Stories 179-180: "The Fall of Our Summer" and "Poems" by Khyber

[amyhit.livejournal.com]

We're back into the angst, this week, with a couple of vignettes that fill in some of the blanks the previous fics have hinted at about Mulder and Scully's past assignations, and the days of their early relationship. First up is "The Fall of Our Summer", a post ep for Drive, which Kyber originally posted to xf_is_love in 2009. Second we have "Poems", a post ep for Wetwired, and the second to last instalment in the KvsS7 universe.


The Fall of Our Summer

Poems


Only one more KvsS7 fic to go. Hopefully you've been fascinated, intrigued, or otherwise drawn in by the story so far, and you'll tune in five (or so) days from now, to reach the end of the road with us.

Comments

The Fall of Our Summer

[wendelah1]

And what a summer they had. It's clear from the story that they haven't really ever talked about what happened to them during the past several months. Dana Scully is being eaten alive by her losses. So is Mulder. He loves her, he wants to be closer to her, but she can't bear it, so instead they get together and fuck. The sex is great but the emotional stuff is--really screwed up.

What I learned from reading the story that I didn't see from watching the episode itself is how much Mulder identifies with Crump.

"He was an innocent man, Scully. Crump, I mean, not the guy in the elevator, but I'll give him the benefit of the doubt too. No, it's worse than that. Mr. Patrick Crump... was a victim, a victim of a system we're supposed to trust but that doesn't give a damn about you if you don't make trouble and tries to crush you if you do." Mulder crushed the can in one hand, rattled it hard into the wastebasket. "That's no way to treat a man, take away his dignity like that."

He could so easily be talking about himself here, couldn't he? He uncovered a government conspiracy. He saved his partner. He had evidence! And look how they treated him. And also here:

"It matters, it matters how we remember. I want everybody to know that the crazy guy on the news yesterday was trying to save his wife's life, that he was doing what anybody would do if they were half a man. Not just," now he swigged from the can, "America's Best Car Chases."

Damn straight. And Scully knows. She knows what it's cost Mulder, what it's cost them both. It hurts her so much that she can't get near it. This is in many respects an unattractive portrait of my favorite character, but one I can accept, albeit with reservations.

Dana Scully is angry. She's angry at the men who kidnapped her twice, medically raped her, stole her ova, experimented on her children, killed her sister. I can't tell who she is punishing more, herself or Mulder.

It had been five weeks since they'd last been at each other, nine weeks since they'd first.

What a great way to put it: "been at each other." Those are words I associate with fighting, not sex, and not with making love.

It should have been ten, Scully thought. She should have dragged him over to her apartment the moment the flight from Buenos Aires had landed, pushed him onto her bed still battered and glowing in the heroic aura of their improbable lives. She should have given him the base and honest gratitude of her body, the sweet barbaric reward he deserved but would barely admit to wanting.

But she didn't. Instead she'd fucked him on his couch a week later out of need and a vague malice, wanting to use him and confuse him at the same time. She thought it was something one of those complicated, clever women he'd loved might do, pull on her clothes and leave without a word.

Oh, Scully. You are still hating on Diana! But, sure, I can see her doing this. I am not saying she couldn't, yet how it hurt my heart to read it. I know there are people who will just hate this. People who want the relationship simplified, prettified, turned into a Romance, instead of the complicated, messy love story it really is. Maybe that is why I am a noromo. Why would I want this for them?

I have a not-so-secret kink for sex that is wrong, wrong, wrong, so as you can imagine this story really hit every note for me. I have a thing for pretty much everything in the sex scene. Emotional pain + hot sex = Very Happy Wendy. Oh, and that description of her watching his cock sliding in and out. Yeah. Very hot. Moving on...

Mulder, though, is not so happy.

When she looked up Mulder was slowing, his eyes flat and sad. He tried to pull back from her, out of her, mumbling.

"No, this is, not like this, this is just fucked up..."

But she won't let him stop, she wants it, she wants this imitation of intimacy. It feels good, and bad, too. This is really strong writing, with emotionally complex characterizations of season six Moose and Squirrel.

When he came inside her, she wondered if a black-eyed demon born of a corpse had a word that felt like "mommy."

I don't think I'm even going to ask what that line meant.

Sometimes it's better not to know.

[estella-c.livejournal.com]

I guess S is thinking about gestating a monster in a tank. It's a horrifying line that reflects and magnifies the inner horror driving Scully. Yes, excellent story, but I just keep saying that about Khyber's stuff, because it's true.

I love the richness and sweetness of poems, which is out of place, I suppose, but which K explained as an attempt to ground his characterizations. It's during the ecstasy/infatuation phase of the relationship, and so defining of Scully's fact-oriented mind and her fascination with Mulder's spontaneity. Didn't you, Wendy, object to the notion of Scully writing poetry in college? I think it was during a discussion of a trio of Sabine's stories. So there you are.

The Fall of Our Summer 1/?

[amyhit.livejournal.com]

Rereading this fic, there was simply no way it could hit me as hard as it did when I read it the first time. The first time I was shaking and my head was buzzing when I got done with it. But upon reread it's still one of the most horrifying and troublingly profound vignettes I've read.

I agree with what wendelah1 says about Mulder identifying with Crump, but oddly I've never given much thought to it. The idea of why Mulder feels for Crump is very secondary, for me, to the fact that he does truly feel for the Crumps, and that I am made to feel for them, not just in relation to Mulder and Scully, but because they're human beings every bit as much as Mulder and Scully are.

I love TFOOS for the way it leads me - forces me - to focus on two otherwise inconsequential lives taken by the government's callous, careless machinations, and to see those lives as immense, and their deaths as immense. Khyber forces the reader to see the events of the episode that way by showing that Mulder and Scully experience it that way. What happened to the Crumps is a great chasm of terrible darkness that could swallow Mulder and Scully if they don't steel themselves against it. Yet steeling themselves also seems to horrify them. He makes them appear so intensely real and human, by making the rest of the XF universe more real and human, and vice versa.

As to how this fits into the greater 'canon' of KvsS7, I'm not sure. One Vapour Trail reference seems to contradict the timeline of TFOOS:

A couple of years ago, a little before Antarctica, he decided he wanted me. At the time, I took the sex--wrenching, biting, fearful doses of it-- because that was all I could handle, and when he refused to let me pick and choose my entanglements I backed away again.

And yet soon after Antarctica they're back at each other (that is a great way of putting it), sporadically. So is that another reason why the sex is so nasty between them in TFOOS? Because they've only just recently 'broken up' from their last 'affair'? And then there's this quote from TFOOS:

Mulder understood, and bent her over a rental
car in Illinois, nine-thirty in the morning under
Indian summer sun, told her in spine-quivering
detail exactly what she felt like.

Some good continuity on this one though - it sounds like the scene that was referenced in How Gravity Works:

Meanwhile, if-- to be honest, probably when-- there's
an "again" it'll be against a rental car,(trying to
lookout over his shoulder until keeping my eyes open is
no longer an option)

The Fall of Our Summer 2/?

[amyhit.livejournal.com]

This is also one of those fics that I feel comes together brilliantly, all in a lurch, which is something I love, and something that Khyber does particularly well. The narrative seems almost meandering for the first two thirds of the fic, and then suddenly it's like (to follow Khyber's cosmological theme) the fuel that's keeping things stable runs out, and the entire fic (as seen through Scully) implodes into darkness and exhaustion that nothing can escape from.

When Mulder fucked her she came, every single time since
the first, and once upon a time she'd thought she was one of
those girls who just doesn't, not with someone else.

missy told her she just hadn't met the right guy yet

God, this line. It's like the dark antiparticle of what a line like this would usually be. (I'm really loving this theme, can you tell *smirk*) It's a horrible twist on the "Only Mulder can do it for her" shipperfic cliche, where only Mulder does do it for her, and it's killing her. Not that I mind that particular cliche, but I never would have even imagined that something so dark could be made of it, and in so few words.

all I know of Vicky Crump is the gaping bloody hole in her head

"Does it work?" he growled. She pulled him in closer, he liked to
feel that, feel her body pressed against him like they were really
lovers.

edematous with dead things, dead angels, blonde and burned, I have
no room left for Vicky or Patrick Crump or anything else

"I don't know anymore," she whispered over his shoulder.

When he came inside her, she wondered if a black-eyed demon born of
a corpse had a word that felt like "mommy."

SURPRISE! THE 'DRIVE' POST EP IS ALSO AN INCREDIBLY SNEAKY AND BRUTAL FTF POST EP! I must keysmash this, just for a tiny moment. sddkljsdsdlkefd! Oh for more fics like this.

TFOOS has one of my favorite last lines for a fic, and certainly one of the most horrifying.

I guess S is thinking about gestating a monster in a tank. It's a
horrifying line that reflects and magnifies the inner horror driving Scully.

I think it's about her having recently gestated an alien inside her own body, and having seen what happens to people who bring their alien 'babies' to term: they end up corpses. In fact, the aliens don't even need the body they gestate in to be alive in order to grow in it. Biologically this is natural, but to human sensibilities I think it seems horribly unnatural and like an ultimate degredation of humanity.

I also think this part of the fic is about...hmm...I suppose it's that Scully's psyche is utterly suffused with the horrors she's seen. As she says, she simply has no room left within her for any more pain or horror. There is no safe place for her, not even in her own mind or body - no 'sacred circle' she can fortify herself with or talisman of sane fact she can hold fast to (I'm considering this in relation with the future Scully of Weret Hekau). There is nothing untouched by trauma. Thus, she can't draw a seperation in her mind (or body) between herself and the alien that had begun to grow inside of her. She has been invaded in violent and unimaginable ways, and she's instinctually thinking about that. She's barren, and Mulder is coming inside of her, and she's wondering if an alien, which destroys the life it grows inside of, has a concept of what a mother is.

Re: The Fall of Our Summer 2/?

[wendelah1]

I also think this part of the fic is about...hmm...I suppose it's that Scully's psyche is utterly suffused with the horrors she's seen. As she says, she simply has no room left within her for any more pain or horror. There is no safe place for her, not even in her own mind or body - no 'sacred circle' she can fortify herself with or talisman of sane fact she can hold fast to (I'm considering this in relation with the future Scully of Weret Hekau). There is nothing untouched by trauma. Thus, she can't draw a seperation in her mind (or body) between herself and the alien that had begun to grow inside of her. She has been invaded in violent and unimaginable ways, and she's instinctually thinking about that. She's barren, and Mulder is coming inside of her, and she's wondering if an alien, which destroys the life it grows inside of, has a concept of what a mother is.

This is the best reading of this line that I can imagine. It blows me away, really, it does, but it makes the story even grimmer.

Poems - 1/2

[amyhit.livejournal.com]

It's funny, I find I disagree with both the assertions of this fic: one, that when Scully was fifteen she thought she might have poetry in her, and two, that when she's thirty-one she doesn't have poetry in her. If anything I see her character developing the other way around. I don't see her as having been all that interested in poetry when she was young, I don't see her as a girl who sat and tried to be poetic or worried that she wasn't. But as the series progresses I think Scully slowly gains greater access to a sense of the poetic - she opens up a little, the way she thinks changes a bit.

I don't necessarily disagree with the feeling of the fic, however; what Scully wants to say can't be said straight-forwardly, and she feels at a loss because she doesn't know how to say it the way it must be said ('poetically'). And, of course, the problem goes deeper than that - it's also that she can't accept what she feels for Mulder because it is, in a sense, 'poetic' feeling. She can't contain it within one part of herself only, compartmentalize it - it's foreign to her internal landscape and she can't let that go.

I know that there is something here, that there's something between
us, and it's just too big and deep and strange for me to accept even
though I know it's there.

As to Mulder, I just don't know what to make of him in this universe. I'm not sure if I like him. He's let Scully down many times, and he knows it but that doesn't prevent him from continuing to do so. Real people are like that sometimes, but his brand of selfishness is not something I find myself inclined (in this universe or canon) to be all that sympathetic to. And then there's this:

He can tell that Scully's suddenly conscious of herself and his
eyes, adjusting her posture. She's doing this for him.

Mulder feels his mouth go dry and stupid.

"G-Gerson's definitely lying," he says. "We should go talk to his
wife again; I think she just wants to get this all over with."

Scully's shoulders slump forward slightly. She abandons the orange,
half-stripped, and looks for a T-shirt to pull on.

Coward. No wonder Scully's a mess. She's an intimacy-phobe who's in love with a commitment-phobe. Nothing like being afraid to be vulnerable and have needs while carrying on an intense affair with someone who's afraid of your vulnerability and your needs.

Re: Poems - 1/2

[wendelah1]

Coward. No wonder Scully's a mess. She's an intimacy-phobe who's in love with a commitment-phobe. Nothing like being afraid to be vulnerable and have needs while carrying on an intense affair with someone who's afraid of your vulnerability and your needs.

That seems a bit harsh. This is third season Mulder, this is early in the partnership, so to me it's that he's more committed to his quest than he is to anything else. This may not be what she wants or needs but this is who he is. I don't see him as having great relationship potential but I don't see him as selfish either. I also don't think it's right to blame her issues with intimacy on him. She'd had relationship problems before, and obviously so had he. Even leaving the X-Files out of it, they weren't going to have an easy time of it, were they?

Re: Poems - 1/2

[amyhit.livejournal.com]

Yes, I suppose I am being a bit harsh on this Mulder, he probably doesn't deserve such accusations. they're equals and they had sex as equals; it isn't his obligation to always give her first consideration. I think I'm just touchy because Scully seems to have taken most of the hits in this universe. If Khyber had roughed up this Mulder's character the way he did this Scully's, I wouldn't be so hard on him, because I would recognize that he was dealing with just as much inner chaos as she is. But it seems like her relationship with Mulder has left her more vulnerable and depleted, while he seems to be better off than even canon Mulder. So it's hard for me not to essentially blame him. Yes, it was always her choice to put the limits on how much of herself she was going to give to the work, and to him, but the position she was put in, right from the beginning, made setting those limits and holding to them a very difficult thing.

Scully was originally put in this difficult, disadvantaged position by a bunch of male superiors, and she is held in that position by them and their expectations; then Mulder comes along and starts pulling her into difficult positions from the other side, like a tug-of-war, and even though none of what's done to her is really his fault, he can be rather unaware of Scully's difficulties sometimes - of how difficult it is for her to do the right thing in her position - and I find it difficult not to accuse him of negligence. Basically, the whole situation raises my feminist hackles a bit - whether that's justified or it isn't - and KvsS7 raises them more than the series does, because it puts Scully in an even more vulnerable position.

Re: Poems - 1/2

[wendelah1]

Scully was originally put in this difficult, disadvantaged position by a bunch of male superiors, and she is held in that position by them and their expectations; then Mulder comes along and starts pulling her into difficult positions from the other side, like a tug-of-war, and even though none of what's done to her is really his fault, he can be rather unaware of Scully's difficulties sometimes - of how difficult it is for her to do the right thing in her position - and I find it difficult not to accuse him of negligence. Basically, the whole situation raises my feminist hackles a bit - whether that's justified or it isn't - and KvsS7 raises them more than the series does, because it puts Scully in an even more vulnerable position.

I completely agree with this statement. Canon!Mulder can be pretty clueless. And Scully always loses more, no matter who is writing the story. It's hard to write a Scully that's consistent with canon without acknowledging the breadth and depth of her losses. I think Khyber's approach takes this reality and runs with it. I do think Khyber's Mulder gets it eventually, he just doesn't know what to do, or how to fix what's broken in their relationship. He's scared. She's so angry, justifiably so, and he reeks of need, especially by season seven.

Poems 2/2

[amyhit.livejournal.com]

The thing about KvsS7 is that I find it interesting enough that by this point in the story I like vignettes like Poems because I enjoy puzzling out the timeline and filling in a few of the gaps in the narrative. It's not something you get to do with fanfic very often, because usually fanfic is told in a fairly linear way, and even if the fic is AU, the point of divergence from canon comes during the fic, so there's no real mystery to it, nothing that needs to be filled in.

From what I can tell, Poems is something of a post ep for not just Wetwired, but also for Hell Money and Grotesque. There are no particular lines of Poems that I love, but it provides connective tissue for the timeline in a way I find intriguing and, for the most part, very well done.

The one thing I do question about this universe is a couple of the fic's date stamps. It's May 2, 1996, and Scully's in the hospital because of what happened in Wetwired. Except Wetwired didn't air until May 10th. Episode air dates don't necessarily always correspond with the date it's supposed to be in the story, so I could let that go pretty easily. However, in Coyote Luck there was an even more baffling instance of this. It's supposedly April 29, 1995 when Scully gets the call to tell her that her car has been found and it's totalled. Except that Paper Clip, the corresponding episode, took place after Anasazi, and Anasazi didn't air until late May. A time discrepancy of a few days is normal, but in Khyber's fic there seems to be nearly a month's discrepancy between the story timeline and the air date timeline. I'm not sure why that is.

More confusing, however, is this fic's brief missing scene from Grotesque:

"You can't do that Mulder. You can't just..."

"What? I can't work alone? Profiling's not a team sport."

The voice she responds with is one he knows only from the times they
steal.

"That's not what I mean and you...fine. Fine."

My confusion is that Coyote Luck leads us to believe that Mulder and Scully had sex once during Paper Clip, and then immediately after that Mulder said he thought having a relationship would be a bad idea, so they didn't. Something Mulder says in Home From the War makes it soud as though they didn't have sex again until the "we're alive" incident following Pusher:

"Do you remember how we got together?" His voice sounds rough, as if emerging from a beating. "Not when Melissa died. After."

Yet in Poems the line The voice she responds with is one he knows only from the times they steal ('times' plural) makes it sound as though they have been together between Paper Clip and Grotesque, which aired several episodes before Pusher.

I suppose one could say I'm over thinking this, but IMO a great deal of the point of KvsS7 seems to be to create an AU scenario that works, that holds together. Khyber's writing is abstruse enough that a few flaws can make it unintelligable. There's a puzzle and then there's a mess, and the two aren't all that far apart - the show itself is a testament to that.

Re: Poems 2/2

[wendelah1]

The date stamp discrepancies are probably just simple mistakes. I admit I'm perplexed about the sex stuff, too. It does seem like there are a couple of different versions of their early romance floating around here. Maybe there were a couple of different versions in his head and he didn't quite get them reconciled before they were posted?

According to Nitpicker's Guide, Hell Money possibly took place during August of 1996, but I think his reasoning is faulty. But Wetwired is date stamped April 27-May 10 1996. Anasazi is April 9-16, 1995, The Blessing Way April 18, and presumably the events of Paper Clip take place soon after. Farrano says late April 1995.

I'm not sure if that made things better or worse.

Re: Poems 2/2

[amyhit.livejournal.com]

Could you link me to this Nitpicker's Guide? I don't know if I've seen it before. Your date stamps clear some of this up, anyway. Up until now I've tended to just go by the episode airdate and figure the episode happened somewhere around then. In this show, that's not the most accurate way to judge things.

Re: Poems 2/2

[wendelah1]

Sure thing. The Nitpicker's Guide for X-Philes only goes through season four, unfortunately, but it is both useful and fun. My husband found it for me in a used bookstore.