A/N: ty to hobbit_hedgehog for the help AS ALWAYS with the beta... a lot of this chapter was written past my bedtime while I was microsleeping so apologies for the MOST typos ever in the first draft lmao


Decipher


Scully: Mulder… let's get a team out here. Let somebody else do this.

Mulder: Help me, Scully.


34

It had been less than a minute before they had picked Lance up in Hunk's SUV—which he was driving, white-knuckled, Keith backseat driving from the seat just behind him the whole time. "You called just as we were about to call you," said Keith. "Pidge's instruments picked up on the falling meteorites—or debris." He paused. "Where were you, anyway?"

Lance opened his mouth to come up with a reply when Hunk took too tight a left turn off of the old highway and into the desert, sending Keith, who, in his haste to get going, had not buckled his seatbelt—sprawling onto his partner. He pulled himself up and off of Lance, giving Lance the half-moment he needed to realize just how sweaty he was from walking around in the desert sun. As soon as that had passed, he shoved Keith up and away from him. "Get offa me!" he grunted, and Keith made it back into his seat just in time for Hunk to pull a quick stop, almost slamming Keith's face into the back of the headrest.

"Let's go," said Lance, patting Keith's shoulder as he unbuckled his seatbelt and quickly exited his side of the car.

Lance squinted against the sun, but he found that his eyes adjusted pretty quickly. In front of them, about fifty yards away, was an impact crater. It was not large—maybe seven or eight feet in diameter, by Lance's estimation, and shallow. There was debris and scattered rock all around the site, but the whole team ignored the outer debris and walked toward the epicenter.

"We're the first ones here," said Hunk, his eyes rapidly scanning the horizon around them. Pidge was next to him, not looking up from their small, handheld instrument.

"Something with an impact that big, falling from the high you've postured…" murmured Lance, glancing down at Pidge's device. They pulled it away from him.

"It means you can do the math without breathing down my neck and reading over my shoulder," said Pidge. They adjusted their glasses. "And you're right—this is the biggest meteor we've had yet—it's probably the only reason you were able to see it during the day."

The actual impact must have come while they were bouncing around in the back of the car—it was the only reason they hadn't felt the faint tremor undoubtedly given off by an impact of that size. Lance knelt down to get a closer look at the crater, but Keith stepped right past its boundaries to the large piece of debris in the center.

"Pidge, Hunk, do you have any ideas about what this is?" he asked, squinting against the sun as he examined it closer. Lance stood up from where he was kneeling at the edge of the small crate and joined them at the meteorite itself.

The chunk reached just past Lance's knees, and was about three feet by five feet, a jagged, almost squarish lump. He knelt down next to it in order to inspect it further.

The piece was definitely roughed up from its fiery fall from the lower atmosphere. Lance reached out to touch it, and soon found that it was not as hot to the touch as he would have expected, for something that had fallen as far as it did. At least, he didn't pull away with any new burns, as he probably should have.

In fact, when he pulled his hand away, he didn't feel any pain at all. It was warm from the hot desert air, but expressed none of the appropriate heat from a sub-orbital drop, as they'd assumed it had fallen.

"Hey," said Hunk, calling the attention of their small group, pointing toward the west. There was a faint line of dust kicking up on the horizon, on the way toward them from the opposite direction of town. Something was coming.

"Whatever we're doing here,' said Lance, "let's hurry it up and do it quick—we're going to have some company very soon."

The others looked up an immediately saw the source of his urgency. Pidge looked to Hunk with a face they must have, just judging by his reaction, given to him more than a couple of times before.

"No," said Hunk, looking down at the space artifact. "There is no way I'm going to be able to get that in the back of the car."

"Not even if we all help you?" asked Pidge.

"Not even then," said Hunk, shaking his head. Lance could see that his head wasn't the only thing that was shaking; he could see the tremor in Hunk's hands as he responded to his roommate.

"So we can't take it with us," said Lance, "what's our next step?"

"We could talk to them, and…" Keith shook his head. "There's four of us, so we have some numbers, but I know that the government has made larger groups disappear with less of a fuss than you'd think."

"Dammit," said Lance.

Keith stopped and turned to him. "You care, don't you?"

"Of course! There's someone coming for us, and we need to get out of here! I do have a sense of self-preservation, Kogane." But Lance knew that he wasn't just talking about being interested in getting out in the quickest way possible. Lance had to admit to himself, though he didn't think he would ever admit this to Keith as well, that he was very interested in this piece of space junk, this rock that was so clearly not just a rock, and that he didn't want to leave behind the one real tangible piece of evidence they'd found of extraterrestrials since they'd come out here. If it was from an extraterrestrial craft, that was. He still wasn't sold on that. But this would be the thing that would be able to prove or disprove it, if it was…

Even as they all fretted, the cloud of dust grew larger. Lance reached into his pocket and pulled out his cell phone, snapping a few pictures of the thing from a few different angles. Pidge noticed what he was doing, and they moved next to him to see what he had gotten. "No," they said, "get that side." They pointed to one of the corners, and Lance dutifully followed their directive. As he finished the pictures, he slid his phone back into his pocket.

"Even if we can't take it with us, we can still have proof," said Lance.

"I'll do you one better," said Keith. Before Lance could ask him what he meant by that, he took a step toward the piece of debris, grabbed ahold of a jagged edge that was twisted, where it had evidently broken free from the rest of whatever this thing was and placed the heel of his shoe firmly against the piece of debris.

"Keith! What are you doing?" exclaimed Pidge, throwing their hands up in horror. "You're corrupting the sample! We don't know what you might be doing to it, and…"

"The people coming behind us are also going to want it in one piece," said Keith, yanking on the chunk he had in his hand, his forearms straining as he pulled. "So far as I think about it, we're better off with a chunk and they can have whatever shit we leave behind."

"As a scientist, I hate this," said Hunk, "but as a potential secret government captive, he has a good point."

Keith just pulled harder again, the sweat standing out against his forehead. Some hair had plastered there, right above his eyes, which were intensely focused on his task.

Lance looked from his partner to the dust cloud, which he could now see what much closer than it had been before. He could make out that it was a black car, and that was just familiar enough to motivate him to move just a little faster.

"Let's go," he said, catching Keith by the arm and Hunk with a glance. Keith pulled one last time, the chunk coming off in his hands and sending him sprawling backward before catching his footing again and allowing himself to be led back toward the SUV. "We don't have time to talk about this here."

Hunk bounded toward the car, reaching it first and starting it up. Pidge was the las tone to join them all at the car, scrambling after them and sliding into the backseat next to Lance.

Moments later, they were off, forming their own cloud in the desert to mirror the one from which they were fleeing. In Keith's hands was a chunk of the metal to mirror the much large bulk they'd left in the crater, disappearing in the rearview behind them.

35

They couldn't have been back at the house for more than a half an hour before Keith disappeared. Lance didn't say anything at first, just skulking around the house a bit as Hunk and Pidge did their work on the little bit that Keith had broken off when they had escaped. They were looking at it under microscopes and scanning it with a number of instruments that looked mostly homemade. Lance didn't step in because he knew that his expertise was much more "telescope" big-picture than the microscope they were using.

He was hoping that he'd be able to talk to Keith for a little bit, at least. He should have been in a good mood after the positive developments of the case in finding the new piece of meteorite debris, and it would be as good a time as ever to talk to him and let him know that he could be there for him, sort of like how Shirogane had told him to. That was something he was looking forward to doing, that is, if he could find Keith at all. However, his partner seemed to be nowhere to be found.

He expressed his concern for Agent Kogane to the other two, but they both just shrugged. "He's been in and out the whole time we've been working with him," said Hunk, "I don't know if he's checking out a new lead or if he's just down at the diner."

"He did the same thing online," said Pidge. "Like, on the message board. He was much more of a lurker than a poster." They paused. "At least, until there was something that really got him heated." They turned back to the tinkering they were doing with an instrument that looked to Lance to be something like a plugged-in electric magnifying glass. What the electric part was for, he wasn't sure, and he turned away before he could find out.

"Do you think he's doing to be okay, going out on his own?" asked Lance, looking toward the door. It was closed against the oppressive New Mexico heat.

Pidge shrugged. "You managed fine on your own, didn't you?" they said without looking up.

"He's got survival instincts," said Hunk, "I'm sure he'll be fine."

Lance let it slip and felt the concern for his partner settle somewhere between his heart and his lung, there to push on his breathing and his heartbeat until they found Keith again. It wasn't that he didn't trust Keith to protect himself, it was just that they were dealing, they assumed, with some pretty dangerous people. So he worried.

He typed out a text to Keith: "where r u?" But then he deleted it and just called his cell phone, selecting the "Agent K. Kogane" contact and pressing the little green phone icon. It rang for a minute before going to voicemail.

"This is Agent Kogane. Leave a message." The whole thing wasn't five seconds long. Lance didn't leave a message, he just ended the call and slipped his phone back into his pocket. His partner was competent and smart, but there were powers conspiring against them that made him uneasy when he didn't know where Keith was. It wasn't like when he had slipped away to talk to Shiro—Keith had been distracted by his talk with Pidge and Hunk about their shared theories. Lance was friendly with them, but he didn't have the same obsession; he couldn't get lost about it. So he just stood a little way off, eventually wandering into the kitchen, worrying about Keith.

He wondered what Shiro felt like, if this was what he always felt like, a brother figure of sorts for Keith. Lance felt that pain in his chest again and pushed that image out of his mind. Instead, he wandered away from Hunk and Pidge to the door to the garage, looking out through the door after he opened it and upward toward the sky. It wasn't totally black yet, but it was getting there. The sun was casting a brilliant set of hues, the rocks below, and the purple shade of dusk. In the sky's brilliant color, Lance could make out the patterns of constellations as they began to appear in the mutable sky. He breathed in the fresh, dry air of the desert and looked around him. Keith wasn't out here, but he imagined that unless Keith was down in a basement room like the one they had both visited the other day—the one with the shelves and shelves of files and information—he would be somewhere with a view of the same stars. That might be something to take comfort in—even though the whole universe was currently and constantly growing, changing, and expanding, the earth was in its same spot, at least according to the scope of human knowledge. That wasn't to say, Lance reasoned with himself, that the earth wasn't moving; he knew that it was drifting away from the Big Bang spot, as all matter was—according to all known laws of physical and astrophysical science—but to people? To him, and to Keith, and to everyone else on the planet? The place where the earth was in a constant. And the stars they saw from that stationary earth were vast and unchanging as well in their ancient capacity.

And even though he was the same person, Lance McClain, former astrophysicist and current FBI agent, he was changing in relation to the world around him. Even if everything else seemed the same, that didn't mean that he was the same. He was seeing things differently—he was taking seriously the idea that there might be crash-landed alien technology on earth (or, at least, he was allowing for the benefit of a doubt). He was opening himself up, emotionally—something he rarely did despite his old reputation for being a flirt back at Quantico and in the physics department.

The way in which he was allowing himself to be seen—to be really seen, not just doing a dumb "never have I ever" or a "five questions" thing at a college community building activity he was forced to go do because his RA was finally taking her responsibilities seriously. He was allowing the side of him that felt things, that sometimes thought with his heart rather than his head and brought him rashly and abruptly to a different place than he'd originally intended to go. And that scared him. Especially when he was realizing pretty quickly that he felt things about his partner. Protective things. He was his partner, after all, and it would make perfect sense for him to be completely worried about where he was going, and wanting to make sure that he would come back safely, and be even more worried when he slipped off without letting him know where he was going…

Hunk shook him out of his daze, waving a hand in front of his face. "Earth to Lance," he said. Then, he took a step back and put the kitchen phone back into its receiver. "I just got the call from Shay. Her grandmother was able to translate the file."

Lance almost shook his head in disbelief. "Really?" he asked. "What did it say?"

Hunk shook his head. "Shay said her grandma wouldn't tell her, but I gave her the number for the fax machine at the post office. She said she'd have her fax it over in about fifteen minutes."

Lance nodded. "Let's go get it, then!" he said. He turned to find his partner before immediately realizing that he was without him again. "Er… should we wait for Keith to get back?"

"Depends on what's in the file," said Hunk. "We'll probably want to go get it anyway, rather than leave it there."

"Yeah," said Lance, but he knew that without Keith, this wouldn't be as sweet a victory, if that was what it was.

36

The report came through slowly, and that was the most frustrating part to Lance. He could see the printer shaking as the message came through, and he was mentally willing it to go faster. Not that it would do anything, but he stared at it intensely as if it would. As soon as it was done, the postal worker snatched it off of the printer tray and handed it to Lance quickly, as if sensing that he was nearly about to leap over the counter to get it from her anyway.

"What's it say?" asked Pidge, standing on their tiptoes, trying to see what Lance was reading on the page.

"Should we wait for Keith for this?" asked Hunk, looking around the nearly-empty post office. "I mean, it's about him, right?"

Lance heard this suggestion, and Lance was pretty sure that he was right. But that didn't mean that he wasn't curious. And that didn't mean that he hadn't already voraciously read half of what the even, measured handwriting—with a faint wiggle, indicative of an elderly hand—and was continuing on down the page, his eyes darting left and right as he took in all of what she had translated.

"Holy shit," said Lance, taking a step back to catch himself, as if what he had just read had knocked him back off of his feet.

"What is it?" asked Pidge, and they finally just snatched the paper from Lance's hand. They squinted their eyes behind their big glasses for a moment, reading intently over the sheet at a pace that was nearly twice Lance's reading speed, and gasped.

"Okay," said Hunk, looking almost ashamed as he took the paper from Pidge when they handed it to him. He scanned his eyes across the page, all of them in their own little world. The postal worker didn't seem to care about them loitering anyway. Lance, however, noticed that she was still there in the room with them and, after a moment, pulled the other two, including the awestruck Hunk, outside where they wandered over to the car as if in a daze. For a moment, and they just sort of looked at each other, none of them quite believing what they had just read.

"We have no reason to think that Shay's grandmother would be pranking us," said Hunk. "I mean, she likes to joke around, but…"

Pidge shook their head. "This is the real deal. This is what we've been looking for. I mean, what we've been looking for all along."

Lance shook his head. If he hadn't retrieved the paper himself, seen the place where it had been stored himself, actually been the one to pull it out of a secret file in a secret government warehouse, there would be no way that he would be able to believe that this was real. Hell, he was still having that problem. And yet here it was. Here was the proof these conspiracy theorists had been looking for all this time. It was the smoking gun, and better yet, it was a physical piece of proof clearly explaining what that evidence meant.

They all shot one last glance in through the window on the front of the post office building to the woman who was sitting at the desk. She was intent on her crossword puzzle, but didn't seem to be looking after them. She hadn't snuck a peek, hadn't noticed what an amazingly important document this was, that she had just held in her hand.

The words were clear enough, and plain to see even in the fading light of the evening, only semi-obscured by Lance's hand when he took the paper from Hunk and got into the back seat of the SUV.

KEITH KOGANE, SUBJECT #2331,
IN-UTERO EXPERIMENTATION
IMPLEMENTATION AND HYBRIDIZATION,
EXTRATERRESTRIAL DNA.
PROJECT


Scully: Not everything is about you, Mulder.

Fox Mulder: Yes, but...


A/N: Okay so... quick story (I know you just read a bunch of my story, but bear with me). So that little twist, the one I revealed right at the end? I've been planning that since I started this fic. Like, literally, when I was planning this out, I had been watching the X-Files (of course) and I loved the arc about Scully being experimented on with hybrid human-alien DNA (I didn't like that they were doing it to Scully, but I thought it was a cool conspiracy for them to uncover). So when I decided that I was going to do an X-Files AU, I wanted to include that sort of storyline as a part of the conspiracy they're discovering. AND, at the time (when only season 1 of VLD was out), there was a super popular fan theory that Keith was Galra because he could operate their tech and because his hand turned purple for just a second that one time. So I liked that particular fan theory, and thought that this would be a fun way to work it into my fic AND have it be a major plot twist.

Fast forward to one of the most simultaneously gratifying and disappointing times of my life, in season 2 of VLD when Keith is revealed to ACTUALLY be Galra. I was psyched that the fan theory had been correct because it meant that there were so many new and interesting implications, but I was also SUPER BUMMED because I knew that when I finally got to this point in the fic, this scene would lose some of its power, because duh, of course Keith's Galra. That's canon.
Anyway, I didn't rewrite it because I still like it as a part of the larger conspiracy and I want to keep on with what my original plan was.

And a sidenote, (not related to the above story), I wrote a piece for a really cool zine (Lancito!, a zine all about Lance and his Cuban heritage, all of the proceeds of which will go to hurricane relief in Puerto Rico and Cuba) all about Lance's feelings of guilt for leaving home behind and his emotions about finding a new home and developing as a person. Check the zine out on tumblr at .com.

And thanks as always for reading! I'm amazed at all this fic has done and how it continues to grow and it's super important to me and I'm glad others like it, too!