Five Things That Never Happened To Tom McLaren
Fandom: Tom McLaren, Vertical Limit
Category/Rated: G
Year/Length: 2007/~1261 words
Disclaimer: Not mine, no profit, only having fun.
Tom McLaren never reached the summit.
Vaughn was in rollicking good humor despite the rarified atmosphere. As Tom held out his hand to Annie and pulled her up the last little step to stand on the summit of K2, he felt as though he could fly.
"What time does the plane fly past?" Tom asked, his voice husky and breathless in the thin air.
"Another forty minutes or so," said Vaughn, panting as he concentrated on breathing. "We'll wave, and it'll be seen around the world."
The minutes seemed to take hours. The three of them sat, awaiting the fly-past with increasing irritation. When the plane finally arrived, Tom almost missed it. Tired and logy from the rarified atmosphere, he was beginning to doze when Vaughn suddenly yelled, "There it is. There it fucking is!"
And as the airliner from Vaughn's mighty empire flew over K2, the three climbers rose wearily to their feet and saluted as they became the ultimate advertisement.
Tom never killed Vaughn.
They were cold, down in the fissure. The labored breathing of the injured Vaughn was beginning to tell on Tom's nerves. Annie was suffering from pulmonary edema, and it was fairly obvious that Vaughn would never make it out of the crevasse into which they'd fallen.
There was dex enough for the two of them to maybe wait out the storm and hope for rescue, but thanks to Annie's insistence that they share the dex with Vaughn, who was so clearly dying that it was just stupid, they were in peril.
Annie was sleeping, a restless, uneasy sleep that was punctuated by restless movement and coughing that brought an ominous pink foam to her lips. Tom wasn't in much better case. He could feel the bite of the cold as his lungs labored to extract the oxygen from the cold, thin air, and the need to cough was as biting as the air he was inhaling.
He glared moodily at Vaughn. If it hadn't been for the millionaire tycoon and his ego, they wouldn't be in this fix now; they'd be safe back down the mountain again. Tom found himself wishing that Vaughn – so terribly injured – would die, found himself reaching for a hypodermic, found himself creeping towards Vaughn.
The look on Tom's face must have been devilish in the faint light, because Vaughn, who had been dozing, scooted back a little on his elbows as Tom drew near him with his hypodermic.
"Are you going to kill me now?" he panted.
And Tom did.
Tom never met the yeti.
There had been a storm around the mountain. Tom, walking alone in the icy beauty of what he liked to think of as the skirts of his bitch-lover, K2, was caught, away from base camp, totally turned around in white-out conditions had backed into a small fissure in the rock in his attempts to wait out the storm.
He was a seasoned climber, a born survivor, and he knew that he should go nowhere until the blizzard, so unseasonably early, was over.
He was starting to shiver, knew that he was in trouble, when the creature came.
He shrank back, trying to make himself one with the cliff as the thing materialized out of the swirling snow, white as the snow itself, white as the ice on his lashes, white as a dream.
It had teeth – tusks really, and a face that seemed as menacing and bestial as anything he'd ever seen in the movies, and when it reached for him, he thought his last hour had come.
Its hands were gentle; its fur as soft and silky as the mink on the back of a starlet. It held him, this ghostly creature, warmed him, sheltered him, and he thought that he'd become delirious, believed that he was dying, because this just couldn't happen.
In the aftermath of the storm, with the world newly whitened, all landmarks vanished, the creature released Tom, took his hand and led him, while he followed behind, biddable as any child.
When they finally stood looking down on the base camp and the creature began to back away, pale and noiseless as a ghost, he wondered how he could thank it for its care. "Come with me?" he said, his voice rusty from disuse.
It seemed to understand, because it raised its fingers to touch his face with an expression very like regret and then it vanished back into the snow.
Tom began to walk down to base camp, back towards sanity and knew that his life had changed forever.
Tom never left the mountain to go home and get married.
The mountains back home in BC were so tiny that they almost didn't rate the name of mountain at all. As Tom's flight descended towards Vancouver Airport, he could see the coastal range, Grouse and Seymour, and beyond them the twin Lions – the peaks that the natives called the Sisters. They were nothing to a man who'd been on the roof of the world. Why, you could walk up Grouse. What kind of a mountain allowed you to hike up its slopes in a half a day?
Taxiing in to the terminal, Tom took a deep breath and tried to relax and prepare himself for the ordeal to come. He loved Helen, he really did, but he was much more comfortable belaying on the mountain than he was dressing up in a monkey suit and meeting her relatives.
Still, this time next week, it would all be over, and he'd be a married man.
She was waiting outside the security area, pretty in her lacy summer dress, her dark hair and vivid coloring making her look as beautiful and exotic as any orchid.
She smiled at him, waved her fingers, plainly delighted, and Tom felt the heat rush to tighten his groin and fill his belly with butterflies, and, all of a sudden, he was no longer in doubt.
Tom McLaren was home.
Tom never stayed behind when Annie and Vaughn went up the mountain.
Sidelined with a strained muscle, Tom had handed over his chance to earn the million dollars Vaughn was offering for the jaunt up to K2, and watched glumly as the threesome started up the mountain for their rendezvous with fame and fucking fortune.
He'd been feeling uneasy about the climb, for no reason that he could discern, and he couldn't shake the sensation that something was amiss. He hadn't quite trusted Vaughn despite the mogul's fast talking, glib presentation. He's seen that Wick didn't like him, and he had a huge amount of faith in Wick's opinion – why, the old climber was virtually a landmark. He'd never left the mountain's slopes since his wife had vanished on K2 so many years ago.
He'd tried to talk to Wick, but the man was half crazy, and had merely muttered what sounded like nonsense and walked away.
So now, watching Annie and her brother, Peter, departing up the slopes of the mountain, following Vaughn, Tom wasn't quite as depressed as he could have been to lose his million dollars.
When the forecast came in, Tom knew that the party on the mountain was in trouble. He'd radioed Peter and told him the bad news, told him to turn back, and Peter had agreed that they really needed to do that.
Hours later, it seemed that they hadn't.
When the call to rescue them came in, of course, Tom was a volunteer; it seemed like the least he could do.
The End
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