(no subject)
TITLE: Choice Toward Being
AUTHOR: Frey
RATING: PG
CATEGORY: V, MSR
SPOILERS: The Truth; other small references to TFWID and Shadows
SUMMARY: Mulder and Scully post-The Truth. A little weird.
AUTHOR'S NOTE: Set current day. (April 2005)
"Love is perpetual creation; a choice toward being."
She's told him before that she wouldn't change a day; that she'd do it all over again. What she means is that being with him (and him specifically, particularly, she slurs to his neck sleepily, -- after) is better than being the way she used to be or being with someone else. Better than anything. She's afraid because she doesn't know any other way to tell him something this vast and inexhaustible, and her plain, thin words seem to break off in her hands.
She's afraid he doesn't know.
On hard nights, after another empty lead, he marches out his band of demons again and demands that she tell him *the truth* about what she's still doing here. Is he so pathetic that he invites this degree of sympathy? Was it something he said, and she's still living in the echo of reciprocative emotions felt years ago? Or is she just afraid of being lonely? Better lonely than dead!
She answers him fiercely that being with him is better than being anywhere else. Anywhere. That she was chosen for him in the beginning but that she has continued to choose him ever since. She has to look away from the naked look in his eyes.
On tired nights when there isn't much of anything she can feel, he presses his cold nose against her cheek and she tries to remind herself that being with him is at least better than being alone. Most days. He goes to sleep holding her hand.
Sometimes she is tired of knowing he thinks of her -- knows her -- sexually, and she lets him rub her back but they sleep on opposite sides of the bed. "Sometimes I wish you were my brother," she confesses, in absurd homesickness for childhood, and she can see his dark head nod from where he's spread-eagled on top of the covers. "It's like when you want to reread the Chronicles of Narnia," agrees Mulder, who has read everything.
"I'm just missing that absence of personal sexuality within the immediate family," she rationalizes, and he answers sympathetically, "You just miss *your* family."
She wants to tell him, thinking of the surprising weight of small limp people and the soapy smell of William's footy pajamas, that family was something she'd wanted to give him.
That first morning in Roswell she'd told him they weren't going to lie to each other any more. He'd gazed at her, astonished, but the empirical evidence seemed to suggest that someone with Dana Scully's mouth and nose and distinctive talent for avoiding his eyes was in fact Dana Scully.
Three years later in the front seat of a Ford, it's one of their 4:52 AM nights, when the sun is one hour and seven and a half years away and the sky an apocalyptic crimson, and he asks, "Scully, do you ever get tired of me?"
She can't answer that one.
Some nights she remembers what it felt like to first meet him, and she wonders at how strange it is that she's in bed with (and kissing) this strange man. She remembers ducking out of the rain into the Liberty Bell Center in Philadelphia late at night, the way his hair stuck up in front and the insular way he had of speaking about himself.
"What do you think about ancient coral formations on Mars?" he asks, reaching over her to the nightstand to retrieve his piece of toast. He tears it in two and offers her half, jam all over his fingers. She manages not to lick it off.
"I'd've thought you already had all the persuasive evidence necessary, Mulder," she says. "Who cares about Mars?"
He looks startled and licks his own fingers. "Who cares about Mars? Scully, if the God of War can manage to sustain a little life, what is there for us to worry about?"
She quirks an eyebrow and puts down her toast to kiss his mouth. Pulling back, she whispers, "What is there for us to worry about?"
He's her warrior druid, eyes still on the sky. It'd be awfully hard to get tired of him.
-End-
** Actually, the Liberty Bell Center really isn't open that late, Mulder. The internets told me.