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edogawatranslations · 5 years

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Danganronpa Kirigiri (3) - Chapter 2, Part 3

Table of Contents | Previous: Chapter 2, Part 2

As we walked, Lico once again brought up a serious topic out of nowhere.

“The two organizations pursuing Rei Mikagami today are a Chinese intelligence agency and a scientific investigative unit of the Russian army.”

These absurd statements no longer caught me off guard; I had fully accepted that the abnormal had become our new normal.

“You’re awfully informed about all this,” I commented.

“It’s my duty to relay you detailed information.” Lico turned around and flashed an innocent smile. “Both organizations have dispatched two unarmed individuals to Japan. Neither group is much of a threat, since they don’t use weapons when active outside of their home countries. The Russians especially; they belong to a team developing supersoldiers, which means they’re more so occult researchers than fighters.”

I quickly scanned the area. From what I could tell, there wasn’t a Russian in sight. The only people around were cheerful women roaming the mall with multiple shopping bags dangling from their arms.

“The three assassins pose the bigger problem,” Lico continued. Despite the grim topic, his expression didn’t change one bit.

Assassins...

We were intruding on their work. To reach Rei Mikagami, we couldn’t simply ignore them and walk on by.

“The first assassin is a woman of unknown nationality who goes by the name of ‘Copycat.’ As you may guess, she specializes in copycat crimes. She disposes of her targets by mimicking the M.O. of a serial killer active in the corresponding country or state, allowing her and her clients to fully escape suspicion, since the victim ends up tossed into the unrelated string of cases. Because of this, her work has mostly been attributed to other killers. Fortunately, this method prevents her from haphazardly killing someone. She acts deliberately and typically refrains from taking offensive measures.”

With the steady stream of information flowing from his mouth, Lico was giving Google a run for its money. His appearance already seemed rather other-worldly, but his information processing capabilities were all the more superhuman.

We rode the escalator one floor up to another women’s clothing department.

The ludicrous conversation continued in the perfectly average location.

“The second assassin is known as ‘Night Flyer.’ He’s rumored to be a Romanian of small build, but nobody has confirmed his identity. His killing style of choice is fairly standard: he approaches and shoots his target with a pistol equipped with a silencer. He’s inclined to be hot-headed, so consider him fairly hostile. Multiple people have witnessed him in the past heading to the nearest airport after completing a hit and flying off in a private jet, hence his nickname.”

“Is he friends with the first assassin you mentioned?”

“No, all of these assassins work alone. They see each other as rivals chasing the same target, so it would be fortunate for us if they took each other out.”

“What do you know about the third?”

“He’s Japanese. He doesn’t go by a particular nickname, but he’s an alumnus of Hope’s Peak Academy: the former Ultimate Rock Climber, Tsurugi Hitomoshi. After graduating, he spent some time abroad and made a name for himself conquering treacherous cliffs. At some point, he turned his climbing into a performance art, scaling historical monuments and buildings such as the Eiffel Tower and Angkor Wat, which caused backlash and eventually led to him being exiled from the climbing community. Only the criminal underworld is aware of his current activities as an assassin; he’s known as someone who can appear anywhere and eliminate anyone with one finger. He can easily bend the barrel of a rifle with one hand. I’ve also heard that he once crushed the heart of a police officer through a bulletproof vest with his bare hands.”

An assassin trained at an elite school. This was one gathering I didn’t want to have any involvement in.

I pitied Rei Mikagami, who had to deal with all these killers chasing after him. I guess prominent detectives were always roped into political schemes or conflicts, almost like how scientists around the world were killed or abducted during World War II for their work on weapons programs.

Someday, even Kyoko might be forced to serve someone for their personal gain. Or perhaps, she already has been...

While walking down the halls, Lico continued the conversation as if casually chatting about the weather.

“By the way, before the two of you arrived, I spotted a woman who fit the description of Copycat entering this department store.”

“Wh-What?” Suddenly sensing bloodlust in the air, I braced myself for action.

Nobody around looked particularly suspicious. Ladies clad in clothes from nearby stores were bustling about, as usual.

“You gotta tell us these things sooner! What did she look like?”

“She had on a coat with a red hood, kind of like Little Red Riding Hood. Blonde hair. She was rolling a small travel suitcase behind her.”

“Sounds like an easy to spot get-up, even from a distance. If we see her, let’s stay on our guard and avoid getting too close.”

“Avoiding her won’t get us any closer to Rei Mikagami,” Kyoko said. “We should follow her. We won’t make any headway without taking risks, right?”

“Yeah, but...”

Forget the possibility that we might have to fly into the face of danger—was this risk worth taking in the first place? We weren’t even sure Rei Mikagami was waiting at the end of this rainbow. None of this was rooted in certainty; it was almost like we were actually making plans to catch a ghost in a mirror.

“Yui,” Lico said, stopping in his tracks.

“Wh-What is it? Do you see one of the assassins?”

Lico pointed at a store in front of us. “There are swimsuits for sale up ahead.”

“Way to go, kid!”

I rushed forward, dragging Kyoko behind me. But my legs suddenly froze up.

Right as I was about to enter the shop, a red hood crossed the path in front of me.

I shot a glance back at Lico to confirm. He responded with a quick nod.

There was no mistaking it; that was Copycat.

We casually started tailing her. Thankfully, we were able to do so discreetly by blending in with the flocks of customers roaming the floor.

The red-hooded figure didn’t seem to have noticed us. Her left hand, which was noticeably white, was dragging a small bag. She wasn’t particularly tall, and her body was fairly slender. Her coat resembled a poncho. Two cat ear-like protrusions stuck out of her hood. Although the hood covered her head, I could see her blonde hair swaying to and fro as she walked.

“For an assassin, she sure sticks out like a sore thumb,” I whispered to Lico. “I didn’t think she’d look so frail and slender.”

“You don’t need strength to kill someone,” Lico replied with an angelic expression on his face.

After we followed after her for a while, she turned into a narrow passageway and went through a door labeled “Employees Only.”

The three of us huddled together beside the door.

“A staircase for employees... Where is she going?” I placed one hand on the door.

“Don’t,” Kyoko said, grabbing my arm. “I have a bad feeling about this.”

“Do you hear the grim reaper’s footsteps again? Don’t worry, I’m not gonna chase her too far. I wanna at least figure out if she went up or down.”

I slowly pushed the door open.

All of a sudden, a slender arm shot through the doorway and grabbed onto my wrist.

“Eek!”

The arm pulled me through to the dim stair landing on the other side. Standing adjacent to the door was Copycat, who was restraining me from behind. From far beyond the door, I could hear the cold, lifeless muffle of a storewide announcement playing over the PA system.

Why didn’t I listen to Kyoko?

I felt a sharp object pressed against my throat.

While slowly raising both my hands to signal my surrender, I snuck a glance at Copycat. Her face was white, reminiscent of a stunning European lady, and she had on a pair of thick high-index prescription glasses. A thin layer of makeup covered her face, enough to possibly be covering up any freckles. Her furrowed eyebrows and troubled expression seemed to suggest that she was more of the shy, introverted type. Did she have on cat ears because of her nickname, Copycat? Or was it because she was a fan of cosplay?

She started uttering some words in a foreign language and loosened her grip on me.

It was then that Lico burst through the door.

“Yui, are you alright?”

“N-Never better...” I stammered out, giving my best effort to sound composed even as I could no longer freely move my body. “Do you have any idea what she’s saying?”

“She’s asking, ‘Who are you?’”

Lico began conversing with Copycat. I had no clue what language they were speaking, but Copycat’s voice gradually grew calmer. Lico’s disarming smile was super effective.

It was then that I noticed—Kyoko wasn’t here.

“Hey, where’s Kyoko?” I asked, trying to interrupt Lico and Copycat’s chat. However, neither of them paid my words any mind. They were engrossed in their conversation.

Even though I was the hostage here, I felt like chopped liver.

“What are you two even talking about?” I asked.

“She’s asking who my favorite manga artist is,” Lico replied. “Let’s see, I would have to say—”

“You’re really having a friendly chat at a time like this?”

Was Lico successfully persuading her to lower her guard?

No... She was an assassin. And the way things were, she could easily kill me at any moment if she desired. I’d had a run of bad luck recently, but this was my first time being taken hostage by an assassin.

What should I do?

I had no knowledge of self-defense and no weapon by my side.

I thought about praying to God, but at the last second, I changed my mind and decided to pray to Kyoko instead.

Kyoko, please save me!

—Click.

A metallic clinking sound echoed out, causing Lico and the assassin to cut short their discussion. Noticing an abnormality, Copycat turned around, but by then, it was already too late.

Clamped around Copycat’s hand—the free wrist she hadn’t used to restrain me—was one end of a pair of handcuffs. The other end was secured to the handle of her bag.

As if having appeared out of nowhere, standing one step below the landing we were on was Kyoko. She was focused intently on pulling the bag down the stairs.

Copycat let out a yelp and rushed forward in an attempt to grab her bag, and as she reached out towards it, she released her grip on me.

The next moment, the bag began tumbling down the stairs. Copycat, linked to it by the handcuffs, plunged down along with it. The bag must’ve been much heavier than it looked, as the slender and light Little Red Riding Hood with cat ears was swiftly pulled down to the lower landing.

Piercing shrieks filled the air as she fell, but before long, her body slammed against the wall of the landing one floor down. She squirmed on the ground and feebly groaned.

“Yui, are you okay?” Kyoko ran up to where I was standing.

“Y-Yeah, I think so. How did you get over there?”

“I took a different staircase down and made my way up from below.” Kyoko puffed out her chest and placed her hands on her hips to make a sort of superhero pose.

Her quick thinking saved me again. Without her by my side, I would’ve met my demise many times over.

A fountain pen rolled up to my feet. That must’ve been the object Copycat held against my throat.

The three of us regrouped, made our way down the flight of stairs, and surrounded Copycat. She hadn’t lost consciousness, but since her whole body took a beating, she was lying down, unable to move.

I unzipped her bag. Inside were a scrapbook of newspaper clippings about serial killers, a few publications detailing cold cases, and a mountain of Japanese manga and doujinshi. No wonder her bag was so heavy. There were also a couple of passports stuffed inside. I couldn’t tell which one was real, but then again, all of them may have been forged.

There was nothing that resembled a weapon among her possessions. The fountain pen was probably the most dangerous item she had with her.

“She’s the kind of assassin to kill her target only after having conceived of a detailed plan,” Lico explained. “Her goal today was likely only to scout out her mark, so she wasn’t at the final phase of carrying out the hit yet.”

“Thank god she’s type A,” I sighed in relief.

“Would you like me to finish her off?”

“N-No, that’s okay.” I laughed nervously. “You don’t have to do that.”

“Are you sure? As long as she lives, innocent people will continue to die. Don’t forget, she’s an assassin.”

“That has nothing to do with why we came here today. We’re here to track down Rei Mikagami, and nothing more.”

Lico stared at me for a few seconds, but didn’t press the issue any further.

“I can’t find anything about Rei Mikagami in her things,” Kyoko reported, standing next to Copycat’s bag.

“Lico, did you get any information out of her?” I asked.

“She apparently doesn’t know anything about Rei Mikagami’s identity. The reason she came here was because she was informed her mark would appear on the rooftop plaza of this department store at four in the afternoon.”

“Why didn’t you say that sooner?! That’s exactly what we needed to know!”

Rei Mikagami will appear at four!

I checked the clock on my phone.

3:55 PM.

“Shoot, it’s almost time.”

“Shall we head up?” Lico suggested, still magically calm.

The rooftop plaza was located above the ninth floor. I imagined the struggle running up all those stairs, but we’d arrive with time to spare.

“Yeah, let’s go,” I replied. “Kyoko, come on.”

“Give me one second.”

Kyoko crouched down next to Copycat’s body and unfastened the handcuffs.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Retrieving these handcuffs. They’re kind of a memento.”

“Oh, from back then...”

Kyoko stuffed the handcuffs into the pocket of her uniform. So that was where she’d been hiding them all this time.

We abandoned Copycat on the landing and started rushing up the stairs.

Next: Chapter 2, Part 4

#dr kirigiri #danganronpa #kirigiri #danganronpa kirigiri #light novel #novel #translation

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sddfgsfdsdf · 3 years

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truffledmadness · 7 years

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A Girl

Content notes: this thing is a holy mess, some of which is about gender, some of which is about sex/romance, all of which is extremely cishet, because it’s mostly personal narrative time up in here, and I’ve only got the one perspective.

I remember the first time I ever felt like A Girl. I was eighteen.

Okay, no, that’s not quite right. I’m AFAB and cis and until I was out of elementary school I felt entirely like a girl--Girl as opposed to Boy, and I was very much a princesses-and-flowers (and Elizabeth I) girl at that.

But then the primordial soup of puberty cooked and transformed me and everyone I was spending time with, and things changed. I always knew I was A Woman, or at least, I would be, but there was this THING, this thing to Being A Girl, and I wasn’t that. I was a female, a woman. I was just Truffles. But I wasn’t that. I didn’t think I’d ever be that.

It had a lot to do with a kind of glamour, as manifest in generic desirability and light mystery. When I say generic desirability, I don’t just mean sexual--I mean an air that meant, when you, A Girl, were out with other Girls, perhaps walking in a horizontal line at the mall, little old ladies would smile wistfully and think what a fine thing it was to be A Girl. Boys you hadn’t had a real conversation with would “ask you out.” What this meant when nobody had a car is confusing to me even now. You and your friends would trade clothes, because you were all the same size. The thinkpiece machine would wish you into a STEM career. Somehow, I could always tell the thinkpiece machine was fine, just fine, with me pursuing the humanities.

It wasn’t that I didn’t have a clump of female friends to lurk the mall with. I did, in varying combinations. But we were goth-adjacent nerds of various stripes and no one, but no one, would see us crouched in Books A Million and think we were indulging in the Mysterious Golden Times of Girlhood. We were just...us. Not mysterious. Not desirable. Maybe we were girls (at least one of us would later find they weren’t), but we weren’t Girls.

A guy friend of mine once asked me for romantic advice in high school. It was prefaced with “Hey, Truffles, you’re a girl...” I wasn’t as brave as Hermione. I didn’t sneer.

I thought I was ugly. I’ve concluded since that I’m probably not, even if I’m not Natalie Portman either, but I knew there was something that made me not-quite. I thought that thing was ugliness. In retrospect, it was probably a combination of the “wrong” clothes, anxiety, and autistic traits, plus my high school really was objectively awful.

But back to when I was eighteen. I was at a University Jewish Society thing with a friend, and a guy there asked the two of us to come to his frat house barbecue the next day. The clear implication was that he needed us to stand on his lawn as a sort of bait for new recruits, who would only want to go to a party if they could meet women, and he was willing to compensate us for our troubles in the form of a free meal and something amusing to do on a Sunday afternoon. The idea that my presence was even remotely plausible bait for potential frat recruits shook me to my socks.

This is humiliating to write, incidentally. It’s intimate and horrible and I feel like I’m splitting myself open to show my organs to the world and I’m doing it anyway, because I could have used a thing like this to read, back then.

These days, I am 25 years old, and I don’t particularly enjoy feeling like A Girl. It happens, from time to time, and I always feel like I’ve tricked people. “Ha! You are flirting with me because you think I’m that thing! I’m not, I’m not, I’ll never be, but I’ve TRICKED you!” My ex once implied I had less to be nervous from at a party where we didn’t know people than he did, because I was “a hot girl,” and such people were wanted at parties. I stored his exact words to send back to my former self, who would never believe me anyway.

So why am I even writing this? I don’t know. Except. Nobody ever talks to women about this. Maybe because Club Feminism has decided that too much pursuit is always worse than sexual invisibility, so we pretend the latter doesn’t exist on Our Side. (”If we admit it’s a problem, we have to give the Other Team points”) Maybe because I was quite young when I first read a guy complaining that ‘girls’ didn’t like him, and I was acutely aware that this guy would never, ever, want to go out with me.

Maybe because a woman can complain her particular crush doesn’t like her and it’s normal, but it’s a shocking and disgusting if she says she wants A Guy, Any Guy and is having trouble acquiring one. Men can say they want A Girlfriend and that’s perfectly normal.

Maybe because even in feminist circles, the experience of womanhood is still framed as such a passive thing. Maybe because it’s been my week for noticing a lot of sexual weirdness (like how “skinny-armed allegedly feminist man in horn rims who only wants to date blonde sorority girls” is a known stereotype, but another character I’ve run into quite a bit, “burly conservative WASP who is REALLY into liberal alterna-girls” is never EVER mentioned except once at an author talk I was at).

Maybe because I was a really sad kid--no, a sad girl, dammit--and I felt like a freak, and I am convinced, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that there are others out there, and half of them are at Feminist Club where they’ll be told that of course they’re experiencing near-constant sexual advances, and that’ll make it worse, and this is the only message in a bottle I can think to send.

#personal #truffles is silly #truffles grows up #idk man

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alexkryceksbutt · 7 years

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She Tastes like Candlelight

MSR

Explicit

It starts with, of all things, a pair of old jeans and a t-shirt.

Logically, he knows it doesn’t make sense. She comes to work in form-fitted jackets that go tight about her waist. She’s been foregoing the baggy slacks in favor of skirts that stop just below the knees, with nylons clinging to the defined musculature of her calves; he’s pretty sure he can count on one hand the number of times he’s seen her wear shoes other than heels, excluding the clinical, white shoes she wears with her scrubs during autopsies.

He’s seen the looks she gets. Sometimes, it’s during an interview, when a witness’s gaze will linger just a little too long on her bustline, and her hand will go up and fiddle with her necklace, her arm blocking her chest in subtle defiance. Other times, it’s men on the streets of the city, shouting out obscenities to her, having the audacity to call her “baby,” and “sweetheart,” and he fights the urge to yell right back, brandishing his badge and his gun, wanting to scare the misogyny right out of the bones of anyone who thinks they’re entitled to her body, but he knows that she would find it condescending. “Thank you, but I can handle myself, Mulder,” she’d say, and it’s not that he thinks she can’t—he just doesn’t want her to have to.

And still other times, the looks come not from strangers on the sidewalk, or from people he can reduce to photos in a casefile, but from their peers. Educated, talented men who transform themselves into slobbery, teenage boys when sitting adjacent to her in meetings, eyeing her with an inappropriate hunger while she jots down notes in the margins of her agenda sheet. More than once, Mulder has found himself in the elevator with a man who will look down at Scully, and then catch Mulder’s eye over the top of her head, just so that he can wink, including him in some inside joke he has no interest being a part of.

He supposes that he empirically knows that Scully is attractive—it’s more or less objective fact—but he’s never allowed himself to notice. He’s trained himself to observe her through a filter. He considers her appearance through what he aptly names the Sexual Harassment Video Gaze. He quickly shuts down any thought that could be used as an example in a training tape on inappropriate office behavior.

This isn’t a hassle, if only because there are so many other aspects to the enigma that is Dana Scully that Mulder can appreciate.

Her mind for example; she’s got a mind that can run circles around him. The way she rattles off scientific studies and facts to shut down his so-called crazy notions is like intellectual BDSM. He doesn’t get off on it, because Scully isn’t someone you simply get off on, but she lords her intellectual dominance over him in a way no one else can, and he finds, sometimes only in retrospect, that he has a thing for being beaten into submission in a debate. In fact, he thrives on it; it gives him cause to grow as an intellectual; to match her cerebral prowess.

Which is why, when she shows up at his doorstep with a casefile and a paint-splattered t-shirt hanging over a worn out pair of jeans, he is taken completely off guard by his immediate and sudden knowledge that Dana Scully is hot.

“Here’s the file on the serial murders. I made some notes for you to look at,” she says in lieu of a greeting, holding out the file in her hand, her nails, which are usually meticulously shaped, are chipped on her index and ring fingers. Mulder says nothing; merely stares in a way that can only be inelegantly described as gaping. She notices him noticing her, and she flushes. She runs a hand through her hair—and damnit if her hair isn’t different too, pinned back from her face with bobby pins, a few strands loose, curling around her ears in the humidity. “Sorry,” she says, as Mulder comes alive enough to take the file from her. “Mom needed help painting the study. Bill was gonna do it before he got back to the base, but he just never got around to it...Uh, anyway, I should be going. Just wanted to drop this off while I was nearby. I’ll see you at the office.”

His instinct is to yell out a defiant ‘no!’, but he reins it in, opting for a more rational excuse to make her stay. “Do you have time to just run over your notes with me? I take it you disagree with my witchcraft theory?” He says it casually, as though her leaving now wouldn’t be the absolute worst thing that could happen.

“Ritualistic killings,” she says easily. “It’s textbook, Mulder, I don’t know what else you want me to say. I know you want to find the supernatural in everything, but the wounds were clearly done by humans. Sometimes, people just do awful things.”

He opens the door wider and steps aside to let her in. She sets her jaw.

“Mulder, I’m sweaty, exhausted, and frankly, would like to spend my Saturday with a cup of tea and a shower.” You’re welcome to mine, he pointedly does not say, too enamored with her unfamiliar appearance to mentally chastise himself for his indiscreet thoughts. “Can’t this wait until Monday?”

“Ten minutes,” he barters. If he can get her in the door he can angle for more time.

She checks her watch with a sigh.

He knows that sigh. It’s the sigh that he hears when he calls her at one in the morning asking for her presence at a crime scene; the sigh he hears when he thrusts her into a sterile, post-mortem examination room without the proper clearance, saying, “I figure we’ve got twenty minutes before they realize we’re not supposed to be here.” It’s the sigh that comes right before an exasperated, drawn out,

“Mulder…”

followed right by an even more reluctant,

“Ok. Fine. Whatever.”

And Mulder grins, because with all her enigmatic, intellectual gifts, Dana Scully is, more often than not, a creature of habit. It’s a weakness of hers he capitalizes on with little remorse, as he ushers her over the threshold and into his apartment.

He’d feel worse—he really would—except that Dana Scully is a creature of habit, and she is not in the habit of doing things she adamantly doesn’t want to do. She stands, arms crossed, eyebrow raised, but her hackles decidedly lowered. Mulder may have made the push, but she is here on her own volition, and that is wonderful; it’s really something, and he never gets used to the idea, even after all these years, that Scully does things Mulder asks of her because she wants to.

She’s considering the couch, so Mulder throws the casefile down on the coffee table next to his half finished bottle of beer, and plops himself down on the cushion by the fish tank, and she follows his lead, taking her usual spot beside him.

“Want anything?” he asks, picking up his drink and nodding towards it.

“Ten minutes,” Scully reiterates as a response, positioning herself on the edge of the couch, flipping open the casefile with one hand, and scratching absently at her nose with the other. The skin on her face is glistening, coated in a thin layer of sweat, and there’s a small splatter of paint on the right side of her jaw, just below her earlobe, and Mulder is struck with an absurd, and very Not Workplace Appropriate desire to kiss it.

He gives his himself the tiniest of shakes, and swallows, as if trying to literally digest away the thought.

Scully doesn’t notice. She’s flipped to the front page of the casefile where a picture of a young woman is paperclipped to the document. The young woman, from the top of her head to her shoulders, could be sleeping, but the photograph is unfortunately full bodied, showing where the murderer had sliced open her skin, cracked open her ribs, and removed her internal organs one by one, leaving her red and hollow. A ghost of a grimace passes over Scully’s mouth. She is desensitized to most forms of violence—can cut into a corpse and think about dinner plans with her arms elbow deep in its chest cavity—but dead women, specifically women who did not have an easy time with death, always brings the human’s compassion out past the doctor’s dissonance.

“All of the murders were executed by the same means, that much is clear,” she says to cover her momentary lapse. “I performed the autopsies myself, they are all exactly the same.”

“You told me over the phone that you meant that literally,” Mulder says, temporarily distracted from the paint on Scully’s cheek and the strange drop in his stomach it’s making him feel, in favor of a bit of intellectual runaround. “Literally, the wounds on all three victims were exactly the same. Same length in the incisions, down to the centimeter, same order of organ removal, same everything. How do you account for that?”

“While it’s unlikely for a killer to perform identically every time he or she may kill, it isn’t out of the realm of possibility.”

“But you do agree that the probability for that is low. I mean, similar techniques, sure, but you’re saying that, if these wounds weren’t performed on three separate individuals, they would be indistinguishable from one another, right?”

“Low probability still allows for that chance, Mulder.”

“What about human error? Or the fact that the bodies were all found nearly a thousand miles apart from one another?”

“So because the chances are low, you’re wont to automatically believe that this is murder by means of what, exactly? The paranormal? Witches, Mulder?”

“Have you figured out the murder weapon yet?” Mulder asks with a smirk, already knowing the answer. Scully sets her jaw and leans back.

“No,” she says, refusing to drop Mulder’s gaze. That doesn’t mean anything, her eyes say. “Look, let’s just say, for sake of argument, that you’re right. That still leaves motive.”

“Anything come up that connects the three of them?”

“One thing,” says Scully, flipping a page to a photograph of the first victim—a middle aged bald man with a small symbol tattooed on his scalp. Mulder can’t place it among any of the various signs and symbols stored away in his subconscious. “Remember this symbol?” Scully asks. “Well, on the latest victim, I found the same exact tattoo on her scalp. It was a complete fluke—I wasn’t even looking for it, I just happened to notice it while I was checking for external evidence.”

“You think the second victim had the same mark? Could both you and the other medical examiner have missed it?” Mulder asks.

“I’d put a lot of stock in that bet,” Scully says. “It makes sense that we would have missed it, she had thick hair, and dark enough skin that a scalp tattoo wouldn’t have stood out in any way. The cause of death wasn’t exactly subtle, only the means of execution. My focus, and I’m assuming Dr. Trine’s, was on the abdominal wounds.”

“When is she scheduled for burial?”

“Wednesday. I’ve already left a message with the coroner’s office to see if I can get into see the body before the showing.”

“And you think these symbols are...what, exactly? Cultist marks?”

“Possibly. And maybe these victims are escapees of the cult. That would explain why they were found so far apart, but why the means of execution was the same.”

“Exactly the same,” Mulder reminds her. Scully doesn’t dignify this with a response. “Well, alright, I guess we wait until we confirm that the second victim has the same mark. Can I get a copy of that photograph to send to Georgetown University. I know a symbologist there who might be able to help us identify it.”

“Of course.”

And the conversation stills. There are no other obvious targets of this killer, so there’s no one for them to go out and protect, and they aren’t going to collect any more information on the murderer outside of 9-5 business hours. Any second, Scully is going to call his bluff, saying, “you knew what my notes were going to be, Mulder, did you ask me in here just to argue?” which is half true, because he’s always up for a bit of lively debate with her, but not entirely his motivation, and he’s not sure how to keep her here without revealing that, more than anything, he just wants more time to look at her. He decides to take a risk, making a sharp turn and steering the conversation down a completely different road, hoping it will make her stay.

“Why was your mom painting her study?” he asks, and if Scully minds this change of subject she doesn’t show it, perhaps used to Mulder being tangential and unpredictable. He likes that—he likes to have someone know him so intrinsically they are no longer phased by his eccentricities.

“She’s getting the house appraised,” she says, sliding back on the cushion just a little, an elbow propped up on the arm of the chair. “That house has been needing renovation, God, probably since I was in undergrad, but Mom’s always so ansty about any sort of change when it comes to the house. One Christmas, Dad offered to completely finance a brand new kitchen for her, and she declined, telling him that there were too many memories in her old kitchen, why would she want to get rid of it? And now, since Dad and Melissa passed, trying to convince her to make any modifications to the house has been about as easy as holding a conversation with a brick wall.”

“Or as easy as trying to convince her daughter to believe in the fantastic?” Mulder teases, and Scully smiles.

“Yeah, just about.”

“Well, your mom’s a sentimental woman.”

“Yeah, just a bit,” Scully scoffs. “I’m pretty sure she kept the shorts I was wearing the day I got my first menstrual cycle.”

“I hope she washed them before she framed them.”

“No kidding. But with the appraiser coming, she’s had to concede to a little bit of renovation. The study hasn’t even been used since Dad died, and I’m pretty sure the original coat of paint was lead based.” She rolls her eyes as she twists a strand of hair between two fingers.

This side of Scully is something Mulder doesn’t get to see that often.

There’s Agent Scully, his partner, with her quick wit and tedious but necessary skepticism, who has professionalism down to a science, even in the face of constant criticism.

There’s Dr. Scully, who can spout the anatomical term for every part of the human body, and can put together whole life stories of the post-mortem with nothing but her five senses and textbook smarts.

There’s Survivor Scully, who puts the memories of tragedy into a box that for any other person would be overflowing, but she manages to keep a lid on it with poise and grace, but in sacrifice, lives behind a wall, treating vulnerability like a mortal sin.

But this is Ms. Dana Scully. Ms. Dana Scully is the woman who talks about her mother with the phantom pains of long since amputated teenaged angst. This is the woman who wears paint-splattered jeans in public, and who forgoes the science journals and casefiles in favor of fiction books she reads in the bath by candlelight, and while Mulder adores every iteration of her, there’s a lightness in this version that makes him feel a bit fluttery. This is the version that laughs more easily, and it’s the real laugh, the one that is loud and abrasive and everything that Scully usually isn’t. This is the version that isn’t weighed down by all the years she’s spent chasing monsters in the dark by his side.

Mulder isn’t sure when exactly he fell in love with Scully.

It’s possible that there wasn’t a specific moment at all. Maybe the transition from friendship was so smooth that one day he just woke up and realized he’d been looking at Scully the same way he looked at the night sky—like an intricately tangled mystery, full of beauty and questions and Truths, of which he may never know the extent of. Somewhere along the way, she had become his greatest X-File.

“My parents never kept anything,” says Mulder, fiddling with his bottle of beer. “I think it was too hard, and the Mulder family wasn’t anything if not masters of repression.”

“Grief manifests in different ways,” says Scully, and she leans against the back of the couch now, and Mulder suppresses a grin of victory. “Everyone deals with the pain differently. I guess my Mom is the type to want to hang onto every detail, and yours were the ones who’d rather forget.”

“I’m sure healthy coping mechanisms rest somewhere between the two,” says Mulder, and the corner of Scully’s mouth quips up. He gets to his feet, and before she can follow suit, he says, “I’m grabbing another beer, this one’s gone lukewarm. Let me get you one.”

“It’s been more than ten minutes,” she says, smirking, but she doesn’t move from her spot, as if she already knew she was never getting out of this apartment without a fight.

“Then we gotta reset the timer.”

A sigh.

“Mulder…”

“Come on, where do you have to be? There’s a Twilight Zone marathon on the SyFy channel. Pretty sure ‘It’s a Good Life’ is the next episode, or the one after. That’s the best one.”

“My whole life is like The Twilight Zone, Mulder, I don’t need to watch it.”

“But these ones have little factoids about the production of each episode at the end of all the credits,” he says, bouncing on the balls of his feet like an excited little kid, and he watches her fight a smile, refusing to encourage him. “Come on, you can’t say no to Serling.”

“Mulder, any other night I’d be happy to keep you company, but I look like I’m covered in that mushroom digestive slime, and I’m pretty sure I smell like it too. Trust me, I’m sparing you.”

Mulder waves a dismissive hand and says, “that’s a poor excuse, you’re beautiful.” He says it easily and with no sense of shame, because even though it’s not Sexual Harassment Video Appropriate, it’s true, and he knows it’ll throw her off her guard.

Which it absolutely does. Her eyes get wide, and her mouth does that wonderful thing where she opens it just a little, the tips of her front teeth visible. “Shut up, Mulder,” she says when she’s recovered, but it doesn’t have her usual finesse, and Mulder doesn’t relent.

“What? You are. You know that, it’s not some big secret. Besides, I've seen you covered in digestive slime, and I assure you, you look nothing of the sort.”

He actually doesn’t know how Scully sees herself when she looks in the mirror. Does she know she’s beautiful? He imagines Dr. Scully might view her own body clinically, noting that she’s smooth, proportional, and symmetrical, which, she would argue, are traits that humans have been conditioned to find attractive, so in that sense, she fits the bill.

But how does Ms. Dana Scully, with no makeup on, and shapeless clothes hanging off her frame, feel about herself? At Arcadia Falls, she wore a horrible, green face mask, and when he looked at the tube of it she left in the bathroom, he saw it was to minimize pores and diminish the visibility of wrinkles.

Her lunches are always salads or pieces of flatbread covered in pesto and vegetables, and her snacks always have the words soy, rice, or low-fat in their descriptions. She puts concealer on her facial mole, and gets her nails professionally done. Does she do these things because she likes to? Or does she think she needs to?

She has scars; the small slit scar in the back of her neck, the remnants of the gunshot wound in her abdomen. Along her milky skin there are thin, white lines all across her body one can only see up close. She's been hit, thrown, beaten, and bashed, all in the line of duty, and those sorts of things stain.

To Mulder, who has his own physical evidence of what he's been through, they are but reminders of the times they could have lost but didn't. They're signs of strength; of resilience. It's never occurred to him that she might see them as deformities, or maybe even as tally marks. “How many times have I nearly died? Let me count my skin.”

“You do know that, right?” he asks, now wanting to make sure there are no misconceptions; no hidden self-conscious behaviors she keeps from him when she views her own reflection. After all, Mulder is nothing if not an ardent proponent of the Truth.

“What kind of question is that?” is her response, which very purposely doesn't answer it.

“Hey, I'm not coming on to you,” says Mulder, although he's not sure how honest that is. “I just want to make sure we're on the same page here.”

“About my appearance?” She isn’t meeting his eye, and Mulder realizes she’s embarrassed, and it’s so un-Scullylike for her to give into her chagrin that Mulder wonders when the last time it was that someone called her beautiful. Not the beautiful the people on the street inundate her with, nor the unsettling winks she gets from her peers, but a genuine, honest, “you are beautiful.” He isn’t sure if he has overstepped a line, or should have crossed it much sooner.

“You're the one who said you looked like digestive slime,” he says, deciding he’s involved now, he might as well commit. “I'm just setting the record straight here. You know how I feel about the truth.”

She regards him the way she does when he says something particularly off the rails. 'You’re beautiful’ may as well have been 'I played poker with Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster’ for how closely knitted her eyebrows are right now.

“Is that a yes or no to the beer, then?” he asks her, and after a moment she says,

“Okay, but just one.”

An episode and a half later, her shoes are haphazardly laying on the floor, her feet kicked under her, her body curled in a ball like a kitten on the couch. She'd deny it if he said it, but she's got a thing for horror and sci-fi genres—she can make enough off-the-cuff references that he knows her college years had to be full with late night movie marathons, and she didn't become a pathologist simply out of a love of science. Like him, she's drawn to the intricacies of the human body and physical law, and while she might not believe them all in practice, she appreciates all the creative ways one could bastardize science.

“What did you mean when you said I'm beautiful?” Scully asks out of nowhere. There is a commercial for frozen pizza playing in the background, and Mulder was about to suggest they order some food, and her question catches him off guard.

When he looks at her she is still watching the television, face neutral. Vanity, in any sort of outward sense, has never been a concern Scully has ever seemed to bother with. He tries to imagine her as a teenager, standing in the bathroom mirror at school, picking at her acne, or poking at how her stomach pudges just slightly over the waist of her jeans when she bends forward, but he can’t.

Mulder remembers Padgett’s novel, and how he described Scully's reservations towards the more material parts of herself as a defense against the ingrained patriarchal atmosphere of her workspace, and while Mulder has no desire to give weight to any syllable Padgett typed out—he was, after all, just another man who felt entitled to her—a part of him can't help wondering if he had been right. For a second time he wonders when the last time Scully had been told she was beautiful? Not by a gushing family member, or an entitled man, but by someone who truly knew her, and expected and wanted nothing from her except for her to see the beauty in herself as well?

She already is waving her hand, embarrassed by her own question, flushed beneath her oily skin. “Never mind,” she says. “Don't answer that.”

Mulder considers a joke to lessen her awkwardness—“I’m pretty sure you could go up to any guy in the Hoover building and ask them to sleep with you and they would get naked right there”—but that's not the kind of beauty Mulder means, nor the type he wants her to think of herself as, like she only has beauty in terms of how it equates to sexuality. Scully’s beauty transcends the physical. In her case, beauty isn’t only skin deep. It goes all the way through her skin, into her bones, into her mind and heart and soul, and to think she might only view herself as someone to fuck is as reprehensible as her viewing herself as ugly.

“I meant that you're beautiful,” he finds himself saying. “In every sense of the word. In the biochemical sense, you surely elicit carnal urges in men—and probably some women, I mean, let’s be honest—but you manage to backup all that physical beauty with an even more beautiful mind, so don't think I mean you'd just make a good person to do the naked pretzel with, and don't think that just because you're not dressed for a federal office job, because it’s a Saturday and why would you be, that you've suddenly transformed into a gila monster.”

Scully says nothing, seemingly fascinated with her chipped index finger nail.

“Have I crossed a line?” Mulder asks, checking off the boxes of all the rules he's broken from his Sexual Harassment Video Gaze.

“No,” she says finally. “Besides, I asked.” She finally meets his eye and gives him a thin lipped smile, and Mulder is overcome with a desire to kiss her, except that's the exact opposite of what he's trying to accomplish here—convince her that she's more than just a lay—so instead he takes her hand in his and kisses her knuckles softly; platonically; safely.

So his surprise is insurmountable when it's Scully who then runs her tongue across her lower lip, and then leans over and kisses him on the mouth.

It's an awkward angle—her legs are still partially tucked beneath her, and she has to hold onto the back of his neck for balance—but it doesn't matter. Her lips are the texture of marshmallows, and the kiss is chaste and brief, and Mulder thinks absently of how this might be what it feels like to kiss a cloud.

She pulls away as quickly as she came, blue eyes wide and frightened, like a child who knows they're about to get scolded for stealing from the cookie jar, but Mulder couldn't be further from scolding. He hears his own pulse thrum at the base of his ears, and he wonders when his heart migrated to his throat.

“I can't believe I just did that,” says Scully, in the same voice that says things like, “but Mulder, that's scientifically impossible,” and “I've never seen anything like this before,” and Mulder realizes, right then, that in the same way she has become his, he's become her biggest X-File as well.

“Feel free to do it again,” he says, trying to sound cheeky, but it comes out shy and uncertain, like maybe that was just a bit of corrupted data that she wasn't going to try repeating.

But she doesn’t disregard the experiment.

Angling herself towards him this time, getting onto her knees so she’s balancing beside him on the couch cushion, she tentatively brings her hands up to cup his face—a gesture she's done a million times before, but that has never felt as erotic as it does right now.

Mulder twists so they are face to face, Rod Serling talking ominously in black and white in their periphery, and they stare, still and frightened like teenagers learning how to explore another person’s body for the first time.

Scully’s breath is hollow, and Mulder can feel the thrum of her pulse in the thumb positioned on his jaw. He kicks himself for not shaving that morning, hoping the stubble beneath her hand doesn’t cause her to pull away.

He’s not inexperienced, of course, he’s kissed a fair number of women, and slept with just as many, (if that’s what this is leading to), but this isn’t just somebody. He’s had one night stands, and short term flings, and even has been in love, but Dana Scully is her own category, and taking in the heat behind her eyes, Mulder knows that his love for her is not one sided, and even though, if pressed, he probably already knew that, it’s something else entirely to be faced with the confirmation. Theories are just theories until the evidence is presented, says the investigator inside of him, and sometimes, if the theory is big enough, finding the evidence can be overwhelming.

“What are we doing?” asks Scully, so breathlessly it almost sounds like nothing but air.

Mulder shakes his head, unable to speak, eating up the unadulterated love emanating from her, directed right at his own person. He instead leans over and kisses the fleck of paint splatter along her jaw, lips together but lingering, and Scully exhales shakily, her fingers flexing against him.

He pulls away to look at her, and just like the flip of a switch, the heat behind her eyes has become charged, and suddenly Mulder is introduced to a brand new Dana Scully—Dana Scully Aroused. Blood rushes to her cheeks in a natural blush on her naked face, and her bust rises and falls harder as she takes in oxygen more sharply. She worries her bottom lip between her teeth, and leans into him again, finding his mouth with hers, and he meets her with enthusiasm, no longer chaste, pressing hard until her lips part just enough for him to run his tongue over the spot her teeth had been just a moment prior.

Mulder’s kissed Scully before—once when Scully wasn’t actually Scully, and once as the clock struck midnight and he could use it as an excuse if he needed it. But kissing Scully and being kissed by Scully are decidedly different things, as he unconsciously brings his hands up slowly along her sides, feeling the outline of her ribs underneath her t-shirt, until his arms find themselves wrapped tightly around her back, pulling her into him so that her chest is pressed against his.

At this, she deepens the kiss, nipping him softly while her own hands move up and her fingers tangle themselves in his hair. In a single, swift motion, he moves one of his arms clinging to her, and slips it under her shirt, and rubs her cool, damp skin with the palm of his hand, and she gasps softly into his mouth at the feel of flesh against flesh.

Already he feels the tightening in his groin, and as much as it pains him to do it, he pulls away from her, searching her face for any sign of hesitation.

She makes a small noise of protest, and casts her eyes down at his lips, about to dive back in, but he catches her first, grasping her chin between his thumb and index finger, tilting it up so she’s forced to meet his eye. She’s heaving, with a chaotic gleam sparkling from the irises of her eyes, like she looks when she’s chased a suspect down the street and pinned him to the ground. How easily and dangerously the same look translates into eroticism.

“I want to,” she says before Mulder can even ask the question, and the words go right to his crotch. He closes his eyes to center himself, before opening them again and shaking his head just slightly.

“You need to be sure,” he says. “I need you to be sure.”

“I am,” she says without missing a beat, but then she furrows her brow, suddenly wary, and says, “Are you?”

Mulder lets out a huff of a laugh, smiling as he traces the outline of her lips with the pad of his thumb. “Oh I’m definitely sure,” he says, because now that the seal has been broken, every single ‘I’m not noticing’ he’s done to keep up the Workplace Appropriate Gaze is now crashing down on him with a vengeance, and he can think of nothing he wants more than to memorize all the different sounds Scully can make when she’s properly touched.

But he also can’t shake the nagging worry in the back of his head, the one saying that once this happens, they can’t go back. He’s already told her, in so many words, that she’s more than just a lay, and he can’t put himself inside her, and then go back to acting like he doesn’t know what that feels like.

“I just need you to realize,” he says, “that we can’t undo this if we do it.”

He’s reminded of their first ever case, walking from the hospital, Scully gesticulating with a soil sample she’d taken off the sole of Billy Miles’ foot, raving, ‘he killed Peggy O’Dell, I don’t believe it,’ and Mulder having to talk her back down to realize the implications of what she was saying.

Its both terrifying and comforting to know that no matter what the situation is, they have always been Mulder and Scully; they are always the same dynamic inside an unlikely duo that works in spite of itself.

Scully, still pressed against his chest, heeds Mulder’s words, and draws in a long breath, thinking hard. “I’d say,” she says slowly, after a long moment, “that we’ve already gone past that which we can’t undo.”

And Mulder considers their position, his hand unconsciously rubbing circles on the bare skin beneath her bra, her breasts rising and falling against his pectorals. Could he go to work on Monday and treat her like he doesn’t know the texture of her tongue? Could he brush his hair that morning and not think about the way she tugged on it just slightly hard enough to make it ache? He swallows hard.

“It sounds stupid, but I just don’t want to jeopardize our relationship,” he says. “You mean too much to me to ruin it because you’re hot and I couldn’t rein it in.”

Scully smiles slyly, leaning in even closer to Mulder now, and says, “so I’m hot now? I thought I was beautiful.”

“Please,” says Mulder, surprised by how low his voice registers. “You’re the smart one, you should know that the two aren’t mutually exclusive.”

At this, Scully captures his mouth again, and just like that, the question is answered for them as they’re thrust into the point of no return. There’s no way, Mulder thinks, lifting Scully up so that she’s straddling his lap, that anyone could ever be kissed like this and pretend like the world didn’t stop in its tracks.

Scully shifts so that her weight is on Mulder’s erection, and Mulder, being in sweatpants and having not had another person touch him there since he started getting eyes for the redhaired skeptic in his office, lets out an embarrassing noise at the contact. Scully pulls away just long enough to smirk, and then grinds down into him as she starts pressing kisses down the length of his jawline.

“Fuck me,” Mulder grunts, pressing his nails into the skin on Scully’s back.

Even though it wasn’t technically a request, Scully murmurs into the crook of his neck, “not here.” She resurfaces to add, “you might find your couch a suitable replacement for a bed, but I’m afraid I don’t share your point of view.”

Mulder regards her, struck by how disheveled she looks, her hair falling out from the bobby pins even more, and her lips swollen already. In a single movement, he scoops her into his arms and stands, and she lets out a girlish squeal he never thought Dana Scully could make, as she wraps her arms around his neck to keep from falling.

“Good thing I have a bedroom, then,” he says, kissing her briefly, before carrying her to his bedroom door.

“Yeah, you never did explain that to me,” she says, nibbling on his earlobe.

“I don’t remember,” he says, because he really doesn’t , and also because he’s fumbling with the doorknob and it’s distracting enough to have Scully’s tongue dipping into the crevice beneath his ear, so she can’t really expect him to tell the story of his mysterious bedroom right then and there, can she?

“Need help there?” she teases quietly.

“You’re not exactly making it easy,” he says, finally getting the knob turned, and all but kicking the door open. Scully, in all her unpredictable glory, lets out a genuine, goddamned giggle, and Mulder thinks if any more blood goes to his erection he may actually start losing brain cells.

He tosses Scully onto the bed a bit roughly, takes one second to appreciate the sight of her bouncing against his mattress, before crawling towards her until she’s fully beneath him.

“This is,” he breathes, looking down at Scully’s parted lips and flushed cheeks, “an excellent vantage point.”

“I could say the same,” she says. “Though it’s a bit dark in here.” She runs a hand up his torso and over his chest. “I want to see you better.”

Mulder nods, and instead of flipping on his reading lamp, reaches over onto his bedside table where he’s got a lighter and candle. He is aware of Scully shifting beneath him as he flicks open the flame and lights the candle. He comes back, and despite how wonderful she looks in them, decides right then that Scully is wearing altogether too many clothes.

He grabs the hem of her t-shirt, and tugs it up in an easy, practiced motion, Scully lifting up her shoulders so he can get it over her head. She’s wearing a black bra, and the underwire has rubbed her skin slightly red beneath her breasts, and he leans down to kiss the marks, flicking his tongue out onto the skin and tasting salt. In response, Scully bucks up against him, and he takes the opportunity to grab hold of her hips and start working on her jeans.

With one hand, he undoes the button, and peels them off of her, revealing her milky white thighs, and muscled calves. He pulls them off, taking her socks with them, and then runs his hands up the length of her legs, and her muscles twitch involuntarily. She’s got on a pair of light pink, cotton panties that don’t match her bra, which are probably panties reserved for lazy days and painting studies. Mulder loves it, and can see they already have a wet spot. He makes his way towards them.

Suddenly she reaches up to still his hands. He stops as she sits up onto her elbows. “There’s a lot of give and no take here,” she says, sounding flustered, and one of her hands settles over the gunshot scar on her abdomen unconsciously as she eyes his fully dressed form.

He considers telling her there’s not an inch of her she needs to hide from him, but he’s getting a bit warm under his clothes anyway, so he tears off his own shirt, and tosses it haphazardly onto the floor. Scully takes a sharp inhale of breath, and eyes his nude chest like it’s an ancient Greek sculpture, which is flattering, but ridiculous, because if anyone here is emitting classical beauty, it’s her.

She brings a hand up and slides her fingers through his chest hair, scratching very faintly with her nails. Mulder takes her by the wrist and kissing her knuckles, before leaning down and kisses her on the mouth again, an act he could spend hours doing and never get bored.

The contact between bare skin is electric, and Mulder has never been more aware of every nerve ending on his torso before. He could go the rest of his life learning how every inch of his body reacts to Scully’s touch, but right now he has more important things to focus on, like the bra that she’s still wearing for some God awful reason.

He slips his hands under her and without breaking their kiss, flips them over so that Scully is on top. She makes a surprised noise deep in her throat, and pulls away from him looking shocked and wild, her eyes wide. Mulder says nothing, and silently reaches behind her and works the clasp of her bra.

“Not bad,” Scully mumbles as it comes undone, and her bra sags, kept on only by the straps around her shoulders.

“Would you think less of me if I told you I used to practice with a bra and a body pillow?”

“Absolutely.”

“Then I definitely didn’t do that,” he says, very slowly sliding the straps of her bra down her arms, savoring her softness and the tensing of her muscles. Her skin breaks out in goose pimples, and she trembles a little as her bra falls off onto Mulder’s belly. He gapes up at her.

He’s seen Scully naked before, but this is worlds’ apart from that. This isn’t even in the same galaxy—if anything, this constitutes as a religious experience. Her breasts are the perfect, round handful, with dark areolas and taut nipples that stiffen beneath his touch. He pinches one gently, and Scully bites down on her lip so hard that when she opens her mouth again she’s drawn the tiniest drops of blood.

“You’re beautiful,” Mulder says.

“Yes, you’ve said,” says Scully, staring down, decidedly not looking into Mulder’s face. He takes her chin again and makes her look at him.

“You aren’t hearing me,” he says. “You’re beautiful.”

Her eyelids flutter, and her breath is shaky, and Mulder is taken with an urgent need to taste her.

“Off,” he says, helping her slip her leg back over his hips. “Get on your back.” He gently maneuvers her onto her back, and props open her legs and kneels in between them. He kisses each breast, running a tongue over her nipples, and then slides his mouth down her sternum. He kisses around her belly button, as he slips his fingers along the elastic of her panties. He feels her tense up as she realizes what he’s about to do, and he looks up at her.

“Do you want me to stop?” he asks. Scully draws in a deep breath, closes her eyes, and shakes her head, just once, and it’s all the prompting Mulder needs. He pulls down her panties, slowly dragging them over her knees, to her ankles, and off over her feet, and then admires what’s in front of him.

She either shaves or waxes, and it’s been some time since she’s done either, as strands of red hair are poking up from the skin. He runs his hand over her folds, so lightly both of them can barely feel the contact, but Scully stiffens anyway. Mulder presses his lips onto the inside of her thigh, kissing up and up, dipping his tongue into the crevice at the joint. She smells like sweat, and skin, and wetness, and he breathes it in like perfume.

He puts two fingers between her labia, and dips his tongue inside her. Just once. Just quickly. Scully sucks in a breath and arches her back at the suddenness of the action, and Mulder knows that he’s already become an addict. He wants to eat her for every meal for the rest of time. He nuzzles her leg with his nose, before diving right back in, slowly circling her entrance with the tip of his tongue.

He flattens it against her and drags it up until he’s at her clit. He holds back the folds and admires the swollen button of flesh, as the shadows cast from the candle dance over it, and when he presses his lips against her, he thinks that this must be what it’s like to taste candlelight. She tastes like candlelight—bright, beautiful, and burning. He traces sweet nothings onto her clitorous with his tongue, and her breathing begins to shallow. Without moving his mouth, he takes a finger and slips it inside her, and her muscles clench around him as he gestures ‘come hither’ deep in her body.

She starts to groan, but stops herself, throwing her first knuckle into her mouth and biting down, wrapping the fingers on her other hand into Mulder’s hair and pulling hard enough to hurt, but he doesn’t care. He’s too drunk off of her to feel anything but the texture of her skin on the sensitive nerves in his mouth.

“Mulder, I’m—” she says around her hand, cutting her own self off with a hitch in her breath. Her legs wrap around him, and he can feel her toes curling. He keeps a rhythmic motion going with his finger, while he continues to confess seven years worth of love with his tongue, and suddenly she’s letting out a sharp cry, the hand in his hair stilling, her whole body stilling, as she comes in his mouth.

“Fuck,” she mutters, the muscles in her groin convulsing involuntarily, her whole body a board, until her orgasm finishes washing over her, and she slumps into the sheets like a ragdoll.

Mulder slips off of her reluctantly, leaving behind one last kiss, before joining her at the top of the bed. She’s looking at him like she’s forgotten every word in the English language, and barely responds to his kiss, as he gifts her with his new favorite flavor, wanting her to know what candlelight tastes like.

“Mulder,” she says, distant and spent, and he brushes the hair off her face.

“What do you want?” he asks her. “Tell me what you want.”

“You,” she breathes, the syllable almost lost in the air. It’s the word he needs to hear, not even realizing how much he was aching for her until hearing her grant him entrance. He fumbles with the tie of his sweatpants, and pushes them and his boxers down in a single motion.

At the sight of him, Scully seems revitalized, her eyes bright, and licks her lips as she takes one hand and wraps it around him. She wets him down with his own precum, and jerks him off agonizingly slow. He groans in the back of his throat like a feral animal, and knows that he must be looking at her like she’s prey.

“Now,” she says, and before the word has even left her lips, Mulder is positioned between her legs, but he stops.

“Should I…” he looks for the words. “Do we need protection?” He knows the answer already. They’ve seen enough of each other’s blood work to know they’re clean, and there’s an entire file in his office about why they don’t need birth control, but he needs to hear her say it.

“No,” she says. “We don’t.”

And Mulder thanks Scully’s God, (he’s not sure he has one of his own), because he is an advocate for safe sex, but fucking Scully for the first time is something he’d rather experience in full. He pushes into her, going in easy with the wetness brought by her orgasm, and he sees the creation of the Universe happen behind his eyes.

“Oh Scully,” he says softly, and he says it like a prayer. She’s warm and tight around him, and he takes a moment to savor it, before he can’t handle it any longer, and starts to move.

He presses himself against her, chest to chest, pelvis to pelvis, and she wraps her arms and legs around him, and he still searches for more contact. He craves Scully’s touch like a drug, and he wants to meld into it. He wonders absently if there’s anything in the X-Files that would help him with that.

He thrusts into her, her muscles pulsating in a deliciously dangerous way that makes him already feel the buildup to his release. He’d like to have her in every way, shape, and form, but he knows he won’t last that long. He feels young, like it’s his first time, and foolish, but Scully will have to forgive him. Sex has never been like this, so effectively it is his first time, and by the way she’s scratching at his back helplessly, he knows she feels the same.

Beads of sweat form along Scully’s forehead, and he kisses them away while pushing into her, and she’s biting her lips again, trying so hard to stay quiet, as though letting anything out would be a vulnerability she just can’t take. So he makes the noise for her, swearing and gasping into her, as she tenses up and comes again so suddenly that he doesn’t have time to brace himself against the grip around him her tensing causes, and just as suddenly as her orgasm came, so does his, and he spills into her, her name on his lips like a reckoning.

He stays inside her for a minute, both of them silent except for their panting, and he finally forces himself to pull out of her. She winces as he slips out, and lets herself be pulled into his arms as he gathers her up beside him, putting a hand upon her hip, her backside pressed into his torso.

“I’ve never come like that before,” she admits softly. “From just sex alone.”

“I’d take credit for it with my amazing sexual prowess,” Mulder says, absently petting her hair, the after effects of his orgasm causing the corner of his eyes to feel heavy with exhaustion. “But I’m pretty sure that wasn’t just your normal, every day lay.”

“No it wasn’t,” she agrees, and Mulder can hear the worry in her voice.

“Hey,” he says into her ear. “Don’t.”

She glances over her shoulder at him. “Don’t what?”

“Think.”

“I’m not,” she protests, but Mulder shakes his head.

“You are, I can hear it, don’t. I know you’re worrying, but don’t.”

She says nothing for a long moment. “What if we’ve just changed everything?” she says finally.

“What if we’ve changed it for the better?” Mulder counters, and Scully looks unconvinced—a look he’s familiar with, and maybe it’s the post coital glow, but it makes him laugh. She scowls at him at first, until a smile overtakes her, and soon she’s laughing too, and Mulder nuzzles his forehead against her shoulder blade, and places soft kisses along her neck.

“The real question,” he asks, starting to fall into what’s sure to be a heavy sleep. “Is how did we manage to make it this long without ever doing that?”

He feels her smile.

“Must be an X-File,” she says.

#fox mulder #dana scully #msr #msr fanfic #txf #the x-files #the x-files fanfic #mine #long post

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russianspy24 · 5 years

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Devils in the Windy City - Chapter 2

Summary: Elijah travels to Chicago, led by a vague prophecy about a girl who could be the Mikaelson family’s salvation. Klaus soon confronts him, and later Rebekah is drawn into another case of family drama. However, this trip to the Windy City turns out to be longer than a short stint. The Mikaelsons discover that their lives may change forever. Including every other vampire’s.

Word Count: 4,870

Author’s Note: This story is posted on FF.net and AO3, and since I’m on Tumblr, decided to post it here. ‘Bout time I’d say. Hopefully you read and enjoy!

Warnings: Rated M

Previous Chapter - Next Chapter

Chapter 2: Don't Fear the Reaper

There was a jingle of metal against plastic. A hand held out an old 7-Eleven slurpee cup. The fingers belonging to the hand needed a good scrub in running water, and there was dirt underneath the nails.

The old man who was hunching over had probably seen better days long ago, and that included his worn, tattered clothes. He made his way under the overpass from busy North Broadway. People who were on their way home or wherever else usually passed him by without a glance, but a few dropped whatever change they could find in their pockets, and he always muttered, "Thanks," and "God bless."

He came to a halt twenty feet away from the glass doors of the Bryn Mawr red line stop, under said overpass, and leaned against the brick wall behind him. A smoke break was in order. So, he put the slurpee cup under his armpit—there was already a good amount of coins inside, maybe three buck’s worth—and rummaged in the oversized pockets of his cargo jacket, using his other hand.

Obviously, he had more money than that, which he'd accumulated throughout the day, but he wasn't going to reveal it all if he wanted more. That was not how it was done. Had to show 'em far less than you actually had. A middle-aged man walked by and held out a dollar.

The bum said, like always, "Thanks. God bless," and, in addition, "You have a good night, sir." Then he pocketed the dollar, put a cigarette in his mouth, and prepared to light it with a bic lighter. Only no matter how many times he flicked it, it wouldn't light.

"Hey," he called out to a well-dressed businessman, who stood on the other side of the sidewalk. He looked like he was waiting. "Hey, man, you got a light?"

Cars passed by, honking.

"Hey, man!"

Elijah heard him. He just didn't realize that the homeless man was talking to him. He registered his presence when he heard the shuffling of feet, the jingling of coins, and the musty smell. He looked at the human as if he were an alien.

Then he blinked and saw the cigarette in his hand. The homeless man lifted it and said, "Got a lighter?"

The vampire shifted back slightly. Obviously not because he was afraid, but because the smell of a city street was interesting enough. Elijah wasn't too keen on the new notes, which seemed to be of...general uncleanliness, coupled with the smell of alcohol and whatever else that he didn't want to fathom.

So, Elijah haughtily said, "No. I don't."

The bum deliberately stared at him, not believing him. Putting the cigarette behind his ear, he tilted his head of matted hair and regarded the fancy man. "Got any change then?"

Elijah's gaze darted past him impatiently, to the glass doors, before returning sharply to the begging man. Again. "No. I don't."

The bum's expression was blank. He didn't move.

"Bullshit, man," he said after a moment. Elijah's eyebrows rose. "A guy like you has extra change. Bet a guy like you doesn't even live in this neighborhood. You from the Gold Coast?"

Elijah glared at him now. "Come on, man—" The persistence in the homeless man's gaze stilled all of a sudden. He didn't blink, and Elijah narrowed his own eyes, compelling him.

"You will go now." And an annoyed afterthought, "You're quite lucky I am not my brother."

"Who?" the man uttered. His mouth gaped slightly like a fish. Hypnotized, his head cocked the other way.

"Run along."

Obediently, the homeless man took a step back. Elijah straightened the lapels of his suit jacket even though they didn't need fixing. He didn't watch as the beggar proceeded robotically down the sidewalk, out the other side of the overpass, and into the night.

Elijah had looked up as he felt a rumble in the distance, stirring the air, vibrating beneath his feet through the asphalt. He glanced down at the Patek Philippe on his wrist and said to himself, "On time actually." The watch read ten past nine. The train slowed to a screeching stop so that its passengers could get off and head downstairs to street level.

In 1893, there was no Starbucks on the corner of Bryn Mawr and Winthrop Avenues, and no 7-Eleven or the UPS store further down. No hole-in-the-wall Thai places, or trendy, hipster breakfast joints.

Before 1889, this neighborhood of Edgewater was known to be "the only electric lighted suburb adjacent to Chicago," and was a part of the Lake View Township. Mansions, belonging to the elite, lined the shorefront. Then after 1889, Edgewater became a part of Chicago and quickly rose to the status of being one of the most prestigious communities. So, the homeless man was wrong. Elijah could've been part of this neighborhood, at least long ago.

During the year of the fair, he and his sister Rebekah were invited to this northern part of the city to attend a soiree, which was organized by none other than Marshall Field, who was perhaps the wealthiest man in the world in the 1890s. He was the founder of Marshall Field and Company, the Chicago-based department stores. To say that Rebekah was ecstatic was an understatement, for she loved parties and shopping, but that's a story for later.

Now, Edgewater was gentrified, and many students and young people lived there, with or without children. Renting prices were reasonable enough, and it was within walking distance of the beach. Parking was terrible, particularly in the summer, though that was name of the game in the city. Getting around town was what the El was there for.

The area off of the Bryn Mawr stop was generally safe, but at night, girls and young women usually used common sense so as not to walk alone, or if they did, they had to maintain constant vigilance. This was Chicago, after all.

The train started moving again. It was heading north toward its end stop, Howard. Loyola University was up ahead several blocks, and downtown glittered south in the night, the Loop seven miles away. The beach was just two streets over to the east.

A crowd pushed through those glass doors.

The train obscured Elijah's senses far more than automobiles ever could. He almost lost Liza for a moment, distracted by the grinding of metal that ground on his ears like nails on a chalkboard. He had moved behind one of the underpass's cracking columns so that she wouldn't see him. Then, as the noise from the tracks receded, he hurried out from under the bridge and deftly followed the girl, who'd already made it across Bryn Mawr, intent on turning left, which was north, onto Winthrop.

She was fast, not breaking her stride. The earbuds were still in, but her music was off. The set of her shoulders projected her instinctive caution. Even though she lit another cigarette, and Elijah caught whiffs of the smoke, he was glad to see that the girl was wary. She'd glanced back over her shoulder a few times, as she passed the breakfast place called Nookies, and the residential part of the street began.

Elijah expertly hid in the shadows as he followed her. He had a little over a thousand years to perfect this. One could indeed call it stalking, but he wasn't a pervert tailing some girl, so he most certainly didn't consider this stalking. This was investigating.

But he knew that when he'd finally reveal himself to her, whenever the time was right, there was a great chance of her reaction not being a good one. This he'd have to handle whatever way he could. And this was another reason why Elijah was following the girl alone. Not with any of his siblings.

This block or two of Winthrop mostly had courtyard apartment buildings. There were also a few worker cottages, but there were more classic Chicago graystones, which were either two level or three. Some appeared to be remodeled. Others kept the iconic gray limestone.

Liza, in particular, lived in a two level one, which was right next door to a tall building that used to be a hotel in the '20s. Present day, it was a residential apartment building. Sure, it might've dwarfed Liza's graystone, but her home was very quaint. She lived on the second floor.

Most graystones were very similar. This one had its wide stone steps to the right, leading up to a shared porch, and a wide bow of projecting, round windows to the other side. The first-floor windows were shielded by a small pine tree. The second-floor bay windows were rounded as well, curtains wide open, the light on, and above the porch, there was a balcony, a nice feature that allowed an overlook of the street.

The small front "yard" was fenced in and grew some sort of plant that was supposed to be decorative. The metal gate swung shut behind the girl, and she jogged up the steps.

The lower level was home to an elderly couple who owned the graystone itself. The Masked Singer was seen on the screen of an old television through the branches of pine. After Liza stepped inside into the small foyer, where her landlord's door was to the left of the stairs, she already heard the telltale sound of...paws upstairs.

On the second-floor landing, the door to that balcony above the porch was left again, and her own apartment door was directly ahead. The balcony was technically communal, but the old folks never went up there.

2B, read the metal characters directly above the peephole. The hanging little bell above the apartment number rang when Liza stepped inside her place. The sound of dancing paws grew only more furious with excitement. A roughly eighty-five-pound red Akita Inu assailed her with a half-destroyed teddy bear in his mouth.

A smile cracked across the girl's face, which was covered with a slight sheen of oil in the T-zone area, something that often happened when riding a subway car that was almost full to the brim with people. It might've been in the high fifties during the day, steadily cooling into the forties with the sunset, but subway trains perfectly insulated that cringeworthy BO.

"I'm tired, Ramsey," Liza said to her dog as she shut the door behind her. She hung her keys on one of the two hooks on the wall—on the other nail hung someone else's set—and gave the destroyed teddy bear a halfhearted tug before letting go.

The Akita's curled tail still wagged as he eagerly looked up at the human, his triangular, brown eyes hopeful. Liza shook her head and went past the canine.

Through the small foyer, in the parlor (or living room as they called it nowadays) was a pile of shit in front of the bay windows. Liza sighed, seeing it, and walked further into the apartment. Judging by the lack of smell, Ramsey must've pooped earlier in the day when no one was home.

"Hey, Ollie," she said. There was another girl there.

This girl sat on the dark gray Ikea couch, which stood with its back to the front door. She was watching that show Harlots that was on Hulu. Their television was a decently sized flat-screen, hanging on the wall directly in front of the cheap sectional. Before her, on the coffee table, which was also from Ikea, was a large plate of steak and mashed potatoes. Oh, and don't forget the bowl of chopped tomatoes and cucumbers, sprinkled with feta. For a girl of her petite size, it was hard to imagine that she could eat it all.

This girl responded with a distracted, "Hi."

Liza stepped past the couch, looking back at the headful of thick, wavy dark hair.

Judging by the way she spoke, even by that one syllable in Hi, Olympia Belugin was in a mood. And instead of following Liza through the rest of the apartment, Ramsey dropped the teddy bear and watched her go. But he didn't watch for long. Oh no.

He quickly went around the chaise part of the couch to sit directly before Ollie and the coffee table, and resumed watching her eat (which was what he had been doing before Liza got there) while Ollie kept her eyes glued to the television. In the show, Lucy Wells was at the opera with her mother, who was taking silent bids for her daughter's virginity. It was riveting, clearly.

The dining room was really an extension of the living space, with its own large windows that looked out into the lovely, narrow alley alongside the building. The dining table, which was hardly used, was from (guess?)—Ikea!

The first door on the right was Liza's room, and just as she turned the doorknob, she heard from Ollie: "Oh, yeah, and you forgot to do the dishes from last night. Thanks. Exactly what I need when I come back from work."

Liza closed her eyes and found no energy to offer up an excuse—which was that she had overslept and had to rush to work that morning. Hence the dirty dishes. Hence the poop. Still, she didn't answer Ollie.

She stepped inside her room, switching on the light, and crossed the floor to put her messenger bag onto her bed. The yellow bedspread and light blue walls were a little too obnoxious at the moment. The color choice hadn't been her choice. Rather, the room had been painted by the previous tenants before they had moved into this place a little over a year ago. The color yellow logically was supposed to brighten spirits.

Not so much now.

Leaving the light on, Liza left. The kitchen was in the back, as all kitchens were when graystones were built sometime during the beginning of the 20th century.

Ollie's room was right next door to hers, and their shared bathroom was directly across from both of their doors, between the dining room and kitchen. One of the few bonuses of living in such an old building was the fact that the landlords kept the vintage pedestal sink and the deep tub.

The back entrance, which had been originally used for receiving deliveries, from say, the milkman, was now where Liza often stepped out onto the patio for a cigarette. When Ollie was in better spirits, she too joined. Or she made enough steak for the two of them on their little grill. The lingering aroma from the food stirred the emptiness of her stomach, but Liza wouldn't dare to ask if Ollie would share. Not now.

The street outside was quiet, save for a few neighbors who were more than likely arriving home late and now searched for parking. They made circles around the block. When he'd noticed one of the cars for a third time, Elijah decided to step further into the shadows. He hid partway in the alleyway that separated the graystone from the newer, red-bricked house on the other side.

He was looking up along the corner of the home, that corner of the living room to be exact. There were moans coming from above. They sounded very much like ones that a lady might utter mid coitus. Regardless of who was moaning and then shrieking, he realized after a moment that whatever sexual activities that were going on in the girl's apartment were coming from a television.

After his previous search on the internet, he'd found out that Liza had a roommate. She was supposed to live with another girl. Considering that he still had much to learn about this Elizaveta Belov, he certainly had no idea who the roommate was. He couldn't see much of the apartment at all. He resorted to just listening. But after a moment, he did see Liza's face against the warm beige walls, what he could see of them at least. Mostly his view was of the ceiling and its original crown molding.

The downstairs folk were far too absorbed with figuring out who the masked singer, the rabbit, was to even bother looking out their windows. Plus, their eyesight would've probably been too poor to distinguish the lurker from the moving shadows of the pine.

Having gotten a plastic bag and some clorox wipes, Liza had stepped in front of the bay windows and then ducked down. She was cleaning up Ramsey's mess. Quick about it, she rose a few seconds later, only to disappear again.

Inside the apartment, she lingered behind the couch again. In her hand, she held the plastic bag containing the dog crap. Ollie didn't turn around. She stuffed a forkful of meat into her mouth.

"Did you take the wolfsbane I made?" Liza asked. Her voice was careful. "I know it turned out thick this time…"

Ollie spoke as she chewed. "No' 'et. I'm 'oing 'o 'omorrow."

"Okay," was Liza's reply. Letting out a soft breath, she turned to head back to the kitchen.

Ollie's delayed reply sounded before Liza opened the patio door: "Thanks...for the wolfsbane." It was a reluctant apology from someone who naturally had a hard time apologizing for things, but something about Liza's own tone sounded understanding.

"No problem, Oll." Liza left the plastic bag outside on the patio so it wouldn't stink up the apartment during the night and shut the door behind her.

Below, at the front of the building, Elijah stood very still. Had he heard correctly? Wolfsbane?

He was certainly no expert in mystical herbal remedies, but he knew for a fact that a concoction of wolfsbane was used only in one instance, and that was to subdue, to weaken, a werewolf.

Was that who this second girl was? A wolf?

Next, he heard the sound of clinking china and running water. Dishes. But the sounds were muted because they came from the back. Liza must've been washing said dishes per her friend's request. Although, it had been more like an order that would've come from someone's mother.

"Rams, get away. I'm not sharing," he heard Ollie's voice next.

Then came the sound of paws. He couldn't see this brief interaction, but this is what happened: Ramsey, ever persistent, jumped onto the couch beside Ollie, who turned to face him with unexpected yellow eyes.

There was a moment of silence between them, a stare down, and then the dog finally obeyed. He stepped backward, lowering his head in submission. Ollie said, "Go," and pointed the way.

Rams went, jumping off of the couch and trotting around it, tail a little low. He looked down the way to the other side of the apartment, where he could see Liza standing in front of the sink. The canine was at a loss as to what to do next. The forlorn teddy bear, which was lying where he'd dropped it, was an option.

Maybe. That was until something caught his attention.

His pointed ears turned back, he straightened, his tail went up in a tight curl, and he was moving to the front windows. Akitas rarely barked, only if there was a good reason to. Despite their size, they were far from Goldens or Labs. They were sneaky and very smart, and they didn't do anything without a purpose. So, when Ramsey sensed someone outside, and he released a low, rolling growl, Ollie tore her attention from the television and paused in her chewing, cheeks puffy.

Elijah took a small step back, hearing the dog. Old leaves crinkled underneath a polished shoe, and Ramsey's head peeked above the window frame. The man saw that the animal was very reminiscent of a large fox, or an orange husky, or a red wolf.

"Why are you freaking out, Ramsey?" Elijah heard Ollie ask, suspiciously, too.

Ramsey yowled at the dark. He didn't quite see Elijah, but the vampire had certainly been made. Ollie's face appeared in the window a second later. She too looked out to see who was there, lurking. She scanned the street, then the sidewalk, north and south. The front of the building, the fenced-in yard, if you could call it that.

"Who's out there, Rams? Huh? Who's out there?" A playful note entered her words. Her voice was slightly husky compared to that of Liza's smooth cadence.

Ollie was pretty, her hair darker, thicker, and slightly longer than that of her friend. Her face, rounder, had those slavic cheeks, too. But whereas Liza was fair, Ollie was warmer-toned. Dark, arching eyebrows framed her eyes, which were large and green.

As that green gaze surveyed the front of the building, Elijah deftly snuck away, going unnoticed, even as the dog still ruff'd.

"What's wrong?" he heard Liza call from the kitchen.

"Rams heard something outside," Ollie answered. "It's fine."

Then their feet were moving. Ollie returned to the couch, fell onto it backward. Liza stepped back to the sink. The dog retreated from the window once he sensed the vampire was gone—from the front of the house, at least.

The scandalous TV show was being rewound. It was harder to hear, while the sound of the sink grew louder now. Elijah blended into the darkness, creeping outside of the first-floor patio, looking up at the window of the second-floor kitchen.

Steam rose, fogging up the glass. He could see Liza behind it. Lifting an arm, she wiped her forehead with the back of her forearm. She had those yellow kitchen gloves on. Elijah took two steps back to better see her face. As unnerving as it was that her roommate was an apparent werewolf, he was there for Liza, after all. But what the hell did she have to do with his family? The fact that she'd brought up wolfsbane could've meant a couple of things. He didn't want to jump to conclusions, however. He wanted proof first. The most important thing was to proceed with caution.

Liza's brown gaze was set much like the expression that he'd seen on her face earlier that day, when he'd left the tea shop: pensive, somber. Her brows were drawn slightly, her lips pressed together, far from a smile, but not quite a frown either. She didn't appear to be one of those girls who were quick to smile, or easily amused. She might've been a deep thinker. She looked like something heavy was on her mind. Maybe not. He could've been wrong. This was only what he was assuming as he tried to read her features.

She was putting the dishes by the sink. Once she was finished, she shut the water off and took off her gloves. She hung them over the faucet, but before stepping away, she looked out the window.

Beyond the first and second floor patios, there was a short driveway and a small single-car garage beside it. An old, Ford sedan from the mid 2000s was parked before a much newer silver Mustang.

In front of the garage on a chunk of dead grass, there were a few pieces of patio furniture—nothing special, just two lawn chairs and a glass table. The place needed some sprucing up, but it wasn't too terrible. There was one of those round, unused charcoal grills near the lawn chairs. The whole area was surrounded by a fence, as were most of the backyards of these graystones. At the end of the driveway, on the other side of the gate, was the alley.

There were no milk men nowadays. Only garbage trucks on Tuesdays, and sometimes scavengers with their trunk beds in the evenings on Mondays before. The homeless were known to waddle past with carts as well. And bordering the alley were the above-ground El tracks.

Liza watched the tracks as a train—no, maybe two trains—neared, for the sound was louder than usual. Elijah too looked back, past the garage, and up at the rails beyond the back street. How the hell a person could get used to the noise was beyond him. When he glanced back at Liza, he saw that her attention was riveted on the train line. The rushing trains, going in opposite directions, snapped with electricity and clanged rhythmically against the rails. Yellow windows with silhouettes, which were sitting or standing, blurred past.

Her face was unreadable, almost in the way of Elijah's own natural physiognomy, everything there below the surface, yet all of it hidden. His own face usually obscured his thoughts, leaving most people floundering as they would try to figure him out. Liza was clearly far, far away now. Maybe there was something hypnotic about the sound of the train—because it did something to the girl. He didn't take his attention off of her.

The trains passed each other with a whoosh and sped to the south and north ends of the line. Even as the roaring receded, Liza kept her gaze there for a moment or two longer. Then, her eyes lowered to the yard.

Elijah shifted closer again to the first-floor patio, to make sure she didn't spot him.

There was a clink sound. When Liza had jumped, he tensed. She was turning around, and although Elijah had a harder time seeing her through the window now, he heard the girls.

"Jesus," Liza had gasped.

Ollie had brought in her dirty dishes. Liza obligingly took them and turned on the sink again.

"Sometimes I forget you're not a wolf after I'm around them all day at the daycare," Ollie said with a hint of dark amusement. There was a smirk in her voice, too.

Elijah heard Liza's heart rate go up as she scrubbed her friend's plate, foregoing the gloves this time. He wouldn't blame any human for being taken aback like that. The wolf's heart beat was steady. Of course, it would be. The vampire found himself on edge. He couldn't help it.

"I thought you said that every woman can find her "she-wolf," Liza quipped, sounding bemused. It was a reference to the Shakira song, which Elijah didn't catch.

"Well, yeah. But you know what I mean. You're so jumpy." Ollie laughed, a rougher edge in her throat.

Elijah took hold of one of the wooden balusters of the patio.

"Shut up."

"Can't I tease you? You have something smart to say all the time."

Liza was silent. She certainly wasn't acting sharp-tongued right at that moment. Ollie yanked the fridge open.

Liza's pulse skipped a beat. She turned off the faucet, added Ollie's now-clean dishes and utensils to the dish rack on the counter, and turned around to find the shorter girl chugging out of a plastic bottle of kefir. Liza crossed her arms and leaned against the sink. Ollie wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and gave her a look.

"Oh, don't be so sensitive."

Knowing better than to argue with a wolf, who was feeling the effects of the coming full moon, Liza forced a smile. She hid her face by turning around to get a glass out of a cupboard.

Ollie threw the now-empty kefir bottle into the trash can, which had a secure lid—so the dog couldn't get in. "I'm going to bed. Good night."

"See you in a couple days," Liza bid. Her tone now belied a relief that she couldn't help but feel. Ollie didn't take offense if she even noticed.

"I won't be bitchy then." Ollie's footsteps were already receding down the hall.

Liza was filling her glass with water from the fridge filter. "I know," she said.

However, they needed a break from each other. It was hard living with a friend. And female werwolves were bitchy twice a month, not once. Sometimes their time of the month coincided with the full moon, but not always.

Elijah was calmer but waited still. He heard, "Come on, Rams," as Liza stepped out of the kitchen, the lights going out. Ollie's door, the closest to the kitchen, closed shut.

Liza continued to speak to her dog: "No? You're not coming in? Fine then." The hallway light dimmed next. She stepped inside her own room, but there was no sound of the door closing, which meant she left it open.

But instead of following his owner, Ramsey stepped into the kitchen, not ready to call it a night. His part-time job of security dog wasn't over yet for the day. Elijah heard the growl. Then a scrape of paws at the back door. The vampire took this as his cue to finally leave. So, he vanished into the darkness, around the building, without making the slightest of sounds.

Sensing the reaper's movement, Ramsey ran out of the kitchen and bolted into Liza's room. She gasped as he skidded to the window, putting his paws up on the frame. He barked loudly and his snout pressed against the glass, fogging it up. Having taken off her shirt, in her bra, Liza quickly reached to yank the curtains shut.

Rams stuck his head past the fabric, anyway, and huffed out a low, threatening snarl that must've translated as, "I know you were there, asshole."

"Shut up, Ramses!" Ollie yelled through the wall.

#vampire diaries fanfiction #the vampire diaries #the originals fanfiction #the originals #elijah mikaelson #klaus mikaelson #marcel gerard #rebekah mikaelson #original character #elijah mikaelson x oc #klaus mikaelson x oc #fanfiction #originals fanfiction #ORIGINALS #vampires #elijah mikaelson fanfic #klaus mikaelson fanfiction

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jessicakehoe · 5 years

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What Was It Like As a Woman in Tech in the ’80s? We Hear From a 30-Year Veteran

Shaan Pruden has worked at Apple for three decades. Since 1989, she has seen the company through all its greatest hits—the Mac, of course, but then the iPhone, the iPad, the Apple Watch, Apple TV and now Augmented Reality. “I think that’s why I’ve hung around so long,” laughs Pruden. “We keep reinventing ourselves.” 30 years ago, when Pruden first joined Apple’s Edmonton office, heading up support for Macs on campus, it was a different world. “We went through some dark days there in the early run before Steve came back,” she remembers. “And then after he came back it’s a remarkable journey that we’ve been on.” Pruden is now the company’s Senior Director of Developer Relations, with a team that works with developers in every category on the App Store.

On a day-to-day basis, that means talking constantly with different developers around the world to offer them support and guidance. “We’re sort of a product advisor, almost like a product manager if you will, except it’s not Apple products, it’s other people’s products (laughs) and we help them put their best foot forward on our platform.”

Suffice it to say, the past three decades have been a journey, one in which Pruden has seen not just technological leaps but also a shift in the environment and makeup of the tech industry. We caught up with Pruden on her recent visit to Toronto to chat about her 30-year career, the things she’s learned along the way, and why encouraging women to join the tech landscape is a big focus of her work at Apple.

A big part of your mission is to involve girls and women in the fields of science and tech. How did you end up in the field yourself?

I was always good at math and so I just thought ‘well I’ll do a degree in math because that’s what I really love.’ My mom was an accountant and my dad was always really good at math so it seemed like a natural thing. And then just before I made my decision about what university I was going to go to and what I was going to take, I thought ‘these computer things might go somewhere, maybe I should do that too.’ I mean, this was a long time ago. When I went to the University of Victoria the computer science department had just gotten set up and used to be in the math department so they were kind of co-located in the same building. It seemed like an easy adjacent degree so I did a double undergrad in math and computer science to kind of hedge my bets.

I think your instincts were right, I think it paid off.

It’s funny because I haven’t coded in years. But knowing how to code is such a key skill especially now because everything we touch in our lives, whether it’s your appliances at home or your car, has software in it. And a curious human being should know what it takes to actually build that. Not the details necessarily but just—what is software, and how does it work? When you learn the basics even, it’s just tremendous for helping you develop critical thinking skills, and when you’re working on coding projects together it’s great for learning how to collaborate and how to communicate with each other. I think it’s just very valuable for anything you’re going to do in your life, and everybody could benefit from those skills.

What are some of the ways to engage women and young girls with this world a little bit more?

I think we need to shine a light on role models for these girls because I think if you’ve only seen computers on TV or whatnot, you might think it’s not for you because the stereotype of a ‘computer person’ is a nerdy guy, when it’s really not. I see every kind of person doing this, from every walk of life, and when you can see that you can think to yourself ‘oh well that’s something that I could do’ and I think it gives you that confidence to try it. The five female developers FASHION just featured are going to shine a light on this—it’s tremendous. I bet you that there are girls out there who are going to read that article and go ‘I never thought about that. Maybe I could do that.’ Some of these girls—they’re not the coders themselves. Being part of a startup and doing an app doesn’t mean you have to necessarily code. You might be the business person who has the great idea about how to market it or you might be the designer making the videos that go online. It takes a real cross-section of people to make a great app.

Historically, if you look at tech companies, women have occupied a very small percentage of roles there. That still continues to be the case. Why do you think that is, even in 2019?

I actually see it very different from even 10 years ago. I think we’ve made tremendous strides and I think the reason is because software used to be the domain of a handful of companies. I don’t know if you remember, but the way you used to buy software was in a box at a store. There was no way you could come up with an idea for an app and create it and put in a shiny disc and sell it yourself. It just wasn’t going to happen. So the App Store really democratized software. Anybody with a great idea can write an app and put it up on the App Store and be in 150 countries all around the world overnight. That’s just amazing. I think that’s opened the doors and I see a ton more women in these startups than in the traditional software houses that we had before, which were pretty dominated by men. But even that’s changing. I work a lot with Adobe and Microsoft and there’s a lot of women that are involved in this now. So I think it will take time to get to an equilibrium where there’s half women and half men, which is why we’re investing in things like Everyone Can Code. Our retail stores are an amazing resource for us, where people can sign up for these classes and learn how to get started. There’s also something we’ve been doing with the Malala Foundation—that’s another effort we’ve made to try and reach out through her organization into regions where we might not have retail stores so that we can impact their lives as well.

Apple hosted its first all-female Entrepreneur Camp in January. Can you tell us a bit more about that?

I’m very excited about that. We just had our first cohort in January and we’re gearing up to have another one in April. It’s designed to support female-founded startups that also have female engineers in a senior role. Our first cohort was 12 companies from around the world, everything from single proprietors to more established companies that had apps on the Store and have a thriving business already. And the idea basically comes back to what makes a great app experience and how we can help them hone and perfect their app. They already had a good idea, what can we do to make the app even better? We have a two-week period with them on the Apple campus to sit side by side and roll up our sleeves, and help them update their app so that it can be the best it can be on all our platforms. It’s just been a tremendous experience. The women that came through that first cohort were so inspiring and I’m very excited to work with the next bunch of them in a couple of weeks.

Is it safe to assume that in the ’80s you were pretty much the only woman in the room? How have things changed since then?

Many, many times. Most of the time. It’s really inspiring to see the change. Great ideas can come from anywhere and I think we were limited in our thinking before because we had one voice in the room. I’ve seen it change dramatically over the last 30 years. Even over the last 10-15 years. The App Store has revolutionized the whole industry and changed who can make apps and get them in the hands of users. It’s created this amazing opportunity for people to express themselves. If you look at the developer community, they had an idea that they were passionate about, they looked at what was already available and went ‘well, there’s nothing good here for my people, so I’m going to go do it myself.’ And these are the people that have the gumption to either figure out how to code themselves or find somebody who can and partner with them, and actually pull this whole thing together. What these people have done is nothing short of remarkable. It takes a lot of passion and a lot of work and creativity to really get something off the ground and build an audience. If you’ve got a passion for something and you’ve got drive, there’s a way to make it happen. And that’s what all these people are doing which is so exciting and so inspiring.

The post What Was It Like As a Woman in Tech in the ’80s? We Hear From a 30-Year Veteran appeared first on FASHION Magazine.

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dippedanddripped · 5 years

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WomensWear in Nevada LAS VEGAS—The major trade shows for apparel, accessories and footwear held every February in Las Vegas saw a big shift with the shows being held a week earlier than normal.

At the same time, two of the shows announced they would move. Informa Exhibitions said it would consolidate all of its MAGIC shows into the Las Vegas Convention Center next August while Womenswear In Nevada said that in 2020 it would move its event from the Rio Hotel & Convention Center to the Caesars Forum Conference Center on the Las Vegas Strip.

The announcements address a major problem for the twice-a-year shows held in February and August, when exhibitors display their clothing and shoe collections and other goods. Buyers have been challenged getting to the MAGIC shows located at the Mandalay BayConvention Center and the Las Vegas Convention Center while the WWIN show is across the freeway at the Rio.

Hats made in China are displayed at Sourcing at MAGIC.

“Logistically, the move to a single campus means a shift from two venues to one,” said Mark Temple-Smith, managing director of Informa Exhibitions’ fashion business. “Fundamentally, though, it’s a new perspective and a sharpened commitment to building a singular, powerful experience for our entire industry.”

Informa has not revealed the new exhibit layouts and locations at the Las Vegas Convention Center, but it did say the Las Vegas Convention Center is making $540 million in renovations to the current space and is working on an $860-million expansion that should be completed by 2021.

Also, Informa, which purchased MAGIC owner UBM last June, is planning to invest $15 million over the next three years in the shows to promote growth. The next edition of the shows will take place Aug. 12–14 with Sourcing at MAGIC beginning on Aug. 11.

WomensWear in Nevada

OffPrice

Womenswear In Nevada has been at the Rio since 2000 but found it was hard to expand because all the ballroom spaces were filled. The show’s new organizers, Clarion UX, said this move will make it possible to expand in a state-of-the-art facility. The move will be made when the WWIN show is held Aug. 17–20, 2020. The next WWIN show will be held Aug. 12–15.

“The incredible Caesars Forum venue opens up so many opportunities for WWIN,” said Desiree Hanson, vice president of fashion events, Clarion UX. “The stunning new venue provides the perfect backdrop for the innovations and enhancements we have planned for WWIN.”

WWIN debuted at the Tropicana Hotel in 1998 when Roland Timney and Jeff Yunis founded the show. It moved to the Rio two years later. The show was sold in 2015 to Urban Expositions, which is now called Clarion UX.

Show dates alter

This year, the various trade shows started on Feb. 2 with the International Fashion Jewelry & Accessory Groupopening at the Embassy Suites for four days followed by a bevy of MAGIC shows starting on Feb. 5 and ending Feb. 7. WWIN launched on Feb. 4 and wrapped up on Feb. 7.

Normally, the February shows begin the second week of February, but this year the dates were pushed up by one week.

The earlier date was not the best for the Sourcing at MAGIC show, which started on Feb. 4 and ended on Feb. 7 because Chinese New Year began on Feb. 5. Normally, more than half the exhibitors at the Sourcing show are from China and Hong Kong.

Chinese New Year and the current U.S. trade war with China didn’t help Chinese attendance. “It was a killer, but China is still here,” said Chris Bryer, director of sales for Sourcing at MAGIC. Organizers estimated that about 600 of the 1,100 booths at the show were from China. India brought about 100 companies. Egypt had a pavilion filled with almost 20 companies, and Portugal had a large pavilion at the front of the show with 16 companies.

The WWIN show began on Monday, one day before the majority of the MAGIC shows opened, which proved a big draw for buyers. The show floor was abuzz with activity. Suzanne Pruitt, a WWIN spokesperson, said there were about 400 companies exhibiting at the show.

On the Curve Las Vegas floor

A photo opportunity at Project Womens

The new Agenda location

Inside Liberty Fairs

One of those companies was April Cornell, a more than 35-year-old apparel and home décor company based in Burlington, Vt. “We’ve been busy,” said Leticia Brewer, April Cornell’s wholesale manager for Canada, who was at the show with Anna Krause, the wholesale coordinator for the United States. “It has been great. It’s a great place to meet new people.”

Also starting before the bevy of MAGIC shows was OffPrice, a discount clothing event that kicked off Feb. 3 at the Sands Expo and Convention Center. But starting on Super Bowl Sunday proved to be a one-day business killer.

“It was just not a great day on Sunday,” said Mitch Rubenfeld of Ultimate Apparel, which sells discounted clothing for men, women and children. “They had a little party here on Sunday and that cut into our time.”

Many MAGIC shows

The Mandalay Bay Convention Center was a busy place for the seven shows organized there from Feb. 5 to Feb. 7 by Informa Exhibitions.

During Project Womens, exhibitors were introduced to the new Conscious Fashion Campaign, a partnership with the United Nations. Certain exhibitors registered as a Conscious Collection to showcase their fashions.

At It Is Well L.A., a made–in–Los Angeles basics brand, the company saw buyers who were visiting from many regions within the United States. “Buyers are looking for staples,” said Susanna Kwon, operating associate for the company. “Trends come and go—and they’re great—but our buyers want something that is more wearable year-round.”

Variety was found at Stitch @ Project Womens. Stash Style, which sells U.S.-made home goods, T-shirts and bags, also creates new apparel through screen-printing and repurposing denim, military jackets and flannels updated using a reverse dye process. Apparel wholesales from $5.50 to $45. “You can make your store pretty eclectic depending on what you’re looking for,” said Lauren Goik, wholesale account manager at the Rocky River, Ohio–based brand.

At the Curve Las Vegas show, fresh brands were excited about introducing their pieces to a new market in the lingerie and swimwear segment.

For Me Seduce, a brand that traveled to Las Vegas from Poland, sales representative Justyna Szefczyk met with buyers from Puerto Rico, Ohio, Utah, Texas, California, Florida and New York. The brand has a provocative approach to lingerie but also offers styles for a more conservative consumer.

“Our range appealed to them [buyers] because we have different styles,” she said. “Especially in Las Vegas, they are more attracted to the sexy styles, but, surprisingly, they also liked the more feminine and softer pieces.”

At the independent design-focused Pooltradeshow, buyers were placing orders for Brooklyn, New York–based Rubyzaar’s shawls, maxi dresses, caftans and shirtdresses with a heavy tie-dye focus.

“I’ve been writing all morning,” said co-owner Molly Rubin, who runs the company with her sister, Sarah Rubin. “I recommend this show for buyers and wholesalers. It’s a great little market.”

WWDMAGIC kicked off at the Las Vegas Convention Center on Feb. 5 and was extremely busy the first day as retailers poured into the show and its ornately decorated booths. “I had 25 orders the first day,” said Raj Kapoor, the founder of Raj Imports in Los Angeles.

Over at the Embassy Suites, the nonprofit, member-owned International Fashion Jewelry and Accessory Group offered buyers the opportunity to meet U.S.-based companies.

At the Bella & Company suite, General Manager Joshua Lee felt the show was better than last year because of the better quality of buyers in attendance. “The smaller retailers are struggling because the big chain stores are taking over, but even those big stores are also struggling,” he said. “Their online business might have been a second thought. There are some online companies like Fashion Nova that are good at focusing on Instagramand online business.”

Moving to downtown Las Vegas

From Feb. 5 to 7, Agenda and Liberty Fairs made their inaugural runs at the World Market Center near downtown Las Vegas, a more than 15-minute drive north of the Las Vegas Strip. But next August, Agenda and Liberty Fairs will be at a different location.

Vendors and show directors at streetwear-focused Agenda and contemporary-inspired Liberty said that traffic at their shows did not suffer from their location change from the Sands Expo and Convention Center.

However, vendors and show directors at Project, a rival trade show at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center, begged to differ. Jason Peskin, a brand director of men’s fashion at Project, said that 80 brands from Agenda and Liberty joined Project because they did not want to make the move off of the Strip.

Agenda veteran brand Staple was one of the vendors making the jump to Project. “I love what Agenda does,” said Jeff Staple, founder of Staple. “But that old retail adage is true. ‘It’s location, location, location.’ When people come to Vegas, they want to stay on the Strip.”

But Tony Shellman, an Agenda event director, said that retail traffic was good at Agenda’s new space. Also, the show continued to serve its mission of providing a venue for prominent brands such as Mitchell & Ness as well as new and emerging brands such as Carton.

“We decided to change and do something different,” Shellman said. “A lot of brands believed in us and made the change with us.”

At the adjacent tent housing the Liberty Fairs show, Robin Chretien of the Robin’s Jeanbrand also said that buyer traffic had not suffered at Liberty’s new space. “Traffic was very good,” he said. When buyers come to Liberty, they look for fashion.”

#agenda tradeshow #fashion blogger #fashion tradeshows #streetwear tradeshows #magic tradeshow #tradeshows #fashion blogs #streetwear blogger #streetwear blog #liberty fairs #pool tradeshow #wwd magic

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