Title: Power (An Abstraction)
Author: HG Frank
Genre: V
Rating: G
Summary: First person internal Pendrell conflict.  Entry for the fourth
LABB contest.
Disclaimer: Despite having seen Brendan Beiser in New York, I do not own
Pendrell (or Scully).  1013 does.

	I remember seeing once a giant advertisement of scrawling
proportions being painted on the side of a wall.  A painted fashion savvy
man, wing tips, sportscoat, trousers, suspenders, was wearing a rope around
his neck and dangling from a nearby painted tree branch.  "The Grim Face of
Death," said the caption, "Is Conservative Clothing."
	It was a petition - against uniforms, conformity, and overall, ties.
Bowties, stringties, Bill Nyes.
	In reaction to the claim, I turned my head to the ground, glared
thoughtlessly at my leather tassels, and continued walking.

	Perchance I was angry.  I never really did care for work until she
came along, but it was still money.  What's textile dissenting when one has
George Washington?  Maybe the ad got to me and ribbed the truth of
dissatisfaction out of me.  If I hadn't thought the better of it, I might
have easily gone postal on Sci-Crime material.  Perhaps I was jealous. 
What's the knot of the tie when one could have the scratch of rope burn?
Probably, most likely, I was disgusted.
	It deglamorized power!  The poster ached of wanting to destroy the
very bare bones of our society!  Here is a man, suave in his suited styles,
gelled hair ruffled slightly, painted twelve stories high.  But here is
that same man, dressed to bring stocks to their knees, swinging in the
gallows.  When I walked past the advertisement that day, turning my eyes to
the pavement and focusing my mind on other matters, I thought not of she
but of what was wrong with the world.  Success was arbitrary, power had
become a 007 buzzword.  It was slipping through my fingers and turning into
a demoralized antagonist. What was one Special Agent supposed to do?

	The only time I had ever experienced the thrill of it all was the
third grade, with the hamsters.  I killed them. On a whim.  The two
squealing hamsters I mercilessly left to starve, in their cage like a
prison.  I later sent the skeletal remains down the garbage disposal, not
caring for any pangs of guilt to get the better of me. When Mother asked
where they had gone, I told her just "Escape."  What it was to be able to
manipulate my parent and play God with a wee rodent.  The sequence came as
a surge of enlightenment to me - a mere third grader with the ability to
lie in the parental face of interrogation.
	But, later, the want of power left me, come high school and pimples
and social spheres.  I subsided.

	Maybe when I saw that painting I wished I had had the public
artistry to have done it myself.  Maybe I secretly wished that I could be
as obnoxious as to deface the stuffed shirts.  The socioteenmelodramas on
television, with their pithy angstophones: the truth.  I had been destroyed
in high school, and instead of becoming the punk-haired rebel or the
snapping beatnik I was now no more than a scientist, lost in a white lab
coat.  If I had had the power to resist the suitism I was confined to, I
would've bought that wall and smeared across it the swinging money maker,
killed by his own tie.
	The power to insult power!

	Instead, instead of doing this, I engulfed myself in myself and
looked instead at my walking feet.  Soul search! soul search! therapists
proclaim, but bah humbug was my shattering response.  I turned my back to
the painting, walked to work, and promptly blamed the painting for degrading
me.
	The next week, the wall's feet covered in graffiti scrawls and tags,
my dead lust for power was almost resurrected, on another whim.  But I
couldn't manipulate this time.  I drank - beer, alcohol, liquor, and was
manipulated instead by the power I craved.
	So, in no act of chivalry, I was killed by a bullet, in the line of
the woman I loved.
	I had so lost myself that I had no name.  It was the advertisement
that ate at me and sent me spiralling down to this.  To this.  People blame
the media but I blame abstractions.