<![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.
15/20
All truths wait in all things,
They either hasten their own delivery no resist it.
They do not need the obstetric forceps of the surgeon,
The insignificant is as big to me as any
Walt Whitman
I looked in the mirror as I shaved, shaving six faces at once, ten, sixteen,
what did it matter? And, as I did every morning for the past several years, I
asked myself the big question. The shapeshifter had asked me in the Arctic and
it had become my mantra. He'd probably forgotten about it by now, which would be
fitting, but I remembered.
Can you die now?
My hand shook, the razor shook, and my faces shook through the tears that
threatened. I bit down on my lip, hard, to make the worse pain go away. Fucking
Ian, I could never follow him. I would not let myself be an imitator even if I
were an imitation.
Phoebe had taken a theory class at one point which had made her babble endlessly
about Baudrillard and simulacra and how we are all copies now, re-productions in
an age in which there is nothing new to say, only rearrangements of what has
already been done.
She had no clue how right she was.
And, as I'd done almost every morning, I answered the question. No, not today.
Scully was in the cab already when I went downstairs. Jason was waiting by the
front door to shake my hand as I left. "I know this has all been rather
stressful for you," he drawled, "but I hope you understand I only want what's
best for all of us. Don't let Emerson confuse you--and watch your back."
His voice continued in my head if not my ears. *I'm your brother and I love
you.* I dropped his hand like a burning brand and left.
Scully was more uncommunicative than usual on the trip, which meant that she
didn't even vocalize her answers to my questions. She was fine, of course. And
I'm from the government and I'm here to help you. There was an experiment we
were shown tapes of while I was in college: you take a bunch of rats and shock
them or reward them at random. Sometimes pressing a lever gets a shock and other
times a treat; sometimes *not* pressing the lever gets a shock or a treat.
Eventually the rats stop reacting at all, they just huddle in a corner of their
cage, blinking, learned helplessness it's called and the theory has been applied
to battered women and children. Scully's eyes were like those rats'. She was
still moving, but I think that was mainly inertia. Some internal barrier had
been breached and parts of her were draining into each other, mixing and
corroding and setting her up for the fi
Maybe I could hit her over the head and drag her by the hair to a therapist when
things calmed down a bit. She'd talked to Zippy, and when I wasn't being selfish
I knew that was a good sign.
She'd been willing to reserve judgement on Jason last night. I think she might
have been impressed by the horses. The stables might have reminded her of an
infatuation with the beasts brought on by her burgeoning sexuality when she was
just a girl. It's hard to think that Scully was ever a child, but I'm pretty
sure she was. This morning all her reservations were gone and she radiated
hatred--not just distrust--for Jason.
Scully doesn't hate all that easily, though Mom also seemed to have accomplished
it.
If both Scully and I were in the throes of an instinctive revulsion to Jason,
that was a datum worth knowing. I'd never yet been disappointed by a decision to
mistrust.
Had I liked any of my brother-selves? No, not yet, not even Baylor whose
tolerance for pain was more awe-inspiring than reassuring. Not the one whose
body I inhabited. Maybe we were all disgusting and I'd just overdosed on us.
How the hell did she put up with me?
****
Mulder twitched on the in the seat beside me. I really appreciated the switch to
first-class travel, it was relaxing and we didn't have to behave normally for
any civilian seatmates.
My mind stuttered, running the same course over and over again like a hamster in
a Habitrail.
The flight was an opium dream, distant and at the same time incredibly clear. I
spent the entire time reliving the night before, the darkness and the incredible
waterlogged feeling of my lungs after I turned off the shower. The hurt between
my legs that I'd thought assuaged when Mulder made his amends to me.
I didn't blame myself, much. Not even as much as I had with Eddie, with whom, at
least, I'd had an extended conversation. Still, I ended up grabbing the armrests
so that I wouldn't shake myself to pieces; Mulder looked concerned but wrote it
off as my terror of flying. Honestly I didn't notice when we left the ground. I
had the sense that I'd lost a few pints of blood, that if I moved too much I'd
dissolve into sparkles of light and dust.
Was this post-traumatic stress syndrome? Karen Kossoff had made vague noises of
that sort before. But it couldn't be, there was nothing "post" about it. Mid-
trauma stress, was that a legitimate diagnosis? Just like me to find something
that wasn't available in the DSM-IV.
I had tried so hard to let Mulder back in, really I did, and it wasn't his fault
that someone else had come through that door. But it was so fucking hard, the
hospital had left another message that baby Miranda would be ready for release
in a week and would I be there? I should call my mother to come stay with
Miranda, I knew, but the way I was feeling I'd probably just go so cold on her
that she'd disown me. Even without the rapist with my lover's face it was too
much.
16/20
Clear and sweet is my soul, and clear and sweet is all that is not my soul.
Walt Whitman
The road wasn't much better than a wide path between the trees and the truck
jarred along hard enough to make me clench my teeth and grab at the 'oh shit'
bar in the door. Mulder was glaring at the muddy track as though he could make
it smooth and level by will alone.
As far as cabins were concerned, this was about as much of a cabin as the White
House is a single-family dwelling. Sure it was faced with logs but it looked as
though Frank Lloyd Wright had gone native. It was also about the size of my
apartment building. Emerson had good taste in architects. Mulder stared for a
moment and slipped out of the truck onto the crushed stone driveway we had
encountered half an acre back. Fortunately, we didn't have to go to the front
door and produce our badges, because the door opened and Emerson came out,
followed by a petite African-American woman who looked, to my burning eyes,
about six months pregnant. Emerson was the clearest carbon-copy of my partner
that we had seen yet, only he wore his hair in a loose mass of waves that fell
to his shoulders and a pair of horn-rimmed glasses of such gauche style that
Mulder would have died rather than hav
"It's good to know I'm not the only one to be cursed with that absurd schnozz,"
the woman said.
It took me a moment to realize what was happening, Emerson's hands were moving
and his mouth was not. He was speaking in sign language and the woman was
translating. Mulder stepped back as though he had been cattle-prodded and looked
from one to the other with shock.
"My husband can't talk. He had an -- injury -- when he was a child and he
doesn't speak. I translate for him. I'm Aileen Goldberg. Why don't you come
inside?"
Emerson pulled on Mulder's coat sleeve and his hands flew faster than I could
follow.
"Damn, I can't believe this! I don't even know where to start! Where did you
grow up? What do you do? Shit! I have a million questions!" he nudged Mulder
again, as if reassuring himself that his twin was real.
Naturally, they had a black leather sofa. I sat on the sofa next to Mulder
while Emerson held court in a matching leather chair and Aileen reclined on a
pile of pillows in front of the fireplace. Over Emerson's shoulders I could see
the woods turning their pyrotechnic colors like a painting that stretched the
length of the wall of glass. Aileen had brought a carafe of coffee and mugs out
to the coffee table as though it were an ordinary family visit rather that what
it was -- whatever it was. Mulder simply stared as though he was afraid that
Emerson was going to sprout horns or admit that he killed and ate babies for
breakfast. Emerson was bubbling with enthusiasm for his lost sibling and his
face was animated in a way that Mulder's almost never becomes.
"I suspected about Jason Lindsay when I saw him on television about two years
ago. I mean it isn't every day that you see your own face on the idiot box. I
thought it was just one of those separated at birth Oprah things, but I did a
little research and decided not to contact him after all." Emerson signed.
"You know about the Project?" Mulder asked.
Frowning, Emerson continued, Aileen his voice.
"Not in any great detail. Just bits and pieces that I was able to dig up over
the Internet. You know that the Internet was originally created so scientists
could communicate with one another from hidden underground bases in the event of
a nuclear holocaust, right? The data banks that were set up are still in
existence in backwaters of servers. You just have to know where to look, and
know all the right hackers."
Thinking of Frohike, I almost smiled.
"The strange thing is that I have no natural parents. None on any paperwork
anywhere," Emerson made a face, "that was discovered when my parents adopted me
away from the foster parents I had been assigned to. A blank spot on the
adoption papers held everything up for close to a year. You know what tight-
asses bureaucrats are."
"You have no idea," Mulder agreed.
"Extrapolating from the data that I was able to obtain, I surmised that there
had been an experiment of a genetic nature and during the 1960's a series of
twins had been made. Ten lived through infancy and were farmed out to foster-
families throughout the country. I lost track of most of them, there's one in
prison, and there's Jason. Can you fill me in on the details?"
Taking a deep breath, Mulder began his narrative of the Brothers Mulder. While
he spoke, I watched Emerson's expressive face move through a variety of emotions
that would have made a Shakespearean actor jealous. At the end, Mulder tried to
explain George Naxos and his lack of adolescent trauma, which was unusual for a
sex-murderer. While Mulder compared his loss of Samantha with the symptoms that
George suffered as a result, Emerson looked away, his eyes finding the face of
his wife.
He signed directly to her, then got up and left the room. Aileen sighed and
rubbed thoughtfully at her belly through the loose denim dress she wore.
"You have to excuse him, he can't talk about what happened to him. It makes him
very upset. But he wants me to tell you."
"One of the reasons Emerson was so interested in finding his birth parents was
because of his foster parents. I'm afraid it was a bit of a nightmare, the usual
assortment of mental and physical abuse," next to me, Mulder winced, "topped off
by sheer neglect. When he was eight, Emerson was left with a neighbor's child
to play while his foster parents, their name was Trapper, went out. The older
kids, the teenagers from the trailer park all went to the Trapper trailer to
drink their beer and get high. They began to tease Emerson. He's never had a
forgiving nature, and he gave the oldest a black eye. The oldest kid, who was
in his late-teens, took Emerson into the bedroom and raped him. Repeatedly. A
few of the other teen-aged kids took turns with him and when that wasn't fun
anymore they used household items as well. Finally, the kids realized that
Emerson was probably going to
Serious ass-pucker factor.
Mulder had gone poker-straight on the cushions next to me. I was having a hard
time breathing. I realized that my hand was hurting so much because he was
struggling to pulverize it with his own.
"The Department of Youth and Family Services Judge determined that his foster
parents were guilty of neglect and had him removed. Fortunately, they sent him
to the Goldberg family who already had three children, and they adopted him.
The Goldbergs are great. They were up here for Chanukah and painted the baby's
room, brought tons of toys, and all the furniture. Typical first grandchild
syndrome."
"But--" I started, "he could have had speech therapy, surgery to correct the
problem."
"Emerson can speak, he just hates the way that he sounds. He thinks he sounds
stupid," she smiled, "besides, if he had spoken I never would have met him, I
was his translator all through MIT."
Movement caught my eye and I saw Emerson poking his head around the doorway he
had left through. He rolled his eyes at Aileen.
"Did I mention that I gave up a promising career developing Artificial
Intelligence models based on Turing so I could take care of this slack-jawed
nutcase of a husband?" she asked.
The gesture Emerson gave her needed no translation.
"We'd like you to stay for dinner so the boys can have a chance to talk."
I realized that Aileen had addressed me as though I were Mulder's spouse rather
than his partner. I wasn't sure how to react. That had never happened before.
****
As far as I was concerned each of my brothers were awful in a unique direction.
Well, Baylor would have been fine if not for his serious commitment to
inflicting pain on himself. In fact, if I could have silenced my demons by
marking my body instead of my psyche, if I could have suffered stigmata and
protected Scully, it would be a more-than-fair trade.
I hadn't ever considered how many dimensions of personality flaws there were; it
was like each of these jokers had taken an ugly part of me and brought it to
perfection. Bill Scully was looking better and better in terms of brothers. I
wasn't entirely sure what Mr. Hyde face Emerson was hiding. So far he seemed all
but saintly, and that made me more nervous.
We had another flight to catch and because Montana is not exactly a hub we had a
connection to make, but we could afford to stay to dinner if we took a morning
flight out of Chicago. (The routes that forced us to fly to Illinois to get back
to Texas deserved an X File of their own.) Aileen excused herself to go tell the
cook that there would be company. Scully had her hand on my knee as I stared at
my long-lost twin.
I explained, as best I could, that there had been a sudden decrease in our
ranks. At least five dead, pending determination of what happened to George.
Emerson put his head between his hands and stared down. I didn't even know that
my face could twist that way.
Adoptees often have a strong desire to learn about their real parents--what's
called "genealogical uncertainty" by the kind of people who have to name things
to make them real. Emerson's had led him to investigate his past and he'd found
something more bizarre than the standard fantasy of being the lost king's son.
Maybe, with the impending birth of his child, he'd been hoping for some sort of
closure on his past.
I'm sure this wasn't what he was hoping for.
Aileen came back and they exchanged a rapid-fire series of hand motions.
"So what's Jason's angle--why did he decide to tell you this?" I was quickly
getting used to having Emerson's voice come out of Aileen's mouth. She was good,
I could tell when he was talking because the cadence was subtly different.
"Maybe he didn't want us to get killed?" Okay, I admit it was lame but I could
always hope there was some good in him.
"He hasn't tried to contact *me*, and don't give me any crap about the power of
the great big wings of Uncle Sam, I know I can take care of myself and probably
you too."
"What would he gain by having some of the others killed but warning Mulder? And
letting Mulder warn the ones who are still alive?" Scully wasn't buying it and
she had a point.
My brain felt like a bowl of Rice Krispies with the milk just poured in. Or
maybe that was the maggots eating their way out. I remembered Sam in the garden,
tempting me with the apple...
The woman gave it to me and I ate.
But I didn't swallow.
"Maybe someone wants monopoly control over the genotype," I mused. "Jason might
have an interest in that."
"But especially then he wouldn't have told you..." Emerson was frowning too.
"What if he didn't want someone else to know about his involvement? What we have
here is a classic conflict of interest," Scully said in her precise way.
"Roush's interest is in having a wide array of examples of...Mulder, so that
they have greater flexibility in potential future...ah, uses. So when Mulder
forced the issue at the warehouse in Austin, Jason had to meet with him, and
then in order to remain credible with her, he had to give Mulder the files."
"Her?"
Scully glared at me as if I were the one who'd made the all-too-appropriate
Freudian slip.
"She's right," I told Aileen and Emerson. "He could be trying to hide his
involvement in the deaths from Samantha."
"This is obscene," Alieen snapped and heaved herself up from the sofa to begin
to pace back and forth in front of the picture window where the sunset had
deepened to twilight, "there are enough *other* things in the world to corrupt
before you even begin to play God with genes."
The gesture Emerson made was an eloquent representation of disgust.
"This is making my brain swell," she said for him, "come on, Fox, and I'll give
you the tour."
With Jason flashing back in my head, I stood up and noticed that Scully had gone
ivory against the blackness of the couch.
"You okay?"
"I'm fine, Mulder," she said through her teeth, "just tired."
I followed Emerson to the main entrance.
"How are-" I started and he smiled, holding up a steno book and a marker.
"Low tech," he scrawled.
Outside, Emerson owned a magic kingdom. The stark green, brown, black of an
evergreen forest surrounded us, rich and comforting. I think I saw a flash of a
deer's tail as we hiked.
He held up the pad. "Any thoughts on why so many of the others are psychos?"
I appreciated the 'others' part.
"Each one seems like a different shade of psycho," I said, "but I have to say
I'm leaning towards the idea of genetic influence. If not determinism, let's
call it a strong predisposing factor. Add in the fact that adopted and foster
children have higher-than-average numbers of adjustment and dissociative
disorders, and you've got a recipe for disaster. I mean, compared to George and
Arlen, Jason and I are perfect examples of upstanding citizens."
He frowned and scribbled, his letters becoming spikier and crawling down the
page. "But there's a difference between a genetic predisposition and a heritable
condition, isn't there?" 'Heritable' was underlined twice.
"Are you asking me if your kid's going to be okay?"
He shrugged, a bit lamely. There, I found a disadvantage to being so expressive,
I could tell that he really did care.
"I can't make promises..." I didn't even know what to call him, Mr. Goldberg
seemed a bit detached. "Emerson, look, God only knows what happened to our
genes. The people who made us were just poking at us to see what would happen,
Mom all but admitted that, and there are no guarantees. I'm sorry."
He turned so that I lost his features against the dying sun.
"You should talk to Scully," I suggested. "She'll tell you that science doesn't
yet understand how to alter germ cells, only somatic cells, so you've got
nothing to worry about."
He rubbed his eyes with his free hand, flipped the page, and scrawled again.
"And she'll be able to explain what you just said?"
I laughed, I'd finally found a more unscientific me. "She explains everything,
even the things she doesn't understand. It's one of her best features." Or maybe
I said "worst." Either way I got a measuring look from Emerson, the kind that
makes me want to check my face for leftover food or sudden deformity.
"Did you ever have a philosophy class?" he scrawled.
"Yes."
"Remember the question when they ask you if you would go back in time to kill
Hitler as a baby? To prevent every atrocity that he committed? That's how I
feel."
He cocked an eyebrow at me in a way that reminded me of Scully rather than
myself.
"I want this baby, but I don't want a monster."
"I can't promise anything."
Dinner was a polar opposite from Jason's lordly table. We were knee to knee at
a round table with a view of the mountains. Emerson had the social advantage of
being able to talk with his mouth full, and he almost kept Aileen from eating at
all while he expounded his theories on global education via the Internet. His
standpoint was that given the access to the facts, anyone was capable of self-
education and the ability to make informed decisions about life and the current
political climate. He also explained how he and Aileen had moved their entire
software company to this remote location after a particularly nasty hit by Mr.
Gates' industrial spies. Their suit against Microsoft was still in the initial
stages and Emerson practically sparked with glee at the idea of taking on the
software Goliath.
Next to me, her thigh pressed against mine, Scully moved her food around on her
plate and ate little, speaking even less.
****
I was so tired that staying the night at the hotel attached to O'Hare was a
relief. A cryptic voice mail from Zippy had indicated that things "were going
down" in Austin and we were headed back there the next day.
Mulder got us two rooms for the record but brought both our bags into the one on
the left. I postponed the issue by taking a long shower. The water pressure was
low enough that I wasn't reminded of Jason's guest suite, much.
They were two different people. Different in every molecule, different as two
cookies from the same cutter, where it was the decorations that counted. Mulder
still loved me with his quiet desperation and he didn't want to hurt me.
I put on one of his T-shirts and opened the bathroom door. He was propped up
against the headboard of the bed, reading the information Emerson had printed
out for him. His hair stood up in clumps and he was still wearing his undershirt
along with his boxer-briefs; Bruce Weber would have loved to put him on a
billboard in Times Square. He peered up over the tops of his reading glasses at
me and smiled the smile that usually worked like a lit match deep inside me.
Five steps took me to the edge of the bed. I held out my hand as I crawled
forward. "Give me what you've looked at already."
He blinked and obeyed. Maybe we'd read until we were tired out and then just get
a few hours of shut-eye before the flight.
As if.
Maybe if I got stinking drunk again he'd chivalrously let me off the hook, so to
speak.
The file was cold and smooth in my hand. I got my glasses and took the file over
to the standard tiny hotel table, hunching over in a way that would have me in
knots in minutes. I knew that my posture was terrible but I couldn't uncurl,
like a person burned in a fire so that the tendons shortened.
Emerson's files filled in some of the early details on the Mulder clan; Jason
had been more concerned with present whereabouts and had skimped on the case
histories. Aside from Ian, Jason, and Mulder, it seemed that most of them had
been placed by private adoption agencies, carefully spaced around the country.
Information on Ian and Jason was all but nonexistent, though Emerson's hacking
revealed that Jason had gone from Andover to Yale. Ian did not seem to have had
any formal education whatsoever.
The other seven did not get the benefit of the silver spoon. I guess that was
harder to replicate than the twins themselves. In those days you could pretty
much buy a baby if you had the money and psychological fitness screening was not
required, but these babies had particularly bad, or well-planned, luck. Aileen
hadn't mentioned that Emerson's original adoptive parents had sent him to the
hospital on a regular basis before being turned into jam in the car crash that
had left him to the tender mercies of the Trappers.
And I'd pitied Mulder.
It was too much hardship. I closed the folder and turned out the desk lamp.
Mulder had finished reading and was channel-surfing. I scuttled over to the bed
and pulled the covers down on my side, sliding in like a bullet. I felt him
shift but I turned my back to him so I couldn't see his inquisitive abused-puppy
look.
He sighed and I heard the TV go off. Many nights on the road he'd gone back to
his room after the sex so that he could watch the tube for a while, and then
he'd sneak back into my room when he was sated and wrap himself around me like a
silk cocoon. Tonight he would need the comfort too much to leave; at least I was
sure that he'd choose me over the idiot box.
He killed the light over the nightstand, leaving only the bathroom light and the
glow from behind the drapes, which weren't doing enough to cut off the outside
world. I felt the air being sucked out of my lungs. Covers rustled until he
found the right layer and then he was sliding his arm around me, tugging me onto
my back.
I closed my eyes and I was back in the lightless bathroom. Everything shut down;
my arms and legs jerked as if I were a plastic action figure and Mulder pulled
away, confused.
I had to get used to the idea of being violated. When I was first returned three
years ago, I hadn't been able to masturbate for several months; I could barely
stand to look at my newly unfamiliar, bloated body in the shower.
That passed.
But if it took another five months this time, Mulder was going to want an
explanation.
Even now he was hovering over me, dismayed and rapidly growing impatient.
I grabbed his forearms and pushed, flipping him onto his back. He went readily,
leering up at me; he thought he knew the game now.
"Listen to me. I am only going to say this once," I said and underneath me his
entire body went into danger mode.
"What?"
I had my hands on either side of his body and my knees between his legs, if he
was going to go anywhere, he would do so with me stuck to him like a leech.
"Jason impersonated you. He raped me. He sodomized me. While you were talking
to Samantha. I'm pretty sure he drugged us both to do it."
In the green light of the hotel, his mouth opened and shut like a fish floating
helplessly in an oil slick. I watched him start into the lake of self-loathing
that always lies underneath the carefully cultivated ice layer he skates upon.
"I need some time," I added, not liking the passing blank look on his oft-
duplicated features.
"Take all the time you need," he said in a voice that was a shadow of a shadow.
I couldn't accurately gage the truth level in his words; I was too tired to
catalog every nuance on his face and body. But I did, however, slide off him
and let him gather me close to his chest in yet another dreary hotel room after
another drearily horrible revelation.
"I don't want you to feel guilty," I told his chest, "and I don't want an
endless round of explanations and recriminations. Shit happens."
I could feel his muscles twitch but he didn't reply. Eventually I slept, though
I don't believe he did.
****
I was going to kill Jason, it was that simple.
Then I was going to get twenty-first century on his ass. I would find his cache
of alien technology, bring him back to life, and kill him again. Then I would
clone him and torture him until he begged for mercy. I would keep him around for
target practice. Cut off his dick and feed it to him in bite-size pieces. Then
I'd kill him and start all over again.
If I hadn't given in to my petty desires those many months ago on my awful
stinking couch, she would have been safe. She would have slapped him and sent
him away.
If I hadn't been petting and necking with my baby sister he wouldn't have had
his opportunity. What a fucking freak, her and me both, Mom's genes were deadly
no matter whose sperm supplied the other half of the recombinatorial portfolio.
I remembered Sam's cool lips like fishscales through water, thought about Scully
in the bedroom above us, wrenched apart by his cock. I imagined her pain,
thinking that it was because of me and still submitting, her soft satin voice
asking me not to hurt her, not to hurt her *again* and me bludgeoning her. For a
moment I wished us both dead, it might give us some surcease.
Get your name tattooed on your forehead so that she'd know it's you, pretty
fucking funny, Fox.
I almost liked the idea that I'd been drugged, it made my part of that night
easier to forgive. He'd - they - Them - whatever - had obviously had a plan.
Me outside fucking my own sister (who, no doubt, was at the most fertile part of
her reproductive cycle) while he was upstairs impregnating Scully. The thought
made the airline coffee curdle in my stomach. But the plan had gone mildly
wrong. I'd managed to escape Sam and make it upstairs to screw Scully without
the benefit of latex. The only shred of hope was that should Scully be
pregnant, there was a possibility I had done the deed. With any luck my sperm
had learned the butterfly crawl from their owner.
But, and here was where I was in deep water, should a child result from said
union(s) would the child not have the same genetic make-up regardless of who had
shot the wad that caused the fertilization? I wasn't as well-versed in genetics
as my bitch of a mother or bitch of a sister, but I was pretty sure that
identical twins would have the exact same genetic make-up. So, we'd never know
who the father of the infant was.
My eyes were burning but I was willing myself not to cry.
She was letting me hold her, was that for her benefit or mine? Scully
compartmentalizes better than an ocean liner, maybe she could even accept that I
wasn't Jason, that my body wasn't the threat (except it was, my body was his
key). Despite her strength, she'd hit so many icebergs in the last few weeks
that she was going to end up on the bottom of the ocean in short order.
Time, she wanted time. I wanted time *travel*, I would go back to any of a
hundred decision points and kill myself to keep her out of harm's way. I would
go back to the beginning of Dr. Frankenmulder's charming little experiment and
set the lab on fire, what the hell it worked for Scully.
Jason had true style, I had to concede that. He'd taken away the one tie I could
count on, my carefully acquired knowledge of the way to rock Dana Scully's
world. Now there was nothing to keep her, and every time she looked at me she'd
have reason to remember what he'd done.
****
I could tell by the keening of the phone that it was mine, not Mulder's. He
groaned and pulled the pillow over his head as I leaned over the backlit
landscape of his back to snag the annoying device off of the nightstand.
"Scully."
Skinner's voice sent a quick rush of adrenaline through my body, as if he were
watching us loll in blatant disregard for regulations. I automatically pulled
the sheet away from Mulder to cover myself up. "Agent Scully, Emerson Goldberg
and his wife Aileen were just reported missing by their security service, which
had instructions to contact me if this were to happen--instructions they say
they received only yesterday, after your visit."
"Is there any sign that they were...hurt...when they were taken?"
Mulder stiffened into ice and opened his eyes.
"No sign of forced entry. Security was compromised without a trace, not even a
dog barked according to the man in charge. I've met him before, he says they
should have detected an unauthorized penetration and they didn't."
Mulder threw off the corner of the sheet he had left and began to throw on
yesterday's clothes. "We'll look into it," I promised.
"The Goldbergs are gone," I said unnecessarily.
"It's Jason," he replied.
"Why take them, why not just kill them like the others?"
He shook his head like a whipped dog. "Not sure. I'd guess it has something to
do with wanting to have some genetic material on tap, so he doesn't have to wear
himself out in the bathroom every day. And Aileen's fetus is near enough to
birth to be viable, maybe he wants to know what the next generation looks like."
Back to Austin it was.
****
Zippy was waiting for us at the local office. The entire floor was hopping with
agents trying to find out what was going on and how they could get a piece of
it. Coffee cups were strewn over every flat surface and some surfaces that
weren't too flat.
We stepped into the relative calmness of his office, warmed by the sun through
the enormous plate glass windows, and I was surprised by his angry scowl. He
reminded me of myself, much earlier in my life, when I knew Mulder was hiding
his sources from me.
"You need to hear this," Zippy pressed play and the reels of the small recorder
he'd picked up when he saw us began to turn.
"I saw that report on the news, about Holly Keene? I've seen her, a couple of
nights ago. A couple of men were...taking her into a building. I thought she was
real drunk and they were holding her up, but now I guess...It was a warehouse,
the one on the north side of Ridgewood, the second one in from Howe Street."
Tinny and compressed, the voice was still familiar. Zippy's own voice was
considerably clearer, and furious. "I had a voice analysis done, and despite the
shitty drawl, it comes out ninety-eight percent likely to be the voice of one
Fox Mulder. You wanna explain that?"
"Or Jason Lindsay," I said and Mulder nodded, comprehending.
"He wanted the raid to happen," Mulder said, thinking out loud. "Maybe the women
in the warehouse were somebody else's project, a threat to his power, so he
called it in. He had to have been lying about Holly Keene; she was catatonic and
nine months pregnant at the time. The whole thing was designed to get us to
Austin."
"And he was the man in Hal Rothberg's vestibule," I said.
"Now just a fucking minute-"
"Well you explain it, hotshot."
Zippy looked as though he was trying to decide if he was going to throw the file
at Mulder or into the garbage. Mulder stared him down.
"There's something I have to tell you guys," Zippy began, "The Roush compound,
just outside town - there's been some interesting equipment going into there
over the past few months."
Zippy's phone rang, which may have been what kept Mulder from throttling him.
Zippy listened for a moment, grunted a monosyllable or two and hung up, the
lines deepening around his too-bright eyes.
"Darien Klein is missing, your boss is coming here, and we're supposed to get
ready for a big ol' Texas blowout."
"Holy Waco, Batman," Mulder deadpanned.
17/20
I fall on the weeds and stones,
The riders spur their unwilling horses, haul close,
Taunt my dizzy ears and beat me violently over the head with whipstocks.
Walt Whitman
By the time Skinner got to Texas things had only gotten worse. The local police
had taken a call from someone claiming to be trapped in Roush's research
facility. She said she'd been drugged and had awakened and escaped her bonds,
but she couldn't leave because of the guards, so she was using an abandoned
office to call. Then there'd been a clamor and she'd been cut off.
I smelled a relative.
Operative theory: Jason had ratted out Sam's little project in the warehouse,
forcing an early shutdown. Sam was now playing tit-for-tat. As far as
reproduction is concerned, men are penises with legs, and that's not a bad
description of us in general; Sam didn't need Jason anywhere as much as he
needed her. He was getting greedy and she was cutting her losses--which made her
attempted seduction easier to understand. Maybe she was imagining another
morgantic dynasty. Unlike Jason, I would be wracked by guilt and uninterested in
competing with her for control of Roush.
Zippy handed Skinner a red folder. "Sir, this is the report I've put together on
Roush's activities in the past few months. You'll note I've traced numerous
illicit arms purchases back to the Austin facility; in addition, their Social
Security withholding forms indicate that they've hired over fifty men as
'security' in the past three months alone, only losing three to regular
attrition. In brief, sir, there's a fucking arsenal in there."
Skinner looked at Zippy as though he had spit out an armadillo.
"Why hasn't anyone done anything about this?" he growled.
The fur around his neck bristling, Zippy glared at the AD.
"You tell me. I cc'd my Division head and the ATF and no one seemed to give a
fuck, sir."
"You ever see anything like this again, come straight to me."
Zippy looked as though the head of the wolfpack had tossed him a particularly
juicy part of a deer.
****
By the time we arrived the enterprising local reporters had caught mention of
the problem on the police radio frequency, and so we struggled through a layer
of the fourth estate before reaching the real perimeter.
Zippy wanted to go in shooting. Fortunately Skinner was in agreement with
Zippy's immediate superior that firing first was a piss-poor idea, and wouldn't
play well on TV either.
There was no activity visible in the compound. It could have been deserted if
not for the multiple bodies showing on the infrared scanners.
Skinner borrowed a bullhorn and stepped towards the closest building.
"Attention, Roush employees," he boomed. "We have received reports that people
are being held against their will inside. Please come out with your hands raised
and no one has to get hurt."
That was when the top window of the building exploded outwards and a shotgun
blast almost moved me up the chain of command. Skinner, his Marine instincts as
sharp as ever, dived just in time to avoid being hit.
He cursed and the local AD, obviously infected with Texas bravado, gave the
order to return fire. I heard the slow beat of our tactical helicopters powering
up. They wouldn't be reducing the compound to powder, not with potential
hostages inside, but they'd shoot anything that moved.
Meanwhile men in flak jackets were popping up on both sides, shooting so wildly
that Mulder and I retreated behind a Bucar to regroup.
I surveyed the disaster unfolding before us. Even if our colleagues managed to
overrun the building, there wouldn't be enough left of Emerson, Aileen and Baby
Goldberg to put in a doggie bag.
"We need a chopper," Mulder said, for once making perfect sense.
I glanced over at the slew of grounded news copters, brought down by threats and
growls from our side. "Which one?"
He pointed. "Isn't it obvious?"
Put that way, it was.
Mulder took off and I followed, checking to make sure that no one noticed our
mad dash into enemy territory. Reporters began to head toward us like iron
filings to a magnet, but Mulder shouldered his way to Rupert Murdoch's local
affiliate.
"Look at it this way," he tossed over his shoulder as he banged on the door of
the bird, "I'll be the only one of us wearing a nametag."
The door popped open and a blonde stuck her head out. "Can I help you...Agents?"
appending our titles once she figured them out.
"I have four words for you: Bernard Shaw. Pulitzer. *Network.*"
"Come on up," she said.
The pilot, what I could see of him under the Boba Fett gear he was wearing,
looked like he'd been fried in hot fat at some point in the past. His face was a
welt of scar tissue, his mouth white and lipless. Vietnam, I guessed. Somehow it
always was. The cameraman helped me into the chopper and as soon as Mulder had
one foot inside we were lifting off.
"There's a lot of gunfire," the blonde reporter said into her microphone, "and I
don't know how much you can see from this angle--Peter, turn the camera so we
can see the feds. It looks like there are at least five--no, six--FBI agents
down. I can see ambulance lights on the road off the other side."
"Are we just going to do the traffic report or are we going into the compound?"
She made a face that would probably look like a smile to the people watching the
video feed. "Charlie, let's go in."
"This is Sheryl Ann Reardon, reporting for KTBC." She had the conspiratorial
whisper down perfectly, though she should lose the accent if she really wanted
to go national. "We're approaching the source of the gunfire now..."
The helicopter jerked like a yo-yo on a string and I was lifted into the air.
I'd missed the seatbelt somehow, and Mulder grabbed me as I came back down and
held his arms around my waist, pulling me up into his lap. I'd suspect that he
orchestrated it but there hadn't been time.
The chopper wheeled in the hot air over the complex, diving and sweeping around
and past the other choppers and the tracer bullets like something out of a
George Lucas movie. I wanted to shut my eyes, but I was afraid not to. If we
were going to get shot out of the sky, I wanted to know.
"There are several dozen private troops scattered around the perimeter of the
Roush compound," the blonde continued into her microphone, "and we have to
wonder how a private company was able to build such a force of private militia
without the authorities knowing."
The authorities knew, they just didn't do anything.
Charlie, the pilot, yelled something at the nearest chopper and made an obscene
gesture, acting, for all the world, like a New York cabdriver. I left my
stomach somewhere when the helicopter wheeled around and dropped like a cable-
cut elevator. I could feel Mulder's heart beating like an engine against my
back, but my heart didn't seem to be beating at all.
The skids of the chopper hit ground with a thump from hell and the blonde hauled
the door open, while she grabbed a small camcorder from a case on the floor.
"This is our stop," Mulder bawled in my ear over the cacophony of the rotors.
We fell out of the chopper and onto the dusty ground, Sheryl Ann following suit
with her camera.
"You can't come in here!" I yelled at her.
"First Amendment rights, babe!" she yelled back at me and the red light on the
camera winked on, "Smile for mister and missus America."
Mulder grabbed my arm and began scuttling for the nearest building while the
KTBC chopper took off again. Sheryl Ann raced after us. The guards were thinner
on the ground inside the compound, but the one that popped out of the doorway
went down in a flood of human blood when I shot him in the gut. Overhead the
sky went orange and the explosion sent us all to our knees as one of the
helicopters exploded. Small bits of blackened black metal showered down around
us while we watched in stunned horror as the insectoid bulk of the machine
smashed like a comet into the building across the compound. I grabbed Mulder's
arm and began running, he hauled the reporter to her feet and the three of us
made it into the building a microsecond before the fireball swept across where
we had fallen.
The hallways were unfinished wallboard with spackle still showing around the
paper joins and the lights were unshaded fluorescent fixtures overhead. In the
echoing grayness, we could still hear the rumble and crump of the firefight
outside. Mulder hurried along, his gun at the alert, like an animal hot on the
scent in fallen leaves. I followed, flicking glances here and there for
ambushes. Stopping at a metal door he flung it open and rushed into the
darkness of a stairwell.
Down into hell, where the air was cooler and full of dust from the shaking
building.
I didn't bother to ask him how he was homing in on Jason and the others. He was
following himself and, in a way, it was the easiest hunt for a suspect he had
ever done. As ever, I followed, and Sheryl Ann filmed as we went.
Another disposable goon stuck his face around the corner and got it blown off
for his trouble. This wasn't unlike the countless training exercises I'd run at
Quantico when I was young and green, bad guys popping up on wires--only
sometimes they had hostages and you had to be careful who you shot.
I wasn't careful.
We were approaching the end of our chosen hallway. The door at the end had been
blown back by an explosion; it was lying black and charred on the ground, and I
could see muzzle flashes refracted through the clouds of smoke pushing out
towards us.
I squeezed off a shot for cover and Mulder darted through the open door, diving
and rolling. I couldn't see into the darkened hallway but I didn't hear him cry
out.
As I prepared to follow him, I heard a noise from Sheryl Ann. I turned and drew
a bead on Samantha (Mann) Mulder.
Mulder would kill me, he'd rip the skeleton from my pulsing flesh and crack the
bones apart to get at the marrow, if I killed his little sister.
What would he think about wounding? I pointed the gun at a neutral angle,
somewhere between her and the heavens where God was laughing at us.
She approached, the Mulder certainty that no harm could befall her as strong in
her as in her brother. "I don't think you plan on killing me. Why don't you put
the gun away?"
"Why don't you stop moving, turn around and put your hands against the wall?"
She pouted, the effect somewhat spoiled by her razorblade earrings and mercury
eyes.
Still, I wasn't expecting her to rush me.
I got off one round before she was on me, and her weight and momentum knocked me
over. An earring stabbed into the fleshy bottom of my palm and she slammed my
gun hand against the floor, jarring the bone painfully and making me lose my
grip. She jabbed at my throat and scratched at my eyes and I thought, well,
America's viewers are going to love this, too bad we're not naked and covered in
chocolate pudding.
"Jason said you were a lousy lay, apparently you're a lousy shot as well, are
you good for anything?" Her arm was tight around my throat as she dragged me to
a standing position, I suppose to emphasize her height advantage.
It was a mistake. I drove my elbow into her stomach and hunkered down as I
flipped her. She gasped in shock as her entire spine crashed into the ground.
Try to tell me that size matters, you bitch.
Punch-drunk, she rolled to her feet and came at me again. She had a switchblade,
like some strange refugee from West Side Story. I should have known that she
wouldn't like killing from a distance. Slashing out, she used her longer reach
to open a burning line across my chest and the top of my right arm. I ducked and
weaved, trying to get back to my gun.
I faked down towards my weapon and she bent her knees for better access to my
throat as I sprang on her. This time her nose broke with a satisfying crunch
when I slammed my fist into her face. No wonder men like fistfights, it's
unbeatable for instant satisfaction when you're winning. Gasping and bleeding,
she went down again. I brought my boot down on her knife hand and heard bones
break. While she gurgled, I kicked the knife away, not minding whether it cut
her on the way out. Then I sat on her wiggly bony body and cuffed both her hands
through a still-exposed steel rebar in the wall.
"You go, girl!" Sheryl Ann urged, dropping her journalistic perspective like an
old pair of shoes.
I had lost Mulder.
While Samantha continued to bitch and screech, I went after her brothers.
18/20
I am the hounded slave I wince at the bite of the dogs.
Hell and despair are upon me, crack and again crack the marksmen,
I clutch at the rails of the fence, my gore dribs, thinn'd with the ooze of my
skin.
Walt Whitman
Girl reporter in tow, I searched the first floor of the building systematically,
barrelling through hallways and kicking open flimsy temporary doors like it was
going out of style. My Spidey sense wasn't working too well: I found Darien and
Emerson instead. I knew it was them because I recognized Darien's streaked hair
and Emerson's shaggy 'do, along with his arm guarding Aileen. They were all in
leg chains bolted to bars through the floor. I wondered what the architect had
thought about the plans for the building. Maybe there was a particular firm
you'd go to if you wanted to build your own dungeon in Austin.
No time for sappy reunions. "Hang on," I said, went for the fire ax at the end
of the hall, and returned to hack them free. Darien went as stiff as a stuffed
deer but Aileen and Emerson were eerily calm and trusting. I suspected shock
which couldn't be doing the baby much good. Two down, three to go; George had to
be around here somewhere.
The perimeter was well-guarded. George had gone from jail to hostage and,
hopefully, right smack into the open arms of an FBI agent or a Texas Ranger.
Mulder, on the other hand, was capable of getting into plenty of trouble right
here in this building.
I sent the resilient Sheryl Ann to lead the freed captives out. She took one
look at Aileen and sensed great human interest--a pregnant woman and two
identical twins for good measure, so she didn't protest when I headed back in
without her. I think she might have seen enough fighting to satisfy her need for
blood. There was a door I hadn't gone through, a white wooden hole in a white
wooden wall with warning signs plastered all over it.
I didn't have my hard hat but I kicked it open anyway.
I could smell them through the fresh paint and the gunpowder.
The building had opened up into one huge room. Strange equipment littered the
sides, some of it working and some hulking inert metal. There were surgical
tables and high-wattage lamps, cabinets for holding machinists' tools and
wheeled trays for instruments I didn't want to think about. Extension cords
draped like nests of snakes everywhere.
Where were they?
****
Scully's a big girl, she can take care of herself. I reminded myself
as I ran through the corridors of Jason's fortress. What about with Jason,
dumbass, was she taking care of herself then?
The corridor ended at a door festooned with warning signs; biohazard,
hard hat area only, authorized personnel only, and suchlike. This was
the smell of blood to me and I went through the door.
A cavern of walkways and steel staircases, reminiscent of the warehouse in
Austin where the Crawford clone had kept his cache of gestating women. I was
standing on a walkway about halfway between the floor and roof. A bilious green
light shone overhead and looked directly up into what looked like a half-dozen
enormous tanks of the now-familiar green liquid, the amniotic fluid of unnatural
birth. I looked down, and more tanks filled levels below my feet. So it
appeared that my lovely brother was going to start heavy-duty production of --
something -- in fairly short order. After seeing the mutated and malformed
fetuses on the floor at Bethel, I wasn't sure that another batch of "new and
improved" humans was a good thing.
"You're late," a voice that was mine and not mine drawled from my left.
"The traffic is bad."
The .357 Magnum in Jason's hand made me feel a little bit better,
amateurs think that guns are like penises -- bigger is better. Dirty
Harry's gun of choice was intimidating but only effective if the gunman could
hit the broad side of a barn. Nevertheless those high-caliber guns made big
holes.
It was a good thing he had the gun, I might have felt slightly guilty
shooting an unarmed man. And I was going to shoot him, I was going to kill him,
that wasn't in question. I just needed to know a few things before I blew his
fucking evil brains all over the metal flooring.
"Why?" I asked.
The bastard was going to make the GQ issue of "evil psychopaths" that year in
his expensive shirt and dark pants. He moved closer to me, the gun held in his
hand like a prop in a photo shoot.
"If you think I'm going to tell you all the intricate details of my plan
including the easiest way to defeat me, like the villain in a James Bond movie,
you're sadly mistaken. Did you ever wonder why they did that, Fox? Sean
Connery would be strapped to a table and Bloefeld would obligingly show him the
button that turned the entire compound into a smoking hole in the ground," he
shrugged and wandered a little bit closer, "you'll just have to die wondering."
"Wrong answer, you're going to die," he made such a classy target
standing there at the end of my gunsight.
"She really wasn't all that good, you know. I can't understand the
attraction."
If I clenched my teeth any tighter, I was going to spit out fillings.
"You should have sampled the charms of our sister, she's quite
talented. But then again, she always had a natural inclination for
carnality, even at a very young age -- ten, I seem to remember."
Deep breaths buddy, I reminded myself. I wanted my hands steady when I shot
him. The general plan was as follows -- right kneecap, left kneecap, right
shoulder, left shoulder, then in the gut. I wanted to
watch his face turn white as he bled to death in front of me.
Jason moved even closer, until we were barely ten feet from one another on the
catwalk. The smile he gave me had been edited for television.
"The only problem with Sam is that she likes to make herself feel
important by running her own projects."
"Let me guess. Bethel was yours, the Crawford plant was hers, and she called
this little installation in to the Feds because you did something that put her
in a snit. Ugly infighting. Very Roman, you know, along with the rest of your
sins. You killed the rest of our brothers, didn't you?"
"Just two. Hal and Baylor," he smiled again, "the rest were Sam's
doing. Between the two of us we were each trying to make our own
collection of DNA to start the new product line. Hal was a worthless
waste of genetic material, and Baylor . . . I almost felt bad about
him. I've never met anyone with such a deliciously yielding nature
before. You see he thought I was just like you - and we're all a little
narcissistic, aren't we? Must run in the family."
"And you want to make more? Get real. The Project was a failure. It
produced ten sick and warped men who cause nothing but pain to anyone they come
in contact with."
"Increased resistance to disease, superior intellect, near-empathic
abilities have been the hallmark of our line, combined with DNA like
that of your Dana, it's a wonderful combination. When the Old Order
releases whatever biological monstrosity they've created, I will rise
out of the ashes and rule the survivors."
God, it was no surprise that the genesis of the project had been with
the Nazis. This spiel of genetic superiority was as old as the
Babylonians thinking that they were better than the other tribes further down
the Euphrates River. And my mother had been involved in it up to her pearl
earrings.
"You know, before you go any further with your little meglomaniacal
soliloquy here, let me update you a little on the background of the
Mulder Dynasty. Our dear mother might have neglected to mention the fact that
our family is Jewish. Mom's Aunt Sophie managed to live through Dachau. Dad's
family hid in Amsterdam, pretending to be Christian, and only a few managed to
survive. So you think long and hard about your master race shit, we've been
there and done that, got the tattoos."
"Is that what you're going to tell your daughter?"
"My daughter?" I squeaked.
"Yes, your baby. The one I made for you with your partner's
ova. There weren't many left after Bethel, but Mom has always been a belt-and-
suspenders kind of lady."
Miranda.
I could barely hear Jason's voice through the rushing of blood through my brain.
I think he might have been surprised when I leapt at him.
His gun went off.
****
A gunshot, like the crack of Doom, drew my attention upwards, to a side of the
building where at least ten enormous tanks of green liquid glowed radioactively
against the murk. There was a temporary wooden ladder leading up to that part of
the building, where a wall would have been later on, and I ran towards it.
Whatever I might have seen had I stayed in place was lost as I got closer and
couldn't see up, but I heard Mulder's voice, twice, and I knew I'd found him.
Hand over hand I climbed the ladder, cursing my too-short legs that prevented me
from skipping rungs.
I had just stuck my head over the edge when the two fighting men slammed into
one of the tanks. I ducked and felt a glass fragment slash my cheek open, and I
was spattered with something thick and salty as semen. It was slimy enough to
make my hands slippery on the ladder and, blind, I reached out for solid ground.
The metal framework of the unfinished floor provided handholds and I pulled
myself up.
I should have known that it would come to this.
The green goo, almost opaque now that it wasn't backlit in its glass fishtank,
coated them both, plastering their hair to their skulls and destroying anything
that made them distinguishable. Two pairs of hazel eyes blazed hatred. One
knocked the other to the walkway, clanging against the metal and sending
spatters of goo down several stories.
The one on the bottom saw me as he struggled to keep the one on top from choking
him. He screamed something, my ears were ringing from the gunfire and the
helicopter but I thought I could lipread.
Kill us both, he said.
I raised my gun and aimed carefully. I didn't intend to shoot Jason in the
shoulder.
I didn't even feel the blow. Only the sudden realization that I was horizontal
and that my gun was spinning across the walkway, bouncing and catching on the
metal grid, told me that I'd been hit.
The static in my head was growing. I rolled onto my back, feeling the bruises
soon to come, and looked up again into Mulder's face.
I blinked and fought the pain and the face swelled and softened. It became
Ian's, poor crazed Ian, not so dead after all but only hiding until the last
act. I want to say that I made that deduction because I'd seen it all before,
but it would be more honest to admit that I just knew.
He spared me a glance and then stooped to pick up my gun. I lurched to my hands
and knees. He didn't know, how would he get it right? Mulder and Jason were
still rolling around and I'd lost whatever certainty I'd thought I had.
I stood and reached out to pull at his arm but he pushed me away casually. I
couldn't see his face and I was still deaf, but I know what he said:
I'm your brother and I love you.
I felt the vibration of the gunshot, felt the walkway shake as a man collapsed,
half his face spread across the other man's head and shoulders, green and red
mixing like some bizarre Christmas cookie frosting.
He blinked and spat as the body collapsed, its hands trailing down his sodden
chest, still fighting even in death. There were fireworks going off behind my
eyes in the space where my brain used to be.
The wounded one fell to the walkway, bubbling screams coming from where his
mouth had been.
Movement, all around me, like snakes rustling through grass. More of them.
Three more. Long hair, Emerson, his tongueless mouth opening, echoing the scream
of his brother, streaked hair, Darien, screaming as well, short hair, George,
screaming from his tattooed throat. Ian moving past me, to where the screaming
and fallen one lay, Ian screamed as well. The one remaining alive on the
walkway staggered back, away from his brothers. Whatever hot metal insanity
linked them closed the chain and he shrieked as well.
Like wolves over the broken body of an antelope run to ground on the plain, they
converged, hands reaching, stretching to the fallen one, the howl moving beyond
my ears and into my body. Fingers reached out to the brother on the floor.
Reaching, pulling, tearing, rending. I saw blood. More blood, and, as they
fell upon him, his screams rose higher in a castrato glissando over the inhuman
song of the brothers Mulder. Gobbets of bloody flesh fell onto the walkway and
dripped onto the next level. Bloodied fingers daubed at one another like
children playing in a mud puddle.
One lovely hazel eye bounced off the metal flooring a few inches from my face, I
put my head on the cold metal and shut my eyes, the sob in my throat dying
unborn.
A moment, a heartbeat, an eternity and the noise was gone. Nothing left of the
fallen brother but a bouquet of bones with a crimson bloom of blood and
crumpled, shredded tissue around. The three latecomers were gone as though they
had never been there, just the live one on the walkway with the corpse of his
brother and Ian, standing over me where I cowered on the ground.
There was blood on Ian's hands.
There was blood on his face, surrounding his mouth.
Already he had the gun at his temple, and I was transfixed by the image, one I'd
often imagined when Mulder sounded too lonely and distant on the phone.
Ian looked all the way to the bottom of me, and I don't think he liked what he
saw. "Take care of my daughter," he said and pulled the trigger for the second
time.
The burning heat of his blood covered me.
More blood.
I was drowning in it.
Only two-thirds of the Mulders in the vicinity were dead. There was still work
to do before I succumbed to shock, despair, or even full-fledged insanity, all
of which were options I fully intended to consider in depth -- some day.
The spasming of Ian's muscles enabled him to keep the gun in his grip even as I
pried it away. The gore-spattered man ten feet from me was still looking
unsteadily at the dead man at his feet when I retrieved my weapon and pointed it
at him.
"Wipe your face," I commanded, sounding absurdly like the mother of a toddler.
He hesitated.
"Do it now!" My voice rose and I swayed. If he moved forward I'd have to shoot,
I was in no shape for a fight.
He raised one soaked arm to his cheek and rubbed. The first pass didn't do much,
just rearranged the blood and other liquid into a diarrhea-like brown. He swiped
again, using his forearm like a cat cleaning itself, faster and faster as if he
could peel off his face if he only tried hard enough and start over as a new
person.
When he raised his head his face was still stained, but it was evident that his
nose lacked symmetry.
I stepped forward and had another thought. What if Mulder had broken Jason's
nose in the fight? The light wasn't the best, nor was my perception. And
obviously I was incapable of telling the difference at fairly crucial junctures.
"Scully..." he said and raised his hands to me, palms up, pleading for
absolution.
After all the surveillance we'd undergone I didn't know what to ask him to
verify his identity.
"Show me your cheek," I ordered and, when he didn't make an asinine crack, or
drop his pants, I revised downwards my estimate of the chance that it was really
my Mulder. My finger trembled on the trigger, less than six ounces away from
firing pressure.
He shrugged and wiped his right hand on the railing, leaving a stain of bloody
slime, and then attacked his face again, scratching at the thick, tacky residue
there.
I have never loved Mulder's mole as much as I did for the few seconds after it
appeared and before I collapsed.
****
Scully brought the baby with her when she was released from the hospital. I
should have guessed. I would have paid a lot of money to be warned of her
impending arrival so that I could have watched her stalk through the entire
floor, kid held to her chest like a Congressional Medal of Honor.
Instead I had to settle for gawping along with Zippy when the two of them
entered his office.
I rediscovered my voice, which along with my heart had fallen several stories at
the sight of her with her hands, literal and metaphorical, full.
"Are you planning to tell me about this at any time before this kid reaches
voting age?"
She looked up and the baby promptly turned its head and began to drool on her
blouse. "I think you can probably guess what the PCS showed about her
relationship to me."
I nodded. She looked quickly at Zippy, then away.
"Do you want to know what I found when I tested your blood?"
"Where they buried Jimmy Hoffa?"
Not even a twitch, either of amusement or exasperation.
"What?" I said, and my voice cracked.
"There's...according to standard genetic testing protocols, she's your child."
My circulation stopped. I swear not a molecule of blood moved through my body.
I wanted Jason to have been lying to me. Trust the son of a bitch (and weren't
we all) to have been telling me the truth about the one thing that I wanted to
be a lie.
I love my delusions, wouldn't leave home without them.
Scully sighed with resignation.
"She's got your genes, but that doesn't make her your daughter. Do you really
think they'd use your sperm when Jason and Ian were so much more accessible?"
I'd been punched by large men with less effect. I thought I could feel the
still-healing sutures in my stomach burst.
You had to give Zippy credit, he continued to fill out papers as though there
weren't thermonuclear strikes going off all around him.
"Mulder?" she prompted. "Do you have any thoughts you're willing to share?"
I looked everywhere but at the little bundle of joy in her arms.
"What the hell am I supposed to do about it? It's not like I impregnated you.
For God's sake, I have been doing everything possible to avoid just that. You
can't just dump this on me. As you're so happy to point out, I can barely take
care of myself, let alone a child."
The door behind her face slammed shut, leaving me outside. I found myself
looking down the barrel of the gun in her eyes.
"Well if that's the way you feel about it --" she said in a voice as bright and
brittle as Jason's Waterford Crystal.
"That's not -- shit. You've got to give me some time to think about this," I
turned and stared at the brick wall outside beyond Zippy's window, "I'm not
exactly thrilled that my fucked up gene pool is continuing."
"Whatever."
The scalpel on her tongue cut me to the spine.
"I'm taking Miranda and going to my mother's. The court has granted me
temporary custody pending an adoption hearing. I've cleared the parental leave
with Skinner. If you have any questions about my involvement with the case
against Roush, you can call me or reach me via e-mail."
The door clicked shut with a noise more final than a slam.
Zippy picked up his head.
"You are such an asshole."
"Fuck you, fuck you to death," I snapped and genuinely meant it.
****
I had never realized exactly how many things that babies required for daily
maintenance until I found myself struggling onto the plane at the Austin airport
with Miranda, a diaper bag, a seat sling, my briefcase (with laptop weighing it
down), and my suitcase. The business travelers stared at me as though I had a
virulent form of leprosy rather than a human being smaller than most of their
carry-on bags. I knew how they felt. I'd always had the same reaction when I
had seen women with children getting on planes. The babies always cried and the
mothers seemed to be both embarrassed and frustrated by a perfectly natural
reaction. And the other passengers had gotten mad enough to kill.
The bruises that I'd gotten at the hands of the various Mulders were making my
entire right side stiff and sore as though I had been through a particularly
rough workout at the gym - with me as the punching bag. After I settled into the
seat, I nestled Miranda against my right arm and let her hot little body work as
a natural heating pad. She grunted like a piglet and tried to nurse my arm. I
popped the bottle's nipple in her mouth and sighed.
The phone call I had made to my mother had been utterly surreal.
Hi mom, I have a baby.
That's nice dear, where did you get it?
Even after I had explained that the baby was both mine and Mulder's due to a
perverse experiment and that I had some reservations about my ability to do my
job with a baby/toddler/child/teenager to worry about, she continued to ask me
when and where I was going to have the baby christened. I shouldn't have been
surprised, but I was hoping that she could be a little more constructive than
that. At any rate, I headed home with my not-yet fully adopted baby and
wondered what kind of havoc an eight pound creature could possibly wreak in my
life.
Answer: a lot of havoc.
Halfway home, Miranda began to wail and I found myself changing her diaper in
the microscopic airplane bathroom while she screamed as though I was burning her
with a hot curling iron. Back at the seat, she sobbed into my chest for awhile
(which was a tip-off that she had the Mulder bloodline for sure) before falling
asleep. I dozed as well and the flight attendant had to wake me up when we
arrived back at BWI.
Then it took twice as long as I'd expected to get off the plane as I held
everyone else up by dragging all the bags, bottles, wadded-up tissues, and God
knew what else with me, taking Miranda almost as an afterthought. It took three
times as long as I'd expected to get a cab; walking with my mule-load of
paraphernalia was exhausting and no one stopped to help me. I missed Mulder. My
aching neck and spasming back and twisted calves missed Mulder.
Our slow progress to the awkward buses that shuttle passengers from the gates to
the main terminal made us late; I'd given Mom an ETA based on pre-baby
experience. By the time we arrived she was about ready to file a missing persons
report.
My first hour at her house was spent making the guestroom baby-ready. She had a
crib for little grand-visitors, but it needed to be set up; it was still sealed
in plastic awaiting Bill's first visit. So she rocked Miranda as I scuttled
about on the floor, doing terrible things to my back, and jammed Tab A into Slot
B according to the Korean instructions, trying not to curse or cry and mostly
succeeding.
We finally got Miranda safely in her crib and I excused myself to wash up. The
clothes were irretrievably mommy clothes as a result of the trip and my face had
the pinched Kabuki look I remembered from my cancer days.
Miranda, though, was only going to get bigger, even if we put another chip in my
neck.
I took the rubber band out of my hair, wincing as it ripped strands out, and
went out to face the wrath of Mom.
She was standing in front of the crib, looking down at Miranda like my chemistry
instructors had looked at some of my less successful experiments.
"How are you going to take care of this baby?" she asked, looking up, and I
noticed how tired her face was. The tragedies of the past five years had put
permanent shadows under her eyes and the flesh under her jaw was sagging.
"I don't really know," I admitted. "I hadn't realized what an undertaking all
this is...I didn't get any time to prepare. I'm afraid...no one can tell whether
there's been any long-term damage from her unusual birth experience, and
certainly no one can predict the effects of the genetic experimentation to which
she and her parents were subjected. She's not obviously dying, but what if...?"
Mom held out her hand and I stepped forward so that we were both looking down.
In sleep Miranda's face was as soft and plastic as Play-Doh. I had a momentary
terror that she wasn't breathing, but then I caught the subtle rise and fall of
her soft-boned chest.
"I don't think you're ever ready for what a child does to your life. You do know
I was pregnant with Bill Jr. when Bill and I got married?"
My face flamed. "Mom!" Many years ago, at one of their anniversaries, I'd done
the math and I assumed my siblings had as well, but we'd never discussed it.
"You can do whatever you have to do," Mom said. "Your father was not exactly the
stay-at-home type and I raised four of you, pretty well I think, without him
most of the time. And I imagine Fox will help out, at least financially."
"It's probably not even his child."
"It?"
My mouth opened and closed. "When I found out that my ova had been taken, I was
angry to have the choice taken away from me. Then they created monsters with my
genes and that was worse. I know Miranda's not a monster but she terrifies me.
Mulder doesn't want a child at all. I feel so alone."
And, Mom, I don't know whether it runs in the genes but I think Jason died
because he put too many of himself in one room; like radio waves interfering
they came together and canceled him out. Somehow the twins knew where he was and
what he wanted to do to them. Even dangerous George and useless Darien had
converged through whatever group or singular consciousness they shared and
protected themselves, attacking the one who'd turned on them like blood cells
responding to an autoimmune disorder. What was worst was that I couldn't
remember if Mulder's hands and mouth had been only spattered from being near to
the gunshot or if he'd -- touched -- his downed brother. This was Miranda's
legacy. I was reminded of Hamlet's warning about Ophelia: conception is a
blessing, but not as your daughter may conceive.
"It's all so, *complex*," I said and knew that was only the barest shadow of
what I could say.
My mother's hand rubbed my back, settling down on my shoulder. "You're very
strong, Dana. You'll be all right even if your relationship with Fox doesn't
survive this challenge."
I must have looked surprised.
"I'm your mother," she explained. "You stopped talking about him."
My face burned; I hated that I had been that obvious.
"He's not exactly the kind of man I would have hoped you'd find, particularly
now. He needs a full-time caretaker of his own. It's harder for a woman with a
child but you're still young, Dana, if you took a job that had regular hours you
might even meet some nice men from the real world."
Now I goggled at her. She'd been so polite to Mulder in the past, I think I
always assumed she saw him as son-in-law material. But I had to get that
coldness from somewhere, didn't I, and she was right that parenting was a very
different job from being a lover or a partner.
"Come downstairs and have something to eat. I have a catalogue of christening
dresses..."
I followed, with the increasing sense that I was trapped in a mad director's
Dadaist movie.
"What if I can't cope, Mom?" I asked her descending back.
She didn't turn around. "Children change a lot of things, Dana. Some things you
don't want to change, and then one day you look up and discover that you're
perfectly happy with the person you've become."
I've had so many transformations in the past few years I don't even remember the
person who used to live in my body. If I couldn't deal with who I was, how could
I become someone new?
19/20
Less the reminders of properties told my words,
And more the reminders that they of life untold, and of freedom and extrication,
And make short account of neuters and geldings, and favor men and women fully
equipt.
And beat the gong of revolt, and stop with fugitives and them that plot and
conspire.
Walt Whitman
Given a choice between going before a Senate Subcommittee meeting and being
raped by Jason again, I'll take Jason any day of the week. Even if he came back
as a zombie to do the deed. Poor Mulder, standing there taking his oath in his
best suit looking suspiciously like Jimmy Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to
Washington while I sat in the gallery with Emerson on one side and Skinner on
the other, Miranda cooing in my lap. I hadn't wanted to take her but whatever
gene that had given Jason the gift of gab rose its ugly head in both Mulder and
Emerson and they agreed that the "coo-factor" would weigh in well in our favor.
After all there I was with Mulder and Emerson, the twins, and a child that was
mine that I hadn't given birth to. I had signed affidavits from my gynecologist
and the team that had attempted to harvest my ova prior to the chemotherapy
stating that I was barren as the f
The current report from my gynecologist was a contrast in the extreme.
Fortunately, Jason's attempt had been fruitless, pardon the pun, and I wasn't
pregnant but that was more due to luck than anything else.
I needed to know if Ian's speech about the barrenness of the twins was true. I'm
a scientist, let's keep that in mind. And these days if anyone but Mulder told
me that the sun rose in the east I'd go outside and check just to make sure that
a conspiracy hadn't reoriented the cardinal directions.
In retrospect, hauling Mulder off to a fertility clinic was probably the worst
thing to do under the circumstances, but just scraping the surface of his sofa
wasn't going to give a fresh sample, now was it? He balked, he bitched, he
whined, he went. He also spent fifteen minutes perusing their videotape
collection before he found something to his connoisseur's taste.
Well, in a nutshell, Ian was wrong. After all he was mad, and possibly the myth
of his own virility as compared to that of his brothers was one of the few
things that kept him from total catatonic schizophrenia. Mulder was as fertile
as a field well stocked with manure.
The clinic was the first time I'd seen him since I'd left him in Austin.
Irrefutable proof, Miranda, Emerson, Mulder, and somewhere in the back of the
gallery, Darien who hadn't wanted to sit with us. I guess he thought the taint
of insanity was passed through the air like a virus. If so, this was a virus
that prophylactics would avail him little against. When I'd tried to ask him
what had happened in that warehouse, whether he'd really been there on the
walkway, he denied it as vehemently as a politician denying that donations would
ever affect his vote. When I asked Emerson, by contrast, he made hand motions
that Aileen refused to translate; she said he'd never left her side during their
escape from captivity, and in a way I wanted to believe that. He seemed like
such a good family man.
In this case perhaps family loyalty had been best served by ripping Jason apart
like Osiris, Osiris whose lover had been his mother and his sister both by some
accounts. I hadn't asked Mulder what he'd seen and/or done, because that would
have required real conversation. And it would force me to evaluate exactly how I
should react to the unspeakable thing I'd seen that day.
Miranda gurgled and drooled on the lapel of my suit. She rooted against me, her
body hot and heavy as a sack of sugar. Aileen had already offered to take her
while I testified which would, with my luck, coincide with her next feeding.
But the Senators had to finish crucifying Mulder first.
Then it was my turn.
I don't remember much about giving testimony, Aileen tells me that I looked and
sounded wonderful, strong and believable spouting out information about gametes,
blastocysts, twinning, and cloning with baby drool on my suit. I do remember
meeting Mulder out in the cold marble hallway afterwards, where the press was
not allowed; I was waiting for him with Skinner, who had Miranda over one
shoulder and an astonishing amount of curdled formula sticking to his tie.
"What the hell are we going to do?" Mulder asked.
"Get better dry cleaners."
"That's not what I meant. "
"I know what you meant and this is really not the time or place to start this
discussion," I said in the most even tone that I could manage.
"You let me know when you want to talk about it," he said in a hard, tight voice
and Miranda let out a thin wail. Mulder took one look at the AD's tie and
blinked.
I was just about ready to snatch her away from Skinner when the doors to the
chamber opened and Emerson and Aileen came out.
"They've gone onto the government funds that Roush misused during the course of
the experiments. Despite all your efforts, it's becoming clear that the
committee is more interested in the financial rather than the ethical problems
the research has caused," Aileen sighed.
Emerson's hands flew in short, choppy strokes.
"Fucking government bean-counters, they'll be the first ones up against the wall
when the revolution comes. It doesn't matter to them what Roush has done to
human beings; they're just interested in the money. Bastards."
Miranda had calmed down by then and was leaving a thin trail of drool down the
back of Skinner's jacket. I decided he could hold her for another few moments,
or until he noticed, whatever came first.
"When you think about all the lives that they ruined. The people that they
killed, the potential lives that they destroyed during the course of this, a
slap on the wrist for punishment is a joke. It's an insult," Emerson continued.
I thought about a burning laboratory in Arizona and my legs felt like rubber
bands, who was I to pass judgement on them? I'd done the same thing. I wanted
to throw up but Miranda had pretty much taken the franchise on that for the time
being.
Emerson's surprised outrage didn't resonate with me. On a scale of zero to
Mulder, my paranoia level was at least 1.2 Mulders. I hadn't expected anything
but a whitewash, given that there was certainly a PAC out there dedicated to
promoting the agenda of the powerful, hidden men who'd ruled my life for so
long. Roush and its successors had an advantage over other interest groups who
often complained that no one in Washington stays bought--renege on a deal with
them and you could end up with a terminal case of death.
"What are you going to do now?" Skinner asked Mulder.
I could see the search engine running in Mulder's head, searching for a field
code to match up with the question.
"No fucking idea," he admitted. "They never found George Naxos's body, I was
thinking I'd look into that."
"Agent Zipprelli has requested lead authority on Roush and the related
investigations. Agent Scully is taking the three month family leave, why don't
you take four weeks off and make a decision at your leisure."
"Agent Scully has a bad habit of not including me in her vacation plans."
"I'm sorry?"
Skinner wasn't anywhere near as sorry as the rest of us.
Mulder sighed and rubbed the back of his neck, he must not have been sleeping
well--again--and his back and shoulders were giving him trouble--again.
"We're not a matched set," he said quietly, and the noise of the hallway fell
away. I felt a burning in my sinuses. "We're not like salt and pepper shakers,
it's not unthinkable to have one without the other. There's work that needs to
be done."
I took my baby away from my boss and breathed in her fresh bread smell.
****
Scully was gone but I had things to do before I could figure out what that meant
to me. The first was to deal with some of the more trivial detritus thrown up by
this latest sordid adventure.
Ian's voice echoed in my head, finishing up his song.
One little Indian boy left all alone,
He went and hanged himself and then there were none.
But I wasn't alone, not really. There was Emerson and Darien. Scully and
Miranda.
Miranda my daughter, Jason's daughter, whose child is this?
The woman greeting patrons at Galileo had a skintight black dress slit up to
bare one thigh, very fashionable.
"Will you be eating alone tonight, sir?" she asked.
"No, I'll be undergoing mitosis after the soup course," I replied and she
frowned prettily. I sighed at her and smiled enough to appease her, so that
confusion wouldn't turn to anger. "Table for two, please."
I hadn't lied; I'd just finished my pasta e fagioli when Darien arrived.
He flounced into the seat, scanning the restaurant for Names and Faces, but it
was a bit too early for fashionable dining. Lots of K Street lawyers, though.
"Thinking of staying out here?"
Darien shuddered dramatically. "Are you *kidding*? Whoever said that power was
the ultimate aphrodisiac had not gotten a very good look at the *bodies* of
these people. My ticket takes me home *tomorrow*." He really spoke like that;
there was a lot of emphasis so that the listener didn't get confused about the
important words.
"You think you'll be able to continue in your...profession...now that the whole
nation's seen you on TV?"
"Please, Mr. Mulder, C-Span is hardly *television*. Anyway," he said, raising a
languid hand to signal a waiter over, "the whole thing's likely to get me cast
as you when they make the movie."
"Movie?"
"There's *always* a movie." He ordered a martini and the agnolotti stuffed with
beets and the waiter disappeared. "You know, you don't need to speak about my
business with such contempt. I graduated summa from Harvard with a degree in
Social Studies."
I should have known--you can always tell a Harvard man, but you can't tell him
much. "What's Social Studies?"
He smiled blithely. "That's the problem, isn't it? I could be asking customers
'do you want fries with that?' or I could be drifting from cattle call to cattle
call looking for my big break. Instead I spend my days *exactly* the way I want
to; I read, I eat, I swim and I fuck. It's not a bad life, and I made enough
money in the stock market over the last decade that even when the stars and
starlets turn to next year's model I'll be comfortable. It's all *entirely*
consensual, so what's wrong with that?"
I put my hand to my temple as if I had a headache. The funny thing was, it did
sound like a pretty good life. Maybe Scully should go off with Darien, have all
of the sex and none of the trauma of being with me. I wondered if Darien needed
a partner, I bet there were plenty of people who'd pay more than double for
twins. Maybe he could take us both on, start a little performing troupe.
My risotto and Darien's agnolotti arrived and we ate. I tore myself away from
the ecstasy-inducing meal to finish our business. "I asked you here for a few
reasons. I wanted to make sure you felt safe, now that Roush has pretty much
been shut down. There's still a good chance that the men behind Roush will still
want a crack at the family gene pool."
Darien was eating his agnolotti in small, precise bites, taking a circle out of
the pillow-shaped pasta each time he lifted one to his mouth. It was stomach-
turningly erotic, especially since he kept his eyes on mine as he bit and
chewed. He rested the fork down for a minute. "I had a vasectomy years ago, when
I first came to LA."
I relaxed a little. I'd suspected as much, he was Californian and therefore not
truly of Earth but there was no indication that he was stupid.
Darien put his hand over mine. He was warm and strong and his wide hazel eyes
invited me to trust him. "I don't live in your world and I don't want to. I'm
sorry, but I'm glad it's you and not me who's been forced to face all this. *My*
parents are the people who raised me, the ones I send money to every month. When
I go back, I don't want to hear from you again, okay? We'll just pretend we each
live in parallel universes, and everything will be fine."
I nodded mutely.
Now, the last question, the one whose answer I could hardly bear to hear. "Tell
me what you remember about what happened in Texas."
He didn't need me to draw him a picture. His hand withdrew. Long lashes hid the
reflecting pools of his eyes. "I know we were drugged, I have the injection
marks. It's all so blurry...I don't remember much until the cameras were shoved
in my face. That sobered me up pretty quick. I guess--Emerson--he led us out
after your partner got us free. The other one didn't want to follow us but I was
in no shape to make my own decisions."
I knew he was lying, but what could I do? Recount my own Lovecraftian memory of
rending flesh and limbs writhing like tentacles, of funhouse reflections in
bloody cracked mirrors? I couldn't swear that I knew what had happened. That it
hadn't been my hands even if they'd looked like Darien's.
We spent the rest of the meal in silence as the restaurant filled up. We got a
number of assessing looks, not just because of the resemblance but, I'm sure,
because inside the Beltway C-Span really does count as television.
****
Before he and Mulder left to return to Austin, Zippy took me to lunch. He let me
eat half of my sandwich before he started in on me. He made an implausible
matchmaker and confidante. Then again compared to everything else he was fairly
plausible.
He reached over the thick dark table and took my hand as he talked. "Dana, you
need to think about what you're doing with Mulder. Don't make this into a
contest over who's suffered more. I wouldn't be sure you'd win."
I stared into my drink. "Has he told you--?"
"Mulder doesn't talk about his own problems, much less yours. It's apparent
you've both been beaten up pretty badly by life, or by Roush if you want to get
specific, in the past few months. You need to give him time. I mean, I'm still
not totally down with the fact that I'm a father, and I'm pretty sure that the
kids are mine and nobody used their genes to knit themselves a new kind of
person with."
My face was a porcelain mask as I stared at him. "I didn't get any time and
everyone expects me to deal with it."
"I think maybe you're imagining that the rest of the world is as harsh a judge
of you as you are of yourself. There's nothing wrong with needing time to deal
with this. You can't pretend that everything is cool--it's not like the stork
just brought you a baby, there are problems you have to deal with. Don't buy in
to the sexist bullshit that says this should all come naturally to you, even if
there were anything natural about what happened to you it would still be
difficult."
I gripped the edge of the table so that he couldn't see me shaking. I could tell
that his advice was good but I wasn't sure I could take it.
"When I found out about Emily, and she was dying, I felt bad, but not
heartbreakingly bad. I hadn't bonded with her. She was just a child who
happened to have my genes. By the time I was used to the idea that she was my
daughter and I should take care of her, she was gone," I pushed the remainder of
my sandwich around on my plate with my finger.
"And when she died, I was relieved. I don't remember crying. I felt numb. I
still do. When I hold Miranda, I feel as though I should have some warm
outpouring of maternal adoration. I don't have it. Holding her feels no
differently from holding anyone else's baby, or holding the dog I had."
"And how does it make you feel?"
"Overwhelmed," I admitted and felt my mouth twist in a self-deprecating smirk.
"That's pretty much par for the course with babies," he smiled a softer version
of his usual neon grin, "eight pounds of terror."
Zippy was a nice guy, I thought randomly, it really was a pity.
"Dana?"
I looked up and he was halfway to a smile. "Do you want me to make an honest
woman of you?"
I laughed and felt the strain in unfamiliar muscles. "It's a little too late
for that. You can pay for lunch, though."
And he did.
20/20
The past and present wilt - I have fill'd them, emptied them
And proceed to fill my next fold of the future.
Listener up there! What have you to confide to me?
Look in my face while I snuff the sidle of evening,
(talk honestly no one else hears you and I stay only a minute longer.)
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
I am large, I contain multitudes.
Walt Whitman
Two months passed. Two months of endless administrative bullshit tracking down
the whys and wherefores of the Roush case. You don't total a multi-million
dollar company and walk away without doing your weight in paperwork. I did
paperwork and interviews of Roush employees during the day and at night Zippy
and I did damage to our livers in the Blues bars dotting the city. Scully kept
in touch by e-mail and the occasional businesslike phone call. I died cell by
cell. She gave me no indication as to how the baby was doing, and I assumed that
all was well. I had a suspicion that she was talking to Zippy since I found a
big pink elephant in the trunk of his car one afternoon. Yes, she was talking
to Zippy and not to me again. This probably hurt more than anything.
To make matters worse, my mother kept calling and leaving me messages to call
home.
I didn't.
Once again, Samantha was gone, vanished without leaving as much as a fingerprint
or a hair suitable for DNA testing. I couldn't even be sure that Dr. Mann
really had been my sister after all or just a faded photocopy like myself.
I know a clinical depression when I see one and I can go into full-blown denial
when I'm in one.
Zippy insisted I come stay with him and I was rather easily led by that point.
He put me in the room his kids used when they visited. I suspect a covert tactic
on his part to get me to think about babies and the beauty of reproduction.
Little did he know that I could think of nothing else.
I read Pooh stories and watched a lot of television, drunk and sober, watched
the whole fiasco hashed and re-hashed on CNN and the networks. I watched Sheryl
Ann Reardon end up as the star correspondent for one of the national networks,
covering the whole story and losing her middle name and her accent for national
distribution. It was nice to see that someone had benefited from all this
bullshit.
Nights I lay alone on the narrow child's bed with a glass of room-temperature
single-malt propped on my chest and watched thirtysomething re-runs on the
estrogen channel, letting myself be brainwashed. It was just as well; my brain
was pretty much gone by that point. I cried when Gary died. He reminded me of
myself, prickly woman and a baby he hadn't planned on. I resolved to be more
careful with my driving.
When I didn't drink enough I could dream, and that was worse than anything.
Zippy never mentioned anything about me screaming out loud, so I guess I didn't.
I woke many nights with my fist stuffed into my mouth, bleeding where I'd
scraped the knuckles raw with my teeth, fleeing from dreams in which it was me
in that cavernous bathroom, me holding Scully in place as she screamed and her
tears and blood mixed with the hot torrential water. Or it was Sam and I
remembered what it was like to fuck her, her meager body folding underneath me
like a paper parasol, closing around me and she was tight and hot as a water
pipe. She was living metal in my dreams. When I woke with the sheets sticky and
wet I could not tell which perversion it was that had made me come.
Jason was dead but I was still dreaming his dreams.
Maybe Jason was only mostly dead. Am I my brother's keeper? I thought about
digging in through my eyeballs to get at my brain and pull out the part of me
that was him. But I couldn't be sure that I'd get him and not me, and what if he
was left alone in this incarnation of my body?
Xeno's paradox points out that before you can reach a given point you have to
get halfway there, and then you have to cover half of the remaining distance,
and on and on to infinity...and if you keep going halfway you'll never really
get there. I felt like that: I was approaching the asymptote of my endurance;
every time I thought I was ready to swallow my gun there was something else to
do first.
When we finally buried Roush's desiccated corpse, I called Aileen and accepted
her offer. The shock and pity in her eyes when I stumbled off the plane,
unshaven and reeking, infuriated me as much as it saddened me.
That first night Emerson came to my room. I was wary; I'd shared a little too
much of Ian's world to be comfortable with a twin of mine in an enclosed space.
One of the things that's likeable about Emerson is that he's not afraid to take
advantage of his muteness to get what he wants. Silence is unnerving if done
right and though he hadn't ever taken a psych class I think he must have known
what to do intuitively; either that or he just picked it up from me.
It took less than five minutes for the first cracks to appear. I asked him if I
should get Aileen to translate, and he shook his head. I asked him what he
wanted and he shook his head. I asked him if he thought he knew me just because
we looked alike, just because we came from the same gamete that had split too
many times before.
He shook his head. It was like beating my head against a wall, only more
frustrating because with a wall eventually there's visible progress.
He was sitting on a corner of my yacht-sized bed, one leg dangling off of the
edge and the other crossed nonchalantly onto his knee. He looked perfectly
comfortable, at peace with himself and his world despite the turmoil I'd brought
into it.
"How can you be so calm?" I asked him. "Is it drugs? Can I share them?" He
smiled and shrugged. "If this is about Scully and Miranda, I don't know what you
want me to say." Another shrug, as if to say, don't say anything you don't want
to.
"I mean, it's not like I've ever had a chance to have a family...it's not like
Scully's going to let me be a father. She doesn't trust me with herself, much
less a baby who doesn't have any of Scully's defenses. It's like if she let me
help her it would make her suffering meaningless, she has to hold onto it all
alone to be strong and it doesn't matter that she leaves me all alone too--"
And then I was crying, huge unmanly sobs and he scooted over on the bed to hold
me by the shoulders. His arms went around me and I could feel the total and
utter sexlessness of it which was a blessing because I would have grabbed for
the gun on the nightstand and killed us both had it been any other way. Instead
I wet his shoulder thoroughly with my tears as I called Scully every nasty name
in the book, words I'd never used to describe any woman, even Phoebe. That
fucking cunt, I was reduced to saying over and over, in a tone so choked with
snot and salt that Emerson probably could have said it more intelligibly.
I love her so much and she doesn't love me, I hate her because she won't love
me, I didn't want this baby but here it is and she won't let me love it either.
He rocked me and crooned a wordless lullaby, practicing for his son maybe, and I
felt his compassion, the way he shared my pain without trying to diminish it.
His love was not unconditional, he didn't and couldn't love our dead brothers,
but he loved *me* and that was far better than unconditional love.
We stayed like that as twilight turned to darkness, bound together like Romulus
and Remus, nurtured on bitter wolf bitch's milk but strong enough to found our
own city. Though I went to sleep alone I slept well.
After that he and Aileen started teaching me ASL to pass the time instead of
drinking. It was a lot more of a challenge. When I got the chance to talk to him
alone I asked *him* what had happened in Texas, figuring that he'd have the
decency to tell me what he thought was true.
Unfortunately the truth was as elusive as it ever was in my family.
We had hiked through the snow to Emerson's favorite lookout spot, where the
ground dropped away into a heart-shatteringly beautiful vista of trees, rocks
and snow. The sky overhead was the color, I realized, of Scully's eyes, which
made my mouth feel metallic in the cold air. I missed her so much that it made
the ulcer pain feel like a hangnail.
"What do you remember about Texas? How Jason died?" I signed, the air cold on my
bare hands.
"Aileen says I was with her the whole time. And I remember it that way. I
remember tearing my shirt as we went through the window."
That didn't sound too bad. As usual I'd jumped the gun.
"But I also remember something different. Something," his hands stilled, "in the
building. I never hurt anything before. Not even when they wanted me to be angry
when I was in therapy. I was supposed to learn how to box to deal with my
suppressed anger, but I said no. I'm a vegetarian, Fox. But in the other memory,
all I wanted was to make him stop. I can still taste his blood when I sleep."
I dry-washed my face with my hands, remembering the stickiness of Jason's blood
on my own skin. "I'm sorry."
He nodded, accepting. Though it was reassuring that he was as forgiving as
Ghandi, I felt somewhat inferior by comparison.
We watched a hawk circle above the tree line of the gorge, looking for prey.
****
Emerson and Aileen insisted that Miranda and I stay at their compound for the
last month of my leave. I didn't realize until the limo from the airport had
departed that they'd enticed Mulder there as well. He would have taken parental
leave too, I think, if not for the seizure that OPR would have thrown upon
seeing the forms.
I'd come to think of the question of his connection to Miranda as involving the
Heisenberg paternity principle: he both was and was not the genetic father.
Absent time travel there was no way to tell for certain; even if we did ever
recover some records from the mess that had been Roush's palace their veracity
would be forever questionable.
I had believed that his indifference to Miranda was the final knife that would
allow me to cut the cords binding us, the ones that were slowly strangling us to
death as they tightened. But when he'd taken my decision so casually and turned
to Zippy to find the next wide-eyed truth-seeker, the pain informed me that my
clever plan to leave him behind had not succeeded.
I told myself that I owed him the phone calls and the messages, though I knew
all along that I was only injecting anticoagulant into the wound, like old-time
physicians with their leeches, bleeding and bleeding in the vain delusion that
it somehow promoted healing. The first time I called Zippy in the middle of the
night and heard the dry desperation in my own voice as I asked about Mulder, how
was he *really*, I knew that I'd once again fucked things up in grand style.
It's not my fault; I wanted to tell him. I was trying so hard. But life tried
harder.
****
We were eating yet another gourmet meal, this one in the conservatory full of
plants while the snow fell outside, when Aileen made her suggestion.
"I want to talk to you about Miranda," she began.
Scully and I traded glances.
"Yes," Scully said tensely, her shields flaring.
"Emerson and I would like to offer to take care of her. Before you say
anything," she held up a hand and Scully's mouth clanged shut, "hear us out.
We'll be taking care of Samuel too," she rubbed her stomach proudly, "and we'll
have the best help in the world. We can protect both of them, as well as anyone
can. You know...she's Emerson's child as much as she's Mulder's."
"What about me?" Scully whispered, her voice flayed and bleeding.
"Dana," Aileen took her hand and waited until Scully looked her in the eye, "I
wouldn't suggest this if you were certain about becoming a full-time parent.
Make no mistake; this baby girl will need someone there around the clock. You
can't chase aliens and make midnight feedings. I know you feel like too many
choices have been made for you. This is your choice. Either way, you can always
come to us, I promise."
Dessert had been out of the question; Scully evaporated to Miranda's room and
the rest of us sat and vegetated, not even trying to talk about anything
important. Aileen was reading over Emerson's latest code and Emerson and I
talked politics, though I was still getting the tenses all wrong because my
memory wasn't very useful for spatial relations.
I was pitifully grateful that Scully would snap my head off like a praying
mantis if I dared give her advice on this. I had no idea what to tell her,
except that I wanted her for myself. (Notwithstanding that Miranda was, as
everyone was at pains to point out, genetically my child, and that Scully had no
more carried her than I had, everyone assumed that as quasi-father I'd naturally
have less interest in the baby than Scully. I considered this assumption sexist
and demeaning, but there was no doubt that the strong likelihood that Miranda
was a twin's child and not directly my own had some influence.)
Problems aplenty remained, even if Scully did agree to give Miranda to the
Goldbergs. She still hadn't evinced any interest in discussing Jason's claims
about her selection for the Project's ova harvesting. When a vast super-
governmental conspiracy decides that your psychic powers make you worth
breeding, their judgment deserves a little respect. Scully rebuilt walls of
denial faster than Washingtonians lopped the heads off of new parking meters.
Finally my resolve broke and I went to go check on my fractured family. Scully
was dozing on her bed and Miranda was gurgling quietly in her crib. She'd just
discovered her toes, a few weeks after figuring out that she had hands, and was
having a marvelous time staring at these amazing, incredible protrusions.
I reached down and picked her up. She was much bigger than she'd begun, and had
a fine head of hair, blonde-brown that would probably darken as she grew. Her
eyes were a compromise green. They'd be her most striking feature and she'd
despise the inevitable glasses.
She smiled at me and I at her. One little hand reached for my chin, tugging at
the five-o'clock shadow; I chuckled and took her hand in mine, raising it to my
lips. Such tiny fingernails, clean and perfect and smelling of baby powder and
sour strawberries. She grabbed at my lower lip with her drool-cooled fingers
and her tiny claws scraped my skin.
I'd never comprehended how people can hurt their children, even though I was
never really surprised when it happened. Now I had so many more reasons to make
the world clean and safe and true, gurgling and shifting against me in the
fading winter light.
I raised her up in my arms so that she could look down on me and she giggled. In
a few months she'd be babbling, and then there'd be words and crawling...then
homework and dates and college applications, just like that. I considered the
likelihood that I'd be around through all this and she moaned as if reading my
mind.
So I bounced her up and down a little, playing catch-the-baby with myself, and
she liked that much better. "I bet you'll be a basketball player just like your
old man," I said. "Look at you--already twenty-two inches long if you're a foot,
you're going to be a string bean."
"Twenty-four," Scully said dryly and I turned back to the bed. Her expression,
if I read it correctly, contained annoyance covering up for a twinge of
jealousy--for whom I didn't dare speculate--and a resigned sort of affection.
Yeah, that's me, Scully, the idiot whose mischief you just get used to after a
while.
"The trick is to hold the ball with your fingertips, not your palm. You get
better control that way."
"She's got half my genes too, you know," Scully broke in, "which means that
she's not going to be six foot tall."
"Skill is more important than height in WNBA," I told Miranda.
Miranda began to wiggle unhappily in my arms and Scully stretched herself over
the bed to take my burden from me. Cradling Miranda in her arms like a Madonna,
she looked back up at me. "Do you want to get our hosts to baby-sit so that we
can talk?"
"Is that what you want?" This was pathetic, I was pathetic. "I'd...I think that
would be a good idea."
She nodded and rose. "I'll be back soon."
I wandered around the room, fingering the tiny baby booties, bottles, toys, and
other baby things scattered over every flat surface. Babies were not low
maintenance, they didn't travel well, and they spit up a lot. Not unlike
certain FBI agents I could name. The elephant Zippy had sent was in the crib,
along with a battered teddy that had to have been Scully's own bear and a
crazed-looking Thumper. I wondered where that had come from.
By the time she came back I was sitting on the bed, examining the stuffed
rabbit. She leaned against the doorframe with her arms crossed over her chest
the way I had seen her in a million police stations across the lower forty-
eight. Only this time she was wearing a faded Johns Hopkins blue jays
sweatshirt with telltale formula stains on the shoulder. The anaconda around my
heart tightened its embrace.
"What do you think?" she asked.
"I think she could probably pull off the eyes and inhale them."
I got *the* eyebrow for that crack.
"Have you formulated any kind of a plan yet?" I asked, "How old does she have to
be before she can date? When can she get her ears pierced? Public or private
school, and are you going to be the only Girl Scout leader whose troop gets a
badge for correctly processing crime scene evidence?"
"I thought I'd take them to the morgue and show them what a Stryker saw does,"
she said with a rare smile.
I turned the bunny around to face her and worked its arms like a puppet.
"I'm sorry," the bunny said in a squeaky voice.
"I didn't give you much of a chance," she replied, the corners of her mouth
still tending upwards. My God, a mutual apology, or something close. Call
Guinness, this was a record-breaking event.
"The genetic relationship...it's too complicated for me to figure out. My brain
just stops when I try to think about it, saying Here There Be Tygers like old
maps of the world. But I know I want to be there for Miranda, because she's a
part of you."
"I guess it's better than collecting my discarded hair and fingernails."
I winced and she carefully sat down on the bed. I could feel the mattress pull
down beneath me and I leaned toward her gravitational tug. "Tell me what to do,
Scully."
The bed shimmied and suddenly she was in my arms. "Hold me," she mouthed against
my throat, and I did.
"I've thought about it, you know," she said into my shirt. The cotton
muffled the words, but then Scully's elocution isn't always the best, and with
my years of experience I could puzzle it out fine. "Having a baby is supposed to
be a *process*, you know. Usually a woman chooses to have a child, and even if
she didn't plan on it and the pregnancy is accidental she gets some time to get
used to the idea. Time to make the connection. I didn't have that. I didn't even
have the certainty that a voluntary egg donor has that she wants to create new
life. What does a genetic relationship mean when it's neither chosen nor
physically manifested? I feel...I know Miranda is my child. But I don't know
what the consequences of that will be. There are things that I still need to
do," and I smiled bitterly at the far wall to hear the echo of what she'd said
upon telling me about her cancer.
It would be nice to tell her that I'd help her be ubermom. Sure, I'd had the
fantasy too. Imagining a little house down Rockville Pike, were you, Scully my
love? Maybe a dog, a sport utility vehicle and the Sunday comics section of the
paper delivered on Saturday?
Right.
The closest we'd get to that would be to watch reruns of Father Knows Best on
Nickelodeon.
On the other hand, Frohike had mentioned in the past that he had a good friend
looking for a nanny job (doing the whole 'mild-mannered housekeeper by day,
hacker by night' thing), it wouldn't be any stretch to pay a couple hundred a
month along with room, board, and a T1 line. Especially since I'd be going a
little easier on my suits if I took a desk job.
The irony of it is, I'd been completely cured of my desire to hunt little
grey men. I'd seen what they'd done to Sam. It wasn't wonderful, and it wasn't
safe, and it wasn't over.
But someone else had to take up the hunt now. Zippy had already begun the
maneuvers to get himself transferred to the X Files, using his newly fledged
contacts on Capitol Hill--he hadn't testified, but he'd worked closely with the
offices of several Senators preparing for the Roush hearings. I'm not exactly
sure why he followed me over the edge of plausibility to hunt bug-eyed monsters.
I think maybe Roush offended his fundamental humanity.
My priorities were much more limited. As secure as Emerson and Aileen could make
their home, it was obvious that it could still be penetrated. I wanted Miranda
where I could watch over her, where I could if necessary trade myself for her
safety. In fact making a home with her would be a step towards guaranteeing her
safety, because it would be a public declaration that I wouldn't just go running
off towards the latest lights in the sky, at least not without arranging for a
babysitter. There's no reason to hold a hostage against someone who's not a
threat.
Even more than that, I wanted to make something in my life come out right for
once. I'd lost so much at the hands of the Project, almost forty years of
manipulation, destruction, and bad manners. I wanted to know that I could carve
out a space for myself, for Scully and her child.
I held her until night turned to grey winter dawn. She dozed some and I might
have drifted a little too. Suspended in amber, refusing to worry about the
future, I was happy for a few hours.
****
The next day the snow was over my knees and I had to slog hard to keep up with
Mulder in the woods. I wished for snowshoes or at least two more inches on my
legs - then again I've been wishing for that for most of my adult life.
In Shakespeare's plays leaving the court or the city to go to the country and
experience the pastoral is supposed to bring peace and enlightenment - a
refreshed perspective on life. But after a few short days with Aileen, Emerson,
and Mulder I was more confused than ever. The facts still remained that I now
had a child to care for and Jason had raped me. It was going to take more than a
walk in the woods to make me feel better about either of those things.
But Mulder continued on, in Emerson's borrowed blanket coat, managing to look
like an outdoor ad campaign for J. Crew. Aileen's feet were bigger than mine
and my feet were swimming in her boots even with the two extra pair of socks.
"I want to show you something," he urged after nearly half an hour of stamping
through the close trees and stumbling over rocks.
"If this is a crashed alien spacecraft you are in deep shit," I pointed out.
"No alien spacecraft, I promise. Emerson took me up here my second day and I
wanted to share it with you."
"It's a little off the beaten track for a Hooters."
"Very funny. We're almost there."
Past the next stand of trees the ground went smooth and flat and I realized why.
Ahead of us lay a gorge, bony with rocks and thick with trees. Above, the sky
shone like an opal in the cold winter light. The vista went on forever,
glittering and sparkling like a frosted Christmas card. The cold air stopped in
my throat.
"Pretty cool, huh?" he asked and gave me one of his puppy wants to be petted
smiles.
"It's beautiful," I agreed.
"Gives you a bit of perspective, doesn't it?"
"A bit."
He sat on a rock and patted his thighs.
"C'mere a minute."
His whitened breath was warm against the side of my face. This was how it all
had started that night after Rhode Island, and it seemed that things had come
back to the beginning. I sat on his lap like an oversized child giving her
demands to Santa.
"Look, I know you're conflicted right now about Miranda and everything."
My nose burned with tears.
"But I've been thinking that there's no point in continuing what I started on
the X-Files. I've found Samantha and, quite frankly, I wish I hadn't. Roush is
gone and with it the threat of the Project. Most of my brothers are dead, and I
may as well hang up my obsession and try to get on with what's left of my life."
He may as well have begun singing vesti la guibba in fine tenor voice and I
wouldn't have believed my ears for that either. I poked him in the nose.
"Who are you and what have you done with the real Fox Mulder?" I asked.
"That's not funny, Scully."
"Sorry."
"Anyway, what I'm trying to say here is that the past is so fucked up and I feel
compelled to try to salvage the future. If you feel like you can't handle
Miranda, let me have her. I can even quit the Bureau and write novels or
something. I can afford a housekeeper and a real house. There's no need for
you to re-arrange your whole life because you feel like you have to. I can
handle it."
"Mulder, you can't take care of yourself!" I blurted.
"Well maybe with someone helpless who needs me, I can rise to the challenge."
As opposed to myself who is neither helpless nor needs him. My head was
starting to hurt and I was afraid that I was going to start crying there in the
cold wind and my tears would freeze to my face. How could Mulder be ready for
this when I wasn't? Every time I looked at Aileen and her casual superiority at
holding Miranda, bathing Miranda, dressing Miranda, I felt more and more like a
little girl dressed in Mom's clothes and not fitting them very well.
"We'll figure something out," he said and put both arms around my waist.
In the cold air, his hair smelled like vanilla when I put my cheek against his
head. There with the gorge spreading out in front of us like a three-dimensional
illustration of the perfection which comes from geological hardship, it seemed
possible. Anything seemed possible.
****
Zippy was waiting for me once again, but this time I felt much better about it.
He'd even figured out my filing system; I always knew the boy had a brain, it's
just that his mouth is so large it's often hard to tell. I insisted that Zippy
follow me on a slew of paranormal cases. I wanted to go out in a burst of glory,
or at least of incomprehensibility, so we looked into all the random phenomena
I'd never touched before. I had another motive for my case choice as well: I
wanted to make him understand that the X Files were about *all* the mysteries of
being, the imponderable unknowable things that lurk in the mists of
consciousness as well as in the spaces between the stars. He didn't take to it
too well, but I was still the AIC and I wasn't going to do anything to change
that until Zippy knew his place.
I boxed up all my tapes and magazines when I got home, on the theory that
Miranda's inquiring young mind would be warped if I kept them readily available,
she'd be asking for breast implants before she turned ten. Mommy, what's that
lady doing in between those two men? Why is she crying? I opened the Post with
new zeal each morning, because I wanted to find a nice townhouse before Scully
got back, as a welcome-home gift.
She came back during one of my disputes with Zippy, but then she pretty much
would have had to, unless she caught one of us asleep.
"What are you saying then? Vampires?"
"Exsanguination, what they did with the blood afterwards is something that we
have to find out."
The door opened as I finished the sentence and Scully walked in, looking pale
and cool in a dark suit. Her eyes barely skimmed me as she walked to where
Zippy was sprawling over my desk.
"You better go upstairs and see Skinner, you're not needed here anymore," she
said and watched his mouth open and shut like a guppy's.
Mine was doing about the same thing.
"What--" I started.
"I've come back to work," she said in a bony voice and put her briefcase down on
her table.
"Who's watching--" I couldn't even say the name.
"Aileen and Emerson," she said and opened her laptop.
"Scully --"
"What was that about exsanguination?" she asked.
I lost my mind.
Laptops explode if you throw them with enough force against a flat surface, like
a wall, for example. For a long moment there was no sound in the room except
for the sound of keys and microchips raining to the floor, that and my heart
banging against my eardrums.
"You selfish BITCH."
Her gaze remained on the desktop where her computer had been, as if she could
re-create it with her sick little mind. I stood there and shook like Ian in one
of his seizures. I felt closer to him than I had when he'd forced his mind in
mine. Vaguely I was aware of Zippy scuttling near the door, no doubt waiting to
see if I was going to pull my weapon or not. Part of me really wanted to turn
her brilliant brain into a Jackson Pollock painting on the far wall, and I clung
onto the sharp edge of sanity with both hands.
At least she had the decency not to raise her eyes when I started to rant. I
can't remember what I actually said but I do know that the words I used to
characterize her made Zippy's olive face turn the color of copy paper.
When the rage finally cleared, I wasn't even in the building anymore. The tired
winter wind cut through my old gray Hugo Boss suit while I headed away from the
building where yet another lying, treacherous bitch had fucked me over. If one
believes in karma, I must have been Don Juan in a former life. Maybe Alistair
Crowley.
The Hoover Building grew smaller and smaller as I walked, and gradually I could
breathe without a pain in my lungs, although my heart hurt for emotional rather
than physiological reasons. It had never occurred to me that she would have
given Miranda up. Maybe I was suffering under the delusion that she was wrapped
around Miranda's pudgy digits the way I was. Then again, I've always been a
sucker for women with hard-luck stories and big eyes. Maybe I'd been mistaken
and Scully simply was incapable of love, at least now. That would explain a lot
of things.
What the hell was I going to do?
I never have a backup plan but this time was the glowing exception. Things
could proceed as planned, without Scully. I could handle it. I would get in
touch with Frohike's hacker friend; I would go to Skinner and request a transfer
to a desk job. Hell, I didn't want to ever see Scully again so leaving the X-
Files was no sacrifice. I would cope. I would find a bigger place to live and
buy a lot of childcare books. Miranda would never be ignored. I would give her
all the love and support that my brothers and I never had. I could do this. I
would go to PTA meetings and pick her up after basketball practice. She would
be normal, well adjusted, and would not be allowed to date until she was at
least thirty. I would help her with her homework and walk her down the aisle
when she found a man or woman that she wanted to spend the rest of her life
with. Miranda would never have
The Mulder Family curse was going to stop. I was going to stop it.
I flagged down a cab and headed for the airport. My daughter was waiting for me
in Montana.
End.
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