t h e m o n e y s h o t t e x t

TITLE: "The Money Shot"
AUTHOR: Ensign Feldman
CLASSIFICATION: UST, H
RATING: NC-17
SPOILERS: Season Six
DISCLAIMER: Not mine, though I like to play with it now and again.
KEYWORDS: espresso; plastique; feng shui
SUMMARY: They've seen each other naked. They've seen each other dead.
There has to be a reason why they haven't gone to bed.
FEEDBACK: [email protected]

Part One.

"She is watchin' the detectives
When they shoot shoot shoot shoot,"
-Elvis Costello

Scully had been dreaming a lot lately about sex. Intercourse,
coitus, congress, a good long slow hard fuck.

Now, even though her lifestyle was a solitary one as far as romantic
attachments were concerned, Scully was not one to ignore her physical needs.
She treated herself to luxurious toiletries and fine bed linens. She did
not deny herself the sensual pleasures of food or wine. She even
brought variety into the bedroom on occasion, even if she was the only
one there to appreciate it. You can't be everything to everyone, but
Scully at least tried to be most things to herself. Recently, apparently,
it was obviously not enough. Perhaps she had gotten into a rut. Perhaps
this mid-thirties sexual peak nonsense was more than a myth. Perhaps it was
this case.

Considering the unhappy fact that her stint with the Domestic Terrorism Unit
had cost her three pairs of shoes and a favorite jacket, this case was so
far her favorite: a low key bomber who only seemed out to inflict a little
property damage. They had been brought onto the team rather late in the
game, though, when the fourth bomb was found unexploded. Someone had
decided that Mulder's special touch was called for.

Mulder had assumed his casual diplomat tone, "I'm flattered that
you brought us all the way out here from our sold-out world tour of the
sticks, grateful actually, but it looks like things are well in hand.
We'd be glad to help with the legwork, but I'm not sure why you've
asked specifically for us."

Special Agent Graver spoke as if constantly lampooning an old
professor, grandiose yet self-mocking, "Well, Agent Mulder, we ahh,
well, we figured that you might be uniquely qualified to help us figure
this guy out, what with your profiling skills and ahh," S. A. Graver
shrugged his massive shoulders and proffered a folder, "Here."

Scully opened it and paused at the first photo, "Hmm,"

"That's the last one, we found it two days ago. A very simple
but quite destructive device, our team disabled it as soon as it was
found."

"This isn't plastique, is it?" she half closed the file as Mulder leaned
over to look.

"Ahh, no. The outside shell is made from colored Fimo, a type of craft
polymer which is hardened by baking. We'd identified the
material from shards collected at the first site. The wiring and
explosive material were layered inside the device and the detonator was
housed in the, ahh, scrotum part of it."

Mulder grabbed the file out of her hands, shucked the manila
folder like so much shell and began to chew over the evidence.

S. A. Graver rose and gestured to the tiny espresso machine
perched atop his filing cabinet, "Coffee?"

Scully nodded, intrigued by his huge hands manipulating the
demitasse cups and spoons.

Mulder was convinced that the only real deviation from the
standard bomber profile was the addition of artistic and/or sexual
frustration, which may be the source of the bomber's destructive
agenda. Perhaps a severe lack of social skills or a disfiguring
injury, although the precipitating event may have been ten to fifteen
years previous to when the bombing began. The bomber seemed to go out of
his way to inflict only property damage, a pattern that may or may
not continue, but which suggested that the bomber would likely have no
prior arrests and therefore no prints on file.

S. A. Graver was unimpressed, "But what about the, well the
distinct nature of the device?" He gestured to the photos that he had
tacked back onto the corkboard behind him.

"A basic primate gesture; any dominant primate will mount a
subordinate one. No penetration, just a few quick thrusts like a kiss
hello. The original 'fuck you', so to speak. Bombers are classically
passive aggressive, like the guy who keys your car in the parking lot. He
may be angry about his sexuality or lack thereof."

S.A. Graver's response was to sip at his espresso.

Scully set cup onto saucer, "Can I look at the actual device?"

The lighting in the property room was too blue, it washed out the
skin tones and made the purple blush of the tip look sad and sallow.
Scully was even more impressed with the workmanship in person, in fact,
it was too good.

"Gentlemen, I think this may've been done from a cast."

S.A. Graver folded his hands, and cleared his throat with a neck-stretching
twist of the head, "What makes you say that?"

"Look here, there's a clear indication of a circumcision scar,
yet there's been no effort to replicate the change in skin tone that
usually occurs between the scar and the glans."

"Penis critique, Scully?"

"It just seems that if the bomber were going for realism, that's a pretty
obvious gaff. If he was working from a live model cast-most likely
himself-he'd take the opportunity to correct any perceived flaws."

Mulder nodded, "Perfectionism. I should have seen it in the way the wiring
was done to follow the veins."

Graver dispatched them to Detroit to follow up a lead on a
product called Jell-O Genitals, a kit with which one could make a food-
safe Jell-O mold of one's genitalia, and which Mulder had 'once saw an
ad for'. S. A. Graver had congratulated Mulder's unique spin on the
case, although he was quick to point out that her own astute
observations had been elemental as well. The feeling that this was
some preposterous joke being played out on them had disappeared when their
flight from Ronnie Reagan to Detroit Metro had been booked.

Nobody goes that far for a gag. Right?

"Baby got goin' on a southern train, you know
Fired up pistons drivin' below
And the whole vibration, seat upholstery
Silky underwear, oh conductor let's roll!"
-Liz Phair

In REM sleep the voluntary muscles exhibit complete atonia; the body
lays paralyzed, but the activity of the brain is much closer to someone
awake than asleep...

Scully had wanted a change of scenery, and Missy had been deep in her feng
shui phase. It had taken most of the afternoon to rearrange the furniture
in her apartment, two small women shoving each piece with sheer force of
will. Really, Mulder should have tutored under Missy, since she'd couched
each suggestion in terms of utilizing space or improving the traffic flow
pattern. It was only when Scully was calling in the pizza order that she
saw the big sister smirk, the one that told her that yes, we've not only
created a nice space for conversation in this living room, but also moved
your couch off of the dragon. She'd even tried to feng shui Mulder, "This
isn't a slam on your job, but I think that man's a mirrored ceiling and five
padded walls."

In retrospect, she shouldn't have told Missy about that videotape he'd left
in the vcr.

Dreaming the memory took mere seconds, a cleansing of the palate before
richer, more luscious fare was served. In retrospect, she shouldn't have
watched that videotape left in the vcr.

Scully came awake suddenly, just in time to see a thirty foot
Uniroyal Nail Resistant Tire (complete with seven foot nail, rampant)
pass by on the right, though it didn't fully register through the post-nap
disorientation. She often had erotic dreams, but rarely on-
duty. They needed to finish this case soon. In the side mirror
she saw that her face was still flushed, and she glanced at Mulder to
make sure she hadn't been caught. Oh look, she caught him.

Mulder had a thumb crooked into his right nostril. Scully
watched as he expertly flicked the detritus out the window and
proceeded to the left nostril, fingers fanned out and pinky cocked like
he was taking tea.

"Admirable technique--"

Mulder very nearly hid the startle by changing lanes, muttering
to himself about potholes.

"--the use of the thumb creates plausible deniability if you're
caught."

"I had an itch."

"Halfway to your brain?"

"Don't take your nose envy out on me."

Her eyebrows were untranslatable. She turned her eyes to the road and
ignored the half-remembered flashes of being pressed and thrust against a
soft white wall, slicked with sweat, his scent penetrating her very skin
like heat, rust and chestnut hair blending in reflection above. She wasn't
really attracted to him, not really; not after he'd opened his mouth. But
she couldn't help but perceive him as a sexual being, possessing that
specific thrilling menace of 'perfectly able to fuck you'. She didn't
breath through her nose when she was too close to him, she didn't want to
take in his scent. When she was cooped up in the car with him, she tried to
let it pass into and out of her lungs without saturating any nerve endings
in her nose or her brain, she tried to think of it as something to be
endured, like corpse smell.

She dialed up the AC.

Part Two

Their first interview was with Kermit Kaydaug; respected member
of the business community, volunteer girls' high school tennis coach,
and on the side, the most successful Midwest mail-order distributor of
Jell-O Genitals.

He owned a hobby store, and his driver's license picture showed a cheerful,
well-cushioned face that was topped with a brush cut and devolved into a
dewlap below the jaw. When they pulled into the lot, they could see him
through the windows of the store. He was a huge man, in the way that the
King of Tonga is huge, in voluminous sky blue shorts and tee shirt
accessorized with a candy necklace. He moved with an immense grace, looking
as if the QEII were docking behind the counter.

Scully thought of hippos running underwater, balletic and inevitable.

Mulder muttered under his breath as she passed him through the
door he held open, "It's like the end of 'Ghostbusters', only Ray
Stantz has just thought of a chubby baby."

Scully ignored him and approached the counter. "Mister Kaydaug? We're from
the FBI, we're here to ask you a few questions."

"I have answers. Bismarck, South Dakota. Three fish. And yes, you guys
*will* rot in hell for framing Leonard Peltier."

She doggedly continued, "Mister Kaydaug, it's about your mail order Jell-O
mold business. We need to ask you some questions about some of your recent
customers."

"I extend complete anonymity to all of my customers who pay for it."

"And those who don't..." She played the straight man to Mulder so often
that she walked right into it, really.

"We make arrangements. That's a separate business."

Since the standing arrangement between them was that Mulder dealt with the
smartasses, Scully backed away while he took over the
interview. If Mr. Kaydaug had started to cry, then Scully would have
tag-teamed back in. Since it looked like he still had happy baby face,
she was spared. Peering through the window that separated the hobby
store from a large gaming room, sparsely populated with pre-teens and
drifters at this time of day, she listened.

"HAT!!"

A boy of about thirteen slouched in from the back room, his lumpy hat and
lumpy physique combining to give the illusion of the sorrowful
lovechild of Gilligan and the Skipper.

"Hat, go get me my blue disk file."

From underneath the hat came a mutter, "But you said I had to
sort the cans and clean the bathrooms."

"And now you're getting me the blue disk file."

"So then I don't have to clean the bathrooms?"

"What, are you union? Go on already."

Hat trudged into the back once more. The interview recommenced.

Scully inspected a poster displaying some thirty-odd extremely cute cartoon
characters, apparently the arsenal in some card game for eight-year-olds.
Each character was labeled in Japanese kanji as well as English. She
especially liked 'Raticate', which despite it's hairless tail and bared
fangs was cute as hell. There was only one other person in the store.
Scully assumed that he worked there, as he was misting down a creepy little
green parrot in a cage by the window, "Excuse me,"

The tall blond man wore a beret with a jaunty little 'drug me'
pin, "Can I help you?" He had a caustic chipperness to him, like he
would have been just as happy to bury her as help her, which ever was
quicker.

She gestured to the poster and the packs of cards, "I was wondering
what 'Pokemon' is."

He knuckled his glasses back up his nose and sighed, "It's what
eight year olds are doing these days instead of playing doctor." He
flashed her a brilliant fake smile with a tip of the head.

"If ever a business suit held a secret," Mr. Kaydaug nodded
sagely, dewlap swaying hypnotically as he made a copy of his customer
list disk.

Mulder bobbed his head over the counter, "Excuse me?"

"I'll bet she even has you fooled, with that stiff 'n' serious
attitude. High kink." He nodded again, eyes narrowing, "Oh yeah, she's
high kink."

Mulder glanced back at Scully, who seemed to be making one of the
employees nervous with her stare, "Trust me, she's Holly Hobby at
heart."

The large man maintained his deliberate certainty, chuckling, "Holly Hobby
with a strap-on, maybe."

"Mister Kaydaug, I think you're first impression is misleading
you. Her place is bursting with pastels and floral prints. She lives
in the one apartment in the world with a cheery kitchen."

"Did you check all the drawers? Or just until you found the
panties?"

Strained silence.

Scully wandered back to her partner in time to see him grab a disk from
Mr. Kaydaug's chubby fingers.

"You've got a pair, don't you? Just admit it."

He was utterly casual as he pulled out his card and laid it on the counter,
"Call if you have any info."

As she followed Mulder out, she faintly heard the blond man
comment, "Hey Kermit, is it just me, or did he kinda look like a Jewish
Corey Hart?"

"Why can't I get
Just one screw
Why can't I get
Just one screw
Believe me I'd know what to do
But something won't let me make
Love to you,"
-Violent Femmes

It was forty five minutes before Scully had cracked Kaydaug's
filing system, only mildly annoyed that Mulder would've realized the
trick to it in minutes. There was no filing system. She proceeded to
organize the data into some semblance of order so that it could be
smelted for leads. Mulder was doing more interviews to get a sense of
Mr. Kaydaug, whether he might be a good prospect for suspect. Scully
felt that Kaydaug could never have done the molds on himself, due to
physical constraints. The candy necklace was disturbing, but nothing
they could actually charge him with.

Kaydaug's business files had yielded five good leads, which could be
checked further next morning. She'd already read through the latest JAMA
on the plane, so she sprawled on the motel bed and scanned the free cable
while waiting for her delivery Thai. She tried not to think about how
desperate it would be to whack off in this awful little room. Frustrated
yes, but not immune to ambience. What did the tv offer to distract
her...ahhh, the 'Real Sex' series on HBO.

At least it was ending. She hated the 'Real Sex' series, full of tattooed
people having sex in pretentious little ways. They should be grateful
they're getting it at all, some of them. She'd had more
attempts on her life since she got her tattoo than attempts to get into
her pants. Come to think of it, lately those two things seemed to only
come in matched sets, the salt and pepper of her daily life.

The more she thought about it, the more it seemed that whacking
off would be striking a blow against those unseen forces that conspired
to make waste of her life and her work; God she must be going through
another puberty to be rationalizing this way. Really, this room was
way too ugly to get naked in and that's that. Your food is almost
here. Don't even think about the showerhead at home.

Scully made sure her pants were buttoned before she answered the
knock, but Mulder's eyes were unfocused as he inhaled, "Spicy. Thai. Satay
Chicken?"

"Maybe." Perhaps a thorough picking is just part of the daily
care of such a nose.

Mulder followed her into her motel room, loosening his tie and
falling into the rickety chair by the rickety table, fingers shoved
into his eyes and pressing at the bridge of his nose. "I think
Kaydaug's clean."

"Not behind his knees. I don't think he can reach there."

The fingers stopped, "I'll forget I heard that if there's Satay
Chicken."

"Deal." Scully dug around the rickety table for the peanut
sauce, but not soon enough to miss Mulder neatly tearing the meat off
the wooden stick with his teeth. Ick-ick-ick-ick... "Find out anything
interesting?"

"Mister Kaydaug's nickname is 'Waders'."

"Waders? Like you'd wear flyfishing?"

"Yeah."

She sighed, "Why 'Waders'?"

"Cause that way you can tuck the back legs of the sheep in and
they can't get away."

"You can't be serious Mulder," Scully sipped incredulously from her ginger
ale, "you don't need candy necklaces for sheep."

That earned her a look from beneath his brow. They ate quietly
for a pace.

"You know why Will Kellogg invented Corn Flakes?" He began
casually.

She replied from around a rather mouth-filling piece of broccoli, "Hmmm?"

"The blandness would keep the kinder from self-pollution. The
theory was that spicy foods were overly stimulating to the nervous
system and likely to cause undue arousal. Such as Thai. Or that
nuclear ginger ale you're drinking, that would definitely rust the
chastity belt through."

He knows nothing. She chewed, swallowed, and chased it down
with the ginger ale which burned in her nose pleasantly.

"Then again, Will Kellogg also believed in coffee enemas-"

"Do you have a point?" She clipped a piece of bamboo shoot
between her chopsticks.

"Not really. Just free associating. I can smell the pepper flakes in your
veggie thing from over here is all."

"Right."

"So what's on the boob-tube?"

"'Orlando'. The boobs were earlier."

An "Ahh," of regret, "So what would you do if you woke up and
were the opposite sex?"

She was more surprised that Mulder had actually read or seen Orlando than
by the question, "Oh I don't know. Probably write my name in the snow."

"That's it?"

She pondered while she chewed, then nodded.

"Somehow I actually can picture Special Agent Scully, M.D.,
pissing in the snow like a stray dog."

"Such a poet." She finished her ginger ale and let out a burp to make her
brothers jealous. She'd always put them to shame in that department,
"Pardon."

Mulder nodded absently.

"Mulder, what would you do if you woke up female?"

"Easy. Multiple orgasms, twenty-four seven."

"If the words unspoken
Get stuck in your throat,
Send a treasure token, token,
Write it on a pound note, pound note"
-Adam & the Ants

Mulder was a gentleman. He had never gone through his partner's
personal belongings, with the exception of the few times he'd had to
bring clean clothes for her to check out of the hospital. Even then,
he had been quick and professional about it, going straight to the
drawers she'd specified and pulling out the first item he'd laid a hand
on in each. Well, the first thing that would match and looked
comfortable. A person needs all the dignity they can get on that
obligatory wheelchair ride out the hospital doors, after all. Okay, so
some of the drawers were pulled out a lot farther than absolutely
necessary, but as a connoisseur of lingerie he'd tried to put together
an appealing ensemble. No need to look like he'd just grabbed a
fistful of laundry. Kaydaug was wrong about that part; he hadn't felt
the need for a souvenir from a place he'd never been.

It was the pair by the tub that he'd found himself unable to
resist.

He'd been driving for hours on coffee and mild guilt, having
dragged them both across several state lines pursuing an obviously lame
but nonetheless intriguing waste of time case. It was two in the
morning when he pulled up to her building, but he followed her up to
her apartment because if he didn't unload the three gallons of recycled
coffee residing in his bladder, he'd certainly start to cry before he'd
even left her neighborhood.

So he's standing there taking a very satisfying, well-deserved
piss when he spots them. Laying against one clawed foot of the tub
where they'd apparently been thrown, presumably at bath time. There
was no thought process. He mechanically shook off, flushed, bent down,
balled the soft plum colored cotton in his hand and pocketed them. He
opened the bathroom door to see Scully's car-nap face, an imprint from
the door marking a red diagonal line down her cheek. She was close
to a pout.

"I thought you'd never finish." The brow furrowed and suspicion dawned,
"But I didn't hear you wash your hands."

"That's okay, your bathroom looked clean enough."

"Fine. But when you leave, I'd appreciate it if you'd open the
door with your feet."

"Will do."

Part Three

"Bottles and cans,
Just clap your hands,
Just clap your hands."
--Beck

The bad news was that although Domestic Terrorism almost never
required autopsies, there was a corpse waiting for Scully when they
checked in the next morning. Apparently "Hat" had dropped dead late
last evening during the course of sorting cans for deposit; one of the
other employees had discovered the body while kicking people out before
close. The good news was that the Wayne County Morgue was a typical
large metropolitan facility. Dingy, underfunded, often overflowing
with a backlog of bodies, but fully equipped with well-trained dieners. The
diener assisted the pathologist in performing the autopsy, another pair of
eyes and hands and arms upon whom the nastier jobs could appropriately be
shirked, such as rinsing out the intestines. When Scully arrived, the body
was already arranged on the table, with a block under it between the
scapulae so that the arms fell to the sides and the chest was fully exposed.
Scully knew she was going to enjoy this one.

She introduced herself to the young black man waiting for her,
shaking his hand. Russell was tall and slim, with a nice collection of
fat braids pulled back in a thick blue rubber band and a beautiful
nose, low and wide as a manta ray skimming the seafloor. His voice was
deep and smooth.

"Dr. Scully, I would usually have started by now so that you
could jump right in, but since this is for a federal investigation, I
didn't want to presume."

"I appreciate that, Russell. Let me suit up and then we can
start with the surface examination."

Russell was well-practiced and thorough, and didn't bat an
eyelash when she pulled out her own long sharp breadknife. He was a
pre-med student at Wayne State, and expressed great interest in her
technique.

"You're used to doing them solo, aren't you?" Russell asked,
tsking and taking the chalk from her fingers.

More than you know, Russell. "It just takes a little longer. Moving them
is really the hardest part, but once I began weight training it got a lot
easier."

"I'll bet," Russell scraped the chalk against the tray to remove the outer
surface which was too soaked with blood to write with, and recorded the
weights of the organs as she laid them in turn on the scale. Scully would
have to remember that; she usually broke the piece to expose the dry center
and wrote with that. During that case in Texas, she'd run out of breakable
pieces and had been reduced to smashing them with the handle of her
breadknife and using the fragments.   She was finishing up the last tissue
samples when her concentration was broken by that too
familiar low nasally voice too close to her left ear,

"Do-do-do,
We met
Do-do-do,
Last night
Do-do-do
Makin' love by the refrigerator light,"

She put down her breadknife, "What is that, Robert Goulet?"

"Wayne Newton, actually."

"Thanks a lot, man." Russell spoke over his shoulder as he
capped a large jar of formalin in which the brain was suspended on a
string, "Now I'm gonna be humming that all day."

"Hey," Mulder gestured with the forefinger of his coffee cup
hand, "It's not like it'll put off the customers."

"Sure as hell put off my girlfriend, though."

Mulder shrugged. "I take it by the morguesbord that you're almost through.
Any idea what killed this kid?"

"I'll have to wait for the toxicology work-up before I finish my report,
but I'd say ingestion of a large quantity of poison."

Mulder sniffed, then nodded to himself, "Floor wax stripper."

"Floor wax stripper?"

"Apparently the store had plans to open a snack bar. Due to a
delay, the equipment was kept in the storage room, along with bottles
of slurpy syrup, cleaning supplies, and an unplugged freezer full of
bloated packages of cookie dough. General consensus among the
employees is that Hat was helping himself to some slurpy but the
heartbreak of idiocy intervened."

Russell shook his head, "Another fine product of the Downriver school
systems."

"Downriver?" Mulder inquired.

"Yeah, those scenic trailer-monkey suburbs jammed between
Southeast Detroit and cow-tipping Oh-Hi-Oh. The kind of place where
the kids can't even spell KKK."

"Oh. Is that why Ted Nugent has his own morning show?"

Scully brought the conversation back on topic, "We still haven't ruled out
the possibility that this boy was intentionally poisoned."

"Perhaps. But why? I doubt his co-workers are involved in
anything heavier than shady business practices, and it's been
established that this was the kind of kitty who'd lick antifreeze off
the driveway."

Scully sighed. Another morning wasted disassembling a body of
non-evidence. Mulder tugged at a clean patch of surgical gown sleeve, "Come
on, let's get some lunch before we interview the hot prospects of the day."

The Thanos Grill was just getting over the lunch rush, and they
were seated right away in the loitering old men section. "So who's our
first hot prospect?"

Mulder slid a slim dossier across the table which the waitress
pinned down with two disturbingly large gyros. "One Wally Vincent,
twenty six year old college dropout and factory laborer. He has
connections to all four of the victims."

"Considering that the victims are Detroit Edison, Henry Ford Community
College, Time Warner Cable and the Tutti-Frutti Ice-Cream Truck Fleet,
I think about 25% of the Metro Detroit area are connected to most if
not all of the victims." Scully punctuated her statement with a crunch
of her dill pickle. Mulder had missed a spot shaving, which moved as
his jaw muscle flexed. "Is your gyro good?"

He nodded, the tip of his tongue flicking after a smear of yogurt sauce at
the corner of his mouth.

Hoo-ya.

Wally Vincent lived in an upstairs apartment in a house on Josef
Campau Ave., smack dab in the middle of Hamtramck.

Hamtramck is a mile and a half square Polish enclave in the midst of
Detroit, much like the Vatican is to Rome these days. Unlike the Vatican,
Hamtramck did not have fine Renaissance architecture and great Italian food.
Hamtramck's highpoints were a plethora of signs bearing such
unpronounceables as Wojtyla and Czopek, and a sausage plant with a large
neon fork sticking out over the road, kielbasa rampant.

The neighborhood was run down, borderline shabby. At the
address, an elderly lady was doing yardwork, stooping and prising out
dandelions with a long flathead screwdriver.

"Excuse me, we need to talk to Mr. Vincent."

The elderly lady squinted up at Mulder, adjusting the babushka
tied around her head. She wore a Metallica "Ride the Lightning"
concert tee-shirt and had about three teeth, "Heh?!"

Mulder notched his voice louder to match her shout, "Mr. Vincent, is he at
home?"

She dropped her head back to the task at hand, shooing him away
with quick flicks of the screwdriver, "Round back, upstairs."

The backyard was paved in broken concrete, and a set of creaky wooden
stairs led up the back of the house to a roofed porch. Mulder opened the
screen door and knocked. In the distance, an ice-cream truck played 'Turkey
in the Straw'.

After the second knock, the door opened a crack, "Yeah?"

"FBI, we're here to talk to Mr. Vincent."

A pause, then the door closed. A very soft, "shit," was barely
audible. The door opened again to show a rather doughy young man in
raggedy shorts and Pink Floyd tee shirt. It was terribly threadbare,
and Scully could just discern that one of the two businessmen shaking
hands was on fire. It was just like the poster in the Lone Gunmen's
bathroom. "Wally's not here, can I help you?"

"Do you know when Mr. Vincent will be back?"

"He's in trouble, isn't he?"

"We just need to ask him a few questions."

"I'll bet." The young man let them into the apartment, which
seemed to be where Guinness cans and porn went to die, "I'm Earl. I
don't live here."

Scully could see why Earl would want to establish that right off the bat.

"Any idea when Wally's coming back?" Scully asked, actively ignoring the
line of dildoes marching along in front of the paperbacks in the plywood
bookcase in the living room. A few of the models were also popular in DC
area adult novelty stores, ahem. As a rule Scully packed light, and she
wouldn't touch anything in this apartment without evidence gloves, and yet,
and yet. It must be getting bad if she was even starting to look at Mulder
as a sex toy.

"He's working until eleven thirty tonight." Earl raked his hand through
lanky brown hair and sighed, "I see you've noticed the prick collection."

Mulder waved a casual hand at a cheerfully nubby pink specimen,
"Wally's a bit of a connoisseur I take it?"

Earl winced, "His latest girlfriend is into DVDA."

Mulder nodded, seemingly speechless.

Scully waited until they were back on I-75 before asking, "So Mulder,"

"Yeah, Scully?"

"What's DVDA?"

His lips pressed together, "Double."

"Double-?" she prompted.

"Yeah, double-double. It very handily explains why Mr. Vincent
needed multiple sets of Jell-O Genitals."

It still took her a few seconds to parse, then "Ohhh, of course, double
vaginal, double-"

"Yep."

"You're blushing,"

"No I'm not,"

Well now he was.

"Little red corvette,
Baby you're much too fast,"
-Prince

REM sleep seems to be an essential part of processing short term
memories into long term storage, but whether dreaming is essential or
simply a by-product is unknown...

Scully shifted from first to second, tight bare nipples grazing
against the satin lining of her suit jacket.   With a primal
synchronization she orchestrated accelerator, clutch and gearshift
until she was up to 96 mph, all the while hearing his breath behind her
over the purr and growl of the engine. The hands that caressed her
jawline and throat, that reached down over her shoulder to unbutton her
jacket and roughly cup a breast were clothed in fine wool sleeves and
unpowdered latex gloves. One hundred and twelve miles per hour. The
bare flesh of the wrist was exposed as one hand reached further down, a
shock of hot silk against her stomach. The hand deftly undid the catch
of her pants and pushed the zipper down by means of invasion, slipping
under her panties and cupping her sex. One hundred and twenty two
miles per hour. That arm now pinned her back against the seat, a cool
smooth finger worming easily into her wetness as the other hand lifted
her chin back. Hot kisses trailed down, and the scent of his warm
breath and his skin enveloped her, and without resistance she went
where those precise little strokes were taking her, grasping his
flexing forearm like an anchor. The needle was buried past one hundred
and thirty.

Part Four

"Pink
Is like Red
But not quite,"
-Aerosmith

Though asleep, she had been twisting in dissatisfaction, breath coming
unevenly and quick. Her hair was mussed and fanned out, caught in the picky
grey upholstery of the headrest. The scullynaps on this trip had been
particularly troublesome. The frequency. The postural restlessness.

The vocalizations.

Whimpers mainly.

At first he'd thought they were nightmares, repressed trauma
from the Antarctic working its way out through dreams, even though she
firmly denied recalling anything after the ambulance, her memory picking up
again as he was shoving his socks onto her feet in the humid panic of the
cold damp ship. It was becoming more difficult to ignore the voice that
insisted otherwise, which pointed out that when Scully was frightened, she
didn't whimper, she got stridently angry.

And she certainly didn't sigh. Not like she did just now. Not
slowly like that, with a languorous tremble of deep satisfaction at the end.
Her cheeks were flushed, and the wispy hairs at her temples were wet down
with sweat despite the breeze from the air conditioner. She shifted, and
began breathing in a normal sleep pattern.

Mulder was fascinated and disturbed. He immediately wanted to
tell Frohike about it, to dispel some of the intimacy of witnessing
something so private, so vulnerable, so goddamned spellbinding. He
could suddenly claim a bit higher percentage of biblical knowledge,
another wedge of the Trivial Pursuit pie of actually bedding the good
doctor. Seen her naked? Check. Seen her come? Check. With turn-
about being fair play, it was only a matter of time before she caught
him roughing up the usual suspect.

He still didn't know what to do with the knowledge that she
shaved herself bare. Okay maybe waxed. After all she wasn't the kind
to forgo pain for beauty, as those shoes will attest. Not a poodle
trim job or even the little Hitler moustache treatment, but full-on
bare. That particular observation hadn't really sunk in until after the
frostbite had healed, but he was having more and more difficulty filing
these tidbits away, distributing these little firecrackers about his person
and walking through life without setting them off. Their sly mutual
attraction had always been, if not money in the bank, maybe money in a
Pacific Rim mutual fund. Always there if things get truly dire, but
sometimes a lot more or a lot less than what they'd each invested. How
about that for distancing and rationalization? Equating lust and loyalty,
trust and need with market fluctuations and laissez-faire capitalism.

They both snapped to attention at the trilling of her cell phone.

"Scully. Yes, sir." she neatened her hair as she listened, tugging her
collar closed.   "Well thank you, sir, I'm sure everyone is relieved that he
could be stopped before he hurt someone." She glanced at Mulder, "We'd be
glad to," her face still a little flushed, and she gave the shoulder belt
an odd look as she stowed her phone back into her jacket. "That was S. A.
Graver. A couple of agents from the Detroit office took Wally Vincent into
custody an hour ago. His work locker was apparently a cornucopia of
evidence. We just need to do a few background interviews and then write up
our reports."

Their wrap-up assignment first took them back to the hobby store of all
places. A dark-haired man in glasses stood behind the counter, his
ratty blue overshirt unbuttoned to reveal a 'Bettie Page Brand Red Ball
Gag' t-shirt. He had large square hands, but his gestures were spare
and fluid as he explained the monkey trap principle, apparently in
reference to Hat, "So then he reaches in to get his paycheck, but the
hole is just big enough to get his hand in,"

Kaydaug stopped sorting cards, "Yeah, so?"

"Well it's not big enough to pull his fist out, he has to let go of the
paycheck."

Kaydaug's face lit up in a beatific baby smile and he jiggled
with chuckling, "Ah, inbreeder's trick."

"Yep. He kept at it for twenty minutes before he saw us laughing through
the window."

The man with the beret had a new pin that proclaimed 'Jesus Hates Me', and
which seemed to illustrate his melodramatic sadness, "I'm gonna miss that
kid."

Kaydaug turned to the agents as they approached, "Hey, we're
thinking of having a Customer Appreciation Weekend, you know, hot dogs and
balloons for the kids, Jell-O desserts for one and all. What kind of fruit
should we put in them, do you think?"

The store erupted with simultaneous suggestions;

"Bananas!"

"Vodka!"

The man in glasses added, "Little bottles of Scope."

"Careful, Alan, they're looking for a bomber, and pinning it on
an asshole like you is probably pretty tempting."

Mulder seemed bent on ignoring Kaydaug, which involved peering into the
birdcage as if Enlightenment itself waited inside. The parrot meowed at
him.

Scully began the interview, "I can assure you that you are not under
investigation, Mr. Forbino, but we would like to ask you a few questions. Is
there someplace more private where we can talk?"

"Sure." Forbino led them into a back office, as Beret Man turned to
Kaydaug with a head flick toward Mulder and began, "Okay, so morph together
Ad Rock from the Beastie Boys, and the tall guitar guy from Blink 182,"

"Tell us about Wally Vincent."

"Ooosh," Forbino winced, cracking open his twenty ounce Mountain Dew, "He
and I don't talk very much anymore."

Mulder's ears perked up, "And why is that?"

"Well," Forbino took a swig, "It started when I walked in on him anally
fisting my girlfriend,"

It could only be described as an anxious titter, and Mulder seemed
embarrassed that it came out of his own mouth. He cleared his throat,
"Indeed?"

"Don't get me wrong, if anybody deserved it, it was her. One of those
suburban Drama class morons who thinks that Gilbert & Sullivan is high art
but won't soil herself with Monty Python."

"Ah."

"Exactly. So anyway, I didn't really mind, it saved me the
annoyance of actually having to break up with her, but he got all
pissed because I'd ruined what had been an all-afternoon project.
'Thanks a lot, Alan, she almost broke my wrist' and all that. Got all
psycho on me. Last I heard he was living in some shithole in Wixom."

The next stop was a retired construction foreman in Wixom, a wizened charmer
who seemed to have kept all his teeth by preserving them in tobacco juice
and coffee.

"Wally. I'll tell you what, he was a strange bird, that's for sure. Good
worker, but hard to talk to. And everyday he'd eat the same thing for
lunch, four Spam sandwiches, half a strudel, and a diet Frosh. Had a little
incident with a nailgun, heh-heh. Sucker got away from him and k-chunk!
Right through the back of his own hand, heh-heh. I had to get the pliers and
pull him free. He got a different job after that."

And after that came Walled Lake and a very earnest, very pear-shaped
apartment manager, "Well, when his lease came up for renewal we declined
even though he was a clean and quiet tenant and usually paid his rent on
time. The number of complaints we received about his Christmas decorations,
even though we'd spoken with him several times and sent letters as well, it
just wasn't worth it to go through that another year."

Scully felt like she was doing the leg work on one of those old-fashioned
60 Minutes character assassination pieces, "What was wrong with his
Christmas decorations?"

"Well, aside from having a manger scene consisting entirely of
inflatable love toys-even the manger animals, mind you-his Christmas
lights were multi-colored condoms filled with water, all tied on a
string hanging there frozen off his balcony. Our older tenants thought
he was a great guy, but the young people with families, you know,"

And lastly a grad student's squalid office in Ann Arbor, "He's still alive?!
I'd've thought for sure he'd've sucked a gun by now."

"You know how it is--
sometimes there's nothing to say
other than you're working hard
and trying to find some sleep here and there."
--Henry Rollins

REM sleep may have evolved separately from non-REM sleep; echidnas do not
exhibit any REM-like stage of sleep, even though they, like all
mammals, like to hunker down for a snooze...

"Subject is a Caucasian male, approximately 35 to 40 years of
age, height six foot one half inch, weight," Scully checked the gauge,
"One hundred eighty six pounds. Subject has brown hair, hazel eyes,
and no tattoos. There is a keloid scar on the left front shoulder,
over the deltoid, consistent with a fully healed gunshot wound. There
is a corresponding scar on the dorsal side of the shoulder, both appear
to be several years old,"

Langly leaned over the body, elbows and forearms digging into the insensate
meat of the belly and sternum, "But enough about Mulder, what about you?
What do *you* think of Mulder?"

Byers let the toe tag flutter back against the pale skin of the
instep, and came slowly around the end of the table toward her. "Um,
where should we begin?"

"Perhaps," Frohike bent his head solicitously, offering her an
ergonomic desk chair, "Perhaps you should sit down?"

Byers leaned back against the table, ankles crossed and hands
folded patiently while she took the seat.   Just behind him, Scully
could see that the body's genitals were covered by a pale pink linen
napkin, folded restaurant style like a little sail.

"He was of the opinion," Byers indicated the body with a tilt of the head,
"That the two of you were somehow linked, part of a group of souls that have
clustered together throughout the last few incarnations,"

Frohike frowned while he poured himself a cup of coffee, "I always thought
this dry-humping version of Buddhism was unbecoming, if
not sacrilegious."

Scully shifted her right foot onto the wheel casing of the chair and
crossed her left leg, "Recovery of memory through hypnosis is one of my
favorite examples of the soft science of psychology."

"Shit, he must be dead-"

"Langly, watch your mouth around the lady."

"-he didn't roll over or anything when he heard that!"

Scully saw that Langly had not only donned goggles and gloves,
but was zipping through the Y incision like a pro.

"Be that as it may," Byers continued, "We have a series of facts at our
disposal, and we only need your input in order to arrange them into a
satisfying whole."

Frohike held out a steaming mug of coffee, and Scully peeled off the two
pairs of sweaty latex gloves before taking it, "Thank you." It was dark and
sweet.

Langly called out, "Left lung!"

"Item one," Byers seemed to translate, "The fantasies."

"Let's be adults here," Frohike steadied the scale while Langly
weighed the organ in question, "We've all had fantasies about you, and
I'm sure you've returned the favor for a few of us."

Scully sipped at the coffee, "Agreed."

"And very often nothing is meant by it. It's a reflex action, an exercise
of libido and imagination stretching each other."

"Right lung!"

Byers cleared his throat, "Item two: the child."

"Watch it, Langly, you're getting it all over,"

"Sorry, he's getting kind of messy, that's all,"

Byers casually scooted a little farther toward the feet, "To have been
forced into a reproductive relationship with the Mengeles of our
age...Anyone could understand why you'd be a little leery of intimacy, a
little untrusting of even those closest to you."

"The heart looks a little small, doesn't it?"

Frohike joined Langly in peering into the chest cavity, "No
wonder he's always getting his ass kicked, if he's relying on a
lawnmower engine to do a V8 job."

Scully peered over the table from her seat, rolling the warm mug between
her palms, "Actually, you're probably used to seeing them on television, but
for tv they use beef hearts. Human hearts are somewhat smaller."

"Oh."

"It looks kind of fragile."

Scully shrugged, "It doesn't have to do very much; just beat constantly for
70 to 100 years."

"Item three: the partnership. You can trust this man to save
your life even to the detriment of his own. You can rely on his
unswerving dedication to uncovering the extent of the corruption that
endangers us all. You have never met anyone so passionate and, in his
way, professional about the work."

Frohike jumped his feet back from the scale, avoiding the slop of blood
that had missed the pan and was heading for his shoes, "But you can't let
yourself lean on a guy who's likely to hike up his skirts and go running off
to be trepanned when things get a little twisty."

Byers nodded, "Exactly. So what are we left with? The unanswered question
of all platonic relationships is 'when'. When will one of you just walk
away? When will the stakes be low enough for each of you to fully trust the
other?"

Frohike added, "When will you be so emotionally strapped as to
dig in the couch for the change that's been accumulating for years?"

Scully lifted her brows and pressed her lips together, shrugging as she
raised the coffee mug to her mouth again.

"Oh and, by the way," Langly reached into the chest cavity and
pulled out something purple which dangled dark and sodden from his
outstretched finger, "You may have wondered what happened to these,"

Frohike confided a coy smirk over the rim of his mug.

"Give the doctor some credit," Byers took out his pocket kerchief and wiped
at his hands, "She already knew about that."

She startled awake and pinned him with a wide-eyed stare.

"Don't worry," he munched laconically on his honey roasted almonds, "We've
only been in the air an hour, you can go back to sleep."

She continued to stare as if he were some lower primate sitting next to her
on the plane, masturbating or harassing the flight attendant.

"What?" Her only response was incredulity. He became defensive, "What?
You want my nuts?"

                                           roll credits

"Our love, and I mean this in a nice way, is like taking Lassie
to the desert, removing her teeth with a hunting knife, and shooting
her in the head with a gun that you and she built together."
-Bruce McCollugh

"Egon, this reminds me of the time you tried to drill a hole
through your head, remember that?"

"That would have worked if you hadn't stopped me."
-"Ghostbusters"