Twelfth Voyage (1/1) by Parrotfish (parrotfish@ibm.net) Rated NC-17 Category: SAR Summary: An intimate journey of discovery solves everything and nothing. Spoilers: Gethsemane. Does anyone still care? Disclaimer: I cannot be held responsible for using characters not of my own creation. I had a bad week. Send me feedback, and the peace of righteousness will be yours. _______________________________________ At an early hour, long before the alarm clock is due to scream its rude morning message, my body awakens my mind. This is a luxury to me because, for most of my life, it's been the other way around. My mind has always awakened my body. Night after night, my long frame would cease its movement as sleep took me. But my mind would soon quicken, fill with images and sounds to taunt and frighten me, until with one final jerk my body would leap to wakefulness, like a heart attack victim shocked back to life by a jolt of electrical current. But this morning, it is my body that quickens first, stimulated by an embracing warmth and a gentle pressure so purely physical that the awareness of it is almost not a mental process at all. The sensation is centered on a gentle throbbing in my groin, seasoned with an erotic fragrance in my nostrils, wrapped in a sheltering cocoon of heat. Only with the waking of my mind does understanding come: She is here. Again. The experience is still new enough to bring with it a surge of wonder and visceral lust. I can't imagine it ever being otherwise, though I suppose an accustomed joy remains a joy nonetheless. Perhaps its value is even greater. I wouldn't know, never having grown accustomed to joy. And I'm not likely to. She is still dying. With that thought, I wrap myself more tightly around her, burrowing my face in her neck and my hard cock into the groove of her ass. I am fully awake now, saying "Good morning" to my old friend, fear. She stirs within my embrace, pushing herself back against me like an animal backing into the safety of a sheltering nest. Her reaction is reflexive, though she hasn't actually been in this situation very many times before. Eleven, actually. I remember every detail of each one. The first was just three weeks ago. Pure luck, my escape had been. An accident. The irony that my good fortune lay with a drunk driver and a mass of twisted metal is not lost on me. I had been tied down in the back of that van for three days, lashed to metal rings that jutted from the floor, drifting in and out of consciousness. Drugged, I suppose. The head-on impact must have killed both driver and passenger instantly. I don't remember much about the whole thing, but I imagine the Maryland state trooper who opened the back door of the van got one of the surprises of his career -- a drugged, nude man doing a horizontal impression of Christ crucified. The first thing I do remember clearly is Scully's arrival at the hospital. I was still pretty out of it, but not so much so that I failed to note the disruption in my personal space-time continuum the moment she entered my room, an intimate awareness that gives a whole new meaning to the theory of relativity. We'd played this scene a dozen times before. I expected her to be relieved to see me, the emotion showing itself for a fraction of a second in her eyes, fleeting as the opening and closing of a camera shutter, burning an image into my soul like light on silver nitrate. Her tears threw me for a loop. Her embrace left me speechless and convinced me that there was a lot more to this than I knew about. Her confession made me furious. She told me everything. The body in my apartment that she thought had been me. Her belief that I'd taken my own life in response to her accusation. Her denunciation of my life's work to the FBI internal affairs committee. Weakened though I was, I railed at her. Told her she'd played right into their hands. Bought exactly whatever it was they were selling. Angrily, I asked how she could have had so little faith in me. The accusations poured from my lips like blood from a head wound. And why not? I had been abducted, beaten, drugged, intended for God knew what fate. And she was sitting in a conference room, casting doubt on my work, my sanity, my life. I was on a roll. "Is this what you've been waiting for all along, Scully? Ever since the beginning? A chance to have the last word at my expense? Well, I'm sorry to disappoint you. Of course, you don't have to have anything more to do with me. Just say the word, and you can walk away from me, from the X Files, from all of it. I'll do just fine without you." Righteous indignation is a dangerous thing. I find there's nothing like it to bring out the arrogant asshole in me. I managed in that moment of fury to forget entirely which one of us was doing the suffering. Which one of us had terminal cancer. And whose fault that was. Scully had reminded me only days earlier. She'd thought I'd blown my brains out at the news. I probably should have, but I didn't have that much decency. Yeah, hold a mirror up to my holier-than-thou attitude, and it's revealed for exactly what it is. Self-serving cowardice. With her next words, Scully held up the mirror. "I thought you were dead." In a flash, I saw our positions reversed. Her body lying on the floor, her head half-missing, her brains spread across the back of a couch, and me, called to make a positive ID. Better a hundred beatings and kidnappings than that. By then, though, it had seemed to late. The bile had streamed from my mouth. The damage had been done. When she drove me home the next day, it had been in silence. She took me up to my apartment and saw me inside. I noticed it had been cleaned. There were no traces of the scene Scully had described seeing the last time she'd been there. Her first words were to ask if I had everything I needed. Bone-weary, aching inside and out, I collapsed onto the couch and rubbed my eyes with both fists. "No." "Can I get you something?" she asked with cold civility, willfully refusing to understand me. "Damn it, Scully!" My open hand slapped the leather cushion, a sound of flesh on flesh. "I didn't ask to be kidnapped. What do you want from me?" Her eyes squeezed shut, the lines of her forehead broadcasting the stress and fatigue her body held. She looked fragile at that moment. Not like porcelain or glass, but like a mighty tree standing firm in a gale while others around it bend, its situation fragile. In the end, it will either be left standing tall and strong, or it will have fallen dead to the ground below. "I didn't ask for the cancer," she replied, her eyes opening and focusing on me. "But it's here. If I can't have a happy ending, can't I at least hope for a peaceful one?" "No!" The word exploded from me before I could stop it, before I could temper it with an explanation. Jesus. The pain came so readily into her eyes. Had I really taught her to expect that from me? She turned to leave. "Scully, wait!" She kept walking, reaching for the doorknob. With three long strides, I beat her there and grabbed her outstretched arm. "Scully, listen to me." She stopped but wouldn't look at me. "I would never deny you peace, if it were in my power to grant it to you," I said, searching desperately for the words that might bridge this yawning gulf. "But I will do everything in my power to deny you the ending." "Mulder." Her voice had softened, giving me a hope that her words didn't reflect. "It's too late." "It is not too late." "Yes it is." "No. This is exactly the right time to be alive. To stay alive." "But it's out of our hands." "I refuse to accept that." Frustration. Anger. Desperation. Determination. These responses would not have surprised me. A lone tear from a glacier-blue eye shook me badly. "I wish you would accept it, Mulder," she said quietly, pleading. "It would make all this a lot easier on me." That should have been the end of that. According to all the rules Scully and I had ever played by, the round was over. Like two fencers for whom the battle is merely sport, both combatants withdraw at the first sign of real injury. Blood is never drawn. Too fucking bad, I thought. While we're conducting ourselves with such sportsmanlike comportment, the field around us is drowning in blood. Ours. Time to quit fencing and take up a new sport. Here goes. "How can I, Scully? You mean far too much to me for me to accept your end, for me not to rage against the dying of your light. I know I've done everything possible to convince you that I'm contrary and argumentative by nature. I know how often I've ignored your good advice and thwarted your attempts to help me. I'm sorry for what I said yesterday. I know you would never willingly betray me. But unwillingly, you are betraying me every day. Not with words to some fucking committee, but with that look in your eyes." The tears were streaming faster down her cheeks now as she cocked her head questioningly. "The look that asks me to say goodbye. I won't do it. I can't." Lying here now, my body twined around hers, our combined heat making a furnace of this slumber-nest, I recall in vivid detail the sensation of her coming into my arms those scant weeks ago. "I don't want to say goodbye," she said, her face pressed into my chest. "I just don't know what else to say." "Say anything else," I replied. "It doesn't matter, as long as it's not goodbye." "I'm right here." "Show me," I replied. That night, I began a new exploration of Dana Scully, and of myself. I imagine she found virgin territory in me as well. I discovered that her courage is rooted deeply in her passion, and that therefore her passion is full-bloodedly courageous. Both characteristics are deeply private affairs with her, resting somewhere within the heart of her inner nature. That she could give as good as she got I never doubted for a moment. But that she could transform what she got into a gift to the giver was a revelation. This morning, I will embark on my twelfth voyage of discovery. I can't tell if she's awake yet, and for a moment I consider leaving her alone and letting her sleep. After all, she needs her rest. But my hard-on twitches against the full globes of her bare bottom, and my little voice of conscience shuts up in a hurry. I am stubbornly, happily selfish about this. Vain, too. I want to make Scully squirm and writhe and tremble, feel the soft flesh of her cunt grow firm and full with vital life's blood, draw from her the wet, opalescent moisture that will grease our joining, hold her tightly as her body surrenders to the blue flash of orgasmic bolts firing from her brain to the pulsing cavity in her belly. And then I want her to demand of me what belongs to her. My hard flesh. My feverish need. The only pleasure I have ever known, am ever likely to know. My surrender, her liberation. So I move my head ever so slightly, nuzzling the back of her neck, the soft, invisible down that covers the tender skin tickling the underside of my nose. She shifts against me, and I plant a small kiss where my nose had been. She hums softly, and I know she's awake. Somehow, the back of her head tells me the front is smiling. "Sorry I woke you," I say, my lips just behind her ear, my voice low with morning gravel. "Liar." Now I can hear her smile, too. For emphasis, she pushes her hips back, increasing the pressure of my cock between her ass and my belly. "Tease," I reply, the word coming out in a rush of air that betrays my lack of total control. "You love it." "Damn right." Arms that had lightly surrounded her now tighten, and she gasps as I suddenly roll onto my back, pulling her with me so that she lies splayed along my body, her face to the ceiling, still cocooned in the warmth of sleep-drenched covers. Smugly, I congratulate myself on the move. The full weight of her ass now presses firmly on my erection, and my pleasure ratchets up a notch. And she... She is wide open above me, exposed to my roaming hands as freely as if it is my own body I touch. And I do touch. My hands begin the exploration, sliding smoothly up her belly and across her ribs, finding her breasts pulled tightly flat against her chest. In this position they seem smaller, firmer. Her whole body does. But her nipples are still soft and gently rounded across the tops of her mounds, flaccid with warmth and sleep. I choose to make them my first stop, brushing my thumbs across them until I feel them harden and point, the change in shape and texture startlingly arousing. To us both, I imagine. I pinch them between thumbs and forefingers and am rewarded with a throaty moan. As I roll the now-hard nubs between my fingers, Scully's hands begin their own movement, rubbing up and down the sides of my thighs, the only part of me she can reach. I find myself hardening further against the deep crevice of her backside, a wild sense creeping into my mind that there is only one body here, that these are my own breasts beneath my hands. That thought makes me crave the feel of the other region so different than my own anatomy, and my right hand wanders down, retracing the route it took on its upward track, continuing past her belly, across the curls that frill the juncture of her legs, cupping the soft flesh below. Scully's hips squirm, and the sensation on my cock is fire. All thoughts of gradual penetration flee, and I find my long middle finger buried deep inside her before I know I've done it. With one hand still squeezing the taut flesh of her breast, the other begins to move back and forth, in and out, finger inside, palm grazing the nerve bundle outside. My goal had been to drive her crazy, but I find myself responding just as strongly, as with each finger stroke her hips move and transmit the sensation to my own hypersensitive genitals. I find this position, this whole situation, explosively erotic. Arousing her arouses me. I can feel her feeling me touch her. Touching her, I touch myself. "Tell me, Scully," I whisper raggedly. "Is this how you do it when you're alone? Is this how it feels? Show me how you like it." My words are strangely harsh and demanding, but I must know. I can't go on without knowing. She says nothing, but one hand stops its restless rubbing along my thigh, moves up to wrap itself around my hand. The one between her legs. She pulls it back so that my finger slides out of her. Her palm to the back of my hand, each of her fingers curled around one of my own, she begins to move, and I feel her middle finger guiding mine, the one wet to the knuckle with the thickness inside her, until the pad of that finger rests lightly at the tip of her clitoris. She sets up a rhythm, her hand showing mine the way until we are in perfect sync, back and forth, back and forth. Her hips take up the beat, thrusting upward on waves of contraction I can also feel in the muscles of her back, her buttocks, her thighs. "Yes," I whisper. "That's it. Show me how you do it, Scully. My hand is yours. Your body is mine." A few more strokes across the swollen point, and then her hand draws mine forward. Two middle fingers dip down together and slide between slick folds of skin, and we're both inside, sharing one tight, hot space swollen with her arousal. I expect to follow her lead in an in-and-out slide, and it surprises me when she holds me firmly in place, my finger and hers sheathed completely together. Instead, her finger twitches, bending mine forward. She repeats the action. And again. I feel my fingertip press hard against the engorged front wall of her cunt with each flick. The movement is tiny. The result is enormous. Scully's head whips over to one side, rolling across my chest, locks of shining red snaking down my side. With the next flick, it rolls back the other way. Flick. Roll. Flick. Roll. I never knew this spot inside her existed, but I will not soon forget it. Her body writhes and shakes above me now, so that I have to bring my free arm down and across her, much as a lifeguard tows a drowning victim through the water, gripping tightly to keep her from sliding off me. My own excitement is nearly unbearable now, the thrashing of her buttocks bringing to bear a furious friction on my achingly stiff cock. When one particularly potent ripple of pleasure makes her arch her back and roll her hips, grinding the soft flesh of her ass into my hard shaft, it makes my teeth clench and my balls ache with the need to sink myself inside her. The taste of blood seeps bitterly through the sensual hurricane. I realize I've bitten through the skin of my lip in an effort to maintain control. The metallic taste reinforces my determination. I will see this journey through to a destination of her choosing. She will show me the way to the undiscovered country. My fulfillment will come only after we find it together. And she is plunging ever onward, propelled in leaps and bounds by the smallest motion of two fingers sheathed together in one narrow, burning space. I can feel the convulsions now, the clench of the muscles in her internal walls, and I know she's close. Christ, I'm so close. She must be... Her hand pulls back, drawing mine with it, and we are suddenly on the outside. She no longer has control enough to wrap her fingers around mine, merely grabbing my wrist and pulling my hand back. She doesn't have to show me. I know. I can feel the precision of the moment. The exact, razor-thin edge on which she's perched, its width matching perfectly the place on which I, too, balance. My finger finds her hardened nub again and strokes it. Once. Twice. Twice more. And then everything happens at once, a blur of sound and sensation and motion. A scream, hips thrusting wildly, her torso pulling away from me with a strength that easily defeats my efforts to restrain it. My eyes, which at some point had slid shut, snap open at the loss of her warm, rigid body as it abandons contact with mine. She rises up, and in one continuous arc sinks back down onto me. I am inside her. Oh, man, I am way inside her. I can barely keep my eyes open, but I can't shut them either for fear of missing the sight of her ass, perfect as two blown-glass floats, the pale expanse of her back, the wild mass of her hair, all towering up and away from the place where our bodies interlock. This position gives her total control, which works just fine for me because I have used up all of mine. It's perfect, in fact. I realize somewhat guiltily that I'm glad she has her back to me. When we're face to face, I can look nowhere but into her the eyes that suck at me like powerful whirlpools, demanding my absolute attention. But now I feel like a participating voyeur, free to watch her body move, to admire the delicate shape of her shoulder blades sliding beneath her skin, to luxuriate in the erotic display of my thick shaft disappearing and reappearing and disappearing again as she rides it in a slow, agonizing rhythm. Her legs are tucked back on either side of me, the soles of her feet facing me, and I hold onto them mostly because I can reach no other part of her from my prone position. I rub circles in her arches and watch, fascinated, as her toes uncurl and splay wide at my ministrations. I smile. I've never noticed Scully's toes during sex before. They seem as fully involved in the experience as the rest of her. She's moving faster now, and I can't help but thrust in response, ramming myself up with each of her downward motions. She's becoming frenzied, and I realize she's about to lose her balance a second before she does. I manage to sit up and wrap my arms around her, controlling her topple by flipping myself with her until she is beneath me, resting on elbows and knees. It's a miracle I manage that much, because now all grace has fled. With a hand on either of her hips, I rear up on my knees and buck my hips into her as hard as I can, and she in turn pushes back in a blind effort to deepen the penetration. I'm on the brink, but I won't go over without her. My right hand slides underneath her and finds her swollen clitoris again. She's come once already, and experience has taught me that to bring her off again requires a less delicate touch. I pinch and roll the engorged flesh. Rough, but effective. Her arms stretch before her and her back lengthens like a cat's when the final, shuddering release takes her. I can't tell if her cunt is clutching wildly at my cock, or if my cock is throbbing wildly in her cunt, or both. The waves of sensation seem to ripple smoothly from her body to mine and back again, until rubbery arms and legs give out, and we both collapse under the sheer weight of our shared climax. Her breathing is ragged beneath me. I know I must be crushing her with her face smashed into the pillow, but it's several minutes before I manage to pull out of her and roll aside. And then it begins. The cataloging. With the irritating clarity of a perfect memory, I begin filing away every detail. Even as she is rolling into my arms, burying her face in my neck, I am building the library for future reference. The sound of her moan. The shape of her backside. The feel of our fingers sliding together inside her. The texture and shape of this voyage. The twelfth voyage. I curse myself for knowing the number, because I realize it means I'm acutely aware that these experiences are finite. Some day, some encounter will be the last one. I don't know what number it will be, but I am gripped by the certainty that it will have a number. And what then? Do I replay these scenes on my mental VCR, like tapes that come in plain, brown-paper wrapping? "Well, Mulder, old boy, what say we pop in number twelve tonight?" Coward. Liar. Hypocrite. You told her you refused to accept her ending. And here you are, counting down to it. Scully stirs in my arms. "You're thinking again." How does she know? "No I'm not." "Yes you are." Her hand brushes across my face, closing my eyes. "Don't. Just let it go. Drift." I pull her closer to me. "Where are we going?" "It doesn't matter," she whispers, already half asleep. "It's the journey that counts." END