The Curious Assignment of Luck by Nina (ninamazing at gmail dot com; feedback much appreciated!) RATING: NC-17 WORD COUNT: 780 AUTHOR'S NOTE: Written for the X-Files Porn Battle at LiveJournal. Prompt -- Mulder/Scully, "one lonely night." He gets wacko sometimes, holed up in the house cutting clippings out of publications Scully would be ashamed to say she'd read. After so many years of Mulder dragging her into assignments it's strange that she's the only one depositing checks into their bank account, the only one who gets to see other people in the course of the day. They get used to it, but he still goes on long walkabouts through the woods; and she figures it's best not to ask him what he finds there. She kissed him goodbye on Monday, teased him not to get arrested or abducted, and he told her he might be gone a week. So she hates herself when by Thursday she's playing arrested or abducted over in her head and drumming her nails against the skin of her forearm, unable to concentrate on anything but the ungodly silence. It seems unbearable, being this far from sirens and engines and flatmates, when she can't hear the fluttering of his papers in the next room. She turns off the lights and crawls into bed, but fights sleep. She's not awake, either, but dreaming, imagining the warm, lanky hulk of him behind her even as she tells herself she isn't. She's so busy pretending and pretending she's not pretending that she jumps a foot in the air when his hand slides over her waist. "Scully, it's me," he says. "Jesus, I thought you were asleep." Her eyes have been closed for so long that his face comes into focus almost immediately -- his eyes are peering at her, slivers of black volcanic glass. "Sorry," she says, shakes her head, reaches for him. He gathers her easily to his chest. Scully shuts her eyes again and sighs, breathing in the smell of earth and burning wood. "You're back early," she whispers; she presses a hot, drowsy kiss to the fabric of his t-shirt. "I missed you," he tells her, rubbing slow circles into the small of her back. "Missed you too," she mumbles and she smiles, pulling his shirt up and jerking her hips toward him. "Oh, Doc, you don't believe in wasting time, do you?" "Nope," she says, licking the place where his chest ends and his neck starts. His hair catches on her tongue. He's already more than halfway done unbuttoning her pajama top, and when he slips the fabric over the back of her shoulders he kisses her lightly on the lips. She kisses him back, his neck in her hands, and then she turns over so she's hugging him against her and resting her head in the crook of his right arm. He takes his time with her tonight, cupping her breasts, tracing circles on her belly. He slips his fingers into the waist of her pajama bottoms and pulls his hands gently over the smooth curves of her skin beneath. He touches her as if she's still thirty, as if he hasn't noticed the scars that time has given them. With Mulder and Scully it's moving backwards from turmoil to tranquility and it seems that this, too, is not without its transitional hiccups. He holds her, painting the back of her neck with openmouthed kisses, and Scully smiles at his slowness. Ten years ago this would have been Agent Mulder, hissing words into her ears, leaving bite marks across her skin. Now the way he slips her out of her clothes and pushes easily inside her is just a refined and reverent version of that decade-old dance. She closes her eyes and hums in contentment when she feels him. Two of Mulder's fingers touch her, rubbing the small place near the tops of her thighs where she wants him the most, and contentment turns into something else as she gasps against the skin of his arm. "How did I get so lucky, Scully?" he whispers, and she knows he doesn't just mean tonight. She's squeezing her muscles around him, moaning with every press of his palm, and moving to catch the rhythm of his thrusts. He's sweet all around her, the warm shadow that's part of her own silhouette now, but inside her he's hard, demanding, touching her everywhere. She always thinks she should be used to the feeling, but when he goes deep she still has to throw her head back into his shoulder, still has to suck in a breath and scream. And he still has to wrap warm arms around her body, still has to grip her like a lifeline to shore. She takes his hands, kisses them. "I think you'll stay lucky, Mulder," she says.