Story 195: "Every Sparrow Falling" by Alloway

[wendelah1]

What a nice response we got to "Oak Leaves in October." It's good to remember that there is more to this fandom than just the canon ship.

"Every Sparrow Falling" is a case file that is also an x-file. This is Mulder and Scully doing what they do best, investigating the paranormal. It's been some time since I last read this, but I remember being scared out of my wits. There is no summary from the author so here's the one from Raiders of the Lost Fanfic, Maybe Amanda's old rec site: "Casefile, paranormal, religion, madness. And hot dogs, peanuts, and Cracker Jack."

For Special Agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully, it began with a sparrow.

More precisely, with a flock of sparrows. Or, as Agent Mulder had put it, a *fall* of sparrows.

"Clever turns of phrase aside, I imagine this must have been quite painful," Scully murmured, hunkered down by the body. The dead man was sprawled out peacefully, save for the bloodied mats of hair and the bird feet dangling out of his skull. Scully surmised she'd find the rest of the bird buried within. "Looks like it fell beak first, but still...given the impact, the rate of speed had to have been tremendous."

"Indicating a long fall from a high point of origin," Mulder agreed. "Consistent with the recent evidence of lights in the clouds, odd humming noises--"

"Mulder--" she protested.

"Come on, Scully, this isn't the first unexplainable 'deadly rain' recorded," he argued. "You've seen the reports. Hell, you've *written* the reports."

She nodded. "Frogs, rocks, crickets, seas of blood, and the inexorable sacrifice of the first-born..." she trailed off. Mulder was first; Samantha had been second-child. "No, Mulder," she said. "This rain is man-made. Or at least sent by aliens with terrible penmanship."

"What?"

Latex-sheathed fingers plucked one of the birds from its chosen spot of ground. "It's been stuffed," she said. "Hardened with a shellac-like coating. And Mulder--the writing is a dead giveaway." She rotated the bird to face him. Ignoring the blind, dead eyes, he focused his attention on the scrap of fabric sewn to the sparrow's chest.

"Wife beating," Mulder read. Scully could almost hear the gears grind as Mulder shifted from alien-chaser to manhunter. "Scully, pass the gloves."

Read "Every Sparrow Falling", then come tell us what you think.

The link is to IOHO's archive, but if their bandwidth runs out, you can also read it on her old site via the Wayback Machine or at Gossamer.

Comments

[estella-c.livejournal.com]

Thanks again, amyhit, for the plotwork. Give the girl a raise. It's hard stuff, and helpful when crafting some kind of opinion. I should reread this, but...never mind.

I admire this fic extremely--it's a hard one to love--because as noted it's very faithful to the underplayed, elliptical, nonshippy casefile adventures of the early years. There's banter, there's suspense, and the plot twists and turns in a genuinely mystifying way. I think of it as circling, spiraling through various characters and times and places to a blunt, still understated conclusion. That it takes a certain laissez faire attitude to feel that the plot points cohere does not bother me. Partly I am willing to trust a writer who demonstrates such obvious control. Partly I don't mind being mystified. In a sense the love of horror fiction is a temporary submission to the Dark Side, which is always beyond our understanding and will usually defeat us. Good horror fiction--oh, hell, all of it--has a quasi-religious quality. We are in over our heads. We might drown.

I'm looking at that ending. Mulder is doomed. It is *very* fast-and-over. I felt unprepared for it because, well, our heroes are hardly every doomed in fanfic. Not in fanfic with detective work. Not in fics with banter! That can't be right.

Mulder is going to become a Mulder-monster. The idiot encountered the goo and lost. Scully tried to, did, save him, but it doesn't matter because they're never going to get to that FBI ball. They'll never have sex. The casefiles are over.

It's awful. I hate it. But only a writer this good could make me thrill to it at the same time. Those dead and madness-manufactured sparrows: I can see them falling and it's poetic. (And how often does an actual poetic allusion of a title play out in literal terms? Cool.)

ESF makes me think of "The Crouching Thing." But bigger, plottier, and...with banter. The combination of light and heavy tones sells the horror.

Oh, coincidence? Without it fiction couldn't exist, though critics still dislike it. Lately I've become convinced that we encounter coincidences every day but seldom slow down enough to notice. Whether they are part of a great underlying plot, who can judge?

[wendelah1]

There's banter, there's suspense, and the plot twists and turns in a genuinely mystifying way. I think of it as circling, spiraling through various characters and times and places to a blunt, still understated conclusion. That it takes a certain laissez faire attitude to feel that the plot points cohere does not bother me. Partly I am willing to trust a writer who demonstrates such obvious control. Partly I don't mind being mystified.

I don't either. I like trying to solve the mystery, that's part of what's so intriguing about this story, that the x-file feels like a real x-file. Those are surprisingly rare in this fandom, even rarer than casefiles.

Good horror fiction--oh, hell, all of it--has a quasi-religious quality. We are in over our heads. We might drown.

Good point. I think this story has overt religious, even mythical overtones.

Slighty OT. Did you know sparrows were offered as sacrifices in days of old?

Mulder is going to become a Mulder-monster. The idiot encountered the goo and lost. Scully tried to, did, save him, but it doesn't matter because they're never going to get to that FBI ball. They'll never have sex. The casefiles are over.

Knowing what we know now, that Mulder will die and be resurrected in season eight, makes this ending seem, I don't know, anticlimactic. "Eh. Scully will save him somehow," I hear myself thinking. Even the first time I read this, I don't think I could believe in the ending, the way people might have back in 1997. Since the story ends before he is Gathered, there is a lot of wiggle-room for us to imagine whatever sort of ending we desire. I say, let's imagine a happy one!

I find myself wishing Alloway had written us a sequel but I think I'm out of luck.