<![CDATA[Date: Fri, 30 Jan 1998 21:07:14 -0500
Subject: Iolokus 10/18
From: mustangsally78@juno.com (MustangSally Seventy-Eight)
TITLE: Iolokus 10/18
AUTHOR: MustangSally and Rivka T
CLASSIFICATION: MSR/Mythology/X-File
CONTENT WARNING: NC-17 for sex, violence, and language
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.
10
O where will you find the courage?
Or the skill of hand and heart,
When you set yourself to attempt
A deed so dreadful to do?*
She was gone when I woke up. From the feel of the air, she'd been gone at
least a few hours. She wasn't even within a hundred-mile radius.
How could I know something like that? Let me digress just a minute--it'll
make what comes next more understandable.
There are some things I've never told any of the various shrinks whose
thresholds I've crossed over the years.
For example, when Sam was taken I started wetting the bed again. No one
ever found out. Mom was having a deep personal relationship with Valium
and Dad was not around, a fact for which I was profoundly grateful every
time I woke to those heavy wet sheets. I was already doing the household
laundry, so it wasn't any problem to clean up after myself. I started
putting towels down to preserve the mattress, but I think eventually my
bedroom began to smell. But it wasn't as if I was bringing chums home
after school to play, and Mom's world had narrowed to the path between
the bedroom and the kitchen, where I'd find her at strange hours, just
sitting at the scratched and dented kitchen table.
And fire. I was not entirely truthful with Scully when I told her why I
fear fire. I didn't tell her that, watching my friend's house burn, I was
transfixed with desire. When I was younger I'd stare at fires for hours,
looking at the shifting flames, how they'd eat and eat and never stop
unless you killed them. I wanted to be the one who'd set that house on
fire. I wanted to get up close to it, infinitely variable and capricious
and so welcoming. Something told me that if I started, though, I wouldn't
be able to stop until I'd burned the world down. So, standing in the
ashes of that summer home, I deliberately made myself fear fire, hate it
as much as I wanted to love it. Making myself phobic--it wasn't the first
time I'd remade myself, but it might have been the most important.
Finally...For Hanukkah 1973, we were supposed to get a puppy. I'd wanted
one for ages. Dad was hard to read, but I'd overheard Mom grinding him
down with that silvery little voice, and I was sure he was going to cave
in by December. When Sam was taken, that hope ended. But I was glad
because, when I was minimally functional again, I thought a lot about
hurting animals. They were small and vulnerable and trusting, like Sam,
and I desperately wanted to do something to show the world that I was in
control, that I was someone who mattered.
Imagine my surprise and delight when I took my first abnormal psych
tutorial at Oxford. What's the sociopathic triad, Fox? Could it
be...bedwetting, firestarting, and cruelty to animals during adolescence?
Congratulations, you get a set of lovely meat cleavers and a lifetime
supply of Hefty plastic bags, for those times when nothing else will hold
what you need to hide.
People mock my behavior. More so now that I'm in the X Files, but they
did even back in ISU and VCS. They just don't get it. Compared to what I
almost was, what I still could be if I didn't pay attention, I'm a
textbook model of mental health. I should give empowerment seminars:
Post-traumatic stress--making it work for *you*.
Like a fair number of sociopaths, I'm smart enough to see people for what
they really are. I know what they're going to do before they know it
themselves, often. I just don't usually give a shit.
So there's no need to wonder how I knew that Scully had adopted the
"ditch first, ask questions later" policy I'd so carefully demonstrated
to her. I knew she was on her way to search out and destroy anyone who'd
stolen her children from her. Yeah, I'm the Wizard of Odd, and Scully was
getting odder by the day.
I was only lucky that she didn't know about my little metal vial full of
forever. This time she wouldn't have aimed to wound.
I called the Gunmen and asked them to track Scully's credit card
purchases down. Fortunately, Frohike had gotten over his ridiculous
little snit. Conspiracy theorists swing so readily from distrust to total
faith. They have to, to make their theories work and to find people
who'll listen to them.
She hadn't lied about the state, anyway. Phoenix.
What's in Phoenix, Scully?
Thank God Arnstein Porter Rowe & Crump pays its associates ungodly
sums to toil twenty-five-hour days; one of them was happy to look up my
file when I called. Tell all the lawyer jokes you want; if you can afford
one,
they're better than live ammunition. Roush's holdings included a building
in Bethel, Arizona, a long unpleasant drive from Phoenix but easily
doable in a day. The building was listed on their reports as "storage."
Maybe they were "storing" "merchandise."
I hung up and called AmericaWest.
Then I called the Gunmen back.
11
I know indeed what evil I intend to do.
But stronger than all my afterthoughts is my fury,
Fury that brings upon mortals the greatest evils.
I was being followed.
I could feel it like a hundred spiders crawling over my body. When I
stepped off the escalator in the Phoenix airport rather than going to
the baggage carousel, I ducked behind a kiosk selling cappuccino and
waited to see who arrived at the baggage claim to claim me. I half
expected Mulder or a team of Them (the ubiquitous, invisible them), but
what I didn't expect was Mulder's peroxide doxie in a gray linen suit
wrinkled from traveling. She clipped along like an antelope on her thin
legs and silly heels, passing by the coffee kiosk like just another
tourist, a briefcase in her hand. With my hand on my gun, I gave up the
shelter of the coffee counter and followed her. Marita collected her
luggage and went over to the rental car desk. I had my own bag in my
hand and followed her as she went out into the bright Arizona sunlight as
she jingled the car keys in her hand.
"What the fuck do you think you're doing?" I demanded as she stopped at a
blue Ford Explorer.
Damn her skinny ass, she didn't look surprised at the sight of my gun or
me.
"I want to know about Roush as much as you do," she purred in her creamy
voice.
"Give me the keys," I instructed.
No one seemed to notice the little drama we were staging in the rental
car area, all the happy businessmen seemed oblivious to the two women
hissing at one another while one woman held a gun. They must have
thought that we were a very strange lesbian couple with a unique way of
solving our problems.
With my free hand, I pulled my cuffs out of the case at the base of my
spine.
"Please put one cuff on your right wrist and get in the passenger seat,
then put the other cuff around the door handle."
She blinked at me and smiled.
"Of course."
Grinding my teeth, I threw both our bags in the back of the Ford while
she sat in the passenger cabin looking like a princess when the
revolution had come.
I didn't know what else to do with her so I took her with me.
I could have driven in silence the entire time, but the small superior
smile began to get to me after a while. The sun was going down and I was
having trouble keeping my eyes on the road. "Tell me more about the
Project," I ordered. I was curious to discover the contours of the lie
I'd be told this time. Perhaps by keeping track of everything that was
told us, we could by process of elimination discover the real plan.
Marita idly drew designs on the grey plastic covering the glove
compartment. My back was aching and I could only imagine how she was
doing, her arm trapped in one position for so many hours. I'd locked the
handcuff key in the trunk so that she understood that doing something to
run me off the road would leave her dangerously exposed even if she did
manage to incapacitate me. She could take the chance that she'd survive a
crash and be able to flag someone down, but I thought it was unlikely.
"The creation of a master race," she said musingly. "The dream of the
twentieth century. With appropriate genetic modifications, the perfect
soldier, the perfect worker...the perfect ruler--all of them will be
possible. Massive, total replacement of the population."
"How can they imagine they'll get away with it?"
"Why do you think that so many healthy young white women have fertility
problems, Agent Scully? Why do Bangladeshis live longer than black men
in the inner cities? They *are* getting away with it. In another
generation,
if the technology continues apace, unmodified people--inferiors--won't be
able to breed, much less allowed to do so. They will work until they die,
and then the New World will begin. There is so much land in the world,
after all, if you take away the people."
I watched the road fall away under the constant thrum of the car's
wheels. When she spoke again, I started and swerved. "Why are you doing
this?" she asked, almost incuriously.
"They were taken from me, without my consent. Using them is wrong, and
it's got to be stopped."
"But destroying your eggs and the fetuses won't do anything to stop the
men who ordered these experiments. They'll just go out and ruin someone
else's life."
"Then I'll find them next. But first I'm taking back what is mine."
Marita shook her head and turned to stare out the window. The cuffs
jostled faintly, the thick metal incongruous against her fine-boned
wrist.
"I had a daughter," she said to her ghostly reflection in the glass. "She
lived to be almost eighteen months."
I watched the white lines of the roadway disappear under the car. The
road was smooth as cake batter, and I thought of the huge federal
bureaucracy and all the taxes necessary to coordinate such a massive
nationwide undertaking as a highway system. Not entirely unlike the
organization necessary for a breeding project.
"She was a test subject too," Marita continued, as if I had given some
indication that I cared. "An earlier version than the children your ova
were used to create. She had six fingers on each hand. The nodes were
everywhere on her--at her elbows, on her back, in the crease of her
thighs. Even daily transfusions of that liquid they use weren't enough to
keep her alive. She was in terrible pain every day of her life. I cried
with joy when she died."
The sky was grey, except for a wash of pink at the horizon where the
setting sun burned through the cloud cover. In the distance, almost
invisible, the darker grey of mountains prevailed. I'd always thought of
deserts as hot, but in the dying day it couldn't have been warmer than
fifty degrees.
"Can you prove any of this?" I asked, my hands twisting on the steering
wheel as I bore down with my foot, pushing the car up another five miles
an hour.
Marita made a little sound, like Mulder when I asked him the same
question. Despair and self-mockery and a dash of condescension for extra
flavor; maybe Marita had learned that noise in his bed, but he'd never
thought to teach it to me. "What would you have said if I'd come to you
earlier? You'd have thought me a pathetic lunatic." Her silky voice made
the words sound untrustworthy, but I had to admit that the woman had a
point.
Marita used her free hand to rub the chained wrist where it was beginning
to bleed. Her voice, never loud, dwindled to almost nothing as she stared
at the passing desertscape. "I was...I never knew my parents. I think I
was a test subject too. I believe that's why my child died...I thought
that Jason was a controller and not a subject, but I knew as soon as I
met Mulder that I'd been wrong...or perhaps my genes couldn't be
transmitted without appropriate technological assistance. When I think
that my arrogance might have brought her into the world like that..." I
thought that she was done speaking, but she began again, more strongly.
"Maybe we can find proof when you get into the facility. There have to be
records there."
"Who is Jason?" I asked.
12
Let no one think of me
As humble or weak or passive; let them understand
I am of a different kind; dangerous to my enemies,
Loyal to my friends. To such a life glory belongs.
Holmes had the Baker Street Irregulars, Donald had Huey, Dewey, and
Louie, and I had Langley, Byers and Frohike. I would rather have had
Harpo, Groucho, and Chico. The Marx brothers might have behaved better.
The Three Amigos sat in the plane like a bunch of college students headed
for spring break. Frohike was hitting on the flight attendant, Langley
was deep in Wired, and Byers was trying to talk to me. I didn't feel much
like talking as the airplane coffee was setting my stomach on fire again.
I was going to have to give up coffee and beer, this much I knew, and the
thought was depressing the hell out of me on top of everything else.
"You know that half of the planes in the US fleet are suffering from
extreme metal fatigue and you take your life in your hands every time you
fly?" Byers asked.
"I saw a crash site. Body parts everywhere. I guess the crash was a
shattering experience," I said and pushed my seat back.
Flying coach, as usual, and I had no legroom. Fuck it, if I lived through
this Scully and I were going to live it up, first class and champagne
every time, courtesy of Dad, Roush, and all the other minions of Hell who
quarterly added to my coffers.
"Mulder you look like hell," Frohike offered from the other side of the
aisle.
"What do you have lined up at the other end of this flight?" I asked.
"We have a contact in Sedona who is going to loan us a van with full
surveillance gear. We pick the van up at the airport and ditch it
afterwards. All very neat and anonymous," Langley explained.
"What do you think Scully went after in Bethel?" Frohike asked.
"You tell me," I grumbled and unpeeled another pair of Rolaids, "But I'll
bet you a hundred bucks you get it wrong."
"You have the money for it," Frohike said and smiled a trollish smile,
"Roush's money."
"I have a theory," Byers began in a soft voice near my ear.
Byers. I could have been friends with Byers.
"I was trying to ascertain what would draw Agent Scully to the Roush
installation at Bethel. There is only one possibility. She has somehow
found information which indicates that the ova which were taken from her
are at Bethel, and she is going to retrieve the ova."
Marita must have known, that must have been the research she was doing
for Scully. The hot lead of this knowledge added to the pain in my
stomach.
"But why would she retrieve those ova when we have that vial in cryo at
the University?" Byers asked, "that's where the logic ends."
"She doesn't know, " I choked.
His head framed in the light of the window, Byers gaped at me, a bearded
vision of compassion.
"You never told her? What the hell is wrong
with you?"
Did he want the whole War and Peace of my twisted psyche or just the
Cliff notes summary? The flight wasn't that long.
"It never came up," I lied.
"Ah jeez, Mulder . . . " Langley whined.
"Back off, okay."
"But are the ova still in vials or have they been fertilized? Are we
talking about fetuses here? Viable or non-viable? This brings up a lot
of complicated issues," Frohike pointed out.
"No shit," I agreed.
"Should the fetuses be of sufficient maturity to be considered viable by
the state of Arizona, I think we can extrapolate from the laws in the
state regarding abortion, that Agent Scully's destruction of said fetuses
would be considered murder," Byers reasoned aloud.
I peeled two fifties off the folded wad in my father's monogrammed money
clip.
"I'll buy the first round, boys."
I added two airplane bottles of Scotch on top of the coffee and the
Rolaids and thought I was going to die. By my watch, I was now three
hours, East Coast time, late for my doctor's appointment for whatever
horrible thing growing in my duodenum. I could imagine myself like some
poor schmuck in an Aliens movie with a creature busting out of my stomach
at any moment. That would have amused Frohike to no end. I shut my eyes
and willed myself not to throw up. Just to make myself more nauseous, I
thought about Marita.
It had to be the last time that we were in bed together, her bed in her
apartment in Manhattan, her little high-class lair where her handlers
sent her customers. At that point I was pretending that I was someone
special, that I was breaking the rules somehow. I later realized that her
seduction of me had been as spontaneous as a Space Shuttle launch. It
was a rainy Sunday afternoon and we hadn't gotten out of bed at all, she
was lying on her back in a nest of expensive sheets and throw pillows
with her manicured fingernails scraping my scalp while I drove her mad
with my mouth. She moaned and thrashed in her well-intentioned
theatrical way while I went down on her. Then she cried out a name, and
it wasn't mine.
Who the hell was Jason?
Good manners kept me from pursuing the question but now, almost a year
later I thought I had the answer.
Jason Lindsay was the spokesperson for Roush. The face of the company
was angular, had a nose with more symmetry than character, wore his shiny
black hair falling into his eyes, and favored dark Hugo Boss suits and
Jerry Garcia ties. This was the face that Danny had wondered about, the
man who looked like he could have been my brother. For all I knew Jason
Lindsay was my brother. Other things that Marita said were starting to
fall into place. Some of the comments she had made that I wasn't as
unique as I would have liked to think. I remembered all I had heard of
the beginnings of the Project in the Cold War, the early successes and
failures of the hybrids, the hybrids containing too much human DNA, and
the different model years of the hybrids.
>From the search I had done on Jason Lindsay, I knew his birth date was
September 9, 1960, which made the poor bastard a Virgo, but who cares.
He'd gotten his BS at Stanford and his MBA at Yale, he played basketball
in college and had been considered one of the bright young things at
Roush which had led to his meteoric rise in the company. He lived alone
in a luxury apartment in Austin and was one of the most eligible
bachelors in Texas even though he had been seen with a variety of
starlets over the past few years. He was the John Kennedy Jr. of
pharmaceuticals.
It sounded like fun.
Following the chain of logic, sick, as it may have been, gave me a theory
that I was NOT going to share with the Gunmen.
The project, in its infancy, had introduced alien DNA into healthy adult
humans who mutated and died as a result. I had seen their bodies in a
buried freight car. In the fifties, human fetuses which did not give the
resulting fetus full alien attributes, but was infected by the viral form
of the DNA which then mutated the resulting essentially human babies.
The babies had a few bonuses from the alien DNA such as higher resistance
to the toxic alien body fluids and side effects such as empathy. That
would have been the Cold War model. In the late sixties the process was
repeated with better success and any resulting viable beings were then
cloned which gave rise to the cloning of my sister Samantha, the doctors,
and the Kurt Crawford series. Sometime in the seventies, the good folk
at Roush began splicing alien DNA directly with human DNA. This stellar
move created such wonderful creatures as Darin Oswald who could bring
down lightning with his mind, and a whole flying circus of mutants. And
most recently They were abducting women and removing their ova to
continue the process by splicing the alien genes with more precision, and
this had created the child creature called Emily. Kids like her were more
high-tech but less viable than the sixties versions. Thoroughbreds, you
might say.
Ergo, the entire Mulder family had been a testing ground since the
beginning. As Samantha was the result of an experiment, so was I. This
meant that Jason was either the clone or I was, or we had simply come out
of the same batch at the lab.
I tripped over Frohike's feet as I stumbled for the airplane bathroom.
At the rate things were going, Jason was going to be an only child very
soon. Him and his n brothers, where n is an unknown quantity.
Am I an unknown quantity? I think the men who've supervised my carefully
limited investigations have known me all too well.
Rather than being food laced with blood, what I threw up in the cramped
airplane bathroom was blood laced with coffee. After I washed my face
(was it mine or was it Jason's) I sat on the closed toilet seat and
shivered. I needed to tell Scully. I needed her right then and there in
a way that was beyond partnership, beyond sex, I needed her to make me
feel real.
And she was out to destroy creatures that had begun the same way that I
had.
Later, in the van, the boys all but forgot about me, rambling on to each
other about past road trips and who forgot to bring the Doritos. Langly
and Frohike were insulting each other as they inspected their friend's
equipment, oohing and aahing over the latest toys.
It gave me some time to think.
Scully thinks that I misunderstand the nature of her connection to me.
Maybe she thinks that even I would have more pride than to tag along
after her with my tongue hanging out of my mouth, if I really understood
what she thinks of me.
Balderdash. I understand perfectly. At least number two on the list of
reasons I love her is that she would have to be brainwashed before she'd
ever say, or even think, "I love him." (Number one might just be
proximity, but of course she's only stayed with me so long because she's
Scully, and so that's not entirely an independent variable.) Phoebe was a
tyro's practice, not a fair test, she couldn't love me because Phoebe
isn't capable of it. Scully's my masterpiece because she is capable, she
obviously is, but--here's the crucial part--I've made absolutely certain
that it can't be for me.
I understand that Scully is a pathologist; she chose her specialty
because she likes to poke into dead things to see what made them hurt.
I understand that the main reason she lets me into her bed is that it's
so hard to remember to buy batteries when you're travelling all the time,
and anyway it saves space not to have to pack a vibrator.
I understand that I hope that this will change someday, though I know it
won't. If I'm a fox, Scully is the hunt. Hounds flowing like water over
emerald grass, scarlet jackets and sharp leather riding crops cured in
blood, hooves pounding like heartbeats in the earth. The cruelty is the
beauty. And one day, if I'm lucky, she'll take my skin and nail it to her
wall.
There are conventional reasons for our relationship, and it would be
another act of arrogance for me to deny that they have any relevance.
Adrenalin, rage indistinguishable from passion in our veins, all that
sort of thing. Every time we fuck we are laughing in death's face.
I'd be more comfortable with that explanation if I didn't think that
really, Death was laughing at us. I think that every time we make each
other into convenient receptacles we saw off another piece of our souls,
or my soul anyway, I wouldn't swear that Scully has one. Every time she
uses me she takes us further from the parallel universe--it has to be out
there somewhere--in which our bond is all that is good and true about my
life, even if we never touch.
I made Byers pull over at the next gas station/convenience store. Langly
made fun of me, said I had the bladder of a pregnant woman, but I didn't
want to throw up all over the nice dirty van. The really annoying part
about an ulcer is that you've got to eat to keep the pain level under
control. But then the pain itself causes nausea, and so food comes up,
uglier than it went down. I'd tried skipping meals to avoid the cycle,
and if you think dry heaves are unpleasant, you ought to try bloody dry
heaves. Bile and blood and saliva, the holy trinity of body fluids.
The convenience store only had little rolls of Tums. I bought four.
13
Can you tearlessly hold the decision
For murder? You will not be able,
When your children fall down and implore you,
You will not be able to dip
Steadfast your hand in their blood.*
The U.N. representative was crying in her sleep, without motion or even
much noise. She cried as if she knew she'd be punished if anyone heard
her. She tugged against her restraints, and when they wouldn't give she
opened her mouth and moaned softly, then turned on her side, curling her
body into itself as best she could.
Her feather-fine hair fell away from her swan's neck, and through the
stray blonde-brown strands I saw a green nodule centered in the back of
her neck, just underneath the hairline. It didn't look swollen and
inflamed as Emily's had; it was more like a large birthmark, if
birthmarks were chartreuse. It appeared to be slightly raised, but not
very prominent, and it could easily have been concealed by a collar or a
scarf or even Marita's shoulder-length hair. How had Mulder never seen it
while he was sleeping with her? A little cover-stick can work wonders. I
should know. I don't think Mulder knows yet that I've got a mole above my
lip.
I scooted closer and reached out, stopping when I could feel the heat
radiating from the sleeping woman. The fine hairs on the back of Marita's
neck surrounded the nodule, but didn't cover it; the skin looked
thickened, keratinous like fingernails. She was still sobbing, and the
small shaking of her body made close inspection difficult.
According to Mulder, the "clones" he'd encountered hadn't demonstrated
any visible markers of genetic tampering--other than being identical
copies, as I'd seen myself. They could be killed by a spike to the back
of the neck, which might release the toxic green substance in their
pseudo-veins but at least was final, whereas shooting them didn't appear
to slow them down any. But their necks looked normal, I thought,
remembering the abortion doctors.
So Marita and Emily had to represent another variation--with *more*
exotic (alien?) DNA than the regular clones? I couldn't quite get my mind
around the question. The neck was vulnerable but vital; nerve clusters
there could be--attached, maybe?--to whatever alternative system the
green fluid represented. But why would the point of joining be external?
If Marita had been telling the truth about her daughter--and the fact
that she was apparently some sort of hybrid herself did not exclude that
possibility--then maybe the visible nodules were defects.
I frowned. There was insufficient data to confirm or disconfirm the
hypothesis. The strange vein-like system I'd seen briefly appearing on
Emily's arms had degenerated so quickly after her death that the
postmortem had been able to determine nothing but that there was too much
necrotic tissue in her body to be explained in a conventional manner.
If the Project had been successful in creating completely human-looking
hybrids already, why were they now making defectives?
Maybe it had something to do with mass production. If Marita was telling
the truth--there that problem arose again--then the next phase of the
Project was to replace normal people with those who'd been categorized,
controlled, and modified. But the Project's masters needed many kinds of
hybrids, not just one or two in every age cohort.
I knew that ova could be frozen. That was what would have happened to my
ova, had they been where they were expected to be. I thought back to the
information I'd received from the oncologist. Inside each ovum is a
chemical stew, a ferment eagerly waiting for an acceptable sperm to
complete its transmutation into a new and unique being. When freezing
occurs, chromosomal abnormalities can be caused; no one knows exactly
why, though it may have something to do with intercellular ice crystals
or damage to the cell membrane caused as water leaches out of the cell to
keep the chemical potentials balanced during freezing.
Frozen ova meant another step in the process where something could go
wrong. Every time you set up a production line, you've got to expect that
a couple cars will leave the factory with no seatbelts or bad shocks. I
suppose the Project kills people who fuck up instead of just firing them,
but it's so hard to find good help these days.
And if these bastards were trying to plan evolution, they might want to
grow a batch of zygotes with funky chromosomes to maturity, just to see
whether they could get their own pet Modells or L'Ivelys or Darin
Oswalds. Errors like Emily would be acceptable.
I wondered what Marita's talent was, that had made her worth saving.
She stirred on the bed and I moved away from her, feeling dirty. I was
playing God no less than the men who'd ripped me apart. I tried to curl
myself into a perfect sphere. If I could just tuck my head against my
knees right, I'd be smooth and impenetrable. I'd be able to gather the
strength I needed for tomorrow.
How could I do this? How could I hold my children in my hand and destroy
them? Was it worth the cost, just to have my revenge on the men who'd
violated me so brutally?
And yet that answer had been reached long ago; it couldn't be changed
twenty miles away from Bethel just because I didn't like what had to be
done. I would set myself on fire if I could burn the men who'd done this.
They had no right. They'd perverted what should have been my choice, if
I'd have made it. They'd killed God and taken His place, so someone else
would have to avenge the crime.
I was so alone. I could feel Mulder, out there in the darkness, heading
towards me with no thought but to grab me and rub me into his skin until
we merged. But he'd smother the fire within me; he'd use his own needs to
do it. He wouldn't mean to put me out entirely, just to make me more the
right size to be his helpmeet--but the result would be the same.
In the end, we're all alone. We have to be. If we try to open ourselves
up we bleed to death. Only our boundaries keep us alive. Even if they
feel like knives sometimes.
If I got through this, everything would work itself out, it had to. Maybe
I could even take from Mulder the strength I so desperately needed
without dissolving into him.
"I wish I were like you," Marita said wistfully, breaking my
concentration. "You're so...strong. I thought that all I could ever be
was useless and pretty and ornamental, and so I never tried...to be
strong. I know I'm not...smart like Mulder."
I didn't quite follow this conversational turn. I leaned over to check
the handcuffs, cursing the fucking cheap hotel beds with their solid
headboards that provided nothing with which to secure a prisoner. I ought
to file a complaint with the Holiday Inn board of directors.
In the absence of a suitable post on the headboard, I'd elected to cuff
Marita's hands behind her back and run a bike chain through them, which I
then wrapped around the leg of the bed. It forced Marita to lie on her
side awkwardly, but I could live with that.
I was suddenly aware that I was lying mostly on top of her. Her blouse
had come undone several buttons too far for decency. Not that Marita
would know about that. Marita's breath was warm and sweet, and she was
looking up at me with wide, compliant eyes.
"You're so beautiful," Marita whispered, her tongue flicking out to wet
her lips.
I felt something turn over inside me.
Dana, I said to myself, this is far more fucked up than sleeping with
Mulder. Prisoner's a whole new level of degradation down from partner,
even a partner on animal tranquilizers. Dana? Dana are you listening?
The corners of Marita's mouth quirked, a shy smile. I moved my hand from
the bike chain to Marita's shoulder, rubbing it as I might have rubbed a
dog's stomach. The blouse was silky, but spotted with dust and stains.
The skin underneath was hot, so hot, a lava flow.
Is her internal temperature the same as a human's? I wondered, and
considered whether there was a safe way of finding out.
Marita shifted, rolling over on her back, her arms dragged underneath her
by the handcuffs and the bike chain at what must have been a painful
angle. Now I was straddling Marita's body. I could see her nipples
outlined against her ruined blouse. My hand moved down, inching over the
swell of Marita's breast. It was warm and firm and undoubtedly weird,
undeniably weird, yet thrilling at the same time. I had the strange
feeling that if I turned around Mulder's ghost would be sitting in the
chair by the window, his legs stretched out in slumped comfort, his eyes
black with desire, his hand creeping towards his lap.
I glanced back up at Marita's face and caught the slight stillness; it
wasn't the slackness of arousal, but a more contained waiting.
I wasn't surprised that Marita would try to seduce me, really. That was
what Marita did. Marita probably thought that deep down I wanted to
believe, wanted to trust just as much as Mulder did.
Mulder probably would have let me tie him up if I'd asked, but I'd never
asked. I skimmed a hand up the bound woman's arm, running from the
blood-warmed metal at her wrist, barely visible in the shadow of her
torso, down the bluish veins on her inner arm, the crease of her elbow
and then the softness over the bicep that swelled just beneath the short
sleeves of the blouse. The woman's lack of body fat is almost criminal, I
thought. I'd have to work out full-time to have arms like that.
Marita's eyes on me were intense, but somehow lazy, catlike. I almost
thought they were yellow in the bad light from the cheap lamps.
I moved the hand that had been stroking Marita's breast to the remaining
buttons. They were on the wrong side, I thought and realized that I'd
only ever unbuttoned a man's shirt from the outside. It's the little
things that make the difference, and I didn't suppress a short laugh
because it wasn't as if Marita was going to get snitty about it.
"You can do anything you want," Marita whispered, and I stopped
undressing her to put a finger to her lips.
"Shh," I commanded. "I know that."
Marita's skirt came off easily, the fine grey linen sliding over fine
silken thighs with barely a whisper. Mulder did this, I thought. He ran
his tongue down those thighs--I moved backwards down the bed to do the
same. Marita moaned; I frowned. That wasn't any fun. The woman could
have waited longer to start faking.
"Tell me what he liked," I said, moving back up so that I could breathe
in Marita's ear. Marita wasn't going to go on Jerry Springer and talk
about threesomes any time soon. And I was curious, and Marita was there
for me.
Marita turned her head into the pillow, exposing her long perfect neck
and a little patch of green. Salamander skin, green and fresh and
inviting. I licked the edge, wondering if I'd get a contact rash. The
skin was as smooth as it looked, not rough and scaly, and I could taste
the sweat caught in the fine hairs of Marita's nape. Then I bit Marita's
earlobe. "I asked you a question," and Marita jerked away but the cuffs
caught her and I could feel the muscles tense underneath her; delicate
silly Marita was thinking about trying to get loose and that wasn't a
good idea.
"He liked to go down on me," Marita breathed.
Ah yes. I didn't know whether he'd call it a desire to return to the womb
or just a desperate need to be liked, but Mulder hadn't ever been happy
unless he could push my head back and spread my legs and make me shake
like a tuning fork.
I decided to see what she'd learned from his efforts.
Afterwards, I lay on the far edge of the bed, not looking at Marita. The
ceiling's random pattern of dots like wormholes was far more interesting.
Marita was enthusiastic, but she didn't have the instinctive sense of
what I liked. Not like Mulder. At first I thought that he was so good he
could get a blow-up doll off, but then I realized that his British bitch
wouldn't have let him go so easily were that the case. It's that I'm like
the creatures he hunts. He needs them to justify his existence, and they
need him to hunt them, to pay attention. He opens my head up and extracts
what he needs to know, and then he leaves.
At least when I do it I sew the poor bastards up afterwards.
I had to admit it: I wanted Mulder there. I didn't know what I wanted to
do to him. What was more important was that I wanted, anything. And I'd
believed I'd never want again.
The world has never had all the colors in it for me that it has for
Mulder. I think that's why I'm so fascinated by him. He's not afraid to
live intensely.
No. He's terrified. But he doesn't have a choice.
Mulder suffers, Scully endures.
When did that begin to make me angry? Not relevant. I just remember that
I stopped feeling the anger in San Diego. I was so hostile to him that I
could have taught the Serbs and the Croats something about enmity, but I
didn't feel it.
He fucked me in the bathroom and I threw my head back against the cheap
cold institutional mirror. I thought for a minute that I might
just...fall through. In the looking glass world, Dana Scully can cry for
her children. There must be a me, in all the possible realities, for whom
barrenness and then the sudden end of barrenness didn't mean this
blankness. This cold fire.
Mulder's natural flair for the dramatic must have been rubbing off.
Marita lay quietly on the other side of the bed. I hadn't even let her
touch herself. That might have been unfair. But fingers and thumbs aren't
what get her off anyway. Even I can see that in her eyes, and most of my
interpersonal contacts are with the dead.
I worried a little about choking her. Consider the position, really--so
awkward, me lowering myself down and trying to ignore my thigh muscles
demanding their rights, agitating against the demands of my libido. Hands
balanced against the headboard and I was thinking, God, that wallpaper is
plainly awful. The heat, dry and yellow, that spread out from my clitoris
through my belly and thighs.The orgasm a jackhammer, ripping me apart.
I'm not entirely sure it was pleasure and not pain that I felt.
It didn't help that I could feel the shadow-Mulder in the chair watching
us the entire time. Was this one of the images he used to amuse himself
those lonely nights of masturbating on his sofa? Really, the sofa should
have given birth to an ottoman after all the sperm it had taken into its
crevices. But in the end it was the same, me and the sofa, infertile dead
ends
both.
"Now," she said, her voice cream and brown sugar, "I have you. I gave you
something Mulder never can."
I turned and looked at her incredulously, but it wasn't worth wasting a
good put-down line on her.
14
Suppose that the children have grown into youth
And have turned out good, still, if God so wills it,
Death will away your children's bodies,
And carry them off to Hades.
Marita watched me load our briefcases into the back of the Explorer with
some trepidation. And well she should, because they were full of bottles
of gas, expensive spring water poured onto the red earth to be replaced
by cheaper, but more effective, fluid. "I thought we were going to Bethel
to find the truth," she said, not quite a question.
I shrugged, unwilling to waste breath on an answer that wouldn't come out
right in any event.
We drove toward Bethel for fifteen minutes before she tried again. "I
assume you have some plan for getting into the facility?" Marita asked
with her customary sly guile. I hoped that poor Mulder hadn't actually
had to listen to her to get laid.
"I was just going to flash my badge and see what happened," I said.
Actually I had a search warrant that looked very professional and
official, if I did say so myself. I had a laser printer the same as the
U.S. Attorney in Phoenix.
She sniffed, a very affected noise in the dry air. "Even Mulder might
have planned ahead."
"Hah," I responded.
"You're lucky that I came along," she said, sounding bored. "I have ID
for both of us. It should stand up to visual and electronic inspection.
As far as they know, I'm an ally."
"As far as I know, you're their ally."
"What, I'm walking you into a trap? Dana, anyone above the level of
janitor at Roush could have you killed within three hours if they wanted
to, just by picking up the phone and having an assassin sent to your
grimy little basement office in DC. And I wouldn't be too sure that the
janitors couldn't do that too. Get this through your head--they don't
think you're a threat. Maybe you should be grateful that they're still
operating on 1960s principles; to them women are annoying inconveniences
to be obviated by the pending development of artificial wombs.
They--don't--care."
The last three words hung in the warming air as we pulled up to the gate.
****
Jason Lindsay had worn his Roush badge for the press conference. With
careful application of enhancement algorithms, Frohike had managed to
capture a good image of it. Jason Lindsay could kiss my ass, the son of
a bitch had gotten the better nose out of the deal. The friend's van had
a state-of-the-art ID cutting machine as part of its equipment, either
that or Frohike pulled it out of his portable hole, he was always a big D
& D fan. There was an obvious computer stripe on it which we couldn't
code correctly, not without access to a land line and a few hours anyway,
but we were hoping that the visual ID would be good enough to get me
through the door.
My job was to become Jason Lindsay.
These days they make hair dye for men, but I had to buy cover stick to
get rid of the mole that Jason Lindsay didn't have, so the woman behind
the counter at the tiny drugstore in the nameless town an hour from
Bethel still thought that I was a transvestite.
Byers had brought along mousse and a tiny tube of hair gel, bless his
well-groomed heart, and I slicked my sopping, blackened tresses back in
Jason's 'do, which resembled Andy Garcia's.
As I fiddled with the makeup, I thought briefly that I'd overlooked one
other model for the Gunmen: the Three Musketeers. After all I was
apparently the Prisoner of Zenda, taking my brother's place though he was
the true heir to the throne. First my life was a bad Star Wars subplot
and now this. I wish the Gods or men who are pulling my strings could at
least stick with one genre. I wouldn't mind being the hero of a Regency
romance. Or maybe we could swing by the Brady Bunch for a change of
pace. I always had a thing for Marcia.
As I dabbed the beige goo on my cheek, I found that I was grinning like
an ass at myself in the rearview mirror. I was covering up my mole the
same way Scully did every morning. Did she really think that she could
fool me? I've seen fingerprints that forensics people missed and she
thought that I wouldn't notice that she had a mole on her upper lip. I
loved that mole, loved the fact that she felt compelled to hide it and
loved the fact that her makeup wore off in the night and I frequently
met the mole first thing in the morning before she awakened.
The blood loss must have been getting to me. Scully made me take iron
pills; I was the only man my doctor had ever known to take them, but my
own Iron Maiden insisted that it was the least I could do to fend off
anemia, the way I managed to stumble into anything pointy. But I was
rapidly outpacing my body's ability to replenish itself. I just hoped I'd
make it to Scully's side in time for her to save me.
I tried to focus on Jason. The CNN footage only had a few seconds of him
moving, stepping up to the podium, but even that little was enough to
show me that he walked like a man who'd just gotten laid by an
eighteen-year-old beauty queen. Which was probably close to the truth. He
didn't swagger, he didn't care to piss anyone off without reason and
swaggering could do that, but he walked, well, satisfied. He moved
liquidly, he was just old enough to have had deportment lessons if his
parents/custodians/trainers had thought it appropriate. He would be an
excellent dancer. He would be a world-class fuck.
I had more trouble with Jason at first because I thought that he wasn't
the kind of man whose mind I usually inhabit, and part of me was praying
that he was somewhat like me. After I realized that he was well aware
of Roush's real enterprise I was able to apply the standard techniques. I
breathed Jason in; when I breathed out my voice was inflected, dramatic,
smoother, with a shading of down-home drawl, a pitchman's voice, a
continent apart from my own toneless
drone.
When Jason told Byers that he was ready the little guy couldn't conceal
his involuntary shudder.
The guard didn't even look twice at the ID, just smiled and said hello. I
gave him a casual, ironic half-salute, and he held the door for me.
I've got the whole world right here, in my pants, wrapped around my great
big dick, I smiled.
There was a card reader after all. I swiped the badge with appropriately
manly nonchalance (thank God the reader had a little sign showing you
which way to hold the stripe or it might have ended right there) and
looked surprised when the machine beeped an accusing red.
"Celine decided to do my laundry," I said with a laugh. "This was in the
pants--two thousand dollar pants, do you believe it, and she decides they
should go in the 'synthetics' cycle, the washer looked like a cat
exploded in it. She made it up to me for the pants but it looks like she
managed to demagnetize the card too."
The guard laughed with me, we were two great guys sharing a laugh at the
crazy ways of women, and, earning my eternal gratitude, he unclipped his
own card and buzzed me through. "You'd better get a replacement."
"For Celine or the card?"
I stopped laughing as the fire alarm began to whoop. The guard ran one
direction, I ran the other. I felt Scully nearer with every pulse of
light and noise.
****
The soldier held the door for us and gave us his best manly-man smile,
obviously thinking that we were a fully lickable pair. Marita gave him a
last soulful glance as the door closed and he grinned as if she'd
smooched him. Then she did something to the door, which bleeped
reproachfully at her. "It's locked from the inside now," she said. "We
can find everything we want without interruption."
They'd had the lighting done by Conspiracies Inc. and it was of course
dim, indirect, and eerie. The liquid hum of hundreds of machines
surrounded us, thrummed through the soles of my feet and in my inner
ears.
Marita's skin had turned Kermit-the-Frog green from the light bleeding
from the tanks. I was sure I didn't look any better.
There were rows and rows of tanks, at least a few hundred. Each large
enough that a grown man could have curled up inside one, most of them
were occupied by fetuses.
Marita went off to the side, looking at the charts strewn over a table by
the wall. I couldn't be bothered to notice anything but the fetuses
themselves.
We were in the facial deformities section, it seemed. Three eyes, one
eye, two eyes but placed where the cheeks should have been. Thick rubbery
lips, lipless mouths that couldn't close over large spadelike teeth,
tusks that had torn through the protective flesh around the mouth. Trunks
and missing noses and harelips. It is one thing to see such
abnormalities in textbooks, in autopsies but another entirely to look at
the
mutated faces of what should have been your own healthy children, or
discarded eggs washed out to sea in a flow of menstrual blood. I hadn't
felt
this queasy since I'd given up chemo for Lent.
I walked forward, into the group of fetuses with arm issues.
The lights on the monitors surrounding each tank indicated that the
fetuses had heartbeats. I stepped closer and watched one flippered thing,
more like a walrus than a person, breathe the green liquid. Its eyes were
open and, when I waved my hand in front of it, they tracked the movement.
I am the walrus.
Goo goo ga joob.
I turned away and headed deeper into the room.
At the back they had the ones that looked viable and regular. From what I
could tell, there were no black (green) babies, no Asian (green) babies,
and no Latino (green) babies either. I couldn't be sure about more than
that, but the Project probably wasn't as anti-Semitic as Hitler had been;
Exhibit A, the Mulder clan.
Behind the last row of tanks there was a door that opened without any
need for a key. The lights were off and I flicked them; halogen burst
into luminescence, nearly blinding me after the dimness of the other
room.
It was a nursery. I smelled talcum powder and the plastic of disposable
diapers and sterilized baby bottles. It was empty yet, but it looked
ready to receive customers. It had even been decorated in a cheerful
Sesame Street theme; the New World Order wasn't going to be populated by
kids who'd been deprived of sensory stimulation during those vital early
months. I wondered if the Children's Television Workshop was connected to
the Project. Public television--is it really a threat to your children?
Is the constant call for cooperation more sinister than sharing cookies?
The monitors burbled complacently. These babies were going to be
decanted without incident. Not too hot, not too cold, but just right.
These weren't my eggs, or any other woman's eggs, not any more. They
were new beings, utterly unique and capable of becoming individuals.
Unless, of course, their creators decided that their usefulness was up.
Or unless the chromosome flavor of the week didn't work out well and
they perished, in horrible pain, before their birthdays caught up with
the number of fingers they had. Or unless their controllers ran out of
the "treatment" used to keep them alive in Earth's alien environment.
Emily...I think I may have said the name aloud. What good did her life do
for her? Pain and shots and slow deterioration, and a succession of women
none of whom could really be called "mother." Such mothers Emily had:
mindless and decaying in a nursing home, bloodless and slaughtered in a
bathtub, heartless and deranged in a secret facility. That would be me.
This room had hundreds of Emilys, but each story of suffering would have
its subtle variations, its individualized Hells. If they were lucky, a
few of these silent slime-coated infants would grow up to be as
well-functioning as Mulder or I was, a hell in and of itself.
Over my dead body.
I strode over to the side of the room, where Marita was gathering files
and making them into neat stacks. I ignored her and pulled cabinets and
drawers open, looking for something powerful, something -- hard.
There was a fire ax just inside the side storage room, whose door I
pushed open in desperation when all I could find in the cabinets was baby
wipes and diaper cream.
It broke the tanks with ease, though my arms began to ache after about
twenty or so.
When I got to the normal-looking babies, Marita slid over to me. "Leave
these alone!" she snapped. "There's nothing wrong with them."
"Says the woman with the green pimple on the back of her neck," I said,
and sucker-punched her. She went down and didn't get up, her high heels
kicking feebly in the growing layer of green goo on the linoleum.
By that time, someone had figured out that there was something wrong in
the lab, and lights were flashing in my eyes, distracting me. Red lights
on green made the scene seem a little like Christmas in Hell. I finished
with the tanks. Then I went back to the briefcases, pulled out the
bottles of gas, and began to pour.
15
Come, children, give me your hands,
Give your mother your hands to kiss them,
O the dear hands and O how dear are these lips to me,
And the generous eyes and the bearing of my children!
I give you happiness but nowhere in the world. *
The flames were spreading rapidly. The green liquid was flammable, and
fire swept across the floor faster than my eyes could track it. Glass
popped somewhere in the lab.
My gas trail had done more damage than I'd thought; the line of fire that
looped into the storage room at the side of the lab flared and I heard a
hollow boom as something exploded a few rooms away. I could feel the
oxygen leaching out of the air as it fed the fire. My hair rose away from
my face and shoulders in the artificial simoom of the air currents.
Marita had gotten to her knees, scrabbling to try to save the fetus
nearest her, crooning wordless reassurance. Its limbs moved feebly as she
reached for it.
The flames caught her as she staggered to her feet, cradling the dying
fetus. Marita was covered in the green stuff from her struggles on the
floor, and the fire coursed over her body, caressing the places Mulder
had touched. The places I had touched. She screamed as her hair began to
catch.
One of the vats that was still standing tipped over, brought down by
something I couldn't see.
Among the shards of glass and the gush of green there was a baby,
full-term or beyond. Its little fists twitched once, twice. I could see
it coughing, spewing green fluid as it tried to adjust to the world of
air.
It wriggled, and I could see that it was a boy. He managed one real
breath, and opened his mouth to scream anger at the world for bringing
him so roughly into it.
The flames swept over him, and I turned away.
I could see into the nursery as well, which had caught fire through the
connecting door from the main lab. Empty cribs and changing tables spewed
gouts of flame from the lines of gasoline I'd poured on them. The stink
was incredible, wafted to me on the heat. The hot air, rising, made all
the cheerful mobiles twist and bob. Ernie and Bert from Sesame Street
smiled at me with their blind plastic eyes. I felt sweat beading at my
hairline, running down the hollow of my throat where one drop trembled
against the tiny cross whose warmth throbbed against me like a mockery.
Suddenly unable to tolerate it any longer, I reached up and pulled hard,
so hard that I could feel the skin at the back of my neck part and the
salty blood mix with sweat and hair to sting painfully. The chain broke
and slithered to the floor as I flung the charm, the idol, the broken God
into the flames, giving it once again to my child. My children. I saw it
falling into the gold of the fire, a black speck against the
conflagration, and then it was gone.
Mulder screamed my name.
I was not terribly surprised that he'd made it, nor that his timing
ensured that he was too late to do anything.
He moved closer, not quite so fast as the flames were spreading around
the room. He grabbed me by the shoulders and looked back into the lab,
horrified, where Marita was still burning like a candle.
"We've got to get out of here! I'll get her, just go!"
I smiled a little and stared harder at the fire.
I felt his gaze, cooler than the inferno around us. He saw what I had
become; he saw that I would not leave of my own volition while my
children's fate was yet uncertain.
He could have saved Marita, who wanted to live. Instead he slung me over
his shoulder, knocking the breath out of me, and began running for the
exit. I struggled a little, for form's sake. I had nothing against
survival particularly.
The fresh paint on the walls was beginning to blister and peel. Burning
plastic soured the air and there was a faint whiff of the smell I'd known
before, from Mulder's clothes when he was exposed to the toxic blood of
the shape-shifting thing and from Emily's hospital room even through the
face mask they'd forced me to wear. It made my eyes sting and water,
though I couldn't really feel anything. Perhaps multiple exposures to the
toxic fumes had built up a little resistance. Mulder was crying, but his
gait was steady.
We passed security doors blown off their hinges, safety glass that had
shattered in glossy green cubes all over the floor. Mulder stumbled a few
times, and finally I grabbed his gel-stiffened hair and he stopped. "Put
me down," I commanded, and though he couldn't have heard me exactly
over the keening of the fire alarm and the sirens that were audible even
from
inside the building, he knew what I meant.
He dropped me to the floor almost too suddenly for me to keep my balance,
and I had to steady myself against him with one hand. He looked at me,
and the smoke and noise and heat dropped away because I was too surprised
to notice anything but his face.
Mulder was *angry* with me. He was distraught, anyone could have
identified the emotion, but his rage was directed particularly at me. I
hadn't seen that, excluding the times he was under the influence of
psychoactive drugs, since--well, I couldn't remember when Mulder in his
right mind had been furious at me. Upset that I wouldn't go along with
some piece of craziness, sure.
He made an impatient face because I was just staring at him, when even a
psycho like Mulder knew that running was really the more important item
on the agenda, and he grabbed my arm and pulled so that we were running
in tandem.
I'd memorized the layout of the facility in order to get in, but I hadn't
given any thought to getting out and I didn't recognize the path we were
taking. Mulder appeared completely confident, but that wasn't any
evidence that he knew where the fuck we were. Now we were in what
appeared to be a corridor of offices, with nameplates and Dilbert
cartoons on the closed doors.
He stopped in front of one door. "Jason Lindsay, Public Relations," the
sign said. He loosened his grip on me and kicked the door open; it gave
at once, cheap-ass construction, because who's going to try to break into
the P.R. guy's office? Who but Mulder.
We ducked into the room, me following Mulder like always. I closed the
door so that we wouldn't be obvious to any searchers. When had he made
this adventure his own? Fuck it, I thought, and swept my eyes around the
room, intending to drag him out.
Until I saw the pictures on the wall. A man who was almost Mulder shaking
Ronald Reagan's hand, and George Bush's, and Clinton's too. That man with
lots of fat executives and the ever-present Bill Gates. With a woman who
I thought was an actress on one of NBC's comedies, Friends maybe.
He was looking around the room like he'd just landed on the moon.
"What the hell is this?" I asked, and he noticed my existence again.
"Jason Lindsay gave a press conference for Roush a few weeks ago. Danny
said...I just guessed...fuck. . . help me," he gave up and grabbed a
computer disk, whatever Jason hadn't finished before he left for the
weekend, and handed it to me. "We need to take some evidence with us."
"Mulder, I just torched an entire gene-splicing lab, and you want to take
a *disk* from the P.R. guy as a souvenir?" He was already pulling file
cabinets open, grabbing files at random, piling them on the desk.
Mulder looked up and gave me the most frightening smile I'd ever seen.
"As you pointed out, you torched it. Not much evidence left there, right?
Want to go back?."
There were shouts from the hall outside, feet pounding past. Then silence
again. Mulder had an armful of files, and he seemed to think that was
enough. He put his ear to the door, then threw it open and stuck his fool
head out. No one blew it off, so he motioned for me to follow and then
guided me to the stairs under a flashing red light and an Exit sign.
>From above us in the stairwell, I could hear doors banging and men
shouting. The smell of smoke was stronger here. The walls were covered in
bilious yellow paint, and then there was a flash and a chunk of
paint-covered concrete nearly took my ear off.
Someone was firing at us from above. Mulder cursed and shoved me down
the stairs, and we scrambled as best we could to get out of the line of
fire,
pressed against the wall for minimum exposure and descending.
I reached for my gun, but it wasn't in its holster. I couldn't remember
what had happened to it.
Mulder, miraculously, was currently in possession of his own weapon, and
he transferred the files to his left hand and aimed the gun upwards,
scanning to see if the gunman was following us. There were no further
shots, but there was so much noise that I couldn't tell if there were
footfalls on the stairs.
Two flights further down and the paint color changed to a cobwebby grey;
a sign on the wall informed us that we'd reached level P1. At the
landing, the stairs ended and there was a door in the wall. Mulder yanked
on the round metal knob and the door stayed exactly where it was. He
swore again and twisted and jiggled the knob, but nothing changed.
He motioned me back with a wave of his gun hand and aimed for the top
hinge. I thought about it as I covered my eyes and ducked away from the
door: the electronics of the locks at the facility were too complicated
to be defeated by a simple shot blowing out part of the locking
mechanism. But what you can't go through, you can often go around, and
the hinges were the most efficient way to do that.
The second shot, though, wasn't from his gun, and he was immediately on
the ground beside me, twisting and rolling to get in position to return
fire. I smelled blood and knew that he must have been shot, but he was
still reacting well and I didn't have time for an interrogation of the
sort required to get Mulder to admit injury.
"I've got a gun in my ankle holster," he hissed as he fired once, just to
keep the bad guy wary. I scrambled down his body, feeling his hard ass
and legs under my hands in a way that might once have embarrassed me,
until I reached his basic black socks and the leather holster strapped
around his leg. I retrieved the little gun--it wasn't even an automatic,
I noted with disgust as I straddled his body to get a better angle on
anyone coming down the stairs.
The man above us was shouting for backup, and now I could hear steps on
the stairs, thudding down towards us. I bent my head a little so that I
could speak in Mulder's ear. "Get the other hinge." He nodded, once, and
twisted under me to aim correctly, and I braced myself on my left hand
and waited.
The soldier came around the turn of the stairs, hunched over to minimize
the size of the target he presented. I shot him just under his right
knee. He screamed, high and resonant in the confines of the stairwell,
and tumbled forward, almost to where Mulder was still straining to aim
right.
I shot him again, this time in the face, and he jerked once and was
still. He was wearing a flak jacket over jeans and a T-shirt--it looked
as if he'd been hastily rousted out of bed to come after us, and the
haste had been deadly. I grabbed his semiautomatic and stuck the girly
gun in the waistband of my pants, in case it came in handy later.
Mulder fired and the door shuddered. The lower hinge wasn't completely
blown off, but he got into a half-standing position and kicked at the
bottom, and the top began to tilt into the stairwell, leaning dangerously
over him as it began to twist off under its own weight. The undefeated
lock at the doorknob held on, but it wasn't designed to keep a block of
solid metal upright, and it squealed and gave way. Mulder pressed me back
against the far wall, covering me with his body.
The door came down, held off the floor by the soldier's body, and we
darted through and were in a parking lot. Cars dotted the structure, but
most of the spaces were empty. Mulder's head whipped around, searching.
"Don't tell me you forgot where you parked," I yelled, my ears still
ringing from the gunfire. He didn't even bother to look at me, only
grabbed my arm again and pulled me away from the open door, behind a
concrete pillar.
He fumbled in his pocket and pulled out a mini-mike. "We're on the
parking level and we need you here now, guys." His tone was distracted, a
little impatient, but much calmer than I'd expected.
There was noise from the direction of the stairwell and he pushed me
against the pillar, getting ready to dodge around the concrete to fire at
whoever was coming for them. I raised the semiautomatic and prepared to
go around the other side.
There was a screech of rubber, crying out as it got transferred from
wheels to garage floor, and a black paneled van careened around a corner
and headed directly toward them. The soldiers in the stairwell began to
fire, so I inferred that the van was on our side and poked my head out to
lay down some covering fire. Mulder grabbed me back, roughly, even
though I'd already begun to pull back, and he looked at me as if he were
surprised that I'd risk death, appalled by my foolhardiness. I almost
laughed, and then the van doors slid open right in front of us, we jumped
in, and I was knocked into the back by the force of the acceleration.
Mulder barely got the door closed as we jolted over a speed bump, and I
could see round bullet holes appearing in the body of the van from
several exciting angles. Papers from the files we'd stolen flew like
albino autumn leaves around us.
A crash shook the van, bouncing my head up and down like a week-old
tulip, and the windshield shattered. I couldn't see very well from the
back, but I thought that Byers was driving. Metal screeched and groaned,
and sparks popped over the front of the van, and then we were through
whatever barrier we'd hit and still accelerating.
16
I will bury them myself,
Bearing them to Hera's temple on the promontory;
So that no enemy may evilly treat them
By tearing up their grave.
We drove for hours, stopping for gas a few times. We were headed, I
discerned, to California, where the boys would dissipate like smoke in
wind and meet up again, when they could, in DC. Mulder probably had
some plan for the two of us, but he didn't let me in on it.
He glared at me for a long time, bouncing around in the back of the van.
There were no seats and the rubber mats that should have cushioned the
bottom of the cargo area had been removed at some point, so we sat on
painfully uneven metal and crud. His face writhed like a belly dancer
when I examined his gunshot wound, which turned out to be reasonably
minor, but he did allow me to touch him. He didn't say a word, limiting
himself to sharp nods and headshakes. He didn't trust himself to talk to
me in front of the others, which was fine by me.
We stopped for the night at another cheap motel in the middle of nowhere.
Byers, still the most respectable-looking of the group (and I include
Mulder and myself, because we were scorched), went to sign us in and
returned with two sets of keys dangling from green plastic rectangles.
Mulder held his hand up for one set, and all three of the Gunmen looked
at me, then at Mulder, then me again, as if they were watching a tennis
match. He flexed his fingers impatiently and Byers tossed a key over.
Mulder caught it out of the air like a hawk taking a pigeon.
We'd gotten adjacent rooms, so we couldn't expect to keep much private,
not with the decibel levels I expected to reach. But it was an illusion
of privacy, enough so that we could talk.
He opened the door and sardonically gestured me in first. I stalked past
him and sat on the double bed furthest from the door, crossing my arms
over my chest defensively. He closed the door and turned to lean on it,
with his own arms crossed. I felt like I was in a gunfight. Draw,
pardner.
"How did you find me?"
He looked at me balefully. "I read ahead in the script."
Fine.
"What comes next?"
He sighed and looked down at the straggly carpet. "If no one salvages any
incriminating videotape from the fire, you could just go back to work."
I felt the air solidify into glass, encasing me, trapping me. "I could?
What about you?"
"I'd say our effectiveness as a team is pretty much shot to hell,
wouldn't
you?" Some energy sinkhole in the room was sucking all the light away;
his face blurred into darkness as I strained to see it.
I hugged myself more tightly, wondering when it had gotten so cold. "Just
because I went off without you, Mulder? Did that insult your manhood?"
He twitched, lurched forward half a step, and I believed he was going to
do me harm. One way or another. But he stopped and swung his fist against
the grimy beige wall instead. I could feel the room shake with the
impact.
I would have welcomed being that wall. "I'm sorry I killed your latest
informant. She lost her nerve at a bad time."
He shook his head. "I don't care about that." There was a change in him,
a gathering storm whose lightnings would transform him utterly. I was
afraid of what the results would be.
"What do you care about, then?" It was the wrong move, I could tell
instantly, a perfect opening. The lightning flashed--I thought I could
feel it crackle in the air--and he flowed across the room and knelt in
front of me, his hands pushing the crappy mattress down on either side of
me.
"I care about you, Scully. About what you're becoming...what you've
become. I think we need...we need help. Maybe some time away from one
another...I just want you to work in the light, and I think you know
you've gone too far into darkness right now."
Fuck. Where was the anger? Why wasn't he aiming it at me? I needed him to
be angry so that I could be indifferent to it. His hands slid closer,
brushing against my hips and I tried to stand up, but he was too close
and I slumped back down without grace.
His face was buried in my neck and he was rocking me, crooning lullaby
nonsense and I was so angry with him for infantalizing me. Except that I
was also sobbing, without any idea how that had happened, and he had to
stop being nice so that I could remember how to be strong.
He picked me up and turned so that I was on his lap and he was the one on
the bed, still not letting me go, telling me how strong I was and how I
was going to be all right. I didn't even have enough volition to
struggle; my existence had narrowed to the need to force the next cry
from my lungs and then curl inwards waiting for another. I couldn't stop
wishing that he'd stayed mad.
I don't remember crying myself out. When I woke he was still wrapped
around me and the motel room was invisible in the darkness. He was lying
on my right arm, which had gone numb. I pulled it out from under him and
he awoke.
His hand rubbed my face. My nose was congested and the burns from close
contact with the fire were beginning to hurt, but I turned into his palm
as if it were cooling snow. He made a sad-amused sound. "I know you don't
want this from me," he said, as hoarse as if he'd been the one crying
helplessly for hours, "but I don't have anything else to give." Then he
stiffened and pulled away, singed somehow by his own words.
"What is it?" I choked out.
"There is...something else. I...I didn't tell you before because I
thought you had too much to deal with already. I was right, but...you
should know...I have some of your eggs."
I blinked in the darkness, feeling the sleep crusted in my eyes. "You
have what?"
"I told you about the fertility clinic, about finding out that your eggs
had been harvested." No, Mulder, you told a family court judge while I
was sitting there, but let's not quibble. "I didn't tell you that I saw
them, where they were kept. And I...I took a vial. I couldn't help it,"
he begged. "The Gunmen got someone to take a look--they were
well-insulated, and they're still frozen. Over twenty, some might be
viable..."
If I'd still believed in God, I would have prayed to Him to remove the
anvil that had fallen on my chest, squashing me into that malodorous
motel bed like Coyote caught in the trap he'd set for the Road Runner. I
had only survived Bethel because, I thought, if I destroyed the place
then the violation would be over.
"Wh--when were you going to tell me that part of the story?" I sat up,
moving my numb arm around, welcoming the way that the pain forced me
to think again.
"I don't know!" He rolled away and off of the bed, pacing in the
darkness. "When you were a little further away from it, when you'd had
some time to get over Emily. It's not like we've had the most open and
friendly of relationships since then."
The anger hadn't disappeared, I discovered, only gone back into its cave.
It could be called out when necessary. "Friendship has nothing to do with
it, Mulder! That's what you've been missing all along. This is about my
body, about what's been done to me and my children, and you had no right
to conceal this from me. No right."
I could feel him nodding miserably. "I know that, Scully. I'm sorry." The
other bed whined as he settled down on it. "I can never take back the
decision not to tell you right then. But once I'd waited...each time was
wrong. Should I have told you when you were seeing ghosts? While you
were in the hospital for your tests? Maybe when the cancer had
metastasized, maybe I really could have made your day then. San Diego
might have been a good place to do it, maybe in the funeral parlor."
I flushed, glad he couldn't see me. But he knew, damn him.
"Scully," he said softly, and I leaned toward his black-coffee voice.
"We're too fucked up to keep looking for the truth right now. When we get
back, take the eggs. Do what you have to do with them. If you want--if
you can--come back to me when you're ready."
"I won't leave the X Files just because you're having a personal problem
with me," I said in a dead woman's voice.
He swallowed. "Then I'll leave, until and unless you're willing to trust
me again. Skinner will be thrilled to make you AIC. He'll give you a good
partner. I--I don't know why I'm doing this any more. As long as you
do...I'll do whatever you want."
Sometimes, when a bone is broken and then left unattended, it heals
wrong. The bones fuse and the limb is shortened, deformed. True healing
can only come when the bone is re-broken and set right.
Is that what you were trying to tell me, Mulder? A medical metaphor for a
medical doctor. I wish I'd understood. All I felt was the unbearable
cracking and splintering as I broke again.
17
Happiness is a thing no man possesses. Fortune
May come now to one man, now to another, as
Prosperity increases; happiness never.
In the end, I did end up visiting Charlie after all.
It was an incredible relief when Byers pulled the van into the dusty
driveway of Charlie's low hacienda-style house nestled between a pair of
barren hills outside Sedona. A chicken walked in front of the van and
gave me an evil glare. The Gunmen huddled in the van and refused to come
out. Throughout the trip, Langly had been making noises about getting
back to DC to analyze Jason Lindsay's files and try to find out more
about him, and Frohike had been giving Mulder dirty looks, as if acting
distrustful were a really cool way of showing Mulder that he cared. From
what I gathered, Mulder was certain that his DNA was shared with Jason
and, likely as not, ten of Jason's closest friends. And I thought he
needed to worry about whether I was sleeping around.
Mulder shouldered his knapsack and followed me to the house, the hot wind
blowing the jacket of his ruined suit around him. Charlie emerged from
the shadows of the house and enfolded me in a fraternal hug. He was
thinner than I had seen him and the gray was starting to show in his
shoulder-length hair and his full beard, but he was hard and muscular
against me and seemed as cool as well water.
"Took your time, Squirt, " he said and smiled.
"Had stuff to do," I replied.
There had been a joke when we were growing up that Charlie could only
say a certain amount of words per day. When his allotment was used up,
he
went silent as a stump. In a house full of jabbering Scullys Charlie
walked in his own silent zone.
"Your boss called. Twice yesterday, once today, I let the kids answer
the phone and they were real unhelpful."
He looked over at Mulder.
"Charlie Scully."
"Mulder."
"C'mon in, Juanna's made lunch. You wanna invite your friends in."
"They're leaving," Mulder said, "and they aren't very social."
I think Juanna and Charlie had five children, but I wasn't sure. It was a
small herd of small people running hither and yon through the low, wide
rooms of the house, and it was hard to get a head count. Juanna turned
out to be a tiny Latina/Native American gold-skinned woman with an
infectious laugh. I tried to help her get lunch on the table and found
that I was staring at simple things like forks as though I had never seen
them before. She patted my shoulder and didn't say anything. For that I
was grateful.
Lunch was served at a battered table that looked as though it could have
dated back to the Spanish settlement of Texas. I took the Mexican beer
that Charlie offered me and let it dull the sharper bits of my mind.
While I ate mildly spicy beans and rice, Charlie and Mulder talked of
vague male things, of four wheel drive vehicles and how much rain fell
last year. It dulled to a mosquito drone in the back of my head.
Suddenly there was a clatter of silverware falling to the ground, Mulder
paled and stood. Charlie pointed him toward the bathroom; they'd already
bonded in that strange way men have. I didn't know who I was angrier at
for that.
"He's a good man, Dana," Charlie said gently as the door clanged shut and
the water began to run. "You should cut him some slack."
I formed my face into a smile. "You don't know what you're talking
about."
"I know what I see. You've been hurt, but all he wants is to help you."
"Charlie, if that were all he wanted I never would have been hurt."
"Y'know, Squirt, you've got to forgive people for not being perfect."
There was a muffled moan from the bathroom and I rose to check on him.
He opened the door as I approached. His lower lip and chin were covered
in
blood, so bright that it had to be arterial, dripping like drool from a
baby's mouth.
"I think--" he said, garbled by all the blood, and then collapsed. Behind
him on the sand-colored tile floor was a trail of blood from the
pink-stained toilet bowl. In that well-organized civilian bathroom it
looked as fake as Karo syrup with red food coloring.
Charlie was already running for the phone.
****
I woke to a world muffled with painkillers. It's a little like being a
kid all wrapped up against the cold, tubby as a snowman. You're mostly
insulated but your fingers and toes get cold and numb.
Scully perched on a nearby chair, reading an issue of the National Review
so old that it had Reagan on the cover. She looked up when she heard my
breathing change.
"You had emergency surgery to cauterize the ulcer," she said quietly.
"You lost a lot of blood, as usual, but that shouldn't matter much. The
real problem is the bullet wound. I'm supposed to report things like
that, and now I could lose my license because they wanted to know what
hospital I'd treated you at and I didn't have a damn thing to say."
I gaped at her. Even unconscious and bleeding, I'd apparently managed to
fuck up again.
"Eurf." I muttered and rattled the IV line that kept me bound to the bed.
"What did you tell them?" There, that came out right. I only sounded like
I was talking through five layers of paper bags.
"I said you'd taken a graze in a hostage situation down in Texas and
waved my badge around. You heal fast; it's not totally outside the realm
of possibility."
I heal fast. She'd commented on it before, but I hadn't given it much
thought. Chalked it up to my supremely masculine force of will, I guess;
real men don't get incapacitated by gunshot wounds even when major
arteries are compromised. But of course one would want one's master race
to heal quickly, especially if one were expecting the Neanderthals to
resist the new order. Jason probably never had any problems cutting
himself shaving either.
Well, none of that would keep Scully in possession of her badge. I was
glad she'd already thought of an explanation, I hate to have to make it
up as I go along. Scully's a much better liar than most people expect her
to be. I nodded to let her know that I'd understood.
"Getting your story straight?" Skinner's voice made me try to sit up,
which only served to cut through the drug haze and remind me that my
abdomen had been cut up from the inside with what felt like a Weed
Whacker.
"Sir," Scully acknowledged coolly. Her shoulders twitched, and I knew she
was shocked, but the voice was the same as always. She should bottle that
voice and sell it as coolant. Engine overheating would be a thing of the
past.
"So, now that Agent Mulder knows what to tell the fine folks at the
hospital when they ask, are you going to think about telling me the
truth?"
"How did you know where we were?" she replied incuriously. I could feel
the blood rushing through my veins, running to my stomach where it bit at
my flesh.
"Your brother's wife was very helpful when I arrived at her door. I think
she's impressed that I'd actually come all the way from Washington to
look at you two."
"I'm impressed," I offered. So he'd lied to me about not knowing where
Scully had said she was going. Maybe he thought that he really wanted an
audition in Scully's boudoir. Maybe I should have encouraged that, it
might have been better for everyone concerned. Instead I gave him a
shit-eating grin aided by the painkillers that, with me not moving, were
buoying me up like the Princess on her twenty feather mattresses; without
the pea in my stomach and the AD in my face, I could have gone straight
to sleep.
"Correct me if I'm wrong," Skinner offered, "but last time we met, wasn't
your hair brown?"
"Only my hairdresser knows for sure," I said, and batted my eyelashes.
Scully turned to stare at me, and I could see that she hadn't noticed
until Skinner had pointed it out. It figures. I mean, Scully had been
busy, but still it hurt some. But I relentlessly persist in forgetting
that Scully would need a radio telescope or a Stryker saw to notice
something happening to me.
Scully stood. "Excuse me," she ordered and walked out the door. We both
looked after her. It wasn't very Scullyesque to take a bathroom break in
the middle of a confrontation. But I'm damned if I know what Scullyesque
really is these days.
****
I felt the cramp for about five minutes before I understood it. I hadn't
had cramps since high school; when I went away to college and met George
I started on the Pill, and I'd never stopped even when I wasn't sexually
active because I enjoyed the freedom from nausea and the two-day flow
instead of the previous week-long pain. Recently, of course, that hadn't
been a problem, even without the Pill.
I excused myself and went to the bathroom.
My panties were soaked in blood, absolutely ruined. I stared at them.
And remembered dry heat in an anonymous motel, remembered speculating
about what made Marita worth saving, Marita's sly assurance that she'd
given me what Mulder never could.
She was wrong about that too, the twit.
So there I was, absolutely the same as before the abduction, really.
Except for the scar on the back of my neck and the microchip inside. And
the three years of nightmares and rage. You could bleed every member of
the conspiracy that had entrapped me dry and still not have a river deep
enough to wash away what had been done.
This blood wasn't even a down payment.
But it wasn't water, either. It was real and it might have something to
do with the future.
I cleaned myself up as best I could, stuffed some toilet paper into my
underwear, and went out to face all the men who would never, as hard as
they tried, understand exactly why I'd gone to Bethel.
Mulder was waiting, baiting Skinner like a trapped and angry bear. He was
going to let me explain, and his deference seemed more like trust than
abdication.
And as I looked at him, as he decoded the encrypted message on my face
and understood that I'd been reborn, I realized that I had been wrong.
Mulder understood. He didn't approve, but we'd never asked that from one
another and I wasn't about to start.
Maybe understanding was enough, for now.
That and hot sex, of course.
"Sir," I said and focused my attention on Skinner, "I need to tell you a
story about a woman who was betrayed."
I gave him as much of the story as he could handle, which was everything
except a night in a seedy motel and the exact status of my ova at the
time of
their incineration, to wit their already-completed union with somebody's
sperm. As far as he was concerned I'd destroyed a bunch of haploid cells
that had been stolen from me, that were mine by right.
I offered him my badge, though I couldn't offer my lost gun, and he just
looked at me.
Finally he sighed. "Step outside, Agent Scully."
Mulder looked at us suspiciously but didn't protest.
We stood close in the bright busy hospital hall and his voice was low. "I
thought that you were different than Mulder. That you were in control of
the
journey you were taking."
"Sir, no one is in control but the men behind these experiments. I don't
deny
that..." I couldn't finish. Deny everything, Mulder's voice in my head
suggested. "What could I have done within the law? When I had
indisputable proof of my d--my daughter's relationship to me I was
scoffed
at, told that I had no right to interfere with her care. She was there in
front of
the people who supposedly run this country and they paid no attention.
Should I have gone to them again?"
Skinner blinked and put his hands in his pockets. "I had hoped that you
would not decide to use the very methods these men use to hide the
truth."
"Some things are more important than making the truth known to others.
What I did--that is my truth, sir, and I accept its consequences."
He nodded, and I felt something tall and strong and faintly dangerous
that
had always been between us crumble and disappear.
"I'm sorry for your loss," he said, and meant more than Emily.
"After the disappearance of the man you and I know as the Smoker, I
don't
have much insight into the corridors of power. If there are repercussions
from this adventure, we will all discover them at the same time. I won't
perjure myself, Agent Scully, but...I understand why you felt you had to
break the rules. Just remember that, without proof of wrongdoing, we're
locked into an endless cycle of retribution and coverup, and whatever
temporary victory you feel you may have achieved is meaningless if the
larger objectives behind this project are obtained."
I nodded once and turned to go back to Mulder.
18
I loathe your prosperous future; I'll have none of it,
Nor none of your security--it galls my heart.
Two days later I was released from the hospital with a couple of bottles
of pills and a lengthy owner's guide for my ulcer. The diet described was
implausible in the extreme. Where was I going to find boiled rice and
bland food when I was in the field? I could just see myself with an MIB
lunchbox in my hand going to question a suspect. Life without coffee was
almost not worth living.
"We need to stop at a store," Scully said.
"Why?"
"I need to buy some underwear."
I considered that for a minute. In the hospital, when Scully had returned
from the bathroom, she'd been brighter, she glowed like a being from a
different plane. I could tell that something had happened--and what does
a woman find out when she goes to the bathroom?
Could Scully have encountered one of the Jeremiah Smiths at Roush?
And then I remembered Marita, burning for the dying children. She'd been
with Scully, and it would be comforting to think that she wasn't really a
person. I remembered one time when I thought for sure Marita had drawn
blood, I could feel the wetness on my skin. The next morning when I
stood with my back turned to the mirror and looked over my shoulder there
were just the faintest of pink welts; by the afternoon I could have gone
swimming and not drawn any comments. Well, not about the marks on my
back, anyway.
"Was it Marita?"
She blinked, blue eyes winking out like candle flames and then returning
full-force, and I chalked up another victory. Scully nonplused is not
something you see every day.
"Probably."
And that was all she'd say. I don't know if I'll ever understand the
details of what went on between the two of them. I'd like to think that
Scully was a little bit jealous, that she dug into Marita with her sharp
little claws.
****
Charlie drove us back to Phoenix. Mulder had a round-trip ticket for the
next day, and I'll never know how he timed it that way when he made the
reservation. I'd suspect him of actually coordinating these things with
the Conspiracy, but maybe he really is psychic. He bought me a one-way
seat next to him, which gave me an idea.
I made Charlie let us off in Scottsdale, the ritzy Phoenix suburb, at the
first really expensive mall we came to. We hugged and he shook Mulder's
hand. Then he turned back to me. Mulder backed away, with that exquisite
sensitivity he shows for everyone but me.
"Do right by him," Charlie whispered to me as he grabbed me again,
squeezing so tight that my burns ached. "I don't think you can do right
by yourself unless you take him with you."
I smiled up at him and tugged on his beard. "Take care of yourself,
Charlie. And try not to give too much advice, it'll ruin your
reputation."
He nodded and left. Mulder looked up at the huge gold Lord & Taylor sign
on the building in front of us and sighed. "What are we doing here,
again?"
"Before we go back I figure I might as well get some use out of your
ill-gotten gains."
"My dividend is sure going to drop now that you've set fire to my
assets."
"Cracking bad jokes won't help when I liquidate your assets." A softball
pitch, just for you, my easily amused partner.
I was not disappointed.
"Ooh, promise?"
Lord & Taylor had a wonderful women's department. Both DKNY and
Tahari do wonders for short women like me, helping us go up and down, in
and out in the right places. I love my cranberry suit with the black
velvet
lapels, don't get me wrong, but it's always bothered me that my partner
has
more suits than I do, when all *he* really needs to do is vary the shirt
and
tie. It's forced me to spend thousands of dollars over the years--it's
amazing what I used to wear before I understood what it made me look like
to stand next to him in my not-quite-right brown pantsuits.
It never occurred to me to exploit his wealth when we started sleeping
together, I suppose mostly because I'd just assumed that he skimped on
everything else to dress so well. I just hadn't been paying attention.
Sure, the apartment was a hole, but it was in a nice neighborhood, and
you've got to pay a lot in rent each month for the landlord to accept all
the broken doors, gunshots, and assorted woundings Mulder has brought to
the building over the years. But, even if I'd known, I don't think I
would have demanded his credit cards. Certainly I'd wanted the physical
release at least as much as he had; it's not like he needed to lure me
with extra inducements.
The fact that I was spending Roush's money made it much easier. Now,
maybe I could have demanded that he set up some foundation for abductees
or "experiencers," as Jose Chung wanted to call them. But that wasn't
very realistic and, frankly, I need at least as much psychic healing as
anyone who'd be a candidate for a grant. Let me tell you, Donna Karan is
a fabulous therapist.
Mulder didn't even blink when he signed the credit slip, though the sales
staff did. I had them ship it straight back to Maryland; no need to make
Mulder struggle under all those bags like some pussy-whipped husband in
a sitcom.
We wandered through the AV department on our way to buy lingerie, and
Jason Lindsay's handsome face was displayed on a hundred TV sets. The
shades varied slightly; on some sets you could see the blue highlights in
his
inky hair and in others it was a muddier black-brown. The drapes behind
him on the podium changed from the blue of a late summer twilight sky to
periwinkle, but in all of them he was saying the same thing: Terrible,
terrible accident. Promising lives lost, promising research avenues
destroyed. Heart goes out to the families and friends of all involved.
The fire started among a batch of highly volatile chemicals and swept
through the facility too fast for full evacuation, and the rumors about
firefighters finding locked corridors and smoke-choked corpses who'd been
sealed in were completely unfounded.
He was handsome enough that I almost wanted to believe him.
I nudged Mulder, who was staring at the images, at the funhouse
reflection of himself. "Is he...?"
"I'm not sure," he said. "I'm guessing yes. I'd imagine that we were
conceived in adjoining petri dishes anyway."
"There would be records of something like that," I said.
"The fake ones or the real ones? He's older than I am, we probably
weren't really made side by side...but it's nice to know that Roush is
staying in the family."
The news changed to show a story about a baby in some national park who'd
fallen through a crevice into a tiny cave and the heroic rescuers trying
to get her out, and we moved on.
Victoria's Secret coughed up a flurry of underwear, at which Mulder could
only goggle. I think he wanted to smirk but couldn't quite pull it off.
He came close when the salesgirl offered to model a few of the nighties
for him and I informed her that we were going to preserve the element of
surprise on that a little longer.
Mulder slept on the plane back east, his head drooping sideways until his
hair, which was beginning to show brown roots, was brushing my face. I
could have moved away, but I decided not to. All the way home, I
listened to the sound of his breathing and counted the gray hairs that
were beginning to peek through the brown and black.
So many years, so much time, so many unfulfilled promises, so many
betrayals marked in each of those gray hairs. I wasn't sure that I
wanted to add to them, wasn't sure that I wouldn't cause a skunk-like
stripe of white to bisect his head, and I knew that I didn't want to add
to the damage that had already been done.
I didn't know what I wanted anymore. I just wanted to go home.
The question isn't "Are you paranoid?"
It's "Are you paranoid *enough*?"
---James Cameron, *Strange Days*
Oh, wow, look, an ad below! <g>
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