Rating: PG

Summary: I hope my department chair never sees this...his name's Tom Nathanson, and this is where I start ripping him apart (giggling ferociously). And here we get to contemplate what might happen to Hairboy's lovely locks...

Spoilers: Nah.
 

January 22, 2001

"This is un-fucking-believable!"

Okay, somebody had a bad day.

Langly irritably tosses his keys on the table, throws his jacket over the back of the kitchen chair-and misses, further increasing his irritation. Among his many talents he lays claim to, one is the ability to aim a jacket at the back of a chair and have it hang squarely on.

I hand him a beer and pop one for myself.

"So what happened?" I ask him as I give him a quick hug. He's not ready for any serious affection yet.

"In a while. Lemme finish this." He closes his eyes, leans back in the chair-how he hasn't killed himself yet doing this, I'm not sure-and puts his feet on the table.

"Uh, babe, do you mind? We eat on this table."

He gives me a wounded look, then puts his feet on my chair.

I think this might be a good time to leave him the hell alone.
 

Juliet's here tonight; she's planning to go through some of Sheridan's computer disks with Langly, Byers, Frohike and Frohike Junior, except that tonight Frohike Junior works till 9, so he's not likely to be able to contribute much.

I cooked up the usual mess of pasta and salad-stock fare around here. Juliet and I are in the living room, enjoying our beers and a few moments of peace and girl talk.

"Work has just SUCKED!" she moans as she takes a long sip of her beer. "I mean, I don't know why, but it has really been nasty lately."

"Seems to be a lot of that going around," I nodded. "Looks like Langly had a REAL bad day...I don't know if John told you or not-"

"Yeah, I heard about Sheridan. That beats any suckiness my day had. How's your man taking it?"

"Not well, from all indications, but he's had other stress to deal with as well."

"How's Joan?"

"Holding her own. I stopped by on my way home tonight but didn't stick around-her charming son was there, and he hates my guts."

She laughs. "Ally, nobody hates your guts."

"This guy does."

"What'd you do to him?" She's laughing.

"I think it has something to do with the fact that I was born Jewish."

"Oh, one of those. Christ, they're not worth even worrying about."

"The guys seem to think they are."

"Ally, you know how much I love John, right?"

"Oh yeah."

"And you know I worship the ground he walks on and I damn respect his brains to boot?"

"You've taken your eyes off his ass long enough to look?"

This makes her giggle, and then she turns serious again. "Yeah. Well, sometimes, you have to admit, they get carried well beyond the pale. To hear John rave on right now, you'd think we were about to have another Holocaust or something."

"I think that's a bit extreme."

"As do I.

"Langly and I, to be fair, haven't discussed it much...we've been preoccupied with pressing private concerns for the most part."

"Well, I think you have enough of those right now."

"You heard about Mulder and the former boss, haven't you?"

"You mean, they've been tossed out? Was this a big shock to anybody?"

"Yeah, actually, I always figured Skinner to be so FBI...yeah, that one took me by surprise."

"I really don't know much about him. John seems to think he was let go under very suspicious circumstances...but then, John thinks all circumstances are suspicious."

We finish off our beers. "You know, Julie, I hate January. Always have. I'd just as soon fall asleep on January 1st and not have anybody disturb me till February. I'd be like Punxatawney Phil. Check out my shadow on the 2nd of February and then decide if there's going to be six more weeks of winter and wait for it to pass."

She laughs at me. "Ally, you are so not tough when it comes to the cold."

"That, and January just depresses the hell out of me. Even in LA, it sucked."

"How bad could it be in LA?"

"Well, it rains in January."

She's really rolling now. "God, Ally, I grew up in Minnesota, Illinois and Ohio...now THAT'S bad weather!"

"It's not just the weather. Winter sucks. I don't think I'm ever going to get used to winter here. Everything bad happens."

"Oh, Ally, you're just having a bad day, let it go." She laughs at me, but more gently. "You don't really believe winter is cursed, do you?"

"I'm not sure what I believe in," I tell her. "Except I do believe I'll have another beer."
 

I'm running stats, and everyone else is attacking Sheridan's diskettes. I'm working off a laptop because all the workstations are taken.

This is a slow process. It would help were I brilliant like the rest of these guys.

Nobody's saying much of anything; it's really work time around here.

So I'm mildly jarred when Langly breaks the electronic hum and clicking keys with a human voice.

"Can you believe, my new boss expects me to cut my hair?"

This hardly constitutes earth-shattering news in most spheres, but here, it's enough to silence the keyboards.

"Did you say you're cutting your hair?" Juliet asks skeptically.

"No, I said my boss EXPECTS me to cut my hair. I didn't say I was gonna do it!"

Byers is thoughtful. "So you met your new superior."

"I wouldn't call him that. Compared to Sheridan, the dude's a techno-idiot."

Meaning he knows less than Langly.

Well, that explains the sorry mood he came home in.

"Babe, doesn't Bryce have even longer hair than you?" He did at the wedding, anyway; I remember salivating over the guy's locks.

"Did this afternoon."

"What's his plan?"

"Thinks he'll buzz it just for the hell of it. Go skinhead or something."

"Tell him I'll kill him if he does."

"He'll tremble in fear."

Frohike and Byers have leaned forward; enquiring minds want to know what the hell is happening here.

"Okay, so you have a new boss. I seem to continuously have a new department chairman-in fact, I was nominated for the year 2001-2002 for the position," Byers comments.

"Whew, Byers, king of the hill," Langly chuckles.

"It's a rotating position. I think that's because after a year, it's been discovered that the principals become homicidal, suicidal, or, in the best cases, simply manic," Byers observes wryly.

"Yeah, well, you're good at the administrivia thing. And I'm not. And working with Sheridan, man, it was like, he didn't bother us with any of that shit. I mean, I didn't even put in a time slip half the time, and he never said boo about it," Langly laments.

"Does this individual have a name?" Frohike asks him.

"It's a one Major Thomas Nathanson," spits Langly. "And get this, we have to call him sir. Jesus fuck. I mean, with Sheridan, you'd go hey, you, or hey fuckhead, and he'd answer. I mean, Sheridan outranked this guy at retirement, but he never got hung on it. And like as long as you got you work done, if you had shit to get done, like you'd just work later or blow off the afternoon or whatever. This guy's like, you're there at 7:42 a.m., and you get written if you don't."

"What a dickhead," Frohike sympathizes.

"You know, babe, you don't have to keep this job...I mean, we've got enough money to carry us..."

He glares at me harshly. "Right. I'm gonna live on my wife's money. Sure. That works for me. NOT!"

Oh boy. Somebody is really, really tetchy now.

"It's not my money, it's OUR money."

"Yeah, and we may need that money...shit, what am I gonna do?"

Byers decides to take the rational argument here. "All right. The man has some odious personality traits."

"And he's a fucking idiot!" Langly spits.

"And he's technically inept," Byers rephrases it into specifics. You can almost watch how this man teaches a class. God, he's got to be good.

And easy on the eyes to boot.

"Has he done anything to inhibit your ability to perform your job?" Byers asks, playing the calm devil's advocate here.

"How the fuck should I know? We barely got anything done! He spent the whole fucking day talking at us!"

Ah, my husband's sentiments for meetings rises to the forefront here.

"What's his philosophical orientation?" A real PhD question if there ever was one. Then again, he is one, so I guess he can ask it.

"His? Like, trust no one! I mean, we're not doing anything all that much different...but man, I don't trust him, what he'd do with what we find...I mean, here I could find myself setting up the next bombing of civilians in Kansas, and I wouldn't even fucking know it..."

"Can he verify what you find?" Frohike asks, taking the technical perspective.

Langly shrugs. "Doubt it. We were talking about some of the algorithms we wrote, and it's like it went right over him..."

"So you could be doing things and he wouldn't even be aware of it, right?" Frohike points out.

Langly shakes his head. "Even if he's an idiot, and we do something he doesn't like, man, we are in the street like so fast...or in jail...and I don't think I can handle being a princess again..." He winces, really hard. "Shit, what am I gonna do?" He's pacing now.

"You could call Lu," I suggested. "She offered you a job, a few times."

"Yeah, and every time she did, we were all ripped to the gills."

"Lu does not get 'ripped to the gills.' Lu gets pleasantly smashed."

"Lu got ripped big time on New Year's Eve," referring to the last time we hung with them.

"She was the most sober of the four of us," I point out.

"Which wasn't saying much!" Langly shoots back at me.

"Whoa, guys, we're off point here," Juliet waves her hands in a time-out gesture. "Langly, bad bosses are all over the place. And in my experience, they don't last long. Of course, they usually manage to be replaced by another bad boss, but you learn, you don't let it keep you from doing your job...you don't have a lot of outside work experience, do you?"

Langly looks grumpy, and he's sulking like a recalcitrant child, which, right now, he is.

"The way I see it, you have an opportunity here, Langly, a chance to do some good things...your boss is a moron, right?"

"Big time," Langly agrees.

"So you do what he says, and then you do what needs to be done." She looks at him like, this is the way of the world, boy, get used to it.

Byers is thinking. He looks so much like a fucking professor when he's thinking...but I guess if you are one, you're entitled.

"Things are going down, you know that, and it's not going to be pretty," Byers assesses carefully. "Maybe you could use your position to move things in another direction...and we could expose them as it happens...carefully, of course." When is Byers not careful?

"And perhaps you could take Miss Russell up on her offer of employment as well...she seems to have a great deal of access," Frohike comments.

Langly shoots up like a firecracker. "Like when am I gonna do all this, huh? Like I don't have enough to do already? I mean, Jesus fuck! I haven't even had time to shop for a car, goddammit, what with Joanie being sick and all...should I just give up sleeping? I mean, I'm working my balls off now, for Christ's sake!"

He does look exhausted.

Frohike looks as if the gears are grinding, and he smiles a small, Frohike-type smile.

"Hmm...perhaps Miss Russell would be interested in a more...senior employee," he muses. "One with more...experience."

It dawns on us what he's saying, and Langly's first reaction is to cringe in horror.

"You?!"

"Excuse me, Blonde Boy, but who taught you some of your best tricks?" Frohike glares at him.

Keys in the door-it's Michael on the video monitor.

"What the fuck's going on?" He says by way of greeting. "Hey, Ally, any leftovers inside?"

"Sorry. Not from tonight. There's some potato chowder behind the milk, you can have that."

"Nope. Kelly ate that."

"Looks like Burger King for you, boy," I say sadly.

"'S'okay, I'll deal. So what's up?"

"Only eruptions in the time-space continuum," Byers says to him.

"Ah, just another day at the office. Hey, Langly, you look like somebody just died...oh, sorry, I forgot about Sheridan..." Michael actually has the grace to look embarrassed.

"Langly here has a new boss who objects to his chosen coiffure," his father informs him.

Michael eyes him suspiciously. "What, he doesn't want Goldilocks messing up the office here?"

"Shut the fuck up, Junior." Langly's mood has not improved with the arrival of the baby.

"So what're you gonna do?" I can see a hint of a malicious smile forming on Michael's mouth.

Kelly may be mellowing him...but not totally.

"We think for the moment...it may be prudent for Langly to go along with the program, so to speak," Byers muses.

"Excuse me, this is my job, do I get anything to say about it?" Langly demands.

Frohike looks hard at him. "Not right now, you don't."

I can see Michael rolling his eyes. Frohike is a loving parent, but a very authoritarian one. And I think sometimes it grates.

"And..." Frohike continues, "I think I will go and pay the lovely Miss Russell a visit tomorrow...perhaps she can utilize some of my...special services."

Michael's really rolling his eyes now, and making gagging gestures.

"Is she the Fibbie with the big tits?" Michael phrases the question about as inelegantly as possible.

"Among her other...assets, yes," Frohike tells him.

"Oh, Jesus. Are you ever gonna stop being so fucking hormonal, Dad?"

Frohike glares at him. "Watch your mouth, dear boy...and when I stop being hormonal is when they can bury me in the cold, cold ground. However, dear boy, this isn't about a romantic encounter...it's about a job."

Michael looks incredulous. "A what?"

"A job, dear boy, one of those things you're forced to cope with on a daily basis."

Michael starts to laugh. "You? Oh my God."

Frohike looks seriously affronted. "Excuse me, Michael, but I HAVE had jobs in the past...and done rather well with them."

Michael finds this thought incredibly amusing.

"Yeah, especially when there're women with big knockers around!"

Frohike looks as if he's been slapped. "Michael, shut up!"

Michael is taken aback by the tone and harshness in his father's voice. He moves towards the door.

"I'm gonna go get something to eat," he mutters.

"Yes, probably your girlfriend," his dad shoots at him.

Touche.

Michael slithers out, rather embarrassed. When he's gone, we all chuckle.

"Frohike, your kid's a brat," Langly tells him.

"Shut up, Langly. You're a great one to talk," Frohike grumbles at him. "Now, what do you plan to do about those lovely golden locks?"

Langly cringes and runs a hand through the strands. "I don't wanna cut it," he complains.

"Langly, you could get it styled decently," Byers reminds him. "You don't have to cut ALL of it, you know."

"I don't wanna cut ANY of it!"

Juliet waves her arms again. This is a grounded woman, and she can cut through male bullshit like nobody's business.

"Oh, Langly, grow up already! So you cut your hair. Big deal. Hair grows back, you know."

Langly touches the front part of hair, which is getting thinner all the time...well, that part isn't likely to grow back.

"Babe, why don't you talk to Miranda?" I suggest. "She did great things with Michael. And maybe she can help you so that you either don't have to cut it, or you can cut it in a way that's acceptable to you and will keep your boss off your case."

He's sulking. I don't think he's open to suggestions right now.

So I'm surprised when he asks, "You think she's finished with her homework?"

"Probably."

He gets up and starts for the door.

With his hand on the last lock, he turns to us.

"God, we've gone so fucking suburban, it's not funny."

But the rest of us laugh when he's gone.

END OF PART 62