Gnossiennes
She wasn't Scully, then. She was Dana, a small spritely girl who had a gentle smile, a happy laugh, and a penchant for fields and books. At eighteen, in her white knee socks and blue skirt, her Oxford still tucked carefully in -she runs across the football field with Caroline and Sarah laughing behind her. It is May, the end of high school, and she's laughing and tripping over the muddy field, out of breath and feeling alive.
"Dana, come back, what are you doing?" Caroline calls, her smile sweetening her tone.
Dana whirls around, throwing her arms out and looking up at the dusky pink and orange sky. The world has such a sense of possibility, now, in this moment. As if she is holding it in her hand and has the power to throw it in the air or let it plummet to the ground. She closes her eyes.
She hears Sarah laugh, then feels someone clasp her hand, tugging her back to reality. "Come on, they're probably there already." Sarah says, tickling Dana's side.
Her hair is hopelessly curling in the humid air, and her mouth still tastes sweet from the Jolly Rancher she'd had on the way to the field. They climb into Caroline's car, Dana breathing hard from her spontaneous run, sweat on her neck, and a tired smile loosening her features.
She winces as Elliot Miller pulls at her ponytail in the back of his mother's car five hours later, another hand up her shirt. Dana quickly shakes her hair out of his grasp, buries her face in his neck as another hand slithers up her skirt. She's never been with anyone else, so Dana has no idea if he's good at this or not. She nips at his ear and grinds her hips against his fumbling hand. She's still a virgin.
"Is that good?" he asks, somewhat uncertainly, panting. He's in her same year, tall and gangly,from a family who could afford to send him to college four times over. Scully nods, and the hand that had been squeezing her chest goes down to his fly.
Before he can awkwardly wriggle out of his pants in the back of a car, Scully straddles him again, pressing her hips into his and kissing him hard on the mouth. She feels his penis brush against her cotton underwear, and reaches one hand down to touch him. He comes in her hand with a groan, and Scully resists the urge to chuckle.
It's the end of high school, and she's gracefully climbing out of Elliot's car, smoothing her hair back into place, squaring her shoulders, and wiping across her lips to remove the smudged lipstick.
"See you at graduation," she says, offering a friendly smile as he tumbles out from the car, looking at her incredulously.
"Yeah-" he chokes out, and Dana waves before turning and beginning the walk back home. Four blocks. Home. What would her father think of her, knowing she was making boys come in their pants in the sweaty backseats of cars?
What would he think of the cigarette she's smoking, now, on the back porch, taking practiced drags? His little girl. He's off at sea and won't be back in time to see her watch across that stage on Saturday, head held high, graduating second in her class. Dana flicks the cigarette on the step she's sitting on, looking out to the dark horizon line.
"I wish you wouldn't do that."
Dana startles, then relaxes at the sound of her mother's voice. "I'm not," she says, squishing the cigarette into a sad little pile, then brushing it away with a hand. She feels her mother sigh tiredly, sitting beside her on the cement steps.
"Your father is proud of you," Maggie whispers, drawing her daughter's body into hers. Dana is in her pajamas -leggings and a large grey t-shirt, her little bare feet already calloused and ready for summer. She nuzzles her mother's neck, and Maggie smoothes her hair back, kissing the top of her head. "You know he'd be here if he could."
Dana nods. She hears a seagull, maybe two of them. "That's not what's bothering you, though. Is it?"
"No. I don't know," Dana's voice is small and thoughtful.
Maggie rocks her a little. "I know it's a big thing, sweetie. Growing up."
Dana sniffs. "I'm not going to miss the uniforms."
Maggie laughs quietly. There is a long pause, then Dana finds her voice again. "I'm just confused, that's all."
"Confused about what, sweetie?" Maggie asks, tipping her daughter's head up to look into her face. So young, still.
"Everything, I guess."
Dana waits until she's in her apartment to cry. If this is love then it's horrifying, she thinks, keeping the lights off as she curls into bed, tears falling down over the bridge of her nose where her glasses usually perch.
She's twenty-two years old, and she's already ruined her life. She loves him, she's sure of that, but when he collapsed, sweaty, on her back and moaned 'I love you' into her ear Dana had immediately brushed him off and dressed. She's been spreading her legs on expensive silk sheets for months for this man whose intellect attracts her to him like a moth to light. A married man, she groans, thinking of how Daniel likes it -him curled over her with her on her hands and knees. Immediately, words appear red in front of her. Slut. Whore. Sleeping with her professor, carrying on a hotel room affair.
What would her parents think of her if they knew? Her stomach immediately plummets at the thought. She thinks of Daniel's little daughter and imagines her at that age, seeing a redheaded adulteress squirming under her father in a rented bed. God, what has she done. A hot flush of shame sears across her entire body, and Dana buries her head in the pillow.
She can still smell his sweat on her neck.
Jack gets turned on when she mentions her Catholic school days in passing, and jokingly suggests a sort of role-play that makes Dana slightly nauseous. In bed, after a decidedly traditional half hour of sex, she turns her cross over and over in her warm fingers. She wonders why she wears it, and closes her eyes against the rush of mortification when she realizes she only speaks to God when she wants something.
Her taste in men is puzzling. Always older, always higher in rank than her, always intellectual. A married professor and now her Academy instructor. She lets her cross fall onto her dewy skin and decides that tonight will be the last night with Jack. And, after him, no more inappropriate relationships.
She's standing in front of a projector, blue and green flickering light staining her face, and the asshole manning it is taunting her. Dana walks a slow half moon, calmly deflecting his wild claims involving the paranormal and assaulting him with straight science. And he's smiling at her like she's a child with ice cream dripping down her hand and smeared across her face.
He's taunting her, thinking he's wearing her down, but Dana is matching him stroke by stroke, and she sees, after ten minutes, how his shoulders relax and his demeanor shifts. It seems that they've called it a draw, and now when he talks to her it's not to tease, but to test. In one moment, she feels the ground level out between them as they toss theories back and forth. It is arousing, Dana realizes with a lurch, to be matched fearlessly by an intellectual equal. They are worlds apart, he's confident they are not alone in the cosmos, and she's fiercely protecting anything she can touch with her bare hands.
Dana doesn't realize it, then, but she does later. It is in that hour that she sheds a layer like an onion, and pulls on a new one, one that holds a gun and works with a man named Fox. Dana leaves, and now she is Scully.
A warmth washes over her as Mulder walks into her hospital room bearing a stupid tape and a bunch of flowers he bought at the hospital gift shop as an afterthought. He gives her a shy smile in front of her mother, and Scully thanks God when she sees how his posture noticeably relaxes at the sight of her. Later, she will find out that while even her family gave up on her ever coming back, Mulder spent every waking moment trying to find her.
A disease is ravaging her body, eating away at her from the inside out, and Scully is heartbeats away from telling Mulder that it's too much. Too much traveling, too much weight on her shoulders, too long on her feet in an autopsy bay. She is furious. Furious at the cancer, furious about her stained shirt collars and the faint scent of vomit that seems to accompany her everywhere she goes. But, above all else, she is desperately furious at Mulder.
He looks at her and tries to see past the tumor growing between her eyes, tries to ignore it, as she has done so deftly for these past few months. But Scully sees his pity, his sorrow, when blood trickles down to her lip, or when she touches his arm and he pulls the car over so she can heave by the side of the road. She hates it.
She reminds herself of how angry she is as she lays in a motel room with her hand down her pants under the sheets, all the lights off except the infernal flickering of the neon VACANCY sign that bleeds through the cheap curtains. Scully touches herself and reminds herself of how unfair this is. She spreads her legs further apart and makes a frustrated noise, squeezing her eyes closed and imagining her faceless lover touching her in this way. Once again she reminds herself of all the ways Mulder infuriates her, biting her lip and running her free hand over her breast to hurry things along.
He's in the next room, she can hear the low murmur of the TV, another thing to add to the list of things that annoy her, and suddenly Scully wonders if maybe he's touching himself, too, and thinking of her. All at once, her dark-haired, anonymous lover takes on Mulder's face, and Scully groans, turning her head to gasp into the pillow, her body stilling as her orgasm runs its course.
It seems appropriate that, when they make love for the first time, it is borne out of pain. Sex is what rises from the ashes when Mulder's mother dies and Scully cradles him to her chest, willing away his anger. It isn't what either of them wanted. How either of them imagined or wanted this to be.
On his couch, Scully's pants thrown somewhere across the room and Mulder's bunched at his ankles, they thrust into each other like horny teenagers hoping to get a sloppy orgasm before the parents walk in. Mulder comes too fast, Scully doesn't even get close, and they don't say anything afterward.
At four in the morning Mulder reaches for her again, and Scully mindlessly crawls onto his lap, rests her forehead on his shoulder as she starts to sleepily circle her hips over him. He almost cries remembering how he treated her before, and pulls her up to move his hands over her back, her arms, her face, kissing her breasts and whispering unintelligible things against them. This time, Scully comes, and she wilts like a plucked flower in his arms, breathing heavily and wiping her brow while Mulder keeps kissing her chest and shoulders, almost to comfort himself in some way.
It shouldn't have happened like this.
The second time, they are sloppy from alcohol, and Scully slips away from him before dawn, her tousled hair betraying her to a curious neighbor who had been kept up around midnight by the noises emanating from apartment below her.
They are in Scully's bed, surrounded by her soft duvet and the neutral colors he's come to associate with her. The Scully under the dark trench coat, away from work, surrounds herself with warm colors and sleeps in a bed that feels like a cloud.
She doesn't really get much out of this position, but it's comfortable, and Scully likes to see his face, feel his body over hers. He grabs her leg, pulls it up under her knee, and spreads her out and open. The new angle lets him slide into her fully, and Scully rakes her fingernails over his back.
Sometimes she has trouble letting her mind go. She spends too much time analyzing their rapidly shifting relationship, and tries to ignore the fact that again she's sleeping with a co-worker. She spends time thinking when she should be forgetting and surrendering herself to sensation.
Mulder asks her if it was okay after they curl up together, and Scully nods. She loves him. She knows this, and it scares her. She's trying to distance herself from him, because the closer they become, the more devastating it will be to lose him. So, she tells him "Mmmh" and makes a humming sound in her throat, nuzzling into his neck. This seems to please him, and he presses a kiss to the top of her head, to her cheek, her nose.
Springfield, Illinois. His room is two down from hers, and he shuffles into a pair of sweatpants before going to her at midnight when the power goes out. She opens her door looking sleepy and surprised, looking past him to the shining parking lot, slick with rapidly falling rain. Thunder roars from above, and Scully's voice is drowned out when she tells him to come in.
"Power went out," Mulder explains, shivering slightly. Scully moves to turn on the light, then remembers, and laughs a small laugh.
"Why did you come to my room?" She's not accusing, just curious.
Mulder sits on her bed and chuckles. "Wanna check me for mosquito bites?"
Scully lets out another little embarrassed laugh, crawling up into the bed and grabbing a pillow to hold. Suddenly they are like children staying up past their bedtime, frightened during a storm. "God, I was such a kid."
"No, just a little know it all." It's a joke. He waits for any backlash, and is pleased when he doesn't receive any. Mulder inhales imperceptibly. He does this whenever he visits her motel rooms, because it fascinates him how she can live somewhere for an hour and make it smell like home, like her.
Behind him, Scully breathes deeply, slowly. When he turns to look at her, her expression is nostalgic and sad. "You changed my perception of everything, Mulder."
He considers her for a moment. "I was trying to scare you off."
Scully smiles to herself, then looks over at him. "I'm glad you didn't succeed."
"Scully"
"Hmm?" She reclines on the bed now, light from outside coming in and casting strange fractured shadows over her face.
"Do you ever regret it? Working with me? When you could have had a whole other life…"
Scully doesn't answer for a long moment, and suddenly Mulder realizes he had asked the question to reassure himself that she had no regrets. Now, he's worried.
"Sometimes, I…" Scully has an arm thrown up around her head and one hand is resting casually on her ribcage. "I wonder about what that 'other life' would look like. Sometimes, I think about what my regrets would be had I not joined the F.B.I."
Her answer is rather cryptic. She senses his uncertainty. "But, Mulder, I enjoy working with you. You challenge me. We challenge each other. I like the unpredictability of it all."
"Sometimes, I resent things that have happened to me since we started working together. But I've never thought of blaming you for any of it. I know you worry about that." She's right, it keeps him up at night, it torments him every time he sits beside her hospital bed.
Mulder scoots back onto the bed so they're sitting together like Boy Scouts about to build a fire. He smiles at her. "You were so green."
Scully's eyes light up. "And you took full advantage of it. You laughed at me."
"I never laughed at you!"
Scully nods, the corners of her mouth tipping up.
"If I was laughing at you," Mulder continues, "it would have been an attempt to cover up how hard I fell for you."
Her smile stretches to a grin. "You did? Really?"
Mulder's expression dims a bit. "You didn't know?"
Scully shrugs. "I guess I never thought about it, back then. I was too focused on proving you wrong."
They sit in companionable silence as the rain trickles down onto the roof and thunder rolls in the distance. Mulder looks over at Scully, his body warming with arousal. He likes her like this, with her hair mussed from sleep, her face scrubbed back to freckles with her beauty mark plainly visible.
Scully looks at him and is surprised by what she sees in his face, even in the dark. It is something she hasn't seen before, an expression so undiluted and intense that she feels a blush coming up from her chest to her cheeks.
"I want to kiss you," he says, and suddenly it is the most beautiful thing she has ever heard. She waits, eyes open, and her heart flutters as their lips meet. It is the romantic thing anyone has ever said or done to her, which is strange considering how utterly simple and honest his statement had been. His mouth moves over hers a bit insistently, now, and Scully lets her eyes roll back into her head.
It feels as if they've been kissing for hours, and Scully feels abandoned when he suddenly moves away from her lips. She hopes it won't be like this, boring and mundane, like a couple who has lost their spark. But whatever he has in mind doesn't seem to involve their bodies coming together, at least not yet.
Mulder has left her lips and is unbuttoning her pajama top, peeling it off her to reveal skin that glows in the half-light. Scully's nimble fingers reach for him and yank his shirt off, as well. This is already different. All the previous times they've been together, clothing had come off in a hurry. They had left trails or tears, but this time they are careful with each other.
He eases her back on the bed and reaches under her hips to ease down her pajamas and underwear. He can always count on her to wear cotton to bed. The smooth plane of her abdomen is revealed to him, and he leans down to kiss her there. Scully is moving to rid him of his sweatpants when he pushes her gently down again and kneels by the side of the bed, pulling her to him and running his fingertips along her inner thighs.
Scully's eyes shoot open and her entire body tenses. No one has done this to her before. Daniel had offered, but the fact that he'd tossed the topic around with such casualness turned her off to the subject. Jack hadn't seemed to want anything more than a quick fuck, any way he could get inside her would do, and he was never one to do things for others. Somehow, it is intensely comforting to know that Mulder will be the first to do this to her. And when, inevitably, he kisses her sweetly between her thighs, Scully is immediately at a loss for words.
He moves his tongue over her curiously for a moment, then pulls back to ask her something, and Scully makes a wordless sound, tugging him back to her and running her nails maddeningly through his hair as he moves his tongue in incredible circles, focusing on just the right parts of her. Scully never wants it to stop.
Whereas before Mulder had taken the lead, Scully decides that this time will be under her control. She loves it like this, with her perched in his lap, the tips of her breasts brushing against his chest with each slow thrust of her hips down to his. Mulder has his hands on her hips, guiding her up and down, but something is wrong, something is distracting her.
"What, Scully? Are you okay?" he asks, when she puts her hands over his on her hips and eases him off.
"I'm fine, I-" she shakes her head, as if she's confused with herself.
"Do you want to change positions?" he asks quickly, as she shifts unintentionally in his lap.
Scully drapes her arms around his shoulders lazily, and does a small thrust into his hips to get his attention. "I want," she whispers into his ear, "I want-"
And he understands. She wants to drive. Carefully, he takes his hands from her hips and slips an arm around her, hand splayed on her back, an anchor as she finds a new rhythm and moves with a confidence he hadn't seen in her before.
It's very near impossible for him to surrender this much control to her, barely touching her as she rocks back and forth and sucks on his shoulder, clutches his back, leaving prints of her nails. Not impossible because he wants to dominate her, but simply impossible for him to not let go completely inside her. She's going so slowly that he doesn't know how long he'll hold out.
Needing to do something, he leans forward to take one breast into his mouth and suckle at it. Immediately, she moans and he feels her beginning to flutter around him. Mulder lifts his head up to her, wrapping his other arm around her as they rock back and forth to cup her head, and kisses behind her ear.
"I love you,". His whispered breath of admission tickles Scully's ear, it takes her over the edge. For the first time, she understands why people call it 'making love'. She hopes he can hear the love in her sob against his shoulder. When she resurfaces, Scully kisses him warm and gently on the mouth, cupping his head and cheek, then leads his hands back to rest on her hips. She smiles at him wickedly.
"Now," she says, and Mulder's grip on her tightens as he takes over. Scully turns over his 'I love you' in her mind, over and over, and feels a sweet warmth, like a brandy alexander, enter her veins. She urges him on, and his name on her lips is magic, now.
After his orgasm, he resumes kissing her breasts, and Scully smiles with the sheer joy of this, bringing his face back up to kiss him soft and long, her eyes twinkling.
"What is it?" he asks, and Scully hugs him with all four limbs.
She thinks it must have been that night, then, as she stands above his grave. Beside her, Scully's mother is standing strong and supportive by her daughter, having learned about the baby the week before when Dana showed up on her doorstep at midnight and asked to come in. She'd whispered what should have been joyous news in the kitchen while Maggie made her a cup of tea. Her mother hadn't asked about the father, but when she pulled Dana into her arms when she climbed into bed with her, she'd whispered,
"He'll come back. I know it."
Her daughter had cried, wrapping her own arms around her mother. "I can't do this alone," she'd said.
Now here she stands, her mother to one side, her staunchest advocate at the other, with her icy fingers linked over her abdomen. Inside of her, the baby flutters, and Scully feels as though her belly is full of tiny butterflies. She presses her hands over the beginning of their baby, and looks down as Mulder is lowered into the cold earth.
Alone, she plays over the tapes he'd recorded while taking notes on a case during a drive. His voice speaking mellowly, occasionally pausing to ask her a question as she drove, then returning back to the recorder. Scully talks to the baby and listens to these tapes for hours.
When Mulder comes back and their baby hears his voice from a hospital bed, it swirls inside her, and Scully rests her cheek against Mulder's chest, listening to the comforting sound of his steady heart as the baby settles again.
She's dozes in a dim room, thinking about what Mulder could have possibly wrapped up and brought to her apartment. She wonders if it's more tapes. He opens her door quietly, and asks her if she's awake.
"Yeah," Scully says, and he comes by her bed as she tells him her prognosis. After she finishes, Mulder puts an uncertain hand on her belly. The baby kicks it with a tiny fist, and Scully smiles at Mulder's carefully contained awe. He doesn't know what to say or do these days, and she is trying to understand.
The night before he leaves is too soon for them to have sex, so they kiss on the bed with the baby sleeping peacefully in his crib beside them. Mulder kisses her eyes, her nose, her ears, her mouth. A long, searing kiss there, his fingertips brushing over her swollen breast.
Scully pulls away, stands up with a slight wince, and picks up their baby, gently placing him on Mulder's chest, covering his tiny body in a soft blanket. William wiggles for a moment, then settles under Mulder's hand, his head brushing against Mulder's chin. After a moment, the baby squirms again, trying to lift his head to root around. Mulder leans down slightly to kiss his head. And Scully watches, eyes wide and wet, as he strokes one little hand that flexes and grips. William mewls in the beginning of a cry.
"That's your cue," Mulder says softly, and Scully takes William out of his arms with the extreme carefulness of a new mother. She deftly opens the first few buttons of her pajamas to slip his head inside, just enough for Mulder to see the baby push against the swell of her breast. He nurses quietly, with the occasional sigh or contented noise, and when Scully looks up from her son her eyes are red.
"Hey," Mulder says softly, stroking her cheek with an index finger. "None of that." She is reminded of what he said five days ago, and laughs, her eyes shining and sparkling as she looks at him.
He's told her he loves her just once, and it is enough. It is more than enough.
It is the first time she's cried while making love. They have both changed so much. She looks in the mirror now, and doesn't recognize the woman she's become. He's got her legs draped over his shoulders on their new bed and his mouth between her thighs, and Scully turns her head to the side, her entire body crying out in pleasure because it's been forever, it seems, and now they are free to do as they wish. No rules to hold them in place, no superiors to chide them for inappropriate behavior.
So, she whispers out encouragement and Mulder works quicker, harder, on her. When her orgasm comes it is gloriously prolonged by his gentle tongue, and when Scully pulls him up into the cradle of her thighs he kisses away her tears.
"You're beautiful," he says, smoothing her hair out of her face as she guides him into her.
Scully looks up into his eyes, pulls her legs up and squeezes him so he begins to move. She kisses him. "Make love with me, Mulder."
A few minutes later, sweaty and warm, he pulls her up into his lap, helping her up and down with his hands on her waist and hip. Scully breathes heavily, her face molding into an expression of concentration, eyes closed. She bites her lip, already swollen with kissing, and allows two tears to skate down her cheekbones.
"It's okay," Mulder soothes, his hand spreading over her waist, stroking her back gently. Scully sinks down again, tipping his face up to kiss him full on the mouth as she rocks in his lap. Her orgasm builds up within her, and then she is coasting, gasping as a wave of ecstasy crashes over her. And it is nothing but the truth when she leans her forehead against his as he continues to thrust up into her, smiles, and whispers, "I love you".
Mulder's dark eyes look up at her in wonder.
A/N: Bleh, another unfinished vignette type thing. Don't take it too seriously. My label for this on my computer was 'ghjklyuioxfiles'.
The Gnossiennes are several piano compositions written by the French composer Erik Satie in the late 19th century. The works are for the most part in free time (lacking time signatures or bar divisions) and highly experimental with form, rhythm and chordal structure. My favorite is No.1.