#and tough yet vulnerable Scully

[observeroftheuniverse]

Started a new playthrough of Fallout 4 with my wife, and we made our player character Mulder.

We had and romanced Cait as a companion, and it made me really want to see an MSR AU with Mulder as Sole Survivor and Scully as Cait.

But I'll be damned if I write it.

[sisterspooky1013]

Nuptiae Sub Rosa, Chapter 1

Not yet rated / Read it here on AO3

The rush of the pressurized air whizzes past his ears as the engine jostles him gently, the lullaby of air travel. It’s no wonder people doze off so often on airplanes; aren’t these the same tricks you use to get babies to sleep? It certainly works on Scully, he thinks as he looks over at her, head resting on the wall next to the window with a puny little airline pillow tucked into the crook of her neck. The ambient light on red-eyes always makes her look a bit angelic, he’s noticed. The gentle slope of her nose illuminated in a hazy yellow glow, her plush lips slightly parted while her eyelashes dance with her dreams.

She’d asked for the window seat, and he obliged, though he secretly loves it when she sits on the aisle or in the middle. Invariably, she falls asleep if the flight is more than a couple hours long, and he always leans towards her a bit to make his shoulder available as a pillow. There’s something about those moments where she’s so vulnerable and unguarded around him that make him feel special, because he knows how much trust feeds into her willingness to do so. She’s been this way around him nearly from the start, and yet it was only after a couple years working together and seeing how she was around other people, even her family, that made him realize just how lucky he is to get to see this side of her.

And yet he puts her through so much. It’s no wonder she’s so exhausted; after a night in jail and then flying down to Florida and back at the drop of a dime, they’d gotten back on a plane the very next day for a case that turned out to be such a waste of time that they are flying back in the middle of the night rather than bother expensing a hotel.

His initial reaction when he learned that she’d been held in contempt of congress and chose jail over giving them any information regarding his whereabouts was pride that she believes so much in him and his cause, that she’s tough enough to withstand the questioning as well as the consequence of refusing to answer. Once he had time to really think about it, he felt ashamed and worried, because this very well may not be the last time she’s put in such a position.

It was just the most recent in a long list of reasons that he’s been thinking about asking her to set up a contingency plan, to protect them both. The feeling of helplessness they each experience when the other is hospitalized or detained is enough to make his stomach turn just thinking about it. How many times has he been asked “are you the husband?” and been turned away when he said no? Enough that he started lying and saying he was, at least when they were out of town and no one was around to fact-check the statement.

While she is the center of his universe in so many ways, to the outside world, she’s nothing more than his coworker.

Another thing about airplane cabins that he’s always noticed: they provide a strange sense of privacy. Maybe it’s only imagined, but it exists nonetheless. The ambient sounds of the engine and the air, the ruffle of peanut bags and slosh of watered down drinks being consumed; it gives you the perception that each word that falls from your lips lands only upon the ears of their intended audience. And so he reaches over and brushes his index finger over the exposed flesh of Scully’s wrist until she stirs and blinks her eyes open, furrowing her brow at his intense expression.

“Is something wrong?” she asks, her tongue thick with sleep.

He shakes his head and she plucks a water bottle from the seat back, taking a sip before returning it. Not for the first time, he laments that while his knees are crammed firmly against the seat in front of him, Scully has plenty of room to roam.

“Are we about to land?” she asks next, looking around them and taking in the scene. The cabin lights are still off, as are the fasten seatbelt signs. Many of the passengers are asleep, and the flight attendants are milling around the drink station chatting. She’s flown hundreds of times, enough of them red-eyes to know that they are still mid-flight.

“No, we’re still about an hour out,” he says, and she gives him one of her patented “are you kidding me right now?” stares.

“Care to share why you woke me up then?” she asks, barely concealing her irritation.

“I wanted to talk to you about something,” he offers by way of explanation, and she closes her eyes briefly.

“Right at this exact moment?” she questions, a bit whiny.

“It’s really important,” he replies, and that seems to get her attention.

She shifts her torso so that her back is against the airplane wall, one leg bent at the knee and tucked up onto the seat beside her. Once she’s comfortable, she gives him an expectant look.

“Okay, I’ll preface this by saying that your initial reaction to my proposition might be very...strong, but I really need you to hear me out. Can you promise to do that before you come to any conclusions?” he asks earnestly, keeping his voice relatively low, given the venue.

She quirks an eyebrow at him, intrigued but weary. “Is it absolutely essential that we have this conversation while trapped at thirty-six-thousand feet?” she asks, but her tone is just a little bit facetious, so he continues without directly answering the question.

“Do you promise, or not?” he asks flatly, and she rolls her eyes but then nods. “Okay,” he begins, “I’ve given this a lot of thought, and I’ve been thinking about it for a long time. Years, actually, since you were returned after your abduction. We end up in these situations where one of us is incapacitated, or at risk, or otherwise unsafe. And as your FBI partner, there’s only so much I can do. Only so much you can do, and I think we could better prepare ourselves for future such situations. If we had different legal entitlements, or abilities…protections, different protections...” He’s trying to back into it, to set it up such that by the time he gets to the meat of it, she’ll understand. But her eyebrows are all bunched up in the middle of her forehead and her bottom lip is pushed out like she thinks he’s crazy, so he decides he should just get to the point. “What I’m saying is, I think we should get married.”

She blinks at him, her expression cemented in that same “you’ve really lost it now” look that he’s seen more times that he can count. She lifts her hand and presses the backs of her fingers to his forehead.

“Did you have a cocktail, Mulder?” she asks, slipping her hand down to feel his pulse just under his jaw. His heart is racing, but it’s not because he’s having a medical emergency. He reaches up to pull her hand away, holding it in both of his own.

“I know it sounds crazy, but you promised to hear me out,” he says, and she gives him an incredulous look to top every incredulous look she’s given him in the nearly four years they’ve known each other.

“You’re serious?” she questions, her eyebrows now nearly kissing her hairline.

“Yes, I’m serious, Scully. Think about it; you wouldn’t have had to testify against me if we were married. The law protects spouses from having to testify against one another. And for medical reasons, all the times you’ve needed to make decisions regarding my care and had to fight tooth and nail. If you were my wife, you’d have the legal right to make those decisions.” Her expression is softening just a bit, and he shifts in his seat to mirror her posture, so he can face her fully. “When you were in the ICU after your abduction, it was terrifying to know that your family could have decided to pull the plug on you or have you transferred to a different hospital too far away for me to keep you safe, or any other number of things that I had no control over. I don’t ever want to be in that position again, Scully. I don’t want you to be either.”

He can see the wheels turning in her head, accepting the benefits that legal marriage would allow them.

“But what about...are you...are you speaking in a strictly legal sense or are you suggesting that we live as…?” She doesn’t finish her sentence, but he understands what she’s asking. He shakes his head emphatically.

“Strictly legal sense, nothing else about our relationship or our partnership would change at all. In fact, it would be important that we keep it a secret given that spouses can’t be partnered. Everything would be exactly as it is now, except that when we run up against one of those moments where the legal protection is needed, we can play the marriage card, so to speak.”

She nods softly, her eyes unfocused and dreamy as she contemplates. He’s unsure if he should keep talking, say more about why he came to this conclusion, but just as he’s about to open his mouth, she speaks.

“Okay,” she says, then turns to meet his eye.

“Okay?” he asks, not quite believing that she could come to agree with him so quickly.

“Yes, Mulder, okay. It makes sense. How do you want to do this?”

———

Their arrival at Reagan National Airport becomes a layover as they stay only long enough to procure tickets to Las Vegas and board another plane within the hour. Scully is exhausted but unable to sleep as her mind races with a million questions, chief among them being what the hell are we doing? She knows that it’s crazy, but at the same time it’s exceedingly practical. They’ve been lucky to escape some of the situations they’ve found themselves in with limbs and lives in check; at some point, that luck will run out. Who knows what decisions Mulder’s mother would make on his behalf were she in the position to do so? Scully shudders at the thought. Crazy as this is, it just makes sense.

Mulder glances over at her intermittently from his window seat, perhaps grappling with the same kinds of questions, though he’s barely spoken to her since they boarded the plane. She has the distinct impression that he’s afraid if he says too much, she’ll change her mind. Not being the type to move forward with any big decision before properly vetting it, she finally speaks.

“So how do you imagine this playing out, Mulder? The next time I'm inevitably hospitalized you’ll just say you’re my husband so they let you in? I think my mother might have some questions for me, if that’s the case.”

He snaps his head over to look at her as though he hadn’t realized she was there.

“No, not necessarily. We’ve made it work the last few years by sheer will and the occasional white lie, so I think we can continue to do so. If we reach a point where we need to disclose our marital status it should be a situation dire enough that the consequence of revealing it is a better alternative than not,” he replies levelly. He’s clearly given this a lot of thought.

She turns away for a moment, staring blankly at the Sky Mall brochure tucked into the seat back pocket in front of her.

“I don’t think I would have disclosed it in the congressional hearing,” she says, turning back to look at him. “I think I would still have taken the night in jail, being held in contempt.”

He gives her a little smile and a nod. “I think that probably would have been the right call, at that point. However, if I hadn’t made it back from Russia, and if a night in jail turned into the possibility of a longer stay in prison…” He gives her a pointed look.

“Yeah, I think that would have been the right time to play the marriage card,” she says, returning his smirk.

They hold eye contact for a moment until it starts to feel a little awkward, and she looks away again. They had agreed to visit the chapel tomorrow, after they’ve each had a chance to get some sleep; should she be thinking of tomorrow as her wedding day?

It’s certainly not the way she imagined it would be, not that she’s imagined it all that much. The idea of marriage and children was never one she could visualize without knowing who would occupy the role of groom, husband, father. There was a time she’d considered such a future with Daniel, and even with Ethan, but never very seriously. The other girls at her Catholic high school were putting together scrapbooks full of wedding plans and dreaming about their wedding night, including romanticizing their first time with their future husband, while she was applying to undergrad and researching medical schools.

Their wedding night.

She feels a flush of heat rise to her cheeks at the realization, and she glances over at Mulder. He has to know that a marriage is only legal if it’s consummated, right? Or was this a detail he was going to spring on her later? The beverage cart rattles by on its way back to the front of the plane.

“Excuse me,” she calls out just as the cart passes their aisle. “Can I get a gin and tonic, please?”

Mulder gives her a surprised look. “You don’t usually drink on the job, Scully,” he teases, and she gives him a deadpan expression.

“We’re not exactly on the job anymore, are we?” she retorts, and he shrugs.

“Make it two,” he says to the flight attendant.

Scully downs her drink in four long gulps as Mulder eyes her suspiciously, taking small sips of his own. She waits several minutes until she feels warmth spreading in her belly, and then she turns her head just enough that he’ll know she’s speaking to him, without making eye contact.

“Mulder, are you aware of the fact that an unconsummated marriage isn’t considered fully legal and can easily be annulled?” She uses her professor voice, her talking-to-a-lazy-small-town-sheriff voice, her strictly-business voice because this topic is far too fraught to make light of.

“I am aware of that, yes,” he answers coolly, and she turns to look at his face, which is unreadable.

“And?” she asks with raised eyebrows.

He meets her eye. “And, what? I mean, it’s not ideal if we leave such a loophole in place, but it’s not my decision to make. How would you like to handle it?”

“Handle it?” she repeats, and she sees him fight off a smile.

“No puns intended. It’s really your call, Scully, I’m fine either way,” he replies, taking a sip of his drink.

“That is incredibly unfair, Mulder,” she admonishes him, wishing she had another drink herself.

“How so?” he asks with a perplexed wrinkle of his brow, and she knows he really doesn’t get it.

She shakes her head and busies herself stirring the ice in her empty cup. If she says that yes, they should consummate it, that’s as much as saying she wants to have sex with him. And if she says no, she may as well reject him, in addition to risking voiding the whole transaction if anyone ever found out.

“It’s not a choice I’m comfortable making for both of us,” she finally answers, turning to face him again. “We have to make a decision together.”

“Okay…” he says, considering how to proceed. “Pros and cons? What are the pros of...consummating?” he asks, carefully choosing his words.

She draws in a deep breath.

“Well, it would eliminate the risk of annulment, which would be a serious issue if we were in a position to need to call spousal rights into play,” she responds, pleading with the universe that Mulder does not throw out ‘getting to have sex’ as a pro.

“And cons?” he asks, thankfully not offering any pros of his own.

“Um…it would be quite awkward, I imagine,” she says plainly, and she sees him nod from her periphery.

“So,” he summarizes, “we’ve got possible annulment and whatever consequences come as a result of that, versus...temporary awkwardness.”

They are both quiet for a beat.

“I suppose that decides it,” she says quietly, then steals a glance at him. He gives her a sympathetic little smile.

“I suppose it does,” he says.

The flight attendant passes by again, and Scully turns abruptly, touching her arm to get her attention.

“I’m sorry, can I get another one of these, please?” she asks, holding up her glass.

“Better make it two,” Mulder adds.

Tagging @today-in-fic

[totallyjazzed]

Analysing Copaganda (or "I watched seven seasons of Brooklyn 99 so you don't have to")

Introduction:

Several months ago my parents approached me asking if I wanted to watch Brooklyn 99, not knowing anything about it, my first instinct was to say no, but then I thought it would be interesting, to watch it and write a proper analysis for exactly what makes it propaganda and why it gives liberals brain worms. If you've spent any amount of time engaging with politics online for the last few years, you've likely already heard of Brooklyn 99. It's a sitcom written by Michael Schur, who previously wrote The Office (I'll get to that later), Parks & Recreation, and The Good Place. The show follows the lives of a squad of police detectives in Brooklyn and the wacky hijinks they get up to.

Brooklyn 99 has become famous, or arguably infamous, on Tumblr (and potentially other social media websites too) for being used as a "retort" to anti-cop sentiments (namely ACAB and any variation thereof), mainly taking the form of "the only good cop is Raymond Holt". In this essay (to use a funny Tumblr meme phrase) I will provide a brief overview of the show and the main characters, and analyse how the show, and each character individually, is pro-cop propaganda (copaganda).

The Show:

Brooklyn 99 is The Office, at least from what I understand about The Office. It’s a sitcom based in a workplace in which characters often pull pranks on each other and have wacky adventures pertaining to their job. The main thing that sets it apart from The Office is that the workplace in question is a police station, this makes it a cop show too. However, unlike more “classic” cop shows like CSI, Law & Order, The Wire, and so on, B99 doesn’t seek to glorify it’s characters as action heroes, but rather paint them as normal people living normal lives. This is far more insidious than the picture of the gnarled man of action who doesn’t play by the book, and by making the characters relatable the show gives viewers people to project onto, making them more vulnerable to the propaganda of the show.

Occasionally, in a break from the antics of Relatable Immature Prankster Archetype and Funny Overly Attached Best Friend Archetype, the show will attempt to say something about racism, or homophobia, or misogyny, or something like that, and while it usually feels well-meaning it often falls flat as it’s a watered-down safe-for-TV version of whatever the issue du jour is. 

In S4E16 (“Moo Moo”), Terry is harassed by a racist cop while he doesn’t have his badge, and is almost arrested until he manages to prove his cop status, the rest of the episode revolves around how racism is bad and that one singular racist cop is a problem, in the end Terry submits a complaint to the NYPD higher-ups and gets his job application denied, and the racist cop gets away with a slap on the wrist. Throughout the show, Captain Holt tells stories about how he suffered from racism and homophobia, and still does. Transphobia is mentioned once (presumably for brownie points) in a throwaway line about Ace Ventura.

At the end of Season 4, Jake and Rosa are framed for a series of bank robberies and sent to prison, and the first two episodes of Season 5 work to show that prison is bad and prisoners are mistreated, they also make abundantly clear that everyone in prison is a menace and deserves to be there (Jake’s cellmate is a literal cannibal and he’s shown to be one of the nice inmates), once the duo are released from jail, there are a few lines here and there about how prison is bad, but they’re only throwaways used to serve as one-off jokes and never again used as an actual critique of the prison system.

Police Brutality is never mentioned, the closest it comes to bringing it up is in S1E19 (“Tactical Village”), where Rosa is introduced to a sonic-blast weapon and aims it as Charles, this is clearly supposed to be a very harmful piece of equipment, but it's only appearance is treated as a joke.

There are also recurring gags about Defense Lawyers being “the enemy” because they only defend guilty parties (the show heavily implies that none of the squad has ever arrested the wrong person), which meshes with the harmful stereotype in cop shows of only guilty people saying for a lawyer or a warrant or whatever, which has been documented before by others.

The Characters:

Jake Peralta (played by Andy Samberg) is the Relatable Immature Prankster Archetype I mentioned before, he’s the office funnyman and usually responsible for the majority of the goings-on and goings-wrong in the show, while he does mature and evolve through the show he never grows out of this character. He’s the closest the show gets to the “gnarled man of action who doesn’t play by the book” character I mentioned before, not because he is that character but because he wants to be, his favourite movie is Die Hard and it’s the reason he joined the police, so he could be like the cool bruce willis man. He’s also the most unlawful character on the show, in S1E7 (“48 Hours”), he arrests a man with no evidence and the squad is essentially locked down until evidence can be found, in the end it turns out the man is guilty. Jake is scolded for this, not for essentially breaking the law, but for wasting everyone’s time when they had much better things to do that night. Jake’s character is propaganda because he’s the zany relatable one with a heart of gold.

Amy Santiago (played by Melissa Fumero) is the overly-organised hyper-nerd archetype, in direct opposition to Jake. Her dream is to be the NYPD’s youngest female captain, and she’s very “I want to keep the people safe” in her approach to policing. In S3E3 (“Boyle’s Hunch”), she is used as the face of the NYPD’s poster campaign, only to have her image vandalised, which is painted by the show as being very bad and sad. Amy’s character is propaganda because she’s the uptight peacekeeper who sticks to the rules.

Charles Boyle (played by Joe Lo Truglio) is the Funny Overly Attached Best Friend Archetype I mentioned before, often depicted as bumbling and naive, he’s an incredibly competent detective, arguably more so than Jake. He’s usually polite and friendly, and has moments of childishness that compliment Jake’s character. Charles’ character is propaganda because he’s the nice guy who just wants what’s best for everyone.

Raymond Holt (played by Andre Braugher) is probably the character most people are aware of, he’s a somewhat stuck-up man who embodies a lot of the same characteristics as Amy, he’s highly-educated, incredibly smart and quick-witted, and emotionally restrained. Originally presented as an outsider, being the new guy to the pre-existing friendgroup, he learns to relax and let go over the course of the show, and acts almost as a father figure to the other characters, primarily Jake and Amy. Raymond’s character is propaganda because he’s a black gay cop.

Rosa Diaz (played by Stephanie Beatriz) is tough, aloof, and often scary in the eyes of the other characters, she is shown to have problems with engaging with people socially, particularly romantically, and while her exterior is rough as uncaring, she’s shown to be fiercely loyal and have some not-so-tough secrets. In Season 5 she comes out to the squad as Bisexual. Rosa’s character is propaganda because she’s the no-nonsense tough cop who secretly has a heart of gold.

Terry Jeffords (played by Terry Crews) is a kind and caring man with a firm-but-fair attitude, acting as Holt’s second-in-command he also acts as a father figure to the other characters, he has two (eventually three) children which he is often seen gushing about. He is the most mature of the group, on-par with Holt in some respects but sometimes more so, refusing to take part in hijinks to focus on his job. Terry’s character is propaganda because he’s the physically strong and imposing, yet kind cop who just wants to provide for his family.

Michael Hitchcock (played by Dirk Blocker) and Norm Scully (played by Joel McKinnon Miller) are an inseparable pair of bumbling, lazy, oafs. Scully is fat, lazy, and old, Hitchcock is lecherous, lazy, and old. They’re propaganda because they’re the lazy incompetent cop archetype.

There are plenty of minor recurring characters, as well as Gina Linetti, a main character who left after Season 6, however as she’s a liaison and not a cop I won’t be analysing her in detail.

There’s a lot more I could have mentioned here, from the dirty cop that sense Jake and Rosa to jail, or the police commissioner who wants to spy on everyone’s phones all at once, Holt even says the line “I don’t want to live in a Police State”, but I’ve left them out for the sake of brevity.

Conclusion:

Brooklyn 99 is copaganda to it’s very core, this much everyone already knows, but unlike serious cop dramas and high-stakes high-action cop shows, Brooklyn 99 offers viewers an escape to a world where the police are the force for good that people want them to be. The premise of “The Office but police” suckers people in with nostalgia for the late 2000s/early 2010s back when things were “good”. Given Michael Schur’s previous work I imagine he and the other writers didn’t explicitly set out to make copaganda, but it’s undeniable that this is what was achieved. And now with the political climate being what it is and the threat of a potential Season 8 addressing this year’s BLM protests, it’s now more important than ever to be able to identify and root out police propaganda, no matter how unassuming, no matter the source.

[dana-sculy]

Vive Ut Vivas - Chapter One

Okay, y’all. I’m not exactly writing material, but I gave it a shot and this was decent enough for me to post it (who am I kidding, it’s trash, sorry not sorry). You can find it in ao3 here.

—————————————

This is an alternate following to the episode One Breath. After Scully is released from hospital, she takes refugee in Melissa’s appartment and they go through the pain of what happened to her. I always thought Melissa deserved better than dying, so this explores her character and her relationship with Scully. She is also the leading factor to Mulder and Scully finally having a decent talk about their feelings, and whatever comes after that.

—————————————-

Sometimes people are the last ones to see what’s right in from of them. Either from fear of the truth or from not believing it could quite be true. But these two are a case to be studied. I’d had a lot of men in my life, but God, they were no Fox Mulder.

I saw how he’d acted when Dana was dying, when hope was only a distant memory to him. I felt the darkness that emanated from him, and if my sister was trapped on a place between life and death, I bet this poor man was likely to be the thing holding her there.

So much to be said to each other. I know my sister more than her own shadow, and Dana was never the best at exposing her emotions to others, especially when they were deep.

“I knew there was a reason to live.” – She said, joking. It’s so good to see my sister smile, even if it’s still a week one. After all we’ve been through these last couple of days, it helps the tension in the room to dissipate a little.

He says his goodbye and touches her hand briefly, but it’s when their eyes meet that I have to hold my breath. There’s so much there: care, affection, hope. I suddenly feel like I’m intruding. It’s not exactly something private, some intimate demonstration of love, but their eye contact shares more than what’s there to be seen. It makes me feel like an outsider just to be around, like they were the only ones in the room and I just entered the wrong place at the wrong time. What was said between them is something I’ll probably never know, but I’m sure they do.

A minute passes by. I notice how Mulder looks nothing of what he looked before; his smile is warm, genuine now, and even Dana shares one or two when he’s around. That is certainly a meaningful exchange.

As soon as the door closes, her mother’s eyes meet hers. She’s noticed it too. If it bothers her, she doesn’t show. A mother always knows – Melissa can almost hear her say. They will save this conversation for later, though: right now Dana is alive and back from the dead, and that’s all that matters after all.

…

When I hear the phone ring, I immediately know it’s her. What surprises me is that my sister accepted my invitation to stay with me for the week, after being released from the hospital. You see, she has always had this terrible habit of closing herself after a moment of vulnerability, even if it was just me there, trying to help. I know it started because of our father, when her rebellious side decided she had something to prove to him, to prove her strong. When you grow up in a house of navy men, you learn to be tough. But I guess I dealt with it the light way and she chose the hard one.

Maybe that’s changing too. – I smile to myself. My apartment isn’t exactly as big and cozy as hers, but the two of us have always found comfort in each other’s company. Besides, it will give me just the opportunity I need to have a heart-to-heart conversation with Dana.

…

As I expected, she doesn’t let me pick her up at the hospital. I’ll let it pass this time, since I’m more than happy with her presence.

Half an hour has passed by when the doorbell finally rings and I hear the thud of her bags on the other side of the door. I rise from my spot on the couch and go open it for her.

“Mel, I don’t know if you made plans for today, but I can’t stay long. I have to present myself to the FBI as soon as possible so they can evaluate me and decide when I’ll be able to return to work again.” – As if to make her point clear, Dana does that eyebrow thing of hers that really annoys me.

“I know, I know. I’ll not step on your toes, sis, as long as you let me make plans for tomorrow. I missed you. It’s not gonna hurt if you spend some time away from Fox and everything to have some fun with your sister, right? – When the word “Fox” reaches her ears I’m sure she took the bait.

“You know, it’s not like that. We’re just partners. If there’s a reason for my eagerness to go back to work it’s just that I want at least a resemblance of my previous, normal life, that’s all.” – Yeah, right, sweetie. She truly believes that, poor thing.

“And the fact that he’s extremely attractive and obviously crazy about you does nothing to change that point of yours, Dana?” – Her eyes dart away from me for a second, and she tries her hardest to fight back a smile surging in the corners of her mouth. Even if she was successful at that, I know her way too much not to notice her signs: she likes him. She just probably doesn’t know it yet.

I remember when we still lived with mom, back when I was nineteen and she had just turned seventeen. At the time, she was into this guy named Paul, who was one of her friends. Whenever I mentioned him she would smile like a kid in a Christmas shop. Old Dana may hide her smile better, but it’s all the same.

“He’s not…crazy about me, Melissa. He trusts me, and we’re friends. Considering what happened to me, he’s happy to see me well again, and probably relieved too. He has this bad tendency to think everything is his fault.”

“Dana, I had boyfriends who cared less for me than he does for you. Mom had to drive him out of the hospital and take him to a restaurant to be sure he would even eat.” – she rolls her eyes at my comment, like she usually does when she wants to avoid talking about something.

“Look, I’m not trying to fight here. I just found you two… intriguing.” – I pose the devilish smile I can get. She can’t help but smile after that.

We stop talking about her partner as Dana guides herself through my place, looking around. She takes her time and then comes back to the couch, where I languidly rest while I wait for her little tour to end.

The floor of the apartment was an old-fashioned parquet with a blend of deep homely browns that contrasted with creamy-colored walls, on which lots of photographs were hanged: there were ones of me, Dana, mom and dad, my brothers and the closest of my friends.

On top of the fireplace, a delicate painting catches her attention – it was a landscape: the coastline jagged, covered by inlets where the water laid still. In the orange-kissed sky, the last vestiges of daylight contrasted with the growing black of cliffs, jagged and folded, shrinking into the distance.

Bursting through the large windows made of glass, she saw shafts of light streaming through the gaps in the linen curtains.

It’s the first time Dana comes to visit me here. It’s been a long time since I stayed in a place for more than one or two months, and after a while, she stopped coming to me and I started going to her place instead. It felt easier for us to spend time together.

When Dana’s finished, she sits next to me on the couch and rests her head on my shoulder. We stay this way for some time, in a quiet, yet comfortable silence. Her hair mingles with mine, leaving a delicious orange sent that probably came from her shampoo.

“Hmm.” – I hear her sigh on my side.

“Dana, can I ask you another thing? And please promise you’ll be honest with me.”

“Fine.” – She complies, defeated. I feel her tiny hand resting on mine, and we interlace our fingers.

“What made you come back? I mean, from the coma?” – I say barely above a whisper, choosing the words carefully.

She takes her time to answer, the thin lines of her forehead contorted in concentration. Finally, she speaks.

“I don’t know. At least, not with certitude.” – I release my breath, and when I’m about to disentangle with her, she holds me where I am. – “The truth is, I’m having a hard time figuring out what was part of my imagination and what was real. The things I’ve heard and seen during my state of coma, it’s all messed up, Mel. When I listened to Mulder’s voice calling me back, I…” – she sighs with frustration.

“Dana, please… don’t. Don’t close yourself now. I’m with you, and I believe that, if you decided to come here, at least some part of you wants me to help you heal.” – I take a strand of her beautiful hair and put it behind her ear, making her look at me. – “We’re sisters and I almost lost you. Please just let us be like we used to, we used to tell each other everything.” – When she meets my gaze, her eyes finally give in, and all the emotions she’s sinking down finally subside into quiet tears.

[crescentmoon223]

Two Worlds Collide Chapter 11

Read it on AO3 | Rated: NC-17 | Stella x Scully

Chapter 11

Stella pushed through the door into the lobby of her hotel, a mixture of relief and frustration fizzing inside her. As tired as she was, the prospect of a night alone in her hotel room felt unbearable. Her gaze flitted to the bar on her left. A month ago, she would have gone straight in and found a willing stranger to occupy her evening. Knowing that she couldn’t chafed at her nerves. Realizing that she didn’t even want to made her eye twitch.

Her heels clicked briskly over the polished floors, not betraying her inner discomfort. She hadn’t slept well last night, had missed lunch, and had spent too many hours sitting in a too-hard plastic chair reviewing case notes with a misogynistic pig of a man who took issue with every word that left her mouth. She should have stopped at the restroom before she left the station, but she’d been in too much of a hurry to get the fuck out of there. Consequently, she needed to pee, her stomach ached with hunger, her feet hurt, her ribs hurt, her neck hurt. In short, she was an absolute mess.

Happy Fucking Birthday, Stella.

And yet, she considered stopping for a drink. Just a drink. A little something to numb the pain before she went up to her empty room. Before she didn’t call Scully because it felt too disingenuous to call today and not mention the date. But as her feet slowed in front of the bar, her gaze caught on an entirely-too-familiar waterfall of red hair on a petite figure perched on the barstool nearest to the lobby.

Heat wound its way through her, crawling over her skin, making her jaw clench. Arousal. Irritation. Anger. What the fuck was Scully doing here?

Stella stalked to the empty stool beside her, sliding carefully onto it. Scully turned to face her, beaming at Stella with a smile so bright, she almost had to squint against the power of it. After a moment of pointed silence, though, Scully’s smile dimmed. She called the bartender over and ordered a whiskey for Stella to match the tumbler sitting on the bar in front of her.

“What are you doing here?” Stella finally asked as the bartender set a glass in front of her. She murmured a thank you as she lifted it to her lips, taking a hearty swallow.

“I think you know.” Scully sipped her whiskey, darting a glance over at her.

“Who told you?”

“Stephen,” Scully said with a small smile. “He tipped me off when I brought you lunch the other day.”

Stella took another gulp of her whiskey, feeling it burn all the way down her esophagus, igniting her temper. What was Chen thinking, meddling in her business like this? He knew she didn’t like a fuss. The whole office knew, but Chen knew her better than most, well enough to have known better.

“I thought you’d be happier to see me.” Scully swung one foot against the edge of the bar, drawing Stella’s gaze to her legs, bare from the knee down.

She swallowed more whiskey, her gaze wandering slowly over the slinky black dress Scully wore. It wrinkled at her hips where she sat, and Stella wanted to take the bunched material between her fingers and pull Scully against her, kiss her, fuck her, use her to blot out the darkness in her mind. Then she saw the way Scully’s breasts spilled over its lowcut bodice, and her brain went up in flames. Fuck. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you in a dress before.”

“I don’t wear them often.” Scully glanced over at her again, eyes probing Stella’s, trying to read her mood. She’d worn a dress for Stella’s birthday. Suddenly, her throat felt too thick.

“I’m sorry.” She dragged her gaze away from Scully, staring into the amber depths of what remained of her whiskey. “I’m not very good company tonight.”

“I can see that.”

Stella blinked at her unexpected candor. “I don’t like a fuss.”

“Then I won’t make one.” Scully leaned subtly closer, drawing Stella’s gaze again to the way her breasts were poured into that dress. “You look like you’ve had a shit day.”

“I have,” she admitted. The whole week had been shit so far. She’d seldom faced such open hostility from a precinct when she was sent in for a review. They were completely fixated on the former officer who’d been accused of the crime, and while he was definitely a fuck-up, Stella didn’t think he was guilty of rape. If only she could convince the prick in charge to listen to her.

“I’m here to make it better,” Scully said softly.

Stella exhaled, her spine softening as she heard the truth in Scully’s words. She was taking her pissy mood out on the person who least deserved it. Scully was dressed to go out, had probably come here tonight with big plans, an evening Stella simply wasn’t up for. She couldn’t bear the thought of polite dinner conversation, hours more in her heels. But for Scully…perhaps she could find the strength for it somewhere inside herself.

Scully shifted closer to Stella on her barstool, sipping her whiskey. “Tough case?”

“Aren’t they all?”

A smile touched Scully’s lips. “Some more than others.”

“It’s not the case as much as the DCI in charge of it,” Stella said.

“Ah. He must be a real asshole to have you this riled up.”

“He is.” Stella took another drink of her whiskey, watching the way the light glinted off Scully’s cross pendant as it dangled just above her cleavage.

“For the record, I don’t like a fuss on my birthday either,” Scully told her. “But sometimes it’s nice to be pleasantly surprised.” Her hand crept over to squeeze Stella’s beneath the bar.

Stella breathed past the lump in her throat, the sudden, overwhelming surge of affection for the woman sitting beside her. She hated surprises, even pleasant ones. But she couldn’t seem to hate anything about Dana Scully.

“Is this anti-celebratory mood a Gibson family trait, or just you?” Scully asked, her expression gentle yet probing. No doubt, she’d realized Stella never mentioned her family. They were both detectives after all.

“Both, I guess,” she answered.

“It can’t be both,” Scully said, her tone teasing.

“My mother doesn’t celebrate much of anything, although she did call today,” Stella told her. “We aren’t close.”

“And your father?”

“He died when I was fourteen.”

“Oh.” Her hand found Stella’s again beneath the bar. “I’m sorry.” It seemed ludicrous that Scully didn’t already know this formational fact about Stella, but she had only herself to blame for it.

“Ancient history,” Stella told her, but sitting here with Scully, body aching after a long, stressful day, it didn’t feel so ancient. She remembered the fresh soapy scent of his aftershave when he hugged her, the bright glint of his eyes when he laughed, the pure unadulterated happiness she’d felt when she was with him. Nothing in her life had ever been the same after he died.

Some of this must have shown on her face, because Scully said, “You and your dad were close.”

“Yes.”

They lapsed into silence for a minute as both of them polished off what remained of their whiskey. Scully turned toward her, understanding gleaming in the indigo depths of her eyes as her knee bumped into Stella’s. “I had planned to take you out somewhere nice, but on second thought, I think tonight calls for room service.”

“Please,” Stella said gratefully. In truth, nothing sounded better.

Scully paid for their drinks, linking her fingers in Stella’s as she led the way toward the elevator. “Anything you want tonight, Stella.”

She raised her eyebrows. “Anything?”

Scully’s eyes glinted dangerously. “Anything.”

***

Scully sat on the edge of the bed, feet swinging restlessly. Stella had excused herself as soon as they’d reached her room and gone into the bathroom, and she’d been in there long enough now that Scully was starting to worry, really worry, that she’d fucked up by coming here. Stella certainly hadn’t been happy to see her, but then, she’d seemed to warm up to her before they came upstairs.

A sick feeling swirled in her stomach. What if she’d made a difficult day worse for Stella? Why was today so hard for her? Why hadn’t Scully respected her boundaries in the first place? Her eyes stung.

The bathroom door opened, and Stella emerged, barefoot and bare faced, wearing her pale pink silk robe. She looked tired. Maybe even a bit vulnerable. But not angry. In fact, the hungry gleam in her eye seemed to hint that she might be glad for company tonight after all.

Scully meant what she’d told her earlier. She would do anything to make Stella’s birthday a little brighter. She’d had a difficult few months, and while Scully had second-guessed herself about a million times before coming here tonight, ultimately, she couldn’t bear the thought of Stella being alone on her birthday.

Scully walked to her now, resting her hands on Stella’s hips as she leaned in for a gentle kiss. She kicked off her heels, bringing herself down to Stella’s level so their lips lined up perfectly. She might never truly get over the thrill of kissing someone without having to go up on her tiptoes.

Stella exhaled into their kiss before dropping her forehead against Scully’s, eyes sliding shut. “I’m glad you’re here.”

“So am I.” Scully swallowed her smile, as pleased by Stella’s affection as she was concerned by the exhaustion in her face. She slid her hands up Stella’s back, feeling the knots of tension bunched in her muscles. “How do you feel about back rubs?”

Stella let out a little sound of relief. “Sounds so good right now.”

“Lay on the bed,” Scully said, giving her a nudge in that direction.

“Should I take this off?” Stella tugged at the sleeve of her robe.

“Your choice.”

Stella lay face down on the bed, still wearing the robe, wincing as her chest came into contact with the mattress. Dammit, Stella. Scully had glimpsed the wet swimsuit hanging in the bathroom. She knew it was a better option than some of Stella’s other coping mechanisms for a rough week, but she obviously hadn’t done her cracked ribs any favors.

And Scully couldn’t relax her with a back rub while she was in pain. She walked to the closet and pulled out the extra pillows and blanket she found there, carrying them to the bed. Then she propped them beneath Stella until she’d taken the pressure of the mattress off her ribs. “Better?” she asked.

Stella nodded, eyes closed and looking far more comfortable than she had when she first lay down. Scully worked her skirt up her thighs so that she could crouch over her, placing her hands on Stella’s shoulders, thumbs pressed into the knots between her shoulder blades. Stella inhaled sharply.

“Okay?” Scully asked, receiving another nod in response. She kneaded her fingers into Stella’s trapezius muscle, gradually increasing pressure as she worked through the knots she found there. Stella seemed to melt into the bed, eyes closed, body gradually loosening beneath Scully’s fingers.

Once she’d worked the tension from Stella’s shoulders, she made her way down her back, kneading and stroking, rubbing away the effects of a stressful day. By the time she’d reached Stella’s glutes, she almost thought she’d fallen asleep, she’d gotten so still, so relaxed, so quiet. But as Scully’s fingers slid over the backs of her thighs, Stella’s hips shifted, arching into her touch.

Scully smiled. “Still with me?”

“Mm,” Stella murmured, shifting again beneath Scully.

Scully sank her fingers into Stella’s hamstrings, carefully massaging away the strain of countless hours in heels and however many laps in the pool. Stella sighed deeply into the pillow beneath her, golden curls fanned out over her shoulders, so beautiful, even if she did look a bit like a fallen angel in this position.

“Any other parts that need attention?” Scully whispered as her fingers slid beneath the hem of Stella’s robe.

“Yes,” Stella breathed. “Please.”

Scully skimmed her fingers up Stella’s bare skin to the juncture of her thighs, finding her already wet, so wet. An ache grew between Scully’s thighs as she began to stroke Stella, doing what she could to erase the last of the tension from her body. She lay beside Stella, pressing their bodies together as she worked Stella with her fingers, swirling and plunging, drawing a gasp from her throat.

Stella rolled to her side, moving the pillows out from under herself, drawing Scully in closer, replacing their somewhat awkward position with a much more friendly one, chests pressed together, legs entwined and mouths meeting for a messy kiss as Scully continued to finger-fuck her.

Stella panted against Scully’s neck, fingers gripping her dress, trying to bring her impossibly closer. She came with a gasp, body tensing against Scully’s before she collapsed onto the pile of pillows behind her, eyes closed and breathing hard.

“I think that’s what they call a happy ending massage,” Scully said, leaning over to brush a golden strand of hair out of Stella’s face.

“Fuck, yes,” Stella said, chest heaving, cheeks stained a satisfied pink.

“Better now?” Scully asked as she crawled in next to her.

“So much better,” Stella murmured, one arm coming around Scully, pulling her flush against her body. The crystalline depths of her eyes were calm now, her body relaxed against Scully’s. “Shame you got all dressed up like that.”

“Not really,” Scully told her. “We’ll go out another night. And your present is under this dress.”

“Is it?” Stella’s interest sharpened, lips pursing in one of her almost-smiles as her gaze dropped to the dress.

“Yes.”

“And I get to unwrap it?” Stella asked.

Scully felt a warm flush spread over her skin. “Yes.”

“Now?”

“If you like.”

“Oh, I like,” Stella murmured, pushing herself upright. “Stand up for me.”

Scully climbed off the bed, ridiculously pleased and equally aroused that Stella had taken so quickly to the game. Also, to see Stella looking so much calmer and more comfortable than she had when she first approached Scully in the bar downstairs. Now, she looked like a woman enjoying herself on her birthday, and it made Scully irrationally proud and just…so happy to see her this way.

Stella stood there for a moment, gaze raking from Scully’s face to her pink-painted toes as if deciding how best to unwrap her. Scully’s body sizzled beneath her stare, heat building everywhere. Finally, Stella stepped forward, pressing Scully against the wall, kissing her deeply as her hands roamed over the dress, sliding over the slinky fabric, pressing here and there to give herself a hint as to what lay beneath.

She palmed Scully’s breast, pinching her nipple through the fabric. “Lace?”

“Maybe,” she gasped, desire tightening in her core.

“You know just what I like,” Stella murmured as her fingers traveled behind Scully’s back, slowly dragging down the zipper of her dress. She resisted the urge to shrug it off her shoulders, letting Stella have the honors. She looked at Scully now, eyes bright, amused, aroused, despite the dark smudges beneath them. Lips quirking, she pushed Scully’s dress off her shoulders, and it slipped to the floor in a whoosh of fabric, leaving Scully standing before her in the sapphire blue lace bodysuit she’d bought yesterday just for this occasion.

Stella sucked in a breath, pinching her bottom lip between her teeth as she again raked her gaze over Scully, pupils blown with lust. Scully had never felt so aroused from watching someone look at her, getting off on the fact that Stella was getting off on looking at her. It was disorienting. And surreal. And hot.

Stella traced her fingers reverently over the lace containing Scully’s breasts, her breath quickening. “My favorite color.”

“Really?” she couldn’t help asking, because she wasn’t sure she’d ever seen Stella wear blue.

“On you,” she said softly, fingers sliding over lace, nails skimming Scully’s sensitive flesh. “My favorite color on you.”

***

Stella roused at a knock on the door, realizing as she blinked through her disorientation that she must have dozed off in bed while they waited for room service to arrive.

“Don’t move,” Scully said, pressing a kiss against her cheek. “I’ll get it.” She slipped out of bed and wrapped herself in Stella’s robe, finger-combing her hair as she looked around for her purse, pulling out a bill to tip the attendant who’d brought their food.

Stella tugged at the sheet, making sure she was fully covered before the door opened. God, she wasn’t sure she even had the energy to sit up, let alone eat. She was so tired, still sore, although less so since Scully’s magical massage and the two orgasms she’d delivered, one before and one after Stella had unwrapped her birthday lingerie. What had she ever done to deserve someone like Scully in her life, even temporarily?

“Happy Birthday,” Scully said, wheeling a cart toward the bed that contained much more than silver room service platters. On one side, a bottle of champagne was chilling in a bucket of ice. An arrangement of flowers stood between the two trays, big squishy peonies in various shades of pink, so beautiful they made Stella’s eyes well with tears. “I know how much you like fresh flowers, and I thought you might like some for your room while you’re here.”

“I do. They’re beautiful.” She blinked, trying desperately to clear her vision, but it was no use. The tears slipped over her cheeks, and she swiped them away. “Thank you. Really. That was very thoughtful of you.”

Scully smiled as she sat on the side of the bed, and the sight of her in Stella’s favorite pink robe was playing all kinds of tricks on her mind, mostly making her want to pull Scully against her and kiss her senseless. “Also, fudge,” Scully said, holding up a white paper bag. “It reminded me of our first night together.”

“It was our second night, as I recall,” Stella said, smiling at the memory. “You didn’t get that off the room service menu.”

“No,” Scully said with a pleased smile. “I left these things at the front desk earlier, while I was waiting for you.”

“A woman who plans ahead.” Stella leaned over to kiss her before burying her nose in the flowers, inhaling their crisp floral scent. Just the thought of having them here for the rest of the week made it feel so much more bearable.

Scully popped open the bottle of champagne. She poured two flutes, handing one to Stella. “To the year ahead.”

Stella tapped her glass against Scully’s, not knowing how to respond to that. What would the year ahead bring? For Stella? For Scully? For their time together? She couldn’t think about any of it, not tonight, anyway. Instead, she sipped, letting the cold, tart bubbles fill her mouth and fizz their way down to her stomach.

Scully lifted the lids off their trays and set them on the floor, and the room filled with the rich scent of beef. Stella’s stomach rumbled loudly, and she pressed a hand against it with a rueful smile. She slipped into her nightgown before crawling across the sheets to join Scully in front of the food.

She and Scully sat side by side on the hotel bed, eating burgers and fries, the bag of fudge on the nightstand, and it was so much like that other night, the night they’d caught Ronnie Strickland, the night Stella had first bared her scars to Scully. Tonight, she sat confidently beside her, not much caring that the gown did little to hide the ancient scars on her legs.

They were mostly quiet as they ate, sneaking glances at each other, sharing smiles and occasional kisses between bites. It was so much like that other night, but also…not at all. They were so much older now, so much wiser, so much more comfortable with each other, even if they’d only been reunited a few short weeks ago.

Somehow, the connection between them seemed so much more firmly rooted than it should have been, given the handful of scattered phone calls and emails they’d exchanged in the intervening years. They were halfway through the bottle of champagne by the time they’d finished their burgers and Scully brought the bag of fudge onto the bed.

“You spoil me,” Stella murmured as Scully handed her a piece of dark chocolate fudge, her favorite. All her favorite things. How did she already know Stella so well? How was she so good at all of this?

“As you deserve,” Scully responded with a playful smile, popping a bite of caramel fudge into her mouth. “This is new since that night,” she added, touching the tattoo on Stella’s wrist. “What does it mean?”

Stella stared at the Sanskrit letters inked there, a warm flush spreading over her skin as she debated how to answer. But surely, this was one small truth she could give her, after Scully had given her so much. “It means rebirth, to start over again.”

“Nice,” Scully said casually before her eyes widened, her mouth going slack as the meaning of Stella’s tattoo sank in. “Oh.”

Stella looked away, intensely uncomfortable, skin tight and prickly, cheeks burning.

“Like mine,” Scully whispered.

“In a way.” She’d gotten it not long after Scully’s first visit, when she’d caught her first serial killer, her first big victory as a Detective Sergeant. It was a celebration of the next chapter in her life, a reminder that her life would always evolve, always move forward as long as she was here to drive it. Maybe she’d been thinking of Scully and her ouroboros when she chose it.

She’d certainly never thought she’d sit here and explain it to the woman herself, to give her this insight into the effect she’d had on Stella’s life, the impact she continued to have. Was there any end to the ways she could knock Stella’s world off its axis, send her spinning when she thought she’d figured herself out?

“Mine got ruined,” Scully said quietly.

Stella turned to her in surprise. “What?”

In response, Scully slipped out of the pink robe, turning her bare back to Stella. She leaned over, squinting more closely at the multi-colored snake on Scully’s back. A scar shone in the center of it now, bisecting the snake through its belly, its colors muted and blurred beneath the shiny tissue. The scar was wide and jagged, obviously the result of some sort of wound. “What happened?” Stella asked.

“Don’t laugh,” Scully said, eyebrows rising to warn Stella that her story was going to involve an X File.

“Of course not.” She would never laugh at Scully, especially not over anything that had caused her so much pain.

“I was abducted by a religious cult that believed this enormous parasitic worm was the second coming of Christ,” Scully said.

“Jesus,” Stella whispered.

“And they put it in me. In my spine.” Scully shuddered, wrapping her arms around her abdomen. “I was pregnant.”

Stella just stared as this information worked its way through her brain. “They put a giant parasitic worm in your spine? That’s what made the scar on your back?”

She nodded. “Agent Doggett had to cut it out of me before it reached my brain. It was…horrifying.”

“That sounds like an understatement,” Stella said quietly. “And you were pregnant with William?”

She nodded as a tear slid over her cheek. “My miracle baby, and they put that thing inside me…”

Stella reached for her, pulling her against her chest. Sometimes she wondered if she would ever fully understand all the horrific things Scully had endured during her time with the X Files. And here she was fretting over Paul Spector cracking her ribs. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay,” Scully murmured against her chest. “It wasn’t in me very long, and obviously it didn’t end up affecting my pregnancy. It did ruin my tattoo, though.”

“I don’t think so,” Stella told her, fingers combing through the auburn depths of Scully’s hair. “Just added character to it, that’s all.”

“A little added life experience.” Scully sat up, smile back in place.

They ate more fudge and polished off the last of the champagne before clearing away the remnants of their meal. Room service trays went into the hall, and the vase of flowers sat on the desk next to what remained of the bag of fudge. They got ready for bed, climbing in beside each other.

Fatigue weighed heavy on Stella, as it had every night this week. But tonight, with Scully beside her, she slipped easily into sleep, not stirring until Scully’s alarm went off sometime later.

“Sorry,” Scully whispered as she reached for her phone and silenced it. Outside, the sky was still ink black. “I didn’t mean to wake you, but I have to catch the train back to London before my shift starts.”

Fourteen years ago, it had been Stella sneaking off at the crack of dawn to go to work. “It’s okay. I wouldn’t have wanted you to leave without saying goodbye.”

“Me either.” Scully leaned in to place a quick kiss against her lips before she slid out of bed. She went into the bathroom, returning a few minutes later wearing blue scrubs, hair pulled back in a ponytail. She wandered around the room, shoving things into the duffel bag she’d brought with her before sitting on the bed to give Stella one last kiss. “Bye.”

Stella reached out and grabbed her wrist. “Thank you, for last night.”

“You’re welcome.” Scully gave her a warm smile. “I hope you’re back home soon.”

“I should be back this weekend.”

“Let’s go out then,” Scully suggested. “A fancy dinner, something fun? A real date.”

“Yes,” Stella agreed. “I’d like that.”

“Okay, then. I’ve got to run, or I’m going to miss my train.” She leaned in for one more kiss and then slid off the bed. She paused by the desk, sneaking a piece of fudge with a guilty smile before heading for the door with a wave.

Stella watched her go, wondering how she could ever really tell her how much last night had meant to her. She hadn’t shared anything that meaningful on her birthday since before her father died. And before she could let herself ponder that uncomfortable truth any further, she climbed out of bed. Following Scully’s lead, she popped a piece of fudge in her mouth as she went into the bathroom to get her swimsuit.

She had laps to complete before heading into the office.

[frangipanidownunder]

Top 5 Most Underrated MSR Moments

There were so many I didn’t choose and these aren’t in a particular order but here are a selection:

1 Pilot bed scene

I mean…she’s bared herself and then he bares his soul. It’sdark, it’s raining, they’re in the same motel room. He’s telling her his deepestsecrets, this young woman he’s just met. A spy! Fox Mulder is a paranoic, self-absorbed,fringe-dwelling, shattered soul and yet he’s willing to tell her his life storyin such an intimate setting.

2 Dreamland

I’d kiss you if you weren’t so damned ugly

They get to know more about each other in this episode inthe most unlikely ways. He thinks he’s smart, knowing all her quirks but heforgets her badge number and that must drive him mad. She is instantly shockedat the change in Morris/Mulder – the cigarettes and the flirtation but shestill puts up with him because she’s known him for years and gets that he’s a moody,strange bastard. BUT WHEN HE TRIES IT ON IN THE BEDROOM SHE KNOWS IT’S NOTMULDER. And when they meet, that exchange is perfect. They DO know each other.So well. There’s such a deep subtext at work here. If the reversal goes wrong,that’s the end. Love it!

3 Field Trip

The handholding scene

This is the perfect end to a goddamned brilliant episode. Ilove the whole point of this story – the fact that the writers tease out theworst points of their personalities and yet they are still desperate to saveeach other. Scully is so rational yet she’s the only one who believes Mulder’sdeath is suspicious is so great. And Mulder realises that he relies on Scully’srationalism. They NEED each other and this ep focuses on just that.

4 Detour

The night scene

I love the whole exchange. Scully’s honesty about her cancerand her fears. That’s some vulnerability our tough girl is showing there. AndMulder’s always a good listener when it comes to these things. And he’sdeflecting here too. His humour about the head of hair, the Flintstonequestion. It’s pure Mulder having to be an emotional person, not a driven FBIagent. Bonus points for ‘I don’t want to wrestle’ and the look he has when shestarts singing.

5 Anasazi

When Scully shoots Mulder

I mean, so romantic! But it does set off the chain of eventsthat sees her applying her logic to save Mulder. I love the deadpan way sheanswers his surprised ‘You shot me,’ with ‘Yes. I did.’ It’s just a tiny butperfect encapsulation of their characters. This is Scully at her finest andthis is Mulder at his most vulnerable.

Thanks for the ask!

[flexiblefish]

Source:[X]

by Gavanndra Hodge 12 JANUARY 2019

Gillian Anderson is hard to pin down. Is she American or English? (Her accent slips between the two, depending on who she is talking to.) Guarded or warm? (She can be either, based on her mood.) Tough or vulnerable? (Or both?)

'‘Because my parents were American and we lived here in the UK, there was always a sense of not quite fitting in. Because of that I’ve always felt a bit of an outsider. I have perpetuated that because that is what feels familiar to me, it is what feels comfortable,’ she explains. When we meet Anderson is English and warm, talking about the birthday parties she has to organise (she has three children, Piper, 24, Oscar, 12, and Felix, 10); and although she is very petite, wearing white patent stiletto boots and slender black trousers, she exudes the commanding charisma that makes her perfect for her imminent roles. Rumour has it that she will be playing Margaret Thatcher in an upcoming series of The Crown, the Netflix series created and co-written by her partner, Peter Morgan. No one is confirming this, but no one is denying it either. Meanwhile, this month she stars in a new Netflix series, Sex Education, in which she plays a sex therapist who lives with her teenage son (Asa Butterfield). And in February Anderson has another plum role: Margo Channing in Belgian theatre director Ivo van Hove’s much-anticipated adaptation of All About Eve, also starring Lily James as Eve, with music by PJ Harvey. The play – a modern reinterpretation of the 1950 film, which starred Bette Davis as Channing, a blazing Broadway star who is gradually supplanted by a younger rival – is about ambition and betrayal, femininity and anger, stardom and personal sacrifice. Anderson’s is a bravura role, one that requires not just the cool intensity that we have come to expect from her, but also humour. Channing is deliciously droll, delivering endlessly quotable lines with comic precision (‘I’ll admit I may have seen better days, but I’m still not to be had for the price of a cocktail, like a salted peanut’). ‘A couple of years ago my boyfriend Pete said to me, “You know what would be a great role for you? Margo Channing,”’ Anderson says. ‘So I rewatched the film and I thought, “Oh my God, how much fun would that be!”’ Anderson, not one to wait for opportunity, discovered that theatre producer Sonia Friedman had the rights to the script and was working on it with van Hove – Cate Blanchett was set to be Channing. ‘So I thought, “Ah OK, I’ll just slink into the background.” Then my agents got a call to say that she [Blanchett] had backed out due to scheduling conflicts, and there was interest, and was I interested? So I was like, “Yes! When’s the meeting? Now?”’ Van Hove, on the phone from New York, is equally excited to be working with Anderson. ‘Margo needs someone who understands what the theatre is all about, someone who can carry a play, who can occupy the whole stage, and Gillian can do that; she is a fabulous theatre actress. Although, of course, she became iconic for me in the 1990s when she was in The X-Files.’ There is something a little surprising about Ivo van Hove, an avant-garde director celebrated for his reinterpretations of plays and operas such as Hedda Gabler, Antigone and Lulu, professing fandom for a mid-’90s sci-fi series; but that is to forget the huge cultural impact of The X-Files, its quality and its ingenuity. The series was about two FBI agents, played by Anderson and David Duchovny, who attempt to unravel various natural and supernatural mysteries. No one expected it to become such a success, least of all Anderson, who was 24 when she was cast in the show. It was her first major role and it made her a star. She won multiple awards for her portrayal of the sceptical Dr Dana Scully, including an Emmy and a Golden Globe. But such stardom often involves sacrifice and Anderson was suffering. The production schedule for The X-Files was brutal, involving 16-hour days for nine months of the year. Furthermore, in 1994, aged 25, Anderson married Clyde Klotz, assistant art director on the series, and nine months later she gave birth to their daughter, Piper. After three years she and Klotz divorced. It was while she was pregnant that Anderson started having severe panic attacks. ‘I was having them daily,’ she explains, experiencing palpitations, numbness, ‘hallucinations, all of it’. Things didn’t get better once Piper was born. ‘I was a young mother, and shortly after that we were separating, and I was working these crazy hours. I remember periods of time when I was just crying, my make-up was being done over and over again and I was not able to stop crying.’ Anderson sought solace in meditation. ‘I went to somebody and there was a meditation we did together. We went to some quite dark places and I got to see that I could still survive those dark places, I was stronger than they were, and after that the panic attacks stopped.’ Anderson had been having panic attacks, on and off, ‘since high school’. As a teenager she was a daydreamer and a troublemaker who felt different from her peers in Michigan because of her childhood in Harringay, having left the ‘incy-bincy flat with a bathroom outside’ that she and her parents lived in when she was 11 years old, when her family moved back to the US. ‘I started falling in with groups and trying to fit in, until it got to the point when it was like, “I don’t f—ing want to fit in. I want to look completely different to all of you, and stop staring at me because I have a mohawk.” I’d shave the sides of my head with a razor blade and dye my hair different colours.’ Anderson’s parents, Rosemary and Ed, were living in Chicago and were both just 26 when she was born. Soon afterwards the family moved to London so Ed could attend film school, while Rosemary worked as a computer programmer. ‘My parents were working very hard and would often work late. I have lots of memories of playing by myself in the back garden and searching for friends in the neighbourhood because I didn’t have siblings.’ After moving back to America, Rosemary and Ed had two more children, a son and a daughter. Anderson admits that her adolescent waywardness might have been related to the arrival of two new babies in the house. ‘I made trouble and I got attention that way.’ Acting is another way to get attention, something Anderson learnt early on. ‘I remember being in a play when I was in primary school. I was meant to be a Chelsea fan. I started chewing gum on stage and blowing bubbles and got all the attention. I thought, “This is all right, everybody is watching me!”’ But when she reached 16 and started doing more professional productions in America, performing became fundamentally important to her. ‘I enjoyed the connection between performer and audience, the control. And I remember thinking, “I can do this. They are showing me I can do this.” 'It changed everything in my life, knowing I could do something. Prior to that there hadn’t been that moment yet when I found purpose and direction.’ Anderson decided that she wanted to pursue acting as a career and was accepted at The Theatre School at DePaul University in Chicago. ‘From the very start of school I didn’t go into the dorms, instead I found an apartment with a roommate in a funky neighbourhood. I was the only one who was living out of school. That is my pattern, carving my own thing. 'All through [theatre] school I dressed like I was a member of The Cure. That was how I was in the world, grungy, not considered, not mature. I was forthright and gutsy – I drove myself to Chicago in my dad’s VW van – but slightly falling apart.’ She always knew she would return to England. ‘My childhood here, the smell of north London, it has such a massive tug on me. I really felt, when we moved to the States, that I would eventually have a life back here.’ She and Piper moved to the city after The X-Files ended its original run, and she went on to have two more children, Oscar and Felix, with her now ex-boyfriend, businessman Mark Griffiths (there was also a marriage to British documentary maker Julian Ozanne, which lasted for two years, with the couple separating in 2006).

In the UK Anderson’s career developed in a way that might not have been expected for the golden girl of ’90s sci-fi. She took juicy roles in big-budget period dramas – Lady Dedlock in Bleak House, Miss Havisham in Great Expectations – and appeared on stage, at the Royal Court and the Donmar Warehouse. But it was her performance in the BBC detective drama The Fall, starting in 2013, that solidified her reputation as the go-to actor for female characters who are charismatic and powerful. Anderson, as DSI Stella Gibson, was imperious in her white silk shirts and high heels, unwavering in her pursuit of the serial killer played by Jamie Dornan. The screenwriter Allan Cubitt created the role of Gibson with Anderson in mind. ‘I wanted Gibson to be an enigmatic figure. Gillian is a riveting actress, but there is an aloofness to her as well. Also I was attempting to reclaim the idea of the powerful femme fatale, without the fatale; someone who is aware that her beauty can be used to help her ends. That she is unafraid of that was radical.’ Anderson was deeply involved in the creation of Gibson’s look, altering the way she thought about herself in the process. ‘What fascinated me about her, and I feel that we were able to find that in the costume design, was that the way she dressed never felt like it was for anyone else but her. I don’t think I have necessarily changed the way I dress since her, but I feel like I am certainly more conscious of what I wear and what it says.’ As a younger woman her style was ‘messy, like a discarded urchin’. She would wear oversized suits and ‘floppy dresses that I had probably stolen from the thrift store’. Whereas now her look is sleek, and she favours brands like Jil Sander, Prada and Dries Van Noten. The Fall was about gender, power and desire; and it was while filming it in Belfast that Anderson began thinking more about the struggles that women face in the 21st century. ‘I was reading all these statistics about young girls being suicidal and having such low self-esteem and I thought, “Surely, given everything that we know, and the fact we are all having these feelings, can we not start a conversation about whether we want this and how to deal with it?”’ This morphed into her writing a book, We: A Manifesto for Women Everywhere, with her friend, the writer and activist Jennifer Nadel, in 2017. Alternating between pieces by Anderson and Nadel, it details their own personal struggles, and includes practical sections on how to deal with issues such as anxiety and low self-esteem using practices such as meditation, affirmations and gratitude lists. ‘We both know how it feels to be in emotional pain,’ says Nadel. ‘Both of us have felt lost, and found a spiritual way out. Both of us have experienced radical transformation as a result of the things that we wrote about in that book.’ Cubitt and Nadel each say that among the most impressive things about Anderson, as a collaborator, are her focus and drive. ‘I have never met anyone with Gillian’s ability to focus. And she has a certainty about things, she is not mired in indecision,’ says Nadel. What this means is not just an incredibly long CV, but numerous satellite projects. Anderson has a line of smart, grown-up clothes that she has developed with the brand Winser London (‘I didn’t realise I was so opinionated about buttons!’). She also works for numerous charities, focusing especially on women’s rights and environmental issues. ‘Because of my work ethic and also having had such high expectations, both of myself and other people’s of me, at such a young age, I think it became near to impossible for me to relax at all, to do anything that wasn’t work-related, so a lot of my later adult life has been trying to force myself to do that, and I struggle so hard, and sometimes I lose sight of it. So there is a part of me that wonders if I am slightly addicted [to work], I learnt it so young.’ The scant spare time that Anderson allows herself is spent ‘going to the cinema, to the theatre, watching documentaries’. Piper, who has just completed a degree in production and costume design, is now living in her mother’s basement, and the two of them recently went on a trip to Amsterdam to see van Hove’s four-hour stage adaptation of the Hanya Yanagihara novel A Little Life. That might not sound like everyone’s cup of tea, but Anderson loved it. And despite all the seriousness and the self-examination (or perhaps because of it), she is good company, thoughtful and witty. She has, she says, got happier as she has got older, less self-critical, more self-accepting. ‘I am constantly reminded of the fact that I am not normal. But fortunately I have enough abnormal people around me to help me feel that it is actually OK.’

[heresince93]

Full transcript of Gillian’s Telegraph interview

Gillian Anderson is hard to pin down. Is she American or English? (Her accent slips between the two, depending on who she is talking to.) Guarded or warm? (She can be either, based on her mood.) Tough or vulnerable? (Or both?)

'‘Because my parents were American and we lived here in the UK, there was always a sense of not quite fitting in. Because of that I’ve always felt a bit of an outsider. I have perpetuated that because that is what feels familiar to me, it is what feels comfortable,’ she explains.

When we meet Anderson is English and warm, talking about the birthday parties she has to organise (she has three children, Piper, 24, Oscar, 12, and Felix, 10); and although she is very petite, wearing white patent stiletto boots and slender black trousers, she exudes the commanding charisma that makes her perfect for her imminent roles.

Rumour has it that she will be playing Margaret Thatcher in an upcoming series of The Crown, the Netflix series created and co-written by her partner, Peter Morgan. No one is confirming this, but no one is denying it either. 

Meanwhile, this month she stars in a new Netflix series, Sex Education, in which she plays a sex therapist who lives with her teenage son (Asa Butterfield). And in February Anderson has another plum role: Margo Channing in Belgian theatre director Ivo van Hove’s much-anticipated adaptation of All About Eve, also starring Lily James as Eve, with music by PJ Harvey.

The play – a modern reinterpretation of the 1950 film, which starred Bette Davis as Channing, a blazing Broadway star who is gradually supplanted by a younger rival – is about ambition and betrayal, femininity and anger, stardom and personal sacrifice.

Anderson’s is a bravura role, one that requires not just the cool intensity that we have come to expect from her, but also humour. Channing is deliciously droll, delivering endlessly quotable lines with comic precision (‘I’ll admit I may have seen better days, but I’m still not to be had for the price of a cocktail, like a salted peanut’).

‘A couple of years ago my boyfriend Pete said to me, “You know what would be a great role for you? Margo Channing,”’ Anderson says. ‘So I rewatched the film and I thought, “Oh my God, how much fun would that be!”’

Anderson, not one to wait for opportunity, discovered that theatre producer Sonia Friedman had the rights to the script and was working on it with van Hove – Cate Blanchett was set to be Channing. ‘So I thought, “Ah OK, I’ll just slink into the background.” Then my agents got a call to say that she [Blanchett] had backed out due to scheduling conflicts, and there was interest, and was I interested? So I was like, “Yes! When’s the meeting? Now?”’

Van Hove, on the phone from New York, is equally excited to be working with Anderson. ‘Margo needs someone who understands what the theatre is all about, someone who can carry a play, who can occupy the whole stage, and Gillian can do that; she is a fabulous theatre actress. Although, of course, she became iconic for me in the 1990s when she was in The X-Files.’

There is something a little surprising about Ivo van Hove, an avant-garde director celebrated for his reinterpretations of plays and operas such as Hedda Gabler, Antigone and Lulu, professing fandom for a mid-’90s sci-fi series; but that is to forget the huge cultural impact of The X-Files, its quality and its ingenuity.

The series was about two FBI agents, played by Anderson and David Duchovny, who attempt to unravel various natural and supernatural mysteries. No one expected it to become such a success, least of all Anderson, who was 24 when she was cast in the show. It was her first major role and it made her a star.

She won multiple awards for her portrayal of the sceptical Dr Dana Scully, including an Emmy and a Golden Globe. But such stardom often involves sacrifice and Anderson was suffering.

The production schedule for The X-Files was brutal, involving 16-hour days for nine months of the year. Furthermore, in 1994, aged 25, Anderson married Clyde Klotz, assistant art director on the series, and nine months later she gave birth to their daughter, Piper. After three years she and Klotz divorced. It was while she was pregnant that Anderson started having severe panic attacks.

‘I was having them daily,’ she explains, experiencing palpitations, numbness, ‘hallucinations, all of it’. Things didn’t get better once Piper was born. ‘I was a young mother, and shortly after that we were separating, and I was working these crazy hours. I remember periods of time when I was just crying, my make-up was being done over and over again and I was not able to stop crying.’

Anderson sought solace in meditation. ‘I went to somebody and there was a meditation we did together. We went to some quite dark places and I got to see that I could still survive those dark places, I was stronger than they were, and after that the panic attacks stopped.’

Anderson had been having panic attacks, on and off, ‘since high school’. As a teenager she was a daydreamer and a troublemaker who felt different from her peers in Michigan because of her childhood in Harringay, having left the ‘incy-bincy flat with a bathroom outside’ that she and her parents lived in when she was 11 years old, when her family moved back to the US.

‘I started falling in with groups and trying to fit in, until it got to the point when it was like, “I don’t f—ing want to fit in. I want to look completely different to all of you, and stop staring at me because I have a mohawk.” I’d shave the sides of my head with a razor blade and dye my hair different colours.’

Anderson’s parents, Rosemary and Ed, were living in Chicago and were both just 26 when she was born. Soon afterwards the family moved to London so Ed could attend film school, while Rosemary worked as a computer programmer.

‘My parents were working very hard and would often work late. I have lots of memories of playing by myself in the back garden and searching for friends in the neighbourhood because I didn’t have siblings.’

After moving back to America, Rosemary and Ed had two more children, a son and a daughter. Anderson admits that her adolescent waywardness might have been related to the arrival of two new babies in the house. ‘I made trouble and I got attention that way.’

Acting is another way to get attention, something Anderson learnt early on. ‘I remember being in a play when I was in primary school. I was meant to be a Chelsea fan. I started chewing gum on stage and blowing bubbles and got all the attention. I thought, “This is all right, everybody is watching me!”’

But when she reached 16 and started doing more professional productions in America, performing became fundamentally important to her. ‘I enjoyed the connection between performer and audience, the control. And I remember thinking, “I can do this. They are showing me I can do this.”

'It changed everything in my life, knowing I could do something. Prior to that there hadn’t been that moment yet when I found purpose and direction.’

Anderson decided that she wanted to pursue acting as a career and was accepted at The Theatre School at DePaul University in Chicago. ‘From the very start of school I didn’t go into the dorms, instead I found an apartment with a roommate in a funky neighbourhood. I was the only one who was living out of school. That is my pattern, carving my own thing.

'All through [theatre] school I dressed like I was a member of The Cure. That was how I was in the world, grungy, not considered, not mature. I was forthright and gutsy – I drove myself to Chicago in my dad’s VW van – but slightly falling apart.’

She always knew she would return to England. ‘My childhood here, the smell of north London, it has such a massive tug on me. I really felt, when we moved to the States, that I would eventually have a life back here.’

She and Piper moved to the city after The X-Files ended its original run, and she went on to have two more children, Oscar and Felix, with her now ex-boyfriend, businessman Mark Griffiths (there was also a marriage to British documentary maker Julian Ozanne, which lasted for two years, with the couple separating in 2006).

In the UK Anderson’s career developed in a way that might not have been expected for the golden girl of ’90s sci-fi. She took juicy roles in big-budget period dramas – Lady Dedlock in Bleak House, Miss Havisham in Great Expectations – and appeared on stage, at the Royal Court and the Donmar Warehouse. But it was her performance in the BBC detective drama The Fall, starting in 2013, that solidified her reputation as the go-to actor for female characters who are charismatic and powerful.

Anderson, as DSI Stella Gibson, was imperious in her white silk shirts and high heels, unwavering in her pursuit of the serial killer played by Jamie Dornan. The screenwriter Allan Cubitt created the role of Gibson with Anderson in mind. ‘I wanted Gibson to be an enigmatic figure. Gillian is a riveting actress, but there is an aloofness to her as well. Also I was attempting to reclaim the idea of the powerful femme fatale, without the fatale; someone who is aware that her beauty can be used to help her ends. That she is unafraid of that was radical.’

Anderson was deeply involved in the creation of Gibson’s look, altering the way she thought about herself in the process. ‘What fascinated me about her, and I feel that we were able to find that in the costume design, was that the way she dressed never felt like it was for anyone else but her. I don’t think I have necessarily changed the way I dress since her, but I feel like I am certainly more conscious of what I wear and what it says.’

As a younger woman her style was ‘messy, like a discarded urchin’. She would wear oversized suits and ‘floppy dresses that I had probably stolen from the thrift store’. Whereas now her look is sleek, and she favours brands like Jil Sander, Prada and Dries Van Noten.

The Fall was about gender, power and desire; and it was while filming it in Belfast that Anderson began thinking more about the struggles that women face in the 21st century. ‘I was reading all these statistics about young girls being suicidal and having such low self-esteem and I thought, “Surely, given everything that we know, and the fact we are all having these feelings, can we not start a conversation about whether we want this and how to deal with it?”’

This morphed into her writing a book, We: A Manifesto for Women Everywhere, with her friend, the writer and activist Jennifer Nadel, in 2017. Alternating between pieces by Anderson and Nadel, it details their own personal struggles, and includes practical sections on how to deal with issues such as anxiety and low self-esteem using practices such as meditation, affirmations and gratitude lists.

‘We both know how it feels to be in emotional pain,’ says Nadel. ‘Both of us have felt lost, and found a spiritual way out. Both of us have experienced radical transformation as a result of the things that we wrote about in that book.’ 

Cubitt and Nadel each say that among the most impressive things about Anderson, as a collaborator, are her focus and drive.

‘I have never met anyone with Gillian’s ability to focus. And she has a certainty about things, she is not mired in indecision,’ says Nadel. What this means is not just an incredibly long CV, but numerous satellite projects. Anderson has a line of smart, grown-up clothes that she has developed with the brand Winser London (‘I didn’t realise I was so opinionated about buttons!’).

She also works for numerous charities, focusing especially on women’s rights and environmental issues. ‘Because of my work ethic and also having had such high expectations, both of myself and other people’s of me, at such a young age, I think it became near to impossible for me to relax at all, to do anything that wasn’t work-related, so a lot of my later adult life has been trying to force myself to do that, and I struggle so hard, and sometimes I lose sight of it. So there is a part of me that wonders if I am slightly addicted [to work], I learnt it so young.’

The scant spare time that Anderson allows herself is spent ‘going to the cinema, to the theatre, watching documentaries’.

Piper, who has just completed a degree in production and costume design, is now living in her mother’s basement, and the two of them recently went on a trip to Amsterdam to see van Hove’s four-hour stage adaptation of the Hanya Yanagihara novel A Little Life. That might not sound like everyone’s cup of tea, but Anderson loved it.

And despite all the seriousness and the self-examination (or perhaps because of it), she is good company, thoughtful and witty. She has, she says, got happier as she has got older, less self-critical, more self-accepting.

‘I am constantly reminded of the fact that I am not normal. But fortunately I have enough abnormal people around me to help me feel that it is actually OK.’

All About Eve is running at the Noël Coward Theatre from 2 February to 11 May 2019

[sigritandtheelves]

The I in Team

Part 5: Trust

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

Rating: Mature Timeline: season 6 Tags: Angst-ish, but veering toward legit MSR Words: 2.2k (pt. 5)

A/N: Sorry it’s been a while! It was a tough week, and I got kinda sick on top of it. :( The format here is a little bit different than the other parts, but that’s because we’re rounding toward the end. I think maybe just one more part!?

_+_

A little after eight in the morning, he stood in front of her motel door, holding coffee and a bagged-breakfast, knocking gently with his boot. It took her a minute, but she appeared, wet-haired, in jeans and a black v-neck.

“Mulder,” she said, surprised. “What are you doing here?”

He held up the coffee and brown paper bag in explanation, little smirk on his face, nervous. “The motel breakfast is pretty bad, so…” He scraped his boot on the concrete. “Can I come in?”

She gave him a look, squint-eyed, like what are you up to. She blinked, then stepped back. “Okay.”

In her room he set their breakfast on the table—her coffee done right, a strawberry croissant, her favorite. “This one’s yours,” he said.

The Florida sun was just warming the early day, grazing the window blinds to stripe the table where they sat. She sipped her coffee and it was good: two creams, no sugar.

“We’re gonna go to the thing today, okay? We’re gonna do it right.”

“We are?”

“Yeah.” He said, looking at her with all seriousness.

She eyed him, unsure. He was chewing his own croissant. “Why?” she asked. “You don’t really want to.”

He shrugged. “I don’t want to listen to some corporate smile-guy telling me to assess my strengths and weaknesses, telling us to align our synergy, or to learn how to build consensus, or any of that bullshit. But we’re off the clock here, pretty much. The world isn’t ending. We’re here together, the sky is blue, there are no monsters in sight, and there’s a nature hike later today. Let’s just… be people. Okay? See if we can?”

She pursed her lips, watched him try to wrangle that obsessive energy and turn it toward whatever this was, hovering between them. He was twitchy. Anxious, she saw, like he’d spent all night working up the courage for this.

“Okay,” she said after pause. But she kept wariness and suspicion in her back pocket. Like a child who’d been bitten by a dog, she was reluctant to stretch her fingers out toward it again.

He surprised her, then, by touching her hair, her cheek, by leaning forward. “I won’t lose you,” he said. “I won’t.”

She just nodded and kept her eyes on the table.

---

At some point, Mulder realized, his self-indulgent pity had become his last refuge and comfort. In his room he’d sat with the taste of her still on his lips, half-hard from the remembered feel of her pressed to him, and thought how he’d do just about anything to have a chance with her again. To have her trust him again. He’d hurt her, though he’d not known how much until tonight. Self-flagellation had felt good: fucking Diana out of anger and the narcissistic desire to hear someone, anyone, say I believe you in that way, holding Scully away from him in self-denial. Except that it wasn’t himself he was hurting anymore. Hadn’t ever been, really. He’d thought he was punishing himself for failing, for losing the X-Files again, for never ever having the right kind of proof... But the whole time, every minute of his selfish, senseless behavior, he’d really been hurting her. And for that… Christ, what a fucking piece of work he was.

The way he saw it, there were two ways forward. He could continue his unsuccessful campaign of denying, hating, and torturing himself over what an asshole he’d been… or he could do something about it and try loving someone for once in his miserable life, no matter how vulnerable it made him feel.

He’d looked at himself in the mirror. He’d actually stood in the motel bathroom and stared at his own pathetic mug and told himself to grow the fuck up right here and now because she wasn’t going to put up with any more of his bullshit. That stupid thing he’d written down this morning when he was being flip? That thoughtless answer he’d given to what he appreciated about her? Wrong. She doesn’t put up with it, and she won’t, and she shouldn’t have to. He looked himself in the eyes and thought, for whatever reason, she actually cares about you, and this is your last godforsaken chance at something good in this life and you are NOT going to fuck it up.

Then he forced himself to get six full hours of sleep, took a shower, and went to buy her breakfast.

---

When she’d finished her coffee, after sitting there without words, listening to her own breathing, she’d looked up at him and said “Okay,” a second time, and then, “Thank you for breakfast.” And there, on her scrubbed and freckled face, he saw the smallest trace of something that gave him hope.

Now they sat back-to-back on an ugly carpet with a bunch of other saps, doing something called a “blind-drawing exercise.” She was saying words that made little sense—directing him to draw shapes on a page that would add up to a picture, and he was fumbling to comply.

“Okay, now draw a triangle coming out from the midpoint of the long arc.”

“Like touching it?”

“Yeah, so the arc forms the shortest side and the farthest angle is acute.”

He bit his lip, concentrating. “Um, okay. I think I’ve got it.”

“Now a smaller arc that’s more of a circle, coming off the longer one at the left end, but make it kind of bulbus.”

“Scully, what the hell are you having me draw?”

She laughed, and her head fell back to touch his shoulder.

“No peeking,” he said.

“You either.”

And for the first time in what felt like months, they were both laughing, and yes, yes, she left her head there on his shoulder, and it made his heart pound and his hand shake. He could hear the smile in her voice as she told him things like “now a small black circle” or “another very small triangle, about a third the size of the bulb shape” and eventually, he had drawn something that almost made sense.

“Hey, is it a bird?”

“Mulder! Did you cheat?”

“No! Look!” and he turned around and showed her and she was laughing at his terrible bird, but he was right, he’d done it right, and it was a small but beautiful triumph.

“Now it’s my turn,” she said, still smiling. “Can I borrow your pencil?”

When she turned around again to draw, balancing her booklet on her knees, she let her back fall against his and kept it there, the heat of their bodies meeting at a single point. He tried to concentrate and describe the basic shape of a tractor (“A big circle and a little circle… some rectangles”), but couldn’t stop thinking that he was, maybe, for once, getting something kind of right.

There was a peace settling between them, a quiet presence like a low hum. Familiar. He recognized its gentle whir, remembered hearing it first rising in a damp motel room in Oregon, thought of its electric buzz at dozens of hospital bedsides, or its low-cycling resonance on late-night couches where they sat shoulder-to-shoulder. It was the sound of them, he thought. It was the sound of whatever this was that they’d forged together and almost lost. It was their trust, most of all.

---

In the woods again, no mothmen. No life-draining bugs. Just a compass for one and a map for the other.

“Hey, Indian Guide, which way is west?”

He held the compass flat: studied, turned, and pointed. They hiked.

A blue bandana held her hair back and dirt smudged her nose. He wanted to wipe it, kiss it off. Wanted to back her up against a tree and show her just how grateful he was for this second chance. He settled for supporting her arm as she scaled a tricky pass, for brushing his hand against her back while he held up a thin branch of prickles for her to pass under. She didn’t tell him no, didn’t glare. He tucked these moments away in his mind as small victories.

Then, on a steep slope, his foot slipped and he fell back against her, almost knocked her down, but she held him, held steady. “Whoa,” she said. “You okay?”

“I got it,” he said, grabbing a nearby branch for balance. He stilled—they both did, and her hand remained longer than it needed to, pressed warm to his chest. Her face was almost level with his on the incline, and they were suddenly just… looking. Lost in each other’s curious gaze, two people suddenly face-to-face with each other. His own hand, he realized, was on her hip, fingers curling at the waistband of her jeans. The air grew thick around and between them, but Florida humidity it was not. “Okay?” he asked, voiced pitched low, almost raspy, and she nodded, just a tiny dip of the head. His fingers tightened on her hip.

“Mulder,” she said.

His eyes fell closed and he clenched his jaw. “I know.”

“You trust me,” she said, a question in the form of a statement.

“You know I do.” Her fingers hadn’t moved, and his heart beat hard against her palm.

“I trust you with my life, Mulder. But not…” with my heart, she thought. Not yet. She watched his eyes and saw him understand.

“I can’t forgive myself, Scully. I won’t. And it’s so unfair for me to ask you to try.” His fingers again, their slightest movement at her waist—a thumb, just at the edge of her skin, like a match-head igniting her. “But I’m going to ask you to try. Let me show you that you can trust me.”

Emboldened with his words, two fingers joined his thumb at her hip. She let her palm slip in an almost-caress to wander past his collarbone, around the back of his neck. He was sweaty there, from the hike and the Florida warmth, and she was similarly damp, the weight of her pack pressing a line of sweat heavy to her shoulder. They were warmer here, of course, than they’d been in Antarctica, but no less alone in these woods, where the deep thrum of primal want began beating between them again. She yearned, suddenly, to lick the sweat clean from his jaw, to push him behind the thicket, into the rocks and dirt, and swallow him whole. She wanted to stamp him as hers and make him prove that he loved her. It was crazy. It was possessive madness, but she could tamp it down no less than she could her own blood beating.

“Scully.”

“Yeah,” she said, wondering how her voice got that way, so low, so heavy.

“I’m going to kiss you,” he said, and she couldn’t have stopped him if she’d wanted to because her body moved on its own, her traitorous hips driving toward his in the green green of that forest. His mouth came down on hers like a hot iron and she was already pulling it closer, opening her lips and begging him with her tongue. She couldn’t help it. God, she couldn’t help it. She wanted him so much.

His left hand let go of the branch to hold her face, to massage his love into her cheek. Believe me, it said. Believe me, I love you, while the other hand had abandoned the world of fabric for more patches of soft skin. They shifted to angle their bodies closer until they were falling into each other, into the needy press of this elemental substance that drummed up from the earth and into their veins, their hearts, their skins.

And then they were really falling. A rock unmoored from its earthy clutch, and their feet went out from under them, slipping, crashing through the underbrush and thicket, sliding down the hill and tumbling into the leaves and dirt. Mulder grasped her to him, sheltering her from prickles and thorns until they came to a stop, filthy and laughing, gasping on the woodland floor.

“Oh, Mulder,” she said. “Are you okay?” She touched his head first, his face, his neck, from her position splayed across his torso. She pulled a leaf from his hair, but it was his arms that were scraped, three lines of deep red along his forearms, where the sticker bush had nabbed him.

“I’m fine,” he said, still smiling. He cupped her face. “You?”

She nodded. “Fine,” and seemed to realize how they were positioned. She looked down at their bodies, at their rumpled clothes, at their legs entangled, and blushed. Before she could comment, could gather her composure and set them rational and right again, a voice called out from several yards away.

“You guys okay?” it asked. “Jeez, we saw that fall! Do you need first aid?”

Not so alone as they’d thought, it turned out. “We’re okay!” Mulder called, then quieter, to her, “Time to get up.” But before Scully could climb off him, he tugged her down, quick, for a kiss. It was no chaste thing, but wet and hot with relief and the adrenaline-thrill of their brief misadventure. “I’ll show you,” he whispered at her ear when he’d let her lips go. “I’ll show you how much I love you.”

And then he was helping her up, brushing off, reaching for the compass in his back pocket, hoping it hadn’t been cracked. “This way.” He nodded back toward the path.

Dumbstruck, a little wobbly, she followed.

(end part 5)

Go to Part 6: Reciprocation

[thegottabe]

*So I just finished season 11 of The X-files...*

I didn’t watch any of the revival episodes until recently (for several reasons, the simplest of which is that watching week to week is the worst and I feel much more frustrated by a bad episode if I have to wait a week for the next one), but since they announced they aren’t renewing the show for the time being, I felt like now was the time to rewatch the entire series, from beginning to end. I wasn’t sure how I’d feel about the new seasons, mainly because - as usually happens on the internet - the haters are the loudest when expressing their opinions and everything I saw about them was negative. However, after watching them for myself, I have to say I kind of loved them. Not the mythology episodes, mind you.

The whole conspiracy mythology should have been wrapped up and dropped a long time ago, long before season 9, let alone 10 and 11. The fact that Chris brought it back after all these years only to make it even more convoluted and silly was a terrible call. Really terrible. Not that it wasn’t a pleasure to see William B. Davis on my screen again, but CSM should never have come back. It made no sense whatsoever, considering the last time we saw him he got blown to smithereens. I mean, yeah, I know Chris has always said “no one on The X-Files is ever really dead” but the man took a freaking missile to the face. He was very dead and should have stayed that way. And don’t even get me started on how stupid Reyes’ storyline was. Besides not making any sense character-wise, it was badly written and well... just stupid. And the final episode was beyond ridiculous. Skinner, Scully, Mulder... these characters I have loved and carried with me for over 20 years deserved so much better. Especially Scully. It was devastating to watch, honestly. It certainly goes on my list of Worst Finales Ever of All Time. As I do with HIMYM and a few other shows, in future re-watches, I’ll pretend the last episode doesn’t exist. The last ten minutes, especially. That said, the rest of the revival episodes were super enjoyable to me. I was never bored, often amused and my love for Darin Morgan was rekindled immediately. He is brilliant. I only wish Vince Gilligan could have written as well. His episodes were always wonderful to watch. As for the little critiques, I know a lot of people really disliked Einstein and Miller, but I found them pretty entertaining myself. They’re no Scully and Mulder, but I enjoyed them and their bickering. I also loved seeing Mulder’s inevitable evolution into a Grumpy Old Man who hates new-fangled electronics and grumbles about “kids today.” And Gillian, as always, nailed all the emotional notes of Scully (after the first episode of season 10, anyway, which was rough for everyone). Nothing could possibly have saved the end of the season 11 finale, but if anything came close, it was David and Gillian’s acting. The lines were terrible, the plot was terrible and the overall episode was terrible, but despite that, the emotion felt real. They took one of the silliest, most overly-dramatic scenes written since the daytime soap Passions and managed to make it moving despite it’s idiocy. So yes, I have to say that overall, I was pleasantly surprised by the revival and I’m glad it happened. There were several times while watching I felt the same magic I felt as a kid watching the OS. Mulder and Scully’s bantering and bickering were as beautiful as ever and the poignant moments were just as bittersweet as they used to be. I went into it expecting to hate it and fell in love all over again instead, and that was a great experience. As far as Chris Carter goes, I’m not going to hate on him too much. Yes, I think his episodes were by far the least enjoyable and most frustrating, but - as long as I ignore that last episode - I can truly say he didn’t ruin the series for me at all. I’ve always had great respect for him as a show runner for several reasons, the first of which goes all the way back to season 2, when he flat-out refused to fire Gillian because of her pregnancy, despite pressure from the higher-ups. Not only was he excited for her, but he found a way to tie it into the show and created some very interesting plotlines as a result. Very few show-runners are so kind to pregnant actresses (see: faux-feminist Joss Whedon’s treatment of Charisma Carpenter). Beyond that, Chris Carter created in Scully one of the first well-rounded female characters I ever saw on television. She was tough yet vulnerable, kind yet assertive, sentimental yet reserved, scientific yet religious, ambitious yet maternal.  Though she struggled between her love for Mulder and her loyalty to her own identity, she was never written as just a love interest or sacrificed on the altar of man-pain like so many other female leads. She felt like a real person I’d want to have lunch with. She was wonderful, and Chris Carter made that happen and I will always be appreciative of that. I also appreciate Chris because of his openness of mind to let other writers take the characters places he didn’t personally want them to go. He was always for a platonic relationship between Mulder and Scully, yet he still listened to feedback from both the actors and writers and let them do what they felt was right. That’s not a common thing. As a writer myself, I know how threatening it feels when someone takes characters you’ve created and feel you know so well and tries to convince you that you’re wrong about them. For Chris to allow his writers the freedom to do that really earns some respect for me, because that’s extremely hard to do. I’m not saying I’m happy with Chris. I’m furious, honestly. I was horrified at the end of the finale and I hated it. Scully’s attitude at the end shows that Chris, at best, has absolutely no understanding of how the female mind works when it comes to maternal feelings. Why he wanted so badly to screw those incredible characters he created over will be forever beyond me and I’m sad that it happened. But even so, his present choices, however horrible, aren’t enough to make me any less thankful for the joy he bought to my life by creating The X-files. For that, I’ll always respect him, though I can’t say I still trust him as a writer. I guess I’m just writing this because, overall, the revival was a positive experience for me. I got to spend several more enjoyable hours with characters I’ve loved all my life and I adored seeing the older versions of Scully and Mulder together. I got all kinds of new shippy moments that made me flail in fangirlish rapture :D Trivial critiques aside, most of the revival was just as fun to watch as the original series once was, and that’s something I truly treasure and didn’t expect at all. ♥

[colourcodedbinders]

Alright, frick.

I really, really hoped it wouldn’t have to come to this. (hold on tight, this is gonna be long. Really long. Super long.)

Chances that our show is coming back are looking bleak. Maybe, in two weeks times, we will have seen the last of these characters that we love oh so much. Maybe, in two weeks time, we’ll hear the last “title of your sex tape,” the last “cool cool cool cool cool”. But that doesn’t need we need to mourn the end of it. The last thing Brooklyn 99 has given us is loss.

With Brooklyn, each and every one of us has gained something. To some, it is joy, to others, it is hope, to others yet, it is courage, and to the rest, it is just pure, unadulterated laughter. it has given us honest, meaningful storylines. It has given us characters that we will undoubtedly love for the remainder of our lives. It’s given us so much that no matter how hard we try, we won’t be able to forget.

It has given us Holt, an openly gay black commanding officer, who was never once, in five years, put down because of his race or sexual orientation. Holt has proven time and again that with hard work, dedication, and honesty, although the immediate results don’t always seem to be the best ones, it all falls into place eventually. Holt has fought for himself time and again, has been the epitome (ooh, nice use of epitome babe) tenacity and courage and a dogged soldier for what is right throughout the series. That isn’t going away. That is staying with us forever.

It has given us Gina, who is proud and unashamed of herself. Gina, who teaches self love and acceptance like no one else, ever. Gina, who grown from a somewhat superficial doink to an accomplished woman with ambitions and goals. She’s grown into a wonderful friend, sister, and mother. Gina isn’t going away. She’s with us always. (After all, Gina Linetti is a state of mind, right?)

It’s given us Charles Boyle, who proves that traditional masculinity isn’t at all what makes a man. Charles Boyle, who is unbelievably kind, selfless, and loving. Charles who has a son and makes him his utmost priority. Charles who will support his loved ones at any cost, who will do anything to protect them from harm, who will quite literally try to sell his soul if it means keeping his loved ones happy. Charles, who teaches that awkward isn’t bad. In fact, it’s a little cool. Charles won’t ever leave us either. He within us, in our hearts.

It’s given us Terry, who takes the scary big man stereotype and flips it on its fricking head. Terry is a man as gentle on the inside as he is tough on the outside, who cares unconditionally for his loved ones and who only ever use violence as a last resort. Terry, who has thre daughters and never once complained, and instead openly talks about how they’re the best thing that have ever happened to him. Terry won’t leave us. He couldn’t if he tried. (Which he wouldn’t.)

It’s given us Amy Santiago, the badass nerd. The ambitious teacher’s pet who stops at nothing to get what she wants. Amy’s made fun of a lot, but never, never is she told (by anyone other than the teasing Gina) not to dream so big, not to aim for the sky. Quite the opposite, really, Amy is told time and again that her determination is her greatest asset, that she’s too good not to dream, that she’s a massive, useful tool. Amy won’t ever leave us. None of us will ever let her.

It’s given us Hitchcock and Scully, the useless buffoons who sometimes prove that they too, are competent where it matters. Hitchcock and Scully teach an important lesson when it comes to loyalty, never leaving each other’s side and trusting each other fully. They are also quite often used as an asset to the team when in the midst of planning or executing a scheme, proving to everyone everywhere that no one is ever totally useless, no matter what it seems. We might maybe want to forget Hitchcock and Scully, but they won’t ever let us forget them. (But really, who wants to forget them?)

It’s given us Rosa Diaz, our badass bisexual biker girl with a heart of gold, Our secretive, scary detective who grew, over time, into a woman who has learned to become emotionally vulnerable in front of those she loves and trusts, without ever losing essence of her personality. Our beautiful, successful, happy character who just so happens to be a part of the LGBT community, whose coming out wasn’t just a flash in the distance, who openly said the words “I’m bisexual” and defended them when faced with her conservative parents. Rosa isn’t only hard to forget; she’s damn near impossible to.

It’s given us Jake Peralta. Jake Peralta the broken, immature man who’s only ever had his job. It let us watch him grow and evolve into someone so much happier, more mature, less selfish, more open and vulnerable and trusting. It’s shown us through Jake, and everyone else, that happy endings are real. That they happen, that all you need to do is find the right circumstances for it.

It’s given us the healthiest couple on television, the healthiest friendships, a family dynamic that quite honestly deserves a post of its own. It’s given us likable characters who weigh in on real issues, who defend our rights, who voice our thoughts, who show us what we’d like to end up as. In its five years, Brooklyn 99 has done nothing but give. 

Last night, we tried to give back. We tried to save it. We did our part, and we’re still doing it, refusing to go down without a fight, but it’s important for us to step back and appreciate all that the show’s given us and realize that at the end, we aren’t really losing anything. All we’ve done in the past years is gain. Gain laughs, gain friends, gain hope and admiration for the world around us. 

Whether Brooklyn 99 comes back or not, it’s important for us to see that it’s never actually going anywhere.

P.S. Watch the next two episodes on F*x and make sure to enjoy them; they���re sure to be amazing. 

(the fact that even after this doozy of a post, I still have more to say about the show is a little baffling to me y’all)

[snickerl]

Blutendes Herz  V

XF fanfiction

Blutendes Herz (Bleeding Heart) is not really a consecutive story but the chapters build upon one another somehow.

Part I can be read here, part II here. Here you will get to part III, and part IV can be found here.

Author's Note: This installment begins exactly like part IV but features an alternative ending which is supposed to soothe the heartache shippers might have suffered from reading the other one. Closure B takes off at the point where Mark asks Scully what her friendship to Mulder really consists of. You can either re-read the first part or jump right into the flow below the cut.

You're sitting on the couch together with your favorite human being. She's pouring you a third cup of tea.

"Thanks for bringing me my favorite tea, Mulder, but you don't have to find excuses every time you come here. Next time, just give me a call when you're in the area and drop by without any of these stupid pretenses."

You scratch the Mexican blanket, the Casablanca DVD, and the funny little porcelain fox she once bought at a garage sale off your mental list. "I hate coming with empty hands, Scully," you reply, not telling her that deep down you're afraid that just you alone is not enough to make your visit worthwhile. That's why you always bring her something she'd left at the house when she moved out.

Just when you started to relax a little, you hear a distinct knock at the door. Your pulse instantly accelerates because of the foreboding sound, whereas she seems to be a picture of calm. "Sounds like Mark. What does he want? When has it become out of style for a man to give a woman a chance to dress properly and freshen up her makeup before he shows up at her doorstep?" she whines, tying her robe tighter. She combs through her hair and rubs her cheeks. You want to tell her that she looks perfect the way she is, that she doesn't need makeup or perfectly styled hair to be beautiful, but you only give her a short, apologetic shrug and sink deeper into the couch cushions, wondering what excuse he might have to drop by at her place just like that.

"Sorry for coming unannounced, my love, but I missed you so much and a man can only wait so long. Impossibly another whole day."

Alright, no pretenses from his side. He's painfully frank about why he's here and his open infatuation is like a cold fist squeezing your heart.

Before Scully is able to reply something, he licks the words off her tongue with a juicy kiss. He shoves her backward into the living-room, his lips glued to hers, maneuvering her to the couch you're sitting on. He obviously plans to engage her in a veritable makeout session, maybe even more, because he clearly wants to plant her flat out on the comfortable piece of furniture. Unfortunately, your long legs are in the way. You try to pull your feet back, but there's not enough space, so you can't prevent him from stumbling over them.

"What the..." he hisses. It takes him a moment to assess what has just happened, but then his facial features morph from utter surprise into boundless fury in a matter of nanoseconds. "You? What the hell are you doing here?" he bellows at you, clearly not pleased at all to see you.

As there is no real justification for you to be here other than that you, like him, simply wanted to see her, and you doubt he would be amused by this one, all you can come up with is the same excuse you gave her earlier.

"I brought Scully a box of tea she forgot at our house." If this feeble attempt to explain your being here wasn't so damn embarrassing, you might have burst into laughter at how ridiculous you sound. But you don't feel like laughing, and neither does he.

"What? You brought her tea? A year after she left you? Are you kidding me?" His voice has become louder with every word. In the end, he's yelling at you.

"Mark," the receiver of the tea intervenes, "would you calm down, please. There's no need to shout like this."

"Who knows how many times I've seen him here? Four, five? And how often has he been here without me even knowing? Huh, Dana?"

"You're not seriously expecting me to give you an account of who I meet with when you're not around, are you?" Her eyes indicate quite clearly that his boring questions are pissing her off. You've never seen her eyebrows melt into her hairline like this, and you've been at the receiving end of her indignation countless times. You're an expert, actually, on what she looks like when she's mad.

Mark is unwavering tough in his current state of anger. "You're entertaining other men in your pajamas when I'm not here, Dana, and it's supposed to leave me cold? Really?"

Your breath is halted. Of course, he doesn't know that Scully in a robe was so common to you even before you became romantically involved that it really is no big deal. Actually, you haven't really noticed she was in her pajamas when you got here until she said she would go change quickly and you told her not to be silly. You saw each other in hospital gowns, nightwear, undergarments, naked more than any other working duo on the planet, so seeing your former spouse in a pair of flannel PJs underneath a thick white terry cloth robe isn't inappropriate one bit. For you, that is. His attitude varies slightly from yours.

"What are you implying here, Mark?" Scully asks tight-lipped, although it's pretty obvious. Regardless that he is miles off target with his suspicions, you feel a pleasant twitch in your groin. An unexpected, yet very pleasant one.

"He's more to you than just a friend, right?"

There, he speaks it out. His voice is weirdly distorted when he draws imaginable quotation marks into the air pronouncing the word 'friend'.

CLOSURE B - Shippers: Everything's Yar

The innuendo is hovering above you like a heavy rain cloud imminent to empty itself upon you. Scully feels it too, and she decides to let the drops fall and soak you.

"You're right, Mark, Mulder is more to me than a friend."

"I knew it," he hisses through clenched teeth.

"It's not what you think, though."

"Ugh, come on, Dana, don't give me this shit. You simply never stopped loving him, that's it, and I was a welcome stopgap to help you cope with your separation, some stupid jerk who boosted your self-esteem adoring you and putting himself at your feet. What an idiot I've been."

"Wow," she mutters, "this is how you think of me? That I would use you like this? I thought you knew me better."

"Well, do we ever really know a person? Know all their motivations and thoughts, every hidden corner of their soul?"

You'd like to tell him that you do. You know Scully's soul better than your own. You can draw a map of every wound that soul has suffered from. You can tell exactly how high the wall is she's built around herself at any given moment and why it's there in the first place. You're able to follow her lines of thought without her having to utter a single word. If he knew how he's wronging her just now, he would keep his fucking mouth shut.

You can't help but back her up. "Would you take it down a notch, Mark? Why don't you just listen to what she's saying?"

"Don't you tell me what to do!" he bellows at you, angry beads of spit splashing out of his contorted mouth. You can't blame him. You remember how you reacted to the Ed Jerse incident all those years ago, and you hadn't even been a couple back then. Jealousy can do peculiar things to a once self-assured man.

"Mark, please sit down and listen to me," Scully says, "I never used you, neither did I ever lie to you. There are certain things I haven't told you, that's true, things about Mulder and myself, but not to betray you but because they are-"

Mark's hands shoot up to silence her. "Wait, let me say it, Dana," he demands, his voice sharp as a knife, "because they are cla-ssi-fied. What a perfect excuse for everything!"

"Well, they are, I can't help it," she replies steadfastly, "I'm not keeping them from you to hide any secrets you obviously think I have but to spare you the ugliness of what I've seen. Believe me, you don't want to know what Mulder and I dealt with. I understand that it's not easy for you and that I'm demanding a lot, but this is the only way it's going to work between us. If you cannot trust me on this, if you can't give me credit here, I don't see how we are going to continue our relationship."

"That's rich, Dana, really! Now I have to be thankful that you're protecting me from the world's villainy? Great! Like a boy who doesn't get told that his hamster died while he was in school."

She stares at him, bewilderment and disbelief written all over her face. "I can't believe we're having this conversation, Mark. I thought we had an understanding that my work with the FBI was part of my past I wanted to leave behind me."

"Can you at least tell me what you meant when you said he's more to you than a friend? I'm sorry that I'm so pathetically territorial here but I need to know there's nothing going on between you, otherwise I'm going to get crazy."

He seems to have forgotten that you're still here, or he doesn't care. You wished she had let you go a few minutes ago. You feel out of place and not entitled to listen to this conversation but you also know that your being here gives her strength. The two of you have got nothing indecent to hide from him, as much as you'd like there was.

"Please, baby, tell me what's so special about him that you can't let go of him," Mark implores, sounding so pleading and vulnerable all of a sudden, you can't but sincerely pity him.

Scully looks at her boyfriend. You notice compassion for him in her eyes, how seeing him falling apart in front of her touches her deeply. She will tell him, you realize, and your stomach feels as if you've just swallowed a pile of glass shards. You try to shield yourself from what you're going to hear because it will be as painful for you as it will be for her.

After another moment of silence she needs to muster up the strength to articulate the words, you hear her say, "he's the father to my son. Mulder and I have a child together."

Boom! The bomb has exploded.

You feel dizzy as the aftershocks ripple in waves through your body. Mark has turned into a pillar of salt. You're actually not sure he's still breathing. He stares at Scully with eyes wide and his mouth gaping. "I'm sorry, what?" he finally manages to utter.

"His name is William. He's thirteen."

"You have a son?"

"Yes."

After a moment he needs to process the information, Mark jumps up from his chair. The loud bang of the backrest making contact with the floor tears the silence apart that has been thickening the atmosphere in the room up to a point you feel you're suffocating.

"I can't believe this! For the six months we've been together you didn't deem me worthy to let me know this of you? That you are a mother?"

"I'm not a mother. Not anymore."

You feel like throwing up. You inhale deeply to fight the nausea. What you want to prevent from happening under all circumstances is that they turn their attention to you because you're emptying the contents of your stomach into the kitchen sink. This is not about you, although you play an important role in this. This is about Scully and Mark.

"What do you mean not anymore? Is he dead?"

Scully gasps. Tears flood her eyes and you see how hard she struggles not to lose her composure and break out in crying. You have to help her out.

"We don't know for sure, but we can assume that he is alive," you tell him, and to her you say, "we have every reason to believe he's safe and happy, Scully."

That's all you're going to say. What's more to explain needs to come from her. Mark won't understand anything with the cryptic way the two of you have been beating around the bush so far. How can he?

As if on cue he croaks, "what's that supposed to mean?"

"I gave him up for adoption a few weeks before he turned one. I insisted on a closed adoption, so we have no information whatsoever about him." Her voice is calm and firm. She has once again managed to detach herself from the painful emotions, talking as if she was giving facts on a case.

"You gave your child up for adoption? I can't quite believe this, Dana. It doesn't sound the least like you. You're far too caring and giving for me to be able to picture this. You love kids. You work up to exhaustion to cure the children in your hospital, and I've seen you together with your nephews and niece and together with my kids. I can't imagine a reason why you should be giving away your own son."

You hate to admit it, but he impresses you. He's not judgemental or self-righteous, he's not blaming or condemning her like so many other people who have learned this about her, including her own brother. He is quite the contrary. "What happened, sweetheart?" he asks in a gentle voice full of empathy and reaches out to her but she pulls her hands away. 'Come on, Scully,' you want to call out to her, 'let your guard down. Open up to him.' But her eyes are glued to her entwined fingers, the knuckles white from kneading them fiercely. She bites her lower lip so hard you're afraid she'll draw blood. The tension wafting off of her is palpable, the inner turmoil readable.

She looks at you, questioning you what to do in the wordless communication you have perfected between you over the years. You give a nod that has to be almost invisible to Mark but is to Scully as if you were gesticulating wildly with both arms. She gets it. She clears her throat, wiping her palms on her thighs in what is an irrational replacement activity. You know that her hands get cold when she's tensed-up, not sweaty. You want to take them in yours, warm them up with your body heat because you actually are on fire, but you're aware that this is her battle to fight. You've talked to your therapist more than once about William, you're not sure she's ever talked to anyone about him, really talked about him. So you catch your breath with relief when she starts to speak.

"I longed for this child. I wanted to be a mother so badly, I had even tried IVF at a time I was single."

"IVF? With a sperm donation?" Mark asks.

"Uhm, yes," she answers shyly. You can see how hard she tries not to look at you. She most certainly doesn't want to give him a clue about the donor's identity.

"But it didn't take it," he concludes correctly.

"No. No, it didn't. I was told I couldn't conceive naturally, so this had been my only chance. A very slim chance, but I was so hopeful and therefore devastated when it failed and I had to accept that I was never going to have a child. About two years later, something that can only be called a miracle happened and I became pregnant the...uhm...the old-fashioned way."

Now she does look at you and Mark takes his eyes off of her to look at you too. He arches an eyebrow, you literally see the movie running in front of his mind's eye and you do everything you can to keep the sweet smile off your face that is tugging at the corners of your mouth. What a magical night that was!

Mark refocuses on Scully. "You call it a miracle, so I take it you were happy when you found out you were pregnant."

"Indescribably. The pregnancy and childbirth weren't without complications, though."

You almost laugh at the ridiculous understatement. A presumably dead father, the everpresent fear that her pregnancy was engineered, that her baby wasn't normal, plus a childbirth witnessed by supersoldiers were actually poisonous to the experience, not *complicating* it. She was finally in a state she had yearned for so long and then she wasn't allowed to enjoy it like any expectant mother should. The injustice of it all still makes you curse everything and everyone: fate, God...the Cigarette Smoking Man and his cronies.

"But when William was finally born and I was holding my healthy baby in my arms, I was so happy. I thought that a wonderful life was waiting for me together with my beautiful son and his father."

So did you. The kiss you shared with her in her apartment was so promising. You finally had the feeling you had found your home, somewhere you could settle down and someone you belonged to. Your bliss lasted exactly for 48 hours - the most wonderful 48 hours of your entire life - before you had to leave the woman you had eventually allowed yourself to love and the baby boy who had taken possession of your heart the moment you first held him in your arms.

"How naïve I was. How stupid," Scully whispers more to herself than Mark, completely sunken in her painful memories.

"Where the hell were you, Mulder?" Mark obviously has problems making sense of what he's been hearing so far.

"I, uh-" you start without even knowing what to say when Scully leapfrogs you. "Mulder's life was at stake. He had to go into hiding."

"I see. He saved his sorry ass and left you and the baby alone."

"I told him to get himself out of harm's way."

"Of course you're defending him but seriously, what kind of man leaves a woman who's just given birth all to herself with a newborn?"

You can't but agree. What kind of man did that to her?

"Our lives would've also been threatened if he had stayed."

"Sure, he did you a favor heaving all the responsibility onto you." Sarcasm is dripping off of every word.

"You weren't there, Mark. Don't judge Mulder for what he did if you don't have any idea what it was like back then."

You can't stand her speaking on behalf of you. You don't deserve it. "He's right, Scully. I shouldn't have left. My place was at your side. Yours and William's."

"Don't be ridiculous, Mulder! You know that had you stayed, they would've gotten you. What would've been the purpose of you staying?"

"The purpose, Scully? The purpose would've been not to walk away from the only two people in the world that were important to me."

You gaze at each other, both briefly oblivious of the third person in the room until said person coughs uncomfortably and brings you back into the here and now. You both turn your heads and look away from each other, startled by the unexpected intensity of the moment.

Scully clears her throat. "Well, Mulder, dead you wouldn't have been of any help either."

No, of course not, but you would've had more than just two days with your family. You would've gotten to know your son better than what was possible in only 48 hours. How many more time would you have had before they shot a bullet through your head? A week? A month? A year? You might have been able to see William sit upright, eat his first solid food, crawl or babble his first words. Mommy, most probably, and maybe even daddy. You could've watched Scully as a mother. You were struck by the radiance of her smile when she was nursing him, you would've loved to see more of her parental bliss. Every single day more with your son and his mother would've been worth your inevitable violent decease.

But you chose to listen to Scully and Skinner in their efforts to convince you to go underground, They told you it would be better for the three of you. When you were lying all alone in a bed in some shaggy motel room in the middle of nowhere, thinking of Scully and William until your heart bled, you weren't so sure anymore that it had been the right decision. When you finally reunited with her in a dark, cold prison cell months later, a broken woman was kneeling in front of you, begging you for forgiveness although you had no right to blame her for anything.

"Honestly, Dana," Mark and his full voice pull you out of your painful reminiscences, "I can imagine that as FBI agents you had to deal with the scum of society and that you put your life on the line every once in a while, but that agents have to go underground to protect themselves and their families from getting killed is new to me. Is that a regular professional hazard you accept when you sign your contract?"

"We were Special Agents. We worked for a unit called the X-Files. Our cases were very much out of the ordinary," she explains without really revealing what kind of individuals you were dealing with. Some hadn't even been human.

"And because of an extraordinary case, Mulder had to hide?" Mark tries to understand.

"We had messed up with some very powerful forces during the course of our work. Almighty forces. Forces that moved people around like pawns on a chess board."

"Such as?"

Scully avoids Mark's eyes. Failing an answer, she hangs her head, presses her lips together and simply shrugs. He knows what to make of her reaction. "Classified," he notes dryly and gets an affirmative nod. "Okay, so you sent Mulder away two days after your son was born. He wasn't there to help you with the baby. I got this. But that can't possibly the reason why you gave...uh, what was his name again?"

"William," the two of you croak in unison and Scully heaves a sad sigh.

"Look, Mark," you rise to speak, "this is all quite painful for Scully. For the both of us. Allow me to cut this a little short. Not only Scully and I were pawns, but so was William. Due to the nature of our work the circumstances are-"

Mark raises a hand to stop you. "Ah, Mulder, let me say it once again: classified." He lets the word roll off of his tongue with relish, as if it were a sip of well-aged single malt, only that he isn't enjoying the taste.

"Right, but let me tell you this much: Scully acted out of pure love for her son. With giving him up, she took him out of the game. You have to understand, on their chess board he wasn't a simple pawn like us, he was the king, the most valuable token they had. Only far away from us in an adoptive family was he able to lead a normal life, a life out of reach of the forces that meant us harm. Scully made the biggest of sacrifices for a mother to make."

"It was our sacrifice as parents. I'm so sorry that I couldn't protect him, Mulder," you hear her whisper. While your look rests on Scully's slouched figure, out of the corner of your eye you notice how her boyfriend picks up the chair he's knocked over earlier and slumps down on it.

Her guilt pangs make you feel awful. All these years, you haven't managed to dissipate her worries that you held her accountable for the loss of William. "Don't you dare apologize to me, Scully. None of this is your fault. All this shit you've been through centers around me, I'm the one to blame here."

"Mulder, you know I chose this life at your side many years ago and never regretted it."

"That doesn't keep me from believing that you would've been better off without me. You deserved far more than what you've got."

"Nonsense. How often do I have to tell you that I would do it all over again?"

You have nothing to say to this. She's told you this many times, that she never regretted having chosen this life although it cost her so much, and as much as you wished for her to have this other, carefree life full of joy and light, you thank the gods above that against all odds she'd chosen to be with you, you selfish sonofabitch.

"Wow."

The man who's set this conversation in motion earlier in a pang of jealousy brings himself back into focus. You have almost forgotten he's still there, listening to what Scully and you had to say to each other. Poor guy, this can't be something you want your girlfriend and her ex to be talking about while you're in the room. Actually, this can't be something you want your girlfriend and her ex to be talking about at all.

"Your relationship really is one of a kind." Mark is shaken by a bitter chuckle. "Listen to you! You're so fucking tender with each other it makes me question my position in this threesome."

You can't believe the word he's chosen. "Threesome?" you make sure you heard him right.

"Yes, threesome." He pauses for a moment until he stares hostilely right at you. "Let me ask you this, Mulder...has it bothered you even for a second that there was someone else when you decided to sneak back into her life? Huh? I mean, honestly, haven't you heard that trying to steal a guy's girlfriend behind his back is no way to behave among men?"

"Mark, please! Would you stop being so possessive!" Scully implores. "I don't like it. Plus, there's no need for you to make such a scene."

"You keep saying that, Dana. You allayed my suspicions more than once, assuring me of your affection for me and that he and you are just friends," he snarls.

"We are just friends," she shouts back at him.

He chuckles again. It's a mocking, sore chuckle. "You really believe what you're saying? What I've just seen here weren't two friends but two people showing me so much syrupy devotion to one another, it makes me gag."

His harsh words bring tears to her eyes, and you hate him for it. He doesn't understand anything, or maybe, actually, he understands it all.

"It's so damn obvious that I'm the fifth wheel here, I think I better go."

He jumps off the chair which threatens to tip over once again. He grabs his jacket and strides toward the door, but Scully blocks his way. "No, please, don't go!"

"Why? Why do you want me to stay?"

"Because...because I really enjoy being with you."

"You know what, Dana? This I actually do believe. You enjoy being with me. You like me. Maybe even a lot. But not even once did I hear from you that you loved me. I don't blame you, don't get me wrong. I know that in a relationship, there's always one party more deeply in love than the other and I guess in our relationship that party is supposed to be me. It's not a very pleasant position to be in, I have to tell you. I've been there already with my marriage to Jessica, and I'm not going there again. I'm sorry. I'm really madly in love with you, Dana, but if you can't love me back the way I love you, and I've just been shown that you can't, I have to get the hell out of here to save my neck."

"What is it you're saying, Mark?" she whispers in a trembling voice although she knows. You do too.

Mark cups Scully's face, tilting it up to make her look at him. His voice is gentle now, his features calm and peaceful. "I'm saying..." He sighs, clenches his jaw so hard you see his muscles throb, inhales deeply through his nose, then continues in an even softer voice, "I'm saying that you are a stunning woman. You're breathtakingly beautiful, you're sensitive, warm, giving. You were a wonderful mother, of that I'm sure. I fell for you the moment you stepped into my office. The man who gets to be loved by you is one lucky guy. Unfortunately, I'm not that man. I wished I was, but I'm not and never will be. Someone else in this room is. I've been enjoying my time with you, Dana, a lot, but I have to protect my heart from being broken, and it will be broken if I stay."

"Mark," Scully starts feebly but is silenced by his lips on hers. It's a chaste kiss, their mouths lingering on each other in a tender touch.

"Take care, sweet Dana," he says while swiping the remains of the kiss off her lips with his thumb. "And you, asshole," he starts talking to you without taking his eyes off of her, "you better get your shit together and make her happy."

He moves toward the door. His hand is already reaching for the knob when he turns around to look at you both. "Go find this son of yours. Build the family you both so achingly long for. You were both FBI agents, for Christ's sake, you know how to get information about someone, don't you? Classified or not."

He opens the door and walks through it but stops in the hallway once again. Without looking back he says one more thing. "Send me a Christmas card of the three of you." Then he's gone.

Scully is rooted to the ground. She stares after him, frozen, not even blinking an eye. You close the door softly and lean your back against it. You're downright flabbergasted by the ultimate course of events. You really have to give him credit. You'd bow to him if he was still here. That was some kind of a dignified exit off the stage. You're beginning to understand why she'd gotten involved with him. The man has class.

"I'm sorry, Scully," you mumble, "that's not what I came here for, today."

"I don't know what to say," she whispers, tears streaming down her cheeks. "I'm an awful person."

"No, you're not."

"I treated him badly, took advantage of him."

"Did you listen at all? He said you were stunning and that he treasures the time with you. No man praises a woman like that if he feels taken advantage of."

"I should've never gotten involved with him. It was not fair to let him believe that I could ever...after what we had...I mean...argh."

She pushes you aside and takes angry strides back into the living-room. Your heart breaks seeing her in so much despair. All you wanted when you came here was to share her company for a while. You didn't mean to chase her boyfriend away, although, if you're being honest, for your own selfish reasons, you're glad he's gone.

Some of what he'd said to her is still ringing in your ear.

"Is he right, Scully?"

"Right with what?"

"That I...uhm, that the other man in this room was in the lucky position to be loved by you?"

Mark Finlay isn't the first man to make such a remark. Many years ago, Philipp Padgett, the writer who lived next door to you, told you that Scully couldn't fall in love like he'd written in one of his stories because she already was in love. He meant in love with you but you were too slow-witted to be able to put two and two together at the time.

"Mulder, you know that the reason for me to leave you was not that I had fallen out of love with you."

She can't hide that she doesn't really want to talk about it right now, but you have to know so you insist. "That's not what he was trying to say, I guess."

"No, maybe not."

"And?"

She looks at you with her beautiful blue eyes that are now red and puffy from crying. "Mulder, let me process the relationship that has just ended before contemplating another one, okay?"

"Sure."

You clear your throat. You're a bit embarrassed. What did you expect? That she would fall into your arms right away and kiss you as if she only waited for Mark to disappear? She had been serious about this man, she had really wanted to give this relationship a try. You just realize how close you'd been to losing her. If it wasn't for the bond you share through William, the time you'd become estranged from one another during the height of your depression could have been fatal to your relationship. The son who left your life as an infant keeps holding the two of you together, how ironic is that?

Scully is standing at the window with her back turned to you, her body posture rigid. She's folded her arms around herself and you see her shoulders rise and fall with every breath she takes. She's upset and confused. You'd like to envelop her in a comforting embrace, stroke her back while she buries her face in your chest and place a kiss into her hair - strictly platonic, without any ulterior motives - but you're not sure it'd be much appreciated. Scully hates to be vulnerable. You can count on the fingers of one hand how often she allowed you to see her in a moment of weakness, the moment she told you that she'd given up William being one of them.

"Scully?" you break the deafening silence.

"Hmm?"

"Do you think he's right about...this, uh, other thing?"

You hold your breath.

"What other thing?"

Her eyes are still locked on something outside.

"William. That we should track him down."

You think you're able to see how the last bit of strength leaves her body. For a moment, you fear she's going to collapse like a marionette whose strings have been cut off, but then she recomposes herself. She straightens her shoulders and her voice is quiet but firm when she starts to speak.

"I sometimes imagine what he looks like. I picture him tall and lanky as you, with brown, thick hair. He hadn't grown enough of it when I handed him over to the social worker to be able to tell what color it would eventually be. His eyes had my color, but most babies are born with blue eyes, especially fair-skinned ones like him. They have very little melanin in their eyes, the pigment that gives color to the eyes, skin, and hair. The eyes sometimes don't produce much melanin, if any, while the baby is in the womb. After birth, light stimulates the production of it, which is why the eye color may darken or change over time. His eyes were still blue when I last looked into them, so maybe they still are."

You haven't seen Science Scully for a while, but there she is, rational and detached as ever, letting facts capture the space where emotions are too painful.

"I wonder what he's like as a schoolboy. Does he like science like I do or is he more gifted in the fine arts and attends a theater or writing class? If he has inherited your height, which I hope he has, he plays basketball probably or he is a good swimmer, maybe, like you. I bet he loves pizza like all teenagers his age, and computer games. Maybe he has a dog. It's nice for kids to grow up with a dog. I've always been a dog person. If he was living with us, we would have a dog, for sure. An Irish Terrier maybe, or a Jack Russell. Those are funny."

She's in another world, a dream world, where she keeps William around. You ask yourself whether this really is a healthy way to cope with the loss. You're not sure and you make a mental note to ask your therapist. You see the same broken woman you saw all those years ago in your prison cell, bereft of everything good in her life, and you realize you're the only person who's able to keep the fragments of her together, which is why Mark never stood a real chance against you. Only you have the ability to glue the pieces of her shattered existence together and make her a whole person. It's your advantage over all men that think they could hit on her, but it's also an obligation. You've seen what happens to her when you're not fulfilling your duty. She gets lost and disoriented with all the choices she'd made being proven wrong after all. You are her lifeline, the x-axis to the y-axis in her coordinate system. It's your damn responsibility to be the man she needs you to be after all the sadness you've brought into her life.

You approach her cautiously, for she's so buried in her contemplations that you're afraid to startle her. 'Take her by the hand and guide her,' you hear your inner voice tell you, so that's what you do. Your fingertips graze the back of her hand which is now dangling lifelessly at the end of an equally lifeless arm, which belongs to a lifeless woman. She doesn't react, is not taking the hand you're offering her. Her walls are up, you realize. Two rows of solid bricks, erected to shut everyone out, to retreat and deal with the pain all by herself. But you won't let her. Not this time. The two of you made that mistake once, each dealing alone with the loss of William, you won't let it happen again. This time, you're going to hold on to her and you're going to help her heal.

"I'm here, Scully," you whisper into her ear.

EPILOGUE

"Mr. Finlay, there's a private letter for you in the mail today. It's on your desk," the agency's intern who is responsible for distributing the incoming mail tells him.

"Thank you, Chad," Mark replies, but the boy is already gone.

He puts his briefcase on his desk and switches the desk lamp on. It's still dark in the morning at this time of year. He pushes the button on his phone to listen to the messages on his voicebox and takes a sip of the coffee he's brought along. He lets himself fall into his chair and sighs. Two more weeks until Christmas, then he will have two weeks off. He will spend Christmas Eve with his ex-wife and the kids this year. He's resolved all his issues with Jessica and they are able to converse on a friendly basis again, which is good for their two children, Benjamin, 12, and Louise, 15. He leans back in his chair and contemplates his agenda for the day when his eyes fall on the envelope on his desk with the note 'confidential'.

He reaches out and takes it in his hand. The paper is thick and there's a commemorative stamp with a Christmas ball on it. Season greetings, obviously. How many has he already received of these? All his clients, and he's got lots of them, send him season greetings, and the house owners, who want him to find tenants for their properties. This particular letter is also from a client, a very special one. He recognizes her handwriting instantly and has to smile.

He doesn't want to rip the envelope, so he opens the top drawer of his desk and takes a letter opener out. He positions the point at one corner and slides the sharp blade through the paper. He puts the opener back into the drawer and closes it slowly. He takes another sip of coffee before he pulls the card out.

The front only says Season Greetings, but when he unfolds it, he looks at some familiar faces. Two out of three are familiar at least, the third person is unknown to him but is so much a combination of the other two that he has to laugh. It's a teenage boy with the same thick dark hair as his father and the blue eyes of his mother.

He takes a closer look at the woman's face and is taken aback by the sheer elation etched on her face. Her eyes are sparkling and her toothy grin almost reaches her ears. He's never seen her that happy, which hurts him a little because he'd always thought that she had been happy with him also. Maybe she was, but not as happy as she could be, as happy as she is with this other man. Below the picture, he finds a personal note from her.

Mark, hope you are well. Thanks for everything. Dana.

His eyes fall on the man. With his long arms put around the other two, he looks like a proud family man determined to do everything in his power to care for and to protect his loved ones. "Well done, asshole," Mark mumbles, "looks like you've really gotten your shit together."

He takes his iPhone out, opens the messenger app and touches the profile picture of one of his favorite contacts. Hey Jess, he types, looking forward to spending Xmas with you and the kids this year. XOXO, Mark. He hesitates for a moment, then presses send. He watches for the indication that the message is being delivered and smiles when the little blue check tells him that's it's been received. The green dot next to his ex-wife's name indicates that she's online right now. 

A few seconds later, her reply gets in. Me too, and a smiling emoji.

END

[nostalgicphile]

Cate what's a misogynistic trope used in shows and movies you'd like to see writers use less of?

I think it’s really important to distinguish between stereotypes of the time and misogynistic tropes. I also feel that the time when I “came of age” still informs my tolerance for what I see portrayed in movies and on TV. When I think back on the popular sexploitation movies I grew up with in the ‘80s - The Last American Virgin, Private School, The Blue Lagoon, Endless Love, Porkys, Animal House, Fast Times at Ridgemont High - and the degree in which extremely young girls were sexualized and gratuitously filmed - well, it’s just disturbing…and a popular trend I hope never reemerges.

Sometimes I envy folks here who were teens when The X-Files premiered. One of the popular crime dramas (if TXF could fall into that classification) when I was around 13 was a TV program called “Hunter.” Like the X-Files, Hunter featured a male/female partnership (homicide detectives), Hunter and McCall. They had wonderful chemistry and yes, everyone “shipped” (though that term had yet to be coined by TXF fandom) their platonic relationship. I liked the show very much and I was hugely invested in the characters. Here is a pic…not unlike early XF promos, no?

In the second season of Hunter, McCall was brutally raped in her home, leaving Hunter to dole out justice after the fact. The rape and beating was graphic and extremely disturbing. Wikipedia describes it like this:

This episode was considered very controversial for its realistic and shocking depiction of a violent rape, which was not common in TV shows at the time.

I was devastated. That I still remember how I felt after seeing that episode over 30 years later, speaks volumes in of itself. Here was a strong female character: smart, tough, an equal to her male partner. To see her brutally raped made me feel….vulnerable. That, as a woman, sexual violence was an inevitable fate - no matter how smart, tough and trained you may be.

And you know what? The episode arc was extremely popular. It put Hunter on the map, really. And, in retrospect, demonstrated an audience appetite for seeing extraordinarily graphic sexual violence against women on TV. If it weren’t a popular trend at the time, it certainly became one.

I’ll be honest with you: when I started watching TXF, I thought it would only be a matter of time before Dana Scully was sexually assaulted. It had become par for the course in TV dramas like TXFs, a highly disturbing trend. I was extremely tense during episodes like Irresistible…and so relieved that Dana Scully was shown escaping on her strength and wits - regardless of how afraid she was. And that is was okay to be afraid. (You can also see how programs like The Fall sometimes come into question…)

I’m not sure if this really answers your question, but I hope it’s food for thought anyway.

How would you answer your own question?

[allyinthekeyofx]

Storybook Words 1/1

This is for you @scully-loves-ruthie for always loving what I do and for being my fic-idea sounding board!  This is mostly angst with a side order of fluff.  Set Post ‘Home again’

1/1

It seems like I have spent every moment of the last couple of weeks just watching Scully, waiting perhaps for her to fall apart on the outside in the same way I know, through bitter experience, she is suffering on the inside.

Because no matter how she tries to hide it from me, from those around her and maybe even from herself, losing Maggie has hit her harder than I think she could have ever imagined.

We have lost so much over the years and while I would once have  bestowed upon myself the honour of being the one constant that has shored up the tattered edges of her life, the last few years have shown me all too painfully, that this is no longer the case.  The minute I began to push her away from me, angry at myself, at her and a whole lifetime of futile belief in things that will never be, I fear I lost her for good.

We will always be friends of course but I stole something from her years ago, a trust in me that I doubt will ever be regained and along with it a little piece of her died right there and then as she sought comfort in the fact that no matter how hard things got, how desperate she felt or how isolated, she always had this. 

This house of escape, of only good memories; a place of safety where she could flee to when things got tough, where she sought perfect solace in the arms of the woman who had held all the answers she ever needed, a mother’s love that never wavered and never dimmed the light that sparked in her eyes when she looked upon the face of her daughter.

It’s a look I know all too well because I see it in Scully when she remembers our son, love mingled with regret that she has only memories of him, of how he felt when she held him in her arms and prayed for an absolution that never came.

It’s the same look when finally, painfully, we could put it off no longer and we began to pack up the room that once had been Scully’s but which had then become Williams.  A room that Maggie had insisted be made over to him so he had somewhere to call his own on the frequent occasions he would be given over to her capable care when Scully was absent; the perfect solution given the fact that I wasn’t around to help with the day to day challenges that a growing baby and a job with irregular hours could bring.

William’s room.

A room which had remained largely unchanged since the day Scully kissed him one final time as she made the ultimate sacrifice to keep him safe and a room which now held memories that were as bittersweet as they were agonising for her, not least because it was clear that Maggie had never given up hope that one day he would find us, would find her.

The crib was gone.  Replaced at some point with a single bed adorned with a navy checked comforter befitting an older child and I could see by the look on Scully’s face that she hadn’t considered that Maggie would update the room as the years passed by.  Pine furniture, sturdy and practical with plenty of storage for the needs of a growing boy, well cared for and even though no one had been around to clean it recently, the surfaces still gleamed; as, dustless and unblemished, the room held onto the faintest scent of beeswax.

William’s room.

A room he will now never see; maintained with love by a remarkable woman he will never know.

I watched as Scully drifted across the space that separated her from the open doorway to the small bedside table that matched the rest of the furniture, her shoulders set with a tension I have come to recognise in her but which she refuses to allow me to gentle in ways I always gentled her in the past; safe behind her walls lest she opens herself to yet more hurt at my hands.

Preferring instead to be the sole custodian of her own heart, a heart that she once gave cautiously only to have it thrown carelessly aside as I battled demons alone that I now know belonged to her also; and I would do anything – anything- to turn back the clock, to start afresh,  because I know now that no matter how I try to make amends for past transgressions it will never be enough to erase the hurt I caused her.

She picked up the hardback book that sat atop the cabinet beneath the lamp and I watched something briefly light her expression as she traced one slim finger over the title and I leaned forward slightly in order to identify it.

The Little prince

She caught me watching her and before I could speak, a tremulous smile tugged at the corners of her mouth at odds with the film of tears that suddenly glazed her fine blue eyes and reflected the light of the late afternoon sun right back at me.

“This was her favourite book.  She would read it to me when I was sick or when I was missing my Father and I always felt so safe, so loved when her voice was the last thing I heard before I fell asleep……I guess she must have read it to William too.”

And just like a switch had been flicked, she blinked back the tears and replaced the book carefully from where it had lain for so many years.  

“Scully….”

She had shaken her head, turning away from me as the cracks that still existed between us widened once more in to a gaping chasm I had no clear idea how to breach.

“There’s nothing here I need to keep.  It can all stay for the clearance people.”

And that, as far as Scully was concerned, was that and I watched as she squared her shoulders in that peculiar way of hers before she turned away; exiting the room which held memories she still didn’t really know how to face.

I had expected her to ask me to drop her back at her apartment, that soulless square box she now called home and had been more than surprised when, as I piloted the car to a halt outside the entrance that she had finally looked at me – I mean really looked at me – for the first time in years; and I suddenly found myself able to read the question in her eyes as effortlessly as I ever had.

An unspoken imploration that required no words.

So I had tentatively reached across and placed my palm against the softness of her cheek, the feel of her skin against mine sending a bolt of electricity through me as, with a single touch she allowed me to become connected to her once again.

Take me home

And so I did.

We didn’t speak the entire drive back, as I concentrated on piloting the car one-handed in order to allow Scully to hold the other against her, fingers gripping tightly to mine with an intensity that belied her calm exterior, her hold relaxing by degrees as the warmth of the car and the gentle swish of the wipers sweeping away the rain that had begun to fall against the windshield lulled her to sleep, and as her hold finally loosened , I kept my hand over hers so she would know I was still there with her, just as in some way I always had been.

It was completely dark by the time we made it to the house we had once called home; a house that even now, held onto the good memories of our life together more than it did the bad and Scully was only barely awake as I half carried her up the steps and into the warmth of the living room where I set her gently down on the battered brown sofa that I knew from bitter experience, was as comfortable as any bed.

She stirred slightly as I removed her shoes, her eyes opening for just a moment as she held on to my gaze, a mixture of such vulnerability and painful yearning that I just wanted to pull her towards me and never let her go, tears held at bay for far too long now finally seeking release as she began to cry.

“I just…I just want to feel safe again Mulder…and I’m afraid now that I never will.”

I sushed her softly , allowing her to cry in my arms, stroking circles against the planes of her back with my palms, as she shuddered wordlessly against me, her tears soaking into the thin material of my shirt even as they scalded my skin, riding out her grief that she had buried so deep inside of her for so long.

And finally, as she lay spent and boneless against me, I reached around in to the pocket of my overcoat, withdrawing the book I had placed there just a few short hours before and even though she didn’t speak, the gentle smile it evoked was all I needed as I opened the leather bound cover and began to read.

Once when I was six years old I saw a magnificent picture in a book, called ‘True Stories from Nature’ about the primeval forest…….

END

A/N Final paragraph is taken from The opening chapter of ‘The Little prince’ by Antoine de Saint Exupery.

[jillmckenzie1]

Colorado Poet Series: Interview with Alyse Knorr

The local literary scene is, one must remember, a community.  (One you can be a part of, by the way, whether you’re a writer or reader!) In fact, after I interviewed the poet Elizabeth Robinson who connected me with fiction writer David Hicks, and it was David Hicks who recommended that I reach out to poet Alyse Knorr.

It was my pleasure to read two of Alyse Knorr’s poetry collections, Copper Mother and Mega-City Redux for the purpose of this interview. These collections of poetry and prose respectively are both delightfully dense and unusual explorations which perpetuate insightful cultural commentary within each of their respective narratives.

First, a little bit about Alyse:

Alyse Knorr is an assistant professor of English at Regis University and editor of Switchback Books. She is the author of the poetry collections Mega-City Redux (Green Mountains Review 2017), Copper Mother (Switchback Books 2016), and Annotated Glass (Furniture Press Books 2013), as well as the non-fiction book Super Mario Bros. 3 (Boss Fight Books 2016) and the poetry chapbooks Epithalamia (Horse Less Press 2015) and Alternates (dancing girl press 2014). Her work has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Denver Quarterly, Columbia Poetry Review, The Greensboro Review, and ZYZZYVA, among others. She received her MFA from George Mason University, where she co-founded Gazing Grain Press.

Now, about Copper Mother (Switchback Books 2016):

“Through a startling mixture of forms and language, Copper Mother generates an unusual love story—of loving one’s world so tremendously that that world must be shared, at enormous risk and with unprecedented ingenuity and effort. The ‘Friends’ of Knorr’s universe bring their gentle curiosity to human heroics and frailties, and the humans—we humans—are redeemed by our eagerness to share our naked selves and by Jane, who bravely matches the terrors of mortality with a selfless faith in our capacity to love. Sincere even in its playful and fantastic moments, Knorr’s poetics emerges from a deep groove of mourning all that we have to lose and will certainly lose, every day and on the last day, perhaps most of all ‘our mothers, tired/and lovely and floral and gone.’ In that mourning, though, runs an illimitable current of open-hearted reverence that is the best of humanity and beyond its possession—that craving for contact ‘[t]his world wishes across/space’ to whomever might accept our greeting and the belief that we are already together with loved ones, those we’ve lost and those we haven’t yet met, in the slippery fullness of time.” – Elizabeth Savage, author of Idylliad

And finally, about Mega-City Redux (Green Mountains Review 2017):

In 1405, Christine de Pizan, the world’s first professional writer, published an allegorical work called The Book of the City of Ladies, in which she imagined constructing (with the help of her fairy godmothers Reason, Rectitude, and Justice) a walled city where women could live safe from sexism, misogyny, and gendered violence. Six hundred years later, we still need such a city. Mega-City Redux charts a road-trip search for this mythical city today, with the help of 21st-century feminist heroes Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Xena Warrior Princess, and Dana Scully from The X-Files. Mega-City Redux is essential architecture built from ‘sword, suit, stake, and pen’ – feminine, marvelous, and mega-tough.”

– Mel Nichols, author of Catalytic Exteriorization Phenomenon

  From here, we dialogue:

1. Your most recent projects, Mega-City Redux and Copper Mother inhabit unique worlds while following somewhat strange, utterly unpredictable narratives.  How did the seedling ideas for these works germinate into their final works? Can you describe the creative decision-making process which led to their unique content and form?

The idea for Copper Mother came from a Radiolab interview with Ann Druyan in which Ann describes creating the Voyager Golden Record with her late husband, Carl Sagan, in 1977. NASA sent the Record into deep space with the hopes that an extraterrestrial civilization might find it, and it contains images, sounds, and languages from Earth meant to introduce our species to aliens. I started reading more and more about the Record, and started wondering what might happen if aliens did find the Record and come to Earth to talk to us about it. Ann ended up a character in the book as “Jane,” and I imagined that the aliens might have a technology that would allow present-day Jane to converse with her 1977 past-self. I’ve always been a big fan of science fiction, so I had a blast getting to play with some classic sci-fi tropes (like time travel and a moment of “first contact”) in the book.

I wrote Mega-City Redux after reading Christine de Pizan’sThe Book of the City of Ladies, a 1405 allegory in which Christine imagines building a walled city—with the help of her three fairy godmothers Reason, Rectitude, and Justice—where women can live safe from sexism and misogyny. I also wrote the book in the wake of the 2014 Isla Vista shootings, when a man shot and killed several women out of purely misogynistic hate. This violent tragedy made abundantly clear to me that we still need Christine’s City of Ladies today just as much as we did 600 years ago, so I imagined going on a road trip to find the City with my three personal fairy godmothers—Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Xena Warrior Princess, and Dana Scully.

With both of these projects, once I had the premise and the characters in mind, I just wrote as many poems as I could to try and see what would happen. I love to work in the novel-in-verse form because I get to build a world and create characters and then put them into interesting situations just to see what they’ll do. I love when my characters surprise me and when the plot takes a turn I didn’t see coming!

2. How did you arrive at the decision to source the unnamed female narrator’s fearless female companions Dana Scully, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Xena Warrior Princess, as companions? How are their popular personas purposed in your work, and what effect does their pre-established backstories have on your work? Why did you choose these characters specifically?

I’m a big TV buff, and TV has always been my outlet for self-exploration and my pathway to self-understanding. When I was a young girl, I couldn’t picture myself as the damsel in distress or the love interest in the media I consumed, but I could imagine myself into the role of hero in the form of a Ninja Turtle or Batman. I only felt ready to come out as a lesbian in graduate school after watching all six seasons of The L Word. And so, I really do consider Buffy, Xena, and Dana to be my feminist heroes or role models—they made a big impact on me when I first watched their shows, and they continue to mean a lot to me today.

At the time I wrote Mega-City Redux, I had also recently read Susan Douglas’s book Enlightened Sexism, which is all about the pop culture feminist TV renaissance of the 1990s-2000s, when shows like Buffy and Xena debuted with their fiercely feminist and also really campy and fun content. Even though Mega-City Redux is about very serious social issues, I wanted to have fun with it, and I loved the idea of spending time on a road trip with these three extremely different women. I loved thinking about how they might interact—how they might annoy each other in the car and how they might care for the other. I really appreciate that they’re all such different types of heroes, which I think is important for feminist dialogue. Dana is my Reason figure—logical and intellectual. Buffy is my Rectitude figure—she tries to set things right, which is an inherently vulnerable act to take. Xena is my Justice figure—she wrestles with the thin line between justice and revenge.

What’s great about these three characters is that they’re already so complex and have so much backstory—Dana Scully is the voice of reason to her partner Fox Mulder, and she’s a very logical, left-brained doctor—but she’s also a person of firm religious faith. This kind of complexity made it easy to work with my characters’ backstories and stay true to them without caricaturing them. But my main goal wasn’t to write about the shows or the characters but rather to take them and plop them into my narrative and go on this quest with them.

3. Mega-City Redux cleverly, humorously combines feminist content with pop culture imparting an accessible, modernized spin. What reader responses have surprised or impressed you?  What role do feminist works such as your own play in the current political climate?

I’m always surprised to see just how much these pop culture figures mean to folks. I’ve had readers talk to me about how they first realized they were gay because of Dana or Xena, and I had a reader recently show me a photo of she and her wife dressed up as Xena and Gabrielle (Xena’s beloved) for Halloween. I teach a class on superheroes at Regis, and I love talking with my students about why pop culture matters. TV is often lightyears ahead of the mainstream public discourse, so it can advance social justice movements in powerful ways—shows like Glee and Grey’s Anatomy won a lot of hearts and minds over to the cause of LGBTQIA rights. But TV also acts—just like the Golden Record—as a kind of time capsule snapshot of our world and our culture at this specific moment in time. I love this inherent tension, and I love the space that pop culture creates for “serious play.”

When I read works like Frank O’Hara’s poem “Lana Turner Has Collapsed” or Gary Coleman’s book of superhero poems Missing You, Metropolis, I’m always reminded of the power of writing about our celebrity or our fictional pop culture heroes. These are our modern-day “saints” and icons—our role models and outlets and thought experiments. They can act as a kind of common language through which to discuss the issues of our time, and because they exist in another, imaginative realm, they’re also inherently full of possibility and potential. These, to me, are the ingredients of powerful dialogue.

4. While the majority of science fiction works treat alien arrival as synonymous with the apocalypse, Copper Mother approaches alien arrival with a tone of friendly, casual curiosity. What reason lies behind this significant, divergent decision?

I wrote Copper Mother while I was living in Alaska, and while we were there, my wife and I received many visitors—family and friends who had always wanted to go to Alaska and finally bought their plane tickets after we moved there. So we spent a lot of our time being tour guides—showing our visitors things and places that felt totally ordinary to us but that totally blew their minds (glaciers! moose! bald eagles!). I think for this reason, I imagined a real tenderness between the humans and Our Friends. They often have awkward but always well-meaning, sweet exchanges. The humans sincerely want to be good hosts and Our Friends genuinely want to be polite visitors. I’ve always been interested in what happens when two very different cultures or groups meet and interact, and on what gets included or neglected from the tour or the introductory conversations.

I’m also very invested in the sincerity of the Golden Record project itself—it’s our only truly “species-wide” project—the only artifact we have that attempts to represent us as a unified planet rather than a fractioned collection of different groups. There’s an inherent optimism in the idea of the Record itself—a beautiful hopefulness that I wanted to capture in my book. To launch the Record into space is to believe that someone will find it who wishes us well and wants to connect with us—and that’s the possibility I wanted to envision in my book, not the terrifying (and cliche!) apocalyptic one. I’m a pretty uncynical person by nature, so this was easy for me to imagine.

5. Throughout the work, the aliens, later joined by Then-Jane, communicate through sound effects. How did you go about developing these dialogues?

The Golden Record includes a tremendous amount of sound, including an address by Jimmy Carter, spoken greetings in 55 different languages, a wealth of music (including Beethoven, Chuck Berry, Navajo night chants, and mariachi), and a series of “sounds from Earth” (wind, rain, crickets, wolves howling, cars).

During my research, I learned that many astrobiologists believe that if extraterrestrials ever actually hear the Record, they probably won’t be able to distinguish between the different sounds included—their auditory organs and understanding of language may be so different from ours that they may not know the difference between the music, language, and natural sounds on the Record. For that reason, I wanted Our Friends (and Then-Jane, since she’s a product of the Record) to speak with a mixture of all the types of sounds included on the Record. All of the dialogue they speak comes from actual Record contents, whether it’s a thunderstorm or a hyena laughing or a trumpet wail. I like the way this allows me to play with the definition of “language”—which is something the Record does, too, by including whale song not in the natural sounds portion of the content, but in the languages section!

6. And finally, info on how to purchase both works!

The best way to purchase is to go out to my website, www.alyseknorr.com, and click the licks on the books to go to the publisher’s page.

from Blog https://ondenver.com/colorado-poet-series-interview-with-alyse-knorr/

[frangipanidownunder]

Stranger Twins pt 3

Inspired by the Doppelganger episode. Tagging @today-in-fic and @fictober. Read Part One and Part Two

Part Three

They tailed Visser to the park where he sloped through the playground equipment and beyond to the stand of trees. He was fleet and Mulder felt his years. Scully huffed next to him and he couldn’t tell if it was old age too, or if she was pissed that her body wouldn’t do what she thought it should be able to.

           “Why are we following him, Mulder? I thought we were going to look around his apartment?” She sucked in a huge breath and pulled her hair back out of her face.

           “I just wanted to see where he was headed, make sure he’s out of the way. He doesn’t seem to have a car nearby, so maybe we’ve got some time up our sleeves.”

           He went to turn back and put his hand on her lower back to guide her away. But as they spun round, Visser was standing in front of them.

           “What the hell?” Scully managed to spit out while grappling for her gun.

           Mulder stepped forward just as Visser lunged and they tangled together, falling to the ground. He could hear Scully yelling, “Freeze, FBI,” but he couldn’t stop Visser from rolling away from him. And he knew he wasn’t going to freeze. But when Mulder looked up Visser was being gripped around the collar by Walter S Skinner.

 He paced, pausing every fifth step to stare them down, before starting again. Mulder opened his mouth every time Skinner stopped but there was nothing suitable to say so he just slumped back in his chair.

           Scully pulled open the curtain from around Visser’s bed and let a stethoscope slide off her neck. She hung it on a hook on the wall and stood between Mulder and Skinner.

           Without warning, Skinner launched himself at her, pushing her to the ground and wrapping his meaty hands around her throat. Mulder’s mouth fell open as he processed what was happening and he sprung from his seat issuing a deep-throated roar. His hands connected with Skinner’s thick shoulders and he dug his fingers into the muscle mass. He couldn’t shift him. Skinner was yelling, barking out indecipherable words. Scully’s legs were kicking and scratching across the floor, her shoes flipped off and her muffled gasps spurred him on. He grabbed Skinner again and managed to lift him high enough to dislodge his hands and Scully slithered away, rolling onto all fours and catching her breath. Two orderlies lunged in to help, pulling Skinner away and shoving him face-first to the floor, arms pinned behind his back.

He was raging. “They’re on all sides, they’re coming.”

           “Are you okay, Scully?” he lifted her up and she felt heavy but warm in his arms. To hear her coughing and heaving for breath made his eyes sting with tears. “Just…take it easy.” He shifted her to a chair, helping her to settle as the orderlies still struggled with the AD.

           “He just snapped.” Scully said, her voice ragged. She held her throat and looked up at Mulder. “Why?”

           He squeezed her shoulder and let it linger for a beat. “I don’t know. But he needs help. I’ll find a doctor.”

           Stepping around Skinner, one of the orderlies lost his grip on Skinner and skidded back into Mulder. Mulder side-stepped him just as the AD launched the other orderly off him. In one swift motion he was up and had his arms at Mulder’s throat in a second, pushing him back so he couldn’t get any traction. He was vaguely aware of Scully trying to call out. He was vaguely aware of the orderlies pulling Skinner back. But he was hyper focused on the look in Skinner’s eyes as he barked out, “I’ve got nothing left to lose.”

 He drove Scully home and she spent the entire journey with her head against the window. The skin on her neck was marred with red bruising. He’d been luckier, with only a few scratches at his throat. He made coffee.

           “This is Visser,” he said, sitting next to her on the couch. She shifted away slightly and he blinked away his disappointment.

           “But how does he do it?” She blew the steam away and waited for an answer he knew he couldn’t give yet.

           “I think Skinner was reliving his Vietnam experience. He was possessed by the soul of his younger self, trapped in the jungle when his entire company fell.”

           “Possessed?” she said. “Is that what you think I am?”

           He shrugged. “Maybe possessed isn’t the right word, but somehow Visser has been able to access your memories, cut them off somehow.”

           “But that still doesn’t explain how he defrauded those people – two of them weren’t even in the country when they withdrew their savings, Mulder. That’s not accessing memories. There appeared to be more than one of them. Did the police look into the possibility of twins? The way Visser surprised us in the park – he was in two places at once, so…”

           “Scully,” he said, cutting her off. “This man is not a twin. Well, not in the widely understood definition of that term. What if Visser has the ability to double people, himself even, but somehow, with you and Skinner, it didn’t fully work? It’s like his capacity has been diminished somehow and you’ve both been reduced to a younger version of yourselves.”

           “Reduced?”

           He reached out and gingerly placed a hand on her thigh. She looked at it, biting her lip, but he didn’t move it away. “I’m sorry, Scully. I don’t mean to make you feel that you are in any way less of a person, but for me, you are not the whole Scully that I came to love. Your life experience, these past years together, they’ve been a journey and they shaped you into this…this…”

           She covered his hand in his and frowned lightly. ”This what?”

           “This beautiful, heartbroken, tough, vulnerable, resilient, dynamic woman who somehow loves me. And I guess I want that version of you back. You make me feel whole.”

           The way she looked at him, the blue of her eyes, the straightness of her shoulders, the set of her jaw, the way she contained herself before speaking, he saw a glimmer of the old Scully and he held his breath waiting for her to come back to him. He longed to fall into her and to make love to her. To lie in the dark and whisper about the dreams they have for their son; to wonder about the length of his hair, the colour of his eyes, whether he loved the stars or football or Tolkein or driving.

           “What are we going to do, Mulder?”

           “We have to talk to Visser. Find out more about him.”

           “And Skinner?”

           “I don’t know. He’ll be out of action for a while, I’d say.”

 He slept on the couch. He was too old for it now and 3am seemed like the pits of misery instead of the hour where his brain found its rhythm. He envied Scully and her youthful mind. Those long days and nights on cases, spouting theories and counter-arguments, poring over files or slides or photos. He heard her soft footfalls creaking down the steps.

           “You couldn’t sleep either?” he said, pushing himself up and running a hand through his hair.

           She laughed lightly. “You look a lot like you do…did…back then.”

           His stubble caught under his nails as he rubbed at the fatigue. “I’ll take that as a good thing, Scully.”

           She sat down and the sofa cushions bounced. “Good, because I meant it. I probably shouldn’t tell you this but when I first met you, when you turned in your chair wearing those round glasses, with the reflections of the slides of the dead teenagers you were looking at, I felt an instant attraction. I remember being quite startled by you. I was expecting someone…”

           “Spookier?”

           She shook her head and her hair fell around her shoulders. “Less good-looking. It was unsettling, seeing you there, all grinning arrogance and smarmy intellect.”

           Her giggle made his cock twitch. He shifted on the seat. “Smarmy intellect. Wow, Scully, that’s a huge compliment. Don’t stop. You’re making me feel so good.”

           “And that sort of deadpan delivery, Mulder. That kept me interested too.”

           “Did it now?” he said, leaning forward. “And there was I thinking you hated me and my sarcasm. You never laughed at any of my jokes, Scully.”

           She laughed now. “I just didn’t want to give you the wrong impression. I was desperately trying to keep my head above water and be ‘one of the boys’. God,” she said, pulling her hair back off her face, “this all seems like yesterday.”

           He sighed. “Even for me, it doesn’t feel like 20-odd years have passed.”

           “And you still haven’t told me anything about those years, Mulder.” She looked down at her lap, wringing her hands. “But I’ve had some dreams – maybe they’re more than that – dreams about my parents, my sister…”

           “Scully…”

           “It’s okay, Mulder. I think I know. I just…it’s all too much at the moment. We need to see Visser. I think I want my life back.”

           “I know I want your life back,” he said quietly.

           “How did we really…end up together, Mulder?”

           The lamp cast a shadow on the ceiling, edges fading out. He gathered his thoughts before turning to look at her. “It was inevitable, Scully. From the moment you walked into that basement office, our lives were being slotted together. It was just a matter of time.”

           A single tear tracked down her face and she lifted herself forward, tracing a hand down his cheek and across his jaw. “I always wondered what it would be like to kiss you, Mulder.” She pressed her lips to his and he breathed her in, recalling all her shapes and sounds over the years. The essence of her remained and he deepened the kiss, pulling her onto him as he lay back on the couch. He shouldn’t do this. She was a young woman. He was an old man. But if he squeezed his eyes shut, if he just went with the flow, he…

           The door flew open. Scully jumped off him, her hair wild around her. “Oh my god. Mulder?”

           He stood up, scrabbling for his gun as the figure at the door stepped through. When he moved into the light Mulder saw who it was. He was staring at himself.