From: David Hearne Date: 23 Jun 1999 11:33:04 -0700 Subject: xfc If Nothing Else, Then Damnation(1 of 3) XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX TITLE: IF NOTHING ELSE, THEN DAMNATION (1 of 3) AUTHOR: DAVID HEARNE CLASSIFICATION: V, POST-EP RATING: PG SPOILERS: "E.B.E.," "Musings of a Cigarette-Smoking Man," "Unusual Suspects," "Two Fathers/One Son" SUMMARY: This is a vignette from the viewpoint of Deep Throat after he walks away from Mulder at the end of "E.B.E." AUTHOR'S NOTE: This story represents a first for me. It was the first story to be edited by someone else. In this case, it was Laurie Haynes who corrected it in an amazingly quick amount of time. To Ms. Haynes, thank you very much. XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX It's like you can still see me even after the mist has come between us and I am far away. Your eyes seem to be touching my back with their sharp suspicion. I know if we ever meet again, you'll not be so quick to trust me as before. Good. I head for the parking lot where I'm being waited upon. Another man is watching me, too. He sits behind the steering wheel of his car and his eyes belong to a man who has seen too much and has done too much. When you have this man's history, you either fall into insanity or a cold aloofness. He has opted for the latter. I get into the car, seating myself in the front with him. He drives us away from the installation. We pass a group of people dressed up in silly costumes, drinking beer and holding up signs to the heavens. We're ready, they call out. Let us spread friendship throughout the universe. The car trip goes by in silence for several minutes until the driver asks--- "What the hell was that all about?" "Do you have something specific in mind?" I reply. "You put on this whole show for Mulder. You led him to that installation, only to give him nothing for it. Why?" "It wasn't for nothing. He got something very valuable." The driver briefly lets go of the wheel to make an exasperated gesture. "I fail to see it." "He got trust." "Of what? Certainly not of you." "Who says that he should trust me? No, this was about him learning who his real ally is." The driver considers that for a moment, then says, "Scully." I nod. "She was the one who encourgaged him to analyze the photo. That's how he found the imperfection we left in it for him." "So, he trusts Scully now. So what?" "Originally, his partnership was set up with Scully in order to throw off his balance. Her scientific rationalism was intended as an irritant. She also symbolizes the things that he has discarded -- a promising career, respectability. And, of course, there are the erotic undercurrents." "That ploy seems to have backfired." I smile. The driver shakes his head. "This is a war, sir, not private therapy for Agent Mulder." "If Mulder can pull away from his demons -- his self-pity, his mascochism, his flirting with self-destruction -- then he can be the one person who can find a way out of this madhouse we've built. Or, rather, Mulder and Scully are the two people who can find a way." The driver says nothing for a few moments, then asks what the next step is. "We have to wait for the right moment -- a chink in the enemy's armor." "Sir, technically, we are the enemy." "That's what makes it so tricky." We arrive at my house. I open the passenger door, but don't step out yet. I look at the driver. "It's quite likely that I will be dead soon," I tell him. He nods. "If that should happen, I want you to take over my position." "I assumed that I would." Then he turns his cold eyes to me. "But you should know, sir, that I play things differently than you." "I do know." "Good. Sleep well, sir." I get out of his car and he drives off. Yes, I do know that you play things differently, my friend. What must have gone through your mind when you found Mulder in that warehouse all those years back? I can imagine you looking down at him with those cold eyes as he writhed in the grip of his hallucinations. You left him alone -- he was, after all, the son of one of your superiors. Yet your instincts must have been telling you to throw him away into the pile of everything we have buried and covered. I made Mulder jump through hoops this past week to teach him not to trust me. I hope he'll remember the lesson if he ever meets you. He shouldn't trust you because you would kill him if it would serve your purposes. And he shouldn't trust me because I share his father's sins. XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX TITLE: IF NOTHING ELSE, THEN DAMNATION (2 of 3) She had secrets just like me. Notebooks were used to hold them. Occasionally, she read to me from one of those notebooks. I don't know how she decided when the time was right for me to be her audience. However, every odd week, she would come up to me and say, "Daddy, would you like to hear a story?" I always did. It was the only time that her private life was ever open to me. I knew little about her friends -- if she ever had any. I was aware that she read a lot but she never talked about what she read. And, of course, I knew that she liked to write. She picked up that hobby a month after her mother died. When I first saw her doing it, I asked her what she was writing. "A story," she said, carefully watching her scratching pencil. "What kind of story?" She looked up at me. Her eyes were just on the edge of hostility. "Just a story," she replied in a low voice. I nodded and left her alone. It would be six months later until she even told me one of her stories. It was a birthday present. The story was about a murder trial, one of those affairs where the wrong man has been accused. Over the next eight years, she would tell me a variety of tales -- adventure, fantasy, historical fiction, romance. The characters of her stories ranged from sailors lost on the ocean, to deer who wandered into surburbia, to Richard Nixon. I would try to find the common threads in these stories. Were there any running motifs? Did a particular theme get her attention? If I could find that theme, would it lead me to a better understanding of my daughter? It's easy for you to say that I should have done more than that. When an eight-year-old girl loses her mother, you should not allow her to flee into a secret place. You certainly should not allow the barriers on this secret place to remain intact even as the girl gets closer and closer to womanhood. Yet, how could I have the nerve to invade her secrecy? It would have been a loathsome hypocrisy. Here I was, a possessor of a hundred secrets more shameful than anything that a young woman could hide. She must have known that her mother had left her alone with a man of shadowy reputation. I carried suspicion and uncertainity into the house everytime that I returned from 'work.' She never asked me about 'work,' though. That could only have been because she loved me. Only love could have created that kind of trust. Avoiding questions, she relied on me to innoculate her against the poison of my secret life. In return, she would gradually reveal herself through the stories, drawing me closer to the moment when I would finally know my child. That moment never came. One of my secrets swallowed her whole. I... I lied to you, Agent Mulder. No surprise, there. As you yourself said, "I'm wondering which lie to believe." I told you that I once executed an alien. No, that story wasn't true. Not completely. The UFO that I saw in Hanoi was not shot down by Marines. I never killed an extraterrestrial there. But I did kill one somewhere else. The place is irrelevant. The time was a few months after they took my daughter away. You see, Mulder, there really was a secret resolution drawn up by the powers of the world to terminate the life of any captured alien. However, that was just to satisify the alleged leaders of the world -- the Trumans, the Stalins, all those who were frightened by the possibilities inherent in a people knowledgable of their place in the universe. Our 'leaders' didn't know two things at the time. One was that many of their advisers and underlings were working out their own agreements with the aliens. Second, the execution of any downed pilot wasn't just needed to avoid aggravating the already-turbulent international relations. The aliens are very strict when it comes to failure. If you are inept enough to crash your own craft or get shot down, then you're not much good to the Project. They wanted us to deal out the punishment. In any case, an alien did find himself captured on our terra firma. I was a hundred miles away at the time, yet I ordered our men to hold the alien 'til I got there. I wanted to do it myself. There was nothing innocent and blank in that expression, Agent Mulder. It damn well knew what a gun was. And I damn well shot it over and over, opening up green holes in that white skin, shattering those large black eyes. I believe psychologists call that 'displacing your aggression.' Are the aliens evil? I'm not sure. They seem more like some impersonal force of nature. 'Vast, cool and unsympathetic.' A very apt description, Mister Wells. I came to realize that shooting one will not rid the darkness from my heart. When the second opportunity came for me to play the executioner, I tried to weasel out of it. A flipped coin put the gun back into my hand, That was part of my lie, Agent Mulder. The other part deals with why I've turned traitor. TITLE: IF NOTHING ELSE, THEN DAMNATION (3 of 3) XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX Some of us have managed to convince ourselves that we did the right thing. Spender is particularly good at self-deception. He completely believes that the situation only gave him one option. That we kept the world safe. That we, in fact, were looking out for our families' best interests. Your father knew otherwise, Mulder. He knew that our justification was crap. When he had been the lone dissenter back then, I did nothing to support him but I was secretly cheering him on. Yet he caved in just as I did. When the aliens look at you with their unforgiving eyes, the sense of powerlessness freezes you. If you're any kind of father, though, you realize that you can't hide in excuses. What made it worse was that they let her return. Apparently, the aliens need to see how their test subjects will react to their normal environment. A standard abductee is given a memory wipe and left alone for awhile. Some realize what has happened to them and deal with it in predictable ways---fear, paranoia, madness. A couple take an original route. Spender's wife, for example, has convinced herself that she is a kind of cosmic guru. Of course, she has it rougher than other abductees. Most of them get returned to a semblance of the life they knew before. The abductees of our families come back to find that an important person in their life has gone missing. It was another part of the agreement. No contact. Spender's wife believes that he just walked out on her. My daughter thought that I was dead. I wanted to be dead to her. I actually thought that it would make the separation easier. And I wanted to remove all traces of my existence from her life. You can guess where this led to. You can also guess at the sheer desperation of my own self-deception. After a few years in an orphanage, she was eventually adopted. Her new parents raised her well enough. Her life was never marked by anything overtly disturbing. There were no drugs, no trouble with the law, no acts of violence against anyone or herself. She obtained a steady job after college, kept with it until her late thirties, never moving upward in the corporation but able to pay the rent and board. Did she continue to write? I don't know. Did she ever have strange dreams? Did she realize that strangers were visiting her again and again, holding her for a few painful hours? Did she ever dare to express her fears to anyone? I don't know the answer to that, either, but I suspect that she turned any pain into a secret. When her co-workers were interviewed by the police, they could only say, "She was a quiet person. Kept to herself. Nice but shy. Nobody ever thought that she was capable of this." Of course not. If you looked at me, would you ever think that I was capable of the things I've done? Would she have made another choice if I had been there for her? I could have been something to hate, something to aim her dark feelings at other than herself. Or I could have just made the end come sooner. I have her notebooks. I never read them. I'm tempted to destroy them occasionally, but they are still there in the basement. Do the others know the thoughts in my head? Do they suspect my attempts at sabotage? Surely, they have been watching me for the past year and wondering if I going to follow my daughter's lead. I sense that I am. I know that I am. A writer once said, "We all expect something from death, even if it's only damnation." I should be so lucky. XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX