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enigmaticxbee · 2 years

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11x10 My Struggle IV

The one where... Mulder tracks down William and they have a final confrontation with CSM.

Tagline: Salvator Mundi

Best: Well, when I watched it when it first aired I wasn’t devastated by it the way I was by MSIII because my expectations were so low by this point, so that’s a plus?

Worst: Guys it’s so, so, so, so bad 😂 I can’t even pick out the worst part. I think GA’s reaction kind of sums it up, and I fully support her decision to never make more of CC’s X-Files.

This ending only highlights the hollowness at the core of the mytharc storyline. As the show went on the mytharc became less about discovering the truth and exposing a global conspiracy, and more about torturing our protagonists. And it’s all for nothing. Mulder and Scully never save the world, or prevent an alien invasion, or bring down the conspiracy, or even expose it to the world (Tad O’Malley ranting aside). They just suffer until neither they nor we as the audience can take it anymore.

In the final scene of The Truth, the original series finale, Scully tells Mulder that they only fail if they give up. They’re together, and they believe in the same thing, and that’s where the hope is. It’s small and personal, but it feels bigger.

Here I can’t shake the feeling that the show ends with their failure - to save their son (they even give up at being his parents, they forsake him so easily at the end), to save their old allies Reyes and Skinner, to stop the alien virus pandemic, to find the truth. And maybe the pregnancy was meant as a little ray of hope in this terrible ending, but to me it’s completely tone-deaf. Their relationship is the heart of the show and there isn’t even anything meaningful exchanged between them in the end. I just feel numb.

✔️ Flashlights

❌ Woods/Desert

❌ Slideshow

❌ Autopsy

❌ Evidence Disappears

✔️ Scully Misses It

❌ Mulder Ditch

❌ Sunflower Seeds

✔️ Voiceover: Jackson/William intro VO

❌ Catch Phrase

❌ Scully is a Medical Doctor

❌ Mulder is Spooky

✔️ Scuuullllaaaaayy! Muullllderrrr! Wiiillliiaaaaaam!!!

❌ Fox/Dana

✔️ Inappropriate Touching (that I am here for)

✔️ Casual Scully

✔️ Casual Mulder

❌ Trench Coats

❌ Bad Tie Watch

❌ Glasses Watch

✔️ Taking! It! Personally!: Scully & Mulder

50 States: Tennessee x6, Virginia x23 & DC x110 (45/50)

Investigate: Apart

Solve Rate: 75%

❌ Bechdel Test: Only conversation between women was about William

MSR: 🐝🐝

Goriness: 👽👽👽👽👽

Creepiness: 👽👽👽

Humor: 👽

Rewatch Thoughts:

William check-in: William: …and then I just kinda became a criminal… Getting Jackson/William’s whole backstory in an intro monologue is… bad storytelling. I think he could have been an interesting, flawed but sympathetic character and I hate that this is the direction CC went with him - I want to love Mulder and Scully’s son!

Break-up check-in: Well, they end up in each other’s arms, and that’s the best thing I can say.

I really dislike the way the story is told bouncing around in time. It’s so choppy and disjointed 😫 Maybe to hide how little it makes sense…

So Reyes is trying to help them? It just seems like too little too late. Also it was in Scully’s vision that they met last season, we don’t even know if they’ve actually been in contact in this timeline.

In the original series finale Mulder was put on trial for the murder of a man that he supposedly killed while breaking into a government facility - something that based on 9 seasons we know he wouldn’t do. And here he just flat out shoots and kills at least 5 security guards that we see and whoever that old guy in the office was as… payback? This just isn’t my Mulder.

Once again splitting Mulder and Scully up for the last episode of the series 🙃

Oh goody more driving!

More time trickiness, showing us things like they’re happening concurrently when they’re not 🙄

Mulder getting to put his arms around his son for the first time in 17 years 🥺

I do kind of enjoy William dispatching this new conspiracy group like it’s absolutely nothing - the show has not made me fear them, or interested in them, they’re just annoying

The show apparently cares so little about Scully that we don’t even get to see Skinner tell her about CSM’s claims, or get to see her process what that might mean about her son, about what was done to her 🙃

Oh goody more running around in dark industrial sites - admittedly not something new to the show, but always my least favorite episode climax

Wiiillliiaaaaaam!!!

Reyes is unceremoniously dispatched.

Followed I guess by Skinner, although maybe he could have survived under the car?

I… how are we supposed to feel about any of this?

Even Mulder killing CSM, which should feel cathartic after everything, just feels 🤷🏻‍♀️ - I mean we saw his face blow up and he came back after that, so I have no faith CC wouldn’t bring him back again given the slightest opportunity!

And… in classic X-Files tradition Scully arrives after everything’s over.

I will just note once again that CSM says: That I am the one who made him? That I am William’s creator? Which supports my belief that William is absolutely still Mulder’s son.

Not that Scully gets the space to think that through after hearing CSM’s claims second hand from Skinner: William was an experiment… I carried him, and I bore him. But I was never a mother to him… WTF. I mean WHAT THE FUCK. She raised him for months. She carried him in her heart for 17 years. I guess you could put this down to shock, but I put the blame on bad writing.

Mulder: What am I now if I’m not a father… This might mean a little more if the show had actually explored what being a father meant to him a little more!

And then the pregnancy reveal. I can’t even explain to you how much I hate this. The dismissal of William as their child because now they have a chance for a real child they can raise together. The pregnancy of a 54 year old woman - even putting aside her infertility. That they only slept together in Plus One to set up this reveal. The idea that a future between them has to involve raising a child, like that’s the only way they can be a family, can be together. That a baby will solve their problems. That Scully’s only purpose on this show is to bear children for the Mulder family. Fucking hell.

We never even learned anything concrete about what William’s relationship was to the alien virus pandemic - did he stop it by killing off CSM and those other conspirators? The tagline was Salvator Mundi aka Savior of the World. But I guess we don’t even know if it’s still happening or not 🤷🏻‍♀️

#xf rewatch #xf fanart #msr #my struggle iv #msiv #the x files #the xfiles #thexfiles #txf #xf #xf mytharc #i want to believe #truth is out there #xf review #11x10 #revival

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randomfoggytiger · 5 months

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I Am, Once Again, Advertising touchstoneaf's S9 "Amor Fati" Fic Series

touchstoneaf’s epic Amor Fati (Fated Love)

(Previous post: X-Files Fic That Irons Out the Mytharc… by touchstoneaf)

It's... it's brilliant.

Description

Not one detail from the series is neglected; not one observation is out of joint; not one conjecture or plot thread from the mytharc is left unresolved (and is, in fact, further built upon), and not one moment between all of the characters is off target. Not only that, but it glues together plotholes as effortlessly as if those were the original show writers' intent; and builds and builds and builds the transition from surveillance at home to life on the run with a (psychic) baby.

I confidently say it IS the series: not just the characters' voices or their actions but as if the author captured Chris Carter and Frank Spotnitz and all of the writers and actors' vision and-- for lack of a better word-- essence and put it all masterfully on paper. The best way I can describe it is it feels like how S9 would have been, should have been.

Part I is Scully's realization that she can't keep William safe (after his near death in S9) and her slow, cautious attempts-- with TLG's help-- to contact Mulder and slip from her job and her life. Her loved ones are all given their turns for farewell (yes, even Bill); Part II is S8-S9 memories and reunion and bliss and rediscovery and duck-and-dodge and the mytharc creeping back in; Part III is hands-on efforts by Mulder and Scully to save innocents and team up with Gibson and his dispassionate alien allies.

There are so, so many passages that are seared into my mind. If you, like me, want to jump right into the action, I recommend reading Part II's chapters 4 through 9-- the leadup to Scully and William's arrival in a small town, their tense execution of plans, and their reunion with Mulder in motel room 42. The entire series builds to that moment; and continues after, organically placing brick after brick after brick. If you are daunted by long-term commitment, it will, at least, serve as quick taste to either ignite or quench your interest.

And Now, For Quotes

I couldn't possibly select one quote as my favorite (not yet, anyway); and the passages below sadly leave out TLG and Skinner and Doggett and Monica and Maggie and Tara and Bill and excellent minor characters and so, so much more; BUT I can't leave these paragraphs behind, either.

She had once, more than once, had the experience of having to tell a false partner from the real one. She was one out of two on that scoreboard. /Have to get it right this time. If…/

Every sense had to remain engaged, in this moment. Every single detail…

A waft of warmer air... and it smelled of Mulder.... The barrel of a gun came first, poking shyly through, questing. Her internal timer counted off the seconds before she would see the arms, and then the head… There were the arms, familiar arms… then the hair she knew, then the face, the eyes…

Mulder’s eyes; legible to her as they would be to no one else on this Earth. He could be a shapeshifter. He could be being used… but she didn’t think so. Not when he looked at her like that. Not when she could see the thing in him that matched the thing inside herself.

and--

That Mulder had accepted this solace from her, as he had from no other being, had contributed almost immediately to bringing forth that strange intimacy that they had always had between them; first jocular, almost sibling-like, as he responded to her gentle teasing with startlement and a growing relaxation. This man who was so used to being abused by others with cruel taunting had been taken aback by her easy reaction to him. But by doing so, she had aided him in lowering his walls, and so now she would never be fooled by his many self-saving wisecracks. Neither was she fooled by the protection he had put off at first; his little show of, “Don’t mind me, I’m a harmless crackpot.” That image, which he had often put off to their superiors and detractors, was countered once you met him in person. Intelligent; yes. Without a doubt. Driven; yes. Almost wholly so. Foolish? Never in a hundred years; though he may have looked that way to others, may have even fostered that impression to aid him in his work.

and--

Mulder tensed, shoulders hunching as he felt her abortive movement. He shook his head angrily against the memories, but when he spoke his voice was quiet with acceptance… and so plumbed with loss that she felt her own heart break. “I needed you so badly, Scully,” he finished softly; as if the admission cost him dearly. “But you weren’t there. I had pushed you away; and the nightmares kept coming and coming…”

Unable to stand it anymore, Scully drew close and pressed her body lightly, tentatively to his tense and unyielding backside. Felt his clammy skin warm automatically with that contact. He did not soften, at first. Did not edge away, nor did he lean into her. Much like that awful night when their office had burnt he simply stood cold with shock and while she supported him; the steadfast fidelity of their bond never questioned in the decade that they had been together.

“I was there,” she murmured into his shoulder. /I’ll always be here./ He could accept it now. She was finally able to press her arms about him in the night. Feel the strong bones beneath unblemished flesh; amazed that he was even alive for her to hold after an ordeal that had indeed taken him from her for so long that she had lost all hope. She shuddered and cinched her arms tighter; felt his ribs shift beneath the silky envelope of his skin. They creaked in protest, but he did not move, and she spoke like one driven. “I was there hurting for you, holding you against the nightmares, even when you couldn't ask me to be there. I was with you every night until you came back to me.”

Magnificent.

Thank you for reading~

Enjoy!

#txf #Collector's Edition #Curated #fic #touchstona #Amor Fati #AU #S9 #I adore this series #it is my S9 #(that and Lapsed_Scholar's S9 AU)#specifically: this is my mytharc S9 #xf fanfic #xfiles #x-files #the x files

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lilydalexf · 2 years

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👽 Random X-Files Fic Rec

This story is set early in season 2, and it was originally posted around then in 1994. It reads, though, like a story written any time during (or beyond) the show's original run in the way it gives Scully depth and attempts to explain bits of the mytharc. But it is firmly an early season 2 story, with Scully still finding her footing with all she's learned so far on the X-Files and how it will fit into her life and worldview. It's also a fully Scully story, with Mulder back in the U.S. while Scully is on her own in Scotland. Title: Aurora Author: Steve Mills and Adam Webb Summary: Scully attends her great-uncle's funeral and inherits a mystery for her to investigate, though certain powers don't wish her to. Length: 39k (~6,300 words) Classification: mystery Rating: PG Spoilers: Season 2 Favorite line: No one line. Everything works well together overall. Read the story! (If you have trouble with the gossamer link, change "krycek" to "fluky" or try this link)

#fic rec #xfiles fanfic #xf fanfic #season 2 #mytharc #steve mills #adam webb

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syntax6 · 1 month

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XF rewatch with my husband

We finally made it through the end of the original series. I haven't seen most of these episodes in years–and Seasons 8 & 9 only once at their original airing–so I am surprised to find my opinions really haven't changed. Episodes I loved, I still love. The final three seasons don't do a lot for me, with rare exceptions.

I asked my husband for the episodes he liked best. He named checked the Flukeworm, Squeeze, Pusher, and everything by Darin Morgan. There's a reason we're married. He favors to the MOTW eps over the mytharc, which he never really warmed to. I defended it mutliple times because I still think the early mytharc is pretty fabulous. The Anasazi trilogy is amazing. Scully's abduction. The Samantha clones. Anytime the characters are having to make agonzing choices about their love for each other or the pursuit of the truth, it's story-telling gold.

As a GenXer, my husband likes "Sunshine Days," and I agree it's one of the better episodes from the post-Mulder days. One of the lessons of the XF is indeed about the importance of found family. But this is why it really didn't work very well without Mulder, whose quest for family really drove the series. I liked Doggett and Reyes, but they didn't have the same skin in the game that Mulder and Scully did. Fox kept GA around for Season Nine, but 1013 didn't seem to know what to do with her. The better MOTW eps from this season pretty much ignored her entirely. And I still can't believe they brought Mulder back for the finale only to have a boring two-hour recitation of the series. WTH???

My husband is a completionist, so we'll probably move onto the reunion episodes, most of which I have never seen. To me, though, the XF still ends at "Je Souhaite," with Mulder and Scully having a beer on the couch, the alien invasion still waiting in the wings, but for the moment, both of them fairly happy.

#x files

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bakedbakermom · 4 months

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Hi ! I’m relatively new to txf fandom and you seem very knowledgeable and lovely, and I just saw a post that had this tweet and I wanted to ask if there’s a fic like that for us ? And if not, do you have any recommendations for your all time favorite txf fics ? Thank you :)

Well aren't you sweet. Not sure about knowledgeable and lovely, but I am quite susceptible to flattery!

Off the top of my head, I can think of 3 fics that have remained key pieces in the fandom since their publication:

Arizona Highways by Fialka Fialka's entire body of work is astonishing, but AH remains not only a staple for the XF fandom, but is widely regarded as one of the classics of fanfiction itself. It made an impressive showing at the 2000 Spooky Awards (fanfic awards within the fandom), winning the outstanding novel, x-file (casefile), angst, Scully characterization, and "other" character categories, and second place for outstanding Mulder characterization.

The story provides a resolution to the Emily arc that both fans and characters were otherwise denied in show canon. It follows Scully, Mulder, and Kresge (from the Christmas Carol/Emily episodes) as they discover that Emily - like the Samanthas and other clones - was but one of a series of children produced from Scully's ova to be test subjects in the wider hybridization conspiracy.

Iolokus by RivkaT and MustangSally A grim alternate universe take on the show's mytharc, this fic is highly controversial due to its bleak takes on Mulder and Scully's characterization, and the horrible things they endure throughout. Clones, rape, human experiments... I must admit that I have not finished this one - it got too dark for me quite early on - but it remains bookmarked for a time I feel ready to get into it.

This fic is both famous and infamous, and has been sparking controversy since its first publication in 1998. Proceed at your own risk.

Incrementum by Lepusarcticus A far more recent entry into the fandom (2017), this work is a series of canon-compliant alternate-universe vignettes which explore what would have happened if Mulder and Scully's romantic and sexual relationship had begun much, much earlier than in canon.

Honorable mention goes to Parabiosis by Penumbra which explores Mulder and Scully's shifting relationship throughout season seven. Penumbra is another author whose entire body of work is worthy of a deep-dive; Fathoms Five is a stunning piece concerning Scully's struggle to understand her own immortality as the world around her marches inexorably onward, and Upsidaisium is a heart-breaking story set in the long grim night of Gethsemane.

Also of note is the series Life During Wartime, a years-long collaboration between four of the fandom's best writers (Maria Nicole, cofax7, finisterre/Marasmus, and Fialka) exploring the colonization apocalypse that never came. Sweet, heart-wrenching, poignant, and fearless.

Do also check out the fics listed under the various categories of the Spooky Awards (linked above) - some are enduring classics, some are great stories that have merely been buried in the sands of time. Many of the fics listed there can be found on Gossamer (one of the few surviving archives from the show's original run and a fandom archaeologist's wet dream) or X-Libris (one person's effort to save older fics and their art from the Wayback Machine in epub and pdf format for posterity and personal use).

Also dig through the XF Book Club's archive on Livejournal for some interesting pieces you can browse by category - and as an added bonus, you can watch fellow fans debate, critique, and generally lose their minds in the comments section!

I know I have some mutuals who are fellow fandom-oldies (or newcomers who have done deep dives) so please feel free to add your recommendations to this post.

#txf #fanfic #fandom history #fandom lore #fic rec

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foxwmulder · 6 months

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tagged by @thegeekyartist. mobile removed all the nice formatting :’(

favorite color: pink

last song: start me up - Rolling Stones. I’m obsessed w it lately help. also of the 1989 vault tracks Say Don’t Go is my fav!

last movie: the eras tour movie…I’ve now seen it thrice in theaters. Yes I’m 31.

currently watching: Our Flag Means Death and Gilmore Girls! two very different shows but one is for the gays and one is for the autumnal vibes. You decide which is which.

other stuff I watched this year: oh lord I can’t even count. Off the top of my head, new (to me) stuff would be Ghosts, Santa Clarita Diet, and OFMD. Rewatched Parks and Rec, Scrubs, Frasier, Stranger Things, Black Mirror…idk I’m a junkie lol.

shows I dropped this year/didn't finish: I’m a martyr, I simply must watch until the end. Except for Scrubs. Idk why but I have never made it through the entire run.

currently reading: I’m in between Dramione fics right now…give me some recs that are dark and angsty and looong.

currently listening to: it’s been Taylor for a while now. What can I say, I love a bandwagon.

currently working on: a massive post-s11 xf fic that is both mytharc and MOTW. and a massive Maurauders fic. I can’t decide which one I’m more excited about haha.

current obsession: *gestures vaguely at url*

If you wanna play please do and say I tagged ya!!

#thanks friend!#the ask files

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xxsksxxx · 1 year

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XF asks: 10, 14, 23 👽

Thank you for asking @enigmaticxbee 💕

10. Who is your favorite character aside from Mulder and Scully?

Alex Krycek. I think his character had a lot of potential. He was mysterious, had a hidden agenda, an unrevealed backstory and he was ambitious. He could've easily become a true successor to the head of the syndicate. A worthy villain. They should've kept him alive and built him up as an adversary instead of the devil-like CSM in the revival imo.

14. Favorite episode(s)? Why?

Memento Mori is my favourite episode. It has everything I love about the x-files. An interesting plot, mysterious mytharc elements, a personal threat to one of the main characters, great and supportive MSR and gorgeous Mulder and Scully. I couldn't ask for more.

But Tithonus is another favourite of mine. I love the cinematography, the plot is very intriguing and leaves you thinking, it has great MSR banter and some fantastic acting.

23. Which broke your heart more: Emily arc or William arc?

Hands down Emily. It came pretty much out of nowhere but when the pieces fell into place it made sense with the abduction flashbacks of her pregnant belly and the found ova in Memento Mori.

I never much cared for the William arc. Maybe it's because it just got on my nerves after a while that the only thing Scully seemed to be doing was cry “my son”, “my child”, “my baby”.

#xfiles #thank you for asking #asks

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swinging-stars-from-satellites · 2 years

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I open Tumblr. I see an X-Files cancer arc gifset. I wax melancholic in the tags. I close Tumblr.

#love that my dash continually has all kinds of s4 content #xf s4 my beloved #favorite season tbh #and not *just* bc I'm a sucker for cancer arc i just genuinely think s4 is a very solid season #the writing is actually so good all season even in the mytharc #i think making the mytharc ABOUT character work by making it so personal to scully's life #made it so much better than when they try to make it all plotty #Lu rambles #txf #txf s4 #txf4 #cancer arc my beloved?

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plaidscully · 5 years

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Basically my opinion on the x files is that if you're choosing favorite episodes based on how smart they are then you're missing out on the true freedom that comes from letting go of your brain, stanning Alex krycek, and ranking favorite seasons based on how close Mulder & Scully stand during those seasons

#xf rewind #you can't watch the mytharc episodes with your brain on you just can't

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sigritandtheelves · 6 years

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Ground

Rating: Mature Timeline: post-Requiem, au Tags: angst, romance, aliens/mytharc, and (lord help me) fluff Words: 4.3 k

A/N: This is the fourth and final work in a series I’m calling Bearings that begins with “Drown,” “Surface,” and “Harbor,” following the reproduction arc from seasons 5-8. CW for all parts: mentions of some sensitive reproductive topics (IVF, loss, miscarriage, infertility, birth, etc.). Because I wanted to rework the season 8 mythology and timeline so it actually made sense, this is quite a bit more plot-heavy than the previous installments, but I hope it’s not too far off in tone from the others.

_+_

She comes home from the hospital to her empty apartment where there is nothing she wants to see, then to his empty apartment where she feeds his fish and draws circles with her left hand on her abdomen. We made you here, she thinks. On his couch, she watches the blank screen of his TV, dazed. His computer disappears. Her computer disappears. She vomits. She calls her mother. She meets the man that’s taken on the impossible task—so earnest, so by-the-book—so unequipped to find her partner.

A week after he’s taken, she stands among scrub grass and cacti, screaming his name into the dark. Beside her the boy Gibson touches her elbow. “It’s there,” he says and points.

“Where? Can you hear him?”

“Yes.”

But they are ripped away from the ship—by FBI helicopters and trucks, shot in the foot by their own people—before she can even think how to possibly reach him.

She comes, slowly, to trust this other man John, though he won’t believe her about Mulder’s abduction. She takes her prenatal vitamins with decaf coffee in the morning, grimacing at the taste. Her mother doesn’t understand, but brings her soup, crackers, ginger ale. She sits on the couch and watches her daughter cry, pats her knee with the empathy of a woman who has been pregnant and alone for long stretches, though never quite like this.

There is a sense of pressure in her belly, of fullness always, like she’s eaten too much, like there’s no more room. On a fuzzy monochrome screen she finds the shape of a peanut, hears the whoosh whoosh of a tiny heart and thinks Oh Mulder, it’s real. The doctor tells her that January 9 is her due date and she thanks her, takes the plasticky printout of the ultrasound paper to hang on her fridge. She touches the peanut shape in the mornings while she drinks her bad coffee alone.

A month goes by. Then two.

The air crackles hot in August and she burns with it—she has too much blood for this heat. Her suits are too tight, her skin is too tight. Her organs complain until one day she doubles over in pain as her strained abdominals split to make room for all her internal shifting. She thinks of those gestating monsters screeching to life in jelly-like bodies, of explosions of blood and claws in the Arizona heat.

“Agent Scully, you alright?” Doggett grips her arm and tries to straighten her, but the tearing sensation grows. She pulls the trashcan to her and vomits. He brings her water in a paper cup.

“You have some bad sushi or somethin’?” he asks.

She smiles at him sadly as she gets hold of herself. “Not quite.” She needs to tell him. The concerned look on his face pushes her over the edge. “I’m pregnant,” she says, and his concern turns to utter shock. When she tells him how far along, a new kind of understanding comes onto his face, but he doesn’t ask questions, for which she is very grateful. Eventually, he forgives her for not telling him sooner.

Two days after her confession, a crackling, distant voice comes through her phone. “Agent Scully,” it says: Gibson’s far-away voice. “Agent Scully, it’s coming back.”

She packs two bags and flies west.

_+_

Helena Montana, a drab motel room: Gibson, Scully, Doggett, Skinner.

“They’re bringing them back,” Gibson said, blunt as ever: “They’ve changed their brains.”

Doggett, pacing the small room, pinched his lips in frustration. “What are you talkin’ about?”

Behind his wire-framed glasses, the teenager narrowed his eyes. “They changed their brains so they can’t fight back. Mulder and the others. So they can’t fight back like I can.”

On the room’s small desk, a police radio squawked, and they all listened to hear if it were news. When it became clear that it wasn’t, Scully turned to Gibson.

“What you can do, that’s something that can be turned on, right? In some people or in everyone?”

The boy shrugged. “I don’t know. But it’s why they wanted me so badly before. It’s why they’re still after me now.”

Skinner heaved a sigh and stood from the desk chair, but with John’s pacing, there was nowhere to go. “Alright, so now what? They’re just turning off this god module or whatever it is and dropping everyone back off? That’s it? We just wait to collect their trash?” Scully bit her lip to keep from objecting to this. Realizing what he’d said, Skinner winced, then softened his features.

“I think what’s important here,” Scully said, “is that we find the people who were taken and make sure they’re okay, and that we protect Gibson and any others who might help us win whatever might lie ahead. That means Gibson should stay here when we go out, and someone needs to stay with him.”

Skinner and Doggett looked at each other for a moment, battling it out in steely gazes. “I’ll stay with him,” Doggett said eventually.

“No,” Gibson’s eyes were wide. “Agent Scully has to stay.”

“What? No, I’m not staying. If Mulder is out there, I need to get to him.”

For the first time, Gibson looked frightened. He reached out his hand and touched Scully’s arm. “I couldn’t tell before, which is good. That means they don’t know either.” Wide eyes peering up at her, an unusual nervousness to his speech. “Agent Scully, your baby is like me.”

---

There were tears, some arguing, but in the end, they trusted Gibson. Skinner and Doggett patrolled as much land as they could until the reports started coming through the staticky radio: strange lights, electrical disturbances, car crashes from distracted drivers. And then—people in a field. Dazed. Lost. Uncertain how they’d gotten there.

Scully had taken up the path of Doggett’s pacing, hand on her belly, ear to the radio always. People in a field. People, not bodies. She felt little flutters of movement from inside her, sparked by her agitation, her restlessness. She thought: Be calm. I’m sorry. It’s okay.

The movements slowed.

She looked at Gibson, who was reading on one of the double beds. She saw him now as he must have been: an infant, someone’s child, a toddler stacking blocks: loved. And what he’d become: quarry, fodder, a weapon in someone else’s war: hunted. How few times she’d bothered to see him as the former, she thought, ashamed.

“Gibson, where are your parents?” She asked.

He looked up at her suddenly, as if in surprise. A little smile turned up the corner of his mouth. “You know, no one has asked me that in a long time.” He thought for a moment. “I don’t think they’re dead, but I haven’t seen them since I first met you. I think those men who wanted me took them.”

“And you haven’t tried to find them?”

He shook his head. “Not safe.”

Scully looked at his socked feet stretched out and stacked on the bed, his too-big tshirt, his khakis with holes in the knee. “Do you miss them?” she asked.

The smile was gone now. “Yeah.”

She walked over and sat beside him, put her arm around the boy, who stiffened at first before relaxing. She wondered how long it had been since someone hugged him. “I’m sorry,” she said. “If… when we figure all this out, we’ll find your parents. We’ll make sure you have a family to stay with. Even if it’s us.”

Before the silence could stretch into awkwardness, her cell phone rang: it was Skinner.

“We got him,” he said. “I’m bringing him to you.”

---

They’d thought the location random—chosen for its sparse population, its vast expanses of open land, perhaps. But they were wrong. A UFO cult, a cluster of abductees in the outskirts of Helena had been kept off the map. This trip was a dropoff and a pickup, another round of collecting and neutralizing potential human weapons. Scully found this out later. After.

Skinner brought him back whole, as he’d promised, only three months late. Scully was out the door and on the sidewalk before the engine of Skinner’s rental car cut off, and they were flying to each other across a motel parking lot, crashing into each other with arms and lips and legs while Skinner stood awkwardly and rubbed his bald head.

“You’re back, you’re back,” she was saying into his mouth and his hand was buried in her hair as he fell back against the car with the weight of her, his muscles weak from disuse. “Are you okay?” Genuine concern in her voice, but she was also nearly laughing with relief, with the unbelievable solid weight of him here in her arms. He was wearing the same clothes he’d disappeared in, as if no time at all had passed.

Mulder kissed her again, buried his face in her neck. “I’m fine,” he said. “Just a little weak. A little confused.”

She touched his chin to lift his head, to look at him, touched his hairline, searched for new scars: two small ones at either temple and her bottom lip was trembling. “Oh Mulder, your poor head.”

He was shaking it, though, his soft hair tickling against her palms. “Nah, it’s okay. I don’t think there’s much more they can knock loose. Maybe even straightened things up a bit in there.” He smiled sheepishly. The look on her face was everything at once: love and relief and gratitude and sorrow and lust and hope.

“I missed you,” she whispered.

He kissed her again. “If I could remember, I’d know I missed you too.”

She took his hands and pulled him toward the motel. “Come on. There’s a lot to talk about, and then you need to rest.”

---

When all five of them were in the room, they talked about everything but one—the one thing she was saving to tell him in private. They tossed around ideas about how to save the world, Mulder and Scully thigh-to-thigh on one of the beds, inseparable. Doggett kept glancing at them, glancing away, fascinated by the magnetic pull of their presence together in a room. Skinner was used to it and untroubled. Gibson, overhearing things the others could not, blushed occasionally and looked perhaps the most uncomfortable of all. But it grew late and they could not know all the answers in one night.

Mulder and Scully rented a third room for themselves where, in the dim illumination of a bedside lamp, she held out her hand to him and gestured for him to sit. When he did, she lowered herself beside him, not touching. She was suddenly terrified in the small room, which smelled like very old cigarettes and cheap air freshener. He was watching her with increasing concern; she was gnawing her lower lip, afraid he wouldn’t be as happy about this news as she, afraid he would see it somehow as a betrayal, a weakness, a call to give up—all the things she knew he’d feared at one time.

“There’s something I need to tell you,” she said finally, eyes locked firmly on their feet, on his boots, still scuffed with Oregon mud.

“What?” he asked.

“I… I’m not sure how,” she began, careful with each word, “but it seems that sometime last year, something changed for me. Physically.” She chanced a quick look at him, found only concern and question. He pulled her hand into both of his and squeezed her fingers, offering encouragement. “Whatever infertility I experienced after my abduction… Mulder, it’s gone. I am most certainly not infertile anymore.”

His eyes narrowed at her words, considering them carefully, and then widened as he realized their import—she could almost see his heart beating, could almost hear it over the rattling of the air conditioner. “Scully,” he said. He swallowed. “How do you know?”

She almost pulled her hand away, sure he would let go anyway when she spoke her next words. “Because I’m pregnant,” she said, and then watched him carefully: “With your baby.” And goddamnit, she couldn’t help it, there was a smile tugging at her lips, even through her fear, because she’d hoped for and imagined this moment so many times in the last months, and here he was, alive and whole. They hadn’t talked about children again, not since they’d been together, not since that terrible time between Emily and Antarctica, and she had no idea what he might be thinking now.

“With my…” he said, trailing off, his face utterly inscrutable.

“I’m sorry to tell you like this. Before you were taken, I didn’t know.” She watched his face, anxious for any sign. She began to pull her hand away, but he held it tight. He lifted his eyes to hers: hooded, lost, vulnerable, but also… hopeful.

“My baby, Scully?”

Another twitch of a smile, her own hope irrupting. “Yeah.”

He did let go of her hand then, but only to touch her further, to pull her arms away so he could gaze at her middle, to pluck at the buttons of her black blazer. “How… how far along?”

She helped him with the buttons, revealed the gentle slope of her abdomen, a softness he’d not seen in her since before she was abducted. “About eighteen weeks,” she said. His fingers spread out, itching to feel, and then, so so gingerly, he touched her middle. Scully’s eyes closed at the sheer enormity of it, the feel of his hands, the knowledge of his understanding, finally finally. One of his hands moved to her cheek and she opened her eyes to his: wet and hopeful, sure and steady in his love. She cupped his face as well, and they looked at each other with thumbs to cheeks and lips as they had in his doorway a year ago.

“Are you okay?” she asked, tentative.

“Okay?” His eyebrows lifted. “Scully, this…” he was shaking his head and then grinning, remembering the warmth of his vision of a boy on the beach, the enormous flood of love he’d felt for her then, that he felt for her now, that he felt for some hypothetical child he hadn’t even known was possible. “I am so very okay, Scully.” And he kissed her again, one hand still on her belly, whispering into her mouth how much he loved her and how fucking happy he was going to make her, and she reveled in it for as long as she could, for a moment longer, drunk on this brief moment of pure hope and possibility, before she pulled back and held his eyes again.

“There’s more,” she said, because it was them, and of course there was more, and there was always something to haunt their happiness, always some cloud holding a future storm. Two parents, each exposed to different strains of a virus, both exposed to a vaccine, both exposed to the markings of a miraculous ship: epigenetic conjury working itself along their every double helix, activating, switching on in the tiny cells that would later become their child (and yes, though they could not know it then, in time their children). It was science and mysticism and love-magic, combining like a perfect syzygy. It was the history of them, their lives, their suffering, their work, their love, emerging of some dark alchemy into a perfect future person, housed now beneath his palm. “The baby will be like Gibson,” she said: a weapon and a target and a key.

“But it’s ours,” he whispered—it was a question and a statement.

“Yes,” she said. “Only ours. Of that I’m sure.” And therefore so much more than merely weapon, target, key.

She hauled him onto the bed with her and they stripped each other bare. His mouth found all the newish parts of her changing body and poured its devotions onto each in turn. Her skin was on fire, her body aflame with reunion and relief and the hot glow of life in her every heartbeat. Her toes curled against the hair of his calves. Her back stretched in an arc, pressing ever toward him. She could feel her pulse between her legs. She begged him to cut his worship short and to just please fuck her now because she was dying without him and she’d been dying this whole time, even though her insides said otherwise, and she needed him everywhere but mostly inside her now. He did not need convincing. He gave and she took and she gave and he took and they came together in sweetness, then collapsed in a tangle of arms and legs, his fingers on her belly. He rubbed small circles, wishing he could feel the same little movements she could. They slept and slept until the sun was high and Skinner was banging on their door.

They answered, barely dressed and blinking against the too-bright August sunshine. There was more to do. Always more: paperwork and planes to catch and the news of more abductions. The syndicate may have been ash in the wind, but the war raged on, indefinite.

_+_

This is the truth that they learn: that there are no happy endings, no tragic endings, no endings at all really—only the infinite struggle, the work, the dark seeping in at the edges, and their love to push it back. There are moments, stringing out into the future. He fingers the monochrome peanut shape on the ultrasound tacked to her fridge, and a faraway smile booms on his lips. She presses the tips of his fingers to her belly where she swears there’s a foot, but he shakes his head. She tells him soon. He drinks her bad coffee in the morning (“It’s decaf, sorry”) while they plot a new resistance against the end times, elbow to elbow at her kitchen table.

Without much fuss, they request transfers to Quantico for consulting work, where they can stay below the radar. They let his apartment lease run out, and his things crowd into her space for a time. Doggett suggests a new partner for the X-Files, a woman with the right kind of background, and then they are six against the world including Gibson, nine with the Gunmen.

“Do you want to know?” The doctor asks.

They look at each other. There’s such giddiness in his eyes: he is bouncing on his toes and she bites her lip to stop from laughing. The gel on her abdomen has warmed to match the temperature of her skin. She nods, unable to deny his excitement. “Okay.”

A new image joins the peanut: a bigger peanut but with vaguely humanoid features, a tiny hand in the air (“He’s waving!”).

He finds some land, a farmhouse: isolated, but not too far. He buys it. They will let her lease run out as well. They move, which takes too long because he won’t let her carry anything heavier than a lamp. She doesn’t mind. She feels overflowing and overfull: ready already, though she has a month to go yet. On the creaky floorboards of their new (old) porch, he tells her to close her eyes.

“Oh no,” she says. “What have you done?”

“Just close your eyes!”

She does, and he leads her through the door, aligns her body where he wants it, fiddles with something, and then says, “Okay, open.”

It’s a Christmas tree: a pathetic little thing, exactly what her Charlie Brown would pick, but he’s done the lights up and they shine so pretty. There’s only one ornament, a little white bassinette. She can’t help it: she cries.

The heater clanks and the water pressure isn’t perfect, but the place is. The house is so utterly them, with her heirloom bookshelves, her modest antiques, his ridiculous kitsch and clutter (an alien bobblehead on the mantle joins her carefully chosen candles). His Navajo blanket finally meets her plush couch and clashes terribly, wonderfully. Her boxes, marked in color-coded labels, come open beside the ones marked “Mulder stuff” in hasty sharpie. Their things forge a strange and heady intimacy of contradiction that parallels their own story.

On their first real night in the house, they grin stupidly at each other across the pillows in the light of a waxing moon. It feels impossible. They grasp the moment and hold it anyway. His arm breaches the space between them, hand cupping her belly. “What is that, a knee? Feels too big.”

She finds where his fingers are and laughs. “That’s his butt. Look, see, he’s still sort of sideways. But his head is moving down.”

“That’s good, right?”

Another goofy smile. “Yeah.”

He brushes her cheek with his knuckles, so in love with her he can’t stand it. “Three weeks,” he whispers, and she nods. But after a moment, the smile fades. The house settles and creaks around them. The bed sheets rustle as she rolls to her back.

“I’m worried,” she says.

“About the birth?”

A frown as she thinks. “In a way, but not how you think. I’ve been thinking of how embedded the syndicate was in the medical establishment, how vulnerable spaces like hospitals are when our enemies can look like anyone.”

He’s frowning now too. “Do you think someone will try to take him?”

A pause, a bit too long. “I don’t know.” She rolls to face him again, the weight on her back too much. “Probably not.”

“That’s not good enough. What can we do?” he asks.

“I may have an idea,” she says.

---

On New Year’s Day it snows, a fine white coating at dusk. They stand on the porch to watch, he wrapped in his well-worn blanket, she in his arms. The sound of the snow is like leaves rustling, but steady, persistent, soft. “They’ll be here,” he says; his voice rumbles against her back, chin moving against the top of her hair.

“Even in the snow?”

He kisses her head and wraps the blanket more tightly around them. “Yeah.”

The Lone Gunmen come bearing gadgets and Gibson, who has been staying with them. Frohike wears a red stocking cap and holds up a bottle of whiskey. “Happy Holidays!”

“We saw you for Christmas a week ago, Melvin.” Mulder is laughing as he lets them all in.

“The holiday is not over until the clock strikes midnight on January 2, and you can quote me on that.” He slaps the bottle of whiskey against Mulder’s chest on his way past.

Around the table, they eat and are merry, some faces growing redder from high spirits of all kinds, others from the fire. They have brought Gibson to be their guard, their alarm should the wrong person come near, but also as their friend. He will stay until the baby is born, and after if he likes. It’s been so long since he’s known family.

On the twelfth, she feels the first real contraction and by evening, she is breathing hard through them. Arms linked around his neck, she hangs and sways, moving her hips.

“Should I make the call?” He asks, and she nods. “I’ll make the call.”

The midwife arrives at nine, certified, but illegal in the state of Virginia. She is a spunky woman of sixty, well vetted by both the Gunmen and Gibson, who lets her in and smiles at whatever he hears in her mind. He stays by the door when the excitement moves upstairs.

Maggie appears next, and her daughter cries when she sees her. “Oh, mom,” she says, teary, sweating, gripping Mulder’s arms in only a tank-top and underwear. “How did you do this four times?” And then she is racked again by another contraction, burying her face in Mulder’s chest. He rubs her back and murmurs encouragement for a full two minutes of quiet groans.

By two a.m. she is on her knees on the stripped bed, gripping the footboard and leaning back, pushing hard as Mulder holds her gaze and whispers words of love. He is born at 2:36 a.m. on January 13: William Scully Mulder, red and roaring, caught by his father and lifted straight into his mother’s arms with tears all around, save the midwife, who smiles and checks and makes notes and says, “Oh Dana, you did so well.”

By the time the first light of dawn breaks through the bedroom windows, the midwife has gone home and the little family sits propped on pillows, in warm blankets and soft pajamas on the remade bed. William has been wiped clean and nursed, weighed and measured, swaddled and kissed. He sleeps the dreamless and hard-earned sleep of the newly born. His parents’ eyes move between each other and the child, not sure what else to do under the weight of what this night has brought.

Maggie tiptoes in with two mugs of tea, which she sets on the bedside table. “Do you want me to take him? You two should sleep. I don’t mind.”

Scully nods and gratefully passes William to his grandmother, who says goodnight and slips into the nursery.

In the quiet of their bedroom, they are alone again, dazed by the enormity of the wide, unimaginable future. Mulder cups her face, kisses her nose, her lips. “You’re incredible,” he says.

“I’m a mess,” she says, and laughs.

“Let’s do it again,” he says, and the look she gives him could shatter glass. But she is smiling, too.

“Things might be okay,” she reasons, posing it as both a question and a statement.

“Yeah. I think they might.” He bumps her shoulder, nips at her ear, pulls her down into the blankets and pillows to rest.

There are still worlds to save, still many battles in this endless war. But there are other kinds of moments waiting, too. Here is where they will hold their ground: in this house and in each other.

- end -

This was probably the hardest thing I’ve written because the pacing and reconstructing a new plot for s8 didn’t seem to fit with the way I’d told the other installments. I was a grumbly mess for a long time in writing it, and I’m still not totally happy. But thanks so much for reading. Tagging @peacenik0 who listened to me complain, and @kateyes224 who offered a quick second pair of eyes and some reassurance. Thank you, friends!

#a thing i wrote #xf fanfic #s8 sort of #au #angst #mytharc corrections #baby stuff #kinda fluffy by the end #sry

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nostalgicphile · 6 years

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Do you ever feel like trying to make sense of any part of The X-Files mytharc is just a huge misappropriation of brain cells? It’s like 1013 just dumped puzzle pieces at us but none of them will EVER fit together because there is simply no comprehensive image.

#le sigh #The X-Files #xf negativity #this is why I just hope Mulder and Scully will just make out #caring about the mytharc is just futile

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enigmaticxbee · 2 years

Text

11x01 My Struggle III

The one where... the previous finale was all a vision sent to Scully from William, and CSM makes BS claims about William to Skinner.

Tagline: I Want to ..LIE..

Best: -

Worst: I’ve been putting off rewatching this episode for (checks watch) 4 years because the first time I saw it I found it to be:

A. a terribly written, boring episode to watch - is this an episode of txf or a car commercial?;

B. full of CC’s worst mytharc exposition monologing impulses;

C. frustrating because after 2 years of waiting to see how they would resolve the cliffhanger from the season 10 finale instead everything’s wiped away so that we can go back to the case of the week status quo; and

D. viscerally upsetting - this episode of my favorite show made me feel BAD. I can count on one hand the times I’ve been this emotionally disturbed by a piece of media. Yes, after 20 years I am overly emotional invested in this fictional universe and particularly in these characters, but this isn’t something that should be treated as a cool plot twist, especially when Scully’s bodily autonomy and relationship to motherhood is handled as badly as it has been on this show.

I powered through this rewatch - see below for a more detailed list of things I hated! - and I’m never watching this awful episode again.

❌ Flashlights

❌ Woods/Desert

❌ Slideshow

❌ Autopsy

❌ Evidence Disappears

❌ Scully Misses It

❌ Mulder Ditch (I mean, not exactly)

❌ Sunflower Seeds

✔️ Voiceover

✔️ Catch Phrase (IWTB: tagline)

✔️ Scully is a (Medical) Doctor

❌ Mulder is Spooky

❌ Scuuullllaaaaayy! Muullllderrrr!

❌ Fox/Dana

✔️ Inappropriate Touching (that I am here for)

❌ Casual Scully

❌ Casual Mulder

❌ Trench Coats

❌ Bad Tie Watch

✔️ Glasses Watch 😎

✔️ Taking! It! Personally!: Mulder & Scully

50 States: South Carolina x3 & DC x106 (44/50)

Investigate: Together & Apart

Solve Rate: 57%

✔️ Bechdel Test

MSR: 🐝🐝🐝

Goriness: 👽👽👽

Creepiness: 👽

Humor: 👽

Rewatch Thoughts:

William check-in: Look, CSM’s a known lier, Mulder is William’s father. Here are my En Ami thoughts and my pregnancy timeline thoughts. Any other explanation’s bad for my mental health, so that’s what I’m sticking with. Besides, see the tagline.

Break-up check-in: Everyone treats them like significant others, they treat each other that way, I guess that’s that?

Things I hate:

1. This time we get CSM’s struggle 🤢 - why is CC so obsessed with him

2. The frantic cutting and editing

3. That I’m not immune to Mulder and Scully’s close talking, even when what they’re saying is absolute nonsense

4. That we’re still doing the Monica Reyes character assassination from MSII

5. The Mulder voiceover - I don’t think we’ve ever gotten internal monologue voiceover like this before and it doesn’t feel right

6. The car chases - WTF is this

7. It was Jeffrey Spender that arranged William’s adoption??? Is that a retcon? Why would Scully have trusted him with that even if she did believe that what he did to the baby in the episode William took away his alien abilities (which it clearly didn’t, at least not permanently). I start think about any of this and immediately spiral into WTF are we doing here 😫

8. CSM and Reyes discussing plot holes 🙄

9. “your desk” 😑

10. Driving, driving, driving

11. Scully, a Medical Doctor - as she reminds us so often - signing herself out of the hospital AMA after a seizure, suffering another one, then getting in the car and causing an accident that could have killed her or someone else!! She’s clearly not in her right mind but this just doesn’t feel in character to me.

12. Hand waving away the alien invasion, I guess because we’ve destroyed the planet in last 20 years and they don’t want it any more?

13. This new duo’s plan. CSM won’t expect Mulder? The man who’s shoved his gun in his face countless times and demanded the truth? I mean, Mulder’s never pulled the trigger so I guess he wouldn’t expect him to actually kill him (if anyone can - remember when CSM’s face exploded, I do!)

14. More driving!!

15. Seeing Scully brutally attacked and fighting for her life - again

16. That I find Mulder slitting a man’s throat to save Scully in any way hot

17. Wait, who sent the assassin and why? Eh, who cares

18. That we’re going back to the distrusting Skinner well yet again

19. Mulder and Skinner’s stupid little fight - you’re grown men, use your words!

20. I already disliked the episode En Ami… but to imply via flashback 18 years later that our protagonist was - unbeknownst to her or the viewers - either raped or medically raped… The ending to this episode is upsetting on so many levels.

21. The term impregnated her with science WTF

22. I…

Things I don’t hate:

1. Mulder’s silver stubble

2. Mulder telling Skinner that where he’s needed is at Scully’s bedside

3. Scully: You need him, and I need you. She hasn’t looked for William for all these years for his own protection, however much that must have hurt her, but for Mulder she’ll do it.

4. The thigh grasp handhold

5. Again, Mulder looks fucking hot - just watch a couple gifs and skip this absolutely garbage episode

#xf rewatch #xf fanart #msr #my struggle iii #msiii #the x files #the xfiles #thexfiles #xf #txf #xf mytharc #i want to believe #truth is out there #xf review #11x01 #revival #cw rape

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