The Cry of the Truth, 08a/22 The Awaiting of You A.I. Irving vsmith@ischemia.card.unc.edu Rating: NC-17 (sexual situations, language) Category: S,A,R (Mulder/Scully) Summary: Consummation. See part 01 for the Disclaimer. Feedback would be great. Please forward to ATXC and Gossamer. Thanks. Author's Note: Look, if you're under 17, don't read this. I have no desire to corrupt the youth of our world. I'm old enough to be your mother -- so go read Dickens or Dorothy L. Sayers or Robertson Davies, for heaven's sake, instead of this schlock! As for the rest of yall: remember, this is fantasyland and my leaving out the STD/birth control discussion between our two heroes has no repercussions. Presumably they've had that little chat before the action of this chapter begins. XXXXXXXXXX My life has been the awaiting of you... your footfall, my own heart beat. -- Paul Valery It was nearly nine o'clock, and Dana was trying valiantly to maintain her hope that Mulder would come as he had promised in his message. It had been an hour since he had called while she was in the shower. Surely an hour was enough time for him to clean up and drive over...or maybe he'd changed his mind. Maybe he had ditched her once again, this time to hunt down Krychek and get revenge on her behalf, like a some crazed knight in a simplistic technicolor adventure set in the days when a woman's virtue was still a commodity, like pork bellies. Or maybe he had decided that he didn't simply want a woman who had been raped, regardless of who she was. It's more likely the lie that's bothering him, Dana mused as she turned back the covers of her bed. He's going to want to know how I could've told Stuart before I told him. That's easy, Mulder, she said to him in her mind. Stuart was making love to me, and doing a really great job of it, while you were still trying to decide what role I played in your past lives. She smirked at that thought. That was mean, Dana. Yeah. Too bad. I may be in love with him, but that doesn't require me to buy into all the accoutrements of his spookiness. She sighed and shook her head. A touch of repressed anger, Scully? Yes. Just a touch. In her closet, she absently flipped through her collection of nightdresses, hoping for inspiration to carry her through until he made his appearance. The dark emerald silk chemise that Stuart had given her peeked out from her more innocent gowns like a guilty secret. She smiled at the memory of the first and only time she had worn it. Early in their relationship, it had been delivered to the Hoover building in a gift box. It was thoroughly x-rayed, and then the security staff had opened it anyway. By the time she got it, the wrapping was ripped, the silk wrinkled, and half the Bureau knew about it. She had castigated Stuart thoroughly; he took her anger well, and then coaxed her into wearing the damn thing. Within minutes of donning it, she was pressed against the wall in his hotel suite, gasping for breath as he plundered her mouth with his tongue. Grasping her thighs in his big hands, he had easily lifted her, then held her in place with the pressure of his body as he guided his cock into her. He had fucked her hard against that wall, harder than she had ever imagined would be pleasurable. But it was, and in the end she asked him to do it again. Ah, Stuart. Man of many talents. She moved on through the nightdresses until she found the one she wanted: the sheer chiffon tee shirt of palest pink. It fell midway to her knees and had a wide neck that made it easy to slip off. Tossing away her terrycloth robe, she put on the shirt and then wrapped a persimmon satin kimono around herself. She tied the sash and looked at herself in the mirror. Admittedly it was an unusual color combination, but it suited her. The persimmon matched her hair, and the pink matched her nipples. Good. Her silk garments rustled around her body as she walked barefoot to the kitchen. There she poured a few ounces of red wine into a stemmed glass, and took a tentative sip. The tannin of the wine conflicted wildly with the taste of toothpaste that lingered in her mouth. She was about to pour the wine down the drain when she heard the rattle of a key in her door. Mulder came in quietly and put his overnight bag on the floor of the foyer. He peered at himself in the mirror near the front door and attempted to pat his hair into place. "You look fine," Scully said, watching him from the dining room archway. He grinned at her through the mirror, then turned and presented the bouquet of red roses he had brought. She took a few steps forward and took the flowers from him. With a shy smile, she bowed her head to sniff them. "Thanks, Mulder," she said, stretching up to place a kiss on his cheek. "Predictable," he said, shoving his hands into the pockets of his jeans. "Not for you," she said, heading for the kitchen. She found a Delft vase under the sink and filled it with water. As she unwrapped the roses, Mulder came up beside her and fingered the blue-and-white porcelain. "It was my grandmother's," Scully said. Mulder's brow knit with the memory of his visit to Arlington cemetery. "Delia Forrest told me she collects this kind of china," he said. "She found a shard of it at the dig site when I was there." Scully arranged the roses in the vase, the flowing sleeves of the kimono twitching with the movement of her arms. She glanced over at Mulder as she worked, wondering who would be the first to broach the subject. "Mulder." "Hmm." He was still staring at the vase. "It was a painful coincidence," she said evenly. "I had already made up my mind to tell you before we talked to Delia." "You said you were sure it was someone she knew..." "That's a good reason to block the memory so effectively," Scully said, drying her hands on a striped dish towel. Mulder swallowed and chanced another question. "Did you..." "I remembered being raped," she said matter-of-factly. There was no room for innuendo here. "From the first, or maybe the second, week after I came out of the coma. For a while I wondered if it was true -- there was no physical evidence, as you know -- since I couldn't remember anything else. But over the years I've come to believe that I was given opiate derivatives following each procedure, to ensure that I wouldn't remember. What Krychek was doing to me was part of a separate agenda." Mulder hissed in a breath between clenched teeth. "Why didn't you kill Krychek when you had the chance?" "Why do you think, Mulder?" she shot back. He nodded in somber understanding of her meaning. "Scully, I'm astounded by how calm you are about this," he said. "I've had four years to work through it, Mulder," she said gently, taking his hand between hers. She stroked his knuckles with her cool fingertips, and immediately felt his tension easing. "I'm sorry I didn't tell you sooner. I just couldn't...for many reasons. I suppose I came out of it relatively well -- my psychological scars don't seem to be so bad. I don't want this to come between us, as lovers." "You're so damn resilient, Scully," he whispered. "How do you do it?" "It beats the alternative," she replied with a soft laugh. He regarded her, the low light of the kitchen reflecting off the satin of her robe, her head cocked slightly to one side, her smile gentle and warm. Suddenly he was overwhelmed with a vision of the two of them, thirty years hence, standing in a kitchen late at night discussing their mutual history. He liked what he saw. "Mulder?" He refocused on the present, lifting her hand to his lips. "I'm afraid that you'll think of him when -- if --" "When," she said, stepping closer to him. She stretched up on her toes and wrapped her arms around his neck. "When. And I won't. Trust me." With those words, Mulder's face softened into a tender smile. His arms slipped low around her hips, and in one smooth motion he hoisted her up onto the counter. She was laughing as he struggled not to drop her -- the satin of her robe made it difficult to hold her. Once settled on the countertop, she wrapped her legs around his waist and pulled him close. "I like this. Now I can look you in the eye," she said. "My neck thanks you," he murmured, inclining his head as he zeroed in on her smiling mouth. At first he kissed her tentatively, like a child, as he had that night in the office so many weeks ago. Scully was gentle with him, aware that, after the day's revelation, this was almost like starting over for him. Her hands rested lightly on his chest; he cradled her head in his hands as he touched his tongue to the soft tissue just inside her lower lip, then flicked it against her upper lip. Mulder was mildly surprised to hear her moan when his tongue slid across hers. Finally she was allowing herself to be aroused, because she knew that this time, there was no reason to hold back. The effect on him was immediate. He spread his hand across her lower back and pushed her pelvis forward until he could feel the hard ridge of her pubic bone pressing against his rapidly growing erection. His kiss became more desperate, less methodical, as he fumbled with the tie of her robe. The satin knot slid open easily; he pushed the robe from her shoulders, then pulled back slightly to see what he had unveiled. "God, you're beautiful," he said, his hands skimming over the pebbly texture of the silk. His brows rose and converged in an expression of such tenderness that Scully wondered if he might weep. He watched raptly as his fingers delicately traced the mauve nipples, and gasped in amazement when they tightened at his touch. When she moaned, his eyes flew up to her face, and he smiled proudly when he saw that her eyes were half-closed with pleasure. Pressing a gentle kiss to her lips, he cupped her full breasts in his palms. She wanted more; she took his face between her hands and steadied his head as she plunged her tongue into him, tasting salt and the evening air and her own mouth there. When she felt his fingers easing under the hem of her shirt, she moaned in anticipation of his touch on her bare skin. Scully licked his lips neatly and then drew back, resting her head against the cabinet door and watching as he stroked her thighs with his long fingers. "You know, Scully," he said, his voice gravelly with arousal. "While you were in Boston, I spent a lot of time here, thinking about you and eating all the food in the pantry." He massaged the strong ridge of quadricep along the top of each thigh, down to her knees and back again. "I looked at all your stuff." She cocked an eyebrow at that; Mulder shrugged, slightly embarrassed. He rubbed the edge of her translucent shirt between his thumb and forefinger. It rasped like the wind in the grass. "I saw this hanging in your closet. I was hoping I might get to see it on you." "Hmm. What else did you do here that I should know about?" she asked, her eyes dark with the suggestion of her words. Mulder chuckled as he smoothed his palms over her bare hips. "Eventually I think I experienced some sort of mind meld with you," he said. "A mind meld? Oh, so you know all about that incredible night I spent with the Harvard rugby team last weekend?" He nodded. "Ah, so it was rugby. I assumed they were soccer players since they were so reluctant to use their hands." Now it was her turn to laugh, an infectious, feminine sound building and repeating back on itself like a song trilling softly in his ear. It ended in an off-tone grunt when his hands delved smoothly between her legs. His fingers splayed over the tops of her thighs as his thumbs skimmed through the hair at her apex and traced the circular entry to her body. "Oh, Mulder," she said, smiling slyly, as if she had just discovered his secret talent. "Oh, Scully," he retorted with his own wicked grin. His eyes flickered downward to watch his thumbs dipping into her, stirring the warm liquid that had pooled in her vault. The scent of it wafted up, stirring a primal response in his own body. She felt a marvelous tightening in the underlying musculature of her chest and neck. Her face burned, her mouth was dry, and she could not stop smiling. After a long moment in which Mulder was finding his way along the protective folds between her legs, she sighed her delight and grabbed two handfuls of his shirt. With a growl, she tugged his shirttails free and leaned forward to slide her hands over his abdomen. "Maybe we should move," he said as she tugged his earlobe between her teeth. "Think so," she mumbled, her fingers working on the buttons in the fly of his jeans. Mulder gasped as her fingers skimmed along just inside the waistband of his boxers. "You know, Scully..." "Mmm," she grunted. She was popping the remaining buttons in his fly and pressing her knuckles against his cock in the process. As she began to comprehend the contours of him, she leaned back slightly in order to watch his expression. "You were saying," she prompted, pulling back the fly of his boxers with one finger and reaching in with the other hand. "I was -- ah. Your hands are so warm..." For a moment he closed his eyes and allowed his head to roll back. His hands now grasped her hips for stability. "Sculleee..." "Talk to me, Mulder," she said tersely, thoroughly enjoying the spectacle of his pleasure. His head rolled back around and he opened one eye. "I haven't done this in a very long time," he said hoarsely. "And I know you *have*." "Mmm." She stroked him gently, but with a firm grip that hinted at the skill with which she handled her weapon. "Do you really think that matters?" "No. Yes. And don't say it's like riding a bike." She chuckled languidly. "You learn as you go. That's what makes it fun." He smiled, his heart suddenly overflowing with the warmth her presence generated there. He kissed her again, gently and thoroughly with his tongue, then deliberately with his lips. "There's so much I love about you, Scully," he said. "I know." She gave him the warm, broad smile that he lived for. "I know and it makes me incredibly happy that you do." Her hands drifted up from his fly to his chest, then around his waist. For a moment she rested her forehead against his sternum, listening to his breath coming and going, enjoying the warm scent of their bodies. Then she faced him once again. "We probably should've talked about this before we got to this point," she said. "In that letter, I said that I loved Stuart because -- well, basically because he loved me. He came along at a time when I had lost my certainty about my work, about my identity, my goals. I felt...like a ship without a port." "And he made a cozy port," Mulder said. Dana inclined her head in a gesture of reluctant agreement. "But I need more than cozy, and you know it." "I dunno, Scully. This is pretty cozy..." She sighed her exasperation. "Mulder...that letter...I thought about what I said for a long time." "Mmm. I could tell," he said. "I never meant to lie to you," she said, her voice thick with emotion. "For a long time I kept it a secret because I didn't want it to be true. Then...I just couldn't bear to think of myself as a victim. And now...Mulder, I knew I couldn't -- shouldn't -- make love to you until I had been completely honest with you." Make love to me...she's going to make love to me. So there is a God, after all. Dana licked her lips and continued. "I didn't want the lie to come between us, but I don't want to truth to come between us either." "What d'you mean?" he asked, his ability to think analytically resurfacing for a moment. "I'm telling you that I'm all right, and I want you to accept that. Don't hold back, don't try to protect me, don't -- don't worry about me while we're making love. Okay?" "Okay," he replied. He kissed her forehead. "So, can I be your port now?" She cocked an eyebrow at him. "You're more like a docking station in space," she said. "Hold on tight then, baby. I'm taking you into orbit." She wrapped her arms and legs around him, and he easily lifted her off the counter. He carried her like a child through the apartment, grinning as she nuzzled his neck and murmured endearments to him. When they reached her bedside, he was sorry to release her. They stood face to face, eyeing each other. Mulder was enchanted by the way the diaphanous tee shirt floated around her body, caressing her breasts whenever she lifted her arms to touch him. He had always anticipated that he would first discover her body by peeling off the layers of one of her dark suits, yet this bit of gossamer seemed perfect for her -- the practical structure of a nightshirt, yet the fabric undeniably provocative. She tossed her head slightly to clear a wave of hair from before her eyes, then fixed him with a look that he had often hoped to see on her face. She was flushed, warm, almost drunk with desire -- for him. End The Cry of the Truth 08a/22 The Cry of the Truth, 08b/22 The Awaiting of You A.I. Irving vsmith@ischemia.card.unc.edu *Rating: NC-17 (sexual situations, language) Category: S,A, R (Mulder/Scully) Summary: Consummation. See part 01 for the Disclaimer. Feedback would be great. Please forward to ATXC and Gossamer. Thanks. *I really mean it this time! If you're under 17, please read something else. "You know something, Mulder? You're a beautiful man." "Oh *stop*," he drawled, rolling his eyes. "It took me a while to see it," she continued, skimming her palms over his chest. "I couldn't afford the temptation, so I guess I just made up my mind not to notice. But then..." Her fingers were dexterous from years of wielding a scalpel, and she made short work of the buttons along the front of his black twill shirt. "I had a dream about you," she said, pushing the shirt off his shoulders. "In which you came to my apartment in the middle of the night, every night for a week, and knocked on the door. Each night when I opened the door, you were missing one more item of clothing, until the last night, when you were naked." Mulder chuckled as she slid the shirt down his arms and allowed it to drop to the floor behind him. He was just beginning to live his dream. "How do you know it was a dream?" he asked. She buried her face in the notch of his sternum where his snowy white tee shirt met the soft skin of his neck. He smelled of clean cotton laundry, soap, and a faint tinge of something herby -- probably shampoo, since she knew he never wore cologne. She tasted the invisible traces of something sweet on his chin, at the corner of his mouth, on the tip of his nose as she kissed her way around his face. He smiled under the pressure of her lips. "Scully...." "Hmm...." Her hands slipped under the tight-fitting tee shirt and pushed it up and over his chest until he pulled it over his head and discarded it. "Scully," he said again, tucking his head to get a look at her eyes, rapidly becoming dilated with passion. "How do you know it was a dream?" A lazy grin crept over her face. "I'll let you know in a minute." His brow knit in a query, but the warmth of her fingers trailing down his bare belly distracted him from pursuing the conversation. He looked down to see the shadowy fingers of her right hand skittering across his ribs as her left hand steadily pressed against his back. Her nails scratched at the thin trail of straight, dark hair that formed a path down the center of his abdomen. Mulder was holding his breath when the jeans hit the floor and her hand molded itself over his cock, sliding the soft cotton of his boxers over the delicate, inflamed flesh. He grinned when he felt her left hand cup his ass as her right hand slipped between his legs to jostle his testes. He heard the rustle of his pubic hair against his boxers, and then nearly fell over when she dropped to her knees in front of him. Scully grasped the boxers by their elastic waistband and gently slid them over his bulging erection and down his legs. She tugged off his socks and helped him pull one bare foot and then the other from the puddle of clothing in which he stood. Mulder instinctively reached for her head as she surged toward him, her hands kneading his strong thighs on their way to the base of his cock. She caressed him with long, sweeping strokes that began in the wiry hair at his apex, spread over his lower abdomen, and came back again. An undulating wave of warmth followed the path of her hands. She took the tip of him between her lips, tasting and sucking, stroking and nibbling until he could no longer keep quiet. Then she released him, and with his help, stood before him again. She was smiling breathlessly. "It defies everything I believe, Mulder, but it wasn't a dream," she said in a husky voice. "Astral projection?" he suggested, giving her the goofy grin that she loved. His eyes narrowed to slits, his brows drooped, and his even white teeth glinted behind taut lips. She was laughing quietly as he reached out and took her face in his slender hands. With a delicacy that was a tribute to his self-control, Mulder kissed her facile brows, the narrow bridge of her nose, the mole on her upper lip, and finally her mouth. His lips murmured against hers, forming words that she could not have readily translated had she not spent six years interpreting his unspoken messages. She opened herself to him, accepting his tongue as it continued its tale in the recesses of her mouth. Scully felt his strengthening cock pressing against her. She pressed back with her pelvis, and he moaned his approval. His lips repeatedly brushed the soft flesh of her neck, and he could not resist biting her in the sweet spot where her neck merged into her shoulder. "I guess that proves I'm not dreaming now," she said, pushing her fingers through his hair as he bent over to nuzzle her breasts. "So what exactly happened in that dream, Scully?" he whispered. She pressed her knee between his thighs, undermining his balance. With a light touch to his chest, she pushed him over onto the bed. He fell, laughing, with a great whoosh like a tree in the forest. As Mulder watched from the bed, she pulled her nightshirt over her head in one graceful motion and flung it like at streamer into the dark depths of the room. Then, stealthy like a cat, she crawled over him. Mulder waited until her face hovered above his, then grabbed her and rolled her over onto her back. She laughed into his kisses until his hands began to wander her body; then his touch demanded all her attention. "Ahhh...Mulder...you're so..." she murmured, her fingers closing around his erection. "So what, Scully?" "Gorgeous," she breathed, shifting her pelvis up toward his roving hand. "Every inch of you is...I -- oh --" "Tell me," he said, spreading his long fingers across her belly. "Tell me about your dream." "This is pretty much it," she admitted, thrusting involuntarily as his fingers crept into the flange between her legs. "You were naked, I pulled you into my apartment, I took off my clothes, and....that's it. Those fingers...I should've known...Mulder..." "Tell me," he insisted, licking the first nipple he came to, then tugging at it with his teeth as his tapered fingers slipped into her. "I took you into my bed, and -- and you did the most marvelous things to me, things that I -- like that, actually." She smiled at the top of his head as he busied himself at her breasts; she was almost surprised to see that he was actually there, doing what he was doing. "That sort of marvelous thing. Do it again." "That? Or that?" "Both," she sighed. "Everything." Mulder groaned as he tasted the other nipple; her hands were gliding over his back as his fingers tweaked her clitoris, pressed into her, learned the way to her cervix. She moved under him like a flickering flame, warm and smooth, reacting to his every breath. "Scully," he croaked, rubbing his face in the sweetly scented valley between her breasts. "I want to tell you..." "Better hurry," she said, writhing even more determinedly under his fingers. He lifted his head to see her face; she was flushed and glowing with sweat. "Dana," he began again, his voice low and tender with the tears that were accumulating in his throat. When he called her that, the last remnants of the often-patched wall between them disintegrated into dust. She reached up for him, and pulled his face to hers so that she could kiss the corner of his mouth, then the side of his nose -- the tremors building up in her thighs and belly made it difficult for her to be more precise in her aim. "We'll be all right, you know," she whispered. He nodded, and his tears began to spill. She grabbed his hand and held it hard against her, then thrust against his fingers once, twice, and on the third approach she cried out softly as she unexpectedly left the earth behind. Mulder watched her face in amazement. His fantasies had never lasted to this point. How wrong he had been, he told himself, when the reality was so much better. She came at his touch. He felt like a demi- god. With one hand Dana pulled gently at his engorged cock, while she used the other to guide him over her. He knelt between her legs and looked down at her still-quivering body. Her copper hair tumbled across the white sheets; a shock of it rested on her pale shoulder, near the spot where he had bitten her. Her chest was flushed and dewy, her nipples deep mauve and taut. Mulder grinned when he felt her tug at him again. She was impatient for him. "Scully, you believe that I love you, don't you?" he said, stretching his legs out between hers. "Oh yes," she said as he slid one arm under her back. He felt her cool arms slip around him, and moaned happily into her shoulder. "Too heavy?" he asked, rubbing his cheek against hers. "Not at all." She had long been hungry for the press of his body against hers. She guided him into her body with one quick, swallowing thrust that made him gasp for joy. "Now; perfect." He watched her face as he stroked into her over and over again. The joining was so easy, so natural, that it hardly felt like the first try. Mulder forgot all his anxieties about pleasing her when she rose up to meet his gentle thrusts. The look of absolute contentment on her face instilled in him a confidence that he had rarely known. As his rhythm intensified, Dana wrapped her legs around his waist and allowed him to keep time. Overmastered by pure sensation, Mulder finally knew the warmth of her depth, the unconditional acceptance of her softness for his hardness, the sweet sigh of her breath against his shoulder as he pressed into her. He felt her hands on his straining back, encouraging him. He felt her strength pulling him in deeper and deeper until he was at the entrance to her womb, a place he had longed to visit. Lost in the interior landscape, he was startled by the low burr of her voice. He had to remind himself of language, and strained to focus on what she was saying. "I love you too," she said, quite clearly this time. He smiled, and she saw it. "How does it feel? I need to know." "It feels like...like all roads lead here," Mulder replied. He performed a mental assessment of his reactions, searching for the words. She put up a hand to clear the damp hair from his forehead as he continued. "It feels like -- *you* feel like the place I've always wanted to visit, but could never quite get to. The person I always wanted to be, but could never quite measure up to. It was you, all along. See why I believe in fate?" She nodded, for once not arguing with him. Mulder relished that small victory, and kissed her once again. "Are you okay?" he asked, thrusting more aggressively now. His knees and quadriceps were beginning to scream in protest to the unaccustomed strain. "More than okay," she replied. "What can I do?" "What can you do?" he repeated in amazement. What a question. "Scully, you're magnificent, just as you are. I'm -- hey, I felt that. How'd you -- ohhh. Is this something you learned in med school?" She grinned up at him. Her gentle fingers remained busy, and Mulder began to tremble. He turned his head from side to side, trying to get a look at what she was doing. Then he gave up on the investigation and focused on her lovely face, and the way her head moved against the sheet with each determined thrust. Chest heaving, she licked her lips and murmured his name, plus some other words that he could not hear over the sound of his own moaning. His aching legs were long forgotten. Dana saw the wave coming for him before he did. Her fingers delicately squeezed his scrotum where it connected to his body, staving off the crash for another minute. He looked at her like a drunkard. She tried not to laugh, and failed. "What're you doing to me, Scully? Will I ever walk again?" he said hoarsely. "Just a little more," she cooed. "Just a little deeper, a little harder -- that's it. Oh, Mulder, you're very, very good at this, you know." "Yes I am," he panted, throwing himself into his work. "Very, very -- you're doing it again, Scully. How can I last when you -- you're -- when you're --" "Yes." She agreed, and answered, and assented, all in one word, and with her permission Mulder forgot once and for all what it meant to be a child left alone with his grief for too long. Dana felt his body tighten and draw back from her, ever so slightly, and then an enormous wave of heat poured from him into her. She floated in a warm, spiraling space, like a grotto of liquid light, and every cell in her body was basked in its radiance. In the distance she could hear herself making a sound like a long, soft sigh. And someone was laughing, not laughing at her exactly, but laughing gently and delightedly and with resignation to the incredible overarching sun. Mulder kissed the sweat from her hairline and whispered her name repeatedly in a singsong voice. She was smiling, her eyes closed, and a sated sigh was purring in her throat. As he watched, her brow began to twitch, and words formed on her lips. "Mulllllderrrrrr," she crooned, much to his relief. "Right here," he replied, kissing her lightly. "It's me. Open your eyes and you'll see." She reluctantly opened her eyes. He was smiling down at her, exhausted and soaked with sweat, but smiling nonetheless, as if he had just cheated death. "Oh," she said. "Are you all right?" "I'm...I've never..." She reached for him, and he lowered his head to receive her kiss. "...Ever..." She applied another kiss to his smiling lips. "...Ever felt anything like that. What happened?" "You did it, Dr. Scully. I'm not sure how you did it, but you did it. I've never felt anything like that either." He pushed his lank hair away from his brow and released a profound sigh. "I guess it's the intoxicating effect of -- uh, you know -- of love." She stared at him for a moment, trying to piece together all the steps that had led them there. It was too difficult a task at that moment. "I'm thirsty," she said. "At least you don't want a cigarette," he quipped, reluctantly moving off her. "I'll get you a drink, assuming I can walk that far." Groaning as he left the bed, Dana tugged the sheet up over her body to try to trap some of the warmth they had generated. In the distance she could hear him grunting and mumbling about overtaxing muscles he hadn't used since Ronald Reagan had been president. When he returned, she was giggling softly. He sat next to her and gave her a tall glass of ice water. "You're laughing," he said sternly. "You sound like a old man," she said. "Yeah, well, I'm just out of practice, Scully. But by Monday morning I'll be qualifying for the pros." "Think so?" she asked, offering him the glass. He took a long drink and placed the glass on the table beside the bed. "If the coach is willing," he said, wrapping his arms around her and pulling her down to the mattress with him. "More than willing," she said. She turned to look at him. He was blinking up at the ceiling, still panting a little. "You all right?" "Oh yeah," he replied. Then he glanced at her and saw the frown of concern on her flushed face. "I'm -- did you -- did you have any flashbacks?" For a moment she had to search for his meaning. Then it all came back to her with a dull thud. "No, sweet -- Mulder." "What was that?" "Nothing," she mumbled, tucking her head against his breast. "You were about to call me something sweet, Dana," he said. "Weren't you. Admit it." She lightly scratched his chest, liking the raspy sound of her nails amid the hair there. "Oh, all right. I've never been very good at endearments," she said reluctantly. "But I *feel* one for you, like a big lump in my throat." "Well then, what is it?" She fidgeted against him, reaching up to adjust her pillow. "That's just it. I don't know. I can't even call you by your first name -- how am I supposed to come up with some ridiculous pet name that you'd probably detest anyway?" Ah, his thorny Scully was back. He grinned at her. "You can call me Fox," he said. She stared at him for a long moment, then looked away, a ghost of a smile playing at her lips. "Fox..." A tingle went through Mulder at the sound of his name on her lips. It sounded exactly as it had when she had said it all those years ago, late one night when he was still trying to decide if she had been sent by the Bureau to spy on him or by God to save him. "Say it again," he said, his voice husky with emotion. Dana cocked her head and considered his face. His eyes were sleepy, but intensely focused on her. His hair, still damp, had been pushed back from his temples, and in the dim light that streaked through the draperies from the street lamp outside, he seemed to have regained the smooth face of the man she had met so long ago. The FBI's most unwanted, indeed. "Oh, Fox...I do love you," she said, reaching for him. He kissed her lips over and over again, holding her as if some unseen force threatened to pull her away, until his own tears mixed with hers on his cheeks and her need to reassure him was as desperate as his need to be loved by her. No one, not even his mother, had ever said those words in association with his first name. In that instant, he realized that he had never expected anyone to love him. He had planned on being alone, on being just Mulder, for the rest of his life. And as with so many of his carefully laid plans, Dana Scully brought new evidence to light that forced him to reevaluate even his most deep-seated assumptions. She rolled them over so that his head rested on her chest and her arms snaked around his neck. She stroked his face with a light, dry touch until his tears stopped as quietly as they had begun. Her belly was wet with them; she reached down and rubbed the moisture into her skin. "Don't worry, sweetheart," she whispered. "I won't leave." "...Love you..." He fell asleep, his nose just inches from one flushed nipple, the rhythm of her strong heartbeat soothing him into his dreams. Dana continued to hold him, and her last coherent thought before sleep overtook her was of how painless it had been to call him sweetheart. End The Cry of the Truth 08b/22 The Cry of the Truth, 09/22 Glossolalia A.I. Irving vsmith@ischemia.card.unc.edu Rating: *NC-17 (sexual situations, language) Category: S,A,R (Mulder/Scully) Summary: Consummation continued. *This chapter is REALLY not suitable for anyone under the age of 17. The entire story has an overall rating of NC-17, and this chapter is one of the reasons for that. Please skip over it if you are under age. I'm not writing an instruction manual here, at least not intentionally. Please forward to ATXC and Gossamer. Feedback would be most welcome. XXXXXXXXXX Glossolalia: See speaking in tongues. // A prayer characterized chiefly by incomprehensible speech...now practiced...in ecstatic forms of worship. Webster's Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language Dana was up at six the next morning, brewing a pot of tea and skimming the Saturday paper as her computer booted up. She followed the same ritual every morning, weekday and weekend alike: tea, news, e-mail, shower, clothes. The fact that her lanky partner was sleeping in her bed, totally naked and stretched diagonally across the mattress, had little influence on these deeply rooted personal habits. She poured tea into a thin porcelain cup and carried it to her desk. Tugging her robe over her bare knees, she sat before the computer and opened her field diary template. She sipped the tea and peered out the window at the rainy spring dawn. Through the glass she could feel the chill that during the night had betrayed all the early blooms in the gardens of Washington. As she began to type, her mind relaxed into the analytical mode that she found most comfortable. Facts and assessments flowed from her brain onto the screen like an orderly waterfall. "Adelia Forrest's physical signs and symptoms were consistent with violent sexual assault. While she claims to have been the victim of spectral rape, the physical evidence indicates that her attacker was all too human. Although I did not perform a neuropsychiatric assessment, I detected signs of a paranoid delusional state most likely induced by the trauma of the attack. Rape victims frequently repress their memories of the attacker's face or other details of his appearance in a subconscious attempt to undo the crime, or at least make the aftermath more bearable. With the passage of time and the benefit of counseling, Miss Forrest is likely to recover her memory of the rapist's identity. The likelihood that she knew her attacker is statistically quite formidable." Formidable...Dana mulled over her last statement. She had known at least half a dozen women in her undergrad days and at med school who had been raped by men they knew -- boyfriends, acquaintances, a bartender, even a professor. Not one of the women had pressed charges. The ramifications of making their rapes public had been too intimidating. They feared for their careers and their relationships. The same fears had kept Dana from confiding in Mulder about her rape for nearly four years. But now that he knew, and had reacted as he had, she felt as if a burden of incalculable weight had been lifted from her. Laying down her shield, once and for all, had been at once terrifying and thrilling. Finally she had shown Mulder her soft underbelly, and he had kissed it. For years she had loved him for what he was as an individual; after last night, she also loved him for the way that he loved her. She saved what she had written and took the teacup between her palms. Inhaling the smoky scent of the tea, she remembered a morning last fall, gray and damp like this one, when she had sipped tea with Stuart Novak. As they talked, he had watched her carefully with his dark blue eyes. She had thought then that Mulder never looked at her that way. Within days, Mulder had shown her that she was mistaken. Dana grinned into her cup, recalling the way that Fox Mulder had squirmed and whimpered and stretched and sighed under the touch of her hands and lips last night. In spite of the acrid flavor of the tea, her tongue remembered well the taste of his skin -- buttery and salty -- and his semen, slightly bitter and acidic. She closed her eyes and allowed her head to roll back and around, stretching the muscles of her neck and shoulders made taut by their lovemaking. She put down the cup and ran her fingers through her hair, releasing the rich Mulderscent that had permeated her body during the night. In her many dreams about the consummation of their partnership, Dana had never imagined that Mulder would be such an emotional lover. His tears had washed over her skin several times during the night, commingling with her own at least once. It made perfect sense now, without the distraction of his roving hands, when she considered all the heartbreak they had shared over the years. In the morning light, Dr. Scully began to understand the meaning of sexual healing. Although her muscles ached and her skin was chafed, her heart was calm and full. She opened her eyes and saw the object of her regard shuffling into the living room. His long limbs were rubbery with sleep, and his spent penis swung like a pendulum against his thigh as he approached her. He rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands and yawned cavernously. "Whatcha' doin'?" he asked, his voice hoarse with sleep. "Working on the report of our interview with Miss Forrest that I should've written three weeks ago," Dana replied. She smiled indulgently as he reached out for her like a blind man. "And you would appear to be somnambulating." "Come back to bed," he mumbled, offering her his hands. She grasped them and stood into his embrace. "But I'm having my tea now, Mulder," she protested. He opened one eye and squinted at her sternly. "You finally have me naked in your bed and you want to drink *tea*?" She brought the porcelain cup to her lips. "Mmhm," she uttered, sipping. "Want some?" "Come on, Sculleee," he whined. "Oh, all right," she said, putting down her cup and keying the computer to sleep. "But what if I can't sleep?" "God, you can be so noisy sometimes," he mumbled, leading her by the hand toward the bedroom. "What?" "Shhh," he said, attempting to put a finger to her lips. He missed her mouth and poked his index finger into her cheek. She laughed softly and pulled the wayward hand to her lips. "Get in bed," she said, kissing his knuckles and releasing him. "Sweet words," he said, dropping onto the mattress. She grinned down at him as he tucked his long legs under the covers. Flopping his limbs and grunting contemplatively, Mulder finally curled his body around the extra pillows. As his eyes slid shut again, Dana half expected his thumb to slip into his mouth. Instead, he smiled devilishly, like a child dreaming about candy. "Come on, Scully. If I have to come after you again, you'll be punished." He giggled dreamily. "Consider yourself warned." "Dammit, Mulder. Is this what life as your lover is going to be like?" she demanded as she tossed her robe aside. She slipped under the comforter and molded herself against his warm back. "Because I have too much to do to sleep every weekend away." "Not every weekend, Dana," he said softly. He covered her small arm with his lanky one, and patted her hand where it rested on his belly. "But you've been gone for so long...and we have so much time to make up." "And you want to do it by sleeping?" she grumbled into his spine. "I love sleeping with you." His voice was fading into sleep. "I love everything about being with you." "I'll be surprised if you still feel that way in another week," she said. She pressed her pelvis into his ass, enjoying the contrast between his smooth skin and the wiry hairs of her crotch. "After I start making you hang up your wet towels, and take out the trash, and clean your toothpaste off the bathroom faucet..." "Shhh, sweetheart. You're waking me up." Defeated, she sighed against his silky back, and found herself relaxing deeply into the rhythm of his breathing. She slipped away into sleep, wrapped in a cloud of his warmth and the heady scents that lingered in the bed. XXXXXXXXXX Mulder was awakened a few hours later by the whisper of her hair against his thigh as one small, cool hand smoothed over his belly like a friendly spider. He did not open his eyes, but grinned wildly as he felt the head of his half-erect cock meet the soft warmth of her lips. Her tongue, pebbly and hot, slicked around the circumference of him, drawing a rush of stiffening blood into the shaft. With her lips she nibbled along the prominent vein that marked the underside of him; she traced it until it disappeared into the wiry nest of hair that covered his root. There she pressed her nose against his mons, breathing in the oceanic scent of him and then exhaling humid sighs of approval that washed hotly across his balls. She lifted them with the flat of her index finger and flicked her tongue repeatedly at the crepy skin of his scrotum, sucking gently on the sparse hair there before moving on to nibble at the small mound of muscle that was his perineum. Now her hands pressed his thighs farther apart and he could feel her smooth arms passing lightly over his legs as she maneuvered into position, hitching one of his long legs over her shoulder and turning her head slightly so that she could nip at him more easily. She nibbled around the corona, too gently to hurt but firmly enough to make him squirm. Then she licked up the bead of viscous fluid that had emerged from the tiny eye atop the glans, and growling with satisfaction at the taste of him, sheathed as much of him in her small mouth as she could manage -- about half his length. Then the sucking began in earnest. Mulder's thighs twitched, his strong gluteals contracted, and a low moan originated deep in his belly. He felt her shifting around him again, lifting her body so that she was parallel to the mattress, balancing on her forearms on either side of his hips. From this approach, she was able to swallow more of him. He could feel the vibration of her soft palate as she moaned her arousal. She circled the root of him with her fingers and then began stroking him in a rhythm syncopated with the timing of each long, intense suck. Rather than opening his eyes and actually looking, Mulder allowed himself the luxury of imagining the sight of her coppery hair spread across his belly, her left arm pressed against his flank, her lush lips swollen and shiny around him. He pictured the dozens of moments when he had lapsed into a daydream of his partner performing this very favor for him -- in the car, in their office, in an elevator, on the firing range, on a plane bound for god-knows-where, on the couch in his apartment, on that bench near the Tidal Basin, in the theatre where they had watched her lover play a Roman warrior in one of Shakespeare's more excruciating history plays... "Ahhh, Scully..." he moaned, his hips beginning to move of their own accord as she gently squeezed his balls between her fingertips and the soft mound of muscle where her thumb merged with her palm. And then the fantasies were replaced by the feeling that was blooming in him, an emotional quickening that made his brow twitch even as his hips undulated against the mattress. The fact of her love for him was finally setting in. It was merciful like a cool, healing touch in response to a sudden headache; it was comforting like a slow-burning fire in a cozy, low-ceilinged room on a snowy evening; it was thrilling and novel like the first sentence successfully spoken in a foreign language long studied but never before used to communicate with native speakers. She quickened the pace of her ministrations and again hummed her response until he stiffened beneath her, then thrust twice into her, then -- "DanaDanaDanaDana." -- he uttered her name in breathy rasp as his hands reached for her hair, her cheeks, her shoulders. The sensation of her swallowing the warm semen that emanated from him drew more shuddering waves, now of an almost painful intensity. He was grateful when she released his cock and proceeded to delicately clean him with the tip of her tongue. Dana eased into his arms, tugging the bedcovers with her so that they were both cocooned in the lofty warmth of her fine cotton sheets and down comforter. Tenderly she kissed the narrow line of skin between his ear and his sideburn, the notch at the hinge of his jaw, the dark mole on his cheek. Her hand came to rest just above his diaphragm, nails scratching lightly for a moment in the fine hair there before her fingers furled into a loose fist. "I love you, Fox," she whispered in his ear. With no certainty of whether he was waking or dreaming, Mulder placed a hand over hers and snuggled closer to her, deeply content in the warmth that radiated from her small body. He had been too many years alone, too many years cold, not to cherish every second that he spent in her shelter. XXXXXXXXX Shortly before noon, Mulder awakened with a dull, thudding headache, the result of twelve hours of sleep saturating a brain that was accustomed to living on four a night. His eyes were dry and itchy, lashes stuck together with sandy particles of dried tears. He rubbed his eyes and sniffed loudly. Turning onto his side, his chest met with something deliciously warm, rounded, and smooth. Scully. More specifically, Scully's ass. Her naked ass, pressed up against his happy morning erection, in her bed. At last. Mulder grinned and pulled her closer. Eyes still shut, he buried his face in the thickness of her hair and inhaled the lingering scent of their mating bodies. He felt her stir against him; one slender arm reached back over their torsos to pat his hip. He sighed. "Good morning," he said. His voice was thick, almost as if he had a cold; the tears he had shed the night before had left him congested and dry- throated. "That you, Spooky?" "I warned you about that," he intoned, pinching a nipple. "I'm so scared," Dana said. "What did I tell you, Dana?" He spoke with the indulgent tone of an overtaxed parent. "We don't use the S word. If we use the S word, we expect to pay." "Make up your mind, Fox. One minute you want me to call you Spooky, then next you're telling me that if I do you'll take a big bite out of me. What's it gonna be?" Oooohhhhh, Mulder's sleep-intoxicated brain said. She wants me to bite her. "Hold that thought," he muttered, pulling away from her. "I'll be right back." He was as good as his word. He returned with teeth brushed, face washed, and bladder emptied. Still quite naked, Scully was now sitting on the edge of the bed, one foot resting on the horizontal sidepiece of the maple bedstead, the other dangling just above the carpet. Both arms were raised above her shoulders; one hand held a brush that she passed repeatedly through her hair, the other hand followed the brush's path, smoothing down the hair with each stroke. Mulder watched, entranced, as her breasts quivered in response to her motions. The morning light rendered her pale skin incandescent. Blue veins shimmered just beneath the surface; cameo pink aureolae were smooth and broad. She smiled at him and put down her brush. "Feeling better, Spooky?" Mulder crossed his arms over his bare chest and glowered at her. "Scully..." "I have a question for you," she said, resting both heels on the crossbeam of the bed and pressing her knees together. She rested her hands on her knees, her upper arms crowding her breasts together. It pleased her to observe Mulder's brows arch in response. Had she allowed her gaze to wander from his eyes, she might have noted that his entire peripheral nervous system was reacting to her display. "How do you decide when you're going to call me Dana, and when you're going to call me Scully?" "How 'bout if I just call you gorgeous?" he drawled, walking to the bed. He stood a few inches in front of her and peered down at her upturned face. "I had the most wonderful dream, *Dana*. I don't suppose you had the same one? Hmm?" "What dream would that be?" she asked coyly. Shaking his head, Mulder sat next to her and put his arm around her shoulders, pulling her close. He kissed the crown of her head. "Oh, forget it. I don't know if I'll ever be able to play games with you," he said. "When I look at you -- you're so small and brilliant and fierce -- I just want to hold you and kiss you and make sure that you understand how much you mean to me." "I understand," she reassured him, squeezing him back with an arm wound his waist. "I do. And once we're more comfortable with all this you'll be tossing bad puns at me just like you do at work." "And you look forward to that?" he asked. "Strangely enough, yes, I do." She pulled away from him so that she could look into his eyes. They were as unshielded as his body, and in them she saw hope for the first time in years. "Fox..." The word came out slowly, as if it were in a foreign language. He grinned and rolled his eyes. It would take some getting used to. "Dana," he replied. "What d'you want to do today? We can't lie in bed forever." "Why not?" he asked, taking up her brush and tapping the bristles lightly against his palm. "Because...it's spring, and it's Saturday, and we're young and in love --" "You're starting to sound like a really bad song from 1973. Chicago, or somebody like that." She glared at him; he tucked his head and fixed his hangdog gaze on her. "Oh, all right. We'll stay in bed all day. Talk me into it," she said, feigning disgust. "Turn around," he said. Without a moment's hesitation, she turned her back to him. Mulder began to brush her hair with long, careful strokes. He watched the sunlight glinting off the copper and gold strands and thought of fairy tales in which magic is done for the sake of a princess's beautiful hair. "I want to take you for a nice lunch," he said quietly. "Is that all right?" "Of course," she replied, wondering what qualified as "nice" in Mulder's lexicon. "I know that tone, Scully," he said, gently pulling a hank of her hair. "No, we're not going to Chuck's Chili and Scripture. Well, not today at least. Do you like horses?" "Are you implying that Chuck puts horses in his chili?" Mulder guffawed. "That's libelous. Of course not. But do you? Like horses?" "Sure. Are we going to the track?" Mulder put down the brush. With a gossamer touch, he traced the shape of her shoulders and upper arms, then reached further and allowed his palms to glance over her nipples. Only too eager for his touch, she responded by immediately easing back against him. "We're going to a place out near Great Falls, an inn with a four-star restaurant. During the day on Saturday is the best time to go because you can walk around the town, window shop, hang out and watch the horses graze..." His touch became more earthly as he cupped the fullness of her breasts and circled the nipples with his thumbs. "How did you find out about this place?" she asked, her eyes fluttering shut as she rested her head against his shoulder. "Read about it in the Post last weekend, while I was anxiously awaiting your return." He kissed the side of her neck with a resounding smack. "I had plenty to time to think of all the nice things I want to do for you." "Maybe I should go away more often," she said. "Not without me." He nibbled his way up her neck to her ear lobe, which he sucked tenderly before flicking his tongue into her ear. "Please don't go without me anymore." "I won't come without you either," she jibed, smiling languidly as his hand smoothed over her belly. Mulder's breathy chuckle sailed across her cheek. "So you want to know why I call you Dana sometimes and Scully at other times," he said, slipping his arms around her waist before resuming his slow caresses. "Mmmhmm," she hummed. "I call you Dana when my heart is speaking to you." He scratched lightly amid the loose cinnamon curls that covered her mons, his short nails making a papery sound against the wiry hairs. "And I guess I call you Scully when my mind is in charge, or when I wish it was. Sometimes I call you Scully just because I've been calling you that forever..." "And sometimes sweetheart," she whispered. "Sweetheart especially." His long, tapered fingers fanned out over her thighs. With his thumbs he massaged the tendons in her groin, making her legs twitch slightly, before opening the outer flange of her vulva with his fingertips and allowing the cool morning air to rush in. She shivered slightly, and her nipples immediately peaked. Mulder smiled. "You're so beautiful, sweetheart," he said in her ear. "And what you did for me last night was like a dream. An amazing dream. Thank you." "This morning," she mumbled. "Hmm?" "It was this morning," she said, licking her lips. He kissed her cheek slowly and deliberately, his lips lingering over the invisible downy hairs there, his tongue flitting over her porcelain skin. Then, pressing his cheek against hers, he watched his fingers play between her legs. He used the first two fingers of his left hand to keep the folds separated, then employed the same two fingers of his right hand in sliding up and down over the inner folds. He methodically tweaked her clitoris into a flushed, erect state, then dipped his middle finger into her vestibule to spread the liquid that had gathered there. "Mulder..." "Yes, sweetheart," he replied promptly. "The night before I left for Boston..." She paused to try to catch her breath. "You promised that you'd --" "That I'd go down on you?" He kissed her cheek again, his fingers unrelenting. "Can I?" "...Yes, please." She felt his smile against her cheek and sighed in happy anticipation. There was so much more to Mulder -- so much that was good and healthy and caring -- than she had ever expected to find. She had assumed that his painful life had beaten all the sweetness out of him. Now she was learning that he simply kept it securely locked in the recesses of his psyche. He had long since given her a key. Luckily, she had finally summoned the courage to use it. Still holding her from behind, Mulder took his right hand away from her body and brought it up to his lips. Quickly he sucked his middle finger clean, then touched his forefinger to her lower lip and painted it with the glaze. His eyebrows again peaked into his forehead as he watched her own pink tongue trace her lower lip, taking up the flavor and spreading it around the entire circumference of her mouth. He wrapped his arms around her chest and hugged her, then slowly eased away from her and off the bed. As he knelt on the carpet, Mulder grasped her legs just behind and above her knees and pulled her -- none too gently -- to the edge of the bed. Her muscles had long since turned to jelly. Dropping back onto the mattress with a desultory giggle, Dana spread her arms as if to embrace the universe. Mulder hitched her legs over his shoulders and held her by the hips, tilting her pelvis up slightly and sliding the nearest pillow under her. She sighed her approval. "Dana?" he said softly. "Fox," she replied. "I love you, you know," he said soberly, beginning a long line of wet kisses up one thigh and then down the other. She sat up as best she could -- only about a quarter of the way -- and smiled at him through eyes half-lidded with pleasure. "You've already made me so happy," she said, far more clearly than either of them expected, given her state of arousal. He squeezed her outstretched hand, then released it, allowing her to fall back to the cool surface of the sheets. As the heat of his mouth met the heat of her body, Dana released a small cry of joy. She had spoken the truth; she was unspeakably happy for the first time since she was a little girl. She felt a contentment akin to the sense of completion she had enjoyed whenever her father returned from a long float, when the stoicism and denial her mother had demanded from each child was replaced by absolute joy at the return of the ginger-haired captain who inevitably brought exotic presents from countries whose demographics the studious young Dana could readily cite. Now, as then, the missing piece of the puzzle had locked into place, forming out of what had previously been just a collection of colored elements a beautiful picture of something that was real. And this is real, she thought as the thrumming in her belly and loins intensified under the exquisite teasing of Mulder's lips and tongue. This is not a story about someone else's happiness; this is my life. He is not an actor; he is my Mulder. We are partners, now and forever. Oh, I wish I had known a long long time ago... Then there was nothing left between Mulder and Scully and the sky. She shot up among the heavens and found him there, a star in his own right, pulsating, iridescent, stunning against the blackness, exuding the most intense heat she could imagine...and then she realized that she was the heat. It flowed through her, sparking and burning and spinning off binaries and novae on its way to her brain and back down again to Mulder's mouth. He loved her. It was that simple. End The Cry of the Truth 09/22 The Cry of the Truth 10/22 A Lie of Omission A.I. Irving vsmith@ischemia.card.unc.edu Rating: R (language, sexuality, discussion of rape) Category: S,A,R (Mulder/Scully) Summary: Mulder finally cracks under the strain of Scully's secret. Please forward to ATXC and Gossamer. Feedback is welcome! Why cannot truth become simply a baby That laughs when it is happy, And cries when it is hurt, As if to tell me which is itself? Cheng Min, "Student" On his way to show Scully the horses, Mulder lost his way. He had neglected to bring the article from the Post that described the little town of Moncure and how to get to it from Washington; Scully suspected he wouldn't have read the directions anyway, even if he'd had them handy. He smirked behind his black sunglasses as he made a three- point turn, narrowly avoiding a ditch, at the end of an unpaved road seemingly nowhere near Moncure. He put the Explorer in neutral and set the emergency brake. Scully peered at him curiously. "We're lost, Scully," he said flatly. They were at a dead end, surrounded by a forest of loblolly pines and hardwoods whose leaves were only just beginning bud. The underbrush had not yet regrown after the icy winter that had just passed. The tall, slender pines undulated in the breeze, and clouds, almost cartoon-like in their puffiness, scudded across the sky. "Got your cell phone?" she asked. Mulder produced the phone from the inner pocket of his leather jacket and extended it toward her. As her fingers touched it, he yanked it away, a smile twitching at the corner of his mouth. "Not so fast," he said. She flashed a brilliant smile his way. Crossing her arms, she settled back in her seat and turned toward him. "Oh, I get it. Twenty years ago you would've said 'we're out of gas, baby' and proceeded to convince me that if I really loved you I'd let you take off my bra." Mulder leered happily. "You're dating yourself, Scully. Try this version: I forgot to recharge the cell battery, and if you really loved me, you'd let me take off your pants." She grinned back at him. "Not bad, Mulder. Did you really forget to recharge?" "Why don't you come over here and give me a jump start?" With a slow smile, she released her seat belt and leaned across the console to plant a kiss on the mole on his right cheek. He had shaved carefully that morning; she hummed with pleasure as she ran her lips over the dewy-smooth skin. Mulder was not so delicate: he groped her breasts through the thin linen of her blouse. "Hey, you're not wearing a bra," he said. She bit down on his ear lobe, provoking a wild yelp from him. "I'm *hungry*, Mulder," she said. "Really? Me too." He shoved his tongue into her mouth, clanking his teeth against hers and bruising her lips. She put up a hand to slow him, but he caught it and pressed it against his cock. Scully's whimper was muffled by his mouth. Mulder's aggression did not wane until she began stroking his the bulge behind his fly. Finally he released her mouth and sat back, panting. He wiped his lips with the back of his hand, hardly noticing when she pulled a tissue from her pocket and dabbed a drop of blood from the corner of her mouth. "Jesus, Mulder," she hissed, showing him the red smear on the white tissue. "What the hell were you thinking? Was that some kind of testosterone surge? I hope to God you don't have your gun with you." "I don't," he said dully. They sat in the respective seats and stared out the windshield at the cool spring noon. Mulder was imagining that they were so far back in the woods that they could die there and no one would find them until their bones had been bleached by the sun. Scully was thinking that he had either lost his mind, or that he was applying some pell-mell psychological bullshit to her brain to try to rouse her memories of being raped. She opened her door and dropped down to the gravel. Slamming the door soundly, she walked around the Explorer and yanked open his door. "Get out," she said. He frowned at her. "Get out. I'm driving." "No." "Yes. Get out of the fucking car, Mulder." Mulder slowly unfolded his long limbs and lowered one big foot, then the next, to the ground. He stood at his full height and stared down at her through his black shades. And then he slammed his own door. She backed away from him, suddenly more afraid of him that she had been since -- than she had ever been. "You bitch," he said evenly. Her jaw dropped. "How could you lie to me all these years? You knew -- you *knew* how much it hurt me when they took you, Scully, and then you lied to me about it. Even after I told you you're the only one I trust...you listened to me say it, time and time again, and you continued to lie to me." "Mulder, please. I --" "That's deception, Scully," he insisted. "A lie of omission is a deception." Perplexed and frightened, she shook her head. "I never meant to hurt you." "No. I don't want you to talk right now. I'm talking now," he boomed, his voice filling the woods. "I've wanted you, Dana Scully, since the first day I saw you. I loved you when you argued with me, when you told me I was crazy, when you *shot* me --" Her bowels turned to fire upon hearing that reference. Sparing Krychek that night had been an excruciating test of her character. Shooting Mulder had actually been easier. " -- I even loved you when you were fucking that *actor*, for God's sake! Fucking him and calling him by my name!" His voice cracked on the last word. He shook his head mournfully and, like a bull, paced furious circles in the gravel. Scully watched, mortified. "How could you not tell me this? Have you got some kind of a mean streak that I'm just now finding out about? You had so little faith in me that you deliberately kept this from me, during these years of -- of friendship, when what I needed above all was your faith and trust. And now you've told me just to be on the safe side. In case you call out his name when I'm the one fucking you." Scully's palm flexed with the urge to punch him, but that was quickly replaced by the urge to flee. She looked past him, at the Explorer, its engine still running. She could get in it, toss him his cell phone, and drive away. Quit the Bureau tomorrow, sell everything, dye her hair blonde, move to Hawaii and get a job as a lab tech. No more death, no more mysteries, no more staid suits and gore-proof boots. Or she could call Stuart Novak, ask if he still had the ring, and catch the next plane to London. A wardrobe of expensive, cream-colored clothes, protestations of love in the tongue of Shakespeare and Donne, night after night of sex just sweet enough to numb her brain and trigger her orgasm. No more balancing the checkbook. No more cleaning the gun on Saturday night. No more Axid-and-Advil cocktails. Of course either option would mean no more sleepy hazel eyes or sly grins. No more long-winded recitations of the mating rituals of Reticulans or wooden pleas to the Section Chief for funding to chase the conspirators who created the Section Chief's job. No more goddamn sunflower seeds. No more scent of lemon-balm at the spot where neck meets ear. No more puffy lower lip, trembling to be kissed. These possibilities thundered through her brain in the time it took Mulder to viciously kick one of the Explorer's tires and then stomp back across the road to where she stood, frozen with confusion, on the edge of the forest. He ripped off his sunglasses and hurled them away, then grabbed her shoulders with his big hands and shook her. Shook her hard. "We *had* him, Scully. We had him so many times and you let him go..." His face was streaked with tears and he was panting as if he had run from Washington. "Goddammit, Scully..." His voice broke with a sob. Without relinquishing his hold on her, he bowed his head and allowed the anger to boil up and out of the secret place where he kept such things. She remained frozen, having made the decision to weather the storm. He looked up again, into her eyes, and his face began to crumple with tears. "He *raped* you, for God's sake," he cried. The harsh edge of his voice disturbed some grackles that had been watching them from the pinetops. Cawing and complaining, they flapped away. Scully felt his words like a blow to the bridge of her nose; the tears stung in her nostrils, her eyes burned, and her throat constricted. She arched her brows and inhaled purposefully, hoping the action would ease the searing pain. At this point she could no longer differentiate between the physical and the emotional. Wresting herself free from his hold, she turned and took a few steps into the woods. She patted the pocket of her jacket and found the tissue she had used to wipe the blood from her mouth. As she took off her sunglasses and dabbed at her eyes, Scully was overwhelmed with a leaden realization. Mulder was right. She hadn't trusted him enough to tell him that she had been raped -- not until he had bared himself to her, declared his love for her, and forced himself to be supportive of her decision to leave him for another man. She had her reasons, of course. She knew them by heart. But now it seemed they were just excuses. Mulder sat back on his haunches in the road, holding his head in his hands as he wept. She moved toward him, stiffly, as if she had been beaten. She knelt on the road, ignoring the pain as the gravel bit into her knees. Slowly and deliberately, she took his wrists and pulled his hands away from his face. He blinked at her, and saw himself reflected in the teary sheen over her irides, blue and boundless as the sky. "Krychek raped me," she said unsteadily. "It's true. I should've told you sooner. I was afraid that you'd kill him on sight, and ruin both our lives... I had faith in you, and trust, but not enough. I'm sorry, Mulder." He gently pulled his arms from her grasp. He sniffed loudly, then accepted the tissue she offered him. Staring at the spots of blood that remained, he shook his head once and then blew his nose. When it was over, he rubbed a hand over his face and through his hair. "I expected more from you," he whispered. "I wanted you to expect more from me." Scully stood and offered him a hand. He took it and followed her back to the Explorer. He paused, his fingers on the door handle, and reached for her. She threw herself against him with a force that pushed him against the door and held onto him with a desperation he had never before seen in her. Mulder hugged her tightly and took a few deep breaths, trying to reorder his thought processes. He had been overcome, like an island in a storm. Something in the frustration of being lost had triggered it all... "Don't," she said into his chest. "What --" "Don't feel guilty. Please, Mulder. You needed to say it and I guess I needed to hear it." "...It hurts." "I know," she said simply. XXXXXXXXXX The breeze that had taunted them in the woods turned into a full- fledged March wind, whipping up whitecaps on the Potomac and sending bits of garbage spiraling down the empty Saturday streets of downtown Washington. Mulder and Scully had passed the ride home in silence, both in a state of postcathartic exhaustion like two children after a temper tantrum. Neither were surprised when sheets of rain sluiced down from the sky. It seemed to suit their moods. Mulder parked on the street in front of her building and cut the engine. For a moment he considered leaving her there and going back to his apartment so that he could be alone with his misery. The man he had been up until twenty-four hours ago might've done just that. The man he had become in the course of one night in the arms of Dana Scully could not and would not leave. He doubted if he could ever leave her again. Once inside her apartment, they discovered that the electrical service had been interrupted by the storm. Scully found candles and was arranging them on the coffee table when Mulder emerged from the bathroom, naked and already half-erect. "The bedroom," he said. She saw his bare feet pad into view as she tore the wrapper off a candle, then allowed her gaze to slide up his bare, lean legs and linger on his flushed penis, elegantly rising away from the ruddy sac between his legs. She skipped over his torso to his face, giving him her best expression of incredulity. "You're awfully certain, aren't you, Mulder," she stated, cramming the candle into a crystal holder. He swallowed audibly. "That's just it, Scully," he said softly. "I'm not certain at all anymore." She tore the clear plastic film from another candle and crumpled the scrap in her fist. She was still wearing her coat; her sunglasses dangled from the placket of her white linen shirt. As she fitted the taper into the second of the pair of crystal candlesticks, she pursed her lips pensively. "And if we make love then you'll be certain again?" she said quietly. For a split second, Mulder's mouth twisted into a grimace of resentment. But when she looked up and he saw the sadness in her eyes, his mocking expression was replaced by dismay. Somewhere along the way, he had forgotten the brutal facts. Last night she had seemed so separate from the content of her letter that he had been able to distance himself from it as well. This afternoon, she had been so stoic in the face of his lacerating anger that it had again escaped him that the rape had been done to this very woman, not some previous incarnation of her. Now, with a crash, it all came back to him. This was the woman who had been degraded in Fox Mulder's name. This was the woman who bore the scars of Krychek's rage. Hers was the body that had been invaded, again and again, while Mulder...while he had indulged in a marathon of masturbatory self-loathing that culminated with his encounter with a woman who could not have been more unlike Scully. He had never told her about Kristen -- that was his own lie of omission. Convenient how I forgot about that, Mulder reflected. She was staring at the matchbook in her hand. It bore the insignia of the Ritz-Carlton on Capitol Hill. She closed her eyes and for a moment she saw the luxe rooms of Stuart's suite, painted by moonlight, and Stuart himself, strong, warm, and kind. It had seemed at the time that nothing from the past could hurt her. There, memory had no dominion over her or her lover. Sensing where her thoughts had led her, Mulder took the matches and lit the two candles she had prepared. He gave one to her and took the other for himself. "Come with me?" he asked, fixing her with his spaniel eyes. The flames flickered in the stream of her sigh. "I'm not sure I --" "Please." His expression had become imploring. Dana swallowed the lump in her throat, and with a deep breath, nodded. Dana took his candle and placed it with hers atop the dresser where the light would be reflected back into the room through the mirror. There had been no mirrors in the place where Krychek had raped her. She had no memory of what she had looked like then, battered, drugged, and used. She watched herself shrug out of her jacket and finger the top button of her shirt. Her face was placid, her eyes nearly black with the expansion of her pupils. She blinked at herself, and wondered for a moment if Mulder saw her as a victim now. A sense of dread was heavy in her belly. "Dana." His voice was surprisingly harsh in the soft candlelight. She shivered when she saw him come up behind her. In the tremulous candlelight, his reflection took on a resemblance to Alex Krychek; through the filter of her neglected memories, she saw his familiar face mutate into a cold, pale, angular mask of brutality. When his hands closed over her shoulders, she recoiled. Trapped between his body and the dresser, she could only turn in place and push against his chest. Mulder caught her arms before she could unleash the reservoir of fear and fury that she had banked for so long. "Let go of me," she hissed. "No." Their training may have been equal, but Mulder was nearly a foot taller and seventy pounds heavier. While it was easy for him to still the thrashing of her body, he did not know where to begin to ease her mind. "What is it, Scully?" "You can't do this to me," she said, tears spilling over her cheeks. "Do what, Scully? I don't --" "Let me go," she panted, pushing against his chest. "Not until you tell me what's going on," he insisted. He wrapped his arms around her waist, lifted her a few inches off the floor, and holding her in this fashion carried her to the bed. "Now sit," he demanded. "Talk to me." As soon as he released her, she sprang away from the bed and tried to duck around him. Mulder easily caught her. He crouched so that he could see into her eyes, and what he found there nearly broke his heart. "You think I want to rape you too," he murmured. "Let go, let go, let go," she keened, flailing against him. Mulder worried that if he freed her she might flee, or pull her gun on him. Simultaneously he feared that if he continued to restrain her, she would continue to misunderstand his intentions. But Dana decided for them both when she succumbed to the hot wave of grief that had been pressing against her since Mulder's outburst in the woods. Her head dropped forward, coming to rest against his sternum, and her tears poured across his chest as she wheezed out a high-pitched sob that was as painful to hear as it was to emit. The sobs came again, and again, as she sank to the floor at his feet. She crouched there, motionless except for the occasional tremor that ran through her small body whenever the sobs came. Mulder knelt beside her and waited. He felt vulnerable in his nakedness, but would not leave her to find his clothes. When, after a few minutes, she willingly nestled in the shelter of his arms, he was glad he had stayed. The warm dampness of her tears rapidly cooled on his shoulder, and he shivered. "Dana, you're safe with me." His lips were close to her ear; her hair lifted with his breath. "You're safe, I promise." She groaned. Words could not stand up in the storm that poured from her. Mulder rocked her for what seemed like hours, until at last she was quiet. "Shower," she whispered. "Okay." He helped her to her feet and began unbuttoning her blouse. Cautiously checking her reaction to every movement, he tugged the shirttails from the waistband of her khaki twill trousers, then undid the last two buttons. His fingers made short work of her belt, flicking the braided brown leather through its silver buckle like a tongue. The silent zipper of her trousers came next. He released the soft wool fabric and the garment fell to the floor accompanied only by the rustle of taffeta lining. By the time he pushed the blouse from her shoulders, her breathing had regulated and she was no longer trembling. Her hands trailed down his forearms, but she did not meet his gaze. Mulder watched her pale fingers spread across his wrists and clasp his hands. "Mulder, I...I thought I saw..." "It's okay, sweetheart. You don't have to explain. I confused us both today." He gently squeezed her fingers. "That fit of mine out in the woods was a chunk of self-indulgence that should never've seen the light of day." She lifted a hand to wipe her eyes, then reclaimed his hand. "I want to put that behind us," she said, her voice thick with the tears she had shed. "But I have to tell you this: don't ever, ever, speak to me that way again. You can be angry at me, you can argue with me, you can challenge me. That's fine. But don't ever call me a bitch again." He nodded once. "What did he call you." It was a dull statement more than a query. She turned her red-streaked face up and showed him the full breadth of her pain. Her upper lip twitched slightly as she recalled the honest answer to his question. "He called me every name in the book," she replied, her brow furrowing as she struggled not to yield again to her tears. "Tell me what he did to you," Mulder said, cupping her jaw in his palm. She shook her head once. "No. Don't ask me to do that. Just -- be with me. All that doesn't matter now, anyway." Although he did not agree, Mulder exhaled a soft assent and released her. Dana stepped out of the pile of clothes that had accumulated around her feet, turned to walk toward the bathroom, and then paused to look at him over her shoulder. "Coming?" Mulder saw then, for the first time, the demure white silk teddy she wore. Arabesques and roses of sheer white fabric had been strategically placed to reveal the full curves of her breasts. The cut of the teddy was loose and old-fashioned, something that could only be worn to sleep in or under the full-legged trousers that she favored when off-duty. It was so perfectly feminine, almost bridal, that seeing it on her made Mulder feel, in spite of the emotional turmoil that had barely passed, like a romantic hero. The ghost of a smile twitched across his mouth. "Scully, you sure?" "It's just a shower, Mulder," she said evenly. "I'll let you know when I'm ready for more, okay?" "Yes ma'am," he replied, taking her outstretched hand. End The Cry of the Truth 10/22 The Cry of the Truth, 11a/22 Between the Stars A.I. Irving vsmith@ischemia.card.unc.edu *Rating: NC-17 (graphic descriptions of sexual activity, language) Category: S, A, R (Mulder/Scully) Summary: Mulder wants to talk about serious matters, but Scully distracts him in the best possible way. Please post to ATXC and Gossamer. Thanks. See part 01 for the obligatory Disclaimer. *WARNING: I just revised this section and realized that it is quite graphic, even for me. If you're offended by that sort of thing, and certainly if you're younger than 17, please don't read this; you might prefer a nice, tasteful book of short stories by Peter Taylor, William Maxwell, or Elizabeth Spencer. Also, there are several fairly significant references to "The Actor" in this chapter; maybe this would be a good time for me to plug it to those of you who still haven't read it! ...This word is far too short for us, it has only four letters, too sparse to fill those deep bare vacuums between the stars that press on us with their deafness. It's not love we don't wish to fall into, but that fear. --Margaret Atwood When Scully emerged from the bathroom, long after Mulder has completed his personal maintenance, she had dried her hair and dressed in a pair of pale green silk pajamas she had bought during her sojourn in Boston. She wore her old steel-framed spectacles. The swelling and redness brought on by her tears had improved greatly with the cool shower and a light coat of elderflower eye cream. She felt emotionally drained but physically renewed. She padded out to the living room and through the kitchen to the small laundry room, where she deposited the towels and other items she had brought from her room. In the kitchen, she took two wineglasses down from the cabinet and opened a bottle of cabernet. As she poured, she it dawned on her that she was alone. "Mulder?" She returned to the living room, looking for signs of him. His weapon and holster rested on the foyer table where he had left them last night. His duffel bag still sat on the floor next to the front door. She knelt next to the bag and rummaged through it. Tee shirts, jeans, boxers, socks, a small box of condoms (how gentlemanly, she thought with a smile), a pair of black nubuck Cole Haan boots (size 12, she noted). In the side pocket of the bag, she found the letter she had given him, complete with a few tear stains. She did not reread it. Dana took one of the heather gray tee shirts and went to the sofa. She pulled her pajama top over her head, then slipped on Mulder's shirt, and for the first time in hours, a smile spread over her face. The cotton was soft and caressing; the shirt floated around her body like a warm cloud. But best of all, it smelled like him, tangy and sweet, like his skin, and a little dusty, like their office. It was this way that Mulder found her, smiling and sipping wine in his gray tee shirt and her pale green silk pajama pants. He nearly dropped the bags of food he was carrying. "Scully?" "Oh, you went for food." She took a bag from him and put it on the kitchen table to tear it open. "Mmm. Beef with oranges? I'm starved." Mulder shed his jacket and took her in his arms. "You're wearing my shirt," he said in a husky voice. "Do you mind?" She twined her arms around him and took a deep breath of the undiluted Mulder. "You smell wonderful." "No, I don't mind. I just -- are you really hungry? Because I -- seeing you in that makes it hard to think about beef with oranges...." His hands cupped her ass through the silk pants, pressing her against him. The delayed desire from the afternoon was back with a vengeance. "I really do need to eat," she said, kissing his chin. "Protein, carbohydrates --" "I can give you what you need," he said with a devilish smile. "Oh, I don't doubt that. You brought me this lovely food, didn't you? Go on, sit down and have some wine. I'm not going anywhere." Reluctantly he accepted a plate of food and a glass of wine. He watched as she sat in the chair to his right and began to eat. "You know, Mulder, we still haven't decided how this is going to work," she said, spearing a piece of beef on her fork. "Well, the basic principal is very simple, Scully," he began. "When the mommy FBI agent and the daddy FBI agent love each other very, very much, they decide to take off all their clothes and make each other feel really, really --" "Stop it," she said with a snort. "You know what I mean. Do we keep this a secret, or what?" He sobered quickly. "A secret? Do you really think we have any secrets anymore?" She inclined her head, weighing his question. "I say we go ahead and tell Skinner," she said. "That way there'll be no time or energy wasted in trying to keep it from him. He needs to know, anyway, in case the smoker tries to play us as a trump card." "Like that's something new," Mulder said sarcastically. "I mean us as a -- a couple...Fox," she said with a shy, sweet smile that made him melt all over again. "A couple," he said softly. It was a word he had never applied to himself. "I like that. I like it a lot." His words had brought a thick, sweet glaze of contentment over her troubled heart. She sipped her wine happily. "So we tell Skinner. What about your mom?" Mulder asked between bites. "She stopped asking about a year ago, so it'll be a total surprise to her," Dana said. "Oh, don't be so sure of that," Mulder said. "When I saw her at Christmas -- while you were in England with Stuart -- she invited me to lunch and tried to talk me into going over there and bringing you back." "I know. She and I had a real falling out over that," Scully revealed. "She didn't realize who the other man was at that point." "And when you told her?" Scully smiled down at her plate. "Then she asked me why the hell I didn't marry him," she admitted. Mulder chuckled. Apparently Mrs. Scully reserved her very best traits for him, while her children received the brunt of her less charming qualities. "So are you sorry you didn't marry him?" he asked, unable to resist the opening. "What do you think?" she shot back. He watched her watching him and blushed under the scrutiny. "I think it's a stupid question," he said. "You gonna eat that?" She glanced down at her half-empty plate. "Maybe later," she said. "Good answer." Mulder gathered up the plates and took them to the kitchen. When he returned, she was sitting erectly in the ladder-back chair, sipping her wine, green silk legs crossed at the knees. "I want to talk," he said, tugging his chair across the floor until they sat knee to knee. She eyed him suspiciously. Mulder tended to turn conflicts into opportunities for humor or investigation. He rarely met anything of emotional significance head-on, or so she had thought until his love for her came to light. Lately he had surprised her more and more with his open heart. She was beginning to realize that he was much better at discussing his feelings than she was; perhaps he thought he had less to lose. The candles gutted, releasing plumes of smoke that twisted and climbed their way up to the ceiling. In the distance, an ambulance screamed down Connecticut Avenue. A car alarm rang on Macomb Street. Her upstairs neighbors were trying unsuccessfully to tape a Van Morrison CD, repeatedly starting and stopping "Brown-Eyed Girl". Just another Saturday night in Cleveland Park. Mulder touched her knees tentatively, rolling his fingertips over the silk, tracing the boundaries of her patellae like a blind man in a museum of Greek antiquities. The ridge of her quadricep was just visible through the fabric, and then the profile of her body disappeared under the generous drape of his tee shirt. He wished desperately that it was four sizes smaller. He wanted to see her nipples pressing out against the cotton, knowing that he would wear the same shirt tomorrow, or the next day, and remember with shivering clarity the feeling of cupping her breasts in his palms. But a part of Mulder -- the part that had learned in childhood to anticipate grief before it happened -- continued to fear this new contentment. He had developed this habit in childhood, when for a while the losses and hurts seemed to come daily. He had taught himself never to enjoy anything fully; he believed that allowing himself to feel joy would only increase the pain when it was gone. And for most of his life this practice had served him well. In the past few years, however, he had begun to see that it was no longer working. Life hurt anyway. Until now. Now, the fear of pain had become secondary to the anticipation of her smile. "Scully," he murmured, calling her by the name his heart knew best. "I know," she said softly. He laughed a little at his own flair for drama, drawing out the moment as he had; for a no-nonsense scientist, she had tolerated it well for a long time. "I love you," he said. He was blushing, and this in itself embarrassed him. He bowed his head for a moment and tried to collect himself. When he met her eyes again, she was waiting patiently. "I love you, and I don't want what happened this afternoon to happen again," he said. Her brow went up; doubts were forming in her mind, and Mulder saw them coming. "I know there are no guarantees," he continued, "But I want to do everything I can to -- to neutralize those memories, so they can't hurt you, or us, anymore." She blinked at him from behind her spectacles. "Mulder, they didn't really hurt until today," she said. He flinched. "You're saying that I dredged them up, from where they would've stayed safely buried until you died? Scully, there's no such thing as 'safely buried'. It's like toxic waste, this stuff Krychek left in your mind. You have to get it out." "No, I don't," she said slowly, her voice a little squeaky with the effort required to keep calm. "I think you do," Mulder said gently. He stroked her thigh with a warm palm, his hand sliding easily over the silk, the caress as light and repetitive as breathing. "The sooner the better, sweetheart." "Mulder, I told you -- I had a few nightmares when I was with Stuart, and then that little flashback this afternoon...but that's just because I'm not used to -- to sex, and to having a man around...that's all." She shrugged dismissively. "I'll adjust." "Adjust, Scully?" His eyes conveyed a dark urgency. She did not seem to understand what he was getting at. "Adjusting's not good enough. And it's not like you." "What do you mean, not like me?" She smiled. "I adjust to all sorts of things. Working with you, for one --" Mulder was not laughing. "Scully. Look at the evidence. This stuff haunts you. Get rid of it, once and for all. Talk it out. To me, or to a therapist, whoever. But don't keep it in your head for another day. As long as you do, Krychek owns a piece of you." Then the word came back to him. Couple. He was one half of a whole now. "A piece of us, sweetheart." A stinging wave of apprehension was cresting in her chest. Mulder was worried about her, and that wasn't allowed. She had not confided her secret in him so that he could bear the burden of her experience. The idea had been to tell him, so that if she had a flashback, he would already know why and not ask her to explain. Of course it could never have been that simple. But that was the idea, nonetheless. "Just think about talking to someone," he said conclusively. "Please." The wave of fear waned and retreated. She sighed her relief, as if she had been holding her breath. Taking a sip of wine, she swallowed with some difficulty; at times like this, her throat tended to constrict, ratcheting up her voice and drawing her shoulders and neck into a tight chain of agitated muscles. She took a few deep breaths, surreptitiously so that he would not see how he had disturbed her, and then nodded. Scully cleared her throat. "Okay," she said at last. "I'll think about it. But, in the meantime, I can prove to you that I'm all right. Right here, right now. You game?" Mulder released his own sigh of relief. Resting an elbow on the table, he cradled his chin in his hand and smiled at her. His eyes crinkled at the corners and his lips drew back to reveal his orderly white teeth. "Game? What are the implications of that word, Scully?" he posed. "I meant it in the sense of 'are you willing', but you can take it however you like," she said, her voice bearing the academic neutrality with which she typically described forensic evidence. All the blood in Mulder's body seemed to flood to his reproductive center when she talked like that. For six years she had aroused him with her incisive observations about everything from leukocytes to satellites. Given that, he dreaded the control he would have to muster on Monday morning when they surveyed their first crime scene together as lovers. Well...dread's a strong word, he reflected. If it was dread, it was certainly delicious dread. He licked his lips and leaned across to kiss her. Her lips pillowed beneath the pressure of his mouth; when he eased infinitesimally away, they bloomed again like a lotus flower. He tried it again, and got the same result. He pulled back slightly and stared at her. Her face was still, her expression just barely patient. He could smell the desire coming out of her pores, and the realization that he had provoked it careened noisily off the walls of his skull. "Stand up," he muttered. With the slightest hesitation, she uncrossed her legs and planted her feet side by side on the cool wood floor. She stood slowly and stepped between his knees. His hands slid up the outer side of her thighs and rested on her buttocks, his palms memorizing the womanly curve of muscle and fat. This close, he could smell her Dove soap as well as the newness of her pajamas; they had a crisp shop smell that spoke of tags made of heavy stock and a hand-painted shopping bag stuffed with lavender tissue and tied with a cobalt grosgrain ribbon. Her hands skipped lightly over his shoulders, then smoothed over his neck, massaging the perpetually tight muscles there before continuing into his hair and rubbing away the tension in his scalp. Mulder resisted the urge to loll his head forward and allow her to continue until he was asleep. After only twenty-four hours as her lover, he had come to discern some touches as expressions of nurturing love and some as sexual. She mixed them all together in her lovemaking, and the result was that he felt utterly and completely loved as both the boy who had been neglected and the man who was raging with lust. He whimpered as he looked up at her, his eyes heavy with lust. She smiled and bent to kiss his forehead. She pressed her lips against each eyelid, then along the bridge of his nose, and finally to his lips. "You..." His dry throat somehow misdirected his voice. He swallowed and tried again. "You made love with Stuart on this table." She straightened. Frowning, she glanced at the innocent pine plank table and then back at him. "How did you..." "The night before Thanksgiving," he said, still stroking her hips. "I came by to see you, to meet him, actually...I started to let myself in, but then I heard something on the other side of the door." Mulder looked at the table as if he could see the scene replayed on its surface. "I knocked, and you let me in. I could feel the -- tension -- in the room. Stuart was sitting here, looking very pleased with himself. And you were red as a beet." Scully made a noise deep in her throat that was half-growl, half-moan, as the memory flickered across her mind, leaving an extra flush of arousal in its wake. "Red as a beet, huh?" she said. Mulder nodded. He was grinning, now that he could see that while he had lost that battle, months ago, he had most certainly won the war for Dana's heart. "Your pajamas were buttoned wrong, and you had a hickey the size of Connecticut on your shoulder." He noted the pink tone of her neck and cheeks. "You're not embarrassed, are you? You shouldn't be. I had always imagined you were hot, but that just --" "Hot?" she cried. "Hot? Are you adopting Frohike's terminology now?" "You and your words, Scully," he laughed. He was hooking his fingers under the waistband of her pajamas. "It's a word that in this case implies that you have a rather voracious sexual appetite and an open mind about satisfying it." "In that case, I think I like it," she said in a low voice. Her gaze was, on first appraisal, sleepy, but Mulder quickly inferred that arousal was making her dreamy. He smoothed the pants down over her hips; the silk disappeared like a cloud, leaving nothing between him and her bareness but his own tee shirt. And for now that had to stay. "Have a seat, Scully," he said gruffly. End The Cry of the Truth 11a/22 The Cry of the Truth, 11b/22 Between the Stars A.I. Irving vsmith@ischemia.card.unc.edu *Rating: NC-17 (graphic descriptions of sexual activity, language) Category: S, A, R (Mulder/Scully) Summary: Mulder wants to talk about serious matters, but Scully distracts him in the best possible way. Please forward to ATXC and Gossamer. Thanks. See part 01 for the obligatory Disclaimer. *Yes, it's graphic! Turn back if you're not interested in biology. See 11a for the full warning and the poetry header. When she had returned to her chair, Mulder walked out of the circle of candlelight that illuminated the dining area. She could only hear the occasional rasp of denim and jersey as he undressed in the darkness. Upstairs, the recording session had progressed to "Warm Love". A little dog barked in the courtyard behind the building as its owner cooed ineffectual palliatives. The wind was picking up, buffeting against the new storm windows that had been installed during the renovation of the building when it went co-op. Just the sound of it made Dana shiver. She tugged the tee shirt over her knees like a little girl waiting her turn at a swim meet. "Pour me some wine, will you," came Mulder's voice. "Are you coming back?" she asked, reaching for the bottle. "I'm right here," he said, stepping back into the light. She gave him a brilliant smile. He was as naked as the day of his birth, gloriously tall and strong, a walking example of why she had gone to all the trouble to study medicine in the first place. "What're you smiling at, little girl?" he asked coyly, cupping her chin in one of his big hands. "You. You're a perfect example of the human animal," she said. "Am I?" He sipped his wine. "How's that?" "All your parts are in perfect working order," she said. "For instance: your lips keep you from dribbling the wine when you take it from the glass. Your tongue allows you to taste it and propel it --" "Wait a minute. Let's stop with the tongue." He knelt gracefully on the floor before her chair. Only then did she see that he had brought a small down cushion from the couch; it functioned much like the kneelers her mother was forever embroidering for the sanctuary at St. Michael's. Scully had rarely seen such a purposeful glint in his eyes. She clutched at the sides of the hard wooden seat as he wrapped his hands around her thighs and began kissing the pale skin that led up to the apex of her legs. "I wanted to tell you how much I love you -- again." He kissed the tell-tale birthmark that lurked in the fine sprinkling of cinnamon hair at the very top of her inner thigh. "I wanted to tell you that our first -- coupling -- was more than I had even hoped it would be." "Coupling?" "Umm." He nudged her with his nose, and gently pushed her legs farther apart with his hands. "Scully, I have a theory." "Oh?" she said, nearly choking on the syllable. "I've been thinking about it on and off all day, trying to name your taste. Shall I share my hypothesis with you, before we test it?" "If you must," she said hoarsely, her hands smoothing the shirt across her belly. "Okay. Here goes. Camenbert. Not the overt smokiness of brie. No, you're much too subtle for brie." He pursed his lips together thoughtfully. "Warm bread, when the bakery first opens early in the morning. And the cabernet -- just a little acidic. I think that about sums it up." He looked for her response. All she could do was nod. She hadn't realized that he had such a fondness for Continental picnics. He broke into a smile, lowered his head momentarily, and shook it with amusement at his own folly. "You okay, Scully?" This time when he looked she was smiling, close to laughing. He kissed the birthmark again, and then nuzzled his way through the plentiful hair to the slippery, inflamed district he had visited in the bright morning light. He dipped his tongue into the vault, and licked up all the sweetness he found there. He groaned his approval of the flavor and went back for more. One hand released her thigh and slipped around the outer side of her leg, then down again. He curled his fingers into his palm, and brushed the hair with the surface of his nails. She shivered at his touch. He pulled back from her slightly and watched with reverent eyes as his left hand traced the graceful shapes that reminded him of one of Georgia O'Keefe's paintings. He staked a silent claim that this intense, secret beauty henceforth should be known only by him -- no matter who else had loved her in the past. He would work to be sure that no one else would see it in the future. He would do everything in his power to ensure that she trusted him, and only him, with this secret. Scully's fingers brushed through his hair. She was concerned by the concentrated frown on his face. His eyes flickered up to her face, transmitting the familiar silent message in a language formed through years of collaboration -- we're all right; don't worry; you can trust me. Mulder suckled at the source of the newly-discovered mystery of his old friend. He tugged gently, then more determinedly, at the folds protecting her clitoris. He scraped her with his teeth, then licked over the spot with his tongue. He heard the blood rushing in his ears as his own arousal mounted. It wasn't the act alone that propelled him so intensely, but the idea that Scully was truly his, and that he was hers. In the distance, as if from across a woodland acre, he heard her calling his name. He felt her small hands on his head, pulling him to her, grinding his mouth against her softness until he was gasping, praying that he could hold his breath long enough. He could, and did. Scully roared her response. He was confused, trying to catch his breath, and for a split second she seemed to rise up off the seat. Then, in a flash, her hands were on his cheeks, and she was kissing him madly, savoring the taste of herself in his mouth. She pulled him up as she stood, and in his stupor, Mulder did what her actions demanded. She pushed him back into the chair he had occupied so recently, and then, clutching his shoulders, straddled him. She was about to lower herself upon him when he found his voice. "Scully," he croaked, clutching at her waist. "I *want* you, Mulder," she insisted, almost irritably. "I know," he whispered, lifting her easily as he stood. He put her on her feet in front on him. She hung her head. A hand slipped under the fall of flame hair to press cover her eyes. He didn't -- "Oh, no..." she moaned. "Scully? Cheer up. It's just this stupid hip," he said, placing a warm hand on her shoulder. "You fuck me in that chair and I won't walk for a week." She burst out laughing and reached out to vigorously rub the affected hip. Then, still chuckling quietly, she took a candle and led him back to her bedroom. The room was once again in shadows, but the darkness had lost in menace. Mulder embraced her from behind as she paused to place the candle on the table next to the bed. His hands roamed over her belly and cupped her breasts under the soft cotton shirt. "Camenbert?" she said, squirming away from him to recline on the bed. The expression of lascivious hilarity on his face darkened. "And Cabernet," he replied. "Didn't I tell you about that formative summer I spent in France?" "No, you didn't, but I have a feeling that I'm enjoying the benefits of it even as we speak," she said, reaching for him. They lay face to face, hands roaming, tasting each other all over again, until Dana's hand closed over his hip and she pushed him over onto his back. She climbed onto him and continued to kiss him. "Mulder," she eventually gasped. "Fox," he said. She smiled slyly from behind the copper curtain of her hair. Mulder smiled back, and for the first time since that morning, the mischief was back in his eyes. "Fox, I --" "Go ahead," he said, grinning wildly. Her feet tucked under his thighs as she straddled his pelvis. Mulder felt a further tightening in his balls as she guided his cock all around her cunt, rubbing the head against her clitoris, then allowing him just inside her vault, then back up to her clitoris again. "You're taking me on the tour?" he quipped. "I've seen the sights of Paris and Rome, but I like this place the best." "Like it enough to move in?" she asked, panting slightly as her arousal compounded. Mulder's hands squeezed her breasts through the tee shirt; he held her nipples between his forefingers and thumbs for a long moment, the slowly began to twist. She tilted her head to one side and closed her eyes. He murmured to her, and she tugged the shirt over her head and tossed it away. The effect of this action on her breasts brought a cackle of happiness from Mulder. "Looks like it's completely furnished," he said, pinching bare pink flesh. "Got a great view," she said breathlessly, circling her hips counterclockwise to her hand's manipulation of his cock. "On a clear day you can see...uh..." He thrust upward and into her. "...Forever..." She dropped down hard, then threw herself forward to kiss him. Her lips tugged at his as her hands plundered his hair. She kissed him with a messy passion that he had not experienced before; this time she seemed especially hungry for him, for the spirit behind the sex. She licked his lips and then went back into the recesses of his mouth for more of his essence -- the rich saltiness of sunflower seeds and the brine of tears he had swallowed rather than shed in front of her. The buttery taste was there as well. Smooth and thick on her tastebuds, it was a taste she had heretofore associated with a loneliness that was paired with shame. But after tonight, she could not get enough of it. She smiled wickedly against his chin as his words came back to her: "I want to swallow every drop that you give me, and pray that I can taste you on my lips for days afterwards." Mulder watched with wonder as Dana rose up tall above him, her spine erect, her breasts bobbing rhythmically. She managed to flick the head of his cock against her cervix with each upstroke, and then drag her clitoris against his mons with every downstroke. Her hand clutched at the spot where their bodies joined; she rubbed herself gently at first, then more intently, a little frown of concentration creasing her pale forehead. Mulder was fascinated by the coordination that allowed her to maintain three separate rhythms simultaneously. It occurred to him that she must be a marvelous dancer. He closed his eyes tightly and focused on the mental picture of his cock buried deeply in the sleekness of her, pushing, pulsing, demanding, accepting the fluid that she produced to ease the way for them both. For a moment he imagined one of his fleet-tailed sperm finding its way beyond the gates of her cervix, burrowing into one of her precious eggs and establishing the perfect combination of all that was best about the two of them. With a flash, Mulder realized that he wanted it to be true. And then she stopped. Mulder's eyes flew open and his mouth moved to utter a protest. "Help," she breathed with an apologetic smile. "Tired." A lambent grin spread across his face. He opened his arms and she pitched forward with a grunt. For a long moment he simply held her, allowing her to catch her breath. He rubbed her back and kissed her forehead. "You haven't been running, have you, sweetheart," he observed. "No. Swimming. Not quite the same," she panted. "So how are you going to hold out to catch a federal criminal if you can't last long enough to fuck me blind?" "Mulder, everyone knows you're the brawn and I'm the brains," she said, gently biting his neck. "And what kind of expression is that? Fuck me blind. God, you're such a romantic fool, aren't you." "Actually I am," he said, pushing her hair back from her face and delicately kissing her cheek. "I love you madly, you know." "Are you sure?" "Mmm. I think I found out today how much," he said, gently rolling them onto their sides, as if they were about to execute a particularly lewd dance. "Fox," she said, her voice gravelly with the constant, drying rush of breath over her vocal chords. "Dana," he said, grinning like a fool. "What'd you say -- fuck me bald --?" "Fuck me *blind*," he said, laughing even more. Now she was laughing too, so much so that she had to pause her part in the dance and flip over onto her back. Mulder followed. He hovered over her for a moment, taking in the glory of her arousal. Her hair was wild, shooting across the pillow like the plumes of a firecracker. He brushed a few strands away from her eyes, then cupped her face between his hands and kissed her. When he felt her small hand close around his overheated cock and guide him gently back into her body, he smiled his relief and thrust upward. "Oh, Scully. I missed you." "It was only thirty seconds, Mulder." "Thirty-seven years, sweetheart," he whispered in her ear. She moaned then, well aware of his meaning. She felt it, too; she had waited her entire life to feel him in her arms, in her body, loving her back. It did not erase the sense of need, but made satisfying it possible. He was a specific answer to the vague question that had haunted her for so long. One at a time, his hands found her knees and lifted her legs up over his shoulders. "Too hard?" he gasped. "Yes, but don't stop," she replied, clutching the sheets in her fists. Mulder abandoned himself in the task and thundered away, at times wincing with the force of the contact, his balls slapping against her upper thighs, their pubic bones grinding together momentarily at the apogee of each thrust. She was weeping now -- whether with pain or joy, Mulder could not determine. "Don't *stop*, Mulder," she said through clenched teeth. "Almost -- almost." He frowned with concentration and tried his best to give her what she needed. Then she cried out, a high-pitched, whispery sound that tore straight through to his heart. She gave him a nod and a tearful smile just as Mulder felt the bottom drop out of his control. He stiffened and bellowed. Saw a blur of white, then a flare of copper, then a smile like roses and pearls, and he knew. His Scully, his sweetheart, had returned from that cold place where he could not follow, where she was hurt and humiliated while he sat helpless and impotent. Her arms slid across his back and she rocked him like an infant, wiping the sweat from his brow and clearing the hair from his eyes. When he could move again, Mulder cradled her head in his hands and kissed her eyelids with the delicacy of a moth contemplating a flame. "Hey Scully," he said between kisses. "Hmm," she breathed, her fingers rhythmically caressing his back. "You want to get married?" Her hands stopped. She stared at him, agape. Her thought processes had come to a screeching halt. Mulder, too, was in shock. Had he really said it out loud? "Some day, sweetheart," he said, hoping he didn't sound utterly horrified. He kissed the tip of her nose. "Did I scare you?" "No. Yes. Are you serious?" He looked into her face, so familiar and so beautiful to him. It had dawned on him that since he had first touched her the night before, he had been thinking of himself as her mate. "Yeah. I am," he replied quietly. He took a deep breath, preparing for the inevitable, well-reasoned response that she gave to each and every one of his theoretical proposals. But she surprised him, once again. "Do you remember how I kept that photocopy of your hand, to remind me of the day that you first told me you loved me?" "You still have it?" he asked. "I keep it in a safe place," she said, her fingers cool and comforting at his temples. "This time between us...this goes there too. In the place where I keep things I want to be able to call up, large as life, in my memory." "So..." "Maybe some day," she said. "In the meantime..." "In the meantime, sweetheart?" he prompted, rubbing his cheek against hers. "You are...my partner," she said with a tiny shrug, her voice thinned by emotion. His reply was soft and simple. "Yes I am." End The Cry of the Truth, 11b/22 The Cry of the Truth, 12a/22 So Long Shorty A.I. Irving vsmith@ischemia.card.unc.edu Rating: R (language, descriptions of rape) Category: S, A, R (Mulder/Scully) Summary: Mulder acts on the strength of his beliefs, and destroys his relationship with Scully. Author's Note: Thanks for all the encouraging mail, particularly in the past few days. Now for the next part. I should warn you - the story gets very dark from here on out. You may think you've wandered into a different story. This is a problem with that I couldn't figure out how to solve, and is one reason this sequel took seven months to write (well, not full-time; I do have a life). My excuse is that real life is full of tonal changes. Mulder and Scully will be showing their flaws, some actively and some passively. So let me be blantantly insecure and say please be kind! On Sunday morning, as the clouds from last night's storm were clearing and the bells of the National Cathedral was announcing the first Eucharist of the day, Mulder and Scully -- or Fox and Dana, as they were learning to call each other -- rounded the curve in Massachusetts Avenue where the gates to the Vice-President's residence abut to the entrance to the Naval Observatory. "You holding up okay?" he asked, barely winded. He was keeping a slow pace to accommodate her shorter legs. "Oh yeah. Just great," Scully lied. She mopped her forehead with the stretched-out cuff of her long- sleeved tee shirt. In spite of the cool March morning, she was hot and weary after only a couple of miles. Her medical training told her that something was amiss: this level of fatigue was disproportionate to the pace and distance of their run. Three months ago she had given up running regularly because of an old hamstring injury. Since then, she had been swimming a mile every other day, and walking three miles on the off days. The weekend of exhilarating sex did not warrant this exhaustion. "Do you?" he was saying. "Do I what?" she panted as they crossed P street. "Do you think Skinner will fund us for that meeting in Seattle? I could give a paper on Bureau protocol, or something dull like that, to make it sound good. Be a great place to make contacts --" "Seattle? You go," she said, finally giving in to the thudding in her chest and slowing her pace. "You go...I'd...rather...go to a...Forensics...meeting..." Mulder made a U turn and jogged back to her side. "Scully? You okay?" "Yeah. I'm fine," she wheezed, pacing on wobbly legs. Mulder circled her a few times, cooling down, before falling into step beside her. "Gonna need CPR? How 'bout mouth-to-mouth? I'm really good at that," he joked, rubbing the damp spot between her shoulder blades. "Maybe later," she said, again wiping her face with her sleeve. She looked around them, at the broad boulevard and imposing Georgian mansions where armed guards kept watch. "Where -- oh. British Embassy. Not too far from home. Ready to head back?" "Sure," he said judiciously. He was ready to run to Maryland, but he could see that she was not. "We'll walk." Good, because that's all I can manage, she thought disgustedly as they began to walk. After ten years of struggling to maintain her cardiovascular fitness, a two-mile jog had reduced her to jello -- slightly nauseous jello, at that. She turned her face up into the cool breeze and took a deep breath. "We have to be careful when we're on the road," Mulder was saying. "We don't want what happened to Sayers and Marlowe to get us." "What happened to Sayers and Marlowe?" she asked. "Blow job in a surveillance vehicle." "Did the bad guys get away?" "No. But the audio team got a real earful. It seems he has a certain pet name for her that nobody --" "I don't want to hear it, sugarboy," she said in a tone that was more lewd that sweet. He laughed, a little hesitantly at first, and then full-heartedly when he saw that she was joking. "Where do you pick up this gossip, Mulder?" she asked. "Oh, here and there. Gym. Firing range. Motor pool. Don't you ever overhear anything?" "Yeah, but it's usually about us." "Oooh? Think it's true?" he asked with a leer. "It is now," she replied with a smile. They were approaching a square that was dominated by a statue of Winston Churchill. Nascent croci and tulips were pushing through the carefully groomed beds at his feet. The lawn was green and fine-haired, and Scully wanted nothing more at that moment than to stretch out upon it. "Come on. Let's pay a visit to Sir Winston." Once sprawled on the cool grass, staring up at the sky, Scully's nausea subsided. Mulder seemed none the wiser; he sat at her side, arms wrapped around his long legs, observing the traffic contemplatively. Scully watched the clouds blowing eastward and shivered slightly on the dew-damp grass. She had awakened in pain that morning. It was not the treasured ache in her hips and thighs that came from making love with Mulder late into the night. That she did not consider pain. Soon after dawn, she had screamed herself out of a nightmare in which Krychek burst into her apartment and raped her as Mulder watched, frozen in a beam of white light. Before Mulder was fully awake, she was in the bathroom, dousing herself with cold water. The run had been her idea; she needed to get out of the apartment, and was hoping to distract Mulder from questioning her about the nightmare. She covered her eyes with her forearm and slowly exhaled. Just as she was contemplating sitting up, she felt warm fingers lightly tracing a line from her elbow to her wrist. "I haven't made out in a park since...since..." His voice faded as he tried to remember the date. "Since your formative summer in France?" she asked, peeking at him from beneath her arm. "Has it really been that long? I must be getting old," he said, easing down beside her. He rested a hand on her belly and leaned over to kiss her. "Mmm. If I'd known you tasted this good, I would've kissed you years ago." "I wish you had," she said softly. He stroked her cheek lightly until she turned her head toward him, lips parted in anticipation of his next kiss. But a frown passed over Mulder's face, and with that hesitation, the moment was lost. "Scully..." he began. "Let me guess," she said, sitting up. "Marie-Claire." "What?" "The girl in France?" she said uncertainly. He laughed under his breath as he rose to sit next to her. "Oh. Her name was Elizabeth, and she was from Scotland, but that's beside the point." He shook his head, still chortling. "Lot of water under the bridge since then...Hmm." He coughed slightly and fidgeted in the grass, trying to order his thoughts. With Scully's nightmare, he had come to a decision. Enacting it was going to be more difficult that he had imagined, however. "What is it, Mulder?" she asked for the second time. "There's something I should've told you, Scully," he said, squinting slightly in the rising sun. She smiled down at her mud-splattered running shoes and tapped her toe against his. "Okay, then. Spill." Mulder stretched his long legs in the grass and slumped forward a bit. The muscle at the hinge of his jaw flexed as he struggled to maintain his emotional equilibrium. He felt as if he were about to jump -- or be pushed -- off a cliff. "Dana, when I was in the gulag, in Russia, Krychek...he told me." "Told you what?" she asked, perplexed. "He told me all about raping you," Mulder said. Every muscle in his neck, shoulders, and belly clenched as he recalled Krychek's story, and the stench of the cell came back to him sickening detail. "He told me about your body. He told me how he felt about what he was doing to you. He told me...too much." She watched him with a cold detachment she usually employed at crime scenes. His suffering was apparent to her; she had been by his side through too many harrowing moments not to be able to spot the signs of his undoing. But today it was not sympathy that she felt. "Mulder." She said his name tersely, immediately causing him to snap to attention. She knew he recognized the tone. "If that's true, then why did you ask me to tell you what he did to me? Which one of us do you doubt?" Mulder clutched at his hair, then pushed it away from his face into a haphazard mess. Eyes glinting coolly at her, he exhaled a harsh sigh of impatience. "I don't doubt you, Scully. Not for one minute. And I resent the question, by the way. I asked you that because -- because I didn't ask you the first night. I had been flying by the seat of my pants the first night, and I got lucky. I didn't want to risk reminding you of anything that he had done to you." "You know that rape is not a sexual act --" "Yes, I know that." Now it was his turn to be terse, and he regretted the hard edge of his words as soon as they left his mouth. A chasm was forming between them, and he was unsure of how to stop it. Instinctively he reached for her. When she recoiled from him, his heart dropped into his stomach. "Sweetheart. Please don't be angry at me. I just --" "You should've told me as soon as you came back. Or at least as soon as the case was wrapped up." A truck rattled by, and they were momentarily engulfed in a cloud of diesel exhaust. Mulder coughed again. "I --" he began. "You were putting it off, weren't you." She scrambled to her feet and paced back and forth on the grass. Her face wore the cool, impassive mask with which she had met his many wild theories. "You were trying to decide if you could deal with changing our relationship, once you knew that I was a rape victim instead of your reliable old low-maintenance Scully. You have a right to your choices, Mulder. I just wish you had told me what was on your mind." "Survivor, Scully. Rape *survivor*. And it wasn't *on* my mind. Not in that sense," he insisted. He remained seated in the grass, watching as she strode like a sandpiper at the water's edge. "I told you the truth. All I wanted was to get home to you and put my arms around you and never let go." When she paused in front of him, he saw that a faint sheen of sweat had arisen on her forehead. In spite of the tension of the moment, Mulder wanted to kiss it away with a slow caress of his tongue. "So what was that all about in the woods yesterday?" she demanded. "Explain that to me." He blinked at her for a moment, sensing that the question had many implications. "It just hit me, Scully. In the quiet, out of the city, with you next to me...I had just learned your body...you're so small and fragile and..." He saw irritation rise in her face, and held up his hands in surrender. "All right. I'm sorry, but when I'm in bed with you, I think of you that way. Small and fragile and womanly. So sue me." She glared at him. "Wait a minute." He held up a hand to stop her tirade. "Let me finish. I didn't say that you were powerless, or ineffectual, or weak. On the contrary, it's the combination of your strength and your femininity..." "The woods, Mulder?" she prompted, her voice low and hard. "Right." He scrubbed his hands over his face, then pulled his knees back to his chest and circled his legs with his arms. "I was angry because you had lied to me all those years. I wanted to -- to strike out, to make it not be true, to break the spell...I dunno, Dana. It's hard to explain. But I'm sorry for taking it out on you. You didn't deserve that." She surveyed him for a long moment. He looked as if he were awaiting a death sentence. "So you have your own lies of omission," she said quietly. Mulder's brow twitched. That was pure, unadulterated Scully -- calling him on his own folly. "Yeah. I guess I do." For a moment she considered asking him if there was anything else he'd been keeping from her. But because she wasn't entirely sure she wanted to know, she skipped that question in favor of another. "In Russia, when he told you this story, did you believe him?" she asked. "No. Absolutely not. I only began to suspect that there might be some truth to it after our meeting with Delia Forrest. You seemed disturbed by her story. And then...and then you seemed fine. I wasn't sure what to make of it." Mulder closed his eyes for a moment, and saw the picture that Krychek had painted with his words. He quickly opened his eyes again to see her standing above him, still somewhat angry, but with him nonetheless. "If you really want to know...of course you do. Being there, listening to his bullshit, helped me clarify what I wanted when I came home. If I came home." She stilled, hands on her waist, and peered down at him. "Why are you telling me this now?" He bowed his head out of respect for the fairness of the question. "That nightmare this morning," he said. "I was in it, wasn't I?" Dana tilted her face toward the statue of the late Prime Minister. He leaned on his bronze cane and nursed his bronze cigar; the smug expression on his cherubic face seemed to be reminding her to keep a stiff upper lip. As if she needed to be reminded. Bastard. "How often does it happen?" he asked. "Not...often," she replied. Knees popping like firecrackers, Mulder got to his feet. He walked over to the statue and rested a foot on its pedestal, then leaned into a hamstring stretch. He changed feet and stretched the other leg as she watched. "You know, Scully, 'denial' is a term that has been grossly overused by the paperback psychologists. I know what a stickler you are for correct terminology, but in this case, I'm afraid the cheap word is the right word." "Are you saying I'm in a state of denial about having been raped?" "About the entire abduction," he said. "The rape -- the rapes are perhaps the most violent element of the experience, therefore the most difficult to repress." "Jesus, Mulder. I don't want to talk about this," she said. "I know you don't. But we have to go back to work tomorrow," he said. "You expect to work out all the details of our relationship in a weekend?" she shot back. "No." He extended his hand, and for a long moment she stared at it with contempt. At last she took it. "It scares me when I'm in a nightmare that makes you scream like that." She tried to smile. "Most of the dreams I have about you are really good," she said, squeezing his hand. "Want to hear one?" He wrapped his long arms around her and hugged her like a bear. Grunting affectionately, he kissed the crown of her head and then released her. "Okay. But let's walk with the traffic. I have a feeling that I'm going to have a very obvious reaction to what you're about to tell me." End The Cry of the Truth, 12a/22 The Cry of the Truth, 12b/22 So Long Shorty A.I. Irving vsmith@ischemia.card.unc.edu Rating: R (language, descriptions of rape) Category: S, A, R (Mulder/Scully) Summary: Mulder acts on the strength of his beliefs, and destroys his relationship with Scully. Please forward to ATXC and Gossamer. Thanks. See part 01 for the Disclaimer! Certainty, fidelity On the stroke of midnight pass Like vibrations of a bell -- W.H. Auden Late in the afternoon, Mulder's cell phone awakened them from a nap. A Russian contact he had been cultivating since his return from Tunguska had arranged a meeting with an emigre astrophysicist at the Vietnam War Memorial. Mulder got the details and then curled up with Scully for another hour of sleepy conversation and intermittent dozing. "We're like animals," Mulder said after dinner, spooning ice cream into her mouth. "Sleeping, fucking, eating, grooming, fucking." "You already listed that one," she pointed out. "I mentioned it twice because it's my favorite part of being an animal," he said. "Oh, it's just the blush of first love," she said, popping a raspberry into his mouth. "It'll wear off." "You think?" He leered at her and offered another spoonful of ice cream. He loved the way she closed her lips around the cream, sliding it off the spoon and into her mouth, all the while keeping her eyes shut so that she could give herself over to absolute enjoyment of the experience. "Oh, I hope not. I like being an animal." "Stick with what works, Mulder," she said, licking away a trace of ice cream that lingered at the corner of her mouth. "You want to go home and get changed? I'll meet you at the Wall in a little while." "You're trying to get rid of me," he pouted. "You're just like all the others. You use me as your sex slave, you tell me you love me, but when Sunday night rolls around, it's so long shorty." "So long shorty?" She cocked her eyebrow at him, and he dissolved into giggles. "If they've been calling you shorty, Mulder, you've been hanging out with a myopic crowd." "Flattery will get you everywhere, my sweetheart," he said, kissing her cheek. He took their dishes into the kitchen, rinsed them, and loaded the dishwasher. When he returned, Scully was smiling her approval. "Thanks. You're a nice boy." "Be sure to tell my mom," he said, ruffling her hair. "I'm going now. Bundle up, sweetheart. I won't be able to keep you warm out there." XXXXXXXXXX The cool, damp morning had progressed into a rainy, cold afternoon -- hence the nap before the fire with Mulder -- and the afternoon had turned into a misty, bone-chilling night. As she parked her car next to his Explorer on Constitution Avenue, she called up the memory of lying in his arms, safe and warm at home, in the hope that it might keep her warm a little longer. Then, gathering her black balmacaan coat around her, she slipped out of her car. Mulder fidgeted in his seat. After a weekend spent naked in bed with Scully, he could barely tolerate the constriction of his admittedly baggy suit. If he had fallen for any other woman, he might've worried about going soft, but he knew that Scully probably felt the same way about being back in her work clothes and would keep them both from becoming complacent. She was like that about most things. Never one to take the easy way around, through, or out of anything, she hated it when he tried to excuse himself from the necessary evils of life, such as following Bureau protocol. Mulder attributed this to her military upbringing. The United States Navy, personified by old Bill Scully, had imbued Dana with many admirable traits. Mulder suspected that Captain Scully was also responsible, at least in part, for her few maddening habits as well. Remembering her abduction was probably the only challenge Dana had ever spurned. Her refusal to delve further into the matter had always been hard for Mulder to accept, but over the years he had remained silent about his concern. Although he had studied enough abduction case histories to know with considerable authority that emotional fallout was inevitable, he never spoke of it to Scully. His interference would not have been tolerated. Now, however, things were different. Throughout the weekend Mulder had struggled with the matter, and he had finally come to a conclusion. He would no longer allow her to cloak her pain in Navy-brat stoicism. Her memories of the abduction, including the rape, had to be reclaimed and processed. Mulder's introspection was disturbed by the hollow sound of her hand on the passenger door. She clambered into the Explorer, bringing a blast of cold air in with her. "I wore my warmest suit," she said. "But I'm still freezing. Think there's a conspiracy afoot to suppress spring indefinitely?" Mulder stared out at the Washington Monument, studiously avoiding her brilliant smile. It had taken him all day to get his resolve up, and he didn't want it spiraling away in a warm, slimy jet of lust. Later for that. "Scully, I want you to undergo hypnosis," he said. She gaped at him, or at what she could see of him, in the darkness. "What?" "Hypnotic regression, to get back your memories about the abduction," he said gruffly, fumbling in the back seat for his knapsack. She watched him for a moment, half expecting him to burst out laughing. But his face was set in stern lines that did not flatter him. "Mulder, what're you talking about?" He pulled his binoculars out of the knapsack and trained them on the illuminated facade of Arlington House on the hill across the river. At night the white grave markers were less apparent, and he could almost imagine that it was just a beautiful old mansion. "I feel certain about this, Scully," he said, turning in his seat to face her. "We have to make sense of what was done to you, once and for all, before these resurfacing memories hurt you any more." She opened her mouth as if to speak, and then closed it again, smiling faintly with disgust and disbelief. The usual Spooky Mulder was back from his vacation, apparently. "You know I don't believe in hypnosis," she said. "Yeah, I know, but it's been proven to be helpful in patients with post- traumatic dissociative disorder." He spoke with the conviction with which he defended all his strange beliefs to her. "You have a classic constellation of symptoms -- the nightmares, the flashbacks, the --" "That's crap, Mulder. I didn't have any problems with this until yesterday." "No? You said in your letter that you'd turned away all the men who'd pursued you because you were afraid of reopening this wound. Well here I am, Scully." His whisper emphasized the intimacy of the issue. "I'm the one who can help you heal that wound once and for all. I got you into this. At least give me the chance to get you out of it." "No," she said simply. "What do you mean, no?" he demanded. She gave one firm shake of her head. "Absolutely not," she elaborated. "It's my brain, my memory, and I'm not letting some quack mess with it." Mulder bowed his head and tried to corral the emotions that thundered between his ears. "I know of a therapist who can take us through it with --" "Us? I'll be the one who gets dragged through the mire. I don't *want* to remember anything else about that time. What I can remember is horrible, humiliating violence. How could you wish more of that on me?" "I don't, Scully," he hissed. Her response was not a surprise to him, but after all they had shared, particularly in the past few days, he had expected more from her. "But -- Listen. Listen to me, Dana. If we can get back any details of where you were, and who kept you there, and what they did to you, then maybe we can at least make your suffering count for something. Before you told me about the rape, I assumed that the chances of your ever remembering the abduction were pretty slim. But now we have a place to start, and to ignore that would be...would be a terrible waste." Scully peered out at the quiet street. It was late, and she was tired in spite of the nap they had shared. She wanted to be in her bed, spooned up alongside Mulder, instead of staking out some crackpot Russian physicist. Their weekend of passionate discovery was coming to a bizarre end. She felt tears stinging her nostrils, and inhaled sharply to stop them. "You're turning me into a piece of evidence," she said. "Stop it." Mulder rubbed his forehead with one hand, trying to see through his muddled feelings to the point behind all this. If they were to successfully maintain their working relationship, he had to be able to argue with her constructively. "You're an investigator, Scully." His voice was raw with the effort to control his temper. "Don't you want to examine all the possibilities?" She shot him a cold glance that chastised him for using her own belief in scientific methodology to coerce her. "This is *not* a viable possibility," she said. "Memories recovered through hypnosis are not admissible under --" "Aw, come on, Scully! We could never take this to the courts. You know that. But at least we could get some resolution, maybe some clues to understanding the bigger picture." She shook her head, scrubbing her collar with the bristly ends of her hair. "I will not be subsumed into your paranoia, Mulder." To the south, the enormous white obelisk glistened proudly in the cool glare of spotlights. Mulder squinted at it from the within the darkness of his car, and wondered how he had wandered into this world. Surely somewhere in the universe there was a place where sentient beings mated without regularly trying to kill each other. "You have this information inside your own head and yet you refuse to contribute it to our search. After all these years, Scully, how. . .?" His gaze, plaintive and rather childlike, drifted back to her pale face. In the semi-darkness, his hand found hers. "How can you do this to me?" With a vicious tug, she freed her hand, then grappled to find the door latch. As soon as the door was released climbed out of the Explorer and paced onto the Mall, her coat flapping around her legs as she walked. Dropping heavily to a bench that overlooked the Wall, she tried to calm herself. The only thoughts that were clear, in a storm of anger, were of escaping Mulder's influence. She heard his footsteps on the gravel walkway nearby, then the rustle of his coat as he padded across the grass to join her. He sat wearily, long legs splayed, arms lax at his sides. "Dana --" "No." "Dana, I love you," he whispered. She sighed her irritation. If he didn't know why it was wrong to say that at this particular moment, she wasn't about to explain it to him. Idiot. With her eyes on the red lights atop the flagpoles of Arlington Cemetery, she spoke as evenly as she could. It would be hopelessly unprofessional to start screaming at him while their contact could be in earshot. "I know you do. But that doesn't give you the right to treat my memories like a commodity. It's another form of rape, and this time I'm not sitting still for it." His hand gripped her shoulder and pressed until she was forced to look into his face. The intensity that she normally found seductive cast a chill over her heart as she began to see it, stripped of its beguiling mask, for what it was. "Do you hear yourself, Dana? You've lost your perspective on this thing. You --" "What could you possibly know of perspective?" she snapped. "You're a man who's spent two-thirds of his life obsessing over his lost sister, attributing what is probably just a sad case of kidnapping and murder to a wild myth of alien abduction." What the shadows hid from her, she could feel pouring off of him as undiluted fury. She immediately regretted bringing Samantha into the argument. "Look, Mulder, I can't do this. I'm saying things I don't want to and I --" "You want to," he said woodenly. "You've wanted to say that to me for years." She shook her head. It was true, but he did not need to know that. "We should talk about this later," she whispered, looking down at his feet. "We still have about fifteen minutes," he said tonelessly. "Tell me everything else." "There isn't --" "Tell me everything else you've been holding back," he said. She clasped her forehead as if checking for a fever. "Look, I'm just -- I'm disappointed. I thought we were moving forward by changing the way things were between us. But now...now we're right back where we started. The skeptic and the believer, and never the twain shall agree. I can't live with this kind of stress in my personal life too, Mulder. It's too much..." Her voice trailed off into a whisper. "Our work has become your life too," he reminded her. "You can't deny that, Scully." "Yeah, but I'm still hoping for more." Her eyes glinted aquamarine in the lamplight. "I thought you were, too." He twitched an eyebrow curiously. "Did you really think we'd end up living in the burbs, with two kids and a minivan and no taint of the fluke man? Did you forget who we *are*?" He shook his head, a gesture of weary resignation as well as disbelief. "Sex doesn't change that. I thought you knew better than to expect a cataclysmic change." He rested his elbows on his knees and hung his head. She might have reached out to touch his shoulder if his words about their relationship had not taken on a cynical edge. "Not cataclysmic, just...a change. In you. In me. We --" "For once, why can't you try it my way?" he cried. "For six years I've tried to bend myself to fit your requirements, Scully. I've tried to go by the book, to be conventional. Would it kill you to try a page out of my book, especially where your own mental health is concerned?" She glanced down at her watch. Seven minutes to go. Too much time, or not enough? "I don't believe it's my mental health you're concerned about," she said coolly. "This reeks of one of your wild goose chases, and this time I'm the goose." "Absolutely not, Scully. That's --" "I will not deny what the data says about hypnosis," she continued, her voice wavering slightly. "The incidence of confabulation, of false memories and --" "Scully, it helped me," he said in a low voice, now more tender. "Did it? Or did it just help you dig yourself in deeper?" Mulder threw up his hands in frustration. "Jesus, Scully, you'd think I'd asked you to let me fuck you in the ass while the whole of Congress watched! This is just -- Fine gravel spat from under her feet as she tried to surge away from him. He caught her arm and pulled her back to the bench. As struggled against him, she cursed him wholeheartedly. "Goddamn you, you paranoid son of a bitch," she sobbed. "You've used me all along and I won't --" "No, no, I'm sorry, Scully. I --" "Let go of me," she hissed. Her squirming had ceased, but her body remained tense and ready to flee at the first opportunity. Her brows pulled together in fierce frown. When she spoke again, her voice was tight and whispery with pain and bitterness and a vulnerability that shocked Mulder. "You're the one he wanted, you bastard. He wanted you for himself and he couldn't have you so he banged my head against that table pushed my face into the sofa so I couldn't breathe ripped me on *purpose* so he could see me *bleed* because he liked the blood he thought it was *pretty* let go of me you idiotic --" Mulder lurched over her and, wrapping his open coat around her, pulled her hard against his body and pressed her head into his chest. She flailed against him for a few seconds, screamed silently into his shirtfront, and then quieted almost as abruptly as she had exploded. He loosened his hold on her so that she could catch her breath. No tears marred her smooth facade, yet Mulder was trembling with grief and horror. She stepped away from him and, with in almost mechanical gesture, smoothed her hair. She cleared her throat. She glanced at her watch. Then she faced him again. "In this case, Mulder, the victim -- the *survivor* -- is not some charming, unfortunate stranger like Delia Forrest who has no idea that you're expecting to find that the semen collected in her rape kit belonged to something other than a man." She flinched slightly at the pounding headache that was forming behind her eyes. "This time it's me, Mulder." He nodded grimly. "I know. That's why I want to get to the heart of this." His voice was soft with regret. He reached for her, but she stepped away. "Please, Dana, don't --" "No, Mulder, it's over between us. It was a mistake in the first place." She shrugged her coat up higher against her neck, suddenly wishing that she had worn a scarf. "Let's just stick to what we do best, and go meet your Russian. If nothing else, we still have a job to do." End The Cry of the Truth 12b/22