A/N: Sorry for the long break in updates! I was going to update, and actually had most of this chapter written since August, but I got a job and then NaNoWriMo happened and ANYWAY it's here now! I am excited for the ~big revelations~ and mystery in this chapter, which will hopefully just make it more interesting going forward!
Ty to hobbit_hedgehog on Ao3 for the beta!
Chapter Nine: Found
Mulder: If coincidences are coincidences, why do they feel so contrived?
28
Lance leaned against one of the shelves as he thumbed through the file. It was old—it was typewritten and most of the dates detailed in it were from the mid-1950s. They were mainly vague descriptions of locations, limes, and events. Some of them were half-gibberish, written in what Lance could only assume was some sort of a code. This had evidently been significant confidential information at the height of Cold War paranoia, and had been duly protected.
He replaced the file on the shelf where he had found it, glancing as he did down to his partner, who was flipping furiously through a ledger of some sort. Lance moved a little way down his row, knowing that he would find the same unintelligible stuff if he kept looking in the same spot.
He went down the stacks, away from Keith, and took a right, heading down two aisles to another row, where he meandered down a bit further before pulling a manila folder out at random. He flipped through a few pages, finding them to be a bit newer than the previous folders. They were typed by a computer or word processor, that was plain to see, rather than a typewriter. The dates of the pages were in the early to mid-nineties, which mean that this facility itself had been used a whole lot more recently than it seemed to have been.
This file was not a list of locations, however, as the previous folders had been. Instead, this had names—names of all genders and ethnic origin, from what Lance could tell—as well as what seemed to be vital statistics and social security numbers before a chunk of text in that coded language he couldn't make out. He scanned over it to see if there was something he could recognize from the previous gibberish he'd looked over, but there were no similarities that he could pick out.
There was something that stood out to him, though. He called Keith over.
"What?" asked Keith.
"Come here," pressed Lance, unable to take his eyes off of the file he currently held in his hand. He heard the footsteps and saw the cell phone flashlight beam as Keith approached, but he didn't look up to him.
"What?" asked Keith, crossing his arms over his chest.
Lance handed him the file, held open to the page that had caught his eye. Keith jerked it away from him. He shone his cell phone flashlight over the sheet, and his narrowed eyes widened as he saw what was written.
"Is this real?" asked Keith, not looking up to Lance as he asked it, unable to pull his eyes away from the document.
Lance nodded. "As real as anything else we've found here."
"Well…" started Keith, but there wasn't more for him to add to his statement. His hands were close to shaking, but he was practiced enough in keeping his emotions controlled that Lance didn't see even a little tremor in his fingers.
"This file, it's… it's got my name." Keith lowered the file and looked to Lance. "This file is about me."
Keith's eyes were wide, a mixture of confusion and fear in his expression, one Lance registered as the most vulnerable he had ever seen his partner. He opened his mouth, about to say something, when the lights came to life all around them, filling the whole underground warehouse with light.
"Someone's here," whispered Lance.
The words didn't seem to register with Keith, who just looked back to the folder in continued stunned silence. Lance swiped his phone's flashlight off and tucked it into his pocket, reaching over to Keith. He caught his arm and pulled Keith to look him in the eye again.
"Keith," he said, still whispering, but with a level and measure countenance. "We need to go. Now."
Lance's partner didn't seem to respond to this, and Lance could hear the echoing sound of footsteps entering the room. Lance glanced over Keith's shoulder, down in the direction where they had entered from. His eyes darted anxiously back to Keith.
He hesitated for a moment, then reached out and grabbed Keith's hand, the one holding his cell phone with the flashlight still on, and pulled him forward.
Keith's hand closed reflexively around the folder—his folder—and clasped around Lance's hand, as well, allowing himself to be led down the rows of files and ledgers.
From somewhere behind them, in the direction of the entrance, Lance heard someone call out, and the other footsteps quickened. There were at least two sets of footsteps, but Lance couldn't tell much more than just that. He pulled Keith down a side-passage and into another aisle of shelves, pausing for a brief moment to catch his breath.
He breathed in through his mouth and out through his nose, the way one of his old classmates had taught him back in Quantico. He had been struggling through some of the training on a particularly foggy early morning, a long run with added obstacles, and the fellow FBI trainee had slapped him on the back before relaying the tip he'd gotten from his high school track coach. It was a simple breathing trick that would help his lungs to absorb more oxygen more quickly.
That was all well and good, but Lance knew that the main reason he was employing this particular technique right now was that it was also the quietest way to breathe when his chest was rising and falling after the quick burst of cardio.
He glanced over at Keith, who seemed to be staring forward and down at one of the shelves in front of him without actually looking at anything at all. Lance became hyper-conscious of his hand, clasped around Keith's wrist, and pulled it away as carefully as he could, as to not elicit any loud responses from his partner. Keith's hand pulled back a bit as Lance let it go, and this cast a shadow of Lance's hand against the shelf behind them, the flash on the camera shining brightly.
"Over there," came a voice from closer than Lance was hoping the other people in the room had made it. They were whispering, but when he was on edge, his heart making the only other sound in the room, thumping in his ears, that whisper seemed louder than a sonic boom. He quickly put a hand over the flash on Keith's camera. This was followed by the footsteps stopping for just a moment before quickening.
"They're coming," whispered Lance, leaning into Keith so he could be even quieter even as he tried to swipe the flashlight off and push his partner to get moving again.
Keith said nothing, and Lance was able to easily wriggle his phone out of his hand. His fingers twitched, but otherwise mostly dangled uselessly as Lance pulled the phone up to where he could see it and swiped the light off.
"Let's go."
Keith allowed himself to be pushed forward and even started to jog as Lance nudged him forward. Lance could hear every tiny squeak of his rubber soles against the concrete floor of the basement warehouse floor, and he hoped that it was just his paranoia and not something that the people chasing them could also pick up on.
He pushed Keith again with the palm of his hand, softly but forcefully, and got him to change direction and begin down a new aisle. Lance could see the folder, still in his hand, and knew that this moment was probably the biggest turning point in Keith's whole life. It would probably be better for them to stop and take a moment to talk about it, discuss it, cope with it at all…
But they were also trespassing in a top-secret federal facility and would most definitely be lucky if they were tried for treason and sentenced to life in prison if they were caught. That was if they made it far enough to be sentenced. He directed Keith down a new aisle.
They were getting closer and closer to the back of the warehouse of shelves. It was a large room, but it was still finite, and that meant that they were going to have to, at some point, turn around and get past the people chasing them. That would mean, at some point, crossing their line of vision down one of the aisles. Lance somehow felt his heart begin to beat even harder.
From somewhere behind them, he could hear the sound of a slew of papers and folders cascading out of the shelves and onto the concrete floor. He was pretty sure he could also hear one of the people following them curse, "Shit!" quickly around the same time.
"Keith," he whispered, leaning close over Keith's shoulder without slowing down, "we need to get back to the entrance." He paused. "Please, we'll deal with the folder later."
Keith didn't appear to hear him at all, and Lance swallowed a scowl of frustration. There would be time to get frustrated later. For now, he had to focus on survival. One of them had to.
He reached one of the aisles—which looked the exact same as the rest of them, with the same width and height and all—and jerked Keith down it behind him, grabbing ahold of his wrist again. He could feel his legs pounding, and he still was careful to touch down on the floor on the balls of his feet to best stay quiet.
He padded forward a bit more before taking a quick glance over his shoulder and then darting forward, running as quickly and quietly as he could back toward the entrance to the basement, toward the stairs that led up back into the desert. He could only hope that they'd be able to make it out past the people who were in pursuit.
Lance clasped his hand tight around Keith's, feeling the cool of Keith's hand even in the heat of the desert building. He pulled him forward and stopped only briefly when the shelf next to him exploded in a shower of papers as a bullet found its home there, a few inches from where his head had just been.
He tensed, ducking down a bit, and then immediately began running again, even faster. This was good because Keith, apparently finally shaken out of his daze by the gunshot, was practically dragging him forward by the hand. Lance almost stumbled, but he found his legs, longer than Keith's but still somehow still struggling to keep up, back underneath him just as a few more gunshots rang out from behind him.
Oh, well, I guess they've found us now, thought Lance as Keith ducked down one of the side-shelves. Lance ducked down after him into the stacks. A moment later he squeezed Keith's hand. Keith's head whipped around, and Lance nodded to the shelf next to them. He wasn't sure if Keith would catch his meaning, but to his surprise, Keith actually took the lead, throwing his shoulder into the shelf. Lance followed along, pushing his shoulder into the long shelf, which was much more solid than he had thought it would be.
After a moment—and in that moment, Lance could feel the perspiration beading up on his face—the shelf began to move. Slowly, at first, but then cascading, knocking into the next shelf, which in turn knocked into the following, rolling over each other like giant conspiracy dominoes.
The gun went off again as another person cried out. Lance paused a moment as one of the people pursuing them let out another shout, and then he grabbed Keith's hand, pulling Keith ahead, toward that door in the corner. Keith allowed himself to be led at first, but then picked up pretty quickly on what he needed to do if he wanted to escape.
When they had made it past the last of the shelves to the door, Lance stopped for a moment to look back at the havoc they'd caused. The back half of the now-lit underground warehouse room was in a state of total disarray, and he could see the shape of some people struggling against the bookshelves that had been pushed down on top of them. For a half a moment, Lance considered going back and helping them up, instead of leaving them there.
Then, he remembered the gunshots, and thought that they could rot in this basement for all he cared.
"McClain, let's go!" hissed Keith, who was already halfway up the stairs. Lance took one last glance at the warehouse, and then he powered up the stairs behind Keith. They both sprinted out of the garage, and when they'd gotten outside, they found a large black SUV with tinted windows parked a dozen feet away from their rental car. As they approached, Lance ducked down quickly to make sure that their tires hadn't been slashed or anything. When he saw that it was fine, he stood up to take the wheel.
Keith was already in the driver's seat, and the car was starting. Lance rushed around to the other side and slid into the passenger's seat.
"Are you okay to drive?" he asked.
His partner replied by shifting into reverse and pressing the gas pedal all the way to the floor, skidding slightly on the desert sand as he turned around before shifting into drive—almost grinding the gears as he did—and pulling away from the secret facility.
29
Lance felt like he had just chugged an entire cup of coffee. His nerves were on fire, his skin felt like it was crawling beneath the clammy, nervous sweat, and his heart was beating like a drum. He could practically feel the anxiety as it spread through his body, now that they were free of the immediate danger, and he couldn't even begin to imagine what Keith must have felt like.
They hadn't said anything in the car, but when they'd gotten back into town, Keith had immediately gone not to their motel but to Pidge and Hunk's house, where the three of them had regrouped and gone to return the rental car. The worst thing that they could have done was to hold onto the one thing by which they could be immediately identified in the small town. As they did this, Lance went back to the motel to retrieve their things. There was not much—just a bag each—but he didn't relish walking across the desert town back to Pidge and Hunk's house with them.
When he had finished all of the work, he had been hot, tired, and sweating, and the excitement of the whole day was wearing off.
That was how he had ended up in the bar. It was called "Jeanie's," but he wasn't sure that there actually was a Jeanie. There was one man behind the bar, and he didn't seem to want to make much conversation beyond asking what Lance wanted to drink before going back to the other end of the near-empty bar to polish glasses.
There were a few other people in the bar, including a couple of middle aged people who must have just come off of work who had some beers and were playing on an obviously tilted shuffleboard that was poorly balanced by a variety of beer-stained coasters. Lance looked down at his own drink—a domestic lager he'd ordered at the last minute when he decided that this bar wasn't going to have any of the more extravagant mixed drinks he'd normally have ordered—and took a sip. It didn't taste as good as a double pomegranate cosmo-rita, but it was cold and it went down really well after the day he had just experienced.
There was something in those files that they weren't supposed to know about. What that was, they weren't any closer to figuring out. All they had was the details that the files had contained, a jumble of coded nonsense, and the knowledge that whatever this database was, Keith was somehow included.
That was what made this more… urgent. There was a fire lit underneath them, so-to-say, to figure out what exactly these files were about. They needed to know because Kogane was involved, and there was no way that they were going to be able to just approach this case from a detached, objective point of view.
Keith was with the conspiracy theorists, and they were probably taking care of him—they were nice, at least, even if some of the things they said didn't make much sense. Hunk would be able to make sure that Keith was comfortable, and Pidge would be able to make sure that he was distracted by some other interesting discovery, but…
Lance did feel some guilt not being there with them right now. He should have been there, to try to begin to work out what was going on with this document with Keith, figure out what was the significance of the code, why it was there, what any of this was. But he needed some space to think, in this moment—he wanted to be able to be able to come up with a rational explanation, or at least a theory, before he spoke with Keith about this again. That way, he'd be able to ground him better, and they would be able to more forward more constructively.
At least, that was what he told himself. Whether or not it was just because he was afraid because he didn't know what to say to someone who was suddenly implicated in a huge government conspiracy he'd been obsessively investigating. He wouldn't know what was right to say to Keith, and he found that more and more, he didn't want to say the wrong thing.
These were the thoughts he had lost himself in when someone approached him and sat down on the stool next to him. He only looked up when this person ordered a drink, because with a mostly-empty bar, it wasn't often that someone would take the set right next to another stranger.
He looked to her and was almost dumbstruck. She was tall, first of all, with dark skin and white, curly hair pulled back into a tight bun under a plain black baseball cap. Her lightweight jacket seemed mainly to protect from the sand of the desert than any heat, otherwise she would have been very overheated in the warmth of Cairn, despite the chilly nights. The bartender poured her the Jack on the rocks and lingered a moment longer than he had with Lance before returning to the far side of the bar.
"Well, hello," said Lance, immediately switching gears to fall into his comfortable and familiar way of speaking with women in bars. "How did a pretty lady like you end up here?"
She took a deep drink out of her drink without looking at him before placing the now almost-empty glass down on the bar in front of her. She paused a moment, and then, as if scripted, she said "Special Agent Lance McClain, you must understand that you're in over your head."
Lance froze. He didn't know this woman or where she had come from, but the fact that she knew who he was and was commenting—he assumed—on what had happened today told him that she was much more than she appeared to be.
"I don't know what you mean," said Lance, his hand clamping around his cool beer just so that it wouldn't tremble. If she was with the government, an undercover agent from that group that seemed to also be pursuing the meteors, that meant that he was in about as much danger as was possible. His mind flitted to Keith, and he realized he was worried about Keith's safety, that there wasn't any agent trying to pin him down at the same time.
"Just know this, Agent McClain," said the woman, still not looking to him, "You have the potential for many allies in what you're doing." She picked up the class in front of her and drained the rest of it. Then, she turned to him for the first time, and he was struck by the depth of her large, gray eyes. "You also have the potential for many more enemies. Tread carefully. We're watching."
With this, she stood and left. Lance wanted to watch her go, but he found that he was staring at the place where she had been sitting, the now-empty seat with the empty glass in front of it. She wasn't from the government, that much was true. She must have been part of the group Keith had theorized, someone who would try to get to the meteorites before the government could. His partner needed to know about this. They had potential allies, at least, which was good because it opened up the possibility of more information on this whole situation.
It also meant that this whole case had become a hell of a lot more complicated.
"Are you going to pay for her drink, or…?" asked the bartender, and Lance shelled out some cash for him without much thought at all. He left his own beer unfinished and walked quickly from Jeanie's. He had a phone call to make.
30
"I have a few questions," said Lance, leaning against the chain-link fence around the lot next to the diner he and Keith had dined at just the other day, a little way down the street from Jeanie's. The desert sky was a purplish shade of dark, and the starts were just beginning to show.
"You have questions?" came the gruff voice from the other end of the line. "I have had seven phone calls asking me to tell them all about you two. And none of them tell me who they are, just that they're of a higher rank than me. I've faced the strangest threats I've ever heard, and I am legitimately worried by them."
"Ross, I—"
"On top of all of that," he said, not letting Lance get a word in, "I told you not to call me."
He was right, and Lance knew that, but…
"I need you to listen. Something happened—the government has a huge warehouse of encoded files, including one with Kogane's information, and it's linked to the Kerberos mission…"
"Are you kidding me?" asked Ross. "I sent you out there to stop this conspiracy theory bullshit, to keep Kogane in check. And there's something here, but I don't want you drinking his alien invasion Kool-Aid."
"Sir, I…"
"Listen, McClain: I'll hold them off. You're smart, and so is Kogane. But I can't do it forever." He sighed. "Figure it out, but be smart about it."
"Yes, sir, but…"
The other end of the line was dead. He jammed his phone in his pocket and looked upward. The sky was clear in Cairn, as it usually was, and he could see the constellations forming in his brain as he scanned the stars, connecting into a full interwoven tapestry of myths. Between all of these myths, a truth connected everything in the sky. The science of the stars, their places in the universe, their processes over billions of years—they were all explainable phenomena.
He began walking toward Hunk and Pidge's house, where he was sure Keith still was. They had to get back together and work toward pulling their own explanation out of these stories.
Mulder: Sometimes the only sane answer to an insane world is insanity.
A/N: ALSO: I'll be writing a piece for the digital version of the Lancito! zine. It's a Lance-centric charity zine that's being created to benefit Cuba and Puerto Rico in the wake of the devastating recent hurricane season. You can find out more about it on tumblr: lancitozine
