This is quite a good story, attentively put together, with good original characters (likable or believable--maybe the word is "trustable") and a botanical fictional footnote to remind us of Scully the Scientist. As shippers gained group confidence they came to expect a hit of romance, if not sex, in their adventures. But whether or not Kipler predated that she held herself to some extent above it, crafting a gentle examination of the Mulder and Scully relationship that reminds us that they are caring and--at least in Scully's case--worried friends.

And I'm thinking that, no matter how hot and bold the sex later entered the fic picture, it did and does mean nothing without that friendship.

The final scene, with Mulder playing piano duet with the mysteriously altered child, is moving and satisfying but also a little confusing. Are readers to assume that some kind of woodland group consciousness also played with his brain cells? Or am I being over-literal?

I think fantastic fiction sometimes bumps into "literature" at this point. Is it Symbolic, or did it really happen?