Caffeine, Conspiracies, and the Fortean Nature of Fishes II: Flying Saucer Safari
By D. Sidhe: Erika
Category: Slash, WIP
Pairings: Mulder/Frohike, Langly/Byers
Rating: R, for even more Entirely Gratuitous Sex (L/B), and language.
Disclaimers and Apologies: Most of what's here isn't mine, either. Apologies to everyone else I'm offending and exploiting here. The Bobby Sherman lyric is parodied in the summary without permission, and the Suburban Lawns song used as the subtitle here is also without permission. Further parts are pending, so get your death threats in early and avoid the rush.
Archive: If you want it, well, we all know the drill by now.
Spoilers: There's a brief allusion to "Diagnosis: Jimmy", but an actual spoiler for the Preston/Child novel The Ice Limit. Yeah, I don't know how that happened either.
Beta: Further gratitude to TRFB, who did all the beta-reading, some of the typing, and contributed meaningfully to a three AM conversation about geoducks and Stephen King's alien weeds, and didn't even bitch when he found out I didn't use any of his ideas after all. (He may be assuming they'll turn up later.) Geek details in this part were subjected to the rather-less-than-rigorous brand of form-over-function science that is the hallmark of the Brilliant-if-Whimsical PaperClip. ("Well, I guess they could try that. I mean, I wouldn't, because it could kill everybody in a three block radius, and it probably wouldn't work, but it does sound pretty cool, if they can find that kind of stuff, which I also don't know how they would.") PaperClip, who refuses to marry me on a regular basis, is possibly the long-lost love child of MacGyver and Red Green, with a fully-stocked junk drawer and a shiny metal box full of Pocket Duct Tape Strips. (PC laughed especially hard over the time thing. "How the hell do you plan to explain that?" "Do I have to explain that? It's alien technology." PC has threatened to buy me a trophy that declares me the world's worst plotter.) It is probably worth noting that PaperClip has nothing to do with the CIA's Paperclip project, and is understandably bitter when asked. Many geek details were supplied by Lee, who also refuses to marry me on a regular basis although apparently her husband wouldn't mind, and who is in fact a real scientist, and for some reason still doesn't hang up when I call early in the morning to ask if it's possible to create DNA from Peeps and Krazy Glue. (No.) Possibly only because she isn't yet aware that I haven't used those ideas, either. Lee also doesn't have much respect for alien technology, but does seem to have a soft spot for Jimmy, so I guess it's okay. Lee laughed pretty hard over a lot of things I left in anyway. Needless to say, errors and implausibilities that remain are there because I'm incorrigible.
Author's Note: I promise, there is wackiness in future portions of this. God, plot is irritating, and exposition is dreadfully boring. I spent most of this yelling at the lads to stop acting like science fair geeks and do something witty. In the end, what they apparently decided to do was have some more entirely gratuitous sex. I have a feeling we're going to be seeing a lot of that. Anyone who wants to write and explain why my math or my science is wrong, feel free, but before you do, remember that there is entirely gratuitous sex, and try to cut me a little slack. I'm trying for humor, plot, smut, and accuracy: Two out of four isn't bad for a chick who majored in English.

Summary: The shiniest UFOs you've ever seen are in Seattle, and the Grays the grayest gray in Seattle…

J. Wayne turned up at ten Friday morning with a bag of muffins and fresh fruit. Byers cleared off one of the tables while Frohike and Jimmy dug up some orange juice and coffee. J. Wayne picked up a stack of folders only to have it snatched from him with a glare by Langly.

"That's confidential."

Byers cast a puzzled glance at Langly, but didn't comment. He handed a folder to J. Wayne. "Your trace is very interesting."

J. Wayne sat down and started looking through the printouts. "Did you figure out what it is?"

"No." Byers half-smiled. "That's just one of several things I wasn't able to determine about it. If you'll look…" he leaned over the younger man's shoulder and flipped a page, "I calculated the mass and the weight, and couldn't match the density with any single element, or any common alloy. It's probably an unusual combination of several metals. With all the variations possible, I wasn't especially surprised by that. But I couldn't manage to sample it, either, and that did bother me, especially considering how lightweight it is."

J. Wayne nodded. "That's the same thing my friend told me."

"I even gave laser emissions spectroscopy a try. Nothing." Byers looked disappointed with the lack of results. "It does definitely fog film, however," he said. "What's even more interesting is that while I was working with it, my watch was disrupted."

"Disrupted?"

"It slowed down. I was working with it in close proximity for about an hour, and when I checked my watch, it was almost half an hour slow. So I did some experimentation, and it seems to distort time by a factor of two-point-something." He reached over and grabbed a peach, pulling out a pocketknife and slicing into it. He set half the peach on the table, and the other half on his desk, next to the piece of slag. "Watch."

"This is like watching paint dry, John," Langly said, irritated.

"Okay, don't watch. We'll check it again in ten minutes. In the meantime, let me show you what else I tried…"

A while later, Byers reached over and grabbed the half of the peach that he'd set by the metal, and put it next to the one he'd left on the table. The one on the table had started to turn brown, and the other one looked like it had when Byers had cut into it.

"Whoa," Langly said. "That's weird."

Frohike stared at the metal. "So if you carried it around with you, you'd age half as fast as everyone else?"

Byers shook his head. "It doesn't seem to work that way, actually. I haven't tested it on live cells yet. But it looks like it's not affecting the makeup of the cells themselves so much as it is affecting how they move through time."

"That's really weird," Langly said.

"And only in a limited area," Byers went on. "The effect itself disappears abruptly somewhere between nine and ten inches from the metal. It's like there's an invisible line around it. At ten-and-a-half inches, it's business as usual with watches, fruit, whatever. At eight inches, your watch moves half as fast as it should." He glanced at his hands. "It's possible that it's had some impact on the somatic cells of my arms and hands, but I'm not sure. Certainly, I didn't feel anything."

Frohike whistled. "That's no hunk of mining refuse."

Byers shook his head. "No, it's not."

Frohike shrugged. "So what the hell was it still doing lying around on Maury? Why wasn't it cleared away decades ago?"

Byers shook his head again. "I don't know."

J. Wayne had been silent for several minutes, and he finally spoke up. "There's another possibility that might explain the discrepancies you found in weight and mass. What if it's not a solid block of metal? Maybe there's something else inside it? A core of some other material?"

Langly scoffed at that. "That's not likely. I mean, it's part of something bigger. If it had a core of something else, it'd be visible."

Byers thought about that. "Maybe not. If this isn't a piece of something larger."

"And the torn and melted edges?" Frohike asked.

"Well," Byers said slowly, "Maybe they're just that—edges. What if it's a piece of something not much larger?"

Jimmy shook his head, finally. "I don't get it."

Byers picked up a piece of plastic-coated cable that was sitting on Frohike's toolbox. He held the end of it out to Jimmy.

"Can you see what color the wire is?"

"Sure. Copper."

"That's because this comes from something bigger, right? And you're looking at the end where it was cut." He turned it sideways. "Can you see the wire now?"

"No. It's inside the plastic."

"Right." Byers thought about it for a second, and dug through the box. He came up with a small tack and a chunk of putty. He wrapped the putty around the tack, and set it down. "All right, this is kind of a loose analogy, but this plumbers' putty should burn about as well as metal, which is to say, not well at all." He grabbed Frohike's lighter and held it to the edge of the putty. It charred and bubbled a little, but didn't burn. "Okay, Jimmy. Where's the tack?"

"It's, uh, still inside—Oh, I get it!" Jimmy beamed. "So you're saying maybe this thing is just melted around a couple of edges, not broken off of something."

"Exactly," Byers said with satisfaction. "So there could be something inside it. Of course," he said thoughtfully, "that makes it less likely to be a piece of wreckage than an object in itself. Something that's supposed to look, more or less, like this."

Frohike leaned forward. "Hold on, Byers. Couldn't it just be honeycombed? Could the metal be reinforced with something?"

J. Wayne shook his head. "Why? The metal itself seems virtually indestructible, what would be the point of reinforcing it?"

"Something burned it. Edges or not," Langly said acerbically. "You may not be able to damage it, but something did."

Byers rubbed his jaw. "He's got a point."

"Let's see if we can get a look at the inside of this little baby," Frohike said, standing up. "We can throw everything we got at it. Something's gotta work."

"Everything" ended up involving a highly concentrated beam of radioactive particles. "You're gonna wanna stand back," Frohike advised J. Wayne, grinning. "I'd love to tell you I'm positive I can contain the particles, but…"

Byers grimaced. "Stop trying to scare him. It's reasonably safe."

J. Wayne didn't look all that reassured.

The eventual conclusion was that there was most likely a density variation in the center of the block. Langly was unimpressed. "I thought we'd already decided that."

Byers sighed. "Frohike, why don't you show J. Wayne what you found out about the pictures."

Frohike cheered up some. He dragged J. Wayne to his computer and offered a detailed explanation of his analysis. "Well, I don't know about your paperweight, but these pictures do seem to be the real deal. The negatives themselves are clean as Byers' bedroom. And as for the actual subject… The shadows and reflections fall right. The colors are what they should be. This object is actually in the sky, and I'd say at a distance of, oh, two hundred yards. You can see how it's bending the light around it, which you can do with a good computer and the right software, but that's not how it was done in this case." Frohike looked delighted. "I think I found Mulder's birthday present."

J. Wayne laughed. "With my compliments."

"So it's a real spaceship?" Jimmy asked.

Frohike sobered abruptly. "It's a real something. Experimental aircraft is most likely. I'm not gonna say it's a spaceship. We don't know that."

At some point in the afternoon, Byers swore loudly, suddenly, and stood up. Everyone watched him without comment as he found a can of spray paint and a discarded piece of plywood. He held a cloth over his nose and mouth and sprayed a thick two foot circle on the board. He picked up the metal, realizing he was being closely watched.

"Oh. I, um, had an idea." He set the metal in the center of the circle. "You gave me an idea, Ringo, when you mentioned paint drying. So we'll find out where the boundary of the distortion is, by seeing where it dries faster."

J. Wayne nodded. "Ingenious."

Langly stalked silently from the room, and Frohike sighed.

Byers stared after him. "I don't know what's gotten into him."

Jimmy stifled a laugh, and Frohike rolled his eyes. "Maybe you should go talk to him."

Byers shook his head. "Later. I'm starting to get a very strange idea about this thing."

"Strange? About a piece of metal that fogs pictures and slows time? Go figure." Frohike shrugged and wandered back to his computer. "Have fun."

"Mel, where's the video camera?"

Frohike turned around and gazed at Byers. "You're going to make a movie of paint drying?"

Byers shrugged, half-smiling. "It's science."

Frohike laughed. "Over by the radio equipment, last I looked. Knock yourself out."

"Thanks."

"If nothing else, this'll be a good bargaining chip the next time someone tries to show us vacation movies."

Byers grinned from behind a row of shelves. "We'll make a copy for Mulder. Class up his video collection."

Frohike laughed, watching J. Wayne. "Are you implying Titstanic lacks class?"

Byers set up the camera, feigning shock. "He swore that one wasn't his."

J. Wayne was trying very hard not to snicker. He glanced down at the paint and looked back up, startled. "John, what did you say the boundary was?"

Frohike came over to look. "Weirdness," he said.

Byers stared. "I'll say."

Jimmy looked at it a while, then shrugged. "Why? You said it was slower inside the circle."

"That's just it," Byers said, eyes never leaving the board. "It's a circle."

Jimmy tried to work that out and gave up. "Why wouldn't it be?"

Frohike rolled his eyes. "Because the metal is a rectangle, you dope."

Byers put a hand on Frohike's elbow. "Look, Jimmy. If it's the metal itself that's causing the zone, the zone should be an outline of the metal, at a set distance. See? It should look like a big shadow of the metal."

Jimmy thought about it. "Okay, I guess. So why's it a circle?"

"Because," J. Wayne said slowly, "it's not the metal that's generating the field. It's something in the center of it, something round, apparently."

Byers shook his head. "We're getting ahead of ourselves again. See how ragged the boundary is? It seemed to me this morning that it was fluctuating slightly. The effect died between nine and ten inches from the metal, and it varied. Something nine and a half inches away from it would sometimes be inside the field, and sometimes not."

"Without anything moving?" Frohike asked.

"Yes. The field is fairly constant, but it does move."

Frohike considered it. "Okay, but the metal is longer than it is wide. The field should still be oblong, even if a fluctuating oval."

Byers sighed. "You're right, I suppose. This is… interesting. There apparently is something inside it, then."

J. Wayne gazed at it. "Then it might be a whole artifact. I wonder what it's for."

Frohike shrugged. "No way to tell, really. You'd expect, maybe, some moving parts or some markings or something."

"Maybe it's an alien egg," Jimmy said.

Frohike let out an explosive breath. "Jimmy, why don't you leave the theorizing to people with more brain cells than a hunk of Sheetrock?"

Byers fought back a smile. "Why'd you think that, Jimmy?"

Jimmy shrugged. "Read it in a book somewhere. The Ice Limit, I think. It had a big meteorite that was really an alien egg."

They turned to stare at him. "You read The Ice Limit?" Byers asked in disbelief.

Jimmy made a face. "I'm not as dumb as I look, guys."

Frohike snorted. "Jimmy, no one is as dumb as you look."

Byers sighed. "Knock it off. But there's no reason to assume it's an egg, Jimmy."

Frohike's turn to shrug. "No reason to assume anything so far. Not that it matters. We just shot enough radiation through it to kill anything alive in there. In retrospect, it may have been a little heavy-handed." He stood up. "Jimmy, why don't you show J. Wayne the morgue and the files." He waved vaguely at the back half of the warehouse. "We probably have something back there that'd be useful. I'll be there in a sec." He waited till the two of them were out of earshot, and motioned to Byers. "You'd better go talk to the hippie."

Byers ran his hand through his hair in Langly-grade aggravation. "God, Mel! I don't know what the hell has gotten into him. I should apologize to J. Wayne. He's really been a jerk about this all day."

Frohike was almost amused. "John, for a bright guy, you're really stupid sometimes."

"What the hell does that mean?"

Frohike sighed and made calming motions. "I'll apologize to J. Wayne, but I doubt it's necessary. He knows what's going on." He cut Byers off again. "Why don't you go talk to Langly and find out what's going on, okay?"

Byers gave him a look that promised a resumption of the conversation later and headed upstairs.

He was surprised to find his room empty, and went on to Langly's. He was sprawled face down on his bed, pillow and arms over his head. Byers pulled the door closed behind him and sat next to Langly.

"Go away," Langly muttered.

"Ringo, would you just talk to me? What's wrong?" He pulled the pillow away. "You've been acting like a jerk all day."

Langly turned his head and glared at him. "You're an asshole, John."

John blinked. "What did I do?"

Langly didn't answer, he just yanked the pillow back. John sighed and rested his hand on Langly's back, wondering what the hell the problem was. Eventually, Langly moved the pillow slightly and said dully, "Cute kid, huh."

John pulled the pillow off and held it tightly, fighting back an urge to smother Langly. "Oh, for pity's sake, Ri. You moron."

"What?"

John tossed the pillow across the room before he succumbed to the provocation of the outraged yelp. "Yes, he's a cute kid. Yes, he's a bright kid. And yes, he's got a crush on Frohike, or hadn't you noticed?"

Langly rolled over and stared. "What?"

Byers stood up and headed for the door. "I'll deal with you later," he said meaningfully. He'd gone maybe five steps when Langly tackled him from behind, slamming them both into a conveniently large pile of discarded clothes. Byers, the wind knocked out of him, gasped for air and ended up with a mouthful of sock. He spat it out. "I hate you sometimes, you know that?"

Langly laughed and rolled them over onto their sides. "You're nuts about me, admit it."

Byers gave a long-suffering sigh. "I suppose. God knows why."

Langly pinned him down and kissed him hard.

"Okay, never mind," Byers said weakly. "I think I figured it out."

"Deal with me now," Langly suggested.

"You're a moron."

"Very nice, John. Very condescending."

"I'll stop being condescending when you stop being stupid."

"Johnny…" There was a hopeless note in the younger man's voice.

Byers sighed. Langly could be shockingly insecure at times. "He's a cute kid. But I am nuts about you."

Langly wasn't convinced. "He's more your type, you know?"

Byers thought about stuffing the sock in Langly's mouth. "I don't have a type, Ri."

"You know what I mean."

Byers leaned over and whispered into Langly's ear. "I'm completely nuts about you. You make me stupid, Ringo."

Langly swallowed. "That's a good thing?"

Byers shook his head gravely. "No. That just makes it worse." He grabbed Langly by his hair, earning a surprised hiss, and pulled him closer, forcing his head backwards to expose his throat. "I wouldn't let anyone else make me stupid."

Langly was giving serious consideration to fucking Byers into incoherence. It probably wouldn't be the most meaningful contribution he could make to the discussion, but it was pretty close, given what Byers' mouth was doing to him. "But you let me?"

Byers managed to move even closer, which Langly would have considered impossible without a total reworking of physics, or at least the removal of clothes. "I can't control it," he said in the low voice that made Langly more than a little stupid himself. "You put your hands on me, and I'm lucky I can remember my own name."

Langly whimpered. "Johnny, Jesus…"

Byers rasped his tongue around Langly's ear. "You do things to me I'm going to end up in therapy for someday. And I'm saving up."

"Yeah?" Langly had pretty much given up on holding up his end of the conversation. The voice and the tongue—and dear God the teeth—occupied his entire diminishing attention span.

"You make me want things I'm going to end up in hell for—and I won't regret a second of it."

And the hands—Langly was starting to want some pretty extreme things himself. John's breath on his skin—fuck, fuck, fuck. Hell seemed like the most fleeting consideration. "Johnny—" he gasped, writhing. "Please, God. Please, Johnny—"

"Please what?"

"Anything, God, please, anything, just, please—"

Byers bit his neck, and he nearly came in his jeans. "Anything" became sharply defined suddenly. "Johnny, fuck me. I swear I'm gonna die if you don't fuck me."

Byers nodded. "That's exactly what you do to me, Ri."

"God—" Langly moaned, somewhere between sin and redemption. "How can you stand it?"

Byers' next words were mumbled into the most desperate kiss Langly could ever remember. "You fuck me. Then I'm okay."

"Please," Langly wasn't even sure if he said it aloud.

Byers nodded again. "I will. Trust me. I will."

**

Frohike almost managed to keep a straight face when the two of them, smelling of sex and complacency, finally emerged from the living quarters. It probably didn't help that Langly had accidentally retrieved a different dirty concert t-shirt from the pile of discarded clothes they hadn't bothered to move from.

Stupid, Byers thought as Frohike winked at him. Stupid was the only possible word for what Langly did to him.

While Byers and Langly had been… re-establishing their relationship, J. Wayne and Frohike had managed to cover most of the available flat surfaces with folders and files relating to a wide variety of subjects: UFOs, particularly the delta variety, were the most common theme, but there were also background files on abductions, radiation, Kirlian photography, the MIB, Dealey, Shaver, Palmer, Foster, Arnold, cattle mutilations, Wackenhut, nuclear waste, and even the slim file on Maury Island, which was destined to grow much larger before they were through.

Langly picked up the folder marked "Mutes". "You know most of these are cults, right?" he said to no one in particular.

J. Wayne nodded. "I'm not ready to buy the just-dropping-by-for-fast-food theory or anything. But apparently they're seeing some of them out in Washington."

"You don't think the black helicopters are relevant?" Frohike asked.

J. Wayne shrugged. "There haven't, as far as I know, been any sightings of them on this one. You accept the treaty theory?"

Byers was flipping through the Garrison file. "I don't find it that unlikely that our government would allow ETEs to experiment on humans and livestock in exchange for technology, no," he commented. "But it seems more reasonable to assume that it's part of a widespread, ongoing disinformation operation. Gore Vidal observed that 'Americans have been trained by the media to go into Pavlovian giggles at the mention of conspiracy.' Think about it. You did it last night, J. Wayne. Whenever cattle mutilation is brought up, everyone giggles and looks embarrassed. How could anyone believe in mutes? Obviously it's cults, or hoaxers, or insurance fraud, or Burger King, for that matter. Anyone who takes it seriously must have a screw loose. And maybe that's why it happens."

"Anal-probing," Langly said abruptly, and then turned bright red. Byers glared at him.

Frohike did his damnedest not to laugh as he explained. "Polls show, for however much you can trust them, that a significant percentage of the population believes that alien abductions take place. The part where people stop believing in the possibility and decide it's just absurd is the anal-probing. Why would a superior intelligence come all this way to cut up cows and inspect a trucker's asshole? You'd have to be nuts to believe that. And like Byers said, maybe that's why it happens."

J. Wayne gazed from one to the other. "By that logic, everything that disproves your premise turns into proof. Doesn't that seem a little circular? I'm not saying you're wrong, necessarily, but taken to its extreme…"

Byers sighed. "Taken to its extreme, that's the paranoia mindset in a nutshell. The trouble is, the opposite is also true. If you accept that any evidence is proof of paranoia, everything becomes useless."

"So do we want to believe?" Frohike asked, half-smiling.

"It does seem like it's at least worth checking out in person," Byers said. "The metal is certainly… unusual. Evidence of something that would be difficult to explain, in any event. I'd like to find out more about it, frankly."

"No way," Langly said belligerently. "I'm not goin' back there."

"Why not?" Jimmy asked, confused. "It was cool!"

"You almost got killed, Jimmy. That was cool?" Byers was incredulous.

"It was cool," Langly said flatly. "It was fucking cold. I got thin blood. I'm not doin' that again."

"Look, kid," Frohike said. "It's July. And we're going to Tacoma, not Timberline."

"That's in Oregon," J. Wayne pointed out.

"I don't care. The point is, we're not goin' into the mountains, and it's not going to be snowing. Get over it."

Langly whined for the better part of the evening. He seemed to have resigned himself, more or less, to J. Wayne's presence, but certainly not to his mission, or their part in it. Finally Byers pulled him aside and said something quietly to him. Frohike, watching, saw him blink, lick his lips, and blush to his blond roots. Byers caught Frohike looking and offered a sweetly innocent smile which sent Frohike bolting for his room where he laughed himself into tears.

**

Over dinner, they discussed how to handle the trip, Langly having surrendered, if less than gracefully, after Byers' little chat.

"We can't all go all the way across country in the bus," J. Wayne said, arguing for flying out. "And we should get out there as soon as possible."

"We can't afford for all of us to fly," Byers repeated for the third time.

"We can," J. Wayne said firmly.

"You're not buying plane tickets," Frohike said. "Not for everybody. But it might be a good idea for you and Byers to go out to scout. You can tell us if these people are serious."

"Why Byers?" Langly demanded.

"Because he knows the most about it, you dork. Do you want to go?" Frohike snapped.

"Christ, no," Langly said quickly. "I just…" He trailed off, not sure how to finish the sentence. Jimmy giggled, and Byers glared at Langly.

Frohike stifled his laugh and went on. "Well, we have to send someone."

"Why not Jimmy?" Langly asked, passing along the glare he got from Byers to Jimmy.

Byers sighed faintly and tried to come up with a tactful way to put it. "Jimmy is… still learning about UFOs. He's not ready to scout a Men In Black sighting."

Jimmy looked a little disappointed, but was honest enough to see the truth of it.

"But I agree," Byers continued. "It shouldn't be me. I'm the best driver we have, and if there is anything to this, we'll need the kind of equipment we can only take in the bus." He glanced at Frohike, a faint smile in his eyes. "Why don't you go with him, Fro?"

J. Wayne seemed pretty happy with that. "Mel, that'd be great. I'm not all that well versed in UFOs, which is why I was really hoping for your help. If I go out there alone, I'm not going to be able to tell how credible these reports really are. If you came with me, it'd be a learning experience."

Jimmy giggled again, and Langly glared at him again. "Maybe you two should take Jimmy."

Frohike looked horrified. "I'm not teaching Journalism 101, dammit. This is a serious investigation."

This time, Langly tried not to giggle.

Byers rescued Frohike. "If we're driving, we really should have Jimmy with us. It's a long trip, and three drivers would be better."

Langly stopped fighting off the snickers and turned his glare on Byers. "It's not that big a van."

Frohike snorted. "How much space do you two need, anyhow?"

Byers ignored it. "We've done it before."

Jimmy giggled again, and this time Langly snickered right along.

"So Mel and I will fly out?" J. Wayne asked, sounding a bit eager.

Byers caught Frohike's eye. "It's as good a plan as any, I suppose," he said.

"Okay, but here's the thing," Frohike put in. "It'll take you a week to drive. Do you want us out there before you start, to see if it's worthwhile, and you can stay and finish the issue, or do you want us to hang around here and finish the issue, and then catch a plane in a couple of days so we're still there ahead of you?"

Byers glanced at Langly. It was obvious Langly was hoping Frohike would report back that it was a waste of time, so they wouldn't have to go. Langly wasn't thrilled about cross-country drives, Byers knew, and especially not with Jimmy along with them. It was understandable, but this was a story, and judging from the slag it could well be a massive story, and Byers wasn't going to give it short shrift just because Langly was upset about sharing a hotel room with Jimmy.

And he had a feeling about this one… Frohike obviously did, too. Byers had been exchanging daily emails with J. Wayne for months, now, and he didn't think the young man would waste their time. Plus, truth be told, there was something exciting about the historical angle to all this, the way it all circled back to the first MIB, the first modern sighting, the first UFOlogists.

Surely, he and Langly would be able to swing some time alone together, anyway. He nodded to himself.

"We'll head out first," he said, conscious of Langly's disappointed sulk and Jimmy's excitement.

Langly sighed dramatically, but didn't say anything. It might have had something to do with Byers' hand on his knee, under the table.

Jimmy grinned, just happy to be a part of it all. "All right!" he said enthusiastically. "When do we leave?"

Byers considered it. "Tomorrow, I guess. We can pack this evening. I know you're not done with your column yet, Langly, but you can email it back when you are."

"Whatever." Langly was still annoyed.

"Okay," Frohike said. "Let's figure out what you'll need to take."

**

"Great," Langly complained as soon as Byers shut his door. "We get to spend the next week in the van with Jimmy. This sucks, Byers."

Byers hung his jacket neatly in the closet. "I expect you'll survive, Ri," he said mildly.

Langly sprawled across the bed. "I could use a little incentive," he grinned. "I remember somebody mentioning something…"

Byers sat down beside him, combing his fingers through the blond hair where it was spread out on the covers. "I've never broken a promise to you yet, Ri," he smiled. "Do you think I'd start with that one?"

"Do you think I'd let you?" He beamed. "Jimi fucking Hendrix!"

"And the Experience Music Project."

"Yeah." Langly grinned.

"I suppose there's Kurt Cobain's grave, too."

"He's no Jimi Hendrix," Langly said wistfully.

"Nobody ever was," Byers sighed.

Langly sighed, too. "He still didn't deserve to be killed by that no-talent bitch."

"I still don't think she did it."

"Well, it wasn't suicide."

"I didn't say it was."

Langly dismissed it in the face of more pressing concerns. "A week in the van with Jimmy."

"It's a long trip," Byers said thoughtfully.

"Yeah, John." Langly glared at him with one eye open. "That's why I'm so pissed."

"It's a long trip, in our van, without Frohike," Byers explained.

"So?"

"So I don't know much about cars. Do you?"

"I know where to put the key and how to make it go."

"Well, we wouldn't want to be stuck in the middle of nowhere when the van breaks down. I think it'll probably need a thorough going-over while we're on the road. Probably at least a couple of times."

"Jimmy knows cars."

"Yes, he certainly does, doesn't he."

Langly smiled, finally. "Thank God. I thought I wasn't going to get laid at all this week."

"I've taken your lack of discipline into account."

"What's that mean?"

"Ri, you can't go three days without sex before I have to keep you off with a stick."

Langly's hand crawled up John's thigh. "Your fault."

"Oh, sure. Blame the victim."

"It's the way you dress, baby," Langly teased. "You know you want it."

Byers sighed heavily. "Apparently, I make you pretty stupid as well."

"You could say that. Or you could just take all your clothes off and let me fuck you."

Byers stood up and took his tie off. "Maybe J. Wayne's more your type."

"Huh?"

"I think I'm too old to keep up with you anymore, Ringo."

Langly sat up and put his arms around Byers' waist. "You're as young as you feel. And you feel pretty young to me, Johnny."

"Puns," Byers sighed.

"Plan B."

*Next Up: Caffeine, Conspiracies, and the Fortean Nature of Fishes III: Trek to Stupidity: In which the guys finally hit the road, Jimmy rescues a very small family, Ominous Developments develop, and the dangers of urbanification of the rural lifestyle are highlighted in a most unusual way. Oh yes, and there's even more exposition, and the author's beta-readers laugh hard enough at her that she tries to remember CPR.*

Harpy hdsidhe@gmail.com Handmaiden of the Goddess of Irony

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