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

[wendelah1]

"Every Sparrow Falling" is one of the best stories I've read in this or any fandom. It's so good, I wish I'd written it. True, it is plot-driven, but what a clever, twisty, insightful narrative Alloway has given us. It is structured much like an episode, complete with a teaser, an "A" plot, a "B" plot and an exciting climax that weaves the two together, but more about the ending later.

The story is full of religious imagery, beginning with the sparrows, who represent God's care for the smallest creatures in Christianity. There are many superstitions relating to sparrows. One is that a sparrow that flies into the house is a harbinger of death. Other cultures view them as bringing love and luck. Sailors have their image tattooed on their bodies to catch their souls so they won't be lost if they drown at sea.

"Then you too are a keeper of the sparrows," Steven Nicholson says to Scully. He has a story he needs to tell her, a story he's been trying to tell to God by flinging his sparrows heavenward. Oddly enough, when the sparrow killed James Le Blanc, the message finally gets through. Mulder and Scully are sent to investigate. Scully has a sparrow in her past, a bird she managed to free as a girl, an act that she felt atoned for her earlier murder of a harmless snake.

Though Steven confesses to Scully, it's Mulder who is really listening, who hears the deeper message, who keeps pursuing the case over Scully's objections. Does the plot show us anything unexpected about the characters? Maybe not. We know Mulder is reckless in pursuit of the truth. We know Scully is relentless in pursing Mulder. As early as the second episode of season one, she takes a hostage and is ready to take on the US military to get him back to safety. It is hardly surprising that she isn't fazed by hearing that "he's one of them now." Maybe it shows us a worst case scenario.

The story is ambiguous about Mulder's fate. The orange recognized him.

As they began to thin themselves into oblivion, the orange caught a familiar scent on their surface as the horseflies and the mosquitoes deposited their final gifts of plasm. Here was a cousin, the worms whispered; here was one who knew the lure of dirt and blood.

But the cousin, no matter how vulnerable, was still stubbornly human; still hard to talk to. The orange arranged themselves, trying to form the old familiar letters for the man to see. "Hungry," they wrote in waves. "Help help help." There was no answer; the cousin did not understand. They had failed again.

The sluggish flow from the Spires puckered and trickled out. In a final gesture of kinship they caressed what they could reach of the man, and let themselves die.

Is it the black oil that is the cousin or Mulder himself? Mulder was infected with a retrovirus pursuing the bounty hunter and infected with the virus carried by the black oil in Russia. Scully cured him in the first case, the vaccine cured him in Tunguska. Maybe Scully thinks she can cure him again. Maybe she's right. The story ends when Mulder begins having "the visions," leaving the reader to decide which side he's now on.

The orange isn't a contagion exactly.

The little girl looked up at him and beamed, beckoning him close. He bent his long legs down, easing himself to her level and leaning toward her obligingly. "Peanuts," she whispered, dripping lips splattering something onto his face. "Popcorn. Crackerjack."

Mulder's legs buckled; he fell to the ground, slowly, as a rush of murderous thoughts and feelings assaulted him. A dark hunger that could never be sated, a thrill of power and violence that would have overwhelmed him if he hadn't spent so many years studying it. If he didn't, on some basic level, understand it.

The last thing he felt before he blacked out was an unbearably joyous message of welcome.

It's sentient, like the black oil. It's ancient, too.