Archive of Our Own

day one

It would be a lot different if she saw it happen, Scully decides, but that isn’t the case.

When she tells this to Mulder he makes the most dramatic whining noise ever and swipes at her with a paw. 

But not just any paw — his paw.  Because it appears that now Mulder is a fox, and has four of his very own tiny fox paws.

“Don’t even try that,” Scully scolds. Mulder sulks with his ears flat against his head and he looks so damn sad that she softens her voice and follows her reprimand with, “I’m sorry.”

She thinks of a joke, what’s black, white, and red all over? but she knows that now is not the time. It’s appropriate though — Mulder’s new fox-shaped body has shocking red fur that rivals the color of her hair, white on his underbelly that matches the white on the tip of his tail, and black legs that makes it look like he stepped in black paint or has very tall socks.

Scully’s reminded of the Dr. Seuss book Fox in Socks and she laughs to herself, then shakes her head and sighs.

It’s too much bizarreness for this early in the morning, even for them.  And that’s saying a lot.

She’s sure that Mulder would be rambling about whatever it is he thinks explains his current situation, but it seems that he lost his ability to verbalize when he gained whiskers and a tail. Instead, he makes assertive squeaking sounds and frustrated growls as a mean of communication, pausing every so often because he keeps getting distracted by his tail swishing behind him like a fuzzy pendulum.

She figures his attempt at communicating works, or maybe it’s just that she knows him well enough to know what he would say, because what she gets from him is: Why is it so hard believe me?  It’s a familiar diatribe, so it’s an easy conversation to have with herself.

“You can’t blame me for being doubtful,” Scully says, sitting down on the bed and smoothing the sheet with her hand (the comforter lays on the floor, torn to shreds, its stuffing spilling out because Mulder had a temper tantrum and attacked it before she had saved him from being locked alone in the hotel room).

In front of her, Mulder briefly turns his head to the side with his jaw firmly clenched before looking back at her, a seemingly transferable thing from his human self that he does when is just too frustrated or annoyed.

It’s when he does things like that she has a hard time not believing this switch-up nightmare. Somehow, even in fox-form he’s able to convince her of something improbable, and she kind of feels like a sucker for it.  And, well—

Scully has got in the habit of considering the ridiculous on the way to sanity.  It’s one the side effects of Mulder. 

She’s experienced a lot of weird things, and she has to admit that this takes the cake.  A three-tier cake of absurdity.  The fox has to be Mulder, she knows it’s him; his eyes are the same soulful shade of hazel, he wears the same surly expression, he licked her hand the first time she dared to call him Mulder (something that human Mulder has never done, and Scully hopes never will), and there’s just something that tells her that it’s him — that electric persona that is Mulder.

Which are all quite subjective measures, she admits, but she makes sure objectivity has a place, too.  She had thought that checking the hotel security footage would reveal something — such as evidence of someone dragging a very human Mulder out of his room and putting this circus trained fox in his place — but there’s nothing to corroborate that; there’s nothing to be seen between the time stamp of 11:19 PM of Mulder slipping into his room and Scully breaking into his room at 9:26 AM. That alone could be conclusive enough evidence (she knows that it would be for Mulder), but Scully makes him prove it further anyway.  She tells him, “one squeak for yes, two for no,” and she asks him a series of questions that Mulder would know the answer to (Does my brother like you? Is our office is in the basement? Do I have a desk? What’s your opinion of Morley’s? Do you believe in the existence of extraterrestrials?  Do I?). 

He answers them all correctly, but really, she isn’t surprised.  She expected as much. It’s not much by way of proof, but it’s all she has for now.

“How did it happen?” she asks, groaning internally at how she fully identifies the fox as her partner. Mulder leaps onto the bed effortlessly, front paws then back landing in a fluid motion, and slips under the white tee and boxers that he must have been wearing before the transformation. He lays down and mimics sleep before hopping up, sending the clothes flying, and then peers up at Scully, waiting.

Scully rubs at her forehead.  “So you went to sleep, and then woke up as a fox?”

Mulder yips once: yes. He’s looking at her kind of forlorn, as though begging her to fix this, but Scully doesn’t even know what this is.

“I don’t know, Mulder,” she says. “I’m still uncertain that this isn’t a psychiatric phenomenon.  We could be hallucinating the entire thing.”  It’s not impossible, and is more likely than Mulder actually turning into a fox.

That obviously isn’t the response Mulder wants — he growls deep in his throat, it sounding like a small motor revving up, and glares at her angrily. 

“I don’t see you having any better ideas.”

And because he’s always got to be the one with the Ideas, he scampers across the room and grabs something off the table with his mouth, and returns to Scully, jumping back onto the bed and placing it in her lap.

She picks it up and looks at it.  It’s a pamphlet from the psychic they had visited yesterday.  Her eyes slide from it to Mulder sitting next to her.

“No, Mulder.”

Mulder whines.  Scully throws the pamphlet at him.  He whines some more.

To Mulder’s insistence and Scully’s annoyance, Scully drives them thirty-six miles into the outskirts of the southern Virginia town to the self-claimed psychic that’s currently Prime Suspect Number One. 

“This is your car, you know,” Scully says, looking over to the passenger seat where Mulder is gnawing on the armrest. He gives her a miffed glare, but stops using the upholstery as a chew toy and instead rests his head against the window and watches as the scenery passes by.

She figures that he’s probably eager to catch Madame Marlana in the act.  Yesterday, Mulder had been gung-ho to investigate a possible connection between her and a string of unexplained disappearances of men — which is why it had struck Scully as weird that Mulder had been late this morning.  Now, she realizes that it should have been the first indication that something was wrong (at the time though, she had dismissed it, thinking that he had tired himself by either a) staying up all night reading case files, b) racking up a hefty pay-per-view bill, or c) a combination of both). But she did not think at the time that he could be suffering from a full-on transformation into a woodland creature, so she had waited around for an hour until she finally got too agitated and picked the lock to his room, which is when she found Mulder. But as a fox.

“If this Madame Marlana did this as you suspect,” Scully says, “then you have to admit she’s got a sense of humor.” She glances over to Mulder before looking back to the road.  “Fox Mulder.”

The jest is not lost on him.  Mulder makes a geckling noise that Scully takes as meaning back off. She lets up because he’s having it rough enough as it is, and she isn’t entirely sure he won’t turn around and bite her (which he had tried to do when she went to restrain him with the seatbelt).

She has a difficult time reconciling that someone has the ability to transfigure a human into an animal.  Sure, she’s seen other people change their shape, cases where someone took the appearance of another, or ones where they changed into something Scully refuses to call a werewolf.  But this is Mulder and it’s just not possible she argues, but then she looks beside her to see a fox reading a case file that he had worked on when he was still…himself, and damn it, foxes can’t read.

As much as she hates to admit it, it’s plausible that Marlana is the cause for Mulder’s change.  After all, the psychic did claim that she had cursed him—

(“You think you’re so clever, don’t you?” Madame Marlana had said, waving her arms around and accusingly pointing with an age-spotted at a then still-human Mulder.  Mulder had shrugged, and typical to himself said, “Yes, actually.” It didn’t help Marlana’s temperament, her bellowing, “A fitting curse should befall you, Fox Mulder, beginning with the next rise of the sun, and you have five days to fix it, or it shall stay.”

Mulder had burst out laughing, and Scully had to take over questioning.)

—and Mulder had been kind of a smartass, so if this suspect did have some sort of paranormal ability to transfigure others, she definitely could find him deserving of it.

And as much as Mulder is driving her nuts, yipping at her and trying to tell her where to go, she can’t say that she doesn’t blame her.

Madame Marlana’s psychic shack is abandoned when they arrive. Empty, as if it never existed.

Mulder makes a pitiful mewling noise from the doorway as Scully walks around the room, shining her flashlight in empty corners.

“It’ll be okay,” Scully says, kneeling down to his level.  She tentatively reaches out and runs her hand over his head against an unruly section of fur. She finds the fur soft, and how it lays reminds her of when his hair is messy and hangs in his face.

Mulder presses into her touch and makes a sound of contentment, a low-pitched whine, and rests his eyes on her.

“It’ll be okay,” she repeats. She doesn’t know who the reassurance is more for.

Scully stops at a roadside food truck, because she knows that Mulder must be as hungry as she is, and she doesn’t know what to do next in terms of investigation. 

Mulder circles her feet as she ponders if Mulder-as-a-fox will be like other foxes and like fish.  At this point she’s pretty sure he would eat anything, so she orders an extra large fish and chips and takes it to a nearby bench. Without waiting to be told, Mulder jumps up next to her and patiently waits while she opens the container.

Turns out that he does like fish — he hurriedly eats out of the styrofoam container, stopping every so often to glance up at Scully’s amused smirk.  Scully picks at the fries as she thinks of tests she can run and racks her brain for previous x-files that involve species transformation.  For this she needs Mulder’s precious storage of memory, so she’s about to start another series of yes and no questions with him, but when she looks over to him she sees that he’s already finished his food and is looking up at her questioningly.

She waves her hand and says, “Go ahead,” and he ends up wolfing down her fries too.  She’s about to tell him that he doesn’t need to act like an animal just because he happens to currently be one, but someone calls out to her before she can lecture him.

“Is that fox your pet?”

She looks up to see the food truck owner standing a few feet away with his hands on his hips and eyeing Mulder, as if he were afraid to come any closer.

To Scully, it’s somewhat a relief, because it confirms that she’s not the only one who’s seeing Mulder in fox form, but it’s also a bit disheartening because, well, now she has to confront that it’s not just some delusion on her part.

She glances to Mulder who has quit nosing the paper in the container to give full attentiveness to Scully’s answer. She hadn’t really thought much past my partner is a fox this is really not good to consider how others might perceive a commonly wild animal as her companion.  She figures that she could flash her badge at the guy to get him to leave them alone, but that’s probably overkill.

“Yes, he’s my pet,” Scully says, smirking at Mulder on the last word. Mulder’s left ear twitches. She tries not to think that if he were a human, he would be making what she said into an innuendo.

The guy continues to stare.  Scully can’t help but feel a little pleased that the guy is obviously frightened.  With a pang she thinks of how a fox is much more intimating than a Pomeranian. “He’s tame.  Mostly,” Scully says.

“Uh, cool.”  The guy nods in interest, but doesn’t come any closer.  “What’s his name?”

Mulder’s name is on the tip of her tongue, but she thinks of something better.  “Spooky.”

Mulder narrows his fox eyes at her. Scully’s sure he’ll have something to say about this when he gets back to his normal self.

If, that voice in the back of her head adds.

When they’re back in the privacy of the car and away from the inquiring fish and chips man (“Can I pet him?” the guy had asked, and Scully had said, “Better not,” as Mulder started to withdraw from the man’s reach and flashed his teeth in warning), Scully takes out her phone, hesitating a moment before dialing the familiar number for their fellow experts in the outré. 

“Lone Gunmen,” Langly answers on the third ring.

“It’s Scully.  We need you to track down someone.”  She wastes no time for pleasantries, and gives him the last known information for Madame Marlana.  “It’s really urgent,” she adds, looking over to her partner in the passenger seat, who’s currently licking his paw and cleaning his face.  “Extremely so.”

“No problem.”  In the background she hears typing on a keyboard.  “But can I ask why you’re contacting us about this, and not Mulder?”

“He’s unable to talk right now.” Technically, it’s the truth.

“Unable?  Is he okay?”  Langly’s voice rises, and Scully can hear the telltale click of someone else picking up the phone to listen to their conversation.

“Mulder is fine but...”  If anyone were to believe this madness, it would be the Gunmen. Scully thinks of what she could say to possibly explain this situation.

Mulder tilts his head at her and actually grins a wide-jawed stupid fox-smile, as though he’s enjoying her misery.

“So,” Scully begins, thinking here goes nothing, “Mulder is a fox.”

Langly laughs.  “I know that you think so.”

“No,” Scully says, her irritation finally at a breaking point and her voice reaching a level that Mulder on one occasion had told her was shrill.   “He’s literally a fox. Four legs, tail, whole shebang.”

There’s frantic whispering and a scrambling over the phone and the next voice she hears is the calm cadence of Byers. “We are going to need visual inspection of this.”

“I’ve got to tell you Mulder, you’re kind of adorable,” Frohike says. 

Mulder makes a sort of dismissive yip, and curls his tail protectively around his body and edges further beneath the couch. He takes interest in the banana bread that Byers is using to try to coax him out — he sticks out his nose, Byers letting out an uncharacteristic giggle when his whiskers tickle his hand, but after smelling it Mulder disappears under the coach again and out of reach.

He probably takes offense that they think he could be bought so cheaply.

“Leave him alone,” Scully calls from across the room. Even though she can’t see him, she can feel Mulder glaring in her direction.

Mulder is being a proper little drama queen. He’s seeing fit to sulk and be unhappy with Scully because she had to perform some tests, and it was just a needle for goodness sake.  And she was even gentler than she normally is with humans, but he still freaked out and knocked over a lamp and ran across a keyboard on his beeline to his current hiding place.

Not that the tests have been much help anyway. On the surface, everything points to Mulder being an average Vulpes vulpes. She says Mulder because she can definitively say the fox in question is Mulder — she has the proof she was looking for (not that she needed it, not really, she knew it was him, knew it, irrational as it may be, but she will never give Mulder the satisfaction of knowing that).  When comparing results from the fox self to previous results from Mulder’s human self, there are traces that suggest that it is the same person, living entity, whatever.  Which, great, but there’s nothing that can explain how this happened.  The Gunmen propose that nanotechnology for gene redistribution is to blame (“Obviously originated for militant use,” Langly had said), but there’s no evidence of that, or biological activators, or a mutating virus. Nothing.

Magic seems to be the strongest candidate for the cause of Mulder’s predicament.  Which Scully is skeptical of to begin with, but it's also unfortunate because the search for Madame Marlana isn’t successful, either.

“We’ll keep looking,” Langly says. “But it could take awhile.”

Again, Scully looks over to Mulder. Apparently, he finally came out from beneath the couch.  The banana bread is nowhere to be found, presumably devoured, leaving him free to chew on electrical wires while Byers shoos him away from equipment and Frohike tries to grab him by his tail.

Surprisingly, she finds herself more irritated at the wait for answers than having to consider something so preposterous as the cause.

Mulder made it clear he doesn’t want to leave Scully’s side, so Scully takes Mulder home to her apartment.  When Frohike had suggested that Mulder could stay at the Gunmen’s place (with the promise of more banana bread), Mulder wound himself around Scully’s legs and made that sad whining sound he’s recently been prone to making when he wants to get his way.

It’s that same whine he’s making as he waits while she rummages through her refrigerator to find him something to eat. She settles for feeding him leftover chicken from two nights ago, and fixes herself a salad.  As she leans with her back against the counter and stabs at lettuce and feta cheese with a fork she ponders what will she do if they can’t figure out how to change him back quickly.  Mulder could be the first animal employed as an agent by the FBI. Maybe they could even make him a fox-sized jacket if he ends up staying like this for longer than anticipated. 

When, not if.  Scully knows this, but she sets her plate down and clutches at the counter until her knuckles turn white anyway.

Mulder makes a sound, one of the few that he’s made so far that isn’t done with the purpose to annoy or complain. “What?” Scully says; she sees that he’s already finished with his food, scarfed down in record time.

He doesn’t say anything else, he just nuzzles his nose against her knee, as if that’s his way of saying thanks.

Being his partner meant that yes, she would be his caretaker sometimes, but she never realized that it would be in this capacity. Where she has to make sure he doesn’t starve, get hit by a car, or captured and made into a scarf. She almost says, “I promise I won’t let you get eaten by an alligator,” but she doesn’t want to remind him that her track record for taking care of small animals is not that great.

Instead she strides into the living room and all but collapses on the couch and pats the seat next to her, inviting him up, which she knows is pointless because he would have done so without her permission. He climbs up with a grace not too different than how she’s seen Mulder as a human scale a fence. He then fidgets, turning around a few times before settling next to her.

They sit in silence while a movie on the television plays on mute.  Every so often she feels Mulder inhale deeply, the exhale a warm breath against her knee. She can tell that he’s worried even though he can’t speak and doesn’t have his usual face — she’s already picking up on the nonverbal signs of his new form, like his tail wrapping around himself like a hug and his black tipped ears kept at rigid stance and he keeps licking his front paws.

He shifts, and looks up at her. Mulder is good at making that sad-eyed expression, and he’s perfected it as a fox.

“We’ll figure it out tomorrow,” Scully promises, hoping that it won’t be a problem tomorrow, and that it is just a shared hallucination after all.

Out of what she blames as compulsiveness to comfort, she pets him, taking special care to rub behind his ears.

He seems to like that. He lays his head in her lap, which is fine, it wouldn’t be the first time (she thinks of dark nights in forests while he sleeps with his head in her lap and asks her to sing), but he definitely didn’t purr before.

“This is weird,” she says, and he makes it even weirder by licking her hand.  “Gross, Mulder,” she mumbles, and wipes the fox saliva on his back.

She has been wondering how much of the Mulder she knows — that specific immeasurable thing that makes up human consciousness — is in there. She figures there must be a substantial amount, because no normal fox could make a smug face like the one he’s making now.

“Good boy, Spooky.”

Mulder makes a soft amused squeak and lays his head back in her lap.  It doesn’t take much longer for him to be lulled to sleep.

Scully almost leaves him sleeping on the couch — it’s not like he doesn’t sleep on a couch all the time — but she just doesn’t have the heart to.  He shouldn’t that far away, she thinks, in case he wakes up confused.  Or something.

So she does something that she never has done before: she picks him up.  She scoops him up and cradles him with both arms, his sleepy face resting against her chest, and she carries him to her room and carefully sets him in the chair next to her dresser. She knows he wakes up in the process of the transfer, but he blearily opens his eyes only for a moment he before shuts them again and goes back to sleep.

It’s been a long day and she knows that tomorrow will be even more arduous, so she gets ready for bed quickly. It’s only a few minutes after her head hits the pillow that she feels the mattress shift.

She sits up, and there’s Mulder standing at the foot of the bed, his eyes glinting in the dark and his tail swishing back and forth. 

“No.  Absolutely not.”

Mulder whines.  And sulks.

“Fine,” she says.  He doesn’t waste any time to crawl next to her on top of the covers and curl up into a red ball of fluff.

day two

She had really really hoped that yesterday was all some sort of fever dream.  She would even go for some kind of temporary psychotic break. Anything, really. 

But no such luck — it’s impossible when what you’re trying to wish away is standing on your chest and insensately yipping in your face to wake you up.

Scully opens her eyes and yep, Mulder is still a fox.

When he sees that she’s awake, he jumps off the bed and starts pacing in front of the door in an impatient way that reminds her of when Queequeg needed to—

Oh.

After a trip outside for Mulder and his business, Scully sits on the floor with the files for the current case spread out in front of her.  To her, it’s a hodgepodge of identities and dates and locations — none of it makes a coherent pattern.

She looks to Mulder for support. It takes a few tries, but with persistent pawing at the papers, Mulder draws her attention to the similarity between the victims — across all of them, they had an untimely disappearance one day after they had had contact with Madame Marlana — and she’s about to say that yes, they’ve already established that, but then Mulder gestures to himself.

“So?” Scully asks.  “Do you think she cursed them too?”  Her doubt is palpable in her infliction.

Mulder’s ear twitches, then nods.

“Okay, if we’re going with your theory and saying that she cursed you then yes, the change did happen with the next sunrise as she said she would.  But then what else did she say?  Five days to fix it or it shall stay?  What does that mean?”  She pauses and glances to Mulder and his fixed fox stare.  “Does it men that if you can’t find a way to change back within five days, you’ll stay this way forever?”

There’s a moment, then Mulder gives a single hesitant yip.  Yes.

She knows they’ve had more dire time crunches before and everything turned out fine, but her breath catches in her throat anyway and she covers her mouth with her hand.  Mulder must pick up on her unease — of course he does, she’s wearing it all over like a heavy blanket — and he presses up against her side. She supposes it’s his way of telling her that he trusts her.

What she would do to hear some of his upbeat optimism.

“Okay,” she says more to herself than to Mulder, and regroups.

“Circe is an Greek enchantress who is known for changing men into animals.  It says that Odysseus protected himself with a herb called moly and then demanded for her to restore his men back to human form.” 

Scully looks away from the computer screen where she’s reading from a mythology website.  Hell, Mulder probably knows all about the myth already and probably would be making dismissive smart-ass fox noises at her, but she’s certain that he isn’t really listening to her.

She looks down to Mulder, who’s lying on his back in her lap with his eyes closed, and yeah, he’s too distracted.

She continues to rub his stomach, anyway.

She blames him, of course.  She blames him because he’s the one who jumped in her lap, and he has white fur on his stomach that’s incredibly soft and he’s making the well, cutest, purring sound, so naturally the only option was to rub his belly.

Too bad her camera is across the room, or she should have enough blackmail on him for this century and the next.

“Mulder,” she says, stopping and putting her hand on the desk.  He opens his eyes and glares at her with betrayal.

“I’m not saying that an actual Greek enchantress cursed you,” Scully begins, and Mulder gives her that look that he gives when she’s being too skeptical and God, it will never stop being strange.  “But maybe,” she continues, “there’s something about this moly herb part of the myth can somehow reverse the effects.” She isn’t used to doing this part of investigation; the speculative connecting of invisible dots is Mulder’s thing.

But thankfully, most everything can be boiled down to science.  “While the herb in the myth is fictional, it’s thought that inspiration for it is from the snowdrop flower.  In it there’s an active substance called galantamine that acts as an anticholinesterase, which can be used as a treatment for Alzheimer’s and other diseases. Maybe it can undo…your current state.” She pauses for interjection, but Mulder isn’t able to say anything, for once.

They go to Quantico to obtain the medicine. Scully decides it’s worth a try, because her experience with undoing species transformation is null and the impending time frame is creeping along, a stinging pressure that doesn’t go away.

She leaves Mulder in her car (she leaves the windows cracked, she does know what she’s doing) and ignores his whining as she walks away, and she does not feel guilty, nope, not one bit.  Let him cry it out, she thinks, like babies in cribs.

She rushes back as soon as possible.

Mulder is happy for about thirty seconds when she returns, but his demeanor changes when she settles into her seat and pulls a needle and vial of medicine from her coat.  He growls, and jumps into the backseat.

“Come on, Mulder!  You knew this was going to happen, we talked about it.” Well, they didn’t so much talk about it together, but she told him what she was going to do and she ushered him along, giving him a gentle nudge with her foot out the door.

Mulder does not budge.  She tries to grab him by reaching her arm back, but her fingers only brush against his fur.

Scully sighs, resting her head on the headrest. “If you’re a good fox, I’ll get you ice cream afterwards.”

The bribe works.  But he still tries to bite at her wrist when she jabs him in the rump with the needle.

She isn’t really sure what she expects if the treatment were to work — would it be a gradual change?  Or a bone crushing transformation like in werewolf movies? She sits back in her seat, arm slumped against the steering wheel and stares at Mulder open mouthed, because she’s afraid that if she were to blink for just a second she would miss it.

Her eyes get to an uncomfortable point of dryness. She blinks.  When she opens her eyes a fox still sits in the passenger seat. Nothing continues to happen.

Mulder tilts his head, as if saying, Well?

“Maybe it takes some time to happen?” Scully suggests.

Mulder puts his front feet on the dashboard and stares in the rearview mirror at his reflection.  He leans in and presses his nose against it, the mirror fogging up. His tail flicks sharply and smacks Scully in the face, she supposes as payback for the shot.

Scully gets him ice cream like she’d promised. She ends up glad she did, because it’s a sunny day and despite the Fall breeze the ice cream melts fast, and watching Mulder lap it up before it runs onto the ground is an image she will fondly remember forever. 

By the time they are done with their ice cream (Scully had to hold hers away from Mulder to keep him from eating hers), there’s still no apparent change; Mulder still has one tail too many and is five feet too short.

Mulder doesn’t seem too concerned — he’s busy wagging his tail and showing off to a group of people walking by — but Scully is concerned, extremely so.

She calls the Lone Gunmen for an update on the search, sending up a prayer up that they have had more success than her. As the phone rings, she watches as Mulder fastidiously cleans remnants of butter pecan off his chin with his paws, his admiring audience now gone.

It seems as though when the psychic doesn’t want to be found, she can really disappear.  “I don’t understand how she keeps slipping from our clutches,” Frohike says over the phone.  How can it be so difficult, she’s an old woman with arthritis in at least one hip, Scully wants to yell, but it isn’t his fault, so she thanks him anyway, and hangs up with a click.

She’s about to relay the bad news to Mulder, but it’s evident that he already knows — it seems that his new and improved hearing is great for eavesdropping.  He looks at her and flattens his ears back and his tail droops and it oh, it just makes her heart sink.

“Mulder,” is all she says because she doesn’t know what else to say, but she opens her arms and he crawls in her lap and lays his head on her shoulder without question, and she pets his back without thinking about it.

When he licks at her earlobe, it feels a lot more like him comforting her than her trying to ease his concern.

Troubles be damned, it won’t stop them from investigating. 

Maybe they can adapt a slogan like the postal service. Neither snow nor rain nor things that go bump in the night nor threat of extraterrestrial colonization nor transformation into quadruped animals stays these agents from thorough investigation of x-files.

It doesn’t quite have the same ring.

There’s more at stake because Mulder is intertwined as part of the x-file himself (between them there must be a whole section of x-files that involve them, she has to ask him what percentage of cases include them, he’d know).  Scully is starting to feel guilty because she hasn’t made much progress — he’s depending on her, and right now she’s the only one who can solve this, and every time he looks at her with that easy implicit trust she feels even more awful.

So that’s why Scully drives them out to Kent to where one of the missing persons had lived.  Mulder rides shotgun with his head stuck out the window for most of the way, occasionally turning around to look at Scully.  She can’t decide if it’s out of wanting to share excitement for the passing scenery or to check on her, or a mix of both.

The house is one of less expensive homes in the neighborhood, but it’s still closer to a six-digit value than anything Scully will ever own.

When a tired-looking blonde woman answers the door, Scully says, “I’m Special Agent Scully with the FBI and this is—” and her sentence disintegrates awkwardly and painfully at the ghost of the introduction of her partner.

Mulder notices; he never misses anything, him. He nudges the space below her knee.

She takes a deep breath and starts again. “I have some questions about the disappearance of your husband.”

The woman blinks.  “The search was called off over two months ago,” she says, as if that’s enough explanation in itself.  She crosses her arms in front of her as a tight retaliation. “What’s with the fox?” 

“Service animal,” Scully quips, arranging her stance into a matched crossed-armed stand off.  That plus a raised eyebrow evokes immediate intimidation, and the other woman adjusts her attitude and Scully seizes her chance.  “May we come in?”

All that they find out from the woman is: that she still doesn’t know what happened, but her husband is a jerk and had it coming, he took a lot of people’s money, so yeah, he could have had many people who wished him harm.

It’s not new information.  Scully grasps her hands together in her lap as Mulder obediently (for once) sits on the floor next to her, his tail a rhythmic thump thump against the floor.

“But,” Scully says, getting to the kind of questions that Mulder normally asks, “in the time that your husband has been missing, do you remember an animal that was around an unusual amount?” She indulges in Mulder’s theory that the victim had got switch-a-roo’d into an animal as well.

For a moment, the woman opens her mouth, but then closes it again and leans forward with her elbows on her knees. “I’m not sure what significance it has but…yes.  There was a vulture that wouldn’t go the fuck away.  I remember thinking it was odd because there was nothing dead in the yard, but it kept appearing on the front porch.”  She points out the window.  “Just sitting there.  You know, like the ones in The Jungle Book. Every morning when I’d go out it would squawk like mad at me.  Almost like it was trying to tell me something.”  She pauses.  “But it hasn’t been around for months.  Why’d you want to know?”

Scully and Mulder share a knowing dismayed gaze.

Shortly after Scully thanks her for her time and leaves with no new leads, but only more questions.

On the way back, Scully talks out loud for both of them. At a red light, she turns to the passenger seat and says to Mulder, “I know you’re concluding that Marlana turned that victim into a vulture, and he disappeared because he could never transform back into human form.  It does make sense that your transformation would not be an isolated incident, but I just don’t understand how it’s possible she’s doing it.”

Mulder dramatically falls onto his back, and upside down gives her one of his perfected Mulder-expressions: Magic, Scully!

She sighs, and reaches over the console to rub his belly. That’ll shut him up, she thinks.

As a fox, Mulder even more spritely and energetic, which means that when he’s wired he’s wired, amped up to two-hundred fifty percent in a flurry of red furry enthusiasm. 

There’s only so much of him Scully can take and she’s this close to skinning him herself if she has to spend one second more in the car with him, so she stops at a park not too away from her apartment and lets him out to hopefully burn off some of that extra energy.

Mulder takes her investigating. He leads her around like usual, but it’s things like lizards and crunchy leaves that have fallen on the sidewalk and discarded food wrappers that he stops and examines with a fascinated curiosity.

It’s almost like a normal day — she’s used to him making the seemingly mundane an adventure.

It makes her forget for a moment.

She buys them both hot dogs from a vender, and she talks out loud to him as they eat, sure that passersby think she’s crazy for having such complex conversations with a fox.  And when a random guy makes a pass at her and Mulder snarls at him until she has to grab him by the scruff of the neck and drag him away, she tries to not show how endearing she thinks it is.

(An, “Atta boy,” slips out anyway.)

“Mulder, I am not going to jump in that pile of leaves with you.”  She means it when she says it, but he tugs at the hem of her coat with his mouth, trying to cajole her into partaking in this ridiculousness with him.  She’s a grown woman, a doctor and a FBI agent, and her reputation is worth more than to been seen rolling around a raked up pile of leaves (not to say that she’s had her reputation questioned by less).

“Go on,” she says, motioning towards the leaf pile.

It doesn’t take much encouragement — it’s like he was just waiting for her to say the word — and he takes off and dives into the pile, showering a confetti of red and orange and brown leaves.

She rocks forward on her toes; the urge to jump stays.

Mulder’s tomfoolery ends when he runs through a mud puddle. 

Scully ends up having to carry him to and from the car on the way to her apartment, because it’s raining and he got fussy when his feet were getting wet.  He still struggles though, and manages to get both of them thoroughly muddy.

Not only that, but he tracks mud through her apartment.

“This is your fault,” Scully says, shoving him back in her bathtub when he tries to escape.

He sinks back in the water and glares at her like some evil fox shark.

Amused at his indignation, she tucks her hair behind her ears and picks up two bottles, wondering if she should use soap or shampoo to clean him.  She makes a judgment call and decides on the shampoo, and sets the soap aside as she pops open the shampoo bottle and squeezes a sizable amount in her palm and rubs it into his fur.

Mulder makes a pitiful noise. When Scully glances to him she can’t help but laugh — with his expression it looks like she’s absolutely torturing him.

“I don’t like this any more than you do,” she says, but it’s a lie.  She’s enjoying seeing him in misery, just a little bit.

She pours some water from a cup to rinse him and then uses more shampoo to the mix.  “In other circumstances you’d be glad I was bathing you.”

That earns her a snerky noise that’s made in the back of his throat.

“It’s kind of nice when you can’t talk.”  She smiles and lathers up the space between his ears.  “Maybe when we find the psychic I’ll ask to keep you like this.”

His whiskers twitch, then flaps his tail, splashing water onto her and the floor.

“Jerk.”

Mulder may not have liked the bath, but he does like the blow dryer. 

As he turns his head right and left to get the warm breeze, Scully thinks how the white and gray shading around his mouth and neck reminds her of his five o’clock shadow.

It hits her with a sudden and overwhelming rush of nostalgia for him.

“I’m sorry,” Scully says. Mulder seems surprised her at her apropos of nothing remark.  “I’m sorry,” she repeats, “that I haven’t figured it out yet. But I will.  Find a way to get you back to normal.”  What she doesn’t say is, before time runs out, because she can’t believe that, not yet.

He lifts his paw and rests it on her wrist.  She takes in a shuddering breath, and turns off the blow dryer sets it on the counter. “Hey,” she imagines him saying, “stop fretting.”

Maybe, Scully thinks. Just maybe, and she leans forward and kisses him on the nose.  Maybe it will be that simple.

She sits back. Mulder wipes at his nose with his paw.

Nope — he’s no prince to be turned back into a human with a kiss.

day three

Scully sleeps restlessly. Not only because of the entire asinine situation, but also because of the almost purr-like rhythm that Mulder sleeps, curled up next to her (under the covers, this time) and radiating heat like a small, annoying furnace.

It’s weird how fast he goes to sleep as a fox.  All the times that he’s slept near her (in rental cars and hospital beds and on her couch by accident) he always sleeps fitfully, and only then he falls asleep until exhaustion outweighs the logic of sleep.

Sleep comes eventually for her, but not soon enough, and she rises with the sun. Mulder is still cozy and snuggled against a pillow so she leaves him be — and aren’t foxes supposed to sleep most of the day, anyway?

She needs to go out alone because she’s suffocating.  Suffocating with his strange fox smell and her having one-sided conversations and only three days left, two if she doesn’t count today.

She goes to Mulder’s apartment and feeds his fish — she didn’t want to risk going there yesterday and have a repeat of the first day when he tried to grab them from the tank. She uses his computer to look up things for the case, including animal sightings that coincide with the disappearances of the victims.

Despite herself, she ends up falling asleep on his couch that smells too much like him. She dozes only a few hours, before jerking awake and causing papers to fall from her lap.

She knows she isn’t at the right place, so she goes back home.

Mulder meets her at the door looking extremely guilty.  Peering beyond him, she sees a pillow destroyed and feathers littering the floor.

She feels as guilty as he looks, so she says, “Don’t worry about it, it was ugly anyway.” He makes an apologetic whine, and she kneels down and scratches at the soft spot behind his ears.

“I won’t leave you alone again.” 

She doesn’t leave him, even when he accidentally puts a run in her stockings when he paws at her ankle for attention.

day four

The ringing of her phone wakes her up.

“Hello,” she mumbles, looking around and realizing she fell asleep on the couch. She turns her head to the side and Mulder’s fox face looks back at her, ears perked and ready to listen in on the conversation.

“Good news,” Langly says over the line.  “Found your psychic. And even better news: she’s not far.”

She’s out the door in yesterday’s clothes with Mulder following closely behind before she’s done thanking him.

“It all makes sense,” Scully says, driving over the speed limit on a road that will take them thirty minutes out of D.C.  “Yesterday when I looking up stuff on animal reports there was almost always a reported sighting of a singular animal behaving strangely nearby that coincided with one of the disappearances.  They would be interacting with humans in an odd way.”  She glances over to Mulder and smiles, seeing that he was hanging on to every word.  “Communication, Mulder. They were trying to communicate.”

Mulder nods his head and makes an affirmative sound.

“And they continue to be missing because they could never turn back.”  She grips the steering wheel tighter, glad that Mulder isn’t able to say anything about her accepting the magic theory.  “I still don’t know how she’s doing it or if she’s able to reverse it for all the others, but when we find her we’ll find out.”  She makes a left turn onto a dirt road.  “And if not, you can threaten to rip out her throat.”

Madame Marlana isn’t recognizable by sight, but Mulder knows her by smell.  He chases her as she runs from her cabin until Scully can catch up. 

“FBI!”  Scully steadies her gun on the psychic, who not only can transform other humans but can change her own appearance as well.  Before she looked as though she was pushing eighty, but now looks like she’s forty at most.

“So the fox hunt me down,” Marlana says, raising her hands in the universal don’t shoot pose.

Getting straight to the point, Scully says, “Change him back.”  Scully orders her to, she remembers what she read of the Odysseus myth — Odysseus demanded that Circe changed his men back into humans, and the enchantress complied.

Thousands of years later, here Scully is, being Mulder’s Odysseus.

“I can’t,” Madame Marlana says. “Once the curse has been set, it’s all on him to change his fate.”

“How?”

“That’s for him to know and find out, or else the day after tomorrow Fox here will stay this foxy.”

It’s enough to make Scully lunge forward and cuff the psychic roughly while Mulder growls at her.  “You’re under arrest.”

As Scully shoves her into the backseat, Marlana says, “It’s not my problem that some men need a reality check with themselves. And Fox here is one of the most egotistic pricks I’ve ever met.”

If Scully happens to look away and doesn’t see Mulder snap at Marlana’s hand, it’s not her fault.

Hours of interrogation doesn’t cause Marlana to crack, she keeps repeating, “What’s done is done,” while sitting cross-legged in her chair and trying to be mysterious.  Nobody really believes Scully’s claim, but everyone is cautious of her nonetheless, wary of being turned into a cat or butterfly or whatever.

Skinner asks too many questions that Scully can’t answer (“You can’t be serious,” he had said looking at Mulder who was defensively curled into a ball in the chair in front of the desk, and Scully had said, “Yes, unfortunately I am.”).

Scully has questions that she can’t answer either. She’s been mulling it over in their basement office for hours with no avail. So she doesn’t struggle much when Mulder starts whining until she agrees to go home.

She hates to though, because that means another day gone and only one more to go until she’ll forever have a partner that grows his own winter coat.

She hates that she believes that, but really, it’s too risky not to.  It’s relentless on her mind as she drives home, like waves that tumble over, each stronger than the next. Even though she knows Mulder would understand it — it’s how he lives his entire life — she says nothing.

Nothing, until later—

“Do you really think it’s a curse?” Scully asks, her voice muffled by the pillow.  Mulder quirks his head and it’s the duh, of course, Scully look.

She takes in a deep breath, and lets it out slow. “I don’t know what to do. Scientific measures did not help, and I tried my best to figure out if there was a paranormal answer.”

Mulder licks her hand, as if that's his way of appreciating that she relied on methods outside her standard.

“I have to fix it.  Need to.”

Mulder gives her a look, and she says, “I know, I know, I can’t fix everything.  But I…” Her voice trails off.

He makes a soft squeak, and nestles into her side.

She sighs. “Maybe it’s not so bad,” she says, and runs her hand over his fur.  “A fox is better than being turned into an alien-human hybrid.”

There’s noise that almost sounds like his laugh.

A frown settles on her face.  “I’m sorry I haven’t been able to help.”

When he licks her face she doesn’t back away; instead, she buries her face into his fur.  “Mulder,” she whispers, and she listens to his quick heartbeat until the fatigue of the past few days overtake her and she’s sleep.

day five

The next morning, Scully wakes up before her alarm. She’s warm, too warm, and there’s an unfamiliar heavy pressure on her chest that’s constraining.

Eyes still closed, she pushes at it, the skin of her palm making contact with skin.

It takes a moment to register, but when it does she’s wide awake and turns and there’s Mulder, back as himself and sleeping soundly next to her with his arm thrown across her middle — him with his messy brown hair, the beginnings of crows feet bookending his eyes, dopey nose and all.

It’s definitely in the top three times she’s been most happy to see his face.

She touches his shoulder.  “Mulder, wake up!”

His eyes slide open, slowly focusing on her and smiling.  “Hey, Scully.”

“You’re you again,” she says.  She runs her hand through his hair, as if to prove it.

He looks down at himself and moves his hands under the covers, furrowing his brows as though considering it all. “Seems so,” he says. “No more tail.”

Scully props herself up on her elbow. She can’t stop looking at him, his usual features a nice recollection.  “Why do you think you changed back?  And the others didn’t?”

Mulder shrugs.  “All the other victims had pretty shitty attitudes, like that one in Kent who stole all that money.  I think maybe they weren’t pure enough of heart—”

“Mulder—”

“—it seems like that’s the type of thing Marlana is trying to punish people for.  Maybe the others didn’t have someone compassionate enough to care. Maybe they didn’t have someone like you to believe them.”  His voice is hoarse from non-use, but it’s bright as a star.  “Maybe it’s proving you’re good enough to have someone worthy care about you.”

Scully scoffs.  “That’s so horribly cliché.”

“Like that would be the most unbelievable thing to happen to us?”

He has a point.

Scully fiddles with the hem of the comforter. After a few beats of silence, she asks, “Do you remember all of it?  When you were a fox?”

“Some of it’s fuzzy, but yeah, mostly.”

She figures this isn’t the time to remind him that he had peed on her kitchen floor.

He licks his lips, tongue darting out and running over his now human-sized teeth before drawing it back in. “There’s one thing I remember really well, Scully.”

“What’s that?”

“You give fantastic belly rubs.”

“Mulder—”

“Also, I’m naked.”

Scully throws her arm over her face. She’s starting to think that maybe she should have let him stay as a fox forever after all. 

a week later 

(Skinner opens the folder of the most recently "solved" x-file, number X042091.  It’s one that has a better resolution than most: a perpetrator is in custody, although there isn’t much way of proof other than some non-substantial tests that would never hold up in court.

He looks at the picture paper clipped to the first page: a red fox that's curled up into an angry orb of fluff and is staring at the camera.

On a post-it note stuck the back of the picture is a note written in Mulder’s sloppy scrawl: To archive how cute I was.  Photography by Agent D. Scully.

He would have a hard time believing it — that is, if Mulder-as-a-fox hadn’t of clawed up his desk.)