TITLE: Heat (2/4) (sequel to Heat) AUTHOR: Abra Elliott CLASSIFICATION: MSR, UST, Mulder POV RATING: R SPOILERS: None; I think this may be timed roughly around season six? FEEDBACK: with gratitude at xilerui@hotmail.com DISCLAIMER: not mine, still poor. NOTES: Many heartfelt thanks to all the people who liked #1 enough to ask for #2. I'm afraid this one won't finish the story, and it may be a little while before I can complete it, but it's beginning to grow on me. I hope it satisfies. I'm not sure why Scully speaks in the present tense and Mulder in the past tense, but I also kind of like that for some reason. As someone who posted a story the other day wrote, this is pretty much my only validation in life, so if you liked it, please recommend it! Also, sorry to those of you who are waiting for a sequel to The Matchmaker; it's still final paper time and I'm drowning in work right now! Soon, hopefully. *** HIDEY-HO MOTOR LODGE SOMEWHERE IN IDAHO IN MEDIAS RES I grabbed the pen and pad of paper off the bedside table and plopped back down in front of my laptop. Glancing at the scrolling screen, I prepared to jot down the long-awaited key to my immediate satisfaction, a phone number that I'd spent fruitless weeks trying to obtain. Somewhere between the glance and the paper my heart stopped. My hand, clenching the pen in an ever-tighter death grip, hung suspended above the small blank square. I think my eyes bugged...I *know* my jaw dropped...and all I could think was *Scully*. But I'm getting ahead of myself. *** My too-famous porn video collection notwithstanding, I'm not nearly as uncontrollably horny as my paranoid (and sadly under-sexed) friends think. It's a little-known fact that pornography is often a refuge for the lonely, at once a release and a sad reminder of what is missing from life. I'm certainly no exception in this regard. I've always felt that I had a choice: sleep around with the first upright, two-breasted organism I could find, or find other ways to take care of my completely natural biological urges. I chose "other ways." Okay, I'm not usually this clinical about it, but that's my story and I'm sticking by it. It hasn't helped that my job requires me to spend nearly every waking moment in the company of a woman who has completely confounded everything I ever thought I understood about women. B.S. (that's 'Before Scully', but it works the other way as well...), my 'conquests' were anything but. I pretty much managed to walk into the carefully-laid traps of every woman I met: all beautiful, all controlling, and *all* of them not a little terrifying. I was theirs, hook, line, and sinker. They were exciting, brilliant women who pushed me to "be something," and who professed varying degrees of undying willingness to back me all the way. It's amazing what a *little* eccentricity will do to a guy's reputation. Once the days of Fox the FBI Boy Wonder were over, once I found the X-Files and all I had left was my little corner of the basement, the women dwindled to a slow, then nonexistent, trickle as well. Even Diana, the queen bee of the hive, disappeared. I know she liked to think she was somehow pivotal in my early X-Files work; she certainly played it that way to Scully, and I guess I kind of encouraged it. What can I say...that was probably the first time I'd ever seen Scully act even a *little* territorial about the X-Files...it was sort of heady. But, make no mistake, Diana was way the hell out of there at the first sign of obsession. Anyway, enter Dr. Dana "take-no-shit-or-prisoners" Scully. The first time I saw her, all I noticed was that her suit didn't fit very well, that she was short, and that she certainly wasn't a threat to my still-raging testosterone. She didn't even come close to provoking my usual self- destructive pattern of hopeless infatuation with tight-assed power bitches; in fact, if anything, she seemed more like one of the guys, a *good* guy that you could count on to be there with her gun loaded, covering your back. I teased her all the time; I guess it was the first time I'd ever been in that kind of position. It had always been the other way around, with women yanking my chain and me following along with my tongue hanging out and my tail wagging. For the first time, I'd finally met someone who wasn't playing mind games...and so I teased her. She seemed to like it well enough; I usually got that indulgent smile she seemed to reserve just for me, which, of course, only made me tease more. Strictly speaking, I guess it wasn't the way I'd treat "one of the guys," but, even then, that's all she was to me. We were just friends. Maybe I had to remind myself of that a little more frequently as time passed, but I knew, in my heart of hearts, that that's all we were. Partners. Confidantes. Friends. I let down my guard. And she blindsided me. I never saw it coming. I couldn't tell you the moment it happened. One day she was Dana Scully, unbeliever, skeptic, pain-in-my-ass, friend; the next, she was *Scully*, the reason I got up in the morning, the reason I went to work, that I persevered, that I found the will to live when things were at their worst. Was it losing her that first time? Was it the threat of losing her again? Was it the combined weight of so many barely-averted losses that made her so precious in my eyes? Or was it the graceful curve of her calves, rising smooth and unblemished from her too-tall shoes? Was it the fiery hair she tried so hard to tame, only to have it escape her control and curl so softly around her face? Was it her mouth...those scowling, sobbing, smiling pink lips that said so much without ever uttering a word? Her eyes, perhaps...wide in alarm, half-lidded in warm drowsiness as she sat in the car next to me, driving from one town to the next, watching normal lives pass us by through gray-tinted windows. Or maybe it was just *her*. Her mind. Her body. Her soul. I'll never know. All I know is one day she was a friend, *just* a friend, and the next she was my life. What's a guy to do? Specifically, what's an FBI agent in love with his partner supposed to do? They don't cover this in the regulations (well, actually they do, but not much to my satisfaction). I tried telling her a few times, but there always seemed to be too much at stake to *mean* it...my confessions were, to a one, made under extenuating circumstances, couched in my teasing banter, and generally forgettable in the grand scheme of things. At least by her; she never brought any of them up again. Remember what I said about porn? Well, it doesn't get much lonelier than being stuck in an automobile for hours on end, days at a time, with the only woman you've ever really loved, who could, by all appearances, give a damn. Or try spending night after night in crappy motel rooms, knowing that she's undressing, bathing, sleeping, on the other side of one very thin connecting door. Frankly, I'm amazed to still even be here; by all rights I should have lost my mind years ago. I'll never reveal who it was that introduced me to the wide world of cybersex (Frohike; who else?), but it was like the answer to a prayer. I'd pretty much worn out my own porn collection, and the stuff in the motels was lousy at best. Since Scully, the magazines had come to seem pretty sleazy, somehow...I needed a human connection, someone to talk to, someone who would respond. The phone thing was great...until I got the bill...but online I could talk, for free no less, with anyone who would talk with me. Praise Jesus and pass the plate. Honestly, I wasn't too impressed with a lot of what I found. Maybe they just don't have much experience, but a lot of the women online seemed to think that repeating "I'm sucking your cock, it feels so good" was a turn-on. Frankly, it kind of left me cold. Then I found her. G-Woman. The name caught my eye (for no reason that I'd ever admit to) and I asked her about it. She told me she'd always had a weird fantasy about making it with a gun-toting FBI stud (too much TV? who was I to complain?); well, here I was, one tailor-made, gun-toting FBI stud at her service. I called myself Apollo (so much for forgetting about Scully...even my username was all about her, or, rather, that stupid keychain I got her all those years ago. I'm such a glutton for punishment). Fortunately, she never asked about it. I made myself a little more studly, in sort-of a Norwegian, or Swedish?, kind of way, and she described herself to me as long-legged, willowy, blonde and buxom. The Anti-Scully. Just what the doctor ordered. Or what she would have ordered if she'd known that the patient was sick. It turns out I was pretty good at the FBI stud game, having had no little opportunity to play it out in my mind again and again as Scully and I drove silently through sandy deserts, wooded forests, and crowded cities. I put years of pent-up frustration to creative use, taking G-Woman in every conceivable place in my office, from the filing cabinet, to the desk, to the desk again (gotta love that sturdy office furniture); I fucked her everywhere that I'd imagined making sweet love to a soft, supple Scully. The forgetting thing, clearly, wasn't going too well. G- Woman was incredible, with an appetite for sex (and a linguistic capability) that nearly put my own to shame; yet, in my mind's eye, it was Scully I saw lying underneath me, riding on top of me, doing the most amazing things with me. It was *her* small hands, her delicate face, her tiny body that gave me pleasure, and I was well on the way to making myself crazier than when I began. I needed to give a voice, if not a face, to G-Woman. To make *her* real to me, and thereby, maybe, escape the hell I'd begun to create for myself. I began asking to call her; I'd never done it before (well, not with an amateur, anyway), but hearing her voice was fast becoming an imperative for me. Scully had been acting strangely for awhile, by turns cold, skittish, and, more than anything, clearly unhappy with me. I thought maybe she knew about my feelings and didn't know how to react. I became anxious, nervous, which only seemed to increase her tension. God, I needed to make that other woman real. She'd seemed to be warming to the idea of talking to me. We were both on the road a lot, both seemed to share similar hours, and both spent significant amounts of time holed up in cheap motels. I asked, cajoled, begged her to let me call her...all the while hoping that the sound of her silky voice might distract me from the *very* real woman in the next room. Tonight she told me yes. Even as I rose from my seat at the little round motel table to grab a pen and paper, I kept one ear trained on the door connecting my room to Scully's. Part of me wanted her to hear my moans of pleasure as I talked with G-Woman; and yet, I was terrified of what she might think of me, her oversexed partner. Her room was almost silent. I could hear the muffled sound of her TV in the background, and it sounded like she was typing up a report. I sighed as I reached for the pen and paper. What was I doing? All I wanted was her, not this nameless, faceless woman that I didn't know and who could never be anything but a cheap substitute for Scully. I sat back down. I saw the phone number. It was the number that was first on my speed-dial. The number I had programmed into my phone at home. The number I knew like a prayer. It was my lifeline, my connection to everything that was sacred to me. And it belonged to G-Woman. My hand hung suspended in the air for a good two minutes. And then, for lack of anything more intelligent to do, and because I was suddenly feeling pretty light-headed, I spread my legs and put my head between them. Holy shit. End of part 2