Be Mad or Chill

[amyhit]

Title: Be Mad or Chill, Obsessed with Angels
Summary: 'cannot be bitter, cannot deny, cannot withhold'
Spoliers: DeadAlive
Disclaimer: I disclaim it.

Beta thanks go to tree , who lent me her eyes when mine were too close to the words to focus. What fine vision she has.

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Comments

[frey_at_last]

I'm glad you've posted this, and I hope you post more of your stuff from the Unnameable Site.

What I love about this story is: As it goes along, it sticks on details and half-impressions and you almost can't see what's going on. But by the last part with the alarm set to PM, which is my favorite, the whole mood tells itself. It's also great to have a lot of fragmented moments and memories and then in the middle, Mulder and Scully really encountering each other over their baby. It gives it some nice emotional ballast.

Also, I adore apartmentfic, where Mulder's apartment is another character there with them. I like how they wander in and out, and in a sense Mulder's apartment is like that, not a real place; but in another way it feels so familiar and so homey, like another part of Mulder's body. Granted I have a lot of preconceived associations going in, but you call that feeling up very distinctly in this piece, I think.

[amyhit]

As it goes along ... you almost can't see what's going on. But by the last part with the alarm set to PM ... the whole mood tells itself.

being literal is difficult for me and staying grounded in the reality of the scene is a real challenge. my writing tends to be almost crippled in how internal to itself it is. tree helped me a lot, pushing me (kindly) to ground it a bit more and set the scene. i'm so relieved it comes through in the end. thank you.

I adore apartmentfic

i was introduced to the beautiful beastie that is mulder's apartment through this quote from 'Para':

--the things that were so exclusively his - his Eurotrash couch, the picture of the Andromeda galaxy over his TV, his glass and soldered rebar shelves. The room
itself was narrow, cramped and moody, exactly like Mulder.

after that i was hooked. his apartment suddenly struck me as such a wonderful place, and, as you said, a character of its own. *sigh* one of these days Pen is going to stop giving me reasons to fangirl her. one of these days.

[mack_the_spoon]

I really wanted there to be more of this!
It feels very much like them at this point in the show.

[amyhit]

thank you. i usually try to write the kind of fics that are left a little short, so i'm glad you wanted to read more.

[hlbr]

I really enjoyed it. It has a strong undercurrent of feeling, like anxiety, while in the surface it's very sedate, I think it's the word. That's what it made me feel, anyway.

I liked these lines, particularly:

What their mouths say and what they mean has become more and more incongruous.

His hand is warm and stationary as they wait for the child to kick again. Beside them in the murky tank the fish dart by, flashing their orange sides through the silt.

There is a mixture of poetry and simplicity in your prose that I really like.

And... Uhm, hi! I'm hele. I came by, from friends' friends, I think. Ah, I know, from tree's journal. I'm glad I clicked. :D

[amyhit]

Hi! yes, i recognize you too. i'm pretty sure i've seen you around everywhere - kind of like that neighbor one has yet to talk to.

i'm glad you felt that dynamic between anxiety and sedation. by the 8th season mulder and scully are both such ponderous people - that is, they carry so much history and knowledge and feeling with them, that i felt like there had to be a certain calm, quietness about them. they're like sages - who knows what they're thinking? - theirs so much depth in them.

glad you came by.

[wendelah1]

You really have captured the mood of that era: the way they seem to circle each other endlessly, the distance between them, the weird silences, the strangeness of Scully thinking with Mulder's brain.

I like the two apples, one with the bite missing, Mulder's fall from grace. I love the lonely toothbrush waiting for its mate,the clock's lost time, the fish that she thought would die.

It is intriguing that you see the distancing as originating in her; as I watched, I saw the opposite. Something for me to ponder. It's like he's not real in her mind, she's so afraid to believe.

God, he is breathing, he is really breathing.

I love the poem, too.

[amyhit]

It is intriguing that you see the distancing as originating in her; as I watched, I saw the opposite. Something for me to ponder.

i think that's what i was doing too, just pondering. i don't like the idea that the tension between them was solely from mulder's side. i do see him as being reticent, but it seemed to me like they were being reticent with each other. they were reacting to the cues they were picking up from each other and it was a question of 'chicken or egg' as to which came first. And i kept feeling that i would be dis-empowering Scully to say she didn't take responsibility for a lot of that tension, whether it was her doing or not.

I'm flattered that you took the time to read into my fic and take the subtexts and metaphoric aspects to heart. the chance to write indirectly about complicated matters through metaphor is probably the key reason i write, so i love that you would pay the finished product that mind.

[leucocrystal]

This is a lovely, painful and awkward, yet somehow perfect moment in time. It was difficult to watch them interact at that point, and this is difficult to read (and I mean that in the good way, because it matches what was on the screen, if that makes sense). Unlike Wendy, I definitely saw distance coming from Scully at the time, even though it was pretty clear she wanted to act or speak more than she did; I used to think of S8!Scully, post-Mulder's return, as almost frozen by shock. Ironic, considering they both really needed her to reach out then, I think.

What their mouths say and what they mean has become more and more incongruous. It’s an intuitive code between them alone, and since his return she worries they are losing the intricacies of it, with no one to carry on the tradition.These lines in particular stood out to me. They address both what the characters are going through and what the audience was at the same time, watching them, almost. Or at least that's how I felt when I read it

[amyhit]

I used to think of S8!Scully, post-Mulder's return, as almost frozen by shock. Ironic, considering they both really needed her to reach out then, I think.

yes. i saw her as being frozen by shock, and also just by the pure insurmountable weight of what she was feeling. because i don't think the pain of the loss stops once mulder's back. he was still lost to her and that pain stays. and with him back she has to take the additional emotional pummeling of feeling joy and gladness and relief and THEN the reticence because their relationship was so new when he was taken, so is it going to be different now?

i should be clear, this isn't supposed to all be in the fic. i'm just chatting meta with you now, but i'm so glad you read this and enjoyed it.

[leucocrystal]

I definitely agree. I always hated how they completely dropped the ball on Mulder's post-traumatic stress (which I still believe he HAS to be suffering from because he apparently remembers enough from his experience), and just sort of settled for making Mulder and Scully awkward around one another. That's why I love pieces like this that explore their seriously shifted dynamic at about this point, even though it definitely tends to be painful reading. (How about painfully necessary?)

And believe me, I'm always happy to chat meta with you! :)

[amyhit]

(How about painfully necessary?)

*whirls around and flails* SO F'ing TRUE!

i have this major intellectual fixation with PTSD and how it manifests. it's strange how the fandom essentially took all responsibility for give the characters their due pain. it sounds like a strange thing to say, but i think if something damaging is experienced then the characters deserve the right to feel the pain of what they've been through. the fact that CC habitually denied them that right was interesting, and it made the characters interesting. i think it made them easy to feel empathy for - that they weren't given opportunity to let it influence their lives. in fact, i tend to feel compelled to feel their pain for them so that it won't fall entirely by the wayside.

that suppression of human responses was at times a brilliant and much beloved dynamic of the story, but there were other times when it felt almost insulting. like an oversight.