea again, feeling glad of Skinner's relative closeness. He felt anchored by the fact he was close enough to reach out and touch the other man. The hushing crash of the surf was lulling, and the spray intermittent, surprising, bracing.
Eventually, he realized Skinner had been calling is name.
"Mulder.
"Mulder, it's cold. Let's get back to the car."
Nodding, Mulder made a few stumbling steps, the sand suddenly treacherous under foot.
"You'll have to unbutton this," Skinner said, a trace of humor in his low, rumbling voice.
He had his shoulder braced against Mulder's, and Mulder was sure the older man would have reached out to steady him had his hands been available.
He undid the coat with more finesse than he'd used to button it. For a long second they stood still, Mulder holding the flaps of the coat, meeting Skinner's eyes.
"She should thank you, too, sir," he said. He wasn't sure if his voice could be heard over the splash of the waves, but Skinner moved, holding the coat open and placing a strong arm around Mulder's shoulders, turning them back toward the car.
Mulder tucked his own arm between the other man's warm back and the thick fabric of the trench coat, and together, they made their way back to the car, the clear January sun on their backs.
The End
