What if we are being digested?

MILAGRO…

To welcome my 2000th follower, here’s a snippet from Milagro.

Today she wears a blouse, unbuttoned maybe a button more than usual, which shows a little more flesh than she might around the FBI.

“She’s just trying to get his attention, but doesn’t know it…”

Tagging @xffictober

TW: canon-typical violence

It’s a bad day for a murder.  It’s never a good day for a murder, Mulder thinks, but this one is especially bad.  It’s been raining and cold all week, going from drizzling to pouring as they’ve closed in on their culprit.  Ritualistic killings: very messy, the victims partially dismembered and the entrails arranged in script that Mulder is glad he doesn’t have the ability to read.  A haruspex, he thinks.  Their second, after the one Clyde Bruckman helped them trap.  The local PD have rigged a tarp over the latest corpse to try to keep the rain off, so that Mulder and Scully can interpret the details as the photographers do their work of documenting this poor woman’s grisly end and the detectives gather what evidence there is.  Skin and hair, blood and fiber: the murderer seems himself as an artist working in multiple media.  It’s gruesome.  The rain patters harder on the tarp, drips through in icy rivulets, as if the very sky wants to erase the evidence of this crime and wash the victim clean.  

Good Morning, Sweet Dreams

It’s not as if they didn’t share a life before. They have a shorthand developed from years of delayed flights, late night diners, abrupt changes in schedule and weekends nulled by the demands of the job.

But he hadn’t expected the joy of seeing her material life spill into his. The way his sparse toiletries are crowded off the shelf by her multitudes. The thrill that grips his chest every time he sees her blouse thrown carelessly over the arm of his chair, or her heels discarded by the door. When traveling, this joy is distilled down into a gratitude which is so bright that he can’t directly face it. He had genuinely thought he was happy before, that his work was enough, but to see soft Saturday Scully, to wake up with Scully, grumpy and slow at 6am on a Wednesday, is to see the green buds of daffodils pushing themselves up through the earth after a long Winter.

Scully has nodded off beside him. The X-File had disappeared with the sunrise, taking both the terrors of the night and the camera crew with them. All that remained was stale, sweaty lethargy from being awake for twenty-four hours.

Half-dressed, she had only meant to sit down for a minute. She wanted to shower, to change into sweats and head down the hall to her officially allocated room to get fresh clothes from her suitcase. Trying to keep up appearances to the motel staff saw her messing up the bedsheets and towels each day, as if they would be offended that she spent every night in his room. I don’t know why, she had said when asked, I just feel bad that they have to change sheets that haven’t even been slept in. Plus, I don’t like the idea of people making assumptions. He didn’t have the heart to tell her that assumptions had been made since March 1993.

Her chin relaxes against her neck, and her slight double chin drives him mad. He wants to lick it. He wants to wake her up with his mouth and make her tremble, but instead he nuzzles her nose with his. An Eskimo kiss, he remembers his mother telling him.

‘Mmmh,’ she mumbles, straightening up. ‘I’m awake, I’m awake.’

‘Looks like it,’ he smiles. ‘Didn’t you want to shower? Get those sheets all good and fake slept in?’

‘Yep,’ she whispers, her eyes closed still. ‘I’m gonna do that. I’m getting up. Right now.’

‘You don’t have to, Scully,’ he tells her softly. ‘You don’t have to move.’

‘Mmmh,’ she mumbles again, sighing deeply. Presently her head rests against his shoulder. He sits still for a few minutes, relishing the weight of her. This is not new for Scully, and though she is still his exhausted work partner, falling asleep as and when she needs, the change in their personal context means he can be there in ways which were previously out of bounds. He can love her.  

He lifts his arm and wraps her towards him, sliding down the bed. Momentum carries her with him, and she settles on his arm, her slack fingers curled on his chest. Their flight back to DC is tomorrow. Their report isn’t due until next week. They have a whole day to just be. The morning sun spills through the lightweight curtains, cloaking the room in gold. There peace in knowing the rest of the city is only just waking up. Mulder pulls the covers over them both. Scully stays still and heavy.

(home again au, pilot au, mytharc, msr, wc: 74k)

Mulder and Scully get a second chance.

“It’s not 1993,” she says, days later, after she has improved considerably, sitting up in her hospital bed. The sheet is damp where her sweaty hands clutch it. “It’s 2016. Agent Mulder and I were chasing a suspect in DC when I was… shot, and…”

(She already knows this isn’t the case. She’s seen herself. She’s exponentially younger, unscarred. But still, she pushes. Tries to hold onto any strings tying her to 2016.)

“Miss Scully…” The nurse meets her eyes gravely. “It’s 1993. You and Mr. Mulder were driving back from a crime scene when your car crashed at an estimated time of 9:03 PM. You both arrested on the side of the road, but the paramedics were able to revive you.”

“I… that’s impossible, though! It’s been twenty-three years! The car didn’t crash, we… we just lost nine minutes.” She falters. We lost what? Nine minutes!

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S4 Rewatch - Cancer Arc

I have very mixed feelings about the cancer arc. On the one hand it was a showcase for GA and gave her great emotional material to work with and she’s phenomenal. It also provides wonderful angsty MSR moments and character development (more on season 4 MSR thoughts here). And great material for fanfic to explore in much more depth.

On the other hand it reveals some real flaws in the show’s structure and aims of the mytharc storyline. This season does weave Scully’s illness and decline into the second half of the season with much more continuity than we are used to seeing between mytharc and MOTW episodes. But there is no sense that they are continuing to investigate the source of her cancer or look for a cure despite what they set up as her reason to keep working in 4x14 Momento Mori. The only mytharc episode after Momento Mori that is directly related to Scully’s cancer is 4x21 Zero Sum, in which Skinner is doing CSM’s bidding in the vague hope that it will help Scully. There doesn’t appear to be any X-Files investigation or follow through to Scully’s line that the truth is in me, and that’s where I need to pursue it. And despite all of his protestations about the importance of Truth - the truth will save you Scully, I think it’ll save both of us - Mulder (as far as we can tell) does not tell Scully anything he learned in Momento Mori about her ova and the hybridization program and the radiation super-ovulation procedure that causes both infertility and cancer. In 4x22 Elegy he says to Scully … you can’t hide the truth from me because if you do, then you’re working against me… and yourself. This is the worst kind of hypocrisy given what he’s hiding - medical information that she could have used to save herself. Can you imagine if we’d gotten to see Scully work to find a cure for her own cancer and then they’d used that to prevent this from happening to any other women? Instead (spoilers for season 5) Mulder finds a miracle device to save Scully and they never think again about the other women who died, or if there might be more victims out there, or if the abductions and fertility experiments are continuing.

If we back up to 3x09 Nisei when the cancer idea was first introduced we learned that there were dozens (if not more) women in ONE TOWN who were dying of cancer brought on by removing chips from their necks that were placed there during abductions. Mulder and Scully do nothing more to investigate this until a year later when Scully gets sick. Think about that - our heroes do nothing to help these women, these victims of medical experimentation perpetuated by a conspiracy within the government that they work for and are ostensibly fighting to uncover. It’s not until they are personally affected that it becomes a priority - revealing even more starkly than before that Mulder’s Quest for the Truth is actually a very personal, selfish one about getting the answers to his questions about his family and those he cares about. Not that he doesn’t deserve to know what happened to his sister. @iconicscullyoutfits wrote very eloquently about Mulder’s selfishness, which I agree with. This is a failing of the show, not the characters. To the show those other victims don’t matter, which reveals a hollowness at the core of the mytharc storyline. Following that throughline: Mulder and Scully never save the world, or prevent an alien invasion, or bring down the conspiracy, or even expose it to the world - they just suffer until neither they or we as the audience can take it anymore. And CC can’t understand why we’re watching it for the MSR? The only hope or good to come out of all of this is that these two people found each other.

This season does weave Scully’s illness and decline into the second half of the season with much more continuity than we are used to seeing between mytharc and MOTW episodes. But there is no sense that they are continuing to investigate the source of her cancer or look for a cure despite what they set up as her reason to keep working in 4x14 Momento Mori. The only mytharc episode after Momento Mori that is directly related to Scully’s cancer is 4x21 Zero Sum, in which Skinner is doing CSM’s bidding in the vague hope that it will help Scully. There doesn’t appear to be any X-Files investigation or follow through to Scully’s line that the truth is in me, and that’s where I need to pursue it. And despite all of his protestations about the importance of Truth - the truth will save you Scully, I think it’ll save both of us - Mulder (as far as we can tell) does not tell Scully anything he learned in Momento Mori about her ova and the hybridization program and the radiation super-ovulation procedure that causes both infertility and cancer. In 4x22 Elegy he says to Scully … you can’t hide the truth from me because if you do, then you’re working against me… and yourself. This is the worst kind of hypocrisy given what he’s hiding - medical information that she could have used to save herself. Can you imagine if we’d gotten to see Scully work to find a cure for her own cancer and then they’d used that to prevent this from happening to any other women? Instead (spoilers for season 5) Mulder finds a miracle device to save Scully and they never think again about the other women who died, or if there might be more victims out there, or if the abductions and fertility experiments are continuing.

o6666666′s master fic list pt. 1 (through May 2019)

pieces posted after May 2019 are linked below

Fic writers would not let that line in “Trust No 1” pass without commentary! Here are some very good fics that deal with that one lonely night when Scully invited Mulder to her bed.