The X-Files Love Month

Hello, everyone. I'm SZ. I confirmed to Wendy that I was still planning to post yesterday, and then... well, the truth is that I fell asleep with my glasses on, and when I woke up I was forced to deal with the fact that it was unavoidably Sunday, but can I just say I lost time? :P Sorry, Red, for trespassing on your day.

I started watching The X-Files when I had the flu.

I missed the show when it aired; I was so disconnected from popular culture that I was entirely unaware of it, despite being a fan of sci fi, until I caught a few episodes in college. And I do mean a few- two, I believe, both MOTWs from the middle seasons, which didn't make enough of impression to get me watching on my own. It wasn't until years later that I became a fan- and it happened, as I said, when I had the flu. My then-partner was also sick, and we were posted up in the guest bedroom to avoid contaminating our usual bed- a strange decision, given that we were both afflicted, but neither of us was thinking clearly. We were sleeping in fits and starts, dragging ourselves downstairs periodically to make tea, and it seemed an excellent time to take advantage of a free week's trial of Hulu Plus. And so, The X-Files.

I don't know what time it was, but it felt like the middle of the night.  I was disconnected from all the usual rhythms of daily life, lying on a pile of pillows in the guest bedroom with my thoughts drifting, trying to ignore all of the unpleasant bodily sensations that go along with flu, and it was winter so the view out the window was usually dark. There's a sense of unreality that can come when you're ill, or at least when I am, as though the world shrinks down to the room, fever and chills and tea and tissues, like the feeling of drifting under the surface of consciousness, not quite asleep but not really awake either. And so my experience of season one was oddly dreamlike, vivid, slightly surreal--my state of mind was curiously appropriate, I think now, for the show's mixture of the strange and eerie with the mundane--and that initial impression has stayed with me. Perhaps there's a touch of fever to my obsessive love for The X-Files.

I had hoped to have a fic to post, but although I've been trying to improve I am truly terrible at finishing stories. I'm quite proficient at starting them, though, and so what I have to offer is a selection of eleven fragments arrayed in order from pre-series to post. Some of these represent my very first attempts at writing these characters, others are recent ideas; some were inspired by moments in canon, some by prompts and tumblr posts, and some by who knows what corner of my brain. Only one of them (1) has been posted anywhere before. I hope to develop at least one of them into a complete story in time for the free-for-all on Mulder's birthday.

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