Story 182: "Up the Ladder" by rivkat

[wendelah1]

Fall is here, though you'd never know it by the temperatures in SoCal. I read "Up the Ladder" in 2007, when I was new to the fandom. It's novella length, at 30,000+ words, but wow, it is a fast read. I would have pegged the word count at half that or less. It was originally posted in 1997. Yep. This is old-school fanfiction at its best.

Summary: Marita comes through for Mulder, giving him what he wants most. But twenty-five years haven't brought as many changes as he might have thought, and her gift might be more dangerous than anything he's faced to date. And what's up with those bees? A potpourri of Conspiracy elements with many old favorites present. Note: Almost everything here about bees is actually true, except for the parts that are just paranoia.

"Up the Ladder"

The link is to AO3, where you can easily leave feedback for our author, but you can read this at her website or at Gossamer if you prefer. Leave your suggestions at the nomination post. And don't forget to let us know what you think.

Comments

[infinitlight.livejournal.com]

I've always liked RivkaT's fondness for fandom cliches: in this case Scully taking care of Samantha, the Mulder-Scully-Krycek roadtrip. They're the kind of ideas that many fanfic writers use (well, maybe they hadn't been so done to death in 1997), but well-written and often with a twist. There's something really comforting about her fic for me for this reason, even though it's frequently disturbing, horrifying and about scary things.

It's a good story. I like the bee plot and the canon-compliant use of Krycek and Marita. I like that it feels very much rooted in the old school, like wendelah1 said. There was a lot of bad fanfiction in the old school, but people were writing stories as the show changed. I think that's exciting in a way that stories written now aren't.

I'm not so fond of the development of Scully and Samantha's relationship and the background M/S. Neither of them rings particularly true for me--I have awkward feelings about Scully accepting Samantha as a substitute for a child of her own, and although the M/S relationship is really background to the story it's too sweet for me.

[wendelah1]

I think it's good to evaluate this story in the context it was written in, too. It was posted originally midway through season four in December 1997. We know so much more about the myth-arc now. We know they end up together and so on.

I don't see Scully's taking on parenting Samantha as stemming from her own desire for a child, although I can see how Rivkat kind of set it up that way by bringing up her infertility. Doesn't Scully say at one point that she gave up the X-Files and took on the responsibility because Mulder needed her to do it? That she saw it as a sacrifice? Anyway, in reality as opposed to fic, if her doctor had thought she was going to become infertile from the treatment, they'd have offered to harvest her eggs and create some embryos and deep-freeze them if she'd wanted. Whereupon she'd have discovered she had no ova because they'd already been harvested and now this is an entirely different story which reminds me of canon in an unpleasant way.

I think Scully's parenting of Samantha is meant to set off alarm bells. I mean, Samantha isn't behaving the way a normal kid of nine would behave, because she's not normal. She was taken over by an alien consciousness and then frozen and then defrosted. Scully's accepting Samantha's good behavior at face value seems very naive to me but her denial is classic. Scully is being manipulated by the alien even before she is taken over by it.

I'm not sure if the MSR is background. M&S both spend a lot of time thinking about it. It's hard to decide which is the A plot and which is the B plot and by the end, Mulder's feelings for Scully and hers for him are driving the plot any which way you slice it.