Peach Season
by Amal Nahurriyeh

Email: amalnahurriyeh@gmail.com 
Summary: Still life with stone fruit.
Pairing: MSR
Rating: NC-17 (sex, produce, total and complete absence of
broader plot)
Warnings: None.
Timeline/Spoilers: I will be canon-compliant and say between Je
Souhaite and Requiem. I'm voting for Je Souhaite being set in May,
and Requiem being set in August, because...just because, I have no
real reason. While this isn't strictly MOF/Caseyverse, it is
consistent with both; these are the people who will eventually find
themselves on a bunker floor in Stark, Montana, and there are nods
to that fic in this one.

Disclaimer: Intellectual property is a capitalist fiction designed to
oppress the working fic-writer. That said, I don't own them either.

Author's Notes: Written for Dreamscatcher from the Haven, for her
donation to the help_haiti auction. Many thanks to her for being
polite about it taking me like six months to write a PWP. This is
inspired by the following exchange in the fourth part of Four Things
Sadie Mulder Doesn't Remember About Her Father, and One She
Almost Wishes She Didn't:


     Mama laughs, thinks for a moment, and puts the paper 
     down. "Oh,it's nothing. No, it's just--" And that's it, 
     the wistful, naked look again. "I was remembering when 
     your father and I were first...." Schtupping, Casey wants 
     to supply, but decides that her mother could still try to 
     ground her, so maybe she should back off a little. "We 
     were at his apartment one morning. I was just getting over 
     the flu. He went out running, and he came back with a bag 
     of peaches from the farmer's market in downtown Alexandria, 
     because I'd said I wanted vitamin C. I meant for him to pick 
     up a half-gallon of orange juice or something logical, and 
     peaches don't even have that much vitamin C, but, well, your 
     father." She leaned back in her chair a little. "And he 
     peeled them for me, and fed me them in bed. And they were 
     ripe like that. The sheets were ruined. Peach juice stains 
     horribly."

     Casey smiles. Yeah, she's pretty sure there was more story 
     than that, but best not to pry. "You two were just gross, 
     you were so cute, you know that?"


As will not surprise you, Scully's recounting was not entirely
accurate.

Mulder's theory of nutrition as described herein is one I personally
hold, though I know it to be false. 

Thanks to Leigh for the beta. Let me know if you catch typos she
didn't.


~ ~ ~ ~ ~

When Scully finally woke up, the sun was already spilling warmly
over Mulder's comforter. In her half-asleep haze, she began to take
stock of how she felt. Her sinuses were noticeably improved from
the night before, and her neck and lumbar spine hurt less. The
rawness in the back of her throat also appeared diminished, though
perhaps eating or drinking might set it off again. But, all in all, she
felt confident in thinking that she was on the mend, and that this had
been, after all, merely a cold.

She'd been feeling the beginnings of it during the case, but it hadn't
gotten truly obvious until shortly before they got on the plane. And
then, of course, she had five hours of cabin pressure, with the
congestion in her head causing a terrible headache and the cramped
seating in coach only adding to her aches and pains. Mulder had
tried to get her to lie down across his lap, but she still thought doing
such a thing in public was a poor idea, even if they had an excuse.
Even if they were on a plane, and nearly certainly not under
observation. It just seemed...wrong, still, somehow. 

She'd been so woozy by the time they'd landed that she'd only
half-processed Mulder climbing into the cab with her and giving his
own address. As she'd dosed on his shoulder, she thought, briefly,
that it was a rare man who would bring a woman who obviously
had a communicable disease and with whom he had a near-zero
chance of scoring back to his place, but Mulder proved to be in
many rare categories. He'd woken her at his apartment, whispering
softly, "I don't think I can carry you and the luggage." She'd
stumbled into bed without bothering to undress, but he'd pestered
her into taking some generic cold medicine he had lying around,
which she did without reading the components, and peeling off her
suit. "The bed has a strict dress code. Nothing with buttons."

"Does that mean I'm not allowed to sleep in one of your dress
shirts?" she asked, as she wrestled with her skirt. 

"Intriguing though the thought may be, I'm a smidge too metrosexual
to allow the possible damage to the shirts," he'd said. And she'd
muttered something incoherent, blown her nose, put on the t-shirt
he'd handed her, and fallen asleep like a rock.

He'd woken her a while ago--an hour, maybe, she hadn't looked at
the clock--as he'd been about to go out running. "Hey, Scully. You
want anything?"

"Breakfast," she'd said into the pillow. "Vitamin C." 

"Will do," he'd said, and kissed her through her hair. 

She'd been woken up by the mumble of noise that was him
wrestling with his broken lock and coming in, probably with too
many bags. Listening to him, she held out hope for a bottle of actual
orange juice, but who knew with Mulder. As long as he didn't think
an orange danish counted. Did they even make orange danishes?
She rolled over a little. 

A crash of noise from the kitchen, and then he appeared in the
bedroom, his shirt soaked through with sweat, holding a white
plastic bag in his hand. "Ta dah," he said, dropping it next to her on
the bed. "Let me shower, and we can eat." 

As he disappeared into the bathroom, stripping off his running
clothes as he went, she struggled up to her elbows and poked into
the bag. It contained a half-dozen peaches, yellow peaches from
the look of them, warm and soft and heavily furred. She'd seen the
Saturday farmer's market in Old Town a couple of times, but had
never managed to really shop there. But these were definitely not
supermarket peaches; they still had leaves attached. 

She puzzled at the bag for a moment, and then dragged herself out
of bed to the bathroom. Mulder was already in the shower, and the
mirror was fogged. "Mulder," she said, leaning against the wall,
"why did you bring me peaches?"

"What?" he said, sticking his soapy head out around the shower
curtain. 

"The peaches. Why did you get peaches?"

"You said you wanted vitamin C," he said, as if that were a
sentence that made sense.

"So why peaches?"

"They don't sell oranges at the farmer's market?" He moved away
from the curtain and into the spray again.

"Mulder--"

"If you're going to talk, come in here, I can't hear you," he said.

She sighed, and stripped off her shirt and panties. He was rinsing
the last of the shampoo from his hair as she climbed in. "Mulder,
peaches aren't particularly high in vitamin C."

"Sure they are." He wiped the water out of his eyes. "They're
orange." He took her by the shoulders and rotated them, so she
was under the water's spray. 

She closed her eyes; the water was hot, and she could feel her
sinuses responding to the steam. "What does that have to do with
it?"

"I have a theory," he said, reaching around her for the bath puff and
bottle of body wash, "about produce."

"Of course you do," she said. The bath puff and body wash had
appeared in the shower without comment, a few weeks after she
had started sleeping over with some regularity. She had found
herself, occasionally, contemplating what it meant: Mulder, whose
shower had previously held only whatever shampoo and
conditioner were on sale that week and some bright orange bar of
soap, ventured into a Bath and Body Works, and apparently
walked around smelling things. Or maybe picked at random, or
went for what he guessed was the most masculine thing in there,
and therefore least embarrassing to purchase. Every time she
showered with the Juniper Breeze he'd bought, she felt vaguely that
she smelled like a gin and tonic, but it wasn't unpleasant, and the
crucial fact was this: Mulder had picked this out. For her. 

"It makes a lot of sense," he says. "I think that foods, particularly
fruits and vegetables, have whatever nutrients for what color they
are." He soaped the puff and began washing her shoulders. 

"I can wash myself, Mulder," she said.

"That wouldn't be half as much fun," he said, scrubbing across her
belly. "Turn around." 

She sighed, and spun to face the water. "Color determines
nutrients?"

"You know. Like 'leafy dark greens' all have the same things in
them, stuff like that. There are orange vitamins and red vitamins and
green vitamins and, I mean, I guess that's it. Vitamin C is orange."

"Because of oranges."

"I mean, I guess yellow too, because of lemons. And pineapple. So
it's a yellow-orange family vitamin." He scrubbed diligently at the
scar where her tattoo had been. She always wondered if he were
trying to see if there were anything left of it. 

"So you think that red, yellow, orange, and green bell peppers have
different nutritional content?"

"Generally, all I think about bell peppers is that they're disgusting,
but, yes, if pressed, I would maintain that."

"Red and white onions." 

"Most likely. Though the majority of a red onion is white, I'd remind
you, so it's probably marginal."

"Red and green grapes."

"Definitely."

"Zucchini and summer squash." 

"Trick question. They're both white in the middle."

"What does that mean?"

He hung the puff back on its hook, and reached for the shampoo.
His back slid wetly against hers as he leaned around her, and she
couldn't help smiling. "White fruits and vegetables, sadly, are
entirely devoid of nutritional content."

"Really?"

"Absolutely. They have carbohydrates and things, but no nutrition."
He began massaging shampoo through her hair. 

She closed her eyes, shut up the voice in her head that scolded her
for not using color-treated shampoo, and concentrated on his
fingers against her scalp. "None of them? And that includes
vegetables that are white on the inside?"

"Not a single one." He turned her towards him again, and tilted her
back under the water to rinse the shampoo out, his hands still in her
hair. She didn't bother opening her eyes; she wasn't awake enough
yet to think. 

"Apples."

"Nope."

"Bananas."

"Well, they're pale yellow, so I guess they might have something"
He started in on the conditioner. 

"Cauliflower."

"Nutritionally vapid."

"Potatoes."

"Totally."

"Eggplant." 

He paused, hands rubbing conditioner into the ends of her hair, and
thought for a moment. "I don't know," he said. "It's pretty white
when it starts out, but it cooks grey. That one might call for some
scientific testing."

"Mulder," she said, tilting her head back, "your entire theory is
hogwash. While some nutrients do have a pigment to them that
affects the look of the food, there's no one-to-one correlation.
Dark green vegetables are high in minerals because of their role in
the food chain, not because they're green. Potatoes are good
sources of vitamin C and iron. Zucchini have reasonable amounts of
vitamins A and C. And peaches are orange," she said as she
reached up to work out a knot as she rinsed her hair, "because of
beta carotene." 

"So you say," he said. 

She groaned, slightly, and leaned forward to collapse on his chest.
"Why are we arguing about produce, Mulder?"

"I don't think anything we do naked in a shower counts as arguing,"
he said, running his hands smoothly down her back to grip her by
the hips. "How are you feeling?"

"Better. A little fuzzy." She rocked her head against his wet skin,
feeling his chest hairs against her cheeks, and marveling that this
was the same asshole who abandoned her without the car at the
single worst coroner's office in the United States not four days ago.
She was still pissed about that, if he ever asked.

"Like a peach." He kissed the top of her head. "Come on. Let's go
back to bed."

"I'm hungry," she said tiredly, as he turned off the water and pulled
back the curtain.

He threw her a towel. "So we'll eat."

The sheets on the bed were warm from the sun streaming through
the window. She had not yet gotten over being surprised, most
days, that this was actually happening, that Mulder was crawling
naked into her bed in front of her and she was toweling her hair dry
not two feet behind him, that they were actually planning on
spending Saturday morning naked and lazy in bed, like normal
human beings who weren't on a mission to save the world from
alien viruses. She doubted this, at least five times a day, and in her
darker moments knew it was necessarily going to get worse at
some point, but it was also right, in a way she couldn't explain to
anyone if they'd asked. Probably a good thing they wouldn't, then.

She pulled the covers up over her shoulders and turned towards
him. He had the bag of peaches, and had pulled one out. "Is this the
only breakfast I'm getting? Because that sounded like a lot of bags."

"Nosy. I got bagels. And other things. I thought you might need to
stay camped in bed all day."

She sighed. "I should be well enough to go out. It's passing."

"Maybe I need to stay camped in bed all day." He took a tiny little
nip of the peach in his hand, much smaller than she would have
expected, and then pulled it away from his mouth and began to pull
at the skin near where he had bitten.

"What are you doing?"

"Peeling it." Slowly, in a long soft piece, the skin slid off. When it
tore from the flesh, he dropped it into an empty water glass on the
side of his bed, and started in on another piece.

She'd never seen anyone peel a peach like that before. Mulder just
kept on inventing bizarre competencies. "How'd you learn to do
that?"

"When I was a kid." He poked a little too hard into the flesh, and
sucked the drop of juice off his finger. "We had a tree in the
backyard. Must have been there when they bought the house,
because it was pretty old, I think. Mom hated it, because she was
allergic to bees, and they always hung around when the fruit was
ripe. But it was good for climbing, so Sam and I would go up it and
grab whatever we could. It was pretty great." He concentrated on
the last scraps of skin near the pointed end. 

"And you taught yourself to peel peaches barehanded." She liked
the idea of little Fox up a tree, investigating stone fruit. 

"It's more about finding peaches that want to be peeled." He
presented it to her, now shorn of its fuzzy covering. "Observe. They
have to be perfectly ripe, but not yet soft or bruised, because that
means the skin will stick to the flesh. They can't be green at the
stem end, or they'll be hard and tasteless, but if they're even a little
bit mushy they won't peel at all. See, I do know something about
produce."

"I'm very impressed." She started to sit up and reach out to take the
peeled peach, but he pushed her back onto the pillow and held it
out to her mouth. "Mulder," she said, trying not to laugh. "It'll make
a mess."

"Sheets wash," he said.

She sighed and took a bite. The peach really was perfect, soft but
still firm-textured. As she'd expected, the juice ran down her cheek
towards her ear; and, as she'd half-expected, Mulder leaned down
to lick it off her, his tongue tickling up to just before the corner of
his mouth. She couldn't help but laugh at that, but he just held the
peach to her mouth again. So she took another bite, teeth scraping
against the red pit, and this time he chased the juice down under her
chin, stopping to suck at her neck gently. "Don't you want a bite?"
she asked as she swallowed. 

"I'm doing fine," he said, trailing his tongue up behind her ear. 

She took another bite, and then preempted him by licking along his
arm where the juice was starting to drip down towards his elbow.
He pulled his head up from her neck, and she stared into his eyes
and slid the point of her tongue along the tendons in his wrist.
Remarkably, he didn't flinch, but she caught the dilation of his
pupils. Maybe slightly-greater-than-zero chances, realistically. She
was feeling a lot better.

He twisted the peach so she could get at a new spot on it, and she
took off a whole chunk lightly, getting much less juicy in the
process, so he settled for going back to her ear, nudging her
still-damp hair out of the way with his nose and nuzzling her earlobe
gently. She slid an arm around his neck and slipped it against the
back of his head, scratching lightly at his hair to encourage him. As
she finished the peach down to the stem and the pit, she turned to
his hand, licking at his juice-sticky palm and sliding her tongue
between his long fingers. He pulled away from her to drop the pit
into the water glass with the discarded skin, and then thankfully
rested his hand against the sheets rather than curling it into her hair
as he rose over her to kiss her.

"You'll get my germs," she whispered as he lowered his mouth to
hers.

"I'm pretty sure you coughed them on me already overnight," he
said. He kissed her gently first, as if checking to see if she would
accept, which she found simultaneously sweet and preposterous.
She pressed back, and slid her tongue over his bottom lip, which he
obviously was able to interpret correctly, because he returned the
favor, and soon she was turning her face away from him to catch
her breath and present him with her ear. He had a thing for ears,
which she did not mind being the beneficiary of, and she repaid him
by digging her nails into his shoulders and rolling against him with a
soft gasp. His hand--still the tiniest bit sticky, but she wasn't going
to complain at this point--slid around her breast, and she made an
appreciative noise into his ear and then bit his neck where it joined
his shoulder, gently but assuredly. 

He began to inch down her body, and slid his hand over her
stomach and between her legs. They both startled when his fingers
slid against her, and found her hot and swollen but dry. He glanced
up at her, as if worried, for some unknown reason, that she were
merely playing along. She scratched her fingers through the hair at
the nape of his neck and thought for a second. "Was there
pseudephedrine in the pill you gave me last night?"

His forehead crinkled, which made an odd contrast to his fingers
sifting through her pubic hair. "I guess? It was just a standard
cold-killing whatever."

"Ah." She nodded. "It's a, ah, known side effect. Effects all the
mucus membranes the same way, as it were." She smiled softly.
"I'm sure we should be able to manage." 

He did something vaguely dirty with his eyebrows and leaned over
to lick her left nipple. Yeah, that would do just fine. 

She had always been unsure of where to put her hands while a man
was going down on her. (Mulder nosed her belly as he pushed her
thighs apart, and she narrowly avoided kicking him in the spleen as
she startled and laughed.) There seemed to be no good answer,
and she'd always felt like a bad porn star clutching the sheets. But
Mulder had, in an uninhibited moment encouraged by two bottles of
wine and the total darkness of her living room during a power
outage, pressed her hand to the back of his head, and then moaned
a little when she grabbed his hair and pulled, so she'd gotten the
message, and wondered occasionally at what kinks and
predilections he'd decided not to share with the class quite yet. (His
hands pulled her hips into his face, and she dug one heel into the
bed and the other into the small of his back.) He liked her
demonstrative, which she was able to perform with ease, and yet it
made her wonder--had he wanted her like this all these years?
When they weren't naked, did he want her to tell him she loved him
all the time, anyway? Could she manage it, without the current
passing between their damp skin to spur her on? She arched her
back and pressed her clit deeper into his mouth, and called his
name as she came, and he shuddered slightly and pressed his nose
against her mons, catching his breath. 

Just as she was about to get voluntary motor control back, he slid
his tongue against her again, and she startled and used her foot to
push him away. "Don't, I'm too tired. Just come up here and fuck
me, okay?"

"Does your mother know you talk that way?" He pulled her legs up
as he crawled up the bed, and she hooked them around his waist to
pull him closer. 

"Are you gonna tell her?" It was easy to smile at him at moments
like this, his hair disorganized from her fingers and his chin damp
with saliva and his cock prodding at her delicately, to open up to
the constant torrent of emotion he poured at her day in and day out,
and to let herself feel it. This man loves me, she always thought at
this point, and I have no idea if there's something I should be doing
about that other than this.

"I think I'd like to live to see my next birthday," he said, and
reached down to slide himself inside her. She closed her eyes and
concentrated on feeling him, every inch of him pressing her into the
mattress, spreading her open, working his way inside her on an
elemental level. He kissed her temple as he started to move, and
she pressed her forehead against his shoulder and followed him,
letting him set the pace. Letting go of conscious thought had always
been the hardest part for her, but it was getting easier, and she was
fairly sure that was Mulder, somehow, that she was so used to
following him down paths that made no sense that her body's
meandering circuits were nothing out of the ordinary. I am going to
love him for the rest of my life, she thought, and opened her mouth
against his skin, tasting him as she came again, feeling his arms tense
around her as he let himself go.

He rolled off of her after he caught his breath, but took her hand in
the space between them on the bed. She squeezed it gently. "I'm
going to need another shower."

"Maybe not quite yet," he said, running his thumb along the back of
her hand.

"Did we crush the rest of the peaches?"

He lifted his head and looked around. "Um, no. They fell on the
floor."

"We can wash them." She turned her head to look at him. He was
still a little unfocused (she wondered, sans contacts and
post-orgasmic, if he could see her face at all), but his face softened
to see her, and she couldn't help but return the smile. "We should
eat. Woman cannot subsist on stone fruit alone." 

"Give me a minute," he said, and kissed her companionably.

She rolled out of bed and staggered to the bathroom, heard him
slide out a moment later, his gait uneven as he headed to the
kitchen. Back in the bedroom, she picked up the peaches and piled
them on his bedside table and climbed back in bed. 

"Do you want orange juice while the coffee's brewing?" he called
out to her.

"You got orange juice?" She took one of the peaches off the pile
and used the sheet to wipe it clean.

"Yeah, of course," he said distractedly. 

Something was bound to go wrong eventually, but there was no
reason not to enjoy the good moments when they came. "Okay,"
she called out, and took a bite of her peach.