From: Nynaeve Date: 25 Dec 1999 14:12:55 -0800 Subject: NEW: Faith 7: Just to Hear You Say You Love Me (1/1) by Nynaeve From: "Nynaeve" TITLE: Faith 7: Just to Hear You Say You Love Me AUTHOR: Nynaeve E-MAIL: scully@on-net.net RATING: PG-13 CATEGORY: S, MSR KEYWORDS: MSR, RST SPOILERS: minor ones for entire show SUMARY: hmmm...read the title. DISCLAIMER: Chris Carter... yadda, yadda, yadda ... 1013 ... blah, blah, blah. Bottom line: not mine. DEDICATION: to Nadine who has always had the nicest things to say about this series (and I mean *the* nicest!) and who asked for this as a Christmas present. Here you go - Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! FEEDBACK: Yup. Love it. Keep it all in little folders, specifically marked for each story. Respond to all of it too. DISTRIBUTION: Anywhere, anytime, just drop me a line so I can come visit. Spookys - feel free to archive WARNING: fluff ahead...major fluff. If you're looking for realism and good characterization, don't read any further. NoRomos - flee, flee now. OK, you've been warned... Faith 7: Just to Hear You Say You Love Me Somewhere along the way, Scully, I quit joking and became serious. About us. I'm no longer exactly certain when it happened. I think I used to know, as if that mattered. The more I look back I wonder if it wasn't an accumulation, a compilation of shared experience that brought me to this point. I can still trace the outlines of this tentative, on-again, off-again romance that brewed and simmered between us. Those outlines have become blurred over the years, but I visited them often, running my mind over and around them, as I yearned to run my finger along the outline of your jaw, to trace the curve of chin as I looked into your eyes. Even a man with a memory less complete than my own would be utterly unable to forget the moment you walked into his life. I saw in you only a spy. An attractive one, but nothing more or less than an agent sent to spy on me, to hinder my work. I did my best to unnerve you, to intimidate you. Honestly, Scully, it looked like it would be an easy task. I doubt I am the first man to have underestimated you, and I know for a fact, I was far from the last. Instead of shaking you loose in Oregon, of freeing myself from you, I fell in love. I fell for your honesty, your integrity, and your dedication, all things I had found to be in short supply in the storehouses of most people's characters. How could I not love those things in you? Diana had only recently left the X Files. Her betrayal was fresh, cut like a thousand knife strokes to my battered heart. Years would ease that pain, blur the memory of her departure and I would later inflict upon you all I should have turned on her. When it started, I was aching, bruised, world-weary and I found in you a reflection of the qualities I most valued in myself. Like any reflection, we were of course opposites. That didn't matter in Oregon. You believed that I believed. You wanted to find the truth as much as I did, even though we couldn't agree on the nature of that truth. And back in D.C., when confronted with hard choices, when asked, tacitly, but I'm certain clearly, to choose between your integrity and your career, you chose that which you will still have long after the F.B.I. fades from our memories. You chose the ideal, the ineffable, the intangible. In your own way, though you may not have known or intended it, your chose me. When they took you from me, I relived a nightmare I thought could only happen once. I wept, alone, in the dark of my apartment, in the solitude of our basement office. I cursed those who had taken you, not knowing who or what they might be, only knowing my life without you was a hollow reed through which the wind raced and shrieked. I wandered, lost and inconsolable, through a maze of pain, wondering what that feeling was in my chest, the ever-present one that threatened to suffocate me. It was only when I went with your mother and saw the grave marker she had ordered that I understood I had fallen in love with you, not just your honesty, integrity, or dedication, but with *you*, your heart, your soul, the fire in your eyes and the light that danced off of your hair. Every wound that your abduction had opened in me I had endeavored, in some way, to stitch shut, make-shift, ugly sutures that held me together, but only just. That moment ripped me open anew. I knew if you never came back I would spend the rest of my life searching not only for you, but for those who had taken you, and I would have torn them limb from limb with my own hands. Then they gave you back, once you had served their agenda, filled their diabolic needs. We watched you. Your mother, your sister, and I watched as doctors scrambled around you, tried to fix what was broken and couldn't. Your mother prayed. Your sister chanted and searched for your 'energy'. I went after the one man I knew was responsible. I came close, Scully, the closest I've ever come, I think. I've faced him since then, faced him with my finger curled around the trigger of my weapon, but I've never been able to finish him off. If Melissa had not called me, not convinced me I needed to be at your side, I would have killed him then. But I already loved you too much not to be with you the moments I could. If you had died, if you had followed the course laid out for you, I would be dead by now. I had grown accustomed in my life to being disbelieved, mocked, made the punchline of jokes. I had survived the battering rams of jest and incredulity by retreating into myself. I kept the world at bay, had a relationship here or there, but never with a woman who mattered deep inside, never one whose very soul created reflections within me. It was so safe that way, Scully. No one believed me? That was all right because no one mattered to me. Then you came into my life. For the first time, someone believed in me and your faith in me made me complete. That you questioned my theories never mattered, for you never questioned me. If I had lost you, lost the reflection of you I carried within me, I would have become a man unable to see himself any longer. I would have disappeared, not with a bang, not with a whimper, but with the sound of heart slowing until it ceases to beat at all. You refused to do what they expected, Scully. They underestimated you. To my dying day I will remember looking at you, awake, smiling tiredly at me from that hospital bed. I didn't stay long, though I wanted to. Your family was with you and despite your mother's assertions to the contrary, I wasn't family. There was so much to tell you; everything I was I wanted to lay at your feet that I almost resented the claim your mother and sister had on you. They'd had their whole lives with you; mine had just begun and I was irritated at the delay, afraid I would lose my nerve, terrified I had to confide in you then or you would never have me. With one sentence you told me not to be afraid. "Mom, I told you - it's 'Mulder'," you insisted. I smiled at you and knew everything would be all right, in its own time. I handed you your cross, the cross I had kept, had worn throughout the long months of your abduction and saw myself in your eyes. The cross I'd worn to keep you close, to feel you against me all the time shone in the overhead light, twinkled, seemed to wink at me. Fear dissolved into nothing more than sullen memory when you professed to have had the faith of *my* beliefs to sustain you. In the months that followed, Scully, I never thought it would take so long to reach you. ***************************************************************** I remember the moment I realized how empty my life would be without you in it, Mulder. It hit me like the proverbial freight train that I was actually in love with you. I was stunned at myself, disbelieving of my own lack of professionalism. In the days that followed this revelation I tried to determine how I'd reached that point. I remember the day I walked into your office. You hated me, I thought. I knew you would try to drive me away. Naive and young, I resolved not only not to let you, but to reform you, to redeem you in the eyes of the Bureau. Instead I came back from all of those first cases admiring you, your persistence, your dedication, your lack of concern about the opinions of others. That you were a skilled and consummate investigator was never in doubt; what drew me to you was your passion and idealism and intensity. You never could drive me away, Mulder. I stuck. And it wasn't me who redeemed you, but you who saved me, from a life both banal and common. I fooled myself into believing all the little moments between us were meaningless. That came to an abrupt end one spring afternoon. You handed me your gun, told me you didn't want to use it on anyone but Modell. I saw before me the man I'd dreamed of since I was a child, but I hadn't recognized you until that very minute. Tears sprung to my eyes with the knowledge that in the very second my love was born, it might be doomed to die, and that even if it lived, its existence could not be acknowledged as such. I thought I would be all right, that I could control this. I didn't imagine you could feel the same. You took my hands in yours and looked me in the eyes. I was undone, Mulder, completely, irrevocably undone, never to be put back together. You loved me, too. For months I struggled, Mulder, to define my place in your life only in terms of our work together. Every time the world threatened to fall apart, I wrapped up the pieces tightly, holding them together to the best of my ability. Then, the cancer struck. You tried to gather me up, to shelter me in your unspoken love. I allowed you to, but only in brief moments. So many times I pushed you away, wanting to stand on my own, wanting you not to love me, trying to mend the hole you silently told me I would leave in your life before I actually left you. Nights I laid awake, gripped in the terror of leaving this life. My hand reached for the phone so often I fast lost count of the times I exhausted myself in the struggle to break not the silence of your solitary rest. I longed for the feel of your fingers, sliding along the curve of my cheek. With an intensity bordering on obsession, I wanted to press my mouth to yours, to kiss you as I had never kissed any man, as I had never wanted to kiss any other. The feeling became a craving I could not satisfy, to know what your lips would taste like, how you would drink me in. Hidden from view I kept my desire to lie in bed with you, sated, drowsy with lovemaking. I insisted to myself I was protecting you from another loss, doing all in my power to spare you that much more pain. The truth was, Mulder, fear held me fast. I could handle the thought of death when I looked at it in its clinical terms, the cancer that dark invader that destroys its host. I was angry, bitter, beset by regrets, but I resigned myself to its inevitability. I kept my heart locked away so that it would not argue with me pointlessly this acceptance of mine. I didn't want to know what I was losing. I couldn't. After you found the means to save me, I told myself it would only be a matter of time until we found our ways to each other. I had no way of knowing how much further we had yet to travel. **************************************************************** When I look back now, Scully, when I study the map of our journey together, I am amazed that the rockiest terrain was in the year that followed Antarctica. At first I was at a loss to explain that. It should have been smoother. The events leading up to and immediately following your abduction to that icy continent had strengthened the bond between us. With the only words I had, I had poured out my heart to you, watched your eyes fill with tears, known that the feeling I'd had all those years before in your hospital room was as true as ever. Without words, you had returned the sentiment when you declared, once it was all over, that your place was with me, with the X Files. It took me a long while to understand it, to see what had gone wrong, and how we almost lost each other to the details of a mundane existence, when all the years on the X Files had only drawn us closer. I ache for the time I lost with you. I let a viper into my life and told you she was no such thing. I made you question my commitment to you, my trust in you, my belief in your integrity, dedication, and motives. And you, Scully, so true to yourself, told me nothing, just built stronger and thicker the walls around yourself. You told me once, sniped at me really, that I knew how you felt about that woman. In that instant I should have taken you in my arms, held you tightly and whispered out my love for you, begged you to talk to me. Instead I lashed back at you, slicing at you with words that might as well have been daggers, letting you know how well you hid your feelings. Words I regretted as they left my mouth. They hit their mark with deadly accuracy and gave you all the reason you needed to add yet another layer to your defenses. That year was a trial, Scully, to my soul and yours. We chafed one another, lashed out with words and deeds calculated to damage. It is no minor miracle that neither of us walked away. I sometimes think we both stayed because neither of us can bear to be the loser. This too shall pass, everyone quotes and that year did, at last. When I faced death, as you had only two short years previously, the hurts, the barbs, the anger melted away. You risked everything to save me. Though I was able to hear your thoughts, the knowledge I gained meant little, compared to cupping your face in my hands and holding you as you shed more tears for all that has fallen to the sword of our quest. Your thoughts I had been able to hear, but thoughts can be treacherous. The morning you came to tell me of Diana's death, you took down the walls around your heart and let me in. And in that there can be no treachery, no deceit, not in the truthful congress of two hearts which love deeply and for all time. I began to count time, no longer in years, but in days, trusting it would only be a handful of those before I could claim you and offer myself up without reservation. After seven years, a handful of days was a small matter. *************************************************************** You kissed me on New Year's Eve, Mulder, and teased me after- wards. Your words were light, airbrushed with irony, but as important as any you've ever said to me. You cut to the fear we both carried inside. You told me the world didn't end. No, I reassured you, it didn't. No one has ever known me as you do; no one has ever let me know him as well as you have let me. The world kept spinning quite normally, placidly even. The arm you slipped around my shoulders as we left the hospital that night was a different one than ever before. It was the arm of a man taking possession, staking his claim. We have always been consummate in the art of silence, Mulder. When we do talk we most often say everything and mean nothing. At times that has brought us down, hailed us close to ruin. At others it has served us well, as we let our actions speak the volumes our lips fail to utter. I suppose life had conditioned me to expect a moment larger than life, a repeat of the scene in your hallway, minus the bee, of course. Even a second drugged "I love you" would not have surprised me too much. What I never expected was better than I ever could have imagined. Our case wrapped up, you were driving me home from the airport. Uttering dire imprecations against the shortsighted fool who had booked us a return flight that landed during rush hour, we sat in traffic. My lap top lay open on my lap as I used the opportunity to make case notes, my attempts at conclusion thwarted by falling darkness. The feel of your hand, lifting mine from the keyboard sent a jolt of shock and desire through me. Without hesitation you brought my hand to your lips and kissed the back very softly. Your eyes never left mine. **************************************************************** I'm not certain who was more surprised, Scully, when I took your hand, me or you. I had envisioned a big moment, a romantic dinner out, a moonlit declaration of my love for you, a hot, lusty teenagers-in-love sort of kiss. Watching you as the darkness deepened around us, as your hair caught the last rays of the sun, nothing seemed more right to me. I had never been more certain of anything in my life than I was of that moment. You were surprised, but unresisting. I watched you watch me. I watched your eyes light with love and desire. I don't think you knew about the small, luxurious, contented smile that rested on your lips. All this time, Scully, we were so afraid the world would end. It did, in its way. Everything I'd been without you burned away with the fading sun and the moon rose on a new world, a world in which nothing can separate us. I held your hand and praised the engineer who designed automatic gearshifts the entire remainder of the drive to your apartment. I played with your fingers, stroking them, twining and untwining them with my own. I ran my thumb over the soft pillows of your palm and felt your hand curl around me. I tasted the tips of each of your fingers, placing small, delicate kisses on each. You watched me the whole time, discovering the world anew as I did. I wondered what I was going to say to you as I parked the car and turned off the ignition. I thought I had to say something, for we had both kept silent too long. I turned to get a better look at you. Your face was relaxed, your hair a bit disarrayed from a long day. Your eyes shone deep blue in the lamplight. You took my breath away. Trite as that sounds, you did just that. I realized that although I'd wanted you for years, I had not once realized the depth of that desire, a desire so fierce, so undeniable it had woven itself into the very fabric of my being. If I live to be a hundred, Scully, I will never stop wanting you. My mind wandered in useless circles until you leaned over and kissed me. Your lips were soft, smooth, tasted slightly of the coffee you'd had on the plane. Their touch was light, almost hesitant. And more thrilling than any kiss I'd ever received. Blood sung in my veins, thrummed in my ears, as it coursed through my body, burning away the memory of the years we'd spent denying this, erasing completely every stinging, loaded word we'd ever spoken to one another. I had not lived until that moment, finding only a pale imitation of life in the unspeakable refuge of dangerous women, of anonymous lovers, of visions floating on a screen. Love, given and received, awoke the sleeper. You drew away from me, breaking contact gently. You searched my eyes, looking for surety that you had not made a mistake. I smiled at you and grasped your hand more tightly in mine. In answer, I pulled you back to me, holding the back of your head in my free hand, kissing you fiercely this time. I wondered how long it would take both of us, such competent, confident professionals, to have the same poise in our relationship, for I more than half expected you to resist me, resist this insistent show of desire. Instead, you returned my passion as intently as I bestowed it, sliding your tongue against my lips. Your mouth opened to mine. Hot, wild minutes passed until we both broke, panting, steaming the windows with our breath. Your face was flushed and your hair more disarrayed than before. "Mulder," you said, voice ragged, shaky. "Um...not here." You waved a hand around, drawing my attention back to the fact we had been sitting in a car on your street making out like horny teenagers. "Afraid your Mom might turn on the porch light and catch us, Scully?" I asked you, a big, wicked grin on my face. You smiled back at me and said, "More like the D.C. cop who lives on the second floor and goes to work about now." "Think he'd tell your Mom?" I persisted. You rewarded my pathetic humor with another long, drawn-out kiss. "It's not Mom, I'm worried about. She'd probably be thrilled. It's word getting back to the Bureau I don't like to think about." I kissed your forehead and agreed, adding, "Besides cars tend to be a bit ...er ... cramped." "Yeah," you agreed as a sly look crossed your face. "Maybe later we can find the grave of some nice famous person, maybe a writer even, and *really* stretch out." I stared at you in disbelief, my mouth unhinged, my lower jaw threatening to part company with the rest of my skull. "Face it, Mulder," you told me, "there is very little I don't know about your past deeds." Reattaching my jaw and convincing it to function enough so I could speak, I asked, "But can you tell me my future, Scully?" You leaned up to my ear and sent shivers down my spine with your whisper, "I'll *show* you." I released your hand at long last, partially amazed our two hands hadn't fused together permanently. We got out and I opened the trunk, getting out your bag. I hesitated, despite your last words to me. Then I grabbed my own bag and followed you inside and upstairs. I thought we might change into casual clothes and go out for dinner. At least that was going to be my excuse for bringing up my overnight bag. I need not have gone to the scant trouble I did to manufacture an excuse. You shut the door to your apartment behind me and were in my arms as soon as I set everything down. Your lips were hot and furious, attacking my mouth, consuming me, choking off any protest I might have made, however unlikely. The feel of your tongue sliding along my own, along the roof of my mouth elicited from me a desperate, hungry groan. I wrapped my arms around you, lifting you off the floor, and walking with you to your couch. We tumbled down together, somehow ending up seated side by side, lips pressed tightly together. My hands found your hair, tangled in it, caressed it. I felt you run your hands down my back. Even through the wool of my suit jacket you left a trail of fire along my spine. Reluctantly I gave into the need for oxygen and pulled away from you. Your eyes were dazed, your lips full and wet, gleaming from the long moments of kissing. Your skin burned scarlet along your cheekbones and flushed pink over the rest of your face. Here was the woman I had wondered about, but never dared to believe I would find. Through the long patient years, the inevitable crises, the fleeting joys and triumphs, I had envisioned you like this. The man in me accustomed to defeat, worn out by those same years, crises, and reversals of fortune, hadn't quite allowed himself to hope for this much, though. I marveled that despite the damage we've inflicted on one another over the years, in this end, could not defeat us, could not stop us from reaching this point. I waited for you to say something, anything. Only fools rush in, they say. I'm the one who rushes in, in this partnership and for once, I hesitated, wanting to do nothing to kill this fragile newborn world. "Mulder..." you purred, gazing up at me as your hands slipped off my suit jacket. "I'll be right back." I should have known you are too anal retentive to let my jacket lie in a crumpled heap on your floor. I watched you as you hung it up and deposited the hanger in your coat closet. "You hungry?" you asked, walking back to me. "Uh..." "Food, Mulder. For food," you cautioned me. I grinned at you as you slid back into my arms. "In that case, no not really," I whispered in your ear and felt you shiver against me. "You?" My only answer was the barest shake of your head as our lips met again. I don't think I'll ever get quite enough of kissing those fabulous lips of yours, but my brain, what little of it was functioning, did eventually prod me to branch out. I kissed my away along your jawline to the spot that has fascinated me for years, the just below and behind your ear lobe, where your jaw ends. The flesh there is tender and smooth, as I fantasized it would be. My kiss made you jump and suck in your breath which you held for long moments, releasing it in one hot, whoosh that ruffled my hair as it rushed past. "Scully?" I whispered. "What do you want?" For the first time I couldn't look at you, afraid of what I might or might not see. I waited for your answer. Your hands framed themselves around my face and you lifted my mouth to yours. You pressed your lips lightly to mine, much as you had that first time in the car. You whispered one word against my mouth. "You." I met your eyes. In them I saw everything good the world has ever contained for me and everything I've ever wished for it to hold in store. I saw the unconditional love I'd known so long ago as a child, the forgiveness of every woman I've ever failed, the faith no one else has ever put in me, the desire I've dreamed about finding in a woman's eyes, in your eyes. I saw a past I could leave behind me, a present I could revel in, and a future I could look forward to. I unwrapped myself from you, stood up, and picked you up. Your arms wrapped around my neck and your hands played with my hair. I rested my head against yours briefly, planting a gentle kiss on your nose. "Would you believe me right now if I told you I love you?" You smiled at me and drew a tender hand across my cheek. "Yes, Mulder, I'd believe you." "Good, because I do love you, Dana." You grimaced at me. "Mulder..." you growled. "You're right. It doesn't work for us, does it?" You shook your head and giggled softly at me. "OK. I love you, Scully." I watched you catch your breath, saw the hitch in your chest, and watched tears fill your eyes. "Scully? What ... ?" You ducked your head softly, hiding your face in the fall of your hair. "I'm fine, Mulder," you promised me, your voice tiny and weepy. "Then why are you crying? It's not exactly the reaction a guy hopes for, you know?" I teased you a bit. You look up, tears trickling down your face, leaving gleaming tracks of moisture along the soft skin of your cheeks. You smiled at me. "Mulder, I love you, too." "Then why? Scully, tell me. Don't keep things from me anymore. Please," I pled with you. "It's just that," you started to speak, before your breath caught again on the hook of your crying. You gazed up me, brushed your fingers along my lips. "Do you know how long I've waited just to hear you say you love me?" I kissed you again, resuming our interrupted sojourn to your bedroom. I laid you down on top of your bed, looking around this room that is so representative of you - tidy, organized, subtle, uniquely you. This journey, begun so long ago, fraught with so much heartache and doubt, had led me this far, had led me to and you to me. One leg of the journey ends and another begins. I placed my lips against yours. In a voice fast being lost to desire and emotion, I tell you, "Only as long as I've waited to tell you, Scully. Only my whole life." END Nynaeve Temple of X http://members.xoom.com/Nynaeve1723/