Make Ends Meet When They're Tattered and Frayed
by leiascully

Feedback: leiascully@gmail.com
Summary: This is the life she wanted. She is not happy.
Timeline: Post-I Want To Believe
Pairing: Mulder/Scully
Rating: R
Word Count: ~2450
Concrit: Welcome
Author's Notes: It's Tuesday on the East Coast! Happy temporary
return of Smut Tuesday! Title is from Jonatha Brooke's "Digging".
It's a good song to which you ought to listen. Kisses to jainanicole
for calling me a liar. Didn't I follow through, buttercup?
Disclaimer: The X-Files and all related characters are the property
of Chris Carter, 1013 Productions, and Fox Studios. No profit is
made from this and no infringement is intended.


+ + + +

Scully gets home and finds, like every day, that she weighs her keys
in her palm for a long minute before she can put them down. It is
even longer before she can bring herself to shrug off her long buff
coat, even though it is April and really too warm for it, and the mud
that sucked at the soles of her shoes as she crossed the yard is
spattered over the hem. There's no sense in it: she found the house,
she decorated it. It should feel like home. But the throw pillows
look much dingier they did in the store, and the house is stuffy,
holding its breath against the kick of the central heat, and Mulder
has left the juice out again. How he can remember to close the
windows she flings open in the mornings and forgets, each day, that
juice goes back into the refrigerator is a mystery to her. She sighs
and slots the bottle back into the fridge, the cuffs of her coat still
rubbing at her wrists. The puff of cold air as the door reseals makes
her yearn suddenly to go for a run, but the faint trails she's found
through their patch of woods are seams of mud. She'd feel worse
for the effort. Reluctantly, she slides her arms out of her coat and
hangs it on the beautiful antique coat rack that Mulder nearly gave
to Goodwill when he was cleaning out his mother's house.

Even in her shirtsleeves, she doesn't feel settled. She can sense
Mulder snipping away at newspapers in his closet. His
singlemindedness reminds her of his irradiation by the alien artifact
all those years ago and his catatonic focus, his eyes on her
desperate but blurred, looking through her. She doesn't like to go
into his office: more than once her bare feet have been cut by slivers
of paper or stray pins, and even when she is shod, it reminds her
too much of the past. She had a place in the basement. She has no
place in this space. She is crowded out by the supernatural. Or, if
she is truthful, she has removed herself from the shadows. She is
not even in the morgue anymore, insulated by death: she has
rejoined the world of the living and the normal. She should be
happy. 

This is the life she wanted.

She is not happy. 

Scully half-sprawls in one of the stern kitchen chairs and takes a
strange comfort from the painful way the slats dissect her back. The
softness of the couch they chose together makes her feel as if she is
lost and sinking, and the cushions do not serve as flotation devices.
She will have angry red marks from the pressure of this bare wood,
she thinks, but she does not move. She should start dinner. There
are bags of beef stew in the freezer that she made the other
weekend in the slow cooker. She finds that it is easier if she cooks
in advance, spending her Saturdays dicing and slicing. There are no
restaurants nearby and Mulder has never had a mind for earthly
things. She reaches for a jar of multivitamins and turns it over and
over, listening to the capsules tumble over each other, slightly sticky
but each separate from the others, like her thoughts.

"Hey."

Scully jumps, startled, drops the vitamins, and knocks her elbow
against the chair so that the bone jangles. Mulder pads in on damp
bare feet, a towel tucked around his waist. His mouth is twisted into
something too wry and apologetic to be a smile. "Sorry I startled
you," he says, and looks into the fridge. 

"I was just thinking," she says. The sight of him makes her stomach
twist with longing. She wants him to cup her elbow in his hand and
soothe the hurt. It makes her resentful, to want him so much after all
this time, to need the comfort. She stays where she is. "How was
your day?"

He twitches one shoulder and she watches the muscles play under
his skin. They are getting older, but he is still marvelous to her,
partly because he is still whole and sound, unexpectedly, and
because he is so easy in his body. "Took a shower to clear my
head," he says, cracking open a bottle of water and leaning against
the counter. "You?"

"Same old," she says, levering up out of the chair. She remembers a
time when an outsider would have needed several dictionaries to
navigate their conversations. They have become mundane,
monosyllabic, uneloquent. "Three colds, five vaccinations, a case of
pneumonia, and a broken arm. Nothing they won't survive."

"Kids are resilient," Mulder says.

"They don't know any better," she says, and can't keep some
bitterness out of her voice. She crosses to the freezer and pulls it
open, peers inside, and lets it shut. Beef stew sounds unappetizing.
She wants pho, or Ethiopian, or Chinese from that sketchy awful
place Mulder dug up, or a grilled sandwich. 

"There's a lasagna in the oven," Mulder says. 

"Did you go to the store?" she asks, clicking on the oven light. The
lasagna is in her glass casserole dish instead of the foil pan she
expected, the noodles askew and the cheese pooling on one side. 

"The Food Network is surprisingly educational," he says, leaning
over her shoulder. He smells like soap and heat. The lumbering,
clumsy way in which he has tried to take care of her overwhelms
her; Mulder has always been a man of surprising grace and
competency. She turns into his arms and clings to him, pressing her
face into his chest to hide the way she's sniffling. 

"Hey," he says and strokes her back. "It's not proof positive of the
paranormal or anything."

"Thank you," she says against his throat, and takes a deep breath.
"It's just been a long week. A long year. Ever since the winter, with
all those poor dead girls and Father Joe, I just keep remembering."

"You've always found a way out of the darkness," he says, kissing
the top of her head. "It's something I admire about you."

"I don't think there is a way out," she says. "Not after everything
we've been through."

"You put on your bikini, I'll mix us up some boat drinks and build
up the fire," he says. "It will be all right."

"It won't be all right, Mulder." She pulls back far enough to look
into his eyes. "You can't imagine that I believe that you're happy
here, never seeing anyone, no scope for your investigations. No
resources."

"I need to get out of the house," he says with a grin that's lopsided
with the wild despair of something caged. "I feel like Tooms in
there, building a nest out of paper. I'm sorry. I know this was the
life you wanted, and I'm trying, Scully."

"You can take the boy out of the city," she says, half to herself.
Homesickness swells under her breastbone. She misses takeout
and street signs and the grit of concrete under the soles of her
running shoes. She misses movie theaters and grocery stores with
ten brands of biscotti. She even misses the lemon astringency of the
shampoo she used to wash away the morgue smell of latex and
putrefaction and the clean stillness of the corpses as she dismantled
their secrets. She cannot stay here, where life has no edges and the
world is muddled with snow or mud or greenery. "Mulder, we dealt
with it then."

"We did," he says, and there is a wistfulness in his voice that
convinces her that she is right to do this. "It nearly killed us, Scully."

"At least we were alive," she says, and there it is, what she has
been feeling all along and not saying. Here she feels dead. She sets
her hip against his thigh, exhausted, taking strength from him.
"We've been forgiven, Mulder. The prodigals are supposed to go
home."

His hand slides up her back to the base of her neck and he crushes
his mouth to hers with a desperate gratitude. She kisses back,
starving for him, as if she has been Tantalus with him just out of
reach. Mulder is her crucible: the trials of the week are burned
away by the touch of his hands. She is fumbling with her own
buttons like a teenager in heat, and he nudges her fingers aside and
shucks her out of her clothes as easily as she's seen him peel corn
out of the husk and leave it fresh and smooth and pale. Her shirt
trickles from the counter to the floor, but she is still wearing her bra.
With the clasp undone, the cups jostle under her breasts. 

"You can write," she mumbles against his mouth, "you can write in
the coffee shops, the library. You can consult for the Bureau. You
can teach, oh, God, anywhere, please." His hands have found their
way into her underwear; he crooks his fingers and pushes into her
with the ease of long practice. She is trembling, half-dressed, the
small of her back hot where she has jammed herself against the
oven's handle for support, and he is still wearing the towel swathed
around his narrow hips. Scully clutches at the terry, pulling him
closer, trying not to slip backwards. Her trousers are pooled
around her ankles and her heel is caught in the hem. 

"You're incredible," he says with his lips brushing her ear. His jaw
scrapes across her cheekbone. She is glad he has not shaved
today. The scour of his stubble cuts through the complacency and
dullness in which she has coated herself to keep the yearning at
bay. He is peeling away all the onionskin layers of resentment and
boredom, peeling both of them down to the bones of themselves.
They have been living this papier-mache life she created. He twists
his fingers inside her and the dream dissolves into urgency.

"Mulder," she says, breathless. His name is round in her mouth,
sustaining but not solid enough. She wants to put her lips around his
fingers, his cock, anything. She wants to be filled. He is
finger-fucking her against the oven and his eyes are the same
intense green they were the first time, in his apartment, in the dark,
and she is panting with wonder. The glass of the oven sears her ass
as he presses deeper into her; she cries out and stumbles against
him. He kisses her in apology and settles her against the fridge
instead, her feet braced wide, his thigh between them. She sinks her
teeth into his shoulder and tongues the knob of bone there. He
groans and pulls the tie from her ponytail, leaning into her body. His
cheekbone chafes against her scalp as she tucks her face further
into his neck. She rubs herself against him until she thinks the wiry
hair on his chest will scuff her raw, penance for the life they have
lived pushing each other away. 

He pushes her shoulders until her back arches and murmurs in her
ear, "You want to move this somewhere else?"

"I need you now," she grits out, trying to get her fingers around any
pertinent part of him, but he eludes her grasp the way he always
has. 

"You're going to have to wait," he breathes and begins to slide that
astounding mouth down her front. He kisses her throat until she
forgets how to swallow, her head tipped back in breathless need,
and her breasts until the heat of his lips burns away her breath, and
each imprint of his mouth on her ribs, her hips, makes her skeleton
light up as if she's seeing herself on x-ray on the backs of her
eyelids. His tongue flickers across her clit and she yelps. She has
worked all her life to contain her impulses within her body, within
her clothes, and he undoes her so easily and hands her back to
herself. Under his touch, she comes so fast and hard that she is
startled, gasping with the breath half out of her. 

"Jesus," she says, quite after the fact, pushing her hair out of her
face with one sweaty palm. Mulder's shoulder has the marks of her
fingers where she clutched at him. Her lips are swollen from his
teeth. He nuzzles the front of her thigh, gazing up at her, myopic and
foreshortened. 

"Take pity on an old man's knees, Scully," he says, and the way his
hair falls in his eyes makes him look like he did when she met him,
nearly, and she surprises herself again by laughing. She drops her
bra on the kitchen floor and steps out of trousers and heels and
finally, finally looses the towel from its failing hold on his hips and
drops it on top of the pile of her clothing. He reaches for her hand
and leads her to their bed, easing her down. She feels swollen,
sated but willing, aching for the touch of him inside her. His cock
nudges her leg and she slides her hand down to curl her fingers
around his shaft. 

"You seem to have me well in hand," he cracks, his thighs rolling
against hers as he levers himself up. 

"I succeeded beyond the FBI's wildest expectations, didn't I?" she
parries, and he laughs, and it's as if spring has finally come. His
laughter is the noise of branches shedding snow. She hooks her
knee over his hip and urges him in: he holds his breath, as if the
pressure is too exquisite to bear, and they relax together. It is
familiar and comfortable and still so surprisingly good. She didn't
think it would be this way, but he still touches her as if he's
worshiping at a mortal altar of the flesh, something holy and wholly
sensual. Her fingertips find the places that make him groan against
the corner of her mouth, and he strokes her inside and out with
fingers and cock, all slickness now, no friction. When she comes
again it is like a wave cresting, a gentle swell and fall, and he pauses
to let her ride it out. She urges him on with her hips as his thrusts
grow more urgent. His eyes are wild as he bucks into her, but it is a
feral glory, not a desperation, and he sinks down against her with a
long strangled sigh.

"I hope," she says, out of breath, "I hope our bones lie together like
they did in that haunted house."

"Like those kids in the mushroom field," he says, and kisses her
palm, and she is home.