#another art trade down! I need to learn self restraint

[videcoeur]

Haunted girl, haunted girl,

Who them hands belong to?

[jiskblr]

The Metaphysics of Magic Items

Every individual has channels of energy which flow through them, which collect, pool, and travel along lines which are very similar from one person to another, though not precisely equivalent. The field of magical items has for the most part been the field of manipulating those channels; early items were usually weapons and armor, which touch only on the most surface-level aspects, and our ability to create more sophisticated items advanced slowly in early times, because we did not possess a good understanding of the principles at work. In a quirk of history, the first channels we learned to manipulate effectively were the ones we know regard as the most idiosyncratic and sophisticated: rings. Rings interact not with the local pooling of energy, but with a deeper level of soul-stuff. This requires fine control and is only possible for the most powerful of spellcasters, but it does not involve systematic understanding of the local flows of energy, and so was separable from the rest of the field. The various bodily affinities were gradually understood in bits and pieces, with the first attempts working only for a single type of effect, such as bracers of armor, and usually only in their weakest form - even early rings are, while powerful, much less powerful than we now know is possible. Also early were potions and oils, which operate using the internal magic channels but in a sufficiently consistent way that a rough, very descriptive understanding, without much grounding in theory, allowed them to create a variety of effects operating along similar lines.

It was in the heart of the dwarven empire in the reformed days where magic was no longer verboten that the first systematic understanding of the individual's magic channels began to be achieved. The first treatises written concerned specifically the channels in the legs and feet, but even this was enough to galvanize the field of item creation: methods which had previously been developed for boots of speed and greaves of stealth were, with the benefit of this systematic understanding of a piece of the whole, expanded to accomodate greater power within three decades, and to expand to a much greater variety of effects within two centuries. From there, the systematization tackled the arms and hands, which went much slower than previously because of misunderstandings caused by rings, which were at that time believed to operate only if found in the traditional shape and location of a physical ring. The insight that they were not interacting with the local channels in the hands allowed scholars to more directly analogize the hands to the feet, with rapidly-productive results when the barrier of misunderstanding was overcome. The community of crafters which discovered these principles was initially a guild system which guarded their secrets closely, but the overall concept of interacting with local channels was not kept secret as effectively. For this reason, crafters in other regions discovered similar principles but applied to other parts of the body. The elvish carvers first found the channels in eyes and were particularly effective in creating sensory-enhancement techniques, and then later generalized to the head and face. The core torso proved more difficult to map, though it has not particularly proven difficult to use once it was mapped; scattered druidic traditions managed to map the waist, but the full torso wasn't understood except in the later-developing study where both dwarves and elves, as well as other communities catching up to them, achieved full understanding of the whole body's map. This eventually unified with the methods used by potion-brewers and other makers of consumable-effect items such as the feather token into an overall set of methods. These take a very skilled craftsman to master the full range of applications, but the theory is consistent and understood by most wizards.

To complete the set of common crafting specialties, let me quickly digress on the spell-like items. Scrolls are as old as wizardry and have been rediscovered repeatedly; they are a minor variant of the notation and stabilized spell that a wizard places in their spellbook. The wand was known relatively early in history, definitely present in Lantide and brought to our continent by expatriates, but their creation was not actively passed down by the elves, and the principles needed were lost during the magic purges of the early dwarven empires. It was only alongside the systemization of magic channels that their creation was rediscovered, and understood as the self-contained 'prepared snare' of magical energy that we now use to create them, which is a mixture of the basic scroll with some techniques used for weaponry, creating a final product which can be used by an apprentice caster, a non-mage crafter, or by anyone who chooses to train in their use, which is common among adventuring fixers. The new - and, we believe, better-developed - theories also laid the groundwork for the staff, which combines the aspects used for weapons, the variants on those structures used for wands, and some fine-grained patterning most similar to rings, and created a powerful, sophisticated extension of a wizard's magical networks which allows a skilled spellcaster a much greater range of spells and can be, in a very real sense, a prosthetic extension of the humanoid body - which is why, unlike almost all other magical adornments and tools, it can be recharged from their reserves. It will come as no surprise to my audience that I am a carver of staves, and while I know several other varieties from earlier in my career I truly believe staves are the pinnacle of the crafter-mage's art. Or, at least, they are for now - perhaps in coming centuries we will advance our crafts and make new and yet-more-marvelous types, as our precessors invented staves.

The overall theory of items and the 'bodily affinities' which shape who makes things and why rests on the basic principle that a magic item functions by manipulating the magical channels of the one who uses it. There is a continuum, of course; weapons touch only very lightly, armor slightly more, and sophisticated items can be made to minimize the entanglement, the 'unaffilious' items. But the greater variety of wearable items all use close bonds to a particular part of the network, and have their effects by altering that network to draw on the spells and effects prepared in the item. Wearing two items which try to bond to the same part of the network will, at best, make one work at slightly-reduced capacity and the other not at all; the modified network created by one effect is the wrong 'shape' for the other to bond to it - unless, of course, one of the two has been crafted to not require it, but that is much more involved and takes, for a crafter practiced with both types, twice the time and materials. In principle there should be dozens or even hundreds of possible network sections which an item could bond to, but for the most part the modern crafter divides them into a standard set of twelve. While a few of these have clear delineations, such as the eyes, it is important for the student to note that most of these are essentially arbitrary. It is a fact that the channels in the vicinity of the waist are well-suited for effects which enhance the physical characteristics: strength, endurance, speed, agility. But while any system of crafters which developed independently but with the same knowledge base would make something very much like belts of giant strength, they would not necessarily call them "belts"; they might instead make breeches of giant strength and consider the lower torso part of a different affinity. The virtue of our standard set of twelve, however, is that it is widespread and covers almost all crafters who trade with us. If you create an item with one of our standard twelve affinities, you can be assured that it will interfere solely with other items made to use that same affinity. If you instead make breeches and make use of the channel segments lower on the body, you may have created an item which interferes both with the waist and with the knees and lower legs.

There is, however, reason to think this problem is not eternal. As our theoretical understanding grows more precise, it seems likely that we will find that some of these affinities can be subdivided, allowing more than twelve to be worn simultaneously. We know for certain the affinities are not perfectly interfering, from the art of 'kytoncrafting'. Like many other niche crafting methods, its origin is distasteful, coming from torture cults which revere the extraplanar kytons. But the methods are, when used with informed consent and restraint, ethical and fascinating. Kytoncrafted adornments embed into the flesh, interfering with the circulatory system of blood, and life-force directly, rather than primarily with the magical channels. The result creates wounds which never heal properly until removed, even with the aid of divine healing, but they do not interfere with traditional items utilizing the same 'body affinity', so that, for example, one may wear boots of speed together with ankle piercings of the spider, and have both function perfectly. To date, all attempts to refine this to remove the lasting injury have made them more difficult to create and embed, ultimately approaching the same end state as an unaffilious item. But it gives reason for optimism nonetheless; one boundary can be breached, and with time we can breach more.

[zi-tales]

Interview: Phecda

1) Father

My mother sang praises of him. I had nothing to go off other than this. At the very least, I should have heard of him in my time living in Nashaba. Someone looking for my mother, asking what happened. Yet, I have heard nothing. Years of silence. I am under the impression perhaps he is too afraid to know the truth. A spineless fool like that never deserved my mother, and will not recieve any respect of mine. He could be dead for all I care.

2) Mother

Her name was Najma. In the village, she was an incredibly skilled huntress, and the one designated to travel to places like Nashaba or Alshuba and establish trading relationships. This made her worldview much broader, and thus much more dangerous. The village was always hellbent on maintaining tradition, and keeping things as they were without outside influence. And yet, my mother respectfully continued to push this conviction, always bringing medicine, or magics, or what have you even at risk of trouble. Beyond this, she was a trainer for the village militia, apparently known as a skilled duelist for years. So, yes, my mother was an intrepid woman, and an incredible fighter. I only hope to be as accomplished.

3) Childhood

My childhood was full of isolation and self-restraint to not interact much. My mother's story for me was being an adoptee from the dunes, and to hide the fact that my ears were the only real tell for my abnormal status. Since the risk of someone noticing such a distinct trait was very high, I had to live mostly alone. This did not bother me much, as I accepted it as a norm eventually. My mother insisted we would move away at some point, so I shouldn't bond with anyone strongly. Until I was... I am unsure. 15? 14, perhaps? I believed it would happen easily. At around that time, I was made aware of our village's distinct xenophobic tendencies, after the subject never appearing until then. That was when I realized the implication of my existence, and when I began to question things. This prompted my mother to accelerate what training she could of vocational things like hunting and fighting, although she didn't manage to do it enough before I slipped up. Perhaps I am rambling a bit. Things happened so long ago, and it is a... A haze.

4) Hometown

My mother's actions and presumed death seemed to have caused a large rift between people within the village. She was influential due to her role as the sole link to the outside world, and without her, the connections fostered were severed. While I was expecting a decline from this, I did not expect self-destruction. No one seems to want to talk about what happened to my mother, either, so I cannot even say for certain that she perished the night I fled. I simply assume so, so I do not spend the trances distracted. It was not somewhere I would call home, regardless. Most people kept their distance from one another, and it was a place of quiet reverence and obeying the law. I cannot say I miss it.

5) Time as an Assassin

The Asterius League was truly a band of interesting folk. Individuals like Arista and Eltanin used to be such... Role models, I suppose? To see them fall so far... It continues to disturb me. We trained with a distinct intimacy that bonded us together as contract killers with meaning, with purpose. Constant reminders that we were not murderers, but forces by which to shape the nation, guided by the many sources of influence. I hardly see killing as a sport, but it comes close. It is an art form, in a way. Every combat is a blank canvas waiting to be used, to observe every detail of the opponent. To kill perfectly, with grace and professionalism. These tenants separated us from the shady, unwashed masses within the Ahlbaali. Anyone can kill for money. We could kill with unparalleled expertise. There were elders, instructors, and acolytes as the organizational structure. My mentor and the man who took me in from the dunes was Errai, an expert marksman and venerable warrior. He taught me everything my mother didn't, like the hidden elegance of Common, how to infiltrate, and anything else that assisted being a true killer. Although, he despised the title of killer. It was far too inelegant for what we were doing. Am I rambling again? Please, let me know. I do not often talk of these subjects, and it can get very messy for me.

6) Transitioning to normal life

Frankly, I was hardly an assassin. I hadn’t ascended ranks past acolyte, which usually gave you the authority to actually take assignments independently. I had taken support roles in contracts with veterans like Errai, but I was not truly an assassin. Simply trained in the disciplines of one. Regardless, losing the Derelict as my home and being alone did force me to carve out a name for myself in Nashaba almost immediately, although contacts of Errai’s recognized me and helped as best they could to establish me as a mercenary or courier. From then, it was a matter of self-sufficiency and living day to day in the organized chaos of the Ahlbaali capital. I was used to the culture already, only had to adjust to the lack of companions and the discrimination behind being a half-elf. People don’t trust knife-ears as much, I suppose. At least I’ve rectified that these days.

7) Sircius

Ebmeros is innately a good man, despite some shrewd behavior and hot-headed mannerisms.  Truly, I have never met a man with more insistence on hiding his own nature than Ebmeros. He is clearly a father at heart, and yet, refuses to let this out due to what I can only assume to be fear of attachment. His fixation on what he can lose seems to be almost overwhelming, although I suppose coming from myself, I cannot begin to criticize this. I have lost what I can, and simply seek retribution. He still stands to suffer, but I intend to stand by him to prevent that as long as I can. Other than this, the ferocity by which he commands his offensive magic is incredible, if only ever disappointing when attempts to put individuals to sleep consistently fails.

8) Roc

A warrior from another time that I incidentally discovered in an Ahlbaali ruin. I can say I have thought of many things to find within the dunes, but a companion is not one of them. The apparent pain of her history forces me to be cautious when I feel a need to inquire about it, as I am one who prefers privacy of those matters myself. Nonetheless, as it does not interfere with her ability as a fighter, I do not plan to push the subject. That being said, I am highly curious what possible circumstances could lead to such a state of being, and wonder myself how I will eventually cope with being in my own accursed state upon expiry. I should consider asking Roc about that, ah?

9) Eleniel

Eleniel... I hope she realizes what she is capable of. Her capacity for goodness is matches only by her desire to martyr herself in the name of personal redemption, to the point where it can be easily construed as suicidal tendency. I worry for her. Eleniel is proof to me that there are indeed selfless individuals in this world, and how dangerous such a devotion to those ideals is. While I cannot say I envy any such obligation, nor can I begin to comprehend the mental fortitude necessary to constantly seek charitable action, I respect her unerring faith in her dogma. It is a rarity in these times, truly.

10) Herself

What do I think of myself? What an odd question. I do not reflect on myself often. To do so feels vain, and my time would likely be spent better elsewhere. I suppose I am... Learning to be normal. So long have I been accustomed to being a wolf of sorts. Everything is a potential meal. I have to negotiate, push myself, ignore pleasantries. Efficiency, displays of skill, et cetera. I live every moment to advance as a person, or something of that nature. And now, I do not know. I continue to try and socialize, which is incredibly alien to me. I have much to learn yet still, clearly. The killing arts should not be all that matters in this life.

11) The Future

I am unsure. I seek to hone my skill with a bow to an impeccable fault, at the least. Perhaps even with a blade, if I can balance my practice that well. Perhaps I am to find a worthy successor to the Umbra? Re-establish the Asterius League once I’ve killed the remnants? Or maybe, I go back to Nashaba, and return to my humble life in the sands? Options wax and wane in appeal always. Nothing ever goes to plan anyway. For all I know, I may learn to romance someone, and I settle down and start a family like Belzer and Veii. I merely hope I am not alone in all of it.

12) The Vermilion King

Normally, I would not put him under concerns of mine. His dogma and apparent ambitions seem to fall more in line with something the churches should combat, not someone like me. But, he holds Eltanin in his employ, which speaks to his shrewdness. On that virtue, I seek the Serpent’s head, and so I may as well help topple this Vermilion King’s schemes. As for him as an opponent... I generally don’t fear dying. He is no exception. Whatever bleeds can die, and if he is a being of blood, then the statement remains relevant all the same.

13) The Umbra

The Umbra is, in short, mine. Only mine. I would not hand it off willingly to anyone unless I believe they will wield it responsibly. The latent power in this bow cannot be underestimated in the slightest. It burrows deep into your soul. Like cruel tendrils that drill into your heart, feeding off of you, but pulsing energy back. We are one. A single entity whose bond continues to grow stronger. It is strange, surely, and I am well aware it will devour me in the end, but... It is not evil, necessarily. It feels akin to an animal. Its instinct is to keep its wielder alive, and only devour them when they no longer matter. If this is my fate, so be it. As long as I make it worthwhile, I have no issues with a cursed death.

14) Malerus I only hope we do not have to tamper with such dangerous materials ever again. Resurrection is one thing, sacrifice is another. Rellus should not have had to make that decision.

[somekindofseizure]

When the Ink Dries Part V

Rated: Explicit

Notes: Thank you @icedteainthebag for spending immense amounts of time working this through with me and for being brilliant.  @gazeatscully and @h0ldthiscat for the hugely helpful early stage beta’ing that helped get it to this point.

And to all of you who’ve been so supportive and amazing.

Parts I-IV can be read here

* * * * * *

Chapter 11

The strident echo of Stella’s boot heels grew humbler come late afternoon as they clicked down the damp concrete sidewalks of London’s shopping districts.  All morning long, she’d walked arm-in-arm with Scully in a mood seemingly unscathed by pain and weather best described as a permanent cold sweat.  But now Scully could feel Stella’s arm growing heavy, leaning a little rather than leading, and beneath the buttery leather of Stella’s off-day civilian jacket was a tightly clamped fist, the humps of four bracing fingers visibly knuckling the black calfskin.  Scully asked if she needed another painkiller.

“One last stop,” was Stella’s indirect answer.

“Are you sure because -”

And then Scully saw it.  Secretive and svelte, a door tucked trenchlike down four wrought-iron steps--a place that looked as likely to sell James Bond his spygear as it did his girlfriends their racy underwear.  Scully had been watching Stella fight to feel like herself all day, and one look at this shop said it was meant to be the pièce de résistance in that carefully drawn battle plan.   

“Nevermind,” she said.

The first time Stella ever suggested they go shopping together, they’d just arrived in Chicago, one of their early girls’ weekends when they’d managed to make their paths cross amidst conferences and con artists (psychics, was Mulder’s word for them).  A  wicked midwestern wind had whipped past as they stepped out of the taxi and Stella promptly announced that she hadn’t packed appropriately.  A bit of a rash declaration for someone who’s just arrived, Scully had thought, a bit like someone who, say, wanted to go shopping.  In an effort to act fast, she’d offered to sacrifice up her own warm coat.

“Don’t be silly, what’ll you wear then?” Stella had asked as she slipped her shoes off and claimed the bed closer to the window.  She liked to control the amount of light that got in.  Which, during sleeping hours, was none at all.

“Your trench is fine for me.”

“No, the weave is too flimsy.  Wasn’t built for this.”

“We don’t have anywhere we really have to go anyway.”

“All weekend?” There’d been an unusual lilt in Stella’s voice that Scully disconcertingly identified as glee.  She’d kept her back conveniently turned to Scully’s pouting as she swanned into the bathroom.  “Call down and ask the concierge where the nice shops are.”

Scully had closed her eyes and thought of the circumstances in which she usually went shopping: when a barbecue stain on her favorite shirt valiantly fought off a third tour of spot treatment, when the soles of her shoes disappeared into puddles of mysterious green acid, when she accidentally lost weight on Mulder’s diet of sarcasm and chewable seeds.  Shopping did not represent release or self-expression or feminine bonding to her; it was a pilgrimage of debilitating necessity, a quest guaranteed to humble and shame her into austerity until the next time it needed doing.  

Huffing loudly as she disappeared into the sound-proof vacuum of the rotating doors, she’d trudged out of the Chicago hotel that afternoon a martyr.  But a few shops, a glass of wine, and a piece of cake later (cake!), and she was following Stella in and out of jangling doors with the slightly giddy buzz of a first-time rebel in a John Hughes film.   

Now they were about to enter a lingerie shop decidedly more slick film noir than Breakfast Club.  Scully found herself holding her breath a little as she opened the door for Stella.  Stella took a step in and folded the umbrella behind the door.  The clerks stopped what they were doing and smiled demurely, folded their hands patiently across their bellies.  It was as if the Queen of England had just walked in.  Did Stella come in here that frequently?  Or was it just a trade secret the shopgirls had, a way of spotting a certain type of woman?  

Once, in New York, she’d picked out a pair of jeans for Scully without her even trying them on.  Scully had stood in the art deco hotel bathroom, pulling them up with the tags still on, stunned as she zipped and ran her hand over the normally denim-defiant curve from her waist to her ass.  If she were patient enough for scheduling to permit, she’d realized, she might never have to suffer the agony of buying jeans--or anything else--again.  All she’d have to do was keep a running list of things she needed in the back of her mind and save all her shopping for Stella’s weekends.

“Would you mind that?” she’d asked.

“No.  But the list-keeping is part of your problem, you know.”

“What do you mean?”

“You tell yourself you need something too many times, it’ll start haunting you.”

“That your big shopping advice for me?”

Stella had come into the bathroom for a little bottle of body lotion from the countertop.  Scully’s suit was hung over the back of the door.  

“My advice is stop buying up a size.  You’re not going to grow into anything.”

She’d swatted Scully’s bottom on her way to the minibar.

Wherever they went, they always visited at least a couple stores.  Stella would shoot withering glances at snot-nosed salesgirls while accepting their free glasses of champagne, criticize craftsmanship at twenty feet through a tinted window, effortlessly translate sizes from US to UK to Euro and back again.  “You’ll get the hang of it,” she’d tell Scully, but Scully knew the implications of this were false.  She’d never known Stella to, say, flip through a copy of Vogue, had never actually heard her entertain fashion as a topic of conversation.  It wasn’t a learned skill for her.  Some combination of confidence, pragmatism and hedonism had bred (among other things) a shopping savant in Stella Gibson.

And the clerks in the posh lingerie shop knew a master when they saw one.  Scully watched them bat their eyelashes in Stella’s direction, biting their tongues with admirable restraint, knowing their help was neither needed nor wanted.  Scully wondered how they even found the time to get ready for work--each one of them made up like Brigitte Bardot in the role of a French maid, little black dresses and heavy eyeshadow, veritable mission statements across their well-brassiered chests regarding the pursuit of fantasy.  She felt compelled to stay close on Stella’s heels this far from realm and country, but that meant being included in the glow of their interest.  Could they pick out the people who didn’t belong just as well?  She began to fidget, play with her hair, clear her throat.  A bell rang out relief and the Bardots turned their heads in unison, a kickline of painted pouts.  The new customer paused under the doorway and shook water out of her hair with her fingertips.

“Is it properly raining now?” asked Bardot Number Three and Scully watched the customer smile and answer, but her mind saw something else entirely.

She’s in her grade school camp t-shirt, slightly preoccupied with her bralessness.  Mulder stands soaking wet at her door, nervous, tall as a tree without her heels on.  She’s thinking she should go change, grab a sweatshirt, but it seems presumptuous that she’d need to, or vain, or overly demure, or maybe she’s just too curious what he’s doing here to take the time...

Scully turned back to Stella, who had set her sights on a deep indigo piece of satin and was shoving it under her arm for future reconsideration.  Then she picked up a simple black balconette bra, unadorned and unpadded, convent attire by this brand’s standards, and handed it over her shoulder to Scully without looking.  

“Stop following me around and go try this on.”

Scully stepped into the bordello lighting of the dressing room, yanked open the black velvet curtain and pulled it shut behind her.  It was more formidably weighted than she’d expected it to be, rooted like a native jungle plant, waving the past away as it welcomed her into its midst.   She hung her coat on a hook, feeling slightly on edge, but she had yet to regret buying anything Stella had picked for her.  Neither, for that matter, had Mulder, she recalled.  One button on her sweater and he’s taking a pair of stilettos out of the box in awe, another button and he’s smoothing the wool felt of a pencil skirt over her hips as she marvels barefoot at its perfect length.  

She began to move more quickly to shake the memories off, a driver who’s suddenly concluded she’s being tailed.  She tore the sweater over her head half-buttoned and her long hair fell in a mess around her face.  Slightly breathless, she grabbed the bra off its hanger, glanced in the mirror to see if she’d lost him.

His mouth is on her chest and she is taking off her t-shirt, the waves in her hair multiplying exponentially with every moment he stares up at her...

The bra seemed to clamber of its own will up onto her torso and she did the rest, quietly fastening her grip on the present moment as she tightened the straps, pinching each cup like the edge of a piece of spinning pottery, determined not to be spooked off course.  Her hand automatically went over her belly-button, a tic she had at mirrors that Mulder sometimes teased her about, but he wasn’t there.

Yes, he is.  He is holding her from behind, a hand on her breast and she is breathless…

Her throat suddenly tightened and her tongue went as thick as the curtain, feet sinking into the floor like quicksand.   The air became too thick to breathe.  Her skin boiled but her fingers froze, and her hands tingled as they thawed against the mirror.  Leaning forward, she looked away from the surface, sought the solace of reason--panic attack, panic attack.

But his hand is here, tight…

Anger and terror swirled in her belly as she pictured herself stuck there overnight and forever, becoming one with the flora like the Amazonian curtains and dim lighting, forgotten and forsaken, and she tried to suck in more air but his hand--

“What’s taking so long?”

Scully tried to answer, but her mouth had gone dry, her teeth just beginning to fall into a rhythmic chatter.  

“Dana?”

She managed to swallow and some saliva flowed again.  The word came out hardened with effort.

“Yeah.”

The curtain opened with a sharp thwap, and in the mirror Scully could immediately see understanding scrawled in the ballpoint blue ink of Stella’s eyes.  The tension in her shoulders began to release and her ankles wobbled free as Stella bent creakily to the floor and handed Scully her sweater.  Scully held it up against her chest like a shield and Stella snapped open the back clasp of the bra.  

“There,” she said softly, pushed the straps down Scully’s arms a few inches.

“I couldn’t breathe.”

Scully could see the effort it took Stella to lie.

“I was off on the size, probably.”

Scully nodded.

“Too tight.”

Scully thanked her the way she knew Stella liked her thanks best--quietly, refracted through as many insignificant elements as possible.  It was exactly how they’d looked at each other in Ed’s psych ward bathroom, surrounded by 1940s kitchen-appliance-green tile and maniacs.  There, in that pause, was the tiny satin ribbon of intimacy between them, a tight little bow, pulled evenly in both directions, a knot sewn securely through the middle.

“I’ll be waiting out there,” Stella said.

And when Scully came out, Stella was standing behind another customer at the register, true-to-form, as though nothing had happened.  The violet piece of lingerie was now out from under her armpit and splayed fondly over two hands.  Scully cleared her throat, relieved to have a lecture to offer.

“I thought you said you weren’t interested,” she said.

“I’m not interested in the doctor.  I didn’t say I wasn’t interested in sex, period.”

“You’re not exactly in fighting shape.”

“I take offense to that.”

Bardot Number Two was wrapping and stickering a set of garters with the speed and gravity of a beknighting.  

“You’ve got hairline fractures that could become clean breaks,” Scully pressed.  

“I promise, I’ll tell them to be gentle.”

Scully lowered her voice to a modest decibel.

“When was the last time you asked a guy to go softer?”

Stella laughed, a low, evil chuckle that meant never and you know it.

“Why do you assume it’s going to be a man?”

Scully tried not to sound too curious, too invested.

“Aren’t they usually... these days?”

“Usually and unmemorably,” Stella murmured.  

They both shuffled a little closer to the register as the customer ahead finished up.  Bardot took the purple thing from Stella and gave her best now-here’s-a-woman-who-knows-how-to-buy-underwear hum.

“Sorry, I know you don’t want to hear it,” Scully said.

“On the contrary, Dana,” Stella said.  “You know I like it when you play doctor.”

Bardot’s eyelashes twitched a couple times.  Only Stella could scandalize someone who sold crotchless panties for a living.  

“Anyway, I would be remiss in my duty if I didn’t say it,” Scully continued, swallowing her warning with a lick of her lip, scratching her scalp in quiet defeat.  She’d have all day to negotiate exactly how long Stella was going to wait before she started taking strangers to bed.  She’d rather do it without an audience.

“It’s not for me,” Stella said with an exasperated sigh. “It’s for you.”

Her eyes twinkled with mischief, her hand out to the cashier as the receipt chattered into existence.

“For Mulder, rather.  He deserves a little something for letting me borrow you on such short notice, don’t you think?  Why are you looking at me like that?”

And that’s when Scully started to cry.

 *

 The late afternoon light fills their bedroom with a penny jar haze, the sun picking up speed as it rolls into their old house and then spins to a stop on the stuffy closet floor where Scully is seated.  She’s wearing a pair of faded blue track shorts, baking on a peel of of wood floor turned Mediterranean orange as the panels make stripes on the bottoms of her thighs like a beach chair.  It feels like summer inside.

 Outside, it’s light-jacket autumn, a day meant for reading with your head in someone’s lap, a Golden Retriever-led jog, taping leaves into notebooks.  It’s the kind of day that represents the occasional success of the universe despite its many known faults--the kind of day you’d feel lucky to get if it happened to be your birthday.  But Mulder hasn’t acknowledged the concept of luck in a long while, and Scully’s universe has been narrowed to the confines of their house’s termite-gnawed walls, its moth-infested closets like pock-marked moons round every corner.  The things she needs to see die and be reborn are all here in her home.

 They have a longstanding tradition on his birthday that he can talk to her about any one topic, anything he wants, for any length of time, and no matter how boring or ridiculous she finds it, she may not shut him down, ask him to stop, even politely change the subject until twelve midnight of the fourteenth.  It began after a few years of Scully’s watching him mope through cakes and picnics and concerts, feeling like a failure as he willed the day to be over with.  She had always felt deeply responsible for the success of people’s birthdays and he seemed to deeply relish hating his; this put them, as always, at a crossroads.  

 “You think you’re the only adult in the world with a birthday?” she’d ask crossly sometime around September twenty-eighth, the time of year she’d begin suggesting possible plans.  Sports events and restaurants, desserts splashed up with promises of lewd frosting-themed side-events--none of it welcomed.  

 “Mortality and unmet expectations, I get it,” she’d say.  “We’ve all learned to deal with it.”

 “I’ve hated it since I was a kid, though,” he’d say with an edge of competitiveness in his voice.

 When he finally told her what would make him happy, it was an accident, a bit of snark during his morning slideshow.

 “Come on, Scully, act like it’s my birthday and humor me,” he’d said.  

 Yes.  She would humor him.  Come October thirteenth.  

 Initially, Mulder had doubted her ability to follow through on her offer, even for one day.  But Scully proved herself that first year, regarding the eight lives of octopuses, no less (an obvious test).  Her low tolerance for pseudoscience was outweighed by her determination and respect for birthdays; she’d nodded patiently with her best Red Riding Hood face, every so often asking a relevant question, and if Mulder could tell she was faking interest, he didn’t complain.  Maybe it was that he liked her suffering for him, or maybe he was just that good at deluding himself - but either way, she knew he knew it meant she loved him enough to do it.  And that, she would have lectured if given the opportunity, was the very point of a birthday.  

 After the success of that first octopus birthday, Mulder was sold.  He spent the next October and the next making lists on the back of napkins and magazines in waiting rooms, carefully narrowing his options so as to choose wisely, make the most of his chance to fill her brain with the best of the nonsense that inhabited his own.  Over the years, Scully perfected a series of false reactions.  Last year, when he revealed the morning-of that he’d chosen something “cosmic,” she’d tittered cheerfully about Mercury in retrograde and Venus in her rising house.  Astronomy, he’d corrected, you know, science, and she’d squealed science?  Is it MY birthday? as he buried her in a smattering of toothpaste kisses.   

 Specifically, the topic was sun outages:  the phenomena of communication disruption during periods following the vernal and autumnal equinoxes, when the sun’s apparent path puts it between Earth and a satellite, the power of its radiation hoarding and burying the signals.  It could be happening, he said, right then.

 “Imagine, Scully,” he said with typical Mulderian awe.  “How powerful that is.”

 And for the first time since they’d begun their tradition, Scully almost failed.  She folded her arms across her chest, leaned back on the arm of the couch.  Rain was pounding the roof and the house reeked of pizza as Mulder idly pulled at her socks.  The day was almost over, she was almost in the clear.  He had, of course, spoken of many more far-fetched things than solar episodes, but this was science and she, a scientist.  It sounded fake to her.  He leaned forward as she struggled to control her right eyebrow during the part about the effect of such outages on the Bombay Stock Exchange.  

 “You--should see--your face,” he laughed.

 Really, but no, really she asked over and over, squinting and dubiously cocking her chin, and she learned that the only thing that delighted him more than her succeeding at her game was losing it.  She was subjected to a punishing foot massage, wherein she moaned exaggeratedly when he squeezed a good spot.  He mimicked her, making silly noises back.  Each time she made her sound, she felt it originate a little lower down in her body, and then heard his response a little further up, and soon he was kissing her neck and sucking her earlobe and telling her she was the best girlfriend in the history of the world.

 “Mm, I think you’ve found your topic for next year,” she told him.

 “Hard science,” he mumbled and she didn’t even mind the wordplay when he used that voice and put his hand on her waist.  It had been a hard year but a very good day.

 By the following year, Mulder’s depression had deepened with the same steadfast intensity he applied to all things.  She requested the day off anyway.  Their tradition would revive him, and if he couldn’t get off his office chair, she’d spend it in his lap purring at him while he talked about forest fairies or vampires or anything really.  As the day approached, he drew no lists on napkins, gathered no topics.  Instead, he made clear his wish not to acknowledge another year’s passing at all.  And come this morning, he banned her from so much as taking the ice cream cake out to thaw.  

 He doesn’t want her attention but she can’t leave because it’s his birthday.  He’s given her no choice but to spend this perfect autumn day off like an accident, a misfiring smoke alarm or a snow flower, and now she sits with her legs crossed as she reaches into the closet and roots out the rot, makes piles she hopes will somehow make their life grow come spring.  The leafy breeze momentarily muscles its way into the room, mulches the smell of her cotton-distilled sweat as it licks the underside of her hairline and the creases of her thighs, reminds her just how ripe she is--twenty seven hours since her last shower and four months past picking.  She swallows the fresh perspiration off her lip, sinks a little deeper into the floor.  She’s lonely and sweaty and Mulder is unshaven and in another room that might as well be another continent.

 This is the state of things when she comes upon a man’s toiletry bag buried under a heap of shoes she doesn’t wear anymore, an archaeological strata that places it somewhere around the year they bought the house.  She remembers Mulder used to keep something like this in the office for emergencies--the same place she kept her lipstick and sometimes a plastic egg of cheap pantyhose.  The idea is bitterly funny now, of Mulder having ever cared that much about shaving, or for that matter, she about pantyhose.  They have both stopped even turning the lights on in the bathroom most of the time.

 Thin rolls of dead animal skin peel off into her lap like a bad sunburn and she almost tosses it directly into the ‘out’ pile, but there’s a vague whiff of sentiment about it.  And what doesn’t have sentimental significance to Mulder?  He is a walking collection of grudges and past associations, a pantry closet full of expired tea bags and spices still holding onto their spot on the shelf in case of the future.  It is only the present he undervalues.  This is the tiny, spiteful part of her that wants to throw the bag out anyway--the part that has turned her nostalgic as well.  There are certain bottles in the bathroom that remind her of him, entire drawers of her dresser, types of chocolate bars and bottles of wine and dozens of songs she’s taken out of daily rotation.  She keeps the kit in her lap, knows by now that these little spasms of cruelty pass quickly.  She unzips it as she gives herself time to determine its fate kindly.

 There are razor blades and a brush and a dark blue velvet-coated box.  Its color is doubled, tripled, quadrupled in depth by the clamoring reflective surfaces around it, though the edges of the blades have gone dull from years of sifting against thick leather and a closet floor.  It’s a color she might buy a sweater in to match her eyes, a classic soft-edged cube that snaps open and shut along a gold stripe, jaws threatening fingers like an alligator.  The diamond it holds is modest in size though it shames the silver razor blades in luster, twinkling like a star in the sun.  At first, she feels nothing, assumes it’s something he’s inherited, that it has nothing to do with her, an artifact.  But when she turns it in her fingers, she sees an inscription inside the band.   “S.  My partner always.  M.”

 And then all the dust in the room is in her throat at once and she begins to cough, a single and then a series, a speeding treadmill of hacking she can’t seem to slow.  She snaps the box shut and holds it tight in her fist as she moves to the bathroom, unable to drop it as she splashes cold water on her face with one hand and sips like a desert traveler right from the faucet, choking and spitting when it won’t go down.  She is still doubled over the sink, catching her breath, when Mulder appears in the mirror over her shoulder like a phantom.  She wipes her mouth with the neck of her grey t-shirt and notices the ears of dark sweat all over it.  She becomes acutely aware of her shorts riding up her ass.  These are things he might have liked sometime, but now he’s here for his ibuprofen or to pee, and she’s self-conscious about how she looks.

 Except he doesn’t excuse himself or reach for the medicine cabinet.  He raises his eyebrows in concern.  This still happens, where she’s still aware of the stubborn and unconditional love between them, but the moments have become less frequent and more ephemeral.  So she tries to hold on to this one with the grip of her eyes, a muscle once taut and toned from use in their partnership, now a bit atrophied.

 “You okay?” he asks.

 She nods.

 “Dusty in there.  Should take a Benadryl when you do that.”

 And he turns to go.

 “I was cleaning,” she says.  This alone, when he was himself, would have started a conversation.  Mulder rushing to her piles, quick to make sure she hasn’t discarded anything he considers important, which is everything.  Was everything.

 “I know.”  He’s already down the hall.  She’s alive.  She doesn’t require CPR.  He doesn’t realize yet the stakes are actually much higher than that.  

 “I found something.”  

 She can tell he’s heard the urgency in her voice in the way he looks over his shoulder.  No signs of extraterrestrials here, just a velvet box held out in her open palm.  She doesn’t care about the ring, not really, but she needs it, is counting on it, to get some answers.  

 Still he seems unruffled, saunters back with the mild interest of someone who’s just spotted a spider, still deciding whether to kill or it save it.

 “What is this?” she asks.

 He sniffs, both lips folded into his teeth, then pops them out.

 “Come now, Scully, you haven’t been out of the FBI that long.”

 “You know what I meant.  When did you buy it?  Were you planning to give it to me?”

 “A year and a half, two years ago,”  he sighs.  And yet, at some point, he sat in some jeweler’s shop, discussing the circumference of her finger with a swooning saleswoman.   Is it this small?  Or more like this?  No like this, but it’s slender.  I don’t know, I’m torn, she’s very small but she has strong hands.

 “But then this stuff came up.”

 He always refers to it this way, his depression, like it’s a case or an event, a busy calendar, and not like something he has to own and admit to.  She licks her lips, shakes her head.

 “I… don’t know what to say,” she says.

 “Guess I’m glad I haven’t asked then.”

 “That’s not what I meant,” she says, eyes up, glare powered by the red circles forming on the apples of her cheeks.  She is angry, not embarrassed now, and she hopes he damn well knows the difference.

 “Mulder, ‘this stuff’ isn’t a thing that’s going to just go away.  You have to address it, let people help you.”

 Let me help you, is what she really wants to say, but say that and she might as well chase him from the room.

 “That’s not what it is!”

 He can’t even say the word.

 “What is it then, Mulder?”  

 It’s not just August now, it’s August inside a volcano, August on Mars, and the sweat beads even faster on her cheeks, sends rivulets running down her sides and the back of her calves, but she doesn’t care.  Whether he still likes it, whether it’s his birthday, whether she should have showered, whether she should be ashamed.  This is the closest she’s come to solving the case in months and the only thing she cares about is not going home with an empty report.

 “What--if not depression--could be so powerful you’d change your mind about that?”

 “You want to get married, I’m sure there are plenty of guys better suited who’d be willing.  Still got your looks, Scully.”

 Before she can hear him finish her name, she throws the box at the wall like it’s something she’s trying to break; neither of them grants it so much as a glance when it lands on the floor in one piece.

 “You know I don’t give a shit about that, Mulder.  I have never asked you for a ring.  But I am asking you for us.”

 “I’m fine.  We’re fine.”

 “No.  You’re not and I’m something you put at the back of a closet and forget about,” her voice is cracking now and she lowers it in order to glue it back together.  “When was the last time you looked at me--”

 “I’m looking at you right now--”

 “Talked to me, really talked to me--”

 “Stop it, Scully.” A sense that it’s coming.

 “Fucked me.”

 He nods, bites his bottom lip for an extended second, eyes coming into a scowl, vaguely self-righteous and jealous, and she feels a single cold tear steal down her cheekbone like an angry runaway out a window.

 “That’s what it’s about,” he says.

 Scully breathes deeply, a slight relief rippling through her.  Stella has told her she should say fuck more often and in this moment, Scully understands why.

 “This passion you feel for whatever you’re doing in there?”

 “I’m--”

 “I don’t care what you’re doing.  You once had it for me.”

 She can feel herself shrink with every emotionally impoverished word, sees her stores of dignity running lower each time she gives him another glimpse into her heart.  He still knows her well enough to notice and cares enough to lower his voice a little, wipe the gleam of irony off his face.

 “Scully, I just need a little more time.  I’m right on the edge of something and it’s taking up all my bandwidth.”

 She steps a little closer.

 “Fuck your bandwidth, Mulder,” she tries and feels strong again.  It’s a jackhammer, this word, and a lifeline.  “You once had so much passion for me that you walked into a tattoo shop and had my initial painted on your body knowing it might make you clinically insane.”

 Suddenly, he smiles--not sarcastic, just soft and familiar.

 “Maybe it finally has.”

 She steps closer, reaches into the sagging waistband of his pre-depression jeans, skating her hand down his lower abdomen.  She hears him lick his lips and knows it’s more likely impatience than desire--how irrational that assumption would have seemed to her ten years ago--but she keeps her eyes on her own wrist, sliding down the rightmost edge of  his red boxer briefs.  She’s doing it blind but there’s a tendon that has always twitched under her fingers and if it’s still there, if he’s still him at all… and it does.  She peels her face back up the sheet of his chest, but she’s not yet ready to risk seeing the dead look in his eyes, so she puts off identifying the body and scratches his beard with her fingernails, looks at it the way she did when it first grew in.  Like it’s a novelty, like she could have some fun with it before she demands he get rid of it.

 Kiss me, is what she would have said then, if she had to say anything at all, or just done it herself.   

 “You don’t fucking get it,” he says, but he’s whispering now and his muscle is settling against her hand and he’s grabbing her shoulder so that their chests sway together and apart as he talks.  “You don’t understand.”

 “I don’t fucking get it,” she agrees and takes his hand, puts it up the inseam of her shorts, rests it on her inner thigh, waits for him to make the rest of the journey on his own.  It is a mere two inches, unobstructed by underwear, simple and straightforward, and if he can’t go that far for her--

 “You think I’m not furious about the fact that I can’t make love to you anymore?”

 But his fingers do travel.

 “Then don’t make love to me.”

 And one of them is inside her before she even finishes the sentence.  She gasps, rises up a little onto her toes.  The floorboards creak under her feet, pliant with the last of the year’s heat.  He locks his knuckles and pumps her for moisture as she closes her eyes, afraid to look for him, afraid he won’t want her back.  She’s ashamed that that matters to her, that it isn’t enough if he’s willing to devote his time and attention--that she needs his desire as well.

 “That what you want?” he asks.  “That what you want from me?”

 “No,” she says, at the risk of losing her chance, of losing everything.  But by now, the word is rolling off her tongue and she is reckless in her vulnerability.  She can be rigid and distant again tomorrow, at work, or when she comes home to find him ensconced in his research, eating with her back against the refrigerator, going to bed alone.  “I want you to fuck me.”

 His finger slips away as she tears her shirt over her head, drops it to the floor and toe-heels backward toward the bed.   Sweat molds her wild hair in one sloppy instant to her shoulders, her waist, her lip.

 “Come on, old man,” she taunts even though they have agreed in the past not to make those kinds of birthday jokes.  All bets are off, have been off for longer than she cares to admit.

 His feet shuffle closer, and she finally finds the courage to look into his eyes.  They’re following her too, nervous but hungry as she sprawls out on the mattress like the bride he’s never made of her.  She runs her tongue slowly between the top and bottom edges of her teeth, drops her chin open when he finally planks his body over her like a starved wolf, bends on his haunches to kiss her tentatively on the mouth.  Yes, he’s tentative at her mouth but he’s hard against her leg and thank God, she whispers aloud.

 He laughs, and this fills her with such intense momentary joy that she feels she might float up off the bed.  It is over.  How many times has she has told herself it was serious, that it would need professional treatment.  But she was wrong, it is over now, he will be fixed with this one simple physical reunion.  The hope is weighty and uncomfortable, makes her breathe harder and writhe in the swooshes of sheets that lately only smell like her.

 “It’s not because I can’t get hard,” he says and she can tell this is not one of his boyish jokes.  “Or that you don’t make me hard.  That’s not why I don’t come to bed.”  

 She hears the word hard and watches her fingers twist his shirt.

 “Then why?”

 He strokes the apple of her cheek and disappears behind his eyes for a moment.  

 “Forget it,” she says quickly. “Doesn’t matter.”

 “It does.  Dammit,” he says to himself rather than at her.

 “Stay with me, Mulder.  Stay, please.”  But he’s shaking his head no and she can tell that her neediness is making it worse, but if it could be dismissed, it wouldn’t be need.  Need, she has found, can only be shared or passed back and forth, never vanquished.  “It’s just me.  I’m right here.  I’m right here.”

 He angrily bounces the mattress under his weight, but she is not afraid of him.  

 “Don’t say that to me when you’re going to leave!”

 “What?”

 “I know your patience is growing thin with me, Scully, I can feel it.  And it’s just like that time, with Philadelphia.”

 She can hardly believe her ears, cannot believe he’s dragged this broken record out, and frankly is almost relieved.  This?  Not the absence of their son or the petty, pointless end to his life’s work, or the times she has accidentally but thoughtlessly embarrassed him in front of her family or the million shitty things they’ve said in passing to each other since he started pushing her away, cruel little lockboxes they’ve been too tired to bother springing open.  No, this stupid thing, the faded tattoo on my back, let’s dust that one off.

 “I was in Philadelphia because you made me go.”

 “I know and you were right, I make everything about me.  And I was right too, to hold onto you so tight.  Because when I don’t, you leave me and you find someone else.”

 “We weren’t even together then.”  She’s landed safely in the past now, feels safer with every second she stays, is willing to pull up a chair and pour herself a drink there.  And how ironic that at the time, it was the least safe she’d ever felt.

 “You didn’t even try to be with me.  You put it on me but you didn’t try either, you didn’t tell me how you felt.”

 “I was dying,” she seethes.

 “You were miserable and you’re miserable now.”

 “Is that what you’re waiting for me to do?  Fuck someone else?”  She lifts her hips and rubs up against him, chooses her words carefully.  “Because I can do that if you prefer.”

 She turns over onto her stomach and turns out her hips, feels his straining jeans scratch peach splotches onto her salt-sticky skin.  She wiggles the band of her shorts down to her hips and pulls her hair over her shoulder to make sure he can see the whole of her tattoo, the head eating the tail, going round and round as it intends to do her whole life, and she almost snickers at the appropriateness.  How clever, how deep she’d thought herself the night she picked it out of a book of cheap designs.

 “Fuck me like this so you can see it.  Show me how much you hate it.  Show me you think I deserve what happened to me.”

 She is really gambling now, breathing hard into the mattress as she tosses her chips.  He doesn’t touch her, but breathes harder too--she feels it travel like a hot steam iron up her spine.  A drop of his own sweat falls into the valley of her back and she swallows with her ear to the bed, a decades-old fight held tight for dear life between her gritted molars as she speaks.

 “I swear to God, Mulder, if you don’t do it--”

 And his arm comes around so suddenly and lifts her off the bed with such force that she loses her breath.  He squeezes her nipple so tight she knocks her head back against his shoulder.  He fumbles with his pants with his other hand, his weight on his knees between her legs.  She tosses her hair back between them and tries to look over her shoulder, but the sun glints a hard edge through the window, for a moment right into her eyes, and she thinks of the sun outages, of whatever has been standing between them for two years, powerful enough to suck the signal not only from their conversations but their silences, their touches, their pencil taps, eyebrows arcs.  Then he leans forward with her packaged under his arm and the glare is gone, he fixes it just like that, a simple tilt on an axis, a shift in perspective.  

 “You belong to me,” he growls in her ear, and though this is the game they’re playing, she knows in the moment, he means it and in the moment, she wants him to.

 “That’s right.”

 “This how you want it, Scully?  Pissed off and hard and rough?  This what’s been missing for you?”

 And then he’s smooth, so smooth, and straight against her thigh, poking at the white edge of her shorts and it has been so long she’d like to look, except that it’s too perfect, him holding her to him in one arm and pressing the bed away with the other.

 “Yeah, hard,” she says.

 “That how that homicidal asshole fucked you?”

 The homicidal asshole was shy and careful with her in bed, a sweetheart right up until the moment he decided to try to kill her--but this, of all times, is no time for the truth.

 “So hard.  So much harder than you ever have.”

 There’s a crackle of elastic losing its give as he tears her shorts down to her thighs with both hands.  He grabs her hips and pulls them, dragging her back onto her knees.  He pushes one rough hand into her hair and sharply claps her on the ass with the other.  She moans and stretches her ribs as his giant hand travels from her scalp down over her face, capturing strands of hair in the swoop back to her breasts.

 “Just fuck me, Mulder, I’m ready.”

 And she continues to try to keep track of both his hands; a thumb down the center of her abdomen as she sucks it off the mattress, one kneading her hip and now one on her lower back as the other disappears and is he wrapping it around himself, she hopes?  She exhales hard and spreads her knees a little.  But no, he collapses her to the bed and starts to trace her tattoo, tickling and torturing her, making her wetter and wetter as she gets flashes of that finger inside her just moments ago, flashes of Stella’s hand up the back of her shirt in a bar their first night and she doesn’t even feel guilty for borrowing a little extra arousal there or stealing friction from the mattress because this is the most functional thing they’ve done in months.  

 The finger goes round and round and round, eventually too many times to be a tease.  She ceases to squirm and moan and just waits, not sure what else to do, beginning to tremble as the air grows cold and the down stands up on her arms and legs.  An angel passing, her mother used to say.  His hand is casket-heavy the next time it flattens itself on her lower back.

 “I can’t,” he says wanly.  “I’m sorry.”  He strokes her hair once, like she’s an oil painting he’s not supposed to touch, and not someone who just begged him to take her.

 “You should go, Dana,” he says now.

 And he says it with no more flair than if he meant to bed or to the store or to work so you’re not late.  But she knows exactly what he means because he calls her what her mother calls her, and her teachers and her priests.  The bed trembles when he leaves it, and she stays but just for now.  This is where she’ll mourn the last of her resilience, cry quietly with her shorts around her hips.  There’s a cake in the freezer.  There’s a ringbox across the room.   Yet another thing she never asked for, never had in the first place, and still managed to lose.

 *

 “Why didn’t you tell me before?”  Stella asked.

 They were sitting at the only the two-top in a self-consciously rustic pub, a place that had undergone a makeover and tacked on the word gastro to seem fancy.  Most of the patrons were concentrated at a long communal farm table splitting the room in half.  In the back, at a rickety little thing where waiters probably stole meals between shifts, Scully could smell the parts they couldn’t reclaim--lime rind-swept kitchen floors, the slightly stale, slightly oversexed glaze of beer-soaked blonde bartop.   One whiff took her back fifteen years and a body of water to where Stella, in a halo of gold liquor, first fingered the cross around her neck and silently absolved her of responsibility in any of the recent events that had almost killed her.  Now here they sat, another country and another split brow bone, a penitent lingerie bag between their feet.  Scully crunched her salad.  

 “I hadn’t really been thinking about it,” she lied, gulping.

 Stella stared into her ketchup as she dipped three French fries at once, a miniature silent treatment.  Scully was aware they came in various sizes; best not to upgrade.

 “I didn’t want to make it about me,” she admitted.

 “Does he know where you are?”

“I haven’t turned my phone on since I’ve been here,” she said.

“Mm, mature.  He’ll be a wreck.”

 Scully scoffed at this and Stella looked piqued.  

 “And by that you mean, what?  That he wouldn’t notice you’re gone?”

 “I moved out.”

 “To come here?”

 “No, before.  I’ve been out of the house a month now.”

 Stella balanced an uneven bit of lettuce and tomato in her burger before biting into it again, then wiped her cheek with a knuckle.  She squeezed the last of a lemon rind into her Diet Coke and gulped it down, dropped one hand like a hockey puck in the center of the table as Scully waited to see which way this was going to go.

 “That bad,” Stella mused.

 Scully nodded and Stella took a measured breath, slightly louder than the others but not quite a sigh.  She watched Scully eat, a reluctant referee.

“It’s not that I don’t love him anymore.”

 “Then what is it?”

 “He’s very difficult.”

 Stella crumpled a napkin in frustration.

“Of course he’s difficult, Scully.”

 Scully looked up at the sound of her last name, the realization dawning that Stella was going to take his side.  Scully hadn’t even thought of it that way, as a thing with sides to be taken, until the moment Stella introduced the concept.

 “What did you think you were getting?  Somebody easy?  Steady?  Bloke who puts a ring on your finger, comes home at five-thirty and watches the game with his mates on Sundays?  You’d scratch your eyes out in boredom.  You like to think you’re traditional but you’re not.  Or you wouldn’t be sitting here.”

Scully didn’t know if that meant here with me or here in the existential sense, having made all the choices you’ve made.  

“He’s not there,” she said, wondering if this was how couples therapy would have sounded had Mulder not refused it.  Reductive little phrases they could bear to send forth into the room, unfairly burdening them with the significance of a much wider range of emotions and events.  This could have summarized, for example, the way he’d begun to spin like a wayward compass after years of being her due north, how confident she’d been at the beginning of the spiral that they’d find their way out together, how sometimes she was so lonely and lost that she wished he’d just take her with him.

“Sex?”

Scully flickered her eyes up at Stella and back to her plate.  Over the years, Stella had almost never asked anything about her sex life with Mulder.  It was unclear whether the perceived danger was sadness or arousal.  Either way, this was different, a metric.

 “No sex,” she said softly.   This, for example, would have summarized the events of his birthday last year.

“He’s depressed.”

 Mulder had never allowed her that simple concession, the peace of having something to call it, something to treat.

“Yes.”

It was strange for Scully to have the focus lifted from persuasion.  The lens turned inward and sharpened her guilt.  Even in the worst of times, like the ones Stella had helped see her through, she had cried, screamed, shot things, wished she could shoot more things, prayed.  But she’d still gotten out of bed, she’d still felt like some version of herself, still loved the things she loved and hated the things she hated.  Her depressions had reasons, beginnings in horrific events and endings in coping mechanisms.  She had no idea what it must feel like to have them start and stop nowhere.  

“I didn’t know what else to do,” she said, the shame in her chest bubbling up into her throat in the form of  defensiveness.  “I’m not going to apologize for saving myself.”

 “Of course.  I understand.  So you’ve moved out of the house then.”

 Ah yes, the impossibly passive aggressive custom of wrapping up unwanted bits of conversation by reiterating something previously mentioned.

“Yes, I got a furnished place.  It’s fine.”

She shook her head at her plate as she picked over the carrots she’d parsed aside when she realized they were (inexplicably) pickled.

“Sorry.  I’ve ruined our day.”

“That’s silly.”

“Keep that lingerie,” Scully said. “I’ll just get upset every time I look at it.”

“If you wish,” Stella said at a clip that indicated she found this kind of self-prescribed sentimentality patently absurd, but not worth arguing.  She began to smolder across the table.  Scully put her elbows on the table, hands clasped at her nose.   I haven’t done anything wrong.  I haven’t done anything wrong.  The clues to Mulder’s moods were neatly filed away, but Stella’s were buried under centuries of breeding.  There was no way to know what exactly had tripped the wire--was it that she’d left Mulder in his time of need, or simply that she’d put Stella through an unpleasant lunch?

 “I’m getting dessert,” Stella announced brusquely as she waved a hand at the waiter.  “I’d advise you to get your own if you want something.”

 Scully bit her upper lip and raised her eyebrows, shook her head helplessly at the waiter as Stella ordered a dish of mousse and then formed a pensive letter L with her arms across her ribs, stroking her lips with her thumb.  It was as if Scully had left the room.  The shadow of Stella’s disengagement fell as cold as her attention did warm.  Scully looked out the window and began to count the cobblestones in the street, starting over three times as she tried to develop a more organized method of keeping track.  She didn’t look when she heard the mousse arrive.

 A kick under the table, like the ones during breakfast.  Eighteen cobblestones, Scully noted, for when she started counting again.

 “You should have told me when you arrived,” Stella said, and then she paused significantly, as if to indicate how unnatural, how forced this kind of open communication felt to her.   She raised a pinky and waved it in the direction of her stitches.  “Regardless of this.”

 “You’re right,” Scully agreed in a small voice.

 Stella nodded, generally as uncomfortable lording any sort of moral high ground as Scully was mining the low.   

 “Sorry,” Scully said as Stella swallowed.

 “I wouldn’t have had to sleep on my fucking couch.”

 Scully sucked her cheek a second, not sure if she was meant to laugh yet.  Stella scraped the mousse with her spoon.

 “Did you see that he brought me an extra spoon?” Scully asked.

 “Don’t you dare, I said get your own.”  She took a breath and flashed her eyes across the table. “Fine.”

   Chapter 12

 Scully rested her chin on her arm as she watched the city go by from the cracked-open black taxicab window--the mighty Thames, rushing the past away and away, the windy little be-lanterned streets desperately holding onto it.  This was, Scully told herself, as good a place as any to find yourself crying in public; stoic but generous in its sharing of burdens.  Stella’s lunchtime tough love had softened into evening easy silence and about halfway home, she took Scully’s hand at a traffic light, folded it into her warm palm and held it there on the cool leather center seat between them.  As the car lurched into green again, Scully let her fingers go slack beneath the weight of Stella’s wrist and looked back out the window, let herself be comforted by the lullaby of older and wiser.

 “I’m getting hungry already,” she said absently as they rounded the corner onto Stella’s block.  There was an old pub tucked into the end of the street, the kind with a crest and an animal in its name.  Scully wondered how often Stella went in there to have her Scotch, her after-work  glass of wine.  It was possible this was too close to home for her to spend much time there at all.

 “That’s what you get for eating salads,” Stella said.  Their voices were sunrise rusty from the long lull in conversation.  Stella paid the driver and looked past Scully at her front door, brow furrowing.

 “You may be in luck,” she added curiously.  “I think that’s a container of soup waiting for us.”

 Scully turned and saw not only soup, but a person attached to said soup.  She held her  questions, worried the answer would take longer to give than the walkway would allow.  She hesitated outside the taxi and waited for Stella to lead the way up to the door.

 “Dani?” Stella asked, though she was clearly sure.  The girl--actually, she was a woman, but young, no older than thirty--squinted and smiled close-lipped.   Maybe thirty-two, now that she was second-guessing herself.

 “Ma’am.”

 She held her free hand over her eyes, though there was not--had not been all day--any sun to speak of.  She seemed to hug the tub of soup a little tighter against her hip.

 “What are you doing here?” Stella asked.  Dani’s accent was different, though Scully couldn’t quite have described how.

 “I thought you lived here, Ma’am,” she said.

 “I meant in London.”

 “Oh.  Yes, Ma’am.  I asked for a transfer.  My girlfriend and I broke up and um.  Yeah.  Gonna be living here now.”  The way she said ‘now’ almost sounded like it had a letter I in it somewhere.  

 If the news that this girl had moved to London meant anything to Stella, she didn’t show it.

 “This is Dana Scully.  She’s an old friend.”  Scully caught the way she looked down, knew she was slightly unnerved by having to define it.  “Dani and I worked together in Belfast.”

 Dani shifted the soup from one hand to the other to offer a handshake.  Her eyes were deeply hooded and soft-rimmed, squinted into narrow, friendly crescents when she smiled.  She was nervous.

 “Did you want us to take that?” Scully asked.

 “Oh.  Yeah.”

 Scully reached for the soup and held it up like a lab specimen, mouth watering as she watched the noodles swish around in the cloudy broth behind the plastic.  

 “Looks perfect.”

 She smiled at Dani just in time to see her looking back at Stella, a little sigh rising and dying on her chest.  It would have been impossible to spot, had Scully not at some point also looked at Stella that way.  Stella, oblivious or indifferent to any sighing or gazing, simply waited for further explanation.

 “I thought you might like something easy,” Dani finally offered.  “Recovering and all.  I made it, act-u-ally.”  

 The girl looked down at her sneakers, pride and embarrassment and courage all funnelling down to the pear-shaped space between her Converse.  Her pin-straight cinnamon colored bob poked forward past her ears.  Scully bit the corner of her bottom lip to keep herself from smiling too broadly.

 “But I can see that you’re fine,” Dani said.

 “It was very kind of you.  Thank you.”

 Dani sucked up a breath, desperately trying to seem casual and failing.

 “Right.  I’ll be goin’ now.”

 Stella nodded and smiled and Dani looked at Scully one last time, a plea for help, Scully thought, or an apology, she wasn’t sure.

 “I hope you don’t mind if I steal some of it,” she said.  “I’m starving.”

 “Course not.”  And with that, Dani backed down the walkway with her chin held up.  “Bye.”

 Scully had barely had time to grin when Dani turned back from the sidewalk.

 “Ma’am.”  

 Stella turned stiffly on her heel and suddenly Scully was eternally grateful she’d never been put in the position of being Stella’s subordinate.

 “Maybe we can have a coffee sometime.”

 Scully could not imagine how long the pause felt to Dani--a bus ride, a lifetime...

 “That sounds nice.”

 Scully waited to make sure Dani was out of earshot.  Stella unlocked the door and entered a code into an alarm system. 

“I didn’t even used to set this thing,” she mumbled.  

“Hey.  Stella.”

Stella pushed her boots off and threw her jacket onto the staircase railing.  She headed up the steps and Scully followed.

“What?... No, I did not sleep with Dani.”

Stella unbuttoned her jeans, tossed the little black bag to the furniture and collected her robe.  Scully’s feet were street-swollen, and when she leaned on the bed and shifted her weight forward, the soles burned.  

“How do you feel?  Do you want me to bring up a glass of water and a painkiller?”

“No,” Stella mumbled almost inaudibly.  “I have to be careful with them.”

“Oh,” Scully said, looking down to hide the surprise in her eyes.  This is how she had always learned important things about Stella.  Accidentally, in passing, and if she was smart, without further questioning.

“Soup then?” 

“After I wash up, yeah?  Need to get the city off me.”

“She’s awfully cute, isn’t she?”

Nothing from Stella.

“She made you soup,” Scully said.  “You must admit, it’s cute.”

“She felt bad for me.”

“She asked you out.  And risked hyperventilating doing it.”

“She’s a child--”

“Thirty is hardly a child--” 

“And she’s a cop.” 

“You’re telling me you haven’t slept with lower ranking police in your employ.” 

“She’s a woman, it’s different.”

“Oh,” Scully laughed.  “These are your principles?” 

“Yes,”  like she was being asked if she had milk in the house, or if she knew how to play the piano.  “Don’t mock them just because they’re not the same as yours.”

Scully hadn’t meant to nudge any soft spots.  She was here to tend to them.  

“I know you have principles,” Scully said with careful earnestness.  “But you can still be flattered.”

Stella shooed her out the door and Scully took no offense.  This was something Stella did on all their weekends together, occasionally hid in the bathroom for twenty minutes or disappeared into the hotel bar alone for an hour.   

“I mean, is it that all young women look at you like that or what,”  Scully muttered rhetorically as she headed back down the stairs.  Stella’s tossed-off reply was almost swallowed by the gulp of the door shutting.

“Only the redheads.”

 *

 Scully lay on the couch with bent knees, hands holding her ankles, a glass of red wine on the Persian carpeted floor beside her, book open face-down on her chest.  She’d tried to read it and gotten distracted thinking about the conversation she’d just had with Stella.  Was it Dani’s innocence that was sticking with her?  A woman in her early thirties would have been through things, been broken by people and broken others.  Certainly, Scully had.  And yet, she’d seen nothing at that point, nothing at all compared to what was coming.  

There was another possible explanation.  She and Stella spent their time together in near-isolation, partially out of circumstance, but also because they were protecting their relationship from anything which might challenge it.  She’d seen fawning shopgirls and cowed bartenders admire Stella dozens of times.  But she had never seen Stella get a hug from a sibling or a parent, had never watched her friends laugh at a dinner party.  Through Dani, she had gotten to see with her own eyes that Stella had other people who cared for her, and that felt good.  At the same time, old friends was a very approximate categorization.  Scully knew she’d been just a little relieved that Stella hadn’t returned the girl’s interest.

She finally got up and made her way to the microwave, hit the stop button before it beeped in case Stella had fallen asleep.  The room filled with the scent of coconut, maybe lemongrass.  She was sitting on the living room floor with her legs out and crossed at the ankles, blowing and slurping at a spoon when a pair of cloud-grey pants stepped into view.  She hadn’t even heard Stella come down the stairs. 

“I think it’s tom ka.  Want some?” she gurgled, looking up.

“Is it any good?”

“There’s no steak or Scotch in it, if that’s what you’re asking.” 

Stella smirked and strode past Scully to the spot beside her, leaned one hand on the sofa and inched down to the floor.  Scully moved to take the other hand, but saw it was already occupied with a half-full glass of Scotch.  The deep V-neck t-shirt she’d put on shifted to reveal extra freckles as she settled in.  Sometimes Scully forgot Stella had them.

“I was going to watch something,” Scully said, nodding up at the blank TV.

“It’s been broken for months.”

“I can put something on my laptop,” Scully said.

“Let’s not be desperate.”

“Months?  What do you do when you’re alone?”  

Stella bit her lip and looked up to furnish a good, if obvious, answer.   

“Nevermind,” Scully said with a smile.  “Don’t answer that.” 

She thought a moment, eager to avoid slipping back into her own thoughts.  The room hummed with silent, important questions she didn’t want to ask or answer.  Paul Spector.  Dani.  Mulder.  The comment about the pills. 

“But talk to me,” she said more seriously.

“Okay,” Stella said.  “What would you like me to tell you?”

“Anything frivolous.”

Stella sighed, as though Scully were purposefully being difficult.  Scully gave her a gentle, blinking nod. 

“No, really.  I’d like it.  Just tell me things I don’t know.”

Stella looked at Scully hard enough that Scully knew she was on her second round of Scotch.  Scully, armed with only half a glass of red and some vegetarian soup, looked at her lap, pleased as  Stella began to tell her things she’d never told her, things that didn’t matter at all and presently mattered the world to Scully.  About the lush hills of Northern Ireland, so green after it rained that they looked spray-painted.  About trying to manage bureaucracy amongst centuries’ old battles about bloodlines.  Her voice was like stained glass, split into colors and slightly translucent, a window into the church where Scully had once briefly gotten the chance to kneel.

Scully stroked the carpet in varying patterns as she listened, turning the color over from its patted-down charcoal to the bright space-black hidden in the interior pile.  When she was little, she would draw pictures in the rug in her bedroom sometimes--hearts and eyeballs and her name - and eventually, her fingers would go numb with carpet burn and--she accidentally brushed Stella’s hand and the electrical charge nipped them both.  Scully startled and sucked her finger for a second as Stella gave a jungle cat’s grin, eyes doing all the work.  She lifted her glass and let the ice cube graze her teeth, then tongued it, teasing it with the possibility of entry before she sent it on its woeful retreat back to the bottom of the glass.  The glass landed on the floor and the ice cube spun like a time machine.

“Do you remember that first drink we had together?” Scully asked.

“That awful karaoke thing.  How could I forget?”

“You were drinking out of a glass just like that and I was--I was…”

Scully reflexively touched her collarbone and squeezed the back of her neck.  More than a decade and she still couldn’t explain whatever she’d felt in that bar dancing with Stella.  The ice cube in Stella’s glass grew rounder as Stella swirled a current around it.  It clinked when the uneven shores of carpet set it slightly askew.

“You thought she’d remind me of you, didn’t you?  That’s why you were so interested.”

“Hm?  Oh.  Dani.  Well…” she looked around and plucked at the rug again, now focusing on one of the tiny cartilage-pink rosebuds.  “You know, the hair and… yeah, I guess so.”

She hid her embarrassment over her left shoulder, but she could hear Stella’s lips spread, wet and slow against her gums.  It was the smile she’d been pushing for earlier, not a huge smile, but a smile worth feeling foolish over.  She turned and caught the end of it just as Stella raised her drink and then eclipsed her teeth behind it--glowing, gone in seconds, not back for years.  Her tongue made a noise like a can of soda opening when she finished her sip.

“I did meet someone who reminded me of you,” she said.  “A forensic specialist.”  

Scully brought her eyebrows to a suggestive half-mast.  There was that word again:  met.  

“More redheads?”

“Actually, it was the reason I agreed to go.  Ireland, I said, they have gingers there, don’t they?  Plenty, Ma’am, they said.”

Scully chuckled quietly.

“No.  Her hair was dark.  But it was long like yours is now.”

She reached for Scully’s ponytail holder, hooked it under her nails, and dragged.  Color spilled like a tipped can of paint:  Crazy Crimson or Ruby Riot or Crisp-Apple Cranberry all over Stella’s muted living room.  Stella stroked it a couple of times and then patted her leg as an invitation.  Scully slouched down to put her head there and looked up at the ceiling as Stella’s fingers straightened ropes of hair across her lap, scratching lightly at the scalp and wiggling underhanded through tangles fermented by wool coat collar and cross-Atlantic morbid humidity.

“I meant she was like you, not looked like you.  She was good like you.”  

Scully would once have been able to accept this kind of compliment gracefully, but somewhere along the way, somewhere on the run or in their home in the middle of nowhere, she’d lost the ability.

“And what happened?” she asked, unsure whether she was rooting to hear a win or a loss.

“We had drinks a couple times, I got to know her.”

“And?”  Scully’s fingers were picking at one another across her stomach.

“And she told me she was brought up in Croydon.”

“Should I know what that means?”

“It means she’s straight.” And then, before Scully could interject – “Straight, straight.”

“That’s bullshit,” Scully blurted, inexplicably irritated.  She could not seem to decide tonight if she wanted Stella to have everyone or no one. 

Stella started to laugh, but then gasped like a knife had gone through her chest.  Her hands went to her ribs to apply pressure, her eyes blinking shut in agony.  Scully kept her eyes on Stella’s hand, memorizing its placement as Stella tried to keep the pain from radiating.  When the worst of it had apparently passed, Stella once again reached for her drink and Scully reached for something to say that didn’t involve nagging or MRIs.

“Noticed you didn’t bring me a glass.”

“You have wine.  That’s enough for you.”

“You’re always so strict about how much I get to drink and you get to drink as much as you want.”

“You have the tolerance of a virgin on prom night.”

“Come on, just a--what’s it called with Scotch again--a little bit,” Scully said. 

Stella’s hand went to her glass and in a moment, there was an amber-dripping knuckle over Scully’s mouth.

“It’s called a finger.”

Scully hesitated a moment, glanced at Stella to be clear what was being offered.  A drop fell to her lips.  She opened them and Stella’s finger hooked the roof of her mouth.  Scully cushioned it with her tongue, closed her lips around it.  The smoky brine of the liquor quickly gave way to the mine-salt taste of skin, and then Stella slowly began to pull her finger back.  Scully playfully tightened her lips, held on tighter and lifted her head as Stella tugged the line.  Scully finally dropped her head back to Stella’s leg.  Stella placed both her hands on the floor beside her.  This, Scully knew, was not usually how Stella worked--tossing the first one back, giving it a chance to swim away.  

“Still want a glass?”

Scully shook her head no and licked the cocktail of grape and Scotch and Stella off her mouth.  She rolled over onto her side to face Stella’s body, pressing her ear into the soft material of Stella’s pants.  She lifted the cotton t-shirt slowly and began to trace the bruises along Stella’s ribs like a child learning a map, watching the evenly-charted abdominal muscles puff and contract at her touch.  A boundary broken but easily mended, a doctor’s exam, if in a moment they decided they needed a lie to believe.  Stella didn’t stop her and Scully had lied to herself enough for one lifetime.

So her face followed her fingers and she brushed her lips against the battered coasts of Stella’s ribcage.  Irregular deep blue centers, ringed in violet and yellow, radar plagued by tropical storms.  Fury rose in her heart at the person who’d done this to Stella, and a string of Latin terms scuttled across her brain, proper names and recovery estimates, all quickly washed away each time a wave of Stella’s breath pushed her skin to Scully’s mouth.  This was the smell she associated with Stella--not the curated clouds of perfume that stuck to the cables of Stella’s sweaters and even made their way into Scully’s suitcases, but her skin--clean and alive, a warm, teeming turquoise waterfall, an unpredictable climate all its own.  She breathed Stella in and felt a helpless collision of affection and desire barreling up her throat.  She steadied that and spoke softly so as to protect Stella from the impact.

“Am I hurting you?”

“No, I like it,” Stella said in a whisper, the pace of it grave with responsibility, but the pitch sugary with pleasure.  

Scully sat up, dragging her hair up across Stella’s lap until she once again felt the weight of it on her own back.  She swept her hand around the side of Stella’s neck, searched her eyes for a yes, a no, anything.  But none came.  The side of Stella’s breast pressed into her arm and made a warm spot on her sweater.  She blinked, moved her face closer, blinked again, spread her fingers, flexing up into the base of Stella’s hairline.  Hovered.

“This is not up to me,” Stella began, eyes traveling over Scully’s nose, her top lip.  “So either kiss me or knock it off.”

And so Scully kissed the first person ever since she’d first kissed Mulder, the only person she and Mulder had both ever kissed.  This kiss was the reason she and Mulder had found their way to each other, it was the reason the room was spinning, and for the moment, she wanted to let it be the reason she was so far from home.  No sad stories, not hers or Mulder’s or Stella’s, just this beautiful, perfect thing on a living room floor.

Her hand moved up Stella’s shirt, this time past the bruised territory, a little higher to soft, safe ground, and she smiled as she felt the satin of what she already knew to be the bra from the shop.

“Careful now,” Stella said.  “You said you’d be upset to see this.”

It had been so long.  So very, very long.  She had always believed loneliness was a choice, and she couldn’t bring herself to choose it another second.

“I think maybe I’d like to be upset.”

Stella put her arms up and Scully pulled the shirt off.  The color was even deeper here in the boat cabin light of Stella’s living room, and it set Stella’s eyes swirling like the innermost curve of a rainbow.  

Scully whispered, didn’t want to have to hear herself say it.

“Sometimes it hurts to look at you.”

“Sometimes it hurts to be looked at,” Stella said and placed the heel of her palm in the hollow of Scully’s cheekbone.  “But not by you.”

Stella’s kiss was as Scully remembered it, but more so--lashing and lush, elusive lips and a strong tongue.  Scully allowed it, enjoyed it, patiently moving her thumb up and down the center seam of the bra cup, and when she caught the satin silhouette of a prickled areola, Stella paused long enough for her to take over.  With Stella’s tongue sedated between her teeth, she fit their lips together like two bits of a lock, each more secure with each bit of torque.  Stella swallowed the change of pace with a gracefully defeated hum, a sound that went down Scully’s throat just like the soup, warm and welcoming, the home she currently lacked despite the two actual residences held in her name.

Stella pushed Scully to the floor, but instead of joining her, knelt at her ears.  She bent at the waist, breasts spilling forward into an upside down kiss.

“Take off your pants,” she whispered, then gently pecked Scully’s nose, her cheekbones as Scully wiggled around with her clothes.  She was nervous, unsure what was coming next, but fairly certain she wanted whatever it was.  And when she was at last lying still in her cotton panties and Jackie-O cardigan, Stella’s hands began to crawl ever-so-slowly down the front of her torso, working the pearly buttons of the tidy blue top open.  Scully waited, kissing Stella back with her eyes open to take in the strange and disorienting view of Stella’s collarbones over her forehead.  Perfectly constructed but fragile from this angle, a limestone statue, shadows settling into each lovely dip and even crease of bone.  And then Scully’s belly was bare, her sweater peeled to the sides and Stella shifted forward.  There was a rush of soft and strong and black and blue over pale everywhere, a phoenix from the ashes--breasts brushing Scully’s eyelashes and lips, fingertips diving head-first down Scully’s waist, tongue winging into Scully’s belly button.  Nothing was where it belonged and it all felt right.

“You deserve this,” Stella said.

“Deserve what?”

Stella’s answer was a lick under the elastic of Scully’s simple cotton underwear, a pluck at it with her teeth.  Scully’s hands went to her forehead to steady herself as red and black and gold bangle bracelets clasped and opened behind her eyelids.  A few moments ago, Scully had felt as though she could simply kiss for the rest of her life, if only someone was kissing her like that, like there was no other room in the house they’d rather be in.  Now she needed more, needed everything, and Stella was going to give it to her. 

“So innocent,” she said and Scully could feel Stella’s bottom lip stick momentarily to her abdomen, a hand go down into the wet center panel of her underwear.

“And then this,” she said.  Her knees came up against Scully’s shoulders and Scully grabbed them, both because she had been needing something to hold onto for a long time now, and because she wanted that thing to be Stella.

It was one finger and then two, and it was Stella’s body combing Scully’s with easy tempo, lips parted as they stroked her stomach, the well-mannered satin bra rolling over in the fray of skin-searching-skin until both Stella’s breasts were mostly undressed, one and a half straps falling down her arms, and all of Scully was buzzing and humming like a bumblebee.  The back of Stella’s hand pushed against Scully’s underwear, eager to get it out of her way, and her nipple brushed over Scully’s pubic bone.

“Fuck,” Scully whispered.

“Mhm.”

It was nothing, a noise, a verbal tic used often in daily conversation, but it was also a glimpse of the relief that was coming, the way it would wash over her.  She wanted it so badly her fingers dug into the tendons of Stella’s knees, wanted it so badly she almost felt sick.  She’d come here to offer relief, not receive it.

“Lift your hips,” Stella ordered and she did, allowing the damp cotton panties to slide down her thighs, but she also reached up to the waistband of Stella’s drawstring pants and pulled them down, her fingers strumming the black satin triple T-straps over Stella’s hips.  Stella shook one leg to get them off, grunting a little with the effort of balancing on three limbs instead of four.  Once they re-framed Scully’s shoulders, they were strong as Greek columns, scars of various wars etched into them, soft and smooth around the curves, held together by a tiny flag of deep blue satin (a matching set, of course.)  Scully ran her fingertips over the warm strip of fabric, thick enough not to betray any moisture.  She smiled a little as she recalled Stella admiring it in the store and traced the lace pagan’s cross across the front with her thumbs.  Smoothing her hands back down the outsides of Stella’s thighs, she then snuck her fingers back up under the triple black satin straps that held the panties to Stella’s hips.  She watched the bands tighten around her fingers, the matching strap thong lifting a little as she played.  She couldn’t decide whether to take them off or not. 

“I’ve never done this before,” she said.

Stella had Scully’s cotton underwear around her knees now, and she crawled forward a bit for the next push.  Her breasts brushed the tops of Scully’s thighs, the perfect, round split-center of her ass hovering right over Scully’s sternum.

“Done what?” Stella asked, clearly trying to make her say it as she stepped Scully’s now useless ankles out of her saturated cotton bikini briefs one at a time.

“I’ve tried it--you know, with men--but--mmm--good God, you feel nice--”

“You’ll figure it out.”  She kissed her way back up Scully’s legs.  “You’re a medical doctor.”

A low blow followed by a tongue jab to the clitoris strong enough to bring Scully gasping up onto her elbows.  Scully laughed her cardigan down her shoulders a bit, dragged her nose up and down the Stella’s panties, then, decision made, moved them over with her fingers and replaced them with her mouth.  Stella sighed and tiptoed into her like she was getting into a hot bath.  

Scully had forgotten the taste, had told herself there wasn’t a distinct difference between men and women, that they were all just sweat and soap and human hormones, a single brand’s line of musks so similar they were not worth naming.  But as she got Stella wetter, sunk her tongue deeper, it came back to her, a flavor she couldn’t imagine anyone else in the world having, part metal and part dessert, the remains of a bittersweet chocolate souffle stuck to a fork.  She knew why she’d made herself forget this now, that she would never have believed herself if she remembered Stella tasting like cinnamon off a piece of aluminum foil, the sugary powdery inside of a bubble gum wrapper.

Scully’s hand looked for Stella’s waist and squeezed, wanting to pull her closer, wanting the weight of her whole body.

“I promised someone that I’d tell you to be gentle,” Stella said and Scully nudged Stella’s clitoris with the tip of her nose, kissed it in apology.

“Just testing you.”  

Stella reached around and snapped open her new bra, shimmied it down her arms until it trapped Scully’s thighs under a tight band.  The bottoms of Stella’s breasts hung soft against Scully’s belly, the rolling weight of them sending a moan straight up Scully’s center into her mouth, where it came out vibrating against Stella’s wet skin.  Stella’s breath went backstage-curtain quiet as she sat her hips back a little further and dropped her chest a little deeper.  Scully moaned again once for Stella, and then again for herself, and then lost track of who she was doing it for.  Stella rolled her hips over the short distance of Scully’s tongue and reached for Scully’s breast, fingers sneaking under the slim cotton triangle bra she wore only on vacation.  She rolled a bit harder against Scully’s mouth and at the same time took a nipple between two nails.  Scully’s legs came off the floor momentarily.

“I’m going to come,” she said, consonants disappearing into Stella’s body, eighty bucks worth of satin cinched at the left side of her mouth.  She tried desperately to hold out, tried to remember what Stella liked best.  She liked Scully’s dirty talk, but that was currently impossible.  A sharp, withholding tongue, was it?  A puffy, swollen lip and the flat of her chin, and then oh yes, a finger up the crack of her ass, slipping it under the single strap of silk there.

Stella nearly collapsed, caught herself with a hand pressed hard into Scully’s sternum, heavy as the one Mulder had placed on her back as he sent her away, but this one called her back to herself, energy and desire charging into Scully’s heart through flexed, shaking fingers.  Even with her arm trembling beneath her weight, even with her face bruised and her serial killer unpunished and her companion crying in underwear stores, Stella didn’t give up, kissed and sucked her, finger-fucked her G-spot like both their lives depended on it.  It was possible, Scully thought, that theirs did.

Scully’s tailbone began to dig into the carpet so hard she thought maybe she could feel the grains of wood beneath it, and Stella’s knee crept almost over her shoulder, angling toward her armpit.  She was just barely managing to keep the bruised, tender parts of herself from the friction, and she let her breasts dip deep into the hollow of Scully’s pelvis while Scully’s face reached up into Stella’s upturned hips.  They were perfectly matched swoops of human being, a pair of slick cream-colored come-fuck-me high heels fit together in a box and separated by a single sheet of tissue.

“Dana.”

Anythinganythinganything she wanted to say but didn’t dare talk over this rare bit of feedback.

“Your mouth…”

Scully swallowed a groan to make sure she heard the rest, kept her mouth doing whatever it was that Stella seemed to like so much.

“It’s perfect, it’s so fucking perfect,” Stella continued, tip of her upper lip just under Scully’s clit, finger firmly circling that spot, oh god, that fucking spot is it even the same spot I don’t even know this spot perfect you want to talk about perfect.  Her hand flailed from Stella’s waist to her thigh and landed on the arch of Stella’s foot, squeezing it tight overhead in lieu of a queen-sized bed frame as her back strained and stretched.  She was trying very hard not to arch it into Stella’s ribs.  Stella breathed like a ceremonial drum into Scully’s body, pussy fluttering like a snare at Scully’s mouth and finally, finally she was moaning and Scully’s body gave and gushed around Stella’s fingers and they were both coming in a closed circuit of electricity, each of them giving life and each of them swallowing it, end to end to end to end.  

“Fuck,” Scully said and buried her face against Stella’s leg.  There were tears puddling in her ears. “Fuck.”

Scully looked up to see Stella half-laughing, half-wincing, balanced like a wobbling sheet cake on her hands and knees, hair melting like butter frosting around her shoulders.

“That was fucking unbelievable,” Scully said, boneless as dough, spotting Stella’s thigh and calf with kisses. 

“You’re fucking unbelievable.” 

“The rug…” 

“Don’t worry about it.”

Stella gathered her breath and began to move gingerly, losing the tangle of the bra, bringing one leg back over Scully’s face and inching toward the sofa on her knees, slithering out of the remaining pant leg like a second skin.  She swore under her breath and sucked her stomach in as she pushed herself up onto the couch and scraped the cashmere throw off the back of it.  Scully watched and waited, feeling helpless as she prepared to be sent to the bedroom.  But once Stella had settled into the back crease of the sofa, she held the blanket open and Scully sat up on her elbows.  She slipped in carefully, filling the spaces left by Stella’s body as she tried not to press against any of them.

“If you say I told you so, I’ll kill you,” Stella said.

“Sssh,” Scully said.  She’d located at least one of the misaligned ribs earlier, and now she placed her fingers strategically around it, compressed it just-so with the palm of her hand.  

“Exhale.”

Stella did, and her lungs went completely still.

“You can still breathe.”  And Stella gradually let her breath return to normal, trust growing as Scully caught each exhale.  Minutes passed, full songs worth of breath.

“That feels so good,” Stella finally whispered.

“Better than what we just did?”

“Nothing is better than that,” Stella said, moving Scully’s hand so she could tuck her face under Scully’s chin.  She slipped her arm around Scully’s waist.  “Except you coming like a rock star on my two-thousand-dollar rug.”

“Oh my God.”

But her body had cooled to match the perfect temperature of Stella’s and as it turned out, it was difficult to blush at Stella’s temperature.  

“Should we move to the bed?”

“I cannot move.  You can go if you want.”

“Okay,” Scully joked and moved a couple of muscles for show.  Stella’s arm tightened around her waist.

“Promise you’ll tell me if you need more space,” Scully said, but Stella was already drifting off.

The next time Scully heard Stella’s voice, it was already morning.  Somehow, Stella had managed to climb out without waking her.  Her voice was low and soft in the next room, a one-way conversation Scully could only hope, half-naked on the couch, was a phone call.  Her sleepy brow furrowed.   Mulder, she was almost sure she’d heard Stella say.   

*

[secretagentspydetectiveninja]

The Misadventures of Prince Kim - chapter 7

(aka the royalty AU story)

[1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6] [AO3]

Max was already learning so much over the next few weeks. Since recent hostilities had left most of the kingdoms rather isolated from each other without much contact or trade, he hadn’t been able to learn a lot about other places while he had been back at home, but now it felt like the whole world was suddenly at his fingertips. It was absolutely fascinating!

Who would have known that the Lahiffe Kingdom, of all places, had fertile plains completely dedicated to growing potato crops? Or that the remote Haprèle Kingdom had some of the most beautiful mountainous scenery in the world? And he had only heard stories about the incredible art and architecture of the Kurtzberg Kingdom, and now he was able to see some for himself just by asking his own classmate.

That was barely even the beginning of it. Despite most other kingdoms having comparatively low technology levels, they still had so much to offer. Why, oh why had previous generations of rulers not opened up their countries to allow this spread of knowledge and culture? Thank goodness places like this school existed, where people from all over the world could come together and share all of this. Max decided right then that he would do everything in his power to persuade the other kingdoms to lift their trade restrictions. Hopefully that would help the whole world advance together, ushering in a new age of peace and prosperity, where everyone would get along with each other and there would be no problems…

But of course that was too much to ask for. Peace? Prosperity? When people like his own friend Kim were going to be future leaders? He may as well say goodbye to the idea of global peace forever.

“Kim, you’re going to end up starting a war or something,” Max warned him, glancing up from his homework. Kim was trying to do his homework too but was procrastinating by making origami out of the paper he was meant to be writing on. Rather messy origami, too.

“I haven’t done anything wrong,” Kim muttered.

“Oh really? I heard you snapped Alix’s pencil the other day.”

“That was totally an accident.”

“Mhm. And I suppose it was also an accident that time you slammed the door in her face?”

“Obviously! She’s so tiny, I didn’t even notice her, so…”

Max rolled his eyes. “Can’t you at least try to get along with her? I don’t want my two friends to end up at war with each other, thank you very much. I think you two could be good friends if you were actually nice to her.”

“Oh Max, you know I love you, but I can’t be friends with someone like her!”

Max gulped and tried not to stare at his beautiful friend’s face. Oh Max, you know I love you… He pushed the phrase out of his mind. Kim meant it platonically, obviously. And anyway, not for the first time Max wondered if Kim’s sudden unexplained idiotic turn for the worse meant that something had happened at that detention. Maybe something decidedly other than platonic. A certain word kept popping into his mind to describe Kim’s recent behaviour if that was the case… tsundere. That wasn’t a good thing.

“You absolutely can be friends with her,” Max said. “If you’re friends with me, and I’m friends with her, then it’s definitely possible.”

“But she hates me anyway.”

“That’s only because you’re being a jerk. You managed to make friends with Adrien, didn’t you? And you’re good friends with Marinette too. I know you can do it. You just need to get over yourself first.”

“Can we just talk about something else?” Kim said quickly. “I’ve really gotta get this homework done, I don’t want to get another stupid detention.” He looked down at his crumpled piece of paper and frowned. “Uh… I don’t really get any of it. Which rank is below count and above baron and how would they be addressed? I don’t even know what that means. And what the heck is a courtesy title? Max please help…”

It took all Max’s self-restraint not to just take the piece of paper and do Kim’s homework for him. This wasn’t even difficult. Viscount was between count and baron, and one would be addressed as “Your Lordship”, and a courtesy title was… No, he shouldn’t. “Do your own homework, Kim,” he said. “I won’t help you with it until you stop being mean to Alix.”

“Hey, and what about her though? Threatening me with that snake? And making fun of my country for not having like… helicopters or whatever it was? She’s not exactly a nice person either!”

“Perhaps you’re both being idiots, but you in particular are being much more of an idiot. So until you stop doing that you can do your homework without my help.”

Kim pouted but didn’t say anything else.

Sports day was quickly arriving now that September was almost at an end. The weather here in this part of the Bourgeois Empire was still fairly warm at this time of year so it would be held outside in the grounds. Kim just couldn’t wait. This would be the perfect opportunity for him to show off how great he was at sports, and by extension, his whole kingdom! Lê Chiến was already famous for that, after all. Sports day was definitely going to be his day.

Since it wasn’t a mandatory event a lot of people weren’t going to be there – he guessed that Prince Nathaniel probably wasn’t going to attend, since he seemed to always try his best to stay as far away from other people as he could – but Kim decided to head down to the grounds early and get in a warm-up first. Max was planning to meet him there a little later, too busy in the library at the moment researching about something called a “constitutional monarchy and parliamentary democracy”, whatever that even meant. Kim knew he should probably spend more time on his school work like Max was doing, but that was just so much effort! And it was boring, too! If he was going to be at this school for three whole years then there was plenty of time for that later, so why not just have fun for now?

Walking down the corridors he heard a voice somewhere nearby and stopped… ugh, it was Alix. And Juleka too, judging by the quiet mumbling replies. He didn’t know anything about Juleka, she seemed alright, but today was not the kind of day he wanted to run into Alix. Hang on a second, she had just said his name… what was she talking about?

“…and yeah, Kim seems intimidating but he’s actually really sweet!”

Sweet? No way! He ran forwards and turned the corner to see–

Oh. It was just that stupid snake she was talking about. She had it wrapped around her arm and was showing it off to Juleka, who was leaning right in its face and gazing at it with her spooky red eyes.

“Awesome,” Juleka said. “Has he killed anyone?”

“No, he’s way too nice for that.”

“But… he could kill someone if he wanted, right?”

“Oh yes, definitely.”

Juleka grinned, and Kim noticed her teeth seemed to be rather sharp. “That’s so awesome. Hey, do you think you can get more deadly cobras as pets? The ones that attack and kill people?”

“Sure you can, but it would probably kill you too if you weren’t careful.”

“That would be the coolest way to die. Agonizing death by snake bite. I would love that.”

Okay wow, that was weird. Kim walked past them muttering, “You guys are crazy…” Out of the corner of his eye he saw them turning to look at him for a second, but neither of them said anything. Good.

Sure enough, Kim absolutely excelled at the sporting activities. He came first in the 100m, 200m, 400m, 800m, even the hurdles. He did lose a duelling match, but at least that was against Adrien, his friend, so that wasn’t too bad. Adrien went on to win the duelling competition anyway and Kim did find it in his heart to feel proud of him. There were also some events that Kim did not take part in, like jousting, since those weren’t big in his kingdom and he hadn’t really tried them much. Anyway, that seemed quite old-fashioned. Jousting? Really? What was this, medieval times?

He wasn’t planning to take part in the archery competition either but he changed his mind when it turned out that Max had decided to try it, saying that archery was a fairly “mathematical” sport and that it couldn’t be that hard. Kim was surprised to find that he really was quite good at it despite never having even tried it before – he was somehow even better than Max.

The sillier races took place towards the end of the day. Kim managed to do fairly well in the sack race, and tried his best in the egg and spoon race but somehow got beaten out by Alya and Chloé, who seemed to have their own personal rivalry going on between them. The trouble began when it came to picking pairs for the three-legged race. Kim had been planning to do it with Max, but it turned out that Max had already got bored and left. In fact, most of the class had by this point, and the royals were not allowed to team up with the nobles so there weren’t many people left to choose from.

“Hey Marinette, wanna team up for the three-legged race?” Kim asked.

“Ah sorry Kim, I’ve already teamed up with Alya!” Marinette replied. “But I could help you find a partner! Hmm, let’s see, who’s still here… Nino’s teamed up with Adrien I think, so not them… maybe you could... Oh hey Alix! Come over here! You’re really short, Kim’s really tall, it would be so funny–”

“What? No, I’m not teaming up with her!” Kim snapped, stepping away as Marinette grabbed Alix by the arm and pulled her over.

“I know you like winning and it would be harder like this, but come on, it would be hilarious! You’re both sporty and everything!”

“Yeah, Kim,” said Alix. “It’ll be fun.”

He shook his head. “No way. I’d rather just not do the race.”

“What? Why not? Weren’t you just asking Marinette to team up with you?”

“Yeah, exactly! Marinette! Not you!”

“Are you kidding me?!”

Kim had just about had enough. There was barely anyone left here anyway, no point staying. “I’m leaving!” he said, and stormed off.

Slightly later, in his room trying to do homework but feeling like bashing his head on the wall would be more productive, there was a knock at his door. He stood up and opened it to see Alix there, looking absolutely livid, with her pet snake wrapped around her shoulders and somehow looking in as much of a bad mood as she was. Without even saying anything she shoved Kim aside, stepped into the room and slammed the door shut behind her. “Kim, what the hell is your problem?!”

“What are you talking about?”

“You know perfectly well what I’m talking about!” Her hands were curled into fists and she seemed alarmingly ready to start throwing out punches. Kim quickly took a step away from her.

“What, just because I didn’t want to do that stupid race?”

“This isn’t just about that race! This is about how much of a jerk you’ve been lately! And don’t think I haven’t noticed that you’ve been nice to everyone else, just not me. Making friends with Adrien, asking out Chloé – yes I know about that, we all do – always hanging out with my friend Max and trying to get him to do your homework for you…”

“Max doesn’t do my homework for me!”

“Stop trying to change the subject. The point is I know you see me as a rival for some reason, whether it’s the snake or the skating or being Max’s friend or whatever, but at least I’ve been trying to be civil. And I know I’m not that good at it. But I’ve been doing a hell of a lot better than you have!”

Alright, that was kind of true. Kim just didn’t want to admit it. “Your snake tried to kill me,” he huffed.

“If my snake wanted you dead, you’d already be dead, trust me. That being said, I think he’s getting peckish...”

The snake hissed and snapped its teeth menacingly. Kim took another step backwards, very much not liking where this was going. Surely she wouldn’t kill him with that snake, would she?

“So anyway, why do you hate me?” she continued, the snake still hissing and baring its fangs rather ominously. “Are you just jealous of my country’s technology or something? Still a sore loser that I beat you in that race? Are you scared of snakes and thinks that gives you a valid reason to act like a douche? Because that’s what you are, in case you didn’t know. And me and my snake both really, really hate douches.”

Okay, he really did not like where this was going. That snake looked hungry. Could cobras swallow humans whole? Or did they kill them with venom first? How long would that take? Would it be painful?

“Don’t forget, I’m a pharaoh, I outrank you by lightyears. I run an entire country and I can do whatever the hell I want. If I want someone dead, all I have to do is say so, and that’s it for them. They’re fricking dead. So if you think you can get away with being an absolute moron without having to face the consequences, you’re even more stupid than I thought!”

Dead? Did she actually say dead? Oh boy, she was going to kill him with that snake, he was certain about it now, never mind what Max said about that. He had messed up so bad. Seeing that snake, flicking its tongue out like a little lizard, clearly ready to pounce on him and kill him in the most painful way possible… He sank to his knees, terrified. “I’m sorry…”

“Fine, but don’t think a tiny little apology is going to solve everything, because it won’t! Unless you actually change your attitude then saying sorry is meaningless, so… Wait, are you – are you crying?”

“Please don’t tell your snake to kill me,” Kim mumbled, hastily wiping tears out of his eyes. He hadn’t cried in years at least, he was sure, and was not happy about breaking that streak. Hopefully no one else would find out.

“What? No, I’m not going to... I would never actually kill anyone! I was just angry!” She sounded less upset now, more concerned. “Did you really think I was going to tell my snake to kill you?”

“Uh… pfffft, no…”

She sighed. “Kim, are you afraid of me?”

“Nope.”

“Answer truthfully or I’ll go get my sceptre and whack you over the head with it.”

“Well okay, I hate snakes so your snake is kinda scary,” he admitted. “And… I guess… since you control the snake… well…” He wasn’t quite sure when he had stopped being so afraid of the snake and more afraid of Alix herself. Of course that was all tangled up in how he didn’t like her and thought of her as a rival and also had a crush on her… It was no wonder he hadn’t properly noticed.

“Yeah, I thought so.” She gave her snake a stroke and it stopped hissing, immediately backing down and resting its head calmly on her shoulder. “I should have known that would happen. Everyone always ends up scared of me. I guess my problem is a bit similar to yours, huh? You’re just an idiot, and I accidentally scare away anyone I want to be friends with.”

“Wait… friends?”

“Yeah, of course. I’ve been trying to be your friend, since you’re friends with Max and you didn’t act all weirdly over-respectful around me just because of me being a pharaoh, like everyone else does all the time. But now I’ve gone and messed that up, haven’t I? You’re scared of me now, just like all the others. Of course I can’t take all the blame for that, since you’ve been acting like such a jerk that I didn’t really have much of a choice but to confront you about it…”

So she really had been trying to make friends with him? Huh… maybe Max had been right after all. Maybe they would make good friends. Kim took a deep breath, thankfully feeling a little less afraid now.

“Okay, I was a jerk,” he said. “I was just… yeah, okay, I was jealous of your country’s tech. And annoyed you beat me in that race. And hated your snake. And just thought you were kind of annoying in general.” And trying to get rid of this stupid crush on you, he added silently. “But I really went overboard with that, and it would be cool to make friends, so uh… I get if you don’t want to now, but… I really am sorry. I’ll try and be less of an idiot. Max says I never think stuff through properly.”

“Max is definitely right about that. But…” She smiled suddenly, that genuine smile again. “He says that about me as well. I guess me suddenly storming in here and lowkey threatening to kill you may have been overboard too. But hey, it’s not like I’ve exactly got many friends, so I may as well make a new one. Are we friends then?”

She held out her hand for a handshake. Kim accepted, relieved.

“Anyway, I think if I run back now I might have time for the last few sports day races,” Alix said. “Are you coming?”

“No, I think I should probably do my homework…”

“Wait, really? Max would be proud! I guess I’ll see you later then, new friend.”

“Yeah, see you.”

She left the room. Oh thank goodness, that had turned out alright… He had been so sure for a few seconds that he really was going to die. And yet here he was, alive, with a new friend too. He certainly hadn’t expected the outcome to be that good. He wasn’t even sure he deserved it, looking back.

And the truth was that he didn’t want to go back to the sports day because he still felt shaky, like if someone suddenly startled him he’d have a heart attack and die. After all, he had just been in very close proximity to an angry cobra, so it was probably best to just rest a little for now. He had a reputation to keep up.

There was still one thing left to take care of, though. That annoying crush. If Alix was going to be his friend now then he’d better try and get rid of it before she noticed, or even worse, before anyone else noticed. Hopefully it would go away soon. After all, there were plenty of other cute girls at this school to fall for, weren’t there? Surely it was only a matter of time.