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The Slender Line
Deslea R. Judd
Copyright 2003
DISCLAIMER: Characters not mine. Interpretation mine.
ARCHIVE: Yes, just keep my name and headers.
RATING: PG13 for adult concepts.
SPOILERS/TIMEFRAME: To The Truth.
CATEGORY/KEYWORDS: CSM, angst.
SUMMARY: The descent into madness, marked by fathers and sons
and the days of the dead.
MORE STORIES: http://fiction.deslea.com
FEEDBACK: Love the stuff. deslea@deslea.com
AWARDS/ELIGIBILITY: Spooky Awards 2004 eligible.
We're all someone's daughter
We're all someone's son
How long can we look at each other
Down the barrel of a gun?
-- John Farnham, You're The Voice
[ this is not what he meant ]
The friendship of men is a difficult matter.
He has known Bill Mulder longer than he knew his wife, and
better than he knows the son they share. He is not prone to
regret, but when he regrets, Bill is among the small list of
regrets in which he indulges. He regrets the toll their toils
have taken on him, regrets the distance and the conflicts and the
words said in anger and the losses they have inflicted on one
another. Bill was a brother in war, and for that alone, he has
allowed him his pointless efforts, his attempts to prevent the
inevitable. He has allowed him to live.
He has not regretted Teena particularly, nor the child of that
union. It was a pall over their friendship, to be sure, but they
rode it out okay. In the face of war, possession of a woman who
ultimately wanted neither of them was not an enduring problem.
But that was until today. Today, their son is a threat to them
both, and he knows, watching Bill drinking his whiskey, watching
the dilemma prey on him, that he will not have the strength to
face it out. One of them must be sacrificed, and Fox is his son
and Bill is older and sadder and fading before his eyes, and so
Bill is the one he chooses.
Today, he regrets the union and the child, but he saves him
anyway.
[ this is not the one he meant to choose ]
There is a slender line between grief and madness.
He knows this, and feels himself skirting the edges of it. It
rises up in him when Fox barrages him with accusations. He wants
to scream that it's all his fault, he wouldn't leave it alone and
now his friend is dead. Instead, he denies everything and gets
into an unmarked helicopter and puts his vengeance in motion.
He is enraged when their son - no, his son, Bill is gone now -
when his son eludes him. "He's here," he says, and he can see it
in the eyes of his men, he's walking the slender line. He lashes
out at the one who pushed him there, tells them to burn it, burn
it all, burn *him*. Make him hurt and hurt and hurt and turn and
walk away.
As he rises up over the desert, flames flicker in his wake, and
the madness ebbs away.
[ this is not the one he meant to save ]
A woman will always be the wedge in the friendships of men.
He understands, with the passage of time, that wanting Teena was
just another facet of holding on to his friendship with Bill.
That she could come between them with her spirit and fire - so
different to his own wife's docility - and he couldn't allow that
to happen. And so he took her fire and her passion and made it
his, and discarded her when the damage was done, when the
marriage was muted and there were children that belonged to them
all.
There is no pretence of affection between them. With Bill gone
and their children adrift, there is nothing left to bind them.
But there is loyalty in Bill's name, and as she lies there, it
occurs to him that he can save her, that it costs him nothing and
that to their son it would be everything. He can afford to be
generous now, with a second chance of his own, and he will do
what he can to repair the damage.
This is not the one he meant to save. But perhaps it can be a
new beginning.
[ this is the way it could have been ]
He has always been a shadow father.
He knows this, even as he reaches out to the boy, even as they
walk and talk, more companionable than they've ever been. He
knows that the work, the reunion is but a fantasy, a phantom of a
life that might have been, but he allows himself the pleasure
just the same.
His days are numbered. He knows this, and he makes peace with
the son he never really had. Whether he succeeds or fails in his
bid to save himself from the bloody fate his actions determined
long ago, he has finished with Fox, made his peace and his
amends.
His blood splashes over the images of the children he never
knew, and he knows that their time is done.
[ this is the one he could have known ]
Second chances are not all that their PR would claim.
He had hoped that his survival might bring with it a new
beginning. He clung to the hope, even when he was drawn back
into the life he left behind. He left the older son to his own
dark path and concentrated his efforts on the younger, the
diligent son he had overlooked in his efforts to avenge and
redeem.
But it fell apart, just the same. The poison of the older
infected the younger despite their enmity, and in the end, the
younger turned on him as well. He has walked this slender line
before, in his abortive attempt to eradicate the older, and this
time he will not fail.
He takes aim, and pulls the trigger, and the slender line
becomes his path.
[ this is the way it splinters ]
The friendship of men is a difficult matter.
He did not believe he would miss his comrades when they fell in
a blaze of light. They were not like Bill, and some were
perennially poised with a knife at his back. But they were
comrades in war, just the same, he knew them and they knew his
labours and toils, and with each passing day he misses them.
His comrades now are young and frightening. The assassin,
watching him with brilliant green eyes through long, lowered
lashes. He is opaque and threatening. The dark-haired woman,
beautiful and often kind, and yet he knows that she has a higher
loyalty and that one day a choice will have to be made.
The day comes when he barters the son's life for his own - he is
dead to him now, a thing, meaningless, and he cannot bring
himself to pretend anything else, even for her - and he sees her
betrayal in her eyes and orders her extermination. The assassin
says that it was done, but he distrusts his word and realises
that his chilling facade of allegiance is one he can no longer
afford, and he sends him far away as well.
He is alive, but he is alone by his own hand, and in the
silence, he wonders about the cost.
[ this is how it falls apart ]
He has always relied on the kindness of strangers.
The thought comes to him one day as he sits in his chair and
endures the daily labours of his nurse. He ponders briefly
whether it is really kindness when he must pay for the privilege.
But when she lights his cigarette and gives it to him he decides
that yes, it is - especially when he contrasts her eyes, lined
with warmth, with the coldness of the assassin and the woman at
his side. They are a triad of hurt, the three of them, caught in
an unwilling intimacy that comes of being the only ones who
remain.
For a long time, the man wanted to be his son, his protege. In
his way, he has been more loyal than either of the ones he lost.
He knows this, and he wonders whether there might still be time.
But he sees the cold gleam in those brilliant eyes when he
reaches out to them both, and he knows that there is not. There
is history between those two, love as well as hate, and
identification with the sons he cast aside. He knows that they
will cleave, if only because there is nothing else, and betray
him so that they can be safe and alone.
So he gives them his final weapon, knowing what they will do,
knowing that it will destroy the son they chose as well as the
father they did not. He thinks about the slender line, and he
wonders if he is crossing it now, or if he crossed it long ago.
[ this is the way it ends ]
Fathers and sons and the days of the dead.
His thoughts are not linear, and that is a relief. Freed from
time and progression and mitigation, he can indulge his
bitterness and hatred without restraint. Losing Bill, losing
Jeffrey, losing Alex and Diana and Marita - hell, he throws his
comrades and Samantha and Cassandra and Teena onto the pile for
good measure. It was Fox. It was all Fox. Loss and blood and
oil and pain and blood and blood and blood -
He waits.
His hair grows long. The frightened little woman who cares for
him (for a price, of course) will not show him a mirror. He
doesn't care. He is waiting. The son is alive - of course he
is, damn him to hell - and he will bring death with him when he
comes. It just doesn't *matter* any more, but he will die with
his hate, the only thing that he has left. The only thing that
no one can take away. He will give information and names and
dates and legends and he doesn't even know if they are true any
more - so much has changed - but they will hurt and that will be
his legacy to the one who repudiated every legacy he tried to
give.
He is mad. He knows this. It pleases him. It frees him of
things that burdened and enslaved him. His loneliness is a
blessing. It frees him to hate, frees him to unleash the endless
fury of endless loss and his mind torn asunder. If he can impart
this last fatherly gift to his son when he finally comes, then it
will all have been worthwhile.
He sits before the window, and waits for his son to cross the
slender line.
END
AUTHOR'S NOTES: This one was written mostly
stream-of-consciousness, and I must confess, I'm a little afraid
to tinker with it. I suspect that if it does do what it set out
to do, then it does so as it stands. For that reason it hasn't
had the heavy second-edit that I normally give my work, and I
hope you'll forgive me if it suffers visibly for that. This one
was an experiment that was never going to fit into conventional
writing wisdom, and so I was kind of trying to work out how to do
it as I went along.