Yadda yadda in Part One

----------------------------------

Right off I-19 West Virginia

Scully couldn't put it down. It was amazing how much the writer knew about organ extraction, and had all of the jargon down.

"I don't think it's healthy," said Mulder. "That a story fantasizing about my death would hold your interest."

"Don't take it personally, Mulder," she said through a mouth full of Twinkie. "It could be about the vivisection of my brother and I'd still enjoy it."

"Bill?" Mulder asked.

"Mmm-hm," she nodded.

"I'd probably like it then, too."

She glowered at him. "That's my family you're talking about."

Mulder curled his upper lip. "Your brother's a prick."

Scully's anger boiled down into ambivalence. "Well, yes, he is. I guess you'd know one from a mile away."

Mulder looked genuinely hurt. "I think the rampant hate from that story is rubbing off on you, Scully."

She pulled the page away, looking from it to Mulder several times. "I think you're right," she said, no trace of sarcasm. She put the story down, and fixed him with a stare not unlike a harbinger of doom.

"Wait," he said, fearfully. "What are you -- ?"

Scully drew back and let her fist fly into his side. Besides his small "ooomph" noise, Mulder barely moved. She thought her knuckles were on fire.

He tucked his chin down sympathetically. "You hurt your hand...didn't you?"

Staring hard at his mouth, Scully replied, "You'd look funny with no lips."

"If you're done imagining me in small chunks on an autopsy bay, I'd like to start this other story now -- " He picked up the pages.

She snatched them away. "Not until you hear the last paragraphs of this story."

Her voice had taken on a husky tone that he only liked when it wasn't directed at him. Otherwise, it made him uncomfortable. Like now. "You know, in this story, I'm already dead. After that, you're pretty much just reading about necrophilia..."

"The story's not about you now," Scully said. "It's about me. Listen."

She half-masked her face with the page. "After the killing, I knew where I'd go. To the one who had always loved me, who was always prepared to love and understand me. I'd never noticed him before, because my love for my asshole partner had blinded me --"

"Frohike!" Mulder exclaimed. "*He* wrote this!"

"Frohike *likes* you," Scully replied, and continued, "But now I could see clearly. I knew he spent his nights diligently working in the labs, making sure that all of the analysis requests were filled extra-fast. The man knew his test tubes. The man knew a beautiful woman when he saw her, and he was waiting for me. I knew that now. He'd been waiting for so long. I would be lucky if his patience had held out.

"He was down in the labs just as I thought. For the first time, I saw the brilliant mind behind the eyes and taut hardbody under the labcoat --"

"That's no one in *our* forensics lab," Mulder retorted.

Scully ignored him. "The minute our eyes met, he knew why I'd come down to see him --"

"To have those fibers analyzed," Mulder offered flatly.

She cut her eyes at him and kept reading. "He guided me into the breakroom, where the carpet was nice and soft --"

"Oh," laughed Mulder snidely. "That's romance. Getting boffed right there between the break table and vending machines. While I'm on my knees, between *your* knees with your skirt pushed up under your armpits, pounding you slowly to the tune of some primitive rhythm playing in my head, I can reach right up, put a coupla quarters in and buy you a Snickers bar or a Pep -- " Mulder stopped abruptly. "Scully," he said, scolding in a low voice. He put the back of his hand softly against the side of her face, where she thought it might make steam rise from her skin. "My, are you warm..."

"I'm...I'm not..." Scully insisted, tearing her eyes away from him.

In her hands, she had torn the story to shreds.

*

Consortium Headquarters

MULDER: Scully....

The room fell quiet.

MULDER: My...you are warm...

And then, the violent ripping of the pages.

It was as if the audio surveillance monitor had gone completely dead. The Red- Headed Man whapped it on the side. Nothing happened.

A man's tears were, in the CSM's opinion, a keening howl of pain and injustice. It gave those around him an unwelcome glimpse into his very soul.

Agent Pendrell's crying, however, was actually kind of funny.

CSM hadn't heard such phlegmy whooping and sobbing since his father had, one- by-one, destroyed his mother's collection of Perry Como albums. The sonovabitch, he'd waved a happy goodbye as the beam of bright light had come to take her away.

Getting back to the situation at hand, CSM clapped Pendrell on the back. "Be a man, son. Be agressive for chrissakes! The next time you find yourself in a room with Agent Scully, walk up to her, brush against her suggestively, pat her on the ass, call her babe and tell her you're free for the weekend."

Pendrell lifted his face from his hands, sniffing, eyes puffy and red. "How many successful relationships have you had, sir?"

Proudly hooking his thumbs into his belt loops, CSM strutted halfway across the room. "Depends on what you mean by 'successful'."

"Okay," muttered Pendrell, blowing his nose loudly. "Let me rephrase the question: How many of them will still speak to you?"

CSM's smile vanished. "When did this become about me? You're the loser here!"

Pendrell's wailing renewed itself, and Krycek, sensing that the attention had shifted from him and his alleged extracurricular activities, tried to sneak out.

"Alex!" barked the CSM. "Sit your pansy ass down!"

"I was just going to get a drink," Krycek whined, begrudgingly taking his seat.

"What do poofs like to drink?" asked the Red-Headed Man, to tremendous laughter.

CSM, smiling widely, added, "Sorry, Alex. The bar doesn't serve semen."

"You bastard!" screamed Krycek, rising from his chair and swinging his prosthetic arm into the side of the CSM's head.

CSM remained standing long enough to gurgle "why?" and crumpled unceremoniously to the floor.

"Now you've done it," intoned the Well-Manicured Man ominously. "The last time someone hit him in the head, he was so delirious, he ordered the Berlin Wall to come down."

Krycek stood, swinging the fake arm jauntily, halfway dancing around the CSM's prostrate form. "This bad boy packs quite a wallop!"

The Red-Headed Man smirked. "That's what Mulder told me about *you*."

Before Krycek could even think to knock the diddlies out of him with the prosthesis, the audio surveillance monitor began to talk again.

Even Pendrell stopped bawling to listen.

*

Right off I-19 West Virginia

The silence was getting to Mulder, and if the quiet didn't do him in, the lack of movement would. All he wanted to do now was stomp the gas to the floor and roar down the interstate like a bat out of hell with the radio loud enough to blow out their speakers and the speakers of the cars around them.

He hadn't seen Scully's face for more than 25 minutes, because after he'd traced the line of her jaw, she'd turned away to the window to watch the sunlight fade. All he could see was the nape of her neck and where she had taken her red hair and hastily cinched it with a metal clasp.

It was getting to him.

"Scully?" he asked, voice low. "Are you asleep?"

She turned halfway. "No."

"Do you care if I start driving?" He didn't know why he was still whispering when she wasn't asleep.

She shrugged indifferently.

"What about the radio? Do you care if I turn it on?"

"No," she said, again with the shrug.

"You know, if you don't ever want to even mention that any of this ever happened, I can take these pages -- " He hefted them up in one armful. "And just throw them out the car window, and roar off before some state trooper charged us with a hundred counts of littering. Actually, more than a hundred counts...whoever wrote this epic about my purported homosexuality obviously never learned that brevity is the soul of...of shit."

Scully smiled now, and the smile he returned was one of relief.

"I think we need to talk about it, Mulder," she said softly. "I think we need to read through them and get an idea of who would be doing this and just, get past it."

"And discuss our feelings about it as well," said Mulder, who was at once sorry that he had said it.

"Yeah," she said distantly. "That, too."

"So?" Mulder asked, palming the car keys that were wet with his perspiration. "What now? You want to stay here and read or do you want to drive for a few hours and read them at a motel?"

"If we stay parked here for much longer, we're going to get arrested for loitering." She separated one story out of the pile with her fingernail, let the seat go back as far as their luggage would allow and put the story face down on her stomach. "I'll read, you drive."

He gestured at the grass they were halfway parked in, the shoulder of the road, and the late afternoon traffic. "Isn't that what got us on the side of the interstate in the first place, Scully?"

"If it doesn't look like it will work, then I'll stop reading. Then, we'll just go to the hotel." She got comfortable in the reclined seat.

(Don't you think it.)

Okay, Mulder said to himself. I won't. Struck from the record.

(You're still thinking about it.)

Mulder jarred himself out of it, and started the car. "Scully..."

She hadn't turned over the pages yet. "What?"

"Do you actually...do you *want* to read them?" The question released more pressure from his lungs than he thought it would.

"Yes," she answered bluntly. "In a way - a sickly fascinating way - they are imminently...readable."

He smiled, more to himself than to her, and eased the car onto the interstate. "Okay, let's review, Scully. So far, there was a story that implied that, while we were perfectly capable and professional people at work, we liked to go home after work and get bizarre and passionate, copulate like monkeys, hang from the chandaliers --"

"Not a chandalier," Scully interrupted, and fished out the story in question. "One of those racks...the kind that hangs from the ceiling. The kind you hang your pots and pans from in the kitchen."

Mulder raised one eyebrow. "Do you...have one of those?"

She shook her head. "No, but my mother did once. She was cleaning it, so she had all of the saucepans off of it. My brother - Charles - who was five or six at the time, got the bright idea to hang from it by his ankles. But it came out of the plaster in the ceiling fairly easily, and pinned him to the floor. He landed on a pair of salad tongs and we had to have them removed from his -- " She stopped, pressing two fingers to her mouth, smiling. "He told me not to tell anyone about that."

Mulder squirmed in his seat. "Ouch."

"So I don't see as to where that would ever actually work," Scully said, flipping pages. "If one wouldn't hold the weight of a six-year-old, I'm sure it wouldn't hold --"

(Us.)

(Go ahead. Say it.)

"Two grown adults," she finished.

Mulder agreed. "So there was that story, the story where I was -- sodomized by a guy named Alex, probably Krycek with a fondness for leather, and the story where you killed me with an Exacto knife and boffed one of the dorks in the lab soon thereafter."

"Hmmmm." Scully was looking at the sheet, preoccupied.

"So what's this one about?" Mulder asked, looking over anxiously.

"I don't know," Scully muttered. "But I already don't like it."

She picked up the page and began reading. "Dana Scully knew she was going to get lucky."

Mulder dropped his jaw playfully. "And you don't *like* that?"

Reprovingly shaking out the page, she continued. "She knew she was going to get lucky because of that gleam in his eye. And because he had accosted her at the filing cabinets that morning by pinning her to them with his crotch."

"That was an accident!" Mulder deadpanned.

"Dana had wanted to be mad, but she had to admit to herself as she powdered her pretty flustered face in the bathroom mirror that she had enjoyed the lewdness and violation of it. She had turned to slap him at first, of course. But making up for the slapping was going to be the best part of all..." Scully drifted off, horrified.

"I think I see where this is going," Mulder said darkly.

Scully slapped the page indignantly. "Mulder! This is making me sound like a total...a total bimbo!" She dropped the page as if it were on fire. "Is this how I come across?"

Mulder pulled away from her defensively. "I didn't write it, Scully!" It dawned on him then. "Wait...it's okay for you to be portrayed in one story as a person who gives a 'living autopsy' to her partner with an Exacto knife, but another one implies that you might powder your face and enjoy being poked...and that's not okay?"

"Mulder..." She put the paper down again. "Neither *one* of them is okay..."

But he had already slipped into a tight-fitting bad mood. "Just read it then."

"Okay." She cleared her throat. "Dana thought it was high time to be done with in anyway that Mulder saw fit. She --" Violently shaking her head, Scully declared, "I can't read this."

"What is it now?" Mulder said in mock sympathy. "The F-word again?"

Angrily, Scully read on. "She removed her stockings slowly and stepped out of her lacy black underwear. The skirt she had on wasn't short enough, but it would have to do. She flung her bra into the trashcan and unfastened about three buttons on her stern-looking white shirt. She was ready for love." Scully put her hands over her eyes. "God, do I *look* like Ally McBeal?"

Mulder gave her his best imitation of an appraising look. "No."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"Nothing. Not a thing."

Making a sound in her throat like a death threat, Scully read, "Meanwhile, Fox Mulder knew he was going to get lucky with Dana tonight. Even as she'd slapped him, he had seen the lust in her eyes, oozing out of her pores. He was hard for her, and he'd have her tonight one way or the other. Besides, he was wearing his lucky Speedo, and nothing went wrong when he wore the lucky Speedo."

Mulder laughed. "I only have one Speedo, and I wouldn't call it lucky."

Scully bit her tongue. The comment she was thinking would not have been appropriate. "Dana walked back into the office and Mulder nearly fell out of his chair with passion."

Mulder gave a little cough. "I *always* fall out of my chair passionately."

Scully, against every ounce of her better judgement, read some more. "He shakily stood up and said, 'Baby, you are the most beautiful piece of *fuck*--" She paused to look at him pointedly. " -- that I've seen all my life.' He proceeded to slip his eager hands up her dress and cup her luscious -- "

"Stop," Mulder told her.

" -- breasts, her nipples hard little knots that radiated heat to his fingertips -- "

"Stop, Scully." His voice was ragged. "Stop now."

"What?" She asked innocently. "It's not okay for you to be turned on by that? Mr. growing-collection-of-porno-movies?"

"*You* aren't in porn movies, Scully." He watched the road, but his eyes might as well have stayed on her. "Whoever this writer is, they've made me into themselves, and they've made you into some stupid, horny every-woman. It's kind of sick."

"So you'd say we have the gist of this one?" She inquired politely, shuffling it to the bottom of the stack before he could answer.

"I had the jizz of it after the first paragraph." Mulder made a right into a gas station.

Scully was staring at him.

He opened the dar door halfway. "What?"

"Did you hear what you just said?" Scully asked quietly.

"I said..." He opened his hands defensively. "I said I got the gist of it, after the first paragraph."

"You didn't say 'gist'," Scully pointed out.

"Yes I did."

"No, you didn't."

"What did I say?"

"Jizz. You said you had the jizz of it."

"I said 'gist'!"

"You said jizz!"

"Like even know what jizz is!" Mulder taunted, getting out of the car.

"I had two brothers, Mulder!" she yelled at him, rolling down the window so he couldn't assume the last word. "They each had Hustler collections and they would -- "She stopped. Her eyes went from her fingers, bent into a 'C' shape to Mulder who, from the back, was chuckling maniacally, to the four truckers having their afternoon brewsky at one of the gas station's three plastic tables, who were leering at her to finish the story. Scully hurriedly rolled up the window and sunk down in her seat, mumbling that she knew what it was, dammit, and if she even suspected that he was doing *that* in the bathroom, she was going to -- "

"AAAAHHHH!" she screamed at a drink that appeared from thin air.

Mulder jumped back, giving a little laugh. "Is it a double-chocolate Yoo-Hoo or a phallic instrument? Nobody knows!"

She grabbed the bottle. "Get in the damn car, Mulder!"

Unable to repress his self-satisfied grin, Mulder said, "You're driving, I'm reading. Scoot."

Scully got up abruptly, pushing herself out of the car so forcefully that her back knocked Mulder into the air pump, where he got some rude first-hand experience with being poked in the rear end with a projectile.

In the driver's seat, Scully studied the keys. He'd left them in the ignition. She could've just ditched his sorry ass, but nooooo...

"How did you know I liked double-chocolate Yoo-Hoo?" she asked suspiciously, unscrewing the metal top.

"It's all in your file, Scully," he mumbled absently, unscrewing the plastic lid on his own bottle of Perk cola and peering into it. "Look, I've won a 'please try again'. Let's go to a bar."

He'd slipped it in there so sneakily that she nearly missed it. "A what?"

"A bar. You know, alcohol, stools, tables...Me and you." Mulder aimed the soft drink cap at the ashtray and missed. "I'll buy us some good imported beer. We'll sit at a corner table and talk trash. Get shit-faced and exaggerate our personal pain."

"As alluring as that sounds, Mulder...no." She started the car.

"But we've never done that before," he insisted.

"There's a lot of things we've never done before, Mulder," she remarked snidely. "Don't let the thrill of going to Oklahoma go to your head. Besides, I've never done one wise thing while under the influence."

Mulder laid back in the reclined seat. "That's the point, Scully."

"What have you got there?" she asked, deftly dodging the subject, indicating the story Mulder had face down in his lap.

Mulder flipped the pages up. "Shall I begin?"

"I'll tell you after you've started," Scully answered sleepily. The massive sugar buzz from the double-chocolate Yoo-Hoo had yet to find her.

"Okay," Mulder said lowly, making his voice as lazy and careless as possible. "Agent Dana Scully went right to the hotel room after she was done with her work at the FBI Friday afternoons. It was the same room she and her partner always booked for the weekend so they could kick-back and mingle..." Mulder regarded the page as if it were the black goo itself, flatly enraged. "How come everybody is so intent on us screwing?"

"How much do they think we make?" Scully stopped for a red light. "We couldn't afford to just sit around in a hotel every weekend."

"Unless," Mulder suggested cannily. "Unless we could find a way to requisition the Bureau for it..."

"Don't even think about it, Mulder."

Mulder pulled the page away from his gaze. "Mingle? Me? I am physically and mentally incapable of mingling."

Scully filed this away in her memory for possible future use. "Read the damn story, Mulder."

"Okay, okay...where was I?" His eyes scanned the page. "It was a great way for the two of them to relax, pull the shades down and explore their hunger for one another." Mulder paused again, halfway smiling. "We're both wrong. It's a loving tale of romantic cannibalism."

"That would at least be a change of pace."

"The weekend was going to be beautiful," Mulder read. "Not that they'd be leaving the hotel room. Dana Scully put down the overnight bag she'd packed and let herself free-fall onto the bed. When the door came open, Dana smiled her hello, but she'd heard the wrong door. The bathroom door is what she had heard, and a diminuitive blond woman with glacial blue eyes stood at the foot of the bed in her silver-blue negligee', taking off her earrings. 'Why hello Dana,' said Marita -- " Mulder glanced up in shock. " -- Covarrubias."

Scully shrieked, but only minimally.

"I think I see where this one's going too," replied Mulder dryly. "And I think I like it."

*

Consortium Headquarters

MULDER: ...and I think I like it.

The room had gone deadly quiet at the mention of her name, and with Mulder's prediction, the silence broke into jeers and high-fives. Even the still-very- unconscious CSM seemed astonished and entertained by the news.

The Red-Headed Man thumped Marita on the back so hard that she had to grab the edge of the conference table to keep from flying out of her chair. "I knew you had it in you!" He guffawed, overjoyed. "Or should I say...I knew you weren't having it in you!"

Marita jumped up, stomping her little foot. "This isn't my story, you imbecile! My story's a very intricately wrought and subtly nuanced masterpiece!"

The Red-Headed Man winked at her. "Sure, honey. Whatever you say."

"I didn't write that! Ask...ask him!" She stabbed her finger at the place where CSM would stand were he standing. "He knows which story belongs to who!"

"Yeah!" said Krycek eagerly, still swinging his "arm" and occasionally breaking into the Hustle. "The story you think is mine really isn't mine at all!"

"Watch where you point that ass, Alexa," commanded the Red-Headed Man, assuming the role of the man who was now parallel to - and drooling on - the carpeting.

Mulder, on the monitor, continued to read, clarifying what they had all expected.

MULDER: I don't know what this word is, but I think the writer was actually trying to spell the sound of someone licking --

"Good lord," complained the Crewcut Man. "Is this a Rainbow Coalition meeting or something? Take your parade to the streets, you homos!"

Marita brought her fist down on the table, swallowed the pain and screamed, "I am not a lesbian! When the bastard wakes up, he'll tell you that."

"The ever popular 'the unconscious man can corroborate my story' trick." The Red-Headed Man and the Crewcut Man exchanged sneers. "It didn't work for Lee Harvey Oswald, missy, and it sure as hell ain't gonna work for you!"

Marita stared at him, puzzled. "What are you talking about?!"

The Elder arose to slowly approach the Red-Headed Man and breathe in his ear. Nodding, the Red-Headed Man declared, "I'm sorry. I don't recall making such a comment."

"Bullshit!" Marita screamed, making the Well-Manicured Man regret turning up his hearing aid. "Who wrote that sorry excuse for a story that Agent Scully read?"

The Red-Headed Man's mouth dropped open. "That, my dear, was an exquisite vignette that explored, in depth, the emotional phases of sex."

Marita rolled her eyes, heading for the bar. "It's just as I thought...a story only its author could love!"

She joined Pendrell, who was imbibing draft beer faster than Kristen could keep his frosty mug full, faster than the world could ferment it.

"What a mad house this has come to be," murmured Marita, hoping to find a co-sympathizer and maybe a possible lay for the evening.

On the monitor, Mulder kept reading, despite Scully's objections.

"Yeah," said Pendrell, returning her soft tones. "It's the perfect time to tie one on...speaking of tying one on," he slurred, emboldened. "The next time you strap one on with Agent Scully, I'd really like to watch!"

Marita abruptly began flailing at him with her open hand and her Gucci handbag, until he too was seeing the ceiling from a horizontal position.

-------------------------------------------

One / Two / Three / Four / Five / Six / Seven /

-------------------------------------------

Feedback

Back to Fanfic Index

Home