Subject: NEW: 30th Century Night 1/1 From: Megan Date: SatTueFeb9133199996 02:35 PM Message-id: <36C5FED2.5B57@worldnet.att.net> ... Disclaimer: Not mine. Spoilers: Clyde Bruckman Summary: What if Scully never died? What if Mulder was on Jeopardy? 30th Century Night by Megan Reilly eponine119@worldnet.att.net January 30, 1999 Scully looked into the mirror. She looked younger than her years tonight, as she had for centuries. Sometimes she didn't recognize the face reflecting back at her, even though she'd been looking at it for most of her life. She would never see the wrinkles deepen or her hair turn coarse and white. The old psychic salesman had been right: she wasn't going to die. Good thing she hadn't bought insurance from him. She'd had a full life. She'd done everything. It had been hard for her to learn to take risks, even with immortality staring her in the face. Nothing could hurt her. After centuries, even her emotions seemed impenetrable. There had been an artist once, who'd desperately wanted to paint her. She'd agreed, but he had never found satisfaction in his work. Finally, he freed her from sitting, kissing her on both cheeks and exclaiming that the profound sadness he wanted to paint was the very thing he couldn't. She didn't look sad in the mirror. She looked neutral, with blue eyes and white skin and red lips. It was an aura around her that she herself couldn't see or percieve. She didn't feel sad. Except when she did. On nights like this one, when she could look up into the sky and percieve how the stars had changed. When she wished there were a vampire around for her to talk to, even though when she did run into them, she never quite knew what to say with them staring at the veins in her neck as though her ancient blood might taste sweeter than the blood in veins today. Vampires did exist. A lot of things existed that hadn't seemed scientifically possible when she was young. She'd adapted as best she could. She couldn't pine for the good old days. Except that she did. Scully had become a world class historian. After all, she was one of the few who'd actually been alive during the twentieth century. If she thought long enough, she could come up with details to explain almost anything. From the tiny fee she charged to serve as a primary source, she'd made her living. She let them believe she was a vampire and no one ever seemed to notice the difference. She didn't let people get close enough to know her that closely. Her autobiography was more than one terrabyte long but she would never let anyone see it. It was a diary to span the ages, begun out of boredom. They say that if a man is tired of London, he is tired of life. That described Scully exactly that night as she sighed and turned from the window. She'd kept a primary residence in London for more than four hundred years. The city couldn't change fast enough to keep her amused. It was time for her to move on, she knew, and had plans to relocate. Centuries were long enough to explore any, or every city, on Earth. If she had any linguistic ability, she might have found the secrets of the pyramids by now. She wasn't a vampire. She just...hadn't died. She couldn't explain it. There was no logic to it. Maybe the willpower that allowed a twentieth century insurance salesman to foresee death had also been strong enough to prevent hers. When she turned forty five without seeing a change in her face in ten years, she'd known. It had taken another ten for the meaning to sink in. She'd watched Mulder grow old and die. As the years wore on, she'd gotten used to his thin skin and frail bones and the passersby who called her his daughter, granddaughter, nurse. Scully had a lock of his hair pressed into a locket, desiccated but full of DNA. In spite of this, she'd never had him cloned. She knew she wouldn't be able to bear seeing him grow up, looking into the blank eyes of a copy, knowing he'd never be the man she loved. They said your first love was the hardest. Maybe your first lifetime was like that too. Of all the things she'd done in the years since, she'd never loved again. That in itself was almost a death. She slipped into bed and turned on the personal video monitor for noise and light and the comfort of human voices. Tomorrow she'd be in Paris, on her way to try to find a place she'd never been, a place she wasn't tired of. It would take her hours to flip through every channel available. Once, she'd gone through them all. Maybe tonight she'd repeat the task. A familiar sight stopped her. A gray haired man with glasses on a blue set. Jeopardy, the game show of her youth. It had allowed so many to feel superior just because they knew trivia. It had to be a novelty in this day and age, the original program with its questions about twentieth century pop culture. And there was a blank-eyed young man she knew so well she almost didn't recognize him. For a second, she thought her heart had stopped and she couldn't hear or feel the breath in her chest. It was him. It was Mulder. "I never knew," she murmured to herself, eyes scanning the image. Had he ever been so young? "You're a graduate student in psychiatry?" Alex Trebek was asking him and she watched Mulder bob his head eagerly and work his lips into a smile. Scully's fingers reached up to touch his face on the screen, but there was just the faint buzz of electricity as the pixel crystals dissipated. She wanted him to be real. Live on tape just wasn't the same thing. He knew all about Shakespeare and basketball and potpourri, but lost anyway. "You made a good show," Scully said to him. She'd forgotten how rough his voice sounded, the way she could feel the sound waves against her eardrums as surely as his breath. She'd forgotten so much about him. The program ended with blinking lights and credits and she felt bereft for one insane moment. It was over, there was no more. She blinked her eyes and was back in her London apartment far in a future without end. She had to remember that he was dead, that he'd died in her arms at 87, weighing almost as little as she did, his hair white and brittle and thin and his brain barely functioning. There wasn't a cure for aging or Alzheimers or cancer back then, like there wasn't a cure for non-death now. She'd give anything to have ended it with him. He'd always been fascinated with her unique condition. It had lit his eyes every time he saw her, even the last time. Finally she'd been caught without a logical explanation. When he asked her how long it would take her to believe, she'd never known it would take this long. What were the odds? That she would be here on this night, alone, in her bed, with nothing to do and bored with the stars, that the first channel she found out of millions would have him on it, in a broadcast she'd never known existed? What were the odds that a thousand year old woman would stay thirty five forever? What were the odds of there being a heaven? In all her years, reincarnation was one thing she'd never seen evidence of. What were the odds that the immortal could die that night? Scully thought she would take her chances. end feedback appreciated. -- eponine119@worldnet.att.net Megan SAVE CUPID!!!! http://www.geocities.com/TelevisionCity/Studio/3774/savec.htm WATCH CUPID: Thursday, February 11 at 9 pm on ABC.