Summary: It's 2004. The alien race from Vega makes contact again, and this time they want to visit, and to help the Earth fight the colonization of the virus-born aliens. But what is their true intention? What is the Divine or Demonic nature of the Spaceship that everybody wants, and to whom does it rightfully belong? Is the Earth just a chessboard, or does Humanity have a greater role to play? Starring a cast of characters from the X-Files, Carl Sagan's "Contact", and the "Wrinkle in Time" universe created by the incomparable Madeleine L'Engle. Notes:
Notes: This was first published in February 2002, under an old, old pseudo. I thought I'd join this month's X-fic party and re-release, as many old X-Philes seem to be leaping out the woodwork! (Hello, hello, everyone!) So, with a few minor edits, here is 'Noise and Signal' again, polished and restored to its former...something. To be continued? Possibly. I know it's the most infuriating thing for a fic author to say, but I really don't know!
Disclaimer: Oh, gods above and below, are we still doing these? All right. I disclaim, disavow and deny any ownership of these characters, and do not intend any infringement or material gain from the publication of this thing. This is a work of homage to the creators and actors involved in that sweeping modern epic known as "The X-Files", and the marvellous universes created by Carl Sagan and Madeleine L'Engle, respectively, in "Contact" and the "Wrinkle in Time" series.
Denver, Colorado
January 2004
DaCosta's Inn
Poncha Springs
7:00 a.m.
"Bambi's mother died," Mulder says, in a voice not yet woken.
Scully looks up and ties the knot on her terry robe with more vigour than necessary.
Mulder's bespectacled eyes are blearily fixed on the Denver Post, spread out on the sparkly gold-and-white Formica of the drop-leaf table. The morning sunlight through the little yellow-curtained kitchenette window casts him in a nimbus, blinding her as it caroms off the table, but Scully knows he isn't smiling.
"Bambi of the roaches?" she asks finally, leaning against the matching sparkly countertop. "How?"
She can read the headlines of his newspaper upside-down from where she stands. With one pace she could be standing next to him. One step more, and she'd be tripping over the flowery, ruffly bed. At least the room is clean, assiduously so, with a tang of rose and eucalyptus potpourri that even bleach won't remove. It's sunk into the wallpaper after decades of permeation.
"Alzheimer's, it says. I didn't know she was such an entity in the science world. They gave her four inches and a nice picture. You can see the resemblance."
Tapping a finger on the paper, he throws back half of his coffee at once, and stands up quickly. He feels a sensation of fingers reaching out from dusty files, through all these years, to touch them in this most unlikely of locations. He feels the sympathy of one motherless adult for another, and remembers the strange dreamlike inevitability of the night he met Bambi, drawn like a moth despite himself.
It's a smile, anyway, and that's worth a great deal just now.
He leans on the table and looks out the window, sees great dark pine trees heavy with snow huddling together around the edges of the gravel parking lot. They're starting to steam a little as the sun comes around. A backlit electric sign that advertises, "Da Costa's Motor Inn – Truckers Welcome, Weekly Rates" spins precariously with a creaking protest song straight from the decade in which it was installed.
A few of their overnight guests are making an early start, their rigs warming up and grumbling like dragons.
Their clientele, who are the only people they speak with now, generally stop for the shortest mandatory rest duration before leaving at first light. There used to be a breakfast diner in the portable building next to the office, but it's closed now. Their most recent alter-egos, Mr. and Mrs. Hale, who have recently taken over the motel, have not decided how long they will stay, and hiring restaurant staff would mean that their lives would become common knowledge in the community.
But the drivers don't care. A comfortable, clean bed, a chance to phone home, and free, strong coffee in the lobby is all they ask for. One of the drivers spots Mulder standing in the window of the Caretaker's cottage, and waves, a friendly bulldog wrapped in flannel and denim. Mulder waves back, once, and the driver catches hold of his steering wheel and swings up into his cab, moving into gear and out of their lives.
Mulder watches him ease his way down the driveway, and sees the shimmer of hard frost on the truck's sides. And afterwards, a waver of an outline moving across the gravel road, like an afterimage of a human, that sends a nauseating pyloric tremor through him.
Great.
Get out of my head. Not now.
I need to get out of my head.
As he turns away to get dressed for his morning run, Scully pretends she isn't watching him, or checking out the protruding knobs of his backbone. She makes a show of reading the Berenbaum obituary. She smiles at the memory of her own adolescent posturing when she first met Berenbaum's daughter, and the frisson that arced between herself and Mulder as they stood watching her walk away. She'd give a lot for a moment of high absurdity these days.
Mulder begins jogging before he is even out the door. It clicks behind him.
She lets out her breath slowly. Sets her half-drunk coffee cup in the sink beside his, and pulls her thick robe more tightly around her.
The temperature has been dropping steadily every week. It's down to zero Fahrenheit this morning. Next winter, if they are still alive, they should head somewhere south, she thinks. When they first began running they had been so preoccupied with staying alive, or staying sane, that they didn't even think of winter.
It was due to Krycek's intervention, and Mulder's decision to trust him just this once, that they had found Da Costa's Inn, a small wayside truck-stop that required a caretaking couple, and provided accommodation and an adequate salary.
"You're gonna die of pneumonia if you keep sleeping in that damn van all winter, which is a shame, really, because I wanted to see your face when you found out I was right all along." Krycek had told Mulder.
Scully had glanced up at Mulder as he sat across from her in the diner, somewhere in Roanoke. He was glaring at something beside her. All the nerves in her flesh had rapid-fired in repulsion, the skin of her arms and back horripillating, and she'd drawn back into the corner as far as she could, away from what only Mulder could see.
She knew who it was. There was only one of them who seemed to appear in public, who enjoyed watching them chew on his words, unable to talk back to him without appearing nuts.
"And your girlfriend won't be in any condition to doctor you, either," he had continued, glancing at Scully with something like pity.
Neither Mulder nor Scully believed that death made all men noble, especially when they had changed sides more often during their life than a laundered dollar. Regardless, sleeping in the van had begun to take its toll. She had a troubling rattle in her chest when she woke up, and Mulder, when he slept, thrashed in the grip of night-terrors he hadn't experienced since he first became an only child.
In the week between Krycek's pointed suggestion, and their new roles as Mr. and Mrs. Hale, that pleasant new Canadian couple in town, Mulder had been almost silent.
He stared out the car window, and picked at his food when they stopped. He no longer badgered her about her little feet but let her drive on and on, until at last she would pull over, road-buzzed and thirsty, feeling as though the highway was slipping out from under her, a living, riverlike thing, purring and stretching as she furrowed in its silver coat with her wheels.
Krycek's spotted history notwithstanding, it was time to rest.
DaCosta's Inn had been home and employment for three months now. The pause in their nomadic life had been a relief at first. There had been moments of peacefulness and even lightness. They had even held a small Christmas Dinner for a few rig drivers who were stuck on the road away from their families, or who were trading the loneliness of an empty apartment for a fat Stat Holiday paycheque.
Scully had not sought out a Midnight Mass nearby, as she usually did, and Mulder had not mentioned it.
They hadn't realized how desperately they needed to rest. After spending a year on the road, hiding and healing, they had finally begun to find their rhythm again, their counterpoint harmony and natural syncopation. They felt once again the pioneer rush of entering unmarked land, of being the only two people alive who knew what they knew.
Not that they hadn't been helped. Many times.
Scully had never seen what Mulder finally admitted to seeing, but she knew the stamp of a Gunmen-inspired solution when she saw one. Credit cards. Phone cards. Mulder's ability to find friendly towns that asked no questions, or well-hidden camping spots, all without a map. The time for exposition and action had not yet come. The Gunmen kept them moving, and for good reason. A year was nothing to the men who planned their actions for generations in advance.
Besides the Gunmen and Krycek, they had only each other. Since everyone else they knew was either too well-liked or delicately placed to contact, they had taken turns dragging one another back from the gaping abyss of terror, futile rage, depression and bouts of suicidal homelust time after time, out of relentless, grinding necessity and fierce and stubborn love.
Other people could disappear, create new lives, enter Witness Protection, but not them. They were known, they were targeted, and for all they knew, the damned chip in Scully's neck was still reporting their every word and movement, her body programmed to go into auto-destruct again at its removal.
And yet they lived. Scully had started to believe she would see her son again, even hold him.
One night she gathered her courage, and whispered into the back of Mulder's shoulder her desire to be a family again, just the three of them, living somewhere within a walk of Maggie and Bill and Charles and their quickly growing families. Maybe a little girl next, for them to raise together in safety. If one miracle, why not two?
Mulder had hummed low in acknowledgement and reached back for her hand. At first she thought he was telling her to go to sleep, but then she felt a shudder and he pulled her hand up to press against his lips already slippery with tears. What else, after all, had he ever wanted, in his entire life, but the circle of a loving family, safe from harm? And to give her the same? And when had it ever been farther from his grasp?
She held him tighter. She didn't know what else to do.
The Gunmen had been busy this month. Several times, Scully had opened her wallet to pay a waitress or shopkeeper, and had found a photograph among the bills. The first time it happened, Mulder had had the blind luck to be watching her fingers, as he sometimes did. When he saw the edge of the thick paper and the bright red of Osh Kosh overalls, his hand went for hers like a snake and held it tight, but could not forestall her brittle cry.
She cussed at him like the Navy brat she was, when he wouldn't let her look at the photo but made her wait until they were slightly safer at full speed along the highway. Her wracking sobs and subsequent all-night silence validated his concern, and did nothing to quell his own reaction. Their son was growing up to look like an equal composite of them. He felt like he'd been kicked in the gut, and proud as hell all at once.
They have six photos now, received in six different states, all carefully cropped to wallet size. William pottering around, dragging a wooden duck on wheels. William grinning his lopsided Muldergrin at someone. William serious and a little pissed off. William riding in a harness on his adoptive father's back, twisting around to watch the photographer. William sleeping in his first pair of real big-boy pyjamas, having kicked the covers off himself in sleep and sprawled his long limbs all over his bed. William staggering towards the photographer with his arms out, his squeal of delight almost audible.
Despite the hurt, they never look at the photographs in sadness. They pick the moments when they are strong, together, even angry – but they will never burn the images of the little boy into their minds as an object of despair. He is theirs, created by them, meant for them, and they for him.
In the tiny trailer, Scully shakes her head and gathers up her clothes on her way to the shower stall. Maybe it's time to re-think that policy. It's been a long time since they shared those photos, and she thinks that it might do them both a world of good right now.
Despair is their worst enemy, Mulder reminds her sometimes, sounding like a well-trained desert Fremen. When he utters these things, Scully thinks of Jesus' time in the desert, and wonders what he would do if she were not with him. He is altering before their eyes, adrift in a new land that has nothing to do with route maps and fuel prices. He's as deep as a moon crater and as likely as not to counter his own resonant truths with a self-deprecating retort, as if assuring her of his fallible humanity. She wishes he wouldn't. The truth of him is what relentlessly carved at the walls of her heart like a sea-cave.
She sees in his eyes a reflection of the awe she feels for him at those times, when she picks herself up again after what she politely calls a bad night, and says to him, let's keep going.
At night he strips down mechanically, in front of her searching gaze and aching heart, and unravels just enough to gather her close, curling her into his lightly furzed chest like a great warm bear, his breath rough in her hair, whispering sorry I'm sorry Dana I'm so sorry it's not you it's not you. She knows. He is an unwitting radio, tuned to some frequency she cannot access. His energy is being transmuted. And she has to admit she is relived. She can't even think of sex without thinking of William, and anyway, she has a profound feeling that she no longer knows him as a lover, not this changed Mulder. It serves them both to simply hold each other through the long sleepless nights.
"Can you tell me what they tell you?" she asked him last week, low pillow murmurs for the pleasure of the sound, and he shook his head.
"It's all broken-up now, since we stopped. It's just sounds that seem like language now and then. Overlayered, like being stuck between stations. But we're not supposed to move yet. I think something's shifting around in their world, or maybe in ours, but they haven't figured out how to work with it."
"Can you, I don't know, fine-tune?"
"Being haunted isn't the same as being sensitive, or even superperceptive, Scully. You know that. You're the sensitive one. This is different. They come to me and find a way in when and how they choose."
She sighs, knowing a little of what he's done in the past to numb himself to the visions and voices, and wonders what else there was she didn't know about during his absence.
"Do you think," she asked carefully, sidestepping the mousetrap he'd set for her, "that you've developed, or have realized, medium-like qualities? That you can suspend your own consciousness and let others enter, or enter into others yourself?"
The state of Mulder's consciousness was a thing they discussed as if they were the parents of a child with some undiagnosed condition, fear giving way to love and acceptance in a neverending cycle of resolution and pain and impossible questions. There was no way to know the extent of the damage wrought upon his fine mind, through impromptu brain surgery, or Fowley's drugs, or the undiagnosed lesions he might still be carrying. Or perhaps it was the normal human aftereffects of extreme mental and physical trauma. Or maybe he was evolving beyond documented human progress and they had only the phenomenal evidence of eyes and hearts to guide them.
Most times, he went along gamely, behaving as a self-aware guinea pig. Sometimes not.
"Do you know," he had replied, "that you're speaking in redundancies, as though the lack of specific terms can somehow be remedied by overabundance?"
"Well." She had closed her eyes and burrowed more tightly into his chest, "I'm trained to think in scientific terms. You're the one with the humanities background."
"I wasn't criticizing." Then, after a pause, "Deflecting, sure."
"I didn't take it as such. Not from you."
After the past year of infrequent, exhausted motel stops to sleep indoors, wash their clothes and switch the registration plates on the van again, they are making up for lost time. Long, wordy explorations of shared experience and individual reality. Transcending the conversation itself to agree upon terms and meanings and to examine their own discussion patterns. Often naked and neatly paralleled on whatever bed they had, not touching except for their linked fingers as communication aids.
She found herself observing them as from above, one rainy night in November, but when she opened her mouth to tell him, she found herself shaking in his arms, needing instead to touch his solidity, to be held and anchored within the reality she was used to. She told herself it was a symptom of high anxiety, to have bodily dissociations.
Except she hadn't been anxious, and she wasn't dissociative.
She realized then that if that small subversion of perception caused such anxiety in her, that Mulder must either be suffering deeply and silently, was mentally looser in the hinges than she, or was truly extraordinary in his ability to accept the radically altered scape of his experience.
She has come to suspect that he has more changes to undergo, and perhaps has been in a chrysalis-state lately, rather than depressed. His sleep is unnaturally deep and his energy sporadic, his movements jerky as a teenager, and his eyes always in the middle distance.
A wave of painful love sweeps her, and she swallows hard. Once again she commits herself firmly to remaining beside this strange and fugitive man, her best friend and erstwhile lover, her spirit-mate, co-parent and husband in all but signature.
Some questions she doesn't ask. Does Krycek have one arm or two now? Are the Gunmen any less paranoid, and did they find out who really killed JFK, and why?
Whatever happened to Skinner?
Does Emily ever come to him, or is she all hers?
Would he tell her if he saw William?
