LOYALTY AND SEDITION
Part 2

Rating: PG-13, for a few scattered sexual references.

Summary: Michael's not enjoying this assignment. At all.

Spoilers: None.
 

ALLY:

August 29, 2000
At Chateau Langly

If I could slap myself unconscious right now, I'd do it.

I can't believe I let Michael read my journal.

Once again, this overwhelming need I feel to help him in any way I can robbed me of any common sense I might have possessed, and I don't have much.

What can I say, I'm a sucker for hard luck cases. And Michael Frohike definitely qualifies as one.

I actually like the little fucker-I really do. This does not mean, however, that I am always happy about him. I still think he's surly and bad-mannered and obnoxious.

And those are on his good days.

On his bad days, he turns in a 'woe-is-me' peformance that makes Mulder's look like amateur night. One time his wife, Dana Scully, who at the moment also happens to be my boss, is talking with me, and she tells me that she thinks Michael is clinically depressed. I have to stifle the temptation to laugh out loud. For this she went to medical school?

It's not like he's not justified. Michael's had it hard. I'm not arguing that point. It's just that he's had it so hard for so long that when anyone tries to be nice to him, do something in his interest, he gets utterly suspicious and paranoid, and ends up biting the hand that's trying to pass him a treat.

He can be hell on one's ego.

I see it in his dad's face all the time. Frohike tries really hard with Michael. He really does. And he feels a lot of guilt, some of it justified. But Michael would probably be a piece of work under the best of circumstances, and certainly, nothing in his life suggests that these are the best of circumstances for him.

I just get tired of being the target of payback sometimes.

Not that I'm his only target-in fact, he probably uses me for practice far less than he uses his dad or Langly. His dad gets the lion's share, but Langly isn't immune from it, either.

They can be very good together, that's the strange part. They can actually work well together and turn out some quality merchandise. I've seen them go and shoot pool and both of them come home unharmed. And Langly did ask Michael to be in his wedding party, although I think he did that more for Frohike than for Michael. Michael actually behaved himself nicely at our wedding.

Paternal death threats may have had something to do with that.

Other times it's cat and dog time, complete with hissing and spitting. And they talk about how nasty women fight.

Give me two women with PMS and Glock 9 millimeters over two emotional, moody, testy guys any day. At least with the PMS, I know what I'm up against.

I'm probably stressing over nothing. I suspect that in five minutes he'll
come out, say he gets it all, and that'll be the end of it.
 

MICHAEL:

Ally writes weird. I mean, she doesn't write bad. But she writes about...well, nothing. I mean, here she's talking about Miranda's Bat Mitzvah, which I guess was a big deal for Miranda, but if you think about it, it doesn't mean much to anything who wasn't there. And she doesn't even write about what a big deal it was for her-well, not like I would, anyway. She talks about who wore what and how people looked and how things tasted and how drunk she got...

No big surprise there. Ally likes the sauce. And for a little lady, she holds it reasonably well-well, to a point, anyway. I actually like getting drunk with Ally. She's a lot funnier when she's got half a pint of tequila in her. She's pretty quiet when she's sober, but give her a margarita or two and she's off and running. And she's not a mean drunk. In fact, she's a gigglepuss. You'd think at her age-I think she turned 45 in the summertime, or something like that, she'd stop giggling, but even at her
wedding, she started in.

I don't think Langly minds, but it'd drive me nuts.

She's talking about her first husband here. From what I've heard of him, he was probably a reasonably cool dude.

And he bought it. For stuff we're still trying to unearth. It doesn't make a lot of sense.

Here she talks about him like she just adores him and stuff and how proud they are of the kid and all-you know, typical grownup shit.

I can see it, because I see the way she looks at Langly. It's like she thinks he's God's gift to her or something. She gets pissy with him sometimes-not way enough, in my opinion-but mostly she just loves him and puts up with him and thinks he's terrific.

I don't get it. Okay, he's smart and he can be funny and he shoots decent pool, but I mean, what's the attraction here?

I've seen enough Bat Mitzvah shit here. I flip to her next entry.

Shit. Her husband dies like two days later. What a bite. She writes this part like she's in a fog or something. She probably was, come to think of it. It's like she's in so much pain she doesn't even know what hit her. Like she's in so much pain she can't even tell she's in pain anymore.

I know that feeling well.

I keep reading.

I don't know why. I mean, this is just a journal that some middle-aged lady keeps, and I'm trying to get down how she did it so that I can do my homework as quickly and painlessly as possible.

And I can't figure it out. She writes about stuff, sure...but it's like...she mostly writes about herself.

No way can I do that.

I'm gonna hate this class.
 

ALLY:

"Michael, are you still in here?" Ally opens the door without even knocking. I mean, I know it's her room, but still...

"Uh-yeah." I've plowed through about eight entries here. I still can't figure out how she can do this. She is like so all over the map with this, I can't even get a grip.

"Aren't you eating? It's dinnertime."

"Oh. Okay." I snap off her computer and head for the dining room. It's pasta. Again. You get a lot of pasta at Chateau Langly. And nobody here's Italian except me, and I'm only half, from my mom's side.

I think you get a lot of pasta here because you can make a lot of it real cheap and easy. But it's okay, tonight there's tomato-basil-garlic stuff, the chunky stuff she makes, and it's pretty good stuff.

Beats baloney on white.

Miranda's bitching-she hates this particular sauce and she's claiming pasta OD. Langly, thank God, tells her to shut up and deal with it. She can always eat it with olive oil and Parmesan instead, or she can starve. She glares at him with a look that says she'll take this shit from him when hell freezes over. At least he's hip to her, which is more than I can say for her mom, because he just ices her back.

My dad's here. He must've gotten here after I went in to look at Ally's journal. I sit down next to him. It's a round table so you've always got somebody next to you. Might as well be my dad. Shelby's on my other side, and Miranda's next to her, and Ally's next to Miranda, and Langly's next to Ally, which also means he's next to my dad.

Small crowd tonight. A lot of times, this place is a zoo. We don't have Byers and Juliet here tonight, which we often do-probably felt the need to eat dessert first, if you get my drift. I think Juliet'd jump him right on top of the table, but Byers is like so uptight. I call him the professor. He acts just like one, and in fact, he is one.

Very possibly the most anal-retentive guy on the planet.

I don't mind the prof. He's okay. For some reason, though, I just seem to piss him off a lot.

Actually, I do that to a lot of people.

My feeling is, fuck 'em if they can't take a joke.

The talk turns to the October issue of TMB-we got September just on the cyberstands two nights ago. Saturday night and I'm working.

Well, it's not like I have much of a life now, do I?

We've been hacking away at this project for months now. It's huge, and when we've got it all together, it's gonna be a hell of a story. We're hoping we get some definitive physical evidence by the time we get October out. But we have to wait on the lovely Dr. Dana Scully for such things. She's a biochemist at Georgetown these days. She's also deaf, and Ally interprets
her classes that she teaches and works in her lab doing some math-type stuff. Like I said, Ally's a great statistician. Dana Scully used to be a Fibbie, I'm told. That's how she met her husband, Mulder.

Mulder. Jesus, that guy is a piece of work. I mean, we're a pretty weird bunch around here. But compared to Mulder, we look pretty tame. What's truly rich is that Mulder is a shrink, and I always feel like he's trying to analyze me. Mulder a shrink.

That guy is more fucked up than any of us.

I can only put up with him because he usually brings Sam Adams with him whenever he's over here at the house. Otherwise, I think he's a user. I mean, he'll call my dad in the middle of the night just to do something for him. And what really pisses me off is that my dad will usually do it. I mean, never mind that my dad almost died last winter or anything like that. Mulder says jump, we're supposed to say how high.

At least he loves his kid. Soon to be kids, from what my dad tells me. And I got to admit, the Mulderette is cute, even if she does look like her dad. I bet Mulder would never bail on his kids.

Not like some other parents I know.

Okay, I'm not being real fair here. I know now that my dad wasn't allowed to see me before I was 18. I've seen the docs. I hacked into NJ Family Courts to make sure my dad wasn't jiving me, and it turns out he wasn't. Okay, score one for Melvin Frohike.

But what took him so long? I was 23 when I saw him. He could've come and seen me when I was 18.

Then again, I might not have talked to him then. And I think he was sort of embarrassed about the whole thing. I mean, he pretty much screwed up life for our entire family, and I'm still sort of pissed at him about it. Me and Leslie, we're the fucking casualties of his curiosity and outrage. Leslie is my bitch sister. We don't talk much. Just as well. I can't stand her.

And I might not have even talked to him when he came up to NJ last year and found me if I wasn't about to get thrown out on the streets again.

Melvin tries, I'll give him that. But I get real annoyed with his attitude sometimes. It's like he's trying to be such a dad. And I'm not into that. I mean, I'm 24. I'm an adult. I don't feel like being bossed around like I'm some stupid kid. And it's not just him. It's all of them. Even Ally treats me like a stupid kid a lot of times. Maybe she doesn't mean to, but she does it, anyway.

At least she's a lot older than me. Langly and Byers, though, they're like only in their 30s somewhere, and you'd think they know it all.

I'd like to say that if it hadn't been for me, they'd never have cracked this project we're all ass-deep in now.

It all started last fall when Langly got sick. We all thought he had the flu. But he kept getting sicker and sicker and he got seen by all these specialists who didn't have a fucking clue about what happened to him. He finally got better, but he was pretty wrecked for a while.

And then Ally got sick. She didn't get as sick as Langly. She did, however, blow her last chance at having kids when she did.

Just as well. The world doesn't need any more Mirandas in it.

And then it was Byers. The prof got the sickest of all. We damn near lost him at least twice. Probably more that we didn't get told about, from looking at his med file.

I never want to read another med file again as long as I live, but that doesn't look like it's gonna happen anytime soon. Because then Juliet got sick, and we found out one of Langly's buds died, and Ally's little bro got sick, and we come to find out like over a thousand people got sick.

And they were all at Black Hat.

Langly tried to hack the data, but he blew the hack. He swears it was a clean hack. Probably was.

I just know a few tricks they don't.

Computers are easy for me. I like them a lot better than I like people. Computers don't make me feel like a jerkoff. They don't bullshit me. They don't give me a lot of emotional crap that I'm not in the mood for. Well, sometimes I get flamed on e-mail, but then, doesn't everybody?

Actually, among carbon-based life forms, I think I like Tiny best. Tiny's Ally's monster dog. She's a big lap dog, and she thinks I'm the greatest thing ever walked the planet. I can talk to Tiny, and she'll listen. She doesn't lip back, either. When I lived here, she used to sleep on my bed every night. Ally says she misses me. She's down by my feet right now, which is good, because if she gets up, she's big enough so she can just help herself to whatever's on the table, which is not good.

Dinner's good. Ally's made garlic bread-she makes killer garlic bread, which is one of the few things Langly and I agree about. And there's never any leftovers, because we always eat all of it. I don't know what she puts in it, but she can put goose cum in there for all I care. It's that tasty.

Ally's talking about what her stats show so far, both the ones we've compiled and the ones she's doing for the lovely Dana Scully. The ones Dana's got aren't conclusive yet, but Ally thinks a few more months and she'll have some concrete stuff.

We don't have a few more months. If this virus gets into the public-and it looks like that's the plan-then we don't have that long.

The lovely Dana Scully better get her ass in gear.
 

It's work time-paid work time. I get paid for what I contribute, so I have to write something or I won't have any money.

I've also got to stay off the 976 lines.

It's real hard to do it. I charged them to Mulder for a while, but he got real suspicious when the charges were a lot higher than normal. He doesn't seem to bitch about my dad's calls, though. Yeah, my dad's a good customer on the phone sex lines.

It's so rich that he bitches at me for doing it. And he makes me pay for every last call.

Hypocrite.

I toss together something that looks reasonably publishable. I have Langly proof it, and he says it's okay, but I need to run the SpellCheck. Like I don't know this already. I can't spell my way out of a fucking paper bag.

And they remind me of this every fucking time. Like they're so goddamned perfect or something.

It's late, and I still haven't started on the damn journal. I need some more input. Actually, I need a lot more input, and I know how to get it. I just need to get Ally's files on the network drive. I feel kind of dirty about this, but not dirty enough not to do it.

This doesn't even require skill. A few commands, and I'm into her computer, and start the download, figuring it only ought to take a few minutes.

It's taking a real long time. I look at the file size. It's almost 5 mbytes. Jesus! Is she keeping a journal or writing 'War and Peace' over again?

I finish the download, and flip to her next section.

Oh God. She's talking about the first time she did Langly.

Why am I reading this crap?

Langly's typing away on the other side of the room, and I'm having a hard time keeping a straight face with him there. He has no idea what's going on, so I've got to keep it low key.

The temptation to tell him I know how he fucks is overwhelming, but he'd probably slug me, and he is a LOT bigger than I am.

But sometimes, a little covert knowledge goes a long way. Particularly if you don't blab it all over the place.
 

I give up. I have no idea how to do this. It just seems like all she does is say what she's feeling about whatever that day. Can be food, sex, kids, work, whatever.

I'll go talk to her.
 

ALLY:

Michael's in my kitchen, drinking my beer and asking me to help him with his journal assignment. This is really weird, but I put down the chem text I'm working on and we talk.

"It's not hard," I tell him. "Even I can do it." I'm kind of the village idiot around here. I have the fewest number of degrees except for Michael, and certainly the fewest brains, and that includes Michael. I'm a middle-aged, middle-class woman of middling intelligence, and I'm still wondering how I got here.

If I can record my life, it should be a piece of cake for him.

"What about the day, at 10:00 at night, do you remember best?"

"What do I remember? What's to remember?"

"Well, what'd you think about during the day?"

He's silent. He finishes a beer, then grabs another.

"Think, Michael. What was it about today?"

"First day of the semester."

"Okay. And what classes are you taking?"

"Jesus, I know that stuff. Everybody writes that."

"Part of your life. Write it. What were the instructors like?"

"The Java instructor's okay. My calc teacher's majorly boring. My writing teacher is a maniac."

"Okay. So write that. What about people in your classes?"

"Didn't pay attention."

"Okay. What about people on the bus?"

"Smelly, noisy, and all shoved together."

"Write that. What'd you do when you got to the office?"

"Took a shower. By the way, you're out of towels."

"Be nice if someone besides me did a load once in a while, and you can use that. Then what?"

"Did my Java coding. A snap."

"Okay, something else. How about this homework assignment?"

"It still sucks."

"So write that it still sucks. Okay, what'd you have for dinner?"

"You cooked it, you oughta know."

"Not the point. What was it like for you? Did you like it? Dislike it? What were people talking about at dinner? Anyone have an argument? Did Tiny try to bribe you into tidbits?" This actually raised a smile out of him.

"Okay, so you go back to the office. You write anything?"

"Yeah. It's gonna go in October."

"So write about writing your piece." I close my chem book. "I think you've got plenty there, dude. Go write it up. It's not like she's going to expect Kurt Vonnegut the first day." Then I smile at him. "Jackie Collins, maybe. But I'll bet you can write rings around her." Jackie Collins novels are one of my guilty pleasures. They're so bad they're good. Langly kids me about it-he's partial to Elmore Leonard and William Gibson-but I don't care. At the end of the day, I don't feel like using any more brain cells. Same for vacations.

"Thanks," he mumbles half-heartedly as he gets up. I'm not sure I helped him, but he's not being a bastard about it.

"I'm not in class tomorrow, but I have to work with Dana, so I'm leaving at 8, if you want to hitch with me," I offer.

"Think I'll do that," he says, not looking at me.
 

MICHAEL:

I got it written. It doesn't look anything like what Ally writes, but it's all I could do.

It's late. I'm gonna hitch with Ally in the morning, and my dad's already gone home, so it's another night on the sofa. At least Chateau Langly has a comfortable sofa. More comfortable than at home-my dad's got a studio, he gets the bed, I've got a sleeping bag on the floor. I hope when his lease is up in October he gets a bigger place.

At least I hope he doesn't kick my ass out.

In the living room, Ally and Langly have crashed out on the sofa. He's spooned around her, and she's so little she seems to get swallowed up in him. She's got her arm flopped over his hip, he's got his wrapped around her chest. He's making these noises like he's so damn content. Both of them look like I'll probably never feel.

Peaceful.

And I'll bet he's got a hard-on right now.

Well, there's always the recliner. I grab one of the blankets and watch Jay Leno until I pass out.

END OF PART 2