TITLE: The Right to Remain Silent AUTHOR: Suture RATING: R EMAIL: holly_springs94706@yahoo.com CATEGORY: Post-ep for "The Truth." V, A FEEDBACK: Oh yes. Please. SPOILERS: No specific spoilers. SUMMARY: A snapshot of what early to middle period Mulder and Scully on the lam may look like. The Hardboiled Fairy made me do it. DISCLAIMER: I don't own these characters, and I'm not sure anybody wants to own this version. ARCHIVE: Anywhere and let me know if possible. xxxxxxxxxxxxxx There's nothing between us but sex anymore. The little man responsible for editing my thoughts takes his red pen and writes "Overwrought" in the margins. The femme fatale I seem to be channeling twenty-four seven these days picks up one of her fuck-me stiletto heels and cold-cocks him. At least he makes the voyage into la-la land with a smile on his face. Mulder and I hurtle down another long, flat interstate highway in a pickup truck that smells too much of him and me and Wendy's SuperValue meals. He drives as if we're very late for an important date. He drives as if he wants to get away from me. I lick my lips and try to figure out whether I'm tasting salt leftover from my lunchtime french fries or my post-lunchtime blowjob. Then I decide it's not a very important distinction and close my eyes against the never-changing brown fields. On the radio, some French woman croons about Bonnie and Clyde the way the French always seem to do. xxxxxxxxxxxxxx I used to think we belonged to the realm of epic, Mulder and me. He was Odysseus, wily and resilient in the face of calamitous fortune. Aeneas forced to carry the weight of his family's sins on his broad, broad shoulders. I was a Penelope for the postmodern, postfeminist twenty-first century. Pro-active and able to take a bad-guy out with a clean shot between the eyes from twenty yards away. Fast forward to the present. In the aftermath of abductions, resurrections, pregnancy, and separations, we act like characters from a pulp novel or a monotonous on-the-road porn film. Against the wall. Over the bathroom counter. On the floor. Anywhere but in bed where we keep to our respective sides and twitch in our own private nightmares. Tonight, I'm bent over a cheap, walnut-stained dresser, trying hard not to look at the shuttered woman in the mirror. Mulder moves me behind me, silent and relentless. I throw my head back and see the tendons in my neck stand out as if in agony. Nobody ever told me ecstasy looks so much like pain. xxxxxxxxxxxxxx Late at night, I watch Mulder sleep and think things that would make Freud faint. Mulder has William's fine, brown eyebrows, his too-large mouth, his gawky, skewed nose. Mulder sleeps like William does, limbs sprawled in abandon. The curve of his jaw is William's. Somebody once said that family resemblances are ghostly. Look at any family photo and you can see the same eye-colors, nose-shapes, cheekbones and expressions appear and disappear like phantoms. Inheritance is an uncanny game of hide-and-seek and, when the game's gone on too long and you're the only "it" left, what you reap is sorrow and pain. I keep looking for the son in the father anyways, even as I straddle Mulder's hips and rock myself into oblivion at a deserted rest-stop. He stares at me intently with those chameleon graygreenbrowngold eyes and for a moment I wonder to myself who put those stranger's eyes in William's face. Outside our pick-up cabin, the heat rises in unforgiving waves. Sweat trickles down the slope of my breasts and Mulder bends his head to lick it away. His tongue rasps sandpaper rough against my skin. He takes a swollen nipple into his mouth and I realize he makes the same dove-soft grunts William used to make. xxxxxxxxxxxxxx When I think about sex now, I think about it in the crude, vapid language of Penthouse fantasies and 1-900 numbers. Cock. Suck. Fuck. Clit. Baby. As if he can read my mind, Mulder never calls me by name anymore when he comes. He sinks his teeth into my shoulder, the side of my neck, my breast and muffles his groans. Sometimes I moan, but it sounds too much like a dirge to my ears. So, if pressed, I babble a stream of "yes's" and toss my head from side to side. Or, I try for safe, neutral words. Hot. Wet. Hard. There. More. I don't think this distance between us is permanent. A fatal crack in a relationship supposedly forged from unbreakable steel. I'm not a melodramatic teenager or some hardbitten gangster's moll in a cut-rate Humphrey Bogart film. Someday, I'll look across the table in some greasy fast-food restaurant and see the man I love again in his own, singular beauty. Maybe, someday I'll even be able to look at family photos of Mulder, William, and me and watch as we change over the course of years. In the meantime, I press my lips against Mulder's thigh and tongue at the soft skin. If I listen hard enough, I can hear an echo of the things we used to say to each other. Please. Scully. Mulder. Love. xxxxxxxxxxxxxx Author's Notes: This vignette came out of an email exchange where I was ranting about how "The Truth" seemed to have summarily shut off my MSR creative juices. I loved the poorly lit passionate kiss as much as the next good fan, but that scene gave me severe MSR writer's block. So, I tried to work it out in the paragraphs above. Apologies to all of those who may be tired of the angst.