Title: Souls Remember
Author: MissAnnThropic
E-Mail: miss_annthropic@yahoo.com
Summary: Mulder and Scully as seen from the POV of one of the aliens. semi-AU.
Disclaimer: I own nasing! Really, I don't. All you see here (that you recognize, anyway) is the creation of someone else. I take no credit.



They had been a problem since the day both were born. Well, not really, but from their very early growth a certain rebellious nature was seen in them. To different degrees and varying intensities in both, but not so strongly that we would have thought to stop them. In fact, the curiosity and uncooperative nature was seen more in the young boy's sister... we took her to keep away the threat of sizable rebellion.

We were wrong. Not in taking the girl... we knew from her time in our captivity she was necessary to remove and we were right in the interest of our cause in removing her. She fought us every step of the way... she would have been a danger as an adult. We were right in taking her at the young age we did... our err was in not seeing that same wild and untamable spark in her brother's eyes. We should have seen it, we're expert by now at pinpointing the rebels in the midst.

The humans have no idea... time is a completely different concept for them. They are ignorant of the past, the uprising of their kind thousands of years before they could remember... centuries before they had the presence of mind to commit to paper things their minds would take to the graves with them otherwise. Before this, we knew each other. The humans and our race... there was a deadlock of battle between us a time so long ago... so long the human mind is no longer aware it existed. It is an embarrassment to us now, but I will admit it... we were nearly evenly matched races at one point. A certain free, wild, and lawless nature existed to those 'wild humans' back then.

The war, as you might suspect, came out in our favor. Not by a quick and decisive pivotal battle, not by a treaty or mass destruction by an overbearing and powerful weapon... it was slow and calculated, as most large changes are.

We had transportation technology they didn't. We slowly picked off the rebels... those who were the leaders of the resistance to us. Without leaders who had the courage to stand up to the power of the heavens mankind grew complacent. They simmered down, their hackles smoothed out, and their deliberate and spiteful attempt to ignore us became denial... denial became ignorance. In time, they did forget us. It has been some source of enjoyment to our race to watch them... those ones who seek the life in the stars, striving to meet those creatures above when they already know us. They don't remember it, but they already hate us.

There exists in man an untamable, rebellious nature that continues to struggle to the surface, despite the decimation of those individual humans with the strongest spark of lawlessness in the initial culling program. One might argue that there is nothing that spontaneously arises, that every trait must trace back genetically somehow... this rebellion to control and restraints does not. It just rises from the depths of humankind... an inborn desire to be as free as the galaxy that can arise in anyone without prediction.

For this unpredictable and yet deadly threat to our race, it is necessary to monitor them as they grow and breed. It is returning. There are many of my colleagues in the Human Management Division that would want to refute this... deny it, but it is fear. I am afraid too, but I will admit I see it. More and more youngsters being stolen from the planet surface... more and more needing to be taken lately to keep the human race 'complacent.' More and more potential leaders that must be stopped before the notion is even in their head. Our holding pins are growing crowded, graves for the massing bodies grow thin... for this reason we are forced to leave some on the surface we would otherwise take. That is the bureaucratic reason that we left the young girl's brother behind... the boy who had in his own psyche that need to be free... freer than any of those around him could even imagine they could be.

And the woman... she is the worst kind in a way. There is no real way to pinpoint the spark (I call it a spark, for it does seem to come to life and shine in the humans that have it in comparison to those who do not, but my contemporaries call it a 'marker') to the intensity or severity that it will grow. It is a dormant spark... one that seems to only flicker and sputter and then suddenly explode into a nuclear-white blinding light. We did not suspect she would become the danger she was, her flame was not a fire until she met him... the young girl's brother... a human named Fox Mulder.

Yes... we know their names. Anyway, the information is accessible to us, most do not care to know them. To most of my fellow human managers they are codes and numbers. I like to know their names, it gives them form... makes them seem more real to me, and it keeps alive in me a fear of them. A fear that, I know, is key in my successfully doing my job.

F. Mulder grew... his spark burned brighter and brighter. I implored the others to take him... I was afraid of that one, and my fear of this human grew each day, as did his spark of resistance. The others denied my requests... there was simply no room for one who did not have a 'marker' obvious in early childhood as a danger. He had had it then, but he had been left behind then as he was being left below now. Politics kept us from taking him then, and politics stop us from taking him now when we should.

F. Mulder was not only a fighter, determined and relentless, but he was smart. My colleagues often disregard the influence of intelligence, mostly because they don't want to give the humans credit for having any... as if to deny it exists will make it go away. I'm not that foolish, I know that they have the intellect in them... they were able to battle us as our equals thousands of years ago. They were smart enough to meet us in combat, and this F. Mulder has something that reminds me of the generals of the Wartime or 'Wild' humans. I'm scared of him... I'm afraid to even look at him, because it makes me think of the possibilities he presents, the mind blowing potential he has. I even honestly fear bringing him up in the process of culling... for all our power I am afraid to meet him.

He had remained manageable, though. His fellow humans seemed to shun him. They seemed to find him outlandish and odd, but really what he was was closer to free and closer to us than any of them were. He was so close to us, to discovering everything that had taken place between our races millennia ago that it makes me tremble, but his bullet has no powder... without an army he is not a threat. This was perfectly acceptable to my comrades, but I felt like this man's life was summed up as a ticking bomb. It was coming. I had the most dreadful, frightening feeling. Our time as uncontested rulers was ending... this man was to bring about our downfall... if only my colleagues had seen it.

Their confirmation that F. Mulder had that power in him came when he was seemingly forced into the companionship of the 'dormant sparker' from twenty years earlier... a small female named Dana Scully.

The moment she saw him... their first contact and her spark stirred... it was coming to life and I saw it as clear as day. Never had my spirit and hopes sank as much as they had that dreadful day.

There is a quality to the leaders of the rebellion that they all had in common. It was a kind of contagion of their cause... their drive. Being around this person, even a single conversation, and not only could another human's dim spark be made brighter, but one could be sparked where none existed before. F. Mulder had this quality... he set those around him on fire... bringing to life in them the need to fight... to be free. In other words, to battle our race once again.

And what we found was that the coincidental pairing of F. Mulder and D. Scully may well bring about the downfall of our entire empire. It was a chance in a billion... hell, a chance in a billion billion that it could happen... so remote that not even in our most over-cautious meetings had we ever considered it.

You see... there are a few intangible and barely explained features in a human being. The spark or marker is one... another is the soul. The soul in the sense that it is the human. The place where personality, mind, and raw emotion meet. Human beings, despite their own uncertainty in the matter, DO have soul-mates. It is a one in fifty million chance they will meet their's, but they do exist and on rare occasions they do meet. When soul-mates meet and become attached it is a powerful thing... amazingly powerful. Even the most disdainful theorists of the human species give credit to the incredible intensity and strength of this soul-mate bond. It is a force not even we can stop... it is beyond all control... it is the power of the universe contained in an insanely delicate body.

The disaster was not so much that F. Mulder was a 'spark-generator type' and D. Scully the 'dormant spark type' that snuck up on us and nearly blind-sided us with her sudden intensity of the fight in her. The catastrophe was that F. Mulder and D. Scully were soul-mates. F. Mulder and D. Scully were soul-mates. Without expecting it, the power and force created by the two of them together was beyond our power and, I'll admit, even beyond our comprehension. We knew it the moment it happened. It was like watching a series of explosions all at once. F. Mulder's already furious spark to resist and fight was agitated and riled up by a potential follower in an army he didn't even know he wanted to raise, D. Scully's spark bursting to life as it reacted to F. Mulder with startling vigor, then the overwhelming blast as their souls reached out to each other and instantaneously intertwined. Almost in secret, they had suddenly become the strongest, most dangerous force upon the planet and the most serious threat to our entire species. A force we all knew, whether we believed in the strength of human beings or not, that we were powerless against the moment the humans learned how to use it.

A great panic spread throughout our system. Everyone knew about the Impossible Threat. One could not miss it... the strength and power of the two humans was like a burning white light on the earth's surface... it was blinding... like staring into the galaxy's sun. We were all afraid... scared to be burned. We all knew this light could scorch us... easily.

We convened, trying to decide what to do. It was vital something be done. We have never expected this, never even planned for it... who would have known that such a small chance could have come to pass? I could not help but wonder if we were witnessing an unspoken prophesy coming to pass... that from the moment we overtook the humans we were destined in this time to fall to them as they once had to us.

While it might seem as simple as taking away one or the other, we learned that was not the case. We DID take one... D. Scully. We 'abducted' her, with the full intent to dispose of her as we did the other high-priority threats. Our plans came crashing to a halt when something happened to her mate on earth we have never seen before. In none of the history books of encounters with the Wartime Humans had this ever happened. F. Mulder's spark, his light of strength and vigor, in the wake of the kidnapping of his soul-mate, did not wither and dim as we had hoped. His light literally turned red in rage, a bright and insidious shade of crimson. It was frightening... like seeing our future in the hue of blood that shined up at us from him.

Fear of the unknown, of not knowing what this enraged, burning red spark could do and the fact the same unfamiliar and startling colored glow was rising in our captive D. Scully, within our own midst, caused us to quickly rethink our plans and return the female to the surface. Their light, upon being reunited, returned to a burning white... the startling blood-red fading away. This we could deal with, as ominous and foreboding as it was to us, it was familiar and felt more readily dealt with. So we realized with an increasing sense of dread that it was not going to be as simple as simply separating them... they had forged a connection and bond we had yet to deal with... hell, we had yet to even hear of. It was beyond comprehension.

And so the final decision was made... that perhaps the only way to fight this uprising that was threatening to engulf us was to utilize our mastery of the time continuum. As mentioned before, humans experience and understand time differently than we do. To them it is rigid, fixed, inflexible. To us, time is malleable, undefined, and those beings involved within it pawns that could easily be shuffled around on the time line. We'd done it before... removing an one A. Einstein from the equivalent of the year 2025 and putting him in the beginning of the 1900's. His ideas, what his mind was capable of was still there, but the technology and means to create his inventions was limited... the weapons he could have made against us were never built.

This is what we chose to do with our largest problem... biggest danger in history, F. Mulder and D. Scully. We would shuffle them back in the time line. Minds don't remember anything of the shuffle and bodies adapt to the time line. Should we set them back two years, for instance, they would not remember the two years they had lived and their bodies would regress two years. It was more a moving of the consciousness. It was almost as if every time frame had an empty husk of that human in it, capable of being filled, that was the correct age and mental stage for the consciousness being moved into it. Actually quite useful... I often wonder why we don't use it more often.

So we did this with F. Mulder and D. Scully. We moved both back in the time line 20 years, before they met when both were still merely young children. To a time when they would not remember on some level they were a weapon together. Other humans around them don't notice the change. In this respect, it is like a row of marbles, continuously rolling down a divot that never ends. One can be removed and the others jump forward to fill its space, and it can be inserted elsewhere in the line and the others make room for it, never knowing that anything has changed. As far as the time line goes in regards to the changes tampering with the past has... like I said, time is flexible. There is a shift, but it is not something that implodes the earth... rather like humans watching the speedometers on their motorized vehicles rolling back to '0', things just click into place in step with the alterations. It is actually amazing how much humans miss being so focused on their own lives... that we can shift the time line around them and they do not notice, noses stuck in their own small personal world.

And so, F. Mulder and D. Scully were displaced to a time and age they'd already lived long ago. The fires in their rebelling sparks did simmer down as they forgot they'd met each other, and now, technically, they never had. They were strangers. Their minds did not recall each other, their bodies wouldn't recognize the scent or presence of the other.

This would have been the perfect solution and we could all go back to relaxing and enjoying our reign on top, but there was one more detail that still left the door open to these two reclaiming their spot as a dire threat to us. One more opportunity that could still lead to them overtaking us and leading the human race into a rebellion of planetary proportions. We only hoped it did not come to pass... prayed desperately it did not.

But it did.

I was the one who saw it. I took it upon myself to watch the two over time... monitor their lives. I have seen them be as close as across the street from each other, but they had never made contact. THAT was nerve-wracking... but this time, as I sat there watching, I knew it would not be just another close call.

This time they were on the same side of the street, striding down the same sidewalk, moving in opposite directions towards each other. And I know before they even get within half a mile of each other that they will pass each other this time.

A quarter of a mile... they are closing and neither have strayed from their path. An eighth of a mile... a sixteenth... and then it happens.

The altered-time line F. Mulder and D. Scully cross paths. They brush right past each other, arms even touching in the tight confines of the crowded sidewalk. They are in close quarters, they make physical contact... and then I see first-hand the one drawback or downfall of the changing of time line shuffle approach.

The soul remembers.

Where the mind and body can forget what it experienced in the future-but-yet-past timeframe, the soul doesn't. Even when soul-mates are moved away from each other on the time line, the one light within them that does not fade with the separation is the light of their untied souls. Nothing within our power or maybe anyone else's can defeat this light. Maybe it should be appreciated as an amazing exercise in the perseverance of the human spirit... maybe I would have had I not been so terrified.

The soul remembers, and their souls remember.

They move past each other, faintly touching, and instantly their souls flare. They remember, oh how their souls remember.

F. Mulder and D. Scully, the second after they brush by each other, both slow and stop. They stand, trying to understand their suddenly strange sensation as their soul-mate lights connect again... rejoicing in a reunion only they can remember.

F. Mulder turns back... D. Scully turns as well. Their eyes lock... they know each other. They've never met in this time line, but they know each other nonetheless.

I sink into my console seat, my body numb with the epiphany that dawns on me as I watch F. Mulder and D. Scully slowly move toward each other on the crowded street. I understand now that maybe the nature of a prophesy is that it cannot be avoided... it WILL happen, despite efforts to avert it. Our days are now numbered... we were on the top for so long, but as I see now it was never meant to last forever. We are doomed... it will only be a matter of time now.

Wartime Humans will be reborn in those passive Postwar Humans that we so underestimate now. Once again our races will do battle for the privilege of being truly free. And all because of F. Mulder and D. Scully.

Because their souls remember.



END