Story 260: "Kinesthesia" by Amy

[wendelah1]

A few years back, I remember telling a friend that I'd been disappointed in most of the Mulder-and-Scully-go-undercover fics. She suggested I give "Kinesthesia" a try. She was right. This is a fun read. Thanks to discordantwords for the nomination.

Rating - NC-17 for all the stuff that makes mothers worry. Kids please read something else!
Classification/Keywords - MSR, Casefile, M/S Undercover
Disclaimers - Mulder and Scully don't belong to me. I just wanted to take away the business suits and feed them junk food. The rest of the characters in the story are mine.
Spoilers/Timeline: Early season six. Spoils FTF just a little.
Summary: As members of a domestic terrorism task force, Mulder and Scully investigate a series of bombings linked to a traveling carnival show.

You can read it in split into 12 chapters on her old site, waybacked.
Kinesthesia by Amy

If you prefer plain text, it's also at Gossamer in two parts. Just scroll to the fic: Amy's Author Page.

Because this is long-ish, feel free to comment on the fic at any point along the way. No need to wait for the end. This is a fast-paced story, if that makes it less daunting.

The nomination post welcomes your suggestions for next time.

Comments

[ledez-dreams.livejournal.com]

I commented before but deleted it because I forgot to warn that I've read the whole story and so there are spoilers up to the end!

Likes:
Undercover is always fun, especially when done well and believable.
The characters are very well fleshed out. She did a really good job making all of the people well rounded and believable. I liked the way she slowly weaved all of the characters relationships with each other and really did make the carnival a family for these people. I was happy Scully went to say goodbye to them all at the end, I would have too.
Related to the first point, the dialogue and the way she used it to give a voice to all the characters was excellent. I thought each character had their own way of speaking that made them unique.
She clearly knew a lot about the rides and the life at the carnival. Loved the descriptions.

Dislikes/Criticisms:
I didn't love the orgy scene with Scully, Tim and the rest of the crew. Maybe I'm just a prude, haha. Or maybe that all it accomplished was to ensure Scully was drunk/high enough to confess her jealousy to Mulder. I think I disliked that scene more, which is more related to me not wanting Scully to show weakness (she is my super hero!). It did work with the characters though and rounded them more, and as I got more into the story, it didn't bother me as much.

The romance was fun, but I think it would have worked better as a UST. It was more fun watching Scully watch Mulder dismantle the thunderbolt in a tool belt with no shirt :) before he was concussed of course! And I liked the case discussion and banter when she cleaned his cut in the bathroom before it led to sex. I think Amy could have kept all those teasing moments at that and it would have worked a bit better. But that's nitpicking, and just my own preference.

With all the possibilities fleshed out, I was a tad disappointed Mandy was the bomber settling an old grudge. That seemed like a LOT of work for her to immerse herself entirely into that world for years, work there, have sex with these people, marry one of them just to exact revenge. SERIOUSLY, that is one hell of a grudge.
In any case though, it worked, was believable, I think I was hoping for a bigger conspiracy, even a more "x file" paranormal explanation. Like dictatorcari pointed out, the mystical tantra thing seemed like it was going to go somewhere interesting, but was just a red herring. And ya I'm not 100% sure the other bombings were really explained, unless I missed it also. I was glad everyone was okay in the end, that's how much she made me care about her characters.

All in all, really fun read. Enjoyed it a lot.