By Amanda Finch
[email protected]

Disclaimers, etc. w/ first part.

Flight 929
En route to Sheehan, Nebraska
February 9, 1999
4:41 PM

Early morning when the light was just seeping through the blinds, we would
take fifteen speechless minutes to let our surroundings download themselves.
I'd lightly touch the side of her face, call on my expensive Oxford
education, and come up with "hmmmm." Or I'd feign short-term memory loss and
be surprised to see her there. "Scully? What have we done?" The joke was
getting old now. She smiled anyway.

I touched my knuckles softly to her forehead, down over one eye, down the
line of her stubborn profile. She smiled into my hand, and I lightly traced
over the other eye and again...

(I can't open my eyes - )

(Well then don't, honey. It's not time to go to work yet.)

(No, I - Mulder, I can't open my eyes...)

Where my touch had fluttered across her face, blindness and bloodlessness
remained. My knuckles had sealed the eyes, had drained the skin.

(What in the - Scully?)

I reached for her face again. Scully! I touched her face, and I felt her skin
crawling with corrosion under my fingertips.

(Mulder...stop this. Stop this. Stop this. Make it stop, Mulder. Make
it...)

But I couldn't stop. I couldn't quit. She drained and she died and cried out
until my touch had sealed her mouth and taken her voice. I couldn't stop. I
couldn't -

"Mulder? Hey! ...Mulder!"

I snapped to on the plane with a gasp that yanked my spine straight and
whiplashed the back of my neck. "What?"

Jonson pulled himself back as much as the confines would allow. "You okay?
You were...I thought you were about to talk in your sleep or something. We're
about to land."

I just nodded, embarrassed. The medicine Wexford had given me for the cough
was like drinking a double NyQuil three times a day. I yawned towards the
empty window seat. Jonson hadn't asked about the third ticket. He mistook it
for optimism. Let him. Meanwhile, tired had graduated into merciless fatigue.
I'd been walking around with a perpetual headache. Two thumbs of pressure
pushed against the back of my eyes. For maybe the third morning in a row, I
regretted putting my painkillers down the garbage disposal in the kitchen,
and for the third day in a row, I hated myself for the regret.

Maybe I had expected to find her. Our search of the airport in Minot had
produced nothing.

I mapped out the small, North Dakota airport in my mind, reliving the past 24
hours.

The ticket desks were in front of me, the security monitors and metal
detectors to my left. Baggage claim was to my right. I thought of how the
thirty-odd passengers milling about at 2 AM, waiting for red eyes to arrive,
had sat reading papers or gift shop paperbacks, maybe sitting in the coffee
shop or the frozen yogurt place. A trio of pay phones gleamed dully against
the back wall.

Thirty people oblivious to the screams in Hangar 10 just sat there. The
copper sharpness of Scully's hair snagged the eye of a man standing at the
phone booth - a man I fabricated in my memory to keep myself from casting
random hate on those thirty passengers for not hearing. I didn't see her, but
I saw a distorted, fractured image of her on the black of his pupil. I heard
him tell the men on the plane that she was there, but he didn't call her she.
He didn't see a human being. He never would.

I imagined her as tired. She seemed so strange, moving there alone.

She'd watched the monitors for the next flight into Minot. It would be
another forty-five minutes before it was in, assuming we'd caught it. Jonson
waited in fear for her to call me on her cell phone, but her battery was
recharging. He was saved from having to explain what was then only a conflict
of interest.

On that night, Jonson had to relinquish control of his weapons quickly, even
though they weren't planning to catch a flight out. An airport security
officer, Jared, corroborated this. It hadn't been the highlight of his week
like I might've thought. His daddy had gaming rifles that were *this* big.
Illegal ones, I suspected. The clearance papers were what piqued his
interest. Obviously he had some quarrel with the local mayor and had hoped
Jonson was there to "take him out."

The baggage claim people remembered her. One of the security guys, judging by
the look on his face as he dimly recalled her, had gotten close enough to
smell her and briefly want her. The urgency had vanished as soon as she had,
but it had been enough to burn into recent memory an afterimage of her face
that matched the photo.

The landing staff were even less helpful. A manifest for the cargo plane
could not be found, though I received from a night clerk the empty, polite
promises of a follow-up call. That's all that was on it, they insisted,
having seen only a skeleton crew of functional staff. No, they didn't know
what kind of cargo; the plane was there to refuel only.

One of the handlers, handbeams glowing, had been approached by a man who
asked him to refuel the craft. The only reason he remembered it was because
that simply wasn't his job. He was a handler, dammit. Did he remember the
man's face? Could he tell me anything about the man? He described someone so
vaguely that it could've been himself, or me, or Jonson.

What about the man who *fell* out of the gate enclosure, I asked. Did he
remember that? He did, but what did that have to do with it? He instantly
backed away, angry, and now fearing a pending lawsuit.

How dare I come into his pad and ask him to remember something? All twelve
gates of it, I thought sarcastically, thinking of how Dulles would pick him
up in its frenzy, crush him and use him to cushion an emergency landing.
Jonson pulled me away soon after, sensing unrest, the way anyone could hear a
rope snapping and unraveling when the silence betrayed it.

(Come on *profiler*.)

I kept a cast of voices in my head from over the years. Not by choice, but by
habit. Each spurs a different reaction, by the sheer power of its negativity.
My father's echoing claim that I was a useless piece of shit worked in these
instances too.

(You've been out of practice. You've no more got this scene mapped out than
you do your goddamned head on straight. Do you?)

This, however, was Patterson.

I thought of the skeptical sneer on the face of the afternoon shift
Lieutenant with Minot's police department. When Jonson had left the man's
office, Lt. Quinlan cocked his bald head to one side and asked, You believe
that bullshit story of his, son? It was Quinlan's theory that Jonson and
Scully had something going on, or maybe just Scully.
I sidestepped this neatly, discussing how, if we could have access to the
terminal's security footage, his men and I could go over times and match
faces up to passenger manifests.

He snidely told me that this was just a small North Dakota airport, not
Dealey Plaza in 1963. I thought he had time for this? Obviously, I'd gotten
the one police contact who had a cousin injured in the whole Ruby Ridge
melee. Great. Besides, he enlightened me, women just leave sometimes. I
examined his ham hands and lewd smile, thinking, I *bet* they do. I'm not
your *son*, motherfucker, and you'll be hearing from my ASAC. I didn't tell
him that I didn't have one. It was just nice to see him almost piss himself.
I could've pulled some major rank and *ordered* him to hand over the footage,
but he was just the kind who'd call Kersh, and I'd have a one-way trip back
to D.C. in the bureaucratic slingshot.

So, more than twenty-four hours later, I was no closer to finding her now
with Jonson as I'd been without him. A cold trail had just gotten colder.

xxxxxxxxxx

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