Ah, summer.  It began officially this week, this
season of shortened tempers and finicky appetites,
a long hot wasteland of reruns ahead of us, the
movie picked over and the leftovers still grumbling
around undigested.   Fortunately, much of our fanfic
has been served refreshingly cold, some of it
absolutely bone chilling, in fact.  The movie has
spawned "flickfic,"  yet another genre to explore in
the endless layers of X-Files lore, and now we all
get to play on endless permutations of the letter Bee.

I have to start with the story most vivid in my mind,
by nascent, at nascent70@hotmail.com.  Her twelve
parter, "Theory in Practice," which proves the old
adage, "write about what you know."  Nascent's
field is science, and she knows her stuff,  but she
makes it accessible to us and still integral to the
plot of this nifty little thriller.  As in the show, the
plot, though fascinating, is secondary to the characters,
who are realized here about as realistically and
completely as you're ever going to see them.
Everyone has sex in this story, though not in the
combinations you might expect.  Best of all is the
interaction at the end, when Mulder and Scully have
that conversation we've all imagined--not couched
in romantic terms, but in the voices they really use,
dealing with issues in a mature and anguished way
that should fill up the hungriest angst-eaters, and
still satisfy those of us who wish for the happiest
ending available.  Don't you just love it when they
talk like grownups?