Part (1/?)
Title: Manifest Destiny
Authors: Kelida Flynn and Slippin' Mickeys
Category: S, A, R
Keywords: Alternate Universe; Mulder/Scully Romance
Summary: Yet to be determined
"Manifest Destiny"
by Kelida Flynn and Slippin Mickeys
PROLOGUE
All things past and future color the night. This was a lesson learned
hard and at a high cost, as are all things of any significance. The
world had ceased being a paint-by-numbers place
ages ago, but no one had ever bothered to notice until now, when it
demanded to be seen as well as heard.
They had not seen it coming. It had always been a possibility lingering
at the fringe, but the reality. . . they could not, and had not,
fathomed it. Even if they had somehow foreseen it, they could not have
prevented it--this melting of midnight onto the landscape. What
remained now could not be erased. The only option left was to redraw
it, beginning and ending at the points of regret, joined together by a
line asymmetrically absurd and beautiful as the journey it traced, and
the people it connected.
.Chapter One.
Manifest destiny.
An American ideal. The aspirations of these United States to expand. To
colonize.
Ironic that when colonization began, it started in America.
Not in the chaotic uproar portrayed in Hollywood, but in a strange way,
it was rather organized. And while not outwardly frenzied, there was an
underlying hysteria felt by the unsuspecting populace. The
expression "they came out of the blue" carried a whole new meaning.
Most were horrified or stupefied, some maniacal and hysterical, but
overall, the feeling in America was a wrenching kind of sadness from a
democracy gone bad. When it began there was a collective lamentation
from the American people when they were stabbed in the back by their own
government. They should have known. People have been screaming about it
for years. Mulder had.
At least that's what they told him.
He thought that it must have been truly a sight to see members of the
colonizing alien race working side by side with their own military.
Herding the wayward people along, ferrying them to whatever destination
would serve the new leaders' purpose.
At least, that's what Mulder had been told.
He woke up in an arcane government institution 300 ft below Lake
Michigan, with no identity, no memory, and no hope.
The only tendril of memory he tried to grasp, was that there was
something, *someone* out there that he was looking for.
How was he to know *she* was looking for *him*?
<><><><><><><><><><><><><><><>
It is inbred in the human condition that survival is of the first and
foremost importance. As high and holy as mankind would like to hold
itself, nature was vicious, and when stripped of their civilization,
their stability, it was inevitable that nothing could stand in the way
of survival, as hideous and unbearable as living could or would be.
But in classic Darwinian fashion, only the strongest had survived and
the meek did not live long enough to inherit the earth. Instead, it
inherited them.
The survivors, if they could be called that, were the ones spared by the
maliciousness of colonization, or the ones too strong or too
scared to take their own lives before the new inhabitants of their
shared world had the chance to take theirs. We are left to re-create
history, she had thought, and to build the new future from the ruins.
"What is past is present is future," she had rambled shortly
after the first wave of colonists had arrived in Washington.
There had been a truth, a simple sort of clarity
in those words, even if she had been suffering from a mild shock.
One of the tragedies of mankind was its tendency to repeat history, yet
in this concept Dana Scully could see the possibility for hope.
Because as those in power continued to corrupt and consume,
the oppressed would rise and rebel. She still believed in the human
spirit, even if the one person who had encompassed it so completely, was
now gone.
"Dana?" Scully wiped the morning sweat off her brow with the back of
her hand and rose to greet her mother as Margaret Scully exited the
large, blue-gray house standing sombrely on the Rhode
Island seashore. "It's almost time for the morning sweep-through. We
should get in before they come so they can leave as soon as possible."
"Yes," she agreed flatly, wiping her soil-stained hands on the
over-sized pair of overalls she was wearing. She had found it hanging
in the closet of the house that she and her mother now shared
with four other inhabitants. Scully left the small garden she had been
tending to and trudged up the small hill toward the house.
"Why is this necessary *every* morning?" a voice asked from the front
porch. It was more of an open-ended question than a rhetorical one, but
Scully answered it nonetheless, though not until
she was within arms-length of Cynthia Adler, the woman who lived in the
room next to hers. Cynthia pressed her nose in between forefinger and
thumb, sniffing slightly, and waited for a response. Scully studied the
woman's angular face and then looking down to Cynthia's hands as though
she were addressing them, answered.
"I don't know. Maybe they're looking for something, or more likely than
not, for somebody."
"And maybe it's just because they want us to fear them," a dark baritone
cut her off. Scully looked to her left at Richter McLachlan, tall,
dark, and almost vicious in a beautiful way. "Because they want the
fear. They've taken away everything else. They want our submission
now. Our souls." Her face grew grave, but she did not feel it
necessary to justify his melodrama with a response. Instead, she
continued on into the house and up the New England style stair case to
her room. In the hallway, on her way to her bedroom, Scully saw
Cynthia's daughter, Jodie, rocking herself quietly on the padded bench
by the window. The girl was only sixteen, but already she was deeply
world-weary and old. Scully did not know if Jodie had been like this
before colonization had begun, but it was already a painfully obvious
reality that the chance to recover any semblance of innocence was long
past.
Leaving Jodie alone in the hallway, Scully passed into her bedroom, an
uncomfortable, sunshiny lemon yellow. She rested herself on the bed and
tiredly began to undress. The knee-high boots came off first, caked
with fresh mud. She placed them on the ground, a chunky cluck as each
shoe hit the hardwood floors. She rubbed her temples. A small pain
had begun growing in her head. The floor below her seemed to begin
tumbling downward into nothing. She wouldn't see it clearly any more.
It was something fragmented, a filmy brown grain, static pattern.
"Honey?" Her mother peeked into her room? "Are you okay, Dana?"
Margaret concernedly entered, sitting next to her daughter.
Instinctively she wrapped an arm loosely around Scully's shoulder,
careful to not be too confining, but close enough to be comforting. She
had noticed her daughter's growing withdrawal in the last few months,
which she had passed off as part of the adaption phase into their new
roles in the new world, but it seemed a deeper melancholy.
Days would pass where she would speak hardly speak more than three word
sentences--a nod of the head yes, a shake of the head, no. But Margaret
gave her daughter space to heal, although now she was beginning to think
that Dana had merely grown over her wounds, and that pain still resided
beneath the surface.
Scully shifted and placed her head on her mother's shoulder.
"...fleeting..."
"Fleeting? How is that?"
"Everything feels like it's slipping away," she murmured, eyes averted.
"Is this how the end of the world should feel, Mom?" She stifled a
sardonic laugh. "Did the Bible ever say anything about the four
horseman riding in on UFOs?
"You can't let this get you down." Margaret's hand flew to cover up a
sob trickling out of her throat. "We've lost so much, but we still have
life. It's worth fighting for, even if we feel so desperate and so
lost."
"Oh, God, Charlie..."
Scully had not seen her brother in over a year when word leaked through
that she would never be given that opportunity again. Charlie had died
during the first wave of colonization. It was still a memory raw in her
mind. She hadn't even known the exact details of his death when she
first had heard. Not until three days later, and three days before
Mulder had disappeared, did she find out that Charlie had been selected
to be a host for the full-blown colonists but none other than Bill
Scully Jr.
Scully suddenly saw a picture of rage in her mind. That of Mulder, his
lips pursed fiercely together as he supported her when she could not
hold herself upright without fear of falling, or running madly into the
streets with her brother's blood dripping from her hands. And for a
brief moment, that was all that should could feel, all that she could
think of to build up her strength again.
"They're waiting for you." Jodie's deep voice said flatly. Her frame
passed like a shadow through the room and she disappeared down the
stairs, her steps light upon the stairwell.
Together, mother and daughter moved to walk down to where the
fully-armed inspectors waited. Scully was unsure if these men with
their death-like faces were fully human or not. They were not the same
everyday. Thinking about it more carefully now, Scully could not recall
ever seeing the same men twice. Today, though, they did not do a sweep
of the house. Instead, they had brought along a woman, although she
could not be sure if this woman was a prisoner or their supervisor. Her
face, though, was almost drawn as coldly as theirs.
"This woman is to live with you from now on." The left guard shoved her
forward. Only then did Scully note the electric shackles around the
woman's ankles. A quick click and buzz followed soon after and the
shackles disengaged and she stumbled forward. Grinding her shoulder
blades outward, the woman gasped softly to herself, lurching onto a
table to recapture her balance. The guards left without another word,
leaving the residents of the house on the Rhode Island shore to stare at
the dark maven of a woman that had, without warning, invaded their
crowded house. She did not respond, though. Instead, her dark eyes
betrayed nothing as she stared them back, and left them for the kitchen
in search of glass of water to wet her dry throat, scorching her mark
through the corridors of the house in her wake.
END Part 1
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