#fox might be going into his mulder era | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

mldrgrl · 4 years ago

Note

Lately I've been all about reconciliation. For some reason, I want all the Mulder-and-Bill-Scully-finding-some-peace fic I can get. I'd love to see your take on this, maybe in the IWTB era? Or even revival era.

One Sorry Sonofabitch

By: mldrgrl Rating: PG Summary: See above - but be advised Mulder and Scully aren’t in this story a whole lot. Please send all complaints to @perplexistan and I’ll be filing a lawsuit shortly for pain and suffering for having to turn Bill Scully into a sympathetic character. (Set post-IWtB)

He holds his tongue to spare his mother what he really thinks when she tells him that Dana and Mr. Mulder will be joining them for Thanksgiving this year. He can’t believe the audacity that man has to show up at a family event. And his sister isn’t much better for what she’s put their mother through over the years. He can’t even remember the last time he saw her. He thinks it might be ten years ago, just before his second son, Michael, was born. Tara squeezes his knee under the table and he musters up a smile and a brief nod.

Now that he’s stationed in North Carolina, it’s a lot easier for him to travel with his family instead of having his mother fly out for the holidays. It’s their first Thanksgiving on the east coast and he’s annoyed at having the happy occasion intruded upon by his selfish sister and her ne’er do well friend. He really can’t believe she still keeps that jackass around.

He loves his sister. He truly does. He just can’t understand the foolish choices she’s made. Starting with joining the FBI, but giving away her child and going on the run with her fugitive partner instead of putting her patriotic duty to uphold the law as her priority is just beyond him. He would never. He had hoped that whatever spell Mr. Mulder had put on her would’ve worn off by now, but alas. And now they’re coming to Thanksgiving.

Tara gives him a look when they hear the car pull up. One that implores him to please behave. His wife has no business being so compassionate, but that’s just the kind of person she is. He hasn’t forgotten how his sister nearly ruined the Christmas that Matthew was born with that strange little girl and her impossible claim to her. It should have been a time of great joy and instead Dana had made it sorrowful and awkward.

“Fox and Dana just drove up,” his mother says, coming out of the kitchen and wiping her hands on a dish rag.

His sons jump up from the game they’re playing in the family room, excited to meet their mythical aunt they’ve heard tales about.

“Don’t run in the house,” he barks at the kids.

“Yes Sir,” they say, stopping short and taking slower steps to reach the door.

Tara is the one that greets them and his mother is just behind her. Bill is the last one to the door and waits for the hugs and excited chatter to die down before he gives his sister a stiff embrace and Mr. Mulder a requisite handshake.

“Mr. Mulder,” Bill says.

“Just Mulder,” Mr. Mulder says.

“Matthew had a growth spurt this year,” Tara prattles, laying a hand on their son’s shoulder. He’s taller than her by an inch, thin and reedy. “As you can see. Can you believe he’ll be thirteen next month!? And we’ve got Michael turning ten in February.”

Matthew’s cheeks darken. He embarrasses easily and his fair skin gets blotchy at the drop of a hat. Both his boys are soft, like their mother. He’d like to toughen them up, but Tara is fiercely protective of them. A regular mother lion. He doesn’t get it. When he was a kid, he idolized his father. Those few weeks or months a year when his dad came home were the best. He was interested in everything his father did and how he did it. His sons don’t express any interest in him and he barely hears more than a ‘yes, sir’ or a ‘no, sir’ out of them on a good day.

“Maureen is napping,” Tara says. “You’ll meet her later.”

His daughter, Maureen, well she’s a different story. She’s only a toddler, but she reminds him of his sister Melissa. She’s headstrong and unafraid, particularly when it comes to her father. She sasses. She rolls her eyes already. She ignores his orders and does what she wants when she wants. She’s also cute as a button and has her brothers wrapped around their little fingers. Tara calls her their little threenager.

“We’ve still got time before dinner,” his mother says. “Why don’t we head to the family room.”

“We brought pies,” Dana says.

“I’ll get them,” Mr. Mulder says. He has his hands on Dana’s shoulders and gives them a squeeze when she looks back up at him. They seem to hold some silent conversation. To Bill, it looks like his sister is begging her friend to please don’t leave him alone in this house. He doesn’t know why she’s here.

They gather in the family room and make small talk. Tara finds the scrapbooks she puts together for his mother every year and shows off all the photos of the kids from their school activities and family vacations. Dana nods and smiles through most of it. Mr. Mulder is more talkative and asks all the questions.

A half hour slips by and finally he hears a cry from upstairs indicating that his daughter is up from her nap. Tara is on her feet in an instant.

“That’ll be the little princess,” Tara says. “I’ll go grab her and get her ready to come down.”

“I’ll help you,” Bill says. Tara looks at him strangely as he follows.

Maureen is jumping up and down in the playpen in their room when they walk in. She smiles brightly and holds her arms up to Tara.

“How’s my girl,” Tara coos. “Let’s get you into the dress Grandma bought you for dinner and then you can meet your Auntie Dana and Uncle Fox.”

“Don’t call him that,” Bill says.

“Oh, Bill.” Tara sighs and stands Maureen on the bed to start undressing her. “You’re going to have to accept him sometime.”

“I most certainly don’t.”

“You know, one of the things I loved the most about you when we were dating was that you always said that family was very important to you.”

“It still is. You know that.”

“I’m just saying that sometimes your actions don’t say a lot about what I know is in your heart. Will you grab me one of the Pull-Ups from her bag?”

“I’ve been cordial. Hell, I shook his hand.”

“Hell is a bad word,” Maureen says. She scrunches her face and shakes her head as Tara tries to pull her red curls into a ponytail. “No hair up, Mama.”

“Listen to your mother, Maureen.”

“No.”

“Hair up or it’ll get washed tonight in the bath,” Tara bargains.

“Okay, hair up.”

“She’s the one that abandoned everything, you know. Not giving a damn about how it would affect our mother. Tara, she gave her own child away for that man.”

“Damn damn damn!” Maureen shouts, jumping up and down on the bed.

Tara gives Bill a weary look. “William Scully Junior, you know better than to use that kind of language.”

Maureen laughs and bounces. “Daddy in trouble. Daddy in trouble.”

“Yes, Daddy was being very naughty. And so are you. Get down.” Tara holds her hands out and helps Maureen off the bed. “Billy, Dana had her reasons, I’m sure. Have you ever even asked her what happened back then?”

“No. Why do you always take the other side of the argument?”

“I don’t know, Billy, why do you like to argue so much?” She smiles and pats him on the chest as she leads Maureen past him out the door. “I’m just putting myself in her shoes and I know that if I were to have to do what she did, there would have to be a very good reason. You saw how attached to she was to that little Emily and how devastated she was. Think about that.”

“Hmph.”

Downstairs, his mother oohs and aahs over Maureen’s green velvet dress and Maureen twirls appropriately, delighted to be the center of attention. His sister smiles warmly and kneels down to introduce herself to her niece and tell her how big she is and how pretty.

“Thank you, I know,” Maureen says.

The women laugh.

“Where are the boys?” Bill asks. “And Mr. Mulder?”

“Outside playing basketball,” his mother answers.

Basketball. They should be playing a real sport like football. The last time he’d tried to teach them how to punt and tackle it had ended in tears. Matthew complained that the roughness might hurt his chances of moving up in his piano lessons and Michael said he preferred to work on his model cars.

Bill lingers in the mudroom, watching surreptitiously and listening to boys play with Mr. Mulder through the open window. There are a lot of high fives and hair tousling. They don’t even seem to be competing, just taking turns with the ball, which seems a little ridiculous.

“Good job, Matt,” Mr. Mulder says, even when Matthew misses a shot that should have been easy. “Loosen that wrist and hold that follow-through.” He takes the boys’ hand and guides it with his own. “That’s it. Let’s try it again.”

Matthew shoots again and they all cheer when the ball makes it in the basket.

“Nice!” Mr. Mulder yells. “Nothing but net.”

Both boys whoop and laugh and jump up and down like monkeys and grab onto Mr. Mulder. He laughs with them and they have another round of high fives and hair tousling.

“How do you know so much about basketball, Uncle Mulder?” Michael asks. Bill cringes.

“I played in high school and I used to be part of a team at my gym.”

“Did you like being part of a team?” Matthew asks.

“Yeah, it was great.”

“I think I want to join the debate team at school next year.” This is news to Bill and he’s surprised. Matthew is notoriously soft-spoken.

“Your Aunt Dana used to be on a debate team when she was in school. You should ask her for some tips.”

“Dad said that you guys used to be FBI agents,” Michael says. “He said it’s like being a glory fried policeman”

“Glorified,” Matthew corrects. “Not glory fried.”

“Glorified, whatever that means. He told Mom before that Aunt Dana should’ve kept being a doctor so she’d be more normal.”

Bill grits his teeth. He doesn’t recall ever saying something like that in front of the boys, but he’s sure he’s said it. He wonders what else they’ve overheard through the years.

“Well, that’s probably true,” Mr. Mulder says. “She’s a great doctor. But, you know what? Your Aunt Dana was the best agent the FBI ever had.”

“How come she quit?” Matthew asks.

“Have you ever done something that made you really happy for awhile and then it just stopped making you happy?”

“I used to like playing MarioKart,” Michael says. “But, now I think it’s boring.”

“It’s kind of like that.”

“My favorite is SimCity. Have you ever played that?”

“No, I can’t say I have.”

“Do you like Guitar Hero?” Matthew asks.

“Yeah, do you like Guitar Hero?” Michael echoes. “We brought our Playstation and we can play.”

“I’m not much of a musician,” Mr. Mulder says. “But I’ll give it a shot.”

“Cool!” Both boys yell.

Bill chooses that moment to emerge from the mudroom and steps out onto the porch. Both boys go instantly quiet and Michael starts dribbling the basketball he’s holding.

“You boys should run and get your jackets on,” Bill says. “It’s getting cold.”

“I’m not cold,” Michael replies.

“Yes, Sir,” Matthew answers and takes Michael’s arm. “Thanks for the lessons, Uncle Mulder.”

“You can keep playing,” Bill says. “I just think you need to get your jackets on.”

“That’s alright, we’ll go help Mom and Grandma in the kitchen. Come on, Mikey.”

Michael reluctantly hands the basketball over to Mr. Mulder. “Thanks, Uncle Mulder,” he says.

Mr. Mulder nods and then it’s just him and Bill outside. Mr. Mulder turns and dribbles the ball a few times before he sinks a basket. He picks it up again and holds it one-handed in Bill’s direction.

“You play?” Mr. Mulder asks.

“I’m more of a football guy,” Bill answers.

“USNA is on a great streak in the Army v Navy games. Think they can keep it up?”

“Wouldn’t be much of a Navy man if I thought otherwise.”

“Were you on the team?”

“No. We won all four years I was there though. Tied one year, actually.”

“I think Scully mentioned that you dad had played one year.”

Bill can’t believe Mr. Mulder is still calling his sister, Scully. It makes no goddamn sense. “1957,” he answers. “14-0, Navy.”

Mr. Mulder nods. The conversation stalls. Mr. Mulder rubs the back of his head for a few moments and then he looks at the door and straightens. Bill turns and sees his sister in the window. She comes outside, pulling her sweater tighter across her waist and crossing her arms as she steps off the porch.

“Mom says there’s about an hour left until the turkey is ready,” she says. “Everything alright?”

“Talking sports,” Mr. Mulder says. Dana stands close to him. He puts a hand on her back.

“It’s good to see you, Dana.”

“You too, Bill.”

The three of them stand in awkward silence. A wind picks up and blows dead leaves across their feet. Bill shoves his hands in his pockets. Dana turns to Mr. Mulder and lays a hand very lightly on his chest.

“Can you give us a minute?” Dana asks.

“Of course,” Mr. Mulder answers. He kisses the corner of Dana’s mouth and Bill’s cheek twitches irritably. He spins the basketball on one finger as he walks away and then tucks it snugly into the corner of the porch before he goes inside.

“I can tell you don’t want us here,” Dana says. Straight to the point. His sister has never been subtle.

“I think it’s you that doesn’t want to be here. You know, every holiday Mom would always bring up the fact that it would be so nice to have all her children at the table. I have to say I agree with her.”

Dana stares at him with a cool gaze. “Are you trying to make me feel guilty?”

“No, I’m just telling you how it’s been.”

“All her children?”

“Alright, we don’t need to fight.”

“I’m not fighting. I’m just wondering if she includes Charlie in that, when she yearns for all her children.”

Bill shifts uncomfortably. “That’s between them. Charles is…”

“Charlie is married. His husband’s name is-”

“Patrick. I know. I do speak with him on occasion.”

Dana gives a brief nod. “Were they invited to Thanksgiving?”

“I don’t know.”

“I’m sorry that we didn’t turn out how you wanted.”

“What does that mean?”

“You always wanted to follow in our parents footsteps. Be just like Dad. Have the doting wife, the Navy career, a house full of kids. Everything in ship-shape order. They made it look ideal when we were kids, but it was never ideal.”

“What kind of nonsense has that man been filling your head with?”

Dana snorts. “The irony is, Mulder is a lot like you, Bill. He values the sanctity of family even more than you.”

“Oh yeah, so much so he forced you to give up your only child.”

“Mulder wasn’t even there when I had to give William up.”

“Exactly. Where was he? Not with his family. You can be sure I would-”

“You would, what? Step away from the Navy? Reject a deployment order? What would you do, Bill?”

“It’s my job,” he says, curtly. “It’s what I do to make sure not just my family, but every family in our country is protected. Tara understood that when she married me. The kids understand.”

“Are you sure about that?”

“Do you know what losing her grandchild did to Mom? Dad’s namesake, Dana. My namesake. How could you?”

“You sanctimonious sonofabitch,” she hisses. “My son’s name is William Fox Mulder. Named after Mulder’s father. Not you, and not Dad. And you have no idea how difficult it was for me to make that choice. None at all.”

“Then why did you do it? If it was so goddamn hard, why isn’t he here with us now playing with his cousins instead of with strangers?”

Dana looks away and licks the corner of her mouth. She used to do that when she was a kid before letting loose with a temper tantrum. He remembers her red-faced and stomping her feet, licking her lip before she exploded.

“Did you know that my life was in danger for all of my pregnancy?” she asks. “Did you know William was kidnapped twice before he was eight months old? Did you know that I had friends that were almost killed trying to protect him? Did you know that I killed people in order to protect him? Did you know that I made the biggest mistake in my life when I asked Mulder to leave us because I thought he was the one endangering our son? Did you know that my heart felt like it was ripped out of my chest when I thought I had lost both of them forever? Do you know that it took years for me to trust in the fact that Mulder forgave me for what I did?”

Bill feels uncomfortable and clammy. He’s never seen his sister like this, as a child or as an adult. She’s like fire. Hot and terrifying.

“No,” he says. “How could I? Why didn’t you come to me?”

Dana raises her brow at him like he’s said something completely incredulous. “We’re family, Bill, not friends.”

“Do you even have any friend, Dana? Aside from Mr. Mulder?”

“I don’t need or want anyone else in my life except for Mulder.”

“Including your family?”

“Mulder is my family. A fact I don’t ever think you’ll accept.”

“That man has poisoned you against your family.”

“That man is the reason I’m here today. You’re right. It is me that doesn’t want to be here.” She turns and walks away.

“Dana.”

She doesn’t turn back though, just walks up the porch and into the house and Bill is left alone. He doesn’t understand how he could have grown up in the same house as each of his siblings, but how they all turned out so different. He seems to be the only one that appreciates the values his parents instilled in them and not blatantly reject the status quo.

When Bill comes back into the house, he sees Dana and Mr. Mulder in the dining room, having a very low and animated conversation. Her hands are in his and his head is bent towards her. She’s shaking her head and pulling one of her arms free to gesticulate with, but he catches it and clasps their hands gently to his chest.

Bill turns away and heads back to the family room. The boys are on the floor with Maureen, helping her arrange her dolls to her satisfaction. Tara and his mother are on the couch in conversation. He sits down, feeling glum and perturbed. Dana comes into the room, Mr. Mulder behind her with his hands on her shoulders.

“I’m not feeling very well,” she says. “Mulder is going to take me home.”

Tara glances at Bill and he shifts his gaze away from her.

“What is it?” his mother asks. “Do you need to lie down? You can use the spare room.”

“No, I wouldn’t want to disrupt dinner. I think I have a migraine coming on and I have medication at home.”

“But, Dana, it’s been so long since we’ve all been together. Can’t you just…”

“Let Dana do what she wants to do, Mom,” Bill says. “If she wants to go home, let her go home.”

His mother wrings her hands together. He can’t stand the disappointment in her eyes and he doesn’t know how Dana can either. The hugs goodbye are awkward. The kids are confused.

“Uncle Mulder was supposed to play Guitar Hero with us,” Michael says, after they leave.

“Some other time,” Tara tells him. “Go wash up for dinner.”

Dinner is somber. His mother looks like she’s on the verge of tears. Tara tries to compensate by engaging the children in conversation, but the boys unhappily push food around on their plates and Maureen whines to be let loose. Before they’re even done, his mother starts gathering up the dishes and bringing them into the kitchen.

“What happened?” Tara mouths at him from across the table.

Bill shrugs. “Mom, stop. Tara and I will take care of the dishes. Boys, take your sister and...show your grandmother that guitar game.”

The boys looked relieved. Matthew takes Maureen’s hand and they head to the family room. After the leave, the ticking of the grandfather clock in the hall sounds immense in the silence.

“Bill…”

Bill raises his hands in surrender. “Dana and I had a talk,” he admits. “It didn’t go well.”

“Is that why she left?”

“She left because she didn’t want to show up at all.”

“This really meant a lot to Mom.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“Maybe the only thing you can do is just accept the fact that this is all there is.” Tara gets up, collecting dishes before she makes her way to the kitchen. It takes Bill some time to follow, but he gathers up plates and silverware and goes in after her. She’s got Tupperware spread out on the counter and is trying to match lids.

“I don’t want to accept it, Tara. I can’t. She’s my sister.”

“Then what do you want to do?”

He scratches the back of his head and thinks, watching Tara empty dishes into plastic bowls. “Pack me up enough of those leftovers for two. I’m...going to go out there.”

“You should take the boys with you.”

“Why?”

“It’s unlikely they’d turn the kids away.”

That hurts because it’s probably true. He finishes clearing the dishes for Tara and she neatly packs up leftovers and stacks them on the counter. He grabs a sweatshirt and then goes into the family room. The boys aren’t playing the video game, they look like they’re playing Go Fish with their grandmother and sister.

“Boys, we’re going to take a drive.”

They look at each other and then look at their father. “Are we in trouble?” Michael asks.

“No, son. We’re just going to take a drive.”

He can tell they’re reluctant to get up, but they do. Tara brings them their jackets and loads their arms with the Tupperware and walks them to the car.

“Where are we going?” Matthew asks, buckling his seatbelt.

“We’re going to go see your Aunt Dana and...Uncle Mulder.”

“Really?” Michael asks.

It’s an hour-long drive. Bill can’t think of a time he’s been alone in a car with his sons for that long. They don’t talk and the radio isn’t offering anything decent.

“You know, Matthew, your Aunt Dana was there when you were born?”

“She was?”

“She and your grandma had come out for Christmas that year. They visited you in the hospital and you were only a few hours old. And...your...Uncle Mulder was there too.” Bill shifts a little in his seat and adjusts his grip on the steering wheel. He was a little disgruntled at the time that Mr. Mulder had shown up with Dana at the hospital, but even more so when Tara insisted he have a chance to hold the baby. He knows photos were taken that day, but he’s never seen them.

“Did Aunt Dana and Uncle Mulder visit me too, Dad?” Michael asks.

“No, they were...they weren’t in town at that time.”

“Oh.”

“Have I ever told you the story of when your Aunt Dana won a shooting contest when she was eight?”

“Um, I don’t think we know any stories about Aunt Dana,” Matthew answers. “Except a couple Grandma has told us.”

“I see.”

“I want to hear it,” Michael says. “I want to know the story.”

“Me too,” Matthew adds.

“She learned to shoot pretty young. My Dad had taught us. She was the best out of all of us, even Dad. She just never missed. Some kids in the neighborhood caught wind of it and said there was no way a little girl could beat them. They were older than us, maybe your age, Matthew. Dana said she could beat the pants off of them, just come out to the woods and name the target. She whipped those boys good. Six older boys against one little girl.”

“Did she win a prize?” Michael asks.

Bill thinks back on that day. He’d felt a mixture of pride and anger. He wanted Dana to win, but he also looked up to those boys. Their pride had been injured and therefore he’d tried to convince Dana to throw the competition at one point, pulling her aside and telling her she was hurting their feelings and should let them win. She looked him straight in the eye and told him no way in hell would she lose to a stupid boy just ‘cause. He’d been afraid the boys would retaliate in some way, maybe hurt Dana or even start a fight with him, but they hadn’t.

“Respect,” Bill says. “She won a lot of respect.”

“Sounds like something Maureen would do,” Matthew says. He and Michael chuckle together.

“Maureen is more like your Aunt Melissa. Dana was a real tomboy. She had to do everything me and your Uncle Charles did.”

“How come…?” Matthew starts, and then clams up.

“How come what?”

“I know Aunt Melissa died a long time ago. But, how come we’ve never met Aunt Dana before now? Or Uncle Charles?”

“Is it because Uncle Charles married another boy?” Michael asks.

“Who told you that?” Bill asks.

“Mom said that’s why Grandma doesn’t like to talk about him and we should try to understand that Grandma comes from another time where that wasn’t ok, but that doesn’t mean it’s not ok.”

“She said that?”

“Mmhm. She said that if anyone at church or other kids say it’s not ok, we just don’t listen to them because God doesn’t make mistakes and love is love and God wants us to love each other.”

Bill is quiet. He can’t believe his devout and traditional wife has said something so progressive and even went so far as to instruct his children to go against the church. Good for her, he thinks. Maybe if his mother had thought for herself once in awhile they wouldn’t have such a fractured family. He can’t believe that thought just crosses his mind.

“You boys listen to your mother,” Bill says. “She’s a good woman and I’m glad you’re both more like her than like me.”

“You’re good too, Dad,” Matthew says.

“You think so?”

“Yeah, you do a really hard job and it’s important and you’re in charge of it.”

“And Mom says that’s why we shouldn’t bother you with trivial things,” Michael says. “So you can relax when you’re home.”

Bill is quiet for a few moments and he glances at both boys in the rear view mirror. “I want you boys to know that you’re never a bother to me. Not ever, alright? You can come to me with anything. You understand?”

“Yes, Sir,” they both say.

“And to answer your question, you haven’t met your Aunt Dana or Uncle Charles before because I think...I think it’s hard for them to feel welcome. That’s why I’m taking you out to Dana and Mulder’s house right now so I can make sure they know they’re welcome.”

“Will we get to meet Uncle Charles one day, too?” Michael asks.

“I promise that when we get home I’ll call him and ask him if he wants to come for a visit.”

“Cool,” Matthew says. “Three new uncles and an aunt.”

The roads start to become more rural and desolate. It’s only twilight, but it feels even darker without any streetlamps or other passing cars. Bill turns off onto a dirt road and slowly bumps along the unpaved path.

“I think this is it,” Bill says, pulling up to a gate.

“Do they live on a farm?” Michael asks. “It looks like a farm.”

“I don’t think so.”

Bill is about to call Dana’s phone when he sees Mr. Mulder step out onto the porch, holding what looks like a long-barreled shotgun. He turns on the cab light of the car and then lowers the window and leans out, raising a hand in greeting. Mr. Mulder looks like he’s squinting and then he goes back inside and turns on the porch light. When he comes back out, he’s no longer holding the gun and he jogs down from the porch and down the path behind the gate. Bill sees his sister come out onto the porch a few moments later.

“Bill?” Mr. Mulder asks once he’s close enough to be heard. “What’re you doing out here? Everything alright?”

“The boys and I brought leftovers,” Bill says.

“Uh. Okay. Let me just unlock the gate, just a second.” Mr. Mulder begins to unlock some chains around the gate. “Scully’s been nagging me to put this on a remote, but I haven’t gotten around to it yet. Drive on up, I’ll be right behind you.”

Bill drives slowly down the lane and Mr. Mulder stays in the shadow of his taillight. He parks behind the car in front of the porch and the boys are quick to unlock their belts and scramble out of the car.

“Is this a farm?” Michael asks, running up to Mr. Mulder and taking his hand. “Do you have cows?”

“Sorry, buddy, no cows,” Mr. Mulder answers. “I think there might have been horses here at one time. There are some stalls out in the field behind the house.”

Bill gathers the Tupperware from the floorboards of the passenger seat and Matthew is right behind him to help him get everything out. Dana stands on the porch in a defensive pose, guarding her territory.

“Come in,” Mr. Mulder says. He guides Michael up the stairs ahead of him. Dana gives Mr. Mulder a look, but then smiles at Michael. Tara was a genius to tell him to take the boys.

The interior surprises Bill. It’s cozy, almost cabin-like. There are afghans on the couch and a well-used recliner. They’ve got a wood burning stove and a fire going. His sister is wearing slippers.

Mr. Mulder leads them all to the kitchen and takes the Tupperware from Matthew and from Bill. “Be sure to thank Maggie for us,” he says.

“I will.” There’s a few beats of silence and Bill eyes his sister. “Dana, would you mind if we talked for a few minutes?”

She hesitates and glances at the boys.

“You guys can go on the porch,” Mr. Mulder offers. “Maybe...these guys might like some ice cream?”

“Can we?” Michael asks, turning to Bill.

Bill nods. Never in his life did he expect to feel gratitude towards Mr. Mulder for anything, but he does in this moment. The boys cheer. Dana doesn’t look happy, but she takes her brother out to the porch.

“I’m not here to fight,” Bill says. “I just want you to know that up front.”

“Why are you here?” she asks.

“Because I don’t like the way we left things. I want to start by apologizing for...not giving you the benefit of the doubt. Or supporting you when you needed it.”

Dana looks surprised and a little chagrined. Her eyes water a bit. She wraps her arms across her middle and looks at her feet. “Thank you,” she says. “That means a lot.”

“I was telling the boys on the way over about that time you won the shooting contest when you were a kid.”

She snorts softly. “You were so mad at me.”

“No, I was proud of you. I didn’t tell you that back then, but I probably should have. Maybe it’s because of things like that that you felt you couldn’t talk to me when you were going through a hard time.”

“Maybe.”

“What I’m not going to apologize for, though, is my life or my family.” He pauses while she looks up and opens her mouth, but then she closes it again and nods a little. “I don’t think I’m wrong for wanting to live in the example our parents set for us. They were happily married for almost forty years and, God willing, I’d like to make it to my fiftieth anniversary and still be just as happy.”

“You probably will.”

“I think you might too.”

Dana raises her brow. Bill rubs the back of his neck and exhales, deeply.

“The kids were telling me earlier that love is love,” he says. “And, now that I’ve seen the two of you together, I think that he kind of seems like a decent guy.”

“I wouldn’t be with him if he wasn’t.”

“No, I don’t suppose you would.”

Dana looks at her feet again and rocks back and forth on her heels for a moment. “I would also like to apologize for keeping you in the dark about so many things for so long. I’ve been so accustomed to needing to keep things private, I forget that I can rely on other people. Mulder has to remind me of it at times when I start to shut him out.”

“You were like that as a kid. Tough as nails, wouldn’t show a weakness to save your life.”

“And a quick temper.”

“Yeah, that too.” Bill chuckles. Dana smiles slightly.

“I’m sorry I left like that. I hope Mom wasn’t too upset.”

“I think it might be salvaged if you thought about maybe coming by tomorrow? The boys really seemed to take to...their Uncle Mulder.”

“He’s really great with kids,” Dana whispers and two tears fall down her cheeks. She dips her head once more and puts a hand over her eyes.

Bill steps closer and pulls her in against his chest. She puts her arms around him and he rubs her shoulder a little. “I can’t imagine, Dana. What you must feel.”

“Some days are harder than others.”

“Does he help you through it?”

“Always.”

“Okay.”

After a few moments of silence, Dana sighs and then pulls away and wipes her eyes. Bill stops her before they go back inside.

“One more thing,” he says. “It’s important to me that you know that I don’t agree with Mom on everything. Just because I believe that her issues with Charles are her business, doesn’t mean I think she’s right.”

“You don’t?”

“Hell no. That’s her son. I would never. The thing is, Charles has told me he chooses to limit his contact with both of us so that it won’t cause problems between us and Mom, if she knows that we speak with him.”

“I know.”

“And, thinking about what you said and just...thinking about it in general, tonight, I’ve decided that if Mom can’t handle the fact that I have a relationship with my brother, that’s also her problem. I’m going to invite Charles and Patrick out to North Carolina for Christmas. I want to extend the same invitation to you and Mr. Mulder as well.”

“It’s just Mulder.”

“You guys are so weird about your names.”

“That’s how we like it.”

Bill puts his hands up in surrender. Dana opens the door and he follows. The boys are laughing at something. Mulder gets up from the table when he sees them and Dana walks into his arms. He rubs her back and nods at Bill.

“Can I get you a bowl of ice cream?” Mulder asks.

“Sure.”

“Dad, did you know that Aunt Dana and Uncle Mulder once arrested a man that was half-worm and lived in a sewer?!” Michael exclaims.

“Tried to arrest,” Mulder amends. “We only caught half of him. The tail end, unfortunately.”

“Gross!” the boys cry.

“Really, Mulder?” Bill asks.

Mulder shrugs. Bill sighs.

The End

#i wrote this #xf fanfic #bill scully #I never imagined I would have to get into this dudes head #perplexistan

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hippychick006 · 4 years ago

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12.06 - Celebrating the life of Asa Fox Episode Review/Recap

Honestly, I see a picture like this on a promo and I have no hesitation diving straight in. Okay, you all know I have a hurt!Sam fetish, complete with writhing on the floor padabooty, let’s not bang on about it.

Official episode summary: THREE WINCHESTERS ARE BETTER THAN ONE – When hunters gather together to celebrate the life and tragic death of one of their own, Sam (Jared Padalecki) Dean (Jensen Ackles) and Mary (guest star Samantha Smith) must take action when a demon starts picking off hunters one by one. John Bedham directed the episode written by Steven Yockey

My optimum number of Winchesters is two but yeah, I don’t mind a buy two get one extra free here and there.

Overall, I do really enjoy this episode, even after rewatch but putting under a cut to save space.

There’s a lot of things I don’t like about the Dabb era, and in terms of this episode, retconning Mary to be a hunter after parenthood is one of those things that niggles a little (I know she was a hunter before parenthood which also irks for different reasons) so there’s a lot I have to shake off from my mind in order to be able to enjoy an episode. And on rewatch, I had less issues than I did the first time (but given I’m coming at this straight from season 15, it could be a case of me just grasping onto absolutely anything that isn’t terrible).

Aside from the Mary thing, I love so much about this episode, not least because there isn’t a single mention of feathers who I am seriously going to struggle watching in any episode going forward thanks to 15.18 debacle.

Anyway moving swifly on…

First up is the intro and I love the introduction of Asa Fox as a character. We first meet him as a child, who Mary saves from a werewolf attack. And then we see him become interested in hunting (as Mary tells him she’s soon going to retire, and he’s worried that if she does: who’s gonna save people like me?)

Asa decides it’s going to be him and through a montage set to Bachman-Turner Overdrive’s Roll On Down The Highway, we see Asa grow up to become a pretty awesome hunter. Throughout all this time, he writes postcards to Mary, but doesn’t send them (no address) so he has quite a collection by the end and I think it’s all his hunts.

I’m so caught up in how awesome Asa is and how much I like this new character, I’m completely jarred when he comes to a sudden and unexpected end via hanging which also brings the music to an abrubt halt.

Great intro, Asa said very few words but I’m already mourning not getting to know him more.

After the opening titles, we switch to Jody who is chilling out at home about to watch Netflix when there’s a knock at the door. Turns out it’s Sam and Dean who have just finished up a hunt and stopped by to visit. Unfortunately the cardboard cutout “just add water” instant girl hunters are at a concert. Jody offers to feed them, and Dean lets her know that he killed Hitler since the last time they saw her.

Sam: *huffs and walks away Jody: *blank stare “thank you?” Dean: You’re welcome

Love it.

They have pizza and watch Netflix and have a debate about rom coms. Sam says Dean is more of “an animated Japanese erotica chick.”

A little oversharing on your brother’s habits there Sammy, but Sam is not concerned in the least. In fact, I love how totally relaxed Sam is sitting here. He’s clearly comfortable at Jody’s slumped on her sofa.

The phone rings and Jody goes to answer it, Sam and Dean have a conversation about Sam oversharing which Dean’s uncomfortable with.

Sam: Dude, be proud of your hobbies. It makes you who you are.

Supportive Sam encouraging his brother!

Jody returns and walks past them, she’s clearly upset. The boys follow to watch her start packing. They ask what’s wrong and Jody says a friend of hers died – it’s poor Asa from the opener and I wasn’t expecting a link from Jody to Asa.

The name is familiar to Dean and he’s trying to figure it out when Sam says it’s the guy Ellen used to tell stories about at the Roadhouse. Asa apparently killed five wendigos in a single night and now I’m even more mourning his loss. Seems Jody met Asa when he came to town on a hunt, she caught him out when he tried to pretend to be an FBI agent by the name, Fox Mulder. He’s worse than the Winchesters! Anyway she helped him out on a ghoul hunt and they kept in touch.The boys decide to go with her to the wake, John didn’t let them go to hunter gatherings outside of bars as he always said they were trouble.

Turns out Asa lived in Manitoba, Dean says “oh Canada” when he gets out of the car on arrival. Sam is impressed with the house which yes, nice digs for a hunter.

We meet Asa’s mother, Lorraine and she knew her son was a hunter. She’s heavily in to the drink but she’s just lost her son, so I’m cutting her some slack as I can’t imagine anything worse.

Dean finds his way to the kitchen (and the beer) which has no label. He’s concerned but “Bucky” homebrewed it himself and it’s strong. Dean introduces himself which gets the attention of the several hunters in the room,

Randy: No freakin’ way. Aren’t you dead? Like, four times? Dean: Yeah. It, uh, didn't take.

Just wait till they hear about Mystery Spot where he died over a hundred times in a single day!

Sam fanboy hunter: Wait. Your brother here? Sam? Dean: Yeah, he's still alive, too. He's –

Fanboy doesn’t even wait for Dean to finish, he’s off to find Sam. Same fanboy (named Elvis), same tbh

While Dean’s making friend’s in the kitchen – and learning not to say the name ‘Wendigo’ which turns out to be a trigger word to take a drink - Sam’s homed in on hotboy Max and his equally hot sister Alicia. Turns out their mother is a good witch who taught Alicia how to hunt bad witches.

Sam (to Max): What did she teach you? Max: Uh, mostly how to seduce men. Alicia: She also taught him some magic, which is actually more useful. Max: Eh, mostly the men thing.

Max is definitely getting his flirt on, making sure Sam knows he’s into hot men, and we cannot deny, Sam is a hot man. Before Sam can flirt back, Elvis interrupts and introduces himself and then makes Sam feel awkward when he asks Sam about being possessed by the devil. Bad Elvis!

Max (and Alicia) are both pissed on Sam’s behalf,

Alicia: Dude, you don't just ask someone about something that messed up. Max: Seriously, back off.

Protective!Max alert, I’m going to need a few minutes with my new ship Samax, though to be honest, the way Max and Alicia are sitting together, it might need to be Samaxia, which no issue other than it sounds like a drug that gets advertised on television with all kinds of side effect warnings, like may cause death...)

Elvis makes Sam feel so awkward that he runs off to go find a beer. Elvis then tries to talk to Max and Alicia and they outright just tell him to go away. Love them.

Aww, Sam got his beer and then went off to find his big brother. In fairness, I think they’ve been separated five minutes at this point and in that time Sam was accosted by Elvis. Dean’s looking through Asa’s office and discovers he has a real angel blade. Sam asks if Dean knew people tell stories about them.

Dean: Yeah. Apparently, we’re a little bit legendary. Sam: Yeah, but, I mean, so was Asa. Then a hunt went bad, and he ended up hanging from a tree, alone in the woods. Dean: He died on the job. No better way to go. Sam: You really believe that? Dean: Yeah. What, you don’t? I mean, come on, Sam, it's not like we're in the “live till you're 90, die in your sleep” business. This? [Dean points at Asa’s hunting wall] This only ends one way.

It’s difficult watching this knowing the ultimate end as I know Sam’s never agreed with this, being the one to want to see an end to hunting at some point; but you can’t deny Dean has been consistent in how he thinks he’s going to go out and has always seemed at peace with that.

Sam says they should get back and Dean agrees but warns Sam not to say “wendigo” to anyone. I love that he warns Sam. Every time Dean is a good brother, it just reminds me how much of a bad sister I am as I would not have passed on the warning. Sam’s confused about why he can’t say it but seems to just accept it.

Only a few people are around by the end of the night, still telling stories of Asa’s epic hunts - mainly Bucky. Why show, why give us this amazing man and kill him off in the first five minutes?!.

Anyway, turns out that the “ghoul story” from earlier had more to it. Asa and Jody got together for some “sweet sweet time alone”. Jody plays it down, says it was more of a casual thing. Turns out Asa could beat Dean in the ladies game and I think even Alicia and Max mother was one of his conquests (we saw this in the opening montage as well, Asa kissing a different woman in his car in between hunts).

Randy asks if people want a beer and heads to the kitchen, and I fear Randy is not long for this world as he walks down the hallway alone. We stay on him as he returns and my anxiety is kicking in, even with expecting something, it’s sudden when his throat is slit and he’s dragged off down a side corridor by someone wearing black.

Alicia walks back into the living room carrying two beers – and we’re reminded she’s dressed all in black?! Alicia? Surely not.

We see someone enter the door and only see their boots as they walk, they stop just outside the living rom where everyone is talking. Loraine hears the footsteps stop and tells the stranger to come in and not hover.

Turns out it’s Mary. Awkward Winchester family reunion, given I think from memory Mary walked out an episode or so ago.

Sam, Dean, Jody and Mary go somewhere more quiet to talk.

Mary: What are you doing here? Dean: What are you doing here?

I love the reversed dynamic of Sam being go between Dean and Mary (where it was the reverse between Sam and John). Sam introduces Mary to Jody as their mother.

Jody: I thought– I thought you were... Mary: I was. Jody: [quietly] Wow. Wow! [She hugs Mary excitedly] It is so nice to meet you!

She belatedly sees the awkward tension and ships out to give them “some family time”

Dean asks where Mary’s been and she responds she’s been using John’s journal to work through a few things.

Dean: You could’ve just asked us, you know. Sam: Dean, come on. Dean: She could’ve. Mary: It’s okay. He’s right. But… This is something I needed to do alone. I… Listen, most of the people I knew are dead. And then I remembered Asa. He was so young when I met him, I thought he must still be around. And then… I saw an article about his death, and, uh… Dean: So you’ll text us once a week, maybe, but you’ll drive all the way to Canada to see some dead guy? Well, that’s awesome. I’m gonna get some air. Mary: Dean, wait...

Mary tries to go after Dean but Sam stops her. Sam knows his brother.

Jody on the other hand stops Dean at the door and pretty much says she’s here if Dean wants to talk about anything other than killing Hitler (which Dean spent the five hour drive telling her in excruciating detail.). She talks about giving anything to have her dead husband and son back but at the same time she would be worried it wouldn’t be the same which gives Dean some food for thought in regard to his complicated relationship with Mary.

Mary’s in the kitchen getting a beer, Lorraine introduces herself as Asa’s mother. Mary introduces herself as Mary Winchester, which Lorraine can’t believe as Mary should be her age. Mary: It’s a long story. She says she’s sorry. Lorraine says she should be, Mary’s the reason her son didn’t become an astronaut. She’s very bitter and hands Mary the box with the postcards Asa wrote to her. Mary defends herself and says she saved Asa’s life.

Lorraine: [scoffing] What am I supposed to say to that? After you, Asa got so… Hunting was his whole life. He never married. Never had a family, kids. And now… enjoy the wake.

I love this next scene between Sam and Mary. Sam finds Mary and asks if she’s all right. She thrusts the box of postcards at him and says she’s fine. She goes into Asa’s office and tells Sam she saved Asa when he was a kid, and this is all on her.

Sam: Well, no. Obviously, mom, he made his own decisions. And he helped a lot of people, you know?

Sam and free will and then we have Season 15 debacle. Pfff

Mary tells him that everywhere she goes and everything she does just feels wrong, but she’ll get used to it.Sam tells her he understands, she just needs space and so does Dean, (who we see outside drinking from his flask), He says Dean is just scared they are going to lose her again,

Sam: “that – that because we're (Sam and Dean) hunters, you're gonna walk away. But I know that’s not true. Even looking at these… [Sam holds out the box of Asa’s postcards to Mary] I mean, you saved Asa in 1980, um, after Dean was born. After everyone thought you quit hunting. Seems like you couldn’t stop then, and… I’m guessing you can’t stop now, either. This job, this life, is crazy and insane. But it’s in our blood. Come on. [Sam puts his arm around Mary] Mary: Where we going? Sam: To say goodbye to Asa.

I love that Sam understands more than anyone the desire to have normal/safe, pulling against the need to save people/hunt things so I love this scene between him and Mary and I like Mary a little bit more because of it. Damn you Jared! You even got me to like Claire once!

They go to say goodbye to Asa and I like when Mary undoes the cover over his face and we get blood dripping onto Asa’s forehead. It’s interesting to have both Sam and Mary in this scene in a callback to Sam’s nursery scene. They both look up and it’s Randy, tied to the rafters, dead and bleeding from his neck wound.

Back in the living room, Bucky is still telling stories about Asa. Sam and Mary rush in and Sam tells everyone they need to leave because Randy is dead. I like this, it’s like a murder mystery now. All of a sudden, water is shut off (this is new canon?), and the twins can smell Sulphur. Lights are flickering. Demon alert!

Bucky tells them it’s Jael, a crossroads demon who hangs people, which is his thing, snaps necks (Asa), slits throats (Randy). Turns out Asa exorcised the demon but now it’s back. Bucky tries to open the door, Elvis helps but it slams shut.

Max (trying to impress Sam): you’re wasting your time [he waves a hand in front of the door and we see red symbols] Max says the entire house has been warded.

Not sure if that impressed Sam or not but Max had me at “Seriously, back off” and now this? *Fans self

Anyway, it means they are trapped inside.

Back outside with Dean, he’s still drinking from his flask. He hears footsteps and doesn’t bother turning around, just tells the person to “go away”. I think he thinks it’s Mary, but turns out to be Billy saying “you’re not the boss of me.”

Dean: Billie. What’re you doing here? Billie: My job. [Dean chuckles] Well, I’m not dead yet. Billie: Shame. But actually, I just finished inside. I was reaping a fresh soul.

Wait, what? But Dean’s brother is in there! Dean’s pissed and marches to the door.

Inside, Bucky is telling the group more about the demon Jael. Asa exorcised the demon but not before it killed a first nations girl by tying a noose around her neck.

Outside Dean is rattling and banging on the door

Dean: Sam. Sammy! Hey! Billie: You can huff and puff, but that house is on supernatural lockdown. They can’t even hear you.

Bucky is still expositioning and Dean is still trying to get past that old Winchester nemesis “the door”, even throwing a solid statue at it, but nothing is happening.

Okay, we’ve now reached the only part of this episode I have an issue with. We’ve got a group of hunters standing around wondering who the demon is amongst them and not one of them can remember the tests for a demon. Sam come on! You knew Christo in season 1 and you performed a reverse exorcism in season 8.

Anyway Elvis accuses Alicia of not being in the room and Max says Dean wasn’t in the room either (uh Max buddy, accusing Sam’s brother isn’t going to win you any points in the whole wooing thing, just fyi - of course wooing Sam in the first place is pretty dangerous terratory)

Finally Alicia remembers about holy water but they are all out. Elvis says they can just make more but Mary reminds them the water is off. Uh? The toilet bowl?

Dean’s stopped attacking the door and turns to Billie and asks, What did you do? Billy says it wasn’t her, she’s just cleaning up the mess but “it’s always nice to see a Winchester who can’t get what he wants.”

Dean: You think this is funny? Huh? Hunters are dying in there. Billie: Everyone dies.

Dean is pretty much losing his shit and I’d like to remind people that at this point, he doesn’t know which hunter has died.

Back with the group, Sam finally remembers his brother is outside so all focus is on Alicia who starts coughing. I think she’s faking it to screw with her brother (totally what I would do) but no,

Alicia/Jael: Alicia’s not here right now. [Her eyes glow red] Leave a message. [she punches Max] Oh, you’re a fun group. We’re gonna have a good time tonight.

Jael leaves Alicia in a cloud of demon smoke and flies into the fireplace. Sam and Max get Alicia up (Samaxia forever – warning for side effects which may include internal bleeding and even death)

They now need to figure who in the house Jael has jumped into. Jody gives the orders (I’ll forgive this, she’s a cop) and they pair off to search the house (why not sweep room to room?), Anyway, Sam’s with Mary and Jody’s with Bucky.

Dean’s worked out that Billy got in to reap the soul so if she can get in, she can get Dean in.

Billie: I could, I suppose. But– Dean: Do it! Billie: But it’s a one-way ticket. And you’re gonna owe me one.

Billie, Sammy is in there, do you think Dean cares about “cosmic consequences” at a time like this? There is a door between them right now ffs! Sammy may even be dead and Dean does not want him decomposing before he can find a crossroads to make a deal!

Elvis who was supposed to be partnering with Lorraine, left her briefly to get her a double (vodka I presume?). Anyway Dean comes flying through the door like the overly dramatic bitch he is whenever Sam is in danger.

Dean (whipping out demon knife): Where’s my brother? [he’s already marching past them btw to go look]

THIS IS MY SHOW! What moron thought this show was going to end with DeanCas? Come on, don’t be shy, show yourselves so we can point and laugh because you are going to have an epic tantrum approximately 3 and a half years from this episode which could have been prevented if you’d watched the damn show, instead of wallpaper. By the way, in this episode, Castiel was played by the statue Dean threw at the door. [It represents the violent nature of the Destiel relationship – I have a 500 page meta on this if anyone is interested].

Lorraine accuses Dean of being the demon.

Dean: Demon? Lorraine: Kill him! Dean: Whoa, whoa, whoa. Easy, lady. Look, I’m not a demon, okay? I’m one of the good guys. Now stick with me, do what I say, and everybody’ll get out of here, okay? Everybody!

Elvis – making far too much use of his screentime matches Dean’s dramatics by pulling out his own knife and saying ominiously “well, not everybody” [complete with red flashing eyes].

In this episode, Dean is allowed to be a proper hunter and is able to fight. He taunts the demon, “You’re kinda slow for a demon, aren’t you?” which, he seriously is, no idea how this demon got my wonderful favourite side character “Asa” killed (if he’s not in the final watching Kansas play at the Road House along with all my other favourites, I will be pissed and have a full week meltdown on Twitter – just fyi) [*I won’t really because I’m not insane. Please don’t report me.]

Dean tells the demon to go to hell. The demon tells Dean that Hell is a “complete train wreck” (uh, no, what is a “complete train wreck” is most of season 12-15) Hell is much more pleasant. Dean repeats for the demon to go to hell and starts reciting an exorcism (finally, the smart brother is in the room). Love hearing Dean recite the exorcism. Demon says nuh uh though and snaps Elvis’ neck complete 180 which causes Lorraine to scream, the black smoke escapes from Elvis still standing body. Elvis collapses on the floor and Lorraine is wailing. And I can say “Elvis has left the bulding” which I’ve been waiting the entire episode to be able to say. I’m marginally disappointed Dean didn’t.

Dean helps Lorraine up while shouting “Sammeh!” which brings Sammeh running to the living room.

Mary: Dean. We thought you were outside. Dean: Yeah, I got back in. Sam: How? Dean: It was a one-time deal. Won’t happen again.

Thankfully, there’s no time for Sam to initiate the Spanish inquisition on THAT right now. They account for everyone – except Elvis obviously. The lights go out and everyone puts flashlights on (Max and Alicia have the phone torch on – me as a hunter!) but Dean pulls out the knife which Alicia and Max look at.

Alicia: Mm, impressive. Dean: Demon blade. Kills ‘em dead. Max and Alicia in unison: Nice.

While I try to work out a Sam/Max/Alicia/Dean ship name, Bucky suggests lighting candles, Dean says they need a devil’s trap. Sam says “on it” and Dean is right there with him “yep”. My boys working in sync!

Dean’s plan is for them all to stand in the devil’s trap. The person who won’t get in, is the demon. Clever plan. Mary is impressed and it’s nice for her to see how well one of her sons turned out as a hunter and the other is a cute dumbass – at least Sam had a flashlight.

Mary goes off on her own for some reason and goes to get the angel killing blade from Asa’s office.

Max tries flirting with Sam again, asking what kind of pentagram they are doing

Sam: Standard pentagram. Nothing fancy. Max: I like a Fifth Pentacle of Mars. It’s got more character.

Max bringing his A game to the flirting, I like it. Alicia doesn’t like all the flirting: “Because character is really what matters right now.” They are just like Sam and Dean! Spin off of codependent witch siblings right tf now. Please and thank you.

Jody sees Mary return and is suspicious she was off on her own. She whispers to Sam that she thinks Mary is possessed, she gets increasingly worried which draws the immediate attention of Dean who comes over and asks what is going on (demon knife drawn out and ready once again). Sam quietly tries to tell Dean that Jody thinks their mom is a demon, but Jody shouts, No, I don’t think, I know! I know she’s a demon. [points accusingly at Mary] which prompts Bucky to steps away from Mary and reaches for his knife.

Mary: Hey! Jody: Kill her! Use the knife! Kill her now! Sam: Whoa, whoa, whoa. Wait. Hold on a second, [turns to look at Jody] Jody, you… You don’t sound like yourself. Dean (not even looking around):That’s because she’s not herself. Are you?

Oh my poor Sam Dumbchester, on rewatch, this episode did you dirty, I was sucked in by my love of Asa Fox and the whole door thing and the Sammeh! I’m so ashamed. Hands my bitter Sam girl platinum membership card back to the bitter Sam girl club in recognition I am no longer worthy of holding it Jody turning into the red eyed demon is in the running for worst “playing of a different character ever” but it’s up against stiff competition from Casifer, Empty!Castiel, Gestapo!Castiel and gayforpay!Castiel and is mercifully short. My main issue with this demon is there is no real consistency through the different bodies it inhabits. They should all have agreed how to play it imo and I do think Kim goes Disney villain OTT but not enough to cause embarrassment, just would have been better if the performance had been toned down some.

Demon Jody had hoped they would kill their mom “wouldn’t that be a riot?”

Dean (sarcastically): Yeah, super fun

Sam tries to attack Jody and is thrown. Big brother is pissed and tries to attack but is thrown too. Uh, how come the lame demon can fight now?

Anyway, Mary attacks and tries to kill Jody with the demon blade and manages to scratch her arm, but Sam says no and pulls Mary away. .

Mary: What are you doing?! She’s a demon. We kill demons. Sam: No, but she’s Jody.

I like this that Mary doesn’t know you don’t just go around killing people, you try to save them first.

The demon is bored and claps her hands, and everyone collapses onto the ground and cannot move (where was this kickass power earlier?). The demon says she’s heard so many stories about the Winchesters, she stands over sam and says, “The idea that he left a meatsuit alive is just so deliciously weak.” Sam gives his “bite me” face.

As for the rest, she’s been inside their heads and starts spilling out secrets – the twins are Asa’s children (I forgot about this detail), Lorraine apparently tried to sabotage Asa’s truck to stop him going out hunting (which is a nice call back to him trying to fix the truck in the episode earlier). She says Jody fantasized about a life with Asa. Bucky manages to get up to attack but Jody grabs him and holds him on his knees.

Jody/Jael: And you. Bucky. Brave, brave Bucky. I was there that night. Tell these nice, stupid people what you did. Tell them what you took from me. Asa was mine.

I like this next scene, Sam manages to stand up and start the exorcism before he’s thrown across the room again. Dean picks up where Sam left off, until he’s thrown through a glass door, the twins are next and get pinned to the wall.

Bucky finally confesses that he killed Asa [and the way he’s dramatically thrown to the floor would never have made it into a scene in seasons 1 to 5]. Oh show, weeps for the quality that once was. Season 12 (heavy sigh).

Mary stands up and finishes the exorcism which sends the demon back to hell.

Sam rushes over to help Jody who says, “That… sucked”

[Try re-watching your performance Kim!]

Lorraine: Bucky, what did you do?

They all turn and look at Bucky.

Bucky says they were hunting in the woods for Jael and he wanted to go back and get the angel blade. Asa wanted to keep hunting but Bucky pushed him and Asa fell and cracked his head and died, which I feel kind of sorry for, not like he did it deliberately and he lost his best friend [and lets be real, it’s not the worst thing a supposed “best friend” has done on this show]. It’s a very tragic end for a great hunter (don’t fast forward to 15.20)

Bucky asks what they are going to do to him.

Alicia: Tell everyone, every hunter we meet. They’re gonna know your name, Bucky. Know what you did. Max: You like stories. This is the story everyone’s gonna tell about you. Forever

I guess I get Max and Alicia’s anger, Asa being their dad and all. It’s just tragic all round because I do feel it was an unlucky accident and Bucky clearly misses his best friend.

I like the setup of the funeral pyre, now 3 hunter bodies being burned, Jody, Lorraine and Mary are standing in front of the pyre. Alicia and Max are resting against their car and Dean and Sam are doing the same against baby.

Lorraine tells Mary she was wrong, “Asa did have a family. He even had kids. I’ve got grandchildren. Suppose I should go meet them.” She walks over to hug Alicia and Max.

Jody and Mary are left at the pyre,

Jody: I don’t know what’s going on between you and your boys, but I gotta tell you, mom to mom, they are good men. Best I’ve ever met. Mary: I know. They’re not the problem.

Jody walks away and leaves Mary on her own, which is Dean’s opportunity, he taps Sam and they both go over to Mary. They ask if she’s okay but Billy appears and says, “She’s really not.” Mary asks who she is and Dean says she’s a reaper that got him back inside.

I would like to have much preferred to have seen Sam’s reaction as well as Mary’s but we don’t get this and it’s a bad choice of angle for me. Billie says Dean owes her one and looks at Mary, “This one. This one right here.”

Billie is still on her “what’s dead should stay dead” kick. She’s a stickler for the laws on that (and never really changes tbh, I don’t really get Billie’s overall arc.)

Mary says she didn’t ask to come back, Billie agrees but says the dead man’s look in Mary’s eyes says she hates it, that she feels she doesn’t fit, like she’s all alone.

Dean: Well, she’s not alone.

Billie (still looking at Mary): Tell me I’m wrong. [Sam and Dean turn to look at Mary and kudos to Jared once again for saying so much with no words as to how he looks at Mary here]

Billy says she’s not here to hurt Mary, “I’m here to offer you mercy. A one-way ticket upstairs, away from all of this.” [Again poor choice of camera for this scene as we see Dean but not Sam]. Mary asks how it would work.

Sam: Mom. [My poor boys!] Mary: You just kill me again? Billie: Reapers don’t kill people. Rules. Mary: Well… then… [she looks up at Sam and Dean] Me: Don’t you dare break my boys fragile hearts! Mary: Then I guess you’re just gonna have to wait. Billie: Winchesters… Me: Same tbh Billie Billie: …if you change your mind– if any of you change your minds– you know my name. [she disappears]

Sam asks if this means Mary is coming home. Mary says yeah, but follows up with: Not quite yet. I just need a little more time.

Sam looks disappointed ☹ but he understands

Dean: Can we buy you breakfast at least? Mary: Bacon? Dean: All the bacon. Mary: I would love that.

I love that Dean and Mary can find a common bond through food. Sam hugs Mary as they walk together towards the Impala

Despite a couple of wobbly bits sprinkled here and there and my poor Dumbchester Sammeh, I still really love this episode overall, the good far outweighs the issues I have and I’ll happily re-watch it as a stand-alone MOTW. I loved the introduction of the witch twins and wish we’d got to see a lot more of them *coughs* and a lot less of other “fan favourite” characters.

It will be interesting where this one will ultimately fall in my definitive list.

#spn rewatch #12.06 #celebrating the life of asa fox #episode review #episode recap #Dabb era actually has some quite good episodes to enjoy #if you ignore being repeatedly punched in the face with Cass is best friend/brother

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myownsuperintendent · 4 years ago

Text

New Fic: “Our Friends” (Part of the “A Different Place” Series)

When Diana returns, it throws a wrench into Samantha's life, as she tries to make sense of what is going on with Mulder and Scully and of Diana's interest in her own capabilities. This fic is part of my “A Different Place” AU, in which Mulder brings home one of the Samantha clones in “Herrenvolk,” and is set during the Season 6 era. It’s rated G and is also here on Ao3. The full series is here. Tagging @o6666666 because she’s been really supportive of this series <3

.....

Fox picks her up from school today. “There’s someone I want you to meet, Sam,” he tells her as they drive. “Is that okay?”

“Sure,” Samantha says. She likes meeting people, if they’re nice. And Fox mostly knows nice people.

They go to a restaurant near where he works, a little diner; she’s been there before with him, a couple of times. There’s a woman sitting at a table in the back when they go in, who waves at Fox. He waves back, and they go over. When she looks at Samantha, the woman’s eyes get wide, and she looks for a long, long time. Samantha has to look away. She doesn’t like people looking at her like there’s something strange about her, even though it happens sometimes, when she acts different from other people. She didn’t think she was acting different now, though. She’s just standing there.

“You told me,” the woman says, softly. “Fox, you told me. But I didn’t realize…”

“I know,” he says. “It’s…it’s something.” He pulls out a chair for Samantha and ruffles her hair as she sits down; maybe that’s to make her feel better, because he knows she doesn’t like that kind of looking. “Let me introduce the two of you, though,” he says, and that’s better too, because maybe once they know each other the woman won’t look at her that way. “Diana, this is Samantha. Samantha, this is Diana. She’s…she’s an old friend of mine, and we used to work together.”

“Like you work with Dana?” Samantha asks.

“Yeah,” he says after a minute. “Like that.” That’s interesting, because she didn’t know he ever worked with anybody besides Dana. Maybe if she had come here at a different time she would never have met Dana. That would be sad, though, so she’s glad it didn’t happen.

“Hi, Diana,” she says. “It’s nice to meet you.”

“Hi, Samantha,” Diana says. “It’s…wow. It’s wonderful to meet you too. Finally. In the flesh.” She doesn’t know what Diana means, finally. If Diana wanted to meet her she’s been right here for two years. “When Fox and I worked together, he used to tell me about you all the time.”

That explains it—Diana doesn’t understand who she is. “I’m not that Samantha,” she says. “I’m a different one.” She doesn’t really like talking about the other Samantha, but she doesn’t want Diana to be confused.

“Of course. I know that,” Diana says. “But still—he was always looking for you then.”

“Not me,” Samantha says. She would know if Fox had been looking for her, because he’s told her about what he was doing. He was looking for the other Samantha and he didn’t know about her. But he’s happy he found her, even if he wasn’t looking. Happier than anything in the world. Sometimes you find just what will make you happiest even if it’s not what you’re looking for. She knows that from Fox, and from books.

Diana still looks confused, but she says, “Well, anyway, you must both be so happy to be together now,” and she’s right about that, anyway.

“Yes,” Samantha says. Because Fox is her brother, so of course he makes her happy.

“We are,” Fox says, and he puts a hand on Samantha’s shoulder.

He lets her get a milkshake, and she drinks it while Fox and Diana keep talking. Sometimes Diana asks her questions too. She asks her about the place where she lived, before she came to live with Fox and Mom, and Samantha tells her. About all the other girls who were like her, and all the boys who were like each other, and doing all the work around the farm together. Diana looks at her more and says, “Wow,” again. She sort of likes talking about it, because she doesn’t get to do that with a lot of people, but she still doesn’t like the staring.

Maybe she should ask Diana a question, she thinks. She read that it’s polite for a conversation to be like a tennis match. “Where do you work?” she asks. “Now that you don’t work with Fox.”

“Well, actually,” Diana says, “I’m back working here now. At the FBI. So I hope we can see more of each other, Samantha. I’d love to hear more about you.”

Maybe she is nice, even if she stares a lot. “Well,” Samantha says, “I really like reading and cooking. Those are probably my favorite things. Do you like reading?”

“I do,” Diana says. “Did you used to do those things on the farm?”

“I did cooking there,” Samantha says. “But I couldn’t read at all. Fox read to me at first, until I learned how. And he still reads to me now, even though I can do it. And sometimes I read to him.”

Diana smiles. “That’s sweet.”

“My favorite book is A Wrinkle in Time,” Samantha says. “Do you like that one?”

“I haven’t read it,” Diana says. “Was it hard for you? Learning to read?”

“No,” Samantha says. “It wasn’t too hard. It was easier than learning to talk.”

“You learned to talk here too?” Diana asks. “How did you do that?”

“With my speech therapist,” Samantha says. “And by practicing.” She wishes they could talk about A Wrinkle in Time. She looks up at the clock; it’s almost four, now. “Are we going to go home soon?” she asks Fox.

“Soon, Samantha,” he says. “I have to go by the office to finish some things up first. Can you work on your homework for a little bit while I do that? Or sit and read?”

“Sure,” she says. She’s done that at his office before, a couple of times.

“I’ll head back with you,” Diana says, getting up when they do, and they all walk over to the building together. She thinks that maybe Diana is going to go somewhere else, but she comes over to Fox’s desk with them too.

There isn’t anybody at Dana’s desk. “Where’s Dana?” Samantha asks.

“I’m not sure, Sam,” Fox says. “She might have stepped out for a minute.”

Samantha sees a piece of paper on the desk, propped against the computer. “She left a note, I think,” she says, going over to look at it. Mulder, it says, I’m not sure where you went, and you’re not answering your phone, but I have to go pick up Emily. I’ll be back soon—Scully. “She’s picking up Emily.”

“Emily?” Diana asks.

“She’s Dana’s daughter,” Samantha says. “She’s three. But we’re friends.”

Diana nods; she looks like she’s thinking about something. Since Dana’s not here right now, Samantha sits in her chair to work on her math homework. Every time she looks up, it feels like Diana is looking at her again.

“Could Dana and Emily come over for dinner tonight?” she asks Fox. “I promised Emily we’d play hopscotch down the whole driveway together. And today’s the first day it hasn’t been raining.”

Fox smiles at her. “Sure, that sounds good. We’ll ask Dana when she gets back.”

“Okay,” Samantha says. She goes back to her homework.

She can hear footsteps before she sees Dana and Emily. “Hi!” she says, as they come over.

“Hi, Samantha!” Dana says. “I didn’t know you were going to be here today. What’re you working on?”

“Multiplication tables,” Samantha says. “And I have to do a book report. I’m going to do it about The Secret of Platform Thirteen.”

“Oh, right, you were telling me about that one,” Dana says. “How did it turn out?”

“Really good,” Samantha says. “They found out Ben was the prince, and he went back to the Island with them. And he and Odge were friends.”

Dana smiles. “That’s great.” She looks up then, to where Fox is sitting at the desk, to where Diana is standing against one of the file cabinets. Now she’s not smiling so much. “Hi, Mulder,” she says. “Agent Fowley.”

“Hi, Scully,” Fox says. “Hi, Em.” Diana nods.

“Hi, Emily,” Samantha says, bending down. Emily’s a little quiet sometimes, especially if there are people there she doesn’t know. And Samantha guesses she doesn’t know Diana, since Diana asked who she was.

“Hi,” Emily says softly. “I drew flowers.” She shows Samantha a picture she’s holding.

“It’s nice,” Samantha says, even though it doesn’t really look much like flowers. But Emily is only three. “Maybe we could draw more later. After we play hopscotch. Dana, can you and Emily come over for dinner?”

“Tonight?” Dana says. “I don’t think we can tonight.”

“Are you sure?” Samantha asks. “Fox says it’s a good idea too. And we could make something nice. Like spaghetti.”

Dana shakes her head. “We can’t tonight,” she says. “I’m sorry, Samantha. But soon, okay?”

“Okay,” Samantha says. She’s a little disappointed, but she knows that’s how it is sometimes. “Someday when it’s nice out. So Emily and I can play hopscotch.”

“Do you want to play for a little now?” Dana asks. “If there’s nothing I need to finish up here, I could take you both outside. I think we’ve got chalk in the car.”

“Can we?” Emily asks. “Can we? Can we?”

Fox laughs. “Go ahead. That’s really nice of you, Scully.”

Samantha isn’t sure if Dana laughs too, but she makes some kind of sound. “Yeah, that’s me,” she says, which Samantha doesn’t really understand. But she puts her math homework back into her backpack, and they go up in the elevator together.

There’s a little park area, near the building, and Samantha and Emily play hopscotch there, while Dana watches them. They can’t make as big a hopscotch court as they could on the driveway, but it’s still fun. When Samantha is waiting for her turn to hop, she looks over at Dana, and Dana looks like she’s thinking really hard about something, or maybe like she’s sad. Samantha’s not sure, so she just tries smiling at Dana, and after a minute Dana smiles back at her. “Do you want to hop too?” Samantha asks. “You can go before me.”

“Sure,” Dana says. “Thank you, sweetheart.” And they all hop, and Samantha decides that Dana probably isn’t sad, because she’s smiling now and looks like she’s having a good time.

Fox comes out and finds them, after a little while. He’s still with Diana. “You ready to go, Sam?” he asks.

“Okay,” Samantha says. She finishing hopping back to one and goes over to him. “Bye, Emily. Bye, Dana. You’ll come for dinner soon?”

“Sure,” Dana says. “Soon, Samantha.” She turns to Fox. “I’ll see you at work on Monday, Mulder,” she says, and then she and Emily go back to their car. They carry the chalk away.

When Samantha and Fox go to their own car, Diana comes with them. “We thought Diana could come for dinner,” Fox says. “How does that sound, Sam?”

“Fine,” Samantha says. She doesn’t think it’s as nice as having Emily and Dana come, since Diana probably won’t want to play hopscotch. Although she guesses she doesn’t know that. “Do you like to play hopscotch, Diana?”

Diana laughs. “I haven’t done that in years,” she says. Which isn’t really an answer to the question, but if Samantha had to guess, she would guess that it means no. She would never stop doing anything she liked to do for years.

When they get back to the house, Mom’s reading in the living room. She looks surprised when they come in. “Diana,” she says. “I had no idea you were…”

“It’s been a long time,” Diana says. “But it’s lovely to see you again, Teena.” Mom must know Diana too, but that makes sense, if she used to work with Fox. They’re all friends with Dana, after all.

Diana and Fox seem to have a lot to say to each other; they talk in the living room while Samantha and Mom are making dinner. During dinner, Diana compliments Samantha on her cooking, and she stares at her more, in between bites.

She leaves after they’re done eating, and the three of them clean up together. “You didn’t tell me Diana was back in town,” Mom says.

“Yeah, I guess I didn’t,” Fox says. He finishes washing a dish and hands it to Samantha to dry.

“Are the two of you working together again?” Mom asks.

“Not exactly together,” Fox says. “She’s back at the Bureau, but we’re not on the same cases, for the most part.”

“Hmm,” Mom says. She puts the glasses back in the cabinet. “Are you glad?”

“Glad about what? Seeing her again?” Fox asks. “Yeah, it’s…I think it’s a good thing. And I’m glad I got to introduce her to Sam. After all those years of hearing me talk about looking for her.”

“Not me,” Samantha says. He’s talking like Diana was earlier, like she and the other Samantha are the same person. Which he almost never does, not since the first days.

He looks down at her. “I’m sorry, Samantha,” he says. “Of course I don’t mean that. I just meant…it’s nice for her to put a face to the name.” Samantha doesn’t understand that either. She has the same face as the other Samantha, and she knows that because she’s seen pictures. So if Diana wanted to know what their face looked like Fox could have just shown her a picture ages ago.

She decides to change the subject. “I saw Dana and Emily today,” she tells Mom. “And Dana said they’d come for dinner soon. She couldn’t tonight, though.”

“That sounds good,” Mom says. “Have Dana and Diana met?” she asks Fox.

“Of course they’ve met,” Fox says. “We all worked a case together.” Mom looks like she’s going to say something else, but Fox turns to Samantha. “Do you want to play checkers?” he asks. He was teaching her at first, but now she’s much, much better than him.

“Sure,” she says, because even though it’s easy to beat him now she still likes to play together. And they go off into the other room.

.....

“Will you remind Dana?” she asks Fox, one morning later that week. “That she said she and Emily would come for dinner?” Usually they don’t even have to ask, because they have dinner together so often. But maybe Dana’s busy right now.

“Sure,” Fox says. “I’ll talk to her.”

She asks him again, when he gets home that night, and he says he talked to Dana, that she and Emily have a lot going on this week but she’ll try to make time. But they still don’t come. Samantha misses having them there at the table. She would even cook plain buttered noodles, which are Emily’s favorite, if they would come.

Diana comes again, one time the next week, but it’s not the same at all. She’s all right, but she’s not Samantha’s friend like Dana and Emily are. Samantha tries to be friends, and she tells Diana all about her book report on The Secret of Platform Thirteen, which she read for the class this week. They had to dress up as a character, and Samantha dressed up as Odge, the hag. She has a blue tooth, and even though it’s in the back where no one can see, Samantha put a blue piece of paper on one of her teeth anyway, because it’s an important part of the character. But she doesn’t think Diana really understood about that. She only wants to hear about when Samantha was at the farm or when she first came here. She doesn’t like to hear about books or even to talk about them; Samantha asked her what her favorite was, and she said she didn’t really know.

“When are Dana and Emily coming?” she asks Fox, after Diana goes home.

“I don’t know, Sam,” Fox says. “I promise I’ll let you know as soon as Scully tells me anything.”

“I wish they would come,” Samantha says, and he looks at her for a long time, but in a nice way, and then he hugs her close.

That night when she wakes up, she goes down to the living room, because she thinks she left her colored pencils down there. When she gets to the bottom of the stairs she can hear Fox talking. She doesn’t hear anyone else, so he must be on the phone.

“Look,” he’s saying. “I don’t want to…Samantha misses you guys.” She can see him on the couch from where she’s standing. “Well, what are you so busy with? We work together…I never said that. But you have to admit it’s been a change…I don’t know what you’re talking about.” His voice is a little louder now. “Look, Sam’s gone through a lot of change already. She’d just like to see the two of you…Did I ever say that?” She knows he must be talking to Dana, but he sounds mad. She doesn’t like to think about that, him being mad at Dana. “Maybe you could just say what you’re thinking. Instead of beating around the bush…See, this is what I mean…All right. All right. I’ll see you at work tomorrow. But…but can you think about what I said?” He doesn’t sound so mad now, more sad. “I’m not asking for myself. It’s for Sam…Yeah. Good night, Scully.” He stays sitting on the couch, after he’s stopped talking.

She doesn’t go to look for her colored pencils. She walks up the steps softly, in her socks, so he can’t hear.

.....

Samantha thinks about what she heard, most of the next day. She’s worried, because she doesn’t want the two of them to be mad at each other. But then, late that afternoon, she sees Dana’s car coming up the driveway.

She jumps up from her seat. “Where are you going, Samantha?” Mom asks.

“To open the door,” she says. “It’s Dana and Emily.” She can see them both now, walking towards the steps. She can’t stop smiling, and Mom smiles too, back at her. She goes to the door and throws it open. “You came for dinner!” she says.

“We did,” Dana says.

“I missed you,” Samantha says. “I didn’t see you for two weeks.”

“I know,” Dana says, and she stoops down to give Samantha a hug. “I missed you too. I’m sorry we didn’t come.”

“That’s okay,” Samantha says. “You were busy, right?” Dana doesn’t say anything, but she has a funny look on her face, and Samantha remembers what she heard last night. Maybe they really are mad at each other. Maybe that’s why Dana and Emily didn’t come for dinner. She looks around; Emily is telling Mom and Fox about what she did in school today, and they aren’t paying attention to what Samantha’s saying. “Are you and Fox mad at each other?” she asks.

“What makes you ask that, Samantha?” Dana asks.

“I heard him talking to you on the phone,” Samantha says. “Are you?”

Dana looks sad now, and she stoops down again and smoothes Samantha’s hair. “I wouldn’t say we’re mad at each other,” she says. “There are just some changes at work…and we’re having a little bit of a hard time. And that might make us…get more stressed out about things than we would otherwise. But we’re still good friends. And you don’t have to worry about any of that.”

“Yes, I do,” Samantha says. “Because I don’t want you to be mad at each other. And I want you and Emily to come to dinner like you always do.”

“And we will,” Dana says. “I am sorry, Samantha. I shouldn’t have stayed away.” She hugs Samantha again. “I’ve known Mulder for a long time now, you know. And sometimes we don’t get along perfectly, but we always make up. And I’ll always love you and spending time with you, even if things are tough at work. Okay?”

“Okay,” Samantha says. But she’s still a little worried.

She doesn’t have time to ask anything more, though, because Emily comes up to her then. “Let’s play hopscotch,” she says.

“All right,” Samantha says. “I’ll get my chalk.” It’s good that they came now, she thinks, because it’s starting to get cold out. They probably won’t be able to play hopscotch a lot longer this year.

While they’re eating, later, Samantha watches Fox and Dana. Maybe they’re not really mad at each other, like Dana said. They don’t do any really mad things, like yell or give each other the silent treatment. But they don’t do any really friendly things either. Usually Fox will say silly things, and Dana will act like she’s not going to laugh but then she will. Usually they talk to each other a lot, and they smile a lot, like they don’t even have to think about it. But tonight they don’t do all that.

She wants to ask Fox about it, after dinner, once Dana and Emily go home. She already asked Dana, but she still doesn’t really understand; maybe Fox will be able to help. “Fox?” she says, while they’re putting away the dishes.

“Yeah, Sam?”

She wants to ask him, really, but when she opens her mouth nothing comes out. And it’s not because she’s having trouble talking, which sometimes happens still, if she’s upset. It’s because she doesn’t know what question to ask.

“Never mind,” she says. “I’m going to go read.”

.....

Diana comes by the house again, later that week. Samantha’s reading when she gets there, but she puts the book down, to be polite. “Oh, you don’t have to stop,” Diana says. “You could read me some of it.”

Samantha’s a little bit surprised by that. Sometimes she reads to Fox, but that seems different, somehow, since he reads to her too. And sometimes she reads to Emily, but that’s because Emily can’t read herself. “Are you sure?” she asks. “You won’t know what happened at the beginning.”

“That’s all right,” Diana says. “You can just start where you are.”

“But it’s a mystery,” Samantha says. “I’ll explain the beginning to you, so you know about the clues.” And she explains the beginning to Diana—it’s a Nancy Drew book, The Phantom of Pine Hill. “But I don’t think it’s going to be a real phantom,” she says. “The ghosts are never real, in Nancy Drew books. I think that’s a little silly.”

Diana laughs. “You sound like Fox,” she says.

“Well, maybe,” Samantha says. “He’s my brother.” And Diana laughs again, even though she doesn’t think she said anything very funny. “Should I read?”

“Yes,” Diana says, “go ahead.” So she does. Diana stares at her more, the whole time. She doesn’t know why she thinks it, but she doesn’t think Diana is that interested in the story. She thinks she’s interested in something else, but she doesn’t know what.

She stops reading when it’s time to make dinner. “You read very well,” Diana says. “I’m impressed.”

“Thank you,” Samantha says. “It’s my favorite thing, like I said.” And Diana nods.

Diana watches Samantha while she’s cooking dinner too, the same way. She has the same look on her face as she had when Samantha was reading. So whatever she’s interested in, it’s something about Samantha, not something about Nancy Drew. But Samantha can’t figure out why.

.....

Dana and Emily come to their house for dinner a lot, but sometimes they go to Dana’s apartment instead. They do that tonight; she and Mom drive into the city together and meet Fox, Dana, and Emily there.

“Will you read to me?” Emily asks Samantha. “Please,” she adds quickly, when Dana looks at her, and Dana smiles.

“Sure,” Samantha says. “What do you want me to read?” Emily brings over The Little Fur Family. It’s one of her favorites, which makes Samantha happy, since she and Fox picked it out for her, when she first came here to live with Dana.

They sit on the couch together, and Samantha reads. Dana’s listening too, while she’s putting dishes on the table, and when Samantha finishes reading she smiles at her too. Samantha smiles back and goes over to help her with the table. “Thank you for reading to Emily,” Dana says to her. “It’s very nice of you.”

“Oh, I like it,” Samantha says. “I like reading to people.”

“Who else do you read to?” Dana asks.

“Sometimes I read to Fox,” Samantha says. “Especially when I was learning, so I could practice. And on Monday I read to Diana.”

Dana looks surprised. “You did?”

Samantha nods. “I was reading when she came over for dinner, and she asked me to. Except I don’t think she really cared about the story.”

“What do you mean?” Dana asks.

“I’m not sure,” Samantha says. “But she said she didn’t need to know what happened at the beginning. And she kept staring at me when I was reading, but then she was staring at me the same way when I was cooking. So I don’t think it was about the story.”

She can tell that Dana is thinking about something and that it’s not something that makes her happy, but she can’t tell what. “Does she come to your house for dinner a lot?” she asks.

“A few times now,” Samantha says.

“And does she always…stare at you?”

“Yes,” Samantha says. “I don’t really like that. And she asks me questions a lot, about when I first came here. And how I learned to do different things.” Maybe she shouldn’t be saying that; she doesn’t understand why Diana acts like that, but then there are still a lot of things she doesn’t really understand about what it’s like here, even after two years. And usually there is a good reason for them. “But she is Fox’s friend,” she says, because maybe that makes it okay.

“Yeah,” Dana says. “Yeah, she is.” She’s quiet for a minute. “Does she…” She breaks off, shaking her head. “Never mind, Samantha. It’s none of my business.”

Samantha puts the forks and spoons on the table, neat and straight. She wonders what Dana was going to ask.

.....

She’s over at Fox’s office again today, because he had to grab some files before he takes her home. She’s standing by his desk, waiting for him, when Diana comes over. “Hi, Fox,” she says. “Hi, Samantha.”

“Hi,” Samantha says.

“What have you been doing today?” Diana asks.

“I had school,” Samantha says. “We had the half-mile run. I was the fastest.” She hopes she doesn’t sound like she’s bragging. Ms. Green told them it’s not a race, but she was the fastest.

“Wow,” Diana says. “Are you a really fast runner, Samantha?”

“I guess so,” Samantha says. “I don’t really get tired.”

“Don’t you ever get tired?” Diana asks, and she’s staring again.

Samantha fidgets. “I don’t know. I might get tired sometimes. But not running the half mile.” She tries to make it sound like it’s not interesting so that Diana will leave her alone. She always feels like she’s different when Diana talks to her. Like she’s something strange they would study in science class.

“How far do you think you can run without getting tired?” Diana asks.

“I don’t know,” Samantha says, and she doesn’t, she really doesn’t.

“Well, could you just—”

“Samantha!” It’s Dana, and she’s standing behind them; Samantha isn’t sure when she came in. “I wasn’t expecting to see you today. This is so nice. Here, come over to my desk. I have something you might like.” She doesn’t say sorry for interrupting, or hello or goodbye to Diana, or anything like that. So Samantha doesn’t either, even though she thinks maybe she should. They just go over to Dana’s desk together.

Dana opens a drawer. She’s got a lot of paper clips in it, all in different colors. “I saw these at the store the other day,” Dana says, “and I thought you might like some. I was thinking about your binder. How neat it is.” Samantha does always keep her homework very neat in her binder, and she has a different colored tab for every subject. And the paper clips are nice, for paper clips, although they’re not really that exciting. But she’s still glad Dana brought her over to see them. She’d rather look at paper clips all day, for a full twenty-four hours, than have Diana ask her more questions about how far she can run.

“Thank you,” she says. “They’re pretty.” And Dana gives her a handful, all the colors mixed together, and she puts them into the pocket of her backpack, carefully. And Dana asks her about school too, and she tells her about the new unit they’re doing in social studies, about explorers and how they sailed around the world. And Dana tells her about her dad, how he sailed around the world too. Samantha’s never known anyone who actually sailed around the world. Of course, she doesn’t know Dana’s dad herself, but she feels like she could sort of know him, since Dana did. At least more than she could know Christopher Columbus or Marco Polo.

“Well, I guess I should be going,” Diana says, her voice a little bit loud.

“Probably,” Dana says. “I’m sure we’re all busy.” Samantha wouldn’t say Dana’s voice is mean, exactly, but it’s the kind of voice people use when they don’t really care about something.

“I’m sure we are,” Diana says. “Goodbye, Fox.”

“Bye,” Fox says. “Talk to you soon.”

“That would be good,” Diana says, and then she walks away. Samantha’s glad.

But when she’s gone, Fox turns to Dana. “What’s going on with you?” he asks.

“Nothing’s going on with me,” she says. “I’m just talking with Samantha.”

“Exactly,” he says. “She was talking to Diana, and you just pulled her away. What’s going on with that?”

Dana sighs. “Well,” she says, “it didn’t look like Samantha was having a very good time talking to her.”

Samantha nods. “I wasn’t.” But they don’t seem to listen to her.

“That’s not your call,” Fox says. “I think you’re letting your personal feelings—”

“My personal feelings?” Dana says, and her voice is loud now, definitely. She looks around the room, lowers it. “I don’t think I’m the one who’s doing that, Mulder. Maybe you should try paying a little more attention. Because I wouldn’t say that was an innocent conversation.” Samantha doesn’t know what that means.

Apparently Fox doesn’t either. “Aren’t you blowing this a little out of proportion?” he asks. “Samantha, if you weren’t enjoying the conversation, I’m sorry.”

“That’s okay,” Samantha says, because it’s not his fault. But she still doesn’t think they’re really listening.

“But to say that it’s not innocent…I don’t even know what you mean, Scully.”

“I just think…from what I’ve heard…and what Samantha’s told me…” Dana breaks off again and looks at Samantha. “Maybe we shouldn’t get into it.”

“No, let’s get into it,” Fox says. “Because if you’re trying to say that you understand what Samantha needs more than I do…she’s my sister, Scully.”

“I know. And that’s not what I’m saying,” Dana says. “You may not believe it, but I’d love to be wrong here.” Samantha wonders what she means. Mostly people hate being wrong. “But if I’m not…I’d rather not talk about it in front of Samantha, right now.”

They both look at her then, for what feels like the first time in the whole conversation. “Maybe you’re…” Fox says. He breaks off and reaches into his pocket, coming up with a couple of dollar bills, which he hands to Samantha. “Do you want to get a snack, Sam?” he asks.

“No,” she says. She doesn’t really know what they’re talking about, but she knows this is a trick. He’s going to send her to get a snack so that they can talk about something without her being there, and that’s not fair, because whatever it is has something to do with her. She can tell that much.

“Samantha, Scully and I need to talk,” he says. “Can you go get a snack for a few minutes? Please?”

She doesn’t want to, but she doesn’t think, from the way he’s looking at her, that she really has a choice. “Okay,” she says.

“Thanks, Sam,” he says, softly, and he looks sorry about it, but that doesn’t make her feel better. There’s something wrong, and it has something to do with her, and it’s making Fox and Dana fight, and she doesn’t know which part is scarier. She doesn’t know what to say to him. She takes the money and goes.

There’s a vending machine at the end of the hall, and she gets a bag of pretzels; then she comes back, as quickly and as quietly as she can. She wishes Fox and Dana were still in their old office, in the basement, because then she could listen at the keyhole. It’s not something she’s ever done, because she’s never needed to before and she’s knows it’s not something you’re supposed to do, but she can tell from books that it’s the best way to find out things. But where they’re working now, it’s just a bunch of cubicles, with no keyholes. She tries standing behind one, not so close to their desks that they’ll see her, but not too far away either. She only hears a few things, though—“like she’s a lab rat,” Dana says, and Fox says, “She’d never do that”—when two men come up and see her.

“Are you a child agent?” one of them asks her.

“No,” she says. She didn’t even know there were any child agents. But then they both start laughing, so she guesses it was a joke. She doesn’t think it was that funny.

“Well, what are you doing here, anyway?” the other man asks. “I don’t think you should be wandering around here, do you?”

“I guess I shouldn’t,” Samantha says. “But I’m not really wandering. I’m just waiting for my brother.”

“Your brother?” the man asks. “Does he work here?”

“Yes,” Samantha says. “Over there.” She goes back to Fox’s desk. He and Dana are still talking, but they stop as soon as they see her. They’re mad, though, she can tell that. When Dana came to dinner she said they weren’t mad at each other, but that was then. They’re mad now.

“Well, I think we should go, Sam,” Fox says. “I don’t think we need to stay here any longer today.”

“Goodbye, Samantha,” Dana says. “I just…well, I hope I’ll get to see you soon.”

“I hope so too,” Samantha says, but she can’t help wondering if they will. When she sees Dana, Fox is almost always there, except for a couple of times when she’s gone to spend the afternoon with Dana and Emily when Mom and Fox are both busy. But that doesn’t happen very often, and it might not happen anymore, either, if Fox and Dana are mad at each other.

“Come on, Sam,” Fox says, and they go to the elevator, and they go away.

He talks to her in the car while they’re driving home. “You don’t have anything to worry about, Sam,” he says. “Scully was just…well, you don’t have anything to worry about.”

“Are you lying to me?” Samantha asks quietly. She doesn’t think Fox would lie to her, because he knows she hates it, but she just can’t believe that she doesn’t have anything to worry about.

“No,” Fox says. “No, of course not, Samantha. I wouldn’t do that.”

So he’s not lying, but maybe he’s wrong. She is worried, even if Fox doesn’t think she should be. Maybe she won’t get to see Dana, and that’s not fair, because Dana is her friend. But she’s Fox’s friend, even more than she’s Samantha’s, and if they’re not friends anymore maybe she can’t be Samantha’s friend either. She doesn’t know how she’d get to see Dana. She can’t drive over to Dana’s apartment by herself. And what makes it even worse is that she still doesn’t understand why they’re mad or how long they’re going to be mad for.

“Are you and Dana still friends?” she asks. She almost doesn’t want to ask, though, because the answer might be no.

He’s quiet for a minute, and then he says, “We are, Samantha.” And she reminds herself that he said he wasn’t lying, but she doesn’t know what to believe anymore.

“Why are you fighting, then?” she asks.

He’s quiet again. “Friends do fight sometimes,” he finally says, but that’s not really an answer. She still doesn’t know exactly what’s going on, right now, with the two of them.

But she doesn’t think Fox will tell her anything more. When they get home, she just goes up to her room and closes the door. She wants to try to understand it, at least, but she just sits there, staring at the wall.

Eventually someone knocks at the door. “Come in,” she says.

The door opens; it’s Mom. “There you are, honey,” she says. “Do you want to come downstairs and make dinner together?”

“Okay,” Samantha says, even though she doesn’t really feel like doing anything. When she’s getting up from her seat on the bed, Mom looks at her face.

“Is there something wrong, Samantha?” she asks. “You look upset.”

“I am upset,” Samantha says. She sits back down, and Mom comes and sits next to her. “It’s Fox and Dana,” she says. “They’re fighting and I don’t really know why. And what if they’re not friends anymore? Will we still see Dana?”

“I don’t think they’re going to stop being friends, Samantha,” Mom says. “They…they care about each other too much for that.”

“I know they care about each other,” Samantha says. “But today at Fox’s office, they were really fighting. If you heard them…”

“What happened?” Mom asks. She puts a hand on Samantha’s shoulder, gently.

“I went there with Fox because he had to pick up some papers,” Samantha says, “and Diana came over and she was talking to me, and then Dana came over and started talking to me instead. And then when Diana left, they started fighting. And I didn’t really understand, but I think it was about me. And about Diana.”

“Oh,” Mom says. “Well, if it was about Diana…” She stops talking for a minute; she looks like she’s thinking.

“What?” Samantha asks. “Please tell me.”

Mom sighs. “Honey, what do you know about Diana?”

“She used to work with Fox,” Samantha says, “so they’re old friends.”

“They weren’t exactly friends,” Mom says. “They used to be…she was his girlfriend. Pretty seriously.”

Samantha tries to imagine that. Somehow she can’t. “Why didn’t he tell me?” she asks.

“Probably because you’re a little young,” Mom says.

“I’m not,” Samantha says, because she’d rather know all about everything, no matter how old she is. It makes things so much easier to understand. “And anyway, if I’m too young, why are you telling me?”

“Because it’ll help me explain to you,” Mom says. “I think…Fox and Dana are used to working really closely together. But he had a different kind of relationship with Diana, and that means—”

“Fox and Dana don’t just work together, though,” Samantha says. “They’re really good friends. When Dana and Emily come here for dinner, they’re not working.”

“That’s what I mean,” Mom says. “I think they’re trying to figure out where they stand now. Which can be hard when there’s someone else in the picture.”

“Why would Diana being Fox’s girlfriend mean that he can’t be friends with Dana?” Samantha asks. “She’s not even his girlfriend anymore. Is she?”

“No,” Mom says. “Not now. But…well, Fox and Dana probably have different feelings about her. Right? Is that what they were arguing about?”

“Yes,” Samantha says. “Fox got mad about what Dana said about Diana. And he said she was using her personal feelings too much, or something.”

Mom nods. “It’s hard sometimes,” she says, “when you’re used to things being one way and then another person comes in. But I really do think they’ll still be friends.”

“Do you promise?” Samantha asks.

“I can’t promise,” Mom says, and Samantha guesses she knew that; she just wishes Mom could. “But I think so.” She squeezes Samantha’s shoulders.

“Will everything…will it be okay?” Samantha asks. There’s so much going on, but that’s what she really wants to know.

“I think it will, Samantha,” Mom says. “Soon.”

She goes downstairs with Mom, then, to make dinner, but she keeps thinking about everything, even while she’s chopping the vegetables and getting everything ready. She thinks about the farm. She’s glad she’s here now, where there are stories and people she loves. But on the farm it was never complicated like this.

Dana and Emily don’t come to their house for dinner, that week, but neither does Diana. Once she hears Fox talking on the phone and tries to figure out who it’s with, if he’s talking to one of them. But when he sees her there, he goes into another room.

She worries about it. She knows that Mom told her that things would probably be okay, but she has to anyway. She just misses Dana and Emily, and she thinks Fox must miss having them come over too. They usually come over all the time. Even if he and Dana are arguing, she doesn’t think they could just stop liking each other, just like that.

They still work together, at least, but that’s no help to Samantha. At least until one day when Fox brings her by his office when he picks her up from school. He never used to do that so much either, but now that he works in a different part of the FBI, he doesn’t have the same kind of cases he used to. She thinks that makes him sad too, from the way he talks about it. But she hopes she’ll get to see Dana, if they’re going to be in the office.

She doesn’t, though. Dana’s not there when they get in. “Can I sit in Dana’s chair?” Samantha asks Fox. That won’t be anything like seeing her, but it’ll be spending time in the same place as her.

“Sure, Sam,” he says. His voice sounds a little sad. She wonders if she should ask him why he can’t just be friends with Dana again and have everything be like it used to be. She would like that so, so much. But every time she tries to ask anyone, they just tell her not to worry about it.

So she sits in Dana’s chair and works on her homework, and Fox sits across from her and works on some papers. They’re there for about ten minutes when his phone rings. He picks it up. “Mulder,” he says. “No, I’m not busy…They found what?...Agent Scully’s there now?” He’s quiet for a minute, listening to something on the other end of the line. “No, I’ll come over there too…Sit tight…Yeah, I’ll be there soon. As quick as I can. See you.” He hangs up the phone and looks at Samantha.

“Do you have to go work on a case?” she asks him.

“Yeah,” he says. “I should drop you off at home first, though.”

But he said he had to be there quick, and she knows that’s really important when you’re solving cases. Nancy Drew is always running somewhere. “I could wait here,” she says.

“No, Sam,” he says. “I can’t leave you alone here.”

“I don’t mind,” she says. “I can do my homework.”

He looks unsure for a minute, and then he says, “How about you wait outside? It’s nice weather. And then Mom can come and pick you up. I’ll call her now.”

“Okay,” she says.

They walk downstairs together, and she gets settled at one of the benches outside the building. “Are you sure you’ll be okay here?” he asks her. “I don’t feel right leaving you.”

“It’s fine,” Samantha says. “I wait for you at the library by myself all the time. And now I’m right outside the FBI, so if there’s a crime, I’ll just go and find someone.”

He laughs at that. “Good thinking,” he says. “I’ll leave you money for a payphone, just in case. And Mom’ll be here soon.”

“I’ll be fine,” she says again, and he kisses her cheek and walks away.

She’s started on her homework again when she hears a voice. “Samantha?”

She looks up: it’s Diana. She hasn’t seen Diana since Mom told her that she used to be Fox’s girlfriend. She already felt kind of funny about Diana, and that makes her feel more funny, even though she can’t exactly say why. “Hi, Diana,” she says.

“What are you doing here?” Diana asks, sitting down next to her on the bench.

“I was with Fox,” Samantha says, “but he had to go on a case. So now I’m waiting for Mom to pick me up.”

“What are you working on?” Diana asks her.

“Math homework,” Samantha says. “I have to make a chart—”

And then Diana interrupts her, again. “That doesn’t sound like a lot of fun. Would you like to do some puzzles, Samantha?”

“Puzzles?” she asks. She’s not sure what Diana means.

“Like brainteasers,” Diana says. “Puzzles that you have to think about. I have some here.” She’s carrying a briefcase.

Sometimes Samantha’s still not sure if something’s strange just to her or if it’s actually very strange. She’s not sure right now. But she thinks this is strange. “I should probably work on my homework,” she says. “It’s for tomorrow.”

“Just try one,” Diana says, and she puts a sheet of paper on top of Samantha’s homework, before Samantha can say anything else.

She’s done brainteasers before, in school. These ones are different. There are shapes on the page and what looks like writing. But it’s not writing like Samantha’s ever seen before, like she learned to read here. It’s in some kind of symbols she doesn’t know.

But that’s not quite right, to say she doesn’t know them. She doesn’t understand what the writing means, but it feels like she could. Like she’s learned one kind of way of reading and writing and talking and listening—the kind they do here, that everyone else does—but that maybe she could have learned the kind on the paper, if things had turned out differently. Or that she could even learn it now, all in one moment, if she concentrated enough and let it pull at her brain.

And that scares her. The way it could take her over. She usually loves learning things, but she doesn’t want to learn this. “I don’t want to,” she says. “No. No, thank you.”

“Just give it a try,” Diana says. “Try to concentrate.”

“No,” Samantha says. She tries to push the paper away, but Diana’s holding it.

“Do you mean you don’t understand it?” she asks. She sounds like she needs to know.

“I just mean that I don’t want to,” Samantha says. “Here. Take it back.” She shoves at the paper again, and this time Diana takes it away, but she’s taken Samantha’s math homework with it, the chart she was making. She’s looking at that now. “I need my homework back,” Samantha says, but Diana’s staring at the paper. Samantha doesn’t know what to do, what to say. She wishes Mom would get here and she could go home.

Then she hears another voice. “Samantha? Are you okay, sweetheart?”

It’s Dana. She looks like she’s just coming back to the building; she’s wearing a coat and carrying her bag. Samantha’s never been so glad to see anybody in her life. “Is Fox with you?” she asks.

“No,” Dana says. “I don’t know where he is. Are you supposed to meet him here?”

“No,” Samantha says. “Someone called him and he said he was going to go meet you. To work on a case.”

Dana looks confused. “We haven’t been out working on a case, Samantha. I’ve been over at the labs. Are you here all by yourself?” She doesn’t say anything to Diana, but she’s looking at her, out of the corner of her eye.

“Mom’s going to pick me up,” Samantha says. “I was just doing my homework. But…” She doesn’t know how to explain to Dana why that paper scared her. She’s worried it’ll make her sound strange.

Dana’s voice is kind like it always is, though, when she says, “What is it? What’s the matter?” Diana’s trying to pull the papers away now, put them back in her briefcase. She still has Samantha’s math homework.

“She has my math homework,” Samantha says. It sounds silly, but she does her best to explain. “And she gave me a puzzle to do…it had writing but I didn’t understand it…but I thought maybe I could have…it made me afraid.” She says the last part very quietly, because she doesn’t want Diana to hear, only Dana.

Dana turns to Diana. “What are you trying to do to her?” she asks. Samantha thought she sounded mad the other day, when she was talking to Fox, but she sounds much, much madder now. “If you’re thinking about doing anything that could hurt this little girl—”

“It wouldn’t hurt her,” Diana says. She’s still trying to put the papers away.

“—or upset her, or exploit her,” Dana says. “She’s a child. She’s not a pawn in whatever game you’re playing.” She grabs for the papers then, and Diana tries to pull them back, and some of them go flying. Samantha tries to find her math homework, but she doesn’t see it. Dana and Diana are still trying to grab the papers when Mom pulls up in her car. From the look on her face, Samantha can tell they all look pretty strange.

Mom stops the car and gets out. “What’s going on?” she asks. “Samantha, are you all right?”

“I don’t know,” Samantha says. She’s not so scared anymore, because Mom and Dana are here, but she doesn’t understand what’s happening, and she wants to know where Fox is, if he wasn’t going to meet Dana after all.

Dana turns to look at Mom; her face is red. “Teena,” she says, “I think we should get out of here. I don’t want to scare you, or Samantha, but I think we need to get out of here. I don’t think the company we’re in is doing Samantha any good.”

Mom looks at Dana for a minute, and then she nods. “All right,” she says, and the three of them get in the car.

“Something with Diana?” Mom asks when they’re in the car.

“She was trying to find out something about Samantha, I think,” Dana says. “Some kind of test. I took this from her.” She must have gotten the puzzle, then.

“Did you get my math homework?” Samantha asks.

Dana shuffles through the papers on her lap. “Is this it?” she asks. “M & M Colors?”

“Yes,” Samantha says. “We were doing percentages.”

Dana hands her the paper. “I don’t understand what this means,” she says, looking back at the paper she still has. “Some kind of symbols. Did you say you could, Samantha?”

“No,” Samantha says. “Just that…I thought maybe I could. Or I could have. If I concentrated. Or if someone taught me. But I don’t want them to,” she adds, quickly. “It made me scared.”

“You don’t have anything to be scared of, honey,” Mom says. “We’ll make sure you’re safe. Don’t give it another thought.”

But she can’t do that. “What was it?” Samantha asks. “That paper. Do you know?”

“I’m not sure,” Dana says. “Can you tell us exactly what happened, Samantha? What were you saying about Mulder?”

So she starts with that, with Fox getting the phone call and leaving, and then she tells about what happened with Diana, while they’re driving back to the house. They listen, and then Mom says she thinks they should call Fox, so she does. Samantha wonders if this means he and Dana will stop fighting.

He gets back to the house really quickly, almost as soon as they do; maybe he was nearby, or maybe he drove too fast. “What happened?” he asks. “Samantha, what happened? Are you okay?”

“Yes,” she says. “I’m okay.” And she tells the whole story again. She feels like she keeps telling it and telling it. Fox looks at the paper Dana took. His face is very white.

When she’s done, Fox gives her a hug. “I’m so sorry, Samantha,” he says. “I shouldn’t have left you alone. I was an idiot to fall for that. I shouldn’t have—I never meant to put you at any kind of risk.”

“It’s okay,” Samantha says. “I’m not upset.”

“It’s all right if you are,” Fox says.

“I’m not,” she says. Not with him. She still doesn’t understand what happened, but she trusts Fox, and she knows it’s not his fault. That he’d rather anything than have something bad happen to her. “What do you think she was trying to do?” she asks, quietly.

Fox looks at Dana. “I think it was some kind of test,” he says. “To see if you could read it. Just…to see what you were able to do.”

“Why?” she asks, but she thinks she knows.

“Because of where you came from,” he says. His voice is very gentle when he says it, because he knows she doesn’t like it when people talk about her like she’s different. Mom’s sitting next to her on the couch; she puts her arms around her shoulders and squeezes tight.

“Is that why she kept asking me all those questions?” Samantha asks. “Just to find out?”

“I think so,” he says.

“What was on the paper?” Samantha asks.

“I’m not sure, exactly,” he tells her. “But Scully and I have seen some things like that before. In work we’ve done. Symbols we can’t read.”

“I didn’t want to read them,” Samantha says. “Was that right?”

“If you didn’t want to,” he says, “then it was.” Samantha thinks about what he means.

Dana’s standing a little back from the three of him, her and Fox and Mom; she clears her throat. “I should go,” she says. “I’m glad you’re okay, Samantha.”

“Thank you for helping me,” Samantha says.

“Of course,” Dana says. “Any time you need me.” Samantha wants to ask if she and Emily will come for dinner again soon, like they always used to, but she’s not sure quite how to, right now.

“I’ll walk you out,” Fox says, getting up from the couch.

“You don’t have to—” Then she stops. “Oh. Teena, I came in your car.”

“I can give you a ride, then,” Fox says. “Really, I can. I owe it to you.”

She looks at him for a minute. “All right,” she says. “I really do need to leave now, or I’ll be late picking up Emily. But don’t talk about it like that.”

They leave then. Samantha still doesn’t think they’re very happy with each other.

“Will they be friends again?” she asks Mom. “In a little bit, maybe?”

“I’m sure they will,” Mom says. “Remember what I told you? They care about each other a lot.” She squeezes Samantha’s shoulders again. “And we all care about you, too. I’m so glad you’re all right. I couldn’t live with myself if…” She doesn’t finish her sentence, but Samantha knows she’s thinking about the other Samantha. And from the way they’re all talking, she thinks what happened today might be something bigger than she understands. Usually she wants to understand everything, but right now she doesn’t ask any more questions. She remembers how that paper scared her, and she decides there are some things that she doesn’t want to know.

Mom keeps watching her, all through the evening, and Fox too, when he gets home. There are some things she does want to ask him. “Are you and Diana still—” Then she stops, because she was going to say still friends, but she remembers what Mom told her. “Do you still like her?” she asks instead.

He sighs. “I’m very upset now,” he tells her, “because I don’t like what she did to you.”

He didn’t exactly answer her. Maybe he doesn’t know. “Are we going to see her again?” she asks.

“No,” he says. “You won’t have to see her again, Sam.” She’s glad about that, but she doesn’t say it in words, because she knows that he did like Diana, before at least, even if he’s not sure now. He stoops and hugs her. “You’re what’s most important to me,” he says. “Don’t you forget that.”

She hugs him too. “And Dana,” she says. “Will she come here again soon?”

“I hope so, Sam,” he says. “I think we’re still a little…there are some things we have to talk through.”

“But you want her to come here,” Samantha says. “Don’t you?”

“I do, Sam,” he says, and she knows he really means it.

But Dana doesn’t come that week, and Samantha misses her. She knows Fox does too, but after a little bit she decides that maybe it’s not up to just him. Dana’s her friend too, and she said that she would help Samantha, any time you need me. So maybe she needs to talk to Dana herself.

She has Dana’s phone number in her address book, and she calls her up one Saturday. “Hello?” Dana says.

“Hi,” Samantha says. “It’s me. Samantha.”

“Hi, Samantha,” Dana says. “Is everything okay?”

“Yes, I’m okay,” Samantha says. “I just miss you and Emily. So I wanted to invite you to come over to dinner.”

“Oh, sweetheart,” Dana says. “Do your mom and Mulder know you’re calling?”

“I don’t think so,” Samantha says. “But you’re my friends and I want to see you.”

“We’d like to see you too,” Dana says. Her voice is soft.

“Are you still mad at Fox?” Samantha asks. “Can’t we still see each other even if you are?”

“I’m not mad at him, Samantha,” Dana says. “That’s not exactly…It’s hard to explain. And it wouldn’t be right for us to put you in the middle of things, anyway.”

Samantha guesses that makes sense. “Does that mean you can come over?” she asks.

“I’ll tell you what, Samantha,” Dana says. “Let me talk to your mom or Mulder, okay? Whoever’s there. I don’t want to barge into the house without talking to one of them. But if they say it’s okay, Emily and I will come to dinner.”

“Okay,” Samantha says. “I’ll find someone.” She looks up; Fox is walking past the kitchen. “Dana wants to talk to you,” she says.

He comes in quickly and takes the phone. “Scully?” he says. “Yeah, hi. It’s good to hear from you…Oh, she did, did she?” He looks down at Samantha and raises his eyebrows. “Well, it sounds like a great idea to me. How does six sound?...Great.”

“Ask her what I should cook,” Samantha says.

“Samantha wants to know what to cook,” he says into the phone. “Oh, she’ll like that…Well, see you tonight, Scully. Bye.” He hangs up the phone and looks at Samantha. “You’re very interfering, you know that?” he says.

“I’m not,” Samantha says. “I wasn’t trying to make you be friends again, if you didn’t want to be.” Anyway, that’s silly, because she can tell he does. “I just wanted to invite them because they’re my friends.”

“I didn’t mean it like a bad thing,” he says. He’s smiling, and he hugs her. “I’m glad they’re coming too. Scully said to surprise her with dinner.”

So Samantha makes roast chicken with herbs, because it’s simple enough for Emily but tastes good for everyone. When Dana and Emily get there, she runs to hug them, and then she and Emily draw together while the dinner is finishing cooking. She looks over at Fox and Dana a lot; they’re sitting on the couch, talking. It’s not quite like it usually is, when they talk a lot and laugh together and it seems like they’ll never stop. But she can tell Fox is trying really hard to be nice, to say things that will make Dana smile, and she can tell Dana’s trying to be friendly too. That’s better than these last weeks. And after dinner, Dana says she’ll help clean up, and she and Fox start laughing together when they’re putting the dishes away. That’s much, much better.

And after that they start coming over again, Dana and Emily, at least once a week, like they used to. They work on dinner together, and she draws pictures or reads or plays with Emily. She doesn’t hear anything more about Diana. She doesn’t ask. She doesn’t want to.

Dana and Emily are there for dinner one Friday night; it starts snowing soon after they get there, and by the time they’re supposed to leave it’s a real storm. “Are you sure you’re all right to drive home in that, Dana?” Mom asks her. “The roads might be bad out here. You and Emily are welcome to stay.”

“It does look bad,” Dana says, looking out the window. “But I wouldn’t want to impose.”

“You wouldn’t be imposing,” Fox says. “We can put you up, no problem.”

“Emily can stay in my room,” Samantha says. “Like a slumber party.”

Emily’s eyes light up. “Oh, can I?” she asks. “Please, Mommy.”

Dana smiles and ruffles Emily’s hair. “Well, if you’re sure it’s not a problem,” she says, “that would be really nice. Thank you.”

They don’t have any pajamas or anything, but Samantha gives Emily one of her t-shirts; it’s big even on her, so Emily can wear it like a nightgown. Mom and Fox and Dana say goodnight to them, and then they settle into her bed together. Emily’s feet are cold.

“We can tell secrets,” Samantha whispers. “Do you know any?”

There’s a little bit of light from the window; she can see Emily screwing up her face. “At school the other day,” she says, “Ben hid playdough behind the books.”

“That’s a good one,” Samantha says. She tries to think of a secret she can tell, but when she looks at Emily again, she’s already asleep.

Samantha falls asleep too, pretty quickly, but she wakes up again after a while; the clock says it’s almost midnight. She gets up carefully, so she doesn’t wake Emily, and goes over to the window. It’s still snowing hard.

She’ll go downstairs, she thinks, and read in the living room. That way she won’t have to turn the light on when Emily’s asleep. She takes her book—it’s called The Egypt Game, and it’s a really good one—and starts down the stairs.

When she’s at the corner of the stairs, she sees a light: the lamp’s on in the living room. She can hear them talking.

“…glad to have you back,” Fox is saying.

“I didn’t think I went anywhere,” Dana says.

“You know what I mean,” Fox says. Both of their voices are soft, gentle. Samantha knows it’s bad to eavesdrop, but she doesn’t want to interrupt them either. “I missed the way things were with us.”

“Me too,” Dana says. They’re quiet for a minute, and Samantha starts to go down the steps again, but then they start talking about her. “Samantha’s doing okay?”

“Yeah,” Fox says. “I think so. She sometimes…she’s got a way of turning things over in her mind. But I think she’s all right. Probably enjoying her slumber party with Emily.”

Dana laughs. “I hope Emily’s actually sleeping.”

“Aw, it’s not a school night,” Fox says. “Anyway, it’s nice having the two of you here. Any time. That’s what I meant.”

“It’s nice being here,” Dana says. “I didn’t…it wasn’t that I wanted to not be here, you know. I just wasn’t sure…I didn’t know what you wanted. And maybe I got a little…” She doesn’t finish her sentence. “Well, I shouldn’t have stayed away.”

“I did want you here,” Fox says. “Believe that, Scully. You deserve…you deserve more from me than what I was giving you.” Samantha thinks Dana says something, but it’s too soft for her to hear. “I’ll always want you here,” Fox says, and then they’re quiet again.

Samantha decides she’ll go downstairs, finally. She guesses they didn’t hear her coming, because when she gets to the bottom of the stairs she sees them kissing. She remembers how strange she felt when Mom told her about Fox and Diana. She’s surprised now, but she doesn’t feel strange.

They stop, and they smile at each other, and then they see her. “Hey, Sam,” Fox says. “You awake?”

She nods. “I didn’t mean to bother you,” she says. “I just came down to read, because Emily’s asleep.”

“You’re not bothering us,” Dana says. “I might look in on Emily, before I go to sleep too.” She holds out her hand to Fox. “Come up with me?”

“Sure,” he says, and he takes her hand. “Good night, Sam.”

“Good night,” she says. “Good night, Dana.”

“Good night,” Dana says, and the two of them start up the stairs together. Samantha watches them go, before she opens her book.

#the x files #my fic #samantha mulder #msr #alternate universe

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scapegrace74-blog · 5 years ago

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X-Files Fanfiction Masterpost

It’s almost the second anniversary of my very first fanfic post on October 1, 2017, so here’s how I’ve frittered away an ungodly amount of time since then.

Drabbles

Driving - Mulder and Scully in the car, Rated G

Flashlight - Why doesn’t Scully like candles anymore? Rated G

Basement - A character study of a different sort. Rated G

Motel - Scully escapes an untenable situation. Angst. Rated G.

Pistol - Mulder meets his gun. Rated G.

Cigarettes - Teenage Dana Scully wants to rebel. Rated G.

Slideshow - How does Mulder do it? Rated G

Guilty Party - Where do you go when you can’t go on? Angst. Rated G.

Suits - Even Mulder has to suffer the indignities of aging. Humour. Rated G.

UFO - Mulder and Scully’s first flight. Rated G.

1013 Words - A compendium of adjectives describing Mulder. Rated G.

Faith - A glimpse into Mulder’s inner dialogue. Post-ep for Revelations. Rated PG.

Winter - Scully has dipped to the lowest point in her horizon. Angst. Rated G.

Family - Scully is Mulder’s chosen family. Rated G.

Run - Meditations on a word. Rated G.

Unnamed - Mulder’s thoughts during Pine Bluff Variant. Rated PG.

Help - Mulder wants to be a father. Rated G.

Travel - See the world, join the Bureau. Rated G.

Unnamed - Smut biscuit. Rated NC-17.

Detour - thoughts on the motel room scene. Rated G.

Walking After You - Scully’s thoughts on the ice in Antarctica. Rated G.

Unnamed - Mulder’s mind reading in The Sixth Extinction. Rated G.

Unnamed - Christmas at the Unremarkable House. Rated PG.

Mobius Strip - Mulder’s thoughts as he drives to South Carolina in My Struggle III. Rated G.

None at this time - Mulder muses on Scully’s bucket of priorities in Jersey Devil. Rated G.

The Things We Never Say - Mulder plans for the future. Angst. Rated G.

Knock Three Times - nobody does head games like Mulder and Scully. Set during Plus One. Rated R.

Inferno - my breakout hit of the summer. A post-ep for Ghouli in which Mulder comes to grips with the events of that ep. Rated R.

Cinders - a post-ep for The End. Angst ahoy, with a side of dubcon. Rated R.

Love is to Die, Love is to Dance - the six stages of falling in love with your partners. Rated R.

A Proposal - how it might have gone down, the first time they broached the subject. Rated G.

Oxytocin - Mulder has an unhealthy habit. Rated NC-17.

The Ocean Breathes Salty - Mulder being a douchebag, set around Three Words. Angst. Rated G.

Stalemate - Mulder being Mulder, set around The Blessing Way. Angst. Rated G.

Dressed to Suppress - Mulder muses on Scully’s evolving sense of style. Rated G.

Two Weeks - a third person POV angst-o-rama, set during the Revival era. Rated R.

Fic trope mash-up prompt for Survival/Wilderness and Unexpected Virgin. Post-colonization. And its sequel.

Fic trope mash-up prompt for Summer Camp AU and Erotic Dreams. Humour. I sorta love this one.

Fic trope mash-up prompt for Green Eyed Epiphany and Hair Brushing / Braiding. Angst.

Fic trope mash-up prompt for Airport AU and Bathtub. MSR.

Fic trope prompt for Royalty AU. MSR in medieval Russia. Trust me.

Linguiphilia - dirty talk in the bedroom, MSR-style. Rated NC-17.

Allotrope - romantic anal sex? Is that a category? Rated NC-17.

Prompt response - five times Mulder and Scully got caught kissing. Rated PG.

Pandora’s Box - prompt response to Scully accidentally finding an engagement ring Mulder bought her, but prior to any relationship. Rated PG.

Slightly Longer Fics

Files - Mulder thought he was in the doghouse. Rated R.

Unnamed - Anger and lust - they’re two sides of the same coin. Rated NC-17.

Hospital - How many times has Mulder been admitted, anyway? Humour. Rated G.

Last Full Measure of Devotion and its sequel We Take Increased Devotion - in answer to a prompt asking about Mulder and Scully’s first date. Rated NC-17.

Detour - the road not traveled. AU for what would have happened if Mulder had stayed and drunk wine with Scully during the ep. Written for the 2018 X-Files Pornbattle. Rated NC-17, obviously.

Even Now in Heaven - a pre-XF fic in which Mulder and Scully have a one-night stand before meeting at the FBI. Written for the 2018 X-Files Pornbattle. Rated NC-17.

Fuchsia - written for the X-Files Pornbattle prompt “dry humping / frottage, both come”. I’m such a classy lady. Rated: NC-17.

No One Falls in Love Under Fluorescent Lights - early season sex, maybe? Inspired by the Stars song of the same name. Rated R.

Jude - sometimes healing and insight come from the least likely places. Petfic! Set during the Revival separation. Angst. Rated G.

Sabine - a fic written for the XFilesFicExchange. Amor Fati post-ep AU. Mulder’s past catches up with him. Angst and MSR. Rated G.

Stories

Unnamed - Scully and Mulder hook up. Scully POV. Rated NC-17

Unnamed - Mulder and Scully hook up. Mulder POV. Rated NC-17

The Wraith - Hallowe’en story. Rated PG.

Severed - what happens when the ties between them are severed? Angst. Housed at AO3. Rated NC-17.

Vacationland - written for the 50 States of Sex collaboration. I chose Maine. Set after the failed IVF. Angst and smut. Housed at AO3. Rated R.

Cardinal Sins - a four part story (plus Epilogue) that explores the possibility of early season sex evolving into something more substantial. West - Lust. North - Envy. South - Gluttony. East - Wrath (trigger warnings for dub-con apply). Epilogue - Pilgrimage. Rated NC-17.

Perushim - a WIP series of one-shots about Fox William Mulder, and what makes him tick. Housed on AO3. Ratings vary by chapter.

Novel Length

Second Side of Light - housed at AO3. A historical AU in which Mulder and Scully meet while crossing the Oregon Trail. Rated PG for the most part, with exceptions marked in the chapter headings. A sequel is in the works.

Seventeen - housed at AO3. A romp through Fox Mulder’s past in search of what makes him tick, one sex partner at a time. It’s a lot less libidinous than it sounds, but still, Rated NC-17.

Black and White and Red - housed at AO3. A historical AU set in the 1950s (with flashbacks to World War 2) inspired by the genre of film noir. Fox Mulder is a heretical photographer. Dana Scully is a desperate woman. This is what happens when they meet.

Coming Soon! Saorsa - an Outlander AU novel. Sorrynotsorry for jumping fandoms.

#my writing #masterpost

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aion-rsa · 4 years ago

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Best Horror TV Shows on Hulu

https://ift.tt/3k8nTTO

You thought movies were the only place to get your daily dose of horror? Oh you fool! You absolute FOOL! There are plenty of bingeworthy and scary horror TV shows out there and Hulu just happens to be a great place to find them.

Hulu is home to recent hits like The Terror and Castle Rock but there are still more scares to be found for the horror enthusiast willing to dig deep. Gathered here are some of the best and scariest horror TV shows that Hulu has to offer.

Editor’s Note: This post is updated monthly. Bookmark this page and come back every month to see the additions to the best horror TV shows on Hulu.

Updated for October 2020

The Terror

Based on a 2007 book of the same name by Dan Simmons, The Terror season 1 tells a fictionalized account of Captain Sir John Franklin’s expedition to the arctic in 1845. In real life, the doomed men likely got lost and succumbed to the cold but the show asks “what if there was something more sinister than low temperatures lurking about?”

The Terror features a cast impressively full of “hey it’s that guy” guys like Jared Harris, Ciarán Hindis, and Tobias Menzes. It deftly turned itself into an anthology with the second season The Terror: Infamy that tells a ghost story within the setting of a Japanese interment camp in World War II.

American Horror Story

Ryan Murphy’s American Horror Story is revolutionary in quite a few ways. Not only did it help usher in a renewed era of anthology storytelling on television, it also was arguably the first successful network television horror show since The X-Files.

Like all anthologies, American Horror Story has its better seasons (season 1 a.k.a. Murder House, season 2 a.k.a. Asylum, season 6 a.k.a. Roanoke) and its worse (season 3 a.k.a. Coven and season 8 a.k.a. Apocalypse). Still, for nine years and counting, American Horror Story has been one of the go-to options for TV horror fans.

Castle Rock

Stephen King properties have made their way to television before. There have been miniseries for classic King texts like The Stand and ‘Salem’s Lot and even full series for works like Rose Red and Under the Dome. Still, none of those series has had the audacity to adapt multiple aspects of the Stephen King universe itself…until Castle Rock.

Castle Rock takes multiple characters, storylines, and concepts from the vast works of Stephen King and puts them all in King’s own Castle Rock, Maine. The first season featured inmates from Shawshank prison, extended family of Jack Torrance, and maybe even a touch of the shine. The show opened itself up for more storytelling possibilities in season 2, adopting an anthology format and bringing Annie Wilkes into the fold.

The Twilight Zone

The Twilight Zone is an all-time television classic for good reason. Join Rod Serling each episode for a new tale of mystery, horror and woe.

Culture

The Words of Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone Are More Relevant Than Ever

By Chris Longo

The Twilight Zone Marathon: A History of a Holiday Tradition

By Arlen Schumer

Whatever you do, however, do NOT drop your glasses.

The Strain

The most novel thing about FX’s vampire horror thriller The Strain is how it equates the ancient fear of vampirism with the more modern, global fear of pandemic. The Strain, produced by Guillermo del Toro Chuck Hogan and based on their novel series opens with a flight landing with all of its passengers mysteriously dead.

Movies

Bram Stoker’s Dracula and the Seduction of Old School Movie Magic

By David Crow

Movies

Lake Mungo: the Lingering Mystery Behind One of Australia’s Scariest Horror Films

By Rosie Fletcher

As CDC director Ephraim Goodweather (Corey Stoll) steps in to investigate, he discovers that there might be something more sinister…and ancient afoot than a simple virus. The Strain lasted for four mostly decent seasons on FX and if nothing else helped re-embrace the vampire as a monster and not some sort of noble antihero.

Stan Against Evil

To parody horror, one needs to love horror. And Stan Against Evil creator Dana Gould really, really, really loves horror. The longtime standup comedian and comedy writer brings his unique humor sensibilities and lifelong appreciation of horror to tell the story of a quaint New Hampshire town that just happens to be built on the cursed site of a massive witch burning.

Movies

Dana Gould Picks His 5 Favorite Monster Movies

By Dana Gould

Talalay’s Terrors! The Director Breaks Down Her 5 Scariest Scenes

By Kayti Burt

John C. McGinley stars as the titular Stan, a disgraced former sheriff who opts to pick up the battle against evil after a close call. He teams up with new sheriff Evie Barret (Janet Varney) to defend the town (and sometimes world) from supernatural threats.

The X-Files

The X-Files is quite simply the gold standard for horror on television. Chris Carter’s conspiracy-tinged supernatural masterpiece not only inspired every horror TV show that came after it, but just about every other TV show in general.

I Still Want to Believe: Revisiting The X-Files Pilot

By Chris Longo

The X-Files Revealed: The Paranormal Roots of the Pentagon’s UFO Program

By Alejandro Rojas

The X-Files follows FBI special agents Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) as they investigate the unusual cases that traditional law enforcement won’t touch. For 11 seasons (and a handful of movies), the show expertly balanced a massive series-long story along with what came to be called “monster of the week” self-contained tales.

Buzzfeed Unsolved: Supernatural

When it first premiered on YouTube back in 2016, Buzzfeed Unsolved became a huge hit by appealing to one of the Internet’s favorite subjects: true crime. Still Buzzfeed saw all of that success and realzied there was still another audience to serve. Thus Buzzfeed Unsolved: Supernatural was born.

Games

20 Scariest Horror Games Ever Made

By Matthew Byrd

Helstrom Review (Spoiler-Free)

By Rosie Knight

In this spinoff hosts Ryan Bergara and Shane Madej examine some of the supernatural world’s biggest mysteries. With the right balance of skepticism and belief, Buzzfeed Unsolved: Supernatural is a welcome entry into the paranormal investigation TV canon.

The Outer Limits

When The Twilight Zone premiered in 1959, it set off a brief little renaissance of anthology horror storytelling on television. The best of these contenders to the Zone‘s throne was probably the sci-fi centric The Outer Limits.

Movies

How Arachnophobia Became the Perfect Creepy Crawly Horror Comedy

By Jack Beresford

Movies

Disney+ Halloween Movies for Kids: The Best Family Films to Watch This Spooky Season

By Alana Joli Abbott

Outer Limits aired from 1963 to 1965 on ABC. In that span it generated 49 spooky episodes, several of which made an impact on pop culture. Alan Moore infamously borrowed the plot of the episode “The Architects of Fear” for the ending of Watchmen. The Outer Limits received a Sci-Fi Channel revival in the ’90s and is currently poised for another bite at the apple.

Freakish

Freakish stars several high profile (at the time at least) social media stars as students at Kent High School. The kids are gathered together at school on Saturday for detention, Breakfast Club-style, when a nearby chemical plant explodes, turning the local population into mutated zombies. The group must band together to survive.

Movies

Best Horror Movies on Netflix: Scariest Films to Stream

By David Crow and 2 others

Movies

Best Horror Movies on Amazon Prime Right Now

By Alec Bojalad and 3 others

Debuting in 2016, Freakish ran for two seasons on Hulu. The show embraces its teenage soapiness and isn’t necessarily the most heavyweight horror option. But it’s a quick, fun watch for any zombie horror fan nonetheless.

The Exorcist

The Exorcist is one of the greatest horror films ever made. The Fox series that bears its name and premise isn’t quite as good (few things could ever be) but it’s still an excellent horror story in its own right.

Movies

A24 Horror Movies Ranked From Worst to Best

By David Crow and 3 others

How Helstrom Became One of Marvel Television’s Last Shows Standing

By Alec Bojalad

The Exorcist is a two-season long anthology series that follows two different cases of demonic possession. In the first installment, two Catholic priests assist a woman with a possession in her home. In the second, two new priests help a young girl battle evil.

Ghost Adventures

Since the turn of the millennium, television has not been lacking for shows involving paranormal investigations. But even within the crowded spooky market, Travel Channel’s Ghost Adventures stands out.

Ghost Adventures: Horror at Joe Exotic Zoo Two-Hour Special Premieres Oct. 29

By Tony Sokol

Culture

How Ghost Adventures: Quarantine Came Together

By Aaron Sagers

First premiering in 2008, Ghost Adventures follows paranormal researchers Zak Bagans, Nick Groff, Aaron Goodwin, Billy Tolley, and Jay Wasley as they travel the world looking for ghoulish occurrences to investigate. Over its 200-some episodes (not including specials), Ghost Adventures has proven itself to be the gold standard for people who just want to watch some dudes stumble around old properties in night vision.

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Monsterland

Since Netflix acquired the rights to Black Mirror back in 2015, the streaming world has been a veritable arms race of sci-fi and horror anthology series. Hulu has already tried its hand at horror anthology with the Blumhouse-produced Into the Dark, and Monsterland represents the latest effort.

Movies

The WNUF Halloween Special: The Making of the Most Fun Found Footage Horror Movie Ever

By Gavin Jasper

Games

How Scorn Turned the Art of H.R. Giger into a Nightmarish Horror Game World

By John Saavedra

Monsterland is based on the short story collection North American Lake Monsters: Stories by Nathan Ballingrud. It consists of eight spooky, unconnected tales and features the acting talents of Kaitlyn Dever, Bill Camp, Kelly Marie Tran, and more. The twist here is that each episode focuses on an urban legend from a different city within the United States. And given how weird this country is, the series won’t be running out of of stories anytime soon.

The post Best Horror TV Shows on Hulu appeared first on Den of Geek.

from Den of Geek https://ift.tt/3lSIDzp

#aion-rsa #Den of Geek

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softnow · 6 years ago

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redux iii

msr | s6 | general | words: 860

fictober day 9!

anon said: "set around s6/diana era, scully starts to have nosebleeds again and her and mulder worry that her cancer is back." that's what this is. sorry. tagging @fictober and @today-in-fic.

— — —

He sees the tissue in the trashcan, not quite buried, and his heart stops. Things click into place. How pale she's been. How she ran from the office mid-sentence last week, claimed a stomach bug, came back with a rubbed-raw nose.

"When were you going to tell me?" He sounds like an angry husband, like he's been cheated on. "Were you going to tell me?"

"It might not be anything," she says, small. So small. He'd forgotten how small she could be. Small like robes and hospital gowns and the notches in her spine.

"Scully—"

"You've been busy. The files, putting it all back together—"

"Scully—"

"I have an appointment next week." She folds her hands in her lap and doesn't quite look at him. He remembers her sitting there with a bruise on her cheek, Philadelphia fresh on her skin. "It might not be anything."

—

On the day of her appointment, she takes off at lunch and leaves him a neat stack of medical reports. She's been busy, autopsies and lab days and research. He's been useless, thinking of nothing and everything. Remembering. Trying to remember when he allowed himself to forget, when he thought the danger was over.

Stupid.

"I'll see you tomorrow," she says, slipping into her coat, and there's something in her voice that makes him look up. She's chewing her bottom lip, her lipstick all but gone, and her hands shake just a little as she reaches for the door.

Scared.

She's scared.

"Look over those reports," she says. "Call me if you need me."

And then she's gone, and he knows how it feels to be a man on death row. He didn't have to endure this the last time. She spared him the agony between it could be and it is. He should thank her for that. He should give her flowers he didn't steal.

—

It takes him an impressive twenty minutes of trying to read her report, touching her neat, delicate script with his thumb, to realize he's an idiot. Impressive, because it usually takes him longer.

He let her leave. Alone. Her hands trembled and he let her walk away. Okay, Scully, see you tomorrow. Let me know if you're dying or not. Have a nice day.

He shuts down his computer and stuffs the files into his briefcase, tries to calculate if he has time to hit a florist—a good one, not the hospital gift shop—and still catch her before she's done. How long do maybe-cancer appointments last? What flower says I'm sorry I didn't actually save you last time?

Suit jacket—on. Coat—on. Lights—off.

He's locking the door when he hears the heels and stops breathing. If she's back, it can't be that bad. If she's back, she's not dying.

"Scu—" He whips his head up and her name dies on his lips. "Diana."

"Fox."

"What are you doing here?"

Diana casts around like there might be someone lurking in the shadows, watching. There's a manila envelope in her hands.

"Can we speak in your office?"

"What is it?"

She holds out the envelope. It's thick, sealed with red tape.

"I have information," she says. "Photos. From El Rico."

Mulder shifts his weight, jerks his sleeve up to check his watch. "Can it wait?"

Diana flinches as though she's been slapped. "Wait? Fox, if these men knew I had this, if they knew I was here— Can we please just go inside? I'll explain everything."

She steps closer and puts her hand on his arm. Her eyes are wide, imploring. He sees her kneeling before him on her living room floor, feels the familiar texture of her mouth on his. This woman, who he loved so fiercely once. Who he maybe could love again. Who cares about his quest, who comes bearing information, who puts herself at risk for him.

At risk.

For him.

He covers her hand with his and shakes his head.

"I'm sorry, Diana. There's somewhere I need to be."

"Fox—"

"I'm sorry." He pushes past her and jabs at the elevator button.

"Fox!"

The doors open and close. The last thing he sees is Diana's face, confused and angry.

—

He gets stuck in traffic and underestimates the amount of time it takes to buy flowers. By the time he has a bouquet of irises on the passenger's seat, he knows his chances of meeting her at the hospital are slim.

He slams the car into drive and heads north to Georgetown.

—

Her apartment is still, quiet. He lets himself in and waits, feeling suddenly like an intruder. What if she didn't want him here? What if she left him those files specifically to keep him occupied, to keep him out of her way? What if she wants to deal with this—good or bad—alone?

He considers just leaving the flowers and a note on the table, but before he can find so much as a post-it, he hears her key in the lock.

The door swings open and he knows. One look, and he knows.

The irises hit the floor.

This time, he's there to catch her when she crumbles.

#mulder #scully #msr #msr fanfic #txf #fictober #i'm sorry #one for taking ten years to answer this prompt #two for it being so heartwrenching #i had vague notions to expand this into a s6 au #but like #who has the time for that #and that last line felt like the perfect place to end #sorry for bombarding you with fic today #i'm getting caught up #myfic #diana

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bountyofbeads · 5 years ago

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Jeffrey Epstein and When to Take Conspiracies Seriously https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/13/opinion/jeffrey-epstein-suicide.html

When you have the #POTUS pushing conspiracy theories about the former president we are in DANGEROUS territory. The #ClintonBodyCount is being pushed by Russia and bots. We can't jump to conclusions until we have the facts. BEWARE

Jeffrey Epstein and When to Take Conspiracies Seriously

Sometimes conspiracy theories point toward something worth investigating. A few point toward the truth.

By Ross Douthat | Published August 13, 2019 | New York Times | Posted August 13, 2019 |

The challenge in thinking about a case like the suspicious suicide of Jeffrey Epstein, the supposed “billionaire” who spent his life acquiring sex slaves and serving as a procurer to the ruling class, can be summed up in two sentences. Most conspiracy theories are false. But often some of the things they’re trying to explain are real.

Conspiracy theories are usually false because the people who come up with them are outsiders to power, trying to impose narrative order on a world they don’t fully understand — which leads them to imagine implausible scenarios and impossible plots, to settle on ideologically convenient villains and assume the absolute worst about their motives, and to imagine an omnicompetence among the corrupt and conniving that doesn’t actually exist.

Or they are false because the people who come up with them are insiders trying to deflect blame for their own failings, by blaming a malign enemy within or an evil-genius rival for problems that their own blunders helped create.

Or they are false because the people pushing them are cynical manipulators and attention-seekers trying to build a following who don’t care a whit about the truth.

For all these reasons serious truth-seekers are predisposed to disbelieve conspiracy theories on principle, and journalists especially are predisposed to quote Richard Hofstadter on the “paranoid style” whenever they encounter one — an instinct only sharpened by the rise of Donald Trump, the cynical conspiracist par excellence.

But this dismissiveness can itself become an intellectual mistake, a way to sneer at speculation while ignoring an underlying reality that deserves attention or investigation. Sometimes that reality is a conspiracy in full, a secret effort to pursue a shared objective or conceal something important from the public. Sometimes it’s a kind of unconscious connivance, in which institutions and actors behave in seemingly concerted ways because of shared assumptions and self-interest. But in either case, an admirable desire to reject bad or wicked theories can lead to a blindness about something important that these theories are trying to explain.

Here are some diverse examples. Start with U.F.O. theories, a reliable hotbed of the first kind of conspiracizing — implausible popular stories about hidden elite machinations.

It is simple wisdom to assume that any conspiratorial Fox Mulder-level master narrative about little gray men or lizard people is rubbish. Yet at the same time it is a simple fact that the U.F.O. era began, in Roswell, N.M., with a government lie intended to conceal secret military experiments; it is also a simple fact, lately reported in this very newspaper, that the military has been conducting secret studies of unidentified-flying-object incidents that continue to defy obvious explanations.

So the correct attitude toward U.F.O.s cannot be a simple Hofstadterian dismissiveness about the paranoia of the cranks. Instead, you have to be able to reject outlandish theories and acknowledge a pattern of government lies and secrecy around a weird, persistent, unexplained feature of human experience — which we know about in part because the U.F.O. conspiracy theorists keep banging on about their subject. The wild theories are false; even so, the secrets and mysteries are real.

Another example: The current elite anxiety about Russia’s hand in the West’s populist disturbances, which reached a particularly hysterical pitch with the pre-Mueller report collusion coverage, is a classic example of how conspiracy theories find a purchase in the supposedly sensible center — in this case, because their narrative conveniently explains a cascade of elite failures by blaming populism on Russian hackers, moneymen and bots.

And yet: Every conservative who rolls her or his eyes at the “Russia hoax” is in danger of dismissing the reality that there is a Russian plot against the West — an organized effort to use hacks, bots and rubles to sow discord in the United States and Western Europe. This effort is far weaker and less consequential than the paranoid center believes, it doesn’t involve fanciful “Trump has been a Russian asset since the ’80s” machinations … but it also isn’t something that Rachel Maddow just made up. The hysteria is overdrawn and paranoid; even so, the Russian conspiracy is real.

A third example: Marianne Williamson’s long-shot candidacy for the Democratic nomination has elevated the holistic-crunchy critique of modern medicine, which often shades into a conspiratorial view that a dark corporate alliance is actively conspiring against American health, that the medical establishment is consciously lying to patients about what might make them well or sick. Because this narrative has given anti-vaccine fervor a huge boost, there’s understandable desire among anti-conspiracists to hold the line against anything that seems like a crankish or quackish criticism of the medical consensus.

But if you aren’t somewhat paranoid about how often corporations cover up the dangers of their products, and somewhat paranoid about how drug companies in particular influence the medical consensus and encourage overprescription — well, then I have an opioid crisis you might be interested in reading about. You don’t need the centralized conspiracy to get a big medical wrong turn; all it takes is the right convergence of financial incentives with institutional groupthink. Which makes it important to keep an open mind about medical issues that are genuinely unsettled, even if the people raising questions seem prone to conspiracy-think. The medical consensus is generally a better guide than crankishness; even so, the tendency of cranks to predict medical scandals before they’re recognized is real.

Finally, a fourth example, circling back to Epstein: the conspiracy theories about networks of powerful pedophiles, which have proliferated with the internet and peaked, for now, with the QAnon fantasy among Trump supporters.

I say fantasy because the details of the QAnon narrative are plainly false: Donald Trump is not personally supervising an operation against “deep state” child sex traffickers any more than my 3-year-old is captaining a pirate ship.

But the premise of the QAnon fantasia, that certain elite networks of influence, complicity and blackmail have enabled sexual predators to exploit victims on an extraordinary scale — well, that isn’t a conspiracy theory, is it? That seems to just be true.

And not only true of Epstein and his pals. As I’ve written before, when I was starting my career as a journalist I sometimes brushed up against people peddling a story about a network of predators in the Catholic hierarchy — not just pedophile priests, but a self-protecting cabal above them — that seemed like a classic case of the paranoid style, a wild overstatement of the scandal’s scope. I dismissed them then as conspiracy theorists, and indeed they had many of conspiracism’s vices — above all, a desire to believe that the scandal they were describing could be laid entirely at the door of their theological enemies, liberal or traditional.

But on many important points and important names, they were simply right.

Likewise with the secular world’s predators. Imagine being told the scope of Harvey Weinstein’s alleged operation before it all came crashing down — not just the ex-Mossad black ops element but the possibility that his entire production company also acted as a procurement-and-protection operation for one of its founders. A conspiracy theory, surely! Imagine being told all we know about the late, unlamented Epstein — that he wasn’t just a louche billionaire (wasn’t, indeed, a proper billionaire at all) but a man mysteriously made and mysteriously protected who ran a pedophile island with a temple to an unknown god and plotted his own “Boys From Brazil” endgame in plain sight of his Harvard-D.C.-House of Windsor pals. Too wild to be believed!

And yet.

Where networks of predation and blackmail are concerned, then, the distinction I’m drawing between conspiracy theories and underlying realities weakens just a bit. No, you still don’t want to listen to QAnon, or to our disgraceful president when he retweets rants about the #ClintonBodyCount. But just as Cardinal Theodore McCarrick’s network of clerical allies and enablers hasn’t been rolled up, and the fall of Bryan Singer probably didn’t get us near the rancid depths of Hollywood’s youth-exploitation racket, we clearly haven’t gotten to the bottom of what was going on with Epstein.

So to worry too much about online paranoia outracing reality is to miss the most important journalistic task, which is the further unraveling of scandals that would have seemed, until now, too implausible to be believed.

Yes, by all means, resist the tendency toward unfounded speculation and cynical partisan manipulation. But also recognize that in the case of Jeffrey Epstein and his circle, the conspiracy was real.

Epstein Suicide Conspiracies Show How Our Information System Is Poisoned

With each news cycle, the false-information system grows more efficient.

By Charlie Warzel | Published August 11, 2019 | New York Times | Posted August 13, 2019 "|

Even on an internet bursting at the seams with conspiracy theories and hyperpartisanship, Saturday marked a new chapter in our post-truth, choose-your-own-reality crisis story.

It began Saturday morning, when news broke that the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein had apparently hanged himself in a Manhattan jail. Mr. Epstein’s death, coming just one day after court documents from one of his accusers were unsealed, prompted immediate suspicion from journalists, politicians and the usual online fringes.

Within minutes, Trump appointees, Fox Business hosts and Twitter pundits revived a decades-old conspiracy theory, linking the Clinton family to supposedly suspicious deaths. #ClintonBodyCount and #ClintonCrimeFamily trended on Twitter. Around the same time, an opposite hashtag — #TrumpBodyCount — emerged, focused on President Trump’s decades-old ties to Mr. Epstein. Each hashtag was accompanied by GIFs and memes picturing Mr. Epstein with the Clintons or with Mr. Trump to serve as a viral accusation of foul play.

The dueling hashtags and their attendant toxicity are a grim testament to our deeply poisoned information ecosystem — one that’s built for speed and designed to reward the most incendiary impulses of its worst actors. It has ushered in a parallel reality unrooted in fact and helped to push conspiratorial thinking into the cultural mainstream. And with each news cycle, the system grows more efficient, entrenching its opposing camps. The poison spreads.

Mr. Epstein’s apparent suicide is, in many ways, the post-truth nightmare scenario. The sordid story contains almost all of the hallmarks of stereotypical conspiratorial fodder: child sex-trafficking, powerful global political leaders, shadowy private jet flights, billionaires whose wealth cannot be explained. As a tale of corruption, it is so deeply intertwined with our current cultural and political rot that it feels, at times, almost too on the nose. The Epstein saga provides ammunition for everyone, leading one researcher to refer to Saturday’s news as the “Disinformation World Cup.”

At the heart of the online fiasco is Twitter, which has come to largely program the political conversation and much of the press. Twitter is magnetic during huge breaking stories; news junkies flock to it for up-to-the-second information. But early on, there’s often a vast discrepancy between the attention that is directed at the platform and the available information about the developing story. That gap is filled by speculation and, via its worst users, rumormongering and conspiracy theories.

On Saturday, Twitter’s trending algorithms hoovered up the worst of this detritus, curating, ranking and then placing it in the trending module on the right side of its website. Despite being a highly arbitrary and mostly “worthless metric,” trending topics on Twitter are often interpreted as a vague signal of the importance of a given subject.

There’s a decent chance that President Trump was using Twitter’s trending module when he retweeted a conspiratorial tweet tying the Clintons to Epstein’s death. At the time of Mr. Trump’s retweet, “Clintons” was the third trending topic in the United States. The specific tweet amplified by the president to his more than 60 million followers was prominently featured in the “Clintons” trending topic. And as Ashley Feinberg at Slate pointed out in June, the president appears to have a history of using trending to find and interact with tweets.

On Saturday afternoon, a computational propaganda researcher, Renée DiResta, noted that the media’s close relationship with Twitter creates an incentive for propagandists and partisans to artificially inflate given hashtags. Almost as soon as #ClintonBodyCount began trending on Saturday, journalists took note and began lamenting the spread of this conspiracy theory — effectively turning it into a news story, and further amplifying the trend. “Any wayward tweet … can be elevated to an opinion worth paying attention to,” Ms. DiResta wrote. “If you make it trend, you make it true.”

That our public conversation has been uploaded onto tech platforms governed by opaque algorithms adds even more fodder for the conspiratorial-minded. Anti-Trump Twitter pundits with hundreds of thousands of followers blamed “Russian bots” for the Clinton trending topic. On the far right, pro-Trump sites like the Gateway Pundit (with a long track record of amplifying conspiracy theories) suggested that Twitter was suppressing and censoring the Clinton hashtags.

Where does this leave us? Nowhere good.

It’s increasingly apparent that our information delivery systems were not built for our current moment — especially with corruption and conspiracy at the heart of our biggest national news stories (Epstein, the Mueller report, mass shootings), and the platforms themselves functioning as petri dishes for outlandish, even dangerous conspiracy theories to flourish. The collision of these two forces is so troubling that an F.B.I. field office recently identified fringe conspiracy theories as a domestic terrorist threat. In this ecosystem, the media is frequently outmatched and, despite its best intentions, often acts as an amplifier for baseless claims, even when trying its best to knock them down.

Saturday’s online toxicity may have felt novel, but it’s part of a familiar cycle: What cannot be easily explained is answered by convenient untruths. The worst voices are rewarded for growing louder and gain outsize influence directing narratives. With each cycle, the outrage and contempt for the other build. Each extreme becomes certain its enemy has manipulated public perception; each side is the victim, but each is also, inexplicably, winning. The poison spreads.

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pjstafford · 4 years ago

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Can The United States Heal?

I have been trying to wrap my brain around the facts that I have two competing thoughts in my brain at the same.

The first is “Our country needs to unite and heal.” We have a pandemic we have yet to fight as an United front. Also, I’m tired of the last four years of divisive news and tweets. Joe Biden is in the White House and Trump has less of a public forum. A feeling of simple normal has returned despite the crazy upside down world of pandemic isolation and economic collapse. I am desperate for the “ grown ups” to be back in charge and for us all to move on from the national trauma we have experienced. We need to simply heal. However, I know that the work of “healing” is not easy or swift. We think we’ve recovered from the broken bone as a teenager but forty years later when it rains you notice a pain in that bone. You think you’ve recovered from the bad first marriage you escape and twenty years later you find yourself yelling at your spouse because he /she did something innocently that triggered your emotional response. You’ve gone through the stages of grief and a picture found by accident in a book can make you feel the hurt as new.

The second is “we cannot heal while there are dangerous domestic factions trying to tear about the very foundations of our democracy and our society.” Forces have to be held accountable. I have no desire to punish the average, typical Trump voter. That would be undemocratic, but the fact that civil war didn’t break out eleven days ago doesn’t mean the problems disappear. Former President Trump is having trouble holding onto his attorneys because instead of arguing the constitutional merits of impeaching a former President, or arguing on the merits of the fact, he wants his defense to be that the election was rigged and stolen. There is a Congress woman that is on record as wanting Pelosi dead and the governor for a state is are she shouldn’t be removed from office for believing something different. She also is on record as believing the Parkland shootings didn’t happen. No one died. No one lost family members. This is similar to saying COVID is like the flu. People aren’t dying of COVID. They are dying of other things. This denial of facts is the systemic problem of why our country can’t heal right now. Would we expect survivors of the Holocaust to unite with those who deny the Holocaust existence? More relevant, how can we ask Black Lives Matter protestors to unite with those carrying the confederate flag and putting drawn swastikas on the walls of our institutions of governent?

So herein lies the issue at its most fundamental. Reasonable people can argue over the root cause of a problem, the importance of the problem and the solutions of the problem. Undeniable, verifiable facts need to be just that. Your opinion about those facts can be different. The alternative facts, parallel data streams dichotomy of the last few years should be stated clearly as lies and those who promote lies as facts and seek to undermine our society to promote violence are not simply going away and they are embracing “unity” only as unity is defined as “ no accountability for me”.

Part of the problem I’m having that I haven’t heard many people talk about is that I’m a sixties style liberal with a belief in protests and I stand in opposition to censureship. Are we censuring folks if we tell them they can’t tell lies or are so we so concerned with political correctness that we cannot hear the voices of those on the extreme right.? The time of the most active domestic terrorism in this country is 1970s and I didn’t always agree that the groups the FBI was targeting were in fact terrorist groups (such as the Black Panthers). Even when I did recognize that members of some groups were terrorists who needed to suffer consequences, I recognized that their actions were wrong but that their stated goals were on what I considered the right side of history. Hell, my thesis was written on how SDS and SNCC were very different groups at their origins who became more similar as the Black Panthers and Weathermen and that this change in tone, style, agenda, and strategies was due to similar experiences at hands of the police and the government. In other words in the sixties those groups who protested peacefully for a better world were radicalized by their own government and became the domestic terrorists of the seventies. So when I hear the person during the insurrection tell a reporter “ I wasn’t like this. You made me this way”. I think I didn’t, but I believe the rhetoric of our President might have.

We all believe in 1776 and the Boston Tea Party, right? We can all embrace “When in the course of human events it becomes necessary”. What we have a hard time with is wrapping our brains around the fact that people who call themselves patriots tried to prevent the peaceful transfer of power of a lawfully elected President. How is that patriotism? This brings us back to the establishment of objective facts, doesn’t it? Because i think most of us know Trump knows he lost the election. But people in this country believe his lies. And if you believe the election was stolen, isn’t it patriotic to wage a revolution?

And again I go back to the seventies. Our country denied the bombing of Cambodia. Soldiers were coming back and saying we were ordered to bomb Cambodia. Many Americans called those soldiers traitors. The legitimacy of objective facts were in dispute until journalists found a paper trail. President Nixon was re- elected by a landslide but had misused and abused his power as President to gain an unfair advantage and had to resign. The country knew that our President and country lied to the American people. Once those objective facts were clear than both parties recognized those facts. We healed, to the degree we did, based on acknowledgement of objective facts.

In this era, the internet is such a factor. Conspiracy theories that seem to be lifted directly from the scripts of my favorite television show, The X-Files, are everywhere, but Fox Mulder was always interested in the truth. A significant portion of the country seems unable to use common sense analysis of materials they read to determine what is believable and what is not. We had a President who made a political career on the false claims that Obama was not born in this country. He fueled the worse of our racism. He lied from day one in office and he continues to lie. Systemic denial of the simple truths became so common that the big lie was easy to believe. Donald Trump lost the election. Fact. He had every opportunity to contest and prove otherwise in court. He could not. But, how do we heal if even Congressional representatives believe in repeating the big lie? What is different between now and the seventies is some people in power no longer believe in the very basis of objective facts. They have embraced the concept of a lie as a state of art to be practice and they consider the American people as puppets to be manipulated. We cannot be discussing how to unify with these dangerous people.

So we need a full trial in the Senate. I say let Trump come to the Senate and make the case that insurrection was legitimate because the election was stolen. ( make sure The Capitol is fortified and safe). Let’s hear the case of how Trump lost the election, how he knew he lost the election, how he encouraged insurrection in support of the lie. Let every Republican choose whether they can see the objective fact or whether they must support the lie. Then, of course, we must address the underlying racism which has been the source of fuel for, as Trump himself called it, ‘ The movement”. Does the trial make it worse before it gets better! Probably. Healing isn’t easy though. Sometimes instead a bandage you need stitches. Sometimes you need amputation. Trump should never be allowed to run for President again.

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greekowl87 · 7 years ago

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11 for the writing prompts

“You’re a monster.”

Took forever to answer and think about. Hope it is okay. I live for iwtb era angst. Tagging @today-in-fic .

I did not remember when it happened. It had been so long. I thought we were getting better. I honestly allowed myself to believe that. We were better. After our trip to St. Martin, there was a little light come back into our lives.

I told him I was going to be late from the hospital that night. I left him a voicemail. I texted him twice, even though I knew he doesn’t use his phone like that. I debated emailing him as well, just to cover my basis, short using carrier pigeons or a messenger. Who am I kidding? He would probably shoot the messenger on sight in lieu of the old age adage of “Trust no one.”

Shit. I barely wondered if he trusted me anymore.

I’ve been down this road before. You remember me telling you about Diana Fowley?

I know it’s been years ago but the hurt is still there. I never want to feel like that again. It was beginning to feel like that again before the FBI came knocking on our door, asking for his help in exchange for his freedom.

His freedom.

It’s been a month and what has that gotten me? Nothing. I feel like he keeps himself locked back up in that corner office even more now. Hell, the beard is coming back. I’m sick of the fucking beard.

I thought things would be different. We could build an actual life together. Both of our names on the house and on the car. I know I haven’t talked about marriage, but maybe he would ask the question again and I would say yes. I will say yes. I’m tired of being life partners. I want to get married. File a joint tax return. Get a golden lab and he can build that white picket fence. Actually being normal and happy.

But no. I haven’t felt this alone in a long time.

… .

Scully paused before hanging up the phone. “I don’t know, mom. I can ask.” She took a deep breath. “Maybe your right. Dragging him out to a family dinner might help. I’ll ask him tonight. Yeah. I love you too. I’ll see you Sunday.”

She hung up her cell and stared at the closed gate marking off their little homestead from the rest of the world. She sat in the car as the engine idled, feel the heat from the defrost make her feel overheated in her coat and gloves, and the nervousness and unease cling to her like a sheen of sweat. Should she come home? What would happen if she just backed the car out of the driveway and drove away?

Banishing such thoughts, Scully unbuckled her seat belt and stepped out of the new Ford SUV as her heeled boots splashed in the mud and gravel. She pushed open the gate and drove through before securing it again. She hesitated before climbing back into the car.

It would be so easy just to drive away. He would never know but her heart ached with the pain and anguish she knew it could cause. But what about her? Hadn’t she sacrificed enough? Wasn’t being on the run with him for six years and giving up their son in favor of his safety enough? And what about the cancer and the abduction? Didn’t she suffer too?

She shook her head and climbed back into the car, banishing the selfish thoughts that still lingered in the back of her mind, festering and waiting for the right moment to explode. Driving up towards the house, she noticed how dark it was, save from the one light that came from his office. Gritting her teeth, she prepared herself mentally for the likely chance of an oncoming argument. But she would be the tactile one, casually bring up the possibility of Sunday dinner with her mother, try to make small talk and pretend everything was okay.

But it wasn’t, was it, Dana?

She clutched her briefcase and quietly walked up the creaking wood steps and unlocked the front door.

The first thing she noticed was the coldness of the house and the light from the under the office door. She casually turned on the lamp and dropped her briefcase mechanically on the couch. She hesitated before knocking on the door lightly and opening it without hesitating.

“You’re late.”

He did not turn around to greet her but kept his back to Scully, staying hunched over the computer. She could hear his fingers typing quickly. She was assaulted by the heat of the office and noticed the space heater plugged into the wall, churning out the hot air.

“I called you. I texted you twice,” she said, trying to keep her voice even. “Short of sending a courier pigeon, I did tell you.”

He didn’t face her and she cleared her throat. “Did you look for work like we discussed this morning?”

“No.”

“What did you do then?”

He held up a finger but still did not turn around. “I was in some chat rooms. Maybe we can head up to Detroit. There was some talk about some crazy lights in the motor city.”

“Mulder, we talked about this. Did you even leave the office today? Look at the newspaper classifieds?” she asked, doing her best to keep her voice even.

“I’ll do it tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow,” she mumbled sarcastically under her breath. Scully licked her lips and continued. “You said that yesterday, and the day before that. And the week before that. Oh and a month ago too. You keep saying you’ll do it but when I come home, you’re here, squirreled away in your little…” She waved her hand about the office. “Fox den. You have your freedom back now, you have your identity back. Why don’t you want to live?”

He snorted caustically. “Like never coming home, working and spending all my time at a hospital, and never talking to my partner?”

“Where did that come from?”

He spun around and Scully was taken aback by the Mulder she saw. She had not seen this version of him in years: the loner who kept her at arm’s length and did not trust her. “I don’t know. How come you never call anymore? You are always late.”

“I called you tonight! How is this about me?” she sputtered in disbelief. “Mulder, what is going on? I thought you’d be happy to have your freedom back?”

“And do what,” he spat acidly. “They ruined my work, my career, and my life. What am I supposed to do? What do I have left? Go work down at the local McDonald’s flipping burgers while you go on being a doctor, making a difference, and I’m just some sad charity case?”

“Mulder, you’re being irrational,” she spoke slowly, her anger barely in check. “Things are different.”

“How? I’m still some fuck up and play second fiddle to you. It’s just now I can do it as Fox Mulder in the public eye.”

“You’re a monster, you know that?” Her voice was tight and she swallowed the bile that came from her brewing fury. “A whiny, sarcastic, crying asshole of a monster who only cares about himself. It is always about you. It has always been about you. I thought things were getting better for us now you had your freedom, but no. All you can think about is yourself. I want to have a life with you, Mulder. I was going to ask if you wanted to have dinner with my mother this Sunday. Do normal things like normal people because you know what, Mulder? We’re normal now. We don’t have our badges and guns and chasing monsters in the dark. We have a house. We have a mortgage. We have a car loan. It’s not just my name on those things, remember? We celebrated when we could both of our names on there. Our names. Our life. We have a life together or have you forgotten that?”

Unknown tears came to her eyes as she wiped them uselessly, her voice never losing its harsh tone. “I thought you wanted that too. We talked about it at one time, right before you were abducted. We talked about it when we were on the run, where I gave up everything for you and never questioned you. Or did you forget all that as well? We talked about having a normal life and getting married.”

“You said you didn’t want to get married.” His voice was small but he icy gaze remained.

“If you’d asked me this morning, I would have said yes. Yes, I would have married you. Do you know why? Because I love you. But you seem to have changed your mind and where your priorities lay.” She gestured to his computer like she was trying to exercise a demon from her life. “I guess I don’t have a new place in your life now that you have your identity back.” She sighed bitterly. “I thought we had worked through this with that last case. I thought we were past all this.”

He was silent, watching her distantly and she stared at him, willing him wordless to say something. Anything. But Mulder just sat there, watching her, remaining quiet. She shook her head.

“I will not be surprised if you don’t come to bed tonight.”

… .

The bed was cold as I shuffled into it. Even wearing the flannel pajama pants and old Georgetown sweatshirt, I was freezing. I tried to switch to the heating unit but to no avail. Now it made sense why Mulder had the space heater in his office. Did he not care to even place a service call to a repairman? I chose to throw extra blankets on but I was still cold.

Maybe we were done? After tonight, we were done. I was sure of it.I had called him a monster and I overstepped the line. I put the final nails in the coffin of our relationship. I closed my eyes as the tears came again, hot and burning. Good. I deserved the pain. The only I wanted to save, I couldn’t. I couldn’t save him.

Who was I crying for? Our destroyed relationship? The loss of our hopes and dreams (or had they been just mine?) Or because as many lifelines I had thrown out, all the miles I had swimmed for him, maybe I just couldn’t save him. Maybe it was my fault.

The cold was welcoming and I deserved it. I deserved it because I failed. My mind was made up. I would go to my mother’s in the morning, spend some time there. He’d be happier without me and he could do whatever he wanted. I was just holding him back. I always held him back. I felt the same insecurities I felt with Fowley. He was meant to be someone else. He was meant for a different life. He just wasn’t meant for me.

I can hear the shower from downstairs. The water rushing through the old pipes could be heard throughout the house. I did my best to ignore it. I heard the stairs shift with weight on them. What was he doing? Then, I heard the door open quietly and I closed my eyes, trying to pretend to be asleep.

I can hear him shuffling around our room. I hear a space heater turning on. Drawers were opened and closed. Then I feel the covers pull back and the weight of the mattress shift as he slides into bed next me.

… .

I can tell you are not asleep. I know your breathing pattern. After fifteen years, Scully you can’t fool me. I had never seen you so…emotional though in the fifteen years I have known you. In the fifteen years I have and still am very much in love with you. Even though I am a monster. A selfish ass of a monster. You are right on that one. But I don’t want to hurt you. I don’t want you to hurt because of me. You’ve suffered enough because of me.

The room is freezing by the time I come in. Why would she subject yourself to this? By the time I slip beneath the covers behind you, you’re already shielding yourself from me. I don’t blame you. I can never blame you. But please don’t run from me. Give me one more chance.

… .

She jumps at his warm hands snaking under her shirt and around her pulling her hips against his. He tangled their legs together and he kissed the back of her neck reverently before trailing a smattering of small kisses to behind her ear. “I’m sorry, Scully. I’m so sorry.”

She lets a sob go that she had disguised as holding her breath. Mulder closed his eyes, securing himself around her as if swallowing her so she could not run away. She hugged him closer too in a weak attempt to push away the emotions threatening to drown her. “You’re right,” she murmured, “I failed you. I failed you.”

“What are you talking about?”

The familiar warmth and weight of him around her brought Scully no comfort. “You could’ve have been so much more without me,” she whispered. “I should have never…all those years ago. You could have been so much more without me. You would be so much happier. I should have never come to you that night.”

“What night?” Then he remembered. Right after New Year’s back in 2000. When everything had changed. “Aw, Scully, stop talking like that.”

“No. Because it’s true. You’re not the monster. I am. I was a fool to think the things I did.” She quieted, wiping the tears away. “I’ll go in the morning, okay? I’ll stay with my mom and you can figure out your life.”

His heart raced with alarm and he panicked. Is this what she truly thought? That this was her fault? Did he push that on her? “Scully. Don’t. You’re talking nonsense. Stop talking like that.”

“What, the truth?” Scully spat bitterly over her tears. She was trying to free herself from him. “Let me go, Mulder.”

“No. Not until you start talking sense.”

Using his size to his advantage, Mulder rolled her beneath him and used his weight to pin her down. “Mulder, let me go!”

In the dim light from the windows and a lamp they left on out in the hallway, he saw the tears that had streamed down her cheeks. He could imagine how red her eyes were from crying. “Why? Why are you running away?”

“I can’t. I failed. I can’t do this anymore.”

“You didn’t fail.”

“I can’t save you. I can’t save us. You made it quite clear tonight that this is all my doing.” She stopped fighting. She just lay there, as if accepting a punishment. “I failed.”

He let her go but still loomed over her. Desperate to make her feel what he believed, he bent forward and kissed her. Mulder’s tongue delved into her mouth so she could taste his love for her. His right arm snaked around while he used his left arm to hold them up so she could feel how well she fitted with him. Surprised by this change in action, she let him mold her to him and felt the familiar pressure southwards. He pressed his forehead against hers, breathing heavily.

“Let me show you how much you belong to me.”

The actions were hurried and clumsy. But the familiar touch warmed the coldness from their hearts. Her cry pierced the night over the churning space heater, creating a blossoming warmth between them as he entered and lingered. She hugged him, never letting him go as he finally withdrew.

“We belong to each other,” he murmured. “You saved me. You have never failed me.”

Scully pressed her ear against his chest, listening to his heart. “What can I do?”

“What can I do,” he corrected. “Maybe we can look in the paper together at the classifieds. Maybe you and inquire at the hospital on my behalf so I can figure out how to get licensed as a therapist. Maybe I can build you a hot tube.”

She kissed his neck and whispered, “That’s all I want to hear, Mulder.”

“What?”

“Maybe. I just want you to try, that’s all.”

“That’s all?”

She nodded. “I just want you to be happy.”

Mulder let the weight of her words settle on his shoulders and he held her tightly. “Well, it’s a good thing I have such a beautiful guardian angel to remind me when I get foolhardy.” He felt her smile against his chest. “Don’t give up on us, Scully. Don’t ever give up on us, please.”

“You taught me to believe,” she answered simply. “I won’t stop.”

“Promise me, Scully,” he begged.

“I promise.”

#xfiles #xf fic #msr #msr fic #prompt #iwtb #angst #smut implied #did i mention angst because i love angst #mulder #scully #prompt answered #send me more prompts #please?#todayinfic

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gilliansanderson · 7 years ago

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If Ever There Is Tomorrow; Chapter 1

An AU in which Mulder and Scully meet three times over the course of their lives; told in a series of vignettes.

Tagging @today-in-fic and fulfilling my @fictober promise. I also wanted to dedicate this one to all the lovely, talented people who helped me out during the @fic-files write-in, because without their support and feedback I probably would not have had the courage to put this out there.

1. As Time Goes By

Spring, 1993

The end of the 20th century is only the beginning. Change hits the nineties at a breakneck speed; Hair is getting bigger, technology is getting smaller, colors are getting brighter while the climate begins to suffer, but in the midst of a new era, some old skeletons are about to be unearthed. The third time they meet is the least bloody, yet opens more wounds. It comes, like the times before, suddenly and without warning.

Well, that’s not entirely true. Mulder had been given plenty of warning when Skinner had informed him he was being assigned a partner; A scientist who was to, no doubt, disprove his work and report back to the kind of men he was fighting. To keep him in line and keep him from going overboard. This hadn’t come as a surprise, he always knew the closer he got to the truth, the more curveballs they would throw his way. What made him almost fall out of his chair was the name, Dana Scully.

A name he couldn’t claim had never crossed his mind.

Dana Scully haunted him like an intrusive thought or the vague memory of a strange fever dream. She reminded him of a time he would much rather forget, yet the feeling lingered; the possibility that maybe one day, their paths might cross again. When he’d heard that she’d enlisted he found himself needlessly frequenting Quantico in the hope and the dread of catching a flash of ginger hair. Her thesis was printed and dog-eared the moment it was published; because challenging one of the greatest minds the world has ever known was something so quintessentially Dana Scully, and he was ever the masochist.

His hopes were not high; he didn’t expect her to accept this assignment, and he certainly didn’t suppose she would darken his basement door that very same day, but suddenly, here she is, smiling down on him from the high road.

“Agent Mulder,” she says quietly, with an air of disbelief, “I’ve been assigned to work with you,”

They shake hands like strangers, his fingers burn at her touch; the sensation lingers even after her hand falls away. She had always run as warm as her complexion, His summer girl had become fall. Her hair is darker, neatly tamed. She teeters precariously on heels that give her precious extra inches, that demand he looks her in the eye. Her ill-fitting tweed suit hangs awkwardly on her slender frame; the whole ensemble reminds him of a child playing make-believe. Hidden is her rebellious heart under sensible attire and a polite smile; the heart he knows he broke, and one he refuses to break again.

So he puts down his slides and puts up his guard.

“Isn’t it nice to be so highly regarded? So who’d you tick off to get stuck with this detail, Scully?”

For a moment she’s stunned, then the next she recovers, “Actually, I’m looking forward to working with you,” she tells him.

He responds with a bitter smile, “Oh really? I was under the impression that you were sent to spy on me.”

A fire sparks behind her eyes, she looks as if she was about to retort before he cuts her off. “I’m surprised you didn’t object to your placement, Scully, what with our tempestuous history,”

She hesitates, he hates that she hesitates, hates that he makes her hesitate. “I can’t say I wasn’t caught off guard,” she admits, “Though I knew it was a possibility we would run into each other when I started working at the Bureau…”

“Yes, this is interesting happenstance isn’t it, Doctor?” She tenses, Mulder stands and brushes past her in order to miss her patented Scully glare.

“If you’re suggesting that you played any part in any decision concerning my career…”

“I’m not suggesting anything, I just always supposed you’d be headed towards a Nobel prize by now, yet here you are wasting your talents in the basement with me,”

Scully blinks and tilts her pointed chin, “You think I’m wasting my talents here, Mulder?”

“It’s just that in most of my work, the laws of physics rarely seem to apply,” he shrugs and hits the lights. In the unearthly glow of his projector, Scully looks like a ghost.

He shows her the dead kids, barely older than they had been, once upon a time. He tells her his theories, she rebukes them with a smirk, slowly the ice begins to thaw and a familiar feeling begins to take root.

Then she leaves, and the basement feels darker and emptier than it ever had before. So Scully was back in his life and maybe, plausibly, this time she would stay. Mulder locks the office door behind him that evening and whistles the whole way home.

Fall, 1978

September in Connecticut, 1978 is record-breaking. The air as thick and hot as soup, her stiff collared shirt clings to her skin and dampens at the base of her neck. She wipes away the sweat beading on her forehead with the end of her ugly striped green tie and ignores the disapproving look her mother gives her.

Dana had always marvelled at how the air was always different in every new place they landed, she secretly ranked them from the icy unforgiving winds of the Scottish moors to the serene and exotic air of Japan. Greenwich so far was not doing too well on this list, however, it looked like she was going to have to get used to it. She had long since gotten used to the routine of neatly packing up her life in matching suitcases and burying a lunchbox in the backyard.

Melissa left a trail of broken hearts behind them like push pins in a map. Her sister had always been better at making friends, she claimed it had something to do with her aura, Dana wasn’t entirely sure what that meant, only that hers was probably broken. Usually, by the time she had started warming to people, her father would sit the four of them on the couch and tell them it was time to start saying goodbyes, so Dana eventually stopped trying to find people to say goodbye to.

She had her friends, they were called Mom, Ahab, Missy and Charlie. Sometimes Bill, when he wasn’t being a pain in the A Double-S. They were all she really needed. When she was very young, she even had an imaginary friend called Lucy, who took the form of a red squirrel. Lucy would curl up behind her hair and whispered secrets in her ear. Dana liked the fact that nobody else could see her, that she was hers and hers alone.

Sometimes she would pen a letter to the boy who had forgotten her, only to burn it in the bathtub with her mother’s lighter.

But still, her Mom always tried. She heard her arguing sometimes with her father that it wasn’t good for them, that kids needed stability. It looked like this year she had finally won the war and a house was bought, not rented.

She shifts uncomfortably as her bare thighs stick to the Principals rigid leather seats. The Principal in question was a tall British woman with large teeth, a sensible mousey bob and a collection of motivational animal posters. Dana catches the eye of a mournful kitten hanging from a curtain, encouraging her to Hang In There! and somehow feels even less optimistic.

“Now Diana, a little birdy told me that you’re especially talented at Science is that right, dear?” She smiles in a condescending way that makes Scully bristle. Bill snickers to her right, Missy kicks him in the shin on her behalf.

“It’s Dana, Ms Paterson,” Her mother corrects her patiently.

“Oh, my apologies, Dana.”

Dana represses the urge to roll her eyes, instead, begins to fiddle with the brand new chain around her neck. Naturally she was the last of the three to be enrolled, but unfortunately for her, also the one the school was most interested in.

“As I was saying, it seems you are just the model student, and if you don’t mind the extra work, we might be able to sign you up to the tutoring scheme, we have a nice young man who is in need of a little extra help in physics,”

Maggie nods encouragingly at her, clearly ecstatic at the prospect of her troubled young daughter making a friend. Dana tries feebly to muster her mothers’ enthusiasm,

“Sure, Miss, sounds… neat,”

“Wonderful,” she croons, “I hope you don’t mind, but I already took the pleasure of asking Fox to come by the office, so you could get to know each other,”

Dana’s hand stilled at the base of her throat, she felt her mother stiffen beside her, and her siblings’ squabbles fall silent. No. It couldn’t be that uncommon a name. “Fox?” she falters.

“Yes, quite an odd name isn’t it? He’s truly lovely boy, very very bright, unfortunately, he had to be held back a year…” Ms Paterson yammers on, but Dana had long since stopped hearing her words, as a minute later he appeared.

He was taller and lanky, the skin on his cheeks textured and he was in dire need of a haircut, but he was undoubtedly the same wide-eyed boy who had been her first real friend. And with wide eyes, he stares at her from the doorway, as if he couldn’t believe them himself.

“Scully?”

Framed by a halo of light from the hall, the image of him becomes blurred by the tears which spring to her eyes. Her chair falls backwards with a heavy thud as shoots to her feet. She mutters an apology to the baffled headmistress before she hurries from the room.

“Scully,” Mulder pleads, catching her hand as she darts past and clutches it tight. Electricity floods her veins. She looks into those familiar hazel eyes and pauses only a moment before she pulls her hand away and runs.

Summer, 1969

The summer of ‘69 is worthy of its song. Rock and Roll is at its peak, a man walks on the moon, and somewhere in New England, a lonely little boy meets a lonely little girl.

With a startled wail and a resounding thump, she falls out of a tree into his yard and into his life.

The day until that moment had been dull and unremarkable. Having escaped captivity and found refuge in his favourite spot, under a tall oak tree overlooking the tranquil sea; Fox William Mulder, seven and three quarters, jumps with a start and stares at the heap of limbs and hand me downs, as it groans then starts to giggle.

“Are you okay?” he asks, as his initial shock subsides.

“Yeah, yeah,” it says, “I’m fine,”

Dana Katherine Scully, six and a half, sits up to brush off the worst of the debris but lets out a sharp gasp as a lightning bolt of pain shoots through her wrist. However, being the tough cookie she was having grown up playing rough with William Scully Jr, the sprain was not enough to make her cry.

“You don’t look okay, you’re bleeding,” Mulder observes. She touches a hand to her mouth which sure enough, comes away red. Between them on the crisply trimmed grass lies a pearly white tooth. The ruffled girl picks it up and studies it curiously, tonguing the fresh gap in her gums, then tucks it into the pocket of her overalls.

“I guess you’re gonna see the tooth fairy,” he lisps, gesturing to his own missing front teeth. Her freckles dance as she wrinkles her nose.

“The tooth fairy isn’t real,” she replies, spitting scarlet on the ground and wiping her mouth on her arm, staining her skin like war paint.

“Is too, and so is Santa Claus,”

He offers a hand to help her to her feet, which she takes with a bloody, gap-toothed grin. This girl was brand new, he knew every fresh face in this small seaside town, and not one of them had ever smiled at him like that before. She’s all skinned elbows and scabby knees. She looks like she was spat out by the sun, with a fiery rat’s nest of auburn hair and a mischievous gleam in her bright blue eyes. He feels like Isaac Newton, hit on the head with the discovery of the century.

“You’re not from around here are you?” he asks.

She shakes her head, “No, we just moved here this week. My Dad’s gone to sea, I was trying to see his boat from up there when I slipped,” She replies, gesturing to the web of twisted branches above their heads.

“He’s a pirate?” he jokes; she quirks a little brow.

“No. He’s a Captain,”

“Captain Hook?”

Fox Mulder is still at the age where girls are kind of gross, but the sincerity with which this pretty tomboy laughs makes his ears turn red regardless. She was like a breath of fresh air after spending the whole day trapped inside a stuffy room, which incidentally he had.

“Fox,” he blurts at her, suddenly losing his cool.

“What did you call me?” she replies hotly, her un-injured hand flying self-consciously to her mussed red hair.

“No! my name is – “

“Fox!” They jump at the booming disembodied voice calling from the house a few meters away, “What in the hell are you doing?”

“Crap,” he mutters. Scully can’t help but flinch at the use of the word which would have cost her her dessert. “I’m supposed to be grounded, I think I’d better go,”

She tries not to be disappointed, but finds herself reluctant to say goodbye to this curious boy with a strange sense of humor, who believes in myths and fairy tales; but he makes no move to leave, equally unwilling to say goodbye to the girl who dresses like a boy and smells like the sea, who climbs trees and doesn’t cry when she falls. They eye each other hesitantly until finally, she breaks the silence.

“Your name is Fox?” she asks.

He makes a face, “Yeah, but I hate it. I like my last name better. It’s Mulder,”

“Mulder,” she tries it on her tongue and decides she likes the taste. She straightens her back and offers her hand like she’s seen adults do a thousand times before. “Ok. Nice to meet you, Mulder, my name’s Dana, but I guess you can call me Scully,”

“Scully,” he beams and takes her tiny, dirty hand in his. They shake in childish ignorance to how their stars had just aligned.

#If Ever There Is Tomorrow #txf fic #the x files fanfiction #msr fic #fictober #oh god im still so nervous to post this #i might throw up #this is my baby #no but thank god for the workshop or i probably would have just aborted #my stuff

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