xf_book_club | Story 133: "Butterfly" by Oracle

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Story 133: "Butterfly" by Oracle

Continuing our theme of early seasons fanfic,

wendelah1 has kindly let me post Butterfly. Apparently Oracle went looking for post eps for Excelsis Dei, and finding none, she decided to write one herself. It was fandom's good fortune that she did. What she wrote is a charming little AU with both a strong emotional arc and a perilous mystery for Mulder and Scully to get to the bottom of - all in just 30K.

Butterfly is the kind of fic Goldilocks would approve of - not too schmoopy, not to angsty, not too plain, not too purple, not too fluffy, not too hard-boiled. Just right. Besides, who doesn't love seeing baby Mulder and Scully be awesome and adorable together?

I read this fic recently for the first time myself, and as you can tell I'm rather fond of it. But that's just me, what do the rest of you think?

Water spills through a crack at the top of the door.

Scully can't think. How many minutes does it take to drown? Five minutes? Five minutes before permanent brain damage, in any case. How many minutes have passed?

The door is a waterfall now. Surely there's enough pressure to burst it open. She starts pounding on it.

"Mulder!"

She's done everything, tried everything. Now she's screaming his name even though he can't answer. He's trapped in the bathroom. He's drowning. Her knuckles are bleeding. Ms. Dawson stands beside her, trying to soothe her, maybe trying to pull her away.

The door creaks. How many minutes have passed? More than five. About ten. Ten minutes. Mulder must have found a way out. Some air vent, some hidden passage. This isn't how it ends, she thinks. This isn't the end.

The door unhinges. Scully pulls Ms. Dawson out of the way as they watch it burst open with a gush of water, two bodies washed in the swell. Mulder and the nurse. Neither of them is moving.

You can read Butterfly on Oracle's website, or, if the pretty blue text distracts you and you don't mind fiddling with the link a bit, you can read it on her Gossamer page instead.

Remember, feedback makes an author happy, and suggestions make us happy.

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I loved "October Skies" but had actually never read anything else by Oracle. I like Oracle's style of writing--descriptive and vivid without being overly wordy.

"Butterfly" is an interesting one for me--I have incredibly vivid, lucid dreams myself. (It's an odd feeling--I've questioned "reality" in my dreams a lot. Felt (or perceived the feeling of) physical pain. Weird stuff.)

I liked the recurring ideas of water (in the hospital, in the bathtub, Scully's tears and Byers offering her water, the water surrounding the chip; even the Wicked Witch of the West, who changes completely when water is added ;)). "Butterfly" has a kind of underwater feel--like things are shifting and changing in the light. Like dreams feel for me, too.

I have long had Oracle down as one of my notable authors - in my list of favourite stories I just have her listed as "Everything", only specifying "Energy and Light" and "Outside/Inside" (my "character/other" pet fascination). Re-reading the story I am reminded about why I took to her when I was relatively new to the world of fanfic: her writing is economical but evocative and is good at portraying both emotional distance and closeness. This paragraph gets it neatly I think:

She went to bed, she slept, she woke up. She didn't cry in Mulder's arms. She didn't spend half the night pressed to him, breathing him in, afraid he'd disappear if she fell asleep.

Last night and its dream seem far away. Mulder plugs himself into his walkman and she steals an earphone, rolling her eyes again when she realises it's the Sex Pistols. But she keeps listening.

In this particular story Oracle makes you feel the devastation that Scully experiences, the claustrophobia of loss, the emptiness of it. She makes you wait a little to work out what the relationship between them is, holding suspense, and lets you know with a few economical words:

She'd be embarrassed if she hadn't just watched Mulder die. That's how it feels. It was real. And now here he is

The story itself, the "x-file", is intriguing enough but mainly works as a platform to generate the emotional journey that Scully goes through and works well for that. I am not sure, however, that the emotional intensity really reflects the nature of their relationship in S2, not for Scully anyway. Although...thinking of Mulder during Scully's abduction, hmmm? (What we need to read is a really good fic about Scully's abduction that convincingly analyzes Mulder's emotions and behaviour as something less obvious than undying love and puts Mulder's actions in "3" in a more complex context than it usually is. I might be talking rubbish here, I should go and do a search on "3" fics)

That little confusing thought aside, my only other objection to Oracle is that her excellent skills at portraying conflicts/emotional development generated by the particular characters that are Mulder and Scully are not always matched by her endings which get a little sentimental and romancy for me. It's like, "oh, major event, major angst! What was that you said? Aawww, kissy, kissy, all sorted!" We know that no resolution is that simple for them.

This has probably ended up being an incomplete review of Oracle's work rather than this story in particular...apologies, but the mind has little train tracks which just demand taking any direction they damn well please.

And, of course, "October Skies"...a guilty pleasure but oh, so sweet!

There's a lot to like about this fic. The style is accomplished, particularly considering the youth of the writer, and the emotions are conveyed both economically and intensely. I remember loving the "double reality" quality of it when I first read it.

Now, I'm thinking, there may be another way of looking at it. Is it possible that the writer went adventurously au, creating a timeline in which Mulder is indeed dead and Scully is in an agony of mourning that drives her to dreams of being comforted by hugs and kisses? I thought of this because, frankly, it's hard to believe in these season-two hugs and kisses. Despite the ending of Squeeze, this fear/comfort fest does not match up with the partnership at that time. There certainly was loyalty and protectiveness on both sides, and ust, but I'm thinking the overt affection is far more likely as a fantasy used by a shattered Scully to dream herself past despair. The fact that she may have entered that reality permanently is then a signal of insanity.

Not a happy ending.

I imagine there are bits that throw the dream/reality reversal into doubt, but--as in MaybeAmanda's "Blue Patches"--the possibility is quite a forceful one. If this is not what the writer intended (it's not supposed to make a difference, I know), that huggy-kissy stuff should have been edited out.

IMO, natch.

Have just been thinking about the au bit. I think you could reverse the 'realities' in the first half of the story, but not so sure about the second half when it is no longer solely Scully's viewpoint (eg Mulder and cancerman in the hospital when Scully is in a coma)...

I can understand the huggy-kissy stuff in the context of 'fear/comfort': waking up from an horrific dream and being so overwhelmed to realize that it is only a dream that Scully might want to wrap Mulder up, but yeah, the end...sweet as it is, it is too much for me.

You mentioned Oracle's age...how old was she when she wrote this then? I'm intrigued

The only way you could, well, tweak those Scully-less scenes toward the end is to imagine her dream-vision as removed and camera-like. It may be a tweak too far. But, darn it, I want those scenes of comfort to be dreamed. It changes them, IMO, from a bad mistake to something poignant and powerful.

The epigraph and the final scene tease us toward that interpretation too.

You might say that I'm trying to do Oracle a favor. Heh. Yeah. I'll await her fervent thanks.

Wendy tells me Oracle was still in her teens. There was a fic writer in earlier years who went by wen--not Wendy--who was also reportedly quite young. It would be interesting to discuss one of her stories. She was polarizing, by which I mean she polarized me.

yes, you are right, you could with a bit of tweaking here and there make that interpretation work - and it would make it all the more powerful and original. Only problem then is that Mulder would be dead and that's always such a grim concept...sigh...

Clever Oracle, I'm impressed! If she was writing like that in her teens then imagine what she could do now. Wonder if she is still writing...? Am immediately going to look for Wen: I am not entirely sure what you meant but polarizing sounds cool albeit quite painful. Torn in two? Pulled in two directions? Shall go and find out!

Despite how much I like this fic, I do generally agree with everyone's criticisms of it as well.

I agree that the displays of affection in this fic are OOC. What

tiger_bay said about Oracle often getting rather romantic and sentimental is very true of her, I think, and has been a big gripe of mine about many of Oracle's fics in the past. For some reason though, in Butterfly the heightened emotions and even some of the hug-and-kissing doesn't bother me like it often does in her other fics. I think it works for me for a few reasons:

One, because in the context of this fic, Oracle's style lends itself well to depicting dramatic scenes without making them seem melodramatic or schmoopy; in fact I feel like in this fic she's taken some scenes I would usually feel are too sentimental and actually managed to write them in a way that I find moving. She seems to be very sure of herself in her writing, and doesn't let the narrative get bogged down with elaborate descriptions. her writing asserts, it doesn't dwell.

Two, Butterfly works for me because of the extreme emotional duress Scully is under. I can believe that in the disoriented seconds after waking from her nightmares of Mulder being dead, she would react without inhibition, before reality fully reasserted itself.

Three, it works for me because it's early-seasons fic. I know

tiger_bay makes the argument that this kind of emotional intensity is OOC for their relationship in S2, and I agree with her. However, I also think that in S2 their relationship still had a level of flexibility it didn't have in later seasons. They weren't quite a set in their ways yet. Because of that, I can more easily see them getting pushed by circumstance into a romantic relationship in S2 than I can in say S5.

Additionally, I think the main reason I like this fic is because it really pushes the intense, dramatic, romantic angle of Mulder and Scully's relationship, in a way that I actually find persuasive. Usually I just find it irksome, but Oracle gets to me by interspersing the sentimental makeouts with bits of vivid character death, keeping me emotionally off kilter as Scully lurches back and forth from desolation to utter relief.

The other main attraction this fic has for me is the way Oracle writes the character death itself. I feel like she overstates the conscious intensity of Mulder and Scully's waking relationship, but I don't feel like she overstates the intensity of Scully's reaction to Mulder's death. This is one of my favorite passages:

Mulder's dead, she can't stop thinking. Mulder died. He's
nowhere. There's nowhere to go.

She knew him for two years, only two years, but she's
never felt anything like this before. This isn't grief.
This is being cut in half, a magic trick gone wrong. This
isn't what she'd thought it would be like.

Scully is alone. She drives.

I love the short sentences, factual, immutable. I think this is how it would be for Scully, especially at that early point in their partnership; I think his death would force upon her an awareness of her feelings - his importance to her - that she hadn't had before.

My least favorite aspect of this fic is the way it sometimes infantilizes Scully, as in this scene:

Mulder has pulled her half onto his lap.

"It's okay, it's okay," he whispers. "It's just another
dream."

When she opens her eyes she leans up and brushes her lips
against his mouth. It hurts to pull away. She's crying
again. He strokes and soothes his hands along her back,
urging her to take deep breaths.

The flight attendant pauses beside their seats. "Sir,
ma'am...is everything all right?"

"Yes," Mulder replies. "Just a bad dream."

It's not that she's distraught, or that Mulder is comforting her that bothers me. It's the details, mainly that there are so many of them. She's (half) on his lap, he's stroking her, soothing her, urging her to breathe, whispering to her. Meanwhile she's crying. Plus it's all happening in public. One or two of these things would seem appropriate, but all of them together create an emphasized impression of her helplessness, and Mulder's contrasting command of the situation. Then a flight attendant comes by, at which point I feel like Scully would be mortified. To add insult to injury Mulder actually tells the flight attendant it's "just a bad dream" that has upset Scully, which infantilizes her all the more.

I also don't really like the idea that Mulder actually did die and Scully has made up a dream world in which he's alive and they're together - not for this fic anyway. I think someone - maybe her - could write a fic very similar to this one, in which that was the implication, and I think that fic could be really good. But IMO it wasn't the point of this fic. Butterfly is a little bit quaint to me, and certainly not so very dark as all that. When I read Butterfly it felt like coming across an up kept cabin in the woods, not a deep dark unexplored cave full of creepy sounds, which is what that other premise would be to me.

Two, Butterfly works for me because of the extreme emotional duress Scully is under. I can believe that in the disoriented seconds after waking from her nightmares of Mulder being dead, she would react without inhibition, before reality fully reasserted itself.

Yes, I can too. Oracle does make you feel Scully's suffocating desperation and I can accept the emotional intensity generated out of sheer relief. I just don't think that it will lead to the relationship that is implied at the end. You're right about this stage of their relationship being more flexible than in later years and in my view was probably like that right up until the cancer phase. (It's why I never really believe in "celibate Mulder" ... I am more open to it with Scully because of the driving influences in her life and the nature of her character, but not Mulder.)

I don't agree with you about infantilizing Scully though. If we take the view that her nightmares are extremely harrowing and debilitating and lead her to leave her usual inhibitions aside when she comes back to 'reality', then the scene on the plane isn't so unlikely. Nightmares DO infantilize all of us. Mulder is frequently treated in a similar fashion by Scully in fan canon but these occasions don't elicit the same sort of objections that a portrayal of Scully as vulnerable and 'weak' do. But that's because I think there is an innate sexism (yaaah! the canons are reigning down!!) in a lot of commentary which is able to accept Mulder as weak and vulnerable, even incompetent, on occasion but take offence when Scully exhibits similar "failings". In this case of course Mulder is the comforter, he isn't living her torment, so he gets to be strong and resilient whilst she is shattered by her emotions.

Good to hear from you amyhit, It's been a bit quiet....

i found your above argument interesting. it sparked a debate in my head (more a debate with myself than with you, because i'm weird that way), so i wrote a bunch of meta (http://amyhit.livejournal.com/77905.html#cutid1) and have posted it to my journal. i've mentioned a couple of your above points in my meta. some i agree with, some i disagree with. i didn't used your user name, but i feel like i ought to let you know anyway, just in case you want to come by and tell me i'm wrong. *g* or, you know, start a dialogue. *shrugs*

It's the end of the world as we know it! The noromo is going to defend the ship!

I thought of this because, frankly, it's hard to believe in these season-two hugs and kisses. Despite the ending of Squeeze, this fear/comfort fest does not match up with the partnership at that time.

Uh, but this isn't canon. This is fiction. This is a story. This is an "au" story, in fact. Most importantly, it is the story Oracle wanted to tell. Why on earth should she have edited out the shippy parts?

Frankly, I'm uninterested in whether or not the state of the ship in the fic matches the exact state of the ship on the show. I know they weren't doing it or anything close to it. As far as I'm concerned they had sex exactly once in the seventh season to make William and that is all. Ever. All I care about when I read (or write) fic is whether or not the sexual tension etc. works within the world the writer has created. After careful reflection and another reread, I think in this case it does.

Starting with the title, the story is deliberately ambiguous about which waking dream is the reality and which is the nightmare. Besides as we know, Scully is very good at denial.

She likes to pretend certain things have never happened to them. She's never been missing, Mulder's never been shot. They've never spent a month in quarantine and there was no flukeman. Last night is just another thing that never happened.

They watch The Wizard of Oz on television. We all know the story. Dorothy hits her head and has a vivid, Technicolor dream of her house falling on the Wicked Witch, which is the beginning of her journey to find her way home. Was it real? Or was it only a dream? I know what the adults believed. I also know that Oz was as real to Dorothy as Kansas.

I think Oracle intends to maintain -- plausible deniability -- about the nature of Scully's dreams all the way through to the very sweet, albeit alternative universe ending. Maybe the dreams are really only dreams. Maybe the comforting Mulder interludes are also dreams. Maybe the only part connected with "reality" begins with Mulder finding Scully unconscious, leading into the conversation Mulder has with the Smoking Man after Scully gets rushed to the hospital.

I like her writing. I like the X-File. I love that she found a void, i.e. no post-ep stories for Excelsis Dei, and decided to fill it! Well done, Oracle!

Woah, feisty! I'll bet you're brandishing your cane.

You know that I'm no stickler for canon-compliance, or even character-compliance, so maybe I should reconfigure my objection here. I don't like Scully behaving like a heart-broken teenager, or Mulder cuddling her in a way that--yes--seems to infantilize her. Of course her emotions can be justified. But I wince at the behavior. My problem with historical AU's has been that Scully should always possess a badge and a gun. I feel that, in "Butterfly," they have been psychically removed.

This is why I've bonded with my off-the-wall reverse dream theory. It turns the comfort scenes into products of Scully's subconscious, making her regression to helplessness believable. For me, this reading has the effect of changing bathos into something like tragedy.

Though there are radically different ways of looking at it, we can all agree that it's a superior story.

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Story 133: "Butterfly" by Oracle

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late comment to my own rec. oops. 1/2

late comment to my own rec. oops. 2/2

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