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Math 101 Classification: Humor, BadMath Fic, MSR Summary: Nobody loves a math geek like another math geek, especially if it's approached from the right angle. Dana Scully wasn't certain who she was most angry at. She glanced at the red taillights from the stopped traffic ahead of her and leaned on her car horn, letting her vehicle add auditory punctuation marks to dramatize her frustration. It didn't improve the situation, but it made her feel better. She turned on the radio for a traffic report. "Sluggish" was the word that Maxine from Trafficam Nine used to describe the cars crawling along the Beltway. She imagined lanes and lanes of slugs slowly oozing across the blacktop. The metaphor worked for her until she tried to imagine slugs changing lanes. They have no turn signal lights. ***************** Earlier that day, she walked into her office in high spirits. Since Mulder's recovery from his ordeal with the artifact-induced psychosis, there was an unspoken intimacy between them that electrified any room where they were together, always drawn to each other, like moths to flames, while everything else melted into insignificance. Proboscis wielding brain eater? Book em, Danno! The week between Christmas and New Years was an absurd mix of celebration, death and rebirth. From Nativity to Necromancy to New Beginnings. She was certain that this year WAS going to be different, and until today it had been. The kiss they shared at the stroke of midnight on New Year's Eve was an unscientific test of sorts, a compassless navigation of the murky waters which they both secretly wanted to explore. More recently, they threw caution to the wind and dove headfirst, without personal flotation devices, into territory that, though mesmerizing and invigorating, was still over both of their heads. Mulder received a large, unmarked box yesterday afternoon, but he temporarily ignored it, eager to finish the piles of paperwork on his desk that was a temporal chaperone standing between Scully and himself. He had to finish last year's expense reports before the auditors started hounding Skinner for them. Receipts were arranged in crumpled piles all over his desk. He glanced at Scully's neatly completed folder. "You're claiming $763.21 for dry cleaning?" he asked incredulously. Scully grabbed her folder and snapped it shut. "You better believe it, Mulder. Do you have any idea of how hard it is to eradicate stains left by digestive enzymes from a giant mushroom? Or blood from seventeen white blouses?" "You could buy NEW clothes for what it cost to have those things dry-cleaned," he said, gesturing towards the clothes she was wearing. "Not really, Mulder. The FBI only reimburses 50% of new professional clothing purchases. It's 100% reimbursement for cleaning clothes almost ruined in the line of duty." Mulder smiled deviously. "No one likes a math geek, Scully." Scully returned his smile and raised it one devilish eye twinkle. "Is that so, Mulder?" The point of the pencil Mulder was holding snapped and broke against the mostly uncompleted expense report form. He saw her devilish twinkle and raised it one sensuous pout. "Well, not ALL math is geeky," he said hesitantly. That algo rhythm thing you taught me last night wasn't." "Algorithm, Mulder. I showed you how to run a simple algorithm on your laptop." "No, I meant what you did after that. That rhythm you showed me." He smiled, then whispered, "On top of my lap." It was almost indistinguishable, but Mulder noticed that she blushed before saying, "We were extrapolating on your theory of exponential growth." "And despite the fact that *I* am NOT a math geek, who extrapolated the correct measurement of said growth?" "You extrapolated without taking into account the presence of a catalyst." "But if I remember correctly, a catalyst isn't supposed to be directly involved in the reaction. Whatever you want to call it, you were directly involved from the point when contact was initiated until several minutes after the, um, appearance of a precipitant." "I don't know if you'd call THAT a precipitant, Mulder." It was more of a ...a demonstration of Archimedes' Force." Mulder bit his bottom lip and squeezed his eyes tightly shut. He whispered huskily, "Say that to me again, Scully. Archimedes' Force." Scully fought fiercely not to react to Mulder's lip bite and deadpanned, "Buoyancy." Mulder let out a frustrated sigh. "Tease." Scully smiled enigmathimatically. ******************* "Do I detect some friction in this room?" Mulder and Scully jumped at the sudden interruption. Scully felt her jaw drop when she saw who was standing in the doorway. Mulder, in one quick movement, swept his desktop full of crumpled receipts into his lap in a desperate attempt to facilitate systemic entropy. Scully broke the awkward silence. "Diana?" Mulder shook his head quickly and stood up, touching Scully's shoulder as he moved to introduce the two women. "Scully, this is Diana Fowley's sister, Delilah." Scully stared at the woman, her mouth moving silently, goldfish-like, but she remained unable to speak. It was as if she had seen Diana Fowley's ghost. "Aren't you going to introduce me to you secretary, Fox?" Delilah meowed. Mulder felt Scully's icy glare freezing through his oxford cloth buttoned down shirt. Goosebumps erupted across his body. He spoke quickly, hoping to stop the reaction before it caused more sensitive organs to reach absolute zero. "This is my PARTNER, Delilah. Agent Dana Scully." Delilah extended her right hand limply and at an acute angle, as if she wanted Scully to kiss her ring. Scully responded by folding her arms across her chest. She gave a brief acknowledging nod and said, "Miss Fowley," and leaned territorially towards Mulder, against the desk. Scully was silently amazed at the resemblance between Delilah and Diana. They were almost identical from the slanty-mouthed smile down to her out of season, open-toed shoes. Delilah dismissed Scully by turning her back towards her and addressing Mulder face to face. "I see the box arrived safely. I trust you got my message." Mulder tried to maneuver so that he could stand behind the safety of his desk. He knocked over a metal wastepaper basket as he awkwardly positioned himself next to Scully. Delilah bent down to pick the can up. Scully noticed that like Diana, Delilah's hair was artificially colored. The graying square roots were slightly visible. "Actually, Delilah, I don't recall getting a message from you," Mulder admitted, trying to regain his composure. "That's strange," Delilah murmured. I left five of them at your home number last night. This IS still your home number, isn't it?" she asked, thrusting a dog eared piece of paper in front of him. Mulder glanced quickly at the piece of paper and nodded before mumbling, "I never quite made it home last night." Scully forced herself to calculate pi to at least fifteen decimal points to keep from smiling. Irrational numbers could be immeasurably useful during times that she needed to keep herself rational. Delilah frowned slightly. Scully had already named that same expression the "huffy hypotenuse" after seeing it on Diana's face many times. Mulder assumed a more professional posture and asked, "What can we do for you, Delilah?" Scully calculated pi again. "Actually, this doesn't involve your sec...partner at all, Fox. I'm in town trying to settle Diana's estate. There were some personal items that Diana specified were to be left to you," she said blandly, gesturing towards the box. Scully averted her eyes momentarily. She felt a twinge of guilt, followed by a dull, familiar ache of empathetic mourning. Whoever Diana Fowley really was, whatever her obtuse connections were, she held a piece to the puzzle of Mulder's past. For a moment she wondered whether or not she should leave and let Mulder and Delilah conduct their business alone. To her surprise, Mulder made the decision for her. He lightly placed his hand on Scully's shoulder and spoke softly. "Maybe it's better if you brought your expense reports to Skinner's office now." He handed her the neatly organized manila folder. "No reason why you should have to sit and watch him spontaneously combust because of my inertia." Scully felt Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle temporarily take hold of her body. Every atom in her body simultaneously fought the urge to run angrily out of the office with the urge to stay passive-aggressively anchored to the desk she was leaning on. Even though she hadn't given a fig about Newton in years, the laws of physics intervened on her behalf. 'Every object moves in a straight line unless acted upon by a force,' Scully thought to herself as she left the office without saying a word to either Mulder or Delilah. 'The acceleration of an object is directly proportional to the net force exerted, and inversely proportional to the object's mass.' As she thought about Mulder, opening that box alone in the presence of the Huffy Hypotenuse, she accelerated through the parking garage where she quickly placed her mass in the driver's seat, plotting a parabolic curve away from FBI Headquarters and onto the Beltway. Her last thought, before becoming one of the many slugs stuck in traffic was, 'For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.' ******************************* Mulder slumped in his chair, considering with some sadness, the loss of potential energy when he asked Scully to leave him with Delilah. The probability of repeating the Preferred Position Postulate that they experimented with at Scully's apartment last night was rapidly approaching zero. He sadly contemplated the fact that he might never get another opportunity to replicate the data collected on Scully's theory that the speed at which two fractional components become a whole number is entirely dependent upon the movement and position of the numerator above the denominator. Delilah grabbed a letter opener off of Mulder's desk and slashed it sharply across the box she had delivered to his office. Mulder felt a strong urge to protect his retinas from the contents, but he resisted it. There was an envelop full of correspondence that Mulder and Diana had exchanged a lifetime ago, before she took her assignment in Europe. He randomly pulled out one letter and forced himself to read part of it. Diana's handwriting, with its familiar, awkward slant, began: "You know, Fox, you ARE Ebenezer Scrooge." The letter behind it, in his own unmistakable script, replied, "Actually, Diana, if you have a basement office, and a sycophantic assistant begging for an extra piece of coal, you know maybe it's enough to simply carry on doing business, bravely facing life with your self-imposed ostracization -- it's heroic just to survive. But without these things you're actually expected to make something of your life, donate to charity, buy a goose, eat at your nephew's. So if anything, I'm actually the antithesis to Ebenezer because if I did have a basement office I quite possibly might be more happy and more content and not feel the need to rent adult videos, or dream about women who make me wear handcuffs." Behind it, was a piece of stationery with Diana's terse response: "That's not flippant?" It was followed by another note written by Mulder's own hand, this time on the back of a McDonald's Quarter Pounder with Cheese wrapper. "No, flippant is my favorite line from "A Christmas Carol: You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato. There's more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!" Mulder smiled a wistful smile. The Conversation on the Wrapper was the beginning of the end of his relationship with Diana. Delilah lifted out the rest of the box's content. There was a pair of handcuffs with a set of keys securely taped to them. A silky negligee with a note in Diana's writing saying, "To remember me by" pinned to it. A thick envelop of photographs which Delilah took the liberty of looking through before asking for Mulder's permission. Mulder glanced at her and quickly grabbed the envelop. Delilah's eyes became snake-like slits, or at least they seemed to for a second, and he let go due to the momentary distraction. She flipped through the pictures expectantly, then tossed them on the desk, saying, "I don't know what the hell THOSE were all about." Mulder started to look through the photos. His eyes widened when he realized what they were - surveillance shots of Scully, going back to the day she applied to the FBI Academy. He shook his head in disbelief. Had Diana carried a torch for him all those years? How did she gain access to Scully's apartment when she was supposedly in Europe. He involuntarily shuddered. "Delilah, do you know anything about these pictures?" Delilah looked at them and shrugged. "They're of your secre...partner, but I have no idea why Diana would have them. Maybe she was trying to tell you something." Mulder shook his head slowly. "Yeah, maybe she was." ********************** It was 8:00 p.m. when Scully finally pulled onto her street, leaving the Beltway slugs behind. She glanced at her apartment as she locked her car doors and noticed the lights on. She thought for sure she turned everything off before she left that morning, but maybe she had been distracted. As she was about to put her key in the door, it opened from the other side. "Hey, Scully," Mulder said with an apologetic grin. Although her heart was pounding, Scully decided to keep her tone nonchalant. "I see you made yourself comfortable." "I didn't think you'd mind..." Mulder began apprehensively. Scully took of her jacket and shoes and unbuttoned the top two buttons of her unstained white blouse. "What happened to Delilah?" "Well, we opened up the box. She was curious as to what was inside of it, so she stayed to see what her sister had left." Scully felt herself blush as an angry jolt of adrenaline ran through her body. She calculated pi again, while she reminded herself that Mulder wouldn't be standing in her apartment attracting her magnetically if wasn't for Diana. "What DID Diana leave in that box, Mulder?" "A few letters and photos and things that she'd saved from the time we worked together. I guess it amounts to dark matter, Scully," he said, as he slowly walked toward her, placing his hands on her shoulders and outlining the edge of the neckline of her blouse. "It doesn't interact with light. I threw the box and its contents away." Mulder's fingers continued to trace concentric circles along the contours of her blouse while deftly unbuttoning it. She forced herself to remember as many prime numbers as she could before she allowed herself to give in to his advances. "What happened to Delilah?" "You missed her grand exit, Scully. She said she had a flight to Tunisia to catch, so she practically ran out of the office. Her path intersected with Skinner's, and she bounced right off his chest into the water cooler. She ended up with a bruise in the shape of a parallelogram on her forehead." Scully counted the last prime number she could think of and gave in to the convection that was rapidly redistributing the heat from the core of her body. Mulder gently lifted her face so she could meet his hungry gaze. They both dismissed Delilah and Diana's box as insignificant cosmic interference with a kiss that reestablished their common denominator. Scully would make a math geek out of Mulder yet.
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