Story 203: "Living with the Dreaming Body" by Punk M

[amyhit.livejournal.com]

After the considerable word count of our last fic, now seems like a good time to take a bit of a breather with a nice short read. This week's fic was recommended by lightlack. It takes place sometime not too long after the events of "Christmas Carol" and "Emily" when Mulder and Scully end up back in San Diego on a case. The fic is focused on Scully and how she is coping with recent developments, the turn her life has taken, what it all means for her, and where Mulder fits in amongst all the chaos and wreckage.


Living with the Dreaming Body by Punk Maneuverability


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Comments

[wendelah1]

Okay, let's accept that your definition of deception is correct. Would you agree that Mulder betrayed her trust by failing to inform her of what he knew about her fertility, about her ova, and about what was done to her during her abduction?

Hmm. I suppose in part I agree with you, though I don't think it's Punk's failure at all. I think she was merely sticking to canon. Canon blatantly overlooked Mulder's actions... It's not a fan's job to try to make better a canonical misstep so enormous it simply cannot be made better. As far as I'm concerned there is no believable explanation for why Mulder had kept Scully's ova without telling her that could make it seem at all okay.

She's not sticking to canon. In canon, they weren't in a romantic, sexual relationship, not at this point in the series anyway. I think Punk intends the dreaming sequences to show the way Scully is reconciled to what Mulder did and what happened to her. But I still don't find that part at all convincing.

I don't need her in this story to explain why Mulder did what he did. I accept his explanation: he did it to protect her. It doesn't excuse it or change how I as a fan (and a fanfic writer) see his actions, but it is what it is. What I need from a writer who elects to put them together as a couple during this problematic time frame is some explanation of how she got there emotionally.

Obviously, for everyone else here, this story works fine. For someone who is as plugged into the injustice and cruelty of the abduction/Emily/William arc (because I see it as all of a piece, and it all had happened when Punk posted this story in 2003) as I am, it doesn't work. At all. I can't put that aside. I can't ignore it.

And I don't believe Scully could either, not in the way this story describes. Unlike estella_c, I am not "old enough to see male protection as a comfortable thing," but more to the point, neither is Scully.

I agree with you, this doesn't feel like season seven MSR to me. If Scully hadn't mentioned seven years, I would not have believed this story took place as late as that. The dreaming (instead of menstruating) and mental confusion make more sense in season five, right after Emily dies. Instead of Mulder protecting her from the information, she dreams to protect herself. Instead of feeling anger and betrayal, she dreams. It works a little better set during that period, especially since she's thinking of the sand dream from that episode. But that's five years they've been together not seven, even if you use the March 1992 date from the pilot. Maybe Punk just made a mistake. It happens.

[amyhit.livejournal.com]

Would you agree that Mulder betrayed her trust by failing to inform her of what he knew about her fertility, about her ova, and about what was done to her during her abduction?

Hmm, no, I don’t think I’d call it a betrayal of trust, but I would probably call it a breach. It wasn’t treacherous (the word google seems to closest link with betrayal). It was something that created a break in trust.

I think Punk intends the dreaming sequences to show the way Scully is reconciled to what Mulder did and what happened to her.

I don’t think the dreams sequences are about Scully reconciling herself with what Mulder did at all. I’d say she’s basically past that before the fic even begins. I only see the dreams as being about Scully reconciling herself with what happened to her, and about her relationship with Mulder in a broader sense –their partnership is consuming, taking up their lives, while their bond is subsuming, encompassing.

You may as well skip this next bit, Wendelah, since you say you’re not interested in why Mulder did what he did, but I need to amend my most recent comment. I decided I’d better go read the transcript for Per Manum, because I realized that I barely remembered the episode at all, having only seen it once, going on five years ago. Now that I’ve read it, I want to considerably soften my statement about how unforgivable Mulder was not to tell her about having found her ova. In the episode Mulder is given only three lines of explanation:

I-I took them directly to a specialist who would tell me if they were okay.

Scully, you were deathly ill, and I... I couldn't bear to give you another piece of bad news.

The doctor said that the ova weren't viable.

Going by this explanation, I find his actions forgivable just as I find his not telling her that she’s infertile forgivable. Wrong, certainly, but understandable. I’d forgotten than Mulder took the ova directly to a specialist to find out if they were viable, and had discovered they were not. All I remembered about it when I was writing my last comment was that he kept them at the end of Momento Mori and did god knows what with them. I was under the impression that they were viable. If they had been declared viable, then it would have been utterly unforgivable that he hadn’t told her immediately that he had them, and helped her make sure she was guaranteed legal possession of them. But as they were unviable, and as Scully was deathly ill, of course he couldn’t bring himself to tell her. In his place, I doubt I could either. What if he’d told her she was infertile and that he’d found her (now inviable) ova in a lab for creating hybrids and clones, and consequentially she’d lost the will to continue fighting for her life? He read her journal, he saw how close she already was to accepting her fate, he had good reason to fear that more bad news would defeat her resolve.

[wendelah1]

No matter what Mulder said to her in Per Manum, the fact is she wasn't deathly ill. She was newly diagnosed with cancer. She was alert and in her right mind. She was competent to make her own decisions about her medical care and her life. It wasn't right for him to withhold information from her, for him to decide for her what she could or could not handle at that point.

If her doctors had discovered while working her up for her cancer that she was infertile, do you believe they had the right to withhold that information? If they didn't have the moral and legal right, certainly Mulder didn't. It doesn't matter whether the ova were or weren't viable, they were still evidence of what was done to her. Finding the truth about what was done to her and the other Mufon women was what kept her on the X-Files. She wanted justice, not protection. Instead of continuing to pursue the evidence, Mulder suppressed it to "protect her" and that was both morally and legally wrong.

I don't think we are going to come to a resolution here. Please don't take this as being critical of you or your argument or anyone participating here, but for personal reasons, this discussion is causing me emotional distress, so I am no longer going to comment.