Story 144: "Heaven" by bugs

[wendelah1]

"Heaven" by bugsfic packs a lot of story into a very small space.

CATEGORY: V, A
SPOILERS: Through the end of season 7.
RATING: PG-13 for slightly disturbing imagery
SUMMARY: Scully begins a search.

"Heaven" through the wonder of the Wayback Machine but also available at Gossamer. And maybe here at her journal?

Comments

[amyhit.livejournal.com]

I think it helped me to appreciate this fic a little bit more when I realized it was written after Requiem but before S8 began, a point in time where anything could happen. Nobody knew how the show was going to handle things (or fail to handle them) so even the tone of the fic was entirely flexible. No one knew if S8 was going to be a horror fest or a gooey family love-in (admittedly unlikely). Bugs was just theorizing, spinning one possible idea of what the future might hold.

Admittedly you could say this for all fic, but I think when a fic is being written in direct response to a canonical revelation, and before the fic writer has anything to go on, it changes the dynamic between writer, content, and audience quite distinctly. Especially where The X-Files is concerned, the writers tended to make very dramatic moves that had even the most stoic viewers thinking the sky was falling, and then they'd downplay things significantly after the gap. Considering where Requiem left things, it's not unreasonable that fic writers prophesied S8 would be gruesome and full of anguish.

[wendelah1]

Like most of the rest of the series, it was gruesome and full of anguish, wasn't it?

[amyhit.livejournal.com]

What, S8? I found it very wishy-washy. It had gruesome and anguishing moments, but more than ever the writers seemed to neglect any sense of meaningful development in exchange for one more MoTW.

Though I guess I could say that I get a similar (though not identical) sense of "trying too hard" from this fic as I get from S8, when S8 actually bothered to try. Ultimately Heaven feels like it's jerking me around. The dream sequence was over the top, and then the revelation that Scully was giving birth (which I began to suspect around the end of the first half) felt clunky.