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xf_is_loveTitle: Hope that Waits in Allentown
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
vegawriters
Fandom: The X files
Pairing: Mulder/Scully
Rating: Hard R/NC-17 if you are sensitive.
Spoilers/Timeframe: Memento Mori
A/N: This fits into the fanon that is unfolding over atwritersvoices. So go check it out if you haven't yet! :D
Disclaimer: Not mine. I make no money off of Mulder, Scully, or even nasopharyngeal cancer. But if Chris Carter needs help writing the next movie, I am SO there.
Summary: She wonders if he will still feel like he does when her body is wasting away because of radiation and chemo. Will he care that her hair is falling out or that she will taste like the chemicals that permeate her body?
And if there were two moons,
who would sleep when one
passed before the other
and took it in
on its dark side? Wouldn’t
some extra light ray out
around the sustaining one?
Wouldn’t you sense the two in one, even if you’d
never seen them parted?
From: Little Match Box by Tess Gallagher
He is silent at dinner. Silent and angry and she is glad for his anger because she, truthfully, is numb with the harsh understanding that the women she met in Allentown those months ago were harbingers of her fate.
Neither of them eat much of the takeout from the diner down the street from her apartment. Her fridge will be full of the small cartons for weeks until she finally gives in and throws them out. Finally tired of pecking at her food, Scully rises and clears the table. She pours herself another glass of wine and brings him another beer and sits back down across from him. “Mulder?”
“Radiation?”
Not for the first time, she hears his unspoken “I Love You.”
She wonders if he will still feel like he does when her body is wasting away because of radiation and chemo. Will he care that her hair is falling out or that she will taste like the chemicals that permeate her body?
“And chemo, eventually. But, truthfully, it’s not treatable, Mulder. The treatments they have are stop-gaps. Nothing has ever really worked.” She is tired of explaining this to him.
“There has to be something.”
“We’ll drive to Allentown tomorrow morning. We’ll see Penny Northern.” She rises and moves behind him and wraps her arms around the strong shoulders that so recently were part of the arms that had her pinned to a wall in the basement of the FBI Headquarters. She wants him to kiss her again. She wants to find the courage to kiss him. Instead, she rests her head on his shoulder and inhales the scent of Old Spice and sweat and Mulder and silently, her tears fall. She will not be here to love this man, to watch him grow old. Already she could not give him children. Now she cannot give him forever.
“Scully … about …”
She knows he is talking about the kiss from last week, about the fallout from her trip to Philadelphia. “Not now, Mulder.”
“Okay.” He trails his fingers up and down her arms and kisses her wrists and she can feel him shaking, trying to keep his emotions intact. She kisses his temple and squeezes his shoulders again and after a long moment, he takes a deep breath. “Hey …. you got anything good to dance to?”
“Dance?” A shiver runs up her body. A half-remembered moment. He’d taken her in his arms while they’d danced. Had he kissed her? She couldn’t remember. “Yeah. I do.” Her Indigo Girls CD is already in the player and she hits play and moves easily into the arms she wants to have protect her from the evil that is inside her body.
He holds her close and she buries her face in his chest and begins to cry and when she realizes tears also run down his cheeks, she leans up and kisses him. They fall onto the couch and he pulls her onto his lap and clings to her and together, they cry. Heads buried in each other’s shoulders, arms around each other’s necks, it is more powerful and intimate than the kiss in the hall. His lips find her face and kiss the tears away even as his fall to her cheeks. He loves her she knows, and what is more, he knows that she loves him. Then they are again kissing and it is passionate and life affirming and his hands are on her hips and she wants more, so much more. She straddles him and tugs at his shirt and she didn’t mean for it to happen like this – a mutual sympathy fuck that celebrates the last time she could ever feel beautiful – but he is pulling at her blouse and she is opening his shirt and they forego the bedroom.
He is as big as she’d hoped and as caring a lover as she’d dreamed. Her needs come first for him, which makes it easy for her to care first about his. He likes it when she bites his nipples. She loves it when he is the one to take the initiative and guides his cock into her body.
“So tight …” he whispers. He sounds like a porn hero. She doesn’t mind.
Someday she will tell him that for all the time she spent naked with Ed Jerse, he was never once inside her body.
Her knees ache in this position and she knows neither of them will last long. He arches against her as she rides him and it is better than every dream she concocted. He pinches her nipples. She pinches her clit. They come, one right after the other.
They recover, gasping for breath, and he makes some comment about how she can send him the bill for the stain on her couch.
“It is worth it,” she assures him. He takes her to bed.
It is loving and it is perfect. They do not say the words. They do not break the spell. It is too much, too close, and she knows that to say the words now, so soon, means, somehow, to admit defeat to the tumor inside of her.
He falls asleep first, his arm tightly around her, and she stares into the darkness and stops her walls from tumbling down. She cannot love this man. To love him and then die on him means to destroy him. When she is sure her movement will not wake him, she rises and finds the journal she bought earlier that afternoon. Quietly, she tiptoes to the living room, slipping into his shirt when she finds it. In the kitchen, she curls up in a chair, grabs a pen, and opens the empty notebook.
Mulder … she writes on the first page. Then she turns to the next page, dates it, and begins writing.
There is a peace that comes in the early morning dark before dawn. I sit here, wrapped in your scent. Your shirt covers my body and is long enough to reach almost to my knees. Even here in my kitchen, two rooms away from where I left you sleeping, I can hear your breathing. I can feel you reach for me. You will wake soon. You will roll over in bed and my pillow will be cool and the lack of contact will force you awake. You will fear I’ve been taken again. You will come searching for me and find me and already I feel guilty because I have not yet caused you a fear that I know you will experience. But I cannot sleep and your own nights are so rarely peaceful that I could not lie there in what I already consider our bed and toss and turn while I wait for the sun to rise. I fear now to sleep. How many more times can I close my eyes before they will not open again?
What have we done? Why did we do this? Why did we cross that line, that sacred line we have silently maintained since the moment I shook your hand? Is this my penance, my proof to you that Ed Jerse meant nothing? Is this my own desires acting on my forced mortality? It wasn’t our first kiss. And my dreams, my hazy memories, tell me there has been something else before. But I cannot remember and to dwell on when it could have been opens up a flood of emotions that, if let loose now, will drown me. But tonight … tonight we continued what we began just a week ago in the hallway outside our office. Tonight, I let go and now … now I’m terrified to face you again. You are my everything. But to love you now only breaks both of our hearts. To love you now means that not only will we lose our friendship when this cancer eats me alive, but that I will have to watch you watch me die. I do not know if I can handle it. I do not know if you can. I want to love you. I want to fall into your arms and have you protect me from this menace inside my body, this evil force that threatens to consume my soul, but to be the focus of your passion, your scrutiny, and your love … it may be more than I can handle. I am dying. How can I help you live even as my life slips away?
***
He wakes and reaches for her and finds an empty pillow and cool sheets. It is only when he sees the faint light coming down the hall that he starts to breathe again. Still, she has left what he is already considering their bed and he knows that the distance she has placed between them is there to protect his heart as much as it is hers. Leaving her for a moment, he waits, listening for the sound of a smothered tear or the intake of an angry breath, until his desire to protect her outweighs everything else and he rises from bed, stopping only in the living room to pull on his boxer shorts.
Once, years ago, over wine and pizza, they’d danced badly to folk music with a pop twist. He’d made a comment about their lives and the bureau, and she’d burst into tears and he’d kissed away the sadness. Once, in a time he knew she didn’t remember, she’d pulled her lips away from his and invited him into her bed. He, being a desperate man in love, had followed willingly. He, being a coward, had left before she’d risen. They’d never spoken of it and he wondered if he had taken advantage of his previous knowledge of her body as he’d made love to her last night.
At sunrise, they would drive to Allentown, toward her own repressed memories and Penny Northern and a hope for a cure he didn’t dare cling to. In the morning, they would have to make the choice to push aside what had happened between them or to face it together.
By sunrise, he knows, Scully will have rationalized her fears into a tiny box. She will ask for time and space. Her fear of commitment to anything but their quest outweighs even his obsessive drive to commit himself completely to his passions.
The light of the kitchen is bright against his eyes and he blinks a few times. She looks up at his step and his eyes focus on the vibrant color of her hair and the pale of her skin and her now haunted blue eyes. She is being strong for him. But he also knows she is scared.
Last night, it had been his turn to ask for the folk music with a pop twist. He’d taken her hand and they’d danced – this time not so badly – and when the tears had streamed down his cheeks, she had been the one to kiss them away. This time, when their lips had parted he had been the one to invite her into his arms. He wondered about the stain on the couch cushions. He wondered if she knew that to him, she would always be the most beautiful woman in the world. He’d undressed her, as desperate to love her as she was to feel alive.
“You okay?” He asks, finally breaking the silence. It seems silly. No, she isn’t okay. She is tired and stressed and needs to make a decision about the kinds of drugs she will soon need to be pumping into her body in hopes of staying alive. After the tears they had shared only hours before, it was possibly the stupidest question he’d ever asked her.
“I’m fine, Mulder.”
The words cut, harsh and deep, right into his heart. He sighs and looks at her, mentally calculating the time it will take to drive the distance to Allentown. Can he handle the hours of uncomfortable silence?
“A little sore, actually.”
The comment catches him completely off guard and when he refocuses back on her, she is smirking.
“Sore?”
“Be proud of yourself, Mulder. The last time I had sex, it wasn’t nearly that … energetic.”
Her eyes suddenly shine with laughter and they both grin. He sits across the table from her and takes the pen from her fingers. “I meant it last night, Scully. Anything you need or want from me, I’m here. That includes … space.”
He expects her to pull away, but her fingers stay linked with his and she relaxes visibly.
“Are we okay?”
With a sigh, she shrugs. “Let’s get through today, okay? Today and tomorrow and see where it takes us.”
Nodding, he wraps his arms around her and kisses her neck. “That’s fair.” He smiles when she kisses him back and when they break for air, the tears are gone from her eyes. “I’m going to go home and get a fresh change of clothes. I’ll see you at the office.”
She touches his cheek and he smiles. One last kiss and he is gone and they are alone to face their tears, their fears, and the only sliver of hope that awaits them at the end of a drive to Allentown.
Author:
vegawritersFandom: The X files
Pairing: Mulder/Scully
Rating: Hard R/NC-17 if you are sensitive.
Spoilers/Timeframe: Memento Mori
A/N: This fits into the fanon that is unfolding over at
writersvoices. So go check it out if you haven't yet! :D Disclaimer: Not mine. I make no money off of Mulder, Scully, or even nasopharyngeal cancer. But if Chris Carter needs help writing the next movie, I am SO there.
Summary: She wonders if he will still feel like he does when her body is wasting away because of radiation and chemo. Will he care that her hair is falling out or that she will taste like the chemicals that permeate her body?
And if there were two moons,
who would sleep when one
passed before the other
and took it in
on its dark side? Wouldn’t
some extra light ray out
around the sustaining one?
Wouldn’t you sense the two in one, even if you’d
never seen them parted?
From: Little Match Box by Tess Gallagher
He is silent at dinner. Silent and angry and she is glad for his anger because she, truthfully, is numb with the harsh understanding that the women she met in Allentown those months ago were harbingers of her fate.
Neither of them eat much of the takeout from the diner down the street from her apartment. Her fridge will be full of the small cartons for weeks until she finally gives in and throws them out. Finally tired of pecking at her food, Scully rises and clears the table. She pours herself another glass of wine and brings him another beer and sits back down across from him. “Mulder?”
“Radiation?”
Not for the first time, she hears his unspoken “I Love You.”
She wonders if he will still feel like he does when her body is wasting away because of radiation and chemo. Will he care that her hair is falling out or that she will taste like the chemicals that permeate her body?
“And chemo, eventually. But, truthfully, it’s not treatable, Mulder. The treatments they have are stop-gaps. Nothing has ever really worked.” She is tired of explaining this to him.
“There has to be something.”
“We’ll drive to Allentown tomorrow morning. We’ll see Penny Northern.” She rises and moves behind him and wraps her arms around the strong shoulders that so recently were part of the arms that had her pinned to a wall in the basement of the FBI Headquarters. She wants him to kiss her again. She wants to find the courage to kiss him. Instead, she rests her head on his shoulder and inhales the scent of Old Spice and sweat and Mulder and silently, her tears fall. She will not be here to love this man, to watch him grow old. Already she could not give him children. Now she cannot give him forever.
“Scully … about …”
She knows he is talking about the kiss from last week, about the fallout from her trip to Philadelphia. “Not now, Mulder.”
“Okay.” He trails his fingers up and down her arms and kisses her wrists and she can feel him shaking, trying to keep his emotions intact. She kisses his temple and squeezes his shoulders again and after a long moment, he takes a deep breath. “Hey …. you got anything good to dance to?”
“Dance?” A shiver runs up her body. A half-remembered moment. He’d taken her in his arms while they’d danced. Had he kissed her? She couldn’t remember. “Yeah. I do.” Her Indigo Girls CD is already in the player and she hits play and moves easily into the arms she wants to have protect her from the evil that is inside her body.
He holds her close and she buries her face in his chest and begins to cry and when she realizes tears also run down his cheeks, she leans up and kisses him. They fall onto the couch and he pulls her onto his lap and clings to her and together, they cry. Heads buried in each other’s shoulders, arms around each other’s necks, it is more powerful and intimate than the kiss in the hall. His lips find her face and kiss the tears away even as his fall to her cheeks. He loves her she knows, and what is more, he knows that she loves him. Then they are again kissing and it is passionate and life affirming and his hands are on her hips and she wants more, so much more. She straddles him and tugs at his shirt and she didn’t mean for it to happen like this – a mutual sympathy fuck that celebrates the last time she could ever feel beautiful – but he is pulling at her blouse and she is opening his shirt and they forego the bedroom.
He is as big as she’d hoped and as caring a lover as she’d dreamed. Her needs come first for him, which makes it easy for her to care first about his. He likes it when she bites his nipples. She loves it when he is the one to take the initiative and guides his cock into her body.
“So tight …” he whispers. He sounds like a porn hero. She doesn’t mind.
Someday she will tell him that for all the time she spent naked with Ed Jerse, he was never once inside her body.
Her knees ache in this position and she knows neither of them will last long. He arches against her as she rides him and it is better than every dream she concocted. He pinches her nipples. She pinches her clit. They come, one right after the other.
They recover, gasping for breath, and he makes some comment about how she can send him the bill for the stain on her couch.
“It is worth it,” she assures him. He takes her to bed.
It is loving and it is perfect. They do not say the words. They do not break the spell. It is too much, too close, and she knows that to say the words now, so soon, means, somehow, to admit defeat to the tumor inside of her.
He falls asleep first, his arm tightly around her, and she stares into the darkness and stops her walls from tumbling down. She cannot love this man. To love him and then die on him means to destroy him. When she is sure her movement will not wake him, she rises and finds the journal she bought earlier that afternoon. Quietly, she tiptoes to the living room, slipping into his shirt when she finds it. In the kitchen, she curls up in a chair, grabs a pen, and opens the empty notebook.
Mulder … she writes on the first page. Then she turns to the next page, dates it, and begins writing.
There is a peace that comes in the early morning dark before dawn. I sit here, wrapped in your scent. Your shirt covers my body and is long enough to reach almost to my knees. Even here in my kitchen, two rooms away from where I left you sleeping, I can hear your breathing. I can feel you reach for me. You will wake soon. You will roll over in bed and my pillow will be cool and the lack of contact will force you awake. You will fear I’ve been taken again. You will come searching for me and find me and already I feel guilty because I have not yet caused you a fear that I know you will experience. But I cannot sleep and your own nights are so rarely peaceful that I could not lie there in what I already consider our bed and toss and turn while I wait for the sun to rise. I fear now to sleep. How many more times can I close my eyes before they will not open again?
What have we done? Why did we do this? Why did we cross that line, that sacred line we have silently maintained since the moment I shook your hand? Is this my penance, my proof to you that Ed Jerse meant nothing? Is this my own desires acting on my forced mortality? It wasn’t our first kiss. And my dreams, my hazy memories, tell me there has been something else before. But I cannot remember and to dwell on when it could have been opens up a flood of emotions that, if let loose now, will drown me. But tonight … tonight we continued what we began just a week ago in the hallway outside our office. Tonight, I let go and now … now I’m terrified to face you again. You are my everything. But to love you now only breaks both of our hearts. To love you now means that not only will we lose our friendship when this cancer eats me alive, but that I will have to watch you watch me die. I do not know if I can handle it. I do not know if you can. I want to love you. I want to fall into your arms and have you protect me from this menace inside my body, this evil force that threatens to consume my soul, but to be the focus of your passion, your scrutiny, and your love … it may be more than I can handle. I am dying. How can I help you live even as my life slips away?
He wakes and reaches for her and finds an empty pillow and cool sheets. It is only when he sees the faint light coming down the hall that he starts to breathe again. Still, she has left what he is already considering their bed and he knows that the distance she has placed between them is there to protect his heart as much as it is hers. Leaving her for a moment, he waits, listening for the sound of a smothered tear or the intake of an angry breath, until his desire to protect her outweighs everything else and he rises from bed, stopping only in the living room to pull on his boxer shorts.
Once, years ago, over wine and pizza, they’d danced badly to folk music with a pop twist. He’d made a comment about their lives and the bureau, and she’d burst into tears and he’d kissed away the sadness. Once, in a time he knew she didn’t remember, she’d pulled her lips away from his and invited him into her bed. He, being a desperate man in love, had followed willingly. He, being a coward, had left before she’d risen. They’d never spoken of it and he wondered if he had taken advantage of his previous knowledge of her body as he’d made love to her last night.
At sunrise, they would drive to Allentown, toward her own repressed memories and Penny Northern and a hope for a cure he didn’t dare cling to. In the morning, they would have to make the choice to push aside what had happened between them or to face it together.
By sunrise, he knows, Scully will have rationalized her fears into a tiny box. She will ask for time and space. Her fear of commitment to anything but their quest outweighs even his obsessive drive to commit himself completely to his passions.
The light of the kitchen is bright against his eyes and he blinks a few times. She looks up at his step and his eyes focus on the vibrant color of her hair and the pale of her skin and her now haunted blue eyes. She is being strong for him. But he also knows she is scared.
Last night, it had been his turn to ask for the folk music with a pop twist. He’d taken her hand and they’d danced – this time not so badly – and when the tears had streamed down his cheeks, she had been the one to kiss them away. This time, when their lips had parted he had been the one to invite her into his arms. He wondered about the stain on the couch cushions. He wondered if she knew that to him, she would always be the most beautiful woman in the world. He’d undressed her, as desperate to love her as she was to feel alive.
“You okay?” He asks, finally breaking the silence. It seems silly. No, she isn’t okay. She is tired and stressed and needs to make a decision about the kinds of drugs she will soon need to be pumping into her body in hopes of staying alive. After the tears they had shared only hours before, it was possibly the stupidest question he’d ever asked her.
“I’m fine, Mulder.”
The words cut, harsh and deep, right into his heart. He sighs and looks at her, mentally calculating the time it will take to drive the distance to Allentown. Can he handle the hours of uncomfortable silence?
“A little sore, actually.”
The comment catches him completely off guard and when he refocuses back on her, she is smirking.
“Sore?”
“Be proud of yourself, Mulder. The last time I had sex, it wasn’t nearly that … energetic.”
Her eyes suddenly shine with laughter and they both grin. He sits across the table from her and takes the pen from her fingers. “I meant it last night, Scully. Anything you need or want from me, I’m here. That includes … space.”
He expects her to pull away, but her fingers stay linked with his and she relaxes visibly.
“Are we okay?”
With a sigh, she shrugs. “Let’s get through today, okay? Today and tomorrow and see where it takes us.”
Nodding, he wraps his arms around her and kisses her neck. “That’s fair.” He smiles when she kisses him back and when they break for air, the tears are gone from her eyes. “I’m going to go home and get a fresh change of clothes. I’ll see you at the office.”
She touches his cheek and he smiles. One last kiss and he is gone and they are alone to face their tears, their fears, and the only sliver of hope that awaits them at the end of a drive to Allentown.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2009-04-13 02:08 am (UTC)He falls asleep first, his arm tightly around her, and she stares into the darkness and stops her walls from tumbling down. She cannot love this man. To love him and then die on him means to destroy him. This brought me to tears, babe. Honestly.
By sunrise, he knows, Scully will have rationalized her fears into a tiny box. She will ask for time and space. Her fear of commitment to anything but their quest outweighs even his obsessive drive to commit himself completely to his passions.
This is perfect, and it makes so much sense when you consider their unspoken understanding that distance equals the lack of potential to hurt each other. But what they don't realize is that distance can hurt as well.
Anyway, beautiful, I'd been looking forward to this the whole month, so I was so happy to read it.
P.S. The smut was secksy. rawrrrr. :)
*iz humbled*
Date: 2009-04-13 03:42 am (UTC)I'm rambling, but can't help it. These two do that to me.
Hands you tissues. I hate that I made you cry, but I'm glad I did. That was the point. ;-)
no subject
Date: 2009-04-13 02:07 pm (UTC)i liked this part too. <3
no subject
Date: 2009-04-13 02:29 pm (UTC)