Story 205: “Relativistic Gravitation and Celestial Mechanics” by LM

[amyhit.livejournal.com]

This week we have a short fic with a long title. The aurthor calls it penance for some "MSR atrocities" she wrote (under an undivulged pen name) when the show was in its early years. The fic itself is MSR, but what drew me to it was that it feels different from what I'd come to expect of MSR. It's set in season 4, sometime after 'Memento Mori,' and is essentially a spare but introspective study of Scully and her relationship with Mulder as they both attempt to come to terms with the reality and the potential outcome of her illness.

Relativistic Gravitation and Celestial Mechanics by LM

Side note: wendelah1 and I were unable to find this fic archived anywhere and we could not get in touch with the author, but I had a copy of the fic saved so we decided to archive it on Fugues in the Key of X. If anyone knows the author or knows how to contact her, please let us know so that we can properly ask her permission to archive her fic. If asked to remove it from the archive, of course we will comply with the author's wishes.

Comments

Great suggestion!

[wendelah1]

I remember searching high and low for this story when I first started reading fic in this fandom just because it was recced at Bright Shiny Objects. I think I finally found it via the Wayback Machine and then that got blocked. I honestly can't remember what site I found it on. She hasn't taken down all of her fic. I found a West Wing story archived somewhere, a West Wing site no doubt. That's how I found her dead yahoo email account.

Anyway, the pleasure of getting to read this little story again after thinking it was lost forever made me a little teary. I'm so glad you saved a copy. I'll try to come back with a more coherent comment later.

[maria37ann.livejournal.com]

"When she was twenty-one, she’d been brave enough to rewrite Einstein. Now, burrowed into Mulder’s neck, she finds herself doing it again."

I just love that line. The whole thing is sparse and lovely.

[wendelah1]

I love that line, too. I like the juxtaposition of logic and emotion. It seems just right for Scully.

[bardsmaid.livejournal.com]

Wow, that was really, really nice. Sparse and clean, with all the essentials there and wrapped up in a wonderful delivery. I'm a very picky reader and don't indulge in much fic, but this was definitely to my liking. Literate fic.

[wendelah1]

I'm glad to hear you enjoyed it.

[(Anonymous)]

Agreed, that was lovely. Thanks for finding it. - Lib

[wendelah1]

I'm relieved that amyhit saved a copy, and happy that she thought to share it here.

[amyhit.livejournal.com]

Glad you liked it.

And for once I'm glad I'm a packrat about fandom stuff.

[estella-c.livejournal.com]

This a beautiful little love vignette, though I didn't pick up much cancer-dread. Not that I wanted it.

There's another vignette by a well-known writer also full of scientific talk. It's a portrait of Mulder and Scully sitting side by side and having a totally silent conversation. Does anyone remember what I'm talking about? It was original enough to stick in my mind.

[wendelah1]

No, I have no idea what you're referring to. Maybe you could ask at the Lost and Found?

I think the cancer was supposed to be the trigger for Mulder to act, which is a lovely thought, although I tend to go with Nascent's take on Mulder's psychology: that if he did make a move, it would be acknowledging to himself and to her that he knew she was going to die. There was no way he would do that.

But I like the story anyway. It has its own internal logic that carries the reader along.

I was interested to read "Don't Know Much About Gravity" that LM said this was a belated response to but I couldn't find it. Maybe I'll ask for it at L&F.

[amyhit.livejournal.com]

"Don't Know Much About Gravity" is a Josh/Sam fic in TWW fandom. It's actually part of a triptych of ficlets in three different fandoms (none of them TXF). If anyone wants to read it, it's over here (http://quasiradiance.babealicious.net/allthesilences.html).

Mulder's psychology: that if he did make a move, it would be acknowledging to himself and to her that he knew she was going to die. There was no way he would do that.

I agree. The cancer arc is probably the period of time I can least imagine them getting together. Yet, as wendelah1 says, the fic has it's own internal logic that makes it work.

[wendelah1]

Thank you. I'll happily read fic in all of those fandoms. So some of that site is still up, just not LM's section? Huh.

The cancer arc is probably the period of time I can least imagine them getting together.

Me, too. Syntax6 made it work, but then when doesn't she, right? I can't think of another cancer arc fic that worked as well.

[amyhit.livejournal.com]

Messy thoughts about tone and content

I haven’t yet been able to put my finger on why exactly, but this fic somehow doesn’t feel quite like it’s written in this fandom. As diverse as the fanfic in this fandom is, there’s a certain feeling that most of it has (or that I get from it, anyway), and this fic just feels different.

It’s a bit beautiful, introspective but spare (a rare combination), but the strange feeling of dissonance between what I’m used to from MSR and the way this fic embodies MSR has always been the most interesting part, for me.

They’re businessy, this Mulder and Scully. Their intelligence feels functional. They’re mature people doing their mature-people jobs, and the strangeness of their lives/careers is only background, where usually it’s part of the foreground. This Mulder and Scully could just as well be feds in some non-bizarre division. The fic doesn’t seek to reinforce our connection with the x-filean. It’s focusing on the characters as professionals, partners, lovers, exhausted people, afraid of the future (death) – having sex at the end of long days.

The tone of their relationship is casual, yet it’s also weighty – a strange permutation in a fic genre that it dominated by “serious and weighty” and “serious but fluffy” and “serious but porny”. Where your typical MSR has the UST dance followed by some combination of sex and The Feelings Talk leading to RST, this fic has sex followed by…um…life stuff, and sex, and life stuff, and sex, and eventually Mulder and Scully both figure the relationship out from their own separate corners and meet in the middle, which is as close as it gets to RST.

"How do we undo this?" she asks one night, curled against him in a tangle of sheets.

Mulder’s hands, which were lazily moving over her stomach, stop. "Do you want to?"

She thinks a minute before she pushes her back against his chest and says, "No. But I think it’s a valid question."

He tightens his grip. "I don’t think there’s a valid answer."

I find this conversation both unusual and believable. Atypical pillow talk, that’s for certain, but I like it. I like that in this fic they can have this somewhat abstracted moment of discussing what they’re doing, without needing to flood a bunch of emotion into it. The emotion’s there – it’s just not carrying them. They’re thinking their way through this as far as the thinking will help.

Also, I think this quality of the fic – the way Scully seems to be watching and doing at the same time – plays in well to the idea that she knows she may be dying. On the surface, her illness plays such a disproportionately small part in the fic (another way this fic isn’t like most of its kind), but I think the way Scully is characterized speaks implicitly about the effect her illness is having on her state-of-mind.

I wonder if the shift of tone and perspective I perceive in this fic is a result of LM having been primarily a writer of TWW stories when she wrote this? I think it might be, though obviously it’s total presumption on my part. I think LM was writing these characters as someone who knew them well and had cared about them, but also had some distance from them, and was writing them from somewhat outside the initial experience.

[estella-c.livejournal.com]

As usual, your analysis grabs the golden ring. You put so much thought into these shorties, and I admire you for that.

It did occur to me, well after the fact, that Mulder's comment about wanting to "do it" before it's too late offended me. I believe it offended me more than it offended Scully. There's sex and then there's death. Unless, of course, you're writing a stonier, more subject-explicit story. Or are a nineteenth-century German composer.

[wendelah1]

This reminds me of the review that someone wrote about The X-Files during that "What's the Best Drama of the Past However Many Years It Was" series. I don't know if I can find the link but if I do, I'll come back and edit this comment. The reviewer talked about how their relationship evolved as Mulder and Scully went about their daily lives, working their cases, flying to different cities, driving to others. I can see why you think this feels filtered of all of the strangeness that we associate with The X-Files, which made it so wonderful and bizarre and terrifying. But maybe for Mulder and Scully the characters, it was just life. Their life. This story reminds me in tone of Frey's vid "Good-bye": loving, nostalgic, looking back at a bygone era. A love letter to Mulder and Scully and the fandom, whatever that represented to Lyman's Might at the time it was written.

I think their actions and emotions seem very adult, for lack of a better word. Maybe this is meant to show how normal people would behave under similar circumstances? I like the idea of Mulder and Scully being together like this, I'm just not sure this is how they could be.

But I loved the story anyway. It had its own internal emotional logic that carried me along and sustained my interest. And, it made me feel happy.

This is the essay I was thinking of: The Greatest TV Drama of the Past 25 Years, Round One: The X-Files v. The West Wing.

[bmerb.livejournal.com]

That was delightful reading that essay, I'm left curious opus how the X Files fared against other shows. And of course we I enjoyed the fic, too. Very well written and lovely.

[wendelah1]

I love this story more every time I read it.