Story 211: “In the Bleak” by Teanna

[amyhit]

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.

Comments

[infinitlight]

It's both Mulder and Scully, but neither of them dies in the story. Although the ending doesn't leave them with much hope.

[bardsmaid]

Having done a lot of research into wartime experiences, I don't find bleak off-putting. Teanna does a good job of capturing the numbness and dissociation people go through when dealing with long periods when conditions are tough and it seems there's no progress to be made. I especially liked her treatment of the very end of the story, because it rings true to experiences I've read about, people suddenly "coming to themselves" as the end approaches, and the choices made/actions taken by Mulder and Scully at this point seemed appropriate for the characters as we've come to know them

[wendelah1]

I concur about the corpse for sure. Even in the cold of New England, a dead body would be showing massive signs of decomposition after that amount of time. I can't imagine children coming anywhere near it. For the health hazard, I can't imagine Scully allowing it. I don't think she'd have any trouble taking on Doggett

[infinitlight]

This was awesome, although I'm usually among those who don't like anything too gut-wrenching. I really liked the author's poetic and kind of stream-of-consciousness style. There were a number of lines in the story that stood out to me. It's a good, solid story, but the quality of the prose makes it great. Like this paragraph:

Her hair, it's never been this long (that he knows), she keeps it in a braid mostly
and he thinks, when he remembers such things, that she looks more like her
sister Melissa now. But he has trouble remembering his mother's face, and so he
might be wrong.

I really like that there's kind of a rhythm to the words here and in a few other places in the story, a beat, like poetry or a song. Another part I liked (and that has the same kind of beat):

A child has led me to these woods, he thinks, and like so many times before, like

[wendelah1]

I'm not sold on the characterizations either. I can well believe Scully might be exhausted and not be in the mood for sex, but "slapping his hands away"? However, I'm not willing to criticize Mulder for wanting the comfort of sex. If it's the end of the world as we know it, I'd certainly want to make love to the person who'd shared my life for so long and who now shared my bed. People can feel more hurt about rejection like that in the middle of a crisis than they might otherwise. Because now time is short and they may not get another chance. That's not whining.That's just human

[infinitlight]

To clarify my position on Mulder, the wording that she slaps his hands away "most nights" annoys me, because it suggests that he's touching her without permission or invitation all or almost all nights, and she's almost always slapping him away, and he doesn't get it. I mean, Mulder's an intelligent person, it seems like he would take this as a sign that they need to talk. 99% of your advances being rejected should suggest that there's something going on other than Scully deliberately being mean to him (which is the tone I get from his POV

[wendelah1]

We don't know much by the end of this story, do we? Maybe if amyhit gets a chance to weigh in here she can give us her interpretation of the facts.

You're right, I can't tell if he's making moves on her every night or if he tried a few times was rebuffed and now he keeps his hands to himself . I'm inclined to the latter, in which case, I can't blame Mulder for having sexual fantasies. Sometimes fantasies of something better than grim reality are all that keeps you going, and like dreams, they aren't something you choose, are they? I think of (and experience, I should clarify) fantasies as waking dreams.

[obviousanswer]

I started off on the wrong foot through no fault of the author. In my addled mind Lance Armstrong= Neil Armstrong = Buzz Aldrin, therefore Lance Aldrin= the second man on the moon. So my first thoughts where "A post-apocalyptic dead astronaut's body? Intriguing!... And he's gone back in time to16?.." etc.. (As a petty aside, I wish writers wouldn't use names with one strong connotation (Does 'Aldrin' count? It does for me, and when you google 'Aldrin' it is pretty much all Buzz...), because even when I'm not being a total idiot, I still end up thinking about their namesakes instead of simply discovering the new character from scratch

[wendelah1]

Dark cynical Scully? Have you read Iolokus or anything by Rivkat? Rivkat gives us the darkest Scully I can imagine and she's a terrific writer. You would probably love Life During Wartime, too. It's long, multi-chaptered and multi-authored, but so worth it. That fic is the reason I started watching the show in the first place.

There were a lot of questions raised, but not many answers provided. I think your description of the fic is very fitting:: it has "a sad, resigned beauty." There is certainly an audience for that sort of story in this fandom but I'm not among them in this case.

I have a hard time imagining Agent Doggett behaving in this manner. Without more information it just feels like his name was slapped onto a character. On the show, he seems like one of the good guys, not the kind of man who'd kill kids either, especially since his own son was murdered.

[obviousanswer]

I haven't read Iolokus, I've downloaded some stuff by Rivkat but haven't gotten around to reading it yet. Thanks for the rec! I'm looking forward to the end of the year when I'll be on holidays and can tackle some epically long fics...

That fic is the reason I started watching the show in the first place.

Wait, you read Life During Wartime before you'd started watching the show? I never realised anyone did it that way around!

Yeah I'm not part of that particular audience either, but it was definitely worth giving it a try.

[wendelah1]

My first online fandom was Stargate SG-1 and one of my favorite writers was Cofax, the catalyst of "Life During Wartime" in this fandom. I'd run out of her fic and liked the apocafic genre so I figured I give it a try. I started watching the show on the scifi channel to get backstory for LDW. The next thing I knew I was staying up to tape it on late night TNT. I eventually got an idea for a fic, made my journal and five years later, here I am

[amyhit]

Looong Comment 1/3I 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