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It starts with, of all things, a pair of old jeans and a t-shirt.
Logically, he knows it doesn’t make sense. She comes to work in form-fitted jackets that go tight about her waist. She’s been foregoing the baggy slacks in favor of skirts that stop just below the knees, with nylons clinging to the defined musculature of her calves; he’s pretty sure he can count on one hand the number of times he’s seen her wear shoes other than heels, excluding the clinical, white shoes she wears with her scrubs during autopsies.
He’s seen the looks she gets. Sometimes, it’s during an interview, when a witness’s gaze will linger just a little too long on her bustline, and her hand will go up and fiddle with her necklace, her arm blocking her chest in subtle defiance. Other times, it’s men on the streets of the city, shouting out obscenities to her, having the audacity to call her “baby,” and “sweetheart,” and he fights the urge to yell right back, brandishing his badge and his gun, wanting to scare the misogyny right out of the bones of anyone who thinks they’re entitled to her body, but he knows that she would find it condescending. “Thank you, but I can handle myself, Mulder,” she’d say, and it’s not that he thinks she can’t—he just doesn’t want her to have to.
And still other times, the looks come not from strangers on the sidewalk, or from people he can reduce to photos in a casefile, but from their peers. Educated, talented men who transform themselves into slobbery, teenage boys when sitting adjacent to her in meetings, eyeing her with an inappropriate hunger while she jots down notes in the margins of her agenda sheet. More than once, Mulder has found himself in the elevator with a man who will look down at Scully, and then catch Mulder’s eye over the top of her head, just so that he can wink, including him in some inside joke he has no interest being a part of.
He supposes that he empirically knows that Scully is attractive—it’s more or less objective fact—but he’s never allowed himself to notice. He’s trained himself to observe her through a filter. He considers her appearance through what he aptly names the Sexual Harassment Video Gaze. He quickly shuts down any thought that could be used as an example in a training tape on inappropriate office behavior.
This isn’t a hassle, if only because there are so many other aspects to the enigma that is Dana Scully that Mulder can appreciate.
Her mind for example; she’s got a mind that can run circles around him. The way she rattles off scientific studies and facts to shut down his so-called crazy notions is like intellectual BDSM. He doesn’t get off on it, because Scully isn’t someone you simply get off on, but she lords her intellectual dominance over him in a way no one else can, and he finds, sometimes only in retrospect, that he has a thing for being beaten into submission in a debate. In fact, he thrives on it; it gives him cause to grow as an intellectual; to match her cerebral prowess.
Which is why, when she shows up at his doorstep with a casefile and a paint-splattered t-shirt hanging over a worn out pair of jeans, he is taken completely off guard by his immediate and sudden knowledge that Dana Scully is hot.
“Here’s the file on the serial murders. I made some notes for you to look at,” she says in lieu of a greeting, holding out the file in her hand, her nails, which are usually meticulously shaped, are chipped on her index and ring fingers. Mulder says nothing; merely stares in a way that can only be inelegantly described as gaping. She notices him noticing her, and she flushes. She runs a hand through her hair—and damnit if her hair isn’t different too, pinned back from her face with bobby pins, a few strands loose, curling around her ears in the humidity. “Sorry,” she says, as Mulder comes alive enough to take the file from her. “Mom needed help painting the study. Bill was gonna do it before he got back to the base, but he just never got around to it...Uh, anyway, I should be going. Just wanted to drop this off while I was nearby. I’ll see you at the office.”
His instinct is to yell out a defiant ‘no!’, but he reins it in, opting for a more rational excuse to make her stay. “Do you have time to just run over your notes with me? I take it you disagree with my witchcraft theory?” He says it casually, as though her leaving now wouldn’t be the absolute worst thing that could happen.
“Ritualistic killings,” she says easily. “It’s textbook, Mulder, I don’t know what else you want me to say. I know you want to find the supernatural in everything, but the wounds were clearly done by humans. Sometimes, people just do awful things.”
He opens the door wider and steps aside to let her in. She sets her jaw.
“Mulder, I’m sweaty, exhausted, and frankly, would like to spend my Saturday with a cup of tea and a shower.” You’re welcome to mine , he pointedly does not say, too enamored with her unfamiliar appearance to mentally chastise himself for his indiscreet thoughts. “Can’t this wait until Monday?”
“Ten minutes,” he barters. If he can get her in the door he can angle for more time.
She checks her watch with a sigh.
He knows that sigh. It’s the sigh that he hears when he calls her at one in the morning asking for her presence at a crime scene; the sigh he hears when he thrusts her into a sterile, post-mortem examination room without the proper clearance, saying, “I figure we’ve got twenty minutes before they realize we’re not supposed to be here.” It’s the sigh that comes right before an exasperated, drawn out,
“Mulder…”
followed right by an even more reluctant,
“Ok. Fine. Whatever.”
And Mulder grins, because with all her enigmatic, intellectual gifts, Dana Scully is, more often than not, a creature of habit. It’s a weakness of hers he capitalizes on with little remorse, as he ushers her over the threshold and into his apartment.
He’d feel worse—he really would—except that Dana Scully is a creature of habit, and she is not in the habit of doing things she adamantly doesn’t want to do. She stands, arms crossed, eyebrow raised, but her hackles decidedly lowered. Mulder may have made the push, but she is here on her own volition, and that is wonderful; it’s really something, and he never gets used to the idea, even after all these years, that Scully does things Mulder asks of her because she wants to.
She’s considering the couch, so Mulder throws the casefile down on the coffee table next to his half finished bottle of beer, and plops himself down on the cushion by the fish tank, and she follows his lead, taking her usual spot beside him.
“Want anything?” he asks, picking up his drink and nodding towards it.
“Ten minutes,” Scully reiterates as a response, positioning herself on the edge of the couch, flipping open the casefile with one hand, and scratching absently at her nose with the other. The skin on her face is glistening, coated in a thin layer of sweat, and there’s a small splatter of paint on the right side of her jaw, just below her earlobe, and Mulder is struck with an absurd, and very Not Workplace Appropriate desire to kiss it.
He gives his himself the tiniest of shakes, and swallows, as if trying to literally digest away the thought.
Scully doesn’t notice. She’s flipped to the front page of the casefile where a picture of a young woman is paperclipped to the document. The young woman, from the top of her head to her shoulders, could be sleeping, but the photograph is unfortunately full bodied, showing where the murderer had sliced open her skin, cracked open her ribs, and removed her internal organs one by one, leaving her red and hollow. A ghost of a grimace passes over Scully’s mouth. She is desensitized to most forms of violence—can cut into a corpse and think about dinner plans with her arms elbow deep in its chest cavity—but dead women, specifically women who did not have an easy time with death, always brings the human’s compassion out past the doctor’s dissonance.
“All of the murders were executed by the same means, that much is clear,” she says to cover her momentary lapse. “I performed the autopsies myself, they are all exactly the same.”
“You told me over the phone that you meant that literally,” Mulder says, temporarily distracted from the paint on Scully’s cheek and the strange drop in his stomach it’s making him feel, in favor of a bit of intellectual runaround. “ Literally , the wounds on all three victims were exactly the same. Same length in the incisions, down to the centimeter, same order of organ removal, same everything. How do you account for that?”
“While it’s unlikely for a killer to perform identically every time he or she may kill, it isn’t out of the realm of possibility.”
“But you do agree that the probability for that is low. I mean, similar techniques, sure, but you’re saying that, if these wounds weren’t performed on three separate individuals, they would be indistinguishable from one another, right?”
“Low probability still allows for that chance, Mulder.”
“What about human error? Or the fact that the bodies were all found nearly a thousand miles apart from one another?”
“So because the chances are low, you’re wont to automatically believe that this is murder by means of what, exactly? The paranormal? Witches , Mulder?”
“Have you figured out the murder weapon yet?” Mulder asks with a smirk, already knowing the answer. Scully sets her jaw and leans back.
“No,” she says, refusing to drop Mulder’s gaze. That doesn’t mean anything , her eyes say. “Look, let’s just say, for sake of argument, that you’re right. That still leaves motive.”
“Anything come up that connects the three of them?”
“One thing,” says Scully, flipping a page to a photograph of the first victim—a middle aged bald man with a small symbol tattooed on his scalp. Mulder can’t place it among any of the various signs and symbols stored away in his subconscious. “Remember this symbol?” Scully asks. “Well, on the latest victim, I found the same exact tattoo on her scalp. It was a complete fluke—I wasn’t even looking for it, I just happened to notice it while I was checking for external evidence.”
“You think the second victim had the same mark? Could both you and the other medical examiner have missed it?” Mulder asks.
“I’d put a lot of stock in that bet,” Scully says. “It makes sense that we would have missed it, she had thick hair, and dark enough skin that a scalp tattoo wouldn’t have stood out in any way. The cause of death wasn’t exactly subtle, only the means of execution. My focus, and I’m assuming Dr. Trine’s, was on the abdominal wounds.”
“When is she scheduled for burial?”
“Wednesday. I’ve already left a message with the coroner’s office to see if I can get into see the body before the showing.”
“And you think these symbols are...what, exactly? Cultist marks?”
“Possibly. And maybe these victims are escapees of the cult. That would explain why they were found so far apart, but why the means of execution was the same.”
“ Exactly the same,” Mulder reminds her. Scully doesn’t dignify this with a response. “Well, alright, I guess we wait until we confirm that the second victim has the same mark. Can I get a copy of that photograph to send to Georgetown University. I know a symbologist there who might be able to help us identify it.”
“Of course.”
And the conversation stills. There are no other obvious targets of this killer, so there’s no one for them to go out and protect, and they aren’t going to collect any more information on the murderer outside of 9-5 business hours. Any second, Scully is going to call his bluff, saying, “you knew what my notes were going to be, Mulder, did you ask me in here just to argue?” which is half true, because he’s always up for a bit of lively debate with her, but not entirely his motivation, and he’s not sure how to keep her here without revealing that, more than anything, he just wants more time to look at her. He decides to take a risk, making a sharp turn and steering the conversation down a completely different road, hoping it will make her stay.
“Why was your mom painting her study?” he asks, and if Scully minds this change of subject she doesn’t show it, perhaps used to Mulder being tangential and unpredictable. He likes that—he likes to have someone know him so intrinsically they are no longer phased by his eccentricities.
“She’s getting the house appraised,” she says, sliding back on the cushion just a little, an elbow propped up on the arm of the chair. “That house has been needing renovation, God, probably since I was in undergrad, but Mom’s always so ansty about any sort of change when it comes to the house. One Christmas, Dad offered to completely finance a brand new kitchen for her, and she declined, telling him that there were too many memories in her old kitchen, why would she want to get rid of it? And now, since Dad and Melissa passed, trying to convince her to make any modifications to the house has been about as easy as holding a conversation with a brick wall.”
“Or as easy as trying to convince her daughter to believe in the fantastic?” Mulder teases, and Scully smiles.
“Yeah, just about.”
“Well, your mom’s a sentimental woman.”
“Yeah, just a bit,” Scully scoffs. “I’m pretty sure she kept the shorts I was wearing the day I got my first menstrual cycle.”
“I hope she washed them before she framed them.”
“No kidding. But with the appraiser coming, she’s had to concede to a little bit of renovation. The study hasn’t even been used since Dad died, and I’m pretty sure the original coat of paint was lead based.” She rolls her eyes as she twists a strand of hair between two fingers.
This side of Scully is something Mulder doesn’t get to see that often.
There’s Agent Scully, his partner, with her quick wit and tedious but necessary skepticism, who has professionalism down to a science, even in the face of constant criticism.
There’s Dr. Scully, who can spout the anatomical term for every part of the human body, and can put together whole life stories of the post-mortem with nothing but her five senses and textbook smarts.
There’s Survivor Scully, who puts the memories of tragedy into a box that for any other person would be overflowing, but she manages to keep a lid on it with poise and grace, but in sacrifice, lives behind a wall, treating vulnerability like a mortal sin.
But this is Ms. Dana Scully. Ms. Dana Scully is the woman who talks about her mother with the phantom pains of long since amputated teenaged angst. This is the woman who wears paint-splattered jeans in public, and who forgoes the science journals and casefiles in favor of fiction books she reads in the bath by candlelight, and while Mulder adores every iteration of her, there’s a lightness in this version that makes him feel a bit fluttery. This is the version that laughs more easily, and it’s the real laugh, the one that is loud and abrasive and everything that Scully usually isn’t. This is the version that isn’t weighed down by all the years she’s spent chasing monsters in the dark by his side.
Mulder isn’t sure when exactly he fell in love with Scully.
It’s possible that there wasn’t a specific moment at all. Maybe the transition from friendship was so smooth that one day he just woke up and realized he’d been looking at Scully the same way he looked at the night sky—like an intricately tangled mystery, full of beauty and questions and Truths, of which he may never know the extent of. Somewhere along the way, she had become his greatest X-File.
“My parents never kept anything,” says Mulder, fiddling with his bottle of beer. “I think it was too hard, and the Mulder family wasn’t anything if not masters of repression.”
“Grief manifests in different ways,” says Scully, and she leans against the back of the couch now, and Mulder suppresses a grin of victory. “Everyone deals with the pain differently. I guess my Mom is the type to want to hang onto every detail, and yours were the ones who’d rather forget.”
“I’m sure healthy coping mechanisms rest somewhere between the two,” says Mulder, and the corner of Scully’s mouth quips up. He gets to his feet, and before she can follow suit, he says, “I’m grabbing another beer, this one’s gone lukewarm. Let me get you one.”
“It’s been more than ten minutes,” she says, smirking, but she doesn’t move from her spot, as if she already knew she was never getting out of this apartment without a fight.
“Then we gotta reset the timer.”
A sigh.
“Mulder…”
“Come on, where do you have to be? There’s a Twilight Zone marathon on the SyFy channel. Pretty sure ‘It’s a Good Life’ is the next episode, or the one after. That’s the best one.”
“My whole life is like The Twilight Zone , Mulder, I don’t need to watch it.”
“But these ones have little factoids about the production of each episode at the end of all the credits,” he says, bouncing on the balls of his feet like an excited little kid, and he watches her fight a smile, refusing to encourage him. “Come on, you can’t say no to Serling.”
“Mulder, any other night I’d be happy to keep you company, but I look like I’m covered in that mushroom digestive slime, and I’m pretty sure I smell like it too. Trust me, I’m sparing you.”
Mulder waves a dismissive hand and says, “that’s a poor excuse, you’re beautiful.” He says it easily and with no sense of shame, because even though it’s not Sexual Harassment Video Appropriate, it’s true, and he knows it’ll throw her off her guard.
Which it absolutely does. Her eyes get wide, and her mouth does that wonderful thing where she opens it just a little, the tips of her front teeth visible. “Shut up, Mulder,” she says when she’s recovered, but it doesn’t have her usual finesse, and Mulder doesn’t relent.
“What? You are. You know that, it’s not some big secret. Besides, I've seen you covered in digestive slime, and I assure you, you look nothing of the sort.”
He actually doesn’t know how Scully sees herself when she looks in the mirror. Does she know she’s beautiful? He imagines Dr. Scully might view her own body clinically, noting that she’s smooth, proportional, and symmetrical, which, she would argue, are traits that humans have been conditioned to find attractive, so in that sense, she fits the bill.
But how does Ms. Dana Scully, with no makeup on, and shapeless clothes hanging off her frame, feel about herself? At Arcadia Falls, she wore a horrible, green face mask, and when he looked at the tube of it she left in the bathroom, he saw it was to minimize pores and diminish the visibility of wrinkles.
Her lunches are always salads or pieces of flatbread covered in pesto and vegetables, and her snacks always have the words soy, rice, or low-fat in their descriptions. She puts concealer on her facial mole, and gets her nails professionally done. Does she do these things because she likes to? Or does she think she needs to?
She has scars; the small slit scar in the back of her neck, the remnants of the gunshot wound in her abdomen. Along her milky skin there are thin, white lines all across her body one can only see up close. She's been hit, thrown, beaten, and bashed, all in the line of duty, and those sorts of things stain.
To Mulder, who has his own physical evidence of what he's been through, they are but reminders of the times they could have lost but didn't. They're signs of strength; of resilience. It's never occurred to him that she might see them as deformities, or maybe even as tally marks. “ How many times have I nearly died? Let me count my skin .”
“You do know that, right?” he asks, now wanting to make sure there are no misconceptions; no hidden self-conscious behaviors she keeps from him when she views her own reflection. After all, Mulder is nothing if not an ardent proponent of the Truth.
“What kind of question is that?” is her response, which very purposely doesn't answer it.
“Hey, I'm not coming on to you,” says Mulder, although he's not sure how honest that is. “I just want to make sure we're on the same page here.”
“About my appearance?” She isn’t meeting his eye, and Mulder realizes she’s embarrassed, and it’s so un-Scullylike for her to give into her chagrin that Mulder wonders when the last time it was that someone called her beautiful. Not the beautiful the people on the street inundate her with, nor the unsettling winks she gets from her peers, but a genuine, honest, “you are beautiful.” He isn’t sure if he has overstepped a line, or should have crossed it much sooner.
“You're the one who said you looked like digestive slime,” he says, deciding he’s involved now, he might as well commit. “I'm just setting the record straight here. You know how I feel about the truth.”
She regards him the way she does when he says something particularly off the rails. 'You’re beautiful’ may as well have been 'I played poker with Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster’ for how closely knitted her eyebrows are right now.
“Is that a yes or no to the beer, then?” he asks her, and after a moment she says,
“Okay, but just one.”
An episode and a half later, her shoes are haphazardly laying on the floor, her feet kicked under her, her body curled in a ball like a kitten on the couch. She'd deny it if he said it, but she's got a thing for horror and sci-fi genres—she can make enough off-the-cuff references that he knows her college years had to be full with late night movie marathons, and she didn't become a pathologist simply out of a love of science. Like him, she's drawn to the intricacies of the human body and physical law, and while she might not believe them all in practice, she appreciates all the creative ways one could bastardize science.
“What did you mean when you said I'm beautiful?” Scully asks out of nowhere. There is a commercial for frozen pizza playing in the background, and Mulder was about to suggest they order some food, and her question catches him off guard.
When he looks at her she is still watching the television, face neutral. Vanity, in any sort of outward sense, has never been a concern Scully has ever seemed to bother with. He tries to imagine her as a teenager, standing in the bathroom mirror at school, picking at her acne, or poking at how her stomach pudges just slightly over the waist of her jeans when she bends forward, but he can’t.
Mulder remembers Padgett’s novel, and how he described Scully's reservations towards the more material parts of herself as a defense against the ingrained patriarchal atmosphere of her workspace, and while Mulder has no desire to give weight to any syllable Padgett typed out—he was, after all, just another man who felt entitled to her—a part of him can't help wondering if he had been right. For a second time he wonders when the last time Scully had been told she was beautiful? Not by a gushing family member, or an entitled man, but by someone who truly knew her, and expected and wanted nothing from her except for her to see the beauty in herself as well?
She already is waving her hand, embarrassed by her own question, flushed beneath her oily skin. “Never mind,” she says. “Don't answer that.”
Mulder considers a joke to lessen her awkwardness—“I’m pretty sure you could go up to any guy in the Hoover building and ask them to sleep with you and they would get naked right there”—but that's not the kind of beauty Mulder means, nor the type he wants her to think of herself as, like she only has beauty in terms of how it equates to sexuality. Scully’s beauty transcends the physical. In her case, beauty isn’t only skin deep. It goes all the way through her skin, into her bones, into her mind and heart and soul, and to think she might only view herself as someone to fuck is as reprehensible as her viewing herself as ugly.
“I meant that you're beautiful,” he finds himself saying. “In every sense of the word. In the biochemical sense, you surely elicit carnal urges in men—and probably some women, I mean, let’s be honest—but you manage to backup all that physical beauty with an even more beautiful mind, so don't think I mean you'd just make a good person to do the naked pretzel with, and don't think that just because you're not dressed for a federal office job, because it’s a Saturday and why would you be, that you've suddenly transformed into a gila monster.”
Scully says nothing, seemingly fascinated with her chipped index finger nail.
“Have I crossed a line?” Mulder asks, checking off the boxes of all the rules he's broken from his Sexual Harassment Video Gaze.
“No,” she says finally. “Besides, I asked.” She finally meets his eye and gives him a thin lipped smile, and Mulder is overcome with a desire to kiss her, except that's the exact opposite of what he's trying to accomplish here—convince her that she's more than just a lay—so instead he takes her hand in his and kisses her knuckles softly; platonically; safely.
So his surprise is insurmountable when it's Scully who then runs her tongue across her lower lip, and then leans over and kisses him on the mouth.
It's an awkward angle—her legs are still partially tucked beneath her, and she has to hold onto the back of his neck for balance—but it doesn't matter. Her lips are the texture of marshmallows, and the kiss is chaste and brief, and Mulder thinks absently of how this might be what it feels like to kiss a cloud.
She pulls away as quickly as she came, blue eyes wide and frightened, like a child who knows they're about to get scolded for stealing from the cookie jar, but Mulder couldn't be further from scolding. He hears his own pulse thrum at the base of his ears, and he wonders when his heart migrated to his throat.
“I can't believe I just did that,” says Scully, in the same voice that says things like, “but Mulder, that's scientifically impossible,” and “I've never seen anything like this before,” and Mulder realizes, right then, that in the same way she has become his, he's become her biggest X-File as well.
“Feel free to do it again,” he says, trying to sound cheeky, but it comes out shy and uncertain, like maybe that was just a bit of corrupted data that she wasn't going to try repeating.
But she doesn’t disregard the experiment.
Angling herself towards him this time, getting onto her knees so she’s balancing beside him on the couch cushion, she tentatively brings her hands up to cup his face—a gesture she's done a million times before, but that has never felt as erotic as it does right now.
Mulder twists so they are face to face, Rod Serling talking ominously in black and white in their periphery, and they stare, still and frightened like teenagers learning how to explore another person’s body for the first time.
Scully’s breath is hollow, and Mulder can feel the thrum of her pulse in the thumb positioned on his jaw. He kicks himself for not shaving that morning, hoping the stubble beneath her hand doesn’t cause her to pull away.
He’s not inexperienced, of course, he’s kissed a fair number of women, and slept with just as many, (if that’s what this is leading to), but this isn’t just somebody. He’s had one night stands, and short term flings, and even has been in love, but Dana Scully is her own category, and taking in the heat behind her eyes, Mulder knows that his love for her is not one sided, and even though, if pressed, he probably already knew that, it’s something else entirely to be faced with the confirmation. Theories are just theories until the evidence is presented, says the investigator inside of him, and sometimes, if the theory is big enough, finding the evidence can be overwhelming.
“What are we doing?” asks Scully, so breathlessly it almost sounds like nothing but air.
Mulder shakes his head, unable to speak, eating up the unadulterated love emanating from her, directed right at his own person. He instead leans over and kisses the fleck of paint splatter along her jaw, lips together but lingering, and Scully exhales shakily, her fingers flexing against him.
He pulls away to look at her, and just like the flip of a switch, the heat behind her eyes has become charged, and suddenly Mulder is introduced to a brand new Dana Scully—Dana Scully Aroused. Blood rushes to her cheeks in a natural blush on her naked face, and her bust rises and falls harder as she takes in oxygen more sharply. She worries her bottom lip between her teeth, and leans into him again, finding his mouth with hers, and he meets her with enthusiasm, no longer chaste, pressing hard until her lips part just enough for him to run his tongue over the spot her teeth had been just a moment prior.
Mulder’s kissed Scully before—once when Scully wasn’t actually Scully, and once as the clock struck midnight and he could use it as an excuse if he needed it. But kissing Scully and being kissed by Scully are decidedly different things, as he unconsciously brings his hands up slowly along her sides, feeling the outline of her ribs underneath her t-shirt, until his arms find themselves wrapped tightly around her back, pulling her into him so that her chest is pressed against his.
At this, she deepens the kiss, nipping him softly while her own hands move up and her fingers tangle themselves in his hair. In a single, swift motion, he moves one of his arms clinging to her, and slips it under her shirt, and rubs her cool, damp skin with the palm of his hand, and she gasps softly into his mouth at the feel of flesh against flesh.
Already he feels the tightening in his groin, and as much as it pains him to do it, he pulls away from her, searching her face for any sign of hesitation.
She makes a small noise of protest, and casts her eyes down at his lips, about to dive back in, but he catches her first, grasping her chin between his thumb and index finger, tilting it up so she’s forced to meet his eye. She’s heaving, with a chaotic gleam sparkling from the irises of her eyes, like she looks when she’s chased a suspect down the street and pinned him to the ground. How easily and dangerously the same look translates into eroticism.
“I want to,” she says before Mulder can even ask the question, and the words go right to his crotch. He closes his eyes to center himself, before opening them again and shaking his head just slightly.
“You need to be sure,” he says. “ I need you to be sure.”
“I am,” she says without missing a beat, but then she furrows her brow, suddenly wary, and says, “Are you?”
Mulder lets out a huff of a laugh, smiling as he traces the outline of her lips with the pad of his thumb. “Oh I’m definitely sure,” he says, because now that the seal has been broken, every single ‘I’m not noticing’ he’s done to keep up the Workplace Appropriate Gaze is now crashing down on him with a vengeance, and he can think of nothing he wants more than to memorize all the different sounds Scully can make when she’s properly touched.
But he also can’t shake the nagging worry in the back of his head, the one saying that once this happens, they can’t go back. He’s already told her, in so many words, that she’s more than just a lay, and he can’t put himself inside her, and then go back to acting like he doesn’t know what that feels like.
“I just need you to realize,” he says, “that we can’t undo this if we do it.”
He’s reminded of their first ever case, walking from the hospital, Scully gesticulating with a soil sample she’d taken off the sole of Billy Miles’ foot, raving, ‘he killed Peggy O’Dell, I don’t believe it,’ and Mulder having to talk her back down to realize the implications of what she was saying.
Its both terrifying and comforting to know that no matter what the situation is, they have always been Mulder and Scully; they are always the same dynamic inside an unlikely duo that works in spite of itself.
Scully, still pressed against his chest, heeds Mulder’s words, and draws in a long breath, thinking hard. “I’d say,” she says slowly, after a long moment, “that we’ve already gone past that which we can’t undo.”
And Mulder considers their position, his hand unconsciously rubbing circles on the bare skin beneath her bra, her breasts rising and falling against his pectorals. Could he go to work on Monday and treat her like he doesn’t know the texture of her tongue? Could he brush his hair that morning and not think about the way she tugged on it just slightly hard enough to make it ache? He swallows hard.
“It sounds stupid, but I just don’t want to jeopardize our relationship,” he says. “You mean too much to me to ruin it because you’re hot and I couldn’t rein it in.”
Scully smiles slyly, leaning in even closer to Mulder now, and says, “so I’m hot now? I thought I was beautiful.”
“Please,” says Mulder, surprised by how low his voice registers. “You’re the smart one, you should know that the two aren’t mutually exclusive.”
At this, Scully captures his mouth again, and just like that, the question is answered for them as they’re thrust into the point of no return. There’s no way, Mulder thinks, lifting Scully up so that she’s straddling his lap, that anyone could ever be kissed like this and pretend like the world didn’t stop in its tracks.
Scully shifts so that her weight is on Mulder’s erection, and Mulder, being in sweatpants and having not had another person touch him there since he started getting eyes for the redhaired skeptic in his office, lets out an embarrassing noise at the contact. Scully pulls away just long enough to smirk, and then grinds down into him as she starts pressing kisses down the length of his jawline.
“Fuck me,” Mulder grunts, pressing his nails into the skin on Scully’s back.
Even though it wasn’t technically a request, Scully murmurs into the crook of his neck, “not here.” She resurfaces to add, “you might find your couch a suitable replacement for a bed, but I’m afraid I don’t share your point of view.”
Mulder regards her, struck by how disheveled she looks, her hair falling out from the bobby pins even more, and her lips swollen already. In a single movement, he scoops her into his arms and stands, and she lets out a girlish squeal he never thought Dana Scully could make, as she wraps her arms around his neck to keep from falling.
“Good thing I have a bedroom, then,” he says, kissing her briefly, before carrying her to his bedroom door.
“Yeah, you never did explain that to me,” she says, nibbling on his earlobe.
“I don’t remember,” he says, because he really doesn’t , and also because he’s fumbling with the doorknob and it’s distracting enough to have Scully’s tongue dipping into the crevice beneath his ear, so she can’t really expect him to tell the story of his mysterious bedroom right then and there, can she?
“Need help there?” she teases quietly.
“You’re not exactly making it easy,” he says, finally getting the knob turned, and all but kicking the door open. Scully, in all her unpredictable glory, lets out a genuine, goddamned giggle, and Mulder thinks if any more blood goes to his erection he may actually start losing brain cells.
He tosses Scully onto the bed a bit roughly, takes one second to appreciate the sight of her bouncing against his mattress, before crawling towards her until she’s fully beneath him.
“This is,” he breathes, looking down at Scully’s parted lips and flushed cheeks, “an excellent vantage point.”
“I could say the same,” she says. “Though it’s a bit dark in here.” She runs a hand up his torso and over his chest. “I want to see you better.”
Mulder nods, and instead of flipping on his reading lamp, reaches over onto his bedside table where he’s got a lighter and candle. He is aware of Scully shifting beneath him as he flicks open the flame and lights the candle. He comes back, and despite how wonderful she looks in them, decides right then that Scully is wearing altogether too many clothes.
He grabs the hem of her t-shirt, and tugs it up in an easy, practiced motion, Scully lifting up her shoulders so he can get it over her head. She’s wearing a black bra, and the underwire has rubbed her skin slightly red beneath her breasts, and he leans down to kiss the marks, flicking his tongue out onto the skin and tasting salt. In response, Scully bucks up against him, and he takes the opportunity to grab hold of her hips and start working on her jeans.
With one hand, he undoes the button, and peels them off of her, revealing her milky white thighs, and muscled calves. He pulls them off, taking her socks with them, and then runs his hands up the length of her legs, and her muscles twitch involuntarily. She’s got on a pair of light pink, cotton panties that don’t match her bra, which are probably panties reserved for lazy days and painting studies. Mulder loves it, and can see they already have a wet spot. He makes his way towards them.
Suddenly she reaches up to still his hands. He stops as she sits up onto her elbows. “There’s a lot of give and no take here,” she says, sounding flustered, and one of her hands settles over the gunshot scar on her abdomen unconsciously as she eyes his fully dressed form.
He considers telling her there’s not an inch of her she needs to hide from him, but he’s getting a bit warm under his clothes anyway, so he tears off his own shirt, and tosses it haphazardly onto the floor. Scully takes a sharp inhale of breath, and eyes his nude chest like it’s an ancient Greek sculpture, which is flattering, but ridiculous, because if anyone here is emitting classical beauty, it’s her.
She brings a hand up and slides her fingers through his chest hair, scratching very faintly with her nails. Mulder takes her by the wrist and kissing her knuckles, before leaning down and kisses her on the mouth again, an act he could spend hours doing and never get bored.
The contact between bare skin is electric, and Mulder has never been more aware of every nerve ending on his torso before. He could go the rest of his life learning how every inch of his body reacts to Scully’s touch, but right now he has more important things to focus on, like the bra that she’s still wearing for some God awful reason.
He slips his hands under her and without breaking their kiss, flips them over so that Scully is on top. She makes a surprised noise deep in her throat, and pulls away from him looking shocked and wild, her eyes wide. Mulder says nothing, and silently reaches behind her and works the clasp of her bra.
“Not bad,” Scully mumbles as it comes undone, and her bra sags, kept on only by the straps around her shoulders.
“Would you think less of me if I told you I used to practice with a bra and a body pillow?”
“Absolutely.”
“Then I definitely didn’t do that,” he says, very slowly sliding the straps of her bra down her arms, savoring her softness and the tensing of her muscles. Her skin breaks out in goose pimples, and she trembles a little as her bra falls off onto Mulder’s belly. He gapes up at her.
He’s seen Scully naked before, but this is worlds’ apart from that. This isn’t even in the same galaxy—if anything, this constitutes as a religious experience. Her breasts are the perfect, round handful, with dark areolas and taut nipples that stiffen beneath his touch. He pinches one gently, and Scully bites down on her lip so hard that when she opens her mouth again she’s drawn the tiniest drops of blood.
“You’re beautiful,” Mulder says.
“Yes, you’ve said,” says Scully, staring down, decidedly not looking into Mulder’s face. He takes her chin again and makes her look at him.
“You aren’t hearing me,” he says. “You’re beautiful.”
Her eyelids flutter, and her breath is shaky, and Mulder is taken with an urgent need to taste her.
“Off,” he says, helping her slip her leg back over his hips. “Get on your back.” He gently maneuvers her onto her back, and props open her legs and kneels in between them. He kisses each breast, running a tongue over her nipples, and then slides his mouth down her sternum. He kisses around her belly button, as he slips his fingers along the elastic of her panties. He feels her tense up as she realizes what he’s about to do, and he looks up at her.
“Do you want me to stop?” he asks. Scully draws in a deep breath, closes her eyes, and shakes her head, just once, and it’s all the prompting Mulder needs. He pulls down her panties, slowly dragging them over her knees, to her ankles, and off over her feet, and then admires what’s in front of him.
She either shaves or waxes, and it’s been some time since she’s done either, as strands of red hair are poking up from the skin. He runs his hand over her folds, so lightly both of them can barely feel the contact, but Scully stiffens anyway. Mulder presses his lips onto the inside of her thigh, kissing up and up, dipping his tongue into the crevice at the joint. She smells like sweat, and skin, and wetness, and he breathes it in like perfume.
He puts two fingers between her labia, and dips his tongue inside her. Just once. Just quickly. Scully sucks in a breath and arches her back at the suddenness of the action, and Mulder knows that he’s already become an addict. He wants to eat her for every meal for the rest of time. He nuzzles her leg with his nose, before diving right back in, slowly circling her entrance with the tip of his tongue.
He flattens it against her and drags it up until he’s at her clit. He holds back the folds and admires the swollen button of flesh, as the shadows cast from the candle dance over it, and when he presses his lips against her, he thinks that this must be what it’s like to taste candlelight. She tastes like candlelight—bright, beautiful, and burning. He traces sweet nothings onto her clitorous with his tongue, and her breathing begins to shallow. Without moving his mouth, he takes a finger and slips it inside her, and her muscles clench around him as he gestures ‘come hither’ deep in her body.
She starts to groan, but stops herself, throwing her first knuckle into her mouth and biting down, wrapping the fingers on her other hand into Mulder’s hair and pulling hard enough to hurt, but he doesn’t care. He’s too drunk off of her to feel anything but the texture of her skin on the sensitive nerves in his mouth.
“Mulder, I’m—” she says around her hand, cutting her own self off with a hitch in her breath. Her legs wrap around him, and he can feel her toes curling. He keeps a rhythmic motion going with his finger, while he continues to confess seven years worth of love with his tongue, and suddenly she’s letting out a sharp cry, the hand in his hair stilling, her whole body stilling, as she comes in his mouth.
“Fuck,” she mutters, the muscles in her groin convulsing involuntarily, her whole body a board, until her orgasm finishes washing over her, and she slumps into the sheets like a ragdoll.
Mulder slips off of her reluctantly, leaving behind one last kiss, before joining her at the top of the bed. She’s looking at him like she’s forgotten every word in the English language, and barely responds to his kiss, as he gifts her with his new favorite flavor, wanting her to know what candlelight tastes like.
“Mulder,” she says, distant and spent, and he brushes the hair off her face.
“What do you want?” he asks her. “Tell me what you want.”
“You,” she breathes, the syllable almost lost in the air. It’s the word he needs to hear, not even realizing how much he was aching for her until hearing her grant him entrance. He fumbles with the tie of his sweatpants, and pushes them and his boxers down in a single motion.
At the sight of him, Scully seems revitalized, her eyes bright, and licks her lips as she takes one hand and wraps it around him. She wets him down with his own precum, and jerks him off agonizingly slow. He groans in the back of his throat like a feral animal, and knows that he must be looking at her like she’s prey.
“Now,” she says, and before the word has even left her lips, Mulder is positioned between her legs, but he stops.
“Should I…” he looks for the words. “Do we need protection?” He knows the answer already. They’ve seen enough of each other’s blood work to know they’re clean, and there’s an entire file in his office about why they don’t need birth control, but he needs to hear her say it.
“No,” she says. “We don’t.”
And Mulder thanks Scully’s God, (he’s not sure he has one of his own), because he is an advocate for safe sex, but fucking Scully for the first time is something he’d rather experience in full. He pushes into her, going in easy with the wetness brought by her orgasm, and he sees the creation of the Universe happen behind his eyes.
“Oh Scully,” he says softly, and he says it like a prayer. She’s warm and tight around him, and he takes a moment to savor it, before he can’t handle it any longer, and starts to move.
He presses himself against her, chest to chest, pelvis to pelvis, and she wraps her arms and legs around him, and he still searches for more contact. He craves Scully’s touch like a drug, and he wants to meld into it. He wonders absently if there’s anything in the X-Files that would help him with that.
He thrusts into her, her muscles pulsating in a deliciously dangerous way that makes him already feel the buildup to his release. He’d like to have her in every way, shape, and form, but he knows he won’t last that long. He feels young, like it’s his first time, and foolish, but Scully will have to forgive him. Sex has never been like this, so effectively it is his first time, and by the way she’s scratching at his back helplessly, he knows she feels the same.
Beads of sweat form along Scully’s forehead, and he kisses them away while pushing into her, and she’s biting her lips again, trying so hard to stay quiet, as though letting anything out would be a vulnerability she just can’t take. So he makes the noise for her, swearing and gasping into her, as she tenses up and comes again so suddenly that he doesn’t have time to brace himself against the grip around him her tensing causes, and just as suddenly as her orgasm came, so does his, and he spills into her, her name on his lips like a reckoning.
He stays inside her for a minute, both of them silent except for their panting, and he finally forces himself to pull out of her. She winces as he slips out, and lets herself be pulled into his arms as he gathers her up beside him, putting a hand upon her hip, her backside pressed into his torso.
“I’ve never come like that before,” she admits softly. “From just sex alone.”
“I’d take credit for it with my amazing sexual prowess,” Mulder says, absently petting her hair, the after effects of his orgasm causing the corner of his eyes to feel heavy with exhaustion. “But I’m pretty sure that wasn’t just your normal, every day lay.”
“No it wasn’t,” she agrees, and Mulder can hear the worry in her voice.
“Hey,” he says into her ear. “Don’t.”
She glances over her shoulder at him. “Don’t what?”
“Think.”
“I’m not,” she protests, but Mulder shakes his head.
“You are, I can hear it, don’t. I know you’re worrying, but don’t.”
She says nothing for a long moment. “What if we’ve just changed everything?” she says finally.
“What if we’ve changed it for the better?” Mulder counters, and Scully looks unconvinced—a look he’s familiar with, and maybe it’s the post coital glow, but it makes him laugh. She scowls at him at first, until a smile overtakes her, and soon she’s laughing too, and Mulder nuzzles his forehead against her shoulder blade, and places soft kisses along her neck.
“The real question,” he asks, starting to fall into what’s sure to be a heavy sleep. “Is how did we manage to make it this long without ever doing that?”
He feels her smile.
“Must be an X-File,” she says.