There was a bang, followed closely by a whoosh of smoke. Reilly coughed and waved a hand in front of his face. "I told you not to put that there."

"Put what where?" Jeb said, choking on the smoky air.

Reilly grinned. "Never, ever play with someone else's toys without asking."

Jeb coughed, and took his glasses off. "It wasn't a toy. It looked like it was a fire hazard." He wiped his glasses on his shirttail. "Some kind of hazard, anyway."

"A hazard to you if you touch it." Reilly crossed his arms and squinted at the mechanism. "Jesus. What does this thing even do?"

"Make loud noises and spit smoke at us. I thought that was obvious?" Jeb put his glasses back on. "And it was your friend that made it."

"According to Kyle, all he did was assemble it." Reilly crouched down and took a closer look at it -- the mechanism, whatever it was, looked like someone's junk drawer had thrown up. Then the vomit had become sentient and fucked a small animal (because that was definitely fur on some of the long metal pieces) -- and from that union had come the mechanism. Possibly by way of a toxic waste dump. "Apparently he woke up one morning and the plans were lying in front of him, like some kind of message from God."

Reilly shrugged and stood up. "But apparently, and according to Kyle, he's kind of a fuckwit. I bet him ten bucks it was a tough caffeine comedown."

"And?" Jeb eyed the mechanism, sure he could hear it breathing -- even though he couldn't see lungs.

"He pitched a can of Mountain Dew at my head. Empty, mind you." Reilly brushed his hands off on his lab coat. "We still locked in here? Try the door."

Jeb tested the door. "I'll never understand how you could design a door that can't be opened from the inside into a facility where they knew we were going to be keeping dangerous animals," he muttered.

Reilly kicked the food slot in the door with his heel, making it clang loudly. "This is a cage, wise guy. You don't make cages openable from the inside."

"That is not a word."

Reilly grinned wickedly. "OK, wiseass. It's a converted closet with a food slot in the door. Not actually designed as a cage." He indicated the walls. "As you can see. Anything stronger than a human -- and we're pretty wussy, you know that -- could go through these walls like paper."

"So why can't we?" Jeb said, resisting the urge to lean on the mechanism. It just looked so... fuzzy.

"Duh."

Jeb forgot and leaned on the mechanism anyway, then screamed and jumped backwards. "Jesus Christ!"

"What in the hell?" Reilly said, staring at Jeb in silent prayer. Oh please let him not have just finally lost it, that's the last thing I need...

"I don't know." Jeb wiped his hand on his lab coat, which looked like it wanted to scream, it was so dirty (was that a bloodstain? Considering Jeb, it probably was).

Well, if it could talk, it would scream.

Jeb gestured to the mechanism. "Just... touch it."

"OK." Reilly glanced at his watch, reaching his other hand toward the furry upper surface of the mechanism, and intoned, "Fifteen hundred hours, thirteen minutes, seven seconds. I'm gonna touch it."

He was pretty sure he heard Jeb snicker at that (why was no one at the School emotionally older than seven? Why?) but at that moment his fingers brushed the fur on top of the mechanism (it was long, brown, and surprisingly quite silky) and he blacked out.

He woke up when Jeb kicked him in the ribs, some blank expanse of time later.

"Ow," he said, and braced himself on the wall to get up.

"Sorry," Jeb said, and offered him a hand, which Reilly gladly took. "Didn't have any water to throw on you."

Reilly checked his watch by reflex. "Holy shit!"

"What?" Jeb said.

"Look at this, look at this." Reilly showed Jeb his wrist. "Twenty past."

Jeb straightened up. "Huh."

"Scully," Reilly said in his best Mulder imitation (which wasn't very good), "I think we just lost time."

Jeb punched him lightly on the arm. "Shut up, I watched that show too. And that's not how the line goes."

"You are so much cooler than I thought you were," Reilly said, and grinned. "Wanna touch it again? We gotta see if it'll do the same thing twice."

But before either of them could contribute further data to the developing study of strange, furry mechanisms and their effects on human perception of time, they heard footsteps in the lab outside.

"Doctor Batchelder?" a voice called.

Jeb shot Reilly a panicked look.

"That's Prescott," Reilly hissed.

"Reilly?" the voice said.

"Think we should put the sheet back over it?" Jeb whispered back.

"Good idea."

They did.

"Well, now he's gonna notice there's a big something on the floor, covered in a sheet," Reilly whispered as Prescott's footprints paced back and forth in the lab and papers rustled.

"Are you here?" Prescott's voice said.

"We need a distraction," Jeb said.

"Happy to oblige." Reilly grinned and kicked the door with his heel -- BANG -- which was sure to alert Prescott to the fact that someone was in the closet.

Then, before Jeb had a chance to protest or ask Reilly what the hell he thought he was doing, Reilly kissed him, full on the lips.

Prescott's footsteps clicked over to the door, and Reilly thought -- in between Oh my God and Is this really happening? -- Come on, you bastard, open the damn door.

Which Prescott quite obligingly did. "Doctor Batchelder, why are you..." and he broke off as his mouth caught up to his eyes.

Playing Seven Minutes in Heaven with a lab tech? Reilly finished to himself, and focused on kissing Jeb -- who was, surprisingly, rather good at this whole distraction thing.

But Jeb broke away from Reilly for a moment (Oh no, don't you leave me now, Reilly thought) to snap at Prescott.

"Didn't your mother ever teach you to knock?"

Prescott refrained from saying anything, and very quietly fled the scene.

Reilly wanted to keep kissing Jeb, but settled for laughing and saying, "That was awesome."

"Thank you," Jeb said modestly.

"You're not too bad at kissing, either," Reilly said.

"I'll tell Roland you said that." Jeb glanced at the mechanism, still covered in the sheet they'd laid over it (and it wasn't like anything had happened to move the sheet in the first place, so Reilly wasn't quite sure why he thought that). "So what do you think we should do with Kyle's mechanism?"

"What we always do with weird things," Reilly said, recovering the small amount of grace he had. "We study it."

With much luff to the wonderful ladies on Fanfiction Flock, especially Amie.