From: ephemeral@ephemeralfic.org Date: 2 Apr 2006 14:03:39 -0000 Subject: NEW: "Sokol: Dancing Skeleton Day" (1/1) by Khyber Source: direct Reply To: khyber@khyberfic.net TITLE: Dancing Skeleton Day AUTHOR: Khyber E-MAIL: khyber@khyberfic.net DISTRIBUTION: Ephemeral, Gossamer, please ask for anywhere else. RATING: PG-13 for mature content CATEGORIES: V, R, AU KEYWORDS: Mulder/Scully romance, post-XF SPOILERS: Spoilers for "Sokol" by Khyber SUMMARY: Takes place at Christmas 1998, six months after "Reach" and "Sokol," by the same author. Disclaimer: The penultimate part of my evil plan to destroy 1013 and cost them ONE MILLION DOLLARS in revenue. Muahahahaha. Author's Notes: Probably qualifies as an AU of sorts. Should be read after "Sokol" and before "Terminus Post Quem." * * * Near El Tulate, Guatemala 25 December 1998 She awoke to the sound of the wind, she thought, or perhaps she'd shifted in her sleep and the creaking of the rickety bed frame had woken her. The wind would probably be a constant companion. This seemed to be the place where the Pacific Ocean flung itself, shattering ocean-sized cloud banks into scudding fragments that melted in the tropical air. She could hear Mulder closing the screen door out in the front room, singing indistinctly-- quiet reassurance for both of them. They never, ever did anything silently any more. Silence was suspect. "Where'd you go?" she said, drowsy but loud, getting his attention. He came smiling into the bedroom, sweeping the curtain across the doorway aside. "You hardly ever sleep later than me, so I figured you needed it. I just went across to the beach. Here, you gotta try this..." Six small bananas tumbled onto the bed, as long as his index finger and brownish-red. "These..." He chuckled, sitting on the edge of the mattress. "Yeah, getting a whole bunch of bananas is a lot harder than you'd think, you need a machete or something." "I think we actually have one in one of the drawers out there." She watched him pick at the end of one with his fingers, stripping the skin halfway down in three neat strips. He handed the miniature archetypal banana to her. She nibbled at the end, wondering how many of them he'd eaten already and what sort of hideous intestinal distress they would have to endure. Nothing that tasted this good could possibly go wrong, she realized. It tasted like a banana, in the sense that this was what God had intended bananas to be like. The big yellow ones, she decided, were some kind of failed experiment kept in production just for sight gags. "Oh, my God. " She gobbled down the top half of the fruit in her next bite. He grinned at her, nodding, pleased with himself. "Mmm. That's amazing. Those grow here?" "Yeah, they're out that way." "There," she said, finishing the first and reaching for a second, "problem solved." They'd wondered who was going to feed them; the vague and largely theoretical knowledge they shared of cooking depended on recognizable ingredients, few of which appeared to be available at the market up the road. Pineapple juice, zumo de pina, zumo de pina, they knew that one. Zumo de pina y bananas. Fruit salad every day. Welcome to the monkey house. There'd been a notion that this looping circuit back northwards would be an end, maybe a new beginning; that they might keep going, test the temperature. They'd been through this ocean borderland on the way down, him liking the compactness, the many lands tumbled into one small area, her liking the warmth and the sea. That was during phase one, their mad tumbling burnout desperado vacation chasing sun and alcohol and fierce sex southwards. They cut back through on their considered, bruised maybe-way-back north, spent a week, then two. Then yesterday she coached his atrocious Spanish through buying the run-down beach house, which had rented to German and Dutch surfers in season and sat empty the rest of the year, for six thousand dollars in cash. "And... Merry Christmas." He held up one of his sweatshirts, balled up a little smaller than her head. "It's Christmas," she responded. First one. They'd sat in the mismatched kitchen last night, drinking and rationalizing the purchase. A bottle of awful Chilean red wine slid back and forth between them across the paint-stained table. The table was too large to fit through any of the doors or windows. She argued that they'd assembled it in here; he preferred to think they'd built the house around it. It was obviously older and of superior workmanship-- clearly an artifact of a more advanced culture, he insisted. "All day." "You're right." "It's not as big a deal down here, I guess. Not like Dancing Skeleton Day. C'mon, open your present." He placed the bundle in her lap: a worn green sweatshirt wrapped around something hard, seemingly spiny. The sleeves of the shirt were tied together in a rough one-sided bow on top. She tugged the knot apart, pulling away the soft, slightly damp fabric, thought she smelled ocean before she saw it. A curved slash of glossy pink-white opened the white and tan-patterned armor, a conch shell bigger than his fist. Grains of purple and brown sand still clung in its crannies. She held it up in both hands, her face delighted, turning it every which way as if appraising it. "Mulder, it's... this is beautiful. Where'd you get this?" Names had become fluid; he strictly guarded against calling her Scully because it would stick out, something strange to a Spanish-tuned ear. Easy to remember if anyone was asking around. He'd shouted that name in Buenos Aires, in a stream of sound that ended in four gunshots (dizzy from the blow to the head, he's trying to get between my legs and then dead weight,) and that may have been the last time they'd heard it. She'd hated Trish, in public, but was getting oddly attached to TJ. It was hard to see Scully in the mirror some days. Scully felt like a distant, successful older sister she last saw at Thanksgiving. Scully in the mirror, looking over her tanned, freckled shoulder with a stern and haunted version of their face. "Seriously, it was on the beach. I just saved us seventy bucks at Pier Nine." "Thank you." He leaned forward and she kissed him first, little and sweet. He raised her softer and longer, lips slightly open. A third mutually initiated one lasted longer, long enough to end with his fingers combing back through her tangled hair. Scully would never let a man, even Mulder, run fingers through hair that could have been described as "unwashed." "Mmm. What time is it?" she asked. Mulder looked around. "I don't know," he laughed softly. "You got a hair appointment or something?" "No, I... yeah." She tugged her legs free from the single blanket on the bed. "What's it like out?" "Windy. Beautiful." Mulder smiled. "I'm gonna have to learn to surf." Scully don't surf. Dana had been known to, a long time ago, and might remember. TJ would definitely give it a try. "I'll teach you," she said. "You can surf?" Outside, wind and water roar against the edge of the land, transparent and immeasurably powerful under the sun. They want to gnaw away the tumbledown coast, scatter the sand and splinter the trees and pulverize the bedrock, and in time they will. "I could, when I was fifteen... a little..." * * * finis Feedback gratefully accepted at: khyber@khyberfic.net Author's note: You should read "Terminus Post Quem" now.