Chapter 2- Spectrum of Light: Red
"Red Represents:
Energy: it boosts our physical energy levels, increases our heart rate and blood pressure and prompts the release of adrenalin.
Action: it is fast moving and promotes a need for action and movement.
Desire: it relates to physical desire in all its forms- sexual, appetite, cravings.
Passion: it means a passionate belief in an issue or undertaking, including passionate love or passionate hate. Anger is negative passion."
As their first case together progressed Scully began to not only associate Mulder with the alluring hazel that was his eyes but more with the vibrancy of the colour red.
As soon as she saw the piercing colour for the first time on one of the many posters littering the walls of the small and dark basement office she knew that it was him, burning and passionate in his own stubborn beliefs. He burned ardently crimson in complete contrast to the dark basement office in The Hoover Building that was his home away from home. A complete contrast but still one of the same.
Fox Mulder became red when he enthusiastically spoke of alien abductions as they left the hospital in Bellefleur on their way back to their rental vehicle. Mulder burned bright when she told him that he was crazy as he tried to convince her with his outlandish theories and make her see (if for only a moment) the world through his eyes, a world where no one could be trusted.
He flickered like Roman candles in the night as he challenged Scully's own faith in science, a faith as concrete and unmoving as his was in the paranormal. He challenged her almost playfully (because he already suspected her fierce dedication to logic from the moment her opened her personal file) but still red, still fiery, still passionate in his beliefs and bursting with energy, just as he was.
She knew almost immediately that Fox Mulder didn't trust her, that he knew perfectly well that she had been assigned to work with him to debunk his life's work.
Had he expected that the woman who would be his soulmate would be a person with such a different outlook on the world as himself?... Probably not.
Would he refuse to trust his soulmate because he feared that her agenda did not align with his?... Perhaps
But even so, in all honest; Scully wasn't sure if she trusted him either, wasn't sure if she trusted her eccentric partner who most of her old colleagues believed to be a total manic. Sure, he may be her soulmate but she did not truly know him or the state of mind he was in(even though her heart said otherwise and for some reason increased pulse rate in his presence).
The universe may have decreed Fox Mulder as her soulmate but Scully wasn't sure if she could take something as serious as that at face value anymore. The universe could be wrong(after all the workings of the world were often a cruel and sadistic thing that left your heart broken, scattered into a thousand pieces that would never again fit together they way they ought to). Could she really take the leap of faith for a man who may or may not feel as she did, a man who chased flying saucers and waved his fists to the heavens(or at least that's what Scully had been hearing around The Hoover Building for the last three years).
She had long sense lost her faith in such romantic ideals and wanted to make up her own mind on the man without the universe intervening or the opinions of her old colleagues clouding her judgement. (Already she could sense Fox Mulder had a good heart).
Scully deduced that Mulder's feelings on the matter must be somewhat similar to her own because even though his eyes lit up in amazement when he first saw her, Mulder did not dare to mention the fact that meeting her had made him finally see in colour. Was he just as afraid as she was at accepting the fact that they were both FBI partners and soulmates or had he simply dismissed the idea of them being meant to be more than work collegues totally. (The logical part of Scully's Brian told her that the latter may very well be the matter but when she looked into his sincere hazel eyes another scenario entirely was revealed).
For the first few days the colours became their unspoken truth. The truth that they both knew but didn't dare speak aloud to each other because even if they could learn to accept and trust one another, they were first and foremost FBI partners and would have to deny the yearnings of their heart, body and soul if it meant closing cases and keeping their jobs safe.
Having a soulmate wasn't usually a thing that people tended to hide(Both Mulder and Scully knew that). Most people celebrated when the found the special person who brought light and colour into their lives and let themselves fall for the other person immediately, the person who would mark a before and after in their lives.
Was Scully slowly coming to believe that there was truth behind the soulmates phenomenon?...This was likely the case.
That first night in Mulder's hotel room in Oregon was when and where Scully felt her original feelings on the phenomenon of soulmates begin to shift, the moment where she truly accepted the idea as being more than a fanciful tale.
After working together for the past few days it was getting harder and harder not to get closer to him, closer to the man her soul called out to, closer to the man whose soul she could hear calling for her.
Or was it just her imagination...She deemed it plausible that it was so.
She couldn't bring it up with him though, answering the call of his soul.
Scully knew that she had to remain professional with Fox Mulder and let the colours, fate, romance and the universe bedamned despite the fact that every new shade her eyes fell on brought him to mind.
Her career was important to her and already she knew that The X-Files were Mulder's life.
They had just returned from a long day of seeking answers in sludgy forests and gloomy graveyards in the pouring rain. Rain beat down on the roof of the motel like a tribal drum and the clouds outside seemed to be crackling with electricity.
After several hours of half answers and more questions, Mulder and Scully had emerged from their rental vehicle like wet rats, deciding to call it a day.
She was drawing her bath when she first noticed something out of the ordinary.
Scully was standing in the bathroom of her own motel room, examining three scarlet and round spots on her lower back. They were almost identical in size, shape and position to those found on the bodies of the victims of the Swenson case. She felt the panic sink like a ship into the marow of her bones and eat away at the pit of her stomach, the bitter taste of bile entering her throat. This was not happening!
'Surely they are just some sort of bug bite', her logical side tried to reason. 'There is no such thing as aliens or alien abductions. But the proof was there and then proof Scully had was the fact that all previous victims in the Swenson Case had three marks identical to her's(and they were already dead and buried). Surely that was no coincidence. What if she was next?
For the first time in her life Scully wasn't in anyway aware of her actions at least until she had found herself right in front of Mulder, the door of his motel room shut and the area around them bathed in soft candlelight. For the first time since she was a child, Dana Scully forgot all pretenses of appearing strong, independant and calm as she rushed to his side for assurance that she wasn't losing her mind. (Spooky Mulder of all people!)
For the first time in years, Scully found herself needing the insight of another person, the reassurance of another individual. She needed him. FBI protocol and the appearance of strength thrown to the wind, forgotten out in the story outside the door of Mulder's room.
The gentle candlelight flickered sensually in his hand, his hazel eyes glowing in a mixture of surprise and concern. He really hadn't been expecting to see her again until morning (but he wasn't conplaining)
Scully tried adamantly to ignore the intimacy of what was happening as she stripped down to her underwear in front of the man who had only been her partner for the last 48 hours. She found herself trusting him despite the boundaries she had set for herself earlier.
She felt a chill run through her body at tge sudden expose to the cool air in the room but this was quickly remedied as soon as Mulder's fingers brushed against her bare skin.
Mulder approached her carefully, keeping a respectful distance as his fingers trailed down her back towards the three spots on her lower back.
He holds her in an attentive gaze, looking concerned and thoughtful, trying to ease her worry with the lightness of his touch and the unspoken tenderness in his features. (Maybe his fears were the same as her's? Would their fears be less if the sentiment was shared?
In this moment Fox Mulder is still red but not the burning, fast moving kind of before. He is a soft red sky, learning to trust his soulmate and hoping to some unnamed god (that he isn't even sure he believes in) that her actions tonight are a sign that Scully is learning to trust him too.
Scully could feel his puffs of breath against her back as he chuckled in relief once he realised what the marks truly were. Scully felt her panic melt at the sound of his laughter but she wanted to be sure. "What are they?", she asked seriously.
"They're only mosquito bites", Mulder said with a good-natured laugh. "I got eaten alive myself out there".
She turned around to look at him. His eyes were clear and honest. He was telling the truth (or at least believed himself that he was doing so). There was nothing to worry about.
Scully could no longer contain her relief as she launched herself into his arms, embracing him as soon as she had wrapped her bathrobe back around her.
She didn't care anymore that he was her FBI partner because right now he was so much more than that. Without even doubting herself for trusting him, Scully had found herself in Mulder's arms in search of is comfort and reassurance.
That was something she rarely sought off of anyone let alone someone she had met only days before. Was that because he was her soulmate or simply because he was Mulder.
Mulder hesitated slightly at first, unsure if the affection that he was aching to give was really what Scully wanted, but he nonetheless dropped his head into her scarlet hair and held on to her, pressing a swift kiss to the top of her head(a little lingering for a friend but not overstepping any lines that there may be too much).
"Are you okay?", he asked softly, mumbling deeply into her hair, his arms tightening on her hips.
He knew that she may be beginning to regret the way she had reacted to the marks but Mulder didn't think any less of her in anyway for coming to him with her fears, in fact he was glad that she was beginning to trust him because he had a feeling that it was almost as hard to gain her trust as it was his.
Somehow this thought made him feel warm inside. Perhaps they were as dissimilar as they had originally imagined.
Mulder watched the red tinge appear on her cheeks as her electric blue eyes became downcast as if for the first time fully accepting her actions.
He half expected her to move away from him and hurry back to her own room, the whole event never to be spoken of again.
She didn't.
Scully felt the heart beat relax as the reality set in. 'There's nothing wrong with me', she thought calmly. 'There is nothing wrong with me and now I'm full on cuddling against my FBI partner'. Scully wasn't sure if she could look at him. She stayed exactly where she was,inhaling the smell of him and trying to push away her thoughts that she knew were inappropriate between FBI partners, like how his arms felt like a safe refuge and how she couldn't help but trust him.
Mulder patiently waited for her to say or do something, revelling in the feeling of holding her much smaller body against his.
For the first time since he met her he saw her as another human who like him was vulnerable and breakable. For the first time he didn't see the stubbornly fierce and sceptical Agent Scully but the woman inside. He felt entranced by her as if she was a drug that he wanted more and more of but could not quite get close enough to properly consume.
Scully nodded against his chest. "Yeah".
She looked up slightly to gauge his reaction to the way she had acted. Scully knew that she would berate herself for acting in such a way in front of her new partner later, would be very angry with herself for acting like she was some sort of airheaded, incompetent and naive agent who had never been on the field before. Scully knew that she wasn't that person and hoped Mulder knew that too.
She moved slightly to pull out of his embrace but Mulder continued to hold her, his arms looped entirely around her body.
When he spoke he was so close to her that Scully could feel his warm breath on his face and his nose was only millimetres from touching her's. His hazel eyes were alight and intense with burning heat and crimson passion.
"You can see the colours now too, right?", Mulder asked quietly, his lips only a hair's breath from her's. A rush of confidence flooded through him but not enough to pull her even closer to him.
He wasn't going to push her any further by pulling her in tge last few vital centimetres. Not if that was not what she wanted. Mulder wanted to so badly because even though he had only just met her recently she already felt profoundly important to him.
"Because my world has never been brighter from the second I met you",he finished in a whispe, feeling raw at this declaration (as though he was in the same state of undress as her) because he knew his brutal honesty could easily have scared her away.
It didn't.
Scully felt herself burn in the sea of the passionate red that was Mulder. He was as fiery as she was, as stubborn, as strong willed and they burned in the passion together.
She suddenly became very aware of how little she was wearing and how easy it would be to let him make her entirely bare, how pleasurable it would be to make him equally as bare as he would make her.
She burned for him and she could feel through his clothes just how much he burned for her.
He wasn't the only one who was red, so was she and together they were a burning sea and sky, more passionate and tense then imaginable.
Scully stood up on tip toes, quickly pulling him down to merge his lips with her's. If he wasn't going to make the last move to bring them together when it was blatantly obvious they both wanted it so badly then she would do so with pleasure.
She dragged his face downwards to her level, her fists clutching his shirt in an iron grip. He tightened his embrace, settling both of his hands on her hips.
They crackled like fire and the lightening in the clouds outside.
As soon as his lips met her's Scully quickly realised how right it felt to have him with her. Why people make such a big deal about having a soulmate.
It's not some stupid thing to do with society at all. It is a person who can make you feel things on a level that no one else can.
Scully loosened her grip on his body a little to undo the first few buttons of his shirt, all the while her lips barely leaving his. She smiled into his mouth as his tongue glided across her upper lip, seeking the entrance that she willing gave. They battled for dominance, both determined to not let the other succeed. Scully tangled her fingers into his soft brown hair, revelling in the feeling of the peace that such passionate making out brought her. It was akin to nothing she had every felt before. the ardency. The fire. Red. It was all Mulder. It was all Scully. It was them. Together they burned like a bonfire.
Mulder growled softly into her mouth, scooping her straight up off of the ground. Scully wasted no time in wrapping her legs around his waist. He responded by holding her tightly against his body and continued to enthusastically explore her mouth, relishing in the sound of her moans of pleasure.
Mulder groaned loudly as Scully bit his lower lip, teasing it into her mouth with her top and bottom teeth. He grinned pulling back for a second to make sure she was okay with how quickly one thing was leading to another.
"Are you sure that you're okay about this, Scully?", he asked genuinely, setting her on the ground in front of him for a moment.
Scully smirked, looping her arms around his neck whole gesturing to her dressing gown and underwear. "Help me out of this will you, Mulder?", she asked innocently as though she was asking him to borrow a pen or to pull over into a gas station for a bathroom break.
"Sure thing, partner".
Mulder's warm hands ran across her hips and across her flat stomach, reaching for the ribbon that she had hastily tied a minute before when she had hugged him.
He tugged it open and with one swift motion, leaving her as bare as earlier in front of him. The difference was that this time Scully seemed perfectly confident in her actions and Mulder took his time to notice some of the little things he had passed over before in an attempt to be respectful to his partner.
Smiling,he reached down to drop a few sloppy but ardent kisses to her chest, neck and collar bone before discovering a more sensitive spot in the skin on her upper neck and ear lobe.
"Muulder", Scully cried softly, running her finger down along his still clothed back, immediately considering him over dressed for the occasion. "Take this thing off", she ordered tugging open the last few buttons on his shirt, discarding it on the floor.
Mulder smirked slightly. "As you wish", he teased as he began massaging her hips, resulting in the pair of them ending up buckling and grinding their bodies against one another.
He made her see red, every shade imaginable. He burned like the sun in her arms as intense and passionate a red as could be possibly imagined.
They were passion. They were the increased heart rates and the release of adrenaline. Together they burned like stars, the celestial balls of fire millions of miles from the earth.
That was how they felt together, burning millions of miles away from all else.
Scully automatically felt herself reaching for the rest of Mulder's clothes. He had seen quite a lot of her body already and now was her turn to have a look at his. She ran her hands down across his chest, across the tight muscles of his abdomen to the waistband of his jeans to start unbuckling his belt and undoing the top and only bottom, tugging his flies down.
Mulder smiled, kicking off his jeans the rest of the way and pulling Scully's hips back against his.
She could feel his enthusiasm against her stomach and the feeling of his arousal only made her want him even more. She could feel heat pool up inside her again and every layer on Mulder's body became one to many.
They were red in every sense of the word. Red as in caution. Red as in danger. Red as in 'you could get hurt'. Red as in 'If you don't slow down now you could fucking loose your job'.
What they were doing could prove dangerous to their careers. They had already broken most of the rules of a male/female partnership and the final one that was still unbroken probably wasn't going to remain as such for longer if they didn't stop to consider their actions.
Wait', she thought abruptly, pulling back. 'He's my FBI partner', the more logical part of herself declared. 'But he's also my soulmate'. God, this really was a mess.
Scully quickly disengaged her lips from Mulder's, looking up at him for some kind of answer for a question she didn't really want to speak out loud.
She knew the rules at the FBI, male and female agents weren't supposed to be even in the same hotel room at any given time. Everything that had happened between them had been totally against bureau policy and if there was one thing she had learned growing up in a naval household it was to respect authority.
"Mulder. Our jobs!", she said seriously, pulling out of his embrace. "We'll be in so much trouble at work if Skinner finds out about this", her heart was still racing from Mulder's proximity but she voiced her reservations anyway, the one thing holding them back.
The burning red between them had faded to a hot pink (more tender, considerate and thoughtful) when Mulder replied.
"Do you want this, Scully?", he asked, his voice husky but his eyes genuine. "Because I won't tell if you won't".
Scully considered his proposal for half a beat before dragging his face down to meet her's again. "I just want all of you", she murmured against his lips. "Now".
So what if they were going behind Skinner and Kersh's back. He was her soulmate and she was his. Being together felt right, like some fundamental part of the universe was finally making since even if nothing else about the world they lived in did.
"Then fuck the rules", Mulder said with a mischievous smile against her lips as they tumbled backwards on to the bed, the last of their underwear being hastily shoved off as they tugged each other closer, willing their bodies to become one.
...
Later they lay in bed, a tangle of sheets, sweat, limbs and bodies. The candle on the bedside table flickered and the rain bashed heavily against the windows, drowning out the sounds of their love making.
Mulder let Scully in on the secrets that both everyone and no one at the FBI or anywhere else knew.
He told her the real story of what happened to his sister and what he would do when he found the men responsible for taking her.
He told Scully why finding the truth was so important to him. He told her how the loss of his sister had affected him as he grew up and how it continued to affect him everyday. He told her how close he was to the truth and of the passionate anger he felt towards those who kept it from him.
He showed her the very core of what made him Red.
Mulder was grateful for her silence as he told her his life's story. He was glad that she hadn't said 'Sorry' or 'I understand' like other people did because that never helped in the slightest.
But then again Dana Scully wasn't like other people and for that reason he knew that he was already beginning to fall in love with her.
Scully was grateful for his honesty, glad that she now understood him better, glad that she had some insight on how he ticked. Her heart went out to him at the loss of a sibling (she couldn't even bare to think about loosing Charlie or Missy or Bill) but she said nothing. Scully always found that actions speak louder than words.
Mulder showed her that he not only loved in red but he hated in red too.
Scully came to see why the man who lay as naked as the day he was born next to her in the bed way was the way he was.
The man she saw next to her wasn't spooky or crazy or enigmatic or any of the other silly descriptions that the other agents that Scully had worked with in the past had bestowed upon him.
He was a complicated man made up of many shades of red, bound on a journey that she was now a part of. He had carried the cross of his sister's abduction since he was twelve years old and now Scully promised to help him carry that very cross for as long as she could.
She was there just like he was to solve this.
Together they decided it was best to keep certain details of their partnership a secret for the safety of their jobs and for The X-Files. Becoming public knowledge was not a risk worth taking if it meant they or anybody else could get hurt in the process.
Neither of them seeked public validation of any sort anyway. It didn't matter what other people thought of them. The only thing that mattered was the truth that they both knew, the colours that theyvshared and the mutual feelings that glowed like burning embers in the pit of their very souls, the embers that would hope fully never burn out.
'And besides', Mulder said teasingly as the phone beside them began to ring loudly. 'Being a secret could be pretty damn sexy'.
Scully rolled her eyes, swatting him on the side as he reached over to the bedside table, grabbing the phone off of the receiver.
"It's for the best, Mulder", she said seriously. Being sexy was only an added bonus. Not that she would admit something like that to him (his ego would explode).