From: Denise Wake Subject: Atonement 1/1 Date sent: Sun, 23 Nov 1997 11:14:17 -0500 Title: Atonement Author: Spooky Email: dwake@utpress.utoronto.ca or ddwake1@netcom.ca Rating: PG (language) Category: V, A Spoilers: none Keywords: post-XF Summary: In a post-Colonization future, Mulder muses while he waits for yet another informant. Atonement by Spooky The man stood in the shadows, balanced tautly on the balls of his feet. Darkness shrouded his features as he waited with hard-won patience, his roving hazel eyes the only movement as they scanned the abandoned warehouse for hidden dangers. Even the most benign tasks were dangerous in these days, and his task was less benign than most. His tall, lean body was clad head to foot in black; the dark hair above the pale, youthful face was wind-tousled. He looked unexpectedly dangerous. Fox Mulder, former FBI Special Agent, was listening to a little voice inside his head. Over the years he'd heard many voices in his head: some telling him he was crazy for pulling another stupid stunt that was going to end with him having another lengthy hospital stay; some telling him the connections he needed to get inside a serial killer's head, or to the bottom of a case; and some voices were those of his demons -- his sister Samantha calling his name in terror, his father and mother holding him accountable for her disappearance, Scully's own abduction and ire when he ditched her yet again and she had to nursemaid him back to health. The voices had made him one of the best agents, and the most troublesome. Now his little voice was telling him that all was not well. His contact wasn't going to show. Was it a set up after all? He edged deeper into the shadows, ill at ease. Tried not to listen to the rustling of the rats among the litter. Rats. Yecch. He had hated rats ever since he'd found hundreds of them trying to get out of those toilets. Rats and killer kitties. Sounded more like a bad movie than an actual FBI case. He tried to focus on other sounds, sounds that didn't belong. At least Deep Throat had picked civilized places for their clandestine meetings; his other informants seemed to favour these unsavoury places where he was likely to get mugged by a junkie. Of course, civilized places were closed to him now. He had come to know more of DC's dark underbelly than he'd ever thought possible. More than he had ever wanted to, certainly. He felt exposed, despite the darkness that caressed him. Darkness of the night, darkness of the soul. Oh, his work was as full of purpose as it had ever been -- more so in fact. No longer tilting at windmills, he was finally striking telling blows against the men who had caused so much pain to him and those he cared about. The men who had taken his sister, murdered his father, abducted Scully and killed her sister. His quest had left bodies strewn in its wake. And the Truth, when he had finally met it face to face, had not been the panacea he had believed it would. It had brought him no peace, no cessation of the demons that plagued him. There had been no great revelation, no great unveiling. It had make exactly no difference to the events unfolding; there had been no great mass awakening of the public. *They* had planned too effectively for that. They had thought he would remain ineffectual. That they could coerce his acquiescence to the new regime. They should have known him better, but the price had nearly torn him apart. Too often Samantha had been waved in front of him, like a red flag in front of a bull. And he had charged off, damning the consequences, leaving Scully to pick up the pieces again. They had always known how to push his buttons, how to manipulate him. He had reached a point where he wasn't even sure he believed she was alive. Defeat had so long been a companion that he was no longer able to envision success. As his father's son he was destined to be part of the New Order. But they had taken his sister to silence his father and unknowingly turned Mulder implacably against them. Their creation had become their greatest enemy. After the years of fruitless investigations, it was exhilarating to be finally striking telling blows against the enemy. And the search for some truths had had to be set aside. He hoped Samantha would understand. When had his quest for the Truth become larger than screams on a chill November night? There were some truths he still did not know. Why his cooperation was important to them. Why they had expended so much effort in spying on and manipulating his life. Why, despite the threat he had presented to them, they had never really tried to kill him. He suspected those answers lay in his past, in the tangled and tattered skeins of the Mulder family history. In crimes his father had committed, and died before confessing. In secrets his mother had taken to her grave. Those answers might be forever lost to him now as those memories had been lost to him all his life. So many secrets, so many lies, and his fucking eidetic memory could not provide the answers. And while he had passed the time in his ineffectual pursuits, the "Date" had come and gone. America had been conquered and only a handful of people knew it. Now the Constitution was merely an old parchment. Meaningless in the New Order. He had unknowingly been an X-File himself long before he had ever heard the term. All the abductions, the tests he never remembered save in nightmares that woke him screaming from sleep. The genetic manipulation his father had countenanced before he had ever been born. All to take his rightful place in the world to come. "You will be one of the inheritors, Fox," he remembered his father whispering as he turned his young son over to the cold, white-coated men. A "master race" -- the old Nazi dream given life -- an aristocracy who would rule a population made compliant and complacent. He still had faith enough to believe that his father would have been horrified by the world he had helped bring to fruition. The night he had died he had seemed genuinely repentant. Dare he hope that his father would finally be proud of him? Maybe it was his fate to atone for his father's crimes. The first to raise objections to the new, subtle, authoritarian measures implemented by a government subsumed by Cancerman and his cronies were the groups that already had a healthy quotient of paranoia. Conspiracy theorists like the Lone Gunmen and UFO groups like MUFON and NICAP. And somehow, they had all heard of "Spooky" Fox Mulder and the X-Files. Incredibly, they believed in him. They expected him to have more information than they did. They expected him to know what to do. That had floored him. After all, just what had he been able to accomplish in six years of investigation? Nothing. Nada. A few conspiracies uncovered, but no proof. Just the Consortium's trick of disappearing evidence. It had begun slowly, insidiously. Initiatives to stamp out crime resulted in the curtailment of individual rights and freedoms. Law enforcement agencies (under the strict rule of the Consortium, of course) were given sweeping powers. Individuals who were a little too vocal in their distaste of the new regime found themselves victims of planted evidence, trumped up charges and asset-forfeiture laws that had been rewritten to cover almost any crime. The appeals process was so slow and convoluted as to be non-existent. Reported disappearances hit an all-time high. Some were undoubtedly individuals who had refused to be silenced, and were quietly "disappeared" in the best tradition of any penny-ante dictatorship. Others were probably taken for experimentation -- the Consortium had far less need for stealth and the Project continued unabated. Unsurprisingly, there was great increase in UFO activity and UFO related abductions. Much to Scully's chagrin. There was little outcry. The experiment in Braddock Heights, where Scully had turned against him, had never actually ended. Instead, it had been refined to "program" the populace into complacency through their television sets. The campaign of disinformation and propaganda would have done any petty tyrant proud. Then the bees had been unleashed, with their new strain of smallpox. Travel had been restricted, the inoculation program had been restarted and Mulder had no doubt that new tissue samples were being added to the vaults under the Virginian mountains. Gradually, the tattered opposition began to coalesce, eventually organizing itself into small resistance cells. It was a small, but growing movement, the nucleus of which, the conspiracy and UFO groups, had very extensive and elaborate ways of gathering information. In a very real sense, they had been in the intelligence business for years. Their expertise had proved to be invaluable now that the stakes had risen so high. But even as the New Order tightened its draconian fist, more individuals escaped its grip to join the Resistance. It was eerie how inevitably, and naturally, he'd come to be leading his motley crew. A veritable X-File. He'd never envisioned himself as a guerrilla. He'd protested he wasn't qualified, he didn't want the responsibility; his psych degree didn't include paramilitary training. It should have been someone like Skinner. But his protests had simply been ignored and he found he couldn't back away. The underground groups trusted him, no one else. Certainly not an ex-jarhead, ex-A.D. who had had his own brushes with the Consortium. Even Mulder had never been certain how trustworthy his boss had been. The real surprise, to Mulder's mind anyway, was that he was actually *good* at it. The knowledge that lives depended on him tempered his natural recklessness. Who would have thought the Oxford psych grad and resident Bureau wacko would actually be *good* at insurgency? He guessed it must be his experience breaking into secret government installations. Too bad he had never been quite as good at getting back out. An X-File indeed. Scully said she hadn't been surprised. She had said she'd always known he was a rebel, ever since she got her first look at one of his ties. He wished Scully were here with him. Well, not here specifically -- there was a real possibility that the entire meeting was a set-up. But he often wished she weren't thousands of miles away, working to try to undo some of the biological horrors the Consortium was unleashing. She was immeasurably safer there, far from the heart of the New Order. But he missed her calming influence, her scepticism. Scepticism that had come crashing down once it was revealed that all he had feared was entirely true. Scully's strangle-hold on order and rationality had shattered and she had had to open the door to chaos. In one stroke, her world had tilted to some bizarre angle and she had struggled hard to accept it. Despite everything they had seen and experienced, she hadn't been prepared. It had cost her so much. She had chafed at their separation, certain he would get himself killed as soon as she stopped watching his back. It had taken both Skinner and himself to convince her of the logic of the situation. No one was as familiar with the Consortium's methods as she; her expertise was vital. Other researchers might overlook or dismiss possibilities as too fantastic. Scully knew better. He worried about her, so far away, where he couldn't protect her. Not that he had ever had much luck at that, he thought bitterly. He hadn't protected her from Duane Barry. He had never been able to protect her when it counted. Her pain and nightmares were alway because of him. The farther away she was from him, the safer she would be. And Skinner was there. That would have to be enough. Skinner had been a surprise. Somehow, Mulder hadn't pictured him as a rebel. He had been on the fence for so long. But he also hadn't been able to imagine his former boss embracing the New Order either. For all the ambivalence Skinner had shown the X-Files team, he had also defended his agents. And he had never been the toady Mulder had thought in the beginning. It was more surprising that the ex-Marine had not acquired the leadership of the fledgling resistance -- that he had deferred to his wayward agent. Another X-File. That had been two years ago, and despite the odds and Scully's dire predictions he had managed to survive. The cabal that now ruled his country had been unpleasantly surprised by his effectiveness. They had come to rue the "modifications" they had performed over the years. Mulder's knowledge of the Consortium, incomplete as it was, made possible the inroads the Resistance made every day. The net that had been spread for him was so tight that he rarely had the chance to venture into the field. He had so hungered for the activity he had ignored his friends' impassioned arguments and taken the risk to come here himself. The information -- if true -- was worth the risk. He hoped. And from a purely practical standpoint, this risk was his to take. No other could take his place. The blood of the alien fifth-columnist he was meeting was fatal to humans. And only Mulder was protected in the all too likely event blood was spilled. The treatment for the alien retro-virus Scully had devised in Alaska hadn't been effective on other victims. She had reluctantly concluded that his recovery was based more on a genetic resistance to the disease than anything she had done. His initial exposure had given him antigens to the retro-virus and had granted him a full-blown immunity to the disease. He'd learned the hard way he was still vulnerable to the caustic properties of the toxin -- the burning in the eyes, nasal passages and throat. So he was here, in the poorest section of Washington, in a rundown warehouse, keeping company with the rats, waiting for an alien, who might, or might not, betray him to the Consortium. His hand went to the comforting weight of the gun at his back. They wouldn't give him the release of death; they'd want him alive to interrogate him. And once they had his secrets, made him betray his friends (he had no illusions, eventually he'd tell them everything they wanted to know -- there were so many ways to coerce the truth and they knew them all), they would begin the experiments. He would be begging for a release they would not grant. There were things worse than death to be feared, after all. He scratched the half-healed scars from his last sortie. More scars. More nightmares. His watch told him that he had lingered in his reveries dangerously long. He slid from shadow to shadow, just another silent darkness within the dark. Just another man, lean and tall, carrying the hope of a nation on his shoulders. Just a man trying to atone for crimes he had no part in, changing a future he had not chosen. Finis Once I rose above the noise and confusion Just to get a glimpse above this illusion I was soaring ever higher, but I flew too high Though my eyes could see I was still a blind man Though my mind could think I was still a madman I hear the voices when I'm dreamin', I can hear them say: Carry on my wayward son There'll be peace when you are done Lay your heavy heart to rest Now don't you cry no more -- Carry on Wayward Son (Kerry Livegren)