Pursuit
Joyce
July 1998DISCLAIMER: Scully, Mulder, and anyone else whose name you recognize belongs to CC and Fox Broadcasting. I am only borrowing them for a moment and will return them. No money is changing hands nor is any profit sought after or expected.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: Thanks to Deb and Miki for being not only great editors, but for writing stories that give me ideas.
SUMMARY: Mulder's thoughts during the trip across Antarctic to rescue Scully.
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Antarctica
Too damn much time to think. Nothing to look at but an endless white on white landscape, broken occasionally by larger lumps of white with bits of gray rock peeking through the snow and ice. I fucking hate the color white. I feel like I'm trapped in one of those frigging snow globes.
In the last forty-eight hours, I have been on four planes, crossed three continents, and, for the last ten hours, I have been driving headlong into a wasteland with no one to dig me out if I get lost. This wild journey is based entirely on the unsupported word of a man sent to kill me and the devout hope that he was giving me a chance to save Scully.
About every three minutes I've been carefully unfolding the slip of paper the Englishman gave me and peering at the coordinates, just to reassure myself that I have some reason behind this insane trek into the snowfields of the Antarctic. I think I must have the coordinates tattooed across the inside of my eyelids. I could probably recite them in my sleep, if I ever sleep again.
I haven't slept since I woke up in the hospital with a new hole in my head and a single-minded compulsion to find Scully. How could I sleep when every beat of my heart was urging the endless succession of airplanes I was in to move faster? Skinner could have booked me on the Concorde and it still would have been flying too slow.
The little leather case holding Scully's life rests against my heart. I feel it like an ember nestled between my thermal shirt and the arctic coat I requisitioned from the Marines. The hope it contains is the only thing keeping me from giving up and turning into a block of ice.
Scully will kill me if she ever finds out that I've been keeping warm by imagining in vivid detail where our kiss in the hallway would have gone if that bloody fucking bee hadn't joined the party. I've got the heater on so low an ice cube wouldn't work up a sweat. I'm still steaming up the windshield. Vicariously making love to Scully is about the only thing keeping me warm and awake, but it's playing havoc with my concentration.
Less heat equals more fuel. I'll risk a few toes if it means getting to Scully. What are a few toes when I'd gladly rip out my heart? In a way I already have. What I don't know, is whether she accepted the gift or was simply caught completely off guard by my sudden lapse into emotional honesty.
After endless hours of driving through a winter wonderland and I'm beginning to forget there are any other colors than white. The dark color of my clothes actually hurts my eyes when I pry them away from peering desperately through the windshield. I think of the hot soup in the thermos plugged into the dashboard, but push that thought away. I intend to toast Scully's return to me with a cup of hot soup. After five years of being with her, I am learning to combine practicality with serendipity.
Hell is a frozen wasteland. Maybe I died from that shot to the head and I'm actually lying in a cold morgue somewhere and this is my hell - chasing after Scully through ice and cold and the waking nightmare of never getting to her in time. Why can't one of us be abducted to someplace warm, like Bermuda? Everyone else disappears into the Bermuda Triangle - warm sands, blue-green sea and soft summer breezes. Scully and I disappear into hell's icebox.
Nothing to do but think and I don't like the road my thoughts are traveling. I'm so far past exhaustion I am no longer sure what is real, if anything I remember or feel is real. My memories are becoming confused, twisted until I am unsure if they are mirages or simply the confused ramblings of a man on the brink of despair.
I won't, I can't, give up. If this bloody cat dies on me, I'll walk. Won't do Scully much good without a way home, but I'll worry about that part after I get her free. With luck, she'll slide that incredible mind of hers into action and think of a way to get us home. I just have to get to her and everything will be alright. Those words are frozen onto the inside of my windshield.
At least for the first twelve hours of my frantic plunge towards this frozen hell, I was too busy to think. The guys and Skinner make a fearsome team. I'm not sure how I feel about introducing them to each other. I would hate to become superfluous to this quest for the truth. They may decide they can do better without me. If this trip goes wrong, they may have to.
Byers deserves a medal. After one brief goggle-eyed gasp when I blurted out his part in my plan, he dove into the action like a trooper. Never knew a guy could blush that deep a magenta. Made a nice contrast to Langley who was turning paler by the moment as he realized exactly who Skinner was. Says a hell of a lot about his courage that he didn't bolt. He looked as wild-eyed as a spooked horse, however. Your worst nightmare isn't supposed to come busting in on you while you're checking up on a friend too dumb to duck when he sees a gun pointed at him.
Frohike, on the other hand, worries me. I keep trying to figure out what it was about Frohike's reaction to Skinner that bothered me. He was too damn cool with the idea that my FBI superior was now part of our little anti-establishment group. After a muttered 'fucking hell' which I don't suppose I was meant to hear, he acted as if Skinner had been one of the guys for years. They moved like a team - getting Byers striped down and into bed and me into his clothes. I had to be buttoned into his shirt. It wasn't my fault I was seeing double. Two Frohikes standing next to two Skinners, and one of each blending into the other, is a sight that would normally have driven me to drink.
Frohike is a mystery wrapped up in scruffy clothing and I'm not any closer to understanding him even after nearly eight years of knowing him. I am also becoming painfully aware that what I don't know about Skinner would fill the Library of Congress.
Shit! Damn rocks. My insurance company won't be happy if I wreck this thing. Neither will Skinner. It's his ass on the line if I don't come back with this Sno-Cat. That man has contacts everywhere. I am beginning to think that half the fucking world served in the Marines with him in Vietnam. The old school tie club has nothing on the Marines.
Well, the sun is coming out. Damn. Nothing like being out in plain sight in a bright yellow Sno-Cat crossing a white icecap. Maybe I should blow a trumpet or something. God, if you are up there, out there, or whatever, I could really use a little less of the blue skies and sunshine bit right now. Fog would be useful. I've always had a fondness for fog.
A dark alley would be nice. I have spent so much of my life in recent years hugging the shadows that I feel naked here at the bottom of the world moving around in broad daylight. I'm used to secret meetings in dark corners in murky hallways or half-lit underground parking lots; dark men with dark secrets scurrying around in the night following a beacon to my place. I can't even take a leak without somebody popping up out of the shadows with a secret truth they want to tell me.
Poor Kurtzweil. The man was pathetic, but he scared me shitless. Not so much by what he said, but by the simple fact of what he was. I saw myself. That wizened old man skulking in alleys, writing paranoid treatises that sounded like something out of the Star, was my future.
My origins are a confused mass of programmed memories, wisps of disjointed conversations, and a frustrating lack of familial communication, but if someone suggested that Kurtzweil was my father, I think I'd be ready to half believe it. Shit, we even sounded alike - two paranoid conspiracy nuts utterly convinced that we alone hold a fragment of the truth that no one else can see.
He knew my father. Is there anyone in hell or on the fast track there that didn't know my father? I am beginning to think that our house was a pit stop on the scenic route to hell - all the nasty guys stopped there to say hi and pat me on the head. No wonder I'm not anywhere near normal. I was probably dandled on the knees of some of the worst scum of the earth during my impressionable years. Maybe I should be glad I can't remember for sure what my childhood was really like. Maybe I should thank whoever was responsible for turning my memories into scrambled eggs for whatever little sanity I do have.
Fellow travelers, Kurtzweil said. Did he think I wouldn't catch that reference? Dad may not have said much about his past work, but I had a history teacher in high school who made very sure we innocents knew what kind of home-grown monsters our country was capable of spawning. I am beginning to realize now that McCarthy was merely a stupid dupe used by the conspiracy to cover their activities. How many men foolish enough to believe in the Constitution were destroyed by that simple label at the hands of a megalomaniac puppet? How much blood was on my father's hands? How much did I drink in with my mother's milk?
Fuck! If I do manage to rescue Scully, I swear I'll send her away. I'll commend her good sense in deciding to leave me and help her pack her bags. She was right to want to leave. I should have done the honorable thing and let her walk out of my life. Selfish bastard that I am, I just had to pick that moment to realize how empty my life would be and just how much I needed to tell her what she meant to me.
I don't regret that kiss. If I die out here in the middle of nowhere, that kiss will be the last thing that dies inside of me. What I regret is that I left it so long. What was I so afraid of? It is fucking obvious that our enemies know exactly how much she means to me a hell of a lot sooner than I did. I don't suppose there was a shred of doubt in that English bastard's mind that all he had to do was dangle Scully's salvation in front of me and I'd dash off into the wilderness without a second thought.
I'm trying not to dwell on the past - it would seem too much like a eulogy. All those moments with Scully that are now a permanent part of my memory, but I'm greedy for more. I don't want her to live in my memory. I want her beside me, living and breathing and taking my theories apart. I want her to go, to leave me behind and find a life. I need her to stay. I guess in the end, she'll make up her own mind - she always does.
I'm trying to be an optimist without any training whatsoever. Blind faith is not optimism - it's simply a refusal to accept what any sane person would realize is hopeless pursuit. I can't stop. All my life I have believed in extreme possibilities. Now I'm betting my life and Scully's life on the most extreme possibility of all - that against all odds, I can somehow find her and stop the virus before it kills her.
I've got to breathe less, I'm fogging up the damn windshield. It would be just my luck to get this far and drive straight into a crevice. I can't fuck this up - Scully is depending on me. Her unshakable trust that I will always be there for her scares the hell out of me. I'm a bad person to depend on. I keep losing people like other people lose keys. My grip on the important things in life - guns, cell-phones, people, just falls apart. Right now I'm holding on to the belief that I can find Scully and save her with the strength of a desperate man. She has saved me so many times I've lost count. Please, whoever is running the universe, let me save her, just this once. Let me be her knight in shining armor and I'll gladly fumble my gun for the rest of my fucking life.
Engines don't cough. That's not a good sound. Come on! Damn it, the gauge says half-full. Shit! Bloody hell! Ouch! Damn fucking mechanical gizmos. Empty. I'm sitting in the middle of nowhere on an empty gas tank.
OK, so I have a spare tank, but that tank is for getting Scully back home. I should have dropped the heat altogether. I could have made it. What's a little cold? I haven't felt my feet in a couple of hours, but they're still down there. Calm down. Breathe slowly. Concentrate. The coordinates on the GPS look awfully familiar.
My hands are numb as I fumble for the note. I can see the numbers in my head, but I don't trust myself anymore. I'm drifting in and out of reality. I can't chance that a snafu in my memory will lead me off into the snow in the wrong direction to die.
The numbers match. I'm here. Now, if I just knew where in hell 'here' was in relation to Scully.
Time for a little hike. If the Englishman was right, she should be just beyond that ridge. Remembering the lecture Skinner's Marine buddy gave me, I switch over to the reserve fuel tank and shift the engine into neutral and leave it running. Turning off an engine up here without a heat source means a slow death.
I clamber up the ridge faster than I thought possible for my aching body to move. My head feels like someone is bouncing a ping-pong ball off the inside of my skull. I have forgotten what sleep feels like. I feel like that engine. If I turn off for an instant, I'll freeze solid and never move again.
Perched on the ridge, I look down at the base. Three large igloos full of men who will probably take extreme exception to my intrusion into their secrets. Plunging, down the ridge, I can only hope that the guards are sensible men - inside where it is warm.
I should have borrowed a white jacket. My dark jacket stands out against the white snow like a beacon. Maybe no one will think that anyone would be dumb enough to try to sneak into a base located in the back of forever. Nobody but me, of course.
I've pushed my luck beyond all reason, but I have to trust that luck will stay with me just a little longer. Scully's out there somewhere. What was it she once said about me? If they set me down in the desert and told me the truth was there, I'd ask for a backhoe?
Something like that. Well, my truth is out here and someone forgot to order the backhoe.
If I were the bad guys, where would I hide the back door?
"Shiiiitttt........!"
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