Story 211: “In the Bleak” by Teanna

[amyhit.livejournal.com]

Our next fic is a relatively short colonization apocafic. To my knowledge, Teanna is a largely unknown author in the XF fandom. She only ever wrote three short XF fics, but her writing is spare, intelligent, sharply observant, and poetic without being wordy. She unflinchingly explores the characters and how they cope with fear, grief, and failure. I should definitely warn everyone that this story is, as the title suggests, bleak. Teanna warns readers that it’s "not a happy story," but at the risk of spoiling everyone, I should probably warn you that major character death is strongly implied and death in general is pretty ubiquitous in this story. This is the apocalypse portrayed with more grim realism than usual.

I hope some of you will read it anyway. There’s plenty in this fic to discuss, and I think summertime is probably the best time to read it, so that those of us who are particularly susceptible to gut-wrenching fanfic can shake off the darkness with a healthy dose of sunlight afterwards.

Read In the Bleak.

Comments

[littlegreen42.livejournal.com]

I wasn't sure whether to ask this in the comments, but then I remembered that there are usually spoilers in the comments, so I guess I'll go ahead: Does "major character death" refer to Mulder and Scully (or one of them)?

[bardsmaid.livejournal.com]

Having done a lot of research into wartime experiences, I don't find bleak off-putting. Teanna does a good job of capturing the numbness and dissociation people go through when dealing with long periods when conditions are tough and it seems there's no progress to be made. I especially liked her treatment of the very end of the story, because it rings true to experiences I've read about, people suddenly "coming to themselves" as the end approaches, and the choices made/actions taken by Mulder and Scully at this point seemed appropriate for the characters as we've come to know them.

However, I have to say that my suspension of disbelief was severely jolted right at the outset by the corpse on the roadside. Having just done some research into this topic for something I'm writing, there seems to be a serious lack of plausibility here. Four weeks later, the corpse is still lying there, almost as if it were a mannequin--no really notable decomposition, no bloating, none of the smells or the processes dead bodies inevitably go through. Children using the corpse as their gathering place? I really can't see it. Plus there's a reason people get rid of corpses as soon as possible; the associated health hazards are something people in this situation wouldn't likely want to add to the burdens they're already facing.

[infinitlight.livejournal.com]

This was awesome, although I'm usually among those who don't like anything too gut-wrenching. I really liked the author's poetic and kind of stream-of-consciousness style. There were a number of lines in the story that stood out to me. It's a good, solid story, but the quality of the prose makes it great. Like this paragraph:

Her hair, it's never been this long (that he knows), she keeps it in a braid mostly
and he thinks, when he remembers such things, that she looks more like her
sister Melissa now. But he has trouble remembering his mother's face, and so he
might be wrong.

I really like that there's kind of a rhythm to the words here and in a few other places in the story, a beat, like poetry or a song. Another part I liked (and that has the same kind of beat):

A child has led me to these woods, he thinks, and like so many times before, like
so many times since They came, he doesn't know if he is quoting someone or if
he made it up. The words are heavy and they don't go well with what he
remembers of himself, of what he was like - his words were lighter, before.

That said, I'm not sold on the characterization. Mulder (the POV character) was recognizable, but I thought the characterization of Scully was odd. In particular this was weird:

In bed, most nights, she slaps at his hands and it hurts. And so he keeps his
hands to himself, and in his sexual fantasies she looks like she used to look in
DC, short hair and smart suits and all.

Ew, and also if she's slapping his hands away most nights the second sentence ("he keeps his hands to himself") doesn't make sense. Also ew.

(And then:

What he plans for when he's been slapped away by Scully and he's lying next to
her, hurting.)

Stop whining Mulder, it's the end of the damn world. Try to get your priorities straight.

I also thought the characterization of Doggett was...strange? Non-existent? It seemed like he was an original character who the author just decided to name Doggett. He didn't really bear any resemblance to the character in the show, that I could see. I don't think I really understood what I was supposed to understand from him.

[obviousanswer.livejournal.com]

I started off on the wrong foot through no fault of the author. In my addled mind Lance Armstrong= Neil Armstrong = Buzz Aldrin, therefore Lance Aldrin= the second man on the moon. So my first thoughts where "A post-apocalyptic dead astronaut's body? Intriguing!... And he's gone back in time to16?.." etc.. (As a petty aside, I wish writers wouldn't use names with one strong connotation (Does 'Aldrin' count? It does for me, and when you google 'Aldrin' it is pretty much all Buzz...), because even when I'm not being a total idiot, I still end up thinking about their namesakes instead of simply discovering the new character from scratch...)

What I liked best were the glimpses of cynical Scully. A bitingly cynical post-apocalyptic Scully rings true for me, there were moments in the show when her dark sense of humour came out and I'd love to read more of it.

But like others have said, though it was well written it didn't quite come together for me. Others have made really good points. Doggett wasn't Doggett-y, Langly didn't do anything Langly-y, why were the children more evil than the adults? How were the adults coping with the chaos? I liked the idea of a crazed Doggett with nothing to lose trying to be a cop in a world gone mad, and his backstory was intriguing (if out of character) but nothing much was added by the conversations with him in the story. There was a lot of mystery, without much pay off for me. It was hinted for a while that Scully was dying, so that wasn't a surprise, it wasn't a surprise that Mulder stayed with her, and Scully dying in a hospital with a sick child is a pretty "typical" Scully death (??? I don't know how to phrase that better...!). Which does have a sad, resigned beauty to it all, but not my cup of tea. I personally wanted more details on the apocalypse or a more unexpected revelatory ending.

[amyhit.livejournal.com]

Looong Comment 1/3

I can’t exactly say I love this fic because it’s just too grim – too bleak – to really love. But I’m pretty sure it was the first colonization fic I read, and to this day it remains one of my favorites in that genre, and one of my favorite XF fics in general, albeit a very dark favorite. I’m very glad that not all apocafic’s take the view this one took, but I’m certain that if I hadn’t read this one, all other apocafics would have felt like they were missing something. Because, IMO, this is the most realistic depiction of an apocalypse I’ve read in an XF fic. There’s nothing fun or thrilling about it, nothing romantic; the beauty of humanity is not starkly or profoundly revealed through humanity’s hardships, there’s little grace and certainly no glory. Instead, it’s the dirty, dull, relentless annihilation of human civilization; it depicts what happens to people, and to entire cultures, when civilization is degraded and stripped away. And I think ITB does a crushingly good job of depicting that.

Teanna’s writing is unflinching, brutal, but not without considerable sensitivity. She’s not just tossing this horrible stuff out there to push our buttons. She’s doing it in order to truthfully reveal a horrible scenario. Every dark thing in this fic is given due weight. The rape and the murder and the death are not put in the story to be shocking or provocative or to instill narrative tension. They’re in the story because the story is a portrait of what an apocalypse looks like, and IMO, it’s tragic but realistic to theorize that an apocalypse would look…about like ITB makes it look.

As a diehard shipper I certainly find the relationship between Mulder and Scully upsetting. But I believe it, nonetheless. ITB shows us a Scully who has had to shut down her empathy in order to survive and remain functional, and a Mulder who has found himself shoveled into a futile role and a maladaptive state. The apocalypse in ITB has been harder, I would say, on Scully than it’s been on Mulder. In ITB we see Mulder struggling with feeling like a useless failure. He’s directionless – not the person he used to be but incapable of being otherwise (hence his fixation on his old coat). He used to be a fed, he used to be a maverick, he used to be brilliant, he used to be willing to martyr himself for a cause. None of that is worth anything now.

Scully, on the other hand, is overcome with death and illness (Mulder, to his credit, does seem to understand this, and doesn’t really blame her for her emotional dearth, even in his own head). Mulder is more conceptual in his experience of it – he philosophizes apocalyptic, to an extent – while Scully is in the flesh-and-blood thick of it all. Mulder is watching Humanity die, while Scully is watching an endless procession of individual people die in her intimate environment. As a doctor, she’s taken on the job of being a beast of burden, with the dying as her load. She’s doing what is necessary, and it seems horribly realistic to me to think that she has come to have little regard for that which doesn’t fall into her path as a doctor.

[amyhit.livejournal.com]

Looong Comment 2/3

In bed, most nights, she slaps at his hands and it hurts. And so
he keeps his hands to himself, and in his sexual fantasies she
looks like she used to look in DC, short hair and smart suits and
all.

People have picked this line out as being creepy, and I can see what you guys are saying and why, but I disagree with how you’re reading it. I don’t think the implication is that Mulder is doing anything inappropriate. I think the implication is that when he shows interest in physical affection, she blatantly refuses. I don’t think she’s slapping him away because he’s pushing her. They’re in a long-term sexual relationship; in such a relationship it’s not unusual for one person to turn to the other in bed and make the moves to start something, or even just cozy up. Mulder does that and Scully refuses him one night; he accepts her refusal, but tries again the next night, at which point she refuses him again. He keeps trying, and she keeps refusing. Maybe the writing could have been a little clearer about that, but personally I didn’t have to strain to presume that’s what was meant. She’s slapping him away because she can’t bear for him to touch her, and she can’t bear to talk about it, and he can’t bear to confront her about it. And, in fact, there’s really nothing for them to say. There’s nothing Mulder can say to make the people stop turning to corpses under Scully’s hands, or to erase the thousands(?) who’ve already done so, and there’s nothing Scully can say to Mulder to make the changes in her disappear.

It’s painful and it’s not how I like to imagine Mulder and Scully’s relationship, but actually the sad state of their relationship is another one of the things I find distinctive and remarkable about this fic. Nobody wants to think of Mulder and Scully this way, but I think Teanna does an admirable job of writing them in a state of disintegration and doing it believably. They’re not bright and sharp and full of cruel edges like in Iolokus (a much more entertaining example of deliberate character disintegration); in ITB they’re simply depleted beyond their capacity to bear it. Neither of them have much generosity of spirit left, yet they’re still trying – even without hope they’re trying – to do their best and to give what they can.

And then there’s Doggett. Wendy pointed out that he is quite different from canon Doggett. I agree that he comes across as being much changed from how he appears in canon, but I think it’s a fascinating decision to write him that way, and I approve very much. The way I see it, Doggett’s character very effectively demonstrates the way the circumstances of the fic has warped everyone. How much do we know about Doggett in canon? His son disappeared and his life fell apart, we know that. Doggett is every inch the law-enforcement professional when he’s certain of his role. But if the world ended and he no longer had a role to speak of – just a gun and a sense of meaningless loss – who knows how he would respond? Who knows how anyone would behave in an apocalypse, without no way to escape from pervasive disorder, grief, and fear of death?

he thinks that maybe Doggett raped and murdered Marla Hemmings and
Laura Burchhardt. Maybe Lance Aldrin was innocent.

Maybe even those kids down in Talla, maybe even them. And Mulder
gave them Doggett.

I don’t think the implication in ITB was that Doggett actually did all of those things. I think he’s telling the truth when he says he didn’t. (I’ve always thought that Doggett was probably searching the packs of wolflings because it was the only way left to him to search for his son.) What I honestly think Teanna was doing with Doggett’s character is giving us a way to see the effect the apocalypse has had on civilization, on people and relationships. Because Doggett – who is a bit unhinged, but essentially still the character who in other circumstances would have made a loyal partner to Scully – could have done those things, and in the world they all live in, they have to be on guard against every bleak and gruesome possibility. In the absence of civilization, nobody gets the benefit of the doubt. Everyone is dangerous, especially the people who manage to be in charge of anything.

[amyhit.livejournal.com]

Looong Comment 3/3

Another thing I love about ITB is the writing style (though I could say that about virtually every fic I love). I love that it’s spare, but at the same time deliberately rough. I think the style of the writing does a brilliant job of conveying the harsh, ramshackle nature of the existence these people are living. Teanna’s writing has both eloquence and a lack of concern for “proper” grammatical and syntactical structure.

And finally, I love that as bleak as the fic is, I don’t feel like the narrative is one static note of despair. The emotions in ITB shift beneath the weight of despair, enough to keep me closely engaged throughout. There’s not much hope in this fic, and there’s even less by the end, and usually I wouldn’t approve of a hopeless ending, but in this case it works for me. I think it works because in staying with the dying girl, and in staying together, they’re making a choice and they’re choosing tenderness. In the face of defeat, it's- not a triumph, but it's something, the very smallest bit of something.

As to what others have said about the people of Land’s End leaving the corpse of Lance Aldrin on the side of the road, I really do not understand how that could possibly seem out of place in the bigger picture. It’s the END of the WORLD. No one is in their right mind, Doggett is enforcing that it be kept there, historically it’s not uncommon for towns to show off slain corpses as deterrents, and corpse rot isn’t much of a concern when they’re already dropping like flies because of an alien virus. I’m not sure how fast corpses decay, and maybe there should have been more of a mention about the corpse rotting away, but again, it’s not a difficult presumption to make that the condition of the corpse is deteriorating.