"The man has a glass eye!"
Mulder couldn't have been happier if he had found the Holy Grail. He gleefully slid behind his borrowed desk at the Chicago Field Office, typing a log on into the computer. Scully simply smiled with long-suffering patience, watching as he pulled up an Internet search engine page.
"I'm glad you are so easily amused, Mulder, but I fail to see the point in this."
"Well, it helps us narrow down who it is."
"It's Chicago, third largest city in the country, how many people here would have a prosthetic eye?"
"Probably not as many as you would think. And I bet that there are only a handful of ophthalmologists that handle cases of a missing eye, am I correct?" As if to punctuate his point, Mulder held up the fake, glass eyeball. It stared at Scully in a disconcerting way from between Mulder's thumb and forefinger.
"Put it away!" She snapped, feeling unreasonably spooked by it. After all, how many real eyeballs had she seen in her time as a pathologist.
"What? Dr. Scully is ooked out by a glass eyeball?"
"No," she snorted, lifting her chin with as much dignified denial as she could. Mulder only blinked at her with amused disbelief. "Maybe…just a little."
"I always wanted one of these," he sighed, palming the large, glass orb with fascination. "I had an uncle who served in World War II. He had one. He'd take it out for us kids to play with."
Scully's nose wrinkled with mild horror at the mental image. "He'd just pop it out and pass it around a bunch of snotty, sweaty, slobbering kids."
"Yeah, it would amuse us for hours! Then he'd just drop it in a glass of water, slosh it around, rub it off, and pop it back in."
"That's disgusting."
"Never got an infection even." He rolled their suspects eyeball across the desk, like a marble. "The boys thought it was the most awesome thing ever. Sort of like a peg leg or a hook for a hand."
"What is with you and your determination to maim yourself?"
"It's the romance of it all, Scully!" Mulder stared up at her as if she had to understand. "A lost eye, a missing limb, all signs of great adventure and tales of daring do."
"Or daring don't. I'm sorry, I never wished for a missing body part when I was a child."
"That's cause you were a girl."
"Excuse me?" She found herself blinking down at her partner from her perch on the corner of the desk. He at least had the grace to look mildly abashed. "Are you suggesting that I, who ran around covered in mud and dirt with a air rifle in hand three-fourths of the time, somehow was not 'boy' enough to find a glass eyeball 'cool'?"
"Yes," Mulder dared to nod in response. "I am."
"And why is that, may I ask?"
"Because, while you may be a girl who grew up to become a doctor who takes bodies apart, even now you find the idea of a glass eye as gross and slightly icky."
"I find it gross and slightly icky that you are playing with it as if it were a toy. Mulder's that's been in someone's head!"
"So have your fingers, but I still hold them from time to time."
The flush that crept up her face could have lit Chicago on fire for a second time. "I at least used disinfectant soap. If we find the man this even belongs to, he's going to want it back, and it's going to have all the germs from off your hands on it."
"I didn't lick it Scully, gees." Mulder rolled his eyes as he typed into the keyboard in front of him. For several minutes he scanned through Internet searches, all the while passing the ownerless eyeball from hand to hand. "Okay, we are turning up only a few doctors in Chicago who do eye replacements for patience."
"How few is few?" Scully leaned over to glance at the screen.
"About twenty centers, but a few quick phone calls, we might be able to find our guy."
"Mulder, we have no description, no name."
"No, but we do have a suspected victim who is already missing an eye and is likely looking for a replacement."
"That's if there aren't others out there who are trying to replace their…eyeballs." Scully glanced with mildly disgusted fascination at the one Mulder insisted on playing with.
"Yes, but we can whittle it down to eye color and ethnicity. We know our almost victim is white and in his thirties. That should narrow the search somewhat."
"Just don't tell them that you've found his original eyeball and have been playing with it all morning." She longed to take the poor prosthetic and dunk it in rubbing alcohol or something. "Honestly, it's evidence Mulder."
"You are totally creeped out by this, aren't you?" The idea delighted her partner to no end as he deliberately waved it in front of him, the iris pointed out towards her. "Dana Scully, pathologist extraordinaire, bothered by one glass eyeball."
"Stop it," she snatched at it, but he was far too quick, holding it just out of her reach.
"Scully, I've seen you up to you're elbows in human entrails, one little eyeball grosses you out?"
"Mulder, it's more the idea that you are playing with it like a toy and it goes in someone's face." If they did find their man she hoped Mulder cleaned the eyeball off first before giving it to him. "Have you even washed your hands his morning?"
"After I took a leak but not after I blew my nose."
She couldn't help the shudder of revulsion that shook her slim shoulders. "Just put it down. And go wash your hands. And let me…disinfect it before it goes anywhere near this person again."
Mulder rolled his own, natural eyes and passed it over to her. She lightly pinched the unnatural looking sphere between her fingers as he stood up, leaning in to murmur just above her ear as he passed.
"You'd make a crappy pirate, Scully."
She glared at him as he sauntered off, unsure of what to do with the prosthetic eyeball in hand. "Yeah, well I'm not the idiot who thinks a peg leg and a hook hand is cool."
Around the open floor of the field office several agents paused to turn and stare at her, a glass eyeball in her hands as she sat on the edge of their borrowed desk.
"Just…stuff for the case." She muttered foolishly as they all turned back to their own work. Carefully as she could she reached from some tissue on a neighboring desk and wrapped the eyeball in it.
"Why do cases with Mulder have to be so…weird," she muttered, shoving the unfortunate object in her pocket.