<![CDATA[From: RivkaT <RivkaT@aol.com>
Date sent: Tue, 14 Apr 1998 00:37:29 EDT
Iolokus II: Agnates
Authors: MustangSally and RivkaT
Summary:What do you do when you find out your entire life has been a lie?
The horrific saga begun in Iolokus continues in the barren landscape of
Texas. Mulder and Scully delve deeper into the genetic experiments done
by the Project on the Mulder family. When the innocent, and
not-so-innocent, legacies of the experiment are murdered because of who
and what they are, Mulder and Scully are forced to face terrible reflections
in a mirror broken into ten distinct pieces.
Rating: NC-17 Classification: XA(R) (Mulder/Scully sexual activity)
Spoilers: Fifth Season through Emily
Disclaimer: We don't own them, which may be why we ride them hard and put them
away wet. Please don't take offense.
9/20
I will go to the bank by the wood and become undisguised and naked,
I am mad for it to be in contact with me.
Walt Whitman
The next morning brought news via Scully's e-mail. The bloodwork on Christopher
Farber's autopsy had returned, and it contained an interesting nugget of
information that Scully pointed out to me with her accusing fingers. The pimp
had been Schenectady's Typhoid Mary; he had enough HIV in his bloodstream to
kill a ballroom of debutantes foolish enough to trust their dates, but he wasn't
immunosuppressed in the slightest.
Superman had been turning teenagers out on the streets of a backwater town, and
probably infecting them as he addicted them.
I had to hand it to the designers--they weren't doing too well on personality,
but they seemed to have created a fine machine.
It seemed that we had agreed to begin looking into the fates of my varied kin
without discussing it at all. What else could we do? At the airport, I faxed
the entire contents of Jason's folders to Skinner back in DC along with a short
cover letter to the effect that he would have to understand that Scully and I
were going to look into this. I would have given my life to see the look on his
face when he realized that this particular thorn in his side was one of many.
This amused me to no end and Scully gave me a *look* while I was snickering into
my copy of Omni while we waited for the flight. The way this was shaping up we
were going to have enough frequent flyer miles to go to the Big Island before
the case was closed. Scully on the beach in a bikini was an intoxicating
thought.
We had been siting in the airport lounge drinking bad coffee for over an hour
when the inevitable phone call came. My cellphone shrieked in the pocket of my
badly-wrinkled suit and I knew who was calling before I even answered the phone.
"Do you want to explain this fax I found on my desk this morning?" Skinner
growled, large and scary as life on the scratchy connection.
I looked at my watch. At least he had enough time to have his morning coffee
before he called.
"I thought my cover letter was pretty much to the point."
"Excuse me if I find the fact that there is more than one Fox Mulder roaming the
face of the planet somewhat disturbing."
"Well, the majority of my kin seem to be involved in the receiving end of law
enforcement rather than upholding Justice. Kind of makes me look good, doesn't
it."
He snorted like a bull staring down a newbie matador at his first bullfight.
"And what do you expect me to do?"
"Let's have Danny run the information through his usual computer voodoo and see
what he comes up with."
"All right," he agreed and I heard him thinking about his next words before he
spoke, "Agent Mulder, keep this professional. Do not let this situation turn
into another one of your personal crusades."
"It's a little late for that, sir."
"Try harder, Agent Mulder," he warned and disconnected.
Scully eyed me over the top of her coffee cup.
"How did he take it?" she asked.
"Pretty well, considering. Do you think he's medicated?"
Massachusetts to L.A. is a grueling flight. I do not like Logan, the
concessionaires all sell Pepsi instead of Coke and the airport is flat and nasal
like a Bostonian accent. Logan reminds me of too many Michaelmas terms, coming
home to a house that would have been less empty had Mom simply ran away from it.
Too many rides in cabs when all the other kids my age deplaning had gaggles of
family waiting to embrace them.
LAX was better, glittering and round as a five-carat diamond on a starlet's
finger. The sun was stuck in the middle of the sky when we met the agents
Skinner had sent to meet us.
They wore black, probably because Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones had made it
hip. Their names were Jordan Marsh and Jeanne Redmond. Redmond did all the
talking. "We've located this Darien Klein of yours. He works from home and we've
had two cars on him for the last twenty-four hours. He's had two visitors, each
of whom stayed for a few hours and then left."
Scully was her usual businesslike self. "Do we know what kind of consulting he
does?"
Redmond sniggered. "The kind without clothes, LAPD says. He's a rent-a-date.
You'd be surprised at how many people in this town who could get laid for free
prefer to pay for it."
"At least that way they know exactly what currency they're paying in," I
suggested, earning dubious looks from the women.
****
We found Darien beside his pool, greased to a thick sheen to get the minimum
necessary tan. I went first; we were going to bring Mulder to meet him once I'd
made the initial contact in order to decrease the freak-out factor.
I looked him over as I approached. Standard deviation: minus scars, plus extra
bulk at the shoulders. New variation, sun-streaked hair with a symmetry never
found in nature, the kind that came at a high price at a good salon. Mulder's
facial features require some attention before they cohere into attractiveness,
and in some angles, when you can't see his eyes, the sum total is downright
goofy-looking, but there is absolutely nothing to be said against his body.
Looking at it, or a reasonable facsimile thereof, was distracting.
I pulled out my badge and strode forward. "Darien Klein?"
He tossed his head towards me and pulled down his sunglasses. "Tell me you're my
three o'clock."
I could feel the blush spread like port wine over my face and neck. "Special
Agent Dana Scully, FBI."
He pouted and licked his lips. "Is there a problem?"
Yes there was, but I was going to hold out for the version with the bullet
scars; retraining takes so much time. "Sir, we believe you may be in danger
because of your relationship to a...group of men. I'd like to ask you to come
with me so that you can be placed in protective custody."
Darien sat up from his lounger and looked me over more carefully, draping his
arms artistically over his thighs and making it perfectly apparent why he was in
enough demand to afford this place. "I get it," he said. "Jorje sent you, right?
Tell him he's got a great instinct for my tastes. So, what happens, you handcuff
me and then I get to see you out of uniform?"
It was a good thing I was already as red as I was going to get. "I'm afraid it's
no joke, sir." I shifted my jacket so that he could see the bulge of the holster
at my hip. "Have you ever heard the name Jason Lindsay?" He shook his head and I
could see him begin to register the seriousness of the situation. "Arlen
Petrovsky? Christopher Farber?" Each question produced another headshake.
"If I haven't heard of these guys, why do I have to go into custody?"
I raised my hand and signaled for Mulder to come out from where he was hidden in
the shadow cast by Darien's lovely house.
Darien's eyes widened as he took in the physical resemblance. "Who are you?"
"Your long-lost brother, apparently."
"I was raised in the Valley! I don't have any brothers!"
"Surprise," Mulder said, drawing the word out until it snapped.
Marsh and Redmond stood guard outside while we supervised Darien as he
overstuffed two suitcases with clothes that didn't deserve the rough treatment.
Darien favored Versace and Dolce & Gabbana over Mulder's Armani, I could see the
two of them trading dismissive glances at each other's favored wardrobe.
Darien was not allowed to bring his cellphone, which was the first thing that
really seemed to upset him. I wasn't sure if he was used to weird things like
this happening to him, this being L.A., or whether his sociopathic heritage was
simply expressed in his extreme lack of affect. Of course, he was Mulder's
twin. . . The telephone dependency might have been genetic.
As we headed out to the car that would take him to the safe house--a location
that not even Mulder or I would know, to give him more protection--he turned to
Mulder, who was lugging the larger suitcase, and asked, "By the way, who the
hell are you?"
"Fox Mulder."
A look of understanding suffused Darien's features. "What is it?" Mulder asked
sharply.
"That's a name I have heard."
"From whom?" I rattled out, milliseconds before Mulder asked the same question.
Now Darien lowered his head, and that familiar unruly chunk of hair (or one very
like it) brushed his forehead. I'd never thought that Mulder made the gesture as
a calculated tactic, but I'd have to reconsider that judgement. He looked
bashfully up through the brown-gold strands. "I assume you guys know what I do."
Mulder made a small strangled sound and I could tell he'd made a connection that
I'd missed.
"We have reports, yes," I said, trying to sound as robotic as possible.
"A couple of years back, there was one man..." he smiled, remembering. "He
spotted me in a bar and spent the evening watching me. I can always tell, you
know. Finally he sent over a drink, and we had a little talk. I explained that I
wasn't free that night, well I'm never free but I had other business, and he
agreed to meet me the next night. Fox was the name he called out...at the time,
I thought it was a rather endearing compliment."
"What was this man's name?" Mulder shook his head to warn me off, but the
question was already there.
Darien let his shoulders ripple artistically in what might have been loosely
deemed a shrug. "I had the feeling he was lying, but he called himself Alex."
Yet another item on the list of things I was discovering that I Did Not Want To
Know.
We put Darien in the car and then stood looking at each other like idiots. "Now
what?"
"Emerson won't take my calls and he's guarded by a small army, I say we go see
Baylor, on paper he looks like a nice enough guy."
Just then Mulder's cellphone rang. He listened for a few minutes, and then hung
up.
"Scratch that," he said. "That was Danny. When he looked up Hal Rothman's name
in the database, he pinged a big DEA trace. The DEA demanded to know his
authorization for the search, he gave them Skinner's name, and now our ever-
loyal AD traded us in for a matched set of drug-sniffing German Shepherds."
"What?"
"We're going in to run a sting. It seems that another Hal Rothman was the only
thing the DEA needed to finish the scavenger hunt and beat all the other
agencies."
10/20
The atmosphere here is not a perfume, it has no taste of distillation, it is
odorless.
It is for my mouth forever, I am in love with it.
Walt Whitman
Mulder walked into the room and five mouths dropped open. One of the agents even
knocked over his coffee; another reached for her gun.
One of them, obviously in command, rose and came over to us. "Agent Martinez,"
he informed us. He shook Mulder's hand, then mine, looking me over like he was
trying to guess my dress size. "You'll do real well," he said, "but we're going
to need some new clothes. Agent Yarrow--Ines--will help you. You," he said,
turning back to Mulder, "are just right."
That had to be the most validation Mulder had received in the last year.
Ines took me into another room as the remaining agents began to give Mulder his
backstory. The other room contained more clothes than the average Gap and Ines
rooted around for something in my size as she explained that Hal Rothman had
been under investigation for a long time and Mulder was their first real key to
his life. Rothman was slick; his phone had been tapped for over a year, they'd
put a camera into the foyer three months ago, and there was still nothing on
him. The agent in charge of the investigation had heard Skinner's crazy
explanation and homed in on the relevant fact: Mulder was a perfect body double
for Hal; they knew that Hal had a big meeting that night; all they had to do was
keep Hal away, let Mulder do the recording, and then any grand jury in the
nation would return an indictment.
My job? Apparently Hal never went anywhere without window dressing.
Ines put a body wire on me before pulling out a pile of what looked like rags.
Instead it was an orange sateen camisole that would have been small on me at age
12 and a cropped thermal undershirt. At least I got to layer them though a bra
was out of the question; the texture of the undershirt disguised the wire while
still making me look like I'd been sewn into the outfit. For my lower half we
had unspeakably trendy Calvin Klein (no relation to Darien) undies and baggy
designer jeans that hung off my hips. My tattoo was visible along with the crack
of my ass. Ines congratulated me on the way it looked. She had some suggestions
for making me look dewy-eyed and underage.
I was beginning to sense that the corporate culture of the DEA was slightly
different than that of the FBI.
****
Martinez gave me the rundown on this iteration of myself. It was essentially an
expanded version of what Jason had already given me. He didn't ask any questions
until he was finished outlining his plan and shoving a Reader's Digest condensed
version of the drug hierarchy on the eastern seaboard down my throat. It was
oddly invigorating to meet someone whose conspiracy story barely intersected
mine at all, except for the near-accident of involving one of my homicidal
twins.
His first question was, however, a doozy.
"How long have you known that Hal Rothman was your brother?"
Scully saved me, swooping down on the conversation like Athena bursting from
Zeus' head. "I'm afraid that information relates to a pending investigation. We
can't say anything more about it at this time."
I spared her a grateful look, and then another that was pure double-take. My
eyes skittered over her body and caught on the white plastic bird-shaped
barettes holding back the wings of her hair. She was wearing pearlescent blue
eyeshadow right off the cover of Seventeen, her lips were shining like peach
nectar, and her nails were as orange as her under, er, outerwear. A stickler for
detail as always, she'd somehow managed to create the impression of broken veins
at the inside of one elbow. The fading finger-mark bruises on her hip were
real, I'd put them there.
She looked about sixteen and I realized that part of it was the shoes, huge
Starsky & Hutch Adidas sneakers instead of the heels she'd left with. I could
only see the toes peeking out from the puddle of jeans on the ground.
If this was Hal's type I was in deeper shit than I'd thought.
The plan was, as such plans go, simple, which was good because we didn't have
much time to rehearse. Derail Hal's limo with a convenient "accident," jam his
cellphone, and have me go to Hal's meeting. With my voice on the tape, Hal
would, quite literally, look like the one who'd sung. The DEA hoped that
appearances would split him from his confederates, prompting him to attain
protected witness status in exchange for testimony. Maybe he too could escape
the nose. Or we could give him the identity of one of the dead Mulders, offering
him the choice of Arlen or Chris. That would actually be pretty funny.
In return, the DEA agreed to watch out for Hal's safety--a fair deal, because
they needed him to live too in order to testify. I don't think they believed
that he had a slew of other brothers who were being knocked off, but they played
along nicely. Maybe Skinner had promised them invitations to the annual office
party.
We were driven to the meeting in a pimpmobile.
The small man who met us at the door of the suite gave Scully only the most
cursory of glances as he beckoned us in. We were led to a well-appointed
conference area. I took the couch so that I had Scully next to me, my hand
resting far up on the inside of her thigh. She looked away as if it didn't
matter to her and that hurt much more than a glare would have.
>From the inner sanctum, two men emerged, one white and one Asian.
I flipped through the pictures in my brain, searching for a match. Fuck, I
should have paid more attention to Martinez's little lecture, these fellows had
no idea that they were just a subplot and they'd kill me just as thoroughly as
any shapeshifting bounty hunter.
I found them: John Kim and Mark 'Tiger' Timmins. I was the money man, sort of
like a Hollywood agent-slash-producer; I'd set them up originally by finding the
financing for their first deal and they still worked with me.
By all accounts Hal was another self-centered son of a bitch so I didn't get up,
just raised my hand from Scully's leg in greeting.
Sharp nods. Scully stared vacantly at them, somehow managing not to blink.
They sat and we got down to business. They had a cash-flow problem related to
the new hundred dollar bills, which were just now getting wide play abroad. The
DEA had coached me on the appropriate solution, which I relayed to them in due
course.
The phone rang and John Kim glared at it, then looked at me apologetically.
"They wouldn't have buzzed it through if it wasn't important." I nodded
magisterially, giving permission.
He picked it up, said "Yes?" and listened for a minute. Then he carefully put
the receiver down on the glass-topped table and turned back to me. "It's for
you."
I had to suppress the automatic look at Scully for her opinion. Drug-dipped
whores don't have opinions.
As carefully as if I were picking up a snake, I reached for the phone.
"Hello?"
"Who is this?" The voice was nasal and scratchy, familiar in a strange way but I
couldn't give it a name.
"Who is *this*?"
"Cut the crap, this is Hal Rothman and I want to speak to John again."
"Where are you calling from?"
"A public phone, my cell won't work and my car broke down and I couldn't make
the meeting, who the fuck are you?"
"*I'm* Hal Rothman," I said, keenly aware of Scully's even breathing on the seat
next to me, "and I don't think this is very funny." John gave a little nod at my
reaction.
"Listen, I don't know what kind of game you're playing, but I warn you--you tell
John--you need me. Don't try and cut me out."
"I don't know what you're talking about," I said and hung up. John and Tiger
were watching me for a reaction. "Fucking DEA head games. They get more
desperate every day."
My companions nodded as if I'd just read from the Torah scroll.
Once again, I was swimming in my own sweat and my brain was stuttering like
Howard Stern's sidekick. Undercover ops more elaborate than a phone call have
never been my forte and I made a terrible happy tooth in my third grade play.
Shit, I have a hard enough time acting like myself most days.
Scully shifted on the couch next to me and sighed.
"This is so lame," she muttered.
John and Tiger smirked.
"Go ahead with the hundred dollar solution for the time being. By the time the
fucking Feds change all the currency no one will know what the fuck is going
on," I stood up and Scully slouched to her feet next to me.
They stood and we went through an elaborately cool handshaking ritual that they
must have learned from watching the Godfather movies. Assholes. Pretentious
assholes. They were no better than the dealers hawking crack on street corners,
they just had marginally better wardrobes.
****
Outside, Mulder ducked around the corner of the building to wait for the DEA's
seized limo to pick us up. He looked pinched and shaky under the blue glare of
the neon above the door.
"Fuck," he hissed and jammed his hands in the pockets of the long black leather
coat he was wearing.
"The phone call?" I prodded and waddled into whispering distance.
"That was him. Almost blew the whole thing right then and there. Fucking
Martinez doesn't know his asshole from a hole in the ground."
"It's a pity the IQ requirement for the DEA is so low," a familiar-unfamiliar
voice drawled and I heard the unmistakable sound of a pistol having the safety
snapped off, "but I'm sure you two know that first hand. Please step away from
the building."
Most of the alley next to the office building was as dark as it gets, and the
man with the gun was a moving center of darkness in the random pools of
darkness.
"Please switch off your wires," he continued in the same strangely polite tone,
"I know you're not armed, Tiger and John never would have let you in if you were
carrying. That was one of the few things you actually got right."
I reached in the waistband of my jeans and pulled the microphone wire loose from
the main unit while Mulder stared at Rothman as though he was a deer staring at
an oncoming 18-wheeler.
"Step into the light please," Rothman suggested.
Mulder did so and I watched his pupils contract as the light slammed into them.
Rothman approached him and they both stood in the cold light of the streetlight
like actors on-stage. It was surreal in the extreme, the matching coats, the
black pants, the loose silk shirts. Rothman even brushed his hair back the way
Mulder did.
"I hope you got a nice bonus for the plastic surgery."
"It's not plastic surgery. I'm your brother."
"And I'm Luke Fucking Skywalker," Rothman smiled Mulder's charming smile back at
him.
"There are people who are trying to kill all of us."
"All?"
I tried to explain.
"There were ten twins born as the result of a genetic experiment and-"
"Shut up, bitch," Rothman snapped and his gun hand lashed out and caught me
across the jaw.
The pavement was cold and dirty when I hit it.
"Scully?"
"I'm fine, Mulder," I sat up and rubbed at the numb flesh, shedding bits of
gravel embedded along the side of my arm.
Mulder talked quickly, trying to get through despite the fact that Rothman was
about as receptive to him as the average congressional committee. "My name is
Fox Mulder I'm with the FBI you should check up on it we were all raised
separately --" He stopped when Rothman poked him in the cheek with the gun.
"You tell Martinez that he's full of shit, and if I ever see your fake fucking
face again, I'm going to blow it off. Understand?"
Mulder's face hardened into something I hadn't seen before.
"Listen to me you ignorant prick, you're going to wind up dead and it's
not going to be from your jackass crack head dealers either," his arm
shot up and he grabbed Rothman's wrist - the one holding the gun.
"I'll fuckin' shoot you, man."
Despite his tough-guy act, Rothman was genuinely surprised when Mulder snapped
his arm out of the way and kneecapped him with the hard toe of one fashionable
workboot. With a roar of pain, Rothman swung at Mulder with his gun hand and hit
his twin with the handle. Mulder spit blood and rammed his shoulder into his
twin's chest. They both bounced off the brick wall of the alley in a flurry of
leather coats, flapping hair and the gleam of gunmetal. Through the sounds of
fists on flesh, I could hear my partner's voice.
The gun went flying and clattered to the ground a yard away from me.
"Don't you want to live? They're going to kill you, you dumb fuck."
"Fuck you man, DEA bullshit. You got nothing on me."
Even as I grabbed Rothman's gun I realized there was no way I could tell them
apart in the gritty light. Damnit! Even if I rushed at one of them I had a
fifty-fifty chance of getting it wrong. Mole, mole,
who's got the mole. Finally, they stumbled to a halt, one twin pinning
the other against the wall.
"Mulder!" I shouted.
And wouldn't you know that both of them looked at me. Shit.
"Mulder if he wants to take his chances, let him go. You might be doing the
world a favor."
I got a dual dirty look for that.
"Let him go!" I ordered, "step away from the twin and raise your hands -- both
of you!"
The twin, whichever one it was, stepped back from the other, both put their
hands in the air.
"They'll kill you and you'll wind up in a fucking plastic garbage bag
like the piece of trash that you are," the one on the right hissed.
Okay, that was Mulder, the one with the bleeding gash on his lip. I
covered Rothman with his own gun.
"They can try," Rothman gave Mulder an ugly smirk and the finger.
Turning his back on us, he slid off into the darkness where he came
from.
Mulder closed his eyes and swayed slightly on his feet. I reached out
with my scraped hand and tugged on his jacket.
"It's funny," he said, looking into the darkness where Rothman had
vanished, "I spent so long looking for a sibling and now that I've found out
that my family gives new meaning to the word 'extended,' none of them wants to
talk to me."
He turned his back on me. I waited in the dark and the cold, while he
regained what was left of his composure. He'd need it after giving
Rothman his real name; Martinez was going to be apoplectic. I stuck Rothman's
gun into one of the pockets on my jeans--with any luck ballistics would be able
to match it to an unsolved crime or two--and waited for the Calvary to arrive.
We got into the limo to drive back from the 'meeting', listening to the cross-
talk among the agents monitoring Rothman's building. The driver was the best
proof of Rothman's claim about the DEA I'd seen yet, he got lost twice in a
four-block radius. How hard is it to find New York City? It's like fucking Rome,
all roads lead there, and yet this jerkoff managed to drive us practically to
Pennsylvania before figuring out how to get back.
Mulder didn't seem too worried; doubtless he wasn't looking forward to
explaining to Martinez just what exactly Rothman had said to him. The last thing
we needed was an OPR investigation into Mulder's lifestyle of luxury because
they suspected him of drug connections.
"He's in the building," I heard through the snap, crackle, pop of the radio. We
were on the George Washington Bridge, crawling slowly towards the city.
Ten minutes later, "He's leaving...catching a cab. Should we follow?"
I recognized Martinez's voice answering in the affirmative. In a minute, he came
on the air again. "Wait a second...Yarrow, you said he entered the building
while you were watching?"
"Yep."
"Why did Johnson tell me the same thing just before your shift started?"
Mulder swore and grabbed the driver's shoulder with one hand while reaching for
the radio with the other. "We've got to get back to his building," he said.
"Something's wrong."
"Martinez?"
"Don't use my name, Mulder, do you have any idea how many people could be
listening? Haven't you ever seen Hard Copy?"
"We'll all be on it tomorrow unless you get in that apartment now, I'm telling
you, there's something very wrong."
Another voice broke in. "Sir? The doorman at the building is calling for an
ambulance."
****
The exquisite fourteen-year-old girl who had been Hal's real waif of the week
was sobbing noisily as police officers flowed around her, a rhapsody in blue.
"He din't use," she insisted, wet eyes as bloodshot as the veins on her arms
were broken. When she opened her mouth the illusion of Kate Moss porcelain
perfection was broken, but it's not like Hal wanted her for her conversational
skills.
The sight of my face had sent her into hysterics.
After Scully had pulled a sedative out of her infinite bag of doctor tricks, the
girl had calmed down somewhat. Huddled on Hal's Chinese brocade couch, getting
her CKOne stink on it which I bet he'd never have let her do if he were around
to protest, she looked much smaller than her full five feet. Youth Services was
allegedly on its way to take her into custody, but in NYC this was not any
guarantee of rapid action. And when they arrived, likely as not they'd just find
some well-connected pimp for her foster-care placement.
None of my concern, anyway. I was just trying to find out what she knew about
Hal's meteoric fall into vomiting and convulsions from his apparent heroin OD.
"He never used," she repeated, wiping some snot away from her upper lip with the
back of her hand.
"Maybe you just never saw him," I suggested.
She shook her head rapidly, like a wet dog. "Naw, he made fun of it. Said he
didn't need it, what was wrong with his life? Nothin', no reason to use."
"Who was his visitor just now, just before he--"
More sniffles, wiped on an arm that looked like it had been stitched back
together after a bad accident.
"I don' know. He said it was an appointment, he told me to get lost and South
Park was on..."
I patted her on the shoulder, awkwardly, as she began keening again. She was
just about Juliet's age, she was probably considering committing suicide to
follow the great love of her life into the belly of the white dragon.
Considering her other prospects, I couldn't say I blamed her.
The agents swarming over Hal's apartment like fire ants weren't having much
luck. No doubt Rothman kept secret accounts with information he could use to
save his ass if necessary, but if he was living up to the family legacy it would
be beyond the abilities of drug-sniffing dogs to discover.
Martinez appeared just as we were about to leave. He had my business card in a
clear evidence bag. "We found this on Rothman's body. Want to try again on how
long you've known about your family values?"
Scully growled at him, if she were a cat her ears would have been flattened to
her head, and he moved back, mumbling something about getting the real story
from Skinner. Smart guy.
To top it off, we hadn't gotten three steps out the door before my cellphone
rang. Hurrying to the elevator to get away from the still-swirling mass of cops,
I flipped it open.
"Mulder."
Skinner's voice shot out of the phone loud enough for Scully to follow it.
"Darien Klein was just discovered giving Agent Fallon a blow job."
"Did he make Fallon pay?"
Scully glared at me reproachfully, but I could tell she was amused.
Skinner continued. "He wanted to get to a phone. He said he had to call and
cancel a 'date,' or the client would never speak to him again."
"For the price of a quarter, that's ten thousand times less that it would
normally cost."
"When is this...prostitute...going to be protected enough to get him out of our
safe house and away from my agents?"
"I wish I could give you good news on that, but I'm standing outside of Hal
Rothman's apartment. And it looks like another funeral for me, unless we just
wait and use a mass grave."
Skinner grunted. "Watch your back, Mulder. I don't know these other men, but I
don't intend to lose a valuable agent to whatever force is behind these
murders."
I wished Skinner's will were enough to prevent that, but it struck me as
unlikely.
While Scully toddled off to her autopsy, I played a hunch and asked to see the
last few days' worth of tapes from Hal's vestibule.
Sure enough, the day before his death a familiar figure had visited. The
resolution wasn't good enough to get the face exactly right; the DEA hadn't
really had many good options for placing the camera where it wouldn't be seen.
They weren't going to like this one bit, though I could probably remember my
whereabouts at that time, I was pretty sure that I'd been five minutes away from
coming into Scully with a spasm and a groan. Excellent alibi, no? The Office of
Professional Responsibility would love that.
I wondered how he'd gotten my card, and how many sets of my fingerprints there
would be on it.
****
I've never done an autopsy on Mulder before, despite all his deaths.
The resemblance wasn't complete. Hal had never taken a gunshot wound, though it
was rumored that he'd acted as his own assassin several times. He liked high-
powered rifles, weapons that a man outside the law could use where real cops had
to give the bad guy a chance to surrender and live. He took care of himself; his
upper arms were better developed than Mulder's, which was consistent with the
home gym and all the shiny silver free weights I'd seen in our brief official
sojourn chez Rothman. And photos of the corpse next to the Nordic Trac were not
going to help sales of home gym equipment. His last meal had involved expensive
goat cheese, walnuts, and radicchio.
There were no needle punctures, not even in any well-hidden places. None of the
signs of use I'd expect from a man with an intimate relationship with opiates.
As high up in the hierarchy he was, he'd still have used heroin cut with
something else at some point. Talcum powder is popular; it stays in the lungs
forever, and Hal's alveoli were pink and untouched. Quinine is used too, but
it's rough on the heart; there were no abscesses, no signs of endocarditis.
Other than the small problem that he was not breathing, Hal was in excellent
health.
The NYPD and the DEA wanted this to be an accidental overdose, because drug
rivals usually just shot each other if they were miffed; it would be convenient
for everyone if Rothman had just snorted too much China White. But it didn't
fly, most "accidental" overdoses involve unhappy people who half-decide not to
pay enough attention to the amount they're mainlining. Hal had been on top of
the world; the DEA agents admitted that without Mulder's doppelganger act they'd
probably still be trying to get enough evidence for an indictment when the
*next* millenium came.
And Mulder's business card was not something Rothman would have been carrying
around. Ironically, Rothman's associates would have been just as upset as OPR to
learn of the genetic ties between the two brothers, only their idea of an
"interrogation" to figure things out wouldn't involve a hot room and nothing to
drink but knives and lit cigarettes in flesh.
Then there was the matter of the duplicate entry into Rothman's apartment
building. Double entry was for bookkeeping, not for people.
The clock was running down. I needed to pay more attention to my own personal
Mulder, remember that he was, in someone's eyes, just one of many.
My face still hurt from where Rothman had hit me with his gun. I have seldom
enjoyed an autopsy more.
I finished the stitches that put Rothman's cold well-formed chest back together
and looked up.
Straight into Mulder's eyes, only I could also see *through* them to the clock
on the far wall.
It was 10:13.
I almost brought my hand to my mouth to cover the moan before I realized that I
was still wearing gloves and I didn't want to suck down Hal's blood and stomach
contents even if he was healthy.
Another revenant, I thought and it stared at me, stared and stared as if I were
the see-through one.
Once is an anomaly, two times a curiosity. By now even I had to admit that I had
a little problem with the unquiet spirits of the dead. "Wh...what do you want?"
I asked. "Who are you?" The hair color wasn't easy to divine, being almost
transparent, but I couldn't see the mole and even in death Mulder would have
been more snide.
His mouth moved.
Don't trust him, I think it said, and then disappeared as the door swung open
and Mulder stepped into the space vacated by his haunt.
"Next stop, Philadelphia. Baylor Francis has agreed to talk to us."
11/20
What is commonest, cheapest, nearest, easier, is Me.
Me going in for my chances, spending for vast returns,
Adorning myself to bestow myself on the first that will take me,
Not asking the sky to come down to my good will,
Scattering it freely forever.
Walt Whitman
I don't like Bruce Springsteen. Well, shall we just say that I have a soft spot
for "Hungry Heart" but that's only because I associate it with one incredible
week in Glasgow with Phoebe and there was a jukebox in the pub where we would
play snooker, get drunk and then go back to what passed for a hotel and have sex
until neither of us could walk. But there I was again in another dingy hotel,
this time in the City of Brotherly Love, with a woman more capable of handing
out passion and heartbreak than Phoebe ever was. In that hotel room while
Scully cleaned the scrape on her face in the bathroom, I sat on the bed and
looked out at the dark city with an echo of a song bouncing around in the dried
gourd where I used to keep my brain.
The night has fallen, I'm lyin' awake
I can feel myself fading away
So receive me brother with your faithless kiss
Or will we leave each other alone like this
On the streets of Philadelphia
So the movie had been about AIDS, which made me think about brother Christopher
and his unpleasant habit of sharing with his stable of girl and boy whores. Not
to mention Darien's occupational hazard. But the elements that I carried in my
blood, bone, skin, and every other cell in my body were no less lethal and
dangerous than the HIV virus. The genes.
God, we were all awful in some way shape or form. Dealers in sin, pain, death,
and weakness. I quote the Rolling Stones: "Every cop is a criminal, and all the
sinners saints." Had I ended up as a profiler because of this genetic taint?
Was my carefully controlled world going to fall apart around me and I'd wake up
one morning with Scully next to me, her torso opened like a gutted bass and her
blood on my hands? I'd been close to hurting her on several occasions in the
not-too-distant past and I wanted to know what was finally going to short-
circuit the tiny bit of control that I had.
If I hadn't let Hal go he might still be alive.
I could flagellate myself all night but it would only make Scully hover over me
the way she did the baby back in Austin. What the hell was the deal with that
anyway? She was calling the hospital on an almost daily basis to find out how
the thing was doing and she thought I hadn't noticed. We were getting entirely
too good at figuring out the other one's tricks. For example, she would walk
out of that bathroom at any moment, fuss all over the cut on my lip and then
proceed to rip my clothes off and fuck herself stupid to wipe out the sordid
memories of Hal's world.
I thought we were past that, I thought her hard resolve not to care about me was
finally breaking down, that she was warming up to me to a certain degree.
When Scully came out of the bathroom, she had put a bandage over the scrape on
her face but the blue eyeshadow reigned triumphant.
"I double dog dare you to walk into Skinner's office like that."
"Bite me, Mulder."
"Anywhere you want."
She had antiseptic and those darling little butterfly bandages and we proceeded
to do the Dance of the Beaten Man, the one where I say no and she says yes and
no one takes any bets on the winner.
Those things pull at my skin in a really annoying way.
Scully, by contrast, pulls at my skin in a purely enticing way. She had no
sooner put away her doctor tools than she began unbuttoning her blouse.
Let's see, I could resist and we could fight and then later she'd probably come
back, or she wouldn't, and either way I'd be miserable.
I stood and walked over to her, finishing the job and sliding the silk over her
shoulders. There were still traces of adhesive on her stomach from where the
wire had been taped on and I bent to lick at them, the roughness and sour taste
an interesting contrast to her peach-down skin. Taking her at her word, I
nibbled, trying to clean her off with my teeth, and she groaned.
"I know you like no one else does," I whispered as I eased her skirt and panties
down to the floor and pressed my face into her stomach. She murmured something
that sounded like agreement and I squeezed her close to me, my hands on her hips
sleeking down her thighs and calves.
Straightening, I picked her up and carried her the few steps to the bed--any
farther and it would have been time for a chiropractor, but I saw something real
peering out of her eyes and the strain on my back was worth it to get her full
attention.
"Turn over," I ordered her and she blinked those blue topaz eyes at me, then
complied. She was on her hands and knees, trembling a little with lust and
uncertainty, and the worm on her back was turning circles inside my head.
Scully's like an amusement park, the wait can be a hassle and the price is high,
but the ride makes it all worthwhile.
I stripped and joined her on the bed, spreading her legs further with one hand
as I moved my cock into position. A false start made her jerk as if shocked and
then I was inside her.
The back of her neck was salty--autopsies make her work up quite a sweat. My
thumbs caressed her nipples and she sighed happily.
"Scully?" I moved one hand down to finger her clitoris, gently.
"Ah?"
"Why is it that we always have the best sex when the rest of our relationship is
at its worst?" She didn't say anything, but I felt her lose our joint rhythm.
"You remember, Scully," moving my fingers a little faster, "that time right
before you ran off to Arizona without me. That was good, wasn't it?"
She grunted.
"So what's going on, Scully, I really want to know your interpretation here." I
stopped moving entirely and put both hands on her hips, stilling her. She tried
to push against me and then tried to pull away, but I held her in place, feeling
her tighten further around me like a fist.
After a thirty-second eternity she bowed her head, letting the hair fall in a
shower over her eyes so that she couldn't see the outside world. "I can't need
you like that," she said. "Not all at once."
Oddly enough the enormous gouge in my chest didn't affect my erection at all, I
suppose because the blood was already trapped there.
"All right," I said, only squeaking a little. "All right." She shuddered when I
started moving again, shaking like a wooden roller coaster as I tugged at her
breasts and gnawed at her shoulder.
She called out my name when she came.
****
Just off Head House square, we found Baylor's bookstore, Our Bookshelf. It was a
nice place, its subject matter identified by a rustic pink triangle hanging in
the window. Robert Rodi was the featured author of the week. I was surprised by
how un-campy it was. Lots of pale pine bookshelves, plants, Bach playing on the
stereo, comfy chairs for casual reading, and two coffee pots labeled "Leaded"
and "Unleaded" with a stack of paper hot cups for patrons to use. I could
easily imagine my brother Bill wandering in by accident, and then going into
cardiac arrest. Mulder headed for the shelves in back and let me deal with his
doppelganger at the front desk. But Baylor was on the telephone and I picked up
a coffee table book called "Boys on the Beach" and watched Baylor over the tops
of the pages of beautiful men frolicking in naked splendor on tropic sands.
Idly, I wondered if I cou
Somehow, Baylor managed to look younger than the rest of the brothers, even
though his name indicated that he had been one of the earlier issues. His face
was rounder and he seemed smaller altogether, despite the neat goatee and
cropped George Clooney haircut. He was also about as camp as his store -- which
is to say, hardly at all. Dressed in chinos and a gray Henley shirt, he fiddled
with the earrings in his right ear and listened to the caller.
"Yeah, I know that, but out of print means out of print . . . I
understand. No, I called the publisher and they told me that no one was buying
it so they stopped the print run. Yeah? Well you can't make people buy things,
right? I still have four copies left, do you want them or not?"
He tapped heavy silver rings on the countertop and leaned over the glass with
the familiar languid grace I saw every day.
"You could try a vanity press . . . " he winced and shut his eyes, "well
be an egomaniac and see if I care. Right. Tomorrow, okay? See you later,
Carl."
He hung up the phone with a restrained click and glared at it.
"Bitch," he muttered.
Becoming aware of the fact that I was staring at him, Baylor looked up at me.
Seeing Mulder's face on someone else was still making my stomach flip no matter
how many times it had happened lately. This time my stomach did a flip and a
half gainer. Baylor's eyes were green, brilliant feline green. My heart
finally started again when I realized he was wearing contact lenses.
"Can I help you?" he asked.
I put down the book and took out my badge.
"Special Agent Dana Scully, FBI."
He smiled.
"Are you arresting me?"
"No. It's not that at all. We believe you may be in danger because of
your relationship to a...group of men. I'd like to ask you to come with
me so that you can be placed in protective custody."
If anything, his smile got wider and he leaned his elbows on the
countertop and laced his fingers together with their silver bands
flaring in the sunlight.
"You know, it's not illegal to have relationships with men, honey."
Damn those Mulders! They were just like Pomeranians: smart, perceptive, yappy,
and determined to make me look stupid.
"I'm talking about a genetic relationship. Members of your family --
your genetic family as opposed to your adoptive family -- are
systematically being killed and the Bureau would like to take you to a
safe house where you can be protected."
"You mean the Bureau would like me not to finish organizing the march on City
Hall next month," he gave me a patronizing smile, "so who came up with this
bullshit story? More of the new Right Wing Conservative Mafia? Does Senator
Helms sign your paycheck, Miss Fed?"
"Mister Francis--"
"You're going to have to try harder than that," he added.
The smile dropped from his face when Mulder blocked the sunlight from the
window.
Baylor blinked and then threw up his hands in resignation.
"Okay, okay. Talk to me."
After flipping the sign on the door over to 'Closed', Baylor led us into
the back of the store. In the office/storeroom, Mulder explained the
situation while Baylor paced and smoked. When Mulder was done, Baylor looked at
both of us with a tide of frustration swamping his photocopy features.
"That's Science Fiction. It's not possible."
"Don't I wish."
"Even if it were true, I can't just pack up and run. I have a life. My
store. I have an author coming in next week for a book signing. I have a lover
who I don't want to leave. I have twenty thousand handbills I have to get
printed for the march next month," he laughed a bitter little Mulder chuckle, "I
have ten cats that live in the alley that I feed."
"They're going to try to kill you. Hal Rothman is dead, Arlen Petrovsky is
dead, Christopher Farber is dead, and you could be next," I pointed out.
"Agent Scully, half my friends are dead and you expect me to care about
strangers?"
"Care about yourself," I suggested.
"No, sorry, I appreciate you coming here to warn me, but I can't leave. I have
too many obligations."
"We can arrest you," Mulder said in a very quiet voice.
Baylor laughed and put his hand on Mulder's shoulder.
"You can try, but I have a fucking fantastic lawyer. Really, thank you
for warning me, but I'll have to take my chances. All right?"
"Did you see his wrists?" Mulder asked me when we stopped at a charming little
coffeehouse a block from Baylor's store.
Sitting outside, watching normal people go along the charming re-created
Federalist street, I could believe that the story of the twins was as false as
the Amish man wearing Reeboks making funnel cakes across the street.
"Hm?" I asked and sipped at the heavenly brew.
"Marked, here and here," Mulder pointed just above and below the joint "binding
marks, from leather cuffs."
"Why do I not want to know how you know this?"
He gave me one of his graveside smiles, a flash of white stone in a dark night.
"And in the racks at the back of the store? Coffee table book called
Prometheus Bound. Tasteful, arty, Mapplethorpe derivative, two hundred glossy
photos of my brother Baylor with cigarette burns, flog marks, ball-gags,
spreader bars, dildoes, and nipple clips -- a veritable plethora of masochistic
ingenuity. I suppose you didn't know that his penis is pierced either."
"We weren't introduced."
"So," he stretched his legs out under the table and leaned back in his
chair, "you going to show me where you got your tattoo?"
If he'd poured steaming coffee in my lap it would have hurt less.
"Maybe I should get 'M' tattooed on my forehead so you won't confuse me with any
of the others."
"Why don't you just get your penis pierced?"
He smirked.
"Want to do it for me?"
"Don't tempt me."
Back at the hotel as he packed up for the next leg of the Magical
Mystery Mulder Twin Tour, I took my cell phone into the bathroom and called the
hospital in Texas to see how the baby -- my baby -- was doing. When I came out,
Mulder was sitting on the bed wearing the expression of a dog who has overheard
the word "vet" in conversation.
"What do you say we forget the whole thing, quit our jobs and move to Key West
and open a hamburger stand?" he asked in a staccato combination of jest and
desperation.
""When do we leave?" I joked back at him.
"As soon as you finish packing."
I knew he wasn't serious, so I continued to pack. He sighed and flopped back on
the bed.
His cellphone rang.
Baylor Francis was dead.
****
All things considering, the Philadelphia police weren't all that bad,
once they stopped doing double takes and whispering amongst themselves. Scully
paused to check with the detective in charge while I pushed past the forensics
teams with my badge as my passport. Baylor had lived above his store and the
apartment was pretty nice -- lots of books and the requisite Mantegna Saint
Sebastian over the bed where Baylor's body lay. Like the Renaissance painting
overhead, Baylor was nude, his body
shining silver in the light from the forensic photographer's lights.
My twin was lying on his back, his wrists and ankles in leather shackles that
hooked to the cast iron bedstead. There were score marks on his chest, the
blood dried and caked on his skin. The black leather gag cut deeply into his
face, and over the band his face was the usual swollen blue mess of one who had
been strangled. A contact had fallen from one eye and the dead, glazed orbs
that stared back at me were mismatched emerald and dull hazel.
Underneath the smeary blood I could see his scars. I'd told Scully about the
cigarette burns but not about their extent, the old ones that had lightened and
spread like ringworm over his pectorals when he grew up and then the newer ones.
The patterns they made, fresh on ancient, were like raindrops on a pond when a
storm is just beginning. In black and white on glossy paper they had been
gorgeous. Now they were just background, lost against his corpse's flesh.
Even in death, his shaved pubic hair made his cock look bigger than mine.
I tried. I really had. Maybe I should have cuffed him and hauled him
off to the safe house myself -- but I had been afraid that he'd see it as a form
of foreplay. I should have done something, rather than leaving him like this -
I may as well have tightened the strap around his throat myself.
Yisborach, v'yistabach, v'yispoar, y'yisroman, v'yisnaseh, v'yishador,
v'yishalleh, v'yishallol, sh'meh d'kudsho, b'rich hu--
Sorry, man.
A gleam of aqua caught my eye and I crouched down next to the bed and picked it
up with latex fingers. Trojan wrappers. Two of them. The condom of champions
and the official condom of the Mulder family. At least he had been practicing
safe sex -- although it hadn't been safe enough, apparently.
Someone else was going to have to organize the protest march.
I handed the wrappers to the forensic tech with the evidence bags and
rendezvoused back with Scully in the kitchen. The detective in charge, by the
name of Bradley, was pleasantly deferential to us Feds, unlike his Big Apple
brethren.
"We're twins," I said before he could ask.
"Right," Bradley didn't skip a beat, "at about five this afternoon we
got a cliched anonymous call that your brother was dead from a pay phone in the
Independence National Park down the street. Seven zillion fingerprints on that
telephone if we even bothered to dust it. We got up here, found your brother as
you see him, and your business card was on his refrigerator under a magnet. We
called you since an FBI agent's business card is not de rigeur in a homosexual
S&M killing."
Cliche? De Rigeur? How cute, an educated cop. I wanted to press him in my
field journal as a momento.
"Is that what you think it is?" Scully asked.
"It happens. On occasion, you get a couple who aren't well educated in the
safety protocols of this particular form of recreation and people
get hurt, people get dead. Then we get an uproar in the community that law
enforcement doesn't care because the victim is gay or because the victim has an
exotic sexual need."
Bradley shrugged.
"Now with this one, because of his activities and frankly he was a real pain in
the ass with the Aids Awareness Action Squad, they're going to cry murder."
"They'd be right," I said and pointed back at the bedroom, "I found
condom wrappers in the bedroom, did your people find condoms anywhere?"
"No."
"And you won't. Our killer is smarter than to leave such useful genetic
material around," Scully offered.
"Or he's collecting semen."
Bradley looked at me as though I had suggested that eating children with a
bernaise sauce was a good idea.
"We just haven't found them yet, that's all."
"Keep up the good work. Call me if you find anything. You have my
number."
It seemed like someone else did as well. Ten numbers. The question, as always,
was who.
12/20
I am given up by traitors.
I talk wildly, I have lost my wits, I and nobody else am the greatest traitor.
I went myself first to the headland, my own hands carried me there.
Walt Whitman
Ian Dubler was committed to a hospital up in Scarsdale. It's a good thing New
York is a big state; otherwise they all might have bumped into one another. Ian
had supposedly signed the commitment papers voluntarily, probably the way
putting your hands behind your head and spreading your legs is voluntary when
the cop tells you to do it.
Mulder read through five years' worth of psych evaluations, flipping through
them with scanner-like efficiency. I stuck with what I knew best, reviewing the
equally thick files describing the physical manifestations of Ian's self-
destructiveness. The hospital administrator and the hospital's lawyer hovered
over us nervously.
"What are those scars?" I asked the hospital administrator, pointing to the
white lines in the pictures of Ian's skin. Thin white lines on the back of the
neck, the front of the chest, below the ear, in the soft flesh of the upper arm,
below the buttocks, and at least five other places.
"Ian has been attempting to kill himself for many years," she said. "We haven't
always been as watchful as we should have been, he's a very bright man,
especially when it comes to new ways to cut himself."
"He tried to commit suicide by cutting himself on the back of the neck?" I asked
skeptically. "That incision doesn't seem very long or deep. Are you sure he did
it to himself?"
"Who else would have done it?"
Ah yes, she lived in a world without conspiracy, I'd forgotten. Naturally there
were no X-rays and thus no evidence of implants.
The case worker pointed out that seeing Mulder would probably upset Ian and undo
whatever small progress that had been made recently. From what I could see
reflected in Mulder's face they were deluding themselves, progress for Ian would
involve a spade and a closed coffin, but I wasn't here to piss people off.
So I faced Ian alone, the one-way mirror behind me so Ian could only see one
reflection of himself rather than two. When the attendant brought Ian in I saw
the terrible reality of what Mulder always had the potential to become: a
pajama-clad mental patient bloated and puffy from too many starchy foods and
sporting an institutional pallor. Ian settled his bathrobe around his chest
with an aristocratic shrug of his shoulders, a talent he must have learned from
long familiarity with the restraints, and assumed the chair across from me. Mad
or not, the intelligence hummed behind the hazel eyes.
"I think I dreamed about you the other night," he said.
My skin crept.
"Really?"
"You're quite lovely, pity about the tattoo though, it doesn't suit you," he
smiled and leaned back in the chair, crossing his long legs in an appallingly
Mulderlike gesture, "You know I've never actually had sex. I've been locked up
since I was twelve and the dating possibilities have much to be desired. In
Texas they were very careful, I was never molested by anyone who didn't have
authorization to do it, but here I fear my long-held virginity may disappear one
night if some janitor gets horny."
He looked up at the mirror over my shoulder while I tried to kill the
mothbeating of fear in my stomach. How the fuck did he know about my tattoo? It
wasn't as though that was common knowledge or mentioned on any file of an
official nature. Unlike Roche, Ian had no access to the Internet or to the
outside world other than the television.
"He's here, isn't he?" Ian asked.
"Yes."
"Which one?"
I had to think about that for a moment.
"Mine. We just want to ask you some questions about your--illness."
"You won't hurt me?" he gave me a flash of distrust that, coming from Mulder's
face, made my chest hurt.
"I'll try not to. Do you know anything about the Project?"
I caught the almost imperceptible cringe, lush black lashes dropping to cover
the fear in his eyes. It was important to remember that this man was not Mulder.
I could not do this interrogation if I kept mistaking Ian for Mulder.
I leaned forward and put my hand out across the tiny table and was able to brush
against his lower arm with my fingertips.
"Careful," he said, "don't you know that madness is contagious? That's why we're
not allowed outside."
"The Project?"
"But hasn't Jason told you? Jason does all my public relations, I am one of
Roush's assets after all--or was until the drugs depressed my libido too much."
"Tell me what they did to you." I kept my voice even, letting a tinge of warmth
creep into it.
"Everything," he said. "The implants are all gone and now I don't hear the Greys
any more. I have heard the aliens singing, each to each. I do not think they
will sing for me."
"You were used for communication purposes?" I remained agnostic on the existence
of technologically superior aliens, but I wanted to coax Ian into becoming less
cryptic.
He shook his head. "I was a radio receiver but I burned out, burned out five
years ago, too much static you know. And it's no good if you can't choose the
station, Dr. Mann tried so hard but she could never find the right knob. I think
my knobs were broken off, if you know what I mean." He leered at me.
I frowned, which appeared to amuse him. "If you want me to tell you that Roush
used my body and my man-juices for an extended period of years, until neither
mind nor body would take any more abuse, I could say that. But what do you think
you'll learn from me? That your Lindsay is the lucky one?" I didn't understand
for a moment, and then realized: of course from his perspective they wouldn't be
"Mulders." It was all how you looked at it.
Ian's hands fluttered against their restraints like birds with broken wings. "If
you want to believe in fairy tales of safety, go ahead. All I know is that I
feel the other lights going out and I don't know why I wasn't allowed to be the
first. I suspect Jason is up to his old tricks, the big bully. As flies to
wanton boys are we to the Greys, they kill us for their sport."
I looked helplessly into the mirror, wanting some clue. Mulder would be able to
get through to him, wouldn't he? "I'm trying to save lives," I finally settled
on, "and I'm trying to prevent what happened to you from happening to other
children, other men and women."
He cackled. "Too fucking late, dear! Jason would never have given you my name if
it didn't advance his purposes, and I can guarantee that his purposes aren't
yours." He leaned forward conspiratorially. "We're blood brothers you know. The
bees are almost ready to be released. But to be the Queen's consort, Jason has
to get rid of all the other drones. He's acting on his own in this, that's your
one hope, the Lindsay line suffers from almost complete azoospermia and no one
but Jason has any interest in decreasing the potential supply still further."
He looked at me more closely, and I was drawn into those eyes, which were at
that moment the exact shade of mahogany that Mulder's had been when he'd been
zoned out on the ketamine and we'd first had sex. "I wouldn't worry much about
the condoms if I were you," he said, and grimaced a parody of Mulder's seductive
pout. "If I get out of here, do you wanna go out sometime?"
Then he lunged forward and would have managed to split his head open on the
table if it hadn't been that soft scratchy plastic that children's furniture is
made from. Instead he just bounced back up, looking disappointed but not
surprised, and grinned at me again.
"We're liars all. Believe none of us!"
And then the orderlies were back in the room, picking him up despite his clever
use of passive resistance techniques, and they dragged him out into the hallway
and there was nothing but whiteness and canvas-padded walls. He began to sing.
"Seven little Indian boys chopping up sticks, one chopped himself in halves and
then there were six."
I followed them out into the hallway, just in time to see Mulder step out of the
observation room. Ian spotted him immediately and began to laugh. He laughed
as the orderlies took him away, the sound bouncing off the scuffed white walls.
The look that Mulder gave me afterwards was one of acidic pain.
****
Scully gave me the poor-baby look that is usually the preface to her version of
comfort sex. The motel was the first we'd found on the way back from the
hospital. The weakness of our selection principle was evident as soon as I got
a look at the 'seventies decor, lots of orangey mandalas on the carpet and
bedspread, and smelled the ingrained cigarette smoke from the heavy drapes.
Even in this setting, the thought of comfort sex was not unappealing. Better
than Cheetos, in any event, which was the best thing in the vending machine.
I think I was rooted like a tree in the middle of the floor for a long time
before I felt her arms insinuate themselves around my waist, her shoulders and
cheek and torso press up against my back.
Sometimes Scully mothers me, if I understand the term in its conventional sense
and not the sense with which I am most intimately familiar. She does the other
too, but this time it felt more like a Campbell's soup commercial than a Mulder
family drama.
This is not inherently a bad thing. If I were truly Scully's lover we would have
many more roles for one another. I am her chauffeur, her goad, her inflatable
sex toy and now her sugar daddy. I would like to be by turns her servant and her
master, her confidant, her playmate, her helpmeet. I want to be her pantheon and
her congregation, cook, thief, wife, and lover. We make so many boxes and rules
for people, but surely a man like me, a man with the madness of ten men, could
overflow all such artificial boundaries for her. It is the ability to play more
than one role and not the content of the roles on particular nights that
matters, and I suppose that as always I hoped that tonight, just once, I would
get it right.
Yes, I am describing infinite need but in some lights I think Scully goes on
forever.
I turned in her arms and gathered her in to me like a bouquet.
Tonight's theme was skin. She didn't resist when I slid my hands under her shirt
and lifted it away from her body. For a while petting her while she hummed low
in her throat was enough. My hands felt enormous against her doll's frame as I
covered every inch of her, trying to read her Braille messages with my fingers
and failing. We were still standing as she stepped out of the jeans and panties
and pressed herself close to me. Her skin burned like magnesium as I palmed her
shoulders, her elbows, down her waist and around the miraculous tightness of her
ass.
She's too short for anything but groping when we're both vertical, so I chose a
bed at random and led her to it. Soft kitty-like sounds, the thrum of an animal
engine, vibrated in her throat.
Maybe I needed a mammalian pet, fish were obviously not doing the stress-
reduction job.
She was with me in flashes, in between the scratchy image of Ian distressing her
as I watched helplessly through the one-way glass. Stroking, rolling, reaching
and holding. Her hands tugging ineffectually at my pants, her mouth dampening my
shirt so that I could feel it wet and heavy like her kiss against my shoulder.
I wanted to stretch her on a rack so that there would be more of her, enough of
her to surround me the way I surrounded her. I wanted to turn her into a Klein
bottle, the kind that only has one continuous surface that is both inside and
outside, so that I could touch everything that constitutes Scully.
When I pulled away for the inevitable prophylactic the pain of losing contact
was almost enough to destroy my arousal, but then her cinnamon sugar breasts
brushed over my lips again and I was lost. I came too quickly, both of us wanted
to get through the act with a minimum of fuss, but I needed more from her and
she wasn't unwilling.
My tongue surrounded her. I traveled from clavicle to belly button to ankle, and
held tight as she jerked against my mouth when I traced the tendons in her feet.
She came again, groaning, when I took her toes into my mouth and I was very
proud; I hadn't gotten that sort of reaction from her in a while.
I had my head between her legs, tasting her, before the contractions stopped.
I left Scully draped across the bed like the pelt of a wildcat and returned to
the mental hospital. I still had the fake Jason ID, and Jason was next of kin;
that and a bunch of dead presidents got the night orderly to let me into Ian's
room. The man I'd bribed was nervous enough to stay around to make sure that Ian
didn't go all Hannibal Lecter on me and bite my face off, but he held himself
far enough back that he couldn't overhear our conversation.
"Hello, beautiful," Ian said as soon as I turned on the lights. He was strapped
into his bed and I could see from the dilation of his eyes that he was floating
like a supertanker on a sea of antipsychotics, but he was reasonably lucid for
all that. Maybe it was habituation.
"How long have you known about the twins?"
He bit his lip and it began to bleed. I suppressed the urge to mirror the
action. God, all this whiteness could make anyone go insane, and I was at least
able to pace.
"That's a nice way to greet your long-lost brother...what's your name, by the
way?"
"Mulder," I said.
He frowned. "They never got to M, I thought?"
Now we were getting somewhere. "Who didn't?"
"Them...the ubiquitous, invisible Them." He laughed, bright and childlike, when
I shuddered. "Oh come on, that's practically screaming from your mind."
I approached the bed and knelt so that we were merely inches apart. Up close, he
didn't look exactly like the man I saw in rearview mirrors; the cheeks were
puffier and the hair dirty. It must be difficult to wash him in full restraints
and I could tell that the staff wouldn't always remember to try. "Can you read
my mind?"
Another gout of laughter exploded from him; warm spittle sprayed my face and I
blinked, feeling once again the credulous fool everyone else assumed me to be.
I'd thought Ian at least would respect that openness about me, but as usual I
was wrong.
"My mind, your mind, who can tell? Do you know your own mind, M--you must be
*Fox*, that's right, the Fibbie."
"Who told you that?" Wear them down with compassion and incessant questions,
that's the approved strategy. I only wished that I knew whether this was
interrogation or self-analysis I was undergoing.
Ian licked the blood from his lip contemplatively. I followed the pink gleam of
his tongue. He was smart enough to be dead, if that's what he wanted. Why wasn't
he dead? How had the staff here kept him alive for so long?
He turned his head as far away from me as he could and sniffled. I could see
that he had a mole about an inch below his ear, and I reached up to feel the
spot on my own neck. The skin was smooth, but it also *wasn't*, in the same
dreamlike way that the light in John Lee Roche's dreams had been there and not-
there.
"I told your little friend that the drugs ex'ed out my libido a long time ago,"
he said as if in answer to my question. "But I didn't mention that the
harvesting continued for a while thereafter. Have you ever heard of
electroejaculation? Used on cattle, and sometimes on men who are brain-dead or
newly dead. I wouldn't recommend it as one of the greater sexual pleasures.
Well, not for the subject, anyway. Jason..."
I put my hand to his chin and tilted it back towards me, almost bouncing on the
balls of my feet in my excitement. His paper-dry skin crinkled underneath my
fingertips, and I jerked as if goosed myself. We weren't exactly matter and
antimatter, there was no need for a containment field, but nonetheless touching
him was distressing. I felt ghostly worms along my own jaw and shook my head,
but I didn't let my brother go.
"Tell me about Jason," I directed.
He moaned like the wind at the top of a skyscraper. An image came to me: Jason,
placing his/my hand over my/his hand on my/his cock, urging me to give in to
him, give it to him, the world black and white as it is in the cameras whose
lenses I can always see tracking us. The little red lights flashing when the
cameras pan around the room provide the only color in the world. I love you Ian
and his breath hot on the side of my neck. And it doesn't matter that they like
to watch, maybe they don't *like* to watch, watching is what they do. It's
inevitable so just relax and enjoy it, Ian, I'm your brother and I love you, his
hand so knowledgeable and swift and the contrast between this overt pleasure and
everything else in the world so stark that there's no reason to deny him. I
love you Ian. I will take care of you. For this gift, all he asks is my duty
and my salvation and my love,
And the orderly was picking me up off the floor as I struggled away from him,
unable to be touched by someone who was not me. I realized that if I had not
been nearly forty and freshly fucked I would have another hard-on and
simultaneously that Ian was seizing.
I raised myself up like a drunk and hurled myself on Ian. Underneath me, his
bloated body felt like a waterbed. I prayed that he was still tuned to the same
channel as before. Dimly, I felt something stir in my head. I clicked on my
mental file folder and opened it.
Scully asleep, her hair burning the pillow, smiling at me in Alaska, her legs in
sheer stockings, bending over a filing cabinet in our office months after we'd
met and me hard as a rock refusing to get up from my desk, her cool fingers
touching my forehead that horrible week in Rhode Island, her stone frozen face
in San Diego, the curve of her spine, the elegant tilt of her head, that "get a
grip Mulder" look she patented, the way she felt around me, her smell, and
taste, and the way that her breath hitched in my ear the moment before she came,
and the way that she looks up at me from her laptop in a thousand hotels, the
small smiles, the ketchup on her cheek, and that derisive snort I've heard more
times than there are numbers for. . .
Hands grabbed me and pulled me away.
I staggered out into the hall as the orderly busied himself covering his ass,
calling for help and pushing me toward the exit.
I walked for a long while before I was ready to flag down a cab. I thought I
understood a little bit about what Ian was trying to tell me in that flood-of-
consciousness delivery. My current theory was that, unlike the others of us, Ian
and Jason had been raised together, just to see what would happen.
And sure enough there was a cannibalistic twin, only he didn't eat flesh, he
didn't reabsorb parts of the other twin into his body. Regardless of what you
thought about Melissa Ephesian's worldview, I suspected that Bill and Tina
Mulder's child did not have enough of a soul to be spread out among ten copies,
and Jason had eaten whatever part-soul lived in Ian's head in order to survive.
He had also had a sexual relationship with Ian, never mind whether Ian's claims
to purity, which I could even accept, were technically true.
Was that incest or masturbation?
He ain't heavy, he's my brother.
Call the cannibalism a metaphor, but I was willing to bet that Jason had
overborne Ian enough to free himself to rise in the Roush hierarchy. With an
alter ego in the basement that was perfectly open to whatever horrible
experiment was proposed, Jason was free to look after his own interests. Weren't
his interests also Ian's, weren't they the same person?
Ergo, I was the same person.
No. Not even close.
13/20
The hiss of the surgeon's knife, the gnawing teeth of his saw,
Wheeze, chick, swash of falling blood, short wild scream, and tinge, dull,
tapering groan.
These so, these irretrievable.
Walt Whitman
George Naxos. I hadn't heard of him, which was a little surprising since Canada
doesn't have that many card-carrying serial killers. Five or six in the last
twenty years, about the number you'd expect for Ohio. Serial killing is an
almost uniquely American phenomenon, like baseball and apple pie. So when they
do catch one outside our borders, ISU tends to hear about it; we're often
consulted during the hunt. Or the officers who worked the case call us
afterwards, trying to find explanation or expiation or whatever it is you need
after you witness the work of a man who has a compelling urge to reenact a Bosch
nightmare on human canvases. And ISU cc's most of that to me, at first because
Patterson thought he could guilt me into coming back and then later because no
one ever thought to rescind the order.
I suspected, looking at the picture, that someone had interrupted the
transmission of this particular report to ISU. I suspect John Douglas, as the
son of a bitch had never liked me. He probably had a good old laugh when he saw
the photo.
I was really beginning to dislike that nose. It bred true, along with the
firestarting, bedwetting, and animal mutilation. George had brown hair just a
shade lighter than mine. In the prison picture his eyes looked muddy brown, but
mine did too in the right light.
George had made his name in Ontario. He liked nurses a lot. He'd wait in
hospital parking lots, outside of old folks' homes, near health clinics.
I'd read the file and tried to keep Scully from reading it herself by
summarizing. "He raped them anally and then stabbed them in the abdomen, waited
for them to die, then dressed them back up in their nice white outfits and left
them to rot in graveyards, draped over the headstones of girls who'd died young,
usually about eight or nine years old."
She shuddered, her eyes rounded like Little Orphan Annie's. Not much freaks
Scully out, but sisters will still do it.
"But wait, that's not the spooky part. It's true that the woman who raised him--
I'd prefer not to call her 'mother' just to keep an open mind about this--was a
nurse, and that she may have abused him. I wonder if they looked for that in the
adoptive parents, or if it was just a side benefit of using the kind of people
who'd participate in the Project? Anyway, the spooky part is this--George didn't
have an eight-year-old sister who died or disappeared at a crucial point in his
psychosexual development."
Scully didn't need reminding that she knew someone else who matched that
description. She blinked, and I almost heard her swallow. "That doesn't mean
that he was...picking up signals from you or anything like that, Mulder."
"I'm sorry, your Ph.D. is in what? That may work for Dr. Schlesinger on the
radio, when the callers can't tell a physiotherapist from a psychologist, but I
can assure you that there should be an eight-year-old sister involved. Or at
least a neighbor child, but that's not true either, according to all the
interviews in his hometown. When he was twelve he just fell into a deep
depression, nearly catatonic, and then one day he woke up and everything was
fine, except for a slight shortage of neighborhood pets."
"And your theory is that the two of you were somehow connected because of your
genetic relationship?"
I suppose that it's a major step forward that Scully wasn't contesting the
likelihood of said genetic relationship, but that didn't manage to decrease her
overall skepticism level.
"You know all the twin studies. Separated at birth and they end up in the same
jobs, married to women with the same names, driving the same cars. And how could
you forget the Eves? *They* knew what the others were doing all the way across
the country, and they may well have come from the same lab I was assembled in."
I could see the synapses clicking over in her head. Scully always had the most
trouble with people who had strange powers. Full-fledged physical mutations,
even the man who was cancer, didn't bother her nearly as much. She didn't like
the combination of apparent normality with exceptionality; maybe it reminded her
too much of her own condition.
"I can't deny that you might feel some kind of connection to him...but without
understanding the mechanism we can't rule out coincidence, or even deliberate
replication of your trauma by the men behind this experiment. Just because the
neighbors didn't know doesn't mean that there weren't visitors in the middle of
the night, tormenting this child for their own power-crazed agendas."
Wow, Scully *was* beginning to sound a lot like me, at least me five years ago
when my theories were beginning to get wild.
"But why," she continued, looking at me, "would they want to replicate the
trauma? Why would they, as you suggested, choose parents likely to be abusive?"
And what did Bill and Tina do to you in the middle of the night, her eyes asked,
the compassion as unwanted as it was ill-timed. I would have explained that Bill
and Tina, upper-class assimilated tightasses that they were, never needed to use
their hands on me. Both of them were brilliant, after all, and words were more
than enough. Never touched me at all after age four, as far as I can remember. I
even put my own band-aids on.
But enough about you, Agent Mulder. "Childhood trauma, especially that extended
over a period of time, is known to produce dissociative states in many
survivors. But I can't really explain why anyone would go to the trouble of
creating all these children and then attempt to guarantee that they'd be
trembling on the ragged edge of insanity all their lives. I think it's more
plausible that whatever psychic connection exists, exists as a side effect only,
perhaps an unwanted one."
The guards marched George in, forcing his shackled legs to move by kicking him
when he wouldn't shuffle his feet. They dumped him in the chair and left,
sparing only a few seconds to gawp at me.
George kept his eyes on the floor until the door closed, and then immediately
turned to look at Scully, probably because he could smell her.
"Hello," he smiled at Scully. She took her standard position by the door, arms
crossed like cannon, staring down at the seated man for the psychological
advantage.
"She's not your type," I said bluntly and swung the chair around so I could
straddle it, like the Marlboro man would have done. "She's got her M.D. and you
like the R.N.s."
"Doctors'll do in a pinch," he said and finally looked at me. Then he flinched.
"Who the fuck are you?"
"That's no way to greet family," I said and grinned, feeling another shred of
sanity pull loose and drift to the floor like dandruff. In person, the
resemblance was almost complete. If he hadn't had the tattoo circling his
throat, a barbed wire collar with one artfully done drop of blood, he could have
made it past the desk at the Hoover building. And maybe even then, they all knew
I was crazy and maybe the tattoo would seem in character. "Has anyone ever asked
you about the Project?"
"I made a vase in pottery class the other day," he offered, and I reminded
myself that the asinine intelligence had followed the nose as well.
Scully took over, and she did me proud. "Have you ever discovered strange scars
on your body for whose origin you cannot account? Have you ever experienced
'missing time'? Do you have any memories of being 'contacted' by strange
visitors? Heard voices in your head?"
He just laughed. "Is this another test? Honey, you're welcome to examine my
body, I've got plenty to show you."
I reached out and grabbed his chin, forcing him to watch me. "You couldn't get
it up with the ones who were live and willing, George, your bravado does not
impress me. Your cock would shrivel to the size of an ant's if you actually got
a chance with a real woman. Now answer the questions."
George tried to laugh again but it was working about as well as his other social
skills. "Fuck, I don't know. I've always been crazy. Sure I see things, I guess,
I hear things and the doctors here, their faces keep changing, sometimes while I
watch. But no one else sees it. Anyway what does it matter? Nuts or not, I'll be
here 'til I die."
We left with renewed exhortations to his jailers to watch him carefully. This
was Canada, home of the Mounties, surely the corruption wouldn't extend this
far. I almost hoped that it did; to have George survive the thinning of the
Mulder herd would be the grossest of insults.
****
My phone rang just after we got through the door. Mulder had already dropped his
shoes and tie in roughly the same place on the floor.
I kicked my own shoes off as I hit the connect button. "Scully."
"It's Zippy, Dana."
"What is it?"
"Your friend Ian Dubler killed himself. Somehow he got free of his restraints
after the two of you left. He grabbed a guard's gun and blew his face away."
"Are you sure it was voluntary?"
"Look, I believe that someone is out to get these guys, but from what the
hospital told me about Ian's record, he was only following up on a long-held
ambition. I'd guess that if there was any outside interference it was just
helping him get free long enough to kill himself."
That made sense to me. "Anything else?"
"No ma'am," he said, sounding offended. I'd gotten too used to stripped-down
communication with Mulder, I wasn't paying enough attention to the niceties of
conversation.
"Thank you for calling us," I said, trying to sound appreciative and interested.
"We had a...rough conversation with George Naxos. We're still a little shaky."
I could hear Zippy's choked laugh above the static. "Spooky's always a little
shaky. I'm surprised you let anything get to you."
"Sometimes it's not a matter of letting, Zippy."
"Yeah," he said and then there was nothing but an open line.
"Who's dead now?" Mulder asked as soon as I put the phone down.
"Ian Dubler," I reported.
Mulder had that posture that never failed to terrify and annoy me
simultaneously. He was hunched over, his arms wrapped around himself, self-
comforting. I walked over to the bed and put my hand on his shoulder.
He shuddered away. "Don't you have something better to do than watch me fall
apart?"
"I don't want you to fall apart."
Mulder laughed once, a bark as bitter as his semen.
I guess I deserved that. I'd hurt him badly, in a number of interrelated ways.
The familiar resentment surged through my veins, how dare he rely on me like
that. I wanted to tell him that I'd never encouraged him to love me.
But as soon as I thought that, as always, the pitiless instructor in me, the one
who did autopsies for demonstration purposes, refused to accept it. Didn't you?
it asked. What did you expect would happen when you stood by him and it was
obvious that he's never believed in anyone before?
"I'm sorry," I said and thought I could hear Mulder's voice saying the same
words, apologizing for anything and everything, apologizing to the stars and the
sea and the wind.
"I'm going to take a shower now," he said, and I took it as my signal to leave.
This wasn't over, but I just couldn't face him, not right then.
****
The shower that I took was long and hot, hot enough to make my cock burn and
forget about other kinds of wet heat for awhile. Other men may take cold showers
to cool their ardor, but I always preferred burning it out of myself. In the
steamy bathroom mirror I considered my reflection. The shadows under my eyes
had been darker and /or lighter, but my cheekbones still had that sharply
unhealthy look. I swallowed a couple aspirin, a couple Tagamet, and an Ambien to
get me through the night.
If I lasted the night. I dredged up the next verse of Ian's little ditty. "Six
little Indian boys playing with a hive/A bumblebee stung one and then there were
five." I was vaguely grateful that the murders were not in fact tracking the
rhyme; that would just be too baroque. And if it's not baroque, don't fix it.
Whoa. I wasn't just flying, I was in low earth orbit.
I slithered between the rough hotel sheets and flicked on the television. The
pain in my gut was slowly tapering off to a grinding ache. That I could deal
with. While the pain ground, I surfed through the cable channels. A few
minutes of surfing came up with paydirt -- one of the cable channels was playing
a James Bond movie. I would have lied if I told you I knew the name of that
particular movie, but it was the one with Plenty O'Toole in it. That was the
girl's name at any rate. I never forget a -- face.
Before Plenty ended up floating in a Las Vegas pool like an inflatable doll
after one of Hefner's backyard parties, I was snoozing on my back and lost the
thread of Bond's plot. The television clicking off roused me from my semi-
conscious state in time to enjoy feeling her body wriggle onto the lumpish hotel
mattress next to me.
And it wasn't Plenty O'Toole.
Warm hands reached for me in the darkness and I gave myself up to be consumed.
Her fingers traced over the skin of my chest and I breathed the way I had on
those occasions I'd had a tracheotomy tube removed. Her nose was cool as a
puppy's against my collarbone and her tongue as hot. Truth to be told, I would
have been just as content to stay intertwined like that until morning, but
milady was not terribly enamored of the sleeping-together-without-sex option,
having tried it and found it wanting.
I flailed out and managed to find the lamp on the bedside table. Between the
drugs and the damsel it took me another two tries to actually flick it on, and
then I could see as I dug around through my toiletries kit for the condoms. I
guess I knew all along that she was coming, so to speak, or I would have left it
in the bathroom.
Scully took the condom from my hand and gently smoothed it on, like she was
bandaging me from some hurt.
I left the light on as she rode me. There's nothing more erotic than watching
Scully's breasts change shape as she slides up and down above me. The way they
sway and stretch, moving with animal innocence as she breathes, the skin soft as
goosedown contrasting with the crinkled cellophane of her nipples.
When I came it was like something in a dream.
****
He'd taken something, I realized, feeling the narcotic softness of his muscles
under my body. Mulder's sleep disorder is such common knowledge that it
practically has its own website. I'd encouraged him to take the Ambien that the
latest doctor had proscribed. Now I was cuddling a rapidly snoozing Mulder when
all I wanted to do was break past the barriers of my mind and become a creature
of body only. I wanted sex and he wanted to sleep. Typical of him to turn the
gender cliche inside out.
He's got wonderful skin, like the belly of a frog, so smooth and practically
feminine. He even smells good when he's clean. All in all Mulder is really not
that poor of an example of the North American Male when you can divorce the
Jungian nightmare inside his head from his body. I didn't climb into his bed to
talk either.
Under the stiff hotel sheets, I smoothed my hand down the carefully maintained
slope of his abdomen and reached for his cock and found it half-hard and
stirring restlessly under my touch. He buried his face in my hair and sighed,
one hand caressing my breast in an abstracted way. So the brain was starting to
shut down but the lower centers were still operating. I slipped my body on top
of his and kissed him, nipping at his lower lip and feeling his hands polish my
back in French curves. He murmured pointless endearments into my throat,
clinging to me as though I was buoyant wreckage that would somehow keep him from
being pulled under into a dark sea. He had that much wrong, I was the dark sea.
I took the condom from him, desperate not to think about it, and flowed over
him, swallowing him in my liquid depths. I began to rock with an oceanic rhythm.
Poor Mulder gets so seasick that he'll never know the helpless passion of riding
an unquiet sea outside of my bed. I tossed between swells, bracing my arms on
either side of his head while he looked up at me in dilated amazement, helpless.
The whitecaps of ecstasy finally broke over both our heads and sent us spiraling
down to the bottom. He clung to me and pulled me under with him. The water
filled my lungs and wiped my brain clean and I surrendered.
****
George Naxos disappeared from his cell that night, while Scully and I were
playing hide-the-gun. There were a few drops of his blood on his bunk, nothing
else, and the man who shared his cell had been choked to death.
Jason insisted that we return to his compound. "You haven't done as well as I'd
hoped protecting the others," he said which had to be the understatement of the
year. "The least we can do is watch each other's back."
Scully's reaction was predictable.
"Mulder, that's nuts!"
The fact that she was sitting in bed with the sheet barely covering her
breasts reduced her authority somewhat. My morning peace offering of
hotel cafe coffee in her hand, she glared at me from across the orange
monstrosity of a bedspread.
"And on what logical deduction do you base your professional opinion,
Dr. Scully?"
I sat on the edge of the bed, beyond striking range, the sweat from my
morning run cooling on my skin in the air conditioned room.
"Obviously I'm stupid, enlighten me."
"Doesn't it strike you as being the least bit duplicitous that Jason is
in contact with your mother? Jason and not Samantha? You'd think
Samantha would have at least told Jason to tell your mother that she was
all right. Then he gives you all the information on your twin
brothers. Why not before? Years before. How long has he been in
charge of PR at Roush? Why didn't he round them up or make contact with
them himself? A well-placed bribe opens more doors than your ID. Why
didn't he use his innumerable connections to make contact himself?"
She was getting agitated; flushing straight down to her cleavage which
made concentrating difficult. I took the coffee cup away from her
before she spilled it and put it on the bedside table.
"My God, Mulder, They took Samantha, They created Emily and the clones,
and They created Miranda," she stopped and took a deep breath," and he
sends you to do his fetch and carry like a good little minion. He's
Roush. He's Them. And you won't see it!"
These things had been floating in my head for days, like ink spilled in
water, swirling around and darkening everything. I hadn't told her
about my late night visit to Ian, but in that uncanny way that she had,
Scully had managed to dig a claw into an exposed nerve.
"Q.E.D." I said.
"Q.E.D. my ass. You don't want it to be true so you can't even accept
the possibility that you're being a patsy. You want to believe so badly
that you'll blindly follow any bullshit breadcrumb trail even if it
leads to a cliff."
Short of stuffing my fingers in my ears, I was sorely limited in
strategies to cut Scully off in mid-rant. I hitched myself closer to
her on the bed and tried to focus whatever seductive charm I could
muster and beam it into the furiously sparking blue eyes across from me.
"Stop that," she growled, and I looked for a furiously slashing feline
tail.
"Stop what?" I said in my most ingenious tone and put my hand on the
warm column of her thigh under the bed sheet.
Muscles jumped underneath my fingers.
"We're going to see Jason and Samantha. End statement."
14/20
I am the free companion, I bivouac by invading watchfires
I turn the bridegroom out of bed and stay with the bride myself,
I tighten her all night to my thighs and lips
Walt Whitman
In Xanadu did Kubla Kahn. . .
I really needed to watch the rest of Citizen Kane one day.
The house was Southfork all over again. The Lindsays had run Roush for
generations and every penny of ill-gotten wealth went into the enormous house
with the manicured carpet of water-thirsty grass surrounding it. The driver of
the Town Car that Jason had sent to the airport for us dropped us off at the
front door and Jason emerged, dressed like the lord of the manor Texas style,
black turtleneck, jeans and cowboy boots. I had never seen him in the flesh
before and the contrast between this confident Ralph Lauren creature with his
sculpted nose and expensive haircut compared to my rumpled and weary partner
made my throat hurt. Was this what Mulder had the potential to be had Tina and
Bill not done such an amazingly good job of fucking up his head? I had to
wonder.
There was a woman with him, all points and angles in a skimpy black miniskirt
and a tight silk blouse. I assumed this was Samantha and I felt a momentary
twinge of envy for her hard little body and brightly intelligent eyes. This was
the woman Mulder had sought all his life, and she was about as warm and sisterly
as a raven pulling at carrion. Maybe it was my female jealousy rearing its
hairsprayed head. After all, she was his sister, not an old flame.
Then again the resemblance to Phoebe was less reassuring than I might have
hoped.
Jason took me to his stables; he was a horse-breeder in his spare time. I wasn't
terribly interested in horseflesh but I welcomed the chance to observe the man
without his distracting reflection.
The stables smelled of damp hay and horsesweat, with hints of ammonia and manure
underneath. Everything was darker and more enclosed than I'd expected. Could
horses really prosper in this hot small space?
Jason didn't try to touch me as we walked through the stables to a larger pen.
"You might be interested in this," he commented as we came upon a man leading a
lovely chestnut mare into the pen. "I've been working on a means to induce
estrus in the mares on demand, so that we don't have to depend on nature's own
schedule."
The man produced a large syringe, uncapped it, and squirted a little of the
clear liquid inside in order to get rid of any air bubbles. The mare shimmied
and sidestepped, but he had her firmly under control and she didn't get far. She
whinnied and tossed her head in anger as he injected her.
He hitched the mare to the side of the pen and left. Jason looked on with
approval while the mare shuddered as if she'd suddenly been dumped in the
Arctic. Eyes rolling, nostrils flaring, she flounced, her mane snapping around
her like a fretful teenager's.
The man returned with an equally impressive stallion. His color was slightly
darker than hers, the color of the tan M&Ms that aren't made anymore, and I
could imagine the needlelike stiffness of his hair as the man patted his side to
steady him. The mare sniffed the air again and pawed the ground with her front
hooves. They watched each other warily as the man released the mare from her
bindings.
He covered her instantly, eight hundred pounds of muscle and bone crashing down
into her. Snorting and chuffing as if he were doing something really impressive,
he arched his neck like a flag in a high wind. Anything that got in his way had
better be prepared to do battle, because getting laid was at stake. I thought of
the drugs coursing through the mare's body, causing the release of hormones
scheduled for later delivery, filling her reproductive organs with blood and
readying her for his invasion.
Jason smiled at me when I turned away. "Her colt will be worth every penny I
spent on this formula. Clients like it when you can guarantee delivery at the
right time."
"And if she's late giving birth there's always ways to hurry it up," I
commented.
He blinked disingenuously. "Of course." Every time I looked at him I did a
mental stutter. I expected the nose to have its familiar dented look, not this
toned, sharpened profile perfect enough to open doors and legs worldwide.
I decided that I didn't want the rest of the tour. I told Jason this and he
smiled charmingly and pointed out that it was dinnertime.
****
Dinner was quite a scene, the four of us in Jason's enormous dining room, with
enough silver and crystal on the table to finance the overthrow of a small
country.
I watched Jason eat; he was polite and economical and he used his left hand, all
very different from me, and I was grateful enough for the difference that I
would have said the grace over meals if asked.
Apparently nobody in my family was very religious, though. Why would they be?
The Maker of the fruit of the vine had nothing on the maker of the fruit of
Christina Mulder's loins.
Scully watched Sam with the careful gaze of a cougar contemplating an eagle.
"Mulder says you're head of genetic research at Roush, what exactly does that
constitute?"
Jason grinned proprietarily as Sam sniffed and preened. "It's complicated," my
sister said.
"I'm patient," my lovely little liar replied, her face as still as a pond on a
windless night.
"I supervise our various avenues of research, ranging from modified retroviruses
to attack various forms of disease--including cancer--to more elaborate
manipulations that attempt to eliminate imperfections from genetic structure."
"*Whose* genetic structure?"
Sam smiled. "Most of the work is carried out on specially bred hairless rats,
I've patented three kinds in my own name, but we're also using rhesus monkeys
for some of the work that's near completion."
"So you still insist that Roush has no connection to experiments on human
beings?"
"Of course we use humans in the very end stages, the FDA requires it. All our
testing is done on volunteers, though, following the standard protocols for
informed consent."
Scully clamped down on her knife, then released it. "I don't believe you. I
don't think the women in the warehouse were volunteers."
Jason broke in. "Agent Scully, I believe I've already conveyed to you our shock
and disappointment to find that this man--Crawford?--had misused his position
with us in such a horrible and destructive manner. Falsifying records, hiding
his activities from us--that warehouse was never meant for anything but storage,
which is why he got away with his--well, his madness--for so long. We deeply
regret Roush's tangential involvement in the matter, and I assure you that we
will do everything in our power to assist the bereaved families of these women."
"And the hired guards? Had he corrupted them too?"
Jason toyed with his fork. "I believe that the guards had no idea what was going
on inside that warehouse. If they did they would of course have reported it to
the proper authorities. He told them not to look inside and they didn't."
"Just following orders?" I suggested and he raised an eyebrow.
"Fox, I don't think you should be so flippant. Good men, men who'd worked for
this company for decades, died in that firefight. They died because they were
loyal and they believed in Roush. As I do, as you should. I'm told you've sold
your stock?"
"I have very aggressive brokers," I took another drink of the wine to give
myself some time. "You know, your story would sound a lot better if I hadn't
seen what happened in Bethel."
He shrugged. "It will sound fine to the rest of the world. Unless of course you
want to go public with the tape." Scully stiffened like a starched shirt. "I
don't think people *like* women who kill their children all that much, what's
your opinion?"
"I think," I said carefully, "that any more conversation and I'll lose my
appetite."
La Familia Mulder was starting to make the Borgias look like the Waltons.
****
After dinner, Jason disappeared, saying that he had to go a fancy party where he
could charm the mayor or something like that. I could tell that Mulder wanted me
out of the way, he had a family reunion to attend and I wasn't a blood relation.
Little did he know.
I scurried upstairs to hide until the urge to confess passed. I found my bags,
tiny dots on the floor of the space-station-sized guest room.
You would have thought with all his ill-gotten wealth Jason would have been able
to afford better air conditioning. I lifted my hair off the back of my neck and
went over to the bedroom window. Through the darkness I could see the lights on
the pond outside and the two dark figures walking alongside the water, I could
have thought that it was a pair of lovers had it not been for the fact that I
knew it was Mulder and Samantha. She had her hand on his arm and he was turning
away from her with an impatience that I knew entirely too well. Whatever she
was saying he didn't want to accept and by turning his back on her he was
turning his back on whatever she was saying.
I knew how it felt to be talking to the tight line of his spine.
The window was one of the expensive ones that are not intended to be opened. To
have that particular model of faux-Georgian window, you had to have air
conditioning and didn't need air. I ran my hand over my collarbones and was
surprised to have it come away wet. I was sweating like one of Jason's horses.
Like the mare that had been covered by the stallion that afternoon in the
stable. My brain flashed back to the hot stable, the harmony of muscle and
movement, the primal toss of the mare's head, the flash of a brown eye. More
heat.
I pulled the curtains shut on Mulder and Samantha, turned back into the bedroom
and stood idly, looking around. Jason's interior decorator's taste was
exquisite. My bedroom looked like it had been stolen lock stock and silver
hairbrush from the Bombay Company, only I had a feeling that these were the
genuine items rather than reproductions.
Genuine. Reproductions. The MulderTwins were genuine, clones were
reproductions. Real and fakes. My life was spinning around a series of events
caused by men with the genetic equivalent of Xerox machines. Was I even me or
was there a dozen Dana Scullies out here somewhere? Seven brides for seven
brothers? Snow White and the Seven Dwarves? What was the song that Mordred
sings in Camelot? The Seven Deadly Virtues?
The toss of the mare's head.
I gathered up one of the nighties from our spree at Victoria's Secret and went
into the bathroom. I wanted to wash the heat and the sweat off my body. I knew
that Mulder would come back from his tete a tete with Samantha wounded and
needy. He would want to fuck. Wait, he would want to make love. I had to start
thinking of it that way. I was trying, I really was. He loved me and I wasn't
sure what mask love wore in my mind.
The bathroom was tastefully appointed with thick towels and no doubt genuine
gold-plated fixtures with a shower stall large enough to play basketball in. I
started the water and stripped off my clothes. The interior room quickly filled
with steam that loosened my chest and made me somewhat woozy. I had too much
wine with dinner. Not again, first too much beer with Zippy and now too much
wine. I would end up an alcoholic before this was over.
The water was deliciously hot, loosening the tight muscles in my neck--
The arch of the stallion's neck.
And I opened the bottle of shower gel on the shelf. Freesia. Heavy, sensual
freesia full of green and earth and purple and languid afternoons. The smell
filled my head and I took my time soaping my body, enjoying the feel of the gel
turning to foam between the skin of my hands and the skin of my body. How was I
going to smell when Mulder finally arrived? Was I going to lie in bed and
pretend to be asleep to give him the illusion of surprising me or should I just
meet him in the doorway wearing nothing but a garter belt and hose with a rose
between my teeth?
I was rather drunk, my head leaning against the tile wall, my hand stroking the
skin between my thighs like a lover's. Drunk and horny besides.
I chuckled to myself until the light went out.
Utter blackness.
"Mulder?" I called over the sound of the shower.
When the shower door opened and a shape darker than the blackness entered, I
reached out for him.
"You could have warned me," I teased and my soapy hands touched the dry skin on
his chest, "what if my partner came along?"
He jerked for a second and his hand clamped around my jaw, pulling my head up
for a kiss. He tasted of brandy as he ravaged my mouth. My hands slipped
across his chest, now wet with water from the shower, and traveled lower where
his cock was standing up to be noticed. I slipped soapy fingers around him and
drew my fingers up and down in the rhythm that I knew he preferred. The hot
water scored my back as his hands roved over my breasts which felt hot and heavy
against his chest.
"Mulder," I murmured into his lips, "make love to me."
He tasted of brandy and something sweet, chocolate or candy, his tongue probing
my mouth like an explorer in an underground cave.
Making a low noise in his throat, he pressed me up against the cold tile wall,
squeezing my breasts with insistent hands. "I can't give you everything you
want," I babbled into his shoulder, "but I'm here, I'll be here until this is
all over."
The tile was cold and hard against my back, and his body was hotter than the
water.
"I'll see it through to the end with you."
I ran like melted sugar against him, boneless and pliant. Pulling me away from
the wall, he spun me around until my face was pointed into the spray and my
blind hands reached out for the wall, to keep my balance in a slowly reeling
world. His hands roved down my spine, over my tattoo, tracing the circle of the
serpents. I moaned and pressed back against him, the shaft of his cock resting
right above my buttocks, his hands roving over my breasts again, pinching my
nipples through the thick suds of the gel. His hands on my hips, pressing me
forward, pushing me down. I went willingly, my fingers sliding down the tiles,
catching on the joins between each of them until I was grasping the shower knobs
for support. More gel on my back, and his hand rubbed it into my wet skin over
my ribcage, my waist, my buttocks, between my thighs and into the crease of my
ass. The pain almost rocke
I screamed and it wasn't with pleasure.
My fingernails broke on the cold tile as he slammed into me again and again,
tearing at me, filling me with broken glass and needles. Finally, he withdrew,
spun me around again and soothed me with his hands on my body and his lips on
mine until my breathing slowed. I was still shaking in shock when he shoved me
back against the wall and parted my legs with his hands.
Only with my foot braced up against the bath tap was I able to remain moderately
upright when he impaled me.
I gasped.
I was stuck to the wall like a butterfly on a pin, his cock hard and stinging
with soap inside me. I moaned with a combination of wine and hurt as he drove
into me without any consideration whatsoever.
I could feel my heart beating against the tile wall behind me.
The water sprayed down into my face, my mouth, burning my eyes and choking me.
The muscles in my legs were tearing, and the pain was spreading through my
entire pelvis. He was groaning into my shoulder, teeth closing on my skin,
hands bracing me up against the wall underneath my arms. Finally, he dug his
fingers into my waist and gave a last series of heaves and shot hot and sticky
into me.
I slid to the floor of the shower, whimpering with horror and coughing water.
Mulder crouched next to me and pushed wet hair out of my face to kiss my
forehead. I wrapped my arms around his neck and shuddered. After a moment, he
disentangled himself and reached over to where the taps were, a few seconds of
fumbling later, and I felt a hot, high-powered spray of water thrummed over my
breasts and belly. God, it was one of those water massage head things.
He had his hand over my mouth when I started screaming again.
When I figured out that it would be a lot easier to see if I opened my eyes, he
was gone. The water was still running as hot as ever, Jason apparently imported
his water from out of state. The light bleeding from the bedroom was enough for
me to turn the shower off. When I stood up, water sluiced out of me and coursed
down my legs like a woman about to go into labor. I had to hold onto the sink
while I drained. I stumbled over to the thick terry bathrobe waiting for me.
I still felt woozy. As a matter of fact, I felt worse. The perfumed silky gown
I'd picked out seemed absurd now and I left it in the bathroom. Zigging and
zagging, I made my way to the bed in the center of the room. It was a good thing
the bed could have doubled as an aircraft carrier, I needed the target to be
that large. I dropped the bathrobe to the floor, assuming that some housekeeper
with a false green card would take care of it in the morning.
The sheets were heavy and soft and I had to throw off the light blanket because
I was still so hot. Covered only by a thin layer of cotton, my body was as
restless as trees in wind. Damn him. What was that, some kind of loyalty test to
see if I really meant what I said? Did he want to know if I'd submit to anything
he asked? And I would have, but not like that. Not so brutally, but maybe the
savage brutality was the point of the test. How much was I willing to put up
with? Maybe that's what love meant to him, it would make sense of a lot of
things.
I drifted, feeling the bed spin beneath me like a psychedelic magic carpet.
When the door opened and closed, I came half-awake again.
He was naked by the time he reached the bed, as cool as ice cream against my
skin. I was beginning to wonder if I had a fever. His hands cupped my breasts
and I shuddered.
****
Jason had plied us with brandy earlier but I needed more to face Samantha. She
got us two bottles of a Texas microbrew out of the huge stainless steel
refrigerator and opened them; I noted that she knew exactly where the bottle
opener was out of the thousand drawers in Jason's gourmet kitchen.
We went outside into Jason's oasis to look at the moon and talk.
The water was trickling over the rocks in the pond, glittering like tinsel in
the moonlight, like the silver rings on Sam's fingers. I had to think of her as
Sam, as this full-grown woman who smelled like my baby sister.
She put her hand on my forearm and I turned away. I didn't want her to ruin this
and I had the strong suspicion that any conversation would make this reunion
even less pleasant. For a while I wanted to imagine that everything was perfect,
Sam at my side and Scully waiting for me. I could talk to her, I had to, but I
needed a few minutes of delusion first.
We must have made five circuits of the pond before either of us said a word.
"I know it wasn't easy for you to be the one left behind," she said solicitously
and every alarm went off.
"I don't want to talk about it."
"Well, what do you want to talk about?" She sounded like an indulgent big sister
when the baby brother's had a bad hair day. I didn't like it from her any more
than I liked it from Scully.
"I'd always imagined telling you what's been going on these past twenty-six
years, but since it turns out that you've known all along all my imaginary
conversations are moot."
"You've always been good at making things up on the fly," she stopped walking
and turned to me.
"Which of your investigators told you that?"
A hawk's smile; I was now certain that I preferred Scully's fur and claws to
Sam's feathers, ruffled or un. "Paranoid much, Fox?"
I guess I couldn't tell her not to use the name. "No, but someone listening to
us might be."
She handed me her bottle. "Finish this for me." The beer was still cold enough
to ease the ache in my throat. Texas made contemplative noises around us; there
were creatures moving quickly and quietly through the ground cover.
I sat on a rock that had been carefully designed to make a good seat. She
remained standing. "Why didn't you ever come to me? You knew how much I was
hurting. You knew"--my voice broke--"how Mom and Dad were when you were gone."
She sighed. "I was eight, Fox. I didn't know anything about that, and when I met
the Greys...it's indescribable, overwhelming. Suffice it to say that the
problems of a few humans didn't seem very important when I could spend days at a
time just listening...they had to give me sleeping pills to get me away from the
interface.
"And then, later, when I began to mature and wonder what had happened to my
family...Jason was there. *He* was my big brother, he teased me and played with
me and protected me when there were factions that didn't have my best interests
at heart. I thought he was you, Fox, and you know what? I was right."
"He's not me, no matter what his genes say. We're not interchangeable like
computer components, you can fiddle around with genes in a lab all day, but once
that person you had a hand in creating goes out into the real world, there are
influences and experiences that mold them. All of us are different. All ten of
us. We're monsters, but each of us is - was his own variety of monster," the
reflection of the moon in the pool wobbled with my voice.
"You're not a monster, Fox."
The feather-tips of her fingers touched the side of my face, slow, deliberate,
and without sisterly intent.
*I'm your brother and I love you.*
Oh God.
If I could blank out one hour of my life to add to the various amnesias from
which I have suffered, it would be this one. Scully, save me, I thought even as
my dick twitched. When I went to mandatory counseling after the Roche incident,
the shrink suggested that I had unresolved sexual issues around my eight-year-
old sister. I considered the idea, truly I did, but concluded that those issues
were no more than the standard Freudian family drama, sublimated and transformed
into an adult sexuality that, if not conventionally healthy, was neither
incestuous nor pedophilic. Scully's age and size made her a plausible sister-
figure, but only in the way that lots of men marry their mothers--she shared
characteristics, not an identity.
All this careful reasoning was crumbling against the onslaught of my growing
hard-on.
"You and Jason are the apex of the results. You're beautiful, you have genius
IQ's, and rising to the top of your respective professions. You're perfect. "
Her finger was under my chin, at the hollow of my throat, feeling the beating of
my heart. Silver rings bruising my throat as she loosened my tie and undid the
top button of my shirt. Her breasts under the silk of her shirt right in front
of my eyes. And her tongue sliding between my teeth and my upper lip tasted
like beer, like clouds and like the grass. She was cool and airy in my hands,
the sharp points of her earrings scalpelcut into my palms. The brain that used
to be mine was full of September breeze and moonlight from the fingernail sliver
of white light above. She breathed mist into my lungs, touched sliver across my
chest and forearms. Everything was underwater, humming like the distant sound of
a pool filter vibrating across the captured aqua chlorinated waters. Metal-
tipped fingers drew down the tight seam through the center of my pants and the
sightless worm stirre
No better than the rest of them.
The far corner of the pond was shaded with an outcropping of rocks and heavy
with rosesmell over the money-lush grass. She was pushing me to my knees in the
grass with her hands on my curiously distant ass and her hard little breasts
tight against the cage of my chest while she was exploring my mouth with her
tongue. The flat feathers of her hair stuck to my sweating, burning hands
The thin black tights ended below the edge of her black skirt and underneath she
was bare, literally bare. She had been shaved back to childhood but it wasn't a
child's moan that came from the stretched length of her throat when I touched
her with my lips, the silver ring gleaming where it ran through the flesh of her
labia.
Sister.
*I'm your brother and I--*
Sister.
Orestes, Electra.
An image flashed across the silver screen in my head, Sam triumphant, taking my
semen and dropping it into a petrii dish to create God only knows what.
"No," I whispered, rising to unsteady feet and knocking over the empty beer
bottles, "no thank you."
The ground was uneven with alcohol as I stumbled back to the gleaming house.
Samantha had fucked my head up pretty badly and I hauled my sore psyche and my
erection upstairs to the guestrooms. I didn't even bother looking in mine, I
headed straight for Scully's. The room was dark save for the reflected light of
the pond shimmering against the ceiling. I had to hold onto the bedpost to
keep me steady while I looked down at Scully. The sheets were painted over her
body as she lay on her side facing the window; her hair was drying in the waves
that she took so much care to blow-dry out of her hair.
Oh please, save me from myself --
Manalive, I had too much to drink. My stomach felt like several serving forks
had been stuck into it, ripping at the sutures. At the same time, I was
electrified, my blood bubbling honey in my veins. I was vile, decadent, no
better than George or the rest of them. It felt good. Good like way too much
crank at Oxford, screaming down the motorway with my head out of Trevor's car,
howling like wolves at the moon.
What was I going to tell her? Should I at all? God, Scully I had the strangest
-- And I wasn't sure if it was real.
Am I even real for that matter?
Scully didn't move as I stripped and advanced on her. I thought she was asleep
until I put my hand on her, and for once she felt cool under my fingertips, it
had to have been a trick of the air conditioning.
Her breasts are perfect. I never knew what my hands had been made for before I
held her breasts. They are the perfect size and shape for me to hold, and this I
trust was not by any design but solely the dictate of fate, that Scully's
breasts should have been made for me. Guns and steering wheels and my own idiot
cock, all of these things are distractions drawing me away from what I should be
holding on to.
I should never have touched Sam.
With my hands around her breasts, pulling her close from behind, I could give
voice to the incoherent sorrow that gripped me as I fled from Samantha. "I
didn't want it to be like this."
She trembled, then leaned into me. Her voice was like a thin silver brook
running through a parched land. "I know this may not be the best time to say
this, but I'm here. We'll do this together. I promise."
I was overcome with wonder, with the feel of her body in front of me and the
power of the words, which from Scully were more binding than a wedding vow. I
was too befuddled with guilt and alcohol, and I knew I couldn't quite appreciate
the full import right now.
So I moaned her name, first into the uncaring air and then against her sweaty
skin, still almost cold to my touch, and I covered her with my tears and with
wet kisses, imagining that the saliva trail glowed in the darkness. She was
balky, despite the words, and I was confused but enthusiastic enough to ignore
the discrepancy.
Just the way she likes it, I promised myself. I owe this to her. If she never
wants to speak to me again, I want her to remember this. With shaking arms, I
held her firmly against the bed, so she could push against me and not get
anywhere. I ran my tongue from the nape of her neck to the small bone knobs at
the base of her spine, breathing wet and moist so that she could feel it on her
skin but barely touching. I traced the serpent on her back.
She squirmed and made a noise, maybe she'd just wanted to be coaxed so that she
could be sure I'd heard her right.
Just enough constraint and distance, this is the trick to making Scully come
when she's in this mood. I turned her over and pinned her thighs open with my
knees. She said my name like a purr as I puffed warm air against her thighs. She
doesn't shave around her pubic area and I teased the sparse hairs on the soft
curves of her inner thighs with my tongue. She smelled of something flowery but
I couldn't taste soap on her skin, she was being considerate. Anyway I prefer
the thick salty scent of Scully, the one she keeps only for me.
I touched her lightly, stealthily with my tongue and she jerked as though high-
voltage current was running through her small body. Surprised, I almost
stopped. Either my technique was reaching unnatural proportions or she was
wound tighter than a Swiss watch. Her hair hissed across the pillow as she
tossed her head while I continued, her legs swirling restlessly around me, her
hands caressing the phrenologist's nightmare of my skull. Tossing, moaning,
rocking underneath my touches while I semi-consciously rubbed the stupidly
engorged mass of my own cock against the sheets that were not as soft as her
skin. It was my name that she was chanting under her breath like she was saying
the rosary. I drank her climax and it was better than any brandy ever bottled.
I couldn't stand it any longer, I raised myself up onto my knees, opened her
with my numb fingers and slid into her where she was hot and liquid as melted
wax. I had my hands braced under her arms and looked down at her sex-dazed face
underneath me. Her eyes were big enough to swallow me whole. Her lips moved,
saying words that were only clear to me later when I dozed against the arch of
her shoulder after I'd come inside her no less than three times (not bad for a
man of my age and inebriation).
Don't hurt me, she had said.
****
In the morning, though my head was pounding and my vision blurry, I was able to
confront certain questions whose importance had eluded me the night before.
Why did Mulder come to me first in darkness? Why did he first ignore what I'd
said to him, and then later melt into my arms like a sugar cube in hot tea? Why
didn't he do any of the little tricks that he knew worked for me, instead
relying as he never had before on mechanical assistance? Why did he fuck me in
the shower without benefit of condoms? Why did he *violate* me?
I was very much afraid I knew the answer.
And I became more agitated when I consulted my calendar. If everything was
working right, and I thought it probably was, there was a fair chance that I
could be pregnant.
I could tell myself that Mulder had an equal chance of being the father. But
that shower jet would have pushed the sperm right up into my cervix, assisting
the little Jason-spawn in their blind procreative purpose. And paternity tests
would be almost uniquely inefficacious in this situation.
There had to be a Planned Parenthood in the area. They'd give me a morning-after
pill and a lecture about contraceptive responsibility. It would be farcical, but
I'd survived worse. I'd have to skim over certain areas of my medical history
for them to agree to give me the pills, but I knew the right things to say to
make myself into a perfect candidate. My degree is helpful once in a while,
believe it or not.
My hands were shaking as I stuffed the sanitary napkin in my panties to soak up
the tiny flecks of blood that were still issuing from my rectum.
Jason whistled as he came into the breakfast room. He poured himself a glass of
fresh-squeezed orange juice from a crystal carafe and then topped off my glass,
though I hadn't asked him to do so.
I looked up at him mistrustfully. I might have been wrong. How do you ask
someone if he raped you?
He saved me the trouble. "Sleep well?" Like Mulder, his face hides less than he
thinks it does. Jason's face was a glutted tiger's. I knew this wasn't even
about violating me. If he'd wanted that he probably could have done it during my
abduction, for all I knew he was just comparing notes on the last time he'd had
me. This was about hurting Mulder, owning Mulder. Having me in a way that
Mulder obviously hadn't. He'd plundered the last vestige of virginity I had
anywhere, and I hated him for it.
I remembered the drugged languor of Mulder's fingers and tongue sliding over me
in the darkened bedroom. Mulder hadn't even stirred when I'd come downstairs for
breakfast, which was unusual. He was uniformly awake before I was in the
morning; mostly he'd go out and run before daring to disturb my rest. Jason
apparently wasn't reluctant to add drugs to darkness and false certainty in
order to gain his objectives.
"What did you give me?"
He shrugged. "Is that what you want to blame it on? The man who runs my stables
thought that that the Keraflex might have similar effects on people, but he
wasn't sure, seeing as how human women don't go into estrus. He was pretty sure
it wasn't poisonous, so don't get your panties in a twist."
"Panties in a twist?" my voice came out as sharp as the orange juice, "don't
denigrate what is commonly referred to as rape."
I had to flatten my hands against the table to keep them from shaking.
Naturally, the bastard smiled.
"What's rape compared to breaking and entering, destruction of property, arson
and let's not forget murder? Multiple murder including the blonde."
"The blonde claimed that you were the father of her child."
"I get that a lot." Cruel, even teeth flashed at me. "Might get that from you
next month."
Son of a bitch.
Just then Mulder stumbled in and I grabbed for the Austin-American Statesman on
the table in front of me.
****
Shit, I'd overslept and let the bastard have some time alone with Scully. She
tried to pretend she was reading the newspaper but I could see that her eyes
weren't scanning.
For once my head was screaming louder than my stomach as I thudded into the
Louis XV chair opposite from Scully and reached for one of the flaky croissants
piled on a silver platter. There were little rosettes of butter and pots of jam
glistening next to the pastry and I helped myself.
"Has anyone ever told you why Dana here was integrated into the program?"
Her eyes fluttered up from the front page and a smart bomb went off in my
stomach.
"Of course she was taken to distract you, Mulder, everyone knows that, but that
objective was hardly furthered by making Emily Sim. To this day no one really
knows how you found her, Dana, but I suspect we were hoist on our own petard."
He stared at me, eyes like drillbits digging into my skull. "Her much-denied
sensitivity to the World Beyond is the kind of thing we're always looking for.
And it's so much better when it's possessed by a woman with a hellraising IQ and
mongrel stamina instead of your average trailer trash."
"Mulder," she said calmly, as if Jason weren't even there, "I think we should go
to Montana."
"Emerson won't return any of my messages, direct and through his lawyers."
"At worst, his bodyguards will stop us at the gate of his little militia
hideout, and if they get a good look at you there's a good chance we'll get in."
"I don't think that's a good idea," Jason interjected. "I've had him checked
out, you know he's pretty deep into high technology research. Computer chips and
all that. Very...specialized electronics."
"Is it worse to build microchips for implantation into people's necks than to
make the drugs that destroy their memories and steal their fertility?" I suppose
part of me was curious to see if he had a preference.
Jason put his hand on my shoulder, his thumb caressing the tendon in my neck. I
dropped the croissant I'd been tearing apart. "Remember, I came to you, Mulder,"
he said. "I want to survive this. Emerson has his own agenda; he might even be
responsible for this series of events, which would explain why he won't talk to
you, or to me either."
"Or he could just have good taste. Being here makes us like you and I would
rather be dead," Scully said and jumped up. "I'm leaving. Come to the airport if
you want, Mulder."
At least she was offering me the choice. "Can I shower and get dressed?"
"Half an hour," she said. "I'll call the cab."
Jason didn't bother to offer to have us driven.
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