'DETOUR - Continued'

CHAPTER 1


They catch a glimpse of themselves in the elevator mirror; covered in dirt, torn clothes, scratches on their faces and hands. They were secretly surprised – and disappointed – when the hotel clerk checked them in without a problem. And, to make it worse, he even had the nerve to add that no matter how late they arrived their rooms would be ready and waiting.

The elevator stops at the seventh floor and Agents Mulder and Scully step out, each hauling luggage and a suit bag. And key cards.

Mulder waits when her card slips from her hand, does a funny little bounce on the carpet and lands in front of someone's door.

Scully picks it up and they slowly stumble along the hallway together. She stops at 703; her door. He stops at 707 across the hall.

Neither speaks because they are too damn exhausted from their adventures - if you wanted to call it that - in the forest and then the cave. The 'Did Drop Inn' as Mulder has named it.

They spare a look to each other. Mulder shrugs. She shrugs back.

"See you in fifteen?" he asks.

"Make it thirty," she tells him. She hopes to catch a nap.

"I don't see why we have to go down there at all. Why can't we just wait until it officially starts tomorrow morning?"

"Because I want to get the first step over with and I need some food. You do what you want."

"Might be some booze there," Mulder muses.

"I hope so," Scully sighs. "But don't have much. You're on those antibiotics."

Kind of her to remind him. They had made a pit-stop between the motel and their arrival at this resort. Scully found a small clinic where she arranged a tetanus shot and prescription for Mulder. Unfortunately, that was all she thought to arrange.

"I'll pass on the cocktails and weenies," he decides. "I didn't get a lot of sleep last night."

"Try staying awake all night with a fully grown, injured man lying across your lap."

"Point taken. Thanks for that, by the way."

"Anytime."


"So, you saved the Wonder Twins?"

A group of agents are collected around a table at the Wine and Cheese, listening to the recollections of two would-be heroes.

Agents Kinsley and Stonecypher glance at the other. "I didn't say we saved them. We…."

"Aided fellow agents when they were in need of …" begins Kinsley.

"Aid," finishes Stonecypher. She smiles proudly. "Mike noticed they hadn't checked in yet. Or called ahead to say they would be late. Mike misses nothing."

Kinsley smiles, a little embarrassed. "All in a day's work."

Agent Finn snorts. "Should have left them down there. Their Holy Savoir would have had them up by morning anyway."

Everybody looks at him, confused.

"Skinner? Their protector? With the amount of shit they cause… someone's got to be covering their butts."

Stonecypher tries to steer the conversation back to the rightful owners. "I certainly can't imagine what they would have done if we hadn't arrived. When Agent Scully told us the day before that she and Agent Mulder were going to stay behind and help the local law enforcement, I told her that was a bad idea. If it weren't for Mike realizing that they weren't back this morning, I'm sure they would still be-"

"They'd probably still be in the bottom of that hole, happy as hell they are missing this."Wade from Vice waves his arms towards the ballroom that will serve as their headquarters for the next two days.

"Well, they are not still at the bottom of that hole, thanks to us. And they were very grateful for our assistance."

Kinsley looks at her sideways. Very grateful is pushing it a bit. Just Grateful would have done. Mulder and Scully are not the most enthusiastic people to start with. Neither seems to have the need to waste too many words on thanks when the few they actually issued did the job.

"Hey, was it the Bureau's version of Groundhog Day when the two weirdest agents pop their heads up from the ground, see their collective shadow and then disappear back into their basement for six more weeks." Agent Finn laughs at his own joke. Nobody else seems to grasp the irony of his humour. He knocks the rest of his drink so far back, you would think his face is going to be sucked into the crystal.

Agent Stonecypher clears her throat fearing she is losing her audience. She stretches her head to take a careful look around the oversized ballroom to make sure she is not being eavesdropped upon. She was, if nothing else, careful. "Did you know that they pack each other's luggage? His andhers."

"They pack each other's luggage?" someone else echoes with a snort.

"I wouldn't dare let Mike touch my clothes."

Kinsley laughs but deep down he wonders why she wouldn't dare let him touch her clothes.

Stonecypher continues. "The moment the car stops at a roadblock, he marches out and disappears straight into the woods Then, she gets out without a word and when I ask her where he thinks he is going, she just walks off after him, straight Into the woods. "

Agent Finn lifts his heavy feet onto the chair across from him. Agent Finn was at the end of the line in etiquette school. "So what were they like to drive with? Was he all… Spooky? Maybe she had a cadaver in the trunk. A nice fresh Little Green Man to open up. Mmmmm, tasty."


"You think I should have worn my purple underwear?" Agent Mulder carefully adjusts the knot in his tie as the elevator doors open.

His partner might have smiled at his usual humour, but today is different. Fellow FBI agents - colleagues - are swirling all around them. Comments about underwear would be taken the wrong way by people who consider them social freaks in the first place.

They stop at the doors of the Euclid Ballroom. A large red banner is draped over the double doors: Welcome Teams!

"They should be paying us to deliver a seminar on Teamwork," Mulder hisses into Scully's ear. "These people could learn from us."

"I think that's what the bureau is afraid of."

Mulder thinks this over and nods. "Look at them all in there; the collective motion of self-propelled entities."

"mmmmmm," she murmurs.

"You know, earlier studies of swarm behaviour used mathematical models to simulate and understand the behaviour."

"Not now, Mulder. God, look at them all."

What looks like hundreds of other FBI agents are buzzing before them, clustered in small groups or hovering around food tables and the open bar. A hint of Muzak is floating through the room, in and out of conversations.

"Definitely the purple," Mulder whispers.

They walk into the enormous Euclid Ballroom, feeling like two doomed hotdogs at a weenie roast. A few of the agents, the lucky ones closest to the door, notice them. A few of those make cracks about the Spookys. The cracks make their way through the room and by the time Mulder and Scully are at the booze table, there is a wide berth around them so that enough people can stare or come up with clever jokes or just gawk if nothing original pops up.

But it isn't really like this.

Mulder's paranoid side only thinks this is happening. One or two agents pause from their chit-chat to stare. Maybe the word, 'Spooky' is heard once or twice. Other than that, their entrance has gone well and with very little interest whatsoever.

Mulder pours a beer for Scully and himself. They stand side by side, looking out at the sea of civilization before them. People who don't know each other are making small talk; people who know each other are catching up. People who can't stand these things are smiling until they can get the hell out of here and go to a real bar to get shitfaced. The sea holds all kinds of fish today.

Across the room, Stonecypher and Agent Cindy Sears from Fraud watch them with a voyeur's eye-to-detail. Cindy Sears tilts her head curiously. "I heard they had a lock installed on their office door. From the inside."

"I wouldn't be surprised."

They watch Agent Scully put her drink down, say something to Mulder and wander across the room towards one of the food tables.

"Didn't she use to go with an agent about ten years ago?"

Stonecypher's head turns quickly. "Did she?"

"Yes. He got killed in a bank robbery though."

Stonecypher nods. "Poor Dana. Well, maybe she's bounced back. She certainly has recovered from her illness. Almost as good as new."

"Really? She looks exhausted."

"Jet Lag," Kinsley decides generously. He has noticed Agent Scully's fatigue and chalked it up to a long car ride and years of Agent Mulder dragging her across the country. "As soon as they unpack, change, put away their FBI identities, they'll be rarin' to go. Once you get to one of these things, you forget all your troubles. Another Shirley Temple, Agent Stonecypher?"

Cindy leans over to Stonecypher and asks thoughtfully, "Would you go out with him?"

"I suppose I might flirt with him. Look at him. Tall, lean. He's got a great body. I saw him with his shirt off today. Oh my."

"When did you see him with his shirt off?"

"At the site. The paramedics were patching up his shoulder." Agent Stonecypher lowers her voice to an acceptable lust. "He works out."

"Oh, he works out all right. I've seen him at the pool." She rolls her eyes and whistles appreciably. "Hot."

"And his eyes. You know, they are very beautiful, very... sexy. "

"What about his…"

"Ladies," Kinsley chokes. "Do you mind? This isn't very appropriate conversation." He isn't sure, but he suspects he is blushing.

"We are allowed to look," Stonecypher informs him with a righteous smile. "I just don't tell Julius that." Julius is her fiancé of eight years.

"I wonder how long it is until she finds her way over to him.".

"I give it a couple of minutes," Stonecypher judges thoughtfully. "They are never apart for long."

"A couple of minutes? I bet I could flirt with him enough to get her running back to his side in thirty-seconds." Cindy Sears says.

"Bet you couldn't," Stonecypher says back. "Thirty seconds?"

"Set your timer, Agent Stonecypher. I'm going in."

"Ladies, please," Kinsley begs again. He looks across the room and tries to understand what these women would see in a man like Mulder instead of, say, a man like himself.

But it is useless. Both of these normally reasonable women have just enough booze in them to egg the other into doing something stupid.

Which they do.


Mulder is cruising up and down the food table. The room is getting louder and louder and he mentally gives Scully one more minute before he leaves without her.

"Fox?"

He turns around and finds Cindy Sears beaming at him. She is holding two glasses of wine. "I thought that was you," and she shoves one of the glasses into his hand. She takes his beer and puts it on the table. "Cindy. From Quantico." It is a safe opening. Anybodyfrom Quantico would qualify as someone he may have run into.

Mulder does the gentlemanly thing and offers her a chair at his very empty table. Cindy does the clever thing and sits right next to him. In a moment, her legs are crossed and she is leaning towards her prey, reaching out to touch - but not actually touch - his injured shoulder. She picks the wrong side.

"How is it? I heard all about it."

Mulder is confused. "All about ….."

"The woods. The animal that attacked you. It ripped its claws into your shoulder."

"How did you know about the …."

"Agents Stonecypher and Kinsley. They told us about the bodies you recovered, the injured you found and saved, all on your own."

"Agent Scully was the one who came up with the idea of building a step ladder out of the bodies in place of an actual ladder …."

Mulder steals a glance across the room to see if this partner who had brought him back from the dead, saved him from himself and other nightmares would come and save him from this hell now. Scully happens to catch his desperate eye but she just shrugs and smiles and moves along.

He is on his own.

Cindy is now talking about cats or military tactics or something. He can swear she is checking him out at the same time.

Across the room, Agent Stonecypher is watching with awe at Cindy's performance in The Magic of the Flirt - until she observes Agent Scully watching her partner caught up in the lures of Cindy Sears. Dana Scully doesn't wander back. She just gives her partner a funny look and wanders back into the crowd. Thirty seconds are up. Then forty. Then sixty. Nope. Cindy Sears isn't that good after all.

In two minutes, Mulder's cell phone rings. "Mulder… Now? Yes, Sir."

He snaps the phone shut. "I've got to get to a private line." With an awkward goodbye to Ms. Sears, he is gone.

At the furthest set of elevators he can find, he hears a familiarpattern of footsteps from behind. "Don't say I never do anything for you, Mulder."

"Never again," he promises and turns around.

Scully is smiling. "You look like you were enjoying yourself with her."

"Jealous?"

"Oh, no. Apparently Cindy Spears from Quantico likes to go around making bets about people's behaviour. Usually men – usually the challenging ones."

Mulder loosens his tie restlessly. "I'm considered a challenge?"

"You're Spooky Mulder. By the way, we're in the top five rumours again this year."

"Same thing?"

"No, this year's is a bit different. We're divorced. Have been for years. But we talked about a reunion while we were stuck in the cave."

"What do you say we get out of here for a while, Scully. Go for a walk in the woods."

Anyone overhearing this suggestion would take it an all-out innuendo. Scully knows better. "Leave it alone. Let the local authorities deal with whatever is left."

"You aren't even slightly curious? Such a scientific anomaly like that? Right on your doorstep?"

"The only thing on my doorstep is my presentation and a good night's sleep. You could stand to do the same."

A heavy sigh slips out before he can stop it. "Skip the presentation, Scully."

They have gone over this argument three times now in a week. He isn't gaining any ground.

"Don't, Mulder," she warns tensely.

Seminars on dead people don't draw a crowd. One half of the Spookys does. Especially if the other half might be lurking close by, which he usually was.

The elevator finally arrives. Mulder holds one of the doors with his knee while she walks in.

"Aren't you coming?" Scully asks.

"No, I think I'll get a drink at the bar. Why don't you come too? We'll talk about teamwork."

"No, this team player is tired of hearing the word, team." The door starts to slide shut. "Mulder, don't do something stup-"

He removes his foot and called, "Sweet dreams," as the doors glide shut.


End of Chapter 1