Yadda yadda in Part One

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Somewhere on I-65

Scully was furious. "How can you enjoy a story where I'm this objectified? I thought this is why you hated that last story!"

Mulder read the last two sentences of the story and sighed. "In that story, Scully, the character only looked like you and wasn't. In this story, despite the weak opening paragraphs, I could really believe it was you."

She almost had to stop herself from hitting the brakes. "What?! Are you suggesting that I would have a make-out session with another woman just because I found myself in the same hotel room with her. Do you believe that?"

Mulder smiled, fighting back the urge to say that he *wanted* to believe.

He didn't have to say it. Scully shook her head and hit the gas. "You're a pervert, Mulder."

"This is news?" Mulder asked incredulously.

"No," she admitted. "I didn't find you and the Krycek story all that stimulating."

"That would make two of us," Mulder agreed with a shudder. "Like being trapped in a Mapplethorpe photo with the bullwhip up my -- never mind. I just nauseated myself."

For once, she thought.

"Anyway," Mulder added. "You were the one absorbed in a story where you murdered me, down to the weight of my spleen and the sound the Exacto knife made *dicing* my eyeballs."

"You know, it *was* technically accurate. For a man of your weight, height and age, that's about the size of your spleen." She watched him squirm and unconsciously web his fingers protectively over the general area of said spleen. "Besides, Mulder, I wasn't turned on by it. It was morbidly interesting, but it didn't make me *want* you."

"Not alive, anyway," Mulder teased. "You know, in some cultures, it's customary to copulate with your dead loved ones because you absorb their memories and life force."

"Do I *request* these bizarre factoids from you, Mulder?"

Mulder smiled wryly. "I guess I just have a giving nature."

"Read the next story."

"There's an Exxon right up there." Mulder gestured to the sign. "We'll switch up again."

Scully fixed him with a stare that could make a wrestler cry. "Uh-uh. I read three or four of these suckers to start off. You owe me at least one."

"We've taken turns!" Mulder protested.

"I'm not stopping again until we've put some distance between us and D.C.," Scully asserted. "So either you read or we can duke it out at the hotel."

"When you say 'duke it out' -- ?"

"Read, Mulder. Now."

Mulder muttered under his breath, something about "bossy" and "short like Napoleon" and read aloud from the very next story.

"Fox Mulder's manhood that night was a glorious sight to behold." He tried, but couldn't keep his bland expression from twitching into laughter.

"It doesn't say that," Scully said reprimandingly, before she started to laugh herself.

"It was about time for one of these stories to be *factual*," Mulder replied.

Scully's laughter became considerably more raucous.

Mulder, suddenly not laughing, tried to remember if any of their cases had ever involved Scully seeing him naked. A tad hurt, he asked quietly, "Have you ever actually, uhm, seen it?"

Laughter abruptly halted, Scully screamed, "NO!" and, shielding the right side of her face with her hand, very nearly swerved into the opposing lane of traffic.

Mulder grabbed the steering wheel. This is what happened when he let her drive. "Damn, Scully. I wasn't *offering* to show it to you! I just couldn't remember if you might've seen me naked."

"If I've seen you naked, Mulder," she said, taking deep breaths. "Then I don't remember it."

Mulder wondered if the sound of his deflating ego was audible in the car, as if someone had taken a hatpin and thrust it in. "Geez. Thanks, Scully."

"I've never seen you naked, Mulder. Happy?" She regained her composure and control of the car. "I mean, I've seen you through your underwear before. That's all."

Mulder's eyes lit up inquisitively. "Well?"

"Well, what?"

"What did you think?"

Scully very nearly swerved again. "What?"

"Honestly," Mulder urged on, basking in the glow of her red skin. "Your medical opinion, Dr. Scully."

"I didn't see it," she enunciated angrily.

"What was your impression of it through the underwear?"

Turning to him, Scully's horrified expression changed in the face of Mulder's torturously wide - and rarely seen - smile. Grovelling to his sense of decency would get her nowhere fast, mostly because she was fairly sure he didn't possess one.

She picked her words very carefully. "In my medical opinion, based solely on what I'm observed through the garment, you seemed to be...endowed well...with a healthy prostate."

"Ohhh," Mulder replied, still smiling. "So you were indeed *looking* at it?"

He was *enjoying* this. She wondered if gas stations sold Exacto knives.

"I wasn't checking you out, Mulder," she remarked, grasping her last ounce of calm. "At the time, it was fairly noticeable."

Nodding knowingly, he said, "Must've been morning."

She'd had more than enough patience. "Can we stop talking about your -- your appendages?"

"You make it sound so banal," he said mournfully, gazing lap-ward.

"It *is* banal, Mulder." She stopped for a red light. "As a doctor, I can assure you that one penis is primarily the same as the next. I suppose every man thinks his is extraordinary, but they're not."

Mulder paused thoughtfully. "So...you're saying it's more of a talent show than a beauty pageant..."

"Mulder..." Her tone was quietly threatening. "This subject ends now. I don't want to hear anymore about it, what its name is or -- "

"*I've* never named it." Mulder pondered telling her that Phoebe had christened it 'King Richard the Great' but remembered her earnest reading of his medical evisceration and thought better of it.

The car was going increasingly fast. "Read the story."

Mulder began again. "Fox Mulder's manhood -- "

"You read that already."

"Fine." He cleared his throat. "It was something about being inside the hives that had such a powerful effect on him and knowing that Dana Scully was right behind him, fully attuned to the drone of the hive, her skin - like his - seeming to push against the scant clothing she wore."

Mulder glanced up from the story, frowning, only to meet Scully's nearly identical look of puzzlement. He shrugged and continued, "The drive over had been unbelievable. Even he couldn't quite recount the story to himself without shaking his head. Midnight had found him driving his car for no apparent reason, wearing nothing but his watch and a sleepy scowl. He had looked over sometime later and noticed Dana beside him in a transparently thin nightgown that betrayed her sleeping habits -- "

"I don't own a gown like that," Scully muttered.

"Shh," he scolded her and read. "In his next moment, she was straddling his naked lap as the car moved on."

"Enter the cliff," Scully said, hyperly attempting to grab the story away. "The characters die. How traumatic. The end."

Pulling the papers out of her reach, he grinned. "There are worse ways to go."

"Says who?"

He shushed her again and kept reading. "She'd pulled the thin gown up. The silk softly kissed his face as did the two supple breasts that poked out from under it. The best seat in the house. The drone was making him want her uncontrollably, making him want to part her thighs and -- "

Scully tried to grab it again, giving the other motorists every reason to believe that the small blue Intrigue was being piloted by two very sloshed, angry people.

"I want to read this one!" Mulder insisted.

"What right do you have reading about *my* thighs?"

"What right do you have dicing my eyeballs with an Exacto knife?" Mulder shot back.

"Oh! Let it go!"

He dropped the story in his lap. "What would you rather do, Scully? Kill me or screw me?"

Scully thought it over. "Those are my only choices?"

Mulder shook his head and began where he left off. " -- Making him want to part her thighs and show her pleasure as she'd never known it. The drone was becoming increasingly clearer as she rode him slowly and eagerly. He experienced an explosion of pure -- " Mulder stopped, wincing.

"What?" Scully teased. "Cat got your 'nads?"

"You just don't refer to a man's King Richard and explosions in the same sentence." Mulder flipped the page.

"King Richard?" Scully asked blankly.

"If I told you, you'd hurt me." Mulder paused to read the next paragraph and then spoke it aloud. "The next moment found them inside the hive itself, where the drone was the loudest. Fox Mulder spread his arms as a signal for the bees to -- "

"Bees?" They said in astonished unison.

Curiosity piqued, Mulder read on. " -- For the bees to come. Dana mimicked his stance and soon the two were one with the bees, each a kinetically morphing mass that could now see the other through several million pairs of eyes."

"I don't get it," Scully said, mystified.

"The bees," Mulder continued, "gathered most around those areas warm and engorged with passion. They made Dana's nipples like spears and formed a moving hill between her legs. They did the same to Mulder, some of them wandering up his anus -- " Mulder threw the rest of the story down with a certified girly scream and stomped it like a spider. "Ugg! I'm going to throw up!"

"*You're* going to throw up?" Scully had to roll down the window, still suffocating from the very thought of crawling with bees.

"Is there....something in my ear?" Mulder asked frantically.

Scully, feeling crawly and itchy herself, shook her head. "It's just the imagery, Mulder...it's highly suggestive."

Mulder gave the floorboard, where the trampled story rested, a hard look of latent betrayal. "It was going so well, too. I mean, slather me in honey? I'm there. Slather me in *honeybees*?" Mulder shuddered again. "You're barking up the wrong guy!"

"It was the most disgusting one yet," Scully decided.

"It was definitely the most unsettling," Mulder said, remembering the lengthy evisceration scene of the third story, not so quick to agree.

"Oh? Krycek forming half of your personal double-backed beast wasn't unsettling enough for you?" Scully queried mockingly.

"You underestimate my fear of bugs." Mulder swallowed thickly. "If Krycek came into that hive with some sort of Bee-be-Gone and a couple of spare protective suits, I'd bend over, grab my knees and sing 'Born Free'."

*

Consortium Headquarters

The Crewcut Man, who really had more of a Stephanopolous 'do these days, drained his martini and fixed cold beady eyes on Marita. "I was wrong about you, Covarrubias. You're not a lesbian after all."

Marita lifted her chin, satisfied.

He motioned for another martini. "You are, however, a freak of the highest calibre."

Marita stepped over Pendrell's dreamily unconscious form with a certain degree of dismay. "*They* didn't understand the story's unique grasp of sensuality, but they are simply FBI agents. *You* -- I expected you to understand."

"Don't remind me of that night Marita," threatened the Crewcut Man, oblivious to the others in the room. "There's not enough Jim Beam in the world to wash away that kind of memory. I should've known something was up when you wore that yellow-and-black-striped lingerie, and that infernal buzzing you called a climax!" The Crewcut Man bit his fist, sobbing quietly. The Red-Headed Man stepped forward to comfort him. The Crewcut Man pulled away. "Don't touch me!" He said in a high, plaintive voice and left the room.

Krycek grunted, going through his mental Rolodex, wondering who might have access to several million bees and an empty warehouse in Oklahoma.

CSM blinked against the bright light and slowly came to.

"Sir!" cried the Red-Headed Man, fanning his mentor with his copy of the MJ Documents, cleverly disguised as a Tom Clancy novel.

The CSM grabbed the Red-Headed Man's lapels and rasped urgently, "You must...end the war...in Algeria. It's isn't right...ceasefire...Get Yeltsin...the new liver." And with another gasp of exertion, the CSM's body went slack once more. After the Berlin Wall incident, the Consortium had hypnotically trained the CSM to engage in these unconscious indiscretions in a falsetto voice much like that of Tiny Tim, but the voice receptors within the Consortium walls couldn't be fooled.

"Oh my god!" declared the Well-Manicured Man, who turned his cranky jowls to Krycek. "With one swing of your trick arm, young man, you threw progress back a quarter of a century and shot our agenda all to hell!"

Krycek, happy over this turn of events, began to dance to everyone's apparent chagrin, walking like a one-armed Egyptian.

*

Somewhere on I-65

Outside, the day's sunlight was waning.

"Where in the hell are we?" Scully asked irritably. "Where's the map?"

Mulder stopped swatting at imaginary insects long enough to answer, "Map?"

"Of course," replied Scully sardonically. Mulder obviously thought he could take them to Roanoke, Oklahoma by sense of smell.

"Are you hungry?" Mulder asked.

"I am starting to feel a little cavernous," she conceded. "What are you hungry for?"

Mulder narrowed his eyes at a moth that lit on the dashboard. "Anything that doesn't try to crawl up my rectum is worth a go."

"That eliminates Stuckey's," she said, taking the first exit off the interstate.

Mulder gingerly picked up a story.

"How many are left, Mulder?"

He shuffled through them. "Exactly four more traumatic experiences until we're both stark raving mad."

"Yippee," she deadpanned. "Rip the bandage off quickly and start reading."

"Hmmm." Mulder held a page away from his face. "This one's set at an 18-point font. What in the hell's up with that? I don't even see our names on it yet."

Scully peered out the corner of her eye. She didn't really have to. The print was enormous. "Whose names are on it?"

Mulder chuckled. "We're not in this alone, Scully. Somewhere, Agents Hutch and Starky are being scrutinized in much the same manner."

"Does this mean that *they* have one of our stories?" Scully asked tensely.

"Maybe it's actually doing Hutch and Starky some good," Mulder quipped. "Maybe there actually was a well-written story that, ironically, got sent to the wrong unit."

"A long-upheld FBI tradition," Scully grumbled.

*

Consortium Headquarters

"No, no, no!" lamented the Well-Manicured Man. "Not *Starky* and Hutch! *Starsky* and Hutch! Mulder and Scully are in the story too! For the love of Pete!" He angrily slapped his hand down on the table. "They don't see their names right on the front page so they don't even bother to read it!"

"It's a lesson we all learn," the Red-Headed Man said sympathetically. "Whoever you're writing for...their names have to be first."

"But it was integral to the whole plot that Starsky find out Huggybear was an alien!" exclaimed the Well-Manicured Man. "That was the only way to start the story!"

The Crewcut Man, composed now with the help of a few shots of bourbon, curled one lip. "Okay, so...this is like Starsky and Hutch a few decades later isn't it? Let me guess...Starsky goes out to see his good friend Huggybear for old time's sake and discovers that he hasn't aged since the series finale, thereby discovering he's an alien?"

The Well-Manicured Man glared officiously. "For your information, the story takes place in an Alternate Universe and -- "

The group groaned collectively.

"Alternate Universe *and* a crossover?" The Crewcut Man snorted. "That sounds like a real winner. No wonder they didn't read past the first page."

"Yeah, if you don't mention their names and/or have them seriously screwing each other's brains out," offered Dickerson's partner, Darin, "you might as well forget it."

"It's like a porn movie," The Crewcut Man agreed studiously. "You just name the players and get your main characters wet and tangled, without," he paused icily, "the help of bees."

Marita rolled her eyes, positioning her bar stool so that Pendrell's blacked- out derriere could be used as an ottoman. "What gives you the right to be setting the criteria by which the rest of us must *create*? I suppose your story, based on that summary, is just like everyone else's."

"You'll know soon enough," said the Crewcut Man. "My story will put that hack atrocity of yours to a blushing shame! My story is more than just a night of partnerly gratification. Mine is a cautionary tale of heart-breaking proportions."

"Sounds like it'll be a good time for a nap," the Well-Manicured Man stated loudly.

"Shut up, old man! You wouldn't know good fiction if it yanked out your dentures and ran off!" The Crewcut Man stalked across the room. "Now, will someone activate the Section Chief?"

The Red-Headed Man pushed the button on Blevins's control panel, and the Section Chief came blustering to grumpy life, ordering a straight J&P and a high-memory reboot.

The group indulged in a shared look of annoyance, jointly cursing the name of whoever had decided to invite an Artificially Intelligent pain in the ass.

*

Traffic Jammer's Drive-Up Restaurant Somewhere in Kentucky

"I just don't understand what the appeal is," Mulder replied unapologetically through a greasy mouthful of double bacon cheeseburger.

Scully had chosen the drive-up restaurant, the kind meant to inspire a kitschy 50s nostalgia about waitresses on roller skates with long ponytails and lots of leg showing. This image was slightly tarnished by the appearance of their purple-haired waiter with the ring through his bottom lip and the Dead Kennedys t-shirt poking out from under his untied apron.

"The appeal of what?" Scully asked, cramming three more chicken strips in her mouth just to get even with him.

"Why are these people watching *us*?" Mulder took a long drink of his cherry slush, leaving two identical, vampiric streams of red liquid frothing out the corners of his mouth. "Who died and made us so damned fascinating?"

Scully dove into the bag for a napkin but Mulder had already swept the back of his hand across his mouth and onto his Levi's. Fascinating indeed, she thought with a smile.

Mulder continued, using a french fry as a pointer. "You know what all these stories have in common? They have us pegged all wrong. That's kind of comforting, that they don't know us half as well as they think they do." Mulder ponderously chewed the fry. "If you look hard, Scully, we're both actually - don't take this the wrong way - kind of pathetic."

"Speak for yourself," Scully said sullenly, thinking that one needn't look so hard.

"I mean, consider the alternatives." Mulder mercifully swallowed. "Agent Killian and her partner, Agent Walter, from Bomb Diffusion? She's tall, blonde, pretty...he's good-looking and -- "

"Gay," Scully finished.

Mulder blinked. "How do you know that?"

"He marched in the Gay Pride parade last year, right through the capital's courtyard," Scully replied through her onion rings.

"Oh, come on, Scully." Mulder took another drink. "Not everyone who marches in Gay Pride parades is necessarily a homosexual."

"He was wearing pink overalls..."

Mulder smirked. "Maybe his girlfriend's red underwear faded."

"He had circles cut out in the back of them so his...butt-cheeks would show."

Seeing the point, Mulder nodded, wadding up his burger wrapper. "Anyway, it doesn't answer my question: why us?"

Scully shrugged. "Why *not* us?"

"God, Scully...we're two FBI agents, not Mr. Steed and Emma Peel." He waved the pages at her dismissively. "I'm not sure why they've decided to live vicariously through us, but if you ask me, whoever's writing these stories are delusional sex-starved losers with no lives."

"You would know," Scully said before she could stop herself.

Mulder snorted. "You've already called me a prick on this ride. Someone didn't have their civility suppository this morning."

"You're such an open, easy target." She flipped casually through the pages. "Have you looked at this next one?"

"Remarkably, since the butt-bees, I've had very little inclination to read another one." He popped a fry in his mouth. "But it *is* your turn to read."

"Of course," she sighed, suddenly wishing she hadn't chowed down on the chicken strips and onion rings. She pushed the uneaten portions towards Mulder.

"Couldn't. I'm stuffed," Mulder said, proceeding to eat them anyway, like she knew he would.

Taking a stallingly long drink of her soda, Scully took a deep breath and found her voice.

"There was a noise, a ringing. Dana Scully, sleep interrupted, quickly catalogued the possibilities - smoke alarm, doorbell, phone. Rolling over blindly, she made a drowsy grab for the phone, dropped it once and nearly fell off the bed trying to retrieve it. 'Yes,' answered Scully, phone pressed to her ear. 'Scully,' gasped the familiar voice, Fox Mulder. 'It's me.' Her eyes searched for the digital display of the bedside clock. She yanked her discarded bra off the top of it to reveal the lonely hour of 1:07 AM. 'Mulder, where are you?' she asked, her heartbeat quickening with the first flutters of worry. 'Standing waist-deep in the truth, Scully. I found the killer's storage room, if you can call it that,' Mulder responded, out of breath. 'You wouldn't believe the number of bodies in here. None of them seemed to have decayed at all.' Dana Scully sat up straight in bed. 'Climate-controlled?' she offered, hopefully. He laughed in reply. 'I'm sweating my ass off, Scully. It's something else preserving these corpses. Wait.' She jerked the chain on the headboard lamp and cast the room in yellow light. 'Wait for what, Mulder?' she asked frantically. 'These aren't corpses,' Mulder said, the truth dawning. 'These are...oh my god, Scully -- ' His voice drifted off as a gun fired in the background. 'Mulder!' she screamed. Mulder, startled, told her, 'I've got to go.' The line went dead. 'But where -- ? Mulder!' Scully cried out. She looked at the time again and realized that trying to close her eyes would only present her with an image of Mulder, dying, thousands of miles beyond her help."

Scully broke off with a gasp, and held the paper in her trembling hands.

"What?" Mulder asked, underwhelmed. "Not enough gratuitous, sticky sex for you?"

Her knuckles were white around the page. "Mulder..." she said, voice quavering. "This..." She held the page out. "This is the story of my life!"

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