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He hasn’t been asleep that long when the call comes through, a little after one in the morning. As is typical of cases passed off by other field agents, it's hard at first glance to say whether there's an actual X-File here, and since he knows for a fact that Scully also went to bed just a short while ago -- he only left her apartment some 90 minutes earlier -- he opts to let her sleep. She can come join him in the morning if need be.
The Chicago field office has requisitioned him a charter flight so he can leave right away. (Gotta love that “Organized Crime Task Force” budget.) He debates grabbing an overnight bag but decides against it; ideally, this trip won’t take him more than a day, and if it turns into something bigger, Scully can always bring his bag up with her. He throws on a suit, calls a cab, and is settled in a seat on an otherwise-empty Learjet by 3am.
Unsurprisingly, he sleeps for the entire 2-hour flight.
In true FBI fashion, there is a great deal of “hurry up and wait” once he’s on the ground in Chicago. They’ve dragged him out of bed in the middle of the night, and now no one can seem to decide who’s supposed to brief him on the case. (Now he’s doubly glad that he didn’t wake Scully up for this.) He ends up dozing in a conference room until finally someone taps him on the shoulder, and he looks up blearily into the face of an agent who has got to be near retirement.
“Agent Mulder?”
He stretches, then rubs the grit out of his eyes. “Someone gonna tell me what I’m doing up here?”
“I’m afraid that’s my fault, son.” He holds out a hand. “SAC Baxter. I’ve been heading up the Cutrona investigation. You’ve heard of Jimmy Cutrona, I trust?”
Baxter pulls out a chair and sits down, setting a case file on the table in front of Mulder. Mulder nods.
“Sure. But I know you didn’t haul me up from Washington in the middle of the night for my extensive racketeering expertise, so what gives? The agent on the phone said something about an invincible man?”
“Damnedest thing I ever heard.” Baxter hesitates, smoothing his mustache. He opens the file folder and turns to a photo of a high-rise building, jabbing it with his index finger. “This is one of several buildings where Cutrona leases space. I had two of my agents parked outside it earlier tonight, and they witnessed a man being thrown from the roof. Only instead of going splat, he fell through an open pair of cellar doors in the sidewalk, and in less time than it took my agents to call it in and hustle across the street, he climbed up outta there and took off.”
He can hear Scully’s response as clearly as if she were sitting here next to him; he fights a little grin as he asks the question on her behalf. “Sir, I hope you’ll pardon me for asking the obvious, but… are you sure it was the same man?”
“Well there sure as heck wasn’t any dead guy down in the cellar when they looked. Listen, I’m as certain as I can be on this.”
“I believe you.” Mulder shrugs an apology. “Just had to check. I’m still not sure why you need me, though.”
Baxter leans forward, putting his elbows on the table and dropping his voice. “I’ll be honest with you, son. I’m stretched about as thin as I can get on this case. I’ve got four buildings under simultaneous physical surveillance, more than a dozen of Cutrona’s associates to keep track of, and twice that many witnesses and people looking for protection from him. The last thing I need is to have to pull one of my guys off assignment to go chasing after… I don’t know, Superman? I figure you must deal with this sort of thing all the time, am I right?”
Mulder gives a noncommittal tilt of his head. Internally, he shuffles through the myriad possible explanations for what Baxter’s agents witnessed. The man who was thrown from the roof might not be impervious so much as possessed of a rapid healing ability. (More Wolverine than Superman.) Or he might be capable of manipulating forces in such a way as to halt his descent at the last second, some variation on telekinesis. Off the top of his head, Mulder can think of at least another half-dozen plausible options, but he resists his usual tendency to run through them all out loud. (Not least because it isn’t nearly as much fun without Scully here to roll her eyes at him.)
“Something like that,” he says to Baxter instead.
He glances up at the clock on the wall; it’s just past 5am, still too dark out to really do much in the way of investigating at the scene. It does seem like there may be something here worth calling Scully in on, and in about an hour, she’ll be getting up for work anyway. He could call her, get the ball rolling, and then once she gets to town, they can try and puzzle out the identity of this mystery man together.
“All right, I'm gonna go ahead and call my partner in on this. We'll get down to the scene come daylight, but for now, I'd like to take a look at a list of Cutrona’s known enemies if you have one, anyone he might have been inspired to throw off a roof.”
Baxter shakes his head. “That'll be a long list. And as far as I know, no one on that list was born on Krypton. But I'll see what I can put together for you.”
“It's a place to start, at least.”
Baxter pushes his chair back and stands, reaching down to shake Mulder's hand before turning to leave the room. Mulder pulls out his phone and dials.
***
Scully fumbles with her alarm clock for a full ten seconds before realizing it was actually her phone that woke her.
“Hello?” She squints at the clock; her alarm’s not due to go off for another forty-five minutes.
“Hey, Scully, it’s me. How soon can you get on a plane to Chicago?”
Well, good morning to you, too. She struggles to catch up. “Chicag-- Mulder, why are you sending me to Chicago?”
“It’s, uh… less ‘sending’ and more ‘summoning.’”
It takes her a moment to put the pieces together. “Wait, are you saying you’re in Chicago? Mulder, what--”
“The field office up here called me in on a case almost before I made it to bed last night. I figured I would let you sleep, check it out on my own, call you if there was actually anything here worth investigating. Turns out there is.”
Fox Mulder, letting her sleep instead of dragging her out of bed on some wild goose chase? She never thought she’d see the day.
“Do I need to bring a bag, or…?”
“Nah, I think we can probably wrap this up in a day. I wouldn’t bother you with it at all, except I could really use your medical expertise.”
She rubs a hand over her face. “Okay. I’ll call you from the airport.”
***
You know, I never really thought about luck in terms of balance before. But in a way, seeing it play out right in front of us with Henry Weems, it makes a certain sort of sense. What if what we observed with Henry is just a really, really exaggerated version of what the rest of us experience every day? What if it’s just that the give and take of good luck and bad is usually so subtle that we don’t even notice it? After all, who’s going to keep track of whether the number of times you find a good parking space or catch the elevator right on time matches up exactly with how often you drop your keys or get a papercut?
It stands to reason, then, that there would be balance in the big things too. “Congratulations! You get a chance to be with the most amazing woman you’ve ever met! There’s just one catch… you also get a brain disorder so rare no one’s ever heard of it, and it’s probably going to kill you before the year’s out. Balance!”
It’s just that with Henry, everything is a big thing, and the negatives in his ledger get printed in someone else’s instead. Hell of a neat trick. And it’s that very lack of internal balance that makes him stand out so much.
And to think… it all started when he survived a plane crash he shouldn’t have. Before that, he was just like the rest of us. Does that mean the possibility exists to manufacture circumstances like his? Sure, the odds against it would be astronomical, and I’m not sure I’d want to gamble with the level of risk that would seem to be required, but it’s almost impossible not to wonder. Then again, what kind of gift is luck like his, when he has to watch everyone around him suffer? Even if I knew for sure it could be orchestrated, I don’t think I could go through with it, especially if it meant that you would bear the burden of my good fortune.
This journal was supposed to be about my brain thing, but I don’t really have anything new to write about on that front. I haven’t had the next set of scans yet, to see if the new medication is helping. I guess I just really had a lot of thoughts about this balance of luck thing, and I couldn’t share them with you out loud today without spilling everything else. I hate having to censor myself with you.
(Yes, I know exactly how absurd that sounds. I know I chose this. Doesn’t mean I can’t hate it.)