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It's probably for the best that I never watched X Files until now or I probably would have changed my name to Fox when I transitioned

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Transphobic parents: This is our beautiful daughter!

The beautiful daughter:

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The white, clear, unmarred ceiling is mocking Scully.

You have something I need.

The words bounce around her mind, ricocheting between parietal bones before then echoing through the rest of her body like a war drum through a valley, the sound amplifying a warning of what’s to come.

The white, clear, unmarred ceiling is mocking Scully. She is not sure her body is quite so pristine.

OR

Scully copes with her cancer diagnosis with distance and sex.

read chapter one of EAT ME ALIVE on ao3, or below the cut!

The white, clear, unmarred ceiling is mocking Scully.

You have something I need.

The words bounce around her mind, ricocheting between parietal bones before then echoing through the rest of her body like a war drum through a valley, the sound amplifying a warning of what’s to come.

The white, clear, unmarred ceiling is mocking Scully. She is not sure her body is quite so pristine.

***

She’s right. Of course she’s right. She wakes up coughing not long after falling asleep. She wipes blood from her face, but not before it drips onto her pillow. Once the bleeding stops, she flips it over and makes a note to change the case in the morning before Mulder wakes. When she settles back in, he reaches an arm towards her, as if he can sense her unease while asleep. For the first time Scully can remember, she brushes off the contact.

***

There’s one front-facing desk in the basement office. One nameplate on the door. One rose petal in her hand, the byproduct of a stranger’s mourning. There is no space for her to leave empty, no evidence of her existence in this room to which she has dedicated years of her life. Nothing permanent, except for her name in a casefile.

***

She doesn’t know what she’s doing. She’s in a bar with a man who is not her husband. She is pulling her waistband down a couple inches to make way for a needle. She is a teenager again, sneaking cigarettes to taste rebellion before the impermanence of youth slips through her fingers like the smoke through her lips, like the life she now fears might slip out of her body.

She doesn’t sleep with him. Of course she doesn’t. She’s being reckless, yes, but not cruel. The most permanent thing is the ink, and even that will decompose with the rest of her.

***

Scully does not like to admit when she is scared. The flimsy scan trembles between her fingertips. She slots it onto the lightboard to ponder it closer, the growth of darkness behind her eyes.

Cancer. Cancer.

She needs Mulder. Her fingers are dialing before she even realizes what she’s doing.

***

Mulder is stepping out the front door on his way to work when his phone rings. He had woken up to an empty bed with a vague note about an appointment left on the coffee maker, so it’s not a surprise when he finds it’s Scully on the other end.

“Mulder.”

“Mulder, it’s me,” Scully says through the tinny speaker. “I need you to meet me at the hospital.”

Mulder pauses, standing in the middle of their front sidewalk halfway to the car. “Are you okay?”

“I… haven’t been admitted.”

“Scully?”

Her voice is small on the other end. “Please, just come.”

“Where should I meet you?”

“The oncology ward.” The words are unsteady when they wobble out of her mouth and reverberate through his chest as he processes what she’s saying in waves.

Oncology. Cancer. Scully.

“Okay.” He tries to keep his voice steady, keep himself steady, for her. “Okay, I’ll be right there. I love yo–” She hangs up before he can get the words out.

He honestly doesn’t remember the drive to the hospital. Or where he got the flowers. The crack he makes about stealing them from a guy with a broken leg could be true, for all he knows. The only thing he cares about, the only thing pumping through his mind, through his veins, is Scully, Scully, Scully.

And then there she is, in front of him, standing and staring at her own insides, at her own cancerous mass.

Steady. He has to be steady. He does his best to wipe the worry off his face and out of his voice; he doesn’t think it works.

He doesn’t know how to breathe when she says the word tumor. Something is being sucked out through his chest. He’s not sure if it’s his heart or his soul, but something is being pulled out of him with unending force, out out out–

Steady.

“You’re the only one I’ve called.”

She explains it with her doctoral clinical detachment, like decline and death are a simple fact and he can’t stand it. He can’t let that be true.

“I refuse to believe that. I– I–”

“For all the times I have said that to you,” she interrupts, “I am as certain of this as I have ever been. I have cancer. It is a mass on the wall between my sinus and cerebrum. If it pushes into my brain, statistically, I have about zero chance of survival.”

The last four words trickle through his body before leaching out through the hole in his chest. He just got her. He just got her, in his arms and properly his, his, his Scully, and now she’s… leaving him. Being ripped away from him.

But not yet. For now, she’s fighting. Not just the cancer, but the people he’s made her enemies by virtue of existing next to her.

***

After delivering Scully’s overnight bag, Mulder sits on an uncomfortable and uncomforting plastic chair in the hospital corridor with his phone in his hands, Maggie's contact highlighted but not yet selected. He's never called her with good news before. She’ll know something is wrong the second his number blinks across her screen.

His hands are shaking. When Scully had told him, back in DC, it hadn’t been concrete. It had been information he had taken in, but Scully was upright, smiling at him, and investigating like she would be on any other day. Her cancer wasn’t tangible to him; it wasn’t real. The bridge of her nose has just been another beautiful inch of skin he longed to stroke, unaware of the danger lurking behind the bone.

Maybe he had just fallen for the facade she had erected. Maybe she had been holding that wall up for days, weeks, months, feeling sick and not telling him to spare his concern, but now she’s in the hospital and sick and dying, and what does he do with that? What does he do when his wife has a disease growing behind her eyes?

He doesn’t realize that his chest is growing tight until his lungs are refusing to expand and he’s choking on worry. The image of the phone he’s rolling between his fingertips begins to swim. He’s gasping and he’s choking and he’s dying like Scully's dying until a hand falls to his shoulder. He looks up and sees shoes, then further to see a man in a flannel, an understanding look of concern splashed across his features.

“Breathe with me,” a low voice demands, and Mulder sucks in a slow breath at the stranger’s instruction. It makes it most of the way in before his throat catches, and he forces it back out.

He follows the man’s instructions for a few minutes, until his arms stop threatening to detach from his body and his eyes are clearer.

“Diagnosis?” the stranger asks. Mulder just nods, his feet on the ground. “You or a loved one?”

“My wife.” He might as well tell the truth while he still can. While he’s still a husband, instead of a widower.

“How bad?”

“Not good.” The moment stretches before Mulder continues, “It didn’t — we found out a couple days ago, but it didn’t feel real. But now she’s… she’s in a hospital bed and asking me to call her mom, and I don't know how the hell to do that.”

“Are you close with her? Her mother?”

Mulder pauses at that, unsure how to answer. He knows he does have a good relationship with Maggie, but most of their conversations happen when something is wrong with Scully and they’re afraid she’s dead or dying. And here he stands, about to have another one, exactly the same.

“More or less,” he settles on. The man nods in understanding.

“When my wife told her mother… she meant to do it herself, she really did. But how the hell do you tell your parent that they're likely to outlive you?” He shakes his head. “We had her mom sat down in the living room, but Cheryl… she got so choked up. I couldn’t — I couldn’t make her do that alone, with everything else she was dealing with. So I ripped the bandaid off.”

“And how did she react?”

“As you can expect. She cried. It… sucked. But by now, I’ve had the ‘my wife has terminal cancer’ conversation enough times that it’s routine. It’s not any easier, it still feels like I’m being shot every time I have to say it, but I know how to go about it.”

“What the hell do I do?” Mulder asks, his voice rough.

“Love her. Be there for her. Things I’m sure you do anyway,” the man advises. “And if she’s anything like my wife, don’t treat her like she’s made of glass; she’ll hate that. Listen to her when she tells you what she needs.”

“She’s not,” Mulder sighs, pushing a hand through his unruly hair. “She’s not good at telling me when she needs something. She tends to bottle it up.”

“You two have been through a lot together, huh?”

Mulder just nods, eyes staring holes into linoleum tiles.

“Then you’ll make it through this, too.” The man gives Mulder a final pat on the back. “You’ll have her and she’ll have you. On the other end, you’ll have me.” A business card is being pressed into Mulder’s hands with “Malcolm Henries” in bold lettering across the top.

“Thank you,” Mulder says simply, and slides it into his pocket for safekeeping.

“I’ll let you make your call.” Malcolm gives Mulder a final sad smile and departs down the hallway, disappearing around a corner as Mulder sits, watching blankly with his phone laying dumbly in his hand.

Mulder is not a doctor. He is not a surgeon. He cannot take a scalpel and a bone saw and delicately pluck out the parts of Scully’s body that wish to hurt her. Mulder cannot cure cancer, but he can do this.

He runs his thumb across the button of his phone lightly, the pattern of his fingerprint catching on the raised CALL lettering. Before he can overthink it any further, he presses down and raises it to his ear.

“Hello?”

“Maggie,” he says, voice rough, “Hi, it’s, uh, it’s Fox Mulder.”

“Fox?” Worry is inked into Maggie’s voice. She knows, too. She knows they only talk now when something is wrong with Scully. Maybe that’s Mulder’s fault, only reaching out for necessity despite his affection for the woman, and the kindness and caring he receives in return.

“What’s wrong?” she asks, breaking Mulder from his thoughts.

“Scully, uh, Dana’s asked me to call you. We’re in Pennsylvania right now; she’s been admitted to the hospital.”

“What happened?” And oh, god. Mulder hasn’t said it yet. He needs to say it.

“She–” His voice wobbles, and he swallows the unease. “She got a diagnosis a couple days ago. Cancer. On her skull.”

“Oh my god.” Maggie sounds like she’s been punched in the stomach, just as Mulder had felt when Scully had first told him. “Brain cancer?”

“No,” he clarifies hurriedly. “Well, not yet. We found a doctor who has treated people with this form of cancer before.”

“Successfully?”

Mulder is silent for a moment, before settling on, “Scully is hopeful. She, uh, wanted you to bring some things for her.” He rattles off the list Scully had given him, consisting largely of hospital records and a few personal items, and Maggie agrees to pack her daughter’s things.

He can hear the tears in his mother-in-law’s eyes when she says, “I’ll be there soon.”

“Do you want me to organize for–”

“No,” she interrupts. “You be there for my daughter until I can, Fox. Please. Be there for her.”

“I will,” he vows. His voice is small. “I promise, Maggie, I will.”

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Fox William Mulder invented masculinity by curling up in Scully’s lap and asking her to gently sing him to sleep.

Never settle for less

(photo: @sculderand-mully)

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Happy trans day of visibility to Fox Mulder 🏳️‍⚧️

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sorry I couldn't resist

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they return just when you least expect them: txf + text posts

more

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Fanfic writers spend years trying to come up with realistic “bed sharing” scenarios, and the X-Files writing team drops a cow through the roof of Mulder’s motel room.

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more than anything

X-Files | Teen and Up | 2.4k words | AO3

Valentine’s Day fic

Scully believes that her feelings for Mulder are one-sided. She later comes to her senses.

It was Valentine's Day. When Scully woke up, that was the first thing she thought: it’s Valentine’s Day. There wasn’t any real reason for it to be at the forefront of her mind, but—despite her lack of plans for the day—it was.

She had the feeling that she’d just woken from a dream, though she didn’t remember what it was about. She was pretty sure that Mulder was there, but she couldn’t hold onto the memory.

With each second of consciousness, it was slipping further and further away from her, like sand through her fingers or a small boat being dragged away by a strong tide.

As she got out of bed, Scully saw Queequeg sleeping peacefully at the end of her mattress. She stopped for a moment when she saw him, almost surprised that he was there, and she had a strange feeling that she hadn’t seen him in a while.

Standing in her bathroom in front of the mirror, minty toothpaste foaming in her mouth, Scully thought about the significance of Valentine’s Day or, rather, the insignificance of it.

Continue reading on AO3

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I love to read transman Mulder as asking everyone to call him Mulder cause it SIGNIFICANTLY lowers the chances of getting deadnamed. Outwitting the haters

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always in sickness, never in health

X-Files | Mature | 2,519 words | AO3

While Scully is hospitalised due to her cancer, she and Mulder have an important conversation.

The bright, fluorescent hospital lights were starting to burn holes in her retinas.

It had now been three days since she’d been admitted. The medicine wasn’t working how it should be. As much as it pained her to admit, she could die any day now.

Three days in this room, and she couldn’t see a way out that involved her going back to her apartment, back to work, back to her life. The only end to this—the only destination of this journey—was to lie under six feet of bitter earth.

Mulder visited her every day, often multiple times, and Scully wondered whether he felt it too, whether he could also sense that the end was near.

Scully wondered if he went home after visiting hours ended, or if he just stayed there.

Continue reading on AO3

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Smoll & Tall inc.

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posting this on my blog to add the link to prints (with the permission of @child-of-delirium who commissioned this piece)

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fox mulder is a trans man and no one can take that away from me

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“mistletoe & milestones”

X-Files | Teen and Up | 8,986 words | AO3

A few weeks into Mulder’s top surgery recovery, Christmas rolls around, and Scully invites him to spend it with her at her mother’s house.

So far, Mulder’s recovery hadn’t been the easiest thing in the world, but it helped beyond measure that Scully was there to help him through it.

He remembered waking up in the hospital, still high on pain medication, and seeing Scully sitting beside his bed, eyes wet. He asked her why she was crying, and she smiled at him, almost lovingly. She told him that she was happy for him, happy that he could live how he was always meant to.

She’d taken better care of him than anyone ever had before. When this realisation washed over him — as he was kneeling on the bathmat in Scully’s apartment, head over the bath as she washed shampoo out of his hair, running her fingers along his wet scalp — Mulder didn’t know how to feel about it.

Somewhere deep inside, he was a child that just wanted love, just wanted someone to care for him unconditionally; this was something his parents hadn’t given him, but Scully did, just perhaps without a feeling quite as strong as love. But, still, she cared for him no matter what.

When washing Mulder’s hair, Scully used her fancy shampoo and conditioner. It smelled like her; Mulder thought the scent might suffocate him. He decided, as Scully coated his scalp with said conditioner, that there were far worse ways to go.

Continue reading on AO3

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“constantly repenting for a difficult mind”

X-Files | Teen and Up | 3,407 words | AO3

As Mulder prepares for top surgery, he tries to find the words to tell Scully why he’ll be having some time off.

For as long as he could remember, Mulder had been waiting for this. He’d been waiting since the first time he noticed his chest, and how it wasn’t as flat as it used to be, since he realised that his body now acted as a marker separating him from the other boys, since before then, even.

He remembered being eleven years old and telling Samantha, several months before she’d disappeared, that he never wanted to have to wear skirts or dresses, that he didn’t want his chest to grow, that he wanted his voice to be deep and his hair to be short, that he wanted to be her brother and not her sister.

Somehow, she’d understood it better than a large number of adults that Mulder had met throughout his life; he realised now that children are accepting because it’s instinct, that hatred is taught.

After Mulder had told Samantha how he felt, she’d stopped referring to him as her sister, instead calling him her brother in secret whispers that were to go unheard by their parents. She’d started calling him ‘Fox’ rather than the name he was known as by the rest of the world, and he later adopted this nickname as his legal name, the only piece of his sister he’d managed to hold onto. She’d even cut his hair for him when he’d been too scared to do it himself.

Although Samantha hadn’t cared that cutting her brother’s hair had landed her in trouble, Mulder did; he had blamed himself. He remembered crying to her, apologising for being the reason that she’d been told off, but she wiped away his tears and, at just nine years old, told him that he needn’t apologise for their parents’ cruelty, that he was her brother and she’d do anything for him.

Yet to this day, Mulder had a very real and (in his opinion) very legitimate fear that he was at fault for everything that had ever gone wrong in his life, that he was the root of all evil, and maybe this fear seemed a bit over-dramatic, but he was yet to find anything to disprove it. He’d been trying for years, since his sister’s disappearance or maybe even earlier, to bury this feeling, this deep-rooted belief that his name could not coexist with the ideas of being good, or moral, or right, but he was still having difficulties with it.

Continue reading on AO3

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WIP Wednesday

Because @for-a-longlongtime twisted my arm about it 😉

And because I know @moonlitbirdie and @perotovar and @sin-djarin and probably @sp00kymulderr have tagged me a million times and I’ve had no WIPs to show for it

Have some ftm Mulder and Bisexual Scully my beloveds 🥰

“Yeah, it works for me up until date number three, then things get pretty awkward pretty quickly.”

Her hand is on his knee now, and her thumbnail scratches little circles into his patella, and he wants to disappear. She hums and stares at him, and it isn’t pity that makes her gaze feel so heavy. It’s something else, something Mulder doesn’t even dare let himself think.

“Seems kinda silly in the grand scheme of things,” she mumbles.

Mulder hardly hears her.

“What do you mean?”

She shrugs, looks down at where her hand is searing a fucking hole through his jeans and branding his skin. Mulder places his hand on top of hers, to encourage her or maybe just selfishly to feel her bare skin.

“It’s just… I would see it as a net positive. Knowing your way around the… uh… equipment so to speak.”

Christ.

Of all the things he’d expect to come from her mouth, that’s so low on the list that it’s laughable.

“Dana Katherine Scully,” he gasps. He has to cope with humor. If he doesn’t, he’ll melt into the mattress and become an x-file himself.

She giggles. Giggles. And squeezes his knee. He wants her so bad it’s pathetic. He has the sudden urge to kick a piece of gravel down the road and whistle a sad tune.

“I’m just saying, if they were smart, they’d take advantage.”

“Are you?”

Oh god oh fuck.

“Am I what?”

He clears his throat and looks away and let’s his hand fall back into his lap instead of on her hand.

“Mulder, am I what?”

“… Smart?”

His eyes are closed. He’s leaned his head back so far against the tacky motel bed headboard that his neck aches. He wants to run away, but he doesn’t want to stop feeling her hand on his knee, even above his clothes.

It feels like hours before she responds.

“I re-wrote Einstein, didn’t I?”

-

I don’t even know who to tag anymore but if you see this and you post a WIP rage me in it I wanna see so bad 💕