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Chapter Text

Cold Open

09/23/1997

Copper Lake, NY

11:21 a.m.

Jimmy steered his tractor from the road onto the headland and stretched his neck to look for the chopper. Almost half a mile off he could see Frank’s tractor, the brand new John Deere 7810, chugging along Pete's chopper that was regurgitating the sweet smelling green mass into the trailer on its side. While Jimmy was still pissed Frank always got to drive the new and fancy tech and he therefore had to take their old tractor with its non-functional a/c and defective radio, he was glad they had the new self-propelled chopper Pete had bought three years ago. He shuddered as he remembered the times when he had to drive the really old 4020, without a cabin, because the tractor he was driving now would have to tow the old New Holland chopper. He would find black snot in his handkerchiefs for ages after the harvests back then.

He had hoped to find his colleagues a lot nearer to him than they were, really no fun in hurrying across a field in a tractor with a bouncing trailer in tow, thank you very much, and he knew he had to speed up. He could already see the mountain of chopped corn plants on Frank’s trailer and he knew Pete would be pissed if he had to stop and wait for him. He guessed where he had to take over the place parallel to the chopper and hurried on. As he bounced in his seat, squinting against the late summer sun and careful not to crack his skull on the roof liner, he carefully watched whether they would get to the headland and turn together or if he would have to step in earlier. They reached the end of the row and he could see Frank speed up a little to prepare for the well-practiced dance in which chopper and tractor had to circle one another on the little space the headland gave them to align anew in order to munch through the next rows of corn.

Jimmy had almost caught up to them when he registered that, yes, Frank was circling his tractor/trailer unit carefully around, but Pete was driving the chopper straightforward over the balk. And into a line of trees. Jimmy had no chance to do more than mutter a plain shit under his breath before he saw the corn head make contact with the wood. Shit, shit, shit, he thought again, and this will take ages to repair and thank goodness it was Pete himself, he would have killed any of us for this. He was positive Pete had fallen asleep at the wheel, as crazy as it was during the corn harvest, where you had to concentrate hard on the fine tuning between your chopper and the trailers. What the fuck, Pete?

He stopped his 4850 beside the now also standing 7810 and rammed the gear lever in park. In the corner of his eye he saw Frank climbing down the cabin and starting over to the chopper. He was just reaching the ground when he registered that the chopper was still pushing forward, risking toppling the tree over. Suddenly he was concerned Pete may have had a heart attack or something like that; no way he could sleep through such an impact. Frank seemed to think the same and they both hurried over to the chopper. Jimmy arrived first and climbed up its side as fast as possible. He reached the small platform, looked inside and saw – nobody. The cabin was empty. His jaw almost dropped to the floor and he gestured to Frank to come up, no use in talking over the combined noise of the three machines. He tore the door open and immediately registered Pete’s clothes in a heap on the seat. What the fuck, Pete?

“What the fuck?” Frank’s voice piped up behind him and Jimmy thought maybe the both of them should read a book once in a while, you know, to widen the vocabulary.

He slipped inside and stopped the engine. No trace of their boss, just a pile of work clothes and a wrecked chopper. Both men looked at each other in the glaring sunlight. “What the fuck?” both of them muttered simultaneously.

A small bird almost collided first with Frank and then with the glass door, but got the hang of it at the last moment and fluttered away, quickly gaining height over the fields and flying off into the late summer sun.

A pair of eyes watched the scene unblinkingly from behind a tree.

Chapter Text

09/26/1997

Washington, D.C.

F.B.I. Headquarters, Basement Office

7:52 a.m.

Special Agent Fox Mulder, Oxford educated psychologist, top profiler and best of his class almost stapled his own trigger finger onto a pile of papers when his partner entered the office.

“Morning, Mulder,” said Special Agent Dana Scully, medical doctor, forensic pathologist, physicist and his overall person extraordinaire, a soft little smile on her lips and two paper cups of coffee in her hands.

“You’re in a good mood today, Scully, and good morning to you, too.” He grinned up at her and her smile disappeared instantly. What have I done now?

“Oh no Mulder, it’s Friday!” she added to his confusion, but placed one of the coffee cups on his desk. Then she grabbed a little paper bag that was sitting in front of her. She opened it and the smile appeared once again. At least the blueberry muffin was the right decision, he thought and gestured at her to sit down across from him.

“What do you mean?” he said, added “Thanks for the coffee” and slipped a file over to her once she was seated.

“Thanks for the muffin,” she answered sincerely but a little frown crossed over her face.

“Spill it, Scully.”

“You have this look in your eyes. And it’s Friday.”

He squinted slightly at her.

“You look like you have booked a flight for us because you got an email from someone who claims to have caught Sasquatch in a trap. And. It’s. Friday.”

He added a little head tilt to the squint.

“You look like another lost weekend,” she finally cleared things up.

Ah.

“As you well know, Scully, time is a universal invariant. A weekend can’t just disappear.”

“As much as I love when you cite me, Mulder, I can assure you, weekends disappear all the time in your presence.” She leaned forward and grabbed the file. “So, what’ve you got here?”

Mulder eagerly jumped to his feet, took three long strides to the door and dimmed the light. Another stride and he activated the slide projector. A photo of a middle aged white man with brown eyes, leathery skin and a receding blond hairline appeared in front of her.

“Meet Peter Lewis, 46, farmer in Upstate New York and recently deceased.” Scully looked at him and Mulder added: “He really should have used sunscreen, huh?” He watched her right brow climbing north a bit and then she answered: “He looks more like 60.”

“He does, but I guarantee you, that’s not the X-File.” He clicked on the remote and Peter Lewis disappeared, revealing instead a scene straight from a cereal ad. Two tractors with trailers and a third, slightly bigger machine, the towing vehicles all in the same dark green and with yellow tire rims, stood somewhat disorganized in the late summer sun on a field.

“This is the field where Peter Lewis disappeared. Two witnesses, both Lewis‘ employees, claim he just vanished from the cabin of this, uh, combine harvester.” His trigger finger pointed vaguely at the green-yellow machinery.

“It’s a chopper, Mulder.”

“What?”

“It’s a chopper, not a combine harvester. It’s not for harvesting grain crops, it’s to make confetti from whole plants. Corn, I guess?”

He looked at her, flabbergasted.

She sighed. “Charlie was heavily into agricultural machinery when we were kids. I myself was more into planes, Bill loved ships, and Missy was massively into dinosaurs, but for Charlie it was always tractors, choppers, harvesters, telehandlers and so on. So, I’ve seen my fair share of this stuff.”

This woman will be my downfall, he thought and said “Yes, corn” instead. Then he shook himself. “The point, and the first half of our X-File, if I may say so, is that Peter Lewis climbed in this thing in the morning, made a whole lot of confetti out of corn, as you phrased it, and then just vanished into thin air. The chopper made its way without him in a straight line into this tree.”

“Into thin air?”

“Yep. He even left behind all his clothes.”

“And there is no way the witnesses could be – let me search for the right word here, Mulder – ah, wait, I found it – lying? Maybe?”

“They could, but why would they?”

“Maybe they killed him?”

“Maybe. You’ll find out soon enough, I guess.”

Both her brows sprung upwards as she looked at him questioningly.

“The other half of our X-File is that Peter Lewis reappeared the next morning, very naked and very dead on the front porch of his neighbor’s house. The coroner isn’t qualified to do a full internal examination, so this one is just waiting for you, but he says the victim was, and I quote: ‘Likely killed by an unidentified predator about the size of an elephant.’” Mulder could suppress a happy giggle but it was a close call. He was somewhat lacking respect for the dead most of the time anyway, all of his empathy reserved for the bereaved, and this case really was something else.

Scully looked at him dumbfounded. “This is what the coroner said?!”

He nodded. “Predator, elephant sized.” The projector clicked and a picture of the remains of the remains of Peter Lewis appeared on the wall.

“Okay, I’m in, Mulder. When’s the flight?”

Chapter Text

09/26/1997

Copper Lake, NY

Police Station

03:42 p.m.

Chief of police Eric Blancard was a sturdy white guy in his late 50s with dark but receding hair, brown eyes, a cleft chin and a friendly smile.

“Agent Mulder, I guess? I really appreciate you could make time for us on such short notice,” he said as he shook Mulder’s hand. “I really don’t know what to make of this case and I have all my people out there looking for this, uh, thing.”

Mulder nodded and gestured over to Scully.

“This is my partner, Special Agent Scully. She is a forensic pathologist and would like to take another look at your victim, maybe she can shed some more light on the perp. You know, with it being a gigantic predator.” Scully knew everybody would be very happy not to have to look for such a thing. Everybody but Mulder, that was.

“Sure, the body is in the basement.” Blancard reached out to shake Scully’s hand, too, and she took it, a smile on her face that felt a bit strained. Police station basements were not her favorite places to perform autopsies. Better than their john though, she thought as she remembered Home, Pennsylvania.

“I’d like to do the autopsy as fast as possible, if there isn’t something more urgent you need us to do?” she asked.

Blancard shook his head. “No, I think we’re fine out there. Such an animal shouldn’t be able to sneak around in the neighborhood very successfully, I guess, and as I said, I have all my people out there, even the K9 unit.”

Scully gave him an impressed look. “K9 unit?”

“Okay, it’s just one of my officers and her dog, but since MacKay came here as a certified canine handler we jumped at the chance and Buster is fully trained.” Blancard managed to sound sheepish and look proud at the same time.

“So, it’s settled,” Mulder chimed in. “I’d like to see the crime scene in the meantime.” His brow furrowed. “Both crime scenes, actually. And maybe you could help me find a place where we can stay?”

*****

Scully went straight into the basement, her briefcase swinging at her side.

As she had anticipated, the room where the corpse was lying on an old autopsy table, surrounded by equally old equipment, was cold as hell. She shuddered but began to prep herself immediately. She found scrubs and a cap in a cupboard and donned both, the scrubs over her suit. Then she looked around for a dissecting cart to put the instruments and her recorder on. She was ready to go in about five minutes, started her recording and took the white sheet off the body.

Her eyes went wide and her brows climbed up. Wow. She began to speak.

“September the 26th, 4:04 p.m. This is Special Agent Dana Scully. I begin the autopsy on Peter Lewis, white male, 46 years old.”

She first took some photographs, then she stated: “The body is heavily mutilated, no traces of foreign substances visible to the naked eye. As the photos of the first autopsy show, large parts of the body were covered in dried blood that has been cleaned up. I take hair and nail samples.” She boxed and labeled the samples and set them on the side to be sent off to Quantico, along with all the other ones she would gather in the process.

“The body is covered in superficial wounds. Deep, long marks that look like scratches. The left eyeball has been punctured, the vitreous fluid has leaked out. The right arm and both legs are broken, the right leg multiple times. In the vicinity of the fractures are round and obviously deep wounds, some of them go completely through the extremity.”

She turned the body over and furrowed her forehead.

“On the back, big patches of skin are missing.” She leaned over the body. “Additionally there are the same round wounds along the vertebral column. It seems to be broken between the 7th cervical and the 1st thoracic vertebra.”

She rolled the body back and reached for the scalpel. “I start the internal examination.”

*****

Four and a half hours later she peeled the gloves from her hands and pressed the stop button on her recorder. Mulder will be such a happy camper, she thought as she took the scrubs off. Her examination may have been much more thorough than the coroner’s, but the end result stayed the same: Peter Lewis died of severe blood loss which seemed to have been inflicted by a gigantic, cat-like predator. A gigantic, cat-like predator that didn’t bother to eat its victim, though. She had measured all the wounds and came to the conclusion that the coroner was either right and the assailant was as big as an elephant or it was smaller but with disproportionately large cuspids.

She sighed and made her way up the stairs to call Mulder so he could pick her up when he came back from his sight-seeing trip.

*****

09/26/1997

Copper Lake, NY

Sunset Motel

10:13 p.m.

While Scully was freezing her ass off in the basement, Mulder had booked two rooms in a motel right at the shore of the name giving lake and brought their overnight bags in. He had told her during the ride from the police station that the view was astonishing and that the owner took so much pride in the most beautiful of sunsets that he named the motel after it. Of course it was dark now and she couldn’t see anything as they arrived at the motel. Mulder handed her her key and she slid out of the car and went straight to her room.

She took a shower and donned some comfortable pants and a sweater before she went over to the adjoining door. His side was slightly ajar, so she knocked softly and stuck her head in.

He looked up from his laptop, glasses on, jacket off, sleeves up. Walls down. She hurried to put her own up.

“There you are.” His smile was soft.

She hummed unspecifically. “Mulder, I could eat something, what about you?”

“Sure, Scully. What do you want? There’s a McDonald’s in town?”

She made a face. 

“Or pizza?” Mulder added.

She made the other face. They ate fast food far too often, but pizza was at least warm and delicious. Most of their meals on the road were neither of those.

Mulder rummaged through the papers on the small table, flipping over handwritten notes and crime scene photos in the process. “I can’t find the menu.” She had shuffled over to his bed in the meantime and placed herself cross-legged on it.

“You don’t look like you want to go out to eat …” he trailed off with a questioning look.

“I’d rather not. Maybe the guy at the reception can give us the number? I’ll go.” But he was standing already and ran one hand over his neck in a fleeting gesture.

“Stay, Scully, I’ll go, I’ve been sitting here for far too long anyway, I could use a little stretch. The usual?”

“The usual. Thank you.”

*****

Mulder went off to the reception. If there was nobody to help him along he would just drive over to Little Italy and purchase the pizzas himself. Scully looked tired. He often forgot how physically demanding her job could be. Slicing and dicing is hard and unpleasant. Even when in this case most of the slicing and dicing had partly been done by the kitty cat already. She had to concentrate. Think, draw conclusions, speak. She had to stand for hours, hunched over the outsides and insides of those poor sods. In comparison he often felt like a spaniel on the hunt, stupidly bouncing around in the woods, only waiting to flush a boar which would subsequently kill him.

As he made his way over to the reception office, a little movement to his left side startled him, then he laughed. Speak of the devil. A young shorthaired puppy, probably a Boxer, but he wasn’t sure, had spotted him from between a couple of cars and waltzed over, like only puppies could. Little to no control over their extremities, but making up for it with eagerness and their inherent enthusiasm for humans. When it reached him it threw itself on its back (and Mulder’s shoes) and presented its belly, the little tail wiggling excited between its haunches, the little face a laughing request. And like most humans, he did as he was told. 

“Awww, aren’t you a good boy?” He bent down and his hands rubbed along the white belly and fawn flanks, slipped behind the incredibly soft ears and along the muzzle. 

“Such a good boy! Atta boy! Who’s a good boy?” This interaction seemed as old as the relationship between both species, a little bubble of pure happiness. The puppy grabbed his hand with its teeth and held it softly but determined. Mulder knew the drill and tried playfully to withdraw his hand, only to rotate the little head with the laughing eyes. The little dog was utterly delighted.

He smiled broadly and said “You are a sweet little thing, but I really have to go. There is a lady in my room and if she doesn’t get a pizza yesterday she will probably eat me alive.” 

Not that he would complain, but this wasn’t the point here. He extracted his hand carefully and stood up, while his new friend rolled over and sat on its haunches. Mulder waved down to it and felt only a little silly, then he went on. At the reception he luckily found the menu he was looking for and while he was walking back to his room he already typed the number into his cell. The puppy was gone.

“Yes, two pizzas, with pepperoni, green peppers and mushrooms. Each, yes. And two bottles of Diet Coke. Yes. To the Sunset Motel, room 4. Thank you.” Mulder hung up and closed the door behind him to find Scully asleep on his bed. 

She really must have been exhausted to pass out like that. She looked softer, the little frown – in a way he felt it was his – gone and he felt the sudden urge to rub her belly to make her eyes smile like the little dog’s. She would bite your hands right off, he thought and smiled. Oh yes, she would. When he looked down at his hand he saw a little bloody scratch, obviously the puppy had underestimated the sharpness of its teeth.

*****

Scully woke from a sharp knock on the door and immediately grabbed for her weapon.

“It’s fine, Scully, just the pizza guy.”

“Sure, like pizza guys are harmless, nowadays.” She gave him a wry smile and Mulder laughed in recognition.

“This one is, I’m pretty sure.”

He opened the door and exchanged the pizzas and beverages for some money. Since the table was cluttered they both sat cross-legged on the bed, munching in silence. Scully felt like stuffing the whole thing all at once in her mouth but could restrain herself to a resemblance of dignity. Still, she was finished with her pizza before Mulder even had half of his. He had an amused glimmer in his eyes and nodded towards her. Sure ? she asked him silently and he nodded again. She grabbed one of his slices and stuffed it in her mouth.

“When was the last time you ate?”

“Fe bueberry muffin fif morning,” she mumbled around the food.

“Jeez, Scully. Never again tell me to watch out for myself, please.”

“I know, Mulder. I’m sorry. But the sandwiches at the police station were just disgusting, I couldn’t do it.”

He just looked at her and offered her another slice.

“Thank you.” she said quietly and took it. She ate this one – the last one, as she promised to herself silently – slowly and deliberately.

After they’d finished (Mulder had offered her another slice, but she had declined, already feeling like a thief, with a little smile and a shake of her head, mouthing a thank you), they started to break down the case. Mulder slouched in the chair while she stayed on his bed.

He told her that the first crime scene, the one where Lewis had vanished, was inconclusive. Nothing to see there but the damaged tree and some tire tracks. And then what he had gathered from Jimmy and Frank, which was basically nothing. Neither had seen anything beyond what he had told Scully in the basement already. They had been driving around in their tractors, then the chopper went into the tree and their boss was gone. Poof.

“Do you believe them?” Scully asked.

“In fact, I do. I mean, who in their right mind would make something like that up? It sounds totally nuts.”

Yes, it does, Agent Mulder, she thought and grinned at him.

“Who laughs last, Scully, who laughs last,” he grinned back and added: “Seriously, if they wanted to get rid of him, they would have had so many possibilities that stir far less attention. I don’t think they have anything to do with it.”

She just nodded. He had a fine nose for people and was usually right about them. And he had a point: The way Peter Lewis had disappeared and was killed would have been unusually elaborate for someone who could throw the victim in front of a tractor, a chopper, a harvester and presumably a dozen more deadly agricultural machines without someone batting a suspicious eye about it.

“What about the neighbor?” Scully changed the subject.

“He’s a recluse. He claims to not have seen Lewis for weeks.” Mulder pouted. “I’m not sure about him right now, he seems more concerned about the fact that Peter Lewis was found on his porch than about him being killed in the first place.”

“Do you think he has anything to do with it?”

Mulder shrugged. “I don’t see how. Have you found anything that would indicate human influence in Lewis’ death?”

“No, not that I can tell. I’m not comfortable with it, but my findings superficially support the coroner. There is an abundance of deep bite wounds and scratches, and all of them hint at a very large animal. He died of severe blood loss.”

“What do you think it is?”

“If it really is an animal – I’d have to check in with a specialist – but from what I see it would be bigger than a bear, and the talons seem to be very sharp. One of Lewis’s eyeballs was punctured and the scratches are pretty deep. That would indicate a cat, but I don’t know of a species this big.”

Mulder eyes lit up. “Could it be a saber-tooth?”

“No.” We’re not going there. “Because they are extinct, Mulder.” She managed to prevent her eyes from rolling.

He just shrugged. “Maybe they aren’t.”

“One would think a population of saber-toothed tigers in Upstate New York would have drawn some attention in the past, but you do you, Mulder.”

“Scully, you said it yourself: It has to be a large cat-like predator and since we don’t know any of those it must be a species that has gone undetected for centuries.” Mulder insisted.

“No, what I said is: it seems to be an enormous cat. And there’s more: The body was heavily mutilated, but our perpetrator didn’t bother to actually eat Lewis. That’s a highly unlikely behavior for a predator. I think it’s way more likely it’s a hoax of some kind. I just can’t explain how it was done.”

“But house cats do it all the time.”

“Pet cats are full and bored, Mulder. If they had to hunt for survival they would eat their prey, too.”

“So maybe this animal is also full and bored? Maybe someone keeps it in a shed and uses it like a hound?” 

She had to admit that she admired Mulder’s acrobatic mind. He took all the information he got and wove it into a compelling and beautiful picture. Where other people tried to fit jigsaw pieces together to get a glimpse at a pre-existing reality he simply composed something completely new. Alas, his pictures mostly were lacking any rhyme or reason. They were nothing she could work with, really. She sighed.

“Mulder, do you really think someone keeps a not only colossal, but also deadly and let’s not forget unknown animal on a leash to kill other people? That’s preposterous!”

Their eyes met for a moment and she could see he was only partly with her. His mind was still busy sorting and rearranging.

“So, what will you tell Blancard?” he asked her after a minute.

Scully sighed. “I’ll have to go with what the autopsy shows. At the moment I have no proof whatsoever of human involvement. Maybe there will be more when the test results come back from Quantico. And I want us to look further into the neighbor, what was his name again?”

“Carl Harris. We can go there tomorrow together, if you want, but he doesn’t strike me as the type who orchestrates such a complex hoax.”

“I’d like to have a look at the crime scene anyway.”

*****

She had just started to write her autopsy report when she decided her Coke was too warm and she needed some air anyway. She paused her tape.

“I’ll grab some ice, need anything?”

He looked up, a bit hazy, and blinked. “Huh?”

“Need anything? I’ll grab some ice,” she repeated and he shook his head.

“I’m fine, thanks.”

She put her sneakers on, snatched the ice bucket and slipped out. A fresh breeze from the lake ruffled her hair and she breathed deeply. It would be nice to actually see the lake, maybe even take a swim before we go home. Home as a place had become a little bit of a hollow concept, since basically every space with Mulder in it felt as such, but while she had accepted this in a way, she had no reason to actually recognize it. So, ‘home’ was her apartment. She nodded briskly to herself, grabbed the bucket a little tighter and marched on to the ice machine. While she waited for the ice, she heard a little sound and found a cat, a young mackerel tabby, coming towards her. It meowed at her with bright eyes and a stiff tail. “Hey, where do you come from?”

“Meow,” came as a response and Scully felt the warm, lean body caressing her calves and leaned down to pet the soft fur. The cat let itself fall on its back and Scully rubbed its belly softly. One second later she felt a sharp pain and saw a little paw with the talons out.

“What is it with you, guys?” She shook her head and inspected her hand. Just a little scratch, but enough to break the skin. She rolled her eyes, grabbed the filled bucket and went back to Mulder’s room.

The rest of the evening they worked in companionable silence; Mulder wrote down his notes from the interviews with James Lang, Frank Costabile and Carl Harris and she tackled Peter Lewis‘ autopsy report. She never understood how he did it, working on his own things while hearing her autopsy tapes which she had to listen to, over and over in short loops, to bring everything in form. But obviously he didn’t mind and she liked to have the opportunity to bounce some thoughts off of him once in a while. Sure, that’s why you like this, her brain provided uninvited, and she bit her lip.

Not even 30 minutes after they had wrapped up for the evening, Scully fell asleep on her bed with a novel that had fallen on her chest. Mulder dozed off in front of the TV with a documentary running about Nazi scientists in the US after WWII; the door between them was slightly ajar.

*****

09/27/1997

Copper Lake, NY

Sunset Motel

06:37 a.m.

Mulder awoke shivering the next morning. He grabbed for his duvet not just to not find it but to register he also wasn’t in his bed anymore. Odd, went through his mind when he pried his eyes open. The floor. He sat up and looked around. The chairs lay on their backs, the TV on its side on the carpet, the cable sticking out from under it like it had fallen on a rat, all drapes ripped from their rods. Every little thing from the table cluttered around. The room was completely trashed. What the hell?  

“Scully ...” he mumbled and looked around as he heard a small sound. He could see a little white foot poking out from under the bed and with a mild panic attack he hurried over, hauled the person attached to the foot out from their hiding space only to find it was Scully, stark naked and seemingly unconscious.

“Scully!” He grabbed her neck for her pulse point and a moment later she jolted upwards, eyes wide. “Mulder! What is …” She trailed off when she took his attire in. He looked down at himself. 

Oh shit. Stark naked. 

She also looked down at herself, and both could see the same associations rattling through the mind of the other. What? Why? Have you …? Have we …? Were we …? No, no and no. What the hell is going on here?

Chapter Text

“What the hell is going on here, Mulder?”

“I have not the slightest, Scully.” He propelled upwards to haul the duvet from the bed, dragging his abandoned pajama pants with it. “Here, ” he said as he draped the duvet around her, then grabbed his clothes and wandered off to the bathroom. She breathed his smell in and followed his naked ass with her eyes. She decided that, while this could easily be a dream – it wouldn’t be overly bizarre in the overall spectrum – it felt way too real to be one.

She shuffled over to her own room, his duvet dragging behind her and closed the gaping wide open door between the rooms. Her room looked exactly like Mulder’s. Everything that wasn’t bolted to anything was strewn about haphazardly, leaving the impression of the aftermath of a giant toddler’s tantrum. Her gut told her that this wasn’t the effect of somebody searching for something, and she was pretty sure she would find that nothing was missing.

A quick check confirmed that her body was unharmed. Her pajamas lay on her bed, in a heap, but intact.

What on earth has happened here?

*****

They both dressed and got through their morning routine as quickly as possible, then decided to call in the Copper Lake police to secure evidence.

Chief Blancard came in personally, not even half an hour after they had called, a female officer in tow. Mulder wasn’t sure if he made it out of sympathy, or if he didn't know what to make of their call and wanted to see for himself. Blancard introduced the officer at his side as Leska MacKay, the human half of the K9 unit they had spoken about the evening before. Mulder, Scully and MacKay gave each other short nods; MacKay tucked a strand of her long dark hair behind her ear and as things go, after Scully’s quick overview, the overall conversation went a bit awkward.

“So, you both woke up naked in his room?” Blancard sounded bored but Mulder and Scully knew this story would outlive their stay in Copper Lake for quite a while. MacKay looked like she had 57 places in her mind she’d rather be.

Mulder nodded sheepishly while Scully tried not to kill anybody with a careless glare.

“And both your rooms were totally trashed?”

Scully waved her hand meaningfully around and bit a duh down. She knew Mulder could feel her rolling her eyes without her actually rolling her eyes.

“But there are no signs of forced entry?”

“No,” Mulder chimed in. Maybe he thought it would be helpful to use spoken language as well. “Both doors were locked from the inside and both locks are intact. Nothing on the windows, too. We really would appreciate you securing some evidence.”

Blancard nodded. “And this door?” He gestured at the adjoining door.

Mulder scratched the back of his neck and mumbled “This was open the whole time.”

“This was open the whole time,” Blancard parroted. His demeanor shifted slightly and Scully went back from eye-rolling to not killing anybody with a glare. MacKay fiddled with her jacket, her eyes downcast.

“Look,” Mulder tried, “both of us have more than once almost died in motel rooms like these. If the difference between a living partner and a dead one is the state of a door, we’d both rather have the door open.”

Blancard nodded, and they both could see that he didn’t believe a word. Scully ticked it off; they didn’t owe him an explanation and he wouldn’t get a better one than the one Mulder had given him. She touched Mulder’s forearm slightly to tell him to let it slide. Nobody would understand anyway.

Blancard seemed to wait for more, but Mulder kept silent.

“And you can’t remember anything?” came after another heartbeat.

Now it was Scully’s turn. “Nothing, no. When I fell asleep I was reading and I think I heard Mulder’s TV. Nothing out of the ordinary. Must have been some time after midnight, I remember looking at my clock radio at 12:27 a.m.”

“Have you been drinking yesterday?”

“No.”

“Otherwise - ehm - intoxicated?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“You know, a doobie, some shrooms?”

“I seriously hope you’re kidding, Sir.”

“I’m not, but I feel your answer is no.”

“You’re right about that, Sir.” Now it was Mulder’s turn to calm her down. She exchanged a quick look with him and added: “Both of us will go to the next hospital immediately to get tested for drugs and head injuries. Maybe someone slipped us something.” Both of them turned and left Blancard and MacKay to secure the evidence.

*****

Half an hour later, Scully parked the rented Taurus in front of the Adirondack Medical Center. Mulder knew she was upset. Lost time, especially mixed with the sensation of something had happened, hit a little bit too close to home for her. He felt uneasy about that, too, but it was more of a second hand feeling. For himself, he was more curious than anything else. He had come to Copper Lake for one X-File and now it seemed he was getting three.

He closed his eyes for a moment and took a deep breath. For a split second an image flickered behind his eyelids and he wasn’t quite sure what to make of it. It locked like a close-up of a pizza box. Why would I think of something like that? He felt the remembrance of paper on his tongue. He scrunched his brows together.

“Is everything alright, Mulder?” The back of her hand fluttered over his forehead, searching for heat that wasn’t there. He liked it anyway.

“Yes, everything’s okay, I just had a weird image shooting through my brain. You know how it is.”

She didn’t, but there was really no reason to make him feel more special than he already did.

“I know. Let’s go inside and wave some badges.”

He watched her march into the hospital, her clicking heels a clear statement of her unwavering resilience. He trailed behind. At the reception they were greeted by a somewhat sinister looking nurse, but his smile was friendly and his voice had a chatty undertone.

“How can I help you?” he asked and Scully positioned herself in front of him. She showed him her badge and introduced both of them. “We need access to several tests immediately,” she added and the nurse just nodded.

“May I ask about the nature of your injuries?”

“We are not injured.”

His head came up from behind his monitor and he looked at them curiously. “You are not injured?”

“No, we’re not. It’s possible we were drugged, though.”

“You know, I’m just asking because we had a bunch of people here with strange injuries in the last couple of weeks.” Chatty indeed. Mulder could have kissed him right there. He jumped in.

“Nurse  …” he craned his neck and looked at the name tag “... Danny. What do you mean by strange injuries?”

Danny seemed to contemplate how much gossip would be delightful and at which point it would get him fired and decided obviously in Mulder’s interest. He leaned over the counter and almost whispered in a rumbling pitch:

“You know, I can’t tell you names and details, but we’re having some seriously strange things coming in.” Mulder looked at him encouragingly. Danny’s voice went even lower. 

“We had people coming in with really nasty scratches that they couldn’t remember getting. And some equally nasty bite wounds. Also no recollection how they got them. And the wounds are way bigger than usual, so it is very, very strange.” Danny’s face was changing between delight and compassion in rapid order.

Mulder huffed a slightly baffled “huh,” and Scully added another question before he could continue: “Anything else unusual besides the bites and scratches?”

Danny took a second to think about it, his face scrunched and then lit up and he said: “Yes! Yes there is: way more people than usual come in with allergy symptoms.”

“Allergy symptoms?”

“Yeah. Mostly to dogs and cats, but also birds. And rodents.” Danny scratched his head.

“And why is this unusual?” Mulder piped up. He was way more interested in the bites and scratches, but didn’t let it show.

“Nobody seems to remember how they came in contact with the allergen.”

“But it was always some kind of animal?” Scully dug deeper.

“Now as you say it, I think so, yes.” A bell rung in one of the rooms and Danny looked like he needed to get back to work so Mulder hurried to recap:

“So, you have big scratches and bites and allergies coming in but the really odd thing about it is that people don’t remember getting them, did I get this right?”

Danny was already halfway around his desk and he just replied “Basically, yes.” before he hurried down the hallway.

*****

Scully found another nurse, and then a doctor, and then the head of the department to force her way into full blood work for both of them, did the physical on Mulder herself and then went off to find someone competent to do one on her. When nothing came up, she utilized all her authority short of shooting someone to get them both a PET scan. Which also came back inconclusive. She oozed frustration at this point and the fact they had to wait until the next day for the toxicology report didn’t help.

On their way back to the motel they made a stop at the police station to go over Scully’s autopsy results with the officers and to see if there was any news in their own matter.

Scully went to talk to Blancard, a task she wasn’t looking forward to. Not only did she feel slightly embarrassed about her findings – elephant-sized predator, my ass – but she also knew Blancard had fostered serious hopes she could come up with a cause of death that would involve somewhat less manpower in the foreseeable future, like maybe Lewis stumbling into his running corn head like hundreds of other farmers did every year.

 Meanwhile Mulder switched on his best smile and bustled off to look for somebody who he could pump for additional information. He hadn’t had to search for too long; right by the water cooler he recognized the slender figure of Leska MacKay, sticking her dark head together with a male officer’s. He approached them in best buddy mode.

“Officer MacKay, sorry for the intrusion, but I’m so lucky to find you here.” He tried to amp up his smile even more and nodded apologetically at her companion, a small white guy on the last leg of his journey to pension. “Do you have any news for us regarding our assumed B&E?”

“Oh, Agent Mulder, hi.” MacKay squeezed the little plastic cup in her hand and tad too hard and a bit of water sloshed over her hand. “Shit,” she mumbled. And added to Mulder: “No, I’m sorry, no news. We have to wait until tomorrow for the results from the lab. And as you surely know, the chances to find something useful in a motel room are somewhat slim. Do you want some coffee?”

Mulder waved the strange offer away. Instead he focused on MacKay’s male counterpart whose curiosity was evidently piqued. “Are you the two agents who woke up in the trashed motel room, like the others?”

MacKay grimaced.

“What others, Officer ...” Mulder trailed off and waited to be given a name.

“Fee, Martin Fee. We had a couple of those cases in the last weeks. No evidence for B&E, but more or less destroyed homes.” MacKay scoffed and he looked at her but plowed on nevertheless. “Sometimes there were just some things misplaced, sometimes things were smashed, but we never got a handle on the perpetrator. Your motel room seems to be the worst though.”

“Why didn’t anybody tell us about this?”

MacKay just shrugged. “I didn’t make the connection and, to be honest, I’m not seeing it now either. These other cases are rather harmless. We had people here who had just a strange feeling, somebody came to tell us about some missing bread. Some pets went missing. Nothing at all like your rooms.”

“But you had some strange occurrences?”

“If you want to call a situation where somebody is wondering where their last chocolate bar went and instead of ticking it off as every normal person would do, doesn’t refrain from calling it in a strange occurrence, then sure, knock yourself out.” MacKay answered disinterestedly.

“But you have to admit, Leska, it is a bit strange,” Fee insisted.

“Martin, there’s nothing strange about it. People eat their last chocolate bar and don’t remember. Pillows fall from the sofa without burglars throwing them around. Cats run away.”

“Yeah, but why do people come to us with this stuff lately?”

“How should I know? Maybe everybody is going crazy. I mean, look at this beast hunt out there – do you really believe there is a gigantic lion that wants to kill us all?” MacKay's voice had gotten piercing by this point and Martin Fee had apparently no further interest in the conversation. 

“Sure, you’re probably right. I have some stuff to do,” he said and wandered off, giving a little nod to Mulder as he went.

*****

Mulder was apparently eager to get Scully out of earshot of everybody else and therefore dragged her into a niche behind the machine that offered the unspeakable atrocity the provider had the nerve to call ‘sandwiches.’

With a glimmer in his eyes and almost bouncing on his toes he informed her about what he had found out while she had played the harbinger of doom for Blancard.

“What do you think, Scully?” He crouched down to get their faces close together. The only way to get closer would be if he climbed into my blazer with me, she thought but couldn’t be upset with him. Instead she sucked up the closeness like a plant would the first rain after a long drought. Not that she would tell him that. Obviously.

When she finally opened her mouth to answer him she had evidently overtaxed his patience while relishing in whatever it was that he exuded. “I think I know what is happening here. It’s a werewolf!” he all but blurted into her ear.

She didn’t need to ask him if she heard him wrong. A little headache pinched the back of her skull and she rubbed her brow slowly with her right hand. Come on, Dana, did you really think he would come up with something reasonable? She managed to scoff at him. And lift an eyebrow.

“Come on, Scully,” he repeated unknowingly the phrase she had just used to scold herself, “we have people who wake up to disturbed homes in the morning, people with allergies to animals who don’t remember being in the vicinity of such an animal, all the missing pets.”

The little headache wandered aimlessly over her brain.

“Fine, Mulder, let’s assume you’re right for a minute.” She raised her right hand between their faces and began counting off her fingers.

“First of all, nobody in town has reported a wolf. Let alone being attacked by one. And how could such an animal break into our rooms without a trace?”

Her middle finger followed. “Second: what about the gigantic predator that killed Lewis? That was way bigger than a wolf and would indicate we have two absurdly unlikely occurrences at the same time. What am I saying? Three, we still haven’t found out how Lewis vanished from his chopper!”

As she looked up at her own thumbnail she suddenly saw a flash of a talon slicing through a light-colored piece of cloth. She blinked and shook herself out of it and continued her enumeration.

Her ring finger almost went into his eye; he blinked and in a displacement activity she zoned in on his mouth. “Third: We’re talking different allergies here. Cats, dogs, birds. Not one person reported being allergic to wolf fur.”

She wobbled her pinky a little. “Fourth: We also woke up naked this morning, do you seriously believe we are werewolves now, too? Have you been attacked by a wolf? Because I sure as hell have not.”

While she felt his breath on the back of her hand she poked the thumb out. “And fifth: The whole idea is absolutely ridiculous. I didn’t believe in this shit in the Goodensnake case and I don’t believe in it now.”

“The last one doesn’t sound like ‘let’s assume you’re right for a minute,’” he breathed in a huff and made her feel like she had kicked a puppy. “So, what’s your idea then, Scully?”

“I don’t know yet. I think we shouldn't forget why we’re here in the first place and should try to get a handle on who – or what, I’ll give you that – killed Peter Lewis. Therefore I’d still like to take a deeper look into his neighbor. And just for the record: I’m not convinced all the occurrences we’ve found so far are even related. I don’t see how the different allergies would go along with the predator scenario, the B&Es and the missing pets and I can’t even begin to imagine how the fairy tale of Lewis vanishing into thin air fits into all of this. But I’d bet you some serious money there is no werewolf in town.”

Mulder drove them back to their motel, still a bit miffed behind the wheel. When they arrived back at the motel they decided to relocate, so they packed up their few things and left, both with a hint of regret for leaving the view and the lake behind. Neither of them noticed the muscular creature watching them leave as it lay in the shadowy grass under a tree.

Their new rooms in their new motel didn’t have an adjoining door. And no lake. And no spectacular view. So instead of enjoying a beautiful sunset at the shore they sat tense in one of the rooms and ate some sealed food they bought for dinner. Both went to sleep with a weapon on the nightstand. Just in case.

Chapter Text

09/28/1997

Copper Lake, NY

Green Fields Motel

06:58 a.m.

When Mulder woke up the next morning he registered immediately that he was lying on the bed for a change. Above the duvet and rolled up into the fetal position at the foot of the bed, but he took what he could get. He blinked slowly at his pajama pants right in front of him. Great. With a groan he sat up and looked the room over. Not nearly as chaotic as the night before, but the rest of his food was gone and the boxes had been torn into shreds and were lying evenly scattered around. His instincts told him there had been no intruder in his room and he chuckled. You’re a real monster, aren’t you? Eating chips and sandwiches instead of killing a bunch of people every night? He was more than ever convinced they’d found themselves in a werewolf situation. And he was thrilled.

Ten minutes later he knocked on her door and Scully opened, still (or once again?) in her pajamas. Her hair was tousled and there was a haunted edge to her eyes.

“Scully, you’re not going to believe this!”

“That may well be true, Mulder,” she mumbled and opened the door wider to let him in. Her room was totally fine. Yes, the remnants of yesterday’s dinner were scattered haphazardly on the tabletop, but definitely not in a ‘a-wolf-slobbered-over-everything’ kind of way. Also, they were still there, so there was that. Mulder’s heart sank. Would have been nice to be in this together.

She looked at him cautiously.

“What is it I’m not going to believe, Mulder?”

He scratched the back of his neck sheepishly. This would be so much harder now.

“It happened again. My room’s not as bad as yesterday, but something definitely happened.”

She sighed. “I know, Mulder.”

He frowned. “You know?”

“Yeah, it happened to me, too.”

Oh?

“What? But your room looks totally fine!”

“It does. But when I woke up I was naked again. Rolled up above my duvet. And my clothes lay in a heap in my bed. Under the duvet. I mean, how could anybody have done that without waking me up?”

“Oh Scully, that’s fantastic!” He wanted to kiss her.

“How, Mulder? How on earth is this fantastic? This means somebody knocked us out for two days in a row, broke in, messed up our stuff and ...” She swallowed hard.

“And?”

Her voice was suddenly very small. “And did something to us, touched us, Mulder.”

His spine froze over. Of course this would be the conclusion she would come to. How could he not have seen this?

“Scully, I really don’t believe anybody was in here.”

“So what? We start sleepwalking both at the same time? We become wolves at night!?”

He shrugged his shoulders. “It is the theory that checks the most boxes at the moment.”

“Mulder, this theory checks exactly zero boxes, none, nada, zilch! It’s insane! It’s not possible. Your body can’t change like that, or change back, for that matter!” She was getting a little shrill now and he knew he needed proof. Fast. She was always biting his ankles demanding proof but this here was different. She believed she was being assaulted by someone and even without considering her history it would drive anybody up the wall. And if he was right, going home wouldn’t change a thing. He had to do something.

*****

Scully insisted on working the Lewis case. Since she was convinced they were assaulted in one way or another she wanted to get the hell out of this town and the fastest way to accomplish this was to solve the case and go home. Mulder was sure that wouldn’t help them a bit but he decided to shut up about it. For the moment. It wasn’t that he wasn’t interested in the Lewis case anymore after all, even if he was very excited about their own predicament.

She was silent on their way to Carl Harris and he wished he could do something to take the fear from her. Not that she would show it, but he could tell by the way her jaw was set and her whole composure in the passenger seat was more rigid than usual. During the whole drive he combed through his brain for something helpful to say but he came up with nothing. Nothing that she would want to hear, anyway. So he gnashed his teeth silently and watched the knuckles of his hands on the wheel go white. If she registered she didn’t say anything either. When they reached Carl Harris’ house she climbed out of the car before he had even put it in park.

“Scully, you okay?” he asked the moment he had caught up with her.

“I’m fine, Mulder.”

Sure you are , he thought but didn’t say anything.

“This looks more like a cabin than a house,” she added and she was right. A small wooden structure, painted in a dark green sometime in the 70s, was sitting between the trees.

“Yeah, Mr. Harris doesn’t seem to be too interested in the indulgences of the modern world.” Mulder gestured at a lopsided outhouse, a smoking chimney and two big stacks of firewood that indicated Harris was not into fossil fuels, at least not for cooking and heating: an old pick-up truck was sitting near the porch.

Scully went up to the porch and looked around. The crime scene photographs had shown Lewis’ naked body, lying on his stomach and sprawled over the two steps that led up to the cabin. There had been a lot of blood, yet none of it was visible to the naked eye anymore.

“Looks like he’s neat, though,” she said and spun around when a grumpy voice answered her from the opening door.

“Of course I am, what do you think, that I’m an animal just because I don’t live in a fancy house?” The guy was in his mid fifties and considerably shorter than Mulder. He was almost at eye level with Scully. His dark hair was greased back and he sported a not very fashionable pornstache. And he looked not amused to see Mulder again.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Harris,” Mulder said to him. “It was just an observation.”

“So, do you often meet people who are happy to have the blood of their dead neighbors smeared all over their places? I for sure don’t need that. Me and Pete may not have been best friends, but I for sure didn’t want him dead and I sure as hell didn't need to see him dead!”

“We just have some more questions, Mr. Harris, then we’ll be out of your hair.”

Harris grunted and stayed put. He was obviously not interested in inviting them in.

“Can we come in, Mr. Harris?” Mulder had no intention of being hushed away like this.

“Why?”

“As my partner said, we just have some questions. And as you said, your dead neighbor was found on your doorstep, so ...”

“I told everything I know, and that’s basically nothing, to Eric – I mean, Mr. Blancard.”

“That may well be, but we have our own investigation, so we would really appreciate your cooperation.”

Harris’ body language stayed hostile, but he opened the door a fraction wider and moved to the side. Mulder used his elbow to clear the way and barged in, Scully in tow.

The inside of the house kept what the outside promised: Everything was old but neat, Harris obviously took good care of his things, or better the things of his grandfather: Nothing in here looked like it was younger than 50 years. Harris let them into his kitchen.

“Cozy,” Mulder murmured while he craned his neck as inconspicuous as possible to get a look at the other rooms.

“So, what do you wanna know?” Harris was definitely not the type to offer a chair, let alone coffee and cookies. Scully took the lead.

“If you could tell us what you remember of the evening of the 23rd and the morning of the 24th.”

Harris flinched and scratched his neck. “I went to bed early, maybe around 8:00 and I got up around sunrise and went to take a piss. I opened my door and there he was. Sprawled over the steps of my porch, all naked and bloody and dead. Definitely in the Top Ten of my worst mornings ever.” Mulder raised an eyebrow as he tried to imagine the other nine candidates but kept his mouth shut.

“And you didn’t hear anything?”

“No, but that doesn’t say much. It’s almost impossible to wake me at night, I sleep like the dead.”

“And did you see anybody?” Scully probed.

“No. Nobody ever comes here.”

“Maybe an animal?” Mulder chimed in.

“Not that I remember. My cat probably. He’s always around in the morning.”

Mulder decided to go for it: “Mr. Harris, have you been attacked by an animal lately?”

“What? No.”

“Any fresh scars? Bite wounds you can’t remember how you got them?”

“You think I wouldn’t remember getting bitten?!”

In the corner of his eye he could see Scully cringe, but Mulder plowed on nonetheless: “Are you missing time? At night maybe?”

Recognition lit up in Harris’ eyes – he may not have a TV, but he must have been in the cinema in the last 20 years. “You’ve got to be kidding me! Are you seriously asking me whether I’m a werewolf?”

Mulder just shrugged sheepishly.

“Can I see your badge again? No, wait, I don’t need that. Just leave. Now.”

*****

“Well, that was a waste of time.” Scully was frustrated. She wanted to get out of this town as fast as possible, the pure thought of spending another night here made her skin crawl.

Mulder didn’t answer. From the way his fingers were clutching the wheel she knew he was ruminating about something, but she couldn’t bring herself to engage. His theory was so out there this time, she just didn’t know what to say to him. And she admitted to herself that she was frightened. Something was happening here and she felt utterly powerless and once again at the mercy of some shadowy evil. The fact that she couldn’t remember anything about the previous nights made it even worse. And Mulder was so giddy about it, at least when he came to her this morning. Like a kid in a candy store, she had wanted to throttle him. Since then his demeanor had shifted considerably but she still felt the need to distance herself.

That their toxicology reports had come back utterly clean didn’t lift her spirits either. She had dragged them back to the hospital to search for basically everything she had ever heard of, more blood work, urine and stool samples, and as he offered her a sperm sample, clearly a joke, she had just handed him another screw-top container. He really should have known her better. When they had finally left the hospital after what felt like hours of poking and prodding the sun had set and Scully had run out of ideas. Everything about this case felt like a pretty crowded dead end and she didn’t like it one bit.

“Let’s stop at the police station,” Mulder interrupted her mental downward spiral. “Maybe they have the results from the motel room. And I want to install a camera in my room tonight. Maybe I can borrow some fancy surveillance equipment from Blancard.”

“That’s actually not a bad idea, Mulder.”

“My ideas are never bad, Scully.” He grinned at her and she rolled her eyes.  “Sure, Mulder.”

*****

At the police station they bumped into MacKay and used the opportunity. MacKay’s eyes flickered nervously around the FBI agents before they settled on their faces.

“You’re here about the results, I guess?”

Scully nodded. “And we want to ask if there’s any surveillance equipment the police can spare for a night or two.”

MacKay looked surprised and mumbled something about asking the chief before turning the conversation back to their crime scene investigation.

“It’s basically as we expected. It’s a motel, after all, and not even a particularly disgusting one, but it’s never a good idea to go over these places with a UV light, if you know what I mean.” All three grimaced. “There are fingerprints all over the place from at least 27 different people and more different hairs as you want to know, most of them human.”

Mulder eyes immediately got their spark back. Scully groaned internally.

“There are animal traces in the rooms?”

“Many, actually. Even if you're not allowed to bring a pet, not all people respect that and hairs can be brought by the owners on their clothing. So, yeah, a lot of hairs. Dogs and cats, as far as the lab can tell.”

*****

As it turned out, Blancard actually had a top-notch state of the art digital infrared camera that he could spare.

“You know how it is, us peasant folks only get new tech every 30 years, and this has been our turn. Nobody here knows how to use it though, so feel free to take it as long as you’re here, maybe you can tell us how it works afterwards.”

He put a laptop case on top of the pile and added: “As far as I understand it, you need this one here, too. It’s a computer where you can plug the camera in, to watch your footage. Or something like that.”

Mulder had hoped somebody could help him with installing the thing, having lost interest in technology basically after the invention of the zipper, but it was obvious nobody here would be of any help.

“Sure, I’ll see what I can do,” he said somewhat strained and prepared himself for being ridiculed by the gunmen in an hour long phone call later this evening.

Chapter Text

09/29/1997

Copper Lake, NY

Green Fields Motel

07:00 a.m.

Scully opened her eyes. On her bed. She had lain awake the whole night, at least she felt that way. The thought of somebody invading her space –her body – without her noticing had crept up and down her spine hour after hour, but at some point she must have passed out. Probably five minutes before the alarm went off. Just enough sleep to leave her completely drained.

She sat up quickly and took the room in. Nothing out of the ordinary. So far, so good. She had decided to forego her pajamas, not wanting to face another morning where she had inexplicably lost them. She hurriedly brushed her teeth while showering, put on some make-up and dressed. As fast as she stepped into her shoes she stepped out of them again. The left one was soppy inside. She wrinkled her forehead but let it go for the moment, barefoot she marched over to the adjacent room.

He’d just called her in when she knocked, and when she entered the room he was sitting only in a pair of briefs, a toothbrush in his hand, in front of his borrowed laptop, the little camera plugged into it.

“Scully, come here, look at this!” He looked over his shoulder at her and brandished his right hand in front of the monitor. He sounded like Christmas, Thanksgiving and his birthday wrapped in one.

She stepped up behind him, trying very hard to ignore the endless expanse of smooth skin in front of her and suppressing the need to touch him. Don’t think about it, Dana. He’s real, you don’t have to confirm that by touch. Instead she tried to orient herself on the dark and frizzy motions. Everything was black and white and after a moment she could make out his bed and the corner of the table and the door in the background and – a dog. On the bed. Sleeping.

“What … Mulder?”

“Scully. This is me.”

“What?”

“This. Is. Me. I watched the change. I was sleeping in the bed and the next moment he was there.” He’s gone crazy after all , she thought, but he looked so overall happy, she wouldn’t know what to say to him.

“Scully, I have proof this time. Look.” His fingers were again wiggling in front of the monitor. “Nobody is assaulting us. It was us all along,” he added as he rewound the tape so that she could see for herself. 

As the video changed into play mode again she could see Mulder lying on his right side on his bed, one arm under his head, the other extended to the other side. Like a big spoon in want of a little spoon , her brain piped up with questionable intent, then it added oh look, he’s naked . Scully swallowed and closed her eyes a moment longer than necessary for a blink. As she opened them again her naked partner was gone – little blessings – and replaced by a lanky and elegant dog. A sighthound with short hair and feathery ears and legs. Scully couldn’t identify the color due to the tape in black and white, but it looked dark coated with some lighter spots on the muzzle, the paws and around the prosternum. A truly beautiful creature. Of course he would be , she thought. No way this man wouldn’t turn into the most beautiful dog imaginable. This was a nightmare, all of this was a nightmare. She pinched the bridge of her nose.

“Mulder, somebody must have cut a part of the video.” She sounded ridiculous, even to her own ears.

“Which part? The part where they force entry without a trace and without waking me up, then drag me away and replace me with a sleeping animal?” His tone was amused and incredulous at the same time.

“Uhm. Yes? Obviously?” She wanted to mock him with high eyebrows and a stern glare, but she knew the nervous flicking tongue on her left lower lip would give her away: He would notice she didn’t believe what she was saying.

In the meantime the dog on the monitor began to stir; it opened its eyes and yawned, then it sat up and jumped to the ground. Yes, definitely a sighthound, a Saluki, to be precise, Scully thought. The dog looked around, spotted Mulder’s leftover fries on the desk and devoured them instantly. It tore the packages apart for good measure, took a reserved look around the room and went back to the bed. Rolled up on the foot and went back to rest. It obviously felt very comfortable in this room, on the bed, in its skin. Just like Mulder.

“Nothing really happens from here on. He’s lying there almost the whole night. He looks around now and then, but he doesn’t do anything interesting.”

Mulder fast-forwarded the video, and slowed down only as the brightness indicated dawn. Both agents watched how the sleeping dog was replaced by a stirring Mulder in the blink of an eye.

She remembered their first case together, Bellefleur, Oregon. She was so inexperienced, and so eager for knowledge. She had been intrigued by all these strange things happening and her concern was not whether or not to believe him but how she could explain their findings in her report. They both had liked that, very much so, but in the next couple of months they had developed a ritual dance. Both of them moved further to the fringes of their opposite opinions. Not because they weren’t able to step in the other one’s shoes, but because that was how they worked best. They both became halves of a whole, most successful if each stayed on their own side. They had worked that way ever since. It fell apart every time they had to work alone. He would insist on evidence when she wasn’t there, she would make leaps, take wild beliefs into account, when he wasn’t around. It was hard for both of them to play both parts of their ritual, so they just wouldn’t if they could avoid it.

But now he had thrown her. He had hard evidence for something she deemed as impossible, and she had seen it. She wasn’t sure how to proceed. But one thing was clear: Under no circumstances could she ignore hard proof just to contradict him.

“Mulder, this is absolutely incredible.”

*****

They were on their way to the medical center. Again. If something happened inside their bodies, something had to be inside their bodies, Scully had argued and he did not disagree. Proof on a flimsy black and white video was all well and good, but those things could be tampered with as easy as pie and he would prefer not to be laughed at at work for once.

“So, Mulder, what do we do now?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, how do we get rid of this – uhm – predicament?”

“Dunno.” He just shrugged.

“Mulder, this is serious! Do you want to be a dog every night for the rest of your life?”

This sobered him up a little bit. He was so excited about having actual proof of something paranormal happening that he didn’t even think about the consequences all this would have for him, for his actual life. For their lives, to be precise. She turned, too, after all they knew. He chuckled as he imagined her as a dog.

“Scully, what do you think you look like? Maybe like Queequeg?” He imagined her this way and it was oddly appropriate. Small and red, a bit mean and ready to do anything to survive. There was a big difference though: he hadn’t been very fond of the dog. He chuckled again.

“This isn’t funny, Mulder. And to be honest: I really don’t care. I want this – whatever it is – to be gone as fast as possible.”

He glanced at her out of the corner of his eye. She looked tired, very much so, but there was a hint of relief. She was less tense than yesterday and he guessed the video had her convinced they weren’t assaulted by some nefarious force. He wasn’t sure what it said about her, that she would be more relaxed at the promise of being a werewolf ( weredog he reminded himself) than being stalked by some guy with too much ketamine on his hands, but he liked it. It definitely was the way he felt.

“So, what do you know about ... you know ...” she piped up with a small voice.

“You mean, werewolves ?” There was way too much emphasis on the word and his brows wiggled almost of their own volition. Oh, how he enjoyed this.

“Yes, Mulder, werewolves,” she mumbled, but instead of raising her own brows at him she just stared out of the window at the seemingly endless scenery of fields. He didn’t like his Scully defeated, so he tried to get rid of the smugness. He cleared his throat.

“As always, it’s complicated, Scully. First of all, I’m not even sure if we’re really talking werewolves here. What I saw on the video was very much a dog, not a wolf, and I’m not sure I have ever heard of something like this. I mean there are shapeshifters and stories about man-dogs in Central Asia, but normally they’re not connected to the werewolf lore. Some linguists tried in the late 80s to get to the bottom of the lore in the Indo-European cultures, and they came up with some theory about young male viking warriors who fought in wolf and bear fur. To their enemies they seemed almost demonical in their rage and their seeming inability to feel pain. These berserks – in the literal meaning of the word – were thought of as related to those animals. Names which contain the word for ‘wolf’ are quite common in a lot of languages ...” 

Mulder droned on and on about what he could scratch together about this article he read several years ago and when he looked at Scully to see whether she was following him or not, she was – gone.

Chapter Text

In the passenger seat, where only moments before his exhausted partner had tried to not be overtly bothered by his glee, sat a pile of her clothes and on top of it: a cat.

The body was covered in medium brown fur with more than a hint of red and a white patch on the chest, the paws and the face and the ears were in a dark chocolate brown, as well as the skin on the nose. Scully’s necklace with the cross dangled loosely from the animal's neck. She – he couldn’t be sure the cat was female, but he had no intention to go down this lane of inquiry and it didn’t matter in the end. She was his partner, albeit in the form of a cat, so she was a she. Period. – looked up at him with the most aquamarine blue eyes possible, her dark tail curled around her little paws diligently.

His jaw dropped so far down he could feel a breeze on his tonsils and he struggled to not swerve into a tree. He briefly wondered if she would turn back to human form in death, but this was decidedly not the right moment for such musings. Instead he managed to bring the car carefully to a halt at the side of the road. Looking down at his white gripped knuckles he drew a deep breath and then turned his head again to look at his partner. The cat. His cat partner. His partner who had just turned into a cat.

She sat there as before, her incredible eyes pinching deep into his very core. In a condescending way, of course; she was a cat after all.

“So, there goes the weredog theory,” he huffed, not sure how to proceed.

He cautiously reached out to touch the small animal but thought better of it. He wouldn’t touch Scully like this when she was human, so maybe he shouldn’t when she was a cat. He tucked his hand back in his lap.

The cat looked at his hand. Then she stood up, stretched her body over the space between the two seats and stood with her front paws on his thigh. She closed her eyes and smashed her head into his chest. His reaction was more reflex than anything else: His hand immediately went up to her head and tickled her behind the ears. Keeping the pressure on his chest up she started purring with the force of a V8 motor.

“You like that, huh?” He asked her and then blushed. Everything about their condition was more than bizarre and him asking his partner whether she liked being touched by him really was the icing on the cake. Of course she likes that, she’s a cat, for god's sake, he thought while he tried to get a grip on the situation. She obviously had fallen asleep beside him while he was telling her what he knew about werewolves and their likes – I’ll not be offended by this! She was really, really tired, he reassured himself – and maybe all it took to get her back was to wake her up.

Since the cat was visibly awake he wasn’t sure how to do this. And then there was the other problem. When she woke she would be very human and very naked, possibly pressed against his chest, and surely, decidedly not happy about it. So, he formed a plan. He would wriggle out from under her, leave the car, close the door and then start to make enough noise to wake the dead. As soon as she would be human again he could turn away and give her enough privacy to get her clothes back on. He was pleased with himself.

He put both hands around her chest to put her back in the passenger seat and started to lift her up, but she wasn’t having any of it. Instead she clawed onto him and tried to climb in his lap.

“Oh no, little minx, that’s not an option,” he laughed while he tried to get her claws out of his jacket. Her tail started to twitch and if what he knew about cats was right, she was starting to lose her patience with him. “Don’t be so bullheaded. I need you to go back to your seat.” He had separated her talons from the fabric and shoved her gently to the other side. Her eyes were murderous. “Okay, just sit there for a minute and let me get out of the car, you think you can do that, Scully?”

The moment he spoke her name he knew he had made a mistake. There was a kind of tension in the air, just around the cat, and in the next moment he was looking at the familiar form of Scully, admittedly in a very not familiar attire. His mouth was suddenly very dry.

She was sitting with her legs somewhat awkwardly tucked under her and her head lolled down to her chest. Her eyes started to open slowly and Mulder wished he wasn’t there to explain to her what had happened.

“Mulder, what ...?” She trailed off mid question as she took the situation in. She groaned.

“I think, I’ll step out for a minute,” Mulder said, eyes averted, and scrammed as fast as possible.

*****

Five minutes later Scully climbed out of the car and walked up to him. Her mood had reached freezing point and was still falling. What kind of shitshow had they gotten themselves into?

“I’m decent, Mulder.”

He looked at her, lowering his head a bit more than he was used to, as she was wearing trainers instead of her usual four inch heels, and smiled wryly.

She sighed. “What happened in there?”

“I think, you dozed off while I was telling you about the werewolf lore,” she didn’t miss the little offended puckering of his lips, “and the next thing I know is, you changed.”

“I ‘changed’?”

“Yeah. I mean, I didn’t see it, but when I looked over you were gone and there was a cat in your place.”

“A cat!?”

He shrugged.

“And you seriously think I’ll believe that?” She knew this would offend him but she just couldn’t climb out of her own skin.

Mulder huffed. “Scully, I saw you turning from a cat into you! Not five minutes ago! And you saw the video of me turning into a dog and back!” He was reaching the end of his rope here and she could hear it in his voice. Pull yourself together, Dana! He’s right and you know it! She took a deep breath.

“Sorry, Mulder. You’re right. Go on.”

He made a relieved sound and a bit of the tension left his body. “There’s not much more, I stopped the car, you – I mean, the cat – made an effort to climb into my lap,” right, make me even more uncomfortable than I already am, great job, partner, “and when I tried to get you back in your seat you woke up.”

This was all too weird. As far as Scully remembered, she had been sitting in the car, Mulder was rattling down some hardly interesting stuff about warrior rituals in early European cultures and the next thing she knew she was not in but on all her clothes. She wanted to shoot somebody. Since this was scarcely an option in her field of employment, despite everything every movie ever made told people, she settled for rubbing her forehead and behaving like the brave little agent everybody thought she wanted to be.

“Okay.” Very good, there was just a hint of desperation in her voice. “So, let’s put together what we know so far. First, I don’t think anybody broke into our rooms. Not even on the first night. If you – ehm – turned into this dog, and I into a cat, this would explain the state of our rooms perfectly.” Mulder nodded.

“You think they played together?”

“Maybe, or maybe they tried to kill each other, but either way they could have destroyed everything easily.” Their eyes interlocked for a moment. “Second, since we both turn into different animals, there is no way to tell how far the werewolf lore will get us in solving this mess. Have you ever heard of anything like it?” Mulder nodded again. Then he hurried to shake his head.

“No, never.”

“What do you think it is then, Mulder? Any leaps? Wild guesses?”

“No, not yet. I have not the slightest idea, Scully.” He made a discontented gesture with one hand and ran the other through his hair. “I think we can be sure that we have to be asleep for the – erm – ‘alternative state’. You turned when you dozed off and the exact moment I woke you up you became human again.”

“Huh. How did you wake me up, by the way? Sounds like the cat was very much awake.”

“She was. You came back when I said your name.”

“Yeah, that’ll do,” she mumbled under her breath but was cautious to be unintelligible towards him and quickly added louder: “Almost as if there are two different ‘persons’ inside and while the dominant one is asleep the other one, the animal one, comes to the front.”

“You think the animal has been part of our – uhm – personalities before, and now it has been given a possibility to express, to incarnate, itself?”

“I have no idea, Mulder. Nothing of this makes sense to me, I’m just trying to find some kind of pattern here. We have to get to the bottom of this, and then we have to get us back to normal.”

He seemed to consider something but then he just said: “Okay, here’s what I think we should do: We have to research the lore around this phenomenon, if there is any, and we have to find the cause of our condition before we can do anything about it. But first we should go back to the motel and you should get some sleep in a safe environment.”

“I’m fine, Mulder.”

“Of course you are, Scully. But don’t you think we should avoid a situation like the one we had just now? I have no idea what would happen if anybody saw what I’ve seen, like in the hospital or the police station, and I don’t want to find out.”

“Mulder, I can stay awake!”

“You’re obviously exhausted, you look like you haven’t slept in days and I don’t want to risk it. Plus: It wouldn’t be the first time I nodded off at work myself.”

She hated everything about it, but had to admit to herself that she was more than anxious about finding herself naked in a strange situation the next time. Let alone the thought there might be people around. People who were not Mulder, people she had no reason to trust. She suppressed a shudder.

“Fine. We go back to the motel and I try to get some shut eye.”

As Scully climbed out of the car in the motel parking lot a little later Mulder asked:

“By the way, what’s up with your shoes?”

Scully had obviously no idea what he was talking about, so he gestured towards her unusual trainers. She looked forlorn for a second, then she seemed to remember something and blushed violently.

“What?” he asked.

Her mumbling was barely audible. “I may or may not have urinated in my own shoe last night.”

Mulder just stared at her for a minute. Keep it together, keep it together, keep it together started like a mantra in his head. He nodded quickly and pressed his lips together in an attempt not to laugh right in her face. She closed the door at the exact same moment he cracked. He was not sure she couldn’t hear him laughing all the way down to the public library.

******

He had decided to go to the library in the hopes to find something on werewolves, but even if not they at least would have a computer with an internet connection he could use.

As it turned out, the number of books on the topic was far bigger than he had anticipated and so he looked with his arms full for a secluded place and started to read. He was careful to make breaks every time his eyelids got droopy. Very careful. No use in waking up naked in the cage of an animal shelter.

He sorted the types of therianthropy in three groups: First the well known werewolf lore, people become wolves at night, regardless of being awake or not, but only if the moon was full. They couldn’t do anything about it, but were not actively turned by somebody with magical powers of some sort, it basically worked like an infection. Second were the witches and mages who could turn themselves into animals when they needed or wanted to, the hows and whys were quite different in the folklore all over the world, but the basic idea was the same: You have magic and use it to become an animal whenever you want. The third group were people who fell victim to somebody else’s magic. They were turned into animals, couldn’t do anything about it but would mostly not turn back until their aggressor allowed it. There were overlaps between the different types of course, but in the end Mulder had to admit that he had no idea where he and Scully fit in these stories that humanity had been telling for thousands and thousands of years. They had not been attacked, they did not turn at night, but every time they fell asleep, they couldn’t influence the transition. In the end he probably could live without all the answers to his questions, all but one: He still had no idea how to get rid of the problem. And he couldn’t shake the feeling that he was missing something here. Like he was supposed to know more but somehow just didn’t.

The letters in front of his eyes began to swim and with a small sigh he took his glasses off and massaged the bridge of his nose. Enough for now, he thought and gathered his notes.

Chapter Text

Half an hour later, Mulder parked the car in front of their rooms and balanced two pizzas and his suitcase while he opened the door to Scully’s room carefully. He slipped inside, considerate not to let his cat partner out, in case Scully was still asleep.

And there she was: coiled up on the pillow lay the mesmerizingly beautiful cat he remembered from the car. She gave no sign that she had noticed him, but her eyes were only half closed and followed him through the room.

He decided to let Scully sleep for a couple of minutes more and sat down on a chair beside her bed. The cat raised her head and looked at him quizzically. Then she stood up, stretched and sauntered over to the edge of the bed. A second look and she jumped into his lap.

Mulder breathed in sharply through his nose but said nothing, careful not to wake her up. The animal was seemingly very interested in bodily contact and he struggled to come to terms with that. Sure, a lot of cats were, but this one here was Scully and it felt oddly wrong to handle her like any other cat. He wasn’t even sure she was specifically interested in him or if any human would do. Did this say something about their relationship? How much of his partner was in this animal? Had the standards changed on how to behave around each other? He felt like everything he could do would be wrong, but there had to be a right way to handle this. He was totally out of his depth, had no guidelines at all to orient himself. So, when the cat curled up herself into a ball, he decided to just roll with it. Calm down and look at her like a normal cat. So he put his hand – it almost covered her whole body – on her brown coat and began to stroke her slowly. She started purring immediately, closed her eyes and he felt every tension leave her body.

He sat there, in this chair, in a mediocre motel in the middle of nowhere, stroking his sleeping partner in his lap and despite everything he felt a wave of all encompassing happiness surge through him. He hid all his feelings, all his affections for Scully most of the time and right here, right now it felt like he could show her all of this and when he did she took it, amplified it in her small body and gave everything and more back to him. All the love, all the trust, all the respect they had for each other was on this strange display, almost like a manifestation in the room, and for the first time he realized how much he reined himself in in their everyday life.

Not too much later he decided to wake her up, the pizza was not getting warmer and they had to work a lot if they wanted to solve this puzzle. He cradled the cat in his arms and let her carefully down on the pillow. She looked at him disapprovingly but didn’t protest as overtly as in the car earlier. He quickly padded over to the bathroom, closed the door and called her cell that was sitting on the nightstand at her bed. After the third ring she answered.

“Scully, it’s me.”

“Hmmm. Where are you?”

“In your bathroom – it’s far less crowded with naked women here than in your bedroom.”

She was silent and he could almost feel her eyeing the bathroom door suspiciously.

“That’s very – uhm – considerate of you,” she answered at last and he bit down a laugh.

“Just knock when I can come out, I brought pizza.”

*****

Scully, still a bit sleepy, gnawed absentmindedly on her piece of pizza, lost in her thoughts, when she felt like she had been struck by lightning.

“Mulder, I think I just solved your X-File.”

“What?” he mumbled, equally lost to the world and slowly coming back to her.

“The X-File, I solved it.”

“Which one?”

Right.

“The one that made us come here in the first place, the Peter Lewis murder.”

“Oh? How so?”

“We thought he had been attacked by a very large predator, because every single one of his injuries pointed in that direction, right?”

“Right.”

“So, what if the predator was not a very large one, but Peter Lewis had been very small instead at the time of the murder?” She didn’t put any effort in hiding her glee from him. She rarely was the one who made the one strange assumption that let everything about a case fall in the right place and she was loving it. She watched as Mulder processed her idea and started to grin when she saw his eyes light up.

“Oh my god, yes, everything strange here is connected after all! Lewis disappears from his” he waved his hand as he searched for the right word and came up with nothing “machine, while all his clothes stay behind and then he turns up dead with injuries not too big for nature, but too big for his body.” He looked like he wanted to kiss her and she hurried to take the next piece of pizza into her hand.

“Exactly. I’d bet serious money that he was attacked by a very normal, very bored domestic cat, while he was – erm – turned. He could have been a mouse, or a rat, or maybe even a small bird. This would explain another strange detail: Why Lewis had not been eaten. To kill for fun is very common for domestic cats. It’s quite possible it was Harris’s cat and it killed him right at the door as a ‘gift’.”

“Or maybe he wanted to eat him but when Lewis died he turned back. I guess most cats aren’t interested in human for dinner.” Mulder took another bite from his pizza and chewed. Then he added around a mouthful: “So, what do we tell Blancard? He won’t find the creature he’s looking for and quite possibly has better things to do for his people.”

“Right.” Scully felt her high fade. There was no way they could put any of this in the official records. Blancard would chase them out of town. Best case. Worst case, he would put them in the drunk tank. She wasn’t even sure she wanted him in on this, even if there was a possibility he would believe them – local law enforcement hadn’t always been helpful in the past, to put it mildly.

“I have no idea what we could tell him that would make him call off the search and not write us off as crazy. With a bit of luck he will call it off by himself,” she said after a beat.

“I don’t care if he thinks we’re crazy.” The familiar childlike pout made her smile.

“I know that, Mulder,” she answered softly. “But if he thinks we’re crazy he won’t call off the search and we have gained nothing but his mistrust. It would be a lose-lose.” She reached out to him and touched his arm fleetingly. “We’re in this together and we will solve this. But I feel we have to do it alone.”

“Yeah, you’re right,” he sighed.

*****

Mulder told Scully what he had found out at the library, which was, while a lot, not very useful at all. Scully was a little less opposed to the idea they had been infected with something than they had been cursed or bewitched, mostly because she didn't believe in curses. Or magic.

Mulder on the other hand hoped for the latter: He had high hopes there was an actual person responsible who could end all of this. Part of his brain still tried to dig something up that was falsely buried but came up with nothing. It was unnerving.

In the end they decided to split up to cover more ground for the remaining hours of the day. Scully would go to the hospital as they had planned to do anyway, to look for anything unusual on a microscopic level, and Mulder would very macroscopically look for the person who brought all of this upon them.

As Mulder entered his room several hours later, he had found nothing. Not a single clue. Niente, nada, zilch. He was frustrated. Without even a half-decent (even for his standards) theory to go on, he felt like a leaf in an autumn storm. A blindfolded leaf in an autumn storm.

He threw his coat onto the bed and decided to watch the footage from last night again. Maybe there was something he had missed the first 26 times he had watched it. With a huff he sunk into the chair in front of the borrowed Toshiba laptop, plugged the male VGA connector from the camera into the female counterpart and secured it with its screws. He typed in the password he had gotten from Blancard and went to get a soda while the computer booted.

He opened the file manager five minutes later, with not much to scroll through on a new laptop. In fact, the directory of the plugged-in camera had exactly nothing to scroll through. Mulder felt something in his belly plummet, but nevertheless went through the motions of disconnecting and reconnecting laptop and camera, turning the computer off and on again and giving both devices soft slaps. It was to no avail. The directory in question was empty and stayed empty, like nobody had ever used the camera before.

While it surely wasn’t the first time evidence they had gathered had disappeared, it normally happened when they were stomping on the alien conspiracy’s heels, not in their day to day run-of-the-mill cryptid cases. He just wasn’t prepared for this, right here, right now. He considered a primal scream but went to inspect his window and the door instead. Nothing. No sign of a break-in, no traces of an intruder. He kicked the chair and groaned.

He had to come up with something new, something that would get them out of the autumn storm.

*****

09/29/1997

Copper Lake, NY

Green Fields Motel

08:16 p.m.

“Scully, I have an idea. And I think you’re going to like it for a change.” He wiggled his eyebrows and dangled a collar and a leash from his outstretched hand.

She fought her bodily reaction to the sexual innuendo down and feigned innocence. “You want me to buy your dog a dog?”

“No, Scully, I want you to take me out for a walk.”

She raised her brows.

“Look, we both know that animals have better senses than humans. What if dog-me can help us figure out who is responsible? Maybe he can smell something? Or he knows how to reach out to the pack?”

“The pack?”

“I don’t know, Scully, but don’t you think it’s worth a shot?” His pleading eyes could hold a candle to every begging dog’s in the shared history of both species.

“So, you want me to wait until you are asleep, take you on a leash and just follow you around while you pee at every tree in the neighborhood and shit on someone’s lawn?”

“See Scully, you’re a pro. It’ll be just like with Queequeg.” She made a face. “I mean, not the final part, obviously. ”

Scully wasn’t sure what she thought of Mulder’s idea. He didn’t know much about sighthounds, that was obvious. On the other hand, everything she knew played right into his cards. They were independent hunters, eager and ready to make up their own decisions. He wouldn’t need her for anything out there, she could just follow him and see where he led them. Of course the dog wouldn’t look for his pack as Mulder framed it, because she was his pack and she would be right there.

Now, when she thought about it, so many of Mulder’s inherent traits were also benchmarks for his dog version, it was uncanny. While being agile and absurdly fast they carried themselves with a lot of grace. They bonded mostly to one person and this person alone, ever so distant around strangers. Absolutely myopic when on the hunt, there was no chance they would react to anything but their prey. Scully felt it in her bones that if she let the dog loose he would sprint out into the night, without a second thought and without any regard to her or his own safety. Her theory from before sprang to her mind, that the animals they turned into actually were expressions of their personalities. She felt a sudden urge to get to know the dog in person.

“Okay Mulder, I think you may be onto something here. How do you want to go about this?”

“I think, I'll go to sleep and when the dog appears you take him for a walk. Try not to use my name, you’d probably wake me. And it would be nice if you could carry some clothes for me anyway, in case I wake up. I really don’t want to be found naked outside on a leash with you holding the other end while I’m human.”

“Really?” She made big dove eyes, smiled sweetly up at him and added in a husky voice: “I always thought something like that would be right up your twisted little alley.” For good measure she batted her eyes slowly. Twice.

“You’re having way too much fun with this, Scully,” he said, but blushed nonetheless.

*****

It was an odd feeling, sitting in his room and waiting for him to fall asleep. Of course they had slept in each other's company, but never for this purpose. Mostly one of them simply dozed off when they were supposed to be doing something else. Or nothing at all. She remembered the woods in Florida where she kept watch while he slept in her lap. That was a shitty night. In a very nice way. She remembered the failed campfire, the cold, the feeling of being watched and how she had stroked his hair, the memory so vivid she almost felt him under her hand again and at the same moment a fresher memory crept to the forefront of her head. How she had felt sheltered by an absurdly big, but utmost gentle hand that covered almost her complete body. It had felt like sitting at the hearth of a cabin, snuggled in a blanket, with a steaming cup of tea, during a snowstorm. Everything about it had a grounding gravity but was light as a feather at the same time. She just knew it was a real hand, Mulder’s hand, and some part of her tried to poke its head out of her deep well of safe denial but she shoved it back down and looked over to her partner. His eyes were closed and his breathing even, but since he was still himself she knew he was still awake. She sighed silently and tried to immerse herself into her book.

About thirty minutes later she heard a soft rustling from the bed and when she looked up she looked straight into the eyes of the dog. Absolutely incredible went through her mind. He stood, yawned and jumped from the bed onto the floor, the tail wagging lightly. He came up to her and without any consideration put his muzzle on her thigh. Remembering the way Mulder had obviously handled her cat version, she just put a hand on his head and scratched behind his ears.

“Hey, buddy. Wanna go for a walk?”

She reached for the collar and felt a wave of gratitude flowing through her system when she watched him presenting his neck as if it was the most natural thing in the world.

As soon as they left the motel premises, the dog – Scully had decided to go with Buddy for the moment – stopped in his tracks and the fur on his neck and back stood on end. A deep growl escaped his throat as he stared into the dark. 

“That was a quick hit,” Scully mumbled and hurried to keep up with the animal as it started forcefully into the woods at the back of the motel. “Don’t pull so hard, Buddy, you’ll hurt your throat and I really can’t let you run off alone.” She neither saw nor heard anything from Buddy’s prey and she hoped he wasn’t chasing a hare or some other innocuous animal. She had no idea how much of Mulder’s bright mind was in Buddy. From what he had told her, the cat was fairly common in her behavior, and her few flashes didn’t suggest otherwise. At least he isn’t busy sniffing asses and marking his territory, she thought.

Scully tried to look like your run-of-the-mill dog owner. Nothing unusual about being pulled through the woods by your sighthound in the middle of the night. She was torn between being as loud as possible to not fall victim to a hunter who considered them as game, and being as quiet as possible to not ruin their mission. Buddy was seemingly inclined to the latter; if she hadn’t felt the pull on the leash, she hadn’t been sure he was even there. Without making a sound he followed a more or less straight line, head high but sniffing nonetheless. Scully guessed it would have been even easier for him in daylight, being quite reliant on his eyesight for a dog, but since he didn’t hesitate once she guessed he was fine. Maybe our perp is really smelly. She on the other hand couldn’t see nearly enough to sneak successfully. She stumbled a lot and Buddy pulling her forward made it worse. So she was fairly out of breath when they finally reached the backyard of an ordinary single-family house. Scully crouched down behind the fence and immediately felt Buddy’s warm, wiry body pressed against her side. She still couldn’t wrap her head around the fact that this was Mulder, and he was, in fact, sleeping. Everything about the dog oozed pure energy and tremendous alertness. Little shudders ran through his whole body while he fixated on the house. Scully couldn’t see anything. She had no idea why they were where they were. If she were with Mulder – the human Mulder – he would undoubtedly climb over the fence and she would instruct him in how many ways this was wrong – while scuttling over the fence herself, of course.

As it was, she had to initiate the transgression herself.

“Okay Buddy, you think you can jump over this thing?” He looked at her like she was covered in liverwurst but without any form of comprehension. She decided to not risk it; no use in having him running away and getting run over by a car. She tethered the leash to the fence, then quickly clambered over it. Her plan was to go alone, to just have a look. He’d have to wait for her, whether he liked it or not. And, oh my, he did not like it. She wasn’t even three steps away when she heard a high pitched whine and looking over her shoulder she saw his slim muzzle squeezed through the chain links. Two more steps and he changed to a howl, a definitely attention drawing howl. From inside the house came a single bark. Shit. She hurried back to the fence and loosened the leash while Buddy started to lick her hands. “Stop it, Buddy.” She laughed silently and decided to unfasten the leash from the collar so he could at least try to jump without strangling himself.

“C’mere!” She lightly tapped on her thighs. He looked at her, the head sideways and she immediately imagined a little squint. Then he made a U-turn on his haunches and started to run away from her and her heart stopped in its tracks.

Chapter Text

Four or five strides later he turned again, sped up anew and leapt in a fluent movement over the fence just to sprint off to the house without even glancing at her. Since her heart hadn’t started again yet it was all she could do to gawk at him while he disappeared around a corner of the house. Shit. She grabbed for the leash and followed him.

When she rounded the corner herself she saw him sniffing a dog flap in the back door and sped up, she really didn’t want to imagine the explaining she’d have to do if he went into the house alone. And she was right about it; she reached him literally at the last moment and could only grab him by the haunches to pull him back. “I should have known you would be a pain in the ass, even as a dog,” she hissed in his ear and he looked at her with all the innocence in the world. Then he tried to slobber right across her face. “Eww, Buddy. Stop that,” she whispered and fought him off. After refastening the leash, Scully hauled her dog-partner away from the door and towards the next illuminated window. Buddy was again pressed flush against her as she slowly raised her head to look inside.

She was looking straight into a cozy living room. At a table with her back to Scully sat a woman with dark long hair. There was a certain familiarity about her, but Scully couldn’t make out who it was from this angle. On the couch slept a mackerel tabby cat and a fawn Boxer puppy. On the floor lay an adult Malinois, awake and listening but seemingly not in the mood to start a serious investigation in the backyard. Everything about the scene felt peaceful and full of quiet content at first glance, but Scully knew they were one noise away from all hell breaking loose. The Malinois being too lazy to investigate was a wonder by itself, it must have been really tired.

“Buster, what is it?” The woman’s voice was heavily muffled, but the name of the dog was clear enough to make Scully fit the clues together, and when the woman turned her head so that Scully could see her profile she wasn’t surprised that it was Officer MacKay. She had a fine look at Copper Lake’s K9 unit, their next aspiring member, and a cat.

Scully still had no idea what had drawn Buddy to this house and now she really didn’t want to be found. And definitely, under no circumstances, with a dog at her side. How could she possibly explain to MacKay where the dog came from? She quickly decided to wake Mulder up. If they couldn’t sneak away they could always engineer some kind of excuse why they needed to talk to MacKay. She tucked on Buddy’s leash and led them away from the house before she gathered the clothes she had packed for him. Putting them in a small heap at the side she asked the dog with a sign to lay down – to her surprise he did it without batting an eye – and kneeled in front of him, grabbed his head and just whispered her partner’s name into the dog's ear. “Mulder.”

In the next second she felt his human skin and his human hair in her hands and his familiar hand came up to her shoulder. “Shh. We have to be very quiet,” she mumbled under her breath while she loosened the collar that was sitting quite tight on his human neck. With a bit of reluctance she let go of him, already missing the opportunity to just touch him whenever she felt like it, and made eye contact. He lay on his stomach and was wide awake. 

“We are at MacKay’s house, the dog inside is already wary and he has a dog flap.” Mulder signaled his comprehension with a slow blink. “Your clothes are right here, I’ll give you a minute.” He nodded.

Scully turned her back to him and watched the house while Mulder donned his gear.

*****

A minute later he joined her at her side and mumbled: “Do you know why we’re here?”

Scully shook her head. “Nothing out of the ordinary, as far as I can see. Maybe you were drawn to the dog? We still don’t know how this thing works, so maybe you remembered somehow from before that MacKay has a dog?”

“But I didn’t know where MacKay lives, so that seems unlikely.” Mulder had no recollection of what had happened since he fell asleep in his motel room, but he felt excited and happy, as if he had done something truly exhilarating. “How did we get here?” he asked Scully.

“You were trailing something as soon as we left our room, and led me in a more or less straight line here. I couldn’t make out what spiked your interest though. In the house are, as far as I can see, MacKay, her K9 dog, a puppy and a cat. None of them is doing anything interesting.”

“I’d like to see for myself anyway, maybe I'll recognize something.”

They crept through the shadows back to the house to have a second look inside the living room. Once Mulder had shoved his head high enough above the window sill to look inside he inhaled sharply. He immediately recognized the Boxer puppy as the one that played with him on their first night in Copper Lake. He suddenly felt silly about not remembering earlier; every child knew that you become a werewolf, uhm, weredog, wereanimal, whatever, by one of them breaking your skin. He could kick himself.

His familiar bout of self-flagellation was interrupted by Scully, who nudged him in the ribs and gestured towards the adult dog. He was staring suspiciously straight at them. The only reason Buster couldn’t see them was the fact that they were hiding in the dark.

“We have to get out of here,” urged Scully. “We have maybe three seconds until he decides that he’s actually not too lazy to have a quick look in the yard.”

Mulder just nodded and they started their retreat as quickly and silently as possible. They were halfway back to the fence when Mulder heard the dog door flapping. “Run!” he hissed to Scully as he simultaneously grabbed her hand and dragged her with him while he attained speed. Buster behind them gained ground rapidly and was confident enough to bark nonstop. Mulder jumped over the fence scissors style without even touching it and immediately turned around to Scully who had climbed on top of the fence in the meantime. Without hesitation and with a look back over her shoulder at Buster she jumped directly into his arms. The dog crashed into the fence at the same moment.

Scully mouthed a “Sorry!” to the furious K9 officer and then both agents hurried to reach the tree line before his human boss would catch a glimpse of them.

*****

“I can’t believe I was that stupid!” Mulder had merely started beating himself up. Scully knew that if she couldn’t pull him into a normal conversation he would spend the rest of the night inside his head, agonizing about everything and everyone he had wronged in his life. Supposedly. She always hated seeing him like that. And in this case it was over nothing; not recalling meeting a cute dog was hardly unforgivable. 

As soon as he told her on their way through the woods about the little Boxer on their first night in Copper Lake, her own brain delivered the picture of the cat she had met the same evening. A cat that had looked suspiciously like the cat that was sleeping on MacKay’s sofa, when she thought about it.

Now they were back in their motel and Mulder had taken a quick shower, after mumbling something about his dirty feet.

“Mulder, you can’t blame yourself. I didn’t think of the little scratch, either.”

He looked at her. “You know this is different for me. I don’t forget things.”

She padded over to him as he was sitting on the edge of his bed and took his right hand into both of hers and inspected it thoroughly. “I can’t even see a scratch.” She showed him her own hand, scratch-free as well. “See? I couldn’t remember being scratched at all until you mentioned it right now and, like yours, it wasn’t visible anymore the next morning. We both were thinking way bigger.”

“But a dog broke my skin right before I started turning into a dog every night. And I had a nagging feeling the whole time. Like I missed a memory.”

“Look at me,” Scully tried again. Her partner seemed to have difficulties dislodging his eyes from the carpet. “Maybe it was exactly that. It’s possible the memory loss is part of the process, a side-effect of the infection. We still don’t know anything about how this thing works. We were thinking about animal attacks, not a playful puppy and grumpy cat. And both scratches healed over very, very fast. I, too, had basically forgotten about the cat the moment I turned my back on it.”

He let his head fall again and after a moment raised it once more slightly for a little nod.

“Maybe it’s like that for everybody who gets infected with this thing, Mulder.” Another nod; it was a good moment for him to accept at least one of her arguments, because she was running out of new ones. She decided to get back on track.

“So, you think you led us to MacKay because you could smell the puppy?”

A little spark came back into his eyes.“I don’t know yet. I mean, it’s probable, I guess. I have just no idea what all of this means.”

She nodded at him encouragingly. He plowed on.

“What we do know is that MacKay lives in this house, with her K9 partner, who presumably is a normal dog, since he is working whenever someone needs him, and a dog and a cat who are apparently not, since they seem the most likely source for our, erm, situation.”

Good boy , Scully thought. “I mean, nothing of this is proven, but let’s roll with it,” she agreed.

“Does this mean that MacKay knows about what’s going on? Are these two changing like we are or are they just a kind of carrier? Is it possible she thinks they’re just normal pets?”

“I don’t know either, Mulder, and I think it would be best if we tried to get some more information tomorrow. I’d say we talk to MacKay first thing in the morning; let’s see if we can get some intel without exposing ourselves.”

*****

09/30/1997

Copper Lake, NY

Police Station

08:09 a.m.

“So, have you two found something?” Blancard was looking expectantly at the two agents who had waltzed into his police station with a determined air around them first thing in the morning. Mulder had little interest in talking to somebody who wasn’t in the center of his new found focus; if Scully hadn’t known anyway she would have sensed it by the way he was fidgeting beside her. She brushed his forearm in a fleeting movement. Stay with me, she was trying to convey silently. This was not the right time to split up. Also, her interest in dealing with Blancard alone was minimal at best. The clenched jaw she could see in the upper corner of her eye told her what she wanted to know. He understood.

“Chief.” Scully nodded at Blancard. “We may have some ideas, but nothing concrete yet. How’s the search going?” Scully cringed as she thought about the hunt for the wild beast that was still going on, wasting time and tying up workforce that was surely needed elsewhere.

“Still nothing, and to be honest, I’m inclined to blow it off.” Since both agents weren’t gasping in horror he carried on. “I mean, what are the chances that an animal this big could hide from us for days? We turned every stone.” Blancard rubbed his chin. “Maybe it died.”

Scully just looked at him.

“Yeah, probably not.” He made a face. “But it could have wandered off, right?”

Scully sensed a possibility to relieve at least a bit of the pressure. A quick look in Mulder’s eyes gave her confidence.

“I’m inclined to agree with you. It seems unlikely that such a predator could go undetected under these circumstances.”

“Yeah, and everybody will keep their eyes peeled anyway, without them beating literally every single bush.”

“I’m sure they will,” Scully added and started to ponder how they could get rid of the chief of police. Mulder was bouncing on his toes in the meantime, and when she looked around she found the source for his flurry – he had spotted MacKay at one of the desks.

Blancard spared her as he said: “Fine. And thank you.” He cleared his throat “I have a lot of work to do, so I hope you’ll excuse me.”

“Oh, of course, of course, we will speak to MacKay for a moment, and then we’ll be on our way.”

“Sure, no problem, see you then.” Blancard was moving so fast while he spoke, she imagined a Doppler effect as he rushed down the hallway. The next second she felt Mulder’s hand at the small of her back and let herself be directed towards MacKay. Since day one of their partnership she had wondered how something that should feel (and probably looked) condescending and patronizing was just comforting and reassuring to her. Sometimes she wasn’t even sure if he used the gesture to steer her or if he used the contact to reassure himself, even if she had no idea of what.

In this moment though, it definitely felt like steering, almost pushing; her feet followed her forward shifting center of gravity on their own until she stood nose to nose with MacKay.

“Officer,” she heard Mulder greeting the dark haired woman over her own head while the airflow ruffled her hair. She took a step sideways, putting the three of them in a triangle instead of a straight line.

“Agents. What can I do for you?” MacKay sounded calm, almost bored, but her eyes flitted around. Something was fishy here, Scully was now sure of it.

*****

Mulder was still racking his brain how he could gently poke MacKay about the matter of interest without letting her know they were suspicious of her. At the moment they were standing here empty handed; they had nothing at all to question her about and they could hardly tell her he'd been literally sniffing around her house the other evening.

“Erm, do you have any news about our B&E?” He had almost forgotten about this mess in the meantime, but since there was still an investigation going on it was at least safe ground to start the conversation. Maybe he would later on find an opening into the more dangerous territories.

The little irritated exhale MacKay puffed out didn’t escape him. She at least knew something, and she wasn’t interested in telling them.

“Nothing, no, I’m sorry. And we have nothing to go on, so I guess we have to shut down the investigation.” MacKay looked them over nervously and added: “Can I offer you both a cup of coffee?”

What is it with this woman and beverages? Mulder thought and decided to let it play out.

“Ohhh, very much so, we haven’t had time to get our first dose of caffeine today – you really are a lifesaver!” He grinned at MacKay enthusiastically while he nudged Scully to play along. Her flabbergasted expression was replaced by a merely slightly irritated one and after a second nudge she added: “That would be great, yes!” with a forced smile around her lips.

MacKay shuffled off, presumably to the kitchen, and Scully hissed: “Mulder?”

“She offered me coffee the other day, too. Let’s see if there’s more to it than a friendly colleague who tries to poison us with the local office brew.” He turned around to follow MacKay, waving at Scully to wait for him and reached the kitchen door just in time to see her slipping a dark powder into two already steaming cups. His instincts told him to confront her right there and then, but Scully’s voice reverberated in his skull: We have to get us back to normal . 

So instead he silently shuffled back a bit and then swooshed noisily around the corner. “I’ll just use your toilet if that’s okay, be right back,” and “it’s the next door, right?” He didn’t need to see MacKay’s face or hear her answer; the way her whole body froze in shock when she heard his voice was enough to tell him it wasn’t brown sugar that was dissolving in his coffee at the moment. He went into the bathroom and watched MacKay leave for the office a moment later through a crack in the door, two cups in her hands and a somewhat hopeful aura around her.

Scully watched motionless how Mulder hurried away and stayed put. If there was something to be found out by snooping, Mulder was perfectly able to do it alone. She let her eyes wander over MacKay’s desk. Not her neat style, but not Mulder’s messy chaos either. The usual tech, some files, documents and papers willy-nilly in a heap, a conglomeration of crescent-shaped coffee stains in the vicinity of the recent originator, the obligatory framed pictures of two kids and the familiar K9 officer who tried to bite their asses off the night before, and a small pouch with some dog treats. Craning her neck, she saw under the desk a cage with a blanket, obviously Buster’s place when he was not in action.

Nothing unusual per se but something about it rubbed her the wrong way; before she could get to the bottom of it, though, she saw MacKay re-entering the room. Mulder followed suit, making little cut throat gestures and grimacing toothily at her. Orrr, I really would have liked some coffee, she thought and suppressed an eye roll.

Mulder let himself fall behind a bit and fiddled inconspicuously with his cell phone for a second, then immediately shoved it back in his pocket. A moment later her own began to ring. Neat , she thought and gave him an approving glance. She made a stalling gesture to MacKay and answered Mulder’s call, pretended to listen after uttering her name and then added “Yes, Sir, we’ll be on our way immediately,” before hanging up and waving at Mulder. “We have to go, something came up.” He shrugged at MacKay apologetically and said “Sorry, but thanks for the coffee,” before both of them rushed out of the office and into the bright sunlight of Copper Lake in the fall.

Chapter Text

Mulder stuffed his hands in his pockets and listened to the clickediclick of Scully's heels to his left, when he felt her arm brushing against his.

“So?” she asked.

“She put something in our coffee and I’m sure as hell it wasn’t sugar.”

“You think she tried to poison us?”

“Maybe? I dunno.” He shrugged. “I have a feeling she didn’t, but it’s definitely a possibility.”

“But why?”

“That’s what we have to find out, I guess.” He looked down at his partner and made a wish to the universe that at least this would be an adventure that would make them laugh twenty years from now.

She worried her lip unconsciously, her brows pulled together in a little frown. He looked at her quizzically and added after a moment: “Want to share with the class?”

“There was something odd about her desk, but I can’t put my finger on it,” she let him in on her thoughts.

“What did you see?”

“Nothing special, really. Papers, pictures. Some dog related stuff. Coffee stains.”

“What kind of pictures?”

“Kids. Probably hers. No partner. And the dog.”

“Which one?”

Her eyes lit up and she gave him one of her rare smiles. The ones with teeth. In a heartbeat his own mood spiked significantly and he grinned back. “What?”

“That’s what’s odd. We know she has two dogs. And a cat. But on her desk is only a picture of one of them.”

“Maybe she doesn’t have a picture of the puppy yet, it’s quite young.”

Scully raised her eyebrows. “Sure, she has a new puppy and doesn’t take pictures. Come on, Mulder, you’re a psychologist and a profiler.”

“You’re right, it’s odd. Not nearly odd enough to take her in though, I fear.”

“No, of course not, and I still don’t want to confront her, but I think we have to give it a try. Let’s go to her house this evening, talk to her, have a look at her house. From the inside this time. She is somehow involved in this, I’m sure about it.”

*****

Since there wasn’t much else to do over the day, they drove back to Harris’ house. Scully wanted to try to get some samples from the cat he had talked about the other day and that had turned into their main suspect in the meantime. She’d very much like to have hard proof for her theory that Lewis had been killed by a domestic cat, even if she still wasn’t sure how to explain it in her report. But in the light of day: This case wasn’t an outlier in the midst of the X-files, not in the slightest. She had handed over way more embarrassing reports to Skinner, so there was that. She shrugged.

Mulder glanced at her curiously from the driving seat and she shook her head with a small smile and mouthed: “Nothing.”

Both were lost in their own thoughts for the rest of the way.

When they went up the porch to knock at Harris’ door, Scully nudged Mulder and pointed at a big black and white cat, stretched out on a bench and blinking lazily into the sun.

“What do you two want now? I thought I made myself clear last time.” Harris’ voice startled them. Again. Does this guy stand behind his door the whole day every day? Scully thought but regained her composure.

“I’d like to take some samples from him.” Scully gestured towards the cat.

“What? From Killer?”

“His name is Killer?”

“Sure it is. He’s infamous in the local mouse and rat population – wouldn’t want to bereave him of his honors, would I?” Harris looked smug, saying this, but then his face changed in comprehension. “You can’t possibly think he killed Pete! He’s just a cat! I’m not even sure if this is more or less crazy than his idea!” His chin hinted at Mulder.

“He is just a cat. And I would never …” Scully saw the look on Mulder’s face and changed the trajectory of her sentence “... say that he killed something bigger than a rat. I just need a sample from him in case he – erm – gnawed on the remains …” the picture of Lewis’ corpse popped into her mind and she added lamely “... of the remains.”

“To exclude him from the suspect pool,” Mulder chimed in cheerfully, not helping their situation in the slightest.

“It would be really helpful to identify the DNA of the real killer,” Scully said with her best intentionally sheepish face. It wasn’t as if she couldn’t understand Harris’ hesitation and while the cat’s DNA on the body would prove nothing to the people she wrote her reports for, in this case it would be enough to convince her of her own theory. She felt like she deserved at least this much.

Harris gave both of them a stern look, but shrugged eventually and went over to take the dozing cat onto his arm. He plucked some hairs out of Killer’s fur, to which the animal merely opened an eye, held his hand out to Scully and asked: “Anything else?”

Scully hurriedly grabbed the proffered evidence and put it into a bag Mulder had miracled out of his pocket and answered: “It would be great to have a swab, too. If Killer would be so forthcoming.” The now purring cat looked at her with half-lidded eyes, seemingly content in the arms of his human.

“You can certainly try.” Harris shrugged and petted the animal’s head in a way that somehow accomplished to look smug.

No help here. Okay, Scully thought and armed herself with one of her cotton swabs in the hope she could be fast enough to stick it between the cat’s jaws before he decided to run off. Luckily Killer wasn’t at all fond of her approach, he immediately hissed at her and was utterly flabbergasted when Scully jumped on what he decidedly hadn’t meant as an invitation and rubbed the cotton ball along his tongue. His extended claws didn’t reach their aim since Scully was already retreating and with a spiteful look the cat jumped off Harris’ arm and sauntered toward the tree line, tail high in the air, twitching only a little with consternation.

*****

Scully was obviously very pleased with herself, sitting in the passenger seat with a tiny smile that not many people besides Mulder would recognize as such, playing along her lips and her small fist securing the evidence. Their proof. Her report would look even more ridiculous, since the only logical interpretation would be that an “elephant-sized yet unknown predator” had mauled Lewis without even leaving a trace of DNA and then left the victim to be slobbered all over by a run-of-the-mill barn cat, but at least in this moment Scully didn’t seem to care and he certainly did even less. Tomorrow they would know for sure and they could put an end to the Lewis investigation, officially unsolved as it would be.

“Let’s send the samples off to Quantico and then we can concentrate on MacKay”, he said softly, squinting against the settling sun and popping a sunflower seed into his mouth. He watched her out of the corner of his eye. She seemed much more relaxed than the previous days, despite their situation still hanging very much in the air. She was probably just pushing away the thought of what would be the long-term implications if they couldn’t solve their problem, but he loved to see her a little bit soft around the edges nevertheless.

“Sure,” she answered and looked down at her wrist watch. “You think MacKay will be at home now?”

“I certainly hope so, I’m getting a bit antsy.”

“That’s probably just a flea you caught yesterday.”

His mock-outraged look met her bright grin and he felt like maybe, just maybe, his wish to the universe would come true.

*****

09/30/1997

Copper Lake, NY

Leska MacKay’s house

08:52 p.m.

When they arrived at MacKay’s house – aiming for the front door this time – it was already dark and the late summer day had turned chilly and damp.

Scully noticed at first glance that all the lights in the house were out and her hope sunk a little. She watched Mulder ring the doorbell and how he fidgeted afterwards while they waited for a reaction from inside.

Nothing. The house still sat dark and silent in front of them.

After a couple of moments Mulder went off to take a look from the backyard and Scully followed, feeling dread in her gut and patting her holster for reassurance.

“Think of the dog!” she hissed into his broad shoulders and he nodded sharply, not shortening his strides.

The backyard lay as dark and quiet as the house, the window they had used the night before to spy at the little family mirroring their clenched jaws and furrowed brows.

“It doesn’t feel right,” Mulder mumbled under his breath.

“No, it doesn’t.”

“Let’s see if we can get inside.”

“Mulder! We can’t just …”

(Scully watched as Mulder tried the first window while she hissed at him under her breath.)

“... break in. We have absolutely no …”

(He was reaching for the backdoor with the dog flap.)

“... grounds and while it shouldn’t make a difference that MacKay is a …”

(The door opened without any resistance and Mulder shot her a surprised glance.)

“... police officer, we both know …”

(Mulder entered the house.)

“... that it very much …”

(Scully followed suit.)

“... does. This could get us …”

(Scully closed the door softly behind her.)

“... into a lot of trouble.”

Mulder hummed noncommittally and both pulled out their flashlights, switching them on. They stood there for a minute, listening to the blood pumping in their own ears, and deciding at last that the house was, in fact, empty. No dogs, no cat, no kids and no MacKay.

Mulder gestured at his chest and toward the front in a wide gesture and Scully nodded while turning to look for the stairs up to the second story.

As she ascended the creaking stairs she heard Mulder making similar sounds on another staircase and guessed he had found the descent to the basement. She wasn’t sure what she was looking for, but her whole body brimmed with the feeling that they were at the right place, though not at the right time.

Upstairs she found a short hallway with four doors, probably the master bedroom, the kids’ rooms and a bathroom, and she decided to start at the door next to her right.

*****

Mulder had indeed found the door to the basement and decided to get down there before looking into the other rooms. If MacKay had something to hide, the basement was as good a start as any and he got bonus points for not alarming the neighbors with his dancing light beam. 

He went down the steep steps, turned left and sneaked along the wall, letting his light wander over shelves with preserved products, a washing machine, a big chest freezer, a giant snake, three pairs of skis and the corresponding equipment, something that looked like air crates for dogs and – wait! what? His flashlight bounced back and forth, but he couldn’t find what had looked like a grown-ass anaconda. Or a python. Or something equally dangerous. He reached for his gun but in the same moment something big and muscular wound itself around his body with astonishing speed and all he could do was let go of his flashlight, illuminating his shoes and as he tried to scream, cool, scaly skin covered his mouth, forcing him to be as silent as the rest of the house. 

He struggled to free himself but all he accomplished was to make his wriggle room even smaller and with every breath he let out the iron grip around his chest became tighter. The heavy body that was wound around him didn’t budge at all and it engulfed him with more and more force, and he knew, in the end, he would not only be plunged in silence, but also in utter darkness. 

His last thoughts were of Scully and how the universe could fuck itself.

*****

In the meantime, Scully was going through the rooms upstairs one by one. She had been right about their occupations. After opening the first door she found herself standing in a small bathroom with a sink with three toothbrushes, a toilet and a shower cabin. In the mirror cabinet over the basin she couldn’t find any drugs at all, not even a single aspirin, instead some basic toiletries, toothpaste, soap and – strangely – a handful of sterile hypodermic needles and syringes in their packages. Scully closed the cabinet with her face drawn into a small frown. Maybe MacKay is treating the animals herself? But with what? She stored the information away to think about it later.

The second room she opened turned out to be the master bedroom with not much more than a bed and a big wardrobe in it. In the closet were clothes Scully wasn’t surprised to find amongst a female, 30-something police officer’s belongings and she closed the door quickly, being acutely aware of the kind of transgression she was committing without a warrant or probable cause. On her way out she felt like she was wearing one or two layers too many and she realized it hadn’t been this way in the rest of the house. It struck her as odd that of all rooms the bedroom had been heated so much more, since most people liked to sleep in cooler environments. With a second glance to the bed she became aware of a big pendant light that was hanging in the shadows low over the bed and it seemed to be a risk for bumping one’s head regularly. It was a strange addition to the common ceiling dome that sat right over her head. Something about this room was off, but she couldn’t put her finger on it.

The kids' bedrooms were similar to each other. A bed, some shelves for books and the usual knick-knack, little desks and chairs, appropriate for children who were in school but not in their teens yet. Both held a range of accouterments that were specific to the household pets like drinking bowls, animal beds, chew toys in one room and a scratching board in the other and as Scully opened the lid of a wicker trunk with a hole in the side she was surprised to find a litter box inside. Everything in here hinted at the pets spending a lot more time in the kids rooms than usual in other families. She turned to go back into the hallway when a reflection at her eye level caught her attention. Searching for the source with her flashlight she found a simple cabin hook hanging on the outside of the door.

Her eyes suddenly went wide as realization hit her: Of course there were animal beds in the children’s rooms. And water bowls. And toys. And the possibility to lock someone inside. Not because their little attackers were especially close to the kids of the house, no. Instead it seemed more than likely that the children actually were the animals. It was not nearly as big a leap as Mulder regularly jumped, with him being basically the pole vaulter of all mental athletes. In fact, given the circumstances it was hardly a leap at all, but nonetheless she felt the warm blanket of satisfaction while she watched a lot of the details they had been chasing around falling into place. And looking at the kids rooms and how they were provided it was all but impossible that MacKay didn’t know about her kids' condition. Mulder would be thrilled!

Scully turned on her heels and flew down the stairs, all she could do to not roll down with flailing limbs in her haste to get to her partner.

*****

Scully reached the ground floor and looked out for her partner’s swiveling light but found nothing.

“Mulder?” She held her breath.

No reaction.

Her heart started to pound against her ribcage and she hurried down the hall, shining her light in a kitchen, a living room and another bathroom. Still nothing. The last door on the right side was ajar, and she pushed it further open to find a steep staircase. She remembered hearing Mulder going down some stairs and repeated her call, voice still low and quiet:

“Mulder?”

Still nothing.

Cold fear crept up her spine and she started to sneak down the steps, her gun drawn. On the floor she tried to orient herself, turning right and letting the small shaft of light twitch over old furniture and the gossamer of spider’s webs.

Again she called his name, again to no avail, and subsequently tried to push down the horror images of what could have happened to her partner. After short consideration she even called after Buddy, not sure if he would turn into the dog if he were unconscious. She startled and wheeled around when she heard a sound behind her but recognized the sound as coming from a freezer or a fridge the same moment she saw a man’s shoe peeking out from behind a shelf. Her heart plummeted through her body down towards the floor, leaving a burning hot cleft of panic in her middle and she hurried over to who she now saw was indeed Mulder, pale and seemingly lifeless. The fiery panic in her center was instantly replaced by an icy cold that threatened to paralyze her. She dropped her gun and couldn’t suppress a soundless cry while her shaking fingers moved over his body, not sure whether to feel for a pulse on his neck or his wrist, needing to check for air entering and leaving his lungs. In an unconscious gesture she draped her own body over him, protecting whatever was left to protect and a tiny sob left her lips the same moment a heavy and powerful body wound itself around her and started to squeeze.

Chapter Text

The first thing Mulder noticed when he came to was a dull pain in his chest, accompanied by a racing pulse. His head felt like it was filled with helium and as he tried to take a deep breath the pain intensified. He groaned and opened his eyes.

He was sitting on a leather sofa, his hands and feet tied. The light was dim, but more on the cozy than the nefarious side, and on a small table in front of him he noticed two steaming cups.

That’s ... different, he thought and swiveled his head on the back rest to his right. He sucked in an astonishingly painful breath as his eyes fell on Scully, who was more lying than sitting beside him, hands and feet bound and unconscious.

“Scully?” he whispered as silently as possible, panic welling up inside him. Since she wasn’t in her new feline form she couldn’t be sleeping and his brain supplied him with miscellaneous ideas of horror, from her being in a coma (that she wouldn’t survive) or her being drugged (what she wouldn’t survive either) up to her being dead already.

“Scully!” Her name sounded more like a plea the second time and he squeezed his eyes shut for a minute before he opened them again and let them roam over her body. There. The movement was shallow, but she definitely was breathing. He couldn’t make out obvious injuries and so he scooted over to her and nudged her with his shoulder. “Scully, come on!” he emphasized.

“She’s fine, but I think she will be out for a couple more minutes,” a voice that he knew but couldn’t place right now piped up behind him. Mulder’s head swiveled around and he recognized Leska MacKay, standing in the doorframe and holding both their guns.

“What happened? What do you want with us?” Mulder tried unsuccessfully to shield Scully from MacKay and was relieved to see that the police officer made no attempt to be threatening. She walked over to the other side of the table and sat down in an armchair. She took both magazines out of their firearms, placed the weapons on the table and put the ammunition in her back pocket before she answered.

“Look, I don’t want to harm either of you and the way I have to do this is as unpleasant for me as it is for you.”

“I seriously doubt that,” Mulder spat back at her, still trying to shield his unconscious partner. “What have you done to her?”

“Nothing. The same happened to her that happened to you: Somebody knocked the wind out of her to prevent you both from harming me. Or my kids.”

“Somebody knocked the wind ... I was attacked by a giant snake!” Mulder was sure he sounded almost as outraged as he felt.

MacKay made a fleeting gesture and said: “Yeah, sorry about that, that was mine.”

“You have a pet snake that is attacking people in your basement? You’ve got to be kidding me!”

“I’m not. She gets a bit defensive at times.”

Mulder gaped at her, mouth slightly open and for once in his life didn’t have a snarky answer at hand. Probably the light-headedness.

“Look, snake aside, I restrained both of you solely for my own protection, I promise I won’t hurt you or Agent Scully, I just need to explain and I need you both to listen and I can only hope you will understand. I’d rather for Agent Scully to be awake though, I don’t want to explain twice, if that’s alright with you.” MacKay ran a hand over the crown of her long, dark hair and looked at him with pleading eyes.

Mulder relaxed. He believed her and honestly, this could have been so much worse. He nodded. A little more time to loosen the rope around his wrists a bit further wouldn’t hurt either, he supposed.

*****

Even before Scully opened her eyes, roughly 15 minutes later, she bolted upright and called for her partner, her wrists behind her back pressing uncomfortably against steel.

Mulder, still bound, nudged her with his shoulder and whispered “I’m here, don’t worry, everything will be alright.”

Scully sunk back into the cushions, focused solely on Mulder and stared at him wide-eyed for a second. Then she simply stated: “I thought you were dead,” in a tone that indicated that simple and easy are not the same thing.

“I know, I thought the same thing about you as I woke up here a couple of minutes ago.” He didn’t try to conceal the emotions behind his words either, remembering every single time he thought he had lost her as vividly and increasingly painful as ever.

They locked eyes for a short moment, in the shared understanding that this was neither the time nor the place to feel sappy. Or anything, really.

Scully tore her eyes off of his and took in the surroundings around her. She drew in a harsh breath as she noticed Leska MacKay, still sitting motionless in the armchair vis-à-vis their couch.

“Agent Scully. I’m glad to see you’re fine.”

“What do you mean, ‘fine’? I’m sitting handcuffed on your sofa, after something attacked  me in your basement, Officer MacKay,” Scully huffed, ignoring rather eagerly the part where she and Mulder had broken into her house.

“Yeah, sorry about that. I need to talk to you both.”

“And you couldn’t do that, I don’t know, this morning? Or in the last couple of days? Or give us a call?” Mulder chimed in.

“I really did want to avoid this conversation, and if you let me talk, you will understand why, Agent Mulder.” MacKay took a deep breath and drew her arms around her belly in a protective gesture. “As you will have guessed by now, this is about your ... let’s call it a predicament.”

MacKay drew her legs under her and looked like she wanted to be as small as possible in her armchair. Both Mulder and Scully could see that she was trying to find the right words. After a moment she took a deep breath and simply stated: “I know what’s going on with you two, and I’m able to help you.”

“What do you mean, ‘help us’?” Scully asked at the same time Mulder inquired: “And what is going on with us?”

MacKay’s eyes flitted between them, then she decided to go with Scully’s question.

“I have a cure. I can’t tell you what it contains, but I have it here and I’m more than ready to give it to you here and now.” She gestured at the two steaming cups on the table between her armchair and the two agents on her couch.

“Why on earth should we trust you with this? Take some secret drug we know nothing about, just because you say so?” Scully was seriously pissed now. Not only had she no idea what had actually happened in the basement (besides that she had been attacked by something) and had awoken with not a small amount of chest pain and bound on a sofa, she was also astonished about the chutzpah of this woman, an officer of the law after all, to think either she or Mulder would go for this shtick. She made a quick glance at Mulder to reassure herself he wasn’t going for this shtick. Since he was still sitting with his hands behind his back, bound the same way she was, she couldn’t be too sure about his intentions, but he looked frustratingly hopeful. She tried to get his attention, but he was fully focused on MacKay now:

“So, what can you tell us about our condition?”

“Not much, I’m afraid, just how to cure it.”

It was as obvious a lie as Mulder could imagine and he immediately followed up, uncharacteristically harshly: “That’s bullshit, and you know it. We may be a bit slow on the uptake, but we're not blind. Something is going on here and don’t tell me you don’t know anything about it.”

Scully let the kids' bedrooms play through her mind again and added: “I know your kids are affected. And it doesn’t seem like you can or want to cure them – I’ve seen their rooms and everything there says this is not a temporary state for them.” Out of the corner of her eye she noticed Mulder’s surprised reaction to this for him new information.

MacKay tried to curl up even more. She hesitated for a long moment, while the agents heard only the clock on the wall ticking. Then: “It’s different for them.” And after another beat: “The cure doesn’t work for them.” She sounded very small all of a sudden.

“But you think it will work for us?” Mulder was clearly reacting to MacKay’s display of emotions, again empathetic as usual. Scully wanted to throttle him, but had seen time and again how far this trait of his could get them. And, if she was honest with herself, it was a trait she really liked about him; she even wished deep down she had more of it herself sometimes. Just not at this moment. With this woman right in front of them, who was playing him like a fiddle.

“I know it will,” MacKay nodded.

“Just because you say it twice doesn’t make me trust you more,” Scully all but spat at her, partly to haul Mulder back.

“She’s right, you know?” he told MacKay and added: “I’m sure you’re hiding something more and I want to know what it is before I even think about drinking this stuff.” His chin jerked slightly towards the two cups on the table.

Scully looked at the woman in her armchair, like she was huddling for warmth and thought back at the officer’s bedroom, the heat and the strange pendant light that had hung in such an odd way far too low over her bed: “Your kids are not only affected, they're the spreaders, aren't they? And there is something wrong with you too, right?”

MacKay just stared at her. “What do you mean?”

“Your bedroom. It’s way too warm for a healthy human to sleep comfortably, and you have this strange lamp over your bed.”

Mulder’s eyes went even wider than MacKay’s as everything in his brain slotted into place: “YOU are the snake! She’s not a pet, she’s you!”

MacKay opened her mouth as if to protest, but then closed it again and didn’t say anything.

Scully looked at Mulder, mouthing “What snake?!” and he answered under his breath: “The one that attacked me, and you, in the basement, the giant constricting one.” That makes an uncomfortable amount of sense, she thought, realizing where the ache in her chest came from.

MacKay had meanwhile deflated completely and said flatly: “Yes. That would be me, then.”

“What on earth is going on here? I need you to tell us what you know, Officer!” Scully said, and: “And my patience is really running thin. May I remind you that you have two FBI agents restrained on your sofa, against their will. This will go south for you very, very quickly.”

“You broke into my house,” MacKay retorted, but the fight had already left her. She sucked in a deep breath and started to explain:

“The ‘condition’ we’re talking about is both hereditary and infectious.” Scully frowned but could restrain herself from interrupting MacKay after her first sentence. “When one or both of your parents have it, you will have it, too. The hereditary version is not curable. That’s why my kids are as they are, and why I couldn’t cure them even if I wanted to.” Now it was on Mulder to frown, but he also kept his mouth shut. “When you’re not born with it but get infected later in life, the cure is as easy as they come: You ingest a little bit of blood from the person that passed it on to you. It’s totally harmless and the result is a complete and instantaneous healing. No residue in your genome, no howling at the full moon or anything like it. You both drink one of those” – MacKay nodded at the no longer steaming cups – “and you will be fine.” Mulder and Scully looked at one another.

“If you don’t drink it, you will stay as you are now until you die and you will pass it on to your children. There is no other cure.”

“So, that’s what you were putting in our coffee this morning?” Mulder asked.

“Yes.” MacKay tried to sound brisk, but her tone indicated there was more, so Mulder and Scully just waited until the officer in front of them would give in to the silence. They didn’t have to wait for too long. MacKay huffed shortly.

“To be honest, I've been doing little else these past few weeks than running around and curing people. Many of them came to the station to report a break-in of some sort, so getting them to drink a coffee was easy for the most part, but some I really had to hunt down. Barely anyone turned more than once. But for Pete I was too late – his animal was a yellowthroat, and he must have nodded off in the middle of the day and then he flew away before I could get to him. The next day he was already dead.”

“But how? Who infected him?” Scully was all in now. This felt like she would get more answers in Copper Lake, N. Y. than in all her years on the X-Files so far. At least on the surface. How all of this really worked would stay a mystery, she was sure of that.

MacKay looked at her uncomprehendingly. “My kids. Like you two. Like all of them.”

“But, he was a bird? I thought you become the animal that bit you?” Scully was confused.

“Oh, no. It’s not like that. You become the animal that you already are, deep down. It has nothing to do with the person that infects you.”

“So, it’s pure coincidence that I got scratched by a cat and now become a cat and he” – Scully nodded at Mulder – “got bitten by a dog and now becomes a dog?”

MacKay furrowed her brows. “You shouldn’t remember that – forgetting who infected you is normally part of the process. But yes, you would’ve turned out the same if it had been the other way around, or if I had infected you. Not that I would ever do such a thing.”

Mulder gave Scully a small nudge and plowed on: “That gets me right to my next question: Why are your kids doing this? And why aren’t you doing anything about it? And: Where are they?” He sounded as intrigued as Scully felt and as she was looking over at him she could see that he had removed the rope around his wrists in the meantime but didn’t make any effort to interrupt their conversation.

“That’s quite a lot of ‘my next question’,” MacKay said flatly, but followed up with: “They are with my father, as is Buster. I had a feeling you would turn up here tonight and I couldn’t risk getting any of them harmed.

As to why they’re doing this: They’re kids. They found the whole thing very funny, and the more I told them that it’s not okay to do that, the funnier it got for them. They are old enough to sneak out of the house at night, but too young to understand the repercussions of what they’re doing. To be honest, until Pete turned up dead, I felt it had been more of an inconvenience than a real problem myself, you know, with people being upset about where their chocolate went and such things. It’s not that infections have never happened before, after all.” MacKay pressed her lips together and swallowed. “But then he did die and I thought they had understood, but they snuck out again, despite me having them locked in their rooms at night. They didn’t turn anyone but you two though. They told me they thought they were protecting me and promised to never do it again. Me freaking out about the FBI arriving may have played a part in that.”

“But how would infecting us protect you?” Mulder had his hands now in his lap, but made no attempt to throw himself on the woman in front of him. She didn’t even seem to notice.

“They thought if you were like us, you would understand. Not put them – or me – in a shelter.” MacKay made a helpless and somewhat resigned gesture. “As I said, they’re kids.”

Mulder threw a glance at Scully before he said: “I believe you. And I’m willing to try your cure.”

“Mulder!” came from his side, where his partner was still struggling with the handcuffs.

 “You have no idea if any of this is true! And even if it were: You honestly want to drink children’s blood?!” Scully couldn’t believe it. Or better, she didn’t want to believe it. Of course he would jump right in, she groaned inwardly.

“It is dried and sterilized, and you need only a tiny amount of the powder,” an offended sounding MacKay chimed in. “It’s not like in the middle ages, where we made people literally drink our blood because we didn’t know any better.”

“See, Scully? Hardly the strangest thing I ever tasted. Better than running around at night and marking lantern posts for the rest of my life, don’t you think?”

But Scully had found the next bit of information to sink her teeth in: “What do you mean, in the middle ages and you didn’t know any better?”

“Our communities are very, very old, and, as you can imagine, extremely secretive about the condition. That I’m disclosing anything to you would have meant my certain death in former times. That, or I would have had to ensure both of you would become a part of the community yourselves. Even now, letting you go cured and with the knowledge you have, could mean that I’ll be forced to go back to the village in which I grew up and never be allowed to go outside again.” She closed her eyes for a moment and swallowed. 

“But it also means that there has never been any proper scientific research done, and it will stay that way for the foreseeable future. But since some of us have been and still are scientists, a little bit of experimenting on the side and in secret has been going on, so at least we know how to make the reversing process less messy and we understand a lot more about our shifted forms. We’re not feeling like monsters anymore, so we don’t have to behave as such.”

“So, this cure has been tested before?”

“Of course! Over many, many generations. Hundreds, maybe even thousands of years, time and again. I can assure you, it’s one hundred percent effective and absolutely safe.”

“But you never tried to cure the inherited variation?”

“I personally? No. And I wouldn’t, even if I could.”

“Why not?”

MacKay looked at Scully like she had grown a second head. “Why would I? It’s who I am, who my children are. It’s not only an important part of my life and personality, it’s also part of my culture and heritage. You could just as easily ask the snake if she wants to get rid of the human form that’s dragging her outside all day.”

“But, it’s incredibly inconvenient, isn’t it?”

“Look, when you are like me, born into it, it’s really not. And even if you’re infected later in life and stay this way, it doesn’t have to be. Most people who are born with it or are infected long term are able to develop a great amount of control over it. We learn to fall asleep any given moment and we learn to dream lucidly, so we can influence what the animal is doing. Also we can wake up whenever we want. Things like with Pete, who probably thought he had the most horrific nightmare and didn’t know how to shake himself out of it until it was too late, are extremely rare.” MacKay shrugged. “The most inconvenient part for me is that I can’t afford to fall asleep in boring meetings like everybody else.”

“You make it sound almost fun,” Mulder remarked and Scully groaned inwardly.

“It has its perks, let’s leave it at that.”

Scully was torn. She had no reason to trust this strange woman besides a straightforward feeling in her gut, and ingesting blood-spiked hot beverages was not really her style. On the other hand she knew Mulder would do it, no matter how much she tried to keep him from doing it. She really didn’t want to be in this all alone. She made another half-hearted attempt to struggle free from the handcuffs.

She felt her partner's hand on her shoulder as he said: “Come on, Scully. We drink it together and we will see what happens.” And to MacKay, waggling his own freed hands, he added: “Could you loosen her cuffs? It will make the drinking part much less complicated.”

It was obvious by the way her eyes went wide that MacKay hadn’t noticed before that Mulder had freed himself, but she stood up without much fuss and went over to Scully, the keys to the handcuffs already in her hand.

“Just out of curiosity: Why did you use the cuffs on me and not on Mulder?” Scully asked and wouldn’t know whether to be amused or offended as MacKay answered:

“Honestly? You look far more dangerous than him. I wanted to survive this night.”

Chapter Text

“I will miss our nightly tête-à-têtes.” Mulder, standing in front of his motel room later that evening, put just the right amount of double entendre in his voice to grant him one of his partner’s superficially annoyed looks, that veiled the amused sparkle in her eyes and the slight, slight upward movement of her lips rather badly.

“What you will miss is eating your pizza and the box,” she diverted in her well-practiced manner, her hand already on her doorknob.

They both had drunk the proffered beverages, and as far as Mulder could tell, his tasted nothing out of the ordinary. Not that he knew a lot about how herbal teas should taste. Nor that he wanted to learn more about it. He didn’t feel any different, either, but he hadn’t felt different after he’d gotten infected, so there was that.

He went into his own room and peeked his head out once again.

“Night, Scully.”

“Night, Mulder.”

She hadn’t moved and was still looking at him. He wondered what she was thinking about but before he could say anything else, she disappeared into her room.

He had to admit, part of him was already grieving the loss of “the condition.” Not that he remembered a lot about being a dog, but to know that he could learn to control it, to experience it on a wholly different level made him feel like he missed out on something big. 

That he would not see his partner again in her alternate state made it even worse. He feared it would never again be as easy and uncomplicated to act on his affections for her.

It is, what it is, he thought, and shrugged. Living like they had the last couple of days would complicate their lives in unforeseeable ways, and he couldn’t shake the feeling that The Community, whoever and wherever they were, would never allow them to roam free if they had decided against the cure. He didn’t know about the repercussions MacKay would have to face for telling them, but she had made very, very clear that any notion of any of it in any kind of official (or unofficial for that matter) document was highly unwelcome. Halfway through the door on their way out of MacKay’s house he had remembered the deleted video footage. Of course it had been her; in hindsight it was so obvious that he felt silly asking her.

He knew what was hardest for Scully was letting go of the whole science aspect of it all, an enormous new field of exciting research right in front of her that promised the most extraordinary revelations in a whole bunch of different sciences. But he also knew deep down she didn’t want to expose and endanger these people, who had kept this incredible secret for such a long time.

He opened the laptop to set up the surveillance equipment for another night, just to be sure, and as he watched through the footage the next morning he was content to be able to tell Scully they were back to normal.

*****

10/01/1997

Copper Lake, NY

Green Fields Motel

08:34 a.m.

Scully had known even before Mulder knocked on her door with muffins and coffee, ready to hit the road.

“We’re clear. And we should head home, don’t you think?” he suggested.

“I don’t see what we could do here anymore, so yes, let’s go.” Her bags were already sitting on her bed.

“We have to go to the police station once more though, I need to get the camera and the laptop back. Not that I’m eager to talk to Blancard again.”

Scully groaned. “Me neither.”

Two hours later they were on their way back to the airport, driving through the outskirts of Copper Lake.

“Blancard probably thinks we’re the most useless agents taxpayer money can buy.” Mulder said it with some humor in his voice, but Scully knew it irked him that they weren’t able to tell the chief of police what was really going on in his village.

“I don’t like leaving him in the saber tooth limbo either, but given the rumors, this whole thing will probably turn out to be quite the tourist magnet. I bet if we come back in a couple of years, we’ll find a ‘Smilodon Café’, a ‘Great Cat Motel’ and somebody will become rich by selling stuffed saber tooth tigers and baseball hats. People like you will be all over the place.” She laughed at him good-naturedly and he couldn’t help but smile back.

“It will be a second Heuvelman’s Lake!”

Scully fell quiet for a moment, thinking about her partner, and how much she would miss his animal form, despite having met Buddy only once. Maybe they should do something about those feelings, the ones that they could hide only in human form. Someday. Maybe.

“There’s just one thing, Mulder:” He took his eyes from the road to look at her expectantly. 

“I know very well what you asked MacKay as you took her to the side before we left: if the whole infection-cure-thing would work again. And I swear to God, if you do this again, on purpose, I will personally bring you to the next shelter the minute you fall asleep.”

“Ah, Scully, I wouldn’t dream about it,” he said with enough mischief to make her roll her eyes. In the same moment their car passed the sign that informed them that they were leaving Copper Lake, and they rolled into the open late summer landscape of Upstate New York.