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scullydubois · 3 years

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Only the Light: Ch. 21

Hello, here is my ‘I didn’t plan for updates to take two weeks, but it always works out to two weeks’ post, right on time. Almost finished with this journey, thank you for sticking around <3

As Mulder helps care for his ill partner and her child, he enlists the Lone Gunmen to investigate the circumstances surrounding Scully's diagnosis. He and Melissa pay a visit to the three men, then Mulder gets an unwanted surprise back at apartment 42.

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As Scully’s world has shrunk, the amount of love in it has grown. This is small consolation for the hell she’s enduring, but it is the only antidote. She realizes this now that she’s staring down the abyss: all the knowledge in the world won’t save you, and wealth is nothing but a false comfort. What will live on are the parts of herself she’s left with others. Her goal for her remaining time, however long that may be, is to hold tight to those she loves...not to slip away until her heart stops beating.

This is hard when she already feels like less of herself. She’s doing chemo twice a week at Georgetown, and it’s brutal. She knew it would be...her only other choice is to get that gravestone of hers re-engraved.

Meanwhile, Mulder pushed all other work aside to get in contact with the Mufon women. It only took him one day to do so, but Scully doesn’t know that, and for now, she doesn’t need to know. He’s keeping what he’s learned so far to himself...Betsy Hagopian is dead and has been since shortly after Scully saw her. Penny Northern is sick and not responding to treatment. A handful of other women, abductees like Scully, have developed rare cancers too.

It’s not something he knows how to talk about, such despondency. His world has always hinged on hope. That’s what his work on the X-Files is to him, one big leap of faith toward his sister. Or was, before Scully came along. It’s not that she diverted him from Samantha...no, she turned a very personal quest into something larger than him. Or her, or any one person they worked with. She pared it down to its core value, its overarching mission: the truth. Because the truth may hurt at first, but given time, it heals. And it is the only path to healing. This is what he’s learned from her. And now, he’s got to do everything he can to pass the revitalized world she’s shown him onto her.

The arrangement falls into place without any friction: Missy handles the chemo run on Monday mornings, and Mulder leaves work early on Thursdays. Emily spends Mondays with her grandma, and Thursdays too when Missy works the night shift.

Thursdays become something of a spiritual day for Mulder. The hours of approximately 3-10pm are spent doting on his partner--in her apartment, and then his car, then the hospital and his car again, and finally, back to her apartment. Mama Scully brings Emily back around eight, and if Missy’s not home, Mulder gets the honor of the bedtime ritual. The domesticity of it all tethers him to reality, maybe for the first time in his life. He’d give anything to change the circumstances, but it’s humbling to feel--for once--that he belongs on Earth.

It is on one of these Thursday evenings that Mulder could swear he feels his whole life trailing behind him, leading him to the present. The end of the year is creeping up in its usual fashion, which means the outside world is a blanket of darkness before the stoves of countless suburban homes have even been started. Having settled her comfortably into bed with a pile of pillows, Mulder carries his partner a glass of water and pulls the wastebasket to her side; this is their routine now.

“You doing okay?” he asks, lingering as she takes a sip of water. It will soon be time to make himself scarce so she can sleep.

She nods, gurgles a garbled affirmation. Mulder turns to go, and her heart leaps to her throat. “Will you stay?” she spews, embarrassed by her need.

“Of course.” She’s unaware, apparently, that when he leaves it’s for her, not him. He approaches her bedside, lowers himself carefully beside her knees. “Any particular reason?” he murmurs, examining the sunken spaces beneath her eyes.

“I just...wanted to talk to you,” she says, and Mulder thinks there might be a bit more color in her cheeks than there was yesterday.

“Okay.” He leans in and sweeps a strand of hair off her forehead so lightly that Scully doesn’t even feel it. She’s apprehensive about being touched these days, and he has taken this knowledge to heart. She is grateful, and to show the extent of this feeling, she strokes his hand, allows him to take hers in his. He runs his thumb over each finger as they continue.

He wants to ask what she’s thinking about, what it is that has so graciously extended his stay in this room. But he knows that she’ll get to it, that she has nothing to keep from him now.

There’s a sincere serenity on her face that he’s never seen. And after a minute or two, she begins. “I didn’t think it could happen--and it certainly doesn’t make much sense-- but right now, I am happier than I have ever been.”

A string on Mulder’s heart, tightened to its prime, bursts without warning.

She caresses the back of his head. “It’s so trivial, Mulder. So much of what we call life isn’t living at all. Or at least not the important kind.”

He lifts his gaze, eye contact conveying more than he could with words.

“But I’ve thought about the parts of my life that are living, and all of them, in some way, come back to you.”

Mulder shakes his head, feeling too flattered. “That’s not true…”

“You can believe whatever you need to,” she whispers, “but it is the truth, and I am eternally grateful that you happened to me.”

He tries to cough away some tears, which works about a quarter as well as he hoped it would. “Hold on, little lady.” He pats her hand in response to her smile. “I think you happened to me.”

Scully’s chest flutters in laughter. “Did I?” These subtle things have always been so important to them.

“You walked into my office, remember.”

“Well, I guess it would depend on who changed the most due to the other’s influence then,” she reasons.

Mulder just gives her a look.

She smirks. “Okay, so maybe I happened to you, but you…” she chews her lip, and this could be any other day of any other year if she weren’t bedridden. She picks out her words-- “You completed me.”

Mulder spills forward, finding his footing and spinning into the middle of the room. “Holy fuck Scully, are you trying to kill me?”

“We’ve been searching for the truth. That’s the truth, Mulder. I wanted you to know.”

He sets his jaw. He won’t burst into tears in front of her, not when she has all the reason to cry and yet has been so strong.

“You should get some sleep,” he tells her, hoping to expedite his exit from the room.

“I will. And it’s okay to be sad, but not for me. My life is as whole as ever.”

He nods, though he doesn’t agree (what’s new?). He knew Samantha for eight years and has been sad for twenty. He’s known Scully for half that--so he gets at least a decade of mourning.

“Sweet dreams,” he says, resting his hands on the door frame. “I’ll bring Emily in when she gets here.”

“Okay.” She closes her eyes, smiles. “Love you.”

“Love you too, DKS.” He blows a kiss and slips out, heat flooding to his face. This is the first time she’s said that unprompted, and is that what the threat of imminent death does to you? Pries you open?

He wonders. Whose love is saving who?

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The primetime line-up is flickering over the television when Mama Scully arrives with Emily, passing her granddaughter to Mulder like the family heirloom she is. They exchange a few words in short breaths, reserving the air supply for their dear Dana. Mama Scully agrees to come see her daughter this weekend rather than interrupt her much-needed rest now, and Mulder is suddenly single parent-slash-babysitter; the specifics elude him.

Perfumed with baby powder from her grandmother’s overly enthusiastic hand, Mulder concludes that Em needs neither bathing nor changing. She doesn’t seem very keen on sleep either, seeing as how her little voice keeps calling out Moldy! and her little fists clobber his shoulders. Still, he will keep his promise. He carries her into the room she shares with her mother, stepping lightly lest the floorboards creak.

As he circles the bed to lay the child beside her sleeping mother, he winces at the mess in the trash can. Good thing he moved it into place though Scully had seemed okay. He hadn’t heard any retching, and it saddens him that he wasn’t there to hold her hair back. He settles Em into place, makes a mental note to rinse the can on his way out.

Her characteristically light sleep lightened further by her illness, Scully stirs from the shift of Emily’s weight against the mattress. She rolls toward the free side and flutters her eyelids open. Her smile is reflexive.

“Hello baby girl,” she purrs. She lays a hand against her daughter’s polka-dotted onesie. “Did you have a good day with Grandma?”

Emily answers with some fluttery babbling and gropes for her mother’s nose.

“I don’t think she’s very tired,” Mulder remarks, hands in his pockets. He smirks. “We should really find out what your mother feeds her.”

Scully pulls her lips into a grin, exhibiting a great deal more effort than she did just moments before. She blinks, rubs her eyes, and seems to go out of the world for a second. Then she sets her gaze on Mulder and speaks dreamily--”Will you tell us a bedtime story?”

“Oh!” Mulder scratches his chin, having expected his dismissal. “Do you think that would help…?”

Scully presses her head into the pillow. “I’m not gonna be able to fall back asleep until she does.”

That is a yes, served with some condescension.

“Okay, well, let me think.” He perches on the side of the bed. “Regrettably, I did not get my degree in bedtime stories.”

“Just say what you know,” Scully mumbles. “We’re the only ones listening, and the goal is to put us to sleep.”

“I hope that’s not a comment on my conversational skills,” he teases, smoothing the sheets.

Again, there’s a look of otherworldliness from his partner. She is somewhere else.

“Go on, tell us a story,” she hums, her surprising lack of impatience attributable to an equal lack of wakefulness.

“Let’s see…” He stretches out, perching on his elbow by Scully’s feet like she did in the first motel they ever stayed in. Emily sits herself up and grasps for him. He laughs, lets her latch onto his fingers.

“There once was a little girl who loved horses and bugging her brother,” he begins. “Now, I’m sure she sounds like just about any little girl out there, but I promise, she was as unique as they come.”

Scully closes her eyes and tilts her head back to listen.

“She always said she wanted to be a butterfly when she grew up so she could spread her wings and fly. And her parents would scoff and tell her that would never be possible, but she believed. She believed it would happen.”

Emily babbles along, adding her own colorful commentary.

“I know, I know right?” Mulder muses to the little girl. “The parents were such jerks.”

He tickles Em’s stomach, then remembers that he’s supposed to be helping her go to sleep. He kisses her temple and begins stroking her knee, hoping to achieve a hypnotic rhythm.

“And so one day, this little girl...well, this little girl got to go on an adventure. She left behind her house and her family, and she got to go up to the sky and see the stars, and it was everything she wished for.”

Scully opens her eyes slowly. Mulder’s focus is centered on Emily, who stares up at him with the awe of a museum-goer seeing the Starry Night. It is as if they are the only two in the room, and this gives Scully great comfort, for she can imagine them having a life after she is gone.

“The girl’s family was sad because they didn’t know where she went. The girl’s brother missed her the most, but it was okay because the girl was happy. She got to fly through the sky like a bird or a plane, and she achieved the dream that her parents thought would never come true.”

Em’s breathing begins to slow into sleep. And thank god, cause he’s running out of story to tell.

“Lay down, little girl.” He guides her onto her back so she can drift off without difficulty, then clears his throat softly.

“Some say that if you see a light in the night sky, that’s this little girl, floating among the stars, living her dream. And her brother, well, he’s pretty fond of that thought. He just wants her to be happy.”

Silence falls over the room like a throbbing sensation of unknown origin. Emily’s eyelids struggle between open and closed, and Mulder knows she will soon be out. Scully’s baby blues, meanwhile, peer at him with such unflinching intensity that he suspects she has fallen asleep like that. It is haunting, but it becomes much less so when she blinks and he realizes that she’s looking at him, that she heard the whole story.

“Is that what you wanted?” he whispers, half expecting her not to answer.

“It was beautiful, Mulder. Samantha lives on.”

He smiles from his eyes...oh, of course it was obvious, his little tribute to his sister. Scully said to work from what he knew, and this myth is something he’s used to keep himself going since his family realized that there would be no happy reunion with Sam. He’s happy to share his fantasy; such escapes are needed now.

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Melissa’s heart leaps when she opens the apartment door to an empty living room. The TV drones out its slapstick laugh track, contributing to the ominous atmosphere. She’d expect to see Mulder taking up a restless refuge on the couch, or maybe sneaking a late night snack to Em. Her sister should be fast asleep by now, her little world able to slacken its hold on her. Unless she is no longer afforded such luxury…

Missy rushes toward Dana’s bedroom, her purse still on her shoulder. In the doorway she slows as her eyes adjust to the lack of light. And thank goodness because three silhouettes catch her eye; a medium one buried under the covers, a large one strewn diagonally across the bed, and a small bump barely visible on the far side. A snore of unidentifiable origin is the only disturbance. Missy smiles to herself. All the missing persons are accounted for and well. She can continue with the blissfully bland routine of her night.

She washes her face and brews some chamomile before settling on the couch with the week’s issues of Mad Magazine and Vogue. Yes, she contains multitudes. She’s up to the Spy vs. Spy comic when Mulder strolls in, yawning.

“I guess my bedtime story was effective.”

“Mmm.” Missy scoots her mug over so he can prop his feet up. Dana hates feet on furniture, but she’s got a child in the house now, so she’ll have to let go of those judgments. “How is she?”

“Oh shit.” She’s jogged something in his memory. “I meant to grab the trash can on the way out.”

Missy knows what this means. “I’ll get it in a second.”

Mulder nods in silent gratitude, relaxes back into his spot. “She seemed livelier than usual when we got home.”

It hits him that he said home, not back. And well, it is Scully’s home. What about him? He sleeps on the couch and he doesn’t pay rent...that’s how he lived at Oxford, though he gets the feeling that it’s not as evergreen at thirty-three years old.

These days, he only goes to his place on Sunday nights to get (what he considers) a week’s worth of clothing--two work outfits (hey, he never really sees anyone but Scully anyway) and one casual outfit that doubles as pajamas. He bought a bunch of fish feeding tablets so all he has to do is drop a few in on Sunday and the fish are set for the week. As far as he can tell, at least. None of them have floated to the top of the tank yet.

“And Em is all good?” Missy confirms.

Mulder nods. “Your mom takes good care of her.”

“I think I know the answer to this, but do you want some tea?” Missy asks, flashing her mug.

“No, no, save it for yourself.”

“Alright.” She flips a page in her magazine. “Just let me know when you’re ready to kick me out. Since I’m kind of in your bed and all.”

“I should be telling you that,” Mulder counters. “You don’t mind me staying here, do you?”

“Not at all.” Missy lays the magazine on the table. “It’s important that you’re around.”

“Really?...For what?”

“For who,” Missy corrects. “Emily needs you to give her balance, and Dana...she just needs you. You’re the safety net under her tightrope.”

“Oh.” This metaphor grounds Mulder better than gravity ever has.

Missy seems to sense this and takes the opportunity to profit off his vulnerability. “So what’s gone on between you?” she asks, an eyebrow arched.

Mulder squints at her. “Huh?”

“I keep waiting for Dana to kick you out or get irritated about you being around all the time,” Missy says with honest simplicity. “But instead, she lets you take her to chemo and fall asleep in her bed…”

“Well, I think the former is more ideal than the alternative, which is that I watch her child,” Mulder replies. “And I fell asleep on the bed, not in it.”

“Okay.” Missy sips her tea, keeps her eyes on him.

It’s pointless for Mulder to try to keep secrets anymore. He wrings out his hands. “If you must know, when you dropped her off at my apartment after her appointment, we... came to a mutual understanding.”

“Ah.” Missy is not surprised by any of it. Of course it happened. Of course her sister hasn’t mentioned it.

“Why are you just asking about this now?”

“Cause I expected my suspicions to be proven wrong, and that hasn’t happened.”

Mulder nods, taps absentmindedly on his knee. “Actually, I have something I’ve been meaning to talk to you about.”

“Oh?” She’s intrigued. The enigmatic Fox Mulder, divulging on his own accord.

“Don’t get excited, it’s not good.”

Damn. Missy reels herself in. “About Dana?”

“About what happened to her or...what is happening to her. It’s about the Mufon women.”

Missy curls her legs beneath herself. “You reached them?”

He nods. “Well, Penny Northern’s hospice nurse picked up when I called. She’s got stage four tumors throughout her body that migrated from her nasopharynx.”

“Holy shit.”

“Yeah. Apparently most of the other abductees have cancer too. And Betsy Hagopian--the woman who Scully saw in the hospital last spring--is dead.”

Missy’s gaze drops to the floor. “So the invasive procedures that the abductors did are killing these women.”

“One doctor’s treating them all--he’s supposed to be a specialist--but it doesn’t look like he’s having much success.” Mulder pauses, his mouth partially open.

“What?” Missy presses.

“The Lone Gunmen and I have been looking into him, and we think that he might have been involved in the abductions.”

Missy barrels forward. “You think he did this to them on purpose and now he’s letting them die?”

Mulder nods solemnly.

“Well, we have to stop him. We can’t let any more patients go to him, especially Dana…”

“I know. I’m going down to see the Lone Gunmen tomorrow after work if you want to join me.”

Missy contemplates. “I have the lunch shift tomorrow, so I could. What would we tell Dana?”

“I’ll say that Skinner is keeping me late to go over some paperwork. You could say whatever, she’s not going to question you.”

“I hate to leave her alone for so long, but...yeah, we have to do this.” She leans back, takes another look at Mulder. “You might just save a lot of women, you know.”

------------------------

Missy feels unseen eyes bore into her as she and Mulder approach the basement entrance of a helter-skelter building. She doesn’t recognize the part of town they’re in, and she doesn’t ask.

Mulder hits the button on a call box beside the door. Before he can speak, a voice leaps out at them.

“Howdy Mulderoony.” Mulder recognizes it as Frohike’s voice. “Glad to see you made it safely.”

A variety of locks and chains are undone, the door pulled open.

“Join our ménage a trois,” Frohike says, ushering them in.

“We can’t stay long,” Mulder tells them, squinting as he adjusts to the darkness of their realm. “You guys forget to pay the electric bill or something?”

“We’re conserving electricity,” Byers says, a shadow in the corner of the room. “It’s good for the environment.”

“I didn’t realize the environment was on your list of concerns.”

“It should be on everyone’s list of concerns,” Byers throws back matter-of-factly.

Mulder slides his hands into his pockets. “Touché.”

Ringo comes forward from the darkness, his hair as tressed and greasy as ever. “Well lookie here. Dana Scully in the flesh.”

Frohike inserts himself between them. “You can’t be serious, pool boy. That’s not her, I’d know her anywhere. It is, however, an equally lovely woman.” He takes Missy’s hand and kisses it. “My lady.”

Missy participates with amusement until Mulder brushes Frohike aside.

“Okay boys, lay off. This is Scully’s sister Melissa. And I believe she’s taken.”

Frohike bows. “A lucky man.”

“Woman,” Missy corrects.

“Oh. Excusez-moi."

Tucked in the darkness, Byers scoffs at the childish antics. “Come on, let’s cut to the chase. Lives are at stake.”

“I’m glad to see someone has a brain around here,” Mulder quips.

Ringo pats Mulder’s shoulder. “Not all of us got a full-ride to Oxford, but hey, I’d say we’ve done pretty well for ourselves.”

“Calm down, Ringo. You’d still be the smartest member of the Ramones.”

Like an unleashed dog, Ringo lunges forward, and Byers and Frohike pull him back. They are quite used to this.

“You can insult me, but never speak ill of the Ramones!” Ringo growls.

Mulder puts his hands up, smirks at the permission he’s been given. “Happily.”

Missy clears her throat, her amusement wearing thin. She’s like her sister in this way.

Mulder gets the memo. “Right. Can the trash talk, we’re here to catch a criminal.”

“If he is, in fact, a criminal,” Byers remarks.

Missy frowns. “Haven’t you proved that?”

“We’re connecting the dots, but we haven’t completed the picture yet,” Byers replies.

Mulder circles around to Byers’ monitor. “What have you got?”

“This doctor, Scanlon, isn’t just an oncologist,” Ringo begins, as if Mulder asked him. “His name is associated with the Lombard Research Facility.”

Mulder and Missy both give him a look. More, more!

“A high security medical research center in Allentown,” he clarifies.

“We’ve hacked into some of the security cameras,” Frohike tells them. “We’d have to get in to see for ourselves, but the activity is rather suspicious. The same men, in and out, at odd times. Whatever they’re storing in there, it’s significant.”

“Then let’s get in,” Mulder emphasizes. “You be the eyes and ears, I’ll be the legs.”

Ringo nods. “We’re working on it.”

“We need to observe their weekend patterns before we make any moves,” Byers insists. “We don’t set up our missions to fail.”

“Fine, but as soon as you’ve reached your confidence threshold--”

“We’ll call you,” Ringo promises.

“What are you expecting to find?” Missy asks, frenzied. “Will it help Dana?”

Frohike drums his fingers on the desk. “That’s the plan.”

Byers nods. “We can’t be sure exactly what we’ll find, but the connection is clear: Scanlon was involved with the abductions, and he’s exploiting these women for his own benefit.”

Melissa shivers involuntarily. “It’s amazing that you’ve figured this out.”

Ringo twirls a pencil through his hair. “We have a lot of free time on our hands.”

Mulder takes a shot at the mini-basketball hoop they have, misses. “And you’d better use it all to implicate Dr. Scanlon’s ass.”

Frohike does a two-finger salute. “Aye aye captain.”

Mulder thumbs toward the door. “Now we’ve gotta get out of here before the smell sticks to us. Scully will know exactly where we’ve been,” he smirks.

“Can’t argue with that.” Frohike shows them to the door. “Give the lady my regards.”

“Will do.” He turns back, exchanges a serious glance with each man. “Sort this out, boys.”

Just as quickly as they came, he and Melissa step out of the chambers and ascend back into the sun’s dominion. Entrusting those three with the well-being of a woman they love so much is far from ideal, and yet, they’re throwing all their faith into it.

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Mulder slides his key into the door of apartment 42 shortly after seven on Sunday evening. He hasn’t been in for a week, and yet a vivid scent of...smoke sticks about the place. And a wrinkled mess of a man to go with it.

The old man lifts his chin. “I’ve been expecting you.”

Mulder is no longer naïve enough to be taken aback by Cancer Man’s ambush. He shrugs and slides his coat off. “Well, you are in my apartment.”

“I’ve heard that your partner is very sick,” CSM says, his steps so clunky that Mulder wonders whether the downstairs tenants will complain.

“What grapevine did you get that from?...Or are you the one growing the grapes?”

“It saddened me to hear. Agent Scully is a valuable member of the Bureau.”

Mulder nods. “You here to pass on your condolences? Cause I’m pretty sure you could just send a card.”

“I’m here to propose a solution...The doctors say your partner’s sickness is incurable. This is not true.”

“Smarter than the doctors, are you?”

“In this case I am.”

A bitter laugh rises from Mulder. “So I’m supposed to believe that you were involved in sickening Scully, yet you want to save her?”

“We all have our regrets.”

“And I have no reason to trust you.”

“Upon learning about her child, I feel a deep need to intervene.”

“Mmm.” Mulder begins to pace. “And by learning about her child, do you mean when Scully’s ova were removed and fertilized without her knowledge? Because I have a hard time believing that you didn’t know a thing about Emily until Scully got custody.”

“Certainly I did not foresee Emily ending up in her mother’s custody.”

“What was the purpose then, of Emily? To terrorize a woman by taking away her bodily autonomy?”

CSM shrugs. “That’s not my area.”

Mulder scoffs. “Okay you old freak. Tell me how to save Scully’s life or get the hell out of here.”

The wrinkled man folds his hands. “She had a silicone implant removed from her neck. Put it back in.”

Mulder freezes. “Are you serious? That’s your miracle cure?”

CSM nods. “It is the only way to save her life. Removing the implant is what caused the cancer in the first place.”

Mulder steps forward, getting in the old man’s face like a middle-school bully. He’s ready to throw a punch--honestly, ready to kill the man--if need be. He could do it. Easily. He could.

“What does the implant do, Cancer Man?”

“Believe it or not, it is meant as a sort of inoculation. It offsets the negative effects of any tests performed during the...time away.”

“Uh-huh, and what do you get from it?”

“Who says I get anything from it?”

“How else would you know that she had it removed?”

“I am everywhere, Agent Mulder.”

Mulder loses his thinly-veiled calm, wraps his hand around the man’s saggy neck. “You fucking pervert, I’ll kill you! I’ve killed a man before just like this. Tell me the truth.”

“This is the truth,” CSM wheezes, not intimidated by his rapidly deteriorating air flow. His cold, hard eyes stare into Mulder’s. “You wouldn’t kill a man over nothing, would you?”

Mulder squeezes harder, his fingers gripping the man’s pulse. He watches the light drain from his victim’s eyes. All the old bastard does is smirk at him.

Angered by this more than anything, Mulder releases the man so suddenly that his bony body is thrown into the wall. He keeps his footing, stumbles forward.

“Get out,” Mulder growls. When he doesn’t respond, Mulder pokes his finger at the door. “Get out now!”

CSM dusts himself off and walks out, the pompous smirk never leaving his face. Mulder slams the door shut behind him.

There are certain truths he cannot escape. If Scully has made him believe in Heaven, CSM has made him believe in Hell.

#sincerely hope i did the lone gunmen justice lol #also i feel like this chapter is...a normal episode amount of angsty instead of the slow paper cut of the last chapter #the x-files #only the light fic #missy and scully fic #txf #txf fic #fox mulder #dana scully #melissa scully #mine #eww this looks weird w/the tumblr update!!#read it on ao3 lol

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bigfootwrites · 3 years

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My 2020 Fanfic Masterlist [AO3]

I change my url too many times to give you the Tumblr links so all links will direct you to ao3. This is a masterlist of all the fics I’ve written in 2020.

MASTERLIST:

Beyond The Stars. [30/03/2020]

Mulder and Scully are on a field trip to see stars but of course that’s not why Mulder is there.

College AU | General | Semi-Complete: Two Chapters |

I’ll Always Be With You. [02/04/2020]

Looks at the events of Scully’s moment with Emily before Mulder walks into the care home.

Pre-Episode | General | Complete: One Shot |

Whirly Bird Series. [14/04/2020]

It was something you learned before coming here, a hobby you would sit there for hours doing. Your mother liked this hobby, it was quiet. You’d tuck yourself away in a corner and fold paper after paper until you got it right, until you got it perfect.

Mulder and Scully Abduct Adopt An Alien. [02/05/2020]

ADOPT not abduct. There is no abduction taking place here. Mulder wants an alien, Scully wants to know what is going on, the alien just wants to eat Lucky Charms.

Pretty much a Monsters Inc AU | General | Incomplete: Two Chapters |

Rain and Metal. [07/05/2020]

But then she’s coming. Gripping his rain-soaked t-shirt as her muscles grip other parts of him. He is doing this to her and it’s beautiful and wonderful and it makes him believe that rain and metal are enough for her after all. That maybe he can be enough for her after all.

Canon Divergence | Mature | Complete: One Shot |

A Baby Is Forever. [27/05/2020]

Prompt request for AU where Mulder gets Scully pregnant in high school and they are ‘forced’ to marry but fall in love.

High School AU/Slight Kid Fic | Mature | Complete: Six Chapters |

ABIF Prompt Series.

Pumpkins and Aliens. [14/06/2020]

Dana Scully is dropped off at an orphanage with the promise of her mother returning in a year. Instead she ends up being shipped halfway across the world.

Historical AU | General | Concept Idea | Unlikely To Continue: One Chapter |

Zombie AU That Isn’t Really A Zombie AU. [25/06/2020]

You ever wanted to go zombie hunting with your mom?

Zombie AU | Mature | Non-linear story | Incomplete: Three Chapters |

Paper Hearts + Broken Parts. [22/07/2020]

Fox can’t sleep so she draws.

Paper Hearts Ep | General | Female!Mulder | Complete: One Shot |

daisies. [27/07/2020]

But it’s as the mouse wanders over to universities closer to the East then the West she knows there’s something not quite right with her, something that makes that pen slip over the lines ever so subtly, not enough for anybody to notice but if one was to look hard enough they would see it.A mattress on the floor, her belongings scattered around, an important thing lying on the mattress. She picks up her coat and Fox watches as she walks away, leaving her there in a rundown apartment, the most important thing walking away from her

AU | Teens and Up | Female!Mulder | Incomplete: One Chapter |

Gone. [05/08/2020]

Summary yet to be written.

High School AU | Teens and Up | Unlikely To Continue: Two Chapters |

The 1836 Beaumaris County Gaol Riot. [18/08/2020]

Secrets are kept. Information withheld from one then withheld from another. Sometimes it was easier to go about the days thinking everything is normal. The unexplained doesn't always need an explanation. What is abnormal for some may be normal for others.

[Summary may change]

Historical AU | Teens and Up | Concept Idea | Incomplete: Two Chapters |

Ireland. [24/08/2020]

A decision to go to Ireland lets the children meet their grandmother, Mulder meets Scully's other brother.

Jewel Universe | General | Incomplete: One out of Two Chapters |

One Moment in Arecibo. [24/08/2020]

They don’t speak about it. Not tomorrow, not the next week, not the next month. But it lingers with them, in their arguments and their touches. When he touches her back she is instantly reminded of that night, of that one moment in Arecibo.

Post Little Green Men | Explicit | Early MSR | Complete: One Shot |

Passageways. [25/08/2020]

Time Travel au! What if, rather than someone from the future falling into the past, somebody from the past fell into the future?

Time Travel AU | General | Incomplete: One Chapter |

50 Days Of Prompts. [15/09/2020]

Prompts taken from a prompt list that I intend to work my way through.

Prompt List | General | Incomplete: 25 Prompts out of 50 |

Baby Cries. [19/09/2020]

How Scully deals with Emily's death.

Post Emily’s Death | General | Complete: One Shot |

FICTOBER 2020 (31 days of prompts) [13/10/2020]

31 days of prompts all through October. A prompt list I'm planning on working my way through for the month.

Fictober Prompts | General | Unfinished: 12 Prompts out of 31 |

California Dreaming / Post-Col Fic [02/12/2020]

Season 9 canon-divergence. 2002 becomes the last documented year. The Colonists come and wreak havoc over everything that was once known and normal. From buildings being blown up to certain parts of the world not in existence anymore. When a simple patrol assignment goes wrong, Mulder finds himself bargaining his way to the top while Scully sinks lower and lower.

Post-Colonisation Fic | Mature | WIP: Four Chapters |

Time Can Heal. [12/12/2020]

Mulder realises that his quest for the truth costs too much.

Irresistible: Canon Divergence | Mature | WIP: Ten Chapters |

Danse Macabre: Adventures of Mr Mulder and Dr Scully. [16/12/2020]

Mulder investigates the murder of Derek Barney who's death may not be as straight-forward as people would have him believe.

Historical AU | Dark | Mature | WIP: Three Chapters |

It Happened One Night / Escort Fic. [21/12/2020]

Scully is an escort who is hired by Mulder because he is going through a divorce and may lose his kid. It was supposed to be one night, they were never supposed to meet again, yet fate has other plans for them.

Escort AU | Mature | WIP: Two Chapters |

100 Days of 100 Word Dialogue Prompts. [31/12/2020]

100 days of 100 prompts.

Prompt List | 100 days | General | WIP: 28 out of 100 |

#2020 masterlist #xfiles fic #i write

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lilydalexf · 4 years

Note

Hi! Did you ever make a rec list of fix-it s11 fics? Despite all its problems and the terrible plot twist of the final episode, I really enjoyed Mulder and Scully's dynamic this season, especially Mulder's character development (he's all about his wife and I was like yes!! f****** finally)... I'm in need of some good writing to do them justice. Any good rec? :)

"Fix-it" fic can mean all kinds of things, so I'm not sure if you mean a full-on AU, post-eps where the characters deal with emotional fallout or unresolved plot points, specific episode scene fill-ins, or something else. Here is a mix of all that! These lists rec fics focused on particular episodes:

Ghouli

Plus One

Rm9sbG93ZXJz

Here are a bunch more great season 11 stories:

cosmological constant by @i-am-alittle-on-edge season 11/post the lost art of forehead sweat

Dichotomous by @aloysiavirgata A light beams from the porch of the little house; a beacon in the night.

E pluribus unum by @perfectmagnet A "This" story.

Eggs and Windmills by @agirlcallednarelle An alternative ending to Ghouli… Assumes MSR is back on track.

Eternity Awaits by @lilydalexf Starts shortly after “This” ends with Mulder and Scully on the couch. Conversation ensues between two very tired partners.

A Familiar Feeling by @baronessblixen Post-ep for "Familiar." As much as I loved the episode, it didn’t really give me any ideas. This is the result. Angsty, fluffy word vomit with our favorite trope: one bed fic.

Feeling Gravity's Pull by @lilydalexf Scully contemplates home as she and Mulder chat and clean up after falling asleep together on the couch. “This” post-ep.

Foxfire by @aloysiavirgata Our heroes should be afforded an opportunity to acknowledge their own remarkable aging.

He Has a Son by @mldrgrl A little bit of a post-ep for Familiar. Mulder thinks about William.

Holding Hands by @scully-eats-sushi Post-episode for “Nothing Lasts Forever.”

House Hunters Renovation: “An Unremarkable Reno,” S147/Ep84 (2018) (New, HD) by @myassbrokethefall A Washington, DC-area couple searches for a home with space, privacy and security; once they settle on a choice, they must contend with unexpected delays, and they argue over his preference for farmhouse style versus her wish for a sleek, modern look while also investigating a series of unexplained murders in a small town. (Reality, 60 min)

Let's Share by @baronessblixen A V-Day ficlet! Set in season 11 after “Plus One”. It’s fluff.

Miracle by @poeticsandaliens Six times Dana Scully called Will a miracle and what that word really means.

Morning Sickness by @sixhours It’s been forever since I’ve written fic, but that “season finale” inspired me to try to make sense of the nonsense, and maybe give Mulder and Scully a chance to start to deal with the shit they’ve been dragged through.

Mulder's Ring by @poeticsandaliens Because I have a hard time trusting Chris Carter, I’ve head-canoned how season 11 ought to end. It ends with Mulder, Scully, William, and fluff with a tinge of melancholy.

Of Monsters and Men, and a Woman by @snickerl I think I smell smoke. / Wine smells better than smoke.

Reflection by @admiralty-xfd Mulder and Scully have their first "date." Set during the events of S11 ep 4 "The Lost Art of Forehead Sweat."

Sasquatch Days by @lilydalexf Mulder tells Scully about the time he found Sasquatch footprints in the mud. A pre-ep for “The Lost Art of Forehead Sweat” while also being a post-ep.

Slow by @myownsuperintendent Mulder and Scully decide to take their reunion slow, but that doesn’t last too long. Set during Season 11, sometime post-”Plus One.”

Through the Binoculars by @wtfmulder Set post-Nothing Last Forever; MSR; Bill Jr. and Tara visit Mulder and Scully on the first easter after Maggie’s death.

U make an Ass out of Me by Chibiness87 What happens between Mulder and Scully when he assumes something? Enquiring minds want to know.

Unlimited Future by @greekowl87 I tried to write a postep (My Struggle IV) as soon as the credits roll to try and bring some semblance of peace or closure to the fandom. Mulder and Scully try to make sense of everything.

Untitled by @lolcat76 Prompt request: a wish to fix the end of MSIV.

Untitled by @lyndsaybones what we didn't see. snippit of daily life for M/S. Post-"This"

Untitled by @monikafilefan A take on "all things."

Untitled by @purrykat First time making love after the 2nd baby. Extra special if Mulder makes it special and shows Scully that she’s still beautiful after having a baby.

Untitled by @suitablyaggrieved “I don’t want to think about what I’d be like without you.”

Winter is Coming by @mldrgrl A little cold weather fluff circa the revival, but basically ignoring everything but the fact they haven’t been living together.

Your Father by @scully-loves-ruthie A little something from Williams’s perspective inspired by Ghouli.

#new post #fic rec #roundup #anon #xfiles fanfic #xf fanfic #asks

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scullysexual · 4 years

Text

Time Can Heal

Season Two | Abduction Arc | Canon Divergence | Angst

Mulder realises that his quest for the truth costs too much.

CHAPTER ONE

I decided to go ahead with this and turn it into a full fic after the response the original post received. I’ve deleted that now. This is the full chapter. Scully’s part is the same as it was but I’ve now added Mulder’s. Factual-wise, this is not going to be perfect and it’s more about improving my writing than it is about being right. Basically Scully’s abduction isn’t dealt with as soon as it should have been and my plan is to do that and to deal with the repercussion of that from the get-go. I’ve always wanted to write early msr too but I could never figure it out but I think I’ve done it. This isn’t going to be a happy fic for the most part, if you read the original you know the angst involved but I really want to write this no matter what and I hope you want to read it just as much. Let me know what you think having been given the full chapter now and I’m happy to continue. I don’t usually ask for comments but with this it would help so much.

- - -

Her apartment was up for sale. There were promises made to get it back. Scully didn’t want it back. They could sell it on for all she cared. She didn’t think she wanted to step a foot back into the place.

Right now she only cared about this bed. This blanket of safety she had made for herself. Up here, she could listen to the faint noise of the radio downstairs, her mother puttering about, a spoon clanging against a mug. The sounds made her feel protected, a promise that nothing would happen to her so long as she stayed here and that was much better than a soundless, empty apartment made for one.

And what exactly was she afraid of?

There was nothing in her memory beyond Duane Barry dragging her up that mountain.

Maybe that is what she’s afraid of. Perhaps those memories are worse than not remembering. Not remembering has it perks, right? Well, that would be if it wasn’t for the ache in her abdomen, for how tired she feels every day, for the feeling that something is missing yet she can’t place what, like knowing you had forgotten to do something but not knowing what that was exactly.

The question remained: Why her? Why did Duane Barry come after her? All she did was ask questions about the implant, look for answers to help him if not anything else. So why take her?

She guesses that would Mulder’s new obsession. Find answers for Samantha. Find answers for Scully. She wants to tell him to stop, that more people will get hurt if he continues but she doesn’t have the energy to fight and argue with him. Not anymore. Not again.

Her mother had told her how Mulder responded when he found out she had returned. How he vowed to whatever it took to find out what happened to her. It was appreciated but it was unnecessary. The whole this was unnecessary. For the past year she had seen nothing but cover-ups and lies, why would this be treated any differently?

.:.:.:.:.:.:.

Mulder visits some time into her second week back. She’s sleeping but she sleeps pitifully, waking up through the night, startling at any questionable sounds. She’ll wake in the pitch black, her hand reaching out to grab her gun before she realises she doesn’t have it anymore. It’s in evidence like a lot of her stuff. She wants her gun back, a gun, it doesn’t have to be her own, just anything so she has something to defend herself with. Just in case.

The door opening wakes her. It’s still light out, she can still see around the room and she sees Mulder standing there, half in the doorway and half out. Scully sits up, her abs protesting still after all these weeks. What did they do to her?

“I’m sorry I woke you,” Mulder says, looking apologetic.

Scully shakes her head, tells him it’s okay.

“Why are you here?” she asks. Not that she doesn’t want him here. When she was taken, lying in that trunk, all she wanted was for Mulder to open the trunk and get her out of there. She would chide herself that she was relying on him, waiting for him to rescue her and free her from the big bad wolf. Eventually those thoughts subsided and it became her only saving grace, imaging him shooting Barry point blank and watching him bleed out on the car seat, on the gravel, on the grass.

“I just wanted to see how you were doing.” He moves into the room, closing the door. “Your mother said you were spending most of your time up here. I was worried.”

“I’m fine,” she responds quickly.

Mulder sighs. “Scully, I’ve been where you are right now. I know that feeling, how the bed is the only place you want to be but, believe me, once you get up, be with people, you’ll find it so much more recuperative.”

“Is that your final diagnosis, Dr Mulder?” Her voice is cold. If he came up here to lecture her about how she wants to recover, to deal with her trauma off of one conversation with her mother he is free to leave right now.

Mulder, rightly so, is taken aback by it. His mouth falling open slightly, his head shaking in bewilderment, eyes blinking in confusion.

“I’m…I’m only trying to help you, Scully,” he says. “As a friend.”

Scully looks away, pulling the comforter closer to her chest and feeling shitty about the way she snapped.

“I also came here to talk to you,” he says after a moment. “May I?” He motions to the end of the bed, asking to sit, the cold guest room devoid of any seating.

Scully pulls her knees towards her, wrapping herself up with her arms and resting her head against her knees, listening.

Mulder sits and Scully waits. Whatever he has to tell her, it’s difficult. She watches him searching for the words, possibly the right words, and sighs and swallows and Scully waits patiently.

“I, um…I think I’m gonna leave.”

Scully’s head lifts from her knees, surprised. “The Bureau?”

Mulder shakes his head. “No…The X-Files.”

He couldn’t be serious.

“Mulder, you can’t.” He turns to her, surprised by this. “What about your quest. Your search for the truth. About Samantha?”

“There’s too much risk,” he tells her. “Too many people being hurt. Deep Throat, you…” He reaches a hand out and places it against her covered knee. She can feel the heat of it even through the duvet. “All for some selfish quest. It isn’t fair.”

It was hard to comprehend what he was saying. For the year she had known him he’d been nothing but committed to this cause, to unearthing every secret, every lie, every ounce of the truth he could find. It seemed strange he would abandon it all.

“But I thought that was what we signed up for?” Scully asks. “That we know the risks doing what we do.”

But Mulder is shaking his head. “I’ve lost Samantha, I’ve lost Deep Throat. I almost lost you. I can’t…risk that again.”

She can see him beating himself up. Understands this has evolved from the guilt he feels towards her abduction.

She grasps his hand still resting against her knee, clasps it in both of her hands, anchoring her to him.

“I don’t blame you, Mulder,” she tells him, her eyes glued on his, willing him to believe. “And you shouldn’t either.”

He smiles sadly, pulls his hand away from hers. He’s considered what she’s said yet his mind is already made.

“I’ll come back,” she says, trying another tactic. “I’ll pass the psych exams, the physicals, and I’ll be back and we can work together again.”

Mulder is shaking his head. “It’s over, Scully.”

She refuses to believe that. Tired, the tears have began forming. She never thought she would cry over a department in the FBI but it’s more than that. It’s a one-of-a-kind partnership she knows she’ll never get to experience again, a friendship like no other.

But they will still be friends. They will still see each other about the building. Maybe spend an occasional lunch together but it won’t be the same. She’ll never have anyone she trusts as much as Mulder, loves as much as Mulder.

She swallows the lump in her throat.

“There’s one other thing,” he says, turning away.

Oh god, there’s more? She looks at him through her tear-clouded eyes.

“I’m leaving Washington.”

It’s a blow to her stomach. Hurting more than any unexplained aching abs could. It twists her inside and makes them drop through the ground.

“No.”

“Scully-“

“Stay. Go to another department if you have to. But don’t leave.”

He looks at her trying to get her to see his side of it but Scully won’t, she refuses to.

“Can’t you see I’m giving you a way out? A chance to get away from me?”

“I don’t want to get away from you!”

It’s one blow after another and she can’t take it. She throws her legs back down, thinks she kicks his thigh in the process but doesn’t care (Good, he deserves it) and turns onto her side facing away from him, pulls the covers right up to her chin.

“Fine, go then,” she tells him, her voice laced with hurt and anger. “I don’t care anymore.” She’s never told a bigger lie.

“Scully…”

“Shut the door on your way out. I’m tired.”

She shuts her eyes, listening. He doesn’t move for a few seconds before he seemingly faces defeat- faces the consequences his decision has caused. This is what he wanted, wasn’t it? For Scully to become completely non-respondent to him.

He sighs and moves, the bed shifting with the loss of weight. She listens to his footsteps treading across the carpet before they come to a stop.

“I’m doing this to protect you, Scully. So this doesn’t happen again.”

She pursuers her lips, shutting her eyes tighter against the tears, breathing heavily.

Only when she hears him turn does she speak.

“I don’t want your protection.”

His footsteps walking away are his only response.

Mulder doesn’t shoot Duane Barry. She takes the gun herself and hits him right in the centre of his forehead.

.:.:.:.:.:.:.

“Are you sure this is what you want, Agent Mulder?”

Skinner holds Mulder’s transfer papers in his hands, looking through them.

It had come as a surprise when Mulder at hold him he was requesting a transfer. The X-Files had just been reopened, it seemed odd to ask for one now. Mulder had his reasons, the same reasons he’d given Scully and while it was broke him deeply to see her become so cold and despondent towards him he knew it was better that way. He hated the thought of her hating him but she’ll understand that it’s for the best soon enough.

“This isn’t another self-punishment, is it?” Skinner asks.

No. The resignation had been self-punishment, Mulder could admit that now. Resigning out of failure to protect those closest to him. Why should he carry on when the one person he held above everything else was lying in a hospital bed because of him? It wasn’t right.

But it was a punishment. This was something else. A chance to start over.

“It’s rare for agents in the Hoover Building to demote themselves to field offices,” says Skinner eyes flicking over the forms.

“But not unheard of,” Mulder counters. He’d done his research; a total of 3% has done what he’s doing but that didn’t matter. What mattered was that it was possible.

“And Agent Scully,” Mulder swallows, fearing the question. “Is she aware of this transfer?”

Mulder nods. “I’ve told her. It gives her a chance to be reassigned now there’s no one left to spy on.”

He didn’t view Scully as a spy anymore. In the beginning, he’d been weary, distrustful but she had proven herself loyal to him time after time that he really had no reason to treat her as an outsider anymore. She had been dedicated, treated him as an equal- not matter how wild his theories would get- when so many others had been quick to scoff and roll their eyes. It had been disorientating at first, thrown him off guard but he had come to value it soon enough.

Now he worried he had destroyed all that.

“I’ll speak to Agent Scully when she returns,” Skinner tells him. “In the meantime, you can go. I’ll call you when an office opens up.”

“Thank you, sir.”

And with that Mulder was dismissed. He makes his way out of Skinner’s office, to the elevator, and down to the basement.

It could be the last time I step in here, he thinks as the elevator doors open and he steps out. He regards his name on the door before opening it, wondering where it will end up once he’s gone.

He’d been down here a few times since the files being reopened. Wrappings still cover the furniture. At the time, he’d been too tired, too devastated with Scully’s disappearance and coma to take it off. He wonders if there’s any point to doing it now?

He looks around, taking it all in. His eyes linger on the area at the back. A swivel chair that Scully would occupy. They had stolen that from another office upstairs. A lone Saturday when the building was virtually empty. Scully had lamented that she wanted a swivel chair and that had been their mission for the day. Case Reports forgotten as they made their way upstairs. There had been a lot of giggles that day, Scully keeping lookout while Mulder tried to drag a chair across the carpet. He’d given up and carried it above his head. An AD from another floor had rounded one corner while they ducked behind another, stifling laughter before the AD was out of sight and they made a dash for the elevator, making it to the safety of their office. Mulder had bestowed his gift to Scully and that chair had remained since.

That had been a fun day. A day where professionality hadn’t existed and he felt like he had unlocked another piece of Scully- another piece of Dana- just like he had in a graveyard in Bellefleur.

Pulling his gaze away from the chair, he removes the wrappings covering the desk and pulls open a draw. A pen and sticky note in his hand he writes his message. He places it on the counter with the hope that she will come down and find it before he begins packing away three years of his life into one tiny cardboard box.

#txf #fic #season 2 canon divergence #scully's abduction arc #angsty fics #i write

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sigritandtheelves · 6 years

Text

Six Octobers

Rating: Explicit

Tags: MSR, canon divergence (somewhere around “Requiem”), love and smut and fluff

Words: 4.2k

Summary: One decade, six small windows into a shared life.

A/N: This may be my only fictober entry this year, so I tried to make it as Octobery as I could. This took me… so freaking long to write. Like way longer than it should have. It’s kind of achingly sweet, but I hope some people like it anyway.

🎃

_+_

October, 1996

Two things happen that alter his life and the path he envisions for it. The first is that they are both somehow, with the same case, made aware of a possible future in which there are things like neighborhood baseball games, homes away from the city, quiet places with tall grass, children. Her children maybe. His children.

(“What about your family, Mulder?”)

He feels strange. He touches her back. He calls her mom. He doesn’t know why he does these things when there are monsters under their noses and in his real life he can barely keep his fish alive. But he sees her with him for the first time in those hushed daydreams of another kind of life in some distant universe. He wonders how she might fit, and if she might like it. A quick, guilty image pulses behind his eyes: he imagines holding an infant—a thing he has never done—on the porch of some little house. The child feels heavy in his arms, like the full weight of this impossible future, smells of powder and milk. In thinking this, something hot ignites inside him. Hot like guilt, because this is not his life, nor can it be; the inverted structure of this way of being disorients him. And yet. He dreams Scully beside him on the porch, wearing blue jeans, reading. Her fingers press between the pages of a book to hold her place, and she looks up. Her smile undoes him. She is still rounded from having carried the child: her edges softened, long hair swept up off her shoulders. What mad vision is this?

Then the thought is gone, swallowed in the gore and loss of this terrible case, as he should have expected. There is no space untouched by blood and sorrow that he has ever known. Andy Taylor is a myth and figment, an impossibility, another good and pure thing destroyed. Within hours, the reckless deputy follows into darkness. The threat here is not new violence encroaching, but old brutality irrupting from below: it has always been. It is the furious revolt against a way-of-life challenged.

Mulder and Scully shake their heads at the cruelty of it, then drive back through Pennsylvania’s falling leaves. But the beautiful vision, like a seed, has been planted down in the soil of his deepest, most hidden wanting. It germinates.

The second thing that happens, too soon after, is that he almost loses her. He imagines her a vacant zombie after Schnauz would have stabbed her brain with an awl. He imagines her dead, maybe, from a bad procedure done wrong. The two images war: soft Dana on the porch (the infant cries and he kisses its belly, tickles its feet) and her body among the brown leaves of the forest floor. Their lives veer always, ever closer, toward the second. He knows this and he hates it.

In their hotel, when she has scrubbed the duct-tape glue from her cheeks and chin, when she has showered and changed into pajamas, and sits on the end of her bed, she asks him to sit with her. She does not cry. She slumps against him, and he wraps his arms around her.

She tells him, “Thank you.”

He says, “I’m sorry.”

And then he stays with her until she falls asleep. He lays his hand on her back as she tucks beneath the blankets. He listens to her breathe and lets himself think about that other life. It is the two things together that make him realize what she could be to him, were he not so incapable of love. The two things make him want something else, something dangerous, for the very first time.

October, 1997

When she begins to look herself again—no more dark circles under her eyes, bones not so visible—he takes her out of her apartment: “To breathe again,” he says. On the first chilly Saturday, he calls her around nine in the morning, asking if she has hiking boots. He brings her coffee and, shy, kisses her on the cheek in the doorway. She blushes hard, so unsure of what this means now.

“You look so good,” he says, and again she doesn’t know what to think. She looks good because she doesn’t look dying? Or she looks good because she looks good.

“Where are we going?” She asks.

He waggles his eyebrows at her. “You’ll see.”

They drive for about an hour, headed north and west into Maryland. He is quiet for the ride, and she tries to read his expression but he gives nothing away. She feels full with life, with the promise of their adventure together, here with him in the car, driving into a mystery. She can’t help but smile.

He takes them to Patapsco Valley State Park, where he pulls in to a wooded area with trails heading in several directions. The air stings her nose and makes her zip her jacket fully. She still has trouble getting warm some days.

“This is the one,” he says, nodding at a trail head, touching her shoulder to lead the way.

“Mulder,” she says. “What are we doing?”

“We’re hiking,” he says. “Not a tough hike, less than a mile. I want to show you something.”

She follows him. Because she always follows him. Because for a while she couldn’t, and feared she never would again, but now she can and she will. Because she loves him. This is what she’s come to know fully as she stared down her own death and readied herself to leave him. What she’d thought was, When I die, it will be without getting to show him how much I could have loved him. She’d tried, though—she’d offered him the very last thing she had to save him, which was her death. She would have taken every bad thing from him if she could, every hurt and regret and guilt and accusation and anguish, taken them with her when she went, knowing she was leaving him with something worse in her absence. But he had refused to lay the weight of his pain on her. And in the end, instead, he’d saved her.

The trail is relatively flat. Still, she notices that he watches her steps: careful, just a tad too protective, his hand hovering whenever there is a rock or root. “I’m fine, Mulder,” she assures him. “I’m really really fine.”

He nods, his smile apologetic. “I know, it’s just…”

She smiles too, a little sad. “Yeah.”

They come to a fork and he leads her to the right, toward the sound of something she can’t quite identify. The smell is different too. Mustier. Wet. Then, a clearing in the trees, and there it is: the river, the changing leaves, a waterfall.

“Oh my God,” she says. It’s like a painting, the sun on the river and the reflection of gold and yellow and red. She turns and sees that he’s smiling, but he’s not looking at the water. He’s looking at her. “It’s beautiful,” she tells him.

“Do you like it?” He asks. “I found this spot one day, a few years ago in the fall. I thought of you when I saw it.” He looks away, sheepish. “We’ve been busy in the fall since then.”

She thinks back—a few years ago in the fall. October three years ago, she was missing and he was… lost. This is what her mother has told her, from what she saw of him. He came here when she was gone, and he was thinking of her in all this color, and now he’s almost lost her again. But she will live this time, too, and he wants her to see it.

She reaches out her hand. He takes it quickly. “I love it,” she says. “Thank you.”

He squeezes her fingers, then tugs her toward him, pulls her into a long, slow hug. His heartbeat thrums through the fabric of his sweatshirt against her cheek, and he is solid and real and good in her arms. He smells of himself and she wants to keep this small thing forever, this moment of his utmost caring. “I would have died too, I think,” he whispers into her hair. She squeezes tight his waist, shakes her head no against his sternum.

“Oh, Mulder.” It is all she can say, because she knows it is probably true. He palms the back of her hair while his other hand grips her waist. His lips linger there, on her head.

After long minutes, they turn to watch the leaves and the water and the bluest sky.

October, 1999

They are new at this, treading a slow march forward into some unknown terrain. Their devotion has always been fierce, but unspoken. It feels strange to him now, bringing it out into the open, learning to touch her with something more than just respect and care.

“You don’t have to,” she assures him. “It’s not a big deal.” But by the way she says this, he knows it is a big deal, having dinner with her mother.

“I want to, Scully. It was good of her to ask.”

She searches his face for a moment. “She just wants to see that you’re okay. She was worried. When I told her.”

Scully is sitting on his coffee table, facing him on the couch, changing his bandages one last time. Gentle, she checks the pink scars at his temples with her fingertips. “Okay?” She asks.

“Yeah,” he says, voice suddenly tight. Her proximity is raising his blood pressure, the smell of her musky shampoo and body lotion. She runs her fingers through his hair in a way that doesn’t feel doctorly, but her face is pure concentration.

“You may not need the bandage, actually. It’s healing well.”

He smiles at her. “Freedom from the gauze headband? But I was going to go as a mummy for Halloween.”

She smirks. “Just be careful with it.”

She’s about to get up and throw away the cottony strips she’s just removed, but he stops her with a hand on her arm. “Hey,” he says, and she looks at him. He touches her face with his hand, watches it grow pink, can practically hear her heartbeat. He leans forward and places a kiss on her mouth. Just a peck, really, a little press of skin to skin. He pulls back and says, “Thank you.”

“For what?” She asks, and now it’s her voice that is strained.

He shrugs. “For fixing me.”

He watches the hesitation on her face—just a bare moment of it—and then she moves in to kiss him again, fuller this time, her fingers coming up to rest on his shoulders. And Jesus help him, this time with tongue. His hands go to her waist, under her suit jacket but over her top. It is not their first kiss, but their movement toward each other has been slow so far, especially after his injury. He senses in her now, though, the full breadth of her desire, and it knocks his sense clear out the window. Head injury or no head injury, he will lay this woman down and make love to her the moment she says the word.

But she presses her hand against his chest and pulls back, then covers her mouth, looking embarrassed. “I’m sorry,” she says.

He can’t help but laugh, squeeze her hip, shake his head. “Sorry?”

Her face is red. “I said to be careful. You—you need to be careful.”

“How careful?” He knows what he must look like, the depth of lust she must see in his face, because she reddens further.

“I—“ she licks her lips, and he almost groans. “No, um...” If it’s possible, she blushes even more. “No vigorous exercise or… activities that increase your heart-rate. For another week or so.”

He looks at his watch, to the day marked where the 3 would be. “It’s Tuesday,” he says. “I’m going to hold you to that.”

Her eyes go wide. She swallows hard and nods.

On Friday they visit Maggie, who feeds them and fusses over the tiny scars on his head. “Oh, Fox, I’m so glad you’re okay,” she says. She’s even made him his favorite food: rosemary chicken and mashed potatoes.

“How did you know?” He asks, and Scully blushes.

After dinner, he emerges from the bathroom and hears the two women talking. When he realizes it’s about him, he pauses at the door to the kitchen. He knows he should feel guilty, but their words make his heart pound, make him smile despite himself.

“It’s just that he’s so clearly in love with you, Dana. I mean, I knew that years ago, but it’s so obvious now.”

“Mom, please! We’re not… We’re just… I don’t know what we are. Just please don’t pry.”

Later, when they’re slipping on their jackets and getting ready to go, he sweeps her into a kiss that he feels with his whole body. Though startled at first, she relaxes against him, touches his face, arches her back so their bodies are flush. When he moves back, she is panting and glassy-eyed. “He is in love with you, Dana,” he says, and her mouth drops open. He nuzzles her nose with his and whispers into her lips, “Four days.”

When Maggie says goodnight, she has half a smirk and a knowing look in her eyes. He winks at her on his way out the door.

October, 2000

In a pumpkin patch in northern Virginia, Mulder holds up a monstrosity for her inspection, boots already muddy from his trek to find the very best one.

She frowns. “Where will we put it?” She carries two smaller gourds already, one in each hand, for the dining-room table.

“On the porch,” he says.

“Mulder, we don’t have a porch.”

“Ah, not yet.” He walks over to her awkwardly, balancing the weight of the pumpkin in his arms, and bends to kiss her forehead. “But I have a good feeling about this next house.”

“It seems too far,” she says.

He shrugs. “We could make it work.”

They’ve been looking tentatively for a house together, somewhere outside the city and the worst of the suburbs. If he had his way, he’d take them all the way out to the boonies, but the thought makes her a little anxious. “What about work?” She keeps saying. “There are more important things,” he always replies.

Now, as they head back to the tractor-pulled wagon that will take them from the field to the farm’s store and restaurant, he tucks his black sweater over the pumpkin that’s pressed to his abdomen. “Hey look. Guess who I am?” He arches an eyebrow dramatically and says in a mocking voice, “Mul-der, that sofa doesn’t go with the loveseat. Mul-der, there’s no such thing as aliens.”

She is six months pregnant and her belly is finally rounding out, stretching the shirt beneath her jacket in a perfect little sphere. She looks down at herself, then at him, and whacks him with one of the gourds. “I hope you got your stomach all muddy.”

He lifts his shirt to look, and sure enough, there’s a smear of gritty brown from the bottom of the pumpkin at his belly button. He rubs at it, but only makes a mess, and gives her a look. She’s biting her lips together to keep from laughing at him.

At the little country store, they pay for their pumpkin and gourds. “Do you want coffee?” He asks.

“I don’t think they have decaf,” she says. She’s already had her daily cup of regular.

“Hot cider, then?”

She nods. “Just a little. Too much sugar.”

In the car they sip their hot drinks. He drives while she navigates, watching the houses grow farther apart and the trees taller. “Here,” she says. “I think it should be the next driveway.”

“The realtor said there’s a gate.”

There is—a long silver gate that is already pushed open. They bump up the long driveway to the small farmhouse where the realtor is just getting out of her car. Mulder glances over to gauge Scully’s reaction.

“It’s cute,” she says, imagining their pumpkin on the wide wrap-around porch, imagining their child toddling around the yard, collecting leaves and bugs and rocks. “So much space.”

He reaches a hand over to squeeze her knee. “Let’s look inside.”

It has only two bedrooms, but there is also an extra room for an office, and a wide living and dining area. Its plumbing is a bit old, its style somewhat outdated, but when they stand together on the porch, they look at each other and they know. They smile. They move toward each other and she rests her head on his chest. He holds her, cupping her shoulder with one hand and her rounded belly with the other.

“I think it’s perfect,” she says.

“Yeah,” he murmurs into her hair. “What’s the little guy think?”

She turns and grins up at him. “He thinks it’ll be a great place to grow up.”

October, 2005

The living room window stands half open to let in air that is dry and cool, smelling of dried leaves. She wears a maroon cable-knit sweater and lays across the couch, trying to read. Her legs are in his lap while he watches TV. Mulder draws patterns on her shin with his fingertips, hand tucked under the leg of her pants. The chill makes her shiver. She tingles with its promise, feels something deep inside her cry out to be touched, to be filled.

“Mulder,” she says. His eyes don’t leave the screen, but the sound is muted and he seems only half interested in the old movie.

“Yeah?”

“Come here for a second.”

He looks at her with a confused half-smile, fingers still gripping her skin. “I’m right here,” he says. She licks her lips, coy, holding back her own smile. She shakes her head and raises her arms out to him, tugs at his sleeve with one hand until he turns fully, until he bends to lower his weight over her.

“Here,” she says, letting her thighs slip apart so her legs can come around his hips, so she can pull him tight to her and feel the whole of him pressing her to the couch. Her arms come around his neck and he watches her, takes in the flush of her cheeks and the spill of her hair over the cushions.

“You’re lovely,” he tells her, and her blush deepens. She lifts her hips just a little, just so he feels the heat of her, the need of her body for his.

“I want you,” she says.

His eyes slip closed for a moment and he breathes deeply, pulling in the cool spice of air that brushes their faces, rustles their hair. He offers a subtle thrust of his hips in reply, a quiet acknowledgment and recognition: he wants, too.

The farmhouse is quiet, save the wind chimes that hang from the porch, which sing with the breeze and the crackling dance of dried leaves on the lawn. William is with his grandmother, so for once the day belongs to them alone. There is a slow unbuttoning, a tugging of fabric, her hot breath on his cheek, his lips on hers. They are so so good at this now. Her sweater lands on the hardwood, her bra next, and her nipples stand straight in the chill of the air. He tongues them warm again. She moans, she arches, she tugs at the fabric at his waist.

He strips them both bare, and then they are only two pale bodies in the autumn light, stretched long on the gray canvas of the sofa. She lifts her knees so he can settle between them, touching her cold toes to the muscled small of his back. He shivers and she laughs, and then he’s kissing her again, slipping his hand down her body: breast, waist, hip, knee, and then back up to the apex of her thighs. He groans at how ready she feels, “God, baby, you’re so wet.”

She flushes at the term of endearment and clenches around his fingers, rolls her hips, reaches to take him in her hand. He is hot and smooth and hard under her up-and-down strokes, moaning, pumping his own fingers inside her until she gasps and begs and bucks under him.

“Please, Mulder,” she says, and she guides him to her entrance, says “ohhh” when he pushes inside her.

He kisses her mouth, speaks into it with each thrust. “Dana,” he says. “You’re perfect,” he says. “I love you.”

She swallows each word, holds his face in her hands, and flies with him.

Later, when she will understand by her exhaustion and her persistent sense of fullness that she is pregnant again, she will remember this day and know. She will feel, at the memory, that same tingle in her spine and the sudden need she’d had for him. In the kitchen when he comes home, she will bring his fingers to her belly, press his palm to the still-flat place between her hipbones, and say “Mulder,” and his eyes will go wide and he will grin and he will kiss her hard and swing her around the room. Some part of her, she will think, knew this while it was happening, while they lay with sweat chilling on their bodies in Saturday quiet.

October, 2006

Now they are four in this little house that is only just beginning to feel stretched tight. In the yard, William scrapes leaves together into the largest pile he can make, then crashes through it with kicking legs. Mulder watches from the porch, holding his three-month-old daughter in his arms. She fusses, so he bounces her against his chest, kisses the top of her head, hums. She quiets, and her small eyes find his face. When he kisses her nose, she grins, toothless and surprised by the proximity of his features. He blows a puff of air on her dark auburn peachfuzz, and she grins again. “You’re my happy girl,” he tells her.

The front door swings open, and Scully comes out, hair askew, drowsy in her sweatshirt and leggings. She walks to Mulder and rests her head against his bicep. “Hi,” she says. The baby smiles again at the sight of her mother, and Scully rubs a knuckle against the tiny cheek.

“Good nap?” Mulder asks.

“Mm hmm. Perfect.” She goes up on tiptoes to kiss his mouth. “Is she hungry?”

At that moment, the baby fusses again, sensing the proximity of lunch. Mulder and Scully smirk at each other with an “I guess so” expression, and he hands the child over. Scully moves to the porch swing, lifts her sweatshirt, fiddles with her nursing tank, and then there are only the soft snuffles and gulps of the baby eating. He moves to sit as well, and they rock in the quiet gray of the autumn noontime. Scully shifts so she can lean against him. They swing. They listen to William’s triumphant yells in the leaves. Once, the boy scrambles up the stairs to show them that he’s caught a wooly bear, a curled ball of black and brown fuzz in his palm. They smile at him, remind him to be gentle, and watch him run back across the lawn to carefully place the creature at the base of a tree.

“Are you ready for tomorrow?” Mulder asks.

She watches the baby eat, holding eye contact with the infant, running a finger over the soft arch of her little brow. “No,” she says. “But I’ll have to be, won’t I?”

Her twelve weeks are up, and tomorrow there will be work again, though only half time at first. “This is the hardest part,” he reminds her. “After tomorrow it will be easier.”

“Yeah,” she says, remembering her first days back at Quantico after William was born. “I just wish today could last forever.”

He rubs circles onto her back, watches the infant’s eyes drift sleepy-closed as she eats. He tickles the little socked feet to keep her awake. “Not yet,” he whispers to her, then kisses Scully’s head. “I know what you mean,” he says.

Scully shifts the baby to her other breast, then settles back against him. He watches, and feels the tug of something in his memory, some remembrance of long ago. A bench in Pennsylvania where the possibility of this moment first entered his mind. Ten years ago, he thinks. How naïve he was then, how stupidly consumed with his own self-flagellation and denial. He thinks of what they’ve made now, in spite of everything.

“But it will be good to get back, too,” Scully muses. “You can use my help. John and Monica can use my help.”

“Always,” he says. Because despite these quiet moments, there are monsters yet. There is darkness at the border of the light they shine into the world, and they have vowed to never give up fighting it. The difference now, he thinks, is that he knows what the good is, too. He knows what is worth struggling for, and when to pull back into the quiet.

The baby has fallen asleep eating again, and he bends to kiss the warm fuzz of her head. Work will come soon enough. Until then, the afternoon stretches long and crisp and slow into the future.

-end-

So you won’t be needing any Halloween candy, because you now have diabetes from reading this. Sorry (not sorry).

#a thing i wrote #fictober #msr #xf fanfic #teh fluffiest

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ghostbustermelanieking · 6 years

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X-Files Rewatch Series Masterpost

summary: Series of (mostly) unconnected stories I write as I make my way through the show again. All can be read independently, but the canon complaint stories are slightly connected.

canon compliant stories

oregon rain (msr ust, pilot, awkward bonding, wc: 3k)

March 8, 1993, a conversation in a hotel room.

the progression (and regression) of first names (msr ust, scully-centered, s1, beyond the sea, lazarus, young at heart, darkness falls, tooms wc: 5k)

Dana and Scully, she thinks, are two separate people, and he only knows the Scully part of her. She doesn’t know which part she likes better, but she likes it when he calls her Scully.

drifting (msr-ust, maggie scully, melissa scully, one breath post ep, wc: 5k)

Scully deals with the aftermath of her return in One Breath.

fate (melissa scully, dana scully, pre-series, s3, paper clip post ep, wc: 3k)

Thirty-two years of sisterhood sounds like forever, she thinks, but it is not enough.

monster dog (msr ust, queequeg, s3, post eps: the list, 2shy, the walk, 731)

Fox Mulder and his unlikely rivalry with a Pomeranian.

everything changes but the sea (csm, mulder family, pre-xf, musings of a cigarette smoking man, demons)

He’d never once considered being a father. (extended backstory on CSM)

roaring like the ocean (msr ust, angst. cancer arc, elegy/demons/gethsmane/redux i, wc: 11k)

Scully deals with her worsening cancer as tensions run high between her and Mulder.

old pennies (msr ust, angst, kistunegari post ep, wc: 1k)

Post-ep for Kitsunegari.

renegade (diana fowley, diana/mulder, pre-xf, the end, wc: 2k)

Why Diana Fowley went over to the other side.

flights (msr ust, fight the future, wc: 3k)

The flights Mulder and Scully took during Fight the Future.

reconsideration (msr ust, mentions of diana/mulder, the beginning, triangle, dreamland, the rain king, tithonus, one son, arcadia, milagro, the unnatural, field trip, wc: 6k)

Times Mulder and Scully reconsidered the status of their relationship.

auld acquaintance (msr ust to rst, post amor fati, per manum flashbacks, millennium, wc: 7k)

In the wake of Mulder's recovery after Amor Fati, Scully asks Mulder for a favor as they begin to grow closer.

the praxis of a water bed (among others) (msr, vignette, rush, the goldberg variation, orison, the amazing maleeni, signs and wonders, wc: 4k)

Five of the first times Scully woke up in Mulder's bed.

ashes and dust (msr, post mulder’s abduction, deadalive/three words, wc: 21k)

The days following Mulder’s resurrection.

here (msr, baby fic, s8: roadrunners, deadalive, empedocles, vienen, existence, wc: 4k)

Four times Mulder or Scully talked to their baby, and one time they both did.

relinquo (doggett and reyes, post the truth, release, william, john doe, 4-d, msii, wc: 6k)

How Doggett and Reyes left the X-Files.

the definitions of home (msr, post the truth, on the run, wc: 9k)

Mulder and Scully, on the road.

melting snow (msr, iwtb missing scene, wc: 2k)

In the wake of the events of I Want To Believe, Scully reflects.

shatter on impact (msr, pre-msi, iwtb, break-up fic, angst, wc: 9k)

An examination of the reasons Scully left Mulder before season 10.

going home (maggie scully, scully family, pre-xf, beyond the sea, paper clip, home again, wc: 5k)

The last things Maggie Scully said to her family.

the lies told (csm, jackson van de kamp, my struggle iii, an explanation for csm's bullshit paternity claim, wc: 4k)

A complex explanation of CSM’s lie about William’s paternity.

praescitum (msr, s10/11 casefile, post-msi, founder's mutation, mulder and scully meet the weremonster, home again, msii, msiii, this, plus one, the lost art of forehead sweat, ghouli, wc: 167k)

As Mulder and Scully adjust to their reassignment to the X-Files and working together in the wake of their separation, they find themselves investigating a small town and a ghost that apparently warns people of bad things to come.

AU stories

unspoken rules (msr, kissing, pilot, squeeze, the jersey devil, ice, beyond the sea, wc: 7k)

Five times Mulder and Scully kissed and never talked about it, and one time they didn’t.

day after tomorrow (msr, s2, firewalker au, wc: 3k)

She almost died a few weeks ago. But she is here, alive. And her partner has kissed her.

forty-yard line (msr ust, s2, irresistible au, wc: 1k)

Mulder and Scully make it to that football game.

november 27, 1973 (samantha mulder, fox mulder, pre-series au, s2 au: ascension, colony/end game, wc: 6k)

five things that could’ve happened to samantha mulder.

band-aids and goddamn cats (msr, au, s3, teso dos bichos missing scene, wc: 1k)

Missing scene from Teso Dos Bichos.

a roll of stars and fade to black (msr, s4, the field where i died au, wc: 10k)

A rewrite of "The Field Where I Died."

anchor (msr ust, s4, cancer arc, memento mori au)

AU where Mulder stays with Scully during Memento Mori.

locking out the ghosts (msr, s5 fic: emily, kitsunegari, kill switch, bad blood, patient x, the red and the black, all souls, the pine bluff variant, and folie a deux, wc: 62k)

Post-Emily arc, an emotionally vulnerable Scully breaks off the incredibly new relationship she and Mulder have recently been engaged in. As the season moves forward, how do they cope with this new development in their relationship, and how do the stressful situations their job puts them in affect this?

merry little christmas (msr ust, how the ghosts stole christmas au, wc: 3k)

A How the Ghosts Stole Christmas AU: what if Mulder hadn’t been alone for Christmas?

the fountain (msr, casefic, hurt/comfort angst, tithonus/detour casefile, canon divergence after milagro, wc: 50k)

When Mulder is forced to confront Scully's immortality in the wake of the Padgett case, he can see only one solution: to search for the Fountain of Youth to either look for a way to get rid of it or find a way to keep her from being alone. When Scully is assigned to a serial killer case in the same area as the alleged Fountain, Mulder tags along in an attempt to help her and find the Fountain at the same time.

Months later, Mulder has been missing for months and Scully is left only with the leads he was searching for. When a new lead pops up, she departs to search for her partner and to discover what happened before he disappeared six months earlier.

california winter (fox mulder, teena mulder, cassandra spender, samantha mulder, jeffrey spender, pre-xf, mytharc from one son/sein und zeit/closure, wc: 12k)

Fox and Samantha Mulder, brother and sister, disappeared from their homes on November 27, 1973.

(A shift in the events of Samantha's abduction leads to a very different outcome.)

encephalon (msr, s7 fic, au where m&s actually deal with mulder’s stupid brain disease: all things, brand x, hollywood a.d., je souhaite, requiem, wc: 18k)

AU where Mulder tells Scully that he is dying in season 7 and the situation is dealt with accordingly.

whispering images (emily sim, msr, early season 8 au, mytharc from within/without, this is not happening, emily, references to invocation and per manum, wc: 14k)

During his abduction, Mulder realizes that Scully’s daughter, Emily, is still alive.

whirlwind (msr, william, s9 au: providence and provenance, wc: 13k)

AU where Mulder comes home during Providence and helps Scully search for their son.

a mountain in colorado (jackson van de kamp, emily sim, samantha mulder, melissa scully, post-ghouli au, wc: 23k)

While Jackson Van de Kamp is on the run, he encounters a series of assumed-dead relatives he didn’t know he had.

**series still in progress**

#it felt like the right time #to finally start clarifying which stories go together and which stand alone #xf fanfic #xf rewatch #i wrote this

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ghostbustermelanieking · 7 years

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fic masterlist

prompted by a request and a need for organization, here’s a masterlist of all the (x-files) fic i’ve done

multichapter

the fountain ** (msr, casefic, hurt/comfort angst, tithonus/detour casefile, canon divergence after milagro, wc: 50k)

locking out the ghosts ** (msr, s5 fic: emily, kitsunegari, kill switch, bad blood, patient x, the red and the black, all souls, the pine bluff variant, and folie a deux, wc: 62k)

polaroid (william, msr, van de kamps, s11 spec, wip, 5/?)

The aftermath of William's meeting with Mulder and Scully.

half-light*** (msr, s10 au/s1 au, rewrite of the original, wc: 74k)

Mulder and Scully get a second chance.

snow in april (casefile, deadalive au, msr, wc: 48k)

Dealing with the fallout from Mulder's return, Mulder and Scully find themselves in the midst of a strange case in a small town.

the unspeakable fear of things **** (msr, emily, s5-6 au, wc: 41k)

Emily Sim is cured by mysterious circumstances, deemed a miracle by the doctors.

starless and shadow (msr, millennium au, post col, wc: 17k)

The world didn’t end. But what if it did?

series

william au

relent (scully, william scully, 9x16: william au, wc: 1k)

Scully decides not to give up her son.

silent conversations (william scully, msr, s9/iwtb/s10 au, wc: 10k)

Inspired by the promos for 11x05: Ghouli/the promo blog for Ghouli, ghouli.net: What if a clairvoyant William had grown up with Mulder and Scully?

noises echoing (william scully, msr, s11 au, wc: 16k)

In the wake of their visions of the apocalypse, Mulder, and Scully must confront the fact that people are looking for their son.

not out loud (mulder, william scully, msr, vignette, wc: 6k)

Seven times Mulder communicated (telepathically) with his son.

half-light au

*** half-light (msr, s10 au/s1 au, rewrite of the original, wc: 74k)

Mulder and Scully get a second chance.

miraculous (msr, william, kidfic fluff, wc: 4k)

It feels too familiar.

(Meeting William for the first time. Again.)

luminosity (msr, william, new kid, kidfic fluff, wc: 3k)

They find out when she has another nosebleed.

emily au

**** the unspeakable fear of things (msr, emily, s5-6 au, wc: 41k)

Emily Sim is cured by mysterious circumstances, deemed a miracle by the doctors.

the truth we both know (msr, emily, william, s9 au, wc: 19k)

Scully deals with newly single parenthood and the fall out from Mulder going on the run.

Christmas Ficlets (msr, emily, william, wc: 12k)

series of Christmas ficlets set post-ufot

x files rewatch series - wip, series of unrelated stories i write as i make my way through txf again

oregon rain (msr ust, pilot, awkward bonding, wc: 3k)

March 8, 1993, a conversation in a hotel room.

unspoken rules (msr, kissing, pilot, squeeze, the jersey devil, ice, beyond the sea, wc: 7k)

Five times Mulder and Scully kissed and never talked about it, and one time they didn’t.

the progression (and regression) of first names (msr ust, scully-centered, s1, wc: 5k)

Dana and Scully, she thinks, are two separate people, and he only knows the Scully part of her. She doesn’t know which part she likes better, but she likes it when he calls her Scully.

drifting (msr-ust, maggie scully, melissa scully, one breath post ep, wc: 5k)

Scully deals with the aftermath of her return in One Breath.

day after tomorrow (msr, s2, firewalker au, wc: 3k)

She almost died a few weeks ago. But she is here, alive. And her partner has kissed her.

forty-yard line (msr ust, s2, irresistible au, wc: 1k)

Mulder and Scully make it to that football game.

november 27, 1973 (samantha mulder, fox mulder, pre-series au, s2 au, wc: 6k)

Five things that could’ve happened to Samantha Mulder.

fate (melissa scully, dana scully, pre-series, s3, paper clip post ep, wc: 3k)

Thirty-two years of sisterhood sounds like forever, she thinks, but is is not enough.

monster dog (msr ust, queequeg, s3, post eps)

Fox Mulder and his unlikely rivalry with a Pomeranian.

band-aids and goddamn cats (msr, au, s3, teso dos bichos missing scene, wc: 1k)

Mulder helps Scully clean up from her cat scratches.

a roll of stars and fade to black (msr, s4, tfwid au, wc: 10k)

A rewrite of "The Field Where I Died".

anchor (msr ust, s4, cancer arc, memento mori au)

AU where Mulder stays with Scully during Memento Mori.

everything changes but the sea (csm, mulder family, pre-xf, s4)

He’d never once considered being a father. (extended backstory on CSM)

roaring like the ocean (msr ust, angst. cancer arc, elegy/demons/gethsmane/redux i, wc: 11k)

Scully deals with her worsening cancer as tensions run high between her and Mulder.

old pennies (msr ust, angst, kistunegari post ep, wc: 1k)

** locking out the ghosts (msr, s5 fic: emily, kitsunegari, kill switch, bad blood, patient x, the red and the black, all souls, the pine bluff variant, and folie a deux, wc: 62k)

renegade (diana fowley, diana/mulder, pre-xf, the end, wc: 2k)

Why Diana Fowley went over to the other side.

flights (msr ust, fight the future, wc: 3k)

The flights Mulder and Scully took during Fight the Future.

merry little christmas (msr ust, how the ghosts stole christmas au, wc: 3k)

A How the Ghosts Stole Christmas AU: what if Mulder hadn’t been alone for Christmas?

reconsideration (msr ust, mentions of diana/mulder, the beginning, triangle, dreamland, the rain king, tithonus, one son, arcadia, milagro, the unnatural, field trip, wc: 6k)

Times Mulder and Scully reconsidered the status of their relationship.

** the fountain (msr, casefic, hurt/comfort angst, tithonus/detour casefile, canon divergence after milagro, wc: 50k)

auld acquaintance (msr ust to rst, post amor fati, per manumflashbacks, millennium, wc: 7k)

In the wake of Mulder's recovery after Amor Fati, Scully asks Mulder for a favor as they begin to grow closer.

the praxis of a water bed (among others) (msr, vignette, rush, the goldberg variation, orison, the amazing maleeni, signs and wonders, wc: 4k)

Five of the first times Scully woke up in Mulder's bed.

california winter (fox mulder, teena mulder, cassandra spender, samantha mulder, jeffrey spender, pre-xf, mytharc from one son/sein und zeit/closure, wc: 12k)

Fox and Samantha Mulder, brother and sister, disappeared from their homes on November 27, 1973.

(A shift in the events of Samantha's abduction leads to a very different outcome.)

encephalon (msr, s7 fic, au where m&s actually deal with mulder’s stupid brain disease: all things, brand x, hollywood a.d., je souhaite, requiem, wc: 18k)

AU where Mulder tells Scully that he is dying in season 7 and the situation is dealt with accordingly.

whispering images (emily sim, msr, early season 8 au, mytharc from within/without, this is not happening, emily, references toinvocation and per manum, wc: 14k)

During his abduction, Mulder realizes that Scully’s daughter, Emily, is still alive.

ashes and dust (msr, post mulder’s abduction, deadalive/three words, wc: 21k)

The days following Mulder’s resurrection.

here (msr, baby fic, s8: roadrunners, deadalive, empedocles, vienen, existence, wc: 4k)

Four times Mulder or Scully talked to their baby, and one time they both did.

whirlwind (msr, william, s9 au: providence and provenance, wc: 13k)

AU where Mulder comes home during Providence and helps Scully search for their son.

relinquo (doggett and reyes, post the truth, release, william, john doe, 4-d, msii, wc: 6k)

How Doggett and Reyes left the X-Files.

the definitions of home (msr, post the truth, on the run, wc: 9k)

Mulder and Scully, on the road.

melting snow (msr, iwtb missing scene, wc: 2k)

In the wake of the events of I Want To Believe, Scully reflects.

shatter on impact (msr, pre-msi, iwtb, break-up fic, angst, wc: 9k)

An examination of the reasons Scully left Mulder before season 10.

one/two/three shots

5/20/19 (jackson van de kamp, baby #3, msr, post s11)

Jackson and his first birthday spent with Mulder and Scully.

voyage to norfolk (jackson van de kamp, msr, baby #3, post s11)

Jackson takes his new sort-of family back to the place he grew up.

under the weather (jackson van de kamp, msr, baby #3, post s11)

Prompt: would you ever consider writing fic where william is sick with a cold or stomachbug and scully has to take care of him? maybe set somewhere post season 11?

bearing north (msr, s11: between rm9 and nothing lasts forever, hurt/comfort)

Prompt: "I’m so disappointed by the lack of hurt/comfort this season. Could you please fix it a little?"

proelium (msr, jackson van de kamp, post my struggle iv resolution)

Post finale: Mulder and Scully connect with their son in an unconventional way.

galaxies (msr, william scully, existence post ep, kid fic)

He doesn’t hold his son for the first four days of his life.

hypnagogia (jackson van de kamp, msr, post ghouli [au??])

Prompt: post-ghouli. william knows scully is his birth mom, but when/how does he figure out mulder is his birth dad? or does he already know?

things unhidden (jackson van de kamp, msr, ghouli au)

What if Jackson hadn’t hidden from Mulder and Scully?

secundus (msr, pre-iwtb, inspired by plus one)

Mulder and Scully discuss wanting more kids.

sofas and ikea (msr, au/written mid s11, plus one, this)

How Scully finds her way home.

shadow demon (msr, casefile, s11 spec)

Mulder and Scully find themselves wrapped up in an unexpected case at a Halloween carnival when a teenage boy asks for their help.

all hallow's eve (msr ust, s1, ghost in the machine fic, halloween)

candy corn in the basement office on halloween night

joy to the world (msr, william, susanne modeski, van de kamps, post-the truth)

Mulder and Scully get William back.

repeat the sounding joy (joy to the world sequel, msr, william, christmas fluff)

Christmas with Mulder and Scully and William.

if the dead can hear the living (2/2, msr, gethsemane au)

“It him?” the detective asks, and she says, “Yeah,” and leaves the room on wobbly legs.

—

“And what about my partner?” Mulder hisses. The alien pauses before continuing with some kind of self-satisfaction. “Dana Scully died last night at Trinity Hospital.”

writer’s pen (csm, meta bullshit)

what if the x files was a series of sci-fi novels written by the cigarette smoking man, and what if the cigarette smoking man wasn’t a shadowy villain but instead a petty writer who cast the people in his lives in his stories?

a blanket, the lights, and the sky (msr, college au)

two college students, truth or dare, and a light in the sky.

under the stars (minimal fate required) (msr, aus)

or: ways mulder and scully could’ve been happy

hold your breath so you don’t say i love you (msr, vignette)

46. things you said when you kissed me goodnight, along the different seasons

where the love light gleams (emily, william, au, on the run)

Emily and William escape the air base where they’ve spent their entire lives, and set out in search of their family.

motions of time (msr, cancer arc au)

He kisses her in the hallway of the hospital under the washed out lights: quickly, with his hands in her hair.

inches between them (msr, deadalive-empedocles)

It’s taken her nearly eight years to believe in the impossible, and it’s still easy to revert to old habits. She believed for Mulder when it seemed vital, when it was imperative that if he couldn’t be there that someone be there to fill his role in his life’s work, to take his place, but she didn’t believe when it really was vital. She never imagined him coming back from the dead, always thought it was impossible. If she ever imagined them raising the baby together, she imagined a reality where he never left and her life didn’t crumble to dust.

car games (scully, william, post-s9 au)

He gets bored on long car rides, restless, tapping his sneakered foot against the center console rhythmically. There is a succession of car games, and he gets tired of them fast. “Who wants to count cars, Mom?” he whines, just a little. “That’s boring.”

another year (msr)

Mulder celebrates Scully’s birthday vs Scully celebrates Mulder’s birthday.

date of birth (william, van de kamps)

Five of William Van de Kamp’s birthdays.

3:55 (scully, pilot au)

His eyes are something strange, almost of… desperation as he looks down at her. Like he’s known her for a thousand years. Dana shifts her weight uncomfortably. The man clears his throat, and says, “Yeah, uh, don’t take you new assignment.”

read it beginning to end (msr)

He stays up late reading Moby-Dick by lamplight, and lays it all out for her at the end of a chapter in pencil.

reunions (and an orange painted sky) (msr, william, s10/s11 spec)

Mulder grins wider in response, tightening his arms around her. “Scully, I think there’s someone you should meet.”

second step (msr ust, s2)

The first step is the one that reminds her that she is alive. The first step was her first year with Mulder, caught up in the excitement of it all. The second step is harder - but, she reminds herself, the second step is worth it.

smoke and mirrors (msr)

What’s your truth, she thinks idly, and is surprised to find that she wants to know the answer.

miles away (for xfilesrevisited)

It’s Christmas, and Scully won’t come downstairs.

unfinished crossover with stranger things

“Mr. Mulder, I am fascinated with your work on the X-Files,” Dustin says excitedly. “I’m sorry I thought you were a murderer.”

“That’s okay, most do.” He shrugs. “I’m sorry for my appearance, but I wasn’t expecting guests.” He shoots a look at Emily.

“It’s like I said, Mulder, that over there is Eleven, and she’s the one who’s like William.”

“She came from a bad place, and her nose bleeds when she does the thing,” William says, swinging her hand.

“And she’s going to help the guys find Will, you know, that missing kid, but she needs a place to stay,” Emily says.

The man is looking at her. Mike, Lucas, and Dustin are clustered together, staring at them. The man steps closer and offers his hand. “Hi, Eleven,” he says quietly. “I’m Mulder.”

Eleven takes his hand with her free one and shakes it. “Hi,” she says softly.

the werewolf theory (au comedy-ish thing)

Mulder and Scully solve a case as a married couple. (And it’d be great if everyone could let the last names thing go.)

“how i met your mother” au 1, 2, 3 (schmoopie family stuff)

basically a happy family au

a pale circle of light (post-the truth)

“Scully!” he calls after her. She keeps walking without looking back, chin firmly set.

drabbles

prompt: scully’s thoughts during the mosquito bites scene /// prompt: mulder remembers their encounter in the pilot during s7

prompt: mulder and scully are trapped in a freezer (s6)

prompt: mulder and scully annoying skinner

i love you: when we lay together on the fresh spring grass (iwtb era)

i love you: muffled, from the other side of the door (emily arc)

things you said that i wasn’t meant to hear (cancer arc)

things you said on the phone at 4 am (s7)

things you said when you were drunk (abduction arc)

things you said that made me feel real (cancer arc, synchrony)

34) things you said in your sleep/ 59) things you said after we fell in love (post cancer arc)

things you said while i cried in your arms (unruhe)

things you said in the dark (field trip)

things you said when no one else was around/things you were afraid to say (ftf)

things you said in the spur of the moment (post-cancer arc au)

prompt: scully tells melissa she’s pregnant

prompt: mulder and maggie in the hospital in essence

prompt: mulder’s missing and scully gets emotional when she finds him

prompt: leaves (mulder, scully, and william on the run)

post-one breath thanksgiving (au)

prompt: scully’s chip

prompt: hug (pusher)

prompt: toes (msr, william)

prompt: fic based off secret love song (s2, abduction arc)

prompt: woman, socks, locker, abandoned storage unit (mulder, scully, samantha)

prompt: trust no 1 au

“Do I make you happy?”/// “That’s why I love you.”/// “Let’s just lay here a little longer.” (s10)

“I don’t trust you.” /// “I-I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to fall asleep on you.” (william, scully, s11 spec)

“I’m not good with words.” (per manum)

prompt: halloween party and ghostbusting

prompt: first “i love you”s

episode prompt: irresistible

episode prompt: post-modern prometheus

episode prompt: genderbender

prompt: proposal

“I need you to pretend we’re dating…” - “It’s only one night, we’ll just share the bed.” - “Don’t panic but I think we might have accidentally gotten married…”

“I think I’m in love with you and I’m terrified.” (my struggle)

“Marry me?” - “I thought you were dead.” (this is not happening au)

“Have you lost your damn mind!?” (mini casefile)

“I was so alone… and then I met you.” (babyfic)

prompt: baby as a term of endearment (arcadia)

“You can’t die. Please don’t die.” (redux ii/this is not happening)

headcanons/short fics

headcanon: william's pretty excited about the fact that he's getting a little sister

headcanon: Jackson takes his little sister on long road trips during the summer

Mulder and Scully are married and domestic af

after Mulder and Scully's demise, Jackson takes custody of his little sister, and uses the X-Files to tell her about them

"You really felt the need to do THAT in front of my brother?"

"i haven't been to a planetarium since i was eleven, mulder."

"The baby kicked the soap right off my belly"

"You're sure it's not twins in there?"

"Okay, that was pretty funny wasn't it?"

Mulder was shocked when a man answered Scully's door practically naked.

“She opened her mouth to scream, but nothing came out, just empty hollow silence”

"Jackson?"

"I don't want to live another second without knowing what it feels like to kiss you"

They locked eyes from across the room, each ready to act on the other's signal.

“Why the fuck you wear that?”

“Damn it, Mulder, I said no”

Suddenly headlights wash through the windows of the empty bedroom.

“You’re lucky that wasn’t Bill.”

“Mulder? Help!”

“Shit, I forgot the eggs”

“How could you even ask me that?”

“Mommy? Mommy??”

“Did you feel that?!”

"We are required for this case to go for a horseback riding trip."

“Is that a birthmark, Scully?”

“Why did you lie to me?”

"I mean -- Gatsby didn't really love HER, the real Daisy; he was obsessed with her, which is a different thing entirely."

“What do you say to that, Scully?”

She looks down at the paper in her hands.

“Your son was just arrested.”

season 7 hcs

season 1 hcs

arrival au

msr + astronauts/space opera au

crossover with castle

au where mulder and scully were together [romantically] since like season 3 or 4 but told no one bc they were fully aware of a betting pool going to see when theyd get together and they didnt want skinner to win

snowflakes

future

guacamole

scully wears a skull sweatshirt on halloween

#ugh some of this stuff is really old and embarrassing #and jesus i've been writing fic for over a year #wow #long post tw #xf fanfic #i wrote this

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