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Scully ruminates on her fate.



RATING: PG
CLASSIFICATION: V
KEYWORDS: post-col
SPOILER WARNING: everything's fair game
DISCLAIMER: Not mine; they belong to CC, FOX, etc.


* * * * *

Dana Scully was in her own private hell.

It was a hell that had been predicted to her a lifetime ago, but it was unbelievable, too extreme a possibility for her to believe in. Besides, how could it ever be proved? The problem with forever was that it was intangible; it never actually arrived. You could only wait for it, endlessly. And so wait she did. Who knew that Clyde Bruckman would turn out to be right?

Alfred Fellig was right, too. You don't want to outlive love. Although she still didn't understand how the man could forget his own wife's name. She would never forget. No matter how many lifetimes she lived or how many horrors she suffered, there was one name she would never forget, even after she had long forgotten her own.

Mulder.

And he had been right, too. The aliens had come, right on schedule. There were times in her life when she had believed in free will over fate, but no longer. No matter how much free will they had expended to fight the coming invasion, it was not enough. And now she was a fatalist.

So here she was, one of the survivors. One of the very few survivors. They had become curiosities to the aliens, scientific subjects. The aliens needed to understand why these few had survived, and what was different about them. She thought she had been a lab rat before. Only, before, they let the rats leave the lab.

But she was different from the other rats. She was the mother rat, the Madonna, the mother of their messiah. Because it turned out that the crazy Canadian cultists who kidnapped her son so long ago were right, as well. No amount of injections or altruistic adoptions could change his fate. He was the One. They needed him, followed him, practically worshipped him. And even though they would never let this rat out of her cage, at least she was allowed some amount of comfort and dignity because of her son.

And so, she was in hell. Or maybe it was only purgatory, since there were no flames or devils. Only cold, white light, sanitized instruments, and a soft bed to sleep in.

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Notes: Okay, that was short and not-so-sweet. I really don't know where that one came from, but the muse insisted and I had no choice but to obey.

The title is from Jean-Paul Sartre's story of the same name.




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