Sweet Nothings for the Numb by Amalnahurriyeh, commentary by Wendelah1, Part 2/3
Title: Sweet Nothings for the Numb
Author: amalnahurriyeh
Fandom: The X-Files
Commentator: wendelah1
Anything that was originally posted under flock or in email has been quoted here with the permission of the author.
"Sweet Nothings for the Numb", without commentary.
II. Crime and Punishment
There are friendly morning noises coming from the kitchen. Mulder keeps his eyes closed as he listens to them. He's pretty sure he's not invited into anything that pleasant sounding, not in this house, not this morning. Don't think about it. He feels exposed, somehow, even in his clean pajamas, even knowing there's no way anyone but Scully knows what happened last night (the scratches under his shirt itch, don't think about it), like everyone in this house knows he's fucked her. But, no, they just know he fucked her over. And that's enough.
What is interesting about this paragraph is how early you get clued in to how it's all about Mulder, even when it isn't. I mean, it's the morning after Emily's funeral and all Mulder is worried about here is whether or not the family can tell if he and Scully had sex. Jesus, Mulder, I think the time for that thought has come and gone, so to speak.
When I wrote my comments and sent them by email to Amal, she wrote back: "EVERYTHING IS ABOUT MULDER. Haven't you learned that that's the message of the X-Files? EVERYTHING EVER IS ABOUT MULDER OR MAYBE HIS DAD OR SON. NO WIMMINS. (Which is actually something I'm screwing with in my big bang, but anyway.)" I can't wait to read Amal's big-bang, by the way, but well, this show is not all about Mulder for me, no matter what the show's writers thought they were up to. I think I know what Amal means. But I digress. . .
He splashes water on his face in the downstairs bathroom, goes through his duffel bag to find something to wear(the pants wadded at the bottom, don't think about it). When he enters the kitchen, there is a sudden silence, or so it seems. Tara is sipping a cup of tea in a bathrobe, with Maggie next to her, reading some sort of giant book together. Scully is sitting on the other side of table; Matthew is curled in her arms, staring blankly up at her. She catches his eyes, and he can feel the gravity of her, the desperate desire to walk over to her and sink into her orbit. (Her eyes closing as she came, the lines of tears on her cheek, her lips parted, don't think about it.) But he walks over to the counter, pours himself a cup of coffee. Bill is flipping eggs at the stove, and cuts him a sharp look. "Morning," Mulder says as calmly as he can.
"Good morning, Fox," Maggie says pleasantly. "Did you sleep well?"
"Well enough," he says, and looks at his coffee cup to avoid making eye contact.
Tara and Maggie are discussing something called "sleep strategies." Mulder lets himself watch Scully with Matthew, since no one is looking at him. She strokes one finger down his cheek, runs it across his lips, and smiles, so softly. It's like being punched, but he keeps watching as she adjusts his limp weight across her arms. She slips her finger into his little hand, and he grips it.
Bill scrapes eggs off the bottom of the frying pan onto the fourth plate. "We're out of eggs," he says to Mulder as he carries them to the table.
Yeah, so's your sister, Mulder thinks, and drinks his coffee.
"Can I have my grandbaby?" Maggie asks, in a high, sing-songy voice. Scully hands him over, and stares at the plate of eggs in front of her blankly. "So, Dana," Maggie says. "How much longer can you stay?"
Scully looks up at Mulder, and he sees it, in a sudden flash--she needs to get out, she can't be here any longer. He clears his throat. "Unfortunately," he says, "I'm going to have to steal Dana back to DC."
A very-Mulder-like insight, not reasoned through, just--there is it!
"Really," Bill says, stabbing at his eggs.
"Yeah, we've got a case that's just about to take off. Bodies stacked six-high waiting for her back at Quantico," he says, and takes a sip of coffee. "Paranormal serial killers wait for no woman, sadly. We've got tickets for this afternoon."
Scully pushed a curd of scrambled egg to the edge of her plate. "It's nice to be wanted, at least," she says, and smiles weakly.
Bill gives him the evil eye as he finishes his coffee. Mulder stands there and takes it. It's the least he can do.
In "Touched But Never Held," the guys actually get into a fist-fight, and Mulder breaks two of Bill's ribs. Most readers cheered, I'm sure.
***
Scully leans her head back against the headrest in the car as they pull out of the driveway. "So, when's our flight?" she asks, eyes closed.
He looks over at her, and hopes he hasn't just fucked things up even worse. "We don't have one."
She opens her eyes and looks over at him, waiting.
"I figured you just wanted to get out of there," he says softly.
She closes her eyes again and nods, just once. He exhales. "Do you have a plan?"
"I had a couple of thoughts," he said, keeping his eyes on the road. "We could just drive to the San Diego airport, fly standby on the next flight headed east, connect through to DC as soon as we can. Or, we could head up to LAX, try the same thing, probably with a little more luck." He clears his throat. "Or we can go find a hotel, make reservations for tomorrow, eat a hundred dollars worth of room service. It's up to you." I just want to do something, he thinks. Let me do something.
He waits at a traffic light while she thinks. "LA," she says, "tomorrow."
He sighs out a breath he hadn't been holding, not really. "OK," he says, and heads to the highway.
***
It's only two pm as they get close to LA. Too early to head to the hotel, because she hasn't said one word to him since they left San Diego, and if he has to sit in a hotel room with Scully, Scully who he just fucked, Scully who won't talk to him, for the entire day, he will probably find his gun and put it to his head. "You want to do something?" he asks. He has to do something.
She cricks her neck and looks out the window. "The beach," she says. "I want to go to the beach."
He has no idea where the beach is, but he knows which way is north and which way is west and he figures that he can't actually fall off the continent, so he drives past the airport and gets off at an exit that says "beach.” They end up in Venice Beach, which is the single worst place he could imagine, but she seems oblivious to the oiled bodies and the clanging metal. There are surfers in bodysuits on the water, but the beach is populated mainly with dogwalkers in sweaters and couples holding hands. Scully walks ahead of him as they cross onto the sand. He hangs back and watches her, her jeans frayed at the hems, her black sweater hanging loose from her shoulders. She stops, ten feet shy of the water and toes off her shoes, pulls off her socks, rolls up those jeans. Her ankles are beautiful, he's seen her naked and orgasmic and her ankles can still get him hard, and what the fuck is he doing, he just doesn't know. She abandons her shoes and walks down to the water without looking back at him. He sits next to them and watches her stand at the edge of the surf, waves curling up and over her toes, nipping at the bone of her ankles, spraying her cuffs and darkening them. Her arms are folded, her chin up. He digs through the sand with his fingers and finds a shell, delicate and reflective. He doesn't remember shells like this from his childhood; the prettiest thing you find on a north Atlantic beach are those oyster shells with stripes of purple, nothing quite this ethereal. He sits and fingers it, tries not to remember, every time he looks at her, that if she'd never met him she'd have been able to make her own choices for the past five years, that if she'd never met him he'd be dead, that there are probably fingerprint bruises on her hips because he held on too hard and there's a fucking metaphor that you don't even have to work for in that. He loves her. Don't think about it.
This is my favorite part of the story. She just channels Mulder for me here. It's so heart-breaking to watch Amal's Mulder watching Scully on Venice Beach. The shell business is good, too. Very Mulderish. Of course, I keep trying to figure out what kind of shell he could turn up on Venice Beach that would fit this description. It doesn't matter, Wendelah1, this is a fucking symbol, okay? Okay.
She walks back up the beach to him and stops to pick up her shoes. He holds out the shell on his palm. She examines it for a moment, and then picks it up and drops it in her pocket, then starts walking back towards the car. She never puts her shoes on, just brushes the sand off her feet out the car door and then puts her bare feet at the floormats. It takes him an hour to find his way back to the airport, because she falls asleep in the car, and he has no fucking clue where he is going.
Handing her that shell reminds me of the scene in "Dreamland II" where he hands her the sunflower seeds. Of course, she falls asleep in the car. Of course he gets lost, "he has no fucking clue where he is going" without her-- this is so right-on. Their codependence is truly frightening by this time in the series.
****
She stares at the fountain in the Radisson lobby while he gets the keys to the room. The car was returned, tickets for tomorrow bought; it was all over now but the long and awkward stretch between today and tomorrow. He watches her out of the corner of his eye as he taps his fingers on the counter. Apparently, the stages of Scully Grief begin with denial, move on to anger, and then segue into silence. He has no idea what the next stage will be. Truth be told, he's terrified of the next twelve hours. He doesn't know when she'll turn to him and ask him again why he never told her; when she'll call him on his idiotic need to be truthful last night, and ask what else he knows; when she will punch him or leave him or hate him once she knows there is a storage unit in Maryland with her not-very-covert cover name on it. Maybe she'll stay silent until they get back to DC, take Friday off, and come back to work and never speak of it again. He can't decide if that would be the best outcome or the next-to-worst.
Of course, Mulder thinks the worst outcome would be if she left him, left the X-Files. We know how desperate and crazy even thinking about losing Scully makes Mulder, so we know he's not playing with a full deck here either.
He touches his hand to the small of her back, half expecting her to jump. Instead, it's like she's on a delay, and takes a moment to acknowledge him standing there over her shoulder. She just looks up silently and waits. Her face is pale and translucent, her chin still pointed; she never gained back most of the weight when she got well again. He's wondering how much she'll lose in the next two weeks. "We're on the third floor," he says simply, and reaches for her suitcase. She lets him take it, for perhaps the first time ever, and walks just ahead of him to the elevator.
She is so out of it that her normal patterns are just gone.
Off the elevator, he points them towards the room, which is down on the end of the hall. She makes no comment about the single room, or the two beds, not even an eyebrow. It's like the Scully's been hollowed out of her, he thinks as she sits, knees together, on the edge of the bed nearer the door. He wants to poke her with a stick until she fights, but he's worried that she might collapse if he does.
This image of Scully sitting on the edge, knees together, is one we have seen before. Scully after her dad's death, in "By the Sea." That dead-eyed grief-stricken stare.
He looks out the window. It's dusk over LA, the blaring lights of the airport beginning to stand out over the refracted grey light of the sky. She is still just sitting there, like she has no idea what to do. They have had many silences, but none have been so deadly as this one.
You have to do this. You have to make sure she gets back to DC in one piece. If at all possible, you have to make sure she doesn't hate you in the process. You love her. You fucked her. Don't think about it. He shoves his hands in his pockets and turns to her. "So, dinner?"
She looks up, half-startled. "Dinner?"
"I'm starved." He is; he hasn't eaten since the slice of toast Scully passed him at breakfast, and she has eaten almost less. "You want to go out, or stay in? I think there are restaurants downstairs or something." If she doesn't express an opinion he is going to have to leave her alone so he doesn't go insane.
She takes a long minute to reply. "I believe I was promised a hundred dollars worth of room service."
He wants to hug her, to kiss her forehead, to slide a file across a desk to her in joy. "I can do that," he says, and finds the menu.
A very Mulder response.
"I'm going to take a shower," she says softly, and stands. "Order whatever."
"There's a whirlpool tub or something," he says casually, as if he hadn't paid an extra fifty dollars for the room with it. "I'll knock when there's food."
It's more like a hundred and fifty dollars once he's done, ordering salads and ribs and an entire chocolate cake. The waiter rolls in the tray and casts a vague, significant look at the sounds of the burbling tub behind the door. Mulder undertips him and shoos him out. He knocks on the bathroom door quietly. "Scully?"
"I'll be right out," she says.
She's not right out. He sits on his bed and picks at the food, waiting for her. He doesn't know what to do with last night; it's an anomaly, and he can't handle it. Was she angry? Was she looking for comfort? She hadn't said a damn word the entire time, hadn't let him touch her, hadn't seemed to care whether the sex was any good, had just fucked him without rhyme or reason, so hard he had bruises on his ass and a lingering headache from the floor beneath him. He eats an onion ring. He needs answers, and he is damn sure she wasn't going to be giving them.
Sex really does make some guys stupid, doesn't it? Was she angry? Was she looking for comfort? If he didn't know what was happening, why did he let it happen in the first place? This makes the previous night's activities even more disturbing. I do buy it, though, that Mulder would just passively let Scully fuck him. I don't think he can say no to her, certainly not now, maybe not ever.
"Touched But Never Held" also had two sex scenes, but in Anton's story, Mulder says no to Scully's sexual advances the first time around, ostensibly because she's drunk and he's worried she might regret it. Not that being sober is any guarantee of sex sans morning-after regrets, as we shall soon see. Amal makes very different choices in her fic as she tells their story. After the food shows up, I adore that Mulder waits for her, but not really, munching on his onion rings.
The ribs are cold when she emerges, wearing the same silk pajamas from last night. He used to fantasize about what it would be like to kiss her in those pajamas, to slide his hands down the fabric and run them up again, underneath, to the skin of her waist. He's worried his next round of fantasies will involve the floor of her brother's living room. He holds out the cake towards her. "I made a small dent, but there's more work to be done."
It's funny the things I see people objecting to in fic. Personally,I have no objections to the appearance of the word "panties" nor to Scully wearing silk pajamas in fanon. I also have no objection to characters letting out a breath they didn't know they were holding, as long as they don't do it more than once a fic.
She reaches around him and grabs the salad, which is some elaborate Californian concoction with strange looking vegetables and giant white hunks which are apparently 'goat cheese.' It's so odd to think of her being from here, to think of a little Scully watching surfers at the beach, driving around with her sister in a beat-up car, going to Tijuana when her parents weren't looking. He can't do it. He tries again: Scully, on the beach in a L.L. Bean one-piece, under an umbrella, shading her eyes to wave at Emily, building a sandcastle at the shoreline, the buzz of the Santa Monica Pier in the distance.
Yeah. That one he can see. Don't think about it.
He has been watching ESPN with half a brain, watching the Lakers fumble the ball around the court. She sits on her bed and eats, unthinkingly, and stares at the game with him. It's almost companionable, except normally she would be making snide comments about why no one in the NBA can make a free throw, or about how a game that scores more than once a minute is clearly designed for the rapidly disintegrating attention span of the American male. He considers baiting her but can't come up with something to say, and, besides, if she ignored him it would be worse than the silence; the silence is almost neutral, but proof of her inattention would hurt.
Because it's still all about him, don't you see?
By the end of the second quarter, she has picked through the salad and moved on to picking at the cake. Her hair is drying soft around her face--not curly, precisely, but with more texture than she's let it have at work for years. He remembers little Scully of the plaid suits, the fluffy bangs, the live sister, the intact ova. He liked that girl.
He loves this one. Don't think about it.
The question that brings to my mind is would he still love her if she still had her ova and her sister and had not been through the last five years with him? I'm guessing no. YMMV.
He finally goes to shower after they stare at five minutes of inane halftime commentary. Pointedly, he puts the remote next to her, says "You can change it if you want." In the shower, he leans against the wall under the hot spray and, awkwardly, assembles an image of her naked body. The swing of her breasts had fascinated him, feeling them move under his hands as she moved. He doesn't want to do this, doesn't want to want a grieving woman using him to punish herself. He wants to be a reward, not a punishment.
The idea of Mulder rewarding Scully with sex is kind of provocative, too. I find myself wondering what sort of system of rewards he wants to set up here. This is me thinking too literally, again, isn't it?
But the punishment fits the crime, at least. Finally, Mulder puts his Psychology PhD to good use. Of course, she's trying to hurt him, but she's punishing herself as well.
He redresses in front of the steamy mirror so he can't see himself, dries his hair. When he leaves the bathroom, she is curled on her bed like a comma, eyes closed. The cake's remains are on the tray. The remote is on his bed, and the Lakers are up by thirteen.
He turns off the lights, lays under the covers and watches Shaq rack up the points, stays awake through the stupid post-game interviews and navel gazing about where Kobe will be in a year, and finally drifts off when SportsCenter begins. In the morning, maybe, she'll be herself again.
The power of positive thinking? Oh, Mulder.
***
He thinks at first that it's the TV turning off that's woken him, because the room is so quiet. But he turns his head and sees her standing next to the bed. She is ghostly-pale, naked and glowing in the dim reflected light of the airport through their window. She is watching him, and something in her wavers and flickers, like she's a bad projection from a broken film reel. He pushes himself up on his elbows and blinks for a moment, until he almost has the power of speech.
I love this image, not only because it's beautiful but because it fits so well with where the character is at. She's a pale reflection of her real self.
But she speaks first, in a quiet voice he's never heard from her before, with a throat that sounds raw and salt-streaked. "Shut me up."
And he knows that voice, knows that feeling, when your brain is firing too often and you need your body to take over. This is why he runs; this is why he is well-acquainted with his right hand; this is why he spent his twenties banging nameless women he met in bars. If he stopped to analyze, he'd find it chilling to hear Scully ask for physical abandon, the Scully who never moves an inch without it being abundantly clear that her brain is doing the moving. But she's naked, and she's asking him for something without any prodding for the first time all day, and it's something he can give her.
He doesn't stop to analyze, so here we go again. But then he doesn't really want to think about it, does he?
He sits up and pulls off his shirt, and then holds out a hand to her. She kneels on the bed, holding his hand, but doesn't come closer to him, doesn't kiss him, doesn't make a single move. It's as if asking had been all she could do, and now he had to drive. Well, OK. He can do that, if it was what she needed. He runs his hand up her arm from her hand, traces the line of her collarbone across to the hollow where her cross rests. She closes her eyes, as if she's focusing on his hand, his touch. It is unbelievably hot, but wrong, wrong, deeply wrong, this isn't Scully looking like this as he brushes his fingers down her sternum, as he cups her breast and pinches her nipple. Her lips part and she exhales quietly and he wants to kiss her, but he doesn't know if she'd let him, so he brings his hands up to her shoulders and pulls her towards him, arranges her so she's straddling his chest, bent over with her breasts brushing his cheeks. He loves the feel of her back flexing as he wraps his tongue around her nipple, loves the way her hips begin to rock against him, but her face terrifies him when he opens his eyes; it is empty of thought, eyes closed, jaw just slightly slack, and God, Scully's never looked like this in her life. He closes his eyes again, switches breasts, sucks harder, brings one hand to play with her damp nipple. She gasps and fists her hands into the pillow, and he wants her to touch him, but it's too much to ask.
"Unbelievably hot but wrong, wrong, deeply wrong" is a great summary of this next section.
He can smell her now, fuck, and he strokes one hand around her hip, tightening on the back of her thigh. She rocks back against his hand, and he trails it around again, rotates his wrist, slides one finger against her to open her up. Not the best angle, but suddenly she is wet and burning against his fingers and he can't help the little moan he makes, can't help clamping down on her nipple with his teeth just a little. She gasps and rotates her hips, and he sucks harder, runs his middle finger over her clit softly, then harder as she sets up a rhythm against his hand. His wrist is going to fucking break off and he doesn't care, but then she straightens up and he loses his grip on her breast, and she's just so beautiful, gasping and grimacing above him. He pulls his hand off her, and wraps both hands around her hips, urges her up his body. She comes without resistance, and when was the last time Scully ever did what he said before today, but he's not complaining, precisely, as she leans one arm against the wall and straddles his face. He doesn't even have to ask, she reaches down with the other hand to hold herself open, and it's the most frighteningly pornographic thing he's ever seen, her glistening cunt hovering over his face, her body leaned over him so he can see every inch of her. He reaches up with his tongue and runs it along the inside of her index finger where it's pressing her pubic hair back, then down her middle finger, and finally between them to stroke her clit. She pulls her hand away as he burrows in, and she is soft and warm and wet and suddenly his overfiring brain is quiet too, he can just lay there and feel the skin of her hips under his hands, the wet silk of her under his tongue, the rough crinkle of her hair brushing his nose, her gasps as she works back against him. And then she's making quiet high-pitched noises, and he opens his eyes to see her face wracked with tension, her forehead crumpling, her fingernails scraping the wall. He sucks her clit into his mouth hard and she throws her head back and gasps, her back muscles twitching under his hands as she comes. He lets off the pressure but keeps stroking her gently; he's fairly sure she came twice last night, and now he wants to keep her going as long as she can, to wear her out, to keep her out of her mind as long as she wants to let him.
But then she's pulling away from him, and he feels her leave his hands suddenly empty. He opens his eyes and wants to say something, but she's turned around, crawling down his body, shoving his pants off and--holy fuck--sinking her mouth around his cock with no preamble. He thrusts up unconsciously, and she anchors his hips into the mattress with her hands and slides down further. He moans her name and reaches out to stroke down her back, runs his hand over her ass. She's too far away to get his mouth on, but he awkwardly slides two fingers into her, and she pushes back onto his hand as she backs off his cock, then licks her way around the head. He curls down slightly, trying to find her g-spot, but loses his ability to focus as she sucks him down again, fuck, all the way, until she's nosing his balls as she tightens her mouth. He can't follow her pattern with his hand, just lets her fuck herself on his fingers as she fucks him with her mouth, surrenders to the feeling of her around him, lets himself go. He moans to her that he's coming, and she slides him down her throat, and he shouts and shakes and comes undone for her.
This roughly parallels a section of the sex scene in "Touched But Never Held" except that Anton wrote them having happy, loving, mutually fulfilling, you complete me I complete you sex (post-Emily???) and this is most emphatically is not that kind of sex scene.
He is vibrating and gasping when he realizes his fingers are damp and cold which means she's gone somewhere, and he opens his eyes to see her, back to him, kneeling on the bed. Her head is bowed, and suddenly he knows with certainty that she's thinking again, and that's what she didn't want, she's sitting there hating herself for fucking him, hating him, hating her life, and he can't let her do that--she asked him to shut her up, he's not going to fail her again, and he sits up and sinks his teeth into the soft white skin of her shoulder.
More Scully misery, more Mulder guilt
She throws her head back and gasps. He wraps his hands around her torso, gets his hands on her breasts, keeps biting her shoulder, alternating teeth and lips, trying to coordinate his hands until she is rocking against him again, loose, eyes closed, her neck open to him. He pulls her back onto the bed, rotates her onto her stomach, and covers her body with his, clamps onto her neck, worrying the scar over her chip with his tongue. He thinks about trying to get hard enough again to fuck her, but he's pretty sure he's in charge of making sure they don't miss their plane tomorrow, and if he comes again it's entirely possible he'll sleep through the wake-up call, so he focuses on the taste of her skin under his lips, the way she responds to his playing with her breasts, where she likes pain and where gentleness, memorizing her body to keep himself focused. He creeps down her back slowly, licking the small protrusions of her vertebrae, biting the strong cords of muscle that bracket her spine, diverging to explore the backs of her arms where she has braced herself, curled fetally under him. She moans when he bites the skin above her elbows, cries out and pushes back against him when he growls into the muscles of her back.
He looks down at her back, and suddenly her tattoo is there, red and angry against her moonlight skin, burning, reminding him of everything he's done to her and that she's done to push him away. And here she is, moaning and supple under his mouth, and if this is penance he doesn't know why he's liking it so much. He bends down and runs his tongue around the snake, and she moans lower than before, the single hottest noise he could imagine, so he does it again, and her hips are working back against his chest so he bites her and she shudders. He keeps going, licking and biting hard enough to keep her making those noises, and he hadn't wanted to fuck her but he feels his cock hardening again, and suddenly he wants to hear her make that noise while he's sunk in her, wants to watch her shoulders tense and release as he thrusts and retreats, wants to kiss her neck and hear her gasp. He reaches one hand down and grabs his half-hard cock, begins working it as he bites, tries to get it to the point where he could fuck her, and starts sliding up her back, until his cock brushes against her cunt and he's bent over her shoulder.
Again, there is a parallel scene in "Touched But Never Held." where Mulder sees Scully's tattoo and decides it is symbolic of how she belongs to him. That might be one way he could look at it, but Amal's version seems much more likely to me, that Mulder would see it as a reminder of what has gone wrong between them, of how they have hurt one another and created distance.
"Don't," she whispers, so quietly that if he weren't right next to her head he wouldn't have heard it.
He freezes and his cock wilts. What doesn't she want? He pulls his body off hers fractionally, tries to read in her face what she's saying. She is flushed and gasping, but there is a crease in her forehead that isn't the orgasmic one, something that says she's thinking. He wants to ask her what he should do. He wants to tell her that he loves her and he just wants to make it better. He wants to fuck her and to hold her and to kiss her and he has no idea what she wants.
And true to form, he certainly isn't going to ask her. And, oh my god. A man losing an erection in an XF fan fiction sex scene. That must be a first. Why do you think she didn't want his penis in her again? Scully refuses the magic healing penis, another rare fan fic sighting.
"Please," she whispers, and turns her face into the pillow.
He leans down and kisses the back of her neck gently, nosing the damp hair away from it. She moans again, and this is a good noise, so he slips his hand under her belly and reaches between her legs. She works her hips away from the ghost of his cock and against his hand, and he slides back down her back with his mouth, keeps working her clit as he finds her tattoo again, gentler this time, but hungry for the taste of her skin. She's quieter but moving again, and he sinks back into her, tries to quiet the nagging question of what she wants in the taste of her skin. She makes a little desperate noise, and he flips her over, pulls her legs up, and dives back in between her legs, slips his tongue into her and nuzzles his nose against her clit. She moans and rocks against him, and he buries himself against her again, desperate to know that he's keeping her the way she wants. He looks up at her. God, he loves her, but she's just not here, is she, not tonight, her legs hooked over his shoulders, her shoulders bracing her against the bed, her hands grabbing the headboard. Because Scully's not there, it's her nerves firing for her, and he did exactly what she wanted, he turned her brain off, but it's her brain he loves, and he misses her, suddenly alone in the bed with her cunt pulsing under his tongue. He'll fuck her as long as she wants him to, but he wants to make love to her, he wants her with him there and he's a little worried that every moment he spends fucking her pushes that moment further away.
This is what you deserve. Don't think about it. He closes his eyes and keeps going.
I don't know about you, but I'm pretty gutted.
So to just to keep the scorecard straight, Scully is having sex with Mulder to punish him, to punish herself, and to numb the pain. Mulder is going along with it, because it's what he thinks he deserves and because she asked and he can't say no to her. They are both really turned on by this. Yes, this is pretty fucked up, isn't it? I told Amal in my feedback to her that this section was even harder for me to read because it is from Mulder's POV so we have to hear what it's doing to him to do those things to her. In a separate discussion, a friend complained that the sex scene was just too long, that it just wasn't sexy. It's not supposed to turn you on, I said to her, it's supposed to make you feel their pain. It's supposed to make you hurt, too. Oh, she said. It worked. The little repetitive motive, "don't think about it," is perfect because that is what Mulder wants for himself and of course, for Scully, too. She wanted to fuck him into realizing the truth about her, about them. He wanted to fuck her into oblivion.
Don't think about it. It's time for the morning after.
Author: amalnahurriyeh
Fandom: The X-Files
Commentator: wendelah1
Anything that was originally posted under flock or in email has been quoted here with the permission of the author.
"Sweet Nothings for the Numb", without commentary.
II. Crime and Punishment
There are friendly morning noises coming from the kitchen. Mulder keeps his eyes closed as he listens to them. He's pretty sure he's not invited into anything that pleasant sounding, not in this house, not this morning. Don't think about it. He feels exposed, somehow, even in his clean pajamas, even knowing there's no way anyone but Scully knows what happened last night (the scratches under his shirt itch, don't think about it), like everyone in this house knows he's fucked her. But, no, they just know he fucked her over. And that's enough.
What is interesting about this paragraph is how early you get clued in to how it's all about Mulder, even when it isn't. I mean, it's the morning after Emily's funeral and all Mulder is worried about here is whether or not the family can tell if he and Scully had sex. Jesus, Mulder, I think the time for that thought has come and gone, so to speak.
When I wrote my comments and sent them by email to Amal, she wrote back: "EVERYTHING IS ABOUT MULDER. Haven't you learned that that's the message of the X-Files? EVERYTHING EVER IS ABOUT MULDER OR MAYBE HIS DAD OR SON. NO WIMMINS. (Which is actually something I'm screwing with in my big bang, but anyway.)" I can't wait to read Amal's big-bang, by the way, but well, this show is not all about Mulder for me, no matter what the show's writers thought they were up to. I think I know what Amal means. But I digress. . .
He splashes water on his face in the downstairs bathroom, goes through his duffel bag to find something to wear(the pants wadded at the bottom, don't think about it). When he enters the kitchen, there is a sudden silence, or so it seems. Tara is sipping a cup of tea in a bathrobe, with Maggie next to her, reading some sort of giant book together. Scully is sitting on the other side of table; Matthew is curled in her arms, staring blankly up at her. She catches his eyes, and he can feel the gravity of her, the desperate desire to walk over to her and sink into her orbit. (Her eyes closing as she came, the lines of tears on her cheek, her lips parted, don't think about it.) But he walks over to the counter, pours himself a cup of coffee. Bill is flipping eggs at the stove, and cuts him a sharp look. "Morning," Mulder says as calmly as he can.
"Good morning, Fox," Maggie says pleasantly. "Did you sleep well?"
"Well enough," he says, and looks at his coffee cup to avoid making eye contact.
Tara and Maggie are discussing something called "sleep strategies." Mulder lets himself watch Scully with Matthew, since no one is looking at him. She strokes one finger down his cheek, runs it across his lips, and smiles, so softly. It's like being punched, but he keeps watching as she adjusts his limp weight across her arms. She slips her finger into his little hand, and he grips it.
Bill scrapes eggs off the bottom of the frying pan onto the fourth plate. "We're out of eggs," he says to Mulder as he carries them to the table.
Yeah, so's your sister, Mulder thinks, and drinks his coffee.
"Can I have my grandbaby?" Maggie asks, in a high, sing-songy voice. Scully hands him over, and stares at the plate of eggs in front of her blankly. "So, Dana," Maggie says. "How much longer can you stay?"
Scully looks up at Mulder, and he sees it, in a sudden flash--she needs to get out, she can't be here any longer. He clears his throat. "Unfortunately," he says, "I'm going to have to steal Dana back to DC."
A very-Mulder-like insight, not reasoned through, just--there is it!
"Really," Bill says, stabbing at his eggs.
"Yeah, we've got a case that's just about to take off. Bodies stacked six-high waiting for her back at Quantico," he says, and takes a sip of coffee. "Paranormal serial killers wait for no woman, sadly. We've got tickets for this afternoon."
Scully pushed a curd of scrambled egg to the edge of her plate. "It's nice to be wanted, at least," she says, and smiles weakly.
Bill gives him the evil eye as he finishes his coffee. Mulder stands there and takes it. It's the least he can do.
In "Touched But Never Held," the guys actually get into a fist-fight, and Mulder breaks two of Bill's ribs. Most readers cheered, I'm sure.
***
Scully leans her head back against the headrest in the car as they pull out of the driveway. "So, when's our flight?" she asks, eyes closed.
He looks over at her, and hopes he hasn't just fucked things up even worse. "We don't have one."
She opens her eyes and looks over at him, waiting.
"I figured you just wanted to get out of there," he says softly.
She closes her eyes again and nods, just once. He exhales. "Do you have a plan?"
"I had a couple of thoughts," he said, keeping his eyes on the road. "We could just drive to the San Diego airport, fly standby on the next flight headed east, connect through to DC as soon as we can. Or, we could head up to LAX, try the same thing, probably with a little more luck." He clears his throat. "Or we can go find a hotel, make reservations for tomorrow, eat a hundred dollars worth of room service. It's up to you." I just want to do something, he thinks. Let me do something.
He waits at a traffic light while she thinks. "LA," she says, "tomorrow."
He sighs out a breath he hadn't been holding, not really. "OK," he says, and heads to the highway.
***
It's only two pm as they get close to LA. Too early to head to the hotel, because she hasn't said one word to him since they left San Diego, and if he has to sit in a hotel room with Scully, Scully who he just fucked, Scully who won't talk to him, for the entire day, he will probably find his gun and put it to his head. "You want to do something?" he asks. He has to do something.
She cricks her neck and looks out the window. "The beach," she says. "I want to go to the beach."
He has no idea where the beach is, but he knows which way is north and which way is west and he figures that he can't actually fall off the continent, so he drives past the airport and gets off at an exit that says "beach.” They end up in Venice Beach, which is the single worst place he could imagine, but she seems oblivious to the oiled bodies and the clanging metal. There are surfers in bodysuits on the water, but the beach is populated mainly with dogwalkers in sweaters and couples holding hands. Scully walks ahead of him as they cross onto the sand. He hangs back and watches her, her jeans frayed at the hems, her black sweater hanging loose from her shoulders. She stops, ten feet shy of the water and toes off her shoes, pulls off her socks, rolls up those jeans. Her ankles are beautiful, he's seen her naked and orgasmic and her ankles can still get him hard, and what the fuck is he doing, he just doesn't know. She abandons her shoes and walks down to the water without looking back at him. He sits next to them and watches her stand at the edge of the surf, waves curling up and over her toes, nipping at the bone of her ankles, spraying her cuffs and darkening them. Her arms are folded, her chin up. He digs through the sand with his fingers and finds a shell, delicate and reflective. He doesn't remember shells like this from his childhood; the prettiest thing you find on a north Atlantic beach are those oyster shells with stripes of purple, nothing quite this ethereal. He sits and fingers it, tries not to remember, every time he looks at her, that if she'd never met him she'd have been able to make her own choices for the past five years, that if she'd never met him he'd be dead, that there are probably fingerprint bruises on her hips because he held on too hard and there's a fucking metaphor that you don't even have to work for in that. He loves her. Don't think about it.
This is my favorite part of the story. She just channels Mulder for me here. It's so heart-breaking to watch Amal's Mulder watching Scully on Venice Beach. The shell business is good, too. Very Mulderish. Of course, I keep trying to figure out what kind of shell he could turn up on Venice Beach that would fit this description. It doesn't matter, Wendelah1, this is a fucking symbol, okay? Okay.
She walks back up the beach to him and stops to pick up her shoes. He holds out the shell on his palm. She examines it for a moment, and then picks it up and drops it in her pocket, then starts walking back towards the car. She never puts her shoes on, just brushes the sand off her feet out the car door and then puts her bare feet at the floormats. It takes him an hour to find his way back to the airport, because she falls asleep in the car, and he has no fucking clue where he is going.
Handing her that shell reminds me of the scene in "Dreamland II" where he hands her the sunflower seeds. Of course, she falls asleep in the car. Of course he gets lost, "he has no fucking clue where he is going" without her-- this is so right-on. Their codependence is truly frightening by this time in the series.
****
She stares at the fountain in the Radisson lobby while he gets the keys to the room. The car was returned, tickets for tomorrow bought; it was all over now but the long and awkward stretch between today and tomorrow. He watches her out of the corner of his eye as he taps his fingers on the counter. Apparently, the stages of Scully Grief begin with denial, move on to anger, and then segue into silence. He has no idea what the next stage will be. Truth be told, he's terrified of the next twelve hours. He doesn't know when she'll turn to him and ask him again why he never told her; when she'll call him on his idiotic need to be truthful last night, and ask what else he knows; when she will punch him or leave him or hate him once she knows there is a storage unit in Maryland with her not-very-covert cover name on it. Maybe she'll stay silent until they get back to DC, take Friday off, and come back to work and never speak of it again. He can't decide if that would be the best outcome or the next-to-worst.
Of course, Mulder thinks the worst outcome would be if she left him, left the X-Files. We know how desperate and crazy even thinking about losing Scully makes Mulder, so we know he's not playing with a full deck here either.
He touches his hand to the small of her back, half expecting her to jump. Instead, it's like she's on a delay, and takes a moment to acknowledge him standing there over her shoulder. She just looks up silently and waits. Her face is pale and translucent, her chin still pointed; she never gained back most of the weight when she got well again. He's wondering how much she'll lose in the next two weeks. "We're on the third floor," he says simply, and reaches for her suitcase. She lets him take it, for perhaps the first time ever, and walks just ahead of him to the elevator.
She is so out of it that her normal patterns are just gone.
Off the elevator, he points them towards the room, which is down on the end of the hall. She makes no comment about the single room, or the two beds, not even an eyebrow. It's like the Scully's been hollowed out of her, he thinks as she sits, knees together, on the edge of the bed nearer the door. He wants to poke her with a stick until she fights, but he's worried that she might collapse if he does.
This image of Scully sitting on the edge, knees together, is one we have seen before. Scully after her dad's death, in "By the Sea." That dead-eyed grief-stricken stare.
He looks out the window. It's dusk over LA, the blaring lights of the airport beginning to stand out over the refracted grey light of the sky. She is still just sitting there, like she has no idea what to do. They have had many silences, but none have been so deadly as this one.
You have to do this. You have to make sure she gets back to DC in one piece. If at all possible, you have to make sure she doesn't hate you in the process. You love her. You fucked her. Don't think about it. He shoves his hands in his pockets and turns to her. "So, dinner?"
She looks up, half-startled. "Dinner?"
"I'm starved." He is; he hasn't eaten since the slice of toast Scully passed him at breakfast, and she has eaten almost less. "You want to go out, or stay in? I think there are restaurants downstairs or something." If she doesn't express an opinion he is going to have to leave her alone so he doesn't go insane.
She takes a long minute to reply. "I believe I was promised a hundred dollars worth of room service."
He wants to hug her, to kiss her forehead, to slide a file across a desk to her in joy. "I can do that," he says, and finds the menu.
A very Mulder response.
"I'm going to take a shower," she says softly, and stands. "Order whatever."
"There's a whirlpool tub or something," he says casually, as if he hadn't paid an extra fifty dollars for the room with it. "I'll knock when there's food."
It's more like a hundred and fifty dollars once he's done, ordering salads and ribs and an entire chocolate cake. The waiter rolls in the tray and casts a vague, significant look at the sounds of the burbling tub behind the door. Mulder undertips him and shoos him out. He knocks on the bathroom door quietly. "Scully?"
"I'll be right out," she says.
She's not right out. He sits on his bed and picks at the food, waiting for her. He doesn't know what to do with last night; it's an anomaly, and he can't handle it. Was she angry? Was she looking for comfort? She hadn't said a damn word the entire time, hadn't let him touch her, hadn't seemed to care whether the sex was any good, had just fucked him without rhyme or reason, so hard he had bruises on his ass and a lingering headache from the floor beneath him. He eats an onion ring. He needs answers, and he is damn sure she wasn't going to be giving them.
Sex really does make some guys stupid, doesn't it? Was she angry? Was she looking for comfort? If he didn't know what was happening, why did he let it happen in the first place? This makes the previous night's activities even more disturbing. I do buy it, though, that Mulder would just passively let Scully fuck him. I don't think he can say no to her, certainly not now, maybe not ever.
"Touched But Never Held" also had two sex scenes, but in Anton's story, Mulder says no to Scully's sexual advances the first time around, ostensibly because she's drunk and he's worried she might regret it. Not that being sober is any guarantee of sex sans morning-after regrets, as we shall soon see. Amal makes very different choices in her fic as she tells their story. After the food shows up, I adore that Mulder waits for her, but not really, munching on his onion rings.
The ribs are cold when she emerges, wearing the same silk pajamas from last night. He used to fantasize about what it would be like to kiss her in those pajamas, to slide his hands down the fabric and run them up again, underneath, to the skin of her waist. He's worried his next round of fantasies will involve the floor of her brother's living room. He holds out the cake towards her. "I made a small dent, but there's more work to be done."
It's funny the things I see people objecting to in fic. Personally,I have no objections to the appearance of the word "panties" nor to Scully wearing silk pajamas in fanon. I also have no objection to characters letting out a breath they didn't know they were holding, as long as they don't do it more than once a fic.
She reaches around him and grabs the salad, which is some elaborate Californian concoction with strange looking vegetables and giant white hunks which are apparently 'goat cheese.' It's so odd to think of her being from here, to think of a little Scully watching surfers at the beach, driving around with her sister in a beat-up car, going to Tijuana when her parents weren't looking. He can't do it. He tries again: Scully, on the beach in a L.L. Bean one-piece, under an umbrella, shading her eyes to wave at Emily, building a sandcastle at the shoreline, the buzz of the Santa Monica Pier in the distance.
Yeah. That one he can see. Don't think about it.
He has been watching ESPN with half a brain, watching the Lakers fumble the ball around the court. She sits on her bed and eats, unthinkingly, and stares at the game with him. It's almost companionable, except normally she would be making snide comments about why no one in the NBA can make a free throw, or about how a game that scores more than once a minute is clearly designed for the rapidly disintegrating attention span of the American male. He considers baiting her but can't come up with something to say, and, besides, if she ignored him it would be worse than the silence; the silence is almost neutral, but proof of her inattention would hurt.
Because it's still all about him, don't you see?
By the end of the second quarter, she has picked through the salad and moved on to picking at the cake. Her hair is drying soft around her face--not curly, precisely, but with more texture than she's let it have at work for years. He remembers little Scully of the plaid suits, the fluffy bangs, the live sister, the intact ova. He liked that girl.
He loves this one. Don't think about it.
The question that brings to my mind is would he still love her if she still had her ova and her sister and had not been through the last five years with him? I'm guessing no. YMMV.
He finally goes to shower after they stare at five minutes of inane halftime commentary. Pointedly, he puts the remote next to her, says "You can change it if you want." In the shower, he leans against the wall under the hot spray and, awkwardly, assembles an image of her naked body. The swing of her breasts had fascinated him, feeling them move under his hands as she moved. He doesn't want to do this, doesn't want to want a grieving woman using him to punish herself. He wants to be a reward, not a punishment.
The idea of Mulder rewarding Scully with sex is kind of provocative, too. I find myself wondering what sort of system of rewards he wants to set up here. This is me thinking too literally, again, isn't it?
But the punishment fits the crime, at least. Finally, Mulder puts his Psychology PhD to good use. Of course, she's trying to hurt him, but she's punishing herself as well.
He redresses in front of the steamy mirror so he can't see himself, dries his hair. When he leaves the bathroom, she is curled on her bed like a comma, eyes closed. The cake's remains are on the tray. The remote is on his bed, and the Lakers are up by thirteen.
He turns off the lights, lays under the covers and watches Shaq rack up the points, stays awake through the stupid post-game interviews and navel gazing about where Kobe will be in a year, and finally drifts off when SportsCenter begins. In the morning, maybe, she'll be herself again.
The power of positive thinking? Oh, Mulder.
***
He thinks at first that it's the TV turning off that's woken him, because the room is so quiet. But he turns his head and sees her standing next to the bed. She is ghostly-pale, naked and glowing in the dim reflected light of the airport through their window. She is watching him, and something in her wavers and flickers, like she's a bad projection from a broken film reel. He pushes himself up on his elbows and blinks for a moment, until he almost has the power of speech.
I love this image, not only because it's beautiful but because it fits so well with where the character is at. She's a pale reflection of her real self.
But she speaks first, in a quiet voice he's never heard from her before, with a throat that sounds raw and salt-streaked. "Shut me up."
And he knows that voice, knows that feeling, when your brain is firing too often and you need your body to take over. This is why he runs; this is why he is well-acquainted with his right hand; this is why he spent his twenties banging nameless women he met in bars. If he stopped to analyze, he'd find it chilling to hear Scully ask for physical abandon, the Scully who never moves an inch without it being abundantly clear that her brain is doing the moving. But she's naked, and she's asking him for something without any prodding for the first time all day, and it's something he can give her.
He doesn't stop to analyze, so here we go again. But then he doesn't really want to think about it, does he?
He sits up and pulls off his shirt, and then holds out a hand to her. She kneels on the bed, holding his hand, but doesn't come closer to him, doesn't kiss him, doesn't make a single move. It's as if asking had been all she could do, and now he had to drive. Well, OK. He can do that, if it was what she needed. He runs his hand up her arm from her hand, traces the line of her collarbone across to the hollow where her cross rests. She closes her eyes, as if she's focusing on his hand, his touch. It is unbelievably hot, but wrong, wrong, deeply wrong, this isn't Scully looking like this as he brushes his fingers down her sternum, as he cups her breast and pinches her nipple. Her lips part and she exhales quietly and he wants to kiss her, but he doesn't know if she'd let him, so he brings his hands up to her shoulders and pulls her towards him, arranges her so she's straddling his chest, bent over with her breasts brushing his cheeks. He loves the feel of her back flexing as he wraps his tongue around her nipple, loves the way her hips begin to rock against him, but her face terrifies him when he opens his eyes; it is empty of thought, eyes closed, jaw just slightly slack, and God, Scully's never looked like this in her life. He closes his eyes again, switches breasts, sucks harder, brings one hand to play with her damp nipple. She gasps and fists her hands into the pillow, and he wants her to touch him, but it's too much to ask.
"Unbelievably hot but wrong, wrong, deeply wrong" is a great summary of this next section.
He can smell her now, fuck, and he strokes one hand around her hip, tightening on the back of her thigh. She rocks back against his hand, and he trails it around again, rotates his wrist, slides one finger against her to open her up. Not the best angle, but suddenly she is wet and burning against his fingers and he can't help the little moan he makes, can't help clamping down on her nipple with his teeth just a little. She gasps and rotates her hips, and he sucks harder, runs his middle finger over her clit softly, then harder as she sets up a rhythm against his hand. His wrist is going to fucking break off and he doesn't care, but then she straightens up and he loses his grip on her breast, and she's just so beautiful, gasping and grimacing above him. He pulls his hand off her, and wraps both hands around her hips, urges her up his body. She comes without resistance, and when was the last time Scully ever did what he said before today, but he's not complaining, precisely, as she leans one arm against the wall and straddles his face. He doesn't even have to ask, she reaches down with the other hand to hold herself open, and it's the most frighteningly pornographic thing he's ever seen, her glistening cunt hovering over his face, her body leaned over him so he can see every inch of her. He reaches up with his tongue and runs it along the inside of her index finger where it's pressing her pubic hair back, then down her middle finger, and finally between them to stroke her clit. She pulls her hand away as he burrows in, and she is soft and warm and wet and suddenly his overfiring brain is quiet too, he can just lay there and feel the skin of her hips under his hands, the wet silk of her under his tongue, the rough crinkle of her hair brushing his nose, her gasps as she works back against him. And then she's making quiet high-pitched noises, and he opens his eyes to see her face wracked with tension, her forehead crumpling, her fingernails scraping the wall. He sucks her clit into his mouth hard and she throws her head back and gasps, her back muscles twitching under his hands as she comes. He lets off the pressure but keeps stroking her gently; he's fairly sure she came twice last night, and now he wants to keep her going as long as she can, to wear her out, to keep her out of her mind as long as she wants to let him.
But then she's pulling away from him, and he feels her leave his hands suddenly empty. He opens his eyes and wants to say something, but she's turned around, crawling down his body, shoving his pants off and--holy fuck--sinking her mouth around his cock with no preamble. He thrusts up unconsciously, and she anchors his hips into the mattress with her hands and slides down further. He moans her name and reaches out to stroke down her back, runs his hand over her ass. She's too far away to get his mouth on, but he awkwardly slides two fingers into her, and she pushes back onto his hand as she backs off his cock, then licks her way around the head. He curls down slightly, trying to find her g-spot, but loses his ability to focus as she sucks him down again, fuck, all the way, until she's nosing his balls as she tightens her mouth. He can't follow her pattern with his hand, just lets her fuck herself on his fingers as she fucks him with her mouth, surrenders to the feeling of her around him, lets himself go. He moans to her that he's coming, and she slides him down her throat, and he shouts and shakes and comes undone for her.
This roughly parallels a section of the sex scene in "Touched But Never Held" except that Anton wrote them having happy, loving, mutually fulfilling, you complete me I complete you sex (post-Emily???) and this is most emphatically is not that kind of sex scene.
He is vibrating and gasping when he realizes his fingers are damp and cold which means she's gone somewhere, and he opens his eyes to see her, back to him, kneeling on the bed. Her head is bowed, and suddenly he knows with certainty that she's thinking again, and that's what she didn't want, she's sitting there hating herself for fucking him, hating him, hating her life, and he can't let her do that--she asked him to shut her up, he's not going to fail her again, and he sits up and sinks his teeth into the soft white skin of her shoulder.
More Scully misery, more Mulder guilt
She throws her head back and gasps. He wraps his hands around her torso, gets his hands on her breasts, keeps biting her shoulder, alternating teeth and lips, trying to coordinate his hands until she is rocking against him again, loose, eyes closed, her neck open to him. He pulls her back onto the bed, rotates her onto her stomach, and covers her body with his, clamps onto her neck, worrying the scar over her chip with his tongue. He thinks about trying to get hard enough again to fuck her, but he's pretty sure he's in charge of making sure they don't miss their plane tomorrow, and if he comes again it's entirely possible he'll sleep through the wake-up call, so he focuses on the taste of her skin under his lips, the way she responds to his playing with her breasts, where she likes pain and where gentleness, memorizing her body to keep himself focused. He creeps down her back slowly, licking the small protrusions of her vertebrae, biting the strong cords of muscle that bracket her spine, diverging to explore the backs of her arms where she has braced herself, curled fetally under him. She moans when he bites the skin above her elbows, cries out and pushes back against him when he growls into the muscles of her back.
He looks down at her back, and suddenly her tattoo is there, red and angry against her moonlight skin, burning, reminding him of everything he's done to her and that she's done to push him away. And here she is, moaning and supple under his mouth, and if this is penance he doesn't know why he's liking it so much. He bends down and runs his tongue around the snake, and she moans lower than before, the single hottest noise he could imagine, so he does it again, and her hips are working back against his chest so he bites her and she shudders. He keeps going, licking and biting hard enough to keep her making those noises, and he hadn't wanted to fuck her but he feels his cock hardening again, and suddenly he wants to hear her make that noise while he's sunk in her, wants to watch her shoulders tense and release as he thrusts and retreats, wants to kiss her neck and hear her gasp. He reaches one hand down and grabs his half-hard cock, begins working it as he bites, tries to get it to the point where he could fuck her, and starts sliding up her back, until his cock brushes against her cunt and he's bent over her shoulder.
Again, there is a parallel scene in "Touched But Never Held." where Mulder sees Scully's tattoo and decides it is symbolic of how she belongs to him. That might be one way he could look at it, but Amal's version seems much more likely to me, that Mulder would see it as a reminder of what has gone wrong between them, of how they have hurt one another and created distance.
"Don't," she whispers, so quietly that if he weren't right next to her head he wouldn't have heard it.
He freezes and his cock wilts. What doesn't she want? He pulls his body off hers fractionally, tries to read in her face what she's saying. She is flushed and gasping, but there is a crease in her forehead that isn't the orgasmic one, something that says she's thinking. He wants to ask her what he should do. He wants to tell her that he loves her and he just wants to make it better. He wants to fuck her and to hold her and to kiss her and he has no idea what she wants.
And true to form, he certainly isn't going to ask her. And, oh my god. A man losing an erection in an XF fan fiction sex scene. That must be a first. Why do you think she didn't want his penis in her again? Scully refuses the magic healing penis, another rare fan fic sighting.
"Please," she whispers, and turns her face into the pillow.
He leans down and kisses the back of her neck gently, nosing the damp hair away from it. She moans again, and this is a good noise, so he slips his hand under her belly and reaches between her legs. She works her hips away from the ghost of his cock and against his hand, and he slides back down her back with his mouth, keeps working her clit as he finds her tattoo again, gentler this time, but hungry for the taste of her skin. She's quieter but moving again, and he sinks back into her, tries to quiet the nagging question of what she wants in the taste of her skin. She makes a little desperate noise, and he flips her over, pulls her legs up, and dives back in between her legs, slips his tongue into her and nuzzles his nose against her clit. She moans and rocks against him, and he buries himself against her again, desperate to know that he's keeping her the way she wants. He looks up at her. God, he loves her, but she's just not here, is she, not tonight, her legs hooked over his shoulders, her shoulders bracing her against the bed, her hands grabbing the headboard. Because Scully's not there, it's her nerves firing for her, and he did exactly what she wanted, he turned her brain off, but it's her brain he loves, and he misses her, suddenly alone in the bed with her cunt pulsing under his tongue. He'll fuck her as long as she wants him to, but he wants to make love to her, he wants her with him there and he's a little worried that every moment he spends fucking her pushes that moment further away.
This is what you deserve. Don't think about it. He closes his eyes and keeps going.
I don't know about you, but I'm pretty gutted.
So to just to keep the scorecard straight, Scully is having sex with Mulder to punish him, to punish herself, and to numb the pain. Mulder is going along with it, because it's what he thinks he deserves and because she asked and he can't say no to her. They are both really turned on by this. Yes, this is pretty fucked up, isn't it? I told Amal in my feedback to her that this section was even harder for me to read because it is from Mulder's POV so we have to hear what it's doing to him to do those things to her. In a separate discussion, a friend complained that the sex scene was just too long, that it just wasn't sexy. It's not supposed to turn you on, I said to her, it's supposed to make you feel their pain. It's supposed to make you hurt, too. Oh, she said. It worked. The little repetitive motive, "don't think about it," is perfect because that is what Mulder wants for himself and of course, for Scully, too. She wanted to fuck him into realizing the truth about her, about them. He wanted to fuck her into oblivion.
Don't think about it. It's time for the morning after.