#ive started rendering more and its annoying but also it makes me happy!!!!!!!

[a-splash-of-stucky]

By Morning Light | iv

Pairings: Bucky x Steve x Reader (though technically no Steve in this part)

Summary: Steve leaves for a mission and Bucky doesn’t handle it too well. It’s up to you to take care of him

Warnings: Nightmares, minor angst, Sad!Bucky. Unprotected sex (wrap it up, kids!), vaginal sex, nipple appreciation (sounds weird, but it’s nothing too kinky). Mention of suicide bombings in passing.  

Word Count: 4.1k

Notes: IT’S HERE!! After many, many long months, it’s here. I got my act together and made myself write this chapter and actually? It’s not what I thought it was gonna be, but I’m still happy with it. Enjoy!

I recognise that the general plot of this story is a bit like some nights (i stay up) and that parts of the description are similar to Steve “Fight Me” Rogers… but I swear I wasn’t trying to copy my own fics, haha.

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~ even the darkest night will end and the sun will rise ~

Though you hate it when both Steve and Bucky have to go on a mission, life is a lot more miserable when only one of them has to leave.

When you’re left on your own, you only have yourself to manage. You’ve taught yourself how to cope with their absence — or, well. Perhaps more accurately, you’ve taught yourself how to get through each day. After being in a relationship with them for so long, you’ve developed a routine, and you know what you need to do to distract yourself from the matter at hand. Yes, it’s difficult, but at least you only have yourself to worry about.

If one of the boys is at home with you, your routine has a tendency to go belly-up.

Steve’s not so bad.

Being left with Steve is akin to being left alone with a very big, very mopey puppy. He follows you around everywhere, and needs to be touched constantly — though he’ll never admit it.

There’s a restlessness about him. He reminds you of a caged bird, aching to be freed. He’ll flit from room to room like a ghost that has lost its way.

When it comes to Steve, the best thing to do is to keep him busy. You take him out for walks (further lending support to the fact that he basically turns into a big puppy) and bring him to any and every exhibition that might be on. That’s how you ended up forking out sixty bucks each to visit a science exhibition about fungi, that one time.

Steve has a hard time sleeping when Bucky’s away, which means that you need to drive his body to the point of exhaustion before you can get him to shut his eyes for anything longer than a ten-minute power nap. You need to push his body to a stage where it physically cannot function without sleep. There are a number of ways of doing this, but you’ve found that marathon sex and super-intense workouts tend to be the most effective methods.

So, if anyone on the team is around, you hand Steve off to that person, with clear instructions for them to tire him out. If it’s Thor, he and Steve will engage in a game of lightning-frisbee that affects the weather across the whole of New York. Natasha will spar with him until she’s got bruises and minor cuts decorating her sides, whilst Sam will do laps with him around some park or other. Or rather, Steve does laps around a park, and Sam whizzes beside him on his motorised scooter.

With Bucky, your life gets a little bit more complicated.

Where Steve might be likened to a needy puppy, you would perhaps describe Bucky as a feral street cat.

The thing with Bucky is that he becomes more unpredictable. One minute, he could be crawling into your lap like a kitten who needs cuddles and attention, but the next minute, he could be holding you at knife point. You can never tell what he’s going to do next.

Life without Steve is mentally and emotionally draining, both for you and for Bucky.

He reverts back to the behaviour that he exhibited when he first started to break his HYDRA programming. Though you weren’t there during that period of his life, you’ve pieced together the details based on what Steve has told you and from the information that you’ve gleaned from reading Bucky’s files. The anxiety, the nightmares, the meek subservience; they all come rushing back at full force.

You’re not sure why Bucky does this. You think that maybe, it’s because he feels more secure whenever Steve is around. There’s always someone there to watch his back, so he feels comfortable enough to let his guard down. Without Steve, even the smallest thud can set him off; he’s on a hair-pin trigger, constantly on high-alert.

Besides the semi-hostile demeanour, he also gets fiercely protective of you. He’s always making sure that you stay well away from any sightlines and is constantly watching you from the shadows, protecting you from...who knows what. You indulge him in his requests, though it does get annoying when he insists that you use the bathroom with the door left slightly ajar.

Whereas Steve never wants to be left alone, Bucky never leaves you alone. He always ensures that you are within his field of vision, even if your attention is not necessarily on him. There’s an overstuffed armchair in the corner of your home office that Bucky likes to sit in when he’s exhibiting this abnormal behaviour. He watches over you like a solitary hawk.

Bucky can’t leave the house when he gets like this. For starters, it’s nearly impossible to coax him into coming out with you. More importantly, that fearsome protectiveness renders him a potential threat to the public. He sticks close to your side and bares his teeth at anyone who so much as looks at you funny. If anyone touches you, Bucky will let loose a threatening growl, like a guard dog. After one fateful incident which involved Bucky nearly decapitating a waiter at a restaurant, you’d made the executive decision to not let Bucky go out in public whenever Steve went away for a mission.

He doesn’t eat unless you tell him to. He will not rest until you order him to strip and get into bed. He becomes non-verbal, answering your questions with  — at most — two-word answers. It’s torture for you to see him like this, but you know that there’s nothing that you can do.

You don’t know why, exactly, he acts like this, but you think it has something to do with him feeling helpless.

Steve is perfectly capable of looking after himself — uh, most of the time, relatively speaking — when he’s away on missions, both of you know this. However, your theory is that there is some part of Bucky’s brain which believes that Steve is safest when Bucky is watching his six and therefore, if Bucky is not watching Steve’s six, Steve must be unsafe.

This time around, it’s Steve that’s gone.

Bucky is not handling his absence very well.

He left for Jakarta two days ago, and is due to return within the next three days. You’re not privy to the exact details of the mission, but you know that it has something to do with a string of recent suicide bombings in the area.

It’s been a rough couple of days for you both.

Today, you’d woken up with a metal hand wrapped around your throat, and things had gone downhill from there. The only real accomplishment you’ve had is that you managed to Bucky to eat some chicken and rice for dinner, which is basically the only proper meal he’s had the entire day. After dinner, you’d bundled him into bed and forced him cuddle with you.

You fall into a restless sleep sometime after ten. You’ve wrapped yourself around Bucky so that he can’t leave the bed. His back is pressed to your chest, your arm is slung over his torso and your cheek is resting on the back of his shoulder. He will never admit it, but he much prefers being the little spoon when he’s not having a great day.

Sometime during the night, your fitful sleep is broken by the sound of quiet whimpers.

You crack open one eye and squint at the world blearily, as your sleep-fogged brain struggles to make sense of the situation. It takes a second for reality to come into focus, but you soon register the fact that the body beside yours is trembling, violently enough for the vibrations to be felt across the entire mattress.

“No,” he’s saying, voice shaky and riddled with fear.  “Please—please, no, not her, please not her.”

Concern floods your system. It breaks your heart to seem him like this. You swallow and swipe your tongue over your lips to get that unpleasant, cottony dryness out of your mouth as you push yourself into a sitting position. A harsh scrub of the back of your hand over your eyes gets rid of the lingering cobwebs of sleep that cling to your mind. Feeling more alert, you cautiously scoot closer to Bucky.

Waking Bucky up from a nightmare is always a bit of a risky endeavour — usually, you leave the job to Steve, as his body is more capable of handling whatever Bucky might do to him. On the few occasions that you’ve tried, you’ve usually ended up either on the floor, or pinned to the bed with Bucky looming over you.

You take a deep breath to summon your courage.

“Bucky?” you say tentatively, as you gently shake his shoulder. “Bucky — sweetie, c’mon, it’s just a dream. Wake up.”

“No,” he moans, “No, no — no, please, don’t—”

“Bucky it’s not real, honey, wake up—”

“No!” he shouts hoarsely, like he’s suffering the worst anguish imaginable. “Please, you can’t—not her, please not her—”

“Bucky,” you say, more firmly this time, “Sweetheart, it’s just a nightmare. Wake up!”

He jolts awake with a heaving gasp, sitting upright so suddenly that he unbalances you, sending you toppling over. You yelp in surprise, landing on the mattress with a muffled oof. The sound of his ragged breathing fills the room.

You scramble to your knees and reach out to comfort him, but stop yourself before you actually make contact with his skin — you don’t know how your touch would be received.

He is backlit by the moonlight streaming in through the windows and his hair forms a dark, shaggy mane that falls around his face. His torso is bare and sweat glimmers on the planes of his chest, making him look like some ethereal being.

“Bucky?” you say cautiously, “Can I hold you?”

He nods tersely. “Please,” he says gruffly.

You knee-walk over to him and wrap your arms around his neck in a side-hug. Bucky, clearly not satisfied by that, grasps you by the waist and hoists you into his lap to hold you better. Before you can develop a cramp in your thigh, you arrange your limbs so that your ankles are crossed behind his back, and your arms are looped over his neck. You plaster yourself to his chest and press your foreheads together, giving him as many points of contact as possible.

“S’okay, Buck, I’m here — breathe with me, that’s it.”

With some encouragement, you manage to get Bucky to match your deep, even breaths. Slowly but surely, his raw, harsh pants slow down to something more controlled, less pained. With a final exhale, he slumps into you, tightening his grip around your waist as he presses his forehead to your shoulder.

“I thought I lost you,” he whispers, his warm breath tickling your skin. “I—I thought you were gone, and I couldn’t—I couldn’t get to you fast enough, and—”

You shush him, threading your fingers through his thick hair and pressing your fingertips into the base of his skull.

“I’m here,” you tell him, “I’m here, I’m right here, with you.”

Bucky presses his lips to your skin and all of a sudden, the air around you changes. It is as if the dust motes swirling around you have been charged with electricity.

He trails his lips over your skin, leaving hot, open-mouth kisses in a meandering path. They travel over your shoulder, past your collarbone, up your neck, over your jaw and finally, find their salvation against your lips. He kisses you fiercely, crushing your lips together like he is drowning man and you are the oxygen that will save him. Bucky clings to you like he’s afraid that he might be swept away by the dark, evil currents that swarm his mind, holding onto you like you’re his lifeline.

The situation is perhaps not the most conventional, but your body is nonetheless responding to Bucky’s touch. A rush of heat darts from your brain to your belly, settling into a pool of lust that is growing hotter by the minute. That same heat floods your cheeks and burns behind your chest. Your nipples tighten in anticipation underneath the thin fabric of your sleep shirt.

“I need you,” Bucky whispers brokenly, heatedly. His voice is like the whisper of a breeze, quiet enough that you have to strain your ears to hear it. “Please, please, I need you, I need—”

“Shh, I’m here,” you whisper, “Right here. You do what you need, sweetheart.”

In one smooth, seamless movement, Bucky flips you over so that you’re on your back. He hovers above you, a shadowy figure that dominates your senses. His long hair falls around you like a dark curtain, partitioning you from the rest of the world, cocooning you in this safe haven. Your legs are wrapped around his waist and slowly, your drag your calves up and down the back of his thigh, urging him to do as he pleases.

Bucky peppers hot kisses over your jaw and down your neck, pausing briefly to close his teeth over your pulse point. You gasp, throwing your head back and baring your throat. He rumbles appreciatively, worrying the skin of your neck between his teeth.

“You’re gonna leave a mark,” you say breathily, a hint of a laugh tinging your sentence.

“Good,” he replies, voice rough. “You’re mine.”

You swallow, touched by those two simple words. “Always,” you promise, squeezing his hips with your knees.

He growls possessively, which prompts you to press your hand over your mouth to stifle an irrational giggle. He sounds like a goddamn caveman. Your laughter morphs into a moan as he pulls aside the collar of your shirt and teases his lips over your collarbone, focusing on the spot that makes your curl.

“Bucky,” you groan, biting your lip to hold back a whine.

His fingers are trailing up your sides  — one smooth and cool, the other callused and warm. He’s rucking up your sleep shirt as he goes, leaving the material bunched under your breasts as he slithers down your body. Bucky plants open-mouthed, reverent kisses over your belly, stopping to leave gentle nips wherever he pleases. His stubble scratches your skin, making you shiver in arousal.

“Off,” he says, flicking at the hem of your shirt impatiently.

Hastily, you pull the garment over your head, tossing it to some irrelevant place in the darkness. In an instant, Bucky’s fingers are cupping and squeezing your breasts, savouring the feel and weight of them in his palms. You gasp aloud when his thumbs brush over your stiffened nipples.

“Please,” you whisper, though you’re not quite sure what you’re asking for.

A cry of pleasure leaves your throat as Bucky’s lips close around your left nipple, engulfing it in sudden heat. A spike of want flares in your belly, making you shift your hips restlessly. Your fingers scrabble for purchase in the sheets as he flicks his tongue over your sensitive flesh. Bucky alternates between teasing the hard nub with his tongue and gently scraping over it with his teeth.

He releases your nipple from his lips and shifts to give the same treatment to the other one. The man likes his symmetry, so this doesn’t surprise you in the slightest. Bucky switches back and forth between your breasts, taking care to give each one the same level of attention.

His touches eventually lose some of their frenzied intensity, mellowing down to something more lethargic, languid. Bucky allows his weight to settle more heavily on top of you, and rests his chin on your chest. When he takes your nipple between his lips, an expression of contentment settles over his features; you can practically feel the tension bleeding out of his muscles with every second that ticks past.

You leave him be. He’s behaved this way in the past, and if nursing on your breasts seems to bring him some element of comfort, who are you to deny him this small act? You card your fingers through his hair and gently massage his scalp, relishing the pleased moan that rumbles out of his chest.

Whether he realises it or not, the hard line of Bucky’s cock is pressing into your thigh. He’s grinding against you lazily, his movements so small that you don’t think he’s even aware of what he’s doing.

Carefully, so that you don’t accidentally dislodge his mouth, you reach between your bodies until your fingers come into contact with the waistband of his sweats. It’s a bit of a stretch, but you manage to push them down, halfway over his ass, low enough for your fingers to graze the top of his leaking dick.

Bucky jerks in surprise when you palm the head, releasing a shaky moan that is muffled against your skin. His breath skitters over your collarbone.

“Look at you, honey, being so good for me,” you croon softly, tucking a strand of hair over his ear. “You’re hard, Buck — you wanna take care of that? You wanna get inside me?”

He moans in affirmation. You smile benevolently as you continue to stroke his hair.

“C’mon then, get these off,” you say, snapping the elastic.

With great reluctance, he pulls his mouth off your breast to do as he’s been instructed. You take the opportunity to shimmy your shorts and panties down your legs. They too are discarded to some distant corner of the room.

Bucky crawls back on top of you, taking his weight on his forearms, which are planted on either side of your head. You wrap your arms around his shoulders and hook your legs over his waist, pulling him close. He bumps his nose against your chin, tipping your face upwards, so that he can capture your lips in an impassioned kiss.

You moan into his mouth when the head of his cock drags over your folds, sending tingles of arousal dancing through your system. Without breaking the kiss, you wiggle your hand between your bodies and grasp his cock, guiding it to your waiting entrance.

“Sweetheart,” Bucky breathes, his lips brushing against yours.

“Inside, Barnes, c’mon,” you reply.

He slides his hips forward, sinking his cock into your warmth and wetness. You gasp as he penetrates you, arching your back reflexively. Bucky groans, dropping his head and resting his temple against your shoulder. Each of his breaths sends a gust of warm air blowing over your neck. He is still, giving you time to adjust.

When you feel like you’re ready, you urge him on with a word of encouragement and a nudge of your foot. Gradually, he works his entire length into your body, spearing you open in that most wondrous way. His cock is just perfect, filling that emptiness inside you right to the brim. There’s just enough of him for you to feel that pleasurable stretch, but not too much that you’re uncomfortable.

“You feel so good,” you whisper, as you trail your fingers up and down his spine.

Bucky hums, turning his head to mouth wetly at your collarbone. “You too,” he murmurs.

He captures your lips with his own as his hips begin to move in earnest. His movements are slow and unhurried, as neither of you are in a rush to find completion. He rests his weight on top of you, blanketing you with his body, a physical shield against the outside world. This feels right; chest to chest, hip to hip, not even a breath of air between you.

Bucky rocks into you slowly, using miniscule movements of his hips, barely pulling out before he’s sliding back into your core. Your lips find his in the darkness and he latches on, greedily swallowing your sounds of pleasure like they are his ambrosia.

You hook your legs over his waist and cross your ankles at the small of his back, pulling him closer. Though you dig your heels into the top of his ass to spur him on, he continues at the leisurely pace that he’s set.

No words are spoken into the quiet of the night, yet every movement speaks volumes in its own right. Every surge of his hips, every brush of his lips, every caress of his fingers — each touch professes his love for you. Bucky tells you how much he needs you without a single word passing his lips, and you do the same.

You close your eyes and allow yourself to get lost in the moment. You focus on the roughness of his stubble against your neck, the warmth of his breath over your cheek, the drag of his chest over your nipples, the sparks of pleasure burning between your legs. His cock is brushing against all the sweet spots inside of you, the ones that make your head spin and your thighs tremble. The numerous, complex layers of pleasure sweep you away in their current; you feel like you’re weightless, floating on a cloud.

At some point, animal instincts start to take over. Love-making turns to passionate fucking, and Bucky’s rhythm quickens, his hips snapping forward more vigorously. He widens his knees and anchors them into the bed, giving himself more leverage to thrust. You cry out exultantly as your pleasure soars to new heights, fisting your hands in the sheets above your head.

Bucky slides his palms up your arms, until his hands find yours in the rumpled sheets. He laces your fingers together, pressing your hands into the mattress as he fucks into you.

“You’re so good,” he whispers, “So—god, so good, I love you.”

“I love you too,” you gasp, “Fuck, Bucky — Bucky.”

“Yeah, that’s it, sweetheart,” he grits out, as his hips drive forward again and again. Your mouth opens on a silent scream as he nails that spot relentlessly, the one that has you screwing your eyes shut so tightly, you’re seeing stars dancing behind your lips.

He’s saying your name under his breath like a prayer, oftentimes praising you and cursing you in the same breath.

“I love you,” he pants, “I love you — please, stay, don’t go—”

“M’not going anywhere,” you promise breathlessly, “I’m right here, Bucky. I love you so much.”

Your orgasm, when it comes, takes you by surprise. It washes over you like a crashing wave, unrelenting in its intensity. It is powerful enough to have you crying out in ecstasy. You dig your nails into the backs of Bucky’s hands as your back arches of its own accord. Your pulse is roaring in your ears and your lungs have seized up; you’re unable to catch your breath. Your climax seems to last forever.

When you come back to your senses, you realise that Bucky is still hard inside of you, still thrusting his cock into your warmth, though his movements are beginning to falter.

“So beautiful,” he praises, as he mouths at your throat. “So goddamn beautiful.”

You’re loose-limbed and pliant, satiated by your release. A pleasant buzz has settled into your bones, and there is a contented smile on your lips. Your limbs are heavy and uncoordinated, but you manage to hook your arms around Bucky’s shoulders and dig your heels into his back more insistently.

“C’mon, Buck,” you breathe, “Come inside me.”

“Fuck,” he swears.

“Mm, you like that? You wanna fill me up? Make me yours?”

“Sweetheart,” Bucky moans, cock driving into you with renewed urgency. “Baby — baby, oh, m’close, I—I’m gonna—”

“Come for me,” you whisper.

There are many beautiful things in this world and among them is the sight of Bucky Barnes when he comes. He is quite the vision.

All the muscles in his body stiffen, save for those kiss-bitten lips, which go slack with pleasure. He thrusts into you one final time, burying his cock as deep inside you as physically possible. You shiver as his warmth spills into your channel, his cock spurting out hot, sticky ribbons of come. He is quiet, save for a single, bitten-back moan.

You roam your hands over his sweaty back, petting him gently as he rides out his climax. When it is over, he is careful to collapse half on you, and half on the bed, so that you’re not crushed under his weight. His softened, spent cock slips out of your pussy, and you whine in disapproval. You hate that feeling.

Blindly, Bucky fumbles around for his discarded sweats, and uses them to clumsily wipe his cock as well as the mess between your legs. He balls the soiled garment in his hand and tosses it onto the floor, to be dealt with in the morning.

The darkness has just started to give way to shades of pink and orange when Bucky rolls over onto his back and pulls you closer. A new dawn brings with it a fresh start and new challenges, but for now, you pillow your cheek on Bucky’s chest and let your heavy eyelids slide shut as sleep pulls you under.

[xaeneron]

On Path of Fire

I haven’t done one of these in a while (or rather I wrote them and then forgot to post them lel), so maybe I’ll actually post this one for the new GW2 expansion after spending the week running around.

Overall, I found the expansion to be pretty solid; the maps are beautiful, the mounts are hilarious and well-implemented, the story was interesting and decently paced, and I’m still experimenting with the new elite specs.  Massive spoilers below the cut!

Questions on anything I wrote, thoughts of your own?  Feel free to boop me; I know I wrote a lot.  

But really, don’t say I didn’t warn you.  There are a LOT of bullet points beneath that cut.  xD

On the maps

Obligatory: they are huge.  It’s fitting since they were designed against HoT’s verticality and more geared towards the use of mounts, so it’s more of an observation, less of a complaint.  There’s a lot of detail and a lot of little things here and there, and it’s incredibly fun to see what you can get away with using mounts to get around the terrain.

That being said I do miss the verticality of HoT maps.  Maybe a combination of both pls? :3

I kind of wish there were more large obvious meta events, but I haven’t gotten to see all of the sort of meta events that go on in the PoF zones. I do think the large metas add replay value, but again a balance is a good thing.

We spur-of-the-moment yolo’ed the Ruptured Heart meta with 11 people.  It was actually pretty fun.  Also so many cannonades ;-;

Hearts feel like they take just a little bit too long.  Some of them are amusing, but when trekking through zones doing map comp (or redoing hearts to get collection items) they drag on a bit.  Guild chatter about hearts was fantastic though:

“These nobles are useless.  What should I do with the chamber pot, throw it off the side or throw it at one of them?”

“I’m throwing flowers at people and making them happy?”

“Matchmaker heart best heart.”

Bounties are hilariously fun?  Sometimes you get unfortunate bullshit combinations of modifiers (anti-stacking fleas + pls stack in the bubble to actually be able to hit the boss mob, I’m looking at you), but overall they’re quite fun.  We spent a good few hours trekking through all five zones murdering things and getting murdered.

These actually look super promising for replayability; our goal/challenge as a group has always been to optimize and work together, so it should be fun to go track down bounties and see what kind of dumb shenanigans we can get up to.

I actually find these really fun in small groups of 5-10.  Zergs sound...unfun.  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The caffeinated skritt is...kind of annoying.  Mostly because it doesn’t operate like the treasure mushroom in HoT and you have to be on the class you want the collection item on, and the maps are so large someone could trigger a chest and no one would be the wiser.

A tip though for people wanting to complete multiple collections: you only need to loot the last bag it drops.  If you’re wandering around with friends and they’re nice enough to chill at the bag, you can reload with other characters and grab the bag again for another collection item (until it despawns).  I have no idea if this was intended, but I burned a few TP to friends on this for the lulz.

I had a lot of GW1 feels running through these maps, especially going down to the Desolation and Vabbi.  I appreciate that these places still exist but have changed with the years, and it’s nice to see what happened.  

Although Vabbi is one weird-ass place now.

BUUUUUUT Zomoros’ lair was hilarious.

I haven’t explored for the sake of exploring in a very long time and it was really, really nice.

CHOYA PINATA.

On the elite specializations

I haven’t actually gotten to try all of them yet, but I’m also not super enthused about all of them (Spellbreaker, I’m looking at you).  Also a gentle reminder that my opinions are mainly based on my background as a PvE player and moreso as a raider.  Also they’re just initial opinions.  Opinions change.  

I started with thief (duh), and proceeded to do the entire story with Daredevil.  I’m not particularly a fan of Deadeye; I appreciate the archetype but I don’t really see rifle having a place with a game designed more around active response in combat.  Also as someone who still can’t shake the seaweed salad dance, rifle just feels really static and dull to me.  But we’ll see.  Maybe I’ll have to make the Predator hue. D/D Deadeye also felt strange, so idk.  But we’ll keep fiddling with it.

Mirage still feels kind of odd but I need to get poor Naois the spec since he’s actually specced for condi, unlike Eet.  It seems like an upgrade to condi mesmer, and the triple blink is hilarious.

I really hope Scourge ends up with some sort of place.  Initial benchmarks look hilarious (but then, so did Soulbeast/Weaver/Firebrand ones), but I took out Richter again for Scourge and I’m actually really happy to play him again.  It’s been so long ;-;

My brother told me, “do yourself a favor and put down a sand shade near some enemies, then press F4.”  I tried it.  I laughed pretty hard.

Weaver is so much button-pressing but it’s really fun?  I’m still getting the hang of it but I do like it a lot.  At least it’s more challenging than condi tempest. *grumbles eternally*

Soulbeast looks promising, although I hope it doesn’t lead to another “let’s use condi ranger/thief on absolutely everything” situation again.  The new pets are also...interesting.  

Although when it comes to ranger I’m a druid at heart, so we’ll see.  Not that I’m usually conscripted for DPS roles anyway

Firebrand looks silly.  And broken.  I’m all for alternative sources of quickness (and alacrity in the case of other specs), but I don’t really want to see raid meta go to 2x PS 2x druid 2x chrono 2x firebrand (or something like that) with only 2 flex spots.  That doesn’t sound fun at all.

Also I’m guessing Firebrand will be the first to get the nerfbat.  The damage numbers people are getting are bonkers.

And hey look, they got the nerfbat.  Down to 33-35k.  At least that’s better than 50k? Ugh.

Renegade feels pretty decent.  Revenant has always been in a weird “built around elite specs” class, and that hasn’t changed.  I’m not sure how I feel about condi rev being more of a thing and less of a meme, but ayyy

Holosmith seems like it would be a lot more relevant if the transform wasn’t currently borked.  Scaling damage to a level 76 fine weapon is...sad.  If it’s fixed power Holosmith could be something legit?  Maybe?  Overall though I like the theme and look of it.  Also lol lightsaber.

Spellbreaker I...idk.  Thematically I like it a lot; I was a big fan of mesmer and shut down mechanics in GW1 and I like the idea of Spellbreaker, but from a mostly PvE perspective, it’s just kind of...eh? WvW and PvP I see it being incredibly useful but with limited boons to nom in PvE it doesn’t really look particularly great (especially with condi berserker getting tuned through the roof).

On mounts

I keep dyeing them funny colors.  Yes Quill’s are all some shade of yellow.

I honestly think they were well done.  I was never a supporter of adding them to the game (not against, but not for them either), but now that they’re here, I’m pretty okay with them.  

I like that each mount is useful in some specific capacity - raptor for flat open stretches, springer for verticality, skimmer for no touchy floor, jackal for portals and evasion through high mob density areas, and griffon for the absolute lulz of flying.  

I keep getting the “mount doesn’t render so your character model is riding away sunk in the ground while your camera remains in place” bug (I think it’s attached to trying to mount up before things are completely loaded), and while it’s funny, it’s kind of frustrating.

Mount swapping is a bit awkward, although binding each mount to its own key helps a lot.

I appreciate that the starting mount (the raptor) is still relevant even when you pick up the other three (four), as it’s definitely the fastest mount on flat ground and it’s improved leap is hilariously long.

Also it’s a giant scaly puppy so I have no problems with this.

The springer is hilarious.  And super terrain-breaking.  High cliff?  No problem, bunny hop.  Core and HoT map comp probably just got much, much simpler.  Also JPs that don’t have mount restrictions.

The skimmer is adorable, and riding it around is strangely...calming?  idk.  Also as one of my guildies put it: “maybe this is Anet’s answer to underwater combat: glide right over it.”  rip.

Of the four core mounts I think the jackal (blink doge) is my favorite.  It has a gorgeous design and the blink/portals are super cool.  Although the blink can get a bit titchy if you’re trigger happy with the jump button.

Of course I have the griffon.

IT’S SO FLUFFY.

I think it handles a little strangely (esp when you can’t dismount quickly, although you can divebomb), but it’s pretty solid.  And adorable.

250g was entirely worth it.

Also that Tahlkora cameo hit me right in the feels.

On the story

I’d get here eventually!  Eventually...;-;

All salad-shaped biases aside, the male sylvari VO is still my favorite and no one can convince me otherwise.  There was a good amount of sass, seriousness, and everything inbetween.  Ive is one to take everything with a “hahahaha you’re kidding what am I doing here help,” so overall the voice acting and dialogue fit him fairly well.

I’m a little disappointed by the lack of race-specific dialogue.  Humans don’t seem to have any special dialogue with or concerning Balthazar, and everyone else doesn’t really have a chance to comment as an outsider.  I know it’s more work and I still enjoyed the story as is, but it would have been a nice touch.

Like Ive would literally not give a shit about half of the things brought up.  Not because he doesn’t care about others, but because he has no clue what anyone is talking about.

This was particularly funny with Joko in the Domain of the Lost, because his whole tirade about the PC not knowing who he is could quickly be shut down with “I’m a salad, I have no idea who the fuck you are.”

The “decisions” were interesting, although unsurprisingly they had very little impact on the game as a whole (maybe in the future?  Doubt it).  I did appreciate that depending on the order the “decide on Amnoon’s independence” steps are done in, the dialogue changes.

I admit that I’ve gotten a little less partial to Taimi as she’s edged closer to Deus Ex Machina territory, but her dialogue and conversations (both with the PC and with others like Phlunt later on) are quite funny.

I wish there were more Vlast/Gleam before he died.  It’s sad that he showed up and just...died, but I can understand why they chose that path as well.  

Although some of that was my own fault; the chapter with the Exalted and Vlast’s upbringing I got supremely distracted by the jumping puzzle and spinning around on my new skimmer.

Still.  More Vlast!

RYTLOCK.  RYTLOCK WHY.  Nice job breaking it hero.  Surely you would know better than to accept help in the Mists from a random shackled man who CONVENIENTLY knows how to relight your magic sword.  Sigh.

I thought a lot about the Herald of Balthazar after finding the notes in Night of Fires.  I went back to it after talking to my brother and came to a very similar conclusion as a theorizer on the GW2 subreddit.  If that theory is true, that makes me very sad.

Pls say it’s true I like gut-punch feels.

Speaking of gut-punch feels, The Departing was amazing.  It was super disorienting not having access to the inventory or the minimap, but it was a very well-done instance and I enjoyed it immensely.  I appreciated that they stuck to the “you lost your name and purpose” thing to the point of replacing your character name (including in the hero panel) with Lost Spirit.

Balthazar murdering the PC was pretty neat. 

Also Aurene showing up exactly on time was both cliche and NO BALTHAZAR BAD STAY AWAY FROM BABY DRAGON. 

This, like a few other story missions later on, is super awkward to do as a group.  It’s supposed to be rather personal, and so the not-instance owners are reduced to buffing wisps (like later on in the thrall party instance, not-instance owners are just awakened thralls), and idk I was lucky I was instance owner but that seems rather :|

Ive had a lot of feels hearing everyone’s voices again.  Also the feels of him not exactly remembering everything and having to follow his purpose through his own memories and not quite remembering everything.  Including Trahearne.  

Also tfw the story mission is essentially Full Circle (as a sub-section of Closure) with a bit of bonus Balthazar.

Joko is being very obviously set up as a “you left me in a cage I swear vengeance rahhhhhh” villain.  Or Anet is going to pull a fast one and he will never show up again, which would be hilarious.

Bonus feels for everyone else surviving and Ive being the only one dead (think Eet).

Backtracking slightly, I’ve never liked Kormir.  I still don’t like Kormir.  And the human gods are miserably terrible people.  At this point there’s not much questioning as to whether or not they exist, but with the extent of their influence, their decision to just kind of peace is...rather appropriately god-like, for better or for worse.

Seriously though, gods pls.  I can see some of the logic of “world will be destroyed anyway if god attempts to fight god,” but surely there are other things that need be maintained.  

Also I like how Kormir notes that Balthazar had been stripped of his powers, and yet he still curbstomps the PC (unless it was entirely the imprisonment in the Mists that just locked his powers away, but Kormir’s dialogue suggests otherwise).

I would kill for a library like that.  Seriously.  So jelly.

The “let’s disguise ourselves as the Archon and go and convince Palawa Joko’s army to fight for us” part was so incredibly stupid that of course it worked.  We spent the entire time laughing at how incredulous it was.

The battle at Kodash Bazaar was actually kind of awesome?  There was stuff everywhere and my only inclination for the first part of the instance was “go hit things.”  

It was incredibly weird to just have Sohothin for the entire instance.  Yes I’m aware I could have dropped it.  But it was hilarious in a Caladbolg sort of way.  With less idiotic knockback, and more 300s cooldown skills.  

AURENE.  Balthazar stop hurting my dragon >:(

Also because he just yolo killed her other brother before she had a chance to meet him in person?  rip.

Although now that I think about it, how would that meeting even go?  Talking to the Exalted indicates that Vlast was isolated and not well-acclimated to the world around him, so by the time they realized he should be interacting with other races it was too late for him to form any empathy for anyone.  His dialogue seems to imply that his motivation was simply the fulfillment of a goal; he seemed far more interested in fulfilling his legacy as Glint’s son than the reason why she needed him and Aurene to do anything in particular.  He doesn’t really have a reason for what he’s doing, he just does.

Aurene is implied to have an empathic link with Vlast similar to her connection to the PC, but idk, it just seems like any actual meeting between the two of them would just be incredibly awkward.

I very much enjoyed both the penultimate and ultimate fight against Balthazar.  Also because if you turned around, you could see Kralkatorrik’s massive face just chilling in the sky because oh shit angry elder dragon.  It was...quite something.

I understand the PC’s current caution about killing elder dragons because of magic imbalance, and I also understand the need to stop Balthazar from being a total moron.  I also understand that there’s not much you can do to stop a mad god besides killing him (since those with the means to imprison him decided to float on).  But uh.  I’m not sure what anyone expected would happen if you kill the god who absorbed two dragons’ worth of magic with another dragon just chilling nearby.  Surely Kralkatorrik absorbing everything and flying off into the sunset while extending the Brand wasn’t a surprise.  

Seriously though what did you think was going to happen.

Baby dragon absorb magik and is not quite so baby anymore.  Aurene come back I miss you already ;-;

I commend you if you actually read all of that.  xD

Overall, a solid expansion with quite a bit of content.  We’ll see how replayable it ends up being as time goes on, but I am still quite amused by it and have plenty to do as it stands.  The story was fairly solid (although sometimes strange with questionable logic, as always), and I’m looking forward to where they take it with LWS4.  

[kosmicdream]

Flight or Fight Drawing mode

for me, i think there’s always this restless feeling that comes when working on comics. That feeling that time is running out or not being utilized to its fullest degree. You are aware of how much more there is to go in your story and can calculate the progression of your journey, but only the present. As you keep going on your story, the circumstances change, and it is always this fluid process you cannot fully accommodate and plan for.

I know in the few years since I started drawing FFAK my expectation for myself and my work has changed tremendously. Its something i reflect on a lot, since i forget how not too long ago, I felt like i was somewhat incapable of producing a comic because of the way i enjoy to write and explore stories. I still think fundamentally, FFAK reflects that raw unedited version of my writing and creative skills in a unique way that I doubt will be replicated again (in the same manner) even as i explore and work on other stories. FFAK just carries this certain kind of momentum of forwards and backwards both at once. You stretch all over the place and peek through small doors to go in strange places. Growth is difficult to gauge because of the way time is handled in the story. Goal points seem endless and bleed together from my perspective. There’s always so much more to go and so much planned that when you make accomplishments they feel sort of like a bunch of tiny small steps in many different directions. And honestly, No one is more impatient than i when it comes to waiting to share this story than me. I am always biting my nails and wanting to get it out faster SOMEHOW even though I work on it constantly as it is. FFAK is no longer just.. a random comic idea i started on a whim that I felt i would only dip my toes in and never actually attempt making. and now it really has consumed my mind like a wildfire. it is also my fireplace and my home in my heart and my peace. I don’t even think I could ever fully be prepared for and handle such a thing but I am glad to have it in my life. But as the haze.. shock? of starting this project starts to fade i find myself fully committed and trying to evaluate the steps and process i take for this comic as a whole. I think its interesting how 2ish years of planning basically gives me enough time to know what sort of story I’m doing. But I am in no eager rush to finish it because my excitement for it only grows and feels more satisfying the more i write and plan. Part of me gets upset I don’t blast pages out the “same” way anymore, even though i appreciate the exploration of ‘putting more effort’ into my drawings. Instead of drawing thru 20 pages a night I’m polishing like, 2.. or 4 a work night. Its kind of annoying!! because I’m not really one for polish and editing (or maybe I just never believed myself capable of doing it in a way i liked? lol) but.. it just feels like the right thing to do right now. it feels almost impossible to ‘rewind’ myself or go back to like, thinking things in a different way than what i try to do now. by attempting more things visually it kind of makes some things easier too. im often pretty surprised like “hey alright that came out ok. i guess i can push myself a little bit more next time to make it look better!!” I think about my early eggshells pages a lot and how i labored over like.. 15 pages over an entire year and felt miserable and in the end, often over rendered + lost clarity and energy and now i just get what i was doing ‘wrong’ to make it not fun for myself. Like, even when i was offered advice at the time I wasnt so welcome to it nor did i understand it, its like I had to suffer a bit before I was able to understand what I needed to do with myself lol. The lesson feels much more impactful after discovering it for myself too on my own pace imo. SO i am thankful for how that turned out! Then i broke down my art to its most base level (earliest ffak pages) and i’ve just been rebuilding myself back up since then and now I’m attempting things I didn’t even think I’d be able to do -- or be interested in. (like color, for example, has never been something I was too interested including with my comics but like.. blammo here i am doing it anyway now.) anyway. its really cool, this art journey thing. i kinda wonder how long ill coast on this certain part of it before i like, end up doing an unexpected detour again. Maybe I won’t..? i dont know!! FFAK is so raw and alive it makes me happy i get to make it and do whatever i want in it. I always wanted to make a comic that I could contribute to on a day to day basis rather than something you just make so you can get it done asap and move onto the next thing. When ffak does eventually finish I wonder if it will be really hard on me. I look forward to its ending because its really neat but it is not a world I want to let go of so quickly. Even tho i have several other stories I’d like to do.. (and have started a couple already LMAO) I think about that expectation with ending stories a lot and completing projects. Most of my very favorite comics have yet to end despite going on for decades.. and when i think about that too, it almost feels very strange. Readers generally want closure to reflect on their experiences reading something so endings are that important ‘release’ from that fake world and  time you participated in it. But when i ask myself what I want to do for endings to my story, i try to contemplate  my favorite endings to stories ive read/watched/experienced to figure out what i want to do with my own. Since.. its my story and my satisfaction with it is really going to be reflective of what I like. Everyone interpretes ‘good’ endings differently and like, clings into diff parts of what makes a satisfying story so its important to isolate what elements you find are important to try to replicate that in your own work. But like.. its hard to see what kind of ending you’re going to make before you make it???? And making the story is a difficult thing to let go of vrs just being funneled all the stuff. Maybe my ‘ffak reader’ half of me will be satisfied but will my ‘ffak creator’ side be happy? Will i feel fufilled on both parts? I mean an experience is going to just be an experience.. i cannot manufacture or control it to be anything than what it will be so to think about it too much is probably only going to go in circles. It certainly has changed me a lot as a person and an artist. WHich is disorienting b/c im also introducing my work to everyone while not also knowing myself completely. (not that is ever fully achievable but, its been something i get forced to confront a lot.) When I work on this project I fight so many demons of my own life, chase ghosts of my heros that i feel are so beyond my ability, and stare down the illusion of my own reflection of what kind of artist i want to be every time i draw a new page.. I’m never going to really be that reflection, and my heros will always be my heros and they’ll always do things I cannot, but I wonder what kind of creator I look like from the outside?? from a person who isnt me. I cannot experience myself as a ‘reader’ but I try to pretend I am seeing myself as one. And the most exciting thing about myself, from that outside perspective, is that I am not sure what I will attempt next or what strange journey i will write about. I am happy that despite every difficult thing I have been through, I am still excited and having fun with my art like I have only just first attempted to draw. Soon FFAK will be three years old and (likely) 4000 pages by then.. I still havent gotten to write and draw out things I planned the very first day, but now I know roughly how the story will end (without actually getting to draw it yet, of course.) And i’m just anticipating the future while knowing  that...i have no idea what it will bring!!! O_O (one thing is for certain i hope to fuck my house doesnt burn down again because, istg, that fucking SUCKED!!!!!!!!) Wooh.. well. i just felt like sharing some thoughts since i just got done re-reading some of ffak and feel a bit overwhelmed with emotion.. Thank you all for sticking around and experiencing this comic with me..! :’3 -kosmic

[somekindofseizure]

When the Ink Dries IV

Rated: Explicit

Notes:  Thank you again to the usual brilliant beta’ing suspects, @icedteainthebag, @h0ldthiscat and @gazeatscully.

If you haven’t read the previous parts, go here.

*

Chapter 9

 The first time Mulder came close to telling Scully he loved her was not the night Stella told him to do so.  It was also not over a bouquet of flowers at a candlelit restaurant, the two of them smiling nervously at a wobbly table as a waiter placed a plastic pie slice under the leg.  It was not on a navy blue night beneath the stars, backs against the warm hood of a car, her gaze following his finger in awe as he pointed here and there.  It was not sitting side by side in a movie theater, her little hand reaching over to place pieces of popcorn on his tongue while he pretended to be annoyed that she wouldn’t let him hold the tub.  It was none of the times or places Mulder had been telling himself he was waiting for.  

Instead, it was in a standard-issue Ford Taurus the color of a curbside TV screen, seats that stunk of the four-month-old coffee spill that was still holding a grudge over its gruesome demise.  Mulder was driving under the influence of a splitting headache having lost a coin toss.  It was one of those days they’d come up so short, run in such perfect circles, that neither of them could face the finality of turning that key, pulling up that emergency brake.  

Of course, sometimes Scully’s mere presence, her sticky red lips and stiff-postured strut, was enough to make unromantic settings seem romantic.  After all, that’s how he’d fallen in love with her in the first place.  Freezer lockers in Alaska, rocks in the middle of monster-infested lakes, sometimes even his crusty basement office went pink and fuzzy late at night when she looked up at him a certain way.  This wasn’t like that either.

Yes, he’d almost gotten high on a single toke of her perfume when he leaned over her shoulder to study the gravesite earlier, but that cautiously applied dab had long faded.  And yes, he’d pretended this morning that the umbrella was narrower than he knew it to be just so he could hook his arm around her waist and iron the curve of it against him, but that drizzle had long since dried up.  By the end of the day, she was just his partner, someone who argued with him compulsively and who always had to pee and yet still never wanted to stop when he did, someone he’d have been happy to hand a bus pass had there been any buses to take.  

She slouched beside him performing a symphony of chap-lipped sighs as the radio station -- the one she’d decided was her best and only hope about ten minutes ago --  failed her with its sorry static and decades-old songs, the stubborn soundtrack that belonged to every dark, lonely stretch of land he’d ever been to.  The last thing he expected, fifty miles from the nearest sign of civilization and twelve hours from the nearest decent mood, was to remember he loved her.

It wasn’t that he hadn’t taken Stella’s advice to heart.  He’d actually hung up the phone that night, locked the door, grabbed his coat and driven to Scully’s, chanting affirmations all the way, determined to become a devout convert in the religion of Seize the Moment.  But he’d left Scully’s place without so much as a knock on the door, then spent all weekend nursing his pride, quietly holding Stella accountable.  She had played a major role in wounding his ego and then taken off with slick instructions to be bold.  Easy for her to say.  Where she was going, she’d have nothing to worry about but military time and minding the gap.

But when the following Monday came, Scully showed up at work as she always had, the wave of hair round her ear patient and perfect as ever, dressed once again in responsible opaque rayon blends, her hands once again focused on touching bodies that would not touch her back (unless, zombies, but anyway).  For once, Scully’s ability to pretend things that had happened had not actually happened would serve him well.  She would make the days pass anonymously, make each little bit of the future look more like the past.  She would make him think he could live with that.

Inevitably, fuzz once again overtook the radio signal and Scully half-whined, half-groaned as her city-mouse optimism suffered another defeat.  She leaned over, coat pooled at her lower back, clasp of her bra showing through her blouse like a second spine.  His brain sizzled in chaos as she started to fuss with the seek button or the tuner button or whichever fucking button it was she kept playing with, each time changing stations mid-musical-phrase, cheerfully surfing the foam between wavelengths.  Mulder rubbed his forehead with his fingers.

“Scully, just pick something.”

“Don’t be snippy.”

“There’s no way you can even hear the songs going that fast.”

“I can so.  I have a skill.”

“You’re giving me a headache.”

“You already had a headache.���

“Can we just shut it off?”

She clicked once more and paused for effect.  

“Sure.”

“No!”

She sat back with a satisfied grin on her face and an Elvis song on the radio; it was one Mulder knew well, a ticklish bassline and a sneakily romantic bridge.  Two verses away, his stomach was squishy about what was coming, afraid to hear that slow dropping drawl in her presence -  honey, you know I’ve never lied to you.  Why couldn’t it be Hound Dog or even Heartbreak Hotel, one whose lyrics had been rendered meaningless and lustless by familiarity.  

He could feel her looking at him.

“Magic touch,” she said.  “Admit it.”

He tried not to smile but failed.

“You don’t believe in magic.”

Hero of the night, conqueror of both bad signal and bad mood, she dropped her head against the window for a well-earned rest.  She began to sing along, so softly that every now and then, a word glitched away on her inhale as Mulder gradually melted like a teaspoon of sugar into the coffee-stained seat.

Why can’t you see what you’re doing to me, when you don’t believe a word I say...

“You know ‘Suspicious Minds,’” he said, forgetting she was self-conscious about her singing voice.

She cleared her throat and switched to a stifled hum, but her knees still skipped from side to side.  He glanced from them to the road, from her pale left cheek to the dotted yellow lines.  And as he began to tap his left toe, he remembered the Elvis figurine he’d once planned to give her, the way it had initially meant nothing, come to mean everything, and finally disappeared altogether.  And suddenly he wanted so badly to tell her he loved her, loved her more passionately than he hated channel flicking, loved her with every single one of his moods, even the bad ones, maybe especially the bad ones, he loved her the way people now made fun of Elvis for singing about loving people.  

But then her knees slowed and when he glanced over, his mouth open and important words on the tip of his tongue, he found her staring out the window like she was afraid they were being followed.  Her breath was caught in a hopeless jet stream between her open lips and the glass and her eyelashes drew pictures between the stalled raindrops.  Perhaps feeling his eyes on her, she turned her face toward her shoulder, confiding more privately in the passenger side door, hips shifting in her seat.  Of course, he realized, she would remember the little Elvis figure too, would remember how it turned up under her knee that fateful night.  It had only been a few weeks, even if they had been pretending it had been longer or never... 

Her chin reaches over the seatbelt, a threshold between the present and the past, and then she is in a shiny hotel room where a lonely ring holder is being held hostage by three people who will probably never have use for such an item.  But for now, there’s no future, just the moon and her, standing naked and satisfied beneath it at a full-length window.  And of course, Stella, sheathed in silk, standing behind her, close and soft as her own shadow, arm shaking the cuff of the robe down as she reaches around Scully’s hip, ducking the curve of her wrist into the indentation of Scully’s pelvic muscle, finding it a perfect fit.  Scully stands up a little straighter, then leans back as two fingers test her body like a swimming pool, dipping and coming out wet and doing it all over again, warming themselves to the idea of a longer stay.  Scully presses her fingertips into the glass, trying to protect the sensitive skin of her breasts and belly and even the jaded palm of her hand from the shock of the cold.  It’s no use when Stella begins to kiss her behind the ear, whispers things Scully later somehow won’t remember though she’ll remember every detail about the way her body gives way and sinks like an anchor into Stella’s right wrist.  When she starts to pant, Stella’s forearm pads the windowpane, one half of an X in front of Scully’s face as her nipples tap the glass beneath it, still fighting the force of gravity that is Stella’s sway, and and for a second, she feels guilty that he’s not awake to see it.  But then her mouth is against Stella’s arm, sucking and biting to avoid speaking and she is absolutely sure that this is no one else’s, not even his, the way her brow furrows for Stella, the way Stella holds her afterwards like a bulletproof vest.  It’s only for the moon and for her to see… and see… and see... 

“You okay?” he asked.

“Hm?  Mhm.”

This was the expression, the mood, he began to associate with Stella Gibson, the countenance of a person trying to shake something off, untaste and unsmell it and unfeel it.  It was quite similar to the way Scully acted when she realized she’d started to believe in one of his theories, that he’d gotten in her head against her wishes.  And to her, he knew, Stella was just as absurd, just as factless and illogical as any of those theories.  We only spent a few days together, she would be thinking.  We don’t have anything in common but a dress size (and, he would have argued, a powerful right eyebrow).  The most irrational of things had happened to the most rational of people.  And now that person sat trying to wish and reason it away, a knuckle against her lip and a far-away look in her eye.  For once, even if she didn’t know it, Mulder’s believing in nonsensical things was going to serve her well. 

So he let the song end uneventfully, let her get out of the car without saying a word that night.  He began to work more, work out more, jerk off more -- anything to keep him from picking up the phone.  Anything to keep him from thinking about what it would be like to have Scully hovering over his body instead of a dumbbell, or hear her whimpering instead of some false videotaped professional (would Scully whimper?).  He tried not to consider that it was possible, remotely possible, that just once, when it was time, something good might happen.  So far, that had happened to him exactly once in his life – the day Scully walked into his office.  What were the chances lightning would strike the same two people twice?

He came close to telling her a second time, this time on their way back from Leon County, Florida.  He’d almost died twice in two days: once, of boredom had he been successfully transported to the FBI retreat, and then again, in a place called Apalachicola National Forest.  She’d kept him alive by singing Joy to the World off-key while in his head, he heard Stella’s voice saying stop wasting time stop wasting time.  He’d spent a lot of time wondering what she meant by that, if she was talking about some specific inevitability or about him generally growing a pair.  But standing at a stuffy airport gate amidst Hawaiian shirts and Mickey Mouse ears, awaiting an already delayed flight, he thought well, that, that was probably exactly what she meant: stop wasting time or one day you’ll be kicking the bucket in a place called Apalachicola National Forest without ever having been happier than you are in her arms shivering to death.

There was that rush people spoke of, the thing he’d seen in movies over the years where someone ran around a city, a party, and yes, an airport, in order to tell a woman he loved her before another minute was lost.  He was going to do that, and he didn’t even have to look further than the sunken blue vinyl seat beside him, but someone from American Airlines tapped the mic with something more important to say.  It was going to be another four hours.  The crowd groaned collectively, but Scully, queen of irritable groans, was silent.   

“Guess we have to kill four hours,” he said but she didn’t look at him.

“Mm.”

“How are we going to do that?”

She is leaning, almost sitting on her kitchen table, her jeans around one ankle beside Stella’s bare calves.  She spends very little time at this table, and has never spent any of it this way before.  She is thinking of the way the seams of Stella’s skirt stretch and curl with Stella’s flexing thighs, she is thinking of the little rosy spots Stella will have around her kneecaps when this is over and she is thinking nothing at all.  Both of her hands are gripping the beveled wooden edge and she wants to move one to the back of Stella’s head, but she can’t bring herself to do it.  She knows this is supposed to be goodbye, and she’s afraid if she tangles herself in the dark roots of Stella’s hair, she won’t be able to let it go in time.  She’s afraid if she can still smell Stella’s scalp when she locks the door and goes to bed alone, she won’t sleep.  She’s knows Stella’s scared of things like this too, so scared that she would rather hurt herself before those things beat her to it, but they must not be exactly the same things because Stella moves Scully’s left hand to the back of her own head, glances up in encouragement.  The fast flick of first-place ribbon blue startles Scully’s fingers into a trophy-winner grip that hugs Stella’s mouth a little closer against her body and she knows it’s what Stella wanted because she can feel her smile.  After she comes, she lies back on the table, managing not to cry by thinking “four more hours, we have four more hours.”

He held out a pack of Twizzlers to get her attention, bit his tongue when her cheeks flushed the color of the pack in his hand, and wondered how he’d know when enough time had passed.  How long did it take someone to get over a person they’d known for four days?  How long would he have to monitor those quiet moments between chasing shadows and questioning witnesses, knowing she was thinking about the register of Stella’s voice, the octave it took in pleasure, the temperature of the skin behind her ear, the way she looked when she listened?  That day Stella called from the airport, he’d thought she was gone.  But she was in fact very much present in their collective memory, just like one of the files in their drawer, one more phenomenon they’d both seen but seen so differently they couldn’t quite talk about it.   She was right there in that pack of Twizzlers, in a cloud of American car condensation, inside a car stereo.

One day a couple weeks later, she was even on their answering machine.  They’d come in tired and hungry, poorly armed with the low expectations their phone calls generally inspired.  Mulder pressed the button and Scully began to set out some take-away cartons, not prepared to delay the intake of fried rice for Langley or Byers or some hysterical MUFON member.  But when the tape started spinning, all other movement ceased.  Stella’s voice came into the room like a sparrow, fluttering and beautiful, inappropriately captive.  Both Mulder and Scully froze, watching it hit the walls and ceiling, trying to stay out of its way.

“I realized once I settled in back here that I never properly thanked you for sharing your work with me,” she said with improbable ease.

Mulder held the corner of his mouth between two teeth as he anxiously glanced over at Scully.  Her hands were laid flat on the desk like she was playing a game with herself, wasn’t sure which hand she’d hid the Ace under.

“And I realized,” Stella continued somewhat breathily, “that I never gave you a way to reach me.  My number here is five – you’ll have to dial the country code first, which is -- I forget, some nonsense combination of ones and zeros you’ll have to look up –”

She rattled off a string of digits that seemed longer than a social security number.  Mulder watched for movement out the corner of his eye, but Scully didn’t reach for a pencil, didn’t do anything.

“That’s my personal number,” Stella said,  the tone of her voice slightly slipping in its certainty. “You can use it for any reason.”

A pause.  

“Either of you.”

And then her voice slid up a notch from its steady dial tone register.

“Any reason at all.”

And with that, she vanished back into the air, a narrow escape through a crack in the window.  Scully went back to separating packets of black and orange, back to parsing out fair plots of rice.  He watched as she folded a set of chopsticks open and rubbed them together evenly.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

“What?  Yes, of course.  I’m ravenous.”

But ravenous Scully usually approached lo mein with the enthusiasm of an athlete, a tennis player locating her best grip.  This was a straightforward nibble, a ball boy creeping out to the net.

“I’ll listen to it again later to write the number down,” he said, wondering if she was afraid he’d erased it.  She gave him a look as though he’d made a wild change of subject.  “Just in case you need it or… want it.”

She shrugged, shook her head.  And then she shoved her lo mein aside like it had passed its expiration date, turned her attention to ripping apart a plastic packet with her teeth.

*

The next time it occurred to Mulder to tell Scully he loved her, it would not be because of the way she smelled or felt standing next to him, or the way she grinned when she teased him over the car radio, or even the sounds she made in his wildest fantasies.  It would be something even more incongruous than a deserted highway or a packed airport terminal full of aggravated travelers that inspired him.  It would be because he was super fucking pissed off.

It was a Friday night, the end of a really bad week in which they’d had to go to Texas.  Twice.  He’d almost killed a vampire who was almost not even really a vampire (he was).  They’d spent an entire fucking day arguing about every single thing that did or did not happen, unable to complete a report that didn’t make one of them sound like a liar.  If only they could have turned in a report about how cute Scully thought the loping Sheriff was; that would have been a quick piece of business.  He felt mean for telling her that the Sheriff hadn’t returned her admiration, but there was only so much a man could be expected to take in one week.  

When the report was done and turned in, it was well past five.  They shifted around on their respective sides of the desk, two creaky old computers powering down.  Couples didn’t go to bed angry, and Mulder and Scully didn’t like to leave the office angry.  He looked up intending to make small talk, be the bigger person, send her off into her weekend with a clear conscience.  He thought about apologizing for his shitty attitude about the Sheriff, telling her that of course the Sheriff had noticed her (and of course, if he was being honest with himself, he had).  Scully must have sensed it coming, felt him look up, because she lifted her chin and waited.  A streak of blood, thick as nail polish, slid down her upper lip.  She raised her eyebrows, oblivious, as the wind went out of his chest.

“What?” she asked as he stepped around to her side.  He said nothing as he took his tie off and wiped her lip with it.  She took it from his hands, tipped her head back, he assumed to hide the fear in her eyes.  Any minute now she would run off to the bathroom.

“Shit.”

“Scully,” he whispered.

“Mulder,” she said up into the tie.  “It’s fine.”

His heart began to race, his stomach lurching as she pinched the bridge of her nose.  She seemed to have expected this somehow because her voice had none of his panic. Had she known she was sick again?  Had she told Stella?  Is that why Stella had told him to stop wasting time and if so, why the fuck had she been so cryptic about it?  What kind of sick Hallmark greeting card message was that?

“No, no, no,” she said, as if he’d asked it out loud.  “It’s just from flying so much in such a short period of time.”

“What?”

“Barotrauma.  Used to get it as a kid.  Been a while.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes.”

He closed his eyes as he sat back against his chair and breathed at the ceiling.

“Shit,” she muttered.

“What?”

So long as it wasn’t cancer, he didn’t really care what.

“I’ll have to cancel.”

“Cancel what?”

She patted her nose dry and looked straight ahead, but her eyes darted off to the side. 

“Nevermind.”

“Cancel what?”

Maybe he did care.

“Nothing, I just.  A date.”

“What?”

“It’s a first date.  I don’t want to take the chance I start bleeding into my plate on a first date.  Talk about traumatic.”

Mulder used every muscle in his body to pull his jaw off the floor.  His eyebrows were still up somewhere under the flop of his hair but he was willing to let those remain there the rest of the conversation.

“You have a date?  With whom?”

“Um.  The guy who fixed the car last week.”

“The FBI mechanic?”

“The new one.”

“The mechanic?”

“Don’t be a snob.”

He didn’t give a shit what the guy did for a living.  He just needed something to repeat while he figured out what the fuck was going on.

“What about the Sheriff?”

“What Sheriff?” 

“The one you spent all week making eyes at.”

“What are you, protective of him all of a sudden?” 

“No.  Look.  Listen.  Go on all the dates you want.”

“Well,” she said with a sigh.  “Not going on this one.”

She dug into her pocket and found a business card.  She eyed the phone and tapped the card on her thumb, flicked it with a fingernail.

“Go ahead.  Call him.”

He had begun to search his memory for the key interaction he must have missed between Scully and the mechanic, begun to wonder where he was, what exactly he was doing while this random fucking guy so easily did what he had not been able to do for years.  He tried with perverse effort to remember the tone of voice Scully had spoken at the garage, her mood when they’d left.

“I think I’ll... I’ll wait til you go.”

 *

Mulder fumed all through his workout, the eating of his frozen pizza, the length of his shower.  Standing naked in his bathroom mirror, he gave himself a resentful once-over as a figment of Stella Gibson sadly shook her head over his shoulder.  Go ahead, take a long hard look at the ball-less, soaking wet bastard who let her say yes to the FBI mechanic.  And he did take a long, hard look at that guy.  He stared that motherfucker down, stared down past his own pouting lips, his new arm muscles and respectable six pack, stared right at the idiotically large, red, gang-font letter that tagged his pelvic bone.  He had a tattoo of her last initial and she was flirting with a fucking buck-toothed sheriff in Texas and saying yes to dates with mechanics.

At some point, she’d decided it was time to move on and she hadn’t even had the decency to tell him?

Well, fuck that.  He towel-dried furiously and brushed his teeth twice.  He put on a clean t-shirt and his lucky jeans (though he had never gotten lucky in them or any other jeans he presently owned).  He sat in the car a few blocks from her building for a half hour, working up his courage, planning his speech, branching her various possible responses like he was writing the code of a very sappy, very boring, and potentially very depressing video game.  He chewed his lip until his saliva tasted like medicine.  And finally, he stepped out into the world.  Ready.

A block into his walk, rain began to fall.  No, not rain, but rushing, stunning, Asiatic gusts of water, the likes of which he’d never seen in Washington.  He was not turning back now.  He was brave.  He was a man in love.  He was at least as good as Sheriff Hartwell and the mechanic.

And he was standing on Scully’s doorstep shivering like a wet chihuahua, drenched to the bone.

“Mulder,” she gasped, a line of concern stapling itself between her eyebrows.  “Come in.”

He pushed his shoes off at the door with opposite toes and stood with his shoulders at his ears, afraid to move.  One move could douse her whole apartment.

“Is everything okay?” she asked as she moved in and out of rooms, getting him a towel.  “Other than the fact that you’re soaking wet.”

There was wine and an open book next to the couch, her glasses playing the role of bookmark.  His time off was spent so arbitrarily, was often woven into the anxiety of what to do with it.  When Scully’s Fridays came, she read the book she’d been planning to read all week, drank the wine she’d been saving up to drink.  He could never spend his free time like that, would never feel he deserved it.  Come to think of it, he didn’t deserve her either.

“Yeah, everything’s fine.  I just came to talk about something, but I can do it another time.”

He dried everything a towel could dry and as he handed it back, finally got a good enough look at her to make him grateful and remorseful at once, like looking at the Eiffel Tower and knowing you would never get to see it again.  

She was wearing a tight little t-shirt that had the name of some sort of camp on it, the letters cracking where her breasts stretched it.  There was a hunter-green colored set of felt pine trees across the belly, and dark spots from years of laundered deodorant under the armpits.  She was also wearing sweatpants.  No buttons, no ties, no matching patterns or monogrammed silk.  The only adornments were her nipples, hardening visibly under the thin fabric, maybe, he micro-fantasized, because he was staring at her.  

But he didn’t want that either – to begin his confession of undying love by staring at her in a tight shirt.  He tried to sound like himself.

“All the good PJs in the wash?”

And had instead come off sounding like a mean big brother.

“Everything else smelled like Texas or forests or mud or slime.  I’ve been busy.”

“Going on dates with mechanics.” 

She sighed.

“We didn’t have any slime this week.  The Sheriff do something to you I don’t know about?”

“God, Mulder.”

“Sorry.”

“Did you come over here in the rain to keep arguing about it?”

“No.  Whose camp shirt is that?”

“Mine.  Used to come down to here,” she said, pointing to her thighs.  He resisted the urge to make a crack about growth spurts and wondered how he hadn’t seen this shirt before.  Maybe her fancy pajamas were only for work trips.  The idea was almost too cute to bear.

“Well, I like it,” he said, backpedaling furiously, feet flailing for the kickstand.  “Just want to get that on record.”

“Noted,” she said, making that face she made almost every day, that brave sane person in the loony bin expression.  “Are you staying?”

“Over?  No – I – what?”

She further compromised an eyebrow and smirked at him sideways.

“I meant, for now.  ‘Cause you can’t sit on my couch in those wet jeans.  I’ll have to find you something to borrow.”

“I don’t think any of your camp clothes are going to work.”

Her back was already turned but he heard her cuff and drag a little laugh back to the bedroom.  He smiled, feeling slightly encouraged, and fidgeted on the tiny doormat, trying not to give her any reason to put him out in the yard.

She returned with a neat stack of clothes that smelled like her.

“The, uh… shirt is yours anyway,” she said.  “I swiped it.”

She sounded less sorry than she did worried that he’d take it back.  He had often suspected her of stealing his t-shirts on the road after “borrowing” them.  But if she were borrowing shirts, it was usually his fault – some creature had taken a bite out of them, or they’d been singed in a fire, or a monster had slimed them, or he’d just spilled a cup of coffee on her.  So he never requested them back.  Still, he sometimes wanted to tell her she could just buy t-shirts in that size.  Then again, he thought as he glanced at her little capped sleeves, he’d rather not.

“And the shorts are…” she said, seeming sorry she’d started any kind of explanation.

They were a pair of boxer briefs, new-ish looking, probably a size too small for him. He’d certainly never loaned her any underwear.  

“Well, they’re clean is all you need to know.”

“All I need to know?  Really?”

“I bought them for someone else and then we broke up.”

He felt his stomach churn and tried to blink away the dizziness.  

“It was a long time ago, a very long time ago,” she insisted, perhaps noticing that he’d gone temporarily insane at the idea of someone leaving underwear there, a further insult to the injuries he’d witnessed that day.  

“I kept them just in case.”

“In case what?”

“In case…you know,” she said blushing.  “Someone came over sopping wet and wanted to sit on the couch.  So just put them on.”

He realized he was not the only one who was nervous.  He suddenly felt the urge to tell her he wasn’t here to start shit about the past, make her feel bad about any of her ex-boyfriends, girlfriends, lovers, murderers, what-have-you.  They had both had enough of that for a lifetime.  But it seemed like a weird way to start things off, apologizing.  Come to think of it, all the ways of starting off he’d planned seemed stupid now.

She was smiling at him, closed-lipped, hip out to the side.

“What is it?”

“I was just thinking about Billy Miles, that night you had me standing in the rain in the middle of the woods screaming at you.”

It was hard to picture with her cheeks all rosy now from what he guesed must have been a bath.  But he could -- the translucent shade of parchment paper grey she’d been, her voice screechy as a rusty old rolling pin.  He’d wanted to kiss her so badly it had caused a giggling fit.  Standing in a torrential downpour getting yelled at by a virtual stranger on the brink of hypothermia was the first thing that had turned him on in years.  

“You must’ve thought I was crazy.”

“I did.  But I also thought you were cute all wet too.”

Was she flirting with him?  Was she retroactively flirting with him on behalf of her past self?  He took his bottom lip under consideration, trying not to think about whether that meant he could have kissed her then and there, their very first case -- and oh my god, how many pushups he’d done for nothing, and shit, the perfectly good hipbone skin he’d ruined – and instead tried to be hopeful that maybe tonight was going to be easier than he thought.  He inched closer, mussed his damp hair to inspire her.

“Here I am again,” he said.  “All wet.”

But she was already turning and walking to the couch 

“And still crazy.”

He tried not to sound too sulky.

“I’ll go put these on.”

Her bathroom was dripping with tile-sweat, lights like plastic peaches around the mirror, air hot with the subtle scent of burnt marshmallow made by a recently active hair dryer.  He felt like a giant human with his foot stuck in a dollhouse.  Surely the apartment had not been built to scale Scully.  But all her things were there.  Her little bottles, her little slippers, her cosmetics and hair bands scattered about.  He never thought of Scully as delicate, never, and he had of course seen many of these things before, but not altogether like this, not collected and posed together in a room where she must have stood naked not thirty minutes ago.  

He hadn’t meant to pry or be nosy; he didn’t even open the medicine cabinet.  But the bathtub was right in his line of sight on the way out.  And what he saw stopped him.  A piece of beige fabric lazily draped and dripping over the bathtub faucet, a bra just fancy enough to warrant the term lingerie, and beside it a washed-out pair of pantyhose with a seam up the back.  A fucking seam up the back.  He’d seen her do this in motels before, knew it meant she’d been wearing this stuff under her suit at work that day, maybe because she’d planned to go directly to the date, he thought, and the thought of that, not of the confounded date but of the seam tickling the back of her thigh, cupping her ass under her pants as she fought and frowned and crossed her arms at him was enough to make him want to relive the terrible day all over again.  He hesitated, bit his lower lip and then ran long, guilty fingers under the nylon, tested the firmness of the satin underwire with his thumb.

“Shit,” he said under his breath, forearms hot with testosterone.  This was going to be a serious conversation between two adults.  It was going to require a lot of sinking in, a lot of thinking over, a lot of weighing options.  He would not need the services of a stiff dick at all tonight, not even in the best-case scenario.  

She was sitting on the couch when he came out, pressed into the corner exactly the way he’d caught her with Eddie van Blundht.  She looked less freaked out than she had that night, but the natural ease she’d had about her earlier had dissipated.  Whatever time he’d taken ogling her stuff in the bathroom, she’d had to wonder what this was all about.  A pained smile came across her face and she twisted the cuff of her pants in her fingers as he slowly walked past her and sat in the space she’d left him, generously allotted proportional to size.  

This is what he’d waited five years for – to make an ass of himself in his underwear, trembling across the couch.  So be it.  So it wasn’t what he’d imagined.  Well, maybe once or twice he’d imagined being in his underwear, but then she was too, and also, these were not actually his underwear.  Fuck it.

“What I’m here to talk about, it’s kind of a difficult…” he interrupted himself with a hard gulp.  “Kind of a difficult…”

He shook his head once like a gnat had gotten caught in the back of his throat on a jog.   Her chin was dipping lower and lower, mouth like a resting marionette, the face she made when trying to decodify nonsense.

“Mulder?”

“It’s nothing bad.  Well it could be bad, depending.”

“Have some wine, maybe.”

He reached for the glass on the coffee table and sipped, and as he did so, Scully lurched forward and reached for his hip, apparently spotting the northern tip of the red iceberg that was his tattoo.  

“Mulder, are you bleeding?”

He grabbed the wrist she’d almost touched him with and held it halfway between them.  She’d scared him and he’d done it harder than he meant to.  But when he looked in her eyes -- a warning and an apology -- there was no annoyance or fear, just blue and more blue, an ocean playing cool witness to his storm, yes, disturbed by the wind, but nevertheless confident of the sovereignty it held in its permanence.  Her lips parted and he had to drop her arm before he got sucked in by the riptide.

“No,” he said.  Now there was no turning back.  Scully would never let him walk out without explaining something she’d mistaken for blood.  “When Stella left, she told me to come here.  Do you know why?”

“You came here to talk about Stella?  After all this time?”

“Scully.  Please.  I’m trying,” he begged.  She took a breath, humoring him like he was showing her one of his slideshows.  Perhaps that would have been a good idea.  Here’s me staring at you in the car.  Here’s me staring at you across the desk.  Here’s me staring at you in the diner.  Are you noticing any patterns?

“Yes,” she said.  “I think I know why she told you to come.”

“You do?”

Scully was up off the couch in a flash and then he could hear her rummaging around the kitchen.  A question he didn’t think had an answer not only had one, but also required a prop of some kind.  She returned with it in the palm of her hand, sat next to him – a little closer, this time, he noticed – and handed it to him.

It was the Elvis figurine he’d bought her in Graceland.  He thought it had been lost forever.

“She said the hotel’s housekeeping staff found it.  She said I should ask you about it.”

“It’s yours.  I bought it for you.”

“You had it the night – that night we –”

“I would carry it around in my pocket.  I never gave it to you.”

He paused, took a deep breath.  This was the humbling part, or one of several humbling parts, of his story.

“I was angry with you when I came back and found out about Ed Jerse.”

“Okay,” she said carefully.  “But why didn’t you give it to me after that?”

“Why didn’t you ask me about it when Stella told you to?”

Scully looked down at her lap shyly.  

“So you just carried it around?  Every day?”

“In my coat pocket.”  He looked up without lifting his chin.

“Mulder,” she whispered.  “That’s very sweet.”

“You’re not disgusted that I would withhold a gift from you out of petty jealousy?”

“No.”

She put her hand in his and he thought she was trying to hold it but he wasn’t quite ready, wasn’t nearly through what he had to say, so he resisted.

“What did I do now?” she asked, smiling.

He laughed as he realized she was just trying to get Elvis back.

“Nothing, it’s all yours.”

She studied it, poking it to make it wiggle, twirling it like a ballerina.  It had been in her house for six weeks, and she’d given it a hard look at least once before that when she’d knelt in that hotel room at Stella’s waist.  He blinked hard – no need to summon that image at the moment.  But right now she was looking it over as if she’d never seen it before, was seeing it in a new light.  It was only now that it had come to mean something to her.

“So my jealous spree didn’t end there.”

“Oh no.  Don’t tell me.  Pencil case?  Bumper sticker?”

He was not in the mood.

“Sorry.  Go ahead.  You’re making me a little jumpy,” she admitted, then reached for her glass of wine, placing Elvis like a bullseye in the red ring it left behind.

“When I went to Philadelphia, the night after – our night with Stella – the night we – you know, the night that ah-- “

“I know the one, Mulder.”

“I went to see Jerse again.  And I went to that tattoo shop…”

He couldn’t say it.  So he waited for her to do it for him.  Come on Special Agent Scully. Put it together.  

She gasped, hand to her mouth, glancing down where she’d tried to touch him a few minutes ago.

“Oh God, Mulder.  You didn’t.”

“I did.”

“Out of spite?  I don’t even --”

“I wanted to see if the poison was real, if it had made you do the things you’d done.”

She began to unwind her legs, seemed to be about to jump off the couch.  He pressed his hand into her thigh.

“I know now it was really you.  I’m okay with it.”

“You’re okay with it?”

“I can accept it.”

“You can accept it?”

He could practically feel the soil of the grave he’d begun to dig, sifting between his cold wet toes.  He wished he could just crush her body to him and kiss her like in the movies, but if it had been the movies, they would have done that part out in the rain, not in here, wearing ill-fitting pajamas of dubious origin.

“I like it.  I like it because it’s you and I like all of you.”

“Tread lightly, Mulder.”

“Goddammit, I’m trying to tell you that I have feelings for you.”

Her mouth closed and then opened again, lips zipping and unzipping like a puffy pink sleeping bag as she tried to figure out what to say.  Her eyes went wider and her tongue came straight out for a second, seeming to resist an urge to try to touch her nose.

“I bought you a gift and didn’t give it to you and I went to Philadelphia and got drunk and got a tattoo and got in a fight with a guy over you and slept in Stella’s hotel room but did not fuck her because I was miserable and scared to be alone and because I have feelings for you.”

It was the best he could do.  More of a rant than a confession, really.  But it would have to do.  She looked around the room like one of his possessed bats or summoned spirits was supposedly flying around.

“Who’d you get in a fight with?”

“Fucking Christ, Scully!  Did you hear me?”

There was a pause.  She looked at her lap.

“I’m sorry.  Give me… give me a minute.”

She stood up and began to pace the path between him and the coffee table, bending her fingers back with opposite hands, occasionally looking at the ceiling as if she were counting in her head.  Her toenails were painted red, same as that one time she had slipped her heels up out of her shoes in the car and massaged her shins with the arches of opposite feet.

Okay, so he’d given this some thought.  He’d had six weeks to plan this, longer.  It was possible she hadn’t spent any time thinking about it at all.  Scully thought about the things that were real and possible, like the book and the bottle of wine and apparently women who pulled her close the first moment they had a chance.  Until this moment, he had made himself -- the man part of himself, not the partner -- as much of a figment as she believed their cases to be.  He let out a little breath, trying not to seem impatient, trying to appreciate her cramming all that time into just a few minutes.  Suddenly, she stopped pacing.  She’d made it to the other side of the coffee table.

“Well, what is it?” she asked.

“What?”

“The tattoo.”

“It’s just.  It’s nothing really.”

“Can I see it?”

“I don’t think so.  Not now.”

“You’ve seen mine.”

He sighed, waving a hand at her, but she waited.  The fate of this whole thing, the biggest gamble of his whole stupid board-game of a life, now seemed to rest on her impression of his infernally ridiculous quarter-machine tattoo.  He stared at her for a moment, begging with his eyes for her to let it go, and then knowing that she wouldn’t, he lifted his ass from the couch, pulled the waistband of the shorts down, and showed her the gaudy red S just below his belt line.  She squinted.  This, he knew, was for effect.  With or without glasses, no one could miss the fucking thing.

“S.  For your sister?”

He could see that she meant it.  She really meant it.  She wasn’t getting it.  Maybe she didn’t want to get it.  If so, this was his out, he could turn this ship around now, bail himself out.  But someday, he might find out there was an afterlife.  And he might meet Stella there.  And he’d want to die all over again from the shame when she asked if he’d done what she said.

“No, Scully,” he said, and sat back down.  She stared at his hip through his clothes like she could still see it.  “It’s not for my sister.”

She took a quiet, sharp breath 

“Oh my God.”

“Yes.”

“For Stella?”

“What?  No.  No, Scully.  What’s wrong with you?”

She breathed out, shrugging her shoulders in her own defense 

“You started this whole thing talking about Stella so…”

“No.”

She looked down and bit her lip.  Oh, to be that lip.

“Superman?” she asked and the font was close enough that he couldn’t tell if she was kidding.

Her eyebrows were rounded like child-drawn rainbows, her tongue testing the downward point of her upper lip like it was a baby tooth, wiggling and ready to fall out.  Her shoulders went back in a way that made her breasts harder to ignore.  She wasn’t hiding her nipples with her arms anymore.

“No,” he said.  “Not Superman.”

And that’s when she began to walk back toward him, dancing rather than pacing, a slow-motion box step round the coffee table.  When she got to the couch, she raised one knee at a time to the cushions on either side of his legs.  Her hands went to his shoulders, ready to waltz him straight out of his mind.

“Sexy?” she asked with one eye narrowed, and he almost said yes because, well because she was now in his lap in a tight little shirt, smelling like wine and those things hanging in the bathtub.  Suddenly, it seemed that everything about the way this had happened – the weather, the outfits, the pointless banter – it was all kismet.  One of her hands was dribbling down the front of his body, over his chest, down his stomach, lips busy rephrasing and repeating her latest guess.  “Does it stand for sexy?”

“No, it doesn’t,” he said with hitched breath.  He had rarely if ever heard her use that word, and when she did it was meant figuratively, as in sexier theory, this kind of science isn’t considered sexy...

The heel of her hand was turned to line up with the fish-bodied top of the S, her fingertips tucked into its tail.  She took her hand away and let the elastic snap as she raised herself above his eye level, took his face in her hands with her thumbs over the tabs of his ears.

“Stupid?” she asked.  There was a buzzing sensation, radio static like those nights in the car, those nights he could never just pull over and suggest they make out until they felt better. It was the frequency that connected them even when they were on different pages, in different cities, on different planets.

“Yes.  It was stupid,” he agreed softly.

“Very stupid,” she said, nodding, pleased he was finally falling in line.

“Very stupid,” he slurred, his lips almost paralyzed by the nearness of hers.  She leaned in closer, the pert teardrops of her breasts just under his chin, her narrow stomach warm and flat against his.  

“Incredibly stupid,” she said in labored syllables, executing consonants that had done nothing to deserve their fate.

“Yes.”

“Tell me what it stands for,” she said, honey-voiced.

“I think you know.”

Her eyes were all sleepy, resting on this spot of his face and then that.

“I want to hear you say it.”

He could almost taste her lips as he licked his own.  It was an appeal as well as an answer.

“Scully.”

She nodded as if he’d been the one guessing, and not her.  

She served him pieces of her mouth like a sloppy homemade slice of apple pie, warm and unruly.  Her top lip was juicy and sweet, her tongue syrupy, her bottom lip crumbling against his teeth.  He bit into it to hold her there and kissed her more deeply, swallowing her.

Her thumbs made circles over his ears like pencil erasers.  She moaned softly each time his hands etched a line from here to there.  The backs of her thighs, split bottom of her ass, the small of her back -- the small of her back, that spot he’d searched out over overcoats and blazers and button-down blouses, the one he’d nearly lost his damn mind over the day Stella escorted Scully out of his office – that one made him moan too.

Her lips vibrated like the skin of a plum when she approved, so perilously delicate he feared piercing them, and yet pressing the curves of themselves desperately against his teeth, begging to be peeled.

She tore his shirt up over his head and lowered her face over his like a crane, her hair falling forward and casting his face in darkness, so that even with open eyes he couldn’t see her.  With his hands full of her and his mouth wet with her, he was almost sure he was dreaming.  But as she slid back down, she rolled her hips against him.  Ever the one to let the light in, ever the one to offer hard evidence.

Her breasts pressed easily through her warm decades-old fifty-fifty blend, rubbing the soft pine trees against his chest hair.  He placed his thumb over the word camp and squeezed the nipple in the round white space of the letter P.  Her head rag-dolled to one side as she grabbed his shoulders and tried to stand up, wobbling at the ankles as the cushion sank under her feet.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“Trying to get my pants off.”

He pulled her knees to his chest, letting her rest her weight against him as she balanced her hands on his head and laughed.   He took over with the pants.

“I’m not wearing underwear,” she murmured, as if he needed a warning.

And perhaps he had.  Perhaps he’d needed a warning the length of a carnival ride sign, a carton of cigarettes.

Because in a moment he was looking right at the soft apex of her thighs and his fairly healthy heart almost stopped.  He wrapped his arms what seemed like three times around her legs and stared as she pushed her hand through his hair, then grabbed a tuft of it and pulled it, finally showing him what it felt like when she wasn’t looking for blood.

“I was going to come back down there,” she offered, leaving the other option deliciously unverbalized.

“Later,” he said and moved his mouth toward her center, his center, the center of the Earth as far as he was currently concerned.  

When his tongue touched her, she groaned like a fault line splitting up the middle, turning over fresh soil, heat rising visibly off the newly revealed surface.  Her ass sank back into his hands as her legs failed to hold her and she surrendered the wet weight of her body to his mouth.  Her hands wilted down the sides of his face, fingers butterflied out in shock.  He curled his tongue inside her as deeply as he could, trying to get the purest possible taste of her, name it and mentally bottle it.  But it was sunflower seeds and hot chocolate stuck to his skin and tree roots and French food and wet forests, nothing that really made sense, and he could either spend all night trying to place it or he could make her come.

He wanted to make her come.  He thought of the one time he’d seen her do it, squirming and pinned beneath Stella.  He wanted to make that happen like he’d never wanted anything.  What would Stella do, he asked himself, and slowly slipped a finger up into Scully’s body, taking aim at the skin just at the other side of his tongue.  Scully gasped and bucked her hips, nearly toppling over the back of the couch.

She ran one hand up her stomach, taking the hem of her shirt up the narrow valley of her abdomen, pulling it round a fist and tugging it upward, but she seemed to lose motivation, because she put her hands to her head instead, began to play with strands of hair in ways that would scar him for life, prevent him from having peace in his office and in cars and airports and anywhere else Scully might get bored.  The t-shirt, flipped up halfway, suspended her breasts in perfect semi-circles, bottoms peeking out like lazy half moons.  And the sound of her panting with the softest part of her breasts exposed and her hands rooted in her own hair made him so hard he wanted to pass out.

He pulled his finger down and then pushed it back up, pressing forward a bit and shining the inside of her body like a cherry while his tongue played with the stem, a few drops of moisture dripping down his chin.  The way her grip tightened, he thought she was about to come but then realized she was pushing his forehead away, pulling at his ears for his attention.  He looked up, annoyed.

“What?”

“I said, tell me.”

“I love you.  I’m so in love with you.”

“I know that, you have my initial tattooed to your hipbone,” she said, breathless.  “Tell me how you want to fuck me.”

He hesitated, wishing he could give her an honest answer appropriate for first-time soul-mate sex.  Missionary style, with you tucked safely beneath me, spilling my seed gently while weeping tears of joy into your hair.  But the fact was, her pussy was holding them both at the edge of mutual destruction two inches from his mouth, her tits were half-uncovered and as-yet unsucked over his head.  He’d been thinking about her for years.  And he had an erection that could inspire a thousand pages of kama sutra.  Every way.  Six ways from Sunday.  Up, down, right and center.  So hard.  So, so hard.  In other words, nothing he was willing to say outloud.  

Luckily, Scully was willing to say something.

“Take your pants off and take your dick out.”  

Their eyes met and he knew he was not alone in thinking of the only other time she’d ever said that (or anything like that) to him.  She hesitated a moment, an apology taking shape in her eyes, perhaps afraid she’d accidentally referenced a sensitive subject in the most sensitive of moments.  Mulder wasted no time, hastily pulled his shorts down, just to show her how far under the bridge that water was.

She looked down, mouth wide enough to --

“What do you want me to do with it?” he asked.  Somehow the idea that she wanted him to fuck her still seemed implausible.  She rubbed up against it.

“What do you think I want you to do with it?”

She wrapped her right middle finger around the head of his dick and guided him underneath her body.

“Oh,” he said, gulping.  “I thought you might tell me to masturbate while I --”

“You want to jerk off, you can go home to your tapes.”

“Of course I don’t want to jerk off, I just --”

“Mulder, shut up,” she said, sounding almost as if she were in the middle of a fistfight.  “And let me do this right.”

“Let you do this right?”

She paused, gave him that calm, smug look that meant she was about to win an argument.

“Let me fuck you right.”

And then he was quiet.  Because even if he thought she’d done everything else wrong that week, he had to agree she was doing this right, she was doing it so right, taking him inside her body slowly, her breath hitched, her eyes going white as a sheet before her eyelashes came flitting down and reproduced the blue like bunnies out of a hat.

She inched him in slowly at first, and then less slowly, gathering oxygen to feed the fire until she was riding him like a flame does a wick, hugging him and melting around him, determined to burn them both to the ground.  

Stella was the only woman he’d been with recently enough to compare, and he’d liked how she felt more than he remembered liking anyone else.  But Scully was different - tiny and tight and hot around him and he had never put his dick inside anything so perfect, not even his own expert hand.  His cock parted her anew with every landfall, the dense cloud of her body settling around him and then lifting again.  

“Are you okay?” he managed to ask, trying to remember that under the raging urge to pound into her was a little thing called love.  She smiled wickedly, loving him back and gripped his neck with angry fingers, reminding him who exactly he was dealing with here.  

He reached up to take off her shirt and watched her hair fall in a mess around her face.  He had dragged her all over the country on foot and in bad weather, and seldom seen a single strand out of place.  But now, right here in the safety of her own living room, he had it thick and tipsy, sticking together in wayward strips.  Through the twisted ribbons of red, her eyes flashed purple, face lit up like he’d spun the wheel and landed a two-week Caribbean vacation.

He had one hand spanning her breasts, the other around the back of her head.

“Go ahead,” she dared.  And because he wasn’t sure if she was referring to her nipples or her hair, he addressed both, pinching at one and tugging at the other.  He held her tight and shimmied his ass to the edge of the couch so he could slouch over and lick her, squeezing her breasts together and then pressed them apart again with his tongue.  For five years, she’d rolled her eyes every time he put something in his mouth and played with it, but now she leaned back on his thighs for him, unwrapping herself like a bag of sunflower seeds, a soda straw, a brand new pack of pencils, and this particular kind of concession was so much better than any other he’d ever fought for.  Her head dropped back, hair tickling his knees his much-maligned oral fixation sought its redemption on the crowns of her nipples, in the creamy white cushioning of her cleavage.

“Oh goodGod thatfeelsgood.”

And amidst the overwhelming feelings of heat and pressure and wetness, his dick found a ridged spot along the front of her body that brought her back upright on her knees.  Her ass was firm against the sensitive insides of his quads, her breasts sliding against his mouth.  She let out a lightly vocalized breath, and he felt her body open, the whole length of him now inside her.  Nothing moved but her lips, slowly parting at their rosy hinges as he returned his attention to mouth-fucking her breasts.  It was easier to be precise now that she was still.  Let me do this right, he thought.

“I don’t even understand… what you’re doing… with your tongue.”

He smiled, took a nipple lightly between his teeth and tapped it with his tongue.

“Oh, fuck me, Mulder, stop showing off.”

She began to fuck him again, weary and desperate now, vaguely annoyed in a way that he thought would forever taint the integrity of her annoyance.  

He leaned further forward and held her against him, suddenly glad of all the angry workouts he’d done over the past several weeks.  He thought he felt her clitoris twitch and she sighed, and yeah, whimpered, as if she’d been running a long race, finally been given a glass of water.  She swore, asked for God in three different ways, then swore again, her nose against his lips and his chin occasionally in her mouth.  And then she said his name and he nearly came, but as always, he wanted her, needed her with him.

And just as he was about to ask, her brow knit up like the front of a ballerina’s leotard, her heart-shaped mouth frozen open like a carnival lovers’ lane ride.

“What – Scully, what -- does that mean?”

“It means I like that,” she said, high-pitched outlines of words.  “Don’t stop.  Please.”

He raised his hips, bucking into her with all the power he could muster in such a position.  She took one hand from his leg and clawed at the muscle in the arm that was working to bear his weight, marveling at it, then pulling his face forward to her body.  When his lips touched skin, he didn’t even know what part of her body it was, but it didn’t matter because he loved them all equally, was sure he always would no matter how they changed.  Finally, her silence and swearing turned to one word, hoarsely delivered right into the canal of his ear.  He knew now, had known since Stella’s visit, that Scully said a lot of things during sex that she tended not to say at the office.

But this word, this word he never got to hear in the course of a workday.

“Yessssss.”

“Do that again.”

“Yessssss… yessssss.”

“I wanna make you come so bad, Scully.”

She almost lifted all the way off him and he thought she was playing with him.

“Scully, fuck… come for me,” he said.

She closed her eyes and held her finger over his lips as she flashed him a naughty red-licorice smile and hissed his new favorite dirty word through her teeth.

“Yesssssss.”

Her mouth fell to his neck, her fingernails embedded themselves in his skin and he raised his hips once more as he said her name, this time long and low, coming and crumbling as she flickered and turned from blazing fire to wisp of smoke, fragrant and weightless in his arms.

“I love you,” she whispered.  He smoothed a hand over her hair, covered her back under the span of two arms.  He kissed her.  These things which had seemed like superhuman feats a couple hours ago now so simple, necessary even.

“I love you,” she repeated as he did so, as if she hadn’t even said it the first time, or as if she’d known this is how he wanted it, deposited directly into his mouth so he could swallow it, hold it and have it forever like a hoarded key.

He nuzzled his face in her collarbone, sturdy and straight as the mast of a sailboat.

“Thank you,” she said and he didn’t know if she meant for coming over or for the orgasm or...  “For The Elvis thingie.  For keeping it all that time.”

She looked at him and blinked a couple times, awfully coy for a woman who’d just let him tear her apart.

“I don’t think anyone’s ever done something like that for me before.”

“Not given you a gift?”

“Thought about me hard enough to not give it to me for five months.”

He thought of Stella’s voice that day on the phone.  He could play it cool, but why bother?  Who knew where they’d be in twenty years or ten or next week?

“Scully, I’ve been thinking about you that hard for five years.”

“Mulder,” she answered softly.  She pressed her cheek against his like they were the last couple left on the dance floor, her ragged breath like a country song in three-four time.

“I didn’t know there was a right and wrong way to fuck someone,” he said.

He felt her smile against his neck.

“Now you know.”

“Now I know.”

“You’ve probably been doing it wrong all along,” she mumbled.

“I haven’t really been doing it at all.”

Her body shook silently against him as she laughed, a feeling so perfect he wished he could bottle it, shake it out of a packet into his coffee and get drunk on it at night, a mood stabilizer the world had saved just for him.  How could he ever be unsatisfied again when he knew that beneath her well-tailored shirts, her nipples blushed the same dusty rose as her lips?  How could he fixate on the past when, sometime in the future, she’d smile again the way she did when she came?  Who gave a shit if there were aliens or not when her slightly sibilant S could bring him to his knees?  How could he ever feel lost when he was able to find his way to the dimples on her lower back?

This was his happy place, his vacation and his home, he thought as he held her tightly and looked down.  Her back was a lush valley of scattered freckles and rolling vertebrae, a postcard stamped with the circular red, green, and gold emblem of her ability to survive anything, run from any threat.  He swore to himself he was never going to be one of those things again.  Never.

Chapter 10

Scully had been having the same kinds of nightmares for a long time -- stories hot with life, crafted in poet’s detail by a subconscious spoiled for choice.  The bone-crack of brush underfoot in a thick forest chase, the particular pitch of black created by a slamming trap door, unsolvable mysteries with incomprehensible faces.  For years, the dreams had ended the same way the experiences that inspired them had – with a mix of confusion and relief, and Mulder close at her side.

But lately she’d been finding reality more frightening than her dreams.  Come morning, the high definition of night would be replaced by hazy, indifferent facts of domestic existence -- the curtain pattern she herself picked out, the slightly dead smell of the dinner she herself had made the previous evening.  In place of the monsters and villains would be the person she loved best, willingly chained to his computer, drugged on the adrenaline of another all-nighter, buried alive in paranoid illusions and useless information. He’d haunted her like a confused sort of ghost, his corporeal body doing the work while his spirit sat in some motel drawer, some field under the stars.  Morning after morning, he’d proven invulnerable to her mortal efforts, her anger and adoration, seemed almost eager to pare away her nerves.  And in the end, like any good ghost, he’d chased her from the house.

One morning just a few weeks after she’d moved back to the city by herself, she woke in a room she didn’t recognize, a place that felt familiar though separate, like walking into a friend’s closet.  Ancient history waxed into the crevices of the solid oak floors, the linens so white they teased blue along the creases, her shampoo clashing with the one previously left on the pillow.  Out the window, a grey sweater of fog wrapped around the tips of buildings soft and thick as cashmere.

London.  That’s right.  London.

She stretched as she passed through the living room – did British people call it a living room or something else? -- and found the couch had already been evacuated, blankets sloppily folded and placed in a chic oversized basket beside it.  She smiled at the lump of feathery wool, alpaca, and mohair, whiney weaves that demanded they never see the inside of a dryer.  So Stella.

Scully had tried to insist they split the bed down the middle.  Over the fifteen years they’d been friends, the bed-sharing conversation had become something of a ritual.  There were many different versions of it, but Stella was always on the same side of the argument, and the significance was always the same – something about the purity of their friendship.  Scully often thought that it would probably say more for the purity of their friendship if at least once, they didn’t have to have a conversation about the bed at all.  

It was generally accepted that Stella knew her way around this kind of modern friendship best.  But for all its indefinability, there was an old-fashionedness to it as well.  The unexpected subsistence of loyalty between two long-distance confidantes who existed safely outside the Venn Diagram of one another’s daily lives – no mutual friends or spin classes, nothing shared but an ocean… and occasionally, for a weekend, a nightstand between hotel double beds.  

“You’re being silly,” Scully had told her the previous night as Stella fluffed her spare duvet, the one now most likely at the bottom of the basket.

“I’m being respectful.”

“Of whom?”

“You.  Mulder.”

Mulder had never checked in when she and Stella spent time together chatting and drinking wine.  He never asked her about sleeping arrangements, had always treated those mysterious weekends the way he’d never treated any mystery -- with respectful incuriousness, undisturbed and uninspected.  A few times, all three of them had had dinner.  Scully would get all worked up trying to figure out a place to eat that fit both Mulder and Stella, but of course Stella thought she fit anywhere, and Mulder didn’t care whether he fit.  Pitcher of Pepsi or crystal champagne flutes, Scully would be the only one shifting awkwardly in her chair those meals, feeling like she was holding her fork in the wrong hand all night, thinking of the picture they must make – an Irish Catholic in a sweater set, a bombshell in a leather skirt, a misanthrope in a wrinkled suit, and at least two out of the three packing heat.  But that would not be the situation on this visit.  Mulder would not be joining them.

“Stella, you have a head injury.”

“No, I don’t.  I have injuries that happen to be on my head.  Aren’t you a doctor?”

Scully opened a defensive palm out to the side.

“You haven’t given me a chance to look at them yet.”

Stella looked up at her with heavy lids and an effortlessly sassy hand on her hip.

“You can sleep in the bed or you can go to a hotel.”

Scully had been too tired to play the scene out any further, and besides, Stella stole the show every time.  She was just as good at keeping people out of bed as she was at getting them into it.  So Scully had suffered a princess’s defeat, falling into the deep plush mattress, feeling like both the protector and the protected, deep-breathing Stella’s shadow off the pillowcases.  She drifted off smiling, thinking of how many weeks she’d once spent missing someone who was such a stranger she wouldn’t have known what kind of candy to get her at the movie theater.  

If only she’d known then that she would someday pad into Stella’s kitchen and find her merrily slouching on a stool, peering into a cup of tea as if it were a jar of butterflies.

“Morning.  Want me to make you a cup?”

“No, I can do it,” Scully said, eager to re-establish the tone of this trip.  She was here to take care of Stella, not the other way around.

She successfully found herself a cup and spoon, then dug out all kinds of things from the fridge that Stella said didn’t belong in tea.  But when Scully turned to the stove, she found a fancy steeper waiting instead of a regular old pot.  She glanced at the microwave.

“Don’t even think about it,” Stella said and slid down from the stool.

The kitchen was sleek and clean, identical wine bottles balanced like uniformed cheerleaders beside crystal clear wine glasses.  Scully wondered if Stella had had a dinner party before she left for Belfast, left the glasses out to dry, and still not gotten around to putting them away.  But more likely, she assumed, this was their usual place, right here out on the counter.  Stella liked to keep pleasure within arm’s length, even if it meant things were going to break more often.

Even with the lights on and the sun theoretically out, the room was darker than what Scully was used to, both in the old house and her new apartment.  But the shade here was a relief rather than a disappointment, an umbrella on a too-long beach day, a welcome break from the pressure to be happy even as she chewed sand.  There was always plenty of light so long as there was Stella, a few more lines under her chin when she checked the flame, but otherwise exactly the same, body wound up sinewy as a birthday candle, skin so radiant it threw a dim glow across the grey surfaces whenever she moved.  

It wasn’t until Stella’s first phone call that random Wednesday afternoon that Scully realized she needed that kind of relief:  her warm, relaxed just calling to voice rolling off the receiver like a palm-warmed rubber ball, her confident silences padding every remark.  It was upsetting for Scully to think about, but once, she had been the thing Mulder consumed night and day, the thing that kept him up all night.  And even as she loved him back with the heliotropic intensity he demanded of all things and people, she had unwittingly kept a little room like this kitchen for herself, dark and sexy, Stella its only light.

Now Scully mentally slipped on her white coat as she took Stella’s chin in her hand and studied the stitched abrasion on her forehead, the hematoma on her cheek.  She tucked herself into the counter corner nearest Stella’s body, brushed Stella’s hair back from her face.  She felt a remarkable sense of calm as she glanced at the dark patches of scabs on Stella’s cheekbone.  There was comfort in having something to offer.  

“It’s nothing to worry about,” Stella said.  

“I know, I’ve heard.”

It’s nothing to worry about, but… is how Stella’s phone call from the hospital had started.  The words Belfast and serial killer and hospital had come at Scully all out of order, moving around like those kitschy refrigerator magnets until they formed a cohesive sentence.

“I’m getting a flight to London,” she’d said, hanging up before Stella could even finish protesting.  It was what Stella would have done for her, had in fact done for her during that miserable time Mulder was missing… dead...

Gone, is what she’d subtitled that whole period of her life, because any more fine-tuned explanation raised questions that were too painful and difficult to answer.  Stella had been the only person Scully could look in the eye after William, the only person she’d let comfort her.  And so she’d let her stay a couple times, would hide her away like a secret drug, a fairy godmother or an imaginary friend, while she went to work and watched everyone wonder how, how is she doing it.  Stella was how she was doing it.  Stella would tend to the apartment like a garden of roses, letting the sun in and casually collecting tiny blue socks, pruning for thorns until it was safe for Scully to pass through.  She’d order dinner when Scully said she was on her way home and prattle off seemingly gruesome investigation stories or scandalous gossip at the table, anything that was distracting enough for Scully to forget herself and eat something.  She’d hold Scully the nights she cried herself to sleep, hushing and soothing the back of Scully’s neck or the wrinkles between her eyebrows with her silvery voice and the sky-ocean smell of her shower-scrubbed skin.  Her one condition in exchange was always that she didn’t have to say goodbye when she left.  Scully would think it a small price to pay, until of course she’d have to actually sit down at the table alone and unfold the I’m off, darling note.

Scully knew just because Stella had done it for her didn’t mean she’d be able to easily return the favor.  She had been prepared to ignore all the text messages that would follow their chat --  I’m fine, Really don’t come, I overreacted by calling -- as she went about the process of taking a short leave from work, putting a hold on her mail.  It wasn’t until she was taxiing down a runway that she realized the only thing Stella had messaged her was a reminder of her address.  The realization of how bad Stella’s condition must be turned her so green that her neighbor asked if she hated flying too.  At the front door, Stella had shrunk against her cautious embrace and Scully had had to stretch the hug out an extra ten seconds just to make sure she could face her dry-eyed.  

“Not now,” Stella had said, pushing Scully off as she felt her fingers lightly feeling around the back end of her rib cage for misalignments.  “Come in.”

She’d gone in.  Made small talk.  Had a piece of a cake.  Left out her troubles with Mulder.  And conducted the bed argument.  Now, the sun was up and she was feeling sturdy enough to resist both Stella’s stubbornness and her own tears.

“Don’t move,” she said as she held Stella’s shoulder still and studied her, grazing the edges of each bruise and cut so as to feel where the swelling stopped.

“They did a nice job on the stitches.  Did you ask for a plastic surgeon?”

“What do you think?”

“I don’t think you’ll scar.”

Stella said nothing as she stepped away to pour the tea into Scully’s cup.  The cup rattled slightly in its dish.

“Real tea, my little American.”

Scully rolled her eyes and Stella smiled as she walked away.  This was part of the fun, Stella’s indulging her with her Britishness.  She made a show of hopping up nimbly onto her stool, but Scully didn’t miss the way she slightly braced herself as her tailbone hit the chair.

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“About what?”

“Paul Spector.”

“Not especially.  I’ve already spent many hours of my life talking about him that I can’t get back.”

Scully was half-relieved.  She didn’t need to know the gory details if Stella didn’t need to say them.  She took her seat beside Stella, rounding her shoulders to form a cave around the steam.  Stella was already dressed, and in the unlikely combination of t-shirt and jeans.  It was a bit like seeing something you’d always found beautiful photographed in black and white for the first time.

“I like your pajamas,” Scully said.  

“Thank you for coming,” Stella said, ignoring the joke, swinging a bare foot out to gently tap Scully’s shin.  

“I’m surprised you let me,” Scully said.  “I’m actually surprised you even called.”

Stella took a breath like she’d agreed to lead storytime.

“Well, I met a doctor there.  He was trying to keep me awake in case I’d been concussed.  And while chatting, he asked if I had any real friends.”

“That seems a bit personal.”

“Mm.”

“And?”

“I said I had a few.  And then…”

Stella looked slightly shy, slightly pleased with herself.

“I decided I might as well call one of them.”

Scully felt the hot tea solidify in her throat, turn from liquid to tennis ball.  Cry about the beauty of friendship and she will fucking throw you out right now.  

She stared down into the cup and patted Stella’s leg, then brought her hand back into her own lap, oddly aware of the shape and size of Stella’s kneecap, how familiar, how concrete it seemed.  They didn’t touch often, and when they did it was not intimately.  And yet, certain parts of Stella’s body could still send Scully’s muscle memory into overdrive.

She reached for a topic that would be easy for Stella.

“Are you dating him?”

“What?”

“Are you sleeping with the doctor.”

“No.  What ever made you think such a thing?”

“You said ‘met.’  People don’t ‘meet’ doctors when they’re in the hospital, they’re treated by them.”

“I resent the idea that we can no longer use the word met without meaning fucked.”

“Mm.”

“Though he did send flowers.”

“Oh Jesus,” Scully chuckled into her tea.

“I’m not interested,” Stella said, and tapped Scully with her foot again, this time a bit harder.  “At the moment.”

It was a harmless remark, but nonetheless, it tweaked Scully somewhere in the pit of her stomach, tuning her like a piano string, plucking so hard her voice went a half step sharper.

“What do you want to do today?” Scully asked, clearing her throat.  “If it’s nothing, I can do nothing.  I’ve got a book.”

“I can’t remember what I usually do for fun.”

“I can tell you off the bat that most of the things you usually do for fun are out of the question.”

“I’m not going to stay in staring at the walls.”

“Then stare at me instead.”

“Slightly more appealing.”

“Only slightly?”

 “Mm.”

“What do you have in mind?”

The corner of Stella’s mouth twitched and she kicked Scully’s shin again.

“Get dressed,” Stella said.  “We’re going out.”

“Fine.”  Scully got up, glanced over her shoulder.  “Are you going to get dressed?”

Stella smirked.

“Fuck off.”

 Part V