Work Text:
"Scully, this creature has been sighted no less than eleven times within the last month---"
"Mulder." Her voice tightened, curling around the vowel, a warning. "I understand that. But you can't deny that this creature, this Oza How---"
"Ozark Howler."
"Yes, well, by your own description, an animal of this build would collapse under its own weight thanks to the square-cube law..." images from practically every case they had ever worked on flashed through her head, one after the other, and she trailed off feebly, a groan caught in her throat.
Mulder's wont was to be intuitive, to jump from idea to idea without a thought of the details. Sometimes he was right, sometimes he wasn't; it was up to her to fill in the gaps, to patch together the theory so that Skinner wouldn't laugh in their faces. Truth was, her mind did work like his. She had merely exercised it, hemmed out the tendency to jump to conclusions. Math and science necessitated this.
It was 5:23 in the morning, a time of day Mulder had cheerily referred to as "prime Ozark Howler hunting time." When pressed, however, he admitted that his only references were "a hunch" and a 50 cent paperback book titled Fearsome Creatures of the Lumberwoods that he had insisted upon buying at a run-down dollar store several months earlier.
As the car rounded the curve, Scully glanced at down at a worn page.
There are some stories too good to be true, then there are others that are just too good...