Disclaimer: I don't own Mulder, Scully, CSM, Skinner, or the Lone Gunmen, and let me tell you, if the Gunmen worked for me, and I could afford to pay them, they'd be living large. They belong to Fox Television and 1013 Productions, who don't put them to work enough. The other characters, unless indicated, belong to me.

And guess what? We're not gonna rate or summarize this time. We will tell you if there's a spoiler in there. Other than that, we're sort of laboring under the delusion that you're grownups.

And we're not gonna put the damn disclaimer in again, either. Enough is enough.

This is a quadruple narrative. Wish me luck.

Luanee Russell is happily stolen from William H. Lovejoy. It's meant as a compliment. She's a great character.
 

De Minimis Non Curat Praetor

MICHAEL:

April 28, 2001

God, I hate this time of year.

I only got one final, that's in calc, but I got two final projects due in a week and a half. And they're major. One's an animation project for my Java class. This could be very cool, but it has one problem.

I can't draw for shit. If artistic talent could save my life, I'd have been dead meat a long time ago.

I didn't want to do this, but looks like, if I'm gonna keep my famous 4.0 average, I'm gonna have to.

I got to ask Langly to help me.

He's the only one of us that can draw. And he's real good.

He's also a major pain in the ass, particularly right now. I think it's because he's trying to be a daddy.

I wish his wife would hurry up and get pregnant so he'd calm down and get on with it.

Plus, I normally work like 20 hours a week. Well, it's end of semester almost, and like everyone who didn't bother to figure out their work all of a sudden pops into the tutoring center and expects me to perform a miracle. So it's been like 25 hours a week. Doesn't sound like a big difference, but let me tell you, when you got like NO free time, it makes a huge difference.

And right now, free time? What the fuck is free time?

I mean, Kelly and me, we barely got time to be with one another. And that's a drag.

Part of that's work and school, but wait, there's more. I've been getting more involved with The Magic Bullet, the magazine that my dad and the guys and me put out.

I think they finally accept me like one of them. And that's the good part.

Bad part is, I've pretty much had to give up sleeping.

I find I dream of sleep like a starving person dreams of food. Thank God that's not a problem. Actually, it is, but deprivation isn't the focus here. More like the other way around. I've really pudged up since I had surgery for my 25th birthday.

I wanna start swimming again. I mean, I can use the pool at school for free.

Of course, I'm never free, so when do I get to take advantage of it?

God, I want to be back at the Carolina shore. We went last month, my dad and Kelly and Jo and me. It was SO awesome. The best.

Doesn't look like we'll be going on vacation again for a while.

Langly's out here now. Better ask him before he gets involved in something.
 

LANGLY:

Like it hasn't been a long enough day, and now Junior wants me to help him with his homework.

And I got to help him. For one thing, he's Frohike's kid.

And as much as it pains me to admit it, the little fuckrag is a friend. Sort of like in the way a little brother gets to be a friend when he starts showing signs of being human.

Not that I have any experience. I don't have any little brothers. I am the little brother.

I can't think about that right now. I got enough problems. I mean, I feel bad about Joanie and all, I wish she was getting better faster, but I don't know what the hell else I can do for her. If there was, man, I'd do it so fast, but she's getting heavy chemo, and I did let her borrow some bone marrow. I kept thinking it'd give her a miracle.

Miracles are getting to be in short supply these days. And right now I could use a few.

Actually, just give me a longer day, and I might be able to deal with stuff. It's like I got all this time pressure. I never had it like this before.

Then again, it's been only like less than two years, and I picked up a wife and kid along the way. Which is great. Don't get me wrong. Ally, my wife, she is like the most amazing woman in the world. She'd have to be, if she can put up with me. And she was married before, and she came as kind of a package deal, so we've got a 15-year-old daughter.

Which is like so so so weird. I mean, me, with a teenage kid. It's still bizarre.

Miranda's a good kid. She's bunches of fun, real smart, responsible. She's also real moody, and she and me, well, we have cat fights sometimes. Especially about her boyfriend. I don't trust him. I mean, come on, he's a 16-year-old guy, and we all know what 16-year-old guys want.

And sometimes the way she talks to Ally, I could just pop her. I don't, of course. Ally'd kill me. But she shouldn't talk at her mom that way. Her mom's like the best mom in the world, and she's real lucky to have her.

And I want to make her a mom again. We're trying. Sad to say, we're not having as much fun trying as you'd think. This is because we had to have the technological revolution give us a helping hand.

And it sucks.

Ally hates it. And I feel sort of guilty, putting her through all this, because I know she feels like shit, but she's like she wants to go forward with it.

Then again, it's no picnic for me, either. I mean, I will never be able to hear the phrase 'make a donation' and not squirm again. Plus, Ally's real clingy and she cries a lot. She says it's the hormones they're giving her.

I hope that's all it is. Because if there's something she's not telling me, I'm gonna be pissed. And with Ally, that's always a possibility. She's like the mostclosed-mouth person in the world sometimes. I mean, I like that she doesn't just go off about stuff. I do plenty of that myself. But sometimes, I sort of get the feeling she's not telling me what's really up. And that bugs me.

The worst part? I don't even know why I feel this compulsion to pass on my DNA. It's not like I have DNA that really deserves to be passed on.

But hey, I'm like driven to it.

So much for instinct being bred out of people.
 

BYERS:

I need to get this finished and get myself home. It's late, I'm tired, I have papers to grade, and Juliet is probably wondering what's keeping me.

She is, fortunately, a very independent woman in many ways, and she has yet to make any sort of comment regarding the hours I keep.

I'm more distressed than she is with regard to the amount of time I spend away from home. I'm now the chairman of the department of Public Policy at American University, and I have been submerged into the politics, infighting, and administrative trivia that comprise such a position.

All this for an extra $3,500 in my annual salary. It hardly seems worth it.

But as of this moment in time, the money is welcome. Juliet was laid off due to personnel cutbacks in her company a week ago. She received a moderately good severance package, but it will not last forever. And unfortunately, the trend of the Clinton-Gore years has been reversed, and the economy seems to be stagnating.

It is only stagnant at the surface. The truth is, there are heavy undercurrents of manipulation in this state of affairs. Our government is deliberately stifling the economy to achieve its own ends. I am not certain what these ends are, but a few trends are becoming clear. I have explained this in many a meeting with my colleagues, most of who appear to scorn my notions.

I doubt they will be so contemptuous of them in the coming times.

I truly wish this were not going to be the case, but from all indications, there is going to be a drastic transformation in our way of life in this country. And not for the better.

Granted, I am pessimistic by nature. I seem to have been born this way. I have moments when I believe all will work itself somehow, but those moments are few and far between. Most of them are when I am with Juliet. I rely so terribly on her spirit and her strength, and it frightens me how dependent I have become upon her.

I doubt she is even aware of the extent of my dependency. I'm not a new millenium kind of guy. I don't cry, I don't create scenes, I don't express my emotions.

In short, I don't communicate.

I rely upon her to communicate for the both of us, which she does an admirable job of.

I also realize how utterly unfair it is for me to inflict this upon her. Perhaps right now she is at ease with it, but she will want more. It's inevitable.

And fair.

I really need to complete what I have in front of me and get on home.

And I desperately need to pet the cat.
 

FROHIKE:

These kids drive me crazy.

I realize that 'kids' may be something of an exaggeration. Two of them are 37 years of age, my own spawn is 25. Hardly juveniles, you say.

Yes and no. Compared to me, a ripe old 56, they are so young.

And they act it.

I have days where I walk into this office and all I smell are the hormones. This is not surprising, considering that all three of them seem to be spending a good amount of their time thinking with their small heads.

I have, of course, been guilty of the same for much of my life, and late at night, when the boy is tucked in bed, I indulge in my fantasies. But I indulge in the moment, and then I go to bed, and it's over until the next time. Not so for these critters. It's like living with three walking, talking erections.

And getting old, very fast.

We have tons of research to do, plenty of writing, you name it, it's behind schedule in a large way. I used to be able to devote full time to the magazine, but in recent history, I've taken a day job. When I took it, I figured it would be here and there, just when Miss Russell needed my services.

Apparently business is booming.

The money is very nice, especially in view of the fact that I still have a child to put through college. The time demands, however, are almost more than I can handle. I'm trying very hard not to become overly stressed out. But my ulcer kicked back into gear almost as soon as we hit the Virginia state line after a wonderful week earlier this month in Atlantic Beach, North Carolina. And I've had one heart attack, and it's not an experience I'd like to repeat.

I'd be considerably less stressed if these three would just get their work done and quit mooning and bickering and complaining. There is a constant fine whine here lately, and I'm not talking about an '87 Vallipocella.

Byers is the least vocal of the three, but the most distracted in many ways. He has new responsibilities in his day job, and they are not doing much to help him maintain his calm demeanor. Lately I've seen some real evidence that he is indeed a redhead. Add to that that his live-in lady, the lovely and intelligent Miss Juliet, has recently lost her job, and that he seems to
be in a constant state of indecision regarding whether or not he should make his relationship with her permanent, and you have your basic basket case male approaching middle age.

Any day now, he's going to show up in a Porsche. I almost wish he would. He might find some release in doing something so utterly frivolous.

Langly is, as always, not one to suffer in silence. Between having a boss he detests, a sister fighting a life-threatening illness, and his current obsession with producing an heir, he gravitates between merely grumpy and downright nasty. His wife, normally a calming influence on him, has been reduced to a quivering mass of chemical imbalance in their quest for DNA
recombination. Her pleasant demeanor has been ruptured, and I fear it may be sometime before she regains her equilibrium. Until she regains hers, we can pretty much count on him to be a lost cause.

I don't know which strikes more terror in my heart: That they will have this baby, or that they won't.

And then there's my son, my love of my life, my joy, and my constant aggravation. I know he is very busy, and he's feeling the pressure, without the benefit of having as much practice in dealing with it as the others and myself. He is trying so desperately to prove himself, and I have to say, he is doing well, but I need to not allow him to become complacent. So I continue to raise my expectations for him, and he in turn has raised his own.

Perhaps I should call a time out here. He's been getting pretty hard to live with lately. And he and Kelly are both studying for finals, preparing their final projects, and probably having a lot less sex than either of them would like.

To all three of you I say: Welcome to the wonderful whacked out world of being an adult.

Ha.
 

MICHAEL:

I tell Langly what my teacher's looking for, he says that should be a piece of cake, what's my problem?

My problem, Blonde Boy, is that I can't draw my way out of a paper bag, and you get points for that kind of stuff. Presentation is 20 percent of the grade.

I could belt him right now. He's looking at me like, so? 20 percent. Big fucking deal.

It is to me, dude.

Whatever. He relents and we talk about what I got in mind, and he says, I can do that. He goes to his work area, which is right next to mine, and unlocks the drawer where he keeps his sketchbooks.

He's got some awesome sketches in there. You should see him draw Ally. Then again, maybe you shouldn't. I've never seen her naked, but I got a pretty damn good idea what she looks like from those drawings.

Hot, but nowhere near so hot as Kelly.

Oh man...just thinking about Kelly, who's only like a hundred feet away, in her room in the dungeon of Chateau Langly, working on her lab reports and studying...so close and so fucking far away.

What I wouldn't give to be in her bed right now, loving her, instead of being out here with three crabby guys.

And Dad's the crabbiest of them all. Swear to God, I'll never slug him again, I promise...but that doesn't mean I don't want to do it. He is like such a major pain. You'd think we were all put on the planet to drive him insane to hear him talk.

I wish we were back at the shore. I'd give anything to be back on vacation.

I ask him when we can go again, he says he doesn't know, real short like. Like I'm annoying the shit out of him just for asking.

And I really want a cat. I haven't had time to hit the shelter to get one, but I want one real bad. When I bring that up, he just groans and asks who's gonna take care of it.

And even though Kelly and me, we did the deed with him and Jo right under our noses, it's like, if she stays at our house, I can't sleep in the same room with her. Ridiculous. I've slept with her already. It's not like he's condoning something that didn't already happen. About every third day he goes off on some rant that we better not make him a grandfather yet.

Jesus Christ. Kelly's on the pill, and she's like got a million years of school left, and she's not gonna take that chance. We know we don't want to be parents.

Yet, anyway.

Besides, if I became a dad, I might turn into...

My dad.

Fuck.

I worry about him, too. It's like he still takes about a million pills since his heart attack, and I know his ulcer's bugging him, he lives on crumbed up saltines and milk. I keep worrying he's gonna get real sick and check out on me, and I'm not ready for that.

I'm ready for him to shut up. But not shut up that much.

Dad asks Byers if he got some stuff from some so-called right to life group. I think of them more as anti-choice groups. Byers is like, I'm working on it, fast as I can.

God, even the prof's getting a bit tetchy here. You don't see that much, but lately, you see more of it.

I wonder if Juliet cut him off again. She did that once. He was hell on wheels until she was giving it to him again.

I can sympathize. When Kelly's in work mode, it's like she's obsessed, and things like sex just have to wait.

I'm not doing well with this.

Byers asks Langly how he's coming along on the fertility clinic stuff. Langly's like, sure, dude, like I don't have anything else to do, I'll just drop it all and do it this minute.

And I know Langly's not getting it enough right now. He and Ally, they maybe going for a kid, but they don't get to have fun getting there.

Langly's like, come here, Junior, here's what I got in mind. I look over his sketches.

Well, it's not exactly what I wanted, but he's in like that frame of mind that if I say something, he's gonna go off on me, so I just say, it's cool.

And way better than anything I could do, anyway.

The prof finally says, I'm getting nowhere, and I'm out of here. He snaps off his workstation, pushes the chair in-the prof's the only one that remembers to do stuff like that-and says goodnight to us all, and he doesn't sound sorry to be bailing.

Langly decides this is as good a time as any to go inside. He's got the shortest commute of any of us, which I wonder lately he thinks is a good thing. Ally's not the easiest person to be around right now. She's doing these hormone thingies, and plus she can't drink or smoke, two things she really likes to do.

Hey, he wants to do the daddy thing, he's gonna have to put up with it.

Dad rubs his eyes, says he's ready to call it a day, he'll see me at home, and I better be there soon.

Oh yeah, Dad. Like I'm just gonna go and have an all-night orgy with my girlfriend.

I wish.

I bite my tongue and just say I'll see him at home.

And it's only Monday. Christ.
 

LANGLY:

Ally's in our room, studying o-chem. She's only got a couple more weeks of this, and she's gotta pass with 90 or better, and she's in grad school next fall.

I think she's nuts. It's not like she needs to do this.

Besides, she's gonna be a mommy again soon, we hope. How's she gonna go to school and work and take care of me and Miranda and the baby?

She's got this weird thing that she has to be doing something productive all the time. Well, yeah, okay, but I mean, taking care of us, isn't that sort of important?

I don't want some stranger raising my kid. I haven't told her this yet, I'm not quite sure how without having her go ballistic on me, which right now, she's got a tendency to do. I mean, she's a great mom, you should see her with Miranda, I think she's the one that should take care of our kid.

Shoot me for my point of view.

She's surprisingly mellow tonight, more like the Ally I know most of the time. She's wrestling some equations, and probably winning, but she's like, she feels like she needs to be a whole lot smarter.

She doesn't need to be smarter. She's a real smart lady already. And beautiful. And sweet. And she puts up with me.

She's wearing my Pharmaceutical Bandits T-shirt, which is way big on her, she steals them to sleep in. She looks cute in it. And way tiny.

She's such a little thing. So how come when I'm in her arms, I'm the one that feels so small?

I mean, I'm way bigger than her, and if she keeps feeding me like she does, which, being a Jewish mom, she probably will, I'm gonna be double her weight. I already weigh thirteen pounds more than when I met her. Okay, that's not massive, but consider the trend. I already feel like I'm gonna crush her, but she's a tough little thing.

And she's got my heart in her hands, and on me, that's the most fragile part. Wouldn't take much for her to crush it.

She got harvested four days ago, so she says any day now, we might have embryos, which means she's gotta drop everything and go get implanted. She got implanted one time already, but it didn't take. I mean, it was only the first time, so it was sort of disappointing, but it was only once. They say most people don't get lucky on the first try. Guess we were no exception.

She's such a pretty lady. She's 45 but you wouldn't know it. I think she's got less lines in her face than me. And that hair. She's a redhead, it's light like peaches. And when she's got curls in it, well...

She's got some curls in it tonight. Not a lot, but enough.

And what really bites is, no sex tonight, not for at least four days after she gets implanted.

She's beautiful.

I wonder what she's gonna look like in a few months when the kid starts growing. She says she's got pictures from when she was pregnant with Miranda, but she hasn't unpacked them. We've got more shit in this room that still hasn't been unpacked. And we've lived here for like over a year. A year and a half, actually.

It's a great house. I love this house. I never want to leave it.

Made possible with a little help from late, eccentric mother-in-law. I sort of miss Eleanor, and I sort of don't. She could be a real bitch. But she was funny, too, and I could make her laugh.

Wonder what she'd say about Ally trying to have another baby at this point in her life. Who knows. You never could tell with Eleanor.

Eleanor, she was like bipolar, and alcoholic, and she had a mean mouth on her. And she was generous and a fabulous card player and real estate dealer and she loved her daughter. She'd tease me about being her goyische son-in-law, but I think she'd have only really gotten mad at me if she thought I was being mean to her daughter.

Which, in our current situation, she might. Like I said, you never could tell with Eleanor.

Ally puts down her book and plays with my hair, which I love her to do. She's got real tiny fingers, and they're real tender.

I miss my hair. It's a lot shorter than it used to be. I can thank my asshole of a boss, Major Tom Nathanson, for that one.

Least Miranda cut it so it doesn't look like that short. And, as she so sweetly pointed out, it covers my receding hairline pretty well.

Yeah, it's moving south. Not real fast, but it's happening. I keep wondering if we have to do all six fertility treatments to score, if I'm gonna have any left. Or if what I have is gonna be all gray. I've got more than a little gray now. I'm blonde so it's not so obvious to anyone but me, but like I've gotten bunches of it. Mostly since I got married.

I wonder if this is strictly a coincidence.

END OF PART 1