#watch this *makes a post and slaps filters on like a eight year old at the frog game at chuck e cheeses where you slap that button*

[milosugar]

🌸🌸🌸

#stressmonster #hermitcraft #msart #watch this *makes a post and slaps filters on like a eight year old at the frog game at chuck e cheeses where you slap that button* #mspost

[junghelioseok]

heart-on.

↳ your one-night stand definitely isn’t relationship material, but maybe—just maybe—your manager’s son is.

◇ hoseok x reader ◇ smut | strangers to lovers!au ◇ 10.1k [1/1]

❛❛ my boss is always telling me how perfect her son would be for me and she promises he’s coming to the next holiday party and don’t worry he’s heard all about me too and ALSO there’s this dude i slept with once a couple of months ago and sometimes he still sends me dick pics when i ask him to at 3 in the morning cause seriously dude’s got a good dick ❜❜

notes: welcome to the first installment of the serendipity series! we’re starting with hoseok, because, well, have you met me? 🤣 be warned, however, that this isn’t anywhere near as edited as i’d like so i’ll probably give it another read/edit tomorrow but for now!!! here it is!!!

⇢ series masterlist. | inspired by this post.

warnings: dirty talk bc hoseok’s got a bit of a mouth on him, unprotected sex (wrap it before you tap it, kids!), sexting. dick pics, obvi. brief mention of a dead pet goldfish :(

You’re refilling your mug when you hear it. Voices filter out from the kitchen, floating past the coffee station where you’re pouring yourself another drink and hanging in the open air of the hallway that leads back to the rest of the office. They’re familiar voices, too—voices that belong to the resident gossips of your workplace. Lottie’s pitchy, nasal tone melds with Hyejin’s higher one, their conversation interrupted every so often by an exaggerated exclamation or gasp from Sandra, the third and final member of their trio.

“Haven’t you heard? Carolyn’s divorce was finalized over the weekend, the poor thing.”

“I can’t even begin to imagine how she’s feeling. I mean, getting back into dating at her age? Goodness!”

“And now she’ll be all alone at the holiday party, too. How sad is that?”

“It’s tragic. Poor thing.”

Rolling your eyes, you grab a packet of sugar and tear it open, upending it over your mug and watching the crystalline granules fall into the dark liquid within. You know for a fact that Sandra and her husband can’t even stand to be in the same room for an extended period of time, considering how they’d spent most of last year’s holiday party talking to entirely different groups of people. You’d sat two tables away from them during dinner, and they hadn’t even made eye contact once. And as for Lottie and Hyejin, well, you’re certain that their relationships aren’t much better. All three of them are miserable people as far as you’re concerned, and you make a mental note to check in on Carolyn—a sweet woman in her thirties who always keeps chocolate bars in her purse—on your way back to your desk.

“Sheesh. Vultures, the lot of them. Don’t you think?”

You whirl at the sound of your manager’s voice. Kyunghee Jung is a dark-haired woman in her late fifties, and she laughs when she sees your startled expression, her eyes crinkling at the corners. “Easy! You’ll spill your coffee if you’re not careful.”

“I’ll probably have a heart attack first,” you reply, pressing a hand to your chest. “What was your job before this? Some kind of intelligence operative? Are you a super spy?”

Kyunghee laughs again and joins you at the counter. “Nothing even remotely as exciting as that,” she answers, plopping her mug down beside yours. It’s decorated with what looks like every color of the rainbow, a massive smiling sunflower taking up the majority of the surface, and the only remnant of the ceramic’s original color is on the very edge of the handle where there’s a lopsided little patch of white. The piece is clearly handmade, and a stark contrast to the simple mint green cup that houses your coffee. Looking at it, it’s impossible not to smile.

“I love that,” you remark, inclining your head at her mug. “Was it a present from one of your kids?”

“Hoseok,” she confirms, running a fingertip along the imperfect handle fondly. “I’ve told you about him before—he’s right around your age.”

You chuckle. “Right, I remember. That’s why he’s the perfect match for me, right?”

“Come now, there’s more to it than that,” Kyunghee defends, waving a hand. “But yes, to answer your question. He gave it to me as a birthday present when he was eight.”

“Well, you never told me he was an artist,” you tease. “Does he have an Etsy? Can I buy one of these off him? Does he do custom orders, maybe?”

Normally, your manager is more than happy to play along with your jokes, but today Kyunghee fixes you with an uncharacteristically serious look. “Why don’t you ask him yourself?” she asks. “He’s coming to the holiday party, after all. I figured you could finally meet.”

You blink. Kyunghee has been making offhand remarks about how well you would get on with her son, Hoseok, for over a year now, but you’ve never even come close to broaching the topic of meeting him. You don’t even know anything about the man beyond the fact that his name is Hoseok and that he works somewhere downtown. He also favors tall socks and yellow suspenders if the framed photograph on Kyunghee’s desk is any indication—or at least, he certainly did when he was still in diapers. Whether he still does, is anyone’s guess.

“Wow, I had no idea he was even interested in coming,” you manage when you’ve recovered from your surprise. “Did you bribe him?”

If Kyunghee notices that your voice is a few pitches higher than usual, she doesn’t remark on it. “Oh, you know. I just told him that this would be his last chance to score free booze on the company’s dime.” She laughs. “Three more months and it’s going to be all beaches and sunshine for me. I might even become a cruise person in my retirement.”

You gasp and slap a hand to your heart. “Kyunghee! Think of the environmental impact!”

“I said I might!” she retorts immediately. “Sheesh. Even in my old age, it’s hard to conveniently forget how shitty and unsustainable those damn boats are.”

You pick up your mug and raise it in a salute. “Well, the oceans thank you.”

“My husband doesn’t,” she answers with a sigh. “He’s been dying to book one of those trips that stop all along the Mediterrannean coastline, and I can’t exactly blame him.”

“That is tempting,” you admit. “You’ll have to send photos, if you do end up going.”

“You’ll be sick of me and my photos before the first day is even up,” she promises. Then she pauses, her eyes darting toward the kitchen where silence has fallen in the last few minutes. “Speaking of being sick—you think the vultures are still hovering around in there? I haven’t had lunch yet, and I need the microwave.”

Obligingly, you edge a little closer to the kitchen doorway and poke your head around the frame, scanning for Lottie and her sidekicks. “Coast is clear. Enjoy your lunch, Kyunghee.”

She nods and raises her mug at you, returning your salute. “I always do.”

///

As soon as the work day ends, you fall into your usual routine. Your commute home is easily walkable on nicer days, and though the winter weather is brisker than you’d like, you decide to walk for the sake of stopping at the convenience store on the corner of the block.

Once you arrive back at your apartment, you change into your comfiest sweats and a loose tee. You turn on some music while you throw together some dinner, and settle onto the couch half an hour later with a full plate and Netflix. Television is a welcome distraction from the events of the workday, and you manage to get through three full episodes of your current show before your pesky brain decides to revisit the events of today, replaying the conversations that you’d both had and overheard.

There’s no denying that you’ve been single for quite some time now, and for the most part, it’s been by choice. Ever since graduating from university, you’ve chosen to focus more on your career, and it’s paid off both in terms of the important position you hold in your company and your above average salary. And yet, you can’t help but think back to the gossip you’d overheard earlier—about the supposed tragedy of being single and attending the upcoming holiday party alone. Your mind wanders to Kyunghee’s son, Hoseok, and how he’ll be in attendance this year. You wonder what he’s like, and whether he really is perfect for you, as Kyunghee seems to be so fond of mentioning.

And then your mind goes to Jay.

You met Jay two months ago, on a well-deserved night out after a hellish workweek. The bar was crowded, and the music coming from the neon dancefloor in the back was just loud enough to drown out your inhibitions. That, combined with the alcohol swimming through your system, made you bold. You sashayed your way across the dancefloor, dodging inebriated bodies and swaying limbs as you fixed your attention on the head of pale lavender hair and deliciously broad shoulders that awaits you just behind the bar counter. The bartender is nothing short of gorgeous, and you’ve thrown all caution to the wind. Sure, several other women are eyeing him like he’s their next meal—several men are, too—but you need another drink. And while he prepares it, you plan to flirt.

A lot.

The bar counter is sticky with spilled liquor, but you don’t pay that any mind as you lean across it, the wood digging into the narrow strip of exposed skin left by your cropped top. “Hi!” you call, and the bartender looks up from where he’s just finished pouring a round of shots for a group of raucous young men.

“Hi yourself,” he says, his pillowy lips stretching into an easy smile. “What can I get you?”

You pretend not to notice the way his eyes flicker down to the dip of your cleavage and instead put on the sultriest smile you are capable of mustering. “Vodka soda,” you tell him, injecting a bit of purr into your voice. “A bit of lemon too, if you have it.”

“Trust me, I have it,” he assures, his smile growing as he reaches for a clean glass and a clear bottle. “Name’s Jin, by the way. I’m here all night, if you need anything e—”

A loud clatter and the sound of breaking glass interrupts the rest of his sentence, and all eyes at the bar go to the source of the disturbance. Conversations stutter to a halt, and even the thumping bass of the music seems to dull. Jin darts to the other end of the bar, where you can see that one of several barstools has fallen to the ground. There’s a man on the ground as well, surrounded by shattered glass and spilled dark liquor, and your eyes widen when you realize that you know him.

And arguably, a little too well.

“Fuck,” you mutter under your breath. People are starting to lose interest in the spectacle, turning back to their own conversations and continuing on as if nothing had happened at all. The man is beginning to clamber to his feet, and a few people lend a helping hand as Jin begins barking out orders for everyone to step back so he can sweep up the broken glass. You seize upon the opportunity, latching on to the nearest arm and pulling them close so you can hide behind them. Vaguely, you’re aware of them sputtering in surprise, but you only have eyes for the man who had fallen off his stool, watching him carefully as he brushes himself off and tries to play it cool despite the sizable patch of whiskey soaking his white shirt.

“Hey, uh…” Your human shield is speaking. “Are you okay? You’re squeezing me pretty tight.”

That draws you out of your daze. Abashed, you loosen your grip on his arm and look up into his face, your throat going dry when you realize how handsome he is. His black hair is parted over his forehead, a stray strand falling into warm brown eyes set above a straight nose and an inviting mouth. There’s a freckle above his top lip, just shy of the center, and your inebriated brain wonders just what it would be like to kiss it.

“I, um—” You clear your throat and try again. “Sorry about that. I just didn’t want him to see me.”

Your newfound companion raises an eyebrow and glances over his shoulder at the drunk man, who is now being ushered out of the bar by his buddies. “You know that guy?”

You nod, cringing. “Yeah, his name’s Trent. I… may or may not have dated him for a few months last year.”

The man laughs out loud. “You dated a Trent?”

“What, like you’ve never made a questionable life choice?” you challenge. “Besides, you shouldn’t judge someone based on the sins of their parents. It’s not his fault they gave him a terrible name.”

“Sure, but it is on him for going along with it,” he replies with a shrug. “I would’ve changed my name as soon as I could if my parents had named me Trent. But hey, that’s just one man’s opinion.”

You laugh. “Okay then, Not-Trent.” Relinquishing your grip on his arm, you let your fingers graze his hand before pulling away entirely. “What do you say we continue this conversation over a drink?”

The man, whose name is decidedly not Trent, catches your fingers in his and gives them a gentle squeeze. “Happily.”

One drink turns into two, and then three. By the end of the hour, you are feeling pleasantly warm, the alcohol spreading through your veins like molasses and turning your surroundings into a hazy blur. The music has grown even louder, pounding against your eardrums, and you grab onto Not-Trent’s wrist as he sets his now-empty glass back down onto the counter.

“Do you wanna get out of here?” you ask, raising your voice to be heard over the thumping bassline. “I can’t even hear myself think.”

“The parking lot’s out back,” he suggests. “Why don’t we get some air?”

You nod and stand up on wobbly legs, cursing your decision to wear heels when you stumble into your companion. He steadies you with a gentle but firm hand, and you don’t miss the way his touch lingers on your lower back, his palm warm through the material of your blouse.

Together, the two of you pick your way through the throng of swaying bodies on the dancefloor. The bassline thuds in your ears, dark and hypnotic, and you can feel the reverberations thrumming across the slats of your ribs and echoing in the cavern of your chest like a second heartbeat.

It’s almost a relief, then, when you step out into the cool night air. Your ears continue to ring for a few seconds, but it soon fades and leaves behind only the muted hum of traffic from the street and the faint sound of music from inside. At your side, Not-Trent releases a long breath and leans against the brick wall of the building, and you turn to take in the steep slopes of his side profile as he tilts his head up toward the velvety night sky.

He’s handsome. Dressed in ripped jeans and black leather, he’s a sight to behold, and you’d be lying if you said you hadn’t been craving a bit of intimacy for quite some time now. The alcohol swimming through your system makes you bolder than you normally would be, and you reach out to lay a hand on his arm. He turns toward you with a silent question glimmering in his irises, but you simply step closer, until you’re pinning him against the wall with your body and you’re breathing the same air.

“Hey,” you say, your voice an airy whisper. His eyes are near obsidian in the dimness of the parking lot, illuminated only by the orange glow of the streetlamps on either end, and your gaze flickers down to his mouth before roving to the freckle that sits upon his top lip. “Kiss me?”

Your companion’s eyes widen. His lips part, but no words come out, and you’re about to repeat your question when he finally finds his voice again.

“That’s really… that’s not a good idea.” Awkwardly, he clears his throat, but the hoarseness of his voice and the harsh bob of his Adam’s apple give away his true desires. “Look, you’ve been drinking. We both have, and—”

You cut him off, pushing up to your tiptoes and planting a messy kiss to the soft dip just beneath his bottom lip. “Don’t care,” you mumble against his skin. “I want you.”

Your companion laughs weakly. His hands find their way to your waist and pause there, as if he can’t decide whether to push you away or pull you closer. “You don’t even know me,” he murmurs.

“I don’t have to know you,” you reply. Your fingers drag down his chest, trailing along the delicate silver necklace that rests against the black of his shirt. From the chain hangs a round pendant, the surface engraved with the letter J. Slowly, you trace it with a fingertip, the metal shining even in the dim light, and satisfaction blooms in your heart when your companion’s throat bobs again. “I want you,” you breathe, soft but insistent. “Isn’t that enough?”

“I—” He clears his throat and tries again, and you wonder if he realizes that his hands have slid down to your hips, or that there’s a growing hardness against your lower stomach that’s becoming increasingly harder to ignore. “Look, I’m flattered—really, I am. And you’re… I mean, fuck, you’re gorgeous. But I don’t think we should do anything when you’re clearly not in the right frame of mind to be making this kind of decision, and—”

“And, nothing.” You wind your arms around his neck, pressing close and grinding subtly against the bulge in his pants. You smirk when he releases a low hiss from between his teeth, and hide it by laying a trail of kisses along the stretch of bare skin exposed by the dip of his collar. “Stop being such a gentleman,” you whisper. Your fingers trail down his chest, past the silver of his pendant and down to the faded denim of his jeans, teasing at the cool metal of his belt buckle. “I want this. But if you’re not interested, I can always go back in there and—”

The rest of your sentence dies in your throat. Your companion has tugged you flush against him in one smooth motion, and your gasp is cut off by the firm press of his mouth against yours. Immediately, you melt into the kiss, and a moan tears from your lips when he spins you around and pins you against the brick wall of the building.

“You’re a spoiled little thing, huh?” His breath fans hot against your cheeks, and you shiver when you meet his eyes and see the dark promise reflected there. “Used to getting what you want, huh, princess?”

Your breath hitches at the endearment—something your companion doesn’t miss. “Oh, you like that?” He chuckles hoarsely, and when he speaks again it’s in a rasp that sends heat straight to your core. “What else do you like, hmm? You want me to be rough with you, princess? Or should I be gentle and treat you like a queen?”

You reach up, raking your fingers through his hair and skimming across the soft strands of his undercut before finding purchase at his nape. “You talk too much,” you whisper.

And then you’re crushing your mouth back against his, whining when he immediately takes back control of the kiss. His grip slides downward, his fingertips digging into the skin just above the curve of your ass, and you squeak when he grabs the back of your thigh and hooks your leg around his waist.

“You feel that?” he rasps into your ear, nipping at the delicate shell and chortling when you keen. Your skirt has ridden up dangerously high on your spread thighs, and you let out a soft whimper when he grinds harshly against your center. The lace of your panties and the denim of his jeans are the last barricades between you, and you wonder, vaguely, whether your companion has a bit of an exhibitionist streak when he slides one of your sleeves down your shoulder and begins kissing a trail down to the swell of your cleavage. “You feel how hard you’ve gotten me?”

You lean down, kissing the soft spot where his jaw meets his ear before letting your teeth graze against his skin. “Why don’t you do something about it then?”

He hisses out a sharp breath, his hands tightening their hold on your hips. “You’ve got quite the mouth on you, huh? I can’t wait to make you eat your words.”

Any retort you may have had is interrupted by a sudden swell of music and the sound of a slamming door. Whirling to face the source of the noise, you immediately spot a familiar head of lavender hair atop broad shoulders encapsulated in the black uniform of the bar. Jin hasn’t noticed the two of you yet, his attention fixated on his cell phone screen, but he looks up when you let out a little squeak of surprise and shove your companion’s chest in an attempt to create some distance between you.

“Hey.” Jin raises a hand in greeting, a knowing smirk curling his lips. “This phone call shouldn’t be too long, so please. Don’t stop the party on my behalf.”

Heat floods to your cheeks. There isn’t much use protesting against his insinuation, considering the rather compromising position you’re in. Much to your relief, though, your companion simply huffs out a chuckle and waves Jin off. “Thanks, man, but we’ll get out of your hair.” Lowering his voice, he turns back to you. “Coming, princess?”

You nod. He offers you his hand, and you take it gratefully, adjusting your skirt so that it drapes properly over your hips and thighs again.

“Have a good night!” Jin calls after you, amusement lacing every word. You can’t work up the nerve to respond, and luckily, you don’t have to. Your companion leads you around the corner of the building, where several rows of cars are parked beneath an orange streetlamp. On this side, the exterior brick wall is painted with a mural, and you admire the colorful galaxies and nebulae swirling amidst silvery white stars and the word serendipity spray-painted in pale blue.

The last car in the row is parked just beneath the letter Y, and it’s here that your companion stops. The sleek black vehicle has an almost vintage feel to it, and you glance up when you hear the jingle of metal.

“I’m guessing this is yours?”

He nods, pulling a set of keys from the pocket of his leather jacket and inserting one into the lock. “Yeah. You like it?”

“It’s beautiful,” you tell him, tracing the edge of the passenger window “Makes my car look like a total piece of shit by comparison.”

Your companion chuckles, pulling open the driver’s side door, and you catch a glimpse of your reflection in the window as he presses a button to unlock the rest of the doors. Your hair’s a bit of a mess and your mascara has smudged beneath your right eye, and you hurriedly swipe at it as your companion turns his attention back to you.

“So,” he says. “Now what? I can give you a ride home, if you want.”

Deliberately, you let your gaze drop down to his crotch, where his bulge—albeit waning—is still visible. “Seriously? I thought you were going to… what was it again? Make me eat my words?”

And just like that, it’s as if a switch has flipped. His eyes darken to obsidian, his lips settling into a stern line, and you barely have time to draw in a breath before he’s caging you against the side of his car and molding his mouth to yours. Your lips part beneath the onslaught, and he wastes no time in dipping inside to explore, licking into you until you’re both breathless.

“Inside,” he breathes once you’ve broken apart, and you instantly obey. You wrench the door open and all but tumble into the backseat, and he isn’t far behind as he slots himself between your spread thighs. Your hands fly to his shoulders where you help him shuck off his leather jacket, tossing it carelessly to the front where it lands in a heap on the dashboard before focusing your attention on the hem of his black t-shirt. Your companion obliges you as you push it upward to expose his toned abdomen, grabbing it by the collar and pulling it off the rest of the way when your reach falls a little short in the cramped interior of the backseat.

“Your turn,” he whispers when you try to reach for his belt, his hands settling around your wrists. “It’s only fair, princess.”

Pouting, you let your hands fall limp in his grasp, and he chuckles as he leans down to pacify you with a kiss. Deft fingers find the hem of your blouse, pushing it up until you can twist out of the material. You throw it aside with no regard for where it lands on the ground, and lay back as your companion drinks you in, his dark gaze raking across the lacy black lingerie that decorates your curves and skims you like a second skin. “Fuck,” he breathes, his voice hoarse with a combination of amazement and disbelief. “You’re stunning.”

You smile, trailing a fingertip from the dip of his collarbone down to the silver necklace that sits prettily against his bare chest. “You’re not so bad yourself,” you tell him, tracing the letter engraved into his pendant. “Jay.”

Your companion—newly dubbed Jay—smiles back. “You’re something else, princess,” he murmurs, before leaning down to kiss you again. He explores your mouth thoroughly—languidly—before moving down to nip at your neck, and already, you can feel the beginnings of marks beginning to form, blossoming across your skin as irrefutable proof of your tryst.

It isn’t long before Jay frees you from your bra, watching with carnal fascination as your breasts spill out of the lacy material. You whine when he reaches out to cup one, his palm hot against your bare skin, and he smirks crookedly when a pinch to your nipple makes your back arch off the leather of the seat. “So pretty,” he rasps. “I can’t wait to see how you look stretched around my cock.”

“Stop waiting, then,” you tell him, trying again for his belt buckle. This time, he lets you fumble it open, leaning back to watch you work with hooded eyes and a lazy little smile. Emboldened, you push aside the denim of his jeans and free his cock from the confines of his underwear. He’s hard and hot and heavy in your palm, and your tongue darts out instinctively at the sight of the pearlescent precum beading the tip.

“Jay,” you murmur, thumbing across the head of his erection and smirking when he hisses in pleasure. “Fuck me.”

Jay seems to consider your demand, mischief flitting across his features before he manages to school his expression into something more neutral. “Where are your manners, princess?” he asks, pushing your hand away and giving himself a few long, slow strokes. “Say please, if you want it so bad.”

For a moment, you consider refusing. Jay seems to be the type of man who enjoys a good game, but between the state of his cock and the earlier interruption, you’re pretty sure he’s nearing his limit. And even if he isn’t, you are. And so, you shelve your pride for the time being, and trail a hand down the length of your bared body as you bat your lashes up at him. “Fuck me, Jay,” you repeat. “Please. Want your cock so bad.”

His answering smile is equal parts amusement and satisfaction, and altogether sinful. “That’s my girl,” he rasps, before shoving your panties aside. Lining the head of his cock up, he enters you in one smooth thrust, and you moan as your walls stretch to accommodate his girth. You’re more than wet enough to take him in his entirety, your eyes fluttering shut when he bottoms out, and he groans hoarsely as he takes a second to relish the feeling of your walls gripping him so tightly.

“Fuck. You’re so wet, princess.” Jay dips a thumb into your slick, spreading it across your clit and rubbing a few experimental circles around the sensitive nub. He groans when you clench around him, his hips stuttering, and you squeeze around him again just to hear him grit out another curse. “Shit. I’m not going to last long at this rate.”

“Don’t care,” you murmur, rocking against him and sighing when the motion sends him a little deeper into your core. “Just fuck me, Jay. Please.”

Jay leans in, a dark lock of hair falling across his forehead as he plants an indulgent kiss on your waiting mouth. “Anything for you, princess,” he breathes. Slowly, he pulls back until only the tip of his cock remains inside you. Then he’s slamming forward, and you can’t even find it in yourself to care about the obscene sound of skin slapping against skin or the way the car rocks. Jay’s thumbing across your clit in tight circles that he times perfectly with the rock of his hips, and you wonder whether the rapidly building pleasure in your belly is due to your dry spell or if he’s just that good. You can feel every inch of him as he fills you up repeatedly, his brows furrowed in concentration and his dark hair flopping as he drives deeper in search of the spot that will have you seeing stars.

You know he’s found it when the pleasure in your belly spikes, your back arching off the backseat. Your skin is sticky against the dark leather and you’re certain the sweat gathering at your temples has destroyed the last of your makeup, but Jay alleviates your concerns with a particularly well-timed thrust and a harsh nip to the soft spot at your clavicle. You keen out something unintelligible, and his lips stretch into a smirk against your skin.

“That’s it,” he encourages. “Cum for me, princess.”

That’s all it takes for the mounting pressure to snap. Your body collapses into a searing orgasm, the pleasure flaring out like a supernova and spreading through your veins like wildfire. “F-fuck, Jay—” you gasp, your fingers scrabbling at his back for purchase and no doubt leaving scratches in their wake. “Fuck, you feel so—”

The remainder of your words trail off into garbled nonsense, and Jay huffs out a strained chuckle as he begins chasing after his own orgasm, rutting against you in a way that both prolongs your pleasure and sustains his own. “Shit,” he groans, his eyes fluttering shut. “Fuck, that’s it. Look at you—taking my cock so well. So pretty and perfect and—”

Whatever he was going to say dissolves into a groan as he gives a few more erratic thrusts before his release overwhelms him. Creamy warmth floods through you, and you rub his back tiredly as his head drops onto your shoulder, his breath flaring hot against your skin as he rides out his orgasm.

It takes several long seconds for the pleasure to recede. Your legs are still shaky when Jay pulls away, straightening up and tucking himself back into his jeans. There’s an empty ache in your core now that you are no longer stuffed full of his cock, and already, you are missing the feeling. Still, you push that aside as you sit up, adjusting your panties and wincing at the wetness that soaks the material and sticks to your skin.

“So,” Jay says after a moment’s silence, and you glance over at him when he huffs out a short chuckle. “That was fun.”

“Not bad at all,” you agree weakly, an irrepressible smile tugging at your lips.

Jay grins. It’s a bright, infectious grin—and it’s one that you’ve already grown rather fond of in the short period of time you’ve known him. It’s a grin that showcases his perfect teeth and crinkles his eyes into crescents, and one that all but forces you to grin back.

“Here, give me your phone,” he says, and you watch as he punches in his number once you hand it over. “Just in case you ever wanna do this again,” he tells you, handing it back. “Don’t be a stranger, princess.”

You glance down at his contact information, saved under the moniker you’d given him and affixed with a short string of emojis. “I won’t,” you tell him, chuckling. “In fact, I just might take you up on the offer.”

-

The screen of your laptop has long since gone dark, and you stretch your arms overhead before waking it again. Rolling your shoulders, you navigate back to the main Netflix menu, hovering over the resume button and watching the trailer loop in the background.

You’d be lying if you said you didn’t think about Jay often. You’ve texted each other quite often since that night in his car—usually when you’re bored and alone and have had a few too many glasses of wine in the evenings. You’ve found yourself tapping on his name instinctively during those odd, ambiguous hours—when late night and early morning meld together and you’re aching for a bit of relief.

And as if he knows you’re thinking about him, your phone buzzes against the coffee table, the screen lighting up with a familiar name.

[11:22pm] Jay 😘🍆💦: thinkin about u, pretty girl 😘

It’s followed by an image, and your heart rate picks up, thudding loudly against your ribs as you open it.

Fuck.

Your memories of Jay’s face—made all the more hazy by the alcohol and the amount of time elapsed since your first and only meeting—truly don’t do him justice. Though the photograph cuts off just above his nose, you can still admire the sharp angle of his jaw and the fullness of his puckered lips. His skin is golden against the white of his t-shirt, and you lick your lips before thumbing across your screen to respond.

[11:23pm] You: yeah? what else are you thinking about, hmm?

His response is instantaneous.

[11:23pm] Jay 😘🍆💦: thinking about that pretty little pussy of yours

[11:23pm] Jay 😘🍆💦: how good it looked in that pic u sent me tuesday 👅

You barely even notice the way your hand begins trailing down your body, pushing aside the elastic waistband of your sweats. It’s as if you’re on autopilot, as your fingers find their way to the damp spot growing on your panties.

Yeah? you write back with your free hand, already teasing at your clothed folds with the other. Tell me more.

///

It’s an uncharacteristically warm Friday morning when you find yourself in the elevator with Jimin, a good friend of yours who works on one of the lower levels of your office building. “Morning,” he says as he steps in, a large iced coffee in hand despite the fact that it’s still very much the middle of winter. Then he squints, leaning a little closer. “Oh my god. You got laid!”

“Oh my god, not so loud!” you hiss, whacking him on the shoulder and jabbing the button to close the elevator doors. “And no, not exactly. I’ve just been texting Jay.”

“Texting, sure.” Jimin mimes air quotes around the word and rolls his eyes. “You’re sexting him, and we all know it. How many pictures of his dick do you have saved on your phone now?”

“Oh my—” You sigh, trailing off. “Can we not talk about this right now?”

“Right, of course.” Jimin takes a sip of his coffee and pretends to check his watch. “When would you like to talk about it then? Do you need to check your calendar? Can I book an appointment for later this afternoon?”

You stick your tongue out at him. “Shut up.”

Jimin just grins, his lips puckered around his straw. “So, how’s Jay? Have you asked for his real name yet?”

You shrug. “What’s the point? It’s not like we’re friends or anything. We’ve literally only met the one time.”

“Yeah, but that’s just because you’re a coward,” Jimin points out. “What’s stopping you from meeting up with him again? You have his number. You have at least one photo of his dick. Ask him out already!”

“It’s not that easy, though,” you sigh. The elevator doors open to let a few more people in, and you move to the side and lower your voice so that only Jimin can hear. “Jay—he’s not exactly boyfriend material. I mean, we fucked in his car the first night we met.”

“So?” Jimin frowns and takes another sip of his iced coffee. “You talk about things besides sex, don’t you? You definitely told him about your goldfish dying, at least. I mean, you told him before you even told me!”

“Yes I did, and he was appropriately sympathetic about Mustache’s passing, unlike some people,” you sniff. “Get over it already, won’t you?”

“Never,” Jimin replies, ignoring your pointed jab. “I’m sure you only told him because you knew you could get a sympathy sext out of it. How many dick pics did you get out of that night, anyway?”

“You’re gross,” you tell him, punching him in the arm. “Not to mention that’s exactly why Jay’s not boyfriend material. He’s perfectly happy with—whatever it is we’re doing. I can’t just ruin that by asking him to get dinner.” You frown, gnawing on your bottom lip. “I don’t want to make this into something that it’s not.”

Jimin hesitates. “Fine, okay. I guess I can understand that.”

“Yeah.”

There’s a pause, as the elevator makes a few more stops. You watch the numbers crawl higher, and know that you’ll soon have to part ways with your friend..

“Hey.” You nudge Jimin with your shoulder, just as the elevator doors close and you begin the ascent to his floor. “Wanna know something interesting?”

Jimin looks up from his phone, where he’s scrolling through Twitter. “Always.”

“My boss’ son is coming to the party tomorrow.”

Jimin’s eyebrows disappear into his ashy blond hair at your revelation. “Kyunghee’s son? Hoseok, or whatever?”

You chuckle. “The one and only. She’s found about a million ways to bring him up in conversation this past week. She thinks we’re a match made in heaven.”

“Wow.” Jimin releases a long breath. “I wonder what he’s like, then.”

You shrug, adjusting the strap of your work tote over your shoulder. “I guess we’ll find out, won’t we?”

///

The morning of the party, you wake up to an empty refrigerator. Half stale cereal and the last dregs of milk from the carton become your breakfast, and you munch on that as you mull over the contents of your closet. You’re still in your pajamas, but you pull out your comfiest jeans and a sweater to change into after you finish eating. Then you turn to your collection of dresses, rifling through them and mentally debating the merits of each material and color.

You could go in one of two directions tonight. On the one hand, this is still a work party, and as such your attire should probably maintain a certain level of decorum. But on the other, you’re meeting Hoseok Jung for the first time tonight. You aren’t necessarily looking to start anything with the man, of course, but you do want to look good. With that in mind, you eventually settle on a deep red number that you pull out of the very back of your closet, made of a silky material that skims your curves and accentuates your best assets. Laying it on the bed, you begin your hunt for a pair of matching shoes. Twenty minutes of searching and another five of agonizing later, you step into the bathroom, intent on showering and getting on with the rest of your day.

Upon exiting the bathroom, you decide that tackling the state of your refrigerator takes top priority over your other weekend errands. Sitting down at the dining table, you take stock of what you have in your pantry, planning out your meals for the upcoming week and making a list of what you need to purchase in order to make them a reality. It’s just after one in the afternoon when you exit your apartment with a completed grocery list and your purse stuffed full of reusable canvas bags. The store is a short walk from where you live, and you decide to put in your earbuds as your feet navigate the familiar route. The temperature is surprisingly mild for winter, and the sun shines bright from its perch in the cloudless blue sky. It’s perfect weather for a walk, and the fresh air clears your mind and eases your heart.

At the grocery store, you forego the stack of baskets and instead grab a shopping cart. Weaving your way up and down the aisles, you check items off the list on your phone one by one. Eventually, you find yourself in the cereal section, grabbing a box of granola before turning to where your favorite cereal normally sits. It isn’t there, and you turn in a full circle, confused, until your gaze finally lands on the familiar box on the top shelf.

Great.

Sighing, you push up to your tiptoes, stretching your arm as far as it can reach. Your fingertips graze the shelf, but you can’t quite get a grip on the box itself. Glancing down, you scan the bottommost shelf and wonder if you can step on it to give yourself a boost.

“Need a hand?”

The voice comes from behind you, and a vague sense of familiarity sparks in your brain. Slowly, you turn around, and your entire body freezes when your gaze slides up to the speaker’s face.

“Jay.” The syllable escapes you in a near whisper. “H-hi.”

“Hey.”

Jay stands before you, looking like sin incarnate in a faded denim jacket, black sweatpants slung low on his hips, and not much else. At his throat, his silver necklace sparkles, the silver J pendant glinting beneath the fluorescent lights of the store, and you’re suddenly beyond grateful that you decided to put on a decent sweater before leaving.

“Here,” he says, stepping forward until he’s close enough that you can smell his cologne—sandalwood tinged with sweet citrus. “Let me help you with that.”

The sudden proximity has your breath hitching in your throat. Your heart thuds erratically against your ribs as he reaches around you, the denim flaps of his jacket gaping in a way that exposes even more of his bare chest. By the time he pulls back with your cereal box in hand, you feel almost faint, belatedly realizing that you’d been holding your breath.

“You wanted this, right?” Jay asks, and you aren’t sure if you’re imagining the innuendo underlying his words or the teasing inflection of the syllables.

“Y-yeah, that’s the one,” you manage, fighting to quell the uneven tempo of your heartbeat as you accept the box. “Thanks.”

“Happy to help,” he replies. Then he leans in, close enough that you can feel his warm breath fanning your cheek as he murmurs his next sentence into your ear. “Anything for you, princess. You know that.”

Heat floods across your cheeks. Your heart skips two full beats before taking off into a sprint, and it’s impossible to ignore the way your core begins to thrum, as if anticipating a repeat of that night you first met all those weeks ago. Almost instinctively, your eyes dart up to the ceiling where the security cameras are, and Jay follows the trajectory of your gaze with a low chuckle and a soft brush of your cheek with the pad of his thumb.

“Sorry, princess. As much as I’d love to get my hands on you, I’m kind of on a time crunch today.”

You can’t stop the wave of disappointment that washes over you, even if you’re in the exact same boat. “Rain check, then?”

“Rain check,” he agrees. Slowly, you reach up to touch the engraved silver pendant resting against his chest, rubbing it between your fingertips before tracing the curve of the J, and he catches your wandering fingers between his and presses a gentle kiss to your knuckles.

“You know how to reach me,” he murmurs with a mischievous wink. His gaze lingers even after he’s released your hand, and you clear your throat awkwardly before turning to deposit your cereal box into your shopping cart.

The two of you go your separate ways then, exchanging goodbyes. You finish the rest of your grocery shopping in a daze, idly going through the motions at checkout and letting muscle memory guide you back home. Your arms are aching by the time you step past the threshold of your apartment, and you heave your shopping bags up onto the kitchen counter with a relieved sigh before returning to the entryway to toe off your shoes. You throw together a sandwich as you unpack your groceries, taking a big bite as you walk back to your bedroom to look at the dress you’ve picked out. Pacing over to the closet, you double-check your shoe choice. Briefly, you debate whether or not to wear flats instead of heels.

There are still a few hours left before you have to start getting ready, so you take the last of your sandwich back to the kitchen and whip up a smoothie to go with it. You scroll through your phone as you eat, browsing through the latest news headlines and scrolling through your social media accounts. Just before six o’clock, as the sun starts setting beyond the horizon and casting long shadows across your living room, you start getting changed. You snap a photo in the mirror once you’re dressed, pulling up Jimin’s name in your phone and sending it to him.

[6:13pm] You: last chance to come tonight

Your phone buzzes with a response almost immediately.

[6:14pm] Jimin: nah. i’d hate to step on hoseok’s toes.

You laugh. Not so fast, you text back. We don’t even know anything about the guy yet. What if he’s boring? Or sexist?

[6:15pm] Jimin: if u think kyunghee raised a sexist you’re seriously deranged

[6:16pm] Jimin: now stop taking selfies and get your ass out the door! you’re gonna be late!!!!

///

Each year, the holiday party tends to be a little over the top, and this year is no exception. The company has bought out the entirety of a restaurant for the evening, and you glance around in amazement at the twinkling lights and lush evergreen boughs decorating the walls and strung up along the ceiling. An assortment of sparkling ornaments hangs from the massive tree in the far corner, interspersed between silver tinsel and more lights. Grabbing a champagne flute off a passing server’s tray, you head farther into the restaurant, skirting around tables draped in creamy linen and greeting your colleagues and friends.

“Is she alone?”

“Figures.”

The voices come from the direction of the open bar, and somehow, you just know that they’re talking about you. Lottie, Hyejin, and Sandra are clustered in the corner with glasses of wine in hand, casting glances around the restaurant and gossiping about anything and everything with a pulse. You’re sorely tempted to grab the nearest pitcher of water off a table and pour it over their heads, but you suppress the urge and instead head over with a saccharine smile. “So lovely to see you, {Name},” Lottie says as you approach.

“I love your dress,” Sandra adds. “Very slimming.”

“Thanks,” you reply, putting on your brightest, fakest smile. “Yours is great too. How are you and your husband enjoying the party so far?”

Sandra’s face sours, and you hide your smirk in your champagne flute. Maybe it’s petty to bring up her rocky relationship, but you’ve been subject to snide comments from Sandra and her friends for years now and it’s become increasingly hard for you to bite your tongue. A few tables away, you spot Sandra’s husband, Rodney, take an enormous gulp of his whiskey and wince as it burns down his throat.

“We’re all having a wonderful time, aren’t we, ladies?” Lottie cuts in when Sandra takes too long to answer. “Hyejin’s date is over there with Rodney, and my boyfriend is fetching himself a drink. You remember Dev, don’t you?”

You nod, even though it’s a lie. “Sure. Say hi to him for me.”

Lottie’s lips curve up into a smile, her head tilting to the side, and you’re suddenly reminded of a snake rearing its head back for the kill. “So, what about you? Have you brought someone tonight, or—?”

“Hi ladies!” Kyunghee materializes at your side, her lips painted a festive red shade to match her dress. She’s wearing the disingenuous smile that she reserves for the resident gossips of your office, and you try not to let your relief show on your face when Lottie’s attention refocuses on your manager.

“So good to see you, Kyunghee,” she simpers. “Have you been here long?”

“Not as long as you,” your manager replies, nodding at the near-empty wineglass in her hand. “I see we’re already making a dent in the wine supply, and you’re falling behind, {Name}. Why don’t we go remedy that, hmm?”

She doesn’t give you a chance to respond, grabbing your arm and leading you away. Kyunghee is surprisingly spry for a woman her age, and you follow after her with some difficulty as she marches through the throngs of conversing people, all the way to the line at the open bar.

“I’d like you to meet someone,” she says, gesturing at the man standing at the end of the line with his back to you. “{Name}, this is my son, Hoseok.”

The man turns around at the sound of his name, a warm, affable smile stretched across his face. “Hi, I’m H—” he begins, but he’s cut off by your sharp intake of breath. His eyes go wide, his smile fading as his mouth falls open, and you’re certain you’re wearing an even more dumbfounded expression. “It’s you,” he says, his voice hoarse.

“Wh-what… how…” You trail off, speechless. The words flounder and die in your throat as your brain struggles to process this development, and you practically feel the way the gears in your head churn to a stuttering halt.

Because this man standing before you, the one that Kyunghee has just introduced as her son, is none other than Jay. He looks completely and utterly devastating in a navy waistcoat and matching slacks, a green tie shaped like a Christmas tree knotted loosely around the white collar of his shirt. His dark hair is parted, his undercut exposed, and you can’t tear your gaze away from the loose strand that has fallen across his forehead.

“H-hi.”

Jay—Hoseok—swallows. “Hi.”

Kyunghee glances between the two of you, her brows furrowing. “I take it you two already know each other?”

Hoseok’s ears begin taking on a scarlet tinge, the color spreading to his cheeks as he struggles to find his vocabulary again. “I—yeah. Yeah, we’ve met.”

“Right. Do I even want to know how?” she asks dubiously, before shaking her head and huffing out a sigh. “No, forget I asked. I don’t want to know. I’ll just leave you two to… catch up.”

Waving goodbye, Kyunghee disappears back into the crowd of partygoers milling around. Hoseok turns back to you, sucking in a deep breath, and you fight the urge to stare down at your toes as his gaze roves across your face.

“I can’t believe this,” he says, breaking the silence that’s fallen between you at last. “My mom’s been talking about you for months, but I never imagined that it’d be you.”

“You’re telling me,” you reply, finally having recovered your voice. “Kyunghee brings you up all the time, but I never thought… I mean, we didn’t even know each other’s names, and now…” You shrug. “Here we both are.”

“It’s a pretty crazy coincidence, huh?”

“Definitely.”

A beat passes, and then two. You’re fully aware that you’re staring, but you don’t dare blink, afraid that he’ll disappear if you close your eyes. Of all the things that you thought might happen tonight, this particular meeting wasn’t even close to making the list. Never would you have thought that the man you only knew as Jay would turn out to be Kyunghee’s son. Never would you have connected Jay to the photographed little boy in yellow suspenders on Kyunghee’s desk, or realized that they were one and the same.

From behind you, someone loudly clears their throat. Another voice calls for you to get a move on, already, and both you and Hoseok belatedly realize that you are still standing in line for the open bar. Hoseok’s eyes go wide again, and you nearly tread on his toes when you both try to move forward. “After you,” he says with a chuckle, gesturing for you to go in front of him, and that’s enough to break the tension. You step ahead of him with a laugh, catching up to the line, and Hoseok doesn’t stray far as he follows your lead.

“So, what are you drinking?” he asks, a smile playing at the corner of his lips. “Vodka soda with a twist?”

“Actually, I think I’m going to stick with wine tonight,” you reply, peering at the bottles lined up on the counter. “What about you?”

“Hmm. Jack and coke, I think. Nothing else is really calling my name right now.”

Grabbing your drinks, the two of you begin searching for a place to sit. You spot Kyunghee at a table near the front, and she smiles knowingly and offers you a thumbs-up when she catches your eye. Eventually, you settle on a table near the Christmas tree, the lights glimmering off the glasses and reflecting off your knife as you pick it up to butter a slice of crusty bread from the basket in the center. Hoseok follows your lead, grabbing a piece for himself, and the two of you munch in silence for a few seconds before Hoseok breaks it.

“You know, my mom says you’re the perfect girl for me” he says with a dry little chuckle. “Think she’s right?”

“I don’t know,” you answer. “It’s funny, though—Kyunghee’s been telling me the same thing. She sings your praises all the time.”

Hoseok laughs and scratches the back of his neck. “Oh, jeez, that’s kind of embarrassing. I’m glad she’s saying good things, at least.”

“You don’t have to worry about that,” you tell him, grinning. “She’s only shown us one photo album from your childhood.”

His face crumples. “Was it the Disneyland one?”

You nod, fighting back laughter, and watch as Hoseok groans and lets his forehead meet the linen-covered tabletop with a dull thunk.

“I don’t like rollercoasters,” he mumbles into the tablecloth, his voice muffled by the material. “They make me queasy.”

“Even now?” you ask, and he nods.

“Yep.”

The clinking of a fork against a wineglass—amplified and broadcast through an array of invisible speakers built into the restaurant’s walls—interrupts any further conversation. You twist in your seat to watch your company’s leadership give their opening remarks, listening as they congratulate everyone for a great year and wish you a happy holiday season. The servers begin going out with plates of food, and you thank them as they set yours down. Hoseok does the same before raising his glass in your direction, clearing his throat and offering you a crooked little smile.

“Here’s to second meetings.”

“Third, if you count the store earlier,” you correct, and he chuckles and nods in agreement before clinking his drink against yours.

You spend the entirety of dinner chatting with Hoseok, getting to know him beyond the few facts Kyunghee has mentioned and what little you’ve gleaned from texting him the last two months. He tells you all about his dance studio, Hope World, where he teaches both contemporary dance and the occasional Pilates class. You find out that in addition to rollercoasters, he also dislikes sour foods and raisins, but he loves mint chocolate and sweet and sour pork. He also has a very low tolerance for alcohol—something he tells you as he tilts the rest of his drink into his mouth. “Should I be worried?” you ask as he sets his glass back down, and he chuckles and shakes his head, sending the loose tendril of hair flopping across his forehead.

Dessert is served, and subsequently eaten. The music is turned up, and people slowly begin finding their way to the open space that serves as an impromptu dancefloor. Hoseok rises to his feet and extends a hand toward you, and you only hesitate for the briefest of seconds before accepting it. He leads you out amongst the other swaying couples, his hand finding its way to the curve of your waist, and you rest your hand on his shoulder as he begins guiding you in a slow, simple waltz.

“So?” Hoseok’s voice is a low murmur, soft and gentle against the shell of your ear. “What’s the verdict?”

You blink. “The verdict?”

Even without looking, you can tell that he’s smiling. You can hear it in the lilt of his voice, and imagine it in the curve of his lips. “About me,” he clarifies, carefully pulling back so you can spin in a circle beneath his outstretched arm. “About us. My mom will never let me hear the end of it if she turns out to be right, but I still wanna know. So what are you thinking?”

“Are you asking if I think we’re perfect for each other?” you ask, giggling. “I don’t know if I believe in all that, to be quite honest. Destiny and soulmates—I mean, doesn’t it seem a little too good to be true?”

Hoseok hums. “Maybe. But considering all that’s happened to us in the last couple of months, don’t you think there’s a chance that it's all more than simple coincidence?”

“Maybe,” you concede. “Still, I don’t know if I can give you a verdict just yet. We haven’t even gone on a date.”

“We did do things a little backwards,” Hoseok admits, tugging you close and winding his arm around your waist. “Let me make it up to you, then. Are you free tomorrow?”

“What if I am?” you challenge.

“Then, I’d like to take you out for breakfast,” he replies without missing a beat.

The prospect of a proper meal with Hoseok Jung does something funny to your insides. Still, something makes you hesitate, and you avert your gaze as you search for your next words. “I wasn’t expecting to end tonight with a date,” you admit slowly. “I honestly didn’t even think you were interested in… well, anything beyond sex, to be honest.”

Hoseok’s face creases into a frown, and you look up again when he murmurs your name. “I understand why you would think that,” he says. “Really, I do. But honestly? I had every intention of texting you and asking you out properly. I was going to play it cool and wait a few days, which was stupid in retrospect. And then you texted me first.”

“I texted y—” You trail off. “Oh, god.”

“It seemed like you’d been drinking,” Hoseok says with a shrug, and you press a finger to his lips before he can say anything more. You remember the night in question, and you remember the bottle of wine you’d consumed. And you definitely remember the photographs you’d sent of yourself, and the ones Hoseok had been kind enough to send in return.

“Wait, so you were going to ask me out? And then I… I sexted you?”

Hoseok nods, and you groan and bury your face into his chest.

“I can’t believe this,” you mutter, and you feel laughter rumble through his chest before a hand comes up to stroke along your back.

“Believe me, I’m not complaining,” he assures you. “But I’d still really like to take you out, so what do you say?”

His gaze doesn’t leave yours for a second as he awaits your answer, and your heart skips a beat when you look up to see the earnestness in his eyes and the hesitant smile playing at the corners of his mouth. “Breakfast sounds wonderful,” you whisper, and the smile that blossoms on your companion’s face is nothing short of radiant.

“Good,” he says. “Great. Breakfast tomorrow, then. Now, can I kiss you?”

You’re already pushing up to your tiptoes, your fingers fisting in the soft hair at his nape. “God, yes.”

///

“Hey, you made it!”

You beam. “Hi.”

You and Hoseok are about to commence your first date, having just sat down at a cozy little café for breakfast. Hoseok has pulled your chair out in true gentlemanly fashion, and you can’t help but smile over your menu at the few lingering snowflakes that have yet to melt into his dark hair.

“So, here we are,” you remark. “Our fourth meeting.”

Hoseok’s lips stretch into his signature grin, breathtakingly bright and infectious. “And hopefully many more.”

You grin at him. “Yeah? Too bad this is breakfast, because I’d drink to that.”

He leans forward, his grin widening. “Next time,” he says as his hand finds its way around yours, his fingers slotting comfortably into the spaces between your own. “We can do dinner, maybe. Or I can cook for you. But for now, I’m just happy that we’re finally doing this.”

You give his hand a soft squeeze. “Me too.”

“Just promise me one thing?”

The sudden seriousness of his tone has your brow furrowing in concern. “Sure, of course,” you reassure. “What is it?”

He winces. “Please don’t tell my mom about all the dick pics.”

#hoseok #hoseok smut #hoseok x reader #bts smut #bts scenarios #hoseok scenarios #jhope #jung hoseok #bts #bts fanfic #bts fanfiction #bts fic #kpop scenarios #hoseok x you #strangers to lovers!au #strangers to lovers #lia writes #gonna change that stupid summary if i can think of anything better LOL #my brain went all mushy on me idk what's happening

[aloysiavirgata]

Petrichor

Title: Petrichor

Rating: Explicit

Summary: He could tell her that her prefrontal cortex was the revelation to the thief on the cross.

Spoilers: Early S7

Author’s Notes:This is a casefile inspired by many things. The Season 7 timeline is a mess, I don’t know what else to say about that.

Early November in the temperate mountain valleys of southern Appalachia. The ground is carpet-soft with plush moss, and the hidden pools are still riotous with life. Ree needed only a pullover that morning, her doll Cordelia peering out of an old tote-bag stuffed with scraps of bread and feed corn. Her mother sent a lunch for her too, tucked in with her books and binoculars and a thermos of hot chocolate.

Ree in faded jeans and a lavender sweater picking her way over rocks and pine needles and fallen leaves, watching for the birds she can name and trying to mimic their calls. She points them out to Cordelia, who stares solemnly with blue-glass eyes. There are foxes, but they hide still. Ree dreams of befriending them. She can lure some of the deer within twenty feet now, and wishes she were Fern Arable, from Charlotte’s Web.

She takes a right instead of her customary left, wanting to test her new binoculars from a different vantage point. She skips over tree roots and rocks like a mountain goat, scarcely needing to look at the ground to keep her footing. The path curves sharply for a hundred feet before Ree finds herself at the edge of a wide pond, dense with duckweed. It is bordered with stands of ancient pine, with mossy boulders and half-sunken logs furred with algae. The silence is deep, but not frightening. It feels holy, like church. Godlight filters through the evergreens, the color of new peas. Somewhere, not far, falling water.

“Ohhhh,” Ree whispers to Cordelia. The beauty makes her chest hurt a little. She fumbles in the bag for her binoculars, laying Cordelia on a rock. Bread crusts and pencil ends spill from a loose seam. A rattle of deer corn on the stone.

Binoculars in place, Ree spots a heron across the pond, squirrels peeping from between the gold and red leaves of elm and sugarberry. She recognizes a deer she’s seen many times before, with a wide white blaze down her nose. Sudden movement catches her eye - a slim figure with long hair moving among the trees. Ree adjusts her lenses but cannot focus properly; the figure is blurred, always moving among the evergreen boughs.

The heron again. Squirrels. The deer now much closer. Then a pale ankle, a woman’s laugh.

“Helloooooooo,” Ree calls, braver than she feels. “I’m just lookin’ at birds and stuff! I’ll go if you want.”

Silence. 

She chews her lip, uncertain. The woods don’t belong to anybody on paper, but there are chancy folk out here with their own laws. “Cordelia?” she whispers. “What do we do?”

Cordelia offers no opinion. Ree grabs a handful of corn and climbs onto a flat boulder. Just beside it is a little patch of grass, and she hopes the doe will come into it. 

The laugh again and this time it’s much closer, just to her left. Were those fingers at her neck? Ree turns to look but tunnel vision sets in, the binoculars slapping hard against her chest when she drops them. The strap twists at her throat and she gasps, her hands springing open in surprise. She slips on the fallen corn and goes down hard on her spine against the rock. 

The deer steps into the glade, her unusual face cautious but curious. She knows Ree will not make sudden movements like the others do.

Ree, dazed, watched the deer nibble the corn with her velvet lips. She tries to sit up, but it’s like her brain will not connect to her body. Her feet seem very far away. 

Something pulls her hair and she manages a thin cry of pain. She’s freezing suddenly, the world glassy and distorted. Ree opens her mouth to call for help but she can’t; the greenness of the glade is in her throat now, and behind her eyes and inside her blood. The laugh again, so pretty, and then long arms are wrapped around her and Ree thanks Baby Jesus for saving her but oh!

Such teeth.

***

A quick glance in the rearview confirms once more that his hair’s pretty well grown back from the surprise birthday neurosurgery, and at thirty-eight such victories cannot be taken for granted. He tries to peer around the tight curve along the mountain road, but can make out only shadows. The bag of sunflower seeds ran dry twenty minutes ago, but he’s got a couple more in the trunk.

Beside him comes a rustle of paper. Scully’s printed out directions from MapQuest, checking off turns like a shopping list. “Still another three miles before the access road,” she says, not looking up from her trim navy-blue lap. She takes a sip of coffee.

Mulder coughs, says nothing. Things aren’t strained exactly, it’s not that. It’s more a liminal space. Everything’s fine, he tells himself. Everything’s fine.

He  checks his hair again.

***

The town is shabby but proud; the roads are clean and there are no cars propped up on the trimmed lawns. On this block a hardware store, a stone church, a fire station, and a bakery. Despite the Fannie Flagg charm, Mulder expects the local homeowners are dying for a Wal-Mart and a McDonald’s. There’s a billboard advertising a newly opened Cracker Barrel, which must count as progress to some.

The Ross home is a small, weatherbeaten clapboard in a stretch of small, weatherbeaten clapboards. Many of the houses have elaborate neo-classical porticoes taller than the actual roof. At the Rosses’, the mailbox is shaped like a dog, with a moveable tail instead of a flag. There are purple balloons hanging limply from its neck. Mulder noses the Crown Vic up the cracked asphalt of the driveway, engaging the parking brake before turning the engine off. 

Scully gathers their files, straightens the picture of Rhiannon Ross paperclipped to the manila envelope. Her little face is joyful in the school photograph. She wears a sweater with purple hearts and has sun-bronzed skin. Her big hazel eyes are laughing, framed by golden braids. 

“You ready?” he asks Scully.

She sighs. “Are we ever, with kids?” 

“Nope.” Mulder straightens his tie. So strange to do these little rituals again, to convey authority and professionalism through a strip of ornamental fabric. 

“You sure you’re okay?” Scully asks him again, fussing with a Post-It. “You know I still don’t think you should have been cleared for this, Mulder. You’re scarcely three weeks past severe trauma, and you haven’t even been back to the office.” She looks up, concern furrowing her brow.

He could tell her that when the gyre widened and spun out, it was she who held the center for him. He could tell her that the cool silver stream of her unvoiced voice stemmed the hellish tide of thoughts and premonition that threatened to drown his sentient mind. He could tell her that her prefrontal cortex was the revelation to the thief on the cross. 

Instead he crunches on a peppermint LifeSaver, washing it down with the rest of his cold coffee. “I get in the most trouble when I’m left to my own devices. You should be glad for a federally mandated excuse to keep an eye on me.”

She smiles at that. “Fair enough.”

They leave the stale air of the car for the fresh autumn breezes of northeast Alabama, the air so crisp it tastes like spring water. Mulder, a devout New Englander, is wary of the South, but cannot deny this to be a beautiful patch of it.

He puts his jacket on as Scully clips several paces ahead of him, bandbox fresh as always. He joins her on the little porch, and the front door opens before they have a chance to knock. Before them is a lanky blonde woman in worn jeans and a striped blouse. The shadows around her eyes look like bruises, lips papery and dry. For 26 years, these mothers have always been his mother, their homes his house in Chilmark.

“Y’all the FBI people?” she asks. Despite her stretchy vowels, brittle tension suffuses her voice. 

“Yes ma’am,” Scully says. They display their badges for her perusal.

The woman nods, then ushers them in. She gestures to a floral couch, taking the chintz armchair across from it. Mulder settles at one end of the couch while Scully, less leggy,  perches at the edge of the other. She is a slim smudge in the pastel room.

“I’m Iona Ross,” their host begins, rubbing a chewed thumbnail across raw knuckles. “I’m Ree’s mama.” 

Behind her, on the wall, are family photographs. Ree has three older brothers. The largest photograph shows the four children arranged on a park bench, smiling in white shirts and blue jeans. Ree is missing her two front teeth.

A man enters the room, rawboned, with the same wheat colored hair as his wife. He’s got on a gray sweater beneath Carhartt overalls and carries a coffee tray. He has big hands with ropy tendons standing out, and it's clear he’s not used to playing host. His face is haggard.

“This is my husband Wyatt,” Iona says, as he puts the tray on the small table between her and the couch.

Mulder looks at the pristine coffee cups and saucers. He guesses this is their wedding china, only brought out for “best.” That it will be carefully placed back into a breakfront after hand-washing.

Wyatt sits in a blue La-Z-Boy, relieved to be finished with his task. “They told us y’all were the best ones to find Ree,” he says in a choppy voice. He reaches out to grip his wife’s hand. 

Mulder, as he always does, longs for this to be true. “I can promise you there is no one at the FBI who will work harder for you,” he says.

Scully smiles sadly in his peripheral vision. “We have the police report, Mr. and Mrs. Ross. But it’s always better if you can walk us through the events yourself.”

“Iona and Wyatt, please,” Wyatt says. “Anyhow, it was Sunday morning and Ree had just got new binoculars for her birthday on Saturday. She, uh, she’s nine now. Real smart little thing, likes nature and all, really likes birds.” His voice breaks. He scrubs at his face with his hands.

Iona takes over, voice raw but steady. “Well, she packed up her little bag with some bird food you know, and her binoculars and some nature books and all. Her doll Cordelia of course, and I made a lunch. She’ll go out for hours in the woods. And whatever, uh, happened it was before she ate ‘cause all the food was there.”

Mulder glances at his notes, just to look at something other than Iona’s desperate face. “The police report says her doll and her bag were found by a pond with the lunch still inside, but her binoculars were missing. The items were found Monday morning by a search party. That’s correct?”

“Yes sir,” Iona replies. “And there was algae all over Cordelia and the bag and the food, even though it was still wrapped up. It was even in the hot chocolate in the thermos.” She looks eagerly from Mulder to Scully. “Y’all think that means something, the algae being on closed-up food? I never heard of it. Maybe it’s like a, whaddya call it, an MO.”

“Unusual details are always good details,” Scully says in her gentle way. “Unusual facts can certainly help narrow things down, Mis- Iona.” She leans forward now, palms splayed over her sharp knees. “I know this next question is painful, but I do need to ask. It says that the pond was searched and that neither Ree nor any of her clothing have been found. But, from the photographs, it seems like there’s a bit of debris in the pond. Logs and large rocks, mostly, and lots of algae and duckweed. Is there any chance that Ree would have gone into it on her own?”

Wyatt gets to his feet. “She ain’t stupid,” he snaps, pacing. “She didn’t do nothing wrong, and despite what you may think, we’re not backwoods morons too ignorant to raise children.” His pain seeps a dark aura into the air, ink through clear water. “Our other three are still fine, you notice. Police report say that?”

“We don’t doubt you at all, sir,” Mulder says. “No one is trying to blame Ree or your family for her disappearance. Agent Scully and I just have to review all lines of questioning to make sure the police have done everything they can thus far. We want to make sure we’re starting from a helpful place as we take over the investigation.”

Wyatt leans against the wall, looking hollow. “Jenny Greenteeth,” he mutters.

Iona, with shaking hands, pours four cups of coffee. “Wyatt,” she hisses. “Not now.”

“Jenny Greenteeth?” Scully repeats, writing it down. “Is that som-”

“It’s an old story,” Mulder says, surprised. “A nursery bogey.”

He is met by three blank stares.

“A nursery bogey is a story created by adults with the specific goal of making children avoid certain behaviors, or to encourage generally good behavior,” Mulder says. He is intrigued by Wyatt invoking the name. “The Namahage of Japan, the Scottish bodach, Russia’s Baba Yaga - all of these legends are about mythical beings who will in some way harm misbehaving children. Sometimes they get specific. Jenny Greenteeth, like the kappa and bunyip, is said to snatch children who venture to close to dangerous water.”

Wyatt is staring at him. “How’d you know all that?”

Mulder spreads his hands in a vague gesture. “These kinds of stories have always interested me.” He feels it best not to elaborate.

“He’s an internationally recognized expert,” Scully chimes in, rather generously. “Can you tell us why you mentioned this particular legend?”

“Don’t mind him,” Iona says, passing around the coffee. “We’re just both about to fall to pieces.”

Wyatt scowls. “I’m telling you,” he says stubbornly. “It’s her.”

Mulder adds cream to his coffee and takes a sip. It’s worlds better than the gas station dregs he just finished. “I know the story of Jenny Greenteeth comes from the north of England and from Scotland. This area has a big Scots-Irish influence, doesn’t it?”

“Yessir. There’s a big Scottish festival hereabouts, and both our families are Scottish from way back. Ree’s named after my Granny Rhiannon. You think that means something?” Iona’s voice is strained, hungry for any morsel.

Mulder shakes his head. “No, not necessarily. Probably not, and I apologize for getting off topic. Wyatt, tell me more about this, uh, theory you’ve got.” He finishes the coffee in a long gulp.

Wyatt rubs his face. “Well, listen. I know how it sounds to me, and I reckon it sounds even crazier to y’all. But growing up around here, every kid knows about the little pools in these hollers. Real deep ponds will spring up practically overnight, I guess ‘cause the ground is weak from all the mining. In the spring you get these real fast streams from the snow runoff. So kids run wild through the woods but they know to be careful. All the meemaws tell ‘em if they aren’t careful, Jenny Greenteeth’ll grab ‘em at the water. She’s got, you know, long black hair and real long arms and green teeth.” He shrugs, a bit sheepish.

“And you think this, uh, this creature took Rhiannon?” Scully asks, managing to sound both compassionate and deadpan at the same time.

Iona and Wyatt exchange a glance.

“Well, there’s a bit more than that,” Iona says, turning her mug in her hands. “Over the summer a woman moved in out in the woods. She, uh, took over some old hunter’s shack not real far from where Ree went missing. Her name’s Tallulah Church. She’s real tall and skinny, probably at least six feet, and I’ll be damned but she’s got green teeth.”

“Green teeth,” Mulder repeats, intrigued. He glances at Scully, who’s scribbling.

“Pale green like jade,” Wyatt says, warming up to his subject. “The kids are all scared of her, call her Jenny Greenteeth ‘cause they know the story. They say the dogs won’t go around there even.”

“A few hunting dogs have gone missing up that way,” Iona adds, her reluctance clearly fading. “Tallulah comes into town every month or so in her station wagon, gets some supplies, then rattles back up into the mountains. She seems okay I guess, just never really talks to nobody.”

“She gives every kid around here the evil eye,” Wyatt asserts, returning to his recliner. “She’s bad news. There’s things going on with her.”

Iona shoots him a hard look. “I’m sure the FBI isn’t interested in a bunch of mountain superstition.”

Scully pipes up. “When you say there are things going on with her, is there anything specific you can point to? Anything stand out in your memory?” 

A glance between Wyatt and Iona. “Just gives me a bad feeling,” Wyatt says. “You ever meet people like that?”

Mulder is curious as to what they won’t tell him, but decides not to create conflict just yet. These things always out themselves, but for now it’s clear he’s learned all he can. 

He exchanges a quick nod with Scully, who has already closed her notebook. “Wyatt, Iona, we’re going to do our best to find out what happened to Ree. It sounds like talking to Tallulah Church may be a good start. If she lives nearby she may have seen something or someone involved in the disappearance.” 

Wyatt snorts. “The police already talked to her. Doesn’t know a thing, they say. Search parties are still out though, and we’re heading out again when we’re done here.”

Scully gets to her feet, and Mulder follows. “Thank you for talking to us,” Scully says. “We’ll review all of this information and be in touch as we can. We’ll let you get back to the search.”

The Rosses rise, hands are shaken. Iona runs her fingers through her hair before crossing her arms tightly back across her chest. “Please bring her home,” she says. “Even - even if…” She trails off, weeping.

Wyatt draws her close, and Mulder and Scully slip past them, barely noticed.

***

It’s just past six by the time they get to their motel, but the sky is black. The parking lot gravel smatters against the fenders as Mulder parks in front of the little office. He gets out to contemplate a luggage cart when Scully emerges. She promptly turns her ankle on the uneven ground, but Mulder manages to grab her by the upper arm before she falls.

“You okay?”

She stares up at him, her breath quick. 

Scully glances at his hand and he remembers to let go. She looks away, tests her footing on the gravel. “I’m good,” she says. “I’m fine.”

“Scully fine, or regular fine?”

She smooths her jacket. “How’s your cranium?”

Mulder goes to the office at that, and retrieves their room keys from the drowsy clerk. A part of him hopes the reservation got messed up, that there’s only one room. But both are available, a queen en suite for each. They’re on the first floor around back, next door neighbors, the clerk says. Mulder swipes the bureau plastic and heads back out to Scully, who has found safer footing on the sidewalk.

He passes her the key. “You want to get some dinner? I saw a Cracker Barrel back yonder.” He drawls for her amusement.

“Sure. I want to take a shower first though. Give you a call when I’m done?”

“Okay.” 

“Okay.��

He wants to kiss her but won’t. He wants to suggest a joint shower to conserve water, but won’t. Her eyes do a quick scan of his face, perhaps reading these thoughts. It would only be fair if she could, really.

Scully grabs her bag and heads to her room. He waits until her door clicks shut before heading to his own.

***

Mulder thought of Jenny Greenteeth in the shower, of skeletal arms grasping at him through the drain. It made the tops of his feet tingle, and he hurried out to towel off. 

From what he’s read, Rhiannon Ross seems like a steady, responsible child, unlikely to go haring off through dangerous parts of the woods, or testing the limits of a slippery embankment. And the algae troubles him, the presence of it on her belongings. 

Mulder dresses in jeans and a t-shirt, pulling a parka on for warmth. He forgot his hair gel, and his head looks a bit like a startled sea creature. Scully doubtless has something in her portable salon.

She meets him in front of the car, Scully-casual in grey slacks and a black sweater. Her hiking boots put her shoulders about level with his ribs, and he is reminded that the love of his life is built on a songbird’s frame. Mulder recalls the fine velveteen skin at her inner thigh, like the breast of a chickadee.

“Nice hair,” she says. 

“Thanks, I’m trying to channel Lyle Lovett.” He strums an invisible guitar.

She slouches against the rough brick of the building, backlit by neon. At her feet are bunches of plastic flowers jammed into the white quartz around the ragged boxwood hedge. “So. Cracker Barrel, huh?” 

“Sure, I figured we could sit in the rockers and talk about the old days. Those kids with their jazz and soda pop, am I right? Spit some chaw, vote Republican. Besides, it seems to be either that or a dubious establishment called A-1 Panda Kitchen. The diner closes at 7.”

Scully wrinkles her nose. “Cracker Barrel it is.”

***

There’s a MISSING! flier of Ree on the table, dog-eared and slipped into a plastic page protector. It’s sporting the same school photo from their dossiers. Mulder pushes it gently aside, feeling like he should apologize.

Scully frowns at the menu, taps at it with an immaculate fingernail. “I don’t see how anyone eats here regularly and lives long enough to reminisce about the old days in a rocker. Even the salad has fried chicken in it.”

He remembers when she would cheerfully put away a plate of ribs, but now she cares about fiber and antioxidants along with her tailoring. And her stupid bee pollen crap. “Aw, Scully, you’re citified. Surely you’ve got some kin in these parts. Hardy mountain folk descended from fleeing Irish potato farmers. You can hand le these vittles, little lady. It ain’t possum.” He considers the chicken-fried steak with interest. It comes with gravy.

“Stop talking like you’re on Hee-Haw.” She looks thoughtful. “I suppose there probably are distant cousins out this way, but none that I know of.”

He blows a straw wrapper past her shapely nose, which she ignores with practiced dignity.

“Pork tenderloin, that seems all right.” Scully closes her menu with an air of resignation. She does not like being fussy with her ordering.

The waitress comes by and he commits to the fried steak over Scully’s clear distaste. 

“Re-myelinating,” he assures her, handing over the menu.

“That’s not-”

“Shhh.”

They amuse themselves with several rounds of a little peg game, and Mulder decides to purchase one before they leave. 

“Mom was pretty calm there, don’t you think?” Mulder drums his fingers on the table. He doesn’t really suspect the parents, but the sad fact is that they’re most often the perpetrators. It at least bears discussing.

Scully shrugs. “Police don’t seem too concerned. Growing up in a house with four kids, I remember my mom keeping her cool in completely insane situations. Charlie had a compound fracture once, when my dad was away. His femur was poking out the front of his thigh, he was in shock, and mom just handled it like a skinned knee until the ambulance came.” She shakes her head, remembering.

“Must be a dominant trait.”

She squeezes lemon into her water, then picks out an errant seed. “Hardy mountain folk. So there’s no body in the pond, she probably wouldn’t have wandered off without her food and doll, and there’s no ransom demand or strange footprints at the site. So where the hell did she go, Mulder? Where’s Ree?”

“I think she was in the water at some point.”

Scully narrows her eyes, suspicious. She twirls a peg between her fingers. “At some point? Not terminally?”

“You know I hate to speculate, Scully,” he says, in tones of wounded innocence.

She snorts. “At last we come to Jenny Greenteeth.”

“It was Wyatt’s idea,” he reminds her, chewing his straw. He is excited by a new monster to mash with Scully.

“Sure, blame the other kid,” she says, with a kind of weary amusement.

“I’m withholding judgement until we talk to this Tallulah Church tomorrow. I’m interested in those teeth.” 

“It’s always teeth with you,” she says. She captures two pegs, then looks up at him. She is well pleased with herself, smirky and bright-eyed.

He doesn’t want to say anything. He wants to find Ree, dead or alive, and go home. But he feels pretty sure he can’t do that until unburdened. Holman Hart’s repressed emotions may have controlled the weather, but Mulder knows his own can control the fate of this case. He brushes his fingers against her palm. “Scully.”

Her expression tightens, but she doesn’t respond.

“We have to talk this out.” He is concerned with where it may lead, but this particular truth is in her. He no longer doubts her feelings at this juncture, only her willingness to do anything more with them.

Scully sighs. She toys with a sugar packet. It amuses and aggravates him that she can pore over dead infants and handcuff mutants to her bathtub with little discomfiture, but talk about emotions and she squirms like a kid in church. 

“I don’t think there’s much to talk out, really,” she says, terse.

She wouldn’t, of course she wouldn’t, and there are times he could wring her swan-like throat. 

“Well, humor me then,” he says, with exaggerated patience. “Because you woke up in my bed two weeks ago wearing nothing but smudged makeup, and we’ve been avoiding any real mention of that. And now that I’m properly back to work, I’d kind of like to know what the hell we’re doing.”

She looks around, like anyone’s listening to two weary Feds on a Wednesday night. “I really don’t see any reason to have this conversation right now, Mulder.” 

The waitress delivers their food and, sensing tension, scurries away.

In the past few weeks he’s thought back to that hellish summer when a bee had saved Scully from addressing the fact that she’d clearly been willing to jump his bones before skipping town. Well, anaphylaxis wasn’t going to rescue her this time. “Why are you being like this?” he asks, as though she’s ever different.

She leans forward, piqued. “Like what? Not wanting to talk about my… my… personal life in the middle of an Alabama Cracker Barrel while looking for a missing child?” 

Her personal life, Jesus fucking Christ. “You’ve been avoiding me other than some medical check-ins since you left that morning, so I’m trying to figure out what happens now. Come on, Scully. It’s not like I left those underwear on the desk for you before we headed out here.”

She blushes, bless her, and talks to make him shut up. “I can tell you that I don’t regret what happened.” Scully applies herself to the tenderloin with an intensity usually reserved for the mysteriously deceased. 

Mulder knows it’s the best he’s likely to get from her at the moment, that he’s pushing her to give him something he can’t even define. But he remembers with longing the intricate ocean of her thoughts, the fractal beauty of them as they wove into his own. He was still bathing in the quantum entanglement of her when she’d checked his pupils that evening, when he’d kissed her in the certainty that she’d drop both her little flashlight and her guard.

Scully had kissed him back like a mermaid with a half-drowned sailor.

He looks at her again, knows that he sees only the surface of her now. “Scully, I’m not asking you to go steady.”

She laughs a little at that, looks up at him with wary interest. “So what do you want, then?”

It’s a damned good question. He has general ideas of lying in bed with her while she declaims on the marvels of the quadrupole ion trap. He would like to map her freckles, like a star chart.

“For now I’m just glad to know you don’t regret it,” he hedges.

She searches the ceiling for inspiration before returning her cool gaze to him. “It was absurd of me to act like nothing happened, to treat you like any other patient since you weren’t back at work. It was easy to ignore what we… what happened. I’m sorry, Mulder.” 

She still can’t say it, he notices. But it’s something. “Your other patients are dead, Scully. So I’m a special case no matter how you look at it.”

There is warmth in her eyes. “You really are,” she says.

***

Scully’s got their peg game in a Cracker Barrel bag on her lap. Mulder had wanted to stockpile cheese blocks and sausages against future car trips, but she had put her foot firmly down. “Do you think we’ll find her, Mulder? Her remains, probably, but still. It would be something for the family.”

He shrugs. It’s hard to separate hopes from expectations sometimes, especially in their line. “I really don’t know. We need to get a better look at the area she went missing, and I’m pretty curious about this Tallulah woman.”

“Children can have green teeth if their mothers took tetracycline during late pregnancy,” she tells him. “It crosses the placenta and binds to the calcium in the fetus’s developing teeth.”

He grins at her. “Only one alternate explanation? You’re slowing down in your old age, Scully.”

Scully bares her little fangs. “Neonatal hyperbilirubinemia.”

“Attagirl.”

***

He parks around back this time, right in front of their dreary rooms. “I figure we’ll head out around 9 or so tomorrow,” he says. “Let the air warm up a bit before we hit the woods.”

Scully nods, yawning. “Pond first, or Tallulah?”

He considers this. “I think it’s best if we have the lay of the land when we talk to her.”

“Okay.”

Mulder turns the car off, but they stay in their seats with the inertia of food and time difference and mental exhaustion. Even the lost children they manage to bring home are haunted afterwards. It’s hard to imagine a good outcome here. 

Scully unbuckles her seatbelt, turns to him with sleepy eyes. She yawns again, then reaches out to muss his hair. “Come by in the morning,” she says. “I’ll help you out.”

She goes to her room then, the bag dangling from her fingertips. She doesn’t look back at him before she shuts the door.

***

He stretches out on the bedspread, mulling over her words at dinner, and annoyed at himself for the distraction from Ree Ross. What could he have expected from this, though? Scully’s not Diana. Scully wouldn’t flaunt their shared bed to other agents, wouldn’t drape herself over his desk while reading grimoires and classified documents. Christ, he could marry her and she’d probably think a wedding band was unprofessional at work, his uptight darling.

It’s strange for Diana to be dead. He’d stopped trusting her in the final hours of her life, but he didn’t want her dead. She was a rare and capable creature, however dangerous. She was solitary and sleek and fast.

He recalls the choices he’d made what she glided back into his life, her ruthless intellect and legs as long as a midwinter night. He recalls Scully’s face when he swore Diana was playing a long game, all for a nobler cause.

He recalls the dusky labyrinth of her mind and what he saw at the center of it; a beast slouching towards Bethlehem to be born.

***

Diana slips through his dreams again, but not in bridal white, not with the round belly of Taweret. She is dead, but not the dead of his other visions. She is weeks dead, greying and skeletal. He can see patches of bone through her ragged dress but her eyes, her eyes are vivid and whole and the color of cabochon emeralds. They are luminescent in the nightmare forest of his dream, beckoning him. It is a leafless forest, bleak, with bony-armed trees looming over him. 

He finds her in a blackwater creek, standing in the middle of it as the water surges past her calves. She smiles at him with too many teeth. “Hello, Fox,” she says. She bats her lashes. “I apologize for my appearance, but they didn’t embalm.”

“Do you need help?” he asks her, casting about for a long branch.

She shakes her head, hair still lush and glossy. The water rises up her legs.

“Is this real? I mean, are you a ghost or is this all in my head?”

The water whips around her thighs. “What’s real?” she asks. “Perception is reality. If you believe it to be true, it’s true enough for government work.” Diana laughs at her own joke.

A white deer walks up to him, with softly furred antlers like fresh snow. It looks at him with black-irised eyes, wet and bottomless voids. There may be constellations in them. Mulder reaches out to stroke its muzzle as Diana looks on. The deer opens its mouth and dried corn comes pouring out.

The water swallows Diana then, before receding fully. She lies on the bank as he remembers her, whole and striking. Her dead eyes are their usual smoky blue, her dress no longer decomposed. 

He wakes up when the ground swallows her.

***

Morning, bright and chilly in the mountains with light of a purity that never touches DC. He remembers a dream with Diana, with water and deer and a general sense of Jungian dystopia. It’s nice to see his subconscious branching out from its usual reruns of family fare.

Wary of fungal spores embedded in the matted carpet, he steps into his untied dress shoes and clomps to the bathroom wearing nothing else but his boxers. He brushes his teeth in the tiny sink, then wets his unruly hair. 

There’s a knock at the door and he groans. “Just a minute!” he yells around the toothbrush. He hopes it’s someone with the extra towels he asked for.

Mulder clomps back towards the door and, lacking a peephole, he pops it open a fraction to accept his linens. Instead of the housekeeper he’d been expecting, he finds Scully kitted out for a hike, brandishing a canister of mousse.

Cold air sweeps in with her laugh.

“Good morning to you too,” he grouses, ushering her in. He secures the chain when he closes the door.

“Nice outfit,” she says brightly. “What’s with the shoes? Is this a formal hike? I wasn’t sure because you’re not wearing pants, but…”

He scowls, sitting on the bed. “You’re mighty chipper. I’m trying to avoid athlete’s foot, if you must know, and I couldn’t find my socks.”

Scully rummages through his bag for a pair of thick socks, which she tosses to him. She gestures at the bed. “May I?”

“Not if you’re going to be mean.” He kicks the shoes off and tugs the socks on.

Scully sits beside him, shaking the can of mousse. “Thought I could do your hair before we prank call some boys. French braid?”

Mulder stands to pull his jeans up, and the weight shift makes her bounce a little on the mattress. “Let me have that mousse.”

She gestures for his hand, then sprays a lilac-scented pouf into his cupped palm. 

“Thanks,” he says, and scrunches it into his hair. He styles himself before the dresser mirror while she watches, amused.

“You left before my beauty regimen last time,” he remarks.

In the mirror, Scully shakes her head but doesn’t seem bothered. “I made some calls this morning about Tallulah Church. There’s no phone or plumbing up there, but the sheriff’s office said she’s usually right around her home. And the motel clerk drew me a map of how to get to the pond from the access road, then how to get to Tallulah’s.” She waves several crumpled papers.

He pulls a t-shirt over his head, then a fleece. “Aren’t you a busy little bee? Looks like someone’s getting her cartography badge this week.” Mulder returns to the bed to put his boots on.

“I’ve got evidence vials too,” she says, producing them from her pockets. “We’re going to find out what happened to Ree.” Her eyes are big and solemn.

Scully masquerades her tenderheartedness as honor, but Mulder didn’t need a God Module to know why she took that terrible dog in years ago. The depth of cold Dr. Scully’s compassion would shock their colleagues, and he likes this secret knowledge about her. Even Skinner, who reveres her only just below the Constitution, underestimates the fierceness of her empathy. 

“What?” Scully asks.

Mulder cups her splendid jaw, thumb at her sphenoid bone. He kisses the space between her eyebrows, and she makes a small noise.

“We have to go,” she breathes, and is outside before he can stand.

***

Not a word about it in the car, just miles of silence broken only by Scully giving directions. The drive ends in a flat patch of dirt by the forest’s edge, a scrubby path poking out from the ferns and overhang.

“Our little forays into the forest never end well,” she observes. “But at least tick season is winding down. After you, Mulder.”

He pushes into the woods, holding branches back so Scully doesn’t get smacked in the head. “Been a while, though. We’re tougher now. We’re hardened woodspersons.”

“And I have a lighter,” she adds.

He grins. “Show off. Hey, how far is it?”

Scully consults her map. “Well, we’re coming at it from a different angle than Ree would have probably taken, but this is the most direct. Looks like maybe a hundred yards up ahead before it opens into a clearing.”

The path unfolds as she said, and suddenly a storybook pond is before him. Squirrels frisk in the branches and birds call to each other across the glen. The surface of the water is velvety with duckweed, like a perfectly clipped baseball field. Shafts of sunlight illuminate red and white mushrooms at the bases of oaks, the feathers of golden-green ferns. He sniffs the air, lush and tannic.

“Oh, wow,” Scully says, coming up behind him. “Mulder, this is unreal. It’s like a Waterhouse painting.”

They pick their way down to the edge of the pond, startling several fat bullfrogs and a garter snake. “Imagine being a kid here, Scully.”

She shakes her head, admiring. “It’s a Wonderland. I’d be out here all the time too.” Scully crosses her arms, staring upwards with a rapturous expression. “From what her dad said, Ree’s a lot like I was as a kid. I didn’t have my own binoculars though. Had to steal Bill’s.”

“Fuck Bill,” he says cheerfully. “You deserved them.”

They circle the perimeter, looking for...what? He never quite knows. The pond makes gentle rippling sounds as the local fauna heads for deeper water under his scrutiny.

Scully pauses at a section of churned-up dirt. She squats for a better view, pokes delicately at the earth. “They made a mess of this, Jesus. At least they had enough sense to band their shoes.” In the dirt, distinct tracks marked with horizontal rubber band lines around the soles distinguish the CSI team’s prints.

Mulder crouches bedside her, spots something golden half-buried in the soft ground. “Tweezers, Scully?”

She passes them over and from the ground he plucks a kernel of deer corn, half coated in dried algae. “Mulder, look. There are more of them, maybe twenty, all pushed in or smashed on this rock. And most of them have algae on them.” She frowns. “The footprints on the ground over it, they’re not marked and they’re too small for an adult.”

Sure enough, there’s a mess of kid-sized sneaker tracks all over where the greenish corn is, muddy smears on the rocks adjacent. They’re algae-covered as well, and too far from the water for such a coating. He stares, thinking.

Scully, meanwhile, is labeling tiny evidence jars in pencil, filling them with samples of algae and earth and corn. She finds the cap of a glittery marker. “Who processed this crime scene? Ray Charles?” She seals it up, tags it. 

“No kidding. Hey, look. There’s a gap between those two big boulders over there. If you wanted to watch someone and hide, it would be a good spot. You think they searched it?”

She snorts with derision. 

“Me too. I’m gonna go take a look. You stay here. Sit on that rock there, it’ll put you at about Ree’s height.”

Scully passes him a few vials and a pencil, settles on the rock. “I think this is where she left Cordelia, based on the photos, though they were mostly closeup. I don’t remember any good overviews.” Some algae remains on the rock, and Scully looks sad.

Mulder jogs around the pond as best he can, but the bracken is heavy and he has to climb over a few logs. Is it really so crazy to think Ree tripped and fell out here, slipped quietly into the pond and snagged on a submerged rock or branch? Lots of little nibbling things in the water; it happens.

His mind returns to the algae. But if Ree went in, how did it come out? Who stepped all over that deer corn?

He’s between the boulders now, with a clear view of Scully across the way. He walks a little grid by the boulder, looking for bits of trace evidence. Snagged hair, footprints, forgotten belongings, anxiously chewed nails. But there is nothing. Either he misjudged the hiding spot, or the perpetrator has been very mindful of Locard’s Exchange Principle

.

“SCULLY!” he calls, setting off flurries of birds.

“MULDER?” She scans the area where he’s hidden.

“CAN YOU SEE ME?”

“NO!”

He climbs up one of the rocks, waves to her. She waves back from her perch. From atop the boulder, he scans the ground below. There aren’t any footprints but, squinting, he can see trails of dried algae along the edge of the ferns, where the rocky area begins.

He calls Scully over, and she moves through the forest as lightly as the squirrels. He points at his finding when she arrives. “That’s weird, right?”

She scoops some up in a vial, the holds it to the light. “Maybe she was playing at the edge, got her hands dirty, went to wipe them, and slipped.”

Mulder shakes his head. “That doesn’t explain the algae on the unopened food, Scully.”

“It could have been simple contamination. Her parents say she’s out here all the time. If she uses the same thermos and bag, brings the same books and toys, it’s not exactly far fetched to think some of it remained from last time and grew in the sun. Busy mom with four kids, how thoroughly is she going to scrub everything down for a kid who’s always outside? Algae are extremely tenacious, and it was out here in the sun for about 26 hours.”

He gazes at the duckweed, lets his vision swim until everything is a green blur. “Maybe,” he says. “But I want to talk to Tallulah.”

“Greenteeth was my delight,” Scully sings, appallingly off-key. “Greenteeth was my heart of gold.”

“You’re a riot,” he says dryly. Delightedly.

“Exposure to copper or nickel,” Scully says, clambering over a log. “Septic cholestasis.”

He might marry her after all.

***

Tallulah’s little shack looks old as the mountains, with log walls and a shake roof. There’s a tiny porch tacked on the front, and a wall of firewood being gnawed by two spotted goats. They stare at Mulder with their rectangular-pupiled eyes.

He reaches out to pet them and startles when they bleat loudly at his overture. They scamper off behind the house.

Scully pokes the toe of her boot into a plastic bucket, rights it. “Her car seems to be here,” she observes, indicating a battered old Volvo wagon. 

“A European car, no wonder everyone here hates her.”

Scully smirks.

They walk up to the house, Mulder withdrawing his identification. It generally gets a snappier reaction the further West and South it travels, but Mulder is also wary of a demented libertarian streak that runs through the country at odd intervals. Seams of it appear throughout Appalachia, and federal agents of various stripes have been fired on by feistier residents.

Scully, thankfully, is a quick draw and a dead shot.

They don’t get the chance to knock before a woman who must be Tallulah Church stands before them on the other side of the screen door. She’s close to Mulder’s height, thin to the point of emaciation, and pale enough to make Scully look freshly tanned. She has beautiful black hair to her waist, and eyes the color of ferns. They seem too bright in her gaunt, colorless face. She’s dressed in a Huck Finn ensemble of castoff men’s work clothing. On her hands are faded canvas gardening gloves.

Mulder shows her his badge and introduces them. Scully wordlessly displays her own identification.

Tallulah grins widely, her teeth perfect and straight and pearly green. “Well come on in,” she says, turning back into the house. Her feet clomp loudly in their heavy boots.

Mulder glances at Scully, who still seems taken aback by this gawky apparition. He holds the door open and they follow Tallulah into the house. 

The little shack creaks with every step, and smells of woodsmoke and earth and herbs. The interior walls are the same weathered gray as the outside. The whole thing is just one room, with a bed in one corner and a kitchen consisting of a fireplace, a dry sink, and a table with several mismatched chairs. Tallulah is occupying a black metal one, and her impossibly long, thin limbs make Mulder think of Jack Skellington. He can’t tell if she’s twenty or fifty.

“Sit down, please,” she says. “The table’s not much but I reckon it would be weird to offer you the bed.” She smiles again. Her voice is as drawling as everyone else in town, but there’s something different about it, something strangely polished and almost British. 

They take their seats. “Miss Church,” Scully begins.

“Tallulah, please.”

“Tallulah. Agent Mulder and I are investigating the disappearance of Rhiannon Ross. She went missing on Sunday morning. Given that you live not far from the area where her belongings were found, we wanted to ask you some questions.” Scully opens her file folder, pen poised like a hovering dragonfly.

Tallulah levels her remarkable eyes with Scully’s. “No ma’am. I know who Ree is, it’s a small town and she’s out here a lot, but I didn’t see her that day. Real nice little girl though. She feeds the deer sometimes.”

Mulder perks up. “Yeah? We saw some deer corn out where she went missing. Did you see her feeding them that morning?”

Tallulah sighs. “No, I’m sorry. As I’ve told the police, I didn’t see a bit of her on Sunday. Which is sort of odd itself, because she’d always be out on a day like that. Too shy to come up to the house, but she liked to watch the goats. They’re not even mine, but I leave them food and water, so we’re friends now.”

Behind her, on the dry sink, Mulder notices green smears of moss or mildew. Or algae. 

“I know you’ve spoken to Sherriff McLeod already,” Scully continues. “So we appreciate your patience.”

“It’s a terrible thing for a child to go missing,” Tallulah says, shaking her head. “I wish I did have something to tell, but I just don’t. I’ve seen the search parties around - I guess they searched the pond.”

“You say you knew who Ree was because it’s a small town, but I got the sense you didn’t mingle much with the good townsfolk,” Mulder observes.

Tallulah chuckles at this. “No sir, not much, which suits them and me just fine.” She lifts her hands to eye level and wiggles her bony gloved fingers. “They think I’m spooky.”

Mulder smiles in spite of himself. “I know a little bit about that. So tell me, Tallulah, you from around here?”

She shakes her head. “Not from anywhere, really, but I was raised outside Savannah in a rich ladies’ orphanage. That’s why I sound like Dixie Carter.”

“An orphanage?” Scully repeats.

“Yes ma’am. I was left at the Baptist Ladies’ Home when I was a day or so old. Nothing with me but a plastic laundry basket and a gingham tablecloth. They said I was a frightful looking little thing.” She smiles ruefully, showing them her green teeth again.

Scully, true to form, tackles that bull head on. “Tallulah, I’m also a doctor, and I’m compelled to ask about your teeth. Do you know why they’re green?”

An expansive shrug. “Oh, the doctors that saw us there had all kinds of ideas of what was wrong with me, but I never got anything official. Marfan Syndrome, that was one.” She snorts. “‘Course, the other kids heard Martian and with the green teeth they decided I was an alien.”

“There’s a genetic test for it now,” Scully says. “You could find out for sure.”

Tallulah chuckles again. “Thanks, Doc, but it doesn’t matter much. I feel just fine. Always have, and I don’t plan to have any kids. I’m twenty-six and haven’t had anything worse than a cold.”

Mulder watches the Doc jot this down and he returns to the subject at hand. “So you moved here over the summer. Where’d you live before this?”

“Oh, gosh, just lots of tiny towns like this one. I find these empty little cabins, you know, and stay for a while. Then I move on when I get restless.”

“The Rosses said you come into town every so often to get supplies and gas. May I ask where you get the money for that?” Scully looks up to ask this.

Tallulah looks sly. “I don’t know that I want to discuss that with the FBI,” she says.

Mulder exchanges a glance with his fellow narc, who nods imperceptibly to any eye but his own. “We’re just here to find Rhiannon,” he reassures Tallulah. “Not do the DEA’s job for them. Neither Agent Scully nor I wish to fill out extra paperwork.”

Tallulah considers this, glancing between them. “Well,” she says at last. “I reckon you could say I’m real good with plants; I can coax anything to grow. And in boring little towns there’s, uh, a lot of people who like plants.”

Scully looks unimpressed by this attempt at euphemism. “Plants,” she repeats.

Tallulah shrugs. “I’ve said as much as I’m going to on that subject without a lawyer. But anyhow, what’s that got to do with Ree?”

“Just trying to get to know a bit about you,” Mulder says. “Sometimes we find witnesses have seen things they don’t even realize they’ve seen, and talking generally can help.”

“I know everything I’ve seen,” Tallulah asserts. “You live out here like this, you don’t miss much. It’s not like I have a lot to distract me.”

“What were you doing last Sunday morning, then?” Mulder asks.

She shrugs. “Woke up, ate, got dressed. Went over to the pump for some water.” She gestures at some distant point through the back wall. “Then I went looking for some mushrooms and things to eat. Eggs. Lots of greens out there.”

Scully narrows her eyes. “Ree was in the woods that morning too. You’re certain you didn’t see or hear anything?”

Tallulah scoffs. “The woods are pretty big. Might as well say we were both in Alabama.”

“Wyatt and Iona are under the impression that you don’t like children,” Scully says. “Have there been any particular incidents that would make them feel that way? Any encounters with Ree? It must have been irritating to have her running all over the edge of your property.”

“No, she’s all right and besides, it’s hardly my property. Scared of me like the rest of them, but all right. I like the way she is with animals, real gentle and all. Got a kind heart, that girl, and I wish more were like her. But here’s the plain facts. My mama didn’t want me, none of the parents who came to the Home wanted me, the other kids thought I was an alien, and I learned to just keep mostly to myself because I can take a hint. I go walking outside a lot, do some fishing in the little ponds and all, and that’s how I know who Ree is. You know the kids call me Jenny Greenteeth.”

“We’d heard that, yes,” Mulder says, feeling uncomfortably sorry for Tallulah. He knows empathizing with suspects is his weakness, and that it drives Scully up the wall.

“It’s not the first time, won't be the last. But I know Ree’s daddy thinks I hurt Ree. He’s pretty disapproving of my...plant business and I think he half believes that stupid old fairy tale.” She rolls her eyes.

“I saw you had a whole lot of firewood,” Mulder says, shifting gears. “You staying here all winter?” 

“I never know, but I’d like to. Doubt I will though, with this, uh, situation.” She picks at her gloves. “People can start to get unkind.”

Mulder gestures to the dry sink. “Seems kind of damp. Looks like you have some mold or something growing over there.”

The three of them follow his finger with their eyes, where bright green streaks the wall and sink. Mulder sees that there is far more than he originally noticed, spread over much of the wall all the way to the bed.

“Oh, yeah, these places always are,” Tallulah says. “You can always find these old cabins if you look a little, but it’s hard to keep them snug. Part of why I move so much. They just sort of collapse around you.”

Mulder glances at Scully, and they agree in a blink. 

“Well, I wouldn’t move any time soon, Tallulah,” Scully says in her Bad Cop way. “And I’d take a break from business until the situation - as you called it - is sorted out.”

Tallulah looks uncomfortable, but nods. “Yes ma’am.”

“Thanks for your time,” Mulder says. “We’ll see ourselves out.”

They rise from their rickety chairs and head out the front door. On his way past the bed, Mulder opens an evidence vial and scrapes it along the wall to gather a film of algae. If Tallulah notices, she doesn’t remark.

The sun feels over-bright after the dim cabin and, squinting, they pick their way carefully back to where they parked. One of the goats is on the hood of their rental.

Mulder is delighted by this, if only because he can write “GOAT ATTACK” on the return form. He hopes it will find its way across Kersh’s desk and make him chug Mylanta straight from the bottle.

Scully, far more vexed, begins throwing fallen pine cones at it. 

“Nice arm,” Mulder says. “Try bringing your knee up next time.”

She glares at him, exasperated. “Where’s a chupacabra when you need one?”

***

They’re back at the Cracker Barrel, playing Pegs, with Ree’s flier propped up against the napkin dispenser. Scully is picking at an anemic salmon fillet, and eyeing Mulder’s chicken fried steak with disdain.

“You know you want a bite,” he says around a mouthful of mashed potatoes and gravy. 

She looks irked. “I didn’t have time for a run this afternoon because I was on the phone with the eponymous Baptist Ladies.”

“I wasn’t going for leisure,” he says with an air of wounded dignity. “Talked to a lot of people while I was out and about. The crotchety old ladies on their porches love me, I’ll have you know. I’m charming, for a Yankee.”

Scully rolls her eyes. “They just thought you looked good in your running shorts.” She pauses, then looks mortified.

“Oh yeah? How about you; you think I look good in them?” She’s so easy to torment sometimes and besides, he’d kind of like to know.

“Your vanity needs no help from me,” she says primly. “So what did you hear?”

“Nothing official, of course, but there are rumors that the oldest Ross siblings, the twin boys, were getting weed from Tallulah, so Wyatt has it in for her.”

“Plants,” Scully corrects. “Geraniums, probably.”

“Doubtless. Some people think Ree stumbled onto Tallulah’s crop and Tallulah killed her, but given the fact that the geranium sales are an open secret, it’s pretty unlikely.”

“Plus I doubt Ree would know it if she saw it,” Scully adds. 

“She might if her brothers are dope hounds with the reefer madness, Scully. Mary Jane. Grass. Wacky tobaccy. It’s ruining good Christian families.” He shakes his head somberly. “Ganja.”

“Devil’s lettuce,” Scully adds and, for whatever reason, this undoes them both and they dissolve into laughter.

This earns them startled glances from nearby patrons who seem to generally disapprove of their dark clothing and clandestine ways.

It feels incredible to laugh. Less than a month ago his head had been cracked open like an oyster while Scully and Diana played Spy vs. Spy. And here he was now in this awful little town, safely away from all major conspiracies, having had carnal knowledge of the enigmatic Dr. Scully, and he had just won at Pegs.

And Scully thinks he looked sexy in his shorts.

She is glaring at the peg board when he asks about her phone calls. “So what’d you learn, other than a tuna casserole recipe and how to tease your hair?”

“Weird stuff, your favorite.”

“Lay it on me, mama.”

Scully settles back in the booth. Delivering information is her comfort zone. “Well, Tallulah’s basic facts were right enough. She was left on the front steps of the Home in a white laundry basket. By the look of the umbilical stump, she wasn’t a hospital delivery. No one was ever able to identify her parents. But about a week before she appeared, a baby girl went missing from the Home. There were no signs of a break-in, and the baby never turned up. Everyone just assumed her parents had taken her back and the whole thing was swept under the rug.”

Some quick math, and Mulder realizes this wasn’t long before Samantha went missing. He frowns, and Scully’s expression makes it clear that she’s done the same calculation.

“It was April,” she offers gently. “In the South.”

“Go on.” 

“The woman I spoke to said Tallulah did have lots of problems with other kids, but not just for her appearance. She did get teased for the teeth, but apparently she was an aggressive kid. Biting, pulling long hair. They went to the Y once a week for swimming lessons, and Tallulah would drag kids under the water under the guise of playing. She was banned from the pool eventually.”

“Jesus,” Mulder says. “Someone needed more time with Mr. Rogers.”

“Oh, is that how they addressed abandonment issues at Oxford, Dr. Mulder?” Scully asks, archly.

He grins. “Hey, the NHS budget isn’t unlimited. So how’d she end up here?”

“Well, apparently when a kid turns 18 they give them some money and set them up with a job in the community, which isn’t a bad situation. But Tallulah took off at 15, said she was sick of handouts. The Baptist Ladies put the word out, but Tallulah was good at hiding and was 19 before anyone found her. And only then by sheer accident - a former employee bumped into her in Macon, Georgia.”

“Were they able to tell you about her movements at all in the intervening decade? Places she’s lived?”

Scully shakes her head. “No, and there’s no records on her at all. No arrests for anything as minor as vagrancy or trespassing, much less dealing. Her fingerprints aren’t in the system. She’s like a ghost. I was going to call the sheriff’s office to ask about the weed, but I thought better of it. I don’t want to walk into anything unprepared.”

He sighs. “I’d like to look at missing child cases in the past ten years, ones where the kid went missing around freshwater. We’ll narrow it to prepubescent girls.”

She nods. “I’ll see what Danny can scrounge on ViCAP. The Baptist Home is supposed to be faxing Tallulah’s medical records, thin as they are, and I want to see what I can pull out. Oh, and here’s another thing. Marjorie - that’s the woman I spoke with - Marjorie said Tallulah was always going out at night to wander in the woods. Her bed and storage cabinet were always covered with green stains and - get this - what appeared to be gold dust. Her hair was wet and had algae in it, like she’d been swimming in a pond or lake. No matter what they did, she’d manage to get out. Eventually they gave up because she kept returning and it seemed to keep her violence down.” 

Mulder considers this. He’s had an idea since yesterday that he’s been hesitant to voice, but what the hell? “I was thinking about her gloves when we visited this morning.”

Scully raises a non-committal eyebrow.

“Hear me out. All of Ree’s stuff was covered with algae, right? And there was algae where it shouldn’t be at the crime scene and all over Tallulah’s wall. She said she’s good with plants too, right? What if algae grows when she touches things? What if that’s why she was wearing gloves when we came by?”

Scully puts her fork down. “She’s an algae witch?”

He sighs. “I’m saying it’s maybe a...like a manifestation of something else. It’s something she can’t control.”

“Let me guess. You think the missing baby was taken by Tallulah’s unearthly mother and that Tallulah is actually a changeling left in her place. She’s from a race of some kind of evil water fairies, and has stolen Rhiannon Ross as her mother stole the other child twenty-six years ago.”

A slow smile spreads across Mulder’s face. “Scully, are you trying to get me back in bed?”

She reddens, rolls her eyes. “Textbooks could be written about your deviance.”

“Oh, no doubt. But details aside, you have to admit there are some weird details there.”

“All our cases have weird details. But the algae is notable. I’d like to take some samples from Tallulah’s cabin and compare it to the algae on Ree’s belongings. I’ll have to see what equipment the sheriff's office has. We’ll need to send some out for DNA testing to be sure, but I could at least do some microscopic analysis. It could place her at the scene.”

Mulder passes her the little vial he’d collected that morning. It’s fuller than he remembered.

“Sneak,” Scully says, approvingly, sipping at her Diet Coke.

“I know you like bad boys. Apropos of which, why do you think the sheriff has left Tallulah alone about this weed thing? I mean, this doesn’t seem like a hip and swinging town, does it?”

“I was wondering that too. And Wyatt never mentioned it either. I’m also wondering why, if we go with your hypothesis, Tallulah would steal a grade schooler rather than a baby. And Mulder, that cabin was one room. There’s nowhere she could have stashed a child. What’s more, shouldn’t some changeling child should have shown up by now? I mean, by your logic.”

Mulder wipes his plate with a roll. “I admit there are complex facets involved here,” he allows. He has ideas percolating, but they need more time to steep. “But whatever the reasons she may have had, there’s no one else who even seems remotely likely. No dubious strangers in town, no evidence of any kind at the crime scene. No one I talked to today indicated there were any grudges with the Rosses.”

Scully curls back into the corner of their booth, looking modish with her dark clothes and sleek hair. “I hate this,” she says. “Autopsies are so clear. Manner and mechanism. You just read the body and it tells a story. Sometimes it’s a challenge, but it’s always there. Missing persons are nightmarish, especially children.”

Mulder, as he is prone to do, thinks of Addie Sparks. “Missing still has hope, I guess.”

She looks chagrined. “I didn’t think, Mulder. I’m sorry.”

He hates that his missing sister has consumed her life too. Hell, Melissa was murdered and Scully’s moved on in a relatively healthy fashion. “No, don’t be. I just mean that there’s cruelty there, in that hope. Schroedinger’s crime, you know. That last heart of Roche’s is the end of someone’s hope, only they’ll never know.”

She reaches across the table to take his hand in hers. “The sense that an answer exists but isn’t knowable is a miserable feeling,” she says. “Especially if it’s an answer that could redefine one’s status quo if only it were revealed.”

He’s pretty sure she’s not talking about the case now, and traces her fingers with his thumb. “So you wanna kill this thing, then? Perform a post-mortem, write it up, and move on?” He doesn’t want this, but at least he’d know.

Scully draws infinite circles on his wrist with her nail, and gooseflesh rises over his body. “Hope doesn’t have to be painful,” she murmurs to the table. She looks up at him with her summer sky eyes in the fading autumn light.

Mulder’s heart squeezes hard, then expands. “It’s kept me going for a long time, even when it is,” he tells her. 

She nods, lets go of him. “The motto of my first  profession is hic locus est ubi mors gaudet succurrere vitae. But I tend to forget the maxim that should drive the second one.”

He has a flashback to scanning the plasma-vivid mind behind that perfect face. “Yeah? What’s that?”

“Dum spiro spero,” she says.

“While I breathe, I hope.” He smiles.

They get the check and go to the car.

***

The drive holds the easy silence of a pizza hangover, the kind when they’re wiped out on Scully’s couch with half-eaten slices and paperwork on the coffee table and floor.

Scully has her feet propped up on the dash and her seat reclined. She has a manila folder on her face, her eyes closed.

He thinks, as he sometimes does of late, about what a shit he was to her after Philadelphia. He’s never asked if she knew then that she was dying, but he’s always suspected she must have. 

All he’d known at the time was that she’d blown him off for a good-looking psychopath, let the man brand her like cattle, then poured her herself into his bed. He’d hated Jerse for the bruises on her face and body and psyche, but the man was under guard and therefore beyond his rage. He siphoned some of it onto Scully instead, for daring to need more than him and for seeking it. He wanted it to be about the desk because he could have given her the fucking desk. He could have easily fixed that without having to fix anything else between them. He could have kept going in a straight line instead of trying to make a map.

He thought of her in Jerse’s arms, in Jerse’s bed. Beaten by Jerse’s fists. He imagined the needle biting into the flawless canvas of her back and leaving that turning serpent there. He noticed that it went in a circle and at the time, he’d let that be about him too.

Later, when he understood that she was even more ephemeral than he feared, fits of self-pity left him wondering why she went for Jerse instead of him. Surely she knew he was available for emotionally destructive sex if that’s what she craved before dying. 

But it turned out that sleeping with her had been like losing his virginity all over again. In twenty years or so, if they were still alive, he might find the balls to tell her that.

***

Scully yawns when he parks the car, batting the folder off her face. “I was awake,” she insists.

“Very convincing,” he assures her. 

She swats his arm, straightens her seat. “I’m wondering if she was dealing elsewhere, maybe giving a kickback to LLE. Someone gets wind, she gets kicked out of town and moves along to another friendly hamlet. You know how these networks run.”

“Local law enforcement,” Mulder sighs. “The eternal bane of my existence. It would certainly explain a few things.”

“And if the Ross twins really are buying, you can see why Wyatt wouldn’t mention it to us. He can throw her under the bus without dragging his kids in too.”

Mulder rubs his eyes. “But how does it all come together? I mean let’s say Tallulah slides into these little towns, she deals to make ends meet. Pays some kickbacks. But why risk it on a serious crime like kidnaping or murder? This is the South, Scully. They do not fuck around, and kidnaping’s federal.”

She shakes her head, still frustrated. “I don’t know. We’ll have to wait for Danny, I guess. I’ll leave him a message when I get back to my room. The internet connection out here is a nightmare, so maybe he can dig it up while I’m at the lab.”

Scully unbuckles her seatbelt, but makes no move to leave the car. She plays with the edge of the folder. “I know you said you weren’t looking to go steady, but now that I’ve put out I was hoping I could get your varsity jacket.” 

He feels some of the tightness leave his neck at her willingness to play. “Oh, I don’t know. It’s a pretty sweet jacket. That’s more than a one-nighter. Maybe if you swing by in a cheerleader outfit I’d think about it.”

She looks up, smiling one of her rare smiles that show her teeth. “I think my mom still has my high school uniform in mothballs somewhere.”

He tosses his phone onto her lap. “Call. Now.”

Scully laughs her throaty, chuckly laugh. “Good night, Mulder,” she says, opening her door. “See you tomorrow.” She passes his phone back and slips into the dark.

He grins all the way to his room.

***

Diana comes to him again that night. He finds her at the edge of a meadow on a large rock, a vivid rainbow overhead. She wears a floor length evening gown of shimmering gold fabric, and her flesh is whole. She pats the rock, inviting him to sit.

“Hello, Fox.” 

He scowls, sitting. “As a manifestation of my subconscious, you could have the decency not to call me Fox.”

She laughs. “As an alleged manifestation of your subconscious, maybe you just want to be acknowledged as a fox by a desirable woman. How is Agent Scully this evening?”

“Spare me. Nice dress, Diana.”

She stands up and twirls. The gown flares out from her graceful waist into a narrow bell. Her feet are bare. “It is, isn’t it? It’s cloth of gold. Very Eleanor of Aquitaine, I think.”

“Is it heavy?”

Diana sits back down. “Oh, yes. Terribly heavy. And costly.”

He rubs it between his fingers. The fabric is stiff and itchy, like tweed. “Well, nothing’s too expensive when you’re dead, I guess.”

“Not expensive. Costly,” she corrects.

He furrows his brow. “Okay. What’s the difference?”

She shrugs. “It’s just that the cheapest way to pay is usually money. Some things cost much more than money. Surely you know that by now. But there’s no need to be dour, Fox. It’s beautiful out, and look at the rainbow.” 

He does. “Someday we’ll find it, the rainbow connection, the lovers, the dreamers, and me,” he sings softly. Even in his dreams his voice is terrible.

Diana gets to her feet again, spinning in the grass. She starts to twirl faster, her hair whipping out around her. Her skin greys again, her face turning cadaverous, and little crawling things flying from her into the grass.

Mulder scuttles back from her on the rock, repulsed but captivated as she becomes a formless blur. 

Then she stops, stares at him from her cavernous eye sockets. Her bony chest is panting.

“Diana?” he breathes. 

She steps towards him and flickers back to her earlier smooth-skinned appearance.

Step.

Flicker.

Step.

Flicker.

He is transfixed.

“Is it real, or is it Memorex?” she muses.

Step.

Flicker.

He wakes up gasping before she can touch him.

***

He’d hoped this kind of shit would end with his neurosurgery, but apparently his subconscious is tenacious. Unless it’s not his subconscious, in which case he needs to get some tips from Scully, who sees an awful lot of ghosts for someone who doesn’t believe in them.

Yawning, he gets the in-room pot gurgling and clunking with whatever factory sweepings pass for coffee in the sticks. The room fills with an aroma reminiscent of burning tires.

A knock at the door distracts him and he opens it to find Scully holding two styrofoam cups steaming from their plastic lids. “Went for a quick run,” she says, stepping under his arm into the room.

He shuts the door.

“Mulder, prop that door open. It smells like wet asphalt in here.” She sets the cups down and turns the coffee pot off with a look of contempt.

“Ah, Scully,” he says, sipping from the cup marked M.

“You can take the car today,” she says. “Someone from the sheriff’s office is giving me a lift to the lab in Huntsville. It’s about an hour each way, so I doubt I’ll be back before dark. What are your plans?”

“I want to talk to Tallulah again,” he says. 

“Watch out for those goats,” she warns darkly. “I think the little one cost us the deposit.”

“I’ll bring pine cones.”

Scully frowns, steps closer to him. “Mulder, you don’t look so good. Are you feeling alright? Maybe you should have them bring her into the station for questioning instead.”

He waves her off. “Bed’s not great,” he says. “I’m just tossing and turning some, but the coffee should perk me up.” He takes a large gulp. “Mmmm, perky.”

She narrows her eyes. “You’re a liar, but if I try to actually examine you you’re just going to be cranky or perverted. At least make sure your phone’s charged so you can call me if you keel over or something.”

He pouts, preemptively deprived of the opportunity for a predictable playing doctor joke. Damn her. “You suck the fun out of everything,” he informs her, sitting on the bed.

She walks over to him, standing between his knees. She puts her empty coffee cup on the night stand, then grips his t-shirt with both hands.

He swallows.

“As your physician, I ask that you try not to die in a stupid and avoidable fashion,” Scully says. Her mouth is inches away. She shakes his shirt for good measure before leaving.

He goes to the shower and stays there for some time.

***

Mulder stops off at the farm store where Scully obtained the coffee. He selects a raspberry danish, then adds a loaf of fresh bread and some local milk in a quaint glass bottle. 

“Five dollar deposit on the bottle,” the clerk informs him. Fahv dahlah dipawsit.

“What’s it made of, crystal?” he grouses, swiping his card.

“You that FBI guy?” the clerk asks suspiciously. “It’s pasteurized, it’s perfectly legal milk.You can test it.” 

“It seems fine,” Mulder assures her. He’d had no idea that there was a black market in milk. He takes his bag and makes for the door.

“It’s not homogenized though,” she calls after him. 

Mulder takes his unhomogenized, perfectly legal milk up into the mountains.

***

Tallulah’s chopping wood when he pulls up. She has on the same Carhartt overalls Wyatt did, and thick leather gloves this time. There are splinters and sawdust in her long braid. She’s not a bit beautiful, but has an appealing serenity.

“Hey,” Mulder says to the goats, who have come to sniff him. He scratches the big one behind the ears. The little one makes for the car.

Tallulah straightens up, wipes her wrist across her brow. “Mornin’, Agent Mulder. Where’s your partner?”

“She’s the science half of this outfit,” Mulder says. “She’s peering at things through microscopes and running them through unpronounceable equipment.”

“Like that algae you scraped off my wall?” Tallulah sounds amused.

“That would be one of the things, yes.”

She frowns thoughtfully. “You sure that doesn’t violate the Fourth Amendment?”

“California v. Greenwood says I can search your trash,” Mulder informs her. “Besides, you invited us in.”

“Like vampires,” Tallulah observes, and adds the split wood to her growing pile.

Mulder holds out the bag containing the bread and milk. He ate the danish on the way up. “Here,” he says.

She takes his offering and peers in. “What’s this?”

“Call it a belated housewarming gift,” he says. 

Tallulah looks at him for a long moment. “You know, some of the old mountain women believe it’s wise to leave a little offering of such homey treats to the Good Folk. Oh, they go to church of a Sunday and preach the gospel just fine, but come Saturday night, there’s little biscuits and butter at the forest’s edge, wrapped all in leaves.”

“I heard something about that,” Mulder says. “I guess it’s like wearing suspenders and a belt.”

She wipes down her hatchet with a faded bandanna, then puts it in a little storage bin next to the house. “Funny what people believe, isn’t it?”

“Funny.” He doesn’t take his eyes off her, even when the little goat jumps on the hood of his car.

Tallulah opens the milk and takes a deep gulp of it from the bottle. “That’s very good,” she says. “Now your partner would roll her lovely eyes at such a thing as you’ve brought, but she’ll kneel for wafers and wine.”

Mulder doesn’t ask how Tallulah knows this. “There’s a five dollar deposit on the bottle,” he says. “All yours, since you’re out of business at the moment.”

She smiles greenly at him. “Come in, Agent Mulder.”

He follows her up the steps and into the cabin, looking at her round-bellied stove, the faded patchwork quilt on the narrow brass bed. Mulder sees the appeal of this simplicity, a pared down life to strip away all foolish distraction. He recognizes his own romanticization of it, a rich boy with summer homes and an Oxford education wanting to play at Saint Jerome. He also considers that the Unabomber went to Harvard and lived this way too. Minimalism may not be inherently enlightening. 

Tallulah is sprawled in a chair, her steel-toed boots kicked off. Mulder sits at the table across from her, bread and milk between them. A ham and a cleaver are out as well.

“You hungry?” Tallulah asks. “That ham is from Sam Oakley out by the grain elevator. Just delicious.”

Mulder shakes his head. “Can she come back?” he asks, without preamble.

“Agent Scully? Any time she likes, though I’d ask for more of that milk if she does. I’ll pay you the deposit.”

Mulder senses a shift in her demeanor. She’s not the friendly, country orphan any longer. There’s mischief rising in her, something tart and maybe wicked. Her posture is languid rather than awkward now.

“You know what I mean, Tallulah.”

She works on loosening her braid. It’s hard in the thick gloves. “You mean Ree. You still think I know something about that.”

Mulder realizes that she is enjoying herself, remembers that the fay are supposed to love riddles and wordplay. “Well, we can talk about something else. I heard the Ross twins are customers of yours.”

She laughs. “The thing I absolutely love best about people is that they make rules to stop themselves doing everything they long for, then do it anyway while pointing their lying fingers at the next fellow for the same. I don’t really need the money, but I do think it’s funny to watch these fine upstanding people condemn me with one hand and pay me with the other. It’s pleasurable money to spend, and it passes the time.”

Mulder’s anarchic soul cannot deny the schadenfreude. “I notice you used third person instead of first.”

“I don’t make those kinds of rules. I just sell the devil’s lettuce to all comers without judgement. I do like to watch them chase themselves in circles, but I’m not a hypocrite.”

Devil’s lettuce. His neck prickles. “No? What are you then?”

She smiles, and her mouth has too many teeth in it. They seem very thin now. “I’m the apple in the Garden,” she says. “This realm has made nothing but trouble for my folk, and I like to pay back mischief as I can.” 

Tallulah slowly takes her gloves off and balls her hands into fists. She opens them and pieces of gold ore are in them. Closes her fists, opens her fists. She pours the gold onto the table and the pieces are streaked with algae.

He stares, awed. Shaken.

Tallulah holds his gaze. “Do you want some of it, Agent Mulder? Everyone else does, and it only costs a little. Can you offer me a most beloved child? The ring finger of each hand? All the memories of your sister?”

“Where’s Ree?” he chokes out.

Tallulah continues as if he hasn’t spoken. “Maybe there’s something else you want? A love spell?” She winks a green eye. “But you don’t really need it. She wants this as much as you, Mulder. When you kissed her she felt only relief and lust in equal measure. My god, she rode you like it was the Kentucky Derby, skirt around her waist and her breasts tight to your chest.”

Tallulah reaches up to stroke his cheek and he jerks his head away, appalled.

“How do you know all of these things?” His voice is scarcely a whisper and his stomach is lurching.

“A little ghostie tells me,” she says, and mimes an hourglass woman in the air. “Don’t think she realizes she does it though.”

Fingers trembling, Mulder retrieves three iron nails from his pocket. He’d pried them out of the floor at the motel, and now he brandishes them, hoping. Dum spiro spero.

Tallulah looks at them and hisses. “Cold iron!” she shrieks. “It binds my magic!” 

Then she snatches them from his hand and eats them, laughing.

He is too shocked to be frightened.

“Don’t feel bad,” Tallulah says, consolingly. “You’re not the first. Listen, you’ve looked through lots of one-way mirrors, right? Interrogating?”

He nods, not yet trusting himself to speak.

“Okay, well, imagine stacks of it. If you were standing on a tower of it, shiny side down, you could see to the bottom.”

Nods again.

“Attaboy. Now, if you were under that tower, looking up, you couldn’t see through up to the top. Hell, you wouldn’t even know there was a tower. One layer or a hundred would look the same. All you’d see was your own reality reflected back.”

Something is starting to coalesce in his brain. “You… your people are looking, uh, through to us, but we can’t perceive you.”

“Oh, looking down is much more accurate,” Tallulah assures him. “Like how you know ants exist and find them interesting, but they have no understanding that you exist because they’re tiny and stupid.” She looks smug and takes another drink of milk.

“Why are you telling me this?” He hates her, but he still wants her to talk.

She reaches across the table, caresses his hands with gentle fingers before he pulls them back. “Because no one will ever believe you and so it amuses me for you to know,” she says sweetly. “You can see up through the worlds  piecemeal, I think. Bits of the whole, like the Louvre through a keyhole. Your partner will say this was a hallucination brought on by recent brain trauma. Your superiors will laugh at you - at least aliens are masculine and slightly scientifically respectable. But fairies? Oh, dear.”

For a fraction of a fraction of a second, she wears Diana’s skeletal face.

Mulder feels hot bile rise in his throat, but forces it down. “Where’s Ree?” 

“The sheriffs in these silly towns never even remember our bargains, of course. They harass for my little game with the ganja, but then no one can recall why I’ve been picked up, and they apologize and I go. Some like babies, to start fresh, but not me. I like to know what I’m getting. I only take one a year, and they’re good ones. Sweet girls who love the woods and water. I was nineteen before I could make the gold come, so that’s only seven. You’ve seen worse then seven. Remember Roche, Mulder?” She changes her face to remind him.

The bile does come then, and he vomits on her floor.

“Rude,” she says mildly, and water pours from her fingers to wash it away and out the front door.

He fights nausea and dizziness. “Give them back. Give me Ree, Tallulah. Just let me take Ree home.” His hair is soaked with sweat and he’s terrified it will be Goldstein all over again. He pulls his gun anyway. Can she turn it on him like Pusher? Scully will be very angry with him if so.

Tallulah is unconcerned. “I don’t hurt them, you goose. I take them up through the looking-glass, so to speak. It’s beautiful there. It’s safe for them. They deserve better than to live with the people who look the other way for thirty pieces of gold. A bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy, really. Or is it a Catch-22? I’m not much of a reader.”

“Ree,” he grinds out between clenched teeth. He puts his finger on the trigger.

Tallulah grabs the cleaver and chops her hand off. There’s no blood. “Shoot me,” she giggles, and he passes out.

***

It’s still light out when he awakens in his car, just past two-thirty by the dashboard clock. There’s a glass of sweet tea and a slab of pound cake on the console. Feel better, reads a note in a fine copperplate. Sorry for the shock. Had to run an errand, but you should eat and drink before you drive or you might crash. Don’t worry - there’s nothing wrong with it. But no need to die in a stupid and avoidable fashion. Thanks again for the gift. I might return the favor.

Mulder eats and drinks. He figures if her food is poisoned or enchanted, he’ll be spared explaining to the Rosses that their daughter was kidnapped through an interdimensional portal as a sacrifice to the greed of public officials and the amusement of a wicked fairy.

The cheapest way to pay is money.

The snack is revitalizing and he sits until he feels his blood sugar level out. He wonders if Tallulah would have killed him if he’d met her empty-handed. He wonders if Ree is really alive somewhere, or if it’s just a game.

A headache has begun pulsing deep in his temple, like the throbbing brain of IT on Camazotz. Mulder fumbles his sunglasses out of the glove box.

He puts them on, filtering out the worst of the light. He breathes through his nose, massages his temples like Scully used to do when her tumor became rowdy. He begins to relax, the nausea and pain subsiding. His eyes slide closed as he digests the morning’s events.

“I’m sorry,” Diana says, her hand on his thigh.

He sits bolt upright and she’s next to him, her long legs cramped in the Scully-configured seat. 

“I’m not asleep,” he insists to both of them, looking wildly around. Tallulah’s house, the mountain, the forest - none of it has the surreality of a dream.

Diana strokes his cheek gently with her cool grey fingers. “I’m going now,” she says. “I thought I was helping, making it up to you after a last betrayal. But it turns out…” she shakes her head.

“Diana, wait. Are we here or am I sleeping? Do you know where Ree is?” He hears his own panic and fights it. “Diana, just help me find her. Don’t leave yet.”

She presses her lips to his temple, murmuring. 

“Take this kiss upon the brow!

And, in parting from you now,

Thus much let me avow —

You are not wrong, who deem

That my days have been a dream;”

Agent Diana Fowley fades away then, into the quiet peace of nothingness.

Mulder never feels himself waken, never feels a shift in consciousness. She’s simply vanished and he’s alone to finish the rhyme.

“Yet if hope has flown away

In a night, or in a day,

In a vision, or in none,

Is it therefore the less gone?”

***

His drive back has a frenzied, febrile quality with saturated colors and echoing sounds. He is sweat-soaked and shivering when he gets back to the motel.

Mulder kicks his boots off and crawls into the bed. He draws the covers up under under his chin and falls away into the dark.

***

He wakes to her light fingers smoothing hair from his forehead. The sky outside is dark and starry, but it’s not even seven.

Mulder blinks, confused. “Scully?”

She’s sitting at the edge of the bed, in her dark trousers and a grey top. Her face is serious. “Mulder, I’ve been trying to wake you for an hour. You were burning up, but the fever seems to have broken. Did something happen?”

Everything. “No. I think you were right. I just came back to work too soon.” He gives her what he hopes is an appealing look.

Scully smells a rat but doesn’t push. She presses her fingers to his wrist. “I want you on antibiotics. I’ll call the pharmacy in the morning. They closed at five.”

He nods. “What did you find on the algae?”

She strokes his hair again and he feels like purring. “Nothing much. There were a few different strains at the pond but only one in her house. And a common one at that. It’s no good for linkage, I’m afraid, though I had them run a couple other tests. Nothing in the medical records they sent either - she’s as healthy as she says.”

“Well, did you get anything from Danny on disappearances?” 

She stops petting him to get up and retrieve a piece of folded paper from her jacket pocket. “I found a dozen that look possible, and six that match the details of this case pretty closely.”

He pats the blanket. “Come back and show me some more of that famous bedside manner.”

She snorts, but returns to her perch. “Here, look. I highlighted the six that look best. Called them too, and gave Tallulah’s name and description to LLE. None of them recognized the name or description.”

Of course, Mulder thinks. Of fucking course. “Betcha we’d get a different answer if we asked people who live there.”

Scully frowns. “What does that mean? You really think police departments from 6 towns are all embroiled in an elaborate web to protect a very low level weed dealer? Mulder, come on. I know you love a nice sexy conspiracy, but I think the best answer is that there’s some kind of drifter active in the area. I say we turn the whole thing over to NCMEC and go home. You look awful and there’s nothing else we can do here.”

He presses his hands to his face. Fuck, fuck. He looks back at Scully.  “I mean this lovingly, but please do not say anything condescending until I finish my undoubtedly insane rambling, okay?”

She narrows her eyes. “I should have let you sleep.”

Mulder props himself up against the pillows. He’s still chilly. “Okay, so there’s this concept of something called the Teind. It’s um…shit.” He stares at the bathroom door for a moment.

“Mulder, when you’re hesitant to share a theory, it gives me grave concern.” She scoots higher on the bed, crosses her legs. “But go on. The Teind.”

“So the idea is that there are other worlds - other simultaneous realms - that are layered over this one. Like a multiverse, okay? Like Schrödinger. You love Schrödinger, right? And Brian Greene?”

She purses her lips.

Mulder barrels ahead. “Okay, so. So one of these realms is what is sometimes called Faerie, or Elfhame. And our world, the so-called Christian realm, is constantly encroaching on theirs. Every seven years the Lords of Elfhame must pay a tribute to the Lords of Hell. This tribute ensures that the Christian realm with not destroy Elfhame and that the Lords of Hell will keep the Christian realm in check. I think that’s what these seven girls are - I think they’re tributes, or possible tributes. Maybe there’s a big pool created, I don’t know.”

Scully says nothing and it makes him nervous.

“Scully?”

She flops back beside him on the bed, gazing at the ceiling. “It’s a prettier story than drowning or murder or sex trafficking,” she says. “I mean sure, it’s essentially a complex pagan mafia real estate kidnaping scam, but it’s still better.”

He pulls the blankets up to his chin.

Scully turns, props herself up on her side to look at him. “What in the hell did Tallulah say to you, Mulder? Because I have to say, this is pretty far down the garden path even for you.”

He wonders if it’s even worth it. “She was able to conjure objects, Scully. Gold in her bare hands.” He has enough sense not to mention the cleaver.

Scully scoffs. “My dad could pull a quarter out of my ear.”

“She said that LLE knew she was taking these girls and she gave them gold for looking away. That the weed thing was just for her amusement, stirring the pot. So to speak.” He grins at his own unintentional joke. 

Scully scoots closer. “Mulder, what am I going to do with you? Don’t you think it’s much more likely that this woman is part of a larger drug and prostitution ring, tasked with procuring children for those up the chain? I believe there could be payoffs - small town cops are overworked and underpaid. But payments to the Lords of Hell? Realms? If she did show you gold, she was probably trying buy your silence as well but didn’t realize you’re too incorruptible to even notice, you stupid noble idiot.”

He feels oddly pleased by this assessment. “Well, can we at least agree that she probably is involved?”

Scully runs her finger down the bridge of his nose. “Yes.”

“And that whatever the source of funds, there are payoffs happening?”

She traces his eyes, his brows, his lashes. “Yes.”

“And that 1977’s Elvis in Concert is grievously underrated in terms of both quality and significance?”

She strokes the corner of his mouth. “Absolutely.”

If he does have a brain infection, he couldn’t care less if it means dying in bed like this. “Get under the covers,” he demands. 

She sits up. “I’m afraid not.”

“No, Scully, we were doing great while you kept saying yes to everything I said. Let’s try again and get back in the groove - can we agree that Kate Capshaw in Temple of Doom was a tremendous step down from Karen Allen in Raiders?”

She smiles. “Not even negotiable. But really, I’ve got a fax coming in up at the office and you need to rest. If we get stuck here because you end up with some exotic encephalitis, so help me god.”

He takes her hand as she gets up. “So you’re really ready to hand this off?”

Scully sighs, squeezing his fingers. “Look, the fax I’m waiting on is from Danny. I asked for a ViCAP cross reference on any unsolved sexual assaults or attempted abductions that dovetail with those missing girls. If nothing else, I think there’s a real case there that needs to be put together. It was a good call, Mulder.”

“If I go to sleep like a good boy, will you let me have one more chance with Tallulah?” He bats his lashes at her.

“One More Chance With Tallulah sounds like a Barry Manilow song. I’ll tell you what - I’ll check on you later and if you still haven’t got a fever I’ll allow it.”

He crosses his heart and lets her go.

***

He dreams a memory. 

Two weeks past, and he’s sprawled on his couch while Scully afflicts him with acts of medical science. She’s administering neurological tests, bruising him halfway to gangrene with a pressure cuff, and siphoning off enough blood to keep her bucktoothed sheriff happy.

“Scully,” he laments. “Your healing will be the death of me.” 

“Don’t be such a baby,” she says, with her usual bedside warmth. “You’re a week past a very serious brain trauma, and you refused to stay in the hospital because you’re an idiot. So you’ll put up with me and you’ll like it.”

He does like it. Looping into her mind with that fungus had been nothing like this. Her heart is an open wound that she constantly stitches back together to make it through another day. The amount of fight in her is enormous, and she channels into a broken and thankless world. 

She loves him, and what surprises him is that it isn’t the inevitable pair-bonding of proximity and isolation. Scully thinks about that sticky June day in the hallway too. Finishes the thought, sometimes, pinned to the wall like a butterfly with his fingers in her hair.

Pretty hot, Scully.

She’s bent over him with her tiny flashlight to check his pupils and his tracking, a corner of her lower lip tucked behind her front teeth. She leans forward, her brow furrowed at some minute anomaly. He stares at the arabesque of her collarbones, the two lines that circle her white throat. 

“Mulder, keep your eyes up,” she says in doctorly annoyance.

He does, and he doubts it takes psychic ability to read what’s onhis face

She runs her tongue over her top lip, and it’s like a circuit closes.

His hands are at the back of her neck, her waist, pulling her towards him as he sits up. He kisses her like should have ages ago, reckless and open-mouthed and decisive.

Scully drops the flashlight and kneels next to him on the sofa. She sips at his mouth with her cool little tongue, slides her fingers through his hair. She stops short  at the bandage and pulls away. “Mulder,” she says, ashamed, and moves to get up.

He grabs her upper arm, far harder than he means to. She gasps, and not at all unhappily. He had not seen this in her directly, but he had suspected.

“Let me go,” she whispers. “I don’t know what I was thinking. You’re not well.”

She’s close enough for him to see her hard nipples through the silk, her dilated pupils. He keeps his eyes on hers while uncurling his fingers from her bicep. 

She swallows.

He reaches out to undo the minuscule pearl buttons on her blouse. He’s always loved the high drama of women’s clothing, like a puzzle box.

Scully says his name again.

“Go,” he tells her, as her shirt falls open. He slips his hands under the fabric to plane her back and waist. He’d touched her here in Antarctica, but not like this. He tongues the tight stretch of her navel, breathes in the hot scent of the skin beneath her bra. It’s astringent with her tea-tree soap, sharp with her sweat.

She’s on her knees still, her fingers back at his stubbled jaw, his earlobes. She’s dipping her head to kiss his hair while she makes little animal noises.

“Go,” he repeats, and she doesn’t.

He unhooks her bra, a simple white satin affair, and she lets go of him long enough to pull it off with her shirt. 

It is with difficulty that Mulder sits back to look at her. Her belly is flat and taut, her breasts full above them. They are lightly veined with the blue of her eyes, her nipples the color of late raspberries. Around them is the fine, crepey skin of her areolae, puckered tight. Her head is tipped forward, glorious flame of hair falling around her fine Roman face, full lips parted.

He’s hard to the point of pain.

Scully watches him watch her, reaches behind her back to unfasten her skirt. She laughs.

“What?” 

“It’s stuck, Mulder. The zipper’s stuck.” She tugs more forcefully, her breasts shifting as she moves.

He half assumes this is the ghost of Ahab at work, denying the FBI the last vestige of his daughter. Mulder pulls at the zipper too, but it doesn’t budge.

Scully reaches under the hem of her skirt and works her stockings and underwear down. She tosses them away like snakeskin. 

His cocks twitches in his jeans with seven years of potential energy. No pretending he hasn’t wanted her since she stripped down to her good-girl cotton panties in a panic, but it’s so much more now.

Pulls his shirt off, then tugs her onto his lap. She’s infertile and knows his medical records better than he does, but he asks anyway. “Condom?”

She shakes her head, runs her light hands over his chest. He could come from this alone, the weight of her bare ass on his lap and the sensory overload of breasts and hands and scent.

He groans when she sucks at the tender skin below his ear. “Scully, I’m pushing forty and I think it’s only fair to warn you that-“

She’s opened the fly of his jeans. Mulder raises his hips, Scully still on his lap, to work them down with his boxers. The cool air on his cock is torment.

Time slows, drips like honey, then stalls entirely. Scully’s eyes are wide, focused, as she moves herself over and around him. Her head rolls to the side, then forward. She sighs something blasphemous from flushed lips.

Mulder bites his tongue until it bleeds to ensure he’ll last longer than the average teenager. Perhaps her next thesis can be on the frictionless surface of her own body, the impossibly slick heat of it. He wants to taste her too, but that would require not being inside her and god help him, he hasn’t got the willpower for that right now.

Scully’s head is against his neck, panting humid nonsense into his ear while her breasts are flattened to his chest. He holds her at the hips, letting the sinuous flexion of her spine have its way with them both.

He’s embarrassingly close to ending this, and clenches his nails into his palm. Scully bites at his neck, his earlobe, and there’s no resolve left. He groans something mindless as he clutches her body, shudders and twitches as she squirms around him. Mulder holds her tight to his hips, grinding up into her with the kind of surging napalm pleasure he’d forgotten was possible. Her little bare feet squeeze his thighs, and the universe condenses to her hundred and ten pounds of exquisite physiology. His head falls to her chest and he slips out of her with a groan.

He could sleep for days, but instead reaches between them under her skirt to find her clitoris. She so wet his finger slips at first. Scully squeaks, a little chirp, and finds a rhythm with him that pleases her. 

She arches her back away from him, her hips forward, and he is awed anew. Her hair tumbles between her shoulder blades, her breasts bouncing softly as he strokes her. 

He says her name, sotto voce, and slips two fingers inside her. He shifts his thumb to her clitoris, presses his fingers to the ridged tissue of her g-spot. He writes his name there a dozen times.

She whimpers, and he leans forward to draw the hot little bud of her nipple into his mouth. He sucks at it, grazes it with his teeth. Scully comes with a gasp and falls against him, shuddering. She licks his neck, mouth on his ear and his lips. 

He envelops her with his arms and draws the Navajo blanket around her narrow shoulders. He holds her, listening to her heart and lungs as they slow to normal. He smooths her tumbled hair.

She runs her fingers along his bandage again. “Are you okay?” 

He has literally never felt better in his life. He feels like a lord of creation, like Adam striding through the Garden of Eden to survey his dominion. “I’m fine,” he says, in her snippy voice.

She laughs, burrowing closer. “You have a bed, don’t you?”

Mulder slips an arm under her legs and another behind her neck. He lifts her as he gets to his feet, carrying her like a bride. She’s such a central force in his life, the mass around which he orbits, that it is odd for her to be so light. 

He kicks his bedroom door open and lays her out face-down on the comforter. “Let’s work on that skirt,” he says.

Somehow he’d forgotten about the tattoo. The burning red mouth that marked the beginning of their darkest times together, that portal to her lonely trip north. He pushes aside the memory of what he’d said, the photographic evidence that came home with her. There be dragons, the old maps say.

He kisses it and she flinches. He prays it isn’t shame. Or fear.

With careful maneuvering, he breaches the zipper and tugs the skirt away. She rolls to her back again, her body spilled across his dark blankets like a shaft of  errant starlight. He is pleased to note she has eschewed the recent fashion for shaving oneself utterly bare. 

He gets to his knees, pulls her to the edge of the mattress by her hard little ankles. She starts to speak, but he cannot hear once her thighs are tight against his ears. 

In the morning, she will disappear with the dew.

***

Her cool palm on his cheek wakes him and it takes an unhappy second for the dream to snap away. He’s uncomfortably hard and rolls onto his side for some relief. It’s eight by the bedside clock.

“Hey,” she says, sitting down. “You okay?” 

He clenches his left thigh until there’s pain, and it helps. She looks tired, he notices. Drawn and weary from too much bad coffee and too little proper sleep and feeding. He ought to make her take a vacation where she gets wrapped in seaweed and fed organic mangoes by beautiful castrati.  

But for now, they’ll have to manage on motel moisturizer and takeout. “Do I smell pizza?” 

“Indeed. Just wanted to see if the fever was gone first.” She squints at him. “You look a hell of a lot better. Did you take something? I might be able to hold off on the antibiotics; I know what they do to your stomach.”

He stretches. “Well, just in case, thanks for checking my forehead instead of going rectal,” he says. “Sometimes you have a slight sadistic side.”

“When was your last prostate exam?” she asks sweetly.

Mulder sits up. “I didn’t know that was your scene, but I’m open-minded. Let’s go.” He peels the covers back, feeling like he needs a long run to revive himself from the day. He hates being idle for so long, and his clothes feel stale.

Scully realizes she’s overplayed her hand and wrinkles her nose. “Let’s preserve the magic on that for now. You okay to get up, or should I bring the pizza here?”  

He’s not freezing anymore, and his head isn’t throbbing. “I’ll get up,” he says. “I’m starting to 

feel like one of those consumptive Victorian heroines.”

“Mmmm,” she says. “Maybe I should leech you and give you some cocaine for that.” Scully goes to the little table where the pizza box is sitting. She opens the lid, and hot greasy air wafts out.

Mulder gets up and walks over, scuffing his socks along the drab oatmeal carpet. He zaps her with his finger and she scowls.

“Ugh, go back to bed.”

He can’t help himself when she’s his favorite toy and part of his brain will always be an arrested 12 year old idiot. He flips the chair around to straddle it, resting his elbows across the back. “What’s that, mushroom and pepper?”

“And pepperoni on half for you.” Scully disdains the greasier meats herself, but will treat him on occasion.

Mulder realizes he’s starving and rolls a piece up like a burrito, demolishing it in four bites before Scully’s done blotting the grease off of her own.

“I’m not performing the Heimlich maneuver if you choke on that,” she says, delicately peeling off two slices of pepperoni that have contaminated her mushrooms. She holds them out to him.

Mulder snaps them out of her fingers like a trained seal. He rolls another slice up, gesturing with it. “So I’m cleared to go nose about more tomorrow, right?”

She tweaks his nose with her oily fingertips. “You’re certainly equipped for it.”

“Right for the gut. We can’t all look like we were carved from marble, I’m afraid. You’ll have to deal with my hideous deformity as nature presents it, Roxanne.” He eats half his pizza, then wipes his face.

Scully finishes her slice. “Did she really show you gold this morning, Mulder?”

He nods, swallows. “Yep. And you said that woman you talked to told she’d show up after nights out streaked with algae and gold dust. Maybe she was, I don’t know, developing her powers. You said she was missing for a few years.” 

She considers this. “I think indicates that she herself was being abused or exploited in some way from a young age, Mulder. I mean, if you can access it, unmarked gold is a nearly untraceable currency and good in any market. They start giving her little cuts, get her dealing in her teens to build trust and rapport with kids. It’s a trafficker’s dream.”  

He hates that she’s not wrong, and it’s got nothing to with defending his theory. He’s got a reputation as a bleeding heart in many corners, but would happily support supplying child predators as involuntary organ donors. Punching Roche had been a career highlight. 

“You have to concede that the linkage between fairies and gold goes way back.” Diana’s rainbow suddenly makes sense to him, and he feels stupid. “I mean, leprechauns, of course. And Rumplestiltskin - who wanted a baby in exchange for gold, I might point out. The original story of Cinderella features bewitched golden shoes instead of glass. Jack climbs the beanstalk for a golden harp and a golden harp and golden coins; there are dozens.”

She rolls her eyes. “Mulder, for heaven’s sake. These stories are all about wish fulfillment. And gold was the ultimate wish, it’s a universal currency. Of course if people are going to create stories about strange, powerful beings with the ability to fulfil desires, those desires will be about financial freedom. I’d say those tales represent far more about human longing than fairy powers.”

“I saw her do it,” he says, but doesn’t press the issue. “You hear from Danny?”

“Yeah, nothing. It’s like whomever took the girls vanished along with them. No reported drifters, no unfamiliar cars, no uptick in petty thefts or break-ins.”

Mulder jabs at the table with a finger. “It’s not a drifter, Scully. We agreed on that.”

“Right, but if it’s Tallulah, then these girls have to go somewhere. She has to be meeting someone, she can’t just - I don’t know - keep them in her little cabins like a stray dog indefinitely, then drive out of town in her Volvo.”

“Well, on that point I cannot argue. I’m going to talk to her tomorrow, see if there’s anything else she wants to unburden. We need to touch base with the Rosses too, I guess.” He eats her discarded crust.

“I can stop by while you’re charming precious metals out of Elfhame.” She’s looking up at him through her sooty end-of-day lashes, the tip of a pizza slice between her teeth.

His stomach flips. Leave it to Scully to arouse him at the weirdest possible times. “Scully, why’d you leave?” he asks, because he wants to know and because she let him put a chip in her neck, and because she smells like tea tree oil and jasmine, and because he made her drink sardine juice to save her life, and because she shot him once, and because she saved him after having his skull drilled into twice, and because she tastes like saltwater taffy and the sea.

She frowns. “Well, you had a fever, and I wanted to-”

“That morning,” he clarifies. “Why’d you go?”

She sighs. “I suppose I knew this was coming,” she says. “Of course you couldn’t possibly be a gentleman and mind your business about it.”

He’s stung until he sees the smile in her eyes. “I’m only a gentleman in the parlor,” he says. “This is most definitely a bedroom.”

Scully leans back in her chair, crossing her legs. “It’s what I did after Dallas, don’t you remember? It’s what I did to Jack Willis, it’s what I tried to do in Philadelphia that time. My journal to you, when I had cancer, it was just a long Dear John letter, Mulder. When I was in med school, there was this man…” she trails off, staring at the cheap tile ceiling.

Mulder tries to process this. “I think you’re being a little hard on yourself, Scully. You weren’t running after Dallas - they transferred you.”

Her eyebrows shoot up. “That’s not what you said at the time. You said I was quitting. You said you would too, if I left.”

He winces inwardly at the memory of what he’d said. “Well yeah, but I was trying to guilt you into staying, so you have to cut me some slack.” 

She laughs, throws a wadded-up napkin at him. “Is that all you were trying to do, Mulder? I remember something else, in the moment.”

He doesn’t tell her that he knows exactly how well she remembers. “You’re incredibly good looking,” he says, with an air of confession. “Sue me.”

She smiles, looking down at her hands. “Mulder, I left the way I did the other morning because I didn’t know how else to leave. I didn’t know what it meant, and I still don’t. Was I… were we supposed to eat breakfast in bed and clean our guns together?”

There’s something bitter in her voice that he sets aside for later. He reaches across the table to take her hands. “Scully, why does it have to be anything? We could have had some coffee, tracked down your underwear together. They’re still in my sock drawer, incidentally.”

She blushes and punches his arm for that.

He laughs. “But seriously. What good does it do to worry in advance about how things will go wrong? I mean, look at me. I’m a total fucking disaster by many metrics, but I get by. I wing it most of the time, sure, but I manage.”

Scully laughs, tucking her hair behind her ears. “Truly a ringing endorsement. But I don’t know what you expect me to say, Mulder. I was a physicist before I was a doctor, you know. So I guess I just leave before entropy can fully take over.”

“I know,” he says. “But you can’t fail at this. There’s no checklist. There’s no test to pass or form to fill out.”

She makes a noise of frustration. “Mulder, do you not understand that that’s exactly the part that’s impossible for me to handle? That I can’t ever know, empirically, if I’m doing all the things that...that...I’m supposed to?”

He stares at her in confusion. “That you’re supposed to? I don’t even know what that means. There’s no supposed to. You just do.” He says this with the confidence of a man whose six-month marriage hadn’t fallen apart, of a man who hadn’t had a one-night stand with a blood fetishist, or an extended disaster with a British sociopath. 

Scully shakes her head. “I make lists and five year plans.”

He refrains from asking her how well that’s panned  out. “Take your shirt off,” he says.

She freezes, startled. “Mulder, we’re on a case, I don’t-”

“Trust me,” he says, knowing she considers it the most dangerous phrase in his lexicon. “You’re stressed. You’re exhausted. I was going to rub your back.”

She smirks. “I think my mom fell for that and got pregnant with Charlie.”

“Indian Guide’s honor,” he says. “I’ll get the lotion from the bathroom.”

Scully eyes him suspiciously, but goes to the bed and smooths the blankets out.

He retrieves the little bottle of lotion and reads it. Scully will have to settle for “Alabaster Gardenia,” this evening. It occurs to him that Padgett would have referred to her as an alabaster gardenia and he rolls his eyes. 

When he emerges, Scully is facedown on the bed, head on the pillow. Her smooth back is bare to the waist of her trousers, where the serpent lives, and her sock feet small and dark. Her shirt and bra are folded neatly on the night table, as though he is an actual masseuse.

Mulder straddles her hips, kneeling, and pours the lotion into his hands to warm it. Close up, he sees red marks from her bra straps on her shoulders and decides to start there.

“Wouldn’t this have been a nice morning?” he asks, working the lotion into her skin. “I could have done this for you. And with better lotion - you know I’m knowledgeable on the subject.”

“Shut up,” she mumbles into the pillow. 

He feels deep, hard knots in her back and attacks them with his thumbs, following the muscles down the sides of her spine. He’s not sure it’s effective, but then Scully groans happily into the bedding.

He’s pleased, working back up to the delicate muscles of her neck and base of her ears. “Is this good?”

“Don’t stop.”

He refrains from innuendo, wanting to prove to her that this is about so much more than sex. He kneads the folded wings of her shoulder blades, her handspan waist. There is lotion on her trousers and in her hair, but he doesn’t think she’ll mind.

She’s dozy and pliant now, breathing slowly. He’ll pet her to sleep like this every night if it suits her, like a little feral cat.

“Mulder?”

“Hmmm?” He traces the tattoo again, trying to bond with it and love it because it’s part of her. The work is admittedly beautiful.

“I’m sorry if I hurt you when I left. I don’t know how to be easy with things like you are.” She turns on her side, an arm draped across her breasts.

“Well, one of us has to have a plan,” he says airily. “Poor Walter’s always been afraid of me corrupting you. I never felt like he was angry, you know? Just disappointed. My god, this would kill him.” He thinks Poor Walter might be more than a touch in love with her too, but keeps this to himself.

She turns fully onto her back now and, to his dismay, works herself under the sheets. “Well, Kersh just thinks you’re mad, bad, and dangerous to know.”

“Put it on my tombstone.”

“Of course you’d take that as a compliment. Lord Byron was really awful, but at least we got Ada Lovelace out of him. Mulder, why are you pulling clothes out?”

He hunts for his favorite t-shirt amid the wreckage of his suitcase. “I’m going for a run. I’ll be up all night otherwise.”

Scully frowns disapprovingly. “You really shouldn’t after today, Mulder. Can you make it a casual jog, at least?”

“Brisk trot. Leisurely gallop.”

“It’s AMA,” she warns him, but doesn’t argue further.

Mulder changes quickly while she drowses, limbering himself against the night table where her clothing sits. He opens the door, and the night air is invigorating.

“Hey Mulder?”

“Yeah?”

“I can’t promise you anything, but I want to try to...you know. This.”

“Okay,” he says, and hopes she’s too sleepy to hear the thickness in his voice.

***

She’s out cold when he gets back, occasional little Scully-snores in the silence. He rinses in the shower, making excessive noise to alert her to his presence.

Mulder dries off and wraps himself in the undersized motel towel, putting his shoes back on against the dubious carpet. He walks over to Scully and strokes her hair.

“Mmmfff,” she says, bleary-eyed. “Am I still here?”

He holds out her shirt. “You’ll want this before you head next door,” he says.

She blinks. “Okay.” Then she promptly falls back asleep.

Mulder is not one to beg. He pulls his boxers on, toes the shoes off, and climbs in next to her. He is delighted to find that she has kicked her socks and trousers off, now clad only in her little grey bikinis.

He strokes the violin curves of her, from her shoulder down the sweep of her waist to her thighs. She sighs in her sleep.

He knows Scully would explain that he’s evolutionarily primed to be attracted to her full breasts and rounded hips. She’d tell him about how pelvic girdle width is an advantageous adaptation for such a melon-headed species.

He’d counter with the Golden Ratio. Sometimes beauty is its own justification.

Mulder snuggles in next to her. If he dreams that night he doesn’t remember. And if she wakes, she doesn’t leave.

***

His alarm goes off at six. Scully is an immovable lump next to him under the bedding, her exposed hair the only sign that she isn’t a heap of pillows or an extra blanket. He strokes the fine vellum of her belly until she stirs. “Time to get up,” he murmurs.

She pokes her head above the comforter and looks at him, confused. “What time is it? Did I spend the night?”

He smoothes her hair back from her brow. “I won’t tell anyone.”

Scully sits up, holding the sheet to her chest with one hand. “Where are my clothes?” She feels around under the blankets with evident agitation. 

Mulder points at the night table. “I put your shirt and bra there, but I don’t know about the pants and socks. You lost those while I was running, but I can give you a hand.”

She puts a hand to her forehead and looks tense. “This is what I was afraid of, Mulder. This… this chaos.”

He rubs her thigh and doesn’t laugh at her idea of chaos. Scully may sometimes think of him as a giant untrained Weimaraner who is either destroying her life or nosing her crotch, but he’s also got a DPhil from Oxford and occasionally he picks up on social cues. He moves the blankets around, keeping her covered, and eventually finds her belongings wadded up between the pillows.

“Here,” he says gently, and hands them to her. 

She nods, biting her lip. “I need to go.”

“Okay,” he says, and doesn’t touch her. “I’m going to get in the shower. Come back over when you’re ready?”

Here smile is lukewarm, but present. “I’ll bring some coffee.”

Mulder tosses her the keys. “Get me one of those raspberry danishes too, if you don’t mind.”

He turns his back to give her privacy, then heads into the bathroom. He must have missed it yesterday, but sees that Scully’s left her little can of mousse on the sink for him. When they get home, he’s going to buy some of those velvet hangers she likes, to keep in his closet. He thinks of Ree, holding out dried corn for her deer. 

They’ve spent so long in the dark together it’s daunting to walk into the light.

***

Mulder takes a scalding shower, burning sweat and dead skin directly from the pores. He scours himself like a penitent until the heat becomes nauseating. When he steps out onto the little rug, the air feels nearly Arctic, and it perks him up. He feels purified of something nameless.

Scully’s lilac mousse in his hair, and he’s back in a suit for seeing Tallulah today. He thinks it’s best to remind her that he has a badge and a gun. He tries not to think about her hand, for once hoping he had experienced a hallucination.

He sits on the bed to tie his shoes when Scully comes back in, carrying a paper bag. She’s got on last night’s clothes still, her hair tucked behind her ears.

“They were out of raspberry, but I got you blueberry. Me too, actually. They looked good.” She holds out the bag, fragrant with coffee.

“Keep the change,” he says, taking the bag from her with happy anticipation.

“You should be doing stand-up, really.” She joins him on the bed.

Mulder passes her food to her, wishing he could make a breakfast-in-bed quip without sounding desperate. “So what’s your game plan today, then?” he asks around a mouthful of pastry.

She licks blueberry filling off her thumb. “Back to the lab, then I’ll see after that. We grew some of the algae samples at different temperatures to see if that could explain it being in Ree’s thermos in particular.” She blinks. “Oh! That reminds me! The lady at the store said to tell you not to forget about your bottle deposit.” 

“Thanks,” he says, hoping it doesn’t incite further questioning.

But no such luck with his inquisitive inamorata. “What bottle deposit?” she asks, puzzled.

He shifts, rolls his steaming cup between his palms. “Brought some groceries up with me to Tallulah’s yesterday. I figured it might grease the wheels a little.”

“Hmmm,” Scully says, and sips her coffee. “Well, it does sound like she had a lot to tell you. Anyway, I’ll be in Huntsville for the morning at least if you need me. Then I figured I’d - we’d, depending on your schedule - touch base with the Rosses, see if the search teams have found anything that hasn’t made its way to us.”

“Sounds good.” He brushes crumbs off his lap onto the floor, and supposes the mice will find them sumptuous.

Scully finishes her danish, clearly pondering something.

“Penny for your thoughts,” he offers.

Scully scoffs. “I’ll add it to my tip. I was just thinking; I did a little research while you were asleep yesterday. Apparently the term name Jenny Greenteeth applies not only to the creature in the legend, but has been generalized in some areas as a name for duckweed. In can make a pond surface look like inviting moss to walk on, like we saw down at the pond where Ree disappeared. Why not just...I don’t know. Why not just warn your kids about drowning instead of making up a - what did you call them?”

“Nursery bogey,” he replies. “The prevalent theory is that most kids will overestimate their abilities against natural dangers. They believe they can swim across a pond, or navigate through a forest, or climb a very tall tree. But if the supernatural is introduced, children are less likely to believe they can overcome the danger. So the deterrent is more effective.”

She shudders. “What a grim way to parent. Though I suppose it’s all just a variant on ‘don’t do that or you’ll die.’ And not so different from the Tooth Fairy or Santa, I guess.” Scully drinks her coffee, musing.

He considers this. He always found Santa creepy in a Panopticon way. “But Santa doesn’t provide a specific deterrent from naughtiness, only a reward for good.”

She sets her cup on the night table, presses her hands between her knees. “Well, there’s Krampus.”

Mulder loves the deranged chaotic energy of Krampus. “Krampus is good.”

“When I was taking German we were, you know, learning all the cultural bits of Germany. And Krampus is a companion of Saint Nicholas, which I thought was just terrible. Saint Nick gets all the credit for presents and just has Krampus do his dirty work.” She shakes her head at the treachery of Bavarian Santa.

He grins. “Santa’s that shitty friend who makes him carry out all the bullying so he can keep his hands clean and be teacher’s pet.”

“Ugh, I always hated that kid,” Scully says. She drinks her coffee, looking dark.

Mulder is joyful. Talking with her like this is the brightest spot in any day and he doesn’t want it to end. But there’s still a lost girl to find. “Well,” he says, slapping his thighs, “we’d best be off.”

She nods, serious again. “Depending on how the lab results look, we might be able to bring Tallulah in for questioning.”

He doubts it will do a particle of good, but they all need something to cling to. “Keep me posted.”

Scully reaches over to pat his hair. Heat radiates from her, and the warm cotton smell of her skin. Her coffee-and-danish breath is sweet in his mouth. “You can keep that mousse,” she says.

Mulder clears his throat. “I’m going to,” he assures her. “So much hold, but not sticky or stiff.”

She kisses him, close-mouthed, and flicks his ear before leaving.

***

The car shimmies up the unpaved road, rattling spent sunflower seeds in the empty Quik Mart cup. He grips the wheel against the uneven drive, against his anxiety over facing Tallulah again. Scully had come undone with Pfaster, her hard varnish becoming brittle and crumbling in the cold. Mulder fears Tallulah may leave him similarly disarmed.

He pulls up the last stretch of road to the meadow below the cabin, and stares in confusion. Instead of the weathered shack is a tangle of kudzu, ivy, strangler fig, and splintered planks. Mulder parks and slowly gets out of the car. He pushes his sunglasses up onto his forehead, picking his way up the path in gripless leather-bottomed dress shoes.

He crouches in the waist high grass, looking for...he’s not sure what. The floor of the cabin is utterly destroyed, existing only as a series of foot-long splinters. Large sections of the walls are collapsed inwards, algae-covered and snarled in woody vines. Tallulah’s few possessions, including her bed and kitchen furniture are gone. The big goat wanders over to chew on a section of the door. 

Mulder stands again, circles the wreckage with his hands on his hips. “Son of a bitch,” he says, kicking at it. He puts his sunglasses back on and stares into the woods.

Typical, absolutely fucking typical. He wants somewhere to put his anger, somewhere righteous and useful, but there is nothing. He longs for the congested grittiness if DC, where he can yell at corrupt officials or aggressive drivers or at least a noisome pigeon. But here there is nothing except unspoiled beauty as far as the eye can see. 

Looking back at the wreckage, he sees something glinting in the bright morning sun. He tugs at a swath of thorny vines hanging over the remains of the porch, and the milk bottle rolls out from beneath the greenery.

Mulder picks it up and sees a slip of paper inside. It slides out when he inverts the bottle. I guess we’re even, it reads, in a familiar hand.

He looks at the paper for a long time then, carefully, sets the bottle back on the ground. He begins running towards the tree line.

“Ree!” he calls. “RHIANNON!”

 Birdsong and silence.

He shouts her name again and again, receiving no reply. Mulder stops to take in his surroundings, never once doubting his interpretation of the note. “REE!”  he yells once more, and has only his echo for a reply.

He paces at the edge of the wood, looking, but there is nothing. Then, a hundred yards or so off, he sees a rock, like the one beneath Diana’s rainbow. He races towards it, loosening his tie. 

She’s still when he gets to her, a small bundle wrapped in a quilt that Mulder recognizes instantly from Tallulah’s bed. He crouches beside the girl. Twigs and leaves are snarled in her cornsilk hair, and her face is hollow and dirty.

Mulder reaches out to touch her cheek. “Hey,” he whispers. “Rhiannon?”

She stirs slightly, then opens her eyes. They’re far greener than they looked in her school picture. He tells himself it’s the light

“Mama,” Rhiannon says. She reaches out a thin, filthy hand.

Mulder gathers her up in his arms, head tucked against his neck. She weighs next to nothing, and he wants to run but is afraid of internal injuries or losing his footing. He moves as quickly as he dares back to the car.

Ree whimpers softly the whole time, her dry little fingers clutching at his collar. She calls for her mother and father.

He comes to the ruined shack and wants to show it to the child, to ask her a hundred questions, but he passes it in silence and arrives at the car. Still holding Ree’s little body close, he opens the back door. She begins to cry and clutch at him when he tries to lay her down.

“Please,” she begs, he can feel his heart break anew  when he pries her away, sobbing, onto the seat. Ree curls into the fetal position under the tattered quilt, mumbling to herself. 

He’d have laid rubber if there were any road to lay it on when he peels off towards town. Steering with his knee, he fumbles for his phone to call Scully, but there’s no service. He swears, flooring the gas.

A thin, awful, wail from Ree and he thinks of Emily dying by inches, dragging Scully down with her to the grave again. Emily’s burning body in his arms, staring mutely at him with her mother’s eyes.

He squeals onto the main road, eliciting a chorus of angry horns, when he realizes he has no idea where a hospital is. Scully’s off in Huntsville and he isn’t qualified for anything beyond CPR.

Mulder remembers the fire station from when they first arrived, and runs several red lights to get to it. Someone throws a rock at the car, but it bounces away.

Ree wails again, sitting up to scrabble at the window. Mulder glances at her in the rear view as he swerves onto MacNeill Street. She is thinner than he realized, and very pale. He didn’t think to check her gums and wonders if she’s in shock.

He calls back a flurry of reassuring nonsense to her, but she seems not to hear him. “I’m with the FBI,” he repeats. “You’re safe, Ree.”

She claws at the glass, whimpering.

Mulder finally sees the fire station up ahead on the left. He swerves across oncoming traffic and pulls halfway into the engine bay, narrowly missing four guys cooking hotdogs on a flimsy portable grill. They rise, yelling and waving their arms.

He’s waving his badge when he gets out, shouting Ree’s name over their indignant bellowing. 

“What the fuck do y-“

He opens the back door, catches Ree before she hits the ground. That’s all the conversation they need. The EMTs are yelling to one another, getting Ree in the ambulance, telling Mulder he’s a goddamn hero but he’d better get his fucking car out of the fucking way.

He backs out along the curb as the sirens scream. The ambulance howls past him, lights flashing, and disappears from view.

Mulder sits in his car for a moment, feeling strangely deflated. Then he gets his phone to call the sheriff with the good news.

***

Scully calls him from the hospital. She met the ambulance and the family there, figuring it was the easiest way to get the details for their report. Mulder is sprawled across the sagging expanse of his motel bed, propped up on one elbow. He is playing solitaire on his laptop as Scully fills him in.

“So anyway, she’d dehydrated and malnourished and had some bad bruises and scrapes, but nothing serious, which is impressive. They’re keeping her overnight at least for observation, but she seems fine, Mulder.”

He drags a queen of hearts across the screen. “Mmm. So is she talking yet?”

“Not much,” Scully says. “She’s still pretty freaked out. From the few things she has said, it sounds like she followed a deer into the woods and got lost. That’s why she didn’t have any of her things.” 

In the background are the beeps and echoes of hospital noises. Mulder finds them strangely soothing. “Okay, so where’d her clothes go? Where’d she get that quilt?”

A frustrated noise from Scully. “Mulder, they’re doing their best to get her story, but she’s very traumatized right now; you should know that. Maybe she found the cabin all collapsed and dragged the blanket out. Maybe it’s a different blanket entirely - this one was pretty beaten up. There’s no sign of sexual or other physical trauma, that’s the main thing.”

He knows it’s the main thing, but still. Still. “Scully, you listed a bunch of conditions that would make your teeth green. Anything that does it to the eyes?”

“Mulder,” she says warningly. “Why?”

 He rolls onto his back, abandoning the  game. “When I found her, I noticed that -”

“No,” Scully says. “Absolutely not.” Her voice is hard.

Mulder closes his eyes. “Is it real, or is it Memorex?” he asks.

“Don’t you dare,” Scully says, her voice a hiss. “Mulder, go for a run or take a shower or make use of the lotion or whatever it is you need to get this out of your system, but I know what you’re thinking and I absolutely forbid you to say a solitary word on the subject.”

He can envision her pacing furiously, black and white and red against the soft hospital neutrals. He imagines holy rage on her Botticelli face. “I won’t say anything,” he promises her.

“Good,” she replies, mollified. “The family wants to thank you in person, if you’re game to head over. I’m hanging out for about another half hour to look at some test results.”

He really, really isn’t game to head over, because he’s afraid he will fail to keep his mouth shut. “Tell them I was recently diagnosed with cranial rectal inversion, and I’m afraid of exposing them to a flare-up,” he says.

“Hilarious. I’ll tell them you turned your ankle during your daring rescue and you’ve got it up on ice.”

Mulder knows the fib is for the family’s sake rather than his, but he’s still grateful. “How many Hail Marys is that lie gonna cost, Dana Katherine?”

“I got a special dispensation from the Holy See for matters involving you,” she says. “It’s like EZ Pass. I go into the confessional, show my badge, and the priest just tells me not to worry about it.”

He’s grinning. “Yeah? You think the Pope’ll write a note to Kersh for me?”

“Even the Holy Father has no oversight over Alvin Kersh. Mulder, I’ve got to run, but I’ll be back at the motel within two hours. Call around for a flight, would you? I really don’t want to spend another night at the motel. Everything feels sticky.”

He turns to his side and pulls his laptop over. “I’m on it,” he tells her. 

She hangs up

“True enough for government work,” he says to no one.

***

Mulder goes for the run she suggested. His feet pound mindlessly against the pavement, past tidy lawns and mom-and-pop stores. He remembers the Samantha clones, the hive of identical girls who were in the world but not of it, and how he wanted to save just one of them. Scully would tell him that good works alone are not enough for salvation, that grace is required first. She might make a Catholic of him after all - he could use a little grace.

He glances through the window of the farm store and resists the urge to stop in. Past the church (CHRISTMAS BAZAAR BOOTHS STILL OPEN!) and two giggly teen girls. He’s coming up on the fire station when a hand claps him on the shoulder. He whirls around, reaches for the gun he didn’t bring.

“Whoa, hey, sorry,” says the guy who told him to move his fucking car earlier that day. “Just wanted to say thanks again.” The man’s about his age, more heavily muscled, and sporting a scruffy beard. His shirt reads VOLUNTEER FIREFIGHTER across the front.

Mulder holds his hands up in apology. “All good. I’m glad she’s home.”

“Owen Cylburn,” the man says, holding out a hand. 

Mulder shakes it. “Mulder,” he says. “Agent Scully’s still at the hospital.”

Owen hooks his thumbs through his belt loops. “Yeah, I heard she was a doctor. Real nice of her to look in on our girl.”

“You family?”

“Naw, but I live a few houses down and she plays with my son Simon sometimes. It’s a small town, you know? Anyway, I heard she’s doing fine.” Owen looks like there’s more he wants to say.

“Anything else on your mind, Mr. Cylburn?” Mulder asks.

He looks sheepish. “Oh, uh. Well, I guess I heard some talk, you know, about whatsername up in that old shack? You don’t really think she was involved, do you? I mean, I checked in on her a couple times and all, made sure the stove was safe. She seems nice. Just sort of strange.”

Mulder considers this for a moment. “Even if she were, clearing her house of fire hazards doesn’t mean you were aiding and abetting, you know. You do anything else while you were up there?”

Owen’s face darkens. “I don’t know what you’re implying, but I’m a happily marr-”

“Not what I meant. Sorry.”

“Oh,” Owen says, looking confused. “No, just the stove.”

Mulder tries again. “What I’m asking is, well, I heard some rumors too. That Tallulah was selling a little weed to supplement her income. Now listen, I’m not looking to hassle anybody. I’m a legalize it man myself, just trying to see if people were heading up there with any frequency to, uh, go shopping. And if they might have seen anything while they were there.”

“Ohhhh,” is the reply. “No, not my thing but I think I’m in the minority. I reckon she could blackmail half the upstanding members of the town if she wanted to, one way or another. Them or their spouses or their kids.” He shrugs. “It’s a dry town, so…”

Mulder nods. “I get it. Like I said, just trying to see if anyone might have been around, might have seen anything. But not trying to make a federal case of it.”

“Mighty decent of you. But anyhow, all’s well that ends well, I guess. My sister’s a nurse up at the hospital, she says Ree looks pretty good, all things considered.”

“Yeah, that’s what my partner said too. She’s a real pretty little girl, isn’t she? Golden hair, and those big green eyes.”

Owen frowns. “All the Rosses have that hair, but I don’t think she has green eyes.”

“My mistake,” Mulder says. “Anyhow, you have a good one.” 

He jogs off, thinking.

***

Scully’s getting out of a patrol car when he returns. There’s a German Shepherd in the back seat, muzzle against the grating.

“This is K9 Officer Jangles,” Scully says, introducing Mulder to the dog. “She’s new.”

Officer Jangles sticks her head out of the open rear window. Her tail is wagging and her ridiculous ears are tilted against one another.

“Brought Jangles up to see Ree,” says the cop. “She’s my niece. Ree, I mean. My brother’s girl.” He has the blonde hair of his clan.

“How is she?”

“Pretty good,” Officer Ross says. “Starting to talk a little more.”

Mulder is genuinely glad to hear this and says so. “It’ll be nice to have your green-eyed lassie home, I’m sure.”

Scully kicks him hard in the shin with her deadly shoes. “Officer Ross, thanks for the lift. Agent Mulder and I have a lot of paperwork to take care of, so I hope you’ll excuse us.”

The officer nods. “I can’t thank you enough, none of us ever could. Can we call your boss for like, uh, a commendation or something?”

Scully smiles. “That’s very kind, sir, but we’re really just doing our job.”

“Alvin Kersh,” Mulder calls, as Scully hauls him into her room. “Extension 44-”

The door slams shut.

***

She punches him in the arm. “What is wrong with you?” she demands. 

Mulder sits on her bed, which is identical to his. Her room smells nicer though, distinctly Scully-ish. “I’m sorry,” he says. He genuinely wishes he were different.

Scully sighs, rubbing her temples. She sits next to him. “I am covered in dog hair, I have listened to hours of conservative talk radio, and now you are in direct violation of the one thing I asked you not to do.” She leans over to sniff him. “And you smell like a stable.”

“I’m trying to keep my ass shapely,” he says. “I want to look sexy in my running shorts for you.”

She punches him again. “Go...go take a shower. I’ll call around for flights. Maybe we can get out of here tonight.”

“Done,” he says. “There aren’t any until tomorrow evening.”

Scully groans. “Please don’t tell me that. I need to get out of here. The water smells like pencil shavings, did you notice? Go shower though.”

Mulder turns and takes her hands. “I know that I am sweaty and disgusting but I think you’re going to want to hear me out before I go shower.”

“It better be good, Mulder, because you’re competing with Jangles right now.”

“So there’s a hotel near the airport with a day spa. It’s not exactly the Four Seasons, but the website looked pretty good. I thought we’d let Alvin spring for another night here, and we’ll luxuriate in Dead Sea mud.”

She laughs, crossing her arms. “Mulder, you can’t be serious.”

“I'm extremely serious. My treat. You know my policy on my father’s money.”

Scully rolls her eyes, mimes a little hand puppet with a talking mouth. “My paychecks are for living expenses, my inheritance is for my side projects.” She does a credible impression of his monotone.

“I’m glad at least some of what I say stuck with you. Seriously though, Scully. Let me do something nice for you.”

She considers this. “Mulder, your ‘side projects’ generally refer to subverting the government in some way or another. Are you trying to get me in bed again just to lob a stone in the eye of the government?” 

“Yes,” he says. “You are my ultimate middle finger to The Man. That is literally my only motivation here. Come on, Scully. You once told Congress to go fuck itself - surely you’ve got room in your arsenal for a moisturizing salt scrub and Swedish massage.”

“We’re like Bonnie and Clyde,” she says, and bumps her shoulder against his. She’s right about the dog fur, he notes.

“Whaddya say?” he asks. It feels silly to have his heart in his throat over this, to worry that she’ll turn him down like a long-shot prom date. “Two empty hotel rooms in Hooterville on the federal dime while we sneak off to live it up on room service. You know you want to, Bonnie.”

Scully drops her chin for a second, then looks up at him, resigned. “What the hell, Clyde.”

He kisses her hair. “Attagirl. I’ll have you fully corrupted in no time. Soon you’ll be stealing office supplies and blowing off mandatory training seminars of your own volition”

She shakes her head, grinning. “Is this where you remind me that a journey of a thousand miles begins with one step?”

He shakes his head. “No, this is where I point out that a journey of a thousand miles is pretty intimidating, so maybe starting with smaller day spa trips is more manageable. Hell, Scully. Even The Pretenders broke it into two five-hundred-mile walks.”

“Go take a shower,” she says.

***

When he comes out of the bathroom she’s sitting in his room with her luggage, looking like a waif at a train station.

“Jesus,” he says, flustered. “Glad I still had a few clean towels.” He rifles through his bag, looking for underwear. He wasn’t expecting an audience.

Scully looks politely away as he tugs them on. “I changed out of that be-dogged suit and figured I’d just pack up and we’d head out when you were ready. I already turned in my key.”

He notices now that she’s in a pair of leggings and a black sweater. Somehow she still looks chic. “You’re in quite a hurry to leave this charming hamlet,” he observes. “Or is it just the lure of the forbidden?”

“Mmmm, maybe both. Mostly it’s the lure of the sauna.”

“Fair.” He sniffs his jeans and, dismayed, pulls them on anyway. Fuck it, he’s a rich man. He’ll take them both shopping. Scully is an indulgence he’ll happily spend his father’s ill-gotten gains on. He’s long suspected some distant connection between his parents’ money and her chip; it would be poetic justice to spoil her.

She curls onto her side in the middle of the bed, watching him dress. “Mulder.”

“Hmm?”

“Nothing.”

When she’s ready, he knows. When she’s ready. Mulder ties his shoes, then retrieves her mousse from the bathroom. He styles his hair in the mirror above the dresser, waiting.

“Mulder.”

“Hmm?”

“When I was a kid, my Aunt Olive would tell us stories about this farm she grew up on outside Killarney. She lived with her grandparents, pretty staunch Catholics you know, but they believed in a lot of the old stories too.”

He’s listening attentively now, but she has a tendency to be skittish when discussing the intangible. He pulls a pair of tweezers out and plucks at imaginary stray hairs. “Yeah?”

“Yeah. After milking, Aunt Olive knew to leave a bowl of milk out for the Tuatha de Dannan. And a slice of bread from the new loaves.” She pauses, thinking. “I mean, I don’t know that they actually believed it, but you know how these things are.”

“Belt and suspenders,” he says.

She chuckles. “Something like that, yeah. Anyway, Mulder, I was thinking about that milk bottle. And then I started thinking about my Aunt Olive’s stories. And I wondered if maybe you bought Tallulah some new milk and fresh bread.”

Mulder puts the tweezers down. He joins her on the bed, sitting in the curve made by her body. He pets her side, her shiny hair, and savors the sheer pleasure of touching her. “It wasn’t super new,” he says. “It was pasteurized.”

“Oh, Mulder,” Scully says. She rubs his thigh.

He stretches out onto the bed, facing her. She has aged with obscene grace. Distilled more than aged, really, he thinks. Refined to a more essential Scully-ness. “Sometimes all that people need is to be seen,” he says. “I figured even if she’s just some weird transient hillbilly who sells weed and tells horrifying lies, she might appreciate a snack.” 

Scully smiles and scoots closer to him. She strokes the bridge of his nose. “Fox Mulder, you big softie.”

He raises an eyebrow. “Should I take that as a personal indictment?”

“You’re a riot.”

He strokes her cheek with the backs of his fingers. “I don’t know, when I was a kid I read To Kill A Mockingbird for school, and the part where Atticus said you had to walk around in someone’s skin to know them really resonated with me. I guess I wish I had been extended that courtesy.” 

Scully smiles. “Mmm, I used to think about how I would have made Boo Radley come out.”

Mulder laughs, imagining a tiny, serious Scully laying artful traps. “Like Bugs Bunny?”

She laughs too. “Something like that, yeah. I guess I just connected with the idea of the unknown being concretely knowable if only the right methodology were applied.”

“Nerd,” he says.

“Always. You would have snuck into the house and said, ‘Hello, Mr. Radley. I’m Fox Mulder.’ No tricks for you.” 

He probably would have, at that. “Yeah, but then comes my usual trouble. No evidence, no witnesses.”

She kisses him softly, bumping his nose with hers. “Maybe I need to walk around in your skin more. You say you got to walk around in my head.”

“I didn’t peek anywhere untoward,” he says, and wraps his arms around her.

She regards him seriously. “I trust you. But I do wonder what you saw. I’m not an angel, Mulder.”

“I wouldn’t want you to be.” He runs his thumb over her lips, and she nips at it. “You’re incandescent, Scully. Like a lighthouse at the edge of a vast, nighttime sea.”

She looks pleased and shy. “Well,” is all she says. “Well.” She tucks her head beneath his chin.

He holds her there, in this bland little room in the heart of nowhere. Her body is warm and compact and trusting, her fingers soft on his neck. She doesn’t always believe in his ideas, he knows, but she believes in him, and it’s more than enough.

Eventually he rouses her, the promise of more luxurious accommodations his only motivator for breaking this gentle peace. They gather their belongings and head to the car. The sky is purple and orange around them and ahead, an infinite sea of stars. He drives west, towards the setting sun. Scully takes his hand and smiles; a flame in the dark.

#xfiles fanfic #xf fanfic #season 7 #casefile #My fic

[bad-boy-spanker]

Austere Academy:Chaper One

Jack Moore gulped as the car entered the grounds of Austere Academy, the twenty-seven-year-old had heard about Austere’s reputation for discipline, even the toughest of lads feared being sent to Austere, but Jack reasoned it had to be better than serving time.

When the car had arrived to pick him up, he’d had a uniform thrust at him by the driver, he introduced himself as AJ King, this guy could have only been twenty-two, twenty-three tops, he had thick, vibrant ginger hair that he’d slicked back, he was clean-shaven with a chiselled, angular jawline, it was apparent the guy worked out, Jack could see his biceps through his shirt, he was wearing a white shirt with a black tie, tucked into tight black cotton trousers, which showcased his nice muscular arse, AJ told him to be ready in five minutes, Jack took the uniform from him & disappeared upstairs.

Once there, he stripped off, snapping a naked selfie for Twitter in his full-length mirror, he added a filter that made his dark brown eyes pop & posted it, Jack inspected the uniform, a plain white button-up shirt, tight thin cotton trousers & a black tie, it was like being back at fucking school, he pulled the tight-fitting trousers over his hairy thighs, & up over his small peach fuzz covered arse, the seam settled in between his cheeks, framing them flawlessly, as he slipped the shirt on, it clung to his arms, he was toned but not overly so, this shirt was fucking tight, he buttoned his shirt, tucked it in & put on his tie, he looked absurd, twenty-seven, dressed as a naughty schoolboy.

Jack wasn’t overly vain, but he took pride in his appearance, his dark brown hair was spiked on top, he might have to wear this ridiculous uniform, but he was styling his hair the way he wanted, no matter what anyone said, at least the thin cotton of the trousers made his arse look good, it was small but peachy, he loved showing off his arse, that’s why he loved his wrestling singlet, crap, he didn’t put it in his bag, mind you, if they had wrestling team, they’d have singlets, he’d heard Austere had a few competitive sports teams, hopefully, a wrestling team was one of them, Jack preened himself for a few more minutes, snapped another pic for Twitter, then went downstairs, AJ was waiting for him, checking his watch, a pissed off look on his face.

“Five minutes you were told, now we’re late, get in the car”

Jack was flabbergasted, this guy was scolding him like he was a fucking teenager, he opened his mouth to say something but decided it probably wasn’t wise, he’d easily be able to kick the crap out of him, even if Jack was older, Jack locked the door as AJ placed his bags in the boot, AJ opened the car door, Jack thanked him & went to sit down, out of nowhere, Jack felt something hard connect with his arse, & a sting began to burn its way across the centre of his cheeks.

“You need to learn to be ready on time”

Jack couldn’t believe it, AJ’s meaty hand had just slapped his arse, & the sting was spreading, the fuck was this guy playing at, shocked he got in the car, AJ closed the door behind him, & sat in the driver’s seat, Jack shifted, it had only been one slap, but it stung, what the fuck have I gotten myself into, I should have been more careful, he thought, recalling how his latest drug binge had earned him his sentence at Austere, the sting in his arse wasn’t going away soon, it was a familiar sting, that caused Jack to cast his mind back to the last time he’d been spanked, over eight years ago.

His dad, John, had found an empty coke bag in his coat, Jack tried to bullshit his way out of it, but John saw straight through his lies, & dragged him upstairs by his ear, bollocking him as they arrived at Jack’s room, John then thrust Jack into the corner of his room & told him not to move, he returned a few minutes later, with an old oak hairbrush, that belonged to Jack’s grandad, it was only a small hairbrush, but, with John behind it, it had ignited a fire in Jack’s arse more times than Jack cared to remember, John grabbed Jack from out of the corner, sat on the bed & pulled Jack across his knee, every time John spanked Jack, he always started with a hand spanking, his hand fell hard & fast, Jack was wriggling within thirty seconds, even through his grey sweatpants, it stung, John soon lowered Jack’s sweatpants, & continued spanking him on his boxers.

Jack always hated it when John pulled his pants down, he started aiming for Jack’s thighs, after John had reddened Jack’s thighs, he pulled down Jacks boxers, once Jack’s arse was bared, John really got into the swing of spanking, Jack was kicking his legs within five slaps, promising he’d never do it again, but John just carried on spanking, five minutes later, when Jack had kicked his pants & boxers to the other side of the room, John rested the hairbrush on the centre of Jack’s arse, Jack’s crying had died down a bit, but he knew the tears would be flowing again soon, John lifted the hairbrush & brought it down with almighty force on Jack’s sit spot, Jack screamed, he always forgot how much that first swipe with the hairbrush stung, John spanked Jack with that hairbrush, nonstop, for twenty minutes, after which Jack had gone limp over his knee, crying continually, his arse was a mass of stinging redness, John stood Jack against the wall & told him to stay there for ten minutes then go to bed, that was the worst spanking Jack ever got of his dad, he couldn’t sit down for a few days afterwards, the car went over a bump, & Jack’s reminiscing ended & he was back to reality.  

Forty-five minutes later, the sting in Jack’s arse had faded into a warm glow & they were somewhere in the countryside, Jack lowered the car mirror to check his appearance, best smarten up, fuck knows what these bastards are gonna expect, he toyed with his hair, his eye caught by a sign, Austere Academy, they were entering the grounds, he was distracted from his thoughts by AJ’s low voice.

“You should read the brochure before we get there”

Jack picked up the brochure & flicked through, Austere Academy, a modern day reform school, for men aged eighteen to forty five, Jack skimmed, looking for any mention of a wrestling team, he spotted a list of the sports teams, football, rugby, wrestling, yes, at least now he’d have something to keep him occupied, he read on, his eye was drawn to an chubby guy in a grey suit, he wasn’t overly fat, he had a belly, but he was well built & his shoulders were broad, his head was covered in fine fuzz, which blended perfectly into his stubble, Head of Austere Academy, Gaz Green, twenty seven, how the fuck was this guy the head of a reform school & the same age as him, Jack skipped ahead, a good looking guy with fluffy brown hair, & dark brown eyes, caught his attention, senior, Callum Kelly, thirty-two, he didn’t look thirty-two, he had a cocky smirk on his face, framed by dark stubble, his biceps bulged in his white shirt & his perfectly round arse, was encased in tight shorts, showing his thick furry thighs, grey knee high socks & black shoes completed his outfit.

The next page Jack came upon contained the rules, uniform to be worn at all times, except on weekends, be on time for your lessons, no drugs of any kind, smoking is allowed, in designated areas only, alcohol may be consumed, but only when permitted by Mr Green, anyone caught breaking the rules will be punished, & here at Austere, we believe the best punishment is a good, old fashioned, spanking, Jack had to re-read it a couple of time to make sure his eyes weren’t playing tricks on him, anybody caught breaking the rules will have his bottom bared & thoroughly spanked, this couldn’t be real, we are a reform school, we believe in firm discipline, hence, a spanking during the day means a spanking before bed.

 “Is this for real, bare arse spankings, a spanking during the day means a spanking before bed?”

Jack’s voice cracked as he questioned AJ, AJ laughed, remembering how he’d asked the same questions when he’d first arrived at Austere.

“It is, every word, bare bum spanking, a spanking during the day means a spanking before bed, punishment parade”

 “Punishment parade, what’s that”

Jack had been so distracted by the bare arse spanking, he hadn’t finished reading, he read the rest out loud.

“If you are spanked more than four times in one week, you will be put on punishment parade, on the nearest Friday, you will be taken on stage in assembly, in front of the entire academy, where your bottom will be bared, caned & slippered, & finally Mr Green will put you over his knee, & spank you, by hand”

AJ, noticing that Jack was flustered, offered him some advice.

 “And take it from someone who’s been there more than once, Green doesn’t mess about, he doesn’t stop spanking you until you’re in tears, you’d be wise to stay on his good side”

Jack sat back, still in disbelief at what he had just read.

“What the fuck”

AJ knew, from bitter experience how swearing was dealt with.

 “Watch your language as well, or you’ll end up getting your mouth washed out, & I promise you it isn’t nice”

Jack began to panic, his arse was quite literally on the line.

“We’re here”

Jack sat up, as the car drew to a stop, AJ got out & opened the boot, grabbing Jack’s bags, he quickly took them inside, he reappeared a few minutes later, some guy had him gripped by the ear, it was Mr Green, he didn’t look happy, he kept spanking AJ as they walked, AJ letting out an ow, every time a slap landed, Green stood AJ next to the car & told him to stay there with his hands on his head, then made his way over to Jack’s door & opened it.

“Hello Jack, I’m Gaz Green, nice to meet you”

Jack stepped out of the car & closed the door, he breathed in the impressive old building, confident that no amount of drugs & partying could be worth this.

#gayfiction #gayspanking #Austere Academy #Jack Moore #AJ King #Gaz Green

[ladyanatui]

The Hickey *A Daiken Fic*

During one of the group's bi-weekly movie nights, the Chosen Children can't help but notice the very obvious hickey on Ken's neck.

AO3 | FF.Net

A few notes...

Okay, this old post of Sweet Affectionate Moments made me want to write a bunch of one-shots with my OTP(s). At this point, I haven’t decided on writing any ships other than Daiken because Daiken is my ultimate OTP of all fandoms ever, and it doesn’t get nearly enough love. This is to the prompt: A Love Bite.

Most of these will be fluffy because, as much as I love darkness and angst, too many Daiken/Kensuke fics are super angsty. And frankly, if anyone in this world deserves fluff in their life, it’s Ken Ichijouji. 

Seriously. 

Just look at my baby...

"Hai, hai…"

Daisuke's booming voice filters into the apartment the moment Takeru lets him in. They pause in the entryway for coat removal, and I flash Miyako a smile over the peninsula counter, but she's already rolling her eyes under her large glasses.

"Oh, hey, I brought you guys some ramen. This is a new recipe…"

I look up, beaming, when they come into the kitchen. "Hi, Daisuke," I say, pausing before grabbing the next box of Pretz. "Hi…"

Takeru slides behind me to slide the couple boxes of ramen into the fridge, and Daisuke pauses at the peninsula corner with a confident grin that assures me nothing is wrong.

I frown anyway.

Because for the first time since we started these movie nights, Daisuke arrived alone.

Ever since we started these bi-weekly gatherings after Miyako returned from Spain, he has Ken in tow, the taller, quieter boy on his heels, the soft smile he always sports around Daisuke firmly in place. We switch off locations—usually between mine and Takeru's apartment and Ken's, as everyone else has a roommate like Miyako or still lives at home like Iori—and even when Ken hosts, Daisuke is the first there. No matter how early Takeru and I arrive, he's already there, relaxing on Ken's couch or stealing Ken's food like he owns the place. But that's just Daisuke's way.

Oddly perceptive for once, Daisuke scratches his neck as he says, "I just came from dinner with Jun," by way of explanation.

"Oh," I say, then smile. "How is she?"

Honestly, the most impressive part is how mature he's become in regards to his sister. They still bicker and fight, mind you, but they can also sit down for a family dinner without trying to murder each other. Occasionally, the Motomiyas are even sweet.

Right now is not one of those times, though.

Daisuke groans and buries his face in his hand. "She spent the entire time talking about her wedding. Shuu-san only proposed last month, but she's had everything planned since she was six." He peers up at me through spread fingers. "They've been arguing about how realistic her plans are."

I nod as Takeru slides over to my side and wraps an arm around my waist. "Hai, Shuu-san doesn't strike me as the type to want a big wedding." I tear open the Pretz box and pour the contents into the serving bowl in front of me.

Miyako's hand stretches across the counter to grab a couple of the pretzel sticks. "Will Ken not be here?"

I chuckle. Miyako is ever the blunt one.

"Some university assignment," Daisuke says. He shakes his head, though not in answer to her question. "He said he'd be here, though. Shouldn't be too hard to finish quickly. For a genius."

Takeru laughs, his side shaking against mine. "Ken hasn't been a genius in years."

Most of Ken's intelligence was exponentially expanded by the Dark Seed, but even still, he's one of the most intelligent Chosen Children. I can never decide who comes out first between him, Miyako, and Koushiro.

But the dark look that crosses Daisuke's usually warm eyes says he has fundamental disagreements with Takeru's statement.

Another knock sounds at the door, and Takeru presses a kiss to my hair before slipping from the kitchen.

I flash a smile. "Why don't you guys pick out a movie while I grab us drinks?"

Without argument, Daisuke and Miyako push away from the counter, and I go over the snacks one last time to make sure I haven't forgotten anything before opening the fridge.

No, the argument doesn't start until Daisuke and Miyako are actually in the living room, trying to agree on a movie.

They never could agree on anything.

Takeru emerges from the entryway with Iori, and per usual, Iori offers me a small smile. "Thanks for hosting again," he says, inclining his head.

I grin. "We love having you guys over."

A sharp yell comes from the living room.

"Yeah," Takeru says after a chuckle, "after all, it's so quiet without company."

The intense look that crosses Iori's face says he'd prefer the quiet, but he happily accepts a drink before heading into the living room as well.

"Should we wait for Ken?" I ask, shooting an apprehensive look at Takeru.

He steps closer and presses a kiss to my lips. "You know Daisuke's going to insist we do."

I sigh. "And the moment Ken arrives and sees that we waited for him, he's going to apologize until someone convinces him to stop."

Takeru snorts.

He knows as well as I do that that someone will be Daisuke. Those two boys were practically inseparable at eleven, and nearly eight years later, that hasn't changed in the slightest. If there's anyone who isn't afraid to tell Ken to shut his self-deprecating trap and accept our friendship with open arms, it's Daisuke.

Even still, there's no sign of Ken for at least twenty minutes.

Not that that slows down Daisuke and Miyako's arguing. Or how much the rest of us want a pair of earplugs.

I frown when I check the clock again.

Perhaps he lost track of time while working on his assignment. Ken can, at times, be a perfectionist.

But right when Takeru is about to make his third attempt to stop the bickering, there's someone at the door.

I move quickly, eager to get away from the yelling and to make sure it's actually Ken.

When I open the door, he stands on the stoop, his hands deep in his jacket pockets and his face buried in the silky gray scarf—which is wrapped around his neck at least three times. It can't possibly be that cold outside.

"Hey, Ken, you're just in time." I step aside so he can come in. "We were just about to strangle Daisuke and Miyako and pick our own movie."

Ken laughs, but it sounds strangled, and for a moment, he hovers outside the door. Is he trying to decide between coming inside and bolting?

"Come on in," I say slowly.

At last, he steps over the threshold, but he's jittery, his movements uneven. This is more flustered and uncomfortable than he's been around the rest of us in eight years.

The mass of scarf at his neck probably doesn't help with that either.

I slide the door shut and press him in a short hug, hoping I can reassure him, help set him at ease. "Come on, Ken. Get comfortable."

"Right." He nods stiffly, and slowly, he unzips his jacket and hangs it by the door. He hesitates a long moment then, one hand clutching the scarf at his throat, and then he uncoils it enough that it's no longer suffocating but keeps it firmly around his neck.

"We've got snacks out," I say in a quiet voice. "You hungry? Thirsty? What do you want to drink?"

In the living room, the rising voices echo through the apartment.

Ken follows me toward the group. "Maybe some coconut water?" he suggests in a quiet voice.

I nod.

But any further conversation halts the moment the living room comes into view.

"Keeeeeennn!" Daisuke's high-pitched whine fills the air—equal parts amusing and annoying. "Thank god you're here. I need someone on my side, dammit."

Almost immediately, Ken relaxes enough to roll his eyes. "What are the options this time, Motomiya?"

A frown tugs at my lips as I turn and open the fridge to grab a coconut water.

We've all graduated high school now—well, aside from Iori, who's a junior this year—and Ken and Daisuke have been best friends practically forever now. But the only times I've heard Ken call Daisuke by his first name were overheard snippets of private conversation. Any time they're in a public or group setting, it's always Motomiya this and Motomiya that. Even after eight years.

True to form, Daisuke launches into a speech about the mecha movie he chose, all wild gesticulations and upbeat voice, while Miyako huffs behind him, her foot tapping angrily against the floor.

I draw Ken's attention as I set his coconut water on the small table by the couch, but after a grateful smile, his attention darts back to Daisuke's enthusiastic face.

Finally, Miyako can't hold herself back anymore.

"No no no!" she nearly screams, stabbing her finger at Daisuke wildly. "We watched one of your stupid action flicks last time, and I want to watch something fun this time. Something that doesn't end with half the supporting cast dying!"

Daisuke scoffs, barely glancing at her. "Bullshit. You just want to watch a movie where the biggest problem is some generic chick can't decide between her best friend and the cool guy in the leather jacket."

Miyako's gasp is as dramatic as they come. "I'll have you know this is a comedy, and it's cute, and it doesn't even have a love triangle, thank you!"

But he grimaces, turning to her fully. "It's cute?" He casts a glance over his shoulder toward Ken, begging him to join the fray.

His best friend's amusement takes the shape of a serene smile, and Ken considers patiently. "You know, Miyako's right," he says after a moment of silence overtakes the room. "We watched an action movie at our last movie night. Perhaps it's time to choose another genre."

Miyako squeals and launches herself toward the player. In seconds, she pulls out the disk and slips it in.

"Traitor." Daisuke crosses his arms over his chest and glares at his best friend like a petulant child.

Takeru, leaning against the couch armrest, stifles his chuckles, and I slap his knee to keep him quiet.

Ken sends Daisuke a soft smile—one that seems to say, Calm down. You know I'm right.

For a moment, it seems to work.

Daisuke's face settles into an irritable though resigned scowl, and Miyako joins Iori at the other end of the couch, a victorious smirk on her face as she snatches up the remote. She and Iori share quiet conspiratorial whispers and little snickers.

"Thank god that's over," Takeru murmurs, and he leans forward to grab his drink and drops onto the couch beside Miyako—leaving just enough space for me to snuggle into his side.

But even as the disk loads in the machine and cycles through quiet logos and copyright warnings, Daisuke and Ken are still standing in the middle of the room, blocking the television, having some sort of silent stand-off.

Then, Daisuke cocks his head. "Why're you still wearing your scarf?"

The tension in the room quickly rears its head, and I freeze before I can join the others on the couch.

Ken opens and closes his mouth like a fish, desperate for air.

When he receives no response, Daisuke leans closer with a frown. "Take it off."

"N-no…" Ken stutters, stumbling back a step. "I like it. I want to wear it."

Daisuke just shakes his head and waves away his best friend's excuses. "Take it off, Ken. You look ridiculous wearing that in here."

"No," he insists, shaking his head.

With a scowl, Daisuke crosses the distance between them and tugs at the gray scarf. "Stop being weird. If you're not going to take it off, I will."

"Motomiya…"

The word is a warning, quiet but firm, but Daisuke blazes right past it, untangling the massive scarf, and Ken does nothing to prevent him.

When at last the scarf's out of the way, crumpled into a bundle in Daisuke's arms, it's apparent why Ken didn't want to take off the protective material. His face, pale as always, flushes at the sudden attention, but the pink of his cheeks is nothing compared to the harsh red-brown bruise on his neck, just above the collarbone.

The room is silent.

Until, finally, the disk reaches the menu and starts blasting upbeat pop music into the living room.

Miyako fumbles with the remote to turn down the volume.

The spell's broken.

Daisuke leans closer, a smirk on his lips. "Say, Ichijouji, how'd you get that huge hickey?"

If possible, Ken's flush deepens.

"What have you been doing in your free time?" Daisuke's smirk turns particularly devious. "Who have you been doing?"

Despite the awkward and uncomfortable air to the room, I can't help but wonder too.

In our eight years of friendship, Ken's never had more than a date or two here and there, and none of them turned into anything more. Honestly, he's never seemed particularly interested in anyone, and he's never talked about potential partners the way the rest of us have.

Behind me, Takeru sighs and sits up straighter. "Come on, Daisuke. Don't be mean."

He proceeds as if he hasn't heard a word: "Because it looks like whoever gave you that hickey wants to get to know you better. If you know what I mean." The smirk hasn't disappeared yet, and there are no signs it will soon. "Come on, Ken. You know you can tell me…"

That strikes me as odd.

After so long, it's hard to imagine Ken and Daisuke keeping secrets from each other. Like always, Daisuke's an open book, and he inevitably weasels all of Ken's secrets out into the open—at least between the two of them. Really, by now, Ken knows better than to try to keep secrets from Daisuke. He said as much at our last movie night at his apartment.

But the amused way Daisuke speaks says this doesn't bother him. Strange.

"How long has this been going on?" Daisuke says through a grin. "How long have you been sneaking around and keeping them to yourself?"

Ah.

He's teasing him.

Daisuke knows exactly who Ken's new lover is, and he's teasing his best friend just for the hell of it. Because he knows Ken hasn't gotten up the nerve to tell the rest of us he's seeing someone yet.

"Motomiya," Ken tries again, but his voice quivers.

"They must really like you if they want to mark the great Ichijouji Ken for all the world to see. They must not want to keep your little tryst a secret anymore. Can you imagine how jealous all the girls will be when they learn you're already sharing your bed?" Daisuke says, his words taunting now. "Or were you just so caught up in the heat of the moment that you didn't even realize until the morning? Is he that good?"

My breath hitches.

He.

That's all it takes for Ken to regain his ground and his composure. "No," he snaps, pushing Daisuke away, "he's an ass who doesn't know how to keep his mouth shut. And he cares far more about his pride than the fact that his boyfriend wasn't ready to tell the world yet."

Daisuke scowls and chucks the gray scarf at the floor. "I distinctly remember you saying you didn't want to hide it anymore."

"We agreed to tell them together."

"We're together right now!"

Holy shit.

My legs give way, and I collapse onto the edge of the couch beside Takeru. I don't have to look at the other three to know they're sporting equally shocked looks.

"This is not how it was supposed to go," Ken says, still irritated, but his voice lowers. "We were going to tell them. Using words. In a normal conversation. Not for you to just drop it while bragging about your sexual prowess."

Daisuke grins again. "Yeah, but come on…"

Ken rolls his eyes. "Really, you're a child."

"That would be pedophilia."

His best friend—no, boyfriend—only sighs.

"Come on, Ken," Daisuke says, finally dropping his bravado and his frustration, and steps closer. "You were going to back out again. Just like last time." He reaches for Ken's hand and threads their fingers together when there's no protest. "If I'm proud or bragging, it's because you're completely out of my league. I know how lucky I am, and I don't want to hide. I don't want to hide how I feel about you."

Ken's blush is back again, but this time, it's accompanied by a pleased smile. "I'm not out of your league, Daisuke. Stop thinking like that."

Daisuke only smiles and squeezes his hand. "You wanna try again?"

He gives a short nod.

With a determined sharpness in his eyes, Daisuke turns to us, tugging Ken close and tucking him under his arm. "Hey, guys…"

"Hi?" Takeru murmurs uncertainly.

On his other side, Miyako releases a strangled greeting, indecipherable.

"We're together," Daisuke says, his words firm and final, leaving no room for argument. "A couple."

"We've been together for two and a half months," Ken adds, his voice softer, uncertain, his eyes unable to meet ours. "We've been…I've been trying to work up to telling you for a while now."

But Daisuke squeezes him again. "We," he corrects.

Ken meets his gaze, then nods. "We."

For a long moment, they stare at each other in silence.

Then, the couch starts shaking as Takeru bursts into laughter, bending forward to bury his face in his hands, laughing uncontrollably.

We turns to him sharply, and I lay a hand on his shoulder with a frown.

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry," Takeru says, forcing the words through his laughter. "I'm not laughing at you guys, I promise. This is just so uncomfortable." As his chuckles faded, he pushes himself up to look at them again and says, "Seriously, though, I'm really happy for you two."

At the other end of the couch, Iori clears his throat. "Yes. Congratulations."

Between the two boys, Miyako straightens and finally manages to get her voice back. "When did this happen? How the hell did this happen? Tell us everything!"

And I simply smile at the two best friends turned boyfriends as Daisuke launches into an overzealous explanation of how their relationship changed. As always, his hand movements are wild and exaggerated, though one side is decidedly tamer than the other. Because he refuses to release Ken's hand.

Every once in a while, Ken shoots him a sharp look, a warning to keep Daisuke on point—perhaps a warning to veer away from certain details.

Probably details pertaining to Daisuke's supposed sexual prowess. Not that Ken disagreed with that assessment. Actually, Ken was the one who used the phrase in the first place.

I fight to keep the grimace off my face.

Best not to dwell on that thought too long.

#fanfiction #digimon #daisuke motomiya #ken ichijouji #tumblr prompt #fanfic #fluff #not enough daiken in the world dammit #hikari yagami #takeru takaishi #miyako inoue #takari #digimon 02 #digimon fanfiction #digi fic #my fanfiction #daiken #anatui #anatui writes

[fyeah-bangtan7]

The Greatest Showmen: An exclusive look inside the world of BTS

Maybe you saw them piled on the klieg-lit couches of Ellen DeGeneres and Jimmy Fallon, trading light bilingual banter with their starstruck hosts. Maybe it was when they spoke solemnly on mental health and self-love at the United Nations General Assembly last September, or when a wall of dolphin-like screams greeted them as they rolled into February’s Grammy Awards in trim matching tuxedos, their hair tinted various shades of pastel macaron.

Or maybe the cover of this magazine is the first time you’ve truly noticed BTS. (Stranger things have happened in 2019.) But it seems indisputable to say that sometime over the past two years, the septet have taken over the world: two No. 1 albums on the Billboard chart in the span of three months; more than 5 billion streams combined on Apple Music and Spotify; a string of sold-out concert dates from the Staples Center in Los Angeles to London’s famed Wembley Stadium.

That hardly makes them the first boy band to dominate a cultural moment, but the fact that they are all Korean-born and -raised, singing Korean-language songs only occasionally sprinkled with English, feels like something brand-new. And it speaks to an unprecedented kind of global currency — one where pop music moves without barriers or borders, even as geopolitics seem to retreat further behind hard lines and high walls.

On a blindingly bright March day in Seoul five weeks before the release of their upcoming sixth EP, Map of the Soul: Persona, the band is holed up at their record label Big Hit Entertainment, preparing. Buildings like this are where much of the magic of the phenomenon known as K-pop happens, though Big Hit’s headquarters on a quiet side street in the city’s Gangnam district (yes, the same one Psy sang about in his 2012 smash “Gangnam Style”) look a lot like any other tech office: sleek poured-cement corridors and glass-box conference rooms scattered with well-stocked mini-fridges, plush toys, and the occasional beanbag chair. Only a display case stacked with a truly staggering number of sales plaques and statuettes, and a glossy large-scale photo print of BTS at their sold-out concert at New York’s Citi Field last October, give away the business they do here.

Down a long hallway, all seven members lounge in various states of readiness as they gear up to pretape a thank-you video for an iHeartRadio award they won’t be able to accept in person. Jimin, bleached blond and pillow-lipped, is having his hair carefully flat-ironed in a wardrobe room filled with racks of coordinated denim and neon streetwear. Dozens of pairs of pristine Nikes and Converse are piled in a corner; a lone fun-fur jacket the color of strawberry ice cream slumps on a hanger behind him, like a neglected Fraggle.

Jung Kook, the baby of the band at 21, sits obediently in a folding chair in the dance studio, also having his hair tended to; J-Hope strides by in a white dress shirt emblazoned with an over-size silk-screen of Bart Simpson, then grins and disappears. Suga, V, and Jin huddle together on low sofas next door, scrolling through their phones and occasionally singing fragments of American R&B star Khalid’s “My Bad.” Twenty-four-year-old RM, the group’s de facto leader and lone fluent English speaker, is the last to arrive.

They run through their speech for a camera crew and do maybe four or five takes until the director is satisfied. Then they settle in for a conversation in an airy break room upstairs, accompanied by their longtime translator, a large, amiable bald man in a business suit named John. (Unless noted, the answers of all members other than RM come through him.) Several weeks after returning from their first Grammys, they’re still riding high off the experience: presenting the award to H.E.R. for Best R&B Album; chatting with Shawn Mendes in the men’s room — “I was like, ‘Do I need to tell him who I am?’ ” Jimin remembers, “but then he said hello first, which was really nice” — and being seated only a sequin’s throw from Dolly Parton. (“She was right there in front of us!” marvels Jung Kook. “Amazing.”)

As happily dazzled as they still seem to be by other celebrities, seeing BTS in the flesh triggers the same disorienting but not unpleasant sense of unreality. On screen, the band can look disconcertingly pretty; avatars of a sort of poreless, almost postgender beauty who seem to exist inside their own real-life Snapchat filters. In person they’re still ridiculously good-looking, but in a much more relatable, boyish way: bangs mussed, even the occasional chapped lip or small (okay, minuscule) blemish. Take away their Balenciaga high-tops and the discreet double Cs of Chanel jewelry, and they could almost be the cute college guy next to you at the coffee shop or on the train.

Except riding public transportation or casually dropping into a Starbucks stopped being an option for BTS a long time ago. In Seoul, their faces are plastered across makeup kiosks and street signs and the sides of buses — even on massive digital billboards that are bought and paid for by private citizens to acknowledge a beloved member’s birthday, or just because. In cities like São Paulo and Tokyo and Paris, fans camp out days in advance for concerts and public appearances, obsessively trading trivia and rumored sightings. When the band posted their takethis link opens in a new tab on Drake’s #InMyFeelingsChallenge, it became the most liked tweet of 2018; this summer, Mattel will release an official line of BTS dolls.

In the still center of this bizarre fame hurricane, the boys have managed to find a few pockets of normalcy. Jimin wistfully recalls a time in Chicago when they were able to slip out of their hotel rooms undetected “late at night, just to get some fresh air.” But most places, he admits, “that’s really out of the question” unless they split into smaller groups. “I mean, look at us,” RM adds with a laugh, running a hand through his own silver-nickel bangs. “Seven boys with dyed hair! It’s really too much.”

Instead, they focus on the things they can do, like sneaking out to the movies (“Always the latest or earliest show,” says RM, if they want to stay unseen), shopping online (V loves eBay, especially for clothes), going fishing, playing StarCraft at home. Group housing is actually common for K-pop stars, and BTS seem to appreciate the shared stability: “We’ve been living together for a while now, almost eight, nine years,” says Jimin. “So in the beginning we had a lot of arguments and conflicts. But we’ve reached the point where we can communicate wordlessly, basically just by watching each other and reading the expressions.”

Though they’re unfailingly polite and attentive in interviews, there’s a certain amount of contained chaos when they’re all together — a sort of tumbling-puppy cyclone of playful shoves, back slaps, and complicated handshakes — but also a surprising, endearing sweetness to the way they treat one another in quieter moments. When a question is posed to the group, they work hard to make sure each one of them is heard, and if someone is struggling to find a word, they’ll quickly reach out for a reassuring knee pat or side hug.

Even with the language barrier of speaking to an American reporter, though, their individual personalities quickly start to emerge: Asked to name their earliest pop memories, the answers land all over the map. “I loved Pussycat Dolls’ ‘Stickwitu,’ ’’ says J-Hope, the group’s most accomplished dancer, snapping his fingers and cooing the chorus. For RM, who started out in Seoul’s underground rap scene, it’s Eminem’s “Lose Yourself.” (“I think that’s, like, a life pick for so many people around the world,” he admits, “but I can’t forget when I first watched 8 Mile and heard the guitars. That was my turning point.”) For Jung Kook, who has released covers of Justin Bieber and Troye Sivan songs, it was Richard Marx’s deathless lite-FM ballad “Now and Forever.”

The soft-spoken Suga cites John Lennon’s “Imagine” as “the first song I fell in love with,” which feels like a fitting gateway to ask where BTS see themselves in the pantheon of musical heartthrobs that the Fab Four essentially invented. “Sometimes it feels really embarrassing when someone calls us a 21st-century Beatles or something like that,” RM concedes. “But if they want to call us a boy band, then we’re a boy band. If they want to call us a boy group, we’re a boy group. If they want to call us K-pop, then we’re cool with K-pop.”

Ah, K-pop. In South Korea, where the genre has become not just a prime cultural commodity but a multibillion-dollar export, the players, known as “idols,” go through rigorous Fame-style schooling in song and dance and media training that often goes on for years before they’re considered ready for the spotlight. And it’s paid off: Business has been booming since the early ’90s, with stars from Girls’ Generation to G-Dragoncrossing over to various markets across Asia, Europe, and the Americas. But while the sound has remained fairly consistent — a canny mix of club-ready beats, hyper-sweetened choruses, and the more urban inflections of Western hip-hop and R&B — it’s never before landed with the lightning-bolt impact of BTS.

Bang Si-Hyuk, the CEO and founder of Big Hit, began putting the band together in 2010, when all the members were in their tweens or teens: RM and Suga were coming up on the local rap scene; Jimin and J-Hope studied dance at performing-arts schools; V, who focused on singing early on, joined officially in 2013. Jin was an aspiring actor recruited off the street for his striking looks; Jung Kook, now the group’s main vocalist, joined while he was still in junior high.

Though fansites tend to lean on their extracurricular differences (Jung Kook is a Virgo who loves pizza! V collects ties and clenches his teeth in his sleep!), each member genuinely does hold a unique space in the group’s process, whether it’s leaning more toward production, lyrics, or the supersize hooks the songs rest on. “With seven members we have seven different tastes, of course,” says RM. “So when it comes to songwriting, it’s like a big competition.” Occasionally, adds J-Hope, “we’ll write a lyric and decide, ‘This sort of reflects me [more], who I am and my own color,’ so we’ll want to keep that for a solo song.”

Because Big Hit doesn’t restrict their right to funnel some ideas into side projects — and because the appetite for more BTS-sourced material online is seemingly unquenchable — members regularly release solo work through EPs, SoundCloud, and mixtapes. But the primary impact still comes through the official album releases, and the particularly weighty subjects those songs take on — a notable departure from the narrow, often strenuously upbeat topics other K-pop artists typically cover.

“I promised the members from the very beginning that BTS’ music must come from their own stories,” says Bang; their subsequent openness about their own struggles with depression, self-doubt, and the pressure to conform took them all the way to the U.N. last fall, where RM addressed the band’s Love Myself campaign and #ENDviolence youth partnership with UNICEF.

“They stand out,” says Japanese-American DJ and producer Steve Aoki, a top-selling global dance artist who has also collaborated with the band on several tracks. “And I’m not just talking about K-pop. They add so much of their personality to the music and into their stories and how they present themselves. And the world has fallen in love with them because they are showing that vulnerable side that everyone wants to see.”

It helps, too, that the group’s more pointed messages are often slipped into the sticky aural peanut butter of anthems like “No More Dream,” “Dope,” and “Am I Wrong.” But they always appreciate the chance, Suga says, to get “a little more raw, a little more open.” RM elaborates: “I think it’s an endless dilemma for every artist, how much we should be frank and honest. But we try to reveal ourselves as much as we can.”

Honesty has its limits, of course, when you’re the biggest band in the world. Asked to describe the new album, due April 12 (at press time, it had already hit over 2.5 million in preorders), members offer up cryptic but enthusiastic koans like “therapeutic” and “refreshing crispness.” To be fair, they can’t say much in part because the new album’s track list isn’t actually finalized yet — late decisions being a luxury of in-house production — though they do agree to play one song, a propulsive rap-heavy banger called “Intro: Persona.” (It was released as a teaser March 27; you can watch the video herethis link opens in a new tab.)

When it comes to more personal questions about the challenges of dating or the goals they might want to pursue post-BTS, they pivot so gracefully to evasive, nonspecific answers, you almost can’t help but be impressed; it’s like watching a diplomat ice-dance. They want you to know that they are incredibly grateful for the devotion of their fans, and so blessed to be exactly where they are; that they really don’t think in terms of five- or 10-year plans. But they turn reflective when the subject of American pop’s holy grail, the Hot 100 singles chart, is raised. They cracked the top 10 last year with “Fake Love” but have yet to reach a higher spot, largely because mainstream radio airplay—a huge component of Hot 100 domination—still eludes them Stateside.

“It will have to be a great song,” Suga acknowledges, “but also there’s a whole strategy that’s associated with getting all the way up. And then there has to be a measure of luck, obviously. So what’s important for us is just to make good music and good performances and have those elements come together.” Does a Spanish-language smash like 2017’s “Despacito” — which spent a record 16 weeks at No. 1 — make them more optimistic about their own odds? “You know, Latin pop has its own Grammys in America, and it’s quite different,” RM says thoughtfully. “I don’t want to compare, but I think it’s even harder as an Asian group. A Hot 100 and a Grammy nomination, these are our goals. But they’re just goals — we don’t want to change our identity or our genuineness to get the number one. Like if we sing suddenly in full English, and change all these other things, then that’s not BTS. We’ll do everything, we’ll try. But if we couldn’t get number one or number five, that’s okay.”

Aoki, for one, has faith they’ll get there. “I think it’s 100 percent possible that a song sung entirely in Korean could crack the top of the Hot 100. I firmly believe that, and I really firmly believe that BTS can be the group that can do that. It’s going to pave the way for a lot of other groups, which they’ve already been doing—and when that happens, we’re all gonna celebrate.”

Back at Big Hit, though, the band has more immediate work to do. RM offers a quick tour of his production room (each member has his own dedicated space on site). The door outside is guarded by a quirky assemblage of figurines by the renowned street artist Kaws, but inside feels, incongruously, like stepping into a tiny, luxurious Sundance lodge that also just happens to have a soundboard: There’s a beautiful coffee table made from a single piece of black walnut; Navajo-style rugs; tasteful art on the walls. RM talks easily about his admiration for producers like Zedd and the Neptunes (“Pharrell Williams and Chad Hugo were my true idols in 2006, 2007. Pharrell’s voice! It’s so sexy, how he sings”), and plays down his own skills (“As a beatmaker, Suga is way better than me. I don’t even know how to play the piano — I just do the chords like this,” he insists, miming keyboard Muppet hands).

Then it’s back to the dance studio, where they’ve changed into track pants and T-shirts to run through new steps with a choreographer. It starts with a rough triangle formation, and an elaborate hip-swivel-into-pelvic-thrust/crotch-grab combo that actually plays much more innocently than it sounds, mostly because they keep stopping to crack each other up. Soon, though, they drill down — repeating the moves until they seem crisp but easy, almost an afterthought. It feels like time to leave them; the boys wave happily, shouting out a rowdy chorus of goodbyes. Then they turn back to the mirror, and keep dancing.

#bangtan #jimin #jungkook #v #suga #jhope #jin #rm #o:interview #190328

[th3h0unds0fl0v3]

I. Extra Credit

Every Tuesday and Thursday morning, during the Spring semester of my sophomore year of college, my two roommates and I would walk a mile from the apartment we shared, where water often streamed out of the kitchen light into a bucket below, to the immaculate gym run by our university where we were taking a meditation class. The lead-up to this class often involved us smoking cigarettes and recounting jokes from some stoned stupor that led us to sleep the night before, always lamenting on how we would get to sleep much earlier next time.

Halfway through the course, one of my roommates dropped the class, citing his insomnia and a bitter hatred for our instructor, who was undeniably irritating, yet occasionally comforting in a subversive way. Despite his protests, I was adamant about taking the class; adamant about how much the watered-down meditation from my childhood karate classes helped me with the emotional ripples of my parents’ divorce and perhaps it would help even out the depressed moods we all wavered in and out of during this time.

I don’t really have any specific memories of the class, other than an exercise where, in order to help us become comfortable with discomfort, I told an incredibly hot, straight, and muscular hockey player that I didn’t like his hair (I actually did like his hair, and often would drift away during class imagining having sex with him!). He replied by telling me I should cut my toenails before coming to class (he was right, I hadn’t cut them in quite a bit as, at this time of my life, certain tasks like cutting my toenails always fell into the entirely-simple-yet-overwhelming bin-of-tasks in my head).

My other roommate and I often joke about how we were too exhausted from the demands of our over-committed schedules to properly absorb any information other than sordid fantasies involving hot guys in our class. And yet, we stuck with it for some reason. 

During this particular semester, I was taking too many classes and working too much and generally coming undone under the weight of perfectionism. In hindsight, I realize I leaned into perfectionism as a means to distract from my sexuality; the “If I Do Everything Else Perfectly, then No One Will Care That I Can’t Stop Thinking About That Hockey Player Slapping My Ass” Syndrome, or, the Best Little Boy in the World Theory, as Andrew Tobias labeled it, less crassly. The idea that gay men, after absorbing the world’s homophobia during their formative years, try to out-do their heterosexual counterparts in all aspects of life so that their sexuality is the last thing people will care about. This theory was first coined in 1973 (pre-AIDS crisis, pre-marriage equality, pre-PrEP, etc.) when society was much less accepting of (particularly) the white-cis-upper-middle class brand of homoesexuality that both Tobias and myself are representative of, as compared to present day. 

However, the impact that coming of age through the 90s and early-aughts still was deleterious on my self-worth and certainly impacted my actions leading up to, and within college. During my high school years, alone, I watched Democratic politicians win public office on anti-gay policy platforms. I witnessed college students at Rutgers University, less than 10-miles from my high school, cause Tyler Clementi’s death by suicide after live-streaming a sexual encounter with a male student on Twitter. I grew up being called a faggot, a fairy, accused of having AIDS, on a regular basis. And while American society was inching its way closer towards some semblance of equality, I still found myself, a sophomore in college, sorting through all the filth that the world had fed me.

There was one day after my meditation class, however, where I felt like I benefited from the (wildly appropriated, poorly instructed) meditation that I was trying to learn. I obtained a sense of clarity and presence that assisted me in attending my four classes, my customer service job at a luxury cupcake shop, my volunteer hours at a preschool, followed by hours of homework in the library. I was never able to duplicate this throughout the rest of the semester, as the class became another thing that I had to do, absorbing the bullet points of meditation and mindfulness at the highest level so that I could talk about it to people at parties, while projecting the image of being well-rounded, well-adjusted, and stable, when at the end of the day I felt like none of these things. Instead, I would lean on the vices that seem ordinary and normal to anyone that attended a residential college, to escape the never-ending pressure that characterized my life at the time. 

My off-campus apartment was the perfect place to gather and boomerang conversations between stoned banter and attempts to answer the questions of our existence while stuffing our dilapidated balcony full of friends and acquaintances, alike, as we passed around countless joints and cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon. None of us were remotely religious, but we would occasionally fall into these discussions that alluded to the idea that there is a greater something, somewhere that governs some aspect of something. In our anxiety-filled present (i.e., succeeding in college, understanding our identities of gender and sexuality, carving out lives away from our families, our hometowns) in post-recession America, these answers seeking, pot-filled nights felt urgent to our survival.

***

Every once in a while, I get this burning sensation in my feet that tells me I am feeling terribly sad for something that has passed by and will never return. I used to be terribly nostalgic all the time, until I read somewhere (Twitter) that nostalgia is a sign that you are unsatisfied with your present. Of course, being that it was Twitter, I took that information in and scrolled by it, without even the slightest attempt to add nuance or depth to the idea. It has been about eight years since these days, and five-years, to the day, since I graduated college. My life finally feels stable and predictable, which, if you had told a younger version of myself this, I would have scoffed at the idea, telling you that I would never let myself settle into a routine. 

At this point in college, I was really indignant about almost every aspect of my life, yet saw myself as someone that was bravely, adventurously marching out of the landscape of homophobia that characterized suburban America in the 1990s and early 2000s, while creating a bold, new life.

My conscious-self believed that proximity and saying “Fuck That Part of My Life” would lead to healing, while my subconscious dealt with all of the anger and rage that I turned inward. But who cared, right? I was able to portray myself as someone who didn’t think about all of that shit anymore, someone who was so much better off without the world that crafted me, as someone who had truly moved on, even if I was still weathering that unrelenting storm within.

In reflecting on sophomore-year-of-college-me, now, I feel almost no nostalgia for his life, and a lot more sadness. Under that guise of self-assuredness, he was a nervous wreck most of the time. He spent a lot of time being mad and scared and ashamed to the point where he couldn’t really speak with any certainty about where he fit in the world. He was lucky, though. He worked hard, and he was smart and curious. He began to build friendships that would transform him and provide genuine care. But he was lost in a world that required him to hold in so much pain and uncertainty. 

This was early 2013, so our smartphones hadn’t completely filled with the apps that would make us connect with each other at a near-constant rate. Instagram’s filters were still oversaturated and grainy, I didn’t quite understand how Twitter worked, and I thought I would get murdered if I downloaded Grindr. I felt relatively protected from my past which enabled me to carve out a world where I wasn’t obsessed with what my high school classmates thought of me, a world where I wasn’t imagining what my Instagram account looked like to a guy I slept with once, a world where I could take my life one day and weekend at a time,  where I would continue to push the bounds of myself, where my 18-year old self wouldn’t recognize my 20-year old self and it felt like a good thing. I found myself in that sweet middle point of college when everything felt smooth and creamy. High school was becoming a vignette-like memory, something that happened to someone who resembled me in a movie, yet adulthood felt a ways away.

Through this time period, I began to think a lot more about the institutions of education, work, class, and how they informed my identity. I started to theorize that these structures can be tailored to what matches your expression at the given moment; that I don’t need to punish myself with perfection, striving towards the traditional metrics that indicate success in our society, and instead trust the my own facilities will inherently provide for my basic human needs - food, shelter, human connection - while also allowing me to access a higher level of self-actualization.

I can articulate a lot of this with the hindsight of eight years, and many conversations with people that are much smarter than me. I realize, now, that this was a deeper rejection of how these institutions aim to serve capitalism, urge us closer to a societal goal of being a “contributing” member of society, which is typically feeding the economy through high-powered work within a corporation, while striving towards a long-term monogamous (straight-seeming, if you are not straight) relationship, and a moderate-to-liberal sense of “giving back” through occasional charity work, such as a company 5K for a good cause. 

Meanwhile, the higher education machine and its denizens dissuaded me from learning for the purpose of learning, and instead, encouraged learning to gain marketable skills that would allow me to earn a lot of corporate-machine money, which I would hopefully funnel back to the school to build another enormous, state-of-the art gym, or luxury apartments for another set of students to learn about how to earn a lot of corporate-machine money so that the machine becomes entirely self-sustaining through perpetuating big money and class privilege. 

And while my penchant towards rebellion popped up here and there through the ensuing years, these machines are powerful, and tap into all of the insecurities that might prevent someone from following their inclinations. Shame and fear, brought on by a world that tells you authenticity is unsafe, will go away if you get a job in banking because no one can shame or belittle a person with stock options.

The next eight years of my life would begin to resemble a pendulum. Rocking back and forth, with varying degrees based on how much shame was pipetted into my life. When the shame was in abundance, I would recall the incentives that this big machine shoved down my throat for four years, and begin telling people that I was considering a move into tech or consulting, despite having neither the skills nor the grades required to enter these fields. But when the shame would dissipate, I would recall what I really wanted to do -- I wanted to write, I wanted to build community, I wanted to care for others, I wanted to fight for justice, I wanted experience outside of the confines of how we are told to experience.

But these machines are so well-designed, engineered to be invisible to the naked eye, working with an efficiency and an ease that allow most of us to contribute to them without our knowledge or consent, and, in many ways, forcing complicity as debt is accumulated through the process of pursuing education. Even if an individual enters this system with barbs that indicate opposition to the machine, the machine will, on average, produce them with $32,731 of subprime debt to repay, forcing them into the classic American dilemma: Sink or Swim. 

These machines tack on debt to the list of basic human needs: shelter, food, human connection, and debt. So, if you entered the system wanting something else, making a lot of money becomes a good option, for a bit of time at least! Then you will go back to what you really wanted to do, right?

Or, you could try to pursue that thing which isn’t as valued by society, and rely on additional credit to purchase food and pay your electric bill. But be careful, don’t make a misstep without a safety net, because one missed payment will be aggregated, again without your informed consent, by private corporations and scrutinized for seven years as you try to access basic human needs such as housing, and in some jurisdictions, employment. 

As I graduated from college, I chose the ladder pathway, and I bottomed out quickly. One day my bank account read $-325.00 when I forgot to postpone my car payment, with a week left to go until I was paid again from my non-profit job. Neither one of my parents were able or willing to support me financially, so I drove Lyft until I was able to bring my account out of the negative, knowing that I would have no way to fill up my gas tank if it burned empty. 

The stress during these days was physically painful. I was so ashamed of where I had ended up, after years of convincing people that I was so special, so destined to be something great. I added blame to the list of things we need to do to sustain our lives: bathe yourself, feed yourself, get some exercise, blame yourself for your condition, sleep, and do it all again tomorrow.

I hate to rely on aphorisms that allude to some greater power which forces people to suffer or endure diversions while trying to keep their focus on a desire or a goal, so I will not say that I am grateful for these experiences and I will not say that I experienced these things for a reason. Pursuing higher education in America was made deliberately expensive by Ronald Regan, and costs continue to rise due to competition among institutions of higher learning which goes unchecked. Homophobia forced me to try to perform as a means of protection, which in turn gave me an anxiety disorder, a nicotine-addiction, and a host of other unhealthy coping mechanisms that I am sorting through now. None of these things need to exist and no one needs to suffer, as all they did was exactly what the instructions called for.

And somehow, I have rebelled against these machines, and over the last year or so of my life, I have diligently investigated how to continue to build my own machine. Rejecting capitalism and homophobia and calling out the forces that have left me gasping for breath since graduating college is not novel. I am not the first person to say any of this, and in writing this, I wonder if it is even fucking necessary; if I should just write this out and keep it to myself.

But part of building my own, extraordinary machine, is the acknowledgment that I do have something to fucking say, and I deserve to say it. Above all else, I want to live in a world where people are able to follow their inclinations without considering anything other than their basic human needs. I don’t want these needs to include these massive numbers owned by Nelnet and Sallie Mae and Bank of America and J.P. Morgan Chase and Firstmark. I want them to not strive to own land or property, or accumulate wealth by owning parts of companies, but rather put their energy towards care and community. Does this sound idealistic and ridiculous? Perhaps. Do I sound like I’m crying over the fact that capitalism has not worked out for me? Absolutely fucking not. I am not crying and I am not asking for sympathy. I am angry, and I am asking for solidarity.

Since starting to build my extraordinary machine, I realized that I have already been doing all of the things that I said I wanted to do, but that I never gave myself the space to realize it. I have been writing since I was a little kid, writing stories of female superheroes battling villains who terrorized the little boys who hung out with the girls at recess. I have been building community since I was old enough to build friendships, but especially that semester when I took that meditation class where we used our apartment as a space for friends and friends-of-friends to gather and ponder the world and feel joy. I care for others and fight for justice on a daily fucking basis, and I am never going to stop doing that. And I am slowly, but surely, learning about experience, outside of the confines of how I was told to experience.

Investigation into this last point started in the meditation class, when I tried to learn how to experience my life without constant, debilitating anxiety, and it continued on, over the last couple of years as I drew the plans for my extraordinary machine. I haven’t worked all the kinks out, by any means, but I have some examples and experiences to share. Like I said, none of this is groundbreaking, or innovative, and I feel an intense fear in putting these things down. But, this is my truth, a concept I have had a tenuous relationship with throughout most of my adult life. Part of revising my concept of experience, must come with understanding that accounting for the truth is not meant to result in a label of good or bad or right or wrong or beneficial or toxic, but rather exactly what it is. 

An honest description, an objective accounting, a set of instructions, and a reflection of the present, so that I can enter my future with a little more flexibility, a little more unwound.