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I wrote 1,242 words of Flackfic wherein he breaks the news of his engagement to his parents, but I'm not sure it's viable. It's from the perspective of Flack, Sr. as he watches his wife and son butt heads, and as of now, it's quite disjointed. I like the first three pages, but it's sparse and nondescript in terms of character development because I don't want to impart to the unreliable narrator an omniscience he cannot possibly possess as an outside observer. I'm going to work on fleshing it out, but if it doesn't look markedly better by tomorrow, I'll scrap it and rewrite it from Flack's POV, which was what I'd originally intended.
I also pounded out 785 words of Mulderfic. Since I'm working with the very limited knowledge of S1, it is more general on character specifics than I would like, but I'm confident that when finished, it will be able to stand among the astoundingly prolific and prodigious body of Xfic with no shame.
And now, fic sneak peeks:
"Darkness Falls"-X-Files
Fox Mulder was afraid of the dark. He had seen a thousand inexplicable, terrifying sights in the daylight or the stark, unforgiving light of clandestine laboratories and military bases without name, and aside from wonder or the occasional spasm of revulsion, he had remained unfazed, able to gaze into the twisted face of impossibility without blinking. His colleagues at the FBI might have shaken their heads and called him mad as they sipped tepid coffee indistinguishable from the styrofoam cup that held it, might have snickered and called him Spooky, but none of them had ever questioned his dedication to his madness or his courage under fire.
But the dark…the dark unmanned him. It was impartial abettor to the things that went bump in the night, indifferent to the notions of righteousness and mercy to children and the aged and broken. It concealed the grinning, leering faces of the monsters that waited with puckered mouths and bulbous eyes to steal you from your bed, but it didn't protect you from them. If it were capricious and you were lucky, it bought you a few extra heartbeats and sour breaths before the end came, but that was all. It vanished with the rising of the sun or the flipping of a switch and left in its wake the evidence of things not seen. Sometimes it was a red smear or a waxy, motionless body with glazed, milkglass eyes. Sometimes, in its wickeder, crueler moments, it left no trace at all, and that was worse.
So he avoided the dark as much as he could. He often slept with the light on or on the couch with the wan, spectral glow of the television set to keep the creeping shadows at bay. It was easier that way, harder to hear the furtive, greedy slither of the shadows over the blare of infomercials or the sibilant, crackling hiss of white noise. Deprived of absolute silence, his brain was unable to conjure the nightmares from which he awoke screaming, keening like a rabbit in a strangling, lethal snare, and when he closed his eyes in the presence of light, the void behind his eyelids was black or green, not the diseased red of drying blood and military quarantine and underground bunkers with no exits.
The nature of his job brought him into frequent contact with that which he despised, and when circumstances forced his hand, he squared his jaw and stepped into the abyss. He hated it, but there was no choice; he would not allow the truth to elude him because the darkness in which it hid turned his stomach into a hot, throbbing knot of apprehension and set his teeth inside his mouth. His heart pounded, and his mouth tasted of alum and alkali, sticky and slick, but he pressed forward on heavy, unsteady feet, gun pointed ahead, a divining rod and .9mm totem against the evil that crouched in the blackness around the next bend or corner. He forged ahead because he knew that if he stopped even for the briefest of moments, he would never start again. He would simply stand where he was until the wind or the damp rot wore away his features and smoothed them to perfect blankness with nimble, sculpting fingers or until fear and uncertainty disarticulated him from the inside out and he crumpled to the floor in a jumble of grey bone and cheap wool suit.
The dark was cunning and feral and insidious. It drifted like smoke against winter-frosted or summer-scorched windowpanes and crept around cornices on padded velvet feet, sly and ever waiting for its opportunity to slither into the unguarded niches of the world-the faded, yellowing crack in the kitchen wallpaper or the hairline crevice in the bathroom grout. It clung to your skin in a malignant miasma and coated your nostrils like soot, seeking out your vulnerabilities with adroit, malevolent fingers, and when he escaped its clutches and stumbled into the scalding daylight, he dusted his hands over his body in a desperate, unthinking attempt to rid himself of its gritty, carcinogenic taint. The dark was poison, and each time it touched him, he shuddered and prayed that it would pass him by. So far, he'd been lucky, but luck was a fickle bedfellow, and he was under no illusion that it would last.
"Home Fires Burning"-CSI:NY
Don Flack, Sr. watched his son and namesake from across the table, prudently silent behind the scant protection afforded by his fork. Experience told him that things were about to turn ugly, indeed, between his wife and his boy, and he was tempted to flee the field of battle for the comforting solitude of the den and the replay of the Islanders game on ESPN2, but getting up would inevitably draw attention to himself, and so he hunkered over his plate and studied the whorls left in the whipped potatoes by the tines of his shielding flatware.
"You what?" his wife shrieked. "When?"
"I asked Rebecca to marry me last night, Ma." Calm, almost flat, but he could hear the tension beneath, brittle and sharp as jagged glass.
"That girl?" his wife said. "The one in the…in the chair?" The last was a breathy cry of incredulity, as though Don had just uttered obscenities at the table.
He chanced a glimpse at Don and groaned inwardly. His face was expressionless, but his jaw twitched, and his eyes blazed inside their sockets. His broad shoulders were set, and he was clutching his napkin in one fisted hand.
Don wiped his mouth with the wadded napkin and set his fork on the side of the plate with deliberate delicacy. "Yeah, Ma. That girl. Unless you think I got four or five Rebeccas and change 'em like underwear."
His wife bristled, and he sank lower in his chair. Fuck me, he thought miserably, and took a sip of iced tea.
"Don't get smart," she snapped. "I'm your mother."
Just leave it, Ana. For God's sake, just congratulate him, hold your tongue, and unload your disappointment on me when he goes home. It's what you're gonna do anyway.
It was too much to hope for, of course. Ana had never held her tongue in thirty-four years of marriage. He might have been the cock of the walk with the boys at the precinct, but she ruled the household with an iron fist and apron strings of tempered iron. Not a hair was out of place, and her children's lives had been planned in intimate detail from the moment of their conception. Everything in its proper time and place, and nowhere in the carefully plotted course of her only son's life had there been room for someone like Rebecca.
He could still remember the dizzy, twitterpated joy with which she'd greeted the announcement that Don was bringing someone home for dinner. She'd spent the entire week cleaning the apartment, on her knees on the kitchen floor with a sponge and a bucket, scouring marks that only she could see, and when there was no more cleaning to occupy her mind, she'd bustled to the market and come back with more food than anyone could possibly eat, most of which had gone untouched. She had been beside herself with anticipation, so sure that her long-nurtured dreams of pink-faced grandchildren were come at last. The day of the dinner, she'd paced to and fro in the living room, nervous and expectant and fidgeting with her necklace or his tie, and peered out the peephole every time footsteps sounded in the hallway outside.
Then the knock had come, and when the door had swung open, her joy had evaporated. He'd felt it go, as jarring and sudden as the bursting of a bubble on the point of a blade. One moment, she'd been standing in the threshold with her arms thrown wide and her lips fixed in a welcoming smile, and the next, the smile had frozen into a bewildered grimace, her eyes wide and stunned as they settled on the sleek, metal frame and utilitarian gray wheels. The cheerful greeting had died in her throat, and her arms had wavered, drooped into the stark T of crucifixion. She and Rebecca had stared at one another in mute appraisal, and then Don had broken the awkward stalemate by asking, in a voice too loud and too boisterous, if they could come inside.
Ana had recovered her gracious aplomb by the time the door had closed behind them, but the damage had been done. The air of giddy jubilance had curdled into an atmosphere of cautious civility and carefully concealed hurt on both sides. Rebecca might have been fragile and impossibly small in her chair, a china doll poised precariously atop a satin pillow, but her eyes had been sharp and alive and possessed of terrible knowledge. She'd spoken when spoken to and accepted the proffered glass of chablis with a polite, "Yes, thank you, ma'am," but she had offered nothing of herself and kept her spidery, pale fingers threaded through Don's for most of the visit, extricating them long enough to eat or push herself from living room to dining room and seeking them out again with single-minded desperation when she was finished.
Of course she did. You suspected on that first night that she wasn't stupid by a long chalk, and subsequent encounters only confirmed your suspicions. Ana's fleeting lapse in decorum lasted no more than fifteen seconds, but it was more than enough for Rebecca to see through the foundation and rouge on her cheeks. She saw the shock and faded elation, and she knew exactly what it meant. Not even through the door, and her potential future mother-in-law had found her lacking.
Don saw it, too. You know he did because his hand tightened around hers as he pulled her into the apartment after him, and he hovered around and beside her as long as she wanted him to be there. He never said a word about his mother's actions-not then, during the wine and small talk, and not later, when the conversation had moved to the dinner table and turned to the matters of her family and her education and all those carefully gilded questions crafted to expose fatal weakness-but his thumb constantly stroked the back of Rebecca's hand in lazy circles, and you knew right then who would win if push came to shove, who he would choose.
"Are you sure, Don? I mean, have you thought this through?" Ana asked, and groped for her glass of water.
Don took a desultory bite of pork chop. "Course I'm sure. I wouldn'ta asked her if I wasn't. 'Sides, what's there to think about? We're good for each other, and we love each other, and that's it."
"No, that isn't it. It takes more than love to build a marriage," she protested.
Don was undeterred. "Oh, yeah? Tell me, Ma, what'd you and Pop have besides love when you got married? If I remember correctly, you were just outta high school, and he was a wet-behind-the-ears beat cop with a billyclub, a badge, and a pisshole apartment on the lower East Side."
"Watch your mouth at my table. And that's different."
Don snorted. "Why? Because Rebecca ain't runnin' track for NYU?"
"That's not fair."
"Damn right, it isn't," Don agreed, and leaned forward, elbows propped on the table and fingers interlaced in front of him. "So why do you insist on makin' a big deal out of it? She works her ass off as a graduate assistant on top of her studyin', and NYU's thinkin' about offerin' her an associate professor position when she gets her Masters. She's not on the goddamn dole, and she doesn't spend her days on Fifth Avenue, blowin' money she doesn't have."
I also pounded out 785 words of Mulderfic. Since I'm working with the very limited knowledge of S1, it is more general on character specifics than I would like, but I'm confident that when finished, it will be able to stand among the astoundingly prolific and prodigious body of Xfic with no shame.
And now, fic sneak peeks:
"Darkness Falls"-X-Files
Fox Mulder was afraid of the dark. He had seen a thousand inexplicable, terrifying sights in the daylight or the stark, unforgiving light of clandestine laboratories and military bases without name, and aside from wonder or the occasional spasm of revulsion, he had remained unfazed, able to gaze into the twisted face of impossibility without blinking. His colleagues at the FBI might have shaken their heads and called him mad as they sipped tepid coffee indistinguishable from the styrofoam cup that held it, might have snickered and called him Spooky, but none of them had ever questioned his dedication to his madness or his courage under fire.
But the dark…the dark unmanned him. It was impartial abettor to the things that went bump in the night, indifferent to the notions of righteousness and mercy to children and the aged and broken. It concealed the grinning, leering faces of the monsters that waited with puckered mouths and bulbous eyes to steal you from your bed, but it didn't protect you from them. If it were capricious and you were lucky, it bought you a few extra heartbeats and sour breaths before the end came, but that was all. It vanished with the rising of the sun or the flipping of a switch and left in its wake the evidence of things not seen. Sometimes it was a red smear or a waxy, motionless body with glazed, milkglass eyes. Sometimes, in its wickeder, crueler moments, it left no trace at all, and that was worse.
So he avoided the dark as much as he could. He often slept with the light on or on the couch with the wan, spectral glow of the television set to keep the creeping shadows at bay. It was easier that way, harder to hear the furtive, greedy slither of the shadows over the blare of infomercials or the sibilant, crackling hiss of white noise. Deprived of absolute silence, his brain was unable to conjure the nightmares from which he awoke screaming, keening like a rabbit in a strangling, lethal snare, and when he closed his eyes in the presence of light, the void behind his eyelids was black or green, not the diseased red of drying blood and military quarantine and underground bunkers with no exits.
The nature of his job brought him into frequent contact with that which he despised, and when circumstances forced his hand, he squared his jaw and stepped into the abyss. He hated it, but there was no choice; he would not allow the truth to elude him because the darkness in which it hid turned his stomach into a hot, throbbing knot of apprehension and set his teeth inside his mouth. His heart pounded, and his mouth tasted of alum and alkali, sticky and slick, but he pressed forward on heavy, unsteady feet, gun pointed ahead, a divining rod and .9mm totem against the evil that crouched in the blackness around the next bend or corner. He forged ahead because he knew that if he stopped even for the briefest of moments, he would never start again. He would simply stand where he was until the wind or the damp rot wore away his features and smoothed them to perfect blankness with nimble, sculpting fingers or until fear and uncertainty disarticulated him from the inside out and he crumpled to the floor in a jumble of grey bone and cheap wool suit.
The dark was cunning and feral and insidious. It drifted like smoke against winter-frosted or summer-scorched windowpanes and crept around cornices on padded velvet feet, sly and ever waiting for its opportunity to slither into the unguarded niches of the world-the faded, yellowing crack in the kitchen wallpaper or the hairline crevice in the bathroom grout. It clung to your skin in a malignant miasma and coated your nostrils like soot, seeking out your vulnerabilities with adroit, malevolent fingers, and when he escaped its clutches and stumbled into the scalding daylight, he dusted his hands over his body in a desperate, unthinking attempt to rid himself of its gritty, carcinogenic taint. The dark was poison, and each time it touched him, he shuddered and prayed that it would pass him by. So far, he'd been lucky, but luck was a fickle bedfellow, and he was under no illusion that it would last.
"Home Fires Burning"-CSI:NY
Don Flack, Sr. watched his son and namesake from across the table, prudently silent behind the scant protection afforded by his fork. Experience told him that things were about to turn ugly, indeed, between his wife and his boy, and he was tempted to flee the field of battle for the comforting solitude of the den and the replay of the Islanders game on ESPN2, but getting up would inevitably draw attention to himself, and so he hunkered over his plate and studied the whorls left in the whipped potatoes by the tines of his shielding flatware.
"You what?" his wife shrieked. "When?"
"I asked Rebecca to marry me last night, Ma." Calm, almost flat, but he could hear the tension beneath, brittle and sharp as jagged glass.
"That girl?" his wife said. "The one in the…in the chair?" The last was a breathy cry of incredulity, as though Don had just uttered obscenities at the table.
He chanced a glimpse at Don and groaned inwardly. His face was expressionless, but his jaw twitched, and his eyes blazed inside their sockets. His broad shoulders were set, and he was clutching his napkin in one fisted hand.
Don wiped his mouth with the wadded napkin and set his fork on the side of the plate with deliberate delicacy. "Yeah, Ma. That girl. Unless you think I got four or five Rebeccas and change 'em like underwear."
His wife bristled, and he sank lower in his chair. Fuck me, he thought miserably, and took a sip of iced tea.
"Don't get smart," she snapped. "I'm your mother."
Just leave it, Ana. For God's sake, just congratulate him, hold your tongue, and unload your disappointment on me when he goes home. It's what you're gonna do anyway.
It was too much to hope for, of course. Ana had never held her tongue in thirty-four years of marriage. He might have been the cock of the walk with the boys at the precinct, but she ruled the household with an iron fist and apron strings of tempered iron. Not a hair was out of place, and her children's lives had been planned in intimate detail from the moment of their conception. Everything in its proper time and place, and nowhere in the carefully plotted course of her only son's life had there been room for someone like Rebecca.
He could still remember the dizzy, twitterpated joy with which she'd greeted the announcement that Don was bringing someone home for dinner. She'd spent the entire week cleaning the apartment, on her knees on the kitchen floor with a sponge and a bucket, scouring marks that only she could see, and when there was no more cleaning to occupy her mind, she'd bustled to the market and come back with more food than anyone could possibly eat, most of which had gone untouched. She had been beside herself with anticipation, so sure that her long-nurtured dreams of pink-faced grandchildren were come at last. The day of the dinner, she'd paced to and fro in the living room, nervous and expectant and fidgeting with her necklace or his tie, and peered out the peephole every time footsteps sounded in the hallway outside.
Then the knock had come, and when the door had swung open, her joy had evaporated. He'd felt it go, as jarring and sudden as the bursting of a bubble on the point of a blade. One moment, she'd been standing in the threshold with her arms thrown wide and her lips fixed in a welcoming smile, and the next, the smile had frozen into a bewildered grimace, her eyes wide and stunned as they settled on the sleek, metal frame and utilitarian gray wheels. The cheerful greeting had died in her throat, and her arms had wavered, drooped into the stark T of crucifixion. She and Rebecca had stared at one another in mute appraisal, and then Don had broken the awkward stalemate by asking, in a voice too loud and too boisterous, if they could come inside.
Ana had recovered her gracious aplomb by the time the door had closed behind them, but the damage had been done. The air of giddy jubilance had curdled into an atmosphere of cautious civility and carefully concealed hurt on both sides. Rebecca might have been fragile and impossibly small in her chair, a china doll poised precariously atop a satin pillow, but her eyes had been sharp and alive and possessed of terrible knowledge. She'd spoken when spoken to and accepted the proffered glass of chablis with a polite, "Yes, thank you, ma'am," but she had offered nothing of herself and kept her spidery, pale fingers threaded through Don's for most of the visit, extricating them long enough to eat or push herself from living room to dining room and seeking them out again with single-minded desperation when she was finished.
Of course she did. You suspected on that first night that she wasn't stupid by a long chalk, and subsequent encounters only confirmed your suspicions. Ana's fleeting lapse in decorum lasted no more than fifteen seconds, but it was more than enough for Rebecca to see through the foundation and rouge on her cheeks. She saw the shock and faded elation, and she knew exactly what it meant. Not even through the door, and her potential future mother-in-law had found her lacking.
Don saw it, too. You know he did because his hand tightened around hers as he pulled her into the apartment after him, and he hovered around and beside her as long as she wanted him to be there. He never said a word about his mother's actions-not then, during the wine and small talk, and not later, when the conversation had moved to the dinner table and turned to the matters of her family and her education and all those carefully gilded questions crafted to expose fatal weakness-but his thumb constantly stroked the back of Rebecca's hand in lazy circles, and you knew right then who would win if push came to shove, who he would choose.
"Are you sure, Don? I mean, have you thought this through?" Ana asked, and groped for her glass of water.
Don took a desultory bite of pork chop. "Course I'm sure. I wouldn'ta asked her if I wasn't. 'Sides, what's there to think about? We're good for each other, and we love each other, and that's it."
"No, that isn't it. It takes more than love to build a marriage," she protested.
Don was undeterred. "Oh, yeah? Tell me, Ma, what'd you and Pop have besides love when you got married? If I remember correctly, you were just outta high school, and he was a wet-behind-the-ears beat cop with a billyclub, a badge, and a pisshole apartment on the lower East Side."
"Watch your mouth at my table. And that's different."
Don snorted. "Why? Because Rebecca ain't runnin' track for NYU?"
"That's not fair."
"Damn right, it isn't," Don agreed, and leaned forward, elbows propped on the table and fingers interlaced in front of him. "So why do you insist on makin' a big deal out of it? She works her ass off as a graduate assistant on top of her studyin', and NYU's thinkin' about offerin' her an associate professor position when she gets her Masters. She's not on the goddamn dole, and she doesn't spend her days on Fifth Avenue, blowin' money she doesn't have."
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