From: ephemeral@ephemeralfic.org Date: Thu, 22 Jun 2000 11:21:18 -0500 Subject: How Bright It Shows: Sequel to Definitive by SisterZooey Source: direct Reply To: SisterZooey@yahoo.com Title: How Bright It Shows Author: Sister Zooey Rating: NC-17, for one eensy part Category: MSR Distribution Statement: anywhere, babies. Just let me know Feedback: SisterZooey@yahoo.com Spoilers: Here and there, but most of them ancient history. There is, however, a brief Millenium spoiler (I am not sure if our overseas friends have seen that yet). Summary: Once again, just read it. But only if you've read "Definitive" first. It can be found at Ephemeral, Clinique's, and my own site (sisterzooey.homestead.com/index) Author's Notes: Once again, to Jennifer. (in the hopes that she gets the joke I have just made) Disclaimer: Oh, no, no, no! You are mistaken! They don't belong to me, not at all! They belong to the nice people at 1013 and CC. Additional Note: The title and the quotes that begin each section of this piece come from the poem "Marriage" by Marianne Moore. Please do read it. How Bright It Shows (1/1) "This institution, perhaps one should say enterprise out of respect for which one says one need not change one's mind about a thing one has believed in" Sunday, 7:30 p.m. Dana Scully's Apartment My eyes are closed and I am drawing the evening into me. I am up to my forearms in soapy dishwater that smells of lemons and more faintly of tomato sauce. I can hear the quiet rustle of the Sunday paper behind me: Mulder is at my kitchen table, leafing through the news. He is drinking a cup of coffee. The smell mixes in my nose with the soap. It is silent, save the fizz of the suds in the sink and the hum of the clothes dryer, where my dress shirts are tumbling with Mulder's jeans. I move my hands in the water and the dishes clink against one another and the sides of the sink. I open my eyes. My wedding ring is sitting in a puddle of water on the soap catch. I absently wash a fork and a glass, never taking my eyes off of the band. All of the terror, anger, and fear that has passed between and around Mulder and me has wrought this moment, this sublimely quiet, peaceful moment in time. If time could stop, would stop, this would be the happy ending, the ride into the sunset. We could live happily ever after. We will not and I am quite sure of this. There will be more deceit, more bloodshed, more violence and tears. But I will always have this moment and the sensation of a wedding band dropping into my palm. I hear the scrape of the chair on the floor as Mulder slides back from the table. He is in his stocking feet and pads softly over to me. He adds his coffee mug to the small pile of dishes and kisses me on the cheek. I turn my head and he kisses me again, on the mouth. The dryer buzzes and he detaches his mouth from mine. "I'll get the clothes." I nod and turn back to my task. Mrs. Fox Mulder. Mrs. Dana Mulder. Mrs. Dana Scully - Mulder. I rinse a plate, placing it in the dish rack with its companion. Mrs. Dana Mulder. Phone solicitors would refer to me as the `woman of the house'. Christmas cards to the Mulders. I close my eyes and shake my head. It isn't us. It will never be us, I reassure myself. When Mulder returns with a basket of unfolded laundry, I am washing the last pan. He sets the basket in a kitchen chair and begins to fold one of my shirts. I wipe down the counters as I watch him make two neat piles of our clothes. We make eye contact once he is done and quickly look away from one another. I catch Mulder glancing at his watch. "Do you want to go home?" "No," he answers before I have even finished speaking. He steps around the table and into my personal space. He takes my left hand and asks, "where's your ring, Scully?" I retrieve it from the soap catch and hand it to him. He slips it on my finger and gives me a light kiss. I feel his fingers tremble as they come up to touch my cheek. We look at the floor between us. "What do you usually do on Sunday nights?" "Um - " we are playing with one another's hands, "I call my mom, sometimes I take a bath, watch a movie, read a book, things like that." I let my voice trail off. "What about you?" "I clean up my place, do my laundry, do a little reading," he is sliding his hand up my arm. A question escapes my lips, "Are you staying here tonight?" "Can I?" "Yes." I feel as if with that single word I had helped to keep the world turning. "Then yes, I am." "I want to be with you as much as I can," I say quickly. I hear him smile. He puts his arms around me and we hold one another for a moment. He kisses the top of my head. "What on earth do we do now Scully?" XXXXXXX "Psychology which explains everything explains nothing, and we are still in doubt." I put my laundry away. I took Mulder's into the bedroom with me. I stand staring at the drawer I had opened to place it in for a minute before deciding against it and setting the pile on the chair near my bed. As I put my socks away, a small black velvet box I had tucked in the corner of the drawer caught my eye. I lift it from its cotton nest and open it. Inside is my father's wedding ring, given to me by my mother a week after the funeral. She tucked it into my hand, explaining that it was too hard to look at it. When I came home that afternoon I put it my drawer and hadn't thought of it since. Tarnished gold. I hold it up to the light, looking through the hole in the center, wondering. I slip it into my pocket and emerge hurriedly from the bedroom. Mulder is sitting on the couch, staring into my cold fireplace. I regard him for a moment, waiting to see if he notices me, before I speak. "Would you like to go for a walk?" "Sure." He gives me half of a smile, a sort of I.O.U one whole smile to be honored at a later date, once we've figured out whether we're coming or going. It is not until we are on the sidewalk half a block from my house that I realize what we have done. We're moving again, a truncated version of the car trip. This is, it occurs to me, a longstanding pattern in our relationship. Which is probably why critical moments in our lives occur so frequently in hallways. We are perpetually on the road to somewhere. Stopping and destinations are for people who know where they are going, a luxury we have never been afforded. I am self-conscious about my wedding ring. I tuck my hand into my pocket. It is nearly nine at night and we are quite alone and quite far away from the homes of anyone who knows us. But what if someone sees it? I blush, worried over this possibility yet ashamed for being so childish. In search of my hand, Mulder's knuckles brush against my thigh. I am quick to take my hand out of my pocket and entangle it with his. Would you be so quick to do the same on a Sunday morning on the Mall, I demand of myself. I do my best to ignore my own line of questioning. Stuffing my other hand into my pocket, I encounter the ring and my stomach twists. We'll see, I tell myself. We walk for nearly a mile without speaking then silently decide to stop at a park. It is deserted. I follow Mulder over to the swings: good black rubber swings dangling over a sandpit. He takes a seat and digs in with his heels to start himself swaying to and fro but makes no effort to get any real height. Neither do I. He speaks first and I am so very thankful for that. "I'm terrified, Scully." "So am I," I say to the sand. "It was easier when we ignored it." I had a high school English teacher who was fond of thundering `Beware of Pronouns' when we read poetry. There was, however, no mistaking to what Mulder was referring. "Easier, yes, but, I wasn't happy." He looks around the chain and at me. "Yes, but are you happy now?" I look up at the sky as if the answer will be spelled out in stars. Mulder believes that the answers to nearly every question we could possibly pose to one another is spelled out in the starts. I'd be willing to believe if I could have the easy answer to this one right now. "Right now, at this very specific moment in time, yes, yes I am happy. I am happier than I have been in a very long time. This weekend was the longest period of uninterrupted happiness I have experienced in years." It is my turn to sneak a peek at him around the chains. "Are you happy?" He is also looking up at the sky. "I have been happy for seven years, Scully." My stomach twists again. "But yes," he looks down and at me, "I have been even happier this weekend." My mouth is dry. "Is this what you want?" "This? No." I feel ill. "I don't like us like this. I don't like feeling tense around you. I don't like being afraid of you. I really don't like feeling as if you are afraid of me. I liked us much better before we acknowledged all of this." He is digging a small furrow in the sand with the toe of his sneaker. "We have two options the way I see it." I am silent, waiting for him to continue. "One, we can pretend this weekend never happened. Consider it a vacation from reality." I nod once, hating the sound of it. "Two, we can force ourselves to get comfortable with this and accept it as the truth and as a reality between the two of us, regardless of how we feel about it." He sighs. "I thought that the things we said last night were enough and they were, at the time." He twists his swing ninety degrees to face me. "I'm in love with you, Scully. Honestly, I have been for about three years now, maybe more. There were moments before three years ago when I realized that I was going to fall in love with you eventually. It's unprofessional, potentially seriously damaging to our relationship, and there is nothing I seem to be able to do about it." He looks surprised. I don't think he planned to talk quite that much. "Three years. that sounds about right." I nod thoughtfully. "When I had cancer I wrote letters to you in my journal. That's when I realized. When I was dying and the main thing on my mind was that I couldn't stand to leave you. But you're right, there were times before that when I could clearly see that I was falling in love." I twist my swing also. "I don't think it will ruin our relationship." Mulder's face brightens almost imperceptibly. "Do you want this?" "I want to be with you." "I think the only way it could ruin our relationship is if we fight it. Do you remember - " I hesitate for a moment, "when we fought at the Gunmen's place? That fight, all of the anger and the jealousy that fueled that fight never would have been there if I had been comfortable enough to say, listen, I love you, and I hate it that you trust Diana, regardless of who she is to you, because I am afraid she'll betray you." Perhaps it is a trick of the light, but I think there are tears in Mulder's eyes. I do not acknowledge them. I have seen him cry too many times. "There are so many times I can think of. When you went after Modell in that hospital, I remember wanting to kiss you." "You've got nothing on me. I wanted to plant one on you in front of that entire Senate sub-committee when I got back from Russia." We grin at one another. "I wanted to drag you right down onto one of those couches in the waiting room on New Year's Eve." "Scully!" Mulder laughs my name. He smiles ruefully. "I wish you would have mentioned that." "Ah, it's beyond the point now." I dismiss the thought with a wave of my hand. We are facing forward again and are sneaking peeks at one another around the chains. Mulder grins at me and taps my foot with his. I quirk an eyebrow at him and he sways close to me, saying in a low voice, "Dana Scully, we've had sex." I laugh aloud, rolling my eyes. "No, no, no," he pleads before I can chide him, "you don't understand. I've been wanting, against my better judgement, mind you (he is quick to add) to have sex with you for years. Now that it has finally happened, it seems completely unreal." He pauses. "I mean, I can hardly believe that I've been - oh Christ, never mind." "What, Mulder?" I am grinning wildly. "What were you going to say?" "Nothing at all." I give him a mock stern look. He relents, sighing loudly. "Fine. I can hardly believe that I've been inside of you." I simply refuse to laugh at him, which means I cannot open my mouth. "I know it sounds stupid and sappy, but it's mind-boggling to attempt to associate you, you right now, with the woman who was in bed with me last night." My urge to laugh fades. "I know what you mean," I admit. "I think we've spent so long trying to isolate what we wanted from what we had that now, when what we want is what we have, our brains just keep on removing that which appears to be fantasy from reality, leaving us completely unable to believe any of this at all." "Do you want to go home?" I ask suddenly, hoping I have found a way for us to believe. "We can go home and get into bed." I feel funny saying something like that to him. I promise myself that I will keep saying things like that to him until it doesn't seem odd anymore. "Your home, you mean?" "Home. Just home." "Living arrangements -" "Explaining this to my mother -" " - to poor Frohike." " - to Skinner." We grimace at one another. Mulder stands up and offers me his hand. "Let's just go home, love." I allow myself to be helped from the swing. "Love?" "Dana?" I shake my head. "Fox?" He shakes his even harder. "Let's just go home, Scully." "Very well, Mulder." We walk back to the apartment with our arms draped loosely around one another. XXXXXX "Below the incandescent stars below the incandescent fruit, the strange experience of beauty; its existence is too much; it tears one to pieces" It would probably be easier to get a handle on this in terms of reality if my blood hadn't abandoned my brain in favor of more lush pastures. The thought that Mulder has magnets in his fingertips and mouth meanders across my arid mind, magnets that are drawing my red, iron rich blood down, down down. I moan loudly and have enough blood left in my head to blush about it. The lamp on my dresser allows Mulder to see the sudden redness in my cheeks. He withdraws his fingers from me. When I lift my head to protest, I see that he is on his way up my body with a look in his eyes that could melt chocolate. Mulder and melted chocolate. With his body stretched out above me, he pins my left shoulder to the mattress with one hand and traces my cheek with the fingertips of the other. "I am sick and tired of being embarrassed about the way you make me feel and being restrained in my response. It's exhausting work and there is no reward." I start to look away when I feel him begin to slip inside me. He turns my eyes back to his with the hand that is on my cheek. I watch his response to the sensation of entering my body. I am mesmerized. When he is done, our faces are so close that our noses touch. He withdraws slowly and thrusts into me again. I moan and we smile at one another. XXXXXX ".that strange paradise unlike flesh, stones, gold or stately buildings, the choicest piece of my life: the heart rising in its estate of peace as a boat rises with the rising of the water" It is nearly midnight and I have no idea how I am going to make myself get out of bed in seven hours. Mulder and I have been idly chatting with no real intention of sleeping for the past twenty minutes. I have no idea what we're talking about - it's totally random and completely lovely. "I am too tall," he announces, "to sleep with clothes on the foot of the bed." He lifts his foot under the blankets and sends my jeans (which we had abandoned earlier) sliding to the floor. I hear a small clink accompanied by the sound of something metallic rolling away. "Oh shit," Mulder sits up, "I'm sorry, was that your ring?" He hurries out of bed to find it. I look down at my hand and see that my ring is on my finger. I sit bolt upright in bed. "That was only some change," I say quickly. "My ring's right here." I hold up my hand but he does not look. "Come back to bed." It is too late. He is coming back to bed, all right, but he has my father's ring in his hand. He shows it to me. "What's this, Scully?" "It's my father's wedding ring." "Why did you have it in your pocket?" "I planned on giving it to you tonight." I lick my lower lip. We stare at the ring together. "I wanted you to have a ring too." "Oh Scully," he says with an amount of tenderness that I have never heard in his voice before. "You don't have to wear it. I just wanted you to have it." Where have I heard that before? He puts it on his finger and slides it around to show me that it is slightly large on him. I shrug. It doesn't matter. We'll have our rings sized together. We won't wear them at work tomorrow for fear of losing them. Then we'll take them to the jeweler over lunch tomorrow. They'll be returned to us in a week. Next Monday, I think, we'll wear them to work. We'll wear them to work as a challenge. Inquire about their origin. Ask if they're a matching set. We will resolve to tell the truth, to stop hiding what would be there, rings or no. XXXFINXXX feedback me, babies.