<![CDATA[Iolokus III: Vix te Agnovi - The Collector's Edition
by MustangSally/Rivka T
CLASSIFICATION: XAR-NC-17
SPOILER WARNING: None
DISTRIBUTION STATEMENT: Gossamer, Annex, others with permission
Summary: Without your family, what have you got? As
Mulder attempts to deal with the mundane horrors of
suburban life, his fragile security is threatened by the return
of a less-than-savory relative. It's Father Knows Best meets
Seven as the former X-Files partners reunite. (XAR-NC-17,
for those of you who must classify.)
Warnings:
"This segment contains moments of affection/happiness
unusual for the series." According to the surgeon general,
women should not read this product during pregnancy
because of the risk of birth defects. Reading this product
impairs your ability to drive a car or operate machinery and
may cause sleeplessness and irritability. Do not use in or
near eyes. Keep this and all other NC-17 fan fiction out of
reach of children. Do not read this product if you have a
severe reaction to extreme situations or an aversion to drool.
Store at room temperature and avoid excessive heat. Do
not use if seal is missing or broken. This has *not* been
sanitized for your protection.
For new moms Parrotfish (Aaron and Paul), and Lynsa
(Josie). This drool's for you.
'VIX TE AGNOVI' means "I hardly recognized you."
Are you lonesome tonight,
do you miss me tonight?
Are you sorry we drifted apart?
Does your memory stray to a brighter sunny day
When I kissed you and called you sweetheart?
Do the chairs in your parlor seem empty and bare?
Do you gaze at your doorstep and picture me there?
Is your heart filled with pain, shall I come back again?
Tell me dear, are you lonesome tonight?
Iolokus III: Vix te Agnovi 1/20
Thou best know'st
What torment I did find thee in; thy groans
Did make wolves howl, and penetrate the breasts
Of ever-angry hearts.
I'd already been through my bag three times, the rest of the
room twice and I was about to turn the bag inside out when
Zippy came through the connecting door.
Ropes of rain lashed against the windows. It was a vicious
spring, wild and storm-wracked, enough to make me believe
that global warming was already affecting climate patterns.
Or maybe the spring wasn't any different from any other
spring; maybe I was noticing it for the first time. Maybe I
was losing my mind.
"Looking for something?" Zippy asked blithely. Oh no, the
storm wasn't making *him* jumpy, not in the slightest.
"Yes," I snapped.
"What is it?"
"It's personal."
"Not one of those female things, is it?"
I bared my fangs and he smiled. "Could it be...this?" He
brought his hand from behind his back and I snatched the
stuffed animal away from him. I've had lots of practice with
defensive glares and I gave him a pretty good one.
Thumper looked at him accusingly too.
"Look, Dana, I've spent enough nights on the other side of
the wall from you, listening to you...well, I don't know if you're
asleep or awake but frankly I don't care. That bunny is not
going to solve your problems no matter how tightly you hold
onto it."
I twisted the bunny in my hands, pressing it into my stomach
so that its plastic nose stabbed into me, and I was painfully
aware of how pitiful I looked. "What do you want me to do?
Leave the thirty thousandth message on his machine? Call
Emerson and beg him to intervene? Go to court and try to
explain to the judge why I left the child I'd just gotten custody
of halfway across the continent?"
"Let's try D, none of the above. The case is closed, the bad
guy is a puddle of goo--and let's not even start on that one,
all right? Our flight leaves tomorrow morning. Talk to him.
*Go* there, Dana, I know you've got the address, you must
have written it a hundred times by now. It's a lot harder to
say no in person."
"You don't understand."
"That he can't forgive you for being human? For being hurt
and used and fed up?"
"I don't need you to defend or justify my actions. I accept
them. Mulder understands them."
Zippy groaned and raised his hands. "Fine. You tell yourself
whatever you have to. But you need to do something,
because I don't think my buying earplugs will really solve the
problem."
The thunder growled elemental agreement.
****
There were lots of things that I never thought I would do. I
never thought that I would climb Mt. Everest, I never thought
that I would ever eat zucchini, I never thought I would wear a
tie to work every day, I never thought that I would know the
difference between large and small cap stock, I never
thought that I would sell out and let the piercings in my ear
fill in with scar tissue, and I never thought that I would spend
a beautiful Friday afternoon in March waiting in a
pediatrician's office. Miranda, however, thought this was a
good thing and sat upright in my lap, looking around at the
other babies and toddlers raising hell with their mothers. I
was the only male in the room tall enough to see over the
reception counter.
Humming to herself in untranslatable Miranda-ese, she sat
on my lap with the tip of my tie stuffed in her mouth and
kicked her feet. The tie, as usual, was infinitely preferable to
the pacifier I had jammed in my jacket pocket when her
Highness found it wanting. Unquestionably, she was the
most intelligent and the most beautiful child in there. The
mothers looked at us with dismay at her aura of self-
possession and poise, or maybe it was the shirt Warwick
had put on her that morning. Tie-dye with little dancing
Grateful Dead bears he picked up on his yearly pilgrimage to
San Francisco. Hell, I thought it was acceptable and what
else would a modern kid wear with overalls anyway? At
least she wasn't wearing the 'legalize it!' one Frohike had
given her.
"Miranda Scully?" the assistant asked.
I took my progeny over to the counter and waited. The
woman looked up at my tie-sucking princess and me and
smiled an inane smile.
"Mr. Scully?" she asked.
"No, Mr. Mulder," I corrected her and nodded down at
Miranda, "this is *Miss* Scully, and Dr. Scully will not be
joining us."
Damn straight she wouldn't be joining us until Miranda was
old enough to vote. Hell, I last saw Scully in early
December, just after she'd abandoned Miranda out in
Montana to my newly discovered twin Emerson. Emerson
was a nice guy but I had begun to imagine something
different for my life than fruitless quests and unending
danger. I threw a temper tantrum and got on a plane to get
my daughter. When I got back, I'd transferred to Quantico --
and that last meeting between us didn't really count,
because I wouldn't look at her while armed. Now it was
spring, and I was getting used to my new life. Actually,
things were shaping up really well. There was a possibility
that I was happy.
The scores hadn't come in from the East German judge yet.
The exam was a routine well-baby visit and Miranda looked
imperiously at the doctor as she undressed her, examined
her chubby little limbs and kept up a running patter of
questions directed at both Miranda and myself.
"You're getting to be a big pumpkin, aren't you?"
The look Miranda gave Dr. Byrne was vintage Scully. The
translation was something like 'I beg your pardon, but my
father and nanny speak to me in an adult fashion, not
patronizing me with baby-talk.'
"I was wondering about her size. . . " I began.
"What about it?"
"She's two pounds heavier and four inches longer than the
average for her age, and she was premature."
"The operative word is average, Mr. Mulder. She's just on
the high end of the curve."
"So she's a moose. A Mooselet."
"Basically. And you are an obsessive first-time parent with
too many facts and figures from the million childcare books
out there."
Had this woman been looking at my bookshelf?
"She's happy and healthy. Don't worry about anything.
What about you?"
I busied myself in stuffing my daughter's rubbery little limbs
back into her clothes. Given a choice she'd prefer to be
nude all the time. Sometimes on lazy nights I'd watch
television on the sofa with her on a towel and me in my
shorts. I hoped this wasn't going to encourage deviancy in
her adult years because she had watched the Redskins play
while she was in the buff.
"What about me?" I asked.
"It's not easy being a single parent, gender roles
notwithstanding. You're separated from your wife, right?"
"She wasn't my wife."
"That makes the issues more complex, doesn't it?" Dr. Byrne
put her hands in the pockets of her lab coat and leaned
against the exam table and watched me try to ease
Miranda's flailing dinner-roll feet into her sneakers.
"Dr. Byrne, I appreciate your concern for Miranda and
myself, but I have a degree in abnormal psychology from
Oxford and I'm administrative Agent In Charge of the
Investigative Support Unit at the FBI section of Quantico. I
have seen things that make Silence of the Lambs look like
The Cat in the Hat. My issues are *nothing* like those of the
average single parent."
I did stop before I pointed out that I had recently reviewed a
case file about an infant of Miranda's age who had been
reduced to hamburger after being raped by her stepfather.
"So you think that you don't need support?"
"I wouldn't know what it was like," I snapped the shoulder
straps of her overalls over Miranda's hot little shoulders and
sat her upright. She gave me a gummy smirk and grabbed
my already-wet tie and popped it back into her mouth.
"Doctor, we're fine."
****
The playground was deserted, not surprising because the
moon was a hangnail in the sky and good little children were
home in bed. Swings pulsed gently in the cool spring breeze
and the slides lolled like outstretched tongues.
Everything was covered in green light, a layer of gelatin over
the world. I moved forward, wafting like a ghost across the
hopscotch circles and four-square boxes chalked onto the
black concrete.
The green-tinged white shoes stood out starkly against the
wood chips of the jungle gym area. I bent to look into the
wooden box of the play structure, big enough for two very
friendly eight-year-olds, hemmed in by ladders and ropes
and other childish things.
The woman's body draped limply over the rough wooden
floorboards. A runnel of dried blood ran along the long index
finger of her right hand and colored her nail tarry black. Her
neck was thrown back and I could see the livid bruises.
I didn't have to touch her to know that she'd been strangled.
There was a sound, feet slipping on damp woodchips. I
turned and looked into a face that hadn't been far from my
consciousness for years. Mulder's face was as immobile as
a death mask as he reached for me.
He smiled as I began to scream.
Zippy's hand over my mouth and the harsh light of the motel
room lamp brought me awake. He shushed and pushed at
me until I managed to get my mind to run my nerves rather
than my spinal cord. When I regained control, I sat up and
his hand fell away. He looked at me like a jigsaw puzzle
whose picture he hadn't quite figured out. There were circles
under his eyes that hadn't been there when I'd met him. I
remembered the feelings too well, of being caught up in
someone else's undertow and being sucked below the
surface, while still struggling against the currents.
"Are you going to tell me about this one?"
I shook my head and got off the bed, moving past him to my
laptop on the table at the other end of the room. He watched
as I booted up and logged into the FBI server and then the
NCIC database.
He followed and watched over my shoulder as I entered the
search pattern I wanted. Within minutes, the results
returned, no exact matches but four hits worth looking at.
Then I read the descriptions of the hits and understood.
"What is it?" he asked, as impatient as I'd been six years
ago.
I tilted the screen so he could see it better.
"George Naxos lived," I said. "And he's working his way from
Texas to DC."
****
I had barely managed to extract Miranda from the station
wagon when my cellphone shrieked. I ignored it as I kicked
the door shut. It was a nice car, really, a sporty silver gray
and green Outback with a darker gray plush interior, and its
new-car smell had lasted an entire five hours, before the
Mooselet spit up all over the back seat. For the first time.
Now the plush was flattened in places from various cleanup
attempts, successful and not, the interior was strewn with
Miranda's traveling toys (it being more practical just to have
another set of toys rather than move them from car to house
with the requisite forklift), and it smelled, more or less, like
dirty feet. The child safety seat in the back was a device of
torture to the Mooselet. She resisted being put in the seat,
whined at stop signs and red lights. There must been a
genetic tendency for high speed in the Scully family
somewhere. As far as Miranda was concerned, when one
was in the car one should *go* and not wait for anything. If I
didn't get her out quickly enough at the end of the journey
she would begin to fuss, and if that didn't speed matters up
enough, she set up howling as though I were pulling off her
arms and legs.
I could see how much fun I was going to have teaching her
how to drive.
Miranda set up a counterpoint wailing to the phone that
lasted beyond the point at which the voice mail took over.
We did a couple of trips around the house while she cried
herself out. I hated to hand her over to Warwick when she
was crying, because it always made me feel like a big
insensitive clod. The fact that he called me a big insensitive
clod when I did so might have had some relation to my
feelings.
While I was walking, I caught a glimpse of the stray cat we'd
been feeding on and off for the past few months. We set out
cans of tuna fish and she'd dart by, picking at fragments, as
long as we stayed inside or across the yard from her. A
flash of sulfur yellow eyes indicated that she had registered
my presence. The cat was black, skinnier than her own
shadow, and very, very cautious. I was beginning to come to
the conclusion that she was ninety percent sure that she
didn't want to be tamed or rescued, but the ten-percent
uncertainty led her to tease.
What did that remind me of?
Or, more importantly, who?
When Miranda was quiescent at last, I headed into the
house. Warwick had made brownies and the house smelled
like a chocolate factory. He came out of the kitchen and
gave me a knowing look.
"Your old boss wants to talk to you. Real bad. He's called
four times in the last hour."
I handed him the baby and he handed me a brownie. I
sighed and headed for my study, hoping that the brownie
didn't contain any controlled substances.
Skinner, unsurprisingly, was still in his office.
"I wanted to let you know," he said as soon as I said my
name, "that there has been a request to take a set of ISU
cases out of ISU jurisdiction for investigation by another
unit."
"And you want me to approve it? I can do that, but can it
wait--"
"That unit is the X Files."
Fuck, fuck, and triple fuck.
"What are the cases?" I asked, clutching the phone like a
drowning man tugging at a fragment of timber.
He rattled off a barrage of numbers, "and one new enough
that it doesn't have a case number yet; the locals haven't
filled out the forms. Five murders, spread throughout the
Southeast and moving upwards. Agent Scully" his pause
could have been measured in microseconds, or I could have
been imagining it, "said that it related to an open X File."
"And she asked you to be the go-between, passing our notes
like in grade school? I thought she was--"
Whatever I thought was lost to history when he grunted like
a man ducking incoming fire. "She wants to speak to you
about the cases. I thought you might like some advance
notice."
I blinked like a stunned steer. "I'll...read up on the cases," I
said breathlessly, and hung up.
Then I remembered that I'd have some difficulty with that.
The computer wasn't working too well as Miranda had spilled
twelve ounces of apple juice into the keyboard. I wasn't too
upset about it because too much apple juice is very bad for a
growing child's health--they fill up on it and don't eat enough
that's nutritious. The computer shop was sending a new
keyboard, but for the moment I was computerless; Warwick's
Little Mermaid screen savers made me seasick, even if he
would have let me touch his jury-rigged monstrosity. Wasn't
it Bill Gates who'd said that 640K of memory should be
enough for anyone?
The end result was that I'd have to go to the office to look up
the case files, and then Scully would probably show up here
and find Miranda. Not that I was expecting some sort of
Baby M smuggling scenario, but what if she decided she
liked being a mom again?
What if she didn't?
I'd have to wing it, and Scully's devastating if you're not
ready for her. And often when you are. I hear that hurricanes
are like that too.
Iolokus III: Vix te Agnovi 2/20
We all were sea-swallow'd, though some cast again
(And by that destiny) to perform an act
Whereof what's past is prologue, what to come
In yours and my discharge.
All things considered, the meeting went better than I'd
thought.
We rang the doorbell, which was answered by an Asian man
about half a foot taller than I am. He had a towel thrown over
his shoulder and a Pet Shop Boys concert T-shirt that looked
like it had seen better days, probably better discos.
"Sir? I'm Special Agent Dana Scully and this is Special
Agent Michael Zipprelli, we're looking for Agent Mulder."
When I said my name he gave me a once-over that had
nothing to do with my feminine attributes. I guess he was
surprised that I only had one head.
"I'm Warwick Chang," he said and didn't offer his hand. "Why
don't you come in, I'll get Mulder."
We came through the foyer and entered a lovely sunny
family room. Miranda's fingerprints were literally everywhere,
along with piles of videocassette tapes out of their boxes--
Disney, I was relieved to see when I craned my neck
discreetly--and teething rings and one of those strange
stacking toys whose purpose is to teach children that big is
bigger than little.
"She doesn't like that one," Mulder said and I spun, almost
falling over when my foot hit a pile of alphabet blocks. "She
thinks it's condescending, did you know that knowledge of
basic physics and spatial relations appears to be hardwired
into babies' brains? Of course you did, I forgot to whom I
was speaking."
His voice was low and flat as the Dust Bowl.
He gestured at the couch, which was covered in a loud
geometric pattern that couldn't have shown any spills that
weren't glowing radioactive. "Sit down, it's not as nice as the
old one but, well, you can guess."
I picked my way to the couch and sat next to Zippy, who
gave my hand a furtive squeeze as Mulder looked straight
through my head.
I licked my lips and met his eyes. "We're here about a case."
"Of course," he repeated, with disinterest that should not
have made my ribcage close around my heart like a hand
wringing a bird's neck. "The one you want to take from ICU."
"It's more than that," I said. "It's George Naxos."
The first emotion he'd shown crossed his face--horror and
fear marbled in equal measure. "You've got to be kidding,"
he said when he'd managed to swallow the expression, "you
know you don't ever need an excuse to visit."
I swear to God I would have hit him if Zippy's arm hadn't kept
me down on the couch.
My partner -- Zippy -- began to talk, hoping vainly to keep us
on-topic. "I think you'd better take a look at what we've got.
You might be in danger, if he's figured out the connection."
Mulder's gaze broke and he looked over my shoulder, at the
dinner table set for two (and a half, counting the high chair).
"So tell me what you think dear George has been up to
lately. I haven't seen any graveyard murders recently."
"He's not leaving them in graveyards. He's switched to
playgrounds."
The muscles in his cheeks jumped as he processed this.
"So you think that now he knows--now that I know--my
sister's not dead he's decided playgrounds are more his
style?" I heard my own incredulousness in his voice and
didn't like how it tasted.
I folded my hands on my lap. "I haven't ruled anything out.
You yourself suggested that there was some sort of
connection between his MO and your sister's abduction."
"Let me ask you, was my leaving all it took for you to
become a believer? Because you've never been this gullible
before. If I'm hearing you right, you now want me to believe
that I'm not a serial killer because I projected my childhood
trauma on someone who was one."
"I don't want or need you to believe anything, Mulder. This
isn't your investigation, I take full responsibility. But I do want
you to be concerned for your own safety." And that of your
daughter, I added to myself.
My daughter.
Damn.
"Pardon my incredulity, but I'm finding it a little hard to deal
with the new Dana Scully. What, the position of Believer
opened up and you saw it as a good career move? Your
instincts aren't serving you very well in that regard, though I
do congratulate you on the promotion to AIC, sorry I didn't
send a card."
Mulder's anger was as familiar and comforting as a cup of
hot chocolate. It helped me focus. "It's possible that George
heard or read something while he was being held at Roush
that enabled him to make the connection, he's nearly as
smart as you are," I said heavily.
"Dana," Zippy warned, "you should tell him."
I looked down at the briefcase in my lap, my careful little
presentation that I'd written up for Skinner and Mulder tucked
inside, and shifted in my seat.
"What?" Distrust, sharp as the bread knife I used to cut open
organs. It burned like acid against my skin; I thought I'd
leave the house with a disfigured face to match the soul
inside.
"I didn't just...figure this out," I admitted. "I've been
having...disturbing dreams. Last night I dreamt about
George's fifth murder."
A flash of interest from Mulder. Despite himself, despite me,
he couldn't resist a story with that certain paranormal
bouquet. "And?"
"And that murder was logged into the NCIC database five
hours ago--twelve hours after I dreamt the scene."
A revenant of the old chiding smile crossed his face like fog
or cobwebs. "A question we haven't learned how to ask yet?"
"Maybe." Zippy twitched beside me. I knew he didn't like
being left out of our in-jokes. I'd explain later, possibly.
****
Warwick was guarding the Mooselet, down in his lair away
from the combat zone. Scully still hadn't asked to see her,
though I noted with clinical detachment her eyes searching
out every sign of a baby's presence, every stain and primary-
colored toy and Handi-Wipe that hadn't quite found its way to
the trash can yet.
She excused herself while I read the file she'd put together
and Zippy watched me like I was his latest suspect.
After five minutes I raised my head. "She never took this
long in the bathroom when she was with me, aren't you
letting her take breaks?"
Zippy stared at me, practically bristling. "I don't know, why
don't you go ask her?"
"You sound like you don't really mean that," I observed.
"I think she needs you in her life like the President needs
another horny intern. But she's hurting and you should talk to
her."
I sighed. "And you can't soothe the savage Scully?"
"There's no need to be an asshole about this, Spooky."
"Fuck you, Zip."
Scully was in our (and I mean Miranda and my) room,
looking not at the empty bed but at the empty crib. Her
hands, clutching the railing, were as white as the low-gloss
nontoxic paint on the crib. Miranda actually had a room of
her own but Warwick and I were in the process of
redecorating it in a Disney theme and the Mooselet and I
were sharing quarters until the toxins from the new paint and
carpet had dissipated.
Scully's eyes were fixed on the wall above the crib, where I'd
taped up all the postcards she'd sent. I think there was one
for every airport they visited and every town. I hadn't
acknowledged a single one but I had spent many nights
pointing out landmarks to Miranda and making up stories
about what the X File might have been. She didn't write
anything on the back, you see, only the date and her initials.
"Kind of pathetic, isn't it?" I asked, "but at least I'll have
something to show her when she's twelve and wants to know
what her Mom was like. 'Oh Miranda, she cared about you
enough to send you postcards, but not enough to actually
write anything'. You could have at least put the fucking case
numbers on them so I could let her read the field journals."
"Skinner would have given you the case files if you'd asked."
"Let's not drag Walter the Terrible into our little domestic
dispute, please," I sat on the edge of the bed and tried to
stare her down.
My legs were shaking like the green Jell-O that Miranda liked
so much. I wanted to hate her, I really did, and I wanted to
group her with the rest of the predatory females that have
plagued my life. I wanted to rip her away from the crib,
wrench her head back in a flurry of burning hair, and tear the
demure black suit from her white body. Then I would throw
her on the bed and *prove* how much I had starved for her.
Of course she'd rip out my heart and eat it right there on the
dark patterned comforter. She was so good at that.
"How is she?"
"Oh fine. Other than the fact that she wakes up screaming
every night, wailing 'Mommy, Mommy! Where's my
Mommy?"
The combination of pain and hatred that flashed through her
eyes nearly stopped my heart in my chest. I'd seen that look
before and had never been on the receiving end of it. I was
now officially one of the bad guys. She won the staring
match as I dropped my gaze to contemplate the dried blob of
mashed banana on the toe of my sneaker.
"If she could talk she might say that or she might say that
she had gas. It's kind of hard to tell at this stage of
development."
"I'd like to see her," she asked in the most careful of voices.
I took a deep breath and hardened the shriveled remains of
my willpower.
"That's probably not a good idea, she's reached that stage
where strangers frighten her and she might throw a
screaming fit, " I lied, "we went to the doctor today and she's
a little stressed out right now."
Scully pivoted on the heel of her size six pump and stalked
out of the room like a much larger species of predatory
feline. Her heels gouged into the carpet.
"Zippy," she growled in a tone she must have learned from
Skinner, "we're going back to the city."
Zipprelli shoved the case files back into her briefcase and
danced to her side.
"We'll be in touch," he said the standard Bureau dialogue
without much emotional investment.
"You do that," I shoved my hands in the pockets of my pants
and trailed them through the door and out to the motor pool
Ford parked at the curbside.
In contrast to the behavior of the past five years, Scully slid
into the driver's seat and gunned the engine. I hoped
Zippy's nerves were up to the challenge.
"You'll hear from Skinner regarding the reassignment of the
cases," she said, nearly ripping the parking brake out by the
cable.
"Take the cases, see if I give a shit. Do whatever you want,
it's what you do anyway," I snapped, my last frayed nerve
giving way like old dental floss.
I had to jump back from the car as she peeled out, nearly
losing a foot in the process.
Bitch.
Selfish bitch.
I got the mail out of the box as the Taurus sped down the
street. Warwick's domestic tendencies did not extend to this
chore for some reason. I think it had something to do with
the fact that he only believed in e-mail rather than anything
made of paper. Among the bills and the junk mail there was
a thick envelope with an Austin postmark and what looked
like a law firm's return address. What the hell was "LLP,"
anyway, it sounded like a Schedule I drug rather than a
business type. As I took my shaking body up the walk to the
front door, nearly tripping over the blooming daffodils in the
random front garden, I opened the letter and read it.
I had to read it again as I sat at the kitchen table and ate
entirely too many brownies.
As far as I could make out through the legalese, the
remainder of Jason's estate, that which was not tied up in
Roush, he had left to Miranda, with a small bequest left over
for me, just enough to be a slap in the face. Between the
properties, contents of said properties and the horse farm,
Miranda was the owner of no small chunk of change. And
there was blood on every coin of it.
I'd have to tell Scully, as Miranda's legal guardian she had
responsibilities now.
Bastard.
Warwick finally brought Miranda upstairs when the smoke
had cleared; by then I was sitting on my old sofa in the study
and gazing blankly at a documentary about Emperor
penguins at the South Pole. The hot heavy bundle that was
plopped in my lap was the Mooselet who promptly gave out
a chuckle and reached for my nose - her favorite toy.
"What up homey?" Warwick asked.
"Same old same old. Maybe I should just get 'sucker'
tattooed across my forehead and be done with it."
"She wasn't what I expected," he said and sat cross-legged
on the old southwestern rug spread across the floor, "I
thought she's be taller."
"She is taller, you just don't notice it at first. It sneaks up on
you, and then it's too late."
The Mooselet cooed in agreement, she too was larger than
she seemed at first. As if sensing my mood, Miranda went
boneless and stuck to my chest like a limpet mine smelling
of honey. She continued to warble as her fat little fingers
picked at the molded plastic eyes of her favorite kangaroo
beanie baby. Her scalp was hot against my face when I
pressed my lips to her peachy little head.
***
I probably should not have been driving. I probably should
have been sitting in the back seat shoveling anti-anxiety
meds into my mouth like M&M's. Or sleeping pills. But the
Bureau's doctors were too fucking professional to let me get
away with that and for some reason I was hesitant to
prescribe for myself. So instead I drove, heading against the
coagulated traffic. Zippy, Blues Brothers shades protecting
him from my Medusian gaze, looked out the window at the
cars creeping past.
"That went well, I thought," he muttered.
I couldn't look at him, I had to keep my attention on the road
so the car would stay on it. I passed a balky while minivan
with a bumper sticker touting an honor student. Miranda
would probably do well in school; she certainly had the
genes and the cash for it.
"It could have been worse," Zippy added after the minivan
lagged behind, "at least he didn't actually throw us out."
"In another minute he would have. The only good thing is
Mulder's agreed to let us take the cases away from ISU."
"And how does that make you feel?"
I spared him a glare at a stoplight.
"I'm fine, Zippy."
"Pull the other one. You're driving back to Annapolis."
"Shit."
"Let's go to your place and order a pizza. I'll take the car
home and get you in the morning."
Like a seagull dazed by a rough spring storm I headed
home.
My apartment was a mess. I honestly hadn't gotten around
to cleaning in weeks. There were dirty dishes in the sink, a
pile of mail that I hadn't gone through yet overflowing from
the coffee table, and the drapes were still closed as I had left
them the week before. I tossed my keys on the table and
stepped over the newspapers jamming the door. Zippy
looked over his glasses as though he was examining a crime
scene, and I suppose that he was.
"Call the pizza place. It's speed dial number four. I'm going
to put on some sweats."
While he called, I added to the pile of dirty laundry in my
bedroom and sat on my unmade bed to take off my
stockings. My lonely dirty bedroom. In my bra and panties, I
stretched out across the bed, too drained to finish dressing.
I rolled over on my stomach and shut my eyes. The rumpled
sheets smelled like my own late-night sweat from the near
nightly dreams of the Brothers. All of the brothers. Some
nights my Technicolor dreams were of enacting half the
Kama Sutra with my particular Mulder, other nights I
dreamed of being bound and gagged while each one
violated me, other nights it was one or the other of the
brothers, and my subconscious betrayed me to the point of a
baroque chiffon fantasy world where I reclined on silken
sheets like Mata Hari and had them all at once. The
problem being, any one of the visitations from the adult
movie studio in my brain could awaken me shaking with
dread or trembling with lust with little relation to the subject
matter. The first time I woke grinding my pelvis into a hotel
mattress while I dreamed of the useless, beautiful Darien
underneath me made my precarious grip on sanity slip within
sweaty hands. The resulting orgasm from the dream Darien
left me weak, shaky, and feeling filthy. At least the first one
had been Darien.
I was now on the fourth trip through the alphabet. To be
blunt, dreaming of George's other nocturnal activities was
something of a relief. At least it wasn't me he left in the
playgrounds. I much preferred being a witness to full-fledged
participation.
When the pay per view hotel movies offered 'Boogie Nights' I
refused to even watch the ads. Zippy probably thought that I
was the world's biggest puritan. If he only knew the truth. I
could have gone to talk to Karen Kossoff but I didn't want to
upset her. Maybe I needed an exorcist rather than a
therapist. I tried taking a vacation, and a week at the wintry
beach in Delaware did not help in the least, just left me
thinking about the amniotic pull of the sea. I wondered how
far I had to walk into the water before my hair floated around
me like seaweed and the sea washed me away. I could float
away on the cold water forever.
"Hey."
Warm hand on my shoulder. I pulled myself out of the
depths and rolled over. For a moment, I saw a different face
on the man standing next to my bed. Realizing that it was
Zippy, I grabbed the bedclothes and pulled them over my
body.
"What?" I muttered and sat up, keeping the comforter
wrapped around me.
"What did he say?" Zippy asked, his weight compressing the
mattress next to me.
"Fuck off, more or less," I rubbed at dry eyes, "he also let us
have the cases, but you heard that."
"Did you get to see Miranda?" he asked with surgical
detachment.
"No," unaccountably, my throat closed around the words, "he
wouldn't let me."
Zippy reached out and rubbed my knee through the
comforter in a friendly, soothing gesture as though I had
been Miranda.
God, how big was she now? Was she happy? Was she
really better off or was she slipping into the morass of
genetic destiny? Mulder was in some ways the eternal
optimist, he thought that love could make everything better.
If he loved her, he thought, he could protect her from fate
and politics and skinned knees. And when his protection
failed he'd see it as an inadequacy of his love. I wondered if
her pain would disappoint him as much as mine did, if he'd
be able to forgive her when she got hurt and if she'd ever
understand that Mulder wanted to bear her pain so much
that he would not allow her to possess her own suffering.
Of course at this point her suffering was a wet diaper.
Perhaps I was projecting.
"Pepperoni?" Zippy asked.
"Mushrooms."
That night I had the strangest dream. For once, my late-
night movie didn't star one of the Mulder brothers. I
dreamed that I was in the hallway outside the X-Files office.
I had a feeling that Mulder was inside, but I was unwilling to
walk in. Instead I watched a woman in a severe black suit
walk towards me in the hall. I was too far away to see her,
but her hair was long and curling past her shoulders, the
color of Bing Cherries.
It must have been the pizza.
Iolokus III: Vix te Agnovi 3/20
His mother was a witch, and one so strong
That could control the moon, make flows and ebbs,
And deal in her command without her power.
Believe it or not, I had a lot of work to do that was related to
my *real* job, and so I tried to get some of it out of the way
while simultaneously keeping the Mooselet entertained. This
required some creativity on my part. She was about as
mobile as a bean bag chair but as far as she was concerned
having the world revolve around her was movement aplenty.
So I plopped her down on the carpet in the study and
stretched out on the floor. How did anyone get anything
done before the invention of the cellphone?
"Ralph," I said into the phone as I waggled the plush unicorn
in front of Miranda, who was still in the process of deciding
whether or not she was bored, "you can't claim a Mr. Coffee
as a reimbursable expense, no matter how much you need
the caffeine to work."
The doorbell rang. During the day dealing with the hoi polloi
was Warwick's job, and I wasn't in any way jealous of it, so I
ignored the noise and finished my lecture on fiscal
responsibility. Miranda had not quite yet made the
connection betweeen the buzzer or the sound of the front
door closing and visitors, though she always appreciated
finding someone new on whom to practice her wiles.
Footsteps down the hall suggested that I was going to have
to face the world, or some fraction thereof, despite my feeble
attempts at hiding out. Warwick knocked, then pushed open
the door.
"Mulder," he said, sounding even more strained than when
he'd announced Scully and her new squeeze, "you have a
visitor."
I pulled myself off the floor and squinted out into the hallway.
"Well," I said as Warwick evaporated, "it's old home week.
How are you, Mother?"
She looked as patrician as ever, with her white hair I knew
for a fact she dyed to get the gray out. She did, however,
seem a little awkward as she held the enormous doll. It was
as big as Miranda and eight times as elegant. Pale as China
White, its rosebud lips and blue vitreous eyes reminded me
of Scully. The flat sociopathic gleam of the glass orbs didn't
hurt either. Its hair was curled in long blonde ringlets that
would have looked good on a Hasidic Jew, and it wore a
sapphire velvet dress with lots of delicate lace sticking out in
uncomfortable-looking places. Its eyebrows were painted on
like a model's but its lashes looked real. It was huge,
expensive, and utterly absurd for an eight month old who still
thought that sucking on her own toes was the height of
coolness.
"I brought my granddaughter a gift, Fox."
"She's not quite to that 'playing with dolls' stage. I'm kind of
hoping she goes straight for guns." What on earth, or on
Reticulum, had she been thinking? The doll was completely
developmentally inappropriate; at best Miranda was going to
eat its hair and spit up on it, if she showed any interest in it
at all.
Her mouth tightened into the flat grim slash I remembered
well. She didn't seem drugged or otherwise confused, and I
wasn't sure how well I liked that. "I want to spend some time
with my family and to get to know my granddaughter."
"Samantha isn't enough to fill your lonely nights?"
"I haven't heard from her in months, Fox."
"Whatever. All right, you've seen Miranda, she's got all the
requisite fingers and toes, she doesn't look very much like
you or me, shall I call you a cab?"
She looked around the room. "It's a nice house. I take it
you've finally spent some of your father's money on
something that will last beyond next season's fall collection."
I took Miranda in my arms, despite milady's protests. I
needed help staying calm and Miranda was better than
Valium, even squirming and whining.
"You were the one who taught me about good taste in
menswear." Even after Mom took the night train to the Land
of the Mood Elevated, she was always quick to notice when I
wasn't looking spiffy. Never mind the fact that a boy who's
well-dressed by adult standards couldn't be more vulnerable
to harassment if he actually sewed a patch on his back that
said "Yes, I am a faggot," never mind that I was already an
incredible misfit, Mom had to ensure that my ties and socks
matched, as if that was her good parenting credential. If it
was, she should have sued the hack who sold it to her.
No. She was leaving, and even if I had to put a Star of David
and a string of garlic over every door and window, she
wasn't coming back.
She stared at Miranda intently. Maybe she was looking for
signs of intelligence, or attempting to commune with her on
the astral plane. I suppose that I could have asked her what
results I should expect from the various genetic
manipulations to which Scully and my genotype had been
subjected. But how could I expect her to tell the truth?
The Mooselet took this opportunity to practice blowing spit
bubbles, which she did with the concentration of a concert
violinist negotiating a tricky movement of Tchaikovsky. I
didn't bother to tell strega mamma that the spit bubbles
usually climaxed in a round of spitting that would have done
a camel proud. Miranda then let loose a cascade of evil
baby chuckles that made Mom raise her eyebrows.
I heard the doorbell ring again. Great, Torture Mulder Day
had been declared a national holiday. I wish I'd known so
that I could have marked it down on my calendar. With my
luck it was my boss come to yell at me, or maybe Kristen
Kilar had finally named me in a paternity suit and I'd have to
support a little bloodsucking fiend for the next fifteen years.
When Zippy came into the study I was so relieved that I
actually smiled at him. This disturbed him enough to make
him stop under the lintel.
"Come on in, Zippy. Mother, this is one of my fellow agents.
We have some important work to do on a pending case, so I
think you should leave. Warwick can get you a cab if you
need one."
Her mouth twitched and she stepped towards me. Would
she really slap me again? Zippy would love that. "I'll be in
town for the next few days," she said. "I'm visiting some old
friends...on Capitol Hill. We should talk, Fox."
Yeah, that's what women always say, right before they start
rearranging your internal organs. I nodded as politely as I
could and motioned to Zippy. He and Mom did an awkward
little shuffle as he came closer and she went through the
door. I wanted to follow her out to make sure that she really
left, but that would be rude; anyway Mom wasn't the kind to
wait around for further humiliation.
I put Miranda back on the floor and walked over to close the
door. Zippy was still looking at me as if I were the kind of
fungus that used to live in my refrigerator. He wasn't going to
say anything, though; old psychologist's trick, force the
subject to make the first move. Fuck that, I thought, I could
spot him a queen -- and I had -- and still beat him at this
game.
"So what are you doing here?"
Zippy bent down to greet Miranda. He pulled her up into a
sitting position and nudged her cheek, eliciting a saliva-
specked smile. He was looking at her, not me, when he
spoke. "I had some more questions and I figured -- well."
I knew what he wasn't saying. "Where is the beauteous
Agent Scully?"
"She had all the autopsy results from the first four sent to her
and she's working on the body of the latest victim. Death
doesn't do weekends and neither does she."
"I remember."
Now they were playing pattycake, or at least Zippy was
trying to play and Miranda was watching him with the kind of
wide-eyed adoration that he used to get from slightly more
mature women.
"So have you figured out how you're going to explain the
birds and the bees to her when she asks where babies come
from?"
"Sure. See, when the mommy loves the daddy very much,
she shoots him. Later his sister takes the daddy's sperm and
mixes it in a little glass dish with the mommy's cryopreserved
eggs. Then they go kidnap a woman off the street..."
He was laughing. Actually, I was laughing too. Miranda
looked from me to him and back, and smiled wide as a moon
pie.
"You're a sick fuck, aren't you?" Miranda nodded, agreeing
with him.
"Watch it, Zip. Little pitchers have big ears."
"Better to learn at home than on the street." He feinted and
poked her gently in the tummy. She roared with laughter and
drooled on his arm, which he just wiped on the carpet. "So,
talk to me. You read the original file on George, right?" I
nodded; Scully must have told him about our first meeting.
"Canadians are being coy about turning it over and I wanted
to find out what you knew."
I turned on the microfilm machine in my head and rewound.
"George Herbert Naxos--at least his middle name wasn't
Wayne, right? Born December 1, 1961, given up for adoption
the same day. Adrienne Naxos was a practical nurse who
worked for a wholly owned subsidiary of Roush, I guess they
wanted to keep it in the family. Unfortunately she seems to
have been a real Nurse Ratchet. There are hospital records
going back thirty-five years, and remember that she could
take care of the minor stuff herself so the records, even if
complete, would only be the tip of the belt buckle. I'm
guessing that she'd lock him somewhere to punish him,
maybe a closet or a basement, and she burned him when he
was really bad. Given the contours of his crimes, sexual
abuse is also a strong possibility.
"On November 27, 1973, around midnight, George had a
series of seizures. Adrienne took him to the ER. She must
have been very frightened, especially when he remained
catatonic for nearly a week. When he woke up he had no
recollection of anything out of the ordinary.
"After that, though, his budding criminal career began.
Subsequent investigation by George's psychiatrist suggested
that his first experiments with firestarting and animal
mutilation began at around that time. No one made the
connection between George and the local epidemic of kitty-
cat slaughter, and things went back to normal for a while.
Then George developed artistic differences with Adrienne.
She wanted to live and he thought she looked better dead.
He strangled her and burned her house down when he was
fifteen and disappeared."
"And was he killing all through the time until he was caught?"
I shook my head. "Not enough evidence to be sure. He
never copped to anything but the murders they already had
him for, but that doesn't mean shit. Also, because he was
caught in Canada which doesn't have the death penalty, the
Canadians weren't really cooperative in investigating
murders he might have committed in the U.S. -- they didn't
want him extradited and killed."
"Bleeding hearts."
"That probably explains why Canada's such a violent nation.
Execute more jokers like George and they'd be as peaceful
as the United States." I smirked and sat down in my chair,
realizing too late that I'd leaned back onto a reasonably fresh
formula stain. Well, I wasn't dressed for work anyway.
"I've seen the pictures of his recent work, I know Scully's
theory on why his MO changed. What do you think?"
I made a choked sound.
"She's exploring the possibility of some kind of connection
between you two," he prompted.
"You can say the bad word, Zippy, I know it's tough but
you're a big boy -- psychic. She thinks he's in my head."
"I've read the Roche file. I've read the file on your sister's
disappearance. I know the significance of November 27,
1973, and that this isn't any more far-fetched than
explanations you've endorsed in the past. Are you unwilling
even to consider the possibility?"
Too full of nervous energy to sit still, I hopped off the chair
again and began rolling Miranda around on the floor. She
enjoyed it, but it didn't make Zippy go away. "I'm...not
unwilling. Maybe too willing. Did you know that for a while in
the 1980s, while he was still free, George and I were on
some of the same mailing lists? The sticks and stones will
break my bones but whips and chains excite me kind. I
guess the family that comes together stays together, or
something like that." Miranda made the face that indicates
that a full diaper is on the way, and I picked her up.
Zippy followed me to the changing table, wordlessly opening
the jar of baby-wipes for me. I worked in silence until I could
be sure what I was going to say.
"Frankly, Zip, I'm fucking terrified. I can barely control myself
and here comes George, moving with the force of pure id, to
showcase all the bad things about me. I have a bad feeling
that this ends with me and him fighting to be alpha wolf,
except that I don't know which one of us is me."
"You're you, he's him. End statement."
Zippy scooped the now clean and sweet-smelling Miranda
off the changing table and held her in one arm with a skill
borne of long practice.
"You know the difference, don't you sweetheart?" he asked.
Miranda gave him a drooly smirk and stuffed his tie in her
mouth.
Naturally, he was smitten.
****
After reviewing the autopsy data, I spent the weekend on the
sofa with my favorite men - Ben and Jerry. At least the
freezer kept the ice cream edible. Everything else in the
refrigerator was suspect. I ate my way through Cherry
Garcia, Wavy Gravy, Phish Food, and Chunky Monkey
before I went into the bathroom to throw up. It wasn't bulimia
per se - just nerves. God, my other great problem
relationship - food.
Why was it that I had the worst time with the simple things in
life? Food, love, sleep, sex? The things that should make
life a little bit more worthwhile. I overate when I was
unhappy. I'd eat until my stomach rebelled and then I'd
throw up. Sometimes I just ate. When I got out of the
Academy and the relationship with Jack Willis (love and sex)
was going to hell, I put on twenty pounds. When They
closed down the X-Files, I ate myself three sizes larger and
my best black suit made me look like an eight ball.
The cancer, or the chip I now bore in the back of my neck
like the Bar Code of the Beast, had twisted my metabolism
so I now had that of a tree shrew. Or maybe I just wasn't
eating the way I used to. It was sometimes hard to
remember, easier just to add another cup of coffee to the
sloshing nightmare inside me.
I hadn't gotten sick from eating like that for years.
I sat on the cold floor of the bathroom for almost an hour,
listening to the clock over the shelf tick and counting the tiles
in the floor. No matter how many times I told myself that it
was only an anxiety attack and that it would pass, the
shaking and sweating refused to stop. So I sat there with my
face on the cold and forgiving toilet seat and waited it out.
Finally, I managed to make it to the medicine cabinet and
dry-swallow a Xanax. I avoided the gaze of the burning-
eyed woman in the mirror and stumbled off to the deceptive
sanctuary of my bed. The pillowcases were cool, if dirty, and
I huddled there while the sunlight made the branches of the
bare spring trees skitter shadows across the walls.
I had the playground dream again. The jungle gym, the
monkey bars, the roundabout, and the swings. As usual, I
found myself moving across the wood chips in the strange
and weightless way of dreams until I was peering in the open
maw of the playhouse. The dread and the darkness filled
me again, as the blackness called.
"You don't want to go in there," a voice that felt feminine
instructed me.
In a non-corporeal form, I turned, saw the shadow figure by
the swings, watched the light bounce off of the blackness
which made up the body.
"Don't go in the playhouse," she prodded.
"Who--"
"Just call me your subconscious, you can accept that
explanation," she sounded a little bit the way I did on my
answering machine, but annoyed, "but just trust me on this--"
"The last thing I'd trust is my subconscious."
"The old chestnut - that to understand the artist you have to
study his work - this is an ideal application for that theory."
"The last thing I want to do is get into George's head."
"He's already in yours."
Then the drugs finally took hold of my lower mind and it all
melted away.
****
It rained most of the weekend and Monday morning it looked
like more of the same. I was in the shower with the
Mooselet when I remembered that Warwick had to meet with
a client that day and I was going to have to work from home.
I wasn't supposed to do that two workdays in a row, but I'd
been such a good boy for so long that I thought I deserved it.
I left a message for Diane before my feet hit the floor. I'd
never actually had an administrative assistant before and I
was still in the honeymoon period where I was asking her to
do things as though I was asking for an inconvenient favor. I
was starting to wonder exactly how screwed up my entire
reaction to women had become in the past year.
"You want to go to the grocery store?" I asked Miranda. "We
have no food and we're going to starve."
She thought this was hysterically funny and dissolved into a
wet shower of giggles, flailing her feet and arms around like
a little froglet. She was easy to get a laugh out of. I buried
my face in her fat belly and blew a raspberry. She howled
with glee and grabbed a double handful of my hair.
Sitting in the safe confines of her baby bath at the shallow
end of the shower, she giggled and banged both her chubby
little fists against the blue plastic sides of the tub. This was
our morning routine; I'd plunk her in the baby bath while I
showered. I never let her out of my sight, which meant for a
lot of soap in the eyes and probably broke several covenants
of child care, but when I was done washing, I'd lather her up
and sluice her off under the shower head. She loved the
shower and squealed with joy as the water bounced off her
pink little body. I used to think that Scully had the softest
skin in the world until this little green-eyed woman came into
my life. I was beginning to get used to smelling of baby
shampoo and Dove soap every day.
I let Miranda roll around on the bed while I got dressed, then
I shoveled her into a romper thing and trekked downstairs for
the ceremony of feeding her Highness. Bibs were for
pussies. Warwick and I had cut up bath towels and put
Velcro on them so she was cocooned from chin to toes, with
only her hands free to cause mischief. She banged happily
away on the tray of the high chair with her fat fists while I
organized cereal, formula, and mashed a banana. It was a
good morning when most of the food went in her mouth
rather than on either of our clothes or in our hair. Today was
not a good morning and the Mooselet gleefully spit a blob of
banana straight into my coffee cup. The result didn't taste all
that bad. I scraped dribbled banana off her rubbery little
face and shoveled it back into her bubble-gum mouth.
Caring for Miranda hadn't been as complicated as I had
originally thought it was going to be. Time-consuming, yes,
but requiring a high IQ, no. She ate pretty much what I ate,
only mashed into a pulp, she slept when she wanted to, and
dirtied disposable diapers at an appalling rate. Yes, I was
worried about the environment, but the future was going to
have to cut me a break -- I was, after all, a man and I
deserved to have my handicap forgiven.
I had more coffee, sans baby banana, and prepared for the
assault on the grocery store. I gathered keys, wallet,
cellphone, trench coat in case of inclement spring weather
and my father's wedding band. I'd taken to wearing the ring
out in public when I was with Miranda as it tended to ward off
awkward questions. The few occasions I had forgotten to
slip the thing on my finger I had gotten bizarre advances
from women and even stranger advances from men.
Warwick had thoughtfully left the grocery list spreadsheet
stuck to the refrigerator and I stuffed it in my pocket and
grabbed the Mooselet to head out.
The sun was shining in the parking lot so I decided to leave
my coat in the car. I propped Miranda up in the shopping
cart and slung the diaper bag over my shoulder, feeling my
testicles shrink as a result of being so unmanned.
Taking a baby through a grocery store is not unlike running
the obstacle courses at Quantico. The Mooselet had a
reach that was going to make her a top scorer in the WNBA.
The problem was the fact that her reach was paired with an
oral fixation (something I had never bothered to grow out of)
and anything that she got in her tentacles went straight into
her mouth. I kept popping Zwieback toast into her oral
orifice to keep her from sucking on Windex bottles.
Vegetable aisle first and I went through the dull routine of
checking the organic produce for bruises and ripeness. I
could have gone through all the produce with a forensics
team and not been happy with the results. Only the best
was going into the Mooselet's body. Warwick and I could
live on beer and Doritos, but her Highness was only getting
top quality. Pasta, canned goods and baby supplies were
next on the spreadsheet. The disposable diaper display still
amazed me - I wondered what technology had been used to
develop all the diapers. No wonder there wasn't enough
money for the space program, it was all being used for
diapers.
Somewhere between the diapers and the cereal, Miranda's
face reddened and she started to strain. This was the sign
that she was moving her bowels and I had about ten minutes
before she began an operatic howling. Her Highness did not
like to sit in a dirty diaper. I can't say that I blamed her.
Rushing back to the deli section, I grabbed the nearest
lunchmeat slicer and begged for a bathroom. The woman
eyed Miranda with suspicion until eau de dirty diaper wafted
across the deli and cut through the assorted odors of salami
and cheese.
The woman's eyes were sharper than the blades on her
slicer.
"This way," she pulled on my sleeve and I decanted my
aromatic baby and followed.
"Pay attention now, Skip--see those double doors, the ones
that say
*Employees only*? Go through there, STRAIGHT back to
the right of the
pop machine, through THAT door, make a left, go up the first
set of
stairs, down the hall and it's the third door on your left. Do
you want
me to take you? I'll wait outside--if you want me to..."
"No, I'm fine, really."
The bathroom was cramped and utilitarian, with nothing to
put Miranda on while I performed *the worst job in the
world*. The only good thing about being over six feet tall is
that the long legs make a pretty viable changing table. I sat
on the closed lid of the toilet with a drop cloth protecting my
jeans, and performed the ritual of the changing of the diaper.
Miranda cooed with pleasure at being freed from her smelly
plastic pants, cleaned and re-fitted with a fresh diaper with
little bunny rabbits on it. I snapped up her romper and
balanced her on my hip while I shoved the debris in the
trashcan to astound the cleaning crew later that day.
Women have soft, curved hips strictly for the purpose of
balancing a baby on them (it also gives them a shape that
attracts men the way free Springsteen tickets attract
crowds). Miranda tended to start out at my bony
protuberance and slide downward, as she had nothing to
rest on. I was seriously considering having a seat bolted to
my hipbone before she slid to the floor like a fireman on a
pole one day. But she clung with Velcro persistence as I re-
shouldered the bag and left the bathroom.
Once we had gotten back into the grocery store proper, I
discovered that some helpful soul had decided that my
shopping cart had been abandoned and needed to be
emptied. I caught up with the stock-boy before he had put
everything back away. I had to retrace my path through the
canned goods again, and this time, I added a generous
amount of canned cat food to the basket to feed our stray.
Cats do not live on tuna alone. Neither do FBI agents and
Web designers so I bought beer. I had to balance the last
six-pack in the kid compartment with Miranda and she
twisted one chubby fist around the long neck of a Corona
and gave me a cherub's smile.
"Da," she offered, nearly sending me into cardiac arrest, "da,
da."
And then she trailed off into a bubbling peal of baby cackles.
A metaphor: Da equals beer. Sophisticated logic for an
eight-month-old, she took after her mother.
Between the two of us we were going to see what the cap on
the therapy bills on the federal health care plan really was.
I couldn't wait to tell Warwick.
Unfortunately when I got back out to the parking lot the back
window on the station wagon was shattered. There was
green safety glass everywhere, and my trench coat was
gone, along with the cellphone that had been resting blithely
in its pocket, so I couldn't roust Warwick from his meeting
with the news of Miranda's burgeoning language acquisition.
Shit, I'd paid a thousand dollars for that coat. It was made in
England, it was absolutely *gorgeous*, and I wouldn't have
enough free time to get a new one tailored until Miranda
started preschool. I wondered if they couldn't use the old
measurements.
Also it would be annoying to get a new cellphone and have
the number changed, not to mention the hassle of getting a
new ID badge to clip to the next coat. For some reason,
even though the Bureau had my picture on the computer,
every time I lost an ID badge I had to get a *new* picture
taken, as if I was suddenly going to get plastic surgery or
something. Not that plastic surgery was an outrageous idea,
but it was aggravating that the pencil-pushers wouldn't take
the more efficient route and use a file photo.
More importantly, the safety glass had done its job admirably
well and there were about four thousand cubist pellets inside
the car. They weren't sharp, but I hardly wanted to add them
to her Highness's diet. So I parked her in the front seat,
setting off a cycle of wails that made every passer-by check
to make sure I wasn't slapping her around, and spent the
next half hour picking out every piece of glass in the car. I'm
not sure I could have put the whole window back together
when I was done, but in the end if there was glass in the
seats Miranda wouldn't find it until her arms were longer than
mine.
I put her safety seat in its rightful place, threw out the ice
cream that had melted in the interim, and headed home. The
only redeeming thing was that I hadn't stashed my sidearm
or my "insurance" pistol in the coat. That would have been a
*bad* thing, this was merely a hassle.
Miranda went into the crib for, hopefully, a nap while I put the
groceries away and started the round robin of phone calls to
begin the replacement process of phone and ID. I also
called the Arlington Police to report the break-in of my car
and the Subaru dealer who promised to have a guy from the
auto glass place come out and fix the window. In the
meantime, he suggested that I duct-tape clear plastic over
the broken window. How charming and how professional. I
found the duct tape in the closet and went outside to do the
deed with a roll of clear plastic wrap. Hopefully that wouldn't
look as bad as a Huggies bag. On the other hand, I just
could have used a diaper, as if the baby seat and the
accumulation of bright plastic toys in the back seat wasn't
enough of a clue. The Subaru was definitely not a car to
cruise for chicks with.
My own little chick was wide awake and peppy as hell as she
stuffed her fingers in her mouth and cooed at me when I
finally made it upstairs to the bedroom. Somehow she had
managed to free her feet from her socks and her pink toes
were cold to the touch. Sighing, I scooped her up and
brought her over to the big bed, where I kicked off my shoes
and rolled her around for a few moments before playing the
Mulder family equivalent of "piggies".
"This little alien went to Market, this little alien stayed home,"
She squealed as though I were funnier than George Carlin
on uppers and let me roll her until we were face to face, her
round jade eyes just inches from mine.
"Da," she asserted and grabbed at my nose.
I could live with that.
Iolokus III: Vix te Agnovi 4/20
The truth you speak doth lack some gentleness,
And time to speak it in. You rub the sore,
When you should bring the plaster.
I woke up without really remembering falling asleep. I could
sense Miranda still on the mattress, and heard a woman's
voice cooing to her with thickened vowels and blurry
consonants that did not belong to my surgically precise bete
noir. I opened my eyes and got a myocardial-infarction-
causing view down the front of Ingveld's sweatshirt.
Warwick's squeeze (there are too many words to describe
that kind of relationship and all are inadequate) was a tall,
shapely blonde wench from one of the former Iron Curtain
countries with an accent that could induce an erection in the
clinically impotent and a body that could do the same for the
hearing impaired. Oy! She was the kind of shiksa that
Auntie Sophie warned us about. Tall, blonde, stacked,
motorcycle-driving, pierced navel and pierced nose, Ingveld
fixed and built computers with her stubby dark blue
fingernails. She and Warwick were inseparable, bound
together by a relationship forged through three years of e-
mail, voice mail, and telephone. Warwick loved Ingveld's
mind. The packaging was an added bonus.
Yeah, I envied them, wouldn't you?
More to the point I envied Warwick. Maybe I needed to find
a nubile twenty-four-year-old blonde to drown my sorrows in.
"Varvick said that your lady was here," Ingveld said,
propping Miranda up on her flat stomach as she settled
herself on the bed next to me.
Ingveld's head was on the pillows and mine was at the foot
of the bed, and I basked for a moment in the nonchalant way
that she dealt with her own personal space and the space of
others. She and Miranda both thought nothing of grabbing
my leg when they wanted attention, or shoving me out of the
way to get a better look at the television. Casual, easy, and
living in a world where nothing would hurt them.
Right.
"She's not my lady."
"Vhatever. He said that she upset you. Does she want to
take Miri away?"
"No. She wants to take some of my cases."
"And the problem is?"
"I'm still mad."
With her usual lack of respect, Ingveld nudged me in the ass
with a Doc Marten boot.
"Do not be. You have the baby. You have the house. You
should be happy."
"It's complicated."
"Life is complicated. You love her or you do not. Decide
and then be that way."
Maybe I would be better off getting my relationship advice
from the genie in Aladdin, but the genie did not smell like
clean girl and leather.
"The new keyboard I have put in. No more apple juice,
okay?" she asked.
"Beer?"
"Not for the baby."
I had finally managed to download the files on George's
latest spree when Zippy called from the hospital.
The real problem with living in the suburbs is that it takes
forever to get back into the city. I drove as fast as the rain
would allow, hoping that the lack of any rear view wouldn't
get me killed. Fortunately I was going against the traffic, as
all the white folks who worked in the city but didn't pay taxes
there headed back home to their nice houses, houses that
looked just like mine from the outside. The ride should have
given me time to prepare but for some reason I couldn't
think. I just drove, with my mind on 'pause'. Which was good
since Zippy hadn't given much in the way of detail and I
could imagine far more disgusting and lurid things than the
average bear. Occupational hazard.
Skinner met me in the hallway, pale lipped and shaking rain
from his trench coat.
"What--" I started.
"You entered the Hoover Building at two thirty this
afternoon."
My mouth hung at loose ends for a moment while my brain
skipped tracks.
"No. I was asleep, at home."
"No alibi?"
"What would I need an --"
I stopped, took a breath, tried to collect the thoughts that
scattered like ticker tape at a parade.
"What exactly happened?" I asked.
The story was short and sweet. A man fitting my description
had attacked Agent Scully in the basement office. My ID
was registered as entering the building forty minutes before
the attack took place, and I was seen leaving the building ten
minutes after it happened. Agent Zipprelli tried to stop the
assault on Agent Scully and the attacker escaped. Since it
was well-known that there had been some 'tension'
regarding my promotion to Chief Administrator of ISU and
Agent Scully's to AIC of the X-Files. . . rumors, you know.
"Sir," I said when he finished, "If I took it into my mind to do
Agent Scully an injury it wouldn't be in broad daylight in the
Hoover Building."
He blinked behind rain-speckled glasses.
"You wouldn't find the body."
"I'm going to pretend I didn't hear that," he snapped, "you
realize the seriousness of this situation. I know exactly how
far things degenerated between you two and the
performance in my office regarding the Admin Chief position
was something less than convincing."
"Darien got all the acting genes in the family."
"I'm not finished yet--"
Although I technically didn't answer to Skinner anymore, his
whip crack tone made me start.
"I know you and Agent Scully had a personal relationship the
nature of which is generally discouraged between agents in
the same section, and I also know that your sole motivation
for applying for the Admin position was to remove yourself
from the X-Files and Agent Scully's presence. Suffice it to
say that it is not beyond the realm of possibility that certain ill
will could still linger after six months."
The OJ Simpson syndrome.
"Ah, there's just two mitigating factors -" I interrupted, which
I could do now since I was higher up the food chain than I
used to be, "First, you know Agent Scully and Agent Zipprelli
are profiling a series of killings that they believe were
committed by my jailbird brother George. And - my car was
broken into today. My trench coat, cellphone, and ID were
stolen. I did call into HR as soon as I got home, which might
have been at about noon, to report the missing ID."
"You reported the ID loss as soon as you got home?" he
echoed in a voice of disbelief.
"That's what I tell my agents to do," I looked over his wet
shoulder and saw a nurse waft in and out of a room where a
small woman with auburn hair lay on a white sheeted bed,
"and I know you understand the importance of practicing
what you preach."
I brushed past Skinner and into the room.
I'd played this scene entirely too many times before. It goes
something like this: the petite redhead lying in a white
sandwich of sheets in a hospital bed with a clear tube
running above her coral lips while her skin stretches pale
and wan underneath the cold light from above the bed. This
time there was the added benefit of petechial hemorrhaging
around her conjunctival orbits, something I was used to
seeing on dead people but not living ones -- most of the
strangulations I dealt with were successful.
The heart monitor beats were a stately dance in the
background. For the umpty-umpth time, she was in a
hospital bed and it was all my fault. Instead of holding her
hand -- I'd given up the right to do that the minute I played
Frisbee with her laptop -- I flipped open her chart and tried to
make sense of the notes inside. From what I could make out
due to ignorance and handwriting, it seemed that other than
the ugly bruising around her throat and larynx, she was
pretty much all right, and that the ER doctor had given her a
hefty shot of Demerol for pain management. It must have
hurt like a bitch to have your windpipe almost crushed, and
from personal experience, I knew I would have been
seriously stoned with that dosage and I didn't weigh a
hundred and ten pounds soaking wet.
I should have been holding her hand when she woke up but I
was afraid that she'd pull me back under, like a sailor who
had already survived one encounter with a mermaid.
So I stood there and waited, waited until her reddened
eyelids stuttered open and she stared up at me like a
television between stations.
"Scully?"
She blinked. Sorry, Agent Scully's not home right now, may I
take a message? The wrinkles around her mouth and eyes
were crisp engraved lines in the stark fluorescent light and
the broken-veined skin under her eyes was as purple as the
dying crocuses outside.
I touched her cheek and she flinched, pupils wide as pennies
with the drugs.
"She doesn't like to be touched," Zippy pointed out.
Of course not, and certainly not by someone with my face.
I straightened up and turned to confront him, squaring my
shoulders. "Tell me what happened."
"I found them in our office. I thought--well, you can guess
what I thought. I pulled him off and he kicked me in the balls
and ran out. Scully was blue and gasping for breath and I
called security. I'm sorry, man. I should have caught him."
I wanted to be angry at him. But that would have required
this disaster to be his fault, not mine and I couldn't let that
be.
"Did you call her mother?"
Zippy started. "Should I have?"
"She lives right around here, you know." I could see that he
didn't even before he shook his head. I suspected that the
lovely and talented Agent Scully had alienated more than
just me when she ditched Miranda like a bad date.
"301-555-2791," I said stonily.
"You wanna call?" he offered me his cellphone.
I shook my head. I'd had enough Catholic guilt to tide me
over into the new millenium, and anyway Mrs. Scully's kind
condescending manner drove me nuts now that we weren't
united in what we were grieving over. She pitied me, this I
knew, and I don't think I ever forgave her for authorizing the
shutoff of Scully's life support all those years ago.
I wondered how I'd manage to get along with the third
generation of Scully women once she started talking.
Perhaps unfortunately for Scully, she regained
consciousness--of a sort--just before her mother arrived. She
was looking hazily around and trying to speak when the door
slammed open and in stalked Maggie.
Mrs. Scully sailed into the room like a destroyer, her hair
frizzy from the rain, and immediately came over to Scully's
bed, pushing me aside as she inspected her daughter.
"'m ok," Scully mumbled, responding to her mother's angry
glare, and tried to turn her head but couldn't because of the
swelling and the monitors.
"What happened, Fox?"
I counted to five and then looked her in the eyes. "She was
attacked by George Naxos, who impersonated me to get into
the FBI building."
"Will she be all right?"
"I'm not a doctor, Mrs. Scully, but from what I see--"
She slammed her hand down on the metal railing of the bed,
and Scully winced, her red-marbled eyes seeming to sink
further back into her skull. "Damnit, Fox, this wasn't
supposed to happen anymore!"
Breathe, in, out, in, out. I was not going to fight with her in
front of Scully, not when Scully was the real problem. I
wasn't.
Zippy stepped forward like the stalwart guy he is. "Mrs.
Scully, I'm Dana's partner Michael Zipprelli, it's a pleasure to
meet you though I'm sorry it couldn't be under better
circumstances." He did it all in one breath, before she could
interrupt. She didn't take his outstretched hand.
"So, did you catch the man who did this? Fox's *brother*?"
He shook his head solemnly. "I'm sorry, Mrs. Scully. We're
going to have Dana under guard until this is over--"
"She's coming home with me."
Scully's eyes widened and she shook her head. Her pupils
were as big as bullet holes; I don't know how well she was
really tracking, but she's always had great instincts.
"Dana, honey," Maggie said, leaning over the bed, "you're in
no shape to continue working. We'll just stay at my place--"
Another frantic shake, and a hideous cough that matched
any twenty-year smoker's.
"Don' wanna--"
"Mrs. Scully," I said diplomatically, "it might be better if Dana
stayed with people who can protect her--"
"You?" she asked, not with contempt, precisely, but with
disbelief, as if I'd told her that I had conclusive proof that
Jesus Christ was a second rater carpenter and *not* the
Messiah.
"The Bureau is very concerned for Dana's safety," Zippy said
softly, "and that of her daughter, it really would be better if
we could concentrate on protecting them in one location."
Holy fuck, I hadn't even considered--Maggie's eyes flickered
over my blanched face.
"Yah," Scully chimed in. She sounded like she had a
mouthful of marbles, but I understood. "Wanna go w' Muller."
Naturally, that settled it. It would take more than Demerol to
take Scully out of the habit of command.
After a few more hours in which she didn't die, they released
her. The doctor warned me to watch Scully for delayed onset
of airway obstruction. Who knew that strangulation could
work slowly?
We drove back to my house. Frohike was outside the
window of the room I shared with Miranda, hanging off a
ladder as he hammered a black wire into place. I had no
idea what it was for but similar wires now outlined every
window in the place. They'd torn up the lawn something
awful, and enormous lights were now in place to keep any
part of the approach to the house from falling into shadow.
The neighbors were not going to like this. It probably violated
one of the covenants in my deed and at the next meeting
they'd vote to spend some of the annual litigation fund on
suing me until I got the house back into compliance with
neighborhood rules.
They could take a fucking number, I'd pay the damages.
I unloaded Scully, still limp and pliant as a mannequin, and
helped her stumble down the path. She only fell against me
twice. Inside, Warwick was pacing, carrying Miranda from
room to room like a ship unable to find a port.
"Can you shoot?" I asked him as I eased Scully down onto
the sofa. She lay across it, a slash of simplicity over the wild
Ikea chaos of the pattern, and smiled softly at Miranda. Her
gaze was so senselessly maternal that my chest nearly
caved in.
"Like, a gun?" Warwick asked, mercifully breaking my
concentration.
"No, like a camera. Of course like a gun. If you can't you
may want to go stay with Ingveld until this is over, if you're
not armed you're a liability."
"My parents run a twenty-four hour grocery store in
Brooklyn," he said.
"Shotgun it is," I said and headed back for the station
wagon. Zippy, bless his homicidal heart, had brought his
entire gun collection up from Texas--he lived out in Virginia
to avoid the District's stricter gun control laws--and we'd
stopped by his place on our way home. Zippy was currently
getting some clothes for Scully.
Meanwhile his boy-scout preparation was going to be put to
good use in my house. I figured that when Miranda learned
to crawl we'd put trigger locks on all the guns, maybe I'd
even join Parents For Gun Control, but given current realities
every gun in the house made her a little bit safer.
When I'd put the guns in the most logical grab points around
the house, I returned to the living room, where Scully was
lolling on the couch. Her unfocused eyes were cornflower
blue and she was nearly sleeping, her mouth open so that
she could breathe more easily. I could very easily get used
to Scully sleepy and biddable like this; I wondered if the
Bureau's insurance would cover a continuous diet of
sedatives.
I walked over to her and knelt, adjusting the sofa pillows so
that she could rest more comfortably. Like Miranda, she had
to be kept from sleeping on her stomach. I must have stared
at her for several minutes before she raised her hand, little
ladyfingers trailing over my cheek like liquid nitrogen.
"Mulder," she said and I could almost pretend that the
huskiness of her voice was desire and not damage.
"Yeah?"
"Did you know I went to a rape survivors' group?"
I could have guessed for a hundred years and never come
up with that as the first thing she'd say to me high on
Demerol. I guess she didn't notice my shock, because she
continued right on, wheezing a little but determined as ever
to have her say.
"It was held in the Chevy Chase Public Library. I went
because I thought it would help me, if I could talk to
strangers about it maybe I could talk to you. There were six
other women, and they...their stories, they were so normal, I
know there shouldn't be such a thing as a normal rape but
the sad fact is that there is." A soft, almost hesitant cough
escaped her, and she took a few moments to breathe. "The
strangest story was the woman whose son's high school
principal raped her after a parent-teacher conference. And
then they got to me, and a lawyer for DOE recognized me,
she'd seen me at the hearings. It shouldn't have mattered
but it did and I thought, I can't tell these normal people the
story of what happened to me, I can't break their world apart.
Anyway they wouldn't believe me, disbelief is so much safer.
So I ran. I'm good at that, running, you know? Running from
what I fear."
Carefully, carefully, Mulder. Even with the drugs there's
never a safety net with Scully. One false move and you'll hit
the ground like a Hefty bag full of tomato soup.
"Are you afraid of me?"
She blinked. "More than anything else."
Her left arm was curled protectively over her stomach and I
rested my hand as lightly as possible on the sleeve of her
shirt. Through the silk I could feel the warmth of her blood. In
a minute she was asleep again.
I watched her sleep until the phone buzzed. I snagged it
from the end table, missing my cellphone already. At least
Scully was so far under that it would take electric current to
wake her. "Mulder," I said, untangling the cord.
"What have you gotten yourself into this time?"
Julie Graff's bark wasn't music to my ears -- unless
percussion counted. She'd been the first female profiler
under John Douglas, moved out to California during the
Patterson years, and had returned to head the ISU when
Patterson nuked himself. She'd sacrificed any hope of a
personal life to get ahead in the Bureau's culture of
manliness, and I thought she might resent my flextime
existence just a little. But with a Ph.D. in abnormal psych
and more commendations than I had injuries in the line of
duty, she was a wonderful Fearless Leader. And, to her
credit, she didn't like to see profilers burn out; she didn't
mind broken marriages, that was a part of the game, but she
hated having to train fresh meat.
"I'm having some family trouble," I told her, knowing it would
trigger her warning lights. "I may need to take a few personal
days."
"Pretty fucking funny, Mulder. I don't like having an AD
lecture me on the care and feedng of my agents. Why
doesn't your charming brother show up in the NCIC
database?"
"He did his confirmed wet work in Canada," I told her wearily.
"Agents Scully and Zipprelli of the X Files just moved him
from 'presumed dead' to 'presumed deadly' yesterday."
She sighed; I imagined her rubbing her temples in the
overheated underground office, pushing loose strands of hair
aside. Unlike most of the women in the Bureau, she kept her
hair long, swept up in a huge messy bun that tended to get
lopsided as the day went on. Most of it was salt-and-pepper
gray, but there was a wide auburn streak just left of center.
Her hair was a good indicator of her personality -- no-
nonsense and fiery at once. "AD Skinner suggested, and I
agreed, that you should remain in your house until we catch
your worse half. We're releasing your picture to the local
news stations, telling them it's George Naxos, and warning
anyone who sees you to call the police."
"Isn't it nice to be so well-liked."
"Shut up, Mulder, did you want us to wait until we had a
picture of *him*? Look, I know this is rough on you, having
him attack your ex-partner --"
"He didn't do anything I haven't considered."
I heard the crunch of ice cubes. She always chewed them up
when she finished drinking her iced coffee. "Right, I forgot.
Sorry I offered some sympathy, Macho Man. Try not to get
yourself killed, I've used up my recruiting budget for the
year."
Click.
Iolokus III: Vix te Agnovi 5/20
For every trifle they are set upon me,
Sometime like apes that mow and chatter at me,
And after bite me; then like hedgehogs which
Lie tumbling in my barefoot way, and mount
Their pricks at my footfall ...
My throat hurt.
I blinked the sleep out of my eyes and realized that I was
staring at a painfully white ceiling. Off to one side a television
was singing, and I heard various shuffling noises, someone
making dinner perhaps.
I remembered the Bureau, the hospital, a little of what had
gone on. Talking despite the pronounced harshness of my
voice even in my own ears.
Glacially slow, I sat up. Everything seemed to work, though
deep breaths triggered a spate of coughs which hurt like
having George's hands on me all over again.
Mulder had thoughtfully left my file on the coffee table in
front of the couch. I quickly gathered the essentials. My
hyoid bone was intact, according to the soft-tissue X ray,
which meant that I had a good chance of being just fine once
the swelling went down. There were the expected thumb
marks and fingernail scratches on my throat, along with the
smaller circular bruises from the tips of his fingers. Because
we'd struggled and he'd shifted his grip, the markings were
spread across most of my throat, so it looked as if my throat
was as covered with color as George's. What was up with
the throat thing, anyway? I made a mental note to ask
Mulder.
The report also noted that I had Tardieu's spots on my throat
and face from the burst blood vessels and so I'd look a bit
like I had a very, very late-onset case of chicken pox. I didn't
want to rush the first look in the mirror; it's so easy to go from
gratitude for surviving to horror at not looking one's best. If
there were no pulmonary sequelae, though, I should be back
in fighting form in no time.
I pushed myself off of the thickly padded sofa and stood,
swaying a little as the blood rushed to and fro. I was hungry
and it was going to be a bitch and a half to eat food in this
condition. Maybe I could borrow some of Miranda's.
Tottering into the kitchen, I found Mulder. He was checking
the temperature on the oven. There were glass bowls and
spices strewn across the countertop, along with a shotgun.
He looked at me. "Back from Planet Painkiller?"
I nodded, then realized that was a bad idea. "Did they
prescribe anything for the pain that won't knock me all the
way out?" My voice was as hoarse as Marlon Brando's.
"I have some Tylenol 3 with codeine, the doctor said that
was fine if you started coughing but they don't want you to
take anything stronger that might depress respiratory
functions." He pulled a wooden chair out from the small
kitchen table and held it out for me. I figured that such
generosity should not go unnoticed, so I sat. Anyway I still
wasn't sure how ready I was to move around.
"Dinner should be ready in about half an hour. Zippy's
upstairs listening to the boys explain the new security
arrangements and Warwick's got Miranda. Can we talk?"
I looked around the kitchen, buying time. This room as well
appeared to have been furnished in one quick trip to Ikea,
the result being that everything was in primary colors and
blonde wood. It looked a little like the showroom must have,
except for the spills and stains that had accumulated in the
strangest places, like the side of the refrigerator and about
six feet up the wall, next to the clock.
"What are we going to talk about?"
He shrugged. "Survival tactics, maybe. You...said some
things, Scully, while you were under the influence. I know
you wouldn't normally admit to them but I don't think they
were untrue."
I racked my brain, which simpered and shrugged helplessly.
I remembered talking, but not what I'd managed to say.
He pulled another chair out, reversed it, and straddled it, his
hands gripping the top of the chair. His sleeves were rolled
up and the corded muscles of his forearms stood out. I
remembered his hands, cool and certain, enfolding me.
"I admit that it's been hard for me to see things your way and
frankly I haven't tried. Can you tell me...*why* you left
Miranda?"
I took a deep, painful breath. I'd rehearsed this speech a few
times, but that didn't make it any easier, or any more
persuasive to my own ears. "You have no idea how hard it
was to watch Aileen just pick her up and make her coo.
Every time she showed me how to do something I just...got
further away. I'm not good at trying things I'm not already
good at."
He glowered. "I wasn't very good when I started."
"Fine, you're a better person than I am, you win. Does it feel
good, Mulder? How does it feel to be a superior being?"
The words caught in the swollen tissues of my throat and I
coughed. It burned like acid. I choked a bit and Mulder
thoughtfully waited for me to catch my breath before he took
it away again.
"A member of the master race, you mean?"
I looked down and laced my fingers together. "That's not
what I meant."
He leaned forward and put his big hand over mine,
swallowing both. I remembered that slightly sweaty palm
intimately. "I know. Scully...I'm not saying I'm better than you
are. Just that...you made some choices I didn't agree with."
"There comes a day," I said, "where you realize, at about
eight o'clock at night, that you haven't thought about how
you were raped for the entire day. And it's surprising, that
you've gone so long without thinking about it. You
congratulate yourself, that's good, that's progress."
He released my hand as if reminded of my need for
distance.
"I like to think that I could have handled all this if it had just
happened a little slower. But I had no sooner done the blood
test than -- Mulder, I watched you, you and your brothers,
you tore Jason to pieces --"
He stood abruptly and whirled so that he didn't have to look
at me. "What was I supposed to do? Should I have turned
the other cheek? That only keeps your face from getting
lopsided. Should I have let him get away with it? After what
he did? The women he killed? What he did to our brothers?
What he did to you?" His hands were braced against the
flour-smeared kitchen counter, shoulders heaving, taut and
beautiful as a Stradivarius.
"Emerson is a saint, " he added a moment later, "he can
forgive. I can't and I won't. I still hate Jason for what he did.
Am I supposed to forgive him?"
"No," I whispered and wanted nothing more than to throw my
arms around him and never allow him to release me. "But he
brought us to this place where you hate me and I'm -- I don't
have anything of myself left over. I'm sorry, Mulder. I'm sorry
I wasn't strong enough for this."
"No one is."
No motion whatsoever. Then a series of shudders and the
words emanated from him almost as if he willed rather than
spoke them, as if he had no choice. "I just don't understand
why you had to leave Miranda. I know why you couldn't
stand to be with me. But what did she ever do to you?"
I was hunched over, my body reduced to a skin full of fire,
charcoal burning and smoking from every pore. I would have
screamed but the ligaments holding my face together were
twisted and immobile.
I knew that nothing of what had happened was Miranda's
fault. But I couldn't get away from some simple truths: Jason
had raped me with the same casual glee with which he'd
created Miranda. I'd discovered her the very week he'd
ripped me apart. And when I held her she'd felt like a
byproduct, I couldn't recognize her among the howling mass
of my own troubles. It was almost as though she had been
the product of the rape, rather than a distantly related event.
Truthfully, I resented the idea that her needs were somehow
of a different order of magnitude than my own, that just
because of the genetic connection I should be able to make
my life work right or at least ignore all my problems and just
dote on her. God knew that the genetic connection between
the brothers Mulder had been of little value to my own
Mulder, and though Miranda was too young to form much in
the way of conscious intent I was no longer sure she'd be
free to become an upstanding human being.
Yes, it was not her fault. But it wasn't my fault either, so why
was I the one to blame?
How could I possibly explain this to him when I didn't rightly
understand it myself?
I wanted the drugs again, wanted to have the edges of my
own hurt and guilt blurred, and I wanted to sink into the
warm pool of semi-awareness so I didn't have to feel
anymore.
"Let's get you something to eat," he muttered and went back
to the stove.
I felt as if I'd wandered into a bizarre version of I Love Lucy.
Mulder, you got some 'splainin' to do.
The doorbell buzzed as Mulder was adjusting something
inside the oven. It smelled good, but he slammed the metal
door and grabbed the now flour-spattered shotgun from the
counter, warning me with a look to stay put.
I heard him growl in the foyer and recognized the tone,
standard posturing; the visitor was almost a friend, to the
extent that Mulder had friends. (Theoretically he could have
acquired a whole slew over the past few months, after all
he'd gotten a house in the suburbs, a nanny, a station wagon
and a promotion and friends would only be marginally more
strange.)
Zippy followed Mulder into the kitchen, looking around with a
strange wistfulness. He probably wondered when he'd lost
his chance at domesticity and how Mulder had found it.
He was carrying a suitcase from my closet, the green one. If
he'd packed carefully there could be two weeks' worth of
clothes inside. If he hadn't packed carefully there could be
three.
"We need to talk," he said. Mulder watched, standard
superior smirk on his face as if we were just two random
rookie agents from his team and he'd seen our entrance
scores.
"What about?" It wasn't as if standing would give me a height
advantage, so I didn't bother.
He drew a deep breath. His eyes were flashing like sunlight
on water and those perfect teeth were bared in a snarl. "I got
you some clothes. There were only two changes of
underwear in your drawers so I had to do some laundry,
which is why I'm so late. While I was waiting I threw out your
trash, all three months of it. I threw out the two dead plants
and watered the one that has a chance of making it. I also
threw out all the food in your refrigerator and the onions that
were rotting in your vegetable bin. Then I took the liberty of
sorting your mail and I even paid your bills, since I assume
you didn't want the electricity or the phone shut off, which
events were scheduled for next week. You can pay me back
by signing over your last few paychecks to me, which ought
to be easy enough since you haven't deposited them either.
"Along with the clothes I brought your Zoloft, which I suspect
you haven't been taking. I almost hope you haven't because
if this is you on meds..."
Mulder's smirk had turned to ill-concealed horror, and I felt
myself flush deep red with the shame of having him present
for all this.
Another humiliation. Funny, you'd think I'd be used to being
violated by now.
I gathered all my remaining self-control into a tiny ball,
smaller than a sugar cube, and tried to keep it in my mouth.
"I wanted sleeping pills and I walked away with those,
whatever happened to service?"
"Dana." His voice had risen an octave; this wasn't Zippy's
hot-air anger but something else entirely. "I need to know
what happened when George attacked you."
Of all the replacement partners in the Bureau, I had to end
up with another fucking psychologist.
He didn't need to tell me I owed him an answer; we'd saved
each other's lives and limbs often enough in half a year for
me to acknowledge that truth. "He was reading a file," I said
in the hesitant little-girl whisper George had left me with. "I
came in and he turned and looked at me. I thought it was
Mulder; he just stared at me. I went over to my desk and sat
down. I was expecting an argument. When I looked up he
was still staring. Then he said, 'Come here,' and I--"
I was panting and my throat hurt. I would have cheerfully
paid a million of Roush's dollars to get Mulder out of the
room. I could feel him broadcasting anger and pain off to my
side. It was distracting. George's eyes had been curious, his
voice burnt velvet; his rage in the sepia-stained basement
had felt entirely appropriate to me and I had missed at first
the absence of self-hatred that was the sine qua non of
Mulder's existence. For a moment, before the tired
realization brushed me, I felt the lovely languor of desire.
Even after I knew it was George the languor held, until the
pain started.
Another slow, calming breath, and I shuddered like a
scarecrow in a high wind. "I knew then, knew it had to be
George. Same damn mistake as always. So I, I stood up and
I" deep breath, one that made me cough, delaying me when
I wanted it to be over, "closed my eyes and I waited. And he
came to me."
Mulder muttered something incomprehensible. My eyes
were unfocused and I started when Zippy strode forward and
dropped to his knees to shove his face up against mine.
"Dana," he repeated. "I can't stop you from killing yourself,
though I must say you picked a particularly unattractive
method. But like this you're going to get *me* killed. If I can't
rely on my partner, what am I supposed to do? You put me
in danger today, you're going to put Mulder in danger, and
everyone else in this house. So we've got two choices here. I
can tell Skinner what I saw at your place--he's itching to put
you on disability, you know--and you can go home. George
will probably find you again and you'll get what you want."
I put my hand to my throat and made the bruises sing again.
"What's the other choice?"
"You agree not to do anything that fucking stupid again until
we've got George, you take your goddamn meds and start to
feel better and we catch him together. Once this is over I'll
load the fucking gun myself for you if you insist but this shit
does *not* fit into the schedule here."
I blinked. Tough love had nothing on my boy Mikey.
"You know, antidepressants take about two weeks to start
working," I said.
He grinned. "Just pretend you've been taking them for a
while."
I raised an eyebrow--it felt unfamiliar; I hadn't been in the
mood to play for so long.
He frowned, then. "There's something else."
"What more could there possibly be?"
In reply, he handed me a thick envelope, rough and
expensive under my coarse fingertips. The return address
indicated that Texas was going to smack me around again.
I hadn't expected to be Miranda's trustee, however.
According to Jason's lawyer, I was legally obligated to use
the money for her benefit until she came of age. I couldn't
reject one lethal cent; it was all for her. I caught Mulder
looking at the envelope and letterhead knowingly. He must
have received similar information about Jason's will. Yippee.
"Well, there's this to say for the Mulder brothers," I said to no
one in particular. "As far as I'm aware there are no deadbeat
dads among them, which is better than you can say for any
randomly selected group of ten men."
Zippy put his hand to my cheek, his thumb running gently
over the broken blood vessels below my eyes, and then we
both jumped as Mulder knocked a measuring cup to the
floor, where it shattered.
Iolokus III: Vix te Agnovi 6/20
A devil, a born devil, on whose nature
Nature can never stick; on whom my pains,
Humanely taken, all, all lost, quite lost;
And as with age his body uglier grows,
So his mind cankers.
She'd as much as admitted that she would have let George
kill her if Zippy hadn't intervened. I tried to imagine what
would have happened if she'd died and was completely
incapable of it; the world without her would be white
nothingness. Fuckhead, you could have answered one of
her calls. You could have wondered why she stopped calling
instead of assuming she didn't give a shit anymore.
And if you hold that torch any higher you're going to get
mistaken for the Statue of Liberty.
After I swept up the ill-fated measuring cup I fled the kitchen
to set up the guest bedroom.
We'd never used it before. Mrs. Scully had made a few day
trips, but we were both uncomfortable enough that I'd never
asked her to visit overnight. When Ingveld stayed over she
naturally slept with Warwick. Who knew what the neighbors
thought about her--I suspected that the prevailing wisdom
was that we were a gay couple raising the daughter I'd had
before I came out of the closet, but don't ask, don't tell is a
powerful norm in suburbia so I hadn't cleared up anyone's
confusion yet.
I hauled a set of sheets out of the linen closet and began to
make the bed. Wordlessly, Zippy came in with a set of
pillowcases and began stuffing the pillows in.
"How many towels will you two need?"
Zippy put my hand on my upper arm, preventing me from
tucking the top sheet under the mattress. "I'm not staying in
here, Mulder. That couch looks fine."
"Don't be ridiculous," Scully wheezed from the doorway. "I'm
nine inches shorter, I'll take the couch."
My brain was going to explode. I could see how the gray-
pink chunks would decorate the carpet and be lost in the
cabbage roses of the wallpaper. I pushed past Scully and
went to find my daughter.
Okay, so Zippy hadn't known how depressed Scully was or
what her apartment was like. On the other hand, after five
years, including nearly a year of on-and-off raunchy sex, I'd
had extraordinarily limited access to Scully's inner life, or
even her outer life, so his ignorance proved nothing. He'd
reassured me that they weren't going to get it on under my
roof, but that didn't foreclose a history between them. It was
Scully's pattern, Jack Willis and me and now him, unless of
course she only went in for supervisors, which suggested
that she could also be doing Skinner.
I reached Miranda on autopilot. Warwick gave me a worried
look but handed her over without verbal protest. She was
heavy and real in my arms, and I began to calm down.
Zippy wasn't sleeping with Scully. He was saner than that.
And the jealousy had made me forget my dearly departed
twin's intervention into her life. Even if Scully wasn't capable
of taking care of herself enough to say "no," Zippy wasn't the
kind of man who'd be indifferent when she stiffened and shut
down.
It's hard to explain, but I never really integrated the rape into
my understanding of what had happened to us over the last
year. Of course it was the main reason, among a strong field
of contenders, that I'd decided to kill Jason, but in many
ways I had imagined a rape without a victim. Scully had
been my bridge to the rest of the world for so long; what the
concrete couldn't absorb, the steel bars beneath could. I
could accept her destructive rage but not, it seemed, her
need.
I think she might have said something to him that she
wanted to say to me, something about the two of us, and
he'd brushed that aside. And since close only counts in
horseshoes and hand grenades, not twin brothers, I'd never
get to hear it and she'd never feel it again.
I'd like to think that Scully ate the macaroni and cheese, soft
enough to go down more easily than the chicken I'd cooked
for everyone else. I myself skipped dinner because I didn't
want to deal with anything but my little princess, who was
demonstrating her mastery of the universe by whacking
anything that came within reach, namely me, and squealing
happy as a hog surrounded by soybeans when she could get
a loud smacking sound out of the contact. I really, really
wanted to live in her world.
Warwick kicked me out when he came back down to work on
his latest presentation, but he let the Mooselet stay. I fled to
my study and watched the sunset bleeding like a breach
birth over the western sky.
The stray cat was in the back yard again; I could see her out
the window. She darted from bush to tree like a scarf blown
by the wind, snagging against every bit of cover she passed.
I wanted to lure her into the house. We'd feed her until she
was round instead of rectangular, we'd get her a collar and
all her shots, we'd do the right thing and have her fixed, and
we'd pet her shamelessly. She'd curl on my lap on the rare
occasions it wasn't occupied by Miranda, and she'd sleep in
the sunshine on the windowsill.
Then I had a vision, as powerful as anything Dr. Werber or
Roche ever sent me. I came into the kitchen and was drawn,
as in dreams we're drawn, over to the shiny silver sink. Tufts
of black fur protruded from the disposal, clumped from the
mixture of water and blood that still swirled in the drain. I
turned like a marionette and went to the stove, where the pot
was bubbling so viciously that the entire stovetop shook. The
lid disappeared and I saw- her face hadn't been
submerged, so it was still mainly intact, but the rest of the
body had been boiling long enough that the sharp feline
bones were visible in the brown, pungent stew.
"Mulder?"
I closed my eyes and willed my body not to tremble. If I
looked bad enough Scully might want to touch me.
God, please let that be George's influence and not my own
twisted impulses. If they could be separated at this point.
"Mulder?" Closer now, two feet at most.
I could smell her skin.
"What is it?" I growled, turning and staring down at her.
"Do you see anything out there?"
Little did she know that she had almost as much to fear from
the monster inside the house.
I shook my head. "Just thinking."
"Oh."
Warwick knocked on the open study door, announcing his
presence. "Sally Jessy Raphael's 'people' are on the phone,"
he said. "She's doing a show on 'My Twin Is a Criminal.'"
His presence punctured the tension so fast I almost heard
the pop.
"How'd they'd get the number?"
"Probably bribed someone at the pediatrician's office."
"Tell her I'll wait until she focuses on the sad effects of
genetic manipulation of the North American male."
"Aye, aye." He turned and closed the door as he left.
I looked at Scully. She was more shocked than she'd been
upon discovering the Flukeman. If only all the monsters
announced themselves with their deformities.
Then there was the nose thing. Did that count as a
deformity? It pretty much depended on what my mood was
like at the time. Today, for example, I was giving Pinocchio
a run for his money. At least Cyrano managed to get Roxane
to love him by proxy; in my life, that would be a moral victory.
"I think the more publicity George gets the better," I told her,
"but I don't think I can stomach Sally."
"You were expecting Jerry Springer?"
"I'm holding out for Letterman," and we grinned shyly at each
other like kids passing notes during class.
"Top ten list?" she asked.
"Sally Jessy Raphael's 'people'. How do you get 'people'? I
think I need 'people.'"
"People who need people," Scully half-sang, sending my
hackles to full attention.
"Don't quit your day job," I said. This was way too weird, we
weren't even friends, were we? We were sending each other
more mixed signals than a dyslexic third-base coach. It was
small comfort to think that she was just as confused as I
was.
I turned to more immediately relevant matters. It was clear
Zippy (and Scully, if I couldn't prevent it) would be doing the
legwork, but I could review the collected evidence thus far.
Ironically, this was the way ISU profilers were supposed to
work; the theory was that we sat like Mycroft Holmes while
all the evidence was brought to us and solved cases from
afar, leaving evidence collection and on-site work to the
Sherlocks in state and federal investigative bodies.
Working in administration had made me aware of the reality
of the *average* profiler's job. The only variety was where
you were going to sit in the cafeteria at lunch. When you
were done with one case there was no travel time to use to
recover. And already I'd been sucked into solving cases
instead of just assigning them, when I was right there and
the file was open and the profile was just too obvious to
waste anyone else's time on. Ralph Williams had already
given me a mug that said "I'm too busy to delegate it, so I'll
just do it myself."
There was nothing unusual about profiling just from reported
evidence. Examining the scene itself was a luxury, indulged
only when the case proved intractable, or too high-profile, or
strange in the way of X Files.
I moved to my desk and opened the manila folder from
George's latest collection. Scully had organized the file and
noted her opinion that he was escalating--as usual she had
to put her two cents in even when it got to my areas of
expertise--but she was thorough enough that I'd be able to
form my own conclusions.
The photos from the crime scenes were repetitive, with the
depressing sameness-in-variety of a soap opera plot or the
designs on a deck of playing cards--hearts, clubs, protruding
tongues. As I flipped through the stack I heard Scully sit on
the couch, and the creak of the leather brought back the kind
of memories that aren't terribly appropriate during the
construction of a profile.
Five swollen tongues dragging on dirt or concrete or wood
faded to gray with the passing of the seasons and the drum
of small feet. Five uniforms, white and peach and pink. Five
sets of torn pantyhose, five rapes. He *was* escalating now,
not just in frequency but in violence, as there was evidence
of vaginal and anal penetration. Prison must have been
boring him. Bite marks on the last three, and on number four
he'd taken a nipple but that hadn't been repeated, maybe it
was just an experiment. The sexual assaults were
postmortem, naturally. Live women just weren't the same.
Strangulation isn't a particularly unusual or suggestive
method of killing. The necessary weapons are convenient,
effective, and satisfying--it's good to be up close, to watch
your victim struggle, choke, and turn blue. To feel her go lax
underneath you like a yarn doll, all her pointless flailing
stilled, her will overborne. I suspected that Scully's
compliance had helped to save her, not that I was going to
share *that* little theory, but George liked the power of
dominating his victims and he was probably surprised and a
tad miffed when Scully didn't resist.
There was no evidence that he'd attempted to force any of
the dead women to fellate him, a favorite of many serial
rapists. That would have required him to let up some on their
necks. So it wasn't just the convenience, there was
something about strangulation he liked. And the tattoo
around his neck, this was related too. Barbed wire drawing
blood so that he was eternally bleeding.
"Do you have a theory about George's apparent neck
fetish?" Her voice snaked its way through the twilight to turn
circles inside my head. I feared and hated and desired the
return of her mind-reading capabilities. I needed her to look
after me. I needed to talk this out.
I needed a really good hairdresser, too, but that was beside
the point.
"It's well-known that partial strangulation can be a source of
sexual pleasure," thank you, Clyde Bruckman, "and I
suspect he may think he's giving them what they want," is
that what *you* want, Scully, "there may have been an early
sexual experience with a woman who did enjoy that
particular kink. One time it went too far, he killed the girl and
he liked it. The girl reminded him of his mother, that bitch,
and she'd provoked him, she wanted to fight and he wanted
to fuck and because he was bigger he got his wish. He
probably didn't do a great job of disposing of the body, but
he was panicked and didn't go through the ritual of
displaying her, which means the murder is probably still in
some unsolved file in Anywhere, USA.
"It might have started earlier, though. His adoptive mother,
nagging, saying such horrible things that he just wanted her
to stop talking. The things he had to choke down just to stay
alive, the rotten slimy food she fed him when he was bad
and had to be punished. And the rage that felt like it would
crawl out of his stomach and burst from his mouth and
destroy the world. The anger frightened him and he liked it, I
think he got the tattoo as a way of asserting control over the
thing that lives inside him. He's bound it with barbed wire;
*he's* the one who decides when the noose will tighten and
when the beast will take over."
"You're saying he thinks there's something living in his
stomach?" I had forgotten how that tone of hers, even
distorted by the hideous swelling of the tissues of her throat,
could make me absolutely batty. If it wouldn't be poaching on
another man's territory I could have strangled her myself.
"It's a metaphor, Scully. Even psychos can understand
metaphors." Hmm, that didn't come out as clearly as it
should have.
She looked away. "Practitioners of Haltha Yoga believe that
parts of the body have symbolic meanings as well and the
throat is analagous to the vagina--could his MO, and the
tattoo, be a reaction not simply to his hatred and fear of
women but his hatred and fear of that which he thinks is
feminine in himself?"
I stared at her. I don't know where she hides the CD-ROM
with the world encyclopedia she uses for this little trick, and
it's not like I haven't had the opportunity to check her over.
"It's possible," I didn't begrudge her the insight. Well, yes, I
did, but it was a grain of sand on the shore of our
accumulated struggles. And it was fairly clever.
Iolokus III: Vix te Agnovi 7/20
The mistress which I serve quickens what's dead,
And makes my labors pleasures. O, she is
Ten times more gentle than her father's crabbed;
And he's compos'd of harshness.
Miranda woke at 3:23, demanding a feeding. She'd been
sleeping through the night recently, but I suspected that all
the strangers around her were disrupting her equilibrium.
Possibly she was picking it up from me.
I trotted down to the kitchen, noting on my way that Scully
had won the battle with Zippy and was stretched out on the
couch, taking up about half its length. The light blue blanket
had slid down past her breasts; she was sleeping in a long-
sleeved sweatshirt and I saw the collar of a T-shirt peeking
out around her neck.
I remembered her sleeping in big flannel nightshirts that
exposed her bird-delicate collarbones, and later, entirely
without hesitation, in the nude even when I put my boxers
and shirt back on. Standard response to sexual assault, I
reminded myself, and was surprised to find a new vein of
self-hatred. I thought that lode was mined out, but Scully's
always inspirational.
I hurried to get the formula heated up, stopping the
microwave just before it pinged so that I wouldn't wake
Scully. I took Miranda over to the table and sat down,
staring blankly at the pictures stuck to the refrigerator, the
ones of Miranda and I, Emerson, Aileen, and Samuel at
Samuel's bris not long ago. My favorite picture was of
Miranda and Samuel sitting in front of Emerson's big
fireplace, looking at each other with more skepticism than I
could believe coming out of their little bodies.
The caption, in Emerson's neat handwriting, was "I thought I
was the only baby in the world."
At this point feeding Miranda was more a response of my
autonomic nervous system than a conscious process, and it
took me a while to notice that her Highness had fallen asleep
in my arms again. She went back in her crib, bare of pillows
and stuffed animals to cut down on the risk of SIDS, and
slept.
Scully was thrashing against a nightmare when I went to put
the bottle in the sink. Flailing as ineffectually as a sick kitten
against the tangled blanket, she keened and her eyes rolled
beneath closed lids as I approached.
I wanted to believe that she deserved to suffer, that her
demons were proportionate to her demonic nature. Like
many things that I want to believe, I was having increasing
difficulty with this claim.
Her eyes popped open as suddenly as a camera flash and I
was trapped in the glare.
She ground herself against the pillows as if she could
disappear through the thick padding through force of will.
One hand flailed for her gun on the side table, and I reached
out to stop her. If she was going to shoot me again I wanted
both of us in our right minds.
"Mulder?"
I nodded and pointed at my unmarred neck.
"Did I wake you?"
I didn't like that question, it suggested that she'd been loud
enough to wake other people before. My nightmares were
silent, she'd slept through plenty lying in the same bed with
me, but hers apparently had a soundtrack. "Late-night
feeding," I said. She nodded, accepting.
I should have left. Instead I reached out and pulled the
blanket back up to her neck. "Were you dreaming about
Jason?" I could really get sick of my passion to know the
truth, if I thought about it.
She shook her head and smiled the way homeless drunks
do when they ask you for money, rueful and mocking and
self-hating all at once. "Baylor, actually."
What? Surely she didn't have bad dreams about *his* death,
of all we'd seen; most of my brothers had died worse deaths.
Then I thought again about her pitiful struggles with the
blanket and understood a little better.
"That happen a lot?"
She knew what I was really asking--is it all of us who do this
to you? She gave me the same smile as she brushed sweaty
strands of hair off of her smooth white forehead. "I'm hoping
my subconscious gives me some time away from George on
the theory that he's made his quota for the month."
I wanted to ask her if I was featured in her late-night horrors,
I needed to know, but I didn't want to be the villain of the
night. I also didn't want Emerson bonking her, even if it was
only in her own mind.
The thought must have been plastered across my face like a
handbill, because she gave me another pained smile and
pushed her hair away from her cheek, making the bruises
show inky black on the paperwhite of her throat.
"Sometimes. Apparently my id isn't concerned with your
ego."
"Scully, " I started, "you know I would give almost anything
for all of this not to have happened to you."
"Almost?" she asked in a slightly sharp tone.
There was a time when I wouldn't have qualified the
statement.
"Miranda. I wouldn't sacrifice her for anything."
Curling herself up into a half-seated position, she pulled up
her legs and I sat in the space on the sofa that was still
warm from her body. Despite what she had just said, she
leaned against me, boneless and limp as the Mooselet. I
could smell the soap on her skin and the dark vanilla and
almond smell that was only her. God I missed this, the silent
intimacy that had evaporated like perfume oil when we had
started sleeping together. We'd gotten the physical world
and all those pleasures, and lost everything else.
"Is she your salvation?" Scully asked in a dreamy voice, her
head drooping like a daffodil with no water against my
shoulder.
"Yes."
"That's good," she said in the singsong tone of one already
asleep.
When her breathing deepened and she drifted away again, I
eased her back against the pillow, and I couldn't stop myself
from smoothing her hair as I did so before I made my guilt-
drunk way back upstairs and fell into bed alone.
****
The pain in my neck was fighting a battle with the crick in my
back for my attention. Morning sunlight batted at my face
and I groaned as the events of the day before ran a slow-
motion replay through my mind. I smelled coffee and that
brought me off the sofa like Dracula arising from his coffin.
Stumbling into the kitchen, I expected to see any number of
people, Mulder, Zippy, Warwick, even George, but I was not
expecting the BLONDE. And she was blonde, blonde down
to the tuft of pubic hair that was coyly peeking out from
underneath the bikini panties small enough to be an
afterthought. I swallowed hard in my hurtful throat and tried
to concentrate. Tall, leggy, buxom, and stuffed in a tight
white tank top that let her nipples show, she was everything
that I wasn't, oozing sex appeal like the warm smell of
coffee. Turning, she smiled and handed me a mug of coffee.
"You vant sugar?"
She had an exotic accent and straight teeth.
"No," I croaked and retreated to the table.
"You are Scully? I am Ingveld," she said by way of
introduction.
I nodded and drank coffee.
"Vox said that you had been strangled at the throat," she
said, sitting in the chair across from me, with one foot on the
seat and her arm around her leg, casual and nonchalant
even though I could probably have given her a gynecological
report from the view.
Vox?
Oh God. Murky waters ran clear. He was sleeping with her.
The burning in my chest had nothing to do with George or
the coffee.
"You look like death not cooked. Come and we'll fix you up
a bit," she stood up and pulled on my sleeve like a child.
Since I didn't have anything better to do, I followed her.
Downstairs, into the realm of Warwick, where himself was
glued to a computer monitor bigger than my television set,
with headphones attached to a Discman. He had become
one with the machine and lines of multicolored code moved
across the black void as fast as his hyper-kinetic hands
could type them. As she passed, Ingveld trailed her hand
over his shoulder with telling intimacy. So unless she was
sleeping with both of them (and you never could tell with
these Marlene Dietrich types) it was Warwick whose name
she mispronounced in the throes of passion.
The "mother in law" apartment consisted of a big living room
complete with TV, sofa and computer, a separate entrance
and a big bedroom which I followed Ingveld into. Like every
other room in the house, the apartment had been decorated
in Ikea showroom. Warwick's bedroom was a mess, clothes
dripping off the furniture and soda cans on the bedside table.
Ingveld opened a black duffel bag and hauled out a plastic
zippered bag.
"You go take a shower, and I will give some clothes to you
and the marks we will make vanish."
The bathroom attached to the bedroom was clean, at least,
even though there were wet towels hanging all over the
place. I found a dry towel, finished my coffee, and locked
the door behind me before I got under the hot spray of water.
Emotional fallout from Jason's rape had been extreme, and I
still locked the bathroom door even when I was alone in my
own apartment. I also could no longer stand flowery-
smelling soaps and shampoos. Fortunately, Warwick and
Ingveld were heavily into herb shampoo and deodorant soap
so I could wash without feeling sick. Bundled in a towel, I
stuck my head out of the bathroom.
"What have you got?" I asked.
Ingveld passed me another tank top and bikini panties. I
almost laughed. I'd been dying of cancer, sick unto death
with chemotherapy drugs and I'd still worn a bra. Then
again, my life hasn't been without regret and wearing a bra
too much was one of the things that I could fix with little
disruption to my life or anyone else's. When I had struggled
into the underwear and we stood in the bedroom like two
textbook illustrations of different female body types, Ingveld
handed me a green wrap skirt that probably bared her
slender calves. It made my lower half look like a sofa -- a
sofa with ten little toe-worms wriggling out from underneath.
"You know," I said, looking sadly into the mirror, "I think I'd
better try whatever clothes Zippy brought me."
She grinned and went over to the side of the room. She must
have brought my suitcase over while I'd been in the shower.
I really wanted to dislike her, but upon further consideration I
decided that she was way too happy and aboveboard for
Mulder to fuck. Also she saw my point about the skirt, didn't
protest, just got out a pair of jeans and handed them over.
"Maybe we do something about your neck?" she said after I
had slipped into a pair of jeans that had been fashionably
tight and now were fashionably baggy.
My throat and neck still hurt, but it wasn't anything that a
judicious application of Ibuprofen and cough drops couldn't
handle. The external signs of my near-George experience
could also be dealt with. God knows I'd covered up bite
marks from George's good twin for almost a year. While
Ingveld dabbed Clinique Pale Ivory and a lot of pressed
powder on my throat, I tried not to flinch at her touch and, for
the most part, I succeeded. Next we covered up the broken
blood vessels on my face, already purple with death.
Eventually the cells would blacken and dissolve into the
surrounding tissue. For the moment artificial pigment would
have to do.
Shaky, wearing more makeup than the average clown, and
violating most of the FBI dress codes, I pulled a blazer on
over my jeans and shirt and went to look for my partner.
Zippy and I drove out to Quantico to surround ourselves with
signs of law enforcement activity. I had to remember that
there were plenty of hard-working people on my side. Still, I
knew first-hand, or first-neck really, that the Hoover building
basement wasn't all that safe, and I sat facing the door as I
reviewed the autopsy reports at my borrowed desk.
"I think we've got another," Zippy said, coming into the
stifling little room I had appropriated for us. He'd been pulling
all the reports on recently discovered bodies in Virginia,
Maryland, and the District, looking for any that might match
George's pattern.
I reached over and took the printout. Victim characteristics
matched somewhat: her teeth identified her as Charleyne
Davis, physician's assistant, four foot eleven, missing since
last week when she'd disappeared after the end of her shift
at Northeast Georgetown at four a.m. He'd always done
nurses in the past, but he might be branching out further into
the health care profession, especially now that hospitals
were hiring all sorts of non-nurse personnel to do caretaking
tasks. But Davis was not just a PA; she was also African-
American, which put her at the outer reaches of plausibility
for George who as far as we knew had to date stuck to the
standard intraracial pattern.
If this one was George's he was trying some new techniques
to coincide with his new set of victims.
"I'll call and have the bones sent over," I said. "Was any flesh
recovered, anything preserved in the refrigerator or
something like that?"
Zippy nodded. "It was in the garbage disposal. It got--
clogged--because the UNSUB just kept, um, stuffing bits.
Nothing in the fridge though."
"Well, I guess whoever did this wasn't big on leftovers."
Davis's hyoid bone had been fractured, suggesting death by
strangulation. There were no fingerprints in the cheap rented
apartment where the killer had left her remains. He'd had
time to clean up, didn't have to leave in a hurry, because
even though his neighbors had called the super to complain
about the strange, sour smell coming out of his apartment
the place was too much of a pesthole to expect rapid action.
He'd killed her and hacked her up, but I didn't think the
cutting was part of the fantasy, just a necessary practicality
to fit her body, by parts, into the pot. This was speculation
because there wasn't actually anything bubbling on the stove
when the cops finally came along. But over the hacksaw
marks where bone had been cut there were the distinctive
signs of "pot polish" -- shiny marks made when bones are
boiled and strike each other and the sides of the pot as they
bubble. And the crime scene photos included images of the
kitchen. I didn't even know that pots *came* in that size;
what could they possibly be good for except to serve
mankind?
The bones had been stacked neatly on the cheap fiberboard
coffee table when the super had finally entered to check
things out, the skull and the two tibia bones displayed in a
pirate's cross in front of the rest. The soggy muscle and fat
trapped in the pipes was not very helpful; any trace evidence
had been washed away, and it was impossible to tell, given
the condition of the flesh by the time it was found, what he'd
used to cut her up or whether his technique indicated any
past experience with butchery.
There was no forensic evidence to suggest he'd eaten her
flesh, but there was nothing to indicate the contrary either.
We couldn't even be sure it was George, at least not until
Mulder gave his oracular opinion.
First I had to deal with Mulder's superior. She sent a
message up to the surface, she wanted to see us instantly,
and we took the elevator down into the depths of the bomb
shelter that was the ISU.
I'd heard about Julie Graff for years. Meeting her was even
more impressive. She had blue peregrine eyes and a nose
to match, a wild swirl of hair piled precariously on her head,
and a no-nonsense brown pantsuit that screamed "authority
figure." If there'd been more women like her at the Academy
I wouldn't have had so much trouble with male father-
substitutes.
I wanted to genuflect but I thought she might take it as
mockery.
"You look like a college student," she said. "Don't you own a
pantsuit? Don't answer that. Instead, explain why this case
should be in your bailiwick," all rattled off before we were
able to sit down.
Zippy glanced at me and then made his own attempt to
answer. "George Naxos is part of an X File that's been open
for the past four years, and active for over six months."
"You're counting Agent Scully's disappearance as part of the
same X File, I presume," she laid her hands flat on her
mahogany desk, "I've read the reports on Roush, I know
Mulder's twisted little version of Family Feud. What I don't
understand is why this serial killer should of his own merit be
an X File. Surely you don't think Naxos's actions are being
dictated by some shadow conspiracy or a shipful of little
green men?"
"Gray," I muttered.
"What was that, Agent Scully?"
"Ma'am, there's evidence that George Naxos's pattern is
somehow related to the trauma that Agent Mulder
experienced as a child. The unexplained transmission of
sensation and information between twins, even when other
crimes are involved, has historically been the business of the
X Files. If you'll look at the cross-references in the file--"
"Fuck the cross-references. You think you'll be able to catch
this monster faster than my profilers because you've got
more experience with spoon-benders? Zipprelli, I remember
you were an okay profiler but you've been away from the
game too long."
"Ma'am," I tried again, "the X Files represent a legitimate
area of inquiry, we've survived numerous levels of review by
demonstrating that our methods work. Agent Mulder himself
has noted the disparities between George Naxos's pattern
and what one would otherwise suspect. And the particular
change he's demonstrated after being freed in Texas--the
switch from graveyards to playgrounds--is highly
suggestive."
She wasn't buying it. This was worse than trying to convince
Skinner of something. And I wasn't nearly as inured to
skepticism as Mulder had been. "Suggestive of what, Agent
Scully?"
"Of some sort of -- spiritual -- connection between Mulder
and Naxos, something that will draw him to Mulder. You
could call it psychic," the look on her face suggested she'd
rather call me a cab, "but I don't think the name is terribly
important. If Naxos also committed the latest murder we're
investigating, then his pattern is more complex than just
replicating Mulder's trauma. He is fixated on Mulder, that
seems clear, and I'm involved whether anyone likes it or not.
We can catch him. But we could certainly benefit from
whatever expertise the ISU could spare."
She stared at me. "Mike, would you excuse Agent Scully and
me for a minute?" He nodded and patted my shoulder as he
left.
I heard the lock snick in the door and she leaned forward,
eyes whirling like diamond-tipped drills. "I know you fucked
Mulder up but good, and that doesn't make me too inclined
to trust you on this. But for some reason he seems to think
that you're right, you'll have a better chance to catch Naxos
than anyone else. And I do trust him. So -- this is still your
investigation, for the moment. You're welcome to consult
with Ralph Williams, he's one of our best up-and-coming kids
and he thinks Mulder walks on water. If you damage Mulder
any further, though, I'll have your badge and the next job you
have will be as ME in Bumfuck, Idaho."
I blinked. "But I already told them the benefits weren't good
enough."
She smiled for the first time. "Then play nice, Agent Scully,
and you won't have to call them again."
After that I needed a breather, so I took the autopsy report
out to Mulder's house. It was Warwick's turn to stand guard.
Given his druthers he wouldn't have let me in, but I pushed
past him.
Mulder was in the family room, rubbing Miranda's stomach
as "Beauty and the Beast" played. The Beast was asking for
advice about how to woo Beauty. Sure, I take all my love
advice from household appliances. Then again it was no
stranger than some of our X Files.
He looked up and quickly scanned around for Zippy, his face
taking on that pinched panicked look when he realized that
we were the only adults in the room.
"We need your opinion on whether this girl is one of
George's victims," I said. "If she is we need to rethink things,
he's getting more exotic."
He read the first few lines. "Boiled her?"
I nodded, then had to say "yes" out loud when he didn't look
up.
He shuddered and closed the file.
"Mulder?"
"I'll read it later, okay? Yes, it's George."
"How do you know?"
"It's...consistent." Miranda whined and he absent-mindedly
began to rub her stomach again. I squatted down and held
out a finger, which she grabbed in her fat little fist and pulled
to her mouth.
Mulder separated us gently but firmly. "Leave that alone," he
told her, "you don't know where it's been."
"I wear two pairs of gloves when I do autopsies," I said,
knowing that I'd opened myself up wider than the Grand
Canyon.
"That's not what I meant."
I rocked forward a little; you'd think that being prepared
would help a little, but it didn't. He flashed me a quick look
and I could tell that he wished he hadn't.
Arms wrapped around my knees, I spoke again. "What's
consistent?"
"He's looking for...fulfillment. When he got out he returned to
the old pattern, with a few significant differences of course,
but mostly it was the same thing--the same victims, the
same kind of location. But that didn't work for him anymore,
the rape didn't give him enough of them, he needed more.
And he thought maybe if he possessed one more fully, if he
*consumed* her, he'd have what he wanted."
Miranda babbled under his slow-moving hand. He'd reduced
me to similar gibberish in the past, but she had a better
excuse.
"So you think he did eat the flesh."
"Parts, anyway. But I doubt it helped him any."
Miranda looked up at me and extended her hand again.
Apparently Mulder hadn't managed to poison her against me
entirely. He'd probably need another few months at least.
Tentatively, I put my index finger in the center of her palm
and pushed. She giggled.
"Helped?" I asked. "In what way?"
"He wants to consume the women, to make them
permanently a part of him, to fill that nurse-shaped hole that
his mother left in his psyche. By necrophiliac sex acts and
then the mutilation and cannibalism of the latest two killings,
he's seeking greater and greater commitment and
satisfaction from the victims."
Miranda grabbed my finger in both her cold wet little hands
and squealed as though Mulder and I were talking about
baseball scores. It made me wonder what she was going to
grow up thinking was normal conversation.
"The switch away from an outdoor setting indicates that this
is a personal quest for him and not simply based on his
relationship to me--he's homing in on me, that I'm not
contesting, but he's also trying to resolve his own issues. I
think you're right that he figured out the connection between
the two of us when he was being held in Texas. Either Jason
told him or there was something more paranormal at work--
and now he wonders whether he hasn't been just playing out
someone else's scene for the past twenty-odd years. He
thinks that's why the previous murders didn't give him
everything he needs. He thinks that if he tries something
that's entirely personal to him, he might find what he wants."
"So where do I fit in the pattern? If he's rejecting the
connection with you, why steal your ID and come after me?"
Mulder bowed his head. "Maybe he thinks he can find
himself by going through me and coming out the other side,
so to speak. Did he...say anything...during the attack?"
'The attack,' what a nice neutral way to put it. I shook my
head. But -- I really should tell him as much as I could stand
to admit. "It wasn't Zippy that stopped him. He had plenty of
time. When I started to pass out -- he eased up. His hands
were around my neck, but there was no pressure. He
looked...confused." Actually he'd had the unhappy puppy
look that Mulder always got when some piece of evidence
disappeared or a witness refused to admit what she'd really
seen. I could interpret that expression as easily as a tox
screen: George hadn't gotten what he wanted from
strangling me. The question was -- did he know what he
wanted? And how could we keep him from getting it?
I looked over at Mulder but he was gone. He was still sitting
on the rug but he'd pulled himself into whatever interior
space that gave him access to things which would send
others running screaming into the street. No wonder he'd
always had such a gift for seeing into the dark corners of
bloody minds, he was a tenth segment of an entire dark
chain of DNA. Miranda but down on my finger and I jumped
as her sharp little gums sliced into my flesh.
God.
"She's starting to teethe," Mulder pointed out, "that's entirely
natural for her stage of development, she isn't channeling
George."
I felt a stab of jealousy that Miranda's merest twitch was
enough to bring Mulder back from the nebula of his mind,
when I couldn't do it with a bullhorn.
"You've become an expert on child care?"
"I do my homework."
Miranda log-rolled over onto her stomach and began to kick
her feet and grab at the carpet, looking like a pink polka-
dotted baby seal with a thin string of drool attaching her to
the rug.
"Is she - normal?" I asked.
"Developmentally and physically she's on the high end of the
natural scale. She does things a month or two early. She
said 'Da' the other day, but hasn't bothered to do it in front of
witnesses. But that's par for the course in my life."
"Brain development? CAT scans, blood work, genetic
testing?" I pressed.
He looked up at me with eyes the color of a forest floor,
moss and leaves, hiding things underneath.
"Didn't have them done. She's just getting standard baby
care and testing."
"Don't you want to know?"
"Know what, Scully, that she's got a time bomb lurking in her
genes and will die horribly in a few years so that I have lots
of time to make myself not care? I can't do that. I don't give a
damn if she's going to morph into a Reticulan, if that
happens we'll just shop for clothes that go well with gray
skin."
"But if there are--problems--they might be correctable," I
whispered. Miranda nodded at me solemnly, agreeing.
"The only people who have the knowledge and technology to
help if Miranda has problems would demand too high a
price."
Point for him. I'd thought the same thing, watching Emily die.
It terrified me--knowing that you could love a child more than
anything else, be prepared to sacrifice everything for it, and
be a better parent than Dr. Spock and things could still go
wrong. Even if there were no genetic landmines in Miranda's
future, she could just as easily run out in front of a truck
when she learned to toddle. She could be dumb, she could
be shy and picked on in school, she could be President;
there was just no way to tell.
I rolled her on her back, which evoked much delighted
squealing. "You know, when you get to be a big moose you'll
be able to do that on your own."
"What did you call her?"
Mulder's tone made me snap my head up to look at him,
stretching the swollen flesh on my neck so that I winced.
"Don't tell me, that's some sort of ethnic insult and I've
offended your lineage. I didn't mean anything by it--"
"Believe me, nothing you could say could offend my lineage.
It's more likely that the moose will sue you for slander. But
did Warwick tell you--?" I just stared at him,
uncomprehending. "Why moose?"
I shrugged. "I dunno, just seemed appropriate."
This earned me one of Mulder's more inscrutable evaluative
looks.
***
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