From: perelandra@my-dejanews.com Date: Tue, 16 Feb 1999 18:19:10 GMT Subject: NEW: "The Secret Life of Airports" (1/1) by Perelandra ============================================= TITLE: The Secret Life of Airports AUTHOR: Perelandra (pen_phile@hotmail.com) RATING: G CATEGORY:V SPOILERS:Through Emily arc SUMMARY:Lives -- routinely made, routinely broken. DISCLAIMER:Okay, they're not mine, I should get over it, right? HAH! :-) AUTHOR'S NOTE:This is a Scullyfic Improv story. The five elements assigned are:- Krycek's prosthesis - Pendrell's lab coat - Mulder's childhood teddy bear - The Teletubby Po - Diana Fowley =========================================== We circle, and descend into JFK. You descend, and you disembark, and you fall into a routine. The chase. The excitement, the fall, the tackle of a target that once epitomized the lure of the FBI. I didn't believe half of the stuff I saw. Hell, I refused to believe when it was my own flesh and blood, staring me in the face; whether it was the 'ghost' of my father, or the voice of my sister, or the strange child-creature I knew and loved as Emily, I always managed to categorize it all into a manifestation of my own strange Freudian guilt-complex. It was the routine of the impossible; we, Mulder and I, the Monster Squad, day in and day out in airports chasing the routinely unknown. Bad food, worse theories, and covered in goo more times than my dry-cleaners can care to remember. They loved the business I brought. I miss it. Our new routine hardly bears the aggression of the old times; the insane, the ludicrous, chasing moon rocks through terminals and overpriced duty-free shops. Now we are reduced to no more than walking through the mundane. Final boarding calls sound throughout the crowded halls and suddenly the sea of people is alive, flowing single-mindedly in the mystique of the last chance; a last chance at togetherness, a last chance at freedom. Oftentimes, for Mulder and I, it had been the last chnce to grasp the truth. We descend into O'Hare. The air seems permanently laden with sound; jets taking off a record every thirty seconds, boarding calls, stewardesses arranging trysts or future ex-husbands saying their ultimate goodbyes. They bounce off the huge glass windows like a modern chant in a shrine to modern civilization; the cacophony resounding in my ears like a giant tribute to the collective blindness of the general masses. They won't know what's going to hit them. If they only knew even half of what their precious "modern technology" is capable of, what they did to me-- But enough of that for now. The background check detail. The recycle bin for "lost causes" like Mulder and me. It is the endless, passionless routine of looking into the often overwhelmingly boring lives of the "general masses", using ten percent of the ten percent of our minds we are allowed to use, while scuts like Jeffrey Spender and Diana Fowley delve lovelessly into the work we have put our lives into. The work that had become our lives. But I'm not bitter. Not a bit. The jets, and the noise, and the heat of compressed humanity momentarily makes me disoriented, and Mulder grabs the strap of my carryon and herds me in the right direction. It's a slight gesture, but it is one of intimacy, of family, of possession that secretly screams of comfort; and it is a gesture of Mulder's alone. He holds on to things, I've found; his obsession with Samantha's disappearance, his hope at her return, even this little teddy bear I found at his apartment once. It was hers, and he told me he holds on to it at night when the nightmares get too much, all the time, ever since she disappeared. He holds on to it when he calls me at night, little-boy scared. He holds on to me. His grip lingers, and I wish he wouldn't do that. These workhorse heels of mine could chase a connecting flight just as well as they can chase international saboteurs; but once, just once, I secretly wish Mulder would grab my hand instead. I like the warmth. We descend into LAX. Here the crowds approach critical mass; the roar of metropolis croons wildly to me like a jazz improvisation bloated wildly out of control, where everybody solos and the drummer doesn't know where to hit the bass. What they don't know, what I had refused to believe but must ultimately accept, is the sinister order behind all the chaos, the single planned clarinet line in the midst of cacophony. What's sad is that no one has a clue as to what's going on. Mulder told me once about the secret struggles, the clandestine fights in which we must be contenders in order to expose the truth to the light. I think about how we are the elite, blessed and cursed with the terrible knowledge of the truth. I wonder how many people in this teeming airport know about the secret life that goes on around them. I wonder how many people are enmeshed in the secret life they can't even perceive. A little girl drops her toy, and it talks when dropped. One of those new children's toy fads -- Teletubbies, I think. The plush red doll cries out a childhood cliche in protest, and in the cruel push of the crowd it is accidentally kicked out of the little girl's reach. Her large blue eyes cloud over with indignant tears, but before her wails can add to the airport symphony, I reach over and recover the lost toy. Her face morphs from imminent despair to delightful joy as I hand her the Teletubby, and she smiles at me with strawberry hair and milk teeth. It takes me like a jolt of lightning through to the very core of me, and my face gets very hot. Emily. Mulder turns at my sharp intake of breath, and sees me just as the child's mother says her hasty apologies and leaves, disappearing with child and Teletubby into the crowd. He glances just long enough to see her, it, the creature that could have been, should have been mine. I am frozen, not knowing where to walk to, giving in to the drowning sounds and sensations of Los Angeles bustle. It surrounds me, and I'm not sure where I am. Is anybody, really? "Sully." His hand is at the back of my neck now, fingers fleeting over the secret scar that locked me forever into this spell, this mystery, this hell. The warmth of contact lingers there for only a moment, as his hand moves to snake protectively around my shoulders. It's so warm here. So safe. But I have to stand on my own. Or who else could he hold on to through the night? "I'm fine, Mulder," I tell him, like I always do. And though he knows I'm lying, he finds it sufficient, and we move on. I think about the mother, disappeared to another Anywhere, USA through Terminal 8. I wonder if she knows. We descend into Dulles. Home. Another openin', another show. Another dead end, another no. We are reduced to what we are, background checkers, chasing nothing but air. We wander, Mulder and I, through the endless sea of black and white businesswear, moving almost subconsciously towards our cars, and home. But I know, in our proximity, how both our bodies tense automatically like foxhounds, hearts pounding and adrenalin racing in remembrance of things past, chasing the truth through these very halls. The guards are relieved that we're not waving our guns around this time, for sure. We're now one of them, one of the clueless masses. I think about them a lot, the people that wade all about me, the tourists and the workers and the government employees all dressed in very characteristic black and white. I think about the unwitting, the victims of the lies and conspiracies that make up the dark heart at the center of the American experience. I think about people like Agent Pendrell, who gave the ultimate sacrifice to a cause he never had the misfortune to know or accept. His lab coat still hangs on its peg in the Sci-Crime lab; I told them expressly not to move it, or discard it like another number on the statistics board. It hangs there now so that every time I walk into that lab I am reminded of his sacrifice. It should have been mine, not his or Melissa's, or the countless unnamed whose innards I've ome to know most intimately. I am not allowed to make the sacrifice, even to save myself. I live in their secret world, cursed with the burden of knowing the truth. At least the people who push around me won't know what hit them. People will walk through these terminals, not even knowing, feeling the truth all around them. The way it courses through us, around us, inside us like a poison. The way a man in Terminal 2, self-absorbed and seemingly in control, could brush against the plastic smoothness of an artificial limb and look into the face of Alex Krycek. How much of the truth will he learn then, before he dies? Probably none. Probably all. A virus can be born here and be around the world in twenty-four hours. A civilization can live and die in the blink of an eye in an airport, the center of transition. The fate of the world can be decided in a crowded terminal, either by otherworldy conspiracies or wholly human madness, and the rest of the world wouldn't care. Or know. I could see my daughter and lose her again in the blink of an eye. I could lose myself. "Scully?" His voice. So safe, and so dangerous. He walked me to my car. "What?" "Scully? Are you okay?" "Yeah, I'm...I'm fine. I'll drive you to your car, and then I'm headed home." "Sounds like a plan." The car revs to life in a parking garage where people have died, and we go about our routine, one of the unwitting masses. ================================================ THE END! Feedback....it's like heroin. Gimme a fix at: pen_phile@hotmail.com. ...what you want to believe: X-Files Fan Fiction by Perelandra http://spookynet.simplenet.com/Perelandra/ The Fanfic Cafe: http://www.insidetheweb.com/mbs.cgi/mb270486