"Your friend." Dean said. Sam, mistaking his sarcasm to mean "He's not MY friend", when he actually meant something more along the lines of, "Yeah, right, Sam. Like you're really his friend. The way you use him. Treat him like a messenger or a go-for. Why don't you just send him on little errands to get your dry cleaning too, Larry Tate?". Dean Winchester, permanently stuck on staple '70s television shows.
"MY friend, Castiel." Sam corrected himself mistakenly. "He's, uh, a 'specialist'. An expert of sorts... in these sorts of unsolvable cases."
"An 'expert' in what field, exactly? And, what do you mean, 'unsolvable'? We've barely started. It's been two days! How can you say this is unsolvable already?" Fox demanded.
"Agent Mulder, what I mean to say is, I don't doubt your skills as an criminal investigator, but... we're dealing with something that not even we have seen before. And we've seen some pretty strange things."
"He's right. They have." Castiel offered as proof, still not used to his word being questioned and not taken at face value. The fact that his integrity was forever shattered the very first time he told a lie, escaped his realization entirely.
"Says the guy in the trench coat. And your an 'expert' in what, exactly? I'm still waiting for answers, here, fellas." Mulder said, genuinely curious at what absurdity would inevitably be revealed next. He was really looking forward to taking off his hard soled shoes and walking around barefoot on his Best Western room's berber carpeting before taking a long hot shower before bed.
"I guess you could say I'm an expert in... the supernatural." Castiel ventured, as cleverly as he could.
"You mean, 'the occult'?"
"No. The supernatural. Anything out of the ordinary that goes above (or below) and beyond that which humans call 'natural'.
"Oh, really? Not the Occult, or Witchcraft, or Demonology, or Necromancy, but the supernatural, in general, as a whole. All of it." Fox said, thinking he was being clever, because he had noticed and made a mental not that Castiel had said 'humans' and not 'we' as if he wasn't one. "They're all crazy. I bet one of them thinks he's Napoleon, next." Fox thought.
"Yes." Cas said, deadpan.
"...Yes? Just like that? Yes? You've got to give me more than that. Even I can do better than just a simple 'yes'."
"Uh, Agent Mulder, Castiel is, um, 'special'." Sam said, skirting the issue, and inadvertently making Cas sound like he needed medication(s) to function safely in society.
"Just tell 'em, Sam. Go on. Do it! Tell him all about how 'special' Cas is." Dean said, his words dripping with sarcasm and venom.
Castiel, never one for pretending to fear personal consequences or enjoying games, stated flatly, "I'm an Angel of the Lord."
"Ha! Ha ha ha! Hahahahahahahaha! Are you guys nuts??? I mean, I have heard some really outlandish things on this case, hell, my whole career, but this? A 'bona fide' angel, right here in front of me, wearing a wrinkled shirt and a bad haircut." Dana Scully took great solace in the fact that Fox was having a hard time reconciling all of this with reality as well. The implications were enormous. Their lives would never be the same again. Never.
"I don't look like I did in Heaven. You wouldn't be able to stand to look at my true form. It would burn your eyes from their sockets. This is just a vessel."
Castiel could barely hear himself explain over Fox's now hysterical laughter. Dean, grinning ear to ear in the background, was absolutely thrilled with how all this was turning out. Even I, the Narrator, don't know if I meant that sarcastically or not. In response to Mulder's disrespectful-of-his-station derision, Castiel used his Voice, "SILENCE, HUMAN. BEHOLD. FOR I AM FROM HE WHO IS CALLED 'I AM'." and he showed Agent Fox Mulder what the phrase "put the fear of God into him" really meant.
From that moment on, Fox Mulder was convinced. If nothing else was true, Dean Winchester was a killer, and Castiel was an Angel of the Lord. And now, no longer out of the supernatural loop, he began to question whether the rest of the Winchester Bros. story might be true as well as he got himself back under control. Dana really needed Fox's calm, cool, laconic demeanor right about then. He was her anchor of choice.
"Sorry about that, Fox, but you left me little choice if we still want to save people. I have found time is always a factor with mortals." Castiel apologized.
"Now that we've spread our wings, some of us literally, can we get back to saving people and ganking baddies?" Dean said.
"I wish I could help more, Dean. But I have never seen anything like this on Earth. No monster that I've ever met did this." Castiel said.
"Well, any help at all would technically be 'more', wouldn't it, Cas?" Dean said as hurtfully as he could.
"I'm sorry, Dean. I cannot tell you what I do not know." And with that, Castiel disappeared. Mulder actually fainted. More from hyperventilating rather than shock. However, if he had stayed conscious, he would have need to change his underwear. Bladder control is a much lower priority than holding on to reality.
The next day, The Agents left their adjoining hotel rooms to drive the thirty or so miles East to meet with Deputy Sheriff Lisa Millerson outside her family's farm. The Millerson's daughter, her sister, Margie, has been identified. Through DNA records. She leads them inside through the kitchen door on the West side of the house, and into the adjoining living room to the left, in the absence of her parents, in an effort not to disturb and upset them further as they were currently making funeral arrangements in another part of the house. This is the part that Fox and Dana knew best. Asking questions and holding all the cards. Taking seats in the chairs opposite the sofa, they proceeded to chat with Deputy Millerson about the disappearance and subsequent decapitation of her twelve year old little sister.
"She was always troubled." Deputy Lisa Millerson had said when the conversation began. "Always running away, getting bad grades in school, shoplifting... little stuff. But I never thought she'd end up like this. Who could do such a thing?" She said, reaching for a tissue sticking out of the top of a floral patterned cardstock box.
"We understand how hard this must be for your, Deputy." Dana said, appealing to her human side, "But we really need answers to some very troubling questions we have concerning your sister. Do you know about the scars found on her body?"
"Or how they got there?" Fox interjected.
"Actually no. I had been wondering that myself. So much so, that I didn't recognize her. I thought it was some other little girl. I've been Margie's sister since she was three."
"So, Margie was adopted, then?" Asked Scully
"Not exactly. My dad, though a great father, wasn't always a great husband. He had an affair with a stranger, a one night stand, almost ten years ago now with some woman he picked up in a bar in Tuscon. Three years later, there she was. Dropped of on out doorstep with a note that said she was his and to have her DNA tested if he didn't believe it. That was it. No other information other than what dad says he remembers she looked like. Margie was her spittin' image, according to Daddy, at least, up until a few days ago..." she said, the water works starting anew.
"Take your time." Dana offered, not wanting to push Lisa for several reasons. Witnesses didn't tend to be very reliable when they were hysterically crying.
"sniff* Sorry."
"What else can you tell us about Margie? What kind of person was she?"
"Well, she was shy. Timid. She didn't have a lot of friends in school. She kept to herself, mostly. I used to take her down to the station with me all the time to keep an eye on her and expose her to good people that wouldn't pick on her for her shyness. The only person other than family she seemed to get along with was Sheriff Taylor. They liked to sit in his office reading together. He with police reports, her with school books. They'd just sit there for hours, reading silently together. It was really sweet of him to do that for her." Again, more tears. Her eyes had become quite puffy and red by this point.
The agents waited awkwardly but patiently for her to recover from her latest wrack of pain. Fox asked, "Do you know these people?" as he handed her a seven photographs of other kidnapping victims like her parents, as her parents entered the room behind the agents. They crossed the room to join their daughter on the couch. Taking the photographs right out of her hands, her father, George, said. "This is Silas McPhearson. He lives over on Drewry. These two I don't know (indicating the couple that had lost their son just prior to abduction and consequent decapitation of Margie Millerson), and these two are actually my neighbors, right up the road there." He said, pointing out the window at the dirt driveway that ran parallel to the state route that lead to the Millerson's farm. "Now, I know you folks got a job to do, and believe me when I say I want you to find whoever did this to my daughter, but I think that's enough for today. I'm afraid Lisa needs some time to herself, right now." He said, as Lisa, wracked with sorrow at the loss of her little sister, was weeping openly and would be of no further use as a witness. And neither Fox Mulder nor Dana Scully had the heart to push her any further.
On the car ride back into town, the two agents discussed what they had learned, and were troubled that they had reached yet another dead end. Well, more like a terminally ill end, as it was still technically alive, but as good as dead if talking to Sheriff Taylor was where the road lead.