Life During Wartime

Fanfiction
Title:	Life During Wartime
Author(s):	several
Date(s):	1999-2000
Length:	112,646 words
Genre:	het, POV, Gen, post-colonization
Fandom:	X-Files
External Links:	online here at Archive of Our Own
Click here for related articles on Fanlore.

Life During Wartime is an X-Files story by cofax7 with Fialka, Maria Nicole, and Marasmus.

A fan comments in 2011:

One of the things that makes Life During Wartime so unique is the way it was written: Four authors who had already contributed many well-read fics to our fandom got together and collaborated on writing this one massive, often wrenching, unusually poignant adventure. They took turns, they wrote compassionately but unflinchingly, and over a period of several years (yup, years) they wrote some of their best work. In the end there were fifteen interconnected stories, ranging anywhere from one page in length to over a hundred pages. All together they make up Life During Wartime. It's the story of colonization from an impressive array of POVs, it covers a lot of ground, and spans a fair amount of time. It's got wholesale destruction, small scale devastation, terror, helplessness, bravery, hope, love -- plus the whole XF gang doing the very best they can amidst the pandemonium.

One of the Authors Comments: 2011

Huh. Well, I don't want to put anyone on the spot or challenge anyone, but I figured I'd just drop in with a few comments and then go away--I certainly don't want anyone to feel like they need to watch what they say. Because seriously, it's been eons in fannish time since this series was written and none of us are so thin-skinned that we'll get our feelings hurt over anything anyone has to say about it now.

That said: LDW is my baby. I wrote it and co-wrote it with Maria, Marasmus, and Fialka (and brainstormed with Lena and I'm still sad she never finished/posted the story she was working on), but I wrote the first story and came up with the basic framework.

The first story was What Good Are Notebooks, and it was written totally off-the-cuff in response to an essay I saw on Salon.com: a piece by a woman who had had 30 minutes to pack to get away from the Oakland firestorm of 1989. I saw that and thought, "What would Scully pack?" And that was how it started. Notebooks is listed second on the master page for obvious reasons, but it was the first story written.

Maria then asked if she could write Mulder's part of the story, and I (of course) said yes, and it all rumbled on from there. I owe a great debt to the folks on Scullyfic, who were extremely enthusiastic and supportive of the project, and not in any way bashful about prodding me with pointed sticks when they felt I should be writing more quickly. The formula on the slip of paper that Krycek gives Skinner was derived by Nevdull, or by her boyfriend, I can't remember. It is, so far as I know, accurate in what it purports to convey.

I cannot say that a firm and hard outline was developed early on. The point was, as some of the commenters have said, that so many post-col stories, even excellent ones, (a) were entirely focused on Moose & Squirrel; and (b) tended to pass over the process of colonization and skip to the aftermath. I wanted to deal with how it happened and how people reacted in the moment. I wanted, in fact, the messy logistics.

The mytharc (as you know) is a mess. The story began early in season 6, I believe, so we chose as our mytharc foundation the aliens we saw in the first movie. Given how inconsistent the mytharc ended up being, I never got any complaints about that. *g*

As for the later parts of the series, there are chunks of the story which are missing (as anyone who has read the entire series knows). I feel bad about never telling Langly's story, or what happened, specifically, to Ari, but by the time I wrote the last story, which became known in my circle as the Mandatory Attendance Finale, I was well out of the fandom. It was very hard to go back and finish, after having wandered off into Farscape and (I think) SG-1 by that point.

We had great plans for Krycek at one point. And Diana Fowley and Bill Scully, who were supposed to end up on a submarine somehow... but life gets away from you sometimes.

In any event, y'all should know that Marasmus cast Charlie Scully: he is played by Damien Lewis, and I had no idea who he was when she told me his name. I've since learned better. *grins*

(And for anyone who wades through to the very end: yes, there is a giant steel ball in a courtyard at Fort Detrick. And yes, it's on the National Register of Historic Places. And yes, I was told it was used for testing biological agents on "volunteer prisoners".)

Anyway, I'm really happy y'all are enjoying the series. It's very gratifying to see people still reading something I wrote over a decade ago. (!!!)

Chapters

1. High on a Hillside by Maria Nicole

2. What Good Are Notebooks by cofax

3. A Place Where Nobody Knows by Maria Nicole

4. No Time for Dancing by cofax

5. What You Don't Know by Marasmus

6. Stand By the Window or, Things to Do in Dulwich When You're Dead by Marasmus

7. Held Nor Free by cofax

8. Getting Used to Gunfire by cofax

9. Whose Frail Warmth by cofax and Maria Nicole

10. Cheating the God of Fire by cofax

11. Breakdown by cofax, a drabble

12. Fimbulwinter by cofax and marasmus

13. The Unfathomable Distance of Stars by Fialka

Reactions and Reviews

2011

The Post-Colonization Series That Dragged Me Kicking and Screaming Into This Fandom: Life During Wartime by cofax7, finisterre (Marasmus), fialka, and Maria Nicole. This was the first(!)story in The X-Files universe that I attempted. I got lost pretty quickly since I started reading it in 2005 when I hadn't actually seen most of the series.

A Place Where Nobody Knows: It's strange that a colonization fic also provides some of the best Teena/CGB characterization out there. Teena Mulder is not who I typically think of when I think of the alien apocalypse, yet LDW includes her, and it's great because really she has more experience with the Consortium's machinations than just about anybody else still standing. LDW is so good at actually acknowledging the mytharc - how far reaching and how deep the roots of it go. APWNK delves deeply into the human cost of the conspiracy. Teena's is the first death, like a foretelling. And by making it an intimate death - by showing CGB in an ugly human light even as he comes to assassinate her - it makes every death that's to follow feel that much more real. Teena is one of the Consortium's longest-suffering victims, but all the people who are about to die are essentially dying in the same snare.

Plus APWNK strengthens the structure of the fic by linking it to part one, with the phone call Mulder made that we now know Teena receives but doesn't answer. The timeline is so clear for these first few chaotic hours that you could make a detailed whiteboard chart of where people are and what they're doing at any given time.

My favorite line from this one is, without contest: Silence. Noise. It might be my favorite description of character death ever, though I've always been a little sad that Maria wrote those last three sentences after it, to end the fic. I would have loved the fic to have ended on just those two words.

The ending to this actually made me well up. It is dignified, in some strange way, and that is fitting for Teena.

I agree, partially anyway, though I don't forgive Teena her willfull ignorance. I think there's a strange mix of pathos and dignity in APWNK. It's interesting the way Teena - who has let cowardice get the better of her for so long - becomes the self-possessed one, and CGB becomes the weak one in the hour of her death. He has nothing left to bargain with, since the only power he's ever truly had is other people's fear.

There is great power both in "A Place Where Nobody Knows" and "Stand by the Window." They're both suicide pieces, examinations of what people do when the options disappear, and this includes the passive Teena and the disapproving WMM, who inhabit opposite sides of the schism. In an odd way they are alike: a woman capable of loving but no strength to fight for those loved, a man capable of humane choices but too complaisant to exert authority. They both allowed their opportunities to slip away unnoticed, and at the end they are drinking tea and waiting to cease existing.

A Place Where Nobody Knows: I'll just come out and say it. After rereading this a couple of times, I have to say, I'm not crazy about this story. Considering how few stories there are are about Teena Mulder, let alone good stories, I guess I should be grateful that it got written at all. I'm a little confused by the characterization. When this was written, was it canon or fanon that Teena and Spender had an affair? I guess it doesn't matter since I don't like it either way.

I do like that she tries here to save her son and Scully, too, that she recognizes that by this time, saving him necessarily means Scully's life can't be forfeit because he can't go on without her.

But this passage really bothered me.

She wonders what he sees as he stands there and looks at her. An old, white-haired old woman, sitting in the middle of the floor, scalp starting to become pinkly visible through thinning hair. An old woman, looking over memories before the world becomes a violent, dangerous, unsafe place. A place that he is determined to protect her from.

Teena Mulder was born in 1941. She was only twenty or twenty-one at most when she had Mulder. If this is set in season six, Mulder is thirty-eight, which would make her fifty-eight, the same age I am going to be on my up-coming birthday. Here she's describing herself as not just old, but "old, old." She uses the word "old" twice in the same sentence. Her hair is not only white but thinning, too, so much so that her scalp shows. Good golly. Not that this doesn't happen at fifty-eight but to me, this sounds like it should be describing Mulder's grandmother, not Teena Mulder. Maybe I'm just nit-picking here. But it bothers me.

And--although she does not think he admits this to himself--a place where she would be a liability, a reminder of his weakness.

And where he would be a reminder of hers.

Throughout this, it feels like she's blaming herself for what has happened, not just to Samantha, but to Mulder, too. Maybe that's realistic. Maybe she would be blaming herself for not protecting her child from harm. But in fanfiction, this scenario always feels like blaming the victim to me. I just don't see how she could have stopped it, or helped the situation in any way. What difference would it have made for her to have told Mulder whatever version of "the truth" she was given by her husband and Cancer Man. I've watched the series from beginning to end several times through and I'm still not clear on what exactly did happen to Samantha so I don't know that she would be any better informed.

This is still a powerfully told story but I liked it better when I read it the first time before I knew who the characters were.

I'm not usually a fan of first person narration in TXF, mainly - I suppose - because first person is a much more intimate way of engaging with a character and, because each of us have our own differing opinions of who Mulder and Scully are, I don't think any XF fic writer is good enough to write them in first person.

However, I really enjoyed the first person narratives we have so far in this series. Using more secondary characters like Charlie, Frohike and Maggie Scully in first person gives us the feeling of intimacy that's always useful in a story like this, when we need to get as close to the characters as possible to feel what they're going through, but because none of these characters are as well define in the series as Mulder and Scully are, we don't feel that same bond, which allows us to read first person more easily (and by us and we, read I and me).

I like how Frohike is still identifiably Frohike, but he's also more than 'simply' the short gut with the hots for Scully. I like seeing his take on the relationship with Langly and Byers, which is much more complicated than it's often suggested as being in the show (I haven't seen The Lone Gunmen, where I imagine the relationship is different, so I'm basing this comment on TXF). I like the idea that Byers might have betrayed the LG, because that seems so at odds with how I perceive Byers, and seeing it through Frohike's eyes make it more interesting.

Similarly, seeing Mulder and Scully through Maggie's eyes makes me think of them in different ways.

High on a Hillside: I'm trying to decide if this would be a good fic on its own. Maybe. The writing is certainly good enough to carry it. But most of what I like so much about HOAH is that it's such a level-headed beginning. It's not the immediate horror-show/thrill-ride that is so common of apocafic. It doesn't drop you in the middle of an apocalypse as a way of subverting questions and getting out of doing the figurative footwork. HOAH actually grounds you in the experience.

Maria Nicole does such a consistently good job of filling in details here and details there - making it real over the course of several pages. Yet it still feels like an action fic, because it's so peripatetic. Mulder's doing everything at once - he's on the phone, he's packing, he's in the bedroom, he's in the living room, he's looking out the window. It even takes about the same amount of time to read as the time that passes in the story. HOAH is also peripatetic in the sense that our focus keeps getting jerked around.

There are things in the writing grounding the fic to the past, which reinforces its believability, makes it feel real. Mulder's thinking about all the times he and Scully have spoken on their cell phones, he's thinking about cases they've worked together, he's thinking about her childhood as a Captain's daughter, he's thinking about the time he read through the bible during a profiling case. He's thinking about his apartment and all the dangerous, conspiratorial things that have happened there.

But we also find out a few bits of information about the future that makes it feel real too. Mulder's thinking ahead to when they get to Maggie's house where they'll have to get food for the road. Frohike tells him they'll meet up again in a month at the rendezvous point, and to watch out for roadblocks. Just those couple of things do so much for this story. You're not left floundering in the moment, you already have some idea of what's to come.

Plus, there's a vividness to what's going on in the moment, if you can manage to focus on it. Byers is wearing jeans. Mulder calls his mother but hasn't prepared what to say on the answering machine. The shelves are full of music and books - things that give our world substance and definition, but don't mean anything from a survivalist viewpoint. There's a box of ammo on the bed, sneakers on the floor, somewhere shadowy scientists and bureaucrats are running scared, find the frequency and you'll hear military evacuation orders, but the SAC on the Paneski case has no idea and he wants Mulder to come help him save a little girl's life.

A lesser fic wouldn't have an eye for all these details. What do details matter when you've got an apocalypse on your hands, right? But establishing a baseline of realism is what LDW does that most apocafics don't take nearly as much time or care on. I wasn't a huge fan of HOAH at first. I felt like it was bogged down in details. But I think that's what a story like this one needs in the long run, is a solid foundation. It gives a kind of maturity to the writing that is really nice.

High on a Hillside: This is the first time I've read these stories (I'm glad to see other people commenting that they haven't read them before, either. It makes me wonder how many other fandom classics I've passed by). I do think High on a Hillside stands well on its own, as an interesting story.

I really like the way Maria Nicole includes pertinent detail without being overly wordy or descriptive. I love Mulder's contemplation and collection of his music and books--in the same way I love looking at other people's bookshelves, there's something that really appeals to me about finding out what my favourite characters read, what they think is important or entertaining.

Also, it resonates with me because it is the kind of "desert island" game we can play any day, to speculate, for fun. What books would we take, if we were never going to be able to read anything else again? What will sustain us, give us knowledge, make us laugh, give us hope?

I liked the link between the Paneski case (and the everyday part of M&S's lives in the FBI that involves investigation and police work) and what's happening in the bigger picture. And the link between the girl already being "in hell", and what's coming for the world. It's pretty creepy.

I found Mulder calling his mother to be quite affecting--I didn't expect that. I guess it's the idea that they've never been close (at least that we've seen--contrast his relationship with his mother with Scully's with her own), but she's his mother and he's coming to this realization that he's not going to be able to help her. Priorities, again: what can he save? Who can he save?

What Good Are Notebooks: I'm not as much of a fan of part two as I am of part one. I do like that it was written, though. It wasn't really necessary, because HOAH has already told us so much about what's going on. But it feels right that if we get Mulder's experience from the get go, we should also have Scully's. If LDW hadn't paired them up so automatically at the start, I think the fic would have felt off balance. Right from the start Mulder and Scully's relationship is a center pin in the emotional structure of the story.

Held Nor Free: It's funny, I'm usually a bit of a Mulder and Scully elitist, someone who doesn't have a ton of interest in the secondary characters. But I think LDW is better than other apocafics largely because it has a scope and a realism it couldn't have if it focused on only Mulder and Scully.

I've read quite a few apocafics that focus on nothing but Mulder and Scully's experience, and they can be really good fics. But I do sometimes feel like it's too simple to be real: Bring on the pain, tug on the heartstrings, never mind what an apocalypse would actually be like, just make it angsty and tragic for Moose and Squirrel. I appreciate LDW for being gritty without actually reveling in the pain of it all, and for not being content to give me a Mulder&Scully apocalypse. There's a big wide world out there - ending. Krycek is standing in Skinner's apartment when he comes back, and I find myself wondering where he was before he was with Skinner, and where he goes after he boots Skinner in the head and leaves. Even the last line of HNF, when Skinner hurls his liquor glass out over the city at dawn - when I read that my attention goes with the glass, out into the city to catch a glimpse of what's going on out there.

I love that the city's power goes out while Skinner is unconscious. The inability to pinpoint the exact moment, but the knowledge of approximately when it happened, is eerie without being overly dramatic.

I also love that Mulder and Scully are still the invisible center of HNF. It isn't about them, but threads of tension tie them to things happening all over the place. Krycek comes to Skinner because Skinner may be able to get information to them, and Skinner is doing what he's doing because he's loyal to them. They're also the center of APWNK, as Teena pleads for their lives, and of SBTW, as the Well Manicured Man spends his last hours thinking of them. Without making it unrealistically all about them, LDW still makes them the common element in all these people's experiences. They're like a watchword.

This really is the story that got me into the X-files fandom. It is the first big X-Files story I read, off a link from cofax7's journal, where I'd been lurking for--several years. *cough*

Reading the story arc again and looking at it more analytically, it seems like an odd choice, except when I factor in that I'm a gen person who likes complicated plots. I also love apocafic. I think the story effectively introduces the major and minor characters, while killing some of them off at the get-go. Coming from the SG-1 fandom, this didn't faze me--we killed off our characters all of the time in fic. TPTB killed them, too, then brought them back to life when the ratings dropped.

It is a different, more poignant experience reading this as a member of the fandom rather than a drop-in guest. I know all of the writers' bodies of work well now, for example. I know who the characters are. I know about the complicated relationships between all of the characters. I'm not having to work so hard to get the nuances. But it is remarkable how much I did glean from just this one story and how well it sold the series as a whole.

I am very impressed with how the writers managed to keep all of their characterizations and world-views so consistent. I think the structure of the piece helps, with each writer assigned a different character to portray in setting up the larger story to follow. I assume the overall plot arc was mapped out well in advance? (If any of the writers is reading, feel free to jump in here.) I find myself wishing the myth-arc had been this well-planned by its creators.

Getting Used to Gunfire: I'm posting comments about "Getting Used to Gunfire" here because to me it feels very connected to the next story, "Whose Frail Warmth." It's told from Maggie Scully's pov and this is where the plot really gets rolling. It's useful to have a narrator who doesn't know what's going on, who can ask the questions the reader might want to know. We also get to observe Mulder and Scully from the vantage point of someone who isn't particularly sympathetic to their close partnership and states as much right up front. From Maggie, we get a clear picture of just how alienated from her family Scully has become due to her work on the X-files. Maggie also gets assigned the role of the skeptic, which frees Scully from that unenviable job. She gets a little testy with her daughter for not giving her the whole truth and then doesn't want to believe it when she does.

Whose Frail Warmth: spoilers: "Whose Frail Warmth" is the linchpin of the series for me. It's the most emotionally resonant story in part because I can so easily identify with the demands of caring for the sick and dying. The death of Maggie Scully is heart-breaking because she's Scully mother; otherwise, frankly, I don't find myself terribly invested in her, on screen or in fic. Scully is worn down in this story by the physical, emotional and mental demands of the work she is doing. But Scully is strong. The death of her mother is what nearly breaks her.

Some of the little details of this apocalypse worry me; for example, no one having a vehicle that works except for Mulder and Scully. It seems like out of a population of 1,500 people in a rural area of the South, someone should have an old truck without an electronic ignition sitting around their side yard and the know-how to get it running again. The overall time line has started to confuse me, too. In "Getting Used to Gunfire," there is a time stamp of December, 1999. But this story is labeled as taking place in the end of November. Those are small things and I'm probably only aware of them because I'm looking at the story so closely.

This one feels bigger.

Abruptly, she straightened in her seat and started to look through the piles of paper on her desk. "Which is why you don't need to feel guilty for leaving. You and Mulder and Maggie have done more for us, for strangers, than most of the people in this town have done for each other."

My mom comes from a small town in North Carolina near the Virginia border, and that's just not how I see this going down. Women would not be fighting over the last orange at the grocery store, for one thing because they have good manners and upbringing and they wouldn't want to shame their families, but also because so many would have a whole pantry of canned food they'd put up themselves back in the summertime. The rest of her speech sounds about right though.

"Yes, fine. It was--most of my patients today weren't from sickness. One came in with bruises and a broken ulna. She's a repeat patient, comes in about once a month or so after her husband beats her up. . . A man came in with an STD that he didn't want to tell his wife about. You'd think the end of the world would be dramatic, but it's all so small and sordid instead."

Maybe the doctor is just plain worn out.

I'm also not understanding where the need for distributing those germ-laden blankets would have arisen. Except for Mulder and Scully and Maggie, these people aren't refugees. They have blankets and quilts and and winter coats. They have beds to sleep in at home. I guess it makes sense for the sick to be centrally located at the high school gym given the lack of transportation, but how did they transport the patients there and why then do they nearly run down Dr. Claire out walking in the dark to see a patient?

Okay, so I'm nit-picking. It's what I do. Overall, what they do get right is more important than what they don't. The small town of Heniston, Tennessee as a microcosm of the rest of humanity feels right. Just like the illness acts like TB on steroid, this apocalypse feels like everything is breaking down much faster than anyone would have imagined, in part because the usual channels of aid have been compromised by the enemy within. Whatever the vector of transmission, the military intentionally infecting the population with not one but a carefully sequenced series of genetically engineered plagues is an ingenious and believable plot device. In an X-Files apocalypse, trust no one.

Maggie's death. You know it's coming. You know it's inevitable because of the structure of the story, beginning as it does with the scene at the gravesite. My favorite part of the story is its structure. Love it. Love that they can still keep the reader mesmerized even though the outcome is foretold. You simply feel compelled to read on to know how it happened and that allows the rest of the story to matter so much more than if it had been told in a more linear fashion. Really brilliant story-telling, that.

Breakdown: I love this little psuedo-drabble. It serves like a semicolon, creating a break between part 10 and 12, but using that break in order to make the transition feel more natural. The shift in gears comes at what would otherwise seem like an odd time. As a reader I've gotten used to them being on the go by this point, so the idea of them getting somewhere creates a dynamic shift that I think could have been problematic if Breakdown hadn't served to prepare me in advance. Plus, not that this is all that obscure or anything, but I love the double meaning of the title. It's the vehicle that's broken down, but the last sentence makes it chillingly clear that Mulder and Scully are a hair's breadth from utter breakdown themselves. The title and the last line turn the fic into something more than just a fragment of plot that otherwise wouldn't have the weight to stand as its own segment. They make Breakdown ominous and poignant in its own right.

This is something I've been thinking about Life During Wartime in general: aside from being a post-colonization story, it's a story with good characterization, solid writing, "hearable" dialogue. I'd recommend it as a good example of XF fiction, whether or not someone was interested in post-col, or mytharc-related stories at all. I was feeling overwhelmed, but I think I got a lot of clarity back in this story. Even though there's a bunch of new characters added and more added to the story, it's simply told and the detail is telling but kind of implied, more than at the foreground. It has a really visual feel for me. Like a movie, more than a story. And I love Frohike and I love stories that treat him as more than comic relief.

The Unfathomable Distance of Stars: I have a special feeling about this story because it deals with the Samantha who appeared in the diner and ran from Mulder in panic. That's the Samantha who should have been honored as a real person, but CC dispensed with her quite dishonestly.

Imagine being drugged for your whole life, and having the courage to kick it just as the world ends. Imagine the double sense of panic, the yearning combined with the undeniable end of things. Samantha is a true sacrificial lamb, though to no merciful god.

And imagine living out the rituals of an affectionate marriage, bearing children, yet sensing that your mate had been more or less assigned to be your caregiver. Does Jason love Samantha? Yes, as two victimized human beings will love each other in intense circumstances; they are both human, their flesh is warm, they know each other better than any others. But they have been cheated of an honest human history. They never had romantic love, they never had a genuine argument, they never got a divorce. All they have are two sons that they now know will die.

2015

I admire LDW enormously, but in truth, this fic is almost on my list as a matter of principle. Because, IMO, it's quite far out in front as the best colonization fic there is. LDW sets the standard. It's possibly the only colonization fic that deals carefully and realistically with colonization, without skipping major details or huge chunks of time, and without being either noir or decidedly optimistic. What it does is capture the scope of colonization, in a balanced, objective way, with M&S at the center.

2017

Many moons ago when we first ventured into the world of fanfiction, this particular post col story had been floating around. It was one of those stories that you know you’re going to read someday, but today just isn’t that day. It was one that was always on the ‘to-read’ list. Well, philes, that day has come and passed finally, and we are excitedly presenting it to you for Novel Length Friday.

Today’s rec is an epic story starting from the very beginning of the colonization, the experiences written from the points of view of many different characters. The authors skillfully take the reader on a wild ride, taking much of what we know and expect in a post-col and flipping it on it’s butt. The characterization alone, with old and new original characters, is unbelievably on point, offering a ridiculously realistic view of how the world may come to an end.

Read this immediately. Trust us, we know our post-col.

A/N: Warning: There are character deaths.

Awards and Nominations

• 2000 Spooky Awards
  • Outstanding Series: First Place
  • Outstanding Apocalypse/Post-Colonization Story: Third Place