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im-a-goddamn-cat · 4 years

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One Man Not Alone

MSR | FTF AU/Canon Divergence | 9k+ words | Rated: T | TW: Minor/Canon-Typical Violence, Minor Character Deaths

Summary: What if Mulder was the one who was stung by the infamous bee instead of Scully?

Notes: It’s been a whole year since I first watched TXF and I’ve finally decided to try my hand at writing a fic. Not only is this my first XF fic, but it’s the first fic I’ve written since 2013. I got the idea for this fic when I was rewatching FTF with some of the lovely people in @the-decaying-dick-cult-rewatch discord server a couple weeks ago.

Tagging: @today-in-fic and the people who were there for that rewatch/the chat afterwards @baronessblixen @impulsive-astrophile @tinglingworld @ariverofsongs @mypanicface @midwest-cryptid @sculleepup

AO3 | FF.net

......

.”Kill Mulder, we take the risk of turning one man’s quest into a crusade,” WMM says. He can’t believe they would even think of putting this type of plan into action.

Strughold contemplates this for a moment. He knows that WMM is right. Killing Mulder would likely lead to an even bigger problem than he ever could be alone. However, before he can offer an alternative course of action, CSM speaks up. “No. This has gone on long enough. He’s getting too close. Soon he’ll discover the truth, and all of this will be ruined.”

Strughold and WMM look at him in disbelief. They can’t believe he is actually going along with this plan despite the risks, especially considering he was the one who had insisted on keeping Mulder alive in the past.

“Besides,” CSM continues. “I doubt that there is anyone who cares about him that much anyways.”

……

Mulder entered his apartment, not caring enough to take off his suit jacket, as he was too focused on the current task at hand. He hadn’t bothered changing clothes after the incident with the bees, instead opting to meet Dr. Kurtzweil in the same suit that he’s had on for at least a good twenty-four hours now. He’s too busy getting sucked into a major conspiracy to care about trivial things like that at the moment.

During his latest meeting with Dr. Kurtzweil, Mulder had told him what he and Scully discovered in the desert; the bees, the corn fields and the tanker trucks full of what Mulder thinks is the virus. Kurtzweil had asked what Mulder thought it was exactly and he guessed that it’s some sort of a transportation system; transgenetic crops that are polygenically altered to carry a virus. Kurtzweil then agreed, telling him that that would “be his guess” as well, and then proceeded to leave.

Mulder had followed him then, demanding answers and was shocked when Kurtzweil told him that he doesn’t have all of them. Mulder then accused him of just using him for information for his books and lying about knowing his father, to which Kurtzweil still claimed that he did. This is what Mulder was so intent on finding out at the moment. He sat down in the chair at his desk, opened one of the drawers in it and pulled out his family photo album. He turned the pages until he landed on a group photo. In it was members of his family and friends of the family, one of which being… Dr. Kurtzweil.

Mulder leaned back in the chair and let out a sigh. Dr. Kurtzweil was telling the truth; he had known his father. Which means he was most likely telling the truth about everything else he had told Mulder. Just then, he heard a knock at door of his apartment and turned around to see Scully letting herself in. She looked forlorn.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“Salt Lake City, Utah. Transfer effective immediately,” she tells him, a slight hint of sadness in her voice.

Mulder turns away from her and looks back down at the photo album, a look of disbelief on his face. Before he can say anything, she continues. “I already gave Skinner my letter of resignation.”

"You can’t quit now, Scully.”

"I can, Mulder. I debated whether or not even to tell you in person, but-”

“We are close to something here.” He turns back to her then. “We’re on the verge! The virus, those bees, and the corn fields, they’re all connected-”

“You’re on the verge, Mulder. Please don’t do this to me,” she interrupts before he can finish.

Mulder gets up out of the chair then and walks over to Scully. “After what you saw last night, after all you’ve seen, you can just walk away?”

"I have, I did, it’s done.”

"I need you on this, Scully,” he tells her desperately.

"You don’t need me, Mulder. You never have. I’ve just held you back.” That stuns Mulder into silence. He looks at her with a hurt look in his eyes. He can’t believe she would think that. Doesn’t she realize how much he needs her? How important her contributions to their work are?

"I gotta go,” she says before he can respond. Then she turns around, walks away from him and out of his apartment. She has to get out of here before he can say anything else. She knows the longer she stays and listens to him plead otherwise, the harder it will be to follow through with quitting.

Mulder stands there stunned for a moment. Then he follows her out into the hall. “You wanna tell yourself that so you can quit with a clear conscience, you can, but you’re wrong!” Scully stops and turns to face him. “Why did they assign me to you in the first place, Mulder? To debunk your work, to rein you in, to shut you down.”

"But you saved me! As difficult and as frustrating as it’s been sometimes, your goddamned strict rationalism and science have saved me a thousand times over! You’ve kept me honest… You’ve made me a whole person. I owe you everything… Scully, and you owe me nothing.” Through this speech, Scully looks at him in shock as his honesty flows out. Her eyes begin to fill with tears.

"I don’t know if I wanna do this alone… I don’t even know if I can… And if I quit now, they win.” Scully’s tears begin to silently flow, her bottom lip quivering with emotion. She leans into him, wrapping her arms around him and he returns the gesture, embracing her in his arms, as she silently cries into his shoulder. After a few moments, he leans back, cupping her face in his hands and plants a kiss on her forehead. He then pulls away and rests his forehead against hers.

She leans back, wanting to see his face. They look into each other’s eyes, seeing all the love and care they feel for one another reflected back at them. Then, a new expression crosses Scully’s face, one that Mulder has never seen before, but one he is sure he recognizes as he’s thinking the same thing she is.

She gently grasps the back of his head and slowly pulls his head down, leaning her face towards his. He slowly starts leaning in as well, their lips inching closer and closer together, until…

“Ow,” Mulder yelps as he grabs the back of his neck and flinches away from her. Scully is momentarily stunned. She doesn’t know what happened. It had seemed as if he were going to requite her advance, finally giving in to something that she thought both of them had wanted for a while now.

But then he backed away.

“I’m sorry,” Scully apologizes, fearing she had crossed a line. “No, something stung me,” he reassures her. Scully is instantly relieved. She thought he had rejected her advance simply because he didn’t return her feelings.

Mulder reaches into the back of his shirt under his neck, feeling something there, and plucks it off himself. He holds it up and they see that it’s a bee. “Must’ve gotten in your shirt,” Scully says, noting their encounter of the bees from earlier.

“Scully… Something’s wrong.”

“What?”

“I-I’m have a stabbing pain in…”

“What?”

“My chest…”

“Mulder…”

“I feel weak…”

That was when her relief turned to panic.

She catches him as he collapses against her, and holds him up so that he doesn’t fall. “I have a funny taste in the back of my throat,” he says, while she quickly, but gently, lowers him to lay him down on the floor. She kneels down next to him and takes ahold of his wrist, feeling his pulse. “Your pulse is thready… Mulder, I think you’re going into anaphylactic shock.”

“No, I’m not allergic…” Scully realizes she has to act quickly; he needs medical attention immediately. She stands up and runs back into Mulder’s apartment, picks up his phone and dials 911.

“This is Special Agent Dana Scully, I have an emergency! I have an agent down!” she shouts into the phone as soon as they pick up.

……

The paramedics arrive quickly and waste no time getting into the building and getting to Mulder. They place him on a gurney and began to assess the situation as they carry him down the hall.

“Can you hear me? Can you say your name?”

“He’s got constriction in the throat and larynx.”

“Passages are open. Okay. Let’s get him in the van right away.” They head for the elevator. “Look out. Coming through. Watch your back,” One of the paramedics tells another resident of the building as they’re backing into the elevator.

When they’re out of the building and heading for the ambulance, Scully decides to inform them more of his condition. “He’s having lancinating pain in his chest and his motor skills are being affected. He said he has a funny taste in the back of his throat, but there was no pre-existing allergy to bee sting.” As they start loading him into the ambulance, she remembers the virus Mulder had mentioned earlier. “The bee that stung him might have been carrying a virus.”

“A virus?” One of the paramedics questions.

“Yes. What hos-“ Before she can finish her question, they shut the ambulance’s doors on her. Slightly annoyed by their rude interruption, she goes around to the driver’s window. “What hospital are you taking him to?” she asks him. The driver just stares at her for a moment, not responding. Then he pulls a gun on her.

Before she has any time to react, he shoots her. She stumbles and falls onto her back on the pavement, blood seeping from the left side of her head where she was shot. The ambulance speeds away before she has any chance of possibly getting up and stopping them. She lies there, feeling faint and struggles to keep her eyes open. She’s just barely conscious enough to see another ambulance pulling up to the building, and she realizes that this is the real one that was meant to pick Mulder up.

Before she can dwell on that thought any longer, she loses consciousness.

……

Scully hears faint, familiar voices. She can just barely make out what they’re saying.

“What are you doing?”

“Reading her chart.”

“Put it down.”

“I’ll put it down when I’m ready.”

She starts to open her eyes slowly, adjusting to the light, the voices sounding clearer now.

“I think she’s coming out of it.”

“She’s coming to.”

When she opens them fully, she’s greeted by the sight of the Lone Gunmen hovering over her.

“Hey, Scully? Scully?” Frohike says.

“Frohike? Langly? Byers?” she says, confused as to what’s going on. She then looks around and takes in her surroundings and realizes that she’s in the hospital, her head is wrapped in bandages and she’s being fed oxygen through a tube in her nose. She tries to sit up, but winces as she feels a stab of pain in her head and lays back down. “What am I doing here?” she asks.

“The bullet grazed your brow and your temporal plate,” Byers informs her.

“A few centimeters to the left and we’d all be playing harps right now,” Langly adds.

“You’ve been unconscious since they brought you in,” Frohike tells her.

Suddenly, she remembers the events that resulted in her being brought here. “Where’s Mulder?!” she asks, sitting up in the bed rapidly. “We put together you called 911 from Mulder’s apartment. That call must have been intercepted,” Byers tells her. “Mulder had a reaction to an Africanized honeybee we found in his hall,” Frohike says, then holds up a vial containing the bee in question to show her.

“I’ve got to get to him…” She pulls the oxygen tube out of her nose and gets up out of the bed, ignoring any pain she might be feeling, intent on leaving to find Mulder. But she is interrupted as Skinner enters the room. “Scully, easy, easy! Look, you’re staying right here,” he says as he tries urging her to lay back down.

“No! I have to find Mulder!”

“Tell me where he is, I’ll find him.”

“I don’t know where he is!” She’s beginning to panic as she realizes that she has no idea where to even begin looking.

Then, she remembers the doctor Mulder had told her about. Dr. Kurtzweil. The one who had tipped him off about this whole thing. That night when Mulder had first told her about him, he had given her his phone number to have on hand as well, in case “anything happened to him” as he had said. She didn’t really see the point in it at the time, but now it seems it’s going to come in handy. “But I think I know someone who might.”

“You leave here unprotected, how far will you get? How far will they let you get? Because they’ll know the minute you walk out of here!” Skinner says.

Scully shakes her head. “They’re not interested in me right now. They’re after him because they think that this is all his quest, that I’m just along for the ride…” She winces as she says this, pausing for a moment. Had that not been how she was acting earlier? She was so intent on quitting and distancing herself from the X-Files, trying to convince herself that she wasn’t truly a part of this and that she could just walk away. She truly does love the work, and thinking about it now, she can’t believe she even thought about abandoning the X-Files; especially now, when Mulder needs her help the most. She’s a part of this just as much as he is.

And she wouldn’t want it any other way.

Pushing those thoughts from her mind for now, she continues. “They think that once he’s gone and out of their way, that I’ll just move on with my life and not question anything out of fear of retribution from them… They don’t realize how wrong they are.” Skinner looks at her for a moment, then nods. Scully goes over to the dresser in the room and opens the top drawer, finding the clothes she was wearing before she was brought here in a plastic bag. She takes the bag out and heads into the bathroom.

She places the bag on the sink and starts emptying the contents of it. She notices that they left her cell phone in her pants pocket.

After changing, she pulls her phone out, intent on calling Dr. Kurtzweil. She realizes then that the paper she had written Kurtzweil’s number down on wasn’t on her at the moment. “Shit,” she mutters to herself. She thinks back to when Mulder told her it, replaying the conversation in her head in an attempt to remember. After a few minutes of replaying that moment in time, she thinks she’s got it and dials it.

After a few rings, someone picks up. “Hello?” The person says. “Is this Dr. Kurtzweil?” Scully asks. There’s a brief moment of silence. “Yes,” he finally answers.

Bingo.

After some time of convincing him that she wasn’t secretly a member of the Syndicate sent out to kill him and that she actually is Agent Mulder’s partner trying to find out what happened to him, he agrees to meet her at Casey’s Bar, the same bar that Mulder had told her he first met Kurtzweil at.

After hanging up, she exits the bathroom. Skinner and the Lone Gunmen look at her, waiting for her next move. “Uh… Is there anything we can do to help?” Langly asks her.

Scully regards the question for a moment, thinking. She realizes that her car isn’t here and if she wants any chance of finding Mulder, she needs to get to the bar asap.

“Yeah. I need you guys to drive me somewhere.”

……

Dr. Kurtzweil went up the alley behind the bar, hoping to sneak in the back way as he usually does. He hopes the person he spoke to on the phone really was Agent Scully and wasn’t someone impersonating her just to get to him. He knows he’s taking a risk coming here, but she sounded genuine enough, and if Agent Mulder truly was in trouble, he wanted to offer any assistance he could.

When he got to the back door and opened it, someone blocked his way. “Dr. Kurtzweil, isn’t it? Dr. Alvin Kurtzweil?” The man asked. Kurtzweil was instantly afraid. He knew he shouldn’t have agreed to this meeting. These people have been tracking and keeping tabs on him for days. Of course they would follow him here, especially since it involved him interfering with whatever they had planned for Agent Mulder.

This man was most likely here to kill him.

Instead of answering him, Kurtzweil turned around and started walking away down the alley, hoping to leave without incident. But before he can get far, a black car pulls up and blocks his path. This stops him in his tracks. The driver then gets out of the car. Kurtzweil looks behind himself and sees the other man was still there, now right behind him.

He was trapped.

……

The Lone Gunmen dropped Scully off at Casey’s Bar where Dr. Kurtzweil told her to meet him. They had asked if she wanted them to wait for her, but she told them that she could handle it on her own. She then thanked them and sent them on their way.

Scully rushed into the bar. Since they had never seen each other before, Kurtzweil told her that he would be wearing a black suit with a black tie with red spots so that she could identify him. She starts looking everywhere in the bar, including the bathrooms, but she can’t find him.

She then notices the back door to this place and decides to try there. She goes out it and ends up in the alley behind the bar. In the alley ahead, there is no one there. But then she notices in another alley to the left, there are two men there and a black car. One of the men is closing the trunk to the car and the other is to the right of him watching.

Hearing the noise that Scully made by bursting out the door, they turn around and see her standing there. She doesn’t recognize the man who was closing the trunk, but from what he’s wearing, she knows it isn’t Dr. Kurtzweil. However, she does recognize the other one. It’s the Well-Manicured Man. The same man who had tried “helping” her a few years back during another incident with a conspiracy and cover-up by warning her that the Syndicate was going send someone to kill her. He had been right in the end; someone had tried to kill her, but they failed as they had mistaken her sister, Melissa, for her instead.

“Ms. Scully.” WMM says, breaking her out of that train of thought.

“Where’s Dr. Kurtzweil?” she asks.

“He’s come and gone.” She contemplates this vague statement for a moment, briefly wondering what exactly had gone on here before she arrived. “I want to know where Mulder is,” she demands.

WMM then holds up a small pouch. “The location of Agent Mulder and the means to save his life.” He then gestures toward the car. “Please.”

Scully contemplates this for a moment. This could very well be a trap to kill her. She had assumed that they were going to let her go on her way, but that was before any of them knew she was trying sabotage their plan. If she had let this be, that probably would’ve been the case. But now that they knew, any hope she had of that happening has gone out the window.

On the other hand, what if he was telling the truth? What if he really does know how to save Mulder and is willing to tell her how? He had tried helping her in the past, although it wasn’t really out of any concern for her safety and was more for the selfish reason of him not wanting any unnecessary attention brought to his group. Still, he had been telling her the truth at the time.

She realizes that she really has no other options at this point. This is the closet to a lead on Mulder’s whereabouts as she’s probably going to get. Deciding that she has nothing else to lose at this point, she decides that she’s going to take this chance.

She begins walking toward the car and WMM joins her. She gets in the backseat on the left and he the right. The third man gets in the driver’s seat.

They begin driving.

……

WMM hands Scully the pouch. She takes it, opens it and takes out the contents inside; it’s a piece of a paper with the coordinates “BASE 1 SOUTH 83°00 LAT EAST 63°00 LONG 326 FT.” written on it and a small bottle with green liquid inside. “What is it?” she asks.

“A weak vaccine against the virus Agent Mulder has been infected with. It must be administered within 96 hours. That leaves you little time to reach those coordinates,” he tells her.

“You’re lying.”

“No. Though I have no means to prove otherwise. The virus is extra-terrestrial. We know very little about it except that it was the original inhabitant of this planet.”

“A virus…” she says in a disbelieving tone.

"What is a virus, but a colonizing force that cannot be defeated? Living in a cave, underground, until it mutates… and attacks.”

“This is what you’ve been conspiring to conceal? A disease?”

“No. For God’s sake, you’ve got it all backwards! AIDS, the Ebola virus, on an evolutionary scale they are newborns. This virus walked the planet long before the dinosaurs.”

“Walked? What do you mean walked?”

“Aliens, Agent Scully. The little green men that Agent Mulder is so interested in arrived here millions of years ago. Those that didn’t leave have been lying dormant underground since the last ice age in the form of an evolved pathogen, waiting to be reconstituted by the alien race when it comes to colonize the planet, using us as hosts.” Scully raises her eyebrow and looks at him with a look of disbelief on her face. This is sounding like the plot of some ridiculous Sci-Fi B-Movie, she thinks.

Ignoring her skeptical stare, he continues. “Against this we have no defense, nothing but a weak vaccine. Do you see why it was kept secret? Why even the best men, men like Agent Mulder’s father, could not let the truth be known. Until Dallas we believed the virus would simply control us, that mass infection would make us a slave race. Imagine our surprise when they began to gestate. My group has been working cooperatively with the alien colonists, facilitating programs like the one you saw, to give us access to the virus in the hope that we might be able to secretly develop a cure.”

Scully is silent for a moment. “If this is true, I highly doubt that the reason your group decided to create such a vaccine is a noble one. You’re just doing it to save your own asses,” she says.

“Survival is the ultimate ideology. Without a vaccination, the only true survivors of the viral holocaust will be those immune to it; human-alien clones.”

“Human-alien clones?” she questions. “Hybrids, Agent Scully. The combining of human and alien DNA to create a new lifeform. As a woman of science such as yourself, I think you would find the entire process quite intriguing. That is, if it were being done under more… Morally sound circumstances.” Scully had to admit to herself that he was right in that regard. She was skeptical, but if any of this were true and was being investigated under better circumstances, it would be quite a massive and interesting discovery and experiment in the scientific field.

“This is why Agent Mulder’s father allowed his sister to be abducted, to be taken to a cloning program, for one reason: So she would survive, as a genetic hybrid. Agent Mulder’s father chose hope over selfishness. Hope in the only future he had, his children. His hope for Mulder was that he would uncover the truth about the project. That he would stop it.”

“Now, Agent Scully, you’re here too. With your medical skills and scientific expertise combined with Agent Mulder’s drive and determination, I believe that Agent Mulder’s father’s hope was well placed, albeit he only had Mulder on his mind at the time. Your skills combined give you a great chance of stopping the project. I know that you two will do everything in your power to discover the truth, and fight the future.”

Scully looks away from him and lets all of this sink in. She looks ahead and sees the driver looking at her through the rear-view mirror. She looks back at WMM then. “Why are you telling me all of this?”

“For the sake of my own children. Once it’s learned what I have told you, my life will be over,” he tells her solemnly. He then looks ahead at the driver. Scully follows his gaze and looks at the driver as well. Scully then realizes then that she doesn’t know where exactly they’re driving to. She also remembers that Dr. Kurtzweil was nowhere to be found where he explicitly told her he would meet her and that is where she encountered these men. “Where’s Dr. Kurtzweil?” she asks.

Neither WMM nor his driver respond. This isn’t looking good.

“I’d like to get out of the car now,” she tells them. Still no response. “Stop the car!” she demands.

"Driver,” WMM says. The driver pulls to a stop in another alleyway. “The men I work with will stop at nothing to clear the way for what they believe is their stake in the inevitable future. I was ordered to kill Dr. Kurtzweil, as I was ordered to kill you.” WMM says. He then grabs a gun from somewhere and shoots the driver in the back of the head. Scully recoils from the blast. "Ow,” she yells.

"Trust no one, Ms. Scully.” WMM opens his door, exits the car, and holds the door open for her. "Get out of the car.”

Scully stays where she is. "Why?”

“Get out of the car!” he demands more forcefully this time.

Sighing, she scoots over to WMM’s door and exits the car.

“You have precious little time,” he tells her. She slams the door angerly, looking at him in contempt.

“What I’ve given you the alien colonists don’t yet know exists. The vaccine you hold is the only defense against the virus. Its introduction into an alien environment may have the power to destroy the delicate plans we have so assiduously protected for the last 50 years!”

“What do you mean “may” have?”

"Find Agent Mulder. Only then will you realize the scope and grandeur of the project. Go. Go now!”

WMM then points his gun in Scully’s face. She starts to walk away, going on her way. WMM opens his door again, reenters the limo and closes the door. The limo explodes then, knocking Scully off her feet. Briefly stunned, she turns around and lifts herself into a sitting position on the ground. She watches the flames burn, consuming both the limo and WMM inside. She then pulls out the pouch and checks to see if the bottle is still intact. It is.

She sighs with relief. She puts it back in the pouch, gets up and after one last look at the burning car, turns around and begins to run for her life.

……

WILKES LAND, ANTARCTICA 48 HOURS LATER

Amidst the vast snow-covered landscape, a Sno-Cat plows along, with Scully at the wheel. She wipes away the condensation forming on the inside of the window and squints her eyes to see where she’s going.

She looks down at her fuel gauge and notices it near empty. She taps it a few times, but it keeps flipping back to empty. She then looks down at the paper with the coordinates written on it and the small hand-held device which tells her exactly where she is sitting on the passenger seat, checking the coordinates.

She stops the Sno-Cat and picks up the paper and device, looking at them side-by-side. She’s in the exact spot that correlates with the coordinates on the piece of paper, but she doesn’t see anything around besides a hillside in front of her.

Sighing, she gets out of the Sno-Cat, stuffs the paper and device in one of the outer pockets of her coat, and begins walking to the hill.

She struggles trying to climb it at first, but eventually gets the hang of it. She makes it to the top and begins looking out on the horizon, trying to spot what exactly it is she’s looking for. She spots a base of some kind in the distance. She pulls the binoculars she brought with her out of one of the pockets inside her coat and looks through them. Looking around through the binoculars, she sees that there’s five small white round buildings and some Sno-Cats at the base.

One of the Sno-Cats pulls up near one of the buildings and a man comes over to get in the passenger side; it’s the CSM. They then start driving away.

Scully then puts the binoculars back into her coat and begins walking down the hill. Once she’s at the bottom, she starts running towards the base. When she gets about halfway there, she starts jogging even faster. But before she can get any further, the ice she’s on starts breaking and gives way under her. She falls down the hole that was created underneath her, falling and breaking through multiple layers of ice, until finally landing in a crevice inside an icy cave.

Lying there in pain for a moment from the far and hard fall, she then gets up slowly, putting her hands on some frozen snow piles for support to push herself up. Once she’s up, she looks around and notices a hole in the ground of the cave. Steam comes up out of it, and she realizes that it must be a vent of some kind. Seeing nowhere else to go, she starts climbing down into the vent feet first.

Once she’s down in it, she gets on her elbows and knees and begins to crawl through it. When she reaches the end, she finds that it drops down somewhere. She turns herself around and lowers herself through the opening, landing feet-first on the ground.

She looks around and realizes that she’s now in an underground building of some kind. She’s in a hallway and on either side of her there’s containers of some sort. She pulls the flashlight she brought with her out of one of her coat’s outer pockets to investigate further.

She begins walking down the hall, looking at all the containers and realizes that they’re cryopods of some kind. She goes over to one and wipes the snow off it so she can see inside. Inside is a man; he’s naked, fully submerged in some kind of liquid, and has a tube sticking out of his mouth. She then wipes more of the snow away towards the bottom and sees something else in the cryopod with him. It isn’t human and it isn’t an animal of any kind.

It can only be described as alien.

……

The Sno-Cat from earlier drives along, plowing through the snow, with CSM and his driver inside. They pull up to another Sno-Cat and stop. This Sno-Cat doesn’t belong to either of them and they’ve never seen it before.

CSM looks at it for a moment and then takes a puff out of his cigarette as he realizes that someone else is here and must be trying to infiltrate the base.

He has a pretty good idea of who it is, but he can’t believe it.

……

When she reaches the end of the hall, there’s a fork in the road with two hallways on either side. She goes down the right one. At the end of it, there’s nothing but a drop-off and stacks of coffin-like containers hanging from somewhere. They have windows on the upper half of them where it looks like they open so that one can look into them without having to actually open them. There’s nothing in these ones.

She turns around and goes back to the fork in the road. She then notices a smaller third opening in the wall between the two hallways. She goes through it, coming out into a room at the end. It’s huge and open, a shape almost like that of the inside of a theatre hall, but bigger and wider. There’s various pipes and structures all around.

She stands in awe at the structure before her. She’s on an upper level of it, so she has a view of pretty much everything here. She looks around noting all the various areas and notices hundreds, if not thousands, more of those same coffin-like containers. Most of them are hanging on assembly lines of some kind, being transferred from wherever they came from to wherever they’re going.

Scully pulls out her binoculars again and looks around. She spots a single container on the ground on the lower level, it’s door open, and there’s something inside. She assumes that must be how they brought Mulder here. Scully puts the binoculars away and looks around for a way down there so she can take a closer look. She spots an area that looks like a ladder built into the wall. She goes over to it and begins to climb down.

When she gets to the third step, there’s some sort of liquid on it that causes her to foot to slip. She falls a few steps, but grabs onto one and catches herself. But there’s more of that stuff on the step she’s holding on to and she starts slipping. She tries to hold on, but loses her grip and falls.

“Oh, shit!” she yells out as she starts to helplessly slide down the side of the wall, unable to stop herself. She lands harshly at the bottom, hitting a ledge, and the impact causes her to almost fall; she grabs the edge of the ledge just in time. She hangs there for a moment, looking down at the abyss of metal objects and structures below her. Still hanging, she begins to shimmy across the ledge, looking for somewhere to go.

She eventually reaches a spot where she can put her feet down and let go. Once she’s down, she stands there for a moment leaning over with her hands on her knees, catching her breath. She then pulls out her flashlight to see where she’s going. She’s on top of some kind of huge cylinder. She slides down and off the side of it, landing on a walkway.

She spots the open container down the walkway and runs over to it. She kneels down next to it and looks inside, finding Mulder’s clothes within. She picks up his shirt and holds it in her hand for a moment. Where is he, and what are they doing to him, she wonders? She can’t bear the thought of any harm coming to him.

She then drops his shirt, stands back up and starts running, determined to find him. She goes around a corner and comes to another hallway much like the one she was in when she first got here.

More cryopods with more people inside, in the same liquid and with the same tubes and in their mouths. Scully goes down the hall, shining her flashlight on all of them, looking at them. How did they get here, she wonders? Did they volunteer for this or were they kidnapped just like Mulder was? Judging from the expressions on their faces, it was the latter.

The thought sends a shiver down her spine. She doesn’t have the time nor the resources to even attempt to do anything about it now though. A few cryopods down, she shines her flashlight on one that makes her stop in her tracks when she sees who’s inside.

Mulder.

She stares at the cryopod for a moment, trying to figure how she can get him out. She feels the outer casing with her hand. It’s ice. She begins hitting it with her hand to see if it would give way. When that doesn’t work, she starts hitting it with the end of her flashlight.

That doesn’t work either.

……

The Sno-Cat pulls up to one of the buildings. As soon as they stop, CSM jumps out and runs inside.

When he’s inside, he starts barking orders at the various soldiers and people there, frantic. “Secure the station! I want everyone else down below! If you’re not armed, arm yourselves! We have a breach!”

Everyone immediately springs into action.

…….

Scully runs back to the container Mulder was brought in. She kneels down and unties one of the oxygen tanks on the side of it, takes it off and carries it with her back to Mulder.

She lifts it up and begins hitting the cryopod with the end of it. The ice starts to crack.

……

CSM is running around frantically, trying to get the situation under control.

“Let’s go, let’s go!” he shouts at the men meant to go down below. They proceed to go down the ladders in the middle of the room, off to their stations.

……

The ice continues to crack under the brute force, until it’s thin enough in one area for the liquid to push through and spill out, making a hole in the cryopod.

Scully puts the oxygen tank down and begins to break more of the ice away with her hands, making the hole bigger. When she deems the hole big enough, she pulls the syringe and the bottle with the vaccine out of one of her coat’s inner pockets. She takes the cap off the needle and tosses it somewhere on the ground, then sticks the needle in the top of the bottle and sucks the liquid into the syringe.

After filling the syringe with enough of the vaccine, she reaches in, sticks the needle into Mulder’s shoulder and injects the vaccine into him. The effect is immediate; the liquid inside the tube in his mouth begins to retreat out of him and the tube itself starts to shrivel up and die.

“Mulder?” She starts to reach for the tube in his mouth, but before she can get ahold of it, the entire building begins to shake violently in response to the vaccine’s presence, knocking her off her feet.

……

CSM enters a room full of monitors and equipment. A man at one of the monitors has a graph up, showing various statistics of some kind. “There’s a contaminant in the system,” the man tells him.

CSM looks at the graph in shock. “Scully has the vaccine!” he says in disbelief.

……

Scully stands back up and looks around. Steam is starting to burst from various areas of the hall. The entire place seems as if it’s starting to collapse. Just then she hears choking sounds coming from Mulder. She turns back to him and goes for the tube in his mouth again. She grabs it and begins pulling it from his mouth. She pulls and pulls, the tube seeming to never end, until finally she gets it all the way out.

“Breathe! Mulder, can you breathe?” Mulder splutters and coughs, spitting out what’s left of the gooey substance in him. His mouth starts to open as he tries to say something. Scully reaches out and tenderly caresses his face, urging him on. “Cold… I’m cold,” he finally manages to say in a weak voice.

“I’m going to get you out of there.” Scully picks the oxygen tank back up and starts to break away the rest of the ice with it.

……

The room begins to shake violently. Error warnings start popping up on all the monitors and sparks start flying from the various monitors and equipment as the damage to the systems begins to set in.

“Abandon your posts! Evacuate!” CSM orders everyone as he leaves the room, heading for the exit. Everyone is panicking, scrambling to get out as well.

A man approaches CSM, confused as to what’s going on. “What’s happened?” he asks.

“It’s all gone to hell!” CSM tells him.

“But what about Scully?”

“She’ll never make it!”

……

Scully gently pulls Mulder out of the cryopod, his body naked and glistening with the goo from inside, and gently lays him on the ground. “Don’t move, Mulder.” She then stands up as if to leave.

“Sc-Scully?”

“Shh, it’s okay, I’m not going anywhere. I’ll be right back.” She runs back to the container Mulder was brought in again, grabbing all of his clothes out of it. She returns to Mulder and kneels down next to him.

“Here, Mulder. I’m going to get you warm.” She starts dressing him and tries to wipe away the slimy substance on him with her coat’s sleeves in the process. After he’s fully dressed, she takes off her coat and puts it on him, giving him another layer of warmth.

Now, she has to get him out of here, and he’s too weak to walk on his own. She puts her arms under his shoulders and knees and using all the strength she can muster, starts trying to lift him. It takes a few seconds and some slight adjustments of her legs underneath her to properly push herself up, but she finally manages to succeed in lifting him up into her arms. She stumbles slightly from the weight of him at first, but quickly regains her balance.

She carries him down the hall and when they get to the end of it, she turns off to the left, and heads for the tunnel in that direction. Once in it, the building shakes again, almost throwing her off balance, but she manages to steady herself as the shaking dies off.

She comes to the end of the tunnel which leads to an area like that of the inside of a silo. There’s an opening at the top, light shining through it. The walls stretch up so high that she can’t see where the opening leads to, but she assumes it must lead to a way out.

……

All the men scramble out of the buildings, running for their lives. They head for the Sno-Cats, jumping in them as fast as they can.

CSM simply walks to his Sno-Cat, not running frantically like the rest of the men. He gets in the passenger’s seat as another man gets in the driver’s side. Once they’re inside, they all begin driving away.

As they drive, the ice underneath them slowly starts to crack.

……

On the wall ahead is an area that Scully thinks looks suitable for climbing as there’s various areas jutting out that will be easy to grab and step on. She adjusts Mulder so that he’s hanging off the left side of her, with his right arm around her shoulders and his right leg wrapped around her hips. She grabs the wall with her right hand, puts her right foot on another area of the wall, pushes herself up, and starts climbing. Mulder does the same; he grabs on with his left hand and pushes against the wall with his left foot, helping to pull them both up.

Eventually they make it to the top, and Scully urges Mulder to pull himself up first. He grabs the ledge and starts pulling himself up as Scully pushes him from the bottom to help him along. He makes it up and over the top and crawls a little ways before collapsing on the ground. Scully then climbs the rest of the way up and joins him.

“We gotta keep moving,” she tells him.

“I can’t.”

“Yes, you can.” Instead of picking him up in her arms again, she kneels down with her back to him and reaches behind herself, grabs his arms, and pulls him forward so that one is on each of her shoulders and he’s laying across her back, much like how a mother monkey carries her young on her back.

“Mulder, wrap your arms around me and hold on.” He’s just barely conscious enough still to register the command and he does as he’s told. Using all her strength yet again, Scully pushes herself up to stand. She wobbles slightly from the weight on her back, but steadies herself instantly.

When she starts walking, Scully notices that they’re in a hallway that looks much like the other ones. She also notices that the ice in all of the cryopods in this hallway is starting to melt. She has no idea what will happen if the things inside get lose and she’s not sure she wants to find out.

She then spots a vent, much like the same one she came in. “Mulder, reach up and grab the vent,” she tells him. Suddenly, she spots movement in one of the cryopods in front of them; the alien inside is beginning to stir. “Mulder, reach up and grab that vent!” she tells him again, more frantically this time.

No response. “Mulder?” She looks back over her shoulder at him and sees that he’s passed out. She slides him off her back and places him on the floor. She gets down on her knees over him, her legs on either side of his hips. She opens his coat slightly, reaches in and puts her fingers on his neck, feeling for a pulse. There is one. He’s still alive, but she’s worried he isn’t going to stay that way for much longer.

The aliens start screeching and thrashing about more violently, trying to break free. The ice is continuing to melt. Any second the aliens will no doubt be able to escape and Scully highly doubts that they’re friendly. She realizes that she and Mulder have to get out of here as soon as possible, preferably before the aliens get loose. Still keeping an eye on the aliens, she also draws her attention back to Mulder and begins performing CPR on him.

“Please, breathe… Breath, breath, breath!” she says desperately in the middle of performing chest compressions on him. Just then, Mulder begins to cough and splutter. Scully leans down over him, coming face to face with him, and gently grabs the sides of his head. “Breath in, breath in, breath!” she tells him, as she caresses his hair with her left hand.

He starts trying to speak, but he’s too quiet for Scully to hear. She turns her head, leans down further and puts her ear right in front of his mouth in order to hear him. “I had you big time,” he says, echoing her same playful banter from a few days ago. She leans back and turns her head to look at him and he smiles at her. She smiles back.

There’s no time to bask in the moment, however. The ice in the cryopods gives way and the aliens start breaking through all around them, their screeches becoming louder. Scully gets up, pulls Mulder to his feet and brings him over to the vent.

“Grab the vent!” she tells him. He jumps up and grabs the edge of it. “Pull! Pull!” she urges him on, while she pushes him up from the bottom to help him along. With Scully’s help, he manages to get up into it.

“Scully…” he says.

Scully begins climbing up the side of the wall, using the cryopod in front of her for leverage. Suddenly, the alien within reaches out and grabs her leg. She thrashes her leg around and manages to get the alien to release her. She then finishes pulling herself up into the vent.

“Keep moving, Mulder!” she tells him once inside. They start crawling as fast as they can down the vent. “Go! Go! Come on,” Scully says, urging him on. She keeps checking behind herself as the aliens continue screaming, checking for any that may be following them.

She sees light ahead, a sign that they’re getting close to the end. “Almost there! Keep going!” she encourages him. They make it to the opening and pull themselves out, with Mulder getting out first. Just as Scully gets out, one of the aliens bursts up out of vent, nearly grabbing her. Just then, everything around them starts shaking violently again. After the shaking subsides, Scully looks back at the vent; the alien has disappeared, most likely scared off by the tremors.

Scully then notices that they’re in the same place where she landed after originally falling through the snow and ice. She spots the opening where she fell through and they make it over to it, stepping over the vent in the process as steam begins to burst from it.

They climb up and make it out onto the surface, the steam from the vent still rising and flowing out through the opening behind them. Mulder collapses from exhaustion and lays on the ground, and Scully kneels next to him, resting for a moment.

Scully starts hearing strange sounds coming from behind them. She turns around and surveys the area, looking for the source. She then notices that the icy ground below and around them is beginning to crack. Remembering what happened to her earlier and not wanting a repeat of that for herself or Mulder, she quickly grabs him, wraps his left arm around her shoulders for support, pulls him to his feet, and runs away from the collapsing spot.

They stop for a second, look back and see that the ice under and around the base is caving in, pulling the buildings down underground. Fearful of that happening to them, they start running as the ice continues to collapse in on itself in all directions in the form of a circle, trying to make it away before it can pull them down too. More steam starts shooting up in various parts of the ice all around them as they run for their lives.

Suddenly, the faulty ice catches up with them, collapsing underneath them, and they begin to fall. But they land on something, something rising out of the ground, and are lifted back up above the surface. They slide off it and fall down onto the sturdy ice below, land on their feet and then fall to their stomachs.

Scully crawls over to Mulder, who fell slightly farther ahead than her. Still laying on the ground, Scully looks back at the object behind them as it rises above them. It’s a huge, disk-shaped metallic structure and as it flies over them, she notices that it has lights and what looks like some sort of opening on the bottom of it, much like a UFO you’d see in a movie would have.

Then she realizes that’s exactly what it is. The structure they were in wasn’t an underground building of any kind, it was this thing; a spaceship. Scully can’t believe her eyes. She continues to stare at it in awe as it starts to fly away, straight ahead of them.

She scoots closer to Mulder, grabbing his left hand with hers, and wraps her right arm around him. She looks at him and smiles. “Mulder, you gotta see this! Mulder!” she tells him, knowing that this is precisely the type of thing he’d want to see. Mulder lifts his head slightly, barely opening his eyes to look. “I see it,” he tells her in a weak voice. He then lays his head back down onto the snow.

Scully looks away from him and back to the ship, watching it fly off into the distance and out of sight. She then looks back at Mulder, his head still on the ground, and smiles at him again. She then lays her head down on the snow as well, the exhaustion from all that’s happened finally settling in.

Mulder looks at her for a moment, then scoots himself over to her and pushes himself up slightly to wrap his arms around her. He leans back, pushes himself up into a sitting position and pulls her into his lap; her legs, which are stretched out in front of her, being the only part of her not in his lap. He fully wraps his arms around her, cradling her head in his arms. He places a kiss atop her head and then lays the side of his face against it.

The hole made by the spaceship giant and gaping behind them.

……

Mulder is sitting on a bench by a reflecting pool reading a newspaper. He stares at a headline: “Local Hanta Virus Outbreak in Northern Texas Contained,” it reads. He then looks up and sees Scully walking toward him. When she reaches him, he hands her the newspaper. “There’s an interesting work of fiction on page 24. Mysteriously, our names have been omitted. They’re burying this thing, Scully. They’re just going to dig a new hole and cover it up.”

“I told OPR everything I know. What I experienced, the virus, how it’s spread by the bees from pollen in transgenic crops,” she tells him. He gets up and starts to walk away. She joins him.

“You’re wasting your time, Scully. They’ll never believe you, not unless your story can be programmed, categorized, or easily referenced.”

“Well, then we’ll go over their heads.” He stops and turns to face her. “No. No. How many times have we been here before, Scully? Right here. So close to the truth and now with what we’ve seen and what we know to be right back at the beginning with nothing.”

“This is different, Mulder.”

“No, it isn’t! You were right to want to quit! You were right to want to leave me! You should get as far away from me as you can! This-this quest of mine… It’s too dangerous.”

“What are you saying, Mulder? That you’re ungrateful that I saved you? That I should’ve just sat back and let them kill you? Mulder, I couldn’t have lived with myself if I let that happen without doing something, anything I could, to save you.”

“N-no! Scully, believe me, I am grateful. More than you could ever know. But… Dammit, Scully, you could’ve died trying to save me! And I’m not going to watch you die because of some hollow personal cause of mine. Go be a doctor. Go be a doctor while you still can.”

“I can’t. I won’t. Mulder, I’ll be a doctor, but my work is here with you now. I’m a part of this just as much as you are,” she tells him sincerely. “That virus that you were exposed to, whatever it is, it has a cure. I held it in my hands. How many other lives can we save? Look…” She clasps his hand in hers. “If I quit now, they win.”

They stand for a moment looking into each other’s eyes, letting the weight of each other’s words sink in. Then, hand in hand, they walk off together.

……

FOUM TATAOUINE, TUNISIA

A helicopter flies over the vast desert. It lands near a cornfield, and CSM emerges from it. He makes his way to the cornfield. A native man is yelling something in Tunisian into the crops. From out of the corn comes Strughold. He walks over to CSM. “You look hot and miserable. Why have you travelled all this way?” he asks him.

“We have business to discuss.”

“We have regular channels.”

“This involves Mulder.”

“Ah. That name, again and again…” he mutters in exasperation. “He’s seen more than he should have,” CSM tells him, seeming genuinely worried about this.

“What has he seen? Of the whole he has seen but pieces.”

“He’s determined now. Reinvested.”

“He is but one man. One man alone cannot fight the future.” CSM stares at him for a moment. “No. He once was, but he isn’t alone any longer. Agent Scully is with him and is just as invested in his quest as he is. If it weren’t for her, Mulder would have been gone and out of our hair by now.”

CSM then thinks back to something an Agent Krycek once told him: “Scully’s a problem. A much larger problem than you described.” Krycek had been right; CSM had greatly underestimated Scully’s presence in all of this. Not only does she care about Mulder deeply, but apparently, she has just as much interest in his quest as he does.

“What more can they do now? The X-Files have been shut down,” Strughold says, breaking him out of that train of thought.

“Yesterday, I received this.” He pulls a telegram out of his pocket and hands it to Strughold. He takes it and reads it, and a look of shock crosses his face at what it says. He looks back up at CSM with a look of sorrow on his face. He then drops the telegram on the ground and walks away. CSM looks down at the telegram on the ground, then looks up and walks away as well.

The telegram sits perched on the sand on the ground, its corners flapping in the wind. On it, it reads: “X-FILES RE-OPENED. STOP. PLEASE ADVISE. STOP.”

……

More notes: Ngl I was kind of rushing this because my semester started recently and I didn’t want this bugging me in the back of my mind when I’m trying to do my work. Granted, I was already almost done with it, but I still didn’t have the full time I wanted to have. I may go back and fix some things up, if there’s anything that needs fixing. But I think it’s fine… For now. Thank you so much for reading!

#my fics #fics #txf #the x files #x files #the x files fanfic #x files fanfic #txf fanfic #msr #fox mulder #dana scully #meowing

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