story where scully does something insane for mulder? can be whatever
Citizen 354 was at almost the top of their list, not far behind 356. The reasons -- though obvious -- had been typed and ratified and re-typed and filed in alphabetical order. It’s the Captain who attempts to make first contact.
It goes to voicemail. He frowns at the red phone under his heavy white fist.
“Sir?”
The long table, rows of curious, bespectacled eyes. “What did he say, sir?”
The Captain scrubs an eye. He flips back and forth, forth and back, through the reasons, and the list, and wishes he weren’t so informed, so as to be able to wonder why. “Something,” he says, “about being sure to feed the fish.”
--
“And I know it cannot be about that bog witch thing, Mulder,” Scully is saying, balancing a takeout bag against his door, propped on one knee, scrounging for her key, “because even you think it’s more likely to be ignus fatus than anything, and besides, the joke makes itself, it wasn’t,” she huffs, the bag sliding, the lock catching, “worth” - catch “taking” - catch “personally.”
His apartment is empty, impersonally. Scully lets the takeout drop. It’s a Sunday. The calls go straight for voicemail -- since Friday. It’s me. Thinking about Marvin’s, but only if you’re free. It’s me, are you still mad about what I said in Hillsboro the other day? It’s me. Mulder? It isn’t funny.
The perpetual dent in his couch just-so. The ripple of water light at his shelf and window. The fish tank, blue and eternal. Scully doesn’t tap the glass, just touches it as though to say: I am late. I am here. Hello. The bodies, two of them, tiny, weightless, waving.
--
He didn’t say anything to me. Already an old refrain. She’s tired even of her own self, these days. Knocking at the Gunmen’s door, trying to look bored and hasty. Frohike looks her up and down. “Where have I heard this one before,” he says, and lets her in.
“Bermuda?” Byers offers. And Langley, in his turn: “Bahama.”
“The only thing I can think,” she tells them, “is that he took something I said on Wednesday too seriously. He’s angry or -- or hurt, and he’s…” Punishing me, is what she doesn’t say.
Silence from her Beach Boys. “What.” Their shared glance. “What.”
“Nothing,” Byers says, “it’s just that we saw him Thursday. He didn’t seem…upset with you.”
Frohike is sort of kicking at his own heel, looking at the floor. A flare goes through her then, not the first, the cool touch of fishtank glass under her fingertips. “Okay.” Nobody will really look at her. “So? What am I missing?”
Shrugs all down and up the line. “I don’t think he was angry, chickee,” says Frohike. “Doesn’t mean he wasn’t insane.”
“Where have I heard this one before,” Scully says, and if she smiles, it will cut tightly through the pain.
--
Her ceiling has all the answers, between midnight and three. Deep cover. Held captive. Six feet under. Sitting pretty on sixteen milligrams of psilocybin or LSD. Skinner had been resolute, but also bored and hasty -- truly.
The maximum number of hours she’d ever had truly no idea where to find Mulder -- where to even start to look -- was thirty-six. They were coming up now on forty-eight. When she relayed some version of this to Skinner, meaning it the way they meant timelines when a civilian was reported missing, he’d looked at her like she was speaking pig latin and had said, Christ, Dana. Stop counting.
Forty-nine. Brain damage. Chemical explosion. Meeting with a source, gone sideways and sour. In Hillsboro, she’d said, you would have to be stupid to believe that -- that was it! Stupid, to believe it. You’d have to be. Mulder had looked at her from under his lashes, in mud up past their ankles. She’d followed him back to town with the earth sucking at the soles of their shoes.
If it’s the last thing you ever say to him, says her ceiling, you’re going to die wishing you’d lived your whole life never saying anything.
Scully blinks. Of course that was absurd. The last thing she’d said to him was, “Lights, please,” and he’d hit them on the way out the office door, and stepped out into darkness, shoulders turned, already receding.
Fifty.
--
Driving in on Monday, she realizes she has gotten, unthinking, two coffees. The thought makes her tap the brakes too hard. Hers spills, hot liquid down the console, where her thigh meets the leather seat. “Damn, shit, oh.” She fumbles napkins from the dash. Maps spill with the old vehicle manual, a scratchy notepad, an empty bag of seeds. Her forehead to the steering wheel, her car running on the side of a side street, in the suburbs, on a weekday just after 7:30. Damn, shit, oh God, why are you doing this to me.
--
Her message light blinks, its warm red. The door slams. Frohike: “Just checking in to say it’s still radio silence over here, compadre. Come over for supper, maybe? Byers had a thought that started with ‘Grace’ and ended with ‘land,’ if you catch my drift. Over and out, as they say.”
A telemarketer: “I’m calling for a Dana K. Scully, this is the second --"
A blank, scuzzy gap that may just be the tape, or may be him. She replays thrice this nothing, thinking, Lights, please. Thinking, just let me say something differently.
The phone ringing shocks her into immediate action. She answers like it’s a foregone conclusion, breathless.
“Hello?”
“I’m calling for a Dana K. Scully--”
Wilting. Her briefcase unfurls from her hand. “Not interested,” she says. “Take me off your list.”
The telemarketer is quiet. Why doesn’t he hang up? At least Scully knows why she’s still holding the phone so tightly.
“It is not,” he finally says, “very easy to do that, you see.”
--
In a white room, Scully is familiar with the physics of your life falling out from under you, hurtling small and far away. For the first half of the interview it’s all she can do not to smile. She can’t help thinking what an excellent prank it might be, were it not real, and true, and happening. “Where have I heard this one before,” she asks. But nobody is laughing.
“Agent Scully,” says the Captain, who holds a thick fold of paper in a thick white hand. “We know this may seem difficult to believe, but trust that you were selected in part for your --” Pale eyes to pale hairline “shall we say, credulity.”
At this she does laugh. Her ceiling had predicted none of it. Even the words space and ship -- and those had occurred to her, both together and separate, between four am and six -- had not scratched the surface.
“Sorry,” she says, sobering. “I’m sorry. It’s just -- I think you may want my partner, really. I’m not really known for -- ” She shakes her head. “I’m a scientist.”
“Yes,” says the Captain, “and that’s exactly why you were of interest to us. Your medical training, combined with your undergraduate studies, makes you uniquely suited for the expedition. The nature of your recent fieldwork is really secondary. Obviously, extraterrestrial intelligence, should any exist, is of tertiary interest to my team. It is useful,” he says, “only in that it suggests you may be able to tolerate the things we had to say.”
Behind him, images of the sun explode and fracture. Stars fail and die. Scully knows about heat death, and black holes, and last year’s big movie. She misses her ceiling. She misses her Mulder. She thinks that only last week she had been knee-deep in bog witch territory, mean and twitchy, not realizing it was the happiest she might ever be.
The Captain is looking at her, in that way Captains always seemed to have: like he expects something.
“You must have been very disturbed when you saw Armageddon,” is what she finds herself saying. “Practically gave your whole operation away.” It’s not even like her. She is so lonely.
“That’s what your partner said,” says the Captain, “almost exactly."
--
At her mother’s front door, then small in her blue-carpeted hallway. Scully clasps her own hands, a good daughter.
Maggie tucks her hair for her, behind her ears. “So like your father,” she says, and Scully swallows, shakes her head.
“Yes,” says Maggie, “you make such sacrifices. I won’t pretend to understand all of them. But we feel them -- the people you love. Even when you’re leaving us behind.”
Scully touches her fingers to her mouth. It is a terrible thing. What she’s been asked to do, the answer she has given. She is glad of her father, for giving her mother this useful shape. Away to war. Off shore. Lost at sea.
“Will you come back, Dana?” asks Maggie. And the frame snaps. It is not something she had asked of the Captain. It was understood between them, an order already obeyed: You will come back. And hadn’t he? He had, always.
A good daughter, her father’s proudest thing. Scully shrugs, nearly shakes her head, finds she can and cannot lie. “Time is very different,” she says, “when you’re considering this kind of travel. The -- the relativity -- it --"
There’s almost nothing more to say. Her mother is looking at her with such calm, such patience. For time to make her the sort of widow she always knew she might have been. She tucks her hair again then holds her daughter firmly between both hands. “Stranger tides, my excellent girl,” she says, and Scully cries with it, her mother’s soldier’s honor, her father’s homecomings, quiet and uncelebrated, true.
“And,” Maggie brings a hand to Scully’s shoulder and squeezes once, too tightly, “Fox?” she asks.
The flash through Scully then -- fury, cold glass, mud in her boots, shame, and the lights, please. Sitting in a white room, lonely but for him. Her silent phone. Her two coffees; her empty ceiling.
“And Fox,” Scully answers, admitting.
--
There are one septillion stars in the universe -- a number beyond the use of quantification. Only two of them are going to explode. That’s all it takes: that small dying. Only that, to throw the whole world out of orbit. It will darken the sun.
To stop it will take forever. Scully signs her name to a variety of papers, in the same blue pen. It will take forty-three light years. It will take 365 lives. It will take a hundred astrophysicists and fifty biologists, and sixty Navy SEALS, and many fathers, and several daughters, and a handful of the faithful and at least one non-believer -- and God, too, if He is on their side.
Scully boards a ship, anchorless. She thinks not of the ground.
--
Citizen 356 drops her bag at the head of the low bunk with a buckled snap. 354 jerks up on an elbow, twisting.
There’s a moment that might be misrecognition but isn’t. I am late. I am here. Hello.
His free hand closes around her upper arm, then her wrist. She’s no longer really standing. He doesn’t rise. The sound of fabric and a muffled sort of hiccup. Under his arm, she disappears all but totally. Her face in his t-shirt, his thumb at the base of her skull, and, at his ankles, her boots still on.
Out into darkness, the stunned, unsorry, understanding look in his eyes. Out into darkness, the gone of the world. The wave of weightless bodies. The end of it all. The rest of their lives.
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some prompt words! bruise, lipstick, stained glass, lighter, rain
post-anasazi/blessing way/paper clip, bc what else do you watch with a fever of 100.1?
“Does this tie say, ‘sorry I collared you in the hallway of our workplace, I was under the influence of LSD’? Or is it just ugly?”
“I got fired in my best suit.” Scully is fully dressed, trim on the edge of Mulder’s couch. Today, like yesterday but not the day before, she wears black. She’s staring at the hole above his Fancy typewriter poster like it could have the answers she’d demanded at her sister’s bedside last week. “I looked unimpeachable and nobody cared.”
“Ouch. Matching patent leather?”
Rain trawls the window, nicking the bullet’s point of entry and dripping into the heavy mug Scully’s placed strategically on the desk. Her lipstick’s peachy ectoplasm; her fine knowledge of parabolic arcs. When she’d let herself in, Mulder had been wandering around in one sock with a puddle forming under the bookshelf. The air is frowzy with coffee and April, cut now with Scully’s fresh perfume.
“Suede.” Like Whittier’s saddest word. Scully’s mouth closes so carefully around the sound. She’s never going to tell him about the wet asphalt on the long road to her mother’s house, the blood in the vamp of her shoe. Maybe in some way he already knows. You remember the Navajo dad showed us as kids? From the Pacific theater? she’d asked with her bruised feet in her mother’s teal bathtub. It was like that, with Mulder and I.
Difficult to understand? Maggie had sluiced lukewarm water up her daughter's shin. Dana, her stern and distant darling. Her own most damning judge.
Secret, Scully had said, thinking of endless chains of consonants. 16 syllables just to mean the word submarine, just to mean the word drown. And so long.
“Say it ain’t so.”
A sigh. “So.”
“Bastards.”
“Yes,” Scully agrees.
Mulder moves to stand between her and the typewriter. A healing pink scratch high on her forehead from when non-union poultry workers had tried to feed her to their plumed god — or whatever the hell had been happening in Arkansas. When he’d come back from the dead last week, she’d turned her back and bowed her head under ICU fluorescents to show him a different kind of scar.
The indignity of her name on misconduct reports and in manila files. Decorated Captain Scully’s earnest daughter, sitting with her spine straight in rooms full of men, on Mulder's couch, across from the bullet hole in his drywall. He’d cleaved to the flare of her honor in a road-side diner with Skinner across the laminate. She’d soothed his fever and nursed his paranoia and fired her gun. She’d driven him across the country on a careful dose of diazepam and then come to pick him up for work this morning. There’s nothing to say for it.
He asks, “Did they even ask you who you were wearing?”
“They asked me, um,” Scully blinks like she does when she’s waking up in cars, “if I’d lie to protect you. The OPR committee.”
“Oh?”
She looks at her watch. “We’re gonna be late. You’re ready?”
“What’re they gonna do, fire us again?” He see-saws his tie in its band. “What’d you say?”
Scully’s knuckles are pale around her scuffed briefcase, the same one she’s had since 1992. When he’d met her she’d been dressed in her best Girl Friday, a passé ‘30s flare to her square cut. It had been a shock, the slight of her shoulders under a robe and his hands not 36 hours later. Revealed: her real stature, no less straight and fine.
“Late,” she reminds. She kills the lamp by the fish tank. Her shoes are muted and sensible, low, and she tees them up at his threshold. “Let's go.”
He tags her elbow at the elevator. The same liminal spot where she’d admitted to some transcendent sureness in him, lighter and leaner than science or liturgy. I sent you signs, he’d said, on the way down. You get any of those?
She’d shifted against the back wall. I had strange dreams.
I’m talking omens, Scully. Like white oxen, weather patterns, that kind of thing. No? Maybe they got sent to the wrong address.
Now, as they wait, he says, “You’re not gonna tell me?”
When she turns toward him, her eyes are washed in the blue of Coventry’s stained glass, the dazzling fragments of war. Her mouth quirks the same knowing way it had before. It builds him up and cuts him down to size. He isn’t Lazarus; he is her partner.
“The tie is perfect,” she finally answers.
The tie is purple. The tie is littered with jitterbugs. The tie is awful. Mulder laughs; the elevator comes. Outside, pigeons hob-knob around her dusty car, and only one of them is the white of Picasso’s dove. The truth is that Scully’s integrity is outweighed only by her unfailing kindness, and the question is only which one of them it will kill first.
They are in a motel flanked by a strip of video rental
businesses and fast food joints. She’d driven thirty miles out of their way today to avoid staying anywhere near a pine treed forest and he’d pretended not to notice, dozing with his arm slung over his eyes and his seat laid back to take advantage of the mini sun blinds that protected the kid from glare. The car was silent - the boy apparently used to long hours in the car - or maybe he was just solitary like Scully. Mulder pinches one of the kid’s toes and listens to the hyper-quiet of the room, waiting for whatever comes next. No water running, no clothes being shed, no sound of breathing. He’d love to know what she’s doing in there and pictures her leaning against the door with her head thrown back, thinking. She’s always been a big one for thinking.
it's been a while since I've read any fics so I'm frantically scouring through my ao3 bookmarks, trying to remember which ones are Scully centric, but I think I've found some!
Heuvelmans' On the Track by The_Mythopoeic. this is THEEE x files fic of all time. truly a work of art. canon divergence starting from Fight the Future. there are various POV's but it is very much Scully-centric.
Phenomenology by h0ldthiscat. short and sweet, also one of my favorites, though not to the degree of the previous one. set around the time of the second xfiles movie, which I've never seen and don't plan to, and instead prefer to interact with it via fanfiction.
folie imposée by seek_its_opposite. set after Folie à deux, Scully taking care of Mulder. I am not immune to Scully the medical doctor.
Touch by @leiascully. Scully's ouroboros tattoo gets some attention 🙂↕️
Living with the Dreaming Body by Punk. s5, post-Emily.
thirty-six by softnow. Scully's birthday fic <3
Pause by cecily_sass. amnesia fic ✨
as you can see I'm not good at summaries but I pinky promise that each of these is absolutely worth reading!
I've also got some Scully fics here, here and here, which are ridiculous compared to those above, because I'm an artist and not a writer, but if you do end up reading any of those, I'd appreciate a comment hehe
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So I really like post-DeadAlive fics. Not because I’m a big resurrection story fan (Jesus / Osiris stans, no offense) but because I can’t get enough of angst, repressed feelings and baby daddy reveal drama. I am going to post a version of my very own later this week. Meanwhile, I read a lot of these, so I thought I would share some recs. Here are a few of my favorites.
Slow Returns - o666666
You just don’t know how often I reread this. I love it so, so much. This one puts the emphasis on Scully’s trauma, and it’s so angsty, and it’s so sweeeeeet. I tear up every time.
DeadAlive AU - @markwatneyandenesemble
I always say I actually think this should probably be called Three Words Canon Divergence or something, but whatever it is, I love it. The premise is two specific changes to canon. When Mulder comes back from the dead: (1) he has memories only to 1996 and (2) Scully isn’t visibly pregnant yet.
Author Skuls seems to feel about about this subgenre like I do, because she seems to have written a lot of post-DeadAlive, and I’m not complaining. Here’s a little DeadAlive Skuls tasting trio:
the smaller odysseys - skuls (@ghostbustermelanieking)
An AU DeadAlive fic in which Doggett convinces Skinner to keep Mulder’s resurrection a secret from Scully for longer. This ends like awwwwwwwww.
ashes and dust - skuls (@ghostbustermelanieking)
A largely canon-compliant DeadAlive / Three Words deep dive.
inches between them - skuls (@ghostbustermelanieking)
Another Skuls fic on this subject, also exceptionally sweet.
Doctor, Copper, Sailer, Corpse - Scarlet Baldy
This is a series of first person vignettes from Scully POV. Extremely angsty and a little painful, with a very self-destructive version of Mulder here, but ultimately a hopeful ending.
Ray of Light - OnlyTheInevitable (@gaycrouton) Honest conversation, then hot pregnancy sex—a Three Words fic we can all get behind. Which I think is actually one of the suggested positions for pregnancy sex.
Words, Words, Words - Circe Invidiosa (@invidiosa ) I’m not much of a Doggett fan, but I love this fic about Doggett breaking things down for Mulder. This is subtly written and moving— a heartbreaking Mulder characterization, in my opinion.
home run - kittenscully
Another great “Doggett gets involved” fic. Also very moving. Apparently this is how I like my Doggett.
The Laws of Coming and Going - Buckingham
A gentle Mulder-centric fic focused on his good intentions and slow moves back towards connecting with Scully. Very in-character and sweet.
Hour of Lead - DarlaBlack (@sigritandtheelves)
This is an excellent read — but watch out for the bleak, tear-out-your-heart ending. It's only painful because it’s canon compliant, so warning: you have to remember what happens with Scully’s longed-for miracle baby in canon. Waaaaah. So much angst.
Untitled - @wtfmulder
I see you, you wildly touching little drabble. This is set between Three Words and Empedocles, and it’s meant to explain the seeming change in Mulder’s attitude, and why does this make me cry?
What have I missed? Y’all have other post-DeadAlive fics you like? Have you written any? SEND THEM MY WAY.
another x files fic! a small weird cancer arc thing about the space between elegy and demons, because it haunts me that those episodes are back to back. lobotomies, psychotic breaks, Vonnegut, best friends. and berries
He’s on the side of the interstate in the warm woven center of night, and Scully is not in his passenger seat. He’s thinking about a research paper he wrote as an undergraduate about suicide methods.
Chapters: 5/5
Fandom: Pluribus (TV 2025)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Relationships: Carol Sturka/Zosia, Manousos Oviedo & Carol Sturka, Helen/Carol Sturka, The Others & Carol Sturka
Characters: Carol Sturka, Zosia (Pluribus), Manousos Oviedo, Laxmi (Pluribus), Tom Cruise (conceptually), also Ravi & Rick
Summary:
One thing about Tom Cruise is that he had had aliens in his brain long before there were aliens in his brain, Carol thinks, so probably this was all going really great for him.
—
post-s1. world-saving for the world-weary or whatever. [complete]
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Hiiiiiiiii!!!!!!!!!!!!! i wanted to ask for some canon-compliant YEARNING fics for x files. uuuhhhh not sure exactly how to explain, but like fics where they build upon scenes with ust and give some more background into the characters' perspectives.
First of all, thank you for this ask, because I truly do love coming up with fic recs, and it's so flattering to be asked.
This was fun, although I admit I also found it a little tricky, as the elements of (1) canon-compliant and (2) building on UST and (3) lots of yearning felt oddly difficult to piece together. So I think some of my recs really have 2 out of 3 of these elements. I felt like you might be asking for a nice LONG slow burn fic, but I found it hard to think of longer canon compliant slow burns. (Am I wrong? Am I just missing obvious fics? People can definitely tell me if I am wrong.)
Parts of your request made me think of things like Nuptiae Sub Rosa or All That is Dark and Bright -- both great fics -- but I didn’t include those because they either have way more RST (Nuptial Sub Rosa) or have way more divergent elements (All That Is Dark and Bright).
“Canon compliant” turned out to be the hardest ingredient, both because there are so many more divergent fics and because I’m not always sure what people mean when they say it. I hope it counts for you as "canon compliant" if they’re on a case that wasn’t on the show, but that seems like a case they could have had. In other words, I hope it counts if the plot is just not obviously canon divergent or AU. Some of these fics are longer and some are shorter.
Yearning in A Casefile
Syntax6’s Casefiles.
Some people might think this is a strange recommendation for your request, but Syntax6 writes Mulder and Scully doing FBI agent / X-files work very much like in canon, dealing with UST and repressed feelings of yearning … until they stop repressing. Now some of her fics are really canon divergent, plot wise, but some are less so. These fics are definitely casefiles, so they’re about serial killers and what have you, too. (Syntax6 is a professional crime novelist now, so she’s really very good at this kind of plot.
This is her site with all her fic.
Two specific Syntax6 recs:
Overnight Sensation - After One Son, Mulder and Scully go to Boston to chase a serial killer. Diana involved, too. This is more on the canon compliant side of the spectrum.
Original Sin - More canon divergent. Scully has moved to Utah after Fight the Future, but finds something important she feels like Mulder needs to see, so she gets in touch.
The Summoning of Nikola Price - alienqueequeg
This is a creepy horror story, legitimately scary, in which their UST / unresolved feelings play a role in the case. I don’t know if it’s exactly what you’re looking for, but it is definitely directly about yearning in some way.
More than a Feeling - SisterSpooky1013
Mulder and Scully go undercover in a carnival/fair. Lots of repressed yearning every which way. This is a SisterSpooky1013 banger.
Behind the Looking Glass - Wendiae
This is a casefile and a Never Again post ep. Scully goes undercover. Mulder is a profiler of a serial killer, and he goes undercover eventually, too. They’re doing really angsty post-Never Again pining. There is this really electric, tense scene where undercover M&S are supposedly pretending to have a hot-and-heavy jealous lovers’ argument for a voyeur killer’s benefit – but you know, it’s really the truth, too.
Amish Country - lolabeegood
Mulder and Scully go undercover in Amish country. This is UST to RST, and a classic fic beloved by many—do pay attention to the CW, as there is some sexual assault.
Yearning in Angsty or Sweet Fics That Could Happen In Canon But Did Not
Dance Without Sleeping - Lydia Bowers / wonderland / @amplifyme
This might be the fic that I feel best about meeting your criteria, although it isn’t exactly canon compliant either lol. But this is a gorgeous classic cancer arc fic that won all the fanfic awards back in the day.
Love In All The Wrong Places - SisterSpooky1013
Well, first of all, this is just an amazing fic, but I would also say it’s about your criteria, although kind of indirectly. This is basically You’ve Got Mail but with Mulder and Scully. They both, on their own, go on to online dating chat rooms under assumed names. They start having conversations with one another, not realizing who it is. They talk to one another about their secret feelings for co-workers and… well, you can imagine.
One Weekend In Georgetown - LibbyT
Scully tries to spend a quiet weekend at home. Mulder won’t stop calling. They’re at a time when it feels like their relationship is at a crossroads, post-Amor Fati. There is a lot of delightful conversation in this. Yearning galore.
Dividends - Suzanne Schramm
Scully comes into Mulder’s motel room too wired to sleep, and they drink some motel booze. A smart variation on a very common trope–this one is an older fic. I especially enjoy Mulder’s gradual realizations here that Scully shares some of the same motivations as him.
The Third - Susanne Barringer
They’re on a stakeout having awkward conversations circa 6. It’s Scully POV, and I especially enjoy how Scully seems to misread Mulder’s reactions in this fic until it’s clear he’s being more serious than he first seems. An amazing ending.
You Send Me - spooky_nerd
This is very specifically about Mulder’s yearning, but it’s great: the X-file is about the yearning. Mulder finds himself suddenly faced with randomly opening portals that take him to Scully’s apartment. This is a shorter piece, but very witty, smart, and so deeply romantic.
Fox Mulder, Closet Romantic - SilhouetteofaCedar
I feel like I have to put this on the list on the off chance you haven’t read it, even though it’s got four billion kudos and is a widely beloved fic. It's beloved for a reason. Definitely heavy on the pining Mulder, as the title suggests.
A Few Canon-Based Post-Eps
Tiger Lily - Eleanore
This is a real vintage fic, from 1996, and one reason I like it is that it is so understated and focused on character. There's just something delicate about it. It’s a post-War of the Coprophages jealousy fic written just a few weeks after the episode aired. Mulder remains smitten with Bambi, and a pining Scully provides him with advice despite her own feelings.
The sunlight that leaks out of your darkness (and into my world) - bayloriffic
A post-ep for Never Again. Mulder is trying. Scully is trying. Everyone’s so full of longing.
Just the Thing - pinebluffvariant
Post-ep for How The Ghosts Stole Christmas that I picked because you can practically taste Mulder’s loneliness and longing in it.
Still Life - Seek_Its_Opposite
This is a Milagro post ep, more focused on Scully’s yearning, but giving us crucial insight into Mulder, too. Beautifully written.
We’re Not Here To Get Involved In Personal Problems - me me (cecilysass)
This is a post-ep for X-Cops, but I think it actually fits what your request is pretty well, and it is canon compliant.
Anyway, I do hope I managed to hit the spot in here somewhere...? If this isn’t quite what you had in mind, please send me another ask and I’ll try to fine tune. And if someone else thinks of something, don't be shy.
AO3 Summary: The weekend after Millennium, Mulder gives Scully a very early surprise birthday present. UST, essentially first date fic. General knowledge of Moby Dick recommended but not required.
My Thoughts: Well, today is January 9 so I thought this was the perfect choice for Fic Friday :) This fic is sooo sweet. Mulder kisses Scully to ring in the New Year and now he is dedicated to actually treating her right. He lies about a case to take her on a weekend getaway and she is so grateful. This is one of those fics that you wish had 10k more words.
summary: Maybe she envies his ability to experience love as a byproduct, as a detail, and be satisfied with it, but that isn’t her.
***
What haunts her now, right now anyway, is not the fingers coiled around her heart but the dead girl in the cemetery truck. It’s the chipped white wooden slats on the side of the truck like ribs, like her own ribs peeling back from her body. It’s the girl buried not in the dirt but in the unholy trappings of mourning: rotting petals eaten through by beetles and cards bearing regrets scrawled in ink that ran in Tuesday night’s rain. She might have found it poetic from a great distance, from another life, but now she only finds it improper. Regrets can’t hold a body. Closure starts dirty and six feet deep; it has to.
“Scully?”
His knock rattles the bathroom door.
She sticks her head out of the curtain, calls, “I’m okay, Mulder,” and returns to watching the soap run down her chest.
Once, as a kid, she ran into a gate on the edge of the base—just looked back at Missy and plowed into it on brand-new roller skates. She remembers thinking her white skates looked like clouds against the sky. “You just got the wind knocked out of you,” Melissa said, picking gravel out of her elbow as she coughed, streaking dirt across her cheek when she wiped her tears. You just got the wind knocked out of you. No harm done. Mulder had almost smiled as she gasped back to life.
What had she looked like to him, flat on her back? Would he have fashioned her a grave out of flowers?
She steps out of the shower, buries her face in a towel, and screams into it, just for a second, before shutting off the water.
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“We would rather be ruined than changed.” – WH Auden
Scully sometimes paid lip service to the idea of wanting what she called “a real life,” but come on. Her mom’s friend’s daughter had invited her to join a book club. She said she’d go, then never did, because there was always something more pressing than some book about a Civil War widow finding love again. There was always a mangled body, an autopsy bay. There was always Mulder.
one of the things I love about the x files is that Mulder isn't a macho man (though some fic authors unfortunately forget about it), and he drinks that respect women juice. close-ups are under the cut
