From: janelindsay@email.com
Date: Sat, 20 Feb 1999 08:19:07 -0500 (EST)
Subject: Outer Space Plane (1/?)


Title: Outer Space Plane (1/1) 

Author: Jane Lindsay

 Rating: PG

Size: 18.8K

Category: Vignette, A

Month/year of posting: 1/99

Spoilers: Mild Paper Clip and The Field Where I Died

Keywords: MSR, A

Summary: What happens when M and S are suddenly separated, with no time to
say goodbye. 

Archive: Please ask before archiving anywhere except Gossamer. 

Disclaimer: All characters contained within are the property of Chris
Carter, FOX, and 10-13 Productions. No copyright infringement is intended.
See "Author's Note" at the end of the story for more details. 

Outer Space Plane. 

 "Ringgggggg." Mulder rolled over sleepily on the couch and 
reached for the phone. 
 "Hello?" 
 The person on the other end was obviously nervous and talking fast.
"Mulder, it's Melvin. Wake up." 
 Mulder was still half asleep. "Melvin?", he mumbled. 
 "Frohike. Wake up, Mulder. Are you awake?" 
 "Yeah, yeah . I'm awake. " Mulder really was awake now. 
"Listen. It's happening. They don't need you anymore. They're coming now. Get up and walk out the door. Get up and walk out the door!" 
 Mulder was already walking. 
    He stood at the end of his driveway, waiting. After one minute, a black Buick pulled up in front of him and he got in. Just like they planned.  Frohike sat next to him. 
Mulder spoke first. "Who gave the order?" 
"Probably Cancerman, but we don't know. We knew we wouldn't know. We discussed this already, Mulder." Frohike spoke firmly. 
"I know." 
 "Listen, Mulder, we knew this day was gonna come. I'm just glad we got you out of there in time." 
Mulder didn't look at Frohike. "What about Scully?" he asked. 
"She's going to be fine. Langley's got her. We already discussed this, Mulder. No changes."  
"I know, " said Mulder softly, looking out the window. 
Frohike saw his friend's jaw vibrating, and softened his tone a little. "Mulder, she's gonna be alright. We'll take good care of her-" 
"I don't wanna talk about it." 
Frohike looked out his window for a mile, then said quietly, "I'll tell her." 
Another mile. "No. Don't." 
Frohike sighed. "God, Mulder, you're a stubborn sonofabitch." 
A few miles."Where's Byers?" 
"Last I saw him, he was still in headquarters, trying to contact other people." As Frohike said this, he was
the one to hide his face. He didn't want Mulder to see how sure he was that Byers was dead.
   The Buick pulled to a stop near a clearing. Frohike handed Mulder a bunch of papers, plane tickets, passports, money. Outside the car, a green and grey helicopter touched down, spreading waves through the grass like a tornado. Mulder got out of the car
, head ducked, ran over and climbed into the helicopter. As the helicopter took off, he caught a glimpse of Frohike raising one hand, disappearing behind the sliding black window of the Buick.
"Where to?" Mulder called to the helicopter pilot, a young man you could barely see underneath the
goggles and intercom system attached to his helmet. 
"Bolivia." 
Mulder had a brief mental flash from Butch Cassidy, but was too tired and heartbroken to make a joke. He crept to the back of the helicopter. He was the sole passenger. There were no seats. He slid down the wall to sit on the non-slip metal floor. He felt
 tears pricking at his eyes, and tried to blink them back. All alone. Shit. He felt like a junkie who could trace all the way back to when he first screwed up. And it was much worse than screwing up his own life. He had screwed up Scully's. He could not i
magine any reason, any little sister so precious as to justify destroying Scully's life like he had. He loved her. He let his head fall back against the wall of the helicopter, and closed his eyes. The humming vibration of the floor lulled him to sleep. 
    At the same time, thirteen heavily armed commandos crashed into every door and window of Mulder's apartment. They found no one. "Oh, damn," the leader of the hit men whispered under his breath. He had a prioritized list of people he was supposed to ki
ll today, and Mulder's name was fifth from the top. He was already running late, and one of his targets had disappeared already. "Come on guys, let's move it out," he said. His bosses would not be happy about today's work. 
    At the same time, ten miles away, Ringo Langley was driving at breakneck speed away from Washington D.C. with Dana Scully in the seat beside him. "Explain to me again what's going on!" she screeched in his ear. He cringed and swung the car around a ti
ght curve. He wished the Gunmen had had the same talk with Scully that they had with Mulder about six years ago.
"The powers that be have decided that you and Mulder have become expendable. That means dead", he explained patiently. 
"And how long have you known about this?" 
"Only since two hours ago when I was sent to pick you up! We didn't- shit, we weren't sitting around on our asses, Scully! We came as soon as we knew! Our source didn't give us much time. What did you want, an engraved invitation?" 
"Some damn warning would have been nice! Something other than a virtual
kidnapping!" 
Langley had never seen her this angry before. He tried to apologize but it came out all wrong. "I'm sorry! We should have told you this was possible. We just didn't want to risk jeopardizing our source. You can understand." 
She crossed her arms firmly over her chest and addressed him from as far away as she could get, wedged into her seat on the other side of the car. "Tell me when I'm a little less pissed off at you for putting Mulder's and my life in danger. Tell me where 
he's going again," she said. "Bolivia," said Langley, relieved he could provide some answers. "Then Ecuador, if it works out. Then I'm not sure. Could be Portugal, or Spain, or Germany."
"Germany? That's where the whole Project began!" 
"Yes, they do have established Project bases there. But the government is not tied in, and therefore it's a safe place for people endangered by the Project. Kind of hiding in the belly of the snake. Korea too....." 

    Over the next few months, Mulder hid in a remarkable array of places and countries. First with a major drug dealer in Bolivia. Then one in Brazil. Drug dealers are very nice people in casual conversation. Mulder talked to more than one and once he got
 past the sheer unreality of it, he enjoyed their conversations. To an extent. Dealers work against the alien takeover interests -the Project- for the economic reason that in a world where there are only a select few surviving humans, there is no business
 for drug dealers. Plus, they have families they care about, too. Mulder understood they had a certain kind of moral code, and respected that. Besides, he was living in their basements. He wasn't going to complain. All this time, he loved her. 
    Scully wasn't doing quite as well. It had sunk in that if she wanted to survive, she was stuck with Langley. Not only that, but she was stuck in America. And America was not a safe place to be. The Project monitors every single way out. Every airport.
 Every border. Every coast. As her circumstances became more bleak, the more withdrawn she became. The last straw came when she piped up one night in the car and asked Langley, "Will I ever get to see him again?" 
Langley considered the question for a good long time. He knew the answer. He knew she probably knew the answer too. Which brought the answer down to a matter of kindness. Langley was kind. He looked her straight in the eyes, and told her what she wanted t
o hear. "Maybe." After this, Scully became even more withdrawn. She pulled away into herself emotionally, but stayed close to Langley physically. She was smart, fast, a good fugitive. She was almost completely silent. 
   34 weeks later  Shinnston, West Virginia. 
Eighty-foot long slippery tanker trucks put their brakes to the test as they slide over the hill, the drivers only half trying to keep the truck inside the yellow lines. They make rumbles that morph with passing thunder and bewilder pedestrians enough to 
keep their umbrellas at half-staff. They roar past rotting fields of light purple chicory, a perfect match with an egg-beater sky. All these colors are getting warmer and angrier, pissed off at the tankers which zoom down a tar black hill, yellow diamonds
 telling Nobody to Drive Carefully. With all this sky there's going to be an
explosion, ignited by diesel perfume which drips from the sky, fills pores and sticks to everything, sliding crystal clear down the dead granite cemetery markers of the Completely Forgotten. 
   Across from the Completely Forgotten dead a smaller Lost But Not Forgotten fugitive is finishing a strawberry milkshake in McDonald's. Scully still has bright red hair that turns pink in the morning light. Her name isn't Scully though, it's Karen now. 
She's curled up in a dead claw shape, staring out the window to a barn red pickup truck parked nose down in a weedy ditch. There is a man with long, blond hair working on the truck's engine. (He has a new name, too- Joe Fish.) He slams the hood, walks aro
und to the cab, tries the ignition. The rusted truck, parts of its body falling away, starts. The man turns around, leaning out the window to flash a grin and a thumbs-up to Karen. She tells herself not to think of him as Ringo Langley anymore, no matter 
how much he still grins like he did way back then. She gets up and cleans her trash from the table, pushing it deeply into the bin on her way out. She pushes the door open with her sleeves pulled over her fingertips, the way s!
he's learned to do. (She has learned how to leave almost no prints, anywhere.) She inches her way down the ramp outside and Joe meets her at the bottom, kindly giving her a boost climbing into the truck. He goes around to the other side to hop in and shif
ts the truck into drive. When he pulls over the blacktop hill, he looks up at the gorgeous pink and yellow and neon orange sky and gets a crazy grin on his face. He looks at the broken half of a woman next to him and tries to convey an insane but comforti
ng idea to her. "We can pull this off." 
   A few days later 
   A door swings open in a hotel room in Korea and Mulder steps in, holding his suitcase and his breath. When he sees there is no one inside, he flops back flat on the bed, his arms spread out to either side. The many new contacts he has made have provide
d him with untraceable airline tickets and hotel rooms all over the Philippines, Taiwan, Japan and Korea. The rooms are nice, but he doesn't notice most of the time. He's too busy watching his back, although the last contacts he talked to assured him that
 he is at least four steps ahead of those who would kill him. Well, whoopee yahoo. Assassination is starting to sound pretty good to Mulder, given his chances of ever seeing Scully again. There is only one thing keeping him going by now. He still loves he
r. 
  One person cannot go too long without life hitting, sooner or later. Scully felt dead to the world for a long time, a halved person. It was like standing on a flat plane, out in space, the mathematical, eternal type of plane. Walking across that plane, 
not knowing if you were going straight or even really caring, just waiting it out. Sometimes it felt like Mulder was alive, communicating to her with that 'silent unspoken communication'; sometimes she felt nothing. She feared that if he was alive now but
 died soon, that she would feel it somehow. That she would KNOW it so indisputably that it would attach itself to her bones; that she could never fool herself just one more time. This limbo was almost preferable to that
pain. Then, one afternoon in a motel that Harry Hayes, previously Joseph Fish, a.k.a. Langley, had chosen, something came to Dana Scully. It was a very private thing, in a very dirty motel. It was around 4 P.M. Scully was in her connecting room with both 
doors shut, sitting on her bed, staring off into space. She didn't know why, but she felt odd...spacey...like something was getting ready to change. All of her brain was tingling. She got up, floating across the room on quiet toe-tips to the door. With on
e sleeve over the opening of the door to hush it, she looked out. In her bare feet, she floated out across the chunked and dusty white gravel of the parking lot, to the center of the stage.
   She dented the air with the fairy tip of her nose and felt the rain in it do something to her, making her feel almost alive. She could sense the smell of the coming rain, warm and electric in her lower belly. The clouds expanded like gray water balloon
s over the crest of the hill before her, burst and raced across the sky at unbelievable altitudes above her. And the rain fell. At first just a few light drops, making her crane her neck back and open her lips. And then one giant drop, almost a tablespoon
 of freezing cold rain fell straight into her mouth. As her eyes widened, as she gulped and sputtered, the rain finally came crashing down, covering her face and washing away all her makeup, filling her hair; soaking cold through her clothes in seconds. I
t felt good. It felt really good. It felt alive. 
  Scully opened her mouth wide and let it fill, gulping as much water as she could, it was so cold and delicious. She never knew water could have a taste. Not like this. When she had drunk her fill, drunk full and deep and satisfied, she began to feel the
 rain pulsing over her like ripples on a car window. It was so cold it made her feel warm, electric chills radiating out to her fingertips and glowing through her eyelids. It stuck her clothes to her till they felt like the only thing between her heart an
d the outside, thin white cotton baby bird skin. Slowly, not of her own thought, she raised her arms and eyes to the sky. And the sky opened up to Dana Scully. 
   Mulder's apocalypse was different. He was channel surfing in a hotel room with every window shade shut, when his eyes scrunched up of their own volition and he began to cry uncontrollably. It was sheer loneliness of a type he'd never felt before, not e
ven when he lost his sister. It was loneliness of a cosmic proportion, and the only person who could make it better was as good as a million miles away. He cried out loud, not caring who was hearing, until he couldn't stand it anymore. He had to do someth
ing, and the only thing he thought of was light. He went to the
window, ripped open the shades, and yelled at all of Seoul, "Go ahead! Take a picture! Fire a shot! I don't give a damn!", etc., until he tired of the melodrama and just stood there limply. He slid down the side of the air-conditioner unit, and sat on the
 floor. He closed his eyes. So tired. He was so tired of hoping. So he closed his eyes, and let all hope go. And just like that, he felt immediately more peaceful. Cradled in nothingness. And easy as breathing, he stepped into the black void in his mind. 
And Scully was there. 
  Seven thousand miles away, Scully saw the clouds rip and a bright black universe busting out at her, the stars falling from their light-yeared distance straight down to her. She saw imploding stars and supernovas speeding up as they enveloped her whole.
 She screamed. She went past warp speed in no time stars racing by till they blurred and melded and exploded. Life went racing down her throat in her ears through her skin out her fingertips as she screamed her life her rage her loneliness her sadness her
 frustration her love. And all of a sudden she wasn't moving anymore. She was standing on nothing in the middle of the universe. On her very own eternal plane. And Mulder was there. 
 "Hey," he said, sauntering to her with that little grin she knew so well. 
They stood there a moment looking at each other and then hugged, Mulder gathering his arms tight around her as Scully lay her neck over his shoulder. They nuzzled each others' hair for a few moments as tears tickled down their faces. 
"I missed you," Scully said. 
Mulder pulled his head back to look at her. "Me too. So bad," as he tucked his fingers through her hair, around her head. He continued. "But I don't think either of us have very long here." 
Scully made it short. "I love you." 
Mulder smiled at her, then said it out loud too. "I love you." 
It was easier and much better to say out loud than he had imagined. But he garbled his next words, trying to keep from crying. "Y'know, Scully, I'm on the run now too. I'm in Korea now, but tomorrow I'm gonna get on a plane and leave, I don't even know wh
ere yet, it's not safe- but, I promise you, when it's safe, I'm gonna come find you. I don't care... where you are, what they say, I'm gonna find you." 
Scully was crying too now. "Mulder, I want to think that I'd find you too. Anywhere. But Mulder... if, if we can't find each other, not in this life, if we can't reach each other... whatddya say we don't screw up the next life, whaddya say we find each ot
her, right away, and we don't ...mess it up." 
Mulder hugged Scully closer. "Deal." 
To their sides, their arms reached in a long gesture outwards, elbows bending back until just the tips of their fingers were touching. They looked at each other just as their lips touched. When Mulder came back, he was sitting on the floor in a Seoul mote
l room. The gray night light of the city was coming in the window-slats. He scrubbed the back of his neck with his hand, got up and stood there. When she came back, she was sitting in the middle of a parking lot. The rainstorm was fading. She got up, and 
slowly went inside. 
                                                                                                       TheEnd.  A note to readers: This is my first fan-fiction that I've posted.
If you feel like flaming, ( "You misspelled 'Mulder'!!! How do you DO
that!?!!!!") please feel free to use your blowtorch. If any of you want to
do a trade on feedback ( you feedback my sto ry, I'll feedback yours ),
I'd be glad to. Please ask before archiving anywhere. IMPORTANT: The
paragraph after "34 weeks later" is not my work. It was written by my
co-author, who wishes to remain Anonymous. I only wish I could have
convinced him/her to write the whole story! Thanks for reading!