Egg on the Face
AN: Real life of course is a challenge, and apologies for being so late in an update. Good news, I am in a Ph.D. program, bad news, I will be a bit more busy. But I have not forgotten.
As the middle child of four, Scully had faced many embarrassing indignities in her life. There had been the time in church when Charlie had flipped her dress up in front of literally God and everyone, showing off the pink heart underwear she had been wearing. There was the awful moment when she realized that the first boy she ever kissed really did it just to get Melissa’s attention and favor. There was the time in high school when she slipped at the top of a set of stairs, falling flat on her face in front of the most popular guy in school. Those all had been particularly traumatic moments, ones that even to this day, decades later, left her cheeks burning and her wishing she could have turned back time just at that moment.
But in the grand comparison of moments, nothing could top the one she felt right now. Staring at an empty body cabinet, her cheeks a flaming red, her gut churning with shame and annoyance, with the realization she would never be able to show her face at a pathology convention again. And somehow none of this was Mulder’s fault. Which didn’t mean she didn’t have the strong desire to kick him at this moment.
“It he’s invisible, how do you know if he’s gone.”
The glare she tossed at him could have melted stone, but he hardly seemed bothered as he meandered to investigate the drawer. Scully threw up her hands and let him to investigate, throwing herself instead on a lab chair and bury her head in her arms. What a blistering fool she had been! She had been so sure, so giddy at her incontrovertible evidence! She had rushed to place phone calls, to get experts in the field to fly there to St. Louis to see her wondrous miracle, like some carny barker hawking a real, live mermaid. Come see the real life invisible man! She had staked her professional reputation on it! And now she was left holding the bad, her invisible man now, well, invisible, even to her.
“I should just shoot myself,” she moaned, considering going for her service weapon in the locker room downstairs and getting the dead over with so someone could clean it up and she’d be done with her mortification. “I was happy, I was so excited. What was I thinking? An invisible man!”
“You saw it, it was real.” Mulder, the man who had been in this very position more time than she could count, tried to reassure her.
“I don’t know what I saw, Mulder,” she bemoaned, raising her head to stare glumly at the drawer. “I do know having that kind of proof in my hands it was just too good to be true.”
How many times had the pair of them been in a situation just like this, only to have the evidence evaporate or be destroyed just at the last moment. Except, in those situations, it was usually Mulder’s thin and frayed reputation on the line, not hers. This one stung just a little bit more than those.
Mulder at least was far more pragmatic than her own defeatist angst. “I don’t think that is why the body disappeared.”
“Why did it disappear?” At all, she wondered to herself, but primarily from her autopsy lab.
“I think it was a result of having a wish granted.”
She blinked up at him, trying to summon the energy to scoff at his theory, but realizing that it made about as much sense as an invisible man did. “A wish? Whose wish?”
Mulder shrugged, considering. “Well, who would want Anson Stoke back? I mean, really, really back?”
The answer was obvious. Few people on this planet would care about a loser such as Anson Stokes, except for one.
“His brother, Leslie,” she replied.
Mulder nodded slowly, a slow smile growing on his face as she could sense he was laying out the mystery for her. “So, let’s just say in hypothetical, that these two losers happened upon a genie...a real djinn, trapped in a storage shed for all these years. They release it. Now, neither of them has the sense enough to plug in a light without shocking themselves, but they are just smart enough to know what a genie is. Might have watch Aladdin one too many times. And so Anson uses up his wishes, makes himself invisible. But he dies. Which means that the genie is free to be claimed by a new master. Conveniently, Leslie happens to be standing...er, well, sitting right there! And he has a few wishes he wants to make himself.”
In the grand scheme of mad Mulder musings, Scully realized this wasn’t even close to the craziest she’d ever heard. But still, she couldn’t help her re-kindled skepticism as she blinked up at him. “Genies, Mulder? Are you sure you aren’t the one who watched Aladdin one too many times?”
“It makes sense, Scully! That storage space hadn’t seen the light of day in almost thirty years, and in there were pictures of the same woman we saw at the Stokes boys’ place, not looking a day older. Not even a gray hair. She should easily be what, your mother’s age?”
“Are you sure it is even the same woman?”
“I’m sure,” he insisted. “And I believe she’s a djinn, a desert demon, trapped in some artifact from that storage facility that Anson made off with.”
“Artifact? Like what, a bong?” Clearly, Mulder would have had to be toking one of those to come up with this theory.
“I thought that, but no.” He didn’t even break his stride. “Traditionally the stories have had djinn in lamps, the oil kind, you rub it and out they come. But it could be anything, a tin, a box. Barbara Eden was in a bottle.”
“I knew she had to come into this somehow,” Scully muttered, wondering when I Dream of Jeannie would come into the conversation.
“Do you know how much I loved that show,” Mulder sighed with a goofy smile on his face.
“You and every other pre-pubescent boy on the planet,” Scully muttered caustically. “So what, Anson rubs some old, dusty decanter, and out pops this woman purring ‘master’.”
“I don’t think this woman has that kind of attitude. Judging by the rise and fall of some of her previous clients, I think she does what they want...exactly what they want, black and white.”
“So?”
Mulder glared at her impatiently. “You have to be careful what you wish for.”
That old adage clicked as Scully considered Anson Stokes’ predicament. “So, let’s say in theory, that Anson decided it would be awesome to wish for invisibility.”
“But knowing Anson, he wasn’t smart enough to ask for his clothes to be invisible.”
“Which explains why he’s naked.” She couldn’t believe she was actually listening to this. “So why did he disappear?”
“Well, if you were his brother, and you weren’t too bright, and you wanted him back and a genie at hand to grant any wish, what would you ask for?”
“I would wish for my brother back.”
“Precisely,” Mulder snapped his fingers under her nose, grinning. “So I say we should look for our missing body at the Stokes brothers’ bachelor pad.”
“You would think that someone would have noticed a yellow man wandering around a morgue.”
“Remember, Scully, genie. Leslie wished for his brother back, then he would just appear.”
“Safe and sound and whole again?”
“I didn’t say that,” Mulder grimaced, glancing at her scrubs. “Get changed, I have a feeling Anson is getting ripe and someone’s going to notice a yellow corpse sooner or later.”
Genies? Walking corpses? Invisible men? “Mulder, I would say this is all ridiculous, but this is you, and I have given up bothering.”
“Good, go get changed.” He pulled her up and pushed her towards the door. “In all our years on the X-files, we’ve not had a genie.”
“The fact that you just made that statement as if it was a good thing is what is the most disturbing to me,” Scully sighed, shuffling off to do as he bid.
LJ Seems to be having problems with cuts...will have to work on tweaking this. Sorry you can't read my postings.