#and he’s just so used to being csm that he can’t see himself going back to how he used to live before because it was just so fucking bad man

[tariah23]

The fact the Denji is just so used to being stuck in shit to the point where he barely has any strong reactions to things ever outside of being a bit thrown off at times and that one time a couple of chapters ago when Yoshida had both he and his sister held as captives where he was pretty much forced to stop being csm or else- Denji isn’t allowed any agency as a character and he cannot have what he wants regardless of how insignificantly small that thing might be. He’s always forced into making discussions that he doesn’t want to, even if they’re painful and scary. And it is always through him being guilted into making them.

[enigmaticxbee]

✖️✖️✖️✖️✖️ 2x08 One Breath

The one where... Scully’s in a coma.

Best: I love, love, love this episode. Mrs Scully and Melissa. Skinner. DD’s best acting (so far certainly - emotionally speaking maybe of the series?) She had the strength of his beliefs.

Worst: I think the CSM parts have been tainted for me by the rest of the series - Mulder, please just kill him and put all of us out of our misery. (If only I didn’t know CC would just bring him back.)

❌ Flashlights

❌ Woods

❌ Slideshow

❌ Autopsy

✔️ Evidence Disappears

❌ Scully Misses It

❌ Mulder Ditch

❌ Sunflower Seeds

✔️ Voiceover: Mrs Scully intro

❌ Catch Phrase

✔️ Scully is a (Medical) Doctor

❌ Mulder is Spooky

❌ Scuuullllaaaaayy! Muullllderrrr!

✔️ Fox/Dana

❌ Inappropriate Touching (that I am here for)

❌ Casual Scully

✔️ Casual Mulder

✔️ Trench Coats

✔️ Bad Tie Watch

❌ Glasses Watch

✔️ Taking! It! Personally!: Mulder

50 States: D.C. x8 (18/50)

Investigate: Apart

Solve Rate: 69%

✔️ Bechdel Test

MSR: 🐝🐝🐝🐝🐝

Goriness: 👽

Creepiness: 👽👽

Humor: 👽👽

Rewatch Thoughts:

This isn’t an episode I rewatch frequently - it’s just too emotional (I cried several times this rewatch, it still gets me). Despite some action sequences, the parts that stand out are the quiet ones. Scully floating. Mulder sitting by her bedside all night. Mulder sliding to the floor, sobbing in his ransacked apartment. It’s about Mulder’s emotional journey.

This is a huge turning point for Mulder. He puts just being there for Scully (especially since there’s nothing he can do to save her) over answers or even revenge. The truth and his quest aren’t the only things that matter to him anymore. He’ll still make stupid decisions and go hairing off on his own (sometimes to protect her, sometimes just thoughtlessly). And part of it’s the guilt because that’s Mulder. But everyone in this episode can see how this is affecting him - that he cares deeply for her (loves her?) Even if he can’t acknowledge it yet, it’s there. ‘Even if it doesn’t bring her back at least she’ll know, and so will you.’ ‘I had the strength of your beliefs.’ Beautiful episode.

Mid-Episode Thoughts:

So Bill Jr was always shitty.

Mulder can’t even look at her tombstone.

Is Mulder fast forwarding through porn?

And I’m crying. Mulder’s freaking out, he can’t handle his feelings about finding Scully here like this. As they talk to the doctor his arms are crossed, trying to hold himself together. I can only guess that he’s there because Mrs Scully smoothed things over with the doctor.

Mulder signed Scully’s will as her witness. I wonder when in the first season she made her will? After 1x13 Beyond the Sea would be my guess.

Melissa Scully. I wish we’d gotten more of her.

I really like this imagery - she’s floating, just barely tethered to the dock.

The first X in the window! When did he make this arrangement with X? How’s it supposed to work? Does X drive by his apartment every night?!

Frohike! Aww, he dresses up to come to the hospital.

Oh really, Langley? Mulder looks down when his partner’s in the hospital in a coma?

X: You’re not supposed to know! That’s the point!

X is partially right, Mulder isn’t him. But that’s because he has a heart. And it belongs to Scully.

Mrs. Scully asking Mulder (Fox) to join them. I’m crying again. Mulder can’t.

Skinner’s ‘Thank you for not smoking’ sign.

Skinner liked Scully. Of course he did.

Way to add to Mulder’s sense of guilt there, Skinner.

Ahab tells Starbuck ‘Not now’.

Did Skinner get that message sealed into a fresh pack of Morleys somehow? Seems like there are easier methods to get him the info!

Why doesn’t Mulder shoot CSM?! Or at least try to get some answers out of him... TV cop out.

Skinner tears up his resignation letter. It’s unacceptable. Great Skinner scene. He admires Mulder’s courage to look further. This is when I fall for Skinner.

8:17 tonight. That’s a very specific time.

Mulder: Because the lights aren’t on. Melissa: Okay...

Love this Melissa Scully scene. You tell him Melissa!

He goes to Scully! He’s here. You’re a dark wizard, Mulder.

His slow slide down the wall...

He thinks this is the call to tell him she’s died. He doesn’t want to but he picks up. The smile slowly appearing. Great acting from DD all episode.

Her smile as she says “Not Fox, Mulder”. They’re so gentle with each other. It almost makes me believe that they would just drop the investigation and move on. Mrs Scully and Melissa watching them - I want to know what they said to Scully about him after!

I’m still not sure what Nurse Owens is all about... Some sort of guardian angel watching over Scully - it wasn’t her time.

[dreamingofscully]

5x02. “Redux II” - X-Files Rewatch

I'll be including more pics below because there's just too many good ones in this episode.

Mulder desperately searching for Scully. Yelling at people in frustration.

"I'm only half dead." - Mulder  😫 😭

The whole scene with Mulder seeing Scully is heartbreaking (DD does a masterful job here). He gets the wind knocked out of him seeing her so sick. He had no idea it had gotten this far, he thought he had more time. Being confronted with the reality of her illness here... She's seemed okay up until now. Fighting desperately to be near her. Only leaves because he's forced away and is pissed at Skinner for taking him away from her. He can't take his eyes away from her the whole time he's leaving.

When Mulder visits Scully in the hospital & she's conscious. The whole scene is just disgusting. 😍 So much touching and gazing. First the cheek kiss, holding her hand and sitting on the bed close to her. Caressing her hair. Then kissing her hand when he leaves.

He tries to just be there and not stress her out about what's going on. Him being around and it not being work-related is not something that they do. Scully insists on needing to know. She tells Mulder to let her take the blame for the murder of Scott Ostelhoff - to give her illness some meaning. Mulder is blown away by her offer - that she would try to protect him even when she's dying. "Mulder, if I can save you let me." He can't do that to her, can't tarnish her memory by letting her do that. UGH.

Bill telling Mulder to leave the work away, to let Scully die with dignity. What does Mulder think Scully told her brother about him?

Lone Gunmen! Finding the chip.

The disagreements in Scully's room. "I think that everybody here has their heart in the right place."

"She's your big defender, but I think the truth is she just doesn't want to disappoint you." Bill Scully

"If it works I don't care what you think she thinks." Again, Mulder doesn't give two shits about what other people think about him. He just wants to do what he can to help people, to find the truth.

Bill hitting back with "You're the reason for it." and "You're one sorry son of a bitch." - more guilt :(

Mulder is just... there, now. He's done what he can and given Scully the chip. Now he just has to wait to see if it works.

I'm going to go off the rails and talk about some Samantha stuff here (even though I don't really care all that much). Is the Samantha in this ep a clone? Must be, given what we learn later. What is the purpose of keeping her around? Is everything she told Mulder a lie or does she actually believe she's Samantha and is living a lie? For what reason? Because CSM relishes having power? Having his own family that views him as benevolent instead of the evil man that he really is? What happens to her after his attempted assassination?

CSM offers Mulder the truth/his sister in exchange for leaving the FBI and working for him instead. It's a tempting offer, and one that Mulder may have taken if he didn't have Scully in his life. CSM has a singular obsessive focus that I think you can parallel with Mulder (not obsessed with power but finding and exposing the truth). They focus on these goals at the expense of everything else.

EXCEPT Mulder chooses Scully over the truth at the end - CSM cannot comprehend that Mulder would do such a thing because he would never do it himself.

I think it is assumed by most people that it is the chip that saves her life. But I like to imagine perhaps it is the three things in her life that save her.

the Chip - representing Mulder and their search for the truth

the Science - her unconventional treatment

her Faith - praying with Father McCue, returning to her church, her family and history

I love that she uses everything at her disposal to try to save herself. She doesn't just rely on one thing. She desperately wants to live. Hugging her mom and talking about pushing away her faith when she needs it the most.

Mulder visiting Scully at night and crying. 😭 I love his infatuation with caressing her hair.

"I was lost last night."

Why did he make up his mind to take the deal with CSM after crying by Scully's bedside? Maybe he thought it would save her and he was desperate. Maybe he thought that he had nothing to lose, if Scully wasn't going to get better.

Again - she offers to take the blame but he CAN'T let her. He couldn't live with the thought of her memory, her legacy being anything but the one she should have - that she is so full of goodness, the only one in his life that has ever shown him decency and respect.

"We all have our faith and mine is in the truth." - Mulder

"Then why'd you come here if you'd already made up your mind?" - Scully "Because I knew you'd talk me out of it if I was making a mistake." - Mulder, with a giant grin at her. Acknowledging that he respects her opinion, that she saves him with every question and comment she makes that goes against his initial thoughts.

When Father McCue arrives, she reaches for Mulder's hand. Needing his strength to make another leap on her own. "You'll be in my prayers."

He kisses her cheek again. Her desperate grasping of his hand when he leaves. Not wanting to let him go. Knowing she has to do this last thing by herself.

The consortium has CSM assassinated because he keeps protecting Mulder unreasonably. Why they kept the spying from him.

"It's the best news I could have ever heard." Mulder's expression telling Skinner about Scully's remission. So soft, relaxed. Holding his vigil outside of her room. Really wish we'd gotten to see Scully telling Mulder this news. ARGH. Thank god for fanfic.

[fuck-customers]

This was quite an experience so I've selected tw for this. (sorry this is kinda long.) I work at malwart as a cashier/self checkout host on 3rds and I gotta say that for the most part it isn't to bad. There are just some days where the crazies come out of the woodwork and then just keep coming.

This particular instance happened last week (5/26). I'm watching the self checkouts and my head night manager M comes up to me and says "There are a couple of kids in the alcohol aisle who look like they could be underage. The girl looks like she is picking things out. If they come up, please card both of them." he then gives a brief description of the boy and girl then heads off.

Not long after he tells me this, they come up and all they have is 7up and red plastic cups. No alcohol. Okay, fine. Nothing wrong with that. Though slightly suspicious since they were just in the alcohol aisle. They purchase their items and leave.

Not 3 minutes later, the guy comes back in by himself and he goes to the alcohol aisle. He grabs a bottle of wine and 24 pack of bottle wine coolers and brings them up to checkout. Please note that at night, I am the only cashier unless we get busy(we are a small walmart). So if he wants a human to ring him up then I was the only one available. He comes up to my register and I give him the usual spiel. I card him and he checks out but then I have to ask "Can I please see your friend's id?"

Him: My friend?

Me: That girl you were with.

Him: Oh, we aren't dating.

Me:.... That's irrelevant? You were in the store with her and so I have to see her ID too. If I don't see it then I can't sell this to you.

Him: What? But she isn't even in here right now! She drove a separate car! We were only in here because we needed to make some photo things.

Me: Again, I'm sorry, sir. But unless I see her ID I can't sell this to you.

Him: Are you serious?!

Me: Yes...?

Him: THIS IS BULLS***!

He then commenced to cuss at me for a few more seconds before storming out of the store. I call up Manager M and tell him what happened. He tells me good job and takes the alcohol back to where it belongs. That and the assistant manager and my CSM come up to see what the fuss was about and so I tell them too. I then put the incident behind me and go about my day.

Fifteen minutes later, he walks back into the store and beelines straight towards me. "Can I buy it now?"

Me:(incredulous that he would come in and even ask) Um no...? I still have to see her ID.

Him: but it's been over 20 minutes! She isn't even here anymore! She drove home!

Me: Okay but how am I supposed to prove that? I'm sorry sir but it's still a no.

Him: Are you kidding me?!

Me: No. I can not sell any alcohol to you until I see her ID.

At this point, he gets really red in the face. He steps into my personal space so I have to look up at him and he glares down at me. Royally pissed off. "I want to speak to your manager. No one says NO to me."

I give him the snarkiest grin I can muster "Sure thing sir. But you may need to prepare yourself because you are going to hear it a lot in the next few minutes." so i call Manager M up and the customer just loses it.

He is pacing the self check yelling his head off. "How dare I say no to him!", "He's not even from here!", "I can't wait to talk to your manager about this."

He is being loud enough that my CSM and AM come up and he goes right over to them to complain about me not selling him alcohol and when he is done they both side with me and tell him no. We can't sell it until we see the girl's ID.

This just makes him angrier. He's screaming at this point because 2 more people told him no and that's when Manager M whips around the corner of the self check angry as all heck "It's non negotiable!"

Customer: But she isn't even here-

M: It's non negotiable! GET OUT!

Manager M then kicks him out of the store and takes a picture of his license plate which he sends to the cops that he keeps on speed dial because he only works night shift.

Later on in the night, one of the cops comes in to tell us that they caught him trying to buy alcohol for his minor friends at another liquor store after he left. So he was arrested.

I just don't understand why he thought he could intimidate me into complying? I'm not going to lose my job because of you!

[applevictorianico-blog]

Bruises- Chapter 2

[First off: Thank you to everyone who has read, commented, reblogged, or combination of the before said. You have no idea what this means to me!]

Summary: This series is my take on TRR if Bastien has a daughter.

Warnings: This series will have non-present parenting issues, possible triggers for combat veterans, and a few others that will be addressed when they come up.

Pixelberry owns the rights to these characters, I own Roxy.

Tags: @badchoicesposts

@bobasheebaby

@riseandshinelittleblossom

@stopforamoment

@sirbeepsalot

@mfackenthal

@jovialyouthmusic

Chapter 2- The Proposition

Five Years Ago: Fort Bragg, North Carolina

Roxy stares at the man that just introduced himself. Her palms are sweating, a knot formed in her stomach, and she’s trying her hardest to control her breathing. Roxy jumps up from her seat, her flight or fight reflexes kicking in. Before she can take a step towards the door, her world went black.

Only seconds later, Roxy found herself on the floor of her Command Sergeant Major’s office. The CSM was kneeled down beside her, and Bastien was returning with a cup of water. Roxy’s eyes darted between the two men as she scrambled to sit up.

“Easy Specialist, that was a pretty hard hit. Give your body a chance to catch up with your thoughts.” The CSM helped her into a sitting position as Bastien held out the cup, hand slightly trembling.

A knock at the door reveals a doctor. The man walked in and looked around the room. “Command Sergeant Major, I was told I’m needed this morning. Sergeant Owens, head of Labs at Womack.” The man explained, before saluting CSM Porter.

“Yes, we need a paternity test for these two quickly and,” Porter pauses for a moment, “quietly.” Porter gave Owens a glare emphasising the ‘quietly.’

“Not a problem, who do I contact with the results?” Owens asked.

“Me.” Porter answered quickly.

Porter and Owen helped Roxy to the chair she had previously been sitting in. Owen quickly swabbed Bastien and Roxy’s cheeks, packing them away carefully in a small case he had brought, then left.

“Stanley, I’m relieving you of your duties for the afternoon.” Roxy nodded in understanding. “I believe you and Mr.Lykel have some history to discuss. I’ll call you with the results as soon as I have them.” Porter stood, as did the pair before him. Roxy saluted as Porter shook Bastien’s hand and saluted Roxy. “Dismissed.” Porter quipped as he sat back down at his desk.

Roxy took off out of the office, quickly walking out of the building. Her hands were trembling, and all she wanted was her mom. For 18 long years, it had just been the two of them, moving town to town, experiencing what life threw their way.

Bastien stayed silent, keeping within a step of her the whole way out. He watched the lady before him as her strong facade began to crumble. He wanted to reach for her, hold her and tell them both they were no longer alone, but he stood, and waited.

Roxy felt the man watching her, she kept her face forward as she spoke, voice cracking from the silent tears streaking her face. “How did you find me? And why now?”

Bastien took a deep breath of the early morning air, the sun was barely peeking over the buildings. “Three years ago, a newspaper article caught my attention. ‘One dead, three injured on way to Commencement.’” Roxy took a shaky breath as more tears fell from her eyes.

“Your Mother’s name was listed as the fatality. I was heartbroken, I spent three months training with the US Marines in Quantico as part of my training. I met Anna my first weekend there.” Bastien’s voice grew softer remembering that night at the bar off base. “I searched for her obituary, where I found you listed as her survivor. In my free time, I searched for more information about you.”

“It took you three years to find me? If you were so heartbroken, why did you leave her behind?” Roxy snapped at Bastien. Pieces of her wanted to hear more, but in that moment Roxy ran as fast as she could. Bastien’s heart began breaking again.

“Help me, Anna.” He whispered as he walked back to his rental car.

Present Day

“So let me get this right,” Roxy began as she finished her last bite of her Risotto, “you’re suggesting I come to Cordonia, become my cousins’ entry into an archaic Social Season for the hand of the Crown Prince?”

Bastien knew the idea was far fetched, he washed his last bite of Salmon down, moving his plate to the side. “I’m suggesting, you come to Cordonia, get to know some of the people and see some new scenery. If you like the country, after the Social Season, apply for the King’s Guard. If you don’t, you can return back to the states.” Bastien waited a moment before adding, “It at least gives you a getaway to plan out your future.”

“Your skipping over the fact that this Social Season is specifically for Liam to choose a bride. Why would I want to marry anyone right now? Let alone someone I’ve never met?” Roxy was almost fuming.

“I won’t be able to spend a lot of time with you, unless your traveling with the Royal entourage. Being the only child of the Head Guard doesn’t grant you access to it, but being a Noble Lady sponsored by a Duchy will.” Bastien sat forward, knowing her stubbornness would keep her focused on the marriage aspect and not on the benefits of getting away. “No one is saying you have to marry anyone.”

Roxy sat back, taking everything in as the waiter asked if they’d like dessert. They both said no, and the bill was sat beside Bastien. He pulled out a card and placed it inside of the book, before turning back to Roxy.

“So the court would know I’m the cousin of these Beaumont guys, but I still can’t claim you as my father?” Roxy narrows her darkening gray eyes.

“We’ve discussed this many times, Roxanna.” Bastien hates this discussion, he used her full first name as the aggravation came forward. “It’s not safe for you. If someone trying to get to the crown was to use you to get to me, I wouldn’t want to make that decision.”

“How many times do I have to tell you Bas, I can handle my own? I’ve been shot four times, stabbed multiple times, blown up once, and then some. You don’t have to make that decision, because the one thing I have learned the last few years, is that I get my loyalty from you, and you will protect the crown.” Roxy was getting tired of this discussion, it’s been the same since they first began communicating. He wanted to be in her life, but he felt as if he was putting her in danger.

Bastien eyes his daughter as the waiter picks up the check, and walks away. “You know, once I was certain you were mine, it killed me inside to know you were on deployment. It really pissed me off I could never get access to your full files, or find out where you were sent. I know I shouldn’t use my position to spy on a member of another countries soldier, but you aren’t just any soldier.”

The waiter sat the copy to be signed down, along with Bastien’s card, and thanked them for their patronage. “However, I have come to realize how much like me you are. Which is why I’m offering you a position in the guard at the end of the season if you so choose.”

“Well, then here is my answer. I will go, and help these Beaumont’s not look like complete failures in front of the court, but you have to admit to the court you are my father.”

[minisception]

So I saw this guy, ‘Haarkon Worldclaimer” when the warhammer community article went up (link), and I’ve got a lot of mixed feelings about him.

Starting with the good, I love the model.  Yeah, it’s super busy, but I actually really like that in a 40k era chaos marine lord.  To me it’s a great blend of the dark vengeance chosen and current raptor kit.  I like that there’s more of that mutated/daemonic look going than in the Blackstone Fortress character.  Lightning claw and... power lance?  daemon weapon?  Seem like potentially an odd equipment load, but that’s not too hard to convert around if it isn’t particularly effective in game.

Admittedly the posing & proportions are a bit weird.  At first I thought that the central chest armor detail would prevent him from seeing anything directly in front of him whenever he was just standing on the ground, then I noticed the oddly elongated midriff, and realized that his whole upper torso craned back to look forward mid leap, instead of just his neck, which is just sort of awkward.  Also, the connection to the base seems remarkably small and fragile, but that’s been a common problem with GW models lately.  When and if I get this guy for myself, I’ll have to build up the base a bit to provide some more stable contact points.

But again, overall I love the model.  The character on the other hand?  There I’m not so sure.

Before getting into lore stuff, rules-wise the “new characters” lately have just been generic heroes with particular, usually suboptimal, wargear.  The Blackstone Fortress lord is literally just a generic black legion lord with a thunder hammer.  Granted chaos lords can’t currently take thunder hammers, but still.  I kind of expect the same here, just a generic lord with jump pack, lightning claw, and... power lance?  The spear might end up being a unique daemon weapon, but those are pretty hit & miss.  Having a jump pack is a good starting point in the current csm ruleset, though, and it shouldn’t be too hard to convert an alternative weapon loadout, so even if ‘Haarkon Worldclaimer’ isn’t a competitive unit in and of himself, he will make a solid foundation for reasonably competitive conversions.  Well, to the extent that any generic chaos HQ that isn’t a daemon prince can be competitive these days.  So... he’ll be a nice display piece.

The lore side of things is the bigger issue.  I /should/ be excited to see a new name and face added to the Black Legion’s lineup, and I /want/ to be excited to see the legion get some more ‘screen time’, but past experience tells me not to get too excited.

Chaos Marines in general and the Black Legion in particular have a history of being used as the go-to jobbers of the 40k narrative.  It’s a reputation some authors have been fighting to reverse - ADB in particular has done a good job of that in his series covering the origins of the legion - but for every ‘Talon of Horus’ or ‘Black Legion’ that depicts the legion as dangerous and competent there’s a ‘Pandorax’ or ‘Fall of Cadia’ that depicts their soldiers as background fodder and their commanders as buffoons who either fail miserably or succeed despite their own best efforts to the contrary.

There’s this related problem of portraying Abaddon as discount bin Darth Vader and the soldiers under his command as knock-off storm troopers.  This despite the fact that, if any faction in 40k were to be the analog of Star Wars’s Empire it would be the Imperium.  Chaos marines are the rag tag rebellion relying on the individually superior skill and passion of its soldiers combined with hit-and-run guerrilla tactics to chip away at a larger and better supplied foe.

As such, Abaddon isn’t the supreme commander of an omnipotent military state served by countless interchangeable soldiers brainwashed from birth to be obedient to the point of self destruction.  Rather, he’s the head of a ramshackle allegiance of self interested traitors and turncoat drama queens.  Abaddon can’t just expect obedience from his forces, he actually has to convince them that they *want* to risk their lives for him.  Every time he kills his own people it makes it harder to buy that he’d ever be able to do that.  It’s a really awful bit of characterization that never worked to begin with, yet was so commonly employed that it came to define his character, to the point that his Battlefleet Gothic rules had him firing on his own ships if they missed a roll.

And that brings us back to the actual topic of this post, Haarken Worldclaimer, and I’m sorry to say it but everything about this character and his introduction screams ‘jobber’.  I mean, first, look at is name.  World”claimer”?  So he’s named not for something he’s /done/ but for something he’s boasted he /will do/?  That’s a pretty bad sign to begin with.  And what is it he’s claimed he’s going to do?  Win the Vigilus campaign by himself against like 9 other factions?  Including the big re-release/update of fan and franchise favorite Calgar?

Being showcased opposite of Calgar in particular screams that Haarken is not a serious new player to take note of, but rather a no-name, no-stakes easy win to make the aging Poppa Smurf look good after his recent hip replacement.  Once again, it seems the Black Legion are being employed as the ‘jobber marines’.

But Haarken isn’t just boasting that he’ll take Vigilus from all the other forces vying for it, he’s boasting that he’ll do it in a scant 80 days.  And that particular tidbit, to me, screams that the dev’s aren’t *just* going to have Haarken job to Calgar, but rather are going to have him slink away in failure, or worse keep fighting till the 80 days are up only to have Abaddon show up and kill him for his ‘failure’ in another example of GW clumsily and lazily aiming for “this guy is evil and scary!” but instead landing on “this moron is a bigger threat to his own followers than literally anyone else,” and I’d rather have no new Black Legion character at all than one that only exists to job, and in the process of jobbing to undo some of the hard work that’s gone into rehabilitating him as a credible threat.

So yeah, I *want* to be excited for a new Black Legion character, but everything about the setup for the ‘worldclaimer’ screams “this is a nobody who exists only to make your chosen faction look bad and who won’t even exist six months from now when his model is re-packaged as a generic unnamed chaos lord.”  I hope I’m absolutely wrong about all that.  I’ve been excessively pessimistic about CSMs in the past, so maybe I’ll be wrong again, but we’ll see. 

Honestly, even if I *am* wrong about all that, I still kind of wish this was a Night Lords character rather than a Black Legionnaire.  Even if Vigilus doesn’t go down like I expect it to, and Haarken does stick around long term, did we really need another Black Legion special character when Word Bearers, Iron Warriors, Alpha Legion, and Night Lords don’t have any yet, outside of a couple half baked Forgeworld heroes?  In particular, of all the legions that might want a jump lord model, wouldn’t Night Lords want it most?  If this guy had been a Night Lord to start, maybe the fact that there aren’t any other Night Lords named characters would make the dev’s less likely to waste him just to build up calgar.  And even if they did just set him up to job regardless, the night lords haven’t already been used in that role to the point of losing all respectability.

It’s rare enough that the Night Lords get any ‘screen time’ at all, so getting some focus, even at the cost of taking a loss, would probably be seen as a positive development by most Night Lord players, especially if they got a permanent named hero out of it.  Where as Black Legion already has a named hero, and have been overused as the losing faction in grand imperial victories to the point that, even after Fall of Cadia (which was a rather embarrassing “victory” to begin with), no coverage at all still seems preferable to taking yet another dive.

[ghostbustermelanieking]

relinquo

s9: post the truth and release, with flashbacks to my struggle ii; references to william and john doe and 4-d. doggett and reyes. part of my series that i write as i rewatch the x files.

Summary: How Doggett and Reyes left the X-Files.

note: this fic arose out of a desire to explore several different things: doggett and reyes’s partnership, what happened to doggett between season 9 and 10, redeeming reyes (because it needed to happen) and exploring why she’s (seemingly) working with csm. (i mostly skimmed over the msii flashbacks, since msii was all undone but reyes is clearly working with csm in s11... i took creative liberties.) i also wanted to explore doggett’s feelings about catching his son’s murderer in release, and how that related to scully’s decision in william (since doggett and scully are two characters who have lost children and confront this fact in two episodes one after the other and it’s never acknowledged!!). mulder and scully aren’t in this fic, but that didn’t stop me from mentioning them five million times.

warning for discussion of doggett’s son’s death.

---

For years, Doggett has associated Monica with the moment he found his son dead. He's always felt like it was unfair to her, after everything they've been through, but the fact remains. He brings her along when he and Barbara meet to scatter Luke's ashes for comfort, but a part of him also feels like he is doing it to reassociate her in his mind with a pleasant memory instead of a horrible one. She is his friend, and it's become easier to be around her as time goes on, enjoyable—he doesn't know what he'd do half the time without a partner like her—but she is also at the center of too many unpleasant memories.

Doggett feels more companionable towards her than he ever has, through the years they've known each other. After the case closed, he and Monica used to meet regularly to review notes on the case, try to find the killer. Out of everyone who worked the case, the NYPD or the FBI, Monica was one of the only people that he felt like really cared about the case. That Luke was more than another number. (He'd even heard rumors, years later, that she'd cried in the bathroom during the case.) Once every few months had become once every year had become once every few years; he'd called her once when he entered the FBI, they'd been on the same task force before, but other than that, they mostly didn't stay in touch. He wouldn't have called Monica a friend before they became partners.

Now, she's undeniably his friend. Now, he's glad to have an ally, a familiar one, in this strange journey that he likely shouldn't be on. Being in the X-Files office has always felt strange, like standing in someone else's shoes (Agent Mulder's, mainly), but it feels even stranger without Scully. Like he's an intruder. Having Monica along for the ride helps.

When Scully and Mulder are gone, disappeared into the night like bandits, the feeling is even worse. It's absurd, but Doggett feels like a ghost, haunting the wrecked shell of the basement office. After he and Monica get back from New Mexico, they clean up the wreckage of the office together, picking it up, filing away the files that weren't stolen. Doggett saves the poster. If he owes Mulder and Scully anything, it's that.

---

But then again, maybe he doesn't owe them anything. Mulder's only ever resented him. Scully became more and more distant as she collapsed into herself, and John used to think that he understood, but that was before Monica told him what she had done. That she'd given the kid away. And Doggett understands the fear of having your kid in danger, hurt, more than most do, but he still cannot comprehend that she gave William up for adoption, the cute little baby who Doggett has held on his lap on occasion when Scully is doing their autopsies for them and recruits him and Monica to watch the kid. (Pains of a single mom.) He'd never said anything, of course, it wasn't his place, but he'd felt unexpected resentment rising in his throat when he heard the news. Selfish envy, that Dana had a son to throw away. They'd gone for drinks, once, the three of them, after they closed Luke's case, and Scully had begun by congratulating him awkwardly and ended in crying all over them both and apologizing repeatedly. He understands and he doesn't; she is mourning a son that she chose to leave. And even though she did it to keep him safe and it's clearly been hell for her, he can't help but be just a little bit jealous that she had a choice to make.

Doggett can't let himself be too mad at Dana, though. He can't. He's only ever known her in varying stages of grief; his initial thought when he'd heard the news about Mulder, when he told her and watched her face crumple with tears, was, Not again. He didn't know how he could support her through another one of Mulder's deaths. (A fucking ridiculous, tragic sentence.) He can't blame Scully because he's had a front seat to too much of this shit. He knows what she's been through. But he knows lost children, too. That is one thing he and Scully and Mulder, even, understand about each other.  

Most of the time, Doggett can't decide whether he owes Mulder and Scully or not. He's loyal; everyone from his buddies in the Marines and the NYPD to his co-workers in the FBI have commented on it. The furthest he's strayed from his loyalty has been divorcing Barbara, and that hadn't even been his idea. (She'd needed space, and he gave it to her.) And that loyalty extends to Scully, and Mulder by default. Once his partner, now his friend, and Scully has stuck her neck out for him before. Mulder, too, even. But the two of them have this cliquish air about them, excluding all others unless someone is useful in protecting the other. (Even Skinner has commented on it, and Skinner is more loyal to Mulder and Scully than he is.) It's impossible not to feel like an outlier, even when one of them is gone. That was why Doggett was so grateful when Monica was assigned to the X-Files; finally, a partner that was his.

He and Monica are reassigned to the VCS shortly after Mulder and Scully escape. They are not prosecuted for their role in Mulder's escape. They are kept together as partners, news that Skinner delivers proudly, adding on that he fought for this. He looks surprised when Doggett and Monica only thank him mildly; Doggett figured they'd see each other whether they stayed partners or not. He's all the way home before he realizes: Skinner is used to stick his neck out for Mulder and Scully and their all-consuming partnership. Maybe he even misses them.

It takes weeks upon weeks of no weird-ass cases with ghouls and goblins, no crazy conspiracies, for Doggett to realize that he does, too. In a way.

At least he still has Monica. At least that part of his recent life changes still feels normal.

---

Monica and John end up at her apartment after work one night, beers from the fridge and Polish sausage from the stand John is always raving about. He gives her a funny look in response to her wistful one when he presents the food to her, and she has to catch herself from bringing the whole ordeal with Lukesh up. It's strange, knowing that there's an entirely different reality that no one remembers but her. Another universe, even, where she is dead. She's found X-Files where Mulder reported similar phenomenon, but she never got the chance to ask him about it.

It's bizarre not to have Dana around after all this time, over a year. Part of her missed the excitement, but she missed her friend more than anything. She comments on the unusualness of it, and John bobs his head back and forth in agreement. “Weird not to be waking up in the middle of the night to chase down some alien or something,” he comments.

Monica nods her agreement. She's half-afraid that someone’s going to come after them the way they've been going after Dana and Mulder for years, but she hasn't seen any signs of it yet. She hopes it'll never come to that.

She and John drink their beer and eat their Polish sausage. It's the kind of companionable she can really appreciate.

---

When Monica thinks about it for long enough, she realizes that she's been there when the two people she would currently consider her best friends lost their sons. And remembering that makes her chest sting with sudden guilt.

She's made her peace with Luke Doggett, more or less. She'll always feel guilty about being unable to save Luke before it was too late—and she'll live with the moment where she realized it was room late for the rest of her life, she and John both will—but catching Regali helped alleviate some of her pain in that area. They've done everything that they can do. But William Scully… she didn't even have a hand in that decision, and she still feels some of the guilt for it. She was there, she tried to talk Dana out of it, but she couldn't. And now Dana and Mulder both have to live with that decision. Monica barely knows Fox Mulder, but she also was there when he met his son for the first time, watched him carry Dana and the baby out of that house,  and she saw the tremendous look of love on his face. A nervous, devoted father.

Skinner had told them, remorsefully, that he'd told Mulder that Dana had given up William. “I know it was Scully's place, but I couldn't bear him asking about that poor kid,” he'd said. “Knowing that he wouldn't get to see him… But Jesus Christ, the look on his face…” And Monica had felt a little of that guilt. She'd had a chance to stop it.

She knows, intellectually, she couldn't have stopped Dana outside of physically taking the baby away from her. The same way she knows she couldn't have saved Luke. But a small part of her insists there was a chance. She had a chance no one else had.

William isn't the first child Dana has lost, either. She told Monica months ago about a daughter, made without her knowledge or consent, an experiment who died painfully days after Dana found her. This conspiracy that she and John have been roped into chasing, it's taken away both of Dana's children and Dana's sister (the one she said Monica reminds her of) and Mulder's sister and Mulder's parents and countless other horrors Monica has only read about in the Files.

Out of all the agents assigned to the X-Files at one point (even Jeffrey Spender, who Monica only met once, and Diana Fowley, who died before Monica ever arrived), Monica has experienced the least amount of loss. She still has both of her parents. She isn't a parent, and doesn't know if she'll ever want to be one, but nevertheless, she has never lost a child. All of her siblings are alive. She has never been kidnapped or tortured or ended up in the hospital for anything other than a car accident or the expected injuries on cases. It makes her feel bizarrely lucky and guilty at the same time.

She's watched this conspiracy of men and monsters and aliens take so much away from Dana and Mulder and others, and she's only had knowledge of it for a year. And now, with Dana and Mulder gone and the X-Files closed, that should be the end of it, but Monica isn't ready to let it go. When she thinks of William Scully growing up somewhere with someone else's name, when she thinks of lost sisters and daughters and all the times she's seen Dana cry over her lost partner. When she thinks of Dana's friends, the Gunmen, who she liked quite a lot, dead in Arlington. When she thinks of John near death in the hospital because he tried to protect Dana's baby. All of it. She can't walk away from that.

Someone sends a postcard to Monica's apartment. Colorado, snowy mountains even though it's the middle of summer. It reads, simply, Thank you, and is signed with a simple, tiny DS.

“Did you get the postcard from Scully?” John asks her the next day in the parking garage. (Their parking spots are next to each other, close to the basement because their new assignment didn't come with new parking spaces.)

“Yes,” says Monica. “From Colorado.”

“Huh. Mine was from South Dakota.” John stabs the elevator button with the tip of his finger.

“I guess she's trying to cover their tracks,” Monica says as they step into the elevator.

“Hmm.” John rocks back and forth on his heels. “I just don't understand why they don't leave the country like Kersh told 'em too.”

“Maybe it's too late to get over the border,” Monica offers, a little defensive. “Or maybe they… didn't want to leave the search behind just yet.”

John blinks at her in surprise. “Why the hell wouldn't they wanna leave it behind?” he asks, astonished. “After all the danger it's put them in?”

Monica crosses her arms, the elevator dinging as they move up. “Think about it,” she says in a soft voice. “There was a reason Mulder wouldn't testify, try to save his life. And it certainly wasn't to protect this truth he's spoke of. There's something else he found, maybe even something he found worth pursuing.”

John nods, clearly in thought. The door dings again as it slides open, other agents climbing on the elevator. “I just don't see the point,” he says finally, quietly, bending down to speak into her ear. “After all they've both lost.”  

The elevator door closes.

---

It's a missing child case that does it. Somehow, Doggett always knew it would be that.

The problem with the Violent Crimes Section is that, well, the crimes are violent. And Doggett has seen a lot in his time, he has a strong stomach and he can handle most things… But the victim reminds him of his son.

Doggett used to use his pain as a motivator, in the mindset of I can help this family, this child, even if I can't help my son. I can bring their child back, or I can bring them the peace I never had. It worked with Billy and Josh Underwood, and with other cases where children are in danger. And he's avoided cases with children as much as possible, but it's inevitable that he's had to work on a few. But this one feels different. After all he's gone through with his son's murder in recent months, looking the bastard who did it in the eye and having him explain why… he doesn't know how he can watch someone else go through this.

He remembers how it felt in Mexico, the gut-wrenching moment when he'd realized that the little boy he dreamt of was dead, had been murdered years and years ago. He hadn't remembered his life, and he's glad he does now, but there was nothing worse than those brief days when he actually thought his son was alive. At home, missing him, worried about him, ready to hug him when he got home. Everything in this past year, finding Luke's murderer and believing Luke was alive and watching everything Dana had gone through with her kid… It's too hard. The picture of Luke on his mantle makes him want to cry, want to throw up.

He calls Barbara in a drunken moment of weakness. She is nice—nicer than he deserves, all things considered. She refuses to reminiscence with him, stops him anytime he says anything like, “Hey, do you remember…”, but she does console him. And finally, she seems to hit the nail on the head in a way that shocks him to the core. “You've been chasing Lukie all this time,” she says. “Never walking away, working in careers that remind you of him. And I never understood that until you found the guy who did it. But John… he's dead now. It's over. We let Luke go. And now… maybe it's time for you to move on.”

John hunches over, his ribs against his knees, rubs at his face with his callused palms. “I just don't want to forget him,” he whispers. Not the way he did in Mexico; a willful sort of forgiving, where he can pretend it never happened, avoid thinking about his son every day so he doesn't feel the pain. It's what he'd silently accused Barbara of, when she pushed him away before finally divorcing him (“I need to forget,” she'd sobbed the night he left, “I can't go on like this.”), when she refused to participate in the investigation because it was too painful for her. He won't accuse her, of course, but he doesn't want to copy her. He can't abandon his son.

“You wouldn't be forgetting him,” Barbara says. “I know you, John. And I haven't forgotten him. Just because I don't let the pain control my life doesn't mean I'm forgetting my son.” Her voice is too rough now, full of pain. A pain that is all too familiar to John.

John rubs his hand over his face, wiping away his tears. “I know you haven't,” he says softly. He doesn't want to have this conversation with her. “Thanks for talking to me, Barb. I'm sorry to bother you.” He reaches up to hang up the phone.

“You need to live your life, John,” Barbara says just before he hangs up. “It doesn't mean you're forgetting Luke. I just want you to be happy.”

“Thank you,” John says softly, and hangs up. He lets the phone fall onto the couch, runs his damp hands through his sweaty hair.  

---

Monica knows a little bit about the man that Mulder and Dana call the smoker. CGB Spender, mystery man, a true B-movie villain. Mulder and Jeffrey Spender’s father. Dana has always described him with an overwhelming ounce of disgust, hatred. She's only gotten bits and pieces of their history with the purported smoker, but it's enough to mutually hate this man she's never met. Who she never will meet, because he’s dead. Or so she thought.

She soon finds herself being summoned to a hospital in New Mexico, a couple of months after Mulder and Dana disappear. The hospital won't tell her why, only that a patient wants to see her and they are insistent that it's important. They won't tell her who the patient is. “I'm afraid I'm going to need more information than that,” Monica says cautiously, not wanting to walk straight into another trap.

“I’m afraid we can't give it to you,” says the man on the other end. He pauses for a second before adding, “But I was told to tell you something.”

“And what is that?” Monica asks.

The man waits a few beats before saying, “I was told to tell you that this is about Dana Scully.”

Monica goes. She doesn't think she has a choice, because that could be Dana or Mulder there in that hospital, needing her help. She doesn't tell John, which is silly, but she was told to tell no one. Dana and Mulder trying to cover their tracks, she thinks. It feels nonsensical, considering the fact that they both know John better anyhow, but she still doesn't tell him. She flies out to New Mexico alone, hearing the thud of her heart in her ears. Even with her worry about Dana and Mulder, she finds that she is almost excited; it's been so long since she did anything outside of routine.

Her worry is clearly not necessary. She realizes this as soon as she gets to the hospital and the men with suits usher her in. It's not Dana or Mulder, and the man in that room doesn't need her help. At least not any help that she is willing to offer.

The smoker lies in the hospital bed, burned nearly beyond recognition, is the man she's seen in old, blurry photos stashed in the X-Files. CGB Spender. The man she'd assumed was dead. She remembers, suddenly, the fireball that consumed the pueblos where they found Mulder and Scully; was he in that?

Monica has no idea how the smoker knows her or how he found her, but he had an offer for her. He wants her to join him, he says, in a plan to reshape the Earth radically. He wants to create a virus to counter the apparent planned alien invasion in 2012. He tells her that very few people are actually immune. He tells her that Dana is one of the few who are. He offers her that same immunity in exchange for her help.

Monica is beyond baffled. Even after everything that has happened to her, she never expected to be offered something like this. An opportunity to go over to the dark side, to betray everything they've been working for over the past year. She's astonished, horrified, repulsed. She bites out some angry words, exits the hospital room angrily and lets the door slam behind her. She would never, ever do anything like that, even to save her own life.

She makes it all the way to the hotel before the implications of what Spender has told her sink in. A virus that will wipe out most of Earth's population. An alien invasion scheduled for 2012. The casualties will be horrifying. Do Mulder and Dana know about this?

Monica sits at the little desk in her hotel room, her head spinning. She can't just walk away from this, she has to do something. She has to stop this because now this is so much bigger than Dana and Mulder and Dana's baby and all the other horrible things she's heard about. This is all of mankind.

All she can think is that she has to do something. She has to tell Dana and Mulder. They're the only ones who would know how to deal with this. She calls Skinner, perched on the end of her bed with a cigarette in hand. (She's trying to quit, and the taste of it in the back of her throat makes her think of fucking Spender, begging for cigarettes on what should've been his death bed, but she needs it now, needs to clear her head.) When he picks up, she blurts, “I need to talk to Mulder and Scully.”

Skinner is silent on the other end for a few beats. And then he's saying, “Agent Reyes?” in confusion.

“Yes, this is Agent Reyes,” Monica snaps, taking a drag on her cigarette. “I need to talk to Mulder and Scully.”

Skinner is silent again, maybe in astonishment. “I don't know where they are,” he says finally.

“It's important, sir,” says Monica, the smoke expelling from her mouth in a thin line. “Incredibly important.”

Skinner's voice goes quiet on the line, hissing into the phone. “I can't exactly discuss this with the level of subtly it deserves on this line,” he whispers. “But either way, Reyes, I don't know where they are. Truly. The most I've heard from them is via postcard.”

Monica bites her lower lip, takes another long, burning drag off of the cigarette. She doesn't know who the hell to give this information to if she can't get in touch with Mulder and Scully. Skinner is the obvious option—more obvious than Kersh, at least, who Monica still has some distrust of, even after he helped Mulder escape—but over the phone clearly isn't the best way to do this. And besides that, Skinner has been tied up with trying to find Gibson a safe place to go. She can hardly ask him to do more.

“What do you need to tell Mulder and Scully?” Skinner asks in a hushed voice on the other end. “Agent Reyes?”

Monica swallows. The cigarette is burning up between her fingers. “I can't say on this line, sir,” she says, and hangs up.

She puts out her cigarette and lights another one. She takes her pack outside and sits on the edge of the pool, feet dangling in the water. The moon is out.

For a split second, she imagines Mulder and Dana driving into this hotel, tired and world-weary. She does something she hasn't done in years, since long before the FBI, and plays out wishful scenarios in her head. She helps Dana and Mulder save the world, kill the smoker, clear Mulder's name and get their son back. (Goddamn, that kid was cute, and Dana missed him so much.) The X-Files are reopened. Luke Doggett is found alive, and John is overjoyed. Monica gets a promotion and a nice fucking apartment and a date and maybe that cat her sister is always telling her to get, and everyone gets a happy ending.

Life isn't a movie and Monica is much too old to pretend. She lights another cigarette.

She remembers Leyla Harrison's eagerness, her constant references to Mulder and Scully and her admiration of them. What would Agents Mulder and Scully do? What would John do? Monica tries to imagine. What would Monica Reyes do? There seems to be only one option, but she doesn't know if it's a sacrifice she should make.

Her feet splash the top of the water. She gives up. She goes in and dials John's number.

---

They catch the killer. Doggett feels like he has done nearly nothing to help. Monica is out of town, and he finds himself missing her, her sunny attitude. She'd find a way to make him feel better.

He keeps coming back to what Barbara said on the phone before, about his job. Staying in careers that remind him of Luke. He likes his job, though; it's like a step up from police work, in the same vein of the military. But it's cases like this that always manage to get to him. That bring back the nightmares, the ghost of his son. If he believed in ghosts, that is.

He's sitting at his desk, fiddling with an Empire State Building snow globe Monica had bought for him in a souvenir shop downtown (the irony—but god, he misses the city) when the phone rings. It's Monica, calling from New Mexico, apparently. “Hey, Mon,” he says with pleased surprise. “What are you doing in New Mexico again? I thought your parents were in Arizona.”

“They are,” Monica says. “I'm on a… case. Sort of.”

“Oh.” Doggett turns the snow globe over in his hand. He's wondering why she didn't invite him. He's wondering if this has to do with Mulder and Scully, who they last saw in Arizona. “What kind of case?”

“It's… complicated,” says Monica in a rush. “Listen, John, would you mind coming down here? I need your help with something. And I don't want to discuss it over the phone.”

Doggett’s mouth tenses in surprise, letting the snow globe fall to the table. “Sure, Mon,” he says, sitting back in his chair. “Everything okay? Are you…”

“I'm fine,” Monica says quickly. “I just… I need you out here, if you can make it.”

“Be there by tonight,” Doggett says.

---

Monica meets Doggett at the airport in Roswell. She looks as if she's deep in thought when he sees her, huge sunglasses falling over her face, an unlit cigarette in her hand. But she smiles as he draws closer and he feels a wave of relief. He doesn't have many friends left after he tanked his reputation on the X-Files, but he has Mon, and he's grateful for that. She'd be the reason he stays at the Bureau, or even in DC, if he stays.

When he hears what Monica has to tell him, it feels like it's all inevitable: Barbara's suggestion, the missing child case, finding Luke's killer, the Files closing. Maybe this is all fated to end.

When Monica finishes, they're parked in the parking lot of her hotel, the sun sinking over the desert. The sunset and the sand seems to give everything a red glow; it's making Doggett's head spin. He says slowly to her, “So this… smoker guy…”

“CGB Spender,” Monica supplies.

“Whatever. So this Spender guy… who just happens to be Mulder and Scully's worst enemy and who, by all accounts, should be dead… wants you to join him?” He shakes his head in disbelief. “And you're actually… considering it?”

“I'm not considering joining him,” Monica says, rubbing at the bridge of her nose. She taps a cigarette absently against her leg. (Doggett recognizes the habit almost fondly from years of meeting in increments, Monica insisting she was trying to quit every single time.) “I'm considering infiltrating him. So I can put a stop to his plans and hopefully save the entire human population.”

“The entire human population,” Doggett repeats slowly. “And you believe this… CGB?”

“John, you've seen what these men can do,” she says. “I have no reason not to believe it. I have no choice.”

Doggett rubs a hand across his mouth tiredly. “And you don't think he won't notice you're a double agent? This sounds dangerous, Monica.”

“Part of the job,” Monica says simply. “And besides that, this is bigger than you and me. We're talking about the world here. The good of all mankind.”

Doggett sighs, looking out to the horizon. Sand stretching out for miles. He can see nothing else. “I dunno, Mon,” he says wearily. “I hardly think the two of us are the leading experts on this shit.”

“Skinner doesn't know where Dana and Mulder are, and I didn't want to bring too much suspicion on him,” Monica says. “And I wouldn't trust anyone else with this information.”

“Good instincts.” Doggett sighs, leaning back in his seat. “I dunno, Monica, I dunno. Do you want me to tell you to do it? I dunno if I can tell you to do it. I dunno if I can tell you not to do it.”

“I have a unique opportunity,” Monica says. “I have the knowledge of what these people do, the horrible things they do, and the smoker has no reason to distrust me. I have an in that even Mulder and Dana don't have.”

He laughs quietly. “Well, it sounds like you've already made up your mind.”

“I don't want to do it,” says Monica. “But I think I have to. For my family, for my friends, for the world. For Dana and Mulder and that poor kid of theirs.”

It always comes back to Mulder and Scully. Doggett wipes his mouth, nods a little in understanding.

“I guess I just want you to tell me I'm doing the right thing,” Monica finishes.

“You're too damn noble, Monica. Of course you're doing the right thing. The question is, what'll it cost you? You'd be going deep undercover, betraying your values. Hell, this could take years.”

“I know,” Monica says. “That's more or less what I signed up for, isn't it?”

“I dunno about that.”

She removes her sunglasses and turns to look at him. Drops her box of cigarettes in the cupholder and gives him a small smile. “I hate to leave DC though,” she says. “Brand new apartment and all. And… I'll miss you.”

Doggett smiles back, just a little. “I'll miss you, too,” he says. “Although you might not believe it, Mon, but… I've been thinking about maybe quitting. This may be an opportunity for both of us to move on, Mulder-and-Scully style.”

“Quitting? I never would've expected that from you, John.”

“Neither did I.” Doggett leans against his elbow, shrugging a little. “But this last case… it really shook me up. I couldn't handle it the way I used to be able to. Couldn't stop thinking about Luke. I called Barb and she… she thinks I should move on.” He rubs his face with one hand, tries to scrub it all away. “Not… forget Luke, but move on. Get away from things that remind me of what happened. Try to be happier.”

Monica watches him quietly, fiddles with her sunglasses absently. “Where would you go?” she asks quietly.

“I dunno. Maybe…” Doggett has a sudden memory, painful and joyful at the same time: Luke on a vacation in Florida they took when he was five. His tanned face grinning up at Doggett where they stand in the water, little hands clutching a fishing pole. It's an oddly happy memory. He wants to hold onto this feeling. “Maybe Florida,” he says. “Get some sun. Get back to nature or whatever.”

Monica smiles again, sunny as the Florida sky. “Sounds pretty.”

“I'm sure it is.”

They sit in silence for a minute, the air conditioner humming. The sun sinks below the horizon.

“So… we're going to do this, huh?” Doggett says finally. “Leave it all behind?”

Monica looks down at her tanned hands, reaches for the package of cigarettes again. “Yeah,” she says quietly. “I guess so.”

---

He buys her a drink, his friend, his partner. One last hurrah. It's some cheesy alien-themed bar that Mulder would probably love. A few drinks in, and he's repeating the sentiment to Monica, and she's bursting into giggles. They stay up too late, drinking and joking and goofing off.

He'll miss her. He really will.

Monica drives him to the airport in the morning, the sunglasses sliding back over her nose. “Practicing your covert routine, huh,” Doggett says at baggage claim, and she says, “Guess so.”

She walks him as far as they can go and stops, the two of them standing in awkward silence. Finally, Monica says, “No one can know what I'm doing. What I'm really doing. Let them think I went evil, that I went off the grid or whatever. Not even Skinner; he's surrounded by too many dangerous people.”

Doggett nods. “What about Mulder and Scully?” he asks. “If I ever see them again?” (He's not holding his breath.)

Monica hesitates before agreeing, “Sure. But only because I never want to be on their bad side. Especially not Dana's; she scares the shit out of me.”

They both laugh at that. And then it is silent again, the awkwardness thick in the air. Doggett fidgets with the handle of his suitcase, unsure of what to say or do. But Monica does it for him; she steps forward and wraps her arms around his shoulders, the way she suddenly hugged him months ago when he'd brought Polish sausage to her apartment. He hugs her back on instinct.

“You call me,” he says into her hair. “You need anything, you get into trouble, and you call me. I'll kill that smoking son-of-a-bitch. Probably get a medal for it.”

Monica chuffs out laughter, kisses his cheek gingerly before drawing back. “I'll keep in touch,” she says. “Somehow.”

“Well, good.” Doggett crosses his arms over his chest.

Behind him, they call his flight. He scoops up his suitcase, somewhat reluctantly, and waves a little to Monica. “You be careful, okay?” he instructs her firmly.

“I will.” Monica grins like she isn't about to do something incredibly dangerous (or stupid) and try to save the world. “You have fun in Florida.”

Doggett nods. Turns and walks towards his gate because he's awful at goodbyes. When Dana had left, packing up her stuff just before they went to break Mulder out, he honestly hadn't known what the fuck to say to her. He's horrible at goodbyes.

He's halfway to his gate when Monica calls out, “Hey, John!” from behind him. He turns. She shouts, “You should get a dog!”

“This wouldn't happen to be a joke about my name, would it?” Doggett shouts back. He's heard it all, ever since preschool, for Christ's sake.

“No, you just always seemed like a dog person to me!” Monica calls.

Doggett chuckles in soft surprise. Goddamnit. He really is going to miss her.

---

Monica drives straight to the hospital from the airport. Attempts to put on the persona that she will unknowingly be sporting for years: cold, unfeeling. She feels like she is doing something too significant, changing her entire life. She tells herself it will be worth it. For Dana and John and her family and all of humanity.

She tells the smoker that she will do it, her face blank, her voice hard. “If,” she adds warningly, “I'm guaranteed immunity. Myself and my family and friends.”

The smoker pulls his charred lips upwards in a snake's smile. “We'll see, Monica,” he says. “A few years with me, and you may find you don't care as much anymore.”

Monica keeps her face hard and neutral. Thinks, I will never be as cold and unfeeling as you, you bastard.

She's about the least equipped for any of this. She has the least amount of experience with this conspiracy, the least tragedy in her life. She has less to lose.

And that, Monica Reyes thinks to herself, is exactly why she has to do it.

---

Doggett gives his two-week notice.

Skinner gives him a strange look, somewhere between confusion and disappointment. (Maybe he likes having reckless X-Files agents around, being in the midst of the action. Or maybe he just really misses Mulder and Scully.) “What's going on here?” he whispers to Doggett privately, later. “Does this have anything to do with Agent Reyes’s own resignation? What the hell are you two up to?”

Doggett says, as innocently as possible, “Sir, I'm moving to Florida. I'd like to start a new stage in my life. And as for Agent Reyes…” He lowers his voice and leans in closer, whispers, “Whatever she's doing, it's important.”

That's the most detailed he'll get. He promised Monica.

He moves down to Clearwater, Florida about a month later. Gets a dog because he promised Monica that, too.

The waves crashing across the street from his crappy little house make him think of his son. They scattered his ashes in the Atlantic because Luke loved the water.

---

Four months later, he gets a letter from Monica. It's short, abrupt, but it says she's okay. It says that she's going to try and stop this. It says she'll be in touch.

Enclosed in the envelope is a postcard from South Carolina.

Doggett burns the letter. The postcard he keeps, puts up on the fridge between the postcard from Dana (Washington State) and the old pictures of Luke, sunscreen smeared over his nose as he smiles into the camera.

[agentelmo]

Your analysis never fail to make me laugh! I have a question about season six, did you think Mulder was still in love with Diana Fowley, maybe just not admitting it to himself? Almost like he continued to leave his feelings for Scully unacknowledged?

First, thank you so much, Anon.  The “humour” aspect of my analysis is always the hardest part for me!  It’s nice to hear people find them funny.  I know it’s taken me some time to get to your question.  I apologise for that.  Been using all my spare tumblr time trying to finish the Fire analysis.  Now that’s done -- let’s get to some asks!

Soooo... Mulder’s feelings... I think where Diana Fowley was concerned things are best described as “it’s complicated”.  They have a history together, and there is even the possibility that they were once married briefly since Mulder is seen wearing a wedding band in Travelers which is set in 1990 -- a time he was apparently in a relationship with Diana.

But I think that’s really the extent of it.  He did love her once, no doubt about that, but I don’t think he is in love with her anymore.  Not when she returns in season 5 and even less so in season 6.  

He never expected to see her again, so her unexpected appearance in The End would no doubt bring up old memories and old feelings long since laid to rest.

It only just occurred to me writing this now, but I wonder if perhaps meeting Diana again actually helped him to realise who he was truly in love with.  He knows what it feels like to be in love, and how he once felt for Diana, so what if seeing her again made him realise that he now feels that way for Scully?

It would explain why he then doesn’t pursue Diana at all, but he does (in a way) pursue Scully.  In Fight the Future he tries to kiss her, and then shortly afterwards in Triangle declares that he loves her.

Season 6 in general seems to be suggesting the two of them are getting closer to finally acknowledging what they feel for each other.  Diana is never a consideration in any of it.  Don’t think he was thinking much about Diana when he was kissing 1930′s Scully, nor contemplating what it would meant to him to never see Scully again.  Which is what ultimately prompts him to finally tell her how he feels.

It only gets muddy in the mythology episodes where Diana shows up again.  But Mulder isn’t all over Diana, he doesn’t ever seek her out, she always seeks him out.  There is never any suggestion that he sees or socialises with her outside of their brief encounters in The End, The Beginning, One Son, Biogenesis and The Sixth Extinction.  When the do meet, they talk about work.  He relies on her for support in the X-Files, but apart from a very brief conversation in The End, where Mulder rebuffs Diana’s attempt to throw shade on Scully...

...we never see Mulder talk about their history, their relationship, or how he feels about her.

Diana makes a move to kiss Mulder in One Son after he tells her that the only way the people he loves will survive is if he gives up.  This is as close as we get to any suggestion that he loves her, but does that mean he’s in love with her?  There’s so little to suggest that.  The kiss with Diana is hardly a passionate smooch -- he barely responds to it and pretty quickly breaks the kiss and moves her into a hug instead.

Then we have that really strange moment in Biogenesis where Diana takes off her top and goes into Mulder’s bedroom.  

He’s sick and seemingly completely out of it, after talking to Scully on the phone he rolls over to go to sleep.  We know from cut dialogue that it’s shortly after this moment that he realises she’s betrayed him.  He angrily lashes out and she tasers him and takes him to hospital.  Since the scene is cut, we can’t say it’s canon but it’s the only explanation we have for what happens between her stripping and him being in hospital.  But what’s key about the scene we do get in the episode is that this is all from Diana’s perspective, we don’t see Mulder’s reaction at all, so we don’t know if he rejected her advances or if he welcomed them.

But all of that is nothing, it’s Mulder’s bizarre Temptation of the Christ fantasy in Amor Fati that confuses things the most.  If Mulder isn’t in love Diana, why dream about marrying and having a family with her?  Well, that’s a really good question.  My explanation for it is that Mulder is dreaming of a life he could have had if he had made other choices.  

Diana has already made the suggestion to him -- put the idea in his head.

So this dream explores that “what if”.  If indeed he was once married to Diana, what might that life have been if they had stayed together?  Dreaming about it doesn’t necessarily mean that’s what he actually wants.  Clearly it’s not, because Scully -- the only person who remains unchanged in his real life and his dream -- is the one person who can break him out of the hell that his dream became.  

A dream that sleep-walks him and everyone he loves into death and destruction.  Deep Throat is dead, Diana is dead, your sister is dead, Scully is dead, etc etc. 

It’s similar for Scully in All Things.  Where she considers “what I would have missed” if she had stayed with Daniel Waterston.  She doesn’t just think about it, she has a moment where she genuinely believes she made the wrong choice and thinks that she wants the life she didn’t choose.  

A life where she married Daniel, had kids -- lived a normal life and not joined the FBI and met Mulder.

Okay, so she doesn’t have an elaborate Jesus Christ Superstar dream quest about it, but her journey is no less profound.  In fact, hers is moreso, because it’s not something that was just pulled out recently for her like it kinda was for Mulder.  This has been a question Scully has wrestled with since The Jersey Devil in season 1.  

It seems Mulder and Scully’s conversation about at the end of All Things left quite an impression on Mulder, because he’s apparently holds onto that idea for over a decade.  The idea she could have been better off with another man, living another life, as we see in the church scene in Nothing Lasts Forever.

You don’t really see Scully mulling over whether or not Mulder would rather have been with Diana.  Although, perhaps you might infer that from what she says to him in Plus One about Mulder meeting someone else who could give him children.

Anyway... I digress.  I do that.  Have you noticed?

Returning to the original question.  I think Mulder cared deeply for Diana, in the same way a person cares deeply for an ex when things end amicably.  It’s not that you hate each other, it’s that things just didn’t work out.  You care for that person still -- love them even -- you trust them and want the best for them.  But the love -- the romantic love anyway -- has faded away.

That’s what I think Mulder felt for Diana -- love, care.  But not in love.  Until Biogenesis, anyway.

When Mulder realises that Diana has betrayed him and has been working for CSM against him all this time, I think even his care for her might have been partially stomped on.  It’s strongly suggested that she has been working for CSM since way back when she was in a relationship with Mulder in 1991, so that’s gotta hurt.

Mulder hears Diana’s confession of love, but doesn’t respond to it.  

He had very recently been injected with the drug that allows him to speak, but he doesn’t speak to her.  To make it clear that he’s choosing not to talk to her, you see that he is able to turn his eyes and look in her direction as she walks out of the room.

I think it’s a safe bet that by this point, he realises that Scully’s warnings weren’t just her “making it personal”, she had been telling him the truth all along.  Like she always does.

At the end of Amor Fati, when Mulder hears that Diana has been killed, he is shocked and pained to hear it.  

But he doesn’t shed a tear -- in fact it was originally written in the script that he cries for her but the scene was re-written; thank God!  He instead recognises the woman right in front of him -- and the hurt he’s caused her in not trusting her, not believing her about Diana.

So in the end, I do think he loved her, but wasn’t in love with her.  Not since she left him in 91′.

[itsbeenawhile7]

The absolution of Dana Scully in the aftermath of My Struggle IV: one pissed off fan’s grand manifesto

–also known as, “what in actual hell happened to Chris Carter?”

If you have not already read through this interview, courtesy of Avi Quijada and XFN, I am going to need you to start there first.

And listen: before anyone goes there, I am not analyzing the fuck out of this to excuse Chris Carter for the disastrous finale he just served up to us. Rather, it’s that there are a lot of us who are products of the Scully Effect in one way or another, and we’d like to feel good about her legacy.  We deserve to figure out a way to clean up this mess you left us with.

Some people write fanfic.  Me?  I do this.  Get some hot chocolate and pull up a comfy chair.

Rant rating: R, for language and possibly some implied violence against Chris Carter

Content warning: I mean…you saw MSIV, right? 

Did MSIV actually destroy Dana Scully for all of us forever?  Nah.  We just witnessed the apex of a once skilled writer complete his own demise.  We just witnessed a writer who got in way over his head, who was trying to articulate extremely complex, controversial ideas and concepts, and doing so in about the most tone deaf way anyone ever possibly could. Having read his interview with Avi Quijada, I now think it is absolutely fair to say that Chris Carter actually did have at least some idea about what the right motivations for his characters were.  But in a writing decision that will baffle me and the rest of the world forever, he did not heed the warnings of those around him, and convinced himself that his audience would be able to infer absolutely everything of import to his story, and that we didn’t need to see any of that stuff actually fleshed out on screen.  Sure, fine, whatever, Chris. Challenge accepted, here we go.

Let’s review. In the space of a scant few ridiculous hours occurring over the course of MSIV, Scully found out all of the following:

the child she thought was conceived miraculously with her partner was not, in fact, created as a the result of that union

she was medically raped and violated in order for William to be brought forth into the world

the being that she has conceived of as their son for 18 years is barely human: he is a shape-shifting, unstable lab creation, who is far, far more dangerous than any of the many forces that have been out to destroy him

William was created specifically by that fucking bastard Carl, and for whatever purpose Per Manum previously served in this universe, Dana Scully and the rest of us ostensibly should now assume it was to obtain fertilized embryos for the CSM to screw around with and deploy when she made the biggest fucking mistake of her life going off with him in En Ami

she is somehow pregnant right now, at age 54 (because Chris is apparently fascinated by perimenopause? or some shit like that?), after having not gotten miraculously pregnant at any point before in her extensive sexual history with Mulder

William directly and repeatedly said to both of his parents of genetic origin that he does not want to be protected, and that he wants them to let him go [quick break here: sorry, Chris, but there is no way that the CSM is the literal genetic father here, because Scully had a fucking AMNIO in season 8, and therefore you will neverrrrrrrrr convince any of us that this could ever possibly be the case]

And in the midst of all of this, Skinner is killed (maybe), her now compromised friend Monica Reyes is killed (maybe), her partner witnesses the murder of their son (maybe), and her partner kills his father (maybe), after having himself killed or witnessed the killing of dozens of New Syndicate operatives (definitely, because: exploding entrails!!!).

Two things stand out to me. Number one: this level of emotional trauma and upheaval is far, far too much for anyone to even be capable of putting up a coherent verbal response to in its immediate aftermath. Number two, to reiterate points Gillian Anderson and Avi Quijada both made directly to Chris: this “grand vision” or “Big Idea” of his should have had an entire season or two’s worth of episodes behind it if it was ever going to stand a chance in hell at working.  I do not believe that the simple act of making these specific storytelling choices is in and of itself the problem, no matter how I might personally feel about it. The X-Files has been telling us a story involving horrifying genetic, physical, and reproductive assaults on its characters since 1995.  We just, y’know, occasionally used to think about the aftermath of those atrocities in scripts and on camera, in episodes like One Breath, Memento Mori, or the Emily arc.  What is abso-fucking-lutely a BIG problem, though, is if your reproductive horror show is executed as poorly as it was written in MSIV. Full stop. 

I will argue until I am blue in the face, though, that Dana Scully is not destroyed by this ending, no matter how poorly written it was. Chris Carter simply didn’t let this character actually do any of what she should have been doing with this ON SCREEN, where we could see her.  We now know for a fact that Chris was aware that he was leaving all of this off screen, so what I want to know is…why?  No, really.  I really want to know the answer, here.  Why on Earth didn’t you show us, Chris?  Hell, you could have even gotten this done with one, or two, or six additional bloated voiceover monologues, since most of what went down in MSIV wasn’t articulated *~anywhere at all~* outside of post-mortem press conversations. (Exhibit A: the entire Monica Reyes sub-plot.)

As a parent myself, I cannot even fathom what it would be like to find out that your child was capable of doing horrific, terrible, inhumane things. That’s also a pretty relevant–if extremely uncomfortable–concept right now, one that could have been grappled with in an era in which we are beginning to finally engage with mental health, gun control, and domestic terrorism in very public forums.  We are made to understand thanks to Avi, that Chris Carter apparently loves using The X-Files to ask us tough questions that don’t always have answers.  So…why the hell didn’t he do it here?  I mean, come ON!  What does it mean to be the parent, biological or otherwise, of a child capable of these horrors?  I’m not saying that any of us have to like it, but as written in MSIV, William is a sociopath.  William is not a human being.  William is not anyone’s child anymore, and William is for damn sure not something capable of being protected.  William can only destroy, because that is exactly what Fucking Carl (trademark pending) made him for. Whether in the Supersoldier sense, or in the New Syndicate global-contagion-let’s-wipe-out-humanity sense, we have been told that the CSM made him to be nothing more than a tool to help execute his own post-apocalyptic needs.

So after 18 years, Scully suddenly and very traumatically has to process that William was an experiment gone wrong (or right, I suppose, if you go talk to Carl). After 18 years, this is the William we’ve got. Can you even imagine how much worse it might have been for Scully if she had actually been there the whole time, watching this happen?  William had a good childhood, he was raised by good people, and he still turned into a sociopath, and he tells us so himself.  Was Scully ever a parent to what William ultimately turned out to be?  That’s…actually a pretty damn good question, in this context. 

And the answer to that question,  according to Chris, is that Scully was the mother of the idea of William, the mother of the idea of a child who was miraculously created out of nothing more than love.  She was the mother to the ideas and imaginings that she had about William for 18 long years.  She was that mother during her pregnancy, she was that mother during his infancy, and she was that mother when circumstances erroneously convinced her to put him up for adoption, in a move that we were told was to try to give him the best life she thought she couldn’t ever possibly give to him.  She was that mother in Ghouli, pouring her whole heart and soul into the idea of her son William in that heartbreaking morgue scene. So, no, I don’t think it means that she instantaneously stopped loving that idea of her son, when the shit hits the fan in MSIV.  But it does mean that she understands that her idea of William hasn’t ever been the right one: the “truth we both know" was actually a horrific lie.  “William…was an idea, created in a laboratory…” is true in this universe, for better or for worse.  Dissecting what that means for Scully, just this one single solitary point alone, should have been granted an entire episode, not 10 seconds on a pier. 

“Scully, he was our son! He was our son!”

He was.

He was their son. For 18 years, they both believed that he was their son. I don’t think anything Scully stutters and stumbles to explain to Mulder in this moment suggests that she doesn’t actually believe that, or grieve for that. It mostly indicates that Chris Carter has no idea how to write this magnitude of dropped psychological bomb. I think he does know his own limitations, which is why it all happens off screen.  Thanks only to Gillian Anderson’s acting, it does appear as though we are witnessing a confused, traumatized Scully here, one who has been exposed to so much death and destruction immediately proceeding this moment that she can’t even find the way forward.  Gillian Anderson, thankfully, fills in the cavernous script hole, and gives us a Scully who doesn’t know how to begin to explain what she has been forced to understand to a now very visibly fracturing Mulder. 

This is not a mother suddenly throwing away her decades of love for a child just because she is getting a “do over” baby. And the only reason we even had to consider whether or not that was the case at all, is solely because of the steaming pile of inadequate shit dialogue that was written for her.

Let’s step back now and consider Mulder, and how his presence impacts Scully’s reaction. Mulder, who shocks the hell out of all of us when he says, “if I am not a father, then what am I?” in MSIV. We have gone an exorbitant amount of time watching this man, who devoted his life to finding his lost sister, seemingly refuse to engage in the same manner with his own lost son.  So, we could take this as an example of even more what-the-actual-Carter-fuckery-are-we-doing-now, OR we could choose to listen to what Chris tells Avi, and believe him when he says this is the hidden motivation that’s been driving Mulder all these years.  You know, off screen.  Because this isn’t at all yet another concept that needed its own entire episode to explore.  Exploding entrails, bitches!

Or, how about we also revisit a much better writer’s take on all of this? Let’s pick up adoptive father James Wong’s narrative, because he actually kind of gets how this kind of thing might work.  In Ghouli, Mulder tells us that we’ve had no idea about his state of mind on any of this. Not ever.  And we can infer that that was intentional on Mulder’s part. He’s doing it because he thinks it is what he needs to do for Scully’s benefit. There is no possible way that Fox-Freaking-Mulder, you punks, didn’t have some ridiculously big feelings about all of this. He’s been presented on screen to us as having sublimated his feelings on the matter since he found out about William’s adoption in The Truth. He wasn’t there to make the choice, and whatever resentment or sadness he may feel about what Scully did, he is swallowing it for her.  He’s standing right beside her, he’s just listening.  That’s his choice.

Also courtesy of James Wong: we know that Mulder has outright lied to Scully about his feelings about William in the past.  In Founder’s Mutation, he tells Scully that he’s had to put it all behind him.  James Wong does what a writer should do to communicate a character’s motivations, by actually showing us that Mulder has lied to all of us at the end of the episode, and letting us see Mulder’s dreams about what parenting William could have been. 

So yes, I am going to take Chris at his word that these really are Mulder’s feelings in MSIV, even though he failed to articulate those motivations appropriately on screen.  Look, many of us have been complaining for years that Mulder’s seeming non-response to his lost son seemed wildly inconsistent with everything we know of his character.  I will take the bone Chris has so generously offered us here as an attempt to rectify all of that.  I think coming into peripheral contact with William in Ghouli began to dismantle Mulder’s carefully constructed walls of sublimation, and by the time he actually gets his hands on him in MSIV, the flood gates have opened and cannot be closed again.

I have no trouble at all buying the narrative that the idea of being a father has quiescently been the single thing holding Mulder together for almost two decades.  Look, I am absolutely here for that.  I think most hard core X-Files fans are absolutely here for that, too.  We know Mulder pretty damn well at this point, and we know that the loss of his sister shaped him forever.  You even made him bring it up in IWTB after years of dormancy.  So, yeah, I don’t have any trouble believing that through it all, while on the run, while locked away and adrift in the Unremarkable House for years, and when ultimately left by a very lost Scully who couldn’t bear north anymore, that this broken man from a broken family did indeed secretly cling to the idea of being a father.  That for all of his failings and losses, he wanted to believe that he had at least had a part in making this miraculous child he dreams is out there.  That he could believe that William was, in fact, living an idyllic childhood, the kind of childhood that he himself never got to have.  For so damn long, Mulder wanted to believe all of that. Yes, Chris, for fuck’s sake, I BUY that, okay? As obnoxious and stupid as that written line is, having now heard it for the 4,000th time, this concept is right on for Fox Mulder.

[Another aside: that line is the one and only moment that David Duchovny loses me in MSIV. But OMG, as an actor who has had to say this ridiculous line every which way to Sunday? I can’t say that I blame him. No one actually talks this way!  There is no actual right way to play it without making all of us want to crawl into a hole and die.] 

Okay.  So Mulder watches his son die. The ideas and dreams that he has carried beneath the surface this whole time die along with him.  Scully sees all of this happening to Mulder, and based on what the Wongverse has established, she has probably not ever seen it look like this for him.  So, what we are getting here is that for this one instance, we are seeing Scully put her own feelings about William second to Mulder’s feelings about William.  Every other moment between them thus far has been Mulder putting his own feelings second to Scully’s feelings about William, right?  I do believe that Chris Carter is daft enough to think that Scully got “her turn” in Ghouli, and so in MSIV, there’s no problem at all if we only get “Mulder’s turn.“  (And apparently, we also have time for Ford Mustang’s turn.) That all plays into the nonsensical words coming out of Scully’s mouth at the end of MSIV. Scully can’t find the words to speak to the guilt and pain she is trying to absolve Mulder of.  How could anyone?

Listen to Gillian’s work, actually giving us some damn meaning here:

“William…William was–”

William was.

Ultimately, here’s MY truth: I hate how the William narrative turned out. I have hated every single moment of the William narrative beyond the end of season 8.  Existence absolutely could have ended the series in the way in which these characters deserved to have their hero journeys end.  And you know, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if I found out that Chris Carter secretly hates that this ending got away from him, too.  I mean, look, we know Chris is a lying liar who is lying in all of the press he is doing right now, as he tries to convince the world that this has been The Grand Plan All Along.  Never mind that this plan is contradicted by his own press prior to 2018, never mind that it is contradicted by all of the other writers and producers who worked on the William story at the time it was conceived, and never mind that it is contradicted by the simple reality that every zig and zag in the X-Files universe beyond season 7 is really the result of never knowing if David or Gillian were going to participate in the story anymore going forward.  So, I’m sorry, but bull-fucking-shit that you had any of this in your head when William B. Davis wrote En Ami, Chris. Why not just admit that handling The X-Files was kind of impossible when one or both leads were maybe not going to be involved in telling the story anymore?  We would all completely understand that, Chris, no one would ever in a million years question that.  Of course you might wind up losing your narrative thread under those business circumstances. We aren’t blind to how the entertainment industry works. 

I mean, there was never any hesitation on Chris Carter’s part to explain why all things had the intimations of a sex scene, not for one minute ever, so don’t try to tell us now that he just kept a lid on the truth about what role En Ami was actually fucking serving in this story for 18 whole years. Sorry, bro, I am not buying it.  When you really think about it, how can Chris Carter possibly not know that he blew it years ago with William’s narrative?  It is precisely the impossibility of navigating the logistics of telling a story far beyond the boundaries set by the involvement of the real people making it that drive showrunners like Vince Gilligan to give themselves a finite amount of time to tell it.  Chris (or the Fox network, or whoever you want to blame) didn’t do that, and therefore he wound up giving up at least 4 other possible endings to The X-Files over to the uncertainty of actors continuing to involve themselves in this project.  I really do wonder if that’s why he went down this particular path of turning William into a monster, and I wonder if that is why he seemingly worked so hard over the course of his Struggles to try to strip Mulder and Scully’s ties to him. Because this really wasn’t the way it was supposed to happen.

And so now here we are, hitting the do over button with a new pregnancy.  I have no doubt that this guy thinks that he actually could hit the reset button just like that, and magically get back to the original poetic justice that these characters were given in their 2001 ending.  He probably thinks that the fans would see this as a gift, even! I mean, shippers were heard, amirite?  But even the idea of ending with a pregnancy, now many many many years too late, isn’t ultimately the real problem. All together, one more time for the folks in the back of the classroom: the problem is, and will always be, piss poor execution. You could hand this exact story to a Penumbra, or a syntax6, or an Aloysia Virgata, and I have no doubt it could be told in a beautiful (if utterly soul-crushingly painful) way.

So, fine. You want this to be the narrative, Chris? Fine. I will fill in the Grand Canyon of plot holes that you left us. The fandom will follow your stupid bread crumbs, and we will imbue them with the motivations and meaning you claim to have been driven by, but inexplicably chose not to write into any of your recent scripts.  William was. Fox Mulder and Dana Scully have been letting him go, piece by piece, for 18 years.  He was not meant to be.  He was, ultimately, not ever theirs, even though he was created from genetic pieces of them. (Fight me, Chris, you can have that CSM created him, but FUCK NO WE ALL DRAW THE LINE AT CARL’S SPERM!)  We can even give this bleak, wasted moodscape a soundtrack, if you want, in the form of a song you chose 10 years ago for them yourself: I will fire up UNKLE’s “Broken” right here, right now.  

And OKAY Chris, I will even follow you down the rabbit hole of this new pregnancy, and I will take it in the spirit of the way I want to believe you intended it: as a way to desperately claw our way back towards getting the ending Existence gave these characters, the ending that was supposed to be their just rewards for all the nightmares they have lived through.  Scully and Mulder are alive, they are a family, they are going to get to finally have a real human child, okay, fine, it’s fiiiiiiiiiine. I will go ahead and imagine that Scully, somewhere a few exquisite and bittersweet heartbeats down the road from the pier, is running away from the FBI and blowing up the motherfucking car (the Mustang, please).  Scully is going to row a damn boat to an island paradise on her babymoon with Mulder, her vibrator, and a blobfish.  You once wanted all of that to be the post-script for your characters, Chris. You lost the thread. I get it, I really do. 

Look, I’m not a gifted writer or a gifted storyteller. I’m a Scully Effect scientist working in medicine, and I’m an overanalyzer at heart.  My creative outlets skew in an entirely different direction.  I am a woman, though, and I am a mother, and people with life experiences just like mine might possibly have had the perspective that could have saved your story, Chris, if only you would’ve consented to hear us out.

If I had been given the chance to help figure out how to crawl out of the William mess created by all those years of renewal-or-not uncertainty, here’s what I might have suggested to you, Chris: let’s make William a savior, not a monster.  Let’s make William an empath with the power to heal others.  Let’s reference Scully’s alien DNA, her chip, Mulder’s season 7 alien artifact brain shit, and let’s say that all of that came together and allowed for the possibility of superhuman recombinant DNA magic once those two people came together.  Let’s give William the ability to read his biological parents’ minds and hearts from afar, but have it be a benevolent thing, and not a painfully torturous apocalyptic thing. Let’s have William come back to Mulder and Scully having harnessed his powers for good, after the New Syndicate killed his adoptive parents as part of a failed attempt to take him out of the picture. Let’s give some concrete evidence that William’s adoption did, for a time, keep him safe, to absolve Scully of that guilt.  Let’s have him tell Mulder that he saw all of the same dreams about building rockets, and father-son TV nights and talk.  Let’s end the New Syndicate’s plans by letting Scully have some motherfucking agency, y'know?  Remember?  Let’s let her do it all like she used to in the glory days, and go be the scientist that she is. Let’s have Scully save the world, by distilling out some saving grace compound from William’s superhuman blood, or stem cells, or whatever the fuck you want to ask Anne Simon to give you, to fight against the New Syndicate’s planned viral apocalypse.  Let’s have Mulder and William vanquish CSM together; these two sons taking out this toxic, villainous “father” that’s been hovering over this whole show, and let’s have them reclaim the narrative of fathers and sons as something that is good, and positive, and right.

Where’s the writer?  I want to speak to the writer!

In the end, Chris, you didn’t do Dana Scully any justice on screen at all.  But your inadequate words don’t get to be the last words on the subject of Dana Scully, nor do they get to define what she means to us. You can’t ruin her, Chris.  She belongs to us now.  We’ll take care of her. We’ll give her the ending she deserves.

[blackcoffeeandteardrops]

For the DVD commentary: Precipice? (You can do the whole fic or any part you want.)

WOoh, fun! Okay, let’s see. So, just as a general commentary, I set out to make the finale that I felt we (and the characters) deserved. Something that delved a bit more into the fear William was sure to have been feeling, and also to touch a little bit on the fact he’s not the only one, even if he is “the first” or someone inherently different than the others. I also wanted to show both Mulder and Scully working to save their son, something My Struggle IV failed to deliver. As an extra, I wanted to redeem Reyes, at least a little. But breaking it down a little more:Chapter 1-Okay, so the purpose here was to demonstrate that life on the run isn’t exactly glamorous for William. He’s running from hotel to hotel, eating what he can to survive. And then one night he’s headed “home” when he realizes he’s being chased. So he takes off, but it’s not enough. He’s captured, his abilities dulled by the fact they drugged him. (Side note: @firstofoctober was more upset/disturbed about the fact I made him eat M&Ms for dinner than the fact that he was, you know, DRUGGED. =P)Chapter 2-I wanted to pick up on a theme we saw earlier in season 11, which was the idea that Mulder and Scully are allowed to spend a quiet evening at home together. Think the end of This or The Lost Art of Forehead Sweat, except minus all the weird case stuff that happened first. Except, of course, it wasn’t meant to last. Reyes comes and tells them William is missing & that they have to hurry. The part where Scully sees the grainy picture of William’s face, which gives her all the motivation she needs to get up and get going was fun to write.Chapter 3-Chapter 3 was supposed to show in some ways how William is like his parents, in that he can’t sit still for very long. He had to find a way out, and so he tried. But then Mr. Y interceded, and thus he was lead down a hallway and shown how there were other kids with abilities there being monitored, like him but different. Writing that he thought of himself as a freak made me sad, but I don’t think it’s that far off the mark.Chapter 4-I really wanted to give Scully and Reyes a moment to talk things out, so that happens here. Think about it–Scully trusted Reyes in some of her most vulnerable moments, she also once trusted her with one of the most important things in her life (you know, William). The scene where Scully goes into the bathroom to collect herself but ends up seeing William in the mirror, which makes her realize he’s trying to reach out to her, wasn’t originally planned. As they got up to head back out onto the road, I wanted to give her a moment to breathe, and I also had been trying to find a way to show that William wasn’t just taking the whole being kidnapped thing lying down. One of my favorite moments is the few seconds at the end Mulder and Scully share once they’ve entered the house at the end of this chapter. It’s a moment of quiet and piece before all the chaos begins.Chapter 5-The beginning of this chapter is meant to happen concurrently with Chapter 4 (hence Scully’s visions of him & flashes of him trying to escape). And at last, mother and son reunite, albeit briefly. I also let William showcase his abilities a bit here, what with throwing guards around and launching Erica Price off the balcony. I’m not sure I’m happy with how that turned out, nor am I sure Scully literally scaling a balcony and then climbing down a tree in chase of her son played out like I saw it in my head, but I still like it nonetheless. Everything kind of comes to a crux at the end here, w/Mulder, Scully, William, Reyes, CSM, & the guards in the field. You thought everyone would be safe, until suddenly they weren’t. Will Mulder let CSM take William so Scully can live?

Chapter 6-Let’s be real, Scully never would have forgiven him for letting CSM take their son. That whole scene happened a little quickly, but Mulder and William made a good father and son team, & CSM is gone for good. And then you have Scully and Mulder outside William’s hospital room, worried for him, but also knowing there’s no turning back now. We then get the moment we deserved to see on screen, which is OTP taking their kid home. Chapter 7-Epilogue. The action has calmed down and we are left to pick up the pieces. Monica Reyes is absolved of her duties as an agent, albeit it took far longer than anyone might have hoped. She’s leaving town, and may end up with Doggett, although I won’t say in what capacity. Which leaves us with OTP and their kid, drinking coffee in the kitchen like it’s the most normal thing in the world, except a little awkward. I also wanted Mulder to show how nervous he was about everything here (”How can you be so calm…” “Oh, I’m not”). William also calls Scully out a little on basically walking on egg shells around him. He’s there and they’re there, so can’t they get past the weird part about it? And then we end on a hopeful note, knowing tonight Scully will sleep under the same roof as the love of her life and her son, which is 100% what she deserves. 

[tariah23]

I wanna know why you're still reading JJK not because it's bad but bc I love seeing you rant about things you love

NATEjajajaaj tbh, I complain about everything I like and everything that I’ve said thus far about JJK, I still feel strongly about because I KNOW that it used to be written way better before but despite all of that, I can honestly say that I still enjoy it a ton. It’s so fun!? I can’t look away?!? I haven’t felt this way about a manga, especially a shounen of all things, in… I really don’t know (I kind of don’t like to count csm since it’s still a seinen to me…). Jjk is joining the ranks of my love for Naruto 🙈……. As absurd as that might sound, it makes me feel nostalgic despite not being that old!!!

It definitely deserves all of its praise as well and I’m not just saying this just because I’m a fan. If it didn’t, I’d definitely say otherwise. I’m glad that everyone is fucking with it! It just made the  Guinness world book of records the other day, I kind of want to throw up 😭. Knowing how Gege’s been writing the story lately, he probably doesn’t give a shit. He just wants to finish JJK as soon as possible so that he could get back to doing fuck all. Well… good for him. But, I’m genuinely glad that I got into it! The fans are annoying but that’s to be expected from a mainstream shounen unfortunately. It’s so nice ignoring them though. That’s the only way you’ll be able to enjoy something as big of a series like this tbh.

All of the characters that I’ve liked or loved never got to the point where they were written horribly like, I can say that Gege has remained pretty consistent in the characterization department, which is a plus, since whenever I get into stuff, I tend to pay a lot of attention to things like this especially. Yuuji is still Yuuji, Sukuna is still that petty old bitch, Gojo remained as silly and courageous till the very end (even tho I still wished that Gege could’ve focused more on Gojo’s trauma… it would’ve been nice to see him overcome the burden of being the apex of the jujutsu society… he was so much more than an idol and he still died believing that that was all that he was. Someone who was so far removed from humanity that he continued to tell himself that this would be all that he ever was and that even if his friends and peers truly did love and respected him, they’ll never learn to “understand,” him because he’s so much more powerful than they were. Their lives would never be the same. And he could never make any of them truly happy in the end. I really HATED THAT Gege let that man go to that DAMN airport still holding onto to his loneliness like this 😭😭😭… and then when you think back to that one scene in the story where various other characters were asked about their feelings towards Gojo, and all most of them had to say was that “he’s the strongest,” I just… :(… Obviously, he’s well respected despite his personality but 😭… Gege, you will burn for this-

I do enjoy how ridiculous JJK can get as well. People can talk badly about it all they want but you can’t say that it’s predictable lmfao. This looney toons ass plot 😭!!! I’m kind of here for the shenanigans. It’s been pretty repetitive as of lately though. Mainly the whole Sukuna vs everyone thing that’s been going on starting from Kashimo (his dumbass) right after Gojo’s death… but it’s okay. Outside of my favs being slaughtered left and right 👎🏾☠️. You can tell that Gege is just rushing through the story now though :/. I kind of can’t wait for it to end but I’m still enjoying the ride until the wheels fall off! I want Yuuji and the rest of the gang to be able to enjoy the rest of their lives, man… Gege wrote JJK with a chip on his shoulder 😭.

[theunnamedlizardrogue]

Chapter 8: Discovery

Sorry for the long wait!

Booker sneaks back outside the inn. He can still hear the voices from earlier tonight. They’re coming from what looks like a block of houses. A man, standing in front of a house, the door closes in front of him and he treads towards the next house. He’s getting closer to the inn. He’s doing rounds; going door to door. It won’t be long until he arrives at the inn. And so the next door opens, and there’s a small pause before Booker can see the black figure move about, he looks like he’s just started talking. It’s risky but Booker edges closer, what’s he doing at this time of night? He moves to a stall near the Inn, and begins to hear “-...but I came to ask if you’ve seen someone?” The woman responds, but she’s too far. “I… - hav… sorry” “They’re a green lizard. Murdered a citizen from the nearest town.” I... The... Why... Uh... The bandit hideout. Somehow. The guards? “If you see anything, come here.” The man hands something - a piece of paper. … The woman shuts the door, and the man turns. At this distance, he can make out a red article of clothing, wrapped around his forearm. Booker shuts the door.

Focus. The innkeep, quick.

The man rubs his hands on his shirt “What’s got you riled up?” Booker shuffles his hands and changes to an articulate speech, lowering his voice.  “A man is going to come in here, a dangerous man. He’s going to tell you that I’m a murderer. But it’s not true. I am carrying a rare map that they plan to take from me. They shot my dragonborn friend the other day due solely on suspicion.” The innkeep looks up at him in surprise. “I beg of you, they will slaughter me on the spot. Tell them you haven’t seen me.”

He lied through his teeth. But there’s no option but to place faith in the innkeep, Endarla and Locke are still upstairs. Booker runs up the stairs to his room.  

He quickly moves and hides by the edge of the door, breathing heavily. It’s dark, and he’s holding a knife close to his chest. Locke raises his head, but Booker holds a finger. Locke stares, and lies down. He can vaguely make out a conversation downstairs. Then footsteps. Footsteps. He grips the knife harder. Footsteps get louder and nearer. Footsteps. … The door handle creaks. Booker’s readied the knife.

The innkeep opens the door. “You’re safe.” Booker sheathes the knife in the dark. He swallows. The innkeeper didn’t notice the knife. That would have been hard to explain. “I thank you, I shall leave in the morning, post-haste.”

The morning after is hard to wake up from, Booker’s head is buzzing. He reaches for his knapsack lying on the floor near the bed and rummages through its contents. 2 potions left, he can’t get any more. The mage left a message at his makeshift stand last night that he’s momentarily stopped producing the potions to focus on his studies. Just have to try and fix the sleep schedule. He sighs and rubs his muzzle.  Always gotta improvise.

It looks like he’s the first to wake up this time, Locke’s lying on the ground with his arm lying on his forehead. He looks as terrible as Books feels. Booker stretches and he thinks of last night. He needs to gather everyone up and leave, before he’s discovered. He gets off the bed, gets on his knees and lightly shakes Locke. Locke wakes up and turns to him, with a glazed expression. “Meet me downstairs, alright?” Locke mumbles a “okaymph”.

Booker knocks on Endarla’s door and shouts “Endarla! Meet me downstairs!” There’s a slight pause before Endarla shouts back “Okay!” Booker pulls up his hood as he heads downstairs.

Endarla’s bought another pie for herself, she offers a slice to Locke. “Okay, what did you need?” “We need to leave town, no questions why, alright?” Both Locke and Endarla look at Booker confused. Endarla opens her mouth “… uh-“ “I know, I know. But someone’s following our movements. Her posture immediately changes. She instantly starts eyeing her surroundings. “Okay.” “If we’re leaving, I’d like to ask you something. I want to visit the box I woke up in” He remembers talking about that a couple of nights ago “…” “It’s not important, but…” Booker looks to Locke, he shrugs He thinks. “… Yeah, we can do that. We’d be out of town anyway.” “Really? Thanks.” He forces a weak smile “Hey, no problem.”

Booker checks corners on his way out of the town, no pirates in sight, thankfully. The morning light is way too bright to sneak around alone. He thinks of the directions Endarla once told him, follow out to the forest. 

The walk out of town is uncomfortable, a path in the middle of an open field. They’re exposed and could get spotted fast. When they reach the trees Booker feels almost instantly relieved, there’s high trees and thick foliage. Both Endarla and Booker try to figure out the trail she took into town. The trees whilst giving good cover A flock of birds fly out of a nest up high in one of the trees. Locke watches in wonder as they pass by. The three keep quiet as they pass through. They found the set of footprints. It’s a very unsteady trail, as expected.

Once they’re out, it finally leads to the box. It’s a stone box, partially glass at the top, and seeing inside it, there’s a cushioned inner layer. There’s silver layered about, but it actually strikes his notice, it’s brown-ish at places. Booker kneels down and traces his fingers on the surface. It’s dirty, certainly. He pulls out a flask filled with water and pours it on his hand, rubbing it again on the silver. It stays brown. He stands up “I’ve worked it out.”

Endarla looks amazed “That easily?”

Booker sighs “Yeah. The box has a silver lining, but the silver itself is tarnished.” “That means?“ “It’s from the air, this box has been here longer than you have.” Booker hasn’t broken eye contact with the box yet “I think it’s a… coffin. And with this sorta quality it means it was someone rich.” Endarla squints “I still don’t understand” Booker finally looks back at Endarla “Alright, let me run you through this” “This box was a coffin for a wealthy person, who designed the box with silver and glass. But it’s been here for a really long while, because you can see the silver’s tarnished over the years. You surely can’t be old as this box, so something tells me you were put here by someone.”

The tracks. That’ll give evidence. They’re hard to determine, but amongst the trio, there’s a fourth boot print here from the others, a little more delicate actually, not like the boots or wraps from Locke, Endarla or Booker. It heads into a different direction in the woods, back the way they came.

Booker’s curiosity takes a hold of him. “We’ll investigate.” “Right.”

Backtracking through the woods, he realises. The tracks… head back into the town. Booker pulls on his scarf slightly. “The person we’re looking for is in the town.” “Ah...” “I… want to know, “Then we go.” “But, it’s still risky.” !”^$&)”!(£)(£^!”_ “I’m curious.”

Booker casually walks into town, ignoring eye contact with anyone who passes by. He takes alleyways, waits until streets are empty, signals to the others when it’s safe to pass, all the while following the tracks.

They finally arrive. A hulking college in the middle of the town. White brick. Multiple buildings with different purposes, storing people, components, and most of all, knowledge. It’s a shame that the books in these colleges rarely have anything more than information about magic. He could never get a hang of it.

They stand at the gates, no one stands guard, but a mage wanders by at the perfect time. “HEY!” Booker shouts. The mage turns and points to himself? “Yeah! Open the gates please!” The mage errs in hesitation before coming closer and opening the gates, it’s better than breaking in.

“Do you know where the main desk is?” “Y-Yeah. It’s… over there.” He points to the large building in the building.

They push open the wooden doors and walk in, an elf receptionist looks up from her desk, and stops writing on a sheet of paper, and stands up; she lifts her head up high with a smile.

“Welcome to the College of Scientific Magic! CSM, for short. This place is run and maintained by our headmaster and founder Ignatius Saeno!” Locke’s already checked out. Booker inquires “… Scientific magic?” The receptionist responds “Yes, based on a theory held by the headmaster back in the day. The synthesis of magic and science into one! Mages scorned him, but look at the infamous mad mage no-” Saeno, that’s a name Booker can remember. He read some of the books as a kid. Ignatius Saeno used to adventure. Known almost worldwide for his erratic manner and was intimidatingly good at his craft. “I’d be interested in hearing the story, but first, we’re looking for a specific mage. He isn’t part of this college and he arrived here in the last two days. He might have been hurt?” “Oh! Yes! We have had one such person. His name was Wolfgang, correct? Let me grab him for you.” The receptionist walks away with an elegant strut. Booker smiles, the mystery is about to be solv-

A spear prods into his back Booker turns his head to the right, and behind him stands a man with a red neckerchief around his neck. With twenty or so other men.

“You’re coming with us.” … They all have a neckerchief. Is it all a symbol? He laughs “What about my friends here?” “Does it look like I give a shit? You’re coming with us.” Can’t attack, outnumbered and at a disadvantage.

Booker looks at Endarla and Locke He fakes a smile “Well, I’ll be leaving, I hope Wolfgang can answer your questions.” Endarla stares “I’m coming with you.” Endarla’s words surprise Booker “What, why?” “Wolfgang can wait, you’re being held at spearpoint” Locke nods in unison. “Well, this is all fuckin’ heartwarmin’, but can we hurry this along? Boss’ll want to see you.”

And just on time the receptionist returns with a man in purple clothing in tow. His hair is a mess, bags under his eyes and his left arm is bandaged.

“What’s happening here?” says the receptionist in slight panic “Nightingale?” Murmurs the purple mage, staring at Endarla. Endarla widens her eyes. Booker tries to cover; he still has his hands up “Sorry about the commotion, miss, but I’ll just be leavi-“ “Shut the fuck up, he’s coming with us, pissed off the wrong people.” The crude wastrel interjects. The receptionist’s eyes lower down towards the man’s neckerchief and she responds with “Ah… Right.”

Before they leave, Wolfgang quickly rushes whispers to Endarla. A spear points at him, but he, in a panicked stupor, declares he just wanted to give her some quick information. He declares that he’ll be staying at the for the time being, and for Endarla to return as soon as possible so he can check how she’s recovering.

The trio are pushed back outside, and led out of the college. When they return to the outskirts of the city, a carriage lays in wait of them. “How long’s the trip?” “Get in.” “Come on, the syllable count isn’t that mu-“ “A day. Get. In.” Booker climbs into the back of the carriage, with Endarla and Locke following him in.

Chapter 9: https://theunnamedlizardrogue.tumblr.com/post/178221350911/chapter-9-by-its-cover

[dreamingofscully]

7x02. “The Sixth Extinction II: Amor Fati” (part 3 of 3) - X-Files Rewatch

“Scully, I was like you once-- I didn't know who to trust. Then I... I chose another path... another life, another fate, where I found my sister. The end of my world was unrecognizable and upside down. There was one thing that remained the same. You... were my friend, and you told me the truth. Even when the world was falling apart, you were my constant... my touchstone.” - Mulder “And you are mine.” - Scully

Pretty long analysis. Let me know what you think of my interpretation of Mulder’s vision!

Mulder’s vision on the beach is the future in a vision/dream that doesn’t quite make sense to him yet. The couple represents him and Scully and William.

The future he wants, subverted by the vision given to him by CSM. It’s purpose: to make Mulder give up and abandon Scully.

Scully is THE ONLY THING separating Mulder from his destruction; whether that is the desertion of his quest through his complacency or his death. CSM wishes to make Mulder into his copy, not caring about anything except himself, but if he can’t have that he’ll settle for killing him.

Diana doesn’t care if Mulder chooses her of his own free will, just as long as she possesses him. She is unaware that CSM doesn’t care if Mulder dies until he tells her so, which makes her change her mind and give the tools to Scully to help him.

The only person who knows that Mulder and Scully are involved? Krycek. He has his hands everywhere, and keeps most of his knowledge to himself so he can take advantage of it in the future. Remember: CSM tried to kill Krycek. He’s working with him now only out of necessity, just waiting for an opportunity to get the upper hand. It’s not as simple as killing CSM, he wants him to suffer and he wants power. 

How can CSM read Mulder’s mind? Because he can’t. He’s giving this vision to Mulder as soon as he enters the room. The same way they make him sicker (Diana at Mulder’s apartment), they have some sort of technology to force a vision on him (I don’t know the exact mechanism, but I also can’t explain how they impart Mulder’s specialness to CSM through a brain operation, so...). When Diana says to Mulder in the last episode “Now we can be together” it indicates to me that there is a purpose to putting Mulder through the dream he is experiencing.

CSM as Mulder’s father. This would throw Mulder off. He wants to trust people and is susceptible to being manipulated because of it. Perhaps there is a small part of Mulder that believes CSM might have good intentions because he thinks he is his father.

Scully sleeping at Mulder’s desk, awakened by Kritschgau. She has her notes on the computer, so I’ll assume she also has the diary she was writing. Kritschgau threatens Scully, like that’s going to stop her from doing everything to help Mulder.

Mulder’s true vision comes back again, and it’s the first time we see the boy. IT’S WILLIAM. The future, again. Interrupted by CSM.

CSM gets Mulder to think he’s dying, that there’s little to be gained by returning. His first thought is to contact Scully, but CSM claims she’ll be in danger. Why doesn’t he return? He doesn’t return because of the chance that what CSM is telling him is correct, and because he wants to see what the purpose of all of this is. Mulder’s guilt plays heavily in this decision as well: he’s always felt responsible for the things that happened to Scully and that he doesn’t deserve Scully, now he has a chance to do something that will, perhaps, make her safer. It’s easy for him to give up what makes him happy when he feels like he’s doing what’s right. Also, if Mulder is anything, he’s curious. He wants to explore what it is that CSM is showing him before abandoning it. By this exploration, however, he tacitly accepts this dream and it unfolds before him.

Scully has another vision. She is the spiritual tether, the only thing that keeps Mulder from completely abandoning himself for the vision. Hosteen was the one responsible for bringing Mulder back from the brink of death in “The Blessing Way”, so now he confers that responsibility to Scully. The importance of bringing him back “for the sake of us all”. More allusions to the tragedy that will befall humanity if Mulder were to abandon his quest. 

Mulder’s mother seems to be involved. It COULD be a shapeshifter alien, but I think if she thought that this was the only way to keep him alive she would go along with CSM’s plans.

“I felt responsible for your death.” - Mulder “You can let that go.” - Deep Throat

Lulling Mulder with absolution. He doesn’t have to be the martyr. He doesn’t have to FEEL. Letting go of his guilt means giving EVERYTHING up, the good along with the bad.

Mulder's forced vision keeps getting interrupted by his true dreams, by his connection to Scully (in the form of William). The message is to keep trying, to persist, to FIGHT AND NOT GIVE UP.

His vision with Diana and the handcuff symbolism. She releases him which implies that now he is ‘free’ but in reality he is only shackled by his choice to forget and give up. A sense of freedom exists in forgetting all the tragedy that came before this, in living another life instead, starting over. He can have everything (his sister, perceived happiness), but in order to do so he receives nothing, he must live a lie. Perfection only in a complete lack of feeling, numbness. If you can’t be hurt, you cannot feel joy either.  

Scully confronting Diana. FUCK YES. Diana’s argument is incredibly stupid. “Oh yeah? Well I may have betrayed him but at least I didn’t not prevent it!!” What? (Remember, she doesn’t have any idea about the nature of Mulder & Scully’s relationship yet.)

“I just want you to think. Think of Mulder when you met him. Think of the promise and the life in front of him. Think of him now. And then try and stand there in front of me, look me in the eye and tell me Mulder wouldn't bust his ass trying to save you.” - Scully

Love Scully’s counter-argument (even though it’s like she’s debating a two-year-old, she could say anything and fucking win). Making it about Mulder. Reminding Diana the reasons WHY she wants to possess him so badly, that she is turning him into something else, and the point of it all will be lost. The fucking spine it takes for her to acknowledge that Diana did love him at one point. Again, she’s not jealous anymore, she knows where she stands with him.

Mulder’s final vision of the boy. He finished his project but is now destroying it. Mulder is destroying all the work, and the progress he’s made over the years. For nothing (LITERALLY nothing - emptiness, hollowness and superficiality).

Following, and directly linked to, Scully’s vision. Part 2 of Albert Hosteen. Again, emphasizing her spiritual connection to Mulder. Needing to look for him through her heart. “There are more worlds than the one you can hold in your hand.” This links the spiritual with the unexplainable things she can hardly stand to believe in, not yet anyway. This is one of her first steps towards belief, to acknowledging the fantastical as truth. She’s not ready to believe fully, but she does have faith.

When Scully prays, we see Mulder on his deathbed. Hearing about all the deaths of those around him, but the only one that affects him is Scully’s. The only one who matters. The symbol of all he’s given up. Not only did he walk away from his guilt, but he walked away from his love and from the truth.

Scully comes to him as she is in reality, representing the truth instead of a fantasy. Mulder isn’t really dying, this vision is fake. She wakes him from his comfortable dream, always tells him the truth even if it’s uncomfortable. ALWAYS.

Scully at the DOD. She told Mulder in his vision that he’d been lulled to sleep, he’d been living a lie, living a shallow existence. She wakes him with her tears and her kiss, her emotional pleas. A return to reality and all the beauty and ugliness that living in this world means. 

Mulder’s “You... help... me.” Finally. The help he’s needed, she gives. Through her spiritual journey (visions through Albert Hosteen) and through her strict adherence to finding the truth and standing up for what’s right (confronting Diana).

One Week Later…

Scully’s been caring for Mulder while he’s been recovering, staying at his place. She’s been filling him in on everything she saw, going over the notes she gathered, but until this moment she hasn’t let herself consider the implications. She’s been on auto-pilot, happy to have him back and worried about his health. She returns to him the morning before her first day back at work. 

Mulder knows how much this confirmation of his beliefs leaves her shaken and confused. He also knows her and what she’s afraid of. He saw into her mind for a brief period, knows the shining truth of her intentions. He can wait for her, just happy she’s there with him. KNOWING that this is the right path, guilt and all.

Mulder’s words are just… so him. No simple “I love you”’s for this fellow. They are each others’ anchor, the most important and guiding force in their lives. Mulder has been dealing with his guilt for so long, and while he still has it and will always carry that with him, he realizes that he can’t just move on. The guilt serves as a reminder, and to forget it would mean forgetting all the good as well.

And... the gazing, the lingering kiss and her fingers grazing tenderly over his lips. So plAToniC. 

She leaves because she’s going to work. I’m envisioning Mulder calling out before she gets onto the elevator, asking her to come back later. Scully’s like “haven’t I always?”

The last vision Mulder has, of him and the boy working together, finishing their project. He’s on the right path. Their connection is stronger than ever, now. ❤️

[aion-rsa]

How EVE Online Is Changing Players’ Lives for the Better

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

This article is presented by CCP.

Video games change lives. 

20 years ago, people would have scoffed at, perhaps even ridiculed, the idea that a game could have a profound effect on its players. But nowadays, it would be very difficult to find a gamer who disagrees. Since its inception, gaming has been an engrossing hobby that helps build relationships, offers stress relief, and can even serve to impart lasting life skills. As games themselves have evolved and pursued more ambitious endeavors, this has only become more true. 

One game that exemplifies this is EVE Online, a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) that is nominally about spaceships and exploring the stars. Although it might seem at first like a straightforward game about blasting away your enemies, hoarding valuable resources, and exploring the star cluster of New Eden, once you peer beneath its surface, it’s also about building relationships between players and learning skills you can take with you to the real world. It could even be argued that without delving into the metagame around EVE, it is difficult to get a real picture of why the game has survived – and thrived – for as long as it has.

EVE’s infamous depth as a role-playing sandbox has allowed its players to become warlords who rally thousands of players and form massive fleets, aggressive capitalists with the wealth to buy and sell empires, and industrial tycoons whose virtual shipyards provide arms for the largest player vs player battles in gaming history. These players often become so immersed in the game that their lives can begin to shift and change around it — often for the better. 

cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530", mediaId: "cd53c251-f7cf-4254-ac17-cf1534fa88c6" }).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796"); });

EVE Online has been changing players’ lives outside of the game since very early on in its history. The game’s unique demands often encourage players to confront and improve on parts of themselves that they wouldn’t expect to. But it’s only recently that EVE’s developer CCP has coined a term for this unique aspect of the game: “The EVE Effect.” The term came about after the studio completed a study on what seems to be an epidemic of loneliness and social isolation spreading around the world in certain age groups, and how that affects players of their game. Through surveys and discussions with players at various real-world events, the CCP team found that over 60% of the players they interacted with said that they had made substantial, impactful friendships with people that they met through EVE Online. Other research by the company showed that many players also believed that EVE had helped them to develop skills that improved their real lives. This combination of friendship and skill development seems to confirm what the MMO’s thousands of players have known all along: EVE is more than just a game. EVE Online is real. 

The EVE Effect is something that resonates with people that have played the game and spent any real amount of time in EVE because they can see it in their own lives. EVE Online can be a harsh, unforgiving game, where trust in another player is often viewed as the ultimate commodity. When you are forced to trust another player to help you achieve a goal and have to risk often irreplaceable in-game assets to do it, the bonds between players can grow very deep very quickly. Once a player starts receiving help from others, it’s natural for the player to then want to do the same for other newcomers — for example, by sharing their knowledge and resources or helping them with a difficult objective in the game. It’s no surprise, then, that players often end up forming vast player-driven corporations, or guilds, in the game that connects them to a web of other like-minded players, and these relationships continue to grow and often turn into real friendships.

CCP’s research showed that on top of making friends, 56% of players said that skills they learned through playing EVE had proven to be valuable in their lives outside of the game and in their careers. Somewhat unsurprisingly, given the game’s unofficial moniker as “Spreadsheets in Space,” the most common career skill referenced is the ability to successfully create and navigate complex spreadsheets, which may not sound like much on the surface until you realize how valuable this skill is to running a successful business.

One player who took his spreadsheet knowledge, among other things, into the real world and capitalized on all the life lessons learned through leading players into battle in EVE Online is Matthew Ricci. Ricci’s claim to fame within EVE Online is self-admittedly, in the grand scheme of things, relatively small. According to Ricci, he was the CEO of a mid-sized industrial-focused corporation in the game, with around 400-500 player characters under his banner.  

“I ran an ore buyback,” Ricci explains. “I had to determine what a fair price was to buy from my group, and then according to my in-game skills, what could I do to make a profit.” Ricci’s in-game ventures allowed him to learn several things about real-world business concepts. “I had to understand market fluctuation, cost break down, supply chains. And on top of that, I had to convince players to sell to me at a lower cost because I could reduce their risk,” Ricci says. 

Eventually, Ricci began asking himself, “If I can do all of this in-game, why can’t I do the same thing in real life?” That’s when he realized that nothing was stopping him from leveraging the skills forged in EVE to improve his real life. Ricci now runs a successful business in Canada. “We have two divisions in the company, a sales representation business to sell electronics to major retailers, and a drop shipping business where we purchase and resell products we find that we like.” 

Ricci credits EVE with giving him not only the knowledge to run this style of business, but also the confidence in himself to build a real company out of nothing, just like in the game.

On the other side of the coin, there are players who use their real-life skills to further their EVE career, and through that broaden their skill set, all while networking with other players who work in the same industries. This feedback loop has led to some EVE players landing great jobs in the real world. 

That’s exactly what happened to veteran EVE pilot Innominate, who asked us to use his in-game name rather than his real name for this article. In the EVE universe, Innominate is a high-level director in the Goonswarm Federation, one of the game’s most populous player-driven factions, and a member of EVE’s Council of Stellar Management (CSM). The CSM is a player-elected focus group that works with CCP on upcoming game features and provides feedback to the developer. The combination of having played EVE for so long, and being in two relatively unique positions in the game, has given Innominate a broad view of the MMO and the effects it has on players.

Start Your EVE Online Adventure Today

“You hear a lot of stories about people who ruin their lives playing [other MMORPGs], but with EVE you tend to hear more of the other way around,” Innominate says. “I started playing EVE, I started going to player meets, I’ve gotten jobs, or I’ve made friends where I’ve never had any before.”

Innominate also believes that EVE Online can be a powerful learning tool.

“Most of the things that make you good at playing EVE are real-life skills,” Innominate explains. “They’re not things you can grind. You have to learn leadership and diplomacy, and eventually you come out of the game realizing, ‘Wait a minute, this shit’s useful.’”  

This “shit” that Innominate refers to are intangible skills that a person has to learn through experience rather than from studying, and the game is rife with opportunities to practice them. This is because of the high-stakes scenarios in the game, where words and communication can affect your station in the game as much as your actions. 

In-game, Innominate helps run Goonswarm’s IT server infrastructure, which is how he eventually embarked on his current career in the IT industry. “After a few years, I thought ‘screw it,’ I’m going to find a job, but the only real experience on my resume was my experience running Goonswarm servers,” he says. “Fortunately, one of our other directors happened to be at a company that was looking for ‘Linux nerds.’ We spoke, and the next day I had an interview, and the day after that I had a job.”

Eventually, the company that hired him grew and needed to find more people, and Innominate turned back to EVE to fill those positions, pursuing players he thought could handle themselves. “The company had always been a remote work company and not everyone is suited for that kind of thing. But something about having a high impact role in EVE prepares people for that sort of thing.” He suggested that the company look into another of the Goonswarm server admins, and from that point, the trend continued. “We’ve hired 10 people from Goonswarm at this point I think. My boss is the Goonswarm Head Diplomat!” 

The idea that a game requires a diplomat to play – much less a head diplomat assuming charge of a vast organization of diplomats – may seem crazy, but in EVE, it’s not uncommon. In many ways, EVE is best viewed as a 17-year-old collaborative science fiction storytelling experiment. Since the beginning, the narrative has been largely driven by the players, who’ve role-played themselves into massive, galaxy-altering battles, economy-shattering hostile corporate takeovers, and infamous betrayals that turned the tides of interstellar wars. So much has happened in EVE Online that the MMO even has its own unofficial historian who documents the biggest events in the game’s long history so that future generations remember the players and factions that came before. 

Veteran journalist Andrew Groen has written two non-fiction historical novels covering the early days of EVE Online and still has many stories left to tell. After years of watching EVE history unfold as a reporter, Groen agrees that there really is something to the EVE Effect. 

“The game is complicated, and the game is complicated in a lot of ways to teach you about real life. The most glaring way that that occurs is in people’s social skills, and their abilities to understand large groups of people,” he explains. “To be able to understand and picture other people’s lives and their needs is an incredibly useful skill set that carries into other areas of people’s lives.” 

Groen’s way of interacting with the community and the game is by telling the story of the game as a neutral observer. Yet, the game has still had a large impact on his life. 

“My life is completely different as a result of the fact that I started writing about EVE,” he says, adding that before EVE he was a person of mild renown in the relatively narrow field of video game journalists. After beginning his journey with EVE, “the idea that I would get a chance to have a dedicated audience that would give me years of time to focus on my work, and give me their money in advance so that I could work on something I’ve always wanted to do, non-fiction journalism — I have no idea what I would be doing without this opportunity.”

Wanting to tell the story of EVE is a calling that many people find themselves heeding at some point during their EVE career. So much so, that it has given rise to a host of blogs, podcasts, and even several virtual talk shows dedicated to the goings-on inside the game world. EVE veteran January Valentine has worked as a producer on two of the largest of these programs, “Talking in Stations” and “The Meta Show,” each reaching hundreds of viewers every week.

“They are, for lack of a better word, talk shows, sort of like you would see on ESPN, except we focus on the goings-on of EVE Online,” Valentine explains. “I try to make the news very understandable so that anyone from any point of view in EVE can understand what’s going on in any other part of EVE.” Producing these shows, and gathering all the news, information, and stories from around the game eventually translated into January creating her blog Something You Should Know, where she writes about important events in one of EVE’s biggest wars.

“In my opinion, EVE is the medium that effort translates best into results. If you’re feeling stuck in real life, you can go online, and put in some real, sincere effort in, and you can grow as a person. You can put effort towards challenges conducive to the growth in real life,” Valentine says of why she feels that EVE has changed her life.

The biggest lesson she’s learned though is “Humility. When you start trying to be active in the meta [in EVE Online], it’s very clear that you are the little fish. Wanting to talk to people like TheMittani, Headliner, or Progod, you have to develop a diplomatic persona, to move around the EVE universe to get to those kinds of people.”

Another player who spends a good deal of her time talking about EVE, either while streaming on Twitch or co-hosting a podcast with her fiance, whom she met while playing EVE Online, is Miranda Fair, who is better known as Mirandalorian. Between EVE engagements, she moonlights as a Captain in the United States Army who focuses on logistics. 

As you might expect, running into active duty or veteran military players is very common in EVE. I asked Fair if she thought the game seemed to disproportionately draw that type of player to it.

“[EVE] has been really beneficial to me as a social outlet, especially while I’ve had to move all over the place with my career,” Fair says. “I’ve actually met people in many different military-centric communities in EVE, and even outside of that, a lot of people are in armies of different countries all over the world. I think what draws military-minded personnel into EVE is that the game is very tactical. When you get into these giant battles, you need to have people who are willing to step up and be leaders, and I think that attracts that military mindset.”

One theme that has come up time and again when talking to people about EVE Online is the personalities and the leaders that the game shapes. 

“It helps people develop leadership and social skills,” Fair says. “Whether you’re leadership for a thousand-person alliance, or the CEO of a corporation of twenty people, or just a member of one of those corporations, it allows you to choose what you want to focus on and get good at, and follow that.”

Some players find the EVE experience so unique and engaging that sharing it with other people becomes a primary part of their gameplay loop. This is something that I personally experienced in my early days, trying to find my own place in the game. Everything I did in EVE felt so unique and different from what I’d seen in other games that I found myself constantly talking to my real-life friends about it, whether they wanted to hear it or not. I loved telling stories about my experiences in EVE so much that I decided to apply for a writing position at an EVE Online-focused news site. 

Before this point, I had never really written anything that was intended for a wide audience. I had written papers for school and posted on online role-playing forums, but had never written anything that I thought tens of thousands of people would ever read. This part-time “job” I picked up to tell my stories paid out in in-game credits, which was helpful to my burgeoning career as a spaceship pilot, so it killed two birds with one stone. I was satisfied with my decision and didn’t think it would go any further than that.

Then the unexpected happened. My dedication to the game soon blossomed into a freelance writing career. I began contributing to several major video game news outlets, chronicling the grand EVE narrative from my perspective. My stories about EVE have now been read by hundreds of thousands of people around the world. I’ve even traveled to Reykjavik, Las Vegas, and Toronto, and other places in search of more stories to tell about the game. I’ve been able to hone my skills as a writer and I’ve gained more confidence, all thanks to my years playing EVE Online. As you might have guessed, I am a massive believer in the EVE Effect. 

One of the most common sentiments shared among the player base, beyond the usual “spreadsheets in space” joke, is that EVE is a game that fascinates people outside that don’t even play it. If there was a list of people’s favorite games that they have never played, EVE would surely be near the top. The reason that people are drawn to EVE is, for the most part, the same reason that the EVE Effect exists. The stakes when playing EVE are very high, and because of that, the bonds that people share in the game, and the lengths that people will go to learn skills that give them an edge, are greater than in other games. 

EVE Online can be a harsh and unforgiving game, where loss is real and can be very demoralizing – it is not necessarily a game for everyone. However, this unique universe drives players forward, to better themselves and to meet new people. Once a battle is won, a corporate empire is built, and goals are achieved, it’s not uncommon for players to shift their dedication to achieving something tangible in the real world with those same skills, and with the help of those same friends that made everything possible in the first place.

Start your EVE Online adventure today.

The post How EVE Online Is Changing Players’ Lives for the Better appeared first on Den of Geek.

from Den of Geek https://ift.tt/3nvDiQ5

[fulcrumahsokaamidala]

Saturday Spectacular #6

Happy Saturday!!! So this is me thanking awesome fanfic writers for their amazing work and all the time they put into their fics. ♥️ I want to recommend spectacular fanfic stories I read this week! ♥️ They are posted in the order I read them. All posts will be tagged #saturday spectacular fic rec

Some Things Are Meant To Be by @pimsiepim | Arrow | Completed

Summary: Three years ago, Oliver went on a cruise on the Gambit and never came back, leaving Felicity devastated. She forced herself to move on with her life, trying to forget that the love they had shared was one she'd never get to live again. Except Oliver didn't die on that boat. But no matter how much he wants to, he knows he can't come back. Too many things happened, and the only way to keep his loved ones safe is to stay as far away from them as possible. It all changes when Felicity starts questioning the circumstances of the accident that took him away from her... ***The sequel to His Girl Wednesday*** You don't have to read HGW to understand this story, but it might fill in a few blanks ;)

Semper Fidelis by @oliversmuse | Arrow | WIP

Summary: Oliver Queen is a member of the Bravo Squad, a team that specializes in search and rescue, covert infantry and translating foreign documents. He is known as one of the best and even though he is one of the youngest recruits he advances quickly. While serving he meets Lance Corporal Felicity Smoak, a young woman with skills in hand to hand combat. Despite the fact they butt heads they fall in love and soon start to talk about a future together. However, when her plane disappears on a mission in China and she is presumed dead, Bravo Squad searches frantically for her, only to find her plane and her bloody dog tags. Five years later Oliver runs into “Megan” at a coffee shop near that gym he has been running with his friends. She has lost her memory from the plane accident but has had dreams of Oliver and the Bravo Squad. With the help of his friends and team mates, can he help her reclaim her past and fall for him once again?

and we’re somehow caught up in a web of lies by inlovewithimpossibility | Arrow | WIP

Summary: After their encounter with the Count and Moira’s release from prison, Thanksgiving is upon the residents of Starling City but when an article arises in the gossip magazines that throws both Oliver and Felicity under scrutiny, the two of them somehow find themselves caught up in the most elaborate lie they’ve told. What was supposed to be a relaxing week at the Queen cabin in New Hampshire for Oliver and a week celebrating Hanukkah and Thanksgiving alone for Felicity turns into a week at the cabin of acting, the Queen women and bubbling not-so-platonic feelings.

Did I Forget to Mention That My Dad is a Supervillain? by @laxit21 | Arrow | WIP

Summary: When Felicity told Oliver about her father, she wasn’t lying per se. She wasn’t completely honest either. It’s just that ‘my dad left us’ sounded better than the truth.

Or: A Series of one shots in which Felicity’s dad is a supervillain and we see how Oliver and the team finds out.

Airplanes, Coffee and Deadlines by @hope-for-olicity | Arrow | WIP

Summary: Felicity begins working at a national newspaper where she has always dreamed of working. On her first day, she meets a very interesting photojournalist. The two will eventually work together but sparks fly immediately.

Alpha by @oliversmuse | Arrow | WIP

Summary: Oliver Queen was a powerful vampire that was captured by a group experimenting on hybrids. Turned into a hybrid that is half vampire and half wolf he is strong, fast and deadly. While in captivity he meets Dr. Felicity Smoak a hermatologist who is called in to monitor his feedings. All Oliver wants is to be free, away from the experiments and being in a cage, and strangely he feels he can trust Dr. Smoak. There is also an unspoken attraction between them that is forbidden. Can he convince her to set him free or will her attraction to him tempt her to keep him close?

Providence by @so-caffeinated | Arrow | WIP

Summary: Will Queen has struggled in silence in the year since he was shot. But when a shadowy crime lord known as Domino targets the only woman Will’s ever truly loved, fate forces him to confront his demons in ways he never could have imagined… Whether he wants to or not. Amelia Prescott has fought to take control of her life since learning two years ago that her personal and professional worlds were manipulated by others. But nothing can prepare her for just how hard she’ll have to fight to set her own course, especially when her heart belongs to a damaged man and a crime lord threatens her every professional move… And her life. Destiny brings them together, but as chaos reigns and personal demons haunt Will and Amelia both, it may also threaten to tear them apart.

(i want to) save that light by @callistawolf | Arrow | WIP

Summary: What if one little thing changed in the history of Arrow? What if, instead of going to Laurel’s apartment after discovering the extent of Merlyn’s plans for the Glades, Oliver stayed at the foundry and talked to Felicity instead? This series of short vignettes explores some of the ripple-effect changes that could take place throughout the next season as a result of this one, fortuitous change.

The What If Harassment Alternative by portlandborn | Brooklyn Nine-Nine | WIP

Summary: What would have happened to Peraltiago And our intrepid detectives, if Amy had reported her mentor captains ugly behaviors?

Closure by @oneofthosecrazygirls-fics | Arrow | One-shot

Summary: Laurel and Oliver get some closure.This fic is part of the What Should’ve Been ‘verse. It can be read as it’s own standalone fic if you want, but it makes more sense within the context of the ‘verse as a whole.**NOT FOR LAURIVER FANS**

Pieces of Always by @so-caffeinated and @dust2dust34 | Arrow | One-shot collection

Summary: Life continues after Forever is Composed of Nows.Ongoing non-linear collection of family moments for the Queens. You do not need to have read FiCoN to enjoy this, but it will spoil the end.

Our Version of Events by @machawicket and @geneeste | Arrow | WIP

Summary: Action star Ollie Queen is trying to clean up his image and land parts that require him to do more than appear shirtless while fighting stuntmen. Pop star Felicity Smoak wants to be seen as an adult in time for the release of her new, grittier album. And talent manager John Diggle’s got an idea about what coverage of Oliver and Felicity’s brand new (and totally fake) romance could do for them both.

The Road Less Traveled by @oneofthosecrazygirls-fics​ | Arrow | WIP

Summary: Canon divergence/fix-it AU. Everything that happened in the series up through 4x11 happens as it did in the show and this fic diverges from there. Direct sequel to “Swear This One You’ll Save” and “Have Your Cake (And Eat It Too)” so make sure you read those first before reading this one. This fic is part of the What Should’ve Been ‘verse.

Let's escape (And just get away) by fangirlforeverything | Arrow | WIP

Summary: The night of the Undertaking Felicity and Oliver both needed to forget what had happened. Now two months later, Oliver is back and Felicity is pregnant.Rewrite of season 2.

I wear high heels (she wears sneakers) by @mogirl97​ | Supergirl | WIP

Summary: “Lena. It’s not just about football.” Kara waved her hands around emphatically, “It’s about school spirit and hanging out with your friends—“ Lena didn’t want to bring up the fact that she didn’t have any friends to hang out with. “—and watching me obliterate a bunch of guys’ egos and going out for celebratory Big Belly Burger afterwards.” ~A Supercorp High School AU~

Artemis by @laxit21 | Arrow | WIP

Summary: When the Queen’s Gambit sank, two people were stranded on Lian Yu. Five years later, four came back.

Daughter of the Demon by @laxit21 | Arrow | WIP

Summary: What if in 1988 while traveling through Las Vegas Ra’s al Ghul bumps into a nice waitress named Donna Smoak and they have one-night stand together? A little bundle of joy named Felicity Smoak is the result. In 2014, the Demon Head becomes aware of his youngest daughter’s existence.

The Ravager by @laxit21 | Arrow | WIP

Summary: Slade Wilson’s plan for revenge against Oliver took time, money and no shortage of lives to pull together. His plan didn’t anticipate Felicity Smoak. How will his plan change now that his lost-lost daughter is working with the very man he’s trying to destroy?

Felicity of Themiscyra by @laxit21 | Arrow | WIP

Summary: Years ago, Donna Smoak left the island of Themiscyra and her sister Queen Hippolyta behind to live in man’s world. She never told Felicity the truth about where she came from. As a result of the Undertaking, Felicity discovers some of her Amazonian abilities and makes an interesting new friend: Diana Prince.

The Daughter That Was Left by @laxit21 | Arrow | WIP

Summary: Before the Gambit, Oliver Queen met QC intern Felicity Smoak. When he boarded the Gambit, he left something behind. Now, five long years later someone is waiting for him.

The Roommate by GameOfOlicity | Arrow | WIP

Summary: AU. Where Oliver is a cute nerdy guy going to MIT and finds himself having a beautiful blonde as his roommate. Oliver and Felicity become really good friends. Oliver is soon going to find out how hard it is not to get attached to his blonde friend.

I Scream But No Sound Comes out by @laxit21 | Arrow | WIP

Summary: When Oliver returns from Lian Yu after five years, he comes back 

Fifty-Three Minutes by @realityisoverrated-fic | Arrow | One-shot

Summary: Between Queen Consolidated and the Justice League, Oliver, Felicity, and Tommy haven't been alone together in over a month. They have fifty-three minutes before other responsibilities have them separating again.

The Microchip Chronicles by CSM | Arrow | WIP

Summary: Post 713. Follows the next nine months of Felicity’s pregnancy.

different. What happened there damaged more than just his body. How will his friends and family deal with this new Oliver?

“Time for a story” Drabble Series by @smkkbert | Arrow | WIP

Summary: This fic shows Olicity and their life as a (married) couple with family. Although Olicity (and their kids) are the protagonists, other characters of Arrow and Flash make appearances.It started as a drabble series, but developed more and more into a full domestic AU.

[frangipanidownunder]

How to write fiction, XF-style

So I attended a creative writing workshop on the weekend and once again was reminded about how to craft a piece of fiction so that it shines. I’ve also been editing my own (non XF) work and beta reading a little lately, as well as meeting/reading emerging writers. So I had a little fun while I’ve been home sick and put on my XF hat to create a little list of writing tips. They’re under the cut because I don’t want to fill up dashes with condescending advice or to preach to the hugely talented bunch of writers who exist on this site. It’s just for fun.

Just write that first draft

Leap in Mulder-style and go for it. Don’t look, don’t check if Scully is behind you, don’t ask for permission, just write. There are no rules. Even if you have a clunky, grey-white fat-backed computer on your desk in front of the windows, or you have a laptop on your bed, or you write with your thumbs on your phone, just write.

Read. Read a lot.

And not just fanfic or David Duchovny or Gillian Anderson novels, but everything and read outside your usual mould - try The Lone Gunmen or Hanky Panky, the Great Mutato, Scully’s senior year thesis, Mulder’s monograph on serial killers or the World Weekly Informer. Read Moby Dick or Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Just read. Words are fuel for your brain.

Writing a story is just continually asking what if

Just like Mulder and his wild theories, you take a character and a scenario and you ask, what if, over and over. That’s pretty much all it is. Just be Mulder. Build your case.

But you must have conflict

Mulder doesn’t often argue with himself, because he keeps telling us he’s never wrong, so you must throw a Scully debunker in every now and again. You need to counter the flow of Mulder’s what ifs with some classic Scullyisms. And in a short story, pretty much every line, and most certainly every paragraph, should have some kind of tension or conflict. Whether it’s setting by dropping your city dwelling FBI agents into a rural cornfield, or character conflict by swapping their inherent belief systems so that sceptic becomes believer and believer becomes sceptic, or even actual conflict where your protagonists argue.

There should also be inner conflict – dilemma (should Mulder continue to look for his sister or accept her death/disappearance?), character flaw (Mulder’s propensity for believing without question or Scully’s logic and science even when she sees stuff she can’t explain) and outer conflict – physical obstacles (Scully being abducted and taken to Antarctica, Mulder’s brain being operated on), pitting your protagonist against an enemy (Krycek, CSM, Bill Scully, shape shifters).

Beginning, middle, end

Pilot, FTF-season five-season six, season 11+? You’ve got to set up your story, provide some character and plot development, throw in a few conflicts, and then bring it to a resolution. Introduce your character/s, throw them into a situation, make it hard for them, then make it even harder and then show us their world as they try to find their way to the end.  That doesn’t mean everything has to be neatly wrapped up. Don’t write The Truth. It doesn’t work like that. You can be open-ended. How did they get back from Antarctica? What was Mulder’s last wish? What presents did they give each other after ghost-hunting?

And don’t forget Chekov’s gun: If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off.

So, please don’t give us a character that watches a fire burn down a motel then a few eps later hates fire and then it’s never mentioned again. And if your character is colour-blind, make it a part of them to tell the story.

Show don’t tell

There’s nothing more dull than exposition and narrative instead of imagery, dialogue and scenes. The Truth, anyone? That courtroom trial was a giant info dump and nobody needs that.

In the show it’s easy to convey a setting through the visual: Mulder and Scully are walking through a forest on a winter’s night when they hear a strange sound. But in writing? That’s pretty dull. So, you need to paint that picture.

A beam of light picks out a dark shape  high in the tree canopy. Mist clouds the beam, smoky and fluid. A second beam crosses the first and a low rumbling growl fills the air.

“Mulder? Did you hear that?”

“I knew I shouldn’t have eaten that second burrito, Scully.”

The wind whips up and the leaves shimmer on their branches, like witches’ laughter.

Symbols and imagery, metaphors and stuff like that

The X-Files is full of it and it works well for the most part, but in writing it’s about striking the right balance. Centre your story around an image or use the symbolism that suits it but subtlety is everything. It still needs to develop the story though.

Mannerisms or traits, retrospectives and dialogue/language quirks are an interesting way to develop character. Mulder and his sunflower seeds – he’s a fiddler and he needs to do stuff with his hands and mouth (lucky Scully), his self-deprecating humour and bad ties all show something about his character. Scully and her sassy susurration, her affairs with older men, her faith, all do the same. The way they call each other by their surnames to reflect their respect is an interesting twist. You can give your story and characters the same treatment. 

Trust your reader

As a reader, we can be trusted to make links between conversations, descriptions, introspective passages and action with the movement of the plot or the growth of the characters. You don’t need to spell everything out.

For example, what if, in the Pilot, when Scully asks “What the hell was that about?”, Mulder says, “Oh you know, I like to jump out of the car, take out the aerosol paint cans I carry everywhere and paint the road with crosses to mark the exact area where something spooky just occurred.”

His answer, “Oh, you know… probably nothing,” is just enough to pique our interest. 

Edit

This is when you can get your Scully on. You need to take a step back and look objectively over your work. There may be darling little Mulderisms in there, words that sing, lines that are so poetic and beautiful that your heart melts, but if they don’t move the plot forward or reveal something about character, you need to raise your gun, aim and shoot.

           Unnecessary information: “You shot me.”

           Writer: “Yes, I did. You didn’t give me much choice.”

Finally, there is heaps of writing advice out there - my favourite book is Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott - but the best thing you can do is write, write some more and write even more. Writing is a muscle and it can be trained to be sharper, stronger and more defined.