Classification: TRHA

Rating: PG

Summary: A headache, an inhaler...and some surprising revelations from Langly.

Spoilers: Unusual Suspects

Disclaimer: Jesus, this again! Not mine. Property of Fox Television and 1013 Productions, but according to the Fair Use Statutes, I can play with 'em! And I will!
 

"How can it happen that every time
You ask us this question the answer seems like a lie
You know what we're saying and you know what it means
And it's always sincere God knows
But it never gets through to where you need..."

"Before You Were Born" by Glen Phillips and Toad the Wet Sprocket, Copyright 1991 Sony Music Entertainment Corporation/Used without permission
 

Mictowr (pronunciation: mis-tore)
 

I could feel tears starting to stream out of my eyes; the reaction was almost involuntary.

"Langly, I don't know what's going on, but I don't appreciate this."

He continued to work the chat line with Byers, and after what seemed like 24 hours started up the printer. Just the soft noise of the laser printer was making me crazy, and I stuck my head under the pillow. I felt like my dinner was about to become history.

"Langly, if you're not going to give me my stuff, then at least get me the fucking trash can so I don't puke all over the covers!"

He stuck the trash can next to me and sat down on the bed on the side opposite me. I almost shrieked from the pain the motion caused.

"Ally, you're not using this." He pocketed the inhaler.

"Langly, you'd better give me a damn good reason for not giving--oh shit!"  My Italian dinner was now a surrealistic pattern on the white goose down comforter. I hadn't been able to even hit the trash can. I was really sobbing now.

"This is getting to be a habit with us," Langly commented. "C'mon, let me get this in the laundry."

"Oh fuck!" I was pissed as hell at him, and pissed at myself--second time in a week I had barfed and he'd been there for it. You'd think I'd try something a little more seductive than tossing my cookies.

"C'mon, get in the shower, I'll get this washed." He took my arm and led me into the bathroom, then proceeded to bundle the bedding into his arms and take it downstairs.

I was shaking badly, my head was beyond throbbing, but my stomach was more settled. I fumbled for the water taps and peeled off my clothes as best I could. Standing up was out of the question at this point; I sat down on the floor of the shower and let the water run over me.

"Need some help?"

"No, just leave me alone right now."

"Whatever."

I'm not sure how long I was sitting in the shower for, but it did help. By the time I was ready to get out, my head was still hideously sore, but the nausea and shivering had ceased. Icould stand up without feeling too terribly dizzy. The thousand points of light had stopped flashing in front of my eyes.

I threw on the robe I had hung on the back of the door and limped back into the bedroom. There were clean sheets on the bed, and Langly was sitting there, feet bare, channel surfing the TV set. He muted the sound when he saw me.

"You okay?"

"Better."

"Quilt's gonna take awhile. Good thing it's warm tonight."

I sank back into the pillow. "You want to tell me what this was all about?"

He turned off the TV set. "Yeah. It's sort of a long story."

"So start talking."

He pulled his pillow up behind him and steepled those incredibly long, slender fingers. "This kind of goes way back."

"How far back are we talking here?"

"Ten years since we got a first real glimpse, but it's been going on a lot longer than that."

"What's been going on?"

"Okay. Ten years ago, we're at this lame electronics fair--"

"Yeah, where you met your partners in crime."

"Frohike and me, we're living in the same crappy hotel, and we've got these hookups for free cable TV we're pushing. He stole my idea, you know."

"Uh-huh. Go on."

"So we're there, and there's this sweet young thing who wants Frohike to decode this file she has. Turns out she got it from Byers. In the meantime, I've got this D&D tournament going on, so I'd bailed for a while. Frohike tries to oblige the lady, and yes, she did have great legs, but he decided he needed some real talent for the job. So he and Byers come and scope me out in the middle of the game, which makes me totally nervous 'cause we were doing a lot of dope in there, and Byers is some FCC jerk at this point. And I'd just gotten 50 bucks on the next play."

"Okay. So what does this have to do with your confiscating my inhaler?"

"I'm getting to that. Anyway, Frohike is forced to admit that my kung fu is best, you should have seen his face when he said that. Like ripping his balls off him."

"Yes, I am more than familiar with the wonderfully macho world of computing. I was married to a software engineer, if you recall."

"So we go ahead and start deciphering this encrypted file we got from the woman, who's not there right now. We get it into text, and she comes back in the room and she's got a gun on us. I figure, we are royally fucked now. Turns out she had fed Byers this song and dance about her trying to find her missing daughter, when in fact she's got no daughter and she's on the run
from the Feds. She claimed the little girl was kidnapped by the kid's father."

"Pretty bizarre story. What's the point here?"

"She tells us Mulder is the kid's dad. Well, we hacked into Mulder's files and he's got nothing in there about having a kid. So that tipped us off that she was sort of hinky." He turned to me. "I need a beer. Want anything?"

"Some club soda please. With lime."

He ran downstairs and I heard him getting into it with the girls. I wondered if he had had brothers or sisters to pick on...I didn't even know.

"Hey, you stole our popcorn!" Miranda yelled at him.

"I only stole half of it!" He shot back.

"Thief!"

"Dweeb!"

"Vulture vomit!"

"Snotface!"

This pleasant interchange continued to take place until he was back in our room, a beer in one hand, a bowl of popcorn tucked under his arm, and a tall club soda with a lime wedge in it in his other hand.

"You must be feeling lousy," he said as he handed me the drink. "No liquor."

"I'll let you do the drinking tonight. So go on."

"Anyway, according to the DOD files, this woman--her name was Suzanne Modeski--had blown up a lab in White Sands, New Mexico, and killed four people. Said she was totally mental. And you might have believed she was, except for what was in the encrypted file."

"And what was that?"

"Okay. One thing was that she was under surveillance all the time.  Apparently her dentist had put this homing device in a filling in one of her teeth."

"I agree that dentists are evil, Langly, but this is a stretch."

"We saw the device."

"How?"

"She pulled out the tooth she had had filled. And there it was. We flushed it away so that it couldn't be tracked to anything other than a sewer rat."

"How'd she get a tooth out?"

"You've heard of pliers, haven't you?"

"God, what a mess that must have been."

"It wasn't pretty. Anyway, the other thing in this message, it gives the address of this warehouse where supposedly they were storing this chemical she had made. She was an organic chemist, and she'd developed this chemical that was supposed to induce anxiety and paranoia when taken."

"Like people would take that voluntarily. Langly, this is crazy."

"Hey, it gets crazier. So we go to the warehouse with her. And we find out that this stuff that was developed by the US government is going to be used in an experiment on the population at large by dispersing it in asthma inhalers."

"You're kidding."

"Wish I was. So Mulder shows up and is playing Mountie, wants to get his man, or woman in this case. And all these military policemen come in, and we almost get killed in the process. And then this other guy comes in, and Mulder gets shot. He calls the dogs off, and he lets us go. In the meantime, Mulder's in bad shape. So we call 911 on his cellphone and he gets taken to the hospital and we get to spend the night in jail."

"How'd you end up in jail?"

"Hey, we were the only ones left at the scene when the cops came, and the gun was there, and Frohike and me, we have records, so we are like totally fucked. So they let us rot in our cell for a while--they put all three of us together, which made it even more of a nightmare--and then finally they get Byers, because he's the most respectable looking and never did time in
one of our country's finest vacation spots, and Byers tells them the whole thing. And they figure he's whacked, too. So we spend the night calling each other names and Frohike threatens to trade me for cigarettes."

"With that hair? You'd be the belle of the ball in jail."

"Ally, that's not even funny." He winced visibly. "So anyway, we have to wait until Mulder gets lucid, and corroborates Byers' story, and they let us go. And we meet up again with this Suzanne woman, whom by now I think Byers is totally ready to die for. She's trying to tell the newspapers about what the government is doing--our own government, our elected  officials--to the American public. And nobody believes her. She tries radio and TV. Nobody believes her. And then she gets grabbed by these guys in a limo, and as they drive away, we see that one of the guys in the limo is one of Byers' coworkers at the FCC. He just about freaks." He sipped his Carta Blanca for a few minutes. "So then we tell Mulder all about this. We started talking while the convention was being broken down, and then we took it to a bar, and we talked about stuff until we got thrown out at closing time. For him, this just confirms his suspicions that the government's been up to weird stuff for a long time."

"Of course the government's been up to weird stuff. How the hell do you think Ronald Reagan got elected?"

"Surface stuff. Mulder's dad was in the State Department, did you know that?"

"No, I didn't."

"Freaky stuff going on there. And not just isolated events. A whole systematic chain of things that have been planned and executed over the last half century."

"And you have proof of this."

"We do, some of it. Somehow, it always seems to get buried. That's why we exist. To make sure it stays alive."

"So was this the pivotal event in your developing paranoia about our government?"

"I'd say it was a watershed, for the three of us coming together, but no, it started a long time back."

"How far back?"

He pushed his glasses up on top of his head. "I need another beer. How's the head?"

"Still hurts, but not as bad."

"Want anything?"

"No, thanks. What the hell time is it?"

"1:30."

***

I had my eyes closed but wasn't asleep when Langly came back in the room. He was sipping another Carta Blanca as he sat back down on the bed, feet folded under him, looking about fourteen.

"Kids still up?"

He grinned at me impishly. "What do you think?"

"I'll take that to be a yes."

"Freddy Krueger is in about his tenth incarnation right now."

"They trash the living room?"

"Oh, yeah. They have the mutt with them, by the way."

"That's fine." We had NY Times on the bed with us. Langly stroked her long grey fur and got her engine going.

He grinned at me. "I had you doing that earlier."

I smiled back. "Yes, you did. And I had you imitating the Screamer." The black cat was now fast asleep atop the printer. "Did you have pets when you were younger?"

"Had a cat and a dog for a while. After they died, we didn't have any others." He didn't elaborate.

I opened my eyes again. "So you were telling me about how your whole...philosophy developed."

He sipped the Carta Blanca for a while, then took a large gulp. "I think it really started back when my dad died."

"How long ago did he pass on?"

"He died when I was twelve."

"Wow. I know from watching my brother Jason that it's really horrible to lose a parent so young."

"It was hard. See, I wasn't planned or anything. My sister Joan is sixteen years older than me and my brother Scott is twelve years older. I think my mom, she was like 40, she didn't plan on having more kids and I don't think she was thrilled about it. She let my sister and brother name me. Joanie was a huge Beatles fan. That's how I got my name."

"They were just making their mark."

"Joanie was into it before almost anybody."

"What does she do now?"

"Joan? She's a teacher, like my mom was. She's got two kids. I used to know 'em, but they stopped letting me see them when I was...you know, doing time."

"How old?"

"Let's see. Chris was born when I was 9, so I guess he'd be 26, 27 now. Julie's gotta be 21. God, they're adults. And I don't even know 'em. Didn't see 'em grow up, nothing like that."

"Do you mind my asking why they stopped talking to you when you were...incarcerated?"

"Because Joan married this dickhead. I knew he was a dickhead when she married him, and I was only 7 then. He's really into this right-wing stuff, he's a lawyer, a scary guy. Joanie used to be like my mom when I was little. My mom wasn't all that interested in me, but Joanie thought I was great. She used to take me places with her friends, they'd all fuss over me, it was great. It didn't bother me that my mother wasn't all that around."

"Sounds like she was a terrific big sister."

"She was, until she met Roy. The dickhead. Roy hated me. Thought that Joanie had a really weird bond with me and convinced Joanie that it was sick. So here I was, this little kid, I had a big sister who loved me and then she didn't. I was sorta confused by the whole thing." He kept drinking now. "I used to visit her, though. Used to go see her when he wasn't home, or we'd meet and have coffee or something. Then, when I got arrested, Roy told her that she was forbidden to have any contact with me. Same with Chris and Julie." He stopped for a moment. "I don't think Roy hits her or anything like that. But I think he beats her down mentally real bad."

"I'm really sorry, babe. So you've not seen her in nearly 12 years."

"Yeah."

"Would you see her again if you could?"

"I'd like to see her. But I don't want to deal with her asshole husband." He looked sad. "And I don't want to make her life shit."

"She's got e-mail, doesn't she?"

"Yeah, I sent her some e-mail once. She wrote back and said that if Roy found out, he'd kill her, and she was sorry and all that, but things were hard enough."

"Does she look like you?"

"Yeah, and she still looks good. I've hacked into the Maryland DMV and seen her photo. She's still got blonde hair, even though she's 52."

"What about your brother?"

"Scott. Scott has four kids by three wives, and he was killed driving drunk in 1987. I was still at Lompoc Country Club. Scott didn't hate me, but he was sort of...he couldn't get it together. He was a smart guy, studied chemical engineering, but he was always in trouble with his wives, the DMV, the IRS, you name it. He was cool to me when I was little, but he didn't fuss over me like Joanie did. I remember him flying kites with me one time when I was four. It was great."

"You said your mom was a teacher."

"Yeah, she taught special education. Retarded kids. Joanie does that,
too."

"What about your dad?"

He smiled a bit. "Well, he was left-handed like you."

"That's about the only thing you've ever told me about him."

"And he had that weird lefty writing like you have."

"Big surprise there."

"He had blonde hair and blue eyes."

"What did he do?"

"My dad? He was in the military."

"You didn't move around much, though."

"Nope, spent almost all my life in Maryland. My dad was a microbiologist. Worked at Fort Detrick." He pressed his chin into his knees and said, very softly, "In the biological warfare unit."

END OF PART 13