TITLE: Iolokus 1/18

AUTHOR: MustangSally and Rivka T

CLASSIFICATION: MSR/Mythology/X-File

CONTENT WARNING: NC-17 for sex, violence, and language (brief
slash scene)

SUMMARY:  Painted across the barren and desolate reaches of Texas, 
the shadows of the Project put additional pressure on Scully and Mulder's
already fragile relationship.  After a hostage crisis raises more questions
about the Project's breeding program, Scully begins her own investigation,
leaving Mulder to choose between saving her and saving himself.  Finally,
the investigation leads to an inevitable tragedy and Mulder and Scully find
that more questions have been asked than answered.

SPOILER WARNING: US Season five through "Emily"

DISTRIBUTION STATEMENT: The Universe at large

THE DISCLAIMER: We would appreciate not being sued.  No actors
were harmed during the course of writing this story.


1
Oh, unfortunate one!  Oh, cruel!
Where will you turn?  Who will help you?
What house or what land to preserve you
From ill can you find?
A god has thrown suffering
Upon you in waves of despair. 

One - the oracle

And that day the hot wind blew down through the burning rocks, and over
the ground of sand.  The wind, a still breath of Hell, smelling of ovens,
smelling of dust. A stray wisp of dust-smoke whipped along the gravel
ground and curled at my feet as I stared into the sun.  Above me, the sky
was the color of molten bronze and a dark bird circled overhead.  Behind
me I could hear the women weeping.  Knotted together beneath the metal
sky, the women's faces were torn and wet.

Mybabymybabymybaby.
My baby's blood.
My baby.

The heat dried my eyes, but the women's tears outpaced the sun.
Swallowing in a dusty mouth I felt the wind lick my face like the tongue
of a lizard before I followed her.

I hate Texas. If there's anything more stubborn, obstinate, hostile, and
ignorant than a Federal Marshall, it's a fucking Texas Ranger.  Rangers
with their goodamned cowboy boots and bolo ties looking at us Feds like
we're going to rape all their cattle and daughters before we piss on the
Alamo.

 "In here," the head honcho Ranger yanked open the door for us. I felt as
though I was part of the invasion of Munchkinland rather than the Eleanor
Roosevelt Day Care Center for Federal Employees.  As I walked through 
the hallways, I smelled the ghosts of cookies, of hamsters in aquariums, of
wheat paste, and disinfectant, breathing in the smells of a hundred
children.   

As always, Scully moved at my left. Even with the wrinkles in her suit,
her face was as freshly pressed as ever. 

I followed her into the room marked Nursery 1 underneath a banner of
smiling teddy bears cut from brown paper, each teddy bear marked with a
child's name.  In the tot-scaled room, set up on tables that barely
topped their knees, the Hostage Negotiation Unit was busy with files and
phone lines and a blueprint of the building.  

A tall African-American woman rose from a tiny
chair and held out her hand.  I blinked with recognition.  Agent Kazdin,
the woman who ran the Hostage Negotiation Unit from the Duane Barry 
case, the gestation of the dark odyssey.  She was a bitch without a doubt,
but
she was good at her job and it had only taken a month or so for my ass to
grow back after she had chewed it off.

"Agents Mulder and Scully, it's good of you to get here so quickly," she
said in a voice as crisp as her clothes.

"How did you beat us here from Washington, Agent Kazdin?" I asked and
shook her dry hand, "did you beam down?"

"Budget for emergency transportation," she said.

Yeah, they had a fucking budget while I was trying to scavenge paperclips
from VICAP. They could fly down on a fucking Lear Jet. I, however, sat in
coach with my knees pressed into my chest. At least they had to use the
kiddie desks now.

"What exactly is the situation?" Scully asked, looking around the room
with a sharp, assessing stare.

Yeah, that's Scully, down to the bone.

 "At eight-fifteen this morning, William Abrams walked into the Day Care
Center with an AK-47, he shot three of the workers, killing two, and then
barricaded himself in the third nursery with twenty children under the
age of four.  He called the White House and demanded to speak with the
President, the call was traced back here.  At ten twenty-eight, three
shots were fired in the nursery, and Abrams refuses to talk to anyone,"
Kazdin recited with the passion of someone giving street directions.

"So why are we here?" I asked.

"He said the magic word, the word that makes Spooky crawl out of his
hole," rapped out a voice with Bronx consonants, "he said aliens."

Fuck, I thought.

"Zippy," I said.

 "Spooky."

Agent Mike Zipprelli was encased in the kevlar and Velcro carapace of the
SWAT unit, which suited his sly dark eyes and gleaming black hair.  He
stared at me for a moment, measuring.  I'd seen him bare-assed in the
locker room at Quantico and unless he had a transplant  . . .

 "You left Investigation Support?"

 "Party was over after you shot down Patterson," he shrugged, "I'd rather
blow the heads off these sick motherfuckers than try to think like them. 
Anyway, asshole in there calls the president and tells the White House
operator that he has important information about the invasion of earth.
Now since he's been here, he hasn't said shit about aliens, hasn't been
saying much of anything since we re-routed his phone so it comes in
here."

 "How far have you gotten negotiating with Abrams?" Scully asked Kazdin,
ignoring the fact that Zipprelli was looking at her as though he wanted
to know what she tasted like.

I wasn't going to tell him.

Kazdin grunted, interrupting my staredown with Zippy before we actually
whipped out the rulers. "Not very far.  He hangs up whenever we call into
the nursery and all he will say is that he wants to talk to either the
President or Dan Rather."

 "Dan Rather? He must be insane," Zipprelli snorted.

 "What's the frequency, Kenneth?" I asked.

No one got it. I sighed, and was rewarded by one of Scully's tight-ass
teacher faces.

 "I don't want to minimize the seriousness of this situation, there is a
man in there with an unknown amount of ammunition and twenty children. 
We lose even one of those tykes and we are going to be up shit's creek
with the men in HQ," Kazdin rubbed her eyes for a moment and then stared
at me. "Since you're the alien man, go talk to Abrams about aliens, get
his confidence, promise him you'll take him back to the Mothership if you
have to, but get those kids out of there."

"Right," I agreed. "What do they call him?"

"What?" Kazdin frowned like I'd just asked her what color her underwear
was.

I pulled my snidest tone out of reserve and used it. Fuck you, I have a
psych degree too. "His friends. Colleagues. What name do they use when
they wish to speak to him? Is he William, is he Bill, or maybe Abe or
Spike? I'm supposed to be his friend and if I get the name wrong he could
decide I'm getting signals from the Dark Side of the Force."

She snapped her fingers and one of the agents whispered something
frantically into his headset. Moments later, he looked up. "Bill."

I nodded and Zipprelli stepped forward with a bulletproof vest.

Naturally, Zippy had tightened the vest too much and in a matter of
moments, I was sweating like a cold beer on a hot day, and I couldn't
quite draw a deep breath.   I hoped that my sweat wouldn't short-circuit
the small headset and microphone Zippy had clamped on my head.  The 
Texas
Ranger who had followed us into the room gave a bovine snort while I
struggled into the TAC gear; the Ranger wasn't wearing kevlar.  Real men
don't wear kevlar.

 "She's cute," Zippy remarked after the door shut behind us.

The kevlar wouldn't help him much if I decided to break his nose.

I followed Zippy to the intersection of two hallways where the SWAT team
had set up a barricade of black plastic and fiber panels designed to
deflect gunfire.  The men in their black clothes and their black hats
were like a murder of crows waiting in a cemetery.  Wiping sweat-soaked
hair back from my face, I let Zippy lead me to the edge of the barricade
and pointed to indicate the door behind which Abrams had the children. 
This door was surrounded by construction paper balloons labeled with the
names of the children.  

Akira
Anna
Connor
Dakota
David
Devon
Jamal
Kevin
Pat
Shane
Tamika

Those were the names that I could read from where I stood and I
wondered
if the balloon children were alive beyond the happy door, or had Abrams
killed any of them.  There was a movie that they had showed when I was a
child, something about a red balloon that got away and had all kind of
adventures.  I couldn't remember the name of the movie but I remembered
that the balloon was alive.  If only I could open the window and let the
children float free, caught by the hot wind.

God, what if I screwed up?  Negotiation was hardly my forte; I couldn't
even get the right order at McDonald's half the time.  I wasn't a fool.  I 
knew I had an irritating effect on people.  If that wasn't the understatement 
of the year . . . 

Now there were twenty little lives counting on me to boot.  Oklahoma City
flashed through my mind, images imprinted in the consciousness of the
nation.  Small bodies carried out by weeping firemen.   Behind the door
of the Nursery, there was silence. No whining or weeping children.  My
experience with children was limited, but I knew that they should have
been crying.  The silence made my blood turn to sand my bones to stone.

"Bill.  Can I talk to you?" I called.

 "Fuck off," the man suggested from the other side of the door.

 "I want to talk to you about the aliens," I continued.

 "Did you miss the memo?" Abrams asked in a dry shade of irony, "Didn't
they tell you that I was crazy?"

 "Then we have something in common.  Tell me what you know."

 "Why should I?"

 "I've seen things," I said and began to slide along the wall towards the
door.

Zippy's hand plucked at my shoulder, but I threw off the grip and
continued to slide to the arc of balloons, the wall cool against my
cheek. The earpiece crackled in my brain, picking up voices from the
command center.  I stopped to listen. "We have something," a man said, "
air duct.  Runs from the roof, through the main system and into the
nursery."

 "Gas?" Kazdin asked.

 "Would flood the whole building.  Might be toxic to the children. It's
geared for adults.  I'm thinking a sharpshooter."

 "Why are you telling me this and not doing it?"

 "The duct is too small for any of my men."

 "Will I fit?" Scully's voice asked.

I held my breath, shut my eyes.

Shit fuck.

 "Every single one of these children are not real. They have been created
to destroy us," Abrams said in a calm, collected voice, sounding as
though we were having this conversation over coffee rather than through a
door with guns on both sides, "they aren't human.  We're holding the
source of our own destruction close to our breast. They will weaken us
from the inside and destroy us."

 "Who are they, Bill?" I asked, my fingers touching the purple pulpy
paper of a balloon marked with Tamika's name. She can't do that, she 
can't crawl through the vents, she can't get caught in the dark, she can't 
try to sneak up behind this fuckhead and she can't take him out.  I won't 
let her.  I can't.

 "The ubiquitous, invisible them."

 "How?"

 "I was changing the junction box out on Jonestown Road.  I heard the
conversation between two men.  They mentioned a plan, merchandise."

Merchandise. The word was like a rock in my gut.  A rock on a bruise.




TITLE: Iolokus 2/18

AUTHOR: MustangSally and Rivka T

CLASSIFICATION: MSR/Mythology/X-File

CONTENT WARNING: NC-17 for sex, violence, and language

SPOILER WARNING: US Season five through "Emily"

DISTRIBUTION STATEMENT: The Universe at large

THE DISCLAIMER: We would appreciate not being sued.  No actors
were harmed during the course of writing this story.


2
The dark cloud of her lamentations
Is just beginning. Soon, I know,
It will burst aflame as her anger rises.
Deep in passion and unrelenting,
What will she do now, stung with insult?

Merchandise?

I heard Mulder gulp air as Abrams said it.

The word crackled through my earpiece  and my brain as I followed the
quartet of Rangers up the stairwell. Why  choose that word?  Was it at
all possible that Abrams knew?

I had been merchandise.

They (the ubiquitous, invisible them) had stacked me and stored me and
returned me to sender.

Postage due.

The Rangers all frowned at each other, none of them liking the idea of
sending a tiny little thing like me in to do a man's job. Fuck them all,
I thought, and took the rifle that one of them handed to me.  They were
damn lucky I hadn't turned my gun on the one who had held the door to the
roof open for me. I checked the rifle, looked along the sights and saw
that it was aimed well and stocked with ammunition.  I wasn't planning on
getting in a firefight with Abrams, but I wanted more than one shot.

"Can you handle that?  Looks a little big for you," Zippy asked.

One of the Rangers snorted and a patch of color brightened Zippy's olive
cheekbones.

"What I meant was, would you rather have a pistol?"

"I learned to shoot with a shotgun."

"You blow this motherfucker's head off and we'll stand you for as many
rounds as you can drink at Parrothead's in town," a blonde crewcut in FBI
Tac pret a porter offered.

"If this young woman wastes Abrams, we'll pick up the bar tab," the
oldest ranger grumbled.

And then they would see who has the worst hangover in the morning and
continue the male posturing.  Zippy started helping me into the kevlar
vest which was designed for a man, and painfully flattened my breasts
against my ribcage.

 Under my high tech armor, I started to roast in the chimney air on the
roof.  A helicopter chattered overhead and sent up waves of sand the
color of crushed cork.  An access panel was unhooked and a section of
roof peeled off.  A black rectangle plunged into the interior of the
building.  A small black rectangle.  A very small black rectangle.

I started unfastening the bulletproof vest.

"Put that back on!  Do you want to get shot?"

"Look, I won't fit in the shaft with this on. I won't be able to
maneuver, and there's a good possibility I'll get heat stroke.  Can we
just get the harness, please?" 

The harness in question was a standard mountaineering one, a man's
harness and even with the buckles pulled tight by Zippy's capable if
friendly hands, it barely fit me.  By that time I had discarded my shoes
and trouser-socks as well as my jacket. The hot air dried the sweat on my
body.  Finally, with the harness in place, the headset over my head, and
the rifle gripped in both hands, I let them lower me into the hole.

 The air vent was metal and hot on my bare feet.  Without a light, my
eyes quickly accustomed to the dark as I was lowered foot by foot into
the stomach of the building.

****

Goddamnit, I thought as I heard what was going on above my head.  I have
a hard time concentrating at the best of times, but listening to Scully
breathe in my ear while I was trying to talk to Abrams was almost more
than my brain was able to handle.  It's just that the breathing pattern
she had taken up in the airshaft was almost identical to the one she
adopted when we had sex. It was a little bit like having a phone-sex call
at your desk while your boss was in the office.  If I walked away from
the nursery door with a hard-on a whole new "Legend of Spooky Mulder" 
was going to be born that day.

"Bill, look here, you can't stay in there with the children, there's a
whole SWAT team outside who will shoot you into Swiss cheese if you 
screw up.  Why don't you put the gun down and come out before the 
situation gets out of control."

"And it isn't out of control now?"

The bitter and salt of his words tasted too familiar to me, I'd had them
in my mouth more than once.

"It's not too late," I whispered into the sticky wood door.

"If the SWAT team doesn't kill me, then They will, if They don't I'll be
executed.  Give me a good reason to give up like a good boy."

I didn't have one and Kazdin began growling some trust bullshit into my
head and I had to turn down the sound of the headset until I couldn't
hear Scully breathe anymore.

I shut my eyes and the words were so clear in my head that I can't
honestly tell you if I spoke them aloud or not.

Don't let them take you alive.  

There are worse ways to die than sucking on your own gun. 

 I know.

Do it, Bill.

The scalpel in my stomach dug a little deeper.

****

There was light at the end of the tunnel.  Literally.  I could see the
light from the grate over the vent in the nursery, could hear a man's
voice muttering to himself.  Since it wasn't echoed in my ear, I knew it
wasn't Mulder.  I crawled forward like a snail on a hot sidewalk, leaving
parts of my body cooked to the side of the vent.  They don't make
non-stick venting.  The rifle was pushed under my arm and squeezed the
hell out of my left breast.  No wonder the Amazons performed
mastectomies
to perfect their archery.  

"In position," I hissed into the tiny microphone.

With my nose up against the dirty grating, I could see Abrams' head and
shoulders above a row of plastic shelving full of bright, happy stuffed
animals.  Sesame Street characters grinned at me with their empty placid
smiles.  Ernie looked particularly vapid that day.  In the corner of my
seriously restricted field of vision, I could make out what looked like
two small bodies on the carpet by the window.  The room was so quiet. 
He
must have killed the children; there was no other explanation.  I dragged
the rifle out from underneath my body and relaxed into a comfortable
position, my cheek alongside the stock and looked down along the sights.

Like shooting fish in a barrel.

The crosshairs lined up at the back of Abrams' head.

The bastard had killed the children.

My sweaty finger stroked the trigger and waited for the order.

****

I wondered where Scully was, if she was waiting somewhere with her
gunsights on the back of Abrams head, or my head for that matter.

"How do I know you're not one of them?" Abrams asked me.

"You don't," I admitted, "you're going to have to take my word for it."

That and a quarter will buy you a nice house with a great view of Love
Canal.

"You're right, I don't."

A rifle makes a particular noise when the bolt is drawn back, even
something like an AK-47.  Despite rumors to the contrary, I actually do
not have a death wish as such.

I dove for the linoleum as the fire poured over my head.

Wood splinters and unidentifiable gore rained down from the ruined door
onto my throbbing head.  All I could hear was my heartbeat and a strange
underwater gurgle that might have been voices.  I raised my head and
wood
chips and bloody chunks of Bill Abrams fell to the floor.  Abrams' head,
looking like a Jack-O-Lantern left out on Mischief Night, bobbed through
a hole in the door big enough for a man to crawl through.  But Abrams
wasn't going to be crawling anywhere again, not unless he could manage to
do it without a brain.  

I stood up and what might have been a hunk of cerebellum the size of my
fist fell to the ground with a wet plop.

>From inside the room came a metallic clanging sound and I looked
through
the hole in time to see Scully drop from the air vent high in the wall
with a rifle slung over her shoulder like a soldier.  She picked her way
across the floor in her bare little feet to the first of the small bodies
on the carpet.  I saw her touch the fragile neck to feel for a pulse.  I
saw her lift the hair from the back of the child's skull and look at the
nape of the little creature's neck.

I knew what she was looking for.

I didn't want her to find it.

The pain almost made me double over.  I made it to the shrunken bathroom
and leaned over the miniature sink and gave up what was left of the
airline breakfast and several cups of coffee.  Afterwards I rinsed my
mouth out and crunched a pair of Tums between my molars.

A moment later, Zippy was leaning over the other bathroom sink heaving
up
whatever possum pancakes passed for breakfast out here.  Only then did I
feel better.

Bill Abrams was dead on the scene from a self-inflicted wound.  The
wound
inflicted by Agent Scully from the ventilator shaft cleanly pierced his
heart and would have killed him had he not blown the fuck out of his own
head a millisecond before.

Abrams left behind no family (none that wanted to claim him) and nineteen
dead children. It looked like--not that I wanted to take Scully's job,
but just eyeballing it--he'd strangled sixteen after he found the first
three gunshot wounds too draining. Too much blood on the scuffed tile
floor; he would have slipped and slid in it. Scully found the twentieth
child hiding underneath a pile of stuffed animals in the coat closet.  I
wouldn't want to have to foot the bill for Jamal's mental heath care for
the rest of his life.

While Scully was coaxing a near-catatonic Jamal out from the closet, I
looked at the neck of the closest child.  He was one of the lucky
ones--shot right off, instead of having to stand in line as his
classmates were slowly executed. There was nothing out of the ordinary,
except for a lot of blood and the fact that the kid was a stiff as a
dried cod. 

The kids hadn't been merchandise.

Even while the Rangers and the other Fibbies pounded Scully on the back
in congratulation, her lips thinned and she stared at me with gas flame
eyes over a pile of dead bodies.

****
TITLE: Iolokus 3/18

AUTHOR: MustangSally and Rivka T

CLASSIFICATION: MSR/Mythology/X-File

CONTENT WARNING: NC-17 for sex, violence, and language

SPOILER WARNING: US Season five through "Emily"

DISTRIBUTION STATEMENT: The Universe at large

THE DISCLAIMER: We would appreciate not being sued.  No actors
were harmed during the course of writing this story.




3

Let Innocence, the gods' loveliest gift,
Choose me for her own;
Never may the dread Cyprian 
Craze my heart to leave old love for new,
Sending to assault me
Angry disputes and feuds unending;
But let her judge shrewdly the loves of women
And respect the bed where no war rages. 


"While the Spookster here processes all this, you wanna go grab a beer?"

I nodded.  It was all over but the paperwork. Mulder had,
uncharacteristically volunteered to write up our end of it while I
collected the gratitude of the Rangers.

"You'll be sorry," Mulder chanted in his toneless singsong from the desk.

 Zippy's eyes rolled like marbles and he jerked away, making a 'crazy'
circle in the air next to his left ear.  I probably shouldn't have
laughed.

The bar was charming.  Beer signs, CD jukebox playing both Country and
Western and a potpourri of domestic beers on tap behind the counter, they
had Coors, Budweiser and, Bud Lite. The women eyeballing Zippy's House 
of Fed suit had big hair and bigger bustlines.  The Rangers and the Fibbies
can be friends provided that there's enough to drink.  Pretty shortly,
the glasses were getting emptied and the conversation was getting loud.

"So, " Zippy began, lighting a cigarette," how do you like working with
the Spookster?"

"It's far from dull."

He nodded and flashed me a brilliant smile.

"Y'know he was the youngest one in our class at Quantico, and a total
dork besides."

"And you were the star?"

"You know it babe," he gave me the orthodontist's fantasy smile again. 

Zippy flagged down the barmaid for my third beer while he was waiting for
her to fill the mug from the tap, he pulled down his tie and unbuttoned
the top two buttons of his dress shirt.  There, against the arabesques of
his collarbones rested a heavy filigree crucifix, catching the light from
the neon over the bar. I stared at the buttery light. Of course he was
Catholic, he was Italian and naturally he would wear a cross and he
probably had a St. Jude medal on his key chain, the patron saint of
policemen and hopeless causes.  When he pushed the beer towards me, his
bright denim eyes caught my gaze.

"Gift from my Grandma, I was an altar boy," he said with a
self-deprecating little smirk.

I wanted to reach out and touch it, but instead I clamped my hand down
around the cold glass and let the ice-brew flow down to my own cold
center.

"What's the matter?" he asked.

I almost spit beer all over his nice shirt.

"What?"

"You look so sad."

"I'm fine, Zippy."

The palm of his hand was warm on my cheek, Mulder's hands are always so
cold, and I wanted to just roll over and surrender, touch something
normal, touch something simple, uncomplicated that wouldn't poison me
afterwards. I saw Ed Jerse's face over Zippy's for a moment, and I jerked
out of his touch so fast that I knocked over my beer.

"Autopsy tomorrow," I babbled, realizing that I'd taken the same witless
staccato tone that Mulder gets, "I have to go."

I rose and he didn't stop me. I felt his molten eyes on me as I left.

****

I was nearly finished with the case files when Scully returned, mad as a
cat after its yearly flea dip. She marched over to the tiny table where I
was and slammed the laptop's screen down, forcing it into sleep mode.

Scully was by no means ready for sleep mode.

When she bent down to kiss me I could taste Zippy's sweat on her, but she
didn't smell like sex, just beer and cigarette ashes.

Normally she's fully feline, never giving more than the subtlest
clues to her desires, the flicker of an expression, tilt of an eyebrow,
all tiny bits of information to be assembled into a coherent whole. It's my 
job, and with Scully I can still get it wrong. I can still blunder, a
slow-witted 
mongrel, into her roomful of cut glass and cut myself to death.  But this
time 
she was tossing me a big-ass hint that she wanted to get laid.

I'd have to think about it.

The fact that I was her creature didn't mean that she should be too
confident 
of that fact. Zippy had touched her, she'd let Zippy touch her, which 
constituted loitering with intent as far as I was concerned even if she hadn't 
followed through on it. Obviously something hadn't clicked and she was 
back to her good ol' standby, fucking Fox Mulder. (And I mean "fucking"
as 
a gerund, though she probably thought of it as an adjective.)

I hoped that she'd led Zippy on until he'd gotten the world's worst case
of blue balls and then laughed at his pencil-slim dick. Scully wasn't
averse to taking the easy shots.

I was ready to hurt her now.

"Did you have a good time?" I asked as though she hadn't just tried to
suck my tonsils out of my head.

She shrugged. She knew I'd imagine the two of them--the rest of the
agents were paper dolls, irrelevant--in the smoky bar, listening to the
stupid wails of some heroin-glazed singer pretending to be in love, the
amber bite of the alcohol and how it would erase the edges of the day.
Bodies moving at the edge of their vision, reminding them that they could
just go back to Zippy's place and fuck like lemmings.

Bunnies, I mean.

I wasn't done yet. "I just don't want you to be hung over. What with the
autopsies tomorrow morning?  Less room for error with children, isn't
there?"

"Apparently not where you're concerned."

Yep. Straight to the balls.  I guess she was too jet-lagged to bother
batting me around the hotel room for fun before she administered the
killing bite. 

The mouse bites back.

"You either, for that matter."
 
Blinking like a cat too close to a candle flame, Scully stared at me for
a moment.  I stared back the best that I could but with those eyes of
hers it sometimes feels like staring into the moon for too long. I
reached for her, wanting to make her apologize, admit that she had been
wrong to go drinking with Zippy, and to punish her for it.  She tasted of
salt when I ran my mouth over the sweat-damp landscape of her throat.  
Her fingers twisted into my hair as though she was trying to open my head
like the top of a Snapple bottle.  

"Be *nice*," I warned her.

I got a bitten lip for that one.

I slapped her hands away from my head and she gave me a poisonous glare. 
I swear to God if I ever hit a woman, it's going to be Scully.  She can
get me from mellow to psychotic faster than a Porsche on a test track. 

Yanking on her wrists, I pulled her down onto my lap.  One of the things
that I frequently forget about Scully is that she is so tiny and so
delicate that I could probably snap her neck with my hands, provided that
she didn't blow my head off first.  I sucked on her neck, tasting her hot
skin and deliberately leaving a possessive mark. She didn't complain at
the scraping of my teeth, only arched her back against me and dug her
fingers into my shoulders.  I slid down her throat, pulling her shirt up
with fumbling, stiff hands and caught her breasts through the framework
of her bra.  She must have been planning to fuck Zippy since she had a
no-nothing cradle of black cobweb and wire hanging onto her breasts like
a bad memory.

Asshole that I am, I backed her down onto the tiny table which wobbled
dangerously under our combined weight.  She shimmied out of her trousers
and her panties, which ended up somewhere over my left shoulder, and I
have no idea what happened to her blouse and bra. But she was lying there
gold, pink, white and glowing in the yellow light from the bedside lamp,
her head dripping off the edge of the table and her legs tight around my
hips.  Scully grabbed the tongue of my tie and pulled me down onto her.

Lines of control were getting thinner and harder to maintain.

Her mouth was like a pencil sharpener, grinding away on my lips and
tongue on the pleasure/pain border.  Fingers scrabbled at my back, my
ass, the fly of my pants, and finally reached for my cock and decanted it
with more enthusiasm than grace.  Her breasts were under my hands, I was
buried in her up to what felt like the base of my spine and she was
rocking underneath me.   God, she was too much, too tight, too wet, too
active around me, and it had been months since she let me touch her.

I lasted about five minutes, if that, until I came with a sloppy
thunderclap and slid on top of her.  She gave a little moan of
disappointment and I moved to make amends with my mouth and hands. 
Eventually she snapped taut as a fishing line with a ten pound bass at
the other end, and I heard her triumphant gasping through the surround of
her thighs.

Somehow, we made it into the bed and I lay there with her curled around
me like the most innocent of kittens snuggling with a favorite toy, while I
tried to figure out why I was markedly NOT HAPPY.  As a matter of fact,
I
was feeling drained in a way that had little to do with sex.

My lovely little vampire love, she bleeds me.

Literally, sometimes.

Not long ago, she almost bled me to death.

San Diego.  I never want to go back there again.  I spent too many hours 
at that damn hospital watching the child/not child dying muscle by
muscle, watching Scully's face get thinner and more transparent moment by
moment.  She became her own reflection in the glass of the isolation
chamber.  Then I was banished, sent outside like a bad puppy to wait.  I
sulked on one of the standard hospital-issue plastic chairs until my
brain went as numb as my ass.  Or my ass went as numb as my brain,
whatever. 

Finally, she wafted out of the isolation chamber, a Sarah Bernhardt
Hamlet with her cropped amber hair, her black suit over narrow shoulders
and slim legs, her face made of eggshell.  I stood up.  Her lips were
pressed into a red ink line.  Hardly slowing her pace, she pulled at my
coat sleeve and clipped along while I loped to keep up. The final
destination was a handicapped accessible bathroom off an empty
conference
room, I'll never know how she knew it existed.  With a hard hand at the
small of my back she shoved me into the dark box of the bathroom, pulling
the door shut behind us. For a moment it crossed my mind that she might
have been one of the shape-shifters, until she grabbed the hair at the
back of my skull and dragged my mouth down on hers.  I'd know her taste
in my dreams, on my deathbed, in the deepest unconscious state, and the
worst of soap-opera amnesia.  Pulling at me, ripping her blouse out of
the waistband of her pants, dropping her jacket on the floor, biting at
my lips, and pulling my hands onto the hard heat of her breasts.   

I don't have that much self-control.  The second my sluggish neurons made
the connection, I was groping her like a teenager out of sight of the
chaperons.  My cock was harder than a fifteen-year-old's, when she
slithered up onto the washbasin, her naked ass in my hands, and my pants
at my ankles, I surrendered.

Like she had to twist my arm.

Frantic, she was, heaving against me, in a jagged rhythm, her breath hot
and wild in my ear, squeezing my cock inside her, wet and endlessly tight
around me.  Her heels bit my spine, her fingers pierced my rib cage and
she rocked back and forth. The only sound she made was a series of sharp
pants, like those of a person in pain, and when she would climax, her
entire body would seize up and vibrate like a struck tuning fork.  I
think she must have come three times in that bathroom and I know it had
more to do with her frame of mind than my prowess.  I'm not that naive. 
When the orgasm finally hit me and turned my spine and my brain into a
pulsing laser beam of sensation and cleansing mindlessness, I felt a
strange sense of gratitude that she'd let me come at all.

The moment that my exhausted member fell out of her, she wiggled off the
washbasin and began to feel around for her clothes. Throbbing and
brain-dead, I listened to her move around the little dark room.

"W-what the hell?" 

"She's dead."

I heard a zipper hiss shut.

"Emily is dead.  I have to get all the hospital paperwork and make the
funeral arrangements.  I'll call you once the particulars are planned."

She shut the door behind her, leaving me in the darkness.  When I could
think I washed my face and rinsed my mouth from the thin warm stream 
from the tap.  California has a water shortage and the water was sluggish 
and metallic and I spat again and again until my mouth was dry.

I could still taste her.

In the artificial air-conditioned Austin hotel air, so dead and distant
from San Diego, I could feel the pain all over again, like I'd just
discovered it. A thousand pounds of pressure and silver knives. Something
was in my spine, pulling apart each nerve fiber, shredding axons and
dendrites.

In California I'd learned that I'd made a terrible mistake. The Scully I
carried around inside me, whispering logic and somehow still managing to
drown out all the other voices in my head, the one who'd eaten me whole
and accepted it all--she was my own invention. I needed her, and I
thought I'd found her. She needed a quick fuck, and she thought she'd
found it. The only difference was, she was right.

The sad thing was that I understood her reasons with more clarity than I
could discover for my own.

****

The next morning, I was sitting at my borrowed desk, trying to write a
coherent profile and waiting for Scully to return from the autopsy bay
where she was checking personally to see whether any unusual scars or
lumps had been missed on the victims.

"You should have warned me," was the first thing Zippy said to me when
he
walked in.

Shit, someone should have warned me.

I shrugged. I guess he meant that I should have encouraged him; that way
he would have known that Scully was, how shall I say it, difficult.

"I know you two are sleeping together."

I looked up at him, genuinely surprised. "What gives you that idea?"

"I saw it in your eyes when she walked out of that schoolroom," he said.
My eyes, not hers. My lover's eyes are nothing like the sun; they are black
holes and no light escapes them. "I'm not as smart as you are but I've
got good instincts."

"Your good instincts didn't keep you from taking Scully to a bar last
night."

"Yeah, well, the little head and the big head disagreed on that."

"Which is which for you?"

"Fuck you," he said, but his heart wasn't in it. "Here's a list of the
families if you want to go ask them how many times they've seen 'Close
Encounters of the Third Kind.'"

****

There was an instructor at Quantico who thought that Robin Williams was 
funnier than nitrous, and he'd start every 9am class off with the rousing cry, 
"I love the smell of formaldehyde in the morning!"

I, on the contrary, hate the smell of dead people. The only good thing the 
cancer did for me was deaden my sense of smell. The various salves that 
most people use make me break out, and I refuse to walk around with a
little 
red mustache all the time. So I deal with the smell like I deal with 
everything, I get through it.

We did the children first, like on a sinking ship.

Bill Abrams suspected that the children at the Roosevelt center were
hybrids 
just as Emily had been.

He was wrong.

None of the little corpses revealed the green tumor's growth at the base
of the skull or any of the strange pseudo-capillaries that Emily had
exhibited.  Not that I knew for sure, the bastards had stolen her body as
well.  But these dead children were terribly normal -- as normal as can be
expected when a high-powered rifle bullet passes through immature tissue
and organs or when strangulation blackens the face with blood, causing
petechial hemorrhages under unwrinkled skin so young and fresh adult
women would kill to have it. There were going to be nineteen closed 
coffins.

When we finished with them, despite all the care I'd taken, there was blood 
everywhere. Nineteen bodies adds up, even if they're just kids. Blood on
the 
floor, on the outdated porcelain tables, dripping thickly down the scales 
used to weigh organs, smearing across the chalkboard used to record data. 
The chalk was so bloody that I had to break a piece in half to get
something 
that would actually write, and even then the blood had soaked in a pink
ring 
around the white center.

The children, contrary to Abrams' claims, were just ordinary dead
American 
kids. On the other hand, Abrams himself exhibited many of the strange
scars 
left on Duane Barry's body. Naturally. I found no implants.

Naturally they had covered everything up with a thin veneer of normalcy.

So I covered everything up with my own thin layer.

But what if those children had been merchandise? What if they had been 
like Emily, captive by their own misbegotten conception?  What if they had 
been my children?

The children whose possibility had been stolen from me.

The ova that They had harvested from my senseless body were in the world 
somewhere open to any abuse or misuse that They decided.

I had to stop that. I had to get back what had been taken from me or
prevent 
Them from using my ova by destroying each and every reproductive cell 
that had been stolen from me.

No short and painful Emily-lives anymore.  I'd rather have no progeny than 
another child suffer the way she had.

I wasn't sure what I was going to do.

Stripping off the gloves and gown, I dropped them into the biohazard bin in 
the Morgue and headed outside.  The Texas sun warmed the death chill out 
of my flesh as I stood next to one of the clerical workers who was smoking
a 
cigarette in the parking lot.   She looked over at me and took in the
splashes 
of blood on my sneakers and the bottoms of my scrub pants.

"The kids?" she asked

"Yeah."

She held out a pack of Morleys and I almost laughed.  

Twenty little bodies.  It was a new record.

The smoke tasted better than I remembered and it cleared the formalin
taste 
out of my mouth, replacing it with the taste of incipient death.

 One of the rental fleet cars pulled up and Mulder got out his blackened 
sunglasses catching a flare of sunlight, his dark suit blowing in the hot 
wind.

"Anything?" he asked me, staring at the cigarette in my hand.

"Nothing.  And you?"

"Nothing.  None of the children were adopted. Abrams must have had a
few 
wires crossed."

I shut my eyes and the sunlight burned flame orange through my closed
lids.

"Are you all right, Scully?" he asked in a soft voice.

"I'm fine, Mulder."


TITLE: Iolokus 4/18

AUTHOR: MustangSally and Rivka T

CLASSIFICATION: MSR/Mythology/X-File

CONTENT WARNING: NC-17 for sex, violence, and language

SPOILER WARNING: US Season five through "Emily"

DISTRIBUTION STATEMENT: The Universe at large

THE DISCLAIMER: We would appreciate not being sued.  No actors
were harmed during the course of writing this story.




4

There's something that she means to do; and I know this:
She'll not relax her rage till it has found its victim.
God grant she strike her enemies and not her friends!


When we got back to D.C. I began to pull myself away from the reactivity 
I'd settled into, the inactivity a thin scab over a wound.

Rouch, Rouch, Rouch.

It sounded like a noise that a dog made before it threw up on the carpet.
 A thickened bark.  As I flipped through the file on Emily that Mulder
had written in his hurried printing, jagged here and there, showing that
it had been written in cars, on airplanes and probably while he was
sitting on the toilet, I realized that I had never looked at the file
before.  I hadn't wanted to know and part of me was still pretending that
it had never happened.  The black rollerball words made it all real. The
bare narrative in Mulder's somewhat lurid style brought the whole thing
back to me with a clarity and a pain that I hadn't felt while it was
happening to me.

I shoved the file back in the cabinet before Mulder came back from the
copier.  I suppose I might have had a strange look on my face as he
walked in, because he tilted his head to the side in his befuddled puppy
fashion before slumping into his desk chair and dragging his tie through
the puddle of spilt coffee in the blotter.  I retreated to my "work area"
and started entering receipt costs into the expense spreadsheet in my
laptop.

I wondered what Skinner would do if I put in a request for reimbursement
for Emily's funeral.

But let me explain.

They (of the ubiquitous, invisible them) had stolen something from me. 
They stole the future.  Not content with just making La Familia Mulder
miserable for the rest of eternity, They decided that my future was going
to walk a parallel path.  While I was missing, abducted, whatever you
want to call it, they managed to steal every last one of my ova.  There
were no scars, no marks, no clues other than an irregular menstrual cycle
(which was par for the course with me).  When I began chemotherapy for
the cancer that was an alleged side-effect of removal of the implant in
the back of my neck, my oncologist suggested that I go in and try to have
my ova harvested as the chemo would treat the cells as though they were
cancerous.

Imagine my surprise when I found that I had no ova to harvest.

I had to replace my everyday dishes after I went on a rampage through my
apartment, destroying everything that had a satisfying crash.  The
wineglasses I reduced to a fine powder on my kitchen floor and I broke
enough mirrors to continue my bad luck well into the next century, if you
believe in that kind of thing.

Not only had They stolen my ova, but They had used them to create some
strange half-human hybrid, the child known as Emily.  My daughter.  The
daughter that I only had for a few short weeks and who died in my arms
since she was not suited to live in this world.

Needless to say this upset me.

But I continued on like the good little soldier that I am, brave little
Scully with her gun and her badge trotting loyally alongside Mulder into
one half-assed mess after another.  I didn't cry, I didn't mourn, I
continued.  I showered, did my hair, dressed, put on my make-up and
drove
to work each day where I felt like I was watching the rest of the world
through the glass of an isolation chamber.

I sat across from Mulder in the basement office, the muscles in my inner
thighs still aching from the sex we'd had in Austin.  Good old Mulder, he
always throws himself into the matter at hand as long as it interests
him.  Apparently I interest him.  In a way, he interests me.  Not the way
that I think he imagines, but he interests me nevertheless.

Rouch.

Rouch interested me greatly.

A hasty search on the Internet had revealed that Rouch had an office in
Austin, ostensibly for sales, but one had to wonder when one was dealing
with Them.  I needed to know more.  Mulder would have contacted the
Gunmen, gone to their "no girls allowed" clubhouse and gotten the
information, or called his latest gift from the Informant of the Week
Club.  I wasn't about to go begging Frohike for anything, the little
troll would probably expect to get some head in return.  

Finally, Mulder noticed that he was mopping up the desktop with his tie
and exited, swearing, stage right.

I pounced on his Rolodex, looking for anything out of the ordinary.

What I found to be out of the ordinary, was a woman's name.  The
Rolodex
was as much as a boy's club as the rest of his life, and the name popped
out like a squeezed eyeball.

Marita.

I had the number committed to memory before he got back.

****

I was starting to feel like I was standing at the dock waving good-bye to
the Lusitania. 

It was fairly obvious to even someone with his head as far up his ass as
I do that Scully was up to something.  She was making me itch as though
my clothes were filled with fiberglass.  I spilled my coffee, dropped
files, knocked my hip on an open drawer and generally acted like a
teenager while she sat with her La Giaconda smile over her laptop.  This
was the situation where I wanted to bash her head into a pulp and take
carnal revenge on her unconscious body.  It occurs to me now that I
should have taken advantage of the situation when she was in a coma years
ago.

I never claimed to be normal, but at least I'm self-aware enough to know
that I am not.  Self-aware enough to keep my thoughts at a fantasy level
rather than acting them out.  Most of the time, anyway.

The Rolaids were losing the battle against the coffee and I had to
retreat to the bathroom to vomit for the second time that day.  Maybe if
I had eaten something healthier than the greasy doughnut I'd gnawed on
the Metro that morning I would have felt better.  When I came out of the
stall, Danny was standing at the urinal getting rid of his coffee in the
more accepted fashion.

"Fox-Man, you look like shit," he greeted me.

"Fuck you," I said and began sluicing water over my face.

"Partying too much again?" he asked and zipped up, which reminded me of
something.

"I saw Zippy in Texas," I said and rinsed my mouth out with the chemical
cocktail that passes for water in DC.

"Yeah?  How's the motherfucker doin'?"

Zippy, Danny, and Spooky all went through Quantico together, in the sexy
days of the late eighties, giving rise to a lot of Top Gun jokes. 
Despite his last name, Danny was a tall Aryan blonde courtesy of the
North of Italy and played the Iceman role, Zippy was our Tom Cruise,
which left me as Goose with the mark of doom on me.  Now Danny was
permanently attached to a computer, Zippy had a Velcro fetish and I had
problems of my own.  A far cry from our spiky buzz-cut and Ray Ban days.

"'His ego's writing checks that his body can't cash', other than that
he seemed fine. I don't think he misses us."

Danny grunted. "Hey," he asked, remembering something and looking at
me
more carefully than you usually want to have happen in a men's bathroom,
"you got a brother?"

If you lived in my world, you'd understand my answer.

"Not that I'm aware of."

"I was watchin' CNN the other day and they had some news conference 
about a drug that the FDA doesn't want to approve, and the guy from the 
drug company looked a hell of a lot like you.  Except he was
good-lookin'."

I faked a laugh.

"Poor bastard.  You didn't catch the name of the drug company, did you?"

"Nah, one of the kids was kickin' up a fuss and Marie was bein' a real
bitch about it.  The joys of family life. Catch you later Fox-man."

"Later."

When I got back to my office Scully was looking serene which made me 
itch even more.  There was no oxygen in the room and I needed to think.  
What the fuck was going on with her now, what the hell was a guy with my 
face doing on CNN (although knowing Dad you could guess the obvious, 
Mom wasn't the only one who needed a cheat sheet to figure out who she 
should be expecting in her bed), and I really wanted to go on-line and find 
out if the drug company in question was my good old friend Roush.

I needed to get rid of Scully for an hour at least.

"Scully, did you happen to pick up that murder case file from the MPD
that Skinner wanted me to look at?  Fucking MPD can't do shit anymore."

"No."

"Do you mind?  I've got to get this expense report crap out of the way
before they start attaching my paycheck."

The MPD ME's office was annoyingly far away and I never would have
sent
her under normal conditions.  Rather than giving me an argument about it,
she closed her laptop and picked up her sunglasses.

"Want me to get you a sandwich while I'm out?"

"Uh, no thanks."

She nodded and left, frightening me through to my spine.

I logged onto the 'net and waited for the CNN site to come up.  While I
was waiting, I reached for the phone planning to put in a call to Marita
and see if she knew anything about this FDA deal and the man that looked
like me.

My Rolodex was already open to her number.

A two by four of nausea hit me in the back of the head but I dialed
anyway.

Voice Mail.

"This is Marita Covarrubias.  I'll be out of the office all day.  If this
is an emergency, please reach me at my cell phone number-"

While her silky voice recited the numbers, I watched the CNN site come
up.

The drug company was Rouch.  The press conference was in DC and I 
would have bet my last antacid that Marita was slithering around 
somewhere nearby.

The snake chewed at my entrails.



TITLE: Iolokus 5/18

AUTHOR: MustangSally and Rivka T

CLASSIFICATION: MSR/Mythology/X-File

CONTENT WARNING: NC-17 for sex, violence, and language

SPOILER WARNING: US Season five through "Emily"

DISTRIBUTION STATEMENT: The Universe at large

THE DISCLAIMER: We would appreciate not being sued.  No actors
were harmed during the course of writing this story.



5
God, and God's daughter, justice, and light of Helios!
Now, friends, has come the time of my triumph over
My enemies and now my foot is on the road.
Now I am confident they will pay the penalty.*



Marita was not what I had expected. I'd talked to her on the phone when I
was running Mulder's little administrative errand, before they started to
sleep together and he'd decided that the two of us should never meet.

How do I know they slept together? Oh, please. After all this time
together, I just knew. It was in the way he'd sit in our office on the
mornings after, just a little looser, a little more slumped. The
guilty-gloating looks he'd give me, liquid eyes shifting like mercury
then freezing at my subzero glare.

I'm confident that after l'affaire Goldstein he didn't go back to her.
Each time we have a crisis, Mulder finds some new betrayal to work on
me.
In his infinite transparent soul, lies are just promises he found he
couldn't keep. But his body, unlike his mind, is a temple; my temple.
I've written my name on it in gunshots and stitches. I've traced runes
above it and bound him with a handshake. This is the only thing I know:
he didn't sleep with her after we got back from Massachusetts.

 I thought about it as I waited for Marita to arrive at the cafe at the
East Wing of the National Gallery of Art. I sipped my coffee and looked
down into the main hall below, where tourists milled, determinedly
getting their dose of DC culture, as if sculpture had anything to do with
government. Reviewing my first time with Mulder made sense, because it
was one of the main things Marita and I had in common. The two of us
were
quite a pair: Mulder's sidekick and his informant, his seraglio.

I'd taken Mulder back to his apartment. I drove the car he'd stolen from
me and through the long drive, hours of grinding my foot against the gas
pedal as if I could smash his face in with my pointy shoe, he hadn't said
a damn thing. He was pretty doped up thanks to the friendly ER doctors,
whose eager drug-drenched hands he'd been unable to resist as he was
still surfing the ketamine wave.

The plan was to set him down and get out of there before I took my own
gun out and showed *him* what it was like to have someone--your
partner,
to be exact--re-enact William Tell with a Sig Sauer and you as the
stammering target, sans apple. I had to take his hand to get him out of
the front seat, and I almost didn't have the strength. It might have been
the chemo I'd been covertly and sporadically engaging in, my little
secret drug habit, not that I really needed to take affirmative steps to
hide it in the previous few months even before Mulder headed out to
Neptune via Air Goldstein. The weakness made me even more furious and
I
hauled him up the stairs. He was blinking and trying to look around him,
but he was moving his head too slowly to see much of anything.

I flicked the locks, one, two, three, and dragged him in. Then over to
the couch where I pushed him down as easily as brushing a shower curtain
aside.

I leaned over to touch the scab right under his hairline and he flinched,
bringing a hand up to stop my inspection. I pulled away, angry at him for
resisting and for leaving me and for getting a hole in his head in the
first place so that all attention had to be focused on him until he was
better. I would have told him about the cancer metastatizing if he hadn't
run off, if I hadn't found him naked and cowering in a bathtub. Really I
would have.

I drew in a breath to start the lecture and he looked at me and winced
again, already hearing the accusatory words--not that it would take
Mulder's near-psychic powers to know what was coming. He caught my 
wrist again, tugging me toward him. My knees rested precariously on the 
edge of his Playboy-era black leather couch and I could barely keep my feet 
on the ground against his leverage.

He twisted and pulled, very gently, and suddenly I was sitting across his
lap, his free arm rising around my back to prevent me from toppling over
and our joined hands extended as if we were going to get up and dance
around the room. I could see the scabs clearly now; little dried flakes
of black blood stuck off from the main wounds and the flesh around the
entry points was puckered and swollen, though not badly enough to
indicate infection.

His mouth bled heat onto mine.

My hands were at his throat, whether to strangle him or push him away I
honestly did not know, and then his head lolled back faster than I could
follow and he looked at me, curiously, waiting.

I gaped at him. I'd never thought that he would make the first move,
especially not now. Not now that I was dying and certain to leave him
shortly. And not now in particular when he'd just got through
hallucinating and had nearly killed at least one of the two of us in his
drugged haze. He smelled, I noticed, of stale sweat and a hint of iodine.

His eyes blanked for a moment, his face relaxing, and I knew he was
experiencing a flashback from the ketamine and the other, still
unidentified drugs that the butcher had used on him. A mental landside,
images twisting and curling in the fire of his past.

This was a bad idea. He was not well, not even at Mulder-normal, not
sane.

He returned to the present and his eyes flashed shock that I was on his
lap--he'd lost the last few minutes before the mini-seizure, and I knew
all over that this was a bad idea.

His hand slid up, over the curve of my back, engulfing my shoulder. I
leaned into it.

I felt the cancer move in my head, smiling at him. Yes, it said, come and
play. To me it whispered: Relax, Dana, all God's children gotta fuck.
What will it be like to slip away in morphine and bedsores knowing that
you never had him?

And he pulled me to him. My thighs shifted on the bones of his legs,
burning beneath me. His eyes were open as our lips met, and as I closed
my own to enter into the necessary darkness I was certain he'd be
watching me the entire time. 

This was a terrible idea.

His lips were gentle on mine as he ran his right hand down the line of my
throat, tickling the pulse there where the cancerous blood jerked and
trembled. With his left hand, he pulled me closer as my mouth opened. 

His tongue was wet sand and I bit at it until I could taste his blood.

The Lost Weekend, as I like to call it, followed. That's when I learned what 
it's like to be Mulder, living with the omnipresent knowledge that you have, 
very recently, screwed up in a very major way. Every minute was as dark 
and rich and sweet as fine chocolate, made both bitter and better by my 
knowledge that Mulder and I understood what was happening in very 
different ways. This is the vortex of self-knowledge that I've discovered: I 
got an extra kick out of my emotional distance in the face of Mulder's 
obvious commitment, and then an dose of guilt for being so cruel, and then 
the guilt fed the sexual pleasure. It was really quite a wonderful thing to
find 
out about myself, and someday I'll have to thank Mulder for it.

Throughout all of it I took deep delight in puzzling out the quirks and
tender 
places in my partner's body.  His cheerfully lecherous jokes, his leech-like 
cuddling after sex, the fact that his socks were the first clothing article he 
took off and the last one he put on.  The fact that his skill at oral sex made 
him worth his weight in gold.

I should have told him then that it was  wrong to call out my name  as 
though I were the cold orb of the moon he was howling to.  However, it's 
hard to be analytic and rational when your vocabulary has drained away
and 
you're left with monosyllabic sighs and grunts, with a few time-tested 
Anglo-Saxon words for variety.

And the honeymoon had been wonderful, once we'd sorted out the 
unpleasantness with Kritschgau. That ridiculous comic-book romance, the 
failed partnership retreat--those weeks at the end of 1997 were almost 
perfect, almost what I would write if I could write the X Files myself. I was 
in remission and I allowed myself to imagine that Mulder and I could just 
keep on as we were and I'd never have to explain to him or myself what I 
thought burned between us.

San Diego exploded my life like the comet at Tunguska.

But I was getting over it. I'd let Mulder back into my bed, hadn't I? Well, 
back onto a hotel table, but let's not quibble. And Marita was going to help 
me close this latest sad chapter of my life. 

Marita arrived only ten minutes late. I could tell that it was her by the eau
de 
conspiracy she wore like a blue haze of smoke around her shoulders.

They were lovely shoulders; I could see why it had been easy for Mulder
to fuck her. And, since he could be absolutely confident that she had a
hidden agenda, there'd be no real need for mistrust.

She coiled gracefully down into the chair opposite me.

"Agent Scully?" Her voice was hot chocolate with whipped cream, the 
words blurred by some unfathomable accent. Blue eyes glittered like poker
chips; time to ante up.

"I need some information. Information about a research project that I was
unwillingly made part of. I had to attend to some of the consequences of
that project in San Diego recently. I need to know if there are
other...consequences as yet unaccounted for. I believe that companies
known as GenTech and Roush are involved. I want names--who owns
controlling shares, who's in charge, where they can be found. Where the
remaining research facilities are located."

She stared at me. I grew angry. Angrier. How dare she look at me as if
she knew what I was just because I'd been an unwilling subject of the
machinations of powerful men? Just because I'd had my future stolen. She
thought she could read me like an airport mystery and I could feel my
face thin out, the anger ready to explode.

Finally she looked away, out at the Calder mobile swinging gently in the
artificial breeze. The thousands of pounds of brightly painted metal
bobbed above the tourists milling through the atrium below, and one blue
plate couldn't have been more than ten feet away from the table at which
we sat. I imagined the mobile coming loose from its moorings, crashing
down as the tourist-ants scampered, mothers trying to snatch their
children away but failing, failing.

"I think I can find that out for you," she said in that furry butter
tone, so rich it had to be a put-on, and I didn't process the content for
a few seconds. She was already rising, sleek and confident, and she
leaned back down and whispered into my ear. "Do not attempt to contact
me
again. You'll hear from me when I have information of use to you."

I looked for a discarded skin or a few iridescent scales on the seat
she'd left behind, which was still radiating her body heat, but there was
nothing.


TITLE: Iolokus 6/18

AUTHOR: MustangSally and Rivka T

CLASSIFICATION: MSR/Mythology/X-File

CONTENT WARNING: NC-17 for sex, violence, and language

SPOILER WARNING: US Season five through "Emily"

DISTRIBUTION STATEMENT: The Universe at large

THE DISCLAIMER: We would appreciate not being sued.  No actors
were harmed during the course of writing this story.



6
I have often engaged in arguments
And become more subtle, perhaps more heated,
Than is suitable from women;
Though in fact women too have intelligence,
Which forms part of our nature and instructs us - 
Not all of us, I admit; but a certain few
You might perhaps find, in a large number of women
A few not incapable of reflection.

I was losing her.  She was drifting away from me faster than the cancer
had taken her.  Damn, it was so fucking cruel, to have her back and
healthy and now -- she was buying a ticket on the Disoriented Express. 
It's a nice trip, I suggest everyone take a ride at least once.  Gives
you some perspective. It was such a cosmic joke.  The planets finally
aligned correctly and for "one brief shining moment" we were together, a
functioning unit in the field, and a couple in bed.  Then it was gone. 
Had I imagined the whole thing?

The first moment she walked into my office years ago in her ugly suit
with her too-earnest face and her frumpy haircut, I was a dead man.  You
could have dragged me around a beach house and called it "Weekend at
Mulder's".  From the beginning, I've had a thing about intelligent women.
Smart is sexy.  Phoebe and I had planned on getting married and raising
our own little serial killers one day, and, like all intelligent women, in
the end she did me a serious injury.  When we parted she took a chunk of
my heart and all my Clash records.  So when little Dana Scully tiptoed
into my hotel room with her mosquito bites, I could have come in my pants
like a kid.  But I declared her off-limits, spending the nights with the
Video Vixens and shooting putty at the moon while I thought about the
way
her skin smelled.  Truth to be told, I had the sinking suspicion that her
sexual interest in me was less than zero, no pun intended.  I also
suspected that she didn't like me very much most of the time.

But--

But that night when she took me home, my brain still swirling like a
Slurpee dispenser at the 7-11, I looked at her pale little face and it
was the hotel room with the mosquito bites again.  My tripping brain was
transposing her then face with her now face and I heard crickets outside
even though it was winter.  She looked so sad and so delicate that I
wanted to -- I wanted to open her up like a bag of fresh-ground coffee and
inhale her.  I wanted to bury my face in her hair and never come up for
air again. I wanted her to save me.

I pulled her onto my lap and I felt her cool blue gaze spray across my
face when I touched her.  She didn't move when I finally kissed her.  It
was one of the kisses that should go down in the great kisses of history,
simply because of the finality of it.  After five years, after a million
road miles, a thousand cheap hotel rooms, a hundred incidents that left
both of us weak and shaking.  Yes, this was it!

And she was dying so if she decided that she was going to hate me for the
rest of her life the torment would be short.

I half-expected her to go through the corny routine of slapping me.
Instead, she seized the sides of my face and kissed me back with a
violence that left the holes in my head stinging.  There on the couch, my
fingers worked their way under her sweater to her hot, sweet skin.  Her
ribs were hard under my fingers and her heart was beating like a trapped
squirrel's.   Cupping her hot breasts in my hands, I experienced a
drug-heightened epiphany that threatened to remove what was left of my
brain.   I ran my lips over the stretches of her throat and drank her in,
her fingers digging hard into my aching back.  All she did was gasp.  I
was drunk with her when I finally began to peel away the wrapper of her
clothes and laid her down on the black sofa, her skin burning with
phosphorescence in the dull light of the room.  Scully's body is a
marvel.  You don't understand that the business suits cover so much. 
There were red weals in her shoulders from her bra straps as she bound
herself like Olivia playing Ganymede, but her breasts were full, her
waist exquisitely tiny and her hips and belly flaring out with geometric
precision.  

I didn't just make love to her -- I worshipped her.   

I polished every centimeter of her body with my hands, with my mouth,
with my body.  She tasted of cookies and, ultimately, she tasted of the
sea.  I sucked her lips, nipples, fingers, toes, and she sighed and
moaned all the while her skin so white on the blackness that she was a
ghost.   My hand between her legs, I kissed her mouth and swallowed all
of her moans, I swallowed the salty tang of her climax twice before I
even took off my shirt.  I fumbled off my clothes while she clung to my
back like Spanish moss, wet with sweat and come, her fingers in my hair,
her teeth grazing the back of my neck.  I sat on the sofa with my cock
tall enough to raise a flag on, and pulled her down onto it.   I ground
my teeth, looked into the distant reaches of the galaxy within her eyes,
feeling her enclose me, her breasts against my chest and her hands
gripping my shoulders.  I don't know how I lasted more than a minute
inside her, maybe it was a side-effect from the drug but I stroked and
ground into her until she was limp as paper on a humid day, her wet hair
sticking to my face, her deliciously tight pussy gripping me.  Somehow
she came again, sobbing against my face, and that finally tripped the
circuit breaker in my head and I shot into her for five years of
frustration and longing.

I wept.

Okay, Hallmark commercials make me weep but this was different, really.

That was a lost three days, lost in skin, sweat, smells, and sex.  We
worked through the Karma Sutra forwards and then backwards, pausing 
only to eat take-out Chinese, bathe, and sleep.  I recuperated from my
experience with Doctor Goldstein very quickly that way. Time stretched
elastic until she finally left, taking her swollen mouth and satiated
eyes home to Annapolis.

The Tuesday I returned to the office, I found her sitting with her
glasses on, reading a post-mortem report.  I almost leaned down to kiss
her but the tundra of her eyes kept me at bay.

The routine was established that day, have sex until we were both sore
and worrying about permanent damage to our genitals, and then say
nothing
about it.  Nothing at all.

I could continue the innuendoes as usual, that was included in the
unwritten 
rules, and I could open the door when she came to my apartment and strip 
her naked, telling her how it felt to have her hair brush me like butterfly 
wings and her butterscotch-pudding skin against mine. We could eat
takeout 
together and discuss cases. But no hand-holding, no movies on my couch. 
We were either naked and fucking, or we weren't.

It's a measure of my delusions that I thought briefly that I was in heaven. I 
had Scully professionally, and boy did I ever have her personally. I had her 
in positions and places I'd never dared fantasize about. The fact that she 
couldn't open her eyes when I was inside her bounced right off my shields.

It was right after the Emily-creature died and Scully began to change
that the stomach pains started.  Psychotropic illness. Peptic ulcer from
internalization of stress.  All very classic, I could have written myself
up as a case study.  Man has sister/mother issues, forms platonic
relationship with woman who fulfills sister/mother roles.  Platonic
relationship turns sexual.  Man is temporarily happy.  Sexual
relationship becomes complicated, he feels rejected and abandoned.  Man
develops ulcer.

The ulcer bit me, and I fast-forwarded to the present. I wasn't going to give 
Scully up without a fight. She'd shot me to save me and the least I could do 
was return the favor.

That's how I came to be leaning against a pillar in Union Station, wringing 
my hands; when I realized what I was doing, I shoved said hands into the 
pockets of my suit and waited.

I watched the good-looking blonde peruse the magazines at the ornate
stand in the center of Union Station, the statues looking over our heads
with their intaglio eyes staring through us.  Loitering behind the
pillar, I felt as though I should have been wearing a trench coat with a
fedora and an unfiltered cigarette cupped in my hand.  She was sporting a
tres noir ensemble, skinny skirt that cupped her ass like a friendly
hand, and those padded shoulders that women wear to make them look 
tough. Marita was about as tough as overcooked pasta.  She caves faster 
than a politician under pressure does, but she could suck the paint off the
bumper of a Range Rover without breaking a sweat.

She didn't see me until I grabbed her by her biceps and began pulling her
away from the newsstand, her briefcase bumping against my leg. 
Briefcase, what a joke, other than a file folder, her cellphone and a few
pens, Marita's briefcase holds nothing related to the job listed on her
resume.  She carries condoms, a change of underwear, KY jelly, a spare
pair of stockings and a travel toothbrush and toothpaste set - for her
*real* job.  

As we walked along, Marita stepped in closer to me, so her breast bumped
against the back of my hand, and a cloud of Chanel #5 filled my sinuses.

"This is very melodramatic darling, you just could have called," she
hummed in my ear.

"What were you talking to Scully about?"

"Just girl talk.  Comparing notes."

You see, that's why arguing with a woman is like tap-dancing in a puddle
of nitroglycerine, they have their own set of rules, and I'll be damned if any 
man has ever gotten a copy. The overriding principle seems to be to make 
the man look stupid. Even if the woman has a cobra wrapped around her 
neck, she'll try to convince you that you're gauche for not knowing it's the
in 
thing.

I steered her towards Americas, the overpriced overgrown diner that
sprawled across one corner of the once-classy main atrium. The maitre'd's
expression indicated that he wasn't sure if my suit was good enough, but
gave us a table anyway.  What kind of a world do we live in when a
maitre'd can't tell a real Hugo Boss from a knockoff?  I shoved Marita
into the chair at the table and plopped down across from her.

"What train are you taking?" I asked.

"The Two-Forty."

"That gives you about thirty minutes to tell me exactly what the fuck you
were talking to Scully about yesterday.  And I'd rather you were talking 
about the size of my dick, I don't think it was anything that innocent."

"Your dick is anything but innocent, Fox."

"Don't call me that."

She must have her smile done at the same place as her hair and nails, at
the femme fatale salon or something.  I felt the pain in my stomach kick up 
another notch.  

The good thing was that I didn't want her any more.  Whatever had pushed
me to her was gone, nothing was left, Dr. Scully had surgically removed
it.  

"Tell me what happened."

The waiter interrupted, taking her order for wine and mine for a scotch
rocks.  Dad would have been so proud.

"She called me," Marita purred, eager to make things complicated. Ring
ring, pick up the clue phone, dearie. I already knew *that*.

"About what?"

"She had questions about the Project."

"Which project is this one? Overthrowing the government, the cover-up of
extra-terrestrial life or Microsoft's plan to dominate the world."

"Roush."

The pain in my stomach danced with a partner in my head.

"What were the questions?"

"Locations of the company's facilities, list of stockholders, but she
could have gotten that from you,  couldn't she?  You get all the company
information with your stockholder information?"

What? Never let them see you react, that's a good rule for dealing with
women, or Consortium flunkies, or sentient beings in general. "Obviously,
she was interested in things that weren't in the stockholder reports. 
What did you tell her?"

"Nothing right now, I don't have the information at my fingertips. I have
to *research*."

She made the word sound obscene. The waiter brought our drinks.  I guess
it didn't look bad from the exterior, a couple of obvious government
types having a drink in Union Station before one got on the Metroliner
back to New York.  What the waiter didn't know was that there was only a
hair of a rope of control keeping me from taking the gun out of my belt
and reducing her vapidly pretty face to a mess of blood and bone shards. 
Instead I took a deep gulp of scotch, feeling it sting the wound inside
me.

"Whatever you tell her, I need to know."

"Isn't it terrible when you can't trust your lover?" she asked.

Honestly, I wouldn't know what it was like to trust one. 

"Marita, I mean it, I need to know."

"What's it like to need?" she said over the rim of her wineglass.

"Don't fuck with me."

Blinking, she settled back in her seat and her smile thinned.

"Have you decided you're going to be a player now?" she asked.

"I don't play games."

I left a twenty on the table to cover the drinks.

TITLE: Iolokus 7/18

AUTHOR: MustangSally and Rivka T

CLASSIFICATION: MSR/Mythology/X-File

CONTENT WARNING: NC-17 for sex, violence, and language

SPOILER WARNING: US Season five through "Emily"

DISTRIBUTION STATEMENT: The Universe at large

THE DISCLAIMER: We would appreciate not being sued.  No actors
were harmed during the course of writing this story.




7
O Zeus!  Why have you given us clear signs to tell
True gold from counterfeit; but when we need to know
Bad men from good, the flesh bears no revealing mark?


"We've been checking up on that pharmaceutical company you asked us
about," Frohike said. As usual, each word had the weight of conspiracy
behind it, as if his life were in danger merely for getting on the phone
with such knowledge. I wanted to yell at him to spit it out but I was
just too tired. 

My bones were turning to sand inside my body and Scully, Scully my dark
satanic bride, was leaving me behind. I had no energy but I'd do what was
necessary to stay with her.

"Mulder?"

"Yeah."

"Do you already know this?" Perfect, now Frohike was getting ticked off.
I could imagine him tilted back in his sagging swivel chair, cool as a
pimp watching someone else's whore get busted. Guest starring Fox
Mulder
as the whore.

"Why would I know anything?" 

Whine, whine. Sometimes the drone of my own voice is just about enough 
to make me choke.

Cough. "We got a list of Roush's major stockholders. They're a privately
held company, but they make enough money that people in the financial
world pay attention...most of the profit's from this one drug that helps
people who've had heart attacks. But they reinvest a lot in R&D. Rumor
has it that many of their projects benefit the military. And of course
they're...connected...with illicit tests on unwilling subjects."

Gee, Frohike, tell me something I didn't know. "So?" I hope God exists,
just so someone appreciates the fact that I do have self-control. Despite
objective evidence to the contrary.

"Mulder...according to our information, you own a ten percent share of
Roush."

"How?"

"Roush just released their report and they listed the major stockholders.
 You're one of them."

The hard drive in my head ground for a moment.  Stock? I'd almost
forgotten that innuendo from the bitch. I had some stock, I knew, the
broker flooded my mailbox with useless paper at regular intervals.  Dad
had invested money for me when I was a child, and there had been a ream
of paperwork about Dad's investments that I vaguely remembered from the
leather and wood lawyer who had settled Dad's will. I signed a lot of
paper that day, mostly to get out of the office as quickly as possible so
I could lick my wounds in private.  There could have been stock.  There
must have been stock; he'd left me everything.  Nice checks came
quarterly and the broker pretty much had carte blanche to re-invest as he
saw fit.  

Blood money.

Great.  That was just perfect, another reason to flagellate myself.

"It's ironic, right?" I said in my most annoyingly flippant tone, the
tone that never failed to make the Great Walter Skinner clench his jaw.

"You could say that, or you could say that it makes your loyalty
questionable."

"Fuck that, Melvin. Infiltrate and divide." A little eddy of acid lashed
my stomach and I refused to bend over with the pain; someone might have
wired my kitchen for video again.

"You could have bought Microsoft."

"Now there's a company with no interest in world domination."

I opened the refrigerator, the cordless phone jammed against my shoulder.
 No beer.  You'd think that a guy with all that stock would have beer.  
At that point I would have sold my soul for some beer, maybe I had no
soul left to sell, my soul was in the stock market.

"Is there anything else?" I asked, sounding both juvenile and whiny
again.

"No.  I just wanted you to know that we know."

He hung up on me.

"You know everything, don't you," I told the dial tone.

He didn't know what I was going to do next, I didn't either, until I
dialed the phone.

****

I let myself into Mulder's apartment when he didn't come to the door
immediately.

"Mulder?" I hated even the small uncertainty of having to call out. 

"I'm in the bathroom," he said, muffled, over the running water. Mulder
was like a bulimic lately, he couldn't take a piss without running the
tap. I don't think he used to do that, but maybe I just hadn't been
paying attention. "There's something you need to see in the bedroom."

I expected another dead body, at the least. Instead I found the room
frosted with pieces of paper.

Although you'd have to know him to understand this, underneath the
clutter Mulder is actually a very organized person. He has his own system 
for remembering where things are. Part of it is to make it harder for any 
malevolent outsider to find particular information, but part is just Mulder's 
own cussedness. He won't do anything the easy way if a harder approach 
can be pulled off with the appropriate amount of effort and planning.

This mess was different. Manila folders lay scattered like dead
butterflies over the floor of the bedroom.  Their contents, I deduced,
were what were covering the bed.

"What is all this?"

He answered by coming up behind me and pushing me forward onto the 
bed. I fell hard and gracelessly. My hands were on the bed, sliding over the
stacks and stacks of papers he'd strewn there. Glossy brochures were
scattered slippery and thick, a bedspread of publications. I think there
were stock certificates too; I could see the thin purple and green
scrollwork around the borders, the decoration that's supposed to make
wealth noble. The papers smelled like money. I couldn't keep my balance
and my arms went out with a whoosh.

I could feel him, his cock poking roughly against me--he was already
undressed. I almost wished I could turn around, because we never fuck
under good lighting conditions and so I never get to look at him, but he
was already pulling up my skirt and snarling at my underwear for being
too practical and sturdy to be ripped off. He had to settle for hauling
it down my legs like he was scraping napalm off my skin; his fingers left
dents. I was stretched out across the bed, financial statements all
around me.

I tried to read--some were upside down from my perspective, but there
were a few that were clear. Mulder's accountants had sent him regular
reports on how his stocks were doing. I hadn't realized that I was
screwing such a wealthy man. I should have gotten him to take me to
dinner more often.

Mulder paid no attention to my distraction--no, wrong, I think he was
counting on it. He put his hand under my stomach, tilting my ass up into
the proper position, and I clenched my hand and was surprised by the
paper cut.  It was long and painful and he forced his way inside me and
that hurt too, but not for long.

As he slammed into me, I could feel his balls slapping against the
insides of my thighs. "You remember what I told you about Roush, about
Blevins?" His voice was more even than it is when he makes reports to
Skinner. "I had the Gunmen check, but I didn't think--I don't read most
of my mail, except for the adult video catalogs." He wasn't even
breathing hard. I wondered if he could be enjoying this or if I'd
corrupted him.

"Roush is connected with the experiments on abductees," he continued.
"Frohike couldn't find out much because they're very secretive. But it
appears that we have an unexpected advantage--I'm a minority stockholder.
I think I'm entitled to look at the books, actually, though my lawyer
hasn't gotten back to me on that yet."

I was so amazed that I lost any sense of what was happening, and I tried
to get my hands underneath me so I could stabilize myself. He batted them
away almost absentmindedly. My shoulders were starting to hurt from the
strain. I wasn't quite lying down on all that pristine paper, but I
wasn't kneeling either; my arms were stretched out like matchsticks,
keeping my face from disappearing into all the letters and brochures. He
was holding me, holding us both, and the stocks were shifting underneath
us as smoothly as his cock was slipping in and out of me.

"Dear old dad," he said, when he'd found a good rhythm. Now he sounded
like he'd been running. "He left me very well-off. Invested his hush
money well. I wonder how many suits I bought because Roush's drugs
aided
the super-ovulation process. I bought three or four in the months after
you were returned."

"Don't..." I moaned, wanting him to shut up, to take it back. It didn't
occur to me to suggest that it wasn't his fault.

"Shh," he warned, and put his fingers into my mouth to enforce the
command. I bit down, not hard enough to draw blood, and he growled and
thrust harder.

It was horrible, it was degrading, I thought in a few brain cells as my
breath caught low in my belly and I sucked on his thumb as though it were
another cock in my mouth.

At least this time it probably wasn't on tape.

His other hand went to my jacket, which was still buttoned, and he clawed
it open. Now my poor leverage was the only thing keeping either of us off
the bed.  If I lowered myself, he'd slip out of me and I didn't want
that.

He pushed my breasts together roughly, as if he could get them both in
one handful if he just strained hard enough. For once he just didn't care
about what was happening to me, and I liked it. If he were gentle, I
would have died. So it was Mulder fucking Scully, subject verb object,
and I didn't make a sound as I loosened around him, as I disappeared into
all the white and cream paper and the cascade of black letters. The
pounding inside my pelvis, his cock pounding inside me, the pounding
inside my head, the pounding of my blood over the pounding black
staccato
letters and numbers on the bedspread. His fingernails sliced into the
circle of my tattoo and somehow that was enough to push me into the
crevasse.  My head fell forward and I started to shake and cry out with
nothing other than animal delight.   He had one arm around my waist to
keep me from getting away, but where would I have gone?

I slept afterwards, still wearing my shoes, still lying on the leaf-pile
of papers, Mulder's arm around my waist, breathing loudly into my ear.

I dreamed a memory.

It was December 28, the Feast of the Holy Innocents, and the sermon
began
on time; the Catholics of San Diego were punctual folk. The priest began
speaking even as baby Matthew's gurgles subsided into sleep.

"We remember today, O God, the slaughter of the holy innocents of
Bethlehem by King Herod. Receive, we pray, into the arms of your mercy
all innocent victims; and by your great might frustrate the designs of
evil tyrants and establish your rule of justice, love, and peace; through
Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the
Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen."

The murmured response of the congregation was familiar to me; once again
I was wrapped in the loving arms of the mother church. It had been so
long, and still there was forgiveness and a place for me, and for all
other wayward children. However conceived, the church loves all life.

The priest began to recite from Jeremiah 31:15. "Thus says the Lord: 'A
voice is heard in Ramah, lamentation and bitter weeping. Rachel is weeping 
for her children; she refuses to be comforted for her children, because they 
are not.'"

I do not remember standing up or moving from the pew into the aisle.

I walked out of the church, down all the rows and past all the heads
turning to see who could stalk out when the sermon had only just begun. 

My cross burned my chest like a piece of the sun. A piece of the Son.

I have no son. Nor daughter neither.

In the hospital, remembering to breathe like someone who's going to live,
remembering what it was like to have someone look at me and not see 
*Love Story* playing at their own personal cinema of life, I was willing to 
let go of the skepticism. I offered chance and faith and microchips each an
equal share in my success story.

That was a variety of disbelief too. That was a copout, and I am ashamed
now of the weakness that would not let me look too closely into the 
mechanism of my resurrection.

For my mother's sake, I vowed, we would have a priest at Emily's funeral.
But from then on, I would make my own chance and my own justice, or I
would have none at all.

Movement finally woke me. I opened sleep-sticky eyes and looked at the
twilight room.  Mulder was picking up the stock papers and shoving them 
into a banker's box.  The fact that he was still naked leant a strange tone to 
the scene.  I watched him, marveling at how nicely he was put together. 
An 
economical animal, no extra flesh, nothing but the stripped-down 
mechanism of skin, bone and muscle.  Most of the bed had been cleared of 
paper, save for what I was lying on.  I sat up in my wrinkled suit and 
gathered up the papers on the dark green bedspread.

Crouching by the banker's box, he looked up at me, and I could hardly
keep from staring at the hard lines of his haunches.  Even though I was
sore, 
I could feel myself get wet again.

"What are you going to do?" I asked.

"I don't know."

The last of the papers went back into the box and I had the flash of
replaying this ritual time and time again in the office, the filing of
the papers, the ending of the argument.  At least with him nude, the view
was better.

"Mulder?"

He dragged himself out of whatever dimension he'd escaped to.

"Yeah?"

"Since you're such a rich man, call the Chrysanthemum and order a big
sushi tray, I'm hungry." 

He smiled and life was normal for a moment.

But the words, the black letters on the glossy paper stared back at me
like marks on the handle of an executioner's axe.

Roush.

Roush paid him money, blood money, hush money, thirty pieces of silver,
how much for his soul, how much was my future worth?



TITLE: Iolokus 8/18

AUTHOR: MustangSally and Rivka T

CLASSIFICATION: MSR/Mythology/X-File

CONTENT WARNING: NC-17 for sex, violence, and language

SPOILER WARNING: US Season five through "Emily"

DISTRIBUTION STATEMENT: The Universe at large

THE DISCLAIMER: We would appreciate not being sued.  No actors
were harmed during the course of writing this story.




8

I am afraid
Some dreadful purpose is forming in her mind. She is
A frightening woman; no one who makes an enemy 
Of her will carry off an easy victory.


Scully put the phone down and I saw a fragment of a guilty look, like a
hawk's shadow over a field on a sunny day, cross her face. She asked me
if I wanted coffee, even though I was the one who was late to work and by
custom I should have gotten it, and I said yes.

When the redial button on Scully's phone put me through to the U.N.
switchboard, I knew that she'd contacted Marita again. She took a long
lunch, and I was pathetically grateful that she didn't say that she had a
dentist's appointment or something similarly ridiculous. She took her
briefcase, and though I didn't have a scale to weigh it before and after
I knew her well enough to see that she carried it more carefully when she
returned.

Scully's mostly made of iron but her kidneys work the same as anyone
else's. Finally she had to go to the bathroom, and I blessed female
anatomy and bigoted males; this was J. Edgar's building and there are no
women's bathrooms in the basement. She had to go up two floors.

She left the briefcase behind.

Scully knows my e-mail password. She has my keys. She could recite my
social security number from all the times she's written it on hospital
insurance forms.

Why didn't I know her secret codes? 

I think that question answers itself.

I tried to slide the letter opener in to jimmy the latch once I realized
that I wouldn't be able to figure out the combination in time. The blunt
knifelike object could have made a fine murder weapon (and might have,
had Scully found me), but it made a piss-poor lever.

I did succeed in puncturing my left hand pretty good when the letter
opener slipped out of the crack in the briefcase and embedded itself in
the hand holding the briefcase in place. I couldn't even nurse it openly
in front of Scully for her medicalized sympathy.

The wound was deep but small; it bled sluggishly. Maybe my blood wasn't
sure if I was alive either. I wrapped my hand in a handkerchief--finally,
a use for the damn things again--and waited for her to get back so that I
could glare at her. She looked to see if the case had been moved, but I'd
been careful and I'm fairly sure she didn't see a change of position. We
wouldn't discuss this in our office, not when it could so easily be
bugged, so I determined to try again that night.

I had to go to the bathroom myself when she returned, because the pain in
my abdomen had gotten so bad. When I threw up this time there were thin
coils of blood among the half-digested food. There was a lot of that
going around; there'd been blood in my stool, as they say, for a couple
of weeks. Now there's a phrase that doesn't tell you much: blood in the
stool. What that means is that your shit turns black and slimy. At first
I'd thought it was the remnants of the Black Cancer, which as far as I
knew still lived, dormant, in my blood. But then I'd managed to connect
it to the stomach pain, bright boy that I am, and knew that it was more
likely an ulcer. I'd scheduled a doctor's appointment, which was actually
coming up tomorrow. They'd make me drink barium and irradiate me.
After
all that I'd been through as a kid and then again as an adult, the
incremental harm had to be minimal. I just didn't have time for this
weakness. Scully was not impressed by it, and she certainly wasn't going
to wait for me to be well enough to chase her.

As it happened, I had more than enough reason to show up at Scully's
place. She left the office to drop off a pathology report she'd done as a
favor to VCS and, five minutes later, the delayed e-mail arrived, telling
me that she was taking vacation time and not coming back to the office
for a week.

I played James Bond to Kimberly's Miss Moneypenny, which she ate up 
with a spoon. She sneaked me in between his three o'clock and his
three-fifteen. Skinner had shoved the stick very far up his ass that
morning, I could tell. He looked at me like I was his sausage and
pepperoni pizza that had arrived covered with maggots instead.

"You granted Agent Scully a week's vacation?" I said. "Where's she
going?"

He glanced down at the papers on his desk. His hand twitched as if he
wanted to rub his temples, but he wouldn't do me the courtesy of
revealing that I bothered him.

"I didn't ask her," he said. "I didn't feel that it was any of my
business."

"Yeah, well, if you think I can get myself into trouble on my own, you've
got a whole new experience coming."

That got his attention. "You believe that Agent Scully is going to engage
in covert or illegal activities?"

"I don't know what I believe." Now there's an understatement. "But she
shouldn't be alone right now."

"I don't think that you're in any position to judge what Agent Scully
does or does not need right now."

"Oh, and you are? Was that part of the bargain you made with the
smoker--he cures Scully's cancer, and then throws her in as your reward for 
playing along?"

He rose to his feet like an avalanche. I was glad that the desk was in
between us. I almost reached for my gun, but then he really would have
beaten me up and I couldn't afford to waste that time.

"*Agent* Mulder," he ground out, "I'm going to ignore that because I
understand that you've both been under severe stress recently.
Apparently, Agent Scully has decided to deal with that constructively. I
wish I could say the same for you. If I'm mistaken, and she's picked up
your bad habits, I will hold you personally responsible for anything that
goes wrong."

The twelve-year-old idiot living in my skull forced my mouth open.
"That's rather inconsistent of you, isn't it, sir? First you say it's
none of my business, but now it's my fault and my responsibility. What do
you want me to believe?"

He was around the desk in a flash.  I'm not a short guy, but I literally
looked up to Skinner.  Literally.  I never noticed the fact that he had
reddish flecks in his eyes until he shoved his face into mine.  Remember
that moment in Jurassic Park where the Velociraptor stares at the hunter
through the bushes?  Like that, only with more teeth involved. I didn't
move because one of us would not have walked out of the office if I had.

"Listen to me and listen well, Mulder. I think we both understand that
Agent Scully is in danger because of her association with you. If she's
taking active steps to increase that danger, I expect you to stop her. If
I have to protect her by taking away her badge, I'll do that. Unlike some
people, my desire to curry her favor does not outstrip my concern for
her."

Primal growl therapy.

Skinner, I thought admiringly as I let myself out, I'm really going to
need your balls this weekend.


TITLE: Iolokus 9/18

AUTHOR: MustangSally and Rivka T

CLASSIFICATION: MSR/Mythology/X-File

CONTENT WARNING: NC-17 for sex, violence, and language

SPOILER WARNING: US Season five through "Emily"

DISTRIBUTION STATEMENT: The Universe at large

THE DISCLAIMER: We would appreciate not being sued.  No actors
were harmed during the course of writing this story.





9

Visitations of love that have come
Raging and violent in a man
Bring him neither good respite nor goodness.
But if Aphrodite descends in gentleness
No other goddess brings such delight.
Never, Queen Aphrodite, 
Loose against me from your golden bow,
Dipped in sweetness of desire,
Your inescapable arrow!


The doorbell rang and I looked at the clock on the VCR, Mulder was half
an hour later than I had expected. Taking into account the amount of time
it took him to get the e-mail message, the inevitable trip up to
Skinner's office to bitch, driving to Annapolis and finding a place to
park.  Mulder isn't as random or as sneaky as he would like the world to
think.

I opened the door.

High anger, high color, his hair sticking out around his head like spiky
feathers, glaring down at me as though I were a bad little child.  He
literally shoved past me into my apartment.  I don't like having him
here; he takes up too much space, invades my little lair and breaks
things.  He breaks water glasses, door hinges, a magazine rack, and it's
all because he is too big, has too much energy for the rooms. While I was
in San Diego he killed all my plants by over-watering them.  I left a
dead child on the West Coast and came home to slimy decay in terracotta
pots.

"What the fuck are you doing?" he demanded and performed a Heathcliff
glower near the sofa.

"I'm going to visit Charlie in Arizona."

As a lie, it was fairly maimed, but Charlie was in Arizona and if
everything went well, I would stop and visit before I came home.  If
things didn't go well, I could hide there.

If things really hit the fan, Charlie could identify my body.

"Bullshit."

"Do you want to see my plane ticket, read my phone bills?  I am going to
visit my brother in Arizona."

He deflated a fraction.

"Why now?"

"Why not?  Slow case load, I still have some vacation time left and I
really need to get away."

"From me."

The minute that Mulder realizes that the world does not revolve around
his shapely ass the heavens are going to open up and angels will sing.

"No."

Turning my back on him, I went into the kitchen, he tagged along behind
me like a puppy chewing on my shoelace. A big gangly puppy not yet 
grown into his paws and snout.  I wondered what kind of dog he was going 
to be when he was full-grown. If he ever grew up.

"You can't go," he said.

Translation from Mulderese to English: Don't leave me.

"I need some time, all right?" said and started putting dishes in the
dishwasher.

He grabbed my forearm hard enough for it to hurt and a wineglass--a new
one, dammit--slipped from my fingers to the floor. The glass exploded
into tiny fragments.

I told you, he breaks things.

"You're a shitty liar, Scully."

Still squeezing my forearm, he pulled me around the open dishwasher door.
The metal corner sliced  through my sweatpants and ground along my
shinbone.  I gasped at the pain, but this didn't stop Mulder from hauling
me into the living room.

He wouldn't let go even when we stopped moving. We were different
temperatures, but for some reason I couldn't tell who was hot and who
cold. I stared up at him. Did I look like that when I knew he was about
to run off without me? I hoped not. So sad and blasted, like a coastline
after a hurricane when all the shoddily built houses have been knocked
down.

"Are you going to screw me over too?  Throw me to the wolves?  Or
maybe
you're just going to fuck  some poor schmuck like Zippy senseless for a 
change of pace?"

"What if I did fuck Zippy?  What would you do?" I asked and stepped
closer to him.

Like a dog who isn't quite sure if he has seen the steak on the
countertop or not, Mulder cocked his  head and blinked at me.  He can be
so fucking stupid sometimes.

"You know, Mulder," I continued conversationally, lowering my voice so
that he leaned in just as if we were conferring over a dead body.

"Some people might think that the abrupt change of topic from my
vacation
time to your old friend Zippy indicated a certain amount
of...jealousy...on your part." 

My shin screamed betrayal, but the rest of me was keenly aware that
Mulder had done much worse in his time.  I could tell by the visibly
throbbing carotid artery in the soft part of his long neck that this was
going to be worth running through the terminal and waving my badge to
make them hold the plane.  And this way I could make the flight without
having to pull a gun on him.

I watched his mental Yellow Pages flip to "Getting Some." His breathing
sped up and he put his hands just above my elbows, pulling me up into the
kiss. His mouth was salty and sour and coppery, as if he'd been drinking
blood.

When he let me go, my weight landed on my heels with enough force to jar
the bones of my legs. He kept his hold on my right arm and marched me
down the hall, half a step in front of him, to my bedroom.

I'm going to let you in on a secret: Mulder knew. He knew why I was
seducing him, and his knowledge had a lot to do with the fact that he
yelled and screamed and basically alerted all the neighbors to the fact
that Dana Scully was entertaining a gentleman caller.

Normally he isn't into blow-jobs, he believes that it's better to give
than receive, but this time he grabbed my head like I was a recalcitrant
screw-top bottle and held me down. He was hot as a burning poker in my
mouth and I tried to tilt my head to get the best angle for my throat as
he nearly scalped me with his fingernails. I wish I could say that I just
wanted to get him into a puddle on my bed so I could go, but the fact is
that his desperation made me dizzy and wet. If I'd choked, he probably
would have let me go, but I was allied with the part of him that wants to
be betrayed and together we managed not to gag.

He came, shaking like a Parkinson's patient, and pulled me up his body to
squeeze me tight. I waited for him to loosen his grip, thinking I could
always take care of my own problem later, but instead he began to lick
his way down my body like he was momma cat and I was the kitten he was
cleaning.

I glanced at my alarm clock, looming accusingly over the bed. I could
still make it if this took less than half an hour. I was wound tightly
enough that it could have been over in thirty seconds, if he'd tried. I
wondered if he knew, after all, and this was some plot to keep me in DC.
And then his five-o'clock shadow scraped against my thighs and I thought
I could fly to Arizona on my own.

I could feel the roughness of each individual taste bud on his tongue.
What the hell, I thought, and moaned his name. As far as I could
remember, I had never done that before. He stopped and looked up at me
and I groaned protest. He grinned like a skull and began again. Spread
open, digging into the mattress with my fingers and my heels, his fingers
inside me and his tongue and teeth dancing over the engorged landscape of
my clitoris, I started to shudder and twitch like a prisoner in an
electric chair.   I was dashed and broken like the wineglass and I
screamed. I don't know if he was channeling his teenage self or if he
simply imagined that he might not get another chance, but soon he
wrenched my legs apart and entered me, hard and ready again.

Of course Mulder would have to become a sexual athlete at the most
inconvenient possible time.

I tried to match his rhythm but he wouldn't let me; he pinned my hips
down with his hands and slammed in and out. Maybe his strategy was to
ensure that I couldn't walk wherever I was going.

"You-like-this," he chanted to me on the downswing of each thrust.

I groaned an agreement.

"Look-at-me, " he continued.

I did, and I didn't much care for his semi-psychotic intensity.

"Say-my-name."

"Mulder."

God, I was getting head-fucked to boot. 

"What-do-you- want?"

I smoothed my hands around the sides of his chest, feeling the breath
like a trapped demon inside him, his cock a trapped demon inside of me.

"Fuck me," I whispered.

"Can't-hear-you," he grunted.

"Oh God, Mulder. Please.  Please.  Fuck me, fuck me hard," I grabbed at
his hard ass, pulling him deeper into me, hurting myself, whispering the
script of his video porn into his shoulder.

The orgasm was as intense as it was unexpected. Through Nagasaki's
cloud,
I saw him grin fiercely and let himself go.

It took more than a few minutes for me to get coherent again. I licked
his shoulder, contemplating what to do next. He was oily and faintly
bitter, like the skin of an orange. He tugged the sheets closer around
himself, murmuring incoherently, and then subsided. The air was cool on
my naked body, chilly where the wetness of sex had not fully dried on my
thighs. Funny how such a ridiculous act, ludicrous in all its aspects and
positively distressing in many cases, can take on such importance.

I left him in my bedroom and went to the living room, where I'd tucked
the map and the printouts in a back issue of JAMA. If I woke him up and
explained, he'd accompany me to Bethel and witness one more destruction
of the evidence, just as anguished and shocked as if he were seeing it
happen for the first time.

Mulder does pain so well.

The last few days, since Austin, he'd been twitchy and nervous as a white
rabbit after the condom  broke. His nose didn't twitch but it might as
well have.

He could smell my research, and he thought I had a plan.

I wondered, if I put him in a box, would he writhe and squirm with
maggots as quickly as my poor dead bunny? No, Mulder would fight. He
wouldn't be entombed in some coffin; he wouldn't be spirited away while I
wasn't looking, either. He might wander off on his own, run through my
fingers the same as always.

Emily's death was a nuclear strike. The sand that I slipped and slid
through in my dream fused to glass.  Since then, when I slept I woke to
glass needles in my eyes. Green glowing rain surrounded me. I walked
barefoot over glass like ocean waves frozen mid-storm and it did not cut
me.

I couldn't go near my little girl without a mask, because she might have
bled on me and made me ill. And though she didn't bleed, she just slipped
away, there were still bloody handprints on the whitewashed walls of my
mind. 

I wondered if I could still bleed.

I hadn't bled in over a year.

Mulder was relieved that I never bothered him about birth control. Even
then, he knew. He knew that even if I weren't dying I'd have no one but
him.  And he liked it, I'm sure of it. The little boy lost doesn't like
to share.  He would have found that out about himself earlier if Samantha
had stayed, I bet.

I was rambling. That too made sense, thoughts sliding on glass, bouncing
off glass. I would make myself a suit of glass armor. I was radioactive;
I killed everyone I touched. And I needed to make that deadliness work
for me.

No more stoic suffering for a voyeur-God who eats it like candy. I'd been
patient. Now it was time for me to act. 

Cain was a farmer and Abel was a shepherd. Cain sacrificed the fruits of
the earth for God's approval and Abel gave Him fresh warm bodies. God
loved Abel and his sacrifices. He thought Cain was a wimp. So whose fault
is it that Cain resolved to do better next time?

I was going to do better next time.

God, I'm told, helps those who help themselves.

I turned and went back into the bedroom to pack. Mulder was sprawled
across my bed, breathing noisily. For all his anguish, he sure sleeps
well once he's gotten laid.

He didn't stir as I quietly filled my duffel bag with dark clothes, extra
ammunition, and other necessities.


TITLE: Iolokus 10/18

AUTHOR: MustangSally and Rivka T

CLASSIFICATION: MSR/Mythology/X-File

CONTENT WARNING: NC-17 for sex, violence, and language

SPOILER WARNING: US Season five through "Emily"

DISTRIBUTION STATEMENT: The Universe at large

THE DISCLAIMER: We would appreciate not being sued.  No actors
were harmed during the course of writing this story.




10
O where will you find the courage? 
Or the skill of hand and heart,
When you set yourself to attempt
A deed so dreadful to do?*


She was gone when I woke up. From the feel of the air, she'd been gone at
least a few hours. She wasn't even within a hundred-mile radius.

How could I know something like that? Let me digress just a minute--it'll
make what comes next more understandable.

There are some things I've never told any of the various shrinks whose
thresholds I've crossed over the years. 

For example, when Sam was taken I started wetting the bed again. No one
ever found out. Mom was having a deep personal relationship with Valium
and Dad was not around, a fact for which I was profoundly grateful every
time I woke to those heavy wet sheets. I was already doing the household
laundry, so it wasn't any problem to clean up after myself. I started
putting towels down to preserve the mattress, but I think eventually my
bedroom began to smell. But it wasn't as if I was bringing chums home
after school to play, and Mom's world had narrowed to the path between
the bedroom and the kitchen, where I'd find her at strange hours, just
sitting at the scratched and dented kitchen table.

And fire. I was not entirely truthful with Scully when I told her why I
fear fire. I didn't tell her that, watching my friend's house burn, I was
transfixed with desire. When I was younger I'd stare at fires for hours,
looking at the shifting flames, how they'd eat and eat and never stop
unless you killed them. I wanted to be the one who'd set that house on
fire. I wanted to get up close to it, infinitely variable and capricious
and so welcoming. Something told me that if I started, though, I wouldn't
be able to stop until I'd burned the world down. So, standing in the
ashes of that summer home, I deliberately made myself fear fire, hate it
as much as I wanted to love it. Making myself phobic--it wasn't the first
time I'd remade myself, but it might have been the most important.

Finally...For Hanukkah 1973, we were supposed to get a puppy. I'd wanted
one for ages. Dad was hard to read, but I'd overheard Mom grinding him
down with that silvery little voice, and I was sure he was going to cave
in by December. When Sam was taken, that hope ended. But I was glad
because, when I was minimally functional again, I thought a lot about
hurting animals. They were small and vulnerable and trusting, like Sam,
and I desperately wanted to do something to show the world that I was in
control, that I was someone who mattered.

Imagine my surprise and delight when I took my first abnormal psych
tutorial at Oxford. What's the sociopathic triad, Fox? Could it
be...bedwetting, firestarting, and cruelty to animals during adolescence?
Congratulations, you get a set of lovely meat cleavers and a lifetime
supply of Hefty plastic bags, for those times when nothing else will hold
what you need to hide.

People mock my behavior. More so now that I'm in the X Files, but they
did even back in ISU and VCS. They just don't get it. Compared to what I
almost was, what I still could be if I didn't pay attention, I'm a
textbook model of mental health. I should give empowerment seminars:
Post-traumatic stress--making it work for *you*.

Like a fair number of sociopaths, I'm smart enough to see people for what
they really are. I know what they're going to do before they know it
themselves, often. I just don't usually give a shit.

So there's no need to wonder how I knew that Scully had adopted the
"ditch first, ask questions later" policy I'd so carefully demonstrated
to her. I knew she was on her way to search out and destroy anyone who'd
stolen her children from her. Yeah, I'm the Wizard of Odd, and Scully was
getting odder by the day.

I was only lucky that she didn't know about my little metal vial full of
forever. This time she wouldn't have aimed to wound.

I called the Gunmen and asked them to track Scully's credit card
purchases down. Fortunately, Frohike had gotten over his ridiculous
little snit. Conspiracy theorists swing so readily from distrust to total
faith. They have to, to make their theories work and to find people
who'll listen to them.

She hadn't lied about the state, anyway. Phoenix.

What's in Phoenix, Scully?

Thank God Arnstein Porter Rowe & Crump pays its associates ungodly 
sums to toil twenty-five-hour days; one of them was happy to look up my 
file when I called. Tell all the lawyer jokes you want; if you can afford one,
they're better than live ammunition. Roush's holdings included a building
in Bethel, Arizona, a long unpleasant drive from Phoenix but easily
doable in a day. The building was listed on their reports as "storage."

Maybe they were "storing" "merchandise."

I hung up and called AmericaWest.

Then I called the Gunmen back.



TITLE: Iolokus 11/18

AUTHOR: MustangSally and Rivka T

CLASSIFICATION: MSR/Mythology/X-File

CONTENT WARNING: NC-17 for sex, violence, and language

SPOILER WARNING: US Season five through "Emily"

DISTRIBUTION STATEMENT: The Universe at large

THE DISCLAIMER: We would appreciate not being sued.  No actors
were harmed during the course of writing this story.




11
I know indeed what evil I intend to do.
But stronger than all my afterthoughts is my fury,
Fury that brings upon mortals the greatest evils.


I was being followed.

I could feel it like a hundred spiders crawling over my body.  When I
stepped off the escalator in the Phoenix airport  rather than going to
the baggage carousel, I ducked behind a kiosk selling cappuccino and
waited to see who arrived at the baggage claim to claim me.  I half
expected Mulder or a team of Them (the ubiquitous, invisible them), but
what I didn't expect was Mulder's peroxide doxie in a gray linen suit
wrinkled from traveling.  She clipped along like an antelope on her thin
legs and silly heels, passing by the coffee kiosk like just another
tourist, a briefcase in her hand.  With my hand on my gun, I gave up the
shelter of the coffee counter and followed her. Marita collected her
luggage and went over to the rental car desk.  I had my own bag in my
hand and followed her as she went out into the bright Arizona sunlight as
she jingled the car keys in her hand.

"What the fuck do you think you're doing?" I demanded as she stopped at a
blue Ford Explorer.

Damn her skinny ass, she didn't look surprised at the sight of my gun or
me.

"I want to know about Roush as much as you do," she purred in her
creamy
voice.

"Give me the keys," I instructed.

No one seemed to notice the little drama we were staging in the rental
car area, all the happy businessmen seemed oblivious to the two women
hissing at one another while one woman held a gun.  They must have
thought that we were a very strange lesbian couple with a unique way of
solving our problems.

With my free hand, I pulled my cuffs out of the case at the base of my
spine.

"Please put one cuff on your right wrist and get in the passenger seat,
then put the other cuff around the door handle."

She blinked at me and smiled.

"Of course."

Grinding my teeth, I threw both our bags in the back of the Ford while
she sat in the passenger cabin looking like a princess when the
revolution had come.

I didn't know what else to do with her so I took her with me.

I could have driven in silence the entire time, but the small superior
smile began to get to me after a while. The sun was going down and I was
having trouble keeping my eyes on the road. "Tell me more about the
Project," I ordered. I was curious to discover the contours of the lie
I'd be told this time. Perhaps by keeping track of everything that was
told us, we could by process of elimination discover the real plan.

Marita idly drew designs on the grey plastic covering the glove
compartment. My back was aching and I could only imagine how she was
doing, her arm trapped in one position for so many hours. I'd locked the
handcuff key in the trunk so that she understood that doing something to
run me off the road would leave her dangerously exposed even if she did
manage to incapacitate me. She could take the chance that she'd survive a
crash and be able to flag someone down, but I thought it was unlikely.

"The creation of a master race," she said musingly. "The dream of the
twentieth century. With appropriate genetic modifications, the perfect
soldier, the perfect worker...the perfect ruler--all of them will be
possible. Massive, total replacement of the population."

"How can they imagine they'll get away with it?"

"Why do you think that so many healthy young white women have fertility
problems, Agent Scully? Why do Bangladeshis live longer than black men 
in the inner cities? They *are* getting away with it. In another generation,
if the technology continues apace, unmodified people--inferiors--won't be
able to breed, much less allowed to do so. They will work until they die,
and then the New World will begin. There is so much land in the world,
after all, if you take away the people."

I watched the road fall away under the constant thrum of the car's
wheels. When she spoke again, I started and swerved. "Why are you doing
this?" she asked, almost incuriously.

"They were taken from me, without my consent. Using them is wrong, and
it's got to be stopped."

"But destroying your eggs and the fetuses won't do anything to stop the
men who ordered these experiments. They'll just go out and ruin someone
else's life."

"Then I'll find them next. But first I'm taking back what is mine."

Marita shook her head and turned to stare out the window. The cuffs
jostled faintly, the thick metal incongruous against her fine-boned
wrist.

"I had a daughter," she said to her ghostly reflection in the glass. "She
lived to be almost eighteen months."

I watched the white lines of the roadway disappear under the car. The
road was smooth as cake batter, and I thought of the huge federal
bureaucracy and all the taxes necessary to coordinate such a massive
nationwide undertaking as a highway system. Not entirely unlike the
organization necessary for a breeding project.

"She was a test subject too," Marita continued, as if I had given some
indication that I cared. "An earlier version than the children your ova
were used to create. She had six fingers on each hand. The nodes were
everywhere on her--at her elbows, on her back, in the crease of her
thighs. Even daily transfusions of that liquid they use weren't enough to
keep her alive. She was in terrible pain every day of her life. I cried
with joy when she died."

The sky was grey, except for a wash of pink at the horizon where the
setting sun burned through the cloud cover. In the distance, almost
invisible, the darker grey of mountains prevailed. I'd always thought of
deserts as hot, but in the dying day it couldn't have been warmer than
fifty degrees.

"Can you prove any of this?" I asked, my hands twisting on the steering
wheel as I bore down with my foot, pushing the car up another five miles
an hour.

Marita made a little sound, like Mulder when I asked him the same
question. Despair and self-mockery and a dash of condescension for extra
flavor; maybe Marita had learned that noise in his bed, but he'd never
thought to teach it to me. "What would you have said if I'd come to you
earlier? You'd have thought me a pathetic lunatic." Her silky voice made
the words sound untrustworthy, but I had to admit that the woman had a
point.

Marita used her free hand to rub the chained wrist where it was beginning
to bleed. Her voice, never loud, dwindled to almost nothing as she stared
at the passing desertscape. "I was...I never knew my parents. I think I
was a test subject too. I believe that's why my child died...I thought
that Jason was a controller and not a subject, but I knew as soon as I
met Mulder that I'd been wrong...or perhaps my genes couldn't be
transmitted without appropriate technological assistance. When I think
that my arrogance might have brought her into the world like that..." I
thought that she was done speaking, but she began again, more strongly.
"Maybe we can find proof when you get into the facility. There have to be
records there."

"Who is Jason?" I asked.
TITLE: Iolokus 12/18

AUTHOR: MustangSally and Rivka T

CLASSIFICATION: MSR/Mythology/X-File

CONTENT WARNING: NC-17 for sex, violence, and language

SPOILER WARNING: US Season five through "Emily"

DISTRIBUTION STATEMENT: The Universe at large

THE DISCLAIMER: We would appreciate not being sued.  No actors
were harmed during the course of writing this story.




12

Let no one think of me
As humble or weak or passive; let them understand
I am of a different kind; dangerous to my enemies,
Loyal to my friends. To such a life glory belongs.


Holmes had the Baker Street Irregulars, Donald had Huey, Dewey, and
Louie, and I had Langley, Byers and Frohike.  I would rather have had
Harpo, Groucho, and Chico.  The Marx brothers might have behaved
better. 
The Three Amigos sat in the plane like a bunch of college students headed
for spring break.  Frohike was hitting on the flight attendant, Langley
was deep in Wired, and Byers was trying to talk to me. I didn't feel much
like talking as the airplane coffee was setting my stomach on fire again.
I was going to have to give up coffee and beer, this much I knew, and the
thought was depressing the hell out of me on top of everything else.

"You know that half of the planes in the US fleet are suffering from
extreme metal fatigue and you take your life in your hands every time you
fly?" Byers asked.

"I saw a crash site.  Body parts everywhere.  I guess the crash was a
shattering experience," I said and pushed my seat back.

Flying coach, as usual, and I had no legroom. Fuck it, if I lived through
this Scully and I were going to live it up, first class and champagne
every time, courtesy of Dad, Roush, and all the other minions of Hell who
quarterly added to my coffers.

"Mulder you look like hell," Frohike offered from the other side of the
aisle.

"What do you have lined up at the other end of this flight?" I asked.

"We have a contact in Sedona who is going to loan us a van with full
surveillance gear.  We pick the van up at the airport and ditch it
afterwards. All very neat and anonymous," Langley explained.

"What do you think Scully went after in Bethel?" Frohike asked.

"You tell me," I grumbled and unpeeled another pair of Rolaids, "But I'll
bet you a hundred bucks you get it wrong."

"You have the money for it," Frohike said and smiled a trollish smile,
"Roush's money."

"I have a theory," Byers began in a soft voice near my ear.

Byers.   I could have been friends with Byers.

"I was trying to ascertain what would draw Agent Scully to the Roush
installation at Bethel.  There is only one possibility.  She has somehow
found information which indicates that the ova which were taken from her
are at Bethel, and she is going to retrieve the ova."

Marita must have known, that must have been the research she was doing
for Scully. The hot lead of this knowledge added to the pain in my
stomach.

"But why would she retrieve those ova when we have that vial in cryo at
the University?" Byers asked, "that's where the logic ends."

"She doesn't know, " I choked.

His head framed in the light of the window, Byers gaped at me, a bearded
vision of compassion.

"You never told her? What the hell is wrong
with you?"

Did he want the whole War and Peace of my twisted psyche or just the
Cliff notes summary?  The flight wasn't that long.

"It never came up," I lied.

"Ah jeez, Mulder . . . " Langley whined.

"Back off, okay."

"But are the ova still in vials or have they been fertilized?  Are we
talking about fetuses here?  Viable or non-viable? This brings up a lot
of complicated issues," Frohike pointed out.

"No shit," I agreed.

"Should the fetuses be of sufficient maturity to be considered viable by
the state of Arizona, I think we can extrapolate from the laws in the
state regarding abortion, that Agent Scully's destruction of said fetuses
would be considered murder," Byers reasoned aloud.

I peeled two fifties off the folded wad in my father's monogrammed money
clip.

"I'll buy the first round, boys."

I added two airplane bottles of Scotch on top of the coffee and the
Rolaids and thought I was going to die.  By my watch, I was now three
hours, East Coast time, late for my doctor's appointment for whatever
horrible thing growing in my duodenum.  I could imagine myself like some
poor schmuck in an Aliens movie with a creature busting out of my
stomach
at any moment.  That would have amused Frohike to no end.  I shut my
eyes
and willed myself not to throw up.  Just to make myself more nauseous, I
thought about Marita.

It had to be the last time that we were in bed together, her bed in her
apartment in Manhattan, her little high-class lair where her handlers
sent her customers.  At that point I was pretending that I was someone
special, that I was breaking the rules somehow. I later realized that her
seduction of me had been as spontaneous as a Space Shuttle launch.  It
was a rainy Sunday afternoon and we hadn't gotten out of bed at all, she
was lying on her back in a nest of expensive sheets and throw pillows
with her manicured fingernails scraping my scalp while I drove her mad
with my mouth.  She moaned and thrashed in her well-intentioned
theatrical way while I went down on her.  Then she cried out a name, and
it wasn't mine.

Who the hell was Jason?

Good manners kept me from pursuing the question but now, almost a year
later I thought I had the answer.

Jason Lindsay was the spokesperson for Roush.  The face of the company
was angular, had a nose with more symmetry than character, wore his shiny
black hair falling into his eyes, and favored dark Hugo Boss suits and
Jerry Garcia ties.  This was the face that Danny had wondered about, the
man who looked like he could have been my brother.  For all I knew Jason
Lindsay was my brother.  Other things that Marita said were starting to
fall into place.  Some of the comments she had made that I wasn't as
unique as I would have liked to think.  I remembered all I had heard of
the beginnings of the Project in the Cold War, the early successes and
failures of the hybrids, the hybrids containing too much human DNA, and
the different model years of the hybrids. 

>From the search I had done on Jason Lindsay, I knew his birth date was
September 9, 1960, which made the poor bastard a Virgo, but who cares.
He'd gotten his BS at Stanford and his MBA at Yale, he played basketball
in college and had been considered one of the bright young things at
Roush which had led to his meteoric rise in the company. He lived alone
in a luxury apartment in Austin and was one of the most eligible
bachelors in Texas even though he had been seen with a variety of
starlets over the past few years.  He was the John Kennedy Jr. of
pharmaceuticals.

It sounded like fun.

Following the chain of logic, sick, as it may have been, gave me a theory
that I was NOT going to share with the Gunmen.

The project, in its infancy, had introduced alien DNA into healthy adult
humans who mutated and died as a result.  I had seen their bodies in a
buried freight car.  In the fifties, human fetuses which did not give the
resulting fetus full alien attributes, but was infected by the viral form
of the DNA which then mutated the resulting essentially human babies. 
The babies had a few bonuses from the alien DNA such as higher resistance
to the toxic alien body fluids and side effects such as empathy.  That
would have been the Cold War model.  In the late sixties the process was
repeated with better success and any resulting viable beings were then
cloned which gave rise to the cloning of my sister Samantha, the doctors,
and the Kurt Crawford series.  Sometime in the seventies, the good folk
at Roush began splicing alien DNA directly with human DNA. This stellar
move created such wonderful creatures as Darin Oswald who could bring
down lightning with his mind, and a whole flying circus of mutants. And
most recently They were abducting women and removing their ova to
continue the process by splicing the alien genes with more precision, and
this had created the child creature called Emily. Kids like her were more
high-tech but less viable than the sixties versions. Thoroughbreds, you
might say.

Ergo, the entire Mulder family had been a testing ground since the
beginning.  As Samantha was the result of an experiment, so was I.  This
meant that Jason was either the clone or I was, or we had simply come out
of the same batch at the lab.

I tripped over Frohike's feet as I stumbled for the airplane bathroom.

At the rate things were going, Jason was going to be an only child very
soon. Him and his n brothers, where n is an unknown quantity.

Am I an unknown quantity? I think the men who've supervised my carefully
limited investigations have known me all too well.

Rather than being food laced with blood, what I threw up in the cramped
airplane bathroom was blood laced with coffee.  After I washed my face
(was it mine or was it Jason's) I sat on the closed toilet seat and
shivered.  I needed to tell Scully. I needed her right then and there in
a way that was beyond partnership, beyond sex, I needed her to make me
feel real.

And she was out to destroy creatures that had begun the same way that I
had.

Later, in the van, the boys all but forgot about me, rambling on to each
other about past road trips and who forgot to bring the Doritos. Langly
and Frohike were insulting each other as they inspected their friend's
equipment, oohing and aahing over the latest toys.

It gave me some time to think.

Scully thinks that I misunderstand the nature of her connection to me.
Maybe she thinks that even I would have more pride than to tag along
after her with my tongue hanging out of my mouth, if I really understood
what she thinks of me.

Balderdash. I understand perfectly. At least number two on the list of
reasons I love her is that she would have to be brainwashed before she'd
ever say, or even think, "I love him." (Number one might just be
proximity, but of course she's only stayed with me so long because she's
Scully, and so that's not entirely an independent variable.) Phoebe was a
tyro's practice, not a fair test, she couldn't love me because Phoebe
isn't capable of it. Scully's my masterpiece because she is capable, she
obviously is, but--here's the crucial part--I've made absolutely certain
that it can't be for me.

I understand that Scully is a pathologist; she chose her specialty
because she likes to poke into dead things to see what made them hurt.

I understand that the main reason she lets me into her bed is that it's
so hard to remember to buy batteries when you're travelling all the time,
and anyway it saves space not to have to pack a vibrator.

I understand that I hope that this will change someday, though I know it
won't. If I'm a fox, Scully is the hunt. Hounds flowing like water over
emerald grass, scarlet jackets and sharp leather riding crops cured in
blood, hooves pounding like heartbeats in the earth. The cruelty is the
beauty. And one day, if I'm lucky, she'll take my skin and nail it to her
wall.

There are conventional reasons for our relationship, and it would be
another act of arrogance for me to deny that they have any relevance.
Adrenalin, rage indistinguishable from passion in our veins, all that
sort of thing. Every time we fuck we are laughing in death's face.

I'd be more comfortable with that explanation if I didn't think that
really, Death was laughing at us. I think that every time we make each
other into convenient receptacles we saw off another piece of our souls,
or my soul anyway, I wouldn't swear that Scully has one. Every time she
uses me she takes us further from the parallel universe--it has to be out
there somewhere--in which our bond is all that is good and true about my
life, even if we never touch.

I made Byers pull over at the next gas station/convenience store. Langly
made fun of me, said I had the bladder of a pregnant woman, but I didn't
want to throw up all over the nice dirty van. The really annoying part
about an ulcer is that you've got to eat to keep the pain level under
control. But then the pain itself causes nausea, and so food comes up,
uglier than it went down. I'd tried skipping meals to avoid the cycle,
and if you think dry heaves are unpleasant, you ought to try bloody dry
heaves. Bile and blood and saliva, the holy trinity of body fluids.

The convenience store only had little rolls of Tums. I bought four.


TITLE: Iolokus 13/18

AUTHOR: MustangSally and Rivka T

CLASSIFICATION: MSR/Mythology/X-File

CONTENT WARNING: NC-17 for sex, violence, and language

SPOILER WARNING: US Season five through "Emily"

DISTRIBUTION STATEMENT: The Universe at large

THE DISCLAIMER: We would appreciate not being sued.  No actors
were harmed during the course of writing this story.



13
Can you tearlessly hold the decision
For murder?  You will not be able,
When your children fall down and implore you,
You will not be able to dip
Steadfast your hand in their blood.*

The U.N. representative was crying in her sleep, without motion or even
much noise. She cried as if she knew she'd be punished if anyone heard
her. She tugged against her restraints, and when they wouldn't give she
opened her mouth and moaned softly, then turned on her side, curling her
body into itself as best she could.

Her feather-fine hair fell away from her swan's neck, and through the
stray blonde-brown strands I saw a green nodule centered in the back of
her neck, just underneath the hairline. It didn't look swollen and
inflamed as Emily's had; it was more like a large birthmark, if
birthmarks were chartreuse. It appeared to be slightly raised, but not
very prominent, and it could easily have been concealed by a collar or a
scarf or even Marita's shoulder-length hair. How had Mulder never seen it
while he was sleeping with her? A little cover-stick can work wonders. I
should know. I don't think Mulder knows yet that I've got a mole above my
lip.

I scooted closer and reached out, stopping when I could feel the heat
radiating from the sleeping woman. The fine hairs on the back of Marita's
neck surrounded the nodule, but didn't cover it; the skin looked
thickened, keratinous like fingernails. She was still sobbing, and the
small shaking of her body made close inspection difficult.

According to Mulder, the "clones" he'd encountered hadn't demonstrated
any visible markers of genetic tampering--other than being identical
copies, as I'd seen myself. They could be killed by a spike to the back
of the neck, which might release the toxic green substance in their
pseudo-veins but at least was final, whereas shooting them didn't appear
to slow them down any. But their necks looked normal, I thought,
remembering the abortion doctors.

So Marita and Emily had to represent another variation--with *more*
exotic (alien?) DNA than the regular clones? I couldn't quite get my mind
around the question. The neck was vulnerable but vital; nerve clusters
there could be--attached, maybe?--to whatever alternative system the
green fluid represented. But why would the point of joining be external?
If Marita had been telling the truth about her daughter--and the fact
that she was apparently some sort of hybrid herself did not exclude that
possibility--then maybe the visible nodules were defects.

I frowned. There was insufficient data to confirm or disconfirm the
hypothesis. The strange vein-like system I'd seen briefly appearing on
Emily's arms had degenerated so quickly after her death that the
postmortem had been able to determine nothing but that there was too
much
necrotic tissue in her body to be explained in a conventional manner.

If the Project had been successful in creating completely human-looking
hybrids already, why were they now making defectives?

Maybe it had something to do with mass production. If Marita was telling
the truth--there that problem arose again--then the next phase of the
Project was to replace normal people with those who'd been categorized,
controlled, and modified. But the Project's masters needed many kinds of
hybrids, not just one or two in every age cohort.

I knew that ova could be frozen. That was what would have happened to
my
ova, had they been where they were expected to be. I thought back to the
information I'd received from the oncologist. Inside each ovum is a
chemical stew, a ferment eagerly waiting for an acceptable sperm to
complete its transmutation into a new and unique being. When freezing
occurs, chromosomal abnormalities can be caused; no one knows exactly
why, though it may have something to do with intercellular ice crystals
or damage to the cell membrane caused as water leaches out of the cell to
keep the chemical potentials balanced during freezing. 

Frozen ova meant another step in the process where something could go
wrong. Every time you set up a production line, you've got to expect that
a couple cars will leave the factory with no seatbelts or bad shocks. I
suppose the Project kills people who fuck up instead of just firing them,
but it's so hard to find good help these days.

And if these bastards were trying to plan evolution, they might want to
grow a batch of zygotes with funky chromosomes to maturity, just to see
whether they could get their own pet Modells or L'Ivelys or Darin
Oswalds. Errors like Emily would be acceptable.

I wondered what Marita's talent was, that had made her worth saving.

She stirred on the bed and I moved away from her, feeling dirty. I was
playing God no less than the men who'd ripped me apart. I tried to curl
myself into a perfect sphere. If I could just tuck my head against my
knees right, I'd be smooth and impenetrable. I'd be able to gather the
strength I needed for tomorrow.

How could I do this? How could I hold my children in my hand and
destroy
them? Was it worth the cost, just to have my revenge on the men who'd
violated me so brutally?

And yet that answer had been reached long ago; it couldn't be changed
twenty miles away from Bethel just because I didn't like what had to be
done. I would set myself on fire if I could burn the men who'd done this.
They had no right. They'd perverted what should have been my choice, if
I'd have made it. They'd killed God and taken His place, so someone else
would have to avenge the crime.

I was so alone. I could feel Mulder, out there in the darkness, heading
towards me with no thought but to grab me and rub me into his skin until
we merged. But he'd smother the fire within me; he'd use his own needs to
do it. He wouldn't mean to put me out entirely, just to make me more the
right size to be his helpmeet--but the result would be the same. 

In the end, we're all alone. We have to be. If we try to open ourselves
up we bleed to death. Only our boundaries keep us alive. Even if they
feel like knives sometimes.

If I got through this, everything would work itself out, it had to. Maybe
I could even take from Mulder the strength I so desperately needed
without dissolving into him.

 "I wish I were like you," Marita said wistfully, breaking my
concentration. "You're so...strong. I thought that all I could ever be
was useless and pretty and ornamental, and so I never tried...to be
strong. I know I'm not...smart like Mulder."

I didn't quite follow this conversational turn. I leaned over to check
the handcuffs, cursing the fucking cheap hotel beds with their solid
headboards that provided nothing with which to secure a prisoner. I ought
to file a complaint with the Holiday Inn board of directors.

In the absence of a suitable post on the headboard, I'd elected to cuff
Marita's hands behind her back and run a bike chain through them, which I
then wrapped around the leg of the bed. It forced Marita to lie on her
side awkwardly, but I could live with that.

I was suddenly aware that I was lying mostly on top of her. Her blouse
had come undone several buttons too far for decency. Not that Marita
would know about that. Marita's breath was warm and sweet, and she was
looking up at me with wide, compliant eyes.

"You're so beautiful," Marita whispered, her tongue flicking out to wet
her lips.

I felt something turn over inside me.

Dana, I said to myself, this is far more fucked up than sleeping with
Mulder. Prisoner's a whole new level of degradation down from partner,
even a partner on animal tranquilizers. Dana? Dana are you listening?

The corners of Marita's mouth quirked, a shy smile. I moved my hand from
the bike chain to Marita's shoulder, rubbing it as I might have rubbed a
dog's stomach. The blouse was silky, but spotted with dust and stains.
The skin underneath was hot, so hot, a lava flow.

Is her internal temperature the same as a human's? I wondered, and
considered whether there was a safe way of finding out. 

Marita shifted, rolling over on her back, her arms dragged underneath her
by the handcuffs and the bike chain at what must have been a painful
angle. Now I was straddling Marita's body. I could see her nipples
outlined against her ruined blouse. My hand moved down, inching over the
swell of Marita's breast. It was warm and firm and undoubtedly weird,
undeniably weird, yet thrilling at the same time. I had the strange
feeling that if I turned around Mulder's ghost would be sitting in the
chair by the window, his legs stretched out in slumped comfort, his eyes
black with desire, his hand creeping towards his lap.

I glanced back up at Marita's face and caught the slight stillness; it
wasn't the slackness of arousal, but a more contained waiting.

I wasn't surprised that Marita would try to seduce me, really. That was
what Marita did. Marita probably thought that deep down I wanted to
believe, wanted to trust just as much as Mulder did.

Mulder probably would have let me tie him up if I'd asked, but I'd never
asked. I skimmed a hand up the bound woman's arm, running from the
blood-warmed metal at her wrist, barely visible in the shadow of her
torso, down the bluish veins on her inner arm, the crease of her elbow
and then the softness over the bicep that swelled just beneath the short
sleeves of the blouse. The woman's lack of body fat is almost criminal, I
thought. I'd have to work out full-time to have arms like that.

Marita's eyes on me were intense, but somehow lazy, catlike. I almost
thought they were yellow in the bad light from the cheap lamps.

I moved the hand that had been stroking Marita's breast to the remaining
buttons. They were on the wrong side, I thought and realized that I'd
only ever unbuttoned a man's shirt from the outside. It's the little
things that make the difference, and I didn't suppress a short laugh
because it wasn't as if Marita was going to get snitty about it.

"You can do anything you want," Marita whispered, and I stopped
undressing her to put a finger to her lips. 

"Shh," I commanded. "I know that."

Marita's skirt came off easily, the fine grey linen sliding over fine
silken thighs with barely a whisper. Mulder did this, I thought. He ran
his tongue down those thighs--I moved backwards down the bed to do the
same. Marita moaned; I frowned. That wasn't any fun. The woman could 
have waited longer to start faking.

"Tell me what he liked," I said, moving back up so that I could breathe
in Marita's ear. Marita wasn't going to go on Jerry Springer and talk
about threesomes any time soon. And I was curious, and Marita was there
for me.

Marita turned her head into the pillow, exposing her long perfect neck
and a little patch of green. Salamander skin, green and fresh and
inviting. I licked the edge, wondering if I'd get a contact rash. The
skin was as smooth as it looked, not rough and scaly, and I could taste
the sweat caught in the fine hairs of Marita's nape. Then I bit Marita's
earlobe. "I asked you a question," and Marita jerked away but the cuffs
caught her and I could feel the muscles tense underneath her; delicate
silly Marita was thinking about trying to get loose and that wasn't a
good idea.

"He liked to go down on me," Marita breathed.

Ah yes. I didn't know whether he'd call it a desire to return to the womb
or just a desperate need to be liked, but Mulder hadn't ever been happy
unless he could push my head back and spread my legs and make me shake
like a tuning fork.

I decided to see what she'd learned from his efforts.

Afterwards, I lay on the far edge of the bed, not looking at Marita. The
ceiling's random pattern of dots like wormholes was far more interesting.

Marita was enthusiastic, but she didn't have the instinctive sense of
what I liked. Not like Mulder. At first I thought that he was so good he
could get a blow-up doll off, but then I realized that his British bitch
wouldn't have let him go so easily were that the case. It's that I'm like
the creatures he hunts. He needs them to justify his existence, and they
need him to hunt them, to pay attention. He opens my head up and extracts
what he needs to know, and then he leaves. 

At least when I do it I sew the poor bastards up afterwards.

I had to admit it: I wanted Mulder there. I didn't know what I wanted to
do to him. What was more important was that I wanted, anything. And I'd
believed I'd never want again.

The world has never had all the colors in it for me that it has for
Mulder. I think that's why I'm so fascinated by him. He's not afraid to
live intensely. 

No. He's terrified. But he doesn't have a choice.

Mulder suffers, Scully endures.

When did that begin to make me angry? Not relevant. I just remember that
I stopped feeling the anger in San Diego. I was so hostile to him that I
could have taught the Serbs and the Croats something about enmity, but I
didn't feel it.

He fucked me in the bathroom and I threw my head back against the cheap
cold institutional mirror. I thought for a minute that I might
just...fall through. In the looking glass world, Dana Scully can cry for
her children. There must be a me, in all the possible realities, for whom
barrenness and then the sudden end of barrenness didn't mean this
blankness. This cold fire.

Mulder's natural flair for the dramatic must have been rubbing off.

Marita lay quietly on the other side of the bed. I hadn't even let her
touch herself. That might have been unfair. But fingers and thumbs aren't
what get her off anyway. Even I can see that in her eyes, and most of my
interpersonal contacts are with the dead.

I worried a little about choking her. Consider the position, really--so
awkward, me lowering myself down and trying to ignore my thigh muscles
demanding their rights, agitating against the demands of my libido. Hands
balanced against the headboard and I was thinking, God, that wallpaper is
plainly awful. The heat, dry and yellow, that spread out from my clitoris
through my belly and thighs.The orgasm a jackhammer, ripping me apart.

I'm not entirely sure it was pleasure and not pain that I felt.

It didn't help that I could feel the shadow-Mulder in the chair watching
us the entire time.  Was this one of the images he used to amuse himself
those lonely nights of masturbating on his sofa?  Really, the sofa should
have given birth to an ottoman after all the sperm it had taken into its
crevices. But in the end it was the same, me and the sofa, infertile dead
ends 
both.

"Now," she said, her voice cream and brown sugar, "I have you. I gave you
something Mulder never can."

I turned and looked at her incredulously, but it wasn't worth wasting a
good put-down line on her.


TITLE: Iolokus 14/18

AUTHOR: MustangSally and Rivka T

CLASSIFICATION: MSR/Mythology/X-File

CONTENT WARNING: NC-17 for sex, violence, and language

SPOILER WARNING: US Season five through "Emily"

DISTRIBUTION STATEMENT: The Universe at large

THE DISCLAIMER: We would appreciate not being sued.  No actors
were harmed during the course of writing this story.



14
Suppose that the children have grown into youth
And have turned out good, still, if God so wills it,
Death will away your children's bodies,
And carry them off to Hades.


Marita watched me load our briefcases into the back of the Explorer with
some trepidation. And well she should, because they were full of bottles
of gas, expensive spring water poured onto the red earth to be replaced
by cheaper, but more effective, fluid. "I thought we were going to Bethel
to find the truth," she said, not quite a question.

I shrugged, unwilling to waste breath on an answer that wouldn't come out
right in any event.

We drove toward Bethel for fifteen minutes before she tried again. "I
assume you have some plan for getting into the facility?" Marita asked
with her customary sly guile. I hoped that poor Mulder hadn't actually
had to listen to her to get laid.

"I was just going to flash my badge and see what happened," I said.
Actually I had a search warrant that looked very professional and
official, if I did say so myself. I had a laser printer the same as the
U.S. Attorney in Phoenix.

She sniffed, a very affected noise in the dry air. "Even Mulder might
have planned ahead."

"Hah," I responded.

"You're lucky that I came along," she said, sounding bored. "I have ID
for both of us. It should stand up to visual and electronic inspection.
As far as they know, I'm an ally."

"As far as I know, you're their ally."

"What, I'm walking you into a trap? Dana, anyone above the level of
janitor at Roush could have you killed within three hours if they wanted
to, just by picking up the phone and having an assassin sent to your
grimy little basement office in DC. And I wouldn't be too sure that the
janitors couldn't do that too. Get this through your head--they don't
think you're a threat. Maybe you should be grateful that they're still
operating on 1960s principles; to them women are annoying
inconveniences
to be obviated by the pending development of artificial wombs.
They--don't--care."

The last three words hung in the warming air as we pulled up to the gate.

****

Jason Lindsay had worn his Roush badge for the press conference. With
careful application of enhancement algorithms, Frohike had managed to
capture a good image of it.  Jason Lindsay could kiss my ass, the son of
a bitch had gotten the better nose out of the deal. The friend's van had
a state-of-the-art ID cutting machine as part of its equipment, either
that or Frohike pulled it out of his portable hole, he was always a big D
& D fan. There was an obvious computer stripe on it which we couldn't
code correctly, not without access to a land line and a few hours anyway,
but we were hoping that the visual ID would be good enough to get me
through the door.

My job was to become Jason Lindsay.

These days they make hair dye for men, but I had to buy cover stick to
get rid of the mole that Jason Lindsay didn't have, so the woman behind
the counter at the tiny drugstore in the nameless town an hour from
Bethel still thought that I was a transvestite.

Byers had brought along mousse and a tiny tube of hair gel, bless his
well-groomed heart, and I slicked my sopping, blackened tresses back in
Jason's 'do, which resembled Andy Garcia's. 

As I fiddled with the makeup, I thought briefly that I'd overlooked one
other model for the Gunmen: the Three Musketeers. After all I was
apparently the Prisoner of Zenda, taking my brother's place though he was
the true heir to the throne. First my life was a bad Star Wars subplot
and now this. I wish the Gods or men who are pulling my strings could at
least stick with one genre. I wouldn't mind being the hero of a Regency
romance. Or maybe we could swing by the Brady Bunch for a change of 
pace. I always had a thing for Marcia.

As I dabbed the beige goo on my cheek, I found that I was grinning like
an ass at myself in the rearview mirror. I was covering up my mole the
same way Scully did every morning. Did she really think that she could
fool me?  I've seen fingerprints that forensics people missed and she
thought that I wouldn't notice that she had a mole on her upper lip. I
loved that mole, loved the fact that she felt compelled to hide it and
loved the fact that her makeup wore off in the night and I frequently
met the mole first thing in the morning before she awakened.

The blood loss must have been getting to me. Scully made me take iron
pills; I was the only man my doctor had ever known to take them, but my
own Iron Maiden insisted that it was the least I could do to fend off
anemia, the way I managed to stumble into anything pointy. But I was
rapidly outpacing my body's ability to replenish itself. I just hoped I'd
make it to Scully's side in time for her to save me.

I tried to focus on Jason. The CNN footage only had a few seconds of him
moving, stepping up to the podium, but even that little was enough to
show me that he walked like a man who'd just gotten laid by an
eighteen-year-old beauty queen. Which was probably close to the truth. He
didn't swagger, he didn't care to piss anyone off without reason and
swaggering could do that, but he walked, well, satisfied. He moved
liquidly, he was just old enough to have had deportment lessons if his
parents/custodians/trainers had thought it appropriate. He would be an
excellent dancer.  He would be a world-class fuck.

I had more trouble with Jason at first because I thought that he wasn't
the kind of man whose mind I usually inhabit, and part of me was praying
that he was somewhat like me.   After I realized that he was well aware
of Roush's real enterprise I was able to apply the standard techniques. I
breathed Jason in; when I breathed out my voice was inflected, dramatic,
smoother, with a shading of down-home drawl, a pitchman's voice, a 
continent apart from my own toneless
drone.

When Jason told Byers that he was ready the little guy couldn't conceal
his involuntary shudder.

The guard didn't even look twice at the ID, just smiled and said hello. I
gave him a casual, ironic half-salute, and he held the door for me.

I've got the whole world right here, in my pants, wrapped around my great
big dick, I smiled.

There was a card reader after all. I swiped the badge with appropriately
manly nonchalance (thank God the reader had a little sign showing you
which way to hold the stripe or it might have ended right there) and
looked surprised when the machine beeped an accusing red.

"Celine decided to do my laundry," I said with a laugh. "This was in the
pants--two thousand dollar pants, do you believe it, and she decides they
should go in the 'synthetics' cycle, the washer looked like a cat
exploded in it. She made it up to me for the pants but it looks like she
managed to demagnetize the card too."

The guard laughed with me, we were two great guys sharing a laugh at the
crazy ways of women, and, earning my eternal gratitude, he unclipped his
own card and buzzed me through. "You'd better get a replacement."

"For Celine or the card?"

I stopped laughing as the fire alarm began to whoop. The guard ran one
direction, I ran the other. I felt Scully nearer with every pulse of
light and noise.

****

The soldier held the door for us and gave us his best manly-man smile,
obviously thinking that we were a fully lickable pair. Marita gave him a
last soulful glance as the door closed and he grinned as if she'd
smooched him. Then she did something to the door, which bleeped
reproachfully at her. "It's locked from the inside now," she said. "We
can find everything we want without interruption."

They'd had the lighting done by Conspiracies Inc. and it was of course
dim, indirect, and eerie. The liquid hum of hundreds of machines
surrounded us, thrummed through the soles of my feet and in my inner
ears.

Marita's skin had turned Kermit-the-Frog green from the light bleeding
from the tanks. I was sure I didn't look any better. 

There were rows and rows of tanks, at least a few hundred. Each large
enough that a grown man could have curled up inside one, most of them
were occupied by fetuses.

Marita went off to the side, looking at the charts strewn over a table by
the wall. I couldn't be bothered to notice anything but the fetuses
themselves.

We were in the facial deformities section, it seemed. Three eyes, one
eye, two eyes but placed where the cheeks should have been. Thick
rubbery
lips, lipless mouths that couldn't close over large spadelike teeth,
tusks that had torn through the protective flesh around the mouth. Trunks
and missing noses and harelips.  It is one thing to see such
abnormalities in textbooks, in autopsies but another entirely to look at the 
mutated faces of what should have been your own healthy children, or 
discarded eggs washed out to sea in a flow of menstrual blood.  I hadn't felt 
this queasy since I'd given up chemo for Lent.

I walked forward, into the group of fetuses with arm issues.

The lights on the monitors surrounding each tank indicated that the
fetuses had heartbeats. I stepped closer and watched one flippered thing,
more like a walrus than a person, breathe the green liquid. Its eyes were
open and, when I waved my hand in front of it, they tracked the movement.

I am the walrus.
Goo goo ga joob.

I turned away and headed deeper into the room.

At the back they had the ones that looked viable and regular. From what I
could tell, there were no black (green) babies, no Asian (green) babies,
and no Latino (green) babies either. I couldn't be sure about more than
that, but the Project probably wasn't as anti-Semitic as Hitler had been;
Exhibit A, the Mulder clan.

Behind the last row of tanks there was a door that opened without any
need for a key. The lights were off and I flicked them; halogen burst
into luminescence, nearly blinding me after the dimness of the other
room.

It was a nursery. I smelled talcum powder and the plastic of disposable
diapers and sterilized baby bottles. It was empty yet, but it looked
ready to receive customers. It had even been decorated in a cheerful
Sesame Street theme; the New World Order wasn't going to be populated
by
kids who'd been deprived of sensory stimulation during those vital early
months. I wondered if the Children's Television Workshop was connected
to
the Project. Public television--is it really a threat to your children?
Is the constant call for cooperation more sinister than sharing cookies?

The monitors burbled complacently. These babies were going to be 
decanted without incident. Not too hot, not too cold, but just right.

These weren't my eggs, or any other woman's eggs, not any more. They 
were new beings, utterly unique and capable of becoming individuals.

Unless, of course, their creators decided that their usefulness was up.
Or unless the chromosome flavor of the week didn't work out  well and
they perished, in horrible pain, before their birthdays caught up with
the number of fingers they had. Or unless their controllers ran out of
the "treatment" used to keep them alive in Earth's alien environment.

Emily...I think I may have said the name aloud. What good did her life do
for her? Pain and shots and slow deterioration, and a succession of women
none of whom could really be called "mother." Such mothers Emily had:
mindless and decaying in a nursing home, bloodless and slaughtered in a
bathtub, heartless and deranged in a secret facility. That would be me.

This room had hundreds of Emilys, but each story of suffering would have
its subtle variations, its individualized Hells. If they were lucky, a
few of these silent slime-coated infants would grow up to be as
well-functioning as Mulder or I was, a hell in and of itself.

Over my dead body.

I strode over to the side of the room, where Marita was gathering files
and making them into neat stacks. I ignored her and pulled cabinets and
drawers open, looking for something powerful, something -- hard.

There was a fire ax just inside the side storage room, whose door I
pushed open in desperation when all I could find in the cabinets was baby
wipes and diaper cream.

It broke the tanks with ease, though my arms began to ache after about
twenty or so.

When I got to the normal-looking babies, Marita slid over to me. "Leave
these alone!" she snapped. "There's nothing wrong with them."

"Says the woman with the green pimple on the back of her neck," I said,
and sucker-punched her. She went down and didn't get up, her high heels
kicking feebly in the growing layer of green goo on the linoleum.

By that time, someone had figured out that there was something wrong in
the lab, and lights were flashing in my eyes, distracting me. Red lights
on green made the scene seem a little like Christmas in Hell. I finished
with the tanks. Then I went back to the briefcases, pulled out the
bottles of gas, and began to pour.


TITLE: Iolokus 15/18

AUTHOR: MustangSally and Rivka T

CLASSIFICATION: MSR/Mythology/X-File

CONTENT WARNING: NC-17 for sex, violence, and language

SPOILER WARNING: US Season five through "Emily"

DISTRIBUTION STATEMENT: The Universe at large

THE DISCLAIMER: We would appreciate not being sued.  No actors
were harmed during the course of writing this story.




15
Come, children, give me your hands, 
Give your mother your hands to kiss them, 
O the dear hands and O how dear are these lips to me,
 And the generous eyes and the bearing of my children!
I give you happiness but nowhere in the world. *


The flames were spreading rapidly. The green liquid was flammable, and
fire swept across the floor faster than my eyes could track it. Glass
popped somewhere in the lab.

My gas trail had done more damage than I'd thought; the line of fire that
looped into the storage room at the side of the lab flared and I heard a
hollow boom as something exploded a few rooms away. I could feel the
oxygen leaching out of the air as it fed the fire. My hair rose away from
my face and shoulders in the artificial simoom of the air currents.

Marita had gotten to her knees, scrabbling to try to save the fetus
nearest her, crooning wordless reassurance. Its limbs moved feebly as she
reached for it.

The flames caught her as she staggered to her feet, cradling the dying
fetus. Marita was covered in the green stuff from her struggles on the
floor, and the fire coursed over her body, caressing the places Mulder
had touched.  The places I had touched. She screamed as her hair began to
catch.

One of the vats that was still standing tipped over, brought down by
something I couldn't see.

Among the shards of glass and the gush of green there was a baby,
full-term or beyond. Its little fists twitched once, twice. I could see
it coughing, spewing green fluid as it tried to adjust to the world of
air.

It wriggled, and I could see that it was a boy. He managed one real
breath, and opened his mouth to scream anger at the world for bringing
him so roughly into it.

The flames swept over him, and I turned away.

I could see into the nursery as well, which had caught fire through the
connecting door from the main lab. Empty cribs and changing tables
spewed
gouts of flame from the lines of gasoline I'd poured on them. The stink
was incredible, wafted to me on the heat. The hot air, rising, made all
the cheerful mobiles twist and bob. Ernie and Bert from Sesame Street
smiled at me with their blind plastic eyes. I felt sweat beading at my
hairline, running down the hollow of my throat where one drop trembled
against the tiny cross whose warmth throbbed against me like a mockery.

Suddenly unable to tolerate it any longer, I reached up and pulled hard,
so hard that I could feel the skin at the back of my neck part and the
salty blood mix with sweat and hair to sting painfully. The chain broke
and slithered to the floor as I flung the charm, the idol, the broken God
into the flames, giving it once again to my child. My children. I saw it
falling into the gold of the fire, a black speck against the
conflagration, and then it was gone.

Mulder screamed my name.

 I was not terribly surprised that he'd made it, nor that his timing
ensured that he was too late to do anything.

He moved closer, not quite so fast as the flames were spreading around
the room. He grabbed me by the shoulders and looked back into the lab,
horrified, where Marita was still burning like a candle.

"We've got to get out of here! I'll get her, just go!"

I smiled a little and stared harder at the fire.

I felt his gaze, cooler than the inferno around us. He saw what I had
become; he saw that I would not leave of my own volition while my
children's fate was yet uncertain.

He could have saved Marita, who wanted to live. Instead he slung me over
his shoulder, knocking the breath out of me, and began running for the
exit. I struggled a little, for form's sake. I had nothing against
survival particularly.

The fresh paint on the walls was beginning to blister and peel. Burning
plastic soured the air and there was a faint whiff of the smell I'd known
before, from Mulder's clothes when he was exposed to the toxic blood of
the shape-shifting thing and from Emily's hospital room even through the
face mask they'd forced me to wear. It made my eyes sting and water,
though I couldn't really feel anything. Perhaps multiple exposures to the
toxic fumes had built up a little resistance. Mulder was crying, but his
gait was steady.

We passed security doors blown off their hinges, safety glass that had
shattered in glossy green cubes all over the floor. Mulder stumbled a few
times, and finally I grabbed his gel-stiffened hair and he stopped. "Put
me down," I commanded, and though he couldn't have heard me exactly 
over the keening of the fire alarm and the sirens that were audible even
from
inside the building, he knew what I meant.

He dropped me to the floor almost too suddenly for me to keep my
balance,
and I had to steady myself against him with one hand. He looked at me,
and the smoke and noise and heat dropped away because I was too
surprised
to notice anything but his face.

Mulder was *angry* with me. He was distraught, anyone could have
identified the emotion, but his rage was directed particularly at me. I
hadn't seen that, excluding the times he was under the influence of
psychoactive drugs, since--well, I couldn't remember when Mulder in his
right mind had been furious at me. Upset that I wouldn't go along with
some piece of craziness, sure.

He made an impatient face because I was just staring at him, when even a
psycho like Mulder knew that running was really the more important item
on the agenda, and he grabbed my arm and pulled so that we were running
in tandem.

I'd memorized the layout of the facility in order to get in, but I hadn't
given any thought to getting out and I didn't recognize the path we were
taking. Mulder appeared completely confident, but that wasn't any
evidence that he knew where the fuck we were. Now we were in what
appeared to be a corridor of offices, with nameplates and Dilbert
cartoons on the closed doors. 

He stopped in front of one door. "Jason Lindsay, Public Relations," the
sign said. He loosened his grip on me and kicked the door open; it gave
at once, cheap-ass construction, because who's going to try to break into
the P.R. guy's office? Who but Mulder.

We ducked into the room, me following Mulder like always. I closed the
door so that we wouldn't be obvious to any searchers. When had he made
this adventure his own? Fuck it, I thought, and swept my eyes around the
room, intending to drag him out.

Until I saw the pictures on the wall. A man who was almost Mulder
shaking
Ronald Reagan's hand, and George Bush's, and Clinton's too. That man
with
lots of fat executives and the ever-present Bill Gates. With a woman who
I thought was an actress on one of NBC's comedies, Friends maybe.

He was looking around the room like he'd just landed on the moon.

"What the hell is this?" I asked, and he noticed my existence again.

"Jason Lindsay gave a press conference for Roush a few weeks ago. Danny
said...I just guessed...fuck. . . help me," he gave up and grabbed a
computer disk, whatever Jason hadn't finished before he left for the
weekend, and handed it to me. "We need to take some evidence with us."

"Mulder, I just torched an entire gene-splicing lab, and you want to take
a *disk* from the P.R. guy as a souvenir?" He was already pulling file
cabinets open, grabbing files at random, piling them on the desk.

Mulder looked up and gave me the most frightening smile I'd ever seen.
"As you pointed out, you torched it. Not much evidence left there, right?
Want to go back?."

There were shouts from the hall outside, feet pounding past. Then silence
again. Mulder had an armful of files, and he seemed to think that was
enough. He put his ear to the door, then threw it open and stuck his fool
head out. No one blew it off, so he motioned for me to follow and then
guided me to the stairs under a flashing red light and an Exit sign.

>From above us in the stairwell, I could hear doors banging and men
shouting. The smell of smoke was stronger here. The walls were covered in
bilious yellow paint, and then there was a flash and a chunk of
paint-covered concrete nearly took my ear off. 

Someone was firing at us from above. Mulder cursed and shoved me down 
the stairs, and we scrambled as best we could to get out of the line of fire,
pressed against the wall for minimum exposure and descending. 

I reached for my gun, but it wasn't in its holster. I couldn't remember
what had happened to it.

Mulder, miraculously, was currently in possession of his own weapon, and
he transferred the files to his left hand and aimed the gun upwards,
scanning to see if the gunman was following us. There were no further
shots, but there was so much noise that I couldn't tell if there were
footfalls on the stairs.

Two flights further down and the paint color changed to a cobwebby grey;
a sign on the wall informed us that we'd reached level P1. At the
landing, the stairs ended and there was a door in the wall. Mulder yanked
on the round metal knob and the door stayed exactly where it was. He
swore again and twisted and jiggled the knob, but nothing changed.

He motioned me back with a wave of his gun hand and aimed for the top
hinge. I thought about it as I covered my eyes and ducked away from the
door: the electronics of the locks at the facility were too complicated
to be defeated by a simple shot blowing out part of the locking
mechanism. But what you can't go through, you can often go around, and
the hinges were the most efficient way to do that.

The second shot, though, wasn't from his gun, and he was immediately on
the ground beside me, twisting and rolling to get in position to return
fire. I smelled blood and knew that he must have been shot, but he was
still reacting well and I didn't have time for an interrogation of the
sort required to get Mulder to admit injury.

"I've got a gun in my ankle holster," he hissed as he fired once, just to
keep the bad guy wary. I scrambled down his body, feeling his hard ass
and legs under my hands in a way that might once have embarrassed me,
until I reached his basic black socks and the leather holster strapped
around his leg. I retrieved the little gun--it wasn't even an automatic,
I noted with disgust as I straddled his body to get a better angle on
anyone coming down the stairs.

The man above us was shouting for backup, and now I could hear steps on
the stairs, thudding down towards us. I bent my head a little so that I
could speak in Mulder's ear. "Get the other hinge." He nodded, once, and
twisted under me to aim correctly, and I braced myself on my left hand
and waited.

The soldier came around the turn of the stairs, hunched over to minimize
the size of the target he presented. I shot him just under his right
knee. He screamed, high and resonant in the confines of the stairwell,
and tumbled forward, almost to where Mulder was still straining to aim
right.

I shot him again, this time in the face, and he jerked once and was
still. He was wearing a flak jacket over jeans and a T-shirt--it looked
as if he'd been hastily rousted out of bed to come after us, and the
haste had been deadly. I grabbed his semiautomatic and stuck the girly
gun in the waistband of my pants, in case it came in handy later.

Mulder fired and the door shuddered. The lower hinge wasn't completely
blown off, but he got into a half-standing position and kicked at the
bottom, and the top began to tilt into the stairwell, leaning dangerously
over him as it began to twist off under its own weight. The undefeated
lock at the doorknob held on, but it wasn't designed to keep a block of
solid metal upright, and it squealed and gave way. Mulder pressed me back
against the far wall, covering me with his body.

The door came down, held off the floor by the soldier's body, and we
darted through and were in a parking lot. Cars dotted the structure, but
most of the spaces were empty. Mulder's head whipped around, searching.

"Don't tell me you forgot where you parked," I yelled, my ears still
ringing from the gunfire. He didn't even bother to look at me, only
grabbed my arm again and pulled me away from the open door, behind a
concrete pillar.

He fumbled in his pocket and pulled out a mini-mike. "We're on the
parking level and we need you here now, guys." His tone was distracted, a
little impatient, but much calmer than I'd expected.

There was noise from the direction of the stairwell and he pushed me
against the pillar, getting ready to dodge around the concrete to fire at
whoever was coming for them. I raised the semiautomatic and prepared to
go around the other side.

There was a screech of rubber, crying out as it got transferred from
wheels to garage floor, and a black paneled van careened around a corner
and headed directly toward them. The soldiers in the stairwell began to
fire, so I inferred that the van was on our side and poked my head out to
lay down some covering fire. Mulder grabbed me back, roughly, even 
though I'd already begun to pull back, and he looked at me as if he were
surprised that I'd risk death, appalled by my foolhardiness. I almost
laughed, and then the van doors slid open right in front of us, we jumped
in, and I was knocked into the back by the force of the acceleration.
Mulder barely got the door closed as we jolted over a speed bump, and I
could see round bullet holes appearing in the body of the van from
several exciting angles. Papers from the files we'd stolen flew like
albino autumn leaves around us.

A crash shook the van, bouncing my head up and down like a week-old
tulip, and the windshield shattered. I couldn't see very well from the
back, but I thought that Byers was driving. Metal screeched and groaned,
and sparks popped over the front of the van, and then we were through
whatever barrier we'd hit and still accelerating.


TITLE: Iolokus 16/18

AUTHOR: MustangSally and Rivka T

CLASSIFICATION: MSR/Mythology/X-File

CONTENT WARNING: NC-17 for sex, violence, and language

SPOILER WARNING: US Season five through "Emily"

DISTRIBUTION STATEMENT: The Universe at large

THE DISCLAIMER: We would appreciate not being sued.  No actors
were harmed during the course of writing this story.







16
I will bury them myself,
Bearing them to Hera's temple on the promontory;
So that no enemy may evilly treat them
By tearing up their grave.

We drove for hours, stopping for gas a few times. We were headed, I
discerned, to California, where the boys would dissipate like smoke in
wind and meet up again, when they could, in DC. Mulder probably had 
some plan for the two of us, but he didn't let me in on it.

He glared at me for a long time, bouncing around in the back of the van.
There were no seats and the rubber mats that should have cushioned the
bottom of the cargo area had been removed at some point, so we sat on
painfully uneven metal and crud. His face writhed like a belly dancer
when I examined his gunshot wound, which turned out to be reasonably
minor, but he did allow me to touch him. He didn't say a word, limiting
himself to sharp nods and headshakes. He didn't trust himself to talk to
me in front of the others, which was fine by me.

We stopped for the night at another cheap motel in the middle of nowhere.
Byers, still the most respectable-looking of the group (and I include
Mulder and myself, because we were scorched), went to sign us in and
returned with two sets of keys dangling from green plastic rectangles.
Mulder held his hand up for one set, and all three of the Gunmen looked
at me, then at Mulder, then me again, as if they were watching a tennis
match. He flexed his fingers impatiently and Byers tossed a key over.

Mulder caught it out of the air like a hawk taking a pigeon.

We'd gotten adjacent rooms, so we couldn't expect to keep much private,
not with the decibel levels I expected to reach. But it was an illusion
of privacy, enough so that we could talk.

He opened the door and sardonically gestured me in first. I stalked past
him and sat on the double bed furthest from the door, crossing my arms
over my chest defensively. He closed the door and turned to lean on it,
with his own arms crossed. I felt like I was in a gunfight. Draw,
pardner.

"How did you find me?"

He looked at me balefully. "I read ahead in the script."

Fine.

"What comes next?"

He sighed and looked down at the straggly carpet. "If no one salvages any
incriminating videotape from the fire, you could just go back to work."

I felt the air solidify into glass, encasing me, trapping me. "I could?
What about you?"

"I'd say our effectiveness as a team is pretty much shot to hell, wouldn't
you?" Some energy sinkhole in the room was sucking all the light away;
his face blurred into darkness as I strained to see it.

I hugged myself more tightly, wondering when it had gotten so cold. "Just
because I went off without you, Mulder? Did that insult your manhood?"

He twitched, lurched forward half a step, and I believed he was going to
do me harm. One way or another. But he stopped and swung his fist
against
the grimy beige wall instead. I could feel the room shake with the
impact. 

I would have welcomed being that wall. "I'm sorry I killed your latest
informant. She lost her nerve at a bad time."

He shook his head. "I don't care about that." There was a change in him,
a gathering storm whose lightnings would transform him utterly. I was
afraid of what the results would be.

"What do you care about, then?" It was the wrong move, I could tell
instantly, a perfect opening. The lightning flashed--I thought I could
feel it crackle in the air--and he flowed across the room and knelt in
front of me, his hands pushing the crappy mattress down on either side of
me.

"I care about you, Scully. About what you're becoming...what you've
become. I think we need...we need help. Maybe some time away from one
another...I just want you to work in the light, and I think you know
you've gone too far into darkness right now."

Fuck. Where was the anger? Why wasn't he aiming it at me? I needed him
to
be angry so that I could be indifferent to it. His hands slid closer,
brushing against my hips and I tried to stand up, but he was too close
and I slumped back down without grace.

His face was buried in my neck and he was rocking me, crooning lullaby
nonsense and I was so angry with him for infantalizing me. Except that I
was also sobbing, without any idea how that had happened, and he had to
stop being nice so that I could remember how to be strong.

He picked me up and turned so that I was on his lap and he was the one on
the bed, still not letting me go, telling me how strong I was and how I
was going to be all right. I didn't even have enough volition to
struggle; my existence had narrowed to the need to force the next cry
from my lungs and then curl inwards waiting for another. I couldn't stop
wishing that he'd stayed mad.

I don't remember crying myself out. When I woke he was still wrapped
around me and the motel room was invisible in the darkness. He was lying
on my right arm, which had gone numb. I pulled it out from under him and
he awoke.

His hand rubbed my face. My nose was congested and the burns from close
contact with the fire were beginning to hurt, but I turned into his palm
as if it were cooling snow. He made a sad-amused sound. "I know you
don't
want this from me," he said, as hoarse as if he'd been the one crying
helplessly for hours, "but I don't have anything else to give." Then he
stiffened and pulled away, singed somehow by his own words.

"What is it?" I choked out. 

"There is...something else. I...I didn't tell you before because I
thought you had too much to deal with already. I was right, but...you
should know...I have some of your eggs."

I blinked in the darkness, feeling the sleep crusted in my eyes. "You
have what?"

"I told you about the fertility clinic, about finding out that your eggs
had been harvested." No, Mulder, you told a family court judge while I
was sitting there, but let's not quibble. "I didn't tell you that I saw
them, where they were kept. And I...I took a vial. I couldn't help it,"
he begged. "The Gunmen got someone to take a look--they were
well-insulated, and they're still frozen. Over twenty, some might be
viable..."

If I'd still believed in God, I would have prayed to Him to remove the
anvil that had fallen on my chest, squashing me into that malodorous
motel bed like Coyote caught in the trap he'd set for the Road Runner. I
had only survived Bethel because, I thought, if I destroyed the place
then the violation would be over.

"Wh--when were you going to tell me that part of the story?" I sat up,
moving my numb arm around, welcoming the way that the pain forced me 
to think again.

"I don't know!" He rolled away and off of the bed, pacing in the
darkness. "When you were a little further away from it, when you'd had
some time to get over Emily. It's not like we've had the most open and
friendly of relationships since then."

The anger hadn't disappeared, I discovered, only gone back into its cave.
It could be called out when necessary. "Friendship has nothing to do with
it, Mulder! That's what you've been missing all along. This is about my
body, about what's been done to me and my children, and you had no right
to conceal this from me. No right."

I could feel him nodding miserably. "I know that, Scully. I'm sorry." The
other bed whined as he settled down on it. "I can never take back the
decision not to tell you right then. But once I'd waited...each time was
wrong. Should I have told you when you were seeing ghosts? While you 
were in the hospital for your tests? Maybe when the cancer had 
metastasized, maybe I really could have made your day then. San Diego 
might have been a good place to do it, maybe in the funeral parlor."

I flushed, glad he couldn't see me. But he knew, damn him.

"Scully," he said softly, and I leaned toward his black-coffee voice.
"We're too fucked up to keep looking for the truth right now. When we get
back, take the eggs. Do what you have to do with them. If you  want--if
you can--come back to me when you're ready."

"I won't leave the X Files just because you're having a personal problem
with me," I said in a dead woman's voice.

He swallowed. "Then I'll leave, until and unless you're willing to trust
me again. Skinner will be thrilled to make you AIC. He'll give you a good
partner. I--I don't know why I'm doing this any more. As long as you
do...I'll do whatever you want."

Sometimes, when a bone is broken and then left unattended, it heals
wrong. The bones fuse and the limb is shortened, deformed. True healing
can only come when the bone is re-broken and set right.

Is that what you were trying to tell me, Mulder? A medical metaphor for a
medical doctor. I wish I'd understood. All I felt was the unbearable
cracking and splintering as I broke again.





TITLE: Iolokus 17/18

AUTHOR: MustangSally and Rivka T

CLASSIFICATION: MSR/Mythology/X-File

CONTENT WARNING: NC-17 for sex, violence, and language

SPOILER WARNING: US Season five through "Emily"

DISTRIBUTION STATEMENT: The Universe at large

THE DISCLAIMER: We would appreciate not being sued.  No actors
were harmed during the course of writing this story.




17

Happiness is a thing no man possesses. Fortune
May come now to one man, now to another, as
Prosperity increases; happiness never.


In the end, I did end up visiting Charlie after all.

It was an incredible relief when Byers pulled the van into the dusty
driveway of Charlie's low hacienda-style house nestled between a pair of
barren hills outside Sedona. A chicken walked in front of the van and
gave me an evil glare.  The Gunmen huddled in the van and refused to
come
out.  Throughout the trip, Langly had been making noises about getting
back to DC to analyze Jason Lindsay's files and try to find out more
about him, and Frohike had been giving Mulder dirty looks, as if acting
distrustful were a really cool way of showing Mulder that he cared. From
what I gathered, Mulder was certain that his DNA was shared with Jason
and, likely as not, ten of Jason's closest friends. And I thought he
needed to worry about whether I was sleeping around.

Mulder shouldered his knapsack and followed me to the house, the hot
wind
blowing the jacket of his ruined suit around him.  Charlie emerged from
the shadows of the house and enfolded me in a fraternal hug.  He was
thinner than I had seen him and the gray was starting to show in his
shoulder-length hair and his full beard, but he was hard and muscular
against me and seemed as cool as well water.

"Took your time, Squirt, " he said and smiled.

"Had stuff to do," I replied.

There had been a joke when we were growing up that Charlie could only 
say a certain amount of words per day.  When his allotment was used up,
he
went silent as a stump.  In a house full of jabbering Scullys Charlie
walked in his own silent zone.

"Your boss called.  Twice yesterday, once today, I let the kids answer
the phone and they were real unhelpful."

He looked over at Mulder.

"Charlie Scully."

"Mulder."

"C'mon in, Juanna's made lunch.  You wanna invite your friends in."

"They're leaving," Mulder said, "and they aren't very social."

I think Juanna and Charlie had five children, but I wasn't sure. It was a
small herd of small people running hither and yon through the low, wide
rooms of the house, and it was hard to get a head count.  Juanna turned
out to be a tiny Latina/Native American gold-skinned woman with an
infectious laugh.  I tried to help her get lunch on the table and found
that I was staring at simple things like forks as though I had never seen
them before.  She patted my shoulder and didn't say anything.  For that I
was grateful.

Lunch was served at a battered table that looked as though it could have
dated back to the Spanish settlement of Texas.  I took the Mexican beer
that Charlie offered me and let it dull the sharper bits of my mind. 
While I ate mildly spicy beans and rice, Charlie and Mulder talked of
vague male things, of four wheel drive vehicles and how much rain fell
last year.  It dulled to a mosquito drone in the back of my head.

Suddenly there was a clatter of silverware falling to the ground, Mulder
paled and stood. Charlie pointed him toward the bathroom; they'd already
bonded in that strange way men have. I didn't know who I was angrier at
for that.

"He's a good man, Dana," Charlie said gently as the door clanged shut and
the water began to run. "You should cut him some slack."

I formed my face into a smile. "You don't know what you're talking
about."

"I know what I see. You've been hurt, but all he wants is to help you."

"Charlie, if that were all he wanted I never would have been hurt."

"Y'know, Squirt, you've got to forgive people for not being perfect."

There was a muffled moan from the bathroom and I rose to check on him. 
He opened the door as I approached. His lower lip and chin were covered
in
blood, so bright that it had to be arterial, dripping like drool from a
baby's mouth.

"I think--" he said, garbled by all the blood, and then collapsed. Behind
him on the sand-colored tile floor was a trail of blood from the
pink-stained toilet bowl. In that well-organized civilian bathroom it
looked as fake as Karo syrup with red food coloring.

Charlie was already running for the phone.

****

I woke to a world muffled with painkillers. It's a little like being a
kid all wrapped up against the cold, tubby as a snowman. You're mostly
insulated but your fingers and toes get cold and numb. 

Scully perched on a nearby chair, reading an issue of the National Review
so old that it had Reagan on the cover. She looked up when she heard my
breathing change.

"You had emergency surgery to cauterize the ulcer," she said quietly.
"You lost a lot of blood, as usual, but that shouldn't matter much. The
real problem is the bullet wound. I'm supposed to report things like
that, and now I could lose my license because they wanted to know what
hospital I'd treated you at and I didn't have a damn thing to say."

I gaped at her. Even unconscious and bleeding, I'd apparently managed to
fuck up again.

"Eurf." I muttered and rattled the IV line that kept me bound to the bed.
"What did you tell them?" There, that came out right. I only sounded like
I was talking through five layers of paper bags.

"I said you'd taken a graze in a hostage situation down in Texas and
waved my badge around. You heal fast; it's not totally outside the realm
of possibility."

I heal fast. She'd commented on it before, but I hadn't given it much
thought. Chalked it up to my supremely masculine force of will, I guess;
real men don't get incapacitated by gunshot wounds even when major
arteries are compromised. But of course one would want one's master race
to heal quickly, especially if one were expecting the Neanderthals to
resist the new order. Jason probably never had any problems cutting
himself shaving either.

Well, none of that would keep Scully in possession of her badge. I was
glad she'd already thought of an explanation, I hate to have to make it
up as I go along. Scully's a much better liar than most people expect her
to be. I nodded to let her know that I'd understood.

"Getting your story straight?" Skinner's voice made me try to sit up,
which only served to cut through the drug haze and remind me that my
abdomen had been cut up from the inside with what felt like a Weed
Whacker.

"Sir," Scully acknowledged coolly. Her shoulders twitched, and I knew she
was shocked, but the voice was the same as always. She should bottle that
voice and sell it as coolant. Engine overheating would be a thing of the
past.

"So, now that Agent Mulder knows what to tell the fine folks at the
hospital when they ask, are you going to think about telling me the
truth?"

 "How did you know where we were?" she replied incuriously. I could feel
the blood rushing through my veins, running to my stomach where it bit at
my flesh.

"Your brother's wife was very helpful when I arrived at her door. I think
she's impressed that I'd actually come all the way from Washington to
look at you two."

"I'm impressed," I offered. So he'd lied to me about not knowing where
Scully had said she was going. Maybe he thought that he really wanted an
audition in Scully's boudoir. Maybe I should have encouraged that, it
might have been better for everyone concerned. Instead I gave him a
shit-eating grin aided by the painkillers that, with me not moving, were
buoying me up like the Princess on her twenty feather mattresses; without
the pea in my stomach and the AD in my face, I could have gone straight
to sleep. 

"Correct me if I'm wrong," Skinner offered, "but last time we met, wasn't
your hair brown?"

"Only my hairdresser knows for sure," I said, and batted my eyelashes.
Scully turned to stare at me, and I could see that she hadn't noticed
until Skinner had pointed it out. It figures. I mean, Scully had been
busy, but still it hurt some. But I relentlessly persist in forgetting
that Scully would need a radio telescope or a Stryker saw to notice
something happening to me.

Scully stood. "Excuse me," she ordered and walked out the door. We both
looked after her. It wasn't very Scullyesque to take a bathroom break in
the middle of a confrontation. But I'm damned if I know what Scullyesque
really is these days.

****

I felt the cramp for about five minutes before I understood it. I hadn't
had cramps since high school; when I went away to college and met
George
I started on the Pill, and I'd never stopped even when I wasn't sexually
active because I enjoyed the freedom from nausea and the two-day flow
instead of the previous week-long pain. Recently, of course, that hadn't
been a problem, even without the Pill.

I excused myself and went to the bathroom.

My panties were soaked in blood, absolutely ruined. I stared at them.

And remembered dry heat in an anonymous motel, remembered speculating
about what made Marita worth saving, Marita's sly assurance that she'd
given me what Mulder never could. 

She was wrong about that too, the twit.

So there I was, absolutely the same as before the abduction, really.
Except for the scar on the back of my neck and the microchip inside. And
the three years of nightmares and rage. You could bleed every member of
the conspiracy that had entrapped me dry and still not have a river deep
enough to wash away what had been done.

This blood wasn't even a down payment.

But it wasn't water, either. It was real and it might have something to
do with the future.

I cleaned myself up as best I could, stuffed some toilet paper into my
underwear, and went out to face all the men who would never, as hard as
they tried, understand exactly why I'd gone to Bethel.

Mulder was waiting, baiting Skinner like a trapped and angry bear. He was
going to let me explain, and his deference seemed more like trust than
abdication.

And as I looked at him, as he decoded the encrypted message on my face
and understood that I'd been reborn, I realized that I had been wrong.
Mulder understood. He didn't approve, but we'd never asked that from one
another and I wasn't about to start. 

Maybe understanding was enough, for now.

That and hot sex, of course.

"Sir," I said and focused my attention on Skinner, "I need to tell you a
story about a woman who was betrayed."

I gave him as much of the story as he could handle, which was everything 
except a night in a seedy motel and the exact status of my ova at the time
of 
their incineration, to wit their already-completed union with somebody's 
sperm. As far as he was concerned I'd destroyed a bunch of haploid cells 
that had been stolen from me, that were mine by right.

I offered him my badge, though I couldn't offer my lost gun, and he just 
looked at me.

Finally he sighed. "Step outside, Agent Scully." 

Mulder looked at us suspiciously but didn't protest.

We stood close in the bright busy hospital hall and his voice was low. "I 
thought that you were different than Mulder. That you were in control of
the 
journey you were taking."

"Sir, no one is in control but the men behind these experiments. I don't
deny 
that..." I couldn't finish. Deny everything, Mulder's voice in my head 
suggested. "What could I have done within the law? When I had 
indisputable proof of my d--my daughter's relationship to me I was scoffed 
at, told that I had no right to interfere with her care. She was there in front
of 
the people who supposedly run this country and they paid no attention. 
Should I have gone to them again?"

Skinner blinked and put his hands in his pockets. "I had hoped that you 
would not decide to use the very methods these men use to hide the truth."

"Some things are more important than making the truth known to others. 
What I did--that is my truth, sir, and I accept its consequences."

He nodded, and I felt something tall and strong and faintly dangerous that 
had always been between us crumble and disappear.

 "I'm sorry for your loss," he said, and meant more than Emily.

 "After the disappearance of the man you and I know as the Smoker, I
don't 
have much insight into the corridors of power. If there are repercussions 
from this adventure, we will all discover them at the same time. I won't 
perjure myself, Agent Scully, but...I understand why you felt you had to 
break the rules. Just remember that, without proof of wrongdoing, we're 
locked into an endless cycle of retribution and coverup, and whatever 
temporary victory you feel you may have achieved is meaningless if the 
larger objectives behind this project are obtained."

I nodded once and turned to go back to Mulder.


TITLE: Iolokus 18/18

AUTHOR: MustangSally and Rivka T

CLASSIFICATION: MSR/Mythology/X-File

CONTENT WARNING: NC-17 for sex, violence, and language

SPOILER WARNING: US Season five through "Emily"

DISTRIBUTION STATEMENT: The Universe at large

THE DISCLAIMER: We would appreciate not being sued.  No actors
were harmed during the course of writing this story.







18
I loathe your prosperous future; I'll have none of it,
Nor none of your security--it galls my heart.


Two days later I was released from the hospital with a couple of bottles
of pills and a lengthy owner's guide for my ulcer. The diet described was
implausible in the extreme. Where was I going to find boiled rice and
bland food when I was in the field? I could just see myself with an MIB
lunchbox in my hand going to question a suspect.  Life without coffee was
almost not worth living.

"We need to stop at a store," Scully said.

"Why?"

"I need to buy some underwear."

I considered that for a minute. In the hospital, when Scully had returned
from the bathroom, she'd been brighter, she glowed like a being from a
different plane. I could tell that something had happened--and what does
a woman find out when she goes to the bathroom?

Could Scully have encountered one of the Jeremiah Smiths at Roush?

And then I remembered Marita, burning for the dying children. She'd been
with Scully, and it would be comforting to think that she wasn't really a
person. I remembered one time when I thought for sure Marita had drawn
blood, I could feel the wetness on my skin.  The next morning when I
stood with my back turned to the mirror and looked over my shoulder
there
were just the faintest of pink welts; by the afternoon I could have gone
swimming and not drawn any comments. Well, not about the marks on my
back, anyway.

"Was it Marita?"

She blinked, blue eyes winking out like candle flames and then returning
full-force, and I chalked up another victory. Scully nonplused is not
something you see every day. 

"Probably."

And that was all she'd say. I don't know if I'll ever understand the
details of what went on between the two of them. I'd like to think that
Scully was a little bit jealous, that she dug into Marita with her sharp
little claws. 

****

Charlie drove us back to Phoenix. Mulder had a round-trip ticket for the
next day, and I'll never know how he timed it that way when he made the
reservation. I'd suspect him of actually coordinating these things with
the Conspiracy, but maybe he really is psychic. He bought me a one-way
seat next to him, which gave me an idea.

I made Charlie let us off in Scottsdale, the ritzy Phoenix suburb, at the
first really expensive mall we came to. We hugged and he shook Mulder's
hand. Then he turned back to me. Mulder backed away, with that exquisite
sensitivity he shows for everyone but me. 

"Do right by him," Charlie whispered to me as he grabbed me again,
squeezing so tight that my burns ached. "I don't think you can do right
by yourself unless you take him with you."

I smiled up at him and tugged on his beard. "Take care of yourself,
Charlie. And try not to give too much advice, it'll ruin your
reputation."

He nodded and left. Mulder looked up at the huge gold Lord & Taylor sign
on the building in front of us and sighed. "What are we doing here,
again?"

"Before we go back I figure I might as well get some use out of your
ill-gotten gains."

"My dividend is sure going to drop now that you've set fire to my
assets."

"Cracking bad jokes won't help when I liquidate your assets." A softball
pitch, just for you, my easily amused partner. 

I was not disappointed.

"Ooh, promise?"

Lord & Taylor had a wonderful women's department. Both DKNY and 
Tahari do wonders for short women like me, helping us go up and down, in 
and out in the right places. I love my cranberry suit with the black velvet 
lapels, don't get me wrong, but it's always bothered me that my partner has 
more suits than I do, when all *he* really needs to do is vary the shirt and 
tie. It's forced me to spend thousands of dollars over the years--it's
amazing what I used to wear before I understood what it made me look
like
to stand next to him in my not-quite-right brown pantsuits.

It never occurred to me to exploit his wealth when we started sleeping
together, I suppose mostly because I'd just assumed that he skimped on
everything else to dress so well. I just hadn't been paying attention.
Sure, the apartment was a hole, but it was in a nice neighborhood, and
you've got to pay a lot in rent each month for the landlord to accept all
the broken doors, gunshots, and assorted woundings Mulder has brought
to
the building over the years. But, even if I'd known, I don't think I
would have demanded his credit cards. Certainly I'd wanted the physical
release at least as much as he had; it's not like he needed to lure me
with extra inducements.

The fact that I was spending Roush's money made it much easier. Now,
maybe I could have demanded that he set up some foundation for
abductees
or "experiencers," as Jose Chung wanted to call them. But that wasn't
very realistic and, frankly, I need at least as much psychic healing as
anyone who'd be a candidate for a grant. Let me tell you, Donna Karan is
a fabulous therapist.

Mulder didn't even blink when he signed the credit slip, though the sales
staff did. I had them ship it straight back to Maryland; no need to make
Mulder struggle under all those bags like some pussy-whipped husband in
a sitcom.

We wandered through the AV department on our way to buy lingerie, and
Jason Lindsay's handsome face was displayed on a hundred TV sets. The 
shades varied slightly; on some sets you could see the blue highlights in his
inky hair and in others it was a muddier black-brown. The drapes behind
him on the podium changed from the blue of a late summer twilight sky to
periwinkle, but in all of them he was saying the same thing: Terrible,
terrible accident. Promising lives lost, promising research avenues
destroyed. Heart goes out to the families and friends of all involved.
The fire started among a batch of highly volatile chemicals and swept
through the facility too fast for full evacuation, and the rumors about
firefighters finding locked corridors and smoke-choked corpses who'd been
sealed in were completely unfounded.

He was handsome enough that I almost wanted to believe him.

I nudged Mulder, who was staring at the images, at the funhouse
reflection of himself. "Is he...?"

"I'm not sure," he said. "I'm guessing yes. I'd imagine that we were
conceived in adjoining petri dishes anyway."

"There would be records of something like that," I said.

"The fake ones or the real ones? He's older than I am, we probably
weren't really made side by side...but it's nice to know that Roush is
staying in the family."

The news changed to show a story about a baby in some national park
who'd
fallen through a crevice into a tiny cave and the heroic rescuers trying
to get her out, and we moved on.

Victoria's Secret coughed up a flurry of underwear, at which Mulder could
only goggle. I think he wanted to smirk but couldn't quite pull it off.
He came close when the salesgirl offered to model a few of the nighties
for him and I informed her that we were going to preserve the element of
surprise on that a little longer.

Mulder slept on the plane back east, his head drooping sideways until his
hair, which was beginning to show brown roots, was brushing my face.  I
could have moved away, but I decided not to.  All the way home, I
listened to the sound of his breathing and counted the gray hairs that
were beginning to peek through the brown and black. 

So many years, so much time, so many unfulfilled promises, so many
betrayals marked in each of those gray hairs.  I wasn't sure that I
wanted to add to them, wasn't sure that I wouldn't cause a skunk-like
stripe of white to bisect his head, and I knew that I didn't want to add
to the damage that had already been done.

I didn't know what I wanted anymore.  I just wanted to go home.

The End

Iolokus II: Agnates - The Collector's Edition

by 

MustangSally <rwbowman@erols.com> and RivkaT <RivkaT@aol.com>



Summary:What do you do when you find out your entire life has
been a lie?

The horrific saga begun in Iolokus continues in the barren
landscape of Texas.  Mulder and Scully delve deeper into the
genetic experiments done by the Project on the Mulder family. 
When the innocent, and not-so-innocent, legacies of the
experiment are murdered because of who and what they are, Mulder
and Scully are forced to face terrible reflections in a mirror
broken into ten distinct pieces.

Rating: NC-17 Classification: XA(R) (Mulder/Scully sexual
activity) Spoilers: Fifth Season through Emily

Disclaimer: We don't own them, which may be why we ride them
hard and put them away wet. Please don't take offense.


Agnates 1/20 

And these tend inward to me, and I tend outward to them And
such that it is to be these more or less than I am And of these
one and all I weave the song of myself Walt Whitman


Imagine my joy when Zippy was waiting for us back in DC.

I walked into the office and he was sitting in my chair, feet
up on my desk, looking up at Scully.  She was standing a few
feet away from him, not quite as close as she stands to me but
overall the picture was enough to make me want to bite his
throat out. Couldn't he smell that this was all my territory? 
I'd drawn the line at actually urinating in the corners since it
would only irritate Scully more than some of my other bad habits.

"What are you doing here?"

"Hello to you too, Spooky. Sorry to hear about your ulcer, is
that why you were such an asshole in Texas?"  he cocked his head
and smiled one of his halogen smiles at me to show that this was
all in good fun, but I just wanted to break his teeth.

Supposedly the cauterization had solved my immediate problems
but I was obviously going to revisit gastrointestinal hell in
the near future.  And the reason was grinning at me from behind
my desk with its hideous Tom McCann shoes on my blotter.

"I repeat: what are you doing here?"

"Agent Zipprelli wants us to consult on a case," Scully
answered for him. "It's an investigation into the disappearances
of a number of young women down in Texas."

The part of me that is always screaming struggled to the
forefront of my consciousness. No, no, no, not again.

"It's right up your alley, Spook.  Hot chicks missing without a
fucking clue. That's what you're into, right?  Who knows you
might even get lucky and find yourself the Klingon of your
dreams."

"Fuck off," I said and gestured to him to get the hell out of
the way so I could sit at my own damn desk. He, of course, moved
not an inch.

"The disappearances are centered around Austin," Scully said
and, though Zippy would not have been able to catch the slight
emphasis on the last word, I did. I realized that I'd never
asked what other information Marita had given her. Roush had a
large amount of property in Austin.

They looked at me expectantly. Scully seemed to think that I'd
accept turning X Files leadership over to her without going
through any of the annoying paperwork to make her AIC, and
though I'd said that I could do that when we were in Arizona,
things seemed very different if her first executive decision was
going to be to follow Zippy back to his stomping grounds. Maybe
my presence would be superfluous anyway. 

"Do you really want to do this?" I appealed to Scully. She just
raised her eyebrow, which that morning apparently meant, Mulder,
you fuck, get with the program.

Zippy watched the two of us, amused by the silent
communication. When he could tell that I'd caved, he decided it
was safe to chime in. "What's your damage, Spooky, anyway?"

"I could tell you, but then I'd have to kill you."

Scully gave me the dog-poop-on-her-shoe look, and I whined,
"Oh, come on, Scully. You have no idea how many years I've
waited to say that to him."

She crossed her arms and Zippy smirked. Another long-held
fantasy shot to hell once realized. I should have learned better
when Samantha was returned, but I'm not that trainable.

I sighed. "Get out of my chair, grab a stool, and give us what
you've got.."

He didn't move.

"This is the deal," Zippy started, flipping open a case file,
"after the shit from the Roosevelt Center died down I started
going through the old case files to see if anything we'd picked
up lately could relate back to Abrams. Turns out that one of his
co-workers from the Phone Company took a powder about nine
months ago. This is the killer, he had been dating the woman, I
figured that this was the external stressor that started his
trip down insanity lane."

How easy it was to forget that Zippy had been in ISU until he
started talking like a profiler and stopped talking like a hick
cop.  I hated to admit it, but he had actually had an awful lot
of promise in ISU, from a strictly analytical perspective – he
never lived the cases the way an inspired profiler did..   
Cases left him without a stain, just like his teeth.  Lucky
bastard.

"Then I got to thinking that he had been talking about people
manufacturing babies.  Nine months.  I talked to a buddy down at
the Austin PD and another one in San Antonio. Turns out that
between the two cities, no less than twenty-four young women
between the ages of eighteen and thirty went missing about nine
months ago.  Given the fact that both Austin and San Antonio
have a fairly large population of transient workers in the
tourist trade, waitresses and the like, not much was made of it
at the time since people come and go at will. But four women
missing at about the same time without as much as a body found
anywhere is suspicious."

"Think they got picked up by the Mothership, Spooky?"

"You're doing waaay too much peyote, Zip."

"I've seen you go off on a wild E.T. hunt for less." 

"Do you want to countersign the request to consult before I
take it up to Skinner?" Scully asked, her face and voice like
liquid paper.

I scrawled my name on the dotted line and let her go.

"What the fuck is with you?" I demanded, the moment her
footclicks were swallowed by the elevator, "you X-File happy all
of a sudden?"

"Fuck you, Spook, I'm doin' my job. Somethin' you never took
seriously."

"This is from the guy who'll wave his dick at anything with
tits?"

"Hey man," he was out of my chair and snarling down at me where
I sat, his eyes glowing like neon, his spit hot on my face, "you
can sit here in your fucking burrow and pick and choose what
bullshit cases you want while the rest of us are out on the
fireline every day. We're working cases you think you're too
good for. We're putting the bad guys in jail while you're
chasing after lights in the sky."

He grabbed his briefcase from my desk, sending a flurry of case
files to the ground.

"I've got three seats on the nine o'clock to Austin tomorrow.
Be on that plane with your full attention or I'm going to leak
to the press that the X-Files are a vanity project and a waste
of taxpayers' money."

I had his arm before he made it to the door and I spun him
around until his solid back slammed into the hollow door. Strong
as a bulldog, he shoved at me and forced me back half a pace.

"You do not come into my office, turn my partner against me and
then threaten me *fuckhead*."

"Do your fucking job, Fox.  Get your head out of your ass and
work for a change."

The door bounced shut behind him.

I kicked the trashcan across the office but it only made my
foot hurt.

****

Zippy caught up with me on the second floor landing. When I
heard his footsteps I turned, reaching for my gun, just in case,
but I relaxed when I identified him. Even if he was an enemy,
his plans didn't involve assault in the concrete embrace of the
Hoover building.

He shook his head and smiled at me. "You know how you can have
a history with a person, and everyone who sees the two of you
together for the first time wonders what could possibly be the
problem and why you overreact to every word the other person
says? And you know you're overreacting, but it's not the one
sentence, it's the whole history, every interaction you've ever
had." He cocked his head and blinked, his dark eyes and
Maybelline eyelashes flirting with me in the dimness of the
stairwell.

"I think I know a little about that," I replied and he smiled
widely.

"I know it's not all Spooky's fault, but he...well.  Pushes
buttons, you know?"

I nodded and began climbing again.

"Should I come see the AD with you first or just come back
later?"

"I'll handle this, he can be..brusque...to people he doesn't
know and I don't want any more male posturing clouding the
issues." He nodded contritely, face falling like a pancake. His
pout was nowhere near as exaggerated as Mulder's; his face
flattened and his eyes widened but his lips stayed pretty much
in place. 

"I'm gonna go buy some snow globes with the Washington monument
in them for my kids," he said and shrugged.

"You have children?"

"I don't. The Artist formerly known as Mrs. Zipprelli and her
new husband do," he shrugged, "didn't work out."

Oh, hell. "You should try some pretty rocks from the Natural
History Museum, I sent them to my brother Charlie's kids last
year and he said that went over well."

He nodded. "Should I meet you back at Mulder's office? Or is
yours easier to find?"

I winced. He really had an instinct for weak spots and I'm sure
it served him well.

"Come to the basement around five, we'll talk. I'm sure you've
got friends in the building you can visit with until then."

****

During the lunch hour I picked up a pack of Trojans to go with
the Rolaids. I didn't think about it until I was back in Casa
Hoover.

Did I want Scully to get pregnant? Did I want that not to
happen? 

We'd never used condoms before; the chances of either of us
dying from HIV were minimal. So because I knew she was infertile
I hadn't paid any attention to "protection," as it's called
these days. As if anything could protect me from sex with Scully.

If she got pregnant she'd have to leave me. Leaving me could
keep her safe, but leaving me this way would make her more
vulnerable than ever. Let's be honest, she could have Zippy's
child, hell she could have Cancerman's child (would that make me
a brother? a first cousin once removed?), and a threat to it
would still bring me to my knees.

So no, I didn't want her to get pregnant. And maybe I didn't
trust her to go back on the Pill now that pregnancy was a
possibility. She'd used it before; she was never ashamed of it
and took it with lunch every day, which is why I know it was her
method of choice. But she wouldn't start up again without a full
checkup first, not my methodical calculating darling, and she
might not return to it at all.

Now that she'd been a mother, for a few short days, she'd want
that again, not right now but eventually, and when that happened
I'd have to figure out how to dissuade her. I couldn't prevent
her from going out and finding some idiot in a bar to be daddy
or even from using a sperm bank. I could try to spend every
waking minute with her, and that way she'd kill one of us well
before nine months was out.

Maybe if I was lucky I could use her sex drive to combat her
reproductive drive. I know this isn't true of my other sexual
partners, but I am, without serious competition, the best lover
Scully has ever had. None of the others' lives or mental
stability depended on pleasing her in every cell, and none of
them, I'm sure, studied her every move, in bed or out, to ensure
total attention to her needs. She thinks that she doesn't need
me, and in a way it's true. Scully's will is strong enough to
let her leave me behind without ever looking back. But I don't
think she's aware of what it would cost her. She could do it,
but she will never be indifferent to me, because I've bypassed
that judgmental, convoluted cerebellum of hers and trained her
body and her reptile brain what to crave.

As a strategy, it would definitely have its benefits.

Then there was one question that hung in the air like a bad
smell – what if she wasn't interested in having sex with me
anymore? 

What would I do to make her stay?

2/20 You villain touch!  What are you doing? My breath is tight
in its throat. Unclench your floodgates.  You are too much for
me. Walt Whitman

Mulder wasn't in *his* office at five; I'd forgotten that he
had a checkup for his stomach, an appointment I'd scheduled for
him. He'd come back when he was done, but I didn't know if I
wanted to be waiting there for him.

Zippy had a filing cabinet open and was paging through a thick
casefile.

I got closer and saw that it was my own. The first one, as
Mulder wouldn't hesitate to remind me. The one now supplemented
with the latest revelations concerning my cancer and my child.

"Find what you're looking for?" I asked sharply, and he spun on
his heel and had the courage to look unashamed.

"I've heard rumors," he admitted, "but I didn't really
understand. It's..."

"Unbelievable?"

His grin was as loud as a gunshot in the dim office and I
thought about the fact that the teeth are the only visible bones
of a healthy body. "Hard to believe, maybe. Harder to
understand. Why would anyone do this?"

I shrugged. "Why do people go to Star Trek conventions?" This
comment earned me a more serious smile. "So," I continued,
"Mulder's at the doctor's, he'll be a while."

"So you want to get something to eat?"

Haven't we done this before, I thought, but what came out of my
mouth was, "Sure."

I think the last time Mulder bought me dinner was tomato soup
and grilled cheese sandwiches at a truck stop in Iowa where the
jukebox was playing both country and western music.  But Zippy
and I went to the Ebbett's Grill where the atmosphere was as
mellow as the dark wood paneling and the waitstaff were both
attentive and discreet. There were real fabric napkins too.  We
ordered drinks and waited for dinner to come.

"So what's your deal with Spooky?" he asked, over the civilized
tablecloth.

I looked at him. "Deal?"

"I mean, are you two an exclusive thing?" 

The substance of the question rattled in my head for a moment.
Exclusive? Technically, there was no one else left alive with
whom I'd had sexual relations in the past five years. I think
Mulder could say the same. Did that count?  Why was Zippy
thinking that-

"I don't know what you're talking about."

Zippy sipped at his beer and sat back in the booth.

"Ah, come on, Dana, I see the way he looks at you.  The boy's
got it bad."

"You know, there are people in the world other than Fox
Mulder," I said, feeling the vodka sting in my bloodstream, my
body, so unused to alcohol, was reacting like a college student
at her first dorm party. 


In the dim light, Zippy was actually attractive since the shine
from his teeth as muted and he wasn't shouting down Mulder.  His
foot brushed my calf underneath the table and it may have a
genuine accident. He looked at me with his deep walnut eyes and
ran his fingers up and down the sweaty sides of his glass.

"So tell me about Dana Scully then," he said in an affable tone.

I chased an ice cube around the glass with my swizzle stick.

"Not much to tell, went to college, went to med school, went
into the FBI," I drank the remainder of the vodka and tonic,
enjoying the cold trail it ran to my stomach.

"Was abducted, had cancer, had a child that died.  Isn't that a
story?" he pressed, and it surfaced where in my mind that he had
trained in ISU with Mulder and that he had, in fact, been a
profiler.

Hard to believe that either of them had been when they carried
on like children on a playground.  But Zippy's tone was too
light and frothy for reality.

Was I being questioned?

"Doesn't that change you somehow?" he pressed.

"It changes your perspective."

"And what's your perspective now?"

"Very distant," I said and offered him the most barely polite
smile.

"I can take a hint," he said and shook his head," so what
subjects are open for conversation?"

"How 'bout them Redskins?"

"Now you see, that's one of my forbidden subjects, I'm a Dallas
fan."

Maybe the joke was funny or maybe it was the vodka but I did
laugh. The waiter came and brought our dinners and for a half an
hour we talked of normal things - department gossip who was
sleeping with who and if anyone at all was sleeping with
Skinner.  We talked about budget cuts, the impossibility of
getting good cannoli below the Mason Dixon line and the general
decrepitude of the entire Lariat rental car fleet. He told me
about his divorce, about how Anne Marie had finally run out of
patience with the insane schedules, the last minute trips and
the black moods from seeing one too many dead bodies.  His sons
and ex-wife were now living a normal life with her new husband
who was a vet and only got called out of bed at night for
emergency calf-births.  The best thing about the late night
bovine midwifery was that cows don't try to shoot the vet.

I lost track of how much I drank, but when we walked through
the cool cavern of the parking garage and Zippy put his arm
around me I didn't protest.  The kiss was pleasant, and it was
nice to kiss a man without getting a cramp in my neck, but
pleasant was as far as it got. He failed to ignite any passion
in me whatsoever, as compared to Mulder who could almost make me
come with one blatant look.

My lack of interest must have been obvious.

"No good, huh?" he asked with a sad little smile.

"Zippy-"

"Yeah, I know, I know 'my heart belongs to Spooky', right?" he
unlocked the car door and held it open for me, "But if he does
you wrong even once, let me know and I'll kick his ass."

In a way, it was terribly charming.

****

"Take me home."

If my head snapped up any faster I was going to find out the
hard way if our heath care package stretched to chiropractors or
not. She had broken a rule, no talk in our oft-bugged office.

"I had too much to drink," she admitted and walked carefully to
the chair and sat with equal care.

"Zipprelli ply you with alcohol and make an assault on your
virtue?" I sighed and began gathering papers into their original
case files, more or less.

She snorted something like a laugh and tossed her hair back;
the liquor was making her slow and languorous, and making me
nervous.

"Something like that," she pulled her key chain out of her
pocket and tossed it on the desk, the brass of the Apollo emblem
glowing gold in the light, "and I'm not about to further
endanger my career by picking up a DUI."

"Might be a nice change from speeding tickets."

I have been asked why I rarely let Scully drive in the field
and the answer is simple, my deliberate little darling has a
size six shoe and a lead foot.  To avoid the hassle of dealing
with local highway patrols, I drive. The speeding should have
been a clue to me all those years ago that something demonic lay
under her carefully groomed exterior.

"Come on, you little lush, the drunk bus is leaving,"

Sitting in the passenger seat of her own car, Scully watched
the lights of Washington go past, past the usual diplomatic tags
proving that foreigners really shouldn't be permitted to drive
on US soil, past the stretch limos, past the river and into
Virginia.  From her statement in the office doorway, I wasn't
sure if she wanted to go to her home or my home, and since my
apartment was closer the decision was simple.  I was also
gripped with a serious hunger for her skin.

Parking in Old Town Alexandria sucks, as a rule, and tonight
was no different. All the slots for my apartment building were
full and we had to walk three blocks in the night.  Passing by
the coffee cafe where I used to pick up my morning caffeine fix
before getting to the Metro station, back when I could drink
coffee, a small, strong hand caught mine and fingers entwined
with mine.  I could have died happy right then and there, except
for the nagging fear that the affection was alcohol-induced.

Scully plunked her briefcase next to mine on the coffee table
and wandered into the bedroom with a boneless walk that could
have made me hard if I'd let it. I went through the usual
routines as though she wasn't there, checking my e-mail, getting
the scores from ESPN while I sorted through my paper mail.  The
only good thing was a letter of confirmation from my brokers
(the thought that I had stockbrokers still made me want to
laugh) that they had, in fact, sold all my Roush stock as per my
request.  They had re-invested the money in a variety of
computer companies that allegedly gave about the same yield. At
least I could look at myself in the mirror in the morning when I
shaved. 

I also now owed Danny a hundred bucks on the last Yankees game.

When I finally went into the bedroom, it was after midnight and
I almost stepped on the puddle of Scully's clothes on the floor.
From the light coming through the drapes that never quite shut
tight, I could see that she was already in bed, sprawled over
more than her fair share wearing one of my old dress shirts..
She was also breathing so loudly that it was a borderline
snore.  

I took off my clothes and got in next to her.  She snuffled
into the pillow when I touched her, but she went soft again and
leaned up against me.

****

Mornings are dangerous times in my world.  Waking up Scully is
like sticking your hand in a bear trap, only worse. This time I
was prepared. I had coffee.

"Hey, " I said and poked at her hip.

She made an unattractive grunting noise and burrowed deeper
into the pillow.

"Go 'way."

"Wake up sleepyhead, it's time for school."

Rolling over, she looked up at me and I watched the play of the
last night's events run through her eyes.   Yes, Scully, we did
share a bed last night and didn't have sex. Mark that down on
your calendar, it has to be an event. I can take care of you and
still let you make the rules, an arrangement that you've never
made available to me.

Naturally I said none of this.

She sat up and rubbed at her face.

"What time is it?" she asked.

"Just after seven," I said and handed her the covered cup that
I had brought her from Starbucks.

Taking the coffee, she pushed hair out of her face and I could
see her struggle to form rational thought.

"When are we supposed to get the plane to Austin?"

"Nine, that gives you enough time to go home and pack."

"Right," she muttered and started drinking the coffee.

"Be back in a minute," I said and went back into the living
room to finish setting up my laptop to get my e-mail on the
road.  I was fighting with the codes when someone started
knocking at the door.

"You know, that damn partner of yours has a hell of a nerve,"
Zippy complained as he marched in, "I don't know where the fuck
she is. I called her apartment this morning and all I got was
the answering machine."

"Good morning Agent Zipprelli, and how are you today."

"She shot me down again last night."

"Maybe you should quit asking her out. The lady is not
interested."

"Fucking genius."

"I know I am.  So what did you try to call Scully about?" I
asked, straightening my tie.

"The flight was moved to ten."

"So you should have more time to get a coherent report together
that I can review on the plane," Scully said, coming out of the
bedroom and tucking her blouse into the top of her pants, "as
opposed to that incoherent drivel you tried to pass off
yesterday."

She handed me her empty coffee cup and shrugged into her jacket.

"I'll see you two at the airport at nine thirty, then."

Picking up her briefcase, she left, leaving Zippy with his
mouth open and me with an empty paper coffee cup in my hand.

"You are so whipped," Zippy said once her footsteps had been
swallowed by the sound of the elevator.

"Fuck you," I said and threw the paper cup at the trashcan in
the kitchen.. It bounced off the rim and rolled across the floor.

"Didja' ever stop to think exactly how big of a shitload of
trouble you can get in for sleeping with your partner?" he asked
and flopped down on my sofa.

"Repeatedly."

"And?"

"What's your point, Pin-head?"

"I think it might be worth a pair of those Redskins tickets
you're always giving Danny for me to forget about it," he gave
me one of his ultrabrite smiles, "and extortion is such an ugly
word."

This was farcical, just a routine round of sniffing and
growling, the flash of canine teeth.  I knew the only thing he
was serious about was the fact that he wanted the tickets.  If
it hadn't been the threat of exposing Scully and me, he would
have found another way to weasel the tickets out of me.  Was it
really going to be that easy?  Were we just kidding ourselves
and the rest of the world that this was a clandestine affair? 
Or did people honestly not give a damn?

One thing was certain. Short of my being abducted by aliens and
having my brain sucked out with a straw, I couldn't give her up.
If exposure threatened, she'd have to be the one to take action. 

If I were analyzing myself, I'd wonder what kept me following
her around. On the surface, she was getting the milk for free,
which was sorely depressing the market for cows. Love as cow, I
thought--what a moo-ving metaphor. But Zippy wouldn't get the
joke.

In any event, as always with us, surface appearances were
deceiving. I had excellent reasons to nurture this strange
attraction. With Scully, I could open up--because I knew she'd
never admit to noticing my most painful revelations.  I could
follow words that came out flecked in my heart's blood with a
sly innuendo, and she'd treat both statements the same way:
she'd give me a blank, almost disapproving stare and change the
subject. If she ever tried to draw me out, I'd pull back, and I
could count on her to do the same.

"There's a Starbucks down the street," I said. "You buy me some
tea, we'll figure out what you're going to tell Scully. There
will be a test later, this I can guarantee."

"Tea?" Zippy shook his head and grabbed my bag. "You are a
lunatic."

"On the contrary, the phases of the moon have nothing to do
with it. I am mad but North by Northwest.  I can tell a hawk
from a handsaw when the wind is Southerly."

"I wouldn't quote too much Hamlet were I you, man. Think too
much about the parallels and you'll end up on somebody's floor
bleeding from multiple puncture wounds."

He had a point.

Zippy's request for our help was not altogether implausible,
though it would have made more sense if I'd had coffee instead.
Twenty-four women gone, all young and probably fertile, high-
risk victims whose disappearances should have been noticed.
Abductions tended to target young healthy women, whereas run-of-
the-mill serial killers, particularly the savvy ones, stuck to
people whose absence would not be particularly surprising.
Unfortunately if you're running an illicit breeding program a
subject's heroin addiction really cramps your experimental
options, which might be the only good thing about shooting smack.

Zippy had actually made a rather brilliant deduction, though I
didn't say that because he'd just insult me for patronizing him.
He'd worked out the girls' menstrual cycles through interviewing
friends and family--he was aided by the fact that fifteen of
them lived in dorm situations, and women living together often
find their cycles synchronizing, it's something to do with
pheromones that Scully probably even understands. In any event,
the girls were all taken a few days before their peak fertility
periods, just enough time to get them transported, cataloged and
drugged into oblivion before...whatever.

Of course, Zippy thought our target was a lone psycho who
wanted to impregnate as many victims as possible. Real men don't
believe in conspiracies, they like things that can be shot,
fucked, or trampled, not necessarily in that order. I didn't
debate the point with him.

However, I would have given my left nut to see Zippy
questioning college girls about their menstrual cycles. I bet he
left all of those dorms with a pocketful of phone numbers.

The loud clanging of a metal milk pitcher made me look up at
the girls behind the counter.  Three of the fresh-faced college
students that I vaguely recognized from my frequent flyer
program were clustered around the blonde who was blushing redder
than a cranberry. Zippy also looked up, looked at the blonde and
smiled.

The hormones in the air were thicker than steamed milk.

Zippy and the girls - doing the mating dance of the eyes.

I felt very old and very tired.

3/20 And there will be any more inception that there is now Nor
any more youth no age than there is now. And there will never be
any more perfection than there is now. Nor any more heaven or
hell than there is now Walt Whitman

"I can't believe that son of a bitch rates a window," Mulder
said, looking out the architectural marvel that was Zippy's.

"Well they're not going to hide Top Gun in the basement, right?"

"I chose that office, good privacy."

"Obviously it wasn't for proximity to the women's room."

"We've got a lead!"

I was going over the stack of Missing Persons reports piled up
on Zippy's desk when the man himself came into the office waving
a fax sheet like it was an Olympic Gold Medal.

"Holly Keene was spotted by a Good Samaritan over in the
warehouse district. They called into the local TV station when
they ran the missing person report last night."

"Let's go," Mulder said and I shrugged, it looked like we were
just going to do grunt work, and not of the kind that Skinner
would condemn. Now *there* was some grunt work I wouldn't mind
starting again, I thought, and almost forgot to follow Zippy
before he lost us in the maze of corridors that led to the
elevator.

The cops were holding back pending our arrival, tightening
around the target warehouse like a noose. Anyone with about a
day's work in security would have been able to spot their
presence for all their attempts at subtlety. This was Texas, I
reminded myself, and subtlety was not really a premium.

Zippy had respect here though; they hadn't made a move until he
arrived. "Spook," he said, casually throwing an arm around
Mulder's shoulders just to make him flinch, "whaddaya think?
Guns blazing or not?"

"It's a tough call," he said, looking at me and seeing the
Eleanor Roosevelt Daycare Center, where blazing hadn't made a
whit of difference. "I doubt our target is a lone man with a lot
of women in chains."

"You think he's got an accomplice?"

Mulder sighed and looked away. I recognized the signs of
compromise in him and was mildly displeased with them, though I
should have been joyous. Mulder was trying to color within the
lines so that they wouldn't treat him like Cassandra;
technically we were just consulting and Zippy was in charge of
the case. "I think he's not alone and might attempt to resist an
armed penetration."

Zippy eyed Mulder the way I look at food I find in Mulder's
refrigerator. "Man, if you're going to start bullshitting me
now, you can just go home."

Mulder's upper lip twitched in a snarl. "All right, hotshot. I
think these women are being used for experiments by someone or
something who's being systematic about it. However you go in
there will be gunfire and people will die. If you're lucky most
of the deaths will be goons and some of the girls. If not both
sides are going to be hit hard. Go in as a UPS delivery truck
first; they'll at least check it out instead of just opening
fire."

"Yeah," Zippy said and looked up at the flat blue sky, "I guess
FedEx would be too obvious."

"And those brown UPS uniforms are pretty flattering." Mulder
gave me a grin that was like a child's drawing of his normal
smile.

On him, it was. Mulder has beautiful legs, perfectly
proportioned with well-defined calves and quads, even his big
feet look good at the ends of those legs. He wouldn't wear a
vest because it looked too strange underneath the short-sleeved
rayon of the uniform.  But he had to add a brown baseball cap
and a pair of sunglasses to complete the disguise.  I was
surprised he didn't go for a rubber nose and a false mustache as
well.

UPS had been very cooperative, even lending us a DIAD (one of
their high-tech pads that could record signatures
electronically), along with real packages with real tracking
numbers. Zippy, whose attention to detail I was beginning to
appreciate, had the packages labeled with the return address of
the company that supplied the security system for the warehouse,
whose identity he'd picked up by using binoculars to read the
little sticker stuck on the window. 

I began to suspect a Mulder-plot when I was informed that there
were no uniforms in my size--it was difficult for small women to
meet the lift-and-carry requirements of the delivery job. I was
reduced to waiting with Zippy's colleagues inside the truck, our
Trojan horse in case things got hairy. At least this required
Mulder to go in with Zippy, so he couldn't just gloat about it.

*** 

I felt flop sweat in every crevice of my body and wondered how
many undercover operations had been blown by nervousness on the
part of the officer. 

Zippy had a friend in Research who was almost as good as Danny.
As we were suiting up, he told me that the warehouse was owned,
indirectly, by a big pharmaceutical company. Three guesses as to
the name, and the first two don't count.

We couldn't pull the shirts out of the shorts to cover up our
guns because that looked too strange and there was obviously no
use in trying an ankle holster wit the shorts unless we wanted
to look like we had matching deformities. Instead we ripped open
two of the small, flat boxes we'd gotten from UPS--they were
stuffed with balled-up paper for verisimilitude--and put our
weapons inside. If we kept them tilted just the right way the
guards at the doors wouldn't be able to see that the boxes were
open.

"What are we waiting for?" Zippy asked and I shrugged and
hopped into the truck. The drive took about a minute and a half.
We were a little early for the real UPS delivery truck, but not
so much that alarms would immediately go off.  Zippy had the
radio tuned to some horrible top forty station and the guards at
the warehouse must have heard us before we rounded the corner.

I get knocked down But I get up again You're never going to
keep me down I get knocked down But I get up again You're never
going to keep me down

The guard standing stiffly at the gate waved us through. "What
kind of warehouse has guards around its gate in the middle of a
city?" Zippy asked over the music. 

I shrugged. "Maybe they're shy."

The building was as grey and solid as a nightmare. The few
windows were frosted glass. I wished again that there had been a
better excuse to keep Scully out of the TAC team, but she'd had
more field experience than half of the regular team members and
they'd all been really impressed when she recounted the story of
our raid on the white supremacists last year.  That's my girl. 
Brains, beauty, balls, and bravado. 

The guard at the door looked us over more carefully. He didn't
recognize us and that made him nervous. Zippy hopped out of the
truck and swaggered over to him, carrying his package underneath
the thick electronic clipboard. I followed, blessing my
unresponsive face; I had no trouble looking uninterested.

"I'm going to need a supervisor's signature on this," Zippy was
saying as I arrived next to him.

The guard frowned. "That never happened before," he said.

"Yeah, well, I guess this stuff is pretty expensive," Zippy
replied, pulling his clipboard to one side so he could pretend
to look at the label. "I guess Security Systems Limited just
likes to make sure everything goes where it's supposed to. Or
maybe there's been a 'wastage' problem recently, you know what I
mean?"

The frown was now a snarl. "Look," I said, "we've got a whole
route left to run. If you want we can say 'delivery refused' and
you can send the supervisor down to our office to pick it up
during business hours, or we can return these to the sender."

The guard paused, considering the ass-chewing he'd get if they
really needed this package and his boss had to leave work to
wait as UPS rummaged through its dead-letter pile. "You come
inside," he ordered me, "and bring both the packages." He ran
his card key through the door. He wasn't very good at hiding his
code; I saw Zippy's eyes track and hoped that the electronics
specialists in the truck could fake the card key better than
Frohike had been able to do.

Zippy carefully put the package and clipboard on top of my own
box. His eyes were flashing like stoplights, but he knew it was
futile. I could almost hear Scully screaming at me to refuse,
make up some excuse, come back later.

I get knocked down But I get up again You're never going to
keep me down I get knocked down But I get up again You're never
going to keep me down

The guard held the door for me and I stepped inside, bringing
the boxes close to my waist so that he wouldn't see the guns in
the open boxes as I passed. I could smell myself; maybe I needed
a new deodorant.

"This way," he pointed down a small dark hallway framed by
corrugated metal. "The supervisor's office is at the end of the
hall."

****

"We're losing him," the agent manning the electronics said,
with the thin pinched look of a person watching a disaster
unfold. "They must be jamming to protect the building."

Zippy opened the back of the truck and pushed past the fake
boxes. I was in his face immediately.

"Give me the warrant," I said.

"We already agreed we couldn't take that chance. Mulder
insisted--"

"Does anyone *hear* Agent Mulder's opinion of the situation
right now?" My voice was irritatingly high, I needed authority
and not hysteria. "Give me the warrant."

"What are you going to do if I don't, Dana, draw down on me?"
His voice was soothing, like the tone you'd use with an abused
pet, and that made the dark interior of the van blaze red to my
eyes. I noted that my hand was straying perilously close to my
weapon and that the other agents were shifting nervously,
readying for a confrontation.

"No," I pushed past him, knocking empty cardboard to the ground
as I jumped down. The guard's eyes widened and he held up a hand
to stop me.

"Federal agent," I said as if that would explain everything and
showed him my badge and my gun, in that order. I felt Zippy
behind me, waving the warrant and shouting, but the world had
slowed down and his voice didn't make any sense. 

The guard had time to raise his gun and squeeze off two poorly
aimed bullets before I shot him.

For a moment the world began to run at the proper speed again.
I heard another agent shouting into a cellphone, saying that it
was going down all wrong and that I'd gone crazy. Zippy was
kneeling at the downed guard's side, feeling for a pulse and
then rifling through the dead man's pockets..

There was a terrible cracking noise from inside the building,
the sound of something large falling apart, and Zippy was at the
door fumbling with the guard's card key and we were in.

I get knocked down But I get up again You're never going to
keep me down I get knocked down But I get up again You're never
going to keep me down 

The music continued to thump from the truck radio, covering the
sounds of the TAC squad deploying. 

4/20 Has anyone supposed it lucky to be born? I hasten to
inform him or her it is just as lucky to die, and I know it.


I ignored the room at the end of the hall and looked around for
other exits. There was a stairwell to my right, an industrial-
sized door that could have let in all sorts of complicated
medical machinery. There were drag marks in front of it, the
floor was discolored and worn as it wasn't down the rest of the
hallway. 

I reached for the door and it swung open easily, on well-
maintained hinges.

The main part of the warehouse was just one big room, several
stories tall and filled with rows and rows of wooden crates. In
a firefight it would be a maze of killing corridors. Up at the
top and off to the side I could see a balcony. The lights were
dim and indirect but I could see the slow steady pulse of
monitors, red and green lights winking peacefully.

There was a metal staircase running from the warehouse floor up
to the balcony, I couldn't quite see where it came down through
all the boxes so I headed in the general direction.

It was like a topiary maze in there. I was considering whether
the confusion was the result of actual planning when I heard the
door, several twists and turns behind me now, clang open, and a
voice shouted, "Where are you?" The sound of safeties being
clicked off carried well.

I glanced up again at the balcony and noted that the lights at
one side were now all red and yellow, the green washed away. The
guns came free of the boxes easily and I shoved the empty
containers into a crack between two crates. I began to run
through the narrow artificial corridors, turning each time the
direction that was closer to the stairway.

The footsteps behind me sped up. As soon as I got above ground
level they'd be able to see me, I'd be a perfect target.

With the thought I heard the crack of a shot and a chunk of
wood exploded off a crate behind me. I pressed myself into the
crate opposite the one that had gotten attacked and looked
around its corner--someone had come to the railing of the
balcony and he was firing at me. From above it would be like
shooting foxes in a barrel. 

"Hold your fire, I'm a federal agent," I yelled with more
optimism than confidence and the crate I was braced against
shuddered as it took a bullet for me. I snuck around the corner,
scraping against the rough wood and acquiring a truly nasty
splinter, and fired just to keep him on edge. Hunching my back,
I darted around the next corner, less than twenty feet from the
staircase. The closer I got, the less cover the crates would
give me. It was simple geometry, angle of incidence and angle of
reflection.

It sucked.

I spun around as a burly blond man appeared from the way I'd
come. He had his gun raised but he wasn't too well-trained, I
had a bullet in him before he could aim properly and his shot
went wild, flaring off into another crate. I panted relief when
I realized that he had been a person and so his blood wouldn't
blind me.

Moving again, adrenaline flowing in my veins instead of blood,
I could hear the hiss and scuff of the man's shoes as he shifted
on the balcony, looking for a good shot.

Death rained down from above once more and this time the crate
beside me shook and rattled like pit bulls were fighting inside.
I felt heat and dropped and rolled away just before the sides
burst in perfect cartoon fashion, popping open in four perfectly
distinct directions. The heavy wood fell on me like a slap from
a giant's hand. I heard, above the hiss of the fire, the pop of
glass bursting and louder sounds that I couldn't quite identify.
Flames were chewing at my flammable protection and I squirmed,
trying to get my guns above my head so that I could come out
shooting.

The concrete floor was still chilled from the air conditioning,
cold enough to make me shiver even as I felt the first blister-
precursors rising on my forearms.

The fire was spreading rapidly when I pulled myself out; the
maze of crates had turned into a wilderness of firelines, and I
was standing on stained concrete trapped between flames. The
fallen crate was behind me; there was no way to go but forward.
Channeling Indiana Jones, I muttered, "Fire, why does it always
have to be fire?"

At least the man on the catwalk wasn't shooting at me any more,
if he could even see me through the leaping flames. Some of them
were the seductive orange-yellow of candleflame but others were
chemical blue and green, probably poisonous. The short-sleeved
shirt and shorts, while designed to make UPS workers charmingly
sexy, did little to shield me from the heat and the living grasp
of the fire, whose thick fingers seemed to reach out for me,
coming closer on each pass. The hair was melting off my legs.

I could feel myself begin to hyperventilate, no doubt worsening
whatever damage the toxic smoke was going to do. The fire had
faces, faces with large eyes and sharp little chins.

I wanted to curl up into a ball until Scully came and saved me.
Only the thought of the crates breaking apart and tumbling into
the narrow corridors on the warehouse floor kept me moving.

Three more turns and I was there, the thick peeling black paint
on the first step as inviting as a luxury hotel. I leaped for
the step, the metal railing blistering my hand, as the building
shook under the assault of the fire.

If Scully had arrived with the cavalry, I couldn't hear it.
Two, three steps at a time I rose out of the flames like a
phoenix, borne up on the waves of hot air now hitting me with
solid fists.

My mind told me that going *up* in a burning building was a
very bad idea, yet there were still those orgiastic lights
winking at me, now uniformly as red as my eyes in the morning.

A figure appeared at the top of the stairs and I almost took
its head off before I registered exactly whose head it was.

A Kurt.

He barreled down, heedless of my gun, panting and sputtering.

"It's all over," he yammered, "we've got to get out of here!"

I caught his arm, crushing a gun against him hard enough to
bruise. "What's going on?"

He looked at me funny. "The building is on fire."

Only sheer terror kept me from rolling my eyes. 

No shit, Crawford.

"Do you know a way out?"

He gestured underneath the stairs, where the flames hadn't yet
spread. "Back door."

I kept a firm grip on him as we descended into Hell, still not
convinced that he hadn't been shooting at me earlier. Or, maybe,
shooting at the crates so that he could start the conflagration
himself.

Nonetheless he did know a way out, including the access code
that opened the door onto chokingly bright cool air. My eyes
burned as uniformed SWAT officers buzzed around us, grabbing the
Kurt and spitting questions at me like nails.

A small familiar hand was at my back, checking me over for
burns and other damage. Scully felt me all over in a way that
would have prompted me to say something snide if we hadn't been
surrounded by men who'd take it the wrong way. One thing I'd
learned over the years, most male cops would either harass
Scully themselves or they'd get in my face and tell me to pick
on someone my own size.

I zoned back in, Scully's inspection complete, as they were
cuffing the clone. He had the wide-eyed lunatic look that I'd
too often seen in my morning mirror. His sweaty hair was clumped
together in spikes and the cops weren't being too careful of his
comfort as they searched him for weapons.. 

"Don't break the skin," Scully ordered. "He has...a rare
condition, it could be dangerous for you."

She was learning, I had to admit, skepticism had been tempered
with the tonic of wild speculation in the past few months.

She stalked past him and headed toward the pops that might have
been gunfire or plain old combustion. I would have followed her
but the Kurt's mutterings caught my attention.

"Had to die," he was chanting," had to, had HAD had *had* to
had to *die*.. Yes, they had to finally die.  All dead, had to
die. Dead because they had to be."

I stepped up to him. His breath stank just like a person's. The
two cops, responding to my nonverbal signals, held him towards
me like waiters bringing today's special.

"Who had to die?" Speaking slowly, calmly, the way they always
wanted me to do during my residency, the one time my affectless
drone has been praised rather than mocked.

The Kurt looked up at me and shuddered. "You said you wouldn't
anymore," he whimpered.

"I won't," I reassured him. "I just need to know who had to
die, and why."

He essayed a smile. I've seen more accurate representations
from emoticons on a screen. Then he jerked against the cuffs and
nodded his head. "I know," he burbled, shifting from sad to
happy in the wonderful way of psychotics.. "They-had-to-die-
because-they-were-bad-girls. They-were-sluts-and-I-made-them-
clean?"

No, that didn't sound rehearsed or anything.  Jesus, I'd heard
parrots that sounded more genuine. I wanted to pat him on the
shoulder and tell him that he'd undoubtedly do better on opening
night, they always say that a bad dress rehearsal makes for a
good show, but I thought it might be perceived by my colleagues
as inappropriate.

"Who are those men firing at the officers inside?"

He blinked. No one thought to explain that to him, I guess.
"They're...mine."

"Did you hire them?" We could do this slowly if necessary. The
cops were shifting impatiently, anxious to get into the shooting
gallery like the good Texans they were. I ignored them.

"Yes?" 

I didn't tell him that was the right answer as he'd hoped;
instead I rubbed my temples with my left hand, trying to
suppress the urge to grab him and shake him until he told me
who'd fed him this cockamamie story.

"Agent Mulder?" The question had the careful tone of someone
soothing a lion with a thorn in its paw.

"What?"

"I think you'd better take a look...upstairs."

The sprinklers had belatedly kicked in and firefighters were
busily foaming the remaining flames to ashes, the chemicals had
burned hot and quickly and there wasn't much left on the floor.
The metal staircase had sagged in a few places and burned my
feet through my shoes--another superb pair ruined, damn it--but
it was still stable and I mounted it with minimal trouble. At
the top the steps were slippery with thick liquid as if the fire
had melted the paint. Then I got a better look and I knew what
had really happened.

It was an abattoir.

Literally, ankle-deep in blood, I walked through the second
level of the warehouse, its side open and exposed to the smoke
and gun-muzzle flashes coming from below.  Downstairs the TAC
team was cleaning up whatever resistance the goons were
offering.  I could hear Zippy screaming at his men.  I lost
sight of Scully in the mess upstairs, her hair hidden under the
baseball cap, and I was glad. I didn't want to see her face when
she saw this. I'm not that strong.

Two dozen women, on hospital cots, lying in neat rows in tidy
beds with IV bags running into their arms, and their abdomens
opened like paper bags with the contents spilling out.  The
contents were near-term infants. Blood leaked along the uneven
floor in thick rivulets. It hadn't happened all that long ago,
my higher brain told my lower, the blood hadn't coagulated yet.

My lower brain moaned and curled up into a ball.

"Jesus Christ," one of the agents hissed next to me.

"Julius Caesar, to be correct," Scully's voice came from one of
the farther pallets, her tiny flashlight searching face by face,
touching each woman to check for signs of life, "the legend has
it that he was delivered from his dead mother by cutting through
the abdominal wall and removed. The story is most likely
apocryphal but it has given us the term Caesarian section.
Although this is hardly the correct manner, the general--"

A thin sound, like that of a kitten whose tail has been stepped
on, cut through the darkness.

Holy fuck, one of them was alive.

You have to give the men credit, they moved fast, moved from
bed to bed, examining big and little corpses to find the source
of the sound. As I made my search, I caught a glimpse of the
agent at the next bed over, a man of about fifty with a face
that would stop a rampaging elephant.  There were tears on his
face as he touched a lifeless little body.

"Over here!" 

Moving fast, Scully raced over to the man who was holding a
bloody baby.  The baby was moving.  She stripped off her flak
jacket and her blazer underneath, wrapping the baby in it.  I
have to admit that I cringed since the jacket was one of the
hideously expensive ones I'd paid for in Arizona. Oh well. . ..
With the baby wrapped in the jacket, Scully began examining the
infant for any signs of harm from its ordeal.  The infant made a
pair of fists and let out a louder wail. It seemed that all
systems were working.

"It's a girl," Scully told me, as if it mattered.

Nodding, I went downstairs to find Zippy, listening to my own
pulse drum a dance beat in my head.

****

My hands were shaking when I pulled the infant out of the dead
woman. I'd autopsied a pregnant woman once and after I was
finished, I spent the rest of the afternoon in the ladies' room
at Quantico until I was vomiting thin traces of bile.

Macduff had been ripped from his mother's womb.  No child born
of woman could undo the evil that Macbeth and his wife had
wrought upon Scotland, they had broken the natural chain of
being, the connection that ran from God to the stones in the
ground and they had to be punished by a preternatural being..  

This baby didn't seem as much preternatural as pathetic. Still
covered with blood and fluid from her untimely delivery in the
room filled with death, she kicked her feet and wailed in a weak
little voice. Other than her extremities being colder than I
would have liked, she seemed un-traumatized by her harsh
entrance to the world.  There wasn't a speck of green anywhere
on her body, just wrinkly red infant skin and an accumulation of
crusty drying blood.  I wrapped her in my jacket and headed back
down to the entrance where the EMT's were waiting for larger
victims.

How was it that I had been able to stand and set fire to what
would have been my own children while this one was making me
shake and sweat as if I'd contracted malaria? Probably a natural
reaction caused by the hormones running freely in my body once
again.  Men like to chalk up a woman's emotional response to
anything to hormones. This isn't entirely true as they are just
as ruled by the chemical cocktail coursing through their bodies
as we are.  I had a pre-med instructor who claimed that men had
their own cranky calendar, only it ran on a cycle of three hours
rather than twenty-eight days and was linked to their feeding
habits.

Feeding.

Somebody was going to have to feed the baby.

My lungs hurt for a minute as I breathed in the memory of
smoke, of fire, of toxic fumes coming from a small body.

Feeling absurd with the infant cocooned in DKNY, I pushed past
the men crowding the stairway and went out the now-broken front
door. The EMT's took one look at the baby and myself and went
pale seafoam with shock.  Pretty much the same color that Mulder
had gone.

I didn't want to think about that too closely right then.

****

Outside the warehouse the assorted local cops and robbers were
swarming in and out, county coroner vans were pulling up and the
local law enforcement was having a hard time keeping the news
vans at bay. Zippy handed me a scribbled sheet of notes on what
they had found inside and went off to smoke.  Scully, I knew,
had gone to the hospital with the baby she had found, a score of
tiny handprints in blood over her white blouse. 

A black sedan pulled into the thick of it all, darkened windows
giving nothing away.  There was, I noticed, a Roush Corporate
parking sticker on the window. The singed hairs on the back of
my neck snapped to attention. In my lovely UPS uniform, I wasn't
exactly making an impressive fashion statement, but at least I
felt prepared. I knocked on the back window on the passenger
side.

The black glass rolled down, exchanging one reflection of my
face for another.

"Jason Lindsay, I presume?"

You had to give the guy credit, he didn't flinch much when I
thrust my uglier version of his face into the back of the sedan
and showed him the mug shot on my ID.

"Fox Mulder, FBI, I want to ask you a few questions about your
company's ownership of this property."

His/my mouth opened for a moment and then shut again.

"I'd be glad to answer any of your questions, " he said in a
warm, hospitable tone that didn't make it up past his perfect
nose to his/my hazel eyes.

It was one thing to see someone with something very like your
own face on a computer monitor and on videotape but in person,
to have him looking back at you and the smell of his aftershave
in your big ugly nose was downright --spooky.

Hopefully he found me equally unnerving, although that wouldn't
be a new experience for me.

"Did you know that several men with identification from your
company had any connection with this facility?"

"No, I didn't."

"Let me paint you a very broad picture here, Mister Lindsay.
Twenty-four women have been missing in this general area over
the course of the last year. Fortunately, Holly Keene was
spotted in this area a few days ago.  Agent Zipprelli managed to
track down her movements to the warehouse. When the Bureau
raided the warehouse earlier this morning we found, amazingly
enough, twenty-four women who had been murdered by having full-
term fetuses cut from their abdomens."

Lindsay winced.

"I assure you, Agent Mulder, that other than clinical trials
under FDA approved conditions, Roush does not test human
subjects."  

I leaned down until our noses were practically touching.

"There was a Kurt Crawford clone in there with them."

He blinked, and I watched the lie form.  Was I that
transparent?  I hoped not.

"Who?" he asked in a voice that was more artificial than Anna
Nicole Smith's boobs.

"There are things that we have to talk about, Mister Lindsay."

He actually smiled and it looked better on him.

"Including the obvious?"

"Including the obvious."

He extended his hand, and I noted French cuffs on his shirt and
gold cufflinks in the shape of Roush's corporate logo.  He
handed me his engraved and embossed business card.

"When you're free from this . . . tragedy, come to my office
tomorrow and we can discuss this in a more civilized atmosphere."

"Sounds like fun," I deadpanned.

"One other thing," from the plush interior of the sedan he
produced a videotape, "you might want to take a look at this. 
It came from one of our facilities in Arizona."

****

The women's bodies showed signs of long-term sedation. I was
angry for them, the usual anger I feel for the victims increased
exponentially by the ruthless uselessness of it all. Didn't They
(the ubiquitous, invisible them) know that sedation would damage
the fetuses? What kind of Nazi science were they practicing,
that they couldn't figure this out? Maybe Emily would have had a
better chance if they'd used a healthy, premenopausal woman's
body to produce her rather than a vessel that had to be drugged
into readiness with a warlock's brew of powerful hormones.

God only knew what damage had been done to the miracle child.
Most people think that the story is over when the rescue ends,
but doctors know better. The rescue is where the story begins.

I felt like I was running in place.  Cataloging the bodies,
filling out forms and doing my job like a good little Fibbie. 
Mulder had hared off somewhere and I wasn't sure that I wanted
to follow.

No, wait, I'd hared off. To the hospital. Mulder was still at
the warehouse, any journey he was taking was in the privacy of
his own mind. I called just to check, and he was there with the
drone of TV cameras and sirens in the background. He sounded
distracted and curt, situation normal, all fucked up.

Mulder said he'd meet me back at Zippy's office. I didn't have
anything better to do, so I went.

5/20

Hurrah for positive science! Long live exact demonstration!
Fetch stonecrop mixed with cedar and branches of lilac, This is
the lexicographer, this the chemist, this makes a grammar of old
cartouches, These mariners put the ship through unknown seas,
This is the geologist, this works with the scalpel, and this is
a mathematician. Walt Whitman


"I think I'm getting sick of seeing you among all these dead
children," Zippy said.

"Jesus, you asshole!" I nearly screamed at him, but it was too
late. The words had cut her like flying glass and I saw the
blood begin to flow from her eyes, like tears but more final.

She shook her head. "He's right, Mulder. I'm the kiddie angel
of death. You've seen," reminding me of Arizona, of the images
in the grainy surveillance video--what would Zippy think of
that? She wafted from the room and I knew she was returning to
the hospital, to sit by the heated glass chamber encasing that
little girl-baby.

Zippy stared at her dissolving back. I looked at the blood on
my shoes and realized that it had dribbled onto my suit when I'd
gotten back into my own clothes.  Another perfectly good suit
shot to hell.

"You know, Spooky," he remarked, as if continuing a
conversation, "I thought you were lucky to have found her, you
were so miserable in ISU. But is it worth it? Is what you're
looking for worth all the struggle?"

"Bite me," I said.

I didn't want to think much about what I had seen on the
videotape Jason had given me, Scully breaking the sides of the
glass vats with a fire axe, Scully pouring gasoline. The lab
going up in flames, Marita burning, and Scully watching it all
before I ran in like the moron I am and dragged her out.  Time
had put a thin layer of scar tissue over those images for me,
but watching the tape made my face burn with the remembered heat
of the fire.

"Yo Zip."

"Yeah?"

"Gonna need some beers to put these flames out."

"Right on Fox-man."

****

The baby was doing as well as one might expect a premature baby
to do under such circumstances, which is to say there was some
respiratorial distress, uneven hearbeat, lack of oxygenation in
the extremities. Nothing life-threatening now that she was
wrapped in the mechanical arms of the preemie ward, sealed away
from human contact.

I ran the PCS myself this time, because I had to know. Mulder
hadn't questioned the need for a drop of his blood and, though
my nose was no longer a blood faucet, I had plenty of my own
available.

The girl, the one they were calling Miranda because she was a
little miracle, a shining star amidst the ugliness of her
emergence--she was mine. The same telltale markers that had
identified Emily as my daughter blazed in the test results.

Meet the new baby, same as the old baby.

Is it mine, or is it Memorex?

And, more incredibly, she seemed to be Mulder's.

No, not that incredibly after all. Mulder's bedtime story about
multiple Mulders was beginning to seem increasingly plausible,
Mulder had never mentioned giving sperm samples to anyone and
his paranoia made it unlikely. If his narrative about Jason
Lindsay was right we were probably looking at Jason's child.
Which raised the interesting question: Did it matter? Miranda
was as related to Mulder as to Jason or any other genetically
identical father; she was indistinguishable from his child. From
an evolutionary perspective, he should be just as devoted to her
as if he'd sired her on me directly.

This, Mulder didn't need to know. Another advantage to running
the PCS myself was the ability to make the results go up in a
puff of blue gas flame.

It wasn't an irreversible decision. I could always tell him
later. (Like he told you about your eggs? a dissenting voice
complained, but I cut its throat and no one else dared speak
up.) We did *not* need a discussion of unplanned parenthood. We
weren't capable of taking responsibility for ourselves, much
less a child.

****

With Scully gone back to stand vigil at the hospital, Zippy and
I did the manly thing -- we went out drinking.

"Why?" he asked, tracing shapes in the beer puddle on the
tabletop.

"That's the eternal existential why, right?" I asked, hating
every mouthful of club soda that I was pouring into my sore
stomach.

"No, that's the very pertinent 'Why would the freak of the week
gather up all those women, impregnate them and then lose his
testicular fortitude at the last minute and open them all up
like microwave dinners? Why.' I just don't get it. Freaks fuck
women and kill them or they fuck children and kill them, they
don't fuck women to get children and then kill both," he groaned
and rubbed at the pointy spikes of his hair.

"This is making my brain hurt," he admitted, "the only psycho-
dude from hell scenario I can come up with is that our freak du
jour was thinking that he was going to create some kind of
master race in his own image.  But why keep them unconscious or
whatever they were? Why hire a little army, you'd think that one
of them would have freaked out and called in the cavalry no
matter how well they were being paid. It seems like lots of high-
tech trouble when he could have just taken the girls to a ranch
out in the desert and kept them corralled there -like horses. 
We've got some weird-ass cult shit going on out in the badlands,
new age bullshit and the stuff that goes on out there. . . Lots
of drugs and sweat lodges for people looking for quick answers."

"There are no quick answers, to life or to whatever this guy
has been up to," I said, knowing that I was giving a
rationalization for not telling him anything.

He looked up at me, and for a moment I saw Krycek's face.

"I know you know what the fuck's going on and you're not
telling me," his face toughened up, "I don't like being kept in
the dark. You got Reggie Pardue killed, Krycek went apeshit,
I've heard stories about other agents whose stars are on the
wall because of your conspiracy theories, I don't want to
mention what happened to Bill Patterson, and you've almost
killed Scully a couple of times. If my ass is on the line here,
I want to know."

"Take the position that your ass is on the line as a fact. The
rest is bullshit," I waved at the waitress who undulated over
and I told her I wanted beer after all, "I could sit here and
tell you everything, which you would not believe and you'd only
get pissed off at me." 

God I was looking forward to the alcohol, the uneasy thought of
AA meetings in my future notwithstanding. Scully wasn't watching
and Zippy had never heard the doctors' lectures, he wasn't going
to tell on me. Supposedly when the sutures healed I'd be cleared
to drink alcohol again, there was no solid clinical evidence
that alcohol created ulcers even though it did aggravate them
once they'd appeared.

"More pissed than usual?"

"Yeah, more than usual.  Let's just boil it down to the fact
that there are some really bad guys out there, Zippy, who think
nothing of taking women, stealing their ova, and then using the
ova for some really fucked up experiments, okay?"

"Stealing ova?" one of his eyebrows reached for the sky, "how
the fuck do you do that? Come after them with a vacuum cleaner
or something?"

"Beats the shit out of me.  Some super-ovulation and laproscopy
procedure.. Scully can explain it."

The beer, when it came, tasted like the nectar of Olympus and
the coldness of it numbed my stomach.  Maybe if I just quit
drinking hard liquor and stayed with beer.  After all, beer was
mostly water, and the dark lagers like this one were high in
protein.  I lost myself in the Guinness for a moment.

"Scully knows all about it, doesn't she? She knows something
else besides, which is why she's hovering over that incubator
like a hen with an only chick," he looked down at his glass
before continuing to speak, "does this have anything to do with
the kid that she lost?  Was that kid yours?"

"Fuck no." I wouldn't let it be. There was no remaining
evidence and so it could not be. Why had she insisted on drawing
my blood before going to the hospital this time? That train of
thought was derailed by its head-on crash with another: What the
fuck was Scully doing talking to Zippy about this when she could
barely say Emily's name to me? While sexual congress with the
divine Miss S. was pleasant, I'd stick to my tapes for the next
five years in return for one honest conversation about this
whole mess. And Zippy seemed to have gotten the story for the
price of a Bud.

Good to know where you stand, isn't it?

Zippy brightened as he watched the storm form on my face. "You
gonna tell me what happened?"

"Fuck no."

"I'll figure it out, eventually.  I may not have gone to Oxford
but I'm not a moron."

"Okay bright guy, you buy the next round."

****

I had only been back at the hotel for about twenty minutes,
just long enough to wash my face and crawl into a nightgown,
when the connecting door opened.  I looked up from my laptop
where I was finishing up my expurgated report on the day's
activities to see Mulder leaning against the closed door with a
peculiar look on his face.

"I met Jason today."

As a conversation starter it was a motherfucker.

"What?"

"He came to the warehouse in the corporate sedan with a driver.
He claimed not to know anything and invited me to his office for
a meeting tomorrow."

Despite the weight and import of the words, Mulder was as
casual as if he were discussing his shoes.  Maybe not.  Mulder's
shoes are greatly important to him.

"You think he's involved with this?"

"He's Roush, isn't he?"

"Offering no explanation for your resemblance to one another?"

"It wasn't exactly the time or the place."

After saving my report file, I closed down my laptop and put it
on the bedside table.   Mulder reminded at his position leaning
against the door, watching me like a dog who is seeing his
dinner made --wistful and hungry at the same time.

"I like the glasses with the lingerie.  It's a look."

The lingerie was one of the spoils of our trip through
Scottsdale, a jade green slip sheath with straps as tiny as an
afterthought and a hem that barely covered my ass. I can't
handle bustier and garterbelts -- I'm so short that it makes me
look like an underage porn star. Which would probably thrill
Mulder to no end, but he can wear the damn itchy things next
time.

Men don't make passes at girls who wear --

I folded up my glasses and put them in the case.

"So I take it that you're going to go see Jason tomorrow?"

"Naturally.  It's a fucking shame that the disk we took from
his office in Bethel wasn't anything more than a Power Point
presentation about marketing projects for the next quarter." 

His suit was wrinkled to rags and his hair matched in terms of
wear and tear. And there was blood on his tie.

"Where were you?" I asked.

"Out.  Where were you?"

"Out."

Sighing, he looked down at his scuffed and bloodstained shoes
for a moment.

"Why don't you love me?"

"Oh Mulder," I groaned.

"No, do I smell or something?  I just don't get it, to borrow
one of Zippy's phrases. We work well together, we've actually
had fun a couple of times, we trust one another, and the sex is
nothing to sneeze at.  Why not?" he finally gave up the door and
ambled over to the bed, his movements were unusually graceful
and careful.

I smelled a rat.  Actually the closer he came the more I
smelled a bar.  With the way my cancer had destroyed the odor-
receptors in half my nose he must have reeked for me to be able
to smell him.  I hoped he hadn't driven.  Damn Zippy.

"You're drunk." 

"Zippy plied me with drinks and made a pass at me."

"And you fought him off?"

"Barely."

The mattress dipped underneath his weight and in the yellow
light I could see where my hairdresser had almost matched the
original color of his hair to cover the darker Jason tone.  The
thought of him meeting with Jason in the morning made my stomach
squirm.  I had no reason, other than the fact that he worked for
Roush, to dislike a man I had never met.  But, as my father used
to say, I didn't much care for the cut of his jib.

Mulder dragged his fingertip up my arm from wrist to shoulder
and my skin danced underneath, sending a glassine shiver between
my legs and making my nipples tighten.  I wanted him. I needed
him.  I needed him to wipe the thought of the baby Miranda in
the incubator out of my head, to erase the tell-tale bars of
amino acids from my mind, telling the story of two sets of DNA
combining to make another one.  I needed him to wipe out the
memory of the cold little baby feet against my hands in the
ambulance, the women split open like insect egg cases, and the
sandbag-filled coffin in San Diego.  

The finger continued over my shoulder to my thoracic notch,
paused, and proceeded to push the loose straps away from my
shoulders, so the fabric clung of its own free will to my
breasts.

"What happened to your cross?" he asked.

Naturally it had taken him no less than a month to notice that
it was missing.

"I lost it."

The tip of his index finger was rough against my lips and when
I drew the finger into my mouth he tasted salty.  With my teeth
eased back from his finger, I sucked on it like it was his cock.
He murmured something under his breath and shut his eyes.

"What?" I asked around his fingertip.

"You distract me."

I distracted him?  That was the pot calling the kettle purple
considering the fact that he had his hand half up my leg and was
stroking the skin on my inner thigh with fingers that felt like
they were covered in suede. My entire body felt like it had been
rubbed with sandpaper and the buttons on his shirt were digging
hard and fast into the skin of my breasts.  It had been weeks
since we'd had sex and I was starving for the feeling of his
body in and against mine. Long thin fingers circumvented the
microscopic panties that went with the nightgown and headed for
home deep inside me.

"You talk to Zippy," he breathed into my ear and sent a shudder
through my bones.

"So?"

"You talk to him and you keep secrets from me."

His thumb pressed hard against the alert nerve endings of my
clitoris and I jumped as the jagged pleasure/pain flashed
through me. His canines grazed the back of my neck, where the
scar was.  I felt like gelatin with a loose framework of
overcooked pasta.  Hot gelatin, hot pasta. Grabbing at the dark
fabric of his shoulders was the only way that I could stay
upright.  The heavy dark sweet smell of lust washed over me like
oiled water in a bathtub.  The stubble on his hard cheeks
scraped against my forehead.

"Don't do it," he said in a voice of coal.

I started to protest again, but he thrust three fingers into my
mouth and the other three went to ground between my legs. 
Skewered above and below, I writhed like a lip-pierced fish
while uneven jerks of hot light pulsed along my bones. Oh God,
how long had it been since-

All the fingers withdrew and I sagged back into the mattress,
in a puddle of my own mind.  Mulder reached around and started
fumbling with something from his pocket.

An inquisitive sound escaped my chest.

"Let's be modern about this, shall we?" he quipped and threw
the condom wrapper onto the floor.

I didn't complain.  It was a small price to pay.

My panties joined the condom wrapper a moment later. There on
the hotel bed, he on his knees before me, me with my legs
wrapped around his bony hips while the silk of his tie danced
along my breasts, I dug my fingers into the dark fabric of his
jacket and moaned when he pierced me.

The connection was as invigorating as a blood transfusion but I
couldn't hold myself still enough against his thrusts, braced
only against the bed, and so we crabwalked backwards, me pulling
and him pushing and the bedspread snarling around us, until I
had my back against the headboard. Each thrust made my head
connect with the solid wood behind me. I wanted to keep him
inside me forever. I sucked at his throat; heedless of the marks
I was making. It felt like his cock was banging at the top of my
skull -- he was so deep.

He pinned my wrists to the wall. I could feel how close he was
from the swelling of the veins in his neck, why did he have to
be so fucking polite, it wasn't politeness but just another form
of dominance--and I screamed, screamed louder than when Duane
Barry took me, threw my head back, howled and fell apart like a
shattered windshield.

6/20 This hour I tell things in confidence, I might not tell
everybody but I will tell you.

I really needed to get another job. The basement office in the
Hoover Hen House was a slum compared to the Roush corporate
building. Something like eight glass-fronted floors of corporate
rabbit hutches rising into the brilliant blue sky of Austin.  At
least I had a good suit on for a change.  You always have to go
visiting family in your Sabbath best.  I got into the glass
elevator along with a very pretty little blonde who gave me a
winsome Western smile and asked for the third floor when I
pushed the button for the top floor.  I smiled back at her, and
up we went.

Best Sabbath clothes.

I remember being taken to my great-aunt Sophie's funeral when I
was nine, which meant Samantha would have been about four or so.
I had my hair wet-combed to my head and I was trussed up in this
amazingly ugly blue suit with a striped tie that only came out
for weddings, funerals, and the infrequent occasions we went to
Temple.  (If you think your life is hard, try being a Jew in New
England.) Samantha kicked me in the shins the whole ride there.
Naturally, I started screaming at her, I told her that I wished
she were dead. Then I pulled the head off her Barbie doll and
that finally shut her up.

Yisborach, v'yistabach, v'yispoar, y'yisroman, v'yisnaseh,
v'yishador, v'yishalleh, v'yishallol, sh'meh d'kudsho, b'rich
hu--

Someday I really have to forgive myself for that.

The reception area was nice, lots of dark wood, crystal and
gold awards, and fresh flowers.  It looked like a high-tech
funeral home more than anything else. The woman sitting behind
the desk with the big Roush R carved in gold behind her was so
perfect and smooth that she could have been generated by her
computer.  I smiled and handed her my card.  She must have been
briefed since the smile she gave in return had no reaction to my
resemblance to her lord and master.

"Just a moment," she crooned and pressed a button.

While I waited, I looked out the window at the city around me.
The glass was so clean that I started to feel the pull of
vertigo. It would have been so easy to think that I could just
step outside and walk over to the building across the street. 
Chances were that I'd only break something rather than being
killed by the fall.  It would be so easy.

"Pretty impressive, huh?" 

Jason's voice was only remotely like mine.  It was the voice
that I had imitated the day that Scully burned the monster-
children and Marita.  Jason had a smooth and wonderfully
inflected voice under a barbecue honey Texas drawl..  He also
was wearing a suit that would have cost me six months' pay to
buy -- I could have done it, though, if I were willing to live
off of the additional cash I got from my investments in his
company.

"Nice view," I commented, trying to sound as blase as possible,
even though my heart was bounding like a bass line in an Abba
song.

"I'm sure you get to look at the Washington Monument all day."

If I was a gopher and tunneled around the Metro line, under the
street; past all the CIA underground surveillance and didn't get
stomped on by a Park Ranger in a bad mood, maybe.  Please,
ma'am, don't pet the gopher, they can bite. Gophers are more
dangerous than Congressmen are, as they have no partisan
alliance and don't give a fuck if they bite a Democrat,
Republican, or Civil Libertarian.

Foxes bite, too.

"What do you intend to do with the videotape?" 

He blinked as though I had made a socially unacceptable
digestive noise.

"Nothing."

"Nothing?  I'll save you the trouble of looking up the
information. The Assistant Director I work under is Walter "Boom-
Boom" Skinner and you can send him the videotape at --"

"I'm not going to send it to the FBI.  I think we can keep this
between ourselves.  There's no need to let the world know that
your partner destroyed a multi-million dollar research facility."

"Is that what you call it?"

I wanted to grab him by his custom-tailored shirtfront and
shake him until his teeth fell out.  But I didn't want to touch
him.  I had a sneaking suspicion that my hands would go through
him like a hologram or else I'd plunge my hands through silvered
glass.

"Let's go into the conference room. All right?" 

The Conference Room had a dark wood table big enough to play
full-court basketball on, all polished to a sheen that reflected
four of me back up from the glassy surface.  Jason showed me a
seat with a neat stack of classification folders piled on the
table before it. I was reminded of the exams at Oxford. All that
was missing was the exercise books and the smell of fearsweat
from the students.

"You must have noticed our resemblance," he began.

"I like the nose job."

"From what I've been able to find out from the archived files
that the company has kept since Roush was started in 1806, the
company has been working closely with the government on many
health-related projects." He began in a smooth presentational
mode that must have been like cream to the fat cat captains of
investment and the starving dogs of the media.

"Like biological warfare?"

"Like vaccination programs and aid to victims of natural health
disasters such as outbreaks of yellow fever, influenza and
typhoid."

"How altruistic."

"We've also been involved in the study of human genetics since
the early nineteen-forties."

"Purity Control."

I really enjoyed the surprise that flitted across his face.

"I know about the Project.  I know about Purity Control, I know
about the biological experimentation to produce human/alien
hybrids. I have seen the Bee Girls, I have seen the Kurt
Crawford clones, the Samanthas, and the others. I have seen the
Bounty Hunters and I have been injected with the black cancer
while in Siberia," my words came out in a bitter rush, as though
I was once again vomiting coffee, "and all I got was this
fucking T-shirt, so what I want to know is what the fuck were
you doing in Bethel."

"It doesn't matter.  That project was run by another division
that has been shut down.  I was thinking of another project that
started in 1960.  You and me. We aren't the last two of our
kind, Fox, there are more."

"More?" I echoed, sounding like Oliver Twist.

"Eight more.  Of us."

"Why the fuck would anyone want to make more?"

"They didn't expect all to live to adulthood," the woman said
as she shut the door behind her.

She smiled.

"Fox."

I stood with my mouth open while my sister hugged me.

I wouldn't have known Samantha.  I could have walked past her
on the street or picked her up in a bar and fucked myself silly
(Scully would have killed me but that's another problem).  She
had changed so much since I had seen her last, since Scully had
lain dying in the hospital and I'd agreed to let the bastard she
called her father metaphorically fuck me up the ass.  My little
sister with her wilderness of brown curls and her flowing skirts
was now a prim high-tech sophisticate with a charcoal trouser
suit, hair clipped razor-close to her head and the color of
anthracite.  Her earrings, spinning silver spirals, fell almost
to her shoulders. Samantha was so cold, hard, and bright that
she made Scully look like Scarlett O'Hara.

"What are you doing here?" I asked, feeling myself go rigid as
a storefront mannequin.

"I work here.  I'm head of the genetic research division."

Too fucking convenient for words.

Okay, there was a possibility that she wasn't my Samantha, but
rather one of theirs.  But then was I my me or theirs too?  It
was giving me a headache..

"Explain."

"You know about the experiments?"

"Human DNA and alien combined, I read the back of the
videocassette."

"There are eight others like you and Jason.  The company has
been trying to keep tabs on them for years, ever since Jason was
appointed head of PR."

My evil twin gave me an orthodontist's tuition bill smile.

"He found the case files and, naturally, took an interest.  We
had a record of the social security numbers the boy-infants were
issued when they were farmed out to their adopted families."

"Was I adopted?"

"No, you stayed with our parents as the control group while the
others were adopted.  Normally it wouldn't be scientifically
sound to attempt to make contact with the others but--"

"They're being killed." Jason interrupted.

"What?" my voice came out as a falsetto squeak.

"We think," Samantha began, drawing me closer to the table, her
hand with short silver fingernails sparkling on the dark cloth
of my jacket, "that in your professional capacity that you can
make contact with the others and bring them to us where they
will be safe."

"The Federal Badge does have some clout, you know," Jason added.

It doesn't do shit when you have overdue tapes at Blockbuster.

"All the information we have is here," Samantha made a graceful
gesture at the table, "you need to review the information and
make it clear to these men that their lives may be in danger."

"Who would --" I started.

"We don't know, that's why we need you."

Jason thumbed a button on the telephone.

"Alice, can you bring Mr. Mulder a cup of coffee?  What do you
take in it, Fox?'

"Nothing.  And don't call me Fox."

I opened the first file and looked down, the words on the page
began to dance and fade.  I didn't realize what was wrong until
Jason took his glasses out of the case and handed them to me. 
As the words shot into focus, I felt myself step through the
silver mirror into the other side of the Looking Glass.

"Samantha?"

She looked at me, her eyes like polished stone.

"What was great-aunt Sophie's number?" I asked.

The numbers she recited were not the phone number that Great
Aunt Sophie had when she died, she recited the numbers tattooed
on Great Aunt Sophie's arm.  I knew, with a sick feeling, that
this was Samantha.

"I'll take the files and get back to you," I head my own voice
come out of my mouth, surprising me with the composure.  

The open casket showed the dried apricot that had been Aunt
Sophie in her favorite aqua dress.  Samantha wouldn't look at
the body, she screamed and ran away.   I found her in the bushes
outside the Temple, digging in the ground with her fingernails.  

"They put you in the ground when you're dead," she told me with
the authority that only a four year old could muster.

"So?"

"You're going to die before I will, you're bigger than me."

With stiff formality, she put her shiksa blond Barbie in the
hole she had carved out of the ground with her fingernails and
began to pat dirt over the plastic body.

7/20 Space and time!  Now I see it is true, what guess'd at.
What I guess'd at when I loafed on the grass What I guess's
while I lay alone on my bed And again as I walk'd the beach
under the paling stars of the morning. Walt Whitman

The folders were scattered all over my hotel room, reminding me
of the stock certificates and the afternoon we had hurt one
another so badly. Scully, incongruous in another one of her
nightgowns, was slitting on the floor next to the bed, her
glasses slid down on her nose, looking at one of the files.
Stepping on the papers, I padded to the honor bar and got the
bottle of Scotch that I wasn't allowed to drink any more. I put
the bottle and glasses on the floor and poured a healthy slug
into each.  Give her credit, Scully didn't sing the care of an
ulcer aria when she reached for her glass.

As she finished one file, she handed it to me. Or maybe it was
the other way around. Either way it was an education, a ten-ply
biography.

We were an anti-Semite's wet dream.

Doctor, lawyer, Indian chief we were not.

Our cast of characters (no points off if you can't tell them
apart; there will be captions for those of you who are a bit
nearsighted):

Arlen Petrovsky, who'd been caught and incarcerated at the
child molesting/pyromaniac stage, before he graduated to killing
his victims.

Baylor Francis, owner/operator of a gay bookstore in
Philadelphia. A nice enough guy, apparently, and his rap sheet
consisted solely of citations for public nuisance during Act Up!
demonstrations. He had actually beaned Archbishop Bevelaqua with
a condom water-balloon on the front steps of the Basilica of
Sts. Peter and Paul.

Christopher Farber, the small-time pimp and suspected murderer
from Schenectady.

Darien Klein, his occupation was listed as "consultant" and he
had an address in the better part of Los Angeles.  God alone
knew what he really did, but other than a few speeding tickets
there was nothing worthwhile in his folder.

Emerson Goldberg, a virtual recluse living in a high-tech
compound in the woods of Montana.  He made a killing in Internet
software and it was rumored that no one had seen him in years. 
What was his story? No information available.. There wasn't a
photo of him on record, and he'd never held a driver's  license
in any state.

Fox the G-man, of whom the less said the better.

George Naxos, the serial murderer. 

Hal Rothman, the coordinator for most of the major drug deals
in the Northeast corridor. He brought the Colombians together
with the Chinese and it's rumored that "heroin chic" was his
idea.

Ian Dubler, the man of a thousand cuts, whose extreme bipolar
disorder had not responded well to meds. From his history,
Scully explained to me, it was obvious that he'd been
misdiagnosed at first with depression, and it turns out that
giving the new antidepressants to a bipolar patient is a *major*
no-no. After the initial fits of self-destructiveness, things
had deteriorated until he was on twenty-four hour restraints,
tranquilizers, and a liquid diet, and even then he managed to
think of new ways to hurt himself. Ian lived at the bottom of a
dark sea, and he saw things crawl by him whose horror only
Lovecraft could have conveyed.

Jason Lindsay. Jason had the benefit of oil-money breeding and
a nose job for his eighteenth birthday. And here I'd thought
only nice Jewish girls did that. Jason, therefore, was the only
one of us who actually looked pretty much like his own man.
Funny, that, because he was also the one who had a clue to what
was going on.

Oh, and, did I mention? Arlen and Christopher were dead, both
in the last two weeks. Arlen had been stabbed in a lunchroom
altercation; the shiv used had yet to be found. Christopher's
body was discovered stuffed into a dumpster behind the Chinese
restaurant he patronized, when his whores went looking for him
to give him the night's take.

And then there were eight.

Eight *is* enough.

Sitting there, I felt my brain bleed into the carpet. Naturally
I didn't want word one of it to be true, who would?  But there
it was, in laser print and photocopy for the world to see.

****

He shouldn't have been drinking the Scotch, but considering
what was laid out in front of us, I suppose we were both lucky
he wasn't drinking Drano.  

"How could this happen?" I heard my own voice ask, as thin and
pitiful as the voice of Miranda wailing as she lay in the
abdomen of her birth mother.

Mulder looked up, blasted and lifeless as the rocky deserts
outside the city limits.

"Technologically, I mean. Creating multiple fetuses from a
single oocyte wasn't possible in the early sixties."

"Alien technology," he said with something like a normal smirk.

I took off my glasses and rubbed the sore places on either side
of my nose. Alien technology, my ass.  More like those bastards
at Roush had started their work earlier than anyone had thought.
The fact still remained that these --twins, brothers, whatever--
of Mulder's and Jason's were walking around out there in the
United States, and it was beginning to look like someone was
killing them off. Strange, wasn't it?  Most of the people who
know Mulder routinely thank God that there is only one of him
and more than one is inflicting entirely too much misery on the
world.

Skinner, for example, was likely to give birth to a large and
healthy Holstein when he found out that there was more than one
Fox Mulder.

"Scully?"

Needy.  He was needy in the extreme. Not that I blamed him, but
I had issues (issue, I believe is the correct term) of my own
currently sleeping in an incubator in a hospital miles away. 
Was it too much to ask that someday, if I have my own child, the
old-fashioned way, that Plexiglas not separate the child and me?
Is that too much to ask?  

But right then the only needy one I could touch was Mulder. As
much as I would have liked to fall apart in his arms as I had in
that hotel room in Arizona, it seemed as though it was my turn
(again) to nurture.

I crawled across the files to him and the skin on his face was
hot and dry as the winds outside.

"Tell me that I'm not like that. Tell me that I'm not like
them," he pleaded.

I continued to smooth the hair away from his face, away from
the tiny, circular scars scoring his hairline.  

"I'd be lying if I said you were a saint," I said.

His skin was so soft when he wept, fragile as tissue paper
underneath my fingertips. Fragile, no wonder They'd felt the
need for backup copies. The past few months had made me forget
all my carefully-hoarded knowledge of the care and feeding of
Fox Mulder. I'd skimped on the regular maintenance and this was
the result, the carburetor was falling out and the engine was
missing strokes.

I tilted my forehead to rest against his and with my palms at
his cheeks it was almost like holding myself. "If you were a
saint you'd have to try to redeem me, I'm hardly pure, and you
know how I hate a superior attitude." Like sunlight through
rain, the smile flitted over his wet face. "You made yourself,
Mulder. You save lives and you live for the truth. You're the
only one I trust--no matter how many strangers borrow your
face." 

I pushed him over and onto the bed; he went without protest.
Then I undressed him, enjoying the build-up of tension in my
body and the way he lolled underneath my hands. He chuffed
softly as I loosened the tie, scraping my knuckles against the
cartilage of his throat. He relaxed and I watched the unhappy
wrinkles on his forehead hide themselves.

The jacket and shirt would need to be cleaned if not thrown out
so I just tossed them onto the floor. His undershirt was soft
combed cotton, thick with his scent. I always imagined that
smell was olive green in color, like his eyes in low light. I
bent my head to breathe him in before I stripped the shirt from
him, and he sighed happily as I nuzzled his armpit. His hand
flopped up to stroke my back and then fell away as I rose to
bare his chest. Carefully, cradling his head with my free hand
so he wouldn't bounce his head against the headboard, I pulled
the shirt over his head and tossed it back over my shoulder.

I touched the sick rose of the bullet scar I gave him. That
pallid cicatrice is like a whiplash on my own skin every time I
uncover it. It was abnormally smooth under my fingers, dry even
as I saw the sweat growing across the span of his throat and
shoulders because the scarring had destroyed the pores.

The guilt was familiar enough that it didn't affect the
arousal. I dipped my head to trace his collarbones with my
tongue, then followed the centerline of his body down between
his pectorals and over the finely cut ridges of the top of his
abdomen. God or man, whoever thought up this body was at least
an artist, if perhaps also a criminal.

The thin leather belt was next, then pants and boxers together
as I grew impatient, pausing only to make sure I didn't unman
him. I had plans for that manhood. He moved slowly underneath
me, undulating like a cat stretching, his cock wobbling up and
down with every hitching breath and his hands thrown up around
his head. My centerfold, my prisoner, my albatross.

I opened the condom packet with more haste than dignity. He
made a sweet surprised sound when I raised the gown and lowered
myself onto him. His hands slid over the satin, going in all
directions and sending frissons through my body like lightning
strikes. The hot-through-cool feeling of his fingers tugging at
me through the thin fabric made me shudder.

I rode him into oblivion.

When I woke up the next morning I wasn't surprised to see that
he had gone, and taken all the files with him.

Typical, I thought and swore under my breath as I called the
airport to book the next flight to Massachusetts. I used his
credit card, mine wouldn't stand the eight hundred dollar charge.

He'd also cleaned the remainder of the cash out of my wallet --
which he had never done before. I supposed sleeping together had
given me the job of human MAC machine. Why be surprised, I'd
been running errands for him for years.. This was beginning to
seem like marriage, except without the tax penalties. 

While I had the airport on the phone I found out that Mulder
had booked his own flight at six that morning.  Which meant that
he was two hours closer towards his goal.   I was throwing my
clothes into my suitcase when there was a demure rap at the
door.  Not caring that I had an advanced state of bed-head and
that I was wearing Mulder's shirt from the night before
(complete with tie) I yanked the door open.  In the brilliant
Texas sunlight stood Zippy with a paper cup of coffee in each
hand. The hotel room must have reeked of sex, the fermenting
odors of body fluids and shed skin cells.  With my permanently
damaged sense of smell, I never would have noticed, but Zippy
was sniffing the air like a hunting dog hot on the trail of a
rabbit. He blinked at me.

"What the hell do you want?" I asked, embarrassed.

"Spooky left me a voice mail message at the office that I was
to bring you coffee and if I touched you he'd break all my
fingers."

"Thanks for the coffee," I said and noticed that he was staring
at my bare legs, which were covered with bruises from bumping
into the crates during the warehouse raid.

"They're from the raid, " I said.

"What the fuck is going on?" 

I gave him the Cliff's notes briefing (aliens and clones and
twins, oh my!) while I threw the rest of my clothes in my
suitcase.  He made no comment, merely shoveled my folders and my
laptop into my briefcase and averted his eyes while I struggled
into a pair of jeans.

"The practical upshot of all this is that he has taken all the
files and information that Jason has given him and left."

"Where did he go?"

"To see his mother.  It's his standard MO.  I have to follow
him --that's my MO."

Bless his moussed little head, Zippy merely nodded and handed
me my least-wrinkled suit jacket.

"I'll drive you to the airport."

Zippy's own car was a truck, and I sat with my suitcase and my
briefcase between my feet as we bumped along.  Do car companies
always skimp on the suspension on pickups?  It was probably part
and parcel of the great conspiracy. I had a brief, ironic
fantasy of investigating the Ford motor company where the
assembly line was manned by somnambulistic Kurt Crawford clones
and Mulder screaming in the boardroom about how the company was
in cahoots with the HealthCare system to promote bad backs among
the American public and waving his gun around like an armed
Michael Moore.

"What's the status on the suspect?" I asked.

Zippy stopped at a light and looked at me through his Ray Bans.

"Dead.  Or at least we think so.  It's hard to verify that a
person is dead when all you have for forensics is a puddle of
green goo.  I don't suppose you care to explain."

I didn't care to but I did anyway, and Zippy merely shook his
head at the insanity of it all.  I guess he wouldn't have
believed word one if he hadn't seen the debris left by the
clone's passing with his own eyes.

"What are you going to do?" he asked as we pulled into the
parking lot of the airport.

"The first order of business is to find Mulder and prevent him
from doing anything stupid.  Them I suppose we'll start trying
to track down what happened to the other twins."

Naturally that was what Mulder would want to do, provided that
he wasn't in Massachusetts trying to suck bullets out of his own
gun. I didn't even want to think about it.

"What can I do to help?" he offered.

"Just stonewall Skinner until I get the chance to tell him
myself."

Zippy made a face.  He knew the AD well enough to be assured
that stonewalling Skinner was one of the hardest things he would
ever do in his life.

"Take care.  Call me and let me know what's going on."

I let him kiss me on the cheek, and for a moment it was nice,
nice and normal. But just for a moment.  I grabbed my bag and my
case and started hotfooting it through the airport.

Twenty minutes into the flight I realized that I was still
wearing Mulder's shirt and tie.  Underneath, my torso was naked.
The clothes still smelled like him. The businessman next to me
gave me a strange look whenever I sniffed the shirt. 

Iolokus II: Agnates 8/20 That I could forget the mockers and
insults! That I could forget the trickling tears and blows of
the bludgeons and hammers! That I could look with a separate
look on my own crucifixion and crowning.. Walt Whitman

Mulder's mother met me at the door of her tastefully
understated home. "Fox is waiting for you. I've spoken with
Jason, and we agreed that I should explain some things to the
two of you."

"How do you know Jason?"

"In good time, dear. Oh, by the way, you wouldn't happen to
have any pictures of my granddaughter...would you?"

The world greyed alarmingly with my rage. I don't hit women who
only assault with words. But I considered it.

And wasn't Mulder going to love that? His own mother was
apparently closer to Jason than to him, willing to share all the
well-kept family secrets with the man who Mulder almost was.

She led me into the damask-coated living room and I sat down in
a stiffly padded chair which quickly made me remember why New
Englanders always looked so unhappy. Mulder was glowering at the
end of an eggshell-white couch. We waited, carefully not
speaking, for over five minutes as she puttered around in the
kitchen, making enough noise so that we were sure she hadn't had
another stroke. I had no doubt that she was delaying for
effect.. The woman should be in charge of running
interrogations. She could have extracted confessions from the
most innocent of men by cranking up the tension like this.

And Mulder and I weren't very innocent.  As a matter of fact
there were a couple of things I could tell her about her son
that would probably send her into another stroke.

When she finally sat down, I almost wept from the sheer relief
of it. Her teacup and saucer rested on the elegant coffee table
in front of the couch as she crossed her hands in her lap and
began to speak.

"I always knew that I wanted to work for a greater cause than
my own advancement." 

Mulder's face twitched. I'd seen firsthand that it wasn't a
good idea to mouth off to his mother, and I think only the
memory of her slap and the fact that she'd finally agreed to
talk kept him from saying any of the three nasty things he'd
automatically thought up.

"It certainly didn't hurt to be a young, attractive woman at
the time when so many serious, patriotic men were looking for a
way to make America strong for the troubles we all could see
were ahead.

"You have to understand, the German doctors were obsessed with
their twin studies. Like many great scientific discoveries, our
success at twinning and cloning was serendipitous, a result of
their difficulty obtaining a suitable number of twins." Tina
Mulder took a sip of her rapidly cooling tea.

Obtaining. I almost got up and left right then, but the raw
hurt in Mulder's eyes stopped me. I couldn't make him do this
alone.

Tina shifted her body towards me and sniffed audibly. "Don't
turn up your nose at me, Miss Scully. I knew what they were and
I didn't like it any better than you do. Their eyes crawling
over my body like slugs, and behind my back I could hear them
whispering, Jewess. Juden," she said, her voice deepening, the
foreign word cutting like a lash. "I know that's what they
thought of me. But it was my children who would grow to rule the
world, in the end."

"Besides," she added with a little smile, "I was wide awake
during every indignity that they subjected me to.  I remember
every moment."

My face was burnt by her scorn.  What the hell did she know
about it? She, at least, had raised one child when all was said
and done, and what tender care she had given him!  A grown man
who can't sleep in his own bed alone because he fears the Boogey-
Man.

"Bill was so proud that we were chosen. When Fox was born and
then tested, he was so disappointed." *He* was?, I thought and
gave her a look that should have stopped the motion of the atoms
in her cells. Lady, you delivered this man to me in more pieces
than a jigsaw puzzle.

"The fertilization was in vitro, of course," she continued,
looking out the window as if the answers were written in
invisible ink on the glass. "Complete ectogenesis was not yet
possible--that's the complete development of a fetus outside the
womb, Fox," she said to Mulder's blank look.

In the midst of all this, he'd forgotten that his parents had
met when his mother was running part of the research project for
Operation Paperclip.. In retrospect the office references should
have called it Operation Ditto. 

"When the blastula reached the four-cell stage it was split.
This created four identical organisms which again began
division. When they reached the blastula stage they were split
again, which made sixteen."

I knew what was coming, but I don't think that Mulder had
figured it out yet. "At that point we stopped, because we were
worried about the consequences of repeated splitting and because
of a shortage of suitable hosts. Of sixteen implanted
blastocysts, we achieved twelve successful pregnancies. Even
today, that's a remarkable rate. When the babies were delivered,
they were injected with what I was told was alien DNA, in viral
form. I knew, from the previous experiments, that this would
cause...alterations, but we thought that we had them under
control, and we were right. Only two of the infants died."

That explained why only the first ten letters of the alphabet
had been used. I watched Mulder add six more deaths to his
conscience. I always knew he had more lives than a cat, but I
had no idea how right I was.

"Oddly enough," Tina continued, "there were some variations in
pigmentation and hair coloring--your mole, Fox, I could always
pick you out when I came to get you." Mulder flinched. "Five
left-handed and five right, which simply means that you were all
double recessives in terms of handedness.. Your experience
suggests that something in the cell division process itself may
affect the expression of handedness among recessives. I've
always regretted not being able to write that up for
publication. The recessive handedness itself isn't that
surprising, because it's associated with intelligence,
creativity, and emotional instability."

She finished her tea and set the cup down. It rattled against
the thin porcelain saucer. I noticed that the pink roses on the
sides of the cup were beginning to flake off, revealing the
white below.

"When none of you tested with more than minimal sensitivity to
the Greys, we went back to the drawing board. Jonathan--we were
lovers by then. When Fox and the others tested so poorly,
hearing the Greys but unable to talk back to them, Bill became
bitter and withdrawn. He felt a failure as a man, and he thought
I was a failure as a woman. Jonathan made me feel--he respected
me as a scientist, and that can be a very attractive thing." Why
did that feel like another jab in the side? 

Mulder continued to sit silently on the sofa, his fingers
pressing into the flesh around his eyes until the skin turned
white underneath.

"In a way, when he got the approval to use his sperm for the
new version, it was an act of courtship, one of the most tender
gestures he ever made.. And this time we were confident enough
to inject the virus at the same time as the blastocyst was
implanted in vivo. More of the DNA was absorbed. There was an
enhanced rate of fetal loss as a result, and in fact Samantha
was the only baby delivered live. The one I carried was
stillborn at eight and a half months," her voice shook slightly,
even after all this time, "but Jonathan and I still had some
clout and I got Samantha to raise."

Jonathan, I watched Mulder's mind chew the name.

"Samantha tested quite well and soon after she reached the age
when she could understand commands of moderate complexity she
was taken. The older-appearing Samanthas you met were true
clones, fast-grown from nuclei implanted into donor eggs that
had been stripped of their own nuclei. The clones have toxic
blood and are fragile in a variety of situations, and the Greys
dislike them intensely, which has caused its share of trouble.
You've also met some younger clones, and those are the next
generation, without the modifications necessary to make them
grow to adulthood in under three years."

"So instead you take the long route through which you can mold
your test subject through an alarmingly complex series of
behaviors until they're catatonic, paranoid, masochists, pimps,
drug dealers of the legal and illegal kind, or God forbid,
government employees." Mulder's voice cracked in the middle of
his statement and he gave his mother a hard little smile.

"Did you love us at all, mom?  Or were Sam and I just another
Science Fair project?"

She should have said something, but she didn't.

Standing, he crossed over to where the grand piano filled the
area in front of the lace-curtained windows.

"You knew all along what happened to Samantha and you humored
me.  My whole life has been nothing but a lie.  You were upset
because They took Samantha, your successful experiment and left
you with me, the reject. And you punished me every day since
then. All this time I thought Dad was to blame, and it was you
from the beginning," he was shouting, in that oddly flat way of
his, loud enough for the entire street to hear.

"Fox --"

"Well I'm sorry, Mom. I'm sorry I was such a fucking
disappointment to you."

The house jumped when the door slammed shut behind him.  I sat
there on the chair with my hands folded in my lap because it was
the only way I could keep from grabbing Tina Mulder by the back
of the head and pounding her face into the wall until she bled.

She finished her drink and put the cup down on the table just a
little too hard. "Fox will be back," she pointed out, "but
before then I think we should talk. I hope you'll listen and try
not to judge me so harshly, though forgiveness hardly seems to
be your strong point."

Great, the Wicked Witch of the Northeast was knocking off
personality points from my score. So I wouldn't win the fucking
Miss America contest, I wasn't trying to charm her.

"What exactly do you wish to discuss with me?"

"I made a mistake with Samantha. I became over-invested. Please
understand, I had two children before I heard the words 'women's
liberation.' I hadn't thought through the consequences of
participating in the Project. With Bill and Jonathan it was just
sperm, it proved their virility. But even the children I didn't
physically bear made me a mother in their eyes, made me someone
who was a subject rather than a controller. From the most
exciting work I could ever imagine, I was suddenly stuck in an
enormous house that seemed to get dirtier by the hour with one
babbling infant and then another, not long after the first
learned how to read. I'd supervised fifty technicians, fifty men
with doctorates, and then like that" she snapped her fingers
"the only one I was supervising was the maid.

"I was ill, there's no denying. I consumed my weight in pills
every month, I drank, it's amazing I didn't accidentally
overdose." 

I wished she had.

"And I thought that Samantha would be my future. When they took
her and left the one they didn't care about in my charge--it got
much worse.

"You must suspect that Jonathan had a healer attend to me when
I had my stroke."

I blinked, revealing my surprise. I'd thought her recovery
amazing, truly on the upper edge of the bell curve, but I hadn't
in fact made the connection between her lucidity and the Man of
a Thousand Faces.

She smiled her razor grin again. "He did me more of a favor
than he knew. I don't pretend to understand the mechanism, but
if you can repair myelin sheaths it's no great deed to purge
twenty-five years of habituation from a patient's system. And
that's what happened to me. When I'd thought through the
implications of my miraculous recovery I decided to underplay my
acuity for a while, but I did track Jason down--I wouldn't let
my boys out into the world without *some* way to look after
them, would I?"

I was beginning to think some fairly ugly thoughts, compared to
my previous distaste for Tina. "About how long ago did you
contact Jason Lindsay?"

She shrugged gracefully. "Approximately nine months ago. And
yes, Miss Scully, that does correspond with the timing of the
Austin group. I'm sorry that so many promising avenues of
investigation were terminated, but that's what makes R & D so
much of a gamble. Jason, unlike Fox, always knows when to cut
his losses."

The bile rose in my throat. "When this is over," I said, "I
think I'll come back and hurt you."

The crepey flesh around her jaw trembled slightly. "It's a good
thing for me that this will never end, then."

I went to look for Mulder.

****

Scully was trotting out the door as I came back from the car, I
pushed past her none too gently and headed back into the living
room. Mom was still sitting in her chair like Queen Victoria at
Albert's deathbed.

"I think you ought to look at these.  You need to see what a
stellar success your precious project really was.  It's a
cavalcade of the dregs of humanity. You should be very proud of
your project," I dropped the files in her lap and went outside,
pushing past Scully who was standing like a rock in the doorway.

Give her credit, Scully let me cool down for ten minutes before
she came out.  By that time my vision had slowed and the world
was no longer shimmering through a red haze of fury.  But I was
shaking while I was taking off my sidearm and putting it in the
trunk of the rental car.

"What are you doing?" she asked in an even tone as though I
were making a chain out of rubber bands.

"Just saving another life or two.  I can't trust myself," I
unhooked the ankle holster and dropped it into the trunk, gun
and all, and locked the trunk.

My fingers trembled when I handed Scully the keys, but I felt
astonishingly clear-headed despite the crap that Madre Mio had
just laid on me.  I should have guessed.  It should have made
sense, why not? It explained so much, it explained why I had
always felt like I was pretending to be someone else, fooling
everyone.  Fooling myself. No wonder Michael Valentine Smith had
been my idol.  I was a Martian, a stranger in the strange land
of my own life.

"Mulder?" she asked with the old edge to her voice, the edge
she has when I've filled her ears with the latest round of
insanity that passes for my logic.

"I'm fine, Scully."

The sun went through the death throes of an overcast New
England autumn and the lights went on up and down the
residential street while we stood there, not talking, not
touching, leaning against the car, watching nothing happen.

The front door opened and my mother poked her head out.

"I'm making dinner.  Will spaghetti be all right with you two?"
she asked..

"That's great, Mom," I said and Scully followed me back into
the house, looking at Mom and I as though we belonged in the zoo.

No wonder she didn't understand, she'd had a normal family, not
mine.

****

After Mulder's mother went to bed, we sat up in his old bedroom
in what could laughingly be called pajamas.  He in ratty
sweatpants and an old T-shirt underneath a flannel bathrobe and
me in leggings and an oversized Navy sweatshirt Bill had given
me for Christmas. Despite the funeral air of the house and the
subject matter, the whole proceeding had a certain shabbily
comfortable collegiate feeling.

"Mulder," I said. "I think I've figured something out." I'll
admit, I was terribly proud of myself. I had a gift for him.

He stumbled over to the ramshackle desk I was using in his
childhood room, the one he'd suggested I sleep in rather than
the guestroom. I'd spread ten pictures out, including the
picture I'd cajoled the MIT alumni office into e-mailing me.

"Look," I said.

For a moment he didn't see it. I'd missed it the first few
times, too, tending to group the men into the quick and the
dead. It had only been a whim that had made me put them in
alphabetic order.

Mulder drew in a deep breath. Slowly, as carefully as if he
were undressing me, he moved the sets of pictures closer
together. Arlen and Baylor, Christopher and Darien, Emerson and
Fox, George and Hal, and Ian and Jason.. Matched pairs, mirror
images. Emerson's mole was even on the opposite side of his face.

I think Mulder's mother helped me figure this out, with her
offhanded (no pun intended) reference to the handedness and its
potential relationship to the cell division process. Jason's
information on the twins was fairly complete from a medical
perspective, though lacking in biographical detail. Of course
Roush had access to the records of the many tests the twins had
undergone in their callow youth. The conclusion was inevitable:
Each of the pairs contained one right-handed and one left-handed
twin.

Is biology destiny? I didn't want that to be the case, it made
the success of the Consortium seem more likely, but poor Mulder
didn't seem to have good prospects even if environment was
crucial. We're taught in medical school that environment
interacts with genetics in ways both simple and complex--with
the best nutrition in the world, I couldn't make it much past
five feet, but I could have been four foot seven if I'd been
significantly malnourished. 

I do not know what it is that makes a man. I learned in church
that the soul is incorporeal, that we are more than meat and
electrical impulses. I learned that we had free will, despite
the many constraints concrete history can clamp upon us. But so
many of our cases defied this simple platitude. All around us
there were men who seemed to have no choice at all in what
they'd done and other men who appeared to command those results,
free of any guiding demand of God or conscience.

The supposedly carbon copies had all turned out differently,
despite the depressing trend. Surely there was room for
variation within the limits set by biology and environment.
Mulder had chosen time and again to turn back to the light and
the quest. Hadn't he?

Now there was Emerson, the unknown quantity--if he was Mulder's
true twin, he could make or break the argument.  Was Emerson
going to be a good twin or an evil twin?  He was, I realized,
the integer X and we had to solve for X.

I looked again at the picture. The face wearing a pair of Ray
Bans and a supercilious smile could have been Mulder's circa
1983. '80's hair with fluffy bangs, hair dripping down to the
collar of his Hawaiian shirt, and a skinny tie, he could have
been Mulder.  Except for the fact that Mulder had dyed black
hair, torn sweatshirts and two studs in his ear at that point --
the Oxford Intellectual look.  The skinny tie was the killer. I
almost snickered. The skinny tie dated the picture as much as a
beehive had dated his parents' (and they were his parents after
all) wedding picture.

"Well, look at it this way, at least you know that Bill Mulder
was your father."

The look he gave me could have eaten a hole in cement.

"I'm so relieved," he said, crossing over to the window and
looking out at the quiet streets with their bleeding foliage,
"we haven't had any cannibals yet, we really need a cannibal--or
a necrophiliac to round out the freak show."

I began shuffling the photographs into the folders again,
looking at the tightness of his robe between his shoulder
blades, knowing that he had retreated into wherever it was that
he went to think. It was a place I wasn't allowed.  A stab of
anger made my eyes swim for a moment.  Why was it that he
accused me of being emotionally distant when he habitually did
the same thing?  I knew it was just a matter of time before his
inner furies built a fire under his feet and I would wake up one
morning alone, again, and have to haul his ass out of whatever
trouble he had sought out. Again.

Sharing works both ways, Mulder.

I shut my briefcase with more force than was necessary and sat
on the bed, the old mattress springs squeaking underneath my
weight.  He continued to look out the window and I looked around
the room that had been his as a teenager. I hadn't imagined that
it had been much different that Bill and Charlie's shared room
in base housing. Actually, either one of them would have killed
the other for a little privacy.  But Mulder had his room all to
himself, and I could picture him here with his books and his
music loud to drown out whatever the adults were doing
downstairs.

****

Scully looked around my child's bedroom, forever frozen in
1973, one of the punishments I'd invented for myself when Mom
and Dad couldn't be bothered. Mom moved to this house and I
packed everything up and put it perfectly in place, just like it
was when Sam was taken. It all looked smaller than I remembered,
the bed narrow and sagging and the spots on the walls where the
posters had been removed.

"Baseball was your sport?" Scully asked, fingering the one
trophy that had survived Mom's housecleaning. I'm not sure why
she kept that one, junior year was no better than the others,
and I hadn't been captain of the team that year. Maybe she just
picked at random, figuring each was as good as any other.

"One of them," I said, "I did track and basketball too." God,
Mulder, she's not some cheerleader you can impress with your
varsity letters. I turned away and looked at the dust-covered
rows of books. Isaac Asimov, Frederik Pohl, A.E. Van
Vogt...optimists all, thinking that humanity was likely to make
it into the next century.

The bed creaked as Scully settled her slight weight down on it.
I fleetingly wondered whether it would fall apart if we used it.
The thought caused an immediate response in my autonomic nervous
system.

"My mother takes enough pills to sleep that she wouldn't hear a
firefight," I said.

Her face twitched and I wondered, not for the first time, what
Mom had said to her before she'd come running onto the streets
to find me. "What are you asking, Mulder?" The little vixen was
going to make me say it out loud. Her cool marble face suggested
that she was going to slap me down when I did try. But she was
going to slap me around anyway, I might as well enjoy it.

I sat next to her.

"Did I just strike out?"

She put her hand on my knee. "Not yet. But with enough balls
you can walk me home."

"First base?"

That earned me a tiger's grin, Scully is capable of imitating
the larger cats when it suits her mood. "You're not very
ambitious, are you, sport?"

I was quickly losing my ability to banter as the blood left my
head for my cock, so I wrapped my arms around her and eased her
down onto the bed. She was perfectly sized for it; her feet
barely brushed the pillow even though her head was well clear of
the baseboard.

I'd had my first wet dreams in this bed. It was about time that
the goddamn thing saw some duo action.

Around my torso, her arms were hard and muscular while her
stomach was agreeably soft against the promontory of my rapidly
hardening cock. There was something to be said for having such a
willing wench while your mother was out cold in the next room. 
I had some ghosts that I wanted to exorcise.  She moved
underneath me in that yielding but determined way that she has. 
My heart began a jackhammer beat. Like any of Hal's customers, I
was a junkie and I knew it.

Against my lips, her collarbones were hard as driftwood and as
strong as rebar.  Her hands moved hard and fast under my shirt,
thumbs running down each of my vertebrae as if she were counting
them. Her legs were around my hips and her feet in her silly
thick violet socks were rubbing up and down the insides of my
thighs.  With the bulk of our clothes between the two of us, all
I could do was grind against her like a teenager at a high
school dance.  Groaning, she adjusted her pelvis for maximum
contact, the junction between her legs hot as a teakettle.

Outside the katydids sang slower and slower as the night closed
in around them. Their short season was over and they were dying.

With a snort of frustration, she rolled out from underneath me,
sitting upright and flicking her hair back from her face.
Impatiently, she pulled her sweatshirt up over her head, her
stomach and ribcage lengthening like a stretching cat's as her
coral-tipped breasts sprang free of the fabric..

Can I just say here that it is an illustration of Scully's
separation of intellect and emotion that she could find out that
I had been part of the eugenics project that has ruined her life
and she still wants to fuck me?   She's either the sanest or the
most insane person that I know.  But there she was, wriggling
out of her long leggings and panties while I was fighting the
same battle with my own clothes, undressing one another is
romantic but time-consuming.  

Finally we were both naked and twined on the faded quilt.

****

Mulder's hands were hot and hard over me in the thin chill of
the boy-child's bedroom. Fingers knotted in my hair and pulled
my head back so he could gnaw at my throat like a feeding
vampire.  Some of the most famous vampire case files he had made
me read had taken place not far from this room.  His free hand
squeezed my breasts and pinched at my nipples until I sliced my
fingernails into his shoulders at the sheer bliss of it all. 
His cock branded my thighs.    Moving down my body he sucked my
breasts, sending a direct line from the blood-rich tissues of my
nipples to the hot and swollen tissue of my clitoris. He suckled
me like a baby.

I had a baby, another baby under glass in a hospital in Texas.
My baby, his baby and I--

The hard insistence of his finger inside me snapped my brain
from the place where thoughts are made of words to where being
is nothing but sensation. He raised his head so that he could
see my face, his eyes inches away from mine as if he'd fall into
my skull if he could. He always likes to watch, more even than
he likes to touch.

"Please," I hissed into his open mouth.

"Now?"

"Oh yes."

My feet still clad in purple socks, on his shoulders. He
grabbed at his sweatpants, still sharing the bed with us, and
thin foil ripped. He fumbled for a few moments down at his cock
and then plunged into me harder and deeper than ever before.  I
was tight around him and he rubbed back and forth against me
with heavenly purpose. Shivers of neon silver danced across my
vision.  I moaned, I tossed, I kissed his mouth, his eyes, and
his forearms on either side of my head.  The tired old bedstead
gave off a squeak with every thrust.

The light from the street lamps outside made his eyes black as
he stared down at me, his mouth hard with lust, and the tendons
like harp strings in his throat.

"MinenooneelsesNosubstitutionsNochanges," I hissed.

And saw why Mulder always watched. His pupils were rainbow
oilslicks rimmed by a razor's edge of deep brown. I expanded in
his gaze, my heart growing three sizes like the Grinch at
Christmas. 

Mine. No deposit, no return.

My eyes were open when the first climax hit me like a
nightstick across the back of the head.


9/20 I will go to the bank by the wood and become undisguised
and naked, I am mad for it to be in contact with me. Walt Whitman

The next morning brought news via Scully's e-mail. The
bloodwork on Christopher Farber's autopsy had returned, and it
contained an interesting nugget of information that Scully
pointed out to me with her accusing fingers. The pimp had been
Schenectady's Typhoid Mary; he had enough HIV in his bloodstream
to kill a ballroom of debutantes foolish enough to trust their
dates, but he wasn't immunosuppressed in the slightest.

Superman had been turning teenagers out on the streets of a
backwater town, and probably infecting them as he addicted them.

I had to hand it to the designers--they weren't doing too well
on personality, but they seemed to have created a fine machine.

It seemed that we had agreed to begin looking into the fates of
my varied kin without discussing it at all.  What else could we
do?  At the airport, I faxed the entire contents of Jason's
folders to Skinner back in DC along with a short cover letter to
the effect that he would have to understand that Scully and I
were going to look into this.  I would have given my life to see
the look on his face when he realized that this particular thorn
in his side was one of many.  This amused me to no end and
Scully gave me a *look* while I was snickering into my copy of
Omni while we waited for the flight. The way this was shaping up
we were going to have enough frequent flyer miles to go to the
Big Island before the case was closed.  Scully on the beach in a
bikini was an intoxicating thought.

We had been siting in the airport lounge drinking bad coffee
for over an hour when the inevitable phone call came.  My
cellphone shrieked in the pocket of my badly-wrinkled suit and I
knew who was calling before I even answered the phone.

"Do you want to explain this fax I found on my desk this
morning?" Skinner growled, large and scary as life on the
scratchy connection.

I looked at my watch. At least he had enough time to have his
morning coffee before he called.

"I thought my cover letter was pretty much to the point."

"Excuse me if I find the fact that there is more than one Fox
Mulder roaming the face of the planet somewhat disturbing."

"Well, the majority of my kin seem to be involved in the
receiving end of law enforcement rather than upholding Justice. 
Kind of makes me look good, doesn't it."

He snorted like a bull staring down a newbie matador at his
first bullfight.

"And what do you expect me to do?"

"Let's have Danny run the information through his usual
computer voodoo and see what he comes up with."

"All right," he agreed and I heard him thinking about his next
words before he spoke, "Agent Mulder, keep this professional. Do
not let this situation turn into another one of your personal
crusades."

"It's a little late for that, sir."

"Try harder, Agent Mulder," he warned and disconnected.

Scully eyed me over the top of her coffee cup.

"How did he take it?" she asked.

"Pretty well, considering.  Do you think he's medicated?"

Massachusetts to L.A. is a grueling flight. I do not like
Logan, the concessionaires all sell Pepsi instead of Coke and
the airport is flat and nasal like a Bostonian accent. Logan
reminds me of too many Michaelmas terms, coming home to a house
that would have been less empty had Mom simply ran away from it.
Too many rides in cabs when all the other kids my age deplaning
had gaggles of family waiting to embrace them.

LAX was better, glittering and round as a five-carat diamond on
a starlet's finger. The sun was stuck in the middle of the sky
when we met the agents Skinner had sent to meet us.

They wore black, probably because Will Smith and Tommy Lee
Jones had made it hip. Their names were Jordan Marsh and Jeanne
Redmond. Redmond did all the talking. "We've located this Darien
Klein of yours. He works from home and we've had two cars on him
for the last twenty-four hours. He's had two visitors, each of
whom stayed for a few hours and then left."

Scully was her usual businesslike self. "Do we know what kind
of consulting he does?" 

Redmond sniggered. "The kind without clothes, LAPD says. He's a
rent-a-date. You'd be surprised at how many people in this town
who could get laid for free prefer to pay for it."

"At least that way they know exactly what currency they're
paying in," I suggested, earning dubious looks from the women. 

****

We found Darien beside his pool, greased to a thick sheen to
get the minimum necessary tan. I went first; we were going to
bring Mulder to meet him once I'd made the initial contact in
order to decrease the freak-out factor.

I looked him over as I approached. Standard deviation: minus
scars, plus extra bulk at the shoulders.  New variation, sun-
streaked hair with a symmetry never found in nature, the kind
that came at a high price at a good salon. Mulder's facial
features require some attention before they cohere into
attractiveness, and in some angles, when you can't see his eyes,
the sum total is downright goofy-looking, but there is
absolutely nothing to be said against his body. Looking at it,
or a reasonable facsimile thereof, was distracting.

I pulled out my badge and strode forward. "Darien Klein?"

He tossed his head towards me and pulled down his sunglasses.
"Tell me you're my three o'clock."

I could feel the blush spread like port wine over my face and
neck. "Special Agent Dana Scully, FBI."

He pouted and licked his lips. "Is there a problem?"

Yes there was, but I was going to hold out for the version with
the bullet scars; retraining takes so much time. "Sir, we
believe you may be in danger because of your relationship to
a...group of men. I'd like to ask you to come with me so that
you can be placed in protective custody."

Darien sat up from his lounger and looked me over more
carefully, draping his arms artistically over his thighs and
making it perfectly apparent why he was in enough demand to
afford this place. "I get it," he said. "Jorje sent you, right?
Tell him he's got a great instinct for my tastes. So, what
happens, you handcuff me and then I get to see you out of
uniform?"

It was a good thing I was already as red as I was going to get.
"I'm afraid it's no joke, sir." I shifted my jacket so that he
could see the bulge of the holster at my hip. "Have you ever
heard the name Jason Lindsay?" He shook his head and I could see
him begin to register the seriousness of the situation. "Arlen
Petrovsky? Christopher Farber?" Each question produced another
headshake.

"If I haven't heard of these guys, why do I have to go into
custody?"

I raised my hand and signaled for Mulder to come out from where
he was hidden in the shadow cast by Darien's lovely house.

Darien's eyes widened as he took in the physical resemblance.
"Who are you?"

"Your long-lost brother, apparently."

"I was raised in the Valley! I don't have any brothers!"

"Surprise," Mulder said, drawing the word out until it snapped.

Marsh and Redmond stood guard outside while we supervised
Darien as he overstuffed two suitcases with clothes that didn't
deserve the rough treatment. Darien favored Versace and Dolce &
Gabbana over Mulder's Armani, I could see the two of them
trading dismissive glances at each other's favored wardrobe.

Darien was not allowed to bring his cellphone, which was the
first thing that really seemed to upset him. I wasn't sure if he
was used to weird things like this happening to him, this being
L.A., or whether his sociopathic heritage was simply expressed
in his extreme lack of affect.  Of course, he was Mulder's twin.
. . The telephone dependency might have been genetic.

As we headed out to the car that would take him to the safe
house--a location that not even Mulder or I would know, to give
him more protection--he turned to Mulder, who was lugging the
larger suitcase, and asked, "By the way, who the hell are you?"

"Fox Mulder." 

A look of understanding suffused Darien's features. "What is
it?" Mulder asked sharply.

"That's a name I have heard."

"From whom?" I rattled out, milliseconds before Mulder asked
the same question.

Now Darien lowered his head, and that familiar unruly chunk of
hair (or one very like it) brushed his forehead. I'd never
thought that Mulder made the gesture as a calculated tactic, but
I'd have to reconsider that judgement. He looked bashfully up
through the brown-gold strands. "I assume you guys know what I
do."

Mulder made a small strangled sound and I could tell he'd made
a connection that I'd missed.

"We have reports, yes," I said, trying to sound as robotic as
possible.

"A couple of years back, there was one man..." he smiled,
remembering. "He spotted me in a bar and spent the evening
watching me. I can always tell, you know. Finally he sent over a
drink, and we had a little talk. I explained that I wasn't free
that night, well I'm never free but I had other business, and he
agreed to meet me the next night. Fox was the name he called
out...at the time, I thought it was a rather endearing
compliment."

"What was this man's name?" Mulder shook his head to warn me
off, but the question was already there.

Darien let his shoulders ripple artistically in what might have
been loosely deemed a shrug. "I had the feeling he was lying,
but he called himself Alex."

Yet another item on the list of things I was discovering that I
Did Not Want To Know.

We put Darien in the car and then stood looking at each other
like idiots.. "Now what?"

"Emerson won't take my calls and he's guarded by a small army,
I say we go see Baylor, on paper he looks like a nice enough
guy."

Just then Mulder's cellphone rang. He listened for a few
minutes, and then hung up.

"Scratch that," he said. "That was Danny. When he looked up Hal
Rothman's name in the database, he pinged a big DEA trace. The
DEA demanded to know his authorization for the search, he gave
them Skinner's name, and now our ever-loyal AD traded us in for
a matched set of drug-sniffing German Shepherds."

"What?"

"We're going in to run a sting. It seems that another Hal
Rothman was the only thing the DEA needed to finish the
scavenger hunt and beat all the other agencies."

10/20 The atmosphere here is not a perfume, it has no taste of
distillation, it is odorless. It is for my mouth forever, I am
in love with it. Walt Whitman 

Mulder walked into the room and five mouths dropped open. One
of the agents even knocked over his coffee; another reached for
her gun.

One of them, obviously in command, rose and came over to us.
"Agent Martinez," he informed us. He shook Mulder's hand, then
mine, looking me over like he was trying to guess my dress size.
"You'll do real well," he said, "but we're going to need some
new clothes. Agent Yarrow--Ines--will help you. You," he said,
turning back to Mulder, "are just right."

That had to be the most validation Mulder had received in the
last year.

Ines took me into another room as the remaining agents began to
give Mulder his backstory. The other room contained more clothes
than the average Gap and Ines rooted around for something in my
size as she explained that Hal Rothman had been under
investigation for a long time and Mulder was their first real
key to his life. Rothman was slick; his phone had been tapped
for over a year, they'd put a camera into the foyer three months
ago, and there was still nothing on him. The agent in charge of
the investigation had heard Skinner's crazy explanation and
homed in on the relevant fact: Mulder was a perfect body double
for Hal; they knew that Hal had a big meeting that night; all
they had to do was keep Hal away, let Mulder do the recording,
and then any grand jury in the nation would return an
indictment. 

My job? Apparently Hal never went anywhere without window
dressing.

Ines put a body wire on me before pulling out a pile of what
looked like rags. Instead it was an orange sateen camisole that
would have been small on me at age 12 and a cropped thermal
undershirt. At least I got to layer them though a bra was out of
the question; the texture of the undershirt disguised the wire
while still making me look like I'd been sewn into the outfit.
For my lower half we had unspeakably trendy Calvin Klein (no
relation to Darien) undies and baggy designer jeans that hung
off my hips. My tattoo was visible along with the crack of my
ass. Ines congratulated me on the way it looked. She had some
suggestions for making me look dewy-eyed and underage.

I was beginning to sense that the corporate culture of the DEA
was slightly different than that of the FBI.

****

Martinez gave me the rundown on this iteration of myself. It
was essentially an expanded version of what Jason had already
given me. He didn't ask any questions until he was finished
outlining his plan and shoving a Reader's Digest condensed
version of the drug hierarchy on the eastern seaboard down my
throat. It was oddly invigorating to meet someone whose
conspiracy story barely intersected mine at all, except for the
near-accident of involving one of my homicidal twins.

His first question was, however, a doozy.

"How long have you known that Hal Rothman was your brother?"

Scully saved me, swooping down on the conversation like Athena
bursting from Zeus' head. "I'm afraid that information relates
to a pending investigation. We can't say anything more about it
at this time."

I spared her a grateful look, and then another that was pure
double-take. My eyes skittered over her body and caught on the
white plastic bird-shaped barettes holding back the wings of her
hair. She was wearing pearlescent blue eyeshadow right off the
cover of Seventeen, her lips were shining like peach nectar, and
her nails were as orange as her under, er, outerwear. A stickler
for detail as always, she'd somehow managed to create the
impression of broken veins at the inside of one elbow.  The
fading finger-mark bruises on her hip were real, I'd put them
there.

She looked about sixteen and I realized that part of it was the
shoes, huge Starsky & Hutch Adidas sneakers instead of the heels
she'd left with. I could only see the toes peeking out from the
puddle of jeans on the ground.

If this was Hal's type I was in deeper shit than I'd thought.

The plan was, as such plans go, simple, which was good because
we didn't have much time to rehearse. Derail Hal's limo with a
convenient "accident," jam his cellphone, and have me go to
Hal's meeting. With my voice on the tape, Hal would, quite
literally, look like the one who'd sung. The DEA hoped that
appearances would split him from his confederates, prompting him
to attain protected witness status in exchange for testimony.
Maybe he too could escape the nose. Or we could give him the
identity of one of the dead Mulders, offering him the choice of
Arlen or Chris. That would actually be pretty funny.

In return, the DEA agreed to watch out for Hal's safety--a fair
deal, because they needed him to live too in order to testify. I
don't think they believed that he had a slew of other brothers
who were being knocked off, but they played along nicely. Maybe
Skinner had promised them invitations to the annual office party.

We were driven to the meeting in a pimpmobile.

The small man who met us at the door of the suite gave Scully
only the most cursory of glances as he beckoned us in. We were
led to a well-appointed conference area. I took the couch so
that I had Scully next to me, my hand resting far up on the
inside of her thigh. She looked away as if it didn't matter to
her and that hurt much more than a glare would have.

>From the inner sanctum, two men emerged, one white and one
Asian.

I flipped through the pictures in my brain, searching for a
match. Fuck, I should have paid more attention to Martinez's
little lecture, these fellows had no idea that they were just a
subplot and they'd kill me just as thoroughly as any
shapeshifting bounty hunter.

I found them: John Kim and Mark 'Tiger' Timmins. I was the
money man, sort of like a Hollywood agent-slash-producer; I'd
set them up originally by finding the financing for their first
deal and they still worked with me..

By all accounts Hal was another self-centered son of a bitch so
I didn't get up, just raised my hand from Scully's leg in
greeting.

Sharp nods. Scully stared vacantly at them, somehow managing
not to blink..

They sat and we got down to business. They had a cash-flow
problem related to the new hundred dollar bills, which were just
now getting wide play abroad. The DEA had coached me on the
appropriate solution, which I relayed to them in due course.

The phone rang and John Kim glared at it, then looked at me
apologetically. "They wouldn't have buzzed it through if it
wasn't important." I nodded magisterially, giving permission.

He picked it up, said "Yes?" and listened for a minute. Then he
carefully put the receiver down on the glass-topped table and
turned back to me. "It's for you."

I had to suppress the automatic look at Scully for her opinion.
Drug-dipped whores don't have opinions.

As carefully as if I were picking up a snake, I reached for the
phone.

"Hello?"

"Who is this?" The voice was nasal and scratchy, familiar in a
strange way but I couldn't give it a name.

"Who is *this*?"

"Cut the crap, this is Hal Rothman and I want to speak to John
again."

"Where are you calling from?"

"A public phone, my cell won't work and my car broke down and I
couldn't make the meeting, who the fuck are you?"

"*I'm* Hal Rothman," I said, keenly aware of Scully's even
breathing on the seat next to me, "and I don't think this is
very funny." John gave a little nod at my reaction.

"Listen, I don't know what kind of game you're playing, but I
warn you--you tell John--you need me. Don't try and cut me out."

"I don't know what you're talking about," I said and hung up.
John and Tiger were watching me for a reaction. "Fucking DEA
head games. They get more desperate every day."

My companions nodded as if I'd just read from the Torah scroll.

Once again, I was swimming in my own sweat and my brain was
stuttering like Howard Stern's sidekick.  Undercover ops more
elaborate than a phone call have never been my forte and I made
a terrible happy tooth in my third grade play. Shit, I have a
hard enough time acting like myself most days.

Scully shifted on the couch next to me and sighed.

"This is so lame," she muttered.

John and Tiger smirked.

"Go ahead with the hundred dollar solution for the time being.
By the time the fucking Feds change all the currency no one will
know what the fuck is going on," I stood up and Scully slouched
to her feet next to me.

They stood and we went through an elaborately cool handshaking
ritual that they must have learned from watching the Godfather
movies. Assholes. Pretentious assholes. They were no better than
the dealers hawking crack on street corners, they just had
marginally better wardrobes.

****

Outside, Mulder ducked around the corner of the building to
wait for the DEA's seized limo to pick us up.  He looked pinched
and shaky under the blue glare of the neon above the door. 

"Fuck," he hissed and jammed his hands in the pockets of the
long black leather coat he was wearing.

"The phone call?" I prodded and waddled into whispering distance.

"That was him.  Almost blew the whole thing right then and
there. Fucking Martinez doesn't know his asshole from a hole in
the ground."

"It's a pity the IQ requirement for the DEA is so low," a
familiar-unfamiliar voice drawled and I heard the unmistakable
sound of a pistol having the safety snapped off, "but I'm sure
you two know that first hand.  Please step away from the
building."

Most of the alley next to the office building was as dark as it
gets, and the man with the gun was a moving center of darkness
in the random pools of darkness.

"Please switch off your wires," he continued in the same
strangely polite tone, "I know you're not armed, Tiger and John
never would have let you in if you were carrying.  That was one
of the few things you actually got right."

I reached in the waistband of my jeans and pulled the
microphone wire loose from the main unit while Mulder stared at
Rothman as though he was a deer staring at an oncoming 18-
wheeler.

"Step into the light please," Rothman suggested.

Mulder did so and I watched his pupils contract as the light
slammed into them.  Rothman approached him and they both stood
in the cold light of the streetlight like actors on-stage. It
was surreal in the extreme, the matching coats, the black pants,
the loose silk shirts. Rothman even brushed his hair back the
way Mulder did. 

"I hope you got a nice bonus for the plastic surgery."

"It's not plastic surgery.  I'm your brother."

"And I'm Luke Fucking Skywalker," Rothman smiled Mulder's
charming smile back at him.

"There are  people who are trying to kill all of us."

"All?" 

I tried to explain.

"There were ten twins born as the result of a genetic
experiment and-"

"Shut up, bitch," Rothman snapped and his gun hand lashed out
and caught me across the jaw.

The pavement was cold and dirty when I hit it.

"Scully?"

"I'm fine, Mulder," I sat up and rubbed at the numb flesh,
shedding bits of gravel embedded along the side of my arm.

Mulder talked quickly, trying to get through despite the fact
that Rothman was about as receptive to him as the average
congressional committee. "My name is Fox Mulder I'm with the FBI
you should check up on it we were all raised separately --" He
stopped when Rothman poked him in the cheek with the gun.

"You tell Martinez that he's full of shit, and if I ever see
your fake fucking face again, I'm going to blow it off. 
Understand?"

Mulder's face hardened into something I hadn't seen before.

"Listen to me you ignorant prick, you're going to wind up dead
and it's not going to be from your jackass crack head dealers
either," his arm shot up and he grabbed Rothman's wrist - the
one holding the gun.

"I'll fuckin' shoot you, man."

Despite his tough-guy act, Rothman was genuinely surprised when
Mulder snapped his arm out of the way and kneecapped him with
the hard toe of one fashionable workboot. With a roar of pain,
Rothman swung at Mulder with his gun hand and hit his twin with
the handle.  Mulder spit blood and rammed his shoulder into his
twin's chest.  They both bounced off the brick wall of the alley
in a flurry of leather coats, flapping hair and the gleam of
gunmetal.  Through the sounds of fists on flesh, I could hear my
partner's voice.

The gun went flying and clattered to the ground a yard away
from me.

"Don't you want to live?  They're going to kill you, you dumb
fuck."

"Fuck you man, DEA bullshit. You got nothing on me."

Even as I grabbed Rothman's gun I realized there was no way I
could tell them apart in the gritty light.  Damnit!  Even if I
rushed at one of them I had a fifty-fifty chance of getting it
wrong.  Mole, mole, who's got the mole.  Finally, they stumbled
to a halt, one twin pinning the other against the wall. 

"Mulder!" I shouted.

And wouldn't you know that both of them looked at me.  Shit.

"Mulder if he wants  to take his chances, let him go. You might
be doing the world a favor."

I got a dual dirty look for that.

"Let him go!" I ordered, "step away from the twin and raise
your hands -- both of you!"

The twin, whichever one it was, stepped back from the other,
both put their hands in the air.

"They'll kill you and you'll wind up in a fucking plastic
garbage bag like the piece of trash that you are," the one on
the right hissed.

Okay, that was Mulder, the one with the bleeding gash on his
lip.  I covered Rothman with his own gun.

"They can try," Rothman gave Mulder an ugly smirk and  the
finger.

Turning his back on us, he slid off into the darkness where he
came from.

Mulder closed his eyes and swayed slightly on his feet. I
reached out with my scraped hand and tugged on his jacket.

"It's funny," he said, looking into the darkness where Rothman
had vanished, "I spent so long looking for a sibling and now
that I've found out that my family gives new meaning to the word
'extended,' none of them wants to talk to me."

He turned his back on me.  I waited in the dark and the cold,
while he regained what was left of his composure. He'd need it
after giving Rothman his real name; Martinez was going to be
apoplectic.  I stuck Rothman's gun into one of the pockets on my
jeans--with any luck ballistics would be able to match it to an
unsolved crime or two--and waited for the Calvary to arrive.

We got into the limo to drive back from the 'meeting',
listening to the cross-talk among the agents monitoring
Rothman's building. The driver was the best proof of Rothman's
claim about the DEA I'd seen yet, he got lost twice in a four-
block radius. How hard is it to find New York City? It's like
fucking Rome, all roads lead there, and yet this jerkoff managed
to drive us practically to Pennsylvania before figuring out how
to get back..

Mulder didn't seem too worried; doubtless he wasn't looking
forward to explaining to Martinez just what exactly Rothman had
said to him. The last thing we needed was an OPR investigation
into Mulder's lifestyle of luxury because they suspected him of
drug connections.

"He's in the building," I heard through the snap, crackle, pop
of the radio. We were on the George Washington Bridge, crawling
slowly towards the city. 

Ten minutes later, "He's leaving...catching a cab. Should we
follow?"

I recognized Martinez's voice answering in the affirmative. In
a minute, he came on the air again. "Wait a second...Yarrow, you
said he entered the building while you were watching?"

"Yep."

"Why did Johnson tell me the same thing just before your shift
started?"

Mulder swore and grabbed the driver's shoulder with one hand
while reaching for the radio with the other. "We've got to get
back to his building," he said. "Something's wrong."

"Martinez?"

"Don't use my name, Mulder, do you have any idea how many
people could be listening? Haven't you ever seen Hard Copy?"

"We'll all be on it tomorrow unless you get in that apartment
now, I'm telling you, there's something very wrong."

Another voice broke in. "Sir? The doorman at the building is
calling for an ambulance."

****

The exquisite fourteen-year-old girl who had been Hal's real
waif of the week was sobbing noisily as police officers flowed
around her, a rhapsody in blue. 

"He din't use," she insisted, wet eyes as bloodshot as the
veins on her arms were broken. When she opened her mouth the
illusion of Kate Moss porcelain perfection was broken, but it's
not like Hal wanted her for her conversational skills.

The sight of my face had sent her into hysterics. 

After Scully had pulled a sedative out of her infinite bag of
doctor tricks, the girl had calmed down somewhat. Huddled on
Hal's Chinese brocade couch, getting her CKOne stink on it which
I bet he'd never have let her do if he were around to protest,
she looked much smaller than her full five feet. Youth Services
was allegedly on its way to take her into custody, but in NYC
this was not any guarantee of rapid action. And when they
arrived, likely as not they'd just find some well-connected pimp
for her foster-care placement. 

None of my concern, anyway. I was just trying to find out what
she knew about Hal's meteoric fall into vomiting and convulsions
from his apparent heroin OD.

"He never used," she repeated, wiping some snot away from her
upper lip with the back of her hand.

"Maybe you just never saw him," I suggested.

She shook her head rapidly, like a wet dog. "Naw, he made fun
of it. Said he didn't need it, what was wrong with his life?
Nothin', no reason to use." 

"Who was his visitor just now, just before he--"

More sniffles, wiped on an arm that looked like it had been
stitched back together after a bad accident.

"I don' know. He said it was an appointment, he told me to get
lost and South Park was on..." 

I patted her on the shoulder, awkwardly, as she began keening
again. She was just about Juliet's age, she was probably
considering committing suicide to follow the great love of her
life into the belly of the white dragon. Considering her other
prospects, I couldn't say I blamed her.

The agents swarming over Hal's apartment like fire ants weren't
having much luck. No doubt Rothman kept secret accounts with
information he could use to save his ass if necessary, but if he
was living up to the family legacy it would be beyond the
abilities of drug-sniffing dogs to discover.

Martinez appeared just as we were about to leave. He had my
business card in a clear evidence bag. "We found this on
Rothman's body. Want to try again on how long you've known about
your family values?"

Scully growled at him, if she were a cat her ears would have
been flattened to her head, and he moved back, mumbling
something about getting the real story from Skinner. Smart guy.

To top it off, we hadn't gotten three steps out the door before
my cellphone rang. Hurrying to the elevator to get away from the
still-swirling mass of cops, I flipped it open.

"Mulder."

Skinner's voice shot out of the phone loud enough for Scully to
follow it.. "Darien Klein was just discovered giving Agent
Fallon a blow job."

"Did he make Fallon pay?"

Scully glared at me reproachfully, but I could tell she was
amused.

Skinner continued. "He wanted to get to a phone. He said he had
to call and cancel a 'date,' or the client would never speak to
him again."

"For the price of a quarter, that's ten thousand times less
that it would normally cost."

"When is this...prostitute...going to be protected enough to
get him out of our safe house and away from my agents?"

"I wish I could give you good news on that, but I'm standing
outside of Hal Rothman's apartment. And it looks like another
funeral for me, unless we just wait and use a mass grave."

Skinner grunted. "Watch your back, Mulder. I don't know these
other men, but I don't intend to lose a valuable agent to
whatever force is behind these murders."

I wished Skinner's will were enough to prevent that, but it
struck me as unlikely. 

While Scully toddled off to her autopsy, I played a hunch and
asked to see the last few days' worth of tapes from Hal's
vestibule.

Sure enough, the day before his death a familiar figure had
visited. The resolution wasn't good enough to get the face
exactly right; the DEA hadn't really had many good options for
placing the camera where it wouldn't be seen.

They weren't going to like this one bit, though I could
probably remember my whereabouts at that time, I was pretty sure
that I'd been five minutes away from coming into Scully with a
spasm and a groan. Excellent alibi, no? The Office of
Professional Responsibility would love that.

I wondered how he'd gotten my card, and how many sets of my
fingerprints there would be on it.

****

I've never done an autopsy on Mulder before, despite all his
deaths.

The resemblance wasn't complete. Hal had never taken a gunshot
wound, though it was rumored that he'd acted as his own assassin
several times. He liked high-powered rifles, weapons that a man
outside the law could use where real cops had to give the bad
guy a chance to surrender and live. He took care of himself; his
upper arms were better developed than Mulder's, which was
consistent with the home gym and all the shiny silver free
weights I'd seen in our brief official sojourn chez Rothman. 
And photos of the corpse next to the Nordic Trac were not going
to help sales of home gym equipment. His last meal had involved
expensive goat cheese, walnuts, and radicchio.

There were no needle punctures, not even in any well-hidden
places. None of the signs of use I'd expect from a man with an
intimate relationship with opiates. As high up in the hierarchy
he was, he'd still have used heroin cut with something else at
some point. Talcum powder is popular; it stays in the lungs
forever, and Hal's alveoli were pink and untouched. Quinine is
used too, but it's rough on the heart; there were no abscesses,
no signs of endocarditis. Other than the small problem that he
was not breathing, Hal was in excellent health.

The NYPD and the DEA wanted this to be an accidental overdose,
because drug rivals usually just shot each other if they were
miffed; it would be convenient for everyone if Rothman had just
snorted too much China White. But it didn't fly, most
"accidental" overdoses involve unhappy people who half-decide
not to pay enough attention to the amount they're mainlining..  
Hal had been on top of the world; the DEA agents admitted that
without Mulder's doppelganger act they'd probably still be
trying to get enough evidence for an indictment when the *next*
millenium came. 

And Mulder's business card was not something Rothman would have
been carrying around. Ironically, Rothman's associates would
have been just as upset as OPR to learn of the genetic ties
between the two brothers, only their idea of an "interrogation"
to figure things out wouldn't involve a hot room and nothing to
drink but knives and lit cigarettes in flesh.

Then there was the matter of the duplicate entry into Rothman's
apartment building. Double entry was for bookkeeping, not for
people.

The clock was running down. I needed to pay more attention to
my own personal Mulder, remember that he was, in someone's eyes,
just one of many.

My face still hurt from where Rothman had hit me with his gun.
I have seldom enjoyed an autopsy more.

I finished the stitches that put Rothman's cold well-formed
chest back together and looked up.

Straight into Mulder's eyes, only I could also see *through*
them to the clock on the far wall. 

It was 10:13.

I almost brought my hand to my mouth to cover the moan before I
realized that I was still wearing gloves and I didn't want to
suck down Hal's blood and stomach contents even if he was
healthy.

Another revenant, I thought and it stared at me, stared and
stared as if I were the see-through one.

Once is an anomaly, two times a curiosity. By now even I had to
admit that I had a little problem with the unquiet spirits of
the dead. "Wh...what do you want?" I asked. "Who are you?" The
hair color wasn't easy to divine, being almost transparent, but
I couldn't see the mole and even in death Mulder would have been
more snide.

His mouth moved.

Don't trust him, I think it said, and then disappeared as the
door swung open and Mulder stepped into the space vacated by his
haunt.

"Next stop, Philadelphia.  Baylor Francis has agreed to talk to
us."

11/20

What is commonest, cheapest, nearest, easier, is Me. Me going
in for my chances, spending for vast returns, Adorning myself to
bestow myself on the first that will take me, Not asking the sky
to come down to my good will, Scattering it freely forever. Walt
Whitman


I don't like Bruce Springsteen.  Well, shall we just say that I
have a soft spot for "Hungry Heart" but that's only because I
associate it with one incredible week in Glasgow with Phoebe and
there was a jukebox in the pub where we would play snooker, get
drunk and then go back to what passed for a hotel and have sex
until neither of us could walk.  But there I was again in
another dingy hotel, this time in the City of Brotherly Love,
with a woman more capable of handing out passion and heartbreak
than Phoebe ever was.  In that hotel room while Scully cleaned
the scrape on her face in the bathroom, I sat on the bed and
looked out at the dark city with an echo of a song bouncing
around in the dried gourd where I used to keep my brain.

The night has fallen, I'm lyin' awake I can feel myself fading
away So receive me brother with your faithless kiss Or will we
leave each other alone like this On the streets of Philadelphia

So the movie had been about AIDS, which made me think about
brother Christopher and his unpleasant habit of sharing with his
stable of girl and boy whores.  Not to mention Darien's
occupational hazard. But the elements that I carried in my
blood, bone, skin, and every other cell in my body were no less
lethal and dangerous than the HIV virus.  The genes. 

God, we were all awful in some way shape or form.  Dealers in
sin, pain, death, and weakness.  I quote the Rolling Stones:
"Every cop is a criminal, and all the sinners saints." Had I
ended up as a profiler because of this genetic taint? Was my
carefully controlled world going to fall apart around me and I'd
wake up one morning with Scully next to me, her torso opened
like a gutted bass and her blood on my hands? I'd been close to
hurting her on several occasions in the not-too-distant past and
I wanted to know what was finally going to short-circuit the
tiny bit of control that I had.

If I hadn't let Hal go he might still be alive.

I could flagellate myself all night but it would only make
Scully hover over me the way she did the baby back in Austin. 
What the hell was the deal with that anyway? She was calling the
hospital on an almost daily basis to find out how the thing was
doing and she thought I hadn't noticed. We were getting entirely
too good at figuring out the other one's tricks. For example,
she would walk out of that bathroom at any moment, fuss all over
the cut on my lip and then proceed to rip my clothes off and
fuck herself stupid to wipe out the sordid memories of Hal's
world.

I thought we were past that, I thought her hard resolve not to
care about me was finally breaking down, that she was warming up
to me to a certain degree.

When Scully came out of the bathroom, she had put a bandage
over the scrape on her face but the blue eyeshadow reigned
triumphant.

"I double dog dare you to walk into Skinner's office like that."

"Bite me, Mulder."

"Anywhere you want."

She had antiseptic and those darling little butterfly bandages
and we proceeded to do the Dance of the Beaten Man, the one
where I say no and she says yes and no one takes any bets on the
winner.

Those things pull at my skin in a really annoying way.

Scully, by contrast, pulls at my skin in a purely enticing way.
She had no sooner put away her doctor tools than she began
unbuttoning her blouse.

Let's see, I could resist and we could fight and then later
she'd probably come back, or she wouldn't, and either way I'd be
miserable.

I stood and walked over to her, finishing the job and sliding
the silk over her shoulders. There were still traces of adhesive
on her stomach from where the wire had been taped on and I bent
to lick at them, the roughness and sour taste an interesting
contrast to her peach-down skin. Taking her at her word, I
nibbled, trying to clean her off with my teeth, and she groaned.

"I know you like no one else does," I whispered as I eased her
skirt and panties down to the floor and pressed my face into her
stomach. She murmured something that sounded like agreement and
I squeezed her close to me, my hands on her hips sleeking down
her thighs and calves.

Straightening, I picked her up and carried her the few steps to
the bed--any farther and it would have been time for a
chiropractor, but I saw something real peering out of her eyes
and the strain on my back was worth it to get her full attention.

"Turn over," I ordered her and she blinked those blue topaz
eyes at me, then complied. She was on her hands and knees,
trembling a little with lust and uncertainty, and the worm on
her back was turning circles inside my head. Scully's like an
amusement park, the wait can be a hassle and the price is high,
but the ride makes it all worthwhile.

I stripped and joined her on the bed, spreading her legs
further with one hand as I moved my cock into position. A false
start made her jerk as if shocked and then I was inside her.

The back of her neck was salty--autopsies make her work up
quite a sweat. My thumbs caressed her nipples and she sighed
happily.

"Scully?" I moved one hand down to finger her clitoris, gently.

"Ah?"

"Why is it that we always have the best sex when the rest of
our relationship is at its worst?" She didn't say anything, but
I felt her lose our joint rhythm. "You remember, Scully," moving
my fingers a little faster, "that time right before you ran off
to Arizona without me. That was good, wasn't it?"

She grunted.

"So what's going on, Scully, I really want to know your
interpretation here." I stopped moving entirely and put both
hands on her hips, stilling her. She tried to push against me
and then tried to pull away, but I held her in place, feeling
her tighten further around me like a fist.

After a thirty-second eternity she bowed her head, letting the
hair fall in a shower over her eyes so that she couldn't see the
outside world. "I can't need you like that," she said. "Not all
at once."

Oddly enough the enormous gouge in my chest didn't affect my
erection at all, I suppose because the blood was already trapped
there.

"All right," I said, only squeaking a little. "All right." She
shuddered when I started moving again, shaking like a wooden
roller coaster as I tugged at her breasts and gnawed at her
shoulder.

She called out my name when she came.

****

Just off Head House square, we found Baylor's bookstore, Our
Bookshelf. It was a nice place, its subject matter identified by
a rustic pink triangle hanging in the window. Robert Rodi was
the featured author of the week..  I was surprised by how un-
campy it was. Lots of pale pine bookshelves, plants, Bach
playing on the stereo, comfy chairs for casual reading, and two
coffee pots labeled "Leaded" and "Unleaded" with a stack of
paper hot cups for patrons to use.  I could easily imagine my
brother Bill wandering in by accident, and then going into
cardiac arrest.  Mulder headed for the shelves in back and let
me deal with his doppelganger at the front desk.  But Baylor was
on the telephone and I picked up a coffee table book called
"Boys on the Beach" and watched Baylor over the tops of the
pages of beautiful men frolicking in naked splendor on tropic
sands. Idly, I wondered if I could write the book off on my
expense report.

Somehow, Baylor managed to look younger than the rest of the
brothers, even though his name indicated that he had been one of
the earlier issues.  His face was rounder and he seemed smaller
altogether, despite the neat goatee and cropped George Clooney
haircut. He was also about as camp as his store -- which is to
say, hardly at all. Dressed in chinos and a gray Henley shirt,
he fiddled with the earrings in his right ear and listened to
the caller.

"Yeah, I know that, but out of print means out of print . . . I
understand. No, I called the publisher and they told me that no
one was buying it so they stopped the print run.  Yeah?  Well
you can't make people buy things, right?  I still have four
copies left, do you want them or not?"

He tapped heavy silver rings on the countertop and leaned over
the glass with the familiar languid grace I saw every day.

"You could try a vanity press . . . " he winced and shut his
eyes, "well be an egomaniac and see if I care.  Right. 
Tomorrow, okay? See you later, Carl."

He hung up the phone with a restrained click and glared at it.

"Bitch," he muttered.

Becoming aware of the fact that I was staring at him, Baylor
looked up at me.  Seeing Mulder's face on someone else was still
making my stomach flip no matter how many times it had happened
lately. This time my stomach did a flip and a half gainer. 
Baylor's eyes were green, brilliant feline green.  My heart
finally started again when I realized he was wearing contact
lenses.

"Can I help you?" he asked.

I put down the book and took out my badge.

"Special Agent Dana Scully, FBI."

He smiled.

"Are you arresting me?"

"No.  It's not that at all.  We believe you may be in danger
because of your relationship to a...group of men. I'd like to
ask you to come with me so that you can be placed in protective
custody."

If anything, his smile got wider and he leaned his elbows on
the countertop and laced his fingers together with their silver
bands flaring in the sunlight.

"You know, it's not illegal to have relationships with men,
honey."

Damn those Mulders!  They were just like Pomeranians: smart,
perceptive, yappy, and determined to make me look stupid.

"I'm talking about a genetic relationship.  Members of your
family --your genetic family as opposed to your adoptive family -
- are systematically being killed and the Bureau would like to
take you to a safe house where you can be protected."

"You mean the Bureau would like me not to finish organizing the
march on City Hall next month," he gave me a patronizing smile,
"so who came up with this bullshit story?  More of the new Right
Wing Conservative Mafia?  Does Senator Helms sign your paycheck,
Miss Fed?"

"Mister Francis--"

"You're going to have to try harder than that," he added.

The smile dropped from his face when Mulder blocked the
sunlight from the window.

Baylor blinked and then threw up his hands in resignation.

"Okay, okay.  Talk to me."

After flipping the sign on the door over to 'Closed', Baylor
led us into the back of the store.  In the office/storeroom,
Mulder explained the situation while Baylor paced and smoked. 
When Mulder was done, Baylor looked at both of us with a tide of
frustration swamping his photocopy features.

"That's Science Fiction.  It's not possible."

"Don't I wish."

"Even if it were true, I can't just pack up and run.  I have a
life. My store.  I have an author coming in next week for a book
signing.  I have a lover who I don't want to leave. I have
twenty thousand handbills I have to get printed for the march
next month," he laughed a bitter little Mulder chuckle, "I have
ten cats that live in the alley that I feed."

"They're going to try to kill you.  Hal Rothman is dead, Arlen
Petrovsky is dead, Christopher Farber is dead, and you could be
next," I pointed out.

"Agent Scully, half my friends are dead and you expect me to
care about strangers?"

"Care about yourself," I suggested.

"No, sorry, I appreciate you coming here to warn me, but I
can't leave. I have too many obligations."

"We can arrest you," Mulder said in a very quiet voice.

Baylor laughed and put his hand on Mulder's shoulder.

"You can try, but I have a fucking fantastic lawyer.  Really,
thank you for warning me, but I'll have to take my chances.  All
right?"

"Did you see his wrists?"  Mulder asked me when we stopped at a
charming little coffeehouse a block from Baylor's store.

Sitting outside, watching normal people go along the charming
re-created Federalist street, I could believe that the story of
the twins was as false as the Amish man wearing Reeboks making
funnel cakes across the street..

"Hm?" I asked and sipped at the heavenly brew.

"Marked, here and here," Mulder pointed just above and below
the joint "binding marks, from leather cuffs."

"Why do I not want to know how you know this?"

He gave me one of his graveside smiles, a flash of white stone
in a dark night.

"And in the racks at the back of the store?  Coffee table book
called Prometheus Bound. Tasteful, arty, Mapplethorpe
derivative, two hundred glossy photos of my brother Baylor with
cigarette burns, flog marks, ball-gags, spreader bars, dildoes,
and nipple clips -- a veritable plethora of masochistic
ingenuity.  I suppose you didn't know that his penis is pierced
either." 

"We weren't introduced."

"So," he stretched his legs out under the table and leaned back
in his chair, "you going to show me where you got your tattoo?"

If he'd poured steaming coffee in my lap it would have hurt less.

"Maybe I should get 'M' tattooed on my forehead so you won't
confuse me with any of the others."

"Why don't you just get your penis pierced?"

He smirked.

"Want to do it for me?"

"Don't tempt me."

Back at the hotel as he packed up for the next leg of the
Magical Mystery Mulder Twin Tour, I took my cell phone into the
bathroom and called the hospital in Texas to see how the baby --
my baby --was doing. When I came out, Mulder was sitting on the
bed wearing the expression of a dog who has overheard the word
"vet" in conversation. 


"What do you say we forget the whole thing, quit our jobs and
move to Key West and open a hamburger stand?" he asked in a
staccato combination of jest and desperation.

""When do we leave?" I joked back at him.

"As soon as you finish packing." 

I knew he wasn't serious, so I continued to pack.  He sighed
and flopped back on the bed.

His cellphone rang.

Baylor Francis was dead.

****

All things considering, the Philadelphia police weren't all
that bad, once they stopped doing double takes and whispering
amongst themselves. Scully paused to check with the detective in
charge while I pushed past the forensics teams with my badge as
my passport. Baylor had lived above his store and the apartment
was pretty nice --lots of books and the requisite Mantegna Saint
Sebastian over the bed where Baylor's body lay.  Like the
Renaissance painting overhead, Baylor was nude, his body shining
silver in the light from the forensic photographer's lights.  

My twin was lying on his back, his wrists and ankles in leather
shackles that hooked to the cast iron bedstead.   There were
score marks on his chest, the blood dried and caked on his skin.
The black leather gag cut deeply into his face, and over the
band his face was the usual swollen blue mess of one who had
been strangled.  A contact had fallen from one eye and the dead,
glazed orbs that stared back at me were mismatched emerald and
dull hazel.

Underneath the smeary blood I could see his scars. I'd told
Scully about the cigarette burns but not about their extent, the
old ones that had lightened and spread like ringworm over his
pectorals when he grew up and then the newer ones. The patterns
they made, fresh on ancient, were like raindrops on a pond when
a storm is just beginning. In black and white on glossy paper
they had been gorgeous. Now they were just background, lost
against his corpse's flesh.

Even in death, his shaved pubic hair made his cock look bigger
than mine.

I tried.  I really had.  Maybe I should have cuffed him and
hauled him off to the safe house myself -- but I had been afraid
that he'd see it as a form of foreplay.  I should have done
something, rather than leaving him like this – I may as well
have tightened the strap around his throat myself.

Yisborach, v'yistabach, v'yispoar, y'yisroman, v'yisnaseh,
v'yishador, v'yishalleh, v'yishallol, sh'meh d'kudsho, b'rich
hu--

Sorry, man.

A gleam of aqua caught my eye and I crouched down next to the
bed and picked it up with latex fingers. Trojan wrappers.  Two
of them. The condom of champions and the official condom of the
Mulder family.   At least he had been practicing safe sex --
although it hadn't been safe enough, apparently.

Someone else was going to have to organize the protest march.

I handed the wrappers to the forensic tech with the evidence
bags and rendezvoused back with Scully in the kitchen.  The
detective in charge, by the name of Bradley, was pleasantly
deferential to us Feds, unlike his Big Apple brethren.

"We're twins," I said before he could ask.

"Right," Bradley didn't skip a beat, "at about five this
afternoon we got a cliched anonymous call that your brother was
dead from a pay phone in the Independence National Park down the
street.  Seven zillion fingerprints on that telephone if we even
bothered to dust it. We got up here, found your brother as you
see him, and your business card was on his refrigerator under a
magnet.  We called you since an FBI agent's business card is not
de rigeur in a homosexual S&M killing."

Cliche? De Rigeur?  How cute, an educated cop.  I wanted to
press him in my field journal as a momento.

"Is that what you think it is?" Scully asked.

"It happens. On occasion, you get a couple who aren't well
educated in the safety protocols of this particular form of
recreation and people get hurt, people get dead.  Then we get an
uproar in the community that law enforcement doesn't care
because the victim is gay or because the victim has an exotic
sexual need."

Bradley shrugged.

"Now with this one, because of his activities and frankly he
was a real pain in the ass with the Aids Awareness Action Squad,
they're going to cry murder."

"They'd be right," I said and pointed back at the bedroom, "I
found condom wrappers in the bedroom, did your people find
condoms anywhere?"

"No."

"And you won't. Our killer is smarter than to leave such useful
genetic material around," Scully offered.

"Or he's collecting semen."

Bradley looked at me as though I had suggested that eating
children with a bernaise sauce was a good idea.

"We just haven't found them yet, that's all."

"Keep up the good work. Call me if you find anything.  You have
my number."

It seemed like someone else did as well.  Ten numbers. The
question, as always, was who.


12/20 I am given up by traitors. I talk wildly, I have lost my
wits, I and nobody else am the greatest traitor. I went myself
first to the headland, my own hands carried me there. Walt
Whitman

Ian Dubler was committed to a hospital up in Scarsdale. It's a
good thing New York is a big state; otherwise they all might
have bumped into one another. Ian had supposedly signed the
commitment papers voluntarily, probably the way putting your
hands behind your head and spreading your legs is voluntary when
the cop tells you to do it.

Mulder read through five years' worth of psych evaluations,
flipping through them with scanner-like efficiency. I stuck with
what I knew best, reviewing the equally thick files describing
the physical manifestations of Ian's self-destructiveness. The
hospital administrator and the hospital's lawyer hovered over us
nervously.

"What are those scars?" I asked the hospital administrator,
pointing to the white lines in the pictures of Ian's skin. Thin
white lines on the back of the neck, the front of the chest,
below the ear, in the soft flesh of the upper arm, below the
buttocks, and at least five other places.

"Ian has been attempting to kill himself for many years," she
said. "We haven't always been as watchful as we should have
been, he's a very bright man, especially when it comes to new
ways to cut himself."

"He tried to commit suicide by cutting himself on the back of
the neck?" I asked skeptically. "That incision doesn't seem very
long or deep. Are you sure he did it to himself?"

"Who else would have done it?"

Ah yes, she lived in a world without conspiracy, I'd forgotten.
Naturally there were no X-rays and thus no evidence of implants.

The case worker pointed out that seeing Mulder would probably
upset Ian and undo whatever small progress that had been made
recently. From what I could see reflected in Mulder's face they
were deluding themselves, progress for Ian would involve a spade
and a closed coffin, but I wasn't here to piss people off.

So I faced Ian alone, the one-way mirror behind me so Ian could
only see one reflection of himself rather than two.   When the
attendant brought Ian in I saw the terrible reality of what
Mulder always had the potential to become:  a pajama-clad mental
patient bloated and puffy from too many starchy foods and
sporting an institutional pallor.  Ian settled his bathrobe
around his chest with an aristocratic shrug of his shoulders, a
talent he must have learned from long familiarity with the
restraints, and assumed the chair across from me. Mad or not,
the intelligence hummed behind the hazel eyes.

"I think I dreamed about you the other night," he said.

My skin crept.

"Really?"

"You're quite lovely, pity about the tattoo though, it doesn't
suit you," he smiled and leaned back in the chair, crossing his
long legs in an appallingly Mulderlike gesture, "You know I've
never actually had sex.  I've been locked up since I was twelve
and the dating possibilities have much to be desired. In Texas
they were very careful, I was never molested by anyone who
didn't have authorization to do it, but here I fear my long-held
virginity may disappear one night if some janitor gets horny."

He looked up at the mirror over my shoulder while I tried to
kill the mothbeating of fear in my stomach.  How the fuck did he
know about my tattoo? It wasn't as though that was common
knowledge or mentioned on any file of an official nature. 
Unlike Roche, Ian had no access to the Internet or to the
outside world other than the television.

"He's here, isn't he?" Ian asked.

"Yes."

"Which one?"

I had to think about that for a moment.

"Mine.  We just want to ask you some questions about your--
illness."

"You won't hurt me?" he gave me a flash of distrust that,
coming from Mulder's face, made my chest hurt.

"I'll try not to.  Do you know anything about the Project?"

I caught the almost imperceptible cringe, lush black lashes
dropping to cover the fear in his eyes. It was important to
remember that this man was not Mulder. I could not do this
interrogation if I kept mistaking Ian for Mulder.

I leaned forward and put my hand out across the tiny table and
was able to brush against his lower arm with my fingertips.

"Careful," he said, "don't you know that madness is contagious?
That's why we're not allowed outside."

"The Project?"

"But hasn't Jason told you? Jason does all my public relations,
I am one of Roush's assets after all--or was until the drugs
depressed my libido too much."

"Tell me what they did to you." I kept my voice even, letting a
tinge of warmth creep into it. 

"Everything," he said. "The implants are all gone and now I
don't hear the Greys any more. I have heard the aliens singing,
each to each. I do not think they will sing for me."

"You were used for communication purposes?" I remained agnostic
on the existence of technologically superior aliens, but I
wanted to coax Ian into becoming less cryptic.

He shook his head. "I was a radio receiver but I burned out,
burned out five years ago, too much static you know. And it's no
good if you can't choose the station, Dr. Mann tried so hard but
she could never find the right knob. I think my knobs were
broken off, if you know what I mean." He leered at me.

I frowned, which appeared to amuse him. "If you want me to tell
you that Roush used my body and my man-juices for an extended
period of years, until neither mind nor body would take any more
abuse, I could say that. But what do you think you'll learn from
me? That your Lindsay is the lucky one?" I didn't understand for
a moment, and then realized: of course from his perspective they
wouldn't be "Mulders." It was all how you looked at it.

Ian's hands fluttered against their restraints like birds with
broken wings. "If you want to believe in fairy tales of safety,
go ahead. All I know is that I feel the other lights going out
and I don't know why I wasn't allowed to be the first. I suspect
Jason is up to his old tricks, the big bully. As flies to wanton
boys are we to the Greys, they kill us for their sport."

I looked helplessly into the mirror, wanting some clue. Mulder
would be able to get through to him, wouldn't he? "I'm trying to
save lives," I finally settled on, "and I'm trying to prevent
what happened to you from happening to other children, other men
and women."

He cackled. "Too fucking late, dear! Jason would never have
given you my name if it didn't advance his purposes, and I can
guarantee that his purposes aren't yours." He leaned forward
conspiratorially. "We're blood brothers you know. The bees are
almost ready to be released. But to be the Queen's consort,
Jason has to get rid of all the other drones. He's acting on his
own in this, that's your one hope, the Lindsay line suffers from
almost complete azoospermia and no one but Jason has any
interest in decreasing the potential supply still further." 

He looked at me more closely, and I was drawn into those eyes,
which were at that moment the exact shade of mahogany that
Mulder's had been when he'd been zoned out on the ketamine and
we'd first had sex. "I wouldn't worry much about the condoms if
I were you," he said, and grimaced a parody of Mulder's
seductive pout. "If I get out of here, do you wanna go out
sometime?"

Then he lunged forward and would have managed to split his head
open on the table if it hadn't been that soft scratchy plastic
that children's furniture is made from. Instead he just bounced
back up, looking disappointed but not surprised, and grinned at
me again.

"We're liars all. Believe none of us!"

And then the orderlies were back in the room, picking him up
despite his clever use of passive resistance techniques, and
they dragged him out into the hallway and there was nothing but
whiteness and canvas-padded walls.. He began to sing. "Seven
little Indian boys chopping up sticks, one chopped himself in
halves and then there were six."

I followed them out into the hallway, just in time to see
Mulder step out of the observation room.  Ian spotted him
immediately and began to laugh..  He laughed as the orderlies
took him away, the sound bouncing off the scuffed white walls. 
The look that Mulder gave me afterwards was one of acidic pain.

****

Scully gave me the poor-baby look that is usually the preface
to her version of comfort sex. The motel was the first we'd
found on the way back from the hospital.  The weakness of our
selection principle was evident as soon as I got a look at the
'seventies decor, lots of orangey mandalas on the carpet and
bedspread, and smelled the ingrained cigarette smoke from the
heavy drapes.

Even in this setting, the thought of comfort sex was not
unappealing. Better than Cheetos, in any event, which was the
best thing in the vending machine.

I think I was rooted like a tree in the middle of the floor for
a long time before I felt her arms insinuate themselves around
my waist, her shoulders and cheek and torso press up against my
back.

Sometimes Scully mothers me, if I understand the term in its
conventional sense and not the sense with which I am most
intimately familiar. She does the other too, but this time it
felt more like a Campbell's soup commercial than a Mulder family
drama.

This is not inherently a bad thing. If I were truly Scully's
lover we would have many more roles for one another. I am her
chauffeur, her goad, her inflatable sex toy and now her sugar
daddy. I would like to be by turns her servant and her master,
her confidant, her playmate, her helpmeet. I want to be her
pantheon and her congregation, cook, thief, wife, and lover. We
make so many boxes and rules for people, but surely a man like
me, a man with the madness of ten men, could overflow all such
artificial boundaries for her. It is the ability to play more
than one role and not the content of the roles on particular
nights that matters, and I suppose that as always I hoped that
tonight, just once, I would get it right.

Yes, I am describing infinite need but in some lights I think
Scully goes on forever.

I turned in her arms and gathered her in to me like a bouquet.

Tonight's theme was skin. She didn't resist when I slid my
hands under her shirt and lifted it away from her body. For a
while petting her while she hummed low in her throat was enough.
My hands felt enormous against her doll's frame as I covered
every inch of her, trying to read her Braille messages with my
fingers and failing. We were still standing as she stepped out
of the jeans and panties and pressed herself close to me. Her
skin burned like magnesium as I palmed her shoulders, her
elbows, down her waist and around the miraculous tightness of
her ass.

She's too short for anything but groping when we're both
vertical, so I chose a bed at random and led her to it. Soft
kitty-like sounds, the thrum of an animal engine, vibrated in
her throat.

Maybe I needed a mammalian pet, fish were obviously not doing
the stress-reduction job.

She was with me in flashes, in between the scratchy image of
Ian distressing her as I watched helplessly through the one-way
glass. Stroking, rolling, reaching and holding. Her hands
tugging ineffectually at my pants, her mouth dampening my shirt
so that I could feel it wet and heavy like her kiss against my
shoulder.

I wanted to stretch her on a rack so that there would be more
of her, enough of her to surround me the way I surrounded her. I
wanted to turn her into a Klein bottle, the kind that only has
one continuous surface that is both inside and outside, so that
I could touch everything that constitutes Scully.

When I pulled away for the inevitable prophylactic the pain of
losing contact was almost enough to destroy my arousal, but then
her cinnamon sugar breasts brushed over my lips again and I was
lost. I came too quickly, both of us wanted to get through the
act with a minimum of fuss, but I needed more from her and she
wasn't unwilling.

My tongue surrounded her. I traveled from clavicle to belly
button to ankle, and held tight as she jerked against my mouth
when I traced the tendons in her feet. She came again, groaning,
when I took her toes into my mouth and I was very proud; I
hadn't gotten that sort of reaction from her in a while.

I had my head between her legs, tasting her, before the
contractions stopped.

I left Scully draped across the bed like the pelt of a wildcat
and returned to the mental hospital. I still had the fake Jason
ID, and Jason was next of kin; that and a bunch of dead
presidents got the night orderly to let me into Ian's room. The
man I'd bribed was nervous enough to stay around to make sure
that Ian didn't go all Hannibal Lecter on me and bite my face
off, but he held himself far enough back that he couldn't
overhear our conversation.

"Hello, beautiful," Ian said as soon as I turned on the lights.
He was strapped into his bed and I could see from the dilation
of his eyes that he was floating like a supertanker on a sea of
antipsychotics, but he was reasonably lucid for all that. Maybe
it was habituation.

"How long have you known about the twins?"

He bit his lip and it began to bleed. I suppressed the urge to
mirror the action. God, all this whiteness could make anyone go
insane, and I was at least able to pace.

"That's a nice way to greet your long-lost brother...what's
your name, by the way?"

"Mulder," I said. 

He frowned. "They never got to M, I thought?"

Now we were getting somewhere. "Who didn't?"

"Them...the ubiquitous, invisible Them." He laughed, bright and
childlike, when I shuddered. "Oh come on, that's practically
screaming from your mind."

I approached the bed and knelt so that we were merely inches
apart. Up close, he didn't look exactly like the man I saw in
rearview mirrors; the cheeks were puffier and the hair dirty. It
must be difficult to wash him in full restraints and I could
tell that the staff wouldn't always remember to try. "Can you
read my mind?"

Another gout of laughter exploded from him; warm spittle
sprayed my face and I blinked, feeling once again the credulous
fool everyone else assumed me to be. I'd thought Ian at least
would respect that openness about me, but as usual I was wrong.

"My mind, your mind, who can tell? Do you know your own mind, M-
-you must be *Fox*, that's right, the Fibbie."

"Who told you that?" Wear them down with compassion and
incessant questions, that's the approved strategy. I only wished
that I knew whether this was interrogation or self-analysis I
was undergoing.

Ian licked the blood from his lip contemplatively. I followed
the pink gleam of his tongue. He was smart enough to be dead, if
that's what he wanted. Why wasn't he dead? How had the staff
here kept him alive for so long? 

He turned his head as far away from me as he could and
sniffled. I could see that he had a mole about an inch below his
ear, and I reached up to feel the spot on my own neck. The skin
was smooth, but it also *wasn't*, in the same dreamlike way that
the light in John Lee Roche's dreams had been there and not-
there.

"I told your little friend that the drugs ex'ed out my libido a
long time ago," he said as if in answer to my question. "But I
didn't mention that the harvesting continued for a while
thereafter. Have you ever heard of electroejaculation? Used on
cattle, and sometimes on men who are brain-dead or newly dead. I
wouldn't recommend it as one of the greater sexual pleasures.
Well, not for the subject, anyway. Jason..."

I put my hand to his chin and tilted it back towards me, almost
bouncing on the balls of my feet in my excitement. His paper-dry
skin crinkled underneath my fingertips, and I jerked as if
goosed myself. We weren't exactly matter and antimatter, there
was no need for a containment field, but nonetheless touching
him was distressing. I felt ghostly worms along my own jaw and
shook my head, but I didn't let my brother go.

"Tell me about Jason," I directed. 

He moaned like the wind at the top of a skyscraper. An image
came to me: Jason, placing his/my hand over my/his hand on
my/his cock, urging me to give in to him, give it to him, the
world black and white as it is in the cameras whose lenses I can
always see tracking us. The little red lights flashing when the
cameras pan around the room provide the only color in the world.
I love you Ian and his breath hot on the side of my neck.  And
it doesn't matter that they like to watch, maybe they don't
*like* to watch, watching is what they do. It's inevitable so
just relax and enjoy it, Ian, I'm your brother and I love you,
his hand so knowledgeable and swift and the contrast between
this overt pleasure and everything else in the world so stark
that there's no reason to deny him.  I love you Ian.  I will
take care of you. For this gift, all he asks is my duty and my
salvation and my love, someone's got to make it out of here and
it's obvious it can't be you, it should be me he says, so why
don't you just give it up? I'm your brother and I love you.  I
will take care of you.  Forever.

And the orderly was picking me up off the floor as I struggled
away from him, unable to be touched by someone who was not me. 
I realized that if I had not been nearly forty and freshly
fucked I would have another hard-on and simultaneously that Ian
was seizing.

I raised myself up like a drunk and hurled myself on Ian.
Underneath me, his bloated body felt like a waterbed.  I prayed
that he was still tuned to the same channel as before.  Dimly, I
felt something stir in my head. I clicked on my mental file
folder and opened it.

Scully asleep, her hair burning the pillow, smiling at me in
Alaska, her legs in sheer stockings, bending over a filing
cabinet in our office months after we'd met and me hard as a
rock refusing to get up from my desk, her cool fingers touching
my forehead that horrible week in Rhode Island, her stone frozen
face in San Diego, the curve of her spine, the elegant tilt of
her head, that "get a grip Mulder" look she patented, the way
she felt around me, her smell, and taste, and the way that her
breath hitched in my ear the moment before she came, and the way
that she looks up at me from her laptop  in a thousand hotels,
the small smiles, the ketchup on her cheek, and that derisive
snort I've heard more times than there are numbers for. . .  

Hands grabbed me and pulled me away.

I staggered out into the hall as the orderly busied himself
covering his ass, calling for help and pushing me toward the
exit.

I walked for a long while before I was ready to flag down a
cab. I thought I understood a little bit about what Ian was
trying to tell me in that flood-of-consciousness delivery. My
current theory was that, unlike the others of us, Ian and Jason
had been raised together, just to see what would happen.

And sure enough there was a cannibalistic twin, only he didn't
eat flesh, he didn't reabsorb parts of the other twin into his
body. Regardless of what you thought about Melissa Ephesian's
worldview, I suspected that Bill and Tina Mulder's child did not
have enough of a soul to be spread out among ten copies, and
Jason had eaten whatever part-soul lived in Ian's head in order
to survive.

He had also had a sexual relationship with Ian, never mind
whether Ian's claims to purity, which I could even accept, were
technically true. 

Was that incest or masturbation?

He ain't heavy, he's my brother.

Call the cannibalism a metaphor, but I was willing to bet that
Jason had overborne Ian enough to free himself to rise in the
Roush hierarchy. With an alter ego in the basement that was
perfectly open to whatever horrible experiment was proposed,
Jason was free to look after his own interests.. Weren't his
interests also Ian's, weren't they the same person?

Ergo, I was the same person.

No.  Not even close.

13/20 The hiss of the surgeon's knife, the gnawing teeth of his
saw, Wheeze, chick, swash of falling blood, short wild scream,
and tinge, dull, tapering groan. These so, these irretrievable.
Walt Whitman

George Naxos. I hadn't heard of him, which was a little
surprising since Canada doesn't have that many card-carrying
serial killers. Five or six in the last twenty years, about the
number you'd expect for Ohio. Serial killing is an almost
uniquely American phenomenon, like baseball and apple pie. So
when they do catch one outside our borders, ISU tends to hear
about it; we're often consulted during the hunt. Or the officers
who worked the case call us afterwards, trying to find
explanation or expiation or whatever it is you need after you
witness the work of a man who has a compelling urge to reenact a
Bosch nightmare on human canvases. And ISU cc's most of that to
me, at first because Patterson thought he could guilt me into
coming back and then later because no one ever thought to
rescind the order.

I suspected, looking at the picture, that someone had
interrupted the transmission of this particular report to ISU. I
suspect John Douglas, as the son of a bitch had never liked me.
He probably had a good old laugh when he saw the photo.

I was really beginning to dislike that nose. It bred true,
along with the firestarting, bedwetting, and animal mutilation.
George had brown hair just a shade lighter than mine. In the
prison picture his eyes looked muddy brown, but mine did too in
the right light.

George had made his name in Ontario. He liked nurses a lot.
He'd wait in hospital parking lots, outside of old folks' homes,
near health clinics.

I'd read the file and tried to keep Scully from reading it
herself by summarizing. "He raped them anally and then stabbed
them in the abdomen, waited for them to die, then dressed them
back up in their nice white outfits and left them to rot in
graveyards, draped over the headstones of girls who'd died
young, usually about eight or nine years old."

She shuddered, her eyes rounded like Little Orphan Annie's. Not
much freaks Scully out, but sisters will still do it.

"But wait, that's not the spooky part. It's true that the woman
who raised him--I'd prefer not to call her 'mother' just to keep
an open mind about this--was a nurse, and that she may have
abused him. I wonder if they looked for that in the adoptive
parents, or if it was just a side benefit of using the kind of
people who'd participate in the Project? Anyway, the spooky part
is this--George didn't have an eight-year-old sister who died or
disappeared at a crucial point in his psychosexual development."

Scully didn't need reminding that she knew someone else who
matched that description. She blinked, and I almost heard her
swallow. "That doesn't mean that he was...picking up signals
from you or anything like that, Mulder."

"I'm sorry, your Ph.D. is in what? That may work for Dr.
Schlesinger on the radio, when the callers can't tell a
physiotherapist from a psychologist, but I can assure you that
there should be an eight-year-old sister involved. Or at least a
neighbor child, but that's not true either, according to all the
interviews in his hometown. When he was twelve he just fell into
a deep depression, nearly catatonic, and then one day he woke up
and everything was fine, except for a slight shortage of
neighborhood pets."

"And your theory is that the two of you were somehow connected
because of your genetic relationship?"

I suppose that it's a major step forward that Scully wasn't
contesting the likelihood of said genetic relationship, but that
didn't manage to decrease her overall skepticism level.

"You know all the twin studies. Separated at birth and they end
up in the same jobs, married to women with the same names,
driving the same cars. And how could you forget the Eves? *They*
knew what the others were doing all the way across the country,
and they may well have come from the same lab I was assembled
in."

I could see the synapses clicking over in her head. Scully
always had the most trouble with people who had strange powers.
Full-fledged physical mutations, even the man who was cancer,
didn't bother her nearly as much. She didn't like the
combination of apparent normality with exceptionality; maybe it
reminded her too much of her own condition.

"I can't deny that you might feel some kind of connection to
him...but without understanding the mechanism we can't rule out
coincidence, or even deliberate replication of your trauma by
the men behind this experiment. Just because the neighbors
didn't know doesn't mean that there weren't visitors in the
middle of the night, tormenting this child for their own power-
crazed agendas."

Wow, Scully *was* beginning to sound a lot like me, at least me
five years ago when my theories were beginning to get wild.

"But why," she continued, looking at me, "would they want to
replicate the trauma? Why would they, as you suggested, choose
parents likely to be abusive?" And what did Bill and Tina do to
you in the middle of the night, her eyes asked, the compassion
as unwanted as it was ill-timed. I would have explained that
Bill and Tina, upper-class assimilated tightasses that they
were, never needed to use their hands on me. Both of them were
brilliant, after all, and words were more than enough. Never
touched me at all after age four, as far as I can remember. I
even put my own band-aids on.

But enough about you, Agent Mulder. "Childhood trauma,
especially that extended over a period of time, is known to
produce dissociative states in many survivors. But I can't
really explain why anyone would go to the trouble of creating
all these children and then attempt to guarantee that they'd be
trembling on the ragged edge of insanity all their lives. I
think it's more plausible that whatever psychic connection
exists, exists as a side effect only, perhaps an unwanted one."

The guards marched George in, forcing his shackled legs to move
by kicking him when he wouldn't shuffle his feet. They dumped
him in the chair and left, sparing only a few seconds to gawp at
me.

George kept his eyes on the floor until the door closed, and
then immediately turned to look at Scully, probably because he
could smell her.

"Hello," he smiled at Scully. She took her standard position by
the door, arms crossed like cannon, staring down at the seated
man for the psychological advantage.

"She's not your type," I said bluntly and swung the chair
around so I could straddle it, like the Marlboro man would have
done. "She's got her M.D.. and you like the R.N.s."

"Doctors'll do in a pinch," he said and finally looked at me.
Then he flinched. "Who the fuck are you?"

"That's no way to greet family," I said and grinned, feeling
another shred of sanity pull loose and drift to the floor like
dandruff. In person, the resemblance was almost complete. If he
hadn't had the tattoo circling his throat, a barbed wire collar
with one artfully done drop of blood, he could have made it past
the desk at the Hoover building. And maybe even then, they all
knew I was crazy and maybe the tattoo would seem in character.
"Has anyone ever asked you about the Project?"

"I made a vase in pottery class the other day," he offered, and
I reminded myself that the asinine intelligence had followed the
nose as well.

Scully took over, and she did me proud. "Have you ever
discovered strange scars on your body for whose origin you
cannot account? Have you ever experienced 'missing time'? Do you
have any memories of being 'contacted' by strange visitors?
Heard voices in your head?"

He just laughed. "Is this another test? Honey, you're welcome
to examine my body, I've got plenty to show you."

I reached out and grabbed his chin, forcing him to watch me.
"You couldn't get it up with the ones who were live and willing,
George, your bravado does not impress me. Your cock would
shrivel to the size of an ant's if you actually got a chance
with a real woman. Now answer the questions."

George tried to laugh again but it was working about as well as
his other social skills. "Fuck, I don't know. I've always been
crazy. Sure I see things, I guess, I hear things and the doctors
here, their faces keep changing, sometimes while I watch. But no
one else sees it. Anyway what does it matter? Nuts or not, I'll
be here 'til I die."

We left with renewed exhortations to his jailers to watch him
carefully. This was Canada, home of the Mounties, surely the
corruption wouldn't extend this far. I almost hoped that it did;
to have George survive the thinning of the Mulder herd would be
the grossest of insults.

****

My phone rang just after we got through the door. Mulder had
already dropped his shoes and tie in roughly the same place on
the floor.

I kicked my own shoes off as I hit the connect button. "Scully."

"It's Zippy, Dana."

"What is it?"

"Your friend Ian Dubler killed himself. Somehow he got free of
his restraints after the two of you left. He grabbed a guard's
gun and blew his face away."

"Are you sure it was voluntary?"

"Look, I believe that someone is out to get these guys, but
from what the hospital told me about Ian's record, he was only
following up on a long-held ambition. I'd guess that if there
was any outside interference it was just helping him get free
long enough to kill himself."

That made sense to me. "Anything else?"

"No ma'am," he said, sounding offended. I'd gotten too used to
stripped-down communication with Mulder, I wasn't paying enough
attention to the niceties of conversation.

"Thank you for calling us," I said, trying to sound
appreciative and interested. "We had a...rough conversation with
George Naxos. We're still a little shaky."

I could hear Zippy's choked laugh above the static. "Spooky's
always a little shaky. I'm surprised you let anything get to
you."

"Sometimes it's not a matter of letting, Zippy."

"Yeah," he said and then there was nothing but an open line.

"Who's dead now?" Mulder asked as soon as I put the phone down.

"Ian Dubler," I reported.

Mulder had that posture that never failed to terrify and annoy
me simultaneously. He was hunched over, his arms wrapped around
himself, self-comforting. I walked over to the bed and put my
hand on his shoulder. 

He shuddered away. "Don't you have something better to do than
watch me fall apart?"

"I don't want you to fall apart."

Mulder laughed once, a bark as bitter as his semen.

I guess I deserved that. I'd hurt him badly, in a number of
interrelated ways. The familiar resentment surged through my
veins, how dare he rely on me like that. I wanted to tell him
that I'd never encouraged him to love me.

But as soon as I thought that, as always, the pitiless
instructor in me, the one who did autopsies for demonstration
purposes, refused to accept it. Didn't you? it asked. What did
you expect would happen when you stood by him and it was obvious
that he's never believed in anyone before?

"I'm sorry," I said and thought I could hear Mulder's voice
saying the same words, apologizing for anything and everything,
apologizing to the stars and the sea and the wind.

"I'm going to take a shower now," he said, and I took it as my
signal to leave. This wasn't over, but I just couldn't face him,
not right then.

****

The shower that I took was long and hot, hot enough to make my
cock burn and forget about other kinds of wet heat for awhile.
Other men may take cold showers to cool their ardor, but I
always preferred burning it out of myself.  In the steamy
bathroom mirror I considered my reflection.  The shadows under
my eyes had been darker and /or lighter, but my cheekbones still
had that sharply unhealthy look. I swallowed a couple aspirin, a
couple Tagamet, and an Ambien to get me through the night. 

If I lasted the night. I dredged up the next verse of Ian's
little ditty. "Six little Indian boys playing with a hive/A
bumblebee stung one and then there were five." I was vaguely
grateful that the murders were not in fact tracking the rhyme;
that would just be too baroque. And if it's not baroque, don't
fix it.

Whoa. I wasn't just flying, I was in low earth orbit.

I slithered between the rough hotel sheets and flicked on the
television.  The pain in my gut was slowly tapering off to a
grinding ache.  That I could deal with.  While the pain ground,
I surfed through the cable channels.  A few minutes of surfing
came up with paydirt -- one of the cable channels was playing a
James Bond movie. I would have lied if I told you I knew the
name of that particular movie, but it was the one with Plenty
O'Toole in it.  That was the girl's name at any rate. I never
forget a -- face.

Before Plenty ended up floating in a Las Vegas pool like an
inflatable doll after one of Hefner's backyard parties, I was
snoozing on my back and lost the thread of Bond's plot. The
television clicking off roused me from my semi-conscious state
in time to enjoy feeling her body wriggle onto the lumpish hotel
mattress next to me.

And it wasn't Plenty O'Toole.

Warm hands reached for me in the darkness and I gave myself up
to be consumed.

Her fingers traced over the skin of my chest and I breathed the
way I had on those occasions I'd had a tracheotomy tube removed.
Her nose was cool as a puppy's against my collarbone and her
tongue as hot. Truth to be told, I would have been just as
content to stay intertwined like that until morning, but milady
was not terribly enamored of the sleeping-together-without-sex
option, having tried it and found it wanting.

I flailed out and managed to find the lamp on the bedside
table. Between the drugs and the damsel it took me another two
tries to actually flick it on, and then I could see as I dug
around through my toiletries kit for the condoms. I guess I knew
all along that she was coming, so to speak, or I would have left
it in the bathroom.

Scully took the condom from my hand and gently smoothed it on,
like she was bandaging me from some hurt.

I left the light on as she rode me. There's nothing more erotic
than watching Scully's breasts change shape as she slides up and
down above me. The way they sway and stretch, moving with animal
innocence as she breathes, the skin soft as goosedown
contrasting with the crinkled cellophane of her nipples.

When I came it was like something in a dream.

****

He'd taken something, I realized, feeling the narcotic softness
of his muscles under my body.  Mulder's sleep disorder is such
common knowledge that it practically has its own website.  I'd
encouraged him to take the Ambien that the latest doctor had
proscribed. Now I was cuddling a rapidly snoozing Mulder when
all I wanted to do was break past the barriers of my mind and
become a creature of body only.  I wanted sex and he wanted to
sleep.  Typical of him to turn the gender cliche inside out.  

He's got wonderful skin, like the belly of a frog, so smooth
and practically feminine.  He even smells good when he's clean.
All in all Mulder is really not that poor of an example of the
North American Male when you can divorce the Jungian nightmare
inside his head from his body.  I didn't climb into his bed to
talk either.

Under the stiff hotel sheets, I smoothed my hand down the
carefully maintained slope of his abdomen and reached for his
cock and found it half-hard and stirring restlessly under my
touch.  He buried his face in my hair and sighed, one hand
caressing my breast in an abstracted way.  So the brain was
starting to shut down but the lower centers were still
operating.  I slipped my body on top of his and kissed him,
nipping at his lower lip and feeling his hands polish my back in
French curves.  He murmured pointless endearments into my
throat, clinging to me as though I was buoyant wreckage that
would somehow keep him from being pulled under into a dark sea. 
He had that much wrong, I was the dark sea.  

I took the condom from him, desperate not to think about it,
and flowed over him, swallowing him in my liquid depths. I began
to rock with an oceanic rhythm.  Poor Mulder gets so seasick
that he'll never know the helpless passion of riding an unquiet
sea outside of my bed. I tossed between swells, bracing my arms
on either side of his head while he looked up at me in dilated
amazement, helpless.  The whitecaps of ecstasy finally broke
over both our heads and sent us spiraling down to the bottom. He
clung to me and pulled me under with him.  The water filled my
lungs and wiped my brain clean and I surrendered.

****

George Naxos disappeared from his cell that night, while Scully
and I were playing hide-the-gun. There were a few drops of his
blood on his bunk, nothing else, and the man who shared his cell
had been choked to death.

Jason insisted that we return to his compound. "You haven't
done as well as I'd hoped protecting the others," he said which
had to be the understatement of the year. "The least we can do
is watch each other's back."

Scully's reaction was predictable.

"Mulder, that's nuts!"

The fact that she was sitting in bed with the sheet barely
covering her breasts reduced her authority somewhat.  My morning
peace offering of hotel cafe coffee in her hand, she glared at
me from across the orange monstrosity of a bedspread.

"And on what logical deduction do you base your professional
opinion, Dr. Scully?"

I sat on the edge of the bed, beyond striking range, the sweat
from my morning run cooling on my skin in the air conditioned
room.

"Obviously I'm stupid, enlighten me."

"Doesn't it strike you as being the least bit duplicitous that
Jason is in contact with your mother?  Jason and not Samantha? 
You'd think Samantha would have at least told Jason to tell your
mother that she was all right.  Then he gives you all the
information on your twin brothers.  Why not before?  Years
before.  How long has he been in charge of PR at Roush? Why
didn't he round them up or make contact with them himself?  A
well-placed bribe opens more doors than your ID. Why didn't he
use his innumerable connections to make contact himself?"

She was getting agitated; flushing straight down to her
cleavage which made concentrating difficult.  I took the coffee
cup away from her before she spilled it and put it on the
bedside table.

"My God, Mulder, They took Samantha, They created Emily and the
clones, and They created Miranda," she stopped and took a deep
breath," and he sends you to do his fetch and carry like a good
little minion. He's Roush.  He's Them.  And you won't see it!"

These things had been floating in my head for days, like ink
spilled in water, swirling around and darkening everything.  I
hadn't told her about my late night visit to Ian, but in that
uncanny way that she had, Scully had managed to dig a claw into
an exposed nerve.

"Q.E.D." I said.

"Q.E.D. my ass. You don't want it to be true so you can't even
accept the possibility that you're being a patsy.  You want to
believe so badly that you'll blindly follow any bullshit
breadcrumb trail even if it leads to a cliff."

Short of stuffing my fingers in my ears, I was sorely limited
in strategies to cut Scully off in mid-rant.  I hitched myself
closer to her on the bed and tried to focus whatever seductive
charm I could muster and beam it into the furiously sparking
blue eyes across from me.

"Stop that," she growled, and I looked for a furiously slashing
feline tail.

"Stop what?" I said in my most ingenious tone and put my hand
on the warm column of her thigh under the bed sheet.

Muscles jumped underneath my fingers.

"We're going to see Jason and Samantha.  End statement."

14/20 I am the free companion, I bivouac by invading watchfires
I turn the bridegroom out of bed and stay with the bride myself,
I tighten her all night to my thighs and lips Walt Whitman

In Xanadu did Kubla Kahn. . . 

I really needed to watch the rest of Citizen Kane one day.

The house was Southfork all over again.  The Lindsays had run
Roush for generations and every penny of ill-gotten wealth went
into the enormous house with the manicured carpet of water-
thirsty grass surrounding it.  The driver of the Town Car that
Jason had sent to the airport for us dropped us off at the front
door and Jason emerged, dressed like the lord of the manor Texas
style, black turtleneck, jeans and cowboy boots.  I had never
seen him in the flesh before and the contrast between this
confident Ralph Lauren creature with his sculpted nose and
expensive haircut compared to my rumpled and weary partner made
my throat hurt.  Was this what Mulder had the potential to be
had Tina and Bill not done such an amazingly good job of fucking
up his head?  I had to wonder.

There was a woman with him, all points and angles in a skimpy
black miniskirt and a tight silk blouse. I assumed this was
Samantha and I felt a momentary twinge of envy for her hard
little body and brightly intelligent eyes.  This was the woman
Mulder had sought all his life, and she was about as warm and
sisterly as a raven pulling at carrion. Maybe it was my female
jealousy rearing its hairsprayed head. After all, she was his
sister, not an old flame.

Then again the resemblance to Phoebe was less reassuring than I
might have hoped.

Jason took me to his stables; he was a horse-breeder in his
spare time. I wasn't terribly interested in horseflesh but I
welcomed the chance to observe the man without his distracting
reflection.

The stables smelled of damp hay and horsesweat, with hints of
ammonia and manure underneath. Everything was darker and more
enclosed than I'd expected. Could horses really prosper in this
hot small space?

Jason didn't try to touch me as we walked through the stables
to a larger pen. "You might be interested in this," he commented
as we came upon a man leading a lovely chestnut mare into the
pen. "I've been working on a means to induce estrus in the mares
on demand, so that we don't have to depend on nature's own
schedule."

The man produced a large syringe, uncapped it, and squirted a
little of the clear liquid inside in order to get rid of any air
bubbles. The mare shimmied and sidestepped, but he had her
firmly under control and she didn't get far. She whinnied and
tossed her head in anger as he injected her.

He hitched the mare to the side of the pen and left. Jason
looked on with approval while the mare shuddered as if she'd
suddenly been dumped in the Arctic. Eyes rolling, nostrils
flaring, she flounced, her mane snapping around her like a
fretful teenager's.

The man returned with an equally impressive stallion. His color
was slightly darker than hers, the color of the tan M&Ms that
aren't made anymore, and I could imagine the needlelike
stiffness of his hair as the man patted his side to steady him.
The mare sniffed the air again and pawed the ground with her
front hooves. They watched each other warily as the man released
the mare from her bindings.

He covered her instantly, eight hundred pounds of muscle and
bone crashing down into her. Snorting and chuffing as if he were
doing something really impressive, he arched his neck like a
flag in a high wind. Anything that got in his way had better be
prepared to do battle, because getting laid was at stake. I
thought of the drugs coursing through the mare's body, causing
the release of hormones scheduled for later delivery, filling
her reproductive organs with blood and readying her for his
invasion.

Jason smiled at me when I turned away. "Her colt will be worth
every penny I spent on this formula. Clients like it when you
can guarantee delivery at the right time."

"And if she's late giving birth there's always ways to hurry it
up," I commented.

He blinked disingenuously. "Of course." Every time I looked at
him I did a mental stutter. I expected the nose to have its
familiar dented look, not this toned, sharpened profile perfect
enough to open doors and legs worldwide.

I decided that I didn't want the rest of the tour. I told Jason
this and he smiled charmingly and pointed out that it was
dinnertime.

****

Dinner was quite a scene, the four of us in Jason's enormous
dining room, with enough silver and crystal on the table to
finance the overthrow of a small country.

I watched Jason eat; he was polite and economical and he used
his left hand, all very different from me, and I was grateful
enough for the difference that I would have said the grace over
meals if asked.

Apparently nobody in my family was very religious, though. Why
would they be? The Maker of the fruit of the vine had nothing on
the maker of the fruit of Christina Mulder's loins.

Scully watched Sam with the careful gaze of a cougar
contemplating an eagle.

"Mulder says you're head of genetic research at Roush, what
exactly does that constitute?"

Jason grinned proprietarily as Sam sniffed and preened. "It's
complicated," my sister said.

"I'm patient," my lovely little liar replied, her face as still
as a pond on a windless night.

"I supervise our various avenues of research, ranging from
modified retroviruses to attack various forms of disease--
including cancer--to more elaborate manipulations that attempt
to eliminate imperfections from genetic structure."

"*Whose* genetic structure?"

Sam smiled. "Most of the work is carried out on specially bred
hairless rats, I've patented three kinds in my own name, but
we're also using rhesus monkeys for some of the work that's near
completion."

"So you still insist that Roush has no connection to
experiments on human beings?"

"Of course we use humans in the very end stages, the FDA
requires it. All our testing is done on volunteers, though,
following the standard protocols for informed consent."

Scully clamped down on her knife, then released it. "I don't
believe you. I don't think the women in the warehouse were
volunteers."

Jason broke in. "Agent Scully, I believe I've already conveyed
to you our shock and disappointment to find that this man--
Crawford?--had misused his position with us in such a horrible
and destructive manner. Falsifying records, hiding his
activities from us--that warehouse was never meant for anything
but storage, which is why he got away with his--well, his
madness--for so long. We deeply regret Roush's tangential
involvement in the matter, and I assure you that we will do
everything in our power to assist the bereaved families of these
women."

"And the hired guards? Had he corrupted them too?"

Jason toyed with his fork. "I believe that the guards had no
idea what was going on inside that warehouse. If they did they
would of course have reported it to the proper authorities. He
told them not to look inside and they didn't."

"Just following orders?" I suggested and he raised an eyebrow.

"Fox, I don't think you should be so flippant. Good men, men
who'd worked for this company for decades, died in that
firefight. They died because they were loyal and they believed
in Roush. As I do, as you should. I'm told you've sold your
stock?"

"I have very aggressive brokers," I took another drink of the
wine to give myself some time. "You know, your story would sound
a lot better if I hadn't seen what happened in Bethel."

He shrugged. "It will sound fine to the rest of the world.
Unless of course you want to go public with the tape." Scully
stiffened like a starched shirt. "I don't think people *like*
women who kill their children all that much, what's your
opinion?"

"I think," I said carefully, "that any more conversation and
I'll lose my appetite."

La Familia Mulder was starting to make the Borgias look like
the Waltons.

****

After dinner, Jason disappeared, saying that he had to go a
fancy party where he could charm the mayor or something like
that. I could tell that Mulder wanted me out of the way, he had
a family reunion to attend and I wasn't a blood relation.

Little did he know.

I scurried upstairs to hide until the urge to confess passed. I
found my bags, tiny dots on the floor of the space-station-sized
guest room.

You would have thought with all his ill-gotten wealth Jason
would have been able to afford better air conditioning.  I
lifted my hair off the back of my neck and went over to the
bedroom window.  Through the darkness I could see the lights on
the pond outside and the two dark figures walking alongside the
water, I could have thought that it was a pair of lovers had it
not been for the fact that I knew it was Mulder and Samantha. 
She had her hand on his arm and he was turning away from her
with an impatience that I knew entirely too well. Whatever she
was saying he didn't want to accept and by turning his back on
her he was turning his back on whatever she was saying.

I knew how it felt to be talking to the tight line of his spine.

The window was one of the expensive ones that are not intended
to be opened.  To have that particular model of faux-Georgian
window, you had to have air conditioning and didn't need air.  I
ran my hand over my collarbones and was surprised to have it
come away wet. I was sweating like one of Jason's horses.  Like
the mare that had been covered by the stallion that afternoon in
the stable.  My brain flashed back to the hot stable, the
harmony of muscle and movement, the primal toss of the mare's
head, the flash of a brown eye. More heat.

I pulled the curtains shut on Mulder and Samantha, turned back
into the bedroom and stood idly, looking around.  Jason's
interior decorator's taste was exquisite.  My bedroom looked
like it had been stolen lock stock and silver hairbrush from the
Bombay Company, only I had a feeling that these were the genuine
items rather than reproductions.  

Genuine.  Reproductions.  The MulderTwins were genuine, clones
were reproductions. Real and fakes.  My life was spinning around
a series of events caused by men with the genetic equivalent of
Xerox machines. Was I even me or was there a dozen Dana Scullies
out here somewhere? Seven brides for seven brothers?  Snow White
and the Seven Dwarves? What was the song that Mordred sings in
Camelot?  The Seven Deadly Virtues?

The toss of the mare's head.

I gathered up one of the nighties from our spree at Victoria's
Secret and went into the bathroom. I wanted to wash the heat and
the sweat off my body. I knew that Mulder would come back from
his tete a tete with Samantha wounded and needy. He would want
to fuck. Wait, he would want to make love.  I had to start
thinking of it that way. I was trying, I really was..  He loved
me and I wasn't sure what mask love wore in my mind.

The bathroom was tastefully appointed with thick towels and no
doubt genuine gold-plated fixtures with a shower stall large
enough to play basketball in.  I started the water and stripped
off my clothes. The interior room quickly filled with steam that
loosened my chest and made me somewhat woozy.  I had too much
wine with dinner. Not again, first too much beer with Zippy and
now too much wine. I would end up an alcoholic before this was
over.

The water was deliciously hot, loosening the tight muscles in
my neck-
-

The arch of the stallion's neck.

And I opened the bottle of shower gel on the shelf. Freesia.
Heavy, sensual freesia full of green and earth and purple and
languid afternoons.  The smell filled my head and I took my time
soaping my body, enjoying the feel of the gel turning to foam
between the skin of my hands and the skin of my body.  How was I
going to smell when Mulder finally arrived? Was I going to lie
in bed and pretend to be asleep to give him the illusion of
surprising me or should I just meet him in the doorway wearing
nothing but a garter belt and hose with a rose between my teeth?

I was rather drunk, my head leaning against the tile wall, my
hand stroking the skin between my thighs like a lover's.  Drunk
and horny besides.

I chuckled to myself until the light went out.

Utter blackness.

"Mulder?" I called over the sound of the shower.

When the shower door opened and a shape darker than the
blackness entered, I reached out for him.

"You could have warned me," I teased and my soapy hands touched
the dry skin on his chest, "what if my partner came along?"

He jerked for a second and his hand clamped around my jaw,
pulling my head up for a kiss.  He tasted of brandy as he
ravaged my mouth.  My hands slipped across his chest, now wet
with water from the shower, and traveled lower where his cock
was standing up to be noticed.  I slipped soapy fingers around
him and drew my fingers up and down in the rhythm that I knew he
preferred. The hot water scored my back as his hands roved over
my breasts which felt hot and heavy against his chest.

"Mulder," I murmured into his lips, "make love to me."

He tasted of brandy and something sweet, chocolate or candy,
his tongue probing my mouth like an explorer in an underground
cave.

Making a low noise in his throat, he pressed me up against the
cold tile wall, squeezing my breasts with insistent hands.  "I
can't give you everything you want," I babbled into his
shoulder, "but I'm here, I'll be here until this is all over."

The tile was cold and hard against my back, and his body was
hotter than the water.

"I'll see it through to the end with you."

I ran like melted sugar against him, boneless and pliant.
Pulling me away from the wall, he spun me around until my face
was pointed into the spray and my blind hands reached out for
the wall, to keep my balance in a slowly reeling world. His
hands roved down my spine, over my tattoo, tracing the circle of
the serpents.  I moaned and pressed back against him, the shaft
of his cock resting right above my buttocks, his hands roving
over my breasts again, pinching my nipples through the thick
suds of the gel..  His hands on my hips, pressing me forward,
pushing me down.  I went willingly, my fingers sliding down the
tiles, catching on the joins between each of them until I was
grasping the shower knobs for support.  More gel on my back, and
his hand rubbed it into my wet skin over my ribcage, my waist,
my buttocks, between my thighs and into the crease of my ass. 
The pain almost rocked me out of the daze as he ripped into my
anus.

I screamed and it wasn't with pleasure.

My fingernails broke on the cold tile as he slammed into me
again and again, tearing at me, filling me with broken glass and
needles. Finally, he withdrew, spun me around again and soothed
me with his hands on my body and his lips on mine until my
breathing slowed.  I was still shaking in shock when he shoved
me back against the wall and parted my legs with his hands.

Only with my foot braced up against the bath tap was I able to
remain moderately upright when he impaled me.

I gasped.

I was stuck to the wall like a butterfly on a pin, his cock
hard and stinging with soap inside me.  I moaned with a
combination of wine and hurt as he drove into me without any
consideration whatsoever. 

I could feel my heart beating against the tile wall behind me.

The water sprayed down into my face, my mouth, burning my eyes
and choking me.   The muscles in my legs were tearing, and the
pain was spreading through my entire pelvis.  He was groaning
into my shoulder, teeth closing on my skin, hands bracing me up
against the wall underneath my arms.  Finally, he dug his
fingers into my waist and gave a last series of heaves and shot
hot and sticky into me.

I slid to the floor of the shower, whimpering with horror and
coughing water.  Mulder crouched next to me and pushed wet hair
out of my face to kiss my forehead.  I wrapped my arms around
his neck and shuddered. After a moment, he disentangled himself
and reached over to where the taps were, a few seconds of
fumbling later, and I felt a hot, high-powered spray of water
thrummed over my breasts and belly. God, it was one of those
water massage head things.

He had his hand over my mouth when I started screaming again.

When I figured out that it would be a lot easier to see if I
opened my eyes, he was gone. The water was still running as hot
as ever, Jason apparently imported his water from out of state.
The light bleeding from the bedroom was enough for me to turn
the shower off. When I stood up, water sluiced out of me and
coursed down my legs like a woman about to go into labor.  I had
to hold onto the sink while I drained. I stumbled over to the
thick terry bathrobe waiting for me.

I still felt woozy.  As a matter of fact, I felt worse. The
perfumed silky gown I'd picked out seemed absurd now and I left
it in the bathroom. Zigging and zagging, I made my way to the
bed in the center of the room. It was a good thing the bed could
have doubled as an aircraft carrier, I needed the target to be
that large. I dropped the bathrobe to the floor, assuming that
some housekeeper with a false green card would take care of it
in the morning.

The sheets were heavy and soft and I had to throw off the light
blanket because I was still so hot. Covered only by a thin layer
of cotton, my body was as restless as trees in wind. Damn him.
What was that, some kind of loyalty test to see if I really
meant what I said? Did he want to know if I'd submit to anything
he asked? And I would have, but not like that. Not so brutally,
but maybe the savage brutality was the point of the test. How
much was I willing to put up with? Maybe that's what love meant
to him, it would make sense of a lot of things.

I drifted, feeling the bed spin beneath me like a psychedelic
magic carpet.

When the door opened and closed, I came half-awake again. 

He was naked by the time he reached the bed, as cool as ice
cream against my skin. I was beginning to wonder if I had a
fever. His hands cupped my breasts and I shuddered.

****

Jason had plied us with brandy earlier but I needed more to
face Samantha.. She got us two bottles of a Texas microbrew out
of the huge stainless steel refrigerator and opened them; I
noted that she knew exactly where the bottle opener was out of
the thousand drawers in Jason's gourmet kitchen.

We went outside into Jason's oasis to look at the moon and talk.

The water was trickling over the rocks in the pond, glittering
like tinsel in the moonlight, like the silver rings on Sam's
fingers.  I had to think of her as Sam, as this full-grown woman
who smelled like my baby sister.

She put her hand on my forearm and I turned away. I didn't want
her to ruin this and I had the strong suspicion that any
conversation would make this reunion even less pleasant. For a
while I wanted to imagine that everything was perfect, Sam at my
side and Scully waiting for me. I could talk to her, I had to,
but I needed a few minutes of delusion first.

We must have made five circuits of the pond before either of us
said a word. 

"I know it wasn't easy for you to be the one left behind," she
said solicitously and every alarm went off.

"I don't want to talk about it." 

"Well, what do you want to talk about?" She sounded like an
indulgent big sister when the baby brother's had a bad hair day.
I didn't like it from her any more than I liked it from Scully.

"I'd always imagined telling you what's been going on these
past twenty-six years, but since it turns out that you've known
all along all my imaginary conversations are moot."

"You've always been good at making things up on the fly," she
stopped walking and turned to me.

"Which of your investigators told you that?"

A hawk's smile; I was now certain that I preferred Scully's fur
and claws to Sam's feathers, ruffled or un. "Paranoid much, Fox?"

I guess I couldn't tell her not to use the name. "No, but
someone listening to us might be."

She handed me her bottle. "Finish this for me." The beer was
still cold enough to ease the ache in my throat. Texas made
contemplative noises around us; there were creatures moving
quickly and quietly through the ground cover.

I sat on a rock that had been carefully designed to make a good
seat. She remained standing. "Why didn't you ever come to me?
You knew how much I was hurting. You knew"--my voice broke--"how
Mom and Dad were when you were gone."

She sighed. "I was eight, Fox. I didn't know anything about
that, and when I met the Greys...it's indescribable,
overwhelming. Suffice it to say that the problems of a few
humans didn't seem very important when I could spend days at a
time just listening...they had to give me sleeping pills to get
me away from the interface.

"And then, later, when I began to mature and wonder what had
happened to my family...Jason was there. *He* was my big
brother, he teased me and played with me and protected me when
there were factions that didn't have my best interests at heart.
I thought he was you, Fox, and you know what? I was right."

"He's not me, no matter what his genes say.  We're not
interchangeable like computer components, you can fiddle around
with genes in a lab all day, but once that person you had a hand
in creating goes out into the real world, there are influences
and experiences that mold them. All of us are different.  All
ten of us. We're monsters, but each of us is – was his own
variety of monster," the reflection of the moon in the pool
wobbled with my voice.

"You're not a monster, Fox."

The feather-tips of her fingers touched the side of my face,
slow, deliberate, and without sisterly intent.

*I'm your brother and I love you.*

Oh God. 

If I could blank out one hour of my life to add to the various
amnesias from which I have suffered, it would be this one.
Scully, save me, I thought even as my dick twitched. When I went
to mandatory counseling after the Roche incident, the shrink
suggested that I had unresolved sexual issues around my eight-
year-old sister. I considered the idea, truly I did, but
concluded that those issues were no more than the standard
Freudian family drama, sublimated and transformed into an adult
sexuality that, if not conventionally healthy, was neither
incestuous nor pedophilic. Scully's age and size made her a
plausible sister-figure, but only in the way that lots of men
marry their mothers--she shared characteristics, not an identity.

All this careful reasoning was crumbling against the onslaught
of my growing hard-on.

"You and Jason are the apex of the results.  You're beautiful,
you have genius IQ's, and rising to the top of your respective
professions.  You're perfect. "

Her finger was under my chin, at the hollow of my throat,
feeling the beating of my heart. Silver rings bruising my throat
as she loosened my tie and undid the top button of my shirt. Her
breasts under the silk of her shirt right in front of my eyes. 
And her tongue sliding between my teeth and my upper lip tasted
like beer, like clouds and like the grass.   She was cool and
airy in my hands, the sharp points of her earrings scalpelcut
into my palms. The brain that used to be mine was full of
September breeze and moonlight from the fingernail sliver of
white light above.  She breathed mist into my lungs, touched
sliver across my chest and forearms. Everything was underwater,
humming like the distant sound of a pool filter vibrating across
the captured aqua chlorinated waters.  Metal-tipped fingers drew
down the tight seam through the center of my pants and the
sightless worm stirred underneath her touch.

No better than the rest of them.

The far corner of the pond was shaded with an outcropping of
rocks and heavy with rosesmell over the money-lush grass. She
was pushing me to my knees in the grass with her hands on my
curiously distant ass and her hard little breasts tight against
the cage of my chest while she was exploring my mouth with her
tongue.  The flat feathers of her hair stuck to my sweating,
burning hands

The thin black tights ended below the edge of her black skirt
and underneath she was bare, literally bare.  She had been
shaved back to childhood but it wasn't a child's moan that came
from the stretched length of her throat when I touched her with
my lips, the silver ring gleaming where it ran through the flesh
of her labia.

Sister.

*I'm your brother and I--*

Sister.

Orestes, Electra.

An image flashed across the silver screen in my head, Sam
triumphant, taking my semen and dropping it into a petrii dish
to create God only knows what.

"No," I whispered, rising to unsteady feet and knocking over
the empty beer bottles, "no thank you."

The ground was uneven with alcohol as I stumbled back to the
gleaming house. 

Samantha had fucked my head up pretty badly and I hauled my
sore psyche and my erection upstairs to the guestrooms.  I
didn't even bother looking in mine, I headed straight for
Scully's.  The room was dark save for the reflected light of the
pond shimmering against the ceiling.   I had to hold onto the
bedpost to keep me steady while I looked down at Scully.  The
sheets were painted over her body as she lay on her side facing
the window; her hair was drying in the waves that she took so
much care to blow-dry out of her hair.

Oh please, save me from myself --

Manalive, I had too much to drink.  My stomach felt like
several serving forks had been stuck into it, ripping at the
sutures. At the same time, I was electrified, my blood bubbling
honey in my veins. I was vile, decadent, no better than George
or the rest of them. It felt good.  Good like way too much crank
at Oxford, screaming down the motorway with my head out of
Trevor's car, howling like wolves at the moon.

What was I going to tell her?  Should I at all?  God, Scully I
had the strangest --  And I wasn't sure if it was real.

Am I even real for that matter?

Scully didn't move as I stripped and advanced on her. I thought
she was asleep until I put my hand on her, and for once she felt
cool under my fingertips, it had to have been a trick of the air
conditioning. 

Her breasts are perfect. I never knew what my hands had been
made for before I held her breasts. They are the perfect size
and shape for me to hold, and this I trust was not by any design
but solely the dictate of fate, that Scully's breasts should
have been made for me. Guns and steering wheels and my own idiot
cock, all of these things are distractions drawing me away from
what I should be holding on to.

I should never have touched Sam.

With my hands around her breasts, pulling her close from
behind, I could give voice to the incoherent sorrow that gripped
me as I fled from Samantha. "I didn't want it to be like this."

She trembled, then leaned into me. Her voice was like a thin
silver brook running through a parched land. "I know this may
not be the best time to say this, but I'm here. We'll do this
together. I promise."

I was overcome with wonder, with the feel of her body in front
of me and the power of the words, which from Scully were more
binding than a wedding vow. I was too befuddled with guilt and
alcohol, and I knew I couldn't quite appreciate the full import
right now.

So I moaned her name, first into the uncaring air and then
against her sweaty skin, still almost cold to my touch, and I
covered her with my tears and with wet kisses, imagining that
the saliva trail glowed in the darkness. She was balky, despite
the words, and I was confused but enthusiastic enough to ignore
the discrepancy.

Just the way she likes it, I promised myself.  I owe this to
her.  If she never wants to speak to me again, I want her to
remember this. With shaking arms, I held her firmly against the
bed, so she could push against me and not get anywhere.  I ran
my tongue from the nape of her neck to the small bone knobs at
the base of her spine, breathing wet and moist so that she could
feel it on her skin but barely touching.  I traced the serpent
on her back.

She squirmed and made a noise, maybe she'd just wanted to be
coaxed so that she could be sure I'd heard her right.

Just enough constraint and distance, this is the trick to
making Scully come when she's in this mood. I turned her over
and pinned her thighs open with my knees. She said my name like
a purr as I puffed warm air against her thighs. She doesn't
shave around her pubic area and I teased the sparse hairs on the
soft curves of her inner thighs with my tongue. She smelled of
something flowery but I couldn't taste soap on her skin, she was
being considerate. Anyway I prefer the thick salty scent of
Scully, the one she keeps only for me.

I touched her lightly, stealthily with my tongue and she jerked
as though high-voltage current was running through her small
body. Surprised, I almost stopped.  Either my technique was
reaching unnatural proportions or she was wound tighter than a
Swiss watch. Her hair hissed across the pillow as she tossed her
head while I continued, her legs swirling restlessly around me,
her hands caressing the phrenologist's nightmare of my skull. 
Tossing, moaning, rocking underneath my touches while I semi-
consciously rubbed the stupidly engorged mass of my own cock
against the sheets that were not as soft as her skin.  It was my
name that she was chanting under her breath like she was saying
the rosary.  I drank her climax and it was better than any
brandy ever bottled.

I couldn't stand it any longer, I raised myself up onto my
knees, opened her with my numb fingers and slid into her where
she was hot and liquid as melted wax.  I had my hands braced
under her arms and looked down at her sex-dazed face underneath
me.  Her eyes were big enough to swallow me whole.   Her lips
moved, saying words that were only clear to me later when I
dozed against the arch of her shoulder after I'd come inside her
no less than three times (not bad for a man of my age and
inebriation).

Don't hurt me, she had said.

****

In the morning, though my head was pounding and my vision
blurry, I was able to confront certain questions whose
importance had eluded me the night before.

Why did Mulder come to me first in darkness? Why did he first
ignore what I'd said to him, and then later melt into my arms
like a sugar cube in hot tea? Why didn't he do any of the little
tricks that he knew worked for me, instead relying as he never
had before on mechanical assistance? Why did he fuck me in the
shower without benefit of condoms? Why did he *violate* me?

I was very much afraid I knew the answer.

And I became more agitated when I consulted my calendar. If
everything was working right, and I thought it probably was,
there was a fair chance that I could be pregnant.

I could tell myself that Mulder had an equal chance of being
the father. But that shower jet would have pushed the sperm
right up into my cervix, assisting the little Jason-spawn in
their blind procreative purpose. And paternity tests would be
almost uniquely inefficacious in this situation.

There had to be a Planned Parenthood in the area. They'd give
me a morning-after pill and a lecture about contraceptive
responsibility. It would be farcical, but I'd survived worse.
I'd have to skim over certain areas of my medical history for
them to agree to give me the pills, but I knew the right things
to say to make myself into a perfect candidate. My degree is
helpful once in a while, believe it or not.

My hands were shaking as I stuffed the sanitary napkin in my
panties to soak up the tiny flecks of blood that were still
issuing from my rectum.

Jason whistled as he came into the breakfast room. He poured
himself a glass of fresh-squeezed orange juice from a crystal
carafe and then topped off my glass, though I hadn't asked him
to do so.

I looked up at him mistrustfully. I might have been wrong. How
do you ask someone if he raped you?

He saved me the trouble. "Sleep well?" Like Mulder, his face
hides less than he thinks it does. Jason's face was a glutted
tiger's. I knew this wasn't even about violating me. If he'd
wanted that he probably could have done it during my abduction,
for all I knew he was just comparing notes on the last time he'd
had me. This was about hurting Mulder, owning Mulder..  Having
me in a way that Mulder obviously hadn't. He'd plundered the
last vestige of virginity I had anywhere, and I hated him for it.

I remembered the drugged languor of Mulder's fingers and tongue
sliding over me in the darkened bedroom. Mulder hadn't even
stirred when I'd come downstairs for breakfast, which was
unusual. He was uniformly awake before I was in the morning;
mostly he'd go out and run before daring to disturb my rest.
Jason apparently wasn't reluctant to add drugs to darkness and
false certainty in order to gain his objectives.

"What did you give me?"

He shrugged. "Is that what you want to blame it on? The man who
runs my stables thought that that the Keraflex might have
similar effects on people, but he wasn't sure, seeing as how
human women don't go into estrus. He was pretty sure it wasn't
poisonous, so don't get your panties in a twist."

"Panties in a twist?" my voice came out as sharp as the orange
juice, "don't denigrate what is commonly referred to as rape."

I had to flatten my hands against the table to keep them from
shaking. Naturally, the bastard smiled.

"What's rape compared to breaking and entering, destruction of
property, arson and let's not forget murder?  Multiple murder
including the blonde."

"The blonde claimed that you were the father of her child."

"I get that a lot." Cruel, even teeth flashed at me. "Might get
that from you next month."

Son of a bitch.

Just then Mulder stumbled in and I grabbed for the Austin-
American Statesman on the table in front of me.

****

Shit, I'd overslept and let the bastard have some time alone
with Scully. She tried to pretend she was reading the newspaper
but I could see that her eyes weren't scanning.

For once my head was screaming louder than my stomach as I
thudded into the Louis XV chair opposite from Scully and reached
for one of the flaky croissants piled on a silver platter. There
were little rosettes of butter and pots of jam glistening next
to the pastry and I helped myself.

"Has anyone ever told you why Dana here was integrated into the
program?"

Her eyes fluttered up from the front page and a smart bomb went
off in my stomach. 

"Of course she was taken to distract you, Mulder, everyone
knows that, but that objective was hardly furthered by making
Emily Sim. To this day no one really knows how you found her,
Dana, but I suspect we were hoist on our own petard." He stared
at me, eyes like drillbits digging into my skull. "Her much-
denied sensitivity to the World Beyond is the kind of thing
we're always looking for. And it's so much better when it's
possessed by a woman with a hellraising IQ and mongrel stamina
instead of your average trailer trash."

"Mulder," she said calmly, as if Jason weren't even there, "I
think we should go to Montana."

"Emerson won't return any of my messages, direct and through
his lawyers."

"At worst, his bodyguards will stop us at the gate of his
little militia hideout, and if they get a good look at you
there's a good chance we'll get in."

"I don't think that's a good idea," Jason interjected. "I've
had him checked out, you know he's pretty deep into high
technology research. Computer chips and all that.
Very...specialized electronics."

"Is it worse to build microchips for implantation into people's
necks than to make the drugs that destroy their memories and
steal their fertility?" I suppose part of me was curious to see
if he had a preference.

Jason put his hand on my shoulder, his thumb caressing the
tendon in my neck. I dropped the croissant I'd been tearing
apart. "Remember, I came to you, Mulder," he said. "I want to
survive this. Emerson has his own agenda; he might even be
responsible for this series of events, which would explain why
he won't talk to you, or to me either."

"Or he could just have good taste. Being here makes us like you
and I would rather be dead," Scully said and jumped up. "I'm
leaving. Come to the airport if you want, Mulder."

At least she was offering me the choice. "Can I shower and get
dressed?"

"Half an hour," she said. "I'll call the cab."

Jason didn't bother to offer to have us driven.

15/20 All truths wait in all things, They either hasten their
own delivery no resist it. They do not need the obstetric
forceps of the surgeon, The insignificant is as big to me as any
Walt Whitman 

I looked in the mirror as I shaved, shaving six faces at once,
ten, sixteen, what did it matter? And, as I did every morning
for the past several years, I asked myself the big question. The
shapeshifter had asked me in the Arctic and it had become my
mantra. He'd probably forgotten about it by now, which would be
fitting, but I remembered.

Can you die now?

My hand shook, the razor shook, and my faces shook through the
tears that threatened. I bit down on my lip, hard, to make the
worse pain go away. Fucking Ian, I could never follow him. I
would not let myself be an imitator even if I were an imitation.

Phoebe had taken a theory class at one point which had made her
babble endlessly about Baudrillard and simulacra and how we are
all copies now, re-productions in an age in which there is
nothing new to say, only rearrangements of what has already been
done.

She had no clue how right she was.

And, as I'd done almost every morning, I answered the question.
No, not today.

Scully was in the cab already when I went downstairs. Jason was
waiting by the front door to shake my hand as I left. "I know
this has all been rather stressful for you," he drawled, "but I
hope you understand I only want what's best for all of us. Don't
let Emerson confuse you--and watch your back."

His voice continued in my head if not my ears. *I'm your
brother and I love you.* I dropped his hand like a burning brand
and left.

Scully was more uncommunicative than usual on the trip, which
meant that she didn't even vocalize her answers to my questions.
She was fine, of course. And I'm from the government and I'm
here to help you. There was an experiment we were shown tapes of
while I was in college: you take a bunch of rats and shock them
or reward them at random. Sometimes pressing a lever gets a
shock and other times a treat; sometimes *not* pressing the
lever gets a shock or a treat. Eventually the rats stop reacting
at all, they just huddle in a corner of their cage, blinking,
learned helplessness it's called and the theory has been applied
to battered women and children. Scully's eyes were like those
rats'. She was still moving, but I think that was mainly
inertia. Some internal barrier had been breached and parts of
her were draining into each other, mixing and corroding and
setting her up for the final implosion.

Maybe I could hit her over the head and drag her by the hair to
a therapist when things calmed down a bit. She'd talked to
Zippy, and when I wasn't being selfish I knew that was a good
sign.

She'd been willing to reserve judgement on Jason last night. I
think she might have been impressed by the horses. The stables
might have reminded her of an infatuation with the beasts
brought on by her burgeoning sexuality when she was just a girl.
It's hard to think that Scully was ever a child, but I'm pretty
sure she was. This morning all her reservations were gone and
she radiated hatred--not just distrust--for Jason.

Scully doesn't hate all that easily, though Mom also seemed to
have accomplished it.

If both Scully and I were in the throes of an instinctive
revulsion to Jason, that was a datum worth knowing. I'd never
yet been disappointed by a decision to mistrust.

Had I liked any of my brother-selves? No, not yet, not even
Baylor whose tolerance for pain was more awe-inspiring than
reassuring. Not the one whose body I inhabited. Maybe we were
all disgusting and I'd just overdosed on us.

How the hell did she put up with me?

****

Mulder twitched on the in the seat beside me. I really
appreciated the switch to first-class travel, it was relaxing
and we didn't have to behave normally for any civilian seatmates.

My mind stuttered, running the same course over and over again
like a hamster in a Habitrail.

The flight was an opium dream, distant and at the same time
incredibly clear. I spent the entire time reliving the night
before, the darkness and the incredible waterlogged feeling of
my lungs after I turned off the shower. The hurt between my legs
that I'd thought assuaged when Mulder made his amends to me.

I didn't blame myself, much. Not even as much as I had with
Eddie, with whom, at least, I'd had an extended conversation.
Still, I ended up grabbing the armrests so that I wouldn't shake
myself to pieces; Mulder looked concerned but wrote it off as my
terror of flying. Honestly I didn't notice when we left the
ground. I had the sense that I'd lost a few pints of blood, that
if I moved too much I'd dissolve into sparkles of light and dust.

Was this post-traumatic stress syndrome? Karen Kossoff had made
vague noises of that sort before. But it couldn't be, there was
nothing "post" about it. Mid-trauma stress, was that a
legitimate diagnosis? Just like me to find something that wasn't
available in the DSM-IV.

I had tried so hard to let Mulder back in, really I did, and it
wasn't his fault that someone else had come through that door.
But it was so fucking hard, the hospital had left another
message that baby Miranda would be ready for release in a week
and would I be there? I should call my mother to come stay with
Miranda, I knew, but the way I was feeling I'd probably just go
so cold on her that she'd disown me. Even without the rapist
with my lover's face it was too much.

16/20

Clear and sweet is my soul, and clear and sweet is all that is
not my soul. Walt Whitman

The road wasn't much better than a wide path between the trees
and the truck jarred along hard enough to make me clench my
teeth and grab at the 'oh shit' bar in the door.  Mulder was
glaring at the muddy track as though he could make it smooth and
level by will alone.

As far as cabins were concerned, this was about as much of a
cabin as the White House is a single-family dwelling. Sure it
was faced with logs but it looked as though Frank Lloyd Wright
had gone native.  It was also about the size of my apartment
building.  Emerson had good taste in architects.  Mulder stared
for a moment and slipped out of the truck onto the crushed stone
driveway we had encountered half an acre back.  Fortunately, we
didn't have to go to the front door and produce our badges,
because the door opened and Emerson came out, followed by a
petite African-American woman who looked, to my burning eyes,
about six months pregnant.  Emerson was the clearest carbon-copy
of my partner that we had seen yet, only he wore his hair in a
loose mass of waves that fell to his shoulders and a pair of
horn-rimmed glasses of such gauche style that Mulder would have
died rather than have them grace his face.  Emerson stalked up
to Mulder and stared at him with brilliant curiosity in his
hazel eyes, finally reaching out to tilt Mulder's head to the
side and examine the telltale mole. Then he reached out and
pinched the tip of Mulder's much-hated nose and grinned.

"It's good to know I'm not the only one to be cursed with that
absurd schnozz," the woman said.

It took me a moment to realize what was happening, Emerson's
hands were moving and his mouth was not.  He was speaking in
sign language and the woman was translating. Mulder stepped back
as though he had been cattle-prodded and looked from one to the
other with shock.

"My husband can't talk.  He had an -- injury -- when he was a
child and he doesn't speak. I translate for him.  I'm Aileen
Goldberg.  Why don't you come inside?"

Emerson pulled on Mulder's coat sleeve and his hands flew
faster than I could follow.

"Damn, I can't believe this!  I don't even know where to start!
Where did you grow up? What do you do?  Shit!  I have a million
questions!" he nudged Mulder again, as if reassuring himself
that his twin was real.

Naturally, they had a black leather sofa.  I sat on the sofa
next to Mulder while Emerson held court in a matching leather
chair and Aileen reclined on a pile of pillows in front of the
fireplace. Over Emerson's shoulders I could see the woods
turning their pyrotechnic colors like a painting that stretched
the length of the wall of glass. Aileen had brought a carafe of
coffee and mugs out to the coffee table as though it were an
ordinary family visit rather that what it was --whatever it was.
Mulder simply stared as though he was afraid that Emerson was
going to sprout horns or admit that he killed and ate babies for
breakfast.  Emerson was bubbling with enthusiasm for his lost
sibling and his face was animated in a way that Mulder's almost
never becomes.

"I suspected about Jason Lindsay when I saw him on television
about two years ago.  I mean it isn't every day that you see
your own face on the idiot box. I thought it was just one of
those separated at birth Oprah things, but I did a little
research and decided not to contact him after all." Emerson
signed.

"You know about the Project?" Mulder asked.

Frowning, Emerson continued, Aileen his voice.

"Not in any great detail.  Just bits and pieces that I was able
to dig up over the Internet. You know that the Internet was
originally created so scientists could communicate with one
another from hidden underground bases in the event of a nuclear
holocaust, right? The data banks that were set up are still in
existence in backwaters of servers.  You just have to know where
to look, and know all the right hackers."

Thinking of Frohike, I almost smiled.

"The strange thing is that I have no natural parents. None on
any paperwork anywhere," Emerson made a face, "that was
discovered when my parents adopted me away from the foster
parents I had been assigned to.  A blank spot on the adoption
papers held everything up for close to a year.  You know what
tight-asses bureaucrats are."

"You have no idea," Mulder agreed.

"Extrapolating from the data that I was able to obtain, I
surmised that there had been an experiment of a genetic nature
and during the 1960's a series of twins had been made.  Ten
lived through infancy and were farmed out to foster-families
throughout the country.  I lost track of most of them, there's
one in prison, and there's Jason.  Can you fill me in on the
details?"

Taking a deep breath, Mulder began his narrative of the
Brothers Mulder.  While he spoke, I watched Emerson's expressive
face move through a variety of emotions that would have made a
Shakespearean actor jealous.  At the end, Mulder tried to
explain George Naxos and his lack of adolescent trauma, which
was unusual for a sex-murderer. While Mulder compared his loss
of Samantha with the symptoms that George suffered as a result,
Emerson looked away, his eyes finding the face of his wife.

He signed directly to her, then got up and left the room.
Aileen sighed and rubbed thoughtfully at her belly through the
loose denim dress she wore.

"You have to excuse him, he can't talk about what happened to
him.  It makes him very upset.  But he wants me to tell you."

"One of the reasons Emerson was so interested in finding his
birth parents was because of his foster parents. I'm afraid it
was a bit of a nightmare, the usual assortment of mental and
physical abuse," next to me, Mulder winced, "topped off by sheer
neglect.  When he was eight, Emerson was left with a neighbor's
child to play while his foster parents, their name was Trapper,
went out.  The older kids, the teenagers from the trailer park
all went to the Trapper trailer to drink their beer and get
high. They began to tease Emerson.  He's never had a forgiving
nature, and he gave the oldest a black eye. The oldest kid, who
was in his late-teens, took Emerson into the bedroom and raped
him. Repeatedly.  A few of the other teen-aged kids took turns
with him and when that wasn't fun anymore they used household
items as well.  Finally, the kids realized that Emerson was
probably going to tell someone about what they had done to him,
and they decided to silence him by cutting out his tongue."

Serious ass-pucker factor.

Mulder had gone poker-straight on the cushions next to me.  I
was having a hard time breathing. I realized that my hand was
hurting so much because he was struggling to pulverize it with
his own.

"The Department of Youth and Family Services Judge determined
that his foster parents were guilty of neglect and had him
removed. Fortunately, they sent him to the Goldberg family who
already had three children, and they adopted him. The Goldbergs
are great. They were up here for Chanukah and painted the baby's
room, brought tons of toys, and all the furniture. Typical first
grandchild syndrome."

"But--" I started, "he could have had speech therapy, surgery
to correct the problem."

"Emerson can speak, he just hates the way that he sounds.  He
thinks he sounds stupid," she smiled, "besides, if he had spoken
I never would have met him, I was his translator all through
MIT."

Movement caught my eye and I saw Emerson poking his head around
the doorway he had left through.  He rolled his eyes at Aileen.

"Did I mention that I gave up a promising career developing
Artificial Intelligence models based on Turing so I could take
care of this slack-jawed nutcase of a husband?" she asked.

The gesture Emerson gave her needed no translation.

"We'd like you to stay for dinner so the boys can have a chance
to talk."

I realized that Aileen had addressed me as though I were
Mulder's spouse rather than his partner.  I wasn't sure how to
react. That had never happened before.

****

As far as I was concerned each of my brothers were awful in a
unique direction. Well, Baylor would have been fine if not for
his serious commitment to inflicting pain on himself. In fact,
if I could have silenced my demons by marking my body instead of
my psyche, if I could have suffered stigmata and protected
Scully, it would be a more-than-fair trade.

I hadn't ever considered how many dimensions of personality
flaws there were; it was like each of these jokers had taken an
ugly part of me and brought it to perfection. Bill Scully was
looking better and better in terms of brothers. I wasn't
entirely sure what Mr. Hyde face Emerson was hiding. So far he
seemed all but saintly, and that made me more nervous.

We had another flight to catch and because Montana is not
exactly a hub we had a connection to make, but we could afford
to stay to dinner if we took a morning flight out of Chicago.
(The routes that forced us to fly to Illinois to get back to
Texas deserved an X File of their own.) Aileen excused herself
to go tell the cook that there would be company. Scully had her
hand on my knee as I stared at my long-lost twin.

I explained, as best I could, that there had been a sudden
decrease in our ranks. At least five dead, pending determination
of what happened to George. Emerson put his head between his
hands and stared down. I didn't even know that my face could
twist that way.

Adoptees often have a strong desire to learn about their real
parents--what's called "genealogical uncertainty" by the kind of
people who have to name things to make them real. Emerson's had
led him to investigate his past and he'd found something more
bizarre than the standard fantasy of being the lost king's son.
Maybe, with the impending birth of his child, he'd been hoping
for some sort of closure on his past.

I'm sure this wasn't what he was hoping for.

Aileen came back and they exchanged a rapid-fire series of hand
motions.

"So what's Jason's angle--why did he decide to tell you this?"
I was quickly getting used to having Emerson's voice come out of
Aileen's mouth. She was good, I could tell when he was talking
because the cadence was subtly different.

"Maybe he didn't want us to get killed?" Okay, I admit it was
lame but I could always hope there was some good in him.

"He hasn't tried to contact *me*, and don't give me any crap
about the power of the great big wings of Uncle Sam, I know I
can take care of myself and probably you too."

"What would he gain by having some of the others killed but
warning Mulder? And letting Mulder warn the ones who are still
alive?" Scully wasn't buying it and she had a point.

My brain felt like a bowl of Rice Krispies with the milk just
poured in. Or maybe that was the maggots eating their way out. I
remembered Sam in the garden, tempting me with the apple...

The woman gave it to me and I ate.

But I didn't swallow.

"Maybe someone wants monopoly control over the genotype," I
mused. "Jason might have an interest in that."

"But especially then he wouldn't have told you..." Emerson was
frowning too.

"What if he didn't want someone else to know about his
involvement? What we have here is a classic conflict of
interest," Scully said in her precise way. "Roush's interest is
in having a wide array of examples of...Mulder, so that they
have greater flexibility in potential future...ah, uses. So when
Mulder forced the issue at the warehouse in Austin, Jason had to
meet with him, and then in order to remain credible with her, he
had to give Mulder the files."

"Her?" 

Scully glared at me as if I were the one who'd made the all-too-
appropriate Freudian slip.

"She's right," I told Aileen and Emerson. "He could be trying
to hide his involvement in the deaths from Samantha."

"This is obscene," Alieen snapped and heaved herself up from
the sofa to begin to pace back and forth in front of the picture
window where the sunset had deepened to twilight, "there are
enough *other* things in the world to corrupt before you even
begin to play God with genes."

The gesture Emerson made was an eloquent representation of
disgust.

"This is making my brain swell," she said for him, "come on,
Fox, and I'll give you the tour."

With Jason flashing back in my head, I stood up and noticed
that Scully had gone ivory against the blackness of the couch.

"You okay?"

"I'm fine, Mulder," she said through her teeth, "just tired."

I followed Emerson to the main entrance.

"How are—" I started and he smiled, holding up a steno book and
a marker.

"Low tech," he scrawled.

Outside, Emerson owned a magic kingdom. The stark green, brown,
black of an evergreen forest surrounded us, rich and comforting.
I think I saw a flash of a deer's tail as we hiked.

He held up the pad. "Any thoughts on why so many of the others
are psychos?"

I appreciated the 'others' part.

"Each one seems like a different shade of psycho," I said, "but
I have to say I'm leaning towards the idea of genetic influence.
If not determinism, let's call it a strong predisposing factor.
Add in the fact that adopted and foster children have higher-
than-average numbers of adjustment and dissociative disorders,
and you've got a recipe for disaster. I mean, compared to George
and Arlen, Jason and I are perfect examples of upstanding
citizens."

He frowned and scribbled, his letters becoming spikier and
crawling down the page. "But there's a difference between a
genetic predisposition and a heritable condition, isn't there?"
'Heritable' was underlined twice.

"Are you asking me if your kid's going to be okay?"

He shrugged, a bit lamely. There, I found a disadvantage to
being so expressive, I could tell that he really did care.

"I can't make promises..." I didn't even know what to call him,
Mr. Goldberg seemed a bit detached. "Emerson, look, God only
knows what happened to our genes. The people who made us were
just poking at us to see what would happen, Mom all but admitted
that, and there are no guarantees. I'm sorry."

He turned so that I lost his features against the dying sun.

"You should talk to Scully," I suggested. "She'll tell you that
science doesn't yet understand how to alter germ cells, only
somatic cells, so you've got nothing to worry about."

He rubbed his eyes with his free hand, flipped the page, and
scrawled again. "And she'll be able to explain what you just
said?"

I laughed, I'd finally found a more unscientific me. "She
explains everything, even the things she doesn't understand.
It's one of her best features." Or maybe I said "worst." Either
way I got a measuring look from Emerson, the kind that makes me
want to check my face for leftover food or sudden deformity.

"Did you ever have a philosophy class?" he scrawled.

"Yes."

"Remember the question when they ask you if you would go back
in time to kill Hitler as a baby?  To prevent every atrocity
that he committed?  That's how I feel."

He cocked an eyebrow at me in a way that reminded me of Scully
rather than myself.   

"I want this baby, but I don't want a monster."

"I can't promise anything."

Dinner was a polar opposite from Jason's lordly table.  We were
knee to knee at a round table with a view of the mountains. 
Emerson had the social advantage of being able to talk with his
mouth full, and he almost kept Aileen from eating at all while
he expounded his theories on global education via the Internet.
His standpoint was that given the access to the facts, anyone
was capable of self-education and the ability to make informed
decisions about life and the current political climate.  He also
explained how he and Aileen had moved their entire software
company to this remote location after a particularly nasty hit
by Mr. Gates' industrial spies.  Their suit against Microsoft
was still in the initial stages and Emerson practically sparked
with glee at the idea of taking on the software Goliath.

Next to me, her thigh pressed against mine, Scully moved her
food around on her plate and ate little, speaking even less.

****

I was so tired that staying the night at the hotel attached to
O'Hare was a relief.  A cryptic voice mail from Zippy had
indicated that things "were going down" in Austin and we were
headed back there the next day.

Mulder got us two rooms for the record but brought both our
bags into the one on the left. I postponed the issue by taking a
long shower. The water pressure was low enough that I wasn't
reminded of Jason's guest suite, much.

They were two different people. Different in every molecule,
different as two cookies from the same cutter, where it was the
decorations that counted. Mulder still loved me with his quiet
desperation and he didn't want to hurt me.

I put on one of his T-shirts and opened the bathroom door. He
was propped up against the headboard of the bed, reading the
information Emerson had printed out for him. His hair stood up
in clumps and he was still wearing his undershirt along with his
boxer-briefs; Bruce Weber would have loved to put him on a
billboard in Times Square. He peered up over the tops of his
reading glasses at me and smiled the smile that usually worked
like a lit match deep inside me.

Five steps took me to the edge of the bed. I held out my hand
as I crawled forward. "Give me what you've looked at already."

He blinked and obeyed. Maybe we'd read until we were tired out
and then just get a few hours of shut-eye before the flight.

As if.

Maybe if I got stinking drunk again he'd chivalrously let me
off the hook, so to speak.

The file was cold and smooth in my hand. I got my glasses and
took the file over to the standard tiny hotel table, hunching
over in a way that would have me in knots in minutes. I knew
that my posture was terrible but I couldn't uncurl, like a
person burned in a fire so that the tendons shortened.

Emerson's files filled in some of the early details on the
Mulder clan; Jason had been more concerned with present
whereabouts and had skimped on the case histories. Aside from
Ian, Jason, and Mulder, it seemed that most of them had been
placed by private adoption agencies, carefully spaced around the
country. Information on Ian and Jason was all but nonexistent,
though Emerson's hacking revealed that Jason had gone from
Andover to Yale. Ian did not seem to have had any formal
education whatsoever.

The other seven did not get the benefit of the silver spoon. I
guess that was harder to replicate than the twins themselves. In
those days you could pretty much buy a baby if you had the money
and psychological fitness screening was not required, but these
babies had particularly bad, or well-planned, luck. Aileen
hadn't mentioned that Emerson's original adoptive parents had
sent him to the hospital on a regular basis before being turned
into jam in the car crash that had left him to the tender
mercies of the Trappers.

And I'd pitied Mulder. 

It was too much hardship. I closed the folder and turned out
the desk lamp. Mulder had finished reading and was channel-
surfing. I scuttled over to the bed and pulled the covers down
on my side, sliding in like a bullet.. I felt him shift but I
turned my back to him so I couldn't see his inquisitive abused-
puppy look.

He sighed and I heard the TV go off. Many nights on the road
he'd gone back to his room after the sex so that he could watch
the tube for a while, and then he'd sneak back into my room when
he was sated and wrap himself around me like a silk cocoon.
Tonight he would need the comfort too much to leave; at least I
was sure that he'd choose me over the idiot box.

He killed the light over the nightstand, leaving only the
bathroom light and the glow from behind the drapes, which
weren't doing enough to cut off the outside world. I felt the
air being sucked out of my lungs. Covers rustled until he found
the right layer and then he was sliding his arm around me,
tugging me onto my back.

I closed my eyes and I was back in the lightless bathroom.
Everything shut down; my arms and legs jerked as if I were a
plastic action figure and Mulder pulled away, confused.

I had to get used to the idea of being violated. When I was
first returned three years ago, I hadn't been able to masturbate
for several months; I could barely stand to look at my newly
unfamiliar, bloated body in the shower.

That passed.

But if it took another five months this time, Mulder was going
to want an explanation.

Even now he was hovering over me, dismayed and rapidly growing
impatient.

I grabbed his forearms and pushed, flipping him onto his back.
He went readily, leering up at me; he thought he knew the game
now.

"Listen to me.  I am only going to say this once," I said and
underneath me his entire body went into danger mode.

"What?" 

I had my hands on either side of his body and my knees between
his legs, if he was going to go anywhere, he would do so with me
stuck to him like a leech.

"Jason impersonated you. He raped me.  He sodomized me.  While
you were talking to Samantha. I'm pretty sure he drugged us both
to do it."

In the green light of the hotel, his mouth opened and shut like
a fish floating helplessly in an oil slick. I watched him start
into the lake of self-loathing that always lies underneath the
carefully cultivated ice layer he skates upon.

"I need some time," I added, not liking the passing blank look
on his oft-duplicated features.

"Take all the time you need," he said in a voice that was a
shadow of a shadow.

I couldn't accurately gage the truth level in his words; I was
too tired to catalog every nuance on his face and body.  But I
did, however, slide off him and let him gather me close to his
chest in yet another dreary hotel room after another drearily
horrible revelation.

"I don't want you to feel guilty," I told his chest, "and I
don't want an endless round of explanations and recriminations. 
Shit happens."

I could feel his muscles twitch but he didn't reply. Eventually
I slept, though I don't believe he did.

****

I was going to kill Jason, it was that simple. 

Then I was going to get twenty-first century on his ass. I
would find his cache of alien technology, bring him back to
life, and kill him again. Then I would clone him and torture him
until he begged for mercy. I would keep him around for target
practice. Cut off his dick and feed it to him in bite-size
pieces. Then I'd kill him and start all over again.

If I hadn't given in to my petty desires those many months ago
on my awful stinking couch, she would have been safe. She would
have slapped him and sent him away. 

If I hadn't been petting and necking with my baby sister he
wouldn't have had his opportunity. What a fucking freak, her and
me both, Mom's genes were deadly no matter whose sperm supplied
the other half of the recombinatorial portfolio. I remembered
Sam's cool lips like fishscales through water, thought about
Scully in the bedroom above us, wrenched apart by his cock. I
imagined her pain, thinking that it was because of me and still
submitting, her soft satin voice asking me not to hurt her, not
to hurt her *again* and me bludgeoning her. For a moment I
wished us both dead, it might give us some surcease.

Get your name tattooed on your forehead so that she'd know it's
you, pretty fucking funny, Fox.

I almost liked the idea that I'd been drugged, it made my part
of that night easier to forgive.  He'd  - they – Them – whatever
– had obviously had a plan.  Me outside fucking my own sister
(who, no doubt, was at the most fertile part of her reproductive
cycle) while he was upstairs impregnating Scully.  The thought
made the airline coffee curdle in my stomach.  But the plan had
gone mildly wrong.  I'd managed to escape Sam and make it
upstairs to screw Scully without the benefit of latex.  The only
shred of hope was that should Scully be pregnant, there was a
possibility I had done the deed.  With any luck my sperm had
learned the butterfly crawl from their owner.

But, and here was where I was in deep water, should a child
result from said union(s) would the child not have the same
genetic make-up regardless of who had shot the wad that caused
the fertilization?  I wasn't as well-versed in genetics as my
bitch of a mother or bitch of a sister, but I was pretty sure
that identical twins would have the exact same genetic make-up. 
So, we'd never know who the father of the infant was. 

My eyes were burning but I was willing myself not to cry.

She was letting me hold her, was that for her benefit or mine?
Scully compartmentalizes better than an ocean liner, maybe she
could even accept that I wasn't Jason, that my body wasn't the
threat (except it was, my body was his key). Despite her
strength, she'd hit so many icebergs in the last few weeks that
she was going to end up on the bottom of the ocean in short
order.

Time, she wanted time. I wanted time *travel*, I would go back
to any of a hundred decision points and kill myself to keep her
out of harm's way. I would go back to the beginning of Dr.
Frankenmulder's charming little experiment and set the lab on
fire, what the hell it worked for Scully.

Jason had true style, I had to concede that. He'd taken away
the one tie I could count on, my carefully acquired knowledge of
the way to rock Dana Scully's world. Now there was nothing to
keep her, and every time she looked at me she'd have reason to
remember what he'd done.

****

I could tell by the keening of the phone that it was mine, not
Mulder's. He groaned and pulled the pillow over his head as I
leaned over the backlit landscape of his back to snag the
annoying device off of the nightstand.

"Scully."

Skinner's voice sent a quick rush of adrenaline through my
body, as if he were watching us loll in blatant disregard for
regulations. I automatically pulled the sheet away from Mulder
to cover myself up. "Agent Scully, Emerson Goldberg and his wife
Aileen were just reported missing by their security service,
which had instructions to contact me if this were to happen--
instructions they say they received only yesterday, after your
visit."

"Is there any sign that they were...hurt...when they were
taken?" 

Mulder stiffened into ice and opened his eyes.

"No sign of forced entry. Security was compromised without a
trace, not even a dog barked according to the man in charge.
I've met him before, he says they should have detected an
unauthorized penetration and they didn't."

Mulder threw off the corner of the sheet he had left and began
to throw on yesterday's clothes. "We'll look into it," I
promised.

"The Goldbergs are gone," I said unnecessarily.

"It's Jason," he replied.

"Why take them, why not just kill them like the others?"

He shook his head like a whipped dog. "Not sure. I'd guess it
has something to do with wanting to have some genetic material
on tap, so he doesn't have to wear himself out in the bathroom
every day. And Aileen's fetus is near enough to birth to be
viable, maybe he wants to know what the next generation looks
like."

Back to Austin it was.

****

Zippy was waiting for us at the local office. The entire floor
was hopping with agents trying to find out what was going on and
how they could get a piece of it. Coffee cups were strewn over
every flat surface and some surfaces that weren't too flat. 

We stepped into the relative calmness of his office, warmed by
the sun through the enormous plate glass windows, and I was
surprised by his angry scowl. He reminded me of myself, much
earlier in my life, when I knew Mulder was hiding his sources
from me.

"You need to hear this," Zippy pressed play and the reels of
the small recorder he'd picked up when he saw us began to turn. 

"I saw that report on the news, about Holly Keene? I've seen
her, a couple of nights ago. A couple of men were...taking her
into a building. I thought she was real drunk and they were
holding her up, but now I guess...It was a warehouse, the one on
the north side of Ridgewood, the second one in from Howe Street."

Tinny and compressed, the voice was still familiar. Zippy's own
voice was considerably clearer, and furious. "I had a voice
analysis done, and despite the shitty drawl, it comes out ninety-
eight percent likely to be the voice of one Fox Mulder. You
wanna explain that?"

"Or Jason Lindsay," I said and Mulder nodded, comprehending.

"He wanted the raid to happen," Mulder said, thinking out loud.
"Maybe the women in the warehouse were somebody else's project,
a threat to his power, so he called it in. He had to have been
lying about Holly Keene; she was catatonic and nine months
pregnant at the time. The whole thing was designed to get us to
Austin."

"And he was the man in Hal Rothberg's vestibule," I said.

"Now just a fucking minute—"

"Well you explain it, hotshot."

Zippy looked as though he was trying to decide if he was going
to throw the file at Mulder or into the garbage.  Mulder stared
him down.

"There's something I have to tell you guys," Zippy began, "The
Roush compound, just outside town – there's been some
interesting equipment going into there over the past few months."

Zippy's phone rang, which may have been what kept Mulder from
throttling him.  Zippy listened for a moment, grunted a
monosyllable or two and hung up, the lines deepening around his
too-bright eyes.

"Darien Klein is missing, your boss is coming here, and we're
supposed to get ready for a big ol' Texas blowout."

"Holy Waco, Batman," Mulder deadpanned.


17/20 I fall on the weeds and stones, The riders spur their
unwilling horses, haul close, Taunt my dizzy ears and beat me
violently over the head with whipstocks. Walt Whitman

By the time Skinner got to Texas things had only gotten worse.
The local police had taken a call from someone claiming to be
trapped in Roush's research facility. She said she'd been
drugged and had awakened and escaped her bonds, but she couldn't
leave because of the guards, so she was using an abandoned
office to call. Then there'd been a clamor and she'd been cut
off.

I smelled a relative. 

Operative theory: Jason had ratted out Sam's little project in
the warehouse, forcing an early shutdown. Sam was now playing
tit-for-tat. As far as reproduction is concerned, men are
penises with legs, and that's not a bad description of us in
general; Sam didn't need Jason anywhere as much as he needed
her. He was getting greedy and she was cutting her losses--which
made her attempted seduction easier to understand. Maybe she was
imagining another morgantic dynasty. Unlike Jason, I would be
wracked by guilt and uninterested in competing with her for
control of Roush.

Zippy handed Skinner a red folder. "Sir, this is the report
I've put together on Roush's activities in the past few months.
You'll note I've traced numerous illicit arms purchases back to
the Austin facility; in addition, their Social Security
withholding forms indicate that they've hired over fifty men as
'security' in the past three months alone, only losing three to
regular attrition. In brief, sir, there's a fucking arsenal in
there."

Skinner looked at Zippy as though he had spit out an armadillo.

"Why hasn't anyone done anything about this?" he growled.

The fur around his neck bristling, Zippy glared at the AD.

"You tell me.  I cc'd my Division head and the ATF and no one
seemed to give a fuck, sir."

"You ever see anything like this again, come straight to me."

Zippy looked as though the head of the wolfpack had tossed him
a particularly juicy part of a deer.

****

By the time we arrived the enterprising local reporters had
caught mention of the problem on the police radio frequency, and
so we struggled through a layer of the fourth estate before
reaching the real perimeter.

Zippy wanted to go in shooting. Fortunately Skinner was in
agreement with Zippy's immediate superior that firing first was
a piss-poor idea, and wouldn't play well on TV either.

There was no activity visible in the compound. It could have
been deserted if not for the multiple bodies showing on the
infrared scanners.

Skinner borrowed a bullhorn and stepped towards the closest
building. "Attention, Roush employees," he boomed. "We have
received reports that people are being held against their will
inside. Please come out with your hands raised and no one has to
get hurt."

That was when the top window of the building exploded outwards
and a shotgun blast almost moved me up the chain of command.
Skinner, his Marine instincts as sharp as ever, dived just in
time to avoid being hit.

He cursed and the local AD, obviously infected with Texas
bravado, gave the order to return fire. I heard the slow beat of
our tactical helicopters powering up. They wouldn't be reducing
the compound to powder, not with potential hostages inside, but
they'd shoot anything that moved.

Meanwhile men in flak jackets were popping up on both sides,
shooting so wildly that Mulder and I retreated behind a Bucar to
regroup. 

I surveyed the disaster unfolding before us. Even if our
colleagues managed to overrun the building, there wouldn't be
enough left of Emerson, Aileen and Baby Goldberg to put in a
doggie bag.

"We need a chopper," Mulder said, for once making perfect sense.

I glanced over at the slew of grounded news copters, brought
down by threats and growls from our side. "Which one?"

He pointed. "Isn't it obvious?"

Put that way, it was.

Mulder took off and I followed, checking to make sure that no
one noticed our mad dash into enemy territory. Reporters began
to head toward us like iron filings to a magnet, but Mulder
shouldered his way to Rupert Murdoch's local affiliate.

"Look at it this way," he tossed over his shoulder as he banged
on the door of the bird, "I'll be the only one of us wearing a
nametag."

The door popped open and a blonde stuck her head out. "Can I
help you...Agents?" appending our titles once she figured them
out.

"I have four words for you: Bernard Shaw. Pulitzer. *Network.*"

"Come on up," she said.

The pilot, what I could see of him under the Boba Fett gear he
was wearing, looked like he'd been fried in hot fat at some
point in the past. His face was a welt of scar tissue, his mouth
white and lipless. Vietnam, I guessed. Somehow it always was.
The cameraman helped me into the chopper and as soon as Mulder
had one foot inside we were lifting off.

"There's a lot of gunfire," the blonde reporter said into her
microphone, "and I don't know how much you can see from this
angle--Peter, turn the camera so we can see the feds. It looks
like there are at least five--no, six--FBI agents down. I can
see ambulance lights on the road off the other side."

"Are we just going to do the traffic report or are we going
into the compound?"

She made a face that would probably look like a smile to the
people watching the video feed. "Charlie, let's go in."

"This is Sheryl Ann Reardon, reporting for KTBC." She had the
conspiratorial whisper down perfectly, though she should lose
the accent if she really wanted to go national. "We're
approaching the source of the gunfire now..."

The helicopter jerked like a yo-yo on a string and I was lifted
into the air. I'd missed the seatbelt somehow, and Mulder
grabbed me as I came back down and held his arms around my
waist, pulling me up into his lap. I'd suspect that he
orchestrated it but there hadn't been time.

The chopper wheeled in the hot air over the complex, diving and
sweeping around and past the other choppers and the tracer
bullets like something out of a George Lucas movie.  I wanted to
shut my eyes, but I was afraid not to.  If we were going to get
shot out of the sky, I wanted to know.

"There are several dozen private troops scattered around the
perimeter of the Roush compound," the blonde continued into her
microphone, "and we have to wonder how a private company was
able to build such a force of private militia without the
authorities knowing."

The authorities knew, they just didn't do anything.

Charlie, the pilot, yelled something at the nearest chopper and
made an obscene gesture, acting, for all the world, like a New
York cabdriver.  I left my stomach somewhere when the helicopter
wheeled around and dropped like a cable-cut elevator.  I could
feel Mulder's heart beating like an engine against my back, but
my heart didn't seem to be beating at all.

The skids of the chopper hit ground with a thump from hell and
the blonde hauled the door open, while she grabbed a small
camcorder from a case on the floor.

"This is our stop," Mulder bawled in my ear over the cacophony
of the rotors.

We fell out of the chopper and onto the dusty ground, Sheryl
Ann following suit with her camera.

"You can't come in here!" I yelled at her.

"First Amendment rights, babe!" she yelled back at me and the
red light on the camera winked on, "Smile for mister and missus
America."

Mulder grabbed my arm and began scuttling for the nearest
building while the KTBC chopper took off again. Sheryl Ann raced
after us.  The guards were thinner on the ground inside the
compound, but the one that popped out of the doorway went down
in a flood of human blood when I shot him in the gut.  Overhead
the sky went orange and the explosion sent us all to our knees
as one of the helicopters exploded. Small bits of blackened
black metal showered down around us while we watched in stunned
horror as the insectoid bulk of the machine smashed like a comet
into the building across the compound.  I grabbed Mulder's arm
and began running, he hauled the reporter to her feet and the
three of us made it into the building a microsecond before the
fireball swept across where we had fallen.  

The hallways were unfinished wallboard with spackle still
showing around the paper joins and the lights were unshaded
fluorescent fixtures overhead.  In the echoing grayness, we
could still hear the rumble and crump of the firefight outside.
Mulder hurried along, his gun at the alert, like an animal hot
on the scent in fallen leaves. I followed, flicking glances here
and there for ambushes. Stopping at a metal door he flung it
open and rushed into the darkness of a stairwell.

Down into hell, where the air was cooler and full of dust from
the shaking building.

I didn't bother to ask him how he was homing in on Jason and
the others. He was following himself and, in a way, it was the
easiest hunt for a suspect he had ever done.  As ever, I
followed, and Sheryl Ann filmed as we went.

Another disposable goon stuck his face around the corner and
got it blown off for his trouble. This wasn't unlike the
countless training exercises I'd run at Quantico when I was
young and green, bad guys popping up on wires--only sometimes
they had hostages and you had to be careful who you shot.

I wasn't careful.

We were approaching the end of our chosen hallway. The door at
the end had been blown back by an explosion; it was lying black
and charred on the ground, and I could see muzzle flashes
refracted through the clouds of smoke pushing out towards us.

I squeezed off a shot for cover and Mulder darted through the
open door, diving and rolling. I couldn't see into the darkened
hallway but I didn't hear him cry out.

As I prepared to follow him, I heard a noise from Sheryl Ann. I
turned and drew a bead on Samantha (Mann) Mulder.

Mulder would kill me, he'd rip the skeleton from my pulsing
flesh and crack the bones apart to get at the marrow, if I
killed his little sister.

What would he think about wounding? I pointed the gun at a
neutral angle, somewhere between her and the heavens where God
was laughing at us.

She approached, the Mulder certainty that no harm could befall
her as strong in her as in her brother. "I don't think you plan
on killing me. Why don't you put the gun away?"

"Why don't you stop moving, turn around and put your hands
against the wall?"

She pouted, the effect somewhat spoiled by her razorblade
earrings and mercury eyes.

Still, I wasn't expecting her to rush me.

I got off one round before she was on me, and her weight and
momentum knocked me over. An earring stabbed into the fleshy
bottom of my palm and she slammed my gun hand against the floor,
jarring the bone painfully and making me lose my grip. She
jabbed at my throat and scratched at my eyes and I thought,
well, America's viewers are going to love this, too bad we're
not naked and covered in chocolate pudding.

"Jason said you were a lousy lay, apparently you're a lousy
shot as well, are you good for anything?" Her arm was tight
around my throat as she dragged me to a standing position, I
suppose to emphasize her height advantage. 

It was a mistake. I drove my elbow into her stomach and
hunkered down as I flipped her. She gasped in shock as her
entire spine crashed into the ground.

Try to tell me that size matters, you bitch.

Punch-drunk, she rolled to her feet and came at me again. She
had a switchblade, like some strange refugee from West Side
Story. I should have known that she wouldn't like killing from a
distance. Slashing out, she used her longer reach to open a
burning line across my chest and the top of my right arm. I
ducked and weaved, trying to get back to my gun.

I faked down towards my weapon and she bent her knees for
better access to my throat as I sprang on her. This time her
nose broke with a satisfying crunch when I slammed my fist into
her face.  No wonder men like fistfights, it's unbeatable for
instant satisfaction when you're winning.  Gasping and bleeding,
she went down again. I brought my boot down on her knife hand
and heard bones break. While she gurgled, I kicked the knife
away, not minding whether it cut her on the way out. Then I sat
on her wiggly bony body and cuffed both her hands through a
still-exposed steel rebar in the wall.

"You go, girl!" Sheryl Ann urged, dropping her journalistic
perspective like an old pair of shoes.

I had lost Mulder.

While Samantha continued to bitch and screech, I went after her
brothers.


18/20 I am the hounded slave I wince at the bite of the dogs.
Hell and despair are upon me, crack and again crack the
marksmen, I clutch at the rails of the fence, my gore dribs,
thinn'd with the ooze of my skin. Walt Whitman

Girl reporter in tow, I searched the first floor of the
building systematically, barrelling through hallways and kicking
open flimsy temporary doors like it was going out of style. My
Spidey sense wasn't working too well: I found Darien and Emerson
instead. I knew it was them because I recognized Darien's
streaked hair and Emerson's shaggy 'do, along with his arm
guarding Aileen. They were all in leg chains bolted to bars
through the floor. I wondered what the architect had thought
about the plans for the building. Maybe there was a particular
firm you'd go to if you wanted to build your own dungeon in
Austin.

No time for sappy reunions. "Hang on," I said, went for the
fire ax at the end of the hall, and returned to hack them free.
Darien went as stiff as a stuffed deer but Aileen and Emerson
were eerily calm and trusting. I suspected shock which couldn't
be doing the baby much good. Two down, three to go; George had
to be around here somewhere.

The perimeter was well-guarded. George had gone from jail to
hostage and, hopefully, right smack into the open arms of an FBI
agent or a Texas Ranger.  Mulder, on the other hand, was capable
of getting into plenty of trouble right here in this building.

I sent the resilient Sheryl Ann to lead the freed captives out.
She took one look at Aileen and sensed great human interest--a
pregnant woman and two identical twins for good measure, so she
didn't protest when I headed back in without her. I think she
might have seen enough fighting to satisfy her need for blood.
There was a door I hadn't gone through, a white wooden hole in a
white wooden wall with warning signs plastered all over it.

I didn't have my hard hat but I kicked it open anyway.

I could smell them through the fresh paint and the gunpowder.  

The building had opened up into one huge room. Strange
equipment littered the sides, some of it working and some
hulking inert metal. There were surgical tables and high-wattage
lamps, cabinets for holding machinists' tools and wheeled trays
for instruments I didn't want to think about. Extension cords
draped like nests of snakes everywhere.

Where were they?

****

Scully's a big girl, she can take care of  herself.  I reminded
myself as I ran through the corridors of Jason's fortress.  What
about with Jason, dumbass, was she taking care of herself then?

The corridor ended at a door festooned with warning signs;
biohazard, hard hat area only, authorized personnel only, and
suchlike. This was the smell of blood to me and I went through
the door.

A cavern of walkways and steel staircases, reminiscent of the
warehouse in Austin where the Crawford clone had kept his cache
of gestating women.  I was standing on a walkway about halfway
between the floor and roof.  A bilious green light shone
overhead and looked directly up into what looked like a half-
dozen enormous tanks of the now-familiar green liquid, the
amniotic fluid of unnatural birth.  I looked down, and more
tanks filled levels below my feet. So it appeared that my lovely
brother was going to start heavy-duty production of -- something
-- in fairly short order.  After seeing the mutated and
malformed fetuses on the floor at Bethel, I wasn't sure that
another batch of "new and improved" humans was a good thing.

"You're late," a voice that was mine and not mine drawled from
my left.

"The traffic is bad."

The .357 Magnum in Jason's hand made me feel a little bit
better, amateurs think that guns are like penises -- bigger is
better. Dirty Harry's gun of choice was intimidating but only
effective if the gunman could hit the broad side of a barn. 
Nevertheless those high-caliber guns made big holes.

It was a good thing he had the gun, I might have felt slightly
guilty shooting an unarmed man.  And I was going to shoot him, I
was going to kill him, that wasn't in question. I just needed to
know a few things before I blew his fucking evil brains all over
the metal flooring.

"Why?" I asked.

The bastard was going to make the GQ issue of "evil
psychopaths" that year in his expensive shirt and dark pants. 
He moved closer to me, the gun held in his hand like a prop in a
photo shoot.

"If you think I'm going to tell you all the intricate details
of my plan including the easiest way to defeat me, like the
villain in a James Bond movie, you're sadly mistaken.  Did you
ever wonder why they did that, Fox?  Sean Connery would be
strapped to a table and Bloefeld would obligingly show him the
button that turned the entire compound into a smoking hole in
the ground," he shrugged and wandered a little bit closer,
"you'll just have to die wondering."

"Wrong answer, you're going to die," he made such a classy
target standing there at the end of my gunsight.

"She really wasn't all that good, you know.  I can't understand
the attraction."

If I clenched my teeth any tighter, I was going to spit out
fillings.

"You should have sampled the charms of our sister, she's quite
talented.  But then again, she always had a natural inclination
for carnality, even at a very young age -- ten, I seem to
remember."

Deep breaths buddy, I reminded myself.  I wanted my hands
steady when I shot him.  The general plan was as follows --
right kneecap, left kneecap, right shoulder, left shoulder, then
in the gut.  I wanted to watch his face turn white as he bled to
death in front of me. 

Jason moved even closer, until we were barely ten feet from one
another on the catwalk. The smile he gave me had been edited for
television.

"The only problem with Sam is that she likes to make herself
feel important by running her own projects."

"Let me guess.  Bethel was yours, the Crawford plant was hers,
and she called this little installation in to the Feds because
you did something that put her in a snit.  Ugly infighting. 
Very Roman, you know, along with the rest of your sins.  You
killed the rest of our brothers, didn't you?"

"Just two.  Hal and Baylor," he smiled again, "the rest were
Sam's doing. Between the two of us we were each trying to make
our own collection of DNA to start the new product line.  Hal
was a worthless waste of genetic material, and Baylor . . . I
almost felt bad about him.   I've never met anyone with such a
deliciously yielding nature before.  You see he thought I was
just like you - and we're all a little narcissistic, aren't we? 
Must run in the family."

"And you want to make more? Get real.  The Project was a
failure.  It produced ten sick and warped men who cause nothing
but pain to anyone they come in contact with."

"Increased resistance to disease, superior intellect, near-
empathic abilities have been the hallmark of our line, combined
with DNA like that of your Dana, it's a wonderful combination. 
When the Old Order releases whatever biological monstrosity
they've created, I will rise out of the ashes and rule the
survivors."

God, it was no surprise that the genesis of the project had
been with the Nazis.  This spiel of genetic superiority was as
old as the Babylonians thinking that they were better than the
other tribes further down the Euphrates River.  And my mother
had been involved in it up to her pearl earrings.

"You know, before you go any further with your little
meglomaniacal soliloquy here, let me update you a little on the
background of the Mulder Dynasty. Our dear mother might have
neglected to mention the fact that our family is Jewish.  Mom's
Aunt Sophie managed to live through Dachau.  Dad's family hid in
Amsterdam, pretending to be Christian, and only a few managed to
survive. So you think long and hard about your master race shit,
we've been there and done that, got the tattoos."

"Is that what you're going to tell your daughter?"

"My daughter?" I squeaked.

"Yes, your baby.  The one I made for you with your partner's
ova. There weren't many left after Bethel, but Mom has always
been a belt-and-suspenders kind of lady."

Miranda.

I could barely hear Jason's voice through the rushing of blood
through my brain.  I think he might have been surprised when I
leapt at him.

His gun went off.

****

A gunshot, like the crack of Doom, drew my attention upwards,
to a side of the building where at least ten enormous tanks of
green liquid glowed radioactively against the murk. There was a
temporary wooden ladder leading up to that part of the building,
where a wall would have been later on, and I ran towards it.

Whatever I might have seen had I stayed in place was lost as I
got closer and couldn't see up, but I heard Mulder's voice,
twice, and I knew I'd found him.

Hand over hand I climbed the ladder, cursing my too-short legs
that prevented me from skipping rungs.

I had just stuck my head over the edge when the two fighting
men slammed into one of the tanks. I ducked and felt a glass
fragment slash my cheek open, and I was spattered with something
thick and salty as semen. It was slimy enough to make my hands
slippery on the ladder and, blind, I reached out for solid
ground. The metal framework of the unfinished floor provided
handholds and I pulled myself up.

I should have known that it would come to this.

The green goo, almost opaque now that it wasn't backlit in its
glass fishtank, coated them both, plastering their hair to their
skulls and destroying anything that made them distinguishable.
Two pairs of hazel eyes blazed hatred. One knocked the other to
the walkway, clanging against the metal and sending spatters of
goo down several stories.

The one on the bottom saw me as he struggled to keep the one on
top from choking him. He screamed something, my ears were
ringing from the gunfire and the helicopter but I thought I
could lipread.

Kill us both, he said.

I raised my gun and aimed carefully. I didn't intend to shoot
Jason in the shoulder.

I didn't even feel the blow. Only the sudden realization that I
was horizontal and that my gun was spinning across the walkway,
bouncing and catching on the metal grid, told me that I'd been
hit.

The static in my head was growing. I rolled onto my back,
feeling the bruises soon to come, and looked up again into
Mulder's face.

I blinked and fought the pain and the face swelled and
softened. It became Ian's, poor crazed Ian, not so dead after
all but only hiding until the last act. I want to say that I
made that deduction because I'd seen it all before, but it would
be more honest to admit that I just knew.

He spared me a glance and then stooped to pick up my gun. I
lurched to my hands and knees. He didn't know, how would he get
it right? Mulder and Jason were still rolling around and I'd
lost whatever certainty I'd thought I had.

I stood and reached out to pull at his arm but he pushed me
away casually.. I couldn't see his face and I was still deaf,
but I know what he said:

I'm your brother and I love you.

I felt the vibration of the gunshot, felt the walkway shake as
a man collapsed, half his face spread across the other man's
head and shoulders, green and red mixing like some bizarre
Christmas cookie frosting.

He blinked and spat as the body collapsed, its hands trailing
down his sodden chest, still fighting even in death. There were
fireworks going off behind my eyes in the space where my brain
used to be.

The wounded one fell to the walkway, bubbling screams coming
from where his mouth had been.

Movement, all around me, like snakes rustling through grass.
More of them. Three more. Long hair, Emerson, his tongueless
mouth opening, echoing the scream of his brother, streaked hair,
Darien, screaming as well, short hair, George, screaming from
his tattooed throat. Ian moving past me, to where the screaming
and fallen one lay, Ian screamed as well.  The one remaining
alive on the walkway staggered back, away from his brothers.
Whatever hot metal insanity linked them closed the chain and he
shrieked as well.

Like wolves over the broken body of an antelope run to ground
on the plain, they converged, hands reaching, stretching to the
fallen one, the howl moving beyond my ears and into my body. 
Fingers reached out to the brother on the floor.    Reaching,
pulling, tearing, rending. I saw blood.  More blood, and, as
they fell upon him, his screams rose higher in a castrato
glissando over the inhuman song of the brothers Mulder.  Gobbets
of bloody flesh fell onto the walkway and dripped onto the next
level. Bloodied fingers daubed at one another like children
playing in a mud puddle.

One lovely hazel eye bounced off the metal flooring a few
inches from my face, I put my head on the cold metal and shut my
eyes, the sob in my throat dying unborn.

A moment, a heartbeat, an eternity and the noise was gone.
Nothing left of the fallen brother but a bouquet of bones with a
crimson bloom of blood and crumpled, shredded tissue around. 
The three latecomers were gone as though they had never been
there, just the live one on the walkway with the corpse of his
brother and Ian, standing over me where I cowered on the ground.

There was blood on Ian's hands.

There was blood on his face, surrounding his mouth.

Already he had the gun at his temple, and I was transfixed by
the image, one I'd often imagined when Mulder sounded too lonely
and distant on the phone.

Ian looked all the way to the bottom of me, and I don't think
he liked what he saw. "Take care of my daughter," he said and
pulled the trigger for the second time.

The burning heat of his blood covered me.

More blood.

I was drowning in it.

Only two-thirds of the Mulders in the vicinity were dead. There
was still work to do before I succumbed to shock, despair, or
even full-fledged insanity, all of which were options I fully
intended to consider in depth -- some day.

The spasming of Ian's muscles enabled him to keep the gun in
his grip even as I pried it away. The gore-spattered man ten
feet from me was still looking unsteadily at the dead man at his
feet when I retrieved my weapon and pointed it at him.

"Wipe your face," I commanded, sounding absurdly like the
mother of a toddler.

He hesitated.

"Do it now!" My voice rose and I swayed. If he moved forward
I'd have to shoot, I was in no shape for a fight.

He raised one soaked arm to his cheek and rubbed. The first
pass didn't do much, just rearranged the blood and other liquid
into a diarrhea-like brown. He swiped again, using his forearm
like a cat cleaning itself, faster and faster as if he could
peel off his face if he only tried hard enough and start over as
a new person.

When he raised his head his face was still stained, but it was
evident that his nose lacked symmetry. 

I stepped forward and had another thought. What if Mulder had
broken Jason's nose in the fight? The light wasn't the best, nor
was my perception. And obviously I was incapable of telling the
difference at fairly crucial junctures.

"Scully..." he said and raised his hands to me, palms up,
pleading for absolution.

After all the surveillance we'd undergone I didn't know what to
ask him to verify his identity.

"Show me your cheek," I ordered and, when he didn't make an
asinine crack,  or drop his pants, I revised downwards my
estimate of the chance that it was really my Mulder. My finger
trembled on the trigger, less than six ounces away from firing
pressure.

He shrugged and wiped his right hand on the railing, leaving a
stain of bloody slime, and then attacked his face again,
scratching at the thick, tacky residue there.

I have never loved Mulder's mole as much as I did for the few
seconds after it appeared and before I collapsed.

****

Scully brought the baby with her when she was released from the
hospital. I should have guessed. I would have paid a lot of
money to be warned of her impending arrival so that I could have
watched her stalk through the entire floor, kid held to her
chest like a Congressional Medal of Honor.

Instead I had to settle for gawping along with Zippy when the
two of them entered his office.

I rediscovered my voice, which along with my heart had fallen
several stories at the sight of her with her hands, literal and
metaphorical, full.

"Are you planning to tell me about this at any time before this
kid reaches voting age?"

She looked up and the baby promptly turned its head and began
to drool on her blouse. "I think you can probably guess what the
PCS showed about her relationship to me."

I nodded. She looked quickly at Zippy, then away.

"Do you want to know what I found when I tested your blood?"

"Where they buried Jimmy Hoffa?"

Not even a twitch, either of amusement or exasperation.

"What?" I said, and my voice cracked.

"There's...according to standard genetic testing protocols,
she's your child."

My circulation stopped. I swear not a molecule of blood moved
through my body.  I wanted Jason to have been lying to me. Trust
the son of a bitch (and weren't we all) to have been telling me
the truth about the one thing that I wanted to be a lie.

I love my delusions, wouldn't leave home without them.

Scully sighed with resignation.

"She's got your genes, but that doesn't make her your daughter.
Do you really think they'd use your sperm when Jason and Ian
were so much more accessible?"

I'd been punched by large men with less effect. I thought I
could feel the still-healing sutures in my stomach burst.

You had to give Zippy credit, he continued to fill out papers
as though there weren't thermonuclear strikes going off all
around him.

"Mulder?" she prompted. "Do you have any thoughts you're
willing to share?"

I looked everywhere but at the little bundle of joy in her arms.

"What the hell am I supposed to do about it?  It's not like I
impregnated you.  For God's sake, I have been doing everything
possible to avoid just that. You can't just dump this on me.  As
you're so happy to point out, I can barely take care of myself,
let alone a child."

The door behind her face slammed shut, leaving me outside.  I
found myself looking down the barrel of the gun in her eyes.

"Well if that's the way you feel about it --" she said in a
voice as bright and brittle as Jason's Waterford Crystal.

"That's not -- shit.  You've got to give me some time to think
about this," I turned and stared at the brick wall outside
beyond Zippy's window, "I'm not exactly thrilled that my fucked
up gene pool is continuing."

"Whatever."

The scalpel on her tongue cut me to the spine.

"I'm taking Miranda and going to my mother's.  The court has
granted me temporary custody pending an adoption hearing.  I've
cleared the parental leave with Skinner.  If you have any
questions about my involvement with the case against Roush, you
can call me or reach me via e-mail."

The door clicked shut with a noise more final than a slam.

Zippy picked up his head.

"You are such an asshole."

"Fuck you, fuck you to death," I snapped and genuinely meant it.

****

I had never realized exactly how many things that babies
required for daily maintenance until I found myself struggling
onto the plane at the Austin airport with Miranda, a diaper bag,
a seat sling, my briefcase (with laptop weighing it down), and
my suitcase.   The business travelers stared at me as though I
had a virulent form of leprosy rather than a human being smaller
than most of their carry-on bags.  I knew how they felt.  I'd
always had the same reaction when I had seen women with children
getting on planes.  The babies always cried and the mothers
seemed to be both embarrassed and frustrated by a perfectly
natural reaction.  And the other passengers had gotten mad
enough to kill.

The bruises that I'd gotten at the hands of the various Mulders
were making my entire right side stiff and sore as though I had
been through a particularly rough workout at the gym – with me
as the punching bag. After I settled into the seat, I nestled
Miranda against my right arm and let her hot little body work as
a natural heating pad.  She grunted like a piglet and tried to
nurse my arm.  I popped the bottle's nipple in her mouth and
sighed.

The phone call I had made to my mother had been utterly surreal.

Hi mom, I have a baby.

That's nice dear, where did you get it?

Even after I had explained that the baby was both mine and
Mulder's due to a perverse experiment and that I had some
reservations about my ability to do my job with a
baby/toddler/child/teenager to worry about, she continued to ask
me when and where I was going to have the baby christened.  I
shouldn't have been surprised, but I was hoping that she could
be a little more constructive than that.  At any rate, I headed
home with my not-yet fully adopted baby and wondered what kind
of havoc an eight pound creature could possibly wreak in my life.

Answer: a lot of havoc.

Halfway home, Miranda began to wail and I found myself changing
her diaper in the microscopic airplane bathroom while she
screamed as though I was burning her with a hot curling iron. 
Back at the seat, she sobbed into my chest for awhile (which was
a tip-off that she had the Mulder bloodline for sure) before
falling asleep.  I dozed as well and the flight attendant had to
wake me up when we arrived back at BWI.

Then it took twice as long as I'd expected to get off the plane
as I held everyone else up by dragging all the bags, bottles,
wadded-up tissues, and God knew what else with me, taking
Miranda almost as an afterthought. It took three times as long
as I'd expected to get a cab; walking with my mule-load of
paraphernalia was exhausting and no one stopped to help me. I
missed Mulder. My aching neck and spasming back and twisted
calves missed Mulder.

Our slow progress to the awkward buses that shuttle passengers
from the gates to the main terminal made us late; I'd given Mom
an ETA based on pre-baby experience. By the time we arrived she
was about ready to file a missing persons report.

My first hour at her house was spent making the guestroom baby-
ready. She had a crib for little grand-visitors, but it needed
to be set up; it was still sealed in plastic awaiting Bill's
first visit. So she rocked Miranda as I scuttled about on the
floor, doing terrible things to my back, and jammed Tab A into
Slot B according to the Korean instructions, trying not to curse
or cry and mostly succeeding.

We finally got Miranda safely in her crib and I excused myself
to wash up.. The clothes were irretrievably mommy clothes as a
result of the trip and my face had the pinched Kabuki look I
remembered from my cancer days.

Miranda, though, was only going to get bigger, even if we put
another chip in my neck.

I took the rubber band out of my hair, wincing as it ripped
strands out, and went out to face the wrath of Mom.

She was standing in front of the crib, looking down at Miranda
like my chemistry instructors had looked at some of my less
successful experiments.

"How are you going to take care of this baby?" she asked,
looking up, and I noticed how tired her face was. The tragedies
of the past five years had put permanent shadows under her eyes
and the flesh under her jaw was sagging.

"I don't really know," I admitted. "I hadn't realized what an
undertaking all this is...I didn't get any time to prepare. I'm
afraid...no one can tell whether there's been any long-term
damage from her unusual birth experience, and certainly no one
can predict the effects of the genetic experimentation to which
she and her parents were subjected. She's not obviously dying,
but what if...?"

Mom held out her hand and I stepped forward so that we were
both looking down. In sleep Miranda's face was as soft and
plastic as Play-Doh. I had a momentary terror that she wasn't
breathing, but then I caught the subtle rise and fall of her
soft-boned chest.

"I don't think you're ever ready for what a child does to your
life. You do know I was pregnant with Bill Jr. when Bill and I
got married?"

My face flamed. "Mom!" Many years ago, at one of their
anniversaries, I'd done the math and I assumed my siblings had
as well, but we'd never discussed it.

"You can do whatever you have to do," Mom said. "Your father
was not exactly the stay-at-home type and I raised four of you,
pretty well I think, without him most of the time. And I imagine
Fox will help out, at least financially."

"It's probably not even his child."

"It?"

My mouth opened and closed. "When I found out that my ova had
been taken, I was angry to have the choice taken away from me.
Then they created monsters with my genes and that was worse. I
know Miranda's not a monster but she terrifies me. Mulder
doesn't want a child at all. I feel so alone."

And, Mom, I don't know whether it runs in the genes but I think
Jason died because he put too many of himself in one room; like
radio waves interfering they came together and canceled him out.
Somehow the twins knew where he was and what he wanted to do to
them. Even dangerous George and useless Darien had converged
through whatever group or singular consciousness they shared and
protected themselves, attacking the one who'd turned on them
like blood cells responding to an autoimmune disorder. What was
worst was that I couldn't remember if Mulder's hands and mouth
had been only spattered from being near to the gunshot or if
he'd -- touched -- his downed brother. This was Miranda's
legacy. I was reminded of Hamlet's warning about Ophelia:
conception is a blessing, but not as your daughter may conceive.

"It's all so, *complex*," I said and knew that was only the
barest shadow of what I could say.

My mother's hand rubbed my back, settling down on my shoulder.
"You're very strong, Dana. You'll be all right even if your
relationship with Fox doesn't survive this challenge."

I must have looked surprised.

"I'm your mother," she explained. "You stopped talking about
him."

My face burned; I hated that I had been that obvious.

"He's not exactly the kind of man I would have hoped you'd
find, particularly now. He needs a full-time caretaker of his
own. It's harder for a woman with a child but you're still
young, Dana, if you took a job that had regular hours you might
even meet some nice men from the real world."

Now I goggled at her. She'd been so polite to Mulder in the
past, I think I always assumed she saw him as son-in-law
material. But I had to get that coldness from somewhere, didn't
I, and she was right that parenting was a very different job
from being a lover or a partner.

"Come downstairs and have something to eat. I have a catalogue
of christening dresses..." 

I followed, with the increasing sense that I was trapped in a
mad director's Dadaist movie.

"What if I can't cope, Mom?" I asked her descending back.

She didn't turn around. "Children change a lot of things, Dana.
Some things you don't want to change, and then one day you look
up and discover that you're perfectly happy with the person
you've become."

I've had so many transformations in the past few years I don't
even remember the person who used to live in my body. If I
couldn't deal with who I was, how could I become someone new?

19/20 Less the reminders of properties told my words, And more
the reminders that they of life untold, and of freedom and
extrication, And make short account of neuters and geldings, and
favor men and women fully equipt. And beat the gong of revolt,
and stop with fugitives and them that plot and conspire. Walt
Whitman

Given a choice between going before a Senate Subcommittee
meeting and being raped by Jason again, I'll take Jason any day
of the week.  Even if he came back as a zombie to do the deed.
Poor Mulder, standing there taking his oath in his best suit
looking suspiciously like Jimmy Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to
Washington while I sat in the gallery with Emerson on one side
and Skinner on the other, Miranda cooing in my lap.  I hadn't
wanted to take her but whatever gene that had given Jason the
gift of gab rose its ugly head in both Mulder and Emerson and
they agreed that the "coo-factor" would weigh in well in our
favor.  After all there I was with Mulder and Emerson, the
twins, and a child that was mine that I hadn't given birth to. 
I had signed affidavits from my gynecologist and the team that
had attempted to harvest my ova prior to the chemotherapy
stating that I was barren as the face of the moon at the time.

The current report from my gynecologist was a contrast in the
extreme. Fortunately, Jason's attempt had been fruitless, pardon
the pun, and I wasn't pregnant but that was more due to luck
than anything else. 

I needed to know if Ian's speech about the barrenness of the
twins was true. I'm a scientist, let's keep that in mind. And
these days if anyone but Mulder told me that the sun rose in the
east I'd go outside and check just to make sure that a
conspiracy hadn't reoriented the cardinal directions.

In retrospect, hauling Mulder off to a fertility clinic was
probably the worst thing to do under the circumstances, but just
scraping the surface of his sofa wasn't going to give a fresh
sample, now was it? He balked, he bitched, he whined, he went. 
He also spent fifteen minutes perusing their videotape
collection before he found something to his connoisseur's
taste.  

Well, in a nutshell, Ian was wrong.  After all he was mad, and
possibly the myth of his own virility as compared to that of his
brothers was one of the few things that kept him from total
catatonic schizophrenia.  Mulder was as fertile as a field well
stocked with manure.  

The clinic was the first time I'd seen him since I'd left him
in Austin.

Irrefutable proof, Miranda, Emerson, Mulder, and somewhere in
the back of the gallery, Darien who hadn't wanted to sit with
us. I guess he thought the taint of insanity was passed through
the air like a virus. If so, this was a virus that prophylactics
would avail him little against. When I'd tried to ask him what
had happened in that warehouse, whether he'd really been there
on the walkway, he denied it as vehemently as a politician
denying that donations would ever affect his vote. When I asked
Emerson, by contrast, he made hand motions that Aileen refused
to translate; she said he'd never left her side during their
escape from captivity, and in a way I wanted to believe that. He
seemed like such a good family man. 

In this case perhaps family loyalty had been best served by
ripping Jason apart like Osiris, Osiris whose lover had been his
mother and his sister both by some accounts. I hadn't asked
Mulder what he'd seen and/or done, because that would have
required real conversation. And it would force me to evaluate
exactly how I should react to the unspeakable thing I'd seen
that day.

Miranda gurgled and drooled on the lapel of my suit. She rooted
against me, her body hot and heavy as a sack of sugar.  Aileen
had already offered to take her while I testified which would,
with my luck, coincide with her next feeding.  But the Senators
had to finish crucifying Mulder first.

Then it was my turn. 

I don't remember much about giving testimony, Aileen tells me
that I looked and sounded wonderful, strong and believable
spouting out information about gametes, blastocysts, twinning,
and cloning with baby drool on my suit.  I do remember meeting
Mulder out in the cold marble hallway afterwards, where the
press was not allowed; I was waiting for him with Skinner, who
had Miranda over one shoulder and an astonishing amount of
curdled formula sticking to his tie.

"What the hell are we going to do?" Mulder asked.

"Get better dry cleaners."

"That's not what I meant. "

"I know what you meant and this is really not the time or place
to start this discussion," I said in the most even tone that I
could manage.

"You let me know when you want to talk about it," he said in a
hard, tight voice and Miranda let out a thin wail. Mulder took
one look at the AD's tie and blinked.

I was just about ready to snatch her away from Skinner when the
doors to the chamber opened and Emerson and Aileen came out.

"They've gone onto the government funds that Roush misused
during the course of the experiments.  Despite all your efforts,
it's becoming clear that the committee is more interested in the
financial rather than the ethical problems the research has
caused," Aileen sighed.

Emerson's hands flew in short, choppy strokes.

"Fucking government bean-counters, they'll be the first ones up
against the wall when the revolution comes. It doesn't matter to
them what Roush has done to human beings; they're just
interested in the money. Bastards."

Miranda had calmed down by then and was leaving a thin trail of
drool down the back of Skinner's jacket. I decided he could hold
her for another few moments, or until he noticed, whatever came
first.

"When you think about all the lives that they ruined. The
people that they killed, the potential lives that they destroyed
during the course of this, a slap on the wrist for punishment is
a joke.  It's an insult," Emerson continued.

I thought about a burning laboratory in Arizona and my legs
felt like rubber bands, who was I to pass judgement on them? 
I'd done the same thing.  I wanted to throw up but Miranda had
pretty much taken the franchise on that for the time being.

Emerson's surprised outrage didn't resonate with me. On a scale
of zero to Mulder, my paranoia level was at least 1.2 Mulders. I
hadn't expected anything but a whitewash, given that there was
certainly a PAC out there dedicated to promoting the agenda of
the powerful, hidden men who'd ruled my life for so long. Roush
and its successors had an advantage over other interest groups
who often complained that no one in Washington stays bought--
renege on a deal with them and you could end up with a terminal
case of death.

"What are you going to do now?" Skinner asked Mulder.

I could see the search engine running in Mulder's head,
searching for a field code to match up with the question.

"No fucking idea," he admitted. "They never found George
Naxos's body, I was thinking I'd look into that."

"Agent Zipprelli has requested lead authority on Roush and the
related investigations. Agent Scully is taking the three month
family leave, why don't you take four weeks off and make a
decision at your leisure."

"Agent Scully has a bad habit of not including me in her
vacation plans."

"I'm sorry?"

Skinner wasn't anywhere near as sorry as the rest of us.

Mulder sighed and rubbed the back of his neck, he must not have
been sleeping well--again--and his back and shoulders were
giving him trouble--again.

"We're not a matched set," he said quietly, and the noise of
the hallway fell away. I felt a burning in my sinuses. "We're
not like salt and pepper shakers, it's not unthinkable to have
one without the other. There's work that needs to be done."

I took my baby away from my boss and breathed in her fresh
bread smell.

****

Scully was gone but I had things to do before I could figure
out what that meant to me. The first was to deal with some of
the more trivial detritus thrown up by this latest sordid
adventure.

Ian's voice echoed in my head, finishing up his song.

One little Indian boy left all alone, He went and hanged
himself and then there were none.

But I wasn't alone, not really. There was Emerson and Darien.
Scully and Miranda.

Miranda my daughter, Jason's daughter, whose child is this?

The woman greeting patrons at Galileo had a skintight black
dress slit up to bare one thigh, very fashionable.

"Will you be eating alone tonight, sir?" she asked.

"No, I'll be undergoing mitosis after the soup course," I
replied and she frowned prettily. I sighed at her and smiled
enough to appease her, so that confusion wouldn't turn to anger.
"Table for two, please."

I hadn't lied; I'd just finished my pasta e fagioli when Darien
arrived.

He flounced into the seat, scanning the restaurant for Names
and Faces, but it was a bit too early for fashionable dining.
Lots of K Street lawyers, though.

"Thinking of staying out here?"

Darien shuddered dramatically. "Are you *kidding*? Whoever said
that power was the ultimate aphrodisiac had not gotten a very
good look at the *bodies* of these people. My ticket takes me
home *tomorrow*." He really spoke like that; there was a lot of
emphasis so that the listener didn't get confused about the
important words.

"You think you'll be able to continue in
your...profession...now that the whole nation's seen you on TV?"

"Please, Mr. Mulder, C-Span is hardly *television*. Anyway," he
said, raising a languid hand to signal a waiter over, "the whole
thing's likely to get me cast as you when they make the movie."

"Movie?"

"There's *always* a movie." He ordered a martini and the
agnolotti stuffed with beets and the waiter disappeared. "You
know, you don't need to speak about my business with such
contempt. I graduated summa from Harvard with a degree in Social
Studies."

I should have known--you can always tell a Harvard man, but you
can't tell him much. "What's Social Studies?"

He smiled blithely. "That's the problem, isn't it? I could be
asking customers 'do you want fries with that?' or I could be
drifting from cattle call to cattle call looking for my big
break. Instead I spend my days *exactly* the way I want to; I
read, I eat, I swim and I fuck. It's not a bad life, and I made
enough money in the stock market over the last decade that even
when the stars and starlets turn to next year's model I'll be
comfortable. It's all *entirely* consensual, so what's wrong
with that?"

I put my hand to my temple as if I had a headache. The funny
thing was, it did sound like a pretty good life. Maybe Scully
should go off with Darien, have all of the sex and none of the
trauma of being with me. I wondered if Darien needed a partner,
I bet there were plenty of people who'd pay more than double for
twins. Maybe he could take us both on, start a little performing
troupe.

My risotto and Darien's agnolotti arrived and we ate. I tore
myself away from the ecstasy-inducing meal to finish our
business. "I asked you here for a few reasons. I wanted to make
sure you felt safe, now that Roush has pretty much been shut
down. There's still a good chance that the men behind Roush will
still want a crack at the family gene pool."

Darien was eating his agnolotti in small, precise bites, taking
a circle out of the pillow-shaped pasta each time he lifted one
to his mouth. It was stomach-turningly erotic, especially since
he kept his eyes on mine as he bit and chewed. He rested the
fork down for a minute. "I had a vasectomy years ago, when I
first came to LA."

I relaxed a little. I'd suspected as much, he was Californian
and therefore not truly of Earth but there was no indication
that he was stupid.

Darien put his hand over mine. He was warm and strong and his
wide hazel eyes invited me to trust him. "I don't live in your
world and I don't want to. I'm sorry, but I'm glad it's you and
not me who's been forced to face all this. *My* parents are the
people who raised me, the ones I send money to every month. When
I go back, I don't want to hear from you again, okay? We'll just
pretend we each live in parallel universes, and everything will
be fine."

I nodded mutely.

Now, the last question, the one whose answer I could hardly
bear to hear. "Tell me what you remember about what happened in
Texas."

He didn't need me to draw him a picture. His hand withdrew.
Long lashes hid the reflecting pools of his eyes. "I know we
were drugged, I have the injection marks. It's all so blurry...I
don't remember much until the cameras were shoved in my face.
That sobered me up pretty quick. I guess--Emerson--he led us out
after your partner got us free. The other one didn't want to
follow us but I was in no shape to make my own decisions."

I knew he was lying, but what could I do? Recount my own
Lovecraftian memory of rending flesh and limbs writhing like
tentacles, of funhouse reflections in bloody cracked mirrors? I
couldn't swear that I knew what had happened. That it hadn't
been my hands even if they'd looked like Darien's..

We spent the rest of the meal in silence as the restaurant
filled up. We got a number of assessing looks, not just because
of the resemblance but, I'm sure, because inside the Beltway C-
Span really does count as television.

****

Before he and Mulder left to return to Austin, Zippy took me to
lunch. He let me eat half of my sandwich before he started in on
me. He made an implausible matchmaker and confidante. Then again
compared to everything else he was fairly plausible.

He reached over the thick dark table and took my hand as he
talked. "Dana, you need to think about what you're doing with
Mulder. Don't make this into a contest over who's suffered more.
I wouldn't be sure you'd win."

I stared into my drink. "Has he told you--?"

"Mulder doesn't talk about his own problems, much less yours.
It's apparent you've both been beaten up pretty badly by life,
or by Roush if you want to get specific, in the past few months.
You need to give him time. I mean, I'm still not totally down
with the fact that I'm a father, and I'm pretty sure that the
kids are mine and nobody used their genes to knit themselves a
new kind of person with."

My face was a porcelain mask as I stared at him. "I didn't get
any time and everyone expects me to deal with it."

"I think maybe you're imagining that the rest of the world is
as harsh a judge of you as you are of yourself. There's nothing
wrong with needing time to deal with this. You can't pretend
that everything is cool--it's not like the stork just brought
you a baby, there are problems you have to deal with. Don't buy
in to the sexist bullshit that says this should all come
naturally to you, even if there were anything natural about what
happened to you it would still be difficult."

I gripped the edge of the table so that he couldn't see me
shaking. I could tell that his advice was good but I wasn't sure
I could take it.


"When I found out about Emily, and she was dying, I felt bad,
but not heartbreakingly bad.  I hadn't bonded with her.  She was
just a child who happened to have my genes.  By the time I was
used to the idea that she was my daughter and I should take care
of her, she was gone," I pushed the remainder of my sandwich
around on my plate with my finger.

"And when she died, I was relieved.  I don't remember crying. I
felt numb.  I still do. When I hold Miranda, I feel as though I
should have some warm outpouring of maternal adoration.  I don't
have it. Holding her feels no differently from holding anyone
else's baby, or holding the dog I had."

"And how does it make you feel?"

"Overwhelmed," I admitted and felt my mouth twist in a self-
deprecating smirk.

"That's pretty much par for the course with babies," he smiled
a softer version of his usual neon grin, "eight pounds of
terror."

Zippy was a nice guy, I thought randomly, it really was a pity.

"Dana?"

I looked up and he was halfway to a smile. "Do you want me to
make an honest woman of you?"

I laughed and felt the strain in unfamiliar muscles. "It's a
little too late for that. You can pay for lunch, though."

And he did.


20/20

The past and present wilt - I have fill'd them, emptied them
And proceed to fill my next fold of the future. Listener up
there! What have you to confide to me? Look in my face while I
snuff the sidle of evening, (talk honestly no one else hears you
and I stay only a minute longer.) Do I contradict myself? Very
well then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.
Walt Whitman

Two months passed.  Two months of endless administrative
bullshit tracking down the whys and wherefores of the Roush
case.  You don't total a multi-million dollar company and walk
away without doing your weight in paperwork. I did paperwork and
interviews of Roush employees during the day and at night Zippy
and I did damage to our livers in the Blues bars dotting the
city. Scully kept in touch by e-mail and the occasional
businesslike phone call.  I died cell by cell. She gave me no
indication as to how the baby was doing, and I assumed that all
was well.  I had a suspicion that she was talking to Zippy since
I found a big pink elephant in the trunk of his car one
afternoon.  Yes, she was talking to Zippy and not to me again. 
This probably hurt more than anything.

To make matters worse, my mother kept calling and leaving me
messages to call home.

I didn't.

Once again, Samantha was gone, vanished without leaving as much
as a fingerprint or a hair suitable for DNA testing.  I couldn't
even be sure that Dr. Mann really had been my sister after all
or just a faded photocopy like myself.

I know a clinical depression when I see one and I can go into
full-blown denial when I'm in one.

Zippy insisted I come stay with him and I was rather easily led
by that point. He put me in the room his kids used when they
visited. I suspect a covert tactic on his part to get me to
think about babies and the beauty of reproduction. Little did he
know that I could think of nothing else.

I read Pooh stories and watched a lot of television, drunk and
sober, watched the whole fiasco hashed and re-hashed on CNN and
the networks. I watched Sheryl Ann Reardon end up as the star
correspondent for one of the national networks, covering the
whole story and losing her middle name and her accent for
national distribution.  It was nice to see that someone had
benefited from all this bullshit.

Nights I lay alone on the narrow child's bed with a glass of
room-temperature single-malt propped on my chest and watched
thirtysomething re-runs on the estrogen channel, letting myself
be brainwashed.  It was just as well; my brain was pretty much
gone by that point. I cried when Gary died..  He reminded me of
myself, prickly woman and a baby he hadn't planned on.  I
resolved to be more careful with my driving.

When I didn't drink enough I could dream, and that was worse
than anything. Zippy never mentioned anything about me screaming
out loud, so I guess I didn't. 

I woke many nights with my fist stuffed into my mouth, bleeding
where I'd scraped the knuckles raw with my teeth, fleeing from
dreams in which it was me in that cavernous bathroom, me holding
Scully in place as she screamed and her tears and blood mixed
with the hot torrential water. Or it was Sam and I remembered
what it was like to fuck her, her meager body folding underneath
me like a paper parasol, closing around me and she was tight and
hot as a water pipe. She was living metal in my dreams. When I
woke with the sheets sticky and wet I could not tell which
perversion it was that had made me come.

Jason was dead but I was still dreaming his dreams.

Maybe Jason was only mostly dead. Am I my brother's keeper? I
thought about digging in through my eyeballs to get at my brain
and pull out the part of me that was him. But I couldn't be sure
that I'd get him and not me, and what if he was left alone in
this incarnation of my body?

Xeno's paradox points out that before you can reach a given
point you have to get halfway there, and then you have to cover
half of the remaining distance, and on and on to infinity...and
if you keep going halfway you'll never really get there. I felt
like that: I was approaching the asymptote of my endurance;
every time I thought I was ready to swallow my gun there was
something else to do first.

When we finally buried Roush's desiccated corpse, I called
Aileen and accepted her offer. The shock and pity in her eyes
when I stumbled off the plane, unshaven and reeking, infuriated
me as much as it saddened me.

That first night Emerson came to my room. I was wary; I'd
shared a little too much of Ian's world to be comfortable with a
twin of mine in an enclosed space.

One of the things that's likeable about Emerson is that he's
not afraid to take advantage of his muteness to get what he
wants. Silence is unnerving if done right and though he hadn't
ever taken a psych class I think he must have known what to do
intuitively; either that or he just picked it up from me. 

It took less than five minutes for the first cracks to appear.
I asked him if I should get Aileen to translate, and he shook
his head. I asked him what he wanted and he shook his head. I
asked him if he thought he knew me just because we looked alike,
just because we came from the same gamete that had split too
many times before.

He shook his head. It was like beating my head against a wall,
only more frustrating because with a wall eventually there's
visible progress.

He was sitting on a corner of my yacht-sized bed, one leg
dangling off of the edge and the other crossed nonchalantly onto
his knee. He looked perfectly comfortable, at peace with himself
and his world despite the turmoil I'd brought into it.

"How can you be so calm?" I asked him. "Is it drugs? Can I
share them?" He smiled and shrugged. "If this is about Scully
and Miranda, I don't know what you want me to say." Another
shrug, as if to say, don't say anything you don't want to.

"I mean, it's not like I've ever had a chance to have a
family...it's not like Scully's going to let me be a father. She
doesn't trust me with herself, much less a baby who doesn't have
any of Scully's defenses. It's like if she let me help her it
would make her suffering meaningless, she has to hold onto it
all alone to be strong and it doesn't matter that she leaves me
all alone too--"

And then I was crying, huge unmanly sobs and he scooted over on
the bed to hold me by the shoulders. His arms went around me and
I could feel the total and utter sexlessness of it which was a
blessing because I would have grabbed for the gun on the
nightstand and killed us both had it been any other way. Instead
I wet his shoulder thoroughly with my tears as I called Scully
every nasty name in the book, words I'd never used to describe
any woman, even Phoebe. That fucking cunt, I was reduced to
saying over and over, in a tone so choked with snot and salt
that Emerson probably could have said it more intelligibly.

I love her so much and she doesn't love me, I hate her because
she won't love me, I didn't want this baby but here it is and
she won't let me love it either.

He rocked me and crooned a wordless lullaby, practicing for his
son maybe, and I felt his compassion, the way he shared my pain
without trying to diminish it. His love was not unconditional,
he didn't and couldn't love our dead brothers, but he loved *me*
and that was far better than unconditional love.

We stayed like that as twilight turned to darkness, bound
together like Romulus and Remus, nurtured on bitter wolf bitch's
milk but strong enough to found our own city. Though I went to
sleep alone I slept well.

After that he and Aileen started teaching me ASL to pass the
time instead of drinking. It was a lot more of a challenge. When
I got the chance to talk to him alone I asked *him* what had
happened in Texas, figuring that he'd have the decency to tell
me what he thought was true.

Unfortunately the truth was as elusive as it ever was in my
family. 

We had hiked through the snow to Emerson's favorite lookout
spot, where the ground dropped away into a heart-shatteringly
beautiful vista of trees, rocks and snow.  The sky overhead was
the color, I realized, of Scully's eyes, which made my mouth
feel metallic in the cold air.  I missed her so much that it
made the ulcer pain feel like a hangnail.

"What do you remember about Texas? How Jason died?" I signed,
the air cold on my bare hands.

"Aileen says I was with her the whole time. And I remember it
that way. I remember tearing my shirt as we went through the
window."

That didn't sound too bad. As usual I'd jumped the gun.

"But I also remember something different. Something," his hands
stilled, "in the building. I never hurt anything before. Not
even when they wanted me to be angry when I was in therapy. I
was supposed to learn how to box to deal with my suppressed
anger, but I said no. I'm a vegetarian, Fox. But in the other
memory, all I wanted was to make him stop. I can still taste his
blood when I sleep."

I dry-washed my face with my hands, remembering the stickiness
of Jason's blood on my own skin. "I'm sorry."

He nodded, accepting. Though it was reassuring that he was as
forgiving as Ghandi, I felt somewhat inferior by comparison.

We watched a hawk circle above the tree line of the gorge,
looking for prey.

****

Emerson and Aileen insisted that Miranda and I stay at their
compound for the last month of my leave. I didn't realize until
the limo from the airport had departed that they'd enticed
Mulder there as well. He would have taken parental leave too, I
think, if not for the seizure that OPR would have thrown upon
seeing the forms. 

I'd come to think of the question of his connection to Miranda
as involving the Heisenberg paternity principle: he both was and
was not the genetic father. Absent time travel there was no way
to tell for certain; even if we did ever recover some records
from the mess that had been Roush's palace their veracity would
be forever questionable.

I had believed that his indifference to Miranda was the final
knife that would allow me to cut the cords binding us, the ones
that were slowly strangling us to death as they tightened. But
when he'd taken my decision so casually and turned to Zippy to
find the next wide-eyed truth-seeker, the pain informed me that
my clever plan to leave him behind had not succeeded.

I told myself that I owed him the phone calls and the messages,
though I knew all along that I was only injecting anticoagulant
into the wound, like old-time physicians with their leeches,
bleeding and bleeding in the vain delusion that it somehow
promoted healing. The first time I called Zippy in the middle of
the night and heard the dry desperation in my own voice as I
asked about Mulder, how was he *really*, I knew that I'd once
again fucked things up in grand style.

It's not my fault; I wanted to tell him. I was trying so hard.
But life tried harder.

****

We were eating yet another gourmet meal, this one in the
conservatory full of plants while the snow fell outside, when
Aileen made her suggestion.

"I want to talk to you about Miranda," she began. 

Scully and I traded glances.

"Yes," Scully said tensely, her shields flaring.

"Emerson and I would like to offer to take care of her. Before
you say anything," she held up a hand and Scully's mouth clanged
shut, "hear us out.. We'll be taking care of Samuel too," she
rubbed her stomach proudly, "and we'll have the best help in the
world. We can protect both of them, as well as anyone can. You
know...she's Emerson's child as much as she's Mulder's."

"What about me?" Scully whispered, her voice flayed and bleeding.

"Dana," Aileen took her hand and waited until Scully looked her
in the eye, "I wouldn't suggest this if you were certain about
becoming a full-time parent. Make no mistake; this baby girl
will need someone there around the clock. You can't chase aliens
and make midnight feedings. I know you feel like too many
choices have been made for you. This is your choice. Either way,
you can always come to us, I promise."

Dessert had been out of the question; Scully evaporated to
Miranda's room and the rest of us sat and vegetated, not even
trying to talk about anything important. Aileen was reading over
Emerson's latest code and Emerson and I talked politics, though
I was still getting the tenses all wrong because my memory
wasn't very useful for spatial relations.

I was pitifully grateful that Scully would snap my head off
like a praying mantis if I dared give her advice on this. I had
no idea what to tell her, except that I wanted her for myself.
(Notwithstanding that Miranda was, as everyone was at pains to
point out, genetically my child, and that Scully had no more
carried her than I had, everyone assumed that as quasi-father
I'd naturally have less interest in the baby than Scully. I
considered this assumption sexist and demeaning, but there was
no doubt that the strong likelihood that Miranda was a twin's
child and not directly my own had some influence.)

Problems aplenty remained, even if Scully did agree to give
Miranda to the Goldbergs. She still hadn't evinced any interest
in discussing Jason's claims about her selection for the
Project's ova harvesting. When a vast super-governmental
conspiracy decides that your psychic powers make you worth
breeding, their judgment deserves a little respect. Scully
rebuilt walls of denial faster than Washingtonians lopped the
heads off of new parking meters.

Finally my resolve broke and I went to go check on my fractured
family. Scully was dozing on her bed and Miranda was gurgling
quietly in her crib. She'd just discovered her toes, a few weeks
after figuring out that she had hands, and was having a
marvelous time staring at these amazing, incredible protrusions.

I reached down and picked her up. She was much bigger than
she'd begun, and had a fine head of hair, blonde-brown that
would probably darken as she grew. Her eyes were a compromise
green. They'd be her most striking feature and she'd despise the
inevitable glasses.

She smiled at me and I at her. One little hand reached for my
chin, tugging at the five-o'clock shadow; I chuckled and took
her hand in mine, raising it to my lips. Such tiny fingernails,
clean and perfect and smelling of baby powder and sour
strawberries.  She grabbed at my lower lip with her drool-cooled
fingers and her tiny claws scraped my skin.

I'd never comprehended how people can hurt their children, even
though I was never really surprised when it happened. Now I had
so many more reasons to make the world clean and safe and true,
gurgling and shifting against me in the fading winter light.

I raised her up in my arms so that she could look down on me
and she giggled. In a few months she'd be babbling, and then
there'd be words and crawling...then homework and dates and
college applications, just like that. I considered the
likelihood that I'd be around through all this and she moaned as
if reading my mind.

So I bounced her up and down a little, playing catch-the-baby
with myself, and she liked that much better. "I bet you'll be a
basketball player just like your old man," I said. "Look at you--
already twenty-two inches long if you're a foot, you're going to
be a string bean."

"Twenty-four," Scully said dryly and I turned back to the bed.
Her expression, if I read it correctly, contained annoyance
covering up for a twinge of jealousy--for whom I didn't dare
speculate--and a resigned sort of affection.

Yeah, that's me, Scully, the idiot whose mischief you just get
used to after a while. 

"The trick is to hold the ball with your fingertips, not your
palm. You get better control that way."

"She's got half my genes too, you know," Scully broke in,
"which means that she's not going to be six foot tall."

"Skill is more important than height in WNBA," I told Miranda.

Miranda began to wiggle unhappily in my arms and Scully
stretched herself over the bed to take my burden from me.
Cradling Miranda in her arms like a Madonna, she looked back up
at me. "Do you want to get our hosts to baby-sit so that we can
talk?"

"Is that what you want?" This was pathetic, I was pathetic.
"I'd...I think that would be a good idea."

She nodded and rose. "I'll be back soon."

I wandered around the room, fingering the tiny baby booties,
bottles, toys, and other baby things scattered over every flat
surface. Babies were not low maintenance, they didn't travel
well, and they spit up a lot.  Not unlike certain FBI agents I
could name. The elephant Zippy had sent was in the crib, along
with a battered teddy that had to have been Scully's own bear
and a crazed-looking Thumper.  I wondered where that had come
from.

By the time she came back I was sitting on the bed, examining
the stuffed rabbit. She leaned against the doorframe with her
arms crossed over her chest the way I had seen her in a million
police stations across the lower forty-eight. Only this time she
was wearing a faded Johns Hopkins blue jays sweatshirt with
telltale formula stains on the shoulder.  The anaconda around my
heart tightened its embrace.

"What do you think?" she asked.

"I think she could probably pull off the eyes and inhale them."

I got *the* eyebrow for that crack.

"Have you formulated any kind of a plan yet?" I asked, "How old
does she have to be before she can date?  When can she get her
ears pierced? Public or private school, and are you going to be
the only Girl Scout leader whose troop gets a badge for
correctly processing crime scene evidence?"

"I thought I'd take them to the morgue and show them what a
Stryker saw does," she said with a rare smile.

I turned the bunny around to face her and worked its arms like
a puppet. 

"I'm sorry," the bunny said in a squeaky voice.

"I didn't give you much of a chance," she replied, the corners
of her mouth still tending upwards. My God, a mutual apology, or
something close. Call Guinness, this was a record-breaking event.

"The genetic relationship...it's too complicated for me to
figure out. My brain just stops when I try to think about it,
saying Here There Be Tygers like old maps of the world. But I
know I want to be there for Miranda, because she's a part of
you."

"I guess it's better than collecting my discarded hair and
fingernails."

I winced and she carefully sat down on the bed. I could feel
the mattress pull down beneath me and I leaned toward her
gravitational tug. "Tell me what to do, Scully."

The bed shimmied and suddenly she was in my arms. "Hold me,"
she mouthed against my throat, and I did.

"I've thought about it, you know," she said into my shirt. The
cotton muffled the words, but then Scully's elocution isn't
always the best, and with my years of experience I could puzzle
it out fine. "Having a baby is supposed to be a *process*, you
know. Usually a woman chooses to have a child, and even if she
didn't plan on it and the pregnancy is accidental she gets some
time to get used to the idea. Time to make the connection. I
didn't have that. I didn't even have the certainty that a
voluntary egg donor has that she wants to create new life. What
does a genetic relationship mean when it's neither chosen nor
physically manifested? I feel...I know Miranda is my child. But
I don't know what the consequences of that will be. There are
things that I still need to do," and I smiled bitterly at the
far wall to hear the echo of what she'd said upon telling me
about her cancer.

It would be nice to tell her that I'd help her be ubermom.
Sure, I'd had the fantasy too. Imagining a little house down
Rockville Pike, were you, Scully my love? Maybe a dog, a sport
utility vehicle and the Sunday comics section of the paper
delivered on Saturday?

Right.

The closest we'd get to that would be to watch reruns of Father
Knows Best on Nickelodeon.

On the other hand, Frohike had mentioned in the past that he
had a good friend looking for a nanny job (doing the whole 'mild-
mannered housekeeper by day, hacker by night' thing), it
wouldn't be any stretch to pay a couple hundred a month along
with room, board, and a T1 line. Especially since I'd be going a
little easier on my suits if I took a desk job.

The irony of it is, I'd been completely cured of my desire to
hunt little grey men. I'd seen what they'd done to Sam. It
wasn't wonderful, and it wasn't safe, and it wasn't over. 

But someone else had to take up the hunt now. Zippy had already
begun the maneuvers to get himself transferred to the X Files,
using his newly fledged contacts on Capitol Hill--he hadn't
testified, but he'd worked closely with the offices of several
Senators preparing for the Roush hearings. I'm not exactly sure
why he followed me over the edge of plausibility to hunt bug-
eyed monsters. I think maybe Roush offended his fundamental
humanity.

My priorities were much more limited. As secure as Emerson and
Aileen could make their home, it was obvious that it could still
be penetrated. I wanted Miranda where I could watch over her,
where I could if necessary trade myself for her safety. In fact
making a home with her would be a step towards guaranteeing her
safety, because it would be a public declaration that I wouldn't
just go running off towards the latest lights in the sky, at
least not without arranging for a babysitter. There's no reason
to hold a hostage against someone who's not a threat.

Even more than that, I wanted to make something in my life come
out right for once. I'd lost so much at the hands of the
Project, almost forty years of manipulation, destruction, and
bad manners. I wanted to know that I could carve out a space for
myself, for Scully and her child. 

I held her until night turned to grey winter dawn. She dozed
some and I might have drifted a little too. Suspended in amber,
refusing to worry about the future, I was happy for a few hours.

****

The next day the snow was over my knees and I had to slog hard
to keep up with Mulder in the woods.  I wished for snowshoes or
at least two more inches on my legs – then again I've been
wishing for that for most of my adult life.

In Shakespeare's plays leaving the court or the city to go to
the country and experience the pastoral is supposed to bring
peace and enlightenment – a refreshed perspective on life. But
after a few short days with Aileen, Emerson, and Mulder I was
more confused than ever. The facts still remained that I now had
a child to care for and Jason had raped me. It was going to take
more than a walk in the woods to make me feel better about
either of those things.

But Mulder continued on, in Emerson's borrowed blanket coat,
managing to look like an outdoor ad campaign for J. Crew. 
Aileen's feet were bigger than mine and my feet were swimming in
her boots even with the two extra pair of socks.

"I want to show you something," he urged after nearly half an
hour of stamping through the close trees and stumbling over
rocks.

"If this is a crashed alien spacecraft you are in deep shit," I
pointed out.

"No alien spacecraft, I promise.  Emerson took me up here my
second day and I wanted to share it with you."

"It's a little off the beaten track for a Hooters."

"Very funny.  We're almost there."

Past the next stand of trees the ground went smooth and flat
and I realized why.  Ahead of us lay a gorge, bony with rocks
and thick with trees.  Above, the sky shone like an opal in the
cold winter light. The vista went on forever, glittering and
sparkling like a frosted Christmas card.  The cold air stopped
in my throat.

"Pretty cool, huh?" he asked and gave me one of his puppy wants
to be petted smiles.

"It's beautiful," I agreed.

"Gives you a bit of perspective, doesn't it?"

"A bit."

He sat on a rock and patted his thighs.

"C'mere a minute."

His whitened breath was warm against the side of my face. This
was how it all had started that night after Rhode Island, and it
seemed that things had come back to the beginning.  I sat on his
lap like an oversized child giving her demands to Santa.

"Look, I know you're conflicted right now about Miranda and
everything."

My nose burned with tears.

"But I've been thinking that there's no point in continuing
what I started on the X-Files. I've found Samantha and, quite
frankly, I wish I hadn't.  Roush is gone and with it the threat
of the Project. Most of my brothers are dead, and I may as well
hang up my obsession and try to get on with what's left of my
life."

He may as well have begun singing vesti la guibba in fine tenor
voice and I wouldn't have believed my ears for that either.  I
poked him in the nose.

"Who are you and what have you done with the real Fox Mulder?"
I asked.

"That's not funny, Scully."

"Sorry."

"Anyway, what I'm trying to say here is that the past is so
fucked up and I feel compelled to try to salvage the future.  If
you feel like you can't handle Miranda, let me have her.  I can
even quit the Bureau and write novels or something.  I can
afford a housekeeper and a real house.  There's no need for you
to re-arrange your whole life because you feel like you have to.
I can handle it."

"Mulder, you can't take care of yourself!" I blurted.

"Well maybe with someone helpless who needs me, I can rise to
the challenge."

As opposed to myself who is neither helpless nor needs him.  My
head was starting to hurt and I was afraid that I was going to
start crying there in the cold wind and my tears would freeze to
my face. How could Mulder be ready for this when I wasn't? Every
time I looked at Aileen and her casual superiority at holding
Miranda, bathing Miranda, dressing Miranda, I felt more and more
like a little girl dressed in Mom's clothes and not fitting them
very well.

"We'll figure something out," he said and put both arms around
my waist.

In the cold air, his hair smelled like vanilla when I put my
cheek against his head. There with the gorge spreading out in
front of us like a three-dimensional illustration of the
perfection which comes from geological hardship, it seemed
possible. Anything seemed possible.

****

Zippy was waiting for me once again, but this time I felt much
better about it. He'd even figured out my filing system; I
always knew the boy had a brain, it's just that his mouth is so
large it's often hard to tell.  I insisted that Zippy follow me
on a slew of paranormal cases. I wanted to go out in a burst of
glory, or at least of incomprehensibility, so we looked into all
the random phenomena I'd never touched before. I had another
motive for my case choice as well: I wanted to make him
understand that the X Files were about *all* the mysteries of
being, the imponderable unknowable things that lurk in the mists
of consciousness as well as in the spaces between the stars. He
didn't take to it too well, but I was still the AIC and I wasn't
going to do anything to change that until Zippy knew his place.

I boxed up all my tapes and magazines when I got home, on the
theory that Miranda's inquiring young mind would be warped if I
kept them readily available, she'd be asking for breast implants
before she turned ten. Mommy, what's that lady doing in between
those two men? Why is she crying? I opened the Post with new
zeal each morning, because I wanted to find a nice townhouse
before Scully got back, as a welcome-home gift.

She came back during one of my disputes with Zippy, but then
she pretty much would have had to, unless she caught one of us
asleep.

"What are you saying then?  Vampires?"

"Exsanguination, what they did with the blood afterwards is
something that we have to find out."

The door opened as I finished the sentence and Scully walked
in, looking pale and cool in a dark suit.  Her eyes barely
skimmed me as she walked to where Zippy was sprawling over my
desk.

"You better go upstairs and see Skinner, you're not needed here
anymore," she said and watched his mouth open and shut like a
guppy's.

Mine was doing about the same thing.

"What--" I started.

"I've come back to work," she said in a bony voice and put her
briefcase down on her table.

"Who's watching--" I couldn't even say the name.

"Aileen and Emerson," she said and opened her laptop.

"Scully --"

"What was that about exsanguination?" she asked.

I lost my mind.

Laptops explode if you throw them with enough force against a
flat surface, like a wall, for example.  For a long moment there
was no sound in the room except for the sound of keys and
microchips raining to the floor, that and my heart banging
against my eardrums.

"You selfish BITCH."

Her gaze remained on the desktop where her computer had been,
as if she could re-create it with her sick little mind.  I stood
there and shook like Ian in one of his seizures.  I felt closer
to him than I had when he'd forced his mind in mine. Vaguely I
was aware of Zippy scuttling near the door, no doubt waiting to
see if I was going to pull my weapon or not. Part of me really
wanted to turn her brilliant brain into a Jackson Pollock
painting on the far wall, and I clung onto the sharp edge of
sanity with both hands.

At least she had the decency not to raise her eyes when I
started to rant..  I can't remember what I actually said but I
do know that the words I used to characterize her made Zippy's
olive face turn the color of copy paper.

When the rage finally cleared, I wasn't even in the building
anymore. The tired winter wind cut through my old gray Hugo Boss
suit while I headed away from the building where yet another
lying, treacherous bitch had fucked me over. If one believes in
karma, I must have been Don Juan in a former life.  Maybe
Alistair Crowley. 

The Hoover Building grew smaller and smaller as I walked, and
gradually I could breathe without a pain in my lungs, although
my heart hurt for emotional rather than physiological reasons. 
It had never occurred to me that she would have given Miranda
up. Maybe I was suffering under the delusion that she was
wrapped around Miranda's pudgy digits the way I was. Then again,
I've always been a sucker for women with hard-luck stories and
big eyes.  Maybe I'd been mistaken and Scully simply was
incapable of love, at least now. That would
explain a lot of things.   

What the hell was I going to do?

I never have a backup plan but this time was the glowing
exception. Things could proceed as planned, without Scully.  I
could handle it. I would get in touch with Frohike's hacker friend; I
would go to Skinner and request a transfer to a desk job. Hell, I didn't
want to ever see Scully again so leaving the X-Files was no sacrifice. 
I would cope.  I would find a bigger place to live and buy a lot of
childcare books.  Miranda would never be ignored.  I would give
her all the love and support that my brothers and I never had.  I
could do this.  I would go to PTA meetings and pick her up after
basketball practice.  She would be normal, well adjusted, and would not be
allowed to date until she was at least thirty.  I would help
her with her homework and walk her down the aisle when she found a man
or woman that she wanted to spend the rest of her life with.  Miranda
would never have to feel alone or unwanted.

The Mulder Family curse was going to stop. I was going to stop
it.

I flagged down a cab and headed for the airport.  My daughter was
waiting for me in Montana.

End.

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.

***

Iolokus III: Vix te Agnovi 8/20
Look thou be true; do not give dalliance
Too much the rein. The strongest oaths are straw
To th' fire I' th' blood. Be more abstemious,
Or else good night your vow!

Wednesday passed with no more news of George. I even 
dared return to the X Files office and sort the latest round of 
referrals into stacks: You've Got To Be Kidding, Warrants 
Further Investigation, and High Priority. Mulder would never 
believe how few files actually made it into the first pile -- of 
course the low percentage might have had something to do 
with the fact that I never once considered the National 
Enquirer an appropriate referral source. Only human 
experimentation (government or alien, take your pick) made 
it into the High Priority pile, so the Further Investigation files 
were piling up. We did a few exsanguinations and 
manifestations whenever we had a chance, but it was like 
opening the drain on a bathtub while running the water full 
force -- intake exceeded outflow. Nonetheless our solve rate 
remained high and I might even get a merit pay increase at 
the next six-month review.

I was headed back to Virginia, sitting at an intersection 
waiting for the light to turn, when my cellphone trilled.  I 
unshipped it from my jacket and answered the call.

"Hello beautiful," a voice that was Mulder's and was not 
purred in my ear.

My throat felt like a rasp had been shoved down my 
esophagus.

"What do you want?"

"I want to fuck you and kill you, what do you think?" he 
mocked and ended with a chillingly familiar dry chuckle.

The brushfire of anger started in my belly, probably in the 
vicinity of my much-tortured ovaries.  It seemed that I felt all 
my anger in my reproductive organs these days.

"You can try.  You didn't do a good job of it last time and you 
couldn't keep a hard-on with a live woman you sick fuck."

Now with the raspy voice he'd been kind enough to give me I 
actually sounded fairly fierce.  I almost believed it.

He snorted with some strange George emotion into the 
phone, sounding like a hyena sniffing for carrion.

"My life is so...strange these days," he whined, now exactly 
in Mulder's voice. "I just need to figure some things out. I 
need you, Scully."

I shuddered and pulled my jacket closer around me. Then I 
pulled my gun from its holster and laid it in my lap. Other 
drivers were going to think I was about to succumb to road 
rage but I needed the reassurance.

"I don't know what you want from me," I stated. I think it 
didn't sound feeble, but I was rapidly losing my earlier 
bravado.

"You wanna let me show you?" he asked, his voice curling 
like whipped cream over chocolate mousse. Holy shit, even 
the innuendoes were Mulderish.

"You want me to meet you?"

"I'm at the park at the corner of Reno and 42nd.  You'll know 
me from the carnation in my lapel."

I got an earful of dial tone.

I dialed Zippy before the noise could begin to annoy me. He 
picked up on the sixth ring; unlike my former partner, he was 
capable of ignoring a ringing phone if he was busy in other 
ways, like hitting on a pretty girl.

"'Lo?"

"It's me. George just called. He wants me to meet him at the 
park on Reno and 42nd in the District. How fast can you--"

He cursed. "I'm out in Wheaton--twenty-five minutes. Shit!"

"Don't call Mulder," I warned and hung up.

Fifteen minutes and five near-accidents later, I pulled up to 
the corner of the park. It was a nice neighborhood, large 
houses set well back from the curb, an extra stripe on the 
street to mark off the bike path. I parked in front of a fire 
hydrant and got out of the car, gun held in front of me.

The park was small, barely deserving of the name. From the 
sidewalk, the ground sloped upwards at a very sharp angle, 
nearly forty-five degrees, so that the park was set off from 
the surrounding territory by about five feet. A short flight of 
concrete steps led upwards. I couldn't see much up there, 
but the main grounds looked mostly flat with a few scattered 
trees on the fringes. There was a basketball court, blocked 
off by a high fence, off to the left.

I felt the first few raindrops on my scalp as I hit the first step 
up.

The early evening light was as gray as newspaper. The rain 
wasn't heavy enough to interfere with visibility yet, but the 
thick clouds above my head warned that it would quickly get 
worse. Fortunately, I didn't see any civilians when I looked 
around; the threatening weather had kept them away.

I pointed my weapon down at the ground and followed the 
concrete path towards the center of the park, scanning as I 
went. Aside from clusters of dying daffodils and crocuses, 
there wasn't much to see. There were a few stands of trees 
at the far edge of the park, and I tried to see if there were 
any human figures lurking, but I couldn't be sure.

"George," I called. My voice was softer than I expected and I 
tried again, straining bruised muscles. "George...Here boy."

More steps, closer to the center, closer to the trees. "What's 
this George, can't you deliver? I should have known better, 
you loser. Hell, I'd make a better man than--"

Motion, off to the left in the trees. It could have been leaves 
rustling in the growing wind. But I didn't think so.

I left the path and headed for where I'd seen the movement, 
cursing my height and my vanity as my heels sank into the 
ground. On the up side, the grass was getting slippery with 
the rain and my heels helped prevent me from slipping.

I jogged over the few dozen feet to the trees, watching 
carefully. It would be really useful if Zippy had been overly 
pessimistic, I thought and slowed down.

There was a crack, a branch breaking over to my right and I 
turned. He was standing, just watching, maybe ten yards 
from me, framed between two dogwood trees. "We never 
really talk, do we?" he asked, only that couldn't have been 
stolen from Mulder because I'd never told him and I 
shuddered as if the light rain were a monsoon.

"Why did you try to kill me?" 

He shrugged. In Mulder's heavy trenchcoat, he looked like a 
refugee from a fashion shoot, as if water were being sprayed 
on him to emulate rain; it didn't bedraggle him the way rain 
affected mere mortals. "It was a mistake, I didn't realize...he 
gets so angry, everything that's happened to us in the past 
year. I think confusion is inevitable. I know you don't mean 
what you said just now. I understand what's happening to us. 
Once I've tied up the loose ends you and I can be together."

"Loose ends?" I parroted dumbly.

He took a step forward. "He's abandoned the quest. 
Betrayed it. All for that little worm. It's pathetic. Our work is 
important, Scully, there's no time to *breed*--" And he was 
coming towards me, nearly jogging on the thick green grass.

Lighting cracked, whiting out my vision as I fired. I'd seen 
him just before the thunderbolt, and at that range if I missed I 
should have been sent back to Quantico. But I didn't see 
anything when my vision cleared, no body, not even a patch 
of darkness on the ground where he'd been. 

After a few seconds lights began to go on in the houses 
across the street from the park. Wonderful, more 
explanations due to the local police. The way my luck was 
running the shot had probably gone across the street, into 
someone's house, and mowed down a kid at dinner. I moved 
forward to where I'd seen George.

Under the two trees the ground was torn, as if a zombie had 
emerged. I dropped to my knees and began to scrabble in 
the dirt, looking down one second and trying to keep watch 
for my friendly neighborhood psychopath the next five.

I was looking around for George when I first touched the 
dead woman's hand.

As I dialed Mulder I heard a faint whistle, bouncing around 
so that I couldn't get a direction. It faded away just as I 
recognized the tune.  It was a tune I had been subjected to 
on endless car rides back and forth across the US.  Slow, 
sad and haunting, a king on a bed in Vegas, putting a 
television out of its misery with a handgun.

	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?

Zippy found me a few minutes later, waving my gun with one 
hand while I gripped her cold dead dirty fingers with the 
other.

****

We held a nonliteral postmortem that night because Scully 
was too tired for a full autopsy, and also it's hard to get good 
help for that sort of thing at night.  Chinese food and crime 
scene reports, another Wednesday night at Casa Mulder.  
Warwick and Ingveld had gone clubbing with their hacker 
friends. The Mooselet was cutting some heavy z's and the 
baby snoring from the monitor underscored the whole 
conversation.

"Definitely flayed," Scully mumbled into her drink. "Some of 
the strokes were done just to damage, but I'm pretty sure 
there's some large undamaged patches of skin that were 
simply removed."

"Where?" I rolled another moo shi pancake, with a little less 
plum sauce this time, and took a bite.

"Mainly the neck." She primly used her chopsticks to bring a 
few sesame noodles to her lips.

"What's that mean, you think? Removing evidence of 
strangulation?" Zippy asked as yet another dumpling fell 
onto the table top. He gave up and simply speared it with his 
chopstick.

"He never felt the need before. No, I think George has seen 
Silence of the Lambs too many times. He wants to create a 
new MO for himself but he can't think of one he likes so he's 
just stealing from Buffalo Bill."

"You mean...?"

"Yeah. He's making himself a throat toupee."

Zippy's face moued in disgust and Scully choked back 
something that sounded suspiciously like a laugh. We knew 
each other too well; we'd gone way beyond gallows humor 
by now. What came after that? Gas chamber humor maybe.

"Kind of makes you wonder about the advisability about 
letting prisoners watch cable," I added.

"At least George knows that we're gunning for his ass," 
Zippy remarked
and took another pull on his Corona.

"That Scully is gunning for his ass, at least," I offered, "I'm 
just pissed off about my trench coat."

"You know what disturbs me the most about all this?" Scully 
asked, her
fingers drawing patterns down the side of her bottle.

"The fact that he could have killed you?  That he's stalking 
us all? 
That there's a serious whack-job running around out there 
with Mulder's
IQ and picking up radio station WDANA?" Zippy asked.

She shook her head.

"What then?" 

"His taste in music.  Humming a Elvis tune to me."

"Which one?" Zippy asked.

I looked up, shocked.  Was she actually making a joke?

"As far as I can see, he has exquisite taste in music," I said.

****

"What are you doing?"

Scully had the grace to look ashamed. The noise that 
brought me to the bathroom had been a metal box of Band-
Aids falling into the sink as she stretched up -- with the sink 
in the way she was just too short to reach the top shelf of the 
medicine cabinet. It was the one storage area in her 
apartment that I'd ever taken over, and that only because 
she had no use for it herself.

She was wearing the sweatshirt again, and gray sweatpants 
that fell all the way to the tops of her ankles. Her bare feet on 
the cold tile floor seemed oddly vulnerable, a breach in her 
armor.  Miranda had her toes.

"I can't sleep," she enunciated in scalpel-like syllables. And 
along with the Band-Aids I kept my prescriptions on the top 
shelf, so that's what she had been up to.

I mentally reviewed the information on the little warning 
handout I'd gotten from the doctor. I never used to read 
those things but with Miranda in the house I felt it wise to 
know the side effects of every potentially edible product. 
"You can't take my Ambien," I informed her.

She stopped stretching and turned to face me fully. "There's 
no adverse interaction with the Zoloft if that's what --"

"Jesus, Scully," I snapped, "does depressed respiratory 
function mean anything to you? Bronchial swelling? Even if 
you split my dose in half it's too dangerous. Go count 
sheep." Or maybe she could count duplicate brothers, my 
ever-helpful guilt complex volunteered. After all we were the 
ones keeping her from happy dreams.

"Mulder, I chased your fuckhead brother tonight with no 
problems.  I do not think I'm in any imminent danger of 
respiratory arrest," she returned fire with something close to 
her old Zippo flare.

"Do you want the bed?" I finally offered, sounding as 
ungracious as she did, "I could take the couch if you think it 
would help."

"Your bed?" she drawled in her gravelly damaged voice and 
raised an eyebrow at me.

I felt blood flow in entirely inappropriate patterns. Danger, 
danger Will Robinson. Even in thick sweats, even with the 
pallor and the bruises and the weight loss she still had the 
power to turn me on. I remembered her tongue flicking in just 
the right place in my ear, her fingers branding the hollow 
above my hipbone, the sour sweat under her arms and how 
the flavor differed subtly between her breasts. Our breathing 
changed together in the hospital-toned bathroom, bouncing 
harshly off the wall.

Good intentions were lying under the sword of Damocles. 
There was an invisible fire in the room. That accounted for 
my paralyzed terror and the sudden absence of oxygen. 
Hypoxia, now there was an excellent explanation.

I bent down and she stretched up. Her mouth opened as I 
forced her back against the wall tiles. They were as cold as 
ice cream under my hands compared to her hot fudge heat. 
She tasted like a mouthful of blood, growling as my hands 
slipped around her head, my thumbs flicking her earlobes 
and tracing the delicate cartilege of her ears.

I wanted to bend further to reach her neck but at the last 
second realized that for once the pain would probably 
overwhelm the pleasure for her. Instead I dropped down to 
my knees -- her head followed me a little of the way down 
because she wouldn't let my lips go -- and lifted her shirt up 
so that I could lap at her pale flat stomach. She jerked 
against the wall as I pushed my tongue into her navel and I 
heard her hands slap and scrabble on the tiles.

She tasted exactly the way I remembered. She tasted like 
manna from heaven; if the Israelites had eaten this they 
never would have been tempted to follow other gods and 
they would have refused to leave the desert. What I had 
forgotten was the heat, melting over my tongue and seeping 
throughout my body like a transfusion.

I pushed her sweatpants down to her knees, accompanied 
by her soft bruised sounds of encouragement, and was 
faced with a logistical dilemma. She's so damn short that I'd 
have to get down on my hands and knees to really taste her, 
which was not unthinkable but would be highly difficult with 
the sink and toilet in the way.

After I reviewed the floor plan and sleeping arrangements, 
there was only one feasible option.

"The study," I said and looked up, waiting for her reaction. 
She nodded. Her eyes were like frayed denim that's been 
washed too many times and I reminded myself that our 
relationship had never been that healthy. She pulled herself 
from the wall, tugging her sweatpants back up to her waist, 
and I noticed that the hand she used to open the bathroom 
door was shaking. I wanted to beam us to the first floor of 
the house so that we wouldn't be able to reconsider, but 
instead I trotted along after her like an empty-headed golden 
retriever (but I repeat myself).

It seemed appropriate that my sex life would get restarted on 
my old leather couch. I closed and locked the study door 
behind me as she sat in the corner, arms across her chest, 
looking down at her lap.

I felt a nameless anxiety. Okay, it probably had a long 
German name that Scully would know, but I had no clue. On 
my knees again, this time on the more forgiving study carpet, 
I put one hand on each of her quadriceps and relaxed as she 
opened her legs and her hands unfolded themselves to 
touch my shoulders. A few graceless fumbles later, she was 
naked from the waist down. When I bent to suck at her 
clitoris, her sweatshirt billowed around my head, creating a 
small humid world around me.

I love cunnilingus. The Latin name's a bit absurd, I wish that 
there was a good Anglo-Saxon term like "fucking" 
specifically dedicated to the practice of burying your face 
between a woman's legs so that you can see, smell, and 
breathe nothing but her exquisite cunt. It's a connection 
undiluted by any distance, unmediated by rationalization or 
even emotion. Scully moaned and the sound was like distant 
thunder as I lost myself in her hot-oil folds.

Some amount of missing time later, she pulled my head up 
and I heaved myself into her lap. Her mouth sucked and 
pinched; she had no reason to avoid *my* neck and she 
made me writhe like a bucking bronco on top of her.

I could feel my cock sticking out of the fly of my boxers, 
which was sort of ludicrous but I suspected that Scully 
wouldn't laugh. I pushed her over so that her head hit the 
middle of the couch and her legs went over the side. I was 
rubbing against her as she squirmed, trying to replace the 
sweat coating her body with my saliva.

I wasn't even going to bother with removing my shorts. 
Honestly I didn't even know if I could wait that long when I 
felt her soaking-wet curls against the skin of my shaft.

Skin. 

Shit.

"Scully?" I whimpered, fully utilizing all three of my working 
brain cells.

She groaned. "Don't you have anything?"

"You forgot to send me an engraved invitation."

She pushed against me and I turned over, as clumsy as a 
sack of wet sand. Now I was in the middle of the couch, 
which gave her enough room to stretch out. I bit my tongue 
hard enough to draw blood when she sucked the head of my 
cock into her mouth. I saw her cheek distend as I bucked 
against her and clenched my fists, one digging into the 
leather and one tangling in her hair.

So long, it had been so long and I couldn't bear the thought 
that I would just come instantly. Scully moved her head, 
adjusting herself across my knees so that she could take me 
further in. But the angle wasn't great and I could see her 
wince as her attempts distressed her bruised throat.

At the very least I could try to spare her physical pain. I 
tugged her head up with my palm against her sweaty head 
and she looked up at me, lips pursed around me, her tongue 
flicking like a metronome.

She let me slide out and watched me, her eyes now the 
color that a summer sky would bleed if cut. I put my hands 
on her shoulders and pulled her sweatshirt up; she raised 
her arms and let me take it off. Then I rolled her carefully off 
the couch, so that she was lying under me.

Then I stopped, cursing, and moved as far away as 
minimally necessary to take off my boxers. She actually 
giggled, though she looked contrite when she saw my face. 
Then her face became a question mark. I wasn't sure what 
she'd think about this, but I carefully lowered myself down on 
her, resting my cock between her breasts.

If she'd raised an eyebrow I think I would have shriveled like 
a peanut, but instead she cupped the sides of her breasts 
and pushed them together. The friction was incredible; her 
sweat and saliva made her slick and hot underneath me. I 
raised my hands to cover hers, squeezing her a little harder. 
I felt the thin bones of her fingers fragile underneath mine, a 
striking contrast to the round swell of her breasts. Her skin 
was like rice paper, so thin that I could barely understand 
how the blood stayed inside. Her crinkled apricot nipples 
complemented the cinnamon swirl of her hair against the 
carpet. The purple head of my cock and the darker skin of 
my hands bracketing her breasts --not to mention the livid 
bruises on her neck -- combined to give the scene the look 
of a Picasso painting to my blurry eyes.

All right, so men are visual creatures, so sue me. Watching 
her--watching us--was erotic. I don't think I blinked, even as 
my eyes dried out and the sight of her became painful.

She was watching me as I ground and pushed against her, 
eyes locked on mine like laser targets. It's me, Scully, I 
wanted to say, and maybe I did. It's me.

Her face was so serious, as if she were preparing to give her 
annual review of our work. I felt her hands slide out from 
under mine so that I was touching the flannel-soft skin of her 
breasts. She reached up to caress my face, drawing me 
down towards her so that I was doubled over, contorted like 
a crushed beer can, and when I could feel her exhalations 
against my lips she stopped pulling. "I missed you," she 
whispered and closed her eyes.

I came, tumbling down onto her like a safe tossed from a 
second-story window. 

When her breathing evened out, I untangled myself and 
staggered over to the desk to get a handful of tissues to 
clean us off. She slumbered as I wiped off the largest puddle 
of come, the edges now drying and tightening on her skin.

I managed to put my boxers on without falling over by 
bracing one hand against the arm of the couch. There was 
no way I was going to wake Scully up to put her clothes back 
on, so instead I just piled them on her stomach and picked 
her up.

She'd lost more weight than I'd thought; if she stepped on a 
scale she'd have to jump up and down on it to make it 
register a hundred pounds. Just like the stray in the back 
yard, she needed to be fed more carefully.

I put her on the bed beside me, my hand resting on her arm, 
and watched her sleep. Eventually, she began to sprawl out 
in the way she always had. I pulled the covers up to her chin 
and allowed my eyes to close.


Iolokus III: Vix te Agnovi 9/20
O, a cherubin
Thou wast that did preserve me. Thou didst smile,
Infused with a fortitude from heaven,
When I have deck'd the sea with drops full salt ...

Mulder's mouth was all over me. I could feel the trails he'd 
left glistening like an oil sheen on hot asphalt. Currently 
though his head was between my legs as you'd expect, his 
large hands covering my inner thighs. He ate me like he was 
starving, like he wanted to drown.  I moaned.

This was not a dream, I realized as the sunlight stabbed into 
my eyes and I looked up at the white stucco ceiling. This 
was Mulder's actual bedroom. Therefore, it was okay to be 
turned on.

I propped myself up on my elbows and looked over against 
the far wall. The crib was gone; we weren't introducing 
Miranda to the primal scene just yet. Mulder lifted his face 
and turned his head to see where I was looking. 

"Warwick has her," he mumbled, gripping my thighs and 
raising his head enough to push his nose and chin into my 
belly, looking for a reaction like an enthusiastic puppy. I 
panted and that seemed to be enough; he bent his head to 
attend to more salient matters.

I groaned as his hands came up to cover my breasts. The 
world contracted to Mulder and what he was doing to me. 
The pulse of his fingers, the pulse of his tongue. Stubble 
against my thighs, scraping off a layer of skin cells. I pulled 
my knees up to give him greater access and tossed my head 
against the pillow.

Hs tongue was wet and cool, like seals flowing through 
ocean water. I threw my hands up behind my head, straining 
to hold on to the headboard.

Climaxing while awake was still unfamiliar to me. My own 
surprised yelp echoed in my ears as he pulled his glistening 
face from between my legs and scooted up the bed. He 
fumbled for the side table and I saw the familiar flash of 
silver foil.

"Where -- ?" Dear God, please don't let him have asked 
Zippy.

"I went for a jog before you got up, past the 7-11." Rip.

"Mulder! You could have been *arrested*! You know you're 
not supposed to -- " He thrust into me, eyes closed, face 
strained in what might have been agony. It had been so 
long; I was instantly made aware of the difference between 
ghost-fucking and the real thing. He held me down for a 
second, then began to move pistonlike. I felt myself 
liquefying around him, the initial discomfort fading.

"Sorry," he lied, pushing my face over to the side with his 
stubbly chin so that he could cover my ear with sloppy wet 
kisses. "Want me to take them back?" He paused and made 
as if to pull out.

"Fuck you" didn't seem appropriate. I raised my legs and dug 
my heels into the small of his back, right above his ass. I 
could tell he was smiling into my hair until I picked up the 
pace and he groaned and stopped trying to be a wiseass.

His hands slid from the sides of my breasts to my thighs 
wrapped around his waist and then journeyed back again. I 
whimpered and lurched against him. He took pity on me and 
slid his fingertips down to my clitoris. My head was pounding 
and buzzing as if I were in the middle of a fire alarm.

Now his teeth were on my shoulder, searching for that one 
spot that always --

Oh

Yes

I convulsed against him, feeling his arm tighten around me, 
trying not to get thrown off. I saw stars, confetti, a mist of 
blood red and green and all the colors in between. Dimly I 
felt him heave into me and come to rest, sweaty and 
shuddering. Oh God, so good.  Utterly good and perfect.  
How could I even entertain the thought of being with anyone 
else?

He peeled himself off me long enough to remove the 
condom and throw it over the side of the bed. If I'd had the 
energy I would have groaned in disgust.

In his arms, my head tucked under his chin, I felt like a turtle 
inside its protective shell. The feeling of well-being was 
almost agonizing, because I knew it would end suddenly.

I may have dozed again, but we were entwined in the same 
position when I heard the door slam open, allowing a pissed-
off Warwick to enter.

"Mulder, she's been crying for you for ten minutes -- oh. 
Look, come and get her when you've got your priorities 
straight."

He was going to close the door but Mulder's voice, raised in 
measured anger over my scrambling to cover myself with the 
sheets, stopped him.

"I'd appreciate it if you'd take a moment to recall just who 
pays whom around here. And that I've never once 
complained when you wanted me to watch Her Highness so 
you and Ingveld could do the horizontal mambo, and you've 
got fifteen years more stamina than I do. I'll be there soon." 
Warwick frowned uncertainly and shut the door.

Mulder's hand circled my shoulder a few times and then he 
swung his legs over the side of the bed. "Sorry 'bout that." I 
was still so shocked that he'd defend me -- us -- in any way 
that I hadn't even begun to feel guilty yet.

Mulder by contrast was made for multitasking of that sort. 
"Why do I feel like my wife just caught me with my mistress?" 
he mused as he struggled into boxers and sweatpants that 
had been left in a pile beside the bed. He sniffed at the 
underarms of a T-shirt and donned that too.

"Back in a few," he said. "Want coffee?"

"I'll get it myself," I replied, wondering where this nonchalant 
attitude had come from. It was bizarrely attractive, like his 
morning bedhead -- he didn't seem devastated by Warwick's 
condemnation, but he wasn't so desperate that he couldn't 
leave me to tend to the rest of his life.

After he left, I stared at the wall of postcards for a while. That 
had been a cry for help, but Mulder hadn't been listening. 
Maybe it was time to help myself.

Then it was out to the kitchen where to my great relief no 
one else from this strange agglomeration of people was 
present. I struggled with the yuppified coffee/expresso maker 
and produced a substance that, while unpleasant, had the 
desired effect.

I drank it standing up. It had been a long time.

I'd scheduled the autopsy for 10 am, and I had to speed just 
a little to make it. In a way there was no reason to hurry. She 
was still dead.

The blood samples I'd taken last night -- it seemed so far 
away I could barely believe she hadn't rotted -- were still 
down in the lab. She'd been moved to Quantico along with a 
large amount of the earth in her shallow grave. The evidence 
techs had even brought some crushed crocuses along.

As usual, he'd put her clothes back on when he was finished. 
Given his little experiment in do-it-yourself tannery, this had 
caused her once-white blouse to stick to her body in a 
pathetic imitation of the missing and lacerated skin. I had to 
cut it away with an Exacto knife, working slowly and carefully 
to avoid destroying any evidence. Beneath the stiff cloth her 
back was blue-gray between the purple-black welts of blood.

The blood had still been moist enough to attract dirt when he 
buried her, but not so wet as to cause the dirt to mix and 
seep through her shirt as mud. Given the extended drying 
time of blood-saturated cotton fabric in damp spring weather, 
I thought he wouldn't have needed to kill her nearby the 
park. He could have done it almost anywhere within or just 
outside of the District and carried her around in the trunk of a 
car.

Hairs & Fibers might have some insights to that, if they could 
distinguish trace she'd brought with her from the 
overwhelming amount of debris she'd picked up during her 
impromptu burial.

Her body evidenced the now-standard signs of manual 
strangulation and postmortem sexual assault. The tissue 
damage at the neck made evaluation more difficult, but I 
judged that he'd strangled her before he cut the skin off her 
throat: If he'd done it the other way around, it would have 
been squishy and difficult for him and I also would have 
expected more severe and concentrated trauma to the 
underlying tissue. (It was the difference between squeezing 
a banana within its peel and a peeled banana -- the covering 
diffuses the pressure, causing less intense but more 
extensive damage.)

At least we could tell her family that the mutilation and the 
sexual abuse had been postmortem. The stripes on her 
back, on the other hand, were probably inflicted while she 
still lived. From the depth, placement, and variation in angles 
of the cuts, I thought she'd still been able to writhe, maybe to 
scream and beg if her voice hadn't given out.

George had kindly buried his victim's purse with her. She'd 
been Maria Penalver, Northeast Georgetown ER nurse. Her 
duty shift had ended at 5 pm two days before, and she'd 
never made it home.

I'd been in the Northeast Georgetown ER a few days before, 
courtesy of George. I didn't remember anything of that part 
of my fantastic voyage, but a quick call confirmed that 
Penalver had tended to me when I was first admitted -- had, 
indeed, held my hand and reassured me as I gasped for air 
like a landed fish. I was a dangerous person to know.

	Is your heart filled with pain, shall I come back again?
	Tell me dear, are you lonesome tonight?

I finished the report and called my gynecologist. Fortunately 
for all concerned, Dr. Shimada was willing to squeeze me in 
over lunch. "Always time for the Eighth Gynecological 
Wonder of the World," she said. I really didn't like having her 
put it that way. But you don't want to piss off your doctor -- a 
lesson I wish Mulder had learned -- and so I didn't say 
anything.

My car was still back at my apartment and in any event I 
could use the thrill of Zippy's Corvette. It was shiny black like 
Batman's costume, like the vinyl-coated goddesses of 
Mulder's porno mags, and frankly it made me wonder about 
whether Zippy was trying to compensate for some more 
personal inadequacy. Zippy would have insisted that he was 
just advertising the real goods, and I certainly didn't want to 
initiate a debate on penis substitutes, so I just smirked 
whenever I saw the thing. Okay, I saw the attraction, but 
then again I didn't have any worries about the size of *my* 
gun.

Zippy insisted on driving me to the appointment, saying that 
he had some errands in Georgetown, so I was able to gulp 
down a croissant and a soda on my way over. He wanted 
me to promise I'd wait in the hospital cafeteria, surrounded 
by lots of people, until he returned. I refused, mainly 
because I wanted him to return on time. If he was worried for 
my fragile safety, he wouldn't delay by flirting with salesgirls.

Dr. Shimada didn't make me wait too long, only long enough 
for me to shuffle through the magazines in her waiting room 
and figure out that, if the magazines had been up to date, I'd 
be back at a point at which my life had made sense. When 
my only nightmares were about things I couldn't remember.  
It was the shit that I could remember which was starring in 
my monster vision these days. 

Inside the exam room, she was as pleasant as ever, her face 
as blank as the moon when I informed her that I'd recently 
become sexually active again and would like to renew my 
lapsed birth control prescription.

If only it were as easy to renew my lapsed faith.

Faith in what?

Oh, just about everything.  God, the Universe, myself, the 
possibility of finding great shoes on sale, and that science 
would find a cure for shortness.  Like I said, faith in 
*everything*.

"Can you slide a little closer to the edge please?" Dr. 
Shimada asked and I did so, looking up at the cartoons on 
the ceiling of the office.  

"You know what they say, you can never be too thin or too 
close to the edge," I joked.

She looked at me, puzzled. 

"You are too thin," she warned.

Whatever.

Finally the exam was over and she let me get dressed. 
There were no obvious abnormalities, whatever that might 
mean in my case; in my first bit of good fortune in three or 
four years, my period had ended just a few days before, so I 
could start on the Pill immediately. In two weeks I could 
forget about latex when I wasn't doing autopsies, assuming 
that the Pap smear didn't turn up anything horrible. The 
thought of returning to anytime/anywhere status cheered me 
more than it should have.

If I could put things right with Mulder...Then what, the 
Happiness Fairy would come and fix my life?

Maybe not, but it would be a start.

And yet -- I was potentially making a mistake when I 
presumed that a healthy sexual relationship was an 
appropriate goal. In the past I'd used sex to keep Mulder 
away from me. I didn't know if I could change that.

****

After Scully left for the autopsy, I puttered around the house 
doing useless everyday things that would have fallen into 
Warwick's job description if I'd gone to work the way I should 
have.  Being confined to the house was fraught with 
disadvantages; I was getting in the way of Warwick and 
Miranda's usual schedule and generally being a pain in the 
ass. Warwick had gone so far as to order a treadmill so that I 
could run inside the house, but it wasn't scheduled for 
delivery until tomorrow. I couldn't wait; much longer and my 
carefully maintained six-pack sized gut was going to 
degenerate into a keg. 

Warwick had been pretty snippy about the treadmill, too. He 
was still sulking from being reminded of the fact that he 
worked for me and not the other way around, and he'd 
retreated to his lair to work on whatever Internet wizardry he 
was performing for his latest client.  I took the Mooselet into 
the study and sat down with the budget spreadsheets that I 
had to justify for the quarterly operations meeting.  The only 
problem was that I found myself staring at the sofa with an 
insipid look on my face  -- not the first time for that behavior 
either.

Ralph Williams showed up at eleven with a briefcase full of 
homework for me and a couple of Sumatra coffees from 
Starbucks, which was the only reason that I let him in.

That and the fact that Ralph was one of the Mooselet's 
favorite toys.  Ralph's nickname around ISU was Worf and 
the sight of the poker-faced ex-college football player sitting 
on the sofa with an indulgent smile while Miranda sucked on 
his tie made me bury my amused smirk in the files.

"What have you got for me today?"

"You're got six annual performance reports you've got to do, 
and a shitload of other administrative bullshit that Diane says 
all you gotta do is read 'em and sign."

The Mooselet applauded and began to make seagull noises.  
Ralph rubbed her tummy and smiled down at her.

"So you gonna tell me what's goin' on with this evil twin 
thing?" he asked.

I took off my glasses and piled the files on the floor next to 
me.

"It's a long story."

"I've got all day."

When Ralph finally did leave, with the files from the week 
before, I could see the same flicker of uncertainty in his eyes 
that Scully wore from time to time.  All of George's actions 
made me suspect, I was tainted by my own gene pool.

I was really starting to hate George with a passion.

On the other hand, he had managed to breach the 
communications gap Scully and I had fallen into.  Manalive I 
had missed her, and not just as far as sex was concerned 
(although she had been starring in my masturbation 
fantasies again and I had gotten fond of the one where she 
was dressed like Marie Antoinette).  What I had missed more 
than almost anything else was her annoying habit of 
deflating my more outrageous theories and challenging 
everything with her usual precise brilliance.  She never failed 
to keep me honest and didn't give a shit about the damage 
to my ego.  No one in ISU did that.  I was either avoided or, 
even worse, treated with the deference due to my new 
status.   

So what were we going to do about the resurrection of 
intimate relations?  I didn't know, but if the night before had 
been a one shot only deal, I was going to strangle her myself 
and not let George have another round.

Miranda had grabbed one of the crime scene photos off the 
pile on the floor and was jamming it into her mouth. Fearing 
both psychological damage from the subject matter and the 
health risk from the developing chemicals, I took it away 
from her.  She screwed her cherub-cheek face into a mask 
of tiny feminine fury and let out a screech that could have 
been heard in Baltimore.

The beanie baby bribe didn't work, the pacifier didn't work 
and I had to get up and get her a cookie from the kitchen 
before she quieted down and the red flush of anger drained 
from her face.  I didn't like having my toys taken away from 
me either.

Iolokus III: Vix te Agnovi 10/20
...and then in dreaming,
The clouds methought would open, and show riches
Ready to drop upon me, that when I wak'd
I cried to dream again.


After dinner I went online in the study to read the latest 
round of jokes that Emerson had forwarded me.  They were 
hysterical.  Half the guys writing code in his mountain 
hideaway were wasting their natural talents for comedy and I 
snickered over the soft sounds emanating from the baby 
monitor.  I got e-mail from both Emerson and Aileen an 
average of twice a day, Aileen's mostly concerned with the 
care and feeding of the heir apparent, Samuel, and bitching 
about Emerson's personal idiosyncrasies.  Apparently his 
new kick was that shoes were bad for your feet and he had 
issued an edict that everyone was to go barefoot in the 
house. Aileen was having a fit over what it was doing to their 
hardwood floors.  Emerson's messages were lengthy 
journal-like missives in which he would document the events 
of the day and throw in a few anecdotes from the happier 
periods in his childhood and colorful cyber-escapades from 
his days at MIT.  

I tried to send as good as I received, on the premise that this 
was the best way to get to know my brother, but I didn't type 
as quickly as speedy-fingers did and I suspected that most 
of what I sent him sounded like self-indulgent whining. Also I 
couldn't really give him a daily event report: two serial child 
rapists, five roadside kidnappers, and a partridge in a pear 
tree didn't make for good familial conversation even in my 
family, setting aside confidentiality issues. That night I was 
tempted to tell him about the recent developments regarding 
George, but since there was no indication that our evil twin 
was traveling in his direction, I decided not to worry him or 
Aileen more than was needed.  They had enough on their 
minds with the impending legal action they were planning to 
launch against Microsoft.

I had George and he had Bill.
 
I had just opened a message from Danny, suggesting that I 
take a look at a Russian porn site that he had found.  I 
clicked on the highlighted link and the first round of naked 
lady pictures zoomed through our T-1, when the door to the 
study opened behind me.

"Research?" Scully asked in that deadly sexy rough voice 
she now had.

"Uh  -- you know Danny," I stuttered and hit the back button 
as fast as I could.

"Right," she said in a tone that indicated she had grasped 
the low level of truth in my statement.

"Feeling any better?" I asked, "your neck, I mean?"

"Better.  Not great, but better."

With the luxury that having an entire house had afforded me, 
I had set up the study so the laptop went on a table facing 
the window with a view of the back yard.  The spring sunset 
was making the dark lines of the trenches Frohike and the 
boys had dug turn black as tire tracks in the faded green of 
what would be lawn.

"Looks like you have giant, mutant gophers."

"If I had started talking about giant mutant gophers a year 
ago, you would have taken me for blood testing to see what 
drugs I was on."

"I didn't say it was giant, mutant gophers, I said it looked like 
giant mutant gophers," she said in a playful voice and even 
though I had my back to her, I knew she was smiling.

"You were ascribing giant, mutant gopher-like characteristics 
to the trenches?"

"That the trenches possibly could have been caused by 
something like giant mutant gophers," her hands dropped 
onto my shoulders and she began working on the muscles 
that always tightened like fried clams when I hunched over 
the keyboard too long,  "If, in fact, giant mutant gophers 
existed, which they do not."

Her fingers, strong and assured, loosened the knots better 
than any Magic Fingers in any hotel could.

"Just because you have not heard of giant mutant gophers 
you deny their existence.  What of the Coelacanth?  Thought 
to be extinct until fishermen told a visiting paleontologist that 
they always got caught in their nets?  What about the giant 
white catfish that has been spotted in the Amazon River?"

"What about the catfish?"

"It's a big fish, a big white fish. And there could be giant 
mutant gophers hiding in South America as well."

"They have enormous frogs in the Amazon basin, the size of 
a two year old child."

If it had been anyone else, I would have thought that she 
was shitting me.  But I was luxuriating in the painless banter, 
the smell of her hair, and the relaxing way that her hands 
moved over my back.  I couldn't repress a little groan of 
animal pleasure, like a puppy having its belly rubbed.

"I didn't tell you before, but this house, the entire 
environment you created here for Miranda – it's good.  It's a 
home.  An actual home," her fingers grazed my neck, "and 
you're doing a far better job of being a parent than I would 
have."

I wondered how much it had cost her to say those words.

"I just had the luxury of some ill-gained wealth, and Jason 
didn't—"

I didn't bother to finish the sentence.

"So what are we going to do?" she asked.

"I don't know."

Scully's hands fell away and I briefly mourned their loss, until 
she leaned over, her breasts pressing warm and heavy 
against my back, logged me off the Internet, and shut down 
the laptop.  Her hair was in my face and I couldn't stop 
myself from burying my snout in it and nuzzling her ear.  She 
gave a short snort of amusement and slapped the top of the 
computer down.

I retaliated by pulling her into my lap. It was such a thrill to 
see her splayed across my legs in her professional blue suit, 
nipped waist and hard plastic buttons promising secrets 
underneath, with just a hint of scoop-neck white silk blouse 
poking out of the 'v' of the jacket's neck. So severe, so 
competent; she'd hang my balls around my ears for 
patronizing her if I ever voiced such thoughts and I had to 
content myself with smiling moronically.

She brought her arms up to rest on my shoulders and began 
to stroke my earlobes with her hot little fingers. "I want to do 
this right," she said softly, staring at the pulse I could feel 
throbbing in my throat. "I'm highly fucked-up right now, 
though. I haven't had -- anything -- to anchor me all this time. 
If you can't be patient tell me now and I won't...I won't look 
for your help."

I could tell her that I'd be her anchor but even with a house 
and a child I was more of a floating buoy. "Just let me know 
what you need," I breathed into her brittle, aloe-scented hair, 
and reflected as I did so that it was time to buy her her own 
toiletries, or Warwick and I were going to be headed for a 
serious misunderstanding.

Then she husked, "Make love to me, Mulder," and thoughts 
of hygiene evaporated.

She didn't have to twist my arm.

****

Once bitten, twice shy.

This time, Mulder had the presence of mind to lock the door 
behind us in the dark bedroom.  I watched his shadow-shape 
flit over to the dresser heard and saw the flare of a match 
and a candle was ignited.  It was a small blue votive candle 
and the room was filled with the smell of the ocean.

"Ingveld," he said in a conversational tone, "is candle-happy.  
I'm not sure if it's a girl thing or because she's afraid when 
the lights go out.  The electric lines on this street are 
woefully under code."

"You're a regular homeowner now, aren't you?"

My voice shuddered with the candle flame.

"I have begun," he admitted as the light pulled the bones in 
his face into sharper planes, "to worry about the lawn."

I would have given out a nervous laugh, but he had crossed 
the room in a pair of quick strides and his hands were cool 
on my nervously burning face.   Fingers traced my nose, my 
brows, my cheekbones, and over my lips, as though he was 
learning my face like a blind man.  A tingling wave rose from 
my stomach and brushed like electric feathers underneath 
my skin.  I wanted to close my eyes but I was afraid that he'd 
melt back into the darkness again and leave me alone.

"Things will be different," he said as his hands tangled in my 
hair.

"Define different," I asked.

His lips were like cool wet leaves.  I felt the nervous 
tightness in my chest relax somewhat.

"Like giant mutant gopher different – bizarre, strange, with a 
basis in the mundane," he whispered into the side of my 
face.

God help me, I snickered.

"Just look at it this way – no more hotel rooms, no more 
sneaking around, no more fear of reprimand – we're in 
different sections now and no one gives a shit," he prodded, 
angling down to kiss me again.

"Did anyone give a shit before?" I raised my arms so that he 
could pull my shirt off. The cotton fluttered against my 
abused throat, awakening brutalized nerves.

"I did," now his hands moved to the waistband of my pants, 
slide snap and hiss of zipper as I undulated on the bed, 
trouser socks and shoes hitting the floor. I laid back and 
watched him undress, golden as an Oscar statuette in the 
warm and flattering candlelight. He threw his socks into a 
hamper at the side of the room, stopping for a moment to 
appreciate his three-pointer, then stripped his shirt off, giving 
me a delectable view of his broad solid chest and compactly 
muscled arms. He almost fell when his feet tangled in the 
pile of my discarded clothes, but he recovered nicely and 
dropped trou with presidential efficiency.

"We could – " I whispered into his mouth as he descended 
again, "be seen together in public."

"God forbid," he said with a chuckle, his fingers twining in 
mine.

His mouth was as powerful as I'd remembered. I panted as 
he explored the contour of my hairline and tasted the flesh at 
the back of my ear, dipping down right to where the bruises 
on my neck began. After so long with only shadow lovers, to 
feel real wetness and pressure on my skin was a revelation. 
"Behave?" he asked into my ear. 

"Of course."

He hadn't tacked on an adverb, after all.

Abruptly he scuttled away, backing up on the bed, and pulled 
the sheet over my body. He retreated further, underneath the 
comforter, until he had entirely disappeared.

"What are you doing?" I sounded fretful, too needy. He'd lit 
candles, this was going to be okay, truly.

"I'm a giant mutant gopher," he rumbled from his hiding 
place. "I seek human maidens for mates."

I covered my face with my hands and shook with relieved 
laughter. "No maidens here, only me," I said as soon as I'd 
regained a semblance of calm.

His hands snaked out and grabbed my ankles, fingers 
trailing familiarly up my calves and to my inner thighs. His 
head was still obscured. "You'll do fine," I heard and then he 
was pulling me towards his hidden lair of blankets.

I could not prevent the goofy smile that stretched my mouth 
to an almost painful extreme. "You know, I think I saw this 
movie on the Sci-Fi Channel."

Without further ado, his head settled between my legs and 
he began giving me a tongue-lashing of the most pleasant 
kind.

My head lolled back and I groaned appreciation. One-
handed, he pushed the blankets away so that he could look 
up. "Sure it wasn't the Playboy Channel?" His other hand 
was still drawing runes on my inner thigh as he pinned me to 
the mattress.

"Back to work, gopher boy."

He snorted, which caused a really intriguing sensation, and 
bent his head again. He was watching my face as he 
plunged his tongue into me. I felt lighter than air, like I was 
flying on a seagull's back. My heels traced lines up and 
down his back as candlelight turned the ceiling into a waving 
wheatfield. The air was warm with the fire and our own heat. 
I curled upwards and managed to capture his head between 
my hands, running through his pelt -- he was keeping it a 
little shorter these days, I noted -- as his nose pressed into 
my belly.

He surged up and latched on to my right breast, moving his 
hand to take up where his mouth had left off. He should 
really register that mouth -- hell, the whole package -- as a 
lethal weapon, I thought as I sighed happily. His thumb 
circled around my clitoris, teasing but not making full contact, 
while he slid a long finger into me. Now I had better access 
to his body, and I wrapped my arm around his shoulders, 
pressing him closer to me. 

I watched him suckle, eyes closed in concentration as he 
stroked his finger in and out of me, simultaneously circling 
my nipple with sable-heavy brushes of his tongue and the 
occasional nip of teeth that made white stars flash in my 
vision.

I needed more, needed to feel him entirely on top of me, 
covering me and hiding me from the rest of the world like a 
concrete slab in a bomb shelter. I grabbed the sides of his 
shoulders, right at the center of those beautiful masculine 
curves of muscle, and pulled hard. 

He knew what I wanted and stopped only long enough to 
reach onto the bedside table for a condom. I stared at him 
hard, so that he'd know not to tear it; I was unable to wait for 
a second try. He gave me a shaky smile and ripped the 
packet open. I had to smile back at his obvious nervousness; 
if he *did* screw it up I'd just have to bounce up and down on 
his face like a yo-yo, and it's not as if that would be such a 
terrible fate.

I hissed in agonized pleasure as he thrust into me. "You 
giant mutant gophers have some advantages over normal 
men," I husked as soon as I'd gotten my voice under control.

He licked my ear, sending me arching off the bed, grinding 
into his pelvis. "You know we have expertise in --" I cut him 
off by raising my legs so that my knees rested just below his 
armpits, squeezing his chest as he slammed in and out of 
me.

"If you use the word 'hole' right now I'm not going to answer 
for the consequences," I panted.

His right hand circled my ankle, rubbing gently, his thumb 
grazing the sensitive skin under my arch, as he insinuated 
his left between our wildly hammering bodies and resumed 
stroking where he'd left off moments ago. "I was just going to 
say that we're used to working with our hands," he said with 
deceptive mildness as the climax overtook me.

I pressed my cheek against his end-of-the-day stubble so 
that he couldn't see the tears; he would have misunderstood. 
My hands kneaded his shoulderblades, like furled angel's 
wings, until he came.



Iolokus III: Vix te Agnovi 11/20
Mark his condition, and th' event, then tell me
If this might be a brother.


The gunmen checked in at noon on Friday and they weren't 
happy.  I listened to them banging around near the 
speakerphone. The cup of coffee shook in my hand.  
Miranda was sitting on the floor near my feet, happily 
sucking on the spatula she had decided was the toy for the 
day.

George had called the Gunmen. Using my cellphone.

"Tell me George couldn't really know these things, Mulder.  
He knew our phone number, where the headquarters are 
located.  And our favorite places to meet.  How is it that he 
knows?"

"I can't tell you that -- you knew before you asked. With my 
family anything's possible, it's even plausible that Jason 
actually told George something about his plans. But he's not 
planning on telling you anything about that or about any 
other secret government projects, no matter what he 
promises. This is just to fuck with our heads."

"Pretty good job he's doing." 

"Guys, remember who's the federal investigator here. You 
don't even carry guns...Do you?" The prospect was almost 
as frightening as the thought that George was walking 
around living my life.

The line went numb as my ear pressed into the phone. I 
guess they didn't want me to know all their secrets in case I 
did go over to the dark side.

I heard Frohike's breathing again as he took me off mute. 
"Frohike, you're going to meet him, aren't you?"

"Sometimes you've just gotta take your chance, know what I 
mean?"

"Let me put a trace on your phone."

"Not a chance."

"Frohike, this man is a killer!"

"Has he killed any guys that you know of? From what I hear 
we're not exactly his flavor."

"He's branching out! Okay, okay, will you at least call and tell 
us where the meet is so we can get him as he leaves?" 
Actually I was planning to have the team swoop down and 
catch George as soon as he showed up, but I could always 
tell Frohike that my colleagues had ignored my instructions; 
it would seem plausible because Frohike remembered my 
old status when I was in the X Files. Hmm, maybe the little 
guy was right to be paranoid.

While I was plotting, so was Frohike. He came back and 
there was a note of relief in his voice. "Yeah, sure."

"Where did he say to meet you? I asked.

He told me.

****

Of all places.

In front of the fucking Hope Diamond.

I could have died of embarrassment. Really.  But no, I was a 
big girl wearing a gun and a body mike.  I also knew that in 
addition to half a dozen agents scattered in the gemstone 
section of the Natural History Museum, there was a jerry-
rigged uplink on the body mike back to Mulder in Arlington.  I 
could imagine him hunched over the coffee table with 
Miranda on his lap while the silent chorus of agents looked 
down at the speaker with him.  

I watched Frohike amble up and look at the glittering blue 
gem in the case.  He looked furtively around, examining 
each tourist and undercover FBI Agent as if he was 
memorizing their features for a quiz later.  I sighed and 
leaned against the pillar I was trying not to obviously hide 
behind.  Asking Frohike to look casual is like asking a tiger to 
become a leopard.  Only the bribe of allowing him to take the 
body mike off me after this was over did he agree to play 
nice with the Feds.  Byers and Langly had refused and were 
off sulking somewhere.  Thanks to recent events, I wasn't 
exactly in their good graces.  I think they would have been 
just as happy to let George hang my head on his trophy wall.         

The light glittering from the facets of the Hope Diamond has 
a certain hypnotic charm.  I stood and watched the sparkle 
on the surface of the so-called cursed gemstone, looked at 
the depths of blue which seemed to go into a universe of 
blue darkness and shine, until I started wondering what it 
would be like to have the weight of the thing hanging around 
my throat, the fire would burn like ice, the facets and prongs 
of the setting would scratch my skin, digging in with the 
weight of the journey from India to Washington, the deaths 
dragging me into the dark blueness and –

"I love you," he whispered, his hands warm on my shoulders 
through the fabric of my blouse and jacket.

I swallowed diamond dust, scratching my tortured throat.

	Are you lonesome tonight,
	do you miss me tonight?
	Are you sorry we drifted apart?

"You have a funny way of showing it," I said without turning 
around.

God, it was worse this time.  Whatever Mulder-confusion I'd 
suffered in the office was nothing compared to this. 
Whatever I had willingly suppressed to hand myself over to 
his dark charms for the purpose of my own destruction was 
nothing compared to this.

Even though the cancer had done terrible things to my sense 
of smell, I know Mulder's.  I could probably track him through 
a department store.  He smells of books, leather, 
sandalwood after-shave, and something feral that belongs 
only to him.  The smell was enough to make me hold onto 
the pillar for support.  Somehow, George had managed to 
capture the eau du Mulder.  I looked down and saw the 
familiar taupe trench coat tails sliding along my legs like a 
caress.  George had his entire body flattened up against 
mine, his fingers gently kneading the rigid muscles over my 
shoulders.  A finger of heat raced along my nerves.

"He's not good to you, you know that?" he whispered into my 
left ear.

The years in Canada had done something peculiar to his 
vowels but other than that, it was the same charmless 
monotone.

In Arlington, Mulder was probably having apoplexy.

"I'm so much better to you," he insisted.

He brought me dead bodies the way that a housecat brings 
dead mice to an owner for praise.

	Does your memory stray to a brighter sunny day
	When I kissed you and called you sweetheart?

"I have an incredible headache," I said, giving the agreed-
upon trouble signal, as if anyone didn't have a fucking clue.

"It's too crowded in here," George said with a twist of 
amusement, "too many FBI Agents spoil the stake-out."

His breath was warm in my ear, his hands moved down my 
arms, leaving hot trails through my clothes.  My head was 
humming like a fluorescent light as his fingers burned 
through to my skin.  The reaction had nothing to do with 
intelligence or sense, my mouth was dry and I felt like I was 
moving through warm honey.  Hello? Dana! Wrong guy.  
This is bad, very bad.  Hand moving under my blouse, 
across my stomach, pulling out the leads on the mike.  Oh 
God.  It could have been and I – The fingers of his right hand 
stroked the skin on my throat, making the bruises whimper 
underneath his touch.  The far corners of my vision wept a 
red haze.  I could hear my own hair hiss on the shoulder of 
his trench coat as my head fell back.

I knew who it was.  My brain knew but my nervous system 
from the medulla oblongata was not paying any attention.  
My thighs were trembling, and I was soaking wet.

	Do the chairs in your parlor seem empty and bare?
	Do you gaze at your doorstep and picture me there?

My wrist vanished in his hand.  As I had done so many times 
before, I stumbled after him.  Over at the Hope Diamond, I 
caught a flicker of movement out of the corner of my eye.

The "Employees Only"  door shut behind us. 

Back pressed up against the wall in the stairwell like a high 
school student, the banister digging into my ass while his 
fingers roved over my breasts and belly, his lips melting the 
sore sad places he had wounded on my throat while his 
hipbone ground hard into my pubic bone, making me 
whimper with my head against the wall.  His fingers pushing 
away the body mike and sliding down the inside of my bra to 
touch my nipples, which were already harder than the gems 
in the other room.  He groaned when I bit down on his 
earlobe.

	Is your heart filled with pain, shall I come back again?
	Tell me dear, are you lonesome tonight?

"God I've missed you," he moaned, sounding just like I had 
two nights before. His fingers were busy at the waistband of 
my pants, fumbling first with the outer button and then 
snuffling with frustration as the pants didn't release their hold 
on my waist. Bizarrely, this hitch was what helped me 
reboot. Of course George wouldn't know that there was an 
inner button, it made the pants hang more smoothly, but how 
would he know about better women's clothes? He'd never 
had a trust fund, never even graduated college or held a full-
time job.

I stiffened like bakelite, pushing my body into his growing 
erection but no longer molding myself to him. "I don't 
understand this," I said, wanting him to be off-guard when I 
finally went for my gun and blew his impersonating, mind-
fucking head off.

"I didn't realize until recently how important you are to me," 
he whispered and ran his tongue over the contours of my 
ear. Giving up on the pants for the moment, he covered my 
breasts with his hands, thumbs rubbing against my nipples 
as if he were channel-surfing and I was the remote control. 
The realization that had chilled me began to seep away, 
melting in the renewed heat. He may not have had Mulder's 
advantages, but he'd figured out how to fake it.

"I just need to take care of a few things, then everything can 
be the way it was. Just you and me, Scully, us against the 
world. So good..." His tongue invaded me, rough and heavy, 
and I brought my left leg up to wrap around his thigh, 
pushing my mons against his hard-on. I'd have to let go of 
his arm to get to the gun, I thought with one half of my brain 
as the other half gurgled with need.

I released his left arm and slid my hand over the hot fabric 
covering his side and waist. He was a solid slab of muscle, 
more buff than Mulder at his manic peak. He hummed, 
approving the caress, and moved his mouth to cover my 
cheek with soft wet kisses. "Tell me you want me, Scully. 
Say my name." 

I craved him like chocolate, like ice cream, like coffee latte 
from Starbuck's on a cold morning, I needed to have his 
bitter sweetness fill my mouth and my stomach like warm 
poison.  

	Are you lonesome tonight,
	do you miss me tonight?

****

I heard her breathing change as he began speaking, and I 
had to struggle not to get a sympathetic hard-on, which 
would have gone down really well with the other agents 
sitting on my couch watching me bounce my daughter on my 
lap. It was torture when George ripped the leads from the 
mike, but it might have saved my ass anyway.

"Isn't anyone else *there*?" I yelled into the phone, over 
Miranda's wails, barely noticing when Warwick scooped her 
up, into his less conflicted arms. "They didn't just 
*disappear*, god damn it! What kind of reindeer games are 
you playing?"

Burble, whimper of voices through the monitor, confused and 
angry. She went with him willingly, yes of course you idiots 
but *where* did she go? Flash of red/white exit light, bar on 
the door for easy opening in case of emergency. A white 
stairwell, more utilitarian than the parts of the building that 
were open to the public.

"The stairs," I said. "Someone needs to check the stairs."

If George was going to play head games with me, I could hit 
back just as hard.

Sometimes it's good to have a reputation. At least one of the 
useless fucks in the Smithsonian acknowledged my demand 
and reported that he was heading to the stairwell.

I was going to kill her, so help me. I'd make her look me in 
the eyes and acknowledge who I was. Not just one of a 
series, not some interchangeable Ken doll for her viewing 
pleasure. 

****

My fingers slipped free of the thick cotton and my hand 
flopped back against the wall, the banister cool and hard 
under my twitching fingers. His teeth nipped playfully at my 
chin, pushing my head up and stretching the bruises. "Say 
my name." Now his mouth was at my shoulder, setting his 
teeth over the marks he'd made that morning. 

My hand was drifting slowly behind my back. I couldn't 
exactly remember why.

"Mulder..."

He jerked, his cock throbbing against me, and his hands 
were at the sides of my face, his thumbs caressing my throat 
and his palms pressing my head in a flesh-and-bone vise. A 
pull in the right direction and my head would come off like a 
dandelion popped from its stem. His eyes were mulch-brown 
and burning with the heat generated by decomposition.

"*My* name," he insisted and my hand hit the butt of my gun. 
I can't say I found it intentionally, but at that point chance 
was good enough for me. I tugged and twisted, trying to hold 
my torso still against him as I prepared to shove the gun into 
his rock-wall stomach.

"George..."

I felt his erection wither and he groaned, anger replacing 
arousal. I heard a noise on the stairwell below us, someone 
finally having clued into the fact that George and I were 
having a tete-a-tete up here. The gun cleared my torso just 
as George looked down my side to see it.

"Bitch," he snarled and used his grip on my head to slam me 
into the wall. I saw white, then black as I felt my legs fold like 
a well-used map.

I shook my head and spit out sweeping compound.  George 
had taken off; his footsteps sounding like a stampede of 
buffalo overhead.  With rubber fingers, I grabbed my Sig up 
off the floor and fought my way to my feet.  Just behind me 
the fire doors exploded and the gallery was flooded with 
agents.  Up the stairs we pounded, catching a glimpse of 
trench coat tails fluttering through the railings.  I fell into the 
middle of the pack, with Zippy running shotgun next to me, 
screaming into his headset.  

"Roof. Upstairs! Move! Move! Move!"

Roof, right.

The roof was the obvious escape route, down the external 
fire escape and –

Mulders are never obvious.

A half phrase of a child's song rattled through my head, 
words changed.

The wonderful thing about Mulders
Is Mulders are wonderful things
Their tops are made out of rubber
Their bottoms are made out of springs

Primal force of chaos.  Unpredictable.

But I spoke fluent Mulder.

I stopped in the middle of the stairwell and the Tokyo rush-
hour crush of dark suits flowed around me like a stream 
around a stone.  I went back down two flights.  My fingers 
burned on the cold metal of the doorknob.

"Dana, what the fuck?" Zippy asked at my elbow.

Dark gallery, little grating catwalks where the lights for the 
displays hung down.  I had a momentary flash of the 
"breeding" facility in Texas and bit my lower lip  to still it.  A 
flash of movement in the shadows.  The only agent I can 
beat at a sprint is Agent Amato, and he's shorter than I am, a 
pack a day smoker and pushing sixty-five.  Zippy nearly 
knocked me over as he leapt out onto the catwalk. Fools 
rush in.  I clattered along behind him, watching the lights 
flash up into Mulder/George's face as it registered surprise 
then teeth-tightening fury.  The catwalk jumped and 
shuddered like a cheap carnival ride as Zippy's bowling-ball 
mass smashed into George's pin body.  They fell onto the 
catwalk. Dazed with an incipient concussion and George 
voodoo, I grabbed onto the handrail with fearsweat hands.  
Zippy could have taken out Mulder with a punch to the jaw 
but George was a slab of meat after years in stir so it wasn't 
quite the same.

Punches flew. I raised the Sig and tried to get a clear bead 
on the man that wore the face I'd awakened to that morning. 
Somehow with Zippy involved it seemed easier.  I needed a 
witness.  I needed a lot of things but a witness would do for 
now.

Blowing the witness' brains out, however, was not a good 
idea.  And I couldn't get a clear shot.  Brown hair, heads 
bobbing, flashes from the lights from below and under it all 
the humming voices of the tourists.

A woman, tour guide or teacher, spoke over the noise of the 
grunting men on the catwalk. Her voice carried with eerie 
clarity up the dozens of feet between us.

" Many people think that the Allosaurus is just a smaller 
Tyrannosaurus Rex. The Allosaurus was actually the great-
grandfather to the Tyrannosaurus Rex. The Allosaurus lived 
140 million years ago during the Jurassic Period."

George had Zippy's back pressed against the handrail of the 
catwalk, hard enough and at enough of a severe angle that 
vertebrae were in danger of breaking.

"Tyrannosaurus Rex lived only 100 Million years ago during 
the Cretaceous Period. The differences can be seen in their 
hands, an Allosaurus had three fingers and Tyrannosaurus 
Rex only had two fingers."

Bones, bones, bones dry bones how much pressure before 
the bones gave way and --

The bones didn't give way, the catwalk did, Zippy, with a 
roar, slid backwards and into the air as the fragile aluminum 
pole severed with a snap. 

The entire catwalk jumped and swayed like a rope bridge in 
a jungle adventure movie. George slid to the far end as 
Zippy screamed on his way down to --

"The Allosaurus was a carnivore or a flesh-eating dinosaur. 
He had very sharp serrated teeth that look very similar to the 
cutting edge on a knife and---"

Bones breaking, crashing, crunching.

I looked over the edge of the platform to see my partner 
crash through the skeletal embrace of the Allosaurus' 
outstretched claws.

George had vanished.

Below, the flashbulbs from the cameras started popping like 
tiny fireworks; Mr., Mrs. and Jr. America were documenting 
the fact that they had just lived through the human segment 
of the last ten minutes of Jurassic Park.  With any luck 
something terrible would happen overnight and the FBI 
Agent Destroys Priceless Fossil wouldn't make the front 
page of The Post.

My cellphone rang at my hip.

"Dana?" Zippy, not surprisingly, sounded shaky, "I think I 
broke something."

"I'll be right down,"

I clicked off the phone and had to bite the back of my hand 
to muffle the hysterical, inappropriate laughter that 
threatened to shatter my skull like the Allosaurus'.

I rode with Zippy to the hospital, held his hand while they x-
rayed him and agreed that a fractured femur was not the 
worse thing in the world that would have happened.  The 
Allosaurus was in far worse shape.  Thank God the fake 
terrain underneath the bones was high-tech cushioning 
material, not exactly designed for this situation but still in 
place in case any dino bones took a pratfall; the padding had 
done an okay job on Zippy and he had far more soft tissue to 
damage. I was tempted to palm a couple of his pre-op 
muscle relaxants but promised that I would call his parents in 
Brooklyn instead.  I did call them and then I really wanted 
morphine.

I wasn't looking forward to going back to the house and 
facing Mulder, either.

Iolokus III: Vix te Agnovi 12/20
. . . like one
Who having into truth, by telling of it,
Made such a sinner of his memory
To credit his own lie -- he did believe
He was indeed the Duke . . .


By the time the other agents stopped asking stupid 
questions and took me back to Mulder, I needed weapons-
grade chocolate.

I settled for the few half-stale brownies lurking underneath a 
coating of tin foil that I found hidden in the refrigerator. I'd 
barely managed to dispose of the evidence when Mulder 
stalked in. "Can we take this into the bedroom?" I asked 
before he said anything. "I think the walls are better 
insulated."

He nodded and led the way. I wanted him to comfort me, to 
tell me that this confusion wasn't my fault. This was about as 
likely to happen as Skinner becoming the new spokesman 
for the Hair Club for Men. I considered dragging my feet but 
judged that delay would only provoke Mulder further.

"Exactly what the fuck were you trying to prove?" he hissed 
in a voice of dry ice.

I sat down on the bed, my legs betraying me.

"That's pretty cute, Scully, pretty fucking cute.  Working your 
way through the alphabet again?  Only during waking hours?  
You want I should have Christopher and Hal dug up?  You 
can put the moves on them," he crossed his arms over his 
chest and leaned up against the closed door, "Of course 
they might be a tad bit *ripe* by now, but you've never had a 
problem with the smell of death before."

"You don't understand--"

"Damn right I don't understand.  All I understand is less than 
twenty-four hours after we're making a short blunt human 
pyramid, you're practically going down on George in the 
Smithsonian.  Color me slightly annoyed."

"I don't have an adequate explanation for what happened."

"Well isn't that just fucking lovely. Okay then, fine, can't 
imagine why I was upset. We'll just call it an X File and be 
done with it."

 "He smelled like you," I whispered. "I knew -- but I couldn't 
stop, not when he -- you were touching me. How can he do 
this?"

His eyes crystallized into frost. 

"How can you do it?" he asked and smiled a dark and rich 
smile, "but I  forget, you're a whore just like the rest of them."

"Slut," I said, not even realizing I'd said it until I heard the 
word bounce off my knees. "Whores, they get paid." 

My mind was full of lint. 

I had a familiar litany to fit this situation, one that required 
only the slightest of modifications to account for new data: It 
hadn't been George's strange tricks at all making me writhe 
in the stairwell, had it? Just like I couldn't *not* have known 
that it was Jason in the bathroom all those months ago. 
What kind of fool, after all, lets her lover leave the lights out 
when her lover's identical twin is wandering the halls of his 
mansion, looking for pussy? Let's face it, part of me 
*wanted* to know what he'd be like. 

Occasionally I managed to disbelieve this voice. But not very 
often and not now.

I was curled up on myself again, as if that ever helped. As 
far as I could tell it just put me in the right shape to get 
knocked out of the park by the great home-run hitter in the 
sky. 

At that moment, my near-concussion throbbing and my near-
strangulation choking me, still sore from my recent sexual 
gymnastics with the man now denouncing me, I could have 
put my gun in my mouth and pulled the trigger right then. 
Actually I'm not sure that I could have avoided doing so, if it 
had been on my person. 

Mulder's sneer had faded but I was paying less attention as I 
considered my options. With Zippy's toys the house was 
better armed than the average gunsmith's. Or there was my 
Xanax and Mulder's Ambien, that and a few of the remaining 
Coronas would do me right, though there was the horrible 
possibility of discovery, more humiliation as my stomach was 
pumped, and then potential brain damage. Men kill 
themselves more often than women because they're more 
likely to get it right; they use guns. They don't bother with the 
subtlety of pills or razors or freewheeling serial killers.

I'd be breaking my implicit promise to Zippy. But what had he 
been thinking, asking me to wait until this was over? It was 
abundantly clear that where the Mulder genome was 
involved there was no such thing as "over," only periods of 
greater and lesser action/adventure.

I could just take my own gun from the end table in the family 
room downstairs, walk out into the twilight and do it. I no 
longer feared Hell; the worst that God could do would be to 
send me back right where I was.

Mulder was staring through me. I wondered if he could 
sense the black cloud of my soul, or if he'd shut down the 
connection between us in disgust. 

I had almost made my legs uncurl to start the long march 
downstairs when the phone rang. I watched, half-curious, as 
Mulder warily picked it up.

He listened for a moment, breathing heavily. "It's for you," he 
said and handed it to me. The red cord stretched through the 
air like a length of intestine.

I pressed the receiver to my ear, hearing Mulder leave -- to 
get to another extension, I presumed. Even without listening 
to the call or interpreting the look on Mulder's face, I knew 
who it had to be. It's not as if I got a lot of gentleman callers 
these days.

"Yeah?"

"Don't do it, Dana. You just need some sleep, everything will 
seem better in the morning."

"What do you care?" I was really curious. Just like my 
Mulder, he seemed impervious to small betrayals, as if 
confident I'd come through for him when it counted.

I could almost feel the moistness of his breath in my ear. 
"We can't do it alone. It's too much for any one person. But I 
know I can see clearly where you're confused and I believe, I 
truly believe, you can do the same for me. Just hang on, 
hang on for me. Because I'm coming."

He clicked off and I put my head between my knees and 
moaned. Like an animal caught in a trap, I'd chew my limbs 
off if I only knew where to start. The sobs that ripped through 
me like grenade blasts were dry and unproductive.

Eventually, after the phone stopped making noise, Mulder 
came and took it from my hand.

I could hear his knees creak as he knelt on the carpet in 
front of me.

"What did he say to you?" he asked in the mildest tone 
imaginable.

"Does it matter?"

Fingers bit into my throat, overlapping the bruises that 
awakened from
their half-slumber.  I looked up and watched the gold flecks 
in his eyes
surface like koi in an algae-filed pond.  I should have 
screamed, I
should have fought.  I couldn't do anything.  He jerked me to 
my feet and
my legs shook like a cheap chair's.

To be held in thrall is a terrible exhilaration.  

George in the Smithsonian had been a snack, a morsel to 
tempt my
Muldercraving into a fever pitch.  I would have fucked Mulder 
on the
stairwell at the Natural History museum, feet away from the 
gemstones and other strange and beautiful things under 
glass. I would have fucked him and loved every minute of it.

My hands were weeping sweat when I closed them over his 
chest.  Pectorals, warm and solid as bread under my hands, 
his useless nipples standing hard as stones against my 
palms.  I raked my nails over the smooth cotton surface of 
his T-shirt.  You can't rape the willing, can you?  

He slapped my hands away, making my fingerbones ache 
with the harshness of the movement.  I caught my breath 
with surprise.  This was a little rough even for him.    With 
eyes that were now more amber than jade, he looked down 
at me as though he was examining an unpromising pork 
chop between cellophane and Styrofoam in the grocery 
store.   Finally, a decision was made and his fingers made 
for my throat again.

The world spun like the revolving light on a squad car. I let 
go.  I let consciousness leak away like water. I surrendered.

An unknown amount of time later I came back to myself.  
The mattress was reassuringly solid underneath my spine, 
the air chillingly cold on my
naked skin.  The room was filled with the insect hum of an 
air conditioner and my arms ached.  The reason for my 
aching arms was clear a
moment later.  I was inverted on the bed; my head touching 
the footboard rail and my wrists efficiently lashed to the 
smooth rail with what felt
like neckties.  It wasn't the first time that he'd bound me, but 
it was the first time that it made me afraid.  Usually, it 
seemed amusing, but
this was not funny.  

The air was so cold that I was carpeted in gooseflesh.

The door opened and I shut my eyes, willing to play possum 
until I had a better idea of what was happening.  While parts 
of my mind were doing the dance of fear and the dance of 
lust in counterpoint, the part that was still functioning in a 
semi-reliable fashion did the waltz of logic. 
George's sexual assaults had all been postmortem.  He liked 
his women
somewhere between passive and decayed.  If, in fact, 
Mulder had absorbed this much of George's pathological 
behavior, I was lucky that the ties were around my wrists and 
not around my neck.  Even considering that I had been 
willing to suck bullets out of my own gun an unknown 
amount of time earlier, I found that idea of being strangled by 
the person who knew me best in the entire world somewhat 
less than appealing.  

So, rather than create an actual corpse a la George, Mulder 
was willing to create a faux cadaver by rendering me 
unconscious and chilling my flesh with the air conditioner.  
Morbid, but not lethal.

Donnie Pfaster.  He'd chilled his women in an ice-cold bath. 

And George, he liked anal sex. God, what if --?

I couldn't handle that again – I really couldn't.

	I wonder if you're lonesome tonight
	You know someone said that the world's a stage
	And you must play a part.
	Fate had me playing in love you as my sweet heart.

Elvis moaned in the background.  If he hadn't already been 
dead I would have wished him so.

The mattress creaked under his weight.  I held my breath.  
Fingertips, hardened from computer keys, smelling of baby 
soap, smoothed over the
surface of my stomach, my breasts, circled the cold-stiffened 
tips of my nipples.  A stab of pleasure cut down between my 
legs.  I squeezed my eyes tightly closed.  The fingers slid up 
to my face, stroking the bruises on my neck, following the 
line of my cheekbones, touching my
lips.  An index finger slipped between my lips and it was all I 
could do to keep from suckling on the dry hardness of his 
finger.

	Act one was when I met you, I loved you at first 
glance
	You read your line so cleverly and never missed a 
cue
	Then came act two, you seemed to change and you 
acted
		strange
	And why I'll never know.

The finger withdrew and I could hear the telltale rustling of 
Mulder shucking off his clothes.  A moment later, he was 
prying my jaws open
with insistent hands before pressing his cock into my mouth 
with a shove. The tip of his cock nudged the back of my 
throat and nearly made me gag.

Tied to the bedstead, I had no leverage or control of the 
situation.  I circled the baby silk skin of his cock with my 
tongue, tasting the dark wildness of him, wishing that I could 
dig my fingernails into the hard white curves of his ass, the 
long muscles in his thighs.  He groaned helplessly and 
continued to stroke slowly in and out between my lips.  I 
sucked hard on his glans, tasting salt and candy, traced my 
teeth along  the shaking vein on the underside while he 
undulated, his knees on either side of my ribcage, shaking.  
A disappointing moment later he came, flooding my mouth 
with semen.  I tried to swallow but rivulets cascaded down 
my cheeks and into my hair.

	Honey, you're lying when you said you loved me
	And I had no cause to doubt you.
	But I'd rather go on hearing your lies
	Than go on living without you.

Silent and still, he lay with his head against my breasts and 
his hand tucked between my legs, his breathing harsh as 
though he'd come back from one of his runs.  
Embarrassingly enough, I was aroused by it all and the 
fingers twined in my pubic hair were wet with the proof of my 
need.  Once he'd caught a normal breathing pattern, Mulder 
began suckling at my breasts, cupping one and then the 
other in his free hand and biting at my painfully tight nipples 
until I started to whimper and move underneath him.  I pulled 
at the ties, wanting to touch him, wanting to pull him closer 
and inside me once again.  His fingers moved, rubbing at the 
swollen length of my clitoris, pressing up inside me until I 
was grinding against his hand and moaning.

Filthy, dirty, guilty waves of pleasure rolled over me, 
breaking over the carefully constructed sandbag walls I'd put 
up around my mind.  I
shuddered against him, seeing white spots and feeling the 
undertow pull against the bottom of consciousness.  At least 
I think I hissed the right
name when I finally orgasamed underneath his touch.

Stuck together with various biological secretions, we lay 
under the cold wind of the air conditioner for a long time.  
Finally, Mulder roused himself from his stupor long enough 
to stumble over to the window unit and switch the machine 
off.  The ties were loosened from my hands. 

Stupid with lust, crazy with need for him greater than a need 
for air chocolate, I pulled him down into the bed with me.  He 
clung like a barnacle while I ran my hands over every inch of 
his body,
sucking at his neck and shoulders.  I slid down his body, 
teasing his nipples with my teeth and nails, scraping the 
sensitive Bermuda Triangle
of nerves just at the base of his spine, where the buttocks 
begin to cleave.  The blind worm of his cock started to 
awaken when I sucked at
his flat stomach, bringing the blood to the surface in a 
raspberry love bite.  I ran my hand between his legs, 
massaging his balls within their protective sac while I 
tongued my way down the narrow seam of fine hair running 
from navel to cock.  He groaned and grabbed my hair.  I
resuscitated his cock with my mouth until it wobbled erect 
once again.  

A feral growl escaped him.

	Now the stage is bare and I'm standing there
	With emptiness all around
	And if you won't come back to me
	Then make them bring the curtain down.

End over end tumbling, skin on skin slick with sweat, saliva, 
and come.  I looked up into the strange mask of disinterest 
on his face between the tops of my feet when he plunged 
into me.   Hot, hard and insistent once again, he filled me to 
my spine, stretching my muscles to the tearing point, rubbing 
against my nerves like steel on flint.  Sweat dropped from his 
forehead to my face and I caught it in my mouth, saltier than 
the come
already clinging to my tongue.  I shuddered as he pumped in 
and out, grabbing my ass and pushing in deeper and harder 
at each thrust.  Torn,
broken and pleading, I pushed myself forward at him until we 
were both grunting like rutting dogs, teeth bared in snarls of 
lust.  I caught fire in great circles that moved out from my 
groin like electromagnetic rings. 

I bit his forearm, blood filling my mouth, in a vain attempt to 
muffle the shout that erupted from my chest when I climaxed 
and my brain  crashed.  Mulder continued to drive into me, 
sending aftershock waves  along my limbs.  Aftershocks hot 
and delicious as the actual orgasm.  His
teeth sliced into my breast right above my heart and he 
jetted into me like champagne.  The thrusting grew weaker 
and weaker as he shuddered to a halt, finally going soft 
inside me.

I gathered him to me, his hair in my face and his arms 
around my waist.  Sticky and shaking we lay like that as the 
room gradually warmed around
us.

	Is your heart filled with pain, shall I come back again?
	Tell me dear, are you lonesome tonight?

Just before I fell asleep I realized that we hadn't used a 
condom, but visiting hours were over and the lights were 
switched out in my mind.



Iolokus III: Vix te Agnovi 13/20
...sometime am I 
All wound with adders, who with cloven tongues
Do hiss me into madness.


It was seven a.m. when I woke up. Scully slumbered, her 
face duplicitously innocent in sleep, the sharp lines of age 
and stress carved into her flesh contrasting with the rest of 
her smooth ivory skin. 

I felt strange, as though I'd been asleep on an airplane and 
awakened in another time zone.  The overcast morning 
muffled light and sound that barely made it through the 
cotton surrounding my brain.  I had a strobe light nightmare 
memory of making love to Scully the night before but I didn't 
want to take the time to stop and examine it just then.  I filed 
it for future rumination.  Instead I showered, being careful 
with the scratches and bites which made me look as though 
I'd been gang-raped by Mongolian yak-herders.  I slapped a 
Band-Aid on the drying scab on my forearm and wondered if 
the teeth marks would blossom and bud into yet another 
Scullyscar.

I couldn't look at her before I went, not without facing the 
memory of the Loch Ness Monster of her smooth skin still 
and cold underneath me cutting through the deepness of my 
pain.

I dressed to unimpress, using my most innocuous suit and a 
nondescript rep tie that wouldn't look out of place in the DOE 
or on a Metrobus driver. Hopefully this would be enough to 
prevent Washington's sterling citizens from dropping a dime 
on me.

Creeping like an intruder in my own house, I made my way 
downstairs and towards the front door. I heard no Warwick-
like noises. He had no reason to be suspicious, none 
whatsoever. I hadn't misbehaved at all since he'd known me; 
this flight into the free world would come as a total shock.

Scully should have known better but, hey, give the girl a 
break, she was mighty confused at the moment. If she'd 
been fully functional she would have known that there was 
no way I could sit at home like the caterpillar on his 
mushroom, waiting for someone else to solve the George 
problem. There was no way I could just allow myself to be 
made a prisoner, locked up as tightly as George in his 
Canadian cell. There was no way that I could let him seduce 
her and, like as not, kill her. (To get a real sense of the freak 
show that was my life, ask me which of those two prospects 
bothered me more.) And he'd hinted that he was coming for 
Miranda. I was not programmed to deal with this and I knew 
the system was about three seconds short of crashing. I had 
to get out, go after him on my own.

There was only one logical place to start. Profile.  Do the 
fucking profile, Spooky. I swung by the Starbuck's for my first 
fix of the day and sat in my car, letting the relays click over. 

George's behavior had been erratic, but he'd given us some 
crucial clues yesterday. He thought he deserved to be me. 
He wanted my life. But he wanted my old, glamorous life, the 
one where I flew around the country in order to get beaten 
up by an astonishing variety of people and things. The one 
where I could afford band-collar Armani shirts and Hermes 
ties, the one where Scully and I fucked with slightly less 
trauma. He wanted, in short, to rewind my life about fourteen 
months.

I might just have let him if it hadn't been for Miranda. 
Miranda whose late-night feedings didn't fit into his schedule. 
She couldn't be erased like a week-old episode of NYPD 
Blue. But George didn't believe that; he was trying to 
reconstruct my old existence.

Therefore, I headed into Alexandria, toward my old haunt at 
Hegal Place. The super was, as usual, in his office. You 
don't run an apartment complex among whose inhabitants 
Fox Mulder is numbered without learning the value of hands-
on management.

He looked up as I came in. "What is it now?"

Obviously I had been there already, or at least George had.

"I have some questions about my apartment."

He sighed. "Were there any problems with the delivery? I 
know you love that couch but it's not exactly easy to get up 
the stairs."

"I'm afraid I need to clarify some things. It's official FBI 
business," I flashed my snazzy replacement badge. "I need 
to know what happened after you gave me my security 
deposit back."

He scratched his head. "Why don't we just take a look, I 
don't want any more trouble with the FBI." He swiveled his 
padded chair around to peck at the keyboard. "Okay, 
apartment 42. Security deposit returned on January tenth. 
Apartment cleaned, various bullet holes and dents of 
unknown source repaired, repainted, floors refinished. 
Rented out again March fourteenth, fifty dollars more per 
month reflecting improvements to the premises, deposit and 
first three months paid by your lawyer."

Good to know that I still had that Spooky sense. "Did the 
lawyer leave a card?"

He pulled open the right drawer on his desk and rummaged 
around. "Sure enough," he said. 

I love lawyers, they *want* people to know what they're 
doing and obligingly leave a paper trail like a Roman road. 
Jon Kyle, of Dallas's Lanson & Hogue, LLP. The business 
card was the same color and used the same font as the 
letterhead they'd used to inform me of how the evil that 
Jason did had lived on after him. (As for good being interred 
with his bones, that I couldn't vouch for. I think he still had 
bones when we finished.)

"Hey," he asked as I turned to leave, "did that business with 
your brother ever get settled?"

I shook my head. "Not really."

I let the door swing shut on his murmured condolences.

Now what? He wasn't home, I knew this the same way I'd 
known where to go. He was somewhere, being me, while I 
was being him. I could break into the apartment and trash 
the place, that would give him some *real* Fox Mulder 
verisimilitude.

Or maybe I'd just take a quick look around, see what was up 
with the old digs.

The two had been nailed into place with some shiny brads 
which jarred me a bit – but once I'd finessed the lock open 
(never return lockpicks – a cardinal rule of law enforcement), 
I stepped back in time.  Damn.  He even had old magazines  
on the coffee table.  I had taken that particular issue of GQ 
with me to the house.  I guess I thought I was still going to 
be able to afford the suits even with the mortgage and the 
car payment.  For a second I had a brief flash of nostalgia for 
the pre-Miranda days.  Then I saw the dead fish floating in 
the tank and thought again.

The red eye of the stereo glowed.  There was a CD in.  I 
touched the play button, noting that he'd programmed in only 
one song and set it to repeat ad infinitum.

	Are you lonesome tonight,
	do you miss me tonight?
	Are you sorry we drifted apart?

Fuck.

My knees gave out with a crack and I fell to the floor, my 
mind refusing to wrap around the words.

	Are you lonesome tonight,
	do you miss me tonight?
	
Oh God please no.  Not last night. I couldn't have.

She was cold underneath me.

	Are you sorry we drifted apart?

Cold as death cold as—

It had to stop.  I had to stop him before I hurt Scully or 
Miranda.

I swallowed the bile eating my throat and stood up, shoving 
whatever bloody human chunks were left of me into a safe 
corner and went into the familiar architectural thoughts of 
analysis and profile.

The bedroom was really interesting.  He hadn't managed to 
re-create it as well as the living room – the comforter was the 
wrong shade of green and it was missing the twin peaks of 
clean and dirty laundry on top. (Ever wonder why I slept on 
the couch so much?)  On the dresser were spread some 
grainy printouts of photos of me – my ID, the photo on file in 
the FBI database, and the same for Scully.  Well, almost.  
You see, he'd pretty much wallpapered the walls with a few 
pictures of my divine little imp.  Color photocopies, 
snapshots taken at a distance in various states of blurry red 
hair, and what looked like a yearbook picture.  Holy shit.  I 
stepped closer to the picture photocopied to poster size.  I 
never would have known her, feathered hair, lips shining 
with gloss, eyes ringed with then-fashionable black lines and 
the telltale gleam of a retainer across her teeth.  Scully at 
eighteen.  Who would have thought?  She looked as sweet 
and frothy as a strawberry daiquiri.   

	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?

But – was the me in the pictures the me me or the him me?

Newspaper photo, gritty newsprint lay on the dresser.  An 
old picture.  Scully and I were walking out of a courthouse in 
Anne Arundel County.  I couldn't remember the case but 
from my haircut it looked like about 1997 – Scully was thin 
with cancer in those days.  The photo made things 
abundantly clear.  He'd taken a thick black marker and 
drawn the barbed wire necklace around my neck.  That must 
have been his way of replacing me with himself.

	I wonder if you're lonesome tonight
	You know someone said that the world's a stage
	And you must play a part.
	Fate had me playing in love you as my sweet heart.
	Act one was when I met you, I loved you at first 
glance
	You read your line so cleverly and never missed a 
cue
	Then came act two, you seemed to change and you 
acted
		strange
	And why I'll never know.

My reflection shimmered at me in the silvered glass.  The 
marker was still lying on the dresser top and I reached for it.  
I wrote across the cold surface of the mirror in thick black 
letters, not giving a shit about fingerprints – since ours were 
the same anyway.

"What's eating you, George?"

	Honey, you're lying when you said you loved me
	And I had no cause to doubt you.
	But I'd rather go on hearing your lies
	Than go on living without you.
	Now the stage is bare and I'm standing there

I don't bother locking the fucking door behind me when I left.

The King's drug-slurred voice chased me down the hall.

	With emptiness all around
	And if you won't come back to me
	Then make them bring the curtain down.

If I waited long enough, he'd show. I went back to my car 
and sat in the driver's seat. Station wagons weren't too 
common among the young unmarrieds who populated this 
area of town, but by the same token no one was likely to 
make me for a cop, driving this thing.

Two hours passed during which I stared at my ex-front door 
and narrowed my attention to a pixel-width. Nothing 
mattered but watching for George. I was my brother's 
keeper. And like Cain, I had plans for my meat-eating 
brother.

	Is your heart filled with pain, shall I come back again?
	Tell me dear, are you lonesome tonight?

****

Dr. Shimada's office called at nine a.m., waking me from a 
sound sleep. Mulder had already disappeared, no doubt off 
playing with Miranda. In any event, the news I got pushed 
him off my priority list. My Pap smear had been normal, but 
when the nurse's assistant went to insert the results in my 
rather large and noteworthy file, it was missing. Subsequent 
investigation disclosed scratches on the locks on the office 
doors and the cabinet where the files were kept.

"Let me speak with Dr. Shimada."

"She's not here yet. She must be running late..." I felt sorry 
for the office manager; this wasn't really in her job 
description.

"Listen, I am a Special Agent for the FBI and if my file is 
gone Dr. Shimada may be in danger. I need you to put me in 
contact with her."

Panic tinged the woman's voice. "I tried to reach her but 
she's not answering her cellphone, or her beeper. She's not 
picking up at home..."

"Give me the address."

I was perfectly calm as I called Ralph Williams and had him 
pick me up in a Bucar. 

When we arrived, we knocked, Then we broke down the 
door -- we'd worry about justifying it to a judge later. The 
break-in was unavailing; there was no sign that Dr. Shimada 
had even made it home the night before. Her mail was still 
scattered across the foyer floor where it had fallen through 
the slot.

The morning sunshine was bright and clean; it didn't care 
what horrors it illuminated. Ralph busied himself getting an 
APB out on Dr. Shimada's Ford Explorer. I wallowed in guilt.

I should have known better -- any fool could have noticed 
that female health care personnel, particularly the short 
ones, had early expiration dates around me. Just like it had 
been with Pendrell, I didn't even know her first name.

Shall I come back again --

"I have a thought," I said to the air. Ralph was nowhere to be 
seen. Well, I tried to let him know, I thought and got back in 
the car.

My apartment looked like a stranger's. Yellow spring light 
seeped heavy and thick through the twisted blinds as I 
opened the door. It was cleaner than I remembered, but then 
that was Zippy's doing.

"Honey, I'm home," I called out.

Oh yeah, I forgot, I'm not married.

The air was dead. Even the dust motes didn't move much. I 
hardly recognized the place. It didn't say anything about who 
I was. Not that furniture would have an easy time explaining 
me. The pictures might have come with the frames for all the 
emotional response they evoked in me.

I edged across the room, keeping my gun pointed in front of 
me, backing away from any corners that might hide George. 
My breathing rasped like a nail file in the quiet.

Reaching the other side of the room, I flipped the hall light on 
and continued down towards the bedroom. My back was 
against the wall, protecting my blind side, as I inched 
towards the closed door. Damn, I wished I knew what the 
place looked like when Zippy left it.

One, two, three. I kicked the door open and trained my gun 
on the figure waiting for me on the bed.

She couldn't have been dead very long, I thought dazedly as 
I took in the scene. Dr. Shimada had been strangled, of 
course, but the hat trick was how George had dressed her. 
Instead of putting her back into her official doctor clothes, 
he'd dug out the emerald green nightie I'd bought with 
Mulder's money all those months ago in Arizona. I was 
surprised he'd been able to find it, actually, I hadn't been 
doing glamour at bedtime in a long time. The color of the 
satin clashed with her blackened face, and she weighed 
about twenty pounds more than I had so there were some 
unattractive bulges.

Shock, I was feeling shock, I had to keep alert.

With my left hand I pulled my phone from my jacket and hit 
redial.

"Williams."

"I need you at my apartment now. I found Dr. Shimada." I 
hung up before he could ask any questions.

I heard the humming, my mind filling in the unuttered words 
as I spun and faced the bedroom doorway.

	Is your heart filled with pain, shall I come back again?
	Tell me dear, are you lonesome tonight?

Cold room.  Such a cold, cold room.

"Why are you talking to him when you could be talking to 
me?"

George was in the hallway, his shadow visible on the part of 
the floor I could see.

"Come in here and we'll have a chat," I suggested.

"Just like old times? I remember what you said the first time I 
had you -- well, all right, the first time, in the shower, mostly 
you just screamed. But that night, what you said, it was so 
beautiful -- 'Don't hurt me.' I really liked that."

"That wasn't you, you sick fuck," I said in a voice that shook 
like San Francisco in an earthquake.

"Wasn't it?" He shimmied half a step forward. "I find it so 
difficult to remember. You smelled different then -- like 
flowers."

I should burst out of the doorway, he was close but he might 
not be able to react in time, all it would take was one good 
shot. But I couldn't shake the absolute conviction that he 
knew what I was thinking. Mulder would know what I was 
thinking. He'd be ready and he'd kill me. It would be slow 
and careful, not like the hastily arranged scenario with Dr. 
Shimada.

No. That was a copout. I wasn't afraid that he'd kill me -- I 
was afraid that he wouldn't, that he'd complete my 
conversion into Bonnie to his Clyde, Bride to his 
Frankenstein's Monster. I didn't know if I had enough of 
myself left to resist that and accept death instead.

I stood with the cooling body on my bed behind me, waiting 
for him to come forward, but I couldn't cross the doorway 
myself.

Instead I darted forward and kicked the door shut. If he was 
going to come through I'd have warning. I might be able to 
make myself shoot him, shoot the man who looked and 
smelled and sounded like Mulder in the face and watch him 
die. The mirror on the back of the door shimmied slightly, 
vibrating from the force of the slam, and I saw my pale 
crazed face waver in front of me. It looked like I was pointing 
the gun straight at my own bruised throat.

"You can't put this off forever." The voice was slightly muffled 
by the door, but years of practice allowed me to interpret it.

"You have to make up your mind, George, kiss or kill. I don't 
like men who play games."

"Could have fooled me. You're the one who's making it 
difficult. It's him, him and that mewling kid, they're distracting 
you. God, Scully, look around you! You can't fight a global 
conspiracy while you're wearing a Snugli." He was close, so 
close, he had to be standing right in front of the door. His 
hand might be on the glass knob even as he spoke.

"You want to fight the conspiracy? How'd you get out of the 
Roush compound, George? How are you supporting your 
current lifestyle choices?"

"Sometimes you need to make deals to get at a larger truth. 
I'm not proud of everything I've done, but it was necessary." 

If I hadn't known that "everything" included the systematic 
murder and rape of numerous innocent women, I could 
almost have found it plausible. In fact I had, when the real 
Mulder said it to me. My finger trembled on the trigger; I 
knew that I wanted him dead not because he was a killer, 
not because he was stalking Mulder and Miranda, but 
because he confused and upset me. If I killed him it would 
be for the wrong reasons, not even with the tissue of 
justification I'd used for the baby-things in Arizona.

Humming like the buzz of a fluorescent light.

	Is your heart filled with pain, shall I come back again?
	Tell me dear, are you lonesome tonight?

Closing my eyes and raising my left arm to cover my face, I 
fired. The mirror exploded and I felt a rain of fragments. One 
dug into my cheek and I welcomed the start of the blood. As 
soon as I dared I opened my eyes. The Sig wasn't intended 
to shoot through doors but it was a good all-purpose 
weapon. The mirror and a good portion of the door were 
history. I couldn't see anything moving when I looked 
through the hole.

Then I heard the front door close and almost sobbed in 
disappointment. He'd escaped.

Classic ploy. If I'd been watching myself on the movie screen 
I would have screamed "Don't go out there."

So I didn't. Fuck heroic, I was ninety percent certain that he 
was still there and I was not going to let him kill me in a way 
that made me *look* gullible.

My arm was spasming by the time Ralph arrived with the 
cavalry.


Iolokus III: Vix te Agnovi 14/20
To have no screen between this part he play'd
And him he play'd it for . . .


I nearly split my skin in surprise when someone knocked on 
my window. I turned my head and stared into the barrel of a 
gun.

"Put your hands on the wheel," the police officer ordered.

I complied. "You're making a mistake," I said. "My name is 
Fox Mulder, I'm with the FBI, my ID is in --"

"Shut up! Slowly, now, unlock the door. Keep your hands 
visible."

I sighed and followed orders. I should have known better 
than to try this without someone to give me my bona fides.

I've been on both sides of this routine often enough to skip 
any detailed recollection of what comes next. The patdown, 
legs spread and hands against the car; the cop was 
competent enough to find my ankle holster. Give the man a 
cigar. The handcuffs, cold and then blood-warm as they 
chafed behind my back.

I didn't try again until the cop and his partner, who'd been 
prudently standing back, ready to fall on me if I tried 
anything, began to shove me over to their cruiser. "You 
should call Julie Graff at the ISU, she can confirm my 
identity."

"Your identity is that you're an identical twin. We know your 
brother's safe at home, being watched by his FBI buddies." 
He opened the door and prepared to push me in.

"George Naxos has a tattoo around his throat," I insisted. 
"Just look on the description."

The cop looked at me curiously. "What's your point?"

After so long away from the X Files I'd forgotten what it was 
like to deal with people who didn't give any credence to what 
I was saying. I took a slow breath. "My neck. Look at my 
neck."

He put his index finger in the collar of my shirt and pulled. 
The tightness at the back of my neck was unpleasant, but I'd 
bear it for a chance at getting out of this without having to 
call Scully. "Geez," he commented, "that must have taken a 
long time. Did it hurt?"

"What?"

"It goes all the way around, hunh? You had to get that done 
before you went to prison, nobody in prison is that good." He 
released me and tipped me into the back seat so that he 
could slam the door of the squad car in my face.

I looked through the wire mesh protecting the cops from my 
violent assault, tilting my head frantically to get a glimpse in 
the rear view mirror, but the angle was too bad and there 
was too much metal in the way to see my neck, to look at my 
unmarked neck. It was unmarked, it had to be. Otherwise --

The drive to the station was long enough to let me consider.

George was taking over my life. Apparently he thought it was 
only polite to give me his in return. I had to believe that 
Scully would forgive me for the fact that George had 
apparently succeeded in fucking her at my house better than 
he had in the Smithsonian. I needed to believe that he hadn't 
actually been along for the ride, so to speak. Nonetheless he 
was obviously contaminating me.

How could they think I was tattooed? Ed Jerse claimed that 
his tattoo moved and spoke to him, but it was always 
present. There were a few X Files involving body markings 
that only manifested in certain circumstances -- witchcraft-
induced marks indicating possession by the Devil, for 
example.  But I'd never seen anything about psychic 
*transfer* of bodily alterations. And what was it about the 
decorated Scully that attracted illustrated men?

I had invited him in, last night. I had invoked him, summoned 
him, as sure as if I'd fucked Scully in the middle of a pentacle 
marked out with her blood. Punishing her seemed less 
important now than it had then, when I was high on anger 
and lust.

I should have known that I couldn't just make him into a way 
to hurt her and expect to be unaffected. Even as kids 
George and I had a connection. And Texas brought us 
closer together, the blood feast we shared weaving us 
further into one another. Making us as one.

All right, so maybe tearing Jason apart hadn't been as good 
an idea as it had seemed at the time.

Why not Emerson and Darien? Darien was a happy whore. 
There were no reports of similar murders coming out of 
California, though I'd set flags up on the NCIC database. 
Emerson sounded fine in his incessant emails, and his 
childhood trauma had never reached out and touched 
George. The whole ugly mess branched out from me. 
Something in my tattered psyche called out for George, and 
George had answered.

I felt the thin ice separating me from my demon brother 
crack; the dark water beyond swirled and I felt the warm pull 
of madness.

I was jerked out of the squad car, fingerprinted, 
photographed (as if that would matter), stripped and 
subjected to a body cavity search. Contrary to popular belief, 
most cops don't enjoy that kind of thing; it's just a routine you 
get used to after a while. People can get used to just about 
anything, it's what makes us so damn adaptable.

By the time I was fully processed Scully had arrived. I heard 
her sharp tones in the hallway as she approached my cell. "-
-missing from his house for the last five hours. He most likely 
decided to investigate on his own." She came into view and 
looked me up and down. I was wearing the same kind of ill-
fitting orange jumpsuit that George had worn when we first 
met him. This Trading Places deal was getting old fast.

"Mulder?"

"Who else would it be? You think George lets cops catch 
him?"

Her eyes narrowed and she trained her scalpel-sharp gaze 
on my neck. I almost felt real blood start to run, to cover 
whatever else was there.  "I thought you said he was 
tattooed?" 

The burly officer next to her blinked and came closer to the 
bars. "He was. I swear to God."

"Show me your scar," she ordered. There were several, 
actually, but she could only mean the bullet hole she'd put in 
me, so I unzipped the coverall and pulled it aside. She 
stared for a moment, then nodded.

"This is Fox Mulder. Let him out."

"I don't know, Agent Scully --"

"Let him out," she insisted. "I'll take full responsibility."

When I walked out, dressed in my real person's clothes 
again, the cops glared at me. They weren't convinced. Hell, 
neither was I.

Before we left, we stopped for my mug shot. The officer 
who'd taken it insisted that he'd seen the tattoo. But the 
photograph didn't show any marks on my neck at all. Scully 
mumbled something about my maybe using magic markers -
- in my sleep, unconsciously, of course -- and I forebore from 
pointing out that I hadn't washed up anytime recently.


Iolokus III: Vix te Agnovi 15/20
You taught me language, and my profit on't
Is, I know how to curse.


When we arrived back at the house, a verbal firefight was 
already in progress. A gaggle of agents cowered in the living 
room while Skinner and Julie Graff barked at each other.

"I don't appreciate having my competence questioned," Graff 
was saying as we came in. "Mulder's behaved himself for 
five months in ISU, in fact his misbehavior can be traced 
directly to the reappearance in his life of *your* agent –"

"Agent Scully is not responsible for the actions of a serial 
killer – or those of his brother." I saw Skinner pace by the 
open doorway, but he hadn't scented us yet. He'd loosened 
his tie a fraction, though his dove-gray jacket was still in 
place.

"I get it – your agents can do no wrong. You'll keep the 
problems in the family, right? With a mentality like that I can 
see why we lost Vietnam."

I stepped into the kitchen, tugging Mulder behind me. Graff's 
face was white splotched with red, ten years older than when 
I'd seen her before. She was raising a handful of ice cubes 
from her Starbucks cup to her mouth when we entered. They 
skittered on the floor as she turned to Mulder.

"I expected better from you."

He blinked, a tad sheepishly. "He threatened my daughter."

Skinner took up the attack, Graff forgotten with the 
appearance of this more appealing target. "And this has 
some connection to your unwillingness to tell anyone your 
insights and go haring off into the ether?"

I knew it would be wiser to remain silent. I'd let George go at 
the Smithsonian just as Mulder's little trick had undoubtedly 
scared our favorite brother away from Hegal Place. I could 
hardly expect Mulder, of all people, to act rationally when I 
couldn't control myself. What worried me more, really was 
the gleeful smirk Mulder had worn in the car when he 
described his little spirit writing act on George's mirror. And I 
couldn't wait to hear him recount *that* part of the day's 
adventures to our superiors.

Mulder just shrugged. "I thought I would have more success 
than a barrage of men in black descending on my old 
apartment. The neighbors get jumpy when that happens – 
bad memories, you know."

"And what insights did this excursion give you?"

"The name of the lawyer who's bankrolling George."

Graff blinked. "I thought he was just ripping off his victims' 
purses."

"Don't forget my trenchcoat," Mulder added petulantly. 
"Anyway, even twenty purses won't get you enough for a 
security deposit and three months' rent at my apartment. Not 
to mention a complete set of furnishings including an Italian 
leather couch."

I wondered if we could trade Mulder's couch, that unhealthy 
veteran of the porn wars, for George's new, improved 
version. Maybe we could have it forfeited when we caught 
him.

"Mulder," Skinner rumbled, "you continue to labor under the 
delusion that you have to do this alone. This is not your solo 
battle. It's not even your battle at all – as was made amply 
clear today, your presence merely complicates matters while 
we're trying to catch this killer. I believe that your supervisor 
and I, along with the agents with whom you're supposed to 
be working, deserve your cooperation as we attempt to keep 
George Naxos from taking more lives. If you can't give us 
your assistance, at least stay out of our way." Julie Graff 
nodded; she wasn't the kind to play backup singer and I 
doubted she'd say anything further.

Mulder stiffened his shoulders and let out a long breath. "It 
was a mistake," he admitted. "Obviously I have a heavy 
emotional involvement here. But don't you think we should 
explore the information I've discovered, now that we're done 
with the spanking?"

Skinner looked down in disgust. The beanie baby by his foot 
didn't appeal to him any more than Mulder's face, so he 
strode to the kitchen chair his trenchcoat was draped over, 
shook his head again, and stalked out.

Julie Graff watched him go, bemused. Then she turned back 
to Mulder. "You embarrassed me today, Mulder. Don't do it 
again." She shut him out as completely as if she'd changed 
channels, focusing entirely on me. "I'm sorry to hear about 
what happened at your apartment. I know what it's like to be 
stalked and I'm sorry this has become so personal. Let me 
know what comes of Mulder's little jaunt, will you? I have a 
team ready to go if you give the word."

****

"What happened at your apartment?" I asked distrustfully 
when Graff left. A pair of agents remained behind, whether 
they were trying to keep George out or me in I couldn't really 
say.

Scully didn't reply, just wafted out into the living room. She 
went to the window and looked out into the yard. I followed, 
waiting. The daffodils were bowing their heads as if in 
shame, bent from the latest storm.

"I found my gynecologist's body in my bed," she said.

"And the cut on your cheek?" I hadn't asked before because 
I'd been too afraid of triggering a lecture on what happened 
when I stole away from her side and how we were both 
endangered by my impetuousness.

"My mirror broke," she said, in a responsibility-evading 
locution that would have made Nixon proud.

"Was he there?"

She nodded.

"Did he…" Did he touch you again, Scully? I didn't think 
they'd fucked, I would have smelled it on her. But I didn't 
know if she'd wanted to.

"I never saw him directly," she said. "We talked through the 
door, and then I shot at him."

She gave me one of her razor-wire looks when I breathed 
relief, but didn't comment further.

I showered and changed into clothes that didn't stink of jail. I 
was nearly out of suits at this point, but really I only 
*needed* one. I just wanted more. 

It was almost time for dinner, so, like some LSD-trip version 
of June Cleaver, I cooked. We waited to eat until Ralph 
called to update us with the latest on the gynecologist's body 
– Scully had been interrupted at the hospital by the call from 
the cops who'd arrested me, but she'd made him supervise 
the transformation of her apartment into a crime scene. 
Maybe she thought he'd take care of her privacy; the other 
agents would certainly be looking for gossip material as they 
investigated, particularly now that everyone knew that my 
twin was fixated on her. By extension, so was I; not that it 
was a real shock to anyone, but after six months the rumors 
had cooled to mere embers before George added all those 
corpses to the pyre.

Miranda made most of the dinnertime conversation, which 
was fine by me although I wished that I could understand it; I 
would have liked to have known what she thought the Red 
Sox's chances were this year.

Just as I was putting the dishes in the dishwasher and Scully 
was trying to make friends with Miranda, who was still 
wearing most of her dinner on her face and in her hair, the 
doorbell rang.  Raindrops glittered off the shining skull of AD 
Skinner.  Two visits in one day?  Was he going to ask me to 
play golf that weekend?  Warwick got Miranda and started 
coffee. The rest of us went into the living room.

Scully got the nice chair and Skinner and I were forced to 
share the couch.

"So, what happened this time?" Skinner's tone was standard 
office issue, with the slightest hint of warmth breaking 
through.

Scully shook her head. "It was...personal." She looked at me 
sidelong, she might tell me more later but probably not.

Skinner's eyes flashed behind the glasses.

"Agent Scully, your report was vague and misleading in the 
extreme.  If you are obscuring information that could 
endanger the life of yet another agent, I'll have *you* 
arrested.  Do I make myself clear?"

Good old Walter, tough love to the end.

Her face was whiter than my word processor screen. God I 
loved seeing her react to a challenge.

The specific reaction, however, was unfortunate. "He talked 
to me about what happened when Jason raped me and then 
later what I said to Mulder when I still thought it had been 
him."

Skinner's head came up so fast I thought he'd hurt himself. 
Obviously she hadn't shared this little bit of ancient history in 
any of her reports. The look of guilt and pity that scampered 
jackrabbit-fast across his face made my stomach twist and 
growl for Scully. 

I stared at him, thinking: Get out, get out, get out. This is 
none of your fucking business, sir.

Scully put her head down and swallowed. Well, at least I 
knew why she hadn't chewed me out for ditching her. I doubt 
the abandonment even registered on her internal 
seismograph of Bad Things.

"Coffee's ready," Warwick offered from the doorway, 
Miranda clinging to his hip, a thick trail of drool dangling from 
her lower lip.

"The Assistant Director is leaving," I said and stood up.

Skinner blinked then followed suit.

Yes, I telegraphed to him, I am throwing you the fuck out of 
my house, sir.

He went quietly, making a few sounds about reports in the 
morning and winding the case up as quickly as possible.  I 
made the appropriate responses and locked the door behind 
him.  When I got back into the living room, Scully had let the 
glassine facade she'd offered Uncle Walt shatter into powder 
and was in a bad way, curled in a fetal ball in the chair, 
rocking slightly. Her eyes were cloudy as a corpse's and she 
was eerily silent.

I eased her out of the chair, murmuring words I didn't 
understand, and took her back to the bedroom. With three 
blankets wrapped around her, curled up against the 
headboard, she eventually stopped shaking. On my way out, 
I noticed that the CD from last night was still in the player, 
like a bone stuck in a choking victim's throat. I ripped it out of 
the player and broke it in half.

It was eight o'clock in Dallas, so I called Lanson & Hogue 
from my study. Jon Kyle had gone home for the day, but I 
was able to reach a paralegal. The name "Fox Mulder" 
produced a surprising amount of deference and, eventually, 
a faxed list of recent transactions they'd handled for "me."

There wasn't much. Aside from my apartment and the rat-
trap he'd used to boil the PA, there was only a building in a 
bad part of Southeast. A fixer-upper, I thought as I read the 
short description of the two-family building. Separated from 
its nearest squatters by empty burned-out lots. The windows 
came with complimentary boards to protect the broken glass 
of the panes.

I had a few questions I wanted to ask the realtor. I mean, 
how does a person *find* these places? "I need an isolated 
building in terrible disrepair, in a location where the 
neighbors won't pay any attention to screams, thumps, or 
flashing lights, at whatever hour they may appear." "Why 
yes, sir, I'll just check my list of psychopathic killer lairs – I 
believe you'll find one of these three to your liking, and 
they're all so affordable!" I could just imagine the standard-
issue smile on the realtor's face – she was probably a 
Stepford clone of the one who'd sold me this house.

I called Ralph Williams and filled him in. He busied himself 
organizing a real raid, something at which he excelled. This 
time I accepted my fate, imprisoned in suburbia. Scully had 
to go, if she was going to beat him. At this point she might 
need to kill him herself to feel safe; anyone else's bullet 
wouldn't be good enough. So I told her, and she uncurled 
and began searching for her vest and gun. 

I grabbed a beanie baby off the floor and stared into its eyes.  
A gun would have made me feel better, but as things now 
were, the closest I could manage was a squirrel.

****

I called the hospital and talked to Zippy, who was still stoned 
on pain meds and only partially coherent.  At least he was 
alive, as few people who had been in intimate contact with 
George were.  When I hung up  the phone I headed back 
upstairs, my feet too heavy to lift to the treads.

I needed to talk to Mulder, and I had a small window of 
opportunity before the rest of the team was ready to go after 
George. We'd had sex that wasn't good for us before. But 
last night had been different, worse, and I didn't want to 
leave him with a final memory of us in which he couldn't be 
sure if he was himself.

Mulder's eyes in the halogen brightness of his bedroom were 
absinthe green. Look too long in them and you might go 
mad. As for me, I would have been more stable if I'd been 
drinking mercury for breakfast for the past year instead of 
living this particular life, and so I could stare all I wanted.

When I walked in, he looked up from the latest pictures from 
my deadly bedroom and immediately went on the defensive. 
"Isn't this the part where you tell me how irresponsible I've 
been and how I should behave myself while you're out 
saving the world?"

"Why would I do that?" I understood him so much better 
now. I had become him at least as successfully as George 
had – tangled up in a conspiracy that had destroyed (and 
created) my family and stolen my memories, embittered by 
the past, dedicated to illuminating truths that no one else 
respected. Miranda had redeemed him, but she'd left me in 
his place. 

And I hadn't applied for that part of the fucking job, X Files or 
no.

While I edged forward, Mulder stared at me as if I were a 
crop circle, ready to believe and ready to declare a hoax. He 
looked so vulnerable in his stained T-shirt and jeans, 
compared to my pristine black suit. There was, of all things, 
a squirrel beanie baby clutched in his hand. He looked like a 
civilian, a little girl's father -- except for his eyes.

As ever, he smelled like lust and intellect. It had to be my 
imagination, filling in for lost nerve pathways. Like the little 
girl's red dress in Spielberg's black-and-white Holocaust 
movie, Mulder stood out in a world gone tasteless and bland 
to me.

He looked down at my feet. Before we started sleeping 
together, we were often able to look each other in the eyes 
during the tough patches. I had more regrets than there were 
books in the Library of Congress, and most of them were 
Mulder-based. But I still believe that time, if not a universal 
invariant, flows in one direction only. I had to deal with 
Mulder as I'd made him, and sex had settled into every curve 
and pockmark of our relationship. 

I could feel his moist breath ruffling the air above my head as 
he shifted to look at some nonexistent spot on the far wall.

When I put out my hand, he flinched. Obviously I wasn't the 
only one who had some reservations about last night's 
command performance. This time would be different, 
honestly. If there was anything left in my soul that was 
beautiful, I would give it to him now. Not to make up for the 
past; that was impossible. But I remembered nights when 
we'd sit on stakeout, waiting for something to happen, 
comfortable in each other's silence. I remembered holding 
him for comfort, grasping his hand because we could only 
trust each other, scrabbling with him in the dirt looking for a 
little girl's bones. Just once, I would try to be the woman he 
first desired.

He made a guilty protesting sound when I slipped my right 
hand under his T-shirt, but I was ready; I covered his mouth 
with my left, relaxing as his tongue slid out and accepted my 
offer.

He was heavy as a stone statue above me as we eased 
down onto the bed. He let me strip off his clothes, but didn't 
move to reciprocate. I had to wiggle off my pants and 
underwear from my position underneath him, grinding my 
hips against his feverishly sweat-cooled skin, and then push 
him away long enough to get my shirt and bra off. When I 
tossed them to the floor he put his hand in between my 
breasts, pinning me down, as if I were going to change my 
mind and make a break for it, and it was like being stepped 
on by an elephant.

The air was forced out of my lungs in a pitiful squawk.  He 
eased up for a moment, smoothing the hair away from my 
forehead with his lips.

I let my hands and legs embrace him automatically; I knew 
the mechanics of the act so well that I was free to 
concentrate on the sensation.  The worn cotton smoothness 
of his skin, the heat of the blood and muscle hiding 
underneath, the sharp prodding point of his hipbone, the 
knot of tension standing sentinel above each shoulder blade. 
Knives flashed behind my closed eyelids as he kissed a 
crown of thorns onto my forehead. Hot wax flooded my 
veins.

His mouth came down on my shoulder like a wrecking ball, 
sledding downwards to my breasts, avoiding the weeping 
scab of the bite mark he'd given me before. Then up again, 
so that we were kissing, close-mouthed and almost tender. 
His fingers teased the sides of my breasts, compressed 
under his weight. My hands bracketed his head, and then he 
turned to take my right wrist in his mouth, tongue tickling 
against my pulse point. I felt the hard ridges of his teeth 
denting the skin and was almost afraid that he'd bite through 
the flesh to get at the bone, crack me open and suck out the 
marrow. I'd wanted to consume him that way before.

I shifted my legs so that his erection fit firmly between my 
legs, tightening around him so that he knew what he was 
missing. He groaned and reached down to enter me, 
returning his mouth to my lips as he slid into me.

He was slow and deliberate, as gentle as he'd ever been. I 
felt the uncertainty that had been flickering on and off like a 
distant radio signal fade entirely. I was shivering as he 
covered my face with yogurt-cool kisses and I reciprocated, 
wanting to know that I'd touched every part of him at least 
once. 

He held me tightly for several minutes, not moving much. We 
were vibrating to the same silent frequency; the blood might 
have been flowing from my arteries to his veins, our hearts 
alternating beats.

I let the pleasure seep through me like brown sugar 
dissolving in hot oatmeal and thought about a story I'd read, 
a long time ago. A frog meets a scorpion on the bank of a 
river. The scorpion asks the frog to take him across the river. 
"I can't do that! If I take you on my back," the frog says, 
"you'll sting me and I'll die." "I wouldn't do that," the scorpion 
replies. "If I sting you while we're in the water, we'll both sink 
and die." The frog thinks about it, seeing the logic, and 
agrees. The scorpion climbs aboard. In the midst of the river, 
rushing water surrounding them, the frog feels the sharp 
sting of the scorpion's tail. "Why did you do that?" the frog 
wails. "Now we'll both die!" The scorpion replies: "You knew 
what I was when you took me on."
 
I don't know if I was the frog or the scorpion.  But if you had 
to take the stinger metaphor literally . . .

Still locked together, tab a fitting tightly in slot b, I rolled him 
carefully onto his back. I squirmed against him until I was 
looking straight down into the moving green and brown 
abyss behind his eyes.  The sharp bones of his hips bit into 
the soft muscles of my thighs.  I felt huge, as though I were 
crushing him underneath me, despite the fact that his cock 
was digging far enough into me that I could feel it pressing 
into my brain.  

All at once we both began to move, going from zero to eighty 
in .5 seconds. Jagged spikes of pleasure cut up inside my 
body, slicing my brain into diced meat.  My breath stuck in 
my lungs, burning my windpipe, breathing fire, burning and 
blackening all around us. I grabbed his forearms in my 
sweating hands and used the grip to push harder and harder 
against him. Underneath me, he tossed his head back and 
forth against the dark comforter, his gyrations highlighting 
the long tendons along the sides of his throat.  He tasted of 
salt, sweat, and butter against my tongue. His hands were 
on my hips, bruising the skin, digging into me, pulling me 
down harder and faster into the bone-hardness of his cock.

"No one," I gulped in a mindless slurry of sensation, "you 
and me only, only--"

"I know," he hissed back.

"Don't let him," and I couldn't go on.

His head was back now, mouth open and I could see the 
darkness of his fillings.  I grabbed his jaw and forced him to 
look up at me, and he did, his eyes black and pulling me into 
the darkness inside.  Shuddering and sweating, I pushed my 
mouth down onto his and he snarled as he arched up 
against me.  I gagged back a shriek of pure animal pleasure 
as he spasmed up into me hard.  I whimpered against his 
mouth as I went on the same wild ride on the nerve ending 
roller coaster.  I dropped down onto his chest, reassuringly 
hard and sweaty underneath me. While I panted into the 
sticky skin of his neck, his hands smoothed the equally 
sweaty skin on my back.  His chest heaved unquiet below 
me.

A gorgeous, George-less lassitude rolled over me and I 
could have lain there for hours.

Then Ralph pounded on the door, signaling that all was 
ready, and I had to extract myself from Mulder. It was like 
moving through glue, but I found all the important pieces of 
clothing, including the body armor, and turned to him one 
last time.

"Tomorrow, we should talk about what happens when this is 
over," I said. "I'm sorry, Mulder. Love isn't supposed to be 
like this."

Lightning flashed in his eyes. I was vaguely surprised that I'd 
managed to hurt him. "You're presuming," he said slowly, 
like a marksman placing his red laser dot on the target, "that 
I love you."

"No, I'm not."

What do you know -- I got the last word, for once.

It sat in my mouth like ashes from a cremation as we drove 
into the District.

Iolokus III: Vix te Agnovi 16/20
A pox o' your throat, you bawling, blasphemous, uncharitable 
dog!


I had to sit in between Ralph Williams and another agent in 
the back seat of the car, because I was as always the 
shortest one. I hated it; the position reminded me of car trips 
from my childhood, crammed in between hot child-bodies. 
Melissa and Bill always got the outsides because their legs 
were longer, leaving Charlie and me with no place to retreat 
and no way to open the windows.

The drive was mostly silent. Ralph reviewed the pictures of 
Dr. Shimada. I glanced over a few times but didn't enjoy the 
contrast between the dead body and the comforter I still 
remembered picking out at Woodward and Lothrop's, the 
long-dead DC department store.

I wondered if they could smell Mulder on me, but I wasn't 
sure how much I cared.

We stopped the car a few blocks away from the target site. I 
estimated the chances that the car would still be intact when 
we returned as falling in the slim-to-none category. The 
agents, except for Ralph, stood out like -- well, like white 
folks in Southeast in the middle of the night. The Bureau isn't 
exactly the poster organization for affirmative action.

"We hardly need the badges," Ralph whispered in my ear as 
we scanned the street, looking at the faces fluttering behind 
shades and the people darting into dark corners of porches.

"Maybe we should announce that we're not looking for 
anyone local," I suggested, but the other agents were 
already moving.

George's latest investment was a large building, three stories 
separated into two halves that had at one time been painted 
different colors, though with all the chipping it was hard to 
see what those colors had been. 

"Two front doors," Ralph commented. "Strategically 
unfortunate."

"Highly suggestive, don't you think?" Twin brothers, Siamese 
houses -- I thought, unwilling to question the source of the 
intuition, that George had been knocking out the dividing wall 
between the two addresses. It probably helped him keep his 
musculature intact while he couldn't work out in the prison 
yard.

The symbolism was clear enough for even a literalist like me 
to follow. Two bodies with one mind. Two facades with one 
owner, though they looked separate to the outside world. 

Muffled noises from our earphones indicated that the team 
was spreading out, positioning people to cover every 
possible exit.

Finally, the signal was given, and we went in, boiling over 
the house like a kicked wasp's nest in reverse.

Sure enough, the two front doors opened onto the same 
large entry hallway. Ralph kept himself at my side; it was like 
being in the car again but with more legroom. I looked up 
into the gloom of the hallway, listening to the noise of FBI 
agents kicking in doors and rushing up stairs. The ceiling 
had been painted a long time ago, and curls of rotting paint 
hung down like streamers of moss in a phantom forest.

From what I could see around Ralph's enormous torso, there 
wasn't much furniture in the place. Instead, George had 
done it with mirrors. Forget ten fragments of himself, he was 
working on exponential numbers -- a dozen reflections of my 
strained face spiralled away in every direction. Somewhere 
in the distance an Elvis CD was playing, and I resolutely 
tuned it out. The shouts from upstairs were routine "clear!" 
and related noises. We walked through the house, towards 
the dual kitchens at the end of the hall. I could see insectoid 
movement, skittling through the beams of light that swept 
over the stove and countertops; George was about as good 
a housekeeper as Mulder.

Before the kitchens came the basement stairs. The doors 
that concealed the stairs must have been attached to the 
departed dividing wall, because the steps began with a hole 
in the center of the hallway, gaping like the severed grin of a 
slashed esophagus. There was only one staircase; the 
building had always been whole, underground. 

More metaphors.

Ralph cursed as he followed my eyes downwards. "I fuckin' 
hate basements," he complained. "Spiders and shit."

"More 'and shit' than spiders this time, I think," I murmured 
and stepped forward to go down into the pit.

The stairs weren't wide enough for us to go down two 
abreast, particularly when one of the breasts involved 
belonged to a former Golden State Warrior, so instead Ralph 
took point, muttering about never wanting to be a field agent.

Picking my way like Dante behind his guide, I descended 
into the gloom. Our flashlights swept the dreary blackness, 
crossing and uncrossing like Sharon Stone's legs. Don't 
cross the particle streams, Egon, I bit back, knowing that my 
companion wouldn't appreciate the reference. I missed 
Mulder terribly in that moment, missed being the straight 
man and having a partner whose actions I could never 
predict but always trust. 

The light bounced off more mirrors, creating a disco-strobe 
effect that immediately gave me a headache. It was a 
brilliant tactic on George's part. With the light flashing back in 
our eyes, the beams were as dangerous to us as to him. I 
pointed my light at the ground to diffuse it somewhat. Ralph 
noticed and followed my lead.

We reached the bottom of the stairs. The concrete floor of 
the basement was cool and clotted with dirt. It had been 
used recently. Someone had tracked in dying leaves torn 
down by the spring storms. Green buds smeared across the 
floor along with torn petals from blooming dogwoods.

"Come out, come out, wherever you are," I called. "You feel 
more comfortable in the basement than in Mulder's 
apartment, don't you? The basement is where you really 
should be." The same could be said for Mulder, but it was 
different. Really. 

Ralph trained his beam on the wall behind the staircase, 
which was covered with more photographs instead of 
mirrors.

The impromptu shrine to me had been annoying, especially 
the yearbook picture which every agent in the Bureau had 
probably seen by now. It was hard enough getting respect 
with the handicaps of my height and sex, and now I was 
eternally going to be eighteen and pitifully geeky in my 
colleagues' eyes. Another sin to lay at George's feet.

This was a step beyond annoying. The photos coated the 
wall, covering it from cobwebbed ceiling to dirt-creased floor. 
Many of these pictures had been taken recently -- in the 
bouncing glaring light I caught a glimpse of Zippy's slicked-
back hair, remaining after the rest of him had been ripped 
out of the picture. I'd been trapped in George's viewfinder a 
thousand times: entering the Hoover building, walking to my 
apartment late at night, eating lunch in the Old Post Office. I 
could all but taste his come in the air; he'd sat and 
masturbated to these photographs. And always he'd inserted 
himself into the pictures, himself as GQ models wearing ten-
thousand-dollar suits. Each time there was a white cut-paper 
head pasted over the model's lost face, with brown hair, 
brown eyes and black tattoo crayoned in. George's artistic 
training had been sorely neglected, and the five-year-old 
drawing style just made everything creepier, as if I were 
Dorothy sharing space with the Scarecrow in those pictures.

There was a rush of air and a liquid thunk and Ralph's light 
went spinning away across the floor, illuminating completely 
useless detritus and bouncing against countless silvered 
fragments. The air was black as copier toner where the thin 
lines of light didn't pass. I swung my flashlight and my gun to 
Ralph's last position. There was nothing, neither George nor 
Ralph, where the big man had been standing just moments 
before. I screamed for backup as I moved my light in wide 
swathes across the basement. Mirrors flashed on and off like 
perverse lightning bugs in this underground spring night.

"You've gotten so crude," George's voice boomed from 
everywhere and nowhere as I spun frantically, looking for 
movement, trying to keep my light down to find his feet 
without getting mirror-struck. The only thing I saw was the 
flashlight, spinning towards me. I got a blinding flash of light 
in my eyes before it bounced away. My vision obscured by 
purple afterimages, I was helpless, but I kept scanning as if I 
could see.

"Come here and I'll show you what crude is," I promised, 
blinking, trying to sort out movement from nothingness. 
Lights semaphored at the edges of my vision and I couldn't 
tell what was real and what mere sensory artifact.

The skin between my shoulderblades tingled and I spun as 
his hands clawed at me, slipping free of the smooth rayon 
shell I was wearing. I screamed rage and fired. Glass 
splintered and shrieked as I destroyed a few of his mirror-
selves. The shot hadn't been close to well-aimed, but I felt 
air hiss as he stumbled away, and now I knew where to point 
the light.

He was backing up now. The angle of the beam pointed at 
his feet made him cast an elephantine shadow against the 
wall; in the dimness I could see his hands raised in a parody 
of nondangerousness. "Don't shoot me, Scully."

"That didn't work for Mulder, either." I knew that no shooting 
board in the world would reprimand me, not with Ralph 
stretched out on the floor somewhere and the basement 
darkness aiding George's threatening actions.

"Mulder's a wimp," he asserted, and threw the rock that had 
been concealed in his balled hand. My flashlight crashed to 
the ground as I felt the impact on the bones of my shoulder. I 
tried to fire but my arm was vibrating with the pain, as if I'd 
slept on it for hours, and I couldn't keep it aimed correctly.

Dark, infernally dark, the criss-crossed lines of oily light from 
the two downed flashlights only serving to emphasize the 
utter blackness they didn't illuminate, blinking in the mirrors 
like dangerous stars. My finger tightened on the trigger; I 
would have sprayed the room with bullets if I'd been sure 
that Ralph was out of my range of fire.

I scrambled for the closest flashlight and tucked it under my 
arm so that I could aim two-handed. Finally, there was 
motion on the stairs as the other agents bought a clue. 
Swiveling my body around to track George, I caught a 
glimpse of legs, climbing onto a table that had been pushed 
up against the wall. There was a crash as he punched out 
the plywood covering a high-set window and then he was 
wriggling through. I fired and thought I'd hit him, and the herd 
on the stairs began firing in that general direction as well, but 
then his feet disappeared and it hadn't been enough to stop 
him.

Most of the agents were still in the house, looking through 
closets or crowding the stairs to see what the hell had 
happened, and I could tell from the cross-talk over the radio 
that the two outside giving chase had no chance. 

While the other agents got their useless workouts, I found 
Ralph's crumpled form on the floor, hidden by a toppled 
mirror, and checked him out. Even though he still had a 
linebacker's body, his head was made the same way as 
anyone else's and he'd have a big headache. George's 
weapon lay abandoned by Ralph's body; just another two by 
four, pulled from the shattered hulk of the house. I pulled 
back his eyelids; the pupils were still the same size but it 
would take time to be sure what was going on inside. Ralph 
had ordered an ambulance to stand by -- he was going to 
make a really good AD someday -- and I could hear it 
screaming through the broken window.

When the EMTs came I moved behind the stairs and found 
George's workspace. From the underside of one stair 
depended a tiny stuffed fox, garrotted with wire that was 
beginning to cut through the fabric of the toy. He'd done 
something obscene with the feet.

It resembled some of Miranda's toys, I thought. There was a 
series of little animals scattered around the house, and of 
course what would be better to give Mulder's baby than a 
fox, as if he'd never heard that joke before. Ingveld had 
mentioned, in one of her bouncy stream-of-consciousness 
ramblings that she used to fill the dead space created by all 
the dour old folks around her, that there were at least three 
of the little foxes, kept in the laundry room because Mulder 
didn't like to see them. I stood on my tiptoes and sniffed; 
nothing.

"Come here," I ordered a random agent, who obediently 
trotted over.

"What does it smell like?"

He gave me a strange look but leaned in and drew a deep 
breath. "Is that...detergent?"

Isn't it wonderful to have your intuitions confirmed?

Oh, and I hadn't even looked at the dead girl on George's 
worktable, pressed up against the back of the stairs so that 
we'd been inches from stepping on her as we came down. 
The other agents' faces crumpled as they tried to keep from 
vomiting; the sour smell of semen and the odor of beginning 
decay had to be heavy in the air. The latest victim was 
stretched out like an autopsy subject on the old wooden 
table, her stomach as yet undistended with bloating and her 
flesh pale and mostly intact.

There was something wrong with her eyes.

The delicate flesh underneath them was distorted, marred. I 
stepped closer. What had looked like tear-loosened mascara 
revealed itself to be runnels of dried blood, emanating from 
the rips in her flesh. He'd torn her eyelids and the skin of her 
orbits when he'd removed her eyes, replacing them with 
glass whose ever-blind irises mimicked my own dishwater-
blue shade.

I wondered what he did with her real eyes. Over in the 
corner, against an exposed beam, there was a pile of rags, 
bunched as if they'd been soaked with something and then 
dried in stiff folds. I holstered my gun, put on my gloves and 
knelt to examine the pile. The cloth pulled free of the floor, 
cracking like a scab being ripped from skin. The blood had 
only leaked onto patches of the cotton cloth, so some parts 
flowed easily while others were as stiff as heavy canvas. 
Underneath, sticking both to the cloth and the floor until 
gravity prevailed and they fell to the floor like rotting fruit, 
were her eyes. It looked as if they'd been brown.

I turned back to the corpse, my curiosity about the eyes 
satisfied for the moment. There were more things under that 
cloth, but I wasn't ready to look at them. The other agents 
followed in my wake, looking at the additional stray parts 
he'd discarded in that corner. I heard a voice whisper, "How 
did she know where –" hastily shushed by another, wiser 
agent.

She was wearing, I realized, one of my bathrobes – the ratty 
terrycloth one I always wore when there was no reason to 
show off. And thus, of course, the only one I'd worn for the 
last six years or so. It was the only item of clothing I'd worn 
during one memorable seventy-two hour period, some 
federal holiday or other, and I'd only put it on to pay the pizza 
delivery guy. I'd had to bring the box into the bedroom, as 
Mulder refused to get up and join me in the kitchen. As soon 
as I'd brought it over to the bed, grease already seeping 
through the bottom and threatening to stain anything it 
touched; he'd grabbed the belt of the robe and pulled it out, 
exposing some critical portions of my anatomy. He made 
some smartass crack which stung at the time, but I had 
managed to forget.  I let the robe slip off, put the box on the 
floor, and got back into bed. Later I made him clean up the 
grease on the floorboards as we wolfed down congealed 
Hawaiian pizza. I'd been naked until he left early Monday 
morning.

The memory was vivid enough that I could smell pineapple 
and salt in my nostrils, stronger than anything I could 
actually smell these days, as I moved to examine her throat. 
Automatically, I pulled out my recorder and clicked it on. 
"Deviation from prior pattern," I noted. "Strangulation was not 
manual, but effected by means of a ligature – there are 
fibers embedded in the skin, apparently from the belt of the 
terry-cloth robe worn by the victim. The belt is –" I glanced 
around – "lying on the floor near the body."

I droned on, recording the rest of my observations. There 
were no visible mutilations other than the eyes, no apparent 
bruising. On her thighs I discerned the silver snail-tracks of 
semen. It had been postmortem, while she was still warm 
but unresisting. He didn't like the struggle; he wanted to be 
loved and accepted. I felt the clammy residue on my own 
thighs pulse as if suddenly flash-frozen. Like calling to like.

"I think you got him," one of the faceless crowd said, coming 
up to me, carefully positioning himself so that he was in my 
line of sight and didn't surprise me. "There's blood on the 
boards. But it doesn't seem to have been deep; there's no 
trail that anyone can find."

That was George for you.

But there was a trail, found by younger and sharper eyes 
than mine, a sticky pile of what looked like skin-colored 
rubber.  Only it wasn't rubber, it was skin.  I held a strip up to 
the light, a strip inscribed with an arc of barbed wire, 
weeping blood.

"What the fuck is that?" Ralph asked, in a voice gruff with 
pain.

"Destruction of evidence. He's whittled the tattoo off his 
neck. If it heals well, it will eventually be virtually impossible 
to tell them apart."

"Shit," he said and I agreed.

It was long after midnight when I got back to Casa Mulder.  I 
slipped through the house after keying in the code on the 
alarm system.  The children were nestled all snug in their 
beds. Ingveld and Warwick tangled in a knot on the sofa 
downstairs while MTV silently blazed from the television like 
a warm technophobic fireplace. In her shiny new room, 
Miranda rolled on her face in a ball underneath the mobile of 
mermaids and fairies. I touched her feather-soft skin and 
watched a bubble of drool ease itself onto the crib mattress. 
Down the hall, Mulder curled tight as a shrimp underneath 
his cotton blanket.  When I touched his head he was as hot 
as Miranda, his hair damp with sleep-sweat. For once his 
face was relaxed into something like peace. Peace that 
would evaporate come daylight when today's information 
was processed.  I deshelled myself from kevlar and Donna 
Karan and slid my naked body next to his.  Gradually, the 
warmth of his body soothed me like warm water into sleep.

We slumbered like fetuses in the womb for hours of lovely, Lethe-blank 
silence, un-haunted by twins or Elvis


Iolokus III: Vix te Agnovi 17/20 
Where, but even now, with strange and several noises 
Of roaring, shrieking, howling, jingling chains, 
And moe diversity of sounds, all horrible, 
We were awak'd . . . 


I slept like the dead. Really. I slept through Miranda's three 
o'clock feeding, I slept through my six o'clock alarm, I slept 
through Warwick's six thirty 'be there or be dog food', I slept 
through the spring sunlight's feeble knock, knock, knocking 
on my chamber door, and I found out later that I outslept 
Scully (which was an oversleeping of Olympic proportions). 
What finally woke me up was a familiar pair of tiny, cold, 
hands latching onto my nose like a tick looking for breakfast. 

"Mooselet," I reached out and got an armful of hot, heavy 
baby. 

While Scully sat at the edge of the bed, muffled in her 
sweats once again, Miranda greeted me with a solemn look, 
her jadeite eyes, and the usual probicus squeeze. Sitting 
pertly upright and
staring down at me as through she was cataloging each and 
every thought that had flitted across my mind since last we'd 
seen one another, Miranda blinked, her nearly translucent 
skin shining pink in the sunlight. Sometimes I thought I could 
see though her skin and see each and every blood cell 
running through her incredibly tiny and complex arteries and 
veins. She was so small, so indescribably fragile – made of 
damp tissue paper and bamboo bones that I thought one 
casual brush with my oafish hand could crush her like a 
paper lantern. Scully seemed made of brick and mortar by 
comparison. 

Finally, Miranda sighed and pressed her wet little mouth 
against my left eye. She was trying to
kiss, but her aim needed work. Then she straightened up 
and twined her wet little fingers in my hair. At the other end 
of the bed, Scully made a strangled noise -- ooh, bad 
adjective, under the
circumstances, but it's the conventional designation for the 
sound -- and stood up. Miranda, watching her movement, 
stared after her with her usual nosy interest. The kid was 
either going to follow in her parents' career footsteps or 
become a gossip columnist. I hoped the latter – being sued 
was better than being shot at. 

"What's that all about?" I asked, my voice coming out in a 
freshly awakened croak. 

"You two look so *cozy*," Scully admitted and shrugged. 

"You sound jealous," I said and wiped a clear pearl of drool 
away from Miranda's bottom lip. 

"She's so . . . easy with you. I don't think she likes me," 
Scully's voice trailed off in such a
hopeless fashion that I wanted to laugh. 

"She doesn't know you yet. She's really developed a 
personality over the last few months." 

Scully stared at her hands. "I have to admit, she wasn't like 
this when I was taking care of her.
Human babies are altricial, they're born about three months 
before they're really ready for
independent life, it has to do with the size of the human brain 
and the compromise shape of a
woman's hips that allow her both to walk and to give birth. 
Newborns are just fetuses outside
the womb, really, responsive to stimuli but not operating in a 
recognizably human fashion . . .
Am I rambling?" 

"Usually you refer to it as 'explaining the science behind the 
phenomenon'." 

The corners of her mouth twitched and Miranda burbled, 
detaching her Velcro fingers from my
hair long enough to stretch out an imperious hand to Scully. 

"Yah-yah-yah-yah-yah-yah!" she declared. 

Roughly translated from Mooselet-speak this meant: "Come 
hither mere mortal and you may amuse me." 

"C'mon," I said. "I'll show you how to bribe her into 
adoration." 

Cautiously, Scully crossed the room and perched on the 
edge of the bed, looking at the Mooselet as though she were 
a small bomb in a pink onesie that was liable to go off at any 
moment. I could have assured her that the Mooselet rarely 
had a bowel movement until at least noon, so she was safe 
for the time being. 

"She likes you to sing to her," I explained and Scully rolled 
her eyes in pain; neither one of us could carry a tune in a 
bucket. 

"This is not time to be vain," I added a moment later as I lay 
down on my stomach on the bed so I was eye to eye with 
Miranda. 

Scully watched, one side of her mouth threatening a smile. 

I took a deep breath and started. 

"Take me out to the ball game 
Take me out with the crowd, 
Buy me some peanuts and Crack-er Jack 
I don't care if I never get back." 

I paused, and Miranda looked expectantly at me, knowing 
that there was more. I couldn't look at Scully. Some things 
are too embarrassing to share with the person you've been 
having kinky sex with. 

"Let me root, root, root for the home team, 
If they don't win it's a shame;  
For it's one, two, three strikes you're out 
At the old ball game." 

On cue, Miranda squealed like a piglet and kicked at the 
mattress while she clawed at the air with devilish glee. She 
really liked to see me make an ass out of myself. 

Now that her Highness had been jollied into a more 
hospitable mood I looked at Scully, who was actually smiling 
down at Miranda with something other than curiosity. 

"Put your face down to her." 

Scully complied, pushing her hair back behind her ear in an 
ember swath over the ash of her sweatshirt. Miranda 
watched solemnly as Scully bent down, then she looked 
back to me with a composed expression that didn't belong 
on a face that small. 

"Kiss," I instructed her. 

Miranda blinked and jerked her attention back to Scully. I 
swear Scully didn't breathe the entire time Miranda thought it 
over. Then Miranda leaned over and slammed her wide-
open sucker mouth onto Scully's cheekbone, practically on 
her ear. So she needed a little target practice. I figured I had 
at least thirteen more years before boys were lining up at the 
door to get open-mouth kisses from Miranda, if the boys 
made it past the moat full of alligators, the drawbridge, the 
attack dogs and the anti-personnel mines. 

When Miranda got bored of sucking on Scully's face, she 
straightened up, looked Scully straight in the eye and made 
a loud and lengthy declaration in Mooselet-speak.  

Scully nodded and thought about it. 

"No, you are completely right, I couldn't agree with you 
more." 

Miranda seemed satisfied with this and stuck her fingers in 
her mouth for some meditative sucking. She latched her free 
hand into Scully's hair and began to squeeze the thick 
handful she'd gathered, looking at the lock of hair as though 
she was going to write an analysis of its color and texture 
later. 

Apparently all it took to win complete and unconditional 
approval from Scully was to be fat, bald, and wear a lot of 
pink.  

I couldn't watch anymore, my chest felt like a tourist voodoo 
doll. I left them there on the bed wrapped in some strange 
feminine communion and went to take a shower. 

If that fuckhead brother of mine did anything *else* to 
endanger this spun-glass truce, I was going to rip off his 
fucking head and piss down his neck. Twice. 

Later, I found Scully sitting on the floor with Miranda by her 
side in Miranda's bedroom. They were looking at a Dr. 
Seuss book and Scully was going over the Cat in the Hat's 
MO while Miranda listened intently. The spring sun oozed 
through the window like honey and set their hair on fire. I 
leaned against the doorframe and warmed myself in it. I 
must have sighed or something because Scully looked up at 
me with something like regret. 

"I have to go to the Hoover Building for the debriefing. 
Skinner was kind enough not to schedule it until three. I 
need to prepare a summary." 

"Go right ahead." 

Miranda looked at Scully and then at me before thumping 
her fist down on Scully's thigh. 

"Yah-yah-yah-yah-yah!" she protested. 

"I'll be back," Scully assured her. 

**** 

The briefing hadn't gone well, the younger agents didn't 
have their information even halfway coherent and by the 
time it was over, the conference room stank of raw agent-
meat after Skinner had gone through a round of ass-
chewing. With a headache and a queasy stomach, I
escaped to the courtyard and looked up at the overcast sky 
that was getting darker and more Gothic by the millisecond. 
Someone moved near me and I jumped, but it was only 
Ralph Williams. Mulder must have given him instructions to 
stick near me, since Williams had turned into my oversized 
shadow. 

My cellphone rang. 

"Scully." 

"Yah-yah-yah-yah brrrrrrrrrrrrrthhph!" 

I had to chuckle, turning my back on Ralph. Miranda had 
lapsed into a bi-labial fricative commonly known as a 
raspberry. She obviously was developing Mulder's fondness 
for the phone. 

"Hey," Mulder said. 

"Hey yourself." 

"We're looking at chicken or pasta here. If I could get OUT 
OF THE HOUSE, I could shop. What do you think?" 

"Thai?" 

"Warwick won't eat Thai," he said in a repressive tone. 

"Pasta's good," I agreed. 

"Okay. Pasta it is," he agreed and I could hear baby-babble 
in the background. "Can you stop and get Italian bread? And 
ice cream. Don't get that girly ice cream. Get something 
good." 

"Sure, fine, whatever." 

He cut the connection and I was about to put the phone 
away when it rang again. 

"What do you want now? Beer?" 

"I want you, angel." 

My stomach felt as though I'd swallowed an entire gallon of 
Heavenly Hash still in the carton. 

"You know," George growled. "I'm going to have a scar from 
that bullet." 

"I thought you wanted me to treat you like Mulder." 

"That's really funny, Scully, I always knew you had a sense 
of humor. Don't you think it's time we settled this? You and 
me? We don't need anyone else. I can leave the rest of it 
behind if you -- I just need to talk to you." 

Was he promising to leave Mulder and Miranda alone if I 
came to him? I thought he was. He sounded sincere, and 
Mulder had always been a terrible liar. 

"Yes," I replied. "I want the answers too." 

"There's a playground by the neighborhood school, about six 
blocks from his house. I'll meet you there." 

Like Mulder, he wasn't big on long goodbyes. 

I put the cellphone away and turned to find my latest 
protector, Ralph Williams, staring at me, his hands on his 
hips pushing back the ubiquitous trenchcoat. Maybe the men 
knew of some secret discount warehouse somewhere; 
trenchcoat replacement ate up perhaps thirty percent of
*my* disposable income but I never heard them complaining 
about it. Alternatively, maybe they just didn't ruin them on a 
regular basis. 

"I have to go," I said and every thought stampeding through 
my mind must have been tattooed across my face. 

Ralph scowled. "Were you planning on bringing anyone else 
on this little jaunt?" 

"Ralph, if you're willing, I could use the backup." 

Surprise twisted in his eyes like a guttering candle flame. 
He'd heard the rumors and read the reports, but it had taken 
a few days of actual exposure for him to understand just how 
renegade the X Files agents tended to be. But I had no 
investment in running off all alone; it just seemed like that 
when he read the reports of me following Mulder around. 

We headed to his Bucar. I had to give him directions when 
he wouldn't let me drive. 

"Look here, Dana," the unfamiliar use of my first name made 
me lift my eyes from the road beyond the windshield wipers 
for a moment and take in the blunt profile of the younger 
man, "Spooky loves you. You guys have a baby. Don't be 
getting your ass killed. It won't do any of you any good." 

"I'll keep that in mind, Agent Williams." 

The rain was picking up. Lightning rather than streetlights 
illuminated the sign for the middle school as we approached 
it. "He'll run if he sees anyone with me," I pointed out as the 
car slid to a halt in the rain-coated school parking lot. The 
playground looked empty of anything but wood and metal, in 
the darkening early evening. Security-conscious parents had 
ensured that the fence around the area was high, and that 
there was only one, easily monitored entrance. I always 
knew that paranoia was good for something. "Wait here and 
watch out -- if he tries to leave he has to come by here or go 
over the fence, and either way you should be able to see 
him." 

"Don't teach your grandmother to suck eggs, Agent Scully. 
I'll let you go in, but you will come out at the first sign of 
trouble." It wasn't a request. He wasn't my superior, either, 
but he was about five times bigger than I was and that had to 
count for something. 

I nodded sharply and headed through the gap in the fence 
that allowed the children in. 

**** 

After losing myself on the treadmill until I was sweaty and 
shaking, I was late for dinner and I only had time to plunk 
Miranda into the high chair and turn towards the kitchen to 
start water boiling for pasta when the lights went out.
Total blackness relieved only by strobe-flares of lightning 
outside.

Shit.

The spring storm continued outside while I barked my knees 
on the coffee table feeling around for the flashlight in the end 
table.  Damn southern spring storms, one good lightning 
blast knocks down a tree, which cuts a line, and the entire 
town would be plunged into pre-Industrial darkness for the 
entire night.

Shit squared.  That meant that Frohike's entire alarm system 
was running on battery power, only guaranteed to last three 
hours.  We should have gotten a dog.  A big, ugly Rottweiler 
and named it Walter.

Blind, I fumbled my way into the living room.

While I rummaged among the pacifiers and other 
accumulated junk in the drawer, my hands slowed as the 
messages from my lower centers finally made their way to 
my brain.  The short hairs on my arms bristled, my heart 
jittered, and I could feel my lips peel back from my teeth in a 
wary snarl.

I smelled him, sour with sweat and decay, rank with blood as 
a jackal. 

He was in my favorite chair; a flash of lightning illuminated 
his smile – my smile.

I straightened up, showed George my empty hands.

"I knew it was just a matter of time before you got here," I 
said, my voice sounding oddly calm between howls of the 
maelstrom outside.

He shrugged, crossed his legs, his-my eyes narrowing in the 
flashes of light from outside.

"How'd you get through the alarm system?"

A Nazi death's head grin. "Su casa es mi casa." What I 
knew, he knew. I should have guessed.

"Finishing Jason's job?" I asked.

"Fuck Jason, and fuck you too."

Okay, so George wasn't the most articulate member of our 
family.

"You've got a nice little deal here, cute kid, cute woman, nice 
clothes, and I've been rolling in shit since the day I was 
born."

Just a little sibling rivalry, perfectly normal if the sibling in 
question wasn't a card-carrying member of the Brotherhood 
of Convicted Serial Killers Local 479.

"Take that up with the assholes who made us. Look George, 
I'm sorry about what happened to you and it's a damn 
shame, but there's fuck all that can be done about it now." 

I took a deep breath and went into the standard Bureau 
pitch. "If you give yourself up we can see what we can do 
about having you extradited to Canada and get you a good 
deal."

"There's no death penalty in Canada, nobody here would 
agree to that, you think I'm fucking stupid, Fox?"

For some reason the use of my first name pissed me off 
more than the invasion of my house and the passes at 
Scully.

I took a half step towards him.

He stiffened in the chair

From the kitchen, Miranda, left too long without amusement, 
began to wail like an air raid siren.  

"The baby," he said and smiled.

Fuck.

I was on him before he made it halfway across the living 
room.   That was my first mistake. Years in prison with no 
other physical outlet but the weight room had made George 
one walking muscle, a muscle with the adrenaline-boosted 
strength of the insane.   I hit him in the solar plexus and only 
managed to hurt my hand for my trouble.  He grabbed me 
around the neck and slammed me face-first into the doorway 
between living room and dining room.  I slid, blind with pain, 
down to the floor; my mouth filled with broken things that 
might have been teeth.  I grabbed his ankles and pulled. 
George went down in a howl of pain an octave lower than 
Miranda's wailing.  Kicking at me, he tried to crawl away.  I 
saw stars, stripes, and heard the 1812 Overture when his 
boot caught me in the temple.

"What the fuck is going on?"

Thunderous footsteps tromping from downstairs, Warwick 
and Ingveld to the rescue.  Hands grabbed me and pulled 
me off, I spit out a bloody protest that I was me, but found 
myself underneath Ingveld's shapely Teutonic posterior.

"He attacked me," George panted in a fairly good 
approximation of my voice.

"No!" I moaned around my torn lips and bleeding tongue, 
sounding not entirely human, let alone like myself.

"Shut up," Ingveld warned and twisted my right arm up 
behind my back.

I spit blood onto the hardwood floor and struggled against 
her, but she was in full Amazon mode and there was little I 
could do to budge her.

"Get him upstairs, away from the baby," George instructed.

They pulled me, fighting feebly and getting rugburn for my 
troubles, upstairs. Into my bedroom, where George took the 
chair from the small desk under the window and put it at the 
foot of the bed. I was moaning Miranda's name, unintelligible 
even to my own ears.

Duct tape and clothesline, purchased on a whim when I 
thought it might be nice to air-dry our clothes sometime, was 
brought from the hall closet and Ingveld propped me up in 
the chair. George set to work strapping me in.  Warwick 
vanished for a moment and came back with the shotgun, 
which he trained on me with a dishearteningly efficient 
manner.

"You fucking bastard, " I choked, "It's me!  Goddamnit!  It's 
me! He's George!  I'm Mulder."

"No one's falling for that one," George told me in my own 
voice, "fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame 
on me."

Warwick nodded in agreement and Ingveld quickly ripped a 
modest piece of duct tape and slapped it over my mouth, her 
lovely face a portrait in disgust.  Holding out his hand, 
George accepted the shotgun from Warwick and checked 
the shells.  

I sobbed against the tape as I watched George head 
downstairs, toward the kitchen and Miranda, Warwick and 
Ingveld following as placidly as lambs.

"The storm took out the phone lines as well, and Scully and 
Williams are out tracking a lead," Warwick told him, "guess 
we better call the cops from your cellphone."

"That wouldn't be a good idea," George said with my voice.

The shotgun went off twice. The heavy thud of falling bodies 
counterpointed the distant drumming of thunder. More noise, 
he was dragging them somewhere, out of the way so that 
they wouldn't block the staircase.

Then he was back in the bedroom. I was crying with relief 
that he hadn't gotten to Miranda. Yet.

He looked at the gun with disgust and put it down, kicking it 
into the hallway well out of my reach. Then he examined his 
bloody hands, grimacing, and headed into the master 
bathroom, shedding muddy clothes as he went.

The shower lasted only a few minutes, which I spent 
struggling fruitlessly with my bonds. George hadn't been a 
Boy Scout but he was no stranger to well-tied knots, and I 
cursed the Martha Stewart impulse that had led me to buy 
the strong plastic line.

He emerged, naked and gleaming. The son of a bitch had 
spent most of his time in jail at the gym and he had the kind 
of musculature I could have had if I spent hours a day on 
weight machines.  I felt like the before picture in a Charles 
Atlas ad.

In just seven years of hard time, I can make you a man.


But – oh sweet God.

He'd done something to his neck, the mark of Cain; the mark 
of the murderer was gone.  A wide band of skin had been 
peeled away, replaced by an ugly red ring, crusted with 
scabs.  He'd gone and cut off the prison tattoo, and how he'd 
managed to do it without slipping and cutting his own throat 
open was an amazement.   The pain must have been . . . I 
didn't want to think about it.  It took the mind of a madman to 
mutilate oneself like that.

"It's going to be such a pity," he said, putting his hands on 
my shoulders, and I could smell the baby shampoo in his 
hair.

"What?" I croaked.

"After your crazed criminal brother killed your woman and 
your baby, a broken man, you leave the FBI and are never 
heard of again."

The incomprehension must have registered on the ground 
beef that was my face.

"You're pretty stupid for someone who's supposed to be so 
fucking smart," he added with a feline sneer, "I'll see you in a 
few minutes. I just have a … little … something to take care 
of downstairs."

Miranda. I felt the flesh at my wrists part and blood begin to 
flow, but the line was too tight to slip from even with 
lubricant.

"Wait," I gargled desperately. Scully and Ralph would know 
they'd been tricked, they'd be here shortly. If I could keep 
him up here for even a few minutes, Miranda's chances 
would improve markedly. "Leave her alone," I begged. "I'll do 
anything..."

His face twisted in a predatory sneer, the response of the 
alpha wolf when the beta bares its throat to prove its 
submission.

"Anything?"

I swallowed more blood. Mine, his, ours, forensics was going 
to have a hard time sorting this out when I killed him. In 
some versions, Faust gets out of his deal with the devil. My 
voice was nonexistent and I only had minimal control of my 
fear-loosened bowels. "Anything."

His fingers were hot on my face.

"Don't fight me," he whispered.


Iolokus III: Vix te Agnovi 18/20
These are not natural events, they strengthen
From strange to stranger.


I looked under and around every piece of playground 
equipment. The rain increased in intensity as I got more and 
more soaked. I jumped when I heard a thunderous noise that 
turned out to be, in fact, thunder, and lightning lit the sky in 
enormous broken-blood-vessel patterns.

Nothing by the swingset, nothing by the monkey bars or the 
twisty slide. Nothing in the pit for the tire swing. Nothing 
under the rope hammock and certainly nothing over by the 
basketball hoops and the smearing hopscotch and four-
square chalked-in courts. I made a second circuit of the 
playground in frustration, but George failed to materialize. I 
even flipped open the nearby dumpsters and found neither 
George nor any of his victims. I had been less wet during 
many baths that I'd taken; you could have used my clothes 
to relieve drought in Africa.

My stomach clenched as I realized that it had been a ploy, 
something to distract me while he moved on Mulder. I cursed 
and jogged back towards the car, where Ralph was waiting.

I couldn't see Ralph standing by the car. I looked around the 
perimeter of the fence, and didn't see any stiff man-shaped 
figures through the rain.

I was rapidly going from trigger-happy to trigger-delirious. 
Looking from side to side with every step I took, I slowly 
worked my way back to the car. I didn't go within grabbing 
range of the car, but circled it from a safe distance.

Ralph's slumped form awaited me on the far side. I hurried 
forward, dropped to my knees and tried to get a look at him 
while keeping an eye out for unfriendly visitors.

I could tell how the story went. Naturally, Ralph looked at 
George and saw Mulder, the man who could get beaten up 
by an eight-year-old child on a crutch and was famous for 
same around the Bureau. Had Mulder known he would have 
died of shame. Ralph wasn't viscerally aware of the fact that 
George was a wall of death underneath those stolen G-man 
clothes. Ralph had jumped George. Result: Ralph zero, 
George one. 

When assaulting men, my suitor was willing to use killing 
aids, in this case a knife or similar bladed instrument. I 
guessed that he'd used a standard hunting knife, the kind 
that could be purchased at any sporting goods store. He'd 
come in low, stabbing upwards and penetrating the sternum.

My ER rotation was a distant memory, but I heard a 
recording of the attending's voice playing in my head: "A 
sucking chest wound is nature's way of telling you to slow 
down." Ralph had gotten the message, special delivery.

****

George grabbed the back the desk chair and hauled me 
towards the bathroom.  The legs of the chair cut grooves in 
the carpet.

"You're going to have a brief opportunity to know what it's 
like to be hunted and reviled by everyone and I, in turn, will 
have an extended time to know what it's like to be a valued 
member of society."

I had to have a concussion, which was why none of this was 
making sense.  Jerk by painful jerk, he continued to drag me 
into the bathroom.   I didn't care what he ended up doing to 
me, really.  He could beat me, rape me, and cut off my dick –
whatever – as long as there was enough time for them to get 
Miranda out of the house.  Scully had to know what was 
going on.  She had to.  She'd pulled my ass out of trouble 
worse than this a thousand times, when it was only my own 
life on the line.  All I had to do was hold out until she showed 
up with a grim look in her eye and her Sig in her hand, an 
avenging angel in size six pumps.

Just don't take too long this time – please?

"If you behave yourself, I won't kill the baby – I'll turn her 
over to your mother – our mother to raise."

It wasn't much of an incentive, but I was counting the 
minutes so I nodded. This seemed to satisfy George and he 
crouched next to me in the shower.  With quick and efficient 
strokes, he cut the wash line away from my body as well as 
the duct tape. Then he used my own belt to lash my hands 
to the showerhead.

"You're such a fucking pussy," he sneered and turned the 
hot water on full.

Half of my brain shrieked back to Scully being torn in two by 
Jason in the shower in Texas, the other half of my brain 
decided that I deserved it. 

The water hit me full in the face gagging me on a mixture of 
my own blood and hot water.  I coughed and George 
punched me in the gut to silence me. While the water 
blinded me and filled my eyes and probably broken nose, he 
set to work with his knife, slicing away at my clothes with 
smooth efficiency.  This must have been the way that he 
undressed his victims once they were dead.  When I was 
finally naked and vulnerable, he shut off the water.

What happened next shouldn't have surprised me, I really 
should have seen it coming.  It only made sense, to a 
madman.  The knife kissed the back of my neck where the 
hair is sparse and fine as Miranda's.  The kiss was insistent 
and became an ungodly pain.  I snuffled against my own 
biceps and tried not to scream as he began to strip the skin 
away from my neck, in a duplicate of his own mutilation.

Yeah, it hurt.  It hurt like nothing else I'd ever felt, the 
deliberateness of inch by inch slicing away the skin down to 
the muscle. Warm blood ran down my shoulders and chest, 
splattering on my feet and the shower wall.  Slowly and 
carefully he continued, humming that same fucking song 
under his breath.  I couldn't look at him; I didn't want to know 
if George was finding this sexually arousing.  Many serial 
killers do find sexual pleasure in pain and mutilation rather 
than in what is considered sexual behavior.  In an odd way, I 
was breaking his pattern; he didn't usually mutilate other 
men.

"Why?" I asked on a gasp of air.

"Why?" he echoed, his breath close enough to sear the raw 
nerves on my neck, "because I *like* you. M – I – C- K –E – 
Y. . ."

"Cut the shit George, you might as well tell me since you're 
going to kill me anyway."

"It's rather Freudian, actually," he said in a dismissive tone 
that I'd used when going over a profile with novice agents.

God, did I really sound like a sanctimonious know-it-all?

"My mother, God rest her soul, was what you might call a 
woman of carnal appetite.  When she was entertaining her 
men friends, I got to stay in the cellar.  A very small and dark 
place.  No washroom," he continued as he nonchalantly 
continued to skin my neck, "and if I made a mess, she made 
me eat it.  And her boyfriend's cocks if that's what they 
wanted."

"Classic," I groaned.

"You got to stay with our mother and had every advantage.  
Did you ever have to eat shit, Fox?"

His hand yanked at my hair, wrenching my head back.  I 
opened my watering eyes and stared back into a cracked 
mirror of my own face.

It hurt too much to speak, he had carved away all along the 
back of my neck and was working towards my Adam's apple, 
where the skin was thinner, where I was already burned from 
Scully's mouth.

Any time now, Scully.

"Did you ever have a man cram his cock in your mouth?" he 
asked in a poisonous whisper,  "Jam your head up and 
down, making you suck his dick even though it gagged you?  
Did you ever have a sweaty stranger shoot his wad in your 
mouth and have to swallow it?"

Kind of made Tina and Bill sound like ideal parents.

No wonder.  Not that it excused any of his actions, but at 
least it explained some of them.

"I'm sorry," I choked.

"It's too fucking late."

I must have passed out through most of it because the next 
series of sensations were enough to bring Elvis back from 
the dead.  He used a brush and bleach to clean the forensic 
evidence away from the shower stall and my body, rinsing 
every shred of evidence away with hot water. Through a red 
frost of pain I watched him take the strips of skin that had 
been part of my neck and flush them down the toilet.

****

The big man was breathing raggedly but I couldn't see any 
blood on his lips, which was at least the absence of a bad 
sign. I didn't have the right materials -- I wasn't in the habit of 
carrying around three-point pressure bandages now that 
Mulder was gone from the X Files -- so I had to fake it with 
my jacket.

I had a bad moment when I realized that unless I underwent 
a sudden mutation that added a limb, I would not be able to 
keep my gun out, hold the jacket on Ralph, and also call for 
an ambulance. Ralph weighed a ton, I didn't have the 
hysterical strength to move him, and he was going to die if I 
just waited for George to return.

I put the gun down and dialed emergency. Nine-one-one is 
my fourth speed dial. Pressing the phone between my 
shoulder and my chin, I retrieved the gun and scanned 
around again. With the dispatcher in my ear and the rain all 
around, I wouldn't hear George if he came up on me. I could 
only hope that at this point I'd be able to smell him.

The rain was falling faster now as I pressed down on Ralph's 
chest, trying just to keep him from bleeding out until the 
ambulance arrived.  They were going to have trouble 
navigating in the blacked-out streets as were the Arlington 
Police and the team from the Bureau who would accompany 
them.  I hoped someone had a good map or lived close 
enough to know the twists and turns of the suburbs.

Sirens, off in the distance, unnatural over the pounding of 
the rain. George had stabbed Ralph a while ago. He could 
be at the house already. No one picked up on the main line 
or Mulder's new cellphone.

Lightning cracked and on the wet grass next to Ralph's head 
I saw a vision of Miranda, complete with high chair. My hand 
slipped and he groaned.

She couldn't be...George hadn't had time--I blinked and saw 
the inside of the house, Mulder trapped and George 
grinning, this time I did not hesitate in distinguishing the two.

"He's in the house, Ralph," I said into his ear. Ralph blinked. 
"Can you...hold this down?" I brought his big limp hand over 
his chest and placed it over mine. Several agonizing 
seconds passed before I felt pressure, not a lot but probably 
enough to keep the improvised bandage in place.

"I have to go now, Ralph. Please try to hold on...they'll be 
here soon." The emergency whine was getting louder, a few 
blocks away at most. I had to believe he'd be safe. He 
nodded, tough linebacker to the core.

"You're bad news, girl, you try to kill everyone you work 
with?" he whispered.
 
"I try not to," I said, "hang on."

Turning the key in the ignition didn't start the car; George 
had obviously done something to the car and I didn't have 
time to determine what, so I got out of the car and began to 
run.

****

My knees gave out and George had to drag me out of the 
shower stall.  He flopped me on the bed and set about 
dressing the two of us.

I watched him towel-dry his hair, then use a fresh towel to 
dry the rest of his body. Deodorant, a dash of cologne at the 
base of the neck.  I felt an uncomfortable warmth rise as I 
watched the hard body of my workout fantasies pull out the 
dresser drawers. 

"You know, you've really let yourself go," he said as he 
pulled on my most comfortable old jeans and FBI sweatshirt, 
complete with formula stains, "you used to be such a sharp 
dresser."

He looked as though the declasse clothes pained him as 
much as the bleach burned the abraded and cut skin on my 
body. I was lightheaded with pain and blood loss and there 
was little I could do but lay passive and watch him. 

He dressed me in gray Calvin Klein boxer-briefs and an 
undershirt, then an Italian cotton shirt with French cuffs.  
Every movement hurt, I welcomed the pain. It reminded me 
who I was: victim, loser – but not George.

He spent a few minutes choosing cufflinks and ended up 
with my Oxford pair. Show-off, I thought, and he shot me a 
lemon-sour glare. "Some of us aren't used to all these 
advantages," he snarled and turned to the tie rack. 

He picked out one of my Hermes ties, the one with a pattern 
of tiny pomegranate-colored wolves against a forest-like 
background of eggplant, deep blue, and pine green. When 
he brought it over to me, I was sure that he was going to 
strangle me (auto-erotic asphyxiation, my mind whispered), 
but he simply held it up against my chin, checking the color 
scheme I suppose. He bent and I felt his carrion breath moist 
in my ear.

 "After I retire from the Bureau, I'm going to use my 
inheritance to fund a mission of retribution. I'm going to hunt 
down and kill everyone who was even peripherally involved 
in the crimes against us. Do you think I wanted to be this 
way? How do you think it feels to find out that your bitch 
queen of a mother wasn't even your mother, that you were 
farmed out to her just to see what would happen? You ought 
to thank me for doing what you don't have the balls to do."

"Let me go," I choked, "and I promise I'll be one vengeful 
motherfucker." He breathed a laugh, torrid against my 
earlobe, and he was gone again, throwing the tie on the bed 
as I gagged on blood. Returning to the walk-in closet, he 
emerged holding my one remaining unstained good suit. 
God damn it. Now I was going to bleed all over it.

He pushed my rubbery legs into the pants, taking only a few 
seconds to figure out the closures, and tucked in the shirt. 
Knotting the tie gave him some trouble, but he finally 
produced a decent version. 

I knew how Miranda felt. 

But my brother was holding me up like I was drunk to infinity 
and beyond while he put me in the jacket. I had to admit it 
was a lovely suit, dark with a subtle pinstripe. Dizzy and 
punch-drunk, I contemplated its beauty. The threads of the 
stripe were almost silver if you looked closely, but it wasn't 
flashy at all from a distance. Single-breasted, for that slim 
runner's look. The only problem with the suit was that both 
waist and ankle holsters ruined the line, but I wasn't armed.

Pity.

Finally it was time for socks, standard black wool, and black 
leather Bruno Maglis. Honestly, I bought them before the 
Simpson trial and I had no reason to be embarrassed.

He settled the jacket on my shoulders, tugged at the cuffs, 
and smiled.

"You're going to make a beautiful corpse."

"You forgot the wedding ring," I said, my probably broken 
nose and shattered teeth giving me the ludicrous 
pronunciation of a man with a bad head cold. 

"You've got no right to wear it, do you?"  He smirked. "What 
room do you want to die in?"

Now would be good, Scully.


Iolokus III: Vix te Agnovi 19/20
Stand fast, good Fate, to his hanging, make the rope of his 
destiny our cable, for his own doth little advantage. If he be 
not born to be hang'd, our case is miserable.


I ran through blackened backyards like Matthew Broderick at 
the end of Ferris Bueller's Day Off.  I tripped over something 
and landed face-down in the mud, losing a shoe in the 
process and wrenching an ankle.  Cursing against the pain 
that shot up from the wounded joint, I got up and staggered 
forward, branches whipping me in the face, rain pounding 
through my hair to my scalp.  The trenches Frohike and the 
others had dug in the backyard of Mulder's house were 
almost welcome, although a trial to navigate between flashes 
of lightning.  Why did this kind of thing never happen on a 
bright and sunny day?  There had to be a rule in the 
Psychotics International Handbook that forbade making a 
stand in clement weather.

My security code didn't work. It had been changed since I'd 
last left. The front door was locked, the back door was 
locked, and the garage door was locked.  Damn Mulder and 
his security!  I stumbled around to the side of the house, 
testing my memory of the layout until I came to the laundry 
room windows.  I took off my remaining shoe and used it to 
punch in the glass, which set the alarm system into Defcon 
Three Mode. Not that the automated call-in to the police 
station would do much good at this point, if George had even 
left the phone lines intact.  Anyway, the alarm was barely 
audible over the torrential rain. I was beginning to wonder if 
God had broken his promise to Noah.

Glass cut into my arm as I broke away the shards with my 
Nine West pump, and I had liked those shoes, too.  I 
managed to hoist myself up and squeeze through the small 
window frame, one of the few advantages of being of less 
than average stature.  More glass chewed on my skin as I 
slid onto the top of the washer.  Leaving a telltale black trail 
of mud and blood behind me, I dropped to the floor and 
cradled my gun in steady hands.

Simple.  No-brainer.  Small house. One man.  Just another 
training exercise.

Except for the pathetic choking sobs of the baby in the 
background.  Not a baby, mine.

Shit.

I tripped over the bodies in the hallway between the laundry 
room and the kitchen.  Flashes of light revealed Warwick 
and his leggy girlfriend piled up like stuffed animals thrown in 
a corner.  I felt around, my fingers contacting sticky blood. 
He had a thready pulse and a gunshot wound to the 
shoulder. She – I couldn't tell where she'd been hit, and I 
jumped so far that my back slammed into the opposite wall 
when she moved.

"He's here," she slurred, like the cheap talent imported from 
Poland to keep the cost of the B-grade movie down. "He 
tricked us – Vox – upstairs –"

I nodded. "Get out of here. The police are on the way. Tell 
them that Miranda is still in here." A swarm of bullets held no 
terror for me, but I couldn't let some cop kill her, thinking that 
he was just taking out a madman.

She got her long, long legs underneath her and staggered to 
her feet. Her lover's blood stained her tank top, making it 
cling even more tightly. She cast one last glance down at 
him. "He'll be all right," I lied, wadding his jean shirt over the 
wound to slow the bleeding a little. "Go."

She skittered down the hallway, towards the garage.

Miranda's cries stopped.

My stomach gave a dizzy lurch – like an airplane hitting 
turbulence and dropping several thousand feet.

Calm, Dana, stay calm.

The kitchen was slashed with moving black shadows from 
the trees' bacchanal outside.  Zippy's loaned shotgun lay on 
the table and the smell of cordite burned my nose, I scanned 
the room as quickly as possible, the high chair lay on the 
ground, and half the cupboards were open.  What had 
George been looking for? Something to season his latest 
human meal with?  He had to know that there wasn't time to 
prepare a late-night cannibalistic snack.  Then again, 
reasoning with a Mulder was not unlike climbing a glass wall.

Something scuttled across the floor, making me jump.  The 
cat, the cat that Mulder and Warwick fed and let in the 
garage in bad weather.  George must have come in through 
the garage, and the cat followed.  Smart animal, she wanted 
to get in from the rain.

I was too enthralled with the cat to see the shadow move 
until it was entirely too late.  The gun was smashed out of 
my hand and my entire body slammed into the refrigerator, 
alphabet magnets rained to the floor as I looked up into his 
face.

His face, their face, the face.

Oh God it had to be George, but--

	Are you lonesome tonight,
	do you miss me tonight?

Wet hair, sloppy sweatshirt, smelling of babies and warmth?

No.

"Hey baby, I knew you'd come back to me," George said and 
gave me one of Mulder's charming smiles.

Thank God.

His smell changed as he stepped closer and I saw the red 
line of grade A chuck peeking over the top of the shirt. The 
odor almost drove me to my knees. Blood and sweat and rot 
– he smelled like a gravedigger, like death itself, underneath 
Mulder's new father smell.  I was flattened against the 
refrigerator like a paper doll with his fingers digging into my 
arms, his thighs flat against mine, and the barbed hardness 
of his evil erection digging into my stomach like a knife.  I 
would cut my own throat before I let him violate me as his 
brother had.  I tried to knee him in the groin, but my legs 
were too well pinned.  He slammed me against the 
refrigerator door again to assert his dominance.

"You were waiting for me in the office, weren't you?" he 
asked, his breath rank on my face like a jackal's.

"No."

He leaned his face down to mine, so the clean-shaven skin 
of his expensive-smelling face scraped against my cheek 
and his tongue brushed the bruises on my neck.  Part of my 
mind shivered and curled into a fetal ball.

	Are you sorry we drifted apart?
	Does your memory stray to a brighter sunny day
	When I kissed you and called you sweetheart?

"You want me."

What is it about every man, sane or not, that makes them 
think that a woman is only interested in the protrusion of 
muscle and erectile tissue hanging between their legs?  Give 
me a break, a vibrator can give the same results with half the 
complications. To be fair, though, I hadn't exactly rejected 
his attentions as firmly as Paula Jones dissed Bill Clinton.

But I knew what I wanted now. "Not if you were the last 
homicidal maniac on the face of the planet," I assured him 
and slammed my skull into his as though he were a soccer 
ball.

Yes it hurt, but it hurt him more than me and he staggered 
back across the kitchen.  I kicked him in the solar plexus and 
he grunted, shaking his head like a stunned bull in the ring.  
My hands scrabbled across the countertop, feeling for 
something that would serve as a weapon.  Baby bottles 
spilled to the floor as George roared with pain and rage and 
came back at me.   I stabbed him in an outstretched hand 
with a fork, which only made him roar louder and slam his 
uninjured fist into my face.  The drying rack went down with 
me and I hit the linoleum in a cascade of breaking glasses 
and bouncing baby dishes.  I rolled through the glass and 
silverware, trying to escape, my face screaming in pain, 
while I struggled against the six-foot plus man on top of me.

There was no contest; his weight crushed me into the floor 
and the broken dishes while his hands homed in on the 
choker of bruises around my throat.  I wasn't going to stand 
passively this time, I yowled curses at him as long as I had 
breath, and clawed at his face the best that I could.

A screech, loud, shrill, and almost preternatural, cut the 
thunder and George gave out a high yelp of pain.  The feral 
black cat had attached its claws into the thin skin of his scalp 
and forehead like a flying demon.  It hissed and wailed, 
drawing thin lines of blood on his face.  I dropped my hands 
to the floor and my fingers closed on a good-sized shard of 
dinner plate.  George batted the cat free from his head and it 
vanished into the darkness of the kitchen with another yowl 
for good measure.

"You bitch, you fucking bitch," he choked and grabbed for 
my throat again.

Shard of plate in my hands, I sliced upwards, aiming for the 
line of raw red flesh.

It rained blood.

George writhed off of me, grabbing at the puncture 
underneath his chin, his breath bubbling through its new 
blowhole, unable to scream with his mouth fountaining blood 
above and below.  His feet pounded against the floor as he 
struggled for breath.  Something fell down in the other room 
with an almighty crash, but since George was still somewhat 
alive, I sat up and watched him rather than investigate.  My 
arms and legs were like wet string as I pulled myself into a 
crouch and looked down into George's eyes, saw the fear, 
saw the realization that he was beaten, and rolled it in my 
mouth like sweet candy.

Maybe I could have done something to save his life, if I'd had 
the proper instruments, but I didn't.  I also didn't have any 
witnesses, save for the cat, and it wasn't going to give 
evidence.  I'd killed hundreds of unborn mutant fetuses, so 
what was a serial killer?

In the silence between thunderclaps, I heard Miranda start 
howling again, as if she had known that the Big Bad Wolf 
was dying.  The howling was surprisingly loud.  I looked 
around the kitchen again and didn't see any baby.  I did, 
however, see the cat slide into one of the cabinets under the 
microwave.  My various hurts screaming in protest, I crawled 
across the floor.  Reaching into the cabinet, I touched fur, 
and then fabric.  Behind a Jell-O mold, Miranda was sitting 
upright next to the cat, her face scrunched into a pink knot of 
misery and howling like Pavarotti on a bad day.

"Come on sweetie," I rasped in my new voice, "mamma's 
here."

I caught her by the front of her romper and eased her out of 
the cabinet.  Once I had her out, I plopped her in my muddy 
bloody lap, my nose twitching at the smell of dirty diaper, 
strong enough to raise the dead.  She looked up at me with 
wide eyes before stuffing a fist in her mouth and going limp 
against my chest, humming to herself. The cat sat next to 
me, its eyes slightly more yellow than Miranda was, and 
gave me an assessing look before beginning to wash its 
paws.  

I heard the banging noise again. Warwick, I thought, and 
rose on rubber-band legs. Warwick was alive, barely, and I 
grabbed a freshly laundered shirt from the basket in the 
hallway to wad against his damaged shoulder. Propped up 
against the wall to slow blood flow, he'd survive until the 
ambulance arrived.

Miranda wailed, wanting to be changed. I picked her back up 
and returned to the kitchen.

George was gone, blood spoor leading out the doorway to 
the main hallway and the living room. I couldn't put Miranda 
down – literally, I was clinging to her like superglue. I picked 
my way through the shattered china on bloody bare feet and 
found my Sig. Despite George's earlier snide remarks, a 
Snugli would have been a big help to free my left hand.

God, where was Ingveld the Valkyrie?

The wet red trail extended through to the living room. I knew 
I should probably be outside, gibbering with fear and 
handing Miranda to someone who could keep her safe, but 
that was no longer an option. George and I had a 
rendezvous with destiny.

We crossed the hallway, waiting for the attack, any George-
noise obscured by Miranda's whimpers. She was working 
herself back up to full-fledged screaming, but wasn't quite 
there yet.

Into the living room, where I swung the gun along the path of 
crimson splashes to target the figure silhouetted in the door 
to our right, staggering down from the steps. 

I was two ounces of pressure from firing when I realized that 
it was Mulder, his face battered and black with blood, 
incongruously dressed in a suit and tie. George's chameleon 
attire suddenly made more sense -- he'd been planning to 
pull a switcheroo, with no one left alive who could reliably 
distinguish him from the object of his affections.

"Well -- shit," Mulder said in a thick voice.

He sagged against the doorframe, looking around with dumb 
amazement.   Miranda homed in on Mulder and stared at 
him.  She pushed against me and took her fist out of her 
mouth, reaching toward Mulder.

"Da," she said.

A crooked smile split his beaten face.

Red and blue lights from the front driveway exploded the 
night like fireworks.

Mulder collapsed as George hit him from behind like a 
truckload of cement.  In a beautiful arc like synchronized 
swimmers they dove behind that damned Ikea sofa. I 
couldn't see them, they were on the other side of the couch 
from me, and I couldn't hear them because men were yelling 
through bullhorns outside.

Gun in hand, I stepped over to the couch and pried Miranda 
off, shoving her ungently under the end table, which had a 
baby-sized space as if it had been designed for cover under 
fire.  She squawked and then went silent.

I couldn't hear anything from the brothers over the din of the 
cops outside, and so I just held my gun out and stalked 
towards the other side of the couch.

They were squirming. In the pulsing light from the squad 
cars they looked half-merged, like the kind of thing you'd find 
in the booth next to the Enigma. Siamese twins joined at the 
torso, hands clutching at each other's blood-slick throats.  
This time I could tell the difference easily, but at the angle I 
had any shot would tear through both of them. There's 
something to be said for low-power ammunition -- though not 
much.

The men outside were insisting that they'd fire on anyone 
who made a move.   I believed them.  They could see 
someone holding a weapon, they warned, and a wheel 
turned in my mind. That was me. They were going to fire at 
me in a minute if I didn't put the gun down.

Both of them looked up at me as I realized this fact, still 
unable to lower my arms.

"Mulder..." I croaked, and George pushed him into the 
carpet, slamming his head hard enough to keep him down 
for a bit, and staggered upright, his arms extended like 
Frankenstein's monster. Mulder groaned and went 
gelatinous on the floor.

"It's all right," he gargled, and threw himself on me as the 
first shotgun blast sounded in my ears. I collapsed to the 
ground, borne down by George's weight. Guns went off like 
popcorn, and I felt George's body shudder and thrust on top 
of me in a grotesque parody of intercourse. 

The noise stopped. Or maybe I just passed out.


Iolokus III: Vix te Agnovi 20/20
Now I will believe that there are unicorns.


Ralph Williams died.

He coded on the table. His big linebacker's heart couldn't 
take the insult of being stabbed by a pseudo-Canadian.  

Scully cried at the funeral. When I put my arm around her 
shoulders it remained attached to the rest of my body. She 
even leaned into me a little, until I winced and she let up. 
Julie Graff sat with on my other side and didn't mention that 
Scully and I had killed Ralph. Skinner was not so kind. I 
appreciated his willingness to treat me like a competent adult 
and not a circus freak. I also appreciated his decision not to 
put an official reprimand in Scully's file, since Ralph was the 
only agent around at the time and she'd done her level best 
to get appropriate backup.

Warwick was luckier than Ralph. He was recovering in his 
bedroom. Ingveld was experiencing serious survivor's guilt 
and would not let him even hold his own utensils, though she 
let him use the keyboard that she rigged just for his use in 
bed. This kind of thing either destroyed a relationship or 
cemented it; I truly hoped that it was the latter for them.

Zippy recovered slowly, aided by a pert young home-care 
nurse who, after the first week, would have done the job for 
free just to bask in Zippy's thousand-watt smile. The famous 
charm was working again, after a long dry spell, and I was 
pretty sure she wouldn't be leaving when the insurance 
stopped paying for her to come. I mean, when it stopped 
paying for her to look after his medical-care needs.   Hey, if I 
had known that being attacked by a dinosaur was such a 
chick magnet, I would have done a half-gainer into a 
stegosaurus years ago.

Scully grumbled as the X Files languished. Given the 
damage to her feet from her imbroglio in the kitchen, she 
wasn't going to be running anywhere even in flats for a while.  
Which meant she'd be easier to catch, but I was in no shape 
to chase.

On the plus side, her scars -- the ones on her epidermis -- 
were going to be minimal, her throat was fine, and she'd 
even been promised that she wouldn't have a bump in her 
nose to match mine. As for me, things weren't going to get 
worse (nose-wise), and I guess that's all that one could hope 
for.  With the matching splints on our noses, we looked like 
we'd gotten a group rate on plastic surgery.  Rhinoplasty!  
Buy one get one free!  Worse, Miranda was convinced that 
we'd had these fabulously neat toys attached to our faces 
just for her amusement, and she divided her time between 
trying to play with the bandages and skittering around in her 
walker like a rocket ship. She was the fastest person in the 
family (family?) at the moment; the two of us were still 
hobbling in pain.

The doctors also assured me that, in a few months, I would 
be ready for plastic surgery to make my neck look more 
normal. In the interim I was wearing lots of turtlenecks, even 
though the stormy spring had given way to standard 
Washington sauna weather and despite the fact that putting 
them on felt like it broke my much-abused schnozz anew 
each morning. Vanity, thy name is Mulder.  That was one of 
the other things that had seemed to breed true in the 
experiment – narcissism.

The day after the funeral, Skinner dropped by and laid a 
minefield between Scully and me as efficiently as the U.S. 
Army in the Korean DMZ.

He'd begun innocently enough, having appeared on our 
doorstep to chew Scully out for rushing into the fray without 
sufficient backup. Having the lecture take place in the 
privacy of my own study didn't make it any more fun, but at 
least Kimberly didn't get to watch us slink in and out. Scully 
actually listened to him as he droned on, while I just watched 
and wondered what he'd think if he knew what usually 
happened on the couch he was occupying. Finally he was 
out of gas, and that was where the trouble began.

Skinner took his glasses off and rubbed his temples, staring 
at a ninety-degree angle away from us in our matching 
swivel chairs. Then he delivered a speech that had me 
twisting in well-concealed agony from his first words.

"Agents," he said, with stiffness that might have indicated a 
rehearsed speech or might simply have been second nature 
to him after all those years in command, "I was unaware of 
the true circumstances surrounding Agent Mulder's transfer, 
and I understand the reasons for your circumspection. 
Please be assured that I will treat your confidences with the 
utmost discretion. I'm hopeful that your current status 
indicates some resolution of the outstanding issues between 
the two of you."

I twitched and Scully breathed carefully, the way she always 
does when she's preparing for combat. "Sir, with all due 
respect, this conversation is touching on matters that cannot 
be of legitimate interest to the Bureau. I look forward to 
resuming my regular duties as soon as medically feasible." I 
wanted to cheer. See, you tight-assed bastard, Scully took 
the same damn course on Orwellian newspeak as you. 

"The issue, Agent Scully, goes beyond the momentary 
objective and relates to the long-term success of the X Files 
division in revealing and halting the high-level deceptions 
we've struggled so long against. You need to be able to 
focus on the work."

"What does that mean, sir, that a child is too much of a 
distraction?" I could have carved the words into the floor with 
the icicles hanging in the air from her words.

He sighed again and worked his shoulders back with the 
careful motions of one who spends too much time at a desk. 
"I don't personally believe that Bureau members, particularly 
section heads, should have their loyalties divided by such 
time-intensive commitments. But I'm aware that the situation 
in which you find yourself is highly unusual, and I would not 
fault you for whatever resolution you find acceptable." His 
voice lowered and he looked at her, ignoring me completely. 
"I want you back on the job one hundred percent, Agent 
Scully, and frankly I don't care if you and Mulder get sex 
change operations and convert to Tibetan Buddhism so long 
as you maintain your dedication to the X Files. Your family 
drama is important as a sign of the abuses of power by the 
men we seek to expose, but it is not the end of the story."

Sometime during Skinner's speech she'd risen from her chair 
and was standing directly in front of him, hands on hips. I 
don't think she was consciously aware of how close her right 
hand was to her holster. "With all due respect, sir, I think I've 
spent the past few months proving that I understand exactly 
that. I didn't decide to make George Naxos the center of my 
work or my life."

Skinner stood as well. I had no desire to join them. In fact I 
was considering hanging a sign around my neck that said 
'noncombatant'. The Marines usually honored the Geneva 
Convention, right? My former boss blundered on like a train 
about to run off its rails. "I'm aware that many recent events 
have been beyond your control. But you seemed . . . very 
affected, perhaps even overwhelmed, when I saw you last 
week."

"I deal with what happened to me every day, sir. I deal with 
the fact that I have been abducted, experimented upon, my 
body violated and children of my body created without my 
consent. I deal with the fact that some of those children died 
horrible deaths. I deal with the fact that I was given cancer 
from those experiments and that I could go out of remission 
any day if whoever is responsible for the chip in my neck 
decides to turn it off. I deal with the fact that I was raped and 
that my rapist created the child I'm now responsible for. If 
this series of events didn't bother me just a little I suspect I 
would be clinically insane. Don't mistake my pain for 
inattention to duty, sir. If it upsets you, I suggest that you not 
ask the questions you don't want answered."

She left the study. He didn't object.

Skinner wasn't my immediate superior anymore, but I was 
nonetheless aware that it would be imprudent to ask him if 
he was satisfied now.

He rubbed the back of his neck and sighed once, loudly. 
Well, my neck hurt too, and I couldn't work up much 
sympathy. "Sometimes I wonder -- only a person who is 
good and true can fight these interlocking conspiracies, but 
the battle itself seems destined to eliminate all the light from 
that person's soul."

"Do you think I made a mistake, leaving the X Files?" I 
shouldn't be surprised that his opinion mattered to me. I had 
a severe shortage of admirable paternal figures in my 
background. And he'd dealt to save Scully, proving that he 
had a touch of Don Quixote in him, which I had to respect.

"I can't presume to judge, Mulder. But you must know that 
there are two worlds in this household. You're going to have 
to decide if they can coexist without destroying each other. If 
you don't decide, the choice may be taken from you."

With those reassuring thoughts he departed. I found Scully 
in the bedroom, unearthing toys from the crevices and 
corners into which they'd migrated, straightening up with the 
tears running down her face. I took a Disney rabbit from her 
hands and drew her down onto the bed. She pressed her 
face into my sore ribcage and moaned; she'd used up all her 
words with Skinner. We rocked ourselves to sleep, and I 
dreamt that George's tattoo reappeared on my throat after 
the surgery but that I was the only one who could see it. 
Everyone else thought I was the same as ever, except for 
Miranda who pointed at my throat and giggled. There's a 
reason Scully and I rarely speak of our dreams.

The good news was that Scully still hadn't made any move to 
leave. We'd had a bad moment the following morning when 
she couldn't find her favorite blue shoes and she'd realized 
that they were in Annapolis. The look of panic on her face 
meant that she was thinking about fleeing back to Maryland, 
with the excuse that this household was already overloaded 
with people in need of care. I'd distracted her by bringing 
Miranda in; the Mooselet could "walk" in a drunken salesman 
path if you held her hands up in the air and I'd helped her 
crash into Scully's legs. Scully was comfortable enough with 
her now to scoop her up and airplane her, landing on the 
bed and bouncing with her, shoes forgotten.

****

I only stayed with Mulder, Miranda, Warwick, and Ingveld 
because they needed someone with medical training in the 
house.  Casa Mulder was like a rehabilitation facility for the 
strangely injured.  But I knew it was dangerous for me to 
stay.  Dangerously easy.

My dangerous liason was sitting with me in the kitchen as we 
waited for morning coffee to boil. Mulder was working from 
home full-time while Warwick was laid up, and I was learning 
how to telecommute; I wasn't willing to let either Mulder or 
Miranda out of earshot for more than a few hours at a time 
until recent events faded somewhat. I was disgruntled 
because, without the matching shoes, my one remaining 
clean work suit was useless and I'd have to make the quick 
trip to the Hoover building dressed like a slob. Mulder hissed 
as the stray, who was now living indoors with us, jumped on 
to his lap, claws extended.

I shuffled over to the refrigerator and extracted a grapefruit 
to follow the cereal and toast I'd already absorbed. "Hungry 
much, Scully?"

"I'm *healing*," I said petulantly. "That takes energy. 
Calories. Fuel for the body's miraculous engines."

"You must be getting some pretty low mileage," he said. I 
refused to give him the satisfaction and pulled out a 
grapefruit spoon. The silverware had Christina Mulder's 
initials engraved on it, I noticed. 

Mulder didn't let me eat in peace long. "What do you think 
we should name her?" He was cooing disgustingly over the 
cat, petting it with the gooey sappiness of a man in love. It 
made me a little ill.

"Mulder, are you aware that the cat is male?" I carefully 
scraped the last clinging fragments of fruit from the white 
zest shell.

He looked surprised. "But it's so small --"

"Personal experience to the contrary, gender dimorphism is 
not terribly pronounced in most mammals. Also, Mulder, this 
cat can't be more than eight or nine months old. Look how 
it's expanded in the past few weeks now that you're feeding 
it."

His hands never stilled on the cat's coat, which was growing 
out faster than my roots. It looked as if the scrawny stray 
was going to be a longhair, even though it had been 
practically bald when we'd first met.

He didn't take the opportunity to comment on my own 
expansion, also related to Mulder's nesting instincts. I was 
almost not underweight and my bras were beginning to fit 
again. He held the cat up in the air, lifting it with his hands 
under its shoulderblades; it looked at him with measured 
disdain. "All right then, what will we call him?"

"Spike?" I suggested.

"Hell Toupee wouldn't be bad, given his recent performance 
with George."

I gave the requisite frown-and-eyebrow combo, and he 
grinned, then winced as the motion pulled sore muscles.

The pathetic thing was that rather than resuming our carnal 
activities at night, all we'd done was Raggedy Ann and Andy 
cuddling.  It hurt too much for anything else.  Sleeping 
together without sex was pleasant, but the broken-nose 
snoring was not.  The cat even snored as he slept on the 
valley between our pillows.

"He keeps getting bigger every day."

"Yeah, he's turning into a real Catzilla."

I just looked at Mulder, knowing that he'd found the name; he 
knew it too and winked. I supposed that it was better than 
Velvet Elvis. At least at the vet he'd discover that pets are 
known by their names and their owners' last names; I 
wondered how he'd react when they called for "Catzilla 
Mulder."

Hell, he'd probably be proud.

The doorbell rang. Mulder was complacently stroking the cat 
and made no move to get up. Even though my feet still hurt 
from the glass explosion on the kitchen floor, I let him have 
his moment of contentment and went to answer the door.

My mother smiled thinly at me through the fisheyed 
peephole.

"Mom," I said stupidly as I opened the door. The spring 
storms had passed and the rain pattering gently on her 
parka was almost light enough to be unnoticeable. She 
stepped in and I reset the alarm.

"Honey, we need to talk."

This phrase had a power like no other to turn my stomach 
and send my mood down to China.

"Things are a little hectic around here," I explained, full of 
shame, as I led her back into the kitchen. Warwick was 
recovering in luxury down in his apartment, and he hadn't 
been up to cleaning anything yet. As neither Mulder nor I 
could even identify the average household cleaning product 
except when used as part of an intriguing method of killing, 
this meant that blood and mud were everywhere, 
indistinguishable from one another, crusted on floors, walls, 
and even a spatter up on the ceiling. 

The various bullet holes made one wall of the living room 
look like a modern art installation. Even the indestructible 
Ikea couch now appeared a little lopsided, since there was a 
big black dried-blood patch upsetting the geometry of the 
pattern. I'd scraped up most of the gore that absolutely could 
not be mistaken for dirt, and that was all the housecleaning I 
could tolerate. There are some things you just don't ask 
guests to do. Mulder had at least gotten the front windows 
replaced and we were going to have a crime-scene cleaning 
specialist come in as soon as he was willing to trust 
strangers in the house -- I was thinking 2010 or so.

The kitchen wasn't much better than the living room, though 
I'd managed to soak some paper towels and scrape the 
worst of the blood off the floor. The walls were almost surely 
a loss; I thought maybe the best thing would be to give 
Miranda some crayons and tell her to go for it.

I automatically went to the coffeemaker to start another pot. 
Mom watched me, evaluating, and I felt like she'd seen my 
report card and was about to explain to me where I'd failed. 
Mom and Mulder exchanged grunts that might have qualified 
as greetings if you were being generous.

I took a deep breath. "So, what's going on?"

The doorbell rang again. We looked at each other; Mulder 
wasn't going to wait in the kitchen without me, so he and I 
both trotted out this time, the cat twining around his feet. He 
opened the door and I stood behind him, my hand on my 
gun where our visitor couldn't see it.

"Dana Scully and Fox Mulder?" The man wearing a 
nondescript business suit could have been a functionary for 
any one of the conspiracies we've encountered over the 
years.

"In general," Mulder replied.

He smiled and handed each of us an envelope. "Consider 
yourself served. Have a nice day."

I looked stupidly down at the thick yellow paper. Mulder 
opened his and didn't blow up, so I followed.

"My god," he said.

My letter was short and to the point. I could only assume that 
his was as well. 

Bill and Tara were suing us for custody of Miranda. I, they 
alleged, had abandoned her, demonstrating my unfitness, 
and continued association with me in my unstable state 
would be detrimental to her development. Mulder was not 
her biological father and was also unfit, given his history of 
mental impairments. We were summoned to court next 
Monday, for appointment of a guardian ad litem for Miranda 
and scheduling of home visits by an independent expert who 
would evaluate the suitability of Miranda's environment. The 
custody hearing would follow thereafter.

"That's why Mom's here," I said dazedly. "What are we--?"

"It gets worse," he said, as if commenting on the weather.

"Hunh?"

He pointed to the signature on the bottom, below Bill and 
Tara's. "That's the lawyer from the firm that handled Jason's 
affairs. The firm that did the legal defense for Roush."

End.
(heh, heh)

Author's notes:

Rivka says: Sally eternally challenges me to take the 
characters places they haven't gone, and this time was no 
exception. So, this is our version of Snugglebunnies, via the 
Tempest. Are we going soft in our dotage? Inquiring minds 
want to know.

Sally says: The challenge, as ever, was to take the tired old 
chestnuts (evil twin and Mulder and Scully have a baby) and 
try to look at them in a new (if jaundiced) light.  As ever, 
without Rivka prodding me, none of this would have been 
possible. And to all the kids who awarded me a "black belt in 
babysitting" .

Iolokus IV: Res Judicata
by
MustangSally <rwbowman@erols.com>
and 
RivkaT <RivkaT@aol.com>


Summary: The saga that began in Iolokus ends not 
with a bang but with a whimper.  Mulder and Scully 
are involved in possibly the largest battle of their 
lives - fighting the unknown minions of the Project in 
family court for custody of their genetically 
engineered daughter Miranda.

Disclaimer: To steal a premise is an elegant offense.  
And the prosecution of said offense is equally 
elegant - or at least interesting.  

We're proud to point out that the final part of the 
Iolokus stories is the longest, in an attempt to wind 
everything up as neatly as possible.  Long yes, but 
still shorter than Oklahoma, and, really, a bit less 
vomiting proportionally.  Size does matter.


I was gambling in Havana
I took a little risk
Send lawyers, guns and money
Dad, get me out of this

I'm the innocent bystander
Somehow I got stuck
Between the rock and the hard place
And I'm down on my luck
 
Now I'm hiding in Honduras
I'm a desperate man
Send lawyers, guns and money
The shit has hit the fan

Send lawyers, guns and money...
The shit has hit the fan.

Warren Zevon

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Iolokus IV: Res Judicata
1/

maybe i'm a little old-fashioned, maybe you're a little unkind
maybe i'm a little impatient, we'll concede that in mind
you won't give me your number, you won't give me your time
you said meet me on the corner, and there's still no sign
maybe i'm a little outdated, maybe a little out of time
to believe your heart is in the right place
despite what you're doing to mine
so i'm standing on the corner, looking like i don't care
d'you wanna crucify my feelings with your fingernails
and leave the loneliest boy in the western world
cruising the streets for an ice cream girl
	Lloyd Cole

"Scully, marry me."

"No!" 

I continued mixing the spackle with short, violent 
strokes.

"It *has* to improve our chances of keeping custody 
of Miranda," he protested.

"You're such a romantic, Mulder."

"If I got down on my knees there's a good possibility 
that I might not get up again," he said in a voice of 
unsweetened iced tea.

This much was true, barely three weeks after his 
twin brother George had gone to that great cellblock 
in the sky, Mulder was still spotted with bruises and 
a necklace of scabbing around his throat from 
George's attempt to switch identities.  He was still 
hampered somewhat by his hurts and it was going to 
be months before he stopped looking like Clint 
Eastwood in 'Hang 'em High'.  For me, with the splint 
gone from my nose and the black eyes fading, I 
looked almost normal. Regardless, I was starting to 
wonder if the duel with evil brother George hadn't 
caused brain damage to at least one of us.

I took the container of spackle and headed to the top 
of the ladder, which wobbled nervously underneath 
me.  I got a small putty knife and started filling in the 
uppermost grouping of bullet holes.  Sitting on the 
re-upholstered sofa by the window, Mulder fidgeted 
in blatant impatience.

"It has to be soon, the court date is next Monday."
 
I'd cleaned up most of the debris from the siege, re-
painted the kitchen and had the sofa re-upholstered 
in preparation for the next round of abuse.  Now I 
was working on the walls of the living room.  The 
house was, more or less, starting to look like George 
had never darkened the doorstep.  If I could figure 
out how to get the bloodstains out of the carpet I'd 
be a happy woman.  Maybe I should just pull up the 
carpet and sand the floor down.  Maybe I should just 
pull up the carpet, crawl underneath and pull the 
carpet over me with strict instructions not to wake 
me until the war was over.  Bad idea- either the kid 
or the cat was likely to pee on me.

"I think we ought to get a real lawyer before any of 
this goes any farther," I said. Mulder's general-
purpose lawyers had convinced the judge not to take 
Miranda away pending a full trial, but the trial was 
approaching and we still hadn't gotten a custody 
expert, which made me nervous as even Atticus 
Finch might have had some difficulty convincing a 
court that we were stable parents.

A pained squawk broke the conversation in two as 
Catzilla stalked into the living room wearing a tense 
expression and ruffled fur. A moment later, Miranda 
crawled in like a small pink Humvee, a telltale tuft of 
black fur sticking to her lower lip.  She was crawling 
now. Her single incentive to become mobile was the 
leggy teenaged cat that she delighted in chasing. 
Catzilla had a bad habit of letting the baby corner 
him and then practicing nonviolence.  Miranda let 
out a gleeful shriek and lunged for the cat again.  
Mulder caught her before pink hands made contact 
with black fur and scooped her up.

"No.  Don't bite the kitty," he warned her.

Looking up at her Daddy, Miranda went round-eyed 
and innocent for about two seconds, then she 
wriggled and reached for the cat again.  With injured 
dignity, Catzilla began to clean his back toes.

"Cat-cat-cat-cat-CAT!" she demanded and kicked 
her feet against Mulder's chest.

"I said 'NO,'" he repeated. 

She set up a fretful wailing until hot tears ran down 
her madly red face and she sobbed like Susan 
Lucci.  Which made me wonder exactly at what age 
the female brain realizes that the easiest way to 
manipulate a man is with tears.  But give Mulder 
credit, he just gave her a squeeze and wiped the 
tears off her face before handing her a black cat 
beanie baby as a substitute.  The toy wasn't a fair 
trade and she threw it to the floor with a snarl of 
frustration.  She was stoking herself up into a full-
fledged temper tantrum and I briefly wondered if 
maybe we should just let Bill and Tara have the full 
Miranda experience for a week or two and see if 
they didn't send her back in a FedEx box with air 
holes punched in it.

As the tsunami of infantile rage built force, Mulder 
plunked her in the playpen where she stood upright, 
grabbed the bars and began to shake them like a 
rebellious inmate at Sing Sing.

"Cat-cat-cat-cat-cat!" she howled.

"You know if you would just *bite* her a couple of 
times we wouldn't have this problem," he scolded 
Catzilla over the noise.

For his part, Catzilla blinked green-gold eyes at 
Mulder and went over to the playpen where be 
began to rub his lips over Miranda's knuckles.  As 
quickly as she had become furious, she went into an 
ecstasy of cooing and babbling in fluid Gaelic to her 
feline companion, who made soft throat-noises at 
her.

"Scully, this is Virginia, conservative, marriage-
friendly Virginia." Mulder said as if we'd never been 
interrupted.

"Isn't Virginia for lovers?" For some reason, the 
recitation of the official state slogan didn't make him 
happy.

"*Scully*. Virginia nearly elected Oliver North to the 
U.S. Senate because Chuck Robb got head from a 
beauty queen. Virginia does not look kindly on 
unconventional family units! You want to be in there 
as a  live-in couple with Bill and Tara holding hands, 
him in his Navy uniform and her cradling that kid of 
theirs? They're the Cleavers, we're the Addams 
Family!"

"We're not living together."

He howled frustration. Miranda thought that was 
wonderful and urged him to do it again, patting her 
hands on the playpen cushion and giggling.  Catzilla 
flattened his ears and ran for cover under the sofa.

"Will you stop avoiding the issue for *just one 
minute*? I'm not asking you for anything except the 
purely legal act. I've given up on the idea of a family, 
I'll settle for a Potemkin Village to fool the court."

I shook my head. Did he even consider the 
possibility that he'd just explained why I didn't want 
to say yes?

I cast an eye around the room, looking for work that 
remained to be done.  Nothing but the bloodstained 
carpet; no escape.

Getting married certainly couldn't hurt our chances 
of keeping Miranda. And that, despite all the other 
shit swirling around me as my life went down the 
toilet, was something I was finally certain about. If I 
said no and we lost, I'd be irrevocably alone. He only 
tolerated me now because Miranda seemed to like 
having me around. Well, that and the prospect of 
regular sex when he got slightly more healed.

"Fine."

"What?" Mulder practically levitated away from the 
playpen and over to me.

"I'm sorry, was I supposed to keep saying no?"

As Hamlet or Oedipus said, 'it seemed like a good 
idea at the time'.

****

Between her home improvement projects and 
wandering around the house looking like a camel 
with a sore hump, Scully somehow made the time to 
accompany the Mooselet and me to City Hall and 
start the paperwork necessary for the marriage.  I 
guess it would have been too much for her to feign 
enthusiasm.  So, between the applications for 
variances in zoning, building permits and dog 
licenses, we filled out the papers and took turns 
supporting the Mooselet as she sat on the counter.  
Miranda was holding the chained pen in one fat fist 
and pontificating in MooseSpeak to anyone foolish 
enough to talk to her.  The only positive event in the 
entire expedition was watching Scully try to take the 
pen away from her.  Her Highness was NOT 
AMUSED and snapped at Scully like a turtle and 
growled.  After a short gasp of surprise, Scully 
snatched the pen away from Miranda and ended up 
getting a ruby-faced wail in return. The clerks behind 
the counter looked up to see what abuse the woman 
was inflicting on the adorable baby and Scully went 
almost as red as her hair.

In the end, I rescued my intended from the baby of 
evil and plopped Miranda against my hip, handing 
her the black cat beanie baby that was now missing 
its eyes and whiskers for some reason.  While the 
Mooselet sang to the toy and batted her eyelashes 
at the clerks, Scully scrawled her name at the 
bottom of the application with the enthusiasm of a 
woman signing her own writ of execution.  I guess I 
should have been insulted, but truth to be told, I was 
so endlessly grateful for her willingness to go along 
with the charade that I couldn't even work up the 
mischief to tease her about it.    

The late spring sky was overcast when we finally left 
City Hall and wandered down the street a bit for 
coffee.  Scully had the Mooselet supported against 
her hip and was looking more comfortable with her 
human burden than she usually did.  Was it at all 
possible that the Mooselet had managed to 
insinuate herself into the heart of the Queen of 
Rational Thought in a way that I never had?  Then 
again, Her Highness was several points higher on 
the cute scale than I was.

Sitting at the outdoor table with the Mooselet 
perched on the table, I waited for Scully to come 
back with the coffees.

"Dak?  Cat-Cat? Da Lee? Nah?" Miranda asked.

"Well," I started and the Mooselet looked up at me 
with great seriousness,  "Scully and I are going to 
get married and that will make her officially your 
mom.  This means that you have to treat her nice. 
No biting."

The Mooselet smiled and flashed her white baby 
corn kernel teeth at me.

"I'm serious.  No biting."

"Na.  Dak. Da. Lee," she reassured me and stuffed 
the entire head of the cat into her mouth.

I knew it was just the teething, but with my family 
you really had to wonder.

With a coffee in each hand and a bottle of juice 
balanced precariously on top, Scully returned to the 
table and handed me my cup.

"What are we going to do about rings?  We have to 
have rings."

That's my Scully, as sentimental as a traffic cop.

"Somehow I don't see you with the traditional 
diamond solitaire."

I smiled to reassure her that I was joking.

"But diamonds are a girl's best friend," she said in 
something like her old manner.

The Mooselet was snapping her head to each of us 
in turn like she had great seats at Wimbledon.  I 
uncapped the apple juice and held the bottle to her 
mouth.  She gulped greedily at it and only a small 
portion of the juice went down my arm.  Across the 
table, Scully blinked in disgust.  This was probably 
her discomfort with the Mooselet from the beginning 
- babies are not clean.  Maybe something in the 
essential human character had been missed from 
the very beginning - women may allegedly be more 
nurturing, but men understand a baby's inherent 
messiness.  After all, we're just big babies ourselves.  
We grok having food on our shirts, eating things that 
have fallen on the floor, and lounging around in our 
underwear.  It's our way.

Whining, the Mooselet grabbed at the juice bottle 
and managed to spill a half a cup down the front of 
her shirt.  Scully hadn't gotten enough napkins so I 
made do with the adult-oriented modest amount and 
sponged the juice off the baby.  Miranda giggled and 
pulled at my watchband.  To keep her happy, I 
unbuckled my watch and handed it to her.  Like most 
things, it went straight in her oral orifice.  I wasn't 
worried.  Swiss Army watches are supposed to 
withstand amazing amounts of abuse, even though 
baby drool had not been listed on the brochure.

"Well, look at it this way, not much will change once 
we're married, we've been spending close to 24/7 
with each other for the past six years.  You'll actually 
spend less time with me because we won't be 
working together."

"I won't be working very much right now anyway. 
Skinner won't let me come back until the official 
account of George's home invasion has been 
approved," she said and sipped delicately at her 
coffee as though she was trying to prove that she 
wasn't the sloppy one in this outfit.

"There's landscaping to be done," I teased and 
drank my now cold coffee,  "and if you decided that 
you don't want to work for the Bureau anymore, I 
think you have a bright future doing home repair."

"You realize, of course, that there's endless amounts 
of paperwork we're going to have to do at HR.  
Change of tax status, life insurance policies, and so 
forth.  This is a fairly bureaucratic enterprise we're 
entering into."

"I suppose, " I started, stung by her analytical 
approach, "it doesn't seem that much of a chore 
when you're in love."

"I --" The man who approached us cut her off, an 
interruption for which I was momentarily grateful. He 
was in his early thirties, dark hair, dark clothes 
tucked and belted with a neatness that screamed 
'cop.'

"Excuse me, sir, ma'am," he said, "but I'm going to 
have to ask you to come with me." He stood 
between us, his right hand not six inches from 
Miranda's head.

"What's this about?" Scully asked.

"Child protective services has received a report --" 
That was bullshit, if Bill had sicced CPS on us they 
never would have found us in the middle of the city, 
they would have come to the house.

"I'd like to see some identification, please." Scully 
stood and had her gun at his stomach in one unified 
move, smooth as chocolate mousse. His attention 
shifted mostly to her, which gave me the opportunity 
to pull my own Sig, hidden behind Miranda's body. 

"I wouldn't do that if I were you, ma'am," he smiled 
and how could the people around us not be noticing 
this? I was aware of the rest of the world trotting 
along briskly as if this deadly scene were playing on 
the TV in an electronics store window, unnoticed. In 
his right hand I could now discern an item that 
looked like a keychain but had the telltale holes of a 
miniature gun. Miranda twisted her head to see what 
had taken my attention from her and made a grab 
for the weapon; when her pincers closed around it 
the man smiled. "That's right, honey, you can play 
with that in a minute."

Adrenaline spiked through my veins as he stared at 
Scully. "Bend down and leave the gun on the 
ground." If I could push Miranda behind me and fire 
fast enough -- the bullet might still pass through me 
and hit her.

Flicking her eyes over me and the baby like a 
lawnmower massacring grass, Scully slowly 
complied.

There would be one moment when he'd have to 
watch her carefully to make sure she didn't surge 
back up with the gun. If I could push his hand up just 
then, I could take him -- it would have to be with my 
gun hand, I couldn't let Miranda crack her head open 
on the concrete to save her from kidnapping. 

Slow as a replay of the Zapruder tape, Scully 
compressed herself downwards. Even I could feel 
the magnetic pull of her eyes as she willed the man 
to watch her, only her, she was the only threat that 
he had to worry about and if he took a fraction of his 
attention from her she might do something 
dangerous.

The tip of the gun barrel touched hot concrete. She 
was bending as if in fealty. I distinctly saw her index 
finger uncurl, and then the other fingers beginning to 
loosen. The man with the gun turned one degree too 
far towards her, overestimating his triumph.

As I rose, spun to take Miranda away from the line of 
fire, and struck upwards with my free hand, Scully 
moved at my feet. I felt a shock to the bones of my 
hand as my knuckles connected with the gunman's 
wrist. 

His hand flew up like a bottle rocket, not releasing 
his grip on his weapon, but he was falling backwards 
and Scully had her gun again pointed his throat 
before he'd figured out that he had undergone a 
ninety degree shift of orientation. When I'd moved, 
she'd headbutted him. It was the simplest thing she 
could do from that position, and coupled with my 
attack he'd toppled like a stack of children's blocks.

Elapsed time? Probably less than two minutes from 
the time he first opened his mouth.

Scully already had him flipped on his stomach, 
hands wrenched behind his back. She was 
mumbling something about big guys who threaten 
babies and inflicting incidental damage to his balls 
as she patted him down. Miranda was now 
squealing because of her sudden trip on Roller 
Coaster Mulder, and  *that* was enough to draw the 
attention of bystanders. Who noticed the guns. 
Cursing and fumbling with my gun, I found my badge 
and showed it around. "Don't worry, folks, it's all over 
now." 

This only increased the crowds.

Even on regular duty, we don't carry handcuffs and 
we had to wait for a police officer to come and take 
our attacker, who had not yet said a word even as 
Scully hissed imprecations and highly specific 
threats in his now-bleeding and dirty ear. I would 
have joined her in her impromptu interrogation 
session only Miranda was bored and fussy and in 
any event I needed to maintain my sentry position to 
ensure that our assailant didn't have a friend waiting 
for a second chance.

We gave our version of the incident to an 
uninterested detective who, despite our strong 
suggestions to the contrary, wrote it up as an 
attempted kidnapping by a sex pervert. Our FBI 
credentials had been completely erased by our 
relationship to Miranda, who demanded to examine 
absolutely everything on the detective's desk, which 
included half-full cups of congealed coffee, empty 
bags of Cheetos, dull pencils, small butterfly clips, 
and the remains of an apricot danish. I tried to calm 
her with the cat toy, but her slobber had not yet dried 
on it and it was too wet and mushy for her tastes.

Scully was quiet on the drive back to the house and 
the Mooselet was complaining in fine voice about 
the fact that residential neighborhoods had a speed 
limit of only twenty-five.  Scully being quiet is not a 
good thing, it means that packets of information are 
speeding along the network in the icy reaches of her 
brain and she's working on some plan that is sure to 
leave me open-mouthed with shock and/or horror.  I 
didn't imagine for a minute that anything 
approaching domesticity was going to slow her 
thought processes down, nor did I think that 
cohabitation was suddenly going to turn her into 
Carol Brady (even though bell-bottoms had come 
back with a vengeance).  However, I did hope that 
she wasn't planning anything that would endanger 
anyone's life or sanity.
  
Even as I schlepped the Mooselet into the house 
and plunked her down in her high chair for lunch, 
Scully took the chicken salad out of the refrigerator 
with a pensive expression and continued to compile 
information while I performed the tricky task of 
feeding the Mooselet and myself.

"I have to go to Annapolis to get some more of my 
things." 

I looked up from where I was wiping Moose-spit 
chicken salad off the floor. It seemed a small thing, 
but knowing Scully there was large wildlife swimming 
under the surface of that statement.  Large wildlife 
with teeth willing to chew up foxes who stepped 
wrong.

The Mooselet grabbed a handful of chicken salad 
from her plate and began to rub it in her fringe of 
silky dark hair.  Scully looked as me as though I was 
about to do the same thing.  Catzilla began doing 
the slalom around the chair legs and sucking up 
chunks of chicken pink baby hands had flung to the 
floor.  I let him, it was easier than mopping.  If the 
Mooselet developed a better overhand pitch we 
were going to have get more cats to cover a wider 
area.
 
"Take the Outback to Annapolis, you can fit more 
stuff in it." I offered.

Scully seemed surprised that I was so amenable to 
the idea of letting her escape my supervision. 
Actually, getting Scully out of the house wasn't a bad 
idea. I needed to get in touch with the Gunmen, find 
out who wanted Miranda, who was pulling Bill's 
strings and why. The attempt on her today had to be 
related to Bill's custody suit; someone wasn't sure 
that he'd win.

I had a thought as she headed to the front door.

"Also, you have to take Miranda. I'm not going to be 
home, there are some *things* I have to do, and 
Warwick's still not fully functional. You're a better 
shot than he is anyway. Besides, you need the 
practice."

She seemed a little dazed. I guided her over to the 
front closet, where we stored Miranda's traveling 
gear. "Here's the diaper bag, traveling with her is not 
that bad, just a little noisy. Just be sure to drive 
carefully.  Remember, there's a baby on board." I 
gave her my best hunka-hunka-burnin'-love gaze. 
She blushed as she used to do when I first began 
teasing her all those years ago, and it managed to 
distract her enough to get her out the door, Miranda 
in tow. I was impressed that she was able to stagger 
down the path to the station wagon.

I watched her wrestle the car door open, shove all 
Miranda's appurtenances inside the car, then begin 
the long process of getting Her Highness into her 
throne, which was about as easy as nailing Jell-O to 
a tree, only you weren't allowed to use nails.

As soon as the baby was strapped in, she began to 
wail. I hoped Scully didn't make the speed = silence 
connection too quickly, the thought of combining 
their needs for acceleration made me very afraid.

Then I hopped in Scully's car, nearly kneecapped 
myself on the steering wheel, swore, pushed the 
seat back, and finally headed for the Gunmen's 
hideout.

*****

Iolokus IV: Res Judicata
2/

Sweet confetti out looking for a saviour
Finding it hard to break the change
Nothing ventured nothing gained
Ice cream beauty acting on her best behaviour
Finding it hard to bite her tongue
Feeling so old as the night is young 
	Natalie Imbruglia

Theoretically, Arlington to Annapolis is a pretty easy 
drive, provided that it isn't rush hour or you don't 
have a screaming nine-month old strapped to a baby 
seat in the back.  Miranda commenced howling 
when I put her in the car seat, which rattled my 
nerves so badly that my hands were shaking and I 
could hardly get the seat pulled forward enough to 
reach the gas and brake pedals.  Delayed reaction 
to the near-disaster in the afternoon -- not to 
mention the full-fledged disaster of the marriage 
license -- might have been a contributing factor as 
well.   

Maybe it was the chicken salad.

Miranda continued to wail all the way to Annapolis, 
varying only slightly in pitch like an electric saw 
going through different thicknesses of wood.  It was 
horrible, and I deserved every mile of misery.  In the 
past I had been guilty of reacting somewhat less 
than tolerantly to women in minivans full of children.  
I passed them at every opportunity and had been 
pretty colorful with my language as to their behavior 
on the road.  Now I was getting my comeuppance in 
spades. I drove like a dowager, trying not to jiggle 
Miranda any more than necessary.

By the time I finally pulled up in the far parking lot of 
my apartment complex, I was ready to kiss the 
tarmac like the Pope arriving in an airport. When I 
released Miranda from the baby bondage of the car 
seat, her hot red face was soaked with tears that 
had wet the entire front of her T-shirt.  She reached 
her hands out to me and wailed, "Lee! Lee!" with a 
heartbreaking earnestness that showed me that she 
had forgiven me for her original incarceration.

With Miranda cradled against my left shoulder and 
the diaper bag slung over my right, hand wrapped 
firmly around the comforting hardness of my gun, I 
staggered up the front steps of the building.  Inside, I 
pushed past the mail that had clogged the doorway 
and sniffed musty, old air.  I locked the door, 
plunked Miranda down on the carpet, and saw that 
the cleaning woman I'd hired to clean up after the 
forensics teams had scraped the place for evidence 
when Dr. Shimada had died in my bed had done a 
good job.  Only I no longer had any plants.  I had 
empty pots where plants had been. 

While Miranda began crawling around the floor 
faster than a hungry cockroach, I looked around and 
groaned to myself.  I no longer wanted to live here, 
too many ugly things had happened here.  Melissa, 
Dr. Shimada, George.  Even if I didn't have my new 
and unusual domestic situation I still would have 
been packing.  Too much is too much.  Whoever 
took up occupancy after me was going to have to 
get her own exorcist. 

After five boxes, each one-handed with the Moose 
(she was not light enough to deserve the diminutive 
any more) on my other hip, I was tuckered out. To 
rest, I took a look at my answering machine, which 
was bravely blinking red. When was the last time I 
checked my messages? Oh, probably sometime in 
the month before George crashed my pity party - I 
had stopped listening to my messages in March 
after I figured out that Mulder was not going to call 
me back; it was too pathetic.

Despite the length of my delinquency, the tape was 
not full. Well, I never claimed to have a social life. 
There were a few random solicitations, two 
messages from Zippy about the case we'd been on 
just before George came, one message from my 
mother.  My mother - I was going to have to do 
something about her shortly.  Just hearing her voice 
made my stomach hurt as though I were trying to 
digest a stone.

The next-to-last message was from George. I had to 
go cradle Miranda, protecting her from the world, 
when I heard  the dead man's voice slice through the 
air.

"Where are you, Scully? I really need to talk to you. I 
promise, I'll be good...I know what you need. Scully, 
pick up if you're there. If you don't answer, I'm 
coming over..."

Finally there was a click and an outraged squeak 
from Miranda as I loosened my grip and she began 
to slide downwards like a slow avalanche of baby 
powder. I readjusted and she slapped spit-slick 
fingers against my cheek, gabbling reassurance.

I was in a bad way if I needed support from a 
preverbal child over the promises of a corpse.

Nonetheless it was the last message that forced me 
to sit down. The pharmacy, calling to ask whether I 
was planning to pick up the birth control prescription 
that Dr. Shimada had written for me just before she 
did her final rounds, so to speak. Honestly, I'd 
forgotten about it. In my arms, Miranda was hot as a 
solar panel.

At least I was still underweight and under stress, 
both natural contraceptives. I could pick up the 
prescription shortly; in the meantime there were still 
plenty of condoms in the house. Mulder, perhaps 
because he wasn't eighteen anymore, had felt 
compelled to buy a lifetime supply, which he had 
stuffed into bathroom drawers that previously had 
housed my skin care products. So using them up 
would not only be pleasurable, it would be a blow for 
neatness in the Mulder household.

Hold on, the Mulder/Scully household. Mulder-
Scully? Scully/Mulder?

Does anal retentive have a hyphen?

The Mooselet chose that moment to spit a milky glob 
of some bodily fluid onto my sweatshirt. I looked into 
her green-corn eyes. "Good job," I said.  "Now what 
can you do about my hair?"

She fixed me with an evaluative look and, creepily 
enough, grabbed a hunk of my hair to stuff in her 
mouth.

It kept her quiet as I picked up the next box.

While I was packing my address book, I accidentally 
joggled the answering machine and George's voice 
whined flatly out from beyond the veil.  

"Where are you, Scully? I really need to talk to you. I 
promise, I'll be good...I know what you need. Scully, 
pick up if you're there. If you don't answer, I'm 
coming over..."

It was my turn to spit up, but my aim was better and I 
got it all in the toilet.  Miranda sat on the floor next to 
me and applauded.

After a trip to Alexandria that resembled the trip to 
Annapolis, only with less rear view because of the 
boxes, I put Miranda down for a nap and dragged 
the baby monitor into the study.   There I made a 
telephone call that almost made me wail loud 
enough to challenge Miranda's concert in the car.

The Virginia police had no record of an arrest that 
afternoon for an attempted kidnapping. It could have 
been delayed record entry but I remembered the 
diligent tap-tapping of the desk sergeant when we 
came in, Virginia was trying to join the computer age 
and enter arrest data straight into the computer 
system.  However, this incident wasn't in the system 
and therefore it had not happened. I checked the 
name of the patrol officer who'd come to our 
assistance and it turned out that Virginia thought 
he'd transferred to a job in Maryland last week.

Great.  Fucking typical.  It was too much to ask that 
something be handled normally.

There was one more errand to be done before I 
could rest. I had to go and deal with my mother.  
Mulder was not in evidence yet and so I packed 
Miranda up. She was slobbery and sleepy, but in a 
relatively good mood which improved further when I 
saw that traffic was light and pushed the Outback up 
to speeds approaching escape velocity.

She pouted when we stopped, but the spit bubble 
spoiled the pathos. "None of that, young lady," I said 
as I extracted her from the safety seat.  "You've got 
to be charming for Grandma."

My mother answered the door on the second ring. 
Behind her I could hear the television and the telltale 
hysterical sobs of a young child. I winced in unwilling 
sympathy. For a moment I wondered whether we 
wouldn't all be better off if babies' howls could only 
be heard by animals, like dog whistles.

"Dana," Mom said, making it into an exclamation of 
surprise.

"Hello, Mom." We'd never really finished our 
discussion, that morning she'd showed up and we'd 
gotten served with notice of the lawsuit. "I want to 
talk to you about Miranda."

She held out her arms for her granddaughter and I 
hesitated long enough for her to take notice before 
shuffling the burden onto her. Miranda smiled and 
patted Mom's upper arm. She liked my mother more 
than she'd liked me at first and this hurt me in ways I 
didn't want to consider.

We walked down the hallway into the living room, 
where Tara was rocking Matthew, who was now a 
suety eighteen-month-old with the Scully blue eyes 
and Bill's own frown.  We acknowledged one 
another with the subtlest of nods, as housewife and 
career woman we were mortal enemies and now we 
no longer had any reason to hide it. 

"Where's Bill?" I asked with distant politeness, as if I 
was inquiring about a pet parakeet.

"He went to the store for some more diapers," my 
mother responded. "Dana, I wish you'd have listened 
to me earlier, it didn't need to come to this."

"It doesn't need to come to this, Mom. Bill and Tara 
have a lovely child,"  -- a lie in the service of justice, I 
thought nastily -- "and they have no reason to try to 
take Miranda."

If her hands had been free, my mother would have 
folded them primly in her lap to go along with the 
frown. Instead she just rocked Miranda, lulling her to 
sleep with her drool drizzling onto Mom's lavender 
sweater. "Dana, you know we've been concerned 
about you ever since you joined the FBI. But in the 
past few years -- with everything that's happened -- 
how can you expect to give a child what she 
needs?"

"I'm her mother," I said. At that moment I had never 
felt more unsure of the truth of that statement. 
Biologically, yes, but there are plenty of biological 
mothers who dump their babies in toilets and beat 
them senseless with electrical cords. I wasn't at that 
level, this I believed, but I wasn't exactly Mother of 
the Year material either.

"You were her mother when you abandoned her in 
Montana."

I stared at my mother resentfully. If I'd still had bangs 
I would have looked through them like the most 
rebellious of teenagers. "I did not  *abandon* her. 
Emerson and Aileen --"

"Don't give me that! Fox isn't capable of taking care 
of himself and I don't believe that any brother of his 
would be any better. Bill's told me about all those 
insane twins --"

"Who gave him this allegedly damning information?" 

Her voice flowed over the interruption like water over 
a rocky streambed.  "-- and I can only withhold 
judgment so long. How long before Fox follows the 
rest of them into madness and violence?"

It didn't help any that I'd had similar thoughts once or 
twice. Or three times, max. "Your crude genetic 
determinism doesn't change the fact that Mulder has 
always been --"

"A psycho?"

I turned and rose, my hand slipping back towards 
my gun, to greet my beloved brother.

"Bill." 

"Dana."

Now that we'd admitted personal knowledge of each 
other's identity, there didn't seem much to say. I had 
one question, though.

"Why are you doing this?"

His face twisted in disgust. "I've seen the tape, 
Dana."

"Tape?" Which one, a surveillance tape of me and 
Mulder doing the nasty?  Probably not, Bill might 
have learned something.

"The tape where you kill all the children. What kind 
of monster --?"

I don't know what I did to piss God off, and I guess 
I'd apologize if I thought He'd consider forgiving me. 
Even Mulder's mistakes didn't follow him around like 
this. But that tape of me in Roush's secret facility, 
destroying the deformed test subjects that had been 
created with my ova, had lured Mulder -- and then 
me -- into Jason's clutches, and it had apparently 
survived the destruction of Roush to continue to 
haunt me.  Someone, someone who wanted 
Miranda in the hands of less careful custodians, had 
taken that tape and showed it to Bill. I needed to 
know who, and why.

"I don't know what you think you saw," I lied, "but it's 
part of a terrible scheme involving human 
experimentation and tremendous suffering, you're 
furthering that agenda by --"

"Don't give me that Woodward and Bernstein crap! I 
know what you and that sicko do, you fight against 
the very government that pays your salary -- 
paranoid theories no better than the Freemen and 
that crazy comet cult --"

"I'm not against government, just against lying to 
citizens and killing them for fun and profit, I guess if 
you're an unthinking fascist that's acceptable but --"

Miranda's wail cut through the argument and, rattled, 
I scooped her out of Mom's arms to my mother's 
great distress. Miranda continued to wail for a 
moment and then settled down. I was so grateful 
that, had she understood it, I would cheerfully have 
paid her a fifty dollar reward; instead I kissed her hot 
silky head and she snapped at my hair with her 
newly budded teeth.  

"Who got you your lawyer, Bill? Are you aware that 
he's with the same firm that represented a company 
whose illegal genetic manipulation and murderous 
plots Mulder and I exposed? What does he get out 
of this lawsuit?"

Bill flinched and I knew that part of him wondered 
the same thing. But he would pack those doubts 
away in a locked closet, confident that he could 
control the extent of his debt to Them. Dealing with 
Them is like taking a hit of crack -- perhaps a few 
strong souls out there can stop any time they want. 
But I thought Bill was not one of those happy few, 
not with a wife and a baby who could be used 
against him.  My brother - the sucker.

"None of that matters because Miranda is going to 
live with us, not some lawyer. We'll raise her right, 
far away from this insanity you've descended into. 
Dana," he said, and his voice was full of real pain, 
"why don't you listen to us? We only want what's 
best for you." Beside him, my mother nodded.

No doubt attracted by the male voice, Miranda 
looked over at Bill and when she realized that the 
red-faced red-haired man was not Mulder and not 
Warwick, she whimpered and burrowed her face in 
my neck, patting my cheek for reassurance.  She 
didn't like this loud man yelling at her and she went 
to me as a source of comfort - even if I had put her 
in the car seat.   

"This isn't getting us anywhere," I announced, 
feeling my daughter's approval buoying me up in this 
strange sea of family trauma. "I'm sorry you've 
believed the lies of strangers rather than trusting me 
to know what's best for me and my family. You 
should know that the men who've convinced you to 
turn on me tend to discard their tools when the job is 
over. So you watch yourself, because I'm not going 
to protect you."

I turned to go, but I could still hear Bill's voice 
clearly. "Listen to yourself, Dana, you sound just as 
psychotic as your crazy partner."

That really demanded an exit line, so I swiveled on 
my heel and smiled like Medusa finding a new 
victim. "Actually, Bill, we're getting married this 
Friday, so I think the correct term is 'fianc‚.'"

Miranda and I drove home in a state of well-justified 
moral outrage and renewed determination to win the 
fight. Okay, so maybe she was just happy not to be 
in pain from teething, but I felt that she shared my 
outlook when she gabbled and pounded her fist on 
the safety seat with such authority and firmness.

She fell asleep instantly when I took her back to her 
room. 

The bloodlust from the argument began to wear off 
as I realized that the battle was going to be 
considerably more difficult than many of our other 
struggles. Skinner was used to hearing reports of 
the unexplainable and convoluted from us, but what 
would a family court judge think? Bill had a point, 
from the outside Mulder and I sounded like the kind 
of people who paranoid schizophrenics would avoid 
because we were too strange and dangerous.

I made the mistake of mentioning some of the day's 
events to Warwick when I went down to look at his 
shoulder. Mulder and I had agreed that having a 
nurse come every day was too dangerous; we didn't 
anyone whose credentials we'd have to take on faith 
in the house. So that left me checking his wound to 
make sure that the miracle of healing was 
proceeding on schedule. I bet Mulder would have 
been a lot more interested in trusting the help if *he* 
was the one checking which bodily fluids Warwick 
was leaking.

"I can't believe you're so calm about this!" he 
blustered as I handed him his latest dose of pain 
meds. "You act like it happens every day!"

I shrugged. "Well, every week, essentially. Except 
during the summers, for some reason. So I guess 
the timing is unusual."

He groaned. "Mulder never told me about this secret 
agent shit when we met."

I couldn't help but smile sympathetically. "Join the 
club."

"What did he tell you - at first."

"Go away, but not in so many words."

To calm my nerves, I boiled a box of pasta and ate 
two heaping bowls full, which calmed me enough 
that I could start on the ice cream.

****

The Gunmen's latest locale was a few blocks from 
Union Station, on the other side from all the 
government buildings. The office was an unmarked 
building in between the Peter Pan and Greyhound 
depots. The other cars parked outside were all too 
bad to steal, so I set Scully's Club and hoped that 
would be enough.

"Mulder," Frohike greeted me at the door. "I've got 
some info on that law firm you were interested in."

In my life, as in the movies, no one wastes any time 
with hello or goodbye.  You have to save time for 
plot or people get bored.

I followed him back into the computer room where 
Langly and Byers were waiting.

"Roush was about forty percent of their business. In 
the months since the raid in Texas, they've laid off a 
bunch of associates. But, last month, they acquired 
a major new client -- also a biotech firm, and all the 
partners who'd worked on Roush business have 
shifted to this new client. Patents, political donations, 
government contracts, there's a lot of legal work 
when you manipulate human DNA for fun and profit."

"Is this new firm made of the same people who were 
at Roush?"

Byers handed me a printout with a list of names on 
it. "That was our next thought. There were about 
twenty scientists who were supposed to be working 
at Roush who were never caught or discovered in 
the wreckage. They've all been missing since then. 
No credit card activity, no employment reported to 
the Social Security Administration, nothing."

"I need to know more about this company."

Frohike shook his head. "Not much out there, just a 
pretty prospectus, and a name: BioQuest."

Langly looked at me. "What do you think it is? More 
government experimentation disguised as a private 
sector venture to accommodate the popular passion 
for privatization?"

I shrugged. "I'll look into it. I also need you to check 
out a lawyer, one my firm recommended for my 
custody case, Laura Broder. I need to make sure 
that she's not connected to anyone who might have 
an interest in doing me harm."

"Custody case?" It wasn't surprising that Byers was 
the one to ask. He wore a ring, and he might have 
some interest in a personal life, unlike the others.

"Yeah, Scully's brother is suing us to get Miranda. 
He thinks we're weirdoes."

"That's crazy!" Frohike said with no sense of irony 
whatsoever. "Do you want character witnesses?"

The thought chilled me as though I had been jogging 
up and down the ice cream section at the 
supermarket.

"No, that's all right, really," I gabbled in a hasty voice 
which made Langly sniff at the implied insult.

I didn't tell them about the impending nuptials. I 
assumed that Scully would want to choose her own 
bridesmaids, and I didn't think Frohike would look 
good in pink taffeta.

The boys prevailed upon me to play with some of 
their new software. I'd only meant to stay for one 
game, but time flies when you're blowing 
xenomorphs away and trying to rescue buxom 
babes. As always, I didn't want to stop until I'd gotten 
the girl, as unlikely as that was to happen. Ultimately 
it was the realization that Scully had yet to call and 
ask where I was that made me nervous enough to 
leave.

When I got home Scully was pacing the kitchen like 
a leopard tired of its cage. In between circuits she 
was gobbling from a mostly-melted pint of Coffee 
Heath Bar Crunch. She ate with the same distracted 
fury that I often saw in bed and I suspected that 
similar dynamics were at work: pleasure but not 
enjoyment, stemming from a desperate need to shut 
her mind off and let bodily functions prevail. I was 
glad that she was gaining weight and I was no 
longer afraid that she'd suddenly crumble 
underneath my hard hands like an autumn leaf, but 
this didn't strike me as the right way to bulk up.

"You're late," she said when she deigned to 
acknowledge my presence, simultaneously giving 
the sodden iceberg in the carton a vicious stab as if 
it were my liver.

"I didn't realize we had an appointment." I didn't want 
to fight, but I wasn't going to be her punching bag 
either.

Scully sniffed, ready to claw back, and then her 
shoulders dropped as she reconsidered and put the 
lid back on the ice cream. "Our would-be kidnapper 
disappeared from police custody, there's no record 
he was ever even there.  Also, Bill isn't financing this 
lawsuit himself, the Navy doesn't pay that well and 
Tara is wearing this season's Jaclyn Smith 
Collection, which might be a matter of taste but I 
don't think so."

"You think someone else is pulling his strings?" 

She closed the freezer and I moved behind her, 
putting my hands on her shoulders where she was 
as tense as the cables on a suspension bridge. Her 
voice was low and I had to lean over her to hear her. 
"Miranda was a test subject before, there might be 
Roush survivors who want to see how well you've 
done with her." 

"We've done with her."

She sighed and tilted her head back into my chest 
as I continued to push against resistant flesh. 
Flyaway hairs brushed against the scabs on my 
neck, tickling like wandering ants, but I didn't flinch. I 
worked over her shoulders and neck until she 
relaxed further, leaning her weight against me as I 
contemplated the pictures of Miranda and her cousin 
Samuel that were stuck to the fridge.  Samuel was 
safe he was home brewed from Emerson and 
Aileen's unmodified chromosomes, just another 
reason to stoke the wry jealousy I had for my saintly 
brother.

"I think you're right," I admitted -- but let the record 
show that Scully was being paranoid, and thus I 
wasn't acceding to the voice of reason. I've got my 
pride. "I've got the Gunmen looking for where the 
mad scientists have gone to ground. For the 
moment we need to focus on the court case, we can 
take more aggressive action when we have better 
leads than a disappearing kidnapper and a 
suspiciously well-funded lawsuit."

Scully turned in my arms and pressed her cheek to 
my chest, which gave me a strange, fluttery feeling 
in my stomach. "What do you think they want with 
her?"

"I think it's fair to say that they aren't interested in 
her developing motor skills."

"I used to want the truth, I used to want Justice.   
Now all I want is to be left alone."

By way of non-verbal agreement, I kissed her, and 
her mouth tasted appealingly of Heath Bar Crunch.

****

I woke in a cold sweat from a nightmare in which I 
was choking in green gelatin. Mulder's arm was 
draped over my midriff and his entire torso was 
pressed up against my back, undoubtedly the 
source of the breathing troubles. I rolled away and 
fled into Miranda's room where I checked to see that 
she was breathing and then watched her sleep. 
Sitting by her crib as she burbled was not quite as 
restful as sleeping myself, but it had a certain quiet 
pleasure.

She deserved better than I did. I knew I had made a 
number of bad decisions in the past year, so that I 
was in danger of actually lapping Mulder in the 
lifetime score. It was as if I'd had an enormous blade 
driven into my chest, right by my heart, when I 
discovered Emily. With a puncture wound like that 
you don't want to remove the foreign object until 
you're in the OR; otherwise the patient will bleed out 
almost instantly. The only problem is that you'd 
better get your victim to the hospital, because slowly 
bleeding to death is still bleeding to death. Emily 
was that sword and I had neither removed her nor 
repaired the damage in the months that followed 
San Francisco. Instead I'd stumbled from place to 
place, trying to pretend that I wasn't drenched in 
blood. My own and others'.

I needed to prove to the court and to myself that I 
was sane once more.

Could I really play hausfrau to pull this off? Mulder 
had adapted to his new babyfied existence. And 
anything he could do, I could do better, it was a 
guiding tenet of mine. Also I owed him and Miranda 
some effort keeping her safe from Bill and whatever 
his connection with Roush was, if only because Bill 
was my flesh and blood.

The slow liquid tide of Miranda's breathing 
eventually lulled me back into sleep, upright in the 
rocking chair beside her. I did not dream again.

Being up a ladder seemed to be an invitation to 
trouble these days. The next morning, I was 
wobbling near the front picture window, the ladder 
straddling the anemic impatiens I had planted to 
replace the bushes that the Arlington PD and FBI 
SWAT team had destroyed. I had a caulk gun in my 
hands and was trying to fill yet another spray of 
bullet holes when a rental Buick Regal pulled into 
the driveway.  The Lariat sticker was clearly visible 
on the rear bumper and I wondered who from the 
Bureau had bothered to render a car so close to the 
office.

It wasn't an agent. The woman who emerged from 
the car was well dressed in an understated fashion 
that I saw in my nightmares.  Obviously, I had been 
watching too many Disney movies because the first 
thing that occurred to me as Christina Mulder walked 
to the door was that she had the same hairdo as the 
wicked stepmother from Cinderella.   

She stopped on the front step and gave me an 
assessing look.  I wasn't exactly at my best 
prospective daughter-in-law mode right then and it 
registered in her pale eyes.

"Is Fox home?"

"Just a moment," I tapped on the window and caught 
Mulder's attention from where he was separating 
baby and cat for the millionth time.

"It's your *mom*," I lipped to him through the glass.

"Shit," he lipped back.

After plopping Miranda back in her playpen, he 
emerged.

"Hi Mom," he said in a slightly flippant tone, "run out 
of people to torment in New England?"

He didn't invite her in.

"What is this about putting your father's house up for 
sale?" she demanded in a tone that could have 
taught Queen Elizabeth a thing or two, "And you 
could have told me that you were getting married," 
she added, looking over her nose at me. I gave in 
and backed slowly down the ladder.

"And where did you hear that?" I asked.

"Fox told Ann Kelly at the real estate office, I play 
bridge with her mother.  Funny that you should tell 
her, wasn't she the one that you were so close with 
that one summer?"

He actually had the decency to blush.

"I'm surprised that you noticed," he murmured.

Mother and son stared at one another for a moment, 
but thirty-eight years of behavior modification are 
hard to break and he backed down.

"Lemonade or iced tea?" he asked.

The back porch was shaded from the sullen Virginia 
sun so it was only as hot and muggy as an armpit as 
opposed to a bare back baked in the sun.  I dragged 
Miranda's playpen out on the porch and she played 
with her black cat toy under the cool eye of her 
grandmother.  Mulder sat next to me on the glider, 
unconsciously fiddling with the neck of his T-shirt 
where it rubbed on the painfully pink new flesh and 
matching black scabs where George had skinned 
his throat.

Through the entire interview, Tina never looked up 
from her appraisal of Miranda.  On her part, Miranda 
looked up from her play from time to time to her 
grandmother with an incurious expression.

"Have you made any plans?"

Mulder took a drink to fortify himself. "First thing 
Friday morning at the county courthouse." And in the 
afternoon, we were going on our honeymoon -- a 
meeting with our new lawyer. "It's a preemptive 
strike since Scully's brother Bill is trying to get 
custody of Miranda on the grounds that we're 
mentally unstable.  I thought that if we got married 
that would help the cause somewhat." 

I picked at the drying caulk on my jeans and looked 
out at the lawn steaming under the sun.  The grass 
needed to be cut. From his place behind the screen, 
Catzilla pawed at the edge of the window frame and 
complained because he was stuck inside and all the 
good stuff was happening on the porch. 

"We still don't have rings," I said grimly. 

When I'd agreed it hadn't seemed quite so, well, 
sordid. I was brought up to believe in the sanctity of 
marriage, and though my recent sexual history 
wouldn't exactly make Father McHugh happy, I still 
got the heebie-jeebies when I considered bringing 
my relationship with Mulder under the heading 
"sacred."

"I have my father's upstairs," Mulder said and rose to 
walk into the house. He was talking over his 
shoulder as he left. "We can't really afford anything 
spectacular for you, but I think there's a jewelry store 
at the mall. It's probably still open."

At least he didn't offer me a cigar ring or the prize 
from a Crackerjacks box.

Mulder's mother had been watching us impassively, 
neither frowning nor smiling, her face as impervious 
as the ceramic tiles on a space shuttle. Tina looked 
down at her hands, then pulled decisively at the 
rings on her left ring finger. They slid off easily; her 
knuckles were still patrician and her fingers slim, not 
swollen with age or care. "Here," she said. "I hope 
you have all the joy of them that I did."

The diamond solitaire and matching thin gold band 
flashed like the fireball from a nuclear explosion in 
her palm.

She held out her hand and I stared at it.

I made it almost all the way to the toilet before I 
threw up.

Clinging to the cold porcelain bowl, feeling colder 
sweat drip from my hairline to the rim of the powder 
room toilet, I shuddered and heaved until I was 
relieved of the burden of lunch.   It was a bad 
anxiety attack, vomiting, hyperventilating, racing 
pulse, feelings of dread and fear, paranoia, and 
claustrophobia. Almost like being back at work. The 
spasms continued until I thought that the toilet bowl 
was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen, so cool 
and smooth and stable, the pivot around which my 
world was turning.

I guess that's why they call it worshipping at the 
porcelain altar.

I heard voices and footsteps in the hall and a 
moment later the door opened and Mulder poked his 
head in.

"Scully?"

"I'm fine Mulder," I moaned and another wave hit 
me.

After I was done and had flushed the toilet, I sat 
back on the tiles and leaned against the wall, afraid 
to go too far from the safety of the bathroom.  
Mulder came after me with a cold, wet washcloth 
and wiped my face off as though I was Miranda.

"Mom left," he said.

"Do you think that I'm mentally unstable?  Do you 
think that I would hurt Miranda?"

Crouched on the floor, he rubbed his eyes until they 
were pink as a rabbit's.

"No.  The only person you endanger is yourself.  
Come on upstairs, the Mooselet is down for a nap -- 
join her."

I stumbled upstairs while hanging onto his arm like 
an old woman.  I brushed my teeth and drank a 
gallon of water.  Mulder helped me out of my clothes 
and poured me onto the bed where he covered me 
with a blanket.  I lay there in the cool room, listening 
to the oceanic sound of Miranda breathing over the 
baby monitor, and I finally drifted off.


Iolokus IV: Res Judicata
3/

inside we can not feel what's fake & what is real
lover of mine I deny I lie
maybe it was in my drink maybe I'm the gypsy jinx
maybe I am his meat at noon with spoons
&spoons of ice cream creams creams
fill my mouth with other things
	Shara

Scully slept like Miranda -- so still that I occasionally 
had to check to ensure that she was still breathing.

After we got married, I'd be expected to watch her 
sleep every night for the rest of my life. I hoped 
she'd change her policy on TV or I'd be bored out of 
my skull in weeks.  I couldn't believe how much of 
the Discovery, History, and Learning Channels the 
woman watched.  I don't think she had ever watched 
a show with a laugh track in her life.  Not to mention 
the fact that she had no idea where ESPN was.

There was a point in my life that I thought I might 
turn out to be Ted Bundy. Now -- tragic irony or 
poetic justice? -- it seemed I was more of an Al. But 
Scully wasn't nearly as well endowed as Peg, more's 
the pity.

It's not that I'd never thought about marriage. Hell, 
I'd even exchanged rings once. (She wanted both of 
us to be marked off from the herd, because she 
thought it was unfair that she was the only one 
supposed to be private property during the 
engagement. I suspect Scully would have the same 
objection if we'd attempted an actual engagement.) 
Then I'd started up with Dr. Werber and the 
relationship went downhill faster and messier than 
the Jamaican bobsled team.

I'd never been any good at happy endings. The 
difficulty of my quest had always substituted for my 
ability to visualize a final goal. Samantha, aliens, 
truth, magic, it all swirled around in a mist of 
fantasies and pipe dreams -- a giant Hanukah list 
that I knew would never be fulfilled. I couldn't shake 
the feeling that I'd screw up or Scully would panic 
and bring our fragile union down like a UFO-buzzed 
plane.

I'd been mad at Scully for leaving, for treating her 
daughter like she was an impulse purchase that 
could be returned for store credit. Yet I didn't have a 
fantasy perfect life that I thought she'd destroyed 
with that decision. What I knew about being a 
husband could fit in the palm of Miranda's hand. 
Where it would probably get smeared on the floor 
like anything else she held did.

Shortly after dark, Scully's eyes melted open and 
she rolled over on her side to look at me.  The 
blankness behind the blue made my chest hurt.

"It's going to be all right," I said to both of us.

Outside, the earliest of the crickets started chirping 
the insect aria of love.  She put her hand on the side 
of my face and her skin was dry and warm as usual.  
Oddly enough, this was one of the Mooselet's 
affectionate gestures as well, only Scully's hands 
weren't wet with drool and the reaction that churned 
my stomach was nothing like the one that I had 
when Her Highness did the same thing.  I leaned 
over and kissed her. Kissing had never really been a 
big part of our foreplay, and seemed to be an 
afterthought rather than an activity unto itself. The 
combination of the fear that was chilling the sexual 
centers of my brain and the dull ache in my ribs 
made it seem like the most natural thing in the world.  
Her hands spread out over the back of my shirt, 
warming against me and she kissed me back with a 
strange hesitancy that was sweet in the extreme.  
We lay there like teenagers on a picnic blanket, 
kissing and listening to the crickets outside, trying to 
think about anything and everything except what 
was looming up ahead like a barely submerged 
iceberg.

****

When I was a little girl I imagined that I would have a 
big Barbie doll wedding with a creampuff dress, a 
horse and carriage ride to and from the church and 
my bridesmaids, who were my best friends would 
wear pink satin dresses.  When I was a teenager, I 
imagined that my father would escort me down the 
aisle of the chapel at Annapolis in his dress whites 
while I wore an ever-so sleek white cocktail dress 
and impossibly high heels. I had miraculously grown 
five inches just in time. The face of the groom 
waiting in either fantasy was directly related to the 
actor who was the top box office or the singer who 
was at the top of the charts that week.  When I was 
in medical school, I still thought wistfully about that 
arch of crossed swords a Navy bride gets to sail 
through, and my fantasy groom continued to look 
like Alec Baldwin, but he was a surgeon.

Yes, all right, I thought about Jack when I was first 
with the FBI. It's terribly embarrassing now. 

Even when we started having sex, I never imagined 
marrying Mulder. God -- I could hardly stand living 
with him.

And none of my fantasy weddings ever took place at 
the county courthouse, sandwiched in between the 
wedding of two lovesick, jailbait youngsters, one of 
whom (the female I assume) was visibly pregnant -- I 
didn't know that people still got married when that 
happened -- and an obvious Green Card couple. "Do 
NOT Take Pictures in the Waiting Room," the sign 
warned, as if anyone would want to. 

The county clerk recited the words of the civil 
ceremony without much interest. Mulder mumbled at 
the appropriate moments, and I grunted agreement. 
Warwick and Ingveld witnessed; Zippy had refused 
to go along with our pathetic scheme, as he termed 
it.   Meanwhile, standing there in her pale blue suit 
from Talbot's, was Christina Mulder.  I like to think 
that she was trying to atone for the hell that she'd 
put us through over the past year, but I suspect that 
she needed to witness the event for herself - kind of 
like making that last trip to the funeral home to view 
the body. She had to make sure that it was dead.  

Mulder, bless his pointed head, was decked out in 
the suit he'd forgotten at the dry cleaners, the only 
one that had survived George's image makeover.  
He looked slightly more festive than usual due to the 
wilting salmon-colored rose from the garden pinned 
to his lapel.  The high collar disguised the scabs, 
though he'd had to insulate the shirt with a layer of 
tissue to guard against seepage. 

I had my own wilting rose pinned to my suit as well.  
Yes, the bride wore a suit. What else would I wear?  
It was a pencil-gray suit, double-breasted with a 
slightly shorter skirt than I usually wore, which meant 
that the skirt would have been obscenely short on a 
normally proportioned woman. The thing that 
cheesed me off was that I had bought a *beautiful* 
cream silk and linen suit when I was dying from 
cancer.   I mean this was a to-die-for suit, as a 
matter of fact I had told no one that I had put a 
provision in my will that it was what I wanted to be 
buried in rather than whatever nightmare my mother 
picked out - anyway, the suit no longer fit.  I huffed 
and I puffed and I squeezed my stomach in, but the 
skirt zipper refused to go the last few inches for me.  
It also made me look like a sausage around the hips 
now that I had gained weight back.

Damnit, that was a great suit. Depression hadn't 
soured my carefully attained fashion sense.

Since I had no intentions of going back to that 
emaciated size again, I gave the suit to Ingveld, and 
it amused her if nothing else.  I was appalled that it 
actually fit Ingveld, even if the skirt was a little short.  
No one was allowed to be that long and narrow..  It 
made me wonder if the end product of all the genetic 
tampering I had witnessed in the past two years was 
to create a race of greyhound people, long and lean 
and lovely.  There was not going to be a place for 
pygmies like me in the New World Order.  But even I 
can't hate anyone as sweet as Ingveld. She made 
me go shopping with her and seemed genuinely 
upset that I was not looking for some tissue paper 
and lace fantasy.  The gray suit was a viable 
replacement for the cream one, and it had trousers 
as well which made it more valuable as a wardrobe 
staple.

Ingveld herself was turned out in a retro sixties 
sundress that showed the tattoos on her arms and 
back, and Miranda was encased in a frothy pink 
monstrosity courtesy of Grandma Mulder.  Actually, 
Miranda was the only one who seemed to be 
enjoying herself..  She babbled and squawked 
throughout the breakneck speed ceremony and 
broke into inappropriate laughter when Mulder 
jammed the ring on my finger.

 ". . . you may now kiss the bride."

Which he did with lips as sensual as a Kleenex.

Miranda squealed and let out a stream of baby 
giggles.  The clerk even smiled.

My stomach heaved and bile burned the back of my 
throat.  It was too horrible.  It was not supposed to 
be like this, he was not the man that I was supposed 
to marry, and it was not supposed to be for this 
reason.  My wedding was supposed to be traditional 
and romantic, not invested with the same level of 
intimacy as getting lunch at the McDonald's drive-
through.

Ingveld took pictures and I hoped that the film 
jammed in the camera.

We had a celebratory lunch for our non-celebration. I 
don't remember anything about it. I tuned back in 
when, in the day's crowning glory, I got volunteered 
to drive my new mother-in-law back to her hotel 
while Miranda alternately complained and cooed in 
the back seat.  At least someone was having a good 
time.

Mulder's mother was just as hard to deal with one on 
one as when Mulder was around. I'd been hoping 
that he'd provoked her like he provoked me and that 
she was a sweet little old lady in her spare time, but 
no such luck. 

Part of my dislike had to be the class difference. My 
father spent his life defending his country; for this we 
lived on base housing and frequently ate Spaghetti-
Os for five straight nights at the end of the month 
when one of the four kids had some special 
expense.  Mulder, by contrast, sweats money, it's 
more common than oxygen to him, and his family 
got the big house in Martha's Vineyard because his 
parents helped deceive a trusting public and 
participated in human experimentation. Okay, 
maybe that just funded the *summer* house.   The 
rest of the money probably came from bribes from 
sub-contractors.

For whatever reason, the woman made my skin 
crawl. As I was pulling into the driveway of the 
Marriott, she put her hand on my arm. "I'm going to 
go to Philadelphia to see an old friend tomorrow," 
she said. "I may want to show you something in a 
few days."

"What would you possibly have to show me that I'd 
want to see?"

She smiled without teeth, but there was still a threat 
present. "I'm interested in why outsiders want control 
of my granddaughter, I think you ought to be as 
well."

"Who are you going to see?"

"Come to Philadelphia when I call you," she let the 
doorman help her out of the car with the stiff 
formality of the old and well-bred and disappeared 
into the air-conditioned shelter of the hotel.

"What do you think about that?  Should we trust your 
grandma?" I asked Miranda. I could see her in the 
additional mirror Mulder had attached to the rear-
view for just such purpose.

Miranda stuffed her fist in her mouth and declined 
comment.

**** 

Mom took all parties involved out to brunch at a 
white-tablecloth restaurant in Old Town Alexandria 
just as if we'd had an orthodox (or Reform, for that 
matter) wedding.  The place wasn't particularly baby-
friendly but the maitre'd caved under Mom's icy 
control. I filled her bottle with apple juice and sat her 
on my lap to keep her involved in the festivities.  
Sitting next to me, Scully was as pale as the linen 
napkins and sipped at her orange juice with a hand 
that shook under the new burden of the rings.

Actually, I was proud of the compromise that we had 
reached regarding the rings.  Not far from the old 
apartment at Hegal Place there was an antique store 
where I had spent hours looking for the more 
obscure occult books, and I had remembered that 
they had estate jewelry.  Scully wasn't opposed to 
having someone else's wedding band and 
engagement ring provided that it wasn't Mom's.  In 
the end, Scully was the proud owner of a large blue 
topaz ring that was almost the same shade as her 
eyes and a plain gold band with someone else's 
wedding date engraved in it. April 15, 1912 to be 
exact. It seemed oddly appropriate, we didn't have 
enough lifeboats either. 

Someday, if any of this fucking mess turned out to 
be anything other than an obscene farce, I'd replace 
the ring with a new one with the correct date so she 
would be sure she was throwing an accurate symbol 
down the toilet.

While Scully drove my mother back to her hotel, I 
stewed. I needed physical activity, I was sick to 
death of being cooped up in the house and my face 
was no longer plastered in every grocery store in 
town so it was probably safe to leave. I laced up my 
sneakers and went out.

Careful of my various hurts, I jogged a couple 
blocks, working with the pain in my ribs, the pain in 
my neck and the pain in my chest that had nothing 
to do with nerve endings. The well-manicured lawns 
and gardens of the other houses seemed artificial as 
a movie set.  Were there really people living in those 
houses or soulless clones as artificial and mindless 
as the TeleTubbies?  I liked to think that my 
intelligence made me feel more than other people, 
you have to be self-aware to feel pain, right?  Not 
that I was negating the suffering of non-Mensa 
members, but wasn't intelligence necessary to 
heighten the suffering?

I reached the playground where Ralph Williams had 
been stabbed.  I stopped and stretched.  Where 
Ralph had fallen there was no plaque, no flowers, 
and no candles.  No sign that a man had taken a 
knife in the chest for my daughter and me.  And 
should Bill take Miranda away from me, Ralph would 
be dead for no reason.  I didn't think Bill would kill 
Miranda the way George would have, but I 
suspected that he'd break her spirit.

I knew that taking my gun over to the base housing 
at Bethesda and making Bill disappear was not the 
answer, but it was a nice fantasy nevertheless.

I jogged home.

Scully met me at the door with the Mooselet on her 
hip and a look of nuclear annoyance in her clear 
blue eyes.

"Where the hell have you been?" she asked.

Wait a minute. Were those rings we had put on in 
the ceremony or tiny handcuffs?

"Went for a run," I took the Mooselet who patted the 
side of my face with her fat little hands and asked 
me long and important questions in MooseSpeak.

"You could have told *someone*, left a note, sent an 
e-mail, or even hired a carrier pigeon," she snarled.

"Passenger pigeon."

"They're extinct."

"I guess that's why you didn't get a message."

The Mooselet knew I was teasing by the tone of my 
voice, but Scully wasn't as sure.  The Mooselet 
wiggled and jiggled and giggled in my arms but 
Scully glared at me and put her hands on her hips 
which made the sweat ice up on my body as the 
ambient temperature in the room took on Antarctic 
proportions.  I looked around but failed to see any 
penguins.

"In the future, if you should decide that you need to 
be elsewhere, please inform *someone*.  Someone 
with thumbs and a command of the English 
language. This means someone other than Catzilla 
or Miranda until she is older."

The Mooselet gave out an apprehensive spit bubble 
and stared at Scully as though she had grown an 
extra head.

"Sure, fine, whatever."
 
"You better shower. The lawyer will be here any 
minute," her nose wrinkled, "you smell."

****

Laura Broder appeared at five of four armed with a 
tape recorder and a briefcase.  From her voice on 
the phone I wasn't surprised that she looked young.  
Frighteningly young, even though her years in 
practice indicated that she was only a year younger 
than I was.  In her light cotton sweater and jeans, 
she looked like a college student, with long red-
brown hair falling loosely past her shoulders in a 
careless swirl that made me think about growing my 
hair again.

"Hi there," she said. "Is that Miranda?"

Sure enough, I had the Mooselet clinging to my hip 
again, I suppose as my badge of good parenting. I 
suppressed the snide "No, it's her twin Susan, but 
they're only suing for custody of Miranda," that 
bubbled in my throat and nodded.

When had I started to hate other people so much? It 
had something to do with the fact that everyone I 
met seemed to have some new way to hurt me. Or if 
they were nice like Ralph Williams I made them 
dead. But we were paying Laura Broder to be nice to 
us. Hopefully the fact that it wasn't voluntary would 
protect her from a bad end.

"Come in," I offered and reset the alarm behind her. 
We went to the dining room, which had suffered very 
little in the assault on the house. Mulder was waiting, 
idly chewing his way through a bowl of sunflower 
seeds, which were probably ruining his new caps.

"So, your folks at Arnstein Porter called me in 
because you have a custody problem. I do have a 
copy of your brother's motion, but it's not terribly 
informative, though it reads like science fiction at 
points. I read about the Roush hearings, and I 
reviewed the public record last night."

"This part did not make it into the public record. 
Roush's human experiments produced one living 
subject, Miranda.  Genetic tests revealed that she 
was created using my ova and sperm that -- that are 
genetically indistinguishable from Mulder's. Might 
have been his." Laura raised her eyebrows, but I 
continued, "The records were destroyed and were 
probably falsified in the first place. I also legally 
adopted her."

I didn't want to say anything that would upset 
Mulder, so I let him take over.

"Part of what the public didn't know about was that 
Roush's earlier experiments involved the splitting of 
preembryos to create multiple copies of the same 
genome. I had ... a number of brothers. Roush had 
access to some of their sperm and might have had 
access to mine."
 
"That helps to explain the recent newspaper stories 
about your twin."

"You wanted them to call him my dectuplet?"

That earned a sharp look. "Okay, I'll need to see the 
adoption papers, but I'll just assume for now that 
everything's in order. Even if it isn't, we're probably 
okay. They're not challenging *your* relationship to 
Miranda, Dr. Scully, because they need the blood tie 
to have any interest in her themselves. I'll have to do 
more research but I think we can do okay on Mr. 
Mulder's fatherhood if she's been living with you as 
your daughter. So, when you found out about 
Miranda you got married?"

I reddened and Mulder looked down. "Actually we 
got married this morning. Scully and I thought it 
would be a good idea, considering."

"That's not good."

Perfect, a lawyer with a talent for understatement. 

"But we need to discuss your objectives for the case. 
They are arguing that you abandoned Miranda, 
Dana, which means you aren't entitled to the normal 
presumption of fitness that parents get. Combined 
with the claim that Fox isn't really Miranda's father 
and the other attacks on your stability and fitness, 
that could be devastating. What we do now is you 
tell me everything you think they might use against 
you. Please try to be as honest as possible, the only 
way I'm any use is if I can prepare against their best 
case."

She paused and drew breath while we absorbed the 
caution. "One more thing. I notice that you use each 
other's last names. It's a charming idiosyncrasy. 
Charm is good; idiosyncrasy is not, particularly for 
two people who just married to stave off a lawsuit.. 
From now on it's Fox and Dana, even when you're 
alone. Get into the habit.  You'll need to talk to a 
number of experts and testify before the judge, and 
if you slip it will look very bad."

Mulder's face had taken on a look of horror that 
rivaled the one he'd worn when I made him 
rummage for Leonard Betts's head in the biohazard 
container.

"You let Bambi call you 'Fox,'" I reminded him. 
Broder's face whipped back and forth between us, 
trying to gauge the emotional temperature in the 
room.

"Doesn't count, she was an animal too," he said. 
"Besides, I wanted to get lai --"

He stopped and rubbed at the scars.

"Whatever," he muttered.

Laura Broder was with us all evening as we tried to 
explain all the events that had led up to this point -- 
Samantha's abduction, the multiple generations of 
experimental subjects, the Mulders that had been 
cc'd around the country, and so on. We also had to 
explain the X Files and all the tricks we'd pulled over 
the years.  Anyone with two neurons to rub together 
would bring Mulder's employment file (not to mention 
his hospitalization records) into court when trying to 
prove that we weren't fit to take care of a child.  
Mulder's employment file was enough to make 
someone hesitate before letting him take care of a 
houseplant.  We didn't bother to mention the many 
fish that had hit the sewers over the years.

Laura took it pretty well, considering.

We talked through dinner, through coffee and 
dessert, and through Miranda's bedtime. The lawyer 
didn't ask many questions, but they were always 
embarrassing when she did. She was particularly 
interested in our mistakes, the times we went 
against orders and protocol. She really didn't like the 
Roche incident (yeah, take a number).  

When the baby monitor screamed bloody murder, 
Mulder left to check on Miranda. I followed Laura's 
gaze. "While Mu -- while Fox is gone, there's 
something I want to ask you.  Are you a lawyer or a 
personal trainer?"

"I'm a lawyer?" Her uncertainty didn't make me 
particularly confident.

"Then stop watching his ass, all right? That's not part 
of your job."

She turned scarlet and hid her eyes with her hand. 
"Okay, I admit it, you got me. But cut me some slack 
-- I work with lawyers all day, it's not often I'm 
actually in the presence of a man like that.  One that 
hasn't spent the past ten years glued to a desk.  I've 
just got my nose pressed up against the glass -- I'm 
not trying to get any closer."

"Yeah, well, do your window shopping on your own 
time."

"I could not charge you for the time I spend looking," 
she joked and I smiled at her thinly. 

I really hated this whole situation -- nothing was 
under my control, I was out of my area of expertise 
in every imaginable way, and I had to make nice to 
anyone who could potentially screw me over if I 
didn't behave. This is why I became a FBI agent in 
the first place -- so I could be the one asking the 
questions and determining the answers. We needed 
Laura Broder or someone like her. But she seemed 
to want to be my friend, too, and I just wasn't 
interested or even capable of reciprocating. 
Certainly not as long as she looked at Mulder with 
that little gleam in her eye.

Wait a minute, we were married.  Should that have 
made a difference?  Should I have been more 
annoyed or less?  This was like driving in New 
Jersey without a map.

Mulder returned and we continued explaining our 
twisted history to her. We got all the way to George 
when she declared that she was completely 
overwhelmed and we'd have to finish tomorrow. I 
wanted to tell her to try living it, if she wanted to 
know what 'overwhelmed' was really like.

Iolokus IV: Res Judicata

4/

You don't want to talk
So baby shut up
And let me drink the wine from your fur tea cup
Velcro candy, sticky sweet
Make my tattoos melt in the heat
Well, I ain't no veggie
Like my flesh on the bone
Alive and lickin' on your ice cream cone
	Alice Cooper

I was lying on the bed, reading a field report from a 
barely-literate rookie who had made a royal mess 
out of working a child molester profile up in Vermont, 
when Scully came out of the bathroom wearing my 
favorite Yankees shirt and a pensive expression.

"What do you think of her?" she asked me around 
the dental floss she was rhythmically drawing 
through her teeth.

I found public dental hygiene borderline disgusting, 
and habitually shut the bathroom door to brush my 
teeth. What was the deal with that, anyway?  No 
matter how hot and heavy things had gotten in hotel 
rooms over the continental US, we'd never been big 
on sharing our grooming rituals.  I wasn't sure if I 
liked this new level of intimacy.  The next thing that 
would happen was she'd think nothing of busting into 
the bathroom to pee while I was shaving.  

"She seems to know her law."

"I mean what do you think of *her*," she prodded.

There were briars around the last word, and I wasn't 
sure what I was supposed to do to get around them. 
Sometimes the direct approach is the best.

"Your point is what?"

"She's an attractive woman."

Oh great.  Fan-fucking-tastic.   We'd been married 
less than a day, still hadn't had sex and she was 
asking me if I was interested in another woman.  If 
Scully kept up with this shit, I could be tempted to 
become interested in another woman. And Laura 
Broder was definitely do-able.

"You're tired, it's late, come to bed," I took off my 
glasses, put away the report and shut out the light. 
Feeling petulant, I flopped back into the pillows and 
took my time getting comfortable.  She snorted and 
padded back into the bathroom.

Scully takes a long time getting ready for bed. There 
are obscure rituals and incantations to the skin care 
gods. There are unguents and powders, sponges 
and brushes and things I can't begin to understand. 
She has more mud than Pigpen, though admittedly it 
looks better on her. If I had known how much work it 
took to get that perfect skin of hers, I probably 
wouldn't have fixated on it so much. 

This night, though, she lasted beyond the full spa 
treatment. I had the feeling she was waiting in the 
bathroom so that she wouldn't have to come to her 
marital bed. That annoyed me. It's not as if she was 
a real newlywed; what would she be nervous about?

I thought that I might do well to cut her a little slack. 
She'd been very calm about the whole wedding, and 
given her issues surrounding independence and 
commitment I should really be pleased with that. 
Also, we still hadn't resolved any of the outstanding 
issues surrounding my dead brothers Jason and 
George. Our next-to-last sexual encounter involved 
me playing George and her playing quiescent 
corpse, which was extreme even for us.

By the time she came creeping back into the 
bedroom I was feeling less superior and more 
sympathetic, which might have been part of her 
plan.

I could see her outlined in the faint light from the 
security perimeter that seeped through the shades. 
She was still wearing the goddamn shirt as she 
tossed back the comforter and slid into bed. I got a 
kick out of her using it as loungewear, but it left a lot 
to be desired, so to speak, when we were actually in 
bed together.

"Hey," I said softly, turning onto my stomach and 
reaching out to put a hand on her breast, "What's 
going on?"

She gave a choked chuckle, sounding like Miranda 
when she was about to spit something up. "This is 
very strange."

"I would have carried you over the threshold but I 
wasn't sure my back would hold out." 

"It doesn't matter." Her voice was back to its 
strangled huskiness, as if -- could it be? Perhaps I 
had skipped a few steps by going straight to her 
chest like a local cop's gaze. Her face was a furnace 
against my fingers but the wetness around her eyes 
hadn't yet evaporated when I touched it.

"I'm fine, Mulder," she whispered.

Liar. Suddenly the darkness was composed of 
broken glass, sharp edges everywhere and I was 
afraid I might get her sliced up if I moved wrong.

I hauled myself over until I was half on top of her, 
braced precariously on my forearms with my face 
hooked over her shoulder to whisper in her ear.

"Dana?"

"Dana?" she repeated with the exact wry 
incredulousness with which she'd greeted my first-
ever use of her Christian name. Still, her knees bent 
and her legs spread wider around me, letting me 
settle my weight more comfortably on her.

"What do you want me to do?" I was drifting on the 
open ocean that is Scully, the water choppy around 
me and no land in sight. 

Asking Scully a direct question usually only works 
when it relates to someone else's dead body, but 
she surprised me: "I want to pretend that this is my 
wedding night." Through the shirt, I could feel her 
breasts flattening against me as she struggled to 
keep her breathing even and my cock hardened in 
response.

Only Scully could ask me to pretend the truth. Surely 
she didn't want some godawful speech from me. My 
brain revolved in blood-deprived circles, the wheel 
spinning but the hamster MIA.

Reverence rather than familiarity, that had to be 
what she was after.  I guess she didn't understand 
that even in the darkest moments of our sex life, the 
ones crossing the lines between normal and deviant, 
reverence was my MO.  How could I not be reverent 
with a strange and wonderful creature like her?

I moved away and she made a non-sound, an 
indrawn breath that was the only sign she was hurt. 
Scully could probably take a bullet and not make 
more noise than that. She exhaled again when I ran 
my hand from her throat to her thighs, skimming with 
the lightest of touches over the tropical-warm 
seascape of her body.

Her forehead tasted like face cream or something.  
Her lips tasted of toothpaste. I relearned the 
contours of her face, feeling the fine invisible down 
on her cheeks against my lips.

"It's going to be all right," I said. Her breast was 
heavy and warm underneath my hand and I swirled 
my thumb around until I caught her stiffening nipple.

The mattress shifted as her body twitched. "Your 
ribs..." she slurred, but it was part of the game; she 
didn't want me to stop or she'd be pulling doctor rank 
on me.

"Don't worry about it." I let my fingers walk down the 
cotton front of the shirt until I hit the bare skin of her 
thighs. Shirt up, underwear down, and things were 
looking a lot better. She felt cooler than usual as I 
licked the undersides of her breasts and stroked my 
hands down her sides. I snagged a pillow and used 
it to lift her hips, giving me a better angle that didn't 
jog my nose. I would have liked to bury my snout in 
her, but that wasn't the kind of pain that interested 
me so I was careful, tasting the sea-salt of her flesh 
but controlling her so that she didn't surge into my 
broken cartilage.

The short grunts she made let me know that this was 
going to take a while. I moved my mouth up to the 
soft skin between her navel and the beginning of her 
pubic hair and nibbled a little.

"F--fox?" she stammered and then laughed 
nervously. I could feel the tight muscles of her 
abdomen jump underneath my lips.

"We could stick to moans and groans in bed, honey," 
I suggested and she jerked like an electrocuted frog. 
The press of her knee against my abused chest 
muscles was enough to make me regret the 
endearment even without her outraged face in the 
bad light.

"Okay--" she said in a half-voice and I felt her force 
herself to relax.

I separated her knees with my hands and bent to the 
task. It's a good thing I enjoy oral sex because my 
ever-wagging tongue was tired by the time she had 
her climax; I was about ready to ask her to fake it 
when she finally jerked, gasped and went boneless 
above me.
 
She took deep relieved breaths as I pulled myself up 
the bed to reach the headboard, lay on my back 
beside her, and let my hand stroke the hot skin of 
her belly.  After a minute, she shot me a that-was-it? 
look.

"The doctor okayed the female superior position," I 
whispered, trying to sound sly and sexy.

"That's not a position, it's a way of life," she 
whispered back. 

I wondered if we were subconsciously trying not to 
wake the baby, two doors down the hall. In any 
event she took the hint and rummaged impatiently in 
the nightstand for a condom, smoothing on the latex 
with gratifying yet finely controlled haste. She 
straddled me, lowering herself onto my cock with a 
series of grunts. Hot as a lava flow around me, she 
settled her weight on my thighs and reached forward 
to brace herself against the bed, but I caught her 
falling breasts in my hands and pushed back. Her 
arms were too short to reach all the way down so I 
was supporting her upper body, her nipples pushing 
aggressively into my palms. Supposedly the woman 
is in control in this position but I liked to watch her 
flailing for balance, liked how she was caught in my 
hands. She gave up and tossed her head back, her 
nearly unmarred throat gray in the dimness of the 
light as she surged up and down, relying on my 
hands to keep her from falling.

The beauty of having her on top of me is that I get to 
see almost everything at once -- her face lax as she 
concentrates on riding me into the ground, her hair 
brushing her shoulders like phantom kisses, her 
breasts above and around my grasping fingers. The 
dimple of her navel, the fierce wildness of hair that 
my cock disappears into, the columns of her thighs 
as they bracket my chest. It's complete visual 
overload.

With her closed down around me, and her incredible 
blue eyes dipping down to meet mine, I thought I 
could die right then and there from sheer animal 
pleasure.  Maybe that piece of paper, that pair of 
rings was going to take the acid out of our 
relationship, maybe she would stop hating me for 
making love to her.  With a jolt, she flung herself 
forward, until her face was a millimeter from mine, 
and the look in her eyes in the darkness of the room 
wasn't entirely sane.  Her elbows were locked on 
either side of my head; her breasts smashed up 
against my chest like hot water balloons.  She 
gasped as she slammed down and around me, the 
hair clinging wet and stringy to her face with effort's 
sweat.  I swirled my hands over the glazed surface 
of her back, skimming over the place I knew her 
tattoo was, although I couldn't feel a difference in the 
fine calfskin of her back.  Her lips were barely 
grazing mine, her fingers clutching my skull through 
my hair, as though she could force something out of 
me by manually liquefying my brain.

"You are - " I started to say but she cut me off, her 
mouth hard on mine as resuscitation.

Locked inside her, never intending to leave, I let her 
squeeze around me, providing the last necessary bit 
of unbelievable white-hot sensation that sent my 
hips towards the ceiling and my cock jetting out a 
couple weeks' worth of hot semen frustration into 
her.  My hands grabbed her hips and pulled her 
down tighter onto me. She moaned into my mouth 
and started to shimmy around me as her climax 
flared along her hot little body.  I clutched at her 
trying to keep her from flinging herself off me like a 
rider on a mechanical bull.  Finally, she ground to a 
halt and flowed onto my chest, any worries about my 
cracked ribs forgotten.

Rubbing the skin on her back, pushing her hair away 
from her face, I looked down at her beautiful little 
face crushed against my chest, her delicate Roman 
nose bent against my breastbone.  Unexpectedly, 
one eye opened and gave me a little flash of 
mischief that hadn't been there for weeks.

"Whoa," she muttered and kissed my left nipple.

"You know what they say - absence makes the 
heart grow fonder."

"I thought it was absence makes the dick grow 
harder."

"Talking dirty to me? You're turning me on."

"Mulder, Diet Coke turns you on."

There wasn't much of an answer for that so I just put 
my fingers over her lips.

"It's late.  Go to sleep." I warned in the same voice I 
used on the Mooselet for the same reason.

She snorted into my chest and did, on top of me, 
and although it made my bones ache, I didn't move, 
just listened to the barely audible pattern of her 
breathing until I was lulled asleep myself.

***
 
The birds were unnaturally loud that morning, and 
for a change, I awoke first. The light seeping past 
the shades was blue-gray, indicating that it was not 
much past six and we had hours until we had to go 
face Bill and the judge. Still sleepy and languorous, I 
huddled down in the sheets, up against Mulder's 
warm body and didn't want to get up.  

I hate courtrooms, I hate trials, and I especially 
hated that I was going to be the one on trial.  Mulder 
must have been more used to the concept, having 
been on trial in one form or another most of his adult 
life, and he slumbered on, his breath faintly whistling 
through his damaged nose.  I wondered if he'd 
deviated his septum, as this noise was a recent 
development.  I picked up my head and looked down 
at him, examining the line of his nose to see if it 
lacked more symmetry than usual.  He was sprawled 
on his back, one hand curled limply against his 
chest, and the other one flailing off into the vastness 
of the sheets like a postmodern St. Sebastian with 
bruises replacing arrows.  For once all the points 
and angles had rounded out on his face and he 
looked almost peaceful.  That was the one time that 
I could look down at Mulder and admit that part of 
me could love him - but only when he was asleep 
and not getting either or both of us into trouble. 
There was a time that I thought that Mulder would 
have been perfect if he didn't talk.  Then I met his 
mute twin Emerson and I realized that he'd only type 
or sign his patented flippant insanity. 

Feeling chilled in my head and in my body, I curled 
tighter around him, soaking up the warmth from his 
skin.  There had been times in the not-so-distant 
past that I thought the only way I kept any measure 
of empathy with the human race was by absorbing it 
from his body.  I nuzzled closer, smelling the rich 
yeasty smell of the sex we'd had overlaying his 
usual book and body smell.  I had kept one of his 
shirts during the dismal six months that we'd been 
apart and slept with my face in it more nights than 
not, until my own smell permeated the fabric and I'd 
slept in it instead. He grunted and twitched in his 
sleep, moving closer to the shore of wakefulness.  
Strange that before we'd become lovers I'd heard 
him at night, calling out at whatever midnight horror 
movie ran through his brain while he slept, but the 
nights that he slept with me he only murmured non-
sentences in what sounded like a tone of 
aggravation.  I imagined that he argued with me as 
strenuously asleep as he did awake.

Sliding my hand over the dry smoothness of his 
chest, tangling my new rings in the soft hair that 
grew like an afterthought of a secondary sex 
characteristic, I felt his heart beat against my palm, 
slow as a sleeping bee's buzz.  Under my hand, the 
flat and useless nipple tightened from the 
stimulation.  Intrigued, I flicked my fingernail against 
it and watched the darker skin wrinkle in dismay at 
being disturbed.  He whuffed deep in his throat and 
stirred a bit.  Moving downwards, I stroked the flat 
length of his stomach, counting the ribs and feeling 
the hard muscles of his abdomen move as he 
breathed.  It was sheer vanity that made him do all 
those sit-ups in the morning, run those miles, the 
only thing he'd ever tended with care before Miranda 
had been his own body - and I had to admit that he 
did a good job.  The skin under his navel was soft as 
the baby's and cool, warming as I moved my hand 
along the faint line of fur that ran from his navel to 
genitals.  Under my hand, the skin twitched, and the 
sleep-dazed length of his cock dragged itself 
drunkenly upright.

I'd been awakened by his mouth between my legs 
more often than I could have imagined, and it 
seemed that this was an opportunity to reciprocate.

Slinking underneath the sheets, I let my shoulders 
make a tent as I knelt next to his hips.  I dragged my 
fingers across the slightly moist skin of his cock and 
felt the pulsing blood rise up to meet me. Leisurely, I 
licked at him, feeling the jump and sway against my 
lips and tongue.  There was something about going 
down on him while he was mostly asleep that 
appealed to me.  Besides, we were married now and 
if one were to believe the popular press our sex life 
was rapidly approaching the end of its shelf life.  
Finally, I peeled my lips over my teeth and engulfed 
him with my mouth.  Funny how his cock that always 
felt like an endless ivory pole capable of elongating 
to unbelievable lengths inside of me during 
intercourse took on more manageable and fleshy 
characteristics in my mouth.

Outside the hot, fermenting tent of sheets, came a 
small, surprised sound followed by a low chuckle.

"Oh Laura, what if Scully finds out?"

I choked and started to laugh.

I had to pull my mouth off before I castrated him.  

With the sheets still over my head I sat up and 
laughed, laughed until my diaphragm was sore and 
my eyes were watering.  At the head of the bed I 
could hear that Mulder was equally helpless at the 
effects of his own wit.  When I had managed to get 
myself back under control and could breathe again, I 
seized his cock at the base and slid my mouth over 
it again.  The laughing stopped when I started 
sucking at him in earnest, sliding my mouth and 
tongue up and down over his shaft in the rhythm that 
I knew he liked.  He groaned, and his hand caught 
my shoulder, fingers tightening in synch with my 
movements.  While I tightened my fingers at the 
base of his cock, he pulled back the sheets from our 
bodies and the weak morning light made me squint.  
His hands were shaking when he pushed my hair 
away from my face.  I know he likes to watch, it must 
come out of his video obsession. I looked up at him 
and saw that he had gone soft-mouthed with bliss 
over the scabbed battlefield of his throat, and his 
eyes glimmered amber in the fresh light. Our eyes 
caught and latched and the connection was 
shockingly lewd, staring at him unblinking as I 
moved up and down, my saliva dripping onto his 
balls as he watched.  I was getting wet myself just 
from looking back at him.

"Oh God," he husked and flopped back into the 
pillows while his hips urged me into a faster and 
more frantic tempo.

He groaned and surged up, shuddering and filling 
my mouth with the saltwater/sweet taste of his jism.

He subsided weakly, breathing hard out of his 
beaten throat.

"Are you trying to kill me?"

"Not unless I'm going to be a wealthy widow."

"I guess I'll be alive for a good long time yet."

I sat up and scooted up to the head of the bed, 
trying to wipe off my lips as discreetly as possible. 
But Mulder caught my chin and swept his thumb 
across my mouth which would have been sexy, if I 
hadn't seen him do it to Miranda a thousand times.  I 
settled back against the headboard and Mulder laid 
his head back onto my chest, his body nestled 
between my knees, my hands draped over his 
shoulders and onto his chest.  He was holding my 
hands and examining them as if for powder burns.

"How do you feel?" he asked.

"Afraid," I admitted, "if this doesn't work, they'll take 
Miranda away from you.  It will be all my fault."

"They won't."

"I wish I had your optimism."

"Tenacity, it's all in the tenacity."

His chest hitched as though he was about to speak, 
but he thought better of it and relaxed again.  I 
rubbed my foot up and down his hipbone and tried 
not to think.  This was the kind of quiet moment that 
we never had much opportunity for. Stolen humping 
in hotel rooms, angry sex over long weekends, 
stealth fucking in bathrooms.    What was lawful 
sexual congress going to be like?  Part of the charm 
had been the fact that the affair had been forbidden.  
He was nominally my superior and *thou shall not 
fuck thy superior agent* was pretty well carved in 
stone.  When I think about it, that Bureau policy was 
the one that we had adhered the longest.

While I sulked, Mulder's dangerous hands swept up 
and down my thighs, my calves and my feet like 
feather fans while the weight of his head pressed 
into my chest like a curse from a Grimm's fairy tale.  
With my pelvis pressed firmly into his spine, I could 
probably bring myself off with a few well-timed 
undulations.  There was so much aroused blood 
pooled around my pudenda that I was getting 
lightheaded.  He was digging his thumb into the arch 
of my foot, making me grumble under my breath.  He 
started wiggling my toes one after another while 
chanting deep in a chuckle-thickened throat.

"This little alien went to market, this little alien stayed 
home . . . "

I giggled and kicked my foot free of his tickling grip.  
Mulder snickered and rolled over, pushing me down 
against the mattress.  His morning beard scored the 
skin on my shoulder and neck, making me laugh 
harder as that tickled as well.  I rolled underneath 
him, hooking my feet behind his knees.

"Ticklish much Gopher-girl?"

"Make my day Gopher-boy," I snorted into the 
crinkled cartilage of his ear.

Hands gripped my waist, pinning me down with 
tolerant amusement that was about as threatening 
as one of Miranda's toys.  He breathed into my ear 
with a low growl that I assumed was the mating call 
of the giant mutant gopher.  If it could only always be 
like this, I wouldn't have had such reservations about 
the entire matrimonial state.  I pulled the speaker 
plug in my head and the critical voice went silent and 
all I could hear was my own heartbeat while Mulder's 
pulse thrummed in counterpoint.  

I sighed and pulled myself up against the ropy 
hardness of his torso, gathering him into my arms 
and pulling him gently down against me, rubbing, 
sticky with sweat and other body secretions.  I ran 
my hands up and down the hard bridge of his back, 
the beads of his spine vibrating against my fingers, 
the unfamiliar metal of the rings jarring my 
phalanges.   He sighed and purred under my touch, 
arching his back like Catzilla, but grinding the 
stiffening length of his cock up against my thigh.  
The scratchy skin on his face scraped my breasts 
when he began to savage at my wide-awake nipples 
that felt hard enough to scratch glass. He leaned 
away to grab a condom, swift as a snake taking a 
mouse.  I moaned and his hands impatiently parted 
my thighs, my head fell back into the hot pillow and 
my moan tightened into a growl when he finally 
pushed inside me.

God.
 
No one would understand, the worse the situation 
got, the better the sex got.  It was like Hansel and 
Gretel clinging together in the witch's oven in a 
pornographic movie. 

My quad muscles started to shake.

"Your ribs-" I hissed.

"It's a good hurt," he said in a swirl of amusement 
and lust.

I arched up against him, trying to draw him in 
deeper, to fill me to oblivion, pulling as gently as 
possible on his still-bruised torso.  He covered my 
face and eyes with hard lipped kisses almost 
stinging my skin.  While he kissed me he slid into me 
with a slow carefulness that made me whine with 
need.  His hands pressed my hair into the pillow, so 
I couldn't move my head away from him.  His mouth 
flowed against mine while his cock moved with 
teasing slowness inside me.  I whined like Miranda 
grasping after a toy or a sweet and he looked down 
at me with a dazed indulgence which was nothing 
like the indulgent look he wore when she made the 
same noise.  

The restless motes in his eyes pulled me in like 
quickmud in a swamp.  I fell into the hot forest inside 
his head, seeing shapes and things moving through 
the green and brown darkness and I saw my own 
eyes looking back at me. Don't hurt me, love me, 
make it turn out all right, make it all go away.  At 
least for the next ten minutes.  I think there were 
tears building up in our eyes and I couldn't tell 
whose.  I tried to turn my head but his hands 
prevented me, and the deep stroking inside was 
making it harder to think than usual.  I was gasping 
and squeezing hard handfuls of the bedclothes so I 
wouldn't hurt him any more, he glided in and out, 
somehow managing to graze my clit on each and 
every stroke.  Building pressure, building pleasure 
radiating out from my pelvis until my toes curled and 
my breathing fluttered like a trapped moth.  In me 
and around me and through me running like mercury 
through my nerves.  

And I looked back into the things creeping through 
the space behind his eyes, I saw his lips form the 
words that I didn't want to see, right before those lips 
closed with sharpening teeth on the spot on my 
shoulder that never failed to send me into oblivion.  
But I didn't go alone, Mulder came with me, shaking 
and crashing into my body.  I held his head against 
my shoulder and listened to our raw breathing in the 
quiet morning room.  We lay that way until the 
trembling stopped, and fell asleep again while he 
was still inside me.

Years later, I staggered to the bathroom and had a 
quick shower. I still didn't know what I was supposed 
to wear to a pretrial conference, and I settled on a 
pantsuit that, I noted with some pleasure, fit much 
better than it had a few weeks ago. Say what you 
will about Mulder, he keeps me fed.

Iolokus IV: Res Judicata
5/

There's a reason for your silence tonight
There's a reason for my fear
There's a reason for the violence tonight
There's a great decision here
I am waiting in the calm before the storm.
When it comes down to this
You never seemed so lonely
Just like the one with an ice cream smile.
	Big Country

Laura rode with us to court. She kept up a running 
stream of commentary, explaining how a platoon of 
strangers was going to march through our lives to 
evaluate them for suitability. She wanted me to get a 
Thirtysomething makeover, blue jeans and sneakers 
and ponytails; mommies seemingly do not wear 
tattoo-baring tank tops, at least not when they're 
being scrutinized by psychologists and social 
workers.  Apparently mommies don't sweat in 
Virginia.

We arrived at the new courthouse downtown with 
only minutes to spare, and had to surrender our 
sidearms before we were allowed in. We weren't 
acting in our federal capacity, and so Virginia was 
unwilling to let us participate in any shootouts that 
developed. If Ingveld hadn't found the right corridor, 
we would have been late for our own high-tech 
lynching.

That first morning in court was anticlimactic in the 
extreme. We listened without comprehension as our 
lawyer and Bill's traded multisyllabic near-insults and 
spouted names of court cases with the ease of 
Mulder listing recorded UFO sightings. I'm not sure 
why we were even present except as live exhibits.

Laura had wanted me to testify about the 
circumstances of Miranda's short stay in Montana 
with Mulder's twin Emerson and Emerson's wife -- I'd 
left her there when I could no longer deal with the 
two of us. God knows I would have left myself there 
too if I could have gotten away with it, but that was 
beside the point now. So there I was in my gray 
wedding suit, stiff and anxious and terrified that I 
was going to vomit all over the court reporter. But 
the judge refused to hear me. I didn't understand 
what had happened until Laura came back to us, her 
skin pulled tightly across her face like a victim of 
excessive plastic surgery, and informed us that he'd 
ruled that I'd abandoned Miranda as a matter of law, 
without needing testimony about my reasons. 
Miranda couldn't comprehend those reasons at the 
time; why should the law?

We sat like stumps in a clear-cut forest and waited 
for her to finish up. The second time she returned 
she was much happier.   Mulder had won his 
separate battle to be declared Miranda's lawful 
father, apparently because Bill didn't really have a 
good alternate candidate; the most likely sperm 
donors were all dead, and so the court wanted to 
assign her a living natural parent. Especially since 
I'd ditched her.

Then we had to agree to a schedule of home visits, 
interviews together and separately, appointments for 
experts to watch us take care of Miranda and grade 
us on our performance, appointments for Bill and 
Tara to meet Miranda and see how she reacted to 
them. I hoped she bit their smug faces off. 

As with any court case, this took an incredibly long 
time. Or maybe it was just the renewed depression 
that stretched time out like Eugene Tooms. When 
we got out, the pounding summer sun was sliding 
down towards the horizon, to match my mood. I let 
Mulder drive back. He was better used to Miranda's 
howls and *he'd* been vindicated by the judge.

I would have headed straight for the liquor cabinet, 
but I was queasy enough without alcohol.  Instead, 
shaking and sweating, I rushed into the downstairs 
bathroom and disposed of the undigested parts of a 
lunch I never should have eaten.

After I dried my hands and fixed my make-up, I 
found Mulder lurking near the door with a 
speculative look on his face.

"You all right?"

"I'm fine," I reassured him.

Mulder grunted and took Miranda upstairs to get her 
changed.  I kicked my shoes off and shuffled out 
onto the porch in my stockings.  The least thing I 
had to worry about at that moment was runners.  I 
sat on the glider and looked out over the bee-buzzed 
and dreamy early evening backyard.  The scars from 
the Giant Mutant Gophers had been filled in with 
topsoil and planted with impatiens (the official flower 
of Casa Mulder), giving undulating lines of color 
spreading out from the house to the edges of the 
yard.  The roses that climbed up the side of the 
porch had come with the house and the main 
branches of the bushes were as big around as my 
forearm. There was no use crying to the roses that 
the judge said that I no longer was due the rights of 
a parent.  At the same time Mulder (freer of 
murdering pedophiles and willing to have holes 
drilled in his own skull) was.  Some things are 
beyond ironic.

Between Leonard Betts and George Naxos I 
changed into someone that I didn't recognize - and 
someone that I wouldn't have wanted to spend any 
time with.

"I have to go to the city.  To see what the Gunmen 
have found out about Laura." Mulder said from the 
shadow of the house.

The back yard was steaming like a jungle and I 
wondered what was stealthily slipping through the 
overgrown bushes.  I needed to call a landscaping 
outfit. The back yard wasn't fit for Miranda to play in.  
She needed a sandbox and a swingset, and a little 
house to hide from the grown-ups in.  She needed a 
thick lawn to cushion her tumbles, where she could 
run, chase butterflies, blow bubbles and build a 
snowman in Virginia' s rare but not unheard-of 
snows.  All the things that I'd never had in the 
utilitarian base housing.  Maybe a pond with frogs to 
catch and big, lazy carp to overfeed, and a tire 
swing. And a big fence full of sensors to keep the kid 
in and the monsters out.  Maybe if the case went 
well I'd make the call. So much was depending on 
convincing the judge that we could make Miranda 
safe from me. God, I had spent the past six years of 
my life trying to make the country safe for truth, 
justice, and the American way, and my reward was 
that I had turned into one of the monsters.  

I'd watched a child of mine die and felt only an 
intellectual frustration because I hadn't been able to 
solve her medical problem.  I'd taken out my 
frustration on Mulder's mind and body afterwards. I 
had set fire to the end result of experimentation on 
my ova - I couldn't even think of the twisted 
mutations as children - and I'd have to defend my 
position to God about that later on. Again, I'd used 
Mulder as my willing whipping boy.  Was I really 
going to be able to recite fairy tales after this?  Could 
I tell a child that Baba Yaga wasn't going to eat her 
or that Sleeping Beauty could be revived with a kiss 
if she was in a deep coma with no indication of brain 
activity and the best thing to do was see if she had a 
donor card?

I just couldn't see myself as a cuddly, comforting 
mommy the way that my mother had been.  I 
couldn't tell a child that everything was going to be 
all right when there are pedophiles, smallpox, killer 
bees carrying viruses, Ebola, pollution, SUV's, and 
dangerous men in dark suits to contend with.

But Mulder could.  He had the nurturing routine 
down cold - and it fit him as well as his boxer briefs 
did.  And, as much as I hated to admit it, it was 
equally as attractive.  The only female that you don't 
mind seeing in your lover's arms is his baby 
daughter.

"Dana?" 

I was still so unused to hearing my first name in his 
voice that I looked up after the third repetition.  

"Are you all right?" he asked.

I managed a wry smile.

"Yes, you must go and make sure that we haven't 
gotten fucked over once again and that Laura is 
exactly as advertised - an earnest young family 
lawyer and not another minion of darkness."

I stood up and shuffled barefoot over to the door 
where he loomed in the darkness.  Barefoot, the top 
of my head barely reached his shoulder, but I was 
still able to put my hand on the center of his chest. 
Through the wear-wrinkled cotton of his shirt, I could 
feel his heart beating through the flesh and bone 
casing.  This calmed me somewhat.

"Go ahead, we'll be fine."

In an awkward, bobbing motion that showed me the 
gangly over-bright teenager he had been, he bent 
down and gave me a quick kiss.  My momentary 
surprise evaporated after I remembered that we 
were, after all, married now and such domestic 
expressions of affection were considered normal.

Shit.  Normal.  What a joke.

****

Scully being passive is not unlike a shift in the 
barometer before a major storm front comes 
through.  Although we'd had an appallingly wet 
spring, early summer storms are not uncommon 
around the Potomac.  The sky around the Capitol 
looked like one of the psychedelic light shows that 
accompanied Grateful Dead concerts.  In a funny 
way, I missed Dead shows.  A couple nights a year I 
could put on a t-shirt and melt into an amorphous 
contact high of happiness.  I wasn't crazy about the 
music or the drug culture; I just liked being an 
anonymous part of an entity for a few hours.  
Deadheads, like Trekkers, are an incredibly 
*pleasant* subculture.  I'd take a long bus trip with a 
group of Deadheads or Trekkers over conspiracy 
theorists any day of the week.  The food was 
generally better too.

Just to underscore the theme of predeterminism that 
was pervading my life like the smell of urine in a 
Manhattan summer, Langley was wearing a dancing 
bear t-shirt and Frohike was sporting an IDIC button 
on his work vest when I rolled into conspiracy central 
that evening.

It occurred to me that the Lone Gunmen's war room 
wasn't a family-friendly place.  Standing in the 
computer-monitor-lit darkness, I could still make out 
half a dozen objects small enough to choke a baby 
and a host of unprotected electrical outlets.  Not to 
mention that the caseless server with the blinking 
lights and running processors looked like it had great 
potential to have Teletubby bodies shoved into the 
works.  AGAIN!  Babies confounded technology on a 
regular basis.  Miranda had already figured out that 
the rubber bands that I had wound around the knobs 
on the lower cabinets of the kitchen would break if 
enough force were applied.  This meant that she had 
open access to the cleaning supplies underneath the 
sink until I had figured out her MO and replaced the 
rubber bands with genuine toddler locks.  Now *I* 
couldn't get the cabinets open. Yet another reason 
to keep Scully around.

I'd have to lock down all my bookmarks when 
Miranda got tall enough to reach a keyboard.  
Actually, I'd have to lock them down that night since 
Scully was tall enough.

"Your lawyer's clean," Langley announced and 
looked at me from over his glasses, which were pink 
with diamond rhinestones for some reason.

"About the only connection she has with Roush is 
the fact that she used their brand of birth control pill 
when she was in college.  Must have been the 
standard issue for the Ivy League dispensaries," 
Byers finished, "but I consider that an extremely 
tenuous link - more than six degrees of separation."

"She's a legal babe," Frohike added with one of his 
more lecherous smiles.

Unaccountably, I was annoyed and shoved my 
hands in my pockets.

"Speaking of babes," Langley moved a little closer to 
me, "we have a general net search run on your 
name as part of our daily server routine."

"How thoughtful."

"We received information from the database on the 
Arlington County server that a marriage certificate 
was issued to you and one Dana Katherine Scully, 
MD."

"Not that we were surprised," Frohike added, fiddling 
with a keyboard until the bare Oracle database fields 
from the courthouse server were displayed like 
bones in a filleted fish, "you've been heading that 
way for years with the grace and skill of that downhill 
skier on the 'agony of defeat' segment of Wide World 
of Sports."

"You could have told us," Byers chimed in with his 
customary gentle tones.

"It's none of your business," my voice came out like 
chipped ice,  "it happened because of the custody 
battle over Miranda."

"Mulder, you should quit deluding yourself.  You've 
had it bad for her for years," Frohike said, "Do you 
want copies of your changed tax status forms?"

My heart was banging around in my chest like a 
loose filter on an air conditioner.

"I want whatever additional information you have 
about Roush.  I have to get back home."

"What's the matter, the wifey not letting you out at 
night?" Langley mocked.

The banging got louder as the AC in my chest went 
into Antarctic mode.

"I guess this means that the Red Dwarf marathons 
are over." Frohike said with a sad shake of his head, 
"what a shame, I just got the latest transferred over 
to VHS format."

"We would have thrown you a bachelor party," Byers 
handed me a sheaf of papers, "there's not much new 
here.  Just some additional detail like telephone 
numbers and e-mail addresses for the BioQuest 
staff."

I realized that they had effectively surrounded me in 
the dark and dirty little room.  I wanted to be back 
home with Scully's stupid throw pillows and scented 
candles instead of this dingy burrow.  Underneath 
my wrinkled shirt, I could feel agitated sweat 
condense on my skin.

"Right.  Thanks."

I took the papers and fled to the steaming street.  
The watery air clogged my lungs and the now-dark 
sky had taken on the gouty complexion it gets before 
the rain comes like the wrath of God.  I stared at the 
monstrous sky over the Washington monument 
which looked it was going to lance the swollen 
clouds.  Jeez, even the sky looked evil that night.  
Rubbernecking at the view probably saved my life. I 
clicked Scully's little gadget that unlocks the car and 
flashes the lights but I was still staring at the sky 
when the car exploded, knocking me to the ground 
like a doll brushed by a giant's shoe.

The printed pages fluttered the dirty pavement like 
oversized snowflakes as the Ford burned away like 
a backyard barbecue.  I believe in spontaneous 
human combustion but not spontaneous automotive 
combustion.  At least they shouldn't combust when 
the internal combustion engine is not running.  
Damn Henry Ford anyway.  Ford: "Found On Road 
Dead - Fix Or Repair Daily". Fox On Road Dead.  
Had I actually been in the car, Miranda would have, 
essentially, been an orphan.  I doubted that the 
judge would have granted Scully even temporary 
custody after he had decided that she had 
abandoned Miranda in Montana.

While the heat from the fire tongued my face, I 
resolved to be more careful with my driving.  Then I 
sat up on the pavement, pulled out my trusty 
cellphone and dialed Triple A, 911, and the voice 
mail of my insurance agent in that order. Then I sat 
on the pavement and waited for the cavalry to arrive, 
making one last call.

"Hi honey, I blew up your car."

****

Miranda was cooing along to Trout Fishing in 
America's rendition of "The Window" on the one of 
her kiddie tapes I'd pulled out of her baby stereo in 
her room.  It was raining; big fat early summer 
raindrops a bucketful of water each pounded the 
Outback.  I pulled up at the scene of the crime, 
identifying it by the flashing red and blue of DC's 
finest, and the flashing yellow of Buddy's Towing 
Service flatbed.  My car looked like a marshmallow 
that had been left in the fire too long.  Plastic had 
melted into the soggy asphalt of the street, the paint 
was scorched away, and the chassis looked like it 
had gone through a garbage disposal.  The driver's 
seat was a distant memory.  Even without much 
explosives expertise I could tell that the blast began 
there, brushing glass away like cobwebs and 
pushing metal out into a giant blackened orchid.  If 
Mulder had sat down -- I'd seen a few of the 
Unabomber's victims, I'd worked on some Mafia 
types who hadn't been able to adhere to witness 
protection guidelines, and I was quite able to 
imagine what would have happened to his too, too 
sullied flesh.

Therefore, I made myself concentrate on the car.  
That topic allowed annoyance to fill the hole that 
terror had just bored through me.  I was going to 
have to go through the whole paperwork dance with 
the insurance company and we were down to one 
car during the interim.  At least we had racked up 
enough frequent driver points with Lariat over the 
years to rent a Porsche Boxer for a month.  Damn..  
I couldn't get a baby seat in a Boxer.  I had an 
unsettled-stomach feeling that there was a minivan 
looming on the horizon.  The station wagon was bad 
enough, but a minivan . . .

Mulder opened the passenger side door and 
collapsed wetly onto the seat.  From the back seat 
Miranda started a running commentary to the world 
at large.  I'd had her down for the night and had to 
bundle her up in a blanket and shove her into the car 
seat in the rain, which had done nothing for my black 
mood.  Ingveld and Warwick had been spooned 
together on his bed like babes in the woods and I 
didn't have the heartlessness to roust them out of 
bed when I was capable of handling this myself.  
Almost.  My hands were white on the wheel.

"Da da da Lee Da.  Nah?" Miranda asked.

"I blew up your mommy's car," Mulder told her, 
turning around in the seat to poke her in the fat 
pouch of her belly.

"Voon?" she asked and her eyes rounded, 
impressed. 

"Voon." He agreed.

"M -- Fox, she'll never learn to speak properly if you 
talk baby talk back to her," I snapped, feeling a little 
rattled at the fact that he had referred to me as 
Miranda's 'mommy'.

"You weren't carrying any plastique under your seat, 
were you?" he asked and turned back around.

"Not this week, no.  I might have had a flat fix 
aerosol can and ice melt spray, but my cargo of 
accelerants was low." I pulled out and began to drive 
home.

Gradually the red, blue, and yellow lights faded and 
were replaced by the cool gold lights of government.

"Zen I azzume zat it waz a bim," he said in the worst 
Inspector Clouseau impersonation I had ever been 
unfortunate enough to experience.

"Bomb?"

"B-B-B-B-B 
AhAhAhAhAhAhAhAhAhAhAhAhMMMMMM !" 
Miranda enthused from the baby seat.

"Oh shhhhhh - sugar, M --" I had to stop to breathe, 
between the baby and the forced renaming I was 
stuttering like the shyest kid in first grade. "Taking us 
to court isn't bad enough, they have to blow us up as 
well?  Isn't that, pardon the pun, overkill?"

"She shouldn't be doing that yet - she shouldn't be 
mimicking words for at least three more months."

"MULDER!  Someone has tried to kill you and NOW 
IS NOT THE TIME TO DO THE PROUD DADDY 
ROUTINE!"

"Why do you assume they were trying to kill me? It's 
your car," he pointed out, leaning through the gap 
between the front seats in an extremely dangerous 
manner so that he could continue to pay more 
attention to Miranda than to me.

"Which you were driving at the time. And with the 
court's ruling today, getting rid of you would be 
sufficient to get Miranda handed over completely 
aboveboard. Maybe they've decided that kidnapping 
causes such a fuss that it's worth the effort to do it 
legally."

"Bahm bahm baaaahhhmmmmm!" Miranda 
continued, thumping her fat pink fists on the bar of 
her baby seat.
 
"What was it?" Mulder asked her.

"Bahm!"

"Who loves the Mooselet?"

"DA! Lee! CAT!"

"BAHM!" she added a moment later.

At a red light, I put my face down on the steering 
wheel.  I had not come out on a rainy night with a 
baby in the back seat after hearing that my car had 
exploded and me braless in sweatpants and one of 
Mulder's T-shirts to have to listen to the infant 
explosion chorus at full volume from the back and 
passenger seats.  There was a serious lack of 
sobriety about the whole enterprise.  I knew I wasn't 
over-reacting.  This would have been annoying in 
any state other than my post-abduction coma.

Miranda giggled herself asleep before we crossed 
the river.  I let Mulder get her out of the car seat and 
watched her sleeping, deflated rubber balloon face 
disappear upstairs over the dark fabric of his T-
shirted shoulder.  I went into the kitchen and found 
solace with Cherry Garcia and a Pop Tart.  When 
Mulder finally loped in, he grabbed a spoon before 
sitting in the chair across from me.  He correctly 
interpreted the glacial quality of my silence and 
poked his spoon into the carton of ice cream as well 
in a companionable silence that we hadn't 
experienced in months.

"The social workers and the psychologists are 
coming tomorrow."

He looked up at me and his rain-flattened hair 
flopped across his forehead.

"You're nervous."

"Apprehensive."

"You want to do everything right, score a perfect 
hundred on the test, get the Summa Cum Laude in 
parenting."

I shouldn't have been surprised, he'd gotten his 
psych degree from Oxford, not from a Cracker Jack 
box, and we had known each other for over six 
years.  I just thought that I had my apple-polishing 
obsession under control these days.  I must have 
made some kind of face because he gave me one of 
his special edition boyish smiles out from under his 
hair before he reached over and ran the cool bottom 
of the spoon over my bottom lip.  My thighs shook 
inside the warm cocoon of the sweatpants.  Mulder 
slid out of his chair and around behind me, his 
fingers were cold from the ice cream and my nipples 
jumped to as his hands moved around to cup my 
breasts, pinching me with practiced skill.  His breath 
was warm against my ear as his ice-cream sticky 
tongue lapped at my earlobe, circled my ear canal, 
nipped behind my ear and pulled at my earring until 
a tiny spark of pain/pleasure made me shudder.

"You know we really should get some sleep, it's 
been a *long* day," he growled.

I knew that.  I also knew how long since he was 
rubbing his pelvis into my back between the rungs of 
the Ikea chair.  There was melted ice cream on my 
fingers but I laced them through his soft hair so I 
could pull his mouth down on mine, he tasted of 
cherries and vanilla over his usual un-nameable 
coffee mocha Mulder flavor.  His teeth were cool as 
glass against mine and I sucked on his lips as his 
now-warm fingers headed south underneath my 
sweatpants until he had the heel of his hand against 
my pelvic bone and his fingers where I was melting 
like the ice cream.

"We shouldn't do this," I murmured into his carotid 
artery and my teeth scraped over the shadow 
stubble there.

"Old boring married folk don't do things like this," he 
muttered back.

The world swirled for a second and the tabletop was 
hard underneath my back.  I was so stunned by the 
fact that he had been able to lift me that the fact that 
he was pulling my sweats down over my hips was 
almost incidental.  Once my panties had landed near 
the refrigerator and the t-shirt was wadded up 
underneath my arms, he looked down with a sly and 
self-satisfied expression.  I was spread out on the 
table like cookie dough waiting to be cut, gripping 
the sides of the table that wobbled threateningly on 
its center support.  Thank God Ingveld and Warwick 
were notoriously heavy sleepers.  The sly smile 
deepened into a smirk as his right hand dipped 
down into the carton of melting ice cream.

"Do that and you're a dead man, Fox Mulder."

"Who wants to live forever?"

The ice cream was cold on my breasts, but not 
painfully so. Nevertheless, I did wiggle and squirm 
as he continued to drizzle the sticky goo all over my 
torso.  Bits of cherry, darker than my darkest lipstick 
speckled the liquid that was beginning to run down 
my sides and onto the tabletop.  Grinning, he leaned 
down and began to lick the ice cream from my skin 
with short cat-like laps of his entirely too-talented 
tongue.  I continued to grip the table to keep both of 
us from landing on the floor, even though my back 
arched and I groaned low in my throat as he cleaned 
my collarbones, breasts, nipples, and delved into my 
navel to retrieve a few flecks of cherry.

"I'm going to kill you." I hissed.

"I'm counting on it," he mumbled into my belly and 
pressed my legs open with his own.

My inner thighs scraped against the denim of his 
jeans as he moved and I caught my breath before 
he painted a line of ice cream over my lips and 
licked that off as well.  While his tongue darted over 
and into my lips, he scrabbled somewhere on the 
table and I wasn't shocked when I felt the coldness 
of the ice cream pressed up and inside me.  I 
squeaked into his mouth and he laughed back into 
mine while his long fingers anointed me as far up as 
they would go.

"Mulder!" I warned.

He pulled up his head and his eyes were green with 
mischief.

"This is the only way that I get your cherry."

After the cold of the ice cream his mouth was almost 
unbearably hot on my nether regions. He sucked at 
my clitoris, making me choke back a series of wails, 
and his long tongue plunged inside so he could slurp 
the rest of the ice cream and cherries out along with 
my own juices.  My head thumped back against the 
table when the ice of the ice cream and the talented 
heat of his tongue whipped me into a climax that I 
had to close my mouth on.  Yelps were smothered 
into thickened grunts as I shuddered and spasmed 
on the dancing tabletop.  While I was still partially 
out of my right mind, he slid into me, hot and hard. 
With his hands braced on either side of my head on 
the table, he drove into me with the precision of a 
finely tuned engine.  I moaned and his mouth, sweet 
and cool, covered mine again.  The buttons of his 
jeans scraped my leg as we gasped into one 
another's mouths and the heat between our bodies 
ate up all the air in the room.  I came again like a 
mousetrap snapping on helpless rodents, biting his 
shoulder to keep from waking up the household.  
This made him pound deeper and harder into me, 
until the table bumped and ground underneath us.  I 
held onto the roller coaster tabletop as he growled 
his gopher love call and nipped at my shoulder as he 
finally came with a tremor that threatened to send us 
careening into the dishwasher.

Panting, sticky with sweat, body fluids and melted 
ice cream, he collapsed atop me and breathed as 
though he had brought the news from Marathon.  

"Who's there?"

At Warwick's voice we snapped apart like Lego 
blocks and I bolted, mostly naked, into the darkness 
of the dining room.  I heard Mulder's fly being zipped 
just before bare feet slapped on the kitchen floor.

"It's you," Warwick said and I heard the refrigerator 
door open, "I was afraid that more of your family had 
come to visit."

"Can't sleep?"

"Shoulder hurts.  Want a beer?"

Warwick should not have been drinking with his 
meds, but this wasn't exactly the right time to point 
this out.  Instead, I pulled the t-shirt down far enough 
to cover all the vital areas, frowning as it stuck to my 
skin and headed upstairs through the living room.  I 
was desperate for a shower and I didn't want to 
know where Mulder had hidden the used condom.

Iolokus IV: Res Judicata
6/

the moon showed up
and it started to show
tonight there'd be ice cream
ice cream for crow
ice cream for crow
sun cream by day
ice cream for crow
ice cream by night
ice cream by day
the sun ain't stable
	Captain Beefheart

The interviewers the court appointed were just social 
workers and psychologists. Unlike everyone else 
who conspires against us, they didn't have access to 
surveillance equipment and deep background. They 
actually had to ask us questions to get to know us. 
As instructed by Laura, I had offered them all soft 
drinks and/or coffee. That was to show that I was 
nurturing. 

We'd also scattered family photos around to show 
that we were family oriented, which had been 
difficult because I wasn't going to let Bill into my life 
even in two dimensions. We ended up with some 
pictures of me and Missy, Charlie and his brood, 
Mulder and Sam when they were still clueless kids, 
dozens of Miranda moments and a few of Emerson, 
Aileen, and their baby Samuel. At the last minute, 
Mulder ran to the store to get frames for the wedding 
pictures. I wasn't too sure about them -- we looked 
like suspects in a line-up in most of the shots, 
though there was one nice picture where I was 
holding Miranda. Mulder had his hand at my waist 
and his downturned face looked, at that odd angle, 
intensely tender.  The only picture on display that 
actually hit any resonance for me had been in the 
office for years - at a crime scene, arguing over 
something in our dark suits with our dark 
expressions.  That was the us that I knew, the other 
pictures from the wedding with our pale clothes and 
earnest expressions were as familiar to me as the 
photos of strangers that came with the picture 
frames.  

I was glad we'd made the effort as our unwanted 
guests wandered through the house. For all I knew 
they were running white-gloved fingers over mantles 
looking for dust, but Laura had said that excessive 
cleanliness was bad because it was child-unfriendly, 
and I just hoped they noticed that Mulder had put 
blocking devices in every unused outlet to prevent 
accidental electrocution. 

Mulder sat beside me on the couch, on the center 
pillow that we'd reversed to hide the bloodstains. His 
legs spread wide in stiff blue denim, his elbows 
poking into his upper thighs, he looked like a college 
professor who'd just found out that yes, the 
sophomore was pressing charges. "So what would 
you like to know?"

A kindly-looking woman with carefully styled grey 
hair leaned forward in her chair and asked, "Perhaps 
you could tell us a little about your family, what their 
childrearing style is like, and your brothers and 
sisters if you have any."

"Maybe it would help if I could draw a chart." 

Instead of glaring, I put my hand on his thigh, and he 
gave me a startled glance, then recovered to his 
standard blankness. "Well, I was raised with one 
younger sister until I was twelve..."

I tried to tune out the horror story as best I could 
while still maintaining a sympathetic and 
understanding demeanor. The sufferer is allowed to 
distance himself from his suffering, people 
understand that kind of defense mechanism, but his 
loving wife is supposed to manifest the symptoms of 
his trauma for him. I guess Mulder would have a 
name for it, a socially approved transference, but I 
had enough trouble feeling my own emotions without 
projecting Mulder's.

Nevertheless I needed no artifice to make my voice 
hesitate and drop when they asked me the same 
questions and I had to talk about Missy. I have 
blocked out as much of the interrogation as possible, 
but a few highlights remain in my mind.

"And how did the two of you meet?"

Even I knew the right way to respond to that 
question, by turning to Mulder and smiling shyly; 
he'd figured it out too and I felt a surge of hope.

I looked at my hands as he gave a Reader's Digest 
explanation of the X Files, trying to make them 
sound about as harmless as the Goosebumps series 
for children. (Though I hear some people blame 
Goosebumps for the rash of schoolchildren 
shootings, so maybe the comparison was apt.)

"And what attracted you to each other?" This from a 
slight gentleman with a neat mustache and a 
disarmingly friendly style, like so many of the cold-
blooded killers we'd known.

And how was that relevant to the inquiry? I smiled in 
the general direction of the professional voyeur's feet, 
as if I were shy about it. "His intelligence, his passion 
for his work." Thinking: His ass, his bedroom eyes and 
barroom stubble, are you blind? Can't you feel the fact 
that the man radiates sex?  Not just a good fuck, but a 
smart one.  I realized uneasily that the official story 
might have just as much truth as the unofficial story, 
and then I thought I shouldn't be analyzing myself at 
this juncture. "He challenged me, both to prove myself 
as an agent and to discover the answers behind 
events that were on their face inexplicable. Um -- he's 
got an incredible sense of humor, he has unending 
compassion for the victims of the crimes we 
investigate." 

The appalling thing about the interrogation was that 
it not only removed my self-respect, it made it 
impossible for Mulder to credit any of these nice 
things I was saying. Humiliation without the upside 
of tenderness. I cleared my throat and looked the 
questioner in the eye, wanting to seem honest and 
friendly. "Fox has supported me through some very 
hard times for me both personally and 
professionally. He's brave, insightful, and incapable 
of giving up. And he is never, ever sick at sea."

The matronly type smiled at me. I was surprised that 
she was the one to take the bait. "Never?"

I grinned back; it was a real love-in. "Well, hardly 
ever."

Mulder squeezed my hand. "Dana is brilliant and 
challenging in her own right. She made me work to 
get results. She took me seriously even when she 
didn't believe my crazy theories. She trusted me." 
And I suffered for him so he felt honor bound to 
suffer me, because no one else would after what 
we've been through. 

A younger woman, the third of the Fates, cleared her 
throat. "What do you think are your husband's 
strengths and weaknesses?"

I really wanted to laugh and point out that he had an 
endless capacity for abuse which was a stellar 
quality in any husband and an even more endless 
capacity for going down on me.

Whatever platitude I muttered I don't remember.

"How do you settle conflicts when they arise?" 

With considerable difficulty, I thought, and smiled a 
smile so plastic that Barbie would have been 
envious. "Vigorous argument, usually. We've got five 
years of experience compromising to make final 
reports of case dispositions, and that helps."

We endured over six hours of interrogation before 
they left. I'd actually had to reapply deodorant during 
my bathroom breaks. I suppose I should be grateful 
that bathroom breaks were allowed, since they'd 
failed to read us our Miranda rights and were 
probably violating some international human rights 
treaty with their prying questions.

I had been too nervous to eat in the morning or 
when we served a simple yet nutritious lunch, so 
when they left I rummaged for food while Laura, 
who'd been lurking in the background, discussed 
strategy with Mulder. After a few minutes, I heard the 
red beep of the alarm announcing her departure. I 
stood in the kitchen next to the refrigerator, sticking 
celery stalks into a jar of peanut butter and scooping 
globs out. I had a bowl of raisins to dunk the 
combination into and then I'd eat the whole thing. My 
mother used to make these snacks she called "ants 
on a log," which was the same thing only with much 
more organization. Maybe someday I'd do the same 
for Miranda but I didn't have the energy to smooth 
peanut butter into the grooves of a celery stalk when 
it was all going to get mixed together in my stomach 
anyway.

Mulder wandered in and his face screwed up like a 
pug dog's. "I'm going to have to buy a new jar of 
peanut butter," he complained, "it's not sanitary to be 
communal like that."

"You get all my germs anyway," I pointed out.

"And what are those? Raisins?"

"They just look like raisins, they're actually ants."

"Oh, okay," he took a handful. "Mmm, folic acid. 
Well, I was going to ask what you wanted from the 
store, but now I think I don't want to know. I'll add 
peanut butter to the spreadsheet though."

"Miranda?"

"Napping." He turned on the ubiquitous baby monitor 
resting on the counter and the room filled with soft 
susurration. 

"Ben and Jerry's," I called out as he left. He 
pretended not to hear.

I went to sit in the dining room, staring back into the 
kitchen and looking through wallpaper samples as I 
stuffed my face. My impulse to decorate was 
worsening now that I needed it to distract me. 
Especially since I'd given up the Annapolis 
apartment. This wasn't my home away from home 
anymore, it was a reasonable facsimile of the real 
thing. 

I didn't clean out the entire jar of peanut butter, but I 
ran out of raisins and so I stopped eating anyway. 
It's not the same without the right balance of 
ingredients. There was a pile of case files on the 
sideboy that I sorted through diffidently, putting them 
into rough piles for discard or further consideration. 
I'd had a search run to find out what other vermin 
Roush's law firm had represented; since they were 
helping my brother attempt to steal Miranda I could 
only assume that they were still in the arsenal of the 
Dark Side of the Force. Danny's first efforts hadn't 
produced anything useful, but he had generated a 
list of client names and I was trying to determine 
which ones were high-tech enough to give off that 
conspiratorial bouquet.

When Mulder returned he brought Wavy Gravy and 
New York Super Fudge Chunk, which earned him 
bonus points. I returned to the kitchen to help him 
unload; he had to do everything that went in a 
cabinet, but I could put away things that belonged in 
a refrigerator. When the blue-and-white rectangular 
package landed in front of me, I first thought that it 
was a tube of toothpaste. I couldn't really read the 
label through the glare of cellophane.

"Oh, no," I said when I figured it out. 

He simply looked at me. I wanted to say: no, really, 
the prospect of testifying in court has always made 
me throw up, and also I've liked ants on a log since 
childhood. 

"So go use it and prove me wrong," he said, reading 
my mind. "It's what you like best anyway."

I had to brace my hands on the counter to keep 
upright. Thoughts churned in my mind like a pod of 
dolphins breaching in the ocean, bobbing and then 
disappearing as they threw up spume. Could this be 
God's best joke yet? Could I still take my Zoloft 
safely? Would Bill and Tara try to take this child 
away too?

What the hell was I going to *do*?

I picked up the package, sharp cardboard corners 
pressing red lines into my palm, and staggered into 
the downstairs bathroom on legs as rubbery as beef 
tongue.

They make home tests entirely too easy and too 
reliable these days, I couldn't even wrap the 
possibility that it could be wrong around myself to 
keep my denial warm.  When was the last time I 
menstruated, anyway?  Before George came back 
and killed my gynecologist - what was that, four 
weeks before?  Five?  Shit.  There had been a time, 
when I was seeing Jack, that I had dutifully noted 
each cycle in my Franklin by scribbling the Pill 
prescription code on the day. Then I'd had cancer 
and I had quit taking the hormones, and then I had 
been pronounced sterile and that was the end of 
that.  Then the sex had dried up and I hadn't 
bothered.

I'd been snookered by part of my own subconscious 
that hadn't let me pick up the prescription, and hadn't 
reminded me to use condoms. Although to be fair 
my subconscious had plenty of other things to worry 
about the time we went bareback, such as the fact 
that Mulder was acting the part of his psycho brother 
George and I was playing victim better than Janet 
Leigh. Dead girls generally don't interrupt the 
proceedings to ask about protection.

Shitshitshitshit!

I must have stayed in that bathroom for almost an 
hour, trying to figure out what I was feeling. When I 
gave up, I opened the door and Mulder was there 
waiting. As usual, he could read me like a fortune 
cookie and he knew immediately. He pulled me into 
his arms and for once I had no impulse to resist him. 

"Everything's going to be fine," he whispered into my 
hair as I shook against him.

It was all too much, my legs finally went out like 
Miranda's when she was too tired or too lazy to even 
pretend to walk.  Even with his arms under my arms, 
I slid down Mulder's body until I was sitting on the 
floor.  I knew I was crying because my face wouldn't 
have been wet otherwise.

***

I woke up alone with the alarm clock registering two 
in the morning.  My first chest-tightening thought led 
me to the window and I looked out to see both cars 
sitting in the driveway shining in the light of a waxing 
moon.  So she hadn't left, or if she had she'd gone 
by foot.  In the back of my mind hummed the image 
of Scully wandering the weak-moonlit night with her 
feet torn to shreds by red shoes.  She didn't have 
red shoes.  God, that was about the only color shoes 
that she didn't have.

	Oh I used to be disgusted
	Now I try to be amused
	But since their wings have got rusted
	You know, the angels want to wear my red 
shoes.

Elvis Costello, the only Elvis I could stand these 
days thanks to George.

The things that Scully had brought from her 
apartment (besides the aforementioned footwear) 
included her photo albums, and these were spread 
out on the living room floor in front of her when I 
padded downstairs.  She was hunched over one so 
intently that she jerked when I put my hand on her 
warm shoulder.

"Hey," I said.

"Couldn't sleep."

Sitting down on the floor next to her, I could smell 
whatever strange cream she put on her face at 
night.  She smelled like vanilla wafers and honey.  
She smelled like the Mooselet when she had been 
eating sweets, just before the sour milky baby spit 
and baby pee aroma hit.  She twisted the unfamiliar 
rings around and around on her finger, as though 
they were lined with barbed wire.  The flashing of the 
topaz was making me sick and I wanted to slap her 
hand away from it. I settled for putting my hand over 
hers and she stilled.

"I feel like a fucking pawn.  Just when I think I get it 
all straightened out; it gets fucked up again," her 
voice was as flat as a tortilla.

I squeezed her hand to let her know that I was 
listening, but didn't dare comment.

"What am I going to do now?  Just start having 
babies like a machine so they can be taken away?  
This isn't supposed to happen to people like me!  I'm 
not some breeding mare so the bad guys have a 
fresh set of infants to manipulate the way they did 
you and your brothers!" she snarled and her eyes 
sparked like fat dripped into a gas jet.
 
I could feel the heat coming off her face like a fire.

"This is wrong, this is evil, Mulder, evil.  They turn 
your family against you, they turn my family against 
me, and they try to take Miranda.  They'll try to take 
this baby too, just so they can cut it apart and see 
what makes it tick."

"Did it occur to you that this baby has nothing to do 
with any of their plans?  It wasn't engineered - it was 
made the low-tech way. They don't know about it, it's 
safe."

"Jesus Christ, Mulder, how can you be so fucking 
na‹ve?!" she shouted and jumped up from the floor, 
the long T-shirt flaring around her like a chiton.

"You don't think that they haven't bugged this place? 
The telephone? That there isn't videotape of us re-
enacting George's last great crime!  My God, 
Mulder, I can't even entertain the thought that we 
could have conceived that night!"

She wouldn't be alone. How was I going to be able 
to face another little pink creature knowing that it 
had been made the night I'd squeezed half the life 
out of her before indulging in yet another round of 
destructive sex?  On the other hand, I seemed to 
remember her impaling herself on my resuscitated 
member and not complaining.  But this was hardly 
the time to mention it.

"And how are we to know that I don't get a little 
shove on the stairwell at the Hoover Building one 
afternoon. 'Oh, Mr. Mulder, we're so sorry but we 
weren't able to save the baby' and they go and 
fucking implant my fetus into some zombie like 
Emily's birth mother, Miranda's birth mother! You 
think maybe the third time's the charm?"

I'd taught her an awful lot about the fine art of 
paranoia.
 
She lunged at me, slamming her head into one of 
the more sore spots in my chest, like Catzilla looking 
for a place to nest.  She was shaking against me 
and it wasn't with laughter.   Her fingers were 
knotted in my shirt as though she were trying to 
strangle me with it - and I wouldn't have been 
surprised if she had wanted to kill me.

"We can't tell anyone," she hissed into my ribcage.

"What are you going to do?  Hide behind furniture 
and trenchcoats for nine months?  You're going to 
look like a seahorse this time next month." I pointed 
out, my hands sliding over her shoulders like 
shadows on grass in a vain attempt to make my 
words more calming.

"Not until we get Bill and his keepers contained, that 
can't take all that long.  They like to get custody 
cases wound up quickly to prevent psychological 
damage to the child."

"But pre-natal care and-"

"I'm a doctor, not a high school student. I know what 
I can and can't do.  I'll review the texts," she 
muttered into my body, sounding reassuringly like 
her old self.

I rubbed my hands over the soft cotton covering her 
back, feeling the beat of her heart like a drum 
muffled in a funeral procession. We slid down to a 
kneeling position like penitent and priest, like lovers 
whispering through a chink in the great wall 
separating them. I wanted to tell her that I loved her, 
that everything was going to be all right, that I would 
protect her, Miranda, and whatever new person was 
busily growing underneath her liver. Frankly, I was 
scared shitless.  The possibilities were all too 
frightening.  Something about the strange 
circumstances of Miranda's birth and life with me 
had made her more *my* child than Scully's even 
though we'd both been in absentia at her conception 
and gestation.  That was a dry run, this was the 
whole nine months.

It was terrifying, and exciting at the same time - like 
bungee jumping.

While I was going through my own uncomfortable 
wash of thoughts like cold rainwater running through 
gutters, Scully gradually stopped shaking against me 
and started to soften, her body conforming to mine 
like an electric blanket, giving off her own candy 
sweet heat.  I kissed her forehead, trying to impart 
the same kind of comfort and reassurance as I had 
in the hospital, the night that she had realized that 
she was dying.   She caught my forearms and ran 
the dry palms of her hands up over the guard hairs 
standing erect on my skin.  Breath heated my throat 
as she rubbed her fingers upward through my hair.  
A thrill like a knife blade running up my spine shot 
from my toes to my scalp, making the blood rush out 
of my head and into my groin. Her eyelids trembled 
underneath my lips, her lashes pricking at me like 
spines while her hands reached underneath my T-
shirt where my stomach muscles jumped obediently 
under her touch.  She pinched at my nipples until I 
winced into her mouth and she gave out the satisfied 
growl of a lioness hunched over a downed antelope..  
I stretched my neck as trustingly as a maiden in a 
vampire movie and let her soft mouth and tongue 
explore the borders between healed and raw skin on 
my neck.  Over my thighs, her hands ran up and 
underneath the loose legs of my boxers until she 
was stroking my cock with her hot little hands.

I found her ass with my hands and ran my palms 
over the smooth skin covering her voluptuous little 
backside, until she pressed closer and nipped at my 
collarbone.  While my left hand circled the extra 
erogenous zone of her tattoo, the other slipped over 
her rump and between her legs where she steamed 
for only me.  I used my knee to press her thighs 
farther open so I could wiggle three fingers inside 
her and rub at her clitoris with my thumb.  She 
gasped at the invasion, although I doubt if she was 
in any way surprised.  Kneeling there with her hair 
standing out around her face like a fiery milkweed 
pod, and her eyes watching the thoughts in the back 
of my skull, she grabbed at my shoulders to keep 
herself upright.  I slid my fingers out of her, trailing a 
deliberate path of her own wetness across her ass 
and thighs until I could reach her from the front and 
slipped them inside again. This time, my other hand 
squeezed her breasts together so I could bite at 
each nipple through the thin fabric of her shirt.

She groaned and tightened around me, and I could 
feel each movement of my fingers inside her echoed 
in her body.  I stroked her inside and out, making her 
shudder and sway against me.  And when I looked 
up from her breasts for a moment I saw the 
blackened blue of her eyes and her 
uncommunicative mouth lust-swollen and half-open.

"You are incredibly beautiful," I stammered like a 
pimply teenager with his first date rather than a 
thirty-eight year old man with his knocked-up wife.

"You've never said -- oh," and her eyes flew open 
wide as she started shuddering her climax around 
me.

I could see myself reflected in the blackness of her 
pupils.  

Scully is a like a radio that I can only tune in to 
certain channels, and the sex channel always comes 
in the clearest.

****

I was still reeling, exhausted from the day's events 
and the tendon-popping orgasm I'd just had. Vague 
thoughts about what I should do to Mulder in return 
were scudding across my brain like clouds before a 
summer storm.

Miranda's wails cut through my musings with her 
own personalized test of the emergency broadcast 
system. The baby monitor was still on in Mulder's 
bedroom so that her shrieks fell down the stairs in 
stereo.

"I'll go," I mumbled. I was weak-kneed but Mulder 
was having a harder time, no pun intended. He 
grimaced and nodded with the same pained face he 
used when he was getting stitches. I was just 
amazed this hadn't happened sooner.

The baby was clean and dry, and she wasn't hungry. 
She was just crying on general principles, as far as I 
could tell. If she didn't want competition for our 
affections, she was a few weeks too late. I circled 
her room, asking her to calm down and wondering if 
I could do this twice. We needed another nanny 
(preferably another heterosexual man or a lesbian; 
but with my luck we'd get an Alicia Silverstone type -
- or worse, Alex Krycek -- who'd blow Mulder for one 
of his ironic smiles).

Miranda's wails cycled down after a few minutes. 
"Ka -- ka -- kat?" she asked and gave me a 
suspiciously familiar whipped-Dalmatian look.

"Oh, no you don't," I informed her. "That doesn't 
work for your daddy and it's not going to work for 
you." To be honest, that pathetic face worked quite 
well for Mulder, but I was hoping that I could keep 
Miranda unaware of her hereditary gifts for a little 
while.

She pouted, blew a spit bubble, and lapsed back 
into semiconsciousness. I put her back in the crib 
and backed out of the room.

Mulder had returned to the bedroom; I could see the 
light trickling out around the closed door. 

I wasn't sure what the etiquette of the situation was. 
Maybe he'd taken care of the problem himself. I had, 
after all, broken up a stable and committed 
relationship between Mulder and his own right hand.

I pushed open the bedroom door and stepped 
hesitantly through.

Mulder was under the covers, curled up in his 
standard spiral-shaped sleep pose. I put my hands 
on my hips and surveyed the territory. Mulder 
blinked at me with the sleepy eyes I had just seen in 
the other room.

I must have registered disappointment, because he 
smirked at me. "Cut me some slack -- er, bad choice 
of words. It's the middle of the night, it's been a big 
day, and I'm pushing forty."

Looking over the flowing lines of his shoulders and 
back, it occurred to me that forty was not pushing 
back very hard. "I could write you a prescription for 
Viagra," I suggested.

He groaned and flung the sheets back, inviting me 
in. I could have walked around the bed to get to my 
side, but it seemed simpler just to crawl over him, 
checking to see that he was in working order as I 
went. His skin was slick and cool under my 
fingertips, fine hairs rising at the eeriness of my 
touch. I bent and sucked at a patch of skin just at his 
waist and he yipped a complaint. 

"Dana, I'm tired," he whined. "Can't I just get a rain 
check?"

I needed a brain check. Yes, I was attempting to 
connect with him through raw sexual energy, which 
was irrational and desperate; would you blame me? 
I felt as unstable as a comic book villain. At this 
point, I had a history that would fully justify a funny 
costume and a descriptive moniker, not to mention a 
weird-ass MO: I had been abducted, had my sister 
killed, been given cancer, had my genetic material 
used to make monsters and other people, had been 
raped by my lover's twin who had also created said 
monsters, and I was now the unwilling bride of that 
aforementioned clownish clone and now, like the 
malignantly unnatural cherry on top of the sundae of 
Life, pregnant by him. I deserved some coolly 
nefarious toys, I deserved to have a city of my own 
to terrorize, and I deserved a sidekick. One shorter 
than I was. And Miranda didn't count.

What I had was Mulder, who was asleep again 
before I'd really processed his rejection. 

Ah, the joys of marriage. I finished tumbling over him 
to my side of the bed, pulled the sheets up to my 
neck, and sulked until sleep ambushed me and held 
my brain for ransom.



Iolokus IV: Res Judicata
7/

All there is left is a photograph
You smile and the ice cream`s meltin` down your pants
And I keep living on, you`re in the past, it`s been so long
Since the Ice Cream Summer, it`s forgotten now it`s gone
	Hanoi Rocks

The morning after we realized Scully was pregnant 
was interesting in the extreme.  I was sitting in the 
kitchen drinking my post-run, post-shower coffee 
and reading the Post while the Mooselet crawled 
around on the floor with her stuffed Po. Catzilla was 
sitting on the table, washing his back toes -- which 
would have reduced Scully to vermilion-faced rage 
since she doesn't realize that Catzilla is cleaner than 
most people.  All was all right with the world. Of 
course I had butterflies in my stomach the size of 
Pterodactyls and my hands were shaking around the 
coffee mug, but that was pretty much what it was like 
to be me.  The Mooselet was winding my sneaker 
laces around a cartoonish pink horse and I almost 
killed myself getting up to answer the doorbell.  
There had been a few flower arrangements and a 
couple of gifts as I have been congenitally unable to 
keep my mouth shut about anything that didn't have 
a life or death consequence.  I'd e-mailed Emerson 
and Darien, and out of some perverse sense of 
revenge e-mailed both Phoebe and Diana through 
their work accounts.  I'd actually used stamps and 
mailed a couple notes to the vague friends I had left 
over from Oxford and my tutor, who had retired to 
Greece.  I figured that Dr. Arenson would get the 
letter by the time Miranda was twelve.  I also 
dropped a note to Mrs. Schwartz who had lived next 
door to me at Hegal place and had brought me soup 
when I was sick and had saved my life by dialing 
911 on more than one occasion.  I thought that 
some of these peripheral people in my life would be 
amused to know that I was having the ball and chain 
welded around my ankle with good grace.

I sloped out to the front room with Miranda under my 
arm and answered the door, expecting another 
bored teenager with a mouthful of gum and a flower 
arrangement, or an efficient Fed Ex guy with a 
Pepsodent smile.  Instead, I found myself looking at 
the face that I had dreamed about for years, first in 
the agony of loss and then in the agony of shame.
 
"Sam?"

She looked like hell; one side of her face was bloody 
and raw, her black feather hair sticking into dried 
blood, her eye swollen shut and her lip dripping 
fresh blood down along her chin.  Hanging onto the 
doorjamb she looked like a glare would send her 
shattered to the floor.

"Hey big brother, sorry to crash the festivities," she 
said with a bitter smirk and collapsed into the foyer. 

The Mooselet started to wail.  I put Miranda in her 
playpen and carried Sam, who only weighed slightly 
more than Miranda, over to the recovered sofa 
where she bled onto the new upholstery, while the 
Mooselet stood up in the playpen and appealed to a 
higher power.

"Lee!  Lee!"

Great, my own kid was ratting me out.  I growled to 
myself and scampered off to the kitchen for the 
emergency first aid kit which, thanks to Scully, was 
as well stocked as a small ER.  My blushing bride 
was waiting for me in the living room, looking down 
at my battered sister with the look of caustic 
loathing.

"Oh shit," she muttered.

Samantha's eyes flickered open and she looked 
back up at Scully with a mirrored expression.

"Congratulations," she hissed.

"What are you doing here?" Scully demanded and 
pulled up a footstool alongside the sofa.  I handed 
her the First Aid kit and stepped back out of the fray.

"Where the hell else was I going to go?  They're 
trying to kill me."

"Who?" I asked over Scully's head.

"I don't know their names, you dick.   *Them*, the 
men that Dad worked with.  Men without names.  I 
was going to visit Mom in New England, she told me 
that you two were married and about the custody 
battle.  I was in the airport and they grabbed me in 
the parking lot.  Beat the shit out of me and told me 
that even if you *got* custody of the baby, they'd 
take her from you."

"And we're supposed to believe that?" Scully 
snapped, ripping open a packet of alcohol wipes 
which she then used to scrub at Sam's bleeding 
face.

Sam winced and flinched away from her.  This is one 
of the reasons Scully only works with the dead - her 
in-bed manner is exceptional, but her bedside 
manner lacks certain warmth.   When I broke my 
thumb on a case in Iowa she cracked it back into 
alignment without disturbing a hair of her own 
shining coif.  I, on the other hand, turned sea green 
with pain and slid to the floor like a colloid.  I was on 
the verge of doing the sea-green colloid routine 
again, but didn't want to lose face in front of my 
impressionable progeny in the playpen.  I didn't want 
her growing up thinking that her Daddy was a 
*complete* wimp. 

"Why should we protect you?" a voice that sounded 
more like one of my brothers' emerged from my 
mouth.

"Because you're my brother," she snarled.

Like that was foremost in her mind the night she 
tried to seduce me while Jason was raping Scully. 

"Blood runs pretty thin around here, Sam, George's 
only stained the carpet.  You have to give me - give 
us -- a *very* good reason not to sling your skinny 
ass out into the street."

Her eyes slid away from mine and she was staring at 
Scully, which was not the place to look for sympathy 
no matter how cozy Scully looked in her butter-
yellow toweling bathrobe.  

"The former Roush scientists still have some of your 
ova, not all were destroyed during your clumsy mass 
abortion."

"I don't believe you," Scully said, and I could just 
about see her ears flattening back against her head.
 
"Haven't you ever heard the story about the boy who 
cried wolf?"

"Tell that to your *children*," she snapped.

"Sorry.  Not good enough.  If you can't drive, I will 
call you a cab," I offered, "but you really don't fit into 
our lifestyle right now."

For a second, I saw hurt in her eyes, and it brought 
back all the bad memories of how I had taunted and 
tormented her before she had been taken away.  
Taken away and I hadn't been able to save her - not 
from the aliens as much as what the humans had 
done to change her into this polished stranger.

She narrowed her reptilian eyes at me. 

"You know I'm the only one who knows exactly what 
has been hardwired into that baby's--" she glanced 
over at the Mooselet -- "genetic code. And if you 
won't help me I'm going to have to cut my own deal 
with whoever will."

"I think you better leave." Scully said.

When Sam had finally been whisked away in a taxi I 
felt safe enough to scoop up the Mooselet in my 
arms as if that was going to shield her from the evil 
spores that Samantha had left in her wake.  Scully 
merely gathered up the detritus from the first aid kit 
and threw it all out in the kitchen garbage as though 
she could clear away the memory of Sam with her 
bloodstains.

"Coffee?" Scully asked.

The Mooselet pulled on my ear with her wet fingers.

"Coffee, Mulder?" Scully prodded.

"No thanks.  I'm experiencing an adrenaline rush 
right now-."

Snorting, she dumped the half-pot down the drain 
and watched it swirl into the black hole of the pipe.

"You know," she said in a carefully cool tone, "from 
my experience, all of your sister's injuries were 
consistent with damage that had been self-inflicted."

"I am, " I said to the Mooselet, "going to buy you a 
set of Russian dolls to show you how lies work."

"Doesn't it seem awfully suspect that your sister 
shows up today in light of the information we 
received yesterday?"

It took me a moment to realize that Scully was 
referring to her pregnancy, but subtlety and 
sneakiness have never been my strong points. It 
was funny how Sam managed to show up right after 
we'd gotten an ETA on the stork's next run.  Funny 
as a condom with a hole in it.

"Of course it's suspect, it's another plot complication 
just in case the custody issue wasn't enough to 
sustain interest." 

Scully paled and I thought my paranoid hypothesis 
had made her suffer an epiphany, but when she 
bolted for the bathroom and I heard the sound of 
retching I realized it was just nausea.

***

Monday morning came early. Far too early. I usually 
hung on to sleep with the tenacity of a rock climber 
whose safety harness had snapped, but for the past 
few days I'd been awake with the gray blush of 
predawn. Maybe there was a physiological 
explanation, the hormones of pregnancy were pretty 
potent.  Add the rage and frustration brought by 
Samantha into the mix and I was ready to go up like 
fuel oil and fertilizer.

Ingveld was soldering the case of a computer back 
together when I stumbled downstairs to check on 
Warwick.  He was sleeping through the noise of 
Ingveld's construction with the ease of the young. 
Unlike the rest of us, she couldn't afford to take time 
off of work every time a monster invaded her life. 
She was under deadline for a federal agency whose 
identity she couldn't reveal to us. She didn't have 
American citizenship but she had a security 
clearance; there was something wrong with that but 
Uncle Sam had adopted the philosophy that if you 
can't catch 'em, hire 'em. 

"Vill you mind if I attend the trial?" she asked as I 
collected a few of Miranda's toys that had migrated 
to their level of the house. "I do not know much 
about the American justice system, it is much 
discussed in Europe but not well understood. It 
seems quite complicated."

I shrugged agreement; Ingveld was mostly harmless 
and maybe the judge would like her.  Ingveld was 
hard not to like.

"Americans are so violent and yet you have so much 
law, is it not strange?"

Never one to let a simple rhetorical question go, I 
reverted to standard lecture mode. "It's two sides of 
the same coin, we want our own way in everything 
and so some citizens make the laws for their own 
aggrandizement while others break them to satisfy 
their contrary wills. America has a strong 
individualist tradition that isn't quite as healthy as 
many people like to believe."

"Perhaps," she conceded. "You have so little trust in 
one another. I write the security protocols for one of 
your courthouses, even the guards do not know the 
right codes to open doors at night. They must patrol 
locked in so they do not betray their employers. That 
is the job that brought us here, vhy Varvick became 
Miri's nanny," she looked so sad, she hadn't even 
been the one who'd shot Warwick but she felt guilty 
because her job had indirectly led him to this 
household of insanity. 

"Ingveld," I said, trying not to sound condescending 
with my fifty thousand light years' more experience, 
"you can't blame yourself. You couldn't have known, 
you couldn't have done anything but what you did, 
and Warwick is just happy that you're with him. I'm 
sure he feels that he put you in danger by being 
here, but the truth is that no one is to blame but the 
vicious criminal who assaulted you both."

She nodded slowly. "I try to think that. Is that how 
you feel?"

Well, no one ever said the girl lacked brains. "I try," I 
admitted. "Often I ask what I might have done 
differently. But we make our decisions with imperfect 
knowledge and it's unfair to judge ourselves entirely 
by the outcomes of those decisions. You and 
Warwick were caught at the edge of a whirlwind, not 
of your own volition, and you should take pride in 
your survival."

Ingveld sighed and looked back at the slumbering 
man on the bed. "I try also," she said and I nodded 
goodbye.

I wondered if Mulder envied the easy unity between 
them. I certainly did.

While Mulder dressed Miranda in one of the dresses 
his mother had given her, which was not unlike 
stuffing all the arms of a large and unhappy octopus 
into a mesh bag, I grabbed a quick shower and got 
dressed for the next set of unwelcome guests.  I had 
styled my hair and was dabbing foundation on the 
circles under my eyes when the wave of nausea hit 
me like a tsunami wiping out a small city in Papua 
New Guinea.  I leaned over the open toilet and 
became re-acquainted with my breakfast.  Mulder 
must have heard my un-ladylike gagging because 
he burst through the door of the bathroom with the 
subtlety of a SWAT team making a target.

"You okay?"

"I'm fine, Mulder." I spat and choked on bile.

He hovered, an Armani-clad mosquito, buzzing and 
annoying me. 

"You should have crackers."

"I don't want crackers," I said and flushed the toilet 
with undue force.

"I'll get you some saltines."

"I don't WANT ANY SALTINES!"

Buzz buzz buzz, he darted around, unsure if he 
should land and finally settled on the edge of the 
bathtub and looked up at me with eyes like healing 
bruises. I ignored him and brushed my teeth to get 
the sour taste out of my mouth.
 
"I just want to help," he whined.

"You can go away," I snapped and spit out 
toothpaste. 

With an injured sniff he left in a cloud of Hugo Boss, 
which made my stomach heave again and the entire 
process was repeated sans well-dressed 
interruptions.  It's a shame that the genetic 
experiments of the Project hadn't made it possible 
for the Mulder line to actually bear any of the spawn 
that they sired. I certainly would have appreciated it.

We spent the day with Bill's hired dog and pony 
show, answering loaded questions (and not with our 
loaded guns, which would have been my 
preference). Sometimes the ludicrous questions 
were the same and sometimes different. How did I 
*feel* about having shot Mulder?  What would we 
look for in playmates for Miranda? Did I think that 
doing autopsies made it harder for me to relate to 
the living? (If it had been an FBI event I would have 
said, "Only some of them," with a significant look, 
but I was trying to hide my acid under a bushel and 
so I smiled demurely. I think. I don't have a terribly 
good idea what demure looks like, but I think it's a lot 
like Mom.)

When they'd gone, we collapsed onto the couch. I 
felt like I'd been strapped to an examining table as 
the doctor brought round after round of medical 
students to examine my exposed innards. Miranda 
had come up from Warwick and Ingveld's lair and 
began pulling the candles off the coffee table and 
seeing what they tasted like.  I was to tired to stop 
her and I watched thirty dollars worth of natural 
beeswax alpine flower pillar candles from Crabtree 
and Evelyn become decorated with dental 
impressions.

Mulder had a bit more energy than I did and he 
scooped her up and cuddled her on his lap. She 
cooed and batted her eyelashes at him.  He couldn't 
help but smile.  He's such an optimist, and I mean 
that in the nicest possible of ways. "Can you hold 
down the fort here for awhile?  I need to run a 
couple of errands."
 
"Real errands or Mulder errands, the kind that end 
up with a trip to the emergency room?"

He smiled a bigger, genuine smile rather than the 
smug one that the rest of the world usually gets.

"Real errands. Suit at the cleaners, diapers, and 
there's Ben and Jerry's in it for you if you're a good 
girl while I'm out."

"Dilbert's Totally Nuts -- the official ice cream of this 
family."

"The baby is going to think that ice cream is the only 
food on the planet."

"At least we'll know where she got the taste for it."

Mulder made no reply but I watched as the tiny 
capillaries hiding just under his skin dilated and filled 
with blood. 

"Why, Fox Mulder," I crowed, "I do believe you're 
blushing."

Five minutes after he left, Tina called. "Fox isn't 
here," I said, but she didn't take the hint.

"I wanted to speak with you, Dana -- I may call you 
Dana now?"

"Why not, everyone else seems to."

"Meet me at the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia at 
eight o'clock tomorrow morning."

"I can't, we have a home visit in the afternoon --"

"There will be plenty of time for that." She hung up. 
Now I knew where Mulder got his phone manners.

****

Scully woke me with early morning vomiting, which 
was apparently being integrated into SOP, right 
before brushing her teeth and styling her hair.  For a 
moment, I thought that Catzilla was coughing up a 
hairball, but when I realized what was going on I 
stayed put.  Scully was unlikely to ruin the carpet.  
After a few tries at being comforting, I was keeping 
my remaining extremities as far away from her 
viciousness as possible. "If you don't want me 
worrying, you could at least close the bathroom 
door," I suggested from the safety of the bed. 

All I got was a muted snarl. After a few minutes, she 
did stagger to the door and shut it with no further 
comment, a disturbing sign in itself. She couldn't 
keep on like this -- I'd flipped through enough books 
to know that we should at least consult an OB-GYN 
if the nausea continued unabated.  There was a real 
danger of dehydration.   Not to mention, there was 
still the question of what the lingering residue of her 
abduction would do when combined with the multiple 
physiological changes of pregnancy. If Sam had 
offered to share her knowledge about *that*, I would 
have been much more tempted to let her slither into 
our garden.

The clock by the bed asserted that it was nearly five 
in the morning, which used to be bedtime but now 
reminded me more of barking my shins on half-
hidden objects as I stumbled to feed Miranda, who 
would slobber half-asleep in my arms. I was not 
looking forward to replaying those months.

Wait, what was Scully of the snooze alarm doing up 
at this hour?

"What's going on?" I called, rising and grabbing a 
pair of shorts from the floor. "Dana?" I rapped on the 
door.

She opened the door in my face, her high-gloss 
finish almost dry, and I felt so scruffy in comparison 
that I had to suppress the urge to scratch my balls. "I 
have to go to Philadelphia. Your mother's got some 
mysterious information she wants to share."

"You could have mentioned this yesterday."

"I'm mentioning it now, telling you yesterday would 
just have upset you. Go back to bed."

"The psychologists --"

"I *know*. I'll be back in time. Your mother's not 
exactly flexible, you know."

"You're a fine one to talk."

"'I know you are, but what am I?' Go to sleep, M -- 
Fox, not even the insult sector of your brain is 
working."

Befuddled, I ran a hand through my hair. As she 
dodged past me, I grabbed her by the elbow and 
spun her back. Our faces almost collided with the 
momentum of my pull as I opened my mouth to 
swap my morning breath for her toothpaste. The hint 
of digestive acid under mint was no worse than it 
had been during some of her chemo days.

When I let her go, she reached up a hand to brush 
my wet lips. The pads of her fingertips came away 
stained with pink. "How very like you," she said. Her 
voice was being broadcast from somewhere beyond 
the moon.

"Hunh?"

"Fox, sometimes I think you want me to come to you 
perfect so that you can see when you've made your 
mark." She found a tissue in her purse and wiped 
her fingers clean, then handed it to me. "Save me 
some lunch, all right?"

***

I was at the museum by 7:50. If I could leave by 
noon, there was a good chance I'd make the home 
visit on time. Tina, however, waited until eight 
exactly to show. The museum wasn't yet open to the 
public, but she had a key for a side door. She 
wouldn't answer any of my questions as we walked 
in.

The Mutter museum is full of medical oddities and 
the remains of various deformed creatures, some of 
them human. I thought she had excellent taste to 
schedule our meeting there.

She led me down a hall, past the woman whose 
adipose material had transmuted into something 
approaching soap, past the conjoined fetuses in jars 
with their faces fused into one another. Up until a 
few decades ago, people believed that a pregnant 
woman who saw such things might through her fears 
transmit the deformity to the baby budding inside 
her, and I felt a stab of that atavistic superstition. 
Hell, I couldn't remember the Mulder boys' birthdays 
and I had no idea how many other Mulderbabies had 
been cooked up to date -- for all I knew this one 
inside me was the seventh son of a seventh son and 
his coming would announce the Apocalypse. Or 
maybe I was mixing myths. Nevertheless the fact 
that the museum's current installation featured 
Siamese/Conjoined twins was ominous; I felt the 
dead eyes watching me, doubled and doubled again 
in the ghost reflections against the protective glass 
cases.

And then there was the wall of skulls, theoretically 
showing the structural differences between nations 
and ethnic groups watching me as a bare bone jury.

Tina led me down a hall, into a small office that 
smelled of old coffee, and sat behind the desk, 
gesturing me to take a seat on the other chair that 
took up almost all of the remaining floor space.

"In the past few months, I reviewed the files Fox left 
with me." Her hands ruffled the surface of the desk, 
disturbing a few papers.

"Five stone killers, a child molester, a prostitute and 
three who only hurt themselves. You must be proud 
of the success stories."

"Don't be snide, Dana. In any event you and Fox 
have killed more people than any of Fox's brothers."

"Was there a point to this harassment?" I was ready 
to leave right then, I could make it back in plenty of 
time for lunch.

"I've also been reviewing the records of the Project 
after I left it. An...old friend let me have them."

I could have said something nasty about the nature 
of that friendship, but speculating about your 
mother-in-law's sex life isn't my idea of bonding. 
"And what have your investigations uncovered?" 

"I believe that, after I left the Project, research went 
in many unproductive directions. The original aim 
was to create more robust versions of humanity who 
could survive whatever plagues and disasters the 
Grays could inflict upon us, or we could visit upon 
ourselves. There was some thought that the new 
breed should be able to live in irradiated 
environments without significant mutation as well as 
having heightened healing powers and resistance to 
disease.

"But the aim changed over time, to creating new life 
that would have capacities known only to legend and 
fantasy."

"So-called psychic powers." 

Tina nodded shortly. "The theory being, I suspect, 
that if we could imagine such powers, there must be 
a way to bring them into existence. The Grays seem 
to have mental powers that we do not share, and so 
the thought was that increased hybridization 
combined with selection of donors who seemed 
'sensitive' would create the desired subjects. 
Unfortunately, hybridization is tricky, and human 
DNA can't take too much of it. So the results were 
mainly nonviable or short-lived."

Emily, I thought.

"The problem is, there is still a grave threat that the 
Grays will attempt to colonize this planet, and we've 
spent the past few decades trying for perfection 
when we simply needed a viable arsenal. From what 
I've deciphered of Samantha's notes, her test set 
down in Austin was an attempt to return to the early 
days of the Project and create normal children with 
advanced immune and healing responses in an 
attempt to counter the perceived threat of viral or 
other biological attack."

"And you think whoever's left from the organization 
that was Roush wants to continue that by gaining 
access to Miranda?"

She nodded again. "I wanted you to come here so 
that you could look at something."

Tina swiveled her chair to reach a dusty cabinet and 
pulled the middle drawer open. At her behest, I 
stood and edged into the sliver of space between 
the desk and the opened cabinet, in which a number 
of vials rested. "What is this?"

"Smallpox vaccine. I want you to take a dose and 
give it to Miranda. Just to be safe."

"How could this -- the CDC should -- " I let myself 
sputter out. No one vaccinated for smallpox 
anymore because it was a dead disease. But I knew 
it had some connection with the Project because of 
the smallpox scar markers that Agent No-First-Name 
Pendrell and I had identified, and Mulder had made 
cryptic comments in the past that suggested he 
knew more. "I don't understand. If the genetic 
engineering is designed to enhance viral resistance, 
why the need for vaccination?"

"The modifications merely enhance the subjects' 
ability to fight off infection. Naturally, they don't 
develop antibodies until they're exposed to a 
disease. And some of the viruses being stockpiled 
now are deadly to anyone with no prior exposure. 
Fortunately, I believe that this vaccine resembles the 
first cowpox vaccine in that exposure to it will protect 
against the more virulent forms, including the 
genetically enhanced supersmallpox." 

As little as I wanted to believe that any group, 
however power-hungry, would want to unleash a 
supervirus on the world, I couldn't make Miranda 
hostage to my skepticism. With trembling fingers, I 
reached into the drawer and withdrew two vials. Tina 
gave me a Ginzu-knife look.

"You know, the cancer you suffered from was 
caused by the manipulation of your reproductive 
systems. I don't think anyone has the slightest idea 
what the consequences of a subsequent pregnancy 
would be for your remission; the Project never 
tracked such things. I hope you're not going to let 
Fox get you pregnant."

I gave her the most unblinking stare in my repertoire. 
"I can assure you that the chance of that happening 
is zero." It was true; she *had* put the statement in 
the future tense.

Tina also gave me a number of Samantha's records. 
From what I could glean on a quick readthrough, 
Sam had been following in her mother's obstetric 
stirrups, abandoning the goal of creating the half-
and-half beings that had led to the monstrosities I'd 
seen in Arizona. Sam's theory seemed to be that 
alien DNA should be scattered on top of a human 
genome like chocolate sprinkles on a sundae. This 
seemed to work with far less incidence of deformity 
and nonviability than full hybridization -- though the 
other babies down in Texas had been stillborn, the 
autopsies I had performed had suggested that they 
would have lived if their mothers hadn't been 
slaughtered.

Sam was trying for a a hardiness that would allow 
the new beings to survive under extreme conditions. 
She wanted it all: enhanced general intelligence, 
survival in baking heat and Frigidaire cold, 
resistance to radiation poisoning, extended 
functioning without water and food, and so on. The 
kids were supposed to see into the infrared without 
benefit of night vision goggles. If Miranda were 
actually so equipped, we'd need to insulate the 
bedroom a little better.

"I'll need copies of these," I told Tina as I checked 
my watch. I had about fifteen minutes to get back on 
the interstate.

"I can't make any promises. But now you know what 
you're protecting, and why."

True, except that nothing she'd shown me had given 
me that knowledge.

We exited the small room and went back towards 
the main exhibit hall. The lower floor, where we 
were, was dimly lit and crowded with funhouse 
exhibits, while the J. Everett Koop Family Health 
Center, beyond the brass and cherry wood display 
of the nineteenth century, was white and shiny as an 
orthodontist's favorite smile with high-tech displays 
about modern medicine. It seemed fitting to be down 
in the atavistic depths of the museum where 
conspiracies and messiness lived along with the two 
headed baby skeletons and the plaster death cast of 
the torsos of Chang and Eng.

The first shot exploded a display case over Tina's 
right shoulder, filling the hallway with the stench of 
preservatives and corruption. Slick gray fluid gushed 
over my calves as I dropped to the floor and 
struggled to find cover. The shot came from upstairs 
-- I'd been wrong about the moral division between 
above and below.

Kneeling in a shooting stance, I stuck my face and 
my gun around the corner of the wooden case I was 
using for cover. The whine of a bullet drove me 
back. One shooter, it sounded like, but there could 
be others.

Where was Tina? Shit, if I got her killed it would be 
Mulder's father all over again.

"Mrs. Mulder?"

A nervous ladylike laugh came from about ten feet 
down the hall past the display case that was 
protecting me. "Call me Tina." With a crash the glass 
in my case disintegrated, dumping shards all over 
the floor. Jars of deformed human organs scattered 
like gumballs. The one that bumped my knee held 
an ear attached to a vestigal third eye, milky with 
death. Agitated, its fine fringe of lashes bobbed as if 
it were winking at me.

This was an untenable position; all the gunman had 
to do was walk along the gallery upstairs until he 
had the right angle, like shooting abductees in a 
barrel. I bolted towards the corner of the room, 
hearing glass shatter as I dodged past the case that 
held a small intestine the size of a baby elephant. I 
slammed into the far wall because I had too much 
forward momentum to make the turn on my own and 
clung to the side of the case filled with preserved 
animal and human brains to prevent myself from 
sliding to the floor.

After a moment spent regaining my balance, I spun 
and scanned for the shooter. I couldn't see anyone 
on the upper level from my vantage point. If he were 
still in his old position, we were now at a ninety 
degree angle from one another. I wished very much 
for an M-16, which would allow me to get under him 
and make the floor into a cheese grater; 
unfortunately even with my extra clip I doubted I had 
enough ammo for the job.

Now what? Continuing forward was the natural 
move, but he could shoot me as easily as I could 
shoot him once we saw each other again. I had few 
hopes that the cavalry would arrive; they so rarely 
did. "Dana," Tina's panicky voice shrilled out, "he's 
coming for me!"

Decision made. I sprinted back to the misnamed 
small intestine, pushing over the velvet-roped 
barriers that prevented people from getting too close 
in an attempt to create some distracting movement. I 
caught a flash of a slim dark figure with a rifle on the 
upper level before I dropped to my knees behind the 
center display case featuring  the skeletons of a 
giant man and a dwarfed woman along with the 
crushed-skull skeleton of the baby she had died 
trying to deliver.  If I hadn't been so concentrated on 
Tina and the shooter, the resemblance to the 
"family" unit in the case would have brought my 
morning sickness back with a vengeance.

"Dana!" Her voice was a wail now. 

I took a deep breath and ran out into the open, firing 
up at the upper level almost at random. The shooter 
spun and dropped back behind a glowing model of a 
diseased lung and I jumped in front of Tina, 
shielding her with my body which was only possible 
because she was huddled into a fetal crouch. 

Our nemesis popped back up like a Whack-a-Mole, 
swinging the rifle back to face us. Then, inexplicably, 
he tilted it up, away from me, and from fifty feet away 
I could see his mouth forming curses.

I took aim and prepared to take advantage of his 
sudden hesitation when a hot fingernail scratched 
my shoulder and the gunman crumpled and hit the 
banister. His rifle went over first as his grip on it 
relaxed, and then he tumbled over, slamming into 
the marble floor with redundantly killing force.

I turned around.

Tina Mulder, looking not at all like a woman who'd 
just been screeching helplessly, put her tiny Smith & 
Wesson back into her purse and blinked up at me. 
"Help me up," she requested, "My joints aren't what 
they used to be."

I held out my hand and we rose together. I think she 
liked me more when I didn't comment on her aim. 
She'd sliced a nice tear in my jacket with the bullet, 
but the skin underneath was only burned to a 
gardening-in-the-sun level.

The dead man's face, when I examined it, was as 
surprised as mine. I don't really need to explain that 
he wasn't carrying ID, do I?

"I need to go," I said, "the authorities will be here 
soon and I can't be cooped up answering questions 
from the locals while psychologists judge my fitness 
in abstentia."

"I'll take care of it. I have . . . friends here."

"So you've said, but it seems that your friends may 
be carrying some concealed grudges."

"I doubt my friends are behind this -- you noticed 
that he wasn't supposed to shoot *you*. With you 
dead, Fox would be a very sympathetic widower in 
court."

How reassuring to think that my enemies would 
guard my physical safety because I was more useful 
to them alive to be vilified. 

Tina smiled at me knowingly. "Go on, get to your 
appointment. I'll be in touch."

I left her as she produced a cellphone from her 
surprisingly well-stocked purse and began dialing.

Fighting my way out of the city, I pondered Tina's 
cautionary advice about pregnancy. My thoughts 
kept circling around the worst of cliches, which were 
Mulderishly suggestive in this context -- horses, barn 
doors, and all that. It wasn't as if visiting my friendly 
neighborhood Planned Parenthood would eliminate 
the risk. Some studies have suggested a connection 
between abortion and breast cancer, the theory 
being that pregnancy causes breast cells to begin 
differentiation and the interruption of pregnancy 
prevents natural shutoff signals from being properly 
processed, so the cells proliferate without regulation, 
which is the definition of cancer. If my 
nasopharyngeal tumor was the result of reproductive 
invasions, then the same process might operate for 
it. So, while Tina might be right that pregnancy was 
a special health hazard for me, a return to eating for 
one might be even more dangerous.

Not to mention the fact that I had no idea what 
Marita had done to me to restore my fertility. Either 
she'd somehow managed to generate germ cells 
from other cells with a full chromosome complement, 
or she'd taken the pattern of a few straggler eggs 
that had missed the earlier vacuuming and 
replicated them. It was possible that one or two had 
been left behind, perhaps because they were 
malformed and stuck to the walls of my ovaries. 
God, this child had more strikes against it than the 
Phillies.

If Tina mentioned any of this to Mulder, he'd throw a 
tantrum that would cause Miranda to give up the 
habit in defeat. Maybe we could keep his mother 
away from us for another year and just pretend the 
stork brought the next one, or that we found it in 
some other kidnapped woman's womb.
 
Oddly enough, as I drove back, I thought about the 
cabinet in the lower level of the Mutter Museum, the 
one that held, in low, flat drawers, all the objects that 
a nose and throat specialist had removed from his 
patients' stomachs and nasal cavities through the 
years of his practice.  Everything was in that cabinet, 
from apple seeds to tiny toy zebras.  I wondered if 
he had unwittingly removed an implant or two and 
caused a female patient to die from the engineered 
cancer.

Iolokus IV: Res Judicata
8/

Did she break you did she 
Break your heart 
And break your bones 
And tear your life apart?
Forget the ice cream, it was really just a whim 
Fumble as I try to back out the same way I came in
	The Charms

While Scully was having her covert meeting with my 
mother in Philadelphia, I had arranged a covert 
meeting of my own.

With the Mooselet in her stroller, I couldn't very well 
expect the Park Ranger at the FDR Memorial to 
believe that I was on duty and to forestall any 
problems with the fact that I had my sidearm shoved 
in the waist of my jeans, I showed him my ID which 
he examined briefly but seemed more interested in 
the Mooselet.  He crouched until they were face to 
face and she grabbed the brim of his Smokey the 
Bear hat.

"An' what's your name?" he asked in deep Southern.

She smiled and batted her eyes at him, the little flirt.

"Miranda."  I explained.

"That makes you Prospero, huh?"

"Something like that."

"You gonna' be an FBI Agent when you grow up?" 
he asked her.

God, I hoped not.

She giggled and flirted away from him and gave him 
a sideways look that would get her into shitloads of 
trouble when she got older.  

"You're gonna' be beatin' 'em off with a stick when 
she's a teenager."

"I'm looking into convents now."

"Y'all have a good day."

Bill was standing near the statue of the first dog with 
Matthew in his stroller.  Showdown with babies.  Ten 
paces and the one with the dirtiest diaper wins.

"Bill."

"Fox."
 
Now, I had never given him permission to use my 
first name and this started the unplanned and rapid 
decent into terrain.

"I shouldn't be talking to you without my attorney 
present," he began, "this is probably illegal."
 
"I just wanted to ask you why you suddenly took 
such an interest in Miranda after almost ten months."

Matthew looked at me with a dull expression.  The 
Mooselet looked up at my face as if to say; "I'm 
related to that?  You've got to be joking."

"I saw the tape.  I know what my sister did.  She's 
dangerous and it's all because of you."

I sucked in a breath.  Bill was like any of the worst 
fanatics I had ever come across, fixated on a single 
concept and unwilling to even consider alternatives.  
Not unlike Scully in that respect, but at least she had 
the intellectual/academic interest to listen to a well-
structured argument, even if the chance of changing 
her mind was nil.  Even in a polo shirt and chinos, 
Bill still looked like he was in uniform and had the 
posture of a man with a yardstick well and truly 
rammed up his ass.

"How did you get the tape, Bill?  Was it in the Barney 
videotape jacket?"

He sniffed and looked over to where the Ranger was 
politely chasing children out of the pool at the bottom 
of the waterfall.

"It was forwarded to me with a note suggesting that 
my niece was in danger.  I am concerned about her 
welfare, Fox, although you don't want to believe it."

"Be concerned with your sister's welfare as well.  
This suit is not exactly causing a stress-free 
environment.  She was happy until this all started.  It 
would be unreasonable of me to suggest that she's 
finding total fulfillment in motherhood - Dana's too 
complicated a person for a simple answer - but she 
is content and we're building a home for both 
Miranda and Dana."

"I don't care what your rental shrinks say.  You have 
caused my sister nothing but trouble and pain since 
she  started working with you and no rose-covered 
cottage is going to change the fact that *you* have 
ruined her life.  I care about my sister, I care about 
her and my niece enough to want both of them away 
from you and your crazy theories and the stupid, 
dangerous things that you do.  Dana won't listen to 
reason and Miranda isn't old enough to make up her 
own mind.  The baby is the only one that I can 
protect."

"You can't protect Miranda!  Jesus, Bill you're at sea 
half the year!  How is Tara going to cope if 
something happens?!" My voice and blood pressure 
were shooting into the stratosphere. "You have no 
idea what you're talking about.  Men with guns, men 
who blow up cars and murder children and adults.  
Is Tara going to be able to protect Miranda and 
Matthew when a dozen men with machine guns 
show up at the door?  She can't!  They'll kill her and 
they'll kill Matthew."

"You're crazy."

"If I thought for a minute that you could keep 
Miranda safer than I can, I'd let you have her.  But 
you can't protect her."

"From enemies in your imagination.  You're a danger 
to your daughter and my sister."

Attracted by the shouting, the Park Ranger drifted 
closer.  He knew I had a gun, and was no doubt 
concerned that I was going to pull it on my dickhead 
brother-in-law. Not that I wasn't tempted.  By that 
time was I shaking and stuttering with anger and any 
information I had imagined that I was going to get 
from Bill was shot to hell by our mutual animosity 
club.  

"This is bullshit.  I'll see you in court," I snarled and 
turned the stroller around on two wheels.

The Mooselet squealed with joy as we fled to the far 
end of the Memorial and the Park Ranger trailed us 
at a discreet distance.  I knew what he was thinking -
- DISTRAUGHT FBI AGENT SHOOTS DAUGHTER, 
SELF IN FDR MEMORIAL, imagining his fifteen 
minutes.  I let him down, however, when I wheeled 
the stroller out of the Memorial and onto the grass of 
the Mall.  There were a variety of picnickers and 
other family groups lounging on the grass in cozy 
little knots.  I imagined that someday Scully and I, 
the Mooselet, and the Baby to Be Named Later, 
would be one of those groups, flying kites, eating 
cold fried chicken, and spreading sunscreen on each 
other in America's front yard.

Bill was right, I had only managed to screw up 
Scully's life from the moment that I had met her, but 
this was the chance that I had to make things right.  
The only three good things in my life were Scully, 
the Mooselet, and whoever was growing inside 
Scully even as the flags around the base of the 
Washington Monument fluttered, and I was not 
going to let Bill, Roush, or Samantha take any of that 
away from me.

****

Even though I failed to respect the speed limits in 
any of the jurisdictions I traversed -- it was such a 
relief to be Mirandaless and able to hit the gas -- I 
arrived back at the house after the psychologists. 
This set was supposed to be friendly; we were 
paying them, anyway. But I suspected that showing 
up late was still a bad idea. They were sitting inside, 
watching as Mulder and Miranda played out on the 
porch.

Unnoticed, I ran upstairs and got into my Mommy 
drag. Jeans, pink T-shirt with smiling teddy bears on 
it, pink socks and white canvas sneakers.  I shoved 
my hair into an untidy clump at the back of my head, 
secured it with a flowered scrunchie and reflected 
that it was only for a good cause that I was wearing 
clothes from Wal-Mart.  The jeans were huge with 
the hope that I'd be able to wear them for more than 
a week or two.  Now that I was aware of my 
impregnated situation, I found myself monitoring my 
waistline on an almost hourly basis.  With my height 
and build, it was going to be impossible to keep this 
under cover very long.  I gave my hair one last tug 
for that mommified (mummified?) look and groaned 
at my reflection. Exit Special Agent Dana Scully and 
enter Yuppie Mom.
 
Jesus, the things I do . . .

I hurried downstairs and onstage.

Mulder had gotten out one of Miranda's wooden pull 
toys, a Crayola-red dragon with yellow and green 
spikes and a lolling mouth that opened and shut as it 
moved. Miranda was dragging it back and forth on 
the floor by tugging on its string and then pushing it 
away so it headed behind Mulder's body. When it 
went out of Miranda's range of vision, she squealed 
with mingled pleasure and anxiety. Then she'd bring 
it back and gabble with glee as if she'd never seen it 
before. Back and forth, as monotonously as that 
strange British television show she watched where 
the puppets did everything twice. I shook my head, 
convinced more than ever that children were the real 
space aliens.

"Having fun?" I knelt nearby to join them, but made 
no move to edge close enough to force him to move. 
I didn't want to get into an argument while the 
psychologists were watching.

Mulder never looked up, apparently fascinated by 
Miranda's game. I shouldn't be surprised -- this was 
a man who enjoyed watching baseball, a game with 
slightly less variation than Miranda's diversion. "Sure 
-- this is your basic fort/da game, Freud wrote about 
it and then Lacan really took the ball and ran with it. 
The object represents the mother's body -- 
psychoanalysis isn't big on gender neutrality -- and 
the idea is that it's the child's attempt to work 
through the anxiety of separation from the mother by 
exercising control over the representative object. It's 
a first step into the symbolic sphere, the first story 
she ever tells herself."

I scrutinized him. He seemed completely serious. 
"Couldn't we just play pattycake or something?"

"Just be grateful we don't live in New York. There, 
the waiting list for the better preschools starts at 
conception. We'd have to do flashcards, make sure 
she knew her multiplication tables before she 
finished toilet training."

As if she'd understood us, Miranda stopped the 
game, gave us both assessing looks, and then her 
face pinked like a blooming rose. The resultant smell 
was anything but rosy.

We looked at each other. "Your turn," we said 
simultaneously and I had to smile. 

I did take her upstairs in the end, followed by the 
quartet at a discreet distance.  Miranda didn't help 
matters by waving at them.  She'd started waving a 
day or two earlier and practiced her new skill on 
everyone and everything.  Catzilla made a kamikaze 
run at my legs as I reached the baby gate at the top 
of the stairs and I had to make a grab for the 
banister and nearly dropped the baby in the process. 
Jarred, she let out a screech and grabbed at my hair 
with more strength than an adult.

"Shhh," I said, trying to sound soothing rather than 
the one that needed to be soothed, but she started 
wailing, the combination of strangers, dirty diaper, 
and my own fear making her unsettled.

Somehow I made it into the nursery and plunked her 
down on the changing table.  I unsnapped the crotch 
of her overalls and pulled the denim back.  She 
promptly grabbed the flapping fabric and began to 
examine the snaps.  The diaper shredded in my 
hands and I almost gagged.  The sweet little bundle 
of joy was caked with fecal matter from her navel 
down to her knees.  I surmised that she must have 
moved her bowels before the smell escaped and 
had managed to squirm around enough to get 
herself coated.  This was well beyond the ability of 
mere baby wipes to handle.  I needed a biohazard 
team, preferably with a helmet and breathing mask 
for myself.  

Miranda started to wail again, louder than the chorus 
in Aida, her face going brilliant red with effort.

I pitched the dirty diaper into the pail and carried her, 
at arm's length, into the bathroom; the psychologists 
scattered like frightened birds. Let them run: I am a 
pathologist, I've dissected people from throat to 
anus. I've autopsied an elephant from inside. 
Miranda smelled bad, and she didn't look too fresh 
either, but if I could just keep her *happy* there was 
nothing to fear except a bad report card.

In the bathroom, I filled the sink with body-
temperature water and stripped off her clothes, 
managing to get her mess all over my first sweatshirt 
of the day.  I scraped off the majority of the mess 
with toilet paper and threw it in the toilet.  Then I sat 
her in the sink and washed her with the 
hypoallergenic soap that Mulder bought for her.  I 
was worried about e.coli infections so I made sure 
that I carefully washed every nook and cranny of her 
pink little folds and fat wrinkles.  With my luck, the 
psychologists would think that I was being unduly 
sexual with her and I could feel my face burn at the 
public display of my ineptness.  Miranda kept 
screaming at full volume.

I felt like I was flunking a lab practical in baby 
hygiene.

I towel-dried her and plopped her naked and pink 
onto a bath towel and scrubbed the sink out with 
bleach-fortified cleanser.  I had to stop twice to keep 
her from playing with the toilet brush.  I gave her a 
rubber duck from her stock of bath toys and that 
seemed to satisfy her.  Once the bathroom was 
cleaned up, I scooped Miranda up and trucked her 
back into the nursery where I re-dressed her in a 
green and patchwork onesie and brushed her hair.  
In the past few weeks, her hair was getting thicker 
and darker, and was even starting to hang over her 
forehead like Mulder's. This annoyed me to no end 
so I dabbed a little of Mulder's mousse on her 
forelock and combed it back into a curl before 
anchoring it with a green plastic barrette the shape 
of a seahorse too big for her to swallow.  The 
barrette was a little off-center, but at least I could 
see her eyes.

She looked at me with utter amazement.  No matter 
what magic Mulder could do with the dragon, I could 
make her hair disappear!  She looked down at her 
legs, registering that they were covered with 
different fabric, even patting one chubby thigh to 
make certain, and looked back up at me.  Holding up 
her arms to be picked up, Miranda blew Laura's 
carefully constructed guise of normalcy.

"Lee! " she demanded, "Lee!  Lee Lee Lee Lee Lee!"

Not mama, not ma, not mom, but 'Lee', which was 
as close to her nine month old mouth could get to 
'Scully'.  I picked her up and took her downstairs.  
She might have been wide-awake and ready for 
another round of developmental theory play with 
Mulder, but I was ready for a nap.

****

"What was that shit?" Laura was pissed, seriously 
pissed, and her voice was high and whiny.

"What are you talking about?"

"That Freud bullshit. Look, I don't care how inferior 
you make the average person feel in casual 
conversation, but these people are going to be 
reporting to the court. You want them on your side, 
not resentful and vindictive because you made them 
look dumb. These fellows were ours and we don't 
have to use them if they don't make you look good, 
but I want you to *behave* and act like a normal 
father, to the extent that you can."

"Ah, there's just one thing."

"What?" she snarled, sounding almost as pissy as 
Scully could get. Maybe, I thought, it's me.

"I don't exactly know what a normal father is like."

"Go watch some reruns of the Cosby Show," she 
ordered and pivoted on her heel to leave.

Stung, I locked the front door behind her and set the 
alarms before starting my nightly rounds.  
Downstairs, Warwick had become one with his PC 
and was doing the Java jam with his headset on.  
Through the quiet of the rest of the house, I heard 
the dentist drill whine of Kraftwerk.  On the sofa, 
Ingveld was curled up in a ball with her hands, 
marked with festive menhdi, folded under her cheek.  
Out of reflex, I pulled the afghan off the back of the 
sofa and settled it over her body.  Warwick didn't 
move his gaze from the monitor.  Catzilla caught up 
with me in the living room and began rubbing 
amorously around my calves, his tail wrapping 
around my leg in the feline equivalent of a hug.  I 
picked him up and he draped himself over my 
shoulder with his paws brushing my back.  Thus 
loaded, I trudged upstairs.  

The Mooselet was sleeping on her face like a shrimp 
again, in the pool of light from the nightlight on her 
dresser.  I didn't want to wake her up, but I turned 
her on her back anyway to decrease the risk of 
SIDS. She didn't even twitch.  The additional people 
hanging around the house had kept her in 
performance mode all day and she had fallen asleep 
in her high chair between mouthfuls of spaghetti.  I 
knew exactly how she felt.  It had been just about all 
I could handle to shovel the dishes into the 
dishwasher and close the kitchen for the night.

I found Scully lying on her stomach crossways on 
the bed, her feet still sheathed in her much-hated 
sneakers hanging off the edge.  I think she could 
have dealt with the whole makeover in good grace if 
it hadn't been for the sacrifice of her lethal shoes. I 
put Catzilla down on the pillow and he promptly went 
over and sniffed her hair, which was his way of 
taking her emotional temperature.  Apparently it 
wasn't good, as he raised himself up on his toes and 
arched his back like a Halloween decoration and 
skittered across the bed to the nightstand, where he 
began checking to see if my glasses had play value.

"I made a complete fool out of myself today. The 
psychologists now know exactly what an inept 
parent I am," she muttered into the comforter.

"Many have fallen before the horror of a diaper."

"Yes but I should have handled it better." She was 
looking at her hands again, twisting the rings as if 
they were pimples she couldn't bring herself to pop.

I understood about needing to be the best at the job, 
whatever it was. But taking care of a child quickly 
disabuses you of the idea that you *can* be the best. 
If Scully still thought that she needed to do it 
perfectly or not at all, there was a good chance she'd 
be hitting the road within days.

I reached out to flick her shoes off and began to rub 
her left foot through the sock. When I dug my thumb 
into her arch she shuddered and flexed her hands 
against the comforter.

"My shirt is ruined," she commented distantly as I sat 
down facing away from her and tugged to get both 
her feet in my lap. "The stain won't budge."

I responded with a general sound to indicate I was 
paying attention without expressing an opinion. I 
guessed from prior experience that the shirt could be 
saved, Zoula at the dry cleaners was Romanian and 
I'm pretty sure that witchcraft was part of the service.

The HEPA filter in the corner gave out a whoosh of 
fresh air guaranteed to blanket the room with a layer 
of white noise (courtesy of an upgrade from Frohike) 
to befuddle any prying ears and we could talk in 
private.

"What did you find out?" I asked.

"Roush wants Miranda back as the only living 
survivor of the newest generation of alien-influenced 
humans. Actually she's retro, she's like you and 
Samantha -- fewer genetic modifications, no green 
pustules, no toxic blood. They're trying to go back to 
basics because it was a success."

"If you call George, Jason, and the rest of the freak 
show a success."

"Genetically it was a success.  What fell apart was 
the nurturing of the infants as they grew, Darien's all 
right, Emerson's overcome his environment and 
you're all right."

"That's debatable." In a way Emerson was the worst 
news of all: It's not so bad to have eight loser 
brothers if that makes you the best one, but 
Emerson had survived worse than me and he had 
turned out better. Not only was he sweet and kind 
but he had also made ten million dollars churning 
out software before I darkened Bill Patterson's 
doorstep. Some might find that intimidating, but I've 
lived with low self esteem for a while.

Scully's tiny feet twitched under my hands. "I have 
some of Samantha's records, I haven't read through 
them yet, and I also have two vials of what is 
allegedly smallpox vaccine suitable to protect 
Miranda from genetically engineered viruses. I think 
I should vaccinate her."

"You trust my mother?" Let's face it, standard in-law 
jokes weren't really sufficient to cover the situation.

"No, but I think she's telling the truth about the 
vaccine. Her story about your enhanced resistance 
to disease jibes with what we already know about 
your swift healing and may also help explain why 
you didn't die in Russia like so many of your co-test 
subjects."

"If you think it's a good idea," I moved up to her 
calves and she groaned, whether at the massage or 
at my submission to her recommendation I'm not 
sure.

She twisted away from me and sat up, bringing her 
knees to her chest as she scrunched up against the 
headboard.  I caught her ankles in my hands and 
slid her back down the bedspread, and she looked 
at me as though I'd pulled her tail.  A little more 
roughly than I should have, I plunked her feet back 
into my lap and started working on her instep again.  
Noticing that when I touched her instep her toes 
spread out from the hard ball of her foot like 
Miranda's did something that made it hard for me to 
swallow.

"I talked to the Gunmen and they've managed to 
track down some of the scientists that used to work 
for Roush," I told her and peeled off her socks and 
found her toenails cherry cough drops.  "I thought I 
would go and see if they had any connections with 
Bill or were continuing any of the human genetic 
projects."

"*You're* going to find them?  Leaving me here with 
Miranda and the press?  I'm now a weak and 
helpless woman because I'm *gestating*?  As if that 
lowers my IQ or efficiency rating?" her voice began 
to get harder and staccato, which is the Scully 
version of getting shrill.

Sometimes I wished she'd get shrill just for variety.

Catzilla picked up on her tone and fled underneath 
the bed.

"Hey, hey, " I warned, walking my hands up her hips 
to where I could grab the belt loops of her jeans, 
"you're still suspended for shooting George.  We 
can't both go - Warwick can't *lift* the Mooselet yet 
and Ingveld works all day.  You stay here and run 
interference with the lawyers and the evaluators.  I'll 
take Zippy and it will be fine."

"You are *ditching* me."

She got a stranglehold on the unbuttoned Henley 
neck of my shirt, which hurt my still-healing neck and 
reminded me of the many circles of hell that the 
genetic manipulators had put us through. I didn't like 
the look in her eye, it reminded me of Texas, 
Arizona and when things had been as bleak as a 
desert landscape.  

"I'm telling you what I'm doing.  That does not 
constitute a ditch." I put a hand on her breast. 
Obviously, massage was not doing the trick.

She turned her head away from my questing mouth. 
"Let's not do this," she mumbled.

"Do what?" I was now up on one knee above her 
and if sexual activity didn't commence shortly I was 
in severe danger of falling over.

"Is this how you want Miranda to settle *her* 
disagreements?"

I released her instantly and rolled to sit alongside 
her. "You're good."

"Thanks." She almost smiled.

"If I get delayed it's not so bad, but you've *got* to 
show up for all these appointments. I promise I'll be 
good, Velcro my cellphone to my jacket, duck when I 
see the punch coming, all the things I never do."

The corners of her lush little mouth drew further 
together. "Could I talk you into an electronic 
monitoring device?"

"Matching leashes for me and Miranda?"

She arched a rusty parenthetical eyebrow. As far as 
I knew she was taking the proposition under 
advisement.

"I want a phone call every three hours or I'm coming 
out there."

I grinned raffishly at her. "So, now can we have 
sex?"

She snorted. "I'm not sure that's such a good idea, I 
think I'm going to start a diet."

"Dana, food products are so *yesterday*. Why can't 
you live in the *now*?"

The first actual smile I'd seen in days graced her 
lips. "Actually I have a present for you." She scooted 
to the edge of the bed and jumped off, shedding her 
sweatshirt as she went.

A large flat object covered by a sheet was propped 
against the wall. I'd vaguely noticed it when I'd 
entered, but Scully's emotional state had been at 
Defcon One and I hadn't devoted any brainpower to 
it.

"I ordered a full length mirror for the closet," she 
said, tugging at the sheet so that it pooled onto the 
floor, "but I thought we might try it out before it gets 
permanently installed." Lengthwise against the wall, 
the mirror was longer than she was tall and about 
two and a half feet wide.

It took me a few seconds to figure out her intent, and 
then I thought I'd been abducted and the aliens were 
feeding me fantasies to get my seed. She looked at 
my gape and shrugged. "If you're not interested . . ."

"No!" I squawked. "I mean, yes! Yes!" Way to go, 
Molly Bloom, I thought to myself but we were 
married now and theoretically I no longer needed to 
impress her with my cool.

Standing on the fallen sheet, she tugged at her 
scrunchie, which pushed her breasts out and made 
my dick throb as if she were pulling pasties off of her 
nipples. Through a smog of lust, I watched as she 
undressed and followed her lead.

She laid down on the sheet (clever Scully, no 
rugburn, I thought) and turned on her side to peruse 
her naked body in the mirror. "Well?" she asked and 
ran her hand over her breast, as if to see what it 
looked like.

I could have told her: it looked good. I shed my 
clothes as if ejecting from a doomed fighter plane 
and joined her so that I could see us both in the 
mirror. 

Not without regret, I decided to skip going down on 
her, which wouldn't provide much extra visual 
stimulation.

Slipping down behind her, I reached a hand around 
and watched as the devilishly handsome man in 
front of me squeezed his partner's breast. She 
pushed her head against his marred chest and the 
soundtrack added a soft sigh. I could feel her humid 
skin along my body as I watched her breasts flush 
and swell under my hand.

I pried her up so that I could get one hand 
underneath and around to pinch the nipple closest to 
the floor. My other hand dove between her legs and 
I watched her legs part. While I wouldn't recommend 
red on pink as a fashion statement ordinarily, on 
Scully it drew me like an insect to a full-bloomed 
flower. The mirror showed a man's fingers 
disappearing inside his lover, then slowly returning, 
slippery and glistening. I repeated the motion 
because it looked so good. And again, so slowly that 
she tried to push against the bunched-up sheet to 
urge me on faster.

Her legs scissored closed around my hand, trapping 
me in her hot butterscotch depths. It felt good, like 
my hand was being melted down to blackened bone, 
but it obscured the view and so I tugged my hand 
out, trailing heat and wet down her thighs.

I could see her reflection looking up at mine as I 
stared at her mirror-face. My doppelganger was 
busy coveting the real Scully as she watched me. 
This cat's cradle of gazes was somehow less raw, 
less painful, than directly watching one another.

Time for action. With both of my hands, I tugged at 
her shoulders to get her up on her hands and knees. 
The reflection prevented her from hiding the 
momentary hesitation that swept over her features 
like a flash fire, but she gamely braced herself 
against the slip-sliding sheet and allowed me to 
observe her.

I pulled her elbows back a little so that they didn't 
obscure my sight line for her breasts. Stretched by 
gravity, tight little nipples stabbing downwards, they 
were unutterably gorgeous, and my hands trembled 
with the memory of touching them.

With a clumsy paw I scraped the hair from her neck, 
directing it all to the side so that in the mirror her 
face was framed by a gleaming magician's curtain. 
In profile her face was as perfect as a Greek 
statue's. She was Galatea in reverse: my love for 
her had made her stone.

But she wasn't stone now. Not when she was 
surging back against me with a hungry growl as I 
stared. Her breasts swung with the motion and I 
grabbed at this newly legitimate fruit, keeping one 
hand on the ground so that I wouldn't crush her.

The mirror-Scully's eyes were wide and pleading. It 
couldn't be real, the real woman would never 
willingly make herself so vulnerable, but the movie 
playing behind the silvered glass was convincing 
and I lowered my head to her neck, still watching the 
show. The man in the mirror was draped over her 
body like a rowdy fur coat. He reached in between 
his partner's legs to rub the head of his cock against 
her. 

"Please- " the doppelganger woman in the mirror 
moaned.

And she was hot-wet but the films are always cool 
and dry. The film was still playing and I was 
watching it and acting it out, following the lead of the 
man in the mirror, thrusting slowly, watching her 
vertebrae shake and the red brand on her back 
shimmer as she sucked in air.

 "Please  -  harder -  faster - more - " the woman 
begged on broken gasps between the hungry 
thrusting of the man.

The line of her body was still catlike but the pride 
had fled in the desperate overriding want to be 
fucked.  Her head was raised, her hair flaming and 
her ass was raised high in the air like she was in 
heat.  The man, he was watching my Scully with 
such consumptive passion that I thought he might 
break the wall between us and seize her.

No. He couldn't have her, nobody could have her but 
me. No image, no brother, no enemy or friend would 
take her away. I think I was saying all this but I can't 
be sure because I was convulsing deep inside the 
wet tight depths of her like an electrocuted fish, 
hanging on to the soft chamois covered bone of 
Scully's hips to keep myself on the planet.

When I collapsed on her, she lost stability and sank 
to the ground underneath me. I had enough higher 
brain function remaining to push my hand towards 
the general area of her clitoris and let her grind 
against me until she came as well with a wail that 
sounded more like pain than pleasure, her body 
stretching out as the shocks raced through her, her 
throat white as a line of frost through the wave of her 
hair. As a result, she didn't push me off, despite the 
fact that I must have felt like 10 G's on her back. 
When sanity returned, I rolled off to the side so that I 
wouldn't kill her. 

"Dana?" I panted, spooning up against her back so 
that I could see her body stretched out like the 
naked Maja as her sweat cooled on my skin.

She tilted her head up. In the mirror, I could see the 
feather fall of her hair as it hit the sheet beside her 
ear. "Mmm?"

"Order another mirror, leave this one here."

She chortled and then yawned. Evidently I'd worn 
her out. Well, a short hospital stay for 
convalescence purposes wouldn't be out of place on 
my end, either.

"Dana?"

"Unh?"

"Did I mention I bought a video camera?"

I know she was tired because she gave a bark of 
laughter and then rolled over, obscuring her silver-
backed competition. "We should get in bed or you'll 
be too stiff to sit in your seat tomorrow." She rose, 
wobbling only slightly, and gave me a hand up.

We'd made up too well, now I didn't want to leave 
her side. Or her legs, or her breasts, or the mirror. I 
clutched her to me like an insecurity blanket and 
slept.

Iolokus IV: Res Judicata
9/

Stretch your eyes a little closer
I'm not between you and your ambition.
I am a poster girl with no poster
I am thirty two flavors and then some.
	Ani DiFranco

It was a tough call to make, figuring out what I was 
going to wear to the Hoover Building while toting a 
baby.  A suit was out, as Miranda had a tendency to 
really pump out the fluids and food crumbs with vigor 
on anything with a Dry Clean Only tag.  I was also 
technically suspended for shooting George Naxos, 
and ostensibly going in to update HR on my recent 
change of marital status.  Or was that martial? I 
settled for a white cotton oxford-style shirt and a pair 
of chinos.  All I needed was a tie and I would have 
looked like I was waiting tables at Friday's.  The 
buttons on the shirt were just on the right side of 
stretching over my swelling breasts. I had to blouse 
out the shirt over my straining waistband and 
reflected that I had a week or two before I had to 
start replacing my wardrobe in earnest.  My leftover 
'fat' wardrobe was starting to run out.

Miranda took up her car screaming the minute I 
pulled out of the driveway and I popped my old Abba 
Gold tape in the cassette player. That seemed to 
placate her enough for me to drive without killing 
both of us.  I parked in the garage under the building 
and hoisted Miranda on my hip and her diaper bag 
over my shoulder.  Thank God, Mulder's idea of a 
diaper bag was a worn computer satchel rather than 
something covered with frolicking bunnies.  I didn't 
think that I could have handled that at all.  The trip to 
Human Resources was fairly painless, since I hardly 
knew any of the clerks; they accepted the fact that I 
was toting a baby as commonplace.  

Miranda was passed through the clerks, male and 
female alike, letting them cuddle her and coo at her 
while she smiled and cooed back with the feigned 
sincerity of a politician.  Of course, I'd rather she 
walk the streets as a career rather than seek public 
office.  I was touched to notice that each time she 
was passed over to another person, she looked to 
me for reassurance.  I'd been reading Mulder's child 
development texts behind his back and now knew 
that she was exhibiting the classic insecure bonding 
behaviors which was common for children with 
working parents. Had she not been bonded at all, 
she would have been more anxious and begun to 
fuss or whine since she would have believed that 
she was in danger of being left with strangers.  On 
the other hand, she was far better bonded to both 
Mulder and Warwick than she was to me, which was 
understandable since I'd only been with her full-time 
for about a month after six away and she didn't trust 
me 100% yet.  She wouldn't be the only one.

No one was surprised that I wasn't changing my last 
name.  I had the suspicion that the official policy was 
that one Mulder on the payroll was more than 
enough.  Let me amend that, one Mulder pushing 
the boundaries of the health care plan was more 
than enough.  My now-husband probably had his 
own commemorative file drawer between the 
commendations and chastisements that he had 
accumulated through his tenure.

After the paperwork was done, I took Miranda up to 
the executive level and gathered myself to face the 
lion in his den.  Kimberly greeted me with open-
mouthed shock, which she quickly covered with an 
embarrassed smile.  

"The e-mail just came through from Human 
Resources," she said and turned a darker shade of 
rose, "I guess I should say congratulations."

Her happiness was feigned, I knew.  The water 
cooler rumor for years had been that she had a thing 
for Mulder.  Frankly, I was pretty sure he had 
encouraged her office crush as a means to get 
better access to Skinner.  This willingness to use his 
good looks and charm to get what he wanted was 
not one of Mulder's more attractive character traits.  
We were going to have to talk about this.  One of the 
things we had not discussed was how much of the 
marriage was going to be a legal fiction and how 
much was not.  Maybe I was being sensitive since I 
was looking at being the size of South America 
come fall.

"Thanks.  Is the AD in?"

She hit the intercom and I was admitted to the Inner 
Sanctum in short order.

I don't think that Skinner expected me to bring 
Miranda with me since he looked at her as though I 
was carrying an armful of biological waste rather 
than a small human being.  Unaccountably, this 
irritated me.  Skinner stood and shook my hand, 
eyeing me with an expression of distrust as though 
either Miranda or myself were going to make a mess 
on his nice beige carpet.  Hell, I'd been toilet-trained 
for years and I'd gotten quite good at throwing up 
into trash cans when the morning sickness hit.  I sat 
in the visitor chair and Miranda stood up on my legs 
to tug at my hair and stare at the shiny-headed man 
behind the big desk.

"You'll have to forgive me for bringing Miranda, 
Warwick isn't quite up to full nanny duties.  His 
physical therapist doesn't want him lifting heavy 
objects until his shoulder is rehabilitated."

"She's getting quite large."

"She's crawling now and starting to cruise from 
pieces of furniture on her own.  I estimate that she 
will be walking before the end of the month."

"I understand that you've been to Human 
Resources."

He wanted me to say it.  He couldn't just accept the 
facts of the matter as though I had simply changed 
my withholding tax so I would owe more money to 
my employer in April.  I had to admit what I had done 
- what Mulder and I had done - as though it was yet 
another one of our classic field fuck-ups like losing a 
body, a gun, or annoying local law enforcement.

"Yes.  Because of the custody issues with my 
brother, Mulder and I were married last week.  It was 
a *very* small affair with only sympathetic family in 
attendance."

"Congratulations," he said in a voice that indicated 
he was deeply regretting yet another mistake that I 
had made in a chain of many.

"Bill raising Miranda rather than Mulder is a non-
option.  I would marry Newt Gingich to prevent that.  
Mulder and I no longer work for the same division 
and have virtually no contact at the workplace so 
there should be no conflict of interest."

"That would be the least of my concerns."

I swallowed and Miranda squirmed around in my lap 
like a wet cat, stretching out a drooly hand to reach 
for the brass bulldog on Skinner's desk, knocking 
over his nameplate, coffee cup, desk lamp, and pen 
holder in the process.  Mortified, I bent over and 
started picking things up from the floor while 
Miranda complained at her inability to capture the 
shiny bulldog.

"Na na na LEE!  NA!  CAT!  LEEEEEE!!!!!!!!" she 
bitched, in pretty much the same tone Mulder 
adopted when I'd told him that he couldn't do 
something.

Sometimes, I swore that if I hadn't run the test 
myself, I would have thought that Miranda had been 
an X-chromosome clone of Mulder.

"Just leave it, Agent Scully."

Defeated, I sat back and bounced Miranda until she 
giggled and clapped.

"Sir, our lawyer is going to be in contact with you to 
testify at the custody hearing.  Please keep in mind 
that Miranda was created in one of Roush's labs as 
one of their experiments.  Mulder and I believe that 
some distaff branch of Roush is using Bill as a 
vehicle to gain access to Miranda, which will not be 
healthy for her in the least.  Understand that 
whatever you may think of either of our abilities as 
parents, her alternative really isn't Bill, but Roush."

"You have proof of this?"

I almost laughed, when did we ever have proof of 
anything?

"We're researching it now.  You don't even have to 
assign a case number, as it still falls under Miranda's 
original case file."

"And Agent Zipprelli is working on it as well?"

Translation: is there anyone sane involved in this?"

"Yes."

"Have your lawyer contact me with the schedule for 
testimony."

I didn't want to push my luck, but I was painfully 
aware of how little Skinner likes surprises.

"One other thing, sir."

The frown told me that I was tap-dancing in a puddle 
of nitroglycerin.

"I'll be taking some leave in January.  Agent Zipprelli 
will be up to speed on all open case files at that 
time.  From November on I will be available for 
consultation, but not field assignments."

I watched him do the math.  It only took a moment 
for him to count backwards nine months.

"Once again, congratulations."

In the elevator, headed for the parking garage, I 
wondered how long it had taken Skinner to reach for 
the Scotch he probably had hidden in the credenza.  
Miranda looked at the floor numbers flashing by over 
her head and broke into delighted peals of laughter.  
I inhaled her sweet baby smell and realized that it 
was better than any aromatherapy candle in the 
world.

****

Twenty scientists at the top of their respective 
genetic sub-fields disappear into the ether and no 
one notices. Money answers a lot of questions, 
closes numerous eyes, and shuts mouths.

But, what if five of those scientists had spouses 
and/or children? And what if, by coincidence, all five 
of those familial units moved to the greater Chicago 
area four months after the initial disappearances?

It just goes to show that family values and 
conspiracies really don't mix.

BioQuest was too new and small to have its own 
building. Instead they leased a floor of a nondescript 
downtown office building. I got into the offices on the 
floor below by judicious use of my badge and then 
waited for closing time, at which point I headed one 
floor up. Security was less than it might have been 
and I ended up in a gray-toned hallway dotted with 
abstract art, the kind that scientific types generally 
preferred.

Even minions of darkness need to know where each 
others' offices are, and I found the workplace of one 
Justine Barnabas, whose name was close enough to 
that of Dr. Judith Barnaby, last seen in Roush's 
Texas research enclave, to make me confident that 
I'd found the right place. On Roush's organizational 
chart, Judith had worked directly under Samantha 
Mann, my erstwhile sister and the mad scientist 
who'd merged sperm and egg to create Miranda 
(among others).

Judith had left her lights on; I closed the door and 
turned everything off but one lamp on the desk. The 
large banks of filing cabinets lining one wall of her 
office were mostly empty, as befitted a young 
corporation. She had company prospectuses, her 
employment contract, and a stack of 
incomprehensible technical reports that ostensibly 
dealt with lab mice. I just wasn't sure that lab mice 
wasn't a euphemism for cute little babies.

I heard motion in the hallway, two women's voices. 
Judith returning? Well, I was no Holofernes and I 
wasn't afraid. I settled into the comfy chair behind 
her desk, waiting for her to come in. With the lights 
down and shadows on my face, my non-surgically 
enhanced nose wouldn't be as noticeable and I tried 
to recall Jason Lindsay's smooth whiskey voice.

The door opened and a woman stepped in; I 
recognized her as Judith from a picture on her desk, 
Judith with a young girl. Straight black shoulder-
length hair, a little plump but succulent, with a wide 
wry mouth that promised both wisecracks and great 
head. (God, was the wedding ring on my finger 
responsible for these recent hints of sexual 
awareness of other women? Maybe it contained 
another microchip broadcasting evil thoughts.) She 
closed the door behind her and then turned, her face 
blanking with shock as she took in my darkened 
form lounging proprietarily in her chair.

"You look like you've seen a ghost," I drawled in 
Jason's voice.

"Oh my God, Jason--?" From the look on her face, I 
could tell they'd been lovers. The man certainly got 
around.

Her hand flailed against the wall until it found the 
light switch and we both blinked, inundated by the 
fluorescent glare.

She drew in a shaky breath. "You're not -- you're not 
Jason."

Regaining some equilibrium, she advanced further 
into the office, so that she was standing on the 
opposite side of the desk from me. "Which one are 
you?"

"I'll give you nine guesses and the first eight don't 
count."

"Fox Mulder," she said, leaning forward to examine 
me. "You've got that facial mole, we've never been 
able to figure out the minor variations in 
pigmentation."

"Yes, I'm sure that's very interesting, but I'm here to 
find out what you nice people want with my 
daughter."

She blinked. "In light of recent events, I'd be a fool to 
answer that question, wouldn't I? I think you ought to 
leave before I call security."

"Don't bullshit me, I can have a team of agents here 
in fifteen minutes if I wanted to disrupt your 
operations. I'm offering you a chance to do this 
quietly."

"I will not talk to you.  You are wasting my time."

The sensual mouth tightened down harder than 
Scully's and made dangerous wishes undulate 
underneath the surface of my mind.  I pushed the 
chair back from the desk and carefully placed my 
sidearm on the blotter, next to the mouse pad.

"Dr. Barnabas, you must know enough about me to 
know that I tend to be a little excitable.  Tendency of 
the breed, I suppose.  Now right now I am a micro-
millimeter away from losing my daughter and that 
makes me very anxious.  You don't want me to be 
anxious."

"All right," she said, "I'll tell you what you want to 
know, because we have nothing to do with your 
concerns. We are interested in your line's enhanced 
resistance to other alien organisms, I have to admit 
we've had endless difficulties making it breed true. In 
some ways the destruction of the Texas facility was 
a godsend, we had to try a number of more 
aggressive strategies and we believe that some of 
them have paid off. We don't need your daughter, as 
you call her."

"Then what's BioQuest's new law firm doing in the 
custody suit?" I was definitely not going to think 
about the phrase 'other alien organisms,' no siree 
bob.

She shrugged. "Do I look like a lawyer? We've got 
enough to deal with trying to rebuild without buying 
trouble from you and your friends in government. If 
you want someone to blame, I suggest you look to 
my former boss -- Samantha Mann. Her departure 
nearly got us all killed, but I wouldn't be surprised to 
find out that she was still manipulating events. She 
apparently made her own...side agreements, I 
guess...with those 'higher up.'" She jerked a thumb 
at the ceiling to indicate the possibility of alien 
involvement. "If Sam wants to restart a breeding 
program on her own initiative, even if she's got 
backing, she needs the raw material."

"And you don't?"

"Please, Mr. Mulder. Your line's sperm has gone 
more places than Bill Clinton's. I could populate a 
small Asian nation with your relatives, if I wanted to.  
We've played that hand out," she smiled, the 
reference to Jason and Ian's more-than-brotherly 
relationship making my stomach lurch.

I felt as perceptive as office furniture. None of this 
made sense. Even if they'd had huge stockpiles of 
genetic material, so much was destroyed in Texas 
that I couldn't believe that Miranda held no interest 
for them. Could Judith be imputing her organization's 
own motivations to Sam? Other informants had 
made similarly misleading statements to me before.

"I don't suppose you've got a phone number for 
Sam."

She flipped a hand toward her nearly empty 
Rolodex. "I'm afraid not, but we're always happy to 
cooperate with law enforcement."

I'll bet. She was watching me now as if I were a 
martini after a bad workday. I suspected that if I 
asked she'd enact one of my videos' more common 
boss/secretary scenarios. But she'd probably been 
present when Miranda and all the other created 
children were inserted into the wombs of kidnapped 
women. She was a manufacturer of merchandise, a 
purveyor of flesh, and that was as effective to 
dampen my libido as saltpeter.

"Leave my family alone," I said, unhappy to hear the 
words come out with more pleading than piss and 
vinegar. "You stay on your side of the line and I'll 
stay on mine."

"Threats, Mr. Mulder, should only come from a man 
in a position to make good on them."

"If you take away Miranda I've got nothing to lose. 
You and your handlers should think about that for a 
while," I stood and my gun was steady in my hand, I 
used it to gesture to the photograph of herself and 
her dark-haired daughter on her desk, "You have a 
daughter as well, I suggest you imagine our 
situations reversed."
 
Reaching in my pocket, I handed her one of my 
cards with the Batphone number on it.

"In case you change your mind, or remember 
anything, I'd appreciate a call."

I pointed at the picture on her desk.

"You're lucky she didn't inherit the nose."

When I left she was already reaching for her phone 
to call security. 

***

That afternoon the moving van came and unloaded 
all the contents from my Annapolis apartment, which 
filled up the garage to the bursting point.  I 
embarrassed myself by dithering over what box went 
where in a stereotypical female fashion, but the 
moving men only smiled and toted the boxes and 
furniture in with indulgent smiles and deliciously Diet 
Coke commercial brawny bodies.  I paid them and 
tried not to notice the effect all the excess 
testosterone was having on my already hormone-
swamped body.  They were probably used to 
dealing with flushed and stammering women 
anyway - an occupational hazard.
 
After they had gone, I stood amongst the boxes and 
the furniture with Miranda glued to my hip, and 
suffered a few anxieties.  With the Annapolis 
apartment now a thing of the past, my escape route 
had been cut off.  I had nowhere to go should things 
not work out.  On the other hand, should things work 
out I was faced with an even more appealing 
possibility - I was going to have to organize a yard 
sale.

Still in pro-active mode, I took Miranda upstairs and 
wandered through the bedrooms, trying to settle in 
my mind what was to be done with the incipient 
child.  Having grown up in base housing and having 
to share a room with Missy, there was no way that I 
was going to inflict this on Miranda and the Baby To 
Be Named Later.  That was another issue that made 
me sink to the floor in shock.  We hadn't talked 
about names, hadn't really planned, hadn't intended 
this child at all.  
 
I'd been so wrapped up in the trial and stunned by 
the sheer facts of the marriage and the pregnancy 
that I hadn't bothered to think that far ahead.  I had, 
in the past, set a plan to my life.  I was supposed to 
become head of Forensic Pathology at Quantico by 
the age of forty-five, I was supposed to marry a 
surgeon and drive a Volvo station wagon with one 
darling child and one darling Golden Retriever in the 
back.  I was supposed to alternate holidays between 
my family and my husband's family, and my father 
would tell my child the same stories he had told me 
at the same age.

Then I met Mulder and that shot that plan to hell.

I now had a legal sham of a marriage, no father, no 
sister, a mother who had sold me up the river in the 
nicest way possible, a cat, a daughter conceived in a 
dark laboratory somewhere as part of a foul plan, 
and a second child that might or might not be killing 
me as it grew in my body. 

I suddenly missed Mulder with a pang so physical 
that I nearly vomited in the hallway.

Miranda, sensing my mood, crawled over and pulled 
herself up on my body until we were nose to nose.

"Lee Dah?" she asked.

And when I started to cry, she did too, as misery 
hates to be alone.

Then we went downstairs and had ice cream.
  
I couldn't believe how empty the house was without 
Mulder.  I had thought that I would use this time to 
soak up whatever kind of privacy I had without 
having him hanging around my neck like the fallen 
angel he had been so often in the past.  But to tell 
you the truth, I was starting to feel as though he had 
a better grip on the realities of life than I did.  His 
nonchalance in dealing with Miranda, the 
exasperation with the lawyers, the irrefutable logic of 
our bizarre wedding, and the casual way that he had 
accepted the fact that I was pregnant was nothing 
short of a miracle.  His acceptance was a miracle; 
the benefit of the pregnancy was still under 
consideration.  Actually his acceptance was also 
questionable.  After all this time, after all we'd been 
through the one thing I knew for sure was how little I 
actually knew about him.

Happiness is not a warm gun, it is cold ice cream 
and I needed a lot of happiness that night.

****

Despite the implicit promise I'd made to Dr. Barnaby, 
I had the Chicago Bureau sweep in an hour after I 
left and shut the place down. Regrettably for Roush, 
not only had they engaged in illicit and deadly 
human experimentation, they'd *also* run afoul of 
the federal forfeiture laws. This meant that Roush's 
assets became the property of the government; a 
corollary was that any attempt to hide such assets 
behind a new corporate identity was itself illegal. 
While normally the government's much-expanded 
power to define and adjudge crimes made me 
nervous, it was a definite asset in this situation. 
When Dr. Barnaby as much as told me she still had 
access to Roush's resources, she provided probable 
cause to shut BioQuest down.

Naturally, a few of the Roush refugees slipped 
through the Bureau's greedy fingers, including the 
lovely doctor herself, but we had an office full of data 
and a lab full of things the field agents couldn't even 
describe. Not bad for a day's work. 

This was beyond my level of scientific competence. 
Okay, so light bulbs are beyond my level of scientific 
competence, I'm not ashamed of it. The upshot was 
that Scully's assistance was required, so I called her 
and told her to get to the airport. She could bring 
whatever looked interesting back to Quantico so that 
she'd be able to analyze it and still jump through 
hoops for the childcare experts. She greeted the 
news with the expected enthusiasm.

We did the great baby trade off in National, which 
might have amused anyone who noticed.  Scully met 
me in the main section of the airport, lines of 
exhaustion around her mouth and her carry-on bag 
and laptop hanging over her shoulder, Miranda 
clinging to her neck.  I had my own laptop and carry-
on bag. She handed me the baby; I handed her a 
travel mug full of coffee.  Remembering that the 
rings glittering on her finger meant that we were now 
allowed to acknowledge our relationship in public, I 
leaned down and kissed her.  She returned the kiss 
with more relief than passion and her mouth tasted 
like cookies.  She kissed Miranda's hot little head 
and jogged off to catch her flight, a slim little figure in 
black, exiting stage left like one of Shakespeare's 
girl-boys off to save the day.  The entire process 
took less than five minutes.  The Mooselet greeted 
me with a squeal of delight and patted the side of my 
stubbly face to reassure herself that I was really 
there.  I rummaged around in my pocket for a minute 
and pulled out the little Chicago Bulls baseball cap I 
had gotten her at O'Hare.  The hat fit and she looked 
out from under the brim at me with a sarcastic 
confusion as if to remind me that a Teletubby hat 
would have been more welcome.

I just wanted whatever good luck we could get from 
affiliation with a winning team.

"Da da da Lee Da," she reminded me.

"She'll be back tomorrow.  Were you a good little 
gremlin while I was gone?"

Her toothy grin indicated otherwise.

We could do this, it could work.

****

I caught up with Zippy at O'Hare.  His expression 
indicated exactly how far Mulder and I had pushed 
him with the latest of our stupid schemes.  Pride had 
forbidden him to get the services of the go-cart for 
the officially disabled, and with his crutches and the 
blue binding of the cast extending to his foot poking 
out from under his suit trousers he looked like a 
professional athlete sidelined at the championship 
game.  Poor guy, he was being traded off between 
Mulder and myself in very much the same way 
Miranda was, only she was young enough not to 
realize that this was not the way that things were 
supposed to work.  Zippy knew it was crazy and he 
was jangling with annoyance as he hobbled up to 
me.

"This has got to be the most fucked-up piece of shit 
plan that has ever lurched out of Mulder's sick 
head."

"Hi Zippy, how's the leg?"

"Bite me Dana," he grunted and began hopping 
alongside me.

"Excuse me for a minute.  Bio-break." I said and 
ducked into the ladies' room.

Morning sickness is a misnomer in the extreme.  
Morning, noon, and night sickness was more 
appropriate.  The only good thing about it is that 
unlike vomiting from excess of alcohol or a viral 
infection, I genuinely felt better after I'd thrown up.  I 
wanted to tell Zippy simply because I was afraid that 
he would start some diatribe about eating disorders 
if I didn't.  I also couldn't tell him that I'd given up the 
Zoloft for fear of fetal damage.  Since baby #3 was 
starting off au natural, it seemed best to keep it that 
way.

"What's the deal?" he asked as he slid into the 
passenger seat of the Bucar he had purloined from 
the Chicago Field Office.

I pulled the seat forward.

"Mulder wants me to take a look at whatever 
BioQuest was growing in the lab."

"You know, Mrs. Zipprelli's little boy has got to tell 
you a couple things," he said as we headed down 
the brilliant morning rush hour toward the city.  
"What the fuck is wrong with you and Spooky? Are 
you fuckin' nuts or what?"

"That's what my brother Bill seems to think."

"Hey, I've been your goddamn audience through this 
fucking circus. I remember when you took the baby 
and left us in Texas, he drank himself stupid in my 
guestroom for two months for missing both of you.  
What happened next?  You left the baby with his 
brother and he threw the computer at you, then you 
called him several zillion times and didn't leave 
messages, then the postcards, then you're face to 
face again and I'm thinking that I'm going to have to 
call in a squad in riot gear.  Now, now not only are 
you living at his house after almost being killed by 
his brother and you're married and making like 
happy ever after?  I don't get it."

"You forgot the custody battle." I reminded him.
 
"Yeah, don't call me for a witness.  I think you're 
both fucking nuts - and I mean that with the deepest 
affection. I also hate perjuring myself.  It makes me 
sweat.  Sweating messes up my hair. "

"Thanks Mike, you're a prince."

"You should have married me when I asked you."

"Probably."

"Do you love him?"

The Sears Tower poked up over the other buildings 
in the bright distance.

"Give me an empirical definition of love and I'll tell 
you.  I trust him, I value his opinion, most of the time 
I enjoy his company, and I know that I was unhappy 
when we were not together."

"That's a cold analysis."

I shrugged and looked down the street at the 
stoplight.

"Down here?"

"Three blocks."

"Zippy?"

"Yeah?"

"One more thing --  I'm pregnant."

Half a dozen expressions chased each other over 
his face before the final one settled over his features 
and one again I found myself bathed in the blinding 
light of a full-force Zippy smile.

"Cool," he said.

I didn't know humans had that many teeth.


****

The batphone rang at midnight and I snatched it off 
the bedside table before it rang a second time.

"Have you ever thrown up in an airplane bathroom?" 
Scully asked.

"As a matter of fact, I have.  Don't give me shit about 
there not being enough room to puke because I'm 
taller than you are."

"I hadn't noticed," she said and I heard the 
unmistakable rustling of bedclothes.

"Anything good?" I asked.
 
"Little pitchers have big ears," which was her way of 
reminding me that the lines could be tapped, I made 
a note to have the Gunmen check it out in the 
morning.

"The Mooselet misses you.  I'd let you talk to her, but 
she's down for the count."
 
"You probably shouldn't call her that, she might end 
up confessing it an eating disorder group when she's 
a teenager."

If that was the extent of the Mooselet's psychological 
problems, we were ahead of the game.

"What have you found out?"

She sighed into my ear, which made the short hairs 
rise on the back of my neck.

"We did find some embryos - but they weren't 
human.  They were porcine.  Fetal pigs that were 
being grown in that green medium that we've seen 
before.  My theory is that they have been trying to 
replicate the gene or genes that gives the viral 
immunity and the acceleration of cell regeneration. If 
they could manufacture it through the pigs the way 
insulin is manufactured and inject it into already 
living people they would have a lot more flexibility in 
shaping the new regime. Not to mention the fact that 
it would be very hard for even sturdy hybrid babies 
to survive if all their caretakers died of plague."

"Pigs --  that's not kosher."

"After the viral epidemic, Jews, Muslims, 
vegetarians, and other non-pork or non-meat eaters 
by theology, choice, politics, or cuisine, will be wiped 
from the face of the planet.  "

"Which reminds me, did you eat a real dinner or are 
you living on coffee ice cream again?"

"Moo Shu pork, actually.  Securing my place in the 
New World order.  Zippy says hi, by the way."

"The bed's too big without you."

"I was thinking the same thing," she said and 
yawned.

"Go to sleep.  You have to be bright and cheery for 
court tomorrow."

"Bite me."

"As soon as you get home."

She laughed softy into the phone and cut the 
connection.

It wasn't easy falling asleep alone.  I wondered if 
Scully was thinking the same thing in the hotel room 
in Chicago, or if she even noticed the lack of a 
snoring lump next to her.  Catzilla hopped up on the 
bed next to me and began to knead my shoulder 
with his paws, looking seriously at me with his 
sulfurous eyes and purring as though making me as 
soft as pizza dough was the most important thing in 
the world.  Other parts of me were far from soft and I 
briefly entertained the thought of indulging in my 
favorite one-player sport but decided I would let the 
pressure build until I got Scully alone again.  
Planning what I was going to do to her on her return 
was worth the dull ache of want in my cock.  With 
Catzilla snoring in a surprisingly Scully-like fashion 
into the pillow next to me I finally fell asleep.

Alone in my big bed I dreamed a classic Lewis 
Carroll dream.  Scully had the baby, and was quite 
pleased.  Proud even, with the little creature's head 
enclosed in a white lace cap.  I took the baby from 
her arms and was stunned when I realized that it 
had the bristle-eyelashes and angry red eyes of a 
piglet.  No one else noticed.  I stood there with the 
pig-baby in my arms and began to sweat with horror.  
I was trying to explain to the judge that it was the 
wrong baby.  Scully eyed me with contempt and 
began to breast-feed the beast in the courtroom 
while the bailiffs dragged me away in horizontally 
striped prison garb with an enormous ball and chain 
weighing my leg down.

No, I wasn't having any anxieties.
 
Iolokus IV: Res Judicata
10/

The sky coloured perfect
As the man slipped away
Waving with a last vanilla smile
...
One more ice cream river body
Flowed underneath the bridge
Underneath the bridge 
	The Cure

If it's in the newspaper, it must be true, after all they 
wouldn't lie to a credulous American public, would 
they?

After the first one paragraph story in the Metro 
section, I knew we didn't have enough luck to keep 
the story from going national.

FBI Agents in Custody Battle over Miracle Baby.

Just in time for the first day back in court, when the 
experts would vomit their carefully acquired 
knowledge of our parenting skills in front of the 
world.

Fuck.

Somewhere they had dug up an old picture of both 
Scully and myself in that black year when she was 
eaten by cancer.  From her haircut  and the 
gauntness of her face I placed it at the time she'd 
gone into the hospital to die.  She was white and 
haggard in her cool black suit and I was hovering 
next to her looking like I had something pinching my 
balls.  It wasn't a picture to inspire any kind of image 
of nurturing. By contrast, the photo with the inside 
story was of the two of us leaving the courthouse 
with the Mooselet a few days earlier and at least we 
looked human there, even though the line of scabs 
was clearly visible on my throat.  Give the Post 
credit, the story was pretty much factual as much as 
the facts were public knowledge, but some 
uncomfortable questions were raised to the effect 
that our "privileged position as government 
employees might unduly influence the verdict". 
Which was kind of bizarre considering the fact that 
Bill Scully was a government employee as well as 
being a highly respected Navy officer.  The fact that 
Bill was respected by anything of higher intelligence 
than a chickpea was bizarre in and of itself.

The Miracle Baby decided that she really wanted to 
chew on the side of the newspaper and I had to pry 
it out of her fat hands before she ingested any ink, 
which I suspected would not mix well with the 
Cheerios and banana she had already eaten.

There we were in the renamed Ronald Reagan 
National airport, and the Mooselet was drooling, not 
unlike the former president.  There was a certain 
pathos there, former leader of the free world in the 
kaleidoscope of Alzheimer's spending the golden 
years of his life on a park bench like Forrest Gump.  
I just hoped that Miranda would be kind to me when 
I was too old and feeble to take care of myself.  I 
hoped the Mooselet would understand that should I 
find out that I was incapable of taking care of myself 
I'd floss with Smith and Wesson.

"Voon?" the Mooselet asked, pulling on my tie.

"Voon." I agreed.

I folded up the paper and shoved it in the diaper bag 
before stretching my legs out in the uncomfortable 
chair in the airport lounge.  Scully's flight was ten 
minutes late but there was still enough time to make 
it into court even if there was a tremendous back-up 
on the Beltway.  I bounced Miranda on my thighs 
while she clung onto my fingers.  The morning e-mail 
from Danny hadn't been promising; enough of the 
BioQuest crew had decamped before the net had 
been dropped which made me consider that there 
was a very large leak in the Chicago field office.  

"Who's coming home?" I asked the Mooselet.

"Lee!"

"Say 'ma-ma'" I encouraged.

"Lee!" she corrected me and frowned at me as 
though I were suggesting that Scully's name was 
now 'Beaufort' or 'the Artist formerly known as 
Prince'.

It wasn't unheard of for children to call parents by 
their first names, but even in my experience, calling 
a parent by their last was a bit odd.  Of course, in 
many traditional households where the parents had 
the same last name this could have caused some 
confusion.  Additionally confusing was the fact that 
the Mooselet was Miranda Scully since Miranda 
Mulder sounded ridiculous.  What was  the new 
baby going to go by?  Frankenbaby Mulder?  What 
name went with Mulder anyway?  Not a lot.

This was another one of the questions that we were 
going to have to discuss when this farce with Bill 
was finally over and done with.  There were also 
some serious closet space issues that had to be 
handled before I replaced enough suits to feel well-
dressed again.  

The light board at the airline registered that Scully's 
flight from O'Hare had come in and I gathered up 
baby and diaper bag and schlepped over to the 
gate.  About halfway through the string of crisp 
government types and some bovine tourists was my 
own crisp government type with her hair shining like 
a new copper penny.

"Hi." I said and the Mooselet reached out both 
hands.

"Lee! Lee!" she greeted Scully and patted her face 
with both hands.

We did an awkward yuppie shuffle where I kissed 
her on the cheek and took her overnight bag while 
she received an armful of baby in return.
 
While Miranda sucked most of Scully's make-up off 
with baby kisses, we made our burdened way out to 
short term parking.  Was I imagining things or did 
she really seem glad to see the Mooselet and me?  I 
had finessed a used Ranger out of Lariat on an 
extended rental that could turn into a purchase if we 
liked it.  I figured after one good Mooselet mess we'd 
be too embarrassed to return it.  It was in excellent 
condition and had more than enough room in the 
back seat to accommodate another baby seat.  
Besides, it was only logical for us to get a vehicle big 
enough to accommodate the growing tribe.  I even 
had a fantasy of driving north to the summer house 
in August and the Outback had claustrophobia-
inducing tendencies for a drive of that length. I 
opened the back hatch and popped her bag, 
briefcase and laptop inside.  The Mooselet, kicking 
and squirming, went into the baby seat in the back.

"Mulder, it's *enormous*," she gasped.

I batted my eyelashes at her.

"Why thank you."

She turned as pink as the Mooselet's onesie.

"How *Yuppie*," she stuttered.

"Laugh all you want, you're driving it."
 
"Driving it?  I won't be able to reach the pedals."

"Drive, Scully, drive."

It took her five minutes to get the seat and mirrors 
adjusted but she managed and we set off, with her 
smirking a little over the grandiosity of the vehicle. 
True, it did look like a normal SUV swollen from 
steroid abuse but wasn't that part of the fun?  Once 
we were out on the highway, she slipped through the 
morning traffic with the skill and ease of someone 
who had commuted from Annapolis to DC for six 
years.  I had the feeling that Scully would be able to 
handle the M25 - right-handed driving and all.  
Maybe, before she got too uncomfortable in her 
pregnancy, we could go to England, I could show 
her Oxford, we could look at crop circles, take the 
Mooselet to Stonehenge (she would probably want 
to put one of the standing stones in her mouth) and 
climb Glastonbury Tor.  God, I was such a sappy 
romantic.

"Find anything interesting?" I asked.

"Pigs in jars, pigs in tanks, pigs in pieces, little bits of 
pig on slides.  If they're performing human 
experiments it isn't at the BioQuest location.  I also 
went through their files to see if there were any 
references to off-site locations and I found 
something."

"What?"

"There were some locked down files in a 
subdirectory called 'segue'.  I copied it onto a DAT 
tape and overnighted it to Danny.  For all I know it's 
their accounting files, but I thought it was worth a 
shot."

"Sounds promising.  Now, forget about that for a 
couple of hours.  I talked to Laura last night and she 
said that Bill and Maxwell have lined up some pretty 
heavy hitters for this morning.  The child 
psychologists and some more specialists.  All we 
have lined up is Skinner."

She took a deep breath and the big SUV wobbled 
for a moment.  The Mooselet chortled with glee.

"He knows," she said.

"You *told* him."

"I *implied*.  I needed to indicate the seriousness of 
the situation, also that it was connected to Miranda 
and the Roush file."

I rubbed my neck.  The only problem with Skinner is 
that he changes teams more often than a farm-
league outfielder.

"Keep doing that and the scarring will be 
unmanageable," Scully instructed sharply. As far as I 
could tell, she'd never looked away from the road.

When we pulled into the lot, I had to shield Miranda 
from the camera flashes with her own diaper bag. 
Scully fended for herself, sailing through the 
reporters shouting their intimate questions as stiffly 
and proudly as the carved lady on a ship's prow.

It was rough sailing inside, too. Bill's experts had 
completed their evaluations and they were Not 
Amused.

Watching psychologists testify was enough to make 
me highly grateful that I'd never gone into private 
practice. At least when you're a profiler there's a 
certain mystique, a "how did he do that?" glamour 
that allows you to make what seem to the hoi polloi 
like highly specific and un-evidenced predictions 
even though they follow naturally from the facts of 
the case. By contrast, most average citizens believe 
that they can tell the difference between a fit and an 
unfit parent, so psychological expertise doesn't go all 
that far.

Bill's experts thought that we were mad, bad, and 
dangerous to know. (Okay, so they were right on two 
out of three, but I still thought they didn't have a 
clue.) I was a big clumsy puppy, full of goodwill but 
lacking real knowledge or stability. There was 
something about my attention span, I think, but my 
mind drifted . . . Scully, by contrast, was cool and 
competent: too cool and competent, a robot nurse 
instead of a warm, fuzzy nurturer. She was distantly 
inaccessible; I was over-involved and hyper-vigilant. 
Together we were guaranteed to produce a child 
with more neuroses than the DSM-IV listed. A kid of 
ours would probably be a lesbian and an intellectual 
(it's not clear which is worse in Virginia). And that 
was only if said child didn't blow her brains out first 
with one of the many guns in the household.

These folks weren't thrilled with working women, 
particularly women in law enforcement. I think they 
probably suspected Scully was gay even though she 
was married, she wore skirts and lipstick, and her 
hair was nearly shoulder-length -- lesbians can be 
tricky that way. Several of these jokers suggested 
that, lacking the experience of sustaining life inside 
her for nine months, Scully could never form a true 
maternal bond with Miranda. I  wondered how Tara 
would do if that were true, and what these people 
thought a father's bond should be, and to give our 
lawyer credit she was quite effective on cross 
examination on those points. Unfortunately, the 
judge, who reminded me disturbingly of Archie 
Bunker, seemed to take all this quite seriously, and 
nodded sagely when the experts talked about the 
importance of female figures fulfilling the traditional 
nurturant roles so as not to confuse the developing 
child's sense of self. Laura also made fun of some of 
the more dramatic predictions, but the damage 
would be done as soon as they brought up the 
choicer moments from my past with the X Files. 

Tara testified that she loved Bill, loved little butterball 
Matthew, adored Miranda, and would be thrilled to 
raise another child while waiting to have more of her 
own. I was sure there was a real person under there 
somewhere, like the bit of grit at the center of a 
pearl, but I didn't have the luxury of smashing her 
open to see.

Bill was more interesting. He wasn't allowed to 
testify about seeing the tape of Scully in Arizona. 
However, he did explain that he'd watched the two of 
us suspiciously for years, and though as the head of 
the family after his father's passing he was naturally 
concerned for Scully he hadn't felt justified in 
intervening until Miranda appeared.

Laura walked up to him with the intensity of Catzilla 
stalking a squirrel from behind the screen door. I 
hoped she didn't bounce off like he did.

"Could you tell me what this is?" She handed him a 
piece of paper.

He blinked down at it. "Looks like a credit report."

"Whose?"

Her tone made him frown. I bet the men under him 
didn't talk to him that way. Or the women either, as 
few as they were. "It's my credit report. Mine and 
Tara's."

"And is the statement of your outstanding debts 
accurate to the best of your knowledge?"

He scrutinized it as if translating it from the Russian. 
"Yes, I think so."

"So, you pay over $600 a month servicing your 
credit card debt?"

Good God, what were they doing, eating caviar and 
truffles every meal? Maybe he went to Hooters and 
tipped really well every time he was on land.  Maybe 
he had a mistress who wasn't happy wearing K-mart 
markdowns like his wife.  Sex lines?  Lap Dancing?  
The possibilities were endless, but one thing was for 
sure -- he wasn't spending the money on his 
wardrobe.

"Yes," he admitted.

"And are you aware that Miranda Scully's legal 
guardian will be responsible for her trust fund?"

"Yes."

"About how much is that per year?"

Bill looked over at his lawyer, then at the judge, who 
looked down expectantly. "About twenty, twenty five 
thousand a year, I guess."

"You guess? Money like that will fund a lot of 
expensive new toys, won't it, Lt. Scully?"

"We'd use that money to make Miranda's life better!"

"And your life would be her life, correct?"

"I don't see what this has to do with anything," he 
complained. "This isn't about me, it's about Dana 
and that fruitcake destroying the life of my niece."

"So your motives are perfectly altruistic here? Tell 
me, Lt. Commander Scully, the day after the judge 
made his first rulings in this case, did you go to the 
Ford dealership in Annapolis and arrange to 
purchase a Ford Explorer?"

"We need that car," Bill whined.

I thought about the Ranger in the parking lot and 
tried not to cringe.  Well, that was a little different, 
Scully's car had been blown up, and we were fixin' to 
put another youngin' in the back.

"Yes, of course. And before the court-ordered 
evaluation with Miranda, how many times had you 
met her?"

Bill was now as stiff as week-old bread in his seat, 
looking past Laura towards the back doors of the 
courtroom as if he would really rather be elsewhere. 
"At her christening, and then again when Dana 
brought her over to my mother's a few weeks ago."

"So, that's about forty minutes, total?"

He sneered. "It was more than that."

"Fifty, then? What makes you so confident that you 
should rip Miranda away from the only parents she's 
ever known?"

He stared lightning bolts at me and Scully. "Because 
I know these parents, and I wouldn't leave a pet 
rabbit with them." Beside me Scully twitched as if 
he'd sawed through a long-healed scar.

"Well, that's another interesting question. Since your 
sister joined the FBI, about how much time have you 
spent with her and Fox Mulder?"

"I'm in the Navy, Miss, I don't get as much time as I'd 
like to visit my extended family around the country."

"So, you were with your sister a week last 
Christmas, a week when Dr. Scully was in the 
hospital, maybe a few weekends more in six years -- 
and you're confident that you know her and her 
husband well enough to judge her unfit?"

Bill clenched his hands on the wooden witness 
protection barrier and leaned forward. "I'm a military 
officer, trained to observe a situation and make a 
quick judgement. That's the only way to save lives in 
a conflict and it's just as relevant here, with Miranda. 
I know as much as I need to."

"I have nothing further," Laura told the judge in a 
way that indicated she thought it was a waste of time 
talking to this moron.

She had to tread a little more softly with Maggie, 
who expressed great concern for "Dana's mental 
health after all the troubles of the past few years" 
and thought that "she hasn't taken the time to be a 
real mother." I think Mommy Scully was pissed that 
Scully didn't turn Miranda over to her tender mercies 
when Scully decided to take a vacation from 
parenting.

I used to like Margaret Scully. From the outside, she 
seemed like the mother I would have wanted for 
myself. Scully found her overinvolved at times, but 
since my mother was about as involved with me as 
Saturn is with the Earth's moon I thought it was 
charming.

What Maggie's testimony made apparent was that 
there was a serious control freak under that 
matronly, warm exterior, which shouldn't have been 
surprising to someone who knew Scully. When 
Scully decided not to move in with Mommy Scully, 
who would babysit while Scully switched to a real job 
at which she could meet some nice Catholic 
(breathing) men, Mom decided that Scully was a bad 
girl in need of correction. (I had a fantasy that went 
that way, but it really had very little to do with 
Miranda.)

Laura did her best, suggesting that Maggie was 
infected with just a smidgen of religious prejudice 
and that she was retaliating against Scully because 
her daughter cut the apron strings, but it's not that 
easy to attack the morals of a smiling grandmother.. 
And there was no way we were going to counter 
Maggie's testimony with my mother's; the judge 
would have stopped right there and awarded Bill 
custody.

Bill's final witness was Scully's oncologist. I hadn't 
even considered it, but the fact was that from the 
perspective of everyday science there was no 
reason she'd gone into remission, and the oncologist 
was very clear that the cancer could reappear at any 
time to claim her. So, Maxwell's assertion was, it 
was better never to let Miranda get attached in the 
first place.

Laura wasn't great on cross-examination. There 
were no good numbers on survival rates after 
remission because nobody but Scully, apparently, 
had ever gone into remission from a nasopharyngeal 
tumor after the cancer metastasized into the blood. 
And Laura didn't want to dwell on the microchip in 
Scully's neck as a source of protection. As 
alternative medicine went, it was hardly 
acupuncture.

I don't remember that night. I think we might have all 
slept in the SUV, because I have absolutely no idea 
what happened between the time that we fled the 
cameras at the courthouse and the time we pushed 
through them the next morning.  Hell, it wasn't my 
first experience with missing time and I would have 
welcomed a free trip to Alpha Centauri at that point.  
But no, Scully, we're still in Virginia.

As promised, things moved rather swiftly, family 
court not being subject to the kind of delays that 
made the Simpson trial into a long-running soap 
opera. Our experts took the stand and swore up and 
down that we were as stable and loving as the 
average suburban family. Their main contention, 
though, was that a "good enough" parent with a 
bond to a child was better than any wonderfully 
doting stranger. This is why Emily never really 
warmed to Scully despite Scully's best efforts; she 
was always waiting for Roberta Sim to return. 
Though Scully had been absent for six months -- 
indeed, maybe because of that -- Miranda needed 
the stability of caretakers she knew rather than more 
disruption.

It sounded good to me. Maxwell sneered and 
pranced and asked whether the fact that children 
usually love and bond with their abusive parents 
means those parents should be left alone to destroy 
young lives. I wanted to smack him but decided it 
wouldn't look good in front of the judge.  Miranda 
was too young to know what was best for her, that 
was the point of the trial. We were paying our folks 
well enough to hold their ground, though, and they 
did, asserting that Miranda was not showing the 
definite signs of suffering associated with abuse. 
She was developing well despite the fact that she'd 
been the main event in a three ring circus for the 
past month. If we had lingering parenting problems, 
they claimed, we should be ordered to take 
parenting classes instead of losing custody. I had no 
enthusiasm for sitting through lectures by underpaid 
social workers along with parents who hit their kids 
with broomsticks, but I'd happily do it just to piss Bill 
off.

I don't know exactly what voodoo Scully pulled to get 
Skinner to testify, but it was clearly the high point of 
the trial. 

God bless his shining head.  He sat up on the stand 
looking like authority incarnate, like Mr. Clean 
testifying against the forces of Dirt.  If I could have 
pulled another ace out of my sleeve, it would be a 
Skinner clone.  My former boss would stop just short 
of perjury to paint my portrait as a dependable agent 
and to give the court a different picture of Scully -- 
strong, compassionate, full of sympathy for victims 
of crime.  I knew this was only because he wanted 
the whole sordid mess tidied up as quickly as 
possible to prevent any other bad press for the 
Bureau.  He was a company man, after all.  The fact 
that he was a former Marine and Bill was Navy must 
have had something to do with it as well. Service 
rivalries were ingrained more deeply than school 
rivalries, it seemed.

"Agents Mulder and Scully are the most creative and 
tenacious investigators I have seen. I would hesitate 
to call any case unsolvable without first invoking 
their expertise."

"So you consider the two of them valuable and 
reliable members of the Bureau?" Laura asked.
 
"Yes. Though I have supervised them through a very 
difficult period, I have always relied on their 
commitment to one another and to their jobs."

This was really skirting lying under oath, but through 
the years I have learned that Skinner is capable of 
telling the truth with the appropriate spin for the 
situation.

Maxwell, when he got his turn, brought a file folder 
an inch thick over to the stand. "Do you recognize 
these?" he asked.

Skinner flipped through the papers quickly and 
frowned down at the lawyer like the Lion King telling 
off a bad hyena.  I really had to widen my video 
viewing.

"They're discipline reports for Agent Mulder. I signed 
them."

"And these?" Another file folder, thicker than the 
first. 

Skinner didn't even bother to look. "I assume that 
those are the rest of the official reprimands."

"And you still think this man is stable and reliable? 
How many other agents have discipline records like 
this?"

"I am not aware of any," Skinner conceded, "and I 
am not aware of any others with the resolution rate 
or the --"

"And how many other agents have killed as often as 
Agents Mulder and Scully?"

"I wouldn't have those statistics at hand." Skinner 
didn't like being interrupted, but I hoped he'd stay 
copacetic and keep the judge sympathetic to his 
masculine authority.

"And how many agents have been allowed to stay 
with the Bureau after at least four psychotic breaks, 
one of which resulted in an attack on you?"

Skinner leaned forward and stared into Maxwell's 
eyes. "I would draw your attention to the fact that the 
FBI has officially classified that incident as an 
assault on Agent Mulder through the use of covertly 
administered psychoactive drugs in order to thwart 
his investigative activities. I believe that the other 
incidents to which you refer are similarly being 
distorted."

I wanted to stand up and applaud.

The Mooselet applauded for all of us.

Then only Scully and I were left to tell our side of the 
story.

Iolokus IV: Res Judicata
11/

Let be be finale of seem
The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.
	Wallace Stevens

The next morning, I was standing in the kitchen, 
trying to choke down a prenatal vitamin the size of a 
robin's egg (I'd chided but Mulder insisted that he'd 
paid cash which was enough to keep Them off the 
trail if it was at all possible to do so) when it 
happened. Not a post-abduction gusher like the girl 
on our very first case. Just a regular drippy 
nosebleed. No sweat.

No sweat, just blood. Pregnancy increases blood 
flow to the mucous membranes, and bleeding from 
the gums and nosebleeds are perfectly common 
consequences. I'd just gotten a clean bill of health 
and the cancer couldn't possibly have resurfaced so 
quickly. After all, even though the remission 
happened almost instantaneously, that doesn't mean 
that it would end with the same speed...

And I'll respect you in the morning, and nuclear 
weapons are only for deterrence, and Santa Claus 
and the Tooth Fairy are making tea for the Easter 
Bunny right around the corner.

As soon as the bleeding stopped I cleaned up the 
few drops that had fallen on the kitchen table. The 
sweatshirt I soaked in cold water; I'd have to throw it 
out unless the residue was unrecognizable before 
Mulder did the laundry. I planned to get out the 
Vaseline and use it at night, when my nose got a 
little less tender, to prevent the delicate tissue inside 
from drying out. Pregnancy-based nosebleeds are 
most likely when the air is dry and cold. And, hey, 
even though we were sitting on a filled-in swamp 
with humidity running 90% every day, it was 
perfectly possible that the air conditioning was 
causing the problem. 

Everyone needs a few foundational delusions. Mine 
are very concrete and limited, compared to Mulder's.

I booted up the laptop and fixed my will so that Zippy 
got my guns and Mulder got everything else. 

Mulder returned from his stress-reducing run (he 
must have jogged to Asbury Park and back) and 
grabbed coffee, kissing my head in passing, not  
knowing what was going on underneath my morning 
fright-fest hair.

The psychologists had been right on one count, 
Mulder was a big clumsy puppy, full of goodwill, with 
a short attention span when he wanted.  When he 
needed to be, he was as canny and cunning as a 
stray in any city of the world where poached pooch 
appears on the menu.  He stopped in the middle of 
the kitchen, his eyes flicking over towards the 
laundry room for a moment before he looked back at 
me, irises more brown than green with canine 
awareness.

"Something wrong?" he asked.

"Same old morning sickness," I lied.

He wasn't satisfied and he sniffed the air 
suspiciously before trotting off upstairs.
 
Court time came, and with it the revelation that an 
appeals court had ordered the courtroom open to 
the press. Apparently Miranda was too young to be 
negatively affected by the trial publicity, and Bill's 
case raised important questions of open, democratic 
government by challenging the FBI's willingness to 
tolerate our shenanigans and exposing our 
misbehavior. The First Amendment uber alles, never 
mind that the media presence added a new ring to 
the already world-class circus in progress.

It couldn't have come at a worse time as far as I was 
concerned, when only Mulder and I were left to 
testify. We'd achieved the dubious distinction of 
having CourTV actually schedule a daily show about 
us, thus guaranteeing us a place in the OJ 
Simpson/Louise Woodward pantheon.

I'd forever be haunted by my pale morning sickness 
face on video.  It would be a depressing addition to 
Miranda's baby book.

Laura couldn't help but give last-minute advice as 
we pushed past the cameras and the shouted 
questions. "They'll try to bait you and make you lose 
your cool.  Remember that the entire gist of their 
argument is that you are mentally unbalanced." 

"That Scull-- er -- *Dana's* mental stability is under 
question never fails to amaze me," Mulder muttered.

"And do not be fooled by how Maxwell looks or acts, 
he's an absolute piranha who has cultivated the 
outward appearance of a goldfish."

Her bitterness was the most emotion I'd seen from 
her yet. I looked at her curiously as she straightened 
her skirt and sat down at our table, but she was 
staring straight ahead with a brave and confident 
demeanor that was probably worth fully half of what 
we were paying her, just for the image.

Mulder looked good on the stand. He looked slightly 
nervous and there was a suspicious wet spot on his 
tie, which could have been coffee, but I suspected 
that it was baby drool.  There were lines of tiredness 
under his murky eyes and his shirt and tie really 
couldn't hide the raw healing skin on his neck.  If 
Laura was hoping to prey on the judge's sympathy, 
Mulder was playing the part to perfection.

Laura and Mulder went over the story just as they'd 
rehearsed it. Oh, no, I wasn't supposed to say 
'rehearsed.' They'd discussed his testimony, that's 
all. His background, his education, his career with 
the FBI. His medical history. Some of the worst 
incidents from his employment files, to get them out 
in the open before Maxwell could introduce them 
and make us look like we were hiding something.

"This quest for your sister and the machinations of 
the men behind her disappearance seems to have 
consumed your life, Fox," Laura said as she got to 
the end of the story. It was nearing lunchtime and 
she was obviously planning to break soon. "Why did 
you give it up?"

Mulder's eyes collapsed into isosceles triangles of 
pain. No matter how many times he heard the 
question, he couldn't prevent the wince.

"I discovered that some things are more important. I 
was pursuing the past, a past that never truly 
existed, and...suddenly I was confronted with the 
possibility of a future. I want to make sure that 
Miranda never feels alone, or uncertain or afraid. I 
want to keep her away from the kind of people who 
created her by force and fraud. I want...I want to do 
one small thing right..." Laura let him ruminate, the 
pauses increasing the impression of deep thought. It 
would have impressed me too had I not seen it in 
the bedroom the previous night. "Raising a child is 
such a small thing in a world of five billion people. 
But I've discovered that it is also the largest thing in 
my existence. I know that I've made mistakes in the 
past. In many ways I've been reckless because I did 
not know what I had to live for. But since I've had 
Miranda, everything seems clearer--more in 
perspective."

I could not prevent the small stab of jealousy that 
pinned me just above my heart. Such a small thing 
in a world of five billion people, really.

After lunch we had cross-examination. I'd seen the 
like before, it was the way the average Bureau 
inquiry went on a contested X File, but it was still 
difficult for me to watch without trying to intervene to 
save Mulder from himself.

Maxwell began where we'd all expected him to, at 
Spooky Central. "Before the so-called 'X Files' were 
opened in 1991, you were a profiler for the FBI's 
Violent Crimes Unit."

"That's what my file says." I winced inside at 
Mulder's obstructionism, but maintained the 
standard composed face I always kept on while 
Mulder was being questioned.

"Now, Mr. Mulder, I've seen 'The Silence of the 
Lambs' but other than that I don't really know much 
about profiling. From what I understand, your 
objective is to understand serial killers, to think like 
them?"

Mulder leaned forward, placing the tips of his fingers 
on the wooden half-wall in front of him, in full lecture 
mode. "Not to think like them, but to know how they 
think so that their behaviors can be predicted. It's the 
Bureau's long-term goal to know enough about the 
kind of people who are capable of such repeated 
vicious acts so that we can engage in 
comprehensive prevention strategies." He sounded 
like a TV commentator, pleasant and simplifying 
things just a little bit for the listeners.

"But you, you were one of the best at really getting 
into their heads, in a way that was much more than 
theoretical. Tell me, is it true that you can find 
murder sites as you drive along the road just by 
looking for the kind of place a murderer would put a 
body?"

Mulder winced. "Okay, that story has been stretched 
*far* out of proportion to what really happened." 

Really? That's not what I'd heard when I was at 
Quantico. 

He shifted in the hard wooden seat and adjusted his 
tie away from his neck. "It was an accident, I was 
answering the call of nature when I stumbled on a 
crime scene, and then my boss decided to scare all 
the trainees by telling them that I'd done it on 
purpose. And then the other times after that we 
already had reason to suspect the presence of 
remains in an area."

Hmm . . . Having met Bill Patterson, I found it 
plausible that the man would exaggerate his golden 
boy's achievements just to make the other agents 
work even harder to please the master. 
Nonetheless, I wasn't entirely convinced -- Mulder 
was wisely downplaying his spookitude for the court, 
but get him out on a deserted highway and he'd find 
a body faster than Michael Jordan finds the net. 
Mulder was also conveniently forgetting about Addy 
Sparks -- the missing victim in the Roche case -- but 
since he wasn't in ISU anymore by then I suppose 
he thought it didn't count.

"But profiling does demand that you immerse 
yourself in the lives of serial rapists and murderers. 
Do you think that has had an effect on you?"

Once again, Mulder rolled out the prepackaged 
answer. "Of course, it's impossible to be unaffected 
by the sheer horror of the crimes we investigate. I'd 
have to be a monster myself to be oblivious. One of 
the reasons the X Files appealed to me initially is 
that they were a change from ISU, where sometimes 
it felt like catching one killer only opened up a slot 
for two more. I think what I've taken away from the 
experience is how precious and fragile life is."

We'd visited cattle mutilation sites with less bullshit 
around, but the judge was listening carefully. 
Maxwell favored Mulder with a tight smile that 
suggested that the lawyer hadn't expected Mulder to 
be such a good actor. "And yet you maintain that 
immersing yourself in the twisted thinking of these 
criminals for years on end has not warped your view 
of the world in any way?"

Mulder sighed. "Doctors don't have to be sick to 
diagnose disease. That's essentially what I *did*" -- I 
thought the subtle emphasis was a good trick -- "in 
ISU."

"I'm going to show you a list of magazines now," the 
lawyer passed a sheet to Mulder, whose hand 
twitched as if he wanted to crumple it and use it for a 
three-pointer. "Do you recognize these names?"

"They're names of pornographic magazines."

"Did you subscribe to these magazines for the 
purpose of 'diagnosis'?" Maxwell casually handed a 
copy up to the judge, who frowned over the tops of 
his glasses at Mulder. For his part, Mulder blanched 
and visibly swallowed, trying to formulate an answer.

"I, uh, before Dana and I were together I 
occasionally used some of these magazines for, uh, 
for myself," he euphemized. "They're fantasies, not 
reality. And they have nothing to do with how I raise 
my -- my child." That stutter at the end, by the way, 
was Mulder almost broadcasting the news about 
Baby X to the world -- he wasn't doing well.

"You subscribed to 'Tit Torture'?"

I looked down at the table so that I wouldn't have to 
watch. Though I never voted for Hilary Clinton or her 
husband, I felt a sudden surge of sympathy for her 
public humiliation. If I could have, I would have 
stuffed cotton in my ears as Maxwell made Mulder 
say "yes" to a revoltingly long list of disgustingly 
named periodicals. The upside, I suppose, was that 
none of the titles even hinted at pedophilia.

Eventually the list was done. Mulder was gasping 
like a landed fish and like a good angler the lawyer 
changed tactics. "So you and Dr. Scully were 
partners for over six years?" Maxwell asked in a 
voice that sounded like old Southern money.

"About six and a half."

"During which time you carried on a clandestine 
affair.  How long did that go on before Miranda 
entered the picture?"

"Objection, cumulative," Laura chimed out and the 
judge nodded.

"I'll rephrase," Maxwell said smoothly. "How long 
had you and Dr. Scully been having sexual relations 
before you discovered Miranda's existence?"

"About a year, give or take a few weeks."

"And did your superiors know about this 
relationship?"

"*Someone* did, given the camera that was covertly 
installed in my apartment."

"Just answer the questions, Mr. Mulder."

Up on the stand, Mulder reddened a bit and went 
silent again, his hands knotted tightly together in his 
lap.

"Given that Section Chief Blevins was implicated in 
the series of events surrounding that unlawful 
surveillance, I think it's fair to say that he knew."

"Yes, the unlawful surveillance. That's when you 
shot a man in the face and left him to be identified 
as you?"

"Yes."

"And Dr. Scully lied to your superiors, confirming the 
misidentification so that you could break into a 
Pentagon facility with the dead man's credentials?"

Mulder swallowed. "Yes."

"Is that standard FBI practice?"

I was glad to see that he'd remembered Laura's 
instructions: breathe before answering, every time. 
"Dana was dying and I had reason to believe that a 
cure for her could be found in that research facility. I 
was right."

Maxwell looked down on his pad. "So, the object you 
stole from the Pentagon was the chip in the back of 
her neck, the one of unknown origin that you and Dr. 
Scully ordered her physicians to implant because it 
might have some relation to the cancer?"

Laura didn't object and Mulder said, almost 
inaudibly, "Yes."

"Please speak clearly so that the reporter can get 
your responses. Does anyone other than yourself 
and Dr. Scully endorse the claim that this stolen chip 
can cure cancer?"

"I was told that the chip would work by a man who 
has been involved in secret government projects of 
this sort for decades."

"What sort is that? No, never mind. Who is this 
man?"

"I don't know his name."

"Well, can we find him and ask?"

"No, he was shot soon after he told me about the 
cure. His body has never been found."

Maxwell paused and looked around the courtroom 
so that we could all understand exactly how 
implausible Mulder sounded.  This piqued Mulder 
enough that, against advice of counsel, he added to 
his reply voluntarily. "Exit wounds are a perennial 
problem in our line of work." The cameras loved it, 
which did little to discourage him from being snide 
no matter how the judge frowned.

It went on like that for a while, from Arecibo to 
Wisconsin and back. Even I almost laughed when 
Maxwell asked Mulder to list every time he'd been 
arrested or custodially detained by some other 
government agency and Mulder had to ask whether 
he should include state or just federal.

I was confused by the finale, though.

"Let's go back to your early employment records 
now. During your tenure in ISU, you managed to 
accrue a substantial number of commendations for 
difficult cases and your reviews from your superiors 
are downright fawning. Then you reopened the 'X 
Files.' It was to this division that Dr. Scully was 
assigned shortly thereafter."

I looked over at Laura, but she was concentrating on 
whatever she was writing on her legal pad and 
seemed to be only paying slight attention to what 
was going on at the front of the courtroom.

"With the reassignment and the addition of Dr. Scully 
as your partner, I notice that you have more 
reprimands than anything else in your files.  To what 
do you attribute that sea change?"

Mulder's face tightened. I knew he was trying to 
figure out what he could say that would deflect 
Maxwell from whatever course he was taking, and 
he wasn't much enjoying being put on the defensive.

"My charming personality."

Someone in the back, possibly one of the clerks, 
snickered.

"Really?  Answer the question please."

"The nature of the cases require a more extreme 
approach than a normal case would warrant.  
Unorthodox methods need to be used and such 
methods do not generally meet with the approval of 
the higher-ups."

"You initially regarded Dr. Scully as a 'spy' sent to 
discredit your work, did you not?"

"Yes, but she quickly proved that she was interested 
in the truth --"

"So interested that you were able to take risks you 
hadn't before, with her to back you up when you got 
in trouble?"

Mulder saw the trap close, but he was already 
inside. "It's not like that --"

"Isn't it? I submit to you that your once-harmless 
conspiracy theories became dangerous to yourself 
and others once Dr. Scully came on the scene. I 
submit to you that she pushed you to further and 
further extremes, whether simply to impress her or to 
convert her to your beliefs it's not clear."

Laura was on her feet now, objecting, but Maxwell 
continued to talk.

"I submit to you that no matter how intelligent and 
brave the two of you are individually, the 
combination of your energies is explosive and 
deadly."

The judge banged his gavel. "That's enough, Mr. 
Maxwell!"

More than enough. "I have nothing further, your 
honor," he said and sat, concealing a smirk behind a 
serious facade; he knew he'd made his point.

Mulder staggered off of the stand like he'd been shot 
again.

Their strategy was clear now: divide and conquer. If 
they could successfully argue that Mulder and I 
together were like hydrogen introduced to chloride, 
then we'd be condemned for our loyalty to one 
another rather than rewarded for it.

My own testimony loomed before me. Tomorrow. I 
didn't think I could face that kind of questioning when 
I couldn't make myself entirely believe our side of 
the story. 

I couldn't let Mulder lose Miranda because of his 
connection with me. We still didn't know whether the 
judge would admit the videotape of me in Arizona or 
what it would show; Mulder had been distressingly 
silent when I asked him what he'd seen when Jason 
showed him a copy those many months ago. And 
this morning's ill-timed nosebleed suggested that I 
might be as bad a bet as a Powerball ticket, even 
without the custody battle.

I looked across the table, where Mulder was 
greeting Miranda -- he'd been away from her for so 
long and Miranda demanded to be reacquainted with 
his nose -- and hurried over to my brother and his 
entourage. I felt Laura following, trying to control the 
interaction.

"Bill," I caught his arm as he began to walk out of the 
courtroom with Tara. Maxwell looked at me 
speculatively. "I have something to say to you. An 
offer."

Laura made a warning noise behind me, but I 
ignored her.

"What kind of offer?" He loomed over me, still 
believing that his height somehow made a difference 
to me. How could I blame Bill for being the same 
kind of person I was -- afraid of the unknown, 
determined to make the world conform to his sense 
of reality?

There were conference rooms scattered throughout 
the courthouse for just this kind of activity. We found 
an empty one and sat down, Laura at my side in 
roughly the same way as my gun.

"I think it's obvious to everyone that the main 
problem you're having here is with me," I said as 
soon as his ass hit the chair, "You don't want me 
around Miranda. You don't really care about Mulder. 
And you're not going to find anyone to say he's a 
bad father. You're flailing around with things he did 
five years ago, and you know the court's not going to 
think that's enough.  So this is my proposal. You 
drop the lawsuit and I'll agree to leave them alone. I 
will stay away; I won't play any role in her 
upbringing. Mulder will have sole custody."

Maxwell immediately opened his mouth, but Bill put 
his hand up. Tara looked at him worriedly. I was 
starting to get sick of her Tammy Wynette routine. 
"Will you wait out in the hall while we discuss this?"

I nodded and Laura and I left. As soon as she shut 
the door she started in on me: "Dana, this is a 
problem."

"You're the one who told me that I was hurting 
Mulder's chances of retaining custody." I realized 
that I wasn't bothering with the first-name thing 
anymore; it didn't seem as if it would be necessary.

"If you want to do this, you really need to get 
separate counsel. Your interests and Fox's are 
diverging here, and I'm not sure I can represent you 
both."

"Our interests are exactly the same -- what's best for 
Miranda. And that's being with Mulder, not *them*," I 
waved my hand contemptuously at the closed door. 
"Now you know I don't have the money to pay 
someone else to sit in there with me. I want you to 
make this happen. I want you to make sure that they 
can't ever challenge Mulder's custody. And I'll do 
whatever it takes."

She shook her head and nibbled at her lower lip, 
thinking. 

"I knew I should have been a criminal defense 
attorney," she said as the door opened.
 
Iolokus IV: Res Judicata
12/

But she's giving him an ice cream headache
And I don't know why he's gonna take it
Anymore, anyhow, anywhy, and he tried to take it back
But it was much too much too late for that
Well, they're headed down a rocky road
And she's got a chocolate chip on her shoulder
She's giving him an ice cream headache
She said, "I always fake it"
And that might have been the last strawberry
	Ilios

Testifying wasn't nearly as bad as I'd thought it 
would be. Maxwell almost had me a few times, and 
the allegation that Scully and I were dangerous 
together but not apart was a little worrisome. But I 
had admitted my mistakes when Laura asked me 
about them; I was a changed man these days. At 
least as far as the court was concerned. I felt that I'd 
explained myself tolerably well, especially with all 
the evidence Laura had introduced about the 
conspiracy against us on direct examination. She'd 
gotten me to discuss Blevins, and the missing 
evidence over the years, and the revelations from 
Roush, and the look on the judge's face when he 
realized that Bill's side could not disprove any of it 
was priceless. 

When Scully had peeled off with Laura to discuss 
her upcoming testimony, I'd been a little hurt that 
she didn't want to do it at home. But then I realized 
that she needed the familiarity with the courthouse. 
She gets nervous in courtrooms, she'd never admit it 
but I can see her twitch and I know that her skin isn't 
always quite so pale. And that's just when she's 
testifying as a federal agent, upholding the law. It 
must have been even worse for her to be in court as 
a citizen, as a defendant.

Feeling reassured, I spent the afternoon filling out 
personnel evaluations and working on a proposal to 
put ISU personnel in the major field offices. Crime 
was being federalized faster than crimes were being 
committed; what with the Violence Against Women 
Act, every serial rapist and murderer in the country 
was suddenly our responsibility whether or not he 
crossed state lines. Getting agents in field offices 
would be a good way to improve our 
responsiveness, maybe catch some patterns we 
wouldn't have seen otherwise. I was very excited 
about the proposal, and it occupied my time 
painlessly until Scully returned.

She still had Laura in tow. I was a little surprised but 
there was room at the dinner table, so what the hell?

"Mulder," she said. Her voice had the sooty flavor of 
disaster in it.

"*Dana*," I said, just to remind her, but she shook 
her head. 

"I talked to Bill. He's willing to make a deal --"

"Goddammit, Scully, no! I'm not sharing custody with 
that rat b--"

"No shared custody. All yours." 

I blinked in confusion. That wasn't a deal, that was 
surrender. "How?"

She gestured towards Laura. "Laura will explain. I'm 
going to -- I'm going to take a look at Miranda."

I sat heavily on the couch. "What's going on?"

Laura perched on the edge of a chair and leaned 
forward, her hands braced on the seat. "Dana 
offered a trade. You get full custody, uncontested, 
and she signs an agreement giving up all rights to 
Miranda and agreeing not to see her or 
communicate with her in any way until Miranda is 
sixteen."

"*What*?"

She continued as if I hadn't spoken. "I think the 
communication provision is gratuitous cruelty, but 
she agreed to it in order to get you full control over 
visitation, if any, with any other member of the Scully 
family. To enforce the agreement, you and Dana not 
allowed to live in the same area and are not to 
spend the night under the same roof, even on a visit. 
You may talk to Dana but not carry messages 
between her and Miranda. Break the agreement and 
Bill and Tara get custody, though that's not 
completely enforceable. Dana also agrees to submit 
to psychiatric evaluation at a facility to be named 
later, and to comply with any inpatient or outpatient 
treatment regime recommended." She paused and 
we were silent for half a minute. "He hates her, Fox. 
I don't know what to tell you."

"Bill suggested this?" 

Laura folded her hands in her lap and wouldn't look 
at me. "No, it was Dana who made the initial 
approach. We worked out the details over the last 
few hours."

I felt like someone had taken an ice cream scoop 
and applied it diligently to my chest. She was 
abandoning us. Again. Didn't think us worth fighting 
for. Didn't want to be Miranda's mother. All my 
delusions -- the hopes that this crisis would bring us 
together, the satisfaction of knowing that she cared 
enough to oppose Bill -- were crushed and broken 
by her indifference, screaming and bleeding in my 
mind. I should have put them out of their misery a 
long time ago, but I was never good at mercy 
killings.

"So that's what she wants." My voice came out as 
flat as ever. I suppose I should be grateful that no 
emotion came through.

Laura slammed a fist down on her knee. "No! 
Dammit, I knew this was going to happen. No, it's 
obviously not what she wants, you don't have to look 
very hard to see that. But she thinks that the judge 
will see her as an unfit mother and give Bill and Tara 
custody, at least joint custody, unless she agrees to 
this."

I looked towards the stairs. Was she saying good-
bye already? Was she packing? How long would it 
take before she forgot Miranda's face, her bright 
clear eyes, her perfect fragile skin?

"What do you think I should do?"

She sighed. "Look, if that tape shows what they say 
it shows, a judge is going to have a hard time with a 
custody arrangement that involves Dana. He'd 
probably refer her to the authorities for prosecution. 
And if you're endorsing her, supporting her after she 
did something like that -- it will be hard for him to 
believe that you've really stabilized and become an 
upright citizen after all."

"So you're saying that our chances aren't good."

"Let's put it this way -- imagine that this case was 
about someone else. Would you want a child to be 
raised by people with your backgrounds, people who 
are struggling with these incredible burdens? We've 
got a fair shot of proving that you're an excellent 
father -- at least for the past half a year. But that's 
only a little over one percent of your lifetime. And, 
honestly, you look good because you responded 
well when Dana did the thing that looks so bad -- 
she left Miranda halfway across the country, in good 
hands of course but it's hard to get around the fact 
that she abandoned her daughter. Who's to say that 
she won't take off again when she recovers from her 
latest problems?" 

When I didn't say anything, she prodded. "As your 
lawyer, I can only tell you about your options. I don't 
know what the right thing for you to do is. Maybe 
you'd be better off if Dana had never proposed this 
deal. But here it is, and you need to decide. We're 
supposed to go in front of the judge tomorrow to get 
his approval. Because the best interests of a child 
are at stake, the judge has to approve our 
agreement. And your consent is required, too. So 
you'd better know what you're going to say when he 
asks whether you've agreed to this."

After about five minutes of strained silence, she got 
up and made her goodbyes. I was paralyzed more 
effectively than if I'd been staring at the Medusa and 
I didn't even bother with the alarm behind her.

The sun slowly dissolved into the earth as I sat, 
trying to comprehend. The sunset was spectacular, 
clouds at the horizon glowing pink as the water 
running down an ax murderer's drain. The new-
summer sky darkened into hot night as I sat.

I went to the study, my knees protesting at the 
sudden motion after hours of disuse. She was there, 
curled up on my couch.

"So when are you going to leave?" I heard my voice 
come out before my brain had completely engaged.

She looked up from where she was reading the Post 
and the light flared off the lenses of her glasses.

"Excuse me?" she asked in a lemon sorbet voice.

"Well, you're going to fuck my brains out tonight and 
then vanish before sunup aren't you?  Did you call 
the airline yet?  Or is this going to be a local 
escape?" I marched over to my desk and dropped 
down like a thrown rock, swiveling the chair so I 
could face her.

Her eyes were round as the Mooselet's.

"Alaska is nice this time of year, except for the 
mosquitoes, and you can get a one-way ticket to 
Juneau with no problem.  You could even rationalize 
a trip up there for an X-File.  I think there have been 
pipeline workers missing again.  I never bothered to 
check it out because I froze my ass off once up 
there," the ichor in my voice surprised me.

"Mulder--"

"That's what you do, isn't it?  When the going gets 
tough, Scully bails.  You take off so fast that you 
scorch the flight deck."

"Does the word 'ditch' mean anything to *you*, 
Mulder?"

"I had to stop doing that when you took the 
Champion's Cup for taking off," I had my fingers so 
tight on the arms of the chair that I was probably 
leaving fingerprints in the hard foam of the armrests.

I tapped an imaginary button on the chair arm.  
Prepare deflector shields, Mr. Chekov, incoming 
photon torpedoes.

"I'm sorry if my family is disturbing your quiet little 
island of domesticity here.  I didn't ask for this to 
happen."

"I'm getting really tired of that song, Scully.  Really 
tired.  You didn't ask to be abducted, you didn't ask 
to have your ova taken, and you didn't ask for the 
cancer.  You didn't choose to have Miranda, and 
when she inconvenienced your life you dumped her 
with Emerson and Aileen.  You didn't provoke 
George into stalking you and you certainly didn't 
*aid* him when he tried to strangle you," I continued, 
trying to keep my voice under control even though it 
was crackling like a cheap stereo speaker. "When 
things don't go your way, you cave like a house of 
cards."

"I don't!"

I snorted.

"This is bullshit, Mulder. I'm trying to do what's best 
for Miranda. You were *there* today, you heard 
yourself rationalize and it's not going to get any 
better tomorrow when that lawyer crucifies me 
alongside you. I'm offering you a way out and as 
usual you just resent my attempts to help."

"Hey, I was dealt a bad hand here too, Scully, and 
I'm just trying to bluff my way through it.  I used to 
think that you were one of the strongest people that I 
know, and in the past year I've realized that it wasn't 
strength that I was seeing. You're self-centered, 
emotionally straightjacketed, and utterly inflexible to 
change."

"Sounds to me as though you've taken the psych 
findings to heart -- or ego as the case may be.  
You're believing your own press.  You are *not* 
Saint Mulder and you are *not* the poster boy for 
emotional stability. Aren't you paying attention? 
There's a good chance we're going to *lose* this 
case, and then what will you do?" 

Okay, so she had a point.  It wouldn't be the first 
time. Fortunately I still had ammunition.

"And what are you going to do about the fact that 
you're pregnant? You think no one's going to notice? 
Maybe you could go away and visit an aunt like girls 
in the fifties used to."

Her spine stiffened -- she seemed to grow an inch -- 
and when she began to speak again she had the 
precise tone of her case reports. "RU 486 is 
available in Virginia. Chemical abortion works in the 
home and I will be able to verify that this child will 
not be anyone's experimental subject."

She stalked forward a few paces, until her hand was 
resting on the doorknob. "For the record," she said 
and turned back so that I could see the bone-white 
cheeks below her bruise-bright eyes, "going upstairs 
does not constitute a ditch."

I sulked in the study for awhile until my natural 
curiosity got the better of me.  Catzilla, who 
understood these things, shadowed me as I crept up 
the dark stairway and stopped.

Scully's voice was soft and I had to strain to hear it. 
What made her good with children was that she 
treated them like real people, albeit with different 
interests and talents than adults had. The mewling 
newborn Miranda hadn't been amenable to such 
attentions, but she was old enough now to respond 
to Scully. She was silent for the moment as Scully 
spoke to her.

"Neither side of your family is any good at 
forgiveness or understanding, so I'm not going to 
ask you for that. I know you'll be angry when you 
figure out what happened. I'm angry too, but -- I had 
to make sure you were safe. And you could never be 
safer than with Mulder. Whatever you think of me, 
you should know that Mulder loves you more than a 
thousand mothers and fathers. He --" her voice 
caught, and then Miranda whimpered. Scully was 
probably holding her too tight. "You've got the best 
Daddy in the whole wide world, you know that? He'll 
make sure you grow up big and strong and nothing 
bad will ever happen to you --" 

I could hear her heaving breaths as she was unable 
to keep the tears from coming. I heard her walk 
across the floor, then a rustle of plastic diapers as 
Miranda was lowered into the crib.

She'd taken a few steps away when Miranda began 
to cry. "Lee," she wailed. "Lee!" 

More rustling, then, and her voice faded in and out 
as she began to circle the room. Each word was 
thick, forced through salt and bone. "It's okay, baby. 
I'll just stay until you fall asleep --" But Miranda 
wouldn't shut up. She was picking up on Scully's 
distress and responding the only way she knew how, 
by fussing. After a few minutes, Scully spoke again.

No, not spoke. She was singing, her voice flat and 
stumbling over every other word.

"Take me out to the ball game, 
Take me out to the show.
Buy me some peanuts and Crack-er Jack
I don't care if I never --"

I broke and ran, my brain pounding against my skull, 
desperate for escape. There are some things that no 
human being should have to face.

Just for a little variety, *I* went into the hallway 
bathroom and threw up. Of course morning sickness 
was soon going to be a thing of Scully's past. Why 
would she want a child when the one she had now 
had brought nothing but pain?  It was Emily all over 
again, but worse.  Scully had actually bonded with 
the Mooselet in a way she hadn't with Emily.  Well, 
the Mooselet was better looking, had more 
personality, and was smarter than Emily, which was 
probably due to the infusion of Mulder genes.  (The 
only one of my brothers who hadn't been vain about 
his appearance was Ian, and he'd been insane.)  

I couldn't let her go.  It was that simple.  No matter 
what the judge ended up with as a verdict, no matter 
what white rabbits Maxwell was able to pull out of 
his tailored pocket, no matter if I had to keep Scully 
in a locked room and force-feed her prenatal 
vitamins for nine months in whatever place I 
managed to find without an extradition treaty to the 
US, I was going to keep this strange little family unit 
intact.  Period.  Full stop.  She could go along 
willingly or not..

****
 
I was surprised to find Mulder in bed when I came 
out of the bathroom.  I would have thought that he'd 
gone to ground on his sofa in the study.  But there 
he was, lying on his side of the bed on his side, with 
the covers pulled up to his hairline as though I hadn't 
promised to leave both him and Miranda and abort 
the embryo I was carrying like a concealed weapon. 
I hovered in the bathroom doorway for a moment. 
He had to be up to something but I wasn't quite sure 
what.  I'd played this scene out in dozens of hotels 
through the past two years: the argument was going 
to be worked out on a purely physical level once 
again.  I had a fairly good idea what loomed in the 
next hour or so.

The tickling in my nose warned me just in time. I put 
my hand up to my face as if I were trying to cover my 
mouth, blocking my nostrils incidentally, and spun to 
return to the bathroom. Running the water to cover 
up the sound of me not puking, tilting my head 
forward so that I wouldn't choke, I knew I was doing 
the right thing. I couldn't let Mulder run the risk of 
losing Miranda because he dreamt of reconstituting 
a family from my freeze-dried life. The last time I was 
dying I'd launched us into this terrible cycle, and I 
could get him out this time. Whatever he was about 
to do to me, I could take, with pleasure. 

I knew that I was enjoying the role of martyr, of 
beautiful dying sacrificial Camille and all the other 
tubercular operatic heroines. But what is there to 
embrace about dying but the martyrdom? I had 
hopes that Mulder would one day look back on my 
choice and see that it had been about love and not 
weakness. I couldn't wish him permanently 
damaged, though, because about one thing he was 
entirely correct: Miranda had a chance to escape her 
legacies, and Mulder could make it happen through 
the power of his convictions.

Clean and bloodless, I emerged to face him.

The mattress creaked underneath my weight as I 
settled into my side (the 'passenger' side, mind you) 
of the bed.  I could tell that he wasn't asleep by his 
breathing.  I reached out to touch the warm skin on 
his back.  He flinched away from me as though my 
fingers gouged his flesh.  Stung, I inched to the edge 
of the mattress and clung there like a burr.

"I'm only saying this once - don't do it.  Don't leave 
Miranda and me again."

Damn the hormones, I started to cry.  And damn 
Mulder, after barely five minutes of listening to me 
sob into the extra-firm pillow, he got up and left.

**** 
  
I slept on my old couch in the study. When I heard 
the shower going, I snuck into the master bedroom 
to grab my outfit for the day, then used Warwick and 
Ingveld's bathroom to prepare. I gave a garbled 
explanation of what was going on while I tried to 
make my hair behave without mousse.

"The videotape, the lawyer thinks it will hurt you so 
that you will both lose if the judge sees it?" Ingveld 
asked again.

"That's what she says."

"And this is why Dana has made this deal?" she 
asked and handed me a tube of hair gel which would 
do in a pinch.

"That's what she says."

In the mirror I saw Ingveld's face contort, trying to 
puzzle out the ways of adults. I looked like the 
Hanged Man of the Tarot, the tie choking my scabs 
no matter how loosely I knotted it. I gave up and 
loosened the tie.  It wasn't as though I had a single 
fucking secret with these people anymore anyway.

Warwick watched me impassively from the bed 
where he lay with his keyboard cuddled against his 
side like a favored stuffed animal.

"So this is all going to be settled and everything will 
go back to normal, right?"

"Oh, yeah, sure, it'll be normalicious."  I gave one 
last swipe at my hair and plodded out to the car 
where I waited like Fred Flintstone for the rest of the 
family to arrive.

Scully came out with Miranda and I realized, too 
late, that I had probably added insult to injury by 
making her bring the baby out.  The steering wheel 
wavered in my untrustworthy eyesight as she 
opened the back door and put Miranda in the kiddie 
seat.  Then Miranda began to scream, demanding 
motion, while Scully tried to decide whether it would 
be worse to sit next to her or next to me.

I won, I guess, and she got in the front seat. 

I won another round when she had to speak first.

"Last night..."

I remained as impassive as a crashed computer 
screen.

"...You never said you would accept the agreement."

I darted left, in between two Tauruses.  Fucking 
Tauruses.

"Well, are you?"

I couldn't very well leave her in suspense until the 
moment arrived; it would look too bad to the judge.  
More's the pity.

"No."

It took her four exits to recover from that.

"Mulder, you're . . . not making a decision based on 
all the relevant information."

"What, it's really Zippy who knocked you up?"

Her hand twisted on the door handle as if jumping 
out at forty miles an hour would be safer than 
staying with me.

"You want to take this risk so that we can stay 
together, and I appreciate that.  But . . . I believe that 
. . . it may be the case that . . .."

If I hadn't needed both hands to swing in and out of 
traffic, I would have strangled her.  "Spit it out, 
Scully, you're getting so good at that."

She took a lungful of air-conditioned baby-scented 
air.  "There is a not inconsiderable possibility that I 
am out of remission."

First I didn't process it because I was trying to avoid 
plowing into the asshole attempting to cut me off, 
and then my operating system suffered fatal errors.

"So you see," she said, emboldened by my obvious 
inability to respond, "it would be highly unwise to risk 
losing your custody when it may not guarantee my 
presence even if you succeed."

I caught a look at myself in the mirror.  Red, ugly 
eyes stared at me from a low circle of Hell.  And then 
there was the courthouse parking lot, and we pulled 
into our spot.

"Nice try, Dana," I said lightly as I unlocked the 
automatic doors.  "But you're going in there and 
you're going to testify that you want to be an adoring 
wife and mother.  It's too damn easy for you to 
sacrifice yourself for us and I'm not going to let it 
happen."

Laura trotted up as I liberated Miranda.  "I was 
expecting a call last night," she chided.

"No deal," I informed her, and she went over to 
Scully's side, comforting her with a low feminine 
murmur as Scully pulled away to hide her confusion 
and hurt.

Scully's oncologist had just testified the other day to 
Scully's recovery and I refused to believe that this 
much misfortune could befall us.  Scully would call it 
a statistical improbability; me, I just determined to 
keep her in good health by sheer force of will.  If I 
had to go hunt down an ET and kick its ass into 
submission just to make the damn microchip in her 
neck work properly, I'd do it. Maybe they had a tech 
support line I could call -- "excuse me, but this 
microchip is still under warranty, can you send 
someone to replace it?"

Laura gave Scully the hurried rundown of tips on 
testimony that I'd heard too many times before.  
Then she shuffled over to the Dark Side to explain 
that there would be no deal and there were a few 
self-righteous noises on that side.

I tried very hard not to listen to Scully and Laura's 
very public conversation about our life and times.  I 
was too busy projecting whatever psychic powers I 
had into the destruction of any cancerous or 
precancerous cells that might be lurking in the 
vicinity.  Even if that benefited Bill accidentally. I 
could still hear my voice echoing in my ears from the 
time Scully first discovered the spate of cancer 
among the Allentown abductees. But you're all right, 
aren't you Scully?

Aren't you, Scully?
 
Iolokus IV: Res Judicata
12/

white pepper ice cream
it's like a line drawing
it snipped my heart
white pepper ice cream
in my mouth
it stings my lips
it's like an eclipse
as if i'm in the crossword puzzle
but i can't fill in the blank
	Cibo Matto

Give him his due, Maxwell didn't waste any time 
before going for the good stuff.  He quickly reviewed 
all the times Scully covered for me, disrupted Bureau 
protocol against her better judgement, defied 
Skinner, or otherwise participated in the effective 
investigation of X Files. 

He asked her about events in Bethel, Arizona, and 
she averred that she hadn't been allowed past the 
front gate of Roush's facility there because she didn't 
have a search warrant.  She claimed that the lab 
had been destroyed while she was there in order to 
hide evidence of human experimentation that she 
would have discovered had she been successful in 
her attempt.  Though this was the kind of naked 
assertion that usually got me in trouble, here there 
was a public record of the dirty work Roush had 
been doing in Texas and Maxwell didn't press her 
very hard. I assumed that he was merely waiting for 
the tape to prove her a liar.

Scully had very little trouble with the professional 
part of the story.  But when it turned personal, she 
was running on fumes.

"Did you have sexual relations with Edward Jerse, 
the man you'd met only that afternoon and who the 
next morning tried to kill you?"

"No, I did not." How I hoped she was telling the truth. 
She hadn't let the folks at the hospital do a full exam; 
evidence of intercourse, if any, had disappeared with 
her next shower.

"Is it usual for you to stay overnight with a man 
you've just met, a man who was a suspect in a 
murder case?"

"First, there was a blizzard outside, and second, 
Edward Jerse was not at that time a suspect, his 
behavior was not overtly psychotic."

"So you just stumbled into this murder case? Bad 
luck seems to follow you around."

"I would think your presence is empirical evidence of 
that proposition," she muttered and someone in the 
press corps emitted a bleat of laughter.

Maxwell then got her to restate every trauma she'd 
experienced in the past six years, Duane Barry, 
Leonard Betts, Luis Cardinal, Donny Pfaster, Gerry 
Shnauz, Jack Willis, Mighty Morphin Bounty Hunters 
(okay, so that's not alphabetical, but I wasn't really 
sure where they fit anyway), et cetera. The little 
bastard referred to each one by case number.

Finally he spiraled in to Miranda, the eye of the 
storm. "Instead of abandoning your child entirely, 
why didn't you simply reach out and get some 
assistance? Your mother, Mr. Mulder, Mr. Mulder's 
brother, they were all willing to help you. But instead 
you chose to give up entirely."

Scully swallowed and straightened infinitesimally. 
"Even with their assistance, I was overwhelmed. I'd 
lost Emily not long before, and I was still devastated. 
I...couldn't acknowledge my experiences, couldn't 
make myself open up to others."

"But you can now?"

"Yes," she enunciated clearly, and I winced as she 
realized the problem. It didn't make me feel any 
better that I'd been suckered the day before, though.

"Well, then, let me ask you some questions about 
your reactions to the troubles you encountered. 
Now, you testified that after the death of your 
daughter Emily and the discovery of Miranda and 
the rape, you suffered understandably lingering 
trauma. You've been taking antidepressant and anti-
anxiety medications, correct?"

"I have been," she said carefully. I tried not to squirm 
in my seat. Being a lawyer, Maxwell was highly 
sensitive to the nuances of speech and he paused.

"Are you doing so now?"

"No."

"Why not?"

She took a slow, careful breath like a dolphin 
preparing to dive under water and hide. "The 
medications were very helpful, but now that I can do 
without them I prefer to do so."

Not in the least untrue, yet incomplete; a letter-
perfect Scully answer. But there was blood in the 
water, despite the fact that she showed no signs of 
injury, and Maxwell tilted his head slightly. "Isn't the 
usual minimum prescription for six months?"

"Yes."  Laura's hands twitched on her legal pad and 
relaxed when Scully didn't volunteer further. 

"And did you discontinue taking the medications 
before that time on the advice of your physician?"

"No."

"So you decided that you were recovered from your 
depression based on your own evaluation, is that 
right?"

"Yes."  Watching Scully choke back explanations 
was incredibly difficult, even knowing that Laura 
would allow her to say more under redirect if the 
cross went badly.  I could understand how people 
tripped themselves up this way.  The temptation to 
justify, expound, and elucidate was enormous.

"Independence is very important to you, isn't it," he 
said softly, sympathetically.  "Your strength is your 
strongest asset."

Her eyes grayed with puzzlement. 

"When you had active cancer, you continued 
working against medical advice up to the point at 
which you collapsed during an important meeting, 
isn't that correct?"

"I fainted," she conceded.

"And when you discovered Miranda you took care of 
her all by yourself for three months, despite what 
had just happened to you and despite Mr. Mulder's 
availability.  You only stopped when your maternity 
leave ended and you had to return to work."

"I..."

He put his hands on the wooden barrier separating 
the witness box from the courtroom floor.  "It was a 
relief to go back to work, wasn't it?  To be confronted 
with a choice between a job that demands twenty-
four hour commitment and a baby with the same 
requirements -- no one could fault you for choosing 
only one, could they?"

"I don't know what you mean," she whispered, eyes 
flickering like the whirring of a countdown timer on a 
bomb.

"You want to be in control of your life so much that 
you take action even though it's physically or 
emotionally too taxing for you, isn't that true?  With 
the cancer, with your daughters, with your 
medication."

She shook her head, but he didn't pause to tell her 
to speak up for the court reporter.

"If the court decides that you're just not healed 
enough for custody, if someone other than you 
makes that decision, won't that be a relief?  You've 
done your duty to your daughter and to Mr. Mulder, 
you've fought the good fight, but wouldn't it be just a 
little bit reassuring to have someone else take up the 
burden of caring for Miranda while you get yourself 
back together?"

Now, finally, the first tear track shone, like a freshly 
cut scar, on her face.  "No," she denied, finally 
bowing her head to preserve whatever dignity she 
could imagine she had left.  When she straightened, 
she had her voice under control, but the price was 
that her tears were flowing more freely.  "You may 
be right that I can't be as strong for myself as I want 
to be.  However, what you don't understand is how 
strong I am for them.  How strong I am with him."  
She turned to the judge, her raised face beseeching 
despite itself.  "Don't make a decision to protect me.  
You can judge me or punish me, but if you decide 
against me out of some twisted version of solicitude 
you will have done a terrible disservice to everyone 
involved."  She swiveled her head back to glare at 
Maxwell.  "So don't attack me for what I've done and 
tell me that defending myself is simply proof that I 
don't know what's good for me."

She took a breath to say more but seemed to realize 
that she'd already broken the cardinal rule of cross-
examination and subsided into her chair with an 
interrupted gasp.

Maxwell shook his head, almost indulgently.  "One 
more thing, Dr. Scully."

She looked at him warily; as if he were brandishing a 
gun at her and she had to hold him off for a few 
minutes so her backup could take him out.

"You've testified that your relationship with Mr. 
Mulder has been tempestuous at times.  Are there 
any lingering difficulties caused by the fact that when 
you wake up in the morning you see the face of the 
man who raped you?"

I stood up at precisely the moment that Laura 
shouted out an objection.  She grabbed onto my 
sleeve and hung on despite the fact that she had to 
tilt halfway out of her chair to do so.  Maxwell gave 
me a look that suggested that physical violence was 
exactly what he expected from me, and I tumbled 
back into my seat as the judge spanked his gavel on 
the bench.

With one last snide look at me, Maxwell turned to 
the judge.  "Goes to the stability of the marriage, 
which is important to the family environment."

"I'll allow it, Mr. Maxwell, but I understand why a 
gentleman might object to having such a question 
put to his wife.  Answer the question, please," he 
told Scully in a tone nearly as severe as the one he 
used on the lawyer.

Scully glanced at the judge.  I may be the master of 
puppy-dog looks, but her 'I'm disappointed that you 
failed me but not terribly surprised' face should have 
pride of place between us. 

Maxwell put his hand on the half-wall between him 
and Scully and leaned forward so that he was 
invading her personal space.  "I can repeat the 
question if you'd like."

The shellac of long-suffering motherhood had worn 
off under Maxwell's previous assaults, and Scully 
gave him a look that should have disassembled him 
into his component atoms.  "No, it does not cause 
any 'lingering difficulties.'"

He let that unlikely statement have a moment to 
plummet to the ground.  "And what about the more 
recent attempts on your life by yet another of your 
husband's criminally inclined brothers?"

"No 'lingering difficulties' there either.  Evil isn't a 
matter of blood, it's a matter of volition," her left 
eyebrow explained exactly what she thought of his 
manners, intelligence, sexual prowess, and personal 
hygiene, "Like most career choices."

"Of course, of course."  He waved his hand; she was 
talking in trivialities and platitudes while he wanted 
to have a serious discussion.  "But if none of that 
bothers you, how can you expect this court to 
imagine that you have the sensitivity necessary to 
raise a child?"

This is the point at which, if we were animated 
figures, little clouds of steam would shoot out of 
Scully's ears.  Her patience was somewhere in 
Canada by now.  "Make up your mind," she 
snapped.  "You want to portray me as a broken-
down victim and a heartless witch at the same time."

Maxwell pulled away from her with a satisfied nod.  
"All right, which is it?  Withdrawn," he said before 
anyone else could react.  "We'll continue cross-
examination tomorrow.  At that time we intend to 
present videotaped evidence that Dr. Scully has 
been somewhat less than truthful about her activities 
in Arizona."

"Sidebar, your honor!"  The judge beckoned and 
Scully got off the stand.  We stewed for a long time 
as the legal beagles argued back and forth and the 
cameras targeted us, looking for reaction shots.  
Miranda was trying to eat Laura's abandoned pen 
and Scully was offering numerous other objects for 
her edification; each was satisfactory for about a 
minute, and then Miranda wanted the felt-tip pen 
again.

When Laura returned, her face was so 
expressionless that I knew the news was bad.  Over 
at the other side, Bill and the others began arranging 
their things to leave, jauntily confident.

"They've found someone they say can verify the 
tape," Laura whispered in a voice of dry autumn 
leaves.  "Some security guard who escaped the fire 
and then worked in Vegas for the past year.  They 
just tracked him down and he's flying out tonight."

"What does that mean?"

"It means very little if Dana's testimony was 
accurate."

I let her stew, refusing to feed her the next line.

"And if it was not, if the tape does show her after she 
testified that she never made it beyond the outer 
perimeter of the compound--it will go badly."

***
 
Dinner was ugly.  Ugly in the extreme.  Ingveld had 
made Warwick an early dinner and run off to take 
care of some consulting work she was doing for the 
feds or some other mysterious project.  This meant 
that Mulder and I ate alone, Miranda having 
collapsed into a sack of potatoes not long after we 
returned home.  The trial was wearing on her usually 
good nerves. She was getting whiny and clingy by 
turns, clearly sensing the stress and tension that her 
adoring public was undergoing on her behalf.  
Whatever damage the psychologists thought my 
alleged abandonment of her had done was 
compounded by their presence and the custody 
battle.

We'd given up any pretense of domesticity and 
reverted to our old bachelor ways, a pizza on the 
floor of the study with the television muttering CNN 
in the background and cans of soda sitting on the 
top of the open pizza box.  For some reason, the 
tomato sauce tasted strange to me and I had to 
scrape it off with my fingertips and then replace the 
cheese like a bad toupee.  The green peppers were 
inedible and I had to pile them on a napkin.  Catzilla 
had stolen a chunk of green pepper that he was 
playing paw-hockey with underneath the desk and I 
was so tired and depressed that I had no energy to 
try to stop him.

Rumpled and tired, Mulder leaned his back up 
against the sofa and wiggled his toes dangerously 
close to the pizza box.  It was unhygienic and he 
knew that it drove me crazy.  He looked entirely too 
calm, too accepting and I was wondering what was 
going on in that pretty head of his, assuming that it 
wouldn't be good and not sure if I wanted to know.

"Are you going to eat that pizza or just dissect it?" he 
asked in a sharp voice.

"Pardon the hell out of me.  I'm pregnant and my 
taste buds are doing strange things."

"You asked me to order green peppers and now you 
won't eat them.  Didn't you know you didn't want 
them?"

"They taste wrong.  Do you want me to throw up?"

"That's your excuse for everything now, isn't it?"

"Fuck you," I snapped and climbed to my feet. "If 
you want a dartboard you can get your ass out to the 
sporting goods store and buy one.  You didn't marry 
one."

I made for the door.  After a day spent being filleted 
by Bill's lawyer I would be damned if I was going to 
undergo Mulder maceration.

****

"Do not walk out of this room."

Goddamn, it wasn't even my voice that snapped out 
of the hole in my face.

This, at least, gave her enough reason to pause like 
a cat who isn't sure if the shine on the kitchen floor is 
wax or water, one paw raised for disappointment.

When the lies get too hard to keep straight, one 
must resort to telling the truth.

"Don't leave me," I croaked, "I've lived without you 
and I don't like it.  You've proved to me that you can 
live without me, but I can't do the same."

She blinked, which was not quite the reaction I had 
been looking for.  I was hoping for something more 
positive since I was spewing my heart's pumping 
blood out all over the hardwood floor.  The door was 
only a few steps away from where I sat and the area 
stretched for miles of tundra while I slogged to cross 
it..  Her body was vibrating at a higher pitch than 
usual and I could hear her breath catching in her 
throat.

"The tape," she muttered.

"Fuck the tape.  Fuck it all, Scully, just think for a 
moment.  Were you happy?  Are you happy?  Can 
you even entertain the thought that I'm something 
other than an annoying but necessary plaything."

The blinking continued and I considered the 
possibility that she'd gone into mental vapor lock.  I 
reached out and touched her forearm where the 
downy hairs had jumped erect as though there was 
entirely too much random static electricity in the 
room.
 
"You can't make this work," she said, "Even if the 
tape doesn't show what we both know it does, you 
heard them, the psychologists.  I'm not cut out to be 
anyone's mother."

"So?  I've been through it with the Mooselet and if I 
can be a parent, anyone can." I tried a smile and got 
yet another blink in response.

I slid my hand up her arm, working my way from 
fabric to flesh, and cupped the searing heat of her 
cheek in my hand.

"You know I lay awake at night wishing that 
everything that has happened to you because of me 
hadn't happened. I'm sorry.  I'm sorry for it all.  I'm 
sorry I love you. I'm sorry that causes you pain.  But 
that's one thing that I don't want to go away."

Breath warm against the underside of my wrist, 
Scully shut her eyes, which made everything easier 
for a moment.  My knees were trembling like the skin 
on a saucepan of hot milk.  She gave no comment 
or argument (mark your calendars) when I led-
shuffled her over to the sofa and pulled her onto my 
lap.  Her head curled between my shoulder and 
jawbone and she went soft as Catzilla in midmorning 
snooze. We had trained each other really badly, no 
wonder I felt free to hurt her if she'd forgive me so 
easily. Or was that vice versa?

"You need a haircut," she muttered into the scarred 
terrain of my neck.

"Yeah, and -- " I prodded.

"And what?" Her cool fingers played over my stubble 
as if she were sanding her fingerprints away.

"And I've just gotten emotionally naked and you 
could at least point and laugh," the palm of her hand 
smelled like pizza but I kissed it anyway.

"I'm sorry, was I supposed to confess undying love 
or something?" 

"If it's not too much of a problem."

Sitting upright, she looked into my eyes with an 
expression as warm as Mont Blanc.

"Oh Fox, I have loved you since the beginning.  My 
life is incomplete without you. Oh you big beautiful 
stud, you," she recited in a flat, level tone, "you had 
me at hello."

My outraged squawk was muffled by her lips.  

Then she moved back to get the space to pull my 
shirt off. She looked at me quizzically before she 
obscured my face. "You understand that it is now 
officially my turn. You will not begin another fight 
until I have done so."

I could live with that.  

But there was something that still bothered me. I 
pushed back from her bathwater-warm mouth as I 
realized what it was.

"I *never* said hello!"

"M -- Fox, what did I just tell you?"
 
"All right, but can we make up again like this?"
 
"Maybe," she said and threw my shirt over into the 
corner. 

Then she knotted her fingers in my hair and pressed 
my head into the sofa back while her tongue darted 
into my mouth with teenage frenzy.  Her back was 
smoothly warm under my hands and I pulled her 
closer until she was straddling the growing bulge in 
my sweatpants, her breasts hot and soft against my 
chest.  It had only been a  matter of days since we'd 
had sex and it felt like months.  She nuzzled along 
my jaw and stuck her tongue in my ear which 
seemed to be attached to my dick by a thin strand of 
enraged nerve.  I was hard as quantum physics in 
the warmth of her thighs even before I squeezed the 
deliciously soft curves of her ass.  Breathing on the 
banding of scars around my neck, she reached 
down between our bodies and squeezed me with 
her hot little hand.  I grunted greedily into her hair 
and she chuckled softly into my shoulder.

"When all else fails," she teased.

"Hasn't failed yet."

"Pride goeth--" she said and slid her hand up and 
down with consummate skill.

I growled and ground my teeth.

"Now," she demanded.

Well, that was a hardship.  I wiggled out of my 
sweats and shorts and they joined the rapidly 
growing pile in the corner.  Finally she was gloriously 
naked, and smiled back at my appreciative gape.  
She undulated over to me and climbed into my lap, 
her finely shaped legs twining around mine.  I 
groaned in gratitude when the smooth bulk of her 
ass warmed my upstanding cock.  I squeezed the 
pale skin of her breasts, watching her tight peach 
nipples compress between my fingers. I looked up 
and into the lasciviously glowing depths of her eyes 
and finally saw through the wall of control and 
distance she'd always erected there.  And what did I 
see?  Bemused indulgence, some need, and a hell 
of a lot of lust.. This was better than any cupid and 
rose-bedecked declaration of love.

On the other hand, it wouldn't hurt for Scully to go 
Hallmark on me just once.

"What?" she asked and gave me a shy smile.

"Tell me you love me."

The color rose from where my hands darkened her 
breasts to her hairline.

"It doesn't count if you're naked," I prodded.

"I think this couch has certain aphrodisiac 
properties."

She smiled and flicked her hair back away from her 
face with one hand in a heart-stoppingly wanton 
gesture before leaning over and beginning to cover 
my face with sloppy, sultry kisses.

"I wouldn't be surprised if I had gotten pregnant from 
sitting on the sofa.  For all we know your 
spermatozoa can live through an autoclave," she 
murmured into the shell of my ear and sent a thrill 
down my left side that made me jump and shudder.
 
"Do you?" I asked again.

"I refuse to answer that question on the grounds that 
it will incriminate me," she said and chuckled, and 
the chuckle followed the murmur down my neural 
network.

I pressed her down into the tired leather, her skin 
white chalk on the blackboard underneath.  I 
reached up and killed the table lamp which was 
trying to strike me blind, and she glowed in the 
yellow light from under the door.  Wantonness gone, 
she shivered underneath me suddenly shy, and her 
skin was cool, smooth milk glass under my fingers.  I 
traced her face, the proud line of her nose, her 
stubborn chin, and her closed eyes like butterflies.  
The lush line of her mouth, the swoop of her 
eyebrows, like swords - beautiful in repose with 
clean line and delicate tracery that were deadly in 
use.  Her breath stuttered in her throat and her legs 
scissored on the dark water of the couch.  Her 
fingers stroked my back, running down my shoulder 
blades and spine like silken tails.  I kissed her throat, 
her shoulders, her breasts, every scent and texture 
sweet and familiar.  The soft skin of her wrapped 
around me and underneath me, I drowned in her 
vanilla peach rich and wild smell.  Ivory on onyx with 
amber inlay she stretched out below me and I 
polished her with my hands, my mouth, proving my 
worship.  When she finally parted the slim columns 
of her thighs and invited me inside she was hot 
honey and wine.  Smooth, delicate, barely moving I 
slid back and forth within her.  Opening her mouth 
underneath mine, she suckled on my lips, darted her 
tongue inside my mouth, mirroring what my cock 
was doing inside her, sleek thrust for sleek thrust.  
Dazed and drunk on her, by her, through her, with 
her, I looked down into her endless eyes and saw 
what I had been begging her to say.

I could feel her climaxes, delicate tremors around 
and through me, in a narcotic haze.  I was swimming 
through her skin, through her blood, and curving 
through and around her heart used for so much 
more than mere circulation.  Filled with the warm wet 
wine that I drank from her mouth, I coursed into her 
with a dreamy gold fire from somewhere in my 
marrow and sank half onto her like a man in an 
opium dream.  Smooth-handed, she polished me, 
my back and shoulders and as much as her small 
hands could reach.  I wanted to cry at the enormity 
of it all, rail against anything that would deprive me 
of *this*.  It wasn't going to happen.  Things simply 
could not be that cruel.

I shifted on the sofa, pulling her around and over me 
like an undersized blanket.  Her hair streamed over 
my face and she sighed in my chest, sounding for all 
the world like a happy housecat.  I smoothed her fur 
and listened to her purr.

She followed me home.

I just had to keep her.

Iolokus IV: Res Judicata
13/

Cherry on the top
Like a nuclear warhead
Nuclear bomb
Gonna lift the trigger
I had a
Dog Fly Religion
Neutron
On a chocolate sundae
	King Missile

Mulder came back from his morning run while I was 
re-experiencing breakfast in our bathroom.  Although 
he was being nicely unhelpful, the smell of his sweat 
(which I have to admit I usually enjoy) made my 
stomach heave harder. With his tail between his 
legs, he went to see if Miranda was available to play 
with.  After I managed to get my stomach under 
control I wandered downstairs and found Ingveld in 
the kitchen, sitting at the table grazing her way 
through a bowl of granola and a peach.  I grabbed 
some coffee (I was planning on having a high 
caffeine baby, thank you.) and plopped down across 
from her.

She looked up at me with the most serious 
expression her fresh young face would handle.

"I haff three older sisters," she said.

The smell of the coffee only made me feel sick 
again.

"My sister Marta had a baby when she was sixteen.  
She was not married."

I put the cup down because my hand was shaking 
so badly that I couldn't trust myself to spill it all over 
the floor.

"What are you saying?" I asked.

"I think it will be good for Miri to have someone to 
play with.  Too much loneliness makes you go inside 
your brain, yes?

Okay, so she'd figured out the covert pregnancy, but 
no one said that Ingveld was stupid, even though 
she was a natural blonde.

"Ingveld, I don't know if you understand, but there's 
a good chance that Mulder might not only lose 
Miranda, but I'll end up in jail."

"You worry too much," she shrugged a graceful 
shrug as though we were discussing nail polish 
colors, "So you know what you are going to wear 
today?"

Sackcloth and ashes would have been a good 
choice, but I had a couple suits left that still fit and I 
let Ingveld help me choose the black one with the 
slim pants and a pale pink blouse which kept me 
from looking like one of the living dead.  I drove to 
the courthouse that day, while Mulder tied his tie in 
the mirror on the sun visor and Miranda screamed in 
the back seat.  He decanted the baby and we 
walked the gauntlet of cameras into the courthouse.  
Laura met us in one of the small conference rooms 
and managed to give us a stern look, which didn't 
rest easily on her young features.

"I take it that you have solved your issues here on 
the proposal with Bill?" she asked.

"Yeah," Mulder said.

"I'd appreciate it if you wouldn't throw me curve balls 
in the courtroom.  It doesn't help your credibility at 
all.  It goes to Bill's argument that you two are 
unstable."

I sighed and got up, the morning nausea returning 
with a vengeance.  "Excuse me, I need to use the 
ladies room."

After I had thrown up breakfast, I was washing my 
hands at the sink and chewing a handful of breath 
mints when Laura came through the door.  I thanked 
God or Fate or Whatever that she hadn't walked in 
on my vomiting.  She smiled and started running a 
brush through her hair.

"Miranda is a cute baby.  She was trying to eat Fox's 
tie," she commented. "She seems to have a lot of 
personality for such a small person."

I knew what she meant.

 "She's been an education."  I agreed.

Looking in the mirror, our glances met.

"Can I ask you a question?" she said in a tentative 
tone.

"It's not like we have any privacy anymore."

Blushing, she looked down.  "I was just wondering, 
when you and Fox were working together, and you 
were involved, how did you manage to keep your 
personal and professional lives separate?"

"Is this going to haunt me on the stand?"

"My own curiosity only.  This doesn't pertain to the 
case in the least."

"Well, there was never any formal agreement, but 
when we were working there wasn't any mention of 
the personal aspect.  It isn't Hoover High where you 
can go cow-eyed and make out in the hall.  We 
worked when we worked and that was all.  On the 
other hand, it wasn't as though we couldn't discuss 
elements of a case outside of work."

Actually, I could remember a couple of times when 
the fog had cleared on certain cases immediately 
after some truly astounding sex and on several 
occasions I'd done autopsies with toilet paper 
wadded between my legs to catch any stray drips 
from the morning encounter.  The sex had been for 
tension release more than anything else, just as 
Mulder had gone on his runs and I'd taken to the 
bathtub.  There hadn't been much overlap between 
work and play.  We were either fucking, working, or 
sleeping, and to think back on it the hollowness of it 
all made my teeth hurt.  Empty calories, with no 
nutritional value.

"The one thing that Bill's psychologists said about 
me that I heartily agree with is that I have always 
been able to keep my emotional life under strict 
control."

It was a sideways look that she gave me, full of 
questions.

"Well," I amended "in all honesty, I was able to keep 
it under control.  The rules are a little different now."

There were no rules, that was the problem.

****

A shadow fell over the table in front of me and I 
looked up. "I didn't expect to see you here," I told my 
sister, "aren't you still hiding out?"

"I heard things were going badly, no big shock, and I 
wanted to see my niece again before she gets 
legally severed from the family," Sam said and bent 
to the stroller where Miranda made a grab for one 
shiny silver earring. Sam hissed, lips peeling back 
from teeth, and she the Mooselet growled back.  
They stared at one another, mongoose and cobra 
well-matched.

Scully came up behind Sam and I could tell that she 
had rarely regretted her inability to carry a gun 
during this trial more. "Come to examine your 
handiwork?"

"I did good, don't you think?" Sam pivoted on one 
rapier heel and looked down at Scully, who stiffened 
and seemed to expand like a cat with its fur on end.

"What do you want? We're somewhat busy at the 
moment," Scully pointed out, and Sam shrugged and 
turned to kneel in front of the stroller.

"You're my sole survivor," she said to the baby, 
almost wistfully, and then stood up, straightening her 
charcoal-gray fitted jacket where it had rucked up. "I 
can't stay. I'll call you when I have information for 
you."

I was obsessing about the videotape and Sam's 
revelations were not at the forefront of my mind. 
"Sure, whatever."

As Sam receded like Kaiser Soze into the distance, 
Scully came and sat next to me, frowning. Around 
us, people were settling in for the day, the clerk and 
the bailiff splitting a donut as Bill huddled with his 
entourage. "This isn't right," she said, discomfort 
working through her face like worms under the skin.

I tried to read the Post as if there were absolutely no 
doubt in my mind about the contents of the 
videotape, which in fact there were not though not in 
the way I'd like. My hands were sweating so badly 
that the sports pages smeared dusty black onto my 
palms.

"M--Fox, the people at BioQuest think she's cut a 
deal to work against them, if she thinks we're going 
to lose and Miranda will be turned over to them --"

I looked up as Scully jumped to her feet, drawing the 
attention of everyone in the room. I followed her 
eyes down to the floor, by the stroller.

Where Sam's calfskin briefcase, so appropriate to 
her professional image, still sat.

I rose as if ejected from a crashing jet. We didn't 
have to look at each other to know the score: my 
legs were longer, I could push past crowds better, I 
had to take Miranda. Scully was already striding to 
the center of the room, her hand grazing her hip to 
flash her missing badge, as I reached over the 
briefcase, careful not to dislodge it, and ripped 
Miranda from the stroller. She began to howl at 
precisely the moment Scully began to yell to 
everyone that they had to evacuate, now. I caught 
Bill's incredulous look and the judge's somewhat 
disapproving curious face as I spun and began to 
run.

Out the narrow corridor between the dark wooden 
seats for spectators, through the double doors and 
into the hallway where witnesses and lawyers and 
security guards lounged. "We need a bomb squad," I 
yelled as I dodged past clusters of people rooted like 
trees in the hallway. People who'd been sitting on 
the hard benches lining the walls began to rise as 
the lights flickered and an alarm began to blatt. 
Scully had apparently convinced someone that she 
was serious. The hallway darkened as if my vision 
were going in a faint, and then the emergency lights 
began to spin, flashing red and white.

I was still moving fast away from the courtroom -- I 
didn't know how much destruction could be packed 
into one briefcase, especially if Sam did have friends 
'high up' like the doctor from BioQuest said. On the 
other hand she'd delivered it personally so it 
probably wasn't more than one city block's worth of 
destructiveness. The slippery marble floor was 
obscured as litigants and court personnel poured out 
of other courtrooms; ahead of me a jury room door 
opened and twelve more wild-eyed citizens added 
themselves to the crush. Underneath the harsh 
quacking of the alarm, the babble of confused voices 
was like putting your ear to the world's largest conch 
shell.

Police officers were everywhere, some escorting 
handcuffed felons and defendants, others just with 
their hands on their guns, trying to figure out the 
problem. One saw me and evidently thought I'd 
taken the crisis as a chance to kidnap a bundle of 
joy; he pulled out his gun and started after me.

I felt Miranda's body shaking with outraged sobs but 
I couldn't hear her over the rest of the noise. Now we 
were in the main atrium, and the crush of reporters 
refusing to leave the building saw me. More strobes 
exploded in my face and I couldn't raise my arm to 
shield myself without loosening my grip on Miranda, 
so I spun and looked for another way out. The cop 
was yelling at me to halt, but he wouldn't fire at the 
baby and I was safe for the moment.

People were running everywhere, like a box of ball 
bearings spilled on the floor. No, ball bearings would 
at least be controlled by the rules of physics. I was 
buffeted by glancing blows as people hurried past 
me, trying to find a free door, spun around and 
around in the middle of the elegant circular room like 
a billiard ball with very poor English as I screamed 
for Scully. She should be out here by now, directing 
traffic, getting things under control. Pressed up 
against my chest, Miranda's wet face soaked into my 
shirt.

There was a whump like a grocery bag bursting as it 
hit the ground, and the hallway we'd come from 
exploded into fire. I saw a hall bench come free of its 
moorings and sail into the air, arcing over the jetting 
flames and landing right on the main information 
desk, which collapsed into a thousand expensive 
splinters. I turned to keep Miranda away from the fire 
and felt a hot fist of heat against my back, pushing 
me away. Then a body hit me right behind the knees 
and I collapsed, barely able to stick out an arm in 
time to avoid crushing Miranda beneath me. In my 
peripheral vision I saw that I'd been assaulted by a 
semiconscious police officer, maybe even the one 
who wanted to arrest me.

While I was down and squirming away from the 
groaning body half on top of my legs, more debris 
thudded against my back and I almost lost hold of 
Miranda twice before I could struggle to my feet. 
Screams filleted the air through the now absurdly 
slow and repetitive sound of the alarm.

The fire was already dying as I staggered upright, 
sprinklers pissing lukewarm water onto the scorched 
and unscorched alike. As more people managed to 
escape the building, I searched for Scully among the 
refugees. It would have been impossible to hear me, 
but I yelled her name anyway, howled like Brando 
demanding entree to Stella's bed, as more and more 
people swept past me towards the blinding summer 
light of open ground and safety. A kaleidoscope of 
humanity, flashes of shoulders and waists and eyes, 
swept past me, and all I could do was sift the 
fragments and ignore all that was not Scully.

It was when the first firefighters pushed upstream 
and passed me, running down the blackened 
hallway to see if anyone still lived in that part of the 
building, that I began to panic. The smell of chemical 
smoke was heavy in the air and I couldn't keep 
Miranda here, her infant lungs were in danger.

Scully's name died into an undifferentiated howl in 
my throat.

The hot damp baby in my arms swung furious fists 
against my chest that seemed to thud directly 
against my heart as I loped towards the door. I'd just 
find somewhere safe to put her --

Where was that? Sam had to be nearby, waiting to 
see if she'd succeeded. 

The roaring in my ears had nothing to do with the 
explosion or the people panicking around me. I 
should have made Scully take Miranda, she's short 
but she's determined, she would have gone through 
the crowds like Michael Jordan through a double-
team defense, I should have been the one alerting 
the others to the danger and clearing the courtroom. 
Hell, we should have let them all die, let God sort 
them out and save ourselves a lot of trouble.

The sunlight smacked me across the face and I 
stumbled out the door where spectators were 
clotting. I looked back into the building and Scully 
was still not there.

I shuffled gracelessly down the granite steps, 
mumbling reassurance to Miranda. She had to be all 
right, Scully's always fine, she doesn't die. I can't let 
her. 

More firetrucks, more ambulances, the police were 
already setting up barriers. I felt the chill of incipient 
shock as the hot morning sun melted my skin and I 
wasn't sure I'd be able to hold on to Miranda.

When Zippy materialized and caught her from my 
Gumby arms, propping his crutches under his 
armpits to free his hands, it didn't surprise me in the 
least.

"What did you do this time?" he joked and then 
blanched when he got a look on my face.

"You armed?" I managed to croak.

He nodded. 

"Shoot anyone who approaches you. Keep her 
safe."

I fled into the darkness as I began, finally, to hear 
Miranda's cries.

Inside, stretchers yawned hungry mouths. Many 
were already being fed by victims who'd been too 
slow to escape the hallway. No one challenged my 
presence. I was ambulatory, barely, and the rescue 
workers had better things to do.

In front of our courtroom the marble floor was black 
as Sam's hair. The impressive wooden doors had 
disappeared, blown into the next century. The room 
was nothing but a gutted shell, charred lumps where 
chairs and tables might have been stuck to the floor 
like rotted teeth. Nothing in that room during the 
explosion could have survived.

Breathing the fouled air, I entered Hell's 
antechamber. The floor was still smoldering in 
places, and my shoes felt like they were red-hot iron. 
The image of the room as it had been fifteen 
minutes before, whole and unmarred, flickered in my 
vision, layered over the new reality like a hologram. 
This was the sign that the profiler part of my brain 
was trying to send the idiot part a message. 

There, behind the bench. Where the judge always 
emerged from in the mornings and after lunch, 
where the lawyers had their private conferences. 
There had been a door, once.

Now it was a wall, solid metal distorted in its frame 
by the force of the explosion but not blown apart. Its 
strength puzzled me until I figured that it had to be 
part of the enhanced security many courts were 
investing in, in these days of Freemen and McVeigh. 
And Samantha Mulder, apparently.

I pounded on the door and screamed Scully's name 
once more.

Silence. Dead silence.

The wail of denial piped through my head at about a 
hundred and twenty decibels. She was there, she 
had to be there, surely she was on the other side 
pressing her hands against the blast-rippled door 
directly parallel to mine.

I was pounding with both fists now, I could feel new 
bruises and cuts explode as my knees began to give 
out and I started to slide toward the floor, unable to 
breathe. I looked away and realized that some of the 
things I'd thought were just burnt chairs had merged 
with bodies.

Blackened tears dripped from my nose as I lay 
against the hot door.

Vibration, not of my own makings, under my helpless 
hands and I pressed my ear to the door.

The sound was muffled, but I knew it was my name.

I wept as I pulled myself up like Pinocchio under 
Gepetto's control and went for the firefighters.

****

I can yell pretty loudly when I have to, and I could 
feel my throat going raw when I called for a bomb 
squad and an immediate evacuation. The press is 
fairly sensitive about the danger after so many 
terrorist incidents in past years: naturally, they want 
to report on tragedy happening to others, but they 
decidedly don't want to *be* the news. My yells 
produced a Niagara-sized rush through a Rock 
Creek-sized outlet.

Looking at the crush of people (reporters, anyway) 
stopping up the main doors like a cork in a bottle, I 
decided that the judge would never make it. I ran 
back to him and grabbed his shoulder. His face 
tightened and reddened with outrage. "I'm sorry, 
your Honor," I said as I half-dragged him back to the 
door to his chambers, "but it's not safe for us to stay 
in this room." Whatever he said to me over the 
confused foaming of the others in the room involved 
the phrase "young lady," but that's all I know.

I noted that Tara and Matthew made it to the real 
exit, but Bill must have suspected a trick of some 
sort and followed me. Our loyal counsel, somewhat 
like dogs, stayed by our sides -- or maybe they just 
figured that, starting from the far end of the room, 
their chances of making it out the main doors were 
slim indeed. 

My stomach shrunk into a black hole when I realized 
that there was no through exit. We could be trapped 
like a microwave dinner when the bomb went off. I 
bolted the door and the lawyers backed away from 
me as if I were the potentially explosive element. 
"We should get behind the desk, it may protect us 
from the blast."

"These doors are supposed to be bomb-proof," the 
judge said sharply, as if I were letting the American 
justice system down by not trusting their strength. 

"Yes, your Honor," I agreed as I urged him to the 
back of the room behind his desk. 

We all hunkered down behind the judge's enormous 
mahogany desk, the judge in the middle and the 
lawyers flanking him to provide maximum possible 
distance between me and Bill. Just as we got 
uncomfortable, the blast door groaned like a lion 
roaring on the veldt.

The judge's bronze statue of Justice weighing empty 
air leapt off the desk in her own need to escape and 
smacked into my left hand, drawing blood which I 
hardly felt as I stared open-mouthed at the Legal 
Eagles crouched next to me. Laura and Maxwell 
were arguing about whether the judge should end 
the hearing and recuse himself as sirens wheeped 
and water began pouring from the ceiling. More 
books and soft-backed supplements fell off the 
shelves as the building shuddered. Laura took a hit, 
continued yammering, and only paused when she 
and Maxwell both leapt to protect Hizzoner from 
assault with a deadly casebook. They collided, the 
judge got slightly bonked anyway, and I almost 
laughed. It was worse than watching the Gunmen at 
play.

Maxwell gave Laura a hand back up and looked like 
he wanted to object when I checked the judge's 
pupils and made the older man track my index 
finger, but my nemesis undoubtedly realized that 
looking as if he didn't care if the judge was 
concussed was even worse than letting me earn 
brownie points by playing doctor. The judge was well 
enough to snap at me for asking him to do silly 
tricks, in any event.

When I'd pronounced the judge fit for work, Maxwell 
and Laura began to argue about the legal import of 
recent events. All three of them ignored the sirens 
and the smoke in favor of legal argument, while I 
tried to determine whether there were any operative 
exits. I was beginning to think that lawyer jokes 
substantially understated the differences between 
the profession and the rest of the human race. Bill 
sat with his hands over his knees, disgusted with 
life, while I peeked at the judge's smoldering books 
on the far wall and guessed that we'd been spared 
the brunt of the blast. The frailer doors on the other 
side of the courtroom must have exploded and 
channeled the explosion outwards.

Mulder ruined my new suit when he grabbed me 
after the firefighters finally knocked the door in. I 
couldn't actually work up any annoyance, though, 
not when he was still crying (from the smoke, of 
course) and his chest shook against mine like a car 
that had lost its shocks. I rubbed his soot-streaked 
face with the heel of my hand and accepted life 
without breathing while he attempted to squeeze me 
back down a dress size.

Zippy was waiting outside for us. His badge was 
flipped open and hung at his waist so that everyone 
could see it. He was leaning against a local squad 
car with his crutches propped up beside him, one 
arm around Miranda and the other ever-so-casually 
training his gun towards the ground in case 
someone tried to dispute his right to babysit.

As we approached, Miranda waved at us, looking 
from Mulder to me and back, awed by the incredible 
amount of dirt and debris Mulder had accumulated. 
She was reporting on her impressions of the whole 
incident in triple time, but when I took her from Zippy 
she grabbed a hank of my now-stringy hair and said, 
in exactly Mulder's tone when I'm not playing along 
with his latest joke, "*Scuh*-lee."

Ever the gentleman, Mulder took Miranda from me 
just before I vomited, narrowly missing both Zippy's 
cast and  the hood of the squad car.

Miranda applauded. MSNBC and CourTV both 
showed me getting sick, damn them, but the 
broadcasters didn't. I guess puke is against 
Standards and Practices.

"Baahhhhm!" Miranda yodeled happily. 

She made it into prime time.

Iolokus IV: Res Judicata
14/

Well I never get to do the things they wanted to do to you,
I have to do them to myself, or go find someone else,
Well if you were so good, I wouldn't be so bothered by you,
I like to drink your nose, and suck your little toes,
Strawberry sundae is mine, 
Only funday, it's the one day I can lie and dream about you.
	BMX Bandits

Still life with old magazines, me leaning against the 
wall in the triage unit at the local emergency room. 
This was the same emergency room we'd gone to 
after George had taken himself out of the line of 
succession courtesy of the FBI SWAT team.  The 
way things were going we would be rating our own 
curtain. Scully was sitting in one of the waiting room 
chairs with a makeshift bandage around her injured 
hand. The Mooselet was clinging to her like a limpet 
and cooing at her in soothing tones of Moose-
Speak.  With her eyes shut and the black smudges 
from the soot marking her haggard face, Scully 
looked like one of the victims of the Oklahoma City 
bombing who had managed to get her child out of 
the wreckage.  I wished that the fucking TV cameras 
had been around to get a shot of that, it certainly 
was a blow to the balls to the argument she wasn't 
attached to the Mooselet.

How could she not be when the Mooselet had 
inherited the old Mulder charm, right?

We waited while the badly injured went in and were 
whisked to ICU or wherever.  Scully had already 
diagnosed the possibility of a green break to the 
small bones in her hand and she definitely was 
going to need stitches, even I could tell that. I'm sure 
she would have been just as happy to suture herself 
in the privacy of our kitchen, but the EMT's had 
gotten hold of her before she could escape.  Which 
was pretty much the way I had - before she could 
escape.

The judge, bruised on the head from where a flying 
law book had beaned him on the noggin, was sitting 
across from us in the waiting area, with his gown 
folded neatly in his lap.  I bit back the urge to walk 
over and plead my side of the case without the 
benefit of legal counsel, because I had the sinking 
suspicion that a pissed-off Laura could give Scully a 
challenge for the crown of Queen of Bitchiness.  
Instead, I put my hand on Scully's messy hair and 
tried my best reassuring smile on her.

She opened her eyes and frowned.

"What?" she asked in a nasty tone.

"How're you feeling?" I asked.

"Very nauseous.  Go away," she said and shut her 
eyes again.
 
"You want a soda or something?  Flat Coke always 
helps me." 

"And how often have you had morning sickness?" 
she asked in the same precisely vicious tone, but did 
not open her eyes. "I just want you to promise me no 
x-rays.  X-rays would not be a good thing."

Of course she was right, no point in asking for 
trouble with her incipient Mulder-mutant by having 
the fetus irradiated on top of any already present 
mutations - like my sense of humor, for instance.  I 
tried the smile again and the Mooselet smiled back 
at me and started pulling at Scully's hair.

"BAAAAAAAAAAMMMMMM!" 

"Mulder, we really have to teach her some more 
words," Scully sighed and smoothed down a stray 
lock of the baby's hair. 

"No time like the present."

I crouched down next to them and went eye to eye 
with the Mooselet's baby jades.

"Say 'ice cream'."

The Mooselet tracked from my face to Scully's, 
checking to see if it was all right.  Scully nodded 
almost imperceptibly.

"Yiiiii Cweeeeeeeem."

"Close enough for government work," I agreed.

I held the Mooselet while Scully got her stitches. The 
Mooselet craned her head around to watch the 
blood and the gore, while I watched her watch.

"If you're a good girl there's some Chunky Monkey in 
it for you." I offered.

The resident pursed her lips.

"You shouldn't feed babies sweets."

"I was talking to my wife."

"Skuh-lee," the Mooselet explained.

Scully smirked when she gathered up her rings and 
held them out to me in her right hand.  I think I must 
have been wearing one of my more stricken 
expressions.

"Help me put them on the other hand.  My fingers 
are numb."

For the second time that month, I slid the rings over 
her knuckles and into place. Although they were on 
the wrong hand, I was just glad she was willing to 
wear them.

We were a sad little crew that piled out of the 
Ranger that evening, Scully bandaged and sooty, 
me sooty, and the Mooselet both sooty and drooling 
asleep against my shoulder.  Warwick and Ingveld 
had made it home and had dinner on the table and I 
was so grateful that I could have kissed them both, 
but I only kissed Ingveld and thumped Warwick on 
his good shoulder.

"That was pretty fucking spectacular," he said, "I 
can't see how they would deny you custody after you 
saved everyone's lives."

Scully was balancing the Mooselet on the counter 
and trying to wipe the worst of the soot off her red 
puckered face, the Mooselet wailed and flailed, 
nearly sending both of them into the dishpan.

"You are going to bed, young Miss.  You are too 
tired and cranky to be with humans." Scully told her 
and scooped her up against her chest.

"You can't trust lawyers.  Maxwell will probably make 
out that we set the bomb for just that reason," I went 
to the refrigerator and got a beer, "Rat bastard."

"What do you call a boatload of lawyers at the 
bottom of the ocean?" Ingveld asked.

I looked at her.

"A start," she said.

I realized that it was a joke and smiled at her.  
Warwick looked over at his ladylove and rolled his 
eyes.

"She's been looking at lawyer jokes on websites," he 
explained.

"I would think that you would need funniness now." 

"Yeah, that's about right." 

"Come on," Warwick tugged at Ingveld's arm.

"Was it not funny?" I heard her ask as they went 
downstairs.

I sighed and drank the beer. God, it tasted good.  
Nothing like a cold beer after a hot day of trauma 
and a major explosion.  It almost made me regret 
ever leaving the X-Files. 

Catzilla rubbed against my shins in greeting and 
jumped up onto the counter so I could rub him from 
ears to tail.  While the rest of us had suffered over 
the past few weeks the now-neutered cat was 
getting fatter, sleeker and silkier by the minute. 
(Scully took him - I didn't have the heart.  I had the 
suspicion I was next in line to get fixed.)  I know I felt 
guilty for not giving him enough attention and made 
up for it in cat snacks, and I suspected that he also 
hoovered up everything that the Mooselet threw to 
the floor.

"What's that cat doing on the counter?"

Guilty, Catzilla and I both started when Scully came 
back in.
 
"Down." She ordered and he leapt gracefully from 
the counter and glared greenly at her before he went 
after Warwick and Ingveld, his tail held high with 
offense.

Too tired to talk, we ate the pasta salad in silence, 
and she went upstairs afterwards while I fed the 
dishwasher and closed up the house.

Up in our bedroom, I shucked off my shoes, jacket, 
and socks and went into the bathroom. The room 
was dark save for candlelight flickering from a votive 
candle resting on the side of the sink.  Scully was 
submerged with a froth of bubbles up to her chin and 
her bandaged hand resting on the side of the tub.  I 
could see the ruby tips of her toenails through the 
bubbles as well as a couple of more strategic 
places, such as the auburn shadow of her pubic hair 
and the salmon tips of her breasts.  Her eyes were 
shut and she had a folded washcloth draped over 
her forehead.  The room smelled of strange floral 
perfumes and the water had a decided lavender cast 
to it.  I sat on the closed lid of the toilet and picked 
up the bottle that sat on the tub rim next to the 
spigot.

"Quiet moments - for relaxation." I read.

"I should buy it by the gallon," she murmured, her 
voice dreamy in the steamy room.

"I should drink it," I put the bottle down and looked at 
the tub, measuring it for size, "Room enough for 
two."

One eye opened and considered me.  I was in 
dangerous territory, knowing that Jason had raped 
her in the shower of his family estate.  But that was 
miles and months away.  She shrugged and half sat-
up to make room, the suds running intriguingly down 
her breasts and back into the tub.  I stripped down to 
my scar collection and eased into the water with her.  
The water in the tub was hot enough to burn my 
balls but I manfully lowered myself into the boiling 
depths.  By careful angling, we were able to fit face 
to face with our legs overlapping.  I leaned back and 
felt the faucet nudge the back of my head before I 
wiggled around to avoid it.  Water splashed out of 
the tub and onto the bath mat.

Scully, unexpectedly, graced me with one of her 
zillion watt smiles and leaned back into a wreath of 
bubbles.

"If anyone had told me in 1993 that I was going to 
end up in a bathtub with you, let alone married to 
and pregnant by you I would have told them that 
they were delusional."

"So you weren't immediately captivated by my 
charm?"

"I thought you were an arrogant bastard."

"And your opinion has changed?"

"No."

"So you lied to the shrinks?"

"Every word of it," she said and blinded me with the 
smile again. 

I snorted and realized that her good hand was 
walking up my thigh in a manner that was anything 
but relaxing.

"We'll drown," I pointed out.

"Spoilsport," she said and gave my cock a friendly 
squeeze before withdrawing her hand.

We lolled in the water until it grew cold and 
emerged, water-wrinkled and thoroughly boneless 
with the effects of Scully's magic bath oils. Damp 
and naked, we tumbled into bed.  Scully had her 
injured hand pillowed on my chest and her head on 
my shoulder, our legs wrapped like ropes around 
each other's.  I listened while her breathing 
smoothed out and she grew limp and heavy against 
me, pulled down into sleep's waters like a swimmer 
with no plans to survive.  The old demon of insomnia 
came and sat on my left shoulder, reminding me that 
the worst was yet to come, I'd once again been 
betrayed, and there was no assurance that Scully 
would stay a minute longer than was necessary.  
There was no assurance that she could even if she 
wanted to, now that the specter of that bad old 
astrological sign of infinitely proliferating cells had 
returned. Exhausted in both body and mind, I lay 
there and listened to the demon whisper poison into 
my ear until the morning sun changed the colors in 
the room.

****

The telephone rattled me out of my cozy post-
trauma snooze, I slid out from under Mulder's arm 
and flailed at the nightstand until I grabbed the 
telephone and dragged it to my head.
 
"S'kly?" I groaned.

"Dana, " she corrected me "the trial has been 
adjourned until Monday pending investigation of the 
explosion." Laura, sounding entirely too chipper for 
what had to be the middle of the night burbled into 
my ear.

"Wh' time izzit?" I asked as Mulder's arm re-velcroed 
itself to my middle

"After nine.  The judge called me at six if you can 
believe that.  The old fart must not sleep at all.  But I 
talked to Maxwell already and he's begun making 
noises about how the judge can't possibly have an 
unbiased opinion after what happened yesterday - 
which might give them cause to call a mistrial."
 
"Fuck," I groaned.
 
Mulder, who must have thought it was a command, 
slid his hand between my legs and homed in on his 
intended target while I concentrated on what Laura 
was saying.  He nuzzled the back of my neck and 
began nipping at the semi-ticklish scar from my chip 
implantation.

"I don't know if we can go through all this again." I 
admitted, and squirmed under the dual assault on 
my nervous system.  I batted ineffectually at his 
hand but Mulder only made a low gopher noise and 
started wedging my legs open like the jaws of life 
opening a crashed car.

"Unless you have some incredible piece of 
information that you want to share with the class, I 
can't see how we can avoid it - unless he's so sure 
of himself with that tape that he won't use the 
bombing against the case."

It was getting hard to think while Mulder's entirely 
too-talented tongue started working its way down 
along my ribcage and towards my stomach, the soft 
fur of his hair dragging along in the wet trail from his 
mouth like a paintbrush.  I tried to arch away from 
him but he was insistent.

"It all comes down to that damn tape."
 
Teeth grazed the inside of my thigh and I bit my 
lower lip to choke back a moan.

"Do you know what's on the tape?" she asked.

"No."  I lied and received a reward for my falsehood 
in the form of a hot mouth sliding onto my already 
aching center.

"There's only so much I can do - your brother's 
squeaky clean other than his finances."

Squeak.  There was a squeak building up inside my 
throat while Mulder's teeth and tongue worked 
merrily away on my clitoris.  My body was shaking 
like a car going over rough terrain and Laura's voice 
was filling with a static that had nothing to do with 
the cordless phone.  My heels drummed helplessly 
against his shoulders as he bent me nearly in two.

"I know who set the bomb," I offered as the bomber's 
brother set my body on fire.

"Who?"

"Samantha Mann.  Samantha Mulder, Mul --- Fox," 
the name came out in a muffled choke more related 
to what he was doing than the name itself, "sister.  A 
woman with a black bob, black suit, left a briefcase 
near Miranda's stroller.  That's where the bomb was.  
Someone blew up our car right before the -"

I had to stop and catch a shaky breath.

"-psychologists came. - "

Bad word choice.

"There's a police report with the DC Police.  You can 
---"

God damn him anyway!  I was shaking like one of 
James Bond's vodka martinis.

" - just check it out Laura."

"Are you okay?"

"Yeah. . .  " my back was at least six inches away 
from the mattress and I swore that my toes were 
curling upwards with the strain of keeping my voice 
under control, "I gotta go - something's come up."

With a vengeance.

Just as I hit the disconnect button, Mulder slid into 
me with the efficiency of a bullet entering a gun 
chamber.  That was enough to send me over the 
edge.  I grabbed at his shoulders and dragged him 
in as deep as he would go as I clutched down and 
around his cock which felt as though it were filling 
me to the brain stem.  He slammed hard inside me, 
breathing as though he had done the four-minute 
mile.  I shuddered, grabbing his hips and squirming 
until each and every thrust grazed my clitoris and I 
came in a blinding burst of snow and ice that ripped 
me down to the bone.  I was moaning his name - I 
don't know which one -- as the shock waves coursed 
through me for what felt like a decade.  I was dazed 
and limp as he continued to thrust in and out of me, 
his narrow hips so thinly covered with skin that I 
could see the layers of muscle, the bunching of the 
muscles in his arms and shoulders, corded 
forearms, and the emerald insanity lighting his eyes 
that pinned me into the rumpled sheets.  And I came 
again with a sudden violence that made me wail like 
a cat with a trodden-upon tail.  He growled his 
gopher growl, lip turning up, and shot hot and hard 
and heavy into me while I went up like the courtroom 
in a glorious burst of flame and destruction.

Manners forgotten, he collapsed on top of me like a 
pile of hardback novels falling from the top shelf.

I wanted to kill him for pulling that stunt, but instead, 
I slid my legs around his and kissed his sweaty hair.  
Grunting, he adjusted his weight so I could breathe 
again and burrowed between my breasts.  
 
"Scully, Scully, Scully . . ." he muttered.

"You forgot to call me Dana in the courtroom, when 
the bomb went off."  I chided him, "goes against our 
pose as a quote normal unquote couple."
 
"There's nothing normal about us."

"True."

He looked up at me with a half-smile twisting his 
eminently fuckable lips.

"Sweetheart.  Darling.  Pumpkin.  Honey-Bunny.  
Precious.  Babycakes," he taunted.

"Don't push your luck, Gopher-Boy."

"Poopsie."

The good thing about Mulder's nose is that it makes 
a good target, and he squawks if you pinch it hard 
enough.

I slid off into a woozy sleep with his head on my 
chest.  I didn't feel him leave, but rather when he 
came back and flopped onto the mattress hard 
enough to make me bounce.  Groaning I pushed my 
hair out of my face and rolled over on my stomach 
so I could watch him wiggle snakelike out of his 
sweatpants.  Underneath he was smoothly naked, 
long and lean with his narrow hips and lean 
muscles.  The Gopher stirred inside me.

"The baby?" I asked.

"Is being tutored in C++ downstairs. Warwick and 
Ingveld decided that we needed the day off," he 
pulled off the sweats the rest of the way and bundled 
under the sheets with me, his legs knotting around 
mine.

"How do you feel?" he asked in a voice that had 
nothing to do with the stitches in my hand.

"Worried.  Exhilarated."

"Nauseous?"

"Maybe later.  I'm worried about the tape on two 
counts. The first is should the tape show what I 
believe it does, which is Marita and I setting fire to 
the fetuses in Bethel. There is no way in hell that 
anyone would let you retain custody since you 
willingly suppressed evidence that a crime had been 
committed.  That crime could be construed as either 
murder or illegal abortion and destruction of property 
at the very least.  The other possibility is that the 
tape is only of you and me stealing the Power Point 
presentation from Jason's office and this all has 
been much ado about nothing.  This means that you 
and I are still married, I'm still pregnant, and I still 
have to do something about the things from my 
apartment in the garage."

"Yard sale?" he asked.

I wrinkled my nose.

"I think I'd rather go to prison."

"Okay, this is the plan, you have the baby and I'll run 
the yard sale."

"Be serious."

"I am."
 
He reached over and twined his fingers in my 
frightening morning hair.

"We just keep going.  Cross the bridges when we 
find them and burn them behind us.  C'mon, Scully 
surely family life is less frightening than liver-eating 
mutants or six foot intestinal worms," his tone was 
light but his eyes were dark with emotion, "how bad 
can it be?"

I couldn't answer that.  I didn't know.  I wanted to 
plan but so much depended on a shiny black 
videotape and an older man in a black dress and I 
was left feeling small and helpless again.  Struggling 
on in the face of adversity and against the tide of 
common sense was Mulder's realm of being, not 
mine.  I liked answers, endings, closures, even if it 
wasn't the hero and heroine walking off hand in hand 
into the sunset.  I just wanted to know that it was 
over.  I wanted to know who the key grip was. The 
only problem was that the minute I wet my feet in 
Mulder's dark pool of reality the chance of having a 
satisfactory conclusion to anything was virtually nil. 
And now I was in it up to my neck.  A neck that he 
was nuzzling and making seductive gopher-noises 
into.  

I sighed and relaxed.  At least the water in Mulder's 
pond was warm and comfortable, and the local 
wildlife was *very* friendly.

"You know, we really do belong together."
 
He stopped nuzzling and went as still as a 
taxidermied fox over the jukebox at Kelly's.

"Excuse me. I thought you just said that we 
belonged together," he looked up at me with the 
usual mischief. "Who are you and what have you 
done to Scully?"

"At this stage of the game, after the mutants, the rain 
of frogs, the black oil, the toilets full of dead rats, 
sentient viruses, the Conundrum, and your brothers, 
who else would have either of us?"

He blinked and the fringe of his eyelashes brushed 
my face.

"Can you imagine getting involved with someone 
else and trying to explain all that?"

"For richer, for poorer, for flukeworms, mutants, and 
parasitic twins, until aliens do us part?" 

Or something like that.

It was a good day, all in all.

By the afternoon, we'd managed to make it out of 
doors and the sunshine was making my eyes hurt in 
the back yard.  Miranda and I were lolling on a 
blanket while Mulder was trying to put together a 
mini-playhouse for Miranda.  I suppose he figured 
that he would be able to move into the four-foot 
square pink plastic palace if things got too rough for 
him in the big house.  The Mulder equivalent of the 
doghouse.  If he ever got the damn thing together.  
Despite all of his stellar qualities, stated at the 
psychologist's interview and unstated at the same 
interview, skill with tools is not one of them.  I let him 
struggle for another half-hour until he became 
sweaty, frustrated, and commenced using language 
unsuitable for Miranda's tender years.  

I finally had pity on him, exchanged Miranda for 
hammer, and worked on the playhouse myself.  He 
lolled on the grass and watched me with a slightly 
outraged expression while it took me a half an hour 
to get the thing together.  However, I cheated - I 
read the directions.

When the pink cube with the bright yellow roof and 
door was finally complete, I crouched next to it and 
pointed, Miranda watched me with her usual bright, 
curious gaze.  She was standing upright, holding 
onto Mulder's shoulder and blinking at the bright 
pinkness of it all.

"This is your house.  Just for you.  This is Miranda's 
playhouse."

She let go of Mulder's shoulder and carefully walked 
across the lawn to me.  She didn't wobble or toddle, 
but took the measured steps of a woman in high 
heels on an uneven surface.  When she finally 
crossed the ten feet between Mulder and me, she 
put her arms out and caught me around the neck 
rather than going to the house.  On the blanket, 
Mulder was trying very hard not to look like he was 
sniveling.  At least I could bury my face in Miranda's 
sweet-smelling neck and hide my own watering eyes 
that way.

Iolokus IV: Res Judicata
15/

They're Justified, and they're Ancient,
And they drive an ice cream van.
They're Justified and they're Ancient,
With still no master plan.
	KLF

The Giant Mutant Gopher Kings Sing Songs of 
Love woke me up Sunday morning.  Mulder was 
burrowing his snout into the tunnel between my 
legs and growling happily to himself.  I was 
growling in return as he continued to nibble at 
me, making the transition from sleep to 
wakefulness more than bearable. I groaned as he 
worked away, setting fire to my pelvis like a dry 
hillside and the flames swept along my nerves 
and into my brain.  My legs were shaking as I 
shut my eyes and let the morning light fill me..  
The soft  wash of his hair against my legs, silky 
as Catzilla's underbelly, his stubble scraping for 
contrast, the hardness of teeth against the 
softness of his lips and the insistent, flexible 
tongue.  It was enough to make me sing an aria 
in praise of the man's mouth.  Since there was 
nothing but time, he teased me to the point of 
climax twice, until I was shuddering, sweating 
and mewling with need like an angry kitten 
deprived of a toy.

"Will you still want me when I turn into a blimp?" I 
muttered into his ear as he pushed his way into 
me. (In the morning I generally let him do all the 
work; it's much easier that way.)

He chuffed like a startled horse and failed to 
begin his usual rhythm. Instead he cupped my 
face in his hands and stared into my eyes, which 
unnerved me. "I wanted you when the X Files 
were shut down and you turned into a little 
porker." I must have snarled at him because he 
laughed at me. He began to thrust irregularly, like 
an engine missing strokes, and I squirmed under 
him. "Also," he said, breath teasing my lips, "your 
breasts are going to get bigger, too."

Wait one cotton-pickin' second, what was wrong 
with the breasts I had? I pushed against him, 
annoyed, and he just smirked at me. Which was 
less aggravating up close than from across the 
room, but still... I closed my eyes and grabbed his 
narrow hips, rubbing up against him like a cat 
with a particularly inviting scratching post.

He yipped as my claws found him and he came.

****

The soap bubble of happiness lasted almost 
throughout the weekend. 

The e-mail I received Sunday morning looked at 
first like one of the average cashew-and-
macadamia sort -- the kind that show up in my 
mailbox on a regular basis, like utility bills. It 
came from an anonymous remailer, a standard 
sign that the person trying to contact me was a 
few peanuts short of a full Planter's cocktail mix, 
though the title "Deal?" lacked a certain paranoid 
panache.

"Mr. Mulder," it said. 

"You've shown your ability to make things difficult 
for us, and we for you. A compromise might serve 
our separate interests equally well.  We will de-
fund the legal battle against you. In return, you 
will provide samples of Miranda Scully's blood on 
a regular basis, no more than three times a year. 
We will take no further action against you or any 
member of your family as long as you continue to 
comply with our requirements.

"Call 312 555 1013 by 9 am Monday morning to 
confirm your agreement.

"JB"

That had to be Justine Barnabas/Judith Barnaby, 
the woman I'd so briefly met in Chicago.  The 
woman with the dangerously sensual mouth.

Did she mean it? 

Of course I wouldn't trust her, per se, but we'd 
only just missed being blown up; there were dead 
people who'd been alive yesterday morning 
because of me and even if I didn't know them I 
was part of the reason they died. That sort of 
thing would only continue as long as we were 
playing this game with the Conspiracy.

It's blood, I thought. It's not as if they're asking for 
*her*. Not like giving up a whole daughter. 

Blood has many uses. Clones. Antibodies. 
Vaccines, mutagens, DNA extraction, thousands 
of Scullywords that boiled down to one: 
complicity.  Just what I liked over the Sunday 
Post - a moral dilemma.  Scully was still 
stretched out on the bed like a Parrish painting 
and I stood and stared at her for a few moments, 
knowing full well that the minute I mentioned the 
e-mail she was going to go off like a M-80.  The 
fragile peace of the weekend was going to end 
with a sickening thud.

At least Scully was still asleep on her face. Maybe 
sex could stave off morning sickness; every morning 
we'd started the day off right, she had foreborne the 
vomit comet act. It would be fun to try out the theory, 
anyway.

"Hey," I poked her shoulder with a tentative finger.

She grumbled and grabbed onto the pillow as if I 
were trying to pry her away from it.

"We need to talk."

Reluctantly, she turned her head and blinked like a 
thoughtlessly awakened cat. "Yeah?" Sad to say, 
this was the nicest morning greeting I'd ever 
received without presenting both coffee and a 
pastry.

"C'mon and read the mail I just got."

Grumbling like a poorly tuned engine, she staggered 
out of bed and pulled on my Knicks shirt. Pouting 
and rubbing her hand through her morning hair, with 
the shirt nearly to her knees, she looked cute 
enough to get her own ABC sitcom - Dana Mc 
Scully.  If she started to do the Macarena with the 
Mooselet I would be waving goodbye as she headed 
out to Los Angeles.

As if she could read my mind, she turned and bared 
her teeth at me, but the intimidation factor was 
lessened when she yawned.

The e-mail woke her up faster than an amphetamine 
injection to the heart.

"This is from the person you met at BioQuest?"

"At least we're supposed to think so."

"Jesus wept, M -- Fox," the stutter was beginning to 
get slightly annoying, as I was having no reciprocal 
problem getting *her* first name right. One might be 
tempted to think that she had a problem with 
intimacy. On the other hand it was cute as hell.

There is something terribly cute about Scully, once 
you peel away the layers and layers of professional 
detachment and the designer suits - she's as cute 
as a bug's ear.  Her cuteness is directly linked to her 
size and her big blue eyes, and if I ever opened my 
mouth to remark upon it I would be de-balled in a 
blink of said big blue eyes.  In any event, when she 
was being so cute with her hair mussed and 
rumpled, wearing the big shirt, and when I knew that 
I'd well and thoroughly fucked her silly before sunup, 
it was impossible for me to keep my hands off her.

I reached out and touched her shoulder. Through 
the cotton she was as hot as sunburn. "What do you 
think?"

She brushed her flyaway hair away from her face 
with an aggravated grimace. "Have we ever met 
anyone who's made a successful deal with these 
people, one that doesn't end with a dead body in an 
alley and missing evidence?"

"I don't think we ever found any traces of the 
*successful* deals, we only got leads when 
something went bad," I replied.

"So we're just supposed to drain her blood 
periodically and trust that the deal will stay put? And 
that's if we don't care what happens to her genetic 
material. What am I going to tell her when I draw the 
blood every quarter, 'don't worry, this is just mommy 
and daddy's version of an IRA'?"

"I'll get some coffee," I suggested, and fled.

In the kitchen, Ingveld was fighting with Warwick. 
Who knows, maybe Scully and I were giving off 
pheromones. "I *know* the algorithm is not sensitive 
enough, this is why I give the problem to you!" she 
said. "It is no different than one of your QuickTime 
movies!" I backed away slowly, shutting the door so 
that they wouldn't know they'd been seen. Much 
more can be forgiven in private than what's 
memorialized in public.

I jogged out to the 7-11 for coffee instead, which 
gave me a bit more time to think. I didn't mind 
getting bent, folded, spindled, or mutilated, and I 
guess Scully was able to make her own choices, 
most of the time, but Miranda had never chosen to 
be in danger.

When I returned to the house I entered the bedroom 
with the coffee and the maple frosted donut held out 
in front of me like bait. Scully snatched them away 
with a look that told me she knew exactly what I was 
attempting and was not impressed, but she ate the 
donut anyway.

I sipped my own coffee tentatively. I didn't want to 
have this conversation. "There's a question we 
haven't really asked."

"Enlighten me." Her voice was as sharp as if I'd told 
her that the solution to an X File loomed in one of 
my famous slide shows.

"We have to consider the possibility that the people 
behind Roush and BioQuest are acting on what they 
believe to be legitimate motives. Though their 
methods are unconscionable, everyone involved 
seems to believe that there is a distinct possibility of 
hostile alien intervention into human affairs. If they 
are trying to defeat colonization, is it wrong to 
oppose that objective?"

"You want to say yes."

"I think we should consider it."

"Like father, like son."

That was low.

"Dammit, Dana, you think I don't *know* that?"

She chewed on her donut and glared at me, 
which was somewhat diluted by the fact that she 
was sitting on the bed wearing only my shirt, 
which had ridden up to her waist.  I think I might 
have lost even more fights in the past if Scully 
had argued with me in the nude.

She sighed and looked away as I sat down beside 
her, as tentatively as a kid with a fake ID trying to 
sneak into his first bar. She still smelled like sex; it 
was distracting. "You know, I never used to worry 
about what was happening to my stray genetic 
material. I brushed my hair, I scratched when it 
itched, I flushed. Now I wonder when the next clone 
is going to turn up."

I gulped hot coffee, wanting it to hurt.
 
"It's obvious that we can't just agree to their terms. 
We need to know more. I propose that we call them 
and suggest further negotiations. If you're going to 
stick a needle in Miranda's arm on a regular basis I 
think you'll earn the right to know what purpose the 
research serves."

Her hand burned through my sweat-sodden shirt 
and into the knobs of my spine. "I wish I had a better 
plan," she admitted. "Make the call. The risk is that 
after they play the tape our negotiating position may 
change, but we can't make a decision right now.."

Relieved, I trotted downstairs to get more food for 
Scully. At some point, I was going to have to 
suggest to her that, though she was eating for two, 
the other person was the size of a lima bean, not 
Alfred Hitchcock. For the moment, though, being 
able to do nice things for her made me feel too good 
to tease. Ingveld and Warwick had made up -- what 
was that about pheromones? -- and she was just 
finishing the punchline of yet another lame joke: "-- 
and the bartender says, I don't care what you do 
with the fish but the lawyer has to go!"

"Let me guess," I said over Warwick's tortured 
groan, "comedy was a new thing with the fall of the 
Communist empire."

Ingveld frowned prettily. "I live almost half my life 
under capitalist government."

"Never mind," I said and got some orange juice out 
of the fridge. It would be better for Scully than 
coffee, though I wasn't sure that being the bearer of 
healthy beverages was going to be good for me 
personally. "How's tricks?"

Ingveld twitched (prettily, too, I might add) and gave 
Warwick a Significant Look. I looked them over as if 
they were the kind of food I found in my refrigerator 
after long hospital stays.

"Everything's good, Mulder," Warwick informed me, 
patting Ingveld's rump reassuringly. "We're all just a 
little wound up, looking forward to ending this whole 
court case."

I nodded, unwilling to find out what forms of lesser 
illegality my young friends were basing out of my 
home. Instead, I picked up my morning offering of 
juice, cereal, and eyeball-sized vitamin and turned to 
go back to the bedroom.

"It's just a *phrase*," he was saying to her as I left.

"Breakfast in bed?  You should get untenable offers 
more frequently," she sniped as I slid the tray over 
her lap.

I squinted down at her and tried to read the Magic 8 
Ball of her face while she dug into the Cheerios. No 
good, the Ball wasn't talking.  Answer Unclear; Try 
Again Later.

****

Scully's efficiency, and I think feminine wiles, made 
a truck filled to bursting with over-muscled workmen 
and rolls of grass sod appear.  Under Ingveld's 
watchful eye the men set to work and eyed her back. 
Meanwhile we escaped to the local kid emporium.  
While I trundled along with the Mooselet in her 
stroller, Scully went through the store picking out the 
swingset and kiddie pool we would acquire should 
the court decide our way.  The Mooselet went moon-
eyed at the vast array of toys and *things* all child-
sized and brightly colored.  Scully selected a few 
items that the Mooselet had to have, including a Cat 
in the Hat stuffed toy almost as big as the Mooselet 
was.  We ate lunch at Mc Donald's and I enjoyed 
watching Scully put french fries on the tray of the 
high chair; the Mooselet picked them delicately up 
one by one before jamming them in her mouth.  
Then it was over to the mall and I had my first real 
taste of married life as I tried to keep the Mooselet 
entertained outside the women's fitting room at 
Petite Sophisticate while Scully tried on clothes.  
Nothing she liked fit and everything she didn't like 
did fit.  While I had been secretly pleased with the 
voluptuousness pregnancy was bringing out in her 
small body, she wasn't.  Finally, she found a couple 
of suits that she could tolerate and had room to grow 
into.  By that time I was so stressed out that the 
baby and I decamped to look at ties.  I had to buy a 
somewhat less than satisfactory yellow and green 
golf-ball printed tie since the saleswoman spotted 
the Mooselet shoving the pure silk monstrosity into 
her mouth.  No child of mine is going to suck on 
artificial fibers.
 
Scully took Miranda to GAP KIDS and I went looking 
for some new CD's.  I met up with Scully again in 
front of a jewelry store where she was eating an ice 
cream cone and looking through the glass with 
chocolate on her chin and a wistful expression 
above the chocolate.  The Mooselet was even more 
coated with chocolate and so was the new pug dog 
beanie baby in her fists.

"What you got there?"  I asked crouching down next 
to the stroller since it was easier to deal with an 
infant female of the species than the fully-grown 
variety in front of a jewelry store.

"Yiiiii Cweeeeeeeem."

What can I say?  She was brilliant.

"Mulder, I miss my crucifix," Scully admitted.

That's right.  She hadn't had it since Bethel.  

"Do you want another one?" I asked. Wouldn't that 
aggravate my mother? I liked the idea already.

"I don't know.  I have the feeling that God and I have 
entered into a non-aggression pact."

"Something else?  A charm in the shape of an ice 
cream cone?"

"Solid gold UFO with diamonds for lights?"

"One of those charming charms in the shape of a 
stick figure with Miranda's birthstone in it?"

"Baaaaahhhhmmmm," Miranda suggested.

"Dr. Scully, Mr. Mulder."

We turned, Scully moving behind the baby and 
me in front as we went for our weapons. The 
portly man who'd addressed us waved soft hands 
and chided, "Please, be calm. I'm here in 
response to your message of this morning."

"Now, that's service," I said. Scully inched closer 
to the baby. I couldn't place the man in the 
rosters of conspirators I'd met. I might have heard 
his voice over my cellphone once, but I couldn't 
be sure. His face was ringed with oval rolls of fat 
and he had just the right avuncular twinkling eyes 
to make a decent Santa Claus.

"Your concern for the uses of your child's unique 
genetic material is perfectly appropriate," he 
continued, gesturing expansively at Miranda, 
"and we would be delighted to show you the vital 
work we're doing for humanity, to convince you of 
our good intentions."

"You'll have to work pretty hard to do that after 
trying to blow M--my husband up," Scully bitched 
and stared at him as if wondering what his 
pancreas would look like under her microscope.

"Please, Dr. Scully, we didn't know you were 
willing to be rational about this, and also we 
believed that Miranda would be safer with us than 
out in the world with so many dangerous enemies 
against her. But if you help us, we can help you."

"What are you offering?" That's my little forensic 
pathologist, straight to the gelid heart of the 
matter.

"I would be pleased to show you our laboratories, 
the work we're doing to fight the black cancer and 
the other threats from...foreign outposts. Dr. 
Scully, I believe your expertise would be most 
appropriate. If you'd come with me while Mr. 
Mulder watches the child? It won't be more than a 
few hours."

She slashed her eyes at me and I could tell that I 
was about to experience that most rare of 
creatures, the Ditch in Partner's Physical 
Presence, no cellphones in sight. I bowed to the 
inevitable by taking her shopping bags, like 
Dagwood helping Blondie, and lugged the 
purchases and the baby back to the car so I 
could go home and brood while the contractors 
fixed the lawn.

****

It was an insane weekend. Somehow we'd come to 
an unspoken agreement that we were going to try 
acting like the normal family that we had been 
posing as since the custody war began. 
Nevertheless, the bones of the matter were always 
holding the structure together, smiling like a skull 
back at me.

Deals.

Enough fucking deals.  Really.  I've been dealt 
with more than a casino worker.  I've played 
hands that would make the best card shark weep 
and run from the table like a wet baby.  Mulder 
wouldn't let me deal with Bill and I didn't want to 
deal with these Roush people.  As if my deal 
wasn't good enough, he had to show me up with 
a better offer - a more palatable one.  It's easier 
to hand over a vial of blood than an entire human 
being.  

The man from the mall told me to call him 
Joseph. "Do you have a last name?" I asked him 
as we pulled out in his chauffeured Mercedes 
limousine.

"That's not really important," he said. "Drink?"

"No thank you. That's not conducive to a high 
level of trust on our part," I pointed out, but he 
only smiled and folded his rounded pink hands 
over his midriff.

The trip took half an hour. The underground 
facility was located under another mall; I always 
knew there was something sinister about those 
places with their cloned Gaps and Expresses and 
Tower Records, though I'm not sure if I would 
have guessed that a mall would be the staging 
ground for the New World Order. Lurking under 
the shoppers and strollers was a world of 
morguelike cool, gleaming silver and drowning in 
fluorescent light.

I was shown a virus that Joseph averred was 
more lethal than Ebola, with a week-long latency 
period so that the infection would spread like 
gossip before the 95% fatality rate kicked in. I 
was shown alleged victims of said virus, as well 
as casualties of the "supersmallpox" Tina feared. 
Injected into animal tissue, the supersmallpox 
deformed and destroyed with the swiftness of 
acid.

Joseph told me that these were not entirely 
earthborn creations. That They wanted to protect 
humanity. That They were trying to find vaccines 
and cures, but with pitiful success so far. We 
stopped in a room filled with clean suits so that 
he could chat with one of the workers. 

"How's your little Jennifer?" he asked and the 
woman smiled, pleased that he'd remembered 
the girl's name. I suspected a veiled threat -- 
They really liked children, especially with 
tomatoes and lettuce -- but LabGirl just pulled out 
baby pictures.

He took me to see rabbits that had supposedly 
been infected with "black cancer," in varying 
stages of the disease/infestation. I couldn't be 
entirely sure the victims weren't elaborate 
puppets stolen from the Alien 5 set, but it 
*looked* as if the cancer took over the invaded 
organism's entire respiratory and cardiac 
functioning, keeping it paralyzed yet somewhat 
alive as the body was otherwise dissolved from 
the inside out, leaving only collagen and water 
surrounding a nest of new cancer-worms. I 
touched one with a gloved hand and the body 
parted under my fingertip like a spoonful of jelly. 
Not a sensation that would soon replace the 
cotton in Miranda's Pat the Bunny book, that's for 
sure. It was more disgusting than a frat house 
bathroom.

Mulder, Joseph intoned, was immune to the black 
cancer thanks to his mother's black arts. Miranda 
might be as well (and what did that mean for the 
Young Jedi Knight inside me, I wondered?) and 
was designed to have even stronger resistances 
to alien vices. If her blood was appropriately 
productive, it might save humanity. Joseph even 
"confided" in me that They had hopes of 
counterattack: if we were vulnerable to hybridized 
viruses and green blood, might not the Little Gray 
Men wither like H.G. Wells' Martian invaders if the 
right pathogen could be found, perhaps aided by 
the insights provided by Miranda's zebra 
constitution?

The song and dance was nice, but I was a highly 
dubious investor. The claims of beneficient intent 
rang as hollow as a chocolate bunny. We already 
*know* how to make AZT and antimalarial drugs, 
we know how to purify water and yet millions 
upon millions of people worldwide can't get 
treatments, whether simple or complex. As far as 
the fat and happy nations, we can't get people to 
get tested for STDs or even convince them to 
watch their weight. Even if this secret project did 
come up with a vaccine or a treatment, They'd 
need an authoritarian government and an 
unprecedented manufacturing base to implement 
it.

Thus, perhaps, the secret government spanning 
across the conventional nation-state boundaries, 
in place since at least World War II.

Power does not subside when the occasion for its 
exercise has passed. The scheme's anorexic 
chances of success might lead only to a 
thousand year Reich, this time aided by 
postnuclear weapons and implanted microchips 
to monitor and control the populace.

And yet -- as a scientist, I wanted to believe that 
knowledge moves only forwards. If there *was* a 
protection against these bioweapons, surely it 
could be publicized, replicated, shared as widely 
as possible. If the weapons already existed, 
would we be wrong to assist in the effort to 
control them?

Joseph offered me the opportunity to participate 
in the research project. "Nonhuman animals only, 
naturally," he said with a twinkle in his eye. 
Somehow the animal-rights political correctness 
was terribly jarring coming from him.

Despite what Mulder thinks, I don't actually know 
everything about medicine; in particular I'm not a 
virologist, though I might enjoy playing one on 
TV. "If we agree," I told him, "I'll want to monitor 
the work, but I'm not interested in becoming a 
Lab Tech in Black."

"But of course," he said in a faintly injured tone, 
lowering his lashes at me. "Are you sure I can't 
offer you a snack?"

I was beginning to suspect that he knew I was 
pregnant. And it would be very convenient for 
Them to have a control subject, with the same 
genetic background but without Samantha's 
enhancements, to see what the real source of 
any special resilience. 

"Mulder and I need to discuss this," I told him. 
"We'll need assurances of your reliability before 
we let you play God with Miranda's genetic 
material."

He nodded. "I understand that, as you must 
understand that if you no longer have custody we 
will have no further reason to negotiate."

I nodded confidently while terror tangled in my 
insides like a razor-edged strand of tinsel.

Joseph offered to ride with me back to the house, 
but I declined. I let the chauffeur take me two 
blocks away from our address, then walked the 
rest of the way in case a media flack was 
watching. I didn't want to give the impression that 
I was tootling around in a limo while I was in 
grave danger of losing my daughter.

That night Mulder and I went to bed right after 
Miranda did, and lay there in the darkness like two 
tomb sculptures, trying not to think about whether or 
not the judge was going to sunder the fragile peace 
that we'd fostered like an exotic bloom.  My cold 
hand was on my stomach and I wondered what was 
growing inside.
 

Iolokus IV: Res Judicata
16/

Fingertip sun at sideshow stalls, they throw the balls
At coconut fur that hides behind
Coloured shades that blind your eyes
Every child's mother holds an ice-cream cone, they circle round
Perceived unknown by an eye that peers from a hole in the tent where no 
one goes
	David  Bowie

They rolled out the VCR first thing next morning. 
Holding hands in the conventional manner wasn't 
good enough for Laura; we actually had both hands 
wrapped around each other's fingers like Romeo 
and Juliet about to be separated by fate. 
Alternatively, Macbeth and Lady Macbeth before the 
shit hit the fan.  This made it difficult to face forward 
but we twisted ourselves around so that we could 
watch the disaster unfold. 

Langly was waiting in a blue Ford Taurus outside, 
press pass around his scraggly neck. If the tape was 
sufficiently bad we'd be in Havana with Miranda in 
twenty hours. I still hadn't told Scully because she'd 
have wanted to pack shoes, and that might have 
alerted someone. She could always buy more, 
Imelda did.

Laura argued with Maxwell and the judge, but she 
knew she was beat and the tape went into the 
machine like prison doors closing out the light of 
day.

The tape lacked the scratchy look of most security 
tapes that have been recorded over every week; 
Roush must have been willing to invest in 
replacements. Or maybe the tape was actually a 
fake. However, wouldn't they have made it look 
more realistic then? I pondered the question as 
Maxwell fast-forwarded through about an hour of 
shots of tanks, corridors, lab rooms, bathrooms, and 
the like.

He started playing the tape at regular speed before 
anything out of the ordinary occurred, to give himself 
time to talk. "When Dr. Scully and her accomplice 
entered the secure area of the facility, the security 
guard switched the camera in that area to go full-
time." Sure enough, the black-and-white door on the 
screen opened and let through two women and the 
camera focused in on them instead of switching 
away after five seconds.

At least, I think they were women. 

They might have been aliens, though, except for 
being too tall. Hell, even Scully was Wilt 
Chamberlain compared to the little gray men. But 
the figures were as blurry as Leonard Betts' aura. If 
I'd seen the tape in any other context, I would have 
speculated that it showed a Sasquatch or other 
humanoid; though I'd mainly be doing it to annoy 
Scully, it was true that it would have been hasty to 
identify the figures as human beings.

Maxwell blanched and stopped the tape, ejected it, 
and reinserted it. When he began playing it again, 
the clarity was still the same.

Now, when I needed it most, my famously 
uncommunicative visage threatened to dissolve into 
an unashamed gape. This was most definitely *not* 
the tape that Jason had shown me in Texas, the 
tape that clearly showed Scully setting fire to a 
bunch of kids stuck in their green baths like bananas 
in Jell-O. Yes, the two figures -- one Scully-size, the 
other Marita-size -- were poking around, and then 
the little one got an ax and began to break the tanks 
that were visible as the camera swerved to follow 
them. But what came from the tanks when they were 
broken was unidentifiable. It might as well have 
been bundles of dirty laundry waiting for the dryer.

Laura had risen to her feet as Maxwell played 
hopelessly with the color and tint functions of the TV, 
as if that would help.

"That person could be *anyone*!" Laura gestured 
around the room, taking in the spectators and the 
judge with the sweep of her hand. "This tape entirely 
fails to identify anyone of any import to this action. 
Nor does it show these supposed 'infants' in the 
tanks; they look more like aquatic plants of some 
sort."

On screen, the little one was pouring gas.

"Your honor," Maxwell said with a thin edge of 
desperation, "this tape has obviously been tampered 
with."

"Obviously?" Laura's voice was rich with contempt. 
"During our last session counsel was most 
forthcoming about the careful chain of custody in 
which this tape has been kept."

Maxwell tried again. "We have copies that clearly 
show --"

Unnoticed the laboratory exploded into fire, and then 
into static.

"This was admitted into evidence as the original. If 
other copies look different, can we have any 
confidence that they have not been tampered with?"

"Counsel," the judge's voice boomed and they 
looked up at him, seemingly having forgotten that he 
was going to decide and that the issue was not 
going to be settled by personal combat between 
them. "It's obvious that this tape does not show 
exactly what was claimed. If you," he pointed at 
Maxwell, "adduce evidence of tampering with the 
original, I'll look at it. In the absence of such 
evidence, I must agree that the tape, verified or not, 
contains nothing that bears upon this case."

"May we have a brief recess?" Maxwell asked in a 
defeated voice.

"Fifteen minutes," the judge waved his hand, it was 
purely charity. And we all decanted into the hall 
where reporters rushed towards us, shouting 
questions.

Maxwell's hand reached out and snagged Laura's 
arm. "I'm going to have you disbarred for this," he 
warned.

"I don't know what you're talking about," Laura 
replied calmly, pulling free and continuing to walk 
towards the exit. Her face was transparently 
innocent, and I was once again glad we hadn't let 
her in on everything. She didn't have the necessary 
guile.

"You and your clients tampered with that tape, and 
I'm going to find out how!"

Laura stopped walking and turned to face Maxwell 
directly. "Don't blame me because *your* client 
jumped to conclusions based on a blurry tape and 
some innuendo against his sister. Gosh, Andy, you 
should never believe the client -- next time, try some 
independent investigation."

Maxwell's face went studiously blank for a second as 
he shifted gears and his charming smile came back 
into play. "You know this isn't over."

"I'm looking forward to continuing it."

****

The sign on the door read "Janitor" but the 
disinfectant-stinking utility room was unoccupied 
save for the alien shapes of the mops hanging in the 
corner, I finally released Mulder's arm when the door 
closed behind us.

"What the hell was that all about?  What did you do 
to the tape?" I hissed.

He shrugged, wide-eyed, and ran a hand through his 
hair.

"I didn't do anything to the tape."

"Frohike?"

"He never said -- Holy fuck," he said with something 
like awe although he was clearly not having a 
religious epiphany. 

I waited.

"Ingveld. Her mysterious project --"

Suddenly it all made sense -- her skulking (inasmuch 
as a giant blonde goddess can skulk), the strange 
errands she had run, her questions, her intimate 
knowledge of the courthouse security, and her odd 
assurances that all would work out well.  I had 
thought she was merely being na‹ve and guile-less.  
Here La Femme was living up to her television twin's 
sneaky skills. I didn't care so much as Mulder's 
mouth descended on me with the subtlety of a 
backhoe.

I managed to pry my mouth away with only as much 
difficulty as resetting a dislocated joint. "This isn't 
why I dragged you in here," I explained as my body 
melted like ice cream in the sun.

"It's why I came," he smirked and tugged up my 
skirt. 

"You haven't yet."

There was a stack of sweeping compound canisters 
piled against the far wall, big 25 gallon containers 
which you can't use for buckets at home as toddlers 
tend to fall in and drown like chipmunks in a 
swimming pool, but they were the right height for our 
purposes.  With my ass on the top line of canisters, 
the height difference was rectified and he clawed my 
hose and panties down past my knees.  

I had forgotten the thrill of the forbidden. Dimly, I 
hoped that we wouldn't feel the need for even riskier 
sex to compensate for the newfound legality of 
intercourse itself. But mostly I just moaned as he 
squeezed my breasts through my shirt, holding me 
up with his hands and his cock. My legs wrapped 
around his thighs and my hose acted like bondage 
gear, making it difficult for me to move 
independently as the nylon hissed against his 
summer-weight trousers. My pumps slipped to my 
toes and then clunked to the ground by his feet. I 
trembled against his thrusts and clutched his 
scratchy wool shoulders.

I wasn't going to come like this, and I was running 
ahead of his orgasm count by an order of 
magnitude, so I attacked the fragile cartilage of 
Mulder's ear, running my tongue along the curve of 
flesh and down to the scarred-over earring holes. 
When I bit the lobe he groaned and gave in, 
pumping into me his relief.

He staggered away from me and sat down on the 
floor, his pants still around his thighs. He panted as I 
patted my hair, hoping against hope that it was still 
in place. He watched proprietarily as I stripped off 
the overstretched hose -- it was summer in 
Washington, surely no one would make too much of 
it -- and stole a roll of toilet paper from the state of 
Virginia to use to contain any untoward leakage. I 
handed him the roll and then put my shoes back on.

"I'll go first," I commanded and cracked the door. No 
one was visible so I stepped out as confidently as 
Dr. Who from the TARDIS. I headed back to where 
we'd left Laura et al. She was looking around 
frantically. "Where's Fox? We've got about thirty 
seconds -- And did you have anything to do with the 
way that tape looked?"

"He's coming, and no I didn't."  I said.

Well to be completely correct, he came and I didn't 
but what was quibbling at this point?

I examined Ingveld, who was studiously readjusting 
the lace on Miranda's collar, which was a brave thing 
to do considering that the spit and half-chewed food 
there were probably an excellent medium for new 
and unusual microbes.

Mulder returned and distracted Laura -- part of me 
hoped that she could smell me on him -- so I leaned 
over and took Miranda from Ingveld. "That was you, 
wasn't it?" I whispered.

She blinked. "I have lived many places," she told me 
as we headed back to the courtroom, "done many 
things. You think I am so young but inside --" Her 
voice dropped to a nearly inaudible thread among 
the bustling of newshounds. "It is not the worst I 
have seen or the worst I have done. You saved our 
lives," and now didn't seem like the time to point out 
that she and Warwick wouldn't have needed saving 
absent us, "and you should have Miri."

Miranda smiled at her, in total agreement.

"BAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHMMMMMMMMMM!" 
my infant terrorist enthused.

"That was not needed." Ingveld said with a small 
frown.

****

Maxwell paced even though there was no jury for 
him to impress, head down as if he were actually 
gathering his thoughts. Did anything ever happen in 
public, in the halls of government, that was 
unscripted? Certainly nothing I'd seen.

After a minute he raised his head, shaking back an 
impatient lock of hair, and began.
 
"It is probably correct to think of Fox Mulder and 
Dana Scully as heroes," he said mildly and I looked 
at him in surprise. Scully frowned at him and then 
smoothed her face like spilt milk when Laura tapped 
her on the hand. "Certainly their investigations have 
saved lives and brought criminals to justice. All this 
despite suffering torments that the Devil might 
personally have dreamed up.

"They are heroes; they are larger than life.

"The problem is that children, babies, need real 
people, not giants. Giants can sometimes fail to see 
the little things in their way. They crush smaller 
people. These heroes' flag of victory is planted on a 
mountain of dead bodies.

"We've heard extensive testimony from both sides 
about Fox Mulder's incredible sensitivity to others' 
suffering, his passion for truth at any cost to himself. 
Both of them are willing to do anything in their power 
so that evil might not prosper, wherever it may hide.

"Where is Miranda in that calculation? What 
happens to her the next time a tantalizing lead 
comes along? We know what Dana Scully will do -- 
what she has done before. And Fox Mulder admits 
that, since he took custody of Miranda, he has 
deliberately avoided learning any more about the 
conspiracy he fears lurks behind every doorway. 
How long will that willful blindness last? Until 
Miranda is old enough for day care? Until a new 
informer shows up on his doorstep?

"We have also heard testimony from both sides 
about the various traumas to which these two people 
have been subjected. The important point to 
remember is not whether they 'deserved' any of it, or 
how sorry we should feel for them. It's a sad thing 
that fighting darkness can cripple a person inside, so 
that he or she can no longer function entirely in the 
light. But the sadness should not deter us from 
putting Miranda Scully's best interests first, and 
those interests lie with adults who can devote 
themselves to her without having to fight their own 
deeply wounded souls.

"Dana Scully has a computer chip of unknown 
origins in the back of her neck. She and Mr. Mulder 
think that it cured her cancer. What experiments will 
they subject their daughter to in the name of open-
mindedness?"

That one made me flinch a little. But if he had known 
about the smallpox vaccination, he would have 
asked us about it on the stand.

My nose twitched like a rabbit's and I suddenly 
needed an excuse to leave, right then, before 
anyone else noticed that I was bleeding. 

Beside me, Miranda wailed as if she'd been 
switched on.

I had no time to wonder about the fortuity of the 
event; I grabbed her and pressed her to my face, 
closing off my leaking nostril. I hoped that being 
used as a human Kleenex would not unduly 
traumatize her in the years to come. She screeched 
like Courtney Love as we hustled out the courtroom 
doors. As soon as they shut, she stopped sobbing 
and I ran into the ladies' room.

With one hand pinching my nose, I used the other to 
clean Miranda off. The door opened and I flinched 
back against the wall.

It was only Ingveld, sticking her head in to confirm 
our presence. "You are alone?" I nodded. "I vatch at 
door until you are fine."

That might take a few years, my friend, I thought as 
the door swung shut on her shapely behind. Thirty 
seconds later, I heard her voice raised outside. "I am 
sorry, but in here is sewage. You must use the 
bathroom in the next hall."

I loved her, then.

It's too bad that Maxwell was wrong about the chip, 
since I was no longer confident that it could do 
anything but set off airport metal detectors. My blood 
thickened quickly enough that I made it back to the 
courtroom in time for Maxwell's big finish. He 
frowned at me for my inattention and continued.

"In closing, I must remind the court of our new 
surroundings, necessitated by recent events that no 
one denies were targeted on Fox Mulder and Dana 
Scully. Their love, however sincerely felt, is no shield 
against bombs. Whether it's cancer or explosives, 
Death is stalking these two. They chose to live in 
danger, but Miranda Scully has not, and we should 
ensure that she remains safe even if the two of them 
do not."

****

Here we were again facing judgment. This time not 
merely to determine the survival of the X Files in a 
dark paneled  room on a high floor of the Hoover 
Building, but to be judged as human beings under 
the all-consuming gaze of the American public.

I didn't concede the right of any court to judge me for 
what I'd done. Maybe it was different when George 
Washington, that wily old Mason, was running the 
government, but truth and justice were decidedly not 
the American way at present. When I wanted to be 
judged, I was my own best critic; I knew when I'd 
failed myself and failed to find the truth. No one -- 
not even Scully -- could evaluate me better than 
that.

I was still coming up short in the Finding Truth 
department. I knew now that my leaving the X Files 
didn't keep Miranda safe. Moreover, Scully had no 
plans to abandon the quest, and therefore I was 
bound to continue as well, even if it was while I was 
pushing a stroller.

The quest was going to have to proceed differently, 
though. The public Roush hearings had made less 
of a splash than speculation on what the presidential 
genitalia looked like. I no longer desired to expose 
the truth behind the secret government to the public; 
that undifferentiated mass was more interested in 
Scully's haircut and lurid details of my porn habit 
than anything substantive I might say to them about 
trust and self-rule. The truth that I sought, like the 
judgment, would have to be private. Yes, I wanted to 
foil evil plots, but I now understood that fighting 
Them required more than just accurate information 
and some interested reporters; it required 
counterattack. I would begin the real battle as soon 
as this latest skirmish ended.

Even though I didn't concede the court jurisdiction 
over my soul, the prospect of being publicly weighed 
and measured for fitness was occasion for some 
self-evaluation. 

There are many things I wish I'd done differently. I 
wish that my last memory of my innocent baby sister 
wasn't of me harassing her. I wish I'd treated 
Phoebe like she was camp instead of high drama. I 
wish I'd figured out that Duane Barry was going to 
go for the chip and that Krycek was a traitor. I wish I 
hadn't listened to John Lee Roche for more than a 
minute. But most of all, I think, I wish I hadn't kissed 
Scully that night she drove me home from getting my 
brain reamed by Dr. Goldstein.

Understand that I would not change loving her, or 
being sexually attracted to her, nor could I. But it 
was not a constructive way of dealing with her 
impending death. Even then, we could have worked 
through it and found an equilibrium, I like to think, 
were it not for Emily's subsequent appearance and 
equally rapid disappearance. So instead we used 
sex as another of our finely honed weapons against 
one another.

If we had waited -- maybe Miranda could have 
brought us together in some way less terrifying to 
Scully. If we had only waited, then when Jason 
Lindsay came into her room that night and 
impersonated me she would have shot him. Or she 
would at least have investigated, and unlike Brad 
and Janet from Rocky Horror, Scully wouldn't have 
ignored a mistaken identity for a good orgasm. 

My mistakes weren't that important when they only 
hurt me. But I seemed incapable of confining them 
to that level. It was only the confidence that Miranda 
was infinitely safer with me than anywhere else that 
gave me the balls to fight -- I'd promised myself that 
things would be different with her, and I've always 
been able to believe in my own passions.

The judge cleared his throat and looked at the 
papers in front of him as though he was looking at 
something about as important as a grocery list. Next 
to me, Scully was breathing like Catzilla did when he 
chased rabbits in his sleep. My mother, returned just 
in time to catch the last act of this farce, was 
resplendent in Nancy Reagan red on my other side.

"I'm an old man, and because I'm an old man who 
grew up in a far different world than we have today, I 
don't understand anythin' about babies bein' made in 
laboratories, host mothers, dectuplets, and e-mail.  I 
can barely figure out how to set the clock on my 
VCR.  I get my son to do that," he looked up over his 
half-moon glasses at the motley assemblage in the 
courtroom.

In my lap, the Mooselet stood up and started waiving 
at Ingveld and Warwick in the back of the room. 

"So when I look at this case, I try to put all that 
behind me and look at things that I understand.  I'll 
tell you what I see.  I see a young woman who has 
gone through hell a couple of times over, and she's 
been hurt by all this.  Hurt to the point where she 
knew that she couldn't take proper care of a baby so 
she abandoned it - in a very good home.  Let's not 
confuse the issue and make it look like she left the 
baby in a basket on their doorstep," he looked over 
at Maxwell who had gone the color of tofu. 

"Then the young man takes the baby to Virginia and 
proceeds to set up a home and support system for 
the child down to rearranging his work priorities to 
the child's convenience.  The young woman returns 
and they begin trying to negotiate a family after they 
get married.  On the other hand, I see some strange 
things in both their pasts, which might indicate that 
they are something other than perfect parents.  I'm 
sure that most of the married couples in this room 
wouldn't pass that kind of scrutiny with flying colors."

Bill now matched Maxwell in skin tone.  

I wasn't sure how I felt about the judge 
characterizing Scully and I as 'young'.  I felt an eon 
old sitting in that chair.  Scully's fingernails were 
piercing the bones in my hands.

"I see assertions that this child is endangered by her 
connection to her parents. And if you believe all this 
fancy conspiracy talk maybe she is. But anyone, 
enemy or friend, could take one look at this couple 
and see that vestin' legal custody elsewhere would 
not make them a whit less vulnerable to threats 
against their daughter. If the girl's in danger, there's 
no one better suited to protectin' her than her 
parents. And, despite the inflated claims of counsel, 
I see nothing in this case relating to a blurry 
videotape with unidentifiable people doing mischief 
to unknown objects.  Other than a waste of the 
court's time.  I see nothing that indicates to me that 
Bill and Tara Scully would be any better parents 
than Dana Scully and Fox Mulder.  Therefore, 
custody of Miranda Julia Scully resides with Fox 
Mulder and his lawful wife. Bill Scully will pay the 
associated court costs relating what I feel is little 
more than a nuisance suit rather than genuine 
concern for the child.  Court is dismissed."

I was going to need to get my heart jump-started.

****

The reporters fell back -- I couldn't tell why they'd 
ever let us get away, and then it became obvious as 
my mother emerged from the forest of taller people 
and their video cameras. Of course they'd let her 
through, it would make a better story.

I turned away, but she hurried over to me and pulled 
at my arm. "Dana," she said.

I refused to look at her. At that moment I believed all 
the terrible things they'd said about my cold-
heartedness. I *wanted* to feel something, and on 
an intellectual level I could identify all the symptoms 
of pain, but that's not the same as really feeling it. It 
was like watching a person with whom you couldn't 
empathize suffer. Only that person was me.

"Look at me!" she commanded, her voice harder 
now. From force of habit, I swiveled my head. 
Mulder stopped walking, prepared to swoop in 
between us. Tina perforce halted as well, hanging 
on to his gentlemanly arm. I felt the cameras move 
in closer, to catch every nuance of this moment on 
tape for the world to see. 

The lines around her mouth were deeper now than 
they'd been weeks before, like mine. Her eyes bled 
sorrow; she truly believed that she'd been trying to 
do the right thing for all her children. She truly 
believed that injustice had been done in that 
courtroom. "I'm still your mother," she said softly -- 
though not so softly that it wouldn't play on CourTV.

"I don't have a mother." I turned back to Mulder and 
his mother and took Tina's free arm. Tina glanced at 
me, her face blank but nonetheless I got a distinct 
feeling that she was hiding a small smug smile. 

What the hell, we were more alike than me and my 
biological mother. But if she thought I was going to 
call her "Mom," the brain damage from her years of 
tranquilizer use hadn't been fully repaired.

The encounter with my mother dampened the 
euphoria, but only for a short while. When we were 
all ensconced in the Outback I felt as lightheaded as 
if I'd spent the day on a rollercoaster, looping the 
loop.

There were still things I needed to settle. I would 
return to the oncologist and find out if our 
carelessness in bed was going to kill me yet. (And it 
was possible that pregnancy hadn't mattered, that 
someone had broadcast a deadly message to the 
metal in my neck. I could imagine both of us 
deciding to believe that rather than conceding that 
one unlucky fuck destroyed us when a planetary 
conspiracy couldn't. If I had to die I was going to 
uncover the truth about that chip first.) I would 
integrate my stuff with Mulder's and make the best 
approximation of a household I could. I would take 
Miranda to Emily's grave so that she could visit her 
sister. 

I would thank Skinner for his support.

I would disrupt the conspiracy and make them beg 
for mercy. Which would not be forthcoming. I would 
kick ET ass if necessary.

I would have a yard sale.

The emotion I felt was more alien than Mulder's little 
gray men. Maybe I didn't get it right, because I was 
awfully out of practice. But I think it was hope.  

****

Iolokus IV: Res Judicata
16/

Close your eyes and let's pretend
We're little children once again
Sticky fingers, dirty minds
When I touch you, girl I come alive
Let's fall in love
It's exciting
I'm gonna make your mouth
A sunny sundae smile
	My Bloody Valentine

I have spent entirely too many hours of my adult life 
in health care facilities.  The waiting room at Scully's 
oncologist's office had good magazines but I was in 
no condition to read any of them.  Scully had the 
Mooselet in her lap and they were going through 
The Cat In the Hat with the thoroughness that Scully 
usually reserved for reading other people's autopsy 
reports.  I was just as happy to see the Mooselet 
pointing at the cat and the hat and the fish in the 
dish while Scully asked her the names of the items.  
In a way, I was glad that Sam had engineered 
Miranda to be intelligent, as the Mooselet was 
certainly giving Scully a run for her money.  I was 
also glad that Scully had decided to stay with us 
since this meant that I could actually get a break 
from MooseDuty from time to time.

Julie Graff was expecting me back to work the 
following Monday so I had to get all the loose ends 
tied up.  First there were the doctor visits - I booked 
Scully oncologist and gynecologist appointments 
practically back to back.  I think she called someone 
to get an estimate on having a contract on me after 
that.  Through bitching and judicious badge-waving, 
I got past the office manager and the doctor returned 
my call himself.  When I explained that Scully was 
pregnant and we couldn't wait, we got an 
appointment for the next morning and the promise 
that any test results would be expedited.  He also 
seemed to think that there wasn't much to worry 
about.  But then he hadn't expected her to go into 
remission either.

While I listened with a mouth open in dumb shock, 
she told him about the nosebleeds, and I kicked 
myself for not noticing.  The doctor nodded and 
listened to her shopping list of symptoms couched in 
medical terms that I didn't understand.  He took 
blood and made friends with the Mooselet during 
Scully's MRI as though it were only a routine visit.  
Scully watched him seal off and label the vial of 
blood.

"I know it's not terribly professional of me to say this, 
but I was less than happy with the testimony that I 
had to give for your brother's case.  I would have 
lived a happier life without having to aid his cause 
against you."

The Mooselet squirmed around in my arms so she 
could watch the nice bald man talk to her mom.

"There's no adequate medical reason for you to go 
into remission in the first place, by the same token, 
there's no adequate reason for you not to remain in 
remission for five years until you are pronounced 
cured."

"There's more at stake now.  I have to worry about 
people other than myself.  I have responsibilities."  
Scully said and her eyes looked suspiciously 
sparkling under the lights.

As for me, there felt like there was a brick lodged in 
my throat.

"Dana I've seen people die who had only a mild form 
of cancer, and I've seen people live who shouldn't.  
All I know is that there are some things that defy 
medicine.  Call it faith, call it will to survive or call it a 
miracle."  

Docile, she nodded her head. 

"I'll have the lab rush the results."
 
In the Ranger, Scully's eyes were red but she didn't 
say anything as we drove the half-dozen miles to the 
next appointment.

****

With the verdict from the oncologist pending the 
blood work-up the last thing that I wanted was to go 
to the gynecologist, but Mulder dragged me with the 
same kind of amused stubbornness that he used 
when Miranda refused to eat her vegetables.  I think 
he was disappointed that I left him in the waiting 
room during the exam, but regardless of his 
predilection for oral sex, I didn't feel comfortable with 
him getting an up close and personal view of my 
cervix.  Call me old fashioned, but a girl likes to 
retain some kind of mystery in sexual matters, and I 
was willing for him to forgo seeing his favorite bodily 
orifice cranked open with a speculum like a car with 
the air filter open.

After the demise of Dr. Shimada, I was looking for a 
sturdier gynecologist and ended up with a former 
Navy doctor with the unlikely name of Blaire 
Wellington.  She was cool and efficient and had the 
upper arm muscles of a woman who worked out with 
weights - she was serious.  I didn't feel that I was 
endangering her all that much. George was dead, 
after all, and Dr. Wellington looked as though she 
would be able to bounce any unquiet ghosts out on 
his ear.

"Well Dana," she said as she peered below the 
sheet covering my stomach and the cold air from the 
air conditioning unit made my thighs break out in 
gooseflesh, "From the home test and the change in 
color and texture of your cervix, you are definitely 
pregnant."

"I'm not sure how it happened."  I muttered.

"You need me to go over the birds and the bees for 
you?" she said with a wry little smirk.

"No, in regard to the fact that I was considered 
sterile a year ago."

She shrugged, "The test may have been incorrect.  
It's possible that your chemotherapy caused you to 
go into a premature and temporary form of 
menopause.  Now that time has passed and your 
body has been able to re-regulate the hormones, 
you may very well have begun ovulating again.  I 
notice that you didn't actually have a laproscopic 
examination of the ovaries so the physician may 
have been drawing conclusions from incomplete 
data."

"Can you tell me when I got pregnant?"

"Not exactly.  We establish a due date by the date of 
your last period and subtract three months from that 
date which is the due date the following calendar 
cycle."

When had been my last period?

Before George came which had been in the 
beginning of spring and now it was nearly summer 
and ---.

Wait a minute.

Condoms don't have a 100% success rate, which is 
what any high school health teacher will tell you.  
With the various manipulations that the Mulder gene 
pool had gone through at the hands of the scientists 
who created them, it might have been possible that 
his sperm might, in fact, have somehow penetrated 
the latex?  Wasn't that also part of the plan of the 
cold war mad scientists?  Be fruitful and multiply, 
breed the New World order and spread hybridized 
genes hither and yon?  Was it possible that every 
time that we'd interrupted the natural course of sex 
for condoms it was habit rather than help?

Imagine the paternity suits.
 
Oh God.  That meant that I could have gotten 
pregnant at any time since we had gotten back 
together.  Which also meant that the George fantasy 
might not have been the seminal (ha!) event.  The 
worm of hope buried a little harder into my heart, 
and I wasn't sure if I wanted to kill it.

"What about the nosebleeds?" I asked. 

"When I had my first, my nose was like a spigot.  I'd 
be performing an exam and gush all over the floor.  
And it was like 'excuse me, I'm bleeding on you." 
And I'd run for the tissues.  The morning sickness 
should pass after the first trimester, but with the 
weight that you've put on and the fact that you 
haven't lost your appetite--" God no, I could now out-
eat Mulder at any meal -- "It's an inconvenience 
more than a danger.  I'm going to give you some 
literature and you'll need to set up a schedule of 
appointments with Allie up front, but other than that, 
there's not much to do but let your body do its job."

Like grow cancer cells, like consume an entire 
freezer worth of Chubby Hubby, like throw up for the 
next three months, and like die before Miranda or 
this baby was old enough to vote.

Let my body do the job.  Great.  My body was one of 
the things that I didn't trust anymore.

"You don't even want to do an amniocentesis?" I 
asked.

"No.  I don't think it's necessary."

I wanted a warranty on the fetus that promised that it 
would be replaced if it was defective in the least.  A 
five-year warranty, an extended service agreement, 
and product insurance.  Dr. Wellington wasn't even 
going to try to make me feel better.  Still she did, 
ostensibly, know her job and had given birth herself 
so I should believe that she was making the right 
decision.

I was still fairly dissatisfied by the whole 
appointment.

Feeling bruised, I let Mulder drive home, even 
though he did seem to take the slowest route 
possible and let every car possible out in front of 
him.  Maybe he thought we needed the good karma.  
While he took Miranda to her room for her afternoon 
nap, I roamed around for awhile, before going to 
ground in the bedroom.  I shucked off my clothes 
and put on the rattiest pair of sweats and ugliest 
oversized t-shirt in my collection of 'go to hell' 
clothes, and collapsed on the bed.  The final verdict 
from the judge and the gynecologist had been given 
and now I was waiting to see if the oncologist was 
going to come back with death or life imprisonment.  
Well, I guess that wasn't entirely accurate.  I was 
getting used to the idea of being legally joined to 
Mulder.  Not much had really changed since we'd 
gotten married other than the fact that we were 
habitually getting out of the same bed in the morning 
and could show affection for one another in public.  
He was still stubborn, narrow-focused, and 
annoying, but I didn't think that marriage was 
supposed to change an essential personality 
anyway.  Actually, from what I had heard from 
listening to my married friends over the years, he 
made a pretty decent husband.  He was domestic, 
supportive, didn't appear to have an interest in other 
women, and was more than willing to change dirty 
diapers.  And the best thing was that he wasn't 
expecting me to turn into Donna Reed.

I rolled over onto my stomach and sighed.

"You're sulking," he observed as he pulled off his 
ironed henley-neck shirt and traded it for a worn 
gray t-shirt spotted with baby stains.

"I am not sulking," I sulked.

He crept across the bed with his eyes flickering 
green in the warm sunlight melting in between the 
blinds until her was straddling my hips and  began 
working at the aching muscles in my shoulders and 
upper back.  "The doctor didn't seem too concerned 
about your cancer coming back and the gynecologist 
gave you enough stuff to read that you won't have 
time to worry for the next nine months.  And once 
the baby gets here you'll be too busy to worry."

"What if I die?" 

"We're all going to die eventually.  I don't know when 
I'm going to die, why should you know?  Don't you 
think that's an unfair advantage?" he purred into my 
ear.
   
Damn him, the sulk was slowing to a crawl like 
Washington traffic to be replaced with a drowsy 
contentment and a lazy kind of pleasure.  I stretched 
under him and decided I would explore the 
contentment for awhile.

"I'll bet you twenty dollars that your blood test won't 
show any abnormal cells. And I should know.  I'm 
composed entirely of abnormal cells."
 
"Especially your brain," I muttered into the 
bedspread.

"It's good to see that pregnancy hasn't spoiled your 
sense of humor," he said in a sour tone and flopped 
onto the mattress next to me, "Let's celebrate."

"What?"

"Well, we've been married for almost a month and 
we haven't killed each other.  We've been co-
habitating for two months at least and we haven't 
killed each other.  We get to keep the Mooselet, and 
we haven't killed each other.  Also, you're pregnant 
and we haven't killed each other."

"Modified rapture."

"You are planning on staying, aren't you?"

"You promised you'd take care of the baby to be 
named later.  I'm only slightly unfit and I wouldn't 
want to abandon another helpless infant."

"The infamous nurturing Scully." He ran his hand 
over my back and I sighed, my obstreperousness 
was partially feigned, the rest of it was post-trauma 
crankiness.  Mulder knew that and knew me well 
enough to indulge me while I was being grumpy.  
His caress gained a little intensity and I could feel 
my nerve endings perk up a bit.

"Is that the only thing you ever think about?" I asked.

"Sometimes I think about food," he admitted and I 
could tell from his voice that he was grinning.

I rolled over and looked across the bedspread at his 
crooked, goofy smile and wondered exactly how we 
had gone from frustrated, secret, and angry sex to 
this domestic idyll.  The answer was painfully simple.  
Once we had finally gotten past the posing, the 
posturing, and the delusion that we should not be 
together in the traditional male/female way and 
realized that we were - in some perverse design of 
fate, really -- the only proper mate for one another, 
we had finally succumbed to the inevitable.  Not that 
this made me happy, but it certainly made me less 
miserable than I was when I was alone.  
And he could make me drip like melted chocolate 
down the side of a sugar cone.  I buried my face in 
the skin of his neck and smelled his Muldersmell, 
and I could feel the wrinkles smooth out of my mind.  
He needed my control, I needed his passion, and we 
fed off of one another's strength.  Maxwell had  been 
right, we were dangerous together but it was a 
controlled danger.  Apart we were as dangerous and 
unpredictable as a tropical storm gaining strength 
and building into a hurricane.
 
When I pushed him over onto his back, he whuffed 
deep in his throat and his eyes glowed green gold 
under lashes fit for a girl.  I licked his neck, teasing 
his tendons with my tongue and his fingers dug into 
my ass.  He breathed wet and crackled into my ear, 
making me shudder and my nipples turn into bullets.  
I growled gopher-speak at him and he growled back 
in the same, grabbing at my swaying breasts 
through my t-shirt and sucking on my mouth until my 
lips almost hurt.  I straddled him and ground my 
pelvis against him, feeling the hard rod of his cock 
prod up at my rapidly soaking crotch as I dry-
humped him like a teenager in the back of a car.

"You really have to stop it with this sexy wardrobe," 
he growled into my ear.

I pushed his head to my breasts, luxuriating in the 
softness of his gopher fur, and felt his teeth nip at 
me through my shirt.  The heel of his hand ground 
against my pubic bone through the layers of 
sweatpants and panties and I could feel the spring 
start to wind tight inside my stomach.  He could 
make me wet with one glance over a dead body, 
practically make me come when his fingers brushed 
the back of my hand, and make my knees turn to 
pasta with a filthy thought telegraphed across a 
polished conference table.  

I grabbed the hem of my shirt and hauled the whole 
thing over my head, and he grabbed my breasts, his 
hands hot and dry the moment they sprang free of 
the fabric.

"Come on gopher-girl.  Do your worst," he teased 
and gave my left nipple a meaningful, painful pinch.

"Oh yeah?"

"I triple-dog dare you."

He shouldn't have said that, really.

I bounced off him and pulled his sweats down to his 
knees with a brusque jerk.  He yelped at the rough 
treatment but started to laugh when I dug my fingers 
into the ticklish part of his stomach between his 
hipbone and the thin line of hair running to his cock.  
I danced my fingers over the delicate skin of his 
stomach and he whooped with outrage, his cock 
doing the Macarena as he moved.  

"That's-not-fair!" he choked.

"Of course not."

I traced the vein on the underside of his cock with 
my fingernail and enjoyed watching him shudder.  
Mulder has a body like a tightly stretched drum and I 
can coax different sounds out of him depending on 
where I touch.  I tongued him a few times, enjoying 
the feral taste contrasting with the baby skin of the 
one eyed trouser snake.  He moaned and his hips 
jerked a few times, encouraging me to take all of him 
in my mouth, which I did in short order.  I worked him 
hard, making him wince from time to time with my 
lips and sucking until my cheeks went concave, 
while I pumped at his base with a tight ring of my 
fingers.  With shaking fingers he pushed my hair 
away from my face and our glances met with 
incendiary effect.  I could feel that I was soaking my 
way through the fabric of my sweats.  I pressed my 
mound against the bed and felt a pre-orgasm 
shudder run through me like razors on my bones.  
He groaned and bucked underneath me.  Twice, 
when it seemed that he was on the verge of coming, 
I clamped my fingers tight around his base and he 
slackened for a moment.

"Oh Jesus, Scully," he whispered, "you're killing me."

In the end I took pity on him, since his cock was 
beginning to look a little sore, and I shimmied out of 
my drenched pants and climbed on top of him.  He 
cried out when I eased him in as far as he could go.  
It felt so good to have him filling me to the utmost 
degree, pressing on my spine, impaling me as far 
and as deep as possible.  I leaned forward so when I 
moved, the shaft of his cock scraped deliciously on 
the burning center of my clitoris.  I pressed down on 
him, slid up, pressed down, and so on until the 
sweat was dripping out of my hair and onto his face.  
Mulder's hands on my breasts were the only thing 
keeping me upright.  This kind of fucking was harder 
than digging ditches.  Finally, the spring wound 
tighter and tighter inside me snapped with a ping 
that made me screech with agonizing pleasure and I 
clenched down and around him as I started to 
shudder and sway with my climax.  Dimly, I heard 
his own gopher cry of delight as he surged up and 
into me with his latex-defying semen.

Like the Energizer Bunny given Duracells by 
mistake, I fell onto him, sticking to him with a variety 
of bodily secretions and we lay there in a cooling 
puddle in a state of blissful brain-death.

"Love you," he muttered in my hair.

"What you said." I grunted.

I drifted off then and must have stayed that way for 
the rest of the night.  I was vaguely aware of Mulder 
moving around later after the baby monitor started to 
snivel, but I rolled over and went back to sleep while 
he dealt with it.  That was a good thing.  When the 
other baby came, I was likely to push on its nose 
thinking it was a snooze button.  When the warm 
lump I idenified as Mulder came back I curled up 
against it and went back to sleep.

Light.  Banging.  Grumbling.  Me blinking and 
making out movement somewhere.

"Well I knocked-" was Warwick's voice, sounding 
aggravated.

Well, it was re-run season after all.

"What?"

I foused on Mulder whose hair was doing truly 
amazing things while he glowered at the younger 
man.

"The doctor - the oncologist is on the phone."

"Oh God."  I said and pulled the comforter over my 
head.  

I couldn't handle it, didn't want to know that I was 
going to die, not with the morning bubble of nausea 
starting to fill my throat.

"Talk to him," I groaned to Mulder.

"Right."

Warwick shut the door behind him, and Mulder 
picked up the line on hold.

"Mulder.  Yeah.  She's asleep.  You can talk to me.  
No, really."

Like a Charlie Brown cartoon all I could hear was 
disjointed honking noises coming from the other side 
of the conversation.

"Okay.  Fine.  I'll tell her."

I heard him put down the phone.

I held my breath.

A hard finger prodded me in the ass.

"No abnormal cells.  Go back to sleep."

I wasn't sure which sentence gave me more 
pleasure.

****
  

After the right and proper order of things has been 
restored, it is traditional in the plays of Shakespeare for there to 
be some kind of celebration to mark the re-unification of 
the community. All the characters gather together for food, drink, 
and song while the audience plots the quickest way 
out of the theater and the way to avoid the rush at the parking lot. 

We had our post-drama celebration catered.  The 
weather had tapered off to a manageable level of heat and humidity 
and the tent the caterers had erected on Scully's 
emerald-green sod looked prettily festive in the dying daylight.  The 
gold twinkle lights in the bushes flashed like horny 
fireflies and were reflected off the incredibly ugly swan ice sculpture 
sitting on the main table.  Scully had gone apoplectic 
when she'd seen the frozen monstrosity and was threatening not 
to pay the catering company since she'd specifically 
asked *not* to have a swan ice sculpture.  She also hadn't liked it 
when I pointed out that the nice Korean family 
catering the 'do' had probably just misunderstood her.  This led to a 
prolonged bout of sulking in the bathroom but I was 
finally able to lure her out with the promise of ice cream cake.  
Marriage and pregnancy were making Scully weird, 
but not unmanageably so. At least not so far.  Eight months into 
the fight for the future and weirdness might be too 
mild of a term.

In any event, I'd extended an olive branch and 
invited Bill, Tara, the rotund Matthew, and Mrs. Scully which provoked 
another bout of bathroom incarceration. But once I'd 
removed the doorknob, Scully had seen reason.  I'd also 
promised that the ice swan was going home with Bill which 
perked Scully up immeasurably.  The Gunmen were there in their 
motley finery; Byers surprised one and all by bringing a woman with him,
a small woman with a wealth of curly hair who I recognized as being the savior 
from the deli department of the supermarket.  

A rental car brought Charlie and his wife and their 
tribe, but Emerson, Alieen and Samuel were too busy in Montana to 
come.  With the three babies (the Mooselet, Matthew, and whatever 
Charlie's youngest was named)  in pretty much the same 
age bracket, we plunked them all down in the playpen while Warwick kept
an eye out to make sure no one killed the others.

Zippy brought a woman I had never seen before 
(and I suspect, was *not*the home health care therapist) and 
immediately delivered her into Frohike's clutches so 
that he could hit on Laura.  I soon saw our lawyer giving him her 
number.  Skinner came alone, Julie Graff brought a 
smoothly pretty African American woman of the same vintage as 
herself, and although nothing was said other than 
the woman's name (Anna Franklin) and the fact that she worked at 
the Smithsonian as a curator.  I had the distinct 
feeling that the two were a couple.  No wonder she never said anything 
about my unusual  domestic arrangements.  After 
darkness fell and everyone was feeling somewhat the better for 
alcohol, Maxwell showed up.  To my great surprise 
and Scully's sudden look of total comprehension, he immediately 
stalked up to Zippy and Laura and puffed his chest 
out; if he were a Daschund, he'd have been yipping and peeing in 
circles around her.  My man Zip is not exactly easily 
intimidated, particularly not by bantamweight blondes who pay 
more attention to their suits than their biceps, but 
then Zippy wasn't really the target of his odd behavior.  It was Laura.

I knew the mating dances, having fluffed my feathers 
on more than one occasion. Then I met Scully, and she clipped 
my wings but good.  Maxwell was doing the dance of 
the jealous male with his attention focused on Laura who returned 
his with the smile of a Renaissance femme fatale. 
She looked really pretty with her hair down too.  Interesting.

"What," I said to Scully as she fluttered by with a 
champagne flute of what had damn well better have been ginger ale, 
"the hell is going on with the lawyers?"

"It's what Jackson Browne calls lawyers in love."

"God." I said and shook my head.

"No worse than Gophers, Gopher-Boy." She said 
and laid one of her zillion watt smiles on me.

Hanging around her neck was the gift I'd presented 
her with that morning in bed - a gold gopher charm with blue topaz 
eyes.  Yeah, I'm a romantic slob who's willing to get 
jewelry custom made.  

Bill watched all this and glowered at his former 
attorney from the other side of the ice sculpture.  Matthew unwisely 
made a grab at the Mooselet's onion ring at that 
moment and got bitten for his trouble.  Tara tried to separate the 
youngsters who both began to scream blue murder.  
I grabbed the Mooselet and Tara and I stared at one another over 
our screaming progeny.

"All this could have been yours," I pointed out.

She smiled over Matthew's wails.

"You realize of course, it was mostly Bill's idea."

I believed her.

"Dana's lucky," Tara remarked, "I don't think that Bill 
has ever touched a dirty diaper."

"Hey everybody.  Just a minute here!"  Frohike 
announced and climbed up on top of a chair.

Zippy's dish du jour looked embarrassed.

"I just want to say that Justice has finally been 
served, and both Mulder and Scully have gotten the punishment they 
deserve - each other."

Which was another reason no one asks Frohike to 
be their best man.  There were some scattered applause and the 
Mooselet, riding on my hip joined in.  

"Any words Spooky?" Zip yelled "anything you want 
to share with your near and dear ones?"

"You're an asshole," I shot back and Scully stepped 
on my foot.

After hopping around for a moment or two, I picked 
up my own champagne glass and watched the fairy lights strung on 
the trees dance through the bubbles.  

"I can't imagine a worse punishment than this.  I 
always thought that I would have a wonderful house, a beautiful wife, 
and a brilliant child.  Of course this is what I get stuck with."

Laugher all around.

I didn't tell them that the only reason we were here 
and not in hiding was that we'd given in. Scully would supervise 
anything done with Miranda's blood to ensure that it really was antiviral 
research and not more cloning and breeding; it would give her 
something to do with her maternity leave. We were in and we wouldn't get out 
alive; no one does. But maybe we could tell the truth and shame the 
devil, once we knew the truth. Then again, it wasn't our way to live a life 
without extreme complications.

"And just in case anyone was wondering, yes it was 
a shotgun wedding and Scully is not just getting fat."

Bill looked like I'd spit in his champagne and Scully (I 
shit you not) blushed like a Victorian virgin.

"Warwick has the sign-up sheet for babysitting, and 
if you can't give your time, we do take checks."

This time I got laughter and applause.  The Mooselet, who may or may not
have understood most of it, clapped and giggled in my arm.  Scully shook her 
head as if both the baby and I had gone mad, but only smiled - and there was no 
edge to it.  The barbed wire she'd wound around my heart pulled tighter,
but it was a good hurt.

"Laugh while you can Gopher Boy.  I know where 
you sleep."

In front of the world, I kissed her and tasted the sting 
of ginger ale onher lips.  If an asteroid had hit Arlington at that 
moment and reduced it to a smoking crater, I would have died the happiest
man in the world.

Then I smelled it - the fragrant aroma of dirty diaper.  
I sighed and headed off to the house to deal with reality. Mom 
had cornered Scully near the desserts and they were hissing at one 
another, two cats in the same territory.

"I should have known better than to think you were 
sensible," Mom said, looking my wife over as if she were Jerry Springer 
trailer trash.

"I worked with Fo--, with Mulder for five years," 
Scully pointed out, and only then I realized that she no longer had to fake 
the unthinking use of my first name. Which would return a weapon to our 
arsenal, and so I smiled graciously at Mom. She stared at Scully as if 
large boils had begun to swell on her face. Who knows, maybe that 
was a normal symptom of being pregnant with a Mulder. 

"If it's a boy there will have to be a bris."

"Is that like a Jewish christening?"  Scully asked, 
widening her eyes innocently.

Mom made a strangled noise and stalked away, 
shaking her head. 

"That wasn't very nice," I said  over Scully's 
shoulder, I couldn't help smiling. "I think you're going to have to eat an 
extra serving of dessert to make up for that."
 
"I'm fully prepared to be the daughter-in-law from 
hell." Scully reassured me.

The next time I saw Mom, she was hitting on 
Skinner, which fit her MO perfectly.

In the dirty diaper, Miranda started to whine and I 
hastened into the house.

In passing, I heard the tag end of the joke that a very 
drunk Ingveld was telling Maxwell.

" . . .  and the frog zaid it started as a pimple on my 
ass and it haf turned into a lawyer."



*****
  
Rivka says: Res ipsa loquitor.
Sally says: Omni mutantur, nos et mutsamur in illis.

*Well almost. . . *
 
At nineteen weeks it is customary for the expectant 
mother to undergo a sonogram.  The theory is to 
check fetal size and development, but more often 
than not it fulfills no other function than to sex the 
fetus and allow yuppie parents to start picking 
names.

"You have got to be fucking kidding!" was all that I 
could manage.

"No," the ultrasound technician said, continuing to 
rub the wand over the freezing cold goo on my now-
protruding stomach, "women of your age have a 
marked tendency to ovulate more than one ova at a 
time and the occurrence of fraternal twins is not 
uncommon after age thirty-five."

I swallowed and looked at her earnest young face, 
trying to block out the horrified hyperventilating that 
was coming from my right.  I swear that if Mulder 
squeezed my hand any tighter bones were going to 
break. 

"Well," my OB-GYN added from where she was 
lurking in the doorway, "you can't really blame your 
husband either since he's an identical twin and that 
indicated one ova rather than two.  I hope you're 
prepared for a high-risk pregnancy.  With your age 
and health history, I'm going to watch you like a 
hawk so we can get these babies to term in the best 
health possible."

"Thanks," I muttered.

"Looks like we have one of each." The technician 
sounded delighted, good, she could take over the 
rest of the pregnancy.

He gloved finger indicated the image on the screen 
- two bulbous headed forms, looking like bad fake 
alien photographs from Mulder's collection.  One of 
the little creatures was proudly sporting a penis and 
the other was not. I caught my breath and looked up.  
Dear God, *two*?  I hope you're having a good 
laugh over this.  The acoustic tiles on the ceiling 
began square dancing and I had the feeling that I 
was in a rapidly descending elevator, descending 
rapidly because the steel cables had been severed.

"Scully?"

"I'm fine, Mulder."

"Good."

And the sound was that of paper and fabric rustling 
followed by a thump as he hit the floor.

End