TITLE: Pilot Flipped
AUTHOR: Helen Wills
EMAIL ADDRESS: Helen@wills2.demon.co.uk
DISTRIBUTION: Gossamer, yes; all others please ask.
SPOILERS: Pilot
CONTENT: S
RATING: PG
CLASSIFICATION: Alternate Universe
SUMMARY: Supposing Mulder was assigned to debunk Scully's work on the
"X" files?

DISCLAIMER: "The X Files" and all the characters etc. associated with
it are the property of 20th Century Fox and 1013 Productions.  I am
not making any profit from this story, and no infringement is
intended.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS/DEDICATION: Arvy, for starting me on this by writing
"Reflections in the Water".  I couldn't resist the challenge, although
no-one could better his UFO poster saying "I Want Proof" <g>

NOTES:  Two things - firstly, this story is entirely unconnected to my
"Prelude" stories, despite being alternate universe.  Secondly, I set
most of the action in the FBI's Washington DC field office, because I
read something once about how Mulder and Scully wouldn't work out of
the Hoover Building in real life.  I've been waiting for an
opportunity to use that information :-)

Comments would be welcome, as always.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
PILOT FLIPPED
By Helen Wills
Helen@wills2.demon.co.uk
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Part 1/1


The receptionist at the J. Edgar Hoover Building was not the most
approachable of women, but even she managed to produce a smile when
the tall, lanky, rather good-looking man paused in front of her desk.
He smiled back absently, pushing his unruly dark hair out of his eyes.

"Special Agent Fox Mulder."

The receptionist handed him a pass and waved him through into the
building; and he was on his way, totally unaware of the ripple of
interest he caused among the women in the crowd milling about in the
massive foyer.

He was familiar with the layout of the building; he'd even worked
there once, so finding his way through the sprawl of desks and
cabinets that formed the Violent Crimes Section's "bullpen" was not a
problem, and in what seemed like no time at all, he was knocking on
the door of Section Chief Blevins' office.

When he stepped inside, Agent Mulder saw Blevins - a man he was
reasonably familiar with - sat behind his desk, and another man he
didn't know leaning on a tall filing cabinet in the corner.

Blevins looked up and nodded.  "Ah, Agent Mulder.  Please take a
seat."

Mulder did as he was told, and settled himself comfortably in the
chair in front of the wide desk to wait.  Inured to this situation by
countless other meetings like it, he was made not uncomfortable by the
interview-like atmosphere: he was an agent of several years' standing
and knew, without vanity, his own value to the Bureau.

"So, Agent Mulder ...."  Blevins rustled a few sheets of paper in a
file briefly, then folded his hands on the desk in front of him and
studied the younger man.  "Thank you for coming on such short notice.
You've been with the Bureau, what - five years now?"

"Near enough, Sir," Mulder agreed.  He was a little surprised by this
approach, but did not betray it.

"You qualified as a psychologist, as I recall, but chose not to
practice.  How did you come to join the FBI?"

"I applied to the FBI during my final year at Oxford," he replied
readily enough.  "I'd been studying criminal psychology, and the field
interested me - the FBI seemed like a good way of practising at the
sharp end of the business, so to speak.  During training, Agent
Patterson discovered that I had a natural aptitude for applying
behavioural models to criminal cases and ... to cut a long story
short, I was assigned to the Behavioural Sciences Unit at Quantico.
Give or take a few brief assignments in other Divisions, that's where
I've been ever since."

Blevins nodded.  "Are you familiar with an agent named Dana Scully?"
he asked.

Agent Mulder blinked at the question.  "Yes I am," he replied, after a
moment.

Blevins seemed rather surprised by this, and betrayed it by a quick
glance at the other man, who had remained silent so far.  "How so?"

"Mostly by reputation.  She's a forensic pathologist who was recruited
by the Bureau out of medical school, and until recently she taught at
Quantico Academy.  I think she's been with the FBI for a couple of
years.  Generally thought of as the best forensic investigator in the
FBI .... She made a name for herself during the Monty Propps case -
without her skill and attention to detail in the medical examinations,
we might not have caught him."  Mulder smiled faintly.  "Some of the
guys gave her a nickname - the Ice Queen - but I could never see why."
He glanced at the silent man as he said it, but received only a blank
stare in response.

Blevins nodded.  "What I'll also tell you is that Agent Scully
recently developed a consuming interest in an unassigned project
outside the Bureau mainstream. Are you familiar with the so-called "X"
files?"

Mulder's brows rose.  He was - but he hadn't expected them to come up
in a conversation with the Section Head of the Violent Crimes Unit.
"I believe they have to do with unexplained phenomena," he replied
with combination of caution and wariness.

"More or less.  The reason you're here, Agent Mulder, is we want you
to assist Agent Scully on these X-files.  You will write field reports
on your activities, along with your observations on the validity of
the work."

There was a pause.  Mulder was wondering just why they felt a senior
profiler was needed for  this assignment, when they already had a
highly qualified forensic pathologist on the job.  Hopefully it wasn't
because of his Academy nickname - "Spooky".  "Am I to understand ...
that you want me to *debunk* the X-files, Sir?" he asked finally.

Despite his best efforts, his tone was decidedly quizzical, and
Blevins twitched irritably at it.  "Agent Mulder, we hope you'll
retain an open mind on the subject, whilst making the proper
professional analysis."  His tone was a rebuke, but Mulder accepted it
philosophically.  "You'll want to contact Agent Scully shortly.  We
look forward to seeing your reports."

XXXX

Agent Scully was based at the Washington DC field office - no big
surprises there, although Mulder had been in and out of that office on
a semi-regular basis for the last six months, with no idea that she
was stationed there.  He wondered, as he passed the office's
receptionist with a nod, why none of the field agents had mentioned
her presence.  Agent Scully had a good enough reputation in her field
to make having her on site in the building quite a coup.

Although from what he knew of her current project (and thanks to a
combination of natural nosiness and his own particular hobbies, he
knew quite a bit), Mulder wouldn't be surprised if she wasn't also
something of an embarrassment to her colleagues.

This theory was proven by the sympathetic and dubious looks he
garnered from the small clump of agents he asked for directions.

Agent Scully was in the basement.  Well ... it could be worse.  As a
member of the Behavioural Sciences Unit, Mulder had worked in a
basement before.   The BSU had started its existence in the basement
of the Hoover Building before being moved to Quantico, but during the
office renovations a few years before, they had doubled up with some
of the forensics staff in the basement there as well.

All the same, when the lift disgorged him at the "lower ground floor",
he felt a tingle of apprehension which was not relieved by the sight
of narrow corridors, dim lighting and abandoned furniture cluttered
around.  He manoeuvred around a stack of empty packing crates,
wondering how on earth this place kept its Fire Certificate with so
much rubbish hanging around, and made his way towards the only doorway
that was lit.

It was the kind of door that was half panelled, half glazed, and
thanks to the bright lighting of the room behind it, Mulder could see
that someone had made half-hearted efforts to scrape off an old
painted sign on the patterned glass: STORES.  Underneath was a much
newer plastic nameplate: Special Agent Dana Scully MD BSc Phys.  Well,
at least he was in the right place.  He raised one hand and tapped on
the door.

"Come in," a cool but feminine voice commanded, and Agent Mulder
stepped inside, feeling uncomfortably like an erring pupil sent to the
headmistress's office.

The impression was not relieved by what he found inside.

In contrast to the corridor outside, the office was brightly lit and
austerely neat, its untidiest feature being a pinboard near the door
that was covered in newspaper cuttings and photographs.  Even those
were arranged in a semblance of order.  There was a desk which, apart
from a stack of ageing files,  a set of document trays and a slide
projector, seemed to be empty of even normal office equipment; and a
set of shelves around the walls filled with orderly rows of books and
box files.  Mulder couldn't remember the last time he'd seen *any*
office in the Bureau looking so tidy, and he included the Director's
inner sanctum in that assessment.

Agent Scully herself was standing in front of a small light table by
the wall opposite, and appeared to be sorting out photographic slides.
Having seen her - at a distance - once before, Mulder was familiar
with her appearance, but it came as a surprise to realise how small
she was; even in quite substantial heels, she barely topped his
shoulder.  She had straight, shoulder-length red hair in a functional
and rather uninteresting style, and wore a plain, light grey
trouser-suit, the jacket of which swung  perilously from a loose hook
behind the door as he entered the room.  Then she turned to look at
him and he was pinned to the spot by a pair of icy-cool blue eyes that
fixed on him like lasers.

There was an uncomfortable pause as they assessed each other silently;
then, when it became plain that she had no intention of making the
first move, Mulder took a hesitant couple of steps toward her, holding
out one hand.

"Agent Scully.  I - I'm Fox Mulder, I've been assigned to work with
you."  Inwardly he cursed at the tiny hesitation in his speech which
betrayed the long-conquered stutter of his childhood, but if she
noticed, there was no visible reaction.

For a moment, he thought she might refuse to shake his hand; then she
was also taking a step forward and grasping it firmly, a wintry little
smile crossing her lips.  "How nice to suddenly be so highly
regarded!" she commented, and Mulder felt himself flush despite the
position he was in being none of his doing.  "Which high-ranking
member of the establishment did you upset to get thrown into the
basement with me, Agent Mulder?"

"Actually, I'm looking forward to working with you," he replied,
deciding that it was time he went on the attack.  He was the
psychologist, after all, and if he couldn't figure his new partner
out, he might as well quit the Bureau and become a landscape gardener.
"I've heard a lot about you."

Wrong thing to say.  Her expression became even colder, if that was
possible.  "Oh really?  I was under the impression you were sent here
to spy on me."

That hurt, especially considering his own doubts about the nature of
assignment when Blevins had laid it out.  "If you have any doubts
about my qualifications or credentials - "

Scully turned and picked a neatly bound document out of one of her
filing trays.  Her reading glasses were hanging around her neck on a
fine chain; she put them on and studied the cover of the document with
an interest that was almost - but not quite - spurious.  "You're an
Oxford-educated psychologist and you work in the Behavioural Sciences
Unit.  You wrote a paper the  year you joined the Bureau, on serial
killers and the occult, that became part of the official FBI handbook
on criminal profiling."  She paused, and looked at him over the top of
her glasses.  "Considering that the current handbook was written by
Agent Patterson, the head of the BSU, that's quite an achievement.  He
isn't noted for accepting opinions that run contrary to his own."  She
tossed the document lightly back into the tray, and Mulder wondered if
it really was his paper or if she was just messing with his head.
"You also wrote the profile that helped catch Monty Propps in 1988,"
she finished, her tone almost indifferent.

Damn the woman ....   "You also worked on that case," he replied, his
tone quiet and defensive.

"I'm surprised you even noticed," she remarked, and the icy little
smile was back, although Mulder noticed that her eyes had lost their
glacial coolness, developing a dangerous spark in its place.  "I was -
what? the fifth or sixth medical examiner called in?  And on *your*
say-so as I recall."

"You were also the last," he pointed out.  "On re-examining the
bodies, you found what all the other ME's missed, and helped close the
case."

"Credit at last."  Scully turned back to the light table and quickly
gathered up her slides, slotting them neatly into the carousel and
fixing it into a projector that was standing on the end of her desk.
Then she hesitated and turned back to him, her face slightly wary.  It
was the most open expression he'd seen on her yet, which was not very
reassuring.

"So, Agent Mulder ....  You spend a lot of time getting into the heads
of criminals, but how are you on hard evidence?"

He snorted gently.  "Without evidence there is no case, Agent Scully -
so I like to think I'm pretty good about hard evidence."

"That's good," she remarked.  "There's just one problem - in my
current cases, hard evidence is often difficult to come by."  She
brushed past him and went to the door, switching out the light.  Then
she leaned over her desk and flicked the projector on.  "Would you say
you're open to extreme possibilities?"

Mulder gave her a bemused look, but he was beginning to lose some of
his defensiveness out of sheer curiosity.  "You get used to extreme
possibilities, dealing with serial killers ...."

"Really?  See what you make of this."  Scully pressed the control on
the projector and a slide appeared on a screen hanging on the wall.
"An Oregon girl, aged twenty-one, with no explainable cause of death.
The autopsy showed nothing."

Mulder studied the image for a moment or two, but could deduce little
from it other than that the girl had been in her night-dress and her
body appeared to have been dumped in a forest clearing.  "Who did the
autopsy?" he asked finally.

"The local medical examiner."

"Any second opinions taken?"

The tiny smile was back on Scully's face, but in the dimmed light
Mulder couldn't make out if it was as cool as before.  "No, none," she
replied.

"Hm."

Seeing that he was unwilling to comment, Scully pressed the button and
another slide appeared.  This time it was a close-up of a portion of
the girl's back, showing two raised lumps.  "There are these two
distinct marks on her lower back.  What do you think?"

Mulder stepped closer to the screen and peered at them.  "Could be a
number of causes.  Needle punctures, an animal bite, stab from a
pickle fork ...."

"*Pickle fork*?"

He glanced back at her, a tiny, mischievous smile on his own lips.
"It has these two sharp little prongs - "

Agent Scully was briefly shaken out of her cool exterior; one delicate
red brow rose.  "Are you serious?"

Mulder turned away from the screen and thrust his hands into his
trouser pockets.  "Not really," he acknowledged, "although this
wouldn't be the first time I've seen it used as a weapon."

Scully shot him a look, but evidently decided she didn't want to know.
She pressed the button again, and the image on the screen changed to a
molecular diagram.  "How were you at school with chemistry, Agent
Mulder?"

"I had great chemistry with the girl who sat two rows in front of me -
What is that?"

Mulder stared at the image on screen and didn't need to look at Scully
to know that she was smiling again.

"I have no idea - I've never seen before either.  It's organic, and it
*may* be a synthetic protein of some kind, but more than that I can't
tell you.  It was found in the surrounding tissues of those lumps."
She changed the image again and a picture of a youth in biker's
leathers, lying face-down on a railway track, appeared.  "This was a
nearly identical case in Sturgis, North Dakota - " she flicked the
images over to a shot of another girl in a night-dress, "- and another
one in Shamrock, Texas."

"You have a theory?" Mulder asked.

"One or two."  Scully switched off the projector and went to turn the
lights back on.  "Perhaps you can explain something to me, though."
Mulder raised his brows at her enquiringly, and she  folded her arms,
taking a deep breath.  "Perhaps you can explain why the Bureau labels
cases like these as "unexplained phenomena" and files them away in a
dark corner with all the crank cases about ghosts, goblins and UFOs?"

It was a loaded question.  Mulder looked down at Scully and could see
from the look in her eyes that this was considerably more than a
request for an honest opinion.  This was definitely a woman with
something on her mind, and if he screwed up his answer, their
partnership might go out of the window there and then before it had
ever started.

"I don't know," he said finally, compelled to honesty by her searching
stare, " but I do know that I wouldn't label any case as a "crank"
without studying it first very carefully."

She nodded as if this was the answer she was expecting, and the tiny
ironic smile was back.  Even though he didn't know why she was looking
like that, Mulder was so annoyed by it that he spoke without thinking.
"Do you believe in the existence of extraterrestrials, Agent Scully?"
His tone was a challenge, and it brought her head up with a jerk.

But if he had expected to throw her poise, he was disappointed.
"Logically, I would have to say no," she replied calmly.  "Given the
distances needed to travel from the far reaches of space, the energy
requirements would far exceed a spacecraft's capabilities."

Well, he had expected a reply something like that.  Then she surprised
him.

"That said - " Scully hesitated, and seemed to choose her words
carefully.  "That said ... the universe is vast, and I was raised to
believe that God's reach is infinite.  From that point of view, it
would be ... arrogant ... to assume that we are the sum total of His
creation."  There was a tiny pause in which Mulder wanted almost to
laugh in delight.  Then her tone became brisk again.  "But if you're
asking me if I think extraterrestrials had something to do with these
deaths, then frankly, Agent Mulder, I would have to say - "

" - That I'm completely nuts," he nodded, and grinned in spite of
himself.  "That wasn't what I was suggesting.  The point I'm trying to
make is that when conventional wisdom and science offer no answers,
might we not turn to the fantastic as a plausibility?"

Scully frowned.  "What I find fantastic is the notion that there are
answers beyond the realm of science."

Mulder shrugged.  "Probably.  But I think we're both agreed that the
answers are out there - you just have to know where to look."

A smile dawned on her face, one with a genuine hint of humour in it,
and it lit up face.  "That's why they put the "I" in FBI."  She turned
back to the slide projector and began to dismantle it again.  "Better
go pack your overnight case, Agent Mulder," she told him over her
shoulder.  "We leave for the *plausible* state of Oregon tomorrow at
8.00 am."

Mulder stared at her for a moment, not quite sure how to react -
whether to laugh or be indignant - realising that this was a
dismissal.  Finally he grinned, shook his head slightly, and headed
for the door.

This was going to be interesting.


Finis