Chapter Fifteen
Narcissus' Ochroid Patella, New York, New York
April 9th, 2000, 2:14 p.m.
"Just one for lunch, ma'am?" a juvenile male that could not have been more than twelve asked Scully as she strode inside rapidly. The restaurant looked extremely busy, even though it was the tail end of the business lunch hour.
"I need to speak with the owners, please," Scully answered tersely.
"Um, is there a problem, ma'am?" Ma'am? Did she really look that old?
"Yes, and I need to speak to either Drew or Angela, now. This doesn't concern you." She raised the tone of her voice accidentally, and Angela heard her from ten feet away. Angela finished serving her customers and headed towards the entrance for Scully.
"Valerie, how nice to see you here. I thought you weren't going to be here until this evening," Angela greeted her with a winning beam and reached for Scully's hand.
"I wasn't, but my colleague hasn't been communicating with me, and I need to locate him so that I know he's okay. Is he still here?"
"Oh, heavens no." Angela led her away from the front to make way for other customers waiting behind her, sat down at a table for two, and motioned for Scully to do the same.
"Um, I can't stay. I have another critique to do in half an hour with Muldron, which is why I'm trying to retrace his steps and find him."
"You might want to sit down anyway." She grabbed Scully's hand and forced her into the seat just as a hurried waiter nearly bulldozed her over. "You're going to get run over if you don't."
"Good grief, this place is busy for a Wednesday afternoon," Scully marveled as she swept her eyes around the room.
"I know. White collared workers seem to take their time for lunch in the middle of the week here in New York. We can't just shove them off back to the office hungry and upset. So while the pace of the service around here is fast, we encourage our customers to take their time and enjoy their midday break."
"When did he leave?" Scully was anxious to find Mulder and show him the results she'd found, but at the same time, she felt oddly comfortable talking to this duplicate of Jodie Foster. Maybe it had been too long since she had carried on a chat with another woman, she decided. All too often, her contact with females only had to do with interrogation.
It'd be nice to find someone to speak with other than the FBI shrink. But sometimes, even the female agents at the Bureau can be so petty and vicious.
She once attributed that fact that it was because they were jealous of her and Mulder. Jealous of what? There was nothing more going on between them besides...all right...lately, there was something. But if there were any small crude rumors circulating among the water cooler, she made up her mind to quell them immediately before they exploded and wound up being in an interoffice memo to Skinner.
"I'd say quarter after ten or so," Angela's pleasant voice brought Scully back to reality. "He came in for some coffee and then proceeded to scarf down an omelet, a bagel, a plate full of bacon, and two pieces of toast, too. That man can certainly eat."
"He surprises me, too, and I've been working with him for seven years. Sometimes, he'll just pick at his food while writing up an article, but other times, I can't pull him away from the table."
"Oh, where are my manners? How about lunch? Have you eaten?"
Well, now that Angela mentioned it, Scully's hungry stomach reminded her that the last trace of nutrition she'd partaken of was five hours ago.
"I'd like to stay, but, I have a prior engagement."
"But you're already here, and I can tell just how famished you are. Rough morning?"
"Unbelievably so," Scully nodded in accordance. "I'd like to take you up on your offer, but I'm afraid that I simply don't have the time to sit down and moon over a platter of..." Her eyes got the better of her as another speedy waiter rushed by the table with an all too welcoming French baguette layered with various deli condiments and lunch meat.
"Free of charge, Valerie. And you won't have to utter a word about how wonderful it is except for a yummy sound."
"All right," Scully surrendered and leaned more comfortably into the back of her chair. "Where could I find a-" Before she knew it, a waitress dropped a menu by her place and scurried back to the kitchen. "Wow. Prompt service indeed."
"That's what Drew and I pride ourselves on, besides the cuisine. Do you know what you'd like?"
"Um, could I have a couple of minutes to-"
"Say no more. I'll be right back. I knew we were going to get backed up, but, geeze..." Angela jumped out of her seat and hurried past another heavily burdened attendant with the effortless grace of a dancer.
Forty minutes later...
"So that's how we got into the world of food. How about you? How did you meet Randy Andy?" Angela asked Scully, who was now at the very end of a meal that consisted of a delicious tuna salad on a croissant, a three bean salad, and some Perrier mineral water with a lime.
"What did you call him?"
"Randy Andy. That is his nickname, right?"
"Yeah...I just haven't heard it in a long time," Scully quickly covered herself. It didn't seem so bad that the Lone Gunmen had indeed picked out their undercover names now that she learned they had given him a particularly embarrassing nickname. She found that very amusing.
"So obviously, you didn't coin it."
"No, I didn't."
"Come on, open up a little about that mysterious colleague or yours. How'd you get paired up?"
"Well, I was relatively new to the New York area seven years ago, and Muldron ran his office out of a basement apartment at that time. In fact, he was in the very same building as mine, and that's how we met one day. I think I took a wrong turn somewhere, you see, before I moved to New York, I lived in Washington, D.C., and my complex had an incinerator in the basement. So I unknowingly trespassed into his living space with my garbage one evening thinking it was the same there, and I'm afraid I woke him up by stumbling around in the dark. He wound up with pajamas full of eggshells, coffee grinds, and an earful of expired orange juice. It took a while for me to believe that someone would want to live and work in a basement almost as long as it took him to believe that I was truly looking for an incinerator."
"And the two of you hit it off from there? I mean, your working relationship, of course."
"Yeah, I guess you could say that. Uh, we've built up an incredible amount of respect for one another throughout the years, and I think I can say at this point, if we were separated from one another, I don't think either of us would know what to make of ourselves."
"Why, naturally. You're a team. I could tell from meeting you right away that you're very compatible with a man like him."
"You could?" Am I that transparent?
"Definitely. Must have been a cakewalk for you two to take the next step."
"Um, I don't quite follow." Scully had a feeling where this conversation was going, and she did not like it.
"It's only logical that if a man and woman work professionally well together, that they'd be good lovers."
"We're not," Scully said instantly and put up her FBI mask before the situation was out of her control.
"You're not good lovers?"
"We're not involved intimately."
"Oh, that's a shame. Very nice man."
"Look, I hate to bother you any more, and thank you very much for your hospitality, but I should really go. If you're just as busy as dinner as you were for lunch, I don't want to be any more of a bother." Scully stood and immediately found it very difficult to keep the room from swirling. She backed into her chair, and the object flew backward to spill onto the ground. "Oh. I don't know what's happened to me."
"Too many long hours spent on your feet?" Angela suggested.
"Maybe. Ooh." Scully suddenly could not tell where the room ended and began. She started to walk around but stumbled into the booth behind her and landed on top of two very befuddled elderly men.
"Say what's the idea, lady?" one of them shouted.
"Have too much to drink, sister?" the other jeered.
Angela came to Scully's rescue and steadied her. Drew noticed the two of them struggling and went over to assist them. "What's going on? Where are you taking me?" Scully demanded.
The aliens spoke a few sentences to one another in their language and began to guide her to the restroom. "Let me go!" she screamed in a louder voice. They stopped heading towards the direction of the bathroom and then headed for the galley as Scully made more noise. "You're messing with the wrong woman!"
As the trio journeyed past the galley's double doors, Scully elbowed herself away from them and drew out her SIG Sauer. "Oh my God!" a cook yelled and everyone started to flee from the kitchen.
"Please use the back entrance! Don't disturb the...-" Drew pointlessly cried. It was no use. The entire restaurant staff ran for the double doors shrieking, "She's got a gun! Somebody call the cops!"
"Customers," Angela finished. The two of them watched helplessly as the restaurant emptied and dozens of people were on their cell phones at once.
"Where's Mulder? I know he's got to be around here somewhere!" She continued to waive her gun around dangerously while the aliens stepped cautiously away.
"Okay, now she's incoherent. Funny that she didn't pass out like Randy Andy," Drew observed.
"Drew, this isn't going to be good attention for our restaurant, having the police here, I mean," Angela announced. "Should we zellup?"
"If we do, they might come back later, and the situation could even get worse. You know how nosy humans get...look at our proof." He signaled to Scully, who was still barking at the top of her lungs and was now running into several appliances.
"Yeah, I agree with that. But we can't keep him here forever. Eventually, he'll start to stink if he dies. That'll draw attention, too."
"I say we go out the back entrance, let the police find these two, and whatever they do with them will be fine by me. Whatever small amount of drama comes out now, we have dealt with quietly before. Then we'll go back to normal business as usual." There was a loud crash and a series of clangs after Scully bumped into an entire shelf of blueberry, strawberry, and chocolate ice cream toppings.
"I do hate the human justice systems, particularly the Americans. They're so slow!" Angela remarked and they left Scully to wander about by herself.
"So that's everything?" Skinner questioned Scully, who had now begun to twiddle her thumbs.
"Yes, sir."
"I'm going to put this investigation on hold right now for two very simple reasons: one, this alien couple as you describe them, Drew and Angela Robinson, are nowhere to be found. The New York Police Department has been conducting a search for the past seventy-two hours and so far, no luck. And two, we just cannot simply afford to put you back up in that apartment."
"Have there been anymore incidents?"
"Not any more that can't be misconstrued for something else. A few bike and car accidents occurred here and there, but nothing fatal. So unfortunately, the powers that be are screaming for blood, particularly yours and Mulder's...I'd just as soon not hand you up to them on a silver platter."
"How much damage did we do this time?" Skinner timidly pulled out a tabloid report from underneath the expense report and showed her the cover story. "FBI Investigators Terrify New York City Citizens."
"Oh, well, you're not taking that story seriously, are you?" she wondered.
He withdrew another two forms of media--one was Cooking Light and the other was Bon Appetit.
"Government USPH Agents Impersonate Well-Known Food Critics From Denver, Colorado" read one.
"Impostors From the Government Pester Well-Established NY Restaurant" read the other.
"We're not from Denver!"
"You should have done your research before going out into the field, Agent Scully. There are two food critics out of Denver, Colorado that go by those very names, and needless to say, they were just a little pissed off that their good names were being tarnished by a couple of sloppy FBI agents. So someone high up above us that's pulling the strings saved your asses on that one by offering them some kind of compensation."
"I...I don't know what to say, sir." She had long stopped her thumb movements, but now she was making full eye contact with the floor.
"Agent Mulder also had to explain this same list of charges to an auditor this morning, Scully. You two are being monitored like two stray animals by some kind of subcommittee in the Senate. So tread lightly, Agent, in these next few weeks to come. They haven't altogether come forward and made a big threat to shut you down yet, but just know that something might be coming up to bite you in the ass like a pit-bull."
"Are we being suspended?"
"That'll be all, Agent Scully." Skinner collected the pile of magazines along with the expense report and dumped them purposefully into the trash.
The X-Files Office, FBI Headquarters, Washington, D.C.
April 14th, 2000, 10:38 a.m.
The sound of the elevator's arrival and her high heels coming down the hallway was like a bad omen to Agent Mulder, who sat with his head cradled in his hands on his desk. On any other day, he might have welcomed it. Hell, he'd even take another round of questioning with Agent Chesty Short if it could keep Scully at bay. He had no such luck. The footsteps came closer.
"Why's the door open?" was the first question to come out of her mouth as she passed through it.
He neglected to answer her intelligibly, and she shrugged as she closed the door. All the noises that came from his mouth were moans until he heard the familiar give of the chair in front of his bureau; he knew Scully had just sit down for a moment's peace. Then her wrath would begin to brew up like a tornado, and before long, a storm was coming.
"Do I smell hazelnut coffee?" she asked him and that caused him to stir from his despair long enough to give a small nod. Scully leaned forward, took the mug that was still impeding his nameplate, and got up to refill it. Never mind the fact that the ceramic had previously been used by a slimy auditor. Never mind the fact that the coffee was now only lukewarm on the hot plate. She still drank from the mug and dumped the coffee pot's leftovers into a nearby sink. He watched her go through the motions of making a fresh pot through the gaps in between his fingers and before he knew it, her hips were about a foot from his face. He wasn't exactly sure why he felt the touch of her fingers rove through his hair, but it wasn't until she set the mug down that he calmed down and faced her.
"Guess neither of us did that well with the expenses audit," he finally remarked.
"Drink some of this, Mulder. You'll feel right as rain in about a minute," she nudged him with her leg and handed him the coffee.
"You know, the first time you ever walked into this office, I was so sure that you only came down here to laugh at me and drain me of all my coffee. Why're you so good to me, Scully?"
"The coffee supply is practically unlimited down here. Why would I want to share an office with a scarce supply upstairs?" When she saw that that brought back his charismatic grin, she stole the mug back and drank some more.
"What do you say to doing some spring cleaning, Scully?"
THE END