Archive of Our Own

Time hates love, wants love poor
But love spins gold, gold, gold from straw
- Carol Ann Duffy

There is a ladybug on the tip of Mulder's nose. He has his eyes closed, lashes curving against his cheekbones, and in the green-yellow sunlight coming through the leaves above he looks like some strange fey creature, slipping through a gap between the worlds. The little beetle considers him carefully, rearranging the bright halves of its back.

She props herself up on one elbow and reaches over towards him gingerly. When the tip of her finger reaches his nose Mulder's eyes pop open, but he only watches quietly as she coaxes the ladybug onto it. She turns her hand and the insect crawls around her finger in a spiral, heading for her palm.

"You should make a wish Scully," he says as the ladybug wanders onto the line of her median nerve. It is the colour of poppies and fire hydrants, with seven dark spots, ink blotches from its calligraphy face. Seven is a magical number, Mulder would say, and she wonders when exactly she started thinking his thoughts for him when he's right there beside her. She feels little bug-feet against her skin like the touch of God, light and meandering along all time's creases.

She sits up a little more, flattening her hand out as if giving a benediction, and blows. The ladybug skips upwards into the air, and she settles slowly back down to the grass, prickly and cool in the shade of the trees. In the distance she can hear childrens' voices and the rumble of city traffic, but here there is only the sound of Mulder's breathing, shirt-button chest rising and falling, and the soft rustling as he tips his head towards her. His eyes are the colour of old forests, growing thick moss and myths under some sleepy enchantment.

It had certainly seemed like a charm, the first time, a candle guttering out on her coffee table beside the empty bottle of Riesling and her hand suddenly choosing, grasping at his arm before he could put his coat more than half on. Stay, stay, but they hadn't stayed at all, slipping and tugging and kissing down the narrow hall and into her bedroom, broken buttons, mouths awkward and seeking. Every quarter of a million years the earth's magnetic field reverses, turning south into north. She woke to his sleepy mouth murmuring nonsense into her hair and felt it start to move.

"So what did you wish for?" he whispers, though there's no-one to hear. She blinks a drifting hair out of her eyes. If prayer is like wishing then she has wished and wished, made fifty-nine first stars out of her Rosary; I may, I might.

"A nicer pair of shoes," she lies, and he laughs, little crow's feet fanning out from the corners of his eyes. She touches the curving edge of his mouth with her yen-stained fingers. She never prayed for this, never quite dared, but the grace of God has always been beyond her understanding.

Above them a bird trills and rattles the branches with its weight. Since she closed and opened her eyes in the temple it seems as though the whole world is quickening about her, humming with life; she has noticed a crack in the sidewalk outside her apartment and avoids stepping on it. Someone on the first floor of her building has a pair of mynah birds and from the foyer she hears them calling to one another, sharp thicket songs and fragments of overheard conversations.

Mulder rolls onto his side and slides one hand possessively across her stomach. His cat-got-the-cream smile is all too familiar now, like shadows at one in the morning and the look of fierce concentration on his face when she straddles him. She had thought, after countless hours in cars and rooms that belong to someone else, that she had learned him like carpal bones and the symptoms of hypercalcaemia, with his tics and foibles for mnemonics, but now she has only found miles and miles further to go. He carries on talking asleep, he wears entirely boring underwear, he is ticklish on the soles of his feet. His ability to draw with squeezy honey on a slice of toast is extremely limited. He has been quietly in love with her for longer than she can quite comprehend.

This, she supposes, is what it is to have a lover. 'Boyfriend' only conjures up images of either campfires and Mulder in a kelly green cummerbund, which is amusing but ridiculous, or Jack's wide paternal shoulders, which is neither, and 'partner' is still true but it's been true for years and this, here in the grass and the sky and the warm spaces between them, is a newborn thing. Lover, she brushes her knuckles against his ear. There is something in the angle of his eyelids that she knows as well as her name, lover, lover, she wants to say it until her mouth is sick of it, roll him back into the grass and speak without words.

Mulder soughs peacefully, his tie loosened at his neck and the end of it trailing along the ground. "So Scully, I read in the paper a few days ago that there have been a series of exsanguinations in Utah, about sixty miles outside Salt Lake City."

She prods him in the arm. "Don't say 'the paper' when you mean the Weekly World News, Mulder, it's dishonest."

"It is a paper. It's made out of paper."

"Yes, but you make it sound as if you're quoting from the New York Times."

"As if the Times ever published anything worth reading about." He pulls a slightly disgruntled face. "Anyway, I think we ought to go and check it out."

She raises one eyebrow lazily. "So is it aliens or vampires this time? Or El Chupacabra?"

He slides his hand upwards, stroking the undersides of her breasts. "Well I hope it's not vampires, you were bad enough the last time."

"What do you mean 'bad enough'?"

"You were all over that buck-toothed Sheriff in Texas," he says, grinning and trailing his fingers a little higher. A breeze stirs at the tops of the trees overhead.

"He was not buck-toothed," she objects, tugging at his shirt collar. They are fast approaching a line which she really doesn't think should be crossed in public, but then they are almost alone under the trees, their own leaf-dappled kingdom. Mulder makes a small noise in the back of his throat.

"Just imagine vampires from Utah, they'd probably be those nice Mormon missionary guys." He crosses his eyes deliberately. "Hello ma'am, we'd like to talk to you about Jesus Christ, and also drink your blood."

She laughs at his peculiar blend of Bela Lugosi and western drawl, turning her head back against the grass to look up at the verdant canopy. "They'd probably have a higher rate of conversions that way. Of one kind or another."

"I don't think you're taking this seriously Scully," he says, dipping his head towards her as she runs a finger along his collarbone. "Those missionary guys work out. I don't know if I could face the competition."

"Poor you," she says, turning back to him with a smile, and their noses brush in a soft, involuntary Eskimo kiss. This close she can see the patterns of colour in his irides, darkening at their ciliary edges. "Perhaps there might be some way you could persuade me not to elope with a Latter Day Exsanguinator."

His hand slips up to cover her left breast, thumbing at the edge of her bra through her thin cotton shirt. "I can be persuasive." His palm is pressed hot against her nipple.

"Sometimes," she admits a little breathlessly. She pulls her hand out of his collar and runs it down the front of his shirt, fingers catching on each button. Public park, she reminds herself. Broad daylight. Somewhere a police siren wails in reinforcement.

"I do think it could be evidence of extraterrestrial activity though," he says, and kisses the tip of her nose. "The report claimed that there had been some unusual weather patterns in the area recently, and, uh, a plague of frogs."

"Frogs?" She arches an eyebrow again and he moves his hand slowly across to her other breast, fingers softly kneading. Last night he had started babbling something about the ley lines around Stonehenge while she unzipped his jeans. She hadn't been surprised to find that Mulder would happily argue in bed; it was discovering that she found it a turn on that had her wondering about Stockholm syndrome. "I thought plagues of frogs were someone else's modus operandi."

"Well I guess that brings us back round to the Mormon vampires." He squints suggestively. "How about it Scully- you, me, a couple of corpses, some fanged evangelists who might really be alien life forms, and maybe one or two things that are illegal in the state of Utah."

"Isn't just about everything illegal in Utah?"

"I hear they still have PG-13 rated movies."

"Well I guess that would go nicely with your idea of a lunch date involving fooling around in a public park, Mulder."

"You wound me, Scully; I was working up to asking you to the prom."

She blinks, and for a second he is only half-grown into his prolix limbs, earnest and angry in an unfocused way; there is an eraser against a printed page, the clatter of doors in long hallways and a plane arcing over a wide ocean. The little plastic button at the collar of his shirt rattles through a sorting machine, the wind shakes through cotton plants in a weaving pattern, warp and woof.

Her shuttle-thoughts are interrupted by his hand wandering upwards to her face. When she meets his eyes they are narrowed in wonder.

"What?"

He seems momentarily to be searching for some reply, but instead he closes the little space left between them and kisses her. It's slow and burgeoning and she can feel the blades of grass against her cheek, the swelling breeze, the warmth of his stomach under her hands as a shiver of fire runs down to her groin. He kisses the corner of her mouth and the little mole on her upper lip. She groans and rolls onto her side against him and his hand skitters over her shoulder to her back, tracing some strange, angular pattern. She breaks the kiss to mumble against his cheek.

"What are you doing?"

"It's a molecular diagram of oxytocin." He nibbles at her lip. "Or maybe a map of downtown Baltimore; I can't see well from this angle."

It is almost too ridiculous; she pushes her hands into his hair, waiting for the next skeltering thought to pass underneath. A squirrel chatters at them from somewhere above. She wonders if this is how the world has always been for him, so avid with possibility, while she has been drawing what she sees.

"So will you come with me to Utah to look into it?" There's a note of caution in his voice. She would still prefer the quiet of her apartment to trampled English cornfields, even with her singular Sherlock there waxing lyrical on long barrows and the Canvey Island Monster, but it occurs to her that he might have meant something else entirely by a pair of plane tickets on his own credit card.

"I wouldn't want to miss it," she says, and tugs him towards her so their foreheads touch. The open lines of the city spread out around them for miles in every direction, full of numinous secrets. "We should probably head back to the office."

"Only probably," he mutters, but wobbles slowly into a sitting position, pulling her up with him. Their suit jackets are huddled in an intimate little pile at the very foot of the tree and he separates them reluctantly. She straightens her blouse and combs stray grass stems out of her hair. Beyond the next line of trees a jogger passes on the footpath, feet ticking against the asphalt, and the sun is sliding down from its zenith. Mulder shrugs on serious grey wool and squints into the distance, a haze along the road and the gleam of the Capitol Building above. The clear, D-sharp sky is beckoning.

She squeezes his hand as they walk away and lets their fingers trickle slowly apart. "I worked seven years for you."

"Did you get what you expected?" Above his Roadrunner grin his eyes are tender.

"No," she says, looking down at their feet. They are walking in step despite their difference in height. He is the one person she was never supposed to fall in love with. "I don't think anybody ever does."

"Maybe you're right."

He doesn't touch her on the way out of the park, just follows close by like a shadow at noon. The traffic lights are turning green as they pass- "Lucky charm," Mulder says, and it might be true. On the sidewalk by the intersection is a red and yellow hot dog stand and a bald man carrying a toddler carrying a rather antediluvian teddy bear and she could have an eidetic memory and never capture all of it, every shade and colour of the expanding universe. Mulder's hand brushes her elbow briefly as she exhales and ten million atoms float upwards in the afternoon sun.