From: syxer7@aol.com (SYXer7) Newsgroups: alt.tv.x-files.creative Subject: NEW: "One More Night" 1/3 Last time now... Date: 24 Feb 1996 06:30:41 -0500 Here we go AGAIN.... This is it. If this doesn't work, I give up and I'll email it to everyone myself. It'd probably be easier. :-( Hello All! This is my first completed attempt at fanfiction. I REALLY want everyone's opinions on this, so just take a second to hit that reply button. Major Angst alert, no relationshipper fodder here. All ages welcome. ;-) Fox Mulder, Dana Scully, and all other characters herein are property of CC, 1013 Productions, and FOX. Don't sue me, you won't get much anyway. One More Night by Pam Smith (SYXer7@aol.com) Sitting in the dim light, he considered the box in front of him. His father had left him this, this Pandora's box he held in his hands. Secrets lay in here. Dark, terrible secrets. Secrets about his father and his past. Did he really want to know these truths? he wondered. Or were there truly some things worth not knowing? He had wondered what his father had meant to tell him on that horrible night, still fresh in his mind after all these months. But he had never gotten the chance to find out. The gunshot... the blood... He shook himself, uselessly trying to shake the image from his edeitic memory. No use dwelling on the past, he told himself. Ha. At the rate he was going, the past would soon be all he had. Except for Scully. But he was even losing her. The distance between the two of them had grown, a great rift in their partnership that seemed insurmountable. It's just as well, he sighed. If she left on her own, maybe nothing else would happen to her. He wouldn't cause her any more misery. Any more nightmares. Again he shook himself, and turned his attention back to the deceptively simple wooden box in his hands. He shook it gently, the contents shifting and bouncing off of its sides. He had to know. No matter how horrible. No matter how terribly evil it would make his father. No matter how it might change him. Even the truths we don't want to know, *especially* these truths, have to come out, he told himself. He cracked the old wooden lid open slowly, peering inside carefully, as if something inside of the container might reach out and grab him, hurt him. Papers. Pictures. Tapes. Evidence of his father's involvement with the dark men who sought to control what he so desperately wanted to find and uncover. And a diary. Steeling himself, he picked up the small, leather-bound volume, placed the box with its remaining contents on the floor, and opened it. Skimming through the first few dozen entries, he slowed and read more carefully when the name Zeus Faber caught his eye. His father had gone with two of his colleagues to interview the last living soldier who had be in contact with the oil creature that he and Scully now knew had possessed Krycek. What drew his attention was less the man's description of the creature than the two men who had been with his father. One of them he had seen mentioned in previous entries, and he surmised that the man described was none other than the black-lunged bastard who had so often tried to shut down the X-Files and who had ordered the deaths of his father and Melissa, and had orchestrated Scully's abduction. One day, he swore to himself, this Cancer Man would pay for his crimes. He had nearly killed him once, but even in that darkest of times he had refused to become one of Them. To be continued... =========================================================================== From: syxer7@aol.com (SYXer7) Newsgroups: alt.tv.x-files.creative Subject: NEW: "One More Night" 2/3 Fixed (again) Date: 24 Feb 1996 06:31:13 -0500 Disclaimers in part 1. This part should end in "To be continued..." Now, though, he wasn't sure he would spare Cancer Man's life if he had the same chance. The past year had taken a serious toll on him, and he felt less and less of a difference between himself and his father after every case. The coldness and cruelty of his father seemed to surface more often than he liked to think about, and this sometimes scared him. But he seemed less and less scared the more it happened. A year ago he felt the opposite, fearing what he had become, disgusted with himself. But now... now he wasn't sure. So much had happened because of him, so many horrible things, that he truly wasn't sure any more. Dad's dead, Melissa's dead, Sam's gone, Scully was abducted, and now Skinner had been shot. Never mind that Cancer Man and his goons had wiped his memory, drugged his water, and killed him with fire. (He still shivered at the thought of that day, the bodies, the decades-old stench of fearsome secrets hidden from sight far too long, and the harsh, unforgiving blaze licking at him as he squeezed himself slowly through his small escape tunnel, created by the piteous creatures he had crawled under and over.) He hadn't truly cared what happened to himself in his quest since that long night in 1972. But so much happened to those around him, it was almost unbearable to think about. He had briefly considered putting others out of his misery on a few nights, sitting alone in his lonely apartment in the night. He had almost done it a few times, gotten close enough on a few occasions to ending this parody of living he sometimes found himself in, but each time something always pulled him back from the edge. Once it had been Melissa. Other times it was the need to find Samantha, or just to tear the truth from the claws of the dark men who held it so tightly and run through the streets with it, screaming it to the rooftops and proclaiming to the world "Here is the Truth which we all seek. Look upon its visage and know it." But it seemed that his reasons for not going through with the deadly actions were rapidly dwindling. Melissa, who had bravely come to him, leaving Dana's deathbed to convince him to see her one last time, was dead, struck down by a dead man's bullet. Scully was... distant. They no longer shared their nightmares with each other, their problems and hopes and all the little things which used to make them such good friends and more. He briefly wondered how much of their distance was his fault and how much was hers, but it didn't really matter in the end. Samantha, once his only true purpose in life, was now being used against him as she was used against their father. It seemed that the prospect of her return was becoming harder and harder to keep believing in. He had almost come to accept her as a lost cause, as a windmill he could never reach in his Quixotic journey. And the Truth was becoming another far- off windmill he could never touch, or when he could, when he could see it, and even brush its farthest edges with his fingertips, it was rudely stolen out from under him, leaving him flailing wildly at wind and empty space, left to regain his balance in the cold, lonely night. To be continued... =========================================================================== From: syxer7@aol.com (SYXer7) Newsgroups: alt.tv.x-files.creative Subject: NEW: "One More Night" 3/3 Fixed (again) Date: 24 Feb 1996 06:31:38 -0500 One last time, part 3/3. Disclaimer in part 1. Look for the "End." :-) He perused some more of his father's diary, but stopped before he reached the year before Sam's abduction. He wasn't sure if he could truly face the truth from his father's own hand tonight. When he had heard the words spoken from Victor Klemper's mouth, seen some evidence of what had really happened in the folder with his and Sam's names on it deep inside the heart of the Virginian mountain, he could still tell himself that he wasn't truly sure what the truth was; that he didn't really know if his father had easily participated in a cruel trade of one of his children's lives, and in the extermination of so many innocent lives in an agreement with Nazis and aliens. It all sounded so absurd that he could almost easily deny himself what he had seen. Deny everything, he thought ruefully. But to see a confession from his father of these truths, to actually and definitely know the real actions was nearly too much. He set aside the diary, face down on the table beside him. He got up and headed towards the window of his small apartment and looked out into the night sky and to the stars. He had once thought that his actions had been justified, that all he believed in had been true. His encounter with the alien bounty hunter and the Gregors had made everything seem so clear to him then. And Scully's warm smile when he woke up so cold in that gray room had made him feel truly happy for just a second. But the scars of those two weeks had not been healed then by Scully's warmth and the admissions of the bounty hunter, and they were surely not healed now, with the sharp knife of time slicing more of his heart and soul to shreds, leaving just enough each time for him to heal before striking again. He still had his father's gun, which he had taken from another, smaller box of snakes. The picture he had held in his hands, with his father, Deep Throat, Cancer Man, and that British man who had warned Scully about Krycek and the Hispanic assassin while he was in New Mexico and had recently warned him about Skinner's second near-death at the hands of that same now-dead assassin, was from that same box. He picked up the gun, a heavy weight in his hands. It was oddly comforting to him, despite his knowledge of what this gun had been used for in its long existence. It was loaded, he knew. He had made sure. He briefly thought of his mother, who had led him to this position. She had overdosed on sleeping pills, unable to live with the stress of living. She had left a parting message on his answering machine, as quiet and deceptively calm as she had been in life. An all-too short good-bye and an all-too shallow apology for her last action and the grief she had caused him in the past had left him with an empty house which he had no desire to see again and, as he had found when he sorted through the contents of the old Massachusettses rooms, the box that lay on the floor before him. Her death had hurt, but they had stopped being mother and son when Sam disappeared. They were strangers to each other, each only acknowledging the other when forced to. So now he sat in his apartment, his father's diary on his right, a box full of secrets at his feet, and his father's gun in his hand, contemplating his future. He half wondered, raising the gun to his lips as he had several times before, if Scully would miss him. A year ago, he realized, she would have. But a year ago he wouldn't be so deadly serious about doing this. He sat there, in the dark, wondering and hoping if the phone would ring and Scully would be on the other end, telling him some thought that had come into her head or some nightmare she needed to talk to someone, anyone, about and that he was the only one who would truly understand. But he knew better than that by now. He hadn't written a note. He didn't think anyone would need one. Or care enough to want one. A small part of him still rebelled at the idea of suicide, shouting at him in a tiny voice that his death would just mean that They had won, that it would be accepting defeat in everything. But that part of him was dwindling smaller and smaller each time he touched cold metal to his skin. And it had gotten so very small now. So very, very small. A lone tear leaked down his cheek. He didn't think he had any left to shed after all this time. To his suprise, several more trails of salty liquid slid down his face, and he found himself sobbing, gasping in choked breaths. He dropped the gun, curling his arms protectively around his waist, trying desperately to regain control. He couldn't stop crying, couldn't stop the tears of sorrow and rage and fear and hate at himself and his life and his father and everything he had seen and done and heard racking his body. After what seemed like hours, he found he could open his eyes again. His cheek pulled at the leather of his couch as he lifted his head up to look down at the floor, at the gun he had dropped an eternity ago. He eyed it carefully, then picked it up and placed it into the box of secrets, followed by his father's diary. Another night, he told himself. If I can make it through to another night, maybe someone else will do the job for me. And then my secrets will die with me. Fox Mulder turned out the lights in his small apartment, closed his eyes, and wished for a dreamless night he knew with a dead certainty that he would not receive. End.