Title: Seeing In The Dark - A Prequel Story
Category: S, MSR, heavy angst, post-col
Rating: R
Spoilers: For my fic "The Furious Winter", and for XF
eps including the cancer and abduction arcs (nothing post-season
6).
Summary: "What was it he had said once? 'The future is here,
and all bets are off'? Something grand and nonsensical like that.
As it had turned out, he had been so, so wrong. The real future
had arrived not so very long after he said that, one freezing,
grey day in January, more than a year ago now. The day the first
ships arrived."
Archive: Yes to Gossamer and Spooky Y2K. Anywhere else: *please*
ask permission first. I just like to know where it's going.
Please retain all headers.
Disclaimer: Mulder and Scully belong to CC, 1013 and Fox, even
though sometimes I like to put on surfer gear and a blond wig and
pretend they're mine. No copyright infringement intended, and I'm
not making a penny off this.
Feedback: cazjq@yahoo.com
URL: http://cazq.freeservers.com
Author's Note: This is a prequel story for my fic "The
Furious Winter". You can read this without having read that
one and know what's going one, but it will ruin that story for
you. I strongly advise reading them in the order in which they
were written <g>. "The Furious Winter" can be
found at http://cazq.freeservers.com/furious.htm The complete
text of this story is also available at my website: go to http://cazq.freeservers.com/longerstuff.htm
Yes, Virginia, this one's for you, with love.
*****
Seeing In The Dark by CazQ
( cazfic@ymail.com )
******
Part I: Devil On The Loose
******
"Whoa, thought it was a nightmare,
Lo, it's all so true,
They told me, "Don't go walkin' slow
'Cause Devil's on the loose."
Better run through the jungle,
Better run through the jungle,
Better run through the jungle,
Whoa, don't look back to see."
- 'Run Through The Jungle', Creedence Clearwater Revival
******
The call came at 8:54pm. She would always remember that,
afterwards. It had been a quietly satisfying evening. After a
long day of wading through paperwork, which always made both
Mulder and herself tired and irritable, she had come in, kicked
off her shoes with a sigh of relief, cooked herself a light meal,
and decided to indulge herself with an evening curled up on the
couch. An empty tea mug from earlier on sat on the end-table,
next to a half-full glass of crisp, golden Sauvignon Blanc, and
Bach's Double Violin Concerto in D Minor unravelled itself softly
in the air.
She remembered with perfect clarity afterwards how she looked up
from her book as the phone rang, seeing the time on the clock
that sat on the mantelpiece. She had lain down the book -- "The
Power And The Glory", Graham Greene, a beautiful copy that
had been a gift from her parents back in college. The leather
binding was the rich crimson colour of a full-blown rose, the
gold embossed lettering slightly flaking and worn.
"Scully."
"It's me, Scully." The voice on the other end of the
phone strained, as if about to burst into tears. As if a gun was
being held to his head. The first stab of fear came then, making
her heart tighten in her chest. She stared into the fireplace,
the cool plastic of the phone pressed to her ear. She had laid a
fire that evening, purely for the simple pleasure of looking into
the flames.
The fire crackled, leapt up as the wood shifted. A brief shower
of sparks flew out towards her, each one dying as it fell through
the air, light dwindling quickly down, down to the dark.
"Mulder, what? What is it? Are you okay?"
"It's starting, Scully. Skinner called me. Tonight's the
night. The invasion is about to begin."
"The invasion," she repeated, blankly, before suddenly
understanding swept through her. "Oh God, They're coming?
Mulder, are you sure?"
"There isn't much time," he muttered thickly. "Get
dressed, pack some things. Only what you can carry. I'm on my way
over."
"Pack -- Mulder, how can you be *sure* about this? Where are
we going?"
"We're going to run, Scully. We're going to run like hell,"
he said, ignoring her first question, and it was that urgency,
that disregard for her initial sceptism, that began to convince
her that it might be true.
The click and then the dull burr as he hung up. She replaced the
receiver slowly, seeing her fingers shaking on the white plastic
as if through another's eyes. She looked at the clock. 8:55pm.
Her eyes fell to where the book lay in her lap, still open at the
page she had been reading.
"'When he woke up it was dawn. He woke with a huge feeling
of hope which suddenly and completely left him at the first sight
of the prison yard. It was the morning of his death.'"
She read the words three times over before she stood, letting the
book fall to the floor, and walked as though in her sleep to the
bedroom to pack.
******
After knocking on the door a third time, he gave up and used his
key. He struggled for a moment to get it into the lock, fingers
fumbling and slipping, feeling nerveless and weak. No, no, no
time for that, he repeated silently, the mantra of
notimenotimenotime running through his head again and again.
Stepping inside, the apartment seemed frozen in a cheerily
domestic moment of time, the lighting dim and comfortable, the
heating system whirring and grumbling quietly to itself behind
the walls. Even a fire, for Christ's sake, burning brightly in
the hearth he'd thought she never used.
Quiet. Too quiet.
One hand on his weapon, he moved quickly and silently through the
room, walking close to his own shadow, quiet and close against
the walls. He paused in the hallway, turning his head, listening.
There. The bedroom. A shadow spilling out over the threshold and
into the hallway, a crisp-edged stain of darkness against the
soft taupes and creams of her home.
"Scully?"
She was standing by the closet, staring in at her serried ranks
of hanging suits with a blank look in her eyes. He hadn't thought
he could be any more terrified, but that vacancy behind her eyes
sent cold little fingers of fear fluttering up the nape of his
neck. If They were calling her...
He went to her, laid a hand on her shoulder, felt her body stiff
and unyielding beneath his touch for a second. He said her name
again, and this time it roused her. Turning to him, she shook
herself a little, a quick, unconscious movement, as if shaking
off the fugue state that had descended on her.
"What do I take, Mulder? I don't know what to take."
You won't be needing those," he said, more harshly than he
had meant to, closing the closet door on her suits. "Just
bring a change of clothes: hiking gear if you have it, something
warm. We'll be able to pick things up for you later if we need to.
Only what you need, what you can't bear to leave behind. We have
to go *now*. I need to see Skinner, to hear it from him, to be
sure it's true, that it's not a trap."
She stood there, worrying at her lower lip with her teeth.
Exasperated, he went to her bureau and began pulling open drawers,
rummaging through her clothes, looking for something warm for her
to wear. That moved her: she strode over towards him and pushed
him away, muttering, "No, no, not those."
As she began sorting quickly through the clothes, he retreated to
the doorway and leant against the frame, watching her, all the
time mentally screaming for her to hurry, hurry hurry hurry
Scully, because there's notimenotimenotime.
******
In the car, she sat like a little girl on her best behaviour,
legs crossed at the ankles, hands neatly folded in her lap.
Mulder drove in his usual loosely chaotic fashion, one hand
clenched on the wheel, the other drumming against his thigh,
raking through his hair, restlessly moving, always moving.
Because his fidgeting made her want to scream, to hit him, to see
the red mark her fist would leave imprinted on his too-pale skin,
she turned away and rested her head on her shoulder, staring out
at the quiet streets flashing by. From this odd angle they looked
nightmarishly skewed, a passing craze of lighted windows like
empty eyes and hunched, darkened buildings looming over her. She
felt the light dinner she had eaten begin to roil and surge in
her gut, and clenched her jaw.
"Scully. Are you okay?"
"I'm fine." She spoke without turning to look at him.
The ludicrous tragi-comedy of his question and her reply made her
want to laugh, but at the same time she was afraid to laugh in
case she couldn't stop.
Out of nowhere came the memory of her mother slapping her in
church one Sunday to break into her hysterics after she tripped
and fell on the way back from Communion, jaw connecting with the
edge of a pew with a dull thud as she fell. The salt tang of
blood in her mouth, making her want to spit, but surely it was a
sin to spit in church? Nine years old, she had sat in the aisle
and giggled hysterically at the sheer throbbing enormity of the
pain, until her mother's hand had cracked across her cheek. The
marks of each finger on that hand had glowed white for a second
on her skin -- shocked silence in the house of the Lord. It had
not been until later on that she had understood that her mother
had struck that blow out of love, to pull her daughter back into
herself.
If she started to laugh and couldn't stop, would Mulder slap her?
Would his restless, fidgeting hand bridge the space between them
to haul her back from the edge of hysteria?
She prayed that it would, and hoped that she wouldn't have to
find out just yet. The fear was rising and rising, and she felt
already the need to act, to do something, anything, to regain
control of the situation.
Mulder swung them round a corner, and she was pushed back in her
seat slightly, enough to feel the weight of the gun at her back
pressing against her skin through her clothes. She pushed herself
back against it a little more, enough for the sensation to be
uncomfortable. It was a little metallic piece of reassurance, a
dead, still centre in the giddy whirl of the night.
What really terrified her, what really made the hysteria bubble
in her throat and her stomach churn, was the thought that Mulder
wanted so much to believe her when she told him that she was fine,
*needed* to believe her. Needed to believe so much that, as
always, he did.
******
The dark road ahead seemed to flow under the wheels of the car
like a river, rushing them onwards, carrying them on a flood-tide
of hideous force. He did not want to go with it. What he really
wanted was to be at home, slumped on his couch, eating pizza,
watching "Star Trek" or some other cheap sci-fi brain
candy.
Instead here he was, driving. They'd spent so many nights like
this, speeding along through the blackness of rural American
nights and the artificial twilights of suburbia. So many nights
with Scully beside him, staring out at the invisible landscape
passing by or sleeping, while he sat with one hand on the wheel,
eating sunflower seeds, rambling on at her about the possibility
of non-carbon based life-forms, or just listening to the quiet,
comforting sound of her breathing.
He felt a stinging of tears for a second behind his eyes as a
yearning as deep and primal as homesickness rose up in him for
that comfortable old way of existing. No, they could not go back
to that, anymore than you could cross the same river twice or go
home again. Skinner. His voice over the wires. It had changed
everything --
A parade-ground bark of "Mulder" had sounded in his ear
the second he picked up the phone, before he'd even had time to
say his own name in greeting.
"Sir, what -- ?"
"I'm in my office, I have to speak to you here as soon as
possible."
"You are speaking to me, sir --"
"In person. I'm certain that this line isn't secure. I've
received some information tonight. Information about what you've
always said was coming."
His breath tightening in his chest, like a wound watch-spring,
tightening and tightening, coiling around his heart and squeezing.
The sudden, metallic taste of fear in the back of his throat.
"They're coming. They are, aren't They? Sir, if that's what
this is about then I seriously doubt it matters who's listening
in on us...it'll all be the same very soon anyway. Sir, if
colonisation is about to happen I have to know *now*."
"Yes," Skinner had said, his voice suddenly thick.
"Yes, They are coming. But it's not what you think, and it's
not what our smoking friend thinks either. I need to see you here,
I need to explain."
"We're on our way. Sir, can I ask -- how soon?"
"Hours, Mulder. Not days. Hours."
Skinner had hung up then, and Mulder had sat with the phone
clutched to his ear for a minute or more before replacing it
carefully on the coffee-table. Then he'd become pure action,
without conscious thought, sprinting round his apartment
gathering up whatever he thought they might need - food, water,
clothes - focusing on preparing for flight so that he could stave
off the enormous, crushing fear that pried at the doors and
windows of his mind. He refused to consider the possibility that
they would not survive the next twenty-four hours, instinctually
feeling that to think about it would jinx them both.
Then he'd faced the inevitable, awful act. He'd had to call and
tell her, had to hear his fear echoed in her voice, mirroring his
own terror, feeding off it.
From that moment on, as he drove them towards their unfolding
fate, the realisation, too awful to dwell on but refusing to be
ignored, grew in his heart: he had found his worst fear at last.
It was not losing Scully or never finding Samantha, or
colonisation. It was turning to look at Scully and seeing his own
fear reflected and whole in her face.
******
As they hurried down the still, dark halls, the Hoover Building
had that after-hours air of quiet repose that she'd once found
soothing. Back when she and Mulder had been off the X-files, she'd
often worked late into the evenings, sitting at her desk in the
bullpen with the soft hum of the janitor's vacuums providing
white noise in the background. Somehow it was easier to work
there in the hush and the dimness than it was during the day,
with no desk-jockeys around her chattering on the phones,
clattering away on their keyboards, throwing her sly, inquiring
looks.
She clenched her fingers still more tightly on the stock of her
gun as she remembered that this was not a restful repose, but
that of the deathbed. There would be no more janitors. No more
busy bullpen. No more deskbound agents bitching and gossiping. No
more. No more. She almost felt sorry for the building as it sank
slowly into the darkness of a night that would give way to a
bloody, hideous dawn.
If it was true. If.
They rounded the final corner and slipped into the outer office,
which lay shrouded in darkness. A thin bar of gold lay beneath
the closed door into the inner office. Silence all around them,
swirling through the air all unseen like poison gas.
Mulder stepped across to the door, reached out to knock. She
stopped him with a hand laid over his and a shake of her head. In
the darkness, she saw him as only a blacker mass against the
night, nodding his head in understanding.
Mulder opened the door, letting her go before him, not out of any
old-fashioned chivalry, but so that he could sweep the room with
his weapon over her head as she covered the floor in a half-crouch.
"There's no one here but me, Agents."
She still finished her sweep of the office before she
straightened up. She had learnt from bitter experience that this
man could be an unknown element, capable of great heroics or
sudden betrayals. Even now, if the end was rushing down upon them
all so fast, she wouldn't put it past some of their enemies to
have arranged a final, twisted revenge, baiting the trap with
Skinner. A bullet to the stomach for each of them, perhaps,
leaving them gasping in agony, helpless on the floor, unable to
do anything but wait for the dawn. Blood spreading in a dark
stain across the pristine plush of the rug.
"There is no trap, Agent Scully." He spoke wearily, as
if the effort of forming the words and pushing the breath out of
his body was almost too much. "You can put your weapons away,
both of you. We're not worth it to them any more, none of us.
When the rats leave the sinking ship they don't bother stopping
to settle old scores on the way."
Somehow, insanely, she had expected to find him in his usual
position, ramrod straight in his chair, waiting for them to take
their customary seats across the desk from him and receive a
reaming. Instead he stood, with perfect parade-ground posture,
his back to the office, staring out through the slatted blinds at
the city glowing electric in the night.
"Sir --" Mulder began, moving past her into the
shadowed room.
"I'm touched that you came back for me, Agents, but you
shouldn't have bothered," he said in that harsh, rusted-iron
voice. "It isn't colonisation, Mulder, but it won't make
much difference. They're coming to use our world as their
battlefield. There's a war being fought over our heads, and it's
about to descend to our level. They've decided to make their
stand here, against those men you saw on the bridge, Scully,
those *things* without faces, and between them they'll destroy us
all."
From where she stood by the door, she could see his face in
profile. She saw what Mulder did not, Skinner's mouth twisting
into what might have been a smile. "The barbarians are
beating at the gates, Rome is about to fall. You should get out
while you still can."
"Come with us, sir," she said suddenly, stepping
forward. She stretched out her right hand, held it still in the
unmoving air between them for a moment.
He turned to face her, moving with glacial slowness, it seemed.
"No, Scully," he said, shaking his head. "I threw
in my lot a long while back. I'm staying to see it through."
"To the bitter end, sir?" Mulder, his voice tinged with
some emotion she could not name. Perhaps disgust. Perhaps pity.
Skinner emitted a harsh bark of almost-laughter. "Yes,
Mulder. To the bitter end. Besides, where will you go? Soon all
this will belong to one side or the other. 'Fill the earth and
conquer it. Be masters of the fish of the sea, all the birds of
heaven and all living animals on the earth.' And of us. Those who
are unfortunate enough to remain."
He trailed off, turned away from her to face out of the window
again. The vision of him, tall and dark against the street-light
glare filtering in through the thick glass, seemed to etch itself
on her retinas.
"I will not be hunted. I will not run for cover, live in
dark corners like vermin until I'm flushed out and killed. Let me
at least have that much."
"You don't have to do this," Mulder said, and she heard
anger swell in his voice. "You're a leader, a fighter. You
could do so much more...*afterwards*, if you don't insist on
getting yourself killed now."
"I'm not the captain, but I helped set the course that
steered the ship onto the rocks, Mulder," Skinner said
flatly. "I've always thought of myself as a man of honour,
but I've done things in the past that no honourable man would
countenance, because I was too afraid to do otherwise. The man
who called to give me this information -- he laughed before he
hung up the phone. He laughed, and told me that I must be very
proud that my participation in their affairs helped to bring this
night about, in some small way."
Silence lay heavy between them all as they stood, frozen in a
nightmare tableau. Mulder was the one to break it.
"It's your choice, sir, but Scully and I are going to
survive this. Do you have any concrete information to give us?"
Skinner rubbed his hand across his brow and then spoke in an
utterly calm voice, as though laying out the plan of action for a
surveillance operation. "According to what I was told, the
Colonist ships will attack this continent, and most likely every
other, at around seven A.M., EST. All major urban centres will
come under full, simultaneous attack -- the aliens will be
putting a scorched earth policy into effect, and they anticipate
little or no active resistance. My source wasn't certain what
will happen outside heavily populated urban areas, but some kind
of clean-up operation is anticipated in the course of which any
remaining large groups of humans will somehow be eliminated. The
main body of the Rebel forces are expected to arrive shortly
afterwards, at which point the battle will begin for strategic
control of this planet and its resources.
You have until seven A.M. tomorrow. I can't tell you whether
there will be any safe place for you to hide after that. All I
can do is advise you to run like hell towards any sparsely
populated area. From this point on, there are no guarantees,
agents."
Mulder nodded, and said, quietly, "Thank you." He
stepped forward and brushed his hand against her arm.
"Come on, Scully. If we're going to go, it has to be now."
Her hand remained raised, stretched out to the unyielding, solid
back of the man at the window. She was waiting for some word that
would make it all alright, for some heroic, sentimental phrase,
for him to say "Dismissed, Agents", perhaps.
He did not speak. She lowered her hand to her side. Turned. Left
the room for the last time.
******
As he sped the car back out of the city, through the commuter
dormitories where bureaucrats slept the sleep of the unjust, the
moon began to haul itself over the horizon. It looked bleak, cold
and distant, that little white eye watching, always watching as
it proceeded, slow and stately, through the heavens. When he was
a kid, it had always been the jumping off-point of the future,
the stepping stone from which Man, in his shiny silver foil space-suits
and goldfish bowl helmets, would leap into the vast sweeps of
space. To the stars and beyond, via Moon Base Alpha.
Now the stars were coming to them.
He glanced aside to see Scully staring at the moon too, a gleam
of icy silver pooling in the liquid dark of each of her wide
pupils. When she spoke, it was in the dull, flat tones of the
damned.
"What about my mom?"
"Scully, there's no time --"
"But there was time to go to Skinner? What hold does that
man have over you, for God's sake? This is my *mother* we're
talking about."
"Scully," he said, feeling his voice begin to crack and
waver, sensing the impossibility of tiptoeing around the truth,
"we had to be sure, and with the things that are going to
happen, very soon, it might be best --"
"To let Mom die at the start? Like some old pet dog you'd
take to have put down? That's what you're trying to say, isn't it,
Mulder?" The calmness in her voice, oh dear God, the hideous
calm.
He took one hand from the wheel, scrubbed at his burning eyes,
digging the heel of his hand into each eye-socket in turn until
black stars burst over his vision. "Maybe it is. Don't hate
me for this. Please. My mother is sleeping peacefully in her bed
right now, not knowing what tomorrow will be. You think I'm not
aching to call her, to tell her, to ask her to try and save
herself?"
Her silence was a weight lying between them. Precisely the weight
of a daughter's guilt, like a drowned corpse carried in the arms.
"In spite of everything, Scully, I love my mother very much.
That's why I'm not going to make that call. I would rather she
died quickly tomorrow than that she had to spend her last few
hours on this earth cowering in terror of the dawn."
Her right hand lay in her lap, opening and closing into a fist
with quick, convulsive movements. Otherwise, she sat motionless
in her seat.
"What about the Gunmen?"
"I called them from the car on my way over to your place.
They were just about to call me. They'd been hearing things
tonight, they said. Nothing concrete, rumours and whispers, but
enough to get them spooked, and when I told them what Skinner had
said to me -- they're headed for some hideout in the Blue Ridge
Mountains, near the Shenandoah National Park. We're supposed to
meet them there before dawn. Byers gave me the time and the
location."
"And if they don't show?" Her voice like the ice that
forms over creeks in northern winters, smooth and blameless,
concealing the dark, swirling depths.
"Then we go ahead without them."
"I see. Every man for himself. Survival of the fittest. Is
that the way it's going to be after tonight?"
He looked at the glowing dash-board clock and pressed his foot
harder on the gas. "First we have to live, Scully. Then we
can think about getting the world back to the way it should be.
First we have to live. We're going to survive this. Together."
She turned suddenly in her seat then, straining against the belt,
leaning towards him so that he saw her face clearly in the thin
green glow of the dash, the horror and the fear swelling up,
bursting out from under the thin skin of shock.
"But Mulder, my mom!"
A single cry in the darkness, impassioned, almost involuntary,
torn from her throat.
"I'm sorry," he mumbled, clenching his fingers around
the wheel, aching to reach out and touch her, as if that would
help, as if it would save anything. "Sometimes...sometimes
the best we can do for those we love is give them mercy."
She sank slowly back into the dimness of the car, leaned her
forehead against the cool glass of the window, staring away from
him, out into the night. Her voice a dying whisper now in the
dark, an anguished diminuendo. "Mercy...my God, Mulder, she's
my mother."
