Story 211: “In the Bleak” by Teanna
Our next fic is a relatively short colonization apocafic. To my knowledge, Teanna is a largely unknown author in the XF fandom. She only ever wrote three short XF fics, but her writing is spare, intelligent, sharply observant, and poetic without being wordy. She unflinchingly explores the characters and how they cope with fear, grief, and failure.
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I can’t exactly say I love this fic because it’s just too grim - too bleak - to really love. But I’m pretty sure it was the first colonization fic I read, and to this day it remains one of my favorites in that genre, and one of my favorite XF fics in general, albeit a very dark favorite. I’m very glad that not all apocafic’s take the view this one took, but I’m certain that if I hadn’t read this one, all other apocafics would have felt like they were missing something. Because, IMO, this is the most realistic depiction of an apocalypse I’ve read in an XF fic. There’s nothing fun or thrilling about it, nothing romantic; the beauty of humanity is not starkly or profoundly revealed through humanity’s hardships, there’s little grace and certainly no glory. Instead, it’s the dirty, dull, relentless annihilation of human civilization; it depicts what happens to people, and to entire cultures, when civilization is degraded and stripped away. And I think ITB does a crushingly good job of depicting that.
Teanna’s writing is unflinching, brutal, but not without considerable sensitivity. She’s not just tossing this horrible stuff out there to push our buttons. She’s doing it in order to truthfully reveal a horrible scenario. Every dark thing in this fic is given due weight. The rape and the murder and the death are not put in the story to be shocking or provocative or to instill narrative tension. They’re in the story because the story is a portrait of what an apocalypse looks like, and IMO, it’s tragic but realistic to theorize that an apocalypse would look…about like ITB makes it look.
As a diehard shipper I certainly find the relationship between Mulder and Scully upsetting. But I believe it, nonetheless. ITB shows us a Scully who has had to shut down her empathy in order to survive and remain functional, and a Mulder who has found himself shoveled into a futile role and a maladaptive state. The apocalypse in ITB has been harder, I would say, on Scully than it’s been on Mulder. In ITB we see Mulder struggling with feeling like a useless failure. He’s directionless - not the person he used to be but incapable of being otherwise (hence his fixation on his old coat). He used to be a fed, he used to be a maverick, he used to be brilliant, he used to be willing to martyr himself for a cause. None of that is worth anything now.
Scully, on the other hand, is overcome with death and illness (Mulder, to his credit, does seem to understand this, and doesn’t really blame her for her emotional dearth, even in his own head). Mulder is more conceptual in his experience of it - he philosophizes apocalyptic, to an extent - while Scully is in the flesh-and-blood thick of it all. Mulder is watching Humanity die, while Scully is watching an endless procession of individual people die in her intimate environment. As a doctor, she’s taken on the job of being a beast of burden, with the dying as her load. She’s doing what is necessary, and it seems horribly realistic to me to think that she has come to have little regard for that which doesn’t fall into her path as a doctor.
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