| Disclaimers:
They're not mine. Thank you Gods. Some spoilers for Patient
X/The Red & the Black, maybe for Biogenesis/Sixth Extinction/Amor
Fati as well.
So you watched them as they moved through the building in their asbestos and flames, scorching a path before them through the things that had, once upon a time, been human, and you said nothing. There was nothing to say, after all. Black had shifted to grey, Oil gone to Alien, and the difference in letters was as subtle as the differences in flesh. All of it burned, didn't it? Paper and ink, flesh and blood, until there was nothing left but the rising smoke and the flickering thoughts behind your eyes. Still, you wondered: Was it an accident? Or a test? Did it even matter? ~ ~ ~ They slid through a world of violent rage, apparently, these killers. You swam through the cool seas of implacable, relentless emotionless logic. It was safer, after all. Hatred passed on, left its crimson trail behind, and led the predators straight to its source. You were smarter than that. Cold, clear remorseless goals, though -- no one could see those, follow those. Everyone geared night vision to heat, not cold. No, goals couldn't be followed and found... could they? And if you didn't remember your own family, not even the color of your father's eyes, if you knew it wasn't that you'd gripped too loosely, but that you'd slipped, slid, skidded at the top of a slope whose uphill grade was too sharp, too steep ever to be regained... it was better than being dead. You were willing to take what you could get, because if you settled for nothing now, well, you'd settle for nothing later. You never looked back, never mourned your losses. There was never time or energy for it. That was how it worked, wasn't it? Wasn't it? ~ ~ ~ You never betrayed him, either. Not really. He had what you needed, Krycek did. And if he took your body in payment, well, was it your fault if he didn't know how much he'd sold? Or how? You heard, much, much later, that the Englishman had taken the vaccine, too. Poor Alex -- leashed by passion and dispassion. As always. Had he never realized it was the cold trails that were hardest to track, and the cold revenges hardest to dodge? At the time, though, you didn't know just how much he'd lost. Because your cool aqua eyes, ocean depths and chilled currents, had been overridden and overwritten by a thing that didn't hunt the sanguine heat of blood and hate but the frozen paths of need and greed, of logic and pain paid as admission to inner circles which did not, at the end, enclose you. Circles, drawn in blood or chalk, in ink or tears, would not have sufficed to protect you, and you'd never believed in magic anyway. But as the Oil poured up over your body, oozed its creeping, skin-crawling, gorge-rising way up and up and up in defiance of gravity, of terrestrial law, of anything approaching the reality you had once thought you lived in, you wished. Oh, how you wished for magic, in those last moments when you could wish for anything. And then the world went away, and there was nothing left but... black. ~ ~ ~ Dark, velvet time of depression, of degradation, of predatory sorrows, of raveled, knitted cares which were never quite made whole. Black of sleep, of eyelids' interiors, of silken curtains sliding down upon some play whose plot never did make any sense to you anyway. Black as sin. Black as coffee, whose rich bitterness draws the night's own, and the night's owned. Black as velvet. Black as a singer's crooning, pain-laden voice, as the overlarge eyes of a child too gaunt, too wise with death's imminent approach to ever be painted on tacky, kitschy black cloth. That image would never bring food to his family, so why waste the paint? Or spend the tarnishing silver solutions that might develop a picture? Silver to black to black & white photos, and the irony of that burns along your mind as you fall back into darkness again. Black as pitch, as tar, as the roads that carry the fools to their doom, as the sky down which the ships ride in their insane, impossible, inertia-defying races of turn and pause, hurdling madly towards the goals and stopping once there as if they'd never been anywhere else. Black night burning with lights, with fire, with needs and goals and imperatives that shoot through burnt silver metal chips to fire their electrochemical paths through brain and muscle, bringing the victims to their pick-up point... or their deaths. Fire. Lighting. Light. Life. Break white and get all colors. Mix them back together, and get... black. ~ ~ ~ You have time, in that echoing, oppressive, empty abyss of no-time, no-space, no-gravity (not even the vertigo of falling) to think these things. To feel them free-associate as you know now Mulder must have felt his mind burn in, and then out, under the artifact's influence.... But that hasn't happened yet, might not happen, and you can still see it coming, and then that thought is gone, too, faded to... Black. Like Oil. Like your mood. Like your hopes. Like your fears. Like your dreams. Like your goals. Like your world. Nothing left, except black. And if you're lucky, if you ever get your body back -- because you know, the way you know you're you -- that that's where you are, that your flesh and bone has become your prison. And if you're ever paroled, if the inmate ever takes over the asylum, then it will only be because you've shaken off the black, had it singed and seared from your veins, your muscles, from every crevice and hollow and too-full point of your body. The body you took such pride in, the orifices you've used so well to your purposes: mouth to speak, ears to hear, nostrils to smell -- and even in the dark of your mind you stop there, surprised in your all-encompassing calm to find that you still won't use the four-letter monosyllables so carefully referred to as 'Anglo-Saxon' obscenities somewhere in your past. Not without need, not without a goal. Oddly, you are calm. Einstein was right -- run far enough and meet yourself coming back around the edge of the galaxy. Fall far enough into fear and come out the other side into calm as enveloping, and as buoying, as the warm waters of the Gulf. From that serenity -- it feels so different from your earlier frozen walls, but would probably look the same, to someone on the outside of it -- you can survey the battening, battering boundary of black and wonder: Is it your mind? Is it the Oil? Does it matter? ~ ~ ~ And while you wait in the black, in the not-far-enough borders of your own mind for... something? Death? Freedom? Change... it occurs to you that if you do escape, if the Oil abandons you-- Does that mean the vaccine works? If it works, what does that mean? That humanity is saved? And if humanity is saved... are you still human? After all you've shed and sloughed and stripped down and pared away... what's left? Will you know who you are, that you're somewhere inside this woman who calls herself Marita Covarrubias? Do you know what she wants? Will it ever matter? Or will you look at the brave new world, at what has been saved and doesn't understand about black -- and you know, without having to think about it, that they would never understand -- and will you decide that it was simpler, here in the darkness of your own mind and your own company? Will you, then, drink silver, eat silver, pour silver through your mind and steel bullets through your brain? Does it really matter? ~ ~ ~ And in the operating theater, where few spectators remained to watch from their safe, removed, Olympian heights, you surfaced, finally, into... light. And wondered: Was it the darkness before dawn then? Or was it always, simply, inevitably... black? You didn't really care. But you did wonder, briefly: Did it matter? Had it ever?
Lyrics
provided by Lark. Ones used, in whole or part, marked with *.
"Settle
For Nothing" by Rage Against the Machine
Highlander
Stories: Aidan: Series
| HL: Aidan: Freestanding
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