#kipler

If you looked up "instant classic" in the X-Files fanfic dictionary, you'd probably find this 3rd party POV story in the short list of examples. With good reason. Title: Strangers and the Strange Dead Author: Kipler Summary: In which dead bodies and shivering people disturb the hilltown of Bradenton, and our young, orphaned narrator serves hot beverages to the investigating agents even as she ponders the peculiar, elusive nature of their relationship. Length: 7,982 words Classification: None provided Rating: General Audiences Spoilers: Originally posted in February, 2000. Thus, it was intended to be read around the time episodes 7X12 (X-Cops) or 7X13 (First Person Shooter) were airing. Disregard later seasons of XF when reading this. Favorite line: Can't pick just one in this very well written story. Read the story!

She knew she was well. But well and whole were not the same thing.

Now tears of joy do blur your vision. Scully's cancer's in remission!

The woods are lovely, dark and deep. But I ...

That winter, when our town was a layover spot for strangers and the strange dead, I was writing the river. I liked to write true things, things I could know: water and stones, brick and ground and the whir of cars under the highway overpass. Most days, walking home from work, I would stop in the center of the Bradenton Bridge and watch the ice pile and crack, watch the milky-green evening sky reflect in the still-open pool of water beyond the legs of the bridge. That picture - the green-milk sky - is a true thing about the river, and people who live near the river nod when they read it, and say: “Oh yes, she knows how it is.”

Why am I suddenly getting so many reads, kudos, and feedbacks on an X-Files fic I wrote in 2000?

That was the second to the last time I saw the woman and man. If I had known, I would have watched her more closely, as she sat alone at the table and very still. I would have studied the piece of the story in her hands, pressed palms-down on the table, and in her lips drawn in, and in her head just-bowed and her eyes closed. As if she were waiting for something to be over.