Timeline: 2x10 Red Museum
Category: Post-episode fiction
Mulder rolled onto his back groaning. He rubbed his face, forcing himself to wake up more fully. He stared up at the ceiling in the dark of his apartment. He went through the routine: focus on your surroundings, remind yourself that you're in your apartment and that you're alone.
He didn't want to know what time it was, so he kept his gaze fixed on the ceiling. He wasn't planning on falling back asleep before it was time to get ready for work, but the hours of lying alone on the sofa would be torture. Better not to know how long that torture would last.
His dreams were betraying him. Nightmares were nothing new. He'd been having nightmares for years. A charming combination of insomnia and night terrors since he was just a young man. The star of his twisted visions had changed, however. His sister used to flit through his dreams like an apparition, but he hadn't dreamt of her in the last few months. Dana Scully now played the starring role in his nighttime show of horrors. Her abduction had brought her to the forefront of his fevered brain, making her play out scenarios he didn't care to place her in even in mental imaginings.
These nightmares filled him with the same sense of impotence that his dreams about Samantha had for years. Impotence that he was powerless to protect her. Powerless to keep evil at bay. Just as powerless as he had been when he was a little boy. A grown man and still completely impotent.
And guilt. There was the familiar taste of bitter guilt. Guilt that he had placed her in danger. He was a veritable dragnet for pain and suffering, and he had trapped another victim in his mesh. Scully may have been returned to him, but she was still reenacting her suffering in his dreams. He couldn't even give her peace in his own dreams; he felt like it was psychic torture. Guilt ate like ashes.
He hadn't awakened warmed from the frustrations of dark lit alleys and shadowy men this time, however. His dreams were truly betraying him.
He scrubbed his face once more, trying to wipe the vision from his mind stamp. He wouldn't be able to face her in the morning if this image kept flitting across his mind's eye. Reserved and appropriate and free from the taint of his baser instincts was Scully. He was torn between building a pedestal for his Scully and pulling her down from her airy fortress above such mortals as himself so he could ruffle up her hair and rumple her clothes.
His unconscious brain, the id has chosen to mess her up tonight. And it hadn't gotten away from him like that for several months. Yes, sexual fantasies about Dana Scully were a change of pace from the nightmarish paces his brain had been putting her through lately, but he was fairly certain that she would have been just as displeased with his most recent imaginative leaps.
He had first begun to dream about her after she had been assigned to him for a few of months. Just his brain working through excess stimuli from the day, he'd reminded himself. Certainly nothing to feel guilty about. She was a novelty, she was around him more than anyone else in his life, and she was a woman. A rather attractive woman. Not necessarily his type, but she had an appeal—an appeal that increased as he spent more time with her, came to appreciate her, and began to trust her. He had no personal life at the moment, so his brain was easily shifted into hormonal overdrive in the nocturnal hours, but he wasn't going to be the guy who mistook a passing fascination for something more.
He'd realized when she was taken from him that his feelings were infinitely more complicated than that. He loved her. And with that realization he no longer could feel as blasé about these kinds of dreams. He felt certain that she deserved better than to have her partner fantasizing about her when she'd just come back from the dead. He couldn't as easily push aside his sexual flights of fancy when he knew that he loved her. It was messy and confusing.
He had failed in marriage, making him believe that he incapable of love or that he wouldn't know it even if it hit him upside the head. But then there was Scully; Scully's disappearance had awoken feelings that he had dissected and obsessed over before labeling them as love. The emptiness, the despair, the feeling of having had something ripped from you: it reminded him of his sister and he loved Samantha.
When Scully had come back, he experienced hope: hope that he could love. Not hope that she would fall into his arms, but hope that he wasn't a hollow shell…that he was still human. Hope that made him affectionately wipe barbeque sauce from her cheek.
That sauce. Those lips.
He groaned once more. 'You might not be able to control your dreams, but you could do your best not to rehash them with such relish,' he admonished himself. Better to pretend she was sleeping in the next room—that usually kept him under better control. 'Damn Clay's BBQ and their ribs so good they could make you…' Except, Clay probably didn't intend to inspire anything other than healthy appetites.
Half remembered sequences from the Wisconsin barbeque restaurant spiced with his latent desires. Running his thumb over her rosebud lips. Her lips parting slightly in surprise. A distinct flush rising on her cheeks. If only he had been awakened by the sound of sirens passing by his apartment at that point, he could have gone into work with nothing weighing on his conscious other than the imagined memory of how soft her lips felt under his thumb.
But he hadn't been awakened. He had been permitted to indulge his fantasies. He'd leaned across the table—bib and all—and taken what wasn't his. He'd kissed her. Softly at first and then more insistently with the rest of the restaurant blurring out around them in a dreamy haze. The magic of dreams making the table in between them disappear and his partner crazy enough to let him lace his fingers through her red hair so he could crush her to him. Whispering into her ear what he wanted before trailing kisses down her perfect white neck as she gripped his arms.
Mulder stood up discarding his Indian blanket and heading for the kitchen. He needed a cold glass of water. Perhaps water could wash away his sins. Maybe it could wash away the lingering sensation—the sensation that reminded him of faded memories uncovered by hypnotic regression—the sensation of having made love to his partner.