A Well-Manicured Life (1/1)

by Madeleine Partous
email: partous@total.net

DISCLAIMER: Chris Carter is King of the Apes. I am
humble monkey in comparison. Oo-oo. All rights reserved
by CC and Fox and used without permission by me but
without malicious money-making intent.

CLASSIFICATION: VCA, very slight MSR

RATING: G

SPOILERS: FTF -- like, *way.* Unless you've seen the
movie or you've already been thoroughly spoiled or you
don't give a damn about this character, run like hell.

SUMMARY: A fond goodbye from a beloved bad guy. Truly -
- that's all I can say without giving it away.

DEDICATION: To all the patient people out there who
still write periodically to say they miss me. Sigh --
you've made it hard to stay away.

NOTE: For those who've been asking, I'm itching to
write again. Seems like a good idea to start with small
stuff and certainly this little thing won't be
everyone's cup of tea. But the intent is to write a --
gasp -- long one again. As soon as I feel
comfortable... 




Darling.

I have been a fool.

An innocent one, perhaps. My foolishness has always
stemmed from a desire to do what's best. For you, my
love. For our children. And for our grandchildren now -
- good heavens, who would have known all those years
ago that one day I would use that word in relation to
the two of us?

Grandchildren. Were we not young ourselves moments ago?
Did I not reach for your hand tentatively in Piccadilly
right after the troops landed in Normandy and shiver
when you said "yes" for the first time?

You have always held to your word. You have always said
yes. You have said yes for more than 50 years now.

Everything I have done, foolish as it may now seem, I
did for you.

I proposed to you on D-Day -- Dierdre Day, I called it,
after you, my love, the woman I have loved for more
years than many men live. It was a silly thing,
perhaps, whimsical and even cloying in light of the
monumental events that surrounded the beginning of the
end of that endless war, but I was young then, so
young, and my heart still occasionally sang.

So long ago.

A lifetime ago.

The world changed that day, but as selfish as it
sounds, it meant nothing to me.

To me, that day will always be Dierdre Day.

Because of you.

Because of all you've done.

Because of all you've forgiven.

God. I've expected you to forgive so much.

But you know how it all began, my dear. You remember.
We were young and filled with the optimism of youth. We
were cocky, overly sure of ourselves.

Why mince words? We were damned arrogant.

The "Boy's Club," you used to call us. Remember? And
now we've become, as you remind me incessantly, the
"Old Boy's Club." Sad, sorry, tattered remnants of the
men we used to be. I can see you in my mind's eye as
you try to deny it -- but you needn't bother. You know
it's true.

*I* know it.

Had we not done so much harm, we would simply be old.

As it is, we are travesties of old age, gargoyles,
wizened paragons of inadvertent evil.

Yet we meant well. We began with a dream. This too you
remember. And we believed we had the answers. We
believed we alone held the solution to the problems of
humanity -- problems which humanity itself, in its
ignorance and blindness, had yet to face.

We were the true leaders of the world. Appointed by the
world's governments, at least initially before our
pride led us astray, unified long before the empty
charade known as the United Nations was formed to pay
lip service to humanism and social conscience. 

To this day, how many people realize that the UN was
created as a cover-up for what we were meant to be?

After all, human nature is what it is. We will never
come together unless we are threatened by a common
enemy. This is why the United Nations never worked.

When no common enemy exists, we turn against each
other.

But we knew. Didn't we, my dear? Unity was not a
problem for the 12, the so-called Consortium, as we
have been amusingly nicknamed by adolescent conspiracy
buffs who troll the internet in search of apocalyptic
cover-ups, inane plots which parody the mind-numbing
absurdity of the truth.

Unity is never a problem when there is a common enemy.
But we were seduced, as Judas was, lulled by our
youthful arrogance into believing that we could play
all parties against each other and somehow manage to
stand at the hub, safe, unharmed and powerful beyond
imagination, even as the world we knew was blown apart.

Such hubris. I cringe now to think about it. Twelve
young men, the chosen ones, as we believed ourselves to
be, double agents who worked for no one but ourselves.

Little did we realize then that we were in fact the new
apostles of the next Sons of Man, the Ones who had come
from the stars and who would father the rest of our
history.

We godfathered both the parasites and the hybrids and
now our adopted sons are uniting in turn to laugh at
the fools we have been.

Their real fathers are awaking. Their dreams are almost
done.

Now it is clear our nightmare is just beginning.

And so the time as come for attrition. The time has
come, at least for me, to pay.

Only a few of us are left. A few of those who have
died, too few of them peacefully, alas, have been
replaced by others whose naked self-interest makes a
mockery of our own carefully disguised greed.

The older ones amongst us fooled ourselves into
believing we meant well. Even when the shadow of a numb
conscience trembled in our breasts to hint that our own
dark ambitions had long ago snuffed all vestiges of any
humanitarian impulse.

The younger ones -- I smile because they too are older
now, long of tooth and ensconced in grey middle age --
make no such empty claims.

They have joined the cause because their governments
believed their ruthlessness may be enough to fight the
future.

I have no such illusions. They bring to the task no
love of humanity, however slim; no desire to save the
planet from what increasingly seems to be a fate worse
than death.

They are driven by a need to be the puppet masters. We
older ones have known for some time now that we were
hoist by our own petard.

We have been called a shadow government. It's really
too amusing. The truth is, we are the shadow puppets.

A prison sentence awaits humanity. We are to be the
slaves of a master race, the true puppeteers who have
engineered the thing with such finesse that they
anticipated and compensated for our pathetic attempts
at deception eons before we were born.

We have learned this too late, fools that we were.
Fools that we are.

And the irony is that most of those who betrayed
humanity to save their own skins will be dead of old
age before the prison sentence commences.

What a legacy I leave behind for our grandchildren. I
had hoped to save them -- you must believe this, my
love.

But nothing can save them now.

Nothing can save any of us.

Except...

It is possible that Mulder can.

My greatest betrayal of my love for you may yet turn
out to be our only hope. Perhaps this is the greatest
irony of all...

You have forgiven me for this too, even if I have never
forgiven myself.

We are surrounded by incompetent, self-serving idiots.
This you will concede, my dear -- we were arrogant but
never, never stupid.

The apple doesn't fall far from the tree. Mulder is
many things -- stupid isn't one of them.

My one weakness in middle age, my love for a woman
whose husband was my friend, the only shining star in a
bad brood of replacements assigned to us as we began to
die, of natural causes and otherwise.

I loved William Mulder as a son. I betrayed him by
giving him one of his own.

His final betrayal, of course, came much later. He was
killed for his kindness, his revulsion at what we had
done, and his fear.

He was killed in cold blood and we did it. I can no
longer pretend to myself that it was otherwise, that it
was just one of us gone amok. United we stand -- the
responsibility for one man's action belongs to all of
us.

I killed him indirectly. My friend. The father of my
son.

As for Tina, her own regrets have made her relationship
with her son problematic. She feels guilty, that's all.
She never meant to hurt him.

But now one of the younger ones, one who is bad to the
bone but who has climbed the ladder through sheer
rodent cleverness, the man you've always despised, the
one who pollutes my study with smoke despite the
obvious lack of an ashtray anywhere in this house, has
made young Mulder doubt the veracity of his paternity.

So many ironies today.

I have been aware of the subterfuge and have stayed
mum.

For your sake.

For Mulder's? No. It fills me with sadness, even with a
strange sort of shame, but to Mulder there is little
difference between the smoking man and myself.

Both possibilities of parentage would be equally
horrific to him.

As it is, he doubts his sister's paternity -- when in
fact she was taken specifically because she was Bill's.

She was taken to hurt him.

She was taken because he believed she was all he had
left. Of course, this was long before he discovered how
much else he had yet to lose. And of course, my clever
confrere, my black-lunged brother in arms, has used
this to his advantage as well.

But now the time has come to make amends, my dear.

I cannot tell Fox Mulder the truth. I will not, for
your sake and also for his own.

But I have disowned him long enough.

Now I can help him save the only thing that matters to
him.

His partner.

Fortunately, he is so obsessed with her that I may be
able to make him save the world at the same time. What
I will be asking him to do is, strictly speaking,
impossible.

Only a lunatic would attempt it. Only a lunatic in love
could succeed.

It's simple, really, and quite elegant, assuming Mulder
can get there at all, assuming he can get in, assuming,
after all that, that he can find her. A daunting task
at best, but if he does, the vaccine should infiltrate
the system sufficiently to wreak havoc. I doubt that it
will kill them all -- they have too many failsafes for
that to happen. But it will shake them up. At least
temporarily. And it *will* delay them.

I only pray that the pathetic old bastards I leave
behind will have the good sense to strike while the
aliens escape to recuperate and regroup. There won't be
much time.

Still. I simply can't worry about that. I will have
done all that I can.

By then, it will be too late; much too late, I fear,
for me.

I am sorry, my dear. More than you know. And I love you
more than the world.

Except that this time, I may be the world's only
chance. And I have been selfish enough, don't you
think?

All I am doing in the end is hastening an inevitable
death sentence. At least my demise will safeguard your
life, yours and our children's and our children's
children. Otherwise the others would go through all of
you to get to me. You know they would. And they would
leave death in their wake.

This I cannot begin to bear.

I have led a well-manicured life. I have made others do
the dirty work while I stood in the shadows and waited.

It's time for me to get my hands dirty. My time has
come to fight a future which otherwise will come to
pass because of me and others like me.

I am going to see my son. And then I am going to die.

You have forgiven me everything.

Please forgive me this.

END


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