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Title: Mere Ripple Summary: not a real ending of course, nor even a beginning. Note: I've never done this before, but this needs to be said right at the top This one's for Caz. More author's notes at end. I hate the sound of my voice. It's got such a nasal quality to it Insecurity is not a particularly useful trait in my line of work, however, so I've tried valiantly over the years to make myself get over it. I often wonder what people see when they look at me. Many would never guess that I have a wife - fewer still would guess that I'm the sort of man who would still refer to her as my wife twenty-nine years after she left me. Twenty-nine years and six months, but who's counting. I wonder if everyone in my line of work wound up here along the same grief-filled path I did Maureen got me here. It would probably be healthier if I blamed her, but I can't. Maureen was -is- the love of my life, and the knowledge that my continued service keeps her safe pushes me forward each day. Pushes me forward each day. I sound like a goddamn boy scout. Or a goddamn senatorial candidate. Still, I keep trudging, even though I know she hates me. She thinks I ruined her life, and maybe I did. But I had only the best of intentions. I met Maureen when I was twenty-five, and a green-as-grass agent who had a tendency to use his badge to impress girls. I met her when I was Scottie Blevins, the rich smart WASP boy who sailed through Harvard on his parents' checkbook. She came over to my ridiculously posh apartment with the pristine carpets even I was afraid to walk on, and she looked at me and laughed as she ground the heel of her shoe deep into one of the plush white rugs. For the life of me I can't remember whom she came with - my "friends" dropped by at all hours with girls hanging off their expensively tailored arms to partake of the gourmet food my kitchen was constantly supplied with. She looked into my eyes and laughed, and I was lost. Her eyes were -are- soft brown. Not particularly remarkable, but the way the light danced in them made Maureen shine. Or, more accurately, Maureen shined, and it gleamed and glinted across her eyes. I haven't a clue what she saw in me. My eyes have never reflected even the harsh fluorescence of overhead lighting. My eyes swallow light, and I'll be damned if I know what they do with it. But Maureen saw something, and her hand gently brushed my fingertips as she guided me away from the festive rich brats in my living room. Her fingertips gently brushed mine as we walked together on the hard wood of the hallway. The heels of her shiny black shoes caught my eye as she guided me into one of the bedrooms. Not my bedroom, but one of the several rooms designated to pamper guests in the lap of luxury. More often, it was the crash landing spot of my dear old buddies after they had too much to drink. She put a record on. I hadn't even realized I had a record player. She put on La Boheme, which I vaguely remembered sleeping through in some hazy childhood memory. I had never liked music of any sort - come to think of it I had never really liked much of anything. Happiness was only achieved with a bottle or two of scotch. But Maureen started humming along with the record, and swaying back and forth in time with the rhythm. I was enchanted. With her eyes, with La Boheme, with her. I had thought, at first, that her intention was to have sex with me on the overstuffed guest bed. I should have known better. She kissed me then, a gentle sigh of lips pressing together. I remember how her face looked coming towards me, features blurring into overwhelming lip and the top edges of teeth, tiny freckles growing into soft brown patches as the tip of her nose brushed against my cheek. Part of me wanted to grab her around her waist and crush her lips against mine and drink the light from her eyes until I glowed with it. The other part of me was dumb struck, bewildered, speechless, and probably halfway drunk. Drunk on bourbon and Maureen, a dangerous combination. The rest of that night was a blur of soft music and dancing. Not really dancing, but more like swaying, we moved so slowly. I memorized her that night; the soft crinkles of smooth skin around her eyes when she smiled, the way her small hands seemed to absorb mine, the clean scent of her hair. A storm front is moving in. You'd think as Section Chief I'd at least have an office with a window to the outside, but no, I'm encased in a little tomb with a view of the hallway. The slatted shades make my office dark and gloomy enough for a man in my line of work. It would be nice if the shades reached all the way to the floor I can see the shoes of the people walking past through the space at the bottom of the windows Even though I can't see their eyes, I feel like they're all looking at me. I don't need a window to know the storm will be here soon. Sometimes I forget how old I am, but never when a storm is coming. The aching sensation in my kneecaps and elbow joints reminds me that I'm not twenty-five anymore. Before I had responsibilities, I used to look out windows for hours, content to let everybody think that I was thinking deep thoughts while I drifted in a state of semi-wakefulness. I always thought the only reason the Bureau put up with me was that someone with my last name had made the down payment on the Hoover building, but now I wonder if they hadn't started fitting me for a noose back then. When Maureen sat and stared with me, the parking lot across from my apartment seemed beautiful. She was watching with me when a storm came, once. We watched as a slim tree bent backwards in the wind, looking like a single whisper more of rain-soaked air would rip its baby roots from the ground and send it flying. We were married within a year, and she was pregnant before our first anniversary. We both decided that the baby would be a girl, although we had no way of knowing. Maureen said that she "just knew," and somehow, that made perfect sense. She named her Grace, and I would sit and rub her gradually swelling abdomen and whisper soft words to "Gracie." If Maureen shined that first night, she was blinding radiant during the months she was pregnant. Light bounced off her skin and her touch was pure warmth. She was a physical embodiment of love, and I basked in the miracle that she loved me. When she was nine months pregnant and her stomach looked like it was housing a watermelon, I was a nervous wreck. I fidgeted and whined and drove her (and everybody else around me) nuts with my jittery panic. When she was a week past her "expected arrival date," I called her from work at fifteen-minute intervals. The sound of her voice telling me to "relax, goddamn it," pulsed in my ears like a mantra. At D-Day plus five, at three forty-five, she didn't answer the phone. I think I stood there with the receiver jammed into my ear listening to the droning ring for at least four minutes. I was in a blind panic. I ran heedlessly down the hallways of the Hoover Building, vaguely aware that my legs were refusing to cooperate and that I was rather gracelessly bumping into people. It's amazing I didn't kill somebody as I drove home, pressing the gas pedal to the floor and gunning through intersections as the lights changed from yellow to red. When I got home, it was too late. She was gone. I was standing stock still, lost as to what to do next, and certain that something impossibly terrible was going to happen if it hadn't already, when the phone rang. A far too perky voice informed me that Mrs. Blevins had been brought in by ambulance, and would I be able to come right over? *is she alive is she alive is she alive is she alive god damn you tell me is she alive* I knew as soon as I saw her eyes that something irrevocably terrible had occurred. They were puddled. Deep murky brown at the top melting into soft sepia, with the pupils blurred and dilated at the centers. They swallowed the harsh fluorescence of the hospital lighting. It was beautiful, haunting, and a death knell. The other bed, across the room, was vacant. A large, gaudy star-shaped mylar balloon adorned the bed frame. "It's a girl," in oversized showy lettering blared at me, a bright star-shaped sore thumb in the dim room. When I turned my gaze back, Maureen's vacant, melted gaze was fixed on me. "I'm fine." Her voice was full of rusted metal and wrought iron tears. "Honest, I'm fine. It was just a silly accident. Don't look so...pained." "What happened?" My own voice sounded harsh, cold and emotionless. The voice of the boy who stared out windows and thought blank thoughts. It seemed to fit in with the harshly antiseptic feel of the hospital room. "It was the silliest thing, really dear. I thought I heard someone calling and I went outside, and I must have gone too close to the road. Silly, isn't it? The woman who thinks she hit me was just terribly upset about it, and she had an ambulance there impossibly quickly." She recited as if reading from a script, in a false singsong. "What aren't you telling me?" I hated the sound of my voice. An accusation, a curse, a damnation, uttered in a nasal contralto to an innocent in a hospital bed. "They lost Grace." Her voice matched mine, flat and toneless. She turned her head away from me, and I resisted the urge to scream at her to goddamn look at me. "We're going to be fine." I repeated the pointless words, aware of the slight upswing of irony in my tone. Painfully aware of the scrutiny she was giving the off-white hospital linens. The complete absence of thought in my mind was remarkable, I stared at her hands clenching and unclenching the sheet in a rhythmic monotone and realized I had no more emotions left to feel and no more words left to say. Tears were falling off her down-turned face and onto her hands in a fragmented waterfall. I was standing over her before I realized I had moved, my feet moving of their own accord and then I was leaning down and grazing her forehead with my lips. "We're going to be fine." The time in the hospital room seemed to stretch to hours and eternity, the walls seemed to close in and entrap us within their lifeless gleaming white. I fell asleep in the unforgiving plastic chair by her bedside and woke up just in time to sign the forms for Maureen's discharge. Doctors and nurses in pale blue and pink and more endless white hurrying about and repeating one another in a chorus of gentle platitudes. "Everything seems to be fine, Sir. She's going to be just fine." I didn't realize until we were driving up the hill to my apartment that spring had arrived. The flare of green against blue, blue sky with the brown of the still half-bare branches intertwining and the sky rushing towards me as I accelerated up the hill. Days trudged forward and I watched the green swallow up the brown of the landscape from my bedroom window. I stumbled back into work, moving through a fog of dazed semi-wakefulness. I walked without seeing, talked without thinking, listened without hearing. I didn't see the man until he was a foot away from my face, his outline a thin line of brightness against the shadowed gloom of the parking lot. I'd never met the man before, but as his face turned upwards into a patch of lesser darkness I knew it had to be him. "Mr. Blevins." The click back of the lighter, hiss of butane and the dancing edge of the cigarette illuminating his face like a flare. "I was so sorry to hear about your wife's unfortunate accident." The sneer written across his rehearsed speech. Animalistic instinct to pounce and tear away at his skin ripped through me I'd gotten used to the absence of all feeling, and the sudden rush of it filled me with heat like a quick shot of Scotch I gnawed on my lower lip, tapped my foot, and willed words to form into coherent sentences. "What do you mean?" Coherent, yes, but definitely lacking in impact. He seemed amused. I tapped my foot harder and felt my ankle throb. "It would be most unfortunate if such an accident were to occur again...wouldn't it, Mr. Blevins?" The tap on the cigarette and the fine column of ash plummeting downwards in the airless parking lot, disappearing from view into the shadows before landing in front of him. Nothing of emotion left beyond primitive rage. The smoke exhaled out of his mouth and swirling upwards to the low gray ceiling. Over the pounding of blood in my ears the dull resonance of my expensive black shoe against concrete. "What's the matter? Cat got your tongue?" The glare of the flame rising and falling, the bit of blue at the center solid around the wavering orange and red corona. The sweat making my fingers slide down my palms as they tried to clench into a fist. "Enough games. I have a message for you." The eternity of the cigarette falling, tumbling white and flame across gray space. "You have been chosen for a great honor, given only to the few men worthy of the responsibility." The edge of his shoe smothering the flame and grinding it into the concrete. "I don't want your responsibility." Carefully controlled. "You have been chosen." Plain as daybreak. "I don't want your responsibility." Control tinted with rage. "You have been chosen, Mr. Blevins. You will come to realize, the most important decisions are the ones you never get to make." Footsteps, echoing loudly and forever. No, not footsteps. Knocking. She is here. "Agent Scully, thank you for coming on such short notice. Please..." Such is the end of the flicker of time, the brief, hot fuse of events and ideas set off, accidentally, and snuffed out, accidentally, by man Not a real ending of course, nor even a beginning Mere ripple in Time's Stream. -John Gardner, Grendel Author's Notes - In case it wasn't as clear as I'd intended it to be, the ending is a segue to the beginning of the pilot episode, just before Blevins assigned Scully to the X-Files. Like I said, this one's for Caz Just think dear, you only had to tell me three times over a nine month span, and viola! g In all seriousness, though, this never would have made it to the posting stage without you Thanks for the nagging, the beta read, and for being one of the most genuinely nice people I've gotten a chance to know through the net. Thanks are also due to wen, for the nitpickin' & goof-ball beta. g And to Kelley Walters, whose marvelous beta got lost somewhere in the six month gap between then and now...sorry! Er...at least I took your suggestion about changing the . g And (yes, I'm still going) thanks to Christine, for being my friend and a voice of encouragement. This originally (and I mean originally as in circa May 1999) began as an improv for the Angst Addicts List I lost the list of elements long ago, but I know I did manage to work in a couple of 'em They were: a slim tree bent backwards in the wind, a star-shaped mylar balloon, and a CD of La Boheme Well...I got a record in there, at least. g All right, I'm shutting up now. Feedback would be lovely. http://grapefruithead.com/luperkal
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