Scully waited until the door closed behind Inspector Greene. She still could not help but feel a certain guilty pleasure in the way Mulder had been relaxed enough in just his boxers with her, but when Phoebe stuck her Sloane Ranger nose into the room, he had wrapped the thick terry robe snugly around himself.

(*He was shielding himself from her,*) she realized suddenly. The thought made her very happy. But then she remembered what he had been saying before they had been interrupted. “Mulder?”

“Yeah?”

“Tell me about your friend’s house burning?”

He turned to study her, visibly evaluating her reasons for asking him that question. “You aren’t the psychologist on this team, Scully.”

She spread her hands in a disarming gesture.  “Humor me. Obviously you haven’t dealt with it well, or you wouldn’t have been so disturbed by today’s fire,” she said gently. “Talking about it can’t hurt, can it?”

He looked away again, and she saw him wrap his arms around himself.

“Hey.”

He turned, puzzled.

“Hugs are free,” she said softly. “But it takes two people.”

He froze.

Scully walked over to him, slid her arms around him.  Slowly, cautiously, he put his arms around her, expecting her to stiffen against his touch. She did not. After a moment she looked up.

“It’s not just you alone against the world, anymore, you know,” she said softly. “You’re my partner.  Anybody who comes after you has to go through me, first.”

He smiled faintly, though she could see the fear still lurking in his eyes.

“Cat fight?” he teased. “I’ve got some videos you could study…”

“You’d do it for me,” she said confidently. Then she took a deep breath. “Do you still love her?” She tried to keep her own opinion of Phoebe out of her tone.

He let go of her, moved away from her touch. “I… It was never love,” he said very softly. “At first, it was flattering. She’s three years older than I am.  When you’re a freshman in a strange country, and you’re all alone, attention from a junior is ”

“Very flattering,” Scully finished the sentence, nodding her comprehension. “And she is attractive…”

“Yeah. And she’s from one of those connected families they have in Great Britain: money from the Industrial Revolution, some relatives who married into titled families, but no real titles of their own. So all my classmates were mightily impressed.”

“And that affected your social standing among your peers.”

“Definitely. But then I discovered that she didn’t want to be in love. She wanted to be in control. I wasn’t a lover, I was a possession. I called my father for help. I didn’t want to go back for my sophomore year.”

“Why did you?” She was a little unnerved by the bleakness of his tone.

“I couldn’t explain it to my father in anyway that he could understand. He told me that if I was a man I could handle my own love affairs, that such things were unimportant. I was supposed to be working, not playing.

“But I wasn’t a man. I was a terrified teenager, and I could feel the chains tightening around me, and my father was refusing to help me get free. I had no one else to ask, so I was trapped. I stayed for the fall semester and resigned myself to the chains.”

“How long did this go on?”

“Till early in my senior year.” He was not looking at her.

“How did it end?” she prodded carefully.

“Ugly,” he said flatly. “She dumped me out like spoiled fish.”

“Why?”

He shrugged, affecting carelessness he did not feel, but did not attempt to explain the scandal.

Scully inhaled slowly. “That must have been hard to take, especially after so long…”

“It was,” he admitted. “I was in counseling for weeks.”

That was an admission she had never expected from him. “Did it help?”

“Yeah. I didn’t kill her or myself.”

Scully was shocked. “Were you seriously considering that?”

“I…I’m not sure, now,” he said very quietly. “It was a long time ago.”

“Well, I think she’s got a hell of a lot of nerve being sweet to you, now!” Scully growled. “I wonder how she’d look with a black eye?”

“Scully!” He was shocked, both at her suggestion and at her willingness to stand up for him. He could not recall the last time anyone had taken his side without some form of coercion or the possibility of advancing themselves in the process.

She smiled at him, all wide-eyed innocence. “It will be an accident! I’ll be so sorry she walked into the door!”

He dropped to sit into a chair, ran his fingers through his hair, still smiling.

“Feel better?”

He looked up. “Yeah, I do. Thank you. Are you sure you didn’t at least minor in psych?”

She shook her head. “I promise. I minored in Poli-Sci.” She sat down in the room’s other chair.  “You want to talk about the fire?”

He blinked. “What?”

“We started to talk about the root causes of your fire phobia. Phoebe was just a distraction tactic.”

He stared at her, and then shook his head in admiration. “You’re good.”

“You’re only now noticing?”

He shook his head, smiling, and relaxed a little more. He tipped his head back and stared at the ceiling for a moment. Then he started to speak, in a calm, emotionless voice.

“My father worked for the State Department,” he began. “When I was little, we traveled with him. I lived in Brazil, Ecuador, Singapore, Japan and Kenya before I was five. I went to kindergarten and first grade in the embassy compound in Riyahd, Saudi Arabia. I went to second grade in Belgrade, and third grade in Tunis.”

“Sounds exciting.”

He looked down and shrugged at little, avoiding her eyes. “Probably would have been if I’d been old enough to appreciate it. As it was, Tunis was the last place we went; the next school year Samantha was old enough to start school, and in Tunis girls weren’t allowed to go to school. So he sent us home, then, and came home when he could.”

“Where did the fire happen?”

“Tunis,” was the answer. “There was no embassy compound. We lived in the community. It scared the hell out of my mother: she and Sammy almost never left the house. An embassy car drove me to school every morning. I hated being that different from the other kids, and I tried very hard to avoid the ride home in the afternoon. I wanted to walk home with my friends; after all, we all lived in the same neighborhood! The embassy car would end up following me home.

“One day, one of my classmates, Ali, asked if I could spend the weekend at his house. Much to my amazement, my father approved. I found out later it was probably because Ali’s father was a general in the Tunisian Army, and the US was cultivating him, even though they were reasonably sure he was planning a coup. They knew he had a private army selected out of the Tunisian Army. Dad figured that if Ali and I were pals, Ali’s father would be less likely to pull anything outrageous, especially while I was in his home.

“He was wrong.”

Scully leaned forward. “So, what happened?”

“There was some kind of minor revolt that weekend. I was nine years old I didn’t understand it at the time. There was an attempt to assassinate the General: rebels fired mortars at the house after dark. Ali’s mother was wounded, his older brother and sister were wounded, several of their household staff were killed. The General wasn’t home when the attack happened; he arrived shortly thereafter. The house was burning. Ali and I were trapped in Ali’s bedroom, caught between the fire and barred security windows. He used a hand grenade to breach the exterior wall of the house and he came in and got us out.”

Scully was fascinated. “Were either of you hurt?”

Mulder shook his head. “No. A little smoke inhalation, a lot of being scared. Once he was sure we were all right, he asked us for a favor.”

She watched his hands tighten into fists, and knew that, while his fear of fire was probably based on those minutes trapped in his friend’s bedroom in a bombed-out house, there was more to this story.

“He couldn’t spare any men to take guard duty at the house that was a personal loss, and he had to be seen as supremely concerned with the national interests. The house wasn’t totally destroyed, and he knew there would be looters. He gave each of us a pistol and told us to shoot anyone who wouldn’t go away when we yelled.”

Scully stared at him. “The man armed two nine-year-olds?!”

Mulder shrugged. “The Viet Cong did. Guerilla forces all over the world arm women and children.  We knew how to shoot; both of our fathers had taught us already.”

“So the two of you were flattered and excited that the General would trust you with this duty?”

Mulder nodded. “He said there were police nearby, and that if we made enough of a commotion, they’d come help us. We both knew that was a fantasy, but we didn’t dare argue with the General. So we took the pistols, and he went off to quell the uprising.”

Mulder stopped talking. Scully studied him for a moment.

“And?” she prompted him. “Something had to have happened.”

He shuddered. “It did. Something after midnight, four rebel soldiers came. From what we overheard them saying as they approached, they had come to kidnap us, to use us as hostages against our fathers, to pressure Ali’s father into quitting his opposition to the rebellion, to pressure my father into withdrawing US support for the ruling government.”

“What did you do?” she whispered, enthralled.

“Y’know, I’ve never told this part.”

“Why?”

“I’m not sure,” he admitted. “I usually just tell about the fires. Ali’s house wasn’t the only house burning by then, and there was no fire department. Fires burned until they burned themselves out. We were relatively safe in a stone garden shed, but the sky above us was orange with the flames, and smoke was all we could smell. The primary part of the fire had blown past us pretty quickly, but…”

“And these soldiers were sent to kidnap you?”

He nodded, his eyes staring backward into history, watching that night play back from his perfect memory.

“What did you do?”

“We killed them.”

Scully stared at him. At first she was not even certain she had heard him correctly.

“What?” she whispered.

“They were coming for us, for Ali and Fox. This wasn’t just ‘the bad guys,’ or ‘the rebels’ that Ali’s father was fighting. They were coming for US.  They had assault rifles AK47s. We had two ancient forty-five caliber US Army Colts. We were both scared to death, but we were cornered. There was no place to run, no place to hide. We’d been ordered to guard the house, and we couldn’t abandon our post. So our choices were simple: we could fight back, or we could surrender, and let ourselves be taken. We decided to fight.”

“And two terrified nine-year-olds killed four experienced soldiers?”

Mulder shrugged. “I doubt they were very experienced; those rebels were more of an armed rabble. We had cover, and they didn’t expect us to be willing to fight, or to be armed. It wasn’t even hard to do, though that old Colt kicked like a mule.  The hard part was stripping their bodies of armament so it wouldn’t be used against us later.  Just as we were stashing the rifles in our shelter, an airstrike hit a block away, and lit up an entirely new horizon of fire. We barred the door with a rifle barrel, and sat back to back watching the windows until dawn, when a company of Marines from the embassy came looking for me. Ali’s dad had finally managed to get a message to my father about our situation.

“The Marines were proud of me when they found the evidence of what had happened out in the yard,” he said wistfully. “They made me their company mascot, an honorary Marine.”

She smiled. She had been brought up in the military, and she knew how military children longed to belong somewhere, no matter how much their parents tried to help them.

“That must’ve been wonderful.”

“It was,” he nodded. “I don’t remember ever feeling as accepted as I did, then. But my mother was horrified, and couldn’t bear to even look at me once she learned what had happened. And she wouldn’t let Sam near me.”

Scully swallowed hard. (*His parents should have been taken out and shot!*) But she did not say anything: Mulder was still talking.

“My father never said anything about he felt about it all he talked about was how Ali’s father and the President felt. He treated it all as if it had been a political move designed to further my government’s agenda.

“It hadn’t been political, at all,” he whispered. “It was survival, pure and simple. And I had nightmares for months of the fires blowing back at us, of our guns misfiring, of the dead men coming after me to avenge their deaths, of their families coming after the infidel whose son had killed their son, and of me coming home from school to find my parents and my sister butchered in our home in retaliation for what I’d done…” He shivered and looked away.

She could not help but believe that these guilt-ridden nightmares were the basis of his life-long guilt over his sister’s abduction. It was not reasonable, but it made perfect sense that as a child he would have blamed himself for anything bad that happened. Samantha’s abduction must have almost been a relief: the bad thing had finally happened. He had finally been punished for the murders he had committed.

“And wild fire brings it all back?” she asked softly, gently.

He nodded mutely, unable to articulate an answer.

“You have every right to that fear, Mulder. That scenario would be awful if it was just something you dreamed, it would be bad enough! For it to be real…? My God!”

He shivered a little, again, and then squared his shoulders and threw it off.

“What about you, Scully? What’s your deepest, darkest, most shameful secret?”

“You shouldn’t think of any of that as shameful, Mulder,” she said sharply. “You did nothing to be ashamed of! You know full well that those men, or their superiors, would almost certainly have killed you and your friend  eventually.  And that by the time they did, you would probably have been grateful for it.”

He sighed. “I know that now. I didn’t, then.”

“Mulder. You were nine years old. You killed two adults armed with rifles whose intent was to kidnap you and use you to blackmail your government.  How were your actions anything but admirable?”

He looked at her expressionlessly. “‘Thou shalt not kill’?”

She snorted in disgust. “‘Thou shalt not commit murder.’ And you didn’t.”

“We fired from cover without warning.”

“You were outnumbered, outgunned, in a war zone.  Survival is the ultimate morality, Mulder. You deserve to try to survive. You succeeded. And I, for one, am very glad you did.”

He cocked his head to one side, but did not ask.

“If it hadn’t been for you, my application for field assignment probably would have landed me in Domestic Terrorism, and I’d have to kill someone if they assigned me to that for very long,” she said with all seriousness. “Or else my application would have simply been denied, and I’d still be teaching at Quantico. And I’d be so bored I’d probably have killed someone by now, just for the excitement.”

“You getting enough excitement, Scully?” he drawled. “I don’t want you to get bored and leave.”  He did not realize how revealing that was until it was too late to stop it.

Scully smiled slowly. “Don’t worry,” she assured him. “I’m not planning to leave.”

“Good. Good partners are hard to find.”

“Yeah,” she nodded, studying him. “They are.”

)*(

19990325/20020131

“Scully, I need your help.”

His voice rasped in her ear and her hand tightened on the telephone handset.  “What’s wrong?”

“I…  Can you come over here?  I don’t trust myself to drive yet.”

She straightened.  “Mulder, you’re scaring me!  What’s wrong?”

He laughed, but it sounded hollow to her.  “I’m not bleeding.  I’ll live till you get here unless you detour through central DC.”

“I’m on my way.”  She was collecting her SIG Sauer, her ID and her keys.  “If this is a ploy to get me over there to amuse you, defenestration will be the least of your worries.”

“I’ll nail the window shut while I’m waiting,” he assured her.  “Thanks, Scully.”

***

The door to apartment 42 was not locked.  She pushed it open slowly.  “Mulder?”

“Right here.   C’mon in.”

She stepped all the way inside and shut the door behind her.

Mulder was wearing ratty gray sweatpants and a battered FBI Academy sweatshirt.  He was on his couch, bare feet on the floor, his body slouched so that the back of his head rested at the top edge of the back of the couch.  His hands were limp on his thighs and his knees were spread wide.  He looked exhausted.

There was a huge pile of dusty videotapes and DVD boxes on his coffee table.  They were stacked badly; the pile looked unstable.

“You’re on medical leave, Mulder.  You aren’t supposed to be exerting yourself.”

“That doctor told me moderate exercise was appropriate as long as I didn’t push till I was out of breath,” he reminded her without moving or looking at her.  He was staring at the ceiling.

“I don’t think spring cleaning was what he had in mind, Mulder.”

“I’ve been trapped in here for nearly a week,” he snapped irritably, “trying to keep my mind off cigarettes.  I hate cigarettes and I am craving nicotine like a junkie needs smack.  This isn’t fair!”

“So you were watching all these movies, one after the other?”  She moved closer and stopped abruptly when she realized that the nearest cassette was a porn flick: ?Susie Does St Louis.’

“That and sitting at my computer deleting spam.”

“Was it working?”  He had closed his eyes again and she bit her lip.  Something was wrong but she could not tell what it was.

“Not really.”

Scully took a deep breath.  “Why did you call me, Mulder?”

He moved then, straightened a little and looked at her for the first time.  “That’s my porn collection, Scully. Take a look.”

She kept her eyes on him.  “No, thank you.”  She managed to keep her voice even.

“I’m not trying to offend or embarrass you.  I need to take you through the process that got my head where it is, right now.  Look at the covers, see if you detect the same pattern I did.”

She did not like this at all, but he was being civilized and polite.  She stepped closer and started scanning the visible titles.

“You’ve got to look at the cover photos, Scully, not just the spines.”

Gingerly she started taking down a stack of the DVDs, piling them neatly on the floor beside the table.  The names blurred quickly; they were all so similar.  But after a dozen or so boxes the answer nearly slapped her across the face.

All the leading actresses were short redheads.

Shocked speechless, she looked up at her partner, who was watching her intently.

When he saw the realization in her eyes, he nodded grimly.

“I was surprised, too.  I swear I didn’t do it consciously.  I swear it.”

She swallowed hard.  “What do you think it means?” she asked faintly.  “You’re the psychologist.”

“Scully, please.  You know I don’t date.  There hasn’t been room in my life for any woman but you for years.  I just hadn’t realized that you were – in one form or another – fulfilling all the needs I had.”

“All…?”  Suddenly she could not breathe.  “You… you fantasized…?  About… me…?”

“Ohhh, yeahhh…”  He dragged both words out as if savoring the experience again.

She shivered and backed up a step.

“I’m not going to leap up and grab you,” he bit the words off sharply, trying to disguise how much her reaction had hurt.  “I… I was suddenly so ashamed of myself that I had to confess.”

“And you couldn’t do it over the phone?”  She had seen his flinch and recognized that she had, however inadvertently, wounded him.  Now all she wanted was to take the pain away.

He tried a wan grin that almost worked.  “No.  I needed to give you the opportunity to shoot me again if you wanted.”

That made her laugh despite the situation.  “Mulder…”  Still smiling, she went to him, sat beside him on the couch.  “I wouldn’t shoot you for this.  I’ve worked too damned hard to keep you alive to risk losing you now!”

He was careful not to move, though she was easily within his reach.  “So you’re not mortally offended?”

She tipped her head to one side, considering.  “Actually…  No, I’m flattered.  And relieved.”

He blinked.  “Okay, you HAVE to explain that.  Flattered AND relieved?”

“Flattered because obviously you…  Isn’t that obvious?” she blushed, avoiding his eyes.

“Absolutely,” he agreed.  “But why relieved?”

“Because… because… ” her voice trailed off.

“C’mon, Scully.  This is important.”

“I know it is.  I just…  I just never expected to have this conversation.”

“Ad lib something.  As long as it’s from the heart.”

She turned to face him.  “Mulder, I don’t use video, but for years my fantasies have been dominated by a tall guy with a swimmer’s body, dark chocolate hair, roving hazel eyes, a rapier wit and an oral fixation he doesn’t try to hide.  Now I know the competition for him is over and I’ve won.  It leaves me without a plan of action.  I never speculated beyond this point.”

Mulder licked his lips and swallowed hard.  “Oh, my God…”

She studied him for a moment.  “Shall we take the penultimate step?”

He cocked his head at her.  “Define penultimate step.”

“The L-word?”

He grinned suddenly and she was startled at how much his smile brightened the room and her heart.  He sat up and took her hands in his and they turned toward one another.

“That would be superfluous, wouldn’t it?” he whispered as he leaned in to kiss her.

He rubbed his mouth against hers gently as he pulled her body snug against his own.  Her mouth and legs opened, welcoming and warm as she pressed herself against him, relishing the hard flat planes of his body and the heat that met her own and flared.

The kiss became deep and intense; he never wanted it to end.  She fit into his arms perfectly and she tasted of coffee and Scully, with a little spice remaining from her earlier flash of fear.  He had no idea that his eyes were closed.

(*I can die now,*) he decided as she somehow inhaled through the kiss, sucking him further inside, sending a surge of freshened arousal through his body.

He was getting dizzy from lack of oxygen when she ended it with a nibble and a lick on his lower lip and pushed back far enough that they could see one another.

They each stared into dilated eyes; black pools awash with lust.  Scully shivered.

“Now?” he asked hoarsely.

“Are you sure you’re recovered enough?” she countered.  “I’ve been celibate for nearly seven years.  I don’t want to kill you.”

He laughed joyously and hugged her tightly.  “God, I love you, Scully!”

“I love you, too.  I’ve waited this long.  I can wait another week, till you’re back in shape…”

He shifted against her and she gasped.

“If we don’t consummate this relationship right now, the tension alone is going to kill me.”  He stood up, then, taking her by the hands again, to tug her to her feet.  “C’mon…”

Scully hesitated, resisting slightly.  “You’re still convalescing…”

“I’m dying, here, Scully!  Come ON!”  Then he stopped and cocked his head.  “Unless you’d rather do it here on the couch?”

She hesitated , visibly tempted, and then shook her head.  “No.  I’m going to need more room than that.”  She turned and headed for his bedroom door.

Mulder stood, staring after her, watching the way her hips twitched from side to side…  He shed his sweatpants without taking his eyes off her.  He was almost annoyed when she stopped and turned.

“Mulder?”

He shook the daze out of his eyes, pulled his sweatshirt off and tossed it aside.  Naked, he went after her.

***

By the time he made it into the bedroom, she was stripped to her panties and bra.  She looked up at him as she reached behind for the clasp on her bra and he shivered as his blood supply surged south.

“Don’t…” he managed to say.

She stopped.  “Don’t what?”

“Let me…”

She let her hands fall to her sides and smiled as he came to her.  She had seen his unclothed body before, but she had never seen him aroused.  She tried not to stare, suddenly very aware of how out of practice she was.  The simplest parts of the etiquette of sex were blank and she did not know where to look.

Mulder was oblivious to her confusion and uncertainty.  He cradled her face in his hands and bent to kiss her again.  This time it was rough, exciting and when he broke away she protested with a wordless growl.

He slid his hands slowly down her neck to her bared shoulders, caressing her, marveling at how soft her skin was, and watching it turn rosy pink with arousal.  He pushed her bra straps down off her shoulders and watched as the fabric’s tension slackened, freeing her breasts.  He dropped his face to nuzzle between them, breathing in her warm scent while his palms cupped her and his thumbs began to rub the slippery fabric over her nipples.

She let her head fall back with a soft moan.  She was smiling, her eyes were closed as she reached for him, let her fingers trail gently down his biceps, past his elbows to scrape lightly against the soft, tender flesh of his forearms.

He walked her back to the bed, kissing the tops of her breasts, trailing his attention up her throat, across her mouth briefly, back down her throat and back to her partially-exposed breasts.

When she felt the bed with the backs of her calves, she sat down and her hands tightened around his wrists, pulling him down with her.

He crawled slowly up onto the mattress above her as she scooted toward the headboard on her back.  One of his hands moved underneath her and he effortlessly flicked open the bra’s clasp.

“I was beginning to think you’d forgotten that it comes off,” she teased, not trying to hide the trace of breathlessness in her voice.

He kissed her rather than answer her, then dragged his mouth away from hers, down her throat again, retracing the well-dampened path to her breasts.  This time there was no fabric to block his touch, and his tongue caressed her nipples in turn while he listened to her breathing accelerate and felt her hands move up his arms like warm-footed spiders.  Her fingers laced through his hair and then clutched at his head, holding his face against her chest.

He made no attempt to free himself; this was where he wanted to be.  He engulfed her left breast, sucking it into his mouth and then backing, letting his teeth scrape against the rippled flesh of her aureole.  He worried at her nipple with his teeth briefly, carefully, and was rewarded with a gasp and the sinuous movement of her body beneath him.

He rested his weight on his forearms and spread his knees to surround her.  She let go of him and flung her arms akimbo.

Still on all fours over her, he forced himself to abandon her breasts to explore the rest of her small but powerful body.  He kissed his way south, lingering at her navel because she squirmed in the most interesting way when he kissed around that centerpoint.

This was Special Agent Dana Katherine Scully, a nationally-respected pathologist, an equally respected federal law enforcement officer.  But right now she was nearly naked, sprawled in utter abandon across the bed beneath him, letting him have his way with her.

He shuddered and she frowned.  “Mulder?”

He grinned at her.  “Yesss…?”

“Don’t stop now; I’ll have to kill you.”

“I don’t think you can reach your weapon from here.”

“I can reach yours.”

She tried and he moved away, putting his hand on her belly to hold her down on the bed.  “Don’t.”

She did not struggle.  She just grinned wickedly and stretched.  Luxuriously.

He could only stare.  “Jesus, Scully…!” he breathed.

“Just providing a little extra positive reinforcement.”

He bent over her, planted the flat of his tongue on her breastbone and licked down her centerline toward her navel.  Her body rose to his touch and her hands grabbed at the sheets.

When Mulder’s teeth took hold of the waistband of her panties and began to tug them down, she squirmed, unable to resist the touch of his skin against her own.  It seemed to take him forever to worry her last garment down past her hips.  Once it was clear of her body it disappeared.

Or at least she lost track of it.  His mouth was on her now, his nose probing into her curls and his tongue caressing that most sensitive part of her.  She lifted her knees and spread her thighs to give him more access.

He went in like a starving man, licking and sucking, nibbling cautiously at her but backing away before her cries meant pain.  She gasped in shock as the ecstasy awoke in her almost at once.  He pushed her right to the edge of heaven, until she was panting and pounding her fists into the mattress, and then he backed off, letting her fall away from the edge unfulfilled.

“Mulder!” she wailed.

He moved up her body on all fours until he could kiss her again.  “I know what I’m doing.  Just go with it…?”

“How many times are you going to frustrate me like that?”

He smiled at the demanding tone of her voice.  “As many times as I can stand.”

“As many as you can get in before I kill you, you mean?”

“My, my.  Aggressive, aren’t you?  That’s the second time you’ve threatened my life, Scully.”

“No predominantly female jury in the country would convict me,” she growled.

“I’m not being a sadist.  It’s worth it; I promise.”

“You’re not hearing me, Mulder,” she growled, though she did not move.  “I haven’t had sex since March, 1992.    If you’re not inside me within the next few minutes, I’m going to lose my mind.  I don’t need any more foreplay and I’m too impatient right now to put up with it.  So quit showing off how enlightened you are and fuck me, goddammit!”

He swallowed.  “I… I never, ever, thought I’d hear you say that to me,” he whispered.  He laid his body down on hers, letting his weight push her into the mattress.  “If I wake up and this has all been a dream, I’m going to kill myself.”

She wrapped her legs around his body and her arms around his neck, pulled herself up off the mattress, shoving hard against his body.

“It’s not a dream, Mulder.  This is real.  This is me.  This is love.  And this is forever.  You’re mine and I’m not ever, ever, letting you go.”

He had to look away, fighting for control, but despite his best efforts his voice broke.  “Scully, I…”

“I know, Mulder.”  Her voice was gentler, now, though her hold on him had not loosened.  “I know.  Now, c’mon.  Let’s do this.  I’ve claimed you; claim me, now.”

Tears streaming down his face, he maneuvered a little and got himself lined up.  She was so wet that he almost wasn’t sure he had actually made contact, but then she tightened her legs and flexed her back just so and he felt himself begin to slide inside.  His pelvis rocked without him consciously willing it, and he sank into her until he could go no farther.

Scully moaned as she felt herself impaled and her back arched in response as her inner muscles tightened, trying to keep that wonderful fullness there.

“Oh, my God, Scully…!”  He was crying now, and she reached up to kiss him, brushing the tears away with her palms.

“I love you.  It’s all right.  Shhh…”  She was crying, too, just out of sympathy.  “C’mon, Mulder.  Just love me.  We’ll be all right.”

He did not try to reply; there were no words for this.  His body began to move and hers rose to meet him, loosening to let him plunge into her depths, tightening as he withdrew as if to make him regret the necessity.  His mouth found hers blindly and his tongue plunged deep into her, mimicking his body’s actions.

Doubly penetrated, surrounded by him, pinned down by his weight, she clung to him as the excitement began to spiral out of control.  His thrusts were coming so fast now that she could no longer keep up, but her body was winding itself up tightly, like a spring, promising a climax the like of which she had rarely experienced.

He was chanting her name breathlessly; he had broken off the kiss so he could breathe and she was glad he had: she had been running short of oxygen, too.  She tightened her hold on him.

“Come with me, Mul…”  His name disappeared as her body locked up in that moment of perfect ecstasy.

He was coming, too, helplessly pounding into her, sobbing her name as her body unlocked and she began to rock  against him to keep it from ending.

He collapsed finally, wrung out, wrung dry, but when he would have withdrawn, she wrapped herself around him again.

“Stay.”

“I’m not too heavy?”  His voice was gone; the words the barest whisper.

“Never!”

He let himself relax slowly, burying his face in her hair as he panted.  His breath, hot and damp against her, was strangely comforting.  She settled back into the mattress, her arms and legs draped loosely over him.

Neither knew how long they lay together that way.  Eventually they could breathe normally and he rolled off her.  She followed him, chilled by his absence, and nestled against him.  He wrapped his arms around her.

“God, Scully…”

“Don’t analyze, Mulder.”  She squirmed up his body to kiss him on the chin and then on the lips.

“I analyze everything, Scully.  You know that.”

“I know.  Don’t.  This time, don’t.  Just appreciate it.”

“Believe me, I appreciate it.”

Something in his tone bothered her.  She braced herself on her elbows and studied his face.  “Don’t get weird on me, Mulder.”

He frowned.  “?Weird’?”

“This was not something I did for you to make you feel better today.  This was something – IS something! – that we have been progressing toward for years.  This is something we did together.  This is our relationship finally culminating in love and its physical expression.”

He hugged her tiredly.  “Can we work on the fine points of terminology later?  I’m going to fall asleep on you.”

She smiled indulgently and stroked back his hair with both hands.  “Sure, Mulder.  Take a nap.  We’ve got the rest of our lives to work out the details.”

He settled against her.  “That would be the general idea.  Don’t hold it against me.”

She disobeyed and flexed her body against his.  “You don’t want me to…?”

His hands found her breasts and he massaged them gently, then kissed them.  “Don’t mess with me when I’m this blissed out, Scully.  Sleep first, decisions and planning later.  Deal?”

She stretched up and kissed him on the end of his nose.  “Deal.”

He was still smiling when he fell asleep.

She was still smiling when he woke up.

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