Scully looked almost like she’d seen a ghost, and he should know; he’d seen her after she’d seen one. Her fingers flexed on the back of one of her high wooden chairs. “It’s because I haven’t been getting enough zinc.” She swallowed. “Isn’t it.”
When he stepped toward her she kept the chair between them. She could break his heart if she weren’t so busy scaring the shit out of him.
He tried, “Scully.”
The low, sibilant way she used to take to like a body to water, in the middle of the night, in the flail of some nightmare: Where is my weapon. Did I take enough zinc. And -- Scully, till she sagged with it. Her muscles going long against her bones, which had gone still against his. Scully, alright Scully. Asleep in his arms untense as an exhausted swimmer.
But now she was rigid. And her eyes were so open, he could see straight to the very blue bottom of her confusion, which was something terrible and true.
“No,” she said. “Don’t do that.” One hand went to her mouth and the other to her chest. Like she was going to throw up and recite the Pledge of Allegiance at the same time. “Oh my god,” she said, all but doubled over with it. “Please don’t do this to me.”
She hadn’t answered the door when he’d knocked, though he’d hardly knocked. The buzz of anonymous highway had been in him, dirt still in his hair, and he’d realized on the walk up to her apartment that he was wearing a rather nice suit, probably Armani.
It was all too strange, even by his generous measure. He’d woken up under a slice of clear blue rectangle in North Carolina that morning. In his gums, it made his teeth ache.
And then there was Scully.
Don’t do this to me, that’s what she’d said when he’d come in the door, too, bolting upright on her couch, scrabbling for her service weapon. Had she been asleep? It was two o’clock in the afternoon. It was, per the gas station calendar as he’d hitched statelines, a Tuesday. Her hair had been a fright. There were bruises under her eyes as purple as any cadaver’s little finger.
He’d thought — what had he thought? What was he supposed to think? She was Scully. The steps were quite simple: If things were strange, he found Scully. Sometimes, yes, it took a moment to travel from point A to point B. Sometimes there were many smaller steps between those two essential ones. But the fact remained that, in ketamine dreams or the throes of self-imposed psychodementia, the buck stopped with Scully. Once he found her, some broader leap toward not-strangeness, or at the very least a better kind of strange, could almost always reliably be made.
Except this was worse, undeniably. Scully cornered across her kitchen where she’d flown after failing to locate her gun. It was not so much that she seemed afraid. The first thing she’d said, before imploring him that she could not take it, had been his name. And she’d said it just like she always had, with a tugging in it, a slur that was like closing a distance. It sounded exactly like the buck still stopped at her front door.
“Please,” she was saying still, but she had stopped looking at him, sobbing to the hard wood and pale tile floor. “I don’t know—”
“Scully,” he said, in a different way, older and more urgent. “It’s me. It is me.”
And damn if her face didn’t snap right up to his again. Yes. The echo and aftershock of recognition. His Scully of the basement office and the connected motel room door. Since forever, his assigned seat-mate, his stalwart, his level best. The dutiful daughter whose eyes had looked like that — Christ, just like that — when her father had died.
Still, she was shaking her head. Her chin in that self-loathing crimp. “I can’t,” she said.
“Yes,” he told her, though he didn’t know what, really. Anything. “Sure you can, Scully. It’s alright.”
Scully took a deep breath. When she tore loose of herself it was with a shudder. The same rent-apart way she'd looked when she recalled burning spaceships with her hands open, or when she’d stepped through the doorway into his room, that first time.
Upon him then, across the room, the dig of her forearm into the flesh of his neck like an incision, like that was how close she wanted to be: to the bone. The chair rattled.
“Hey,” he said, “hey, oh —” He put his arms around her ribs and spine. He put a hand in her hair to hold her and mean it. He said her name one more way, a way that wasn’t worth describing.
Scully cried like to bring down high heaven. She cried like when she’d nearly had her heart torn out on his ratty living room floor. She cried in a way he’d never heard her cry before.
Mulder put his face to her hot neck. When he tried to speak, he didn’t know what there was to say. He stood and shook funeral dirt all over her, his widow, and her bright clean kitchen floors.
She had gone to Philadelphia and come back changed—he feared irrevocably. Sure they had newfangled lasers that might starch ink from skin but this wasn’t about that. It was about the cool level way she looked at him across their desk, the way she’d not met his eyes in the hospital, and how he’d thought he missed her, then.
They confer professionally with long silence. Scully’s raw with bruises and rough handling. He recalls how, in Graceland, he had addressed her a postcard but not gotten it sent. Scully — scrawled, and that was all.
4x6 sentiment. The square footage of them. If they got another desk she’d have to stand in his shadow to reach anything of value. Her face is familiar, and silent, and WISH YOU WERE HERE! is what the card had had to say before he’d ever touched it.
The quiet grows to the size of the room.
“I may be in love with you,” is how he chooses to fill it.
After he’s said it, he knows it is true. Before he’d only had his hunches.
Scully says nothing. Impassive. But he sees it, a kind of wince, to the right of her eyebrow, with the bruise, like he, too, has caused her some pain. She leans forward and slides a file off the desk, tucks a paper clip to it, then looks down to her brief case and neatly puts it away.
Had he spoken? Mulder blinks at the place where a moment ago her face had been, absent now as she ducks about her business. “Scully?”
Half-rising. “Hm?” The smooth, unflinching side of her face. It’s astounding. He blinks again at nothing. “Did you hear what I said?”
Scully gives him an absent, midweek smile. A Thursday night, reports done, let’s call it early crimp. Then it’s gone. “Been a long day,” she says. “Night, Mulder.”
The door shuts behind her, and on Monday, he knows, she will come in with her face powdered, and her mouth closed. The postcard stuck in a motel drawer with the Gideon Bible.
story where scully does something insane for mulder? can be whatever
Citizen 354 was at almost the top of their list, not far behind 356. The reasons -- though obvious -- had been typed and ratified and re-typed and filed in alphabetical order. It’s the Captain who attempts to make first contact.
It goes to voicemail. He frowns at the red phone under his heavy white fist.
“Sir?”
The long table, rows of curious, bespectacled eyes. “What did he say, sir?”
The Captain scrubs an eye. He flips back and forth, forth and back, through the reasons, and the list, and wishes he weren’t so informed, so as to be able to wonder why. “Something,” he says, “about being sure to feed the fish.”
--
“And I know it cannot be about that bog witch thing, Mulder,” Scully is saying, balancing a takeout bag against his door, propped on one knee, scrounging for her key, “because even you think it’s more likely to be ignus fatus than anything, and besides, the joke makes itself, it wasn’t,” she huffs, the bag sliding, the lock catching, “worth” - catch “taking” - catch “personally.”
His apartment is empty, impersonally. Scully lets the takeout drop. It’s a Sunday. The calls go straight for voicemail -- since Friday. It’s me. Thinking about Marvin’s, but only if you’re free. It’s me, are you still mad about what I said in Hillsboro the other day? It’s me. Mulder? It isn’t funny.
The perpetual dent in his couch just-so. The ripple of water light at his shelf and window. The fish tank, blue and eternal. Scully doesn’t tap the glass, just touches it as though to say: I am late. I am here. Hello. The bodies, two of them, tiny, weightless, waving.
--
He didn’t say anything to me. Already an old refrain. She’s tired even of her own self, these days. Knocking at the Gunmen’s door, trying to look bored and hasty. Frohike looks her up and down. “Where have I heard this one before,” he says, and lets her in.
“Bermuda?” Byers offers. And Langley, in his turn: “Bahama.”
“The only thing I can think,” she tells them, “is that he took something I said on Wednesday too seriously. He’s angry or -- or hurt, and he’s…” Punishing me, is what she doesn’t say.
Silence from her Beach Boys. “What.” Their shared glance. “What.”
“Nothing,” Byers says, “it’s just that we saw him Thursday. He didn’t seem…upset with you.”
Frohike is sort of kicking at his own heel, looking at the floor. A flare goes through her then, not the first, the cool touch of fishtank glass under her fingertips. “Okay.” Nobody will really look at her. “So? What am I missing?”
Shrugs all down and up the line. “I don’t think he was angry, chickee,” says Frohike. “Doesn’t mean he wasn’t insane.”
“Where have I heard this one before,” Scully says, and if she smiles, it will cut tightly through the pain.
--
Her ceiling has all the answers, between midnight and three. Deep cover. Held captive. Six feet under. Sitting pretty on sixteen milligrams of psilocybin or LSD. Skinner had been resolute, but also bored and hasty -- truly.
The maximum number of hours she’d ever had truly no idea where to find Mulder -- where to even start to look -- was thirty-six. They were coming up now on forty-eight. When she relayed some version of this to Skinner, meaning it the way they meant timelines when a civilian was reported missing, he’d looked at her like she was speaking pig latin and had said, Christ, Dana. Stop counting.
Forty-nine. Brain damage. Chemical explosion. Meeting with a source, gone sideways and sour. In Hillsboro, she’d said, you would have to be stupid to believe that -- that was it! Stupid, to believe it. You’d have to be. Mulder had looked at her from under his lashes, in mud up past their ankles. She’d followed him back to town with the earth sucking at the soles of their shoes.
If it’s the last thing you ever say to him, says her ceiling, you’re going to die wishing you’d lived your whole life never saying anything.
Scully blinks. Of course that was absurd. The last thing she’d said to him was, “Lights, please,” and he’d hit them on the way out the office door, and stepped out into darkness, shoulders turned, already receding.
Fifty.
--
Driving in on Monday, she realizes she has gotten, unthinking, two coffees. The thought makes her tap the brakes too hard. Hers spills, hot liquid down the console, where her thigh meets the leather seat. “Damn, shit, oh.” She fumbles napkins from the dash. Maps spill with the old vehicle manual, a scratchy notepad, an empty bag of seeds. Her forehead to the steering wheel, her car running on the side of a side street, in the suburbs, on a weekday just after 7:30. Damn, shit, oh God, why are you doing this to me.
--
Her message light blinks, its warm red. The door slams. Frohike: “Just checking in to say it’s still radio silence over here, compadre. Come over for supper, maybe? Byers had a thought that started with ‘Grace’ and ended with ‘land,’ if you catch my drift. Over and out, as they say.”
A telemarketer: “I’m calling for a Dana K. Scully, this is the second --"
A blank, scuzzy gap that may just be the tape, or may be him. She replays thrice this nothing, thinking, Lights, please. Thinking, just let me say something differently.
The phone ringing shocks her into immediate action. She answers like it’s a foregone conclusion, breathless.
“Hello?”
“I’m calling for a Dana K. Scully--”
Wilting. Her briefcase unfurls from her hand. “Not interested,” she says. “Take me off your list.”
The telemarketer is quiet. Why doesn’t he hang up? At least Scully knows why she’s still holding the phone so tightly.
“It is not,” he finally says, “very easy to do that, you see.”
--
In a white room, Scully is familiar with the physics of your life falling out from under you, hurtling small and far away. For the first half of the interview it’s all she can do not to smile. She can’t help thinking what an excellent prank it might be, were it not real, and true, and happening. “Where have I heard this one before,” she asks. But nobody is laughing.
“Agent Scully,” says the Captain, who holds a thick fold of paper in a thick white hand. “We know this may seem difficult to believe, but trust that you were selected in part for your --” Pale eyes to pale hairline “shall we say, credulity.”
At this she does laugh. Her ceiling had predicted none of it. Even the words space and ship -- and those had occurred to her, both together and separate, between four am and six -- had not scratched the surface.
“Sorry,” she says, sobering. “I’m sorry. It’s just -- I think you may want my partner, really. I’m not really known for -- ” She shakes her head. “I’m a scientist.”
“Yes,” says the Captain, “and that’s exactly why you were of interest to us. Your medical training, combined with your undergraduate studies, makes you uniquely suited for the expedition. The nature of your recent fieldwork is really secondary. Obviously, extraterrestrial intelligence, should any exist, is of tertiary interest to my team. It is useful,” he says, “only in that it suggests you may be able to tolerate the things we had to say.”
Behind him, images of the sun explode and fracture. Stars fail and die. Scully knows about heat death, and black holes, and last year’s big movie. She misses her ceiling. She misses her Mulder. She thinks that only last week she had been knee-deep in bog witch territory, mean and twitchy, not realizing it was the happiest she might ever be.
The Captain is looking at her, in that way Captains always seemed to have: like he expects something.
“You must have been very disturbed when you saw Armageddon,” is what she finds herself saying. “Practically gave your whole operation away.” It’s not even like her. She is so lonely.
“That’s what your partner said,” says the Captain, “almost exactly."
--
At her mother’s front door, then small in her blue-carpeted hallway. Scully clasps her own hands, a good daughter.
Maggie tucks her hair for her, behind her ears. “So like your father,” she says, and Scully swallows, shakes her head.
“Yes,” says Maggie, “you make such sacrifices. I won’t pretend to understand all of them. But we feel them -- the people you love. Even when you’re leaving us behind.”
Scully touches her fingers to her mouth. It is a terrible thing. What she’s been asked to do, the answer she has given. She is glad of her father, for giving her mother this useful shape. Away to war. Off shore. Lost at sea.
“Will you come back, Dana?” asks Maggie. And the frame snaps. It is not something she had asked of the Captain. It was understood between them, an order already obeyed: You will come back. And hadn’t he? He had, always.
A good daughter, her father’s proudest thing. Scully shrugs, nearly shakes her head, finds she can and cannot lie. “Time is very different,” she says, “when you’re considering this kind of travel. The -- the relativity -- it --"
There’s almost nothing more to say. Her mother is looking at her with such calm, such patience. For time to make her the sort of widow she always knew she might have been. She tucks her hair again then holds her daughter firmly between both hands. “Stranger tides, my excellent girl,” she says, and Scully cries with it, her mother’s soldier’s honor, her father’s homecomings, quiet and uncelebrated, true.
“And,” Maggie brings a hand to Scully’s shoulder and squeezes once, too tightly, “Fox?” she asks.
The flash through Scully then -- fury, cold glass, mud in her boots, shame, and the lights, please. Sitting in a white room, lonely but for him. Her silent phone. Her two coffees; her empty ceiling.
“And Fox,” Scully answers, admitting.
--
There are one septillion stars in the universe -- a number beyond the use of quantification. Only two of them are going to explode. That’s all it takes: that small dying. Only that, to throw the whole world out of orbit. It will darken the sun.
To stop it will take forever. Scully signs her name to a variety of papers, in the same blue pen. It will take forty-three light years. It will take 365 lives. It will take a hundred astrophysicists and fifty biologists, and sixty Navy SEALS, and many fathers, and several daughters, and a handful of the faithful and at least one non-believer -- and God, too, if He is on their side.
Scully boards a ship, anchorless. She thinks not of the ground.
--
Citizen 356 drops her bag at the head of the low bunk with a buckled snap. 354 jerks up on an elbow, twisting.
There’s a moment that might be misrecognition but isn’t. I am late. I am here. Hello.
His free hand closes around her upper arm, then her wrist. She’s no longer really standing. He doesn’t rise. The sound of fabric and a muffled sort of hiccup. Under his arm, she disappears all but totally. Her face in his t-shirt, his thumb at the base of her skull, and, at his ankles, her boots still on.
Out into darkness, the stunned, unsorry, understanding look in his eyes. Out into darkness, the gone of the world. The wave of weightless bodies. The end of it all. The rest of their lives.
Chapters: 5/5
Fandom: Pluribus (TV 2025)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Relationships: Carol Sturka/Zosia, Manousos Oviedo & Carol Sturka, Helen/Carol Sturka, The Others & Carol Sturka
Characters: Carol Sturka, Zosia (Pluribus), Manousos Oviedo, Laxmi (Pluribus), Tom Cruise (conceptually), also Ravi & Rick
Summary:
One thing about Tom Cruise is that he had had aliens in his brain long before there were aliens in his brain, Carol thinks, so probably this was all going really great for him.
—
post-s1. world-saving for the world-weary or whatever. [complete]
the way i write fic for “new” or currently airing shit is so predictable like . one feverish, under 5k, largely dialogue driven/canon compliant piece to get the voices down. something longer and more emotional when a specific episode upsets me. a 10k word post-canon follow up as soon as the season ends. wash rinse repeat
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
Chapters: 2/4
Fandom: Pluribus (TV 2025)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Relationships: Carol Sturka/Zosia, Manousos Oviedo & Carol Sturka, Helen/Carol Sturka, The Others & Carol Sturka
Characters: Carol Sturka, Zosia (Pluribus), Manousos Oviedo, Laxmi (Pluribus), Tom Cruise – do not ask, also Rick & Ravi, look at my IMF team dawg i’m gonna get existential about what it means to be human in alien imperial times
Summary:
One thing about Tom Cruise is that he had had aliens in his brain long before there were aliens in his brain, Carol thinks, so probably this was all going really great for him.
—
post-s1. world-saving for the world-weary or whatever.
Zosia either smiled with just one side of her mouth — which was new — or Carol could only see one side — which was also new. In either case, her own mouth felt dry.
“Systems,” Zosia said. “Simplicity. We’re interested in continuity.”
sorry for writing unhappily married people doomed to keep rehearsing all the ways they've hurt each other for as long as toxic codependency and/or earthly life will allow. it will happen again
begging and pleading on my knees for more mark/Helly okay byeeeeeeee!!!!!! (Professor/TA??? AU already married before being severed???? AU Gemma is fine and Mark/Helly meet organically?????) you’re an angel among us thank you for sharing your gift of writing.
this is so sweet, thank you!! i’m unfortunately not super big on aus unless they hew pretty close to canon, but hiatuses are loooong. i don’t think u’ve seen the last of markhelly(na) from me
i just need you to know that in my peak xfiles phase i binge read all of your fics about MSR and they literally changed my brain chemistry to the point where i still think about some of them to this day . so when i saw your name attached to markhelly fics i got SO excited and safe to say u did not disappoint your writing literally is some of the best i have ever seen
this is so kind, thank you. markhelly did a number on me that has not been done since my msr days, so i love that there’s overlap in ao3 readership, too. there are dozens of us!!!
not to be obnoxious, but i have to say that my ear for television show character dialogue is so good that i could probably get away with making my borrowed made up people do or say almost anything without it seeming ooc. unfortunately i am exclusively interested in making them behave and speak exactly how i think they would behave and speak within the precise tonal & experiential confines of a highly restrictive devotion to canon. kind of tragic that god gave this gift to one of his most dutifully mimetic soldiers
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
Mark thinks about a mirror, a cubicle, about Helly’s smart mouth. The axis of the world, slipped, some time ago, and the depth of some unknown horizontal. Yesterday he had remembered the words: prime meridian, but had not known who or where it was.
--
post-2x10. Mark and Helly spend a long weekend alone on the severed floor.
