TITLE:  Ceremony
AUTHOR:  Darwin
E-MAIL:  darwinxf@yahoo.com
RATING:  NC-17 for explicit s-e-x. Character based, but
quite graphic in parts.  Be warned.
CATEGORY: MSR, Angsty
SPOILERS: Obligatory post-Orison fanfic as required by the
union.  And that pesky mythology arc / impending
colonization thing.  Others.  (See author notes.)
SUMMARY: What's left when words fail?
FEEDBACK: C'mon, hit me.  I'll hit back, I promise.
DISCLAIMER:  Blah blah blah.
ARCHIVE: Sure. Let me know so's I can come see.
AUTHOR'S NOTES: Follow the story.
 

You are not my old friend.
How did I used to sit
and look at you?  Now
though I seem to be standing still
I am flying flying flying
in the trees of your eyes.
  --from Marge Piercy's "We Become New"
 

It's a nice day for a white wedding.
  Billy Idol.
 

 It's Friday so they ditch work early and drive away from
what's become of their lives, north out of the District
until the city is a dreary splotch in the rear view mirror
of his car.  They leave her car in the Hoover parking
garage, even after being so careful that morning to arrive
separately, demurely their own cars.  As though they hadn't
been in his shower together an hour before, skin slipping
against soapy skin.  Sighing, laughing.  He had made a
Unicorn horn from her shampoo-stiff hair and she'd teased
him, something about wasting his time casting far and wide
for elusive mythical creatures when one had been in front of
him all along.

 "Yes," he'd said.  "I've considered that."  The sudden
sincerity in his voice had moved her, the way his eyes
shifted toward his bony feet as he confessed this then found
her face again.  He kissed her as they rinsed off.

 He drives through the suburban sprawl of Maryland, past the
Borders and Blockbusters and Red Lobsters, and makes a right
into Pennsylvania she's pretty sure, though if there'd been
a marker she'd missed it.  She smiles slightly as she
replays the morning, reaching over with her hand to knead
his thigh, reminding herself they are not headed to
Allentown or Home or toward any other crouching horror, that
they are not such separate vessels anymore, that she is
allowed to touch him.

 Work that week has been long, boring in the way that so
many people's jobs are often boring, full of stuffy tense
meetings to discuss budgets and allotments.  Days like that
should come as a relief to her.  But, full of implications
as they tend to be that she and her partner exist solely to
defraud and defile the American taxpayer, they are not.  All
day she felt a desire to be anywhere else like an itch in
the middle of her back she couldn't quite reach.  Mulder
tapped his pencil on his legal pad, shifted in his seat and
thrust his legs into the aisle like a peevish seventh
grader.  With the future of the human race looming uncertain
and she being one of the very few humans to have a glimmer
of knowledge about coming events, her baseline of anxiety
has become a thrumming hive of bees in her gut.  (No
wondering where that imagery comes from.)  In any case, the
impetus to care about violent crime projections for
ohtwo-ohthree is scarce.

 They had the opportunity, mid-week, to take off to El Paso
to check out a series of deaths that appeared to be the
result of an ancient Aztec curse, if Mulder was to be
believed.  She didn't want to go, which didn't surprise
her.  But the weird part was that Mulder didn't seem to want
to go either.  Not really.  She convinced him too easily
that the deaths were most likely attributable to botulism,
which, even she had to admit, was a stretch.

 It comes down to this:  Something is close.  A change
galactic in scale.  A reckoning.  She can feel it
approaching the way a dog senses the mailman three blocks
away.  This vibe, this large shifting of atoms, this moment
of green sky and silence before the twister touches down
makes Scully want to lay low, to stay close to home, close
to Mulder.  He senses it too she is pretty sure, though they
don't discuss it.  She doesn't want to know about this
thing, tries to hold the information away from her in order
to be safe from its implications.  Like she did with her
awareness of Mulder's feelings for her as they grew deeper,
more complicated and decidedly sexual, and for the same
reasons.  But she knew, she knew.  And she knows now.

 Scully comes back to the moment, admonishes herself to be
here in the car driving north on a two lane road into a
Friday twilight with Mulder.  Just now his wrists are bent
against the steering wheel and he is tapping along to
Jailhouse Rock, accompanying Elvis with an enthusiastic,
off-key whistle.  His white teeth are flashing.  He's rolled
his shirt sleeves to mid forearm and shed his suit jacket
like a snakeskin on the back seat.  When he catches her
looking, his predatory glance takes her in from the tip of
her red head to the toes of her not-so-sensible shoes and
she knows his tenebrous, tamped down mood of the week has
lifted.  Come on and do the jailhouse rock with me, indeed.
She thinks it likely she will get into some type of trouble
with him tonight.

 Soon houses grow scarce and the dusk-lit sloping hills are
dotted with Holsteins, black and white against the pale
green early spring shoots of grass.  They drive through
Gettysburg where the fields that hosted some of the
bloodiest battles of the Civil War are indiscernible from
those that lead up to them except that the blood-fed grass
seems a little thicker here, greener and lusher.  She
pictures gashed and septic soldiers lying side by side in
this field on a day not so long ago--a blink in geologic
time--most of them dying slow musket-shot deaths and
wondering, no doubt, what for.

 They thought of their mothers, Scully is suddenly certain,
most of  them too young to have loved another fiercely and
freely enough to replace her image.  They had marched in
twos and threes away from their homes weeks or months
before, brimming with anticipation and confident of their
own eventual heroic returns, unable to conceive of their own
unexceptional if gory ends.  She cracks her window and looks
at the hills.  They had been young too once, all craggy
upthrust, sharpness and acute angles.  But now they rise
slowly, lazily above the fields.  Old hills, worn down, they
reassure her.  She sucks in a breath of cold air and lets it
wash over her.

 Scully has left home a lot lately herself, literally and
figuratively.  It had been on her mind.  Pfaster evicted her
from her actual, physical dwelling of course.  And though
she tidied it up pretty well, she still didn't feel
comfortable there.  But he also stole away her idea of
herself, Pfaster, the metaphorical home all sane people need
to retreat to many times a day.  She was now certain she
hadn't been acting for God or for Satan when she shot an
unarmed, subdued man, but rather for her most primitive self
which the situation had shocked her back to.  She was, after
all her aspirations toward moral conduct and thirty years of
honing her intellect, just another animal willing to kill
when cornered.  She didn't feel guilty, exactly, after
shooting him.  Just uncomfortable, different, humbled.  New.
 

 And there was something else, another lost home.  As she
sat crouched and bound in her bathroom, she wasn't thinking
of her family like she had during other times of mortal
danger, of how each member would feel to get that terrible
phone call, of how her mother would bear to bury another
daughter.  She realized later a fact which astonished her:
At some point in the not too distant past, her family had
let her go of her.  Lovingly, knowing they needed to, that
she needed them to.  They had released her unconditionally
from all the things they had ever imagined for her and
handed her over to her new fate, to her odd, brooding turkey
of a partner and their unlikely and dangerous pursuit.  And
when she had been scampering across the floor of her
apartment, shards of glass digging into her knees and arms,
there was raw fear, yes, and the concomitant reflexive
impulse for self-protection.  But what if not her family
gave her the strength and will to fight him as hard as she
had when most victims fold in fear, when that's what a part
of her wanted to do?

 God, yes.  Always God.

 But what tethered her to the earth?  There was a one word
answer to that question, and, as terrifying as it was, the
answer was Mulder.  Mulder and their work he couldn't do
alone.  The fact that he would be curious the next day when
she hadn't shown up at the office by nine-thirty, that he
would spend the morning dialing her various numbers, shaking
his head when he couldn't reach her but trying to reassure
himself, ironically, that there was a reasonable explanation
for her absence.  He'd poke around the Hoover building,
check the bullpen and the lunchroom and the lab.  No one
would have seen her.  He would return to the basement and
try to get involved with some new puzzle while unconsciously
rehearsing the cool stare with which he would level her when
she came through the door.

 When he still hadn't reached her by lunch time, he'd decide
to go to her apartment, having in the meanwhile convinced
himself that she, ticked at him over the Orison case, was
home sulking and sticking him with the paperwork, worrying
him, making him come to her.  And though it was unlike her,
he'd think she was just capricious and cheeky enough to
ditch him that day.  When he tried her on his cell for the
umpteenth time on the way over in his car and it rang and
rang, he'd force back anxiety by picturing her home splayed
on her sofa still in her PJ's,  spooning ice cream straight
from the carton and watching a trashy morning talk show--
when he barged in maybe she'd even greet him with the
title:  "Help, I'm too fat to leave my house!"--but
delivered in classic Scullyspeak, a monotonous deadpan into
which she somehow injected untold subtleties.

 She could see it all.  Mulder would sit in his parked car
outside her apartment for long minutes staring at his
hands.  When he had worked up the resolve to go in, he'd
knock softly and then harder at her front door.  When met
with silence he'd use his key which he would have to fumble
into the lock because his hands would be shaking so badly.
And when he found her mutilated body in a bath of her own
water-weakened blood, he would go insane.

 No.  It didn't end that way.  She'd fight Pfaster to the
death, but she wouldn't lie there and wait for the cavalry,
wouldn't capitulate to this evil man for a second in hopes
of saving herself through some strategic submission.  She'd
seen the glossies.  She knew what was at stake.

 The moments before and after she shot Pfaster are not clear
to her, grainy and chaotic as an eight millimeter home
movie.  But she remembers Mulder getting her a glass of
water and sitting her down on the couch before calling for
help and surveying the damage.  He put out a few candles
before giving up.  He paced the apartment slowly, keeping a
wide berth around Pfaster and his blood trickling in a thin
stream toward the front door where it was collecting in a
puddle, cooling and congealing.  The apartment smelled of
gunpowder and wax and rust.  Scully drank her water.
Periodically Mulder would find more wreckage and whistle
softly, looking up at her like she was a cat who had just
barked.

 Dispossessed, she had packed her bag and they had gone to
Mulder's place that day.   There she had showered and then
fallen into a dreamless nap on his bed that lasted well into
the evening.  When she woke up and stumbled into the front
room, Mulder stood at the window in his plaid pajama bottoms
and his Knicks T-shirt, his is back to her.  The room was
lit only by the muted television the screen flashing the
frenetic colors of a basketball game.  Lost in thought, he
didn't seem to hear her approach from behind.  She closed
her hands around his waist and pressed her cheek into his
back, between his scapula.  He started at the contact before
settling easily into her embrace.

 She imagined she heard his intelligence, his Mulderness,
humming like electricity, running up and down his body along
the lines of synapses centered in his spine.  She thought of
all the times she'd nearly lost him and what a miracle it
was, he was, and the happy accident that they both stood
whole and sane in his living room.  She breathed him deeply,
his clean and complicated scent, so many layers.  Without
weighing options or even thinking at all, she reached her
hands up under his shirt and rubbed her palms slowly over
his flanks.  When he didn't stop her or turn around, she let
her hands run up to his ribs and back again.  Then she did
it again.

 She closed her eyes as she rubbed her hands over his smooth
skin, letting one hand settle on his diaphragm and brushing
the hand other lower, down the midline of his body until she
encountered the scritch of coarse hair near the waistband of
his sweats.  She rested her hand on his belly and ran the
other one up his sternum , encountering his armor.  She
marveled at how hard he was, how soft, how he seemed to have
quit breathing.  But when her fingers found one of his
nipples and played over it lightly while her other hand
rubbed his stomach languorously, his chest expanded sharply
before he resumed taking quick shallow breaths.  Against her
fingertips his nipple was tender and--later Scully thought
this odd-- cold.  In all the years she had known him and in
all the states of undress in which she'd tended to him, she
didn't think she'd ever touched him there before.  Or at
least not intentionally.  And what was her intent, exactly?
At that point she couldn't say.  She rubbed her chin against
his back.  She felt light with danger and anticipation, like
her foot was feeling around for the brake pedal but couldn't
locate it.

 "Scully," he said.  He was pleading.  He turned and
gathered her up so carefully she knew that he didn't
understand.  He was writing off her advances to shock and
desperation.  But she didn't need to be held so much healed
seam to seam.  Subsumed and recreated.  Fucked.  Scully, in
the remote corner of her brain which wasn't shut down by the
sensation of Mulder's trapezius muscles shaking slightly
beneath her hands or his erection jousting with her hip
bone, was beginning to understand.  This odd, unexpected
seduction she was apparently determined to carry out was
just a logical extension of her behavior from the day before
with Pfaster.  When its home is razed a good animal, one
intent on survival, rebuilds.  And this is a catastrophic
process, this tearing down and building up.  It requires
drastic action, real change, courage.  She needed him to
help her.

 This wasn't just about Pfaster, though; he had only been a
harbinger of all the big changes afoot, the catalyst for
this reconfiguration, her to Mulder, that needed to happen
anyway.  They would need a new home front from which to
battle whatever was to come in whatever way they could, a
home their bodies and hearts could create together, a
virtual but very real space that would give them potency and
respite.  They already had such a space, she supposed, but
this new thing would consecrate their bond, strengthen
instead of  weaken them as they had always feared.  Whether
it was the chip in her neck talkin' to her again, her tattoo
doing likewise, or her some deep hitherto untapped intuition
she couldn't say, but she knew this was right.  Mulder had
been skeptical.  Convincing him had been the sweetest task
of her life.

 They drive and drive until the sky is dark except for a
streak of pink on the far western horizon.  Porch lights go
on and she imagines she and Mulder in one of these houses,
preparing a meal, watching TV, arguing over whose turn it is
to pay the bills.  It's a normal life, all right, and
appealing in its own way.  But now she knows that if that
were she and Mulder they wouldn't be she and Mulder.  If she
ever really thought that's who she was supposed to be she'd
given up that old image of herself, of the two of them.

 Her stomach rumbles at the thought of food.  She'd been too
nauseous to eat at lunch time and Mulder'd looked up from
his pastrami long enough to quirk an eyebrow in her
direction about it.  She'd just really begun to eat
normally, three weeks after Pfaster, and he registered
slight concern without grilling her, all of which she
appreciated.  He looks over at her now his eyes soft, just
back from a daydream.

 "Hungry?" he asks.

 "I suppose.  Where are we anyway?"

 "Donno, exactly.  I think we're by Amish country though,"
he says, pointing to a yellow road sign with a buggy on it.
"If we can't find a restaurant we can shoot one of these
cows and barbecue."

 Just when she's resigned herself to eating in a roadside
diner that features chicken and waffles, they stumble on an
Italian place which looks cozy and authentic, a mirage amid
the fields of corn and fuzzy blue-green oats.  As they read
the menu taped to the front door, she gets excited at the
prospect of good food and of eating out with him without
watching the door, being able to touch hands over the table,
snatch bites from each other's forks, share dessert.  Maybe
they can't have any kind of regular life, but being able to
have this night with him makes her happier than she can
explain.

 Later she tastes the meal again in his mouth as they kiss
on his bed, the crisp dry wine, the tang of garlic. They've
been kissing since they got back from dinner, rolling around
a little and talking in low rough voices, but always
returning to the kissing.  She tilts her head, dives in to
his mouth and loses track of everything like she's entered a
wormhole in time.  They're marooned on the peninsula of his
bed, she decides.  And when it occurs to her that it would
be unlikely for anyone to be marooned on a peninsula, she
angrily banishes her smarmy critical mind and sticks her
tongue deeper into his mouth.

 The outer limits of this universe she decrees they're
inhabiting this night contain the shifting geometric
patterns of passing headlights thrown across the ceiling and
his fish tank giving off weak light and gurgling in the next
room.  Tonight the stars are only pricks of light in the sky
blinking stupidly, all hot gas and bluster, perhaps even
dead.  If she's been there she doesn't remember, didn't drag
any dust back on her shoes.  And though there's hard
evidence of their work-a-day lives everywhere, manila
X-files strewn across his coffee table, a cryptic message
from the Gunmen blinking on the machine, a picture of the
flukeman tacked to the bulletin board, the drive and the
meal and the wine have cleared all that from her head.

 Here tonight there are no conspiracies, no genetic mutants
or Grays or apocalyptic blueprints, no endless jawing in
hallways or banter or paperwork, no gruesome slide shows or
cancer or moth men, no rental cars, no stiff necks or bleary
eyed nights or delayed flights.  Her universe contracts to
his breath hot in her ear, to his Adam's apple bobbing in
his throat and the rasp of his stubble against her neck, to
his sighs his hands reaching up under her skirt and stroking
her thighs, to his swollen lips that have by now kissed her
everywhere.  When she thinks of that her brain still
unhinges, her stomach goes south.  He is still so new to
her, these things they are doing so unbelievable and
wondrous.  Mulder's bones, the casual heaviness of him.  His
long thigh pressing between her legs.  She feels their
daytime personas falling away, too, as they kiss.  He
doesn't need to be more persuasive than this, his hard cock
knifing between them against her stomach not inspiring the
tiniest bit of skepticism in her.

 Mulder gets up suddenly and crosses the room.  She eyes his
long body wolfishly as he tugs his already loosened tie over
his head, unclasps his watch and lays it on the dresser,
unbuttons his dress shirt and drops in onto a chair.  More
comfortable in only his rumpled dress pants and his T-shirt,
he returns to the bed.  Backlit by the kitchen bulb, he
becomes a shadowy, haloed figure crawling toward her, a
creature that has clawed its way from the center of the
earth to devour her.  But he doesn't scare her.  Even
occluded he is somehow familiar, her brother from that other
world where the roots are flowers.

 He falls next to her and grabs her up and they shift on his
half made bed so she can make out his face again, his strong
jaw and the hook of his nose, his eyes that continually
elude her.  When he's angry or aroused she sees hard and
glinty agates.  When he's sad or sated, sea water.  She rubs
his cheek with her palm, smoothing over a place he had
nicked himself with the razor. She wonders where this man
had come from and what cosmic mix up had paired them in this
life.  He seems more the love child of Uri Geller and
Sigmund Freud than the product of his tepid, unexceptional
parents, with a dash of Buddy Holly thrown in and enough
Batman to keep them alive.  He is kinetic energy
encapsulated with the eyes of a sea turtle, the moves of a
gazelle, and the hairdo of a hedgehog; he is dark and light,
kindness and cruelty, id and superego, guilty and justified,
all colliding violently under his ribs and collapsing,
whirling  pulsar-like.  She knows him.  This is his heart.
And he is her mate.

 She looks into his eyes and wishes it were summer already.
He smiles at her and it seems as if he wants to speak but
that the words aren't there.  He does this a lot, looks at
her like the empty gumball machine of his brain isn't
dispensing any words today, no matter how many dimes he's
fed it.  Mulder, a man who can pontificate in excruciating
detail on a thousand subjects interesting only to him, is
speechless before her, in the face of her, of this new thing
that they are.  She hasn't yet gotten used to his silences
or his eyes on her like this so it still unsettles her,
makes her blood fizzy.  And she shares his problem.  She
can't possibly make words come together in a way that will
remotely convey what is in her head and her heart.  What
would she say that wouldn't sound hackneyed and adolescent,
trite or rehearsed?  All the words in the register of love
have been used up by bad movies and sitcoms, stripped of
their power.  There is nothing left to say.

 They show each other instead.  This works for them.  They
had worn each other out and showed no signs of slowing their
pace.  He is, as she suspected he would be, an amazing
lover: limber, obsessive in all the right ways,
orally-fixated.  More importantly, he has a way of stripping
her of her inhibitions, of disarming her with humor and
somehow at the same time referencing their complete trust in
one another with just a glance or a few words.  And Mulder
is so comfortable naked and appreciative of her body that
she's grown used to seeing herself as beautiful again, to
viewing her body as more than functional at best, spring
loaded to betray her at worst.

 She finds she uses her voice more when they make love than
she ever has with anyone else.  He likes it when she's
specific.  She likes it when he likes it.  So she says
things, asks for things, that make her blush later when
she's away from him and they float back to her sounding like
the disembodied scraps of dialogue she'd occasionally hear
drifting out from under his door when she'd come by in the
evening for an unscheduled visit.  Those times she'd freeze
her fist in a pre-knock position and consider whether she
really needed to interrupt him, whether the errand she'd
come on was worth the awkwardness of waiting the long,
weight-shifting, hallway minutes for him to answer the
door.  Sometimes he looked annoyed she'd bothered'd him,
sometimes just embarrassed.  Either way, the exchange that
followed always left her unaccountably sad.  She didn't dare
pause long enough to analyze that emotion, either.

 Sex with Mulder, once an appealing if prohibitively
dangerous idea, is now a daily need.  She gets her
recommended daily allowance, usually after work at his
apartment.  One time in the office, though they swore they
wouldn't ever.  It was crazy.  After they had been kissing
and teasing each other too long--she had started it--he spun
her around and bent her over the desk, leaned against her
back and asked her in a low growl if she wanted it.  When
she didn't answer he yanked up her skirt, drew his engorged
penis out from his fly, pushed her underwear roughly aside
and jammed himself inside of her.  She was stunned, her
mouth hanging open as she contemplated his jar of pencils
and waved her ass higher to facilitate a better angle of
penetration.  It was surreal.  His hands were gripping her
shoulders tightly as he slapped his hips against her and she
was trying not to moan.  And as fast and hard as he had
fucked her, she had come twice.  It was as though sex had
been invented for them. They were not well.

 It certainly was a different thing with him than it had
been with anyone else, sex.  She was different.  She
couldn't believe they'd spent so many years not touching
each other everywhere like this.  She knew rationally that
those years had built to this, that it was so good between
them because of the combination of the mysteries they were
uncovering and the extant trust.  Still, when she ended each
day naked and pressed against Mulder, she often had the
nagging, regretful feeling that she'd been making beef stew
for dinner every night for years and leaving out the beef.

 Though it occurs to her to do so, she doesn't stop him
when, after an hour or more of this infernal kissing on the
bed, he undoes the buttons of her blouse one by one,
unfastens her bra and takes her breasts in his hands,
cradles the soft weight of them.  He rolls the nipples
between his fingers then brushes the sensitive tips lightly
with the pads of his thumbs.  He moves maddeningly slowly.
She loves how his big hands shift beneath her shirt, the
distant look in his eyes, the way his tongue darts between
his lips to moisten them like he has engaged only the
oldest, most reptilian part of his brain for this task.

 When he bends down and takes one of her nipples into his
mouth, she reels in the sensation of him strumming the tip;
her clit records each pass of his tongue.  He bites down and
she squirms against the mattress almost whimpering, her legs
treading water, struggling for purchase.  She glances toward
him just as his eyes open to meet hers, her breast still in
his mouth and his tongue rubbing slowly over her, soothing
her now, and they exchange silent endearments, their eyes
crinkling almost like they're in pain.  She reaches down and
brushes the hair from his eyes which haven't left her face.
When he starts working her nipple with the edges of his
teeth again she lets her eyelids fall slowly, languidly
closed to show him how it feels, to let him know how she
can't even bear what he is doing to her.

 When she comes back to herself reluctantly, her nipple is
still swimming in the warm pool of his mouth and he is
reaching up beneath her skirt, playing with the lacy edge of
her underwear.  She opens her eyes and takes hold of his
wrist, stopping his progress.  His eyes question her.

 Scully is abruptly nervous, her mouth that had been
watering a minute ago drying out.  Because she can't have
the light of his eyes on her while she says what she needs
to say, she puts her mouth up close to his ear and whispers
it.  "Remember when I got cranky the other day about the
expense report and you muttered something under your breath
about PMS?"

 He pulls back and looks at her.  "I think I'll take the
fifth here, Scully."

 She smiles slightly.  "You were right.  That's what it
was.  PMS."

 Mulder, his acuity depressed by a lack of blood to his
brain, takes a few seconds to connect the dots.

 "Ahhh," he says.  "So is it safe to say that today you no
longer have PMS?"

 "Safe to say."

 "Does that mean you have MS now Scully?"  Mulder says,
sitting up slightly in mock-panic.  Then: "No, that doesn't
sound right."

 She bites his arm, though she's grateful for the joke.  Her
nervousness washes away.  She had planned to go home to fall
asleep next to Mulder without things getting too lascivious
for once.  But then he tasted so good she eighty-sixed that
plan without making a new one.  Her imminent confession had
been bothering her ever since, a pebble in her shoe.

 "So," he says leaning over her on one elbow, his eyes
shifting over her body.   "You want to make out some more
and then go to sleep?"

 "That sounds nice," she says.  It does.  Nice.  But after
an hour of wrestling on the bed with him she doesn't want
nice.  Lust boils her blood and  her skin burns like shards
of glass are working their way out.  She has never had sex
when she had her period, had never really wanted to.  But
when Mulder rolls on top of her and crushes her mouth with
his he feels so good against her aching pelvis, the weight
of him.  His lovely cock taut and pressing down on her hip.
God.  Then the room spins and she's on top of him kissing
him hard, plundering his mouth, grinding herself against
him.  She rolls to the side and her hand is under his shirt,
bumping over his ribs, threading through the coarse hairs on
his belly.  He shudders when her fingers wander south past
his belt buckle and wedge under the waistband of his boxers,
when the back of her hand grazes the smooth head of his
cock.

 "Scully," he says sharply, grabbing her hand.

 "Huh?" she says, blinking at him line she's just come out
of hibernation.  She's lost to the world, three sheets to
the wind, addled with lust.

 "Maybe we should take this down a notch if we plan to get
any sleep at all."

 "Sorry," she says, rolling off him.

 "Don't be," he says and laughs darkly.

 They lay side by side holding hands and breathing like
they've been doing wind sprints.  As if keeping with the
theme, Mulder gets up and changes into sweats, stripping off
his clothes like they burn his skin, then goes into the
kitchen drinks a glass of water straight down.

 As he prowls through the apartment shutting off lights and
brushing his teeth, bolting the door and feeding his fish,
she slips out of her clothes and into her Pajamas and gets
ready for sleep.  When they meet back in bed minutes later
he rolls toward her and wraps her in his arms, kisses her
forehead.  She nestles into his chest, raises her knees
between them until they bump against his still stiff prick.
They laugh softly.  She leaves them there.

 He yawns and his breathing begins to settle down.  She
wills her blood to recede, to lay low in her veins.  She
wants one more kiss so she plants a quick one on his lips.
He opens his eyes and kisses her nose sleepily then puts his
lips to her ear and whispers the secret sweet thing they've
both known for ages but that they've rarely voiced, the way
they're not supposed to feel about each other but do
anyway.  She nods at him.  Then he tells her to sleep well.

 She burrows her face into his breastbone, rubs her chin
against the broad plane of his pectoral.  Her lips,
seemingly of their own accord, drop hard little kisses
across his chest.  They radiate out from his heart like a
trail of stones so that if she ever gets lost she can find
her way back.  As she descends down his torso his skin grows
softer.  No bones to prop it up.  Organs below.  Her kisses
against his belly turn slack and wet, open-ended.

 "Scully?"

 She jams her tongue experimentally in his belly button as a
reply.

 "Scully?"

 Why is he pestering her?  Can't he see she's occupied?
"Hmmmm?" she answers, not wanting to stop kissing him long
enough to make words.

 "What are you doing?"

 She tears herself away from her task, sighs, considers as
she scooches back up his body.  "Trying to get to third
base."  He laughs, his eyes squinty and warm looking down
his body at her.  The baseball metaphors are fun for them.
She is amusing him tonight at least.

 She loves his chest, loves running her hands over the slow
curves of it, wants to spend the rest of her life
contemplating it, to eat all her meals from it and sleep
with the matted strip of hair that runs up its center
brushing her cheek forever.

 Clearly her need to come is making her irrational.  She
takes his nipple between her teeth and bites it.

  "If you do that one more time, Scully, I'm going to be
able to pound nails without aid of a hammer until noon
tomorrow."

 "Why don't you let me help you with that?"  She reaches for
the drawstring to his sweat pants.  More for her own sake
than for his, even, she wants to take him into her mouth, to
have something substantial to suck on that might pacify her
cravings.  She wants to hold his cock against the sides of
her cheeks like ice against a bruise.

 "Are you asking me to show you mine while you aren't
willing to show me yours, Agent?"  He divests his body of
her grabby hands and backs away from her, tucks the sheet
around his waist chastely.

 "You've seen mine by now I think Mulder."

 "Nevertheless, as capable as I know you are of relieving my
little situation, and as much as I can't believe I'm saying
this, I think it's only fair we both go to bed equally
frustrated."

 Scully groans and rolls away from him onto her stomach.

 Mulder rolls on top of her quick like he's going in for the
pin, and again she's struck by how good the weight of him
feels on top of her, pressing her into the mattress,
grounding her.

 "You're really hot tonight, aren't you Scully?   He is
whispering, rasping the words into her ear.

 She nods.

 "So is this a policy, no sex during your period?"

 She shrugs.

 "Nothing official, huh?"  Between sentences he's kissing
the back of her neck, nudging the tender flesh under her
ears.  "Will it hurt you?"

 She shakes her head no.  Actually she knows that orgasms
during her period help alleviate her cramps, though she
won't be going into this with him now.

 "Is this something you've just never done?"

 She nods.

 "Because I should tell you that the idea isn't distasteful
to me.  Not at all."

 She brings in her breath and holds it.

 "In fact, it's just the opposite."

 "Oh Mulder," she says, her voice half stolen by the pillow,
"I just don't think I can."

 "Why not?  You don't recoil in horror from the fluids my
body produces.  Why would I recoil from yours?"

 "This is different.  It would make a mess.  And your
sheets..."

 "I have lots of sheets."

 She cranes her neck around and raises a skeptical eyebrow
in his direction.

 "Okay, I don't have lots of sheets.  But I think I have
another set around here somewhere.  Maybe even clean."

 She smiles and feels him smiling too against her neck just
to the right of her implant scar.

 "We could get a towel and put it beneath us if you're
worried about the mess.  We'll just toss it in the hamper
when we're done and then you and me can hop in the shower.
End the day like we started it."

 His rationalizations are starting to persuade her.  Or
maybe it's the fact that he hasn't stopped pulsing his hips
against her ass.  She had been letting her legs fall open as
they spoke and now she's raising up on her knees slightly to
let his cock, barely constrained by the thin material of his
sweats, slide along her swollen lips through her pajamas.
Their bodies are, as usual, having a conversation all their
own.

 "I know you're not squeamish, Scully."

 "It's just so... personal."

 "That's why I want to do it."

 Scully draws in her breath.  The head of his cock is
nudging her clit.  Mulder, sensing his bulls eye, steadies
himself there and begins to rock infinitesimally against
her.  That more than anything he can say begins to sway her.
 

 "You sure?" she asks.

 In response Mulder begins to really move his hips against
her.  She spreads her legs further and raises herself higher
into the air and he is rubbing the top half of his cock
against her slit in earnest now, his head making unbearably
intermittent contact with her clit.  It feels so amazing,
though, that she is sure she can come just from this if it
goes on much longer, if he finds any kind of rhythm at all.

 His voice is strained with arousal, his fists white and
pressed into the mattress on either side of her when he
speaks next.  "Scully, I'm so sure I'm about to beg, here.
God.  Please.  You feel so good.  Let me take your pants
off."  He is heaving short hot exhales into her ear as he
rubs against her faster now, harder, his hips making square
contact with her ass with each thrust.  Then his hands are
working at her pajama bottoms, trying to push them down over
her hips as he breathes into her ear, "Please, Scully, let
me fuck you."

 She rolls out from under him and disappears into the
bathroom, leaving him to mumble feverishly to himself.
Goddamn her stupid period.  She had begun in the past few
years to hate its useless carnage and pain, a war that she
still had years to fight but couldn't ever win.  And all
that was before she had a lover who had ejaculated on or
around her cervix so often in the past few weeks that she
had begun to feel inevitably fertile, like he was pumping
her full of babies.  And when she was honest with herself
she had to admit that she always thought somehow, someway,
someday they would come.  She had to concede at least that
now was a bad time, the worst time even, for babies.  In
fact, if she thought they would listen she would tell
everyone to stop having babies until the coast was clear.
But at the same time Scully couldn't keep the thought from
her head that if she got pregnant, they would have to deal
with it...

 So the dark streak of blood she found in her underwear at
noontime was an unexpected disappointment, a theoretical
loss becoming an actual one.  She cried a few hot tears in
the bathroom in the basement before chiding herself for
getting her hopes up.  She took three advil, put a tampon
in, washed her face, and was nearly herself again before
Mulder was back with their sandwiches.

 In the bathroom now she slips out of her pajamas and folds
them neatly, takes a towel from the stack on the shelf.  She
empties her bladder and removes her tampon.  She is wet for
him;  her insides feel swollen to bursting.  Then she can't
believe she is about to do this, almost puts her clothes
back on.  But something stops her.  Maybe it's a deep-seated
desire to reinscribe her period.  Maybe she's still just too
horny for words.  Probably both.  She drinks a glass of very
cold water to stiffen her resolve, knots the towel around
her waist and makes herself push open the door into the dark
coolness of the hallway.

 Mulder is under the covers when she enters the bedroom
again, but he peels them back to invite her into his bed.
In so doing he exposes his now naked body to her.  His cock
is straining toward her, pink and bright against his dark
matted hair.  He is offering himself to her, exposing
himself to make her feel less vulnerable.  Always the
psychologist, Mulder.  Besides which, he is a total
exhibitionist.  Which is actually okay by her.  She would
never admit to him or to anyone how much she likes his
little light saber, his pocket shape-shifter.  She
appreciates the way it bows slightly toward the heavens but
still has an agenda all its own, a personality far more
bubbly and resilient than Mulder's.  She thinks of his cock
as the place where Mulder begins, where you'd have to start
if you were going to draw him.

 "You," he says, shaking his head.   He says this word a
thousand ways.  Tonight it conveys admiration, affection,
awe.  She lies down carefully, flat on her back.  Mulder
unknots the towel and spreads it neatly beneath them while
letting his eyes run down her body.  When he's finished he
traces a line down her jaw with his finger.  He moves slowly
and in the sparse light of the bedroom his hands seem to
leave trails like comets.  She wonders briefly if it's
possible he's giving off some light of his own like some
rocks deep in the earth are said to do, if he'd brought this
small bit of luminescence up with him from his murky depths.

 She reaches down and wraps her hand around him, drags the
pad of her thumb in slow circles over the sensitive tip of
his urethra and spreads the wetness beading there over the
soft papery skin. He draws a deep uneven breath, lets it
out.  She still has an urge to kiss it right there on the
fat head, but she doesn't want to move around too much.

 "Nothing too acrobatic," she warns him.  She still holds
him in her fist, half a promise half a threat.  She's tense,
afraid to move.

 "No." he says, shaking his head earnestly.  "Just you and
me.  Just this." He kisses her lips for the hundredth time
that night, but just so tenderly this time.  His mouth is so
soft on hers it makes her either want to cry or burst into
flames.

 He brings his body down to hers and she parts her legs to
receive him.  He holds her face between his hands as she
reaches down and guides his cock inside her.  "Ahhh," he
says as she slips him in.  An understatement.  Scully turns
her head almost wincing from the pleasure of it.  And she
knows he feels it too, how good it is tonight, the
over-ready walls of her cunt grabbing him with the an
amazing combination of softness and pressure.  She plants
her feet on either side of him and he rocks in and out,
locking into her eyes.   "Sc.." is all he can say of her
name and his eyes fill with water.  She is so sensitive, so
ready, that she can feel every inch of him, can make out the
ridge of his swollen head as it strokes her on the inside.
She wraps her legs around his waist locking her ankles,
keeping him near her.  He groans at her getsture, kisses her
mouth hard.  Intercourse, which usually strafes her a
little, couldn't possibly tonight.  It feels perfect, like
they could find a nice easy rhythm and do just this for
hours.

 She looks down where their bodies joined, to where his cock
is moving in and out of her coated with her dark blood.
Married, her brain supplies.  We are married.  She has left
her home for him, her family.  And he who never had a home
had left parts of himself behind to meet her here: his armor
of knee-jerk cynicism, his fearful refusal to act on this.
She wants him deeper.

 "Mulder," she says over his shoulder.  He's begun to nibble
her neck.

 "Hmm," he says .

 "Come here."

  He brings his face to hers.

 "I want to be on top."

 "Absolutely," he says, nodding.

 It isn't graceful, but she climbs into his lap and he sits
up against the headboard, tosses pillows to the floor.  She
straddles him, centers herself and sinks down, impaling
herself again as his arms wrap tightly around her, holding
her in place.  She strings her arms around the back of his
neck loosely, arches her neck toward him and sighs.  She is
flush to his groin and he is deeper than he's ever been.
She can feel him in her chest, in her arms, in her tight
throat.

 With their height difference this is a good position for
them, allowing them to be face to face as they fuck, mouth
to mouth.  He initiates a kiss to occupy her while he
reaches his fingers down to explore their joining.  She
doesn't want to look, but she can feel her blood pooling
beneath her on him, stickier than the lubricant she is also
producing, and she wants to tell him to stop before she
makes his hand dirty.  But he is filling her again and
again, jarring her harder with each thrust and she doesn't
have any breath.  He takes her clit between his index finger
and his thumb, grasps it deep at its root and pulls gently,
drawing it out and away from her body.  "Oh," she hears
herself say.

 Then he's repeating the motion, gripping and tugging her
clit, pulling at her again and again, accelerating as she
grows slicker.  He's jerking me off, she thinks and almost
laughs out loud.  Instead she grasps his shoulders and rides
him.  She moans in a full-throated way because if he stops
doing that with his fingers she will die.  But he doesn't
stop and his cock is still sliding in and out of her and the
combined sensations are more than she can stand.  She is
rising and falling on him, panting in his ear.

 Though she usually plateaus for long periods of time and
comes so unobtrusively that he has to ask her if it's
happened yet, this time her orgasm is like a light bulb
exploding, hard and sharp, surprising and cataclysmic.  When
the waves of pleasure subside her brain gets a hit of oxygen
and she realizes that she cried out when she came, that she
is moaning some more as she comes down.  And then she is
babbling into his ear, telling him how she loves him, loves
him.

 This time he knows for sure she's come, she can tell by his
cocky smile and the fact that he has released her clit.  She
wonders if whoever moved into Padget's place knows she's
come too, then decides she doesn't care.  In fact, she
suddenly hopes that what's left of the consortium is
listening through a bug in the lava lamp, that Krycek is
eyeing them through a zoom lens from across the street and
wishing like hell he had two good hands so that he could
beat himself off as he snapped pictures, that They are
hovering just above the cloud line monitoring this new
development, scratching their pointy chins at how
unnecessary it all is, how messy and incomprehensible.  She
doesn't feel bad or wrong or caught.   She is just glad to
be finally behaving like a normal human specimen.

 Mulder is trying to give her some recovery time because she
is quivering in his arms like protoplasm.  Though he is
still hard inside her he all but stops moving his hips,
kisses her hair, calls her baby which she's never let anyone
get away with before.  When he says it is okay, though, not
meant to make her feel diminutive, just cherished.  Soon he
grows needy and is jamming himself into her again, almost
throwing her off him with each thrust.  But each time she
threatens to fly up and away his arms catch her and pull her
back down to him.  And then he is coming too and when he
stiffens and fills her he is almost howling.  As he begins
to go soft he is talking again, "thank you ... god
Scully...god...so good."

 They grow still leaning against each other.  She curls into
his chest and listens to the crazy drum of his heart until
it evens out and slows.  He strokes her back lightly.  She
begins to feel like maybe she could talk again, though she
has no particular desire to.  As they cool together she
becomes conscious of the tacky mess between them again, of
the slip of come and blood that was supposed to create and
nourish their child in her womb but that is instead seeping
from her open wound that will never heal, dripping down
between them onto the sheets.  She doesn't know where the
towel is.  She is crying.

 "Mulder," she says, pushing away from him.  She is tired
and just wants to get cleaned up and go to sleep.  She hopes
he doesn't notice her tears.

 "Shhh," he says, pulling her back to his chest.  She lets
him rock her.

 "Scully," he says suddenly, cupping her chin, making her
look at him, "this is all that matters to me.  We're going
to have this always."  He is fierce, talking like he usually
only does just before he comes.

 "Yes," she says.  "We will." She almost believes it.  And
she could relax and enjoy it if the future weren't looming
inescapable above them, a hefted piano dangling from a
threadbare rope.

 He senses the lie in her voice, she thinks, needs more.  He
moves his hand from her chin to her lips and rubs the back
of his fingers against them.  She is still.  Then he drops
his hand and runs his knuckles down her body until he
reaches the damp pelt of her pubic hair.  Their sex is done;
she feels rubbery as a deboned chicken.  "Mulder," she says
drawing his name out, warning him.

 "S'okay," he says.  "Let me."  She grows silent, enraptured
by his moves, curious.  He extends two fingers and runs them
along her cunt lips slowly and carefully.  She doesn't
respond except to continue eyeing him.  She smells the iron
in her blood, their sweat and sex.  He is moving slowly,
deliberately, stalking her like a big cat.

 When she thinks he's about to withdraw his hand, he plunges
four fingers deeply inside her.  She gasps, sure he has
finally lost his mind.

 Then he withdraws his fingers slowly and holds them up to
the sliver of light coming from the bathroom;  they glisten
with blood.  She is mesmerized.  He presses his wet fingers
low on his belly, just above the root of his cock.  Slowly
he draws them up his own body until he is streaked with war
paint, marred with her blood.  His eyes come up and search
her face as his hand grows still over his heart.

 She nods at him, indicating that she understands.  He is
her family now, and she is his. Blood is what they are, all
that is visible of their bond.  That this is their ceremony,
their sacrament, necessarily private and all they will ever
get.  But that it's a lot, that it's what they will need to
go forward, that it is everything.  They both swallow hard.
She covers his hand with her own, twines his fingers through
his over his heart and finds his eyes.  Both of them nod
slightly, awed.

 Later, they are in the shower. They have stripped the bed
and changed the sheets.  She lathers him everywhere and he
does her. Too tired to stand, they lean on one another as
they rinse off.  Pink bubbles slide down their legs and soon
they are squeaky clean like children again.  He dries her
hair with a fluffy towel.  She is tired like she has been
crying a long time, drained but peaceful.

 "Hey," he says, standing in the bathroom, thumbing her
cheek, "You want to go to Mexico with me?"

 "What's in Mexico?   More goat suckers?"  She is woozy,
leaning on him and slurring her speech, half listening.

 "No.  A good deal on a yacht."

 He has her attention.

 "We can cash in our chips and buy a boat.  We can be at sea
when this thing goes down."

 "No," she says immediately, shaking her head.  "That isn't
right. That isn't how it ends."

 He is nodding, a half smile on his face.  Without really
trying to, she has given him the answer he needs.

 "Thanks for asking, though.  That's sweet."  She says this
like she's just declined his offer to rub her back.  She
smiles ruefully at her weird life, kisses his chest.

 As they climb into bed and as sleep comes up to claim her
she wonders if she would banish what she knows, if such a
thing were possible.  Forget the terrifying shreds of
knowledge they've compiled, frustratingly incomplete as they
are.  Especially since the correct actions they might ever
take are all but impossible to discern.  Sleep will come
before an answer like that.

 There will be no unlearning, no feigning ignorance, no
running.  He would hate her for asking him to try.  They are
who they are.  They know what they know.  And because of
that, they will do what they have to do.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

end. february mm.  e-mail feedback to darwinxf.yahoo.com.

Author notes:

-Hello to all.  I swore my first fanfic, posted a year or so
ago, would be my last.  (Called, stupidly, "Desire Is
Suffering," at Gossamer.  It's not as angsty as it sounds.)
But writing this stuff is fun and infectious.  Not as fun as
reading this stuff, but hey if we all thought that way we'd
all be reading about Xena or something.  So here it is.
Hope you like it.

-I may repost a beta'd version of this later.  I'm exhausted
by this and need it to go away from me now.  Sorry if it's
rough.  I can't always see my own typos when I've been
starin' at 'em too long.  (I'd use a grammar checker, but
they flag nearly every sentence I write and give lots of
advice.  Helpful things that are actually only helping to
reduce our cherished common language to mush such as
"Sentences that are very long tend to be difficult to
understand..."  or "consider replacing moth MEN with moth
PERSONS or moth INDIVIDUALS to be more inclusive." Oy.)
 -Second draft:  Thank you for your feedback!  I got great
feedback on everything from subtle character stuff to the
way to spell Pfaster.  All replies helped make the story
better. Thanks!  (Pfaster is way creepier than Phaster for
some reason, isn't it?)

-The plot of this was going to veer in the following way:
Scully would be driving home from dinner as Mulder dozed
beside her and they would and wind up at the burning bridge
from Patient X / The Red and the Black..  But they just
decided to go home and have sex instead.  Can you blame
them?  (You want that plot?  G'head, take it.  They're not
going to let me use it I'm afraid.)

-To steal Mulder's joke:  In *this* universe, this story is
the snake handling that happens instead of Signs and
Wonders.  Ick on so many levels to that.

-A friend of mine read an early draft of this story and
liked it except for one moment he found unrealistic:  No man
in his right mind, he contended, and least of all Mulder,
would EVER deflect an oral overture from Scully.  He would
shut up and pull his pants down.  I saw his point but
countered with the real possibility that Mulder was just
casting for a bigger fish.  He may sometimes be a punk, but
he's no fool, our boy.  You be the judge.
 Second draft:   Got lots of comments on this.  Pushed a
button, lots of opinions.  Everything from "yeah, it would
never happen that way" to a few ticked off SNAGS (sensitive
new age guys or gals) who wanted to insist that men aren't
mere slaves to their needs, as it were, and perfectly
capable of acting out of tender heart-driven love over
throbbing penis-driven lust, a sentiment I agree with.
(Especially our Mulder in this case as one reader pointed
out-- pushing forty and on the heels of three weeks of turbo
sex.  Phew!  Thanks to all who chimed in.)

-If you wrote me last year and I told you I would keep in
touch and/or send you anything new I wrote and didn't it's
because my hard drive melted down and I left aohell (note
new e-mail) and I lost all data.  Sad event of the summer.
Sorry, but e-mail me to get back in touch.  It was nothing
personal.

-I don't list spoilers for each episode b/c I figure if you
don't watch the show you won't get it anyway so what's to
spoil?  Furthermore, I try to use all we know of Scully and
Mulder to build the story so I hope I reference a lot of eps
in one way or another.  But there are specific nods in here
to Milagro, Terma, Home, Momento Mori and the whole cancer
arc, the goat sucker one whatever that was called (I taped
over it and blocked it out completely) and one subtle one
each for Detour and Small Potatoes as well as the mythology
stuff and of course Orison.  There may be others.

-In X land, Millennium took place Jan. 1 (duh) so I'm
assuming Orison took place in late winter, placing my story
firmly in early Spring which is what I wish it were right
now.
 Second draft:  Okay, so I flubbed this.  If you figure it
all out the date of my story is right around Scully's
birthday (Feb. 23-- mine too!) and not exactly in early
spring.  So sue me.  I couldn't possibly jerk around the
dates more than the show.  It's early spring I tell you.
Late March.

-In my world for my convenience only Scully wears no panty
hose with skirts.  It's just a little rule I have.  It makes
me happy.

-And lastly, on a related note, though I had ambitions to
write a character based story with some sex, on my final
read before posting I have had to admit that it's all just
smut justification.  And, darnit, I can live with that.

---
peace xo darwin.  end.