Subject: NEW: Pilot (1/1) Date: Mon, 14 Apr 1997 12:20:10 -0400 From: Madeleine Partous Newsgroups: alt.tv.x-files.creative --------------------------------------------------------------------------- PILOT (1/1) by Madeleine Partous email: partous@total.net Hi. It's me, the Cryptmaster, back from the grave. Good news, though (or bad, depending on your point of view): the Pact is coming along and I'll be starting to post again next week, Thor and Zeus willing. I got momentarily distracted -- no derisive snorts please -- by this little ditty after watching the Pilot again for the zillionth time. More and more, I'm convinced that the only *true* shipper on the show is Chris Carter himself. Radical thought, huh? But there you have it. Comments welcome, pro and con. You never write when I'm not posting -- Internet fame is fleeting, isn't it? Help me make it through the Pact... SUMMARY: We know how they met -- but what was Mulder *really* thinking when he saw Scully for the first time? CATEGORY: V, MSR RATING: PG for language *********************************************************** DISCLAIMER: The characters and concepts belong to Fox and Chris Carter and have been lovingly borrowed with no possibility of financial gain even in my wildest dreams. Dialogue (except for the last line, which is borrowed from another contemporary icon) is copyright by Fox/Chris Carter and is used verbatim without permission but with a whining kind of grovelling apology. *********************************************************** "Sorry! Nobody down here but the FBI's most unwanted." Mulder pored over the slides in front of him. He had a pretty good idea who was knocking on his door, and he was royally pissed off about it. His castle. His domain. He knew that many people saw his exile to the basement as a demotion, a source of shame, but he'd considered it a new lease on life, the compensation for the dues he'd paid. He'd been the golden boy, and it had earned him a measure of freedom. Now he planned to exploit it for all it was worth, despite the fact that he knew it would condemn him to ridicule and obscurity in the end. To hell with them. To hell with all of them. But he should've known they wouldn't make it easy for him, that they'd try to drag him back into the fold. He was too valuable an operative, even when everyone laughed at him behind his back for his unorthodox methods. Spooky Mulder. Ooooooo. Spooky's got a hot new theory. The thing was, back then he'd been right about 80 percent of the time, and even though they were all supposed to be on the same side, it hadn't made him a lot of friends. Hell. It hadn't made him *any* friends. He heard the door swing open and the precise, determined click of heels. He pretended to ignore them. "Agent Mulder? I'm Dana Scully. I've been assigned to work with you." "Oh, isn't it nice to be suddenly so highly regarded. So who did you tick off to get stuck with this detail, Scully?" He looked up intently and tried to act as suave as he could. Jesus. It wasn't easy. He wasn't sure what he'd been expecting exactly, but it wasn't this. Not even remotely. A tiny woman stood before him, her hair auburn, lank, her business clothes ordinary, even though they couldn't altogether hide the voluptuous curve of her hips, the backward parentheses of her waist. Her face. Her eyes. He hadn't expected such blue eyes, such innocent blue filled with earnestness and... God. Could it be? Actual excitement? In any case, she seemed completely unfazed by his tone. "Actually, I'm looking forward to working with you. I've heard a lot about you." "Oh, really? I was under the impression that you were sent to spy on me." It was true. And it wasn't just an impression. Mulder had knocked around long enough to know beyond a shadow of a doubt that this little waif, this straight-arrow go-get-'em chick from Quantico, had been hand-picked and groomed to debunk him. He'd done his homework. Mulder knew all about Dr. Dana Katherine Scully. Except... His eyes lingered for a moment on the eager young face which framed those breathtaking eyes, a stunningly perfect aquiline nose and impossibly full lips that curved upward in a shy -- or was it ironic? -- smile. God. It was strange. His heart sped up and he could feel himself flush, just a little. He hated himself for it but he couldn't help his reaction. She was... interesting. In some way. He just wasn't quite sure why, except there was an odd kind of recognition there. As if he knew her. As if he'd always known her. Bizarre. And ridiculous. Anyway, there was nothing about her that was particularly attractive. The suit she wore verged on tacky, and her makeup was practically nonexistent. And yet... She was natural somehow. That was it. There was real beauty there, no question about it. But it was the beauty of a woman who knew how good she looked and who'd decided along the way that she'd make damn sure not to stress it. A woman who wanted to be judged for her mind, he surmised, not her body or her face. The problem was there was something about her that her deliberate indifference couldn't quite mask. "If you have any doubt about my qualifications or credentials..." she began a little caustically, but there was still a kind of studied indifference about the way she said it. Power. Jesus. This little girl was all the way on. He took a breath and prayed it didn't show. To make sure, he interrupted her. "You're a medical doctor," he drawled, looking down at a file and pretending elaborately that it was hers. "You teach at the Academy; you did your undergraduate degree in physics: 'Einstein's Twin Paradox: A New Interpretation,' Dana Scully's Senior thesis." He threw a glance at her and lowered his eyes hurriedly, turning away with what he hoped was a realistic smirk. "Now that's a credential: rewriting Einstein." He was being a smartass and he knew it. He was fairly sure she didn't read him well enough to see through it, though. Fairly. Except that something in her expression said that maybe, just maybe, she did. And that she understood it. That she was even willing, for the time being, to tolerate it. Outrageous. She studied him coolly. "Did you bother to read it?" Touche. Yet her tone was only marginally contemptuous; there was humour there, too, and a strange confidence for such a young woman. Mulder was aghast to feel the sudden heat of an arousal he'd never in a million years expected to feel in this kind of situation. What the hell was wrong with him? "I did!" he said, just a little too shrilly. Damn. He rose and turned away before she could see his discomfort. And the evidence of his body's response to her. He hoped. "I liked it!" He kept up the sarcasm, but she'd almost managed to disarm him somehow and he couldn't figure out how she'd done it. It was unacceptable. The tables had to be turned back to his advantage. For his sake. Christ -- for the sake of his work. "It's just that in most of my work, the laws of physics rarely seem to apply. Maybe I can get your medical opinion on this, though." She was by the book and Mulder had few illusions about his ability to freak other people out by being anything but. Anyway, he thought grimly as the slide projector whirred and spat into life, turning out the lights for awhile would hide his body's betrayal from her until he had a chance to calm down. "Oregon female, age 21," he continued in a chipper singsong. Smarminess and sarcasm. It was a magical combination, one that had always managed to infuriate and distance his "colleagues" in the past. "No explainable cause of death. Autopsy shows nothing, zip. There are, however, these two distinct marks on her lower back." His voice rose ingratiatingly. "Dr. Scully, can you ID these marks?" She gave him a speculative look for a moment before turning to the screen, and what he saw on her face next took his breath away. Her eyes widened and she pursed her lips as she walked right up to it. God. She looked electrified by what she was seeing. Fascinated. Actually excited? Now *that* was a first. Her voice rose to reach him over the loud hum of the projector, but there was no mistaking the fact that she was deliberately imitating his know-it-all tone. "Needle punctures, maybe? An animal bite? Electrocution of some kind?" He grinned. Not bad. Still. Wouldn't do to encourage her right off the bat. He cycled to the next slide. "How's your chemistry? This is the substance found in the surrounding tissue." She stared at the screen for a moment and then her mouth dropped. Mulder fidgeted. Jesus. She was good. It had taken her less than five seconds to recognize that she'd never seen anything like it. "It's organic," she said thoughtfully. She paused for a second but her eyes never left the screen. "I don't know. Is it some kind of synthetic protein?" The last time Mulder had heard that kind of muted excitement, it had come from him. And no one else had ever listened. He'd learned his lesson; now he knew how to hide it. "Beats me. I've never seen it before either." He recovered quickly; by the time the next slide was up, his cocky confidence was firmly back in place. "But here it is again in Sturgis, South Dakota, and again in Shamrock, Texas." And then she looked at him, and he thought at that moment that he was going to lose it, lose it completely; at that moment, it took every last bit of willpower he had not to throw himself at her feet. He'd never felt anything like it. She was cool and she was collected; she was laughing at him, this much he could see, but there was affection there too, for no apparent reason, and most of all, there was excitement. She was trying to hide it, just as he himself always did. But it shone through her impossible eyes and radiated from her like a strange, almost sexual, afterglow. "Do you have a theory?" That was all she said, but it was enough. He was lost. Lost because no one else had ever asked and he'd been forced to venture theories no one wanted to hear, theories no one had asked to hear, and the fact that he'd been right so often had only led them to despise him more. He'd expounded on them anyway, despite the frigid silence, the smirks and the furtive glances the other agents had thrown each other. Because he had to. Because he wanted to. Because he wanted to believe. And now she had him. She'd got him. For some inexplicable reason, this mousy little girl had found a way to reach into him and grab him by the sinew, by the heart, by the very guts of him. Just because she was willing to listen. Just because her mind seemed as titillated by all this as his own. Just because, for some reason, she seemed to care. One thing was certain, though: he couldn't let her see the effect she was having on him. He coughed once and let his training take over. "I have plenty of theories." He paused for a moment before stepping up to her in what he hoped was a nonchalant manner. It was time to see exactly where she stood. Apparently, she could deal with a flakey case. The question was, could she handle a flakey partner? After all, if they were going to work together, she'd better get used to it. To him. By the time he stopped walking, he was right in her face. Close enough to smell her. Mulder realized a little dazedly that he liked the way she smelled. Invading other people's space was something he did routinely. It disarmed them, gave him an edge over them. By the time they stopped squirming, they'd usually told him everything he wanted to hear. But this little slip of a thing didn't even bat an eye. She didn't budge an inch. Impressive. "But maybe what you can explain to me is why it's Bureau policy to label these cases as 'unexplained phenomena' and ignore them," he murmured silkenly. It took everything he had not to actually sniff her. He wanted to. Badly. Christ. This was killing him. All he could do was reach for the sarcastic delivery that had served him so well in the past. Make fun of the bastards before they have a chance to make fun of him. Except he kind of liked her. Kind of a lot. But he couldn't let it matter. He'd been shafted too many times before for trusting. He'd trusted too easily, and look where it'd got him. Nowhere. Alone. Derided and despised. He leaned towards her and whispered sardonically, stealing a noseful while he was there. "Do you believe in the existence of extraterrestrials?" Special Agent Dana K. Scully smelled like roses in springtime. Inane. Appalling. But accurate. Jesus. And then her blue-on-blue eyes blazed back at him and something about the way she threw her head back defiantly helped to ground him a little. "Logically, I would have to say no. Given the distances needed to travel from the far reaches of space, the energy requirements would exceed a spacecraft's capabilities..." Oh, man. Same old, same old. Mulder nodded resignedly as he leaned back against the desk. Of course. Why should he expect anything else? But he wondered why he felt oddly disappointed. "Conventional wisdom," he snapped. "You know, this Oregon female, she's the fourth person in her graduating class to die under mysterious circumstances." It was time to lay his cards on the table. She needed to know what being assigned to Spooky Mulder really meant. Not to mention that it would look suitably outrageous on her first report back to the big boys. "Now when convention and science offer us no answers, might we not finally turn to the fantastic as a plausibility?" That was it. His overriding premise. The only rule he lived by. He'd long given up on logic. The killers he'd caught, the homicidal madmen, had taught him that there was no such thing as simple cause and effect. He held his breath as she looked at him incredulously for a moment. Then she cleared her throat. "The girl obviously died of something." He smiled. True. "If it was natural causes, it's plausible that there was something missed in the post mortem." True again. "If she was murdered, it's plausible there was a sloppy investigation." Too true. And she was absolutely correct to bring all of it up. Mulder himself hadn't yet eliminated these possibilities and he was absurdly pleased that she'd jumped on them immediately. After all, although his theories were flakey, his methods were anything but. He'd built his reputation by being meticulous. "What I find fantastic," she continued vehemently, "is any notion there are answers beyond the realm of science. The answers are there. You just have to know where to look." He grinned at her suddenly. "That's why they put the 'eye' in FBI." She was spunky as hell. Mulder tried hard not to chortle. Oh, she was a case, all right. Dana Scully the science lady. Lordamighty. Well. She was in for the ride of her life. Yep. On the train from hell with ol' Spooky Mulder as conductor. All in all, though, the fact was he liked Dr. Scully just fine. A first-rate mind and there was a fire there too, one he'd make it a hobby to stoke along a little. Assuming, of course, that her only agenda wouldn't be exposing the folly of his ways. Somehow he suspected it wasn't. He could feel integrity in her; it ran like steel through her diminutive body. He wasn't sure how he knew. He just knew. It should prove to be an interesting couple of years. "I'll see you tomorrow morning, Scully, bright and early," he said casually over his shoulder as he walked to his chair and sat down again, making a show of studying the slides. "We leave for the very plausible state of Oregon at 8 am." If he'd looked back, he might have been surprised to see an affectionate smile on the young doctor's face. As it was, he waited until the door shut quietly behind her. Mulder pursed his lips and grinned. "Sm-o-kin'!" END