Title: Generosity and Parsimony with Firearms
Author: amyhit
Summary: He'd thought so earlier and he's certain of it now, there is something bereft about her.
Rating: R
Spoilers: Never Again
Disclaimer: I thought maybe I had something but I had it appraised and it turns out Chris owns the only authentic article.
Feedback: You think I what, write this for my own artistic fulfillment?
Author's Notes: At the end
Thanks, Mel60, for doing your best with this piece. It's stubborn, I know. It's been digging in its heels with me for a couple of months.
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Leave me out with the waste
This is not what I do
It's the wrong kind of place
To be thinking of you
It's the wrong time for somebody new
It's a small crime and I've got no excuse…
-Damien Rice, 'Nine Crimes'.
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It takes one heady sweet shove and she's face down in his sheets. "Ed," she breathes, lifting onto her forearms, but he's too fast. With a grunt he descends over her onto the limp mattress. He has her loose trousers down in a single tug.
His satanic imaginary friend – his Mrs. Hyde – went off in a peel of cackles only a moment earlier, leaving him alone. It's silent now that it's just him. Just him and Dana in the cold bedroom with the taped windowpane.
His date lies beneath him, bare from navel to knees. Now that he has her there he sits atop her panting, not moving. Dana has a triumvirate of freckles on the outer sphere of her ass, pretty as a stamp, and damn it if Ed's not suddenly unsure about all of this. He thinks he's never had a woman this petite; he could undress her without any attention paid to buttons. He wonders at her aerodynamics. She is fine as an automobile he is inclined to think, a two-seater with an engine that'll just purr – his boyhood desire. If he's certain of anything it's that she is too damn good for him to be fucking her on a second hand mattress under a stained ceiling.
Him, he thinks, fucking her. Jesus. He is hard and quivering.
"Ed?" Dana says again, growing impatient or worried, he can't tell which. "Is there something wrong?" She is breathing sideways, her chin almost touching her shoulder. He feels every bit the blue-collar guy, crouched over her, breathing onto her back like a boor. "What is it?"
Very slowly he moves his hands to his belt buckle and begins working the pin out of the hole. "Nothing," he says. His belt clinks loosely open. "It's nothing."
"No." This time she sounds stern and struggles to turn over beneath him. "Ed, if you don't want to do this then don't. In fact, I think we'd both be best to just– " He places a hand on her back above the square of fresh gauze and hears her breath catch. He begins to stroke her there where she is marked with mythic red and green.
She moans.
At least he thinks she does, though it is very quiet. Then – oh fuck, oh god – she begins to squirm. He just takes it slow, circling the white patch with his forefinger, then leans over to press his mouth down on her shoulder. "Ed, what are you– unnh-" she shivers under his mouth and he squeezes his eyes shut.
"Just this," he says. "God Dana, I just – I just want to make sure nothing bad happens to you."
This admission has the strangest effect on the woman beneath him. He doesn't expect her to understand his anxiety, how could she? But neither does he expect her to laugh. Yes, she's definitely laughing – emitting small, choking quivers. They travel from her rib cage to his knees and up his straddling thighs. She trembles and trembles her sodden shoes right off her feet. They clunk on the floor behind him. He is beginning to wonder, apprehensively, if the alcohol didn't affect her more than she claims, but she manages to stagger out a few words for his benefit.
"I'm sorry, it's not– it's just that if you knew everything I've…" she trails off. "That's just a very bad thing to want," she says, and maybe it's only him, but he feels no gaiety in this at all.
"Oh yeah?" He continues drawing circles on her back – slow circles – an entire hurricane of them. He is transfixed by the storm, this weather, the way she set her jaw just now, and the barbarous pain in his shoulder. "Why's that?" he asks.
"It just is."
The only thing moving in this room is his hand.
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He'd seen it on television when he was just a kid: Men at war – blood and torn earth and a lot of prosthesis' once the dust settled. All of which appealed to his male sensibilities at an age when he'd never shaken the hand of anybody who'd later died.
What had stuck with him was watching a soldier take a bullet in his neck, trying to load a rifle during the early days of gun warfare. Home sick from school, his fevered eyes wide, witnessing the packing of the powder. How absurd the soldier looked hunched there in the middle of muddy Armageddon, ramming away at that powder for all he was worth. The narrator, whom Ed had thought was very dull, said, Having ceased the assault in order to reload his weapon, a soldier became helpless. This soldier's survival relies on his ability to reload more quickly than his opponents. Many of his comrades have already been caught with their guard's down.
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Dana's feet are cold little spurs urging him on. "Oh-god-harder," she says. Her legs are around his waist and dragging him closer. He does his best to comply. His father used to call this rutting, what they're doing now. Ed doesn't dare kiss her mouth for fear of a collision of teeth and it's a shame. She has a lovely mouth.
"All right?" he pants.
"Harder-" It's a barking moan, manners forgotten, but not for long – the next thing she hisses is, "god, please." It's still a demand though. He'd thought so earlier and he's certain of it now, there is something bereft about her. She has the look of a woman who has come face-to-face with some kind of negative utopia. Not that Ed knows what that looks like but he's read a few books, seen a few movies, fell out of love – that last one's still pretty fresh in his mind.
Thump, thump, thump – the room is ringing with their violent meter. He worries the force of his thrusts will leave dents in the wall plaster behind the great metal bed frame. Then, looking down at those large eyes and that small body beneath him he thinks, never mind, it's really not the plaster he's worried about.
"Yeah?" he asks. He hopes it's 'yeah' because if it's 'no' he doesn't think he'll be stopping.
She nods furiously, lashing her head. "Yes, that's– oh, oh ghh– " Without warning she grabs him by the neck and presses them mouth-to-mouth. Their collision is hammer on flint, a spark of pain between them and then he feels the beginnings of orgasm down below. He doesn't even know whose.
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For long seconds they lay strewn on the bed, contorted yet not touching. The blanket is tangled around her legs so when he tries to pull it up she just draws her knees as high as they will go without giving him any regard. He lays back, defeated, and itchy with drying sweat.
"Dana?" He moves a palm across but she's already gone silently from the bed. Now she's standing in the doorway, a tangle of clothes in her arms, looking for all the world like a small wary burglar – caught. That's when he remembers about the war and the guns and the soldiers he'd seen in childhood, shot dead in fields beside their fallen comrades, the gunpowder loose on their hands. Still a look on their dead faces, a look that says, hurry, hurry. He thinks of bloody ramrods left in the barrels of ownerless guns. He thinks, thump, thump, thump.
"I'll be just a moment," she says leaving. He recognizes her sweater as the lump that's pressed beneath his hip and feels a lunatic impulse to apologize to it directly. He pats it down. Gee, sorry 'bout that.
He hears a hissed 'Damn', which would be her, topless in his bathroom.
"If you need something to sleep in, there should be a shirt hanging on the door in there," he calls after her. "It's clean," he says, which it might be.
In the drafty room Ed watches through the window as the last snowflakes slow, then cease falling. He finds the AM's lassitude eerie and uses his time alone to check beneath the bandage on his arm. His bleeding has ebbed and there is silence now. The misogynist under his skin is gone. Meanwhile the one in his bathroom slips her clothes back on too fast, as though fearful of what will happen if she is caught with her guard down.
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She emerges from the bathroom when she hears the noise. Peering down the hall towards the dark living room she wishes terribly for the unwieldy flashlight she's come to associate with investigating spooks and ghouls. Things that go bump in the night, in Scully's experience, abhor illumination.
"Is everything okay?" she calls.
Off duty and without so much as a penlight to vivisect the pre-dawn gloom, she navigates three swift steps back to the bedroom door. She brushes through, leaving it ajar behind her. Ed has remained where he settled moments ago when his kiss slid sideways from her mouth to her shoulder and he rolled off her with a final groan. Since she's been gone he's moved only enough to divest himself of his socks. Neither of them entirely undressed earlier and now their tattered false modesties sulk the floor between them.
"Ed, are you all right?" she clips. He looks up, appearing addled. She comes warily closer. "Ed?" Gingerly he reaches across the nightstand and flicks on a very inadequate dresser lamp. Foo Fighter light, she thinks, hanging back in the half-shadows. "Were you out in the kitchen? It sounded as though something fell or… I'm not sure." Under Ed's bleary scrutiny she chastises herself, Paranoid, Dana.
"Right, uh– it was probably just the cast-iron falling off the dish rack. I stack 'em pretty high so they're always sliding into the sink or wherever."
She nods. Ed continues to look strangely up at her until she self-consciously glances down: she looks like a matron in his shirt or a child in a smock. Only three of the buttons are in their holes. She doesn't look at him while she finishes the others. She's on the last one when he swings his feet onto the floor, hissing at the cold. "So this Mulder guy," Ed mumbles. "S'he one of those 'fathers' you were talking about?"
She leaves the shirttails hanging and stares. She can't recall mentioning Mulder at all this evening."Ed, how did you…" His gaze flicks over her face, then quickly past and belatedly her mouth goes dry. "O-oh."
Oh god, -that's- how.
"I…" She grasps unsteadily for the bed frame, misses, scrabbles and clasps it. How could she possibly could have failed to realize? "No. No, it's not– it isn't– "
She must have... before... when they were... She closes her mouth. Dizzily she spies the faint, pinafore-clad reflection of herself in the window beyond the bed. She's wearing Ed's shirt for Christ's sake. She is reprobate, she is absurd. With great effort she lets go of his bedpost and begins to remove the garment. Then she'll finish dressing and leave, which is what she should have done in the first place, which should have been obvious an hour ago, which–
"Dana?" His voice is drawn. She forces her dry mouth to speak.
"I apologize. For my conduct and my insensitivity. I, uh- didn't realize." She meets his eyes. He is frowning and his forehead is creased. She summons all her humility. "Had I known of my mistake I would have behaved with more tact." She takes another moment to face up to him, at least face him, before averting her focus back to the task at hand: two more buttons hold fast when only a moment ago her task was reversed. Two steps forward, three steps back, she thinks bowing her head still further, choking back any noise that might force its way from her throat. The blouse only just parts to bear her when Ed grasps her fingers, stopping her from shrugging the garment off entirely. His hands on her hands are frighteningly solid. Quickly she pulls hers away. "Please, just let me get my sweater on and I'll go."
"'Mulder', you said his name a moment ago."
"Yes, I understand." She wonders if he's going to rub it in; if she can take that much.
"No, Dana– " His speech is slow, beseeching her to comprehend, " –I mean just a moment ago. When you came back in."
"When I…" She blinks, focusing past him. When I... Oh. But then... "Just a moment ago?"
"Yeah," says Ed.
"I asked you if– "
"You asked 'Mulder' if everything was all right. I just thought… I mean obviously he's on your mind. And I remember what you said before, you know, about fathers and I thought…" Ed scratches his jaw uncomfortably.
"You thought Mulder was the one I was talking about."
"That's– yeah but uh, never mind. Obviously he's- he's something else."
She licks her lip. Obviously he's something else, she thinks.
She was an adult and – markedly – self-possessed the first time she ever felt profound attraction, that quivering hunger and a warmth in her face belying an elsewhere warmth that was infinitely more unnerving. She was also pale and sensitive and prone to self-reproach. Little wonder she soon taught herself not to. Not to blush, not to a lot of things. Tonight her cheeks heat to scalding in the cold, dim room. She curses. Self-reproach and attraction have always had something to do with it.
Ed captures her attention as he bundles a blanket from the bed, rolling it around his arms. Now that the crisis is over she finds she can't remember what she was doing before. "I should probably go," she tries.
He sighs, surprising her with his firm rebuttal. "Dana, it's okay."
"No, really, I insist. My car is near by, I'll just– "
"The streets are a rink out there. You shouldn't be driving in that. I just figured I'd take the couch. You've got a flight to catch, you'll need your beauty sleep."
"All three hours of it." She crosses her arms but drops her gaze. "I can take the couch, Ed, really."
Ed pretends he hasn't heard. "G'night Dana. Sleep on the left. There're no springs to watch out for."
He's leaving when she stops him. "Ed, wait."
"Just take the bed," he groans, outlined by the window with his blanket in a jumble.
"All right but– " (If there's one thing she's learned about bachelors it's that they're always prepared to lay their jackets down over the hovel of their lives, escorting hapless maidens safely to the other side) " –I assume you'll need a pillow," she says, holding one up. He smirks, amused by her sensibility and comes back for it. As she moves to meet him the lamp's glow slides fully over her face and he stops short. His tentative grin disappears.
"God, Dana, you're bleeding."
"What?" The tips of her fingers fly to her nose and draw back red. "Oh, uh– " She tries to shield her face but he takes her once more by the wrist and moves her hand away.
"Here," he says. She leans her head back, expecting him to hand her a tissue or even the band of a carelessly discarded sock. Instead he takes her face between his hands and wipes the blood from her lip with his thumbs. "There," he announces when he's done. One last swipe gets it all. "It's stopped. You're all better."
There's a long pause while she struggles, swallows, and the wet pat of snow is audible, falling from power lines outside. "Yes. Thank you."
"Don't worry about it."
"Must be the dry air," she murmurs. Ed huffs.
In the gray room the tiny light from the lamp is growing fainter as dawn brightens. She looks down at the pillow she'd been holding and it is speckled with her blood. He is near enough to pet her hair a little, the pillow pressed between them in her arms, and she can feel that, despite everything, if she wanted to she could still have him again before it got too light out.
She has a nagging need to go search the kitchen for disturbances. Mulder would never have accepted that thing about the dishes without checking, she thinks. She still feels there is something in the apartment that shouldn't be. But then she realizes it's probably her.
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Fin
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Is that all right with you?
Give my gun away when it's loaded
Is that all right with you?
If you don't shoot it how am I supposed to hold it?
--Damien Rice, 'Nine Crimes'.
Author's Notes: A program on the history channel got me to thinking about the absurdity of gun warfare, especially during the early days when a practiced hand could reload no more than a couple times a minute. The dangerous impracticality of such a trend seemed to parallel the dysfunctional nature of certain relationships: both parties made vulnerable in order to keep to the dictates of their 'arrangement'. Then the song 'Nine Crimes' came along and embodied all the ambiguities I loved so much about 'Never Again' while continuing the 'firearms' theme. I put pen to paper. Here's the result.
On the other hand, this is...not my favorite fic. It feels a little glassy-eyed, so to speak. It needs a Mulder, maybe. Or a rewrite.