From: phileandforget Date: Thu, 20 Dec 2001 09:00:29 -0800 (PST) Subject: New Submissions (3 more) Source: direct Title: Promisery Author: phileandforget Date: November 1, 2001 Category: Angst Keywords: MSR, character deaths Rating: R (suicide scene!) Summary: Death and broken promises are revealed through the journal of Dana Scully, and seen through the eyes of her ally and predecessor to the X-Files. Disclaimer: I own neither Mulder, Scully or The X-Files -- they are the property of Chris Carter and 1013 Productions. I suppose I could lay claim to the anonymous character, but even then, I suspect not. So, no infringement intended, please don't sue, and if you do happen to read this, feedback is always appreciated. ;) Promisery phileandforget 2006 How many times must we kill them, before they are dead? Before they are erased from our minds like the strangers they were, or at least banished to memory as the ghosts they are? I am haunted by them; haunted by what he did. It lingers with me like a foul smell, the stench of death - but more than that, the stench of betrayal. My mind's eye is drawn into a picture of tragedy, an accidental witness to an infinite cycle of reciprocal sacrifice. At once understandable and utterly bewildering, his actions lie across their promise like a final scar, permanent and prominent. No longer a wound, for she is not here to bleed, yet not quite a scar either, for there was no time to heal. Just -- an act. An act of betrayal, recorded, with the promise, recorded faithfully in her own words: "You can't harm yourself without harming me, Mulder. So promise me you'll do neither. Mulder, promise me." Already the words have begun to blur on their delicate paper beds, fading as though shrinking from their own bitter end. His reply, too, has begun to fade with shame. "I promise, Scully." The tears they cried that night have resurfaced upon the surface of the page that records them, slowly expunging the words, like the rain washes away a dusty, dirty summer. In its own subtle way, history is being erased. One day, the page might even be clean again, bereft ofher graceful script and awaiting another, more childish one. Or if not, the words will disintegrate into the page, into the earth from whence they came. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. But not, I hope, before they reach their intended reader. I try to read them to him, but too often choke on the words and give up. I do try, though. It's all we can do, try to undo the damage that we are all trying to forget... 2001 Dana Scully put down her pen and stared at the clock beside her. It took a moment of adjustment before they unblurred, whereupon the numbers revealed themselves as 02:05am. Like an old, arthritic lady before - or perhaps after - a heavy storm, she rose from her desk. It was time to sleep, she thought vaguely. It was so late... Too late. It was too late. Would sleep be a surrender, she wondered. Would she give in to the temptation of a few hours' solace? Would those few hours even hold any solace for her, or would they be but restless thoughts and poisonous dreams? Tiredly, she ran a hand over her eyes. It was too late for such weighty decision as whether or not to sleep. It was too late for everything and yet, with her own child slumbering in the room next door, and his father on the couch, it was perhaps too early to be so late. The night had but begun. When Mulder showed up at her door, when they talked and confessed, and when she wrought from him a promise, everything was just beginning. It was fresh like new dried flowers; beauty in the salvaged. She saw possibilities for them - for them all, as a unit of bound souls, a family - she saw with startling clarity what they could be. And he saw it too. Two hours ago, he had come to make a confession. William had slept through it, blissfully unaware of his father's undoing and remaking. Blissfully unaware of the taste of cold metal in his mouth, metal that warmed with hateful hesitation. Blissfully unaware, too, of the scent of gunpowder in his nostrils, a scent that never ceased to fade, as though it had, in those long minutes, permeated his very tissue. He was six months old. He slept. Dana Scully, on the other hand, woke up to herself. With eyes unnaturally open with muffled fear and throat unusually closed with stifled tears, with breath as rapid as the rain outside, she had listened to every word. Moreover, she had understood. While he spoke, his head bowed in shame at his own dual cowardice, she had ventured a glance across the room. A glance, heavy with guilt, in the direction of her own gun, the private weapon she stored secretly, dangerously. It was at once her protector and her predator, though for the moment, it lay peaceful and safely out of reach. Even for her searching eyes. She sought it and he happened to glance up at her. In that moment, he read her mind, and because of that, she confessed likewise. Then she made him promise. Dismissed by her urgency and near frantic need for reassurance, her own hypocrisy fell away. The words she later recorded were accurate enough, though they tumbled thoughtlessly from her terror as she held him to her breast. "Promise me." Her voice, low and fierce, compelled his answer. He was reluctant to give it, and she drew away, shaking him like an old rug. "Mulder, promise me!" Then she pulled him back to her, torn between her anger and her love. As she spoke, the tears broke out of her throat and surged out through her furious eyes. Feeling them fall upon his cheek, he pulled her closer to him and whispered desperately, brokenly, "I promise, Scully. Now you promise." Their vows taken, they collapsed against each other in limp relief, as though having established one more fact, a Truth beyond all Truths. A Truth born of their sacred love, and thus similarly sanctified. How little they knew, as they tore at each other's clothes and made reckless love. How little they knew, as he drifted off to sleep and she stole away from him to stay away. It was all but a sweet illusion, a fallacy of their own creation, one to which they clung as fiercely and unwittingly as children to youth. 2002 It had been foreseeable that she should die first. For all the insinuations, for all the teasing little hints about her mortality, or lack thereof, that he had eagerly believed, there was no escaping the Truth. He had hoped beyond hope that Scully, his Scully, would die first; he could no longer conceive a life without her. Selfishly, he had wished them a lifetime together, at the end of which, he would die peacefully and she would peacefully follow. As she had always done, she would follow him into the void. Never did he imagine her dying before him, without him. It was inconceivable that she should leave him like that, abandon him in his ultimate time of need. He had so feared to imagine it, that when it finally happened, his response had been straight denial. Even while going through the motions of arranging her final comforts, he had been in denial. It wasn't really Scully, it wasn't really his life he was burying. What it was, he dared not think, but it wasn't her. The certainty sustained him long enough to accept it as fact, but the fact sustained him only as long as it took to realise she wasn't coming back. Taken from him as soon as it had happened, by a solicitous and grieving grandmother, William was blissfully unaware of his father's second undoing. The awareness would, of course, burgeon and then burden as he matured, but his innocence prevailed the night it happened, and many of the thousands that followed. It was an ironic parallel, a bitter mockery of the forgotten promise he had once made. It was past midnight when he entered her apartment, the one with the better memories. His own had been dark and cold for hours, a veritable grave of old sorrows. Seeking solace, he had returned to hers, to what had been theirs, if only for a few short months. Upon entering, however, the realisation had fallen upon him, as heavy and crushing as the sky itself. She wasn't there. At first, the thought refused to register. The refusal itself registered though, and was rapidly followed by the thought, the realisation, itself. She wasn't there. And search as he might, he would never find her there. Scully, his Scully, was six feet under. Buried young, burdened with the guilt of her promise, his misery, buried with the maternal regrets, the sour failure of a sweetly promising life. Buried in a closed casket, in a white dress that was meant for other purposes. Buried in his heart, and slowly digging her way out, tearing with accusing claws and gnashing teeth. "Why did you let me die, Mulder?" His name rising from her throat in a gentle, confused purr. Violence and love, love and violence. He stared wildly around the room, panting with the exertion of tearing it apart in his search for her. She wasn't there. She wasn't coming back. She was restless for his company, unwilling to proceed alone into the void. Unwilling to leave him alone, she was lingering. He could feel her indecision as he went to the cupboard and withdrew her secret weapon. He had to watch her back. If he didn't, who else would? He was the only one she trusted. He had let her down once, he couldn't do it again. Such were his thoughts as he raised the gun to his mouth. Such were his thoughts as I burst into the room. 2006 I see him every day, like an image burned on the tender underside of my eyelids, visible only when I sleep, or when I blink. Needless to say, I generally try to avoid either. If it was hard to watch the first time, dumb and aghast, it's harder now, when I know what to expect. Me in the doorway, him on the couch. Thinking himself alone. Raising the gun, opening his mouth, pulling the trigger- The first weeks were the hardest, but they eventually plateaued into a state I now embrace as normalcy. The work is arduous, but rewarding. I believe we're making progress -- after all these years, the Truth always just out of reach is nearing our basement empire. The signs are often hard to read, but, conversant in the language of ambiguity, we do recognise some occasionally. And then sometimes, we'll have a breakthrough, an indisputable breakthrough. This is when it stings the most -- the injustice, the irony, the guilt. It is hard to accept that we are finally nearing the Truth and they are, neither of them, here to share the astonishing view. We only reached it by climbing upon their backs. Although we've earned our glimpse, they were the ones who forged a path for us. Still, there is no dwelling on the past. I have learned this the hard way, as has my partner. We have grown from our suffering, rising from the ash of our grief like a phoenix, bonded in new purpose. In the wake of Mulder's death - my fault, our loss - we came to realise that we are truly alone in our crusade. When Dana Scully was killed, let me not understate the devastation, but let me confess that when Mulder died, our grief was focussed as much towards our immediate loss as the one we saw as impending. We feared for our project, our inheritance. The X-Files. We feared for "The Truth," for our own inadequacies, for world on our shoulders. Yet in the aftermath, in turning desperately to each other and to the files, we saw new possibilities. You might say that we saw in each other the first hint of a path through this unfriendly wilderness. It is four years since they left us. Four years since I learned to trust no one (except my partner) and look beyond the lies. Four years since I found her journal and in it, a broken promise. How many times must we kill them, before they are dead? How many cases must we solve to absolve ourselves, what must we uncover before we recover ourselves? I will never stop paying penance for their deaths -- for hers, for the sake of the project, and his, for the sake of the partner. Was it not enough that she died for him, but that he then died for her, *despite* her? He broke a promise that, alive, would have broken her heart. It is hard to conceive of any valour in that, yet strangely, I understand it. She was dying when I met her, a silent, agonizing death, when we all thought he was dead and wouldn't admit it. Nurturing both her grief and their child inside her, she believed he had died for her, taken her place - she never understood that he had done it as much for himself. But had he not been recovered, I dare not think how much longer she would have carried on thus, our Scully the Stoic. I understand such love. And now that they rest in peace, I wonder yet whether their deaths are still happening around me, in an eternal cycle of each dying to save the other. For four years, my partner and I have regularly paid our respects to the dead. This we do by honouring the living; the legacy with blue eyes and auburn hair, a menace to his grandmother and angel to his godparents. William grows up before our eyes -- a strange and beautiful child, so unsettlingly bright that I have at times wondered whether he can read my mind. We have investigated this, of course, though our suspicions have never been voiced to anyone but each other. It is for his own protection. And perhaps, of course, his uniqueness might just as conceivably be the result of his equally unique parents -- born of such extraordinary people, how could he help but be gifted? He has his parents' lust for knowledge; no answer is sufficient. The aptness of his name, Will, amuses me -- surely if his parents were wilful, he has but inherited it twofold. It is four years since they left him, and William will never know what he lost. When he gets a little older, I will give him the cross. Hopefully, by then, he will know his mother through her words, if nothing else. I am surprisingly firm about this. Perhaps it is in honour of another child I once knew, one who died tragically young, and one I did not, that I respect the value of knowing one's kin. When I give him the cross, I will explain to him its significance, and show him how a cross on its side forms an x. I will explain to him that it symbolises the meeting of two faiths, and that for the owners of these two faiths, he was that meeting. The centre of their universe, embodiment of their love - the Truth they both knew. Certainly the only one they ever agreed upon. Four years ago, my partner and I rose unsteadily on our own feet, and learned first to fight for what was ours. Upon receiving it, we taught ourselves to see -- beyond the lies, beyond our own existences and that of the entire human race. We taught our minds to open like grand ballroom doors, to perceive the stunning decadence and depravity of a world beyond our own, to perceive a threat -- so very real! -- and again, fight for what is ours. This time, we fight for more than the mere X-Files -- we fight for the sovereignty of the human race. It is a long and bitter struggle, a fight amongst ourselves, a fight against Them, fueled by a belief that while the Truth is out there, it is beholden to no one, least of all a shadow government. Perhaps this is what Mulder and Scully were fighting for; perhaps this is the goal we have travailed so long to realise. The goal, so noble and vast -- the Truth in all its myriad forms, cast across the human race like a sandstorm of forbidden knowledge. What becomes of this knowledge is not our place to decide; the Truth is but Pandora's box, with the evils already unleashed and no one the wiser -- yet. They will be. Our goal grows nearer with each passing day, the wheels having been set in motion for years now, and the carriage hurtling down towards us at a frightening pace. It will soon be upon us, and we race to meet it. We have a legacy to fulfil and after that, one hell of a view. End Feedback: webmaster@withinrach.com Fanfiction: http://fanfic.withinrach.com