AN INCONSIDERATE DEATH
by - Joyce
September 1998
DISCLAIMER: All the familiar characters belong to 1013 Productions and Fox Broadcasting. I'm only borrowing them for a moment and will return them. No infringement is intended.
FEEDBACK: mab49@earthlink.net
SUMMARY: A death and its consequences.
Two cigarettes left. I intended to buy more this morning. Now it appears that I won't be needing to. How ironic to realize that I am clairvoyant about the small vices, but blind to an avalanche of chaos smashing apart my life.
Well, waste not, want not. It appears I will have time for a final cigarette, possibly two if I've read my erstwhile colleagues correctly. I will sit on the brink of death and enjoy the only true vice I ever allowed myself; the one habit of my innocence I could never slough off.
All my schemes are in ashes, like the body of the man whose ill-timed death has reduced me to a prisoner awaiting execution. Mulder will never know how much I depended on him, how much I based my future on his determined questing spirit. I can't even blame his death on some plot within the Consortium. My colleagues are as stunned as I am. No one ever thought to take random acts of chaos into account when building our separate schemes. Ironic, that the death of the greatest threat to our security should reveal how helpless we are against simple chance.
I sit here, in a richly appointed antechamber in the halls of power, perched on a stiff wooden chair, waiting to die. The watchful eyes of two young Turks remind me of my new position. Sentence has been pronounced. My former lackeys, obsequious to their new masters as ever they were to me, wait for the orders to terminate me. I see a dim reflection of my old ambition in their eyes. They see advancement in my demise.
Fools.
To trust in the benevolence of the doddering incompetents in the next room is to trust the serpent not to bite.
For nearly an hour, my former comrades in the Project, have been arguing over which one of them they trust to oversee my execution. Apparently my resurrection, after their ill-advised assassination attempt three years ago, brought home the unpleasant realization that nobody in their organization is incorruptible.
A reminiscent smile twists my lips as I recall their surprise and dismay at my ability to survive their pathetic little plot. My guards stiffen, wary of a condemned man's smile.
Good.
They still fear me.
I blow a cloud of smoke in their direction and watch them struggle not to cough. I am reduced to petty acts of malevolence, more out of habit than desire.
So close to real power. Years of pandering to the whims and fancies of the Elders. Such a ridiculous name for a cabal. It incites the revolutionary tendencies of the young who think themselves superior to anything older than themselves.
In the end, all my efforts were for naught. In pursuit of power, I sacrificed everything. The man I might have been haunts my soul, but little else remains to remind me of what I surrendered for a little power. In spite of his hatred, Mulder pitied me. I gave him this small victory as a reward for faithful service. He was a good boy. I am proud of the young man I raised to be the instrument of my will, my unwitting protege.
Power was my god and I have been its eager acolyte. I have few regrets, either of things done or undone. I laid my plans with the skill of a grand master. Every contingency was prepared for. I was master of the game.
The Elders were easy to manipulate. I should feel guilty about using them, but I gave up guilt for Lent fifty years ago and never reacquired the habit. They were never my equals in deceit.
Crises appeared on schedule. I gradually inveigled the Consortium ever deeper into my debt as I flawlessly neutralized the threat and restored the balance in their favor. I controlled the leaks I created. I spun the webs that bound them in ever increasing dependency on me. My plans were solid, adapting to and encompassing the spasms of fate.
I look back upon my works and they are good. Well, there was one event that took me by surprise, but, if I do say so myself, I recovered with my usual aplomb and used the results to my advantage. Adapt or die was the motto I lived by. I would have been able to adapt to this latest surprise given enough time. However, time is clearly not what I have in abundance at the moment. I suspect my colleagues know this. I adapted while they merely reacted to situations. They fear me even while despising me. What they do not understand will destroy them. I am content to take the knowledge that would save them and this planet with me to my grave. Let their ultimate despair be my memorial.
It was my vision which saw the possibilities in Hoover's national police force. My comrades thought in petty terms of enforcement and control. I watched their moronic infiltration and provocation ploys during the upheavals of the Sixties and laughed. The men who thought they were going to run the world couldn't even pull off the simple task of controlling over-active, idealistic teenagers.
I claimed the FBI as my territory. It was such a simple matter to gain control of the agency after its bumbling became public knowledge in the early Seventies. One of my more subtle ploys, I recall with pride. Without someone to hold their hand, bureaucrats are appallingly inept in keeping secrets. With a little encouragement and a trail of breadcrumbs, even dense reporters can follow the signs to a cover-up.
With an eye to the future, I prepared the fires that would forge Fox Mulder into the weapon I would use to drive open a pathway to power. With his unwitting assistance I planned to take my place among the Elders as a ruler of men. As I waited, I amused myself by manipulating lives and careers of those men I foresaw would be useful to me in the battle to control Mulder's headlong charge after the truth.
I believe Mulder would have been astonished to realize that entire sections of the FBI had been manipulated and rearranged to give him the best opportunities to demonstrate his particular genius. Like a doting parent, I taught him to survive hostility, adversity and ridicule. A sword is heated, beaten, reheated and beaten again many times, before it is ready to be used in battle.
Fox was a precocious three-year-old when I first saw his potential as a gadfly to rattle the smug self-satisfied Project Elders. Bill never realized that I supplanted him as Fox's mentor, just as he never realized when I supplanted him in his wife's bed. All the advantages my position in the Project could supply were given to Fox. I created adversity so that he might be strong. I arranged for the Oxford scholarship so that his mind might be trained to the highest levels. Phoebe was an oversight. Still, she did serve a purpose, as did the Fowley woman I arranged to be so temptingly available. By the time they were finished with him, Mulder had learned to fear the entanglements of women. My plans for him did not include a house with a white picket fence and 2.5 children.
As far as I know, the conditioning held, even when it was sorely tested by Agent Scully. Now there was a woman I respected. She knew how to keep her mind on her job and that job was keeping Mulder alive and focused. As a reward, I allowed them a certain amount of freedom to explore the emotional aspects of their partnership. I am, ultimately, a closet romantic. Mulder needed her and I needed Mulder. Romance is sometimes the price you have to pay for pragmatism.
She despised me. My respect would have offended her so I didn't offer it. She would never have understood. Still, if I had met someone like her when I was young, we would own the Consortium by now.
When the time was ripe, I set into motion the events which would lure Mulder into the X-Files. With a single word, I splintered his memories and unleashed his burning need to know the truth.
The Elders were nothing if not consistent in their stupidity. Blevins was their choice to rein in Mulder. I protested, but nepotism is one of the most pernicious vices of the Consortium. If they had listened to me, Mulder would have been carefully contained without untidy complications, except of course when loosing him after a stray truth or two would have been to my advantage.
Skinner, I am proud to say, was entirely my choice. I recognized his worth to me and to Mulder from the first time I observed him as a young, aggressive agent with a stern sense of duty and loyalty. He has not let me down. I regard the man with an almost affectionate pride. It is a pity he will never know how I died. He has a capacity for enjoying the taste of revenge. Perhaps he will even miss me. Who else will he have to challenge him to be a Marine in the political tar pits of Washington bureaucracy? He is my legacy to the Consortium. They will find that without my controlling hand, Assistant Director Skinner is a very dangerous man.
Blevins assured me that Dana Scully was the perfect choice to discredit Mulder's work. Since my entire purpose was not to discredit Mulder, I withheld my counsel and let the pompous bastard blunder onward. Blevins was a ponderous man in body as well as mind. A man with no subtlety or finesse, much like his uncle. Petty ambition ruled his ethics and his opinions. Lacking honor or the ability to commit to a cause beyond his own self-interest, he never recognized the warning signs I saw in Agent Scully.
Watching her initial briefing and her pert, correct answers to Blevins heavy-handed hints, I hid my amusement behind a cloud of smoke. Of all the abilities I saw in reading over Agent Scully's personnel file and from my own assessment of her character, betrayal was the one act she was inherently incapable of performing.
Subsequent events justified my intuitive perception that assigning Agent Scully to Mulder would be one thing that would center him and ground him. She was the rock he could put his back up against and trust to stand with him against all odds. I feel a sense of pride in how well I manipulated that budding relationship. Just enough pressure to refine the dependency and danger enough to distill distrust into implacable and unshakable trust. A very nice job, if I must say so myself.
Almost to a man, the Elders were blind to her incredible intelligence and indomitable will. They saw her only as a tool to control Mulder. I saw her as the refining fire that would burn away all impurities and transform Mulder's naive quest into a genuine threat to the stability of the Project. I controlled his penetration into the shadowy secret world of the Project. He was my ticket to power, the finely tuned instrument that answered to my hand alone.
My error, my only miscalculation, was in failing to foresee that the old fools would try to break up the partnership they created and when that failed to break him, to take her for testing. I didn't want him broken. I needed him whole and functional. That they were correct in their assumptions only increased my efforts to reverse the decision.
Blevins, in all his glorious stupidity, provided me with the opening I needed. I merely had to mention a young up and coming Consortium agent and how important it was to keep tabs on Agent Mulder. Alex Krycek was the perfect foil to jar Mulder out of his funk. He drove Mulder crazy, as I knew he would. I did not anticipate the move to abduct Agent Scully. No doubt Blevins enlisted the aid of Krycek in this asinine blunder. Krycek has the morals of a weasel and enough ambition to more than make up for his lack of tactical foresight. I do believe he actually thought he could out-maneuver me and win Mulder over, replacing me as Mulder's watchdog.
Dealing with an out-of-control Mulder was a much more important problem. Scully's disappearance seriously compromised his usefulness to me. Reluctantly, I stepped out of the shadows to intervene and refocus Mulder's anger. I admire the boy, but when he gets angry he's like a shotgun - nobody is safe. I wanted him angry at the men who took his partner. Krycek never had a chance. He neglected the first rule of treason - suspect everyone of having the same low moral character as yourself. The little weasel never suspected that I had deliberately set him up. Mulder proved to be more preoccupied than I anticipated, less homicidal, so Krycek remains a bomb looking for a place to explode.
However, Skinner proved every bit as valuable as I had foreseen. I wonder what he would have done if I had come into his office the day he reopened the X-Files and wrapped him in a bear hug. I think I must have smiled more that day than any other day of my life. I was even willing to forget that little by-play with my home address that gave me a chilling few moments staring down the barrel of Mulder's gun.
Against all expectations, Mulder survived every effort to destroy him. I orchestrated most of them, along with the rescues in the nick of time, but he survived a fair number through luck and his partner's skill. He never seemed to question why he led such a protected life. Like all children, he accepted miracles as commonplace events.
The Elders never caught on to my little game of smoke and mirrors. They dithered, unwilling to take the decisive overt steps to terminate him. I did notice an increasing suspicion of my favorite answer to their arguments in favor of Mulder's murder - 'kill Mulder and turn one man's quest into a crusade.' It sounds very profound but says absolutely nothing. Perhaps that's why it worked so well for so many years. No one wanted to be the first to admit that they had been checkmated by a meaningless phrase. The unwillingness of powerful men to admit that they have been hoodwinked worked in my favor for years.
As I look back over the events of the past week, I am forced to admit that I had grown complacent. Mulder seemed endowed with an almost miraculous ability to survive. I watched with pride as he pulled allies into his orbit and made slow, but steady progress against the wall of secrets surrounding the Project. I made sure that while he knew the "truth" he lacked the essential evidence to go public. I carefully regulated his diet of the truth; he knew exactly what I wanted him to know. The Elders were content to let me handle the "Mulder problem." My rise to power in the inner circle was assured. Everything was going according to my plan.
Now, on the brink of success, everything lies in ashes. It is illogical to blame Mulder, but I do. I can't seem to resist the irritated feeling that he was most inconsiderate when he skidded off an icy mountain road, instantly killing himself and his partner.
Without the "Mulder problem," my colleagues consider me irrelevant. Me, the master of shadows and obfuscation - irrelevant. Because Mulder was distracted, I'm sitting here waiting for a bullet in the back of my head. How many times did I tell him, pay attention? The young never listen.
Ungrateful boy.
I gave him a hero's life. Without my intervention, he would have lived his life in slothful mediocrity. I gave him tragedy and drama. I gave him a star to follow and a friend to stand at his side.
For my generosity, I never received a word of thanks, just a steady stream of abuse. I must confess to a secret pride in his nicknames for me. Despite his overt hate, I think he knew we were inextricably bound together. Without me to focus his hate, to give purpose to his restless intellect, he would have lacked the great enemy that every quest requires. He was my favorite, the son of my spirit. Now, I find that we are indeed bound together. His untimely and most ill-considered death pulls me along helplessly in his wake.
Life without Mulder has repainted my life in shades of gray. Emotion has been foreign to my nature since I was a boy, so I am surprised by the faint stirrings of something in my soul that may be grief.
My guards come to attention. With studied casualness, I crush my cigarette on the polished surface of a Louis XV table and pull out my final cigarette. Absently I toss the empty package to one of the lackeys. He instinctively catches it before throwing it aside in anger. I nod approvingly at him and relish the growl he makes in response. As I rise, I glance at the man sent to watch me die. He looks more nervous than I am. If I was a wagering man, I would be willing to bet that he will puke his guts out the moment my brains splatter across the floor.
As I allow my executioners to escort me to a place where the cleanup won't pose a problem for the housemaids, I consider the notion that if the Englishman was right, my fate may be kinder than that of the men killing me.
I take comfort in the fact that they will not survive long without me. I was the glue that kept everything together. Without me they are children playing conspiracy games and doing very poorly at that. I manage a cold knowing smile as I stroll down the corridor. Let them wonder what knowledge they kill with me.
Fox, you have no idea how many plans you wrecked, what glories you missed out on, with your most inconsiderate death.
THE END
Feedback will be given a good home at: mab49@earthlink.net
