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spookyscullies · 6 years ago

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my updated archive!

smut:

reaching for belief

set at the end of Paper Hearts. a little bit of angst, but not too much considering the smut that follows :’)

Scully is concerned for Mulder, so she drives him home and joins him in his apartment.

rating: NC-17

breakfast is the most important meal of the day

this is in response to @skinny-gillian ‘s prompt post of those drawings of Mulder going down on Scully :’)

rating: NC-17

do not disturb

rating: NC-17

set in Syzygy when Scully’s just straight up annoyed with Mulder because he’s kind of being an ass. she gets so worked up that she decides to confront Mulder in his motel room before Detective White has a chance to intervene once again. in summation, sorta angry sex :)

trust is a fire that melts ice

rating: NC-17, NSFW

set in Ice when Scully checks Mulder to see if he’s infected

when heat rises

rating: NC-17

the shower scene from One Son, but there’s no wall separating Mulder and Scully :’)

make me

rating: NC-17

Mulder kisses Scully out of frustration in the office which leads to much, much more

let’s play a game

rating: NC-17

your classic “share one bed in a motel room” trope, mixed in with a game of Truth or Dare, and a few bottles of whiskey. Smutty, but sweet.

teachers!au series:

teachers!au: subject matter

based on this post of head canons i made, for #1

rating: PG

teachers!au: rainy day lunch

based on this post of head canons i made, for #2

rating: G

teachers!au: chaperoning

based on this post of head canons i made, for #3

rating: G

teachers!au: parking lot talk

based on this post of head canons i made, for #4

rating: G

teachers!au: scully’s library secret

based on this post of head canons i made, for #5

rating: G

teachers!au: coffee conundrum

based on this post of head canons i made, for #6

rating: G

teachers!au: extracurriculars

based on this post of head canons i made, for #7

rating: PG

teachers!au: a good lecturing

based on this post of head canons i made, for #8

rating: G

teachers!au: assembly

based on this post of head canons i made, for #9

rating: PG, but it gets a tiny bit steamy at the end :)

angst:

ending of hubris

prompt post submitted by @pettypotts: “I can’t keep kissing strangers and pretending that they’re you.”

rating: just sad and angsty but not too sad at the end

how to begin an ending

rating: NC-17

Mulder is trapped in a downward spiral of grief after Scully is shot in her apartment instead of Melissa.

you always believed

rating: PG

post ITWB and break-up. Mulder leaves Scully a message on her answering machine. inspired by “Another Life” by Semisonic, which i believe is the epitome of break-up songs for msr.

soft fluff series:

an unsuccessful breakfast: soft fluff series

rating: G

it’s sunday morning and scully and mulder decide to make pancakes (and don’t actually make breakfast). just pure fluff and cuteness ! featuring lovesick!scully and playful!mulder

come steal away with me: soft fluff series

rating: G

Mulder and Scully take a few vacation days, coincidentally at the same time as each other. set before anyone is aware of their relationship, aka the Season of Secret Sex :) also, featuring feisty!scully.

little green men: soft fluff series

rating: G

William can’t sleep because Mulder has told him about supposed “little green men”. very, very soft fluff with the mulder family :)

general:

Moby-Dick, Milk, and The Spy

based on this post:

“In school, Mulder would be that tall nerd kid who has jeans a bit too short for him and sits alone at lunch because no one wants to hang out with this spooky kid whose sister went missing, until this new kid in school arrives and she sits with him because she notices he’s reading Moby Dick. Her name is Dana Scully, her dad’s a sailor and she asks him which character is his favourite.”

rating: G

cemetery disturbance

a tiny blurb based on this post

Mulder gets arrested for pretending to be a ghost in a cemetery

rating: PG

tiny baby fic: grocery shopping

rating: G

Scully and Mulder go grocery shopping

scully’s got a secret

set in Three of a Kind in between where Frohike finds Scully at the bar in the casino and when we see her and Frohike walk into the hotel room. drugged!Scully has a secret she desperately needs to share with Frohike.

rating: PG

one-on-one

set in Two Fathers when Scully finds Mulder played basketball. Mulder challenges Scully to a game, and she agrees

rating: G

jump scare

Mulder and William plot to scare Scully on Halloween like they do every year, which inevitably leads to disaster.

rating: PG

#danasculllies writes #txf #msr #msr fan fiction #txf fan fiction #mulder #scully #fox mulder #dana scully

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txf-fic-chicks-blog · 7 years ago

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Tumblr Tuesday

Calling all angst lovers! Anyone in the mood for some WTF-happened-after-IWTB fic?

Here’s a little snippet that delivers on a devastatingly emotional level. It’s brief enough that to describe it more would be to rob it of its impact, just know that it packs a punch in a couple hundred words.

It hurts real good, folks. Gotta give that breakup context somehow, right? Hopefully today’s writer has plans to make it all better eventually...

Title: Choices

Author: @spookydarlablack

Rating: PG-13

Length: 1K/500+ Words

Synopsis: Possibly part of THE breakup, or at least a conversation that I imagine could have contributed to it.

Spoilers: Through ITWB

Trigger Warnings: Nothing we’re aware of

#tumblr tuesday #txf fic chicks #xf fanfic recommendations #txf fanfic #msr fanfic #reading list #choices #by: spookydarlablack

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councilof9 · 4 years ago

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DEFCON 28 Badge Challenge

If you are still working on the Badge challenge, be warned! Spoilers below!

If you’d like to play along, you can grab all of the required materials for free at:

https://media.defcon.org/DEF%20CON%2028/DEF%20CON%20Safe%20Mode%20Badge.rar

Exposition:

Before getting into the badge challenge write-up, we would first like to take a moment to thank all those who helped make this possible. First and foremost, a big shout out to 1o57 for putting together these amazing puzzles every year, and the sacrifices required to make it happen. Also a big thanks to the DEFCON organizers as a whole, who allow people like us to engage in these puzzle-solving shenanigans, and giving 1o57 a place to create and foster the hacker mindset.

Finally, a big thank you and congratulations goes out to Co9’s newest members, and four complete DEFCON newbies (congrats on your first con!):

Cr0wn_Gh0ul (@Cr0wn_Gh0ul)

JTobCat (@jtobcat)

LeFevre (@Lefevre)

motive (@leemsparks)

With that, let’s get into it.

The DEFCON 28 Badge

The Council of 9, undaunted by the irregular startup routine of DEFCON Safe Mode, prepared to scuffle and rumpus against the bewildering puzzles of 1o57 once again. After purchasing our DC28 badges, the fun began.

As 1o57 puzzles go, you never have an official starting place. You have to find it. So as we found answers or interesting information, we would record it for possible future use, and move on to the next thing we could find. Eventually, the breadcrumbs resolve into a path to follow.

This years badge consisted of three physical items:

A traditional printed cassette tape insert booklet

An old school audio cassette tape

The Lanyard

Booklet

The cassette tape insert booklet had several codes printed across it.

First, looking at the track listing:

Taking the first letter of each song on the side A tracklist spells out “LOSTINTIME”. For the uninitiated, 1o57 is the longtime Defcon badge designer and puzzlemaster. These track names also contain hints for later - Keywords like Lissajous.

Color Block Sub Cipher

Written, the color boxes read

Orange White Pink

Purple White/Green Orange/Green

Blue/Green Green Pink White

Purple/Green White/Green Orange White

and

Orange Blue Yellow/Yellow Green/White Purple

Green/White Green/White Yellow

By substituting the letters directly below for colors the first image, decodes to DEF CON SAFE MODE. It's basically a key.

So the second is

Skull Text

This string of text wasn’t nearly as simple to decipher. This skull artwork was a throwback to DC21, which had us scurrying to find notes and write-ups on the Badge puzzles from that year. Ultimately, however, we found the solution by taking the text string and pasting it into a 6x6 route transposition cipher, yielding:

tIstFCOnRFoofFioumYrgureoohrDOuntlon

Which is read Come on four dot four is right in front of you

We didn’t yet know what to do with this, so we put it aside for later.

Cipher Text Page

Xbaw maek wzme pgty zvxy izwk iwhk lnhy

agrl rrlp fsis xadh uflx dsqh rzrg qegu

itwb wveq aslo moii xmzx mvea rtil yekd

lvks jrbo arvy nmjz wodi gcxe tkrr cyir

xbsu rwyf slwr ixyk lrwz sbzr zbpg rrrw

hjsi alXX 1o57

The solution to this text really came from the fact that we were paying attention to 1o57 dropping random hints in various locations - not from anything in the booklet itself. 1o57 had played a video on his Twitch channel from The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension. Most notably, Buckaroo is famous for using the phrase: “No matter where you go there you are”

Using this as an OTP key...

nomatterwhereyougothereyouarenomatterwhereyougothereyouarenomatterwhereyougothereyouarenomatterwhereyougothereyouarenomatterwhereyougothereyouarenomatterwhereyougothere

...you get another Buckaroo quote (actually written by Greek philosopher Odysseas Elytis) :

Know that as in life there is much that many have looked up on but few have seen because as my father told me and his father told him you will come to learn a great deal if you study the insignificant in depth

Cassette Tape

With the booklet sorted, we turned our attention to the DC28 cassette tape. Upon listening to the tape, there are some immediate … features… that stick out.

Tones

One of the first things anyone listening to the tape will notice is the odd tones that sound at different times, and seem to repeat. These were halves of a DTMF (Dual-tone Multi-Frequency) tone, known better by many as “touchtones”, and appeared in two (2) groups of fourteen (14) tones that repeated three (3) times. By combining these single frequency pairs back together, we restored the dual frequencies and, by examining the peak frequency of the tones, we were able to identify the keypresses that generated the given tones. The flow of tones came out as:

DTMF Numbers: 2 6 3 3 9 6 7 3 7 9 9 9 4 9

We’re not done yet, though! Not yielding any immediate plaintext, we continued checking for a second-stage decipherment. As we’ve learned from other puzzles, any phone-related cipher should be checked for T9 coding, which turned out to be exactly what we have here.

By looking at a phone keypad,

Reading those indices onto the available letters, we get: CODEWORDSYZYGY

Oscilloscope

It’s not just the obvious side of the audio that we need to examine - the audio on the cassettes had much more than meets the … ears. Based on some hints that 1o57 dropped, and our experience with past puzzles, we decided to examine the audio for any hidden waveforms or other hidden data. Using a software oscilloscope, we examined the tape audio and discovered plenty of hidden text, as well as Lissajous patterns (remember that word from the Tracklist? Ya, that was the hint to get us here). The patterns we saw included a spaceship, a heptagon, a butterfly, and some very interesting text. The text we needed was:

The full text that shows up in the oscilloscope reads:

FIND A KEY AT LOSTBOY.NET SLASH PALEBLUEDOT

These two lead us to http://lostboy.net/PaleBlueDot

When we found this, though, the site was not yet active (since DEFCON hadn’t officially started). Oh well, better solve the Lanyard while we wait.

The Lanyard

This year’s lanyard proved to be quite tricky. We went through several iterations of attempts to make sense out of it. Pictured below is the lanyard with our attempts at dividing up and delineating each shape.

1o57 offered quite a few hints about the symbols on the lanyard - and with good reason. Finding the appropriate reading for the text was pretty difficult. Here are some of the most important hints that came out:

...now excuse me while I go read more about French aristocrats fleeing a post 1789 revolution.

More hints will start flowing from the font of knowledge tomorrow after DEFCON officially starts....

These sorts of hints eventually point towards the Crackly font, hosted on emigre.com (https://www.emigre.com/PDF/Crackly.pdf). Using this font, we were able to extract the following values from the lanyard segments:

Note first those mad MSPaint skills. Note second that all of those numbers are below 26, we immediately changed them into letters, giving us:

Q X U N

E K K E

V I O Q

Q G C O

Throwing this through a ROT, because you should always ROT everything, discovered that it was ROT-24’d. (Side note: Why ROT-24? Because ROT-24 is a negative ROT-28. Tricksy)

O V S L

C I I C

T G M O

O E A M

While not immediately obvious, one observant council member noted the presence of the C-O-M series of letters when reading in the vertical 4x4 pattern. Reading it in this way gave us what we were after:

OCTOVIGESIMALCOM → http://octovigesimal.com

Octovigesimal.com

This new page contained quite a bit of new content that we needed to sort through, and any answers were certainly not obvious.

Image filename: besidenequals2.jpg

The summation equation written at the bottom of the Goonies skull key implied that we need something that follows the pattern 1.1 + 2.2 + 3.3 + 4.4. The banner of the website implies that we need to look at the album “The Great 28” by Chuck Berry. This is further hinted at by the text “Record your answer~”, as in a record. We even think the tilde, from the latin for ‘title’ was probably part of the hint.

Upon looking at the Track list of “The Great 28” we saw that there is a track called Come On, which is right before a track called “Nadine (Is it You)”. This seems to link back to the text that we extract from the cipher text on the cassette tape insert “Come On Four Dot Four is right in front of you” Come On happens to be Section 4 track 4 of the album (4.4) and is “right in front of” (before) “Is it You”.

Going with that train of thought, and concatenating the titles of tracks 1.1, 2.2, 3.3, and 4.4:

Chuck Berry - The Great 28:

we get: MaybelleneRockandRollMusicMemphisComeOn

However, we don’t know what to do with this yet. Note it and move on.

Last on this site, but certainly not least, is another URL. Hidden right in plain sight underneath the logo is a pointer to the URL “Base-28.com”.

Alright, time to move on.

base-28.com

The first thing to look at here is the ciphertext in the top center of the page. We have a few strings to play with from previous solves. With the earth, moon and sun being in a line on the page, we figured it was a good opportunity to try the key that we found previously (from the audio DTMF codes): SYZYGY. This ciphertext is Vigenere encoded with SYZYGY as the key, and decodes to Who are you going to call? Definitely sounds like Ghostbusters to us.

Also of note here, is that the image on the arcade cabinet was identified as being the Temple of Gozer - a Ghostbusters scene. This scene is actually Chapter 28 on the GhostBusters DVD, and is titled “Crossing Streams”. This reinforces the Ghostbusters clue that the vigenere text gives us, and will prove critical to the next step.

On either side of the website we see pictures of members of the band The Commodores. 64 of them, in fact. These two clues combined tell us that we need to look at the Ghostbusters Commodore 64 game. What specifically about it? We don’t know yet.

Visually, it looks like this...

Pale Blue Dot

The Lissajous from the audio on the cassette tape pointed us to lostboy.net/PaleBlueDot. Upon accessing this page, we were greeted with… a wall of numbers. A giant freaking wall of numbers. Oh, and a joke.

How many Sagans does it take to change a lightbulb?

A quick google search will reveal the hilarious answer: “Billions and billions”

How it’s supposed to be solved

The numbers in the image are divided by the decimal, with a number of seemingly arbitrary length on the left, and eight (8) digits to the right of the decimal.

Left-Hand Numbers

Noticing that the numbers, with appending a few leading 0s, can be paired into values all less than 26.

Separating them out, and converting them via Letter-Numbers

Then, Vigenere decode using the key “billionsandbillions” (from the Sagan riddle) to get the plaintext:

ChineseTakeout

CrunchBar

Eggs

Twinkie

Marshmallows

Popcorn

Pizza

PotatoChips

Gum

Cheezits

Beer

These resulting words are the Game Franchise Username for the Ghostbusters c64 game, save bankroll amount. This consists of the Username (left side decoded) + 8 digit account number (right side number), with the decimal separating the two.

Right-Hand Numbers

The numbers on the right of the decimal, being 8 digits, are the account numbers for the Ghostbusters game. These can be plugged into the game (via an emulator) to discover the corresponding amount of money that is ‘saved’.

Emulator Franchise Username and account number screen:

Account Amount after validation of Username screen:

The Final Step

Realizing that these account balances all have trailing ‘00’s, remove the 0’s and convert the remaining numbers into letters to reveal the next destination.

Numbers: 13 25 19 20 5 18 25 19 3 9 5 14 3 5 20 8 5 1 20 5 18

Letters: M Y S T E R Y S C I E N C E T H E A T E R

Also, noting that each segment in the graphic is separated by the text ‘PaleBlueDot’, place a dot between the words, to arrive at a web address.

https://mysteryscience.theater

How we actually solved it (the narrative of pain)

One of our immediate observations was that the numbers always had eight digits on the right of the decimal. From the base-28.com site we knew about the c64 Ghostbusters game, and had the Crossing Streams chapter title as a potential hint that we needed to use clues across websites. In our reading about the c64 game, we learned that it was one of the first that allowed players to ‘save’ their game. Researching how this ‘save’ feature worked, we noted that it always used 8-digit account numbers, which curiously lined up with our 8-digit numbers to the right of the decimal. This felt like a crazy idea at the time, but we were frustrated enough to try it. Given the account numbers, we needed to find a way to reverse out the Names and Balances that would give those account numbers.

This video explains how the ‘save’ feature works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3cpbCCfK5A

Rather than digging into the algorithm, like we should have done, we discovered a Chrome extension that generated Ghostbusters accounts.

We tempted fate and downloaded the extension, only to rip out the code in order to reverse the algorithm. With that, we wrote the below brute forcer which, after inputting a Name, would try all possible account balances and then check if any of the resulting account numbers matched any of the account numbers from the image.

We immediately set out trying names that came from 1o57’s Twitch streams or other areas of the puzzle so far - and we found a few that worked:

'REAGAN,RONALD',

'POLLY,SKATING'

'SOTER,STEVEN',

'MORANIS, RICK',

'BROLIN,JOSH',

'HOUSE,BRICK'

But note that we said ‘a few’. We couldn’t find hits for every account balance. Fortunately, these were enough to assure us that we weren’t crazy, and we began attempting to interpret our output. While working through this, we realized that we didn’t even need the names. Using the information from the aforementioned YouTube video, we learned how to derive the information we needed. Take the account number for 1o57 which is 27710104. Reverse the number by pairs to get 04017127. Then convert from octal to hex, you get 101E57. The middle byte, 1E, is the hash of the name. The account balance is the first and third byte, so 1057. We filled in the remaining few accounts to come up with a full dataset. As it turns out, the whole page could have been solved like this on a calculator.

Examining the resulting balances, and knowing that the game’s algorithm divided the balance by 100, we dropped the trailing ‘00’ and then converted the remaining numbers into letters, revealing the string mysterysciencetheater. After trying this on a few of the known sites with no luck, we discovered that this was pointing us to mysteryscience.theater The PaleBlueDot in the middle of the numbers was also a hint to look for a domain.

While we had discovered some new information, it was not a complete solution. We still hadn’t used the left-hand side numbers from the PBD image, so we now shifted our focus to those numbers. After realizing that the numbers seemed to be relatively low when split into their component digits, we tried Letter-Number conversion again. We then Vigenere’d that output with the riddle answer ‘billionsandbillions’, and came up with a list of delicious food from the Ghostbusters movie. As it turns out, these were the names we were supposed to use to get the balances via a Ghostbusters c64 emulator. oops.

The complete output was:

Mysteryscience.theater

This page was kind of interesting in that there wasn’t really much to do with it… at least not immediately. From time to time, 1o57 will time-gate an area of his puzzles, and this is exactly what we ran into here. So, fast forwarding something like 24 hours, let’s begin examining the final puzzle-filled state of the page.

The top of the page now contained ciphertext. After a few attempts at deciphering it, we tried one of our old unused pieces of data (the concatenated list of Chuck Berry song titles) as a key and were greeted with a successful decipherment:

An y QewpFyyvRqd,

WehjhwpIclpVtme:

Ioqfig oloage.

Using OTP key: MaybelleneRockandRollMusicMemphisComeOn

On a PaleBlueDot,

WrestleWithThis:

Things change.

The meaning from this was clear! Head on over to http://lostboy.net/PaleBlueDot/WrestleWithThis

WrestleWithThis

Not much to see on this page, just the text “It’s only a tiny problem” and a YouTube video.

In the page source was the following comment:

<!- bFNhZ2FuQExv ->

And the title of the page was:

Wrestle With This y6nk3z9y

The comment Base64 decodes to lSagan@Lo

Additionally, the hint on the page about a ‘tiny’ problem, combined with the page title, resulted in a tinyurl link for our next destination:

tinyurl.com/y6nk3z9y → http://lostboy.net/PaleBlueDot/EverythingWasFineWithOurSystem.jpg

EverythingWasFineWithOurSystem

The image on this page immediately presents us with two sets of ciphertext, and a curious little man yelling at us from the corner.

As seen lightly overlaid into the blue of the car:

U2VuZCBDb3Nt =base64=> Send Cosm

And in the rear light:

TG9zdGJvWSBkb3Qgc2xhc2ggSEhI =base64=> LostboY dot slash HHH

Navigating to http://lostboy.net/HHH, we were greeted with two more youtube videos. The first one was titled “Close but no Cigar”. Immediately realizing that this meant we hadn’t interpreted the clue correctly, we Nope’d right the heck out of there. Luckily, we also knew what HHH was referencing from watching 1o57’s Twitch stream on 8/7. so we wasted no time in discovering the correct endpoint.

lostboy.net/HappyHarryHardOn

Here we go, a YouTube video and some encoded text. This feels right. The video was of RayParker Jr. performing the GhostBusters theme song, and below it was the text “What a singer! LostboY.net/PaleBlueDot/?” Also on the page was the text “F1LZuQ9E4JQ”.

The F1… text was another YouTube video; Chuck Berry and Tina Turner performing Rock n Roll Music. In an interesting twist, we discovered that by sorting the video comments by Newest first, there was a comment from NEW SOUND AGENCY with the text “b3MgdG8gQ2Fy”.

Also, if we look at the NEW SOUND AGENCY channel on YouTube, it has just one video of 1o57 playing around with a MiniMoog. Yep, this is a clue. This text of the comment base64 decodes to “os to Car”....hmmm.. That seems to fit with the other ciphertext we’ve found so far.

As for the URL, the team immediately recalled that Ray Parker Jr. may have, probably, almost certainly, likely, stolen the Ghost Busters theme music from Huey Lewis and the News’ “I Want A New Drug”. The next URL, then, was pretty simple to guess:

http://lostboy.net/PaleBlueDot/HueyLewis/

HueyLewis (and the Solve)

This page was pretty simple. A single ciphertext was present on the image and gave us the following:

c3Rib1kubmV0 =base64=> stboY.net

And finally, putting together all of the fragments that had been discovered:

U2VuZCBDb3Ntb3MgdG8gQ2FybFNhZ2FuQExvc3Rib1kubmV0

Base64 decodes to => Send Cosmos to [email protected]

We shot off an e-mail (several e-mails?) as directed, and got replies letting us know that Defcon 28 Badge Challenge: Complete … phew. The e-mail also linked to another video and requested that we watch it as a team.

We immediately shared a screen as a team and viewed the video together.

With that, DC28 badge challenge was complete.

@TheCouncilOf9

Co9.io

[email protected]

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frangipanidownunder · 7 years ago

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The birth of something

This was written from a headcanon sent to @lepus-arcticus. It’s post The Truth/pre ITWB. It’s full-on angst.

He watches her leave every day, listens to the car scrunching down that long driveway. Some days he wishes it weren’t so long, so that her inevitable goodbyes aren’t so dragged out. Other days, he wishes it were miles and miles so that he could hold onto her for longer.

It is sleeting outside, the worst kind of weather. He’s always liked the rain – those days long ago where she laughed with him, where they shared umbrellas, where her hair frizzed around her face, where they closed cases or let them slip through their wet grasps. The snow offers up different images, falling from that craft in the Arctic, trudging through knee deep snow to find her in the Antarctic, putting a mutant’s thumb in an evidence bag. It’s so strange to remember some days, that these things were real. He often feels disconnected, distant from his own life. Like he’s viewing the memories through ice, thick and white-frosted. When she’s gone for days he wants to scratch away the frost and really see. Jump back in.

But he’s trapped and blinded here. Hampered by the past, stunted by the future.

His cooking is improving and the last of the tomatoes he grew add a depth of flavour to the sauce that he’s inordinately proud of. He’s been so used to death, that life and growth is something astonishing to him.

“This is delicious,” she says. Her fingers curl around the stem of the wine glass and she sips. “What did you do today, Mulder?” It’s not really a question by this stage. It’s a check in, a doctorly appraisal, a verbal hand to forehead to test for fever.

“I pottered around the yard, I mended the shed door, I read a little.”

She’s nodding. “I can bring you some more books. That second-hand store near the hospital is so lovely, the shelves are ordered by genre and there are little hand-written recommendations for like books. The woman who runs it knows me now,” she laughs softly. “She has a pile of books ready for me. You know what she said to me the last time?” She pops a forkful of twirled tagliatelle in her mouth.

“What’s that?” he asks, watching her chew.

“I think you’ll really love these, Dr Scully. I picked them especially for you.”

“You haven’t told her they’re for me.” He takes a drink and watches her a beat longer. “Why is that?”

Her fork clangs against the bowl. “You know why, Mulder.”

There’s a spray of tomato seeds on the side of his plate. He pushes them around. “Yeah, Scully. I do.”

“Mulder, there’s something I need to tell you.”

Her voice falls away and she flicks her gaze downwards. Revealing has always been difficult. He feels that it stings her when she peels away her layers, burns.

“I’m late.”

The tomato seeds slide around. “How many days?”

“Just a few, but I thought it was worth reporting.”

He nods. “I’m not your superior agent anymore, Scully. You don’t have to report to me.”

She stands up, taking her plate away. “I just thought you should know.”

This year the winter has roared and settled its white fury over the landscape. Scully is unable to get back and with the forecast, it might be a week or more before she can travel. He walks the rooms of the house watching the glass frost and patterns unfurl like fern fronds. It is poetry in action and he finds an old notepad, trying to capture it with one of his pencils. His work is clunky but he feels something stirring inside. His own patterns unfurling.

He begins to write, a stream of consciousness but it takes shapes and builds. He takes the notepad and a mug of coffee to his study and sits in the chill to write the story out. As he works, he sees the structure in his mind, words he writes form the vertebrae of the book which connect like a spine and from it he adds other joints and bones. He works through the twilight as the snow sheds its quiet mysteries over the landscape. His fingers are stiff, his neck creaks but creation has begun. And he feels he has earned every dull ache.

He sleeps fitfully through the few remaining hours of darkness. In the fresh light, he writes again. Adding muscle and ligament so the work flexes and bends.

Days stretch out and he has a first draft. He hasn’t eaten more than a few crackers in all this time but the fat of his body has been given over to something else. The weight has been added to his work. Scully calls daily. The weather will ease in a few days and she will come home.

“Still no sign,” she tells him and there is a depth to her words that burdens him. He is unable to decipher her message as either positive or negative. Their son is a shared pain. And he isn’t sure that either one of them can probe or prod that scar again.

As he adds nerves and lifeblood to his work, it grows and grows. He sleeps an hour a day, no more. On the last day, the day when it flourishes to the full, the morning silver sprays through the slats in the blind. It shimmers across the room and wakes him. He’s missed a text from Scully. She’s on her way home.

He is at his desk when she arrives. “Big thaw makes everything look sad,” she says, handing him a cup of coffee. “How are you, Mulder? You look tired.”

“I’ve been busy,” he says. “How are you?”

“I’m…not pregnant,” she says and looks just beyond him, to where the screen of his laptop holds his creation. “So that’s something.” She turns to leave.

“Scully.” He stands up and closes the laptop. “I’m sorry.”

She looks back at him with shining eyes and her heavy exhalation washes over him, inundating him with bitter guilt. “Come and sit with me, Mulder. Tell me what you’ve been doing since I’ve been gone.”

She holds out a hand to him. He takes it, twining his fingers through hers.

“There’s nothing much to tell, Scully. It snowed a lot. And then it just melted away.”

#txf fanfic #my fanfiction #msr fanfic #angst #the birth of something

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