Work Text:
i. To not eat, to not sleep. To not move. To move. To run, fast, through the burning green foliage behind your apartment complex. To move your pen across the page with restless fingers. To fidget. To fumble. To scrutinize. To hand it in to Skinner. To watch. To shift. To eat great big sandwiches and oily potato chips that leave crumbs all over your desk. To crack the shells of sunflower seeds between your teeth, to play with the ragged edges of them. To speak. To drop your papers all over the hallway linoleum as she walks through the elevator door. To play wall ball alone in your apartment. To sleep on the couch. To microwave last week’s sesame noodles. To brush your teeth. To wake up in the black of night, hard. To shower in frigid water. To jerk off. To run. To pace. To sleep, to try to sleep. To leave her voicemails. Scully, I thought you would like-- Scully, I saw-- Scully, there is this article in the New York Times about a man who underwent radioactive plutosis and he-- Scully, what are you having for dinner? Scully, wanna know your horoscope, you might want to steer clear of scented candles for at least a week. Scully, is it raining there? What are you wearing, Scully?
To work. To dry clean your suits. To look at the sky. To look at the dirt. To organize. To file. To stay late. To watch the door, watch the clock. To listen.
To wake up and eat and drive to the office and take the stairs to your office and sit in your chair and stand and sit and stand and sit and log onto the computer and type gibberish and fidget and fumble and move and sigh and prepare yourself and prepare yourself and prepare yourself as the elevator doors open and her heels sound in the hall, to blink in the unbearable light of the projector, to be grateful for its mechanical stream of color and light which paints gore all over you, to be eternally indebted to the projected images of bloodied bodies, which conceal the red of your face as she enters the room and says good morning.
ii. It is making you mean, this thing. This, her. It is making you spiteful.
You move across the room toward Gibson Praise, who is sitting on the ground watching cartoons like a regular kid. Behind you, Scully and Diana stand side by side like two warring gargoyles. At this moment, you think you might despise them both. Gibson looks at you, unimpressed. It is in this moment that you feel real, true mortal terror, for perhaps the first time since working on the X-Files. You think Gibson can see the desecrated, vile things that live inside you. The absolute, unerring cowardice of five stagnant years with your partner, your best friend back from the dead twice. You remember then, that neurological superpowers or not, Gibson is still just a little boy. Even if he can see these things, you think, he cannot understand them, nor can he possibly articulate them. But your hands still shake as you crouch beside him and begin talking about chess.
“I know what’s on your mind,” says Gibson suddenly. “I know you’re thinking about one of the girls you brought.”
You swallow and laugh nervously. You think of Samantha, of Emily. You remember to never, ever underestimate a child. You turn your head fractionally to the left. Diana half-smiles. Scully’s stained glass eyes burn right through you.
“Oh?” you prompt, turning back to Gibson.
“One of them’s thinking about you.”
This isn’t real, you think. This is a dream, a nightmare. A folktale, a parabel, a fable. The ghost of Christmas future come to show you your grave and make you beg for a merciful rewind.
“Which one?” Diana asks.
Gibson studies you. You level with him. You beg.
“He doesn’t want me to say.”
iii. When it is all over, you remember little of the arctic. Mostly you remember the cold; the pod of virulent ice encasing Scully’s body like a glass cocoon; the blinding wind; the vicious sky. Sometimes you remember Scully’s beet mouth against the snow.
You were in love with her before Antarctica, but your feelings have shifted since then, have become undeniably sexual. Scully moves around the Hoover building in tight navy suits and you want to pump into her, to grip the backs of her thighs and bury your face in her cunt, to beg on your knees before her like a dog, like some weak thing, to fuck her until she forgives you for ruining her life. Instead, you ditch her for a ghost ship. Only she is there too. She punches you and saves your life. You tell her you love her and she laughs in your face. You are exhilarated by each little rejection, each universe of the two of you, which you replay in your mind while your fist flies over your cock in the privacy of your empty apartment.
You play house in the suburbs. Beneath the dirt, monsters twist and crawl. Scully pulls her gun on you and shoots you in a house full of ghosts. Your corpses lay together beneath the floorboards. In Florida, Scully’s hair sticks to her cheeks and neck. She yells at you in the wet, yellow hurricane light. You want to sink your teeth into her. You are still mean, mean with loving her, selfish and ignorant. Scully you’re making this personal. Scully arrives to her desk in the bullpen, where you have both been relegated, and types emails and case notes and you want to bury your cock, your fingers, inside her. You waste time while one apartment over Padgett examines Scully, connects with her, writes a manuscript so disrespectful and yet so equally fervent to your own feelings for Scully that you want to put your gun in his mouth and cry and scream and plead. Scully’s heart is nearly torn out. She is everywhere, stealing the food off your plate, flicking you in the head and laughing and calling you a fucking asshole, asking for your sperm. In the damp earth, you and Scully rot together amid the corrosive veins of a gigantic mushroom. Agent Scully is already in love. You wake with a start.
iv. The lone gunmen exit your apartment, leaving you and Scully alone in dark. You lean over her where she is still sitting on the couch, furious. She meets your eyes, her dually rageful face as unfair as it is absurd. What does she have to be angry about, you think. She left you, she went with the cigarette smoking man, she risked her life for an empty disk that is now sitting uselessly on your desk, glittering by your fish tank.
“Mulder,” she says warningly.
“What were you thinking?” you ask finally, breathing fast and hard.
“I’ve already said everything there is to say,” she says sharply. “You may have forgotten, Mulder, but I do not need to explain myself to you.”
“Bullshit,” you say, half-hard already, your eyes on her mouth and her eyes on your crotch. She stands, puts her hand on your chest, pushes you backward. You stumble, shocked. Her hair is the color of drying blood and her teeth are sharp and white, her skin radiating in the humid shadow of your living room. She smells of perfume and guncotton. You move toward her and she stands her ground, her red tongue moving beneath her cupid’s bow. Your cock is twitching and angry. Your hands don’t shake.
Her hands, which are at her side, move up, landing on either side of your neck. They are so warm. You close your eyes and think of death. You wish she would wrap her hands all the way around your neck and snuff you out then do your autopsy after.
“Scully,” you say.
You have lost all spacial awareness. You must now rely on echolocation. You must call out to her. “Scully,” you say again, trembling.
This time, she answers.
v. Her mouth on your mouth. The light of the both of you shaking the ground, shaking the whole city. Somewhere, Skinner tosses and turns in the dark and wonders why he cannot sleep.
Scully’s anglerfish glow, her tongue, her starched white button and burning skin beneath. Your lips and teeth on her breasts, sucking her nipples into her mouth. Your hot forehead, her elegant neck, your hands which rip at her clothes. Her mouth, which laughs. She mercifully takes off her trousers and shirt, she has always been smarter than you, and you ask, please scully, to see her tattoo. She obliges, turns away from you, her hands on your wall, and lets you take a long hard look at the snake on her lower back, devouring its tail infinitely, shining with her sweat. She pushes her ass toward you and you grip her, moving her legs apart, and she turns her face up toward the ceiling and moans and you babble Scully please you can’t scully if you do that again I’m going to come and you put your mouth and tongue and teeth all over the scar on the back of her neck, feeling the faint geometrical ridges of the chip beneath it. Scully turns around to face you and you push your jeans and boxers down enough to release your cock, which is steel hard and violet with blood, and put your arms under her milkweed thighs and lift her and she opens herself to you, wrapping her legs around your waist as you drag the head of your cock along her glistening, velveteen core and enter her in a single, sure movement while she digs her heels into your back until you can go no further.
“Mulder,” she gasps, “Mulder, oh my god.”
You fuck her, slamming into her over and over, cradling the back of her head with one hand, rubbing her clit with the other.
Now is this. Now is Bellefleur, Oregon. Now is two minutes before Scully walks into your office for the very first time. Now is nine lost minutes. Now is Scully bent over body after body in nameless morgues. Now is Scully’s return from the dead. Now is cancer. Now is Scully’s nose bleeding all over your shared case files. Now is raining sleeping bags. Now is Scully saying your name in forests, hallways, cornfields. Now is Scully moving next to you, her hand on her gun, her eyes on yours. Now is a great big rock in the middle of dark shallow water. Now is a tattoo parlor. Now is laughter and tremendous rain. Now is remission. Now is in two hours, when Scully will sleep dreamlessly next to you and now is tomorrow, when Scully will join you at work and look at you all day with her warm blue stare and now is when she will go home with you again tomorrow night, and now is Bellefleur again, only in several months, when you will rise into a column of opaque light, thinking of Scully, thinking of how you really got the luck of the draw, thinking of an ill-fitting plaid suit and egalitarian laughter and an immediate commitment to the truth.
“Fuck me, god, Mulder, please,” says Scully, biting your shoulder, and you do, you plunge into her over and over, you tell her you love her with your sonar voice, you suck on her chest and breasts, you pinch her clit, you pound into her and make her look at you.
Across the city, in the Hoover Building, it is the year 2000. It is also September 1995. It is also November 1997. It is also March 1993. In your office, you are examining photos of crimes unsolved. You are thinking of life unknown, life unexplained. You are thinking of the new agent, the one assigned to spy on you, just another barrier to your work. You are thinking of your sister. Now the hallway is filling with the footfalls of someone other than you for the first time in months. Now someone is knocking on your door. Now Scully is clenching around you and screaming your name as she comes, hard, her hands all over you, her back pressed to your apartment wall, her gunpowder hair in your nose as you follow her into the ether, as you spurt into her so hard you stop being able to see. Now she is opening your office door. Now you are turning around.