From: janelindsay@email.com
Date: Tue, 8 Jun 1999 12:37:32 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: Outer Space Plane 2


Title: Outer Space Plane 2 
Author: Jane Lindsay 
Rating: PG 
Size: 30K
Category: MSR 
Month/year of posting: 6/99
Spoilers: None.
Keywords: MSR
Archive: Gossamer, yes, everywhere else, please ask first.
Summary: Scully and Mulder haven't seen each other for one year. Maybe now they can catch a break.
Outer Space Plane 2.
Around 10 A.M. 
  Scully was sitting on the end of another hotel bed staring off into space when Langly burst into her room. He was pale, even more so than usual. He was shaking. He held a small black cell phone in his hand. "Scully," he said, " it's Mulder." Scully stared at him for a second. Just a second. Then she lunged and grabbed the phone from his hand. "Hello!!!" she yelled. "Scully, it's me." Scully's world stopped still to the sound of Mulder's voice. "Mulder," she squeaked out. It was all she could manage. Mulder was off, talking a million miles a second until all the words blended together. This glorious cascade of sound and life and happiness and Mulder went pouring through the phone system into Scully's ear. Scully herself had no idea what Mulder was saying and didn't care. The word-processing part of her brain had shut off and left the rest of her body to splish splash in the glorious puddles of Mulder's voice. She was very happy. 
  Langly watched from the foot of the bed as a glorious transformation overcame Scully. Her face and her entire body lit from inside like a Chinese paper lantern. Her legs drawing up to her in a warm ball on the bed. Her toes curled. Her eyelids slid shut slowly, though ecstatic blues still shone through. She rocked in contented circles, humming a nameless little croon that bubbled up all the way from her deeply champagne-colored toes. Then her eyes opened, shocked and blue. 
  Scully had understood nothing of what Mulder said, nothing until, "I'm coming." She understood that all too clearly. Her brain felt as if it had been blasted with Arctic air. 
"What?" she whispered. "No. No Mulder, you can't. You can't do that. They'll-" 
"I'm coming Scully, " he said. "I can't not do it. I'm coming July 1st. I have the tickets. I'm leaving Seoul now. There are seven stops in between, one in Chicago which is where Langly can contact me in case of any problems. " Scully looked over at Langly, who nodded to confirm whatever Mulder was telling her. 
   When Langly had first picked up the cell phone he had been informed by a computerized voice that the call he was about to receive was on a secure line. Then he heard something roughly like this- "it's me don't change phones I'm in Korea and I'm coming there but I can't meet you in Seattle you're gonna have to travel a little Langly how do you feel about Akron? You have to be there in two days take your car and ditch it get on Greyhound Number 37 and go to the opposite end of the city then go to the Hertz and get yourself a green Dodge Neon and call 399 5767 4432 you'll get a computer enter 4232 and it'll tell you whether you're clean if you are get to somewhere in Wyoming by midnight send a fax to the same number with test in the upper right hand you'll get the number of a bank account in Tahiti clean it out buddy you're gonna need it if anything goes wrong call me at emergency number 555 4232 are you listening 555 4232 Don't sleep in Chicago if you can just get there in th!
e daytime and get to the First Union get the money from there under Calvin Scott I'm leaving Flight 023 in ten minutes stopping in three hours in Italy Venice International five hours Trinidad Airport half an hour Mexico don't call me there. I'm coming in through Dulles and hitting Montana International and Ronald Reagan can you believe they actually named an airport after that fucker he's caused half my problems so far you got that Langly? Good. Let me talk to Scully." 
   Now Scully struggled to understand the plan that Mulder outlined. The resolve in his voice was frightening, as it echoed the kind of ridiculous single- mindedness that brought him to danger many times before he became an international fugitive. This kind of talk now could send him careening towards death. She knew, being an international fugitive herself. She was about to open her mouth and tell him so, but then she thought of something that changed her mind. Fugitives get caught. All of them eventually slip up, or simply miscalculate and move a day too late. And if a fugitive is genuinely wanted, if the country or government or consortium chasing him is willing to spend enough money and manpower and energy to catch him or her, they will almost always be caught. Unless the hunted is willing to make bolder moves than the hunters, he is simply waiting to be caught. All this spun through Scully's head in a sort of exhilarating rush, distilled to the one simple urge -- Fuck it.!
 She sighed a huge, deep sigh and immediately felt relaxation and above all, love for Mulder infusing her body and soul. 
"Fuck it," she told Mulder, tears and a smile crossing her face at the same time. "You're right. Everything else is just..." 
"Waiting to die." Mulder finished the sentence for her. 
"Yes," she said. "I'll meet you there." 
*** 
six hours later 
Highway 90, Iowa 
   Scully and Langly were making good time. They had to -- they had almost 1,200 miles to cover in only two days. It was about four o'clock in the afternoon. It was a sunny day and the colors of the sky and highway glowed against fields of green soybeans on one side and yellow corn on the other. There were no other cars on the highway, and this was both comforting and somewhat frightening. The image that neither passenger of the car could shake from their heads was of a single car rising over the horizon behind them, speeding, gaining on them. To distract herself, Scully concentrated on mileage. Maps spread out across her knees, one eye on the odometer, she calculated where to spend the night. Trading off and napping, they could pull off about six more hours of driving before sleep became necessary. Therefore, the Super 8 in Sheridan. That gave them six hours to drive 550 miles. Maybe it was a good thing there were no other cars on the road. Langly turned on the radio and foun!
d the hardest rock that he could, which in Iowa turned out to be "Slow Ride". He stepped on the gas. Scully stared out the window, something approximating a smile drifting across her face.
  Mulder squeezed into a seat on one of the two flights out of Kuala Lumpur at 6 A.M. After a quick inspection of all the faces he could see on the plane. He lay back in his seat and faked sleep, while under almost-shuttered eyes he peered out the window. It was hard to see through the black glare on the windows from the lights inside, but he could tell it was a clear night with only a few fluffy low-altitude clouds which reflected moonlight, bright white. He could even see a few stars up there. (They were of the constellation Orion.) He thought of Scully, of where she would be right now. Probably somewhere in Iowa. It would be about four o'clock there. He wondered if they were still driving, or if they had decided to sleep during the day, then drive all night. Day and night were about the same to Mulder anymore. He wondered if it was the same for Scully, if she caught midnight flights with ease and could feel the full moon even from indoors. He closed his eyes and fell asleep!
 to the image of Scully, warm and safe in a motel bed somewhere far away. 
*** 
twelve hours later 
Scully and Langly awoke simultaneously, in separate rooms but by the same cheap alarm clock ( Scully's - Langly forgot to set his.) It was 4 A.M., a gray glowing morning light filtering through the motel curtains and setting up a hopeful light blue inside. It was quiet, so much so you expected to hear light flute tones, a soundtrack to fill up all that dead air. Scully got up and pulled on her underwear, hopping on one foot and disturbing the dust motes. Langly lay in bed for a few more moments, then got up and started putting on layers of thin nylon clothing, which is harder to bug than cotton or wool. Football jersey, ski pants, goddamn plastic tennis shoes. The light in his room got warmer and friendlier until it hit a tone exactly like what Langly's mother used to call "oatmeal". She had been fond of words like that, interior-decorating words you could roll around in your mouth like "hearty" and "rustic" and "authentic". As much as those words annoyed him then and now, he !
missed Mom. 
   He knocked on Scully's door, just to make sure she was up, but was surprised when the door was pulled open to reveal Scully. She was all dressed and ready, even had her suitcase slung over her arm, but it was the smile that caught Langly off guard. It was bright and friendly and pretty. Langly had forgotten what it was like to have a woman smile at you like that early in the morning. It was nice, but the nicest part of it was seeing the friendliness. This came as a surprise to Langly, who had supposed that if Scully ever did smile like that in his presence that it would become difficult to behave himself as a friend should. Oddly, now that it had happened, all he felt was happiness for Scully because she was so happy. This was the definition of true friendship with a woman, he realized with a bit of a shudder. Being glad for her even when the cause of her contentment is another man. Keee-rist. You're in the prime of your life, you're forced to live with probably the most be!
autiful woman you will ever see in your life, and all you can think about is her friendship. You are a pathetic specimen of manhood, he told himself, then sucked it up and gave her his best (and truly, happiest) pathetic grin. 
  Mulder landed in Naples in a properly awful mood. He felt sick and out of sorts and dammit, he just wanted this to be over. He was nervous and tired of darting around airports in such a way as to minimize exposure. He just wanted to be home, that is with Scully, wrapping his arms around her and falling asleep for a year or so. Yeah, so sue me, he thought, I'm forty and that's the extent of my wants right now. I just wanna get some sleep with the woman of my dreams. 
  Scully dug a plastic fork into her styrofoam Hardee's container, and twirled the last bite of eggs on the way to her mouth. She couldn't help it. No amount of crappy take-out food could ruin this good mood. The sun was coming up over the edge of a hill in the distance, and the few trucks out on the road were eighteen-wheelers driven by men with cross-country deadlines who loved the dawn almost as much as Dana Scully. She raised her hand to wave to one of these road dwellers who happened to be towering over her in the next lane, then reconsidered. Maybe the reason truck drivers liked the morning was the comparative lack of tiny rental skateboards like hers on the road. But the truck driver had already seen her tentative wave, and wasn't about to turn down a greeting from such a pretty woman so early in the morning. He grinned broadly and raised one paw, wrapped around a cup of coffee, in a sort-of salute. Scully smiled a secretive sort of smile and wiggled her fingers 'good m!
orning' from around her own cup of coffee. She let it go at that. Langly smiled his shy, nerdy smile at her from across the car. 
  In Hyde Park in Akron, Ohio, there is a huge hill, wide and round, from which you can see almost the entire city. The hill is covered with long green and yellow grass growing from pebbly soil, and is treeless except for one twisted apple. The tree has been growing in the shale on top of this hill so long it no longer looks like an apple, but more resembles a piece of driftwood implanted there in some forgotten flood. Its bark has been sanded away to reveal dry, shiny wood neither yellow nor gray. The scars from the long-ago lightning that split it almost to its base are gone. Its few leaves are leathery. There are no buildings except one on Rock Hill. And that one is at the top too, an ancient gray shack once used as a lightning shelter for horses. It is warm on the inside, always. No matter how gusty and breathtaking the wind might become, you can stand in there and smell old hay and peer out through the cracks between the boards and watch the lightning hit out on the plain!
s beyond Akron. The building stands at a respectful distance from the tree, but not quite over the horizon of the hill. And yet everyone in Akron, Ohio who has climbed the hill alone has been taken with the urge to sit down a while on the crumbly sandstone between the old shack and the apple tree, and think. It's that sort of place. This is the place where they were going. 
*** 
Late that night. 
Langly sighed and readjusted his wrist on the steering wheel to take a slow curve in the highway. Scully murmured and shifted sleepily in her seat next to him, but did not wake up. Langly smiled. Scully would sure be surprised when she saw how far he had gotten them during her sleep. In fact, they were almost to the turn off to Highway 9, which would drop them straight down to Chicago. He decided he would wake her for that. She'd like that. Then she would probably insist they pull over to sleep in a motel, telling him he had driven enough. That was okay. Truth be told, he sort of enjoyed being mothered by Scully, it reminded him of the Lone Gunmen. Langly had really been the baby of that family, and nobody, not Scully, no one except another Lone Gunman, could know how much he missed it. He missed the way they would all rag on him about his music, his hair, his clothes, even though they were all easily as odd as he was. He missed orange juice in the kitchen, straight from the c!
arton. He missed Frohike's theories on the CDC's firewall. He missed the glow of computer screens lighting the entire living room in blue and seeping down the hallway to where he slept. He missed Byers yelling "I love the smell of new electronics!" and hard rock until three. But now he had to live on his own. People were depending on him now. So he did what he could. He turned on the radio and found a nice slow song to listen to as Scully napped beside him. And he watched the night sky's many colors. And he guided the car carefully down the ramp and onto the highway to Chicago. 
  Mulder touched down in Chicago late at night after Scully and Langly had retired to a Howard Johnson's on the outskirts of the city. He went from O'Hare straight to the hotel where Scully or Langly could contact him for the next six hours. He curled up on the bed and fell asleep. The red lights of the digital clock read 1:30. 
 "Hey, Scully, wake up." Langly whispered into Scully's ear. He gently shook her shoulder. "Scully, come on, we gotta get going." (The excited smile on his face came through in his voice.)
Scully buried her face in her pillow. 
"Come on Scully, you don't wanna be late for Akron," he said. He thought that she had never been so sleepy and slow to get up before. She was like a teenager. It was kinda sweet. 
"Akron?" she moaned into her pillow. "What the hell's in Akron?" 
Langly tried not to snicker. He watched as Scully sprung up from the cream- colored sheets like a prodded jackrabbit, her hair following and floating around her head in a static-electric red dust cloud. She pushed him off the bed as she scrambled to disentangle from the sheets and hopped out of bed. She looked like a make-believe person, running around the hotel room, grabbing her jeans and trying to get into them while raking a wet hairbrush through her hair to clean it. She wore a crazy grin that she   couldn't quite hide when she looked at him. Scully recognized the rather hazy look on his face from her brothers- he'd been staring at her in her underwear- but she hadn't cared when her brothers did it and she certainly didn't mind now. She pointed her hairbrush at him and tried to look stern. 
"Are you ready?" she demanded. 
  Mulder flipped himself out of bed around six o'clock too. He had just enough time to think ' oh, shit, not again ' before he hit the floor. He sat on the floor and tiredly rubbed his eyes. Talk about your internal alarm clock gone haywire. He had started rolling himself awake a few months ago and it was a hard habit to break. And then, despite the pain in his sides and the morning haziness of his brain, a smile spread across his face. Scully. Tonight. If not tonight, tomorrow. Period. Better get your ass moving, Mulder. He was out of the door in three minutes. (His world's record.) 
*** 
Halfway out of Chicago 
"Scully, do I turn left here?" 
"No, you go three more blocks to the Parkway... we could really use a traffic report." 
"Remarkably... I think I know this street. Yeah, I do. Me and the Men went to an exposition here once.... Doom 3." 
"Uh-huh.... they have expositions for that?" 
"Actually, it was a convention. They were releasing version three right about then and-" 
"Turn here, Langly." 
*** 
three miles later 
"Um, Langly... tuna sandwich?" 
"Nah thanks... well... ok. Thanks." 
*** 
two minutes later 
"Hey, this is good... like my mom used to make..." 
"Why thank you." 
*** 
Mulder leaned back in his seat and watched the world go by outside his window, on a separate highway. Scully and he were taking as separate routes as possible to get to Akron, the most northerly stop they could both get to before joining and heading onwards to
Canada. They were pretty sure, about Canada. That could all change though. Mulder really didn't care where they went, Canada, Mexico, nowhere, all the same to him. All the same as long as Scully hung around. He was grinning giddily by now. He was really looking forward to this. Better than being a kid waiting for Christmas. Better than being a teenager waiting for Halloween. Better than Langly waiting for Woodstock '93. This was the best wait there was. Also the most torturous. Love is, at the same time, the best thing and the next to the worst thing on earth. Love is a good thing, like the song says. And just like the other song says, love stinks. Mulder was very much on the good thing side of the equation at this time. But he was aware of the other side of the coin. He'd been there. With Phoebe. With everyone else. And when Scully was gone. But never when Scully was with him. Then he only knew her. His love. Her love. Their love. I am he and he is me as you are he and we are!
 all together... y'know? And if a song, or a person, or a love, comes along 'specially made for you... you listen. 
*** 
on Scully and Langly's highway. 
From horizon to horizon before them and behind them, the sky was clear and sunny, without a single cloud. It was so delightful that Scully rolled her window down and leant all the way out, letting the wind blow her hair back. (It incidentally dried her wet hair  better than any hand dryer in a restroom ever had.) Langly enjoyed the surreal aspect of miles of suburbia in his own way, playing the most psychedelic rock on the radio at high volume and watching Scully's legs while she bent out the window. Akron came quickly. Actually, the first thing either of them saw of Akron, coming over their separate horizons, was Rock Hill in Hyde Park. First a small bump in the distance, then over the crest of a large hill and they were much closer than they had thought. 
Mulder's grin spread wide over his face like peanut butter over bread. 
Scully sat silent in the car next to Langly, and her eyes got all wide as her breath hitched up high in her chest. 
Langly cried to see the scene around him. He knew that this was going to be one of those moments that you remember for the rest of your life. He knew he'd done a good thing. But the things he'd always remember were these- The look on Scully's face when she saw Rock Hill, the place she'd find Mulder. The color of the sky that day. The smell of clover flowers, and the color of the trees in the lawns they drove by to get to Hyde Park. The particular purr of the car as he pulled the blue- vinyl covered steering wheel to the left around a curbed corner. The taste of his own tears in his mouth, and the look of his own teary eyes in the rearview mirror. Langly wasn't in love with Scully. But without her, he didn't know what he was going to do. 
  Mulder's bus pulled to a screeching stop and let off a puff of exhaust and steam that sounded like an old steam engine, and he got off the bus with his only bag slung over his shoulder. He looked up at the green cross-diagonal street signs above the bus stop sign. Two blocks. He stepped off the curb, looking both ways, and set out for Rock Hill. He got onto the soft green grass of the park and picked up his pace. He couldn't quite see the top of the hill for the circus tent of oak leaves above his head, which didn't abate until he was at the very base of the hill. And he climbed carefully, slowly. The footing was awful, sandstone and pebbles, but the slope was gentle enough that he could almost stand upright. When he got to the top of the hill, he came around the side of the old building, stepping by the weathered gray boards and purple thistles with as much reverence as if he had been in the greatest cathedral. Scully was there.
  Scully sat in the crook of the old apple tree, looking out over Akron, letting the wind from the plains beyond ripple and lift through her hair, and powder her face in sunshine. No sound was in her ears except one like wind blowing over a microphone, yet she knew he was there. The second he came over the rim of the hill, slowed, and stood by the old building she felt him. She stood; she turned. She ran to him; knocked him around 90 degrees and felled him to the ground, landing on top of him. She held him down to the ground, they looked at each other for one second, and she lowered her mouth to his. That kiss was a perfection. That kiss was- Neon body paint on a hot day and pizza and Pepsi and seventy nine candles and Aretha Franklin and Janis Joplin and Dolores O'Rierdan and Alanis Morissette all screaming at once and the world's biggest cherry pie and Free Falling and the ending of The Color Purple and the Planet Krypton and Never- Never Land and the Underneath of Oz and Ci!
cily Alaska all in a gigantic four-universe pile-up. It was quite a kiss. 
  Langly leaned back against the front bumper of the car down at the bottom edge of the hill. He crossed his ankles in the dusty  reddish ground and looked around the silent park. He narrowed his eyes, feeling a little like a bodyguard. All he needed now was the reflective sunglasses. And a partner. He lay back on the hood of the car and let out a quiet sigh, looking up at the sky, then felt phantom beads drawn on his or his little lovebirds' heads and sat up again. So this is what Mulder's paranoia felt like. Langly didn't 
like the feeling, and hoped it would dissipate soon. He thought he'd managed to be relatively calm for all of the ten months he'd been protecting Scully, but now he was really hyped up. It wasn't a "bad feeling" about this place, but rather all the responsibility of protecting Scully now that she was finally with Mulder. He'd watched her for so long, strangling under the weight of being only half a soul, lonely. He knew what it was to be lonely. He wasn't about to let her happiness be taken away from her now, either through her death or Mulder's. That would just be too damn ironic. 
  He muttered his teeth from side to side, then decided to take a quick walk around the perimeter of the hill just to make certain things were ok. Scully and Mulder sure wouldn't notice anything wrong until it was too late. He advanced slowly around the hill, walking the sideways crabwalk you always see in movies so that he could jump back behind the curve of the hill if anyone started shooting. He heard, just beyond where he could see, a slow growl of a vehicle pulling up to the edge of the hill and crouched down quickly. He reached behind himself for the gun tucked in the back of his jeans ($200 blue light special at Wal-Mart) and waited a second, heart fluttering hard in his throat. He moved out from behind the perfect round curve of the hillside and found himself face to face with the only person who could follow a Lone Gunman; the last surviving other Lone Gunman. Scully and Mulder lay on top of their mountain, and looked at each other. They saw the sunset's colors reflec!
ted in each other's eyes, felt the earth accommodate itself to the bones of their arms and hips, smelled the only smells they'd wanted to smell for a long time, only half heard the sounds of a joyful reunion down below them. Mulder held her quietly in his arms. They didn't say much. What was there to say? Except "I love you." After all they'd been through, it was kind of redundant to say it. But it felt good anyway. After a while they stood up, Mulder took Scully's hand, and they went down the hillside. The long grass parted a path for them, tickling their palms if they stopped for a moment, then rippling with the rest of the grass, giving a sound like the gentle applause of thousands. They reached the end of the slope and stood at the edge of the green, soft grass before noticing the brownish-red pickup truck parked a few yards away. And the two men in jeans and dark sweatshirts with their arms over each other's shoulders, leaning on the hood. 
                      The End of Part 2.

Thanks first and foremost to Shell, my wonderful editor and a peach of a human being. She was so gracious that she never even mentioned it when I forgot to acknowledge her editing of Outer Space Plane 1. She is infinitely patient, unbelievably perceptive, and always makes me laugh. I cannot imagine spending as much time with my stories as she has. Thank you, Shell. 
Thank you also to someone who prefers to remain Anonymous, but who read this story over my shoulder as it was being written, thereby sparing Shell some REALLY bad typos. ("Muldre? Are we going for the French spelling here?") 
Feedback is perpetually appreciated, as I save it forever in a folder entitled "Friends." Enough. Over and Out.