From: "David Hearne" <ottercrk@sover.net>

Date: Mon, 9 Aug 1999 17:34:15 -0400

Subject: xfc: Hartwell (1 of 1)

Source: xfc


From: "David Hearne" <ottercrk@sover.net>

TITLE: HARTWELL (1 of 1)

AUTHOR: DAVID HEARNE

SUMMARY: A third perspective on the events of "Bad Blood."

SPOILERS: "Bad Blood," of course.

RATING: PG

ARCHIVING: Take it, take it!

AUTHOR'S NOTE: I have the feeling that somebody has used this idea already.
If someone has, I mean no infringement. I hope our stories are sufficiently
different.

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My momma used to tell me, "You better prepare yourself for trouble 'cause
life ain't gonna give you nothing else."

Now, that's a bleak way of looking at things, but you have to understand.
Momma was from "the old country." She was nine years old before she left
Europe with her parents. Over there, they tend to be on the gloomy side. She
may have picked up the Texas way of speaking, but she never lost the
European way of thinking.

I guess that I take more after my daddy. He was born here in the U.S.A. and
to him, life was something to take easy. It's a matter of geography, I
suppose. Over there in Europe, there's more than enough grimness to go
around. I ain't saying that things are one-hundred-percent peachy keen here
in America, but the general feeling is that if you just relax and mind your
own business, then you'll be okay. That's pretty much how I look at things
myself.

Still, my momma was right about a lot of things. It's a good idea to prepare
because you never know what's coming down the trail.

Or who's coming.

When you got the kind of community that I have to look out for, it's best to
keep your eye out for certain people. I've done my share of research and
I've got a list of individuals who may be trouble. There's a rich guy out in
Massachusetts who thinks he's a modern-day...a modern-day...who's that guy
from "Dracula?" You know, the German fella who supposed to be an expert on
vampires? I forget. Anyway, this man from Massachusetts goes around looking
for vampires to kill and he's got the time and money to waste on his hobby.
And there's a group of college kids from Arizona who investigate what they
call "supernatural nocturnal humanoids." Like most of the people on my list,
they're pretty harmless. However, you don't how they would react exactly if
they actually found a "supernatural nocturnal humanoid."

However, there's one fella on my list that's definitely trouble.

I got the call when I was at home watching football and drinking beer which
I admit is close to my idea of heaven. The phone rang.

"Hello?"

"Sheriff Hartwell?"

"Yep."

"Sheriff, I'm Agent Fox Mulder from the FBI."

Well, nuts. "How may I help you there, Agent Mulder?"

"I understand that you got a body down there in Chaney. A body that died in
an unusual way."

We sure enough did. I had been trying to make sure Ronnie's handiwork
slipped under all the radars. Unfortunately, there ain't a whole lot of
weirdness in this country that don't escape Fox Mulder's attention.

You see, weirdness ain't just Mulder's obsession. It's his job. It's what he
gets paid for. My sources had told me that he's very smart and well-versed
on mutants, ghosts, werewolves, you name it.

Of course, I couldn't tell him to go away. That would make things even more
suspicious. So I agreed to wait for him and his partner to come on down.

Afterwards, I tracked down Ronnie. "See what you done, you fool kid?"

"Ah, come on, Sheriff. We don't got nothin' to be afraid of. If those FBI
agents want to make trouble, we can just..."

I cuffed Ronnie upside the head. "Oh, that's just what we need, don't we?
More bodies with more funny marks on their necks."

"Why are you so wound-up, Sheriff?" Ronnie whined. "We're immortal, ain't
we?"

"Yeah, as long as nobody sticks a stake in us. And that's more likely to
happen if we get a bunch of people chasing after us." I shook my head. "Why
did you have to go and do a fool thing like this? It was bad enough when you
were sucking cows."

"I don't know," he muttered.

Well, I know why. It's those dang movies. I'm telling you, they can put a
lot of dumb notions in a kid's head. In the movies, vampires are always
these rich fellas who get their rocks off by sucking blood. Man, I'm telling
you---I'm not rich nor do I get off from biting women in the neck.

Most vampires in movie are two types---the ones who enjoy sucking blood and
the ones who get all sad about it but "can't help it." Now, that's a load of
ca-ca there, too. No vampire "has" to suck blood. I have a harder time
keeping my hands off a Hershey's bar than a human neck. And no vampire needs
blood to keep alive, either. Anybody who goes around drinking it is just
plain sick. Or, in Ronnie's case, dumb.

Boy, I saw this one movie, the kind that was so bad you couldn't turn away
from it. It had a couple of pretty-boy actors, each playing one of the two
types of movie vampires. The movie was two hours of the blonde pretty-boy
moaning about being a vampire and the dark-haired pretty-boy kept acting
like he wanted to bugger the blonde one. And the dialogue, man. "His
knowledge would pass to me as if through a pane of glass." Have you ever
tried to go through a pane of glass? It ain't exactly...

Sorry about that. I got kind of sidetracked there. I just don't understand
Hollywood, that's all.

Anyway, I now had Agent Fox Mulder to deal with. In fact, I had him and his
partner, Dana Scully, to deal with.

Agent Scully...

I didn't know a lot about her, though I gathered she wasn't too much into
investigating weirdness. I sure didn't know she was pretty.

Very pretty. Soft red hair, shining blue eyes, a body that was trim and
healthy.

When I first met her, I liked her from the start. She was direct, but not
headstrong. She didn't go into nothing that she didn't something about. She
didn't smile a lot, but when she did, it could make your whole day.

I guess I'm not doing too well at hiding my feelings, right?

Well, I have to tell you now that I wasn't planning to ask her out or
anything, much to my regret. One reason was just the situation we were in.
Another reason is that I have dated "normal" woman before. Trust me, it
never works out.

Another reason is that she was spoken for.

A vampire is very sharp of senses. We can catch a lot of things if we pay
attention. When I saw Mulder and Scully, I could tell that there was a lot
more than a professional partnership going on here. It wasn't like they
sleeping with each other. In fact, they hadn't done it with anyone for a
long, long time.

How can I tell? Well, let's just say that there's a certain scent they
didn't have.

Still, they were close. It could be seen in the way they held themselves and
looked at each other. It was a friendship that had been forged out of hard
times and trust. There had been no romance yet, but there had been a lot of
courting.

Of course, when you're that close, the faults of the other person are
clearer to see. And they get a lot more irritating. I could tell that right
now, they were ready to bite the other's head off. Scully wasn't too big
about hunting for vampires and Mulder was looking to prove her wrong.

I realized that I needed to use that to my advantage. I ain't exactly proud
that I did this, but this was a question of family and family has to come
first.

Another thing vampires can do is send out different signals to different
people. What I did was play up to both Mulder and Scully, letting them see
what they wanted to see in me.

For Scully, I was a Texan stud, polite but not afraid to flirt. I also made
sure that I came across as less smart than she was. Women like men who are
less smart than they are.

You know, I said this out loud to a girlfriend once and she said, "Lucius,
if that was true, we would have to like all of you."

All right. Point taken. Let me say then that a woman likes a man who is less
smart than she is and is not afraid to admit it.

In this case, it was true. When we were talking about the tourist's murder,
Agent Scully reeled off all these diseases and psychological problems that
could have been related to this case. I was genuinely impressed.

I admit that I was impressed by Agent Mulder, too. Right after Scully got
done with her scientific theories, he started spewing a lot of stuff about
vampires, some of which was actually true. Hell, he knew more about vampires
than I do. I ain't never heard of a vampire that eats manure. Hope I never
meet one.

Mulder even knew about the knot-untying habit. Man, that's a
pain-in-the-butt, if there ever was one. I've never known anyone who can
lick it. Even support groups like Obsessive Vampires can't help.

To tell the truth, though, I didn't really like Agent Mulder. He had that
smart-ass Yankee attitude. You know, he thinks all people in Texas got
tobacco juice for brains. That's why I made myself look in his eyes like a
dumb hick.

Of course, I think there was more to it than that. Just as Scully was
looking for a little lovin', Mulder wanted a partner who wouldn't always
question him. He wanted his own goofy sidekick, the kind who would always
look at him in awe.

There was also the fact that he could see how Scully was looking at me. He
wanted me to be a dumb hick just so he wouldn't feel inferior.

In any case, I worked it out so they couldn't focus on the case. I was
pretty confident that I could make them so distracted, they would give up
and leave town.

Then Ronnie came and messed things up again.

First, he kills another tourist with Mulder and Scully still around in
Chaney. (I admit that it did give me the chance to watch Agent Mulder get a
ride on a runaway RV. Man, it took all I had not to fall down laughing.)

THEN he tries to suck Agent Mulder's blood.

I'm telling ya...

To borrow a quote from Molly Ivins, if you put Ronnie's brain in a
bumblebee, it would fly backwards. (I'm also not sure why Ronnie is always
sucking blood out of men. 'Course that ain't none of my concern.)

When I found Ronnie with the stake in his chest, I could only think, "Serves
you right, you idiot." Mulder was at the scene, running in circles and
flapping his arms and yelling, "He was a vampire, I tell you! A vampire!"
Scully looked like she had the greatest headache in world history.

I felt real bad at that point. Not for Ronnie, of course. This was going to
cause some major friction between Mulder and Scully, to say the least. I was
afraid that any chances for love had been flushed down the toilet.

Things got even worse when Ronnie's parents showed up. His momma took one
look at him and I could almost hear the cash register ring in her head.

"You can't file a lawsuit," I told her later. "It's just ain't done."

"I'm doin' it, ain't I?" she snapped back. "And they owe me for Ronnie's
death."

"He ain't dead! Not until they chop his head off and stuff his mouth full of
garlic and I doubt they're gonna do that!"

It was no good. Ronnie's mom saw a chance to make some money. She must have
thought they could have settled before it got to court. Or maybe not. Let's
just say that when it comes to intelligence, it runs in Ronnie's family. So
now I'm getting worried that we're all gonna get more publicity than we
need.

Then some lab mortician takes the stake out of Ronnie's chest and the dummy
was on the loose again. And Mulder and Scully came back to Chaney.

Interestingly enough, they seemed to have patched up things a bit. (When she
saw me, Scully smiled at Mulder and tapped her teeth. I couldn't figure out
what that was about.) Mulder was still high-and-mighty to me, but he
actually left me alone with Scully. He did it with a knowing smile on his
face. I couldn't quite figure that one out. I suppose that it was nice of
him to do so, but...

Oh, well. It don't matter. Like I said, I may have been tempted, but some
things just ain't meant to be.

So we took care of them.

No, not like that. What do you think I am?

We just put them out for awhile and took off. We've had to move before. It
comes with the territory. We already had our new home ready. And Mulder and
Scully were left with a crazy story and nothing real to prove it with.

I wonder how they're doing right now. I hope things are going all right
between them. I'm not too sure what Mulder has done to deserve Dana Scully,
but that boy better do all he can not to lose her.

As for Ronnie, they've got him in counseling now. If he ever tries a stunt
like that again, though, I'll counsel the hide off his butt.

Me? Right now, I'm having a cold one and watching the game. My door is
always open. You can sit a spell with me anytime.

Come on in.

I don't bite.

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