x-files-fics

[x-files-fics]

Prompt idea: Scully in a wedding dress, but she’s not getting married.

She swishes experimentally before the mirror, a sad smile on her face.

“She imagined Missy wearing it, then me. Poor Maggie.”

Mulder watches her the way he watches the bird feeders on the lawn.

“Poor Maggie,” he echoes, gazing.

Scully fluffs yards of watered silk over the stiff crinoline, her already slender waist appearing barely a handspan above the vast skirt of the dress. Even without the lingerie of the time, the rigid bodice gives her breasts a conical, Jane-Jetson, atomic-age shape.

Mulder digs it, a new Scully fetish unlocked.

Her hair is twisted up in a messy bun but she is still Grace Kelly elegant. Liz Taylor, Audrey Hepburn, in that rich ivory gown. That rich copper hair, frosted with a long, cobweb veil. Scully touches the tiny buttons at her slim wrists.

“I’m sorry, Mom,” she murmurs. Smoothes the tulle at her temples. “It just didn’t work out.”

Mulder, in slouchy olive joggers and a navy Roots hoodie, holds his arms out for a dance.

Scully laughs, wrinkles at the corners of her hydrangea eyes, at the corners of her ranunculus mouth. “There’s no music,” she says, already leaning in to him.

God she’s lovely. Lovelier than ever she was in her twenties.

“I always hear music with you,” he says, draws her close. He spins her, and she’s crying a little and laughing, under the Strawberry Moon.

[x-files-fics]

155 words - Phoebe

“Did you love Phoebe,” Scully asks in the baking sun of New Braunfels. They’re eating paczi, her hair cropped and sleek as Marion Davies.

He chokes. “What made you think of Phoebe?”

She shrugs. “Daniel. Mistakes of youth.”

Mulder chews. “Were you really going to marry him?”

“I asked first.” Her smile is the darkest, reddest rose.

“I loved what she made me feel,” Mulder says, ruminating. “I love that she got me to fuck her in a graveyard.”

Scully laughs. “I’m Catholic,” she muses into cherry-cheesecake filling. “I understand.”

Mulder is aroused. He is appalled, entranced, by the thought of her with Daniel Waterston. He thinks of her ponytail, freckles like cinnamon on coffee cake. Earnest.

He pulls another quarter from her ear.

“Tada!”

Phoebe, young and unsure.

Scully, 35 - breathtaking and confident, bites her lip. “Ohhhh, Fox,” she coos.

He is so hard.

She prays that Phoebe, somewhere, is happy. She’s so alive.

[x-files-fics]

prompt: t-shirt, i adore you, knock three times

They run into one another at the ice machine on the third floor. She’s wearing her Stanford t-shirt and pajama pants, having planned a quiet night of Diet Coke and document review before Mulder drags her out into the marshes in the early morning.

“Your room is on the second floor,” he observes. “You staking me out? Christ Scully, this has to stop.”

She narrows her eyes. “You’re awfully presumptuous.”

“You got it baaaad,” he says, whapping on his ice bucket like a bongo.

“Oh, Fox,” she says flatly, filling her own bucket. “I cannot contain myself. I adore you.”

“I checked the fire evacuation map and your room is right under mine,” he notes. Whistles a few bars of Knock Three Times, leering. Winks.

They part ways at the stairwell door. “You think Skinner knows?” Mulder asks, thumbing her lips.

She snorts. “Mulder, at this point I’m pretty sure Bigfoot, The Loch Ness Monster, and every covert employee at Area 51 knows. I assume it’s in the Bureau’s new hire packet.”

He looks thoughtful. “Well,” he says. “Fuck it, then.” Mulder scoops her up, ice bucket and all, and carries her down the hall to his room.

[x-files-fics]

What do you think Scully and Mulder would disagree on as parents? A prompt, if you will.

Scully wanted schedules. Meal plans. Calendars. She wanted piano lessons on Thursdays, swim lessons on Mondays, and labeled bins for the Legos and Thomas train cars. She wanted whole grains and bento boxes and clothes from Boden and Hanna Andersson and Tea Collection. Vacations in the Galapagos and the Grand Canyon. She wanted - in her most secret heart - for him to be the star of the soccer or lacrosse teams. Or both.

Mulder wanted the gauche consumerism of Disney World every spring. He wanted drippy ice cream cones and a perpetually muddy dog and troops of sticky neighbor children marauding through the back door so he could say JESUS CHRIST WILLIAM I’M NOT PAYING TO AIR CONDITION THE WHOLE STREET. He imagined burnt pig-anus hot dogs over a campfire, a floor strewn with action figures, snow angels, Chef Boyardee. No chess coach, no deportment classes, those new-fangled sneakers that lit up. He imagined Welch’s grape juice stains on the couch.

***

Scully, luscious and fully fleshed again, with William suckling at her blue-veined breast. Scully like a Renaissance Madonna reimagined by Margaret Atwood.

“My mother sold her wedding dress to pay for Charlie’s football gear,” she says, touching William’s rose petal cheek. “My father made pretty good money for the Navy and all, but four kids so close together…we ate a lot of spaghetti. Lots of hand me downs. Missy shoplifted makeup a whole lot, if my mother ever knew…”

“Malnutrition why you’re so short?” he asks, because he knows she wasn’t actually malnourished.

She scowls. “It was never dirty, my mother would have died first. But just…you know. Heaps of rain boots at the door and school books on the table and hair ribbons and pencil stubs and recorder sheet music and half a cream-cheese-and-jelly sandwich withering on a plate because Bill and Missy were pinching each other…”

Scully trails off, switches the baby to her other breast. Remembers dinners of store-brand fish sticks and creamed corn because one of them had an unexpected pricey field trip.

William gurgles, clutches a fistful of his mother’s silky hair. Blows a raspberry beneath her Delft pottery gaze.

Mulder kisses William’s warm, fragrant head.

Mulder remembers his father, pleasantly loquacious on bourbon, teaching him about shoulder lines and top-stitching at 8. His mother and Samantha in matching ruffled Gunne Saxe dresses, the starched disapproval of the maid when he tracked footprints over the fresh vacuum lines in the carpet.

Chicken a la King, wedge salad, Steak Diane, swigs of his mother’s sidecar…

William hiccups, dribbling milk down his fat cheek. He begins to hiccup more, which makes him laugh at first, and which then makes him cry.

“It was just always loud and chaotic,” Scully says, propping the baby against her shoulder. “Someone was always hurt or in trouble or pulling hair or getting their hair pulled…it was impossible to think or relax. College was such a gift.” She remembers a study- fort she built in the San Diego coat closet.

William belches, then cheerfully vomits down her cleavage.

Scully groans.

Mulder mops her up with tender precision, watches William try to stuff his dinner-roll fist into his mouth.

“It’s been silent at my house for twenty-eight years,” Mulder says.

[x-files-fics]

Prompt: wine, cheese, unremarkable house.

They’re on the porch, playing checkers with shot glasses of red and white wine.

Mulder captures one of her glasses, knocks the Sangiovese back like tequila.

“Shit,” Scully observes, frowning. “Dammit.”

“I love when you swear,” he says, with the air of a deep confession. “It’s hot.”

She rolls her eyes. “Mulder, you once got aroused by my knowledge of airplanes. You’re depraved and vile.”

He bites his lower lip, looks at her through his lashes. “Say Brewster F2A Buffalo,” he purrs. “Say Gloster Gamecock.”

“King me” she replies, jumping and then downing a Sauternes. Her lips buzz, sweet honey in the rock even after so long.

He puts a chunk of mortadella in the glass after she returns it to the board. Feeds her a morsel of Roquefort.

She licks the edge of his finger and his heart flutters like it did decades ago when she said if I quit now, they win. When she went ghostbusting with him on Christmas. When she autopsied his mother, when she carried his son.

Mulder hooks a finger behind her top front teeth. Presses his thumb to her chin. “Say F6F Bearcat,” he murmurs.

Scully’s eyes are butane, Scully’s mouth is the tender, lush cerise of a peony in May. Her tongue is like wet sand at the beach in summer. Her tongue is an amuse-bouche. Her clever mouth is the first thing he fell in love with.

“Fuck. You,” she manages.

He does, beneath the platinum moon and the old light of a billion, billion stars.

[x-files-fics]

How about some middle-aged reflections on the early days of their (romantic/sexual) relationship?

They’re spreading mulch around the trees, tucking flowerbeds in for winter. The air is crisp and dry, sharpened by the pungent smell of the mulch.

“Got the Stanford alumni newsletter yesterday,” Scully says. “Guess who their new entomology professor is.”

He frowns back, puzzled. Her tone indicates that the answer is one he should get. Does he know any entomologists?

Mulder starts to shake his head. “I have no-“

He sees her face, the smirk she’s trying hide, and then he remembers. “Nooooo,” he says, drawing the word out with a laugh. “Bambi?”

“Bambi,” she confirms, grinning now. “Did you sleep with her? I honestly can’t remember.”

“No!” He’s a bit shocked that she thought this. He’d kind of wanted to though, he recalls. Little khaki shorts.

Scully rolls her eyes. “Oh, sorry to impugn your virtue.”

Mulder offers her a petulant look. “You make it sound like I was Wilt Chamberlain-ing my way through every case.”

She leans against the big sycamore, scoffs. “You’re mighty defensive there, Marty.”

He grins back. “Judge away. You weren’t putting out yet. Not to me, anyway.”

Scully laughs. “We were so young.”

“We were so young.”

She rolls her palms around the rake handle, her beautiful slim fingers with oval nails like the inside of a seashell. She’d been pretty back then, he thinks. Lovely. But now she’s ethereal, refined to some radiant essence.

“I think….hmm. I think some part of me really felt that if you and I followed the rules then everyone else had to as well, you know?” Her expression is a little wistful. A little sad.

He does know. “I like to think it made it that much sweeter in the end.”

“It did. I loved you so…so….purely. I remember when you made it to that Congressional hearing. I think I was done then. The rest was just waiting to happen.” She laughs, a little shy even now.

“You were like Beatrice,” he says to her, adoringly, in the honeyed light. “Come to lead me into Paradise.”

Scully drops the rake, walks over to take his hands in hers. “Is this heaven?” she asks, gazing up.

Mulder smiles back, squeezes her cool little fingers. The wind chimes on the deck ripple like harp strings. The sun makes a halo on her tawny head.

[x-files-fics]

prompt Gunpowder coconuts and lip gloss

It’s another two hours to Albany.

“Everything north of the Bronx is Canada,” Mulder grouses.

“You’re from New England.” Scully remarks, a map draped over her narrow lap.

“Shut up,” he says, chipper. “Grenades.”

Scully rolls her eyes. “Really? You’re such a boy.”

“You’re such a boy,” he repeats, in a mocking falsetto. “What do you want? Lip gloss? Tampons? A push up bra?”

“Shut up,” she echoes. “Fine. The Professor could absolutely have made a coconut grenade.”

Mulder merges left, scoffs. “Where’s he getting the gunpowder, Annie Oakley?”

“Potassium nitrate from guano,” she says, prim. “Turn left in four miles.”

“You need a lot of piss for that,” Mulder observes. He sets the trip odometer.

Scully rolls her eyes. “He can collect that in coconuts too. Honestly, Mulder.”

“Sulfur?”

“You absolutely KNOW Mrs. Howell packed Epsom salts,” Scully says.

“On a three-hour tour?”

“On a three-hour tour. Mulder pull over, that coffee went right through me.”

He does, at a nondescript gas station with a FOOD MART!!! sign taped to an out-of-order pump. “Don’t forget to save your urine in a coconut,” Mulder calls after her.

There’s not even a break in her stride as she flips him off over one tailored, charcoal shoulder.

[x-files-fics]

Prompt: leather jacket, pay phone, Southern accent.

Mulder’s Southern accent is pure Hilton Head; the Long Island Lockjaw of the magnolia-and-sweet-tea set. His mother’s people came from here and he learned to golf with them. Mulder knows about Lowcountry food and unironic madras trousers and herons in the pre-dawn light. He knows when to say “The War of Northern Aggression,” with a laconic wink.

Mulder knows all the lyrics to “The Battle of New Orleans.” He happily eats shrimp with the heads still on.

Scully - lower middle class Navy brat with aristocratic cheekbones and a chip on her fine shoulder - is his acceptable Yankee wife. She’s never going to say “pecan” the proper way. Never going to cut her eyes just right at white shoes after Labor Day. They named her Jessica and said she was from Sag Harbor, and the Louis Vuitton tote bag is getting her by.

Scully, in AquaNet and Lilly Pulitzer, misses Mulder’s Mid-Atlantic cool, his New England snobbery. Misses his firm opinions on Chicago-style pizza (a casserole) and Billy Joel (unironic legend). She wants her hand pressed to his sternum in a grey t-shirt and a leather jacket, a faded hoodie from the Vineyard.

Mulder (Emmett, she hisses in her own head) knows that quality families would never repair the upholstery because it’s déclassé to care. Would never

Mulder eats a cheese straw, Mulder nuzzles her tingling ear in the steamy June evening, tells a funny story at the Cavendish-Lawrence wedding.

“I swear to Christ, Jessica had to pull over and find a payphone,” Mulder says, to his starry—eyed audience. “My poor sweet girl on the side of the road with a tornado alert, ordering Christmas presents.”

Mulder clutches her to him, his fingers big and hot and wide against her waist as the audience titters with admiration. Mulder smells like fresh cotton and old money. Mulder looks like the best terrible decision she’ll ever make.

She’s going to fuck him tonight, she decides. She simply cannot stand it anymore, and it would be such a shame to waste away without having had him, like some medieval ascetic. She wants him to lick her tattoo, to bind her to the living world.

Mulder drops a kiss on her buzzing cheek, near the tiny neutron star encroaching on her very essence.

She hears the tide lap against the dock, laughs the way Jessica is expected to laugh.

She feels alive, like sparks rising towards the sun.

[x-files-fics]

ASK ME ANYTHING, SHE SAYS

Olay, DO MORE FISHER KING 💁🏼‍♀️

He marries her on the Vineyard in October. She didn’t want to be a June bride. She didn’t want to sweat and have her hair frizz and her fine vellum skin be lumpy with mosquito bites. She wanted to be cool and auburn and lovely, and it’s why he married her at all.

***

He gazed at her like a siren on a rock, like she was the last thing he’d see before it went pitch-black. She wore silk the color of Labor Day whitecaps and her veil was summer-storm mist. He loved her the way we love fire; primal and aching and fiercely hominid. He burned for her because it is a pleasure to burn.

***

He could not have cared less about the wedding but hoped she would. She hadn’t, though she’d looked at the obnoxious ring with a certain grudging respect. “It’s carbon arranged in the most boring way possible,” she observed, letting all (nearly) three carats catch the light. “”And it’s gorgeous. I love it.”

Her sapphire eyes, her garnet hair. And he’d given her a diamond, so clear and bland.

She didn’t love it, not really, and he knew it. Knew she loved it because his mother thought Catholics were simpletons and, more importantly, staff. His mother was Jewish by blood and WASP by raising. His mother preferred natural fibers. His mother excelled at tennis.

It was a family piece. It was The Done Thing, even on her plebeian Catholic finger, slim and pale and lovely as a moonbeam. His mother flinched but never balked. She was properly brought up, and her son had made a decision. She was a lady and so was Dana’s mother, in her sweetly aspiring way.

Their mothers wept and he beamed down at her like a demigod; like the Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed With The Sun.

***

He worshipped her properly later, before the applewood fire. He tossed his lot in with hers and he felt like some duke’s second son, unbound by obligation.

“Fox,” she moaned, and he loved that too. They were virgins again that night. They brushed one another like purple fruits, ripe to bursting on the vine.

***

He was appalled by how he wanted to put a baby in her, by how “wife” changed everything he thought he understood about himself.

The ring, clear as the waters of the Euphrates by day, was opalescent and clouded beneath the moon.

“Christ,” he moaned into the hot vanilla silk of her throat. “Christ, fuck, Dana…”

The tulle of her rucked-up gown left scratches on her thighs, like the tongue of a cat, and neither of them ever noticed.

***

She was a doctor again in the morning, and he was a Special Agent, and the sun was pale as straw in the weakening light.

[x-files-fics]

Prompt: candlelight concert, jealousy, ust to msr. Thanks so much, big fan here😊.

It was the kind of hotel where you could have set The Shining if it had any charm or ambiance. It had only desolation to recommend it to Kubrick and storm-downed trees across the lonely highway to recommend it to the X-Files division.

***

It was the kind of hotel you wouldn’t even have an affair at because it was too depressing to be salacious.

It was the kind of hotel where the homeless lived by the week, where alcoholics were subsumed, where mid-level corporate managers in short-sleeved button downs killed themselves. There was cheap wood paneling, shag carpet, and a desk clerk named Rabbit.

Rabbit smelled of Marlboros and Olde English 800. Mulder bet there was an El Camino, lovingly cared for, under a tarp next to a double-wide.

Mulder was a snob at times.

“We got a room each for you and your pretty niece,” Rabbit said, winking at Scully like he was Tom Jones in Vegas. “Unless….?”

Scully slapped down her badge like a royal flush, also in Vegas.

“Room each,” she said, tight-lipped and terse.

Rabbit folded.

***

Mulder found the piano when they were hunting for a laundry room. It was in a forlorn, moth-eaten event hall with swags of sun-faded velour curtains; cobwebs frosted with neglected dust.

He sat down at the decrepit thing, white keys like a smoker’s teeth, and he limbered his fingers. There was a candelabra on the top, a sad object filled with half-melted candles the color of old bones.

Scully lit the candles with the Zippo she’d carried since the Apalachicola National Forest. “You don’t play, Mulder.” She paused, cocked her head. “Or do you? Fox Mulder, do you play the piano too?”

He had the stab of jealousy that he always had about Ed Jerse. Ed got her to ink her body after a few hours, and she didn’t know he’d taken fucking piano lessons from 4 to 17.

He played her Clara Schumann’s Piano Concerto even though he knew she wouldn’t recognize it. He played it because Scully and Clara might have been friends.

Scully’s mouth was a blooming peony as she watched him, eyes the Star of Bethlehem. Scully watched him like oysters watch the tide.

���Agent Scully is already in love,” he heard again, and played as though he were auditioning for Julliard.

***

Scully went to the hallway in the thundering dark. The storm gods had been aroused and the night was such a lonely place, especially by flashlight. A cold Coke would be something to do, at least. Something to roll between her palms.

He thought the same - a Lipton iced tea in hand.

“Hi,” she said, looking abashed. “The thunder was -“

“The storm,” he said, at the same time.

They smiled. They looked away.

There was nothing else, there was nothing, just the shapeless silken lines of her pajamas and the foxy silk of her hair and the smiling Cheshire Cat slice of a waxing moon.

***

The moon was so bright and the universe was so big and forever is a long, long time to be alive and alone.

***

She followed him so she could leave later, he knew that. He’d learned her the way he learned everything - intensely and entirely and in a way that consumed him, piece by piece.

He made love to her like an acolyte at a shrine. He made love to her the way flowers make love to the sun.

Fish do not know they are in water.

***

He felt her stir at 3 AM. “Scully,” he breathed, a prayer hastily invoked.

“I didn’t mean to wake you, I-“

He heard her blushing, somehow, in the dark. He heard the blood rush to her good cheekbones, to her beautiful, lopsided mouth. Her capillaries plumped, lush with hot blood. Everywhere, everywhere.

“Please,” he said. “Scully don’t.”

Scully froze, her shoulder blades tensed, ready to unfurl. Ready to let her fly. “It wasn’t-“

He touched her spine like the Western Wall. He touched her spine like a rosary.

***

She never unmade her hotel bed and she didn’t care who knew it and she knew he was jealous of Ed or maybe Padgett and she was jealous of Diana and possibly Phoebe but Fox Mulder had a mouth like the last ripe plum in October. Fox Mulder kissed her throat like a man in the desert kisses an oasis.

They stayed three nights, for the storm and then the pancakes and then the burnt-orange solitude.

Mulder’s fingers were restless and searching and eternally wanting someplace firm to settle. He kissed her by Bolero and he made love to her by Giazotro and he fucked her to Bizet.

Scully had learned Hot Cross Buns on a keyboard, Scully had learned the recorder in 4th grade. She had learned from Mulder that money can’t buy you happiness, but it can buy opportunities and access and mitigate risk.

She started dressing like she’d been raised with it - silk lingerie and a good stylist and Chanel Brown Sugar lipstick. She saw the way society responded and doubled down. Her heels were high and thin and clicked like distant gunshots.

***

She cupped her hand over his at the steering wheel. He had beautiful hands, the color of graham crackers, with bones from an anatomy text. If she could draw she would draw them, and then his strange mossy eyes and the way his lips kissed themselves.

She would draw his back and she would laugh and say “Fox Mulder, you vain thing.”

And then, because she could, she would drag him on top of her. His body was hot and heavy and dangerous and safe.

***

Her hand cupped his and it was an eggshell, so tiny and pale and fragile. He wanted to kiss her little white knuckles and say I love you, I love you.

He wanted to crush her house-sparrow bones into a powder and drink them.

***

They drove into the east, into the east, and they were tenderly, tremulously, alive

[x-files-fics]

(if you are accepting prompts!) what iffffff you wrote a soft gentle little fic in which Scully has a spectacularly unlovely head cold and after some grouching Mulder looks after her? There are so many moments of peril on x files that sometimes it’s nice when the enemy is just a simple rhinovirus, lol.

He doesn’t even attempt to make it himself. Calls ahead to Loeb’s with his order, which he accepts from a stylish young Mexican man whose name tag reads Pierre.

“A sheynem dank,” Mulder says, echoing the grandmother who called Samantha a shaineh maideleh.

Pierre nods. “Bitte, baby,” he says. “De nada.”

***

Mulder clomps up her stairs with Puritan determination. He feels that since he did not cook the food himself he must exert some other effort for it. His soul is at eternal war with itself.

He doesn’t knock; lets himself in with the Home Depot key Scully had made for him around the time that Tooms wanted into her pants for all the wrong reasons. It sticks a little still, even after so many years. He’s rarely had to use it - when aren’t they together?

A hacking noise from her bedroom, something wet being coughed. Spat.

Mulder helps himself to a bowl, a plate, a spoon.

“I’b arbed,” she rasps from down the hall. “I’b a Federal Agent.”

“Don’t shoot,” Mulder calls back, hunting down a napkin. “I am a poor boy from a poor family.” Her mother wears Revlon and his wears Guerlain.

He tips some soup and two of the matzo balls into a bowl, wedges one of the challah rolls next to it. He puts the leftovers in the fridge.

Mulder carries the plate down the hall, the nearly-full bowl sloshing dangerously atop.

He enters Scully’s bedroom. She’s been upgrading over the past couple of years, replacing her IKEA basics with good secondhand finds in cherry and walnut. The candle she’s lit smells like white flowers with thick, creamy petals.

Scully is tucked into bed like an Austen heroine, all delicate pallor and genteel unhappiness. Her nose is pink-tipped and raw, hair in a ponytail. She’s wearing a gray sweatshirt instead of her usual pajamas.

Mulder sets the food down on her nightstand, next to a vase of dried roses and her Yaqui slide holster. A speed loader. There’s a well-framed Monet print over the bed.

Pat Conroy’s Beach Music is open face down on her lap, surrounded by crumpled tissues. She doesn’t look happy to see him, her purple-shadowed eyes narrowing a bit.

“Go away,” she says. Sneezes.

“Brought you some soup,” he says, unnecessarily. Points at it, also unnecessarily.

“Bulder,” she sniffs. “Go hobe. I don’t like being fussed over. I hab a cold, dot Ebola.”

“Too bad,” he says. “I’m going to. Do you have Vick’s Vapor Rub? You really should have Vick’s Vapor Rub.”

She closes her eyes. Pinches the bridge of her nose, centering herself. “It’s dot your fault I’b sick,” she says, looking back over at him after a moment.

“I dragged you into the woods again. You fell down a hole full of corpses! You’ve been in remission for like…twenty minutes.” He jabs the spoon at her.

She rolls her eyes. “You don’t get a cold frob being in the woods. Or frob being chilly. You get a cold frob a virus.”

He feigns outrage. “Excuse me, but are you contradicting noted excellent mother-slash-world-class-epidemiologist Doctor Teena Mulder MD?”

This sends Scully into a flurry of coughing. She swats at him in annoyance. “Ugh,” she says at last. “You see why I can’t hab you here, you’re a lousy durse.”

Mulder takes her hand, pale as a kid glove. He shoves the spoon into it, squeezes her fingers about the handle. “Eat the soup or I’m calling your mom. I’m calling BILL.”

She narrows her eyes again. “You wouldn’t.”

“I think you’re well aware that I’m capable of being overly dramatic when the wind is southerly and the fancy strikes.” He holds the plate before her like an offering to a goddess.

Scully considers him. “You did get us out ob the teabwork sebidar,” she observes. “Techdically.”

“I did,” he agrees.

“You bade be sing,” she adds. Reproachful.

He grins. “The angels all were singing out of tune, And hoarse with having little else to do, Excepting to wind up the sun and moon, Or curb a runaway young star or two.”

Scully looks at the spoon in her hand for the first time, as though wondering how it got there.

“Byron,” she says, a little smile. She picks up the roll, examines it. Peers at the soup. Sneezes again. “Mad, bad, and dangerous to know.”

“Caroline Lamb,”Mulder replies. He doesn’t point out that Caroline Lamb had been Byron’s lover, that she’d sent him a clipping of her pubic hair in the mail. He certainly doesn’t think of the juncture between Scully’s thighs at all, whether it matches the drapes, whether it tastes like kettle corn and Vineyard whitecaps in July. Lobster rolls and saltwater taffy.

He’d meant it, about the sleeping bag. He wishes there had been a sleeping bag and he is so, so grateful there was no sleeping bag.

Scully sniffles again, defeated. “You got be batzo ball soup?”

He thumbs an escaped tendril of hair back from the sweep of her extraordinary cheekbone.

“I did,” he murmurs back. He sets the plate down between them. He peels the roll open, yeasty and fragrant, and dunks it into the golden broth.

He raises it to her mouth.

Scully sucks at it, draws it past her lips. She bites. Chews, swallows. She holds his eyes with hers. She catches an escaped droplet with her tongue.

“Good,” she mumbles. Watches him dip the dry part back into the bowl. “Thank you.”

He feeds her another bite. Her mouth opens like a snapdragon, like an oyster in the tide. She drops her gaze this time. Her guard.

They complete the entire roll this way, and one matzo ball. Silent, slurpy. Scully’s lids droop, her lashes brushing her cheeks.

“Sleepy,” she mumbles, curling onto her side. Her paperback falls to the floor.

Mulder returns the food to the night table. He strokes her hair until she’s out cold, snoring a little. He curls into the bed as well, his nose to hers. He touches her philtrum with his pointer finger. He traces the tender pink whelk of her ear.

They sleep for hours until she coughs awake, gasping, her thin chest heaving. Mulder rubs circles between her scapulae.

“Go hobe,” she says, knees drawn, leaning against his chest. “You deed to sleep.”

He puts his arms around her, drops a kiss on her tangled head. “Okay,” he agrees.

She’s out again in moments. He holds her upright until he drifts off as well.

They sleep until morning. He feeds her soup for breakfast, calls into work with a case of Ebola.

[x-files-fics]

ACTUAL DRABBLE: Clyde Bruckman’s

The dog is an affront to wolves everywhere. Proof that God does indeed play dice with the universe. A paean to human arrogance.

Scully cups the ratty little face in her elegant hands.

Mulder grimaces in a way that could generously be interpreted as a smile, if one had only read about humans in books.

“Queequeg,” Scully murmurs.

Mulder knows that the dog has not objected to the taste of human flesh. Mulder knows he will tolerate the stupid dog because she loves it. Mulder knows Bruckman might have been Diogenes’s honest man.

“He’s a great dog,” Mulder lies, unrepentant

[x-files-fics]

Can I whine for more Fisher King??

She’s back to work and they look at her in hushed voices somehow; look at her like she’s on the slab.

“I’m fine,” she says over the drone of a Stryker and the crisp pop of a skull key. Over breadknifed livers and the fibrous wrap of pericardium.

Simone Richards catches her smoking in the parking bay. “Dana!” she admonishes.

Dana passes her the cigarette and Simone takes a long, appraising drag.

***

Mulder makes love to her the way Yo-Yo Ma plays a cello; a passionate blend of favorite standards and eclectic novelties. A virtuoso performance to an appreciative audience of one. He does not think she is damaged.

“Mulder,” she mumbles against his manubrium. Into the warm rebar of his clavicle. She bites at it with her white little teeth, her breasts pressed to him like grapes being crushed for wine.

Later, when he’s asleep on his sueded belly and the cats are curled around his head, she gazes at his spine. We are so vulnerable, she thinks, touching his jugular. His carotid. Forget exoskeletons - we have no fur or feathers or claws or venom. Our bite is relatively weak. Our newborns are pathetic.

Only a poorly understood but generally-accepted-as superior brain. Only an ability to cook food, to outlast our prey. Even ravens make tools.

She falls asleep without meaning to. She dreams of white and white and white, of blurry-faced women, of Duane Barry crowing triumphant to the indifferent stars.

***

They have bagels in a crowded little spot where the walls are bare and the ambiance is terrible. The bagels are teetering on a Michelin star.

“I think we should break up,” he says, wisdom-tooth-deep into chive cream cheese. “Dana, it doesn’t end here. Not with what I do.”

She opens her eyes wide, appalled. “Oh, Fox! Solving crimes! Is…is it dangerous?” She throws a caper at him, rolling her eyes.

He scowls. “I’m serious. What happened with Tooms, with Barry. I don’t want this for you.”

“I don’t want it for me either, come to that,” she remarks. “But I’m willing to risk it.”

He furrows his brows. “Why?”

Idiot, she thinks. Fucking idiot. She would like to talk to the various people who did such a number on him that a man this good looking and intelligent is somehow this insecure. Just talk at first, anyway.

“Because your parents are rich and I have med school loans still,” she says at last. “So my plan is to marry you, kill you, and live in luxury for the rest of my days.”

He looks at her for a long time.

She sips her coffee. She eats an olive from his plate.

“Oh,” he says finally. “That’s all right, then.”

[x-files-fics]

the x files season 7 ficlet, 500 words, angst

I’m bad at titles. I guess this falls under “If Mulder’s brain disease was real, why did he hide it from Scully?”

Note: I don’t really have an opinion about Mulder’s Brain Disease as a plot point; treat this as canon-adjacent or canon-divergent as it suits you.

It is hopeless, the doctors say, hopeless, his contacts agree, and he tries and tries to find his own solution - he will not give up - but hopeless is all he finds. They've seen so much, survived so much, he has put her through so much, and coming to the other side of all things to this place that is theirs is so new. No one ever said life was fair.

He remembers what it was to watch her dying. The helplessness, the anger, the desperation as a placeholder for soul-rending despair yet to come. He doesn't want that for her. He doesn't want her scouring journals, sleeping in labs, crying in the shower where she thinks he cannot hear.

She'll be furious when she finds out, he knows; she'll be furious and hurt and might never forgive him. But if this is all they have, he wants to make it count. Whether she suffers a long, drawn out goodbye over the space of months or whether she's furious for the space of weeks or days, he wants her to have something to look back on. He wants to leave her with good memories, happy memories. Something more than bitter regret for how long they took in getting here.

And so he tells her not to worry. To read her journals, work on her manuscripts. Dine with her mother. I'll check it out, he says, and I’ll call you if it's worth our time. And he does. Week after week, he does. He picks cases that are interesting, mysterious. Things that will tease at their shared curiosity and challenge their shared intellect. Things that will let them laugh, and explore, and have fun in that easy way they've so rarely experienced since their first year, since he and Deep Throat drew her into the Syndicate's crosshairs and loss became the third constant companion in their partnership.

He takes her to Huntington Beach, to Smith Mountain Lake, the Shedd Aquarium, a side trip to Nashville and some truly outstanding chicken. He finds reasons to take her west, and if he accidentally drives a little too far south down I-5 while she's napping and lands them in spitting distance of San Diego, well, it'd be a shame to waste the serendipity of an unexpected lunch with her sister-in-law and nephew. He can always finish the paperwork and meet her after.

He kisses her under the same stars in a dozen different states and watches her bloom, no longer the green and puppyfat kid from Quantico but once again graced with her easy smiles and goofy laugh. He takes a picture or two for Maggie, so that when it's all over and he breaks her daughter's heart, she'll know he did his best, that it wasn't all a waste, that for a while, he made their girl happy.

She'll be furious when she finds out, and he feels terribly guilty, but guilt is not a new companion, and her smile could rival the sun.

[x-files-fics]

22 and 27 together from the prompt list perhaps 👀

'Send me a number and I'll attempt to write an early mulder/scully drabble in less than 1,000 words <333' (prompt list / og post here!)

22. playful teasing

27. sharing an umbrella in the rain, or a coat/blanket in the cold

set season 3 ish (ft hints to modern day hehe) - fluff - lil bit of crack??? perhaps😌 - no spoilers

“Hey, Scully,” Mulder said, turning the radio down. “You ever play an instrument?”

Scully’s head lulled against the headrest of the passenger seat as she turned her attention to her partner. She was quietly humming along to the radio before he cut her performance short, and had been gazing out upon the forest beside them, marvelling at the stillness of the trees and admiring the occasional wildlife that would step out into their moonlit spotlight.

He had pulled her back to reality, she realised, as she had been miles away in her thoughts. She didn’t mind, though. Luckily for Scully the view either side of her tonight was rather a beautiful one, not that she’d ever dare admit it.

“My aunt taught me a little piano when I was about 9, 10. Simple melodies, but I never stuck at it.” She gave him a lazy smile, wondering if there was a point to his question, or if he was simply intrigued at the idea of her being a secret musical prodigy.

“It’s probably a good thing you didn’t, imagine how upset you’d have been when you got older and realised you still couldn’t reach the pedals.” He said very matter of factly, casually picking some lint from his jacket.

A well deserved signature eye roll was all she could respond with at first.

“What about you, Mulder, ever play an instrument?”

Mulder looked at her again with a small curl of his lips. He loved stakeouts with Scully. There always seemed to be such a calm energy within their conversations - perhaps the quiet night atmosphere coaxed the ease out of them. Or perhaps when cannibalistic satanic cults, or something of that variety, weren’t threatening their lives more than the inevitable, this was just what normal, everyday conversations between them felt like. Sure, they’d had plenty of relaxed conversations in between all the running-for-your-life moments, but there was something about ‘stakeout talk’ that felt especially effortless.

“Nope,” he said, eyes focussed on the house they were surveilling, but mind focussed solely on her; on them. “Never played an instrument. Samantha took up the clarinet for a while, which I’m sure you can imagine was just joyous for me.” He scoffed a laugh, remembering fondly the screeching sounds of the instrument echoing through the living room every Wednesday. He distinctly remembers, even clearer so, the time he stuffed one of her tiny teddies inside of it as a sign of protest. “She got better at least, but God, she was hopeless at it. Didn’t let it stop her though. A good quality to have I suppose, she certainly wasn’t a quitter.”

Scully smiled, ‘like brother like sister.’

“But no, no instruments for me,” he said with a yawn. “Always wanted to learn the guitar, though.”

Scully gave him a light nod in silent approval, in impressed agreement. She could totally see it.

Mulder was suddenly reaching between their seats to the back, pulling out a square, burgundy blanket, all the while rambling on: “I always loved the sound of it. The guitar is raw, Scully. It feels…it feels grounded. The sound. Very earthy. Very natural, you know? If there was a soundtrack for earth it would be played on a guitar. Sometimes I think I need that, you know, something to bring me back down to earth for a change.” He expelled a breathy chuckle as he smoothed out the fabric of the blanket that now lay over the pair of them. “Okay, there you go, that should warm you up.”

“How-” Scully’s brows knitted together loosely, mirroring the fabric on her lap. “How did you know I was cold?”

“Scully, you’ve been running your hands over your thighs and embracing yourself like you’re touch-starved, I don’t exactly have to be a profiler to see you’re more than a little chilly.”

With a stifled smile, Scully nodded her thanks, curling up a little under the fabric.

“You know, a guitar is so fitting for you.” Scully said, breaking their comfortable silence, “Weirdly perfect, actually.”

“You mean it’s a weirdly perfect fit, or I’m just weirdly perfect?” Mulder teased, shooting her a wink.

Scully simply looked back at him, face strong and unchanging. “Perfectly weird, more like.”

“Watch it, Scully, or you’ll lose your blanket privileges.”

“You should do it,” she continued after a beat. “You should learn guitar. Might be a nice hobby. God knows you need one,” she thought, but decided not to add. “Who knows, Mulder, maybe you’ll get really good, quit the FBI and start an alien rock band with one of those striking one word names like ‘Encounter’ or ‘Invasion.’”

“I’d call my fans the U-F-Hoes.”

“Oh, God, Mulder.” Scully grimaced in judgement, but couldn’t help the small laugh that followed.

Flashing her a confident smirk, he rested his elbow onto the back of her seat. “Would you come on the road with me, Scully? Be my groupie?”

“One, I’m ignoring that last part. Two, I probably wouldn’t plan to, Mulder, no, but I’ve known you- known us long enough now, that by some stroke of misfortune it wouldn’t surprise me if I ended up with you on the journey.”

Silence fell upon them for a soft second, breaths shallowing if only a little, until their gaze was shattered by Mulder suddenly clambering his way to the back seat of the car, taking the blanket with him.

“What- What are you doing?” she asked, stripped bare from her knitted embrace.

“Blanket’s not big enough to cover us both in the front, I could see it kept slipping off your thigh there.”

“Why were you looking at my thigh?” Scully pressed, an amused smirk flooding her features. “Sounds like you wanna be my groupie.”

“Just come here,” he deflected.

After a few seconds, gazes stuck on repeat in a silent ‘yes/no’ battle, Scully surrendered, exhaling in defeat.

Carefully she climbed over to join him, his hand finding her waist to support her, and she shuffled under the blanket next to him.

It wasn’t hard to spot her slight awkwardness about the situation.

“Hey, you don’t know how lucky you are, Scully. Do you know how many U-F-Hoes would kill to be this close to the lead guitarist of Muldergiest?”

“Oh brother,” she half whispered. “Keep it up Mulder and the only thing you’ll be close to is the other side of that door.”

“Oh she bites, she stings.”

“She’s also stealing this blanket for the foreseeable future,” she added, melting further into the blanket, and into his side.

Mulder shook his head in faux disappointment. “You’re meant to fight crimes, g-woman, not commit them. You’re going to give Muldergeist a bad rap.”

Scully rolled her eyes for what felt like the hundredth time tonight as she looked up at him.

In all his galling glory, the truth was, he could really do with a little fine tuning. Lucky for him, he had someone in his life that didn’t all mind the dissonance.

The other truth was that his blanket could be found residing on said someone's bed for years after. Now, it can now be found in a room with double the hosts, in a space where love has permeated for years, or, on occasion, draped around the shoulders of a certain groupie, wine in hand, as she listens to the intricate melodies played on a simple six string guitar.

//

Thank you @contrivedcoincidences6 for the prompt! These prompts always seem to end up being like side characters in these pieces instead of the main focus of the story lollll, but I hope I got enough of them in there for you!! I hope you enjoyed it <3

[x-files-fics]

*winks* hit me with an ultimate combo of prompts 2+3+5 ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

'Send me a number and I'll attempt to write an early mulder/scully drabble in less than 1,000 words <333' (prompt list / og post here!)

2. eye contact across a crowded room

3. exchanging secret smiles

5. admiring them from afar

set season 3 ish - fluff - no spoilers

“Stay here and keep an eye out for the other guy, for Rogers, he’s gotta show at some point,” Scully ordered, talking more at Muder than to him in an attempt to not draw too much attention. “I’m gonna stay hot on Derekson before we lose him again, the man moves like a goddamn whippet.”

‘Stay hot inedeed,’ Mulder couldn’t help but think as he watched her leave and make her way through the crowd, subtly inching her way towards their prime suspect on the other side of the pool. He knew his eyes should be scanning the retreat for their second suspect, but instead he found them transfixed on one ‘Mrs N. Y. Koops’ as the corporate retreat guest list would reveal Scully’s undercover alias to be. Once she was out of ear shot, Mulder exhaled with a low whistle, she looked truly breathtaking.

Neither agent was dressed to the nines, per se, but their poolside looks were nothing short of fashionable, as they had been for the past 3 days of working undercover here at the retreat.

Mulder was in a crisp, slightly baggy white t-shirt tucked loosely into some pale cuffed jeans. His black canvas belt hung lazily out the remaining hoops, matching in colour to his sandals.

Scully’s ankle length red floral skirt cinched deliciously at her waist, and she donned a white crop top that showed a generous amount of skin whilst still being deemed modest. Then there was her worn red cap. Well, his worn red cap, actually. Something about that knowledge made him tingle.

Overall, she looked dangerously domestic.

He watched as she stopped a few feet away from Derekson, grabbing a free drink from a nearby serving tray. She looked back at Mulder and caught his eye, taking a sip from her straw and smiling at him. She raised her glass slightly as a ‘cheers’.

Mulder smiled at that, and shot her a little wink.

As Mulder watched her converse with people around, keeping up appearances, and of course gathering more and more evidence against Derekson and Rogers, the hosts of the retreat, Mulder thought back to their own conversation just a couple of days ago whilst she was doing her makeup in the hotel.

“I'm telling you, Scully, the whole thing smells…”

“Spooky?”

“Spooky. Exactly.”

“Mulder, the guys you want us to find are nothing but practiced con artists, they’re- they’re not-”

“What?”

“...They’re not the spooky aliens you think they are!”

He chuckled to himself, remembering how they laughed together that morning. How they kept referring to Derekson and Rogers as ‘the spooky aliens’ as a playful nickname; how she joked about him not even buying her dinner first as they put on each others fake wedding rings; how she complained about him yet again being the one to choose their alias names:

“How come you get to be Jason and I’m Neila. I’m not even sure that’s a real name, Mulder.”

“It’s pretty! Plus, if I can survive my entire life with Fox, you can make do with Neila for just a few days"

He was promptly brought out of his trance when he found himself near drenched in water, the result of some kids cannonballing in the pool beside him.

His eyes found Scully’s almost immediately, and he shook his head in disapproval when she held her glass up to her lips to stifle her laughter.

The rest of the afternoon was full of stolen moments like that, their gazes a hot laser piercing through the crowded area.

This case was definitely one of their calmer ones, not only because of the relaxing nature of their location, but the severity of the suspected crimes were low, all normalcy considered, and the suspects themselves were of no huge threat. Scully wondered for a second if they were here because Mulder truly believed it could be an X-File, or if it was all some sort of ploy to practically have a little vacation together. Mulder knew it was because of the former, but didn’t deny the latter was a bonus he had definitely taken into consideration.

When Mulder had eventually found Rogers and gathered those final bits of precious information, he had turned to Scully, subtly miming the throw of a dart, which she knew all too well as their little ‘bullseye’ code. Later, Scully had finally cornered the men, handcuffing them both simultaneously with each hand as she read them their rights. Mulder had simply watched in fascination. He wondered if she knew how thorough and brilliant she was at her job…he wondered if she knew how good she looked doing said job right now.

Back at the hotel, with Derekson and Rogers safely tucked away in the local authority's custody, the agents were getting ready to return home. They stood in the bathroom together as Scully combed through her hair and Mulder packed up his toiletries.

“I’m sorry this wasn’t the X-File you’d hoped it to be,” Scully said, offering his reflection a small smile.

“Ah, don’t be. I had fun,“ he replied

“Wow,” Scully said after a beat of silence, before lightly teasing with “not like you to accept a regular old theory, even after it’s proven. You’re usually still full of denial.”

“Sometimes, I guess, you see something from a new angle,” he began, suddenly still, eyes looking straight to hers with a different intensity than they had been all afternoon from across the pool. “You see a new side to something, something that’s always been right in front of you, but you haven’t had the capacity to explore, and then, suddenly, everything sort of falls into place.”

Scully watched him leave, but not before he gave a little double tap to his name tag in suggestion. With brows knitting together in confusion, she looked at herself in the mirror. There in the reflection, her eyes were drawn to her own name tag, Mrs Neila Y. Koops, and it took all her might to bite back her beaming smile as she saw the letters in reverse.

SPOOK .Y ALIEN

“Goddamn you, Mulder.”

//

Thank you @wikluk for the prompts! I feel this story didn't end up completely focussing on the prompts you gave, but they're all in there!! I hope you enjoyed🙏

[x-files-fics]

#1 ☺️

'Send me a number and I'll attempt to write an early mulder/scully drabble in less than 1,000 words <333' (prompt list / og post here!)

1. accidental hand touching

set very early season 1 - fluff - no spoilers

"So tell me, Scully," Mulder concluded, gesturing wildly to the street map pinned to the wall before them. "How do we have two witnesses AND legitimate store footage placing Sarah Knight here, but an entire classroom of students placing her here, halfway across the state, at the exact same time?"

Mulder began pacing, absolutely bewildered. Luckily, it was still early enough into the case that the buzz of excitement and anticipation still reigned supreme within him.

Their polar opposite attitudes were pulling recklessly to both ends of the spectrum today, as Scully remained with feet practically glued to the floor beneath her.

Perfect opposites, in so many ways.

Her arms were folded tightly across her chest as she looked up at the paper, pondering, questioning.

"I don't know, Mulder, I'm kind of at a loss here. But with the secret twin theory now disproven, the footage we have still holds greater power over the forty students’ claims."

Mulder walked back to her, his energy seemingly growing impossibly stronger with each stride. “Forty students, Scully. Four, zero. How do you get that many people to lie for one person, what could they have possibly been offered, or bribed with?”

She smiled lightly at his flustered face, momentarily tuning out of his enthusiastic monologue. It wasn’t that she didn’t care to listen, far from it, it was more so that she was suddenly, so utterly enthralled by his pure passion.

She was passionate too, of course, she just found how different that feeling portrayed itself within the pair of them so deeply fascinating.

Perfect opposites.

She only caught the last of what he said when he went to touch her bicep, his fingers landing upon the ones of hers poking out from under her still crossed arms.

“The art of suggestion, Scully, evidence shows that Sarah is capable of putting thoughts into peoples heads and making them believe it truly happened.”

For a moment, Scully didn’t respond, her mind adjusting back into focus.

Mulder was suddenly silent, staring at her as he awaited her response. Their gaze was strong and downright unyielding, pulled together like a magnet, but their hands, his left to her right, connected with such gentle collision that she wasn’t even sure if he was still touching her anymore.

Her eyes confirmed it true when she briefly looked down at where they were in fact still connected, before flicking her eyes back up to meet his again.

His eyes copied her journey, and Mulder sheepishly lifted his hand up a few centimetres upon realisation, splaying his fingers in a wordless apology. He then briefly lowered it back down and awkwardly patted her hand a couple of times with an unreadable expression.

For a second, the pair stood looking back at the sheet in silence before huffing a laugh in unison at their juvenile awkwardness towards the situation.

The silence returned promptly as both seemed to have completely lost their train of thought, not even sure what they were talking about beforehand. Bewildered, as if what they weren't looking directly at the source of their previous conversation.

Suddenly, before Scully could process what was happening, Mulder grabbed her hand with both of his, lifting it close to his face as he ran his thumbs gently over her knuckles, staring with intent. “What moisturizer do you use?”

Scully laughed at that, loud and genuine. Any tension, regardless of how small it was, promptly vanished. His decision to simply address the light awkwardness where she would have let it fester a smart, and appreciated idea.

Perfect opposites.

“Is this what rummaging around in the obfuscous depths of cadavers all day does to the hands?” he chuckled, continuing to elict playful giggles from her too.

“Keeps ‘em young.” Scully responded, placing her other hand over his and giving him a light squeeze.

With a small nod and a stifled smile, she slid her hands away from his, turning to walk back to his desk to pull up a chair, deciding to re-read the case file again.

Continuing to face the wall for a second, Mulder smiled to himself.

Something told him having someone incessantly fighting his every thought and theory wasn’t going to be as painful as he had once thought.

In fact, he thought quite the opposite.

//

Thank you @thatfragilecapricorn30 for the prompt! This was super fun to write 🫶