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

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

[amyhit.livejournal.com]

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.