TITLE: Iolokus IV: Res Judicata AUTHOR: MustangSally & RivkaT CLASSIFICATION: CONTENT WARNING: SUMMARY: The saga that began in Iolokus ends not with a bang but with a whimper. Mulder and Scully are involved in possibly the largest battle of their lives - fighting the unknown minions of the Project in family court for custody of their genetically engineered daughter Miranda. SPOILER WARNING: None DISTRIBUTION STATEMENT: Gossamer, others with permission THE DISCLAIMER: To steal a premise is an elegant offense. And the prosecution of said offense is equally elegant - or at least interesting. Harassment, feedback and publishing contracts to: Mustangsally78@juno.com, RivkaT@aol.com We're proud to point out that the final part of the Iolokus stories is the longest, in an attempt to wind everything up as neatly as possible. Long yes, but still shorter than Oklahoma, and, really, a bit less vomiting proportionally. Size does matter. ******************************************************************************** I was gambling in Havana I took a little risk Send lawyers, guns and money Dad, get me out of this I'm the innocent bystander Somehow I got stuck Between the rock and the hard place And I'm down on my luck Now I'm hiding in Honduras I'm a desperate man Send lawyers, guns and money The shit has hit the fan Send lawyers, guns and money... The shit has hit the fan. Warren Zevon +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Iolokus IV: Res Judicata 1/18 maybe i'm a little old-fashioned, maybe you're a little unkind maybe i'm a little impatient, we'll concede that in mind you won't give me your number, you won't give me your time you said meet me on the corner, and there's still no sign maybe i'm a little outdated, maybe a little out of time to believe your heart is in the right place despite what you're doing to mine so i'm standing on the corner, looking like i don't care d'you wanna crucify my feelings with your fingernails and leave the loneliest boy in the western world cruising the streets for an ice cream girl Lloyd Cole "Scully, marry me." "No!" I continued mixing the spackle with short, violent strokes. "It *has* to improve our chances of keeping custody of Miranda," he protested. "You're such a romantic, Mulder." "If I got down on my knees there's a good possibility that I might not get up again," he said in a voice of unsweetened iced tea. This much was true, barely three weeks after his twin brother George had gone to that great cellblock in the sky, Mulder was still spotted with bruises and a necklace of scabbing around his throat from George's attempt to switch identities. He was still hampered somewhat by his hurts and it was going to be months before he stopped looking like Clint Eastwood in 'Hang 'em High'. For me, with the splint gone from my nose and the black eyes fading, I looked almost normal. Regardless, I was starting to wonder if the duel with evil brother George hadn't caused brain damage to at least one of us. I took the container of spackle and headed to the top of the ladder, which wobbled nervously underneath me. I got a small putty knife and started filling in the uppermost grouping of bullet holes. Sitting on the re-upholstered sofa by the window, Mulder fidgeted in blatant impatience. "It has to be soon, the court date is next Monday." I'd cleaned up most of the debris from the siege, re-painted the kitchen and had the sofa re-upholstered in preparation for the next round of abuse. Now I was working on the walls of the living room. The house was, more or less, starting to look like George had never darkened the doorstep. If I could figure out how to get the bloodstains out of the carpet I'd be a happy woman. Maybe I should just pull up the carpet and sand the floor down. Maybe I should just pull up the carpet, crawl underneath and pull the carpet over me with strict instructions not to wake me until the war was over. Bad idea- either the kid or the cat was likely to pee on me. "I think we ought to get a real lawyer before any of this goes any farther," I said. Mulder's general-purpose lawyers had convinced the judge not to take Miranda away pending a full trial, but the trial was approaching and we still hadn't gotten a custody expert, which made me nervous as even Atticus Finch might have had some difficulty convincing a court that we were stable parents. A pained squawk broke the conversation in two as Catzilla stalked into the living room wearing a tense expression and ruffled fur. A moment later, Miranda crawled in like a small pink Humvee, a telltale tuft of black fur sticking to her lower lip. She was crawling now. Her single incentive to become mobile was the leggy teenaged cat that she delighted in chasing. Catzilla had a bad habit of letting the baby corner him and then practicing nonviolence. Miranda let out a gleeful shriek and lunged for the cat again. Mulder caught her before pink hands made contact with black fur and scooped her up. "No. Don't bite the kitty," he warned her. Looking up at her Daddy, Miranda went round-eyed and innocent for about two seconds, then she wriggled and reached for the cat again. With injured dignity, Catzilla began to clean his back toes. "Cat-cat-cat-cat-CAT!" she demanded and kicked her feet against Mulder's chest. "I said 'NO,'" he repeated. She set up a fretful wailing until hot tears ran down her madly red face and she sobbed like Susan Lucci. Which made me wonder exactly at what age the female brain realizes that the easiest way to manipulate a man is with tears. But give Mulder credit, he just gave her a squeeze and wiped the tears off her face before handing her a black cat beanie baby as a substitute. The toy wasn't a fair trade and she threw it to the floor with a snarl of frustration. She was stoking herself up into a full-fledged temper tantrum and I briefly wondered if maybe we should just let Bill and Tara have the full Miranda experience for a week or two and see if they didn't send her back in a FedEx box with air holes punched in it. As the tsunami of infantile rage built force, Mulder plunked her in the playpen where she stood upright, grabbed the bars and began to shake them like a rebellious inmate at Sing Sing. "Cat-cat-cat-cat-cat!" she howled. "You know if you would just *bite* her a couple of times we wouldn't have this problem," he scolded Catzilla over the noise. For his part, Catzilla blinked green-gold eyes at Mulder and went over to the playpen where be began to rub his lips over Miranda's knuckles. As quickly as she had become furious, she went into an ecstasy of cooing and babbling in fluid Gaelic to her feline companion, who made soft throat-noises at her. "Scully, this is Virginia, conservative, marriage-friendly Virginia." Mulder said as if we'd never been interrupted. "Isn't Virginia for lovers?" For some reason, the recitation of the official state slogan didn't make him happy. "*Scully*. Virginia nearly elected Oliver North to the U.S. Senate because Chuck Robb got head from a beauty queen. Virginia does not look kindly on unconventional family units! You want to be in there as a live-in couple with Bill and Tara holding hands, him in his Navy uniform and her cradling that kid of theirs? They're the Cleavers, we're the Addams Family!" "We're not living together." He howled frustration. Miranda thought that was wonderful and urged him to do it again, patting her hands on the playpen cushion and giggling. Catzilla flattened his ears and ran for cover under the sofa. "Will you stop avoiding the issue for *just one minute*? I'm not asking you for anything except the purely legal act. I've given up on the idea of a family, I'll settle for a Potemkin Village to fool the court." I shook my head. Did he even consider the possibility that he'd just explained why I didn't want to say yes? I cast an eye around the room, looking for work that remained to be done. Nothing but the bloodstained carpet; no escape. Getting married certainly couldn't hurt our chances of keeping Miranda. And that, despite all the other shit swirling around me as my life went down the toilet, was something I was finally certain about. If I said no and we lost, I'd be irrevocably alone. He only tolerated me now because Miranda seemed to like having me around. Well, that and the prospect of regular sex when he got slightly more healed. "Fine." "What?" Mulder practically levitated away from the playpen and over to me. "I'm sorry, was I supposed to keep saying no?" As Hamlet or Oedipus said, 'it seemed like a good idea at the time'. **** Between her home improvement projects and wandering around the house looking like a camel with a sore hump, Scully somehow made the time to accompany the Mooselet and me to City Hall and start the paperwork necessary for the marriage. I guess it would have been too much for her to feign enthusiasm. So, between the applications for variances in zoning, building permits and dog licenses, we filled out the papers and took turns supporting the Mooselet as she sat on the counter. Miranda was holding the chained pen in one fat fist and pontificating in MooseSpeak to anyone foolish enough to talk to her. The only positive event in the entire expedition was watching Scully try to take the pen away from her. Her Highness was NOT AMUSED and snapped at Scully like a turtle and growled. After a short gasp of surprise, Scully snatched the pen away from Miranda and ended up getting a ruby-faced wail in return. The clerks behind the counter looked up to see what abuse the woman was inflicting on the adorable baby and Scully went almost as red as her hair. In the end, I rescued my intended from the baby of evil and plopped Miranda against my hip, handing her the black cat beanie baby that was now missing its eyes and whiskers for some reason. While the Mooselet sang to the toy and batted her eyelashes at the clerks, Scully scrawled her name at the bottom of the application with the enthusiasm of a woman signing her own writ of execution. I guess I should have been insulted, but truth to be told, I was so endlessly grateful for her willingness to go along with the charade that I couldn't even work up the mischief to tease her about it. The late spring sky was overcast when we finally left City Hall and wandered down the street a bit for coffee. Scully had the Mooselet supported against her hip and was looking more comfortable with her human burden than she usually did. Was it at all possible that the Mooselet had managed to insinuate herself into the heart of the Queen of Rational Thought in a way that I never had? Then again, Her Highness was several points higher on the cute scale than I was. Sitting at the outdoor table with the Mooselet perched on the table, I waited for Scully to come back with the coffees. "Dak? Cat-Cat? Da Lee? Nah?" Miranda asked. "Well," I started and the Mooselet looked up at me with great seriousness, "Scully and I are going to get married and that will make her officially your mom. This means that you have to treat her nice. No biting." The Mooselet smiled and flashed her white baby corn kernel teeth at me. "I'm serious. No biting." "Na. Dak. Da. Lee," she reassured me and stuffed the entire head of the cat into her mouth. I knew it was just the teething, but with my family you really had to wonder. With a coffee in each hand and a bottle of juice balanced precariously on top, Scully returned to the table and handed me my cup. "What are we going to do about rings? We have to have rings." That's my Scully, as sentimental as a traffic cop. "Somehow I don't see you with the traditional diamond solitaire." I smiled to reassure her that I was joking. "But diamonds are a girl's best friend," she said in something like her old manner. The Mooselet was snapping her head to each of us in turn like she had great seats at Wimbledon. I uncapped the apple juice and held the bottle to her mouth. She gulped greedily at it and only a small portion of the juice went down my arm. Across the table, Scully blinked in disgust. This was probably her discomfort with the Mooselet from the beginning - babies are not clean. Maybe something in the essential human character had been missed from the very beginning - women may allegedly be more nurturing, but men understand a baby's inherent messiness. After all, we're just big babies ourselves. We grok having food on our shirts, eating things that have fallen on the floor, and lounging around in our underwear. It's our way. Whining, the Mooselet grabbed at the juice bottle and managed to spill a half a cup down the front of her shirt. Scully hadn't gotten enough napkins so I made do with the adult-oriented modest amount and sponged the juice off the baby. Miranda giggled and pulled at my watchband. To keep her happy, I unbuckled my watch and handed it to her. Like most things, it went straight in her oral orifice. I wasn't worried. Swiss Army watches are supposed to withstand amazing amounts of abuse, even though baby drool had not been listed on the brochure. "Well, look at it this way, not much will change once we're married, we've been spending close to 24/7 with each other for the past six years. You'll actually spend less time with me because we won't be working together." "I won't be working very much right now anyway. Skinner won't let me come back until the official account of George's home invasion has been approved," she said and sipped delicately at her coffee as though she was trying to prove that she wasn't the sloppy one in this outfit. "There's landscaping to be done," I teased and drank my now cold coffee, "and if you decided that you don't want to work for the Bureau anymore, I think you have a bright future doing home repair." "You realize, of course, that there's endless amounts of paperwork we're going to have to do at HR. Change of tax status, life insurance policies, and so forth. This is a fairly bureaucratic enterprise we're entering into." "I suppose, " I started, stung by her analytical approach, "it doesn't seem that much of a chore when you're in love." "I --" The man who approached us cut her off, an interruption for which I was momentarily grateful. He was in his early thirties, dark hair, dark clothes tucked and belted with a neatness that screamed 'cop.' "Excuse me, sir, ma'am," he said, "but I'm going to have to ask you to come with me." He stood between us, his right hand not six inches from Miranda's head. "What's this about?" Scully asked. "Child protective services has received a report --" That was bullshit, if Bill had sicced CPS on us they never would have found us in the middle of the city, they would have come to the house. "I'd like to see some identification, please." Scully stood and had her gun at his stomach in one unified move, smooth as chocolate mousse. His attention shifted mostly to her, which gave me the opportunity to pull my own Sig, hidden behind Miranda's body. "I wouldn't do that if I were you, ma'am," he smiled and how could the people around us not be noticing this? I was aware of the rest of the world trotting along briskly as if this deadly scene were playing on the TV in an electronics store window, unnoticed. In his right hand I could now discern an item that looked like a keychain but had the telltale holes of a miniature gun. Miranda twisted her head to see what had taken my attention from her and made a grab for the weapon; when her pincers closed around it the man smiled. "That's right, honey, you can play with that in a minute." Adrenaline spiked through my veins as he stared at Scully. "Bend down and leave the gun on the ground." If I could push Miranda behind me and fire fast enough -- the bullet might still pass through me and hit her. Flicking her eyes over me and the baby like a lawnmower massacring grass, Scully slowly complied. There would be one moment when he'd have to watch her carefully to make sure she didn't surge back up with the gun. If I could push his hand up just then, I could take him -- it would have to be with my gun hand, I couldn't let Miranda crack her head open on the concrete to save her from kidnapping. Slow as a replay of the Zapruder tape, Scully compressed herself downwards. Even I could feel the magnetic pull of her eyes as she willed the man to watch her, only her, she was the only threat that he had to worry about and if he took a fraction of his attention from her she might do something dangerous. The tip of the gun barrel touched hot concrete. She was bending as if in fealty. I distinctly saw her index finger uncurl, and then the other fingers beginning to loosen. The man with the gun turned one degree too far towards her, overestimating his triumph. As I rose, spun to take Miranda away from the line of fire, and struck upwards with my free hand, Scully moved at my feet. I felt a shock to the bones of my hand as my knuckles connected with the gunman's wrist. His hand flew up like a bottle rocket, not releasing his grip on his weapon, but he was falling backwards and Scully had her gun again pointed his throat before he'd figured out that he had undergone a ninety degree shift of orientation. When I'd moved, she'd headbutted him. It was the simplest thing she could do from that position, and coupled with my attack he'd toppled like a stack of children's blocks. Elapsed time? Probably less than two minutes from the time he first opened his mouth. Scully already had him flipped on his stomach, hands wrenched behind his back. She was mumbling something about big guys who threaten babies and inflicting incidental damage to his balls as she patted him down. Miranda was now squealing because of her sudden trip on Roller Coaster Mulder, and *that* was enough to draw the attention of bystanders. Who noticed the guns. Cursing and fumbling with my gun, I found my badge and showed it around. "Don't worry, folks, it's all over now." This only increased the crowds. Even on regular duty, we don't carry handcuffs and we had to wait for a police officer to come and take our attacker, who had not yet said a word even as Scully hissed imprecations and highly specific threats in his now-bleeding and dirty ear. I would have joined her in her impromptu interrogation session only Miranda was bored and fussy and in any event I needed to maintain my sentry position to ensure that our assailant didn't have a friend waiting for a second chance. We gave our version of the incident to an uninterested detective who, despite our strong suggestions to the contrary, wrote it up as an attempted kidnapping by a sex pervert. Our FBI credentials had been completely erased by our relationship to Miranda, who demanded to examine absolutely everything on the detective's desk, which included half- full cups of congealed coffee, empty bags of Cheetos, dull pencils, small butterfly clips, and the remains of an apricot danish. I tried to calm her with the cat toy, but her slobber had not yet dried on it and it was too wet and mushy for her tastes. Scully was quiet on the drive back to the house and the Mooselet was complaining in fine voice about the fact that residential neighborhoods had a speed limit of only twenty-five. Scully being quiet is not a good thing, it means that packets of information are speeding along the network in the icy reaches of her brain and she's working on some plan that is sure to leave me open-mouthed with shock and/or horror. I didn't imagine for a minute that anything approaching domesticity was going to slow her thought processes down, nor did I think that cohabitation was suddenly going to turn her into Carol Brady (even though bell-bottoms had come back with a vengeance). However, I did hope that she wasn't planning anything that would endanger anyone's life or sanity. Even as I schlepped the Mooselet into the house and plunked her down in her high chair for lunch, Scully took the chicken salad out of the refrigerator with a pensive expression and continued to compile information while I performed the tricky task of feeding the Mooselet and myself. "I have to go to Annapolis to get some more of my things." I looked up from where I was wiping Moose-spit chicken salad off the floor. It seemed a small thing, but knowing Scully there was large wildlife swimming under the surface of that statement. Large wildlife with teeth willing to chew up foxes who stepped wrong. The Mooselet grabbed a handful of chicken salad from her plate and began to rub it in her fringe of silky dark hair. Scully looked as me as though I was about to do the same thing. Catzilla began doing the slalom around the chair legs and sucking up chunks of chicken pink baby hands had flung to the floor. I let him, it was easier than mopping. If the Mooselet developed a better overhand pitch we were going to have get more cats to cover a wider area. "Take the Outback to Annapolis, you can fit more stuff in it." I offered. Scully seemed surprised that I was so amenable to the idea of letting her escape my supervision. Actually, getting Scully out of the house wasn't a bad idea. I needed to get in touch with the Gunmen, find out who wanted Miranda, who was pulling Bill's strings and why. The attempt on her today had to be related to Bill's custody suit; someone wasn't sure that he'd win. I had a thought as she headed to the front door. "Also, you have to take Miranda. I'm not going to be home, there are some *things* I have to do, and Warwick's still not fully functional. You're a better shot than he is anyway. Besides, you need the practice." She seemed a little dazed. I guided her over to the front closet, where we stored Miranda's traveling gear. "Here's the diaper bag, traveling with her is not that bad, just a little noisy. Just be sure to drive carefully. Remember, there's a baby on board." I gave her my best hunka-hunka-burnin'-love gaze. She blushed as she used to do when I first began teasing her all those years ago, and it managed to distract her enough to get her out the door, Miranda in tow. I was impressed that she was able to stagger down the path to the station wagon. I watched her wrestle the car door open, shove all Miranda's appurtenances inside the car, then begin the long process of getting Her Highness into her throne, which was about as easy as nailing Jell-O to a tree, only you weren't allowed to use nails. As soon as the baby was strapped in, she began to wail. I hoped Scully didn't make the speed = silence connection too quickly, the thought of combining their needs for acceleration made me very afraid. Then I hopped in Scully's car, nearly kneecapped myself on the steering wheel, swore, pushed the seat back, and finally headed for the Gunmen's hideout. ***** Iolokus IV: Res Judicata 2/18 Sweet confetti out looking for a saviour Finding it hard to break the change Nothing ventured nothing gained Ice cream beauty acting on her best behaviour Finding it hard to bite her tongue Feeling so old as the night is young Natalie Imbruglia Theoretically, Arlington to Annapolis is a pretty easy drive, provided that it isn't rush hour or you don't have a screaming nine-month old strapped to a baby seat in the back. Miranda commenced howling when I put her in the car seat, which rattled my nerves so badly that my hands were shaking and I could hardly get the seat pulled forward enough to reach the gas and brake pedals. Delayed reaction to the near-disaster in the afternoon -- not to mention the full-fledged disaster of the marriage license -- might have been a contributing factor as well. Maybe it was the chicken salad. Miranda continued to wail all the way to Annapolis, varying only slightly in pitch like an electric saw going through different thicknesses of wood. It was horrible, and I deserved every mile of misery. In the past I had been guilty of reacting somewhat less than tolerantly to women in minivans full of children. I passed them at every opportunity and had been pretty colorful with my language as to their behavior on the road. Now I was getting my comeuppance in spades. I drove like a dowager, trying not to jiggle Miranda any more than necessary. By the time I finally pulled up in the far parking lot of my apartment complex, I was ready to kiss the tarmac like the Pope arriving in an airport. When I released Miranda from the baby bondage of the car seat, her hot red face was soaked with tears that had wet the entire front of her T-shirt. She reached her hands out to me and wailed, "Lee! Lee!" with a heartbreaking earnestness that showed me that she had forgiven me for her original incarceration. With Miranda cradled against my left shoulder and the diaper bag slung over my right, hand wrapped firmly around the comforting hardness of my gun, I staggered up the front steps of the building. Inside, I pushed past the mail that had clogged the doorway and sniffed musty, old air. I locked the door, plunked Miranda down on the carpet, and saw that the cleaning woman I'd hired to clean up after the forensics teams had scraped the place for evidence when Dr. Shimada had died in my bed had done a good job. Only I no longer had any plants. I had empty pots where plants had been. While Miranda began crawling around the floor faster than a hungry cockroach, I looked around and groaned to myself. I no longer wanted to live here, too many ugly things had happened here. Melissa, Dr. Shimada, George. Even if I didn't have my new and unusual domestic situation I still would have been packing. Too much is too much. Whoever took up occupancy after me was going to have to get her own exorcist. After five boxes, each one-handed with the Moose (she was not light enough to deserve the diminutive any more) on my other hip, I was tuckered out. To rest, I took a look at my answering machine, which was bravely blinking red. When was the last time I checked my messages? Oh, probably sometime in the month before George crashed my pity party - I had stopped listening to my messages in March after I figured out that Mulder was not going to call me back; it was too pathetic. Despite the length of my delinquency, the tape was not full. Well, I never claimed to have a social life. There were a few random solicitations, two messages from Zippy about the case we'd been on just before George came, one message from my mother. My mother - I was going to have to do something about her shortly. Just hearing her voice made my stomach hurt as though I were trying to digest a stone. The next-to-last message was from George. I had to go cradle Miranda, protecting her from the world, when I heard the dead man's voice slice through the air. "Where are you, Scully? I really need to talk to you. I promise, I'll be good...I know what you need. Scully, pick up if you're there. If you don't answer, I'm coming over..." Finally there was a click and an outraged squeak from Miranda as I loosened my grip and she began to slide downwards like a slow avalanche of baby powder. I readjusted and she slapped spit-slick fingers against my cheek, gabbling reassurance. I was in a bad way if I needed support from a preverbal child over the promises of a corpse. Nonetheless it was the last message that forced me to sit down. The pharmacy, calling to ask whether I was planning to pick up the birth control prescription that Dr. Shimada had written for me just before she did her final rounds, so to speak. Honestly, I'd forgotten about it. In my arms, Miranda was hot as a solar panel. At least I was still underweight and under stress, both natural contraceptives. I could pick up the prescription shortly; in the meantime there were still plenty of condoms in the house. Mulder, perhaps because he wasn't eighteen anymore, had felt compelled to buy a lifetime supply, which he had stuffed into bathroom drawers that previously had housed my skin care products. So using them up would not only be pleasurable, it would be a blow for neatness in the Mulder household. Hold on, the Mulder/Scully household. Mulder-Scully? Scully/Mulder? Does anal retentive have a hyphen? The Mooselet chose that moment to spit a milky glob of some bodily fluid onto my sweatshirt. I looked into her green- corn eyes. "Good job," I said. "Now what can you do about my hair?" She fixed me with an evaluative look and, creepily enough, grabbed a hunk of my hair to stuff in her mouth. It kept her quiet as I picked up the next box. While I was packing my address book, I accidentally joggled the answering machine and George's voice whined flatly out from beyond the veil. "Where are you, Scully? I really need to talk to you. I promise, I'll be good...I know what you need. Scully, pick up if you're there. If you don't answer, I'm coming over..." It was my turn to spit up, but my aim was better and I got it all in the toilet. Miranda sat on the floor next to me and applauded. After a trip to Alexandria that resembled the trip to Annapolis, only with less rear view because of the boxes, I put Miranda down for a nap and dragged the baby monitor into the study. There I made a telephone call that almost made me wail loud enough to challenge Miranda's concert in the car. The Virginia police had no record of an arrest that afternoon for an attempted kidnapping. It could have been delayed record entry but I remembered the diligent tap-tapping of the desk sergeant when we came in, Virginia was trying to join the computer age and enter arrest data straight into the computer system. However, this incident wasn't in the system and therefore it had not happened. I checked the name of the patrol officer who'd come to our assistance and it turned out that Virginia thought he'd transferred to a job in Maryland last week. Great. Fucking typical. It was too much to ask that something be handled normally. There was one more errand to be done before I could rest. I had to go and deal with my mother. Mulder was not in evidence yet and so I packed Miranda up. She was slobbery and sleepy, but in a relatively good mood which improved further when I saw that traffic was light and pushed the Outback up to speeds approaching escape velocity. She pouted when we stopped, but the spit bubble spoiled the pathos. "None of that, young lady," I said as I extracted her from the safety seat. "You've got to be charming for Grandma." My mother answered the door on the second ring. Behind her I could hear the television and the telltale hysterical sobs of a young child. I winced in unwilling sympathy. For a moment I wondered whether we wouldn't all be better off if babies' howls could only be heard by animals, like dog whistles. "Dana," Mom said, making it into an exclamation of surprise. "Hello, Mom." We'd never really finished our discussion, that morning she'd showed up and we'd gotten served with notice of the lawsuit. "I want to talk to you about Miranda." She held out her arms for her granddaughter and I hesitated long enough for her to take notice before shuffling the burden onto her. Miranda smiled and patted Mom's upper arm. She liked my mother more than she'd liked me at first and this hurt me in ways I didn't want to consider. We walked down the hallway into the living room, where Tara was rocking Matthew, who was now a suety eighteen- month-old with the Scully blue eyes and Bill's own frown. We acknowledged one another with the subtlest of nods, as housewife and career woman we were mortal enemies and now we no longer had any reason to hide it. "Where's Bill?" I asked with distant politeness, as if I was inquiring about a pet parakeet. "He went to the store for some more diapers," my mother responded. "Dana, I wish you'd have listened to me earlier, it didn't need to come to this." "It doesn't need to come to this, Mom. Bill and Tara have a lovely child," -- a lie in the service of justice, I thought nastily -- "and they have no reason to try to take Miranda." If her hands had been free, my mother would have folded them primly in her lap to go along with the frown. Instead she just rocked Miranda, lulling her to sleep with her drool drizzling onto Mom's lavender sweater. "Dana, you know we've been concerned about you ever since you joined the FBI. But in the past few years -- with everything that's happened -- how can you expect to give a child what she needs?" "I'm her mother," I said. At that moment I had never felt more unsure of the truth of that statement. Biologically, yes, but there are plenty of biological mothers who dump their babies in toilets and beat them senseless with electrical cords. I wasn't at that level, this I believed, but I wasn't exactly Mother of the Year material either. "You were her mother when you abandoned her in Montana." I stared at my mother resentfully. If I'd still had bangs I would have looked through them like the most rebellious of teenagers. "I did not *abandon* her. Emerson and Aileen --" "Don't give me that! Fox isn't capable of taking care of himself and I don't believe that any brother of his would be any better. Bill's told me about all those insane twins --" "Who gave him this allegedly damning information?" Her voice flowed over the interruption like water over a rocky streambed. "-- and I can only withhold judgment so long. How long before Fox follows the rest of them into madness and violence?" It didn't help any that I'd had similar thoughts once or twice. Or three times, max. "Your crude genetic determinism doesn't change the fact that Mulder has always been --" "A psycho?" I turned and rose, my hand slipping back towards my gun, to greet my beloved brother. "Bill." "Dana." Now that we'd admitted personal knowledge of each other's identity, there didn't seem much to say. I had one question, though. "Why are you doing this?" His face twisted in disgust. "I've seen the tape, Dana." "Tape?" Which one, a surveillance tape of me and Mulder doing the nasty? Probably not, Bill might have learned something. "The tape where you kill all the children. What kind of monster --?" I don't know what I did to piss God off, and I guess I'd apologize if I thought He'd consider forgiving me. Even Mulder's mistakes didn't follow him around like this. But that tape of me in Roush's secret facility, destroying the deformed test subjects that had been created with my ova, had lured Mulder -- and then me -- into Jason's clutches, and it had apparently survived the destruction of Roush to continue to haunt me. Someone, someone who wanted Miranda in the hands of less careful custodians, had taken that tape and showed it to Bill. I needed to know who, and why. "I don't know what you think you saw," I lied, "but it's part of a terrible scheme involving human experimentation and tremendous suffering, you're furthering that agenda by --" "Don't give me that Woodward and Bernstein crap! I know what you and that sicko do, you fight against the very government that pays your salary -- paranoid theories no better than the Freemen and that crazy comet cult --" "I'm not against government, just against lying to citizens and killing them for fun and profit, I guess if you're an unthinking fascist that's acceptable but --" Miranda's wail cut through the argument and, rattled, I scooped her out of Mom's arms to my mother's great distress. Miranda continued to wail for a moment and then settled down. I was so grateful that, had she understood it, I would cheerfully have paid her a fifty dollar reward; instead I kissed her hot silky head and she snapped at my hair with her newly budded teeth. "Who got you your lawyer, Bill? Are you aware that he's with the same firm that represented a company whose illegal genetic manipulation and murderous plots Mulder and I exposed? What does he get out of this lawsuit?" Bill flinched and I knew that part of him wondered the same thing. But he would pack those doubts away in a locked closet, confident that he could control the extent of his debt to Them. Dealing with Them is like taking a hit of crack -- perhaps a few strong souls out there can stop any time they want. But I thought Bill was not one of those happy few, not with a wife and a baby who could be used against him. My brother - the sucker. "None of that matters because Miranda is going to live with us, not some lawyer. We'll raise her right, far away from this insanity you've descended into. Dana," he said, and his voice was full of real pain, "why don't you listen to us? We only want what's best for you." Beside him, my mother nodded. No doubt attracted by the male voice, Miranda looked over at Bill and when she realized that the red-faced red-haired man was not Mulder and not Warwick, she whimpered and burrowed her face in my neck, patting my cheek for reassurance. She didn't like this loud man yelling at her and she went to me as a source of comfort - even if I had put her in the car seat. "This isn't getting us anywhere," I announced, feeling my daughter's approval buoying me up in this strange sea of family trauma. "I'm sorry you've believed the lies of strangers rather than trusting me to know what's best for me and my family. You should know that the men who've convinced you to turn on me tend to discard their tools when the job is over. So you watch yourself, because I'm not going to protect you." I turned to go, but I could still hear Bill's voice clearly. "Listen to yourself, Dana, you sound just as psychotic as your crazy partner." That really demanded an exit line, so I swiveled on my heel and smiled like Medusa finding a new victim. "Actually, Bill, we're getting married this Friday, so I think the correct term is 'fiancé.'" Miranda and I drove home in a state of well-justified moral outrage and renewed determination to win the fight. Okay, so maybe she was just happy not to be in pain from teething, but I felt that she shared my outlook when she gabbled and pounded her fist on the safety seat with such authority and firmness. She fell asleep instantly when I took her back to her room. The bloodlust from the argument began to wear off as I realized that the battle was going to be considerably more difficult than many of our other struggles. Skinner was used to hearing reports of the unexplainable and convoluted from us, but what would a family court judge think? Bill had a point, from the outside Mulder and I sounded like the kind of people who paranoid schizophrenics would avoid because we were too strange and dangerous. I made the mistake of mentioning some of the day's events to Warwick when I went down to look at his shoulder. Mulder and I had agreed that having a nurse come every day was too dangerous; we didn't anyone whose credentials we'd have to take on faith in the house. So that left me checking his wound to make sure that the miracle of healing was proceeding on schedule. I bet Mulder would have been a lot more interested in trusting the help if *he* was the one checking which bodily fluids Warwick was leaking. "I can't believe you're so calm about this!" he blustered as I handed him his latest dose of pain meds. "You act like it happens every day!" I shrugged. "Well, every week, essentially. Except during the summers, for some reason. So I guess the timing is unusual." He groaned. "Mulder never told me about this secret agent shit when we met." I couldn't help but smile sympathetically. "Join the club." "What did he tell you - at first." "Go away, but not in so many words." To calm my nerves, I boiled a box of pasta and ate two heaping bowls full, which calmed me enough that I could start on the ice cream. **** The Gunmen's latest locale was a few blocks from Union Station, on the other side from all the government buildings. The office was an unmarked building in between the Peter Pan and Greyhound depots. The other cars parked outside were all too bad to steal, so I set Scully's Club and hoped that would be enough. "Mulder," Frohike greeted me at the door. "I've got some info on that law firm you were interested in." In my life, as in the movies, no one wastes any time with hello or goodbye. You have to save time for plot or people get bored. I followed him back into the computer room where Langly and Byers were waiting. "Roush was about forty percent of their business. In the months since the raid in Texas, they've laid off a bunch of associates. But, last month, they acquired a major new client -- also a biotech firm, and all the partners who'd worked on Roush business have shifted to this new client. Patents, political donations, government contracts, there's a lot of legal work when you manipulate human DNA for fun and profit." "Is this new firm made of the same people who were at Roush?" Byers handed me a printout with a list of names on it. "That was our next thought. There were about twenty scientists who were supposed to be working at Roush who were never caught or discovered in the wreckage. They've all been missing since then. No credit card activity, no employment reported to the Social Security Administration, nothing." "I need to know more about this company." Frohike shook his head. "Not much out there, just a pretty prospectus, and a name: BioQuest." Langly looked at me. "What do you think it is? More government experimentation disguised as a private sector venture to accommodate the popular passion for privatization?" I shrugged. "I'll look into it. I also need you to check out a lawyer, one my firm recommended for my custody case, Laura Broder. I need to make sure that she's not connected to anyone who might have an interest in doing me harm." "Custody case?" It wasn't surprising that Byers was the one to ask. He wore a ring, and he might have some interest in a personal life, unlike the others. "Yeah, Scully's brother is suing us to get Miranda. He thinks we're weirdoes." "That's crazy!" Frohike said with no sense of irony whatsoever. "Do you want character witnesses?" The thought chilled me as though I had been jogging up and down the ice cream section at the supermarket. "No, that's all right, really," I gabbled in a hasty voice which made Langly sniff at the implied insult. I didn't tell them about the impending nuptials. I assumed that Scully would want to choose her own bridesmaids, and I didn't think Frohike would look good in pink taffeta. The boys prevailed upon me to play with some of their new software. I'd only meant to stay for one game, but time flies when you're blowing xenomorphs away and trying to rescue buxom babes. As always, I didn't want to stop until I'd gotten the girl, as unlikely as that was to happen. Ultimately it was the realization that Scully had yet to call and ask where I was that made me nervous enough to leave. When I got home Scully was pacing the kitchen like a leopard tired of its cage. In between circuits she was gobbling from a mostly-melted pint of Coffee Heath Bar Crunch. She ate with the same distracted fury that I often saw in bed and I suspected that similar dynamics were at work: pleasure but not enjoyment, stemming from a desperate need to shut her mind off and let bodily functions prevail. I was glad that she was gaining weight and I was no longer afraid that she'd suddenly crumble underneath my hard hands like an autumn leaf, but this didn't strike me as the right way to bulk up. "You're late," she said when she deigned to acknowledge my presence, simultaneously giving the sodden iceberg in the carton a vicious stab as if it were my liver. "I didn't realize we had an appointment." I didn't want to fight, but I wasn't going to be her punching bag either. Scully sniffed, ready to claw back, and then her shoulders dropped as she reconsidered and put the lid back on the ice cream. "Our would-be kidnapper disappeared from police custody, there's no record he was ever even there. Also, Bill isn't financing this lawsuit himself, the Navy doesn't pay that well and Tara is wearing this season's Jaclyn Smith Collection, which might be a matter of taste but I don't think so." "You think someone else is pulling his strings?" She closed the freezer and I moved behind her, putting my hands on her shoulders where she was as tense as the cables on a suspension bridge. Her voice was low and I had to lean over her to hear her. "Miranda was a test subject before, there might be Roush survivors who want to see how well you've done with her." "We've done with her." She sighed and tilted her head back into my chest as I continued to push against resistant flesh. Flyaway hairs brushed against the scabs on my neck, tickling like wandering ants, but I didn't flinch. I worked over her shoulders and neck until she relaxed further, leaning her weight against me as I contemplated the pictures of Miranda and her cousin Samuel that were stuck to the fridge. Samuel was safe he was home brewed from Emerson and Aileen's unmodified chromosomes, just another reason to stoke the wry jealousy I had for my saintly brother. "I think you're right," I admitted -- but let the record show that Scully was being paranoid, and thus I wasn't acceding to the voice of reason. I've got my pride. "I've got the Gunmen looking for where the mad scientists have gone to ground. For the moment we need to focus on the court case, we can take more aggressive action when we have better leads than a disappearing kidnapper and a suspiciously well-funded lawsuit." Scully turned in my arms and pressed her cheek to my chest, which gave me a strange, fluttery feeling in my stomach. "What do you think they want with her?" "I think it's fair to say that they aren't interested in her developing motor skills." "I used to want the truth, I used to want Justice. Now all I want is to be left alone." By way of non-verbal agreement, I kissed her, and her mouth tasted appealingly of Heath Bar Crunch. **** I woke in a cold sweat from a nightmare in which I was choking in green gelatin. Mulder's arm was draped over my midriff and his entire torso was pressed up against my back, undoubtedly the source of the breathing troubles. I rolled away and fled into Miranda's room where I checked to see that she was breathing and then watched her sleep. Sitting by her crib as she burbled was not quite as restful as sleeping myself, but it had a certain quiet pleasure. She deserved better than I did. I knew I had made a number of bad decisions in the past year, so that I was in danger of actually lapping Mulder in the lifetime score. It was as if I'd had an enormous blade driven into my chest, right by my heart, when I discovered Emily. With a puncture wound like that you don't want to remove the foreign object until you're in the OR; otherwise the patient will bleed out almost instantly. The only problem is that you'd better get your victim to the hospital, because slowly bleeding to death is still bleeding to death. Emily was that sword and I had neither removed her nor repaired the damage in the months that followed San Francisco. Instead I'd stumbled from place to place, trying to pretend that I wasn't drenched in blood. My own and others'. I needed to prove to the court and to myself that I was sane once more. Could I really play hausfrau to pull this off? Mulder had adapted to his new babyfied existence. And anything he could do, I could do better, it was a guiding tenet of mine. Also I owed him and Miranda some effort keeping her safe from Bill and whatever his connection with Roush was, if only because Bill was my flesh and blood. The slow liquid tide of Miranda's breathing eventually lulled me back into sleep, upright in the rocking chair beside her. I did not dream again. Being up a ladder seemed to be an invitation to trouble these days. The next morning, I was wobbling near the front picture window, the ladder straddling the anemic impatiens I had planted to replace the bushes that the Arlington PD and FBI SWAT team had destroyed. I had a caulk gun in my hands and was trying to fill yet another spray of bullet holes when a rental Buick Regal pulled into the driveway. The Lariat sticker was clearly visible on the rear bumper and I wondered who from the Bureau had bothered to render a car so close to the office. It wasn't an agent. The woman who emerged from the car was well dressed in an understated fashion that I saw in my nightmares. Obviously, I had been watching too many Disney movies because the first thing that occurred to me as Christina Mulder walked to the door was that she had the same hairdo as the wicked stepmother from Cinderella. She stopped on the front step and gave me an assessing look. I wasn't exactly at my best prospective daughter-in-law mode right then and it registered in her pale eyes. "Is Fox home?" "Just a moment," I tapped on the window and caught Mulder's attention from where he was separating baby and cat for the millionth time. "It's your *mom*," I lipped to him through the glass. "Shit," he lipped back. After plopping Miranda back in her playpen, he emerged. "Hi Mom," he said in a slightly flippant tone, "run out of people to torment in New England?" He didn't invite her in. "What is this about putting your father's house up for sale?" she demanded in a tone that could have taught Queen Elizabeth a thing or two, "And you could have told me that you were getting married," she added, looking over her nose at me. I gave in and backed slowly down the ladder. "And where did you hear that?" I asked. "Fox told Ann Kelly at the real estate office, I play bridge with her mother. Funny that you should tell her, wasn't she the one that you were so close with that one summer?" He actually had the decency to blush. "I'm surprised that you noticed," he murmured. Mother and son stared at one another for a moment, but thirty-eight years of behavior modification are hard to break and he backed down. "Lemonade or iced tea?" he asked. The back porch was shaded from the sullen Virginia sun so it was only as hot and muggy as an armpit as opposed to a bare back baked in the sun. I dragged Miranda's playpen out on the porch and she played with her black cat toy under the cool eye of her grandmother. Mulder sat next to me on the glider, unconsciously fiddling with the neck of his T-shirt where it rubbed on the painfully pink new flesh and matching black scabs where George had skinned his throat. Through the entire interview, Tina never looked up from her appraisal of Miranda. On her part, Miranda looked up from her play from time to time to her grandmother with an incurious expression. "Have you made any plans?" Mulder took a drink to fortify himself. "First thing Friday morning at the county courthouse." And in the afternoon, we were going on our honeymoon -- a meeting with our new lawyer. "It's a preemptive strike since Scully's brother Bill is trying to get custody of Miranda on the grounds that we're mentally unstable. I thought that if we got married that would help the cause somewhat." I picked at the drying caulk on my jeans and looked out at the lawn steaming under the sun. The grass needed to be cut. From his place behind the screen, Catzilla pawed at the edge of the window frame and complained because he was stuck inside and all the good stuff was happening on the porch. "We still don't have rings," I said grimly. When I'd agreed it hadn't seemed quite so, well, sordid. I was brought up to believe in the sanctity of marriage, and though my recent sexual history wouldn't exactly make Father McHugh happy, I still got the heebie-jeebies when I considered bringing my relationship with Mulder under the heading "sacred." "I have my father's upstairs," Mulder said and rose to walk into the house. He was talking over his shoulder as he left. "We can't really afford anything spectacular for you, but I think there's a jewelry store at the mall. It's probably still open." At least he didn't offer me a cigar ring or the prize from a Crackerjacks box. Mulder's mother had been watching us impassively, neither frowning nor smiling, her face as impervious as the ceramic tiles on a space shuttle. Tina looked down at her hands, then pulled decisively at the rings on her left ring finger. They slid off easily; her knuckles were still patrician and her fingers slim, not swollen with age or care. "Here," she said. "I hope you have all the joy of them that I did." The diamond solitaire and matching thin gold band flashed like the fireball from a nuclear explosion in her palm. She held out her hand and I stared at it. I made it almost all the way to the toilet before I threw up. Clinging to the cold porcelain bowl, feeling colder sweat drip from my hairline to the rim of the powder room toilet, I shuddered and heaved until I was relieved of the burden of lunch. It was a bad anxiety attack, vomiting, hyperventilating, racing pulse, feelings of dread and fear, paranoia, and claustrophobia. Almost like being back at work. The spasms continued until I thought that the toilet bowl was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen, so cool and smooth and stable, the pivot around which my world was turning. I guess that's why they call it worshipping at the porcelain altar. I heard voices and footsteps in the hall and a moment later the door opened and Mulder poked his head in. "Scully?" "I'm fine Mulder," I moaned and another wave hit me. After I was done and had flushed the toilet, I sat back on the tiles and leaned against the wall, afraid to go too far from the safety of the bathroom. Mulder came after me with a cold, wet washcloth and wiped my face off as though I was Miranda. "Mom left," he said. "Do you think that I'm mentally unstable? Do you think that I would hurt Miranda?" Crouched on the floor, he rubbed his eyes until they were pink as a rabbit's. "No. The only person you endanger is yourself. Come on upstairs, the Mooselet is down for a nap -- join her." I stumbled upstairs while hanging onto his arm like an old woman. I brushed my teeth and drank a gallon of water. Mulder helped me out of my clothes and poured me onto the bed where he covered me with a blanket. I lay there in the cool room, listening to the oceanic sound of Miranda breathing over the baby monitor, and I finally drifted off. Iolokus IV: Res Judicata 3/18 inside we can not feel what's fake & what is real lover of mine I deny I lie maybe it was in my drink maybe I'm the gypsy jinx maybe I am his meat at noon with spoons &spoons of ice cream creams creams fill my mouth with other things Shara Scully slept like Miranda -- so still that I occasionally had to check to ensure that she was still breathing. After we got married, I'd be expected to watch her sleep every night for the rest of my life. I hoped she'd change her policy on TV or I'd be bored out of my skull in weeks. I couldn't believe how much of the Discovery, History, and Learning Channels the woman watched. I don't think she had ever watched a show with a laugh track in her life. Not to mention the fact that she had no idea where ESPN was. There was a point in my life that I thought I might turn out to be Ted Bundy. Now -- tragic irony or poetic justice? -- it seemed I was more of an Al. But Scully wasn't nearly as well endowed as Peg, more's the pity. It's not that I'd never thought about marriage. Hell, I'd even exchanged rings once. (She wanted both of us to be marked off from the herd, because she thought it was unfair that she was the only one supposed to be private property during the engagement. I suspect Scully would have the same objection if we'd attempted an actual engagement.) Then I'd started up with Dr. Werber and the relationship went downhill faster and messier than the Jamaican bobsled team. I'd never been any good at happy endings. The difficulty of my quest had always substituted for my ability to visualize a final goal. Samantha, aliens, truth, magic, it all swirled around in a mist of fantasies and pipe dreams -- a giant Hanukah list that I knew would never be fulfilled. I couldn't shake the feeling that I'd screw up or Scully would panic and bring our fragile union down like a UFO-buzzed plane. I'd been mad at Scully for leaving, for treating her daughter like she was an impulse purchase that could be returned for store credit. Yet I didn't have a fantasy perfect life that I thought she'd destroyed with that decision. What I knew about being a husband could fit in the palm of Miranda's hand. Where it would probably get smeared on the floor like anything else she held did. Shortly after dark, Scully's eyes melted open and she rolled over on her side to look at me. The blankness behind the blue made my chest hurt. "It's going to be all right," I said to both of us. Outside, the earliest of the crickets started chirping the insect aria of love. She put her hand on the side of my face and her skin was dry and warm as usual. Oddly enough, this was one of the Mooselet's affectionate gestures as well, only Scully's hands weren't wet with drool and the reaction that churned my stomach was nothing like the one that I had when Her Highness did the same thing. I leaned over and kissed her. Kissing had never really been a big part of our foreplay, and seemed to be an afterthought rather than an activity unto itself. The combination of the fear that was chilling the sexual centers of my brain and the dull ache in my ribs made it seem like the most natural thing in the world. Her hands spread out over the back of my shirt, warming against me and she kissed me back with a strange hesitancy that was sweet in the extreme. We lay there like teenagers on a picnic blanket, kissing and listening to the crickets outside, trying to think about anything and everything except what was looming up ahead like a barely submerged iceberg. **** When I was a little girl I imagined that I would have a big Barbie doll wedding with a creampuff dress, a horse and carriage ride to and from the church and my bridesmaids, who were my best friends would wear pink satin dresses. When I was a teenager, I imagined that my father would escort me down the aisle of the chapel at Annapolis in his dress whites while I wore an ever-so sleek white cocktail dress and impossibly high heels. I had miraculously grown five inches just in time. The face of the groom waiting in either fantasy was directly related to the actor who was the top box office or the singer who was at the top of the charts that week. When I was in medical school, I still thought wistfully about that arch of crossed swords a Navy bride gets to sail through, and my fantasy groom continued to look like Alec Baldwin, but he was a surgeon. Yes, all right, I thought about Jack when I was first with the FBI. It's terribly embarrassing now. Even when we started having sex, I never imagined marrying Mulder. God -- I could hardly stand living with him. And none of my fantasy weddings ever took place at the county courthouse, sandwiched in between the wedding of two lovesick, jailbait youngsters, one of whom (the female I assume) was visibly pregnant -- I didn't know that people still got married when that happened -- and an obvious Green Card couple. "Do NOT Take Pictures in the Waiting Room," the sign warned, as if anyone would want to. The county clerk recited the words of the civil ceremony without much interest. Mulder mumbled at the appropriate moments, and I grunted agreement. Warwick and Ingveld witnessed; Zippy had refused to go along with our pathetic scheme, as he termed it. Meanwhile, standing there in her pale blue suit from Talbot's, was Christina Mulder. I like to think that she was trying to atone for the hell that she'd put us through over the past year, but I suspect that she needed to witness the event for herself - kind of like making that last trip to the funeral home to view the body. She had to make sure that it was dead. Mulder, bless his pointed head, was decked out in the suit he'd forgotten at the dry cleaners, the only one that had survived George's image makeover. He looked slightly more festive than usual due to the wilting salmon-colored rose from the garden pinned to his lapel. The high collar disguised the scabs, though he'd had to insulate the shirt with a layer of tissue to guard against seepage. I had my own wilting rose pinned to my suit as well. Yes, the bride wore a suit. What else would I wear? It was a pencil-gray suit, double-breasted with a slightly shorter skirt than I usually wore, which meant that the skirt would have been obscenely short on a normally proportioned woman. The thing that cheesed me off was that I had bought a *beautiful* cream silk and linen suit when I was dying from cancer. I mean this was a to-die-for suit, as a matter of fact I had told no one that I had put a provision in my will that it was what I wanted to be buried in rather than whatever nightmare my mother picked out - anyway, the suit no longer fit. I huffed and I puffed and I squeezed my stomach in, but the skirt zipper refused to go the last few inches for me. It also made me look like a sausage around the hips now that I had gained weight back. Damnit, that was a great suit. Depression hadn't soured my carefully attained fashion sense. Since I had no intentions of going back to that emaciated size again, I gave the suit to Ingveld, and it amused her if nothing else. I was appalled that it actually fit Ingveld, even if the skirt was a little short. No one was allowed to be that long and narrow. It made me wonder if the end product of all the genetic tampering I had witnessed in the past two years was to create a race of greyhound people, long and lean and lovely. There was not going to be a place for pygmies like me in the New World Order. But even I can't hate anyone as sweet as Ingveld. She made me go shopping with her and seemed genuinely upset that I was not looking for some tissue paper and lace fantasy. The gray suit was a viable replacement for the cream one, and it had trousers as well which made it more valuable as a wardrobe staple. Ingveld herself was turned out in a retro sixties sundress that showed the tattoos on her arms and back, and Miranda was encased in a frothy pink monstrosity courtesy of Grandma Mulder. Actually, Miranda was the only one who seemed to be enjoying herself. She babbled and squawked throughout the breakneck speed ceremony and broke into inappropriate laughter when Mulder jammed the ring on my finger. ". . . you may now kiss the bride." Which he did with lips as sensual as a Kleenex. Miranda squealed and let out a stream of baby giggles. The clerk even smiled. My stomach heaved and bile burned the back of my throat. It was too horrible. It was not supposed to be like this, he was not the man that I was supposed to marry, and it was not supposed to be for this reason. My wedding was supposed to be traditional and romantic, not invested with the same level of intimacy as getting lunch at the McDonald's drive-through. Ingveld took pictures and I hoped that the film jammed in the camera. We had a celebratory lunch for our non-celebration. I don't remember anything about it. I tuned back in when, in the day's crowning glory, I got volunteered to drive my new mother-in-law back to her hotel while Miranda alternately complained and cooed in the back seat. At least someone was having a good time. Mulder's mother was just as hard to deal with one on one as when Mulder was around. I'd been hoping that he'd provoked her like he provoked me and that she was a sweet little old lady in her spare time, but no such luck. Part of my dislike had to be the class difference. My father spent his life defending his country; for this we lived on base housing and frequently ate Spaghetti-Os for five straight nights at the end of the month when one of the four kids had some special expense. Mulder, by contrast, sweats money, it's more common than oxygen to him, and his family got the big house in Martha's Vineyard because his parents helped deceive a trusting public and participated in human experimentation. Okay, maybe that just funded the *summer* house. The rest of the money probably came from bribes from sub-contractors. For whatever reason, the woman made my skin crawl. As I was pulling into the driveway of the Marriott, she put her hand on my arm. "I'm going to go to Philadelphia to see an old friend tomorrow," she said. "I may want to show you something in a few days." "What would you possibly have to show me that I'd want to see?" She smiled without teeth, but there was still a threat present. "I'm interested in why outsiders want control of my granddaughter, I think you ought to be as well." "Who are you going to see?" "Come to Philadelphia when I call you," she let the doorman help her out of the car with the stiff formality of the old and well-bred and disappeared into the air-conditioned shelter of the hotel. "What do you think about that? Should we trust your grandma?" I asked Miranda. I could see her in the additional mirror Mulder had attached to the rear-view for just such purpose. Miranda stuffed her fist in her mouth and declined comment. **** Mom took all parties involved out to brunch at a white-tablecloth restaurant in Old Town Alexandria just as if we'd had an orthodox (or Reform, for that matter) wedding. The place wasn't particularly baby-friendly but the maitre'd caved under Mom's icy control. I filled her bottle with apple juice and sat her on my lap to keep her involved in the festivities. Sitting next to me, Scully was as pale as the linen napkins and sipped at her orange juice with a hand that shook under the new burden of the rings. Actually, I was proud of the compromise that we had reached regarding the rings. Not far from the old apartment at Hegal Place there was an antique store where I had spent hours looking for the more obscure occult books, and I had remembered that they had estate jewelry. Scully wasn't opposed to having someone else's wedding band and engagement ring provided that it wasn't Mom's. In the end, Scully was the proud owner of a large blue topaz ring that was almost the same shade as her eyes and a plain gold band with someone else's wedding date engraved in it. April 15, 1912 to be exact. It seemed oddly appropriate, we didn't have enough lifeboats either. Someday, if any of this fucking mess turned out to be anything other than an obscene farce, I'd replace the ring with a new one with the correct date so she would be sure she was throwing an accurate symbol down the toilet. While Scully drove my mother back to her hotel, I stewed. I needed physical activity, I was sick to death of being cooped up in the house and my face was no longer plastered in every grocery store in town so it was probably safe to leave. I laced up my sneakers and went out. Careful of my various hurts, I jogged a couple blocks, working with the pain in my ribs, the pain in my neck and the pain in my chest that had nothing to do with nerve endings. The well-manicured lawns and gardens of the other houses seemed artificial as a movie set. Were there really people living in those houses or soulless clones as artificial and mindless as the TeleTubbies? I liked to think that my intelligence made me feel more than other people, you have to be self-aware to feel pain, right? Not that I was negating the suffering of non-Mensa members, but wasn't intelligence necessary to heighten the suffering? I reached the playground where Ralph Williams had been stabbed. I stopped and stretched. Where Ralph had fallen there was no plaque, no flowers, and no candles. No sign that a man had taken a knife in the chest for my daughter and me. And should Bill take Miranda away from me, Ralph would be dead for no reason. I didn't think Bill would kill Miranda the way George would have, but I suspected that he'd break her spirit. I knew that taking my gun over to the base housing at Bethesda and making Bill disappear was not the answer, but it was a nice fantasy nevertheless. I jogged home. Scully met me at the door with the Mooselet on her hip and a look of nuclear annoyance in her clear blue eyes. "Where the hell have you been?" she asked. Wait a minute. Were those rings we had put on in the ceremony or tiny handcuffs? "Went for a run," I took the Mooselet who patted the side of my face with her fat little hands and asked me long and important questions in MooseSpeak. "You could have told *someone*, left a note, sent an e-mail, or even hired a carrier pigeon," she snarled. "Passenger pigeon." "They're extinct." "I guess that's why you didn't get a message." The Mooselet knew I was teasing by the tone of my voice, but Scully wasn't as sure. The Mooselet wiggled and jiggled and giggled in my arms but Scully glared at me and put her hands on her hips which made the sweat ice up on my body as the ambient temperature in the room took on Antarctic proportions. I looked around but failed to see any penguins. "In the future, if you should decide that you need to be elsewhere, please inform *someone*. Someone with thumbs and a command of the English language. This means someone other than Catzilla or Miranda until she is older." The Mooselet gave out an apprehensive spit bubble and stared at Scully as though she had grown an extra head. "Sure, fine, whatever." "You better shower. The lawyer will be here any minute," her nose wrinkled, "you smell." **** Laura Broder appeared at five of four armed with a tape recorder and a briefcase. From her voice on the phone I wasn't surprised that she looked young. Frighteningly young, even though her years in practice indicated that she was only a year younger than I was. In her light cotton sweater and jeans, she looked like a college student, with long red-brown hair falling loosely past her shoulders in a careless swirl that made me think about growing my hair again. "Hi there," she said. "Is that Miranda?" Sure enough, I had the Mooselet clinging to my hip again, I suppose as my badge of good parenting. I suppressed the snide "No, it's her twin Susan, but they're only suing for custody of Miranda," that bubbled in my throat and nodded. When had I started to hate other people so much? It had something to do with the fact that everyone I met seemed to have some new way to hurt me. Or if they were nice like Ralph Williams I made them dead. But we were paying Laura Broder to be nice to us. Hopefully the fact that it wasn't voluntary would protect her from a bad end. "Come in," I offered and reset the alarm behind her. We went to the dining room, which had suffered very little in the assault on the house. Mulder was waiting, idly chewing his way through a bowl of sunflower seeds, which were probably ruining his new caps. "So, your folks at Arnstein Porter called me in because you have a custody problem. I do have a copy of your brother's motion, but it's not terribly informative, though it reads like science fiction at points. I read about the Roush hearings, and I reviewed the public record last night." "This part did not make it into the public record. Roush's human experiments produced one living subject, Miranda. Genetic tests revealed that she was created using my ova and sperm that -- that are genetically indistinguishable from Mulder's. Might have been his." Laura raised her eyebrows, but I continued, "The records were destroyed and were probably falsified in the first place. I also legally adopted her." I didn't want to say anything that would upset Mulder, so I let him take over. "Part of what the public didn't know about was that Roush's earlier experiments involved the splitting of preembryos to create multiple copies of the same genome. I had ... a number of brothers. Roush had access to some of their sperm and might have had access to mine." "That helps to explain the recent newspaper stories about your twin." "You wanted them to call him my dectuplet?" That earned a sharp look. "Okay, I'll need to see the adoption papers, but I'll just assume for now that everything's in order. Even if it isn't, we're probably okay. They're not challenging *your* relationship to Miranda, Dr. Scully, because they need the blood tie to have any interest in her themselves. I'll have to do more research but I think we can do okay on Mr. Mulder's fatherhood if she's been living with you as your daughter. So, when you found out about Miranda you got married?" I reddened and Mulder looked down. "Actually we got married this morning. Scully and I thought it would be a good idea, considering." "That's not good." Perfect, a lawyer with a talent for understatement. "But we need to discuss your objectives for the case. They are arguing that you abandoned Miranda, Dana, which means you aren't entitled to the normal presumption of fitness that parents get. Combined with the claim that Fox isn't really Miranda's father and the other attacks on your stability and fitness, that could be devastating. What we do now is you tell me everything you think they might use against you. Please try to be as honest as possible, the only way I'm any use is if I can prepare against their best case." She paused and drew breath while we absorbed the caution. "One more thing. I notice that you use each other's last names. It's a charming idiosyncrasy. Charm is good; idiosyncrasy is not, particularly for two people who just married to stave off a lawsuit. From now on it's Fox and Dana, even when you're alone. Get into the habit. You'll need to talk to a number of experts and testify before the judge, and if you slip it will look very bad." Mulder's face had taken on a look of horror that rivaled the one he'd worn when I made him rummage for Leonard Betts's head in the biohazard container. "You let Bambi call you 'Fox,'" I reminded him. Broder's face whipped back and forth between us, trying to gauge the emotional temperature in the room. "Doesn't count, she was an animal too," he said. "Besides, I wanted to get lai --" He stopped and rubbed at the scars. "Whatever," he muttered. Laura Broder was with us all evening as we tried to explain all the events that had led up to this point -- Samantha's abduction, the multiple generations of experimental subjects, the Mulders that had been cc'd around the country, and so on. We also had to explain the X Files and all the tricks we'd pulled over the years. Anyone with two neurons to rub together would bring Mulder's employment file (not to mention his hospitalization records) into court when trying to prove that we weren't fit to take care of a child. Mulder's employment file was enough to make someone hesitate before letting him take care of a houseplant. We didn't bother to mention the many fish that had hit the sewers over the years. Laura took it pretty well, considering. We talked through dinner, through coffee and dessert, and through Miranda's bedtime. The lawyer didn't ask many questions, but they were always embarrassing when she did. She was particularly interested in our mistakes, the times we went against orders and protocol. She really didn't like the Roche incident (yeah, take a number). When the baby monitor screamed bloody murder, Mulder left to check on Miranda. I followed Laura's gaze. "While Mu -- while Fox is gone, there's something I want to ask you. Are you a lawyer or a personal trainer?" "I'm a lawyer?" Her uncertainty didn't make me particularly confident. "Then stop watching his ass, all right? That's not part of your job." She turned scarlet and hid her eyes with her hand. "Okay, I admit it, you got me. But cut me some slack -- I work with lawyers all day, it's not often I'm actually in the presence of a man like that. One that hasn't spent the past ten years glued to a desk. I've just got my nose pressed up against the glass -- I'm not trying to get any closer." "Yeah, well, do your window shopping on your own time." "I could not charge you for the time I spend looking," she joked and I smiled at her thinly. I really hated this whole situation -- nothing was under my control, I was out of my area of expertise in every imaginable way, and I had to make nice to anyone who could potentially screw me over if I didn't behave. This is why I became a FBI agent in the first place -- so I could be the one asking the questions and determining the answers. We needed Laura Broder or someone like her. But she seemed to want to be my friend, too, and I just wasn't interested or even capable of reciprocating. Certainly not as long as she looked at Mulder with that little gleam in her eye. Wait a minute, we were married. Should that have made a difference? Should I have been more annoyed or less? This was like driving in New Jersey without a map. Mulder returned and we continued explaining our twisted history to her. We got all the way to George when she declared that she was completely overwhelmed and we'd have to finish tomorrow. I wanted to tell her to try living it, if she wanted to know what 'overwhelmed' was really like. Iolokus IV: Res Judicata 4/18 You don't want to talk So baby shut up And let me drink the wine from your fur tea cup Velcro candy, sticky sweet Make my tattoos melt in the heat Well, I ain't no veggie Like my flesh on the bone Alive and lickin' on your ice cream cone Alice Cooper I was lying on the bed, reading a field report from a barely-literate rookie who had made a royal mess out of working a child molester profile up in Vermont, when Scully came out of the bathroom wearing my favorite Yankees shirt and a pensive expression. "What do you think of her?" she asked me around the dental floss she was rhythmically drawing through her teeth. I found public dental hygiene borderline disgusting, and habitually shut the bathroom door to brush my teeth. What was the deal with that, anyway? No matter how hot and heavy things had gotten in hotel rooms over the continental US, we'd never been big on sharing our grooming rituals. I wasn't sure if I liked this new level of intimacy. The next thing that would happen was she'd think nothing of busting into the bathroom to pee while I was shaving. "She seems to know her law." "I mean what do you think of *her*," she prodded. There were briars around the last word, and I wasn't sure what I was supposed to do to get around them. Sometimes the direct approach is the best. "Your point is what?" "She's an attractive woman." Oh great. Fan-fucking-tastic. We'd been married less than a day, still hadn't had sex and she was asking me if I was interested in another woman. If Scully kept up with this shit, I could be tempted to become interested in another woman. And Laura Broder was definitely do-able. "You're tired, it's late, come to bed," I took off my glasses, put away the report and shut out the light. Feeling petulant, I flopped back into the pillows and took my time getting comfortable. She snorted and padded back into the bathroom. Scully takes a long time getting ready for bed. There are obscure rituals and incantations to the skin care gods. There are unguents and powders, sponges and brushes and things I can't begin to understand. She has more mud than Pigpen, though admittedly it looks better on her. If I had known how much work it took to get that perfect skin of hers, I probably wouldn't have fixated on it so much. This night, though, she lasted beyond the full spa treatment. I had the feeling she was waiting in the bathroom so that she wouldn't have to come to her marital bed. That annoyed me. It's not as if she was a real newlywed; what would she be nervous about? I thought that I might do well to cut her a little slack. She'd been very calm about the whole wedding, and given her issues surrounding independence and commitment I should really be pleased with that. Also, we still hadn't resolved any of the outstanding issues surrounding my dead brothers Jason and George. Our next-to-last sexual encounter involved me playing George and her playing quiescent corpse, which was extreme even for us. By the time she came creeping back into the bedroom I was feeling less superior and more sympathetic, which might have been part of her plan. I could see her outlined in the faint light from the security perimeter that seeped through the shades. She was still wearing the goddamn shirt as she tossed back the comforter and slid into bed. I got a kick out of her using it as loungewear, but it left a lot to be desired, so to speak, when we were actually in bed together. "Hey," I said softly, turning onto my stomach and reaching out to put a hand on her breast, "What's going on?" She gave a choked chuckle, sounding like Miranda when she was about to spit something up. "This is very strange." "I would have carried you over the threshold but I wasn't sure my back would hold out." "It doesn't matter." Her voice was back to its strangled huskiness, as if -- could it be? Perhaps I had skipped a few steps by going straight to her chest like a local cop's gaze. Her face was a furnace against my fingers but the wetness around her eyes hadn't yet evaporated when I touched it. "I'm fine, Mulder," she whispered. Liar. Suddenly the darkness was composed of broken glass, sharp edges everywhere and I was afraid I might get her sliced up if I moved wrong. I hauled myself over until I was half on top of her, braced precariously on my forearms with my face hooked over her shoulder to whisper in her ear. "Dana?" "Dana?" she repeated with the exact wry incredulousness with which she'd greeted my first-ever use of her Christian name. Still, her knees bent and her legs spread wider around me, letting me settle my weight more comfortably on her. "What do you want me to do?" I was drifting on the open ocean that is Scully, the water choppy around me and no land in sight. Asking Scully a direct question usually only works when it relates to someone else's dead body, but she surprised me: "I want to pretend that this is my wedding night." Through the shirt, I could feel her breasts flattening against me as she struggled to keep her breathing even and my cock hardened in response. Only Scully could ask me to pretend the truth. Surely she didn't want some godawful speech from me. My brain revolved in blood-deprived circles, the wheel spinning but the hamster MIA. Reverence rather than familiarity, that had to be what she was after. I guess she didn't understand that even in the darkest moments of our sex life, the ones crossing the lines between normal and deviant, reverence was my MO. How could I not be reverent with a strange and wonderful creature like her? I moved away and she made a non-sound, an indrawn breath that was the only sign she was hurt. Scully could probably take a bullet and not make more noise than that. She exhaled again when I ran my hand from her throat to her thighs, skimming with the lightest of touches over the tropical-warm seascape of her body. Her forehead tasted like face cream or something. Her lips tasted of toothpaste. I relearned the contours of her face, feeling the fine invisible down on her cheeks against my lips. "It's going to be all right," I said. Her breast was heavy and warm underneath my hand and I swirled my thumb around until I caught her stiffening nipple. The mattress shifted as her body twitched. "Your ribs..." she slurred, but it was part of the game; she didn't want me to stop or she'd be pulling doctor rank on me. "Don't worry about it." I let my fingers walk down the cotton front of the shirt until I hit the bare skin of her thighs. Shirt up, underwear down, and things were looking a lot better. She felt cooler than usual as I licked the undersides of her breasts and stroked my hands down her sides. I snagged a pillow and used it to lift her hips, giving me a better angle that didn't jog my nose. I would have liked to bury my snout in her, but that wasn't the kind of pain that interested me so I was careful, tasting the sea-salt of her flesh but controlling her so that she didn't surge into my broken cartilage. The short grunts she made let me know that this was going to take a while. I moved my mouth up to the soft skin between her navel and the beginning of her pubic hair and nibbled a little. "F--fox?" she stammered and then laughed nervously. I could feel the tight muscles of her abdomen jump underneath my lips. "We could stick to moans and groans in bed, honey," I suggested and she jerked like an electrocuted frog. The press of her knee against my abused chest muscles was enough to make me regret the endearment even without her outraged face in the bad light. "Okay--" she said in a half-voice and I felt her force herself to relax. I separated her knees with my hands and bent to the task. It's a good thing I enjoy oral sex because my ever-wagging tongue was tired by the time she had her climax; I was about ready to ask her to fake it when she finally jerked, gasped and went boneless above me. She took deep relieved breaths as I pulled myself up the bed to reach the headboard, lay on my back beside her, and let my hand stroke the hot skin of her belly. After a minute, she shot me a that-was-it? look. "The doctor okayed the female superior position," I whispered, trying to sound sly and sexy. "That's not a position, it's a way of life," she whispered back. I wondered if we were subconsciously trying not to wake the baby, two doors down the hall. In any event she took the hint and rummaged impatiently in the nightstand for a condom, smoothing on the latex with gratifying yet finely controlled haste. She straddled me, lowering herself onto my cock with a series of grunts. Hot as a lava flow around me, she settled her weight on my thighs and reached forward to brace herself against the bed, but I caught her falling breasts in my hands and pushed back. Her arms were too short to reach all the way down so I was supporting her upper body, her nipples pushing aggressively into my palms. Supposedly the woman is in control in this position but I liked to watch her flailing for balance, liked how she was caught in my hands. She gave up and tossed her head back, her nearly unmarred throat gray in the dimness of the light as she surged up and down, relying on my hands to keep her from falling. The beauty of having her on top of me is that I get to see almost everything at once -- her face lax as she concentrates on riding me into the ground, her hair brushing her shoulders like phantom kisses, her breasts above and around my grasping fingers. The dimple of her navel, the fierce wildness of hair that my cock disappears into, the columns of her thighs as they bracket my chest. It's complete visual overload. With her closed down around me, and her incredible blue eyes dipping down to meet mine, I thought I could die right then and there from sheer animal pleasure. Maybe that piece of paper, that pair of rings was going to take the acid out of our relationship, maybe she would stop hating me for making love to her. With a jolt, she flung herself forward, until her face was a millimeter from mine, and the look in her eyes in the darkness of the room wasn't entirely sane. Her elbows were locked on either side of my head; her breasts smashed up against my chest like hot water balloons. She gasped as she slammed down and around me, the hair clinging wet and stringy to her face with effort's sweat. I swirled my hands over the glazed surface of her back, skimming over the place I knew her tattoo was, although I couldn't feel a difference in the fine calfskin of her back. Her lips were barely grazing mine, her fingers clutching my skull through my hair, as though she could force something out of me by manually liquefying my brain. "You are - " I started to say but she cut me off, her mouth hard on mine as resuscitation. Locked inside her, never intending to leave, I let her squeeze around me, providing the last necessary bit of unbelievable white-hot sensation that sent my hips towards the ceiling and my cock jetting out a couple weeks' worth of hot semen frustration into her. My hands grabbed her hips and pulled her down tighter onto me. She moaned into my mouth and started to shimmy around me as her climax flared along her hot little body. I clutched at her trying to keep her from flinging herself off me like a rider on a mechanical bull. Finally, she ground to a halt and flowed onto my chest, any worries about my cracked ribs forgotten. Rubbing the skin on her back, pushing her hair away from her face, I looked down at her beautiful little face crushed against my chest, her delicate Roman nose bent against my breastbone. Unexpectedly, one eye opened and gave me a little flash of mischief that hadn't been there for weeks. "Whoa," she muttered and kissed my left nipple. "You know what they say - absence makes the heart grow fonder." "I thought it was absence makes the dick grow harder." "Talking dirty to me? You're turning me on." "Mulder, Diet Coke turns you on." There wasn't much of an answer for that so I just put my fingers over her lips. "It's late. Go to sleep." I warned in the same voice I used on the Mooselet for the same reason. She snorted into my chest and did, on top of me, and although it made my bones ache, I didn't move, just listened to the barely audible pattern of her breathing until I was lulled asleep myself. *** The birds were unnaturally loud that morning, and for a change, I awoke first. The light seeping past the shades was blue-gray, indicating that it was not much past six and we had hours until we had to go face Bill and the judge. Still sleepy and languorous, I huddled down in the sheets, up against Mulder's warm body and didn't want to get up. I hate courtrooms, I hate trials, and I especially hated that I was going to be the one on trial. Mulder must have been more used to the concept, having been on trial in one form or another most of his adult life, and he slumbered on, his breath faintly whistling through his damaged nose. I wondered if he'd deviated his septum, as this noise was a recent development. I picked up my head and looked down at him, examining the line of his nose to see if it lacked more symmetry than usual. He was sprawled on his back, one hand curled limply against his chest, and the other one flailing off into the vastness of the sheets like a postmodern St. Sebastian with bruises replacing arrows. For once all the points and angles had rounded out on his face and he looked almost peaceful. That was the one time that I could look down at Mulder and admit that part of me could love him - but only when he was asleep and not getting either or both of us into trouble. There was a time that I thought that Mulder would have been perfect if he didn't talk. Then I met his mute twin Emerson and I realized that he'd only type or sign his patented flippant insanity. Feeling chilled in my head and in my body, I curled tighter around him, soaking up the warmth from his skin. There had been times in the not-so-distant past that I thought the only way I kept any measure of empathy with the human race was by absorbing it from his body. I nuzzled closer, smelling the rich yeasty smell of the sex we'd had overlaying his usual book and body smell. I had kept one of his shirts during the dismal six months that we'd been apart and slept with my face in it more nights than not, until my own smell permeated the fabric and I'd slept in it instead. He grunted and twitched in his sleep, moving closer to the shore of wakefulness. Strange that before we'd become lovers I'd heard him at night, calling out at whatever midnight horror movie ran through his brain while he slept, but the nights that he slept with me he only murmured non-sentences in what sounded like a tone of aggravation. I imagined that he argued with me as strenuously asleep as he did awake. Sliding my hand over the dry smoothness of his chest, tangling my new rings in the soft hair that grew like an afterthought of a secondary sex characteristic, I felt his heart beat against my palm, slow as a sleeping bee's buzz. Under my hand, the flat and useless nipple tightened from the stimulation. Intrigued, I flicked my fingernail against it and watched the darker skin wrinkle in dismay at being disturbed. He whuffed deep in his throat and stirred a bit. Moving downwards, I stroked the flat length of his stomach, counting the ribs and feeling the hard muscles of his abdomen move as he breathed. It was sheer vanity that made him do all those sit-ups in the morning, run those miles, the only thing he'd ever tended with care before Miranda had been his own body - and I had to admit that he did a good job. The skin under his navel was soft as the baby's and cool, warming as I moved my hand along the faint line of fur that ran from his navel to genitals. Under my hand, the skin twitched, and the sleep-dazed length of his cock dragged itself drunkenly upright. I'd been awakened by his mouth between my legs more often than I could have imagined, and it seemed that this was an opportunity to reciprocate. Slinking underneath the sheets, I let my shoulders make a tent as I knelt next to his hips. I dragged my fingers across the slightly moist skin of his cock and felt the pulsing blood rise up to meet me. Leisurely, I licked at him, feeling the jump and sway against my lips and tongue. There was something about going down on him while he was mostly asleep that appealed to me. Besides, we were married now and if one were to believe the popular press our sex life was rapidly approaching the end of its shelf life. Finally, I peeled my lips over my teeth and engulfed him with my mouth. Funny how his cock that always felt like an endless ivory pole capable of elongating to unbelievable lengths inside of me during intercourse took on more manageable and fleshy characteristics in my mouth. Outside the hot, fermenting tent of sheets, came a small, surprised sound followed by a low chuckle. "Oh Laura, what if Scully finds out?" I choked and started to laugh. I had to pull my mouth off before I castrated him. With the sheets still over my head I sat up and laughed, laughed until my diaphragm was sore and my eyes were watering. At the head of the bed I could hear that Mulder was equally helpless at the effects of his own wit. When I had managed to get myself back under control and could breathe again, I seized his cock at the base and slid my mouth over it again. The laughing stopped when I started sucking at him in earnest, sliding my mouth and tongue up and down over his shaft in the rhythm that I knew he liked. He groaned, and his hand caught my shoulder, fingers tightening in synch with my movements. While I tightened my fingers at the base of his cock, he pulled back the sheets from our bodies and the weak morning light made me squint. His hands were shaking when he pushed my hair away from my face. I know he likes to watch, it must come out of his video obsession. I looked up at him and saw that he had gone soft-mouthed with bliss over the scabbed battlefield of his throat, and his eyes glimmered amber in the fresh light. Our eyes caught and latched and the connection was shockingly lewd, staring at him unblinking as I moved up and down, my saliva dripping onto his balls as he watched. I was getting wet myself just from looking back at him. "Oh God," he husked and flopped back into the pillows while his hips urged me into a faster and more frantic tempo. He groaned and surged up, shuddering and filling my mouth with the saltwater/sweet taste of his jism. He subsided weakly, breathing hard out of his beaten throat. "Are you trying to kill me?" "Not unless I'm going to be a wealthy widow." "I guess I'll be alive for a good long time yet." I sat up and scooted up to the head of the bed, trying to wipe off my lips as discreetly as possible. But Mulder caught my chin and swept his thumb across my mouth which would have been sexy, if I hadn't seen him do it to Miranda a thousand times. I settled back against the headboard and Mulder laid his head back onto my chest, his body nestled between my knees, my hands draped over his shoulders and onto his chest. He was holding my hands and examining them as if for powder burns. "How do you feel?" he asked. "Afraid," I admitted, "if this doesn't work, they'll take Miranda away from you. It will be all my fault." "They won't." "I wish I had your optimism." "Tenacity, it's all in the tenacity." His chest hitched as though he was about to speak, but he thought better of it and relaxed again. I rubbed my foot up and down his hipbone and tried not to think. This was the kind of quiet moment that we never had much opportunity for. Stolen humping in hotel rooms, angry sex over long weekends, stealth fucking in bathrooms. What was lawful sexual congress going to be like? Part of the charm had been the fact that the affair had been forbidden. He was nominally my superior and *thou shall not fuck thy superior agent* was pretty well carved in stone. When I think about it, that Bureau policy was the one that we had adhered the longest. While I sulked, Mulder's dangerous hands swept up and down my thighs, my calves and my feet like feather fans while the weight of his head pressed into my chest like a curse from a Grimm's fairy tale. With my pelvis pressed firmly into his spine, I could probably bring myself off with a few well-timed undulations. There was so much aroused blood pooled around my pudenda that I was getting lightheaded. He was digging his thumb into the arch of my foot, making me grumble under my breath. He started wiggling my toes one after another while chanting deep in a chuckle-thickened throat. "This little alien went to market, this little alien stayed home . . . " I giggled and kicked my foot free of his tickling grip. Mulder snickered and rolled over, pushing me down against the mattress. His morning beard scored the skin on my shoulder and neck, making me laugh harder as that tickled as well. I rolled underneath him, hooking my feet behind his knees. "Ticklish much Gopher-girl?" "Make my day Gopher-boy," I snorted into the crinkled cartilage of his ear. Hands gripped my waist, pinning me down with tolerant amusement that was about as threatening as one of Miranda's toys. He breathed into my ear with a low growl that I assumed was the mating call of the giant mutant gopher. If it could only always be like this, I wouldn't have had such reservations about the entire matrimonial state. I pulled the speaker plug in my head and the critical voice went silent and all I could hear was my own heartbeat while Mulder's pulse thrummed in counterpoint. I sighed and pulled myself up against the ropy hardness of his torso, gathering him into my arms and pulling him gently down against me, rubbing, sticky with sweat and other body secretions. I ran my hands up and down the hard bridge of his back, the beads of his spine vibrating against my fingers, the unfamiliar metal of the rings jarring my phalanges. He sighed and purred under my touch, arching his back like Catzilla, but grinding the stiffening length of his cock up against my thigh. The scratchy skin on his face scraped my breasts when he began to savage at my wide-awake nipples that felt hard enough to scratch glass. He leaned away to grab a condom, swift as a snake taking a mouse. I moaned and his hands impatiently parted my thighs, my head fell back into the hot pillow and my moan tightened into a growl when he finally pushed inside me. God. No one would understand, the worse the situation got, the better the sex got. It was like Hansel and Gretel clinging together in the witch's oven in a pornographic movie. My quad muscles started to shake. "Your ribs-" I hissed. "It's a good hurt," he said in a swirl of amusement and lust. I arched up against him, trying to draw him in deeper, to fill me to oblivion, pulling as gently as possible on his still- bruised torso. He covered my face and eyes with hard lipped kisses almost stinging my skin. While he kissed me he slid into me with a slow carefulness that made me whine with need. His hands pressed my hair into the pillow, so I couldn't move my head away from him. His mouth flowed against mine while his cock moved with teasing slowness inside me. I whined like Miranda grasping after a toy or a sweet and he looked down at me with a dazed indulgence which was nothing like the indulgent look he wore when she made the same noise. The restless motes in his eyes pulled me in like quickmud in a swamp. I fell into the hot forest inside his head, seeing shapes and things moving through the green and brown darkness and I saw my own eyes looking back at me. Don't hurt me, love me, make it turn out all right, make it all go away. At least for the next ten minutes. I think there were tears building up in our eyes and I couldn't tell whose. I tried to turn my head but his hands prevented me, and the deep stroking inside was making it harder to think than usual. I was gasping and squeezing hard handfuls of the bedclothes so I wouldn't hurt him any more, he glided in and out, somehow managing to graze my clit on each and every stroke. Building pressure, building pleasure radiating out from my pelvis until my toes curled and my breathing fluttered like a trapped moth. In me and around me and through me running like mercury through my nerves. And I looked back into the things creeping through the space behind his eyes, I saw his lips form the words that I didn't want to see, right before those lips closed with sharpening teeth on the spot on my shoulder that never failed to send me into oblivion. But I didn't go alone, Mulder came with me, shaking and crashing into my body. I held his head against my shoulder and listened to our raw breathing in the quiet morning room. We lay that way until the trembling stopped, and fell asleep again while he was still inside me. Years later, I staggered to the bathroom and had a quick shower. I still didn't know what I was supposed to wear to a pretrial conference, and I settled on a pantsuit that, I noted with some pleasure, fit much better than it had a few weeks ago. Say what you will about Mulder, he keeps me fed. Iolokus IV: Res Judicata 5/18 There's a reason for your silence tonight There's a reason for my fear There's a reason for the violence tonight There's a great decision here I am waiting in the calm before the storm. When it comes down to this You never seemed so lonely Just like the one with an ice cream smile. Big Country Laura rode with us to court. She kept up a running stream of commentary, explaining how a platoon of strangers was going to march through our lives to evaluate them for suitability. She wanted me to get a Thirtysomething makeover, blue jeans and sneakers and ponytails; mommies seemingly do not wear tattoo-baring tank tops, at least not when they're being scrutinized by psychologists and social workers. Apparently mommies don't sweat in Virginia. We arrived at the new courthouse downtown with only minutes to spare, and had to surrender our sidearms before we were allowed in. We weren't acting in our federal capacity, and so Virginia was unwilling to let us participate in any shootouts that developed. If Ingveld hadn't found the right corridor, we would have been late for our own high-tech lynching. That first morning in court was anticlimactic in the extreme. We listened without comprehension as our lawyer and Bill's traded multisyllabic near-insults and spouted names of court cases with the ease of Mulder listing recorded UFO sightings. I'm not sure why we were even present except as live exhibits. Laura had wanted me to testify about the circumstances of Miranda's short stay in Montana with Mulder's twin Emerson and Emerson's wife -- I'd left her there when I could no longer deal with the two of us. God knows I would have left myself there too if I could have gotten away with it, but that was beside the point now. So there I was in my gray wedding suit, stiff and anxious and terrified that I was going to vomit all over the court reporter. But the judge refused to hear me. I didn't understand what had happened until Laura came back to us, her skin pulled tightly across her face like a victim of excessive plastic surgery, and informed us that he'd ruled that I'd abandoned Miranda as a matter of law, without needing testimony about my reasons. Miranda couldn't comprehend those reasons at the time; why should the law? We sat like stumps in a clear-cut forest and waited for her to finish up. The second time she returned she was much happier. Mulder had won his separate battle to be declared Miranda's lawful father, apparently because Bill didn't really have a good alternate candidate; the most likely sperm donors were all dead, and so the court wanted to assign her a living natural parent. Especially since I'd ditched her. Then we had to agree to a schedule of home visits, interviews together and separately, appointments for experts to watch us take care of Miranda and grade us on our performance, appointments for Bill and Tara to meet Miranda and see how she reacted to them. I hoped she bit their smug faces off. As with any court case, this took an incredibly long time. Or maybe it was just the renewed depression that stretched time out like Eugene Tooms. When we got out, the pounding summer sun was sliding down towards the horizon, to match my mood. I let Mulder drive back. He was better used to Miranda's howls and *he'd* been vindicated by the judge. I would have headed straight for the liquor cabinet, but I was queasy enough without alcohol. Instead, shaking and sweating, I rushed into the downstairs bathroom and disposed of the undigested parts of a lunch I never should have eaten. After I dried my hands and fixed my make-up, I found Mulder lurking near the door with a speculative look on his face. "You all right?" "I'm fine," I reassured him. Mulder grunted and took Miranda upstairs to get her changed. I kicked my shoes off and shuffled out onto the porch in my stockings. The least thing I had to worry about at that moment was runners. I sat on the glider and looked out over the bee-buzzed and dreamy early evening backyard. The scars from the Giant Mutant Gophers had been filled in with topsoil and planted with impatiens (the official flower of Casa Mulder), giving undulating lines of color spreading out from the house to the edges of the yard. The roses that climbed up the side of the porch had come with the house and the main branches of the bushes were as big around as my forearm. There was no use crying to the roses that the judge said that I no longer was due the rights of a parent. At the same time Mulder (freer of murdering pedophiles and willing to have holes drilled in his own skull) was. Some things are beyond ironic. Between Leonard Betts and George Naxos I changed into someone that I didn't recognize - and someone that I wouldn't have wanted to spend any time with. "I have to go to the city. To see what the Gunmen have found out about Laura." Mulder said from the shadow of the house. The back yard was steaming like a jungle and I wondered what was stealthily slipping through the overgrown bushes. I needed to call a landscaping outfit. The back yard wasn't fit for Miranda to play in. She needed a sandbox and a swingset, and a little house to hide from the grown-ups in. She needed a thick lawn to cushion her tumbles, where she could run, chase butterflies, blow bubbles and build a snowman in Virginia' s rare but not unheard-of snows. All the things that I'd never had in the utilitarian base housing. Maybe a pond with frogs to catch and big, lazy carp to overfeed, and a tire swing. And a big fence full of sensors to keep the kid in and the monsters out. Maybe if the case went well I'd make the call. So much was depending on convincing the judge that we could make Miranda safe from me. God, I had spent the past six years of my life trying to make the country safe for truth, justice, and the American way, and my reward was that I had turned into one of the monsters. I'd watched a child of mine die and felt only an intellectual frustration because I hadn't been able to solve her medical problem. I'd taken out my frustration on Mulder's mind and body afterwards. I had set fire to the end result of experimentation on my ova - I couldn't even think of the twisted mutations as children - and I'd have to defend my position to God about that later on. Again, I'd used Mulder as my willing whipping boy. Was I really going to be able to recite fairy tales after this? Could I tell a child that Baba Yaga wasn't going to eat her or that Sleeping Beauty could be revived with a kiss if she was in a deep coma with no indication of brain activity and the best thing to do was see if she had a donor card? I just couldn't see myself as a cuddly, comforting mommy the way that my mother had been. I couldn't tell a child that everything was going to be all right when there are pedophiles, smallpox, killer bees carrying viruses, Ebola, pollution, SUV's, and dangerous men in dark suits to contend with. But Mulder could. He had the nurturing routine down cold - and it fit him as well as his boxer briefs did. And, as much as I hated to admit it, it was equally as attractive. The only female that you don't mind seeing in your lover's arms is his baby daughter. "Dana?" I was still so unused to hearing my first name in his voice that I looked up after the third repetition. "Are you all right?" he asked. I managed a wry smile. "Yes, you must go and make sure that we haven't gotten fucked over once again and that Laura is exactly as advertised - an earnest young family lawyer and not another minion of darkness." I stood up and shuffled barefoot over to the door where he loomed in the darkness. Barefoot, the top of my head barely reached his shoulder, but I was still able to put my hand on the center of his chest. Through the wear-wrinkled cotton of his shirt, I could feel his heart beating through the flesh and bone casing. This calmed me somewhat. "Go ahead, we'll be fine." In an awkward, bobbing motion that showed me the gangly over-bright teenager he had been, he bent down and gave me a quick kiss. My momentary surprise evaporated after I remembered that we were, after all, married now and such domestic expressions of affection were considered normal. Shit. Normal. What a joke. **** Scully being passive is not unlike a shift in the barometer before a major storm front comes through. Although we'd had an appallingly wet spring, early summer storms are not uncommon around the Potomac. The sky around the Capitol looked like one of the psychedelic light shows that accompanied Grateful Dead concerts. In a funny way, I missed Dead shows. A couple nights a year I could put on a t-shirt and melt into an amorphous contact high of happiness. I wasn't crazy about the music or the drug culture; I just liked being an anonymous part of an entity for a few hours. Deadheads, like Trekkers, are an incredibly *pleasant* subculture. I'd take a long bus trip with a group of Deadheads or Trekkers over conspiracy theorists any day of the week. The food was generally better too. Just to underscore the theme of predeterminism that was pervading my life like the smell of urine in a Manhattan summer, Langley was wearing a dancing bear t-shirt and Frohike was sporting an IDIC button on his work vest when I rolled into conspiracy central that evening. It occurred to me that the Lone Gunmen's war room wasn't a family-friendly place. Standing in the computer-monitor-lit darkness, I could still make out half a dozen objects small enough to choke a baby and a host of unprotected electrical outlets. Not to mention that the caseless server with the blinking lights and running processors looked like it had great potential to have Teletubby bodies shoved into the works. AGAIN! Babies confounded technology on a regular basis. Miranda had already figured out that the rubber bands that I had wound around the knobs on the lower cabinets of the kitchen would break if enough force were applied. This meant that she had open access to the cleaning supplies underneath the sink until I had figured out her MO and replaced the rubber bands with genuine toddler locks. Now *I* couldn't get the cabinets open. Yet another reason to keep Scully around. I'd have to lock down all my bookmarks when Miranda got tall enough to reach a keyboard. Actually, I'd have to lock them down that night since Scully was tall enough. "Your lawyer's clean," Langley announced and looked at me from over his glasses, which were pink with diamond rhinestones for some reason. "About the only connection she has with Roush is the fact that she used their brand of birth control pill when she was in college. Must have been the standard issue for the Ivy League dispensaries," Byers finished, "but I consider that an extremely tenuous link - more than six degrees of separation." "She's a legal babe," Frohike added with one of his more lecherous smiles. Unaccountably, I was annoyed and shoved my hands in my pockets. "Speaking of babes," Langley moved a little closer to me, "we have a general net search run on your name as part of our daily server routine." "How thoughtful." "We received information from the database on the Arlington County server that a marriage certificate was issued to you and one Dana Katherine Scully, MD." "Not that we were surprised," Frohike added, fiddling with a keyboard until the bare Oracle database fields from the courthouse server were displayed like bones in a filleted fish, "you've been heading that way for years with the grace and skill of that downhill skier on the 'agony of defeat' segment of Wide World of Sports." "You could have told us," Byers chimed in with his customary gentle tones. "It's none of your business," my voice came out like chipped ice, "it happened because of the custody battle over Miranda." "Mulder, you should quit deluding yourself. You've had it bad for her for years," Frohike said, "Do you want copies of your changed tax status forms?" My heart was banging around in my chest like a loose filter on an air conditioner. "I want whatever additional information you have about Roush. I have to get back home." "What's the matter, the wifey not letting you out at night?" Langley mocked. The banging got louder as the AC in my chest went into Antarctic mode. "I guess this means that the Red Dwarf marathons are over." Frohike said with a sad shake of his head, "what a shame, I just got the latest transferred over to VHS format." "We would have thrown you a bachelor party," Byers handed me a sheaf of papers, "there's not much new here. Just some additional detail like telephone numbers and e-mail addresses for the BioQuest staff." I realized that they had effectively surrounded me in the dark and dirty little room. I wanted to be back home with Scully's stupid throw pillows and scented candles instead of this dingy burrow. Underneath my wrinkled shirt, I could feel agitated sweat condense on my skin. "Right. Thanks." I took the papers and fled to the steaming street. The watery air clogged my lungs and the now-dark sky had taken on the gouty complexion it gets before the rain comes like the wrath of God. I stared at the monstrous sky over the Washington monument which looked it was going to lance the swollen clouds. Jeez, even the sky looked evil that night. Rubbernecking at the view probably saved my life. I clicked Scully's little gadget that unlocks the car and flashes the lights but I was still staring at the sky when the car exploded, knocking me to the ground like a doll brushed by a giant's shoe. The printed pages fluttered the dirty pavement like oversized snowflakes as the Ford burned away like a backyard barbecue. I believe in spontaneous human combustion but not spontaneous automotive combustion. At least they shouldn't combust when the internal combustion engine is not running. Damn Henry Ford anyway. Ford: "Found On Road Dead - Fix Or Repair Daily". Fox On Road Dead. Had I actually been in the car, Miranda would have, essentially, been an orphan. I doubted that the judge would have granted Scully even temporary custody after he had decided that she had abandoned Miranda in Montana. While the heat from the fire tongued my face, I resolved to be more careful with my driving. Then I sat up on the pavement, pulled out my trusty cellphone and dialed Triple A, 911, and the voice mail of my insurance agent in that order. Then I sat on the pavement and waited for the cavalry to arrive, making one last call. "Hi honey, I blew up your car." **** Miranda was cooing along to Trout Fishing in America's rendition of "The Window" on the one of her kiddie tapes I'd pulled out of her baby stereo in her room. It was raining; big fat early summer raindrops a bucketful of water each pounded the Outback. I pulled up at the scene of the crime, identifying it by the flashing red and blue of DC's finest, and the flashing yellow of Buddy's Towing Service flatbed. My car looked like a marshmallow that had been left in the fire too long. Plastic had melted into the soggy asphalt of the street, the paint was scorched away, and the chassis looked like it had gone through a garbage disposal. The driver's seat was a distant memory. Even without much explosives expertise I could tell that the blast began there, brushing glass away like cobwebs and pushing metal out into a giant blackened orchid. If Mulder had sat down -- I'd seen a few of the Unabomber's victims, I'd worked on some Mafia types who hadn't been able to adhere to witness protection guidelines, and I was quite able to imagine what would have happened to his too, too sullied flesh. Therefore, I made myself concentrate on the car. That topic allowed annoyance to fill the hole that terror had just bored through me. I was going to have to go through the whole paperwork dance with the insurance company and we were down to one car during the interim. At least we had racked up enough frequent driver points with Lariat over the years to rent a Porsche Boxer for a month. Damn. I couldn't get a baby seat in a Boxer. I had an unsettled-stomach feeling that there was a minivan looming on the horizon. The station wagon was bad enough, but a minivan . . . Mulder opened the passenger side door and collapsed wetly onto the seat. From the back seat Miranda started a running commentary to the world at large. I'd had her down for the night and had to bundle her up in a blanket and shove her into the car seat in the rain, which had done nothing for my black mood. Ingveld and Warwick had been spooned together on his bed like babes in the woods and I didn't have the heartlessness to roust them out of bed when I was capable of handling this myself. Almost. My hands were white on the wheel. "Da da da Lee Da. Nah?" Miranda asked. "I blew up your mommy's car," Mulder told her, turning around in the seat to poke her in the fat pouch of her belly. "Voon?" she asked and her eyes rounded, impressed. "Voon." He agreed. "M -- Fox, she'll never learn to speak properly if you talk baby talk back to her," I snapped, feeling a little rattled at the fact that he had referred to me as Miranda's 'mommy'. "You weren't carrying any plastique under your seat, were you?" he asked and turned back around. "Not this week, no. I might have had a flat fix aerosol can and ice melt spray, but my cargo of accelerants was low." I pulled out and began to drive home. Gradually the red, blue, and yellow lights faded and were replaced by the cool gold lights of government. "Zen I azzume zat it waz a bim," he said in the worst Inspector Clouseau impersonation I had ever been unfortunate enough to experience. "Bomb?" "B-B-B-B-B AhAhAhAhAhAhAhAhAhAhAhAhMMMMMM !" Miranda enthused from the baby seat. "Oh shhhhhh - sugar, M --" I had to stop to breathe, between the baby and the forced renaming I was stuttering like the shyest kid in first grade. "Taking us to court isn't bad enough, they have to blow us up as well? Isn't that, pardon the pun, overkill?" "She shouldn't be doing that yet - she shouldn't be mimicking words for at least three more months." "MULDER! Someone has tried to kill you and NOW IS NOT THE TIME TO DO THE PROUD DADDY ROUTINE!" "Why do you assume they were trying to kill me? It's your car," he pointed out, leaning through the gap between the front seats in an extremely dangerous manner so that he could continue to pay more attention to Miranda than to me. "Which you were driving at the time. And with the court's ruling today, getting rid of you would be sufficient to get Miranda handed over completely aboveboard. Maybe they've decided that kidnapping causes such a fuss that it's worth the effort to do it legally." "Bahm bahm baaaahhhmmmmm!" Miranda continued, thumping her fat pink fists on the bar of her baby seat. "What was it?" Mulder asked her. "Bahm!" "Who loves the Mooselet?" "DA! Lee! CAT!" "BAHM!" she added a moment later. At a red light, I put my face down on the steering wheel. I had not come out on a rainy night with a baby in the back seat after hearing that my car had exploded and me braless in sweatpants and one of Mulder's T-shirts to have to listen to the infant explosion chorus at full volume from the back and passenger seats. There was a serious lack of sobriety about the whole enterprise. I knew I wasn't over-reacting. This would have been annoying in any state other than my post-abduction coma. Miranda giggled herself asleep before we crossed the river. I let Mulder get her out of the car seat and watched her sleeping, deflated rubber balloon face disappear upstairs over the dark fabric of his T-shirted shoulder. I went into the kitchen and found solace with Cherry Garcia and a Pop Tart. When Mulder finally loped in, he grabbed a spoon before sitting in the chair across from me. He correctly interpreted the glacial quality of my silence and poked his spoon into the carton of ice cream as well in a companionable silence that we hadn't experienced in months. "The social workers and the psychologists are coming tomorrow." He looked up at me and his rain-flattened hair flopped across his forehead. "You're nervous." "Apprehensive." "You want to do everything right, score a perfect hundred on the test, get the Summa Cum Laude in parenting." I shouldn't have been surprised, he'd gotten his psych degree from Oxford, not from a Cracker Jack box, and we had known each other for over six years. I just thought that I had my apple-polishing obsession under control these days. I must have made some kind of face because he gave me one of his special edition boyish smiles out from under his hair before he reached over and ran the cool bottom of the spoon over my bottom lip. My thighs shook inside the warm cocoon of the sweatpants. Mulder slid out of his chair and around behind me, his fingers were cold from the ice cream and my nipples jumped to as his hands moved around to cup my breasts, pinching me with practiced skill. His breath was warm against my ear as his ice-cream sticky tongue lapped at my earlobe, circled my ear canal, nipped behind my ear and pulled at my earring until a tiny spark of pain/pleasure made me shudder. "You know we really should get some sleep, it's been a *long* day," he growled. I knew that. I also knew how long since he was rubbing his pelvis into my back between the rungs of the Ikea chair. There was melted ice cream on my fingers but I laced them through his soft hair so I could pull his mouth down on mine, he tasted of cherries and vanilla over his usual un-nameable coffee mocha Mulder flavor. His teeth were cool as glass against mine and I sucked on his lips as his now-warm fingers headed south underneath my sweatpants until he had the heel of his hand against my pelvic bone and his fingers where I was melting like the ice cream. "We shouldn't do this," I murmured into his carotid artery and my teeth scraped over the shadow stubble there. "Old boring married folk don't do things like this," he muttered back. The world swirled for a second and the tabletop was hard underneath my back. I was so stunned by the fact that he had been able to lift me that the fact that he was pulling my sweats down over my hips was almost incidental. Once my panties had landed near the refrigerator and the t-shirt was wadded up underneath my arms, he looked down with a sly and self-satisfied expression. I was spread out on the table like cookie dough waiting to be cut, gripping the sides of the table that wobbled threateningly on its center support. Thank God Ingveld and Warwick were notoriously heavy sleepers. The sly smile deepened into a smirk as his right hand dipped down into the carton of melting ice cream. "Do that and you're a dead man, Fox Mulder." "Who wants to live forever?" The ice cream was cold on my breasts, but not painfully so. Nevertheless, I did wiggle and squirm as he continued to drizzle the sticky goo all over my torso. Bits of cherry, darker than my darkest lipstick speckled the liquid that was beginning to run down my sides and onto the tabletop. Grinning, he leaned down and began to lick the ice cream from my skin with short cat-like laps of his entirely too-talented tongue. I continued to grip the table to keep both of us from landing on the floor, even though my back arched and I groaned low in my throat as he cleaned my collarbones, breasts, nipples, and delved into my navel to retrieve a few flecks of cherry. "I'm going to kill you." I hissed. "I'm counting on it," he mumbled into my belly and pressed my legs open with his own. My inner thighs scraped against the denim of his jeans as he moved and I caught my breath before he painted a line of ice cream over my lips and licked that off as well. While his tongue darted over and into my lips, he scrabbled somewhere on the table and I wasn't shocked when I felt the coldness of the ice cream pressed up and inside me. I squeaked into his mouth and he laughed back into mine while his long fingers anointed me as far up as they would go. "Mulder!" I warned. He pulled up his head and his eyes were green with mischief. "This is the only way that I get your cherry." After the cold of the ice cream his mouth was almost unbearably hot on my nether regions. He sucked at my clitoris, making me choke back a series of wails, and his long tongue plunged inside so he could slurp the rest of the ice cream and cherries out along with my own juices. My head thumped back against the table when the ice of the ice cream and the talented heat of his tongue whipped me into a climax that I had to close my mouth on. Yelps were smothered into thickened grunts as I shuddered and spasmed on the dancing tabletop. While I was still partially out of my right mind, he slid into me, hot and hard. With his hands braced on either side of my head on the table, he drove into me with the precision of a finely tuned engine. I moaned and his mouth, sweet and cool, covered mine again. The buttons of his jeans scraped my leg as we gasped into one another's mouths and the heat between our bodies ate up all the air in the room. I came again like a mousetrap snapping on helpless rodents, biting his shoulder to keep from waking up the household. This made him pound deeper and harder into me, until the table bumped and ground underneath us. I held onto the roller coaster tabletop as he growled his gopher love call and nipped at my shoulder as he finally came with a tremor that threatened to send us careening into the dishwasher. Panting, sticky with sweat, body fluids and melted ice cream, he collapsed atop me and breathed as though he had brought the news from Marathon. "Who's there?" At Warwick's voice we snapped apart like Lego blocks and I bolted, mostly naked, into the darkness of the dining room. I heard Mulder's fly being zipped just before bare feet slapped on the kitchen floor. "It's you," Warwick said and I heard the refrigerator door open, "I was afraid that more of your family had come to visit." "Can't sleep?" "Shoulder hurts. Want a beer?" Warwick should not have been drinking with his meds, but this wasn't exactly the right time to point this out. Instead, I pulled the t-shirt down far enough to cover all the vital areas, frowning as it stuck to my skin and headed upstairs through the living room. I was desperate for a shower and I didn't want to know where Mulder had hidden the used condom. Iolokus IV: Res Judicata 6/18 the moon showed up and it started to show tonight there'd be ice cream ice cream for crow ice cream for crow sun cream by day ice cream for crow ice cream by night ice cream by day the sun ain't stable Captain Beefheart The interviewers the court appointed were just social workers and psychologists. Unlike everyone else who conspires against us, they didn't have access to surveillance equipment and deep background. They actually had to ask us questions to get to know us. As instructed by Laura, I had offered them all soft drinks and/or coffee. That was to show that I was nurturing. We'd also scattered family photos around to show that we were family or