Title:  If Truth Be Told (1/1)
Author:  Susan Littlejohn
         susanlittlejohn@netscape.net
Rating:  G
Category:  MPOV
Spoilers:  Amor Fati and The Sixth Extinction.
Summary:  Mulder musing as bits and pieces filter
through the cheesecloth of memory.
Disclaimer:  C. Carter, 1013, FOX, no infringment
on well-defined ownership rights intended.
Archive:  That's fine.


If Truth Be Told



It's still there.  The tinniness.  Hear it whispering to me 
whenever I shut my eyes, and force myself to push it back.
Push back...push.  Push.  The blessed pushing.  His telling
me what he thought I wanted to hear all along, all these
twisted years of half-truths and innuendo.  Maybe he believed
I'd be grateful, but the mockery I made of his perversest
divulgence screamed otherwise.  User!  Always will be, but
he'll never use me again.  Never.  Dead or alive, and I hope
to all that is just, he's as lifeless as the many he made
corpses, she won't ever let him.  She's the touchstone.
Proven worth, oh, so worthy of the best I've never given her.

They saved me.  Both of them did.  Like feminine Marines.
Saved me from his webs of delusion and obscene usury.  Usury
of an eidetic, but englutted mind, and tortured soul.  Entwined
around the so-called martyr's death he'd instrumented for me.
Liar!  Until the end he thought he had me, playing the savior,
swirling in coiling smoke.  To drag me down into his haze of
impenetrable clarity.  A clarity he thought bestowed, but never
embraced.  Can I really know?  Must it be demanded I should?
Though saddled with a mind bereft of zesty agility, it knows
the difference between the heaven and hell ol' Smoky juggled
me between.  Please let this be temporary.  These days my mind
struggles.  It wrestles with the totality...

Of their saving me.  Both of them.  The tenebrific woman of my
surreal shadows; the illuminant redeemer, of my bedrock.  I
believe.  If true, although I do not doubt my...I've already 
told you what She is, for even half a second.  Ever.  That the
paradox is truly dead...yes, I'll miss her.  Of course I will.
Despite knowing what I've got; always had, but was too myopic
to appreciate with the depth it should have been.  I loved the
dark one once.  Did a holdover of love, long ago shared, save
me?  The paradox that is no more.  Surely snubbed out, no doubt,
by Krycek's pitiless hand, at black-lunged Shiva's behest.  The
anguish of mulling, never knowing in the ultimate sense?  But I
must know...

I exhale a cleansing breath.  The same breath surrendered when
I knew she’Äôd come to save me.  Save me from the beckoning abyss.
The void of emasculation; defeat.  My wondrous touchstone.  The
touchstone meant to be touched, over and over again.  Her self-
professed not knowing what to believe, I don't believe for one
minute, though she told me so again today.  Hers is weathered
now, but not obfuscated.  She'll never discard it as useless.
Not my touchstone.  

She remains belief in oblation, for as long as she is.  Carrying
the standard of all that is vital and true.  Melded, oh, the rich
comfort of the very idea...we shall continue the telling to
whomever has courage and vision enough to listen.

If truth be told...

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