New World in My View (Magnus/Scully, PG-13)
Title: New World in My View
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Helen Magnus/Dana Scully (friendship, mostly)
Crossover: Sanctuary/The X-Files
Summary: After war breaks out between humans and abnormals, Dana Scully finds herself at the Sanctuary.
Prompt: In celebration of the rapture which, uhm, neglected to happen. geonncannon prompted with Sanctuary/X-Files + Helen Magnus/Dana Scully + Human/Abnormal war + “I Will Follow You Into the Dark” ( requests are still open)
She’d hitched a ride on the back of someone’s rusty red pick-up somewhere in the mountains of West Virginia. He hadn’t accepted payment (not like she had anything to give, but she could drive and set bones and shoot a gun and do pretty well with a can of beans over a campfire), simply said that he’d heard things were worse out West now and he was going to head that way to fight and maybe a doctor would be helpful when he got there. She’d shrugged and hopped in the back with a few people she wouldn’t otherwise associate with and tried to keep her hair out of her face.
There was no point in staying, really. Mulder was gone, split off from her when something rose out of the Chesapeake, blue and green and tentacled with barnacles growing on its skin, roared at all the tourists and promptly splashed back down into the water so hard the Bay nearly emptied, flooding everything for miles. That was the beginning, though there had been an odd succession of volcano eruptions, earthquakes and avalanches in the weeks before that hadn’t made much sense to her no matter how many scientists went on CNN to explain it.
She presumes Mulder’s still alive somewhere, simply because there’s no way he’d miss this. Even if they’d been separate from the FBI for years with no idea if the X-Files were even open, he wouldn’t miss the chance to prove himself right after all this time. Not so much about the aliens, no, but true monsters would be validation enough now.
She loses her driver - she never got his name, but in her head he struck her as a Jim - and the other passengers somewhere in Seattle. They’re determined to surprise a pack of werewolves, something she’s fairly certain is impossible. Having learned her lesson from years of running behind Mulder’s habit of showing up first and being sensible about it later, and no longer being required by a government salary to run toward the sounds of insanity, she heads in the opposite direction. Part of her wants to turn and find them - just like she’s positive Mulder’s somewhere back on the East Coast, talking urban legends and mythology to anyone who will listen, she desperately wants to close off a few cases that still bother her - but her sense of personal survival wins out.
She runs into Will Zimmerman, badly in need of a haircut, on her way out of town.
She shaves her legs. It feels glorious.
She could stay under the steaming hot water for hours, but the promise of the first real meal she’s had in three weeks makes her turn the knobs and wrap herself in a fluffy towel. She steps out of the tub and frowns, watching the water drip off her body and onto the carpet.
“Ah, Dr. Scully,” her host, Helen Magnus, says with a smile when Scully sticks her head out of the bathroom.
Scully smiles and spies an impromptu dinner table set up in the corner. “Dana’s fine. I don’t have anything to wear.” She’d been told to leave her clothing in a basket outside the door, presumably so someone could burn what she’d been wearing for nearly two weeks straight, but hadn’t been given anything in exchange. She’s torn between maintaining some level of propriety and simply not caring and sitting down just in the towel.
Helen offers her a neatly-folded pile of clothing and Scully disappears back into the bathroom. The clothing looks suspiciously like it used to belong to someone else, someone twenty years younger, but it fits and it’s clean. She finger-combs her hair, longing for a blow-dryer but the need for food finally overcomes everything else and she settles for pulling her hair into a reasonable approximation of a ponytail before padding barefoot out into the room.
“Feel better?” Helen gestures for her to take a seat opposite her at the table.
“Much, thank you.” She picks up her fork. “What the hell is going on?” There’s more than enough food for the both of them, and there’s even a plate in front of Helen, but Scully knows that it’s for looks only and the other doctor won’t eat a bite. The chicken is delicious, flavor almost covering for the texture indicative of being discovered in the back of the freezer without a date. She learns that Helen calls them abnormals and winces at the term monster. That they’d had enough of hiding in the shadows and the dark, living in tiny villages just out of reach of humanity, and chosen to take back their world. That Helen, unbelievably, has taken their side in all of this.
As a human, Scully takes offense at the defection from the species.
But as someone who picks worms off the sidewalk to put back in the grass after a rainstorm, she understands.
She swirls the last sip of wine in her glass once, swallows, and sets the glass down with a sense of finality. “How can I help?”
Several weeks in, Scully’s convinced that she’s been here before. Not necessarily the Sanctuary, but this city. With Mulder, in the early years before the Smoking Man and cancer and Krycek’s inability to die. Unlike Mulder, she never committed their case files to memory so she can’t pinpoint the exact date, the exact monster - abnormal, she’s managed to train herself to not say “monster” out loud, especially around who is apparently Bigfoot who brings her coffee and tells her not to mention it to Magnus - but there’s a sense of familiarity she can’t shake. They logged a lot of time in the Pacific Northwest, she remembers; probably something about the rain.
She asks Helen about it over lunch one day. The woman has an impeccable memory for being 160 years old (something Scully would once have questioned but now takes at face value because it’s the least weird thing she deals with on a daily basis) and should remember two FBI agents knocking on doors in her territory asking after strange visions and disappearing pets. Helen merely shrugs and says she doesn’t recall.
Things are quiet, now. They were hectic at first, when Scully discovered that even nine years working on the X-Files couldn’t adequately prepare her to set a broken wing of a phoenix. She thinks she would’ve managed better if it hadn’t caught on fire halfway through. But three months have passed since the war broke out, two since she last saw Mulder and one and a half since she arrived at the Sanctuary and officially joined the other team. Reports from the field are occasional at best and calls for their help have slowed to the point where Scully’s almost bored.
Helen’s network informs her that this isn’t the case everywhere. India and Eastern Europe are bloody battlefields and the screen that should show London has been dark since day four. It takes Scully a while to figure out that the Sanctuary network isn’t actively fighting - something she doesn’t understand at all.
“The mission of the Sanctuary has always been to coexist peacefully.” Helen takes a deep breath and wraps her cardigan tighter around her shoulders as the wind whips through her hair. She looks down from the parapet of the Sanctuary over the smoldering ruins of the city across the river. “Not this.”
There’s a tinge of anger to Helen’s voice that Scully doesn’t quite understand. She’s had her own life’s work thrown in her face, sure. But how the other woman couldn’t see this coming, Scully will never know.
A flash of orange light and suddenly they’re not alone on the balcony.
Helen spins around. “How did you…”
“Henry lowered the shield. I apologize for the intrusion, Helen, but there is a situation that requires your attention.”
“Who the hell is this?”
The tall, bald man turns and sees Scully for the first time. “Jonathan Druitt,” he says after a moment spent studying Scully in the moonlight. “And you?”
“Dana Scully,” she says, thinking it the wiser course of action to not take his outstretched hand.
John smiles crookedly and returns his attention to Helen. “Has something happened to dear William?”
“He’s inside, John. You mentioned a situation?”
“Ah, yes. The Mumbai Sanctuary has just been attacked. Firebombed.”
“And Ravi sent you instead of using the telephone.”
“Firebombed, Helen.”
Helen sighs and gestures to Scully. “We’d best be going.”
Scully frowns, but follows the other two back inside. She doesn’t know how much good they can do if they’re needed in Mumbai. It’s not like they can catch a plane.
“Hold on,” Helen advises once they’ve gathered a small army of medical supplies.
“To -” Scully starts and then everything is orange and electric and spinning. “- what?” she finishes on the other side, the disorientation forcing her to drop to her knees.
Helen smiles despite herself. “Sorry.” She offers Scully her hand and helps her up. “The first time’s always the worst.”
“First time for what?” Scully coughs, aware that, somehow, she’s now in Mumbai. The main fires have been extinguished, but smoke still swirls in the air and a tiny flame licks its way across the remains of a couch.
“Teleporting.”
John returns them to their Sanctuary hours later. It might be days; Scully can’t read her watch through the exhaustion and she’s too tired to care. She can now say that she’s spent significant time getting up close and personal with a djinn (it hadn’t seemed inclined to offer wishes, only curses - but politely apologized that they weren’t directed at her) and been elbow-deep in the body cavity of creatures she hadn’t even heard of. They’d patched up those they could and respectfully buried those they couldn’t and now Scully really, really, wants a shower. Or bed. She’d take both at the same time, if that were possible.
They collapse on the floor of Scully’s room, sooty and sweaty and worn out and neither of them smells particularly good. On another day, Scully might wonder why Helen had followed her rather than continuing on to her own rooms.
“Rock, paper, scissors for shower?” Scully offers, knowing that ordinarily Helen would be above such childish methods of decision-making but under the circumstances Scully has no interest in doing three rounds of no, you go first.
“On three.”
Scully wins by throwing rock and takes the most amazing shower of her life. Somewhere in the second rinse of shampoo she hears the outer door open and muffled grunting, followed by Helen’s “Oh, food. Thank you.”
She doesn’t bother with clothes. The ones she’d worn into the bathroom were gifted to the garbage can the instant she peeled them off her body and the bathrobe is more than big enough to be appropriate. She assumes that she’ll be asleep inside an hour and a half.
“Did you leave any hot water?” Helen jokes when Scully emerges in a cloud of steam.
“Are those grapes?” She makes a beeline for the tray of food set on the edge of the bed while Helen brushes past her to take her own shower.
Scully must have fallen asleep, because there’s a piece of toast on her stomach and Helen is stretched out beside her, watching. Scully drops the toast back onto the tray, now on the floor, and turns on her side.
“Thank you,” Helen says after a moment.
Scully’s pretty sure she should be the one doing the thanking; even if there’s no one to say “I told you so” to, even if the entire Hoover building has crumbled to the ground with all of her reports and case files that ended with vague non-explanations of events she hadn’t been willing to commit to print, there’s some sense of validation in her heart now, that they were right all these years. But she simply smiles and hides a yawn behind her hand. “You’re welcome.”
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Helen Magnus/Dana Scully (friendship, mostly)
Crossover: Sanctuary/The X-Files
Summary: After war breaks out between humans and abnormals, Dana Scully finds herself at the Sanctuary.
Prompt: In celebration of the rapture which, uhm, neglected to happen. geonncannon prompted with Sanctuary/X-Files + Helen Magnus/Dana Scully + Human/Abnormal war + “I Will Follow You Into the Dark” ( requests are still open)
She’d hitched a ride on the back of someone’s rusty red pick-up somewhere in the mountains of West Virginia. He hadn’t accepted payment (not like she had anything to give, but she could drive and set bones and shoot a gun and do pretty well with a can of beans over a campfire), simply said that he’d heard things were worse out West now and he was going to head that way to fight and maybe a doctor would be helpful when he got there. She’d shrugged and hopped in the back with a few people she wouldn’t otherwise associate with and tried to keep her hair out of her face.
There was no point in staying, really. Mulder was gone, split off from her when something rose out of the Chesapeake, blue and green and tentacled with barnacles growing on its skin, roared at all the tourists and promptly splashed back down into the water so hard the Bay nearly emptied, flooding everything for miles. That was the beginning, though there had been an odd succession of volcano eruptions, earthquakes and avalanches in the weeks before that hadn’t made much sense to her no matter how many scientists went on CNN to explain it.
She presumes Mulder’s still alive somewhere, simply because there’s no way he’d miss this. Even if they’d been separate from the FBI for years with no idea if the X-Files were even open, he wouldn’t miss the chance to prove himself right after all this time. Not so much about the aliens, no, but true monsters would be validation enough now.
She loses her driver - she never got his name, but in her head he struck her as a Jim - and the other passengers somewhere in Seattle. They’re determined to surprise a pack of werewolves, something she’s fairly certain is impossible. Having learned her lesson from years of running behind Mulder’s habit of showing up first and being sensible about it later, and no longer being required by a government salary to run toward the sounds of insanity, she heads in the opposite direction. Part of her wants to turn and find them - just like she’s positive Mulder’s somewhere back on the East Coast, talking urban legends and mythology to anyone who will listen, she desperately wants to close off a few cases that still bother her - but her sense of personal survival wins out.
She runs into Will Zimmerman, badly in need of a haircut, on her way out of town.
She shaves her legs. It feels glorious.
She could stay under the steaming hot water for hours, but the promise of the first real meal she’s had in three weeks makes her turn the knobs and wrap herself in a fluffy towel. She steps out of the tub and frowns, watching the water drip off her body and onto the carpet.
“Ah, Dr. Scully,” her host, Helen Magnus, says with a smile when Scully sticks her head out of the bathroom.
Scully smiles and spies an impromptu dinner table set up in the corner. “Dana’s fine. I don’t have anything to wear.” She’d been told to leave her clothing in a basket outside the door, presumably so someone could burn what she’d been wearing for nearly two weeks straight, but hadn’t been given anything in exchange. She’s torn between maintaining some level of propriety and simply not caring and sitting down just in the towel.
Helen offers her a neatly-folded pile of clothing and Scully disappears back into the bathroom. The clothing looks suspiciously like it used to belong to someone else, someone twenty years younger, but it fits and it’s clean. She finger-combs her hair, longing for a blow-dryer but the need for food finally overcomes everything else and she settles for pulling her hair into a reasonable approximation of a ponytail before padding barefoot out into the room.
“Feel better?” Helen gestures for her to take a seat opposite her at the table.
“Much, thank you.” She picks up her fork. “What the hell is going on?” There’s more than enough food for the both of them, and there’s even a plate in front of Helen, but Scully knows that it’s for looks only and the other doctor won’t eat a bite. The chicken is delicious, flavor almost covering for the texture indicative of being discovered in the back of the freezer without a date. She learns that Helen calls them abnormals and winces at the term monster. That they’d had enough of hiding in the shadows and the dark, living in tiny villages just out of reach of humanity, and chosen to take back their world. That Helen, unbelievably, has taken their side in all of this.
As a human, Scully takes offense at the defection from the species.
But as someone who picks worms off the sidewalk to put back in the grass after a rainstorm, she understands.
She swirls the last sip of wine in her glass once, swallows, and sets the glass down with a sense of finality. “How can I help?”
Several weeks in, Scully’s convinced that she’s been here before. Not necessarily the Sanctuary, but this city. With Mulder, in the early years before the Smoking Man and cancer and Krycek’s inability to die. Unlike Mulder, she never committed their case files to memory so she can’t pinpoint the exact date, the exact monster - abnormal, she’s managed to train herself to not say “monster” out loud, especially around who is apparently Bigfoot who brings her coffee and tells her not to mention it to Magnus - but there’s a sense of familiarity she can’t shake. They logged a lot of time in the Pacific Northwest, she remembers; probably something about the rain.
She asks Helen about it over lunch one day. The woman has an impeccable memory for being 160 years old (something Scully would once have questioned but now takes at face value because it’s the least weird thing she deals with on a daily basis) and should remember two FBI agents knocking on doors in her territory asking after strange visions and disappearing pets. Helen merely shrugs and says she doesn’t recall.
Things are quiet, now. They were hectic at first, when Scully discovered that even nine years working on the X-Files couldn’t adequately prepare her to set a broken wing of a phoenix. She thinks she would’ve managed better if it hadn’t caught on fire halfway through. But three months have passed since the war broke out, two since she last saw Mulder and one and a half since she arrived at the Sanctuary and officially joined the other team. Reports from the field are occasional at best and calls for their help have slowed to the point where Scully’s almost bored.
Helen’s network informs her that this isn’t the case everywhere. India and Eastern Europe are bloody battlefields and the screen that should show London has been dark since day four. It takes Scully a while to figure out that the Sanctuary network isn’t actively fighting - something she doesn’t understand at all.
“The mission of the Sanctuary has always been to coexist peacefully.” Helen takes a deep breath and wraps her cardigan tighter around her shoulders as the wind whips through her hair. She looks down from the parapet of the Sanctuary over the smoldering ruins of the city across the river. “Not this.”
There’s a tinge of anger to Helen’s voice that Scully doesn’t quite understand. She’s had her own life’s work thrown in her face, sure. But how the other woman couldn’t see this coming, Scully will never know.
A flash of orange light and suddenly they’re not alone on the balcony.
Helen spins around. “How did you…”
“Henry lowered the shield. I apologize for the intrusion, Helen, but there is a situation that requires your attention.”
“Who the hell is this?”
The tall, bald man turns and sees Scully for the first time. “Jonathan Druitt,” he says after a moment spent studying Scully in the moonlight. “And you?”
“Dana Scully,” she says, thinking it the wiser course of action to not take his outstretched hand.
John smiles crookedly and returns his attention to Helen. “Has something happened to dear William?”
“He’s inside, John. You mentioned a situation?”
“Ah, yes. The Mumbai Sanctuary has just been attacked. Firebombed.”
“And Ravi sent you instead of using the telephone.”
“Firebombed, Helen.”
Helen sighs and gestures to Scully. “We’d best be going.”
Scully frowns, but follows the other two back inside. She doesn’t know how much good they can do if they’re needed in Mumbai. It’s not like they can catch a plane.
“Hold on,” Helen advises once they’ve gathered a small army of medical supplies.
“To -” Scully starts and then everything is orange and electric and spinning. “- what?” she finishes on the other side, the disorientation forcing her to drop to her knees.
Helen smiles despite herself. “Sorry.” She offers Scully her hand and helps her up. “The first time’s always the worst.”
“First time for what?” Scully coughs, aware that, somehow, she’s now in Mumbai. The main fires have been extinguished, but smoke still swirls in the air and a tiny flame licks its way across the remains of a couch.
“Teleporting.”
John returns them to their Sanctuary hours later. It might be days; Scully can’t read her watch through the exhaustion and she’s too tired to care. She can now say that she’s spent significant time getting up close and personal with a djinn (it hadn’t seemed inclined to offer wishes, only curses - but politely apologized that they weren’t directed at her) and been elbow-deep in the body cavity of creatures she hadn’t even heard of. They’d patched up those they could and respectfully buried those they couldn’t and now Scully really, really, wants a shower. Or bed. She’d take both at the same time, if that were possible.
They collapse on the floor of Scully’s room, sooty and sweaty and worn out and neither of them smells particularly good. On another day, Scully might wonder why Helen had followed her rather than continuing on to her own rooms.
“Rock, paper, scissors for shower?” Scully offers, knowing that ordinarily Helen would be above such childish methods of decision-making but under the circumstances Scully has no interest in doing three rounds of no, you go first.
“On three.”
Scully wins by throwing rock and takes the most amazing shower of her life. Somewhere in the second rinse of shampoo she hears the outer door open and muffled grunting, followed by Helen’s “Oh, food. Thank you.”
She doesn’t bother with clothes. The ones she’d worn into the bathroom were gifted to the garbage can the instant she peeled them off her body and the bathrobe is more than big enough to be appropriate. She assumes that she’ll be asleep inside an hour and a half.
“Did you leave any hot water?” Helen jokes when Scully emerges in a cloud of steam.
“Are those grapes?” She makes a beeline for the tray of food set on the edge of the bed while Helen brushes past her to take her own shower.
Scully must have fallen asleep, because there’s a piece of toast on her stomach and Helen is stretched out beside her, watching. Scully drops the toast back onto the tray, now on the floor, and turns on her side.
“Thank you,” Helen says after a moment.
Scully’s pretty sure she should be the one doing the thanking; even if there’s no one to say “I told you so” to, even if the entire Hoover building has crumbled to the ground with all of her reports and case files that ended with vague non-explanations of events she hadn’t been willing to commit to print, there’s some sense of validation in her heart now, that they were right all these years. But she simply smiles and hides a yawn behind her hand. “You’re welcome.”