Deadline
By Shelli-Jo Pelletier
***************
Fox Mulder sighed in frustration and drummed his fingertips on the tabletop next to the laptop. The little blinking cursor continued to sit there, extremely annoying him, at the end of his last sentence. He considered reaching into the screen and strangling it but figured it would be too much work. He glared at it instead, but it refused to take the hint.
"What's wrong Mulder, writer's block?" his partner, Dana Scully, asked.
"Yeah, I can't remember and he wants this on his desk tomorrow morning. Did we find Chester Bonaparte in the graveyard before or after we found Private Dunham in that Haiti voodoo case?"
"Before," Scully informed him. "Why? Are you going to give him that case?"
"Why not? It was a perfectly good case."
"I thought Chris Carter asked for another installment in our 'mythology.'"
"Well I can't give him what we haven't found yet, Scully," he protested.
"Just make something up. The fans don't know the truth from the fiction." He gave her a look. "Okay, okay, whatever. I don't suppose he would go for that anyway."
"We agreed to do this for a reason, Scully. We want people to know the truth, and this is working. Thousands of people all over the world know everything we do now."
"Yes, but Mulder. They all think it's a television show. Truth is nothing if you don't believe it."
He sighed again and went back to typing. She was right, but what else could he do? Go on national television and inform all the X-philes of the world their favorite late night thrill drama was real? Yeah, right. The teenagers would get a kick out of that, at least. The rest of the kids would huddle under their blankets waiting for the world to end, and everyone else would blow it off as some nut case with a passing resemblance to David Duchovny.
"Look, Mulder, I'm sorry. I know how much this show means to you. But did you ever think it was the wrong thing to do?"
"Oh, you're just angry that the last girl we were investigating asked for your autograph. You should be honored, Scully." He looked up from his typing to grin.
"Honored that every time we try an investigation someone thinks were actors? And what about that guy we had to have committed last week?" she reminded him.
He winced at the memory. "He had a history of mental instability."
"Yes, but we pushed him over the edge. That poor man thought he was trapped in his television set."
"When Chris Carter asked to do a show about our work I had no idea it would go so far. Did you know they won a Golden Globe for best drama in 1994?"
"Yes, that was the night you stopped by my apartment with Champaign."
"Oh yeah, well there, that proves it. We're a hit."
"Wrong. David and Gillian are hits. We're figments of some producer's overactive imagination."
He mulled over this for a minute as he thought of how to phrase the boy transforming into a black cat. He finally settled for, "But the pay is good, right?"
"Mulder, the only reason I put up with it is because the pay is good."
"Well, then we'll just have to grin and bear it until the public's ready to accept the truth." She shook her head, as if that would ever come to pass. "Now, I have to finish this. Do you remember what Colonel Wharton was having for breakfast that morning we went to see him?"
