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personal-stxff-blog · 8 years ago

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The Phoenix

Hey everyone! So, here’s another x-files college au with a weird twist. It’s also on AO3 so I’ll link that here (so far there’s seven chapters but I’ll post them all up here in one bulk - sorry ‘bout that). If anyone on here is interested I’ll continue to update on Tumblr, although I might do that anyway to be honest. Anyway, sorry for the ramble. Here you go!

It wasn’t Mulder’s idea of a great night out, but they dragged him along anyway.

Ringo had been the one to suggest going, and for once Melvin had actually agreed to one of his ideas. John seemed impartial and rolled with what they were saying. Fox, however, wasn’t too keen on it. They had pored over movies on TV and at the cinema - nothing. None of them were hungry and the angry old farmer at the top of the hill had caught them UFO-spotting a few nights ago and had told them that if they came back one more time he’d set his dogs on them. It didn’t seem to leave them many more options.

“I just don’t see why,” Mulder huffed. “Since when have you guys been into brawling and street fighting? In fact, when have any of you cared about any variety of sport?” Ringo Langley - who, like the other two, preferred to be addressed by his last name - grinned and tapped his nose.

“Ever since we started watching Gladiators,” Frohike sighed, smiling to himself. “Natalie Lennox is an absolute babe.” Langley glanced up from his computer with a frown, opening his mouth to protest immediately.

“Uhh, have you seen Marisa Peré?” he argued. “She was the original Lace -and she was the best!”

“Lennox is way hotter - what are you talking about?” Frohike persisted, throwing his hands up dramatically. “And besides...”

Mulder tuned out the sound of their ceaseless bickering as he approached the crumpled poster on Frohike’s desk. It was torn and dog-eared from some sort of excessive reference which Mulder preferred not to consider. “Got what it takes?” was slapped at the top of the paper in vibrant red writing. He continued down the page, skimming through the information. “The Combat Zone proudly presents...Fight-And-Fantasy REDUX!...Old and new acts every week...sign up if you think you’ve got what it takes...winner wins $500, losers win a broken nose...$10 a ticket. The more the merrier.” Mulder shook his head in disbelief. Did he really have nothing else to do but waste ten bucks watching a bunch of amateur fighters and scantily-clad women beating each other up?

Apparently so. The argument had been cleared and the three boys were reaching for their coats by the door. Byers glanced back at him hopefully. “You coming, Mulder?” With an internal sigh, he nodded, grabbing his jacket from the chair behind him. How bad could it really be?

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

Pretty bad.

They were stuck in a stuffy room with crowds of people who were primarily drunk or terrifying - sometimes they found men and women alike who happened to fit into both categories. Mulder had never felt so small in his life, or so excruciatingly young. They were the youngest around by far, the rest of the people in the cramped bar/arena starting in their late twenties and drifted into the thirties, forties, even fifties. Many of them looked as though they were part of some type of biker gang. If this bothered the Three Stooges who dragged him through the scary masses, they hadn’t shown it. They smiled and excused their way past the bar and shuffled into a tiny booth with a surprisingly fair view of what was supposedly the ‘ring’. A rickety wire cage that snaked all the way up to the ceiling, the sides concealed by thick curtains that wouldn’t have looked out of place in a theater. Maybe that’s what this place used to be, he thought, staring around absently. It wouldn’t surprise him.

“One of our favorites is coming on tonight,” Byers said excitedly. “She’s called the Phoenix. Just wait ‘til you see her, Mulder. She’s such a fantastic fighter. Nobody knows who she is, or where she came from. That’s why they call her that - she just rose out of nowhere, like out of the ashes, or something. We’ve heard that even the managers and coaches have no idea who she really is.”

“She’s hot, too,” Frohike agrees, sipping on his drink. “Wait until she comes on, she’s got a body like you’ll never believe.” Mulder rolled his eyes, a gentle huff of laughter breaking between his lips. The mention of cute girls made this entire idea seem a little less ridiculous, though he wasn’t willing to admit that to anybody just yet. He wasn’t necessarily pleased with the idea of them beating the crap out of each other.

“Ladies and gentlemen!” The widespread clamor of everybody yelling over each other dwindled into eager murmuring as a voice boomed out of the tinny speakers. Mulder opened his mouth but Langley quickly nudged him into silence, his eyes rooted to the spindly cage. He looked around; everybody was hypnotized, under some sort of spell, by the looks of things. He momentarily entertained the idea of witchcraft and laughed to himself. “It’s the moment you’ve all been waiting for, for tonight we have some wonderful people with us. We’ve got a vicious fight between the deadly Viper and her arch-rival Nemesis -” The audience cheered and clapped, drinking in the MC’s voice. Mulder cringed. “Then we’ve got the Lion and the Wolf up against one another in the second round -” More whooping and hollering. Mulder couldn’t help but wonder if they all had such embarrassing names. Talk about wannabe wrestlers. “And there’s plenty more where that came from folks, but I know what you’re all here for... The ultimate showdown between our much-loved killer queens - it’s the Phoenix and the Widow, fighting once again for the grand prize of $500!”

The room was filled with ear-splitting screams and shouts. Most people seemed to be hollering in the Phoenix’s honor, although there was a scattered undertone of people screaming ‘Widow!’ hysterically. Mulder wondered if he’d even be able to make it to the final fight without taking a couple of painkillers in the bathroom, or just straight-up walking out. His head was pulsing already.

“Is it always this loud?” he yelled into Frohike’s ear, who also happened to be whistling and cheering on the Phoenix. He nodded, patting his friend’s shoulder and laughing. Mulder held his own face in his hands, void of hope.

“Our first fighters of the night are new to the ring, so be nice,” the MC teased through the speakers. Everyone roared with laughter. He introduced them slowly, bringing up fabricated backstories and leaving everyone hanging as he called out their names. “Iiiiiiiiit’s... Storm!” and “Heeeeeeeeeere she is: it’s Athena!”

Mulder watched them both saunter into their corners, throwing furtive looks to the crowd and blowing kisses at nobody in particular. His three friends lapped this performance right up, their tongues practically hanging out of their mouths. He raised his eyebrows and sunk further back into the leather seating. Surely any movie would’ve been better than this, right? Did we really have no other choice?

The fights came and went without provoking any other emotion but pure, consistent boredom from him. It suited his friends, who designated him as the one to buy more cans of Coke and Sprite from the bar. This didn’t improve his mood in the slightest, for he needed to push past all the tough biker guys to get to the bar, which was also tended by a pretty scary looking man. As much as he wanted to leave, he found himself hanging around. There was no real reason why. He felt at though sticking around would be the polite thing to do, but that never normally kept him from running away from whatever his friends had planned out. Screw politeness, there was something else. He figured he’d stick around until the end. Maybe he'd been a little too harsh on the guys, maybe he was making a big deal over nothing. Maybe something good would come up somewhere.

Emphasis on ‘maybe’.

The evening dragged on and the acts were all the same; cute, flirty girls with feisty attitudes and beefy men with cocky smiles and bulging muscles. Blood was spilled on more than a few occasions and hastily wiped away in the intervals between brawls. Lion spat out a piece of broken tooth into the audience mid-fight and it landed at Langley’s feet. Mulder wasn’t a particularly sensitive person but he drew the line after watching Viper’s nose break and seeing her getting carried off the stage screaming and wailing for help. He picked up his jacket and nodded at his friends. They immediately looked disheartened.

“What’s the matter, Mulder?” Byers asked. “The Phoenix is about to come on! Don’t you want to see what all the fuss is about?”

“Not particularly,” he mutters, hurrying his coat on. “It was great guys, but I think I’ve had enough gore for one day. I’m actually surprised you three survive in a place like this.” They have the dignity to look offended.

“Sit down,” Frohike insists. “Trust me. She’s way hotter than Lennox and Peré combined.” Well now I definitely want to stay, Mulder thinks sarcastically. Yet against his better judgment, he sinks into his seat again, propping his elbows up on the table and resting his face on them like a sullen schoolboy. He concentrates on deliberately ignoring the stupid MC bigging the girls up, delving into their non-existent stories. His focus slips, however, and he finds himself listening in on snippets from the Phoenix’s introduction. She swanned out of nowhere, out of the ashes, as Byers said. Young, fiery, not to be messed with. He scoffed under his breath - not that anybody would’ve heard him. The roars of her fans were deafening as she was introduced into the cage.

Mulder squinted, waiting for her to appear so he could see what all the fuss was about. This had better be worth it, he complained internally. He leaned forward, his head resting on his knuckles.

There she was. The Phoenix.

The first thing he noticed about her was that she carried herself differently to the other girls who had previously been. She didn’t flaunt, she didn’t have any flair or glamor or anything that marked her as something of a show-off. She walked like she meant business - like she knew what she was doing. He found himself impressed, for some reason, and found himself sitting up a little straighter in his chair. The second thing he noticed was that she didn’t need to prove her sexuality to the audience, not deliberately at least. Her legs were dressed in skin-tight leather, accentuating every curve of her lower half. Watching her felt wrong, somehow. It felt almost obscene. He found his face flushing, though no one could see for the only lights were those illuminating her arena - and it definitely was hers. She had her audience hanging onto her every movement. She was wearing a tight black vest too, but he tried to skim past for the sake of keeping some illusion of being a gentleman. Then he remembered that they weren’t the only ones in the room and felt stupid. He didn’t look anyway; his shirt wasn't long enough to pull over his lap.

The only thing missing was a face, an identity. She was looking away from the audience; all he could see was a burst of flame which just so happened to be her cropped red hair. As though reading his mind she turned suddenly and abruptly. The only glitzy part about her was the glitter dashed against her cheeks and lips; it sparkled under the lighting like embers.

No wonder they called her the Phoenix. She didn’t just look like fire, she was fire; she was a burning flame, passion, desire, life itself. Mulder found himself captivated, suddenly enthralled by the idea of street-fighting so long as she was involved. She had pulled him into the most wonderful inferno imaginable and he never wanted to leave, only to be surrounded by everything she represented.

He found that he was gaping and immediately stopped himself, trying to regain his composure. Of course, the others had already noticed but they had also fallen into her trap. They were gazing at her like they couldn’t believe their own eyes. Mulder pinched himself. This is not a dream.

He may or may not have been in love, in a wonderfully starstruck kind of way. He decided that the combat zone wasn't so bad after all.

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