so.... is anyone else going to completely ignore the past several seasons and pretend it ended in 7?
Yeah. This is all a crazy, lucid pregnancy dream Scully has when Mulder is in Oregon. She wakes up to his phone call and immediately starts telling him about it. “Mulder, I dreamed you’d been abducted and then you came back, but you were dead and I had to bury you, and we got pregnant, Mulder, and our child, our son, he wasn’t really our son because the Smoking Man impregnated me with science…and we lived together in this quaint, dingy old house out in the country, and then we didn’t, and then I got pregnant again when I was like 54…”
Mulder, meanwhile, just smiles, interrupts her. “Hey, Scully, write all that down before you forget what happened, I have a dream analysis book somewhere in the office. But right now, I gotta go, the Skinman and I are just about to leave for the airport. I’ll see you in a few hours?”
And she ends up finding out she is, in fact, pregnant. But she doesn’t name the boy William. That name bears the weight of too much history. She names him Samuel…Sam. Because he is an answered prayer.
oh my god the first scene in the unnatural. this man literally called scully into the office to do nothing. he sat there and pretended to be interested in aliens but started watching baseball and reading about box scores. he just wanted to hang. then he crushed this woman’s fake ice cream cone, called her a math geek, found something actually interesting on accident, destroyed government property, and dipped on this lady he probably pestered at like 8 am to come in and pretend to do x-files shit. he ate some hot dogs, tipped a child poorly, listened to a story about baseball. went home and was probably like oh. wait. i should probably do something about these massive feelings i have for my coworker. cuz all that’s real is baseball and love. and the past due bill on my porn addiction. we’re gonna play baseball, feel each other up a little under the guise of sports instruction, my name is Fox Mantle.
and it WORKS. scully is so into it. i honestly love Fox Mulder so much. I love the way he thinks. he has all his brain cells — he is clearly an incredibly smart man — but sometimes some of those brain cells are taking a snack break or doing lines in the bathroom.
Please make a post about the story of the RMS Carpathia, because it's something that's almost beyond belief and more people should know about it.
Carpathia received Titanic’s distress signal at 12:20am, April 15th, 1912. She was 58 miles away, a distance that absolutely could not be covered in less than four hours.
(Californian’s exact position at the time is…controversial. She was close enough to have helped. By all accounts she was close enough to see Titanic’s distress rockets. It’s uncertain to this day why her crew did not respond, or how many might not have been lost if she had been there. This is not the place for what-ifs. This is about what was done.)
Carpathia’s Captain Rostron had, yes, rolled out of bed instantly when woken by his radio operator, ordered his ship to Titanic’s aid and confirmed the signal before he was fully dressed. The man had never in his life responded to an emergency call. His goal tonight was to make sure nobody who heard that fact would ever believe it.
All of Carpathia’s lifeboats were swung out ready for deployment. Oil was set up to be poured off the side of the ship in case the sea turned choppy; oil would coat and calm the water near Carpathia if that happened, making it safer for lifeboats to draw up alongside her. He ordered lights to be rigged along the side of the ship so survivors could see it better, and had nets and ladders rigged along her sides ready to be dropped when they arrived, in order to let as many survivors as possible climb aboard at once.
I don’t know if his making provisions for there still being survivors in the water was optimism or not. I think he knew they were never going to get there in time for that. I think he did it anyway because, god, you have to hope.
Carpathia had three dining rooms, which were immediately converted into triage and first aid stations. Each had a doctor assigned to it. Hot soup, coffee, and tea were prepared in bulk in each dining room, and blankets and warm clothes were collected to be ready to hand out. By this time, many of the passengers were awake–prepping a ship for disaster relief isn’t quiet–and all of them stepped up to help, many donating their own clothes and blankets.
And then he did something I tend to refer to as diverting all power from life support.
Here’s the thing about steamships: They run on steam. Shocking, I know; but that steam powers everything on the ship, and right now, Carpathia needed power. So Rostron turned off hot water and central heating, which bled valuable steam power, to everywhere but the dining rooms–which, of course, were being used to make hot drinks and receive survivors. He woke up all the engineers, all the stokers and firemen, diverted all that steam back into the engines, and asked his ship to go as fast as she possibly could. And when she’d done that, he asked her to go faster.
I need you to understand that you simply can’t push a ship very far past its top speed. Pushing that much sheer tonnage through the water becomes harder with each extra knot past the speed it was designed for. Pushing a ship past its rated speed is not only reckless–it’s difficult to maneuver–but it puts an incredible amount of strain on the engines. Ships are not designed to exceed their top speed by even one knot. They can’t do it. It can’t be done.
Carpathia’s absolute do-or-die, the-engines-can’t-take-this-forever top speed was fourteen knots. Dodging icebergs, in the dark and the cold, surrounded by mist, she sustained a speed of almost seventeen and a half.
No one would have asked this of them. It wasn’t expected. They were almost sixty miles away, with icebergs in their path. They had a responsibility to respond; they did not have a responsibility to do the impossible and do it well. No one would have faulted them for taking more time to confirm the severity of the issue. No one would have blamed them for a slow and cautious approach. No one but themselves.
They damn near broke the laws of physics, galloping north headlong into the dark in the desperate hope that if they could shave an hour, half an hour, five minutes off their arrival time, maybe for one more person those five minutes would make the difference. I say: three people had died by the time they were lifted from the lifeboats. For all we know, in another hour it might have been more. I say they made all the difference in the world.
This ship and her crew received a message from a location they could not hope to reach in under four hours. Just barely over three hours later, they arrived at Titanic’s last known coordinates. Half an hour after that, at 4am, they would finally find the first of the lifeboats. it would take until 8:30 in the morning for the last survivor to be brought onboard. Passengers from Carpathia universally gave up their berths, staterooms, and clothing to the survivors, assisting the crew at every turn and sitting with the sobbing rescuees to offer whatever comfort they could.
In total, 705 people of Titanic’s original 2208 were brought onto Carpathia alive. No other ship would find survivors.
At 12:20am April 15th, 1912, there was a miracle on the North Atlantic. And it happened because a group of humans, some of them strangers, many of them only passengers on a small and unimpressive steam liner, looked at each other and decided: I cannot live with myself if I do anything less.
I think the least we can do is remember them for it.
I can’t begin to describe how happy and flattered and a little teary I am that this just broke 100k.
I may be the actual only human being on Tumblr with a post this popular that I not only don’t regret making, but am actually HAPPY whenever I notice a surge in its circulation.
I never intended this to gain any traction at all (you’ll notice there’s no sources or anything–this was a personal ramble, prompted in good humor by a friend after I jokingly said that I wished someone would give me an excuse to cry about Carpathia on Tumblr so I could get it out of my system.) I literally expected to get, like, maybe 20 likes and a reblog, from friends, indulging me in my nonsense.
It just….means a lot to me that it’s touched so many people. I see a lot of tags to the effect of “HOW DARE YOU HURT ME LIKE THIS AND MAKE ME CRY ABOUT A BOAT” that are often really funny, but overwhelmingly the tags on this post are from people saving it for a rainy day, or remarking in a sort of quiet awe that they never even really thought about her role in the story–and God knows I never did, I learned it by complete accident much as most of the people who’ve found this post.
And so many of you guys are taking strength and reassurance from the reminder not only that people are capable of amazing things together, but simply that kindness matters and that a simple, tiny act of compassion is never wasted. I’m just really glad to have been able to do that for some folks.
If I can just add one personal note. I need to emphasize something I only touched on in the original post.
I need to emphasize that Carpathia failed.
A lot of the tags and comments have a tinge of…despair, or guilt, or wistfulness about things like this happening so rarely. Or inadequacy, or just being overwhelmed or unhappy about not being in a position to step up in a comparable way. And I want to gently bring up the fact that this is still the sinking of the Titanic.
They did not get there in time. They did not save the ship. It can be argued that they may not even have saved a single life; we have no way of knowing. This was still a horrific maritime disaster mired in arrogance and incompetence and a lack of care.
If the response to this story shows anything, it shows this: It matters that they tried.
Even though they got there too late, even though the ship still sank. It matters that they tried. The difference between making the best reasonable speed after confirming the seriousness of the situation, and the miracle they pulled off–it matters. It makes all the difference. Even if it made no difference at all. Not one of you read this and concluded that I was stupid for caring so much when the Titanic still sank and all those people still died.
You don’t have to fix the world. You’ll likely be cold and sick and miserable and testy and scared, and unprepared, and in over your head, and entirely too small to be of any real use. It feels stupid, passing out blankets and coffee in the middle of an ice field knowing what just happened. It’s hard to feel anything but useless when all you can do is tap a wireless transmitter and promise help that you know will come too late.
It matters that they fought for those people. It matters that they cared, and it matters that they tried. It matters that they didn’t stop. If it didn’t matter, you wouldn’t have read this far.
I think one of the big strengths of fanfiction as a medium is that it can, on average, assume the reader has a way higher degree of familiarity with canon than like…canon can. If you’re in the Star Wars AO3 tag you probably like Star Wars enough to remember more things about it than the average Star Wars-enjoying-ten-year-old. Which makes it way easier for fanwriter a to get to the juicy stuff and really engage with the worldbuilding or minor characters without having to spell out like. Who Wedge Antilles is for everyone who forgot or never noticed him in the first place. You could write a book about Wedge in the old EU because EU readers could also be assumed to be serious fans, but you can’t make a new canon Disney+ show about him. Those cost money to make and are intended for a broader audience.
And all this means that like. A good fic writer can and often will surpass canon when it comes to like. Thematic resonance and stuff, because they can really dig into something. Star Trek 2009 gave Kirk a new, more generic tragic backstory because it couldn’t expect the average moviegoer to be familiar with Kirk’s old, way more interesting tragic backstory. (Frankly, I’m not sure jj abrams knew about TOS Kirk’s backstory) whereas I have read a LOT of well-written, interesting, deeply resonant fanfic examinations of Tarsus IV, and what it means for Kirk’s character that he’s a genocide survivor. Star Trek 2009 answers the question “why did Kirk cheat on the kobayashi maru?” With “‘cause his dad crashed a spaceship when he was a baby.” A close examination of TOS canon implies the answer is “because he lived through a real-life Kobayashi that did have a win option, but which wasn’t taken.” BUT—and this is significant—even the TOS canon movies can’t really assume knowledge of the full TOS tv show, so that implication is never examined or made explicit. Instead it’s fanfic (and maybe spin off novels? Idk I’ve only read 2 trek books, if there’s one out there that covers this that would be really cool) where we get dives into that thread, where Kirk gets a commendation for original thinking because he can look a testing board in the eye and say “I’ve seen what happens when someone is entrenched in this kind of thinking, and I cannot let it happen to me. I understand the lesson, but it’s not hypothetical anymore and it never will be. I did what I had to do.” And that’s interesting! That’s meaningful! That can’t happen in a summer blockbuster. But it can happen in fic, easily, and that’s a strength of fic, I think.
Not to make a Christmas Post but Santa did everything right re: the Rudolph situation and every time I see some edgelord slander talking about “the lesson of Rudolph is that your differences will be punished until the powers that be find them useful” I just assume that person is a little thick and misunderstood a song written to be so simple babies can understand it
One of the most basic things they teach you in Teacher School is that if you know a kid is being bullied, bringing all the other kids together and scolding them for being mean and excluding That Kid is a great way to escalate it from “they don’t let this kid play with them” to “they are beating up this kid.”
If you actually want to address the problem, the other kids can’t know they’re being told what to do. A good way to address it is to create a situation where the bullied kid gets to be the big cool hero in a way that benefits everybody, then put the bullied kid in that situation and let them save the day.
Santa, in “Rudolph,” is essentially doing the same thing that any teacher does when they have a class jeopardy game with a pizza party riding on it, and give the last question to the weird kid who’s bullied for being super into anime, and that question happens to be about that kid’s favorite anime, and they get it right, and now EVERYBODY gets pizza, thanks to Anime Kid!
Creating a situation, among a community of christmas-loving deer, where christmas can only happen because of the thing that’s special about Rudolph, was literally LITERALLY him intervening on Rudolph’s bullying. Do you think Santa, an immortal time-bending elf-saint who is sanctioned by god to monitor the children of the world and deliver them toys, is unable to navigate a foggy night? You really think his offering Rudolph, an untested rookie, the glamor post was an act of last resort? Do any of you know ANYTHING about Pedagogy or Classroom Management? These are deer. BABIES understand this song.
Well… We’re alive. And we’re relatively young and Skinner was so tickled by the movie… I bet he was. That he has given us a Bureau credit card to use for the evening.
The way that The X-Files was never actually about the aliens but about love and family... And that’s why the show was so bad—because they kept denying that and trying to make it about aliens, but the aliens could only matter if the family mattered, too.
Right in the pilot, Mulder offers us the show’s thesis: “Nothing else matters to me!” The only thing of import to him is finding Samantha—fixing the gaping chasm that ruined his family.
Over time, he comes to care for Scully so much that they become family to each other, they love each other as much as Scully loves her mom and her dad and sister and brothers, etc. And Mulder loves her as much as he loves his sister and his mom and his dad. They are each other’s family.
And they learn that the most important truth in life is love, the truth they’ve both come to know.
what if scully’s dad was still around when she was abducted? what would that have looked like?! would he have doubled down on his opinion of her becoming an fbi agent instead of taking a more typical route as a doctor?
i imagine him hating mulder, much like bill. but maggie still gravitates toward him. they still find a solace with each other and trying to keep hope. she can see his pain, how lost he is. but ahab just sees him as the cause for her kidnapping. i also feel like it would make more sense for him to be the one to move forward, assuming she is dead. it just doesn’t feel right to me that maggie did that or that melissa would stay quiet. but if it was their father, that makes way more sense to me.
maggie wouldn’t shy away from speaking up on dana’s behalf and even mulder’s. and ahab does heed what she says. i would have liked to see it. cuz maybe if bill had shown up that time, we would have gotten the first taste. but it coming from her dad would be different. yes, brothers can be protective & overbearing. but there are different expectations with a father. a brother doesn’t have the same ~authority.
and like maggie, i think ahab would see mulder’s feelings for their daughter. and the different reactions would be *priceless* especially once scully is returned. ahab seeing scully’s reaction when mulder visits? “i had the strength of your beliefs” when he realizes maggie let mulder hold onto her necklace?
honestly killing him the first episode he’s even in? why!! i would have liked to see more of scully’s relationship with him.
ask and ye shall receive. under the cut for brevity.
Mulder doesn’t even notice Mr. Scully at first, too busy bustling past cops to look at the scene of Scully’s kidnapping—her last known whereabouts. God, but he’d drove through three red lights to get here as quickly as possible, wondering how long the message had sat there, waiting for him to listen to it. He examines the scene, willing himself not to break in sight of all these people—not when Scully’s in danger.
It’s not until he hears Scully’s mother half yell, half sob at one of the officers to get in her daughter’s apartment that he turns around and realizes her parents are there. He’s met Mrs. Scully before—one time Scully was running late for a lunch date and her mother came down to the office instead of waiting to pick Scully up outside. His precocious partner had introduced them with cheeks pinked in embarrassment at her forgetfulness, but her mother was nothing but kind.
“Mrs. Scully,” Mulder says, finally reaching her, and reaches out to grasp her arm—perhaps in symbiotic comfort.
She tilts away, looking at his hand with shock. Blood, he sees, and clears his throat, wiping his hands on his coat. “Fox?”
“She’s not in there, Mrs. Scully,” he murmurs, heart feeling leaden.
“Maggie,” Mr. Scully heaves, wrapping his arm around his wife to pull her into him, taking her other hand in his.
“This is Fox Mulder, Dana’s partner at the FBI.” Mrs. Scully looks up at her husband pleadingly, but his face is stony.
Mr. Scully doesn’t stick his hand out, so neither does Mulder. “I’m sorry, sir. I got here as fast as I could. Sc—Dana left a message on my landline. I’m sorry. But I think I know who took her. I won’t stop until I find her. I promise.” He slides his gaze from the rigid Mr. Scully to the teary-eyed Mrs. Scully.
“If she hadn’t insisted on becoming a field agent this never would have happened,” her father hisses, turning his gaze to the ground, but by Mrs. Scully’s muttered Bill! Mulder can guess that it was a jab at him.
Mulder simply lets his head fall and nods. He reaches out to rub Mrs. Scully’s shoulder but thinks better of it. “I’ll let you know what I can.”
—
When Mulder stormed into the hospital looking for Scully, looking for whoever took her from his life—her life—for three endless, agonizing months, he hadn’t intended to end up in a shouting match with her father.
“Bill, please!” Maggie begs, tugging on her husbands hand.
“I will not stand for this raving lunatic being near my daughter!” he roars, face red. “He’s the reason she was taken from us! I haven’t forgotten all the trials Dana faced while she was a field agent, I will not let her health and safety be compromised by this man spending time with her!”
“I’m the reason—? Sir, with all due respect, I have been searching day and night for Scully. I have spent my every waking hour not occupied with work looking for her. I have to see her. I have to know that she’s alright. I need to—” Mulder chokes up, standing down as a tear slips down his face. “I need to.”
“Daddy, stop,” Melissa speaks up, voice firm from Scully’s bedside, where she pets Scully’s hair. “This infighting is the very last thing Dana needs. Just be with her.”
Maggie steps in front of her husband as Mulder sinks into a nearby armchair, rubbing her hands on his chest. “Bill, she’s right. This isn’t helping. Fox isn’t to blame.”
Bill heaves a sigh before sitting down. “You do anything this side of suspicious and you’ll regret ever being born,” he says. “Do you understand?”
“Yes, sir.”
Mulder fingers Scully’s cross necklace beneath his shirt.
—
“I don’t know if it will help... But I’m here, Scully. I’m here.” Mulder clasps her hand, searching for any sign of wakefulness, but finds none. Determined not to give up, he settles into his chair, soon falling asleep.
Mulder wakes up to Bill Scully looming over him from the other side of Scully’s bed, having just cleared his throat. “Morning, sir. Or afternoon. Or evening.” He adjusts his grip on Scully’s hand.
“Hello, Fox.” Bill lowers himself into the chair behind him, clasping his hands together. “How is she?”
“Unchanged, I think.”
“Mm.” They sit in silence, gazing at Scully’s peaceful face. “Do you love her?”
“W—what?”
“Do you love my daughter? You’re close, aren’t you? She spoke fondly of you. I took that to mean you were friends. So, do you love her?”
Mulder blinks, still stunned by the abruptness of the question, before answering. “Yes, I love her. More than I expected.”
Mr. Scully only sighs, leaning forward to press a kiss to Scully’s temple. “Melissa is right. It feels better to sit by Dana’s side, offering her comfort rather than seeking our own.”
“She’s the one that convinced me to come down here. Melissa was adamant that Scully needs me here if she’s going to wake up.”
Mr. Scully nods. “You should go home.” Mulder’s head shoots up. “Get some rest and nourish yourself. You look homeless.” He chuckles, even though he’s not sure if it’s a joke. “My wife will be here soon. She’ll give you a call if anything changes.”
“Thank you, sir.” Mulder stands up to leave, though he can’t quite bring himself to let go of Scully’s hand that easily.
“Thank you for loving my daughter.”
Mulder feels his eyes dampen and quickly nods before letting Scully’s hand go.
—
“I had the strength of your beliefs,” Scully says, brimming with happiness despite looking tired down to the bone.
She and Melissa badger him into a chair, and he acquiesces bashfully. “I almost forgot.” Mulder reaches behind his neck to undo the clasp of her cross necklace, presenting it to her. “Roll over.” Scully fingers it once she’s on her back again, beaming at him.
“Where did you get it?” Mr. Scully asks, and Mulder looks first at him, then to Maggie.
“I gave it to him for safekeeping. I trusted him to keep it close,” Maggie says, holding her husband’s hand.
“Thank you, Mulder,” Scully says, taking his hand in hers.
They gaze at each other, heedless of the people around them, and Bill Scully realizes that whether or not they know it—though his wife and elder daughter seem to know this already—that man will be his son-in-law one day, should Dana choose to marry. They’re already inextricably tied to one another; they refuse to be separated, he knows.
“Thank you for your diligence, Fox,” he says, nodding to him.
