Isolation, Prologue and Chapter One
Isolation
by ML (LJ name Zinnia03)
email: msnsc21@yahoo.com
Rating: PG13 for mild violence and swearing
Type: Gen, het. M&S, a character/other pairing
Disclaimer: You know the tune, sing it with me now: I don't own
them, I'm just borrowing for a while.
A/N: Written for xf_bigbang 2010. Bouquets of thanks
to wendelah1 for outstanding beta. I'm so grateful!
That said, if there are any errors or omissions, that's my fault.
More notes at the end of the story.
Summary: It's time to come out of hiding and get back to the
business of saving the world. Mulder is looking for people to help
him and Scully do just that. With so many of his former friends and
colleagues either missing or dead, he gets help from an unexpected
quarter -- and finds that he's not the only one who's ready to get
back into circulation.
Takes place in 2008, after the events of "I Want to Believe".
We never gave up, we never will. In the end, if that's the best they can
say about us, it'll do.
-John Fitzgerald Byers
x-x-x
Prologue
He couldn't see. He couldn't hear. He couldn't breathe.
He flailed around, trying to escape. The pressure built in his
lungs like cement hardening. Now his arms couldn't move, they were
trapped at his sides. If he could only get free...he fought with his
last breath, trying with main force to thrust his body out of the
thing that held him. It seemed hopeless but he couldn't give up.
Then suddenly, he was free. He took a deep breath, and felt himself
in free fall.
Brian Jordan's eyes flew open. He took another deep breath and
realized that he'd rolled himself up in the sheets. He extricated
himself and lay still, taking deep breaths and staring at the
ceiling.
Calmer now, he noted thankfully that his wife's side of the bed was
empty. This was not unusual; she was a morning person, he was a
night person. No doubt she'd already made coffee and was reading the
paper.
He got out of bed and shuffled to the bathroom. He could hear the
faint sound of a foghorn in the distance. A glance out the window
confirmed the thickness of the fog. It could be eight o'clock in the
morning or high noon for all he could tell.
He watched himself in the mirror as he lathered his face for
shaving. Annie said it didn't bother her, but he didn't like even
one day's growth of beard on his face.
Morning ablutions completed, he pulled on his sweat pants and a golf
shirt and went downstairs.
He found Annie at the kitchen table, poring over the latest edition
of the weekly paper.
Annie looked up when Brian entered the room. She'd heard him
running water in the bathroom upstairs. Brian wasn't the type of guy
to just roll out of bed and throw something on.
She took a sip from her coffee cup and remarked, "You're up early.
I know what time you got in last night."
"Sorry," he said, dropping a kiss on her head as he headed for the
coffee pot on the counter. "I tried not to wake you. Did you get a
chance to look at the editorial?"
"I liked it. Though I have to say, it's a heavy subject for this
neck of the woods."
He sat down across from her. "Should I not have written it?"
"I was just surprised. I'm not sure that Internet privacy is a
subject anyone here has given much thought to. This is a town that
used to have a party line when I was a kid. You could pick up the
phone and get an earful any time of day. Everyone knew everyone
else's business."
"All the more reason that they should be warned. Especially as far
as their kids are concerned. The Internet is more like the Wild West
than anyone's hometown. You can find pretty much anything out there,
whether it's private or not."
"Worse than Donna, huh? My folks used to say, 'telephone,
telegraph, tell Donna'."
"I think she's my chief rival for the news. If I can print something
before Donna knows it, it's a real scoop."
"Speaking of that, do you want to walk down to the cafe and see if
you've roused the rabble with your crazy talk?"
"Maybe I'll give them a day or two to calm down."
Annie smiled into her coffee cup. This was their weekly joke. The
table at the back of Donna's cafe was the morning gathering place of
the old-timers who called themselves "the Rabble." They weren't
afraid of telling Brian exactly what they thought of the latest
edition of the paper.
Tomorrow they would go to Donna's coffee shop. If anyone disagreed
with Brian, he'd listen to them with good humor and sympathy as he
always did. It was in his nature to be self-effacing, to not argue
or draw undue attention to himself. Though he might be a crusader in
print, he wasn't confrontational.
Brian was well-liked in the town, although he'd gotten off to a
rocky start with the citizenry. Far from being the usurper or change
agent they'd feared, he was protective of his adopted home town.
Annie hadn't always seen the value of being so isolated. Now she saw
things differently, mostly due to Brian.
They were certainly off the beaten track. Cell phone service was
spotty at best, even satellite connections could be thwarted by "fog
in the bay." That was the excuse the satellite TV reps used to
explain poor reception to the irate citizens who were missing their
NFL fix. Brian got at least one letter a week from someone claiming
their town was being discriminated against, just because it was too
far away from a big city to be a commuter town, and too remote to be
a tourist destination.
"What's the plan today?" Brian asked Annie.
"Want to go down to the beach with me? I want to collect some stuff
for the classroom."
Brian nodded enthusiastically. "I'll make a thermos of tea and some
sandwiches -- we can have a picnic."
"You're such a romantic. When I first met you, I would never have
imagined that."
"You didn't even like me when you first met me."
"That's not strictly true. You were intriguing. We don't get many
strangers 'round these parts. I was just one of those suspicious
townspeople."
"You make it sound like you've never lived anyplace else."
"Okay, so I've seen some of the world. I chose to come back here.
Doesn't that make me provincial and narrow-minded?"
"I never said that -- about you, or anyone else," Brian protested.
"No, you didn't. That's what everyone thought you would do. We
judged you before we knew you. It turns out you were hard not to
like. It just took a little time to get to know you. Whereas for
you, I think it was love at first sight."
"With you, or with the town?"
"Both, I think. It's a package deal."
"You'll never get me to admit that."
"That's all right," she said, kissing his cheek. "Your secret's
safe with me." She put her coffee cup in the sink. "How about
making those sandwiches, and I'll get my gear into the car?"
"Sure." He followed her to the sink and set his cup next to hers.
Through the kitchen window, they could see that the sun was just
starting to burn through the fog.
Annie hummed a little tune as she dug through the pile of waders,
buckets and assorted equipment that they somehow never got around to
organizing. She threw what she needed in the back of the car and
went back inside the house.
She could hear Brian moving around in the kitchen, getting their
picnic ready. He always did things so neatly and precisely. She
thought that he must have had some scientific training in his
background, though he denied it.
Almost everyone except Annie had been against selling the paper to
an "outsider." Her parents had run the Perdita Press for years. The
expectation was that Annie would continue in their footsteps --
though that kind of expectation was why she'd left town in the first
place.
Fortunately for all, once the town knew Brian's story, they'd warmed
up to him. Now you'd think he'd grown up here. And Annie, who had
grown up here, had begun to appreciate the town anew through his eyes.
If anyone had told her that seven years after her parents died,
she'd still be living here, she would have laughed.
Funny how things turned out.
~*~
Chapter One
He woke up in a cold sweat, heart pounding from whatever had
happened in his dream. He looked over at the sleeping form next to
him. He hadn't awakened her for once, he noted gratefully. Very
quietly, he got out of bed and went to the bathroom. He turned on
the nightlight, looking at his shadowed face in the mirror. The
beard was gone; seeing his face in the half-light made it easy to
imagine that it was there, like the remnants of a dream. The beard
had been the first thing to go when he'd come out of hiding. Too bad
he couldn't chase the nightmares away so easily.
He rubbed his chin reflectively, then turned on the tap and splashed
cool water on his face. As he looked up again, he caught movement
behind him in the mirror. So much for not disturbing Scully; he
turned to see her standing in the doorway.
"Mulder, what's wrong?" Scully asked.
"I'm sorry I woke you. Did I wake you?"
"I tend to notice when my human blanket leaves," she teased gently.
"Seriously, what's wrong?"
"Just another nightmare," he muttered. "Guess I should be used to
them by now."
"It's been a while since you've had one," she said. "It's almost
time to get up anyway. Come on, I'll make some tea."
He followed her downstairs, into the kitchen of their new house.
Even though they'd been here a few months, he wasn't used to the
space inside -- and how close the neighbors seemed outside.
Scully turned the light on over the stove and switched the burner on
under the kettle. Mulder watched as she got mugs out of the
dishwasher and tea from the pantry. If anyone should happen to look
in the window, it would look like a cozy, domestic scene.
Scully sat next to him and took his hand. "Change is coming."
That comment sure came out of left field, he thought. "Is that your
medical opinion, Dr. Scully, or are you reading my palm?"
She let go of his hand and sat up a little straighter. "No, it's my
personal opinion. We've had a lot of changes in a short time. More
are coming. You can't pretend that everything that's happened in the
past few months hasn't had a profound effect on you."
"It doesn't take a doctor to know that," he said flatly.
"No, it doesn't. I know you, Mulder. One thing that hasn't changed
about you is how you plunge into things without stopping to consider
the consequences or how they will affect you. So you work through
them in other ways. The nightmares come. My mom used to call them
'worry dreams'."
"That's quite a scientific sounding diagnosis." Mulder grinned.
"It's better than PTSD." The grin died. "Clearing my name was only
the beginning. There's a lot of crap that goes along with it. Tell
me, Dr. Scully, am I ready to be back in the real world?"
"Or should we be asking, is the real world ready for you? It's what
we hoped for, isn't it? Your name cleared, and you free to do what
you want?"
"Oh, I don't know. I was getting used to being a kept man."
Scully snorted. "What I was making at Our Lady of Sorrows could
barely pay the mortgage and keep you in sunflower seeds."
"Point taken. Let me turn the question back to you: change hasn't
come just for me. What about you?"
The kettle chose this momemt to come to a boil. Scully stood up and
switched off the burner, removing the kettle. She turned to face
Mulder. "I know we still have a lot to talk about -- what the future
looks like to you, to me...to us."
"And to the world," Mulder added. "That's the elephant in the room,
isn't it? What's the future of the human race, not just us. Not to
mention, what are we going to do about it?"
"I don't know how to answer that question." She set mugs down on the
table.
"Frankly, I don't know either," Mulder admitted. "People are
starting to contact me again. The word is out. People who -- who
knew the guys want to know what's going on now that I'm 'back' as
they put it. They have -- expectations."
Scully warmed the tea pot with a little hot water, then measured out
the loose tea and finished filling the pot. "I have no doubt that
they do. I can only hope that they haven't just been waiting around
for someone to tell them what needs to be done." She watched the
teapot on the counter, as if it couldn't steep the tea without her
supervision.
"I don't think that they have. I think that the problem is there
hasn't been any kind of central clearing house for data. Or, as far
as I can tell, any attempt at an organized resistance. Each group
has been working on its own, and who knows how to put it all
together?"
"Is that what you see yourself doing?"
"The only thing I know for sure is that they haven't given up. I
can't stand idly by, either. I don't want to wake up some morning
and find out that the invasion's already over, and we've lost.
Whatever plans they've been making, they've just gone on with them,
I'm sure.
"If there are human collaborators -- and you can bet your sweet ass
there are -- then I need to find out about it. I can't believe that
someone hasn't been paying attention. That's what I need to find out
from this 'geek underground' that seems to think that I'm their
leader now. The world still needs saving. I can't do it alone."
"Mulder, we agreed --" It seemed that it always came back to this.
"I can't do both. My ability to do research as part of my job -- the
access that I have -- I can't do it alone either, Mulder."
Mulder held up his hand. "I'm not going back on my word. Your job
is important, and it gives you contacts who may be able to help, not
to mention help with research. I just wish" -- he swallowed hard at
the unexpected emotional response -- "I just wish the Gunmen were
here."
"I know, I do too," Scully agreed softly, putting her hand on his
shoulder.
Mulder cleared his throat. "I'm talking to Skinner today."
"I remember. I just don't know why. Would you go back, if he asked
you?"
"Well, no one has made me an offer yet," Mulder said with a rueful
grin. "I'm sure Skinner could make it happen if he wanted. What
with the pension reinstatement for me and back pay for both of us, I
might owe him."
Scully tried to school her expression. She kept her tone as neutral
as possible. "Do you want to work for the FBI again, Mulder?"
"I don't know," Mulder said. "I honestly don't know. It would mean
access to resources I might not otherwise have."
"Will you promise me one thing? Talk to me before you agree to
anything? I'm not saying that you can't do what you want," she
amended quickly. "Just -- just talk to me."
Mulder nodded. Her refusal to work on the Bannan case with him and
her continued resistance to working with the FBI still stung a
little. And she had still saved his ass. Again. They were still
partners, he told himself; they just didn't work for the FBI.
"I'll let you know tonight what Skinner has to say."
x-x-x
Annie was already in the car when Brian came out with a backpack
containing their lunch and a thermos of hot tea. They could have
walked to the beach, but experience with Annie's collecting trips had
taught them it was better to drive than to lug a heavy bucket up the
steep path from the beach, then walk the mile or so back into town.
Brian backed the car carefully onto the street. Annie admired their
house, white clapboard with gingerbread trim and a neat white picket
fence in front.
It was not much different than the other houses in the neighborhood,
all built around the same time when logging was the big industry in
the area. Now, in midsummer, every front yard seemed to have
something blooming. It seemed almost unreal, especially with the
wispy fog giving everything a pearly-looking glow.
"What do you see?" Brian asked. "Is there a cat on the roof again?"
"No, just admiring the house."
"I like it, too. Except for the front yard. I feel like we're
letting down the neighborhood." All of their neighbors had roses,
hydrangeas, or some other kind of flowering plants. The Jordans had
a nice patch of green lawn. Compared to other yards, it was a little
drab.
"I studied biology, not botany. Also, I don't have a green thumb.
Do you?"
Brian shook his head no.
"I bet Mrs. Cotton would help. She thinks you're cute."
Brian blushed. If he'd remained a bachelor, Annie was sure that
every woman in town would be dropping by with casseroles and
introductions to eligible women in the area, young or old. Mrs.
Cotton was their neighbor and she took a proprietary interest in them.
"If you think she would, I'll ask her," Brian said.
She knew that Brian tried hard to deserve the good will of the town.
He volunteered for just about any good cause he was asked to help
with. He judged the science fair, helped with pancake breakfasts,
and was on the volunteer fire brigade.
Perdita was the kind of place where all the neighbors knew each
other, and watched out for each other. It was a place where you
could leave your doors unlocked without fear. It seemed fitting that
the town was named Perdita. Oldtimers claimed it had been named by
the son of a logging magnate who'd learned Latin in school and
thought it was clever to name it the opposite of its much larger
sister town up the road.
The town was literally off the beaten track, and the townspeople
liked it that way. In summer, the road was passable, if you took the
right exit from the Interstate and didn't mind driving on roads that
were last paved during the Johnson administration. In winter, it was
more of a challenge. This was a town where a four wheel drive
vehicle was a necessity, not an affectation.
Despite the Rabble's resistance, they both knew change was
inevitable. Brian wrote about it in the paper, printing both pro
and con views. He wrote about preserving the character of the town
without turning it into a museum, about the benefits of town
improvements. He was against theme restaurants, Starbucks Coffee,
and budget motel chains who thought that it would be a good idea to
put Perdita on the map. On the other hand, he was in favor of
repaving County Road H-2 and wasn't afraid to say so. The Rabble
wasn't sure that they agreed with him on that; they were of the
opinion that anyone who couldn't handle the road into town had no
business being here. So far, proposals for resurfacing had been
overwhelmingly defeated. So much for the power of the press.
x-x-x
University Park, Maryland
Scully missed the little house in Virginia. She didn't miss the
long commute, however. During her internship it had been especially
hard, as she often couldn't get home between shifts. She hated
leaving Mulder alone. She still had to fight her fear of losing him
again.
Thirty miles to Baltimore on mostly well-paved roads wasn't so bad,
not compared to the drive to Our Lady of Sorrows. She smiled as she
remembered trying to get Mulder to record some of her medical
journals so she could listen on the way to and from their little
house. It was comforting, listening to his voice, but he'd sometimes
spoken in such a suggestive way, it had been extremely difficult to
concentrate on the words.
She locked the door behind her and stepped into the brightly-lit
garage. She set the house alarm before opening the garage door.
They lived in a neighborhood now, a "nice" one, one where neighbors
would notice if something odd was going on. This, both Mulder and
Scully felt, was to their advantage. Drawing on their limited
experience impersonating suburbanites, she and Mulder had made a
point of meeting the neighbors and being friendly. They wanted to
ensure that they'd be missed if they suddenly disappeared.
Arcadia it was not, thank goodness. The community wasn't gated, and
there were no punishing, restrictive CC&Rs. The first thing Mulder
had done was plant a plastic flamingo right by the front door "to
prove there's no Tulpa." He'd taken it down himself after a week.
Since the FBI contacted them back in January, everything had
happened so quickly. The Bannan case had been a wake-up call to both
of them, though for different reasons. Mulder had been itching to do
something, anything, after so many years of being sidelined. Trying
to talk him out of the Bannan case had stemmed from the fear that she
would lose him, and herself, to the work again. Sometimes she
regretted pushing him into helping the FBI in the first place.
What form his work would take now had been the subject of many a
late-night discussion. While at the FBI, they'd refined their skills
at argument; however, mutual survival had become more important while
they were fugitives and they'd fallen out of the habit. It took some
practice to get back the sense of give-and-take that had helped them
to understand and solve cases, and apply it to their lives.
Mulder wanted to be out in the world again, and she couldn't blame
him. So far, most of his activities had to do with re-establishing
his identity, and making discreet inquiries into who among his former
contacts was around and willing to help with what Mulder had taken to
calling "the Resistance", with some irony, but also with purpose.
The compromise they finally worked out was that Scully would take a
job near D.C. so that Mulder could explore his options. That didn't
mean that she was interested in abandoning medicine in favor of the
FBI. Once Scully's controversial treatment of Christian Fearon began
to show positive results, she found herself with a lot of offers.
Many were for lectures at medical symposia. A few were from
university medical programs. In the end, she accepted an offer from
Baltimore.
Once upon a time, he'd urged her to leave the FBI. "There's so much
more for you to do. There's so much more for you to be." At the time
it had almost broken her heart. Leaving the FBI then would have been
leaving Mulder. The circumstances were different now.
Even though Mulder insisted that he owed her more than he could ever
repay, she wasn't going to walk away. The six years they'd spent in
more or less forced togetherness hadn't always been easy. If nothing
else, it had strengthened their love and commitment. She'd made a
choice when she followed him into exile, and she wasn't changing her
mind now. Recent events had proved to her that he still needed her
help. She couldn't, and wouldn't, let him fight on alone.
"Good morning, Dr. Scully," her assistant greeted her as she
arrived at her office. "Rounds are at nine a.m., and there's a staff
meeting at ten-thirty today."
"Thanks, Carol." Scully booted up her laptop to start her day.
x-x-x
They had the beach to themselves. The sun had burned away the fog
and now the cold wind blew in from the ocean, making them grateful
for the hot tea Brian had made.
Annie came back from the tide pools to find Brian staring out at the
ocean. He didn't seem to hear her approach at first. "I got a
couple of hermit crabs to add to the tank."
"That's nice," he said absently. The sun shining on the waves, or
the wind, had made him close his eyes. Annie flopped down next to
him and he put his arm around her. She nuzzled his neck with her
cold nose.
"Hey, what do you call that?" his eyes opening wide.
"I call it getting warm. Since you've been sitting here all cozy
while I did the dirty work."
"It's your class."
"You're my Honorary Teacher's Aide, remember? The kids voted."
"As long as I don't have to cut anything up, or clean the fish
tanks."
Annie kept a couple of tanks, sea-water and fresh, in her classroom.
She always had a few specimens for the class to observe in
preparation for their own trip to the tide pools.
At Lost Forest High School, she taught life sciences as well as
chemistry. The small school district had a hard time finding and
keeping teachers. So many good science teachers ended up working in
private industry for pharmaceutical companies or chemical companies.
Annie's career had gone in the opposite direction: she'd already
worked for Big Pharma. Finding someone who was versed in more than
one scientific discipline had been a boon for the school, and Annie
found being a teacher, where science was about discovery for the
sake of discovery rather than profit, refreshing.
"Some assistant you are," she grumbled good-naturedly.
"I'll make it up to you in other ways," Brian promised.
"It's a deal." She kissed him and snuggled in his arms, looking out
over the horizon with him.
It was so peaceful, with no sound other than the waves and the
occasional cry of a gull. It was easy to not worry or even think
about anything.
Annie turned in his arms. "What are you thinking about?"
"Not much. How nice it is here. How lucky I was to find someone
like you."
"That's a line of thinking I approve of."
"Our anniversary is coming up. It'll be three years in August."
"Three years since you came to Perdita," she said. "We've only been
married for a little over two."
"Three years since I met you. That's at least as significant as our
wedding anniversary."
"I think so too." She gave him a kiss.
"Meeting you opened up a whole new world for me. I was just
drifting around before. I needed someone like you, and someplace
like this town."
"I think we needed you, too. I can't imagine life here without you."
"I can't imagine life without you, period. That's a joke, by the
way."
Trust Brian to announce his jokes. The significance wasn't lost on
her. A year ago she couldn't imagine him joking about it.
"You just keep surprising me. Who knew you were such a comedian?"
"Another hidden facet of my life. Maybe that's what I did before."
"Probably not as your day job, sweetie. I love you, but you're not
that funny."
"And here Abel offered to let me headline on Open Mike Night," Brian
said regretfully.
Annie did laugh at that, and Brian joined in. "I don't know what's
funnier, you at Open Mike Night, or having a dinner show at Abel's,"
she said. "What on earth made you think of that?"
She felt Brian shrug behind her. "We haven't talked about this for
a long time." She knew it how much it bothered him not to remember
what his life was like before, even if he seldom mentioned it any
more. Even if the nightmares he used to have when they were first
together had abated. "Why now?"
"Maybe the anniversary coming up has gotten me thinking about things."
The feeling of his arms around her didn't change, and she couldn't
discern any tension in his voice. She wondered what his expression
was like. She waited.
"Maybe I've gotten tired of waiting around for something that might
never happen. If my memories should suddenly come back, I think we'd
both notice. I have a life now, a good one. I guess I'm just trying
to say that I'm grateful."
The boating accident that robbed him of his memories had happened a
few years before she met him. Post-traumatic retrograde amnesia, his
doctors had told him. He'd been advised to "start over" with his
life and not worry whether or not his memories would return, because
they might not.
He'd told Annie all this on their first date It had been almost too
much for her to take in. How could she fall in love with someone who
didn't even know his own past?
Eventually, he won her over. He was just so sincere, she couldn't
believe that in his life before the accident he could have been
anything other than the same type of person. In all other ways, he
seemed perfectly healthy. His short-term memory was fine, and he had
no other issues that she knew about.
"I do know one thing for sure. I didn't have anyone like you in my
life." He kissed her cheek, then her nose.
"Well, as long as you're not living a double life," She inclined her
head so that she could kiss him back, settling herself into his arms.
"When you say you're working late at the paper, it's not because
you're Superman, out saving the world."
"I don't think so," Brian said. "I don't look good in tights."
"Neither do I," Annie said. "We're a good match."
~*~
by ML (LJ name Zinnia03)
email: msnsc21@yahoo.com
Rating: PG13 for mild violence and swearing
Type: Gen, het. M&S, a character/other pairing
Disclaimer: You know the tune, sing it with me now: I don't own
them, I'm just borrowing for a while.
A/N: Written for xf_bigbang 2010. Bouquets of thanks
to wendelah1 for outstanding beta. I'm so grateful!
That said, if there are any errors or omissions, that's my fault.
More notes at the end of the story.
Summary: It's time to come out of hiding and get back to the
business of saving the world. Mulder is looking for people to help
him and Scully do just that. With so many of his former friends and
colleagues either missing or dead, he gets help from an unexpected
quarter -- and finds that he's not the only one who's ready to get
back into circulation.
Takes place in 2008, after the events of "I Want to Believe".
We never gave up, we never will. In the end, if that's the best they can
say about us, it'll do.
-John Fitzgerald Byers
x-x-x
Prologue
He couldn't see. He couldn't hear. He couldn't breathe.
He flailed around, trying to escape. The pressure built in his
lungs like cement hardening. Now his arms couldn't move, they were
trapped at his sides. If he could only get free...he fought with his
last breath, trying with main force to thrust his body out of the
thing that held him. It seemed hopeless but he couldn't give up.
Then suddenly, he was free. He took a deep breath, and felt himself
in free fall.
Brian Jordan's eyes flew open. He took another deep breath and
realized that he'd rolled himself up in the sheets. He extricated
himself and lay still, taking deep breaths and staring at the
ceiling.
Calmer now, he noted thankfully that his wife's side of the bed was
empty. This was not unusual; she was a morning person, he was a
night person. No doubt she'd already made coffee and was reading the
paper.
He got out of bed and shuffled to the bathroom. He could hear the
faint sound of a foghorn in the distance. A glance out the window
confirmed the thickness of the fog. It could be eight o'clock in the
morning or high noon for all he could tell.
He watched himself in the mirror as he lathered his face for
shaving. Annie said it didn't bother her, but he didn't like even
one day's growth of beard on his face.
Morning ablutions completed, he pulled on his sweat pants and a golf
shirt and went downstairs.
He found Annie at the kitchen table, poring over the latest edition
of the weekly paper.
Annie looked up when Brian entered the room. She'd heard him
running water in the bathroom upstairs. Brian wasn't the type of guy
to just roll out of bed and throw something on.
She took a sip from her coffee cup and remarked, "You're up early.
I know what time you got in last night."
"Sorry," he said, dropping a kiss on her head as he headed for the
coffee pot on the counter. "I tried not to wake you. Did you get a
chance to look at the editorial?"
"I liked it. Though I have to say, it's a heavy subject for this
neck of the woods."
He sat down across from her. "Should I not have written it?"
"I was just surprised. I'm not sure that Internet privacy is a
subject anyone here has given much thought to. This is a town that
used to have a party line when I was a kid. You could pick up the
phone and get an earful any time of day. Everyone knew everyone
else's business."
"All the more reason that they should be warned. Especially as far
as their kids are concerned. The Internet is more like the Wild West
than anyone's hometown. You can find pretty much anything out there,
whether it's private or not."
"Worse than Donna, huh? My folks used to say, 'telephone,
telegraph, tell Donna'."
"I think she's my chief rival for the news. If I can print something
before Donna knows it, it's a real scoop."
"Speaking of that, do you want to walk down to the cafe and see if
you've roused the rabble with your crazy talk?"
"Maybe I'll give them a day or two to calm down."
Annie smiled into her coffee cup. This was their weekly joke. The
table at the back of Donna's cafe was the morning gathering place of
the old-timers who called themselves "the Rabble." They weren't
afraid of telling Brian exactly what they thought of the latest
edition of the paper.
Tomorrow they would go to Donna's coffee shop. If anyone disagreed
with Brian, he'd listen to them with good humor and sympathy as he
always did. It was in his nature to be self-effacing, to not argue
or draw undue attention to himself. Though he might be a crusader in
print, he wasn't confrontational.
Brian was well-liked in the town, although he'd gotten off to a
rocky start with the citizenry. Far from being the usurper or change
agent they'd feared, he was protective of his adopted home town.
Annie hadn't always seen the value of being so isolated. Now she saw
things differently, mostly due to Brian.
They were certainly off the beaten track. Cell phone service was
spotty at best, even satellite connections could be thwarted by "fog
in the bay." That was the excuse the satellite TV reps used to
explain poor reception to the irate citizens who were missing their
NFL fix. Brian got at least one letter a week from someone claiming
their town was being discriminated against, just because it was too
far away from a big city to be a commuter town, and too remote to be
a tourist destination.
"What's the plan today?" Brian asked Annie.
"Want to go down to the beach with me? I want to collect some stuff
for the classroom."
Brian nodded enthusiastically. "I'll make a thermos of tea and some
sandwiches -- we can have a picnic."
"You're such a romantic. When I first met you, I would never have
imagined that."
"You didn't even like me when you first met me."
"That's not strictly true. You were intriguing. We don't get many
strangers 'round these parts. I was just one of those suspicious
townspeople."
"You make it sound like you've never lived anyplace else."
"Okay, so I've seen some of the world. I chose to come back here.
Doesn't that make me provincial and narrow-minded?"
"I never said that -- about you, or anyone else," Brian protested.
"No, you didn't. That's what everyone thought you would do. We
judged you before we knew you. It turns out you were hard not to
like. It just took a little time to get to know you. Whereas for
you, I think it was love at first sight."
"With you, or with the town?"
"Both, I think. It's a package deal."
"You'll never get me to admit that."
"That's all right," she said, kissing his cheek. "Your secret's
safe with me." She put her coffee cup in the sink. "How about
making those sandwiches, and I'll get my gear into the car?"
"Sure." He followed her to the sink and set his cup next to hers.
Through the kitchen window, they could see that the sun was just
starting to burn through the fog.
Annie hummed a little tune as she dug through the pile of waders,
buckets and assorted equipment that they somehow never got around to
organizing. She threw what she needed in the back of the car and
went back inside the house.
She could hear Brian moving around in the kitchen, getting their
picnic ready. He always did things so neatly and precisely. She
thought that he must have had some scientific training in his
background, though he denied it.
Almost everyone except Annie had been against selling the paper to
an "outsider." Her parents had run the Perdita Press for years. The
expectation was that Annie would continue in their footsteps --
though that kind of expectation was why she'd left town in the first
place.
Fortunately for all, once the town knew Brian's story, they'd warmed
up to him. Now you'd think he'd grown up here. And Annie, who had
grown up here, had begun to appreciate the town anew through his eyes.
If anyone had told her that seven years after her parents died,
she'd still be living here, she would have laughed.
Funny how things turned out.
~*~
Chapter One
He woke up in a cold sweat, heart pounding from whatever had
happened in his dream. He looked over at the sleeping form next to
him. He hadn't awakened her for once, he noted gratefully. Very
quietly, he got out of bed and went to the bathroom. He turned on
the nightlight, looking at his shadowed face in the mirror. The
beard was gone; seeing his face in the half-light made it easy to
imagine that it was there, like the remnants of a dream. The beard
had been the first thing to go when he'd come out of hiding. Too bad
he couldn't chase the nightmares away so easily.
He rubbed his chin reflectively, then turned on the tap and splashed
cool water on his face. As he looked up again, he caught movement
behind him in the mirror. So much for not disturbing Scully; he
turned to see her standing in the doorway.
"Mulder, what's wrong?" Scully asked.
"I'm sorry I woke you. Did I wake you?"
"I tend to notice when my human blanket leaves," she teased gently.
"Seriously, what's wrong?"
"Just another nightmare," he muttered. "Guess I should be used to
them by now."
"It's been a while since you've had one," she said. "It's almost
time to get up anyway. Come on, I'll make some tea."
He followed her downstairs, into the kitchen of their new house.
Even though they'd been here a few months, he wasn't used to the
space inside -- and how close the neighbors seemed outside.
Scully turned the light on over the stove and switched the burner on
under the kettle. Mulder watched as she got mugs out of the
dishwasher and tea from the pantry. If anyone should happen to look
in the window, it would look like a cozy, domestic scene.
Scully sat next to him and took his hand. "Change is coming."
That comment sure came out of left field, he thought. "Is that your
medical opinion, Dr. Scully, or are you reading my palm?"
She let go of his hand and sat up a little straighter. "No, it's my
personal opinion. We've had a lot of changes in a short time. More
are coming. You can't pretend that everything that's happened in the
past few months hasn't had a profound effect on you."
"It doesn't take a doctor to know that," he said flatly.
"No, it doesn't. I know you, Mulder. One thing that hasn't changed
about you is how you plunge into things without stopping to consider
the consequences or how they will affect you. So you work through
them in other ways. The nightmares come. My mom used to call them
'worry dreams'."
"That's quite a scientific sounding diagnosis." Mulder grinned.
"It's better than PTSD." The grin died. "Clearing my name was only
the beginning. There's a lot of crap that goes along with it. Tell
me, Dr. Scully, am I ready to be back in the real world?"
"Or should we be asking, is the real world ready for you? It's what
we hoped for, isn't it? Your name cleared, and you free to do what
you want?"
"Oh, I don't know. I was getting used to being a kept man."
Scully snorted. "What I was making at Our Lady of Sorrows could
barely pay the mortgage and keep you in sunflower seeds."
"Point taken. Let me turn the question back to you: change hasn't
come just for me. What about you?"
The kettle chose this momemt to come to a boil. Scully stood up and
switched off the burner, removing the kettle. She turned to face
Mulder. "I know we still have a lot to talk about -- what the future
looks like to you, to me...to us."
"And to the world," Mulder added. "That's the elephant in the room,
isn't it? What's the future of the human race, not just us. Not to
mention, what are we going to do about it?"
"I don't know how to answer that question." She set mugs down on the
table.
"Frankly, I don't know either," Mulder admitted. "People are
starting to contact me again. The word is out. People who -- who
knew the guys want to know what's going on now that I'm 'back' as
they put it. They have -- expectations."
Scully warmed the tea pot with a little hot water, then measured out
the loose tea and finished filling the pot. "I have no doubt that
they do. I can only hope that they haven't just been waiting around
for someone to tell them what needs to be done." She watched the
teapot on the counter, as if it couldn't steep the tea without her
supervision.
"I don't think that they have. I think that the problem is there
hasn't been any kind of central clearing house for data. Or, as far
as I can tell, any attempt at an organized resistance. Each group
has been working on its own, and who knows how to put it all
together?"
"Is that what you see yourself doing?"
"The only thing I know for sure is that they haven't given up. I
can't stand idly by, either. I don't want to wake up some morning
and find out that the invasion's already over, and we've lost.
Whatever plans they've been making, they've just gone on with them,
I'm sure.
"If there are human collaborators -- and you can bet your sweet ass
there are -- then I need to find out about it. I can't believe that
someone hasn't been paying attention. That's what I need to find out
from this 'geek underground' that seems to think that I'm their
leader now. The world still needs saving. I can't do it alone."
"Mulder, we agreed --" It seemed that it always came back to this.
"I can't do both. My ability to do research as part of my job -- the
access that I have -- I can't do it alone either, Mulder."
Mulder held up his hand. "I'm not going back on my word. Your job
is important, and it gives you contacts who may be able to help, not
to mention help with research. I just wish" -- he swallowed hard at
the unexpected emotional response -- "I just wish the Gunmen were
here."
"I know, I do too," Scully agreed softly, putting her hand on his
shoulder.
Mulder cleared his throat. "I'm talking to Skinner today."
"I remember. I just don't know why. Would you go back, if he asked
you?"
"Well, no one has made me an offer yet," Mulder said with a rueful
grin. "I'm sure Skinner could make it happen if he wanted. What
with the pension reinstatement for me and back pay for both of us, I
might owe him."
Scully tried to school her expression. She kept her tone as neutral
as possible. "Do you want to work for the FBI again, Mulder?"
"I don't know," Mulder said. "I honestly don't know. It would mean
access to resources I might not otherwise have."
"Will you promise me one thing? Talk to me before you agree to
anything? I'm not saying that you can't do what you want," she
amended quickly. "Just -- just talk to me."
Mulder nodded. Her refusal to work on the Bannan case with him and
her continued resistance to working with the FBI still stung a
little. And she had still saved his ass. Again. They were still
partners, he told himself; they just didn't work for the FBI.
"I'll let you know tonight what Skinner has to say."
x-x-x
Annie was already in the car when Brian came out with a backpack
containing their lunch and a thermos of hot tea. They could have
walked to the beach, but experience with Annie's collecting trips had
taught them it was better to drive than to lug a heavy bucket up the
steep path from the beach, then walk the mile or so back into town.
Brian backed the car carefully onto the street. Annie admired their
house, white clapboard with gingerbread trim and a neat white picket
fence in front.
It was not much different than the other houses in the neighborhood,
all built around the same time when logging was the big industry in
the area. Now, in midsummer, every front yard seemed to have
something blooming. It seemed almost unreal, especially with the
wispy fog giving everything a pearly-looking glow.
"What do you see?" Brian asked. "Is there a cat on the roof again?"
"No, just admiring the house."
"I like it, too. Except for the front yard. I feel like we're
letting down the neighborhood." All of their neighbors had roses,
hydrangeas, or some other kind of flowering plants. The Jordans had
a nice patch of green lawn. Compared to other yards, it was a little
drab.
"I studied biology, not botany. Also, I don't have a green thumb.
Do you?"
Brian shook his head no.
"I bet Mrs. Cotton would help. She thinks you're cute."
Brian blushed. If he'd remained a bachelor, Annie was sure that
every woman in town would be dropping by with casseroles and
introductions to eligible women in the area, young or old. Mrs.
Cotton was their neighbor and she took a proprietary interest in them.
"If you think she would, I'll ask her," Brian said.
She knew that Brian tried hard to deserve the good will of the town.
He volunteered for just about any good cause he was asked to help
with. He judged the science fair, helped with pancake breakfasts,
and was on the volunteer fire brigade.
Perdita was the kind of place where all the neighbors knew each
other, and watched out for each other. It was a place where you
could leave your doors unlocked without fear. It seemed fitting that
the town was named Perdita. Oldtimers claimed it had been named by
the son of a logging magnate who'd learned Latin in school and
thought it was clever to name it the opposite of its much larger
sister town up the road.
The town was literally off the beaten track, and the townspeople
liked it that way. In summer, the road was passable, if you took the
right exit from the Interstate and didn't mind driving on roads that
were last paved during the Johnson administration. In winter, it was
more of a challenge. This was a town where a four wheel drive
vehicle was a necessity, not an affectation.
Despite the Rabble's resistance, they both knew change was
inevitable. Brian wrote about it in the paper, printing both pro
and con views. He wrote about preserving the character of the town
without turning it into a museum, about the benefits of town
improvements. He was against theme restaurants, Starbucks Coffee,
and budget motel chains who thought that it would be a good idea to
put Perdita on the map. On the other hand, he was in favor of
repaving County Road H-2 and wasn't afraid to say so. The Rabble
wasn't sure that they agreed with him on that; they were of the
opinion that anyone who couldn't handle the road into town had no
business being here. So far, proposals for resurfacing had been
overwhelmingly defeated. So much for the power of the press.
x-x-x
University Park, Maryland
Scully missed the little house in Virginia. She didn't miss the
long commute, however. During her internship it had been especially
hard, as she often couldn't get home between shifts. She hated
leaving Mulder alone. She still had to fight her fear of losing him
again.
Thirty miles to Baltimore on mostly well-paved roads wasn't so bad,
not compared to the drive to Our Lady of Sorrows. She smiled as she
remembered trying to get Mulder to record some of her medical
journals so she could listen on the way to and from their little
house. It was comforting, listening to his voice, but he'd sometimes
spoken in such a suggestive way, it had been extremely difficult to
concentrate on the words.
She locked the door behind her and stepped into the brightly-lit
garage. She set the house alarm before opening the garage door.
They lived in a neighborhood now, a "nice" one, one where neighbors
would notice if something odd was going on. This, both Mulder and
Scully felt, was to their advantage. Drawing on their limited
experience impersonating suburbanites, she and Mulder had made a
point of meeting the neighbors and being friendly. They wanted to
ensure that they'd be missed if they suddenly disappeared.
Arcadia it was not, thank goodness. The community wasn't gated, and
there were no punishing, restrictive CC&Rs. The first thing Mulder
had done was plant a plastic flamingo right by the front door "to
prove there's no Tulpa." He'd taken it down himself after a week.
Since the FBI contacted them back in January, everything had
happened so quickly. The Bannan case had been a wake-up call to both
of them, though for different reasons. Mulder had been itching to do
something, anything, after so many years of being sidelined. Trying
to talk him out of the Bannan case had stemmed from the fear that she
would lose him, and herself, to the work again. Sometimes she
regretted pushing him into helping the FBI in the first place.
What form his work would take now had been the subject of many a
late-night discussion. While at the FBI, they'd refined their skills
at argument; however, mutual survival had become more important while
they were fugitives and they'd fallen out of the habit. It took some
practice to get back the sense of give-and-take that had helped them
to understand and solve cases, and apply it to their lives.
Mulder wanted to be out in the world again, and she couldn't blame
him. So far, most of his activities had to do with re-establishing
his identity, and making discreet inquiries into who among his former
contacts was around and willing to help with what Mulder had taken to
calling "the Resistance", with some irony, but also with purpose.
The compromise they finally worked out was that Scully would take a
job near D.C. so that Mulder could explore his options. That didn't
mean that she was interested in abandoning medicine in favor of the
FBI. Once Scully's controversial treatment of Christian Fearon began
to show positive results, she found herself with a lot of offers.
Many were for lectures at medical symposia. A few were from
university medical programs. In the end, she accepted an offer from
Baltimore.
Once upon a time, he'd urged her to leave the FBI. "There's so much
more for you to do. There's so much more for you to be." At the time
it had almost broken her heart. Leaving the FBI then would have been
leaving Mulder. The circumstances were different now.
Even though Mulder insisted that he owed her more than he could ever
repay, she wasn't going to walk away. The six years they'd spent in
more or less forced togetherness hadn't always been easy. If nothing
else, it had strengthened their love and commitment. She'd made a
choice when she followed him into exile, and she wasn't changing her
mind now. Recent events had proved to her that he still needed her
help. She couldn't, and wouldn't, let him fight on alone.
"Good morning, Dr. Scully," her assistant greeted her as she
arrived at her office. "Rounds are at nine a.m., and there's a staff
meeting at ten-thirty today."
"Thanks, Carol." Scully booted up her laptop to start her day.
x-x-x
They had the beach to themselves. The sun had burned away the fog
and now the cold wind blew in from the ocean, making them grateful
for the hot tea Brian had made.
Annie came back from the tide pools to find Brian staring out at the
ocean. He didn't seem to hear her approach at first. "I got a
couple of hermit crabs to add to the tank."
"That's nice," he said absently. The sun shining on the waves, or
the wind, had made him close his eyes. Annie flopped down next to
him and he put his arm around her. She nuzzled his neck with her
cold nose.
"Hey, what do you call that?" his eyes opening wide.
"I call it getting warm. Since you've been sitting here all cozy
while I did the dirty work."
"It's your class."
"You're my Honorary Teacher's Aide, remember? The kids voted."
"As long as I don't have to cut anything up, or clean the fish
tanks."
Annie kept a couple of tanks, sea-water and fresh, in her classroom.
She always had a few specimens for the class to observe in
preparation for their own trip to the tide pools.
At Lost Forest High School, she taught life sciences as well as
chemistry. The small school district had a hard time finding and
keeping teachers. So many good science teachers ended up working in
private industry for pharmaceutical companies or chemical companies.
Annie's career had gone in the opposite direction: she'd already
worked for Big Pharma. Finding someone who was versed in more than
one scientific discipline had been a boon for the school, and Annie
found being a teacher, where science was about discovery for the
sake of discovery rather than profit, refreshing.
"Some assistant you are," she grumbled good-naturedly.
"I'll make it up to you in other ways," Brian promised.
"It's a deal." She kissed him and snuggled in his arms, looking out
over the horizon with him.
It was so peaceful, with no sound other than the waves and the
occasional cry of a gull. It was easy to not worry or even think
about anything.
Annie turned in his arms. "What are you thinking about?"
"Not much. How nice it is here. How lucky I was to find someone
like you."
"That's a line of thinking I approve of."
"Our anniversary is coming up. It'll be three years in August."
"Three years since you came to Perdita," she said. "We've only been
married for a little over two."
"Three years since I met you. That's at least as significant as our
wedding anniversary."
"I think so too." She gave him a kiss.
"Meeting you opened up a whole new world for me. I was just
drifting around before. I needed someone like you, and someplace
like this town."
"I think we needed you, too. I can't imagine life here without you."
"I can't imagine life without you, period. That's a joke, by the
way."
Trust Brian to announce his jokes. The significance wasn't lost on
her. A year ago she couldn't imagine him joking about it.
"You just keep surprising me. Who knew you were such a comedian?"
"Another hidden facet of my life. Maybe that's what I did before."
"Probably not as your day job, sweetie. I love you, but you're not
that funny."
"And here Abel offered to let me headline on Open Mike Night," Brian
said regretfully.
Annie did laugh at that, and Brian joined in. "I don't know what's
funnier, you at Open Mike Night, or having a dinner show at Abel's,"
she said. "What on earth made you think of that?"
She felt Brian shrug behind her. "We haven't talked about this for
a long time." She knew it how much it bothered him not to remember
what his life was like before, even if he seldom mentioned it any
more. Even if the nightmares he used to have when they were first
together had abated. "Why now?"
"Maybe the anniversary coming up has gotten me thinking about things."
The feeling of his arms around her didn't change, and she couldn't
discern any tension in his voice. She wondered what his expression
was like. She waited.
"Maybe I've gotten tired of waiting around for something that might
never happen. If my memories should suddenly come back, I think we'd
both notice. I have a life now, a good one. I guess I'm just trying
to say that I'm grateful."
The boating accident that robbed him of his memories had happened a
few years before she met him. Post-traumatic retrograde amnesia, his
doctors had told him. He'd been advised to "start over" with his
life and not worry whether or not his memories would return, because
they might not.
He'd told Annie all this on their first date It had been almost too
much for her to take in. How could she fall in love with someone who
didn't even know his own past?
Eventually, he won her over. He was just so sincere, she couldn't
believe that in his life before the accident he could have been
anything other than the same type of person. In all other ways, he
seemed perfectly healthy. His short-term memory was fine, and he had
no other issues that she knew about.
"I do know one thing for sure. I didn't have anyone like you in my
life." He kissed her cheek, then her nose.
"Well, as long as you're not living a double life," She inclined her
head so that she could kiss him back, settling herself into his arms.
"When you say you're working late at the paper, it's not because
you're Superman, out saving the world."
"I don't think so," Brian said. "I don't look good in tights."
"Neither do I," Annie said. "We're a good match."
~*~