Rating: PG

Summary: Michael's terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad day.

Spoilers: None.
 

MICHAEL:

September 30, 2000
Apartment of Melvin and Michael Frohike
 

Shit. I can't get it together this morning.

We worked real late on the stuff for October last night. Only break I took was to watch ER so I could see my dream girl.

And the project I got stuck with was real boring. My dad wanted me to get on e-chat with this dude who used to test weather conditions for bio warfare at Fort Detrick back in the 50s. We're doing a lot of background stuff right now, prepare for the Big One.

It wasn't so bad as I thought, really. The dude was pretty cool for being like near 70, and he was real funny. We ended up on e-chat for a real long time and then I had to put all my notes and shit together and make it into an article. I didn't finish until about 3:00, then I had to wait for my dad, who's doing stuff on vaccines that they were trying to develop-by testing on prisoners and blacks, mostly-to finish up, and it took him till I think around 4. Even Byers and Langly were still finishing up when we bailed out. I fell asleep in my dad's car, and he must've gotten me in the house somehow, because I was in my sleeping bag when I woke up.

Way too late.

Shit.

Okay, if I skip the shower I can still make the bus. No point in bugging ad-he's like totally down for the count. He'd say no, anyway.

Should've stayed at Chateau Langly-might've been able to hitch with Ally, seeing as it's Friday and all. Ally's got a calc class when I've got a writing class...

SHIT! I've got a calc exam today! And I haven't got the fucking book.

What's even worse is, it's my own fucking fault. Ally put the damn book on my desk in the office before she crashed for the night. She didn't forget last night, like she sometimes does.

Maybe I can hook up with her after her class-but she's got a chem class after that and I have no clue where the hell it is. Fuck. I'm not gonna have a chance to study before the exam.

Fortunately, calc's an easy class. I've got my notes, the few that I take. Mostly it comes pretty easy.

I race down the street just in time for the bus to pull up. I haven't had a shower, haven't changed my clothes, and I look and feel and probably smell like hell. I haven't shaved for three days, and the Frohike five o'clock shadow is legendary-it comes at three instead of five. So I'm looking pretty scruffy.

At least today I'll fit in with the crowd on the bus.

I go over the calc stuff in my head. I should do okay. Not a problem. I try to relax.

We're almost in Anniston, and suddenly I remember...I've got a paper due in writing class today.

SHIT AND DOUBLE SHIT! Casey doesn't take late papers. I figured she was kidding, but the scuttlebutt around class is, unless you've got a medical excuse, you might as well forget it, take the fucking zero. Best you can get is before she leaves campus, and seeing as it's Friday, she probably bails first chance she gets.

Fuck. I was trying to get a 4.0. Blow everyone away, particularly my dad.

Guess that's not an option now.

And it sucks, because all my assignments so far from her are A's. It's so weird-the chick criticizes your papers half to death, but then she grades real light.

And she LOVED my Mindy and Buttons paper. Which blew me away, because it was sort of nasty, particularly the scene where Buttons gets to Mindy's mom after she tells him no treat. But she's got a sense of humor, at least about some things.

Apparently late assignments isn't one of them.

I'm looking through my stuff-God, I can't even remember what this assignment was, for Christ's sake. Oh, it was supposed to be some kind of expository thing, an essay, 3 to 5 pages.

Expository...exposed. Maybe...just maybe...

I gotta talk to her.
 

I wanted to nail her before class, but I barely made it under the five minutes late and lose points limit, so that was out. Then on break, she gets rampaged by a bunch of idiots who're whining about their stuff.

Finally, after class, I wait around until the last whiny-ass is done blabbing to her. She asks me if I have a question.

"Uh, yeah, sort of," I say. "Um...I was working last night, and I write for this publication called the Magic Bullet, and I wrote this article, and I didn't have time to do the assignment, and I was wondering if I could hand it in for this week-"

"Michael, no late papers. You know that." She pulls her cigarettes out of her backpack; she's not sticking around much longer.

"What if I can get it to you today?"

"How're you going to do that? I'm only on campus until one."

Okay, I've got two hours. "Well, okay. I could go to work and e-mail it to you. It's actually a real good piece."

She contemplates this for about thirty seconds-Casey does everything fast. I can barely keep up with her as she's walking.

"Okay, I'll tell you what. You go to your office and e-mail the piece you wrote, and do it as an attachment in Microsoft Word 97, because they're too damn cheap here to upgrade us. No copy and paste shit. And no dot txt files, because the format commands get screwed up.

"And it's in my e-mail box by the time I leave campus, with no technical problems, or you don't get credit. I'm here till one, and at one, I leave and get my son out of nursery school, and after that, it's up to my kids." She smiles for a moment, like the thought of her kids mellows her out a bit. I've seen pics of two little kids in her office, a boy and a girl, and they're actually sort of cute. And she occasionally mentions them, but not that much.

"Thanks," I mumble, preparing to take off.

"And Michael? This is a one-shot deal. Don't pull it again." She's off like the Tasmanian Devil; I half-expect a cloud of dust to swirl up around her.

I gotta find Ally, real fast.
 

She's already left her calc class. I think she's got an hour before chem. Maybe she'll be in the coffee bar line, that's usually where she goes.

The area where the food places are is mobbed, as usual. I'm having a hard time finding her, and her being short and my being short aren't helping me. It's almost twenty minutes before I catch her.

"I need your car," I'm almost out of breath from trying to get hold of her. I tried her calc room, which is at the other end of campus, so I had to run back up here.

"What's wrong?" She's such a mom. She looks actually concerned.

"I left an assignment at home, and I've got like an hour and a half to get it in, or I get a zero."

"You need to get organized, dude," she tells me, sounding like she does with Miranda, and that rankles the hell out of me, but I really need her car, and luckily for me, she pulls the keys out of her purse and hands them to me. "What time are you here till today?"

"3."

"I'm gone at 2. But I've got to get my keys back, so meet me here at 3, and you can hitch with me."

"Thanks." I suddenly realize I have no idea where the hell she's parked. "Where's the car?"

"Structure 2, 4th floor. The leviathan." Parking Structure 2 is huge. I'm amazed with something that monstrous, they run out of parking every day here, but they do. "Oh, and Michael, it needs gas. I'm running pretty close to fumes."

Great. This is just what I need right now.
 

I've got two bucks on me. At least she offered me a ride back, because otherwise, that was my busfare, and it's going into her gas tank.

Why, of all the fucking days, did she decide not to get gas before work? This is so not like Ally, who's really a pretty-well organized girl.

Then I remember she worked with us until about 2, and she's probably tired, too, and she probably overslept like me...but knowing Ally, if she thought she would be less than ten minutes early for class, she was gonna be late. Ally panics at late, at least for herself. This amuses me because Langly is ALWAYS late. And the weird thing is, unless she's gotta be somewhere  with him, she doesn't say boo to him about it.

Of course, if she has to be somewhere with him, then all hell breaks loose, and it's sort of fun to watch Ally get so pissy with Langly.

She doesn't do it enough.

Then again, when she does do it, she's got this voice that could cut glass. Ally's got a real soft voice, and she doesn't usually raise it much, but when she does, it's godawful, like nails on a chalkboard. Langly actually looks like he's being tortured when she's yelling.

I love it.

I get on the Beltway...and traffic's not moving.

Shit. Shit. Shit. This is not my day.

And I don't know my way so great around here. The side roads can get real confusing. One thing about Newark, and it's the only good thing you can say about Newark, you can find your way around pretty easy.

So I'm stuck on the fucking highway. It's already 11:48 according to the clock in Ally's car.

One hour and 12 minutes till I'm a zero.

I flip to the traffic station. There's a fatal accident right before the exit where I get off. Traffic's backed up all the way to Fairfax.

Shit. I am totally screwed.

I look in her glove box for maps. She's got everything but in there-I mean, she's got a flashlight, Tylenol, Bonine, a pair of running shorts, spare undies, a T-shirt with a big parrot on it, her registration, a lighter, an old pair of glasses, but no goddamn maps.

I stick my hand under the seat and see what she's got there. Two packs of Marlboro Lights, one empty, one unopened. Another lighter. 82 cents in change. I pocket the change. Obviously she hasn't missed it this far. Bunch of receipts from the Safeway, Taco Bell, Starbucks, an empty paper cup from Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf, bunches of pens, an instruction sheet from the vet...next time she hassles me about not putting my water glasses in the sink or leaving my empties around, I'm gonna remind her of this.

The back seat's full of Miranda's magazines. I'm so bored I grab for an old issue of Cosmo, which I thumb through while I'm waiting for the traffic to inch forward. The babe on the front cover is totally hot. Cosmo's not afraid to show some skin, which is good. I take the sex quiz. If it's possible to flunk it, I do.

12:05. I've gone 1.2 miles. My toes on my left foot are getting numb. This girl needs to switch to an automatic, for Christ's sake.

I grab another issue of Cosmo. I can't believe Ally lets Miranda read this shit. Miranda's only in 10th grade. My mom would have killed my sister for bringing this home when she was in 10th grade. I flip to the article that's titled "How to Drive Him Wild in Bed."

I'll tell you what would drive me wild in bed. Someone there with me, preferably warm and breathing and not thinking I totally suck.

12:20. I've still got three exits to go to get off this fucking highway. Not only am I cutting it close to make this paper, but I'm gonna be killing myself to get to the calc exam in time.

12:35. I've got one more exit to go, but if anything, traffic's going even slower, because the coroner is out there and only one lane is open. And everyone's trying to get in front of everyone else.

12:42. I'm off the highway-finally. And it still takes seven minutes to get to the offices, if you make all the lights. Chateau Langly is in the old part of town, meaning that it's nowhere near the highway.

I am majorly panicking, all because some fucking anal-retentive bitch doesn't take late papers.

Why do I need to prove I can get a 4.0, anyway? I mean, really, what's the point?

The point is, I don't need my dad thinking I'm any more of a fuckup than he already does. I gotta do something right, just for once in my life.

So, at 12:54, I get to the offices. Dad and the prof are there, and they want to ask me some questions about what I wrote up last night, but I ignore them. I log into my system, head for the directory where it's stored, and reformat it and mail it off to Casey's office.

I race out the door without even saying hi or bye to Dad or the prof. I've got five minutes to make my calc exam.
 

I set a new land speed record getting back to campus. The problem was, I got there, and I had to find a parking space.

There are a lot more cars and people here than there are parking spaces.

I wait behind someone who's getting ready to leave, but some guy comes up to her and she decides it's time to flirt with him, right there in the parking lot. I'm losing it so bad, I'm thinking I might just park behind her, illegally.

I get to my calc exam twenty-five minutes late. The instructor doesn't give a fuck. He just tells me he's collecting at ten to three, finished or not.

I'll be done.

It's cake. Thirty-eight minutes later, I'm out the door.

I know I aced this thing.

First thing that's gone right today.
 

I look for Ally, she gets out of class at two, but she doesn't know I'm done already, so I hang out in the food court and wait for her. Be nice if she'd show up real early today.

She doesn't. She's there at quarter to three, which is about on time for her.

Week's over for school...wait, no it's not. Shit. I've got a field trip to Skyland Mountain for my astronomy class tonight.

Maybe she'll let me borrow her car.
 

ALLY:

Michael says he put gas in my car, but you wouldn't know it; we're almost running on empty again. He asks if he can borrow my car to go on a field trip for astronomy tonight, and I say yes. I'm tired and I have no desire to go anywhere but home at this point, except maybe to dinner, and Langly can drive.

Nobody got much sleep last night. I got 3 and a half hours and Langly got two; I don't know how anyone else did, but I was the first one to leave the office, so I expect that everyone is dragging today.

I have work to do, both for the Gunlords and for Dana, but it's going to wait till tomorrow. I've had it.

But we've got the October issue of TMB on the cyberstands. It's the fattest issue we've done to date, save for the Christmas issue we put out each year. Conspiracy theories and Christmas seem to go together. Go figure.

The reason the issue's so huge is that we've been doing a series on biological and chemical warfare. What scares me is that there's so much shit out there on it. Granted, most of it's classified, but Langly et al never let a little thing like that stand in their way.

We've turned up reams and reams of data from all kinds of sources-the Defense Department, chemical and pharmaceutical companies, the State Department, insurance companies, hospitals, the CDC.

Some of it's common knowledge now. The Tuskeegee syphillis experiments, the prisoner testing, the LSD experiments at Fort Detrick in the 50s, people know about this.

What they don't know is far worse.

We plan to change all that.

And our interest is way beyond academic and concerns of social justice.

This time, it's personal.

We've been very careful in this series, verifying nearly everything to death, running various statistical models, cross-checking anywhere we can. We need to seriously be able to back up any claims we make, with a vengeance.

Because chances are, we're going to make some people very unhappy. Probably not our readers-so far, response to the series has been phenomenal--but there will be people who will be upset that this is leaking out, like plutonium into ground water.

There is data we're not ready to release yet. Dana Scully's been working away at it in her lab, trying to determine the structure of a protein of a virus that infected Langly, Byers, Juliet, my brother Jason, me, and an awful lot of people that attended the Black Hat Briefings in August of 1999. Isolating a previously unknown protein, determination of what kind of virus it is, how it reproduces, what the vectors are-all this takes time and work. And money.

Fortuanately, Dana has a lab at Georgetown, where she teaches biochemistry. And it looks like she has some willing funders for her grants. She's received an NIH and an NSF grant, but she needs a lot of money and equipment to do her research into viral DNA and RNA proteins. So she spends a lot of time playing groveling for dollars.

Nobody ever said the life of a principal investigator was a glamorous one.

And things are moving as fast as Dana can push them right now, but science moves at its own pace-very slow.

And she's pregnant again, which, whether she wants to admit it or not, is slowing her down some. It's not as terrible as her first pregnancy with Rebecca, which was a nightmare, but she's only in her fourth month and already she's puffing up and having trouble keeping her blood pressure down.

She just had amnio, and it's another girl. Thank God it's healthy. She and Mulder plan to name Mulderdaughter #2 Sarah.

 They blame Langly and I for this baby-based on her due date in February, they got pregnant on our wedding night. We are quite amused.

And Mulder is thrilled to death. If it's possible, he's even more excited about this one than the first one. And Rebecca is only life itself to him. And while Dana was not thrilled about the timing, I get the impression she's looking forward to giving Mulder another little girl.

Mulder is a Daddy. You can diss him on a lot of counts, but you can't discredit him there.

And I'll still have work to do even when she goes on leave. She plans to work till the bitter end, but I don't think that'll happen.

Right now, I don't want to think about work. I want to curl up on the sofa and fall asleep.

Which I do until somebody shakes me awake and asks for my car keys.
 

MICHAEL:

I don't want to do this. It's Friday night and I'm tired and I don't feel like driving out into the wilds of Virginia in the dark. They handed out maps in class, but like I said, I don't get around here so great.

Still, Luke, the instructor, is a fairly cool dude, and he's got some cool scopes set up when I get there. He's got two sections he teaches, and there's a lot of people there, and Luke says if you want to bring beer, it's fine, just make sure you don't drink and drive.

Luke doesn't treat me like a geek. I think that's because he is one. He's like forty probably, mostly grey, pulls it back in a ponytail, always wears ratty Levis and sweatshirts. He's totally mellow, and he keeps the class interesting, which it's hard to do when it's at night.

I'm sort of relaxing and getting into it when I see Casey. My writing teacher.

What the fuck is she doing here?

Oh God, I am so stupid. Why didn't I make the connection? L. Steinert...K.C. Steinert...I really am a moron.

Just my luck. I get a husband and wife show. I bet they swap notes about their students.

Casey sees me, and she seems real happy I'm there...doesn't this woman ever get depressed about anything? She's got two little kids with her, they look like the kids on her desk in her office. The bigger one's a girl, she's cute and quiet like her dad. The little boy she's got, though, he's even more of a maniac than his mom.

"I got your paper," she says.

"What'd you think?"

"I was...impressed. You say you do this for a living?"

"If you wanna call it that."

"Well, here's the deal. If you write something for your publication, and it's within the parameters of the assignment, you can hand it in, so you don't have to do double work. But only as long as it fits in with that assignment, and only if you hand it in at the beginning of class, when it's due." She's bouncing around as usual, only this time she's trying to keep up with her little boy, who's racing around all over the place. "You've got talent. And the subject of your paper...I'd like to see where that goes." She takes off after the kid, who's running like a rocket on speed now.

So maybe I'm gonna keep my 4.0 after all.

There's a bunch of us lined up to use the scopes, Luke's got two of them, and there's like fifty of us. I got to see Jupiter already, and it was so cool. The rings are edge on right now.

So I have to wait near the end of the line. I'm scoping the crowd, I really don't know anybody in the class, and I'm not real good at meeting people.

And then she's there.

She looks just like Kellie Martin on ER. Longish blonde hair, she's got it clipped back in this clip that's got butterflies on it.

In my astronomy class.

I must be more tired than I thought.

END OF PART 4