@aloysiavirgata / aloysiavirgata.tumblr.com
when you get this, put 5 songs you actually listen to, then publish. Send this ask to 10 of your followers (positivity is cool)
From my MSR playlist:
Like a River: Bishop Briggs
Mutineer: Warren Zevon
The Ship Song: Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds
If It Be Your Will: Leonard Cohen
Short Skirt/Long Jacket - Cake
Happy Passover!!
Thank you! I hosted 26 people on Monday and it was tremendous fun (the cooking part) and 😒😒😒😒 (the dealing with my in laws part) but I’m a pro at this point, darling.
I just read This Her Fever & I liked the way you wrote Bill Scully. He’s an overbearing ass, but it’s also easy to see his point of view (though his jubilant ‘man’s work!’ “0In A Christmas Carol makes me criiiiiiinge). What do you think of him?
Thank you, anon! There are a few things I’d change it that fic but overall I’m pleased with it still. It was SO fun to write.
You know, I’m the big sister in my family. And I would fucking HATE Mulder. Loathe him. I would cheerfully rip his spine out through his stomach.
So you know. I have a lot of empathy for Bill.
Twelve opening sentences to twelve different fics
Thanks to @slippinmickeys for the tag! This was really fun and I wholeheartedly encourage everyone to give it a go!
***
1. Dana Scully rejects tasseography, astrology, tarot cards, chiromancy, augury, crystallography, spirit boards, runecasting, scrying, and all other methods of prognosticative divination.
- The Parting Glass (FTF)
2. He sits on the porch next to a little propane heater, gazing out at the Winter Hexagon as it slowly rolls above the horizon.
- Albedo (Cozy at the Unremarkable House)
3. She recites The Raven to herself on the drive in, lists all the state capitals in alphabetical order, and goes through the periodic table.
- In The Gale (IWTB)
4. “I got each flavor of the high-protein kind,” Scully says, gesturing at the cans stacked on her coffee table.
The Ineluctable Tendencies Of Tumbling Toast (Queequeg)
5. Their cars are conspicuous in the nearly empty parking lot, which magnifies the free-floating uncertainty.
Dichotomous (s11e09)
6. Lauren Atwater sits on the edge of the front stoop, drinking coffee out of a worn plastic travel mug she bought a year ago from a Dunkin' Donuts in Abilene
A Dim Capacity For Wings (On the run)
7. That Phoebe Green brought this to her attention is somehow the most rankling thing about it, Scully thinks.
Anthemoessa (Scully - Bedelia - Stella - Clone Club)
8. Sunday morning is pancake morning, and William charges into his parents’ room just shy of 7 am.
Dryad (AU casefile)
9. They’ve been going through the storage room for hours, marveling at the sheer volume of items her mother had held onto.
Madeleine (s10e04)
10. The bodies are small, the heaviest weighing in at forty-seven pounds.
Hic Jacet (Emily)
11. There are ghosts afoot in London, stirred by the excesses of humanity in the face of their own dull eternity.
White Winter Hymnal (post Bad Blood)
12. She finds Mulder behind the house, drowsing in one of the hammocks they’d strung between the ancient oaks that tower above their patch of the planet.
Rags of Light (IWTB)
Hi! I just wanted to drop in and say I went down the Virgata rabbit hole last night and am now obsessed with you and want to be besties. I forgot I even had a tumblr account, but my recent-ish obsession with TXF and GA has apparently resurrected it. I’ve read nearly all your stuff on AO3 and it is absolutely fantastic! I love writing, I have a journalism background and have toyed with the idea of getting back into fan fiction or even writing a book… but I can’t wrap my mind around sitting down and actually fleshing out start to finish any of the conceptualizations rattling around in my brain. Anywho. I think you’re fantastic and so supremely talented and thank you for sharing your writing and a bit of your life with us!
Thank you so much for the very kind words! Writing is my favorite of all of my hobbies and whenever someone takes the time to comment it absolutely makes my day. I’m so pleased you’ve enjoyed my work, especially given your writing background!
Have spent the past week madly prepping for Passover. Will attend to my inbox over the next few days. Thank you, lovely kind people!
Prompt: leather jacket, pay phone, Southern accent.
Mulder’s Southern accent is pure Hilton Head; the Long Island Lockjaw of the magnolia-and-sweet-tea set. His mother’s people came from here and he learned to golf with them. Mulder knows about Lowcountry food and unironic madras trousers and herons in the pre-dawn light. He knows when to say “The War of Northern Aggression,” with a laconic wink.
Mulder knows all the lyrics to “The Battle of New Orleans.” He happily eats shrimp with the heads still on.
Scully - lower middle class Navy brat with aristocratic cheekbones and a chip on her fine shoulder - is his acceptable Yankee wife. She’s never going to say “pecan” the proper way. Never going to cut her eyes just right at white shoes after Labor Day. They named her Jessica and said she was from Sag Harbor, and the Louis Vuitton tote bag is getting her by.
Scully, in AquaNet and Lilly Pulitzer, misses Mulder’s Mid-Atlantic cool, his New England snobbery. Misses his firm opinions on Chicago-style pizza (a casserole) and Billy Joel (unironic legend). She wants her hand pressed to his sternum in a grey t-shirt and a leather jacket, a faded hoodie from the Vineyard.
Mulder (Emmett, she hisses in her own head) knows that quality families would never repair the upholstery because it’s déclassé to care. Would never
Mulder eats a cheese straw, Mulder nuzzles her tingling ear in the steamy June evening, tells a funny story at the Cavendish-Lawrence wedding.
“I swear to Christ, Jessica had to pull over and find a payphone,” Mulder says, to his starry—eyed audience. “My poor sweet girl on the side of the road with a tornado alert, ordering Christmas presents.”
Mulder clutches her to him, his fingers big and hot and wide against her waist as the audience titters with admiration. Mulder smells like fresh cotton and old money. Mulder looks like the best terrible decision she’ll ever make.
She’s going to fuck him tonight, she decides. She simply cannot stand it anymore, and it would be such a shame to waste away without having had him, like some medieval ascetic. She wants him to lick her tattoo, to bind her to the living world.
Mulder drops a kiss on her buzzing cheek, near the tiny neutron star encroaching on her very essence.
She hears the tide lap against the dock, laughs the way Jessica is expected to laugh.
She feels alive, like sparks rising towards the sun.
Dos it annoy you that, per The Truth, the Clarice Starling universe is canonically fictional?
No. Fuck you, Christopher. Everything after Je Souhaite is AU. 🥰😑🥰
are the kittens called pepper and wensley after the good omens characters?
No, my wee nieces suggested it! But I was tickled when I realized.
ASK ME ANYTHING, SHE SAYS
Olay, DO MORE FISHER KING 💁🏼♀️
He marries her on the Vineyard in October. She didn’t want to be a June bride. She didn’t want to sweat and have her hair frizz and her fine vellum skin be lumpy with mosquito bites. She wanted to be cool and auburn and lovely, and it’s why he married her at all.
***
He gazed at her like a siren on a rock, like she was the last thing he’d see before it went pitch-black. She wore silk the color of Labor Day whitecaps and her veil was summer-storm mist. He loved her the way we love fire; primal and aching and fiercely hominid. He burned for her because it is a pleasure to burn.
***
He could not have cared less about the wedding but hoped she would. She hadn’t, though she’d looked at the obnoxious ring with a certain grudging respect. “It’s carbon arranged in the most boring way possible,” she observed, letting all (nearly) three carats catch the light. “”And it’s gorgeous. I love it.”
Her sapphire eyes, her garnet hair. And he’d given her a diamond, so clear and bland.
She didn’t love it, not really, and he knew it. Knew she loved it because his mother thought Catholics were simpletons and, more importantly, staff. His mother was Jewish by blood and WASP by raising. His mother preferred natural fibers. His mother excelled at tennis.
It was a family piece. It was The Done Thing, even on her plebeian Catholic finger, slim and pale and lovely as a moonbeam. His mother flinched but never balked. She was properly brought up, and her son had made a decision. She was a lady and so was Dana’s mother, in her sweetly aspiring way.
Their mothers wept and he beamed down at her like a demigod; like the Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed With The Sun.
***
He worshipped her properly later, before the applewood fire. He tossed his lot in with hers and he felt like some duke’s second son, unbound by obligation.
“Fox,” she moaned, and he loved that too. They were virgins again that night. They brushed one another like purple fruits, ripe to bursting on the vine.
***
He was appalled by how he wanted to put a baby in her, by how “wife” changed everything he thought he understood about himself.
The ring, clear as the waters of the Euphrates by day, was opalescent and clouded beneath the moon.
“Christ,” he moaned into the hot vanilla silk of her throat. “Christ, fuck, Dana…”
The tulle of her rucked-up gown left scratches on her thighs, like the tongue of a cat, and neither of them ever noticed.
***
She was a doctor again in the morning, and he was a Special Agent, and the sun was pale as straw in the weakening light.
Another little slice of your brilliant Baby Vera universe??? 🥹
Melissa believes in astrology, Emily realized at some point. Absolute honest to fucking god believed in it, even dead as a doornail, which she never saw coming in a star chart. Believed we are ruled by planets and hydrogen and old light. How had this tall, wifty thing and her mother emerged from the same gene pool? Perhaps they are like N. arizonaria, and seasonally dimorphic.
She sees Melissa the most, loves her the best. Melissa is the most communicative. Ahab seems to find death a bit embarrassing, speaks to her with the stilted sentiments of a Hallmark card. He and Missy are never together. There are many others, but they are the most not-together.
Auntie Sam is odd. A little girl so much older than her. Decades old, with a thin little chest and satiny plaits, because that’s how Dad remembers her. Big dark eyes and ribbons and a rime of New England salt; her father’s first muse.
“Asterism is- “ Missy begins.
“Shut the fuck up,” Emily snaps, little Vera on her chest. Vera smells like baby powder and sweet hay and puppy breath. Their mother’s milk. She cannot believe her mother, however youthful, has produced another baby. She cannot believe her father was allowed to name her Vera.
Honestly, Mulder.
“Missy?” William asks from the kitchen. He is slicing Granny Smiths like biopsy samples for his apple-rum cake. Emily smells vanilla and brown sugar and the luscious warmth of melting butter. William loves organic chemistry you can eat.
Emily kisses her tiny sister’s ermine head. “Of course,” she replies. “Keep going, Will.”
He sighs heavily. William has their mother’s elegant pallor and their father’s flair for the dramatic.
Vera hiccups loudly, then snuffles back to sleep. She is very nearly two months old.
“Perioral dermatitis,” Will says.
Emily nuzzles her sister’s fresh-bread scalp. “This baby is delicious.”
“She cries every night at 3,” William observes. “But she does smell nice. Perioral dermatitis.”
“Caused by Mercury in retrograde,” Emily asserts. “Cured by Boone’s Farm and shitty weed.”
Missy flicks her in the ear, but Samantha has a chuckle.
Three words: acorn, broom, mirror
Undercover at Target, of all godforsaken places. She’s stocking shelves by day while he wears a faded blue jumpsuit and uses an oversized broom to shove dirt around by night. They have the place completely in their sights this way, but they miss one another.
Scully’s hair is shorter than he prefers, if he’s allowed to have a preference, but it’s also charming, like a little beret made of copper. Like the jaunty cap of an acorn. She has a sharp, white little chin, Scully does. Digs it into his neck sometimes, when she’s drowsy and her lovely head is so full of thinking it tips over against him.
He’s made love to her twice; the first time hard and fast and gasping. The second time like learning Braille.
He sees her in the rear view mirror as she leaves the store in her prim khakis and red polo. As he gets ready for his shift to begin.
She walks past him like they’ve never met, like he hasn’t kissed the tender inside of her elbow. The gunshot scar in her belly. He watches her narrow hips twitch a little as she walks past his rusted Chevy.
He hates to see her leave but he loves to watch her go.
Have two more hours of cooking and gardening and then I plan to kick back and get a little tipsy without any further human contact for the day. 🙏
Inbox open!
Do you host for Passover?
We always host a big first Seder and someone else hosts a smaller one the second night. This year it will be about 26 people. Ours, I mean.
Babe what mascara do you use!!!
Too-Faced “Better Than Sex”
“There is a common emotion we all recognize and have not yet named—the happy anticipation of being able to feel contempt.”
Thomas Harris, Hannibal
Someone else said this but there is definitely a lot of Gillian in your looks even though you have such different coloring. The big round eyes and the bone structure I think. And very expressive!
🥹
Actual footage.
