Story 133: "Butterfly" by Oracle

[amyhit.livejournal.com]

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.

Comments

[tiger-bay.livejournal.com]

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.

[tiger-bay.livejournal.com]

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