#emily arc

[hvnniedraws]

emily (closeups)

[casuallycryingoverbooks]

Chapter Six of A Muse, A Myth, A Mortal is up!!

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

Scully reached for a retort but gasped as she felt a sharp pain in her abdomen. In a moment, Mulder was by her side, crouching next to the chair. “Scully, what’s wrong, do we need to go to the hospital?” Scully shook her head with a smile, tears brimming in her eyes, though she was not entirely sure of their origin. She reached for Mulder’s hand. She put it on her belly and covered it with her own where her bump was still yet to show, or maybe barely there. They waited like that a few moments before she felt it again and this time Mulder gasped. “Is that-” Scully nodded, “Is that normal?”

[freckleslikestars]

the thing with feathers

Missing Scene in Chinga, a conversation between Scully and Jack Bonsaint

828 words, read here on AO3

‘If you don’t mind me saying, Miss Scully, but you seemed hesitant to think the kid had anything to do with this mess – more hesitant, I mean, than us locals.’

‘Yeah, I guess I was,’ she bit her lip, looked down at the stack of pancakes the sheriff had ordered her at the all-night diner, ‘she reminded me of someone.’

He gave her a soft smile, ‘you don’t have to elaborate, we’ve all got to have our past,’ and for some inexplicable reason, she wanted to talk about it to him. To tell him all about her pain.

She cleared the lump in her throat, ‘it’s a long story.’

‘I got time if you need it.’

‘A few years ago my ova were stolen, and used to create a child that I was...unaware of,’ she swallowed thickly, retelling the story for the first time, ‘and I didn’t know, didn’t find out, until this past Christmas. She was living not ten minutes down the road from my brother and his family. She’d been so close all this time and I never even knew to look.’

‘That must have been quite the surprise. How did you know she was yours?’

‘I didn’t, at first. She was the spitting image of my sister when she was that age, so I thought...I thought she was Missy’s. I guess my sister also being called Melissa didn’t help with this case, to be fair. We lost Missy a couple of years ago, see, and all of a sudden there was this child that looked so much like her – impossibly so,’ she shrugged. ‘Her adoptive parents were killed, and I-‘ she winced ‘-I kinda, integrated myself into the investigation.’

‘Well, I’m sure they were grateful for your help.’

‘I doubt it.’

‘Well, we certainly are.’

She smiled, ducked her head, ‘thank you. I had her DNA tested, so sure she was Missy’s. Started the adoption process for her.’

‘But it wasn’t Missy’s DNA.’

She shook her head, had to clear her throat again, ‘Christmas Eve I received the DNA results. I was a mother, and until that moment I was sure I never would be.’

‘What happened?’

‘She was a very sick little girl. She died, two weeks later. She was around the same age as Polly. Her funeral was four weeks ago yesterday.’

‘I’m sorry. If I may say, you’re handling it remarkably well.’

She hummed, her brow furrowed, ‘I really don’t think I am. I haven’t cried – I feel...shut off. This was supposed to be my weekend to get away from it all and give myself time to process this past year – past few months, even. See, I had cancer, and it went into remission at the beginning of November. During my post-remission check-ups, they discovered the lack of ova. And then...well. Emily. I thought getting away would help, give me time to grieve.’

‘Grief doesn’t work that way, Dana,’ he sighed. ‘I lost my wife, four years ago now. Took me a long, long time to come to terms with it. Even now I have days when I’m not so sure I have. Sometimes I can feel the wings of it beating against my chest, trying to take flight; tear me apart with its talons.’

‘How do you do it?’ she asked, a hint of desperation in her voice, ‘how do you cope?’

‘Well, same way you’re doing it right now, I guess. You get up every mornin’ and you make something of the day. Now, course, I never knew your Emily, but I knew my Martha and I know she wouldn’t want me wasting no days on this earth. People tell you it gets easier with time, and maybe it does, but it’s not linear. There isn’t a science to grieving, you just have to take each day as it comes,’ he cleared his throat and drew a line through the syrup on his plate with his knife. ‘I figure the only way we really get through it is by believing that tomorrow will be slightly easier. My Martha was big on belief: used to say “the future is for those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.”’

‘Eleanor Roosevelt?’

‘Yes,’ he looked up at her, a flash of surprise passing his face, ‘yes, my Martha was a big believer in believing.’

‘I have someone who’s big on believing.’

‘That’s good, that is. You need to hold on to the ones that believe: they make everything seem a little more hopeful.’

‘Thank you, Jack.’

He covered her hand on the counter with his own and shook his head with a soft smile, ‘you don’t need to thank me for anything, not ever. “The only cure for grief is to grieve,” you know who said that?’ she shook her head, ‘Rabbi Earl Grollman. You cry for your little girl, Miss Scully, and then you go home and you hold your believer tight and don’t let ‘em go.’

Tagging @today-in-fic

A/N: My grandmother died a couple of months ago, and we were estranged and it didn't really...affect me. But it meant that I reconnected with my grandpa, and we had a conversation about grief the other week; he's got dementia and he spent the last 60-odd years with my grandmother, so not having her there is difficult, and a lot of the time I don't think he understands, but he has these moments of lucidity where I think he understands everything so much more deeply than the rest of us... it was a really good talk, actually, about hope and faith and the value of life. Anyway, that's kind of where this came from. So. Yeah.

[minuete-blog]

I’ve been so absorbed in reading angsty dark romance novels that I feel like I’ve been neglecting this awesome fandom. I wanna say I’m trying to perfect my angst writing, but who am I kidding? M&S create the angst themselves.

Takes place right after “All Souls” and the end of the Emily Arc (which I still hate and can’t stand to watch although My Struggle Arc is pretty damning)

Tagging @today-in-fic

Cluelessness

I couldn’t say I felt lighter once I stepped out of the confessional booth, but I could now hold onto my faith: my belief that I would see Emily again someday in Heaven.  The afternoon sun causes momentary blindness as my eyes adjust to the sudden change in brightness once I exit the church to head to my car.  I blink several times still standing at the entrance until I notice his figure leaning against a tree less than 10 yards away from me.  Mulder. How did he know I was here?  I make my way towards him as he straightens himself away from the tree.

“How did your session go?” he asks once I am near.  I let out a huff.

“Confessionals aren’t sessions, Mulder.” I see an upturn of his lips, though his teasing manner didn’t reach his eyes, which are filled with sympathy.  I swallow back a lump forming in my throat and focus my gaze on his tie that is always askew. “How long have you been out here?”  

He shrugs.  “Not that long.”

“You could’ve sat in one of the pews inside while you were waiting.”  Another shrug.

“I think I’ve reached my quota for the year.  I don’t want your God to smite me for desecrating his place with sunflower seeds.”  I look down and notice the empty shells surrounding him as if it were to act as a circle of salt to guard him against whatever sanctity resides in the church.  I let out another huff as I start to walk to the parking lot with Mulder beside me matching my stride.  

“The case remains open pending the arrest of Aaron Starkey,” Mulder says after a beat or two of silence between us minus the sounds of our shoes hitting the pavement.

“We’re not going to find him.   Aaron Starkey doesn’t exist,” I reply quickly with as much certainty as I felt at the police station.  I feel Mulder’s gentle grip on my left elbow as he turns me to face him.  His hazel eyes flicker left-to-right as he searches for answers I’m trying to convey through my eyes.  Answers that he is unwilling to believe.  We are at an impasse.

His hand migrates from my elbow to my shoulder, mirroring the stance we had days ago at the station.  I recall that moment with so much clarity that I fear to acknowledge its significance, but the emotions quickly tumble back.  A flash of anger that surged within me at his clueless remark about me being so vulnerable and easily manipulated, followed by the hurt when I admitted to Mulder that I saw Emily.  I couldn’t blame Mulder for his cluelessness when I was the one that trained him to take “I’m fine” at face value.  It was my way of stonewalling people emotionally, barricading myself from an entourage of emotions that I would see play out on their faces: distress, sympathy, disappointment.  This man before me who believes in the mystical and legends, who drops everything and pursues evidence of extraterrestrial life, who can make apologetics weep at his biblical knowledge, does not believe what I believe occurred with this case.  

I know that Mulder could see my attempt to keep my emotions in check as I try to turn away from his discerning gaze, but the same hand moves up to cup my cheek, his long fingers splay out to where his fourth and pinky fingers could feel the erratic pulse against my neck as my breath hitches.  He leans in hovering over me as I willed my hands to remain still despite the urge to place them on his chest to push him away, to give me back my personal space he so often invades.  His touch that usually grounds me feels heavy as if I’m shackled.

“Scully...” he trails off, his eyes look pained as if he knows he is the cause of my current emotional state.  Without breaking eye contact, my hand reaches up to cover his upon my cheek.

“Have you finished drafting your side of the report for this case?” I ask as I pry his hand away from my face, letting his hand drop away.  He worries his bottom lip as his eyes become like lost-puppy eyes.  He shakes his head as he shoves his hands in his pockets.

“No.  I’m going to sign off on your report.  It was your case from the very beginning, Scully.  I was merely along for the ride,” he answers.  He’s offering an olive branch in a Mulderish roundabout way, and I know that I should just take it, but I can’t seem to let this issue go.

“Why do you belittle me when it comes to my faith, Mulder?”  He looks at me with disbelief.

“I see what misplaced zeal could do all in the name of God Almighty, but for you to think that I’m belittling you for your beliefs tells me I need to do a better job at expressing my faith in you.  I’m sorry if I ever made you doubt yourself.”

“Right,” I breathe out as I finally tear my eyes away from his gaze.  

I am about to turn away when he says, “I respect our journey together, Scully.  Always.”  

An echo of long ago, when I doubted my abilities to help him with the Pfaster case.  My eyes well up with tears that I force myself to withhold.  Mulder sees it though.  He can see the brightness of my blue eyes as he clears his throat and starts to walk towards the parking lot ahead of me.  

“Come on, Scully.  Let’s head back to the office.  The report isn’t going to draft itself.”

[sigritandtheelves]

Drown

Rating: Teen/Mature Tags: Angst, Emily Arc, Per Manum

Stare into the void of season 5’s reproduction arc with me. Brought to you by cramps and seasonal depression in this miserable heatwave. This is for @kateyes224 who wanted me to share the pain. CW for all the reproductive traumas associated w/this arc (child death, miscarriage, infertility, etc.). Yikes.

_+_

There had only been the briefest of windows, and he had missed his chance, of that he was sure. At first there were waves of relief so strong he couldn’t feel the ground beneath his feet: she’ll live, she’ll live, she’ll live pulsing in his veins with each beat of his heart. It was enough; it would be enough; it should be enough, he told himself, and then he sobbed into a bloody photograph of the long-gone happiness of his childhood and realized that it wasn’t. There was always more more more he had to do, and now that she wouldn’t die, he’d have the strength to do it.

He watches her open to him. He watches her fill back up with life, with a joy he hasn’t seen since their early days, and he feels her press closer to him with that openness. Here is Life, and she is going to live it. Here is Scully’s love, and he turns away.

She brings him wine and cheese.

He runs.

She makes a sex joke and sings him to sleep, and the next day they drive home as if nothing has happened.

Later, he dreams about dancing with her at a Cher concert—in a bar, of all places. In the dream he pulls her body flush against his and he smiles at her with a depth of knowing and with the absurdity of their circumstances and most of all with love, while they hold hands to hearts in the smoky room. But when he wakes, he is sweating as if it were a nightmare. He is hard as a rock in his pajama bottoms.

She senses his rejection, after a while, and starts to pull back. Her feet touch the ground again, as his did too soon, and she remembers that although life is a gift, it is terribly, terribly hard.

They work; they smile; he flirts, but she stops flirting back. And then she goes to visit her family for Christmas and the window slams shut.

_+_

“I think I’d like to be alone,” she whispered, and he felt it happen, the snick of the door to her heart as it closed to him. She heard him step away and sighed in relief when he was gone. She would let herself have this, and nothing else. She would kiss the sweaty forehead of her dying daughter, hold the chubby hand that was the weight of everything she would never have, and send this baby, with all her others, into the darkness of unlife alone. Dana Scully felt rebuked for opening herself to even the merest possibility of motherhood, and to the possibility of love as well. She’d regained a chance at life: how dare she ask for more?

Just an hour after Emily slipped away, she got a call from her mother: Tara was in labor. Death for life, she supposed. Scully signed some papers, dialed Mulder’s number, and wandered to meet him with too-dry, salt-crusted eyes. She felt like the cold hand of the undead, brought back from the edge of the grave, but scooped empty of life, reeking of sterility and gunmetal and blood.

Mulder touched her arm, but she barely felt it.

“Will you take me back?” Her voice: flat.

“Yeah,” he said. “Scully, I—“

But he was stopped by the sharp look in her eyes: she would take no comfort now. He dropped her at her brother’s house and returned to his motel where he cried for her, the first time in this new year. Inside Bill’s living room, alone again, she stared at the Christmas tree lights until they blurred and became a white wall of fire. She wanted it to burn her, but instead she fell into cold sleep. When she woke she was an aunt, but no longer a mother.

---

He brought flowers and kind words to the funeral that Scully felt was something of a burden on her family. Perhaps they thought she was selfish for arranging it when they had so much to celebrate. Who was she, who had barely known this child and had given away her heart so quickly, to demand this ritual? They planned a christening; she planned a funeral. But Mulder, who mourned all lost little girls so fully and selflessly, understood. He may never forgive her for being so ready to leave him, but he understood her need to grieve. Scully wondered if this might be what a miscarriage felt like—to grasp so briefly, so fiercely, to a hope for the future, and then to have it ripped away. She would never have the chance to know, she thought, to confirm the comparison.

Back at her brother’s house, there were casseroles, brownies, a Jell-O mold. Scully thought, morbidly, that they should have had the christening on the same day and made it a twofer. She ate nothing, but knocked back enough of Bill’s good scotch that her stomach burned and she finally felt warm. Mulder hovered in the corner looking constipated. She sat on the couch getting drunker and accepting half-hearted declarations of sympathy until she couldn’t take it any more.

She stood too fast and the room spun, but Mulder was at her elbow in a second.

“I wanna go home, Mulder,” she said into his bicep, where her face had landed.

Into her ear, quietly, “Do you need to go up and lie down?”

She shook her head, red hair rubbing, static-clinging to the front of his suit. “No,” she said. “I want to go all the way home.”

“Can you pack your bags?”

“Already packed.”

“Okay. I’ll get them. Will you be okay here?”

She shrugged and tried to get ahold of herself. She combed fingers through her hair and watched the room dip and sway around her. Maggie’s eyes found hers across the room, and Scully looked away in half-shame.

“Dana, are you alright?” Her mother had somehow appeared at her side, looking concerned.

“I’m fine, mom. I just… I need to go.” Mulder descended the stairs with her bags and tucked them in the entryway before walking over to the two women.

“You’re not going to say goodbye to Bill and Tara?” Maggie asked.

As if remembering them suddenly, Scully looked around the room. But then the thought of their new-parent-tired faces and the soft skin of their perfect infant made her dizzy, slightly nauseated. “I can’t right now.”

She was spinning again, and Mulder reached out to hold her steady. Maggie glared at him. “You take care of her, Fox.”

He nodded. “I will.”

In the car, her head lolled and tears ran down her cheeks. He’d never seen her drunk before: not the stoic inebriation of her brother’s house, and certainly not this weepy version that spoke of her own fears and crushed his heart like glass under a boot-heel.

“It’s not me, Mulder. I’m not like them. It’s not for me.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I can’t do it. I’m all wrong for it. My hands are for dead things, not for babies.”

“Scully…”

“You were right. You were right. It’s not mean to be. I can’t go to brunch and laugh at empty jokes and buy onesies and pretend I don’t know what a corpse smells like. I felt like a fucking monster in that house, Mulder. Like the goddamned angel of death,” and a sob slipped out after her last words.

His jaw clenched and unclenched as he drove. He had no idea what to say, so he let his hand rest on her black-clad knee. She was all the light he knew, but he had still tainted her with darkness like a bottle of spilled ink.

“Maybe I don’t deserve it,” she said, almost under her breath. He felt his stomach muscles clench, as if he’d been punched, and a rage flow through him at the world, at himself for the part he played, for making Dana Scully ever ever doubt herself. But he said nothing, just drove them back to the motel.

---

Scully threw up into a trashcan and then collapsed onto his motel bed. Mulder took the bin away and came back with a glass of water and a wet washcloth. He sat in the nook created by her bent knees and ran a hand over her back. She sat, dabbed her face and lips with cool terrycloth that felt rough and good. She drank all of the water, knowing how much she’d need it. After a minute, when the room had slowed its spin, she tucked herself up against the pillows again. Mulder pulled her shoes off and draped the bed’s throw blanket over her.

“Would you have quit?” he asked, not really expecting an answer, and for a moment, he thought she’d already fallen asleep.

But then she said, “If it meant I could get even one thing back that they’d taken from me? Yes. Wouldn’t you?”

He opened his mouth to agree, but then bit it back—it would have been a lie. He wasn’t sure there was much of anything that could make him quit.

“It doesn’t matter, anyway. They never would have let me have her.” Her voice was tired, too exhausted for hope and for pointless speculation. Mulder took his things to the bathroom and changed out of his suit. He eyed the empty space on the bed, but took the armchair instead to work. Her voice startled him.

“You should have told me.”

“What?”

“You knew something. You knew what they’d done and why.”

The ova. The Crawford clones with red hair. Bodies in green tanks. They’re our mothers. Shame gripped at his guts. “No, not why. Not really,” he said.

“You said you knew there were children. My children. It’s my body they violated, Mulder. My future. My life they ruined.” He couldn’t see her face, but he could hear the tears in her words. And the quiet rage. “You didn’t have the right to keep that from me.”

He had that same terrible impulse he’d had after the Jerse case, to tell her that it was his life too, but he knew he’d lost any right to that claim. So he just said, “I know,” and waited for her to fall asleep. He swallowed back his further omission: the little vial in a Fairfax cold storage facility marked Scully, Dana Katherine. When her breathing slowed, he dialed the airline and booked their flight back to Washington.

_+_

Two weeks later, after they’ve rescued a pair of teenagers from the Michigan mud, he confesses everything into the basement elevator while she stares on, incredulous. She takes a vacation, and he’s sure it’s a dry-run for leaving him. He can’t help his desperate flirting, his selfish need to throw everything he can at the possibility of making her stay. But for her, each joke is like a swallowed needle, a stab wound from the inside. Two weeks after that, she invites him to lunch where he’s sure she’ll break the terrible news of her departure, but instead she does something different, but which amounts to roughly the same thing: she asks him to father her child. Her fingers tremble over a Cesar salad and she pretends there are other options, other possible donors, so she can swallow any bites at all. If she can’t have him, perhaps she can have his child. If she can’t have his child, she’ll have no child at all.

He’s so fucking selfish that he wants to say no. He wants to hold her to him like the deflating life raft of a drowning man; the harder he squeezes the more she slips away. But he remembers the tears in his rental car, her mumbled Maybe I don’t deserve it, and he hates himself into saying yes. A baby will split them apart, he thinks, but he jerks off into a plastic cup while remembering the sound of her “Oh God”s as she watched a genocidal inferno unfold in her stolen memory—and he hates himself more.

She listens to another woman call him Fox while she waits to learn if she’s carrying his child. Then she loses her last chance in a wash of blood, and the X-files burn.

They stand in dripping ruin, in the fumes of hot metal and sodium bicarbonate where her uterine walls clench violently in disgrace, and they are both of them suddenly futureless.

-end-

All I can say is… sorry? It feels like there could be more to this, though, so maybe I’ll make it better in a follow-up. Playing with tense shifts a little bit here—hope it worked out.

[littleuberscullys-blog]

Emily related fic? :)

thanks!! :) ________________________________________________________________

set during the emily arc, 5.06 “christmas carol” and 5.07 “emily”rating: pg

Even after the social worker delivered the bad news to her,Dana Scully did not give up hope of one day becoming Emily’s adoptive mother. Whenshe had free time, she found herself casually searching for an apartment withtwo bedrooms instead of one, browsing through the little girl’s section atTarget, and making spontaneous trips to Michael’s Craft Store and Toys-R-Us sinceEmily showed an interest in art and Mulder’s Mr. Potato Head impression. Oneday, as she drove home from work, she passed a jewelry store. Images flashedthrough her head of Emily staring at her necklace, mesmerized by the way theshiny gold cross caught the light. She pulled into the parking lot.

***

After Emily’s health declined soon after, Scully forgot aboutthe purchase she made that day. It wasn’t until after the funeral, when a smallcardboard box arrived at her doorstep, that the full reality of her loss hither. With shaking hands, Scully carefully cut the box open, revealing an evensmaller green velvet box. She couldn’t help the sob that escaped her mouth asshe opened the tiny box. Inside, a gold cross with a small pink heart at theintersection hung from a thin gold chain. Underneath the necklace, on the cardboardinsertion that kept the necklace from tangling in the box, were the words “ToEmily, love Dana”.

[minuete-blog]

I finally caught up with Philes’ Xmas Advent Calendar Prompts (for now)!  Day 3: Snowman.  Tagging @today-in-fic and @txf-prompt-box .  Drafted this in 20 minutes, minimal editing, no beta.  I’m sure I’ll be regretting such a quick post.

Dare to Dream

Though Scully was born in the winter, she’d always considered herself a summer child.  She was too young to have remembered the snow when the Scully clan journeyed from Annapolis, Maryland to Alameda, CA, forever staying on the west coast while her father was briefly stationed in Nagoya, Japan via geo-baching before stationing themselves in San Diego, CA.  Her childhood winter memories consist of mild and wet weather.

So when Scully meets a little girl that is inherently a part of her, she dares to dream of the possibilities of raising a young child on the east coast, in her Georgetown apartment.  She dares to imagine experiencing all four seasons through her child’s eyes.  Imagines her child hopping into rain puddles in the spring, building sand castles in the summer, jumping into a pile of leaves in the fall, and building snowmen in the winter.  She dares to dream as she makes her case to the social worker under Bill’s roof, as she tearfully admits and explains her clinical detachment of relationships.  As she requests an onslaught of tests to be performed, orders prescription and treatments for her daughter, she dares to hope that Emily will leave the hospital unscathed.

It isn’t until Scully is left standing alone above a coffin full of sand, reaching down to retrieve her cross, that the dreams she held were merely that.  Ashes to ashes and dust to dust, her dreams for her daughter laid in the wasteland.