| The Totally Useless Consortium
Follies - Part One By Amanda Finch [email protected] CATEGORY: H
(sorta spoofy, if you *must* know) Thanks go to LA, who alternately guffawed and ripped this work to editorial shreds <wink> and Kristen, who not only masochistically sat through the rough draft of this, but allowed herself to be portrayed in the form of a character. I love you guys! ---------------------------------- Consortium Headquarters Sure, it was a little early for a drink, but that's what the Red-Headed Man needed, and dammit, that's what he was going to get. Kristen, the girl who worked the Consortium's bar, might as well set up 8 shot glasses now and watch him knock 'em down. The Red-Headed Man walked across the lusciously thick carpet and grabbed a stool. "Your usual?" Kristen asked blandly. "You bet your sweet cheeks," The Red-Headed Man declared jovially, admiring the short blonde from behind. "Goody," intoned Kristen drolly as she hauled out the bourbon. The Red-Headed Man elbowed his seating companion. "What's up?" The Cigarette-Smoking Man took a long, thoughtful puff off of his Morley. The Red-Headed Man's theory was that ole CSM had a difficult time with words, especially since he went around half the time trying to make himself sound Canadian. "Today's the day," the CSM told him, stubbing the cigarette out. "We're going to have all of the data together. You handed yours in, right?" The Red-Headed Man scoffed. "I handed it in over a month ago! You approved it yourself!" Lighting another cigarette, the CSM nodded wearily. "Yes, that's right. It was the one where -- yes, I remember it clearly. You did good work there." "It was my best so far," said the Red-Headed Man defensively. He glared at his empty hand. "I want the bigger shot glasses, Kristen, and I want them now!" Kristen reappeared from behind the liquor counter, shot glasses in tow. "I was going to give you the bottle and a straw," she said smirkingly. "But suit yourself." Harumphing, the Red-Headed Man turned back to the CSM, "So you have everybody's now?" Casting a meaningful look at the large manila envelope beside him, the CSM murmured, "They're all here. Each and every one." "You even got Krycek's?" The Red-Headed Man asked incredulously. CSM shrugged through the smoke. "He was the first one to turn his in...he was very...eager." "What was his assignment?" The Red-Headed Man leaned forward. Dismissively throwing his hand in the air, slinging hot ashed all over the bar, the CSM exhaled and replied, "You know I can't tell you that. Just like I can't tell *him* what your assignment was." Noticing his bourbon - all 8 shots of it - the Red Headed Man drained one. "It's not fair that you should know what each of us was assigned." "I initiated the project!" CSM exclaimed crisply. "I just wish we could be a little more open about it," whined the Red-Headed Man, draining a second shot and wincing. "You just want to make sure that no one followed their assignment more thoroughly than you did." Stubbing out yet another cigarette, the CSM almost momentarily lit up again. "And if you did your best it doesn't matter." "Tell me something," said the Red-Headed Man conspiringly. "Did...Did the Well-Manicured Man participate?" CSM paused. "Yes. Yes he did." "So...so how well could he possibly do?" The CSM glanced warily at the Barcolounger that held their esteemed supervisor as he sat riveted by a Baywatch marathon. Lowering his voice to a whisper, he ducked his head next to the auburn one of his colleague. "It was some of the most boring dreck I've had the displeasure of having my tastes assaulted with in quite some time." "I heard that!" called the Well-Manicured Man, who turned his evil head and peered at them from the side of the Barcolounger. "And I'll have you know that my...boring dreck as you call it is what literature was like until the morality in this land declined!" "Who turned up your hearing aid, you old fart?" asked the CSM, boldly. The Well-Manicure Man's face puckered up, astonished. "I'm not going to dignify that remark with a response!" "Knew you wouldn't," said the CSM gamely, as the WMM's withering glare disappeared behind the Barcolounger. In his heart, even CSM knew that if Yasmine Bleeth hadn't chosen that moment to jog wetly across the sand, his ass would've been grass. "Christ!" laughed the Red-Headed Man, draining his third shot. "If I had spoken to *my* dad like that when I was a kid, he would've had me abducted!" The CSM lifted one shoulder apathetically. "It isn't so bad." He cleared his throat and put down his liquor. "Ok, here's the plan. We're all going to meet here in exactly 10 hours to discuss the Project and how we're going to continue it in the future. We'll get all the participants together. But we won't do it here. Some of these people have no right to being inside these walls. We're going to meet at our Georgetown office -- " "That's the one in the hospital!" the Red-Headed Man almost wailed. "I hate hospitals...they're depressing." "Take the entrance through the office suites in the back," advised the CSM. "You won't have to see any of it." "Good," he said, shuddering, draining a fifth shot of bourbon. "You know how I hate that kind of thing." "You always were sensitive, yes," agreed the CSM. He caught sight of his watch out the corner of his eye. "Don't you have a Sniper Engagement at noon?" "Oh, shit!" The Red-Headed Man looked at his watch, too. "And it's an hour across town...I'd better head out. You can finish up my bourbon if you'd like." "I'll take care of it," the CSM replied, waving him off. "You sober enough to aim?" The two laughed uproariously as the Red-Headed Man departed. It was an ongoing joke within the Consortium. They all knew that *their* beer, while providing the same relaxing mood-enhancers, had been specially formulated to not inebriate or cloud one's judgement, and the need to urinate every 15 minutes had also been eliminated. The CSM gathered the large manila envelope under his elbow, anchoring it there, as he went to tidy up the bourbon that the Red-Headed Man had left behind. "I wouldn't, if I were you," Kristen warned from the other end of the bar, wiping the counter with a towel. "Why not?" asked the CSM, taken aback. Kristen smiled winsomely. "I spit in it." The CSM chuckled, pushing the bourbon away. "Thank you for warning me, Kristen...someday, I'll make you the Special Representative to the Secretary General..." "Promises, promises," Kristen said demurely. It's where we got the *last* Special Representative, the CSM thought to himself with a smile. Marita could mix the best damn tequila sunrise this side of the Mason-Dixon. He had committments elsewhere, but the CSM had to take one last look at the completed project now that it was all together. Now that they were almost done. He sighed. This is what he had always fought to complete. For months, he had rallied his troops together, listening to them, watching them gleefully delve into their chosen assignments. It brought back memories of the old days with the Consortium, when there were no consciences riding their father's coattails through the Shadow Government doors. Even the Red-Headed Man, one of the better operatives, had an attack of morals every now and then. Breaking from his reverie, the CSM opened the envelope and, taking a careful look around, removed its sheaf of contents. Hey, said a warning bell in his head. (Hey, this isn't the project. This isn't the assignment.) This was...a falsified returned-abductee claim...addressed to... Agent Fox Mulder. (No. NO!) He'd seem them all on a Consortium recruit's desk that morning. The falsified returned-abductee claim was laying neatly on the blotter next to the recruit's finished data for the project. The interoffice envelope bound for the basement was sitting right *there*. (This CAN'T be happening.) That meant that his hard copies of the project data, just completed this morning, were delivered in the interoffice mail to the X-Files office. The clock behind the bar taunted him that Interoffice Mail had been delivered promptly an hour before. * 11:20 AM FBI Headquarters Washington, D.C. Fox Mulder was tapping his foot compulsively, concocting less-than-subtle throat noises and making a big show of checking his watch. Dana Scully knew this could mean one thing, and one thing only. It was lunchtime. She smiled into her paperwork. "You're going to have to wait, Mulder. I'm halfway through this last report, and we're not leaving until we're *both* done." Not even trying to deny that she had read his mind, Mulder leaned back in his chair, lip curled ever so slightly. "You ain't the boss of me, Scully." "Do your reports. You've been fidgeting and reading that Sorcery book for the last 15 minutes when you could've been thinking and typing," she straightened her case notes and clipped them up to the computer. "We can't turn our reports in separately, and I'm not going to go through lunch dreading coming back from lunch because there's still a case file on my desk approaching its deadline. So forget it." She raised her eyebrows sternly in his direction. "And if you fall backwards in that chair and knock yourself out like last time, I'm going to have a personal vendetta against you for the rest of the week." Mulder's chair came down with a hard thud. "Last time? When did I pass out?" "See? You don't remember. Type." "Yes, ma'am," he said dryly, staring at his half-blank computer screen. How specific could one be about a killer who extracted eyes to fulfill a chemical- deficiency without sounding redundant and a bit wry? Mulder did what he'd been wanting to do all day, opened up the computer document entitled E_V_Tooms and changed the names of the people involved, the places named, the M.O., and the organ extracted. Piece of friggin' cake. His report about the earlier case was just vague and homogenized enough to be about this case, too. "Finished," he announced. Scully glanced up. "You're full of it!" "Really, I'm -- " Mulder noticed a sentence in his case conclusion that mentioned livers and changed it to eyeballs. "Now. I'm finished." "I'll believe it when I read it." "I don't have to show it to you," Mulder scoffed. "It just has to show up on Skinner's desk. That's it. End of case." She smiled a small, secret, proud smile. "If you're going to re-use a pre- existing case file again, you may want to change the date at the top of the report this time." Mulder mutteringly altered the date to show the current month and year, studying her at the table she was working at as she made several futile attempts to not laugh until, soon, she was chortling in a maniacal fashion, halfway shielded by her computer from Mulder's paperwad arsenal. "You're evil," Mulder accused absently, smiling, putting down the book. "I suspect witchcraft." Scully grabbed the sheets off the printer and thrust them in his direction. "Initial." He passed his on similarly. "You too. Got the file ready?" "Ready and waiting," she said, holding it out yawning in front of him. FWM, FWM, he scribbled and stapled them together, depositing them in the file. "You sure you don't want to go through those photos again -- ?" "We decided what we decided, Mulder. How many perspective shots can you have of socketless eyeballs and eyeless corpses anyhow?" She put his copy with her initials into the file and snapped it closed in her hand. "Besides, I refuse to look at them before I eat. This file is going up to Skinner right now." "That leaves us a couple of hours to eat and get ready for the drive out to Oklahoma," Mulder replied, checking his watch again as she rattled the keys in the office door behind him. Scully groaned. "I had successfully erased that from my memory." "It's not my fault that the townspeople of Roanoke, Oklahoma didn't know a couple of days in advance that three teenagers were going to spontaneously combust, Scully," Mulder said gravely. "And all of the flights out are booked up." "Who wants to go to Oklahoma?" Scully asked, disbelieving. Mulder shrugged. "Shirley Jones?" Grimacing, Scully walked ahead of him. "God, that fall from the chair did more damage than I thought..." Smiling widely, Mulder sang in a flat sing-songy voice, "Oklahoma, where the wind sweeps over the plains..." "Stop, you're scaring me." Scully pretended to shudder. He stopped singing. "It's the hunger, Scully. It made me delirious, but hey, as long as your precious reports make it in on time, what's a little delirium from your partner?" "I'd *kill* for just a *little* delirium from you, Mulder." "What's *that* suppose to mean?" Scully's quick walk was already well-ahead of his shuffle as her laugh faded off into the hall. Pausing to let him catch up, she asked, "Did you grab the mail on your way out?" "I gave it to you. It's in your portfolio." Their voices muted as Mulder matched her pace and hit the up arrow on the elevator. Eric Dickerson would have to tell the CSM that he'd been too late. * 12:32 PM Consortium Headquarters The emergency regrouping of the Project's members was slowly coming together and the union straggled in, each seeming surprised to see the others, with more than a little anger running under the surface. This was not a tea party, not a congregation of friends, but an array of people united under the Project's cause. Kristen leaned forward to smile up into the face of the broodingly handsome man in the leather jacket who had cut his way through the rest of the small crowd forming to sit at the bar. "Can I get you something?" Alex Krycek might've thought he was smiling, but his more-than-slightly serpentesque grin made Kristen recoil. "Whaddaya got?" "Anything you can name," she said, turning away. "Vodka," he told her, lapsing back into his brooding. As she set the drink in front of him, he surveyed the room critically and asked her, "Do you know what's going on here?" "No," she said, eyebrows raised. "They're not telling you guys either? Sounds pretty serious. You seem calm, but for the past hour, the rest of this place has been up in arms." He gave her a hard look. "That's not funny." "What?" Krycek sucked down half of his Vodka. "Picking on a guy for something like that. You think it's amusing?" "Look, I don't even know what you're talking about." She tapped his empty glass. "Wanna another one?" "I want a margarita," he said groggily. "With extra tequila." Kristen held up two sizes of glasses. "Which one?" "The big one," he said wearily. "Ooh," Kristen remarked as she put it down in front of her work station. "That's the *two-handed* margarita." "Alright," Krycek said angrily. "That does it!" With his good arm, Krycek pushed the empty Vodka glass over the edge of the bar so that it shattered at Kristen's feet. "Enjoy picking it up, bitch." He left Kristen shaking her head behind him as he stalked off to take a seat at the table with the converging Project players. Almost immediately, he was seized at the neck by the Well-Manicured Man. "You hideous, oily traitor!" rasped the WMM and he throttled Krycek. "Arrhehlodshdg!" Krycek exclaimed, choking, motioning to the CSM. "Get your crazy, senile old father offa me!" "Dad, *let go*," the CSM whined. The Well-Manicured Man released his grip, and shook a bony finger at his son. "*You* told him I was senile." Taking a seat, the CSM said, "I'm sure he figured it out for himself, Dad. Sit down. Everyone...sit down." The group formed. The CSM took a quiet roll call counter-clockwise. Krycek, The Crewcut Man, his 2 recruits - Eric Dickerson and Robert Darin, his dad, the Red-Headed Man (angry about having to leave his Sniper Engagement in someone else's hands), The Elder, Marita Covarrubias, Section Chief Blevins and Sean Pendrell. Now was the time to show courage. To all 10 of them. "A grave error was made this morning by someone in this room," the CSM began. Eric Dickerson hung his head to avoid the CSM's evil beady eye. "On Dickerson's desk this morning was the compiled data of the Project. It was ready to be evaluated today at our Georgetown office." The CSM folded his hands in front of him. "Next to the compiled data was...the falsified returned-abductee report that we were going to send to Agent Mulder this week. But instead, I am holding this bogus returned-abductee report, and Agent Mulder has, in his possession, a hard copy of all the data that this project has collected over the past 8 months." All 10 of them gasped collectively. "That Agent Mulder," the Well-Manicured Man kvetched crankily. "He thinks that just 'cause he put his daughter in the sky, he can call all the shots for us, huh?" Rubbing his face with one annoyed hand, the CSM said, spitting, "Dad, if you can't make your brain stay in the current year, then please leave the table. You are referring to Bill Mulder, who has been dead for a little while now." "I did that," Krycek proudly shared with the group. "We are talking about Bill Mulder's son, Fox Mulder. Am I making sense to you?" The CSM waited for the realization to occur to his father. "OH," said the Well-Manicured Man, as if he might sheepishly slap his forehead. "Oh, I see. Yes, Fox Mulder. That kid...that kid's not right. When he grows up, he's going to be trouble." The CSM put his face down in his hands. "What in the hell was I thinking?" As 9 of the group took Dickerson out back to beat him within inches of his life, the CSM knew what he had to do. He had to arrange for Mulder and Scully's rental car to be bugged with audio equipment. Sure, the inevitable was going to happen. But he had to know what was going on at all times. Ganging up on Mulder and physically trying to take the data from him would cause all sorts of problems, considering Mulder's disposition. And, perversely enough, the CSM needed to know what Mulder thought of it. They'd all want to know. ------------------------------------------- One / Two / Three / Four / Five / Six / Seven / ------------------------------------------- |