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

[infinitlight.livejournal.com]

I also didn't have a problem with the corpse by the side of the road, for the reasons you mention and because burying your dead indicates a kind of hope for the future that I don't think is reflected in the story.

There's also the probability it would have been hard for townspeople to band together to bury it. For one thing, they don't seem to be working together (and again, it feels like there's a collective loss of hope that makes any kind of collaboration with others more difficult). People would also be scared of antagonizing Doggett. One person could dig a grave, of course, but although I've never buried a human, I've buried animals, and it's hard goddamn work on your own, especially in the winter.

[amyhit.livejournal.com]

and because burying your dead indicates a kind of hope for the future that I don't think is reflected in the story.

Yeah, that's an excellent point - probably the most important one, actually, when it comes to explaining the meaning and importance of the corpse in ITB.

I hadn't actually thought of this before now, but it seems fairly likely that if one reads this fic and balks at the corpse of Lance Aldrin, it might be a good early indicator that this fic is not for you. Because in a way, Lance's corpse can be said to be definitive of the state of the world in ITB. there's a reason Teanna starts with Mulder thinking about the corpse, and why the fic keeps coming back to the corpse. Lance's corpse tells you that ugly brutal death has become so pervasive people no longer react to it, that gore and filth are a fact of life, that murder and rape are rampant, that law and order are absent, that most people are too exhausted to care about anything as mundane as terrestrial pestilence, and too exhausted to uphold even the pretence of a ritualistic burrial of the dead.

For the most part, the way a civilization treats its women, its children, its sick, and its dead are very reliable indicators of the state the civilization is in (i.e. if only the able and the male are treated with civility, you're fucked).* Well, in the course of ITB, two women are raped, a desperate women tries to pimp her young daughter to Mulder, no one (except Scully) comes to watch over young Myra as she's dying in the hospital, and Lance Aldrin (barely older than a child himself) is left to rot at the side of the road. The details Teanna focuses on are, IMO, the ones that paint the clearest and probably most realistic picture of what a civilization in pervasive decay looks like. (And okay, now I'm repeating myself, but really, that's basically what this fic is: a picture of human civilization in decay. To comment on the fic and not focus on that aspect of it would be, to me, to comment on the frame and ignore the actual picture.)

*ETA: and I guess this is - to intellectualize the story's structure more than necessary - the reason why it seems definitively right when Scully and Mulder stay with Myra at the hospital: essentially, Myra embodies most of the main qualities of disadvantage a single individual can represent within a society, and as such to abandon her would be the least humane thing they could do, while to remain with her regardless of the probable outcome is the most humane, the most civilized. It just so happens that in the very end, Mulder and Scully's existence narrows down to one decision, and that decision epitomizes the struggle that infuses ITB's narrative from beginning to end.