7/8/01 Title: Scully's Journey 1: The Single Step Author: ML Email: msnsc21@yahoo.com Distribution: Yes to Ephemeral, Gossamer, IWTB, but if you haven't archived my stories before, please drop me a line and let me know, and leave headers, etc. attached. I thank you! Spoilers: Pilot Rating: PG Classification: Vignette Keywords: Scully POV Summary: A journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step. Disclaimer: These characters are not mine, they belong to Chris Carter, TenThirteen, and Fox Broadcasting. I am using them only for recreational purposes, mean no infringement, making no money. Scully's Journey 1: the Single Step by ML March 7, 1992. Evening. I started my new job today. It's not at all what I expected. My new partner is nothing like who I thought I'd get. I'm not sure yet whether I'm pleased or otherwise. I was so proud of myself, striding through the J. Edgar Hoover FBI Building earlier today. I couldn't help but smile, though I was afraid it would make me look young and a little awestruck. The truth is, I *was* feeling a little awestruck. Yes, I'd been to Headquarters before, but never to meet with anyone important. This was obviously important. At first I thought it was a job interview. I had my briefcase with my curriculum vitae, a copy of some of my lectures at Quantico, and some letters of recommendation from instructors there. I was a little surprised when Section Chief Blevins simply told me what my new assignment was. I've been lobbying for fieldwork for a long time. Jack didn't think I was up for it, and I think he tried to go behind my back to keep me at Quantico. I think that was the last straw for me. To be honest, I felt that my credibility as an instructor would suffer if I wasn't allowed to go out in the field, at least for a while. I wanted to be able to use real-life forensic experience, not just the bodies they shipped over for me to autopsy. I wanted to see them in situ, as it were. I can tell my students that the body has a story to tell as much as I want, but until I see the beginning of the story myself, it will sound hollow to them and to me. Not to mention the fact that I do want to distinguish myself at the FBI, not spend the rest of my life in an autopsy bay. And from what I've heard, unless you do something to get yourself on the fast track, you're doomed to whatever you're assigned. Especially if you're good at it. I know I'm good at what I do, but the job I'm doing now isn't the only thing I'm capable of. I just need a chance to prove it. When Section Chief Blevins asked me what I knew about Agent Fox Mulder, I didn't tell him everything. He is, or was, what's known as a "blue flamer," someone who's destined for big things at the FBI. But in the last year or so, the rumors about him have changed. I'd heard a little something about his weird interests, so I wasn't entirely pleased to find I was to be partnered with him. There was something a little "off" about the whole interview with Section Chief Blevins. Without coming right out and saying it, he seemed to be trying to tell me something. I had the feeling that he was trying to get me to agree to take a particular point of view where Agent Mulder's project is concerned. A point of view that doesn't have anything to do with investigative techniques, but with some sort of administrative or perhaps political agenda. I asked Blevins point blank if he was expecting me to debunk Agent Mulder's work. He backpedaled a little when I was so blunt, but I think I may have struck a nerve. It appears to me that those in charge aren't happy with this division, but rather than shut it down, they are trying to discredit the work being done by Agent Mulder. I don't know why they want this, but Iwon't be their hatchet-woman. If I can't debunk the work legitimately, I won't debunk it to satisfy someone's personal agenda. Thinking about it right now, it makes me mad that they thought I would agree to such a thing. I'm not entirely naive, I know that there are plenty of people in power who have personal agendas, and will try to forward them any way they can, but I won't be a part of it. I am only interested in one thing: getting to the truth. Maybe I should have turned down the assignment and gone back to Quantico. But if I had, I doubt I would ever have been offered a field assignment again. My fate would have been sealed as far as advancement in the FBI was concerned. I might one day become ASAC in Podunk, Idaho, but that would probably be the pinnacle of my achievement. That's not what I joined the FBI for. I have to be honest with myself, here. I wanted a field assignment so badly, I don't think I would have turned this one down no matter what I'd found out. I was a little disappointed that I was assigned to such a weird division, and one obviously held in very low esteem by the powers that be, but I am willing to make the best of it. I hope the same can be said of my new partner. We didn't start off very well. I knew no matter who I was partnered with, I could expect a certain amount of hazing and patronizing behavior. Agent Mulder probably resents the fact that he's been assigned someone so green. He implied that he resented being assigned anyone at all. He gives every indication of being someone who prefers his own company. He even accused me of being a spy, which in light of the things Section Chief Blevins said, made me feel he was a little too close to the truth. But it rankled me, all the same. Maybe I expected to be treated like an equal, which upon reflection is unfair. I *am* a green agent, and whether I'm female or male, that fact remains. Regardless of gender, I'm going to have to prove myself. He had me at a bit of a disadvantage this afternoon. Mulder, I mean. He obviously had been expecting me, and had even looked into my background a little. He tried to bait me, and even to scare me a little. Anyone who has an older brother can tell you that you can't back down in the face of treatment like that. You can't show even a hint of weakness or uncertainty. I think I stood my ground pretty well. I'll have to thank Bill for bullying me so much when we were kids, and Ahab for making me stand up for myself when he did. I hope I made a good impression with Agent Mulder today. God, reading that over, I sound so...girlie. But I told myself I wouldn't self-edit this journal, so it stays. What about my first impressions of Fox Mulder? Well, he certainly doesn't *look* like a crackpot. For starters he looked younger than I thought he would. Maybe it was the glasses that gave him that young professor look, or maybe it was the smirk that accompanied it. It was a look that all but said, "I know more than you do, and you're going to be sorry." I wished at that moment I'd had more time to find out about Fox Mulder before accepting the assignment. Especially when he made it clear he'd already known I was coming, and had done a little research himself. I hope we'll be able to get along. At least for the time being, we're stuck with each other. I'd better stop now. Agent Mulder said we've got an early flight tomorrow, to some place called Bellefleur, in Oregon. Or, as he said, "the plausible state of Oregon." Said with a little smirk, of course. I wonder what he knows that he's not telling me. XxXxX March 22, 1992. Evening. I started keeping this journal to collect my thoughts about this new course I've started on. I thought at first I would keep track of our cases with this record --a sort of unofficial field report-- to help me keep track of what we did, when we did it. What I observed, my reactions to it, initial impressions, and so on. To use it as an aide-memoir as much as for my own personal documentation of my new assignment, and my new role. I think, however, there are going to be things in here that I will never be able to put into an official report. I have spent the past several days since our return re-writing my field report, most of which was destroyed in the motel room fire in Bellefleur. Mulder has been working with local Oregon law enforcement, as well as the Portland FBI office, to get our main suspect and witness, Billy Miles, to Washington for questioning. He arrived yesterday and today was the final interrogation session. I don't know how Mulder was able to get approval for this bit of unorthodoxy, but he did. It got better results than the previous day's questioning. Until today's session, Billy claimed to have no memory of the incidents in the forest near Bellefleur. Tonight I'm trying to re-create the personal entries that were also destroyed in the fire. I'm glad I hadn't taken my personal journal along, and I won't do it in future, either. One might think the fire was a freak accident, except for everything that went before it. I no longer know what to think. All I can say is, I can't dismiss Mulder's theories out of hand. The problem is, I can't substantiate them in any concrete, scientific way, either. I hope Mulder understands that there are things I couldn't put into the field report. Unsubstantiated things, things that Mulder insists happened, but that I didn't see and I can't explain. I hope he realizes that I did it to protect him, too. If I officially document everything he thinks, everything he says he saw, that will be the end of his investigations. I won't be needed to debunk him; they will believe he has debunked himself by his claims. After what we went through on this case, I can't abandon him. I think there must be some truth in the things he told me when we were in the field. I've never experienced anything like our first day in the field. I wonder if it's like that for every rookie, but I have to say that every rookie probably doesn't experience what I did. We'd barely arrived in Bellefleur when things started to happen. Some kind of atmospheric disturbance occurred on the road there, which excited Mulder, though he wouldn't explain why at the time. I wouldn't have thought more about it --I thought he was pulling my leg-- except for what happened in the same spot the following night. But I don't want to get ahead of myself. I'm trying to understand what happened, to separate the fantastical from the facts, and the only way I can do it is to try and see a logical progression of events. My very first day in the field, I witnessed the exhumation of a body, and had to autopsy said body. Perhaps that's not so unusual in the course of an investigation, except that this body didn't appear to be human. Mulder was again as excited as a kid at Christmas by this discovery. Mulder's explanation was pretty incredible--that the body had somehow been transformed from Ray Soames to this ... thing. By aliens. In all honesty, I couldn't come up with a plausible explanation myself. That doesn't mean I could accept his, however. Mulder was feeling pretty cocky all around, and seemed very pleased that I couldn't come up with anything. He's sort of endearing when he's like that, and though he seems very serious about his theories, he isn't pedantic about them. He tried to reassure me by saying he had the same doubts I did. Still, I suspect it takes a lot less for him to put aside *his* doubts than it does for me to put aside mine. The next day, after we visited Billy Miles and Peggy O'Dell, he seemed even more sure of his own theories. But he was beginning to make me mad. He had been baiting me all along, holding me at arm's length, as though he expected me to come to the same conclusions he had. And then he accused me of having a secret agenda. He made it plain that he didn't trust me to submit an unbiased report, or to be open-minded enough. It's a terrible struggle. I can't just believe what he tells me, and go along with his outrageous theories just to appease him. I'm trying to show him that I'm willing to listen, but that he has to trust me, too. I don't know how we can be partners if he doesn't. I know what he suspects of me, and I haven't wasted my time protesting his accusations. Instead, I have been trying to show him by the way I approach the work, and my seriousness of purpose, that I am invested in this job. I do want hard, scientific evidence of what he believes before I can corroborate his work, but I won't dismiss it out of hand. That I respect his work enough to listen to what he has to say, no matter how crazy it might sound. The second night we were in the field, I did something that may have helped me to gain his trust a little. How much can hinge on the taking of a single step! I was unsettled by what I'd seen and heard so far, and I only got more unsettled as the day went on. We ended up getting chased out of the forest by local law enforcement, and experiencing something Mulder called "missing time." By the time we got back to our motel, I was cold, wet, disoriented, and more than a little confused by the events of the day. So, when I felt the strange bumps on my back, all I could think of was seeing those bumps on Peggy O'Dell, and on the victims in Mulder's introductory slide show. I didn't think, I could only react. I needed reassurance, so I went to the only person I could turn to. I wonder, if the lights hadn't gone out, if things would have been different. I would have finished my report, I would have gone in to shower, and I would have seen in the bright bathroom light that the strange marks on my lower back were in fact mosquito bites. But the weirdness of the day, and the storm outside, conspired to scare me half out of my wits. Without even thinking about what I was doing, I ran next door to Mulder, and exposed not only my back, but my fears, to him. To say Mulder was surprised to see me on his doorstep in my robe would be an enormous understatement. But I didn't think about his reaction until later. I was so frightened, I just stepped over the threshold into his room. I was so frightened. When he told me they were just bug bites, I was so relieved, I hugged him. After a startled moment, he hugged me back. I'm a little embarrassed about it now, but he didn't tease me. Reaction set in, and I sat down in a chair by the door. I don't think my legs would have carried me any further. I couldn't stop shaking. I knew it was shock, and I couldn't help myself. Before I knew what was happening, Mulder had made me lie down on his bed, and covered me with his spare blanket. I couldn't look him in the eyes at first, and he seemed to understand that. He sat on the floor with his back against the bed and let me get back my composure. After a while, my shaking stopped. Every now and then, he'd ask me a question or make a statement that required a response. Little by little, we started talking about other things. Anything besides the case. Then I asked him about his family. He was silent for a long time, and I thought I'd overstepped some line he didn't want crossed. Then he started telling me about his sister, Samantha. There's something about talking in a dark room --or maybe candle light-- that invites intimacy. Listening to his soft voice, talking about the pivotal event of his youth, I began to understand a little of what drives Fox Mulder. His interest in unexplained phenomena seems to point back to this incident. I think somehow he blames himself. It certainly sounds as if it tore him, and his family, irrevocably apart. He also told me things that he said I needed to know. He told me he felt his access to certain files, information he needs, is being blocked by someone who doesn't want him to know "the truth." What truth? Is this only about Mulder's missing sister? Why would there be such a cover-up on what would otherwise be one family's tragedy? I really don't know very much about Mulder's background, except what I told Blevins, and what Mulder has told me. Someone mentioned once --probably Tom Colton, who seems to know something about everybody-- that Mulder's father was a big deal in the State Department once upon a time, but that he's been retired for years. So perhaps Mulder's sister's kidnapping does have a larger significance. I can't believe that Mulder's paranoia is already rubbing off on me. But the events that happened later that same evening gave credence to what he told me. We lost everything in the motel fire. My laptop with all my field notes, my private notes, all the evidence we collected. I might have thought it was a tragic coincidence, except that Mulder had already told me that the lab where we'd done the autopsy had been ransacked, too. I wish I could say the case broke wide open after that. We did have a brief chance to talk to Theresa Nemman before her father whisked her away, and I guess you could say we "solved" the case. But not in any way that I can understand. There was more covered up than discovered, even if we did keep Billy Miles from killing Theresa Nemman. There's no conclusive evidence to show what happened to Peggy O'Dell, or the others. I started to rewrite my field report on the plane on the way home to Washington. In between, I wrote what scraps of notes I could with my own thoughts about the case. Things I can't put in the official report, but that I wanted to document. Blevins told me that as far as the FBI is concerned, the case is closed. I don't think Mulder has been told, yet. I couldn't find him in his office before I left for the day, and I wouldn't leave the news in a voice mail. Today Mulder insisted that we have Billy Miles hypnotized, though I have never thought that anything said under hypnosis could be considered admissible testimony. The story Billy told was fantastical, and seemingly fit into Mulder's theories about what happened. I watched from outside the interview room, in the presence of Blevins and a couple of other officials, who seemed more intent on watching Mulder watch Billy Miles than anything else. They left before the interview was over. Mulder seemed to sense when they left. He turned and looked through the one- way glass. I could swear he could see me, and that he was daring me to disbelieve what I heard. I could tell that I disappointed Blevins with my equivocal field report. But I can't dismiss everything that happened out of hand, as they seemed to think I would be able to do. There is too much I cannot explain scientifically or even rationally. But I still can't dismiss it. I certainly don't understand the decision to close the case, when there's obviously more to be discovered. It makes Mulder's insistence that he's being blocked by someone seem more plausible. It was difficult to defend to Blevins what we saw and experienced without any real evidence to back it up. It was so fantastic, I'm still not sure I know what happened. We have no photos, and only Mulder as eyewitness. I don't disbelieve what Mulder says he saw, but I didn't see what he did, so I can't corroborate it either. I had only one piece of physical evidence, the metal object I withdrew from Ray Soames' nasal passage. I handed it over to Blevins, to prove the truth of some of the story. But I intend to ask for it back. I want to run some more tests on it, and try to find out its origins. Whatever Mulder believes, or whatever Blevins believes, there is more to this case than meets the eye. I'm just not sure it has anything to do with alien abductions. When Blevins asked me point-blank what Mulder thought, all I could tell him was that he believes that we are not alone. Mulder has some strange ideas. I even called him crazy. But he's not crazy, not really. Single-mindedness, determination, and willingness to think outside the accepted parameters are all traits which probably helped make him the profiler he is. Just because he has decided now to apply those abilities to a project that also falls outside accepted parameters doesn't make him crazy. So what do I think of my new partner now? It's too early to form a definitive opinion, but here are my first impressions. He's intelligent. Arrogant. He knows he is both these things. He's also defensive, which probably comes with the territory he's chosen to inhabit. He's quick-witted, and he's got a self-deprecating sense of humor, which I suspect is also part of his defense mechanism. It was very hard not to match him tit for tat with his quips, but I don't want to start our partnership off on that kind of footing. He may not feel he has anything to prove to me, but I still feel I have to prove myself to him. I can't believe what Mulder believes. But neither can I explain it. I wonder if we'll ever really find out what happened in the forest. XxXxX 1 a.m. I can't sleep. More than an hour ago, I got a call from Mulder, telling me that the remaining evidence of the case in Bellefleur had been removed from the official records. It seems pretty definite that as far as local law enforcement is concerned, as well as the FBI, the case is closed. I don't know what to think. I was brought up to believe certain things. My parents, especially my father, taught me to believe and respect authority and though I had my rebellious phase, up until now, I had no reason to question it. I have always believed that science could explain anything. As I told Mulder in *my* arrogance, "you just have to know where to look." But the things that have happened in the last couple of days have challenged some of those fundamental beliefs. I'm still not sure what to believe, but it's obvious what Mulder believes, and it does explain a lot about him. Mulder's fanaticism concerns me, but what concerns me more is that there might be a grain of truth to what he says. Or maybe I just don't know where to look yet. There *has* to be an explanation, something that I can point to and say, "See? That's what it means, this is why." I can't give up on my training and belief because of some unexplained incidents. The fact that there now seems to be a cover-up proves that there's an explanation less fantastical, and more human, than Mulder wants to see. I know what I have to do. I have to help him to see. I have to help myself to see. The truth, and the means to prove it, is out there somewhere. end. ===== Author's notes: This is the first in what will be an occasional delving into Scully's changing views as she gets to know Mulder and the X-Files. I'm not going to attempt to do this with every episode. I'm going to pick and choose the ones which I think show Scully learning something new about herself, about her partner, and/or their quest. And I'm going to try and do this chronologically, to show how Scully's thoughts and feelings toward both the work and her partner change over time. For the time being, this is all about Scully, but I might possibly in future attempt this with Mulder, too. He just doesn't strike me as a journal-keeping kind of guy. It's also an excuse to go back and watch the old eps, and watch the partnership in action! If you like this idea, or even if you don't, let me know: msnsc21@yahoo.com