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RATING: R

CLASSIFICATION: Mulder/Scully Romance, Vignette

SPOILERS: Orison

SUMMARY: Mulder shuts the door, wanting both to touch her and not touch her. She seems a rare creature, holy in her suffering.

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This story was written for the prompts Mulder/Scully, another dark forest, autumn, patience is not a virtue, she was a spy, this is the way it happens, traitor, two-way mirror.

Thanks to Scarlet Baldy for the beta.

***

This is the way it happens.

Scully comes to the door with her overnight bag in hand. Her face is scuffed with the wounds of another battle, veiled with the shadows of another dark forest. She walks beneath Mulder's arm to stand in his living room, looking lost and uneasy. She sets her bag down.

Mulder shuts the door, wanting both to touch her and not touch her. She seems a rare creature, holy in her suffering.

"Thank you for letting me stay," she says quietly.

"Of course. Anything else you need?"

Scully rehearsed this in her head on the car ride over. Reality is a different matter, but she steps towards to him and slowly, deliberately, runs her finger down the front of his shirt. She hooks one finger between the fourth and fifth button. Then she looks up with eyes like a two-way mirror. "Make it go away," she whispers.

Time stretches and shimmers before he speaks gently to her. "Scully, I don't think this is the ri-"

"Patience is not a virtue." She lets go of his shirt and unbuttons her own.

Wrong, wrong, wrong, he thinks as he moves closer. Wrong to want her when she's broken and wrong to push her blouse off her body like this and wrong to kiss her cracked lips. Wrong to slide your hands over her battered back while she looks at you with wide eyes. You just watched those fingers on your chest kill a man. She doesn't know what she's doing. You don't know what you're doing.

But she was a spy and he was a traitor, and they both know what they are doing after all. Somehow they manage to make it to his bed, scattering clothes across the floor like autumn leaves.

Streetlamps and moonglow filter in through the curtains, striating bed and bodies with thin slices of light. Mulder runs a hand from Scully's chin down to the narrow saddle of her hips, noting that her nipples are wine-dark in the dim room. When he bends his head to take one into his mouth, it feels like a raspberry against his tongue. She arches beneath him until the sharp wings of her shoulder blades just skim the sheet.

Mulder is mindful of all the ways in which is she is fragile and wills himself to be careful. He follows the sweep of her jaw with his thumb then, softly, presses his lips to her bruised neck. When he moves into her, she says his name in a voice that gives him pause. It isn't Scully's voice - or even Dana's voice - but a woman's voice. He breathes her in and, instead of the polished workaday scent of her perfume and hairspray, she gives off the warm, sweet aroma of a woman's skin.

Scully clutches his shoulders, murmuring half-formed thoughts into his hair. "Please," she whispers, not even sure what she's asking for. She wants him to cover her, to drown her, to save her. Thirty-four minutes of scalding water and apricot scrub had not purged Donnie Pfaster from her skin, but the safe weight of Mulder's body atop hers promises to do so.

At least for a time.

***

Scully wakes at one AM, possibly from a nightmare, though she can't recall. She hadn't meant to sleep.

Mulder is on the other side of the bed, breathing evenly. His eyes slide open as she stirs, and he sits up, blinking. "You okay?"

She looks at her scraped hands. "I was just...the couch, I-"

He leans over to kiss her hair, then gathers her to him. Scully traces his face with the tip of her finger before resting her head below his shoulder. She dreams there until morning.

****

The End.

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