Part (1/?)

Title: Manifest Destiny
Authors: Kelida Flynn and Slippin' Mickeys
Category: S, A, R
Keywords: Alternate Universe; Mulder/Scully Romance
Summary: Yet to be determined

"Manifest Destiny"
by Kelida Flynn and Slippin Mickeys


PROLOGUE

All things past and future color the night.  This was a lesson learned 
hard and at a high cost, as are all things of any significance.  The 
world had ceased being a paint-by-numbers place
ages ago, but no one had ever bothered to notice until now, when it 
demanded to be seen as well as heard.

They had not seen it coming.  It had always been a possibility lingering 
at the fringe, but the reality. . . they could not, and had not, 
fathomed it.  Even if they had somehow foreseen it,  they could not have 
prevented it--this melting of midnight onto the landscape.  What 
remained now could not be erased.  The only option left was to redraw 
it, beginning and ending at the points of regret, joined together by a 
line asymmetrically absurd and beautiful as the journey it traced, and 
the people it connected.

.Chapter One.

Manifest destiny.

An American ideal. The aspirations of these United States to expand. To 
colonize.

Ironic that when colonization began, it started in America.

Not in the chaotic uproar portrayed in Hollywood, but in a strange way, 
it was rather organized. And while not outwardly frenzied, there was an 
underlying hysteria felt by the unsuspecting populace. The
expression "they came out of the blue" carried a whole new meaning.

Most were horrified or stupefied, some maniacal and hysterical, but
overall, the feeling in America was a wrenching kind of sadness from a 
democracy  gone bad. When it began there was a collective lamentation 
from the American people when they were stabbed in the back by their own 
government. They should have known. People have been screaming about it 
for years. Mulder had.  

At least that's what they told him.

He thought that it must have been truly a sight to see members of the 
colonizing alien race working side by side with their own military. 
Herding the wayward people along, ferrying them to whatever destination 
would serve the new leaders' purpose.

At least, that's what Mulder had been told.

He woke up in an arcane government institution 300 ft below Lake 
Michigan, with no identity, no memory, and no hope.

The only tendril of memory he tried to grasp, was that there was 
something, *someone* out there that he was looking for.

How was he to know *she* was looking for *him*?

<><><><><><><><><><><><><><><>

It is inbred in the human condition that survival is of the first and 
foremost importance.  As high and holy as mankind would like to hold 
itself, nature was vicious, and when stripped of their civilization, 
their stability, it was inevitable that nothing could stand in the way 
of survival, as hideous and unbearable as living could or would be.  

But in classic Darwinian fashion, only the strongest had survived and 
the meek did not live long enough to inherit the earth.  Instead, it 
inherited them.

The survivors, if they could be called that, were the ones spared by the 
maliciousness of  colonization, or the ones too strong or too 
scared to take their own lives before the new inhabitants of their 
shared world had the chance to take theirs.  We are left to re-create 
history, she had thought, and to build the new future from the ruins.

"What is past is present is future," she had rambled shortly  
 after the first wave of colonists had arrived in Washington.  
There had been a truth, a simple sort of clarity
in those words, even if she had been suffering from a mild shock.  

One of the tragedies of mankind was its tendency to repeat history, yet 
in this concept Dana Scully could see the possibility for hope.   
Because as those in power continued to corrupt and consume,
the oppressed would rise and rebel.  She still believed in the human 
spirit, even if the one person who had encompassed it so completely, was 
now gone.

"Dana?"  Scully wiped the morning sweat off her brow with the back of 
her hand and rose to greet her mother as Margaret Scully exited the 
large, blue-gray house standing sombrely on the Rhode 
Island seashore.  "It's almost time for the morning sweep-through.  We 
should get in before they come so they can leave as soon as possible."
	
"Yes," she agreed flatly, wiping her soil-stained hands on the 
over-sized pair of overalls she was  wearing.  She had found it hanging 
in the closet of the house that she and her mother now shared
with four other inhabitants.  Scully left the small garden she had been 
tending to and trudged up the small hill toward the house.

"Why is this necessary *every* morning?"  a voice asked from the front 
porch.  It was more of an open-ended question than a rhetorical one, but 
Scully answered it nonetheless, though not until
she was within arms-length of Cynthia Adler, the woman who lived in the 
room next to hers.  Cynthia pressed her nose in between forefinger and 
thumb, sniffing slightly, and waited for a response.  Scully studied the 
woman's angular face and then looking down to Cynthia's hands as though 
she were addressing them, answered.  

"I don't know.  Maybe they're looking for something, or more likely than 
not, for somebody."

"And maybe it's just because they want us to fear them," a dark baritone 
cut her off.  Scully looked to her left at Richter McLachlan, tall, 
dark, and almost vicious in a beautiful way. "Because they want the 
fear.  They've taken away everything else.  They want our submission 
now.  Our souls."  Her face grew grave, but she did not feel it 
necessary to justify his melodrama with a response.  Instead, she 
continued on into the house and up the New England style stair case to 
her room.  In the hallway, on her way to her bedroom, Scully saw 
Cynthia's daughter, Jodie, rocking herself quietly on the padded bench 
by the window.  The girl was only sixteen, but already she was deeply 
world-weary and old.  Scully did not know if Jodie had been like this 
before colonization had begun, but it was already a painfully obvious 
reality that the chance to recover any semblance of innocence was long 
past.
	
Leaving Jodie alone in the hallway, Scully passed into her bedroom, an 
uncomfortable, sunshiny lemon yellow.  She rested herself on the bed and 
tiredly began to undress.  The knee-high boots came off first, caked 
with fresh mud.  She placed them on the ground, a chunky cluck as each 
shoe hit the hardwood floors.  She rubbed her temples.  A small  pain 
had begun growing in her head.  The floor below her seemed to begin 
tumbling downward into nothing.  She wouldn't see it clearly any more.  
It was something fragmented, a filmy brown grain, static pattern.

"Honey?"  Her mother peeked into her room?  "Are you okay, Dana?"  
Margaret concernedly entered, sitting next to her daughter.  
Instinctively she wrapped an arm loosely around Scully's shoulder, 
careful to not be too confining, but close enough to be comforting.  She 
had noticed her daughter's growing withdrawal in the last few months, 
which she had passed off as part of the adaption phase into their new 
roles in the new world, but it seemed a deeper melancholy.
Days would pass where she would speak hardly speak more than three word 
sentences--a nod of the head yes, a shake of the head, no.  But Margaret 
gave her daughter space to heal, although now she was beginning to think 
that Dana had merely grown over her wounds, and that pain still resided 
beneath the surface.

Scully shifted and placed her head on her mother's shoulder.  
"...fleeting..."

"Fleeting? How is that?"

"Everything feels like it's slipping away," she murmured, eyes averted.  
"Is this how the end of the world should feel, Mom?"  She stifled a 
sardonic laugh.  "Did the Bible ever say anything about the four 
horseman riding in on UFOs?

"You can't let this get you down."  Margaret's hand flew to cover up a 
sob trickling out of her throat.  "We've lost so much, but we still have 
life.  It's worth fighting for, even if we feel so desperate and so 
lost."

"Oh, God, Charlie..."  

Scully had not seen her brother in over a year when word leaked through 
that she would never be given that opportunity again.  Charlie had died 
during the first wave of colonization.  It was still a memory raw in her 
mind.  She hadn't even known the exact details of his death when she 
first had heard.  Not until three days later, and three days before 
Mulder had disappeared, did she find out that Charlie had been selected 
to be a host for the full-blown colonists but none other than Bill 
Scully Jr.  

Scully suddenly saw a picture of rage in her mind.  That of Mulder, his 
lips pursed fiercely together as he supported her when she could not 
hold herself upright without fear of falling, or running madly into the 
streets with her brother's blood dripping from her hands.  And for a 
brief moment, that was all that should could feel, all that she could 
think of to build up her strength again.

"They're waiting for you."  Jodie's deep voice said flatly.  Her frame 
passed like a shadow through the room and she disappeared down the 
stairs, her steps light upon the stairwell.

Together, mother and daughter moved to walk down to where the 
fully-armed inspectors waited.  Scully was unsure if these men with 
their death-like faces were fully human or not.  They were not the same 
everyday.  Thinking about it more carefully now, Scully could not recall 
ever seeing the same men twice.  Today, though, they did not do a sweep 
of the house.  Instead, they had brought along a woman, although she 
could not be sure if this woman was a prisoner or their supervisor.  Her 
face, though, was almost drawn as coldly as theirs.  

"This woman is to live with you from now on."  The left guard shoved her 
forward.  Only then did Scully note the electric shackles around the 
woman's ankles.  A quick click and buzz followed soon after and the 
shackles disengaged and she stumbled forward. Grinding her shoulder 
blades outward, the woman gasped softly to herself, lurching  onto a 
table to recapture her balance.  The guards left without another word, 
leaving the residents of the house on the Rhode Island shore to stare at  
the dark maven of a woman that had, without warning, invaded their 
crowded house.  She did not respond, though.  Instead, her dark eyes 
betrayed nothing as she stared them back, and left them for the kitchen 
in search of glass of water to wet her dry throat, scorching her mark 
through the corridors of the house in her wake.
 
END Part 1