DBKate2@aol.com made the irresistible suggestion that we try writing a Pendrell fic that included the following items: a pack of Morley Ultra Lights, a fish bowl with one goldfish inside, a caller ID box, a bean bag plush cow that moos when you squeeze it, and a pair of blue-tinted sunglasses. Jeez, that gal sure knows how to throw down the gauntlet in style... ;) Here's my rather angsty reply to that, then. I hope you're pleased with yourself, Kate, this sucker was running round and round my head all afternoon while I was trying to think about the failure of the Versailles treaty. I'm blaming you if I fail that exam, hon ;). ------------------------------------------------------------------ Disclaimer: Agent Linley is all mine. The LabMouse and everything else isn't. I'm not making a red cent off this, y'know Archive: Hmmm. Have your people call my people and we'll talk. Clearing Out (1/1) by Caz There's a cow in the corner of the SciCrime lab that moos when you squeeze it. Surely an X-file. If only it were. This particular cow is two inches high, covered in plush material and filled with beans. Its head, overly heavy, with two useless cartoon-style horns, sags downwards sadly under the weight of accumulated filling. I pick it up carefully, stare it in its little beady black eye, and give it one more experimental squeeze. "Moooooo." That's possibly the most pathetic thing I've ever heard. I replace the cow where I found it, perched perilously atop a computer monitor, looking as if it longs for bovine companionship. I'm a little surprised, actually, that its former owner never took pity on it and bought it a few friends. A little plush herd of saggy Friesians colonising the Hoover building: it has a certain appeal. Of course, I'm its owner now, by default, since no one else appears to want to claim it. I sigh and grab it again, ignoring its plaintive mooing, and stuff it into the box on the desk. Mercifully, Pendrell only had the one monitor gonk. He did, however, have a plethora of yellow Post-its, covered with his distinctive, slightly childish looking rounded hand, adorning the monitor and hard drive tower of his PC. They give the grey machine something of a carnival air, as if it's dressed up in its party wear and just waiting for the other revellers to arrive. I pick one off at random and peer at it: a string of numbers and letters, coded in the secret languages of science. Hell, even I don't know what this means. Perhaps he was the only one who did. I decide to leave the Post-its. Let someone else strip his computer of its gaudy finery: I refuse to do that. I open the drawer beneath his desk and find it a jumble of papers. Computer printouts, dog-eared back copies of 'Scientific American', conference notes, lab equipment requisition forms, carefully annotated copies of newly published forensics papers and the menu of a good deli two blocks down from the Hoover building jostle for space. A quick rummage through reveals nothing of value, but I lift it all carefully out anyway and stack it in the bottom of the box. All that's left in the bottom of the drawer are a couple of baby dust bunnies, a carefully framed photo and a packet of cigarettes. Well well well, Agent Pendrell, so you had a dirty little secret. A nicotine addict, hmm? I take the cigarettes out of the drawer and feel an instinctive stab of fear as I see that Pendrell's brand of choice was Morley Ultra Lights. For God's sake: is borderline paranoia catching? It's not like I've never touched the things myself. The seal is broken and one cigarette has been removed, but from the dust coating the packet I'd guess he hadn't lit up in a while. Saving them for a rainy day? I slip them into the box atop the papers, and reach back in to extract the photo. I'm not sure what I'd expected, but it wasn't this. A beaming Pendrell, hair longer than I remember, features blurred slightly by youth, stands against a Colgate-white snowy backdrop, with a shockingly blue sky arching over him. He's wearing full skiing gear, right down to the warrior-stripes of coloured zinc sunblock smeared over each cheekbone and down his nose, and a pair of reflective blue-tinted sunglasses with cheap plastic frames. He has one arm around an equally happy-looking young woman, who is bundled up in a snowsuit and painted with matching zinc stripes. She has her head thrown back, frozen in time by the camera, her shock of red-gold hair flying out from underneath an over-sized ski-hat as she laughs, exposing teeth as brilliantly white as the mountains at her back. I slip the photo reverently out of its frame and turn it over. On the back is scrawled in a looping, flamboyant hand "Brian, put this on your desk so you can boast about the gorgeous young woman you taught to ski in Aspen! Love and hugs, Katy xxx". "Agent Linley?" I call to the elegant, slender black woman bent over a centrifuge at the other end of the lab. "Could I ask you something?" "Sure, Agent Scully," she replies, in a lazy Southern drawl. "What can I do for you?" I hold up the photograph and try to remember not to use my "investigative mode" voice on her. "Do you know who the woman in this picture is?" "Well sure," she says, the slight smile on her lips erasing itself. "That's Agent Pendrell's kid sister. Katherine, I think her name was. She died last year: car accident. She'd just started at CalTech, brilliant future ahead of her. Poor kid." She takes the picture from me, runs one manicured fingertip over it and sighs. "Agent Pendrell never spoke of it, but we all knew he took her death pretty hard. You didn't know?" "No," I mutter, taking the picture back off her, "no, I didn't. He...he never spoke of it to me. Thank you." "Anytime," she says, shrugging fluidly and making her way back across the lab. "I'm gonna head home now, if you wouldn't mind shutting off the lights when you leave." Pendrell had no living relatives, I'd been told when I enquired with Personnel after his death. His parents had passed away within months of each other while he was at Quantico, and apparently no one in Personnel had thought his pretty, laughing, dead kid sister worth mentioning. I'd volunteered to clear out his personal effects, feeling as if I ought to do *something* for the man I'd been unable to save. I trace the lines of his smiling face on the photo and slide it back into the frame, placing it gently in the box with everything else. I add his neatly ordered collection of pens and pencils, the box of computer diskettes and the personal organiser sitting on the desk, and then tuck the box under one arm, saddened by how light it is. One last thing. I squat down and peer into the glass fish bowl sitting on the desk. Vlad gives me a cold-eyed, impassive stare in return, before flicking his tail and swimming to the other side of his tiny little glassed-in world. Only Pendrell. Only he could be so sentimental as to rescue the fish that sat behind the counter of the local news-stand for so long. When Tom, the old man who'd run the business, finally collapsed of a heart attack one day, Pendrell has been the one to head down to the street corner and gallantly rescue Tom's beloved fish, a pretty little goldfish that Tom carefully carried to and from the news-stand every day. He'd installed the critter on his desk, and sworn the SciCrime staff and myself to secrecy until he could find a way to smuggle it back out of the building. "Vlad, Pendrell?" I'd asked, bewildered. "Yes, you know, Agent Scully," he'd said earnestly, giving the fish an extra pinch of fish-flakes before straightening up and peering over the desk at me. "As in Vladimir Zworykin." "Ah, that Vlad," I'd responded, enlightened. Only Pendrell could name a fish after the inventor of the electron microscope. I slip Vlad's fish-food into my pocket, and carefully lift his (her?) bowl with my spare hand. God knows how I'll get the poor creature home, but I have to try. Pendrell would have wanted it. That's that, then. All cleared out. I take a last look around, and head for the door, setting Vlad down gently to flick off the lights, one by one, until the lab is sunk in darkness. All's quiet on the Western Front, then. "Goodnight, Agent Pendrell," I murmur as I leave, glad that there's no one but a fish to witness my flash of sentimentality. ------------------------------------------------------------------- The phone is ringing as I shuffle awkwardly into my apartment, weighed down by a dead man's life in a box and a terrified fish. I set Vlad down on the coffee table, breathing a sigh of relief that some water stayed in the bowl rather than on the floor of my car on the drive home, and grab the phone. "Scully." "Hey, Scully, it's me. Where've you been? I've been trying to reach you for the last half-hour." "I got caught in traffic, and my cell battery was drained. Mulder, I...did you know Agent Pendrell could ski?" "No, I didn't, Scully," he says gently. "Listen...I know you must be tired if you've only just come in, but do you mind if I come over? I wanted to go over some things in the Zellerman file before we fly out there." I gaze at Vlad, still frantically swimming round and round as the water in the bowl starts to settle, and find myself saying simply "No, Mulder, I don't think so." And then I hang up. The phone rings again a moment later. A glance at my caller ID box tells me that it's Mulder: no surprises there, then. I picture him staring at the phone in shock, before deciding I must've dropped the phone and hit the cut-off button by accident or something along those lines. No dice, Mulder. I ain't picking up, not tonight. A good man's fish and I have an appointment with a bottle of wine and 'Breakfast at Tiffany's'. Something tells me Pendrell would've liked that movie. I grab a half-finished bottle of Chardonnay and a glass from the kitchen, and return to the living room, settling cross-legged on the floor in front of the bowl. After a second's thought, I rise again, grab the Morleys from the box and a book of matches from the kitchen, and light up. I haven't smoked in six years, but I think Pendrell would understand why I'm doing it now. I take a deep drag, coughing a little as the smoke hits my lungs, fill the glass, raise it in Vlad's direction and then toast the empty air. "To the electron microscope, and its biggest fan, Brian Pendrell," I propose to the fish, who ignores the tears trickling down my face and mixing with the wine as it enters my mouth. That doesn't seem quite right, though, and so I raise the glass again, and think for a minute. "To unsung heroes," I mutter thickly, and this time I drain the glass to the dregs. FINIS Okay, he's not technically *in it*, but it's very much *about* him, so does it count? Jeez, I can't believe I posted a un-beta read fic: any mistakes here are all my own work this time ;).