If Any Ask Us Why We Died
by JBP LtJBP@aol.com
Category: V, implied K/P, angst
Summary: Post-colonization Pendrell musings.
Rating: Oooh... PG-13 at *most*. I think I said a kind of nasty word once.
Thank yous: To Shan for the absolutely wonderful beta. (any mistakes herein
are mine.)
Disclaimer: I wrote this very late at night, it's not my fault what my brain does when it wants to sleep. Oh, right, *that* kind of disclaimer. Well, not
too many people are actually in this story, but CC and 1013 own them. Not
that they treat Mulder, Scully, Krycek, Pendrell, & co. much better than I do
when I borrow them. The people at the end are mine, I made them up. The title
of the story belongs to Chumbawamba. It's from the song "One by One" from
their album "Tubthumper." The full line is "If any ask us why we died/ we
tell them that our leaders lied/ sold us out down the riverside..."
appropriate, somehow, I thought. However, I emphasize that this is NOT
songfic! I just needed a title... :-)
Distribution: Archive if you like, just let me know about it so I can bask in
the glory of knowing that someone may read this thing, and keep my name and
the disclaimer attached, blah blah blah.
Feedback: Please, please, please. Let me know you read it, let me know what
you thought. Even if you hated it, tell me that (provided you tell me why).
Wombats: None. (where did that come from? Reading too many of these things
late at night, no doubt.)
It's ironic. Everyone thought I was one of the first to go, one of a
handful of victims before the war truly began, before everything changed. And
yet, here I am, one of the last left. Meanwhile, those who thought to
survive, and those that were expected to have a chance against them, lie
dead. What was called the Consortium, they are all gone. Even the Smoking
Man, who cheated death more times than Captain Kirk, is dead. Mulder, Scully;
their fate had its own tragic irony: their end was totally unrelated to any
of the conspiracy that so changed their lives. They died protecting the
children at a daycare center hostage situation. They were given honorable
burials, their coffins wrapped in the flag of the nation whose justice they'd
sworn to uphold. The nation whose shadow government had lied at every turn,
taken every opportunity to make their lives hell. I hope their deaths brought
them some peace. I certainly have little.
Surviving in this world is anything but easy. It is a changed planet
those of us left walk upon. Bio-engineered diseases wiped out seventy percent
of the population. Riots during and after the plagues, as well as starvation,
took millions more. Of those left, most are slaves to the alien colonists.
Needless to say, the aliens did not keep their promise to save the Consortium
members and their families, those not taken out by the rebel aliens. Make a
deal with the devil...
Better to resist than serve. That's what Alex used to say. Yet that
brought him nothing but sorrow, emptiness, and death as well. No, that's not
right. It brought him death, and that brought *me* sorrow and emptiness. I've
been tempted to join him in death, join the others. But part of me is afraid
of what is there, and the rest of me simply doesn't want to give those
bastards what they want. So I remain alive, and for now, free of the aliens.
I hide with a few other survivors. We look for more willing to rebel, and we
do whatever we can to sabotage the alien colonies. They're still working on
hybrids; their biology is just not suited for life on this planet. But stay
they must, for they need its resources.
Maybe you wonder how I survived. Maybe you knew me before, knew of my
'death,' or are simply curious at my mention of supposedly being one of the
first to die. Either way, I suppose I owe you an explanation if you've read
this far. The rebel aliens faked my death, so that I could live another life,
helping them. They needed a human with knowledge of science, and knowledge of
some of the Consortium's technology. I was the best they could find, and
naturally they didn't ask me first. No one thinks to ask the lowly lab tech,
just go right ahead, I don't mind staying late to process that evidence for
you, Mulder... I don't have a life, or anything... But that was my former
life.
I couldn't help the rebels all that much. Yet during that time, I felt
more alive than I ever had before. In my old life, I meandered through
school, through career ideas, winding up at the FBI. Now I had meaning, a
purpose. And with the rebels, I met Alex. We were together until he didn't
come back from one raid on an alien compound... Not long after, the
colonizing aliens crushed the rebel aliens completely. Only a few of the
humans working with them, myself included, managed to escape.
Was it worth it? Do we have a chance of accomplishing anything? You who
read this perhaps know better than I do. My hope in writing this, and hiding
it in a little corner of the alien information nets we managed to tap into,
is that part of the truth about the rebellion will be known. If we succeed,
it will show what one life, one person's thoughts were like at the time. If
we fail, it will tell the story to someone, maybe to someone who cares and
will understand what we tried to do and why. Truth... that was Mulder's
grail. That was what Alex used to hide when he worked for the Consortium, or
pretended to (what was past never mattered much to us, for we'd both
metamorphosed into something completely other than what we once were). And
truth is something there is little left of these days. The aliens have those
humans they've enslaved completely cowed. They've learned something of human
psychology, and their propaganda belongs in _1984_. The slave humans are
useless to the rebellion, they live hand-to-mouth, wanting nothing more than
what little comfort the aliens allow them.
Hope, truth, all that good stuff... we could use more of that around
here. Might do something for morale. Right now, all I've got is thoughts of
who might be reading this. You, the future.
**************
"Where did you get this?"
"Somewhere on the nets. It just popped up at me earlier today."
"Don't go poking around strange places on the nets. There are bad
things out there! And look at this... a crazy man must've written it."
"It had to have been Sean Pendrell who wrote this. We learned about him
in history class. Gee, he was crazy! They told us he wanted to *hurt* the
aliens, how silly is that?!"
"Very."
"Owwie! It gave me a paper cut!"
"Let me see..."
1342 --The aliens had learned something of human psychology: it
depressed the strange creatures to be numbered instead of named. Depression
helped keep the slaves under control. -- tenderly wiped the green blood from
her young charge's finger.
FINIS.