Chapter Text
Scully awoke to a pounding on the door that nearly sent her into cardiac arrythmia. Did they come back? But no, anyone who might be coming for her wouldn’t have knocked, they just would have kicked the door down. Or snatched you off the street. Less trouble.
She was getting very blasé about all this.
Pausing only long enough to grab a robe, she padded out to the living room and checked the peephole. Mulder. Of course, who else?
“What’s the matter?” she asked even before the door was fully open.
“You like my shampoo,” he said, and it took her an entire fifteen seconds to process that yes, those were the words that he had actually said, it wasn’t a dream and she wasn’t having a stroke.
“You came over here at one in the morning to tell me that I like your shampoo?”
“It’s been driving me nuts all week,” he said, clearly amped up about something but not making a move to cross her threshold. “I haven’t thought about shampoo since—I don’t even know, I don’t think about shampoo. But this whole week, I can’t stop noticing it. And then I got home and I realized it wasn’t me. I wasn’t the one noticing, you were. Your body. It’s some kind of—of Pavlovian thing. On some really fundamental level, you like the way my shampoo smells.”
She froze like she’d been caught out, which, from the way he was looking at her, she might have been. She forced herself to relax. “Okay…?”
He just kept staring at her. Like she had all the answers. But I don’t! I don’t know what I’m doing. She could only stare back, a little helpless and still overwhelmed from the week they’d had. He can accept these things and run with them, but I can’t, I can’t. She still felt frozen, could only stare back at him. It felt like they were building to something, but she didn’t know what to do.
Neither, apparently, did he. All his manic focus dropped away suddenly, the air between them reversing charge, repelling. “Okay,” he echoed her. “Well. It was bothering me. So.”
He started to turn away, and she reacted without thinking, her body (her body, thank God still for that) reaching out to stop him. Just a gesture, her hand rising, but he did stop. Waiting to see what she’d do next.
She had to come closer to do it, stepping into his space. And maybe it was because she was tired, and maybe it was because of the week they’d had, and maybe it was just time, but that little voice screaming what the hell are you doing? was silent. The whole apartment was silent, actually. One AM hush, and she closed her eyes so that absolutely nothing distracted her from the feeling of her fingers running slowly, so slowly, through his hair.
He’d gotten it almost right. She did like the smell of his shampoo. But even more than that, she liked the way he smelled. She breathed it in now, that heavy overtone of store-bought clove and cedar not quite managing overpower the more elusive, so essentially Mulder scent of him. What is it? It was like a bonfire of vanilla pods, smoky and warm, but there was something else.
She combed her fingers through his hair again, trying to get to the bottom of it, of what made him him. It was so quiet that she could hear him breathing, too. Could hear him go from holding his breath to fighting for air, no matter how he tried to hide it.
“Scully…?” he asked her, his voice tight.
She opened her eyes.
He had come closer to mirror her, hand sliding up to cup her face, the tips of his fingers tangled in her hair. We’re back here. “Scully, I’ve spent the past eighteen hours thinking about about what you said. About faith. How it’s about where you end up. And I realized I’ve been going about this the wrong way. I keep starting with belief, what I want to believe about what exists between us. But I realize you’re probably thinking about the process of it all, all the things that could go wrong, of how it could even work.
“And the truth is—I don’t know. I don’t know if this will go badly. I don’t know if this will ruin our careers or our partnership. Hell, I don’t know how to do this. Any of this. And I don’t know if it will end. I want to believe that it can work—but I think that’s a given. More than that, though, I realized I want to have faith that it will work. That it’s not just the current moment of feeling but all the past evidence that, as much as we disagree sometimes, for five years, you’ve had enough faith to stick with me through violence and loss and the goddamn freezing rain, and that’s a fucking lot of evidence, Scully. I know no amount of proof is enough for you but that’s a solid place to start, don’t you think?”
The way he looked at her, she knew he could see their whole history, her whole history. And still wasn’t judging her, was just waiting for her to come to her own conclusions.
For all that she never liked to think about it as it was happening, she’d known exactly how her affairs would end. Knowing made it strangely easier to deal with the present: in the queasy tumult of infatuation, at least she never had to feel uncertainty.
She didn’t feel uncertainty now, either. For all that she didn’t know what would happen, she had never felt so certain. She felt like fire, an irreducible element. Try to divide her now and she would only be that much more of herself.
He didn’t make her whole. She made herself whole, in order to stand here and burn for him.
And he was burning, too.
“Yes,” she said against his lips, “I do.”
At the last moment, though, he turned his head, and for an instant she thought another improbable interruption had arrived. What now? she wanted to scream. But no, there was no further crisis. He had only turned his head to kiss the inside of her wrist, igniting a trail of fire all along her arm. She flushed. His tongue darted out then, pressing against her pulse like he wanted to drink her heartbeat down until it was his own. She wanted to let him. Oh, how she wanted.
His hands were under her pajama top, tracing the curve of her hip bones. Hers were—whoops, already inching his shirt past his waist, past his ribs, and he finally pulled away for long enough for her to get the tee off over his head. Hers followed.
Undressing on the way to the bedroom was a strange dance of echoes, observing each other in bodies that had so recently been their own. It was surreal familiarity combined with a glowing sense of rightness, that yes, those hands belonged there, those arms, that body. Hers and not hers at the same time. She had never felt so intertwined with someone.
They had gotten each other into bed and she was supine now, and she didn’t have to tell him what she wanted because he wanted it too, or maybe he had wanted it first—but who cared about chicken and egg problems when he was leaving a little trail of hickeys up the inside of her thighs, licking her open like he had done this before.
He was working his tongue in a lazy rhythm, up and down on her clit like he had all the time in the world, only it didn’t make her relax. Electric tension pulsed through her, slow waves that buffeted her objections until they drowned in pleasure. Just how she liked it, exactly—
Exactly how—
She sat up very suddenly. “You cheated.”
He looked up at her, and God it was annoying how hot that was, his lids heavy with pleasure, mouth sticky with her. “I did not.”
“Not—cheating-cheating. You—when you were me—experimented—” It was very hard to form sentences.
He understood though. And smiled, and bent back down. “Maybe I’m just very good at this.” He slipped a finger inside her, and then another, and she lost an even larger portion of her vocabulary.
“Yeah, but—mmm—it’s very specifically—oh, oh—”
“I could mention that you also very specifically went for that one spot…” he teased.
She froze, or as much as was possible when he wouldn’t stop making that come here motion inside of her, each stroke just a little faster and more torturous than the last. “That’s…we’re talking about you.”
“Uh-huh.” Smug asshole. “You want me to stop?”
She fell backward again. “No,” she admitted, and he laughed as he bent back down. The sound reverberated through her. And she wanted him to keep talking somehow, even though she absolutely did not want him to stop finding much more useful applications for that mouth of his, but she couldn’t get the words out to explain. I want to feel you purr she thought, she might even have said aloud, although she didn’t think so. She was much too far gone, and yet there was this—sensation. Like they were flowing into each other, a churning deluge of feeling and thought, and in the midst of it he started to hum.
Nothing with a melody. Just a tuneless bit of noise, little more than a sustained moan, and how did he…? it was the surprise of it as much as anything else that submerged her in a long, velvety bliss.
It’s never been quite like that, she thought, feeling floaty and pleasantly stupid. Like he—was me. She felt a smile growing and didn’t bother trying to hide it. “Ohh I am going to be so mad at you in a minute,” she sighed.
“Longer than that, I hope,” he said, crawling over her and oh. He slipped inside her so easily and he felt so good. Part of her wanted to lie there and stay blissed out, but those slow thrusts were an infuriating tease. He knew how she liked it.
But she knew how to get him, too. She moved with him, arching her hips away at the very last moment to create a different kind of friction. It made his breath stutter, so she did it again, remembering how it felt to want to be so fully engulfed. Again, deeper this time, again, right down to the base of him, until their hips bruised against each other—
“Jesus, Scully,” he breathed. He snaked an arm under her back and pressed her close, or pressed himself close, it was impossible to tell if there was any difference. She felt like all her nerve endings had branched across the negligible divide and entwined with his, each dendrite clasping with his like joined hands.
He—they—rolled over, so that she was on top and he could reach down and stroke her clit with that tidal pressure, the intensity swelling. She clenched around him, remembering what it was like to be him, a surreal kind of kinesthetic memory that made her move by instinct in a way she knew he’d like. And he was doing the same.
It was unbearable, being so exquisitely attuned to someone else and having them mirror it back at you, light upon light. She let the obliterating brightness fill her and spill over, whiting out into release.
In the aftermath when their breathing quieted and he pulled a blanket over them, limbs entwined and body heat evening out, she still wasn’t entirely sure where he stopped and she started. But the feeling of connectedness was…familiar. Oh. Here we are.
He must have felt it too. “I’m you,” he murmured, half-asleep already. “You’re me.”
“No,” she murmured back, too spent to fully articulate her objection. “No, we are. You’re us. I’m us.”
“We’re us,” he agreed.