From: whitneycox@aol.com (WhitneyCox) Subject: All the Ash Burnt Roses Leave (1/1) Date: 23 Nov 1997 05:46:26 GMT All the Ash Burnt Roses Leave by Angel Whitneycox@aol.com c1997 New Bohemian Productions Rating: PG Spoilers: 'Redux II' Summary: An ode to the death of darkness and a requiem for an old friend.... Classification: V (vignette) Author's Note: To fully understand this story, you really ought to read "Smoking," which is archived here, there, and generally everywhere (or you can write me if you absolutely can't find it). Otherwise...well, let's just say that the main character in this piece's existence won't make any sense. Disclaimer: No, they're not mine. They belong to Chris Carter, 1013 Productions, FOX network, and probably a whole bunch of other Men In Suits. They could sue me, sure, but practically every member of my family is somehow involved in the legal profession, so I'd sue them right back for making me wait until the second of November to find out exactly how Mulder escaped death. Also, an excerpt from T.S. Eliot's poem 'Little Gidding' is in here. I don't think he'll mind, considering he's dead.... Feedback (pleasepleaseplease!) to whitneycox@aol.com * * * Who the hell had defied her? Who the HELL had killed him? She had handled the body herself. The man in the apartment next to his had brought him, cold and pale, to her doorstep in the middle of the night. She had stripped his body of its bloodstained clothing and placed it on a table in her private lab; strange to see him that way, cold and dead and naked. He looked so white and small, stretched out on the metal slab. Death became him, sadly enough. Its hand had smoothed and softened his features, granting him a macabre peace that life had robbed him of. With the blood mopped off his chest, the bullet hole looked so small as to seem not nearly enough to kill him. But his back belied this tiny puncture wound with a gaping hole large enough for her to place her fist inside. She had received phone calls from every member of the Consortium and then some, each giving her their condolences, each not wishing to be the one who didn't call her and therefore the one she would suspect. Behind her omniscient facade, however, she had no idea which one of them--and she knew it was one of them, no one else had any reason to perform such a calculated hit--had ordered his assassination. Maybe it was the ghost of JFK, she mused, come to extract his revenge. Maybe so; to hire an assassin outside her knowledge and reach would have been a near-impossible task. The almost admired the mastermind's resourcefulness. Almost. The dead man in front of her silenced that admiration. Never, forever. To think that all that greatness was brought down with a single piercing projectile; a pull of a trigger and the bite of a shot that silenced a man forever. Lesser men had fallen that way--Lincoln, King, Lennon, Rabin--but none so great as he, her dear friend, who revealed Snowden's secret--that man is mortal, and bleeds, and dies. Tenderly, she ran a damp washcloth over his body, his face, his limbs, his torso. His chest was almost hairless, with a few lazy curls marring the white plains of flesh. His face had aged poorly, but the rest of his body appeared to have been born merely yesterday. She would even go so far as to call him beautiful, so perfect in his softness, his snowy-ness. A tiny brown stain profaned the skin of his thumb and forefinger of his right hand, telling of his lifelong lung-blackening habit. His nails were short and well-manicured, with not a trace of dirt beneath them. Working her way down his body slowly, she suppressed a sob. She wasn't an emotional person, and now was certainly not the time to become so. Think, she told herself. Think of watching _2001_ and making fun of Mulder. Think of Alex Krycek and that damnably hot leather jacket. Think of banana cream pie and pecan praline ice cream and sharks and the letter Q, just don't think about the man who was once her dear companion and now is little more than an empty shell, a carcass, a body, silent and still . . . The tears came and she crumpled to the floor. A verse from T.S. Eliot surfaced in the sea of her mind: "Ash on an old man's sleeve is all the ash the burnt roses leave." Such would be the epitaph, the eulogy for a nameless man. A fitting ode to the death of darkness. Only the burnt roses were the dead man before her, and the ash had found its way onto her sleeve. She hugged her knees tightly and lay on the floor, shuddering and sobbing and wailing to heaven every last ounce of painful sorrow that coursed through her blood like a disease. The cold, hard floor left dusty imprints on her cheeks and jeans; she returned the gift with her warm, salty tears. Finally, rendered totally helpless by her intense grief, she allowed sleep to engulf her on the unsympathetic linoleum tiles. * * * That was how he found her. He lifted her frail body in his arms, so careful, so careful not to wake her. Slowly, he carried her up the stairs and laid her down among the pillows and blankets of her bed. Then he lit a cigarette and waited for her to awaken.