are shows and movies allowed to be subtle and ambiguous anymore..... is that still allowed or does everything have to be a patronizing hand holding session. just wondering
i’m watching the x-files for the first time. thirty years too late but hey…
mulder casually remembering exactly what scully wrote her graduate thesis on is, unfortunately, one of the hottest things i’ve ever seen a fictional man do
the bar is simultaneously in hell and somehow incredibly specific
leaked box (allegedly) of the final version of the x-files lego set, via u/General_Durian_1013 on the lego leaks subreddit
thoughts: word was already out there that the set is several hundred pieces fewer than the prototype, and this seems to bear that out. looks like a flukeman minifig in place of tooms/sasquatch. interesting that the mulder and scully minifigs appear to be styled after their season 1 looks, while the prototypes looked more season 4ish (or later). much lower ceiling in the office and maybe (?) no skylight in the back. overall still looks pretty cool and if the other rumors pan out, there’ll be a launch day gift with purchase set of “scully’s lab” (whatever that is - i’m assuming autopsy bay? here’s hoping for a lab coat & ponytail scully xD)
I understood but didn't fully grasp the insanity and pure soulmate-ism of Mulder and Scully until the season 4 ep Never Again.
"Not everything's about you, Mulder. This is my life."
"Yeah but it's..."
*slow, painfully pregnant fade to black*
LIKE what was he going to say??
And this is directly followed by the episode Memento Mori which...I have no words. They are in love. Don't think they know it yet but I'm more than willing to wait and watch them find out. I genuinely have never shipped a ship this shippy
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 psychodemetia, 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.
AU ficlet for the end of The Truth because William should have been there with them.
This was meant to be written for the X-Files Bingo. Then everything went to hell, and I didn't finish it in time. I've decided to finish it and put it out in the world as it is.
Tagging @today-in-fic
~
The rain patters against the roof outside, but inside, it’s quiet. Mulder barely dares to breathe too loudly, to move too quickly, to make a single mistake. He’s made too many of those already. His hand is on his son’s stomach, rising and falling with the boy’s even breathing. It’s everything he’s dreamed about these last couple of months. What kept him going.
When he closed his eyes at night, he pictured Scully and their son, just doing everyday life things. All the things he was missing. He pictured them smiling, just living. And that’s what kept him alive, too. Hoping that one day he could return, be with them again.
His son has grown into a solid form, bigger than Mulder expected. When he left, when William was only a few days old, he felt light in his hands, but took up all the room in his heart. His reddish tuft has turned a darker shade, as have his eyes. The ghost of Scully’s features is there on the boy’s face. As well as his own. They’ve always been a perfect team, working well together. Their son, however, is their masterpiece.
The bed dips and Mulder lifts his eyes from his son. Scully is smiling at him. Soft and gentle, tired but happy. Her hair is still wet, her complexion rosy from the hot water. The white fluffy robe almost swallows her. She doesn’t seem to mind. She scoots closer, on the other side of William, who sleeps through it all. Mulder watches him, curious to see if the boy wakes.
“He’s a deep sleeper,” Scully says, reading his thoughts.
“Wonder who he gets that from.” He smiles at her, and her answering smile is a balm on his beaten soul.
“He gets his appetite from you,” she says, her fingers tracing his, careful not to disturb their son. “He’ll be awake before you know it.”
“I can’t wait to get to know him,” he whispers, the words feeling heavy on his tongue. His son doesn’t remember him. When he opens his eyes to look at him, he’ll see nothing but a stranger. For Mulder, holding him when he was a few days old, it meant the world. He missed everything in between then and now. How can he ever make up for it?
“You will,” Scully says. The voice of reason, the sound of hope.
But is there hope for them? For any of them? With what he found out, the future has an expiration date. The date’s set and he can’t do anything about it. Neither of them can. He looks at his son, sleeping peacefully. Unaware of what’s happening around him. He lives in certainty that his parents will keep him safe. Mulder promises it, manifests it. They will keep William safe. His eyes find Scully’s. There’s no resentment; she did all of this on her own. She kept going. Maybe, he thinks. Maybe there is a sliver of hope when she’s by his side.
“What are you thinking?” she asks him in a soft voice. He’s not ready to voice it yet. His fears, his hopes. No matter how much she deserves to hear both.
“I’m thinking… I’m thinking about the last time we sat like this. When our journey started.”
“You told me about Samantha.” Scully puts a hand over his and he’s back there in that hotel room, nine years ago.
“You thought I was crazy.”
“I still think you’re crazy.” She smiles at him, and he laughs.
“Did you think we’d…,” he trails off. Of course she didn’t think this is where they’d end up. Him on the run from the government. Her by his side. Their son, too. Mulder touches the boy’s hand, needing to assure himself that he’s real.
“Did I think we’d be here?” Scully asks softly. “I couldn’t have imagined any of it, Mulder.” He nods at her. “But I’ve told you before,” she says, touching his cheek. “I wouldn’t change a single day. And I’m not giving up. We’re not giving up.” She emphasizes the we.
“You and me, huh?” He grins. “And William. This is all I want, Scully. All we have is each other. I don’t care if we… I won’t give up. I can promise you that. You and Will. But all I want is for us to have a life. Together.”
“Then we want the same thing.” He reaches over, touches her lip. She kisses his thumb without taking her eyes off of his. The determination in her expression fuels him. His spirit. She’s the love of his life, the reason he keeps going. A smile cracks over her face, like the sun breaking through clouds.
“I love you,” he whispers.
“Good,” she replies. “Because I love you too. But we need to sleep if we want to save the world.”
He won’t remind her that she’s already saved the world. His, anyway. Instead, he just nods. Careful not to wake William, he scoots closer, wrapping his arm around the two people who make up his whole cosmos. He hears her sigh and tightens his hold on her. Tomorrow they will have to make a plan. They don’t know where they’re going yet. They don’t know how it will work. If it will. But there will be a tomorrow.
“Maybe there’s hope,” he says, looking at her. The words finally slipping from his lips.
“I know there is,” she replies after a beat. He watches her, soaks up as much of this moment as he can. Exhaustion tugs at him, and before he knows it, his eyes drift closed. He falls asleep with a newfound confidence that they can save the world after all.
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.
my buddy's turning 29 today so we're taking him for ice cream in the park before a cruelty free skincare company shoves him into their eco-friendly van and has him shot
I’m finding the comments under this post actually really enlightening and useful as someone born in the 2000s. Some of these things i just never would have thought to consider - the plan B example comes to mind, and definitely not blue m&ms lol.
I’m currently dealing with the double whammy of being both Gen Z and not-American when it comes to writing accurate 90s America, so if anyone would like to add in the comments anything that is a (slightly less-obvious) tell that a fic writer is non-American as well that would be so so helpful!
baratheonpilled
izzy806
theartofmadeline
pixelskylines
