Story 183: "All the Children Are Insane" by MustangSally

[amyhit.livejournal.com]

In The X-Files fandom there are debatably no two authors more closely associated in the minds of fanfic readers than RivkaT, the author of our last fic, and MustangSally, who are indelibly linked by their co-authorship of "Iolokus". Which is why this week we're going to be reading "All the Children Are Insane," perhaps MustangSally's most widely read solo fic.

It's a vignette set in the summer after S5, with sex, angst, and the burnt-office base notes of existential crisis. The posting date stamp on "All The Children Are Insane" is June 18th 1998, just one day before Fight the Future hit theaters. To me the writing has always hummed with the captured tension of that summer, the fever pitch of fannish excitement and anxiety.

All the Children Are Insane

mustangsally78 is still around; sending feedback never hurts. And as always, our recommendations thread is over here.

Comments

about mulder's section

[amyhit.livejournal.com]

Mulder's section of ATCAI, on the other hand, I like a lot more. I like the entire first paragraph, except for maybe the part about him shooting up the FBI management meeting. I don't think Mulder would ever do that. But then I guess I can't blame the guy for thinking about it. I especially like, I'm going to have to get a lobotomy to deal with this; anti-depressants are just not going to do the job. This isn't just Mulder being drole, it actually rings true.

Oblivious to my dark thoughts, Scully taps along next to me, playing Ganymede to my Cassio. Or whoever. The 12th Night brain cells are not responding to anything coming from the server.

I have to Wiki this. I Like it a lot, just by the sound of it, but I'm not really sure what it means.

I find it adorable that Mulder and Scully are both walking the walk of the severely inebriated, but that Scully pulls it off better because she's shorter and therefore her wobbling is not as apparent.

They took her future, and now they've taken mine, but you can't weigh oocytes with paper files - it isn't a fair trade.

Can we all just pretend that it's canon Mulder thinking this line? Because man, about half of my issues with Mulder could be alleviated seriously by his simple acknowledgment of this. In fact, this entire paragraph is great. There are still tape marks on Mulder's window, and he claims you can't break down a door as many times as his has been, without having lingering lock issues. There's a theme here: damage, trauma, the marks left behind, the long-term effects of present wounds and actions. Chalk this up as my favorite paragraph of the fic.

Mulder then proceeds to think in a series of really awesome metaphors/similes:

Her throat has precisely the same arch as a well-thrown curve ball.

Underneath it all she is a swan, white and lithe against the black water of the sofa

The fur between her legs feels like a wet rabbit skin against my thigh, and I reach down between the white lines of her thighs to where she is wetter than the rain and hot as spilled blood.

I think MS may overdo it a bit with the literary devices, and some of them do kind of break the mood (if you want your sex scene to be hot, it's never a good idea to have the guy thinking of himself as a baboon, because then the reader will think of him as a baboon, and that will effectively render him repulsive, at least momentarily), but most of them are pretty great. I particularly like the animalistic theme, with Mulder likening Scully to a swan, and then a rabbit, and Scully likening Mulder to a cat with a mouse when he bites her neck in orgasm.

My second favorite part of ATCAI, and the most memorable moment, for me, is the one write_out already quoted, beginning in the hall outside Mulder's apartment with him saying "I can't get it in," and ending with Scully whispering "Nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing," in Mulder's ear. They are so very quintessentially two drunk people in this scene, and it's vivid and sexy, but also kind of horrible and mortifying. If it were canon I'd hate it, but since I get to wipe the slate clean as soon as the fic is over, their reckless, messy, ill-considered abandon is kind of thrilling.

Re: about mulder's section

[wendelah1]

Oblivious to my dark thoughts, Scully taps along next to me, playing Ganymede to my Cassio. Or whoever. The 12th Night brain cells are not responding to anything coming from the server.

There are three different plays in the quote: Ganymede is from "As You Like It," Cassio from "Othello" and "Twelfth Night" is the title of "Twelfth Night." Unless I'm missing something, I think it's just further proof of Mulder's inebriation and Mustang Sally's love for language and literature.