The Truth, by Glacis. Not rated. Dedicated to all the X-Philes who've given up on logic, consistency or any plot
closure from the show. No copyright infringement intended. No more harm done
than has already been done in canon.
They had him! Mulder tossed and strained, fighting against his bonds. He
didn't know how they'd trapped him this time, and he couldn't feel chicken wire
against his face so he didn't think he'd been transported back to
"Would you stop yelling like a cow caught in a damned tar pit and
wake up, already, Fox? You're frightening the children. It's past time for you
to get up and going, anyway. God knows you've managed to mess up every last
thing you've done for the past year, and God only knows how I'm expected
to handle half a dozen kids, this house, hold down a full time job and still
take care of you. It's worse than having a seventh child. At least a child
would pay attention and do what he's told. Get up, already!"
Mulder's eyes popped open.
Who on Earth was calling him Fox? Nobody called him Fox. Not even his parents.
When they'd been alive. To his intense shock, Scully stood at the side of the
bed, fists balled at her hips, eyes squinted nearly shut, a scowl on her face
and her mouth wide open as she howled at him like a villain in a bad Italian
opera.
"Scully?" he asked faintly.
The howl notched up another fifty decibels. "Don't give me that!
Why I ever made the mistake of marrying you, I will never know. Useless, lazy,
irritating ..." The insults continued as she stomped to the door and
slammed it shut behind her. The only sound to penetrate the wooden barrier was
a sort of high pitched hum, as if a mosquito the size of a Great Dane was
whining in his ear.
He stared at the door.
Married?
Fox?
What sort of an X File had he landed in?
The door flew open, banging against the wall and nearly sending him out
of his skin. Children boiled in the room.
Red-headed children. At least a score of them if not more. And a couple
brunettes.
They swarmed over him, chanting nonsensical syllables that all seemed to
end in some variant of "Daddy." Mulder attempted to burrow under the
covers. Three of them followed him. It was a good thing he was wearing pajamas.
Grey flannel pajamas with little long-horned cattle printed on them.
Sheer horror kept him still a fatal moment, and the intruders landed on
him, three directly in his face and more on top the covers, pinning him there.
Vertigo hit, and the world spun, growing dark from lack of oxygen and sheets
covering his nose and mouth. He whimpered.
A foghorn with a distinctly nasal whine ended the torment. "Kids!
Leave your father alone! Come get your lunches before you're late for school!
If you miss the bus you're going to walk! Fox! GET OUT OF BED NOW!"
Apparently the herd of children were as cowed by Scully -- his wife ?!
-- as he was, because all the little hellions flew off the bed and out the door
as quickly as they'd attacked. He curled into a fetal ball under the sheets,
panting and sweating.
The smack came from out of nowhere. He shot out from under the sheets,
rubbing his flank, staring wild-eyed at the blue-eyed, red-haired harpy glaring
at him and pointing at a suit hanging from a hook on the back of the door.
"Worse than the kids. Get up, get dressed, and get out. Don't come
home until you've been to both interviews, the unemployment office, the dry
cleaners to pick up my work suits, don't forget to stop by the bank and don't
write any more checks without at the very least letting me know, since all
you're doing lately is taking it out and I'm not a money tree."
He was in awe. She hadn't even taken a breath. "NOW!" she
shrieked.
He moved.
Fifteen minutes later he'd combed his hair, knotted his tie and fumbled
his way out of the bathroom. The bathroom had been a wasteland of hair care
products, makeup, hand-held electrical appliances the uses of which he didn't
dare guess, feminine hygiene products, bright pink hand towels and soap in the
shape of little ducks.
As he walked gingerly out into the hall, he heard a strange noise. It
sounded like sitar music, only flat, out of tune, and oddly distorted, as if he
were hearing it during a very bad acid trip. He tip-toed to the closed door at
the end of the hall and inched it open.
The sickly-sweet stench of weed nearly took his head off. There, in love
beads and tie-dyed denim, eyes blissfully closed as she tortured a badly-strung
sitar, was his sister.
"Samantha?" he whispered.
One eye opened. It looked like an olive floating in tomato soup, it was
so bloodshot. "Hey, Foxy, chill, dude. Job tomorrow. Peace today. Give
love a chance."
The eye drifted shut, and the plucking fingers picked up their torment
of the strings. Mulder gulped air, immediately regretted it as his head started
to buzz, and backed out of the room as quickly as he could without falling over
his own feet.
Where were his fish? Where was his couch? What happened to Scully? Sam?
Was this another case of strange clones or LSD in the water supply or
alien-induced hallucinations?
Sidling into the kitchen, he saw his, er,
wife. She was standing on the back porch, her back to the room, talking to
someone. He snuck up a little closer.
"Could you deliver the package in an hour or so, Alex? He'll be
gone for the rest of the day and we won't be disturbed."
"You bet, Dana. One hour. Long lunch hour. I'm yours, babe."
There was a wet sucking sound, the kind of sound he'd heard in cheap
porn videos but never actually connected with real people, much less real
people like his partner ... if the pod person currently playing tonsil hockey
with the guy in the postal carrier's uniform was actually his partner. Dana?
Since when did anyone call her Dana?
He stepped back from the kitchen, then deliberately bumped into the hall
table before entering the room. Scully glanced over one tailored shoulder at
him, then smiled down at the man at the base of the steps. "Thanks,"
she said sweetly.
"You're welcome, Mrs. Mulder, any time."
The honorific would have robbed Mulder of speech even if he hadn't seen
the mailman's face. Alex Krycek tipped his hat at the
horrified Mulder, gave Scully a truly lascivious wink, then headed down the
walkway. He was wearing shorts. Short shorts. Short, blue, tight shorts. Mulder
felt his groin give a leap of interest it hadn't even hinted at when Scully had
broached him in the bedroom, and faced an uncomfortable truth.
Here, wherever here was, he had the hots for Krycek. Who was a mailman.
The children swirled around him again, and he counted heads this time.
Stair-steps, from twelve to about five years old, the tallest four carrot tops
and the shorter two ... dead ringers for Alex Krycek.
Mulder gulped.
At least he wasn't the milkman. That would be one cliché too many.
Scully rounded on him, and he smiled sickly and ducked out the door,
carried along on a wave of kids. He found himself alongside the fence without
the slightest idea what to do next. The door shut behind him with a resounding
thwack. As he stood there, trying to figure out the next logical step in this
nightmare, the next door neighbor's back door opened, and Byers stepped out.
Mulder smiled his appreciation. Some things didn't change, no matter how
whacked reality got. Byers was dressed in a neat brown suit with a neat brown
tie, his brown hair neatly combed and his brown beard neatly trimmed. The
The world shuddered. Or perhaps it was just Mulder. He could feel his
jaw drop, but couldn't begin to summon the strength to close it, or to stop
staring.
A man was waiting for him, leaning up against a dark sedan. Skinner
looked normal, too, but Mulder wasn't taking any chances. Not after witnessing
the love-in between two thirds of the Lone Gunmen.
"Sir?" he asked hesitantly. Skinner gave him a dirty look.
"Don't try to bullshit me, Fox," he growled.
Mulder blinked. Skinner called him Fox? What sort of rabbit hole had he
fallen down?
"This is just a friendly reminder. You got one week. You don't come
up with the money in one week, I pay you another little visit, and it ain't gonna be friendly, or
pretty. You wanna keep your knees in one piece, you
get Mr. Marlboro his money." Skinner glared at him with an effect that
would make a basilisk turn puce with envy. Mulder nodded, not having the
faintest clue what he was agreeing to, but willing to do just about anything to
make Skinner go away. It worked.
Skinner stalked around the front of the sedan and got in the driver's
side. As he was pulling away, the back window slid down silently, and Mulder
choked. Cancerman was sitting there, smiling at him,
in a compellingly threatening way.
He didn't know whether to laugh or cry. Scully was the fishwife from
hell -- his fishwife from hell. Who was cuckolding him with Krycek, the mailman. The three of them, between them, had a
passel of children who resembled a pack of raptors. He glanced over his
shoulder and shuddered again. Frohicke had come out
front of the house from which Byers had left. He was pruning roses.
He was also wearing plaid Bermuda shorts, a lime green polo shirt with a
perky little embroidered logo on the chest, and bright teal high-topped
sneakers. With yellow socks.
Mulder shuddered again. The Lone Gunmen as a menage
a trois were poster children for the Suburban Gay
Rights Movement. His erstwhile alien-napped / missing / dead /starlight-bound
sister was a reject from the sixties, with enough illegal drugs growing in his
back bedroom to send them all to prison for a nice long stretch. He looked
down.
And he was wearing charcoal pinstripes. With a red power tie.
Movement caught his eye, and he looked up to see X staring at him from a
comfortable lean against a shady tree. Mulder's eyes
narrowed and his mouth tightened. He strode over to his previously dead
informant and planted himself in front of him, a determined look on his face.
"Okay, spill it. What the hell's going on? You're supposed to be
dead. Scully's supposed to be my partner. Sam's supposed to be missing. Krycek's supposed to be ... somewhere else. I lost track.
The Gunmen are supposed to be straight. And I'm supposed to be a special agent
for the FBI." He glared at the man.
X looked back at him as if he'd grown a second head. Then he slowly
straightened up and handed him a business card. Mulder glanced down at it.
"Linc's," he read aloud, "hot
music and cold drinks." He glanced up. "Huh?" he asked, giving
every evidence of years of training as an FBI interrogator and an
Oxford-trained psychologist.
"Let me know if you still want that bar-tending job," X told
him with a straight face. Then he turned on his heel and walked away.
Mulder stared at the card in his hand, the cars lazily winding down the
street, Frohicke merrily snipping rose heads, Krycek boldly trekking up his back walk to go schtup his wife. As he stood there, trying to find a way to
wake up, he heard a shrill beeping. Tucking the card in his jacket pocket, he
pulled out his cell phone and flipped it open.
"Mulder," he said, head spinning.
"Ah, Fox," a light voice sang in his ear. He didn't recognize
it. It didn't really matter -- he was ready to kill the next person who used
his first name, anyway. "Heard about you getting laid off, man. Total
bummer. Why don't you come by the office and we'll take a meeting?"
He listened numbly to the man chatting him up, automatically following
instructions, noting directions. He climbed into a car he vaguely recognized,
somehow unsurprised to find the key on his key chain worked in the ignition. As
he drove downtown, along streets he knew but didn't recognize, he could feel
reality gelling around him.
This was worse than an X File. This was real life.
Pulling up to the curb outside a small stucco office building, he got
out of the car and stumbled up the walk. He didn't know when DC had morphed
into LA, but for some odd reason it didn't feel as wrong as it really should
have. He opened the door and walked through the foyer, ignoring the
receptionist who ignored him in return. Leaning against the doorjamb of the
inner office, he glared at the curly-headed blond man clicking away at the
computer keyboard.
"What the hell is going on?" he growled. It came out closer to
a whimper.
"I haven't got a clue!" Surfer-boy looked up and beamed sunnily at him. "Never have. Make it up as I go along.
Figure they'll buy anything as long as it's murky enough, the clothes look
cool, the music's spooky and there's lotsa blood and
gore. Add another weirdo alien or knock Scully up for sweeps. Let all the guest
stars do a script so I can take the day off and go surfing. Who needs
continuity when you've got voice-overs? Who needs a plot when you've got
special effects? Welcome to the network, Fox. Ain't
the truth a bitch?"
If he'd had a gun, he'd've shot himself. As it
was, he sat down, pulled a pile of scripts over to start reading, and wondered
if Krycek was free for dinner.
(the end, with trepidation for the next season)