*** p e a c e b e u p o n h i m by khyber khyber@home.com Rating: R for language, violence, mature content, moderate sex. Moderate for me, anyway. Warning: contains negative portrayal of law enforcement personnel. If this bothers you, go back to sleep. Classification: SAR. Spoilers: None, really. Takes place shortly after the movie. Mulder and Scully are on counterterrorism duty. Yeah, I know they were supposed to be on domestic CT, but, well, whatever. *** peace be upon him *** Night streetlights stripped quietly by them, lines of window-frame shadow streaking across the inside of the car. "Mulder, can we stop somewhere? I want to get... some tea or something." "Okay, sure... good idea... where were you thinking?" He scanned the nonexistent traffic for a place to change lanes out of habit, reflexes forgetting it was after midnight. She chuckled ruefully. "Actually, I need a drink, I don't care where." "Scully, I am so glad you said that." *** 10:43 pm "We just want to talk about a few things," Mulder said quietly. "Does it have to be now?" the man said. His eyes were large and dark on either side of a prominent olive-toned nose. "My sons are in bed..." Mulder looked over the man's shoulder towards the darkened hall in the small apartment. No wife, he knew that. Mulder couldn't remember when it was Davood Hidrisi's wife had died, and he felt guilty. It was '86 or '90, in Lebanon, he thought he remembered that. "Yeah, it pretty much has to be now," Agent Denotis said, pushing his lean, hard frame further inside the doorway of the apartment. Hidrisi cast his eyes down, stepping aside resignedly. Agent Denotis shoved his way in, glaring with stone-brown eyes at the man in his loose shirt and worn khakis. "All right, just... be quiet, they have school in the morning." Denotis' partner, Mulder remembered his name was Rob, stalked where Denotis shoved, tall and blond where Denotis was short and dark. Scully slipped her way in front of all three men, self-consciously shrugging her shoulders back. "We're sorry about the time, Mr., uh, Hidrisi. We won't be long. We just need to ask you a couple of questions." Rob looked like he was about to cuff her across the back of the head. Mulder bristled at him, and the husky golden boy bristled right back. They'd gotten off to a marvelous start right off the bat two days ago when Denotis spent most of a briefing staring down Scully's blouse and Rob reacted with satisfaction on finding out Mulder was, indeed, a Jewish name. Might come in handy, he said. Mulder asked if he was looking for a matchmaker. Rob didn't laugh. It had gotten even better from there. "So how's the cabbie business?" Denotis snapped. The Lebanese man shrugged. "It's an honest living. We get by, for now. It gives me time for school." "That's right, you're an architect or something." "I'm a civil engineer. I was a civil engineer. I'm trying to finish my Master's." Scully looked around the apartment. Neat, spare. Everything old but clean. Light from two small lamps, one intricately decorated, one a twelve-dollar halogen from K-mart. A dozen pictures in ornate frames over the couch, people with olive skins in white clothes, somewhere with sandy-coloured buildings and sun. Denotis spared a glance for her, checked her ass. She looked blankly back at him. "You went to school in Syria?" the wiry agent asked brusquely. "No, Lebanon," the man replied. "But you've been to Syria, right?" "Yes, in 1983. I was an assistant on a dam project. I was there for three, four months." The man looked slightly stricken as Rob began to move down the hallway, peeking into the tiny kitchen. Mulder gestured at him to come back. The other agent glared at him, which was about as eloquent an exchange as he and Mulder had had since eight that morning. "Did you meet Gholam Hosseini there?" Denotis snapped. "Who?" "How about Ali Qabash?" the agent continued. "I don't know him." *** "So what do you think about Hidrisi?" Scully wipes at a smudge on the table with a bar napkin. Scully's never served a drink, I remember, never asked if anyone wanted fries. We don't have fries now, either. Nachos. Scully avoided all the heavily-cheesed ones but watched them very, very closely, and ate all the guacamole. Discipline. She looks two kinds of tired, the honest kind from three consecutive 16-hour days with Frick and Frack, and the other kind from five years of nothing changing. "I think he's got good grounds for a harassment suit," I reply. "God... I don't know, Mulder... I've never done anything but the X-files. That was my first field assignment. My only field assignment, really. Hell, this is the only job I've ever had." We have trouble with the in-between stages. There's very little between 'what did you think about the case?' and 'I dreamed that I went to my own wedding and no one knew who I was' for us. "I think before, when I was going to resign," she continued, hunching both elbows up on the table, "half of that was fear. I was afraid of, not the unknown. Of doing this permanently, being an FBI agent with everything it implies, not being out there at the edge anymore. I was afraid of not doing this." "Yeah, well, it didn't really pan out like we planned, did it." "No, it didn't," she says with a faraway sound. In Missouri, earlier in this rapidly draining summer, the way I saw her holding the gun as Sister Sophie, Sister Sophie something-or-Bubba howled Jew-slut and fascist bitch and whatever else rattled around in her little brain. Scully had it reversed, not to shoot, and I know she was thinking about cracking Sophie right across her howling mouth, just to make it all stop for a minute, just to do something. That was the second kind of tired. "So what are you staying for now?" dare you dare you dare you "What are you staying for?" We both know this, of course. If it takes us five years of cancer, cancermen, flukes, and flukemen to get to the point where we know this, maybe it will only take another two or three of white-black-Muslim-Asian-Christian supremacists and mad haters for one of us to look up from our desk at the other and say, fuck this, let's get married and buy a goddamn pig farm. "Terrific benefits package and really cool company cars," I said. *** "How about Bahram Pourshefie?" Denotis and Rob had him cornered on the couch, behind the low coffee table. "He was a friend of my boss," Hidrisi said tiredly. "I drove him around for a couple of days." "He was from Iran." Rob moved into the conversation with this brilliant observation. The sum total of my education in counterterrorism over the past three days was that Iran is always bad. Hidrisi chuckled. "There's sixty, eighty million people there, it happens." "Don't get smart," Denotis snapped. "What did you and Pourshefie do?" "We went shopping," Hidrisi shot back, then he took a deep breath. "His English wasn't very good but his Arabic was, so I interpreted for him." "What did you shop for?" "Electronics, mostly. Lots of portable CD players, Discmans. DVD players. He was going to take them back to Iran to sell." "Any computers?" Hidrisi shrugged. "He bought a couple of computers, yes." "What kinds?" "I don't know, Pentium II's." I had this on a piece of paper that was in Denotis' files, along with a copy of the receipt. "What kind of software?" "I don't remember." It was Rob's turn now, stepping in close and leaning over the man. "Any design software? Circuit design? Computer drafting?" "I wouldn't know. I'm a taxi driver, remember?" Hidrsi said coldly. "How was he going to get them back to Iran?" "I think he would probably use an airplane." And the tag to Denotis... "You're just a regular Billy Crystal tonight, aren't you." "I thought he was Jewish," Hidrisi replied. "That's kind of the point here, isn't it?" *** "Come on, Scully, it might be fun for a couple of days." "You can't be serious." "I'm serious." "What would we do? Last time you had a vacation, you went to visit Elvis' grave." She regretted that immediately, for her even more than for him. Not one of their better moments. "What would you do, if you had two weeks off?" "Sleep." Have you forgotten already, a voice stretched languidly inside her head, spreading its arms for Mulder to hold down while she bit at the sheets. "Why don't you just sleep at work? That's what I've been doing." "Yeah, you snore." "Only at work..." Oh, you liar, Dana baby. Dana baby I was named in the afternoon, after the morning sleeping in stretched and sexed and sore and lazy. *** The youngest poked his head into the kitchen. He wore kid-jammies, blue and white with a cartoon character Scully didn't recognise. He snapped to his big brother in Arabic, rapid-fire and shrill. "Hossein, go to bed!" Ali snapped right back, in English. She'd been been watching Ali drink milk, talking about his school. He was a smart kid, a kid who reads books. He seemed a little small for thirteen. "You're a coward!" Little Hossein tried to spit, whether at her or his brother Scully couldn't tell. The gob didn't quite clear his bare feet, but he seemed rather proud of it nonetheless, thrusting his chin out like a bed-rumpled young Mussolini. "And you're a stupid little boy, go to bed!" "I hate you, coward!" The little boy disappeared around the corner in a flash of two V-fingers and angry flannel. Ali looked like a suffering parent, frustrated yet apologetic. "Hossein's friends, lots of them are Palestinian. They all have big brothers. Most of them moved here when they were my age, so they never learned English well and never went to school. They don't have jobs or they work in a bakery or something. They all talk big and pretend they're Hizbollahi. Hossein doesn't know he's an American." "He's an American? I thought you were Palestinian." The boy's smart, she thought. Smart and carrying too much responsibility. "Yeah, he was born here, then our parents went back and he and I stayed with our uncle George. I hadn't seen my mom since I was five. I don't really remember her much. Hossein starts talking about how the Jews killed his mom like he was there or something. She wasn't even an Arab, she was half French and half Armenian. Hossein doesn't know that, I guess." Scully remembered that much, becasue it was an important part of The Profile. The Profile was everything. 'Davood Hidrisi turned to fundamentalist Islam following the death of his wife in an Israeli bombing raid in South Lebanon in 1992. ' It establishes motive, you see, you have to understand these people, get inside their heads. At least, that was how the line went. She realised she had been silent for twenty or thirty seconds, and Ali was staring at her. "Are you guys going to go soon?" he asked quietly. Scully looked out into the hallway. Mulder managed to glance in at exactly that moment. Ali sighed. "My dad didn't do anything." "Well nobody said he did, we... they just want to know about some people he might know." It sounded lame even to her. "You mean, like, Ali Qabash, maybe Gholam?" "Yes." "He doesn't know them." "How do you know?" The boy stood up from his chair. Scully thought he sighed again. He walked over to the sink and started running the water, to wash his glass and another, probably Hossein's bedtime milk. "My father gets up every morning at seven, and gets me and Hossein ready for school. When we go to school, he goes to the University, goes to his prayer meeting, comes back, makes something for us for supper, then goes and drives the cab until eleven. He doesn't even watch TV. All he knows about Ali Qabash and Gholam come from the newspapers and the other cab drivers. If Ali Qabash is coming to my house for tea, he comes in the middle of the night," Ali said, putting the two glasses in the chipped cupboard, "and does it real quiet." *** Scully slides into the booth beside him, sitting sideways, one leg tucked under her. Her hand lifts to his temple. "Hey." "I'm tired, Scully." "That's because it's two in the morning." His hand matches hers, his thumb brushing lightly across her cheekbone. It seems as if she settles into his touch. "You're getting un-frostbitten." "Don't try to get technical, I'm the doctor." She straightens her neck, pulling herself away from him. "We should go." "Yeah, I guess. Probably got another big day tomorrow." "Oh, god, don't remind me." Mulder leans his head back, looking pained. Scully watches her hand slip down his cheekbone, catching in the wrinkled, open collar of his shirt. *** "He comes here once every two weeks, mostly. I think he's come six times now." Ali leaned against the wall in the hallway where I stopped him after he asked when we were coming back. Something in the way he said it made it clear that "we" had been here before, which Denotis had managed to avoid mentioning. "What does he ask your father?" "Same as tonight," he shrugged in his young-old way. "Who he knows. What he thinks. He used to come right at dinner, and my dad would be late for work." "Ali, is this true?" "Yeah. Why would I lie? Then you'll all come back for sure." Ali bucked his shoulders, standing up straight and turning his back to me. " I'm going to bed." *** Scully beckons me from the door of the kitchen, holding her cellphone. Rob is trying to convince Hidrisi that he saw his friend buying some kind of computer-aided design software that costs forty grand and is just the ticket for designing missiles. Hidrisi is getting pissed, and said the guy did buy a copy of Quake II with the Gaza Strip mission pack. That was a bad call on his part, and Denotis is back on the philosophical shit again. I walk over to Scully, who's moved into the darkened hallway and lean in close. Her perfume is faded, and she smells slightly like woman-sweat. It wakes me up, turns a distracted part of me on, reminds me of Scully's physicality. I want to reach down, way down, press my hand against her groin, see if her eyes close and her hips move and her scent changes. She inclines her head down the hallway towards the boys' room. "The older boy said Denotis comes here every couple of weeks, for at least the past three months." "Do you believe him?" "I think so. He seemed to know the drill. He and his brother should be bouncing off the walls right now, but they're certainly not surprised to see our friends." "Okay, that's good enough for me." Scully ducks away from me, I know she's going to peek into the boys' room. I walk back into the lit living room. Denotis is working on him, about the prayer group now. I lean towards Rob's shoulder and whisper. "Wrap it up. Now." "Little woman ready for bed?" he replies with a smirk. "Cut the shit." I start heading for the door and change my mind. I turn around with my hands on my hips, clearly waiting for them. Scully joins me, turning sharply towards the living room, making her hair swirl around her. Denotis turns around from his perch on the coffee table, glares at us. "What?" "Time to go," Scully says coldly. Rob's already standing. Denotis doesn't say anything to Hidrisi, just stands up and leaves him there. The man's head drops forward, exhausted, relieved but resigned. The other two shove by me, and Scully follows them. I try to think of something to say as the guy looks up at me, and fail. *** Scully turns around before shutting the car door, leaning inside. She is silent for five, ten seconds, looking at me. Her mouth is slightly open, and I fantasize that I can feel her breath. I feel as if we are painted in four dimensions on a flat background, sound in stereophonic over a tinny undertone of late-night traffic. "Mulder?" "Yes." *** I see the lights go off through the front window, the living room first, then the glow from the kitchen. I hear a door creak and snap shut. Hidrisi is probably smoking on his back step, I think, he won't smoke in the house. Denotis is pacing furiously in front of their car, and Rob is looking at us like he's a hunting dog. "You just have no fucking idea! You have no fucking idea what this is about!" Mulder can do this, Mulder likes doing this when someone else swings first. "This is about fucking harassment, Denotis, you don't even know if half these guys even fucking exist and you keep hammering on this poor bastard because he's too honest to get a lawyer and fucking sue you!" "Just shut the fuck up until you have the slightest fucking idea what is going on around you, Mulder." "No, you shut up, you little cocksucking fuck. Just shut the fuck up about what's really going on. This get you hard, Denotis? You and your little badge and your little prick get hard thinking about working some poor guy over with a lead pipe until he tells you where the bomb is? That make the little guy stand up?" Well, that went great. Mulder's sensitivity works both ways, he always knows just where to hit. Denotis' veins swell and his face turns red inside two seconds. It's a bad decision for Dino as I find my feet moving myself between Mulder and Rob. The shorter man runs at Mulder, trying to knock him over the hood of our car. Mulder just sidesteps, looking annoyed, and grabs the back of Denotis' jacket, helping him along so his shoulder and head slam against the windshield. My hand is moving, and I realise I'm perfectly, insanely prepared to shoot Rob as he glances nervously back and forth, trying to decide. Dino shakes himself like a terrier and tries to take a poke at Mulder, who cracks the smaller man across the side of the head once, hard. Rob and I make the same decision and he dashes in and grabs Denotis while I press my body up against Mulder. "You don't have a fucking clue what's really going on, Denotis! Not a fucking..." Mulder snarls, and turns around, yanking open the car door. I look back at Rob, who's looking at me as Denotis snarls his way into their vehicle. Somehow, I don't think we feel a lot in common right now. *** This makes three, one two three times and again and again he fills me, the old-fashioned way again this time like the first, on my back with Mulder over me like the loving sky. He's whispering me like a stream and I'm soft and open, arms and legs and life open to him. His thrust is a second spine stiffening me, filling me north to my heart. I don't know how often my body could make love to Mulder. The first time, he was as tender and gentle as any lover had ever been to me, as any lover could be, and still left me raw and speckled with faint blood, my nipples teased to extremity, my lips chapped and cracked, a dull ache of stretched muscles in my belly and thighs. The second, neither of us were gentle for an entire weekend. I could barely walk, and I saw Mulder twinging for days at the scratches I had torn in his back and thighs. It scared the hell out of us both, and I alternated between quiet, discreet fear and rolling back and forth in my lonely bed, thighs clenched around my hand, trying to recreate some part of what I had felt. I'm holding Mulder inside me gently, neither of us moving more than it is absolutely necessary for bodies to move. I lost track of how many times he told me he loves me. It had been three times before tonight, now it's three to the thousand. He starts to move again and I laugh like a drunk, offering my neck up to him. *** We have been telling each other to go to sleep for three hours now, uncertain of whether to form a tangle of limbs, or to separate ourselves, or if there is anything to be said. *** khoda hafez... khyber@home.com