Archive of Our Own ^beta

“This may not be the time to mention it, but someone is wearing my favorite perfume.”

Scully, in her grim motel room, puffed on a flickering cigarette as if she were 14 again.

She wasn’t sure why she was smoking. She could not even recall where she’d discovered the half-used pack of cigarettes—in the bathroom? Under the bed? Between the dubious headboard and the dingy plaster wall? Or when she had discovered them, for that matter.

But here she was, taking long, claustrophobic breaths of whatever Molotov cocktail of chemicals she was suddenly okay with ingesting. Normally, this would require a dramatic manual override of both her medical and personal ethics. Scully knew cigarettes were terrible for her. But tonight, here, in this stupid, grimy, violet-shadowed room that seemed to contain the kind of emptiness typically associated with a cemetery, it was almost all she could manage.

Scully looked over at the bedside table, at the ashtray, the TV remote. Sighing around the cigarette, Scully picked up the remote and flicked on the television. It sputtered to life, staticky and glitching.

Scully, too, felt staticky and glitchy, raw and warm and livid. She fussed with the buttons on the remote. Nothing. The TV screen swarmed with a billion unforgiving black and white dots.

Why was she so angry? Scully couldn’t even begin to remember the last time she’d felt this way.

Her pulse was jumping, temples pounding, forehead and cheeks blistering, the back of her neck tight. She inhaled great lungfuls of smoke down into her clenched, quivering chest, feeling the smoke curl into her ribcage and settle there like fog. She could sit here all night, puffing and burning her way through this pack of cigarettes, wild like an animal. She would stay awake all night if she must. She would order takeout and eat greasy pizza and wipe her hands on the stained duvet and shower and fester and scream at the walls.

She would return to Washington in the morning.

“God,” Scully said aloud.

Here she was, sitting atop this shitty bed with her shoes still on, blaspheming in the dark, unable to get her television to work. Mulder’s TV probably worked just fine. Scully could imagine him lying prone on his bed this very instant, watching some convoluted documentary about wolves that possessed the ability to glow in the dark. Scully puffed on her cigarette, then removed it from between her lips with two fingers, furious.

She clicked one of the channels on the remote three times in quick succession. Finally, the screen revealed an actual image; a dozen or so policemen careening about in greyscale in a sort of antiquated car chase. Scully placed her cigarette between her teeth, watching skeptically. This was the sort of film Mulder would put on when she came over to his place laden with bags of Chinese food. Something comical and halfway idiotic that would make her bluster and complain until her cheeks were blistering.

She clicked a different button on the remote. The TV switched channels obediently, revealing the same car chase, though it had moved seamlessly to the next frame. Scully inhaled sharply, her eyes watering. She clicked yet another channel. The film continued to play, accompanied by chaotic old-timey music that made her teeth ache.

Scully took another pull of her cigarette, then stood, replaying in her mind the events of that afternoon. Mulder. Mulder and Detective White, the fucking pair of them.

“Detective White could use our help,” Scully muttered derisively, beginning to pace the length of the room. She flicked the blinds open and glanced wrathfully out at the parking lot, half hoping to see Mulder standing with his hands stuffed in his coat pockets under the supernaturally bright moonlight, alone and perhaps wanting company.  

He was, of course, not there.

“She’s just trying to solve this case,” Scully bit out, turning on her heel. She took a drag of her cigarette. “She’s just—” Scully turned again, pacing her room with condensed and potent vitriol. “Detective White.”

Scully killed her cigarette in the ashtray and sat on the edge of the bed, legs swinging. She pulled off her heels and grimaced at the sting buried in the balls of her feet. She took a long, surgical look at herself in the mirror opposite her, at her hair, which was somehow all out of place, at her eyes, which were burning with—she didn’t know what.

Scully, without breaking eye contact with her reflection, shrugged off her blazer, petulantly, as if in defiance.

She was sweating. Profusely. She got up to check the thermostat, which was set a harmless 67 degrees.

What the hell was going on? Scully marched into the bathroom, militantly applying cold water to her flushed face. Her pupils were blown out, her stomach hurt. It made no sense. And yet.

Scully paused, mid-splash. She reached for the faucet and turned it carefully off. She moved her tongue around the defined corners of her little mouth, and stood there, leaning her hands on the counter, thinking. She felt off. There was no other way to describe it. She wanted to—

Scully jolted upright.

She backed out of the bathroom, shutting the door on its fluorescent light entirely, and fell back onto the mattress, the bedsprings groaning beneath her sudden weight.  

She clutched at her cross necklace, which had become a sort of conduit for the warmth now radiating off her body. The tiny crucifix burned into her hand.

Earlier, Mulder had gotten up in her space, had moved into the ambit of her own body heat, had smelled her.

Even then, even as she had been admonishing Mulder for his piss-poor comportment during the case, Scully had been astonishingly aware of his proximity, of the distance from her forehead to his nose, which may well have been the distance from the Earth to the Sun.

She had wanted to scream. It was lascivious of him to do that, to stand there brazenly in the public corridor of the Comity police station and sniff her left eyebrow.

“Must be Detective White.”

Scully’s stomach had dropped; she had wanted to vanish that very instant. To leave Mulder to his unseeing and incomprehensible ignorance of her feelings, to ditch him forever, to let him do whatever the hell he wanted with Detective White.

Maybe, if she was lucky, Scully would have the privilege of living through it vicariously while Mulder recounted his sexual escapades with Detective White to her on their journey back to D.C., laughing and drawling and reminiscing, in his signature impish manner. Perhaps he would tell Scully about how he fucked the daylights out of Detective White. Perhaps he would tell her nothing. Scully feared she bored Mulder, that she was not his type. He wasn’t even her type, anyway, not really. But he was something.

Scully unbuttoned her trousers.

She imagined, for an unbidden split moment, what it must feel like to be Detective White. Mulder had done nothing this entire case but apply warmth and charisma to Detective White as if providing light to a delicate, sun-seeking plant. He had joked with her and listened to her and apologized to her on Scully’s behalf, as if Scully gave a damn.

“Horned beast?” Scully had echoed earlier in the morgue, incredulous, staring at the scorched remains of the body, well aware of Mulder’s inexorable presence behind her, but also of Detective White.

Fuck Mulder, fuck him and the little game he was playing. He had no right to talk to Scully the way he did. Had no right to take purposeful inhales of her scalp in a corridor.

She unzipped her pants.

She knew she was wet. She could feel it blooming on her underwear, hot and viscous between her legs. The television was still playing that terrible movie. She did not try to turn it off.

Scully slipped her right hand into the humid space between her trousers and her underwear, eyebrows raising at the wetness she discovered there, already evident through the cotton material of her underwear. She shifted, pulling at her pants, wanting them off.

She hoped, with vicious clarity, that Mulder was watching the same damn stupid old film on his TV, cursing and clattering. She hoped he was having a terrible night.

Succeeding in removing her pants, Scully felt her clit throb. Typically, she masturbated about once or twice a week. Recently, she had graduated to masturbating daily. It had become—necessary.

Once, not too long ago, when she and Mulder had been working on a particularly overwhelming case, Scully had not had time to masturbate for 6 consecutive days. It had felt unethical, errant, an issue of national proportion. Mulder had brushed up against her countless times and probably noticed and remembered none of it. But Scully had been wet, gasping, mentally scrambling to find time to rush to a bathroom stall and pull her panties down just far enough that she could fuck herself, straining to remain silent in the corporate bustle of the Federal Bureau ladies’ room, thinking of Mulder and convulsing in hedonism; pleasure bordering on agony.

Scully dipped her hand beneath her underwear, the spin of nicotine clouding her usual neurochemical profile. She felt euphoric yet enraged, grasping at straws, grasping.

Detective White and her perfume. It probably smelled clean and light, like gardenias and pear blossoms and jasmine tea. Scully began to touch herself, teeth gritted, barely permitting herself to engage in the pleasure bursting beneath her fingertips. She could smell herself now, dark and heavy, sumptuous like nectarines overripe to the point of decomposition.

Detective White was one lucky son of a bitch. Scully moved slickly over her clit, beguiled with the intricate network of cracks in the yellowed ceiling.

She felt pinned to the bed, wet to the point of drowning. She imagined herself spreading into the fabric of the duvet, becoming part of the miserable, falling-apart motel.

It was a good representation for her. She was, after all, largely unwanted, an inconvenience, nothing more than a place for people to tramp in and out of, a waystation until their real destination could be reached. She recalled, dimly, that she was also intelligent and practical and striking and resourceful and determined and very, very good at her job, and beautiful, and even loved, but these facts had become permeable since entering Comity.

Scully gasped, working over her clit with wooden fingers. Right now, in this very motel, Mulder was falling asleep. Falling asleep with his hands and his arms and his eyelashes and his torso and his bottom lip, uselessly beautiful, unnervingly observant, except when it counted.

Scully pushed the back of her head into the pillow, her mouth falling open. She began to move her hips, thrusting against her palm.

She was going to kill Mulder. And Detective White. Not necessarily in that order.

“Fuck,” Scully said, softer than the television. Her abdominal muscles cramped with the sheer desire to be filled, to be fucked within an inch of her life. Which she could do, she just had to be creative.

Scully removed her hand from her vulva briefly and sat up, casting about for an item she could use.

The spidery beams of a vehicle’s headlights entering the parking lot distracted her momentarily, but then she found her bag and dug in it frantically until she found, in a moment of true cosmic irony, a slender, oblong bottle of forgotten perfume.

Scully returned to the bed, spread her legs, upended the bottle, and, without further deliberation, slid it into herself. As it cleaved her, she thought she could hear voices distantly. A man and a woman.

She began to move the bottle in and out of her, her internal walls clenching around it like a fist. She was beginning to lose patches of her vision. She fucked herself faster, her other hand moving over her breasts, her thighs.

She hears bedsprings creaking nearby. Distinctly.

Was Mulder—?

But before Scully could consider the possibility of a universe where Special Agent Fox Mulder was touching himself, pleasuring himself, groaning on his knees in the center of his shoddy motel mattress and pumping his hand over himself furiously, the phone beside her began to ring.

Scully answered on the third ring, delirious. “Yes?”

She grabbed for her slacks, shoving the perfume bottle beneath her pillow.

“Special Agent Dana Scully?”

“Speaking.”

“This is the Comity Police Department. We’re informing you that there’s been another death. A teenage girl. She appears to have been impaled by shards of glass from a mirror.”

“I—we’ll be right over,” Scully stuttered out, and hung up.

She stood, pulling on her pants, stepping into her heels. She located her coat on the back of a chair and threw it on, trying adamantly to return her hair to its sculptured position. She was unable to do anything about the flush on her face and neck, which was unethical, errant, an issue of national proportion.

Scully grabbed her room keys from the bedside table and wrenched her door open, stumbling into the hallway. She marched soldier-like down the narrow fluorescent corridor, her pace quickening when she grew close to Mulder’s room.

She approached his door, which was cracked open. Was this a cause for concern or an invitation? Scully felt addled, felt her brain crawling with the worms Mulder had placed there. She was unable to tell the difference.

Scully pushed the door all the way open, injecting herself centripetally into a most unwelcome scene. Detective White was straddling Mulder, leaning over him, kissing him open-mouthed.

“Mul—” Scully gasped, drawing herself upright as Mulder and Detective White sat up. Scully tried momentarily to detect some sign of guilt on her partner’s face and was not able to find any.

“There’s been another death,” she stated, vocally conjuring a tone of superciliously bored monotony that she hoped would not bely her disbelief.

Then she turned and left the room, spilling out of the motel into the ruthless January night.