TITLE: MELANCHOLIA AUTHOR: JEYLAN EMAIL: jeylan@earthlink.net http://128.241.207.5/Jeylan/Jeylan2.htm RATING: [MA] CATEGORY: MSR SPOILERS: Nope. TIMELINE: Not as early. After Scully's abduction; pre-cancer. SUMMARY: A wayward walk on a ghostless, haunted afternoon. DISCLAIMERS: A bunch of people out there seem to believe that they own Fox Mulder and Dana Scully (or pieces of them, anyway), and are therefore entitled to profit. I am not one of those people. I am not profiting. Which is fine, because money has nothing to do with why I like these guys. I don't own the poetry, either. THANKS: To my wonderful beta readers, Brandon, Pam, and MBush, and thanks to Amanda for feedback. ================================================= MELANCHOLIA ================================================= ~the way things always fuck up and slip away before you can grab hold of anything to make sense of it and every instant time/words/intentions just go on streaming past half-noticed without adding up to anything ever and you can't take anything back ever~ === NEITHER HERE NOR THERE ====================== It was a rutted road. The macadam was worn deep, and silvered, and crazy-cracked with the heat of forgotten summers. It was a potholed road. Mulder scuffed his feet on it as he walked, kicking at crumbles of pavement and stray rocks. His hands were shoved in his pockets, and his shoulders hunched. Scully was ignoring him. It was a cold road. The trees that loomed over their heads were heavy and shuddering with new leaves, swollen with sap and spring urges. But this wasn't summer yet. And the shadows were lengthening, and the little town behind them was not the town where they were supposed to be. And then she spoke. "You could have cut that guy some slack, Mulder." "Yep. Could've." "But you didn't." "Guess not." //Let her drop it. Just pleaseplease let her drop it.// "Mulder, look. Did that mechanic really need to know we're late to witness an exorcism?" //Did he? She thinks he didn't. God, maybe there's some reason I should have kept my big mouth shut.// It was a coldness in his guts, when Scully disputed him. Not always, but often. Always, though, on chilly darkening days like today when the air smelled sweet like this. Mulder shrugged. "I thought it might light a fire under him, you know --" "Do mechanics really need to know these things? I mean, I'm asking you seriously. That's the question, Mulder." //Mechanics? Are there special rules for mechanics?// Mulder was reasonably certain that, if he himself were a mechanic, he would still be interested in the demonic possession down road in Marysville. But then, maybe he wouldn't be a very good mechanic. There was always that. "All I know, Scully, is right now I just want him to get that gremlin out." "I beg your pardon?" "Mechanics, exorcists, shrinks, witch doctors, you know..." he mumbled. //Dumb, dumb, dumb.// Shuffled. Kicked a rock. This particular rock was smooth and round. The kind of rock that made you want to pick it up and roll it around in your palm. A river rock, far from any river. A sad rock. Grey. Lonely. Like late winter days on Martha's Vineyard. Like being eleven again and looking forward to summer, and not knowing what was coming next, and just kicking a rock down the road and imagining it all: Life. The things that might be possible. All the stuff that was going to happen someday. Scully was quiet. //She's mad at me,// he thought, beneath a flowering cherry tree. Stopping, he raised his face to it, and breathed in deep its icy, earthy strangeness. They had already passed beyond the last tired little houses of the forgetful little town, all alike. It was quiet here. The blossoms overhead were trembling with secrets, and the cold late sunlight streamed through in stabs, spot- lighting his rock when it tumbled by chance into a gap between long chilly stretches of shade. Mulder nudged the rock musingly into a sunny spot beside the road. Something in the air made him want to run, just run, as hard as he could, get right off the road and run out directionless through the green green hills. //She'd be mad at me if I ran off. She's carrying the picnic stuff.// He stole a glance at Scully from the corner of his eye. She had paused beside him, and she was just standing, looking silently up at the cherry blossoms with him. It was moments like this he loved better than anything, these meaningless in-between moments when Scully was just Scully, just standing, just looking at a tree. The way her nose crinkled, when she squinted her eyes against a flitter of sun. That fascinating little mole, moving as her lip moved. Not quite a smile. "You let them all think you're crazy, Mulder. Why do you do that?" "Do I do that?" "Deliberately, and with malice aforethought." She started walking again. "Why do you have to jerk everyone's chains all the time? They're perfectly happy with their little worlds, before you come along. Don't you realize that?" "Everything in order until I mess with it," he agreed. Scully wasn't looking back to see if he would follow. She knew he would follow, puppylike, on her heels. She knew him. She knew that what he said wasn't always what he meant. //Her hair is great, all messy like this in a clip. Sexy ass, too. Oh, yeah. Damn.// Scully's blue-jeaned ass just went on walking down the road, taking no notice. Trusting him to follow. "You mess with people's minds," she said. "You're good at it, and you know you're good at it, and what's more, Mulder, I actually think you enjoy it. Messing with people's minds." "God, Scully, I love it when you talk dirty to me." //She should wear jeans more often. All the time. Scully in jeans, walking pissed off down country lanes.// "Why can't you be serious?" "OK. I'm serious. I *really* love it when you talk dirty to me." A fascinating, wordless, exasperated sound coughed from her throat. "Fine. Crack jokes! But what I don't understand, Mulder, and I really think you need to give this some serious thought, is why you can't just *sometimes* make a few concessions, and settle for telling people what they expect to hear." //What people expect to hear...// Mulder frowned. "People want to hear *normal* things, Mulder, provable, verifiable things. Not crap about exorcisms fifty miles down the road. In fact, I'm not even sure *I* want to hear crap about exorcisms fifty miles down the road!" //Wow, she's really hot.// "What they expect, or what they *want*, Scully? Don't you think people *want* to hear the truth?" "No. Not generally. No." "Oh." This was really getting interesting. Mulder felt sad and excited all at once, because Scully thought people didn't want to hear the truth, and because they were walking down this cracked little lane talking intimately like this about cool things. "If you just made a little bit of an effort, it would make your life easier at work, it would make *my* life easier at work, and you'd be able to fit in better." "But what should I say if I don't tell the truth?" Really curious, he took a quick skip-step and caught up to her; tried to catch her eye. "Forget it. Forget I mentioned it." "Do I *want* to fit in, Scully? Fit into *what*?" Panicky edge in his own voice, he could hear it. Visions of nice suburban neighborhoods ricocheted through his mind, nice wife:house:car: dog:neighbors (irritating son) wonderful daughter who might not ever be abducted by aliens (because you never know) and then everything would all be *really* nice, but, if she was abducted, then they could just Not Talk About It until it went away. "No, of course not. You? Fit in? Of course not. Just forget I brought it up. Stupid idea." //Fit in. Friends. Going out to games. Drinking beer, and shooting the shit about philosophy. Fit in. Maybe a date, every now and then.// The road had curved away from town. Nothing out this road. Just heading for a cemetery, a place to walk. The buzzing sound of people living had dropped away behind them, fallen back. And this was an unwelcoming road, making its slow, winding, broken way inevitably out from the concrete world, bound for the haunt of spirits. It was a road that belonged here, and knew it. It connected things, and therefore it belonged in a way they couldn't belong. This was a road with reasons and suspicions of its own, and its own way of forgetting. Mulder's eyes traced along the weedy edges. Dandelions, spit- weed, glowing golden buttercups. He picked a buttercup, and tried on impulse to brush it under Scully's chin. She jumped out of reach and looked at him like he was crazy. "Like butter, Scully?" he muttered. She didn't answer. Twirling the buttercup, Mulder stopped. There was an old gate beside the road. Not the cemetery, so this must lead to a house. The drive was clogged with knee-high weeds, and there were tangled wild roses vining all over the stone posts that marked the entry. He stood entranced, peering up through weeds and apple blossoms and shaggy, claw-fingered trees, but whatever was up there lay hidden from sight around a bend. "You wanna go look, Scully?" "I thought you had your heart set on picnicking in the cemetery." "Yeah, we can do that later. Come on." Dandeliony grasses tangled untamed and green around his ankles, as he strayed off the broken road. Every tiniest bud and sprig thrust upwards with the same damp urge. Greenness. Aliveness. Spring. Clingy cool shadows, and sad forgotten wayward wildnesses beneath the trees. Mushrooms pressing up through last year's cast-off leaves. A substitute sunlight of apple blossoms scattered down pinkly. And at the top of the forgotten road, a forgotten house waited. The tunnel of overarching trees opened out onto hilly cool clear- sky sun, and there the house dozed between hydrangeas, shivering cold lilacs at the corners, with drowsy windows, heavy-lidded, and a yawning great ear-to-ear porch. Mulder stopped ... and looked. But the house didn't look back. === NOW AND THEN =============================== The house was asleep inside, lulling softly in the twilight between memory and dream. Sleeping, it had been easy to get in. Only the front windows were boarded, carelessly, and the front door was locked. Mulder felt a sort of sadness for the house, left behind alone like this and so carelessly vulnerable. Scully had set the bag of sandwiches right down on the front porch, and stepped boldly up to the front windows, prying with little, white, persistent fingers at the slatted boards. And he'd known right away that she would get in. She was good at getting in. She'd jumped off the porch, disappearing around the corner of the hyacinths. "Come on, Mulder!" she called. "Are we exploring, or what?" "Oh, yeah, yeah. Definitely exploring." He followed. //There's always a way in.// Mulder helped Scully with the rusted, twisted latch on the sunken door of the daylight basement. //Most people just don't look.// The latch slid, crumbling and sharp in his hand. //They see what they expect to see. Hear what they expect to hear. Lucky them.// "Well, what'd'ya think, Mulder? I think we're good at this. Are we good at this?" "Snoopy is us. We should list 'breaking and entering' on our resumes, Scully." The door fell open, and then grated to a stop against the slanting cement floor. The dank smell of unfinished projects and buried summertime plans drifted out. A smell of oil, and metal, and possibilities, of dust gathering on molded shadows, retreating from the light. It was a cluttered cellar, stuffed with forgotten things, and it made Mulder's skin prickle; raised a shiver along his spine. "Hey, Scully, you better go first. There might be spiders." She made a face, and went first. And then he felt guilty. Passing cautiously through the dingy, crate-cluttered darkness, he followed her, edging sideways around a hand-crank laundry wringer and climbing over loose heaps of plumbing supplies, an antique pipe threader, old pipe wrenches and rusty saws. He tripped on the control board of a vintage train set, and was half-blinded by a wave of nauseous pain, a sweet sadness like a light in his head. "Hey, Mulder, why don't you be a man, and help me out, here!" //Teasing me?// Surprised, he tore his eyes away from the broken chunks of train set. Scully had found the way up, and she was struggling to shove aside a stack of heavy crates that were blocking the foot of a rickety inner stair. //Too heavy for you. You hate asking for help.// "Yeah, you know that's what you want." He stepped up beside her. "Why can't you just admit it, Scully? You want a *man*." "Shut up," she said. She was trying not to smile, so Mulder pretended not to notice. Not noticing her not smiling, he turned his attention instead to the obstacle at hand. Pulled a box off the top of the stack, and then another. Heavy. Old magazines, old newspapers. Stuff somebody read once, or hadn't gotten to yet. Hope eternal; reading material for a rainy day. The inside door must be standing ajar, and, with a few boxes out of the way, light from the back windows streamed down through the cobwebs. All this was stuff someone had wanted to keep. Hold on to. Someone who wasn't here anymore. //Nothing to hold onto. Nothing. No thing. Can't hold on to things.// Mulder climbed up over the rest of the boxes and jumped down carelessly onto the bottom stair, which cracked and collapsed under his feet. Wincing, the rotten wood gouging into his ankles, he pried his feet out carefully, and stepped to the next step up. Solid. The next step up was solid. "You OK?" Scully had climbed over the top of the crates and was sitting there staring at him, with wide blue eyes and smudges of dust on her face. "Ankles of steel," he said. "Rotten step. This basement floods sometimes." He pointed with his eyes. "You can see it." Thoughtlessly, he grabbed Scully by the waist, lifted her, and set her back on her feet one step up from where he stood. Her body under his hands felt tense with surprise. "Don't over- do the *man* thing, Mulder," she said. "Makes you nervous, huh? Gets your attention?" Because she was one step higher they were basically eye to eye, but the light was behind her, and all he could see was the flaming red haloed edges of her hair. Not her face. He knew she could see his, though. So he put a challenge in his eyes and faced into the light, hoping as he always hoped. That she'd take it, this time. //???// "In your dreams, Mulder," she said, and turned away. The house was very still. No one had walked here for a long time. It was dry inside. Clotted with dust. Even the spiders were dried out into mere mummified husks of spiders. The rooms were mostly empty. It was an old-fashioned house, with a wide front entry where someone must have garlanded fir swags on long-ago Christmases, and visitors had hung their coats on hooks along the wall. The living room was large, and dark, and empty. Lilacs and hydrangeas whispered along the sides of the house, brushing secret messages against the windows and the walls. Scully wandered around aimlessly, doing Scully things. Mulder sometimes watched her, and wondered about those things. Right now she seemed to be noticing the carved wood trim, and the places where carpets had been tacked to the hardwood floors. She was looking all around the rooms, maybe trying to figure out where the furniture had been, and which room was used for what, deciding if she liked the wallpaper, and giving the whole place a make-over in her mind. Yeah, that was it. She was trying to decide how best to put it to rights. He already knew the first item on her imaginary check-list: clean out the cellar. Scully liked things neat. While she prowled through the half-lit front rooms like a cat in a new cage, Mulder stood unmoving, staring in dismay at the wide windowsills where cats once sat. Cats? Yes, there must have been cats. And sun had shone on these windowsills, warm and sheltered, where now was only boarded-up shadow. And a wrinkled grandmother's hand had set out flowers in a vases, here. In another spring. Tearing his eyes away, he turned and climbed alone up into the gabled top floor of the house. He passed by a children's room, where the frame of a bunk-bed was still bolted to the wall, and entered a wide, slant-ceilinged space with creaking floors, and window seats looking out across the valley, away from town. Mulder leaned his elbow against a window edge, and stood quietly, looking. Valley. Wide and green, with apple trees in blossom. Cemetery. Small and unkempt, with tilting gravestones. Westward. He sank down blindly into the window seat, and sat quietly, looking out over the apple trees at the little cemetery down the hill. What thoughts had been thought here, and what dreams dreamed? What children conceived in this pensive, gabled room that looked out on sunsets and ghosts? There was sweet spring air on his face; a through breeze. Cracked glass. Here was where the house planned plans about itself, and remembered to itself the forgotten things broken and flung down in its own cellar ... or disremembered them. Here was a place for imagining, and a place where imaginings tended to flow downhill. Mulder's hand slipped into a crevice where the window seat had sprung loose from the wall, and his fingers touched paper. Hypnotically, he stroked the edge of pages, and then slid his hand carefully in, and slipped the book out. Funny little book, of old green cloth, stained and faded. It felt like a secret message in his hand, like a love letter. Like it had been waiting for him. "What are you doing?" Her voice in the room behind made him flinch. "Nothing, nothing." Lurching up, averting his eyes, Mulder shoved the book blindly into his pocket and faced away from Scully as he edged out the door. He went down the stairs too fast, too carelessly, letting his feet skid the edges of the treads, the way his mother always hated. Ker-thunk-a-swoosh-, thunk-a-swoosh-, thunk-a-swoosh- went his feet on the stairs, and echoes of childhood rang dismally through the lonely house. And he was sorry for it. Scully didn't follow right away. She caught up with him in the kitchen, after a while. Mulder was sitting on the counter, staring sadly at the scuffed depression-era linoleum floor. He knew many things, now, about this house. He knew that a handyman had lived here, who had fixed these cabinets, and replumbed the sink. He knew that people had been frugal here, and saved string from parcels, and off packages of butcher shop meat. Children had learned to walk on this kitchen floor, and mothers -- probably more than one generation of mothers -- had watched lilac blossoms bobbing outside these lemon trimmed windows, while baking pies. This kitchen was his favorite room. North exposure, indirect sun. No boards on these windows. Scraps of yellow flounce still clinging to the curtain rods. Yes, this room was his favorite. Scully found him kicking his heels against the lower cabinets to make them clack. She stopped and frowned, with her hands on her hips. "So, Scully, what'd'ya say? You all ready to move in?" "Do you realize how much work this place needs? You'd have to strip the wallpaper, refinish the floors, tear out that awful linoleum, replace most of those cabinets. Not to mention that there's something wrong with the foundation -- you were probably right about the flooding, Mulder, the whole place is tilting, and..." She interrupted herself when she saw the smirk on his face. "Oh, crap, Mulder, do you have to make a joke out of everything?" They went back outside. Mulder pulled off a sprig of early lilac, buried his nose in it for a long, deeply inhaled moment, and then shoved it at Scully. "Here," he said. With no need for talk, they sat together on the worn wooden front porch. Scully climbed right up on the wide rail, and ate her sandwich happily with the cool spring light on her face. Mulder sat on the steps, stealing glances. Her skin was too pale, and in this paling light her freckles stood out. With her hair pulled back she looked like a little girl. Mulder ate his sandwich, and thought about the people who came and went, who had taken turns reordering this little corner of the world, putting it to rights, and then were torn away, one by one. But the order lingered, like a shadow with no form to cast it. A persistent order, fading slowly, after the people were all gone. The people only lingered in his mind. People who might have been him. Scully. Both of them -- sitting here today, but not tomorrow. Tomorrow he and Scully would be nothing more than one more forgotten dream in the history of the house. He took the little green book out of his pocket and flipped it open at random. It fell open at a place where it had been much opened before, and Mulder ran his fingertips along the edges of the fine, dry paper, stained by other hands. Yes, much opened at this place. "God, this is so peaceful, here," Scully said. "Couldn't you just stay here all day?" "Yeah, sure. Just ignore the demons, forget about demons. No demons." With her face tilted up to the clouding sky, and her eyes closed, she wrinkled her nose. "I'm tired of demons. Don't you ever get tired of demons? Don't you wish we could just hang out someplace like this, I mean all day, and just pretend that this is why we came? Just to hang out?" //She's happy. She really could sit on this porch all day, being happy.// "Yeah, sure, Scully. Just hang out. Sure." //This is her idea of stable. A kind of order she relates to. Foundation's a little off, maybe, but nothing that can't be fixed. She likes this place.// Mulder's eyes fell unseeing to the opened page. //She actually likes this place. It's familiar to her.// Mulder felt an exquisite pressure behind his eyes, behind his ribs, a tightening, keening, crying sort of sensation like bittersweet music. Sitting here, suspended between someone else's past, and Scully. Sitting here, watching butterflies flutter through apple blossoms from the porch of this abandoned house, and the awareness of being late, too late for the exorcism down the road in Marysville. Sun sinking, far from home, and late. Nothing meshing the way it was supposed to. A fine, drawn out, whispering wailing sweet sweet sweet sort of feeling. And his eyes gripped hold of words. And he read, //'...And yonder all before us lie deserts of vast eternity. Thy beauty shall no more be found, nor in thy marble vault shall sound my echoing song; then worms shall try that well-preserved virginity...'// Mulder gritted his teeth, squeezed his eyes tight shut, and tried to stop the poem from reciting itself to completion in his head. //But at my back I always hear Time's winged chariot hurrying near...// He rubbed his eyes. //Just shut up, shut up!// He could hear Scully crumbling her sandwich wrapper. Making himself open his eyes, he looked at her. She was beautiful. Her wrist was casual and careless as she tossed the wrapper down, even though he knew she'd go searching for it later. Scully wasn't one to leave trash laying around. She lifted the lilacs to her face, and lavender light like a fragrance of blossoms reflected up onto her skin. "Mmmmm," Scully sighed happily. "It's nice here. Isn't it nice here, Mulder?" She was so beautiful he could barely look at her. His breath choked up in his throat, and his groin tightened. His eyes slid easily, too easily, by long guilty habit over the elegant clearness of her features, the plains and angles of her face. He could have closed his eyes, and drawn her in his mind more exactingly than a police artist. He always could. But not like this. Not with this cool blue-lavender light on her skin. Not the way the shadows in her hair fell to purple in the bluing afternoon. Not this dusty coolness of the light on her hands, and on the soft, babylike fragility of the flowers. Scully's hands were always so white, so innocent. They never looked like hands that cut up corpses. He was fascinated by her hands, and the way her fingertips touched softly the lilac blossoms, trembling them. Just sitting there, just being Scully, she was home and heart to him and it didn't matter if they were late to be somewhere else. Time meant nothing. He wanted to wrap her in his arms, and couldn't, and knew he couldn't. Admiring Scully was like wishing to cuddle a koala bear -- more soft and fuzzy in prospect than actuality. Nevertheless, she had smudges of dust on her perfect skin, and he wanted to wash them off for her. "Beautiful, isn't it beautiful?" she murmured, lifting her eyes lazily from the flowers to look at him. One negligent glance from the clear clear blue of her lilac shining eyes, and he was struck through to the heart, to the gonads, shaky as the lilacs in her hands. Everything about her was beautiful. Her grace, her tiny, compact strength, the physical breathing presence of her, the energy of her just being there, just watching him. The softness of the words on her lips. "And while thy willing soul transpires at every pore with instant fires," he muttered, gazing up at her. "What did you say, Mulder?" "Nothing." //...worms shall try that well-preserved virginity...// "I wonder who owns this. Do you think they'll clean it up?" Mulder got to his feet. "Hey, where are you going?" she called after him as he started walking away. "Looking for worms," he said. ================================================= ..end part 1 MELANCHOLIA NC-17 (2/3) jeylan@earthlink.net http://128.241.207.5/Jeylan/Jeylan2.htm === TWILIGHT ==================================== He knew only that he had to get away from this house, had to get away from this persistence of things ordered in patterns outlasting their usefulness. Patterns without people. Things in intentional sequence, without minds behind them. No one left to intend. Train set, with no little boy at the controls. Scully, sitting sexy and molestable on the front porch, fussing over dead people, blissfully unworried about intentions. Scully was unaware he might be thinking ... what he was thinking. She was only musing about things -- about wallpaper, and carpenters, and building inspectors. She was cleaning out the cellar in her mind. Making things neat. Mulder hastened his steps, almost stumbling in the tussocks of grass. //Had we but world enough and *time*--// He kicked at a grass clump. //*Time!* This coyness lady were no *crime.* No *crime.*// Another kick. Wild crocuses, buttercups, little daisies. Poppies. Clover. His feet took him of their own volition down through the little orchard, and down the curve of the hill. To the cemetery. //Yes.// The cemetery. The cemetery was quiet, and peaceful. Mulder liked cemeteries; well, sometimes he liked cemeteries. Today, he liked cemeteries. He wandered the graves for a while, reading names. Paget, Neve, Askew. Crocuses nuzzled their soft spring heads tenderly at the tombstone of Asenath Playfair. Haseltine Beamish. Paget, again. There were lots of Pagets, and Askews. Which family had lived in the house on the hill? Fade. Cager Fade, 1846-1910. Mehitable Askew, Barticus Askew, Emma Hazel Askew. Patience Askew, 1897-1905. //Oh!// Mulder's long fingers traced sadly over the dates and the carved cherub. And then he moved on. Mitpord, Hesketh. John Sale Hesketh. Amy Angeline Hesketh. Gertrude Augusta Mitpord. Augustus Gregory Mitpord. Ethelyn Upcott. Myrtel Rose Piggot. As he wandered, his heart rate slowed, and Mulder began to breathe normally again. The graves were overgrown, and some of the markers were so weathered he could barely make them out. //Lelia, 1810-1907, loving wife of Floyd Albert Hobb,// he read, and beside it, //Floyd Albert Hobb, 1814-1846.// The gate, opening in from the road, looked like it hadn't been closed in decades. Gus, the mechanic who didn't want to hear about demons, had called this the "old cemetery." There must be a newer one, somewhere. Probably with newer graves, better kept up, and living people who still remembered the occupants. But not here. Here were unmanicured trees, and bushes aspiring to treehood, and here were many wildflowers. Here was the sound of the wind. The grass was high, and some of the graves were sinking, relaxing, caving down in to the tangling green earth. Mulder was careful where he stepped. The late afternoon sun was lowering behind huge maples, the sky above had greyed with high clouds, and the little cemetery was falling into edgeless shade. A nervous breeze had picked up, a rushing of air as eager to get out of here and go eavesdrop on the exorcism as he was. He could feel it. Mulder stood quietly, with his head up into the fidgety gusts. This breeze glossed secrets, and tasted deliciously of hidden things, forgotten things. The grasses and the trees whispered with it, speaking only to the dead ... and to him, if he could have understood. He tried to understand. He listened, rapt, and watched enchanted the cryptic dancing gossip of the grasses and the leaves. A discourse between ghosts and living air. Then, in moody silence he sought out a less gloomy corner, and, choosing his tombstone, he sat down. Cager Fade. Mulder felt an affinity to Cager Fade. Cager Fade's tombstone was carved with a grinning, blank-eyed skull and angel wings, and all around his grave was a dance of red poppies. Mulder sat, leaning back against the stone. He opened his book, shivered slightly, and wished the sun were warm. //'Lift not the painted veil which those who live Call Life: though unreal shapes be pictured there, And it but mimic all we would believe With colours idly spread--'// He squeezed his eyes closed, stroking his fingertips over the page. //Lift not the painted veil, which those who live call Life.// True. The greeny and scarlet dancing world which he could feel breathing all around him was so clearly only a veil, shuddery and fitful beneath the prankish air. There was something underneath. //'I knew one who lifted it--he sought, For his lost heart was tender, things to love, But found them not, alas! nor was there aught The world contains, the which he could approve. Through the unheeding many he did move, A splendour among shadows, a bright blot Upon this gloomy scene, a Spirit that strove For truth, and like the Preacher found it not.'// //Shelley knew.// Shying from that thought, restlessly, he turned a page. And, as if by some innate magic invitation, his eyes lifted up and found Scully, found her without having to look. As if there could be no more natural focus for his attention. She was standing at the crest of the hill, just standing there, looking uncertain, looking down at him. Her hair was fire in the cold air. She carried her weight on one hip. Her arms hung easily at her sides, but her white fingers fidgeted nervously, shivering the sprig of lilac. He looked at her, and she, unsmiling, looked back. Then she turned away. He sighed, and returned to his book. //'Flourishing vine, whose kindling clusters glow Beneath the autumnal sun, none taste of thee; For thou dost shroud a ruin, and below The rotting bones of dead antiquity.'// Mulder felt a welling throb that rose up and flooded through his whole body like a physical pain. *Beauty.* It bound him to the tombstone, to the earth, and to the words in the book. //*Shelly knew.* More than a hundred years dead, and he knew what I can't explain to Scully.// >From his school days he remembered liking Shelley, in that distant, theoretical way that students form their likes and dislikes. He remembered deciding that Shelley was 'the real thing,' though he couldn't now recall why he'd thought so. But now... Now to rifle through these pages of poetry was like finding words for a melody that had haunted him, long. //'Oh! there are spirits of the air, And genii of the evening breeze, And gentle ghosts with eyes as fair As star-beams among twilight trees:-- Such lovely ministers to meet Oft hast thou turned from men thy lonely feet.'// He caught a glimpse of motion from the corner of his eye. Scully'd gone back for the empty lunch sack and the thermos, and she was now working her way down the hill, towards him. She'd been content where she was, yet she was following him here. Part of his mind noticed it, while the rest went on reading. //'Of these inexplicable things, Thou didst hold commune, and rejoice When they did answer thee; but they Cast, like a worthless boon, thy love away.'// She edged nearer, distracting him from his poem. She was pretending to read inscriptions, but really she was watching him cautiously from the corner of her eye, as if she thought he might chase her off. "Pull up a tombstone, Scully." She grimaced, came next to him, and shoved his hip with her toe. "Move over," she said. And Mulder moved. She cuddled in close beside him. //'Still dost thou hope that greeting hands, Voice, looks, or lips, may answer thy demands?'// he read. "Hey, Scully, this is kind of nice," he whispered into her hair. "I'll share my headstone with you, any time." "Shut up," she said. "You want some cocoa?" There was still cocoa in her thermos, and it was still warm. Mulder imagined her, sitting alone on the porch of that depressing house, enjoying herself, and saving the last of her cocoa for him. Scully loved cocoa. It must have been a sacrifice. "Thanks," he said, and drank. The chocolate warmth in his mouth and flowing down his throat was a welcome contrast to the cold stone, cold earth, cold grass, cold breeze, and cold, cold company of the used-to-be people under the ground here. Scully, warm and restless against his side, was also welcome. And everything shifted into sharp focus, suddenly so blindingly clear. Himself, Scully, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Cager Fade, life, mortality, Time. Beauty, beauty, beauty! Beauty too deep for words, so deep it hurt. The welcome taste of chocolate, and the yawning immensity of being. "Mulder, I really hate it when you get like this." "Huh?" "Moody. You're depressed again. We were having such a nice day, and now you're depressed." "Depressed? Me? Naw. No." His face was long, his voice was sad. He knew she must hear his voice sad. "Hell, no." "Come on, Mulder, snap out of it. Cheer up." "I'm not cheerful? This isn't cheerful enough for you, Scully?" He forced a goofy smile, a smile like the grin on Cager Fade's tombstone. A cosmic giggle, in the face of elemental awe. Scully didn't get it. She rolled her eyes. "Mulder, it's creepy here." "Creepy?" He recapped the thermos, and set it down in the grass. "Hey, I'm surprised at you! All the bodies are safely buried, we're not planning to exhume anyone, and--" he checked his watch "--unless we're very, very lucky, we may not even be in the market for a good exorcist, anymore. The birds are singing. What's creepy, Scully?" She elbowed him in the ribs. "You know what I mean." Yes, he knew what she meant. She meant she felt helpless. She couldn't see any way to fix this. Her face looked very pale and sad, and her shoulders were hunched. She was slouched listlessly, close at his side, still holding her lilacs and using the narrow grave marker as an excuse to happen to bump more familiarly against his body. She was careful not to let it seem she actually wanted to touch him, of course. Scully was nothing, if not careful. Her carefulness made him sad, with a sadness deeper than a grave. Her carefulness made him feel helpless, in a way that nothing else in life made him helpless. He looked at her composed features, so carefully resigned, and couldn't help remembering the breathless girl she had been -- that girl with flashing eyes and flushed cheeks who had first joined him on the X-files, not so long ago. Eager to please, easy to flirt with. Defiant. Where had she gone? That other Scully, the one he'd fallen half in love with the first time he looked in her eyes? Gone, gone. Just one more apparition, swept away in the onward rushing of time and events. Now he was depressed. "Here, read to me, Scully," he said, and shoved the book into her hands. After a short hesitation, she chose a page at random. "Poems Written in 1816," she read, "The Sunset:" And Mulder started picking poppies. "There late was One whose subtle being, As light and wind within some delicate cloud That fades amid the blue noon's burning sky, Genius and death contended. None may know The sweetness of the joy which made his breath Fail, like the trances of the summer air..." Scully's voice was throaty, soft, her words -- Shelley's words -- barely a whisper on the graveyard air. Mulder gathered heaps of poppies into his lap, and began to braid them. His fingers fumbled awkwardly at first, relearning the simple rhythm of it, the way he used to French braid Samantha's hair sometimes, because he could see the back of her head and she couldn't. He could almost hear the echo of Samantha -- //Quit being such a pussy, Fox! If you stop griping and just do it, then it'll be done, and you can pretend you didn't.// He blinked hot tears, and went on braiding. "...and in the east The broad and burning moon lingeringly rose Between the black trunks of the crowded trees, While the faint stars were gathering overhead.-- 'Is it not strange, Isabel,' said the youth, 'I never saw the sun? We will walk here To-morrow; thou shalt look on it with me.'" Scully let the book fall to her knees. "What are you doing?" she said. "I'm weaving a garland for my true love's hair," he answered. Scully coughed a strangled cough, picked up the book again, and resumed: "That night the youth and lady mingled lay In love and sleep -- but when the morning came The lady found her lover dead and cold. Let none believe that God in mercy gave That stroke. The lady died not, nor grew wild, But year by year lived on -- in truth I think Her gentleness and patience and sad smiles, And that she did not die, but lived to tend Her aged father, were a kind of madness..." "If I died, would you die or grow wild, Scully?" "What?" Now she sounded cross. She hated to be interrupted. "Never mind." He already knew the answer anyway. No matter what happened, Scully would keep on keeping on until the day she died, just like she always did. It was the definition of Scully. "Her lips and cheeks were like things dead -- so pale; Her hands were thin, and through their wandering veins And weak articulations might be seen Day's ruddy light. The tomb of thy dead self Which one vexed ghost inhabits, night and day, Is all, lost child, that now remains of thee," she read. And Mulder took his poppy garland, and set it gently into her red hair. It caught up on the clip at the back, and without thinking Mulder's hand reached to the clip, and unclipped it. With a satisfying vibrance her hair sprang free, swinging wildly down around her face, and her pale cheeks flushed. "Mulder...?" she said. She didn't look at him; seemed afraid to move her head. "God, you're so beautiful!" His voice came out rougher and more intense than he'd expected. Scully laughed a choked, nervous little laugh. He could practically hear the gears turning in her head, trying to find the right angle to deflect this. Scully was good at finding angles, good at deflecting things. "Why can't you ever be serious, Mulder?" she said, more sharply than she probably meant. "I *am* serious, Scully. I'm always serious. I've never seen a more beautiful woman." Serious? He was twitching he was so serious. His whole body was pumped with arousal, his jeans suddenly too tight and binding. He shifted his hips, unconsciously struggling for a way to take the pressure off. He could feel his breath fast and nervous in his throat, his heart racing. She'd kill him if he made a move on her here. She was small, and close. He could smell her hair, and the scent of her skin. They were alone, so alone, and the air was chilling. He rolled up on one hip, hovering close above her. He wanted to warm his hands between her legs, wanted to kiss behind her ears and make her wiggle, press her down helpless into the grass and make love to her on a bed of poppies. She'd kill him if he tried. Leaning close, he brushed his lips against her cold ear. "Don't you ever want to just go fucking crazy?" he whispered. "What?" Irritably, she shoved at his shoulder with the side of her hand. "Never mind." Mulder leaned back against the tombstone, and began to shred the petals off poppies. She watched. "What the hell are you doing?" she asked after a while. "Thinking about Time. How huge and slippery it is, and how there's never enough." "Enough for what?" "*Life*! Don't you ever freak out that if you don't do it now, *right NOW*, that maybe you'll never ever get another chance ever?" "Do what?" It was hopeless. Mulder sighed, and gathered up his shredded petals. Carefully, systematically, he started placing them on Scully. One on each ankle, one on each knee, two on the top of her head. "I hope you're having fun," she said. "You see, that's just it. There's never time for fun." He sprinkled a path of petals crosswise across her chest, and then laid another line starting at her throat and tracing down the center of her body. Dropping one red petal at a time, red like fury, red like passion, red like blood, and stained glass, and remembering that you can see. Red that cuts. The kind of red that once meant only spring, only life, in the days before chemical dyes. The kind of red that doesn't last. And then he arrived at her crotch, and stopped. "There's never enough time," he said impatiently. "No matter how long you live. I think that must be a rule." He dumped the rest of the petals in an unceremonious heap on her crotch and turned his face away, hugging his knees. "Take for example Lelia, over there, loving wife of Floyd Albert. She was a little too young for the Romantics, and she didn't quite make it to the Roaring 20's. All Lelia Hobb saw of life was more or less just 97 years of Victorianism." Scully, covered in flowers, frowned. She was probably trying to figure out what he was talking about. "Fun? God, Scully, think of all the corsets!" //And more than 60 years of grieving for Floyd.// Scully was still scowling under her poppies, and he noticed the way the silkening light erased the etched beginnings of tiny lines that would one day mark her face -- lines which would, like the other directions of her life, be forevermore partly his fault. But now, in the softly silver, glooming light, the lines seemed to reverse and dissolve. And Scully, earnest and frowning, looked in this light almost like his own Scully again -- young, and flush-cheeked and eager, and unafraid to rush in. She looked almost like the girl he had first fallen in love with. //Floyd must have loved Lelia.// "Why do you always have to be so melodramatic?" she said. "Melodramatic?" A wind was starting to pick up and the evening was fast darkening. Swift black clouds clogged across the face of the sky, smothering the sunset. //'Is it not strange, Isabel, I never saw the sun?'// Scully's pale skin was ghostly, and her blue eyes, greying in the strange light, were as deep as the sky. //Melodramatic?// Her poppies and her hair were hot embers, hotter than any living thing had any right to be in the chillness of this electrical air. This was the air of brewing storms, air that rushed by quickly, whispering urgent secrets, not pushing but pulling -- air with somewhere to get to. Scully was fidgeting, unbalancing some of the petals. And this was a moment of magic, of petals starting to fall, but she wasn't paying attention. Just as she often didn't pay attention. She was rifling the pages of the book. "Look," she said, "there's something written inside the front." She rested the book in her lap, in the red petals, and read aloud the spidery brown writing: "Like the beautiful bodies of those who died before growing old, sadly shut away in a sumptuous mausoleum, roses by the head, jasmine at the feet -- so appear the longings that have passed without being satisfied, not one of them granted a single night of pleasure, or one of its radiant mornings." Mulder's blood raced so hard he could hear it in his ears. He couldn't look at her. The poets were right. Life is short and improbable, and death is boundless. Cold. He had a sudden wild vision of everything all at once, and the dubiousness of everything -- life, death, time, this cemetery, this cloud-torn sky, this wind, and Scully. Scully. Hot, and real, and tiny among the graves, and alive. //*Now.*// And how many infinite nows slipped by every day? Countless days, uncounted days, filled with nows, filled with longings, all unsatisfied -- //It's *now.* It's going to be now.// As soon as he looked at her, it would be now. And he knew it, and he couldn't look at her. He could feel the heat of her hip pressing against his hip, warm with moving blood that didn't have to move; would one day stop moving. He could feel her breathing presence, drawing the wind into her lungs. Breath and a pulsing life in her body, instead of cold, inert clay. Mulder's imagination was vivid, but he didn't need to imagine the bodies beneath the ground to be able to appreciate how rare and singular and shiningly evanescent was this moment. This one trembling, uncertain moment, animate with possibilities as all moments are. The wind made a sighing in the trees like the voices of a crowd far away, like the regrets of the dead. And the birds had fallen silent. "What's wrong, Mulder? What are you thinking?" "Prayers to broken stone," he whispered into the wind, and turned his head slowly. And looked at her. And he saw her eyes change. Her pupils dilated, and her eyes went dark. Blindly, she shut the book, and set it down in the grass. Now. It was now. Even if she slapped him back and never spoke to him again, it was still, goddamit, going to be *now.* His heart pounding so hard it shook his hands and his sternum and the knot in his throat, Mulder reached for her. He put his hand into the poppy petals between her legs, and found the petals cool, and tender to the touch, but he touched them roughly, grasped firmly, worked his cold fingers down into the warmth between her legs. And he leaned to kiss her. She stared at him with her mouth open. She didn't move. He kissed her. "What are you doing?" she murmured into his mouth, and he kissed her more deeply, so that she couldn't talk. He squeezed her body with his fingers, demanding a response. Wrapping his other hand into her hair, he tipped her sideways, pushing her and falling with her. Tilting and dropping down onto the uneven ground to lie at an angle to the tombstone in the cold poppy-tangled grass. And she was kissing him back. That was all Mulder needed to understand. Miraculously, she was kissing him back. Her mouth tasted of cocoa, and she moaned into his mouth. She clutched at his back, grabbed at his ass -- Mulder groaned, and his eyes rolled up in his head. He got one knee up between her legs, forcing it hard against her, got both his hands on her breasts, and his mouth on her throat -- "Stop," she murmured, "Mmmmm, stop." It was a nonsensical thing for her to say, and he puzzled at it distractedly while he worked at getting his hand up under her sweater, while he sucked at her neck, and ground his knee against her clit; rubbed his hard-on against her thigh. Her cold hands were searching under his coat, inside his shirt. He was dimly aware of his wool trench coat flung out covering them both like a wild cape, and that was nice, but it would be nicer still if he could get her shirt untucked. She was squirming underneath him, pressing herself against him, moaning deep in her throat, and repeating again, softly, "Stop, mmmm, stop." Mulder stopped. "Huh?" he inquired thickly. She bit him under the chin, scraped her teeth back and forth against the stubble of his beard, and sucked. "This isn't the right time, Mulder," she complained, trying to slide her hands into the back of his pants. "This isn't the right place." "It never is." He got hold of the button of her jeans, and released the tension, popping it. "That's just the thing, it never is. When's the right time, Scully? Huh?" Roughly, he got his hand inside her jeans, inside her underwear. She didn't stop him. She was wet. The heat and smell of her arousal did something to the deepest, most primitive part of his brain, and with a groan he dove for her mouth again, working his fingers inside her body and his tongue into her mouth, and moaning into her mouth, his whole body charged with the imperative of it. He was going to take this woman. Now. *Now.* He was going to fuck her, make love to her, make her cry out, make her toes curl and her head toss. He was going to bury himself in her warmth, and her wetness, and let his whole soul revel in it, in this shuddery on-ness, and awakeness, and aliveness -- this fleeting instant, this incalculable, extraordinary, fugitive fragment of LIFE -- stolen as it was out of the jaws of the earthen ponderous inertia of Time. This fragment of heaven -- This -- "Stop!" she said again, more distinctly. Mulder slowed. He breathed a shaky breath. "I don't want to stop," he said stubbornly. He rubbed his fingers through her slippery wetness. "And I don't think you want me to stop." Drawing her natural lubrication up onto her clitoris, he stroked it, and Scully's eyes flickered shut. She bit her lip, and moaned, and relaxed back into the grass, and Mulder was so turned on by her he didn't know if he could stop, not now, not when this was finally happening, after much too long of wishing it would. "Listen," he said roughly, "help me out here. I'm getting some, uh, mixed signals." Scully laughed, and grabbed him by the balls. He shuddered as her small, strong hand searched out the shape of his erection through the binding fabric of his jeans. "OK," he tried again, hissing air through his teeth. "You want me to stop, you gotta come up with a better reason that that." Scully laughed again. No, she didn't -- she giggled. Scully, his Scully, his straight-faced serious-minded ever-rational friend and partner Scully, was laying beneath him in the cemetery grass giggling like a high school girl. That was a weird image to twist his muddled brain around. "OK," she said. "I don't want our first time to be in a cemetery." //Our first time.// Mulder's thoughts were getting dopey and red around the edges. Funny how it sounded like she'd said 'our first time.' He was pretty sure there were some implications to that he wasn't getting, right now. "Not good enough," he gasped, helping her get into his jeans. "A reason that makes sense." "Not wanting to do it in a cemetery doesn't make sense?" He didn't bother to answer. The question was too dull, too theoretical, too distant, too like some office logic designed to suffocate the bud, and cut off consequence. His cock sprang free, and her hand was on it -- little and cool and greedy, grasping him, searching out his shape. >From the depths of his being, Mulder groaned. "OK, how's this for a reason that makes sense?" she said. "I want to make love to you in a real bed." //Oh, shit.// Mulder groaned again, and let his forehead plunk down hard into the cold grass. "We can do that later," he argued with the grass. "Next time." "*This* time, Mulder," she insisted. "Get up and put your pants on." //Shit, shit, shit.// She meant it; he knew she meant it. There was no arguing with her when she got like this. ================================================= ..end part 2 MELANCHOLIA NC-17 (3/3) jeylan@earthlink.net http://128.241.207.5/Jeylan/Jeylan2.htm === SHADOWS OF THE TREES WITNESSING THE WILD BREEZE ===== He slipped the book of poetry into his inside pocket above his heart, and waited for her to stand. First she gave him the bag of trash, which he crunched more compactly and shoved into one big trench-coat pocket, and then the thermos went into the other. And Scully let him help her to her feet. It gave him a warm glow, as those rare, rare moments always did when she let him take care of her. "Going to storm," he said, watching the giddy dance of her hair flying into her face, with two crushed red petals still tangled in it. The sun had set, and the sky was darkening fast, clouding deeper. Just enough light left to see the color of the petals, the flaming red. He touched one lightly with his fingertips and then bent down to pick up the fallen poppy wreath, and put it in her hand. Scully smiled, lifted the poppies, and set them back in her hair. Turning from him, she began to walk slowly and carefully over the slanting, uncertain ground between the graves. He watched his feet, cautious in the gloaming, watched her retreating back, and wasn't sorry after all when they reached the gates of the cemetery and passed through. The air beyond the gates felt different. A warmer scent, and a wilder rustling of possibilities. Branches tangled with branches overhead, and the trees above them whipped madly, creaking, muttering, and whispering. It was a shivery, electrical night with insurrection in the air, but the cracked pavement was firm and flat underfoot. No sunken graves here, only the building storm, and the road stretching out long at their feet. //Only one road,// Mulder remembered from long ago, and smiled. //The road that leads to the whole world.// Scully found his hand with hers. "You do realize, of course, that you'll have to make a choice," she said very seriously. "Between the snake girl, and me." She swung his hand in hers. "You or the snake girl?" "If the car's ready, you'll have to choose. But, of course, it might not be." "Hell with the car. Hell with the exorcist, and the minister, and the demons, and hell with the snake girl," he said. "To hell with all of them. Tonight, I choose you." //I choose you.// And he grabbed her, and pulled her off the road, shoved her back against a tree and kissed her, forced his knee between her thighs, half lifting her up, kissing her roughly, and her arms were around his neck. There was a flash and a shock wave, a pulse of pressure and a roll of thunder -- and then suddenly the rain. Fat drops, only a few, finding their way down between the leaves. A sibilant sound. Rain, rain. Hissing down, sweet and green and cool and flower scented, earth scented, new tender spring leaf scented. Mulder threw back his head and laughed, groaned, bent over Scully again and kissed her. "I dare you," he whispered, and grabbed for the button of her jeans. "I dare you." "Not here." "Why not here?" He tried again. "Not here." She broke away from him -- he let her go -- and she skipped back out to the road, to the rain, out from cover of the trees, into the downpour. Clutching her flowers to her head, she looked surprised, like a fairy-tale princess thrown out of the castle. "You did it to yourself!" he shouted over the roar of rain. "What?" She stood dumbly and stared at him, raising one hand into the rain, her hair flattening. "What?" "Shelter!" He gestured at the tree overhead. "Moss!" The ground underfoot. "Me!" Pointing his thumb at his chest. "I was gonna make love to you, and there you are out in the rain!" "Ha!" she called back. "Ha!" With one hand on her flowers, she spun wild-armed in the deluge, almost dancing. "In the mud? Not in the mud, Mulder!" Mulder leaned back against the tree, watching her, and laughed. She laughed too. "Not *mud*, *moss*," he shouted back. "Come on, Scully, let's run!" Dashing suddenly from his sheltering tree, he grabbed for her hand and missed and went careening down the road in the dark without her. Running, blood pumping, feet splashing, cool sweet rain on his skin, his coat whipping out behind him, cracking like a cape, and thunder rolling overhead, Mulder tipped his face to the tormented sky and forgot about everything else, almost forgot about Scully. But she caught up -- laughing, grabbing at his sleeve, panting. He slowed for her. She was stubborn, and strong, and fast, but her legs were short. They walked hand in hand in the rain, and then they ran some more. Just for the hell of it. Just to run. No need to talk about it. Seldom any need to talk. But not as wild, with her beside him. Just jogging. They checked in to the town's one B&B. One room. They took the largest room, at the top of the house. One bed. They were the only boarders tonight. Rebellious boarders without any luggage, avoiding the eyes of the nice fat landlady. Avoiding questions. They climbed the stairs in silence. Not touching. Mr. and Mrs. Shelley. It was a gabled room at the back of the house, clean and civilized. A lived-in sort of room, filled with well-loved things. Loved by someone, once, a long time ago. There was a real quilt on the bed, made by someone's hands, and an accumulation of knick-knacks and books. Funny little old photographs in frames. Someone's grandparents. Mulder lit the candle the landlady had given them in case the power went out, and surveyed the cache by candlelight. All the parts of a puzzle were here, all the pieces of a life, or perhaps scattered pieces of several lives, struggling to suggest a unified shape, a meaning, an importance, stubbornly holding their own under the careless glances of countless strangers. It was a romantic room, an elegant room, filled with antiques. It was a sad room, vaguely tragic, as if everyone who passed through took something intangible and irreplaceable away. But there was a private bath, the rain beat loud and lulling on the near roof, and the windows looked out on turbulent tree-tops and on over the brushy downward-sloping banks of a steep ravine. Away to the west was the hill, and the house. Their forgotten house, still dreaming its own murky dreams, and visible intermittently against the flash of lightnings in the sky. The latch of the bathroom door clicked. Light spilled into the bedroom behind him and was quickly extinguished. Mulder turned from the window, not laughing anymore, and he looked at her in the candlelight. She was beautiful, of course. She'd stripped out of her wet clothes, down to her T-shirt and panties. Her legs were bare, smooth and white. She had brushed her wet hair, and set the flower wreath back on neatly so that it was no longer askew, no longer poised on the brink of falling. And that made him sad for some reason. It was so like Scully. He took off his dripping coat, and let it drop to the floor as he crossed to her. And he took her. He lifted her up, and dumped her onto the bed; fell on top of her, still rain-splattered. And she let him. She didn't protest. They both recognized what was happening. This was inevitable. >From the beginning, it'd always been going to come down to this -- come down to the two of them, on some stormy night, together in one bed, half-lost in some forgotten wayside town by candlelight. This had to happen. A night which had been waiting for them. "Happy, Scully?" he murmured, as he stripped off her shirt. "Mmm," she said. "You're wet, Mulder." He snorted, and got his hand between her legs. "Bitch, bitch, bitch," he said pleasantly, punctuating his words with sucking on her breast. Nipping, biting her. No response. He bit harder, and heard her moan. Her breast was wobbly and soft, tasting talcum-sweet and female. He liked the way her nipple hardened, and the heat of her body, the way she arched up off the bed to meet him, and the greedy fumbling of her fingers on his clothes. Yes. Too long he had been waiting to make love to this woman. Too long. He slid his hands over her legs, lifted a knee, folded it, folded her, pushed her back, felt her yield. Yes. Caressed her smooth, smooth skin. The scent of her made him crazy, triggered responses and desires and a feeling of omnipotent, soaring joy which he had not felt for too long now. Much too long. Hardly noticing what he did, he kissed her legs. He helped her pull off his wet clothes. He loved the feeling of her hands on his body, moaned and rocked when he felt her touch his cock, but that was all incidental. Mulder knew his purpose, and his aim was to make her writhe, to hear her cry out, to make her toes curl, and her head toss, and her hair snarl, and her eyes roll up in her head. And he was lost in it, in the scent and taste and touch and aura of her, lost in the sweet private brown curls between her legs, lost in the joy of sucking all the places he had longed to suck, and frustrated when she barely murmured in response. She was trembling under his hands, his mouth, but she held it in. "Come on! Come on! Who ya scared is gonna hear us?" He rammed into her hard, almost wanting to hurt her, and she accepted everything. She didn't protest. Biting her lip she grimaced a smile, and closed her eyes. He fucked her hard, rubbed her hard with his hand, sucked her nipples and her throat and was almost rough with her. And she seemed to like it. Seemed surprised, maybe confused, as if this wasn't the way she was used to being loved. And that suspicion incited him more. He rolled her, flipped her on top, knelt beneath her, impaling her with himself, his thrusts, and she gasped and giggled. He flipped her again, threw her off balance, threatened to tip her off the edge of the bed upside-down and watched her eyes widen, felt her hands clutch his shoulders, grabbing for a hold. He laughed. Tossed her around the other way and found a new angle of penetration, an angle that felt good; he worked it circular, side to side, made her moan. Her eyes flashed, and for one pure undiluted instant they were completely together. Yeah, that was the spot. That angle, that way, the way that made her break a sweat, made her hands grip the quilt, her head fall back helplessly. Her moan was low and deep and pulsing, and when she started to moan a tingling began in him, and a welling up, a flooding of passion and of love, and Mulder wanted to cry out, did cry out, long and loud and wordlessly, just from loving her so much, and he pounded harder and harder into her body, faster and harder, slamming into that best spot, making her feel it, willing her to admit it, forcing her to *know* him, acknowledge this, recognize what was happening, *feel* everything, this experience of being alive, this aliveness of being in love, male and female, together in a place where all the logic and all the games could never reach, not here, because he controlled this place, and they together, and he held her in it, and, feeling the flex of her muscles gripping him rhythmically, experimenting with angles until he made her sob out loud again and again, he felt his soul would pour into her along with his love and with his seed, and then the orgasm rose up, overwhelmed, outpoured. And he searched her face, but her eyes were closed. And he fell, breathless, on top of her. Loving her. And it was almost perfect. But he kept his soul after all. Most of it. She lay for a long time with her head tossed back. Finally she opened her eyes. "Mulder, that was... Wow, that was..." She was crying. Just two silent tears. She was looking at him like he was ... Like she was ... //Like she loves me.// "Happy, Scully? You like that?" He searched her eyes. "You -- you have no idea," she whispered. "I -- I -- Mulder, I --" Tenderly he touched her lips; rediscovered himself in her eyes. Amazed himself with touching her like this, and looking into her eyes like this. "You trying to tell me you love me, Scully?" She nodded. She captured his hand, and kissed his fingertips. He smiled, still panting. He could see it in her eyes. He knew it. In truth, he had known it and seen it long before this. Very gently, Mulder bowed his head, and kissed her eyes closed again. After a while Scully got up, and cleaned herself in the bathroom. She put her panties back on, and helped herself to his T-shirt before she was ready to climb back in bed beside him. "Why'd we wait so long, huh?" she murmured contentedly, as she drifted off to sleep. Mulder stroked her damp hair, and watched as her breaths grew longer. At midnight he alone was still awake, still edgy, standing naked in the window, his body crossed with tossing tree shadows and a restlessness nagging at him like an itching on his skin, like a pulse, a wordless whisper. //*Beauty, beauty, beauty.*// Scully slept. His back to her, he gazed out at the unquiet sky, and the moon above the abandoned house up on the hill. And the moon was still behind the speeding clouds, and Mulder's thoughts were with the wild wind, racing. Awake, and alone. === Finis =============================================== THE POETRY: Andrew Marvell, 'To His Coy Mistress.' Percy Bysshe Shelley, Sonnet: 'Lift not the painted veil' Fragment: 'The Vine-Shroud' To---, 'Oh! There are spirits of the air' 'The Sunset' C.P. Cavafy, 'Longings' T.S. Eliot, 'The Hollow Men' Jim Morrison, 'Not to Touch the Earth'