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Chapter Text

Chase had said: and Chase knew what he was doing: that he’d be back in five. Well- he’d said give it ten, at a push. It had been fifteen minutes and Chase had not returned, but Brittany Evans wasn’t too concerned. This was like Chase, this was usual: he’d no doubt seen some stalagmite with a drip formation that warranted a billion blurry photographs or a side-passage he’d have to scrawl the location of down in his tatty notebook. It was part of why she loved him, as much as it infuriated her- and as much as it assured their tardiness at every social event they’d ever attended- this persistent curiosity of his, this enthusiasm for the small things and the path less travelled. Chase Sullivan had in his eyes this verve she’d never noticed other men lacked until he’d walked into her life four months ago looking to rent a room at the front desk of the motel she’d been manning, her head bent over a sloppily rewritten resume: he’d invited her out the next day on a 12 mile hike with rock-face scrambles and bushwhacking and she’d thought, what the hell. One thing led to another, a fling became something more, and now she sat cross-legged on the floor of a dark cavern with mud and bat shit coating her new sneakers and dust coagulating in her hair. Chase had said he’d go on ahead and scope out the passage that he told her led down to this ‘really cool! Incredible, like nothing you’ve ever seen before’- cavern, which- god knows- probably looked just the same as the rest of them. He’d said it was okay if she wanted to wait: sometimes, he told her, this particular passage was flooded with seawater and was inaccessible, and he knew she’d rather keep her feet dry if she could help it. Ever the gentleman. 

Brittany kept her headlamp off to converse the battery. She hadn’t been caving before, but doing so seemed pretty sensible. She’d seen a couple of horror movies and heard a couple of folk tales about people who got tangled up in cave systems and ended up withering into skeletons between slabs of limestone and she intended to save herself from becoming a statistic. She had spare batteries in her pocket and energy bars and water bottles in her pack. She hadn’t told Chase, because he was an incessant ‘leave no trace’ tree-hugger, but she’d been marking the walls of the cave as they’d traversed with a bright red sharpie every few steps: a trail of breadcrumbs, just in case. 

Chase knew that he was not a good man. He tried to be, sometimes, and he pretended to be, all the time. In almost all areas of his life he knew with certainty he was reprehensible, and yet some small part of him remained that played him visions over and over in his mind of a sunnier way of living: of a life where he was good, of a life he could spend with Brittany. 

Brittany Evans, his vice and his world. 

Chase could be a good man for her- he would be a good man for her- and when all of this came to a head he’d protect her. He’d find her a way out. Even if he had to throw her the one life-buoy he had. He’d drown. That was fine, good, penance. 

The passage sloped down here, levelling out into a crawl. Beyond the crawl-passage he’d find Brittany, and he’d tell Brittany the passage had been flooded- a real shame- and they’d call it a day. They’d go back to the van and they’d drive back to their little camping spot they’d found nestled in a cove further down the beach and they’d eat cup noodles and go home in the morning. Brittany wouldn’t complain about not seeing the crystal cavern. She wouldn’t twig that he’d lied to her. She was good like that. 

Brittany thought she could hear something. It was like- she thought it was music at first, but it was ridiculously discordant if it was. It was a far off sound, and a bit like a cat running back and forth on a keyboard- jumpy, nonsensical. Water dripping? They were on the beach. Chase had assured her that the entrance was set back far enough that it wouldn’t suddenly flood, but Brittany’s spine started to feel like it was contracting. Her heart began to beat a little louder. Chase would be back soon, and Chase would tell her that it was the mating calls of subterranean fruit bats. That would be alright. 

There was no incredible cavern. There was a laboratory. It was incredible in its own right, Chase supposed, in an architectural sense. 

The work was not incredible. 

This part of the crawl-passage necessitated a bit of a squeeze, but once he’d managed it, he’d be back with Brittany. His task was complete and Chase could go home. 

The sound became louder, and louder, and louder. Brittany considered deluding herself for a single moment that the clatter was the sound of Chase’s carabiners as he came on back to her and then threw the thought aside immediately. This was something else: not metal on metal. It could still be the bats. It could still be, she reassured herself, completely harmless cave phenomena. Regardless, she didn’t want to be alone in the dark. She hit the button on her headlamp. 

Funny how she hadn’t noticed it when she came in: the rock wall in front of her looked remarkably like a face. 

Chase splayed his fingers in front of him, feeling their grip on the rim of the narrow passage. This ledge dropped off into the cavern he’d left Brittany in. With the mere thought of being close to her the memories of what he’d done were starting to dissipate. He pulled his shoulders through the gap: was it his imagination, or did it feel much tighter than when he’d entered? Arms first, eyes closed, he wriggled out of the hole. 

“Brittany?”

He’d expected her to have her headlamp on. He thought she didn’t like the dark. 

“Brittany? Hey, I’m back.”

Had she gone off without him? That was unlike her. That was worrying. He whipped his head around in a full circle, headlamp bouncing off stalagmites and grooves in the wall. 

There she was: there was Brittany. He hadn’t noticed her at first because she’d curled herself up real small against a little concave wedge and sat with her back turned to him, knees coiled into her chest. Chase’s heart ached softly, fondly. She got like this sometimes- too claustrophobic in a cave, too tired on a hike, too waterlogged on a fishing trip. She’d shut down and Chase would ply with her promises of taking her home to a warm bed. He’d dance around her with doe-eyes like a lovesick teenager and plant little kisses on her forehead until she started to laugh. It was like their little game. Oh, his stubborn-hearted Brittany: how she made his world good. 

“I know.”

The shape- the Brittany shape- rose from kneeling. Chase stopped short. There was something sharp in her voice. Brittany wasn’t ever sharp: she was round and smooth and soft. 

“I know it- I know what they do- I know.”

“Baby? Brittany?”

The Brittany-shape turned around. 

The Brittany-shape looked him dead in the eyes. 

The Brittany-shape lunged for his throat. 

The figure staggering to Mulder up the beach was bedraggled, his head bowed. It was not windy and yet as he walked it was like he was being buffeted about: unsteady somehow, tipping this way and that like a drunk. 

“That’s him, right?”

Scully was bent over on the passenger seat. As they waited she’d been reading a novel he’d lent her, a collection of sci-fi stories. I’m not huge on science-fiction, Mulder, she’d told him, not looking up from the book once the entire drive. 

“I think so.”

Mulder and Scully had been sitting for the better part of an hour in an abandoned parking lot, staring out at the ocean. This was hardly a beach for holiday-makers. The sky was terribly overcast, for one thing, and the beach was more harsh grey pebble than sand. From here Mulder could see, set far back on a gentle rise, the great maw of a cave drawn into the cliff face. 

“Agents Mulder and Scully?”

Chase Sullivan was a white male, aged in his early thirties at a guess, with shoulder-length hair coiffed into surfer-blonde ringlets and the world-weary expression that Mulder saw all too often in the eyes of people given no other choice but to speak to them. Mulder and Scully rose from the car to address him: professionalism had given way to practicality and they’d ditched the suits for his tatty Knicks shirt over a long-sleeve and an oversized grey flannel respectively. He flashed the badge and hoped he still came across, in some measure, reassuring. 

“I’m glad you’re here. It means more to me than-“ Chase followed his words up and down in the air with his hands- “It means more to me than you could know.”

Now that they stood eye-to-eye, Mulder could see clearly the bandages that were taped to the side of his neck. 

Two days ago Chase Sullivan had emailed Mulder at his personal address. This had given him pause at first, scared him: until Chase admitted he’d discovered his contact details in an old UFO magazine and should like to speak to the elusive M.F Luder about a case he’d promised was well inexplicable, very important to him, and very, Chase thought, in his ballpark- and yes, the article was eight years old, but on the off-chance he was still in the area, could they talk?

With Scully back-seating over his shoulder he and Chase had corresponded in a string of about five seperate messages. Chase was a classic screwball- who Mulder believed made several good points- and a longtime fan of the collected works of M.F Luder [collected, as they were, in the back pages of scrap magazines, but any press is good press.] A hobbyist caver, he told Mulder of how he was checking out a new system with his girlfriend Brittany and he’d stumbled across both a) ‘the strangest thing, the most bewildering phenomena’ and b) ‘the most horrifying sight of his life’. 

Brittany, Chase claimed, had been stolen away by a monster right in front of him. A great big white monster with no eyes- or very small eyes, he wasn’t sure- that had risen up from a side passage and just taken her, snatched her right up, and gotten him in the side of the neck with it’s great talons for good measure. 

“Like the Flukeman.” Mulder had mused, hands hovering over the keyboard as he formulated a reply. Scully poured herself more wine. 

Chase had said that he’d already gone to the local police. He had reached out to everybody he could think of and nobody had believed him. Brittany could be alive down there, he was sure of it: when Mulder questioned why he was so sure, he said he couldn’t explain it, but he knew. He knew she was alive. 

Scully had scoffed. “Heartwarming.”

Mulder, taking the bottle from her and adding to his own glass, believed him wholeheartedly. 

“I can’t- I’m real sorry, but I can’t come with you.” Chase handed Mulder and Scully each a small backpack. 

“I know I said I’d lead you down, but something came up-“

Mulder took the pack. It was a satchel rather than a backpack perhaps, and was hardly any larger than his fists put together. A length of rope and a shiny carabiner swung off it’s end. Scully’s was almost identical, but hers had the accents done out in neon red instead of yellow. 

“What came up?”

Chase had promised to lead the agents to where he’d left Brittany and the monster-where he’d narrowly gotten away with his life. Mulder had made it quite clear that he had no caving experience in his emails, and that if they were to go in pursuit of the cave monster Chase would surely have to accompany them. 

“I just- I can’t. My sister is ill- I didn’t mention that before, I’m sorry- and usually she’s fine, but she- she got a whole lot worse this morning. I shouldn’t even be here, I should be with her-“

Chase choked on a strangled half-sob and drew his arms around his shoulders. 

“I promise it’s not far. I drew you a map, but it’s a dead straight cave. No inclines, no nothing. Fifteen minutes each way to the cavern.”

Mulder had no reason to believe Chase was flaking on them: he looked genuinely distraught. Maybe lesser agents would call it in, but despite the eerie visions of the Flukeman in his head Mulder was not overly concerned: cryptid phenomena had always intrigued more than scared him, and- like a proper true blooded American, yee-haw- the weight of his gun reassured him.

Of course, he wasn’t the only person here. 

“Scully?”

Mulder addressed his partner, who was picking around in the contents of her pack. 

“Hmm?”

It wasn’t like her to drift off during a conversation. 

“Chase can’t come into the caves with us.” 

Chase stared holes into the toes of his converse. “I’m sorry.”

Scully drew something from the pack, small enough to be hidden in the palm of her hand, and slid it into her breast pocket. 

“That’s fine.” Her tone was cool and pensive. Mulder twigged it immediately as her ‘something’s not right, but it’s not urgent- we’ll talk later’ tone. 

“Mulder and I should be able to manage.”

There was, most certainly, something up.

Chase clasped his hands together, his relief evident. 

“God, thankyou- thankyou so much.”

He pointed at the packs. 

“I made these out for you. They’ve got headlamps and spare batteries in. And the map, uh-“ 

He deliberated for a moment, and then pointed decisively at Scully’s pack. 

“The map’s in that one.”

“Anything else we need to know?” Scully asked.

Chase paused, and then nodded. There was some kind of wordless discourse between the both of them that Mulder was not privy to and it slightly unnerved him. 

“It’s in case of emergencies.”

Mulder did not know to what Chase was referring, but could follow his line of sight directly to the lump of the small object in Scully’s breast pocket. 

“Of what sort?”

“Cave snakes. They have a venomous bite. ”

Scully raised an eyebrow. 

“They won’t bite you, anyway.” Chase continued. “They’re docile. Like I said- it’s just in case.”

She nodded. Chase drew his car keys from his jeans. 

“I should really get going- look, you remember my address? My phone?”

They’d exchanged those necessary pleasantries over email, and Mulder had written both on a folded post-it in his back pocket. 

“I wish I could help you guys- I wish I could. But my sister- you wouldn’t believe how hard it’s been. You wouldn’t believe. But I know Brittany’s there, and I know you’re the only people who can help her.”

Mulder- still feeling a tad thrown- waved him farewell as Chase practically tripped himself over running back the way he’d came. The agents were silent for a moment as his retreating figure lurched and jolted over the sand. 

“Are you going to tell me-“

Scully cut him off with a gesture before he could finish. From her pocket she procured a tiny little glass vial- evidently an injection vial, though no label was affixed. It held a substantial amount of some kind of clear liquid. Mulder, bemused, flipped the velcro latch on his own pack. He had to dig through a handful of loose triple-A batteries and a protein bar to get there but he eventually unearthed the very same vial and the considerably more frightening inclusion of a small injection needle in a sterile plastic bag. 

“For snake bites.” Scully said- clearly unconvinced. 

Mulder scanned the horizon for signs of Chase, but he’d cleared well off. 

“Scully, what do you think this is?”

Scully shrugged. 

“I think if he’d set out to drug us to death, he wouldn’t have given us the needles.”

“So you don’t think it’s- you don’t think it’s weird?”

“It’s definitely weird, Mulder. I didn’t say that it wasn’t.”

The contents of the rest of the pack were completely normal. As Chase had promised he’d given them ample spare batteries, protein bars, and a first aid kit. And as much as the vial was strange, Mulder couldn’t think of a reason to doubt him: he knew, at least, that Brittany Evans was real. He wasn’t stupid. He and Scully had made sure to cross-reference births and deaths and the missing persons registry to validate her existence and her residence in the coastal town and, through a series of forum posts on the personal website of her sister- [who used her full legal name as an online moniker, the FBI’S favourite kind of user]- they had validated her relationship with Chase  Sullivan and corroborated his story about visiting the cave system with Brittany on the relevant dates. My sunny sister Brittany and her wonderful boyfriend Chase! I snapped this as they were leaving my house to go explore… a cave? I know, right? I’ll never get it- what are they gonna see, rocks? The second they left, I ordered a pizza…. 

What was an officer of the law to do before the rise of online blogging? Mulder couldn’t remember how he’d gotten around. 

Missing persons had nothing to say about Brittany, but that was not unusual. This was a small town and she’d only been gone for a few days. 

[Mulder had wondered, just a little, about the sister- who seemed so fond of Brittany, with pictures of the two of them posing together in bars dating back for months- but her webpage had not been updated since the image of Chase and Brittany on the threshold of her home was posted.]

All in all, the vial worried him- and it worried Scully as well, he knew that much- but perhaps antivenom would have to be the answer they’d accept in lieu of better explanation and besides, all evidence pointed to there being a very real missing person in the very hypothetical lair of a very frightening cave-cryptid. 

Another day, another dollar. 

Mulder leant over Scully’s shoulder as she unfurled the little sheet of paper that Chase had drawn them for a map. Looking at the thing, Chase really needn’t have bothered. He’d just drawn them a straight-down line in pen, with ‘x’s marked at three points and an explanation that these were passages they weren’t to take. 

“Concise.” Mulder remarked. 

“Pointless.” Scully muttered. He followed her up the incline that led to the mouth of the cave. It was a circular opening, like a tunnel. Mulder half expected a train to come hurtling out of the entrance, but it was much too small. Scully bent down to navigate an overhanging rock as she stepped inside and cursed as she hit her head with a dull thwack. 

“Scully? Are you okay?”

She rubbed at her forehead, clearly more frustrated than injured. 

“That sounded like it hurt.”

He ran his fingers along her hairline. There was a small red bump there, but no skin had been cut. 

“You know, we should probably have brought helmets.” Scully said. Then, her mouth twisting into a shy grin- “Mulder- it wouldn’t hurt if you kissed it better.”

There was a newness to this. There was a hesitancy to this. There was a great stirring feeling in his heart to this- to the inexplicable nature of whatever they’d become recently. Mulder had not known the touch of her lips for long, and the soft freckling of the skin between her breasts was even newer: and yet he had found in the grand scheme of things it changed little about the all-consuming way he had always loved her. The new scope of their relationship, however, did offer a clear benefit in that he now had plenty of tools at his disposal to prove this to her, and he brushed the small welt on her head with his lips. 

“Will that do?”

“Oh, it might.”

Using each other’s arms as supports, Mulder and Scully ducked under the overhang and clambered into the still darkness until their forms were totally swallowed by it. 

One man sat cross-legged on the roof of his car and watched them disappear through leather- handled binoculars. Chase Sullivan did not like to consider himself a liar, but these days he did little else. The story about the sick sister was well crafted, he thought: an underhanded stab at a weak point, sure, but effective. M.F Luder mentioned a young sister in precisely zero of his cryptozoology articles: in fact his personal life was quite the enigma: but you could call Chase Sullivan a super fan. 

A well-researched aficionado.

A sane man only doing the right thing. 

Chapter Text

“Mulder? Take a look at this.”

There was still enough ambient light to see by, well enough: the cave’s opening stood a few feet back, seeming to beckon to Scully- come away, where it’s light, where it’s safe- but Scully drove away temptation and pointed to a red streak smeared along the cave wall. 

“Blood?”

Mulder hovered at her shoulder. “I don’t think so.”

He traced the streak with his finger. It did not run. 

“Marker.”

“Left as a guide, maybe?”

Mulder shrugged. “Probably. You know, Scully- I’ve been caving before. Back was I was a kid, me and my father, with the Indian Guides.”

“Yeah?”

They carried on down the passage. It was so dead-straight that Scully had a hard time coming around to the idea that it was a natural cave: it reminded her of the smooth contours of the walls of a sewer pipe. (Scully, in some other life, would not be so intimately familiar with the interior of a sewer pipe. Alas, she lived in this one.)

“Mmm-hmm. Take nothing but pictures, leave nothing but footprints and kill nothing but time.”

“And that’s meant to mean?”

“Caver’s motto. Or-“ Mulder threw the switch on his head-torch. They were leaving the natural light behind them. “Speleologist’s motto.”

“So what’s a spelunker, then?”

Mulder caught her elbow as she stumbled over a jutting slab of stone. 

“As of right now, Scully? We are. Head-torch.”

“Oh. Right.” Scully jabbed at the button on her head-lamp. Mulder’s was already on, so it did little.  Scully glanced behind her, back to the little yellow circle of sunlight, back to the rest of the world: it seemed so impossibly far away.

Scully didn’t typically consider herself claustrophobic. At least, not more so than any other person. Her childhood had been spent reading in cramped boat cabins on fishing trips and  chasing her brothers through the crawlspace under their uncle’s holiday house. Nevertheless, sometimes it seemed like the dark- when she was alone in for too long, when the walls started to bend in on her- reminded her just a bit too much of pitch-black car trunks. 

She wasn’t afraid. Just- she was just cautious, these days, of being trapped. Cautious as anybody would be.

A slight bend in the passage had blotted the cave mouth completely from view. The yellowed light of their head-lamps bent off the smooth rock walls. Scully had shut off her torch for now, as Mulder’s light illuminated the cave enough for them both and they figured they should be conserving battery power where they could. 

“Hey, Scully- do you remember how to tell the difference between stalagmites and stalactites?”

“Stalagmites might, uh-“ the words lost, Scully mimed the stalagmite stretching from the ground with her hand. “they might grow.. upwards. They might grow taller. And stalactites hang on tight.”

Mulder idly thumbed another little red line drawn in the rock face as they passed it. 

“Corr-ect. I think.”

“And I wasn’t even an Indian Guide.”

“You would have made a good one.”

“Kumbaya, my Lord….”

“Oh, Scully, we sang raunchier campfire songs than that.”

“What-“ Scully laughed as she ducked under an overhanging jut of limestone- “with your father?”

“No,” Mulder blundered, “when everybody’s parents had gone to sleep.”

Scully could picture it easily: tiny little Fox Mulder covered in embroidered badges poking at the embers of a campfire with a stick. It was harder to imagine friends around him, other little scouts: but they must have been there, and they must have been singing with him. 

“Teach me a raunchy campfire song, then.”

“Maybe when we get back to the car, Scully.”

His tone was laden with airy innuendo. This wasn’t new, but the truth in it certainly was. Scully had never been very good at passing back innuendo and hoped that a playful poke between his shoulder-blades sufficed. 

Perhaps it hadn’t. Or had too well? Mulder stopped dead short. 

“Mulder?”

“Scully- look at this.”

Scully couldn’t see anything beyond the wall of his t-shirt. With a hand against the stone for leverage, she ducked and skirted his waist and was immediately hit with a wave of nauseous dismay as she realised that the sewer-pipe tunnel came to a stop in front of them and tapered off into a hole. 

It looked no larger than an air ventilation passage. 

“Mulder, I’m not crawling through there.”

“I don’t think we have a choice.”

Mulder was already on all fours, clearing away tiny little pieces of gravel with his palm. He peered into the hole and winced. 

“This isn’t going to be easy on the knees.”

If Scully was being honest, this probably shouldn’t unnerve her as much as it did. She’d spent the better part of the last six or so years squeezing through a variety of air vents and crawlspaces and shafts of every stripe. It was a wonder, really, that her knees still held up at all. But there was something about this cave, about the thought of crawling deeper and deeper inside it’s innards, that made her feel like she was being swallowed alive. 

“Chase said that the monster abducted her in a cavern,” Scully said- perhaps more to herself than to Mulder- “so it makes sense that the passage would open back up again, eventually.”

Of course, Scully didn’t know if she believed that there was really any kind of monster roaming around. Oxygen deprivation in cave systems was known to cause mania and hallucinations, and it stood to reason that Brittany and Chase had been the victims of nothing more sinister than a sudden rock slide- explaining the injuries Chase bore on his neck- that had caused Chase to flee, his brain filling in the mental blanks. Terror and a lack of breathable air had the tendency to paint one’s memory in ridiculously dark colours, to spatter one’s memory with the hulking great shapes of cave creatures.

“I’ll go first?” Mulder offered. 

“If you want.”

“You feel okay about this?”

At the end of the day, she’d been through a whole lot worse than a tunnel. 

“Let’s get it done, Mulder.”

Well, thought Scully, this is undignified. Few aspects of her career had much dignity, to be fair- she remembered that she’d wound up crouched over a nest of bile-covered newspapers on her third case- but this felt particularly humiliating. The roof of the tunnel bent in about a hand-width above her head and her shoulders occasionally scraped the sides as she focused on dragging her knees forward, her hands forward, her eyes forward: unfortunately all the view she was offered was that of Mulder’s scurrying behind and the soles of his outdoorsy boots. He was having a much harder time of it than her, that was sure. Being tall offered no advantage below ground and every move he made was accompanied with a grunt of effort as his shoulders dragged against the rocks. She felt bad for him, a little, and most of all felt quite bad for herself. She’d turned her headlamp on, because as ridiculous as he might look, his bobbing shoes affirmed to her that he was still there, and real, and not lost in the dark, and she needed that. 

“Can you feel that, Scully?”

Mulder had stopped. She couldn’t see his face, but could hear him shuffling around.

“Feel what?”

“There’s a breeze.”

“I can’t feel anything, Mulder. Your ass is in the way.”

“I swear, Scully. I can feel it. Fresh air.”

Scully closed her eyes and tried to focus. No: if there was any fresh air, Mulder’s body was acting like a plug and it certainly wasn’t getting to her. The thought was comforting, though, and confirmed her theory that this passage couldn’t go on for too much longer. There must be some sort of cavern or entrance ahead. 

Hand over hand, palms rubbed raw by the rocks, Scully could have been crawling for minutes or forever when she heard Mulder exhale loudly and the soles of his shoes drop away into black. In one sudden moment she found herself totally alone, and all at once the cave seemed to fold in on her as if it had been waiting to catch her unawares: the tunnel seemed tighter, the stones beneath her hands sharper. 

“Mulder?”

“I’m fine. There’s a drop.” 

Scully could see now that the tunnel simply ended. Her torch illuminated a sharp stop: it looked like a dead end, but Scully shuffled forward and found her fingers splayed along the rim of a hole in the ground. Mulder beamed up at her. 

“I almost landed on my head.”

“I would have loved to see that, Mulder. Give me a hand.”

With no way to turn around, Scully had no choice but to spread her arms forward and slither through the hole head-first. The drop wasn’t at all severe, but if you’d landed wrong it would be easy to break an arm or knock your head. Scully lamented how ridiculously ill-equipped they were. Helmets, at the very least, would have been smart. 

Mulder caught her at her elbows, working an arm around her back and moving with her as he helped lower her down. For a brief second she was entirely suspended in his arms, face at his neck: and then her feet found purchase on solid ground and she pulled away to examine the cavern they’d landed in. 

“Mulder. Turn your headlamp off.”

Mulder dutifully did as he was told. They were not left in total darkness- a piercing beam of sunlight shone from a small hole in the roof. Particles of golden-white dust danced and bobbed in the air. 

“It’s pretty.” Mulder mused. 

“It is. But Mulder- look, give me the map.”

Mulder twisted around and withdrew the crumpled paper from his pack. He passed it to Scully, an eyebrow raised. Scully scoured the map, but what she was looking for wasn’t there: nevertheless, she was confident that something wasn’t right. 

“The cave system goes back into the cliffs, right?”

“I think so.”

“And we’ve been walking dead-straight this whole time.”

Mulder paused. “Yes. I think so.”

“And-“ Scully pointed at the roof of the cavern for emphasis- “the roof isn’t that high. Five metres, maybe.”

“What are you getting at?”

“Where’s the light coming from?”

“What do you mean?”

“You saw the cliff face when we came in. It was steep. If there was some kind of deep valley or ditch this far back, we would know about it. Speaking geographically.”

Mulder rubbed his finger up and down against a little rocky dip. Scully could tell he was giving her words serious consideration. He thought kinetically, always moving, and by the way his fingers drew wide, lazy circles she could tell he was just as stumped as her.

“It’s possible,” he said, slowly, “that we got turned around at some point and didn’t realise.”

“That doesn’t inspire confidence.”

“No. It doesn’t. But I didn’t see any branching tunnels, did you?”

Scully shook her head. No, she hadn’t. She could have sworn that they’d kept on straight ahead, but she supposed that the dark did play tricks on one’s mind. According to Chase’s directions, they’d be alright as long as they followed the main passage- which they had. 

This must make sense. Somehow.

Protein bars- as much as they boasted of FULL FLAVOUR CARAMEL AND WHITE CHOCOLATE!- had never, in Scully’s opinion, tasted of anything but slightly moist chalk. Mulder had already eaten both of his with apparent relish and now busied himself using the edge of one small stone to sharpen another into some sort of makeshift shiv. They had their guns, so she’d questioned the point, and he’d patiently explained that the cave monster may have developed an incredibly tough skin due to his subterranean nature. Bullets, he’d elaborated, may not have the stopping power. If it came to melee combat it would count to be prepared. 

“Good thinking, Mulder.” She’d said. “Good thinking.”

She had left him to his peculiar lines of thinking and carried on with her own. They’d decided on a small break in the sunlit cavern, though there wasn’t too much to discuss: the path ahead was clear. The pitch black mouth of another tunnel loomed at the far end. It almost seemed like a third party in the room, eerily sentient, like it was hanging over her shoulder and reminding her constantly that she could rest here with Mulder as long as she liked, but soon they’d have to come away with him. Walk inside him. Become swallowed up forever. 

She tried not to think about dying in a tunnel. She tried to think about the sunlight-hole. Whichever way she shook it, it just didn’t seem to make sense. She thought her inner compass was pretty good, all things considered. After a million tangles in the streets of busy cities and forays into deep woodland she thought she’d honed it quite well. She would have bet money that they’d been walking- or crawling, for the most part- in a straight line. Into the cliff. Under the ground. Could it be, maybe, that the cavern was situated under a well, or some kind of giant hole? Scully leant further back against the rock. That made a bit of sense. It would have to be a very deep hole to cut this far down- maybe man-made- but it added up. 

It was still weird, though. But- Scully shoved her protein wrappers back inside her pack- it was all weird. They were on the tail of a hypothetical cave monster with tiny eyeballs and dagger teeth. Big picture, Dana. 

Her hands brushed against the cool glass of the medicine vial.

She could think about that, too. But one thing at a time. 

“Do you think that’s sharp enough?”

Mulder held his stone knife aloft. It did look sharp enough: it actually looked scarily sharp. 

“Don’t keep that in your pocket, Mulder; you’ll cut yourself.”

It was almost like admonishing a child. 

“With luck, Scully, I won’t even have to use it. I have a feeling the cave monster’s probably quite placid, actually.”

Mulder had been crouching against a stalagmite, using the side of it to sharpen the blade. He scurried on his hands and knees over to where Scully sat. With his clumsy gait and squinty brown eyes he reminded her quite a bit of some sort of cave creature, the more she thought about it. 

Fox Mulder was born to be a newt. 

“It barely harmed Chase, and he never saw it kill Brittany. Acting under the assumption that it’s consciously intelligent, I don’t believe the monster would have set out to eat her at all. This was probably its first contact with humans, and we can assume it doesn’t live off a diet of them. It’s more likely that it’d primarily eat rocks or sediment.”

“You think, Mulder?”

“Look- that’s my theory.” He had the good grace to shrug self-consciously, but Scully knew he believed every word that he said. 

She thought his rock-knife was foolish. She tended to find many of his theories unfounded.

But God: when he began to speak about cave monsters and sky-lights and the great unknown, when he stared her down with that listen, Scully plea, she loved him something eager. 

They stood together at the entrance to the tunnel. It was standing height, for now. A cloud must have scudded across the sun and they were once again in complete shadow, stripes of torchlight bobbing against the walls. 

For the briefest of moments, something made her turn back. 

For a split second, Scully thought she saw a face. The stalagmites along the left wall of the sunlight cavern looked like bottom teeth, and those holes dug into the stone looked like a pair of hollowed-out eye sockets. 

Before she could point it out to Mulder she’d lost the image. The holes were way too far apart to look anything like eyes. 

Scully shrugged the thought away. Scully forgot. 

Scully followed Mulder down, down, ever deeper into the bowels of the cave.