Story 118: "Hard Times Come Again No More" by CazQ

[wendelah1]

Recently, I was asked to post another very fine IWTB prequel story here, but I'm posting this instead because in a very few days I expect you will not be able to read it anywhere on the internet, not unless I go ahead and create THE OUTLAW FANFICTION ARCHIVE, Where Unwanted Stories Go to Hide from Their Authors.

If you read my fandom journal, here or at Dreamwidth, then you already know that CazQ has deleted cazfic, taken down her website, and requested that all of her stories be removed from fanfiction archives, including Gossamer. Since then, she has also blocked her site from The Wayback Machine with robots.txt. Her Author's Page at Gossamer is still up, but will most likely be gone by the next update, which I expect will be in July, since the last one was April 8th. This is a grievous loss.

Just as she is one of the finest writers to have ever graced our fandom, "Hard Times Come Again No More" is one of the best, if not the best story to have come out of the ashes of the second TXF movie. It's so good that I can almost forgive 1013 for inflicting that travesty on the fandom.

She feels, out of nowhere, deeply and unassuageably homesick for another Mulder, one she knows is a long time dead now: a lean and hungry-eyed white knight in a horrible tie, with much of the wide-open wonder of the boy still clinging to him, who would stick his fingers straight into any unidentified substance but could never just come right out and say what he meant. That Mulder who stood too close to her in morgues; always assumed he was going to drive; raised his hackles every time another man leant in too close to talk to her; stood like a gunslinger with his hands on his hips whenever he wanted to argue a point; made her sit through innumerable basement slideshows, and played travel Scrabble with her in hospital rooms for hours on end.

This is exactly how I feel about both of them. I miss them terribly; sadly, I missed them even more after seeing I Want To Believe. CazQ wrote the story I had been wanting to read ever since I left the theater back in July 2008.

Go read it. Go read all of her stories and save them to your hard drive. Comment about any of them; I'd love to know what you think. Just do it soon.

The link is to her page at Gossamer, scroll down until you find the title. Her Gossamer Page has now been deleted. If there is something of hers you want to read, I have everything saved.

"Hard Times Come Again No More"

Comments

[infinitlight.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the heads-up; I have some time later tonight and will start saving stuff. It makes me sad to think about doing this (although I suppose I should be doing it more for stories I want to keep and reread--I have a lot of my favorites already, but there are so so many more and they won't, necessarily, be around forever).

God, I loved this story. I know the feeling of leaving IWTB with the sensation of something missing, not so much from the film itself (a whole other post), but from *me* and from my relationship with the characters (if that makes any sense and is not ridiculously dramatic). I'd been so excited about seeing my old friends again, and of course they were different, and I was different too...

I was grateful to get IWTB, in the same way I'm grateful for stories like HTCANM (I hope I got that acronym right). Even though they make me miss the characters more, they remind me of and celebrate how much I love these people and this world, and they show that life really does go on, even though sometimes we don't really want it to.

Slainte. Absent friends.

[wendelah1]

God, I loved this story. I know the feeling of leaving IWTB with the sensation of something missing, not so much from the film itself (a whole other post), but from *me* and from my relationship with the characters (if that makes any sense and is not ridiculously dramatic). I'd been so excited about seeing my old friends again, and of course they were different, and I was different too...

No, it doesn't seem over-dramatic at all. In fact, I bet it was a common reaction, in fans from back in the day. A lot can happen in fifteen years.

By contrast, I didn't start watching the show until 2005, a few years after the series ended. Plus, I'm old. My life certainly changed from 1993 to 2008, but from 2005 to 2008, not so much.

What this story does is so well is articulate the complex feelings of love and loss that watching the film brought up for so many viewers, though perhaps not for the same reasons, through the point of view of Dana Scully. It's genius, really, is to have captured it in a way that creates this emotional feedback loop between the reader and the character. You feel her feelings with such intensity because they are your feelings, too.

Well, I did, anyway.

Slainte. Absent friends.

Yes.