Work Text:
Haints in Beaufort South Carolina. Officially it’s a kidnaping, of course, but Mulder goes on a tear to LLE about boo hags and blue painted porches while Scully, feeling a bit like a boo hag herself, smiles thinly in the background.
***
When they’d tumbled into bed after Africa she’d imagined her life would be Before and After; imagined the years prior would fossilize like the Burgess Shale for her to inspect for transitional moments. But it wasn’t so, not at all.
Here now, look at this. Beside her is Mulder, tapping the steering wheel to Neil Young while he natters on about cleromancy and Four Thieves’ Vinegar. You’d think it was ’95, you’d think she hadn’t had her calves locked around his back on Saturday night.
What does she want? She doesn’t know. She doesn’t want him to kiss her at work but she… she doesn’t want him not to. Perhaps, she thinks, she wants to flit between parallel dimensions at will, untrammeled by quantum coherence. She remembers falling in love with Schrodinger and sneering at the Copenhagen orthodoxy. She goes father than Erwin now and rejects the necessary collapse of superpositions, wanting to have it all.
Mulder parks them in the motel lot. She opens her door and the steamy coastal air pours in, thick as an old London pea souper. The brief jaunt from the car to the office leaves her frowsy and damp. How can any mammal thrive here?
In the stuffy little room, Mulder is speaking to the clerk in an irritated tone. Scully drowses against the soda machine, wondering why the AC isn’t at full blast. She catches the occasional gust of air from an ancient box fan.
“Looks like we’re bunkin’ together, Miz Dana,” Mulder drawls from nearby.
She peers at him through a half-opened eye. “Pardon?”
Mulder rolls his sleeves up as he talks. “Transformer’s blown, and the third floor is over a hundred. They moved our stuff to a queen on the first floor that’s at least twenty degrees cooler. The jenny won’t run the HVAC system.”
Scully closes her eye again, exhausted by the prospect of explaining a single room to Skinner, who absolutely knows she’s fucking her partner but plays by the social contract they all seem to have agreed on as long as things can be easily ignored. She says fucking to herself again, because it’s a crass word and she feels crass and sticky and irritable. Aloud, she says “no.”
Mulder chuffs in the hot dark behind her lids. “This isn’t the St. Regis, Scully. Options are limited. Come on, let’s get settled and showered, at least.” He touches her waist.
Scully blinks at the curious clerk, then follows Mulder out into the steamy evening. Though after the airless office, the parking lot feels practically crisp. She tastes salt and silk tree blossoms and diesel on the breeze. They make their way to another stuffy little room with a massive gardenia blooming next to the door. The scent is cloying in the heat.
A queen bed is mounted to the back wall. Scully sees their bags sagging in the middle of it and sits at the edge of the bed with weary distaste. She puts her sidearm on the night table.
“Hey, could be a good time,” Mulder says, pulling off his tie. He slings it around her neck, shimmying a little to make it slide at the base of her skull. He tugs her forward and she narrows her eyes.
He lets go of the tie and whistles something vaguely burlesque, unbuttoning his shirt and shucking it to the floor. He makes jazz hands in front of his white t-shirt. Scully groans and flops backwards onto the bed. She stares up at the lazily circling wicker ceiling fan, letting her eyes slide out of focus.
“You’re no fun,” Mulder says, and opens the door. Closes it.
Scully is too lethargic to investigate his departure, to take her jacket off, but she unbuttons her shirt and lets the layers fall open and away. Her sweat evaporates, cooling her at least a little.
The popcorned ceiling is cobwebby, and she watches them churn with the fan’s motion. She kicks her shoes across the room.
“Hey,” Mulder calls as the door opens and closes again. Locks it this time.
Scully sits up with her shirt and jacket hanging open, sees him holding a plastic bucket loaded up with ice and a few cans of Coke. Beads of condensation glisten on the aluminum and she licks her lips. “Give me that.”
He leers. “Show me the rest of that bra and I might.”
The dense heat strips any contrariness out of her and she shrugs her blouse and jacket to the bed. She smooths her skirt over her lap, then looks up at Mulder. “Well?”
His lower lip is between his teeth. Having had it between her own, she understands the habit. Mulder is watching her with a focus that would be disconcerting in other men, and she has the sense that he’s transferring her image to some photographic plate behind his eyes.
Wordlessly, he hands her a cold can. Their fingers brush when she takes it.
Scully lets her head fall forward and rolls the drink along the back of her neck, behind her ears. Under her chin. She feels Mulder’s eyes on her and falls into the strange eroticism of the moment. She looks up at a sound and sees him opening the windows, but leaving the white curtains drawn.
“Mulder!” she hisses, though she knows the bed isn’t visible from outside, even if the curtains were open.
He brings the ice bucket with him to the bed and sets it on the floor between them. He sits next to her, takes the Coke from her hand.
“Hey!”
He presses a finger to her lips, pushes her gently so she’s lying down and staring up at the ceiling fan again. The tension in her back keeps her from making full contact with the nubbly bedspread. She gasps when the ice cube touches her throat, when it melts and water spills over her clavicles and down her ribs. The ice goes quickly and he sets a cube between her breasts, another at her navel, water trickling down her sides with her juddery breaths.
“Skirt’s wet,” he says softly. “Don’t want it ruined.”
She says nothing and he says nothing and gardenia wafts in through the window. He puts his fingers to the side seam of her skirt, draws the zipper down. Scully watches his hands bracketing her pelvis, draws a deep breath at the rise of her own hips so he can pull the fabric down and away. There is something shocking in it, with her jacket and her briefcase and her gun in the honeyed light. They’ve been shadowed before, blanketed, illuminated only by bands of errant moonbeams. Not appropriate, of course, but not…not this.
Mulder points at the window, puts a light hand over her mouth when he slips an ice cube below the elastic of her underwear. He lets it sit at the rise of her pubic arch while she gasps into his palm. It tastes of salt and hand sanitizer and his own warm skin. He runs the other hand between her breasts, hot where the ice was, and down her belly. He kisses her neck.
“Mulder,” she mumbles into his fingers. She tries to tug him down, but he pulls away. Gets up.
Confused, she says his name again.
He kneels on the floor before her and she feels too exposed when she can’t see him, too vulnerable. They haven’t done this yet and she doesn’t know if she can, isn’t sure if she can be this way with him, this naked. Scully begins to protest but stops when his mouth hits her chilled skin through the fabric of her underwear. She drops her head back to the comforter, substitutes his hand on her mouth with her own.
The ice cube is replaced, Mulder licking at the meltwater with maddening calm. He leaves her underwear in place, his breath seeping through. She’s got one leg drawn up, her heel digging into the edge of the mattress, and the other leg draped over Mulder’s shoulder. She bends her knee to pull him closer. He laughs against her thigh.
Mulder pushes her underwear aside but leaves them otherwise in place, and the elastic bites a little into her skin. His mouth is hot against her labia, the flat of his tongue firm against her clitoris. He slips a finger inside her, then a second. She grinds against his palm, his steady mouth, past caring what he might think of this raw need. The world is narrowed to her sweat-soaked body, to Mulder’s head bowed like a devotee. She bites at her cupped fingers.
There are voices outside and she startles, but Mulder frets at her lightly with his teeth and it all goes away again.
Her free hand is twisting in her discarded jacket now, making a black rosette of it, her neck bared to the circling blades above their heads. Her back arcs like an aqueduct, melted ice running beneath.
She lets her jacket go to scrabble at Mulder’s hair, half sitting, each breath a swallowed moan now that her voice is unstifled. She squirms and doesn’t really know if she’s trying to get away. His fingers are making rhythmic come-here motions, his mouth melting her as fast as the ice, and finally, finally, her thighs shudder and clamp against his jaw. She collapses back onto the bed, panting, starry-eyed.
Mulder, because he cannot leave well enough alone, licks her again to make her yelp and twitch.
“Mulder,” she manages, rubbing her face. She’s burning up, limp as Spanish moss.
He gets up then, joins her on the bed with ice in his teeth. He stretches out on his side, traces her face with a finger. He leans over to kiss her, warm lips and cold tongue and the taste of herself on his mouth. She sucks at the ice, bites at his chin. Her legs are wobbly, spasmed out with pleasure, or she’d push him over and straddle him.
He lays his cheek on her chest, still rising and falling like she’s run a half marathon.
“I’d be happy to return the favor,” she says, feeling somehow shy even now. She strokes his tousled head.
“Good for the moment,” he says. “I’ll put it on your tab.” He yawns, closes his eyes.
Scully studies him as he drowses, his Greek statue pout and long lashes and the healed skin over his god module. She thumbs the bridge of his nose. Their breathing falls into sync as evening turns to night. She drifts to sleep with him, windows open. If the haints come in the night, they move on. Love is a powerful talisman.