<![CDATA[Date: Thu, 29 Jan 1998 18:56:16 -0500
Subject: Iolokus 1/18
From: mustangsally78@juno.com (MustangSally Seventy-Eight)
TITLE: Iolokus 1/18
AUTHOR: MustangSally and Rivka T
CLASSIFICATION: MSR/Mythology/X-File
CONTENT WARNING: NC-17 for sex, violence, and language (brief slash
scene)
SUMMARY: Painted across the barren and desolate reaches of Texas,
the shadows of the Project put additional pressure on Scully and Mulder's
already fragile relationship. After a hostage crisis raises more
questions about the Project's breeding program, Scully begins her own
investigation, leaving Mulder to choose between saving her and saving
himself. Finally, the investigation leads to an inevitable tragedy and
Mulder and Scully find that more questions have been asked than answered.
SPOILER WARNING: US Season five through "Emily"
DISTRIBUTION STATEMENT: The Universe at large
THE DISCLAIMER: We would appreciate not being sued. No actors were
harmed during the course of writing this story.
1
Oh, unfortunate one! Oh, cruel!
Where will you turn? Who will help you?
What house or what land to preserve you
>From ill can you find?
A god has thrown suffering
Upon you in waves of despair.
One - the oracle
And that day the hot wind blew down through the burning rocks, and over
the ground of sand. The wind, a still breath of Hell, smelling of ovens,
smelling of dust. A stray wisp of dust-smoke whipped along the gravel
ground and curled at my feet as I stared into the sun. Above me, the sky
was the color of molten bronze and a dark bird circled overhead. Behind
me I could hear the women weeping. Knotted together beneath the metal
sky, the women's faces were torn and wet.
Mybabymybabymybaby.
My baby's blood.
My baby.
The heat dried my eyes, but the women's tears outpaced the sun.
Swallowing in a dusty mouth I felt the wind lick my face like the tongue
of a lizard before I followed her.
I hate Texas. If there's anything more stubborn, obstinate, hostile, and
ignorant than a Federal Marshall, it's a fucking Texas Ranger. Rangers
with their goodamned cowboy boots and bolo ties looking at us Feds like
we're going to rape all their cattle and daughters before we piss on the
Alamo.
"In here," the head honcho Ranger yanked open the door for us. I felt as
though I was part of the invasion of Munchkinland rather than the Eleanor
Roosevelt Day Care Center for Federal Employees. As I walked through
the hallways, I smelled the ghosts of cookies, of hamsters in aquariums,
of
wheat paste, and disinfectant, breathing in the smells of a hundred
children.
As always, Scully moved at my left. Even with the wrinkles in her suit,
her face was as freshly pressed as ever.
I followed her into the room marked Nursery 1 underneath a banner of
smiling teddy bears cut from brown paper, each teddy bear marked with a
child's name. In the tot-scaled room, set up on tables that barely
topped their knees, the Hostage Negotiation Unit was busy with files and
phone lines and a blueprint of the building.
A tall African-American woman rose from a tiny
chair and held out her hand. I blinked with recognition. Agent Kazdin,
the woman who ran the Hostage Negotiation Unit from the Duane Barry
case, the gestation of the dark odyssey. She was a bitch without a
doubt, but
she was good at her job and it had only taken a month or so for my ass to
grow back after she had chewed it off.
"Agents Mulder and Scully, it's good of you to get here so quickly," she
said in a voice as crisp as her clothes.
"How did you beat us here from Washington, Agent Kazdin?" I asked and
shook her dry hand, "did you beam down?"
"Budget for emergency transportation," she said.
Yeah, they had a fucking budget while I was trying to scavenge paperclips
from VICAP. They could fly down on a fucking Lear Jet. I, however, sat in
coach with my knees pressed into my chest. At least they had to use the
kiddie desks now.
"What exactly is the situation?" Scully asked, looking around the room
with a sharp, assessing stare.
Yeah, that's Scully, down to the bone.
"At eight-fifteen this morning, William Abrams walked into the Day Care
Center with an AK-47, he shot three of the workers, killing two, and then
barricaded himself in the third nursery with twenty children under the
age of four. He called the White House and demanded to speak with the
President, the call was traced back here. At ten twenty-eight, three
shots were fired in the nursery, and Abrams refuses to talk to anyone,"
Kazdin recited with the passion of someone giving street directions.
"So why are we here?" I asked.
"He said the magic word, the word that makes Spooky crawl out of his
hole," rapped out a voice with Bronx consonants, "he said aliens."
Fuck, I thought.
"Zippy," I said.
"Spooky."
Agent Mike Zipprelli was encased in the kevlar and Velcro carapace of the
SWAT unit, which suited his sly dark eyes and gleaming black hair. He
stared at me for a moment, measuring. I'd seen him bare-assed in the
locker room at Quantico and unless he had a transplant . . .
"You left Investigation Support?"
"Party was over after you shot down Patterson," he shrugged, "I'd rather
blow the heads off these sick motherfuckers than try to think like them.
Anyway, asshole in there calls the president and tells the White House
operator that he has important information about the invasion of earth.
Now since he's been here, he hasn't said shit about aliens, hasn't been
saying much of anything since we re-routed his phone so it comes in
here."
"How far have you gotten negotiating with Abrams?" Scully asked Kazdin,
ignoring the fact that Zipprelli was looking at her as though he wanted
to know what she tasted like.
I wasn't going to tell him.
Kazdin grunted, interrupting my staredown with Zippy before we actually
whipped out the rulers. "Not very far. He hangs up whenever we call into
the nursery and all he will say is that he wants to talk to either the
President or Dan Rather."
"Dan Rather? He must be insane," Zipprelli snorted.
"What's the frequency, Kenneth?" I asked.
No one got it. I sighed, and was rewarded by one of Scully's tight-ass
teacher faces.
"I don't want to minimize the seriousness of this situation, there is a
man in there with an unknown amount of ammunition and twenty children.
We lose even one of those tykes and we are going to be up shit's creek
with the men in HQ," Kazdin rubbed her eyes for a moment and then stared
at me. "Since you're the alien man, go talk to Abrams about aliens, get
his confidence, promise him you'll take him back to the Mothership if you
have to, but get those kids out of there."
"Right," I agreed. "What do they call him?"
"What?" Kazdin frowned like I'd just asked her what color her underwear
was.
I pulled my snidest tone out of reserve and used it. Fuck you, I have a
psych degree too. "His friends. Colleagues. What name do they use when
they wish to speak to him? Is he William, is he Bill, or maybe Abe or
Spike? I'm supposed to be his friend and if I get the name wrong he could
decide I'm getting signals from the Dark Side of the Force."
She snapped her fingers and one of the agents whispered something
frantically into his headset. Moments later, he looked up. "Bill."
I nodded and Zipprelli stepped forward with a bulletproof vest.
Naturally, Zippy had tightened the vest too much and in a matter of
moments, I was sweating like a cold beer on a hot day, and I couldn't
quite draw a deep breath. I hoped that my sweat wouldn't short-circuit
the small headset and microphone Zippy had clamped on my head. The
Texas
Ranger who had followed us into the room gave a bovine snort while I
struggled into the TAC gear; the Ranger wasn't wearing kevlar. Real men
don't wear kevlar.
"She's cute," Zippy remarked after the door shut behind us.
The kevlar wouldn't help him much if I decided to break his nose.
I followed Zippy to the intersection of two hallways where the SWAT team
had set up a barricade of black plastic and fiber panels designed to
deflect gunfire. The men in their black clothes and their black hats
were like a murder of crows waiting in a cemetery. Wiping sweat-soaked
hair back from my face, I let Zippy lead me to the edge of the barricade
and pointed to indicate the door behind which Abrams had the children.
This door was surrounded by construction paper balloons labeled with the
names of the children.
Akira
Anna
Connor
Dakota
David
Devon
Jamal
Kevin
Pat
Shane
Tamika
Those were the names that I could read from where I stood and I wondered
if the balloon children were alive beyond the happy door, or had Abrams
killed any of them. There was a movie that they had showed when I was a
child, something about a red balloon that got away and had all kind of
adventures. I couldn't remember the name of the movie but I remembered
that the balloon was alive. If only I could open the window and let the
children float free, caught by the hot wind.
God, what if I screwed up? Negotiation was hardly my forte; I couldn't
even get the right order at McDonald's half the time. I wasn't a fool.
I
knew I had an irritating effect on people. If that wasn't the
understatement
of the year . . .
Now there were twenty little lives counting on me to boot. Oklahoma City
flashed through my mind, images imprinted in the consciousness of the
nation. Small bodies carried out by weeping firemen. Behind the door
of the Nursery, there was silence. No whining or weeping children. My
experience with children was limited, but I knew that they should have
been crying. The silence made my blood turn to sand my bones to stone.
"Bill. Can I talk to you?" I called.
"Fuck off," the man suggested from the other side of the door.
"I want to talk to you about the aliens," I continued.
"Did you miss the memo?" Abrams asked in a dry shade of irony, "Didn't
they tell you that I was crazy?"
"Then we have something in common. Tell me what you know."
"Why should I?"
"I've seen things," I said and began to slide along the wall towards the
door.
Zippy's hand plucked at my shoulder, but I threw off the grip and
continued to slide to the arc of balloons, the wall cool against my
cheek. The earpiece crackled in my brain, picking up voices from the
command center. I stopped to listen. "We have something," a man said, "
air duct. Runs from the roof, through the main system and into the
nursery."
"Gas?" Kazdin asked.
"Would flood the whole building. Might be toxic to the children. It's
geared for adults. I'm thinking a sharpshooter."
"Why are you telling me this and not doing it?"
"The duct is too small for any of my men."
"Will I fit?" Scully's voice asked.
I held my breath, shut my eyes.
Shit fuck.
"Every single one of these children are not real. They have been created
to destroy us," Abrams said in a calm, collected voice, sounding as
though we were having this conversation over coffee rather than through a
door with guns on both sides, "they aren't human. We're holding the
source of our own destruction close to our breast. They will weaken us
from the inside and destroy us."
"Who are they, Bill?" I asked, my fingers touching the purple pulpy
paper of a balloon marked with Tamika's name. She can't do that, she
can't crawl through the vents, she can't get caught in the dark, she
can't
try to sneak up behind this fuckhead and she can't take him out. I won't
let her. I can't.
"The ubiquitous, invisible them."
"How?"
"I was changing the junction box out on Jonestown Road. I heard the
conversation between two men. They mentioned a plan, merchandise."
Merchandise. The word was like a rock in my gut. A rock on a bruise.
2
The dark cloud of her lamentations
Is just beginning. Soon, I know,
It will burst aflame as her anger rises.
Deep in passion and unrelenting,
What will she do now, stung with insult?
Merchandise?
I heard Mulder gulp air as Abrams said it.
The word crackled through my earpiece and my brain as I followed the
quartet of Rangers up the stairwell. Why choose that word? Was it at
all possible that Abrams knew?
I had been merchandise.
They (the ubiquitous, invisible them) had stacked me and stored me and
returned me to sender.
Postage due.
The Rangers all frowned at each other, none of them liking the idea of
sending a tiny little thing like me in to do a man's job. Fuck them all,
I thought, and took the rifle that one of them handed to me. They were
damn lucky I hadn't turned my gun on the one who had held the door to the
roof open for me. I checked the rifle, looked along the sights and saw
that it was aimed well and stocked with ammunition. I wasn't planning on
getting in a firefight with Abrams, but I wanted more than one shot.
"Can you handle that? Looks a little big for you," Zippy asked.
One of the Rangers snorted and a patch of color brightened Zippy's olive
cheekbones.
"What I meant was, would you rather have a pistol?"
"I learned to shoot with a shotgun."
"You blow this motherfucker's head off and we'll stand you for as many
rounds as you can drink at Parrothead's in town," a blonde crewcut in FBI
Tac pret a porter offered.
"If this young woman wastes Abrams, we'll pick up the bar tab," the
oldest ranger grumbled.
And then they would see who has the worst hangover in the morning and
continue the male posturing. Zippy started helping me into the kevlar
vest which was designed for a man, and painfully flattened my breasts
against my ribcage.
Under my high tech armor, I started to roast in the chimney air on the
roof. A helicopter chattered overhead and sent up waves of sand the
color of crushed cork. An access panel was unhooked and a section of
roof peeled off. A black rectangle plunged into the interior of the
building. A small black rectangle. A very small black rectangle.
I started unfastening the bulletproof vest.
"Put that back on! Do you want to get shot?"
"Look, I won't fit in the shaft with this on. I won't be able to
maneuver, and there's a good possibility I'll get heat stroke. Can we
just get the harness, please?"
The harness in question was a standard mountaineering one, a man's
harness and even with the buckles pulled tight by Zippy's capable if
friendly hands, it barely fit me. By that time I had discarded my shoes
and trouser-socks as well as my jacket. The hot air dried the sweat on my
body. Finally, with the harness in place, the headset over my head, and
the rifle gripped in both hands, I let them lower me into the hole.
The air vent was metal and hot on my bare feet. Without a light, my
eyes quickly accustomed to the dark as I was lowered foot by foot into
the stomach of the building.
****
Goddamnit, I thought as I heard what was going on above my head. I have
a hard time concentrating at the best of times, but listening to Scully
breathe in my ear while I was trying to talk to Abrams was almost more
than my brain was able to handle. It's just that the breathing pattern
she had taken up in the airshaft was almost identical to the one she
adopted when we had sex. It was a little bit like having a phone-sex call
at your desk while your boss was in the office. If I walked away from
the nursery door with a hard-on a whole new "Legend of Spooky Mulder"
was going to be born that day.
"Bill, look here, you can't stay in there with the children, there's a
whole SWAT team outside who will shoot you into Swiss cheese if you
screw up. Why don't you put the gun down and come out before the
situation gets out of control."
"And it isn't out of control now?"
The bitter and salt of his words tasted too familiar to me, I'd had them
in my mouth more than once.
"It's not too late," I whispered into the sticky wood door.
"If the SWAT team doesn't kill me, then They will, if They don't I'll be
executed. Give me a good reason to give up like a good boy."
I didn't have one and Kazdin began growling some trust bullshit into my
head and I had to turn down the sound of the headset until I couldn't
hear Scully breathe anymore.
I shut my eyes and the words were so clear in my head that I can't
honestly tell you if I spoke them aloud or not.
Don't let them take you alive.
There are worse ways to die than sucking on your own gun.
I know.
Do it, Bill.
The scalpel in my stomach dug a little deeper.
****
There was light at the end of the tunnel. Literally. I could see the
light from the grate over the vent in the nursery, could hear a man's
voice muttering to himself. Since it wasn't echoed in my ear, I knew it
wasn't Mulder. I crawled forward like a snail on a hot sidewalk, leaving
parts of my body cooked to the side of the vent. They don't make
non-stick venting. The rifle was pushed under my arm and squeezed the
hell out of my left breast. No wonder the Amazons performed mastectomies
to perfect their archery.
"In position," I hissed into the tiny microphone.
With my nose up against the dirty grating, I could see Abrams' head and
shoulders above a row of plastic shelving full of bright, happy stuffed
animals. Sesame Street characters grinned at me with their empty placid
smiles. Ernie looked particularly vapid that day. In the corner of my
seriously restricted field of vision, I could make out what looked like
two small bodies on the carpet by the window. The room was so quiet. He
must have killed the children; there was no other explanation. I dragged
the rifle out from underneath my body and relaxed into a comfortable
position, my cheek alongside the stock and looked down along the sights.
Like shooting fish in a barrel.
The crosshairs lined up at the back of Abrams' head.
The bastard had killed the children.
My sweaty finger stroked the trigger and waited for the order.
****
I wondered where Scully was, if she was waiting somewhere with her
gunsights on the back of Abrams head, or my head for that matter.
"How do I know you're not one of them?" Abrams asked me.
"You don't," I admitted, "you're going to have to take my word for it."
That and a quarter will buy you a nice house with a great view of Love
Canal.
"You're right, I don't."
A rifle makes a particular noise when the bolt is drawn back, even
something like an AK-47. Despite rumors to the contrary, I actually do
not have a death wish as such.
I dove for the linoleum as the fire poured over my head.
Wood splinters and unidentifiable gore rained down from the ruined door
onto my throbbing head. All I could hear was my heartbeat and a strange
underwater gurgle that might have been voices. I raised my head and wood
chips and bloody chunks of Bill Abrams fell to the floor. Abrams' head,
looking like a Jack-O-Lantern left out on Mischief Night, bobbed through
a hole in the door big enough for a man to crawl through. But Abrams
wasn't going to be crawling anywhere again, not unless he could manage to
do it without a brain.
I stood up and what might have been a hunk of cerebellum the size of my
fist fell to the ground with a wet plop.
>From inside the room came a metallic clanging sound and I looked through
the hole in time to see Scully drop from the air vent high in the wall
with a rifle slung over her shoulder like a soldier. She picked her way
across the floor in her bare little feet to the first of the small bodies
on the carpet. I saw her touch the fragile neck to feel for a pulse. I
saw her lift the hair from the back of the child's skull and look at the
nape of the little creature's neck.
I knew what she was looking for.
I didn't want her to find it.
The pain almost made me double over. I made it to the shrunken bathroom
and leaned over the miniature sink and gave up what was left of the
airline breakfast and several cups of coffee. Afterwards I rinsed my
mouth out and crunched a pair of Tums between my molars.
A moment later, Zippy was leaning over the other bathroom sink heaving up
whatever possum pancakes passed for breakfast out here. Only then did I
feel better.
Bill Abrams was dead on the scene from a self-inflicted wound. The wound
inflicted by Agent Scully from the ventilator shaft cleanly pierced his
heart and would have killed him had he not blown the fuck out of his own
head a millisecond before.
Abrams left behind no family (none that wanted to claim him) and nineteen
dead children. It looked like--not that I wanted to take Scully's job,
but just eyeballing it--he'd strangled sixteen after he found the first
three gunshot wounds too draining. Too much blood on the scuffed tile
floor; he would have slipped and slid in it. Scully found the twentieth
child hiding underneath a pile of stuffed animals in the coat closet. I
wouldn't want to have to foot the bill for Jamal's mental heath care for
the rest of his life.
While Scully was coaxing a near-catatonic Jamal out from the closet, I
looked at the neck of the closest child. He was one of the lucky
ones--shot right off, instead of having to stand in line as his
classmates were slowly executed. There was nothing out of the ordinary,
except for a lot of blood and the fact that the kid was a stiff as a
dried cod.
The kids hadn't been merchandise.
Even while the Rangers and the other Fibbies pounded Scully on the back
in congratulation, her lips thinned and she stared at me with gas flame
eyes over a pile of dead bodies.
3
Let Innocence, the gods' loveliest gift,
Choose me for her own;
Never may the dread Cyprian
Craze my heart to leave old love for new,
Sending to assault me
Angry disputes and feuds unending;
But let her judge shrewdly the loves of women
And respect the bed where no war rages.
"While the Spookster here processes all this, you wanna go grab a beer?"
I nodded. It was all over but the paperwork. Mulder had,
uncharacteristically volunteered to write up our end of it while I
collected the gratitude of the Rangers.
"You'll be sorry," Mulder chanted in his toneless singsong from the desk.
Zippy's eyes rolled like marbles and he jerked away, making a 'crazy'
circle in the air next to his left ear. I probably shouldn't have
laughed.
The bar was charming. Beer signs, CD jukebox playing both Country and
Western and a potpourri of domestic beers on tap behind the counter, they
had Coors, Budweiser and, Bud Lite. The women eyeballing Zippy's House
of Fed suit had big hair and bigger bustlines. The Rangers and the
Fibbies
can be friends provided that there's enough to drink. Pretty shortly,
the glasses were getting emptied and the conversation was getting loud.
"So, " Zippy began, lighting a cigarette," how do you like working with
the Spookster?"
"It's far from dull."
He nodded and flashed me a brilliant smile.
"Y'know he was the youngest one in our class at Quantico, and a total
dork besides."
"And you were the star?"
"You know it babe," he gave me the orthodontist's fantasy smile again.
Zippy flagged down the barmaid for my third beer while he was waiting for
her to fill the mug from the tap, he pulled down his tie and unbuttoned
the top two buttons of his dress shirt. There, against the arabesques of
his collarbones rested a heavy filigree crucifix, catching the light from
the neon over the bar. I stared at the buttery light. Of course he was
Catholic, he was Italian and naturally he would wear a cross and he
probably had a St. Jude medal on his key chain, the patron saint of
policemen and hopeless causes. When he pushed the beer towards me, his
bright denim eyes caught my gaze.
"Gift from my Grandma, I was an altar boy," he said with a
self-deprecating little smirk.
I wanted to reach out and touch it, but instead I clamped my hand down
around the cold glass and let the ice-brew flow down to my own cold
center.
"What's the matter?" he asked.
I almost spit beer all over his nice shirt.
"What?"
"You look so sad."
"I'm fine, Zippy."
The palm of his hand was warm on my cheek, Mulder's hands are always so
cold, and I wanted to just roll over and surrender, touch something
normal, touch something simple, uncomplicated that wouldn't poison me
afterwards. I saw Ed Jerse's face over Zippy's for a moment, and I jerked
out of his touch so fast that I knocked over my beer.
"Autopsy tomorrow," I babbled, realizing that I'd taken the same witless
staccato tone that Mulder gets, "I have to go."
I rose and he didn't stop me. I felt his molten eyes on me as I left.
****
I was nearly finished with the case files when Scully returned, mad as a
cat after its yearly flea dip. She marched over to the tiny table where I
was and slammed the laptop's screen down, forcing it into sleep mode.
Scully was by no means ready for sleep mode.
When she bent down to kiss me I could taste Zippy's sweat on her, but she
didn't smell like sex, just beer and cigarette ashes.
Normally she's fully feline, never giving more than the subtlest
clues to her desires, the flicker of an expression, tilt of an eyebrow,
all tiny bits of information to be assembled into a coherent whole. It's
my
job, and with Scully I can still get it wrong. I can still blunder, a
slow-witted
mongrel, into her roomful of cut glass and cut myself to death. But this
time
she was tossing me a big-ass hint that she wanted to get laid.
I'd have to think about it.
The fact that I was her creature didn't mean that she should be too
confident
of that fact. Zippy had touched her, she'd let Zippy touch her, which
constituted loitering with intent as far as I was concerned even if she
hadn't
followed through on it. Obviously something hadn't clicked and she was
back to her good ol' standby, fucking Fox Mulder. (And I mean "fucking"
as
a gerund, though she probably thought of it as an adjective.)
I hoped that she'd led Zippy on until he'd gotten the world's worst case
of blue balls and then laughed at his pencil-slim dick. Scully wasn't
averse to taking the easy shots.
I was ready to hurt her now.
"Did you have a good time?" I asked as though she hadn't just tried to
suck my tonsils out of my head.
She shrugged. She knew I'd imagine the two of them--the rest of the
agents were paper dolls, irrelevant--in the smoky bar, listening to the
stupid wails of some heroin-glazed singer pretending to be in love, the
amber bite of the alcohol and how it would erase the edges of the day.
Bodies moving at the edge of their vision, reminding them that they could
just go back to Zippy's place and fuck like lemmings.
Bunnies, I mean.
I wasn't done yet. "I just don't want you to be hung over. What with the
autopsies tomorrow morning? Less room for error with children, isn't
there?"
"Apparently not where you're concerned."
Yep. Straight to the balls. I guess she was too jet-lagged to bother
batting me around the hotel room for fun before she administered the
killing bite.
The mouse bites back.
"You either, for that matter."
Blinking like a cat too close to a candle flame, Scully stared at me for
a moment. I stared back the best that I could but with those eyes of
hers it sometimes feels like staring into the moon for too long. I
reached for her, wanting to make her apologize, admit that she had been
wrong to go drinking with Zippy, and to punish her for it. She tasted of
salt when I ran my mouth over the sweat-damp landscape of her throat.
Her fingers twisted into my hair as though she was trying to open my head
like the top of a Snapple bottle.
"Be *nice*," I warned her.
I got a bitten lip for that one.
I slapped her hands away from my head and she gave me a poisonous glare.
I swear to God if I ever hit a woman, it's going to be Scully. She can
get me from mellow to psychotic faster than a Porsche on a test track.
Yanking on her wrists, I pulled her down onto my lap. One of the things
that I frequently forget about Scully is that she is so tiny and so
delicate that I could probably snap her neck with my hands, provided that
she didn't blow my head off first. I sucked on her neck, tasting her hot
skin and deliberately leaving a possessive mark. She didn't complain at
the scraping of my teeth, only arched her back against me and dug her
fingers into my shoulders. I slid down her throat, pulling her shirt up
with fumbling, stiff hands and caught her breasts through the framework
of her bra. She must have been planning to fuck Zippy since she had a
no-nothing cradle of black cobweb and wire hanging onto her breasts like
a bad memory.
Asshole that I am, I backed her down onto the tiny table which wobbled
dangerously under our combined weight. She shimmied out of her trousers
and her panties, which ended up somewhere over my left shoulder, and I
have no idea what happened to her blouse and bra. But she was lying there
gold, pink, white and glowing in the yellow light from the bedside lamp,
her head dripping off the edge of the table and her legs tight around my
hips. Scully grabbed the tongue of my tie and pulled me down onto her.
Lines of control were getting thinner and harder to maintain.
Her mouth was like a pencil sharpener, grinding away on my lips and
tongue on the pleasure/pain border. Fingers scrabbled at my back, my
ass, the fly of my pants, and finally reached for my cock and decanted it
with more enthusiasm than grace. Her breasts were under my hands, I was
buried in her up to what felt like the base of my spine and she was
rocking underneath me. God, she was too much, too tight, too wet, too
active around me, and it had been months since she let me touch her.
I lasted about five minutes, if that, until I came with a sloppy
thunderclap and slid on top of her. She gave a little moan of
disappointment and I moved to make amends with my mouth and hands.
Eventually she snapped taut as a fishing line with a ten pound bass at
the other end, and I heard her triumphant gasping through the surround of
her thighs.
Somehow, we made it into the bed and I lay there with her curled around
me like the most innocent of kittens snuggling with a favorite toy, while
I
tried to figure out why I was markedly NOT HAPPY. As a matter of fact, I
was feeling drained in a way that had little to do with sex.
My lovely little vampire love, she bleeds me.
Literally, sometimes.
Not long ago, she almost bled me to death.
San Diego. I never want to go back there again. I spent too many hours
at that damn hospital watching the child/not child dying muscle by
muscle, watching Scully's face get thinner and more transparent moment by
moment. She became her own reflection in the glass of the isolation
chamber. Then I was banished, sent outside like a bad puppy to wait. I
sulked on one of the standard hospital-issue plastic chairs until my
brain went as numb as my ass. Or my ass went as numb as my brain,
whatever.
Finally, she wafted out of the isolation chamber, a Sarah Bernhardt
Hamlet with her cropped amber hair, her black suit over narrow shoulders
and slim legs, her face made of eggshell. I stood up. Her lips were
pressed into a red ink line. Hardly slowing her pace, she pulled at my
coat sleeve and clipped along while I loped to keep up. The final
destination was a handicapped accessible bathroom off an empty conference
room, I'll never know how she knew it existed. With a hard hand at the
small of my back she shoved me into the dark box of the bathroom, pulling
the door shut behind us. For a moment it crossed my mind that she might
have been one of the shape-shifters, until she grabbed the hair at the
back of my skull and dragged my mouth down on hers. I'd know her taste
in my dreams, on my deathbed, in the deepest unconscious state, and the
worst of soap-opera amnesia. Pulling at me, ripping her blouse out of
the waistband of her pants, dropping her jacket on the floor, biting at
my lips, and pulling my hands onto the hard heat of her breasts.
I don't have that much self-control. The second my sluggish neurons made
the connection, I was groping her like a teenager out of sight of the
chaperons. My cock was harder than a fifteen-year-old's, when she
slithered up onto the washbasin, her naked ass in my hands, and my pants
at my ankles, I surrendered.
Like she had to twist my arm.
Frantic, she was, heaving against me, in a jagged rhythm, her breath hot
and wild in my ear, squeezing my cock inside her, wet and endlessly tight
around me. Her heels bit my spine, her fingers pierced my rib cage and
she rocked back and forth. The only sound she made was a series of sharp
pants, like those of a person in pain, and when she would climax, her
entire body would seize up and vibrate like a struck tuning fork. I
think she must have come three times in that bathroom and I know it had
more to do with her frame of mind than my prowess. I'm not that naive.
When the orgasm finally hit me and turned my spine and my brain into a
pulsing laser beam of sensation and cleansing mindlessness, I felt a
strange sense of gratitude that she'd let me come at all.
The moment that my exhausted member fell out of her, she wiggled off the
washbasin and began to feel around for her clothes. Throbbing and
brain-dead, I listened to her move around the little dark room.
"W-what the hell?"
"She's dead."
I heard a zipper hiss shut.
"Emily is dead. I have to get all the hospital paperwork and make the
funeral arrangements. I'll call you once the particulars are planned."
She shut the door behind her, leaving me in the darkness. When I could
think I washed my face and rinsed my mouth from the thin warm stream
from the tap. California has a water shortage and the water was sluggish
and metallic and I spat again and again until my mouth was dry.
I could still taste her.
In the artificial air-conditioned Austin hotel air, so dead and distant
from San Diego, I could feel the pain all over again, like I'd just
discovered it. A thousand pounds of pressure and silver knives. Something
was in my spine, pulling apart each nerve fiber, shredding axons and
dendrites.
In California I'd learned that I'd made a terrible mistake. The Scully I
carried around inside me, whispering logic and somehow still managing to
drown out all the other voices in my head, the one who'd eaten me whole
and accepted it all--she was my own invention. I needed her, and I
thought I'd found her. She needed a quick fuck, and she thought she'd
found it. The only difference was, she was right.
The sad thing was that I understood her reasons with more clarity than I
could discover for my own.
****
The next morning, I was sitting at my borrowed desk, trying to write a
coherent profile and waiting for Scully to return from the autopsy bay
where she was checking personally to see whether any unusual scars or
lumps had been missed on the victims.
"You should have warned me," was the first thing Zippy said to me when he
walked in.
Shit, someone should have warned me.
I shrugged. I guess he meant that I should have encouraged him; that way
he would have known that Scully was, how shall I say it, difficult.
"I know you two are sleeping together."
I looked up at him, genuinely surprised. "What gives you that idea?"
"I saw it in your eyes when she walked out of that schoolroom," he said.
My eyes, not hers. My lover's eyes are nothing like the sun; they are
black
holes and no light escapes them. "I'm not as smart as you are but I've
got good instincts."
"Your good instincts didn't keep you from taking Scully to a bar last
night."
"Yeah, well, the little head and the big head disagreed on that."
"Which is which for you?"
"Fuck you," he said, but his heart wasn't in it. "Here's a list of the
families if you want to go ask them how many times they've seen 'Close
Encounters of the Third Kind.'"
****
There was an instructor at Quantico who thought that Robin Williams was
funnier than nitrous, and he'd start every 9am class off with the rousing
cry,
"I love the smell of formaldehyde in the morning!"
I, on the contrary, hate the smell of dead people. The only good thing
the
cancer did for me was deaden my sense of smell. The various salves that
most people use make me break out, and I refuse to walk around with a
little
red mustache all the time. So I deal with the smell like I deal with
everything, I get through it.
We did the children first, like on a sinking ship.
Bill Abrams suspected that the children at the Roosevelt center were
hybrids
just as Emily had been.
He was wrong.
None of the little corpses revealed the green tumor's growth at the base
of the skull or any of the strange pseudo-capillaries that Emily had
exhibited. Not that I knew for sure, the bastards had stolen her body as
well. But these dead children were terribly normal -- as normal as can
be
expected when a high-powered rifle bullet passes through immature tissue
and organs or when strangulation blackens the face with blood, causing
petechial hemorrhages under unwrinkled skin so young and fresh adult
women would kill to have it. There were going to be nineteen closed
coffins.
When we finished with them, despite all the care I'd taken, there was
blood
everywhere. Nineteen bodies adds up, even if they're just kids. Blood on
the
floor, on the outdated porcelain tables, dripping thickly down the scales
used to weigh organs, smearing across the chalkboard used to record data.
The chalk was so bloody that I had to break a piece in half to get
something
that would actually write, and even then the blood had soaked in a pink
ring
around the white center.
The children, contrary to Abrams' claims, were just ordinary dead
American
kids. On the other hand, Abrams himself exhibited many of the strange
scars
left on Duane Barry's body. Naturally. I found no implants.
Naturally they had covered everything up with a thin veneer of normalcy.
So I covered everything up with my own thin layer.
But what if those children had been merchandise? What if they had been
like Emily, captive by their own misbegotten conception? What if they
had
been my children?
The children whose possibility had been stolen from me.
The ova that They had harvested from my senseless body were in the world
somewhere open to any abuse or misuse that They decided.
I had to stop that. I had to get back what had been taken from me or
prevent
Them from using my ova by destroying each and every reproductive cell
that had been stolen from me.
No short and painful Emily-lives anymore. I'd rather have no progeny
than
another child suffer the way she had.
I wasn't sure what I was going to do.
Stripping off the gloves and gown, I dropped them into the biohazard bin
in
the Morgue and headed outside. The Texas sun warmed the death chill out
of my flesh as I stood next to one of the clerical workers who was
smoking a
cigarette in the parking lot. She looked over at me and took in the
splashes
of blood on my sneakers and the bottoms of my scrub pants.
"The kids?" she asked
"Yeah."
She held out a pack of Morleys and I almost laughed.
Twenty little bodies. It was a new record.
The smoke tasted better than I remembered and it cleared the formalin
taste
out of my mouth, replacing it with the taste of incipient death.
One of the rental fleet cars pulled up and Mulder got out his blackened
sunglasses catching a flare of sunlight, his dark suit blowing in the hot
wind.
"Anything?" he asked me, staring at the cigarette in my hand.
"Nothing. And you?"
"Nothing. None of the children were adopted. Abrams must have had a few
wires crossed."
I shut my eyes and the sunlight burned flame orange through my closed
lids.
"Are you all right, Scully?" he asked in a soft voice.
"I'm fine, Mulder."
4
There's something that she means to do; and I know this:
She'll not relax her rage till it has found its victim.
God grant she strike her enemies and not her friends!
When we got back to D.C. I began to pull myself away from the reactivity
I'd settled into, the inactivity a thin scab over a wound.
Rouch, Rouch, Rouch.
It sounded like a noise that a dog made before it threw up on the carpet.
A thickened bark. As I flipped through the file on Emily that Mulder
had written in his hurried printing, jagged here and there, showing that
it had been written in cars, on airplanes and probably while he was
sitting on the toilet, I realized that I had never looked at the file
before. I hadn't wanted to know and part of me was still pretending that
it had never happened. The black rollerball words made it all real. The
bare narrative in Mulder's somewhat lurid style brought the whole thing
back to me with a clarity and a pain that I hadn't felt while it was
happening to me.
I shoved the file back in the cabinet before Mulder came back from the
copier. I suppose I might have had a strange look on my face as he
walked in, because he tilted his head to the side in his befuddled puppy
fashion before slumping into his desk chair and dragging his tie through
the puddle of spilt coffee in the blotter. I retreated to my "work area"
and started entering receipt costs into the expense spreadsheet in my
laptop.
I wondered what Skinner would do if I put in a request for reimbursement
for Emily's funeral.
But let me explain.
They (of the ubiquitous, invisible them) had stolen something from me.
They stole the future. Not content with just making La Familia Mulder
miserable for the rest of eternity, They decided that my future was going
to walk a parallel path. While I was missing, abducted, whatever you
want to call it, they managed to steal every last one of my ova. There
were no scars, no marks, no clues other than an irregular menstrual cycle
(which was par for the course with me). When I began chemotherapy for
the cancer that was an alleged side-effect of removal of the implant in
the back of my neck, my oncologist suggested that I go in and try to have
my ova harvested as the chemo would treat the cells as though they were
cancerous.
Imagine my surprise when I found that I had no ova to harvest.
I had to replace my everyday dishes after I went on a rampage through my
apartment, destroying everything that had a satisfying crash. The
wineglasses I reduced to a fine powder on my kitchen floor and I broke
enough mirrors to continue my bad luck well into the next century, if you
believe in that kind of thing.
Not only had They stolen my ova, but They had used them to create some
strange half-human hybrid, the child known as Emily. My daughter. The
daughter that I only had for a few short weeks and who died in my arms
since she was not suited to live in this world.
Needless to say this upset me.
But I continued on like the good little soldier that I am, brave little
Scully with her gun and her badge trotting loyally alongside Mulder into
one half-assed mess after another. I didn't cry, I didn't mourn, I
continued. I showered, did my hair, dressed, put on my make-up and drove
to work each day where I felt like I was watching the rest of the world
through the glass of an isolation chamber.
I sat across from Mulder in the basement office, the muscles in my inner
thighs still aching from the sex we'd had in Austin. Good old Mulder, he
always throws himself into the matter at hand as long as it interests
him. Apparently I interest him. In a way, he interests me. Not the way
that I think he imagines, but he interests me nevertheless.
Rouch.
Rouch interested me greatly.
A hasty search on the Internet had revealed that Rouch had an office in
Austin, ostensibly for sales, but one had to wonder when one was dealing
with Them. I needed to know more. Mulder would have contacted the
Gunmen, gone to their "no girls allowed" clubhouse and gotten the
information, or called his latest gift from the Informant of the Week
Club. I wasn't about to go begging Frohike for anything, the little
troll would probably expect to get some head in return.
Finally, Mulder noticed that he was mopping up the desktop with his tie
and exited, swearing, stage right.
I pounced on his Rolodex, looking for anything out of the ordinary.
What I found to be out of the ordinary, was a woman's name. The Rolodex
was as much as a boy's club as the rest of his life, and the name popped
out like a squeezed eyeball.
Marita.
I had the number committed to memory before he got back.
****
I was starting to feel like I was standing at the dock waving good-bye to
the Lusitania.
It was fairly obvious to even someone with his head as far up his ass as
I do that Scully was up to something. She was making me itch as though
my clothes were filled with fiberglass. I spilled my coffee, dropped
files, knocked my hip on an open drawer and generally acted like a
teenager while she sat with her La Giaconda smile over her laptop. This
was the situation where I wanted to bash her head into a pulp and take
carnal revenge on her unconscious body. It occurs to me now that I
should have taken advantage of the situation when she was in a coma years
ago.
I never claimed to be normal, but at least I'm self-aware enough to know
that I am not. Self-aware enough to keep my thoughts at a fantasy level
rather than acting them out. Most of the time, anyway.
The Rolaids were losing the battle against the coffee and I had to
retreat to the bathroom to vomit for the second time that day. Maybe if
I had eaten something healthier than the greasy doughnut I'd gnawed on
the Metro that morning I would have felt better. When I came out of the
stall, Danny was standing at the urinal getting rid of his coffee in the
more accepted fashion.
"Fox-Man, you look like shit," he greeted me.
"Fuck you," I said and began sluicing water over my face.
"Partying too much again?" he asked and zipped up, which reminded me of
something.
"I saw Zippy in Texas," I said and rinsed my mouth out with the chemical
cocktail that passes for water in DC.
"Yeah? How's the motherfucker doin'?"
Zippy, Danny, and Spooky all went through Quantico together, in the sexy
days of the late eighties, giving rise to a lot of Top Gun jokes.
Despite his last name, Danny was a tall Aryan blonde courtesy of the
North of Italy and played the Iceman role, Zippy was our Tom Cruise,
which left me as Goose with the mark of doom on me. Now Danny was
permanently attached to a computer, Zippy had a Velcro fetish and I had
problems of my own. A far cry from our spiky buzz-cut and Ray Ban days.
"'His ego's writing checks that his body can't cash', other than that
he seemed fine. I don't think he misses us."
Danny grunted. "Hey," he asked, remembering something and looking at me
more carefully than you usually want to have happen in a men's bathroom,
"you got a brother?"
If you lived in my world, you'd understand my answer.
"Not that I'm aware of."
"I was watchin' CNN the other day and they had some news conference
about a drug that the FDA doesn't want to approve, and the guy from the
drug company looked a hell of a lot like you. Except he was
good-lookin'."
I faked a laugh.
"Poor bastard. You didn't catch the name of the drug company, did you?"
"Nah, one of the kids was kickin' up a fuss and Marie was bein' a real
bitch about it. The joys of family life. Catch you later Fox-man."
"Later."
When I got back to my office Scully was looking serene which made me
itch even more. There was no oxygen in the room and I needed to think.
What the fuck was going on with her now, what the hell was a guy with my
face doing on CNN (although knowing Dad you could guess the obvious,
Mom wasn't the only one who needed a cheat sheet to figure out who she
should be expecting in her bed), and I really wanted to go on-line and
find
out if the drug company in question was my good old friend Roush.
I needed to get rid of Scully for an hour at least.
"Scully, did you happen to pick up that murder case file from the MPD
that Skinner wanted me to look at? Fucking MPD can't do shit anymore."
"No."
"Do you mind? I've got to get this expense report crap out of the way
before they start attaching my paycheck."
The MPD ME's office was annoyingly far away and I never would have sent
her under normal conditions. Rather than giving me an argument about it,
she closed her laptop and picked up her sunglasses.
"Want me to get you a sandwich while I'm out?"
"Uh, no thanks."
She nodded and left, frightening me through to my spine.
I logged onto the 'net and waited for the CNN site to come up. While I
was waiting, I reached for the phone planning to put in a call to Marita
and see if she knew anything about this FDA deal and the man that looked
like me.
My Rolodex was already open to her number.
A two by four of nausea hit me in the back of the head but I dialed
anyway.
Voice Mail.
"This is Marita Covarrubias. I'll be out of the office all day. If this
is an emergency, please reach me at my cell phone number-"
While her silky voice recited the numbers, I watched the CNN site come
up.
The drug company was Rouch. The press conference was in DC and I
would have bet my last antacid that Marita was slithering around
somewhere nearby.
The snake chewed at my entrails.
5
God, and God's daughter, justice, and light of Helios!
Now, friends, has come the time of my triumph over
My enemies and now my foot is on the road.
Now I am confident they will pay the penalty.*
Marita was not what I had expected. I'd talked to her on the phone when I
was running Mulder's little administrative errand, before they started to
sleep together and he'd decided that the two of us should never meet.
How do I know they slept together? Oh, please. After all this time
together, I just knew. It was in the way he'd sit in our office on the
mornings after, just a little looser, a little more slumped. The
guilty-gloating looks he'd give me, liquid eyes shifting like mercury
then freezing at my subzero glare.
I'm confident that after l'affaire Goldstein he didn't go back to her.
Each time we have a crisis, Mulder finds some new betrayal to work on me.
In his infinite transparent soul, lies are just promises he found he
couldn't keep. But his body, unlike his mind, is a temple; my temple.
I've written my name on it in gunshots and stitches. I've traced runes
above it and bound him with a handshake. This is the only thing I know:
he didn't sleep with her after we got back from Massachusetts.
I thought about it as I waited for Marita to arrive at the cafe at the
East Wing of the National Gallery of Art. I sipped my coffee and looked
down into the main hall below, where tourists milled, determinedly
getting their dose of DC culture, as if sculpture had anything to do with
government. Reviewing my first time with Mulder made sense, because it
was one of the main things Marita and I had in common. The two of us were
quite a pair: Mulder's sidekick and his informant, his seraglio.
I'd taken Mulder back to his apartment. I drove the car he'd stolen from
me and through the long drive, hours of grinding my foot against the gas
pedal as if I could smash his face in with my pointy shoe, he hadn't said
a damn thing. He was pretty doped up thanks to the friendly ER doctors,
whose eager drug-drenched hands he'd been unable to resist as he was
still surfing the ketamine wave.
The plan was to set him down and get out of there before I took my own
gun out and showed *him* what it was like to have someone--your partner,
to be exact--re-enact William Tell with a Sig Sauer and you as the
stammering target, sans apple. I had to take his hand to get him out of
the front seat, and I almost didn't have the strength. It might have been
the chemo I'd been covertly and sporadically engaging in, my little
secret drug habit, not that I really needed to take affirmative steps to
hide it in the previous few months even before Mulder headed out to
Neptune via Air Goldstein. The weakness made me even more furious and I
hauled him up the stairs. He was blinking and trying to look around him,
but he was moving his head too slowly to see much of anything.
I flicked the locks, one, two, three, and dragged him in. Then over to
the couch where I pushed him down as easily as brushing a shower curtain
aside.
I leaned over to touch the scab right under his hairline and he flinched,
bringing a hand up to stop my inspection. I pulled away, angry at him for
resisting and for leaving me and for getting a hole in his head in the
first place so that all attention had to be focused on him until he was
better. I would have told him about the cancer metastatizing if he hadn't
run off, if I hadn't found him naked and cowering in a bathtub. Really I
would have.
I drew in a breath to start the lecture and he looked at me and winced
again, already hearing the accusatory words--not that it would take
Mulder's near-psychic powers to know what was coming. He caught my
wrist again, tugging me toward him. My knees rested precariously on the
edge of his Playboy-era black leather couch and I could barely keep my
feet
on the ground against his leverage.
He twisted and pulled, very gently, and suddenly I was sitting across his
lap, his free arm rising around my back to prevent me from toppling over
and our joined hands extended as if we were going to get up and dance
around the room. I could see the scabs clearly now; little dried flakes
of black blood stuck off from the main wounds and the flesh around the
entry points was puckered and swollen, though not badly enough to
indicate infection.
His mouth bled heat onto mine.
My hands were at his throat, whether to strangle him or push him away I
honestly did not know, and then his head lolled back faster than I could
follow and he looked at me, curiously, waiting.
I gaped at him. I'd never thought that he would make the first move,
especially not now. Not now that I was dying and certain to leave him
shortly. And not now in particular when he'd just got through
hallucinating and had nearly killed at least one of the two of us in his
drugged haze. He smelled, I noticed, of stale sweat and a hint of iodine.
His eyes blanked for a moment, his face relaxing, and I knew he was
experiencing a flashback from the ketamine and the other, still
unidentified drugs that the butcher had used on him. A mental landside,
images twisting and curling in the fire of his past.
This was a bad idea. He was not well, not even at Mulder-normal, not
sane.
He returned to the present and his eyes flashed shock that I was on his
lap--he'd lost the last few minutes before the mini-seizure, and I knew
all over that this was a bad idea.
His hand slid up, over the curve of my back, engulfing my shoulder. I
leaned into it.
I felt the cancer move in my head, smiling at him. Yes, it said, come and
play. To me it whispered: Relax, Dana, all God's children gotta fuck.
What will it be like to slip away in morphine and bedsores knowing that
you never had him?
And he pulled me to him. My thighs shifted on the bones of his legs,
burning beneath me. His eyes were open as our lips met, and as I closed
my own to enter into the necessary darkness I was certain he'd be
watching me the entire time.
This was a terrible idea.
His lips were gentle on mine as he ran his right hand down the line of my
throat, tickling the pulse there where the cancerous blood jerked and
trembled. With his left hand, he pulled me closer as my mouth opened.
His tongue was wet sand and I bit at it until I could taste his blood.
The Lost Weekend, as I like to call it, followed. That's when I learned
what
it's like to be Mulder, living with the omnipresent knowledge that you
have,
very recently, screwed up in a very major way. Every minute was as dark
and rich and sweet as fine chocolate, made both bitter and better by my
knowledge that Mulder and I understood what was happening in very
different ways. This is the vortex of self-knowledge that I've
discovered: I
got an extra kick out of my emotional distance in the face of Mulder's
obvious commitment, and then an dose of guilt for being so cruel, and
then
the guilt fed the sexual pleasure. It was really quite a wonderful thing
to find
out about myself, and someday I'll have to thank Mulder for it.
Throughout all of it I took deep delight in puzzling out the quirks and
tender
places in my partner's body. His cheerfully lecherous jokes, his
leech-like
cuddling after sex, the fact that his socks were the first clothing
article he
took off and the last one he put on. The fact that his skill at oral sex
made
him worth his weight in gold.
I should have told him then that it was wrong to call out my name as
though I were the cold orb of the moon he was howling to. However, it's
hard to be analytic and rational when your vocabulary has drained away
and
you're left with monosyllabic sighs and grunts, with a few time-tested
Anglo-Saxon words for variety.
And the honeymoon had been wonderful, once we'd sorted out the
unpleasantness with Kritschgau. That ridiculous comic-book romance, the
failed partnership retreat--those weeks at the end of 1997 were almost
perfect, almost what I would write if I could write the X Files myself. I
was
in remission and I allowed myself to imagine that Mulder and I could just
keep on as we were and I'd never have to explain to him or myself what I
thought burned between us.
San Diego exploded my life like the comet at Tunguska.
But I was getting over it. I'd let Mulder back into my bed, hadn't I?
Well,
back onto a hotel table, but let's not quibble. And Marita was going to
help
me close this latest sad chapter of my life.
Marita arrived only ten minutes late. I could tell that it was her by the
eau de
conspiracy she wore like a blue haze of smoke around her shoulders.
They were lovely shoulders; I could see why it had been easy for Mulder
to fuck her. And, since he could be absolutely confident that she had a
hidden agenda, there'd be no real need for mistrust.
She coiled gracefully down into the chair opposite me.
"Agent Scully?" Her voice was hot chocolate with whipped cream, the
words blurred by some unfathomable accent. Blue eyes glittered like poker
chips; time to ante up.
"I need some information. Information about a research project that I was
unwillingly made part of. I had to attend to some of the consequences of
that project in San Diego recently. I need to know if there are
other...consequences as yet unaccounted for. I believe that companies
known as GenTech and Roush are involved. I want names--who owns
controlling shares, who's in charge, where they can be found. Where the
remaining research facilities are located."
She stared at me. I grew angry. Angrier. How dare she look at me as if
she knew what I was just because I'd been an unwilling subject of the
machinations of powerful men? Just because I'd had my future stolen. She
thought she could read me like an airport mystery and I could feel my
face thin out, the anger ready to explode.
Finally she looked away, out at the Calder mobile swinging gently in the
artificial breeze. The thousands of pounds of brightly painted metal
bobbed above the tourists milling through the atrium below, and one blue
plate couldn't have been more than ten feet away from the table at which
we sat. I imagined the mobile coming loose from its moorings, crashing
down as the tourist-ants scampered, mothers trying to snatch their
children away but failing, failing.
"I think I can find that out for you," she said in that furry butter
tone, so rich it had to be a put-on, and I didn't process the content for
a few seconds. She was already rising, sleek and confident, and she
leaned back down and whispered into my ear. "Do not attempt to contact me
again. You'll hear from me when I have information of use to you."
I looked for a discarded skin or a few iridescent scales on the seat
she'd left behind, which was still radiating her body heat, but there was
nothing.
6
I have often engaged in arguments
And become more subtle, perhaps more heated,
Than is suitable from women;
Though in fact women too have intelligence,
Which forms part of our nature and instructs us -
Not all of us, I admit; but a certain few
You might perhaps find, in a large number of women
A few not incapable of reflection.
I was losing her. She was drifting away from me faster than the cancer
had taken her. Damn, it was so fucking cruel, to have her back and
healthy and now -- she was buying a ticket on the Disoriented Express.
It's a nice trip, I suggest everyone take a ride at least once. Gives
you some perspective. It was such a cosmic joke. The planets finally
aligned correctly and for "one brief shining moment" we were together, a
functioning unit in the field, and a couple in bed. Then it was gone.
Had I imagined the whole thing?
The first moment she walked into my office years ago in her ugly suit
with her too-earnest face and her frumpy haircut, I was a dead man. You
could have dragged me around a beach house and called it "Weekend at
Mulder's". From the beginning, I've had a thing about intelligent women.
Smart is sexy. Phoebe and I had planned on getting married and raising
our own little serial killers one day, and, like all intelligent women,
in
the end she did me a serious injury. When we parted she took a chunk of
my heart and all my Clash records. So when little Dana Scully tiptoed
into my hotel room with her mosquito bites, I could have come in my pants
like a kid. But I declared her off-limits, spending the nights with the
Video Vixens and shooting putty at the moon while I thought about the way
her skin smelled. Truth to be told, I had the sinking suspicion that her
sexual interest in me was less than zero, no pun intended. I also
suspected that she didn't like me very much most of the time.
But--
But that night when she took me home, my brain still swirling like a
Slurpee dispenser at the 7-11, I looked at her pale little face and it
was the hotel room with the mosquito bites again. My tripping brain was
transposing her then face with her now face and I heard crickets outside
even though it was winter. She looked so sad and so delicate that I
wanted to -- I wanted to open her up like a bag of fresh-ground coffee
and
inhale her. I wanted to bury my face in her hair and never come up for
air again. I wanted her to save me.
I pulled her onto my lap and I felt her cool blue gaze spray across my
face when I touched her. She didn't move when I finally kissed her. It
was one of the kisses that should go down in the great kisses of history,
simply because of the finality of it. After five years, after a million
road miles, a thousand cheap hotel rooms, a hundred incidents that left
both of us weak and shaking. Yes, this was it!
And she was dying so if she decided that she was going to hate me for the
rest of her life the torment would be short.
I half-expected her to go through the corny routine of slapping me.
Instead, she seized the sides of my face and kissed me back with a
violence that left the holes in my head stinging. There on the couch, my
fingers worked their way under her sweater to her hot, sweet skin. Her
ribs were hard under my fingers and her heart was beating like a trapped
squirrel's. Cupping her hot breasts in my hands, I experienced a
drug-heightened epiphany that threatened to remove what was left of my
brain. I ran my lips over the stretches of her throat and drank her in,
her fingers digging hard into my aching back. All she did was gasp. I
was drunk with her when I finally began to peel away the wrapper of her
clothes and laid her down on the black sofa, her skin burning with
phosphorescence in the dull light of the room. Scully's body is a
marvel. You don't understand that the business suits cover so much.
There were red weals in her shoulders from her bra straps as she bound
herself like Olivia playing Ganymede, but her breasts were full, her
waist exquisitely tiny and her hips and belly flaring out with geometric
precision.
I didn't just make love to her -- I worshipped her.
I polished every centimeter of her body with my hands, with my mouth,
with my body. She tasted of cookies and, ultimately, she tasted of the
sea. I sucked her lips, nipples, fingers, toes, and she sighed and
moaned all the while her skin so white on the blackness that she was a
ghost. My hand between her legs, I kissed her mouth and swallowed all
of her moans, I swallowed the salty tang of her climax twice before I
even took off my shirt. I fumbled off my clothes while she clung to my
back like Spanish moss, wet with sweat and come, her fingers in my hair,
her teeth grazing the back of my neck. I sat on the sofa with my cock
tall enough to raise a flag on, and pulled her down onto it. I ground
my teeth, looked into the distant reaches of the galaxy within her eyes,
feeling her enclose me, her breasts against my chest and her hands
gripping my shoulders. I don't know how I lasted more than a minute
inside her, maybe it was a side-effect from the drug but I stroked and
ground into her until she was limp as paper on a humid day, her wet hair
sticking to my face, her deliciously tight pussy gripping me. Somehow
she came again, sobbing against my face, and that finally tripped the
circuit breaker in my head and I shot into her for five years of
frustration and longing.
I wept.
Okay, Hallmark commercials make me weep but this was different, really.
That was a lost three days, lost in skin, sweat, smells, and sex. We
worked through the Karma Sutra forwards and then backwards, pausing
only to eat take-out Chinese, bathe, and sleep. I recuperated from my
experience with Doctor Goldstein very quickly that way. Time stretched
elastic until she finally left, taking her swollen mouth and satiated
eyes home to Annapolis.
The Tuesday I returned to the office, I found her sitting with her
glasses on, reading a post-mortem report. I almost leaned down to kiss
her but the tundra of her eyes kept me at bay.
The routine was established that day, have sex until we were both sore
and worrying about permanent damage to our genitals, and then say nothing
about it. Nothing at all.
I could continue the innuendoes as usual, that was included in the
unwritten
rules, and I could open the door when she came to my apartment and strip
her naked, telling her how it felt to have her hair brush me like
butterfly
wings and her butterscotch-pudding skin against mine. We could eat
takeout
together and discuss cases. But no hand-holding, no movies on my couch.
We were either naked and fucking, or we weren't.
It's a measure of my delusions that I thought briefly that I was in
heaven. I
had Scully professionally, and boy did I ever have her personally. I had
her
in positions and places I'd never dared fantasize about. The fact that
she
couldn't open her eyes when I was inside her bounced right off my
shields.
It was right after the Emily-creature died and Scully began to change
that the stomach pains started. Psychotropic illness. Peptic ulcer from
internalization of stress. All very classic, I could have written myself
up as a case study. Man has sister/mother issues, forms platonic
relationship with woman who fulfills sister/mother roles. Platonic
relationship turns sexual. Man is temporarily happy. Sexual
relationship becomes complicated, he feels rejected and abandoned. Man
develops ulcer.
The ulcer bit me, and I fast-forwarded to the present. I wasn't going to
give
Scully up without a fight. She'd shot me to save me and the least I could
do
was return the favor.
That's how I came to be leaning against a pillar in Union Station,
wringing
my hands; when I realized what I was doing, I shoved said hands into the
pockets of my suit and waited.
I watched the good-looking blonde peruse the magazines at the ornate
stand in the center of Union Station, the statues looking over our heads
with their intaglio eyes staring through us. Loitering behind the
pillar, I felt as though I should have been wearing a trench coat with a
fedora and an unfiltered cigarette cupped in my hand. She was sporting a
tres noir ensemble, skinny skirt that cupped her ass like a friendly
hand, and those padded shoulders that women wear to make them look
tough. Marita was about as tough as overcooked pasta. She caves faster
than a politician under pressure does, but she could suck the paint off
the
bumper of a Range Rover without breaking a sweat.
She didn't see me until I grabbed her by her biceps and began pulling her
away from the newsstand, her briefcase bumping against my leg.
Briefcase, what a joke, other than a file folder, her cellphone and a few
pens, Marita's briefcase holds nothing related to the job listed on her
resume. She carries condoms, a change of underwear, KY jelly, a spare
pair of stockings and a travel toothbrush and toothpaste set - for her
*real* job.
As we walked along, Marita stepped in closer to me, so her breast bumped
against the back of my hand, and a cloud of Chanel #5 filled my sinuses.
"This is very melodramatic darling, you just could have called," she
hummed in my ear.
"What were you talking to Scully about?"
"Just girl talk. Comparing notes."
You see, that's why arguing with a woman is like tap-dancing in a puddle
of nitroglycerine, they have their own set of rules, and I'll be damned
if any
man has ever gotten a copy. The overriding principle seems to be to make
the man look stupid. Even if the woman has a cobra wrapped around her
neck, she'll try to convince you that you're gauche for not knowing it's
the in
thing.
I steered her towards Americas, the overpriced overgrown diner that
sprawled across one corner of the once-classy main atrium. The maitre'd's
expression indicated that he wasn't sure if my suit was good enough, but
gave us a table anyway. What kind of a world do we live in when a
maitre'd can't tell a real Hugo Boss from a knockoff? I shoved Marita
into the chair at the table and plopped down across from her.
"What train are you taking?" I asked.
"The Two-Forty."
"That gives you about thirty minutes to tell me exactly what the fuck you
were talking to Scully about yesterday. And I'd rather you were talking
about the size of my dick, I don't think it was anything that innocent."
"Your dick is anything but innocent, Fox."
"Don't call me that."
She must have her smile done at the same place as her hair and nails, at
the femme fatale salon or something. I felt the pain in my stomach kick
up
another notch.
The good thing was that I didn't want her any more. Whatever had pushed
me to her was gone, nothing was left, Dr. Scully had surgically removed
it.
"Tell me what happened."
The waiter interrupted, taking her order for wine and mine for a scotch
rocks. Dad would have been so proud.
"She called me," Marita purred, eager to make things complicated. Ring
ring, pick up the clue phone, dearie. I already knew *that*.
"About what?"
"She had questions about the Project."
"Which project is this one? Overthrowing the government, the cover-up of
extra-terrestrial life or Microsoft's plan to dominate the world."
"Roush."
The pain in my stomach danced with a partner in my head.
"What were the questions?"
"Locations of the company's facilities, list of stockholders, but she
could have gotten that from you, couldn't she? You get all the company
information with your stockholder information?"
What? Never let them see you react, that's a good rule for dealing with
women, or Consortium flunkies, or sentient beings in general. "Obviously,
she was interested in things that weren't in the stockholder reports.
What did you tell her?"
"Nothing right now, I don't have the information at my fingertips. I have
to *research*."
She made the word sound obscene. The waiter brought our drinks. I guess
it didn't look bad from the exterior, a couple of obvious government
types having a drink in Union Station before one got on the Metroliner
back to New York. What the waiter didn't know was that there was only a
hair of a rope of control keeping me from taking the gun out of my belt
and reducing her vapidly pretty face to a mess of blood and bone shards.
Instead I took a deep gulp of scotch, feeling it sting the wound inside
me.
"Whatever you tell her, I need to know."
"Isn't it terrible when you can't trust your lover?" she asked.
Honestly, I wouldn't know what it was like to trust one.
"Marita, I mean it, I need to know."
"What's it like to need?" she said over the rim of her wineglass.
"Don't fuck with me."
Blinking, she settled back in her seat and her smile thinned.
"Have you decided you're going to be a player now?" she asked.
"I don't play games."
I left a twenty on the table to cover the drinks.
7
O Zeus! Why have you given us clear signs to tell
True gold from counterfeit; but when we need to know
Bad men from good, the flesh bears no revealing mark?
"We've been checking up on that pharmaceutical company you asked us
about," Frohike said. As usual, each word had the weight of conspiracy
behind it, as if his life were in danger merely for getting on the phone
with such knowledge. I wanted to yell at him to spit it out but I was
just too tired.
My bones were turning to sand inside my body and Scully, Scully my dark
satanic bride, was leaving me behind. I had no energy but I'd do what was
necessary to stay with her.
"Mulder?"
"Yeah."
"Do you already know this?" Perfect, now Frohike was getting ticked off.
I could imagine him tilted back in his sagging swivel chair, cool as a
pimp watching someone else's whore get busted. Guest starring Fox Mulder
as the whore.
"Why would I know anything?"
Whine, whine. Sometimes the drone of my own voice is just about enough
to make me choke.
Cough. "We got a list of Roush's major stockholders. They're a privately
held company, but they make enough money that people in the financial
world pay attention...most of the profit's from this one drug that helps
people who've had heart attacks. But they reinvest a lot in R&D. Rumor
has it that many of their projects benefit the military. And of course
they're...connected...with illicit tests on unwilling subjects."
Gee, Frohike, tell me something I didn't know. "So?" I hope God exists,
just so someone appreciates the fact that I do have self-control. Despite
objective evidence to the contrary.
"Mulder...according to our information, you own a ten percent share of
Roush."
"How?"
"Roush just released their report and they listed the major stockholders.
You're one of them."
The hard drive in my head ground for a moment. Stock? I'd almost
forgotten that innuendo from the bitch. I had some stock, I knew, the
broker flooded my mailbox with useless paper at regular intervals. Dad
had invested money for me when I was a child, and there had been a ream
of paperwork about Dad's investments that I vaguely remembered from the
leather and wood lawyer who had settled Dad's will. I signed a lot of
paper that day, mostly to get out of the office as quickly as possible so
I could lick my wounds in private. There could have been stock. There
must have been stock; he'd left me everything. Nice checks came
quarterly and the broker pretty much had carte blanche to re-invest as he
saw fit.
Blood money.
Great. That was just perfect, another reason to flagellate myself.
"It's ironic, right?" I said in my most annoyingly flippant tone, the
tone that never failed to make the Great Walter Skinner clench his jaw.
"You could say that, or you could say that it makes your loyalty
questionable."
"Fuck that, Melvin. Infiltrate and divide." A little eddy of acid lashed
my stomach and I refused to bend over with the pain; someone might have
wired my kitchen for video again.
"You could have bought Microsoft."
"Now there's a company with no interest in world domination."
I opened the refrigerator, the cordless phone jammed against my shoulder.
No beer. You'd think that a guy with all that stock would have beer.
At that point I would have sold my soul for some beer, maybe I had no
soul left to sell, my soul was in the stock market.
"Is there anything else?" I asked, sounding both juvenile and whiny
again.
"No. I just wanted you to know that we know."
He hung up on me.
"You know everything, don't you," I told the dial tone.
He didn't know what I was going to do next, I didn't either, until I
dialed the phone.
****
I let myself into Mulder's apartment when he didn't come to the door
immediately.
"Mulder?" I hated even the small uncertainty of having to call out.
"I'm in the bathroom," he said, muffled, over the running water. Mulder
was like a bulimic lately, he couldn't take a piss without running the
tap. I don't think he used to do that, but maybe I just hadn't been
paying attention. "There's something you need to see in the bedroom."
I expected another dead body, at the least. Instead I found the room
frosted with pieces of paper.
Although you'd have to know him to understand this, underneath the
clutter Mulder is actually a very organized person. He has his own system
for remembering where things are. Part of it is to make it harder for any
malevolent outsider to find particular information, but part is just
Mulder's
own cussedness. He won't do anything the easy way if a harder approach
can be pulled off with the appropriate amount of effort and planning.
This mess was different. Manila folders lay scattered like dead
butterflies over the floor of the bedroom. Their contents, I deduced,
were what were covering the bed.
"What is all this?"
He answered by coming up behind me and pushing me forward onto the
bed. I fell hard and gracelessly. My hands were on the bed, sliding over
the
stacks and stacks of papers he'd strewn there. Glossy brochures were
scattered slippery and thick, a bedspread of publications. I think there
were stock certificates too; I could see the thin purple and green
scrollwork around the borders, the decoration that's supposed to make
wealth noble. The papers smelled like money. I couldn't keep my balance
and my arms went out with a whoosh.
I could feel him, his cock poking roughly against me--he was already
undressed. I almost wished I could turn around, because we never fuck
under good lighting conditions and so I never get to look at him, but he
was already pulling up my skirt and snarling at my underwear for being
too practical and sturdy to be ripped off. He had to settle for hauling
it down my legs like he was scraping napalm off my skin; his fingers left
dents. I was stretched out across the bed, financial statements all
around me.
I tried to read--some were upside down from my perspective, but there
were a few that were clear. Mulder's accountants had sent him regular
reports on how his stocks were doing. I hadn't realized that I was
screwing such a wealthy man. I should have gotten him to take me to
dinner more often.
Mulder paid no attention to my distraction--no, wrong, I think he was
counting on it. He put his hand under my stomach, tilting my ass up into
the proper position, and I clenched my hand and was surprised by the
paper cut. It was long and painful and he forced his way inside me and
that hurt too, but not for long.
As he slammed into me, I could feel his balls slapping against the
insides of my thighs. "You remember what I told you about Roush, about
Blevins?" His voice was more even than it is when he makes reports to
Skinner. "I had the Gunmen check, but I didn't think--I don't read most
of my mail, except for the adult video catalogs." He wasn't even
breathing hard. I wondered if he could be enjoying this or if I'd
corrupted him.
"Roush is connected with the experiments on abductees," he continued.
"Frohike couldn't find out much because they're very secretive. But it
appears that we have an unexpected advantage--I'm a minority stockholder.
I think I'm entitled to look at the books, actually, though my lawyer
hasn't gotten back to me on that yet."
I was so amazed that I lost any sense of what was happening, and I tried
to get my hands underneath me so I could stabilize myself. He batted them
away almost absentmindedly. My shoulders were starting to hurt from the
strain. I wasn't quite lying down on all that pristine paper, but I
wasn't kneeling either; my arms were stretched out like matchsticks,
keeping my face from disappearing into all the letters and brochures. He
was holding me, holding us both, and the stocks were shifting underneath
us as smoothly as his cock was slipping in and out of me.
"Dear old dad," he said, when he'd found a good rhythm. Now he sounded
like he'd been running. "He left me very well-off. Invested his hush
money well. I wonder how many suits I bought because Roush's drugs aided
the super-ovulation process. I bought three or four in the months after
you were returned."
"Don't..." I moaned, wanting him to shut up, to take it back. It didn't
occur to me to suggest that it wasn't his fault.
"Shh," he warned, and put his fingers into my mouth to enforce the
command. I bit down, not hard enough to draw blood, and he growled and
thrust harder.
It was horrible, it was degrading, I thought in a few brain cells as my
breath caught low in my belly and I sucked on his thumb as though it were
another cock in my mouth.
At least this time it probably wasn't on tape.
His other hand went to my jacket, which was still buttoned, and he clawed
it open. Now my poor leverage was the only thing keeping either of us off
the bed. If I lowered myself, he'd slip out of me and I didn't want
that.
He pushed my breasts together roughly, as if he could get them both in
one handful if he just strained hard enough. For once he just didn't care
about what was happening to me, and I liked it. If he were gentle, I
would have died. So it was Mulder fucking Scully, subject verb object,
and I didn't make a sound as I loosened around him, as I disappeared into
all the white and cream paper and the cascade of black letters. The
pounding inside my pelvis, his cock pounding inside me, the pounding
inside my head, the pounding of my blood over the pounding black staccato
letters and numbers on the bedspread. His fingernails sliced into the
circle of my tattoo and somehow that was enough to push me into the
crevasse. My head fell forward and I started to shake and cry out with
nothing other than animal delight. He had one arm around my waist to
keep me from getting away, but where would I have gone?
I slept afterwards, still wearing my shoes, still lying on the leaf-pile
of papers, Mulder's arm around my waist, breathing loudly into my ear.
I dreamed a memory.
It was December 28, the Feast of the Holy Innocents, and the sermon began
on time; the Catholics of San Diego were punctual folk. The priest began
speaking even as baby Matthew's gurgles subsided into sleep.
"We remember today, O God, the slaughter of the holy innocents of
Bethlehem by King Herod. Receive, we pray, into the arms of your mercy
all innocent victims; and by your great might frustrate the designs of
evil tyrants and establish your rule of justice, love, and peace; through
Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the
Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen."
The murmured response of the congregation was familiar to me; once again
I was wrapped in the loving arms of the mother church. It had been so
long, and still there was forgiveness and a place for me, and for all
other wayward children. However conceived, the church loves all life.
The priest began to recite from Jeremiah 31:15. "Thus says the Lord: 'A
voice is heard in Ramah, lamentation and bitter weeping. Rachel is
weeping
for her children; she refuses to be comforted for her children, because
they
are not.'"
I do not remember standing up or moving from the pew into the aisle.
I walked out of the church, down all the rows and past all the heads
turning to see who could stalk out when the sermon had only just begun.
My cross burned my chest like a piece of the sun. A piece of the Son.
I have no son. Nor daughter neither.
In the hospital, remembering to breathe like someone who's going to live,
remembering what it was like to have someone look at me and not see
*Love Story* playing at their own personal cinema of life, I was willing
to
let go of the skepticism. I offered chance and faith and microchips each
an
equal share in my success story.
That was a variety of disbelief too. That was a copout, and I am ashamed
now of the weakness that would not let me look too closely into the
mechanism of my resurrection.
For my mother's sake, I vowed, we would have a priest at Emily's funeral.
But from then on, I would make my own chance and my own justice, or I
would have none at all.
Movement finally woke me. I opened sleep-sticky eyes and looked at the
twilight room. Mulder was picking up the stock papers and shoving them
into a banker's box. The fact that he was still naked leant a strange
tone to
the scene. I watched him, marveling at how nicely he was put together.
An
economical animal, no extra flesh, nothing but the stripped-down
mechanism of skin, bone and muscle. Most of the bed had been cleared of
paper, save for what I was lying on. I sat up in my wrinkled suit and
gathered up the papers on the dark green bedspread.
Crouching by the banker's box, he looked up at me, and I could hardly
keep from staring at the hard lines of his haunches. Even though I was
sore,
I could feel myself get wet again.
"What are you going to do?" I asked.
"I don't know."
The last of the papers went back into the box and I had the flash of
replaying this ritual time and time again in the office, the filing of
the papers, the ending of the argument. At least with him nude, the view
was better.
"Mulder?"
He dragged himself out of whatever dimension he'd escaped to.
"Yeah?"
"Since you're such a rich man, call the Chrysanthemum and order a big
sushi tray, I'm hungry."
He smiled and life was normal for a moment.
But the words, the black letters on the glossy paper stared back at me
like marks on the handle of an executioner's axe.
Roush.
Roush paid him money, blood money, hush money, thirty pieces of silver,
how much for his soul, how much was my future worth?
8
I am afraid
Some dreadful purpose is forming in her mind. She is
A frightening woman; no one who makes an enemy
Of her will carry off an easy victory.
Scully put the phone down and I saw a fragment of a guilty look, like a
hawk's shadow over a field on a sunny day, cross her face. She asked me
if I wanted coffee, even though I was the one who was late to work and by
custom I should have gotten it, and I said yes.
When the redial button on Scully's phone put me through to the U.N.
switchboard, I knew that she'd contacted Marita again. She took a long
lunch, and I was pathetically grateful that she didn't say that she had a
dentist's appointment or something similarly ridiculous. She took her
briefcase, and though I didn't have a scale to weigh it before and after
I knew her well enough to see that she carried it more carefully when she
returned.
Scully's mostly made of iron but her kidneys work the same as anyone
else's. Finally she had to go to the bathroom, and I blessed female
anatomy and bigoted males; this was J. Edgar's building and there are no
women's bathrooms in the basement. She had to go up two floors.
She left the briefcase behind.
Scully knows my e-mail password. She has my keys. She could recite my
social security number from all the times she's written it on hospital
insurance forms.
Why didn't I know her secret codes?
I think that question answers itself.
I tried to slide the letter opener in to jimmy the latch once I realized
that I wouldn't be able to figure out the combination in time. The blunt
knifelike object could have made a fine murder weapon (and might have,
had Scully found me), but it made a piss-poor lever.
I did succeed in puncturing my left hand pretty good when the letter
opener slipped out of the crack in the briefcase and embedded itself in
the hand holding the briefcase in place. I couldn't even nurse it openly
in front of Scully for her medicalized sympathy.
The wound was deep but small; it bled sluggishly. Maybe my blood wasn't
sure if I was alive either. I wrapped my hand in a handkerchief--finally,
a use for the damn things again--and waited for her to get back so that I
could glare at her. She looked to see if the case had been moved, but I'd
been careful and I'm fairly sure she didn't see a change of position. We
wouldn't discuss this in our office, not when it could so easily be
bugged, so I determined to try again that night.
I had to go to the bathroom myself when she returned, because the pain in
my abdomen had gotten so bad. When I threw up this time there were thin
coils of blood among the half-digested food. There was a lot of that
going around; there'd been blood in my stool, as they say, for a couple
of weeks. Now there's a phrase that doesn't tell you much: blood in the
stool. What that means is that your shit turns black and slimy. At first
I'd thought it was the remnants of the Black Cancer, which as far as I
knew still lived, dormant, in my blood. But then I'd managed to connect
it to the stomach pain, bright boy that I am, and knew that it was more
likely an ulcer. I'd scheduled a doctor's appointment, which was actually
coming up tomorrow. They'd make me drink barium and irradiate me. After
all that I'd been through as a kid and then again as an adult, the
incremental harm had to be minimal. I just didn't have time for this
weakness. Scully was not impressed by it, and she certainly wasn't going
to wait for me to be well enough to chase her.
As it happened, I had more than enough reason to show up at Scully's
place. She left the office to drop off a pathology report she'd done as a
favor to VCS and, five minutes later, the delayed e-mail arrived, telling
me that she was taking vacation time and not coming back to the office
for a week.
I played James Bond to Kimberly's Miss Moneypenny, which she ate up
with a spoon. She sneaked me in between his three o'clock and his
three-fifteen. Skinner had shoved the stick very far up his ass that
morning, I could tell. He looked at me like I was his sausage and
pepperoni pizza that had arrived covered with maggots instead.
"You granted Agent Scully a week's vacation?" I said. "Where's she
going?"
He glanced down at the papers on his desk. His hand twitched as if he
wanted to rub his temples, but he wouldn't do me the courtesy of
revealing that I bothered him.
"I didn't ask her," he said. "I didn't feel that it was any of my
business."
"Yeah, well, if you think I can get myself into trouble on my own, you've
got a whole new experience coming."
That got his attention. "You believe that Agent Scully is going to engage
in covert or illegal activities?"
"I don't know what I believe." Now there's an understatement. "But she
shouldn't be alone right now."
"I don't think that you're in any position to judge what Agent Scully
does or does not need right now."
"Oh, and you are? Was that part of the bargain you made with the
smoker--he cures Scully's cancer, and then throws her in as your reward
for
playing along?"
He rose to his feet like an avalanche. I was glad that the desk was in
between us. I almost reached for my gun, but then he really would have
beaten me up and I couldn't afford to waste that time.
"*Agent* Mulder," he ground out, "I'm going to ignore that because I
understand that you've both been under severe stress recently.
Apparently, Agent Scully has decided to deal with that constructively. I
wish I could say the same for you. If I'm mistaken, and she's picked up
your bad habits, I will hold you personally responsible for anything that
goes wrong."
The twelve-year-old idiot living in my skull forced my mouth open.
"That's rather inconsistent of you, isn't it, sir? First you say it's
none of my business, but now it's my fault and my responsibility. What do
you want me to believe?"
He was around the desk in a flash. I'm not a short guy, but I literally
looked up to Skinner. Literally. I never noticed the fact that he had
reddish flecks in his eyes until he shoved his face into mine. Remember
that moment in Jurassic Park where the Velociraptor stares at the hunter
through the bushes? Like that, only with more teeth involved. I didn't
move because one of us would not have walked out of the office if I had.
"Listen to me and listen well, Mulder. I think we both understand that
Agent Scully is in danger because of her association with you. If she's
taking active steps to increase that danger, I expect you to stop her. If
I have to protect her by taking away her badge, I'll do that. Unlike some
people, my desire to curry her favor does not outstrip my concern for
her."
Primal growl therapy.
Skinner, I thought admiringly as I let myself out, I'm really going to
need your balls this weekend.
9
Visitations of love that have come
Raging and violent in a man
Bring him neither good respite nor goodness.
But if Aphrodite descends in gentleness
No other goddess brings such delight.
Never, Queen Aphrodite,
Loose against me from your golden bow,
Dipped in sweetness of desire,
Your inescapable arrow!
The doorbell rang and I looked at the clock on the VCR, Mulder was half
an hour later than I had expected. Taking into account the amount of time
it took him to get the e-mail message, the inevitable trip up to
Skinner's office to bitch, driving to Annapolis and finding a place to
park. Mulder isn't as random or as sneaky as he would like the world to
think.
I opened the door.
High anger, high color, his hair sticking out around his head like spiky
feathers, glaring down at me as though I were a bad little child. He
literally shoved past me into my apartment. I don't like having him
here; he takes up too much space, invades my little lair and breaks
things. He breaks water glasses, door hinges, a magazine rack, and it's
all because he is too big, has too much energy for the rooms. While I was
in San Diego he killed all my plants by over-watering them. I left a
dead child on the West Coast and came home to slimy decay in terracotta
pots.
"What the fuck are you doing?" he demanded and performed a Heathcliff
glower near the sofa.
"I'm going to visit Charlie in Arizona."
As a lie, it was fairly maimed, but Charlie was in Arizona and if
everything went well, I would stop and visit before I came home. If
things didn't go well, I could hide there.
If things really hit the fan, Charlie could identify my body.
"Bullshit."
"Do you want to see my plane ticket, read my phone bills? I am going to
visit my brother in Arizona."
He deflated a fraction.
"Why now?"
"Why not? Slow case load, I still have some vacation time left and I
really need to get away."
"From me."
The minute that Mulder realizes that the world does not revolve around
his shapely ass the heavens are going to open up and angels will sing.
"No."
Turning my back on him, I went into the kitchen, he tagged along behind
me like a puppy chewing on my shoelace. A big gangly puppy not yet
grown into his paws and snout. I wondered what kind of dog he was going
to be when he was full-grown. If he ever grew up.
"You can't go," he said.
Translation from Mulderese to English: Don't leave me.
"I need some time, all right?" said and started putting dishes in the
dishwasher.
He grabbed my forearm hard enough for it to hurt and a wineglass--a new
one, dammit--slipped from my fingers to the floor. The glass exploded
into tiny fragments.
I told you, he breaks things.
"You're a shitty liar, Scully."
Still squeezing my forearm, he pulled me around the open dishwasher door.
The metal corner sliced through my sweatpants and ground along my
shinbone. I gasped at the pain, but this didn't stop Mulder from hauling
me into the living room.
He wouldn't let go even when we stopped moving. We were different
temperatures, but for some reason I couldn't tell who was hot and who
cold. I stared up at him. Did I look like that when I knew he was about
to run off without me? I hoped not. So sad and blasted, like a coastline
after a hurricane when all the shoddily built houses have been knocked
down.
"Are you going to screw me over too? Throw me to the wolves? Or maybe
you're just going to fuck some poor schmuck like Zippy senseless for a
change of pace?"
"What if I did fuck Zippy? What would you do?" I asked and stepped
closer to him.
Like a dog who isn't quite sure if he has seen the steak on the
countertop or not, Mulder cocked his head and blinked at me. He can be
so fucking stupid sometimes.
"You know, Mulder," I continued conversationally, lowering my voice so
that he leaned in just as if we were conferring over a dead body.
"Some people might think that the abrupt change of topic from my vacation
time to your old friend Zippy indicated a certain amount
of...jealousy...on your part."
My shin screamed betrayal, but the rest of me was keenly aware that
Mulder had done much worse in his time. I could tell by the visibly
throbbing carotid artery in the soft part of his long neck that this was
going to be worth running through the terminal and waving my badge to
make them hold the plane. And this way I could make the flight without
having to pull a gun on him.
I watched his mental Yellow Pages flip to "Getting Some." His breathing
sped up and he put his hands just above my elbows, pulling me up into the
kiss. His mouth was salty and sour and coppery, as if he'd been drinking
blood.
When he let me go, my weight landed on my heels with enough force to jar
the bones of my legs. He kept his hold on my right arm and marched me
down the hall, half a step in front of him, to my bedroom.
I'm going to let you in on a secret: Mulder knew. He knew why I was
seducing him, and his knowledge had a lot to do with the fact that he
yelled and screamed and basically alerted all the neighbors to the fact
that Dana Scully was entertaining a gentleman caller.
Normally he isn't into blow-jobs, he believes that it's better to give
than receive, but this time he grabbed my head like I was a recalcitrant
screw-top bottle and held me down. He was hot as a burning poker in my
mouth and I tried to tilt my head to get the best angle for my throat as
he nearly scalped me with his fingernails. I wish I could say that I just
wanted to get him into a puddle on my bed so I could go, but the fact is
that his desperation made me dizzy and wet. If I'd choked, he probably
would have let me go, but I was allied with the part of him that wants to
be betrayed and together we managed not to gag.
He came, shaking like a Parkinson's patient, and pulled me up his body to
squeeze me tight. I waited for him to loosen his grip, thinking I could
always take care of my own problem later, but instead he began to lick
his way down my body like he was momma cat and I was the kitten he was
cleaning.
I glanced at my alarm clock, looming accusingly over the bed. I could
still make it if this took less than half an hour. I was wound tightly
enough that it could have been over in thirty seconds, if he'd tried. I
wondered if he knew, after all, and this was some plot to keep me in DC.
And then his five-o'clock shadow scraped against my thighs and I thought
I could fly to Arizona on my own.
I could feel the roughness of each individual taste bud on his tongue.
What the hell, I thought, and moaned his name. As far as I could
remember, I had never done that before. He stopped and looked up at me
and I groaned protest. He grinned like a skull and began again. Spread
open, digging into the mattress with my fingers and my heels, his fingers
inside me and his tongue and teeth dancing over the engorged landscape of
my clitoris, I started to shudder and twitch like a prisoner in an
electric chair. I was dashed and broken like the wineglass and I
screamed. I don't know if he was channeling his teenage self or if he
simply imagined that he might not get another chance, but soon he
wrenched my legs apart and entered me, hard and ready again.
Of course Mulder would have to become a sexual athlete at the most
inconvenient possible time.
I tried to match his rhythm but he wouldn't let me; he pinned my hips
down with his hands and slammed in and out. Maybe his strategy was to
ensure that I couldn't walk wherever I was going.
"You-like-this," he chanted to me on the downswing of each thrust.
I groaned an agreement.
"Look-at-me, " he continued.
I did, and I didn't much care for his semi-psychotic intensity.
"Say-my-name."
"Mulder."
God, I was getting head-fucked to boot.
"What-do-you- want?"
I smoothed my hands around the sides of his chest, feeling the breath
like a trapped demon inside him, his cock a trapped demon inside of me.
"Fuck me," I whispered.
"Can't-hear-you," he grunted.
"Oh God, Mulder. Please. Please. Fuck me, fuck me hard," I grabbed at
his hard ass, pulling him deeper into me, hurting myself, whispering the
script of his video porn into his shoulder.
The orgasm was as intense as it was unexpected. Through Nagasaki's cloud,
I saw him grin fiercely and let himself go.
It took more than a few minutes for me to get coherent again. I licked
his shoulder, contemplating what to do next. He was oily and faintly
bitter, like the skin of an orange. He tugged the sheets closer around
himself, murmuring incoherently, and then subsided. The air was cool on
my naked body, chilly where the wetness of sex had not fully dried on my
thighs. Funny how such a ridiculous act, ludicrous in all its aspects and
positively distressing in many cases, can take on such importance.
I left him in my bedroom and went to the living room, where I'd tucked
the map and the printouts in a back issue of JAMA. If I woke him up and
explained, he'd accompany me to Bethel and witness one more destruction
of the evidence, just as anguished and shocked as if he were seeing it
happen for the first time.
Mulder does pain so well.
The last few days, since Austin, he'd been twitchy and nervous as a white
rabbit after the condom broke. His nose didn't twitch but it might as
well have.
He could smell my research, and he thought I had a plan.
I wondered, if I put him in a box, would he writhe and squirm with
maggots as quickly as my poor dead bunny? No, Mulder would fight. He
wouldn't be entombed in some coffin; he wouldn't be spirited away while I
wasn't looking, either. He might wander off on his own, run through my
fingers the same as always.
Emily's death was a nuclear strike. The sand that I slipped and slid
through in my dream fused to glass. Since then, when I slept I woke to
glass needles in my eyes. Green glowing rain surrounded me. I walked
barefoot over glass like ocean waves frozen mid-storm and it did not cut
me.
I couldn't go near my little girl without a mask, because she might have
bled on me and made me ill. And though she didn't bleed, she just slipped
away, there were still bloody handprints on the whitewashed walls of my
mind.
I wondered if I could still bleed.
I hadn't bled in over a year.
Mulder was relieved that I never bothered him about birth control. Even
then, he knew. He knew that even if I weren't dying I'd have no one but
him. And he liked it, I'm sure of it. The little boy lost doesn't like
to share. He would have found that out about himself earlier if Samantha
had stayed, I bet.
I was rambling. That too made sense, thoughts sliding on glass, bouncing
off glass. I would make myself a suit of glass armor. I was radioactive;
I killed everyone I touched. And I needed to make that deadliness work
for me.
No more stoic suffering for a voyeur-God who eats it like candy. I'd been
patient. Now it was time for me to act.
Cain was a farmer and Abel was a shepherd. Cain sacrificed the fruits of
the earth for God's approval and Abel gave Him fresh warm bodies. God
loved Abel and his sacrifices. He thought Cain was a wimp. So whose fault
is it that Cain resolved to do better next time?
I was going to do better next time.
God, I'm told, helps those who help themselves.
I turned and went back into the bedroom to pack. Mulder was sprawled
across my bed, breathing noisily. For all his anguish, he sure sleeps
well once he's gotten laid.
He didn't stir as I quietly filled my duffel bag with dark clothes, extra
ammunition, and other necessities.
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