Out of the System
Parts II & III by Janet CS

STORIES ON THIS SITE ARE INTENDED FOR ADULTS ONLY

Author's Note:
This story is likely to annoy both pro- and anti-relationshippers with equal ferocity. It's the follow-up to my previous offering, "Out of the System", in which Mulder and Scully have an explosive sexual encounter, but in which Scully forbids kissing and Mulder reluctantly obeys.

Personally, I can't see M & S *ever* having a hearts-and-flowers moment in which the L-word is explicitly uttered, but I do see their connection as a complex, sometimes angry, sometimes sexually tense, but always complementary one in which the stereotypical roles are reversed. Scully is animus; Mulder anima. They need each other.

Ooh, I could go on and on. The point I am trying to make here is that this story does *not* contain sex this time -- NOR the kiss many people wrote to ask for, though gods know I did begin the story with the best of intentions in that regard. (And the worst of intentions, in the sense that they were *supposed* to make the sign of the 8-legged aardvark.) But you can see for yourself what they chose to do.

Timeline marker: this story immediately follows the episode "Unruhe". The title, Patt Setzen, is German for "stalemate", as in chess. This one's just PG-13, for language.

There will be more in this series. I can't possibly resist the Scully-has-cancer storyline. But don't blame *me* if I still can't get their lips together...I'm just a humble messenger!

Oh, right, and the usual thing about unauthorized use of characters belonging to Chris Carter. Listen, CC, if you don't want people playing with your characters you shouldn't make 'em so good or cast 'em so well, that's all I can say.

Out of the System II: Patt Setzen
by Janet CS

Scully thumbed the button and held the sturdy plastic bucket as the glistening cold cubes rattled down from the mysterious depths of the ice machine. The deafening hum matched the shimmers of heat the laboring machine threw off; Scully found it difficult to believe that ice could truly be produced in the guts of such a beast. Mulder's aliens must be beaming cargoes in from secret silos in North Dakota...

She was punchy, she knew it, but what could you expect? The latest brush with death had been desperately close, and she knew her dreams would be filled with the screams she had refused to voice when they first came to her, as she writhed in the chair struggling to remember enough German from her college courses to save her.

She hugged the bucket to herself, feeling the cold soak through the thick plastic and the nap of her robe as she returned to the door to her room.

She glanced down toward Mulder's door, a well-ingrained reflex she could not suppress. It stood mute and blank, anonymous. Anyone could be behind such a door, or no one -- but she knew Mulder was there, and that made all the difference.

Inside her featureless, antiseptic-smelling cubicle, Scully found herself sitting on the bed, hair hanging in her eyes, still hugging the cold bucket. It was the cold that roused her from her blank stupor; *shock*, her mind supplied, *delayed reaction to extreme stress*.

But even after she had set the bucket on the bedside table, the shivering would not stop.

She longed for Mulder to come and talk to her. -- No. That was not precisely true, though she would welcome it.

She longed for Mulder to come and touch her. So that she could feel real, believe she was alive.

She could ask for neither. She toppled back onto the bed, her feet still hanging off, and was out before her back met the King-Koil.

Mulder paced the floor in an agony of indecision, glancing over and over at the wall that separated them as though it would wear away under his glare and become transparent. He could feel her tension in a subliminal way, like the maddening hum of an unseen hive of wasps. And his own agitation did nothing to help -- the fact that he had barely made it in time chafed and chafed at him. It happened too often. What would happen when, someday, he really was too late? When he failed Scully as he had always failed everyone he Oh, God, she was screaming!

He hurt his hand in his mad scramble for the door, smashing it against the round metal knob with a force that numbed it instantly.

It did not slow him down.

He was banging on her door, yanking uselessly at the knob. "Scully! SCULLY!"

The screaming stopped with a gasp. He was so attuned to her voice that he could hear her breathing in there.

"Scully, open the door. It's me," he called uselessly. His hand began to throb. He ignored it.

Her voice now, a little ragged, from just the other side: "I'm -- all right, Mulder. A nightmare."

Mulder sagged, forehead against the door. Of course she was having nightmares. When he had seen that ornate goddamn ice-pick, when he realized what would have gone through her mind, knowing exactly what Jerry Schnauz meant to do to her, he had known that his own inevitable nightmares were busy booking a special guest star. A Scully robbed of her fire, of her reason. A zombie-Scully with no light in her bruised, bloodshot eyes, with the one word left to her vocabulary a toneless litany of accusation, *mmMullderrrr...* "Please let me in," he said, quietly, and the door snicked open.

She was drenched in sweat, her hair plastered to her head, her eyes vague and haunted. He knew the look. He knew it very well. She backed away from the door, eyes flickering toward the floor around her, and Mulder followed her in.

When the door was shut and locked Scully flinched. Just a little.

"Scully," said Mulder gently. It was a question.

It was as though Scully's brain had snapped to attention: her eyes caught and pinned him. She inhaled through her nose.

"Mulder," she said finally, standing tall in her bare feet on the knobby motel-room carpet, "today was -- really close. I feel -- very close to death still, even though intellectually I know it's past and it's no closer than usual.

"I'm glad I'm alive," she went on, eyes searching his face, "but I'm not sure I believe it. If my dreams are anything to go by --" she shuddered.

"What are you saying, Scully?"

"A little help here, Mulder," dropped to a whisper now. "Help me feel it. If you want to..."

As if he could possibly not fucking want to. What did she think he was made of? Did she honestly not *know* what she did to him?

"Just one thing," said Scully as he stepped closer.

Oh, Christ. He knew what she was going to say, and now it was his chest that went numb. But he had to find his voice before he was forced to hear her say it again.

"No *kissing*, right?" He couldn't keep the sarcasm out of his voice.

Fine. Better sarcasm than anything truly humiliating. Oh, Dana, you bitch.

"Right." Her voice had hardened.

There was a charged pause. His entire body begged him to swallow his pride: anything, any indignity just to taste her again, to submerge his need into hers as he'd done before. To bury himself in wild heat, the memory that tormented him like a drug withdrawn "No," said Mulder, desire and rage shrieking epithets in his head.

"Not this time, Scully."

"*What*?" Scully was blindsided by confusion. She had assumed he would go along with her preferences again -- though he had not liked it the other time, either, and had taken revenge with a thousand and one dancing touches of his lips on every other part of her body besides her mouth. She shivered at the memory. Six months had passed since that one never-alluded-to encounter, but its vividness remained. She could no longer remember the face of the first man she had ever loved, she'd realized some time ago. She could not remember the face of the distant cousin she'd carelessly offered her virginity to, either. Mulder's eyes, Mulder's mouth taunted her when she tried to summon those images...damn him.

She licked her lips and saw him flinch as she did it.

"But why, Mulder?"

"Because I don't much like being treated like a whore," said Mulder.

She gaped: felt her mouth falling open as if she had dropped her jaw from a great height and stood watching it spiral down toward the distant ground. Mulder's hazel eyes remained steady on hers, giving away nothing.

"That's what you're doing. And I don't want that. Sorry, Scully, but if you really need to feel alive, I recommend a long soak in a hot tub and a good movie. I think Two Mules for Sister Sarah is on at midnight..."

A wave of unreality shook Scully by the scruff of her neck. Two mules...? The axis of the world tilted, and she was being bruised by Mulder's grip on her arms, and then there was a soft bouncy surface beneath her shoulder and her hip.

"Scully?" The note of concern was sharp in his voice, and it cleared her head slightly.

"...be all right..." she mumbled against the clean-smelling groundsheet as Mulder pivoted her enough to get her feet onto the bed. "...residual...Twilite Sleep...and exhaustion. Mulder?" His name was sharp with panic suddenly as his weight lifted from the side of the bed.

"Yes, Scully?" Whisper like velvet hanging over her.

"Please stay..." Darkness twirled over her like an accelerated clock hand. She felt Mulder's weight and warmth curving up against her back and legs as she gave way to oblivion.

When she woke, she was alone again.

But the TV was on, volume very low. Groggily Scully raised her head, squinted until the screen swam into focus. Clint Eastwood squinted back at her. Shirley MacLaine, in a nun's habit, was sneaking a swig of whiskey when he wasn't looking.

And Scully started to laugh.

-end-

"These are the dreams I'll dream instead
...This is the fear, this is the dread,
These are the contents of my head" -- Annie Lennox

Out of the System III: Dana de Bergerac
by Janet CS

Another instalment in the "don't-kiss-me-Mulder" series (as I have come to think of it). Just as Mulder surprised me in the last instalment with his "you're treating me like a whore" line, Scully has gone and made a liar out of me in this one. Ah well...

The usual blather about how I don't own the characters, I am simply possessed by them...which makes one wonder just a *little* about Mr Chris "Faustus" Carter's success...;P

No sex OR kissing, just a little language. And, ewww, some emotional stuff...

Mulder,

Sometimes I think about your first name and how it is forbidden. Is it that you are embarrassed by it? Or is it something to do with the power of names? If I whispered into my cupped hand, "fox", would you appear?

It's not that I mind, you know. The few times I've heard you call me Dana, I felt suddenly exposed and foolish, as though you'd called me by some childhood nickname like "punkin" or "princess". And I would feel *so* foolish that I didn't even dare ask you to stop. But you did stop. You figured it out. If you can only be Mulder, I can only be Scully -- if we were in the military, we would surely not even be that intimately identified. Rank would serve as our names, and we could be even better protected and better caged.

I'm taking painkillers now, for the pressure in my head.

During the day I suffer through with over-the-counter pills that do nothing but taunt me. When I get home, or when I retreat into my motel room for the night, I feel more and more grateful for the little prescription vial...the relief is nearly as intense as orgasm.

Which would seem to be a convenient segue.

The pills I take don't quite alleviate the pain so much as block my ability to care about it. And I've found that this effect extends to private little fears, which is why I'm writing this at all. I want to live, Mulder, but I know all too well where I stand on my timeline, and I might as well die having told the truth about everything I can.

It took me some time to realize how very angry it made you when I made the condition that there could be sex between us, but no kisses. It took me months to understand that you thought I was saying, "*You* may not kiss me."

God, Mulder. Didn't it occur to you that I was forbidding *myself* at least as much as I was forbidding you? Did you honestly not consider that I, too, was being denied something I desperately desired?

Obviously not.

Probably I should have let it happen, rather than turn it into the charged issue it became...I don't know about you, Mulder, but I can't even look at your mouth without thinking, 'I'll never know now, what it would have been like'.

Too late, too late for everything. I can never ask you for anything again without seeing you think about fragile tragic Scully and her Wizard-of-Oz hourglass running out of sand with every dainty nosebleed. Fuck you, Mulder! I'm not dead yet!

But if I came to you right this moment, looked you in the eye and said, "Kiss me, Mulder," I would bet my soul that you would refuse. No startling dramatic lines about feeling like a whore, either, I'm sure; just a flow of honorable euphemisms dancing around your belief that it was not me who asked, but the angel of Death.

I know you too well, Mulder. But I love you anyway. And don't get all stupid and misty over that, because you knew it all along. Or if you didn't you're even dumber than I Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

[Subsequently crumpled and thrown in wastebasket]

-end-

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