TITLE: Bad Fox Four
NAME: Mik
E-MAIL: ccmcdoc@hotmail.com
CATEGORY: M/Who?
RATING: NC-17. M/Who? This story contains slash i.e.
m/m sex. Not suitable for children, Baptists or Republicans.
SUMMARY: First time M/Who? If you ever wondered how Scully came back.
ARCHIVE: Only
with my permission.
FEEDBACK: Feedback? Well, yes, if you insist.
TIMESPAN/SPOILER WARNING: Okay...uh...if you haven't
seen every single ep of X-Files you have no business
reading this. G'way. KEYWORDS: story slash angst Mulder Who NC-17
DISCLAIMER: All the X-Files people and all the Whovian
people belong to other people and I'm making no money
by twisting their bendable little bodies into odd shapes, I'm just having fun. And all your base are belong to me.
Author's notes: I'm new to this specific genre, and if I've appropriated a title already in use, just let me know and I'll fix it. I tried researching to find if it had been used before, but you know how unreliable the internet is.
More Notes: A special nod to my darlin' beta, for reminding me of one of the most amazing places in the world to post a letter.
If you like this, there's more at https://www.squidge.org/3wstop
If you didn't like it, come see me, anyway. Pet the dog.
Bad Fox Four
by Mik
Mulder risked a glance at his watch. The Doctor, breathing deeply of something he called esstik, looked up sharply. "Bored?" he asked as if he didn't think it could be possible.
Mulder shook his head, a knee jerk denial to something that was, in fact, the truth. "No," he insisted, perpetuating the lie. "Hungry." Well, that was a truth as well. "Thanks to you, my dinner ended up on the sidewalk."
The Doctor held out what looked like a luridly cerulean tongue depressor, which Mulder waved away quickly. "I offered," he reminded Mulder petulantly, as if he were offended by the possible suggestion of his inhospitable behavior.
"Uh…thanks, but I had...blue sticks for breakfast."
"I suppose you want human food," the Doctor suggested, sniffing again, with apparent gusto.
Mulder started to nod, then checked himself. "That depends. Do you mean food fit for human consumption, or made of humans?"
The Doctor looked properly horrified. "Whaddyou take me for?" He put the stick down, and clambered up to the console. "Do you have any idea what you lot taste like? Full up on grease and salt." He shuddered. "No, thank you." He started to crank and twiddle controls. "Right…what's your pleasure? A nice penne with garlic, shallots and white wine? Xiao Long Bao? Duro Wat? A slide of 'zah? Fish and chips? C'mon, the sky's literally the limit."
Mulder was tempted, he really was. He could close
his eyes and taste butter dripping off the tender flesh of a
A flicker of something else went across the Doctor's face, disappointment,
perhaps, and then he grinned. "Fantastic. I know the best little place. It's in the heart of the
Mulder felt a flutter in his midsection and his ears rang, and he groped for a rail, while the room spun standing still, and just when he thought he should have stood in bed, everything stopped with a thud.
"Here we are, last stop," the Doctor said cheerfully.
Mulder started for the door, and was surprised that the floor still seemed to move under his feet. "Maybe I'm finally waking up," he muttered, hands sliding along the gantry rails for support.
"Sorry?" the Doctor asked, patting his pockets for something.
"Nothing." Mulder gave the door a push. It only moved a fraction, as if stuck. He grunted as he gave it another try. "We appear to be blocked," he announced.
"What's that?" the Doctor looked up from his pockets, brow furrowed. "How can that be?" He loped down the ramp, pushing Mulder aside. "Impossible."
"And yet, we are." Mulder, feeling decidedly unsteady on his feet, grabbed for the nearest strut, and almost didn't notice that it seemed to breathe beneath his fingers. But he noticed enough that he pulled his hand away and wiped it on his shirt.
The Doctor gave the door another shove and it gave a little more. He peered out, pulled back, frowned and looked again. "Impossible," he repeated.
"What is it?" Mulder demanded. The Doctor looked both flummoxed and frightened. "What's the matter?"
"It…um…" he held up a hand, "stay very still." He backed slowly and carefully away from the door. "Just wants a…minor adjustment, that's all."
Mulder couldn't help himself. He shifted around so that he could look out. Not that he could see much. A rusted bar seemed to be lying across the door, and beyond that an even more rusted I beam cut across his field of vision. Beyond that was nothing but blue. But it wasn't what he could see that disturbed him. It was what he could hear; howling, lonely wind and a creak of iron in agony just over his head, as the Tardis seemed to swing slowly, suspended above solid ground. He wondered, half seriously, if they were somehow caught somewhere in space…locked in a tractor beam, hung up in a planet's orbit, trapped on one of the rings of Mars. But he knew definitively that they were somewhere they shouldn't be. He pulled back and shut the door, turning around in time to see the Doctor pull out a rubber mallet and give the control panel one good whack.
A moment later it felt as if they were settling into something soft, which let the Tardis sink a centimeter or two slowly. The Doctor approached the door and peered out carefully. Then he smiled, but the smile seemed forced. "Here we are," he said, turning back to look at Mulder. "We...um...might be a little late."
"Late? But it was middle of the day just a minute ago," Mulder protested. He came down the ramp slowly, as the Doctor pushed the door open wide. It was still middle of the day. The sky was bright...not necessarily blue, but definitely bright. And so was the ground. Just as he stepped out, he heard the last of another agonized iron groan, an ear piercing creak and then a thud that shook the snow under his feet. Whipping around, he saw something...a cage? A brightly painted, circular cage tip to its side and come to rest in the snow just a meter or two from them. "What the...?"
The Doctor stepped out behind him and pointed upward.
Mulder turned to see the eeriest thing he'd ever seen in his life, and he'd seen a lot of eerie things. In fact, if anyone ever took a survey on the person who had seen the most eeriness in his lifetime, Mulder's name would definitely be in the top five. But this beat out alien autopsies, zombies, crop circles and water logged dinosaurs. This was the holy grail of eerie.
A Ferris wheel. Just a Ferris wheel. With brightly painted cages, some still suspended by rusting iron chains, twisting in the wind, some disappearing into the snow, like pieces of a decomposing corpse, all of them empty. Instead of the laughter of children, there was only the wind and the moaning of the dying iron. It was as if someone built it, and then walked away.
He looked around. That was the other eerie thing. It seemed as if everyone had walked away. The place had every indication of humanity: there were buildings, there were roads, there were even rusted hulls of automobiles. There was a decaying wooden building with a clown's face grinning madly over the entrance, there was another building, beginning to list to one side, that promised ice cream. There were once red bumper cars tilted and abandoned on their arena. There was a carousel shifting back and forth in the wind, as if straining to spin again, yet the ornate, and rampant horses lie on their sides pierced by broken poles, or had been devoured by time, leaving nothing but glass decorations, and brass bridles. Grass and bare trees poked through the snow covered place where sidewalks should be. But there were no people. There were no birds. No dogs. No sign of life, save those two men staring up at the abandoned Ferris wheel.
Mulder looked at the Doctor, who was still looking up, head tilted back at a ridiculous angle, eyes squinched up, lips curled back to show almost all his teeth. He had a hundred questions, a thousand, but the first one to come to his tongue, was easily the least important now. "Were we in..." he pointed to the cage next to them, still moaning and shifting in its death throes, "in that?"
The Doctor nodded, shielding his eyes with both hands, looking back to the east.
"You knew it was going to fall and you just landed right...right next to it?" Mulder's arms flew up in outrage. "We could have been killed!" His words bounced off a concrete wall and back at him angrily.
"Well, you might." The Doctor looked down at last. "Wouldn't have done the Tardis a treat, either." He frowned. "We should go."
"Seems everyone else has." Mulder looked around again, and registered a large building a hundred yards off. It was probably fifteen floors, a perfect block of concrete, blemished by rows of windows, most of them broken, some flirting with tattered grey curtains fluttering in the wind. The whole place looked like the scene of a science fiction film from the fifties. "Where the hell are we? And where is everyone else?"
"Pripyat," the Doctor answered, reaching for his arm. "C'mon, let's go."
Mulder's feet stalled. "Pripyat...as in..."
"Yes." The Doctor shoved him toward the Tardis door. "You humans and your fascination with nuclear technology."
"...
"Yes."
He turned, looking out at the segment of the Ferris wheel visible over the Doctor's shoulder. "What happened to everyone who lived here?" He scrambled through his mental files of the topic. They were as bare as FBI files on Scully's abduction. "Were they exposed? Did they just die?" He had to admit he'd really never given much thought to the aftermath of Russia's near nuclear disaster, and certainly none to the long term effects upon the civilization around it "Damn it, there were children!"
The haunting image disappeared as the Doctor pulled the door shut and dropped the latch into place. "No, they were evacuated, several days later, when the government was willing to admit there was a problem. But a lot of them died eventually."
Mulder found he had been holding his breath 'til the Doctor shut the door. "Are we going to be radioactive now?"
"A little bit." The Doctor hurried to the console. "Nothing to worry about. The Tardis will fix it" He looked up, grinning again. "Still hungry? Still want Borscht?"
"Uh...no, thanks." Mulder looked back at the door, and felt his long broken heart beat again, and break again. An entire town, an entire way of life, a shared history, a community...gone, and yet the only visible carnage had been created by time. What happened to the children who had once ridden that Ferris wheel? What happened to the parents who bought them ice cream, and smiled indulgently? Where were the teens who dreamed of driving race cars while they took turns ramming into one another? Where were the students, the waitresses, the 'little mother' who made the best borscht in the world?
The Doctor appeared unmoved. "Fancy a burrito?"
"Um ...yeah, sure," he mumbled. A whole life...gone. Just like Scully. But on such a horrific scale.
"Brilliant. I know the best place."
Mulder felt the Tardis rumble to life under his feet. "Brilliant," he mocked, angry that this…this person could shrug off the terrifying realization that humans were capable of wiping themselves out with their stupidity. It was something Mulder had always had an intellectual understanding of, but now he knew it. "Try not to land us in an active volcano or something, will you?"
"Nope...I am aiming a bit north of the volcanos," he promised, "Ciudad de Mexico. You'll love it." He began to crank with enthusiasm. "Hold on now."
There was a whir, a couple of bumps and a thud, and just like that they were opening the door on a wide alley between two very busy thoroughfares. All manner of traffic whizzed by on either side, making more noise than Dulles at peak commuter hours. Mulder was almost tempted to put his hands over his ears but he needed his hands for balance as he stepped out onto an uneven mud brick pavement, shimmering under the afternoon sun. But at least it was alive. It was almost as if the Doctor deliberately brought him to the most crowded, full of humanity space he could think of, after witnessing the mournful emptiness of Pripyat.
The Doctor stepped out confidently behind him, breathing deeply. "Welcome
to
Mulder, who had been watching dark blue busses tip dizzyingly as small taxis darted around them, like mice at the feet of an elephant, jerked a look over his shoulder at the Doctor. "I didn't realize the Tardis was sponsored by Fodor's," he drawled.
The Doctor ignored his remark, clapping a hand on his shoulder and pointing. "This way."
They emerged from the alley to a large and seemingly mad concourse, vehicles of all shapes and sizes defying the laws of traffic and possibly of gravity. In the center of all of this rose a huge, marbled edifice, domed with what appeared to be gold. Steps of green at each corner lead to a large plaza, where people and birds seemed to battle for space, and uniformed men weaved in and out on bicycles. "Beautiful, isn't it?" the Doctor asked admiringly.
Mulder nodded grudgingly. "A church?"
"I suppose it depends upon what you worship," he agreed. "It's
the Palacio de Bellas Artes. The
Mulder hung back. "Those people...that place..." he gestured over his shoulder as if that decaying amusement park were just behind them, "did that just happen? Should we have looked for survivors?"
"Of course not...that happened twenty years ago, in your history." The Doctor was striding away, eyes upward, grin fixed in place, clearly reveling in the noise, the smell, the life of the city.
"But when..." Mulder realized the Doctor wasn't going to stop, and he had no wish to keep the conversation going at full volume, so he started to run, bumping and crashing 'til he was at the Doctor's side again. "But when we were there, how long ago had it happened?"
"Twenty years ago." The Doctor considered a sign in a window and turned down another alley.
"So, it's...today?" Mulder persisted.
"It's always today...somewhere." The Doctor shrugged and pushed at a door.
"But...my today. Is it my today?"
"Yes." The Doctor made a generous gesture, including a bow. "It is your today. I give it to you."
Impatiently, Mulder grabbed his sleeve. "Tell me where we are...in history."
The Doctor sighed and looked down at his wrist. "I was trying to stay as close to your history as possible, give or take a year or two. I would say..." he considered the image of the turning hourglass, which looked suspiciously familiar to Mulder, "within about six months of you dumping your supper on the walk." He saw the suspicion in Mulder's eyes and pulled himself free of Mulder's grip. "He stole that from me. Bloody cheek."
Mulder scratched his ear, muttering, "You would know cheek."
The Doctor ignored him, turning his thousand candlepower smile on a very small, very dark, very old woman peering out from behind a brightly colored curtain. "Hello. What's the special today?"
Mulder's eyes narrowed. "I believe you'll
find that the native language of
"Enchilada. Chicken or pork," the woman told him in a timorous voice.
"Fantastic." The Doctor clapped his hands together. "Two. And two beers. Brilliant." He drew out a wooden chair under a table with a cloth that almost matched the curtain at the doorway. "Sit down. This is going to be great."
"She understood you," Mulder protested,
pulling out a chair for himself. "We're in the middle of modern day
"Ah, that's the Tardis at work," he explained easily, as the woman reappeared with two glasses of beer on a tray. He lowered his voice. "It has a universal translator. Thank you," he told the woman. "And when I say universal..." he twirled a finger, "I mean universal."
"Oh, yeah, right...I'd forgotten that," Mulder said, reaching for his beer. It had been a long time since he'd had a cold beer on a hot afternoon. He took a long draw from the glass and set it down, nearly spitting out every drop.
The Doctor, glass to his lips, paused, looking alarmed. "Bad beer?"
Mulder shook his head, staring down at his shoes. They were still crusted with snow. Talk about cognitive dissonance.
End Chapter Four
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