Title: After the Afterglow Author: Mary Parker Rating: R, for scandalous situations Spoilers: "all things" and the baby arc Disclaimer: Yeah, neither of them are mine. They belong to each other, or Chris Carter and Fox and 1013. Whichever you like to think. Certainly no profit on my end. Summary: After falling madly into bed with Mulder (finally!), Scully has second thoughts. Of course. In the end, the sex was the easy part. The tension between them and the years of teasing had served as foreplay to accomplish what she had always agonized over as inevitable. The anxiety of the week before, when she had told him the procedure had failed again and they had lain in her bed fully clothed and barely touching, had vanished. Maybe nothing happens for a reason, she had said to him tonight, thinking of the non-existent baby and of Daniel and of her brief treacherous thought that maybe it was Mulder's fault. Mulder, in a rare moment of obtuseness, had failed to understand, but the evening had been pleasant. After tense expectant months, they were finally relaxed. At some point she had fallen asleep. Through a haze she felt strong arms lifting her, carrying her, laying her gently on the bed. She reached for him as he started to leave. "Stay with me a moment." He hesitated. "All right." He sat on the bed, lay down awkwardly behind her, held her as he had the week before. There were inches between their bodies. Drowsily she cuddled against him, roused a little by his hand over her stomach. She woke more feeling his erection against her back. Her body, seemingly always ready to react to Mulder, tingled and tightened. She moved his heavy hand to her breast, running his palm over her firming nipples. "Scully?" His fingers fluttered, uncertain. She rolled slightly to face him. In the moonlight, his pupils were large. He was trembling against her thighs. "Let's have sex, Mulder." "Are you awake?" he said wonderingly. "Am I awake?" She ran her fingernails over the bare skin where his shirt had rucked up. "I'm tired of pretending, Mulder. I'm just tired. I want you. Don't you want me?" He closed his eyes and swallowed. She let her fingers drift away from his body. When he spoke, his voice was husky. "More than anything, Scully." He was gentle, nearly worshipful, as he undressed her. Their bodies rolled against each other with a strange familiarity. The experience was satisfying, though to her it felt like a dream. They lay together panting until he was soft inside her and their heartbeats had slowed. She was restless. She traced the lines of his slack muscles, pressed a palm over the heat of his back. The sheets rustled as he stirred. "I love you," he mumbled. "I'm sorry." He had fished his crumpled t-shirt from the floor and folded it over the wet spot. She spent a quiet half hour fitting the contours of their bodies together and then the seams against her hips were too much. She rolled out of bed, passed a washcloth over her body in the cramped bathroom, and found her coat. "I'm not the same person," she heard herself to say to Daniel as she piloted the car through sparsely populated streets. There was nothing like an ex-lover to clue on in on fundamental truths. She had changed, and although the moment eluded her, and the catalyst, at least the substance of the upheaval was recognizable now. It was tension that drove her these days: intellectual, sexual, physical. She wasn't able to spend more than half an hour relaxing. There was the appeal of Mulder. There was the intensity, and her estrangement from the rest of the world. She couldn't locate the change. Her meeting of Mulder wasn't it, nor the night in the graveyard in the rain, nor the day she found herself in the hospital asking for a non-existent nurse. She remembered talking to an overdressed woman in a very wet bathroom about switches being flipped, but she hadn't done the flipping. Her experience was more of a slide, a moving sidewalk that had carried her from a dim world to a room filled with the brilliance that she had found was her love for Mulder. She would feel her occasional resentment as a counter-tension. These days she was all get-up-and-go. The treadmills relieved her on paperwork days, the resulting energy fueling her crusades. Ambition and determination had transmuted into this aimless driving force. She had thought of herself a shield once; now in her mind she was a bullet, a plough, a sleek sword slicing through deceit and injustice. Even her love was all tension. The greatest moment of the lovemaking had not been the orgasm, when she had floated on seas of chilled champagne while the gentle patient movements of his body made waves to rock her. No, she had loved him most fiercely during the bright clear moment just before release, at the giddy balance point. Now as she entered her own apartment in the dark she felt weary, uncertain. Too many scales tipped at once, the weight of accumulated moments crushing her. The high voltage jolt of lust relieved for the moment, her love was mellow. She was relieved that Mulder hadn't completely transformed her after all. There were still corners of her mind that urge and allowed an hour's soak in the tub, as now, when she longed for the cool green tiles and the clean white porcelain of her bathroom. But could she reconcile these quiet spaces with the desire that drew her to Mulder? He never settled down. Even in sleep his body twitched and fretted. Perhaps her yielding rendered her uninteresting; surely his love was intense and required the laser focus that all his other endeavours and interests merited. She could sense the precise outlines of her body, neatly confined in her skin, but Scully felt blurred. Mulder. She stripped down, contemplated a shower, decided she liked the last remnants of his sweat on her skin, and slid between cool sheets missing him. The curve of her body left a space for him, ample for his lanky frame, the space she knew he would occupy in her bed. What would he think, when the restless stirrings of his body woke him, or the strident beeping of his alarm clock, which she'd prudently paused to set? Would his mellowness reveal deep affection, or would he avoid her eyes at the office? Perhaps his gaze would be chilly, that icy pine-green glare that left frost on her stapler. She didn't think he'd understand waking up alone. Her panic ought to be easy to overcome, she thought, but she couldn't surrender her terror that everything was ruined now, a friendship lost in one moment of weary honesty. Uneasy, she flopped out of bed and folded herself into a chair in the living room, bare knees hooked over the armrests. She fumbled for the remote. Infomercials. Music specials. Late-night horror movie. Might as well, she thought. She had real zombies to compare to the ones stumbling around onscreen. The phone rang. She knew it was him. Who else? Her caller id and her voicemail were full of Mulder. She picked up the receiver. "Scully," she said. Calm, collected. Her heart thumped in contradiction to her voice. "You left?" he said quietly. She said nothing. "Was it that bad?" His tone was light, but she could sense his anxiety. "I figured we were both used to our own beds," she lied. She couldn't say she'd cut and run so he couldn't. She couldn't tell him that she was afraid to go forward and afraid to go back. They were both silent for a while, balancing on this precipice of their relationship. Scully watched the zombies. There was nothing she could say that wouldn't make it strange. More strange. "Well," he said at last, "I'm sorry I couldn't give you more than that." "More than an orgasm?" she said bluntly. "More than sex. A baby. A life. All those things I've taken from you." "Don't discount my free will, Mulder." She knew she was hurting him, truncating his self-castigating apologies this way. She wanted to shake herself, to break through her own defensive shields. "Sorry." That was a step. "For what?" He had that brooding tone that meant he was on a wonderful journey to the land of guilt and flagellation. What a pair of fuckups they had turned out to be. "I don't always respond well to sex," she said. "Oh no?" That had drawn him out a little. "Well, Scully, I admit my experience there is limited, but..." "Emotionally," she said. "I don't want this to screw everything up." "What everything?" HIs voice softened. "Scully, it's me. Do you think a kiss will destroy the world? My sources say no - the world hasn't ended yet. I'm not sure They care anymore." "It wasn't just a kiss, Mulder." "And this isn't a fairy tale, Scully. I'm not Prince Charming and I'm not a beast. There's no glass coffin this time, and no end-all curse on either of us. You think I won't respect you in the morning? You think I won't love you? All those years I was running because it was too much that I loved you. But the respect, and our partnership: you can't think that will change now." "But you changed me," she whispered. She felt overwrought, on the edge of desperate tears. "Scully." There were worlds in his name the way he said it, long histories of pain and tenderness. She sniffled and quieted. "Loved?" she asked, with only the vaguest tremor. "You know that." She did, she found. She had. He puffed a breath into the phone that was nearly a chuckle, as if he could hear her silent revelations. "Shouldn't it be me being illogical?" he asked wryly. She bristled, subsided, considered the sitation from his point of view. It was true that she had requested and he had gladly complied, and that if death, betrayal, and desire hadn't destroyed them, it was unlikely that sex would. In this case, the default frightening outcome was what she had wanted in the first place. "You've changed me too, Scully," he said, intruding on her thoughts in his accustomed way. "That's what" - he hesistated - "lovers do for each other. And to each other." She considered that. "I miss you," he said. His voice was tender. "But that isn't different from any other night." She put Mulder on a timeline in her head and tracked his evolution. Yes, he was different. More diffuse. More patient. Happier, perhaps, now that his worries about his sister were resolved. And he care about her, Scully, she saw, more than anything. She wondered when that had begun; it seemed to predate his closure about Samantha. "Speak to me, Scully." He was afraid of losing her. "I love you," she said, almost irrelevantly. "Mulder." "And your shoulder blades will ache with the imperative of wings," he said. She could tell he was quoting something from the way his Oxford-educated voice caressed the syllables. "What?" "Nothing. Happy new year." "It isn't January. Or" - she swung out of the chair to check the calendar in the kitchen - "Yom Kippur." "Feels like the end of something, though, doesn't it? And the beginning. At least, I hope that's not wishful thinking," he added in a suggestive tone. "It's good to know that sex turns you mauldin, Mulder." She cradled the phone in the curve of her shoulder and smiled. "There's my Scully," he said approvingly. "So, what's the battle plan?" "I'm going to bed," she said after a moment and a yawn. "So should you. You need the sleep. And then," she paused, "I'll see you in the office. I'm not ready to - I mean, there are things to consider. I think we should be cautious. Play this by ear. And I can't...it's a lot of habits to reverse so quickly." "No pressure," he said. "I can wait. God knows we both have some adjustments to make." She didn't want to hang up, but there was nothing left to say. "Good night, Mulder," she said, not letting herself go as far as a second "I love you." Small steps. Baby steps. He knew whether she told him or not. "Sweet dreams, Scully." His voice was like a kiss. She hung up the phone, turned off the television, and slid under her comforter with a smile still lingering at the corners of her lips.