Isolation - Prologue
by ML 

email: msnsc21@yahoo.com
Rating: PG13 for mild violence and swearing

Type: Gen, het. M&S, a character/other pairing 
Disclaimer: You know the tune, sing it with me now: I don't own
them, I'm just borrowing for a while.  The original characters:
they're mine, all mine.

Author's Notes: This was written for the 2010 XF BigBang.  
I couldn't have done it without Wendy's expert beta.  Bouquets 
of thanks to her! That said, if there are any errors or omissions, 
that's my fault.  More notes at the end of the story.  

Summary: It's time to come out of hiding and get back to the
business of saving the world.  Mulder is looking for people to help
him and Scully do just that.  With so many of his former friends and
colleagues either missing or dead, he gets help from an unexpected
quarter -- and finds that he's not the only one who's ready to get
back into circulation.   

Takes place in 2008, after the events of "I Want to Believe".

We never gave up, we never will.  In the end, if that's the best
they can say about us, it'll do.
-John Fitzgerald Byers

x-x-x

Prologue

He couldn't see.  He couldn't hear.  He couldn't breathe.

He flailed around, trying to escape.  The pressure built in his
lungs like cement hardening.  Now his arms couldn't move, they were
trapped at his sides.  If he could only get free...he fought with his
last breath, trying with main force to thrust his body out of the
thing that held him.  It seemed hopeless but he couldn't give up.

Then suddenly, he was free.  He took a deep breath, and felt himself
in free fall.

Brian Jordan's eyes flew open.  He took another deep breath and
realized that he'd rolled himself up in the sheets.  He extricated
himself and lay still, taking deep breaths and staring at the
ceiling.  

Calmer now, he noted thankfully that his wife's side of the bed was
empty.  This was not unusual; she was a morning person, he was a
night person.  No doubt she'd already made coffee and was reading the
paper.

He got out of bed and shuffled to the bathroom.  He could hear the
faint sound of a foghorn in the distance.  A glance out the window
confirmed the thickness of the fog.  It could be eight o'clock in the
morning or high noon for all he could tell.

He watched himself in the mirror as he lathered his face for
shaving.  Annie said it didn't bother her, but he didn't like even
one day's growth of beard on his face.  

Morning ablutions completed, he pulled on his sweat pants and a golf
shirt and went downstairs.

He found Annie at the kitchen table, poring over the latest edition
of the weekly paper.  

Annie looked up when Brian entered the room.  She'd heard him
running water in the bathroom upstairs.  Brian wasn't the type of guy
to just roll out of bed and throw something on.

She took a sip from her coffee cup and remarked, "You're up early. 
I know what time you got in last night." 

"Sorry," he said, dropping a kiss on her head as he headed for the 
coffee pot on the counter.  "I tried not to wake you.  Did you get a
chance to look at the editorial?"

"I liked it.  Though I have to say, it's a heavy subject for this
neck of the woods."

He sat down across from her.  "Should I not have written it?"  

"I was just surprised.  I'm not sure that Internet privacy is a
subject anyone here has given much thought to.  This is a town that
used to have a party line when I was a kid.  You could pick up the
phone and get an earful any time of day.  Everyone knew everyone
else's business."  

"All the more reason that they should be warned.  Especially as far
as their kids are concerned.  The Internet is more like the Wild West
than anyone's hometown.  You can find pretty much anything out there,
whether it's private or not."

"Worse than Donna, huh?  My folks used to say, 'telephone,
telegraph, tell Donna'."

"I think she's my chief rival for the news. If I can print something
before Donna knows it, it's a real scoop."

"Speaking of that, do you want to walk down to the cafe and see if
you've roused the rabble with your crazy talk?"

"Maybe I'll give them a day or two to calm down."

Annie smiled into her coffee cup.  This was their weekly joke.  The
table at the back of Donna's cafe was the morning gathering place of
the old-timers who called themselves "the Rabble."  They weren't
afraid of telling Brian exactly what they thought of the latest
edition of the paper. 

Tomorrow they would go to Donna's coffee shop.  If anyone disagreed
with Brian, he'd listen to them with good humor and sympathy as he
always did.  It was in his nature to be self-effacing, to not argue
or draw undue attention to himself.  Though he might be a crusader in
print, he wasn't confrontational.

Brian was well-liked in the town, although he'd gotten off to a
rocky start with the citizenry.  Far from being the usurper or change
agent they'd feared, he was protective of his adopted home town. 
Annie hadn't always seen the value of being so isolated.  Now she saw
things differently, mostly due to Brian.

They were certainly off the beaten track.  Cell phone service was
spotty at best, even satellite connections could be thwarted by "fog
in the bay."  That was the excuse the satellite TV reps used to
explain poor reception to the irate citizens who were missing their
NFL fix.  Brian got at least one letter a week from someone claiming
their town was being discriminated against, just because it was too
far away from a big city to be a commuter town, and too remote to be
a tourist destination.

"What's the plan today?" Brian asked Annie.

"Want to go down to the beach with me?  I want to collect some stuff
for the classroom." 

Brian nodded enthusiastically.  "I'll make a thermos of tea and some
sandwiches -- we can have a picnic."

"You're such a romantic.  When I first met you, I would never have
imagined that."

"You didn't even like me when you first met me."

"That's not strictly true.  You were intriguing.  We don't get many
strangers 'round these parts.  I was just one of those suspicious
townspeople."

"You make it sound like you've never lived anyplace else."

"Okay, so I've seen some of the world.  I chose to come back here. 
Doesn't that make me provincial and narrow-minded?"

"I never said that -- about you, or anyone else," Brian protested.

"No, you didn't.  That's what everyone thought you would do.  We
judged you before we knew you.  It turns out you were hard not to
like.  It just took a little time to get to know you.  Whereas for
you, I think it was love at first sight."

"With you, or with the town?"

"Both, I think.  It's a package deal."

"You'll never get me to admit that."

"That's all right," she said, kissing his cheek.  "Your secret's
safe with me."  She put her coffee cup in the sink.  "How about
making those sandwiches, and I'll get my gear into the car?"

"Sure." He followed her to the sink and set his cup next to hers.  
Through the kitchen window, they could see that the sun was just
starting to burn through the fog.

Annie hummed a little tune as she dug through the pile of waders,
buckets and assorted equipment that they somehow never got around to
organizing.  She threw what she needed in the back of the car and
went back inside the house.

She could hear Brian moving around in the kitchen, getting their
picnic ready.  He always did things so neatly and precisely.  She
thought that he must have had some scientific training in his
background, though he denied it.  

Almost everyone except Annie had been against selling the paper to
an "outsider."  Her parents had run the Perdita Press for years.  The
expectation was that Annie would continue in their footsteps --
though that kind of expectation was why she'd left town in the first
place.  

Fortunately for all, once the town knew Brian's story, they'd warmed
up to him.  Now you'd think he'd grown up here.  And Annie, who had
grown up here, had begun to appreciate the town anew through 
his eyes.

If anyone had told her that seven years after her parents died,
she'd still be living here, she would have laughed. 

Funny how things turned out.

~*~

Continued in Chapter One