#cthene

seiche (Tumblr)

“Say you believe it, too. Say there’s going to be an after. Say we’re going to live.” 

Her mouth winced. She couldn’t look at him anymore and didn’t, tucking her chin. “I can’t.” 

“Why?” He sounded raw. Scully felt herself to be unknowable and cruel. The waiting room feeling. “After all you’ve done, after all we’ve been through, why can’t you believe we’re going to win this?” 

“Because I don't know what happens next,” she told him, “if it isn't the worst thing.” 

AU-- Mulder and Scully didn't change their partnership (yet), despite impending Colonization.

@seepunkrun/Punk Maneuverability/Punk/runpunkrun's Opsis (Gossamer)

He'd picked the wrong day to be lonely and had definitely picked the wrong way in which to show it. If he wanted something from her, comfort or companionship, he would have to ask. She wasn't going to play games with him.

He'd balked at the door, but when his hesitation didn't result in apology, she'd pushed him the rest of the way out and thrown the dead bolt, glad to be rid of him. Finally turning the lights on, she'd walked into the bathroom and crouched by the toilet to throw up what seemed to be a city's worth of ashes.

Colonization Scully's transformation after the world is set on fire.

contradiction_to_nature's XF Writing Challenge:  Clothes

She finally nips the bag with her index and middle fingers, gingerly drawing it out.  Her careful wrapping job has done nothing to protect the delicate weave from absorbing the ever-present dust in the air.  She has given up on ever having clean hair again, her face always coated with a smothering sheen of sweat and airborne grime.  Pulverized concrete, unearthed trees, ashes.  So many dead, gone.

Scully mournfully studies her torn, bloodied suit.

@lotsoforangesoutside's Wednesday 100s (Tumblr)

In another universe, they got married during a lockdown, a complete lockdown, three months after colonization.

Colonization, quarantine, and regulations.

soundingsea's (DW) in the lonely cool before dawn

Scully shakes her head. "Mulder, nobody's heard from Southern California in over a year; there are blockades starting at Vegas. Ever since the Hoover Dam went, it's been considered a loss. Not much agriculture with no water."

"Doesn't look like water's going to be a problem here," Mulder replies, eyes turned upward.

Scully breathes in the smell of oncoming rain. 

Colonization hits, and hits hard.

@writingwell/RocketMan/Darkstryder's (xffics) Live Free

Desperate to make them quiet, Mulder raised his voice to be heard above them.

"Do you want to hear a story?"

Some heads turned to see him; one of the older ones next to Scully started quieting the kids in the back; it seemed a good distraction.

Post-Colonization Mulder and Scully hold onto hope while huddled with a small, underground group.

Seema/SeemaG's ([email protected], LJ) Stronger than Death

...I'd been there when they'd forced her mouth open, poured the black oil down her throat, and then thrown her into the cell. I'd held her in my arms as she'd trembled and squirmed against the madness slowly taking her over, and then I had her brought to the infirmary. A shot of precious morphine later, I'd tied her limbs down to the table; she stopped struggling and I'd leaned over, closed her eyes with the palm of my hand. Nine hours later, Susan died and I held her earrings in my hand.

"Scully."

"We can risk it," I told Mulder. "We have a choice to make."

"I can't run."

"I know that." I took a deep breath. "But do we stay?"

Post-Colonization Mulder and Scully, prisoners, hatch a plot to escape.

@spooky-nerd/spooky_nerd's Beyond the Setting Sun: a Post-Colonization drabble (Tumblr)

“Scully, if the sky crumbled and fell on top of our heads tomorrow, you would find a way to rationalize it,” Mulder had told her once, with equal parts awe and irritation in his voice. If only she had known at the time how prophetic those words would turn out to be.

They had been on a case when it had happened. She still remembers the shrill, earth-shaking scream of the crafts as they had broken through the dark and split the peaceful night apart. She had woken with a dread like no other. The back of her neck thrummed. They were here.

Post-Colonization Mulder and Scully are separated when her chip begins to control her.

Jenna Tooms/misslucyjane’s (mulderscreek) "...missing..."

Things she misses.

She misses her apartment, her mother, Mulder's fish tank, William's morning noises. She misses Frohike's leers and Langly's t-shirts. She misses wearing a badge and being an authority figure. She misses doing good, being good, feeling good.

She misses Skinner's gruff voice and Monica's wide smile and Doggett's soft drawl. She misses her baby. She misses her friends.

She misses her hair.

Post-Colonization Scully counts her losses.

pokeitlikejello's

The Drabble Files - Chapter 14

He made her a promise and God, she was so scared. Why did they have to split up? Was it his idea? Hers? She couldn’t remember. Not after all the concussions.

Post-Colonization Scully waits for Mulder's whistle.

@leiascully's (Ao3)

X-Files OctoberFicFest Day 30: Dazzle

The end of the world is dazzling. The sun is too bright. It glares off the sand of the beach. The shoreline is higher than it used to be, but the waves have pushed the sand up where there used to be beachgrass or even lawns. The shore has been reshaped, just like everything else. The waves ripple around the ruins of expensive houses. Once upon a time, they lived fairy tales here.

Post-Colonization Mulder and Scully did what they could.

One word prompt: beach

The loose linen is nothing like the suits she used to wear, before. Before the downfall of the organization she'd trusted, before the invasion of her body by the alien virus.

Post-Colonization Marita feels the cumulative weight of her life.

Sarah Segretti/sarah_segretti's Operation Clean House (Ao3)

He’s been attached to Special Ops. He’s one of only two people on this planet who have been inside one of Their ships and lived to tell the tale.

She’s the other. But she doesn’t remember the details.

He’s never quite forgiven her for that, she thinks, although he knows – and she knows he knows – that it’s not her fault. She wishes she could remember. She doesn’t want to be separated from him on this night.

Post-Colonization Mulder has to go on a mission alone.

Branwell's Won and Lost

They nicknamed the third assault force Operation Pest Control. The regular army sent in a thousand men at each site. They traveled in tanks or helicopters, and included units with powerful explosives. Missiles couldn't be used effectively against foes who had dug themselves in deep during the Stone Age.

The enemy died by the dozens. The soldiers died by the thousands within minutes of reaching shifting zones around the ships.

DOD HQ organized Tiger Teams that included specialists in tactical nuclear weapons. The President's family arrived at the bunker in West Virginia, where they were forced to stay in total ignorance and confusion.

Post-Colonization Mulder and Scully: indestructible.

AUs

EmScully's Not Alone

 Scully struggled to pull the door closed and stepped gingerly down the porch towards the outhouse. The small building groaned around her and she moved quickly, already chilled and missing the warmth of her little stove. When she stepped out of the outhouse she saw movement out of the corner of her eye, she did a double take and froze. The dead carcass of the alien next to her porch was being torn into by a very much live version, blocking the way of her front door. 

AU-- S7 Scully is abducted instead of Mulder; and both are aided by their son from the future to find each other in a world turned upside-down (and infested with monsters.)

@scullyphile's The Lure of the Paranormal (Tumblr)

“What’s going on? I thought we were having a good Sunday morning. Puns, flirting, fishing, sunshine. What’s wrong?” She asked. When he met her eyes, she knew. “It’s about William.”

Post S9 Mulder and Scully use fish puns to hide the pain.

cthene's In the Watchfires of a Hundred Circling Camps

Frothing and wheezing on his back, the kid claws at Mulder’s face with his nails. His black eyes bulge like quivering pearls of tapioca. He’s afraid. 

Mulder freezes. A silent scream lashes across his mind, confirming what he already knew, and his grip fails. Someone’s son or grandson is still in there.

“Mulder!” Scully yells at him.

The trachea uncrushes itself and the kid sucks the air, already lunging upward again. 

Mulder watches himself grab his skull and brain him against the floor. With vicious force he wasn’t capable of two seconds ago, he hammers the kid’s head over and over again into the tile until the tile cracks. He feels his own hands cleaving open the base of the skull, a plate of metalicized bone falling away like a shard of eggshell to let the sticky albumen run out. Mulder’s fingers plunge into the wet brainpan, closing around the slippery stem and yanking it out as the body beneath him seizes and dies. 

AU-- Post S9 Mulder is turned: a new creature in a new world, in search of his and Scully (and their son's) place in it.

@poeticsandaliens/aster_risk's OctoberFicFest Day 30 - Rental Car

William loves these days, ripping down an empty road to the next empty town in the next empty state, searching for the next unclaimed rental car. It’s only desolate once they get there. When you’re the only humans left on the planet, civilization is a thousand times more desolate, and nature is a thousand times more beautiful. 

AU-- Mulder, Scully, and their son live life on the road.

@pinebluffvariants/@flukemen's (Ao3) Baseball

“Let me tell you a story. I wasn’t always a total idiot - no, don’t deny it, I’ve heard you talk to people - anyway, my story. It was about twenty years ago. We’d already known each other for almost ten years but for various reasons, nothing had happened between us. Actually let me take that back. So much had happened between us, just not what we both wanted. I knew it, it was so obvious, but we were scared.”

“Scared.”

AU-- Mulder retells The Unnatural date night to William as a bedtime story.

stellar_dust/stellar_dust's The City and the Stars (Combined) (Ao3)

No one would have believed in the last years of the twentieth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.

How fitting, then, that it was, finally, a woman with a microscope who discovered the key to their destruction.

AU-- Mulder, Scully, their son, Skinner, Doggett, and Monica sneak into town... then everything devolves into chaos.

Blackwood's (site) Restless Vespers (site)

The sofa creaks as she rises. He feels her standing behind him, knowing what she will say before she says it. "We did all that we could. You did more than anyone could have asked."

"Did I?"

She lays a hand on his sleeve, but he isn't ready for absolution. "Of course you did," she says so gently it feels like a caress. "You're Will's father. You negotiated with the Rebels when no one else could and," she pauses. "I never would have survived without you."

"You would have gone on, Scully. It's who you are."

"Breathing isn't the same thing as living."

"It's Life."

AU-- Post-Colonization Mulder and Scully have a chat.

@danascullysjournal/Paper_hearts_and_homemade_arts's Chrysalis

Dana Scully bandaged them both the best she could, but her training was of flesh and bone, stitches and scar tissue, medication to stave off the searing pain.  Grossly unqualified for the patient before her, she prayed silently for a breakthrough.  Anything to help a man whose soul was eclipsed.  

The date for colonization had come.  And gone. 

And now… the man in her bed was not the same. 

Post-2012 Scully talks her partner through his grief.

@all-these-ghosts/all_these_ghosts's radio nowhere - Chapter 30

When he gets to the plateau at the summit, there is nothing left but dirt and ash and blackened, jagged shards of metal. Every tree and shrub and blade of grass has been leveled. Below him the mountainside is charred from the flames that rained down after the explosion. The late afternoon sky is dark and tinged red.

AU-- Revival Mulder Is stumbling around the ruins looking for his son.

afg's (mulderscreek) Mendocino (mulderscreek)

Skinner had once told him over a bottle of Scotch, how surprised he'd been that Mulder had not killed himself and confessed to him drunkenly, that he and the rest of the group had had him on a sort of unofficial suicide watch for months after Scully had been killed.... In truth it had been touch and go. Many a long night, he had sat with his gun in his hand trying hard to think of a reason to stay. He'd failed her on that last day, the least he could do, he thought, was to tough it out until the end. He couldn't light candles or recite a 'Hail Mary' but he could stay alive. It was his penance.

AU-- Post-Colonization Mulder lives just a bit longer than Scully.

Pale The Chicken Slayer's "Seven More Days" (xphilefic)

The flu hit, distroying cities and states. I'm not sure if the whole world got it, but it's a safe bet. America is dead, almost time for the funereal, when we lay the past into the ground. Mulder died, one of it's earliest victims. The sky scorched with a pale black horizon, like a mystery or a dream. The world seems like a novel, ripped from the pages and brought into our small lives, the authors don't realize how their works will affect us. And ruin us.

Post-Colonization Scully roams the world, immortal.

@scully-loves-ruthie's Prompt: There's only us

Mulder hiked his pack higher up his back, it took a couple weeks, but he and Scully soon learned there was no one to fight for supplies, and worse yet no one to save.  An unholy trip to Maggie’s followed by an understated mourning at Skinner and Monica’s.  It didn’t take much after that to understand there would be no finding, no saving, no banding together to ride out the apocalypse, a ramshackle collection of misfits suited for an FX series.

Post-Colonization, there are only two people left alive.

Oracle (The Other Side) At Sunset (Gossamer)

"William, we don't have to stay another year," she says. "Your dad visits me sometimes, at night. He doesn't speak, but he sits beside me. We talk without sound."

"Mom -"

"I know you don't believe me, William, but I see him. I see them all. Sometimes, under the red moon, I walk to the top of the cliffs and I see them. They look up at me from the desert, expectantly. Waiting for us to join them."

AU-- Scully and William are the only survivors.

@lepusarcticus's the after

“Happy turning day,” she smiled, setting a mug on the side table. He caught a whiff of the contents. Rich. Heady. Intoxicating.

“Don’t know why you still keep track of these things. It’s been centuries,” he mumbled, playing at sleepiness.

AU-- Immortality and vampirism.

BONUS

If you're curious to read more Colonization content, I'd recommend the Colonization HQ, as well as @lilydalexf's and @dashakay's recs (here and here, respectively.)

Thanks for reading