CATEGORY: SH, Spoof, slight R
RATING: PG-13
SPOILERS: Movie, Sixth Season
DISCLAIMER: Not mine. Moving on...
SUMMARY: Mulder and Scully wake up to, yes, the horror.
ARCHIVE: Yeah, knock yourself out. Pertinent yadda attached.

(Author's notes follow.)

Greetings, my fellow disenchanteds. :) Pull up a bean bag chair and join me,
won't you?

xxx
Sixth Sense
xxx

Mulder had woken up in a variety of different situations. He woke up once
naked with Indians staring down at him and ferns shoved up under his armpits.
That had been vaguely unnerving. Once, he woke up in the home of a vampire
girl whose name had escaped him for a good five minutes while he checked his
throat for fang marks. That was exciting. Then there was the time he woke up
in a mental institution and a big zombie bug thing was making nethersounds
outside his window. To say the least, that was damned wonky.

This morning, he woke up encased in goo, completely naked. Now *that* was
freaky. It was only the slimy tube down his throat that kept him from gagging
on the implications.

Under other circumstances, Scully's naked body beside him would've made this
morning number one on the list. Talk about watching what you wish for, Mulder
thought.

Alright, he thought. Don't panic.

Scully turned similarly astounded blue eyes towards him that said, "No!
Panic!"

He just had to fight to remember the sequence of events that lead up to this.
Think back, he ordered himself. He remembered his sister's abduction, and his
friend Barry dropping that frog down his pants on his thirteenth -- okay,
that was *too* far back. Think! Okay, there was that building explosion. That
was important, and recent. Wasn't it? Suddenly, a fast flash of gooey bodies,
trains, cornfields, bees --

The bees! He remembered vaguely a liplock with Scully that had gone sour, and
she wasn't wearing Saran wrap, so it wasn't the recurring dream he had about
her. Damn the bees! Damn them to hell!

Alright, then that van exploded with the old guy inside it. Unless he'd
gotten out of it at the last minute, but that only happened in boxcars.

Then he'd fought that ski lift operator and stole his Sno Cat. Well, he could
selectively forget that, couldn't he? Yes. So, in Antarctica...

Ohhhhh. That's where they were! They were in Antarctica, in goo, in some sort
of pod thing, naked.

Scully looked at him again as if to say, "And tubes down our throats. Don't
forget the tubes."

This telepathy thing was *really* starting to annoy him. He told her so, and
he could swear even in the goo she was flipping him the bird.

Well, he might as well take advantage of it.

("Testing, one two three. Testing...")

("It's a tube. Not a damn microphone.")

("Any ideas on how to get out of here?")

("AIEEEEEEEEEE!")

Mulder frowned at the guy in the pod right next to him! UGH! Back hair! ("I'm
trying to have a conversation here, buddy. Do ya mind?")

("Have a heart, Mulder.")

("Helloooo?? I'm stuck in goo here!")

The guy beside him suddenly seemed to realize this. ("Gooo! AIEEEEE!")

("Good lord!") Mulder scowled at his partner. ("If you don't believe in
aliens now, I'm going to strangle you with that tube.")

("I don't see any aliens, Mulder -- ")

("ALIENS! WHERE?? AIEEEE!")

(" -- I see goo, and pods and...you're not wearing any pants!")

The woman on the other side of Scully sighed. ("Not this *again*.")

Mulder leaned forward a little in the goo. ("Ma'am? This has happened to you
before?")

("Yeah, once. Why? My face is a little further north, sir!")

("Sorry, sorry -- any idea how to get out of here?")

("It's a system malfunction. Soon this pod thing will get really weak and you
can kinda push through it.")

("Thanks.")

The woman nodded a bit in the goo, pulling at the tube. ("Hey...you're kinda
cute. If we get out of here and you want to -- ")

("As I was *saying* -- ) Scully interrupted and Mulder leaned back and fell
right through the back of the pod on his ass, carried out on the wave of the
goo. 

Even outside of the goo, he could hear Scully laughing at him. He pulled
experimentally at the tube and watched as the entire viscous length of it
coiled at his knee.

Scully made a retching sound. ("I'm going to be --")

And the end of the tube materialized in his hand as he crouched there.
Dammit, he was *cold.* He attempted to stand, went rubbery at the knees and
was promptly knocked backwards by Scully who fell out the back of her pod and
went sliding across the corridor into yet another row of pods.

He offered his slimy hand as assistance. "That was strangely arousing."

"I can see that," She said wryly to his groin area, got to her feet and
coughed her first deep breath, probably one of several million. "Where are my
damn clothes?" She stopped suddenly, hair plastered down to her head, wiping
at her face. "Wait. Is this really happening?"

He pinched her forearm.

"Like that proves any -- OW! You used your fingernails!"

He smiled as he went down the corridor, freeing the nude captives from their
gelatinous prisons as he passed. Scully followed suit on the adjacent row,
face growing more incredulous.

"Mulder?" Scully said, awed. "How do you spell 'phantasmagorical'?"

"P-H-A-N..." He shook his head when the next letter didn't come to him. "Why?"

She looked at him sideways as a very angry bald man rushed out of his pod at
her feet. "I just get the feeling I'm going to be using it. A lot." The bald
head reminded her. "To Skinner."

She wrote the file notes in her head. He composed his resignation letter and
caught sight of pants up ahead in a laundry cart marked CONSORTIUM in
stencilled letters. Those bastards! They were going to pay for this.

x

Bob Ingot had seen lots of things in his fifty-two years. This was Antartica
after all, and the frozen tundra somehow lent itself to the strange and
unusual. Some of the more militant cults had their weapons stockpiled here,
and just a few months back, there'd been this alien hoax thing where everyone
died. That had at least broken the snowy monotony. But never before had he
seen a ragtag group of about fifty shivering people in varying stages of
undress struggling over the hillside, seemingly out of nowhere. It sorta
reminded him of Village of the Damned, only they all had slicked back hair.

And their leader was the sonovabitch who'd stolen his Sno Cat. Sure, that was
months ago, but he hadn't been able to find it. It was almost two months pay
at the ski lodge to get another one, and he'd been paying a rental fee on a
jet ski.

A woman in the group waved at him. "Sir! Sir! Can you help us?"

This was a mite strange. He was mad about the Sno Cat, but he wasn't a stupid
man, so he took off down the hill in his snow shoes as they stumbled and
slipped behind him. His wife was never going to believe this, just like she'd
laughed at him about that Huge Spaceship Coming Out of the Ice thing. She'd
laughed so hard he hadn't mentioned the Huge Spaceship Coming Back and
Re-parking in the Ice thing.

x

Now he knew why travel agencies didn't have posters that said "See
Antartica." Of course, maybe they did. The last time he'd been in a travel
agency, he'd been more interested in living to see the next day than he was
in taking a vacation.

Getting out of Antartica was only slightly less difficult than getting out of
Tunguska, and that included the black oil. The clothes they'd been able to
come up with hadn't helped. The pants he found had fit fine, but the shirt
he'd grabbed was emblazoned with a huge pot leaf. The ticket clerk, who spoke
some language he knew about as well as Sankskrit, kept trying to book him a
flight to Amsterdam. Scully, alluring yet cold in her halter top and chinos,
had used the Red Cross blanket to wipe a portal of glass clean and grew
slightly faint at the sight of their ride out, a plane that in greener climes
would be cropdusting or hauling an advertisement banner over a little league
game.

She would never complain about major airline conglomerates again, and felt
nearly compelled to drop to her knees and kiss the ground like her father had
when his ship  barely made it to shore. But she had the weird feeling that
any kiss would be interrupted by something terrible, rubbed the back of her
neck in puzzlement and left to find the two of them a cab outside Dulles.
She'd taken a shower at all three of their stopovers, and she *still* hadn't
gotten all that goo out of her hair.

Mulder absently grabbed someone's forgotten paper off one of the various
courtesy seats and dropped it in shock when he was the date.

It was April 1999? What the --?

So much for the resignation letter. After eight to nine months of being AWOL,
he was sure that small bureaucratic matter had been handled for both of them.

Wait a minute! Eight to nine months? And no one had *found* them?

He was still pouting about it in the taxi, along with the fact that his car
had been towed from the airport lot and sold for an obscenely low price at
one of those seizure auctions.

"How in the hell were they going to find us, Mulder? We were inside pods,
inside some kind of underground facility in Antartica." She growled at the
eavesdropping cabbie and lowered her voice. "Pinch me again."

He slumped down in the seat, "Pinch yourself. I'm tired and I still feel goo
in my -- " Catching her drawn and dreading face, he said, "Right. Don't
share."

Scully found that pinching herself didn't have quite the same effect and
ordered the driver to FBI Headquarters.

x

Mulder changed his mind. Getting *out* of both Tunguska and Antartica had
been simpler than getting *into* the FBI building without their badges or
identification tags. They'd been forced to walk through the metal detector
again and again until Mulder was sure the silver fillings in the back of his
mouth glowed radioactively.

It wouldn't have been so bad if they didn't keep finding that implant in the
back of Scully's neck, which was still an issue of some sensitivity. The
security agent wanted to hear the story that went with it.

"It's shrapnel," she hissed through clenched teeth. "Okay?"

The wand-wielder curled his lip. "And you're just *leaving* it back there?"

"It has sentimental value," Mulder offered, which earned him a painful
twisting pinch on his upper arm once the guy finally waved them through.

Only the obstacle of getting the monitor on Skinner's floor to let them go
into his office awaited. The guy appraised their blue jeans and outrageously
unprofessional appearance and dialed Skinner's office. After a moment, he
covered the mouthpiece. "He wants to know why."

So would I, thought Mulder wearily.

"Why what?" Scully demanded. "Tell him we're here! And that he's talking to
us now!"

The guy wrangled them an invitation into their assistant director's office
after about five minutes. Finally, with the face of a martyr, he told them
they could go back.

"We've been *missing* for nine months and this is how they react when we come
back?" Scully grew more and more incensed as they got closer to his office.
"What in the hell is going on here, Mulder?"

He sighed raggedly. "You ever think maybe they were overjoyed to not find us?
They probably threw a party. I bet if we moved some wastebaskets we'd find
some confetti the cleaning people missed."

She opened the door and glared at Kimberly. "We're here if anyone cares."

Kimberly boredly looked up from her Patricia Cornwell novel. "Go ahead, but
he's got a meeting in five minutes."

"Sure he does," Scully whispered ominously. "With us."

Mulder shoved his hands in his pockets and braced himself for the tirade that
would surely greet them the minute the door clicked shut behind them. Because
of the goo, his hair already looked like it had been yelled at. He was good
to go.

Skinner greeting was, mysteriously, ambiguous as usual. Mulder started to
think maybe *he* had helped arrange their ectoplasmic hiatus, but his grunt
was that of a man who'd been in the middle of a five-way conference call in
lieu of a conspiracy.

"Do I have to go into the 'I Can't Help You' speech again?" He asked flatly.
"Because I'm sure I have it on tape somewhere. You can listen to it while I
go downstairs to get a sandwich."

"You can't help us?" Scully repeated, enraged as if Skinner had just told her
couldn't have the building evacuated in ten minutes. "You can't help us!
We've been missing for nine months! And you're not surprised?"

"I told you," Mulder muttered blandly. "He doesn't care." He leaned over and
grabbed Skinner's three-hole puncher, emptying it out angrily on the desk
blotter. "Confetti, sir."

Even Skinner couldn't decide whether he should be angry about the small
blizzard on his calender or simply be confused about the allegations. "If
you've been missing for nine months, Agents, it's because, gratefully, the
two of you were at one blissful no longer my responsibility. You were
assigned to A. D. Kersh after that whole Antartica debacle and -- " His stare
drifted from Mulder's face to Scully's. "What did I say?"

"The only Antartica debacle we know about is the one we just spent three days
flying in from," Mulder answered. "Which one are *you* talking about?"

Skinner cleared a little square of confetti off his desk calendar, just to
make sure it wasn't April the first. Nope. "The one the two of you came back
from nine months ago, talking about a spaceship and pod people and whatever
else in the hell you were yapping about. I wasn't listening. You were
assigned to do background checks and domestic terrorism work. You were
re-assigned to the X-Files a few weeks ago, though I haven't heard from you
since that whole skirmish with near-death I had. Of course you're suspended
until next week, which is the main reason I'm pissed off about you standing
in my office. That answer your questions?"

Mulder pinched Scully again, and then himself, just to be on the safe side.
Finally, when he couldn't feel his arm anymore, he let go.

x

Dazed, they walked down the hall.

"Mulder..." Scully crossed her arms over her t-shirt. "Did I buy something
out of the Coke machine at the airport that said 'Drink me'?"

He couldn't quite remember why, but something about the mentioning of Coke
machines made him very nervous. It would probably come back to him later.
"I've got a theory that I'd like to share since you happen to be without your
Sig Sauer."

So she'd noticed. "Hit me."

"Remember Eddie van Blundht?"

"Unfortunately, that's one of the things I happen to remember."

He picked his words carefully. "I pick that instance because you have to
admit that, for a few seconds, I both stood in your doorway and propositioned
you on your couch."

She snorted. "I found myself naked in a pod full of goo three days ago."

"Don't forget the tube."

"I'll kill you," she replied menacingly. "Look, Mulder. Your aliens exist,
your spaceships hover, abductions really happen, the chip cured my cancer,
bees carry viruses and trees absorb evil. Please, I'm eager to hear your
theory."

Mulder mouthed a silent thank you to the heavens. "I think we've been
replaced by exact replicas of ourselves."

"That's what I thought you were about to say," she murmured. "So, what now?"

"I don't know about you, but I say we wait for them to get a really
interesting case and then plam 'em in the neck." He patted himself down.
"Damn. It was in the pants I wore to Antartica."

"I guess I can safely assume then that you don't have a spare key to my
apartment."

He walked to the elevator and pushed the 1B button. "We're on suspension,
right?"

"Technically, yes." She shook her head. "You think our clones would've been
an improvement, right? I thought that's why they would make clones, because
they would be quieter, more well-behaved, more careful with cell phones,
etcetera."

"That would tip them off rather quickly, wouldn't it?"

She watched the number lights dwindle down. "I suppose you're right."

He gave her an appraising look in her jeans and snugly fitting t-shirt.
"While you're on this acceptance kick with the extreme possibilities, I was
just wondering -- "

"No."

Dammit. And he'd thought the tubes had made the telepathy possible. Turned
out it was the goo.

x

Of course, their keys were on their clone versions, but Mulder's lock-pick
drill was right there in the top right-hand drawer. Still admiring of whoever
had been able to find another copy of the I Want to Believe poster after the
fire, Mulder drove Scully in a rental car to her apartment. She was still
snickering occasionally over the fact that their clones had pieced the burned
files together with one of those document rehydrators when she'd had them all
on disk right there in her apartment. The clones were stupid *and* a
discipline problem.

Scully had snagged a file from their office -- evaluation forms. Their
clones' behavior and adherence to protocol was about the same, but they
hadn't been much on case resolution. "Our numbers are way down."

Mulder pulled into the parking area of her apartment building. "How way down?"

She puzzled over the number. "It's like we haven't even been doing cases.
Like for the past nine months, we've just had a series of weird things happen
to us. But actual cases are few."

He shrugged. "I'm more concerned with the fact that replicas of us are
probably hanging out in your apartment, and the fact that there are spans of
time I can't remember."

Alright, she had to agree with that. "I seem to remember all the bad stuff
from the past five years." She ticked off the months on her fingers. "Six
years. I can get my mom to fill me in on the details if you can't."

"Me too." He thought about this for a minute. "Just remembered who my mom
was. So no."

"I guess Diana can help you," she suggested snidely.

He raised one eyebrow at her. "Who's Diana?"

She would mouth her own silent thank you at the heavens later.

They climbed the front stairs to her apartment. Mulder poised with the
lock-pick drill at her doorknob, but stopped. "Do you hear that?"

Putting her ear up to the door, she heard the undeniable sounds of passion
emanating from within. "Mulder," moaned her replica's voice as a slightly
nasal grunt signified thrust.

"That's what I think it is, isn't it?" Mulder raised two extremely intrigued
eyebrows. "Pump and Circumstance."

She groaned, wondering how much of the goo had seeped into his brain.

He absently cleaned from under his thumbnail with the drill. "What should we
do?"

"We should tell them to get off my damned sofa. I just had it reupholstered
last -- " She scowled. "February. I'm going to have to get it cleaned anyway
if they've been at it for all nine months. I shouldn't ruin their fun just
because *I'm* not getting any."

"Wanna go get some coffee with me?"

Yawning, she dragged her hand down her tired face. "Judging by the sounds, I
put their estimated time of orgasm at approximately two minutes from now."

"What about us?" His voice was almost imploring.

"Our estimated time of orgasm?"

Blood rushed to his face. She never thought she'd see the day.

"Will that pick work on *your* apartment door?"

"Sure, it's worked before when I've locked myself out." For a moment, he
flipped it on and followed her out of the apartment building. "Oh, I see.
We'll find the stiletto there, right? Then we can come back here and get
them."

She'd let him believe that for now. Frankly, she had unfinished business in
his hallway. Good thing her shirt didn't have a collar.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
And that's what happened to the sixth season. :) No flames -- I'm enjoying
the sixth season as much as anyone, just not on the same level as previous
seasons. (Where's the angst, dammit?)

Thanks to Ashlea ("Insta-Beta") for prodding the idea along with a very sharp
stick and laughing supportively through some cutting and pasting into IM
boxes while this developed. And thanks to the lovely Becky, Beta Ingenue, for
her X-Ray vision and archiving.
----------------------------------------

April 1999

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