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008 - and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started - (wip)
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always—
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flames are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.
T. S. Eliot, Little Gidding
Scully can still remember the stinging rake of the corpse's hands at her throat when the dead stop rising. The world shudders out like the flickering death of a lightbulb filament, and none of the hosts of dead have the decency to rise and testify. Even if words could still seep up from those swollen throats and ragged lips she supposes they would be unintelligible. The hand of God is everywhere, and nowhere. Somehow that's one of the most surreal things about it: that it's all so mundane.
She breathes in and sights down the rifle scope. In. Gentle, calm. The splintery fencepost presses against her sternum. Out. Hold.
Hold.
She pulls the trigger, and the noise is deafening, the loudest thing she's heard in weeks. Something in her cries out softly, startled into memories that aren't worth anything anymore, and the deer bounds off. It doesn't get very far, the animal's startled brain realising that it has died only after a few stuttery leaps forward.
Gentle. A gentle death. Gentler than the rest, and their deaths were still gentler by far than half of them deserved. There must be something wrong with her, she decides, that she hopes the traincar doctors and the men who pulled their puppet strings died terrified and pained and alone. So it goes; there's something wrong with the world. Much more than will ever be wrong with any one person in it anymore.
Mulder gives a soft noise of appreciation behind her and together they clamber carefully over the barbed wire, precariously balanced for a few moments before landing with a soft thump and a rustle of dried grass. Two weeks ago it was a rustle of papers as they'd picked their way through the remnants of their old offices, reports hopelessly strewn about in offices they'd never before had cause to visit, empty save a few stray corpses slumped over desks, curled up as though in fitful sleep in a corner behind doors barricaded with furniture, as though any such thing could keep the devil out. Their mouths had been full of congealed mucous, thick and green and no longer even bubbly; the air in their lungs was too long gone. They didn't froth. Nothing half so vital. All they'd done was stink.
She and Mulder had braved their accusing silence, flashlights sweeping over plundered filing cabinets, splintered wood, and broken glass. They'd passed to places locked to them before. A world of information held from them before was there, waiting.
None of it had meant anything at all. There had been no answer. None that mattered anymore. Mulder had still slipped a few file-folders into one of their bags and together, they'd slipped out into the dead city, saying nothing. That has been the way of it since. There's nothing to say, and so they hardly speak at all. The grass rustles like breathing as they pass through it, a wordless pair. Maybe the last in the world. After the stink of the city, millions of bodies rotting in cars, in apartments and houses, office buildings, on the sidewalks, slumped out onto the streets, after they'd passed beyond the explicitly familiar, through Triangle and past Quantico and out into the woods and the air had cleared, the line of automobiles dwindled, she had looked up at the clear sky and begun to weep.
God's hand was in it, she'd told Mulder, who didn't believe. "Who else," she'd asked, accusing Mulder, accusing God, absentee and not, "would leave us? The last humans on Earth, Mulder, you and me. A man who's been chasing the end of the world half his life, and a barren woman."
She had, for the space of a few long moments, wholly believed Arthur Fellig, whatever his name really was, and held it to be true that she was always meant to see it someday. She'd just anticipated there'd be a lot more to forever. Hubris. Mulder would call up Nemesis, and maybe under other circumstances would laugh, but all Scully wants is to be Jacob. A burning bush wouldn't be enough proof anymore. She wants the chance to wrestle with God. She has practice, after all -- in her way, she's been doing that all her life.
The doe's eyes are wide in death, staring sightlessly up into an empty sky. Scully thinks that all things see God most clearly when He hurts them. She will have some subtle revenge; they will have to carry her, cleaned but still heavy, back to shelter on foot. It will not happen without respect. Scully demands that, plies her trade with a doctor's hands as though somewhere in her training, or perhaps in the long stretch of years in between, she was imbued with the knowledge not of Hippocrates and Paracelsus but of the haruspex, breathing in fat-smoke and breathing out augury and auspice. The only story to be read in the spilling of the doe's guts, steaming in the morning chill, is an unsavoury, unappetizing one: death through death, because some tenacious but now useless thing is hungry. It is in its way more senseless than the death of civilization which had preceded them.
Still, there is no hesitation in the dig of the knife. Severing the digestive tract and setting it part and parcel aside, Scully plays at possessing purpose. Kidneys, bladder, liver follow in short order, weighed momentarily in her hands out of old habit, as though she doesn't know exactly what killed the beast, as though there's something to be learned. Fat-smoke and augury. She wonders if Mulder wouldn't expect it after all they've been through together, wonders if all she's had the misfortune to see and to know, regardless of his inclination to believe in it at the time, mightn't have instilled in him a sense, an impression that she might be able to touch something of the beyond. That she is, in a word, spooky. She wishes she could, that these moments didn't come when they were least wanted, when they made her most heartsick. A sign. Anything. But the truth of the matter is that she's wholly mundane, and if God ever turned to her and spoke she wasn't ready or able to hear clearly.
It terrifies her, and there hubris again. You've seen so much, but you still can't believe. No, no, faith is easy but belief is hard, because faith can be set on a pedestal but belief is in the heart and hers is a fluttery, fragile thing she doesn't trust. Mulder's must be profound. Enough space to bury so many, so much, and carry on beating. That terrifies her too. Pursing her lips, she wipes the blade on a clump of grass and stands, grateful beyond mentioning for the toil to follow, if not for the return to their temporary shelter.
There are so many emptied houses here in this small residential town, little parcels of nothingness portioned out by walls and fences which serve to disguise the greater nothingness only poorly. From above it must look like a patchwork quilt, each partition filled with the hollow remnants of what once meant the world to some small segment of humanity, some modest collection of souls, the gods of their own small universes as they ascribed history and meaning to all they created and destroyed and consumed, all that they owned and stowed away as keepsake or souvenir; the self-created histories, that is, of millions of lives which they couldn't, the pair of them, even for all they know, hope to really reconstruct. What would it matter if they did? No craft flies over that patchwork now, and in time it will fray, the partitions blend together until the truth, maybe the truth they've been seeking, becomes undeniable: none of it ever meant anything at all, not except to those who held on for an eyeblink to pretend that it is. The Lord giveth and he taketh away. What did He see then, when these spaces had designs on being full, and what does He see now that they are hollow?
They carry the body of the for between them, leaving the viscera glistening on the ground; heaving it over the fence is the hardest work but not the longest, not the most absorbing toil: past dead houses with windows staring blankly, along an empty road no longer visited by the hum and grumble of engines but rather birdsong and the scrape of two pairs of boots, they carry her. It is ritual, it is motion, they are kinetic energy and potential, biochemistry; they know nothing but the placing of one foot in front of the other, the straining of the arms; the lolling head of the doe bumps step by step on Scully's thigh. No life, no breath. Scully's own escapes her in little strained bursts and Mulder fares not much better. She feels like Sisyphus, because this is going to be the rest of her life, however long or short. She hopes to God it's short, or that if it isn't she manages to find in it something of value independent of what was before, independent of the way she defined herself relative to others, to ideas and concepts which no longer exist and therefore hold no sway.
They hoist and bleed the animal in silence some way distant of the clearing in which they've made their camp, and in the silence as they wait, muscles burning, Scully leans her shoulder against Mulder's bicep, giving a soft sigh, just as she might have done in another life, dragged down by a similar sort of bone-weariness. She might even have wished vaguely for an opportunity for something warmer, kinder, and more human, impossible then because of the nature of their association. Now the depth of her respect for him means different things than it did when reputation was a concern, when the ethics of this undefinable thing they'd built up around themselves had been the subject of scrutiny, both others' and their own. Now all that keeps her from turning and burying her face in his shoulder is the knowledge that if she does, what has built up inside her may spill over, that she may find herself overwhelmed not by the lengths they have travelled together but the breadth and depth of what has happened to the rest of the world. It's not a weight she means to lay on him again. By rights they should be sharing it, and so they stand, shoulder to shoulder, each leaning into the other but heads held high, serene.
In the sunlight filtering through the trees, a golden midday, the scene is almost peaceful, the two of them standing here, their arms stealing in the slow progression of time about one another's waists as the last dregs of the doe's blood drip sluggishly, crimson splatter on dried leaves and undergrowth, nearly sublimated in the damp, earthy scent of the forest, vegetal matter both living and decaying, warmed by the day.
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always—
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flames are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.
T. S. Eliot, Little Gidding
Scully can still remember the stinging rake of the corpse's hands at her throat when the dead stop rising. The world shudders out like the flickering death of a lightbulb filament, and none of the hosts of dead have the decency to rise and testify. Even if words could still seep up from those swollen throats and ragged lips she supposes they would be unintelligible. The hand of God is everywhere, and nowhere. Somehow that's one of the most surreal things about it: that it's all so mundane.
She breathes in and sights down the rifle scope. In. Gentle, calm. The splintery fencepost presses against her sternum. Out. Hold.
Hold.
She pulls the trigger, and the noise is deafening, the loudest thing she's heard in weeks. Something in her cries out softly, startled into memories that aren't worth anything anymore, and the deer bounds off. It doesn't get very far, the animal's startled brain realising that it has died only after a few stuttery leaps forward.
Gentle. A gentle death. Gentler than the rest, and their deaths were still gentler by far than half of them deserved. There must be something wrong with her, she decides, that she hopes the traincar doctors and the men who pulled their puppet strings died terrified and pained and alone. So it goes; there's something wrong with the world. Much more than will ever be wrong with any one person in it anymore.
Mulder gives a soft noise of appreciation behind her and together they clamber carefully over the barbed wire, precariously balanced for a few moments before landing with a soft thump and a rustle of dried grass. Two weeks ago it was a rustle of papers as they'd picked their way through the remnants of their old offices, reports hopelessly strewn about in offices they'd never before had cause to visit, empty save a few stray corpses slumped over desks, curled up as though in fitful sleep in a corner behind doors barricaded with furniture, as though any such thing could keep the devil out. Their mouths had been full of congealed mucous, thick and green and no longer even bubbly; the air in their lungs was too long gone. They didn't froth. Nothing half so vital. All they'd done was stink.
She and Mulder had braved their accusing silence, flashlights sweeping over plundered filing cabinets, splintered wood, and broken glass. They'd passed to places locked to them before. A world of information held from them before was there, waiting.
None of it had meant anything at all. There had been no answer. None that mattered anymore. Mulder had still slipped a few file-folders into one of their bags and together, they'd slipped out into the dead city, saying nothing. That has been the way of it since. There's nothing to say, and so they hardly speak at all. The grass rustles like breathing as they pass through it, a wordless pair. Maybe the last in the world. After the stink of the city, millions of bodies rotting in cars, in apartments and houses, office buildings, on the sidewalks, slumped out onto the streets, after they'd passed beyond the explicitly familiar, through Triangle and past Quantico and out into the woods and the air had cleared, the line of automobiles dwindled, she had looked up at the clear sky and begun to weep.
God's hand was in it, she'd told Mulder, who didn't believe. "Who else," she'd asked, accusing Mulder, accusing God, absentee and not, "would leave us? The last humans on Earth, Mulder, you and me. A man who's been chasing the end of the world half his life, and a barren woman."
She had, for the space of a few long moments, wholly believed Arthur Fellig, whatever his name really was, and held it to be true that she was always meant to see it someday. She'd just anticipated there'd be a lot more to forever. Hubris. Mulder would call up Nemesis, and maybe under other circumstances would laugh, but all Scully wants is to be Jacob. A burning bush wouldn't be enough proof anymore. She wants the chance to wrestle with God. She has practice, after all -- in her way, she's been doing that all her life.
The doe's eyes are wide in death, staring sightlessly up into an empty sky. Scully thinks that all things see God most clearly when He hurts them. She will have some subtle revenge; they will have to carry her, cleaned but still heavy, back to shelter on foot. It will not happen without respect. Scully demands that, plies her trade with a doctor's hands as though somewhere in her training, or perhaps in the long stretch of years in between, she was imbued with the knowledge not of Hippocrates and Paracelsus but of the haruspex, breathing in fat-smoke and breathing out augury and auspice. The only story to be read in the spilling of the doe's guts, steaming in the morning chill, is an unsavoury, unappetizing one: death through death, because some tenacious but now useless thing is hungry. It is in its way more senseless than the death of civilization which had preceded them.
Still, there is no hesitation in the dig of the knife. Severing the digestive tract and setting it part and parcel aside, Scully plays at possessing purpose. Kidneys, bladder, liver follow in short order, weighed momentarily in her hands out of old habit, as though she doesn't know exactly what killed the beast, as though there's something to be learned. Fat-smoke and augury. She wonders if Mulder wouldn't expect it after all they've been through together, wonders if all she's had the misfortune to see and to know, regardless of his inclination to believe in it at the time, mightn't have instilled in him a sense, an impression that she might be able to touch something of the beyond. That she is, in a word, spooky. She wishes she could, that these moments didn't come when they were least wanted, when they made her most heartsick. A sign. Anything. But the truth of the matter is that she's wholly mundane, and if God ever turned to her and spoke she wasn't ready or able to hear clearly.
It terrifies her, and there hubris again. You've seen so much, but you still can't believe. No, no, faith is easy but belief is hard, because faith can be set on a pedestal but belief is in the heart and hers is a fluttery, fragile thing she doesn't trust. Mulder's must be profound. Enough space to bury so many, so much, and carry on beating. That terrifies her too. Pursing her lips, she wipes the blade on a clump of grass and stands, grateful beyond mentioning for the toil to follow, if not for the return to their temporary shelter.
There are so many emptied houses here in this small residential town, little parcels of nothingness portioned out by walls and fences which serve to disguise the greater nothingness only poorly. From above it must look like a patchwork quilt, each partition filled with the hollow remnants of what once meant the world to some small segment of humanity, some modest collection of souls, the gods of their own small universes as they ascribed history and meaning to all they created and destroyed and consumed, all that they owned and stowed away as keepsake or souvenir; the self-created histories, that is, of millions of lives which they couldn't, the pair of them, even for all they know, hope to really reconstruct. What would it matter if they did? No craft flies over that patchwork now, and in time it will fray, the partitions blend together until the truth, maybe the truth they've been seeking, becomes undeniable: none of it ever meant anything at all, not except to those who held on for an eyeblink to pretend that it is. The Lord giveth and he taketh away. What did He see then, when these spaces had designs on being full, and what does He see now that they are hollow?
They carry the body of the for between them, leaving the viscera glistening on the ground; heaving it over the fence is the hardest work but not the longest, not the most absorbing toil: past dead houses with windows staring blankly, along an empty road no longer visited by the hum and grumble of engines but rather birdsong and the scrape of two pairs of boots, they carry her. It is ritual, it is motion, they are kinetic energy and potential, biochemistry; they know nothing but the placing of one foot in front of the other, the straining of the arms; the lolling head of the doe bumps step by step on Scully's thigh. No life, no breath. Scully's own escapes her in little strained bursts and Mulder fares not much better. She feels like Sisyphus, because this is going to be the rest of her life, however long or short. She hopes to God it's short, or that if it isn't she manages to find in it something of value independent of what was before, independent of the way she defined herself relative to others, to ideas and concepts which no longer exist and therefore hold no sway.
They hoist and bleed the animal in silence some way distant of the clearing in which they've made their camp, and in the silence as they wait, muscles burning, Scully leans her shoulder against Mulder's bicep, giving a soft sigh, just as she might have done in another life, dragged down by a similar sort of bone-weariness. She might even have wished vaguely for an opportunity for something warmer, kinder, and more human, impossible then because of the nature of their association. Now the depth of her respect for him means different things than it did when reputation was a concern, when the ethics of this undefinable thing they'd built up around themselves had been the subject of scrutiny, both others' and their own. Now all that keeps her from turning and burying her face in his shoulder is the knowledge that if she does, what has built up inside her may spill over, that she may find herself overwhelmed not by the lengths they have travelled together but the breadth and depth of what has happened to the rest of the world. It's not a weight she means to lay on him again. By rights they should be sharing it, and so they stand, shoulder to shoulder, each leaning into the other but heads held high, serene.
In the sunlight filtering through the trees, a golden midday, the scene is almost peaceful, the two of them standing here, their arms stealing in the slow progression of time about one another's waists as the last dregs of the doe's blood drip sluggishly, crimson splatter on dried leaves and undergrowth, nearly sublimated in the damp, earthy scent of the forest, vegetal matter both living and decaying, warmed by the day.