Title: The Further Adventures of Agent Pendrell
Author's notes: AU. Pendrell lives, and gets in way over his head. But hey, for once, he gets to be the hero. Spoilers for everything up to Redux and Redux II (season 5) and a little little bit of Jump the Shark. And probably more, too, but whatever.
Rating: T for a couple of naughty words.
He gets shot. His lung collapses. His arm won't ever be quite the same again. But Pendrell's alive, and that's so much better than dying after drunkenly walking into a bullet.
Scully- surely he can he call her Dana, in his own mind- visits him once in the hospital, but he was doped up to the gills and babbles about how pretty she looks when she shoots people and even sings "Happy Birthday." Once again, he gets to see her special "you're an idiot" expression.
He keeps her "get well" card in the first drawer of his desk, and wonders if he has to wait until her next birthday to ask her if she wants to go for a drink.
Because he watches her so closely, he knows something is wrong. No one else seems to notice that she has grown quieter, that her gaze and her fingertips linger on unexpected objects, that she speaks of tomorrow and next week and next month with an uncertain catch in her voice. Mulder knows, he can tell, but he doesn't want to think too closely about that. Imagining them confiding just makes him jealous and depressed.
Dana has brought him a sample of what appears to be bear fur (though according to Mulder, it could be Bigfoot hair- but he's pretty sure it's bear fur) and her nose bleeds onto his sterile countertop.
"It's cancer. Terminal," she tells him, with clinical detachment, when he brings her tissues. He fumbles the box- his left arm is still in a sling- and apologizes, over and over.
The fingers not holding the stained Kleenex lightly touch the bridge of her nose. "Not your fault," she replies, smiling, but it doesn't reach her eyes.
"What- how-" He doesn't know what he's trying to say. Maybe why, or God, why is this happening, or- "Is there anything that can be done?" Is there anything I can do?
Her eyes glance at his chemicals and gadgets and lab instruments, and he can feel her weighing his possible credulity against his- their, actually- shared love of hard science. After a brief moment of hesitation, she sits down on a stool and tells him about her disappearance, the strange tests that she is just starting to remember, Betsy Hagopian, Penny Northern. About all the other women with scars on the back of their necks, who had also removed their implants and died because of it.
To his dismay and utter humiliation, he cries when she tells him about the microchip, the one he inadvertently destroyed during his tests. She ends up comforting him, and she's the one who is dying.
He sends queries to just about every tech company, medical research facility, and nutcase Internet forum in the world, but receives no helpful information. This isn't a spy movie, he doesn't have contacts and secret signals and all that crap- like that even exists in real life. Really, when it comes down to it, he's a lab rat, and what was he expecting, anyway? But he has to try. Her cancer developed when the chip was removed; maybe a replacement could send it into remission.
One of the companies he contacts is called Roush. It responds with an obviously automated email about catheters, and Pendrell doesn't bother to follow up.
However, unbeknowest to Pendrell, a man with a box of Morleys in his pocket makes a trip to an Pentagon storage facility. He removes a slim metal capsule from a cardboard box, chain smokes three cigarettes, and leaves an identical but empty capsule in its place.
Some months later, the day that Mulder is declared dead, a not-so-dead man will walk into a government warehouse and steal the empty capsule, desperate for a cure.
When Byers declares that it only contains deionized water, Mulder wishes he really had died in his apartment.
Pendrell sits slumped over his computer. He doesn't know what else to do, because Scully is in the hospital and it's no longer a matter of if or when. His fingers fly over the keyboard, each message a scream for help, from anybody. The only replies he gets, now, at 4AM EST, are from UFO and abductee groups, and not the normal ones either, but the tweaking tech nerds who don't sleep at night and can only write sorry, man, screw the system and screw the alien man.
"We have nothing to do with those kinds of abductions." A cigarette glows red from Pendrell's open doorway. "They're drug addicts, mostly unexceptional physical specimens. If they can't remember a week or two or five, surely there's a simpler explanation than extraterrestrials."
The man is old, but something about him makes Pendrell wish he still had his gun. Even with physical therapy, he couldn't have expected to pass his firearm qualifications quite yet, and besides, lab work isn't the field. But now he was unarmed and cornered in a mostly empty FBI building, and if this man is harmless, Pendrell would eat his own microscope.
"What do you want." She's dying, and he doesn't have time for bullshit.
Wrinkled fingers hold out a little silver tube. "If you damage this one, I won't bring you another. Inject it where the other was implanted, at the base of her neck. Long term, it is best stored in deionized water, but surely you will not hesitate to put it to use." He chuckles as Pendrell pries open the lid and taps the contents into a small dish, fingers hastily adjusting the settings on the microscope as he shoves it underneath the lens. The view focuses on a small, complex microchip, as inscrutable and mysterious as ever.
Pendrell looks up at the smoking man. "Why?"
"Why, what?" the man replies, mockingly.
Pendrell stammers, inarticulate, attempts to voice questions he cannot understand himself. "Why... well, why! Why me, why her, why now?"
The man pauses, takes a pensive drag from his cigarette. "Because you asked, so persistantly. I find it charming, a breath of fresh air from Mulder's base threats," he says, tapping his finger on the computer monitor, where Pendrell had been composing yet another desperate email. "Because we needed test subjects, and Dana Scully is, as you know, an exceptional woman." Pendrell holds his breath, releasing only when the man exhales, a long, smoky sigh. When he finally speaks, his voice is hard and practical. "And I bring this cure to you now, because I need Mulder to be useful, not broken."
Pendrell can feel the blood rush to his face. "You son of a bitch."
"And," the man continues, perhaps a little more gently, "because I am fond of Agent Scully." He stubs the remains of his cigarette on the counter and walks to the door.
"Thank you," Pendrell says, despite himself.
The man turns back to him, and Pendrell thinks he looks surprised. "You're very welcome."
The door clicks shut, and the footsteps fade down the hallway. Pendrell picks up a clean pipet and a flask of deionized water. Turns out he's one hell of a lab rat; his hands don't even tremble as he transfers Dana's life from the dish back to the tube.
Mulder's head was in his hands, doubled half over in his chair. He could hear Scully's mother sobbing, and wondered if he should go ahead and let Bill Scully kill him before Skinner shows up to claim the honor.
He could hear loud, echoing footsteps even before the door to the stairwell slammed open. Mulder was on his feet, gun drawn and pointed at the shorter agent before he knew what he was doing. "Pendrell?"
"Agent Mulder?" Pendrell said, for once without his usual brand of wide-eyed bewilderment. "You're ... not dead?"
Mulder's involuntary laugh caught in his dry throat. "Not this time. But what..." Mulder trailed off. Pendrell's stiff fingers uncurled slowly from the capsule clenched tightly in his good hand. "Where did- is that what I- Pendrell-"
The other man just looks at him, weary and frightened. "I think," Pendrell says, slowly, "I think you know who gave this to me. And I think you know what this is."
A long pause, as Mulder and Pendrell both regard the little tube and all that it means. "Pendrell, you're a god among men. Get her doctor. I'll wake her up."
"You know," Mulder tells him, days later, sleep-deprived and positively giddy from success, "you're absolutely fucked now."
"What do you mean?" Pendrell asks, distractedly. Dana smiles at him, weak and tired but wonderfully alive. He can't stop looking at her.
"That man. The smoking man." Mulder snorts. "We have a history. He's no good, Pendrell. I don't know how you found him, or what you promised him, but he's going to collect at some point. And then you're fucked."
Pendrell spreads his hands, shrugging. "I- well, he just gave it to me."
"He doesn't just give anything to anybody."
"I don't even know why he brought it to me, I'd never seen him before in my life." Pendrell sagged deeper into his uncomfortable hospital chair, wondering what the hell he had gotten himself into.
A nasal voice interrupted from the doorway. "You've been bitching into the endless ether of the 'net for, like, months, asshole," a youngish blond man says snidely. "I'm sure the smoking man and every other person noticed. We did."
"You must be Agent Pendrell," one of his companions interrupted, walking over to shake his hand. "I didn't even stop to think what the deionized water might be for! John Fitzgerald Byers," he added, as an afterthought.
Pendrell is immensely qualified to identify nerds, being one himself, and these three definitely fall into distinct nerd catagories- though he's not entirely sure why the smallest, frog-like man is wearing a tuxedo to a hospital. "You might be interested to know," said the frog, introduced as Frohike, "that your public posts have been disappearing since yesterday. Someone is systematically deleting them. Probably our smoking friend."
"No," said Skinner from the doorway, quietly. "It isn't him." Skinner hovers by the doorway, his eyes on Dana. After a long, thoughtful, meaningful moment, she smiles, and he enters the room. "The smoking man is dead."
The uproar quiets down after a nurse threatens to kick them all out and ban them from visiting.
Mulder sits with the bloody photo of him and his sister in his hands, and to everyone's surprise, his face screws up in pain and sorrow. He sits silently as Skinner tells them about Roush- "I contacted those guys!" exclaims Pendrell, but at least three people tell him simultaneously to pipe down- and about the murders of the smoking man and Blevins. In hushed tones Skinner reveals his past dealings, shocking Pendrell, who had never imagined the stern assistant director engaging in such sordid things. Mulder and Scully, and then the Lone Gunmen, disclose what few facts they had discovered about the elusive smoking man.
"He said he was Samantha's father. He brought her to me, and now he's dead," Mulder says dully. The edges of the bloody picture are crumpled in his fists, lasting proof of some strange, undefinable affection.
"You have his DNA," Pendrell points out, ever the lab tech. "And you've got to have some of hers, right? Test it. See if he was telling the truth."
"If the blood is his," Scully replies, skeptical. The others have been stunned to silence, but the scientists in the room are carrying the day.
Pendrell considers this, and shakes his head. "He left a cigarette butt in my lab. We can cross-test it."
"I don't think any of us are hurting for cigarette butts," Skinner says, wry and deadpan. "He leaves them everywhere. I've got Ziploc bags full of them."
Mulder's mouth is hanging open, and Langley snorts. "As paranoid as you are, you're saying that you never-"
They almost get booted from the hospital, but Skinner has the gall to pull his badge and pretend this was an official FBI interview.
"Mulder," Pendrell says, holding several interesting DNA results in his hands, "I think there's something you need to know."
Years later, Pendrell and the Lone Gunmen pull the fire alarm. His life flashes before his eyes, and almost all of it is her; the last clear thing he sees before he dies is Dana, holding little William, and he hopes that he has made her life a little better, a little safer, a little happier, and-