By MustangSally
RWBOWMAN@erols.com
 

DISTRIBUTION STATEMENT: ATX. Whatever
SPOILER WARNING:  None
CONTENT WARNING: NC-17 (Adult situations and language)
CLASSIFICATION: MSR
The Disclaimer: As Oscar Wilde said while going through customs "I have
nothing to declare except my genius."

Date: Wed, 24 Sep 1997
Comments actively sought by MustangSally at: RWBOWMAN@erols.com

~~~

Diamonds and Rust
1/5

Well I'll be damned, here comes your ghost again
But it's not unusual; it's just that the moon is full
And you happened to call
And here I sit, and on the telephone
Hearing a voice I'd known a couple light years ago
Heading straight for a fall
 

"I swear I'm going to fucking *strangle* her."

The thought was keeping Mulder warm as he stomped back and forth across
the deserted field.  In the distance he could see the yellow lights of
the farmhouse where there were warm rooms and coffee and maybe even a
soft bed to warm his frozen ass.  Hands shoved in the pockets of his
wool coat, too thin for the frigid North Dakota winter, but definitely
FBI dress code; he stamped his now-ruined wingtips in the frozen dirt
more to keep the rest of his body warm than his feet.  He'd given up on
his feet an hour earlier.

Where the fuck was she?  What did she do?  Stop to get her hair done or
something equally *girly*.

"I'm freezing my balls off out here." he complained to the frozen
carcass of the steer, which lay on the ground next to him.

He should have worn the horrible down ski jacket his mother had sent him
last Chanukah, not that he'd been on skis since he'd been a teenager,
but at least it was warm.  It was aqua and black, and it made him look
like a fairy, but it was warm.

So he'd be a warm fairy.  Big fucking deal.

"You're no help." he told the frozen cow, "I could cut you open and
crawl inside, but I don't have a knife."

The eyeless, tongue-less, genital-less, mutilated cow said nothing.

"Good for nothing sack of shit." he added not sure who if he meant
himself, the cow or Scully.

It hadn't even been an interesting cattle mutilation, there had been
Goodyear tire prints all around the carcass and even he had to admit
that the terrestrial cause of the death of the cow was more related to
the empty beer cans lying around than anything from beyond the horizon.
Probably a bunch of drunk kids joy-riding in a stolen pick up hit the
cow and then decided to carve it up a little for the hell of it.  Drunk
yokel teenagers with Ozzy Ozborne concert shirts, with nothing better to
do on Saturday night.

Cow tippers gone bad.

>From cow tipping to cow homicide was a small step indeed.

He should write a paper, send it to Bovine Monthly and then present
Skinner with a framed, autographed copy and a dozen square cubic feet of
manure for good measure.

The thought warmed him somewhat.

This was turning into the field assignment from hell.  Even Scully had
been acting strangely.  In fact, she had seemed to genuinely enjoy
watching his face fall as he realized that the mysterious landing tracks
had come from steel belted radials.  At the same time she had
volunteered to walk back to the farmhouse and wait for the sheriff to
verify their findings and declare the cow's death deliberate damage to
property rather than a supernatural visitation.  This left Mulder
guarding the cow from further violation, which was brain-numbingly
stupid.  Who would want to violate a couple hundred pounds of inedible,
frozen hamburger on the hoof?

It was clear to Mulder that ever since he'd "returned from the dead";
Scully had a real bug up her ass.

Nothing he did was right.  She constantly questioned and criticized
everything from his reasoning to his handwriting.  A fault was found in
everything.  The wrong section of the airplane, not the ground floor of
the hotel, his tie didn't match his suit and he had put too much cream
in her coffee.  It was like working with Goldilocks or his great-aunt
Sophia with the sciatica.  It was like working with his *mother*.

If she started calling him Fox he was off like a dirty shirt.

I'm sorry Assistant Director Skinner; I have to request that Agent
Scully be removed from the X-Files, as she has been possessed by the
evil spirit of my great-aunt Sophia.  She's even complaining of lower
back pain and she always has lipstick on her teeth.  No, sir, I'm not
imagining anything.  She's also taken to wearing cotton print schmattas
and drinking black tea with sugar.  Lots of sugar.  Oh you understand?
Thank you sir.

The headlights of a pickup truck hove into view and he watched it
approach with growing dread.  The pick-up was candy apple primer and
eventually the swaddled figure of Special Agent Dana Scully dropped from
the cab and walked over to him, her head wrapped in a plaid knit scarf
and oversized mittens flopping from her hands.

"Where the fuck have you been?" he demanded, his voice coming out white
in the cold air.

"The Sheriff won't come.  He says it's going to snow." only her eyes
visible above the scarf, her voice muffled.

That was it, he was going to drop dead right then and there right next
to the cow and let Farmer Johanssen find their bodies when he plowed the
fields after the spring fall.

"I had to borrow the truck.  The rental couldn't take the field," she
said in a miserable voice.

"I've been standing out here for over an hour and he won't come?"

"It's been thirty-five minutes, Mulder.  Just get in the truck and we'll
go back to the hotel."

"This is total bullshit. "

"Get in the truck, Mulder."

"Over an hour!  Are these people morons?  I haul my ass out to the
muddle of fucking nowhere and they're afraid of snow?"

"GET IN THE FUCKING TRUCK, MULDER!" she bellowed.

The tip of her berry-red nose appeared above the scarf and her hair
flopped down into her eyes.

God, it was like Comity all over again, only colder.  He looked up.
Yep, it was a full moon to boot.

The truck seat was pulled so far forward tat his knees bumped the
dashboard.  She slammed the driver's door shut and the whole vehicle
shuddered.

"Before you say a word, the heater is broken," she said in the precise
voice of the immeasurably pissed off.

Jamming the truck into gear, she gunned the engine and they bumped back
towards town snowflakes starting to fall from the infinite black sky
above.  Mulder sat in the passenger seat; hands sandwiched between his
knees, and his head down, tortoise-like, in the collar of his too-thin
coat.

It was a long, cold ride back to the hotel.
 
 

Diamonds and Rust
2/5
 

I remember your eyes were bluer than robin's eggs
My poetry was lousy you said, where are you calling from?
A booth in the Midwest
Ten years ago I had bought you some cufflinks
You bought me something.  We both know what memories can bring
They bring diamonds and rust
 

"So did you folks manage to find th'*aliens* you were looking for?" the
waitress asked with a merry smile.

Over at the counter, a couple of locals were snickering into their
rhubarb pie and coffee.

The two Federal Agents seated on opposite sides of the booth of the
hotel coffee shop with a twin set of Federal Expressions that were as
bleak as the night outside.

The waitress chewed some gum.

"Guess not.  What can I get you folks?"

"Coffee?"

"Hemlock?"  Mulder said and quickly amended it when he got the sharp toe
of Scully's boot in his shin.

"Coffee is fine." he corrected himself.

"Right," the waitress agreed and ambled off in her white shoes.

"You're mad at me, aren't you, Scully?" he said and began, as was his
annoying habit, to empty sugar packets into the ashtray and fold the
resulting paper into neatly pleated little fans.

She gave him a look of utter loathing over top of the menu.

"No shit, Sherlock."

"It just so happens that I am also angry with you," he said in a
deceptive, sleeping crocodile voice.

"Oh pray tell *why*," she asked in a manner that dripped ichor on the
table.

First fan down, Mulder began gutting a Sweet-n-Low packet.

"For leaving me out there in the arctic tundra with only a dead cow to
talk to.  For letting me freeze my balls off."

"I couldn't care less about your balls," she said and snapped the, menu
shut, "It's a bitch being ditched, isn't it?"

"And what *pray tell* did you mean by that?"

"For the past five, almost six years, I have endured your somewhat less
than endearing habit of leaving me in untenable positions, in
life-threatening situations without the benefit of transport or
communication while you flounce off on yet another foolishly
self-glorifying leg of your monomaniacal quest like Don Quixote with a
cel phone."

"Don Quixote?  Is that what you think I am?"

"And I ain't no Sancho Panza."

The waitress clomped back and placed the thick white cups of coffee
before them.

"You folks ready to order yet?"

"French toast."  Scully said without taking her poisonous blue eyes from
his face.

"Three eggs, scrambled, bacon and hash browns."

The waitress looked down at Mulder's hands.

"Don't do that," she instructed him, "those cost money."

Dropping the third sugar packet, he hid his hands in his lap.

Once the waitress had gone off again, Scully smirked at him over the
gold-flecked Formica top of the table.

"You enjoyed that, didn't you?"

"Yes." she admitted.

Five years of departmental wars, mutants, giant fluke worms, his
dysfunctional family, her chocolate addiction, cancer, and several
million miles passed under the tired treads of rental cars and now
Scully was acting like a disgruntled wife.  What a girly thing to do, he
had thought she was better than that.

"I thought maybe tomorrow we could drive around and see if there's any
abandoned barns with satanic markings or something."

She put down her cup of coffee and blinked at him.

"Mulder, department literature states that there is virtually no
organized satanic activity in America other than isolated pockets of
teenagers who have spent too many hours listening to Black Sabbath.
You're grabbing at straws trying to justify your request to come out
here and investigate cow murders.  Let's just pack it up and get the
hell out of Dodge."

"Is this a hormonal thing, Scully?"

Okay, cheap shot and the baleful blue glare told him as much.

The waitress put their food in front of them and Mulder ate in
uncomfortable silence, the eggs turning to wood pulp in this mouth.  On
the other hand, Scully tucked into her French toast with genuine
pleasure, stuffing big chunks of egg-soaked fried bread dripping with
syrup between her chapped lips like a greedy child.

He hated the way she ate.

He choked down his shell-laden eggs smothered in salty ketchup
reflecting that there had been rare moments when he missed the yielding
worship that Krychek had offered, although he had always suspected that
there was a sexual subtext there.  Everything with Scully was a battle.
>From the first day in the basement he had endured her complete inability
to see or understand anything that she couldn't test empirically.  How
could a woman who wore a crucifix around her slender white throat refuse
to acknowledge that there were unseen and inexplicable forces at work in
the world?  What was the difference between belief in an invisible God
and a ghost?  Then again, if confronted with Santa Claus, Scully
probably would have wanted to see ID for fear that he was a wanted
pedophile.

The Santa Claus thing was kind of kinky when you thought about it.  What
a stupid goyim thing to do, anyway.

Looking across the table at his narrow minded bitch of a partner,
happily pigging out like a bulimic on a binge, Mulder realized something
he had been fighting off like the flu.

It was over.

They should part company before things got really ugly.

His hand shook around the thick white mug.

Oblivious, Scully continued to eat.

Fumbling with the tagged motel key, Scully finally got the key in the
lock of her room while the snowflakes fell hard and fast like a frozen
tickertape parade around her.  Mulder grabbed her oven-mitt of a mitten
and stopped her.

"We need to talk.  My room."

The expression in the cobalt glass globes of her eyes was that of
guarded surprise.

The motel was a uniform beige, guaranteed not to show dirt or wear, just
tiredness.  From the beige walls to the pale wood furniture festooned
with the scratches of a thousand grain buyers' keys and briefcases, the
room was a testimony to drab efficiency.  It could have been a Federal
office.

"Have a seat." he said and gestured to the room's only chair.

She threw her coat on the bed and sat down, composed a patronizingly
alert expression on her smooth face and waited.

"It has become obvious to me over the course of the past few months that
you have been something other than enchanted with the work that we do."

He began to pace in the dreary little room, his dark coat-tails flapping
about his legs, she watched in silence.

"Your constant criticism and general disdain have become a hindrance and
an annoyance.  When we get back to Washington I'm going to request that
you be transferred to another division."

Her eyes narrowed.

"Kiss my ass, Mulder."

Before the argument could continue, the telephone on the bedside table
began to shriek.

In a swift, predatory swoop, she caught the phone before the next ring
and barked into the mouthpiece.

"Scully!" she listened for a moment, asked one-word questions and
re-cradled the phone.

She crossed her arms over her chest and favored him with a DEFCON 4
glare.

"That was the Sheriff.  They've found another one."

In steely silence she put on her coat.

"What makes this one worth venturing out in the snow?" Mulder asked.

The look on her face indicated that his IQ had slipped below two digits.

"Apparently it's his cow."
 

Diamonds and Rust
3/5

Well you burst onto the scene already a legend
The unwashed phenomena, the original vagabond
You strayed into my arms
And there you stayed, temporally lost at sea
The Madonna was yours for free yes the girl on the half-shell
Could keep you unharmed

The next two hours were hell Mulder later remembered it only in
flashes.  The sorrowful Sheriff, the bloodstained straw in the barn,
blood tracked through the snow leading to the sheriff's own house.
Bloodstained clothes and sneakers in the bedroom of the youngest
daughter, the farm fair queen.  The daughter, a corn and milk fed beauty
queen with a wealth of wheat colored hair and a deadly pair of soft
breasts under her sweater had been unrepentant at the turn of events
that had led to the crime.

"He loved that cow more than he loved me.  He has blue ribbons all over
the fucking house and he didn't even take my picture when I was
homecoming queen.  Asshole!  I'm glad that fucking cow is dead!  Grind
her up into hamburger.  I'm glad she's gone."

How quickly love turned to obsession, to hate, molded by massive
internal geological forces from a lump of coal into a diamond (where had
he heard that before?).  Crystal clear cutting diamond able to slice
through steel and pierce anything with it's flawless surface.

The snow continued to fall, finishing off what the frozen field had
begun on his shoes.  The only good thing about the polar temperature was
that the cow pats were frozen solid.  The lights of the police cruiser
bounced off the white frame farmhouse as the deputy led the handcuffed
prom queen into the back of the car.  Her parents stood in a sniffling
lump, wondering aloud what they had possibly done to make their child so
full of hatred for a simple animal. Mulder jammed his hands deeper into
the pockets of his coat and tried to keep a carefully neutral Federal
Expression, although he was sure that hysteria was going to strike at
any moment.

"I don't see why they needed us here. It's not as though it's a federal
crime to slaughter cows," Scully murmured, "Although I expect it was
easier to have an outside agency than the father do the investigating."

"You know, Scully, this is my first cow-ma-cide."

The snowflakes melted in the fire of her hair.  He couldn't look at her
face, he would lose it, fall down and howl amongst the frozen ruts of
mud in the farmyard.  God, he was tired, tired and cold and punchy.

"You really ought to show a little more respect," she said in a voice
more chilling than the wind, "it's a very moo-ving scene."

They actually made it to the truck before the snickering started.
 

Naturally Mulder couldn't sleep. There was a direct correlation between
how tired he was and his inability to sleep.  The more exhausted, the
less likely that Morpheus would come along and clock him on the head
with the baseball bat of slumber.  Lying in the tired beige hotel room
bundled in a pair of disreputable sweatpants and a Henley neck thermal
shirt old enough to vote he stared at the smudges on the ceiling.
Counting sheep?  Counting Cows? Counting Crows? (good band)  Counting
Pamela Anderson Lee clones bobbing over a dune in the beach.

One

Two

Three

The cow.

It all came back to the damn cow.  The sheriff hadn't been able to see
his daughter's festering resentment of the cow because it didn't fit
into his view of the world, couldn't see the cow blood in his own back
yard because he didn't want to see it, couldn't see it.  The reality was
too painful, too true to be borne.

Groaning, Mulder rolled over, pulled the pillow of his head and smelled
the after shave of a thousand grain-buyers.

It was like Bongo Jimmy's car.

Bongo Jimmy, who had been studying the "greats" at Oxford and had become
Mulder's drinking buddy, sported an extravagantly spiked coiffure and
drove a Volvo ancient enough to have been a troop transport in the Great
War.  Bongo Jimmy loved that car more than he loved his green-haired
girlfriend, Crunch, or his mother.  The car was the symbol of his
rebellion, spray-painted like the side of a building in the worse club
section of London with "anarchy in the UK" and "Fuck the Queen" written
on the dull gray surface with permanent felt-tip.  It was a great car,
capable of getting them back from London to Oxford without loss of life
or class time even though the body panels were riddled with rust holes.
But the car was a sham, a charade, a transsexual joke, the car had been
his father's "knock about the family estate" car.

You see, Bongo Jimmy was the next in line to be the Earl of Whitning.
So he was the car, the solid and bourgeois even with the paint job.  He
never could see it.  No matter how many times Mulder pointed it out,
Bongo Jimmy just got irritated and threw lager on him.

Am I a cow dreaming I am a Volvo or a Volvo dreaming I am a cow?

Am I an FBI agent wishing I was a college student or a college student
wishing I was an FBI agent?

Am I a cow wishing I could dream about being an FBI agent?

Am I trying to convince myself that I am something else?

I drive a Volvo, a beige one, so why don't you cut me some friggin'
slack?!

Shit.

He was channeling Nicholas Cage again.
 

There was light coming from underneath the connecting door so Mulder
slithered into Scully's motel room

"Go away," she warned.

Cross-legged on the bed, tapping at her laptop, she looked like a
college student herself in her AIDS walk T-shirt with the neck band cut
out, Johns Hopkins boxer shorts and thick cotton socks bunched around
her skinny ankles.  She even had her hair in one of those nameless
clippy things that never failed to make Mulder wonder if they could be
used as sex toys.

"I can't sleep." he admitted.

"So what else is new?"

"What are you doing?" he asked in a whining, child's voice and sat on
the edge of the bed.

"Writing a request for a transfer.  I'm not letting you throw me out.
Unlike you I care about my career."

"If you cared about your career, you would have gotten out of the
X-Files as fast as your stubby little legs would carry you."

The eyebrow went up.

"Stubby-little-legs?"

"Sorry."

She sniffed and resumed tapping.

"I've been thinking--"

"That just gets you into trouble."

"--I really don't want you to go."

"Oh really?" she stopped and looked at him with eyes as cold as the dead
cow in the field, "And what am I supposed to do?  Roll over and swoon
with gratitude?  Bite me, Mulder."

"It's the cow, it's the Volvo.  We have to finally accept their
significance, what they really mean as opposed to what they actually
are.  Is the cow a cow or something else, and if you paint Fuck
Authority on a Volvo aren't you negating the message altogether?"

"And your point would be?"

"Things can't continue as they are.  Woody Allen said that relationships
are like sharks, once they stop moving forward they die.  What we have
here is a dead shark."

"I thought we had a cow and a Volvo," she reached over and laid the palm
of her hand on his forehead, "Are you feeling all right?"

"No." he admitted.

Her hand felt so smooth and cold on the rumpled bottom sheet of his
head.  He wanted to curl up against her and let the coolness of her
flesh leach all the heat from him.  Scant inches away, her skin smelled
like peaches and coffee.

"I think you're running a temperature."

"It's mad cow disease," he joked and looked into the clouded backs of
her eyes, "I would have died without you, more times than I can count, I
will die without you.  Can't be trusted alone."

"You're delirious," she decided and reached over to the bedside table
where she produced a bottle of ibuprofen and handed him her water glass.

She closed the laptop and laid it aside, watching him with her medical
face.

Like a good child, he took the pills and drank the water.  Funny, he
didn't feel sick, didn't feel feverish, and his thought processes were
clearer than usual.  He stared at the smooth skin of her kneecap and
sighed.

"You just don't get it, do you?" he asked.
 

Diamonds and Rust
4/5
Now I see you standing with brown leaves falling all around
And snow in your hair
Now you're smiling at the window of that crummy hotel
Over Washington Square
Our breath comes out white clouds, mingles and hangs in the air
Speaking strictly for me we both could have died
Then and there
 
 
 

"Enlighten me."

"It's us.  It's you and me.  We're the dead shark."

She shook her head, the strands of her hair, which had escaped the clip
danced around the serious oval of her face.

"What about the cow and the Volvo?"

"Forget about the cow and the Volvo.  It's a metaphor, a fucking
metaphor." he shouted and clambered up from the bed.

Owl-eyed, she watched as he went into full-fledged rant, hands cutting
the air as he strutted and fretted across the stage like a bad actor.

"Five years, Scully.  Five fucking years we tap dance around pretending
that there's nothing.  Games.  Head fucks.  We sit and sneer at each
other with cutting cheap sarcasm and innuendo.  Only I'm not suffering a
paper cut here.  I'm bleeding to death from a hemorrhage and you're
fixated on cows and Volvos."

"As I recall, you brought up the cow and the Volvo."

"Goddamnit, do you have to disagree with everything that I say?"

"No I don't."

He dug at his brain through his skull.  Obviously some neural connection
was not being made.  He had to be speaking Urdu.  Really, honestly and
truthfully, he wanted to strangle her for the third time that day.  He
wanted to squeeze the tender willow branch of her throat until her eyes
bulged and her blackened tongue protruded from her vicious lips.

Justifiable homicide.

"This must stop." he said in a voice flat as the prairie outside.

"Sit down, Mulder."

Pills and water lurching in his stomach, he flopped onto the bed, ready
to throw up from sheer frustration.  He looked up at her.  God, even
upside down she was beautiful, the bitch.

"I have to agree with you."

"This is a rare event."

Pursing her lips in annoyance, she continued.

"There has been a certain amount of unnecessary strain recently--"

"Recently?"

"---And I admit that there are unresolved issues that need to be dealt
with if we are going to continue to work together in an effective
manner."

Mulder shut his eyes; the woman had no idea how close to death she was.
One more officious phrase from her lovely mouth and he was going to
remember if North Dakota had the death penalty or not in one hell of a
hurry.

The mattress, lumpy and sprung, shifted as she moved.

Cool, cool as spring mud, cool as the side of a beer bottle on a hot day,
lips pressed into his forehead.  He stopped breathing as the lips moved
down to touch one and then the other eyelid.  His heart slowed as the
cool lips brushed the flat, dark mole on the side of his face that he
hated so much.  His heart stopped dead in his chest when those soft, cool
lips finally touched his.

Dead shark.

Seriously dead shark.

A bizarre image of a cow driving a Volvo with a dead shark in the
passenger seat floated through his mind.  God, if she ever knew, she'd
kill him.  He was afraid to move afraid he'd break the spell.  He was
just plain old afraid.  Supine, passive, lax as Sleeping Beauty he lay
and savored the delicate touch of her mouth as she carefully traced the
lines of his lips.

Manalive.

After a long moment, she moved away.  His eyes popped open like a soda
can and he looked up into her inverted, composed face.  Composed?  How
the fuck could she be composed?!  It was the discovery of fire, the
dropping of the atom bomb, the Yankees winning the World Series, all that
*and* a bag of chips.  How could she be composed?

Urgh.

He hated her.

It was anger, a plateful of anger with lust on the side that made him
vault off his back and onto the mattress on all fours like --- like a
cow.  Not a cow, a bull.  A big, pissed off and horny bull.  Oh yes he
enjoyed the flicker of trepidation in her eyes.  Yes he enjoyed the
nervous twitch of her cool mouth.

He backed her up against the headboard.

"Uh Mulder I---" she stammered.

Let her stammer, let her worry.  Let that put a little color in that
ivory face and get a little hot blood flowing through that slim white
body instead of formaldehyde.

Her skull was an eggshell in his hands as he drank her mouth.  Coffee,
toothpaste, and the sweet peachy taste that was she filled his head.
Rigid and unyielding as a department store mannequin at first, she
smoothed into soft, pliable flesh in a moment.  Her hands gripped at the
saddle of his hipbones, pulling him closer even as she straddled the hard
ridge of her closed thighs.

How could he have ignored this for so long?  How had he not noticed that
attached to the mind and the mouth was a woman's body?

For a genius he could be pretty fucking stupid.

Her hands, hard and cool underneath his short, counting his ribs,
checking the texture of his skin, hands that had touched so many dead
touching his living body.  Somewhere in the midst of all this, she made a
greedy sound deep in her throat and pressed her body into his.  Her mouth
and hands turning frantic, nipping, pinching, catching his lower lip
between her sharp little teeth while her nails scratched at the cluster
of nerves just above the cleft of his ass.

Blind, starving he gripped her to him, teeth clicking, skidding down the
hard muscle of her neck to gnaw there like a feeding beast.  One of her
arms disentangled from him, for a moment flailed helplessly reaching off
the world of the mattress.

Then a crunch, the thin shatter of broken glass and they were in primal
darkness,

Well that was one way to do it.

The dark made things easier, easier for him to haul the thermal shirt
over his head and fling it into the blackness, easier for her to pull the
T-shirt over her head while he wrestled the tangle of boxers and panties
over her hips.  Who would have though that Dana Scully wore cotton
panties like a little girl.  Then again she couldn't have been expecting
to have sex with her partner in a beige hotel room north of Fargo.
Underneath his sweatpants he was naked and when the damn things were
finally jettisoned overboard and the hot skin of his cock finally met
with the cool white flesh he couldn't help but groan.

Swarming over him, twisting, rolling, and her hair, loose now, brushing
like feathers against his outraged skin.  She journeyed down the
aggravated length of his body.  Trailing cool fingers, now-hot mouth down
skin and bone, sinew and tendon, twisting the hard kernels of his useless
nipples between her fingers until he shook like cafeteria gelatin
squares.  She tongued his navel, bit the incline of his stomach until he
choked with pleasure and her mouth closed over him.

He almost came right then and there like some pimple plagued teenager
getting his first blow job.  Instead he gritted his teeth and reached out
for her.  Hands encountered the hard surface of her open thighs and he
made his way upward until he found her hot, wet and more than ready.  It
was like putting his fingers in a blueberry pie still bubbling from the
oven.  He reached into her, feeling her clamp down around him like a
swallowing throat,

There was a distinct possibility that if he dipped his wick in there,
he'd never get it back.

The hell with foreplay, he hadn't spent one thousand eight hundred and
fifteen (give or take) nights alone with his video vixens to waste time
now.

She yipped when he tumbled her over the bed, the mattress cot loose from
its moorings and skewed sideways half-off the bed.  His knees were on the
box spring and her head was dangling over the foot of the bed.  God she
was a tiny thing.  Tiny, hard muscled; strong and soft like a wild
rabbit.  His intent was clear and she arched her back to meet him
halfway.

After all that's all he'd ever really wanted, for her to meet him
halfway.

Inside, Oh God Almighty, inside that blueberry pie hot and endless and
--= Underneath him she moaned, pulling him further into her treacherous
depths.  He stroked into her, mouth on one warm breast and hand on the
other.  Her fingers pulled at this hair.  At this rate he wasn't going to
last very long, that much was certain, and if he could only make her come
he could die happy.  Surely she'd bite his head off like a praying mantis
afterwards.  As slowly as he could he ground into her, burying himself to
the base and pulling out as far as he could while trying to keep in
contact with that damnably small target where female pleasure originated.

At least she seemed to be close enough for Government work.  His usually
composed partner was gasping underneath him.  Her hard fingers sawed into
the base of his spine and he has the distinct feeling that she was on the
verge.  Maybe he could make it for just a few more moments, if his heart
didn't stop first.  He had to think of something else.

Matter is neither created nor destroyed.

Her tongue probed his ear.

In 1066, the Norman King William the Conquer defeated the Saxon warlord
Ethelred the Unready at the battle of Hastings.

She was rocking underneath him like an unsettled sea.

Objects at rest tend to remain at rest--

Groaning and moaning and shuddering all around him.

--Objects in motion tend to remain in motion--

She keened into his ear.

The monks under the rule of Charlemagne developed the Carolingian script,
the ancestor of modern handwriting--

Oh GOD.

And he was gone into the blood-dark sea surrounded by her, as his
overtaxed nervous system lit up like a pinball machine on TILT.  He came
for what seemed like a year or two.  So hard that it almost hurt
straining nerves and muscles unused to a foreign touch.

Falling down into her, caught in her arms and saved from drowning in a
circle of arms and legs and a gentle voice murmuring nothing at all.

"Mulder?"

"hrrrrfph?"

"You're on my hair."
 
 
 
 

Diamonds and Rust
5/5
Now you're telling me that you're not nostalgic
Then give me another word for it - you who're so good with words
And at keeping things vague
'Cause I need some of that vagueness now, it's
All come back to me too clearly.
Yes I loved you dearly.  And if you're offering me diamonds and rust
I've already paid.

Joan Baez
 

Working morning.

Airport coffee, McPaper, crying children, taxicabs all under the dirty
sky, the usual Federal grind. In the hard plastic chair designed for
someone with a misshapen ass, Mulder shifted, crossed his right leg over
his left, shifted again, and crossed his left leg over his right.  It
didn't help.  Over at the reservation desk, Scully was making some poor
clerks' life a living hell.

"Mike," she said with deliberate menace, "my partner and I are agents of
the Federal Bureau of Investigation and we *must* get on that plane."

"Ma'am the plane isn't fully boarded yet so we don't know how many seats
are taken."

"We're trying to prevent a murder here, Mike.  Do you want that on your
conscience?"

Hard swallow, Mulder could see the kid's Adam's apple bob like a mouse in
a snake.  On some level the kid must have sensed that the murder he was
preventing was his own.

"I'll page you."

It was really clever, Mulder decided, the way that she had turned up the
collar of her jacket to cover the brown-purple marks on her neck.  Scully
tapped back across to him on her little feet and neatly tucked herself
into the next uncomfortable seat.  Ducking his head into his copy of USA
Today, he tried not to smile.

Taking her filo-fax out of her briefcase, Scully began sorting receipts
into the appropriate compartments.  The wench had little folders in her
filo-fax neatly labeled with case numbers and could whip out a week's
worth of expense reports in half an hour.  Naturally, Mulder could spend
a week or two hauling mysterious receipts and pocket lint out of his
clothes and still end up in the red.

Even the though of expense reports couldn't dull the juvenile gloat he
had settled into.

"Scully?"

"Hmmm?"

"What do we do now?"

"We get on the plane and we get the hell out of here." she said without
looking up.

"That's not what I meant."

"I know that's not what you meant."

"The shark's in your court, Scully."

She actually smiled although she never looked up from her sorting.

"It's not that I wouldn't like to have a shark, on occasion, and it's not
that I haven't considered the possibility of a shark.  After all I am
only human."

That was up for debate.

"But I wonder do we really need the set of problems and complications a
shark would bring?"

"The rewards could be substantial."

"Oh come on Mulder, you weren't *that* good."

"Will Miss Scully and Mr. Mulder please report to gate four?" the PA
system cut off his reply.

It never ceased to amaze him how someone with legs that short could move
that fast.  He had to jog to keep up with her.

The plane was crowded with other refugees from North Dakota seeking
warmth and sunlight.  When the flight attendant showed them to their
cramped coach seats, Mulder went in first and sagged against the wall of
the plane.  He was so tired . . . but it was a good tired.  In the aisle,
Scully stared at him and did the eyebrow thing that never failed to raise
his blood pressure to dangerous levels.

"What?" he demanded.

"You know I prefer the window seat."

He did too.  When he sat on the aisle, he had to stretch out his long
legs and people tended to trip over his feet.

"Right."

God, she's got me whipped already.  Then again, she had me whipped at
'hello'.

He got up, got out, and let her take the coveted seat.  As he leaned back
into the uncomfortable headrest one thought was uppermost in his mind:

I swear I'm going to fucking *strangle* her.
 

Finis
 

************************
(Let me know what you think!  This isn't my usual genre - a comedy of
manners -and I want to know what the general consensus is out there in
fan-fic land.  Is it a dead or a live shark?)

Dead- forget it

Live- go girl