Beyond the Setting Sun: a post-colonization drabble that got stuck in my head and may become something more later on idk
There is one who sees the future, or so she is told. An old, blind woman who wraps her eyes like lady justice. Not to convey her impartiality, but to cover up the horrible scars. She lives in a trailer park about 20 miles outside of Tulsa as the crow flies, and it takes Scully a month to make it there.
By that time her hopes have dwindled down to nothing, and only sheer stubbornness remains as her driving force. Hope had fled into the lonesome night a long time ago.
She sleeps, but she dreams strange things. Phantom memories from her time in captivity. Or maybe it’s just the infection, making her hallucinate. She touches a hand to the back of her neck to the wound that burns feverishly. A torn t-shirt and duct tape had worked as a bandage in a pinch, but the wound had been deep, and from the moment she had done it, she had felt the threat of an infection marching ever nearer, humming a sickeningly familiar death chant.
The woman’s name is Addie, but to the people in the once-flourishing town of Tulsa, now down to less than 1000, she goes by other names. Crazy Addie, Old Addie, Crazy Old Addie, all mock-honorifics said in jeering tones. As if their reality hadn’t just been torn apart at the seams less than a year ago. There are more things in heaven and earth, she wants to say. But the words stick in the back of her throat because she realizes it is the exact thing he would have said.
The passage of time favors none but the dead. She lies awake at night, that wound growing more and more painful, and she wonders if she may see him sooner than she thinks.
The sun burns with a merciless, joyless heat, and she walks on stiff legs to her destination. Her knock is heavy on the door of Addie’s tin can of a house. She wonders how a woman this old could have survived this long in such an unprotected dwelling. But, Scully thinks as Blind Addie (yet another name) answers the door, perhaps there was nothing left to take from this poor woman.
Addie’s hands shake, but her grip on her cane is steady and her steps are sure. Scully calls her ma’am, out of respect and habit.
“You have taken a hard road to come here,” Addie says, her bandaged eyes turned eerily right at Scully, her head cocked at an uncanny angle. “There is a heavy weight atop your shoulders. Grief. You seek something you have lost, so you have come to the one who sees.”
“Yes,” she breathes. Her hands shake too, as she clenched them tight against what may come next.
Addie tilts her head, interested. “You have sight of a different kind. You saw the truth with your very eyes. You are one of the marked ones, set aside for the destruction of our species. And yet, here you are. Still human.”
Still human. It is for this reason that she still counts herself lucky, in spite of everything.
“Please,” she finds herself saying. “Please, I need to know.”
Addie smiles. “He is not far, child. Follow the setting sun, and you will find him.”
She leaves almost immediately after, forging a westward path through the wastelands of America.
* * *
“Scully, if the sky crumbled and fell on top of our heads tomorrow, you would find a way to rationalize it,” Mulder had told her once, with equal parts awe and irritation in his voice. If only she had known at the time how prophetic those words would turn out to be.
They had been on a case when it had happened. She still remembers the shrill, earth-shaking scream of the crafts as they had broken through the dark and split the peaceful night apart. She had woken with a dread like no other. The back of her neck thrummed. They were here.
She still remembers stumbling to his adjoining room, shaking him awake. Oddly enough, he had been resting peacefully that night. He had roused gradually, and then all at once when he had seen the look on her face. One hand on his shoulder and one clasped to the back of her neck, fingernails digging matching imprints in their skin.
“Mulder, they’re here.”
Grabbing what they could, they had fled in the night. Their rental car would not start, so they had gone on foot. They made it two miles before the pain grew so intense that it dropped her to her knees.
She had felt, rather than seen, Mulder’s fear. The trembling of his hands as he took her face in them. The way her name broke apart on his lips, in the back of his throat. She felt herself go limp entirely, and the world tilted to the side as he lifted her into his arms. It fell away entirely as she listened to the warm thump of his heart. A beautiful, fragile thing.
When she came to, he was still walking, and her voice was all-but gone. She had been yelling, he had told her as he rested her under the shade of a spruce and held a water bottle to her chapped lips.
Yelling what, she wanted to know.
He could not meet her eyes when he told her the words.
“You said ‘I won’t do it.’”
It wasn’t until two weeks later that they understood what those words meant.
They went by many names, but most called them Hybrids. Soulless, once-human creatures who did the bidding of the Colonists. They were easier to kill than the bounty hunters, but they were stronger and more resilient than a mere human. Bullets were safer than hand-to-hand combat. Scully, whose aim had been likened by Mulder to that of Annie Oakley, preferred a head shot through the eye. A guaranteed kill, and less of a waste of bullets than multiple shots to the chest.
It took another run-in for them to realize what was happening. Four of them, and they took down three before the last one pulled out a strange device and pressed a button.
One moment of confusion, and then her world erupted in white-hot pain. Distantly, she felt her knees hit the ground, heard Mulder screaming her name, but it was all muffled by the ringing in her ears.
Pain. And then something behind the pain, welling up horribly with singular intent : kill him.
No. No no no.
Kill him. Kill him. Kill him.
Her hands shook, the pull was so strong. Mulder grappled with the hybrid and she fought her own battle against the foreign thing taking up refuge under her skin, in her own mind.
Then, his hands were on her. Blood on them, maybe his, maybe the monster he had just slain. That voice grew louder, and she pushed him back for fear of what she might do. In his eyes were confusion and hurt. His mouth moved in the shape of her name, brows questioning, but all she could hear was the ringing, shrill and agonizing, forming the shape of a thought in her head.
Kill him. Now.
“Mulder stay away from me I can’t control it I can’t stop it it won’t stop it wants-“ The rest of her words were lost to the ringing. She felt like she was being pulled underwater, the world slipping away.
He put two and two together somehow. Because as suddenly as it began, the sensation stopped. Color and light and sound returned, and he was standing above her, holding his gun. The device sat a few feet away, a hole blown clean through it.
He must have known then, as she did, how hopeless their situation was.
* * *
Every step is a jolt of pain through her body. The pack she carries has turned to lead, and her mouth feels gritty and dry like the sand her boots kick up around her. To a passerby with ill intentions, she is easy prey, but they do not know about the gun tucked into the waistband of her dirty, faded jeans, nor the knife in her boot, nor the sheer ferocity of determination that keeps her feet moving, her heart beating even as her head pounds and the fire at the back of her neck rages.
She sleeps in abandoned cars and gas stations and among the ruins of structures that were once pieces of a world that now belongs to another lifetime. She dreams of him, and of all things, and when she wakes in the morning, she dusts herself off and continues west towards the setting sun, remembering the words of that strange, blind, trailer park prophet.
* * *
“We stay away from the common roads, we avoid populated areas, we travel at night, we sleep in shifts. We can do this,” he had assured her, full of that unflinching conviction that never ceased to amaze and exhaust her.
“To what end, Mulder?”
“To the ends of the earth, Scully. It’s you and me. Whatever happens, it’s you and me.”
* * *
There is an end to this world somewhere, she thinks wearily. Her boot drags the ground and she stumbles for the hundredth time that day. Maybe you’ll be there when I find it.
* * *
He was right about one thing. Whatever happened, it would be the two of them against the world.
It was dark, and they did not see, nor did they hear the approaching troops. Mindless hybrids, patrolling, rounding up people like her who had been taken and chipped, marked as chosen by the enemy.
She had felt it. By then it was too late. Too many. And the ringing in her ears, this time too much. The world faded away. She woke up in a prison filled with future hybrids, terrified men and women, all former abductees kept in check by the chips in their necks. She spent two weeks there in a fog until one night she had the presence of mind to take a broken piece of glass and dig the chip out. She slipped out through a hole in the fence during a changing of the guard.
She has been chasing him ever since, haunted by that night, the last she saw of him. She would not forget the look on his face, not in a thousand millennia. Fear and hopelessness. Surely he was dead, she had thought. No one could survive that. Not even him.
But then, he always did love to prove her wrong. Perhaps hope lay beyond the horizon, past the setting sun.
* * *
Time and space narrow to a singular point, and the darkness becomes indistinguishable from the day. Everything clouds, and her body goes numb. She must fall, because she is looking up now, and the sky is all she sees. This is how it ends, she thinks, somewhat relieved.
* * *
She wakes to the crackling, smoky smell of a campfire. Everything hurts, so she must be alive. Somewhere to her immediate right, someone is humming a familiar tune. Even before she opens her eyes she knows who it is. She stirs and the tune stops pre-chorus. She opens her eyes and he is there.
“Scully, it’s me,” he says. His hand is feather-light on her cheek.
How many times have we been here before, Scully? Right here. So close to the truth- and now with what we’ve seen and what we know to be right back at the beginning with nothing.
↦ THE X-FILES: Fight the Future (1998), dir. Rob Bowman
There is no other story like this one. Scully is abducted again and returns home to an entirely new situation. The abduction isn’t the focus here - love and home is. Mulder and Scully leave DC, and it would be entirely unsettling and sad but for the fact that they have each other as they search for (and find?) a new home. It’s a classic.
Title: Jasper’s Last Thought
Author: MD1016
Summary: Scully is abducted again, and returned to find her world has changed.
Length: 14k (~5,600 words)
Classification: Romance, Angst
Rating: PG
Spoilers: None
Favorite line: “You can stay with me as long as you like…forever. If you want.”
Read the story!
One of our absolute favorite things about the relationship between Mulder and Scully is the love. The undying, over the moon, burns as bright as a million suns kind of love. The can’t eat, can’t sleep, reach for the stars, over the fence, World Series kind of stuff. It seems that their love for one another is always put to the test, and today’s rec doesn’t hold back. Mulder barters to get Scully back after the colonization, and what ensues isn’t for the weak-hearted. Put your big kid undies on, readers. and enjoy this tragically beautiful story.
Title: Night Giving off Flames
Author: JET
Rating: R
Length: 17K / word count: 9,100+
Synopsis: Quasi-Post-Colonization AU that occurs sometime after “Hollywood AD”. Oddness. One wee-tiny spoiler for “HAD” and hardly any others whatsoever. Did I mention it’s Odd?
