TITLE:   The Heretic's Tragedy
AUTHOR:  HeadPlay
E-MAIL:  headplay86ed@hotmail.com
DISTRIBUTION: Archive me.
RATING:  NC-17 for language, body parts, and coitus.
CATEGORIES: MSR, Scully Angst, Scully POV
KEYWORDS: More sex than romance, for now. If the 
thought bothers you, you might want to check out. If 
it seems like a realistic possibility given the 
psychological hell that Carter put his characters 
through, proceed.
SPOILERS: Vague first and second season references,  
Tithonus, Millenium

SUMMARY: These never do much for me, so I'm not going 
to include one, if that's okay.

Disclaimer: Given that 30,000 + stories have been 
archived in Gossamer over the past nine years, I 
seriously doubt that I face the risk of prosecution. 
But I will say thank you to everyone who's turned a 
blind eye. And they aren't mine. Obviously.

Author's Notes: Comments very much appreciated at 
headplay86ed@hotmail.com. I love it that we're still 
reading.

*****

She couldn't help but listen.

A dozen times she'd heard the soft click of a key in 
her front lock, the hesitant step of his footsteps as 
he approached her bedroom door. A dozen times she'd 
been disappointed. Rolling onto her side, she gazed 
sullenly at the clock. 12:32 glared back, the red 
light spilling over her comforter, reminding her of 
the window of opportunity passing by. 

Will you get up the nerve tonight Mulder? 

As bold as he was in bed, she knew that he doubted 
himself each time he let himself into her apartment. 
The thought thrilled her, the implications did not.

The final truth, Mulder, is that I like fucking you 
in the dark. And I really like the fact that we don't 
talk about it in the morning.

She smiled to think of his reaction to her words. He 
would chuckle, smiling his ironic smile, maintaining 
his calm exterior. The guilt would rush in later, 
when he considered, as she had, that after seven 
years they had yielded to the temptation only to 
persist on a collegiate diet of after-hours sex-- to 
become, as her mind so crassly supplied, fuck 
buddies. 

She supposed it was the most she could give him at 
this point. More and more often now she found herself 
amazed that they hadn't given in at the beginning. 
She'd wanted him as soon as he walked into his 
office, and he knew it. It would have been so easy to 
sleep with him then; as much as he tried to play the 
jaded wiseass, she was fresh enough to have slipped 
in and seduced him as he stood open-mouthed in that 
immortal Oregon hotel room. After all, Mulder did 
seem to prefer sex with strangers. Her heart jumped 
at the thought, and she shifted involuntarily in her 
bed. She should have moved to him as he sat on the 
hard floor, head leaning back against the scratchy 
polyester comforter. It was so easy now, in her mind, 
to turn his young, pale face to the side and kiss 
him. Scully sighed. She had been too green, too 
naive. 

Her thoughts gradually began to move away from that 
time, her mind as annoyed with the idea of her old 
self as Mulder must have been. They pulled away for 
several long years after that, after Mulder had 
gotten fed up with her stubborn inability to confirm 
his damn Truth with a capital T and decided that she 
was too irritating too fuck with any regularity. No, 
that wasn't being fair. He liked her, even then. But 
by the time the genuine affection had returned, her 
mind had firmly settled on the idea that Mulder was 
too dangerous to love. Desire, as it turned out, was 
an entirely different matter.

12:44. Would he come tonight, or not?

There had been no apparent pattern since he'd first 
shuffled through her bedroom door a couple of weeks 
ago, whispering "Scully, it's me," to prevent her 
from pulling a gun. She sat up, swiping strands of 
hair from her mouth and eyes, immediately concerned, 
but strangely unalarmed. 

"Mulder? What time is it? What's going on?"

He paused at the doorway, and through the hazy 
shuttered light of the streetlamps below she could 
make out a black t-shirt and carefully faded jeans. 
Bar wear? She couldn't smell smoke. 

He took three steps to the foot of the bed and paused 
again, giving her a meaningful look with a morose 
half smile. And then he began to pull his t-shirt up 
from the wasteband of his jeans.

There were no more words.

They never lost eye contact as he stripped, casually 
moving lower to remove his shoes and socks, providing 
her with a tempting view of a well-sculpted network 
of traps, lats, and rhomboids. Her mind casually 
noted that he was thin right now, as was she, the 
muscles close to the surface of the skin and well-
toned. She glanced over the place where a well-placed 
bullet had exited his right shoulder. It had healed 
well, though not as well as her own beneath her left 
breast. Vanity reminded her to put Mederma on it each 
night, and the tiny circle had faded from dark red to 
white in only a few months. She guessed that in a 
moment, Mulder would be seeing the fruits of her 
labors. Of course, that had been her intention all 
along.

Shoes unlaced-- he was in no hurry, it seemed-- he 
moved to his jeans, swiftly unbuttoning them before 
pulling them down over light blue boxers. No boxer-
briefs tonight, not that she cared. She was long 
gone, the world around her buzzing as she felt her 
face go warm, her lips full and trembling with 
arousal. She knew what this meant, and she also knew 
she wasn't going to stop him. The thought made her 
feel faint.

The jeans came down, and her eyes were full of 
thighs. God, she loved his legs. Lean, hard muscle, 
the tan over his calves and knees fading to a milky 
white before disappearing into his boxers. He paused 
for the last time, and her eyes moved to the telling 
stiffness at his waist.

Hoo boy indeed.

I am in shock, she thought.

Now he was kneeling on the bed, moving towards her. 
The warmth over her face spread down her chest and 
between her legs, culminating in a wet, hot fullness. 
This was really going to happen. No guns, no bees, no 
hospital bed, no drugs. She could smell him now, a 
mix of shaving cream and Ivory soap and clean Mulder 
smell--he'd showered-- and then his hand was on her 
face, his thumb tracing over her bottom lip, tilting 
her head back to look into her eyes. He moved closer, 
and she cursed the way her chin and lower lip 
trembled, ever so slightly. 

The kiss was insistent. Gentle, but amorous. Not the 
kiss he'd given her as they stood in the hospital on 
New Year's Eve just a few weeks before. His tongue 
swept into her mouth, hard, needy, tasting of coffee 
and salt and man. Is that what people meant when they 
spoke of musk? She didn't stop to ponder the thought 
as her hands moved up to rest against his firm chest 
and then moved, unheeded, along his collarbones. He 
shuddered, half-kneeling above her, and the movement 
reassured her. So much of this was automatic, and for 
the first time she realized that she had just as much 
power in this as he did, if not more.  The sense of 
control mixed with her arousal, an edgy, wild, 
dangerous chemical concoction, and for the first time 
in quite a while she felt like a woman who carried a 
gun and played with the big boys in the dark. A spy, 
a mystery, someone who could take all and need 
nothing.

The thought was exhilerating, and the tremble that 
had initially threatened her composure moved from her 
lower lip downward into her thighs. She knocked him 
off of her and onto his side-- this is on my terms, 
Mulder-- and captured his jaw in her hands, pulling 
his face up and onto her mouth. He groaned as her leg 
slid up his own, her thigh pressed against and on top 
of the narrow sling of his hips. 

Throughout it all, she never reconsidered. Not as he 
wrenched her top up and over her head, rubbing and 
sucking her breasts as his hand moved between her 
thighs and then under her panties, not as he dragged 
her pajama bottoms down smoothly to the backs of her 
knees, and not as he positioned himself, mad with 
lust and, suddenly, she realized, like a half-
remembrance-- love-- at her entrance. 

She had lost too much not to take what she wanted 
when she wanted it. He looked to her for approval, 
and she leaned forward, simultaneously rolling on top 
of him and taking in the smooth thickness of his 
dick, and yes, she thought, it's a dick and it's 
Mulder's and I'm fucking him and it hurts but FUCK 
the WORLD I've wanted this for as long as I can 
remember, and she knew when it started deep in her 
lower stomach that it was going to be good, better 
than most, better than any. She looked at his face 
and he was beautiful, brow crinkling and sweat caught 
in his eyelashes, and he looked for a moment like a 
younger man with damp hair falling into his eyes. He 
opened his eyes and pulled her breast into his mouth, 
looking up into her, challenging her, and it was 
enough. She jerked against him four, five, six times, 
muscles involuntarily clenching around him, and the 
timing was good too. Their bodies danced the dance 
they were created for, pull and release, pull and 
release, until both slumped, spent, into the 
mattress.

It had been magic sex, and she didn't believe in 
magic. Each time had been amazing, but, well, it 
wasn't every day that you had sex for the first time 
in three years. Since Ed. The thought still made her 
stiffen in embarrassment, and she supposed it always 
would. In a way, she knew she had been going for 
something similar with him-- in that why-the-hell-
should-I-care-when-the-world-doesn't way-- but the 
sex had been fumbling, unsure, and she knew 
afterwards that it had been about the act rather than 
the pleasure.

Speaking of pleasure, it looked like she wasn't going 
to get any tonight. 1:36. The nervous energy was 
seeping out of her, and she began to nurse her 
disappointment with fatigue. It meant nothing. Three 
times in one week would be pushing it. They had other 
priorities. He would come again. With a final glance 
at the clock, she turned away, pulled the comforter 
up to her head, and closed her eyes.

*****

Outside, a solitary figure stood uncertainly in the 
lamplight, shoulders hunched against the cold and 
perhaps something else. He took one step off the curb 
and then another, hands in his pockets, before 
turning abruptly on his heel and continuing down the 
street.