Title: On the Saxon Shore
Author: Maureen S. O'Brien
Rating: G
Category: V
Spoilers: none really
Keywords:
Summary: The last scene of the series, if I was writing it.

Disclaimer: Characters and situations from The X-Files belong to
Chris Carter, Ten Thirteen Productions, and Twentieth Century Fox.

Author's Note: This one's for Pellinor.

--------------------------------------------------------------------
They stand on the shore at Quonochontaug. Someday, legend will call
them King of the Byuro, Queen of the Vinyard, Queen of the Sea. They 
would scorn such titles, for they are citizens.

"They won," he rumbles. 

"But at what cost?" Tena asks. 

Poets will derive her name from "tene",
pain, or "teind", payment, tithe, tax. Later linguists will deride this
analysis, not realizing it was more comment than calculation.

"The price we've always paid for freedom," Margaret answers her
sternly. 

Students of mythology will claim that her name is proof that
she never lived; she is merely another form of the saint who conquered
a dragon by feeding it a copy of Holy Scripture. Or she is a sea 
goddess, because her name means 'pearl'. Or she is an earth goddess,
because her name means 'daisy'. 

"They might be back," Walter Sergei Skinner offers. 

Folklorists will
speak of him as a clever conflation of three national heroes, a figure
that much of the world could rally behind after the aliens left and
barbarism began to recede. 

"I wouldn't count them out yet."

Tena stares at the water, her voice bitter. "If they were rescued by 
some clone of Samantha's who promised to heal them, she must have 
failed or been lying. They would have come back by now. And if they 
were abducted by one last UFO, we should only hope they're dead."

"Someone said they heard Krycek say that they'd been frozen somewhere
by a Syndicate elder. But that a computer would wake them if the 
situation here on Earth ever got too bad."

"Mrs. Scully -- " Walter begins.

"I didn't say I believe it. I just said that it's been said."

"Good," says Tena. 

"Why?" he asks bluntly. 

"We defeated the aliens, but you know as well as I that our civilization 
is not going to survive this," she says briskly. "The aliens will
return, although in scattered bands, and we will have to kill them or
die. A world distrusting all authority needs to remember that not all
government employees were untrustworthy. In short, when the world falls 
apart, it will need legends." 

When spaceflight's secrets are rediscovered and humans first fly FTL, 
the ships have names like MULDER and SCULLY and people speak of 
searching Out There. For The Truth.

His jaw hardens. "Lies."

"Heroes are real," says Mrs. Scully. "Heroes take the shapes that are
needed, and we can't predict what that'll be." 

Someday, when the aliens
rise from barbarism again, shapeshifters will remember stories of 
persistent fools who managed to triumph. 

"And a good story is always true."

They will be legends, all three, though subordinate to the young ones. 
Bright figures, sung and painted and told as long as the human race 
survives, because they helped it to do so. Someday people will travel
from the stars to see places only rumored to be their tombs, kneeling
to ask intercession, bending to kiss unmarked stones.

But for now, only the waves and the sea grass bow.