Work Text:
She began to measure her time in sound the day he left. Zero hour was the squeak of the faucet, and then the water flailing and gargling around the tall unfamiliar form suddenly within its reach. The shallow clap of her feet on the shower drain as she stepped into the stall and stood against him, his kiss smacking her forehead as she crossed her arms over her post-partum body. Later, there’d be moments of incredulity that he was actually gone, and she would regret not actually watching him go. The sound of a door closing in the next room was the only proof she had.
And after that, there was the cooing of her mother and of strangers. “He’s such a good baby, such a happy baby,” they’d say over and over. It’s confounding for her now to think of it, because the only sound of William’s she can remember is his crying. Probably it’s the only thing she can stand.
Then the silence moved in. A silence so steady she could balance a tipped-up quarter in it, one so labored she felt she was ruining something when she spoke. Tiptoeing around it gave her purpose, helped her numb herself to everything else. On the rare nights she was overwhelmed by sorrow or desire, she muffled their voices in her pillow. Silence was the most sensitive sleeper she’d ever taken to bed.
Now there is only the sound of the Jeep’s asphalt embrace, the bored click of its signals, oblivious to its role as a third party accomplice, as an instigator meddling between lovers. She hasn’t asked where they’re going, whether he’s sure, whether they’ll stop soon so she can get out of her clothes. She hasn’t asked what he expects her to do, how he expects her to live like this. She remembers the careless routine she once had of wishing that he would spare her some details. It’s only now that the mystery is her future that he’s finally gotten the hang of it.
The peripheral capture of frantic passing black and green night landscapes makes her nauseous and she closes her eyes to escape it, but she can still hear the colors whooshing. At least we are together, she thinks, and stokes her own fury. She shakes her chin and leans her temple on the window. Their love shouldn’t have to be a consolation prize.
“Scully,” he says some time later and she opens her eyes.
It’s the first time she’s woken to her own name in a forever-ful of cars purring, of muffled cries, of silence, crying, would-be caretaking, doors closing, showers splashing – things that are not his voice. He used to say her name so often it irritated her, the cadence and frequency striking her like a joke she didn’t get. Over time, it became a comfort to hear him chew on it like one of his sunflower seeds. Sometime, she doesn’t know when, she became aware of the way his tongue turned the syllables over in his mouth, and it became her siren song. Right now it’s just an alarm clock.
There is a fresh silence waiting for them in the motel room, a promise of her empty, soundless future. She compares it to the one she abandoned along with everything else back in Georgetown. This one is hotter, more volatile, the kind that’ll set the room on fire if they aren’t careful.
“Say something,” is all he attempts, of course placing the burden with her.
“About what?” She strips down unceremoniously, unfastening her bra with her back to him, pulling her tank top back on and dropping her pants. She has a pair of white silk pajamas with her but right now she finds their hopefulness, their reverence for self-care, embarrassing.
“At least we’re here together,” he says. She jumps at the chance to attack the sentiment aloud this time.
“That’s not enough.”
“What?”
She looks at him, his eyes soft and hands frozen in his duffel bag, arrogantly and innocently expecting her to be grateful he’s there. She can’t, not yet.
“It’s not enough just to be together. We have to have lives.”
“This is our life.”
“This is your life. Our life was going to be in Canada. With jobs and people who didn’t know us and maple syrup.”
“Did you want to stay behind? You could have just said that.”
“I agreed to run away with you. Now we’re chasing – chasing – I don’t even fucking care. We’re running into it, not away.”
“I’m sorry if it’s inconvenient to you that the entire world is in danger.”
The volume of her voice slides.
“You are not personally responsible for the world. You are personally responsible to us.”
She struts to the bathroom in her string bikini suit of armor Jockeys, slamming the door only to hear his hand catch it like a baseball. There he is, standing over her shoulder in the mirror, this face that has haunted her for a year while she feigned nonchalance. Now, as she brushes her teeth with her blood boiling beneath peppermint foam, she’s grateful for the practice.
The familiar brushing noise calms her, and as if sensing her temper needs refueling, he places his hands on her hips. She whips a hand behind her and sloppily slaps him away. There’s a bulge in his jeans where their bodies accidentally sway together.
“I care what you want,” he insists and she can hear his temperature rising to meet her. Good.
“No, you don’t.” She spits in the sink. “You could have at least asked me before you turned the car around. You haven’t even asked me how I feel about this. What are you going go to do, go buy me a bottle of hair dye?”
“Well…”
“Jesus Christ, you’ve already planned it.”
“Scully –”
She slams her hands on the sink.
“No, don’t do that, don’t you dare say my name like that.” She wipes her mouth with a stiffly bleached hand towel and tosses it away as she glares at him in the mirror. “Don’t say my name like that. Scully, be a team player. Scully, be reasonable. Scully, understand my latest fucking crusade. Scully, be quiet while I make all the decisions about our life.”
He glares back and she can see their son in his eyes. His voice is wounded and spiteful, the voice of the future teenager they would not raise. “Well, not all the decisions.”
She hears her hand slap across his face before she even realizes she’s turned around. Her palm burns and his cheek blooms a pink splotch, but she feels no regret. She has none left to give.
“I didn’t mean that. I know you had to do it,” he says and encircles her body in his arms, hands flat on the small of her back. “I’m sorry,” he says as she pushes at his chest in vain. He takes her forearms and tries to place them at her side, but she shakes him off and stabs at him – his shoulders, his face, whatever she can reach. Her body ricochets back, bottom thumping the sink like a tambourine.
“Scully, I didn’t –” Her skin crawls.
“Don’t touch me –”
“Scully—” Hot tears gather in the corners of her eyes.
“You left me there with him, you left me to make that decision—“
“I know.”
“I hate you,” she says, quietly, an experiment. Her fists slowly clench against his chest.
“Scully—” He fastens his grip behind her back and lets her struggle inside his hold.
“I hate you.” Her hands grope and scramble up his t-shirt, tearing it up off his skin like grass. He grunts and flinches as she leaves pink finger-distanced margins on his torso. And then, as if to give her more of him to hurt, he pulls the grey t-shirt over his head and grabs her face, kissing her hard with closed lips.
He ignores the bite she takes out of his lip, not letting her go. The taste of his blood in her mouth is a poultice, it settles her. She waits, breathing deeply, lips pressing but still. Her gums begin to throb from the pressure of their faces.
And then, with her rage thrumming in the back of her head, she just barely hears it. The sound of his pleasure, a subtle appliance-like hum he gives off without meaning to. She feels torn between a scream, a cry, and a moan, and settles once again with the only safe choice-- silence.
He senses her restlessness and speaks without moving his lips away, shoving the words into her mouth at point blank range.
“I love you.”
“Fuck you.” She’s never said it to him before, not like that, not in a way that didn’t mean “You’re cheating on this round of Monopoly,” or “I told you to take a left up there,” or “I can reach it myself.” She feels steam seep from her hot open pores and her spine soften.
He retaliates with a lift of her waist and drops her on the plastic-coated countertop. She falls back onto her hands and tiny bottles of off-brand shampoo topple onto her knuckles, clattering against one another. The edge of the formica cuts into her hamstrings like a knife. Go ahead and cut me open, she thinks, give me my autopsy on this motel bathroom counter, let’s see if there is anything left inside.
And there are the sounds he packed amongst his things and took with him a year ago. The modest rolling of her shirt down her arms and under her breasts. The fumble of four hands at his zipper, pushing and shoving for the honors. The thump of her head on the mirror when he tries and fails to take her like a lion does a deer, his jaw snapping open and shut over her clavicle while she reels.
The strings of her panties twist beneath her ass as he pulls them down her legs, rubber-banding against her calves as she finally lifts herself to let them by, pressing her body against the head of his cock while she has the opportunity. She sighs long and hard at the smoothness, the shape of him. There is something that needs no sound at all.
“This what makes you wet now? Telling me you hate me?” She feels her cotton panties scrape over her ankles and looks down to watch him push them to the floor with his foot. He spreads her thighs further and looks her dead in the eyes. He’s inside her all at once and her breath seethes like there’s a broken valve somewhere. He broke it and he better fix it.
She gasps, curls her fingers tight in his hair, bruising their cheekbones together like rocks. He escapes and cranes his mouth around the side of her neck, finally biting into her with his teeth bared. A moan abruptly escapes her lips and she strains to choke it, afraid it’ll halt his meal of her.
But instead he closes his wet lips over the bite, sucks until he draws the blood to the surface. His spread fingers dig into her ass and she returns the favor to his shoulders, creating deep half moons in his muscles, imagining in vivid detail the epidermal cells collecting under her nail beds. If he disappears tomorrow, this time she’ll have the DNA to prove he was there.
His hand wedges between their bodies, spanning to squeeze as much of both her breasts as it can. She scrapes her heels into the tightly curved muscles of his ass, messy Saturnesque rings of clothing still hanging over his hips.
His hips move like a wave and he nudges her face until she’s right in front of him and he can level his gaze at her, sink his teeth into her again, this time straight through her soul. He’s inside her, he’s outside her, inside her again, and at some point, he takes her arms and brings them round her back, grasping both her wrists in the grip of one hand. He pins them there and she rolls back on her coccyx bone, keeping her forehead on his body, closing her mouth over his pectoral muscle when sound travels up her throat. He tugs her back by her wrists.
“Let me hear you.”
Silence.
He pulls out and she struggles to grab him, touch herself, anything but this emptiness, but he only squeezes her wrists tighter.
“I missed you,” he pants, his free hand under her chin, his chest heaving, eyes looking for her.
“Don’t.”
He pulls her wrists toward the mirror, laying her out in front of him so he can bend over her.
“Fine. I missed this, your body. I missed your tits.”
She wonders if he’s trying to make her laugh, but his face is solemn and hungry. He touches the very tip of his tongue to one nipple, then the other, then blows from one to the other. His breath hits her like an Arctic chill and she squirms against the counter, tailbone sparking like drilled concrete. She wraps her legs round his thighs and squeezes.
“Don’t – Just – fuck you,” she says again, because she remembers how good it felt to say moments ago. It feels even better with the tip of his tongue tracing featherweight figure eights around her clit.
“I missed your pussy. How tight it is, how wet.” She groans and rubs her head against the mirror for leverage, wiggling forward, trying to slide that tight, wet pussy against the mouth that summoned it. He is, as always, just out of reach.
She throws her weight and manages to slide off the counter as he stands upright, her breasts trailing through his chest hair, tank top bunching into a thin roll around her ribs. The moment he lets her wrists go, she pushes him.
“Bed,” she says, walking by, but he rakes her in at the ribs, holds her in his forearm with her back to him. The shower curtain shrieks open.
“You need to cool off,” he says as he leans to turn the shower on, jeans and boxers taut around his thighs. There is the squeak of the faucet. There is the water falling. Just like that morning. She pushes against his arm, then slaps with both hands, trying to escape.
“Mulder. Mulder.” But he lifts her over the ledge of the tub. And as he moves to place her inside it, she anticipates the sound of her feet clapping the ground, of completing the reenactment of her least favorite radioplay. She pushes the wall away with her hands, her bare bottom resisting his belly.
“Get in,” he says and turns the nozzle so that it hits her square in the back. She exhales hard against the freezing cold water.
“No.”
“Get in!” There is her laughter between sharp, shivery breaths.
“No.” Her feet flail, kicking up as he tries to lower her. She finds the ledge with the balls of her feet, smooth and rectangular, droplets of shower spray making echoey rubbing noises under her callouses. She presses stubbornly with all four limbs, like a cat trying to avoid being put into its carrier, like a human tension rod. “I’m not getting in.”
Seemingly satisfied with this position, he turns off the water and she spreads her legs, one of her feet slipping slightly. She thinks of the bed, thinks this is dangerous, thinks of herself having to give a fake name at the hospital. But he grabs her hips tight.
“I’ve got you,” he says under his breath, a stagehand giving her a line she’s forgotten. He drags her hips closer to him and her hands slide a few tiles down on the wall. She feels long and sexy bent over the tub, the ends of her hair and nipples sending off drops off water to ping the chipped ceramic beneath her. She hears him panting for her.
“I missed you,” he repeats like a challenge.
“I don’t care. Make me come.”
He enters her painfully slowly this time, inching in until she feels his pelvis flat against her bottom.
“I missed your ass,” he says as he fucks her in perfect rhythm with her heartbeat. “I missed the way it moves when you walk, the way it bruises in my hands, the way you push it back against me when you want me to fuck you harder.” He obliges her as his words begin to slur; it makes his voice seem even more like a dream. “You feel sofuckinggood.”
Her arm muscles tremble and her knees threaten to buckle. He slides his hands up the front of her slick body, slowing for the speed bump of her shirt and takes one breast in his hand, his forearm crossed under the other. She lets her weight displace itself into his arms, lets her feet feel precariously light on the wet ledge. “Tell me it feels good.”
She blows out her mouth to divert water dripping down off her nose.
“Tell me,” he says, but she turns her face and buries her mouth on her bicep. He pulls her hair to make her arch her body back toward him, grunting as his cock grazes the very end of her – or at least, what she thinks is the end. In a moment, he is climbing over the ledge between her legs, fly of his jeans clanging, shaft of his cock seeking more of her. She gasps and brings her feet to the floor beside his, stands on her tiptoes and rolls her hips even further forward. His knees bend to accommodate her and his jeans are like horsehair against her wet legs. As her breasts brush the cold tile, she thinks of the strength in the back of his thighs, the dip of his glutes as they lead down his legs. His dick is somewhere between her lungs now and she breathes deeply, as if she could make them swell with air and touch him. She feels safe nestled there between the wall and his chest, his chin and his cock.
Mulder rests an arm beside her on the wall and his breath whirls in her ear like a conch shell. She tries to remember what it is people say – that you can hear the ocean, that you can hear the future, that you can hear the gods. She’ll settle for hearing him.
“I’m going to come so hard in a minute and I’m not waiting for you unless you tell me to,” he says. “So hard.” His hands run over her hungrily, and one finally rests on her clit. “Goddamit, Scully, this is me.”
“No.”
“Dana,” he begs. She feels her breath snag on her name like a nail.
“Break me.”
His hands flex gamely against her thigh and her clit. Her throat plays her voice like a record player now. Her moans come easily and slippery, skipping occasionally and repeating. He drives her up and down the wall, fucks her harder than anyone ever has, rubs her unrelentingly until she is twitching in his arms and her toes white against the hard, hollow bathtub. Her ass spreads against the flat, rippled skin of his prison-pushup body.
She wants to tell him she’s ready to come, but she can’t find the words, so she flattens her cheek to the tile and he understands, moves closer. He covers her body with his own, as if she might move, as if she might not be willing to live here on her tiptoes dripping freezing cold water onto his dry body for the rest of her life.
“Oh… fuck… yessssss…” she says on the downbeats of her orgasm, her voice crisp and victorious. His dick throbs as he comes too, vibrating like a tuning fork from the percussive strikes of her body. Her name buzzes up his vocal chords like a lullaby.
“Scully… Scully… Scully…” She can hear the years ahead of her come spinning back into place.
She moans one last time as he drags his hands down the back of her body and then stills, warming her like a blanket. The faucet drips, punctuating the breaths that escape their mouths and stick to the tile. He ducks his head into the nook of her neck.
“You are everything to me. Everything.” There is not a single molecule of air separating her from his words. There is nothing about him that is out of reach. Her face is streaked with hard water and mascara.
“Talk to me all night,” she whispers and thinks of the pajamas in her bag.
“You haven’t heard enough?”
“Your mouth got really filthy on the run.”
There is the soft rake of his nose in her wet hair. The quiet chuckle he uses to subdue his sentiment. The rustle of the starchy towel unraveling as he reaches for it and wraps it around her shoulders. Her finger is poised over the volume button, hovering over the up-arrow.
She closes her eyes to listen to him begin the way he always does.
“Scully.”