FIC: Ruins by Maidenjedi (XF, 1/1)
Title: Ruins
Author: Maidenjedi
Rating: R
Warnings: None really, but this is bleak, as it's post-col.
Summary: Three months after the world ends, Mulder and Scully are heading west. XF Santa 2013 gift for
memories_child
NOTES: This functions as a sort of prequel to my post-col story Left Standing. There’s no real need to read that first but they do tie in together.
memories_child asked for post-col/post-series, and this came to mind. As in the previous story, I’m ignoring finale canon and the second film.
“We think the colonization will start in 2012.”
“What makes you say that?”
“All the evidence we have points to it. December 2012. But what isn’t clear is how they’ll communicate with us now that the primary points of contact have all either died or dropped off the face of the planet.”
“Literally.”
“And there’s no way to use backchannels? What about Krycek, didn’t he have ways?”
“If he did, he covered his tracks pretty well. We managed to get a message to Marita Covarrubias, but she had nothing to give us.”
“Nothing she was willing to part with, anyway.”
“Okay. So we have some time.”
“Some time, yes. All the time in the world, well.”
“Ten years.”
“Anything can happen in ten years.”
-
They’d been right.
Anything could happen in ten years.
It was the morning of February 17, 2004. Three months had passed, and the world was still dead, and nothing had come for them.
Yet.
-
They were in Kansas, and it was as flat and unimaginative as Mulder remembered it.
The sky, mercifully, was clear and blue, nearly cloudless. “So beautiful,” Scully whispered, looking up. “I can’t believe how often I took this for granted.”
“I know what you mean,” Mulder replied, shielding his eyes as he, too, looked up. “Think Holman’s behind this?”
Scully laughed, and Mulder looked down at her, savoring the sound, ignoring the wheezing note threaded through it. They hadn’t had much reason to laugh.
Since the world ended.
-
They didn’t come as planned.
It was supposed to be methodical. There was an order to these things, as in all things.
But instead, they rained down unholy fire, all at once, taking out whole cities. They leveled population centers with no rhyme or reason; they picked off individuals the same way. Mulder and Scully had been in hiding, had been for so long they could hardly recall anything else, and they escaped the way others had, by simply not being in the way when it happened.
It ended as it had begun, abruptly, with no warning. But not before civilization had been obliterated, and survivors left to pick up the pieces as best they could.
-
“West,” said Scully, when Mulder asked which way they should go. He’d agreed readily, feeling the same pull. The answers were always in the west.
They headed for a place in eastern Colorado, where Charlie Scully had a cabin and some land. It was slow going for awhile. West of the Mississippi there was a lot of carnage, a lot of property damage. As they pushed past the Ozarks, population centers were spread out, and survivors hid or had run. For the first time in years, Mulder and Scully traveled as openly as they dared, and there was no one to tell them they were wasting Bureau resources, or to track them and corner them like rabbits.
It was bliss.
It was hell.
-
“Where will we go after?”
After we find nothing, when winter comes, when we decide to look for William after all.
“I don’t know.”
-
“Mulder, do you think they’re still alive?”
“If they are, we may never know about it. Wherever they ended up, it might have been worse there.”
There was no real word about what had happened where. D.C., they knew, was a faint memory, a scar on the landscape. The same with New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, St. Louis. They’d run across a small band of refugees from Detroit whose blank expressions told a terrible tale. In Kansas City, a miniature civilization had grown up on the outskirts of town, and the leaders revealed that the initial attack had shut down so much infrastructure that illness took out another third of the population within a month. Scully surmised that happened in a lot of places, and she looked grave when the symptoms had been described. Mulder didn’t have the courage to ask her for days, and when he did, she turned cold and abrupt, and gave her diagnosis of plague with a scowl.
“Careless,” she said. “We were so cocky, so self-assured. A practically eliminated threat to our civilization and it rises up in the wake like that.”
They looked at each other, the gravity sinking in (how many more died in the attack? How many more in the days and weeks after?), and they slept clutching each other’s hands in the dying light of their campfire.
-
They’d picked up bicycles somewhere along I-70, after the motorcycle they’d been sharing finally couldn’t take the stress anymore.
“How come, on TV, whenever the world ends, there is always an endless supply of gasoline and new cars?”
“They’ll do anything to sell Dodge Durangos, I suppose,” Scully replied.
The bikes were slower, but it was getting to be summer, the days stretching out like taffy. Easier to maintain, too, since they didn’t need fuel, and quieter, to help them avoid unwanted attention. Even now, when the answers to man’s anxiety about the far reaches of space - the truth, out there, had come home - violence was common.
Around Lawrence, Kansas, Mulder stopped, and Scully pulled up next to him as he pulled out a map.
“We could be in Colorado in two days, if there are no snags.”
Scully sipped water from a canteen and nodded. “Let’s keep moving, then. I want to get where we’re going.” She took a deep breath and covered her mouth when she was sure he wasn’t looking at her. She coughed into her hand, and tried to ignore the ache in her joints.
-
Scully kept it from Mulder for all of twelve hours.
-
They got where they were going.
On the eastern edge of Colorado, in a cabin on a patch of land not far from the Platte River, he held her hand and sang, returning the favor from so long ago.
"It’s a beautiful night, he whispers when the song ends. The stars are bright, there are no threats bearing down on us. If you go, Scully, if you go you’ll miss this. You’ll miss it."
I’ll miss you.
-
years ago
“What do you think it will be like?”
“The end of the world? Probably nothing like anyone imagines it would be. Depends how it happens. Alien invasion, mutually assured nuclear destruction, the Rapture. There could be - probably would be - survivors. They would have a difficult time of it, all that lost power and stinking corpses and…”
“Gee, Scully, way to stay on the bright side.”
“Well, Mulder, we’re stuck in the middle of nowhere in southern Idaho with a dead battery, no way to jump start it, it’s raining, I’ve ruined a third pair of shoes in two weeks, and you want me to believe we’re out here on a noble mission to discover the truth behind a Yeti legend.”
"....”
“Exactly.”
-
elsewhere
In Miami, Florida, at a radio station that once reserved airtime only for the most popular of pop music, broadcasts went out every hour asking if there was anyone out there at all, anyone who would answer.
The power reserves lasted long enough that the broadcast went out for three days. The attacks there were light, comparatively. Survivors gathered in hotels, resorts at which they may have been serving drinks days earlier.
When the power finally died and reality set in, the broadcasts went out over a filched CB radio, on varying frequencies, and Walter Skinner picked it up one night as he crossed into the city limits.
He found Aaron Gomez sitting on an overpass, hoping to boost his signal unencumbered.
“There is nothing left,” he told him. It was true, as far as it went. Skinner couldn’t know what it was like elsewhere, but the eastern seaboard of the former United States, the world as far as he now knew it, was dark and dead.
Aaron shook his head, and spoke into his radio handset again. “The world hasn’t ended. We’re still here.” He gestured to the candlelight shining in the windows along the shoreline. “We’re still here.”
-
“What did they say?” She was wringing her hands. She hadn't done that since high school. She folded them and looked at Jeffrey, and he was struck that she could have been begging.
For her life? For his?
For deliverance?
He looked defeated, destroyed. For all that Jeffrey Spender had tried to look himself again with surgeries and special treatments, it was this, finally, that cast humanity in the lines left.
“Jeffrey?”
“Marita, there was no answer. It...I think they're coming.”
-
To the south, further away than either Scully or Mulder imagined, their son awoke to blasts from outer space one day, to gunshots on the second. He was left alive, alone, and he was impossibly young.
John and Monica were shocked to find him at all, let alone alive. He was babbling about Gibson Praise, about New Mexico. “Get there,” he said. “Gotta get there.”
So they moved on.
-
END
Posted originally at Dreamwidth, http://maidenjedi.dreamwidth.org/837270.html. Comment here or there. All fanfiction posts will originate at Dreamwidth.
Author: Maidenjedi
Rating: R
Warnings: None really, but this is bleak, as it's post-col.
Summary: Three months after the world ends, Mulder and Scully are heading west. XF Santa 2013 gift for
memories_child
NOTES: This functions as a sort of prequel to my post-col story Left Standing. There’s no real need to read that first but they do tie in together.
memories_child asked for post-col/post-series, and this came to mind. As in the previous story, I’m ignoring finale canon and the second film.
“We think the colonization will start in 2012.”
“What makes you say that?”
“All the evidence we have points to it. December 2012. But what isn’t clear is how they’ll communicate with us now that the primary points of contact have all either died or dropped off the face of the planet.”
“Literally.”
“And there’s no way to use backchannels? What about Krycek, didn’t he have ways?”
“If he did, he covered his tracks pretty well. We managed to get a message to Marita Covarrubias, but she had nothing to give us.”
“Nothing she was willing to part with, anyway.”
“Okay. So we have some time.”
“Some time, yes. All the time in the world, well.”
“Ten years.”
“Anything can happen in ten years.”
-
They’d been right.
Anything could happen in ten years.
It was the morning of February 17, 2004. Three months had passed, and the world was still dead, and nothing had come for them.
Yet.
-
They were in Kansas, and it was as flat and unimaginative as Mulder remembered it.
The sky, mercifully, was clear and blue, nearly cloudless. “So beautiful,” Scully whispered, looking up. “I can’t believe how often I took this for granted.”
“I know what you mean,” Mulder replied, shielding his eyes as he, too, looked up. “Think Holman’s behind this?”
Scully laughed, and Mulder looked down at her, savoring the sound, ignoring the wheezing note threaded through it. They hadn’t had much reason to laugh.
Since the world ended.
-
They didn’t come as planned.
It was supposed to be methodical. There was an order to these things, as in all things.
But instead, they rained down unholy fire, all at once, taking out whole cities. They leveled population centers with no rhyme or reason; they picked off individuals the same way. Mulder and Scully had been in hiding, had been for so long they could hardly recall anything else, and they escaped the way others had, by simply not being in the way when it happened.
It ended as it had begun, abruptly, with no warning. But not before civilization had been obliterated, and survivors left to pick up the pieces as best they could.
-
“West,” said Scully, when Mulder asked which way they should go. He’d agreed readily, feeling the same pull. The answers were always in the west.
They headed for a place in eastern Colorado, where Charlie Scully had a cabin and some land. It was slow going for awhile. West of the Mississippi there was a lot of carnage, a lot of property damage. As they pushed past the Ozarks, population centers were spread out, and survivors hid or had run. For the first time in years, Mulder and Scully traveled as openly as they dared, and there was no one to tell them they were wasting Bureau resources, or to track them and corner them like rabbits.
It was bliss.
It was hell.
-
“Where will we go after?”
After we find nothing, when winter comes, when we decide to look for William after all.
“I don’t know.”
-
“Mulder, do you think they’re still alive?”
“If they are, we may never know about it. Wherever they ended up, it might have been worse there.”
There was no real word about what had happened where. D.C., they knew, was a faint memory, a scar on the landscape. The same with New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, St. Louis. They’d run across a small band of refugees from Detroit whose blank expressions told a terrible tale. In Kansas City, a miniature civilization had grown up on the outskirts of town, and the leaders revealed that the initial attack had shut down so much infrastructure that illness took out another third of the population within a month. Scully surmised that happened in a lot of places, and she looked grave when the symptoms had been described. Mulder didn’t have the courage to ask her for days, and when he did, she turned cold and abrupt, and gave her diagnosis of plague with a scowl.
“Careless,” she said. “We were so cocky, so self-assured. A practically eliminated threat to our civilization and it rises up in the wake like that.”
They looked at each other, the gravity sinking in (how many more died in the attack? How many more in the days and weeks after?), and they slept clutching each other’s hands in the dying light of their campfire.
-
They’d picked up bicycles somewhere along I-70, after the motorcycle they’d been sharing finally couldn’t take the stress anymore.
“How come, on TV, whenever the world ends, there is always an endless supply of gasoline and new cars?”
“They’ll do anything to sell Dodge Durangos, I suppose,” Scully replied.
The bikes were slower, but it was getting to be summer, the days stretching out like taffy. Easier to maintain, too, since they didn’t need fuel, and quieter, to help them avoid unwanted attention. Even now, when the answers to man’s anxiety about the far reaches of space - the truth, out there, had come home - violence was common.
Around Lawrence, Kansas, Mulder stopped, and Scully pulled up next to him as he pulled out a map.
“We could be in Colorado in two days, if there are no snags.”
Scully sipped water from a canteen and nodded. “Let’s keep moving, then. I want to get where we’re going.” She took a deep breath and covered her mouth when she was sure he wasn’t looking at her. She coughed into her hand, and tried to ignore the ache in her joints.
-
Scully kept it from Mulder for all of twelve hours.
-
They got where they were going.
On the eastern edge of Colorado, in a cabin on a patch of land not far from the Platte River, he held her hand and sang, returning the favor from so long ago.
"It’s a beautiful night, he whispers when the song ends. The stars are bright, there are no threats bearing down on us. If you go, Scully, if you go you’ll miss this. You’ll miss it."
I’ll miss you.
-
years ago
“What do you think it will be like?”
“The end of the world? Probably nothing like anyone imagines it would be. Depends how it happens. Alien invasion, mutually assured nuclear destruction, the Rapture. There could be - probably would be - survivors. They would have a difficult time of it, all that lost power and stinking corpses and…”
“Gee, Scully, way to stay on the bright side.”
“Well, Mulder, we’re stuck in the middle of nowhere in southern Idaho with a dead battery, no way to jump start it, it’s raining, I’ve ruined a third pair of shoes in two weeks, and you want me to believe we’re out here on a noble mission to discover the truth behind a Yeti legend.”
"....”
“Exactly.”
-
elsewhere
In Miami, Florida, at a radio station that once reserved airtime only for the most popular of pop music, broadcasts went out every hour asking if there was anyone out there at all, anyone who would answer.
The power reserves lasted long enough that the broadcast went out for three days. The attacks there were light, comparatively. Survivors gathered in hotels, resorts at which they may have been serving drinks days earlier.
When the power finally died and reality set in, the broadcasts went out over a filched CB radio, on varying frequencies, and Walter Skinner picked it up one night as he crossed into the city limits.
He found Aaron Gomez sitting on an overpass, hoping to boost his signal unencumbered.
“There is nothing left,” he told him. It was true, as far as it went. Skinner couldn’t know what it was like elsewhere, but the eastern seaboard of the former United States, the world as far as he now knew it, was dark and dead.
Aaron shook his head, and spoke into his radio handset again. “The world hasn’t ended. We’re still here.” He gestured to the candlelight shining in the windows along the shoreline. “We’re still here.”
-
“What did they say?” She was wringing her hands. She hadn't done that since high school. She folded them and looked at Jeffrey, and he was struck that she could have been begging.
For her life? For his?
For deliverance?
He looked defeated, destroyed. For all that Jeffrey Spender had tried to look himself again with surgeries and special treatments, it was this, finally, that cast humanity in the lines left.
“Jeffrey?”
“Marita, there was no answer. It...I think they're coming.”
-
To the south, further away than either Scully or Mulder imagined, their son awoke to blasts from outer space one day, to gunshots on the second. He was left alive, alone, and he was impossibly young.
John and Monica were shocked to find him at all, let alone alive. He was babbling about Gibson Praise, about New Mexico. “Get there,” he said. “Gotta get there.”
So they moved on.
-
END
Posted originally at Dreamwidth, http://maidenjedi.dreamwidth.org/837270.html. Comment here or there. All fanfiction posts will originate at Dreamwidth.