xf_book_club | Story 148: "If I Die in a Combat Zone" by Sabine

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Here we have...well I'm not entirely sure what to call it. Late seasons pseudo-apocafic? It defies genre, that alone has me intrigued. And do check out "the even-numbered pages" too, if you can. It got a little stiffed for time of its own.

TITLE: If I Die in a Combat Zone
AUTHOR: Sabine (sabine101@juno.com)
ARCHIVE: Gossamer, Spookys okay. Else please drop a line.
CATEGORY: Short.
RATING: NR

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

amyhit.livejournal.com

As a temporary place holder for the longer, better comment I eventually want to make, I've been thinking over the last couple of days, how interesting it is that both this and Heaven were posted within a month of each other, and that both were posted before the start of S8. It changes them in my mind, to think that they were speculation on how things really were, and not simply little ficlets designed to creep out the readers with unfulfilled 'what-ifs' for five minutes, or an afternoon. And I like that the two fics are quite different, yet they share such similarities because they focus so closely on Scully's emotional and psychological state, and they both return to the "bigger picture" of the mytharc in order to make us feels Scully's anguish.

From:

amyhit.livejournal.com

Um, I've always loved the title?

Mostly what I think is great about this fic is that the dream can be viewed several ways:

- As a kind of foretelling of the future. Scully has exhibited clairvoyant abilities in the past.

- As a way of guaging Scully's fears literally, since she certainly has reason to fear global war.

- As her subconscious mind projecting her fears through metaphor. She's dreaming of kids in a war, which makes sense because she's pregnant. Whatever happens in the future will involve her child too, and that's got to be terrifying. She has the impression that someone needs her help, but she can't move, which is probably how she feels about Mulder - he needs her help, but what can she do? Plus she can't remember why she's even there, or what the point of taking hill 470 is - a feeling of hopelessness and confusion which echoes when she wakes up: "She doesn't know why she's in this, anymore, without him."

- Also, the dream could be a reference to the 'past life' that Mulder describes in The Field Where I Died. The war could be the Civil War, which is why all the people around her are described as kids. Plus, in the dream Scully always "sits up against the sandbag and checks to see if her legs are still there. They are, and every time she wonders why she thought they wouldn't be." Scully is supposedly a sergeant in that past life, and she dies on the battle field, though I don't think we're told how. Maybe her/his legs get blown off? I don't know if it's supposed to be a reference to that at all, but if it is it's a powerful indicator of how she feels in her waking life - like the walking dead. Plus it would bring up the question of fate, history repeating itself - perhaps Scully is fated to fight in a war - which ties back in with the first possibility, that her dream is prophetic.

Because of all the possible meaning that can be gotten from it, IIDCZ gets creepier, sadder, and more meaningful every time I read it - kind of like a recurring dream; the longer you live with it, the more you recognize it as a part of you. Except in this case, the longer I think about IIDCZ, the more I recognize it as a part of Scully, and the deeper that part seems to go. The dream is so violent and tangible and consuming that it makes the sudden silence when Scully wakes hard to bear. By only snapping Scully awake at the last moment, Sabine made the dream overpower the reality, so that the reality is what feels somehow unreal.

The last two sentences are what make this fic. I love them. The rest of the fic is good in that it builds up to the finish, but it's only the last two sentences that bring it all together and set IIDCZ in canon, turning it from a nasty bit of war imagery into a complex series of implications about Scully's character, what's happening around her, and inside of her.

From:

estella-c.livejournal.com

I've always thought that the test of good fiction is that it arouses all sorts of ideas and sustains many interpretations. amyhit has certainly provided all I could entertain.

I really think that Scully is suppressing a great gestative fear that emerges when she sleeps and lets down her guard. Her lover has gone to the war and she knows, better than anyone else in the world, that the REAL war to end wars is coming. The children soldiers are her child, or rather her child is just the emblem, the place-marker of all the children she'll never be able to protect (as she in fact does fail to protect William).

To have no legs is to have no power, maybe to have no partner.

IIDIACZ is just fear, great and justifiable fear, of warfare. I haven't said anything particularly original here, but I didn't want amyhit to be lonely. She's done such heroic explication.

From:

amyhit.livejournal.com

Thank you, Estella, I appreciate the company. And I think your comment was a good one. We're bound to end up expressing similar things in different words (we are commenting on the same short fic, after all) but that doesn't make your expressing your thoughts any less valuable.

The children soldiers are her child, or rather her child is just the emblem, the place-marker of all the children she'll never be able to protect

I'm glad you said this. My comment kind of focused on her child specifically, but you're absolutely right - the fact that she's going to be a mother herself is just going to make her more empathetic towards all children.

IIDIACZ is just fear, great and justifiable fear, of warfare.

Yes! The first couple of times I read it I kind of got distracted by the descriptions and little details, so it resounded with me less. But when I came back to the fic a year or two later what came through so strongly was as you've said, the great justifiable fear. For all the complexities of how the dream can be analyzed, fear is the very fabric of the fic - so much fear, an almost unbearable amount of fear - and the terrible thought that Scully is living with that much fear.