Title: Gutless (14/16) Author: Magdeleine See Prologue for full headers; all posted chapters can be found at http://shannono.simplenet.com/gutless GUTLESS Chapter 14 Drees Street and Main 7:18 AM The tiny red Honda barreled along the road with little heed to the pounding rain or the twenty mile per hour speed limit. Three blocks behind the Honda, a rented Crown Victoria struggled to keep up, the tar lines in the blacktop throbbing beneath its tires like a staccato cello solo. Mulder was not happy about driving this fast. He was normally ambivalent about bending the law when shadowing a suspect, but the rain-slick blacktop was hard to maneuver on. He found himself wanting to drive like a blue- haired old lady, which made him jumpy and irritated with himself, but the fact remained that while the sheriff's daughter might speed with impunity, a pair of FBI agents tailing the sheriff's daughter ought to be just a little bit more cautious. He didn't want to think about Volney's reaction if he found out about this little excursion. The windshield wipers were thwipping back and forth at a frantic pace, clearing the rain for a microsecond before the constant flow of water obscured Mulder's vision again. He hunched over the steering wheel, practically driving with his knees and elbows, squinting out at the smeary red tail lights of the tiny assortment of cars engaged in the sport of controlled hydroplaning. Water hissed steadily beneath the Crown Vic and swished out from under the wheels of approaching cars, changing pitch as the cars whizzed past. Scully leaned forward and turned up the heat a notch. The inside of the windshield began to fog up; Mulder squeegeed it angrily with the flat of his hand. "Cut it out, Scully, I can't see." "I'm cold," she bit out. Mulder squeaked a hand across the windshield again, leaving a six-inch-wide swath clear in the middle of the fog, and grabbed recklessly at the heat control. "It's not that cold," he informed her, and snapped the heat off. She glowered and turned away from him, ostensibly to look out the rain- marbled window. "Fine." The Honda's tail lights flared like a trumpet call and Mulder had to do some talented braking action to avoid drawing attention, avoid hydroplaning, and avoid cramming the Crown Victoria up the Honda's tailpipe. He hadn't recognized Taymor's Staffing Service under the gray drape of rain; somehow he'd thought it was somewhere a few blocks further on. The Honda shot into a parking spot directly in front of Taymor's. As the Crown Vic passed it, Scully whipped her head around counterclockwise to peer out the back window when she could no longer keep in visual contact through the passenger side. "Turn here!" she barked. "Here! *Now!*" "I *am,*" he snapped back, craning his neck around to check for oncoming traffic. The car plowed through a deep puddle with a low-pitched *sploosh* that slapped against the underside of the car. There was a parking lot in this block, right across the road from Taymor's, but he couldn't see a way in from this street. There were too many damned bushes in the way. Scully twisted in her seat, still keeping an eye on the red Honda. "In here," she ordered, and pointed authoritatively at the parking lot without looking at it. "Hang on a minute." "Mulder, will you PARK THE CAR already?" "I AM," he howled, and hit the gas. He wrenched the car to the left and through a one-car-wide inlet to the parking lot that he'd spotted barely in time, jouncing them severely as the wheels struck a faded orange concrete traffic bump far too fast. It was nowhere near appropriate behavior for a stakeout, but Mulder didn't give a damn. The parking lot was nearly empty. Mulder ignored the chipped lines of paint on the concrete and plowed across the parking lot, braking hard and throwing the Crown Vic into park in a spot parallel to Main Street, the driver's side facing east, toward Taymor's. He cut the engine and looked across the street just in time to see Amber Volney slam her car door and run across the wide sidewalk without a coat, umbrella or even a newspaper held over her head against the pouring rain, the perfect picture of the indifference of youth to cold and wet and mother's orders. She splashed through a puddle, darted under the wide green awning that covered the entire front of the store, yanked open the wide glass door and slipped inside. Moments later, Amber appeared in the display window, tossing her dark hair to free it of water, throwing her blue backpack into the chair behind the receptionist's desk. She stopped, fluffed her hair a little with one hand, and then walked off toward the back, disappearing from sight. Rain slammed down on the car in sheets, blowing in from the West, obscuring every window except the one facing Taymor's. "Do you think she saw us?" he asked, more to have something to say than because he actually thought they'd been burned half an hour into the stakeout. He kept his eyes on the lighted windows of Taymor's Staffing Service. "No." Scully's voice was very quiet, barely audible over the drumming of the rain. Across the street, Amber Volney reappeared in the display window. She sat down at the receptionist's desk, propped her feet up and began flipping through a stack of files in a haphazard manner. Occasionally she tossed one onto the desk. "Looks like she's in for the day," Mulder said. Scully didn't answer. "I said, it looks like she's in for the day." "I heard you the first time," she snapped. He turned away from the lighted windows of Taymor's and looked at his partner in the pinched gray stormlight. She had her arms wrapped tightly around herself, and her face might as well have been carved from stone, her eyes fixed straight ahead. It wasn't exactly her angry expression, but he didn't know what else to call it. "If you're tired," he offered, "you can go ahead and take a nap." She angled her face in his direction but still didn't exactly look at him. "I don't want a nap." "I'm just saying that I know I woke you up and we couldn't get any coffee and it would be understandable if you needed to take a quick --" "Mulder, I don't need a nap." She turned all the way away from him, her shoulders tight under her trench coat. "Okay. Okay." He sighed and turned back to Taymor's. Amber was fiddling with the antenna on a little radio, frowning at it; she played with the dials, apparently did not get what she wanted, and gave the radio a hard *thwack* with her palm. This seemed to satisfy her. She settled back into her chair and began to belt out a lip-synch solo, pointing sexily at someone invisible during relevant musical phrases. A pickup truck bumbled past, splashing through various puddles, playing loud country music that made the panels of the Crown Vic vibrate. The mobile concert faded out in the distance and all that was left was the cold rattle of the rain and Amber Volney's mute concert across the street. Mulder sighed again, took off his seat belt, and shifted around until he was in a somewhat comfortable position. "Hey, Scully," he tried, "I could sneak out to the gas station across the street and grab us some coffee." "I don't want any coffee." "It would help wake you up. Wake us up," he amended quickly. "Mulder," she said in a patient voice edged with scorn, turning slightly toward him, "it may be a while since you've done this kind of surveillance, but we're not going to have many bathroom breaks in our future and caffeine is a diuretic." "I could get decaf." "I'm not even going to go into the logic of that statement," she snapped, and turned away again. 10:52 A.M. Scully saw the man coming before Mulder did. More accurately, she saw a dark rain-streaked blur crossing the lighter rain-streaked blur that she had identified as Lind Street, and made an educated guess. "Down!" she hissed, and slid lower in her seat. Mulder didn't even turn to double-check what she was talking about; he hunched down in his seat awkwardly, his knee smacking the dashboard as he doubled up. The noise tore through Scully's mind like a bullet -- She swallowed a whimper and rested her head against the seat back with a cushiony thump. The man-shaped blur scurried past the driver's side of the Crown Vic and slowly came into focus from the shoulders up: short, bald, brown suit, goggle-eyed like a frog. He held a blue plastic tub above his head in both hands like an offering to a whimsical ancient god. There was a furiously twisting level of dark blue evident along the side of the tub, evidence that the man had been out in the rain long enough to collect a lot of water. The man sped past the parking lot without glancing at the car, much less the federal agents crammed into it like the bottom half of a circus clown act. "I don't think he saw us," Mulder announced as he wormed his way upright again. He started peering out the only clear window as though an entire platoon of bald men with plastic tubs was about to come charging their way. Her eyes were drawn to his face the moment his attention was elsewhere, like some kind of science experiment from second grade involving magnets and iron filings. He hadn't shaved this morning, perhaps because he was in such a determined hurry to get on the road and start keeping an eye on Amber Volney. She couldn't remember the last time he'd done that. She couldn't remember how she'd lived through the last time. "You know, Scully," Mulder observed, absently drawing little curlicues on the fogged edges of his window, "the real difference about the Midwest isn't so much the people as it is the *cars*. In the city it's such a hassle to find parking that once you park one place, you might as well keep the space for the day and just hoof it around the immediate area, rain or shine. Out here, you can leave the umbrella behind and just drive the two blocks to your next destination. The Midwest is rich in parking spaces." She stared helplessly at the dark texture of his face and wished he'd shut the hell up. The ache of wanting him was starting to grind at her bones like a high fever; it made her restless. More than anything else she wanted to run her palm along his jaw and feel that stubble with her hand and her lips. "Then again," he continued thoughtfully, "it might just be the cheaper gasoline." She didn't answer. Her mind was caught up in flesh fantasies of sandpaper stubble scraping against the inside of her thighs, of threading her fingers through his soft dark hair to direct him and urge him on -- "You okay, Scully?" She broke herself out of the vision to find Mulder facing her, studying her face with a faint frown etched between his eyebrows. A sudden cramp in her neck brought reality front and center, and she realized that she was still slouched down below eye level, still in hiding. "Fine." The word didn't seem to mean anything anymore but she said it nonetheless, struggling upward to sit stiffly in her seat. His eyes were still on her -- she could feel him examining her as though his huge rough hands were running along her limbs to check for broken bones. She turned and looked him full in the face and suddenly felt as if she'd been blindsided by a wall of cold water. And she was drowning -- His eyes caught and held her for an endless moment, his face set in that eternal Mulder expression of puzzlement and mulish determination but his eyes, his eyes were lit with a spark of surprised awareness that burned to the bone. Dizziness washed over her, a swirling giddy half-drunken sensation that she recognized from childhood, when she'd spun herself around and around like a top and thrown her head back to watch the pebbled ceiling magically turn into a universe of concentric circles. At age six, that sensation had been her favorite, better than swimming on a hot day, better than jumping into a crackling pile of leaves. As an adult, it terrified her. It was like standing in the doorway of an airplane at cruising altitude, with a parachute strapped to your back and the cold air sucking at you, standing and contemplating the incoherently huge distance to the ground while dumb animal fear warred with impetuous human desire and you know that at any moment desire would win and you'd hurl yourself out the door. She could feel her attraction to Mulder pulling at her like some insanely strong gravitational force. The door of the airplane was open, all right, and she was standing there with the wind whipping at her, staring down at the curve of the earth's surface, but the difference here was that she had no damned parachute, none at all. The desire to jump remained, and that scared her worse than the concept of falling -- the panicky surety that she might do something without her mind's permission, that if she let down her guard for the slightest moment, something -- -- might happen, something irrevocable. She ripped her eyes away from him and turned away, feeling profound relief that she retained *that* much control over herself. And then she yawned. It was an absurd, huge, undignified yawn, and it scared her half to death. How could she keep watch over this starved animal hunger if she was too tired to concentrate? "If you want to take a nap --" Mulder began. "I don't want to take a nap." His gaze sunburned her neck for another moment and then she felt it shift away. When she felt sure of herself again, she chanced a swift look at him out of the corner of her eyes. He was staring out into the rain, mulling something over in the deep cavern of his mind. Something about his face made a tiny worm of unease twist deep in her gut -- something in the set of his jaw, maybe, or the way the rain rolling over the windshield threw moving shadows across his face. She looked down at her hands, clenched together in her lap, and tried not to wonder what the hell he was thinking about. 12:26 PM Mulder had entertained vague hopes that staking out Amber Volney would be more interesting than the usual kind of stakeout, but after more than five hours of watching the little brat do office chores, he was starting to wonder just what the hell he'd been thinking. Had he really expected some kind of smoking gun? All he'd gained from the experience, thus far, was a low opinion of Amber's clerical skills and a fairly numb ass. Not to mention an earful of chilly silence from Scully. The weird tension shivering between them, the one that Mulder didn't care to put a name to, had been cranking up and up all morning, like a violin string tightened beyond the point of vibration or resonance, tightened to the point where there wasn't much else it could do besides snap with a whip-sharp *THWAP!* He knew, on a visceral level, what was going on, but he didn't want to think about it. His waking mind had chosen to studiously keep away from examining anyone's motives this morning, particularly Scully's. Or his own. In the field, Mulder operated on instinct a good ninety percent of the time, and he was in the field right now. There was a knot of dread in his stomach, about two fingerwidths down from the southern end of his sternum, making him restless; he felt like an elementary-school kid who couldn't sit still, the kind of kid who went charging around and around at recess instead of playing kickball. Looking at Scully intensified the feeling; he watched her select a juice box from the little cooler at her feet and strip the thin plastic off the bendy straw with a surgeon's dexterity. Ignoring him. Shutting him out. There was a strange urge building up in him, a nervous, twitchy need to draw her into conversation, stir her up, irritate her. Very similar to the need he'd had at age eight to push girls down on the playground. "I have a problem with your theory," he told her. Her eyes went wide and she stared at the windshield, and it occurred to him that she'd been doing that on and off for hours now, usually at the points in conversation when, normally, she'd turn to look at him. A sick feeling of recognition began glowing around the edges of his thoughts, but he ignored it. She was silent and still as a rabbit hiding from a predator. "According to your theory," he pushed on, "the murderer administered half of the binary poison and the other half was purely in the victims' hands. If you'll excuse the expression." She made a face, flinching away from him. "So tell me, Scully ... if, as you've theorized, the murderer was not present for the murders, why weren't the liquefied guts still sloshing around in the victims when their bodies were discovered?" There was a long moment of rain-pattered silence. "Stomach pump," Scully said at last in a strained, throaty voice that he barely recognized. "The murderer removed the viscera with ... with a stomach pump." "I don't think so," he informed her, feeling a smug I-know-something-you- don't-know glee that made him a little sick to his stomach. "If the time of death was completely random, the murderer couldn't have known when to show up unless she'd been following the victims around, and *that* would have been noticed." He leaned over in a fit of deliberate casualness and took a juice-box out of the cooler by Scully's feet, brushing her leg almost accidentally. She flinched again and moved her leg away, the movement jerky. He sat back up and unwrapped the straw with shaking fingers. Some dark and nameless boy-monster was dancing savagely in the back of his mind, and Mulder couldn't seem to resist the suggestions the little devil was calling out. It was like interrogating a suspect -- the crazy feeling of flying by the seat of his pants, not knowing some of the questions he would ask until he heard them pop out of his mouth -- running on instinct all the way. Exhilarating. But this wasn't some suspect; this was *Scully*. He looked blindly down at the juice box and speared it with the pointy end of the straw. Thunder exploded around them at the moment the straw struck home. <*A tad over-dramatic for a box of cran-grape,*> he thought he said, but his lips never moved. So much for witty repartee. Scully's voice rasped into the ringing silence after the thunder, moments before he could hear the rain again. "I don't know." "What?" He honestly couldn't remember the question, but the word sounded smug. The great scientific Scully mind, finally stumped. "I ... don't ... *know*," she snapped in her sandpaper voice. Her face was flushed and hot-looking, as though she was running a marathon. "If you're not going to fill in the blanks, dammit, you might as well go ahead and enlighten me as to your opinion." It was the longest sentence she'd strung together in hours. He drank down her voice greedily, like a man wandering in the desert who comes across a full canteen, and in a moment of perfect clarity he saw that this was what he wanted, this was what he'd been prodding her for -- he wanted her to talk, that was it. Get her talking, pry her open bit by bit -- The nameless something in the back of his mind stirred at the thought. Mulder stubbornly ignored it, and moved on. "I think there's somebody in this town -- let's call him or her 'Pat' -- who's having an occasional spell of amnesia, experiencing heightened sexual tension, having a few weird sexual dreams where they seem to be somebody else, say, Jim Taymor." He looked at Scully. Nothing. "In the dream, Jim is making love to someone -- say, Marjorie. And at that moment, across town, Marjorie dies." Still no response. "Pat gets up, goes to work, doesn't even remember the dream ... and all the while, he or she is playing host to a monster that they know nothing about." He looked at her. She was very pale, and silent; she stared at the dashboard like a woman contemplating her worst nightmare. "I think it's all about dreams," he continued, hating her silence. "The host, and the victims. I think that the Tochok finds its victims while they're sleeping, and I think that it can not only *keep* them asleep, but it can affect their dreams. Maybe you were right about the sleep paralysis thing --" She jumped, as if goosed, and almost turned to face him; he saw her catch herself, and close her eyes briefly. "-- I think maybe the Tochok can evoke the effects of sleep paralysis, so the victims can't fight back physically, only mentally -- and I bet that's why it only picks victims who are fixated on somebody. I bet the Tochok takes the form of the person that the victim most desires, that unrequited love ... the one person that the victim could never resist ... the one person the victim would never want to fight off." His voice slid down the octave, resonated like the sounding board of a string bass. Scully's face screwed up in an uncharacteristic expression of pain, her eyes shut tight, her body seeming to vibrate with tension. Silent. Still silent. Shutting him out. Why wouldn't she just *talk?* "It's a creature that feeds on our deepest dreams," he told her softly. "The ones we don't tell anyone else, the ones we'd rather die than see dragged out into the light, those secret desires that we only think about when we're alone ... a lot of killers use that sort of vulnerability, but this is the first time I've seen it used so directly ..." He trailed off, caught up in his own web of words, barely sidestepping the huge unnamed *something* stirring and whispering in his mind. Thunder muttered thickly, high overhead, and thin light flickered over Scully's paper-white face, illuminating that expression that he instinctively recognized but refused to acknowledge. He looked out the window then, across the street at the windows of Taymor's where Amber Volney was jabbering into a telephone, an elaborate dumbshow for the FBI agents out here in the tense cold. "I think," he said at last, "I think that the only way to kill something like that is to kill the host." 5:18 PM The rain just would not let up. There had been a few times that it got a little lighter, once so much that the streetlights turned off for almost five minutes, but the storm always came back full-force, sheets of rain pelting the rented car with an odd sound like an almost-empty washing machine agitating a few lonely clothes in a sea of bubbles. It was dusk now. Mulder was silhouetted against the dim light of the fading day, squinting to see across the street. He seemed restless, on edge; his fingers drummed on his knee almost soundlessly. Dusk. Twilight. His breath fogged up the window and he absently wiped it clean with a sweep of his hand, the moisture running down the glass like quicksilver. Scully dug her nails into her palms and hunched down a little further into her trench coat. She was not superstitious, she refused to even consider it, but she had to admit to herself that, if she *had* been, the omens were not looking very good. Here she was, on stakeout with Mulder at twilight in a car with foggy windows. Granted, it was cold instead of hot, and the moisture in the air was composed of battering rain rather than thick humidity, but the similarities were perfectly clear to a woman of science. The only way they could be any clearer would be if Mulder decided to strip to the waist for some insane reason. The image tore fire through her brain, flared along every nerve ending in a white-hot flash. She gritted her teeth and waited for it to pass, counting the seconds as if she were guessing the proximity of an approaching storm. One-thousand-one one-thousand-two one-thousand-three and the wave of flame passed over, leaving her feeling weak and shaky, her skin supersensitive. She shuddered all over for a moment and then, helplessly, yawned. Her eyes drifted halfway closed, and her shuttered gaze fixed on Mulder's face. His good, strong, desperately handsome face, tired and stubbled and everything she could ever think of wanting. And to think, she'd flippantly called it a Mulder-Awareness Day. Dear God. Not since Custer took on his last batch of Indians had something been so phenomenally underestimated. She was vaguely aware that one hand had unclenched and left her lap, slowly smoothing over the upholstered no-man's-land in the direction of Mulder's thigh. For long, lazy seconds this state of events was perfectly all right -- nothing wrong here, folks -- and then some panic-button in her mind was tripped and her eyes snapped open, adrenaline slamming through her veins. She looked at her traitorous hand in horror and snatched it back, wrapping the fingers of her other hand around her wrist like a handcuff. She had almost -- oh Christ, she'd almost -- Mulder swung around in her direction and she nearly jumped out of the car. "Wha --?" she gasped guiltily. "She's been gone for almost ten minutes," he said, pointing his finger accusingly at the driver's side window. "She went down the hall and didn't come back." Scully stared at him for a naked hideous moment before her numb mind could process the sentence. Oh. The stakeout. Amber Volney. "Oh." He gnawed on his lower lip, deep in thought, and the tiger began to pace back and forth in Scully's stomach again. A desolate thought occurred to her: she was going to break. Any moment now, the tiger would fling itself against the bars of the cage and the sucker would bust wide open-- any moment now, she'd climb right the hell across the seat and into his lap and start ripping his clothes off with her teeth. It wasn't a question of *if,* anymore. Just *when.* She shut her eyes and, hopelessly, sent up a wordless prayer for the strength to last just a little bit longer. Suddenly she heard the driver's side door opening -- cold wind blew in on her and spattered her with fine mist, smelling like fresh wet laundry hung up to dry. The rain seemed to roar. She wrenched her eyes open just in time to watch her partner climb out of the car, moving stiffly. "Where the hell are you going?" she yelped, too stunned to follow him. Mulder leaned down to peek back into the car. "There's a window in Taymor's office that looks out on the alley. I'm going to sneak back there and take a look." "Are you NUTS?" she shrilled at him, but the door shut and she was left alone in the car, exhaustion pressing on her, listening to Mulder's faint footsteps as he ran across the street in the rain. The sign on the wide glass door had been flipped so that it said CLOSED, but the lights were still on at Taymor's. Mulder skimmed the front of the building, slumped a bit but not really daring to walk hunched over because that, if anything, would gain the attention of a passing motorist or someone in a nearby business. He would bet even money that Amber had gone, skipped out the back for some weird teenaged reason, maybe headed out on a date that her father wouldn't approve of, leaving her car out in front of Taymor's as mute "proof" of her whereabouts. Taymor would probably be working late, and as long as those lights were on she'd have an alibi. By the time Mulder made it around the back of the building, he was soaked to the skin, shivering, his teeth chattering. At least he was moving, though; at least he got to *do* something for a change. Water poured in a steady waterfall off the gutterless edges of the roof, hissing onto the pavement and sluicing into a stream down the middle of the alley. He consulted his mental map of the interior of Taymor's and came to the conclusion that the window he had noticed yesterday should be right ... abouuuuuuuuut ... Ah. There. Slowly, cautiously, he edged up to the window and peeked inside. It was recognizably Taymor's office, all right; there was the bookcase Mulder had seen yesterday, there was the ridiculous merit award hanging on the back wall, there was the desk -- His jaw dropped, and he stared. There were two mostly-naked people grappling passionately on the desk. One of them was Amber Volney, and the other was most certainly Jim Taymor. "Shit," Mulder breathed, his two top picks for the office of Sexually Frustrated Tochok Host going up in smoke. The barely legal office assistant and the married owner of the company, who the hell would have thought it? Scully'd said that Amber had a crush on Taymor, but ... As he gaped through the window, Amber fumbled a hand backwards over the surface of the desk down to a drawer, yanked it open and came up with a condom. That squelched Mulder's half-formed hopes that maybe this was their first time and he *had* been right, just not *anymore* -- whatever these two were to each other, they'd practiced already. This was no awkward first encounter. Shit. Mulder found himself plodding back across the street, splashing through a big damn puddle that he vaguely remembered skirting on the way out. He had been *so* sure he was right. They'd sat here all day in the damn rain because he was so *sure* ... The rain came at him in waves, and he was forced to shield his eyes with one hand just to keep from being blinded. Half-drowned, freezing his ass off, and his mind in a state of pissed-off shock, he stumbled to the Crown Vic and collapsed inside. "Scully," he said, wiping water off his face, "you're not gonna believe what I --" He broke off as he got a good look at her and realized that she was asleep. She was slumped, just barely, her head tipped back against the seat back and tilted slightly off center like the earth's axis. Her arms were wrapped tightly around her middle, her little fists tucked under her elbows. Even in sleep, the faint line between her eyebrows was present and accounted for, and her mouth looked thin and tense. He recognized it as her crossroads expression, when she was fighting with some decision that she didn't want to make, but had to. He looked at her for a long time, the water dripping off him in fat beads. She was ... She was so ... The nameless feeling in him expanded and roared, demanding attention. "Scully," he said softly, and when that failed to wake her he leaned over and touched her shoulder. "Hey, Scully --" Her eyes snapped open and she stared full into his eyes. And *snarled* at him. Her lips drew back from her teeth and her eyes slitted at him dangerously as she snarled a single word: "*Don't* --!" He yanked his hand away so fast that it ended up splayed in the air next to his ear, drawn back in the surprised defensive posture of a man almost bitten by a trusted pet. Scully shrank back against the passenger door, breathing in harsh pants, one fist clenching and unclenching at irregular intervals as she stared at him with the burning eyes of a cornered wolf. She looked absolutely savage. "Scully --" She shook her head in three short jerks. "Scully, are you awake?" he asked suspiciously, suddenly positive that she was sleepwalking, having some kind of vivid dream -- he'd heard about this sort of thing, the polar opposite of sleep paralysis, where the connection between brain and body never switched off and people went raging around in the night acting out their dreams -- "I'm --" Her eyes met his again, and the desperate way she stared at him convinced him that she definitely wasn't asleep. She was awake, all right, and horribly lucid, and she was either terrified of him or she was trying to keep herself from murdering him. He wasn't sure which. "What the hell is *wrong* with you?" he blurted harshly, without thinking at all. "Nothing! I'm FINE," she snarled, despite the lie that her eyes made out of the words. "I just dozed off for a --! I -- what the hell is wrong with *you*?" His temper started to rise, and he stomped it back down again with an effort. "I just found out that this stakeout is pointless," he snapped. "We might as well go back to the motel." "*What*?!" "Amber Volney and her boss are over there fucking each other's brains out on his desk," he said, striking out with the blunt words as though they were fists. "That's it. That's all. End of story. We'll have to start over." "I don't understand." "Neither one of them can be the host if they're not sexually frustrated, and whatever sort of relationship that is, I can guarantee you they're getting their itches scratched. It pushes plausibility for one of them to be pining for somebody *else*, so there goes that angle. Neither one of them can be the host or become a victim, so there's no point in hanging around unless you really want to watch them break out the post-coital cigarettes." He reached for the keys still in the ignition. Her voice rasped, "Don't you *dare*." He snapped back around to face her and stared, shocked and astounded at the challenge. "What?" She seethed at him like a volcano. "Just because *your* theory's been broken doesn't mean *mine* has --" "Oh, please," he sneered. Dull fury was starting to seep through his brain, radiating from that nameless place like blood flowing from a stab wound. "You don't say six words to me all day and *now* you want to start discussing the case?" Her eyes flashed at him in warning. "Mulder --" "Okay," he said, his vision starting to go red. "Okay, let's discuss it. Let's discuss this theory of yours. You thought Amber was going around killing everyone who looked at Jim Taymor because she wanted him but couldn't have him. Right?" "That doesn't mean that she still couldn't be --" "*Right*?" he pressed, not knowing why he was goading her on this, not knowing why he needed to rub it in her face. An image flashed through his mind, something out of the cheesy adventure movies he'd watched when he was a kid -- Scully hanging off a cliff by her fingertips and he was stomping on them -- Tension boiled through the car like red fog. He held Scully's gaze ruthlessly, and saw some kind of decision snap into place behind her eyes. She turned her back on him and flung the passenger door open. He tried to stop her as she scrambled out. "Scully --" "Go to hell," she snapped, and slammed the door. Thunder cracked the sky open above Scully just as she made it to the end of the block, and the rain seemed to intensify, stinging down on her in huge hurtling drops that she briefly mistook for hailstones. It felt as though her hair had come to life like Medusa's snakes, but that was just the freezing water streaming along her scalp, waving her hair like reeds in tiny swift-running currents. The rain surrounded her, pounded down on her, ran cold down her face. It blurred her vision and obscured her hearing -- the sound of the car door slamming a block behind her seemed unimaginably distant in the constant hiss of the rain, and the splashing footsteps hurrying in her direction were almost inaudible. "SCULLY!" She whipped around to find Mulder bearing down on her and for a moment it seemed like some kind of weird Breakfast at Tiffany's reunion scene, that he would throw his arms around her and protect her from the beating rain with his body and his wet mouth and his hands under her trench coat. The illusion was broken when he stopped in front of her and began to yell. "GODDAMMIT, SCULLY," he roared, "GET BACK IN THE CAR!" She balled her hands into fists. "NO!" she screamed up at him. "I've wasted ALL DAY on your STUPID STAKEOUT! Somebody's gonna DIE tonight and we wasted ALL ... DAMN ... DAY!" Thunder boomed through the clouds above them, shaking the world; Scully barely noticed. "You and your STUPID THEORY! We've been sitting on our ASSES all day instead of looking for a killer and because YOU guessed wrong! Somebody's gonna DIE and WE CAN'T DO ANYTHING ABOUT IT!!!!" "If you had a better idea," Mulder yelled, "you sure as hell never told ME!" "You wouldn't have listened ANYWAY!" "*YOU* never tried!" he howled at her, his face dark with rage. "YOU just shut me out and IGNORED ME!!" "DAMN you, Mulder," she screamed. "What do YOU care? It's all about your THEORY with you, I'M just here to listen like somebody in a damn SOCRATIC DIALOGUE! Well, you know what? YOUR THEORY *SUCKS*!!!" He shook his head violently, water flying from his hair. "Your problem isn't my THEORY, Scully! It's something else, *isn't it*?" He stepped even closer to her, towering over her like an angry grizzly bear. "ISN'T IT?" Terror and longing and fury all collided and exploded in her head. "*FUCK* ... *YOU*!!!!" Lightning cracked above them. She turned away and started to stalk off, the rain slamming against her face. Out of nowhere Mulder's hand latched onto her arm, right below the elbow. "*Scully* --" She whipped around and punched him in the jaw, a hard roundhouse right. His head snapped back with the force of the blow and he overbalanced, stumbled, and fell to the ground. Scully stared at her stunned partner for an awful moment, the rain roaring down around them. Lightning burst overhead like a flashbulb. She turned and ran. End of Chapter 14 (14/16) Feedback to playwrtrx@aol.com All posted chapters can be found at http://shannono.simplenet.com/gutless