From: ephemeral@ephemeralfic.org Date: Mon, 23 Mar 2009 12:32:57 -0500 (CDT) Subject: The Ineffable Aura of Planet Spooky by bravenewcentury Source: direct Reply To: bravenewcentury@gmx.com TITLE: The Ineffable Aura of Planet Spooky AUTHOR: bravenewcentury E-MAIL: bravenewcentury@gmx.com DISTRIBUTION: Ephemeral, Gossamer, please ask for anywhere else RATING: R CATEGORIES: VRH, post-episode KEYWORDS: Mulder/Scully romance SPOILERS: all things SUMMARY: Iced tea and aliens. Not the sort of post-ep you are thinking of. The first thing Mulder wonders is why he never remembers to close the damn blinds. The bed is striped in dappled bars, falling slanted across his face, and he squints and reaches up to try to rub the sleep out of his eyes. He's somehow managed to gather up the whole duvet about himself, tangled around his bare legs and sliding lazily off the bed to his left. There's still a soft impression in the other pillow, and as he pulls the duvet up over his head he can smell the remnants of the night, sweat and sex and Scully. Now that is a combination. He wakes alone more often than not, still- she's strict about maintaining their appearances at work, and it is, unfortunately, Monday morning- but compared to waking up on the couch with yesterday's shirt stuck damply to his back this is paradisiacal. The events of last night still seem imprinted in the very air of the room; her silhouette in the doorway, blanket draped around her shoulders, green sweater pooling on the floor, her breasts, her hands, her _mouth_... They've been sleeping together for a few months now- and that thought is almost ridiculously amazing in itself, after seven years of contrived misstepping- but it seemed like something even more significant had settled into place yesterday than the first night she pulled him back from her door and whispered "Stay". There was a sea-change in her eyes. It wasn't the sort of thing that anyone else would have noticed, anyone who hadn't been looking at her for too many years, making up for what he couldn't touch with the eye's subtle cartography, but somewhere between dying ex-lovers and the voice of God she'd found him a smile he had never seen before. He feels like Columbus. With an unpleasantly familiar shriek the alarm announces 6.30 am, and he slaps at it and pushes the duvet away. He almost wishes he could stay in bed, luxuriate in the sheets' warm afterglow, but the echoes of Scully beside him hardly compare to the original specimen holding forth in their basement Batcave. And if he's lucky, she might let him steal a kiss in the elevator again, or somewhere else that's unlikely to be surveilled. He's fairly grateful that not too many of his fantasies about her feature the J. Edgar Hoover building any more, or making it through the workday might be even more difficult. The tap drips on in a steady monotone as he pads into the bathroom. The spare toothbrush- her toothbrush- is propped up affably next to his, and there's still a little water pooled around the drain in the sink. He has spent years on her trail, following any scrap of evidence, and it's lead him right back round into his own apartment. He steps into the shower and lets the steam coil out like a smoke signal in the small room. After dressing Mulder walks into the kitchen in his shirtsleeves and picks a clean bowl up from the drainer, rummaging in the cupboard for cereal. The coffeemaker is warm, a dirty mug left in the sink, and as he pulls out the pot to pour himself some he notices the little scrap of paper caught underneath one corner. It's a five-day old receipt from the local 7-Eleven for milk, fruit, yoghurt, teabags- she's taken to picking up certain things on her way over- but on the back are a few defunct scribbles and a handful of words pressed up small along one side. He turns to hold it under the light. 'Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth/for your love is better than wine.' Even now he would still be hard pressed to say exactly how long he has really been in love with Scully, to pinpoint when it was that trust and friendship and standing back to back with her as the whole world went to Hell had burst like a nova into something greater and far more terrible, but sometimes he really has to wonder why on earth there was ever a time that he wasn't. She writes in loops and whorls, like fingerprints left on a page. He turns back to fill up his coffee mug and tucks the receipt into his shirt pocket. The mornings are getting warmer as the spring draws into summer, and as he strolls down the street towards his car the low sun stretches out his shadow before him, going impossibly far. Traffic on the I-395 is slow; he chews on a sunflower seed and watches a little flock of seagulls wheeling above the cramped crawl of the cars, circling on an early thermal and pulling off towards the Potomac, the distant swell of the Atlantic. They vanish into the river-mist horizon as he makes his way on. Into the city itself and the Bureau car park is slowly filling up, the great daily chorus of neat black suits and set expressions, and he thinks of Scully laughing as he kissed his way up her arm and surely he can't be hiding it in the slightest, smile caught up on his face like a secret over-told. She is already sat at the table when Mulder enters their early meeting, his argent and marmalade stoic in her most indifferent expression, and he resists the urge to touch her shoulder, squeeze her hand, as he slips into the seat next to her. She glances him a greeting, the smallest inkling of a smile at the corner of her mouth. There is truth in their shortest epistles. AD Arnold is trying to make some elaborate point about murder rates in the Midwest, jabbing at the chart with his pointer as if he's going to mine out meaning from its skittering veins of colour. Next to him at the head of the table Skinner is nursing a mug of coffee, staring at Arnold with a glazed expression. Scully shifts slightly in her seat and brings her foot over to rest companionably against his. Under the table, her fingers brush against his knee, and he meets them with his own for the briefest of moments. They don't look at each other. Across the table from them Danny Walton from Media Relations is pretending to make notes on his legal pad, looking around surreptitiously at the rest of the table. He glances at Scully, back down to the pad, then at Mulder, and catches his eye. Danny's mouth quirks in a little half-smile, his eyes flicking to Scully again, and he winks so obviously they probably saw it on Capitol Hill. "So you see, this is the kind of thing we're dealing with," Arnold drones on, flipping over the chart to a street map of Indianapolis scattered with multicoloured dots, which he taps absently. "This serves as a reasonable visual aid, but of course the real pattern of behaviour is easier to understand out in the field." Mark Short from VCU cranes his head over Danny's shoulder and snickers at whatever really is happening on that legal pad. Skinner is looking imploringly into his now apparently empty coffee mug. After an unrelenting twenty minutes Arnold pauses in his unwitting soliloquy and glances expectantly around the room. Skinner pounces on the respite. "Graham, do you think we could take a five minute coffee break? I think it's still, ah, a little too early in the morning for some of us." He directs a few significant looks around the table, counting himself quite out of this group, of course. Arnold shrugs. "Well sure, as long as it's only five minutes," he says, in exactly the same tone of voice he had been using to discuss a series of decapitations in Detroit. Law enforcement, Mulder reflects, is truly a warped system. Standing up from the table as quickly as he can he catches a glimpse of Danny's pad as the man fumbles for his thermos mug. On the top page is a half-finished doodle of the meeting table, complete with a wide-mouthed Arnold with the pointer jabbed halfway through the chart, and a trail of sleepy Zs rising from Skinner's bald head. Mulder sees that he and Scully are surrounded by a wobbly-edged aura, and have matching pairs of setaceous antennae sprouting from their heads. Scully puts her hand on his elbow for just a moment. "Nice drawings Danny," she says, leaning over the table slightly, "you've really captured something of Agent Mulder there." Danny has the good grace to blush, but he pulls the sheet off and offers it to her with that little half smile again. She folds it up and slides it into her pocket as they walk out into the corridor. Mulder stretches his arms above his head and rotates them slowly back down to his sides, a few centimetres from the classic teenage boy move with Scully walking a little ahead of him. "So, good meeting huh?" "As scintillating as usual," she says, turning to arch an eyebrow. "Good of you to join us this time Mulder." "What can I say, Scully, I just woke up full of the joys of spring." They turn a corner around the bullpen, towards the drinks machine. "It is kinda stuffy in that room though, especially on a day like this. I think I'm starting to get a headache." "What kind of headache?" She glances back over her shoulder somewhere between amusement and concern. "Oh, a really bad kind, like I might need to immediately go and spend a few hours in a darkened basement, then go eat a nice lunch somewhere." "That's terrible Mulder," she says, and he can hear the smile in her voice. "It sounds like you might even need medical supervision, to make sure the problem doesn't become any more severe." They stop at the drinks machine and he props himself up against it; she glances him up and down, jacket raised and his shirt tugging out of his waistband slightly. "That bad, Dr Scully?" he asks as she thumbs change into the machine. "Well I wouldn't want to disregard professional advice." "That would be most unlike you." Two cans rumble out, and she passes him an iced tea. Their fingers touch. This, he thinks suddenly under the strip-glow of the office lights, is the last love affair he will ever have; this small, fox-haired woman with her sharp corners and her keyless eyes. There could be nothing after. "So how about that darkened basement then?" Scully clinks her can against his in a toast. "But it's your turn to explain our absence to Skinner." "I think 'I was drugged' is starting to wear a bit thin, unfortunately." He pulls his jacket closed one-handed to button it back up, and feels the annotated receipt crinkle over his heart. The elevator is already occupied when they get in, to his chagrin, but they stand as close as professionalism and the presence of a female agent with her arms full of files will allow. Scully fishes Danny's doodle out of her pocket and unfolds it, studying it like an x-ray. He leans his head over her shoulder. "Well he got the shape of your antennae all wrong, Scully, it's quite disappointing." The file-bearing woman makes a sound somewhere between a cough and a splutter, and stares intently at the elevator buttons. "The radioactive glow is a nice touch though," Scully says, taking a swig from her can. "The ineffable aura of Planet Spooky." "Our Kool-Aid is the best," Mulder agrees. They'd barely made eye contact during the meeting, but in the picture Danny has them looking at one another, circled off together in their own orbital glow. The elevator dings for the basement and they walk out side by side through the sliding doors. He picks up his basketball just inside the office door and bounces it off the ceiling, dislodging a pencil, as Scully walks around his desk, folding back the edges of Danny's drawing. She picks up a drawing pin and tacks it up on the wall between De Loys' Ape and a newspaper cutting about a shower of turtles in Tallahassee last October. They had sat in his hotel room eating salty peanuts out of the mini-bar and watching lightning chase along the edges of the sky. She is still contemplating the picture as he finishes the last of his iced tea, the light from the window above hallowing the set of her shoulders and the angle of her head. He wanders over to perch on the edge of the back desk beside her. She doesn't look at him. In the picture, their hands are parallel on the table, almost touching. "I love you," she says, almost absently, and for half a second he stiffens involuntarily, half-expecting to hear the clarion of the Fraternisation Alarm, for the sprinklers to come on or something. When the federal government carries on apparently unheeding he leans forward and rests his forehead on her shoulder. She lifts her hand and touches his cheek, the edge of his jaw. "How's your head?" "It feels better over here," he says to her breasts, and she scrunches her fingers in his hair, momentarily possessive. A bird lands on the skylight, sending shadows fluttering over them, little dapples of light. He breathes her in like the morning.