Yadda yadda in Part One

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

Traffic Jammer's Drive-Up Restaurant
Somewhere in Kentucky

Mulder mumbled something in his own defense, but Scully was already sucked into the story and horrified by how uncomfortably personal it seemed and began to read again. "The next morning, after an apparent night of pacing and nervously re-dialing his number only to hear the sound of not connecting, Dana Scully drove to the office where she was going to pursue the only lead she had on Fox Mulder's whereabouts. She'd asked him, 'Where are you, Mulder?' and she was pretty sure she wouldn't find 'waist-deep in the truth' on a map. He'd told her about the storage area, but not where he'd actually ended up finding it. She'd called the Crystal Cape, Wyoming police to look for him and a search-and-rescue team was descending upon the area. If he were alive, wouldn't he have contacted her somehow? Both she and Mulder had experienced the closest of close calls, so the threat of one losing the other seemed painfully repetitive and surreal until it had occured to them that, this time, it could be the real thing, the real end. She was a nanosecond away from crying when she went to unlock the office door and found it already open. She expected to find the office ransacked, or a small gathering of her superiors confiscating case files, but instead, she found Fox Mulder himself, who, excluding an ugly gash down one cheek, was very much alive and unharmed. 'You wouldn't believe the time of corpse-hopping I had last night,' he said, swivelling around in his chair. Agent Scully found her relief at seeing him alive turn suddenly into blinding rage."

"Uh-oh," Mulder replied, straightening himself in the seat to keep from feeling so small. "I get the distinct feeling that this story's a prequel to that Exacto knife story."

Scully was so mad, so caught up in the moment, that it was better - for Mulder - that she not be reminded he was in the car.

"She walked a small circle around the table that served as her work area, and asked him calmly, 'Was your phone broken after you hung up last night?' Mulder shook his head, explaining the gunshots and how they were coming from the guards. 'So,' Scully asked, much more calmly, 'Was there something wrong with your mouth? Were you unable to speak?' Mulder affirmed that the ability to speak had not deserted him early that morning. 'So,' she delved again, 'I'm guessing you were handcuffed or restrained in some manner?' Mulder said no, that the gash on his face was from a sharp rock piece that snagged his skin, if she was wondering. She wasn't. 'So, you ran immediately after you hung up on me and didn't stop running until you got off that elevator, right?' Again, Mulder said, 'No. Where are you going with this, Scully?'"

"The real Mulder, the one in the car with you," her partner assured her, "knows exactly where you're going with that."

Scully grunted in a way that made Mulder get closer to his side of the car, and read, "Dana Scully stood there, intrigued that her partner could be such a thick-headed self-absorbed moron -- "

"Hey!" Mulder exclaimed.

" -- and asked him, 'Were you possibly drugged in such a way that you couldn't physically pick up the phone? Maybe you were under duress? A gun to your head? A knife to your throat? A suspicious syringe to your arm? Maybe an extraterrestrial *took* the phone and wouldn't give it back to you?'"

"Now you're adding things in," the real Mulder accused, feeling as if he was being read *at* instead of being read *to*.

"Shut up, damn you."

"Okay."

She shook the pages out. "Mulder stared back at her, still confused by the interrogation -- "

"He's slow," remarked Mulder, "but he more than makes up for it in ch -- "

"I told you to shut up."

"Sorry...sorry..."

Scully returned to the (possibly) fictional Mulder, " -- still confused by the interrogation, and asked, 'Is there something wrong, Scully?' Dana wondered if he was joking, or really this dim. 'I'm just looking for any excuse to not take my gun out and shoot you in the knees.'"

The reading was now over. She was now breathing the words in, letting them spin around maniacally in her brain and spewing them back through her mouth.

" 'Are you telling me that you didn't have the luxury of 10 seconds?' she asked him. 'Long enough to dial my number, wait for me to answer and say, Hello, I'm alive, on my way home, you can go back to sleep now? Would that kill you? Cramp your style? Mess up your hair? Answer me, Mulder -- ' "

The real Mulder cleared his throat, about to speak.

"Not you," Scully said bluntly.

Mulder decided that silence would definitely be in his favor, which he noted to himself was a decision a 'thick-skulled' person wouldn't have made until much, much later.

"But Mulder couldn't or wouldn't answer except to say, 'I didn't want to wake you again. I didn't know it mattered so much.' This was more than Scully could take. 'If I called you in the middle of the night, alluded to some danger of a vague nature and hung up the phone before I could give you details about where I was, would you be able to go back to sleep?' Mulder frowned. 'Of course not. I'd try to track you down. I'd worry. I'd -- ' Scully threw her hands out. 'What makes you think you worry more about me than I worry about you? Wait, don't answer that. I know the answer to that. Because you're such a self- absorbed bastard. You don't even stop to ponder that maybe your partner is having to think about what it might be like to not have you around anymore --'"

"Scully?"

She read on unheedingly. " 'You, the brilliant profiler, the eerily observant investigator, the Oxford-trained psychologist, don't seem to notice how I feel about you, how I've felt about you for years now.' She pushed him, hard, making him fall over backwards in the office chair that was as broken as he was, and sat down on his chest. 'Never mind the appalling amount of pheromones I must sling around in your presence on a daily basis. How many more signals do I have to send you? A burning bush? A memo? What? Maybe if *I* became a serial killer, you'd figure me out, Mulder! In fact, that's a good idea. You'll notice that all my victims are selfish smartasses. I'll start now!' Mulder tried to wriggle out from under her, panicked. 'Oh, god, Mulder,' she said, rolling her eyes and reholstering her weapon. 'You're such a damn coward. How are you feeling right now?' -- "

"Frightened," answered the flesh Mulder. "Very, very afraid."

"Good," said Scully, and went on without so much as looking at him. "'What would you like to do to me, right now? Do it! What are you thinking right now? Say it!' Mulder choked for a breath. 'It's hard for me to form much of a thought when a woman's *sitting* on me, Scully, for two very obvious reasons,' he said breathlessly. 'The first concerns the flow of oxygen to my brain -- ' Scully got up and kicked him in the side. 'Like there's any oxygen left for your brain once it comes up from your lungs and passes your *mouth*!' Mulder fixed her with a patently hurt expression and grimaced very alluringly at the pain in his side. She almost felt sorry for him. Almost. She turned to walk away. 'Where are you going?' he asked through the pain. She opened the office door and said over her shoulder, 'You're the investigator; I'm sure you'll figure something out.' The door slammed hard behind her. Dana Scully walked straight to A.D. Skinner's office and told Kimberly she was going in whether the secretary liked it or not, hand just close enough to her weapon to be persuasive. Kimberly paged Skinner without asking him if he were busy and Scully opened the door so roughly that it swung wide and hit the wall. A.D. Skinner looked up, charmingly befuddled and temptingly angry at this invasion of his space. 'Got your memo, sir,' she said, undoing buttons and throwing her jacket to the floor. 'How fast can you have that desk cleared?' Walter Skinner picked up the phone after a moment's pause and told Kimberly to hold all his calls. It only took one sweeping motion of his well-muscled arm to knock case files, memos and other debris to the floor..." Scully stopped, dismayed, wind seemingly out of her sails. "I thought I was going to kill him, too. Huh."

"I thought you were going to kill *me*...for real," Mulder said, taking the story from her, eyes skimming over the rest of it.

"Assistant Director Skinner?" Scully asked herself in disbelief, hands bent as if they were still holding the page that Mulder had taken. "Is nothing sacred with these people?"

Mulder smiled gleefully. "Let's ask him. I can fax it to him in the morning -- " Anticipating her grab for it, he pulled it away. "Oooh. Look at this last part. He's got you up on the desk and -- no, no way. This sexual position isn't even possible."

Scully rolled her eyes. "I'm sure you've tried them all."

Mulder winced. "Not quite, but I own a fully-illustrated copy of the Kama Sutra, and I don't remember seeing that one." Silently, Mulder read on, aghast. "And furthermore, there are just certain things that shouldn't be done with scale models of the Washington Monument."

*

Consortium Headquarters

The Red-Headed Man was regarding Section Chief Blevins with new-found respect. "Sir, I've...I've never heard Dana Scully's narrative written with such grace and sincerity."

Krycek stopped dancing long enough to laugh. "Oh, come on! He's a computer! He has programs that do this kind of crap for him!"

Blevins narrowed his eyes at Krycek with a small metallic sigh. "I could zap you, you know."

"Ha!" Krycek swung his faux arm threateningly. "This comes hurtling towards your head and you'd be in the shop for a month. It's my second amendment right." Krycek danced towards the bar, laughing so insanely that he tripped over Pendrell.

"Let's face it," Crewcut Man droned. "It might've had something going for it in the beginning, but the ending was a complete disaster. You drew her as sensible, if angry, but I simply don't think it's in her character to participate in this kind of behavior. I won't even mention the sloppy way you've written Skinner here. If he came to this meeting like he was supposed to, he'd have you in one of those Navy Seal head-locks."

"I'd have to agree, concerning the last scene," the Red-Headed Man replied diplomatically. "It started out almost as a farce. It was kind of funny and satirical to begin with, and the end was...bawdy, you know. It was just kind of uneven. You can't just have one genre three-fourths of the way through and then another one right there at the end."

"It was a shift in tone," Blevins said defensively. "You should try it sometime."

"Please," sniffed the Well-Manicured Man. "You gave into the whole characters- have-sex thing like everyone else, despite any good intentions you may have started with."

On the audio surveillance monitor, Agents Mulder and Scully had gone in pursuit of hotel rooms.

"One question," said the Red-Handed Man, stepping reverently over CSM. "Why'd you write Mulder as such a loser?"

"Hmmm." Blevins pretended to think. "Because he is?"

Marita laughed scoffingly. "All of you are so damned jealous of Mulder you can barely stand it."

"Jealous?" sneered the Crewcut Man. "Of Mulder?"

"What's not to envy?" Marita asked. "Have you seen the man in a Speedo?"

"Oh, yessss!" trilled Krycek loudly, before burying his face amidst the umbrellas and assorted fruit impaled in his drink.

MULDER: I can't believe this. It's 40 miles to the nearest hotel - Crandall Oaks Inn - and if we wanted to go to another one, we'd have to go completely off course.

SCULLY: We have a course?

Crandall Oaks, thought the Red-Headed Man, who had an idea. "Hey!" he called out to the Well-Manicured Man, "What's that saying you have? The best way to predict the future is to invent it, right?"

The Well-Manicured Man smiled brightly. "*I* said that?"

*

Highway 88 Somewhere Else in Kentucky

"Two more stories, Scully," Mulder said, voice laced with dread. "One more for you, one more for me. Wanna wait until we're at the hotel?"

"There's time to read one," Scully replied, dashing his hopes. "The quicker we get through these, the better. There's no use prolonging it."

The page was shaking between his hands.

"What's wrong, Mulder?"

"I -- " Mulder had gone from pale to blanched bloodless. "I knew this moment was coming up. I knew."

"What, Mulder?"

"I was thinking, in the back of my head, that the embarrassment factor was really unbalanced in my favor."

"And?"

Mulder turned to her, hazel eyes baleful and scared in the proverbial headlights, humor gone. "I think this will even things up."

Scully tried not to smile. "If it'll help, I'll save all my laughter until the end."

Shaking his head, Mulder picked up the first word and unwound the rest with his tongue, not wanting to believe that someone else had known and committed it all to paper.

"There's no real point in re-hashing the general information. Anyone can access that by putting his name in the FBI Database. Reggie Perdue worshipped the group upon which his youngerst agent sauntered. Bill Patterson, watching his protege' stealthfully and intricately interrogate a suspect would casually comment that he would get an erection from the intensity of the event that lasted until he got home to his wife." Mulder pulled the paper away, grimacing. "That *definitely* more than I needed to know."

He focused again. "Mulder's family would be the last voted for having stepped out of a Norman Rockwell painting. After the disappearance of Samantha came the separation. Bill Mulder couldn't stand to see his son have a good time, and his family became whatever stocked his bar. Teena Mulder had found early on that her husband was emotionally and physically impotent, and what she couldn't get from him, she sought elsewhere. Her son became the one who was left, not the one who wasn't taken."

"This is..." Scully stared at him blankly, realization creeping up on her. "Biographical."

Mulder laughed hollowly. "This isn't even the good part, Scully." Mulder waited, almost hoping she'd say more so he could put off reading more, but Scully only waited for the rest. "Back in his violent crimes days, Fox Mulder reduced monstrous murdering sub-humans to bed-wetting, fire-setting and animal maiming anomalies. With his powers of deduction and keen profiler's mind, he could bust a killer down to his component parts. The same could be down with Mulder, using his own techniques on him." Mulder stalled, taking in Scully's reaction. She seemed as horrified as he was.

"Fox Mulder didn't wet his bed past the normal age. His animal-maiming hadn't progressed past stomping the occasional bug with a high-pitched shriek of terror -- "

Scully turned toward the window, and unsuccessfully attempted to stifle a laugh.

"High-pitched doesn't necessarily mean `girly', Scully," he said unconvincingly, and picked up his dropped train of thought. " -- and his setting a fire was laughable since the mere sight of one would've led to the aforementioned bed-wetting. He was, however, a dysfunctional piece of crap from Day One, a victim of his environment even today. Never mind his tendency to mentally assign every authoritative male he comes into contact with the role of neo-father. More than that, Mulder's behavior can be scrutinized and summed-up by his experience with one thing: women."

"So, unfortunately," Scully intoned as if reading the next sentence, "that's where our story ends."

Hurt, Mulder gave her a look that could've evoked remorse from plywood. "You said you wouldn't laugh until the end."

"I'm -- " Oh, she was heartless. "I'm sorry, Muld -- "

"No you're not," Mulder said, downtrodden. "And you shouldn't be. I owe you a couple laughs." He read. "Fox Mulder's fascination with sex started early, at age...10." Mulder swallowed. "Age 10 found him going to watch the junior high girls play soft ball. Fox would sit in the shade of an inconspicuous tree and introspectively explore his -- forming...manhood. His actual experience with sex didn't start until much later. Through high school, he was pensive and withdrawn, preoccupying himself with getting good grades and playing sports. He never participated in school social functions and skipped the two biggest milestones of his senior year of high school -- his senior prom and graduation festivities, where he would've been celebrated as the school's Salutorian."

"You never told me you were the Salutorian," Scully said, trying to find some light in all the darkness that clung to Mulder.

"I guess you thought I *slept* my way to Oxford."

"Mulder..."

"Fox Mulder finished high school still a virgin." He looked at her pointedly to see what she thought; she shrugged. "During the second semester in his first year of College at Oxford, Fox Mulder lost that virginity. As can be imagined, it was an awkward experience at best, masterminded by a Jenna Ellerbee two years above him in studies..." his voice started to dwindle off. "When Mulder confronted her about the night before, he was ridiculed loudly and cruelly in front of...her friends."

Scully blinked. "Is that true, Mulder?"

Mulder sighed, nodding grimly. He could remember her face not in the throes of passion but in the angry contortions it had taken on when he dared to insinuate himself in her personal space the morning after. She was sultry and dark-haired (weren't they all?) and almost as tall as he was. In the same voice that had melted his reason the night before, she advised him that he shouldn't wield a light saber so large if he had no idea of how to use it.

There was some law of physics that stated if something embarrassing was being said, people stopped talking and birds stopped singing. The courtyard had become a vacuum and Mulder, then Fox, simmered in shame for approximately an hour. He realized later that it wasn't the comment that bothered him, but the fact that he hadn't been able to return and equally insulting sentiment in keeping with the Star Wars motif. He had rarely been speechless since. Besides, out of the woodwork had come women who were quite willing to help him master use of his light saber.

"Phoebe's the next one," Scully informed him.

Mulder groaned. "As if I could forget *that*?"

"I thought you were over there trying to remember."

He smirked. "I wasn't that bad, Scully."

"You were with her for -- " Scully flipped the page. " -- two and a half years?"

Shifting uncomfortably, Mulder asked, "Only two and a half? It felt like...a lot longer than that."

"That good, huh?" She inquired rhetorically, eyebrow threatening to leave her forehead at any moment.

He rolled his eyes. "Like a stint at Angola, only with more wallpaper."

"What ended it?" Scully regretted the words the minute she said them, poised to take them back.

"I'm not sure it ever really started," Mulder said absently. "Technically, I'm the one who ended it. I got recruited into Quantico as soon as I had that degree in my hands. She told me that if I left, I couldn't come back, that she wouldn't go with me. I put my life on hold for seven months because of that. Quantico almost stopped giving a damn. Another couple of weeks and I'd be -- " He broke off, thought for a moment and laughed to himself. "I don't know where I would've ended up."

Scully smiled. "Tied up in her basement, fighting for your life?"

Mulder swivelled around quickly, too quickly, searching her face, "During which drunken stupor did I tell you that story?"

"What story?"

"The -- " It dawned on Mulder that she didn't know. He breathed out. "Nothing. Never mind."

Scully glanced down at the pages, tracing the words with her fingers. "Oh, you mean this story?"

Wily double agents, Exacto knife eviscerations and sodomizing bees *combined* had not caused this much tumult and panic to make itself known on Mulder's face. She thought he might grab for the story, but, to the contrary, he seemed deathly afraid of touching the paper, even as she offered it to him. Hesitantly, Mulder closed his fingers over one corner of the still-proffered pages and moved them to his lap, face-down. Mulder wasn't *about* to let her hear the one about him waking up from a drunken stupor and finding himself tied-up and covered with pudding, Phoebe smiling over him.

(Phoe? Ummm, why am I covered with pudding?)

(It's not pudding, Fox. It's blanc-mange.)

(Blanc-Mange? Didn't I see some of this stuff mortally attacking people on an episode of Monty Python once?)

(It's sweet. Taste it. It's too bad that I'll be the one eating it all.)

(I love your gluttonous side.)

And then, the phone had rang.

(Phoebe?)

(Whoever it is, I'll make it brief.)

But it was a forty-five minute call from her mum. Forty-five minutes of Phoebe's mum asking, "Dear, who's that crying out?" Forty-five minutes of Fox Mulder limblessly fighting off the advances of Phoebe's pudding-loving terrier, Conrad. And another year of Conrad's knowing terrier-smiles, mocking him.

He weighed the pages down with the palms of his hands, staring at her glassily. "I can't let you see this, Scully. I can't. I know this isn't fair. But -- I can't. Let me keep this one to myself."

"That steamy?" She grinned skeptically. "Some secrets should remain secret?"

He weakly chuckled. "I'm doing you a favor."

She nodded curtly. "So, Jenna, Phoebe..."

Looking up from his hands, he asked tiredly, "Who else?"

"You don't remember," she exhaled, amazed. "Men are -- "

"I know who they are," he muttered defensively. "I just don't know what the criteria is for making the list."

"Criteria?" Scully snorted in disbelief. "Did you just say criteria?"

"I meant -- " He sighed. "What merits a mention?"

"Oh." Scully thumped the top page. "Wondering if their might be a couple of names you didn't know? Hookers?"

"Hookers?" Mulder laughed in spite of himself. "I've never been to a hooker. I've never had to...pay for it." Why was he telling her this? He cleared his throat. "Not with money, anyway."

Scully's eye had inadvertantly wandered up one of his leanly muscular arms and across his pectoral line -- so tantalizingly apparent through his t-shirt -- before she could mentally shake herself. Okay, she believed him, but couldn't hold back the jab. "Maybe *you* were the hooker."

He actually smiled, teeth catching the streetlights for half a moment. "Couldn't find any stockings in my size."

"That explains it," she murmured, preoccupied. "The next one's a Diana -- "

Mulder's finger reached desperately, prematurely. She yanked the page away. "I'm letting you off the hook on whatever that Phoebe story was, Mulder, but you're not getting away with all of them. So pick what you feel is the most embarrassing one before I start reading."

In his mind, Mulder held the Phoebe anecdote in one hand and the Diana one in the other. Terrier, Diana. Diana, terrier. There really was no contest. "Read the one you have," he said bleakly.

If there was a soundless facial representation for triumphant snickering, Scully was swimming in it. "Since Diana was and is an FBI agent, her last name won't be mentioned here, but she was, unofficially, Mulder's first partner after he took it upon himself to have the X-Files re-opened. One day, Agent Mulder was impassioned by a lust that had been developing over several months. When Diana had propositioned him one morning by waiting for him atop her desk, Agent Mulder joined her there with a gleeful abandon that was a bit more than the desk could take. It collapsed beneath them. Both were injured as a result. Diana had difficulties with her back, and had to receive physical therapy. Agent Mulder had two bruised kneecaps, a sprained wrist, a busted lip and several perforations to his upper left thigh."

Mulder willed the blood not to creep into his face, to little effect.

Clicking her tongue, Scully's voice oozed catty amusement. "I'm not sure what I find more intriguing -- the mysterious perforations or the gleeful abandon."

"You're right," he deadpanned. "Must be another Fox Mulder."

Scully read over the paragraph a second time to his growing dismay, and raised her eyes so slowly that the realization in them couldn't *possibly* be a good thing. "Mulder! My desk! That was *my* desk!"

He pretended a sudden fascination with his cuticles. "It's still on the books that I have two desks in the office. If I requisition for another one, they're going to ask what happened and I'm afraid that, with my reputation that they might investigate it as an excuse to discredit me and find out that I was fornicating on government property with a government agent on government time, on top of a government desk." He stopped to take a breath. "That's why you don't have a desk."

"Surely there's some statute of limitations on desk misuse." She nodded, enormously pleased. "What about those thigh perforations?"

"Those were," he winced, "government thumbtacks. And upper thigh was just a considerate euphemism for ass."

Grinning behind the hair that had fallen over into her face, Scully made a right into the hotel parking lot and thought that if there was any justice in the world, she would've told the FBI recruiter to sod off and stuck with her medical studies. Oh, to have been on the removing end of *those* surgical pliers.

"I know what you're thinking again, Scully."

She tried to look up innocently into his sleepy eyes. "Oh?"

"Sure. You, me, an open case file, an open container of shrimp lo mein..."

She parked the car, swallowing her urge to chortle uncontrollably and said, "You've sure got me figured out, Mulder."

There were exactly 10 other cars in the motel parking lot. Mulder was willing to bet that half of those belonged to the people who were operating the place and the others to people whose respective spouses thought they were out quilting or playing mini-golf or whatever it was Kentucky citizens did to pass the time. The hotel wasn't the strip of boxes that Mulder had come to expect from their temporary living, but actually a neatly-kept three-story structure. He'd bet more money they had a lot to offer in the way of cable and pay-per- view. Loaded down with Scully's Samsonite and his duffel bags, he caught up with her and they walked into the front entrance together.

An abnormally tall clerk appeared from the office behind the front desk, took in their dress, their bags and replied matter-of-factly, "I'd never have pegged you two for bee-lovers."

Mulder dropped their luggage.

Scully tried to maintain her nonchalance. "Excuse me?"

He stared at them blankly. "You're not with the Beekeeper's Association of America?"

Mulder stooped to retrieve the luggage. "That would be no."

The clerk took the hotel's reservation book and slapped it down on the counter. "The Beekeepers have booked us up. You make a reservation?" He snorted at their puzzled faces. "Of course you didn't. Why *would* you have a problem checking into a hotel in the wasteland of mid-Kentucky? Well, let me tell you, buddy -- "

Mulder, no stranger to being scolded by hotel proprietors of all sizes, interrupted the man firmly. "We need a room. We didn't make a reservation. Either you have a room or you don't."

Slamming the book shut, he scowled down into their faces darkly. "One room. And only one."

Scully blew hair out of her face, feeling once again as if she were a checkmated pawn in the big chess game of life. "We'll take it." Mulder fixed her with a stare that was equal parts horror and hilarity. "I'm tired, Mulder. How bad could it be?" She asked, signing them into the book.

Another bizarrely tall hotel employee relieved Mulder of his burden of luggage and led them into the elevator, which they took to the top floor. Scully unlocked the door, and she and Mulder absorbed the blows of an entirely new nightmare. A nightmare of lace and animal prints with a heart-shaped bed, iced bottles of champagne and a sunken Jacuzzi, all topped off by a mirrored ceiling.

"Holy shit," Mulder offered hollowly.

Scully's own voice came back to haunt her. (How bad could it be?) When would she finally learn to stop asking those kinds of questions?

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