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speak to me, baby in the middle of the night pull your mouth close to mine I can see the wind coming down like black night
the sky is broken - moby
She wakes to the thrumming rain slipping down his window, an errant tree branch beating a drumbeat on the exterior wall of the apartment complex. She doesn’t wake all at once; she slides from her dark sleep-addled dream world into quiet consciousness seamlessly and easily. She takes slow steadying breaths, enjoying the soft exhalations and how comfortable she is on Mulder’s couch, lovingly wrapped in his thread-worn blanket that smells inexplicably like him. Old Spice deodorant, coffee, old books, a wild forest, and gunpowder. It is her most favorite and treasured scent in the world, a cocktail just for her.
She shifts into a more comfortable seated position, legs stretched across the cognac leather couch, nylon-clad toes peeking towards the gurgling fish tank. Her hamstrings twinge behind her knees not unpleasantly. She dimly remembers their shared tea-scented words from earlier this evening.
“What if there was only one choice, and all the others were wrong?”
There is a witchy, electric feeling beyond Dana’s ability to express flooding her veins. It is static fiery electricity, lightning before it strikes, licking a battery, the climb before the fall. She has felt this before, inexplicable, a force beyond her reckoning. Some call it “intuition”, others “a cop’s sense”. Her sister, the only one whom she’d ever disclosed this feeling, called it "her third eye opening", recognizing that which cannot be perceived by any other means. Dana had laughed this away like she did with all of Melissa's eccentricities, but after the past couple of days… she was no closer to expressing what exactly this feeling was, but she could acknowledge it. She could accept it. She could even begin to act on it.
She felt this way when she graduated from medical school. When she left Daniel. When she first came to the Hoover Building in DC. When she walked into the Hoover Building’s basement for the first time. When she was abducted. When she found out she had cancer deep in her brain. When he leaned in for a kiss long overdue then interrupted by a piercing agony in her neck. When she was at the ends of the earth looking for a cure for her best friend. When he touched her and named her things like “constant" and "touchstone", her thumbs brushing the fullness of his lips before she made herself walk away. It is that feeling you have when you stand on a precipice, toes dangling over the edge towards the darkest unknown. Jump, your blood thrums, inexorable and undeniable. Darwinian sense is overridden by damned curiosity, to plunge the bottom of the darkest abyss for the sake of nothing but a wordless hope.
Here it is once more, chasing sleep away, replaced only by the cold feeling in her veins and the quiet determination that overcomes her when her mind is made up beyond words, beyond sense.
She stands on unsteady feet, knees cracking in resistance as she strides gently to the kitchen. She fills a glass from the faucet and downs it, the chilly tapwater sliding down into her belly. Something catches her eye; Mulder’s door is cracked and his bedside lamp is on.
“Dana?” He calls gently to her. There is a shuffle of pages and bedclothes.
“Mmm. And all the… choices would then lead to this very moment.”
“Hey,” her voice cracks with exhaustion on the exhale She goes to him, gently pushing aside the door to lean against the doorframe, cradling the water glass in her hands and taking him in. He is shirtless, a soundless black-and-white sci-fi film playing on his television, a book on his lap, reading glasses charmingly pushed up his forehead. The bedside lamp renders his bare skin golden, warm, and inviting.
“You sleep alright?” He asks kindly. "I didn't want to wake you."
“Yeah, thank you,” she smiles. “I… don’t suppose you have anything more comfortable I could wear, do you?” She gestures to her rumpled skirt and sweater.
“Well, we’ll just see what we can turn up.” He comes to his bare feet, clad only in loose-fitting pajama pants that hang low on his hips as he moves to his dresser and fumbles through clothes. She can see a smile twisting on his lips as he passes her a ratty t-shirt and pajama pants. “See how those fit you.”
“Thanks, I’ll just be a moment,” she murmurs as she moves into the bathroom. She closes the door behind her then presses two fingers into the space just below her jaw. One might have thought she’d just climbed a building with how rapid her pulse was thrumming beneath the skin, threatening to leap straight out of her flesh.
She quickly gets to work, taking deep breaths as she strips off her clothes and dons his, his signature smell overwhelming her. The t-shirt has “OXFORD” in large scarlet letters, wide at the neck and showing the freckles on her chest and shoulder to good advantage. She has to tie the drawstring around her waist to keep the plaid pajama bottoms from falling down her hips and cuff the bottoms, but they’re comfortable enough. She uses the toilet, then after she scrubs her hands with soapy scalding water, takes a clean washcloth and runs it over her face, neck, pits, between her thighs, willing the cold washcloth to soothe her anxieties.
She combs her fingers through her hair, dealing with a couple of uncooperative curls. She watches herself in the mirror, willing the mirror-Dana to relax. Her eyes reflect brightly back at her, a flush high in her cheeks, rebellious and hungry. On a final impulse, she uses toothpaste straight from the tube and brushes her teeth with her index finger, spits, and wipes down the sink. With nothing left to distract herself with, she opens the door.
She wasn’t the only one preparing, she notes with some amusement. The television has been shut off and some stray tissues, magazines, and pieces of dirty laundry have been put away. Mulder has moved surreptitiously a few inches to the right to offer the entire left side of the bed for her. He looks up from his reading innocently. She thinks he looks like some hot-shot college professor with his thick parapsychology book in his hands, wire-rimmed glasses, and messy brown hair.
“You look great,” he laughs. “How do you feel?”
“Hmm,” she hums, moving to sit on the left side of the bed, curling her legs up to rest her chin on her knees. She knots her fingers in the folds of the oversized pajama bottoms and stares at her pale bare feet. “I feel like a lot of things are about to change, for me. But first, I wanted to apologize for falling asleep on our conversation. I uh… just couldn’t seem to keep my eyes open.”
“It’s alright, Scully.” He squeezes her shoulder with a warm hand. “I should know better by now, with how bored you look listening to me go on and on about aliens and demon fetal harvesting,” he jokes. She smiles back wanly. “besides,” he continues, “sometimes when you fall asleep like that, you really needed it.”
“Considering you were away, it was an exhausting couple of days.” She agrees. “How was England?”
“Cold. Gorgeous. Rainy. Disappointing. The Irish told me they missed you,” he says, the hand lingering on her shoulder moving down her arm to her hand. She shudders as his fingers skim her bare flesh. She thinks if she looks over she’ll see electricity vibrating between his fingertips and her skin. He finds his goal and rests his palm over her hand, stroking her knuckles absently. Why has the joining of their hands always been the most natural thing in the world? “I was hoping you’d say yes, just to be over the pond with you for a while. Maybe drink at a pub, see a haunted castle, go climb some moors…”
“That sounds nice,” she murmurs, imagining them, her scarlet hair vivid against the grey of the sky, climbing some verdant green hill in the pouring rain, Mulder carrying on over the blustering wind about how beautiful these crop circles were going to be. She likes it. She likes it a lot. But then again, cold or wet or dry or hot or everything in between, there are few things she loves more in life than traveling through some abandoned countryside with him. “I almost wish I had.” She turns her hand so his fits against hers. She can feel untold faded scars, most she had treated herself, some from before they'd stepped into each other's lives. “But then again, we wouldn’t be here right now if I had, hmm?”
He laughs. “You’re very right. Although I find that the argument of fate doesn’t always work. For example, what’s to stop me from doing this?” He reaches over to brush a lock of crimson hair from her face, meeting her eyes with his unwavering gaze. She thinks his eyes flicker down to her lips for just a moment. She allows herself to lean into his caress but resists the urge to turn her head and kiss his palm. “Or this?” He says again, this time gently pinching her nose with a teasing smile. She scrunches her nose at him in reply.
“Who’s to say? Maybe you were destined to pinch my nose all along,” she laughs. “There are reasons for everything, if only we know where to look.”
“It’s kind of depressing, thinking of ourselves as just avatars of fate,” he says thoughtfully. He’s gone back to stroking her cheek, jaw, and chin with a featherlight touch. She feels the blood in her cheeks rise to the surface in response. “No choice or say in our lives. Everything that has happened was predetermined, our lives a ship with a rudder we cannot alter. What's the point in doing anything if it's all predestined?”
Dana shakes her head. “No. I think… we’re choosing branching paths with everything we do. But all those branching paths lead us to something bigger than ourselves.”
“You think the branching paths of our lives have led to this, us being here?” His voice is scarcely above a whisper, eyes soft and thoughtful. He's leaning forward and she has seen this scene before, except there were hot tears staining her face and bee pollen clinging to their hair in a dusty sunbleached hallway. This time, she will take a different path.
“Yes,” she exhales, and leans in to kiss him.
“One wrong turn, and… we wouldn’t be sitting here together.”
They have shared a half dozen kisses at this point, some accidental and giggling, some purposeful and somber, like when they rang in the new millennium together in a hospital ward, his mouth tasting of morphine and dried blood. That ancient crackling feeling overcomes Scully again as she leans into his lips, parting hers and coming uncoiled from her position to drape her arms across his broad shoulders. He catches her, strong hands splayed against her back, bringing her hard against him and sighing into her mouth. This kiss is scorching and euphoric and addicting and above all, dangerous. She finds herself tangled in his lap, hapless as a schoolgirl as his hands move across her body, tracing fire with every movement.
The trees are beating against the building again, a fresh wave of storm clouds sweeping through the city. A wild crack of thunder peals through the air and Mulder breaks away, pressing his forehead against hers. There is something reassuring and sobering in the gesture, as there always has been.
“I’d say I’m sorry, but you kissed me first.” He’s breathless, his hot breath washing across her skin.
“Don’t be sorry,” she finds herself gasping, “I want this.”
“This?”
“Mmm,” she leans heavily into him and presses her mouth into the crook of his neck, licking and nibbling the tender skin she finds there. She can feel his pulse against her lips, rapid and fervent. His hands come hard around her waist, sliding up to cup the circumference of her ribcage. She wonders if he can feel her heartbeat like she feels his lifeforce. She draws his earlobe between her teeth and he exhales, sharp and sweet against her hair when she bites down. “Do you?”
He chuckles, warm and throaty. “Oh, Scully… you have no idea.” His voice is thick with worn desire as his hands dig into her skin, grinding her down onto him.
“I might have some idea.” She situates herself neatly in his lap, thighs on either side of his pelvis, arms on his shoulders, allowing herself to gaze into his eyes, all dilated pupils and shadowy forest floors. Glancing up, she moves over him to flick the bedside lamp off, leaving them in quiet darkness.
The storm rages outside, wind and rain battering the windowpane as they kiss, impatiently tugging off each other’s nightclothes with mumbles and “arms up,” and flinging them off the bed. His mouth is scorching against her skin as he kisses across her chest, hands drifting lazily down into her - no, his - baggy pajama pants, cupping the smooth muscle of her ass, squeezing, kneading, spreading. Scully reads his life story in Braille across the tanned planes of his chest, a timeline of Mulder's suffering in the name of the FBI - her gunshot, another oval-shaped bullet wound, dagged claw-marks, faded straggling scars from stitches she sewed herself, molded skin from burns and then worn ragged from roadrash. He shudders helplessly under her touch - she’s touched his chest countless times in the name of Hippocrates but never punctuated her love with kisses and lovebites.
He finds the warmth and wetness hidden underneath her cotton panties and strokes, gently at first, testing her, then again with purpose and she’s gasping in his ear as she frantically moves to return the favor, palming the hardness straining through his briefs. Fingernails clawing his skin, she drags his clothes down his thighs and he moans, soft and throaty, as she strokes him into groaning submission.
Fumbling and desperate, they get off the rest of their clothes and she’s on top of him again, looking down at the man she’s sacrificed so much of her life for. He is full of love and passion and ardor, hands gentle on her hips, eyes dark and glimmering in the faint light of the bedroom. Another man would be pushing her down, impatient and horny and selfish. Not Mulder. He slowly strokes gentle unknown sigils into her soft thighs, eyes roaving her body in the moonlight. He has waited. They both have. She pulls him into her and he cries out, fingers gripping her flesh as she begins to move, slow and purposeful, pushing him ever deeper into her.
“Oh… oh… mmmh, Scully,” he gasps, body jolting as she rides him, the cresting wave of pleasure rising to take her. “please…” His pleading voice lights a fire within her she thought was long extinguished and she knows she'll do anything to hear it spill from his lips again and again.
There is something inexorable and healing in this, this joining of bodies, so unlike any other time for her. Everything with Mulder, even the mundane, is different, special, wild, but this… this exercise in carnality overwhelms her. So much has stood between them, unsaid and unspoken, only expressed in tense looks and slamming hotel room doors. She knows, even in this moment, that there are darker and more sinister conspiracies working against them. But for a moment, just a moment, none of it matters. All that there is how much this man means to her, always will, and she thanks every choice she’s ever made that brought her to this path. Lightning is the only thing to light their lovemaking, provoking his beautiful features into harsh relief for a microsecond as he squirms and gasps and moves beneath her hips. Her breathing is loud and ragged in her ears, a soft mewl at the end of each shuddering exhale as she feels her own pleasure rising up to drown her.
Mulder fits his hand against her pelvis, thumbing her clit while she rides him and it takes nothing at all to bring her to a convulsing orgasm, crying out his name and pleading for him as she falls onto him. He moans his approval in her ear as he grasps her hard against him, pumping himself into her and climaxing with a strangled cry as she rides the last waves of her own euphoria down to earth.
After, she rests on top of him for a while, enjoying his heartbeat winding slowly down as the rain patters peacefully outside. Mulder is quiet, stroking her hair and looking at her curiously. He kisses her forehead with unwonted tenderness and she smiles into his skin. She slides off him gently and makes her way to the bathroom, naked and calm, to clean herself up. When she returns he’s rolled over, breathing softly and drifting off to sleep. She has never seen him so relaxed, so unguarded. It floods her with emotion and tears prick her eyes. She must be more tired than she thought. She looks at the clock; it’s just past 2 am. She curls against him and falls straight away to sleep, his arm draped over her body, naked and safe in each other’s embrace.
“Well, that says a lot. That says a lot, a lot, a lot.”
She feels not a little guilty when she wakes at 5 and leaves, pulling herself unwillingly out his arms, donning her creased clothes as she watches herself in the mirror. She never felt different from herself when she lost her virginity, unlike some girls who claimed that something had changed irrevocably within them. But she feels different now. Lighter. Assured. Eyes and hair brighter. Possibly a line smoothed away from her forehead. Shoulders relaxed. A different aura, as Melissa would say.
When she returns he’s sleeping easy, draped across his bed like a Greek sculpture in repose. She lingers for a moment, wavering between giving up and curling back into his warm embrace before committing herself to leaving. When she walked into this apartment today, she would have been terrified if anyone had seen her, sleep-worn and carrying her heels carelessly over her shoulder, lips bruised from kisses and a love-mark or two marring her neck. But she doesn't care now, and it scares her.
She drives back to her apartment on empty rainswept streets, streetlights painting the roads impressionistic and lovely as soft tune floats the radio. She recognizes it from three days ago - Mulder was dancing to it in the office while poring over slides of crop circles. It'd been in her mind ever since and she winds the windows down and turns the volume as high as her car will tolerate.
There was so much between them, that ever would be between them… but perhaps they could begin to face it together.
hold your mouth to mine because the sky is breaking it's deeper than love I know the way you feel like the rains outside speak to me