From: Brighid Date: Sat, 30 Jan 1999 10:41:02 -0800 Subject: New: I Would Not Stop (1/1) by Brighid Title: I Would Not Stop (1/1) Author: Brighid Spoilers:Spoilers for: Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose, Tithonius Rating: PG Category: VA Keywords: Scully musings Archive: Gossamer yes -- otherwise, sure, but keep my name & let me know. Constructive feedback greatly appreciated. Disclaimers: All things X-files belong to Chris Carter, 1013 and FOX. This is not for profit, but for love. I Would Not Stop by Brighid I would collect headlines, but most of the press is electronic these days; environmentalists and technocrats have almost completely eradicated the use of paper. As a result, that's almost eradicated the concept of privacy. It makes it difficult for me to be what I've become. My past slips into inexorable greyness, and my future stretches out, an infinite blank. I try to hold onto memories, I try to mark the passage of years, but they just blur into one another, the years mixed up, the faces and voices interchangeable. I used to work so hard at keeping my face young, at keeping my body slim, at finding some sort of peak and holding it. Now, I can't even bear to look into a mirror. The picture never changes, and how sad it is it, really, to wish for white hair and sagging breasts and a softly rounded belly? How sad is it, to want to see the marks of time on my face, and not merely feel them in my soul? The aliens never came; Mulder won that war, although he never got his sister back, not really. He became good friends with a number of the clones, and I think there was love there, of a sort; they took care of him like family, at any rate, after Bruckman's botched prediction. Mulder didn't die, precisely, from asphyxiation. The body went on, but the brain damage was severe, and he needed constant care. The Sam's took him in willingly, cleaned and fed and changed him. They even read to him, although he was too far gone to even begin to understand the complexities of Doctor Seuss. I visited him as much as I could, until my unchanging face made him weep every time he saw me. The Sam's he could handle; they had always been frozen in time for him, and so that made sense to his limited mind, but I became a reminder of his own mortality. One day, a juvenile Sam stopped me at the door and just shook her dark braids, smiling gently at me, and would not let me in. He died three years later. I should have been prepared for it. I had already buried my father, my sister, my mother and then my brother. Yet none of their deaths quite - cut me the way Mulder's did. They went early enough that I wasn't so far apart from them, I wasn't so alien and abstracted from mortality. Mulder's passing made me terribly aware of just how far removed I'd become. Skinner lasted until he was ninety. He was lucid until the end, still a big man, still a strong man. He'd had the sense to retire as soon as the fracas was over, to sink his money into some remote property and hide away in the wilderness. After Mulder died, I sought him out and stayed with him a few years. He did not comment on my changeless face, and I came to fall in love with his changing one. We became lovers, of a sort, although I think it was more in our minds than in our bodies, an intimacy created by shared solitudes rather than mutual passion. I buried him, too, and at the funeral everyone thought I was his granddaughter. I didn't bother to correct them. Over the years, I've become aware of someone else, another like me, though not quite like me. He follows me sometimes, and his eyes are always like I remember them: jackal wild and hectic green, smiling over things that terrify me. Of all of us, it strikes me as painfully ironic that Krycek and I are the survivors. Sometimes, I feel as though we should meet in a deserted underground parking garage, and fight it out until there is only one. But that would be too lonely, I think. So we smile and nod from a distance, he with his nanos and me with my curse, and we wait for judgement day, when we'll be the last ones standing. Adam and Eve in reverse. They don't remember any of us right, you know. It bothers me, a little. Mulder, for example, has assumed Elliot Ness proportions -- larger than life and twice as good. The details of his decline are most definitely not taught in the schools. Our saviours do not end up vegetables because they kicked the chair over while masturbating. It just doesn't happen that way, and if it did - we rewrite history. Officially, Mulder was the victim of an attempted assassination. I'm not sure whether to laugh or weep over what I've become over the passage of years. I'm like a cross between His Girl Friday and Saint Scully the Sceptic. I am reason personified, I am this little dashboard Virgin. I am the Handmaiden of the Truth. If Mulder was the Christ of the New Millenium, I was his Martha or his Mary Magdalene. I'm so goddamned squeaky clean I want to vomit. There's a convent of nuns named after me, for God's sake! Mother would be so proud. I have long since outstripped Fellig, and in retrospect, I think I understand him better. It is hard to have outlived your time, your world. Yes, there is always something new to learn, something new to experience, but it wearying, wearing. Time erodes rocks and souls alike, until there is nothing left but sand. You can't build a life on sand. You can't build anything. You merely - exist. At first, I was tempted to do what he did. I haunted accident scenes, thought about interceding when death hovered over a child too young, a love too knew, but I could never do it. I could never bring myself to cover their eyes at the last minute and stare into the face of death. Not because I wasn't ready, not because I feared dying, still. It was, quite simply, because I could not do to someone else what had been done to me. I couldn't just hand some unwitting soul a life sentence. It hurts to spend forever saying good-bye. The End