Disclaimer in Part 1
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Thrown Back - 16/18


2:30 A.M.


It was quiet all of ten seconds after Byers
and Frohike had vacated the room before either
of them spoke.  It was Margot who broke the
silence when she felt Langly's casted arm come
to rest over her right hip, his hand cupping
her butt, and his lips nibbling intermittantly
at her face.  Margot's giggle was weightless,
the way she was making him feel.  He felt miles
above the earth, soaring among the clouds.

"Ah, you're not so shy now, mmm?"

While Margot jiggled her hip beneath the weight
of his arm, Langly replied with a draft of wispy
breath, "I'm not a-as shy when I'm drunk."

"Is that so..."  Margot eagerly returned his
kiss, stroking his tongue with hers, with his
rolling over and playing dead.  The delicate
strokes, reviving his will to be a participant
in life again; primarily hers.

"Ye-yeah," he stammered, partially still in her
mouth, gulping for air.  He waited until he
could organize a thought before saying more.
"I-I'm gigabuzzed, but I'm happy now.  I've been
dead inside, takin' the long w-way ho-home every
day, 'cos-'cos I th-thought you was.  Dead, I
mean."

"Where'd you get that idea?"  Her right arm
slithered along his back, its hand kneading his
body, careful not to aggravate whatever was sore.

"I wa-wasn't drunk when I wa-watched 'Nairn'
rip you away t-to be with h-her.  Ho-honest."

"Tell me what happened.  All of it, from the
time after Gustin handed me over to the aliens."

Langly sank his fingers into her backside not
realizing how hard he had, and how much it hurt.
Her buttock's right cheek went numb.  "He-he.
He handed you over to the greys, a-at least I
thought h-he did...  He told me he had.  Then,
ne-next thing I know, you're by the ca-car,
goin' for the la-laptop until...till 'Nairn'
'evapped' ya to be wi-with her..."

Wriggling out of his death grip, Margot said,
"I don't understand..."

"You th-think *I* do..."

"Hasn't Esther been in touch?"  His 'no' was
muffled, but she persisted, "What about you,
love?  Didn't you try to reach her via my laptop?"

Langly stayed silent, and when she pressed him
again, his answer was the same.  "No.  I, I
couldn't fa-face her--hell, *you* bein' wi-with
her in the ether.  I woulda gone o-over the edge
freaked, no comin' back.  Girl, I almost di-did,
killin' the life outta my brain with hooch tryin'
ta numb my pain."

"Oh, darling...what you've been through."  After
she left off burying his face with a dusting of
kisses, with Langly letting his soul be absorded
by hers, her remark was thoughtful.  "The *greys*."
It seemed weird that her other-worldly captors had
a designation, and the one man who didn't want to
dominate her knew it.  "I couldn't tell what color
they were, I only know that I could talk to them,
and they could talk to me without actually having
to verbalize.  It was as though they spoke to my
mind, collectively, and I to theirs."  Her fingers
slipped into his hair at his nape.  "I wasn't
exactly terrified, but I wasn't keen on being with
them for any great lengths.  It was all so strange."

If she only knew how strange it could get, he
mulled, reveling in the flow of her voice.

"They threw me back, as it were, and quickly, which
I'm grateful for.  I wonder if their calculation of
time is roughly concurrent with ours?"

They'd held onto Scully a whole lot longer, like it
had been an eterity.  Langly began examining the
back of Margot's neck with rough-moving, probing
fingers until she told him to stop.  The skin felt
normal, but he'd feel better about her being 'chip
clean' if he could get a better look under one of
their high-intensity lamps.

"What's wrong?"

"No-noth-nothing..."

"Nothing?  It felt as though you were looking
for something."

He hoped there was nothing to find, but he
wouldn't tell her anything until he knew for
a certainty himself.  Tomorrow, before she
woke up, he'd pass the wand of one of their
metal detectors over her, and keep his fingers
crossed.

"Richard, for pity's sake, what aren't you
telling me?"

Man, she's sharp....  Langly eased his hand
back to her behind, and peppered its right
cheek with some gentle three-fingered pinches.
"You feel so good to ho-hold again," he hedged.
"I thought I'd lost ya be-before we ev..."  He
wasn't sure if he had enough wits to say the
rest, but he forced enough courage from some
cerebral bank whose brain cells weren't
completely pixilated.  "I...  I love ya to-too,
Margie.  Th-that's what I was tryin' to tell ya
over the phone before Max broke all over your
ass..."

She made him make some space for her top leg
which she wedged between his long limbs.  An
invisible beaded string of sweat popped up on
his forehead, and when she crawled into him
deeper, he could feel his heart's explosive
pounds swell within his ear.  "Then what are we
going to do about this impetuous, heady love of
ours?"

"Wha-wha'da *y-you* want u-us..."  'Us.'  That
had a comforting ring to it.  "To do about it?"
Somehow, it felt safer letting her set the
overall tone and pace.  With his minor league
experience with women the chance of his striking
out was real.

Margot kissed the prominence that was his nose,
silhouetted like a cut-out against the dark made
seeable by the meager amount of streetlight
trickling in through the one grimy window above
their heads.  "Wait until you aren't so, well,
shall we say, out of commission, before we drink
our fill of each other?"

"Ne-nev.  Never gonna happen."  He got a kick
out of the way she protested, hearing her get
so worked up, but he reined her in before she
got too upset.  "I'll ne-never g-get enough of
y-you, Margie-babe.  We got chemistry."  Following
his deep-throated chuckle, Langly told her in so
many words that for his first time with the first
woman he was in love with, he didn't want to be
half-crocked, his senses dulled like a knife
that had never seen a whetting stone, and he,
practically a parapelegic.  While he told her this,
he thought that it would probably be true that he
wouldn't know what he was doing, but at least she'd
be getting a very able-bodied man.  Not some lump
she'd have to work her tail off into positions, or
be careful with because his body was one productive
pain factory.

"Level with me, babe, okay?"

"With you, that's not a problem.  You inspire
the tenor of leveling that leaves no stone
unturned."

He snickered into her shoulder, and she jabbed
his nose into it more.  "You're really one of
those closet poetry-readin' coffehouse chicks
who scuba dives for kicks, I'm right, huh?"

She laughed, a laugh brimming gusto and warmth.
"What makes you ask?" she parried, liking the
way his legs had wound around hers, as though
they were the crushers of a nutcracker.  Was she
going to give him the full treatment once he
was fit enough to handle her brand of it.

"You sound like a poet," Langly said with
unabashed admiration.  He wasn't big on poetry,
but it exhilerated him the way she expressed
herself, like she'd invented the English
language, really knew how to use it the way it
was meant to be used.  She breathed life and
vigor into the stale and trite, into him.

"What's wrong with being both?"

"Nothin'.  Sounds good on you."

"Ah, the sea...inspires me.  The sea, and my
talent for talking too much."  Langly said that
wasn't true, even though it was, sometimes.
"Dear Uncle 'Pert says I've the soul of a poet.
Is that acceptable?"

"Like I said, I gotta meet this uncle of yours
sometime."  The man who'd had such a huge
influence in her life, had the boy-man's
curiosity going; what the gentleman looked like,
the sound of his voice, his sense of humor most
of all.  Were there any similarities between
him and Frohike?  Langly figured maybe he'd have
to do some 'cyberlytic' digging first.

"He'd love meeting you, I dare say."  She already
knew they'd hit it off.

"I can get behind that."

Suggestively, Margot said, "Yes, that works both
ways.  Once you're strong enough."

Langly's stomach skydived.  "I'm ve-very strong."
He hugged her hard again, the bulge in the front
of his jeans was against her thigh, and she
crowded into his chest, claiming ownership, his
overwhelming approval glowing its brightest.
"Just un-untried..."

She rocked against him a little, and Langly
rocked her more vigorously.  "Not for long..."
Then, Margot told him she never wanted to be
without him, and he drank that in.

Sullying vestiges of the ugliness and emptiness
his depression had deposited in him, were purged.
Langly told her to put her hand over his heart,
which she obediently did.  Her palm wanted to
gather the fiercely beating organ to itself, as
it closed over the spot under which it beat.
"You own that," he said adamantly, the netting
of booze-fog no longer interfering with clearer
thinking, "you go, I'll follow, 'cos it'd be
out-an-out suicide livin' without my heart."

"Poet," she accused.  Langly counted off 'three'
in his head.  She didn't waste time beating around
bushes.  "I know the feeling, love" she whispered
letting that, and her desire for him, tempered by
his fragility, quiver in the gathered stillness of
the early, Indian summer morning whose sun had a
way to go yet before rising.

"So...you didn't come back just for your stuff,
huh?"

"You're my new stuff."

He 'ouched' loudly after her covert pinch to his
neck.  "I've fallen in love with the cheekiest
man in the world."

He rubbed the least sore facial cheek against hers.
"After you meet Mulder, you'll know why I'm a-uh,
left in the dust runner-up."


||oo||


Margot awoke with a jolting start, jangled awake
without warning, the tentacles of the harrowing
dream's pleasure and pain, long forgotten.
Langly's face was whiter than a bleached cumulus
cloud, standing over her as he was with a noisy,
odd looking contraption strapped to his bean polish
body.  The noise was the culprit.  "And what do
you think you're doing?"  Fitfully awake, she sat
up on the tossed salad of a bed.

He gripped the long-nosed hosey-looking 'thing'
in his hands tighter, finding it hard to look
her in the eyes.

"Well?"  A look of half-mast vagary cast a tall
shadow over her yawning face.  "Is this your idea
of kinky?"

He glided the slender appendage with, what looked
to her to have, a platypus' tail attached at its
end, over her, to and fro as though she hadn't
caught him in the act of detecting.  The clicking
sounds had him agitated, and the words gushed
through his mouth.  "Ar-are you wearin' anything
metal?"

She had to think.  Slowly then, "My studs...
Why?"

"Your say whats?"  His eyebrows flew up above
his glasses after she'd batted the lengthy
wand out of her frowning face.  Man, she looks
pissed, Langly thought, but continued to run it
over her.

"RICHard, love, I'm *not* amused.  What's the
meaning of this?  You look as though you've seen
a ghost."  She began undoing the gold-plated
mounts from their posts as her eyes bored holes
through his lenses.

The tight knot, with fear as its pit, tightened
in his stomach, as his face went a lighter shade
of pale.  "See...here they are."  She held out
the jewelry for him to inspect.  He passed the
segmented arm over her earrings, and then her
again.  Over the earrings the detector clicked
like crazy.  Over her, not a sound.  Langly's
color improved the several times more he ran his
spot check.  His breathing lost the force of its
ragged intake.

"Mind telling me what's this all about?"

Tests over.  He undid the easy-release strap,
and the outlandish machine fell away.  He
stepped out of the harness which seemed as
though it was made of burlap, and placed the
device atop the folding chair which already
had enough of his stuff falling off of it.

He gave her a twitchy smile, wondering what
cock-and-bull he was going to lay on her.

"You won't like me fractious, Richard, so
you'd better start explaining and fast.  What
were you doing?"

"I--I."  Langly looked like a deer retreating
from being caught in headlights.  "I hadta,
uh.  I hadta make sure you were...clean."
Clean?  That sounded way lame, he fretted.

"Clean?" she echoed his grasping at straws.  Her
stare started paring skin.  "And what's that?"
She pointed at the metal detector.  "A dirt
magnet?"  She gave her armpits brief sniffs.
"I've reeked worse, believe me.  Try going without
a freshwater shower for a week on the open seas."

"Not that kind of clean."

"Then, what kind?"  The look she was giving sent
chilly ripples through him.

"Clean from...uh..."  Think fast, he goaded
himself, before she's hip to the clue that
the greys helped her see the light, and she
realizes you're not worth the time of day, loser.
"Fr-from, uh bugs."

"Bugs?"

"Alien bugs."  It wasn't wholly a lie.  The chip
they'd embedded in Scully wasn't a far cry from
a real McCoy.

"Alien bugs," she repeated distastefully, as
though they'd given her the plague.

"A listening device."

"Oh..."  Well that was certainly better than
some nasty creepy-crawlies.

"They could've planted one on ya, ya know.  To
learn our secrets, maybe.  I wanted to make sure,
and I didn't wanna alarm you unnecessarily."
Langly worked her with those shameless 'kicked
puppy dog' eyes.  "You mad at me?"

"Of course I'm not mad at you, silly goose."
She opened her arms to him, and he flung him-
self onto the bed, gobbling her up in his arms,
the casted one no slouch, and made geese
honking noises in both ears, swooping in from
both sides.  "Just, uh.  You're balmy--behave
yourself."  He went motionless with a straight
face, as though he really had a true beak.  "Well,
I must say you caught me off guard."  Pondering
what he'd just said, she speculated, "Would aliens
have such things too?"

"Why not?"  He stopped nipping her knuckles.
"Who says humans got the patent on snoopy?"

"Guess not, when you put it that way.  Hmmm.
Maybe our body snatchers are so advanced, they
wouldn't need something tangible in place,
perhaps all they need do is expand their bloody
minds, and know what we're thinking over vast
distances."  For an instant then, she imagined
what it would feel like expanding one's mind over
vast distances.

Langly abruptly stopped strolling the fingers
of his right hand around in her dark, unruly
mane.  Not just a gorgeous body, he thought,
as his lips kissed where he'd had his fingers.
"God, I never thought about something so light
years advanced like that."  Although, he'd
speculated about a lot of fanciful things about
the EBEs whenever Mulder had gotten done filling
the Gunmen's heads with his wacky ideas, over the
years.  "You sure you don't dig sci-fi?"

Well he sure dug her improbable looks.  "How's
your head, dear?" she asked, looking up into
his eyes which mirrored her face, regarding
him with a look of concern, and massaged his
partially-discolored cheek with the palm of
her hand.

"My head's the only part of me that ain't sore.
Your strawberry brew did the trick with the
hangover."  His mouth wormed itself into the
palm, and he kissed it several times.  "You give
massages too?"

"Aren't you glad you asked?"  She floated over
the bed, and around him so his back was to her,
sitting on the backs of her legs, and gently,
she started in gently on his neck.  "You tell
me once I'm done."

"You're aces," he murmured, allowing her to push
his head forward with her hand on top of his
head, and lolly-rolling it from side to side.

"I have been known to deal a mean deck of cards."
Her deceptively delicate-looking fingers dug
into the knotted muscles in his neck, and he
sighed appreciatively, telling her how great
she was, again and again.  "I think you should
take it easy today, love.  Sleep in the entire
twenty-four hour stretch.  Your improved physical
condition will thank you for doing so."

"Only if you stay in bed with me all day too."

"Who'll fix you something to eat, and bring it
in to you?"

"Frohike," was Langly's dogmatic, cocksure response.

"I suppose he's never told you, you take unfair
advantage of situations."

Langly slowly peeked around to the right, and
although he was loath to have her leave off from
the revitalizing ministrations, holding her
against him felt real good too.  "Who, me?"  He
eased her down to the bed, between the rumpled
pillows, and pressed his advantage, kissing her
with a momentum that was building, she adding fuel
to the fire.  Nervously, his healthy hand explored
where she encouraged it to go, he a Christopher
Columbus discovering the bountiful 'new world'
of the feminine form.  He gained more confidence
with her every wispy sigh, and murmurs of loving
approval.  "You're so beautiful," he seeded into
her scalp, "I so wanna take care of you, like you
should be."

"And I, you.  I simply adore you."  She invited
his tongue in again.  Her lingering fingers
paused over the excessively long, thin trail of
irregular, hypopigmented skin on the underside of
his right forearm.  Breaking off from his buttery
smooth lips, she whispered, "Is this a scar,
Lambkins?"

Langly wavered in his worship of Margot's equally
soft lips.  She held his arm firmly, and his eyes
joined hers to glance down at his marred flesh.

The hairline, yet raised enough to be felt, some-
what jagged scar, the hunting knife had left as a
stark reminder, was whiter than the white skin
surrounding it.

"Love?"

He closed his eyes, reliving all the bad times
in a moment of crippling thought.

"Who did this to you?  Your father?"

The bad, bad times not even Frohike nor Byers
knew anything about.

The numerous failed suicide attempts when he
was barely out of his mid-teens, his fancy-free
drug experimentation had been a cover-up for a
desperate soul screaming to be heard, helped,
rescued from the clutches of a man who, when
the lye hit the filth, hated himself, and had
taken it out time and again on the family he'd
systematically demoralized.

Langly nodded against the refuge of her bosom
as tears he hated shedding strained to find
their release once more.  She leaned into him,
kissing them away as they streamed.  "He came
after me one night when I got in real late from
studying at a friend's house.  He just knew I
was out terrorizing the countryside, and was
gonna teach me a lesson I'd never forget.  When
he discovered he didn't have his belt, he said
he was gonna take it outta my hide another way."

This latest revelation was cathartic for them
both.  "I meant no harm, my asking," she said
with a voice small, conciliatory, meant to bind
up the wounds to his maligned psyche, knowing
only that they understood each other, and there-
by, with caring combined, they were infinitely
stronger, rivaling wrought iron.

"I was raped when I was ten..."

"What the fu--"

"It when on for a year before I went to live
with second cousins on my father's side."

Seething, Langly shook, his fist grappled her
hand like a bear trap, he feeling rage that
made him dizzy; a rage that had poison as its
purifier.  "Who the hell did that shit to you?"
He wrapped her up in his arms protectively
when he saw the self-loathing in her eyes.

"A man I trusted every bit as much as I trusted
his brother.  A man who was sick and warped
in so many ways."  Her voice shook when she
uttered, "'Pertie's brother Ian...the wicked
sot."  Clinging to Langly's arm, she said as
though the dreaded-departed one was in the room,
"When he died a year ago in a hospital outside
London, I rejoiced."


||oo||

End Part 16