Work Text:
It’s her day off and she’s working in the garden. He watches from inside, a hot cup of coffee in each hand, the morning haze clicking with locusts and separating them like a second window. He wonders if it’s like this for the students who observe her in the operating theater, if they know how fortuitous it is to find themselves hovering above her at a window.
Outside, she applies the same furrowed concentration of her autopsy days to this new bucolic hobby; lips pursed, brow twitching, neither disgusted nor pleased as she roots out the decay, studies the cause of death. She moves to the porch steps and tiptoes her fingers into tiny plastic containers of violets, makes homes for them amidst earthworms. These days, Scully works mostly with the living.
He’s jealous of this – Scully and her work – he gets so little of either of them. As he leans out on his palms, the sun drapes itself over his Hanes t-shirt like an orange cape. He squints to see if there are splotches of pink forming on her near-translucent skin. Her baby blue tank top is so soaked with her sweat that it makes shadowy Venn diagrams between her breasts. Thank God for small favors: at least there are no handsome dermatologists in the garden.
She moves her long cherry popsicle-colored hair like a squid, trying to stop it from cloying to her skin or dangling its tentacle in her work. Finally, she stands up straight and scrapes her hands up into it, giving him her good morning half-smile, slightly rueful, just slightly possessed of the fact that it’s nearly eleven and she’s been up five hours. She uses a twisty tie from the plants to secure her hair away from her face, marking herself an azalea. Nothing - not him or the heat or her hair, will stop her from trying to love this garden.
By the time he comes out with her coffee, she is kneeling over a bed of something – chrysanthemums, he thinks. He swipes a bare foot at the sliver of inked, exposed back poking out from under her shirt.
“Hey,” he says and she turns her face up, squinting at the sun. “You want to take a break from communing with nature? It’s your only day off for the next ten days.”
“Are you asking me to commune with you instead?”
“Come on, Scully. Stop pretending you don’t hate gardening.”
“I like gardening… ” She surveys the acreage of their home lovingly, guiltily, and then finally concedes with the tiniest of breaths.
“I’ll finish it tomorrow when I mow the lawn,” he says, trying to assuage her conscience.
“Well, I could use a break.”
He follows her into the kitchen and rests his chin on her head as her fingernails bleed black dirt into the sink.
“They have special gloves for that.”
“I wear gloves every day of the week.”
He places a thumb over that sliver of back and makes his best snake noise.
“I haven’t seen this little guy in a while.”
“At least two weeks.”
“Our schedules are just off.”
She doesn’t let him off the hook but doesn’t shrug him away either, doesn’t remind him he doesn’t actually have a schedule.
“You better say goodbye.”
“To you? You’re leaving me for falling asleep before sex?” He watches her grin spread in the reflection of the window.
“To the ‘little guy’.”
“What?” He tries to hand her a cup of coffee as she turns to dries her hands, but she refuses in favor of the fridge. He collects his thoughts as it huffs open. “The tattoo? You’re getting it removed?”
She holds a glass pitcher of lemonade against her chest, curve of the carafe nestled into the tops of her breasts. He’s vaguely aware he’d be turned on if he wasn’t in the process of being consumed by pre-emptive betrayal.
“How? Does that really work?”
“The lasers they use now do quite well.”
“I thought it was part of you, it was important to you, it was an experience, etcetera etcetera.” He waits for her to be offended at his catchalling of her feelings. But she simply pours the lemonade into a glass and gulps, speaks with the compromised voice of an almost-swallow.
“It was. But things are very different now. I have my health, I have you. I have the…” she takes a deep, inclusive breath, “garden.”
“What brought this about?”
“I’ve become very aware of it in the locker room at work. My colleagues have of course shown restraint.”
“You’re getting it removed because you’re afraid people will think you’re a wild child? Scully, I think you can rest easy.” As if to show him how bored she is with his arguments, she folds her tank top up over her belly, holding the sweating carafe there and subjecting it to melting heat of her tight stomach. Two ice cubes shift and clink against one another.
“Mulder, what is the problem? I thought you’d be happy about this? I thought you hated the thing.”
“It’s part of you. It’s been there since…”
“It’s certainly been there the past two weeks,” she says with an irresistibly-raised eyebrow.
He pounces at her and grabs her shirt, wet folds wrinkling between his fingers. She smiles and wipes her still dirt-stained hands on his chest, reaching up for a quick kiss. She smells like earth, sweet and salty, ripened kettle corn.
“When? Where?”
“Soon. Just at the hospital. They have the equipment in Dermatology.” He can’t help it. He doesn’t even have time to help it.
“Are you fucking kidding me? Klein’s doing it?”
“He offered.” She does not even bother to sound defensive.
“When the fuck did he see it?” She shoves him away and sighs deep in her chest.
“Stop it, Mulder.”
“He offered?”
“No! I meant, I asked about it and he offered to do it for free.”
“Of course he’ll do it for free.” He can’t remember feeling this jealous since… well, since she got the fucking tattoo in the first place. He wonders which instance is more irrational on his part, and decides to do the math later. The tone of her voice picks up its even, scalpel-sharp edge.
“Mulder, this is not cute. It is insulting and appalling. Dr. Klein is a colleague of mine and the extent of our personal relationship is that he occasionally drops me home from work, so that I can leave you our car to do whatever it is you do when you say you’re working on something, which by the way I never surmise has anything to do with infidelity despite the fact that you give me zero details and could be with literally anyone in the world.”
She places her hands on her hips and tilts her chin toward the bedroom.
“And for the most part, when I get out of Dr. Klein’s car, I go upstairs immediately, take off my clothes and wonder if by the time I’m done washing my face, you’ll be lucid enough to fuck me from behind, at which time you might see that fucking tattoo of which you suddenly are so fond. Of course, at those times you are never jealous enough to be wide awake, waiting at window, ready to strip me naked, but are instead inevitably and consistently dead asleep with a laptop or a book on your chest. Am I resentful?”
He bites his lip.
“A little. Sounds like it, a little.”
Cool as a cucumber but dripping with sweat, cursing and keeping her temper, a tiny embodiment of contradiction. He’s annoyed, impressed and also aware that she’s wearing that bra he likes because it has no lining. He softens his tone.
“You didn’t even think to ask me if I’d care?” She walks toward the stairs.
“I didn’t ask you if I could get it, why would I ask you if I could remove it?”
“Oh come on, Scully. Do not make comparisons of handsome Dr. Klein with Ed Jerse and not expect me to think you’re sleeping with him.”
She sighs, shaking her head, and starts to take the stairs slowly and quietly, relishing the upper hand he’s given her by accusing her of things he doesn’t even believe himself.
“Okay, I don’t think you’re sleeping with him. I just really don’t want you to remove it.” She turns, halfway up the steps, moves a piece of her falling hair with the back of her hand, streaking her cheek with remnants of soil.
“Why not?”
“It’s sexy.”
“Since when?”
“And I don’t like change.”
“What is this really about?”
He looks around the foyer, peeking into the other rooms, as if the answer might be sitting somewhere like a set of misplaced keys. In one room, there’s “because it was there the first time we had sex,” in another, “because it was the first in a series of events that made me realize I was violently in love with you.” He leaves them both. This is how it is lately. His thoughts seem to want to be left alone.
“You wouldn’t understand.”
He scratches at the grains of wood on the bannister, clawing for the right thing to say. The subject has suddenly grown to unmanageable universe-tipping proportions and he longs to shrink it back down to the irascible but trivial nugget of tattoo removal.
“I need a shower. I smell like worms,” she says in a pitch that makes it clear it is not an invitation. She pulls her tank top off as she walks up the rest of the stairs. He can see her knuckles grip it the way he grips a baseball when he’s containing frustration, and she grips it tighter still at his last demand.
“If you’re going to do it, at least don’t let him do it.”
She spins on the landing and throws the tank top at his face. He catches it against his chest.
“For fuck’s sake. You want to act like some territorial meathead? You want to claim me? Then go ahead and do it, Mulder. But you could at least make it worth my while, while you’re at it.”
His mouth opens to speak and his eyes blink repeatedly. For a moment his need to finish things, to win, to get to the bottom of a thing, seems prescient. They can have sex anytime; right now he must make his point.
But then she turns, feet finally ready to march, to stomp, and his eyes lock upon the red-green circle of ink he’s fighting so hard for. He catches her with one long outstretched arm in the belt hook of her chinos, drops to a knee on the second to last step, and holds her waist in one hand. Once he’s got his balance, he brings the other hand to her stomach, cradling it as he drags his lips in the shallow pools of sweat sitting in the slope of her lower back.
She makes herself like jelly, lets him take her by the hips and turn her around to face him. He unbuttons her fly and drops her pants with a tug, finds nothing beneath them. He looks up at her, nose brushing against her warm, wet skin.
“Day off.”
She gasps and grabs the bannister when his mouth touches her, moans quietly while he works her over with his tongue. Her sweat, heavy with salt and sunscreen – zinc, maybe coconut - stings his lip just under the nose, draws his thirst. His hands slide all along her torso and she traps one over her breast, urging him to bring her soft nipple to its full potential through the damp fabric. As she grinds into his bottom lip, she begs him to finish her with his dick. He waits long enough for the retraction of that plea, waits long enough for her to want to come right here, one knee buckling against his cheekbone.
When she’s finished, she sinks slowly, sits bare-assed on the old oak floor with her knees framing his waist. He grunts and kisses the dirt on her cheek, rubbing hopefully up against the crest of the stair that holds her weight.
“Mulder, I have to tell you something and I don’t ever want you to bring it up again,” she whispers.
“You’re fucking Dr. Klein?”
“I hate gardening.” Her kiss is lemony and sweet and his cock tingles as he imagines the way she tastes to herself, spritzed with citrus. How can he always fall asleep? How can he ever be asleep?
“The tattoo reminds me that if I take you for granted, you will leave me.”
She searches his eyes over her slightly sunburnt nose, quietly assessing his sincerity and trading it with her own.
“I’ll keep it,” she says, slowly bringing a hand to the button of his jeans as she stares into his eyes. “But I’m never going to leave you.”