#& gel dust would wear even more patterns and such but he’s pretty much the same | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

fucking-zawa-sensei · 4 years

Text

Opulence - erasermic fanfic

Title: Opulence

Pairing: erasermic

Rating: Explicit

WC: 9k+

Summary:

When they’re done, when Hizashi is finally, finally laid bare and beautiful across their sheets, still shimmering and sparkling and flushed a delicious pink, the blond is breathing heavily, sweat drops gathering along his hairline and in the ridges of his collarbones.

He looks absolutely filthy in the best kind of way.

Notes: An incredibly late birthday gift for my friend, @rootistabootus(it has been 4 months girl I am so sorry), who can always make me smile any day, any time, who sends me the best memes, who supports my love for characters she doesn’t even know, who is quite possibly one of the bubbliest, most positive people I have ever met. Who makes me feel like I can do anything, who inspires me to create and take risks and stop letting fear dictate my life. She’s selfless and one of the hardest workers I have ever met. Her optimism is fierce and strong and makes me think that anything is possible. Thank you for always being there for me and making my life that much brighter. You are an actual piece of sunshine fallen down to Earth and I am happy to have the opportunity to bask in your endless warmth. I love you!

Read full fic here on AO3

Opulence

It was a normal occurrence, something that happened probably once a month at least.

Hizashi would come home, door swinging open and caught just before smacking into the opposing wall, the telltale clack of expensive heels giving away that this wasn’t a post-patrol late night entrance. His costume boots sounded the way all heroes’ did: like nothing at all.

Underground or not, every hero needed to be capable of stealth when the situation called for it.

With villains who had guns for fingers and steel wire hair, the situation often called for it.

Hizashi rarely dressed up for the studio either, unless he had a celebrity guest joining him on air. Shouta still remembers the glittery gold suit pants Hizashi wore when his favorite DJ was in town. It was hard to forget, with the way they threw speckles of rainbow light across every surface in their bedroom each time Hizashi opened the closet on the rare nights when Shouta forgot to pull the blinds shut.

Modeling was something that came with any popular hero’s list of duties, along with interviews, commercials, cameos in movies or TV shows, presentations at hero schools, the list went on.

The more public you were, the more the public wanted you.

Hizashi hadn’t gone the way of selling albums or cologne in magazines. Instead, he’d used his agency’s desire to sell his body in print and pixels to gain himself a spot in the fashion industry, a passion he’d had for as long as Shouta had known him. He once saw the young hero-in-training cutting out swatches of colors and patterns and pasting them inside his notebook, erasing any useful study material beneath.

Not like Hizashi ever needed to study.

Shouta didn’t quite understand the difference between couture and editorial, but he liked the way Hizashi’s smile looked when he ran his fingers over a sequined body suit or a faux fur shrug.

He never paid it much mind when his husband came home from a photoshoot, knowing the first place Hizashi would go was the bathroom to wash off any lingering glue and makeup, working gel and temporary dyes out of his hair. He’d spare a glance, curious to see what the other man had been zipped into that night, Hizashi somehow convincing designers to gift him the outfits more often than not, but that was about it.

Here and there he’d make a comment, a low whistle if it was particularly sexy, something more snide, like, that is not staying here for more than a week, if it was something they both knew Hizashi would never wear outside the house again. Shouta can still remember the great purge of spiked leotards and pointed shoulder jackets they’d been forced to endure last year when they’d run out of room in the closet for their actual clothes.

Tonight is different.

Tonight, as Shouta casts his eyes over his shoulder from where he is spread out on the couch, half-finished book in his hands, he is unable to turn away.

The smirk on Hizashi’s face, as he tilts his head up from where he’s bent down, unlacing the long, knee high black stiletto boots hugging his calves, said he hadn’t expected anything less.

Shouta’s eyes can’t pick one thing to focus on, generously grazing over every curve and dip in Hizashi’s body, all deliciously on display.

Hizashi’s shimmering, gold nails release their hold on the metallic painted laces, his hands running lightly over his knees, and then his fishnet covered thighs, before settling on his hips as the blond straightens into a standing position. He leans back a bit, the way he always did when he was feeling confident and hungry for attention, cocking a hip seductively.

That grin, accented by glimmering, glitter dusted lips, stays in place.

Shouta’s gaze is ravaging his husband.

Tonight, they’d put him in a long sleeved leotard, something Shouta was pretty used to seeing. This time, though, the material was all a shiny, smooth faux leather, with a delectably deep plunge from Hizashi’s collarbones down to just below his navel, his belly button piercing shiny and vibrant like all the other accent pieces to the outfit. Shouta is pretty sure they must have the suit taped over Hizashi’s nipples because there was no way it would be staying in place otherwise.

He also knows for a fact that they didn’t have Hizashi take out his nipple piercings, as the little ball studs were just as prominently on display as the perky flesh they were slipped through.

The whole suit looks like it was engineered to be one size too small, hugging Hizashi’s lean frame like a second skin, accentuating the angles of his hips and the deep V between them, the curve of his biceps as he shifts his arms, even his ass, never particularly all that large, looked plump and delicious with the hall light falling over the tight fabric. It left nothing, absolutely nothing, painstakingly nothing, to the imagination.

Shouta knows before his eyes dare to fall on the space between his husband’s legs that the bulge will be there, but he doesn’t expect Hizashi’s manicured fingers to wind up in his view as well, casually caressing the growing mound as Shouta continues to stare.

As if this wasn’t enough, as if the thought of his husband walking from their apartment’s parking lot and through the lobby in this incredibly sexual outfit wasn’t already getting Shouta’s throat to dry up, whoever designed this shoot had decided to take it a step further.

Hizashi had a natural beauty that was impossible to deny, and a sinful ability to turn on the heat when needed.

So why they’d decided he needed to be slicked up in a shimmery, glittering body oil was beyond Shouta.

As he finally rips his eyes away from the blond’s fingertips, still stroking over his erection as it pulls against the taute fabric, he sees Hizashi’s chest looking dewy in the same way it did in the moments before orgasm. A fierce, unrelenting heat begins pooling quickly in Shouta’s lower belly.

“Like what you-”

“Yes,” Shouta cuts off Hizashi’s teasing words, clichéd and useless. Of course he liked what he saw. Who wouldn’t? The whole point of dressing Hizashi up like this was to make any witless fool who picked up the magazine have to resort to using it to cover themselves up.

Hizashi exhales softly through his nose, one arm coming up, hand moving toward his face, and it all feels like it has slowed down, like each miniscule movement takes one whole rotation of the little hand around the analog clock hanging on the wall next to the kitchen entryway. Shouta watches the way the fabric relentlessly constricts around Hizashi’s body, as his hand runs through his hair, disrupting all those flawlessly smooth locks. They hadn’t styled it in any way tonight, letting it all fly free over the man’s broad shoulders. The golden shine of Hizashi’s hair broke up the predominantly dark outfit nicely. Shouta could see why they’d made the decision, but it certainly isn’t helping the uncomfortable way his jeans are getting tighter by the second. Hizashi lets his hand fall carelessly to his side when he’s done running his fingers through his hair, a few strands getting caught on his lip gloss and his long, fake lashes. Hizashi blinks slowly, eyes downcast, and Shouta doesn’t think it’s possible to get to the bedroom fast enough.

Judging by the way Hizashi’s next breath brings forth a small shudder as he releases it, he’s feeling the exact same way.

Shouta isn’t one to rush anything, though.

He closes his book in one hand, his middle finger still stuck between the pages, and slowly, slowly, leans forward, never breaking eye contact with Hizashi, to set it on the coffee table in front of him. Still bent over, he extracts his finger just as languidly, licking his bottom lip as the digit slips out. Hizashi swallows loud enough for Shouta to hear it from across the room.

“Are you going to take those boots off anytime soon?” Shouta asks, falling back against the couch, sinking lower into the cushions and lazily letting his legs spread wide. He lets one of his hands fall into his lap, just close enough to his crotch to stroke one finger lazily over his growing erection. He rests his head against the cushioned back and tilts it toward Hizashi, wearing a smirk of his own now.

Hizashi might have got him going with his outfit, but Shouta knew exactly how to get the other man just as riled up.

Hizashi hated waiting, and more than that, hated when his pleas for attention went ignored.

Shouta watches as the corner of his husband’s perfectly painted lips twitches. The blond flips his hair over his shoulder, brushing away the pieces that had stuck to his gloss, before sliding his legs and feet out of the high boots. The fishnet stockings go all the way to his toes, as does the body oil, despite never being in the photographs.

Hizashi steps up out of the entrance way, one hand still firmly planted on his hip, and begins sauntering across the hardwood floors like he’s gliding across a runway at fashion week. Each and every step pulls at the tight clothing, the light catching every curve, every dip as he moves, one foot in front of the other, bare thighs rubbing against one another, his hardon pressing up against the leotard, his slicked chest rising and falling with heavy, hot breaths.

The hand not stroking himself through Shouta’s pants is now curled into a fist beside him. Shouta clenches his jaw to stop himself from jumping off the couch as Hizashi finally stops in front of him. The blond’s last step is a powerful stomp that leaves his legs spread wide in a triangle, one hand still firmly planted on his hip, the other comes up to run over his own chest, fingers impossibly sliding beneath the bodysuit. Shouta watches with interest as Hizashi’s fingers make their way to the small bump of his nipple, everything so easily visible despite the fabric. Hizashi’s eyelids slip closed, long lashes caressing his upper cheeks. He throws his head back, letting his mouth pop open, as he pinches and rubs at the sensitive bud. Hizashi lets out a moan that Shouta knows is only half real, is entirely constructed just to get Shouta even more bothered than he already is, but it doesn’t matter.

His mind doesn’t care if Hizashi’s putting on an act.

His mind is hardly there anymore, all the blood gone rushing down to Shouta’s crotch the moment his husband had passed through the door.

So when Hizashi finishes gasping and tilts his head back up to stare down at Shouta, he stops playing games.

Shouta’s hands latch onto that deep plunged neckline and pull.

Hizashi comes all too easily, as if he’d planned the whole thing, as if he knew full well he’d end up straddling Shouta’s lap, their clothed cocks rubbing against each other with each and every panting breath they took.

He probably did.

Shouta doesn’t particularly care if it’s all going to Hizashi’s plan. He’s too busy fastening his mouth to the blond’s throat, kissing and licking over his adam’s apple, his collar bones, his jawline.

An annoying little voice in the back of his mind thinks I hope this oil is edible, but it doesn’t stop him from enjoying the soft, supple feeling of Hizashi’s skin beneath his lips.

It’s made all the more better when one of Hizashi’s hands comes to his chin, pulling his face away from the other man’s collar bone and toward his mouth. He knows when they part he’ll have that glittery lipstick all over his mouth, that they’ll be laughing about it tomorrow morning, still tangled together beneath their sheets. Shouta’s stomach jumps in the same way it does each time he looks outside the school’s windows and across the courtyard to the other side of U.A.’s towering building, where Hizashi and he cross paths during third period, separated by far too many walls and windows and trees, but the other man never failed to send him a large, shining Present Mic grin.

It was the little things that got Shouta’s heart skipping, which brought a light pink flush to the tips of his ears.

Right now, though, his whole body was warm, as Hizashi’s tongue drags him back to the present.

The blond’s thighs tighten around Shouta’s, and Hizashi shifts positions, bringing his chest closer, pressing into Shouta’s, so he can settle his ass over Shouta’s achingly hard cock. He starts grinding on Shouta’s lap, bringing a gasp from his lips. Hizashi hums into their kiss as Shouta’s hands move from the blond’s hips to those two plump cheeks, digging his nails in just hard enough to get a rouse from the other man, but not enough to leave a mark. He never liked bruising Hizashi, though the blond sometimes seemed to enjoy rougher treatment. Shouta didn’t think it was good to have any tender spots on your body when you were a hero, no matter how many times Hizashi insisted no villain was ever going to get close enough to his ass for that to be a problem.

Hizashi’s hands make their way into his hair, curling around Shouta’s wavy, unruly strands. He pulls, just enough to get Shouta moving back, their lips separating, both gasping, panting for air. Hizashi stares down at him, his hips stilling as he catches his breath.

“Y-” Hizashi tries to start, but clearly needs another second. He swallows, takes another breath and says, “You ready to cut me out of this thing?”

Shouta raises an eyebrow, a smirk coming to his lips.

“Are you saying you can’t get out of that yourself?”

Hizashi rolls his eyes, “I’m trying to be sexy, Sho!”

Shouta doesn’t give in.

“I think it would be sexy if you did a little strip tease,” he says, squeezing his hands around Hizashi’s ass cheeks, making the other man jump.

“F-fine,” Hizashi says, an additional blush rising to his face atop the lovely glow that had already formed during their kissing. “I don’t know how they packed me in here and I don’t know how to get out.”

Shouta snorts as Hizashi’s eyes dart away, his lips coming dangerously close to a pout, and Shouta’s heart skips.

Hizashi could come home bare naked and he’d never be more attractive than like this, natural, guard down, no personas or masks or other personalities fighting for attention, just pure Hizashi.

Shouta releases his grip a bit, bringing a hand up Hizashi’s back, rubbing soothingly across the smooth faux-leather. Hizashi’s eyes and mouth soften at the touch, before he leans back in for a less hungry kiss.

This one feels like it lasts too little, but the message it leaves is far more than just lingering, it’s persistent, unending.

I love you.

Hizashi smiles as he pulls back, head titled just enough to the side to make Shouta see him in another time, japanese maple trees framing him, the orange autumn glow shining through their leaves and cascading over Hizashi’s shoulders.

Hizashi’s thumbs brush along Shouta’s scruff covered jaw.

“Bedroom?” Shouta asks on the tail end of a breath he’d been holding for far too long, bringing his hand to Hizashi’s front, finally dipping into the space left bare by the deep plunge neckline, casually playing with the longest jewel that hangs from Hizashi’s belly button piercing. He turns it over between his thumb and forefinger, watching how the lamp light beside the couch plays in all the little rivets of the small stone.

“Please,” Hizashi begs, his hands dropping down to Shouta’s shoulders, squeezing at the same time as he jerks his hips forward just enough to get some friction on his aching cock. They let out matching hums of pleasure and the heat in Shouta’s belly becomes more insistent.

“Then let’s go,” Shouta says, his voice deep.

For how weak his legs feel right now, he still manages to wrap his arms around Hizashi’s back and lift them both out of the chair, the other man quickly crossing his long legs around Shouta’s waist. Even this feels like too much, too similar to all the times Hizashi and he had pressed one another up against one of the many walls of their home, too distracted by the others’ body to make it anywhere near a horizontal surface. Hizashi had always joked it was a double workout, could be counted as training, but the hungry look the blond gave him each time he slipped his thigh between Shouta’s, rubbing up against his crotch before hoisting Shouta up the wall, said keeping in shape was the last thing on Hizashi’s mind.

Admittedly, Shouta gives a couple glances toward the smooth, sturdy surfaces framing their hastened walk as he carries Hizashi down the hall. The other man doesn’t help, doesn’t seem to care at all that Shouta’s hands are digging further and further into that faux leather as Hizashi sucks harshly under his jaw and along his collar where his shirt has been pulled down by Hizashi’s weight.

Read the rest here...

#erasermic #aizawa shouta #eraserhead #present mic #yamada hizashi #erasermic fanfiction

127 notes · View notes

wardencommanderrodimiss · 4 years

Text

Witches, Chapter 17: Blackquill wants to fight an orca; Phoenix wants to fight Blackquill; Athena contains within her a multitude of whale facts.

[Seelie of Kurain Chapter Masterlist] [ao3]

[Witches Chapter Masterlist] [ao3]

----

Phoenix leaves early, tells Trucy he’ll meet her at the courthouse, and stops by the office first. The computer wakes up slowly and when it finally does, it’s as blank as Phoenix left it last night, not a word of assistance or encouragement. So he’s on his own. All right. Fine.

On his way out through the front, he stops. The lid over the piano keys is opened, something lying directly on the keys. His old badge, weighing down the corner of Lotta’s photograph, a snapshot out of time, poorly planned, Phoenix and Larry both jostled about by Maya, and Edgeworth almost smiling at that, and Gumshoe the only one who’s timed it right, with confetti fluttering through the air fallen from his hand. If he squints with the Sight from the right angle and distance, like it’s one of those illusion puzzles, sometimes he’ll see Mia standing to the side, smiling.

“I can take a hint,” he says, setting it back down on the piano. He can’t see her in the photo today, but it’s okay because it being here, not on his desk, and his badge here and not in his desk, means that she’s here, not frozen in a photo. “All right. I get it. I can do it, and I’m not alone.” He has people to help and to keep him in check. He’s not going to lose a second badge.

At the courthouse he smacks himself in the face with cold water, hoping to knock sleep out of his eyes and with it, clear out the dust from eight years of not playing the lead. Athena bounds into the defendant lobby sounding as cheery as ever and announcing that she ran a few laps around the building to get ready, but tired bags hang beneath her eyes and he tells her such when he asks her if she got any sleep. “Do I really look that bad?” she asks, prodding at the skin below her eyes. “I’d better do something about that. Prosecutor Blackquill gives me shit over everything and I can’t leave another opening. Hey, Trucy!” she calls, as the other two members of the agency enter with Pearl. “You don’t happen to have concealer, do you? Or Apollo, do you? I need to look like I actually slept soundly and I’m desperate.”

“Sorry,” Apollo says. “The only cosmetics I use are hair gel.”

“You mean it doesn’t naturally do that?” Pearl gasps. “I thought for sure…”

“Concealer, coming right up!” Trucy produces a round makeup compact from her Magic Panties - she carries those around in a purse and everything that would normally be found in a purse goes into them - and holds it up to Athena’s face. “No, that’s not the right shade. Hold on.” She plunges her hand back into the waistband and pulls out what appears to Phoenix to be pretty much the same, but comparing it against Athena’s skin, Trucy nods, satisfied.

“Since when do you wear makeup?” Phoenix asks. They’ve had talks about this topic. Why is it all so expensive. Why is this a scam industry that breeds insecurities. No I’m not buying you lipstick. You can buy it yourself when you’re much older. Yes I’ll buy you that lip gloss that’s in a narwhal-shaped container. That’s not really makeup.

“I don’t,” Trucy says. “This is old stage show stuff we still had!”

“We” being the Gramaryes, surely. She pats away the dark circles under Athena’s eyes and with a wave, wishes them both luck, and skips off for the gallery with Apollo and Pearl in tow.

Leaving Phoenix to enter behind the bench, chat with this judge for the first time in a year. If he really thinks about it, this judge - this man, he was going to think, but after all these years he’s not really quite sure how to assess what the judge is or isn’t and whether he’s a being that exists in any capacity outside of the courthouse - has seen him at his lowest, to rise as high as he could, and crash again, sink lower than that, and now here he is again. This judge has presided over all three trials where Phoenix has been accused of murder. He saw Phoenix’s first trial and his last and now he’ll see this second first.

He tells Phoenix that standing here as a lawyer makes him look younger. Phoenix thanks him and decides not to mention that it’s definitely shaving that makes him look younger. Might as well just take the compliment, if it’s a compliment, and not another “baby-faced” jab.

“And you look as young as ever, Your Honor,” he replies, and it’s true, really - his face hasn’t changed a bit since Phoenix first met him. No more wrinkles, and no less. Eternal, unchanging, a fixture of the courtroom who Phoenix knows how to work with.

And then there’s the prosecutor. The latest prosecutorial mystery for Phoenix to unravel. Another one to save.

Prosecutor Simon Blackquill has an even more frightening visage staring at him at level across the courtroom, rather than looking down on him from up safe in the gallery. Not that safe isn’t anything but relative when it comes to a man who throws silvery slices of wind with the slash of a finger and whose hawk flaps about as it pleases, but in the gallery Phoenix is just one of a sea of faces merely observing. Down here at the bench? He’s the man who offered to defend an orca, with nowhere to hide and nowhere to run from the man who brought an orca to trial.

Funny how all this works.

Blackquill berates Phoenix for bringing this case to court, never mind that it’s Blackquill who actually brought this to court - and the poor judge got this case late last night and skimmed it and missed the part that the defendant is an orca. But otherwise Blackquill seems - to be taking this seriously? Enough to speech-ify on the fact that they have an orca to be prosecuted here.

“Though she cannot be present in the courtroom, nor speak for herself, we will treat this defendant as any other,” he says, casting a glance toward the screen being set up behind the witness stand; hopefully in a few minutes Sasha will have Orla on video phone, introducing the defendant to the court and perhaps charming then with her cuteness. Phoenix has had enough witnesses try and play cute to turn the judge and gallery against the defense - it’s about time he gets to have that power on his side. “Man or beast, we stand equal with the same value to our souls.” He pauses, eyes narrowing at his own words. The hawk on his shoulder ruffles its feathers. That’s a loaded word, for someone who knows magic: humans have souls, fae don’t, animals don’t, and fae animals certainly don’t. A soul or lack of one is no indication of moral judgment or standing. It’s just an extra piece of the self that can be cut loose and used in magic, and this seems to be what Blackquill is pondering, and his bird getting at, because he amends himself. “To our lives and hearts. Take Taka, as much a person in spirit as the rest of us who stand here today.”

Phoenix would love to know what Taka is, whether it’s just an ordinary bird, a fae creature, or a familiar - Blackquill doesn’t give a hint, and Phoenix doesn’t know what the difference between a fae animal and specifically a familiar looks like. And even if he did he can’t see through Blackquill’s twisted aura to know.

The Twisted Samurai distorts everything around him, that even if Phoenix wants to test his eyes on Athena next to him, he can’t. The courtroom falls into darkness when he tries, inconsistent silver light throwing the colors off where they aren’t inverted. Athena’s wide eyes appear nearly gray, not blue, and her hair dulls similarly; he sees double of her, sometimes, like he’s dazed or cross-eyed. And across the courtroom Blackquill has eyes almost straight white, and nothing else of him the same. His shape twists and breaks like his reflection in a wavy funhouse mirror has been reflected into a rippling pond, his hair changing lengths, his skin all the depth of white tissue paper, veins and blood and bones below, a dead man walking. At his steadiest, his entire body simply trembles at the edges, like energy barely contained in a vessel too small for it, a person held together in a form that doesn’t naturally belong to them; and all of him either stark white or black, and mostly white, patterned like a photonegative of himself.

Phoenix closes his eyes and gives himself a moment to reset and readjust to the regular world that he’ll see when he opens them.

“The question, then,” Blackquill continues, while Athena squints in confusion at Phoenix because he’s been squinting at her with the Sight, “is what one - what our orca, in this case - has done with that life, and how stained and shriveled their heart.”

Then he decides to prove that the greatest monster in the room is him, immediately after the first witness testimony - from Norma DePlume, who is as much of a terror as Phoenix expected, and she and Blackquill as nasty to each other as he could have imagined - when he demands the judge give his verdict, because they’ve heard everything they need to, and, “deliver your judgement so that I may carry out the sentence.”

“Objection! Hold it!” What the fuck! “You aren’t - you aren’t planning on killing Orla yourself, are you?” Beside him, Athena can’t keep her “what the fuck!” contained, or rather Widget warbles it out, and Phoenix really, really wants to know who programmed the robot to say fuck. “Is that what you’re implying—”

Blackquill says nothing, merely smirks, and Phoenix decides that he absolutely, definitely, does not want to actually know the answer. If Edgeworth wants him to defend this man, which he does, that’s not an “if”, Phoenix would rather not think that this case only went to trial because Blackquill wanted to take a literal stab at fighting a whale. He’d like to think it’s because he and Athena and Pearl found some decent proof, reasonable doubt, and because of what Blackquill said there in his opening statement, that animals have value and deserve a fair chance, too.

(Maybe he just said that to get it on the record hoping for reasonable doubt of his own and a fair trial for Taka when that goddamn bird inevitably hauls off and claws someone’s eyes out.)

(Edgeworth didn’t even warn him that Prosecutor Blackquill had a murder bird! Is the logical conclusion that Edgeworth didn’t know about the bird? Points toward fae creature, a la Gavin’s hound, except who the hell is managing to summon any fae anyone in prison? That place is iron for a reason. Or maybe after everything else, Edgeworth figured this is nothing to Phoenix.)

“We have a right to cross-examine!” Athena’s shrill and rightfully indignant cry rings out over a shriek from Taka that sounds like laughter. “We’re always allowed to, you know!”

“I simply hope to spare us all the waste of time that comes as consequence of your methods,” Blackquill replies, directed more at Phoenix than Athena, who like last trial he seems to mostly be ignoring, “and spare you the heartbreak of burning yourself to ash in a fight for a ‘Not Guilty’ you will not win.”

Like yesterday, Phoenix wonders if they’re talking about an orca, or something else. About Blackquill himself, and the task regarding him that Phoenix has been given. Does Blackquill know what Edgeworth has asked of Phoenix? It sort of sounds like he does.

“Okay, but I’m still going to cross-examine,” Phoenix says. And maybe drag it out a little more than usual, just to let Blackquill know he’s not intimidated.

And DePlume likes the sound of her own voice, so maybe they’ll learn something new from her, some piece of information she hadn’t meant to let slip, if they push on her every statement.

What Phoenix learns instead is that Blackquill likes penguins and thinks them the only part of the aquarium actually worth anyone’s time, and apparently no one told DePlume that the victim died of blunt force trauma, not being bitten by the orca. Not that it helps; there’s more security footage than the short looped bit that they saw behind Fulbright’s back, and that does actually show that Orla had the victim in her jaws, and Blackquill can put a good - bad - spin on it. Sure, it wasn’t when the victim was killed, but it certainly was proof of her malicious intent, toying with a corpse like she’s a cat caught the canary - Blackquill stares Athena dead in the eye as he makes that analogy - but not even hungry to eat it, just taking another life between her teeth as a game.

A game, and singing the while she does it. The theory, working from their preliminary autopsy report that Jack Shipley died instantaneously from a brain contusion, is that Orla headbutted him into the glass of the tank. DePlume didn’t see any moment of actual impact - that was what Phoenix saw on the security footage, Orla with her head tipped out of sight behind some tank decorations - but came to the conclusion that this was definitely the exact time of the victim’s death. A conclusion extrapolated from something that Phoenix really, really wishes Sasha had mentioned: a year ago, another orca trainer at Shipshape Aquarium died under such similar circumstances.

DePlume wrote a whole damn book about it. Sasha entirely neglected this critical fact. Phoenix is going to scream. Maybe faint, instead, get just a little wobbly in the knee area, because Blackquill has this all in the palm of his hand, all under control, and what a horrible mess he would make of a jury trial. Start with them biased against him on basis of that tricky little matter, convicted murderer, and end with them swayed however he wants them to, just as he plays the gallery, but they aren’t the ones making the final call.

(Edgeworth fretted often about what a particularly charismatic and manipulative lawyer could do to the jurist system, and Phoenix thought he was worrying over Klavier, his charm, his glamours, his celebrity status. How likely instead that he was concerned with Blackquill, already planning ahead to when he would place him back in court?)

Though if Phoenix is going to faint for any actual reason, it’s the picture that Blackquill has projected up for the court. A page from DePlume’s book, half the sheet taken up by a glossy color photograph of the dead orca trainer - so that’s the kind of writer DePlume is, a sensationalist one, like some others he could name. The unfortunate girl was probably around Sasha’s age; her body lay on the edge of the show pool, water puddling beneath her and dripping from her long dark hair. Her shirt has flowing puffy pirate sleeves in a soft powder blue fabric. Almost the color of Trucy’s show cape, and it’s hard not to think of his daughter, but it’s even harder not to think of someone else wearing that color and killed while performing at her profession. It was a rehearsal, not a live show, when Thalassa died, but—

Reflections, reflections. He keeps running up against familiar faces on the corpses in this case.

“Athena! Phoenix! Please!” Sasha pleads from somewhere out-of-sight, while Orla, centered in the screen, chirrups in confusion, but when she makes sound, she shows off her powerful jaws full of teeth. “Orla didn’t kill anyone! Please, we’re begging for your help!”

Orla waves a flipper, the gravity of the situation not really clear to her.

The trainer who died last year - if Orla really did everything DePlume says, biting and headbutting, they should see marks of that, blood and bruises, and there’s nothing. Logic himself out of fear, that’s right, he can do that - Orla can’t speak, but she understands them, and Sasha in part understands her. Sasha has faith in her. Phoenix has to have faith in Sasha.

“You’d be better off saving your breath, you sad slippery pup.” Blackquill leans forward, elbows on the bench, laughing, and Phoenix really, really does not like that. “Perhaps you did not see his face, but allow me to tell you - when he saw that photograph, he turned even paler than me. You were yourself rather afraid of the orca then, weren’t you, Wright-dono?”

Not enough for him to play the judge and gallery against the defendant, now he’s trying to turn lawyer and client against each other, make them lose faith in the other. How discouraged must Sasha feel, to be told Phoenix is doubting too?

“For shame, to take up the matter of a client who you have neither the courage nor drive to defend, and further crush them under the false hope you’ve given.”

“Nothing about my defense is ‘false’, Prosecutor Blackquill.” Keep his face and voice calm and level, don’t give Blackquill an inch or a twitch to work from. “If you’re hoping for an easy win by talking me into giving up, I assure you, it’s not going to happen. Orla is my client, and I don’t give up on my clients.” Whether or not she can speak to him doesn’t matter. That she’s an orca doesn’t matter. You can never truly know if your client is innocent or not, Mia said once, a very long time ago. And she’s right, and was always right, because even Truth can get subjective and messy, be talked around, and relying wholly on it made him an arrogant idiot. All you can do is fight with everything you have.

And he’s going to. He’s going to do Mia proud, orca or no.

“I see the trust that Sasha has put in Orla, and I respect that.” He sympathizes, after all the nightmarish cases when he’s had to trust someone that no one else would, or trust someone who didn’t even trust himself. “So I’m willing to have faith in Orla, too.”

“Yet you do not know the first thing about orcas, do you?”

“Is that relevant?” Phoenix asks.

He relishes the surprise that grips Blackquill’s features. Time to find out whether the Twisted Samurai, master manipulator, is smart enough to not be taken in by a tactic Phoenix has had seven years to perfect, playing the idiot and being underestimated. If it can’t get him anything about this particular case maybe he’ll learn something more about Blackquill himself that can help Edgeworth.

“Do you know why they are also known as ‘killer whales’?”

What kind of trick question, and how actually relevant—? “Uh, because people have a tendency to fear what they don’t understand, and because they didn’t understand orcas and just saw their teeth, they presumed that these creatures were out to get them too?”

That’s basically a psychology explanation, right? He’s basically working on Athena and Blackquill’s level, in their wheelhouse, now, right?

Blackquill stares at him. One of his eyes twitches. Taka scratches its head. The question is written plainly across his features, the icy stare and the cold scowl: how did you pass the Bar, twice?

Joke’s on him; Phoenix doesn’t know either.

“No,” Blackquill says. “That is not it.”

“It was a good attempt,” Phoenix says, glancing to Athena for confirmation. She shrugs, her teeth pressed together in a failure at forcing a smile, and she sharply sucks in her breath. Okay. Ouch. That noncommittal of an answer is a hell of an answer of itself.

“The reason,” Blackquill says, stressing the word, now acting along the belief that yes, Phoenix is a fucking idiot who needs to be addressed accordingly, “is that they are cunning and merciless predators known to hunt and kill even true whales. They are also known as ‘wolves of the sea’ for that same reason, that they are clever, powerful, and dangerous creatures who hunt in packs.” How, in the midst of going over the case, preparing witnesses, and filling in the gaps of the evidence Fulbright had, did he, from prison, have the time and resources to do this much research on orcas, down to etymology of the name? “Tell me, does that sound innocent to you? Does that not sound like the creature we have here on stand today, and her capacity to so efficiently kill a man before entertaining herself with that corpse?”

So he thinks orcas are smart enough to ascribe malicious intent to, and he’s doing his damndest to convince everyone else of the same. “My goodness,” the judge says. “So they truly are ‘killers’? Though may I ask, what do you mean by ‘true’ whales?”

Phoenix wondered the same, but if there’s time for a tangent then he’d rather use it to reconvene with Athena, steady themselves, and figure out how to work past this huge gap in their knowledge. It looks really bad, all the pieces they weren’t aware of. They need a new angle of approach as everything they’ve done so far has been smacked down—

“Oh, I can help you with that!” Athena says brightly, and her ponytail sways from side to side as she bobs up and down with uncontained glee. “Technically, if we want to get pedantic, which we do” - spoken like a true lawyer; Phoenix could shed a tear with pride - “what’s known as a ‘whale’” - she makes quotation marks with her fingers in the air - “is different in our informal everyday usage than in taxonomy. You traditionally wouldn’t call a dolphin a whale, right?”

Maybe Phoenix won’t have an opportunity to confer with Athena and will just ponder how dire this case has gotten on his own, while Athena spouts Whale Facts. If Blackquill meant to distract her, it’s working, but Phoenix is not honestly sure he could’ve expected this to happen, or the judge to ask. Either way, Blackquill hasn’t turned his back bored on the tangent yet; he has stepped back from the bench, arms crossed, the chain between his cuffs tangled up around them, eyes half closed, maybe glad for the break.

“But,” Athena continues, “you could! Technically! So from, like, primary school biology we know that classification in taxonomy goes, kingdom phylum class order genus species, but there are orders within orders and suborders—”

“Athena,” Phoenix says, not sure she can even hear anyone else but herself right now, “I don’t think His Honor needs this much detail.”

“Yes, do stop her,” DePlume says with a roll of her eyes.

Which makes Phoenix immediately want to change his stance and tell Athena to continue talking, but someone else gets to it first. “Let the lass go on,” Blackquill says dryly. “Don’t crush her spirit. I’ll do enough of that myself when we get to the next testimony and the sentencing.”

“—and so there’s a smaller order known as Cetaceans, that’s literally just, derived from Ancient Greek for ‘whale’. But this whales order contains two more even smaller orders, and those are toothed whales and baleen whales. Baleen whales are what you’d consider ‘true whales’, basically, like blue whales and humpback whales, and they’re probably what you think of if you were asked to picture a whale. But toothed whales include dolphins and orcas and narwhals—”

“Wait,” Phoenix says. “Narwhals aren’t giant fucked-up seals?”

Blackquill closes his eyes entirely.

“Nope! They don’t have a fin on their back, so maybe that’s why you got confused, but belugas don’t either, and they’re whales as much as narwhals are! But the short of the orca matter” - wasn’t the judge’s question about what a true whale is, not how orcas are taxonomically classified? - “is that they are actually classified within the dolphin family. Orcas are dolphins! So if you’d call a bottlenose dolphin a whale, you can call an orca a whale. They’re both the same amount of whale! Or informally you can just keep using the words ‘dolphin’ and ‘whale’ however, with no regards to which animals are genetically most similar, and people will get what you mean, because words mean what we’ve made them mean and that’s how we use them. But since you wanted to know, now you know!”

“I - yes.” The judge is slightly taken aback by her enthusiasm. “Thank you, Ms Cykes. You really have done your research for this case.”

Phoenix somehow has the feeling that she knew that long before this case.

“And yet.” Blackquill leans forward, his eyes alight and alive, a point ready to be made even off the back of something not case-relevant. “You dispute and explain the ‘whale’ part, but never once say a thing to refute the ‘killer’.”

“I - but, I—” Athena turns helplessly to Phoenix, her mouth opening and closing without any more words coming through.

“I simply cannot bear to hear more such drivel from the defense about trusting a killer,” he continues. “Can you, either, Your Baldness?”

Phoenix would’ve been thrown out of the court after bringing a bird in (or a whip, or for throwing an enchanted coffee mug across the room), or for even half of this amount of contempt for the judge - the rules have always been more lenient for prosecutors, he’s always known that, but there’s never been such a stark demonstration of it. Once this trial is over, he’ll take that up with Edgeworth. Far from the most important action to take to level the field, not by a long shot, but might as well make a note of it.

“Funny that he’s talking shit on ‘trusting a killer’,” Phoenix mutters, “when he’s the convicted killer here, asking the judge to trust his case.” He snorts, but Athena doesn’t laugh or make a sound. She stares across at Blackquill, drumming her fingers on her collarbone right next to Widget. The one to laugh is Blackquill himself, even though Phoenix was taking care that he wouldn’t be heard by anyone but Athena, to keep that from being an on-the-record statement when he’s said enough bullshit that already will be going into a transcript. (Goddamn narwhals.)

As if Blackquill wasn’t enough of an uncomfortable, inscrutable mystery. Where’s his damned bird? Taka isn’t close to Phoenix, but it isn’t right with Blackquill, either; it splits the distance, and Phoenix doesn’t know how good a hawk’s hearing is. Pretty good, he thinks. He’ll ask Kay if she knows. And Taka heard, what was his name, the tanuki from Mayor Tenma’s trial, talking to them in the lobby after, and what Taka heard got to Blackquill, got to Edgeworth. Is that how this works?

“I’ve been told I can’t take a hint,” Phoenix says, louder, and Taka circles over the room and decides to settle now on the judge’s head. “And I certainly am not going to take this hint of yours to give up, Prosecutor Blackquill, because I’ve also been told I don’t know when to quit.”

“Your self-awareness does no credit to you,” Blackquill says. “Very well. Witness, tell them what you saw, and what you heard. Deliver the fatal blow to their deluded determination.”

Back to work.

It’s touch and go, like every case, every time, just like Phoenix remembers, but they work through DePlume’s testimony, keep pressing the possibility of a human killer. Suggest that Orla was manipulated, given the command to start singing by a human culprit who wanted to draw attention to her, frame her, and create a witness. He’s pushing the bloody coin at the court as much as he shows his badge to witnesses during an investigation - and he’s not gonna stop doing the latter any time soon, not now that he’s got a new badge to be proud of because it means he survived and that’s worth announcing to everyone, right? - but the judge is coming around, surely—

And Blackquill is not; Blackquill’s a damn tricky bastard who has a blood-covered burlap bag, the exact piece of evidence Phoenix desperately wanted to find. He has the bag, he knows Phoenix wanted it for proof, but since he’s known of it since yesterday he’s had time to spin a tale that keeps Orla as the perpetrator. He’s prepared it to the point that it’s not even a bluff: he has Marlon Rimes as a witness to confirm that something happened, a loud clattering noise from the orca pool room that Blackquill argues is the moment that Orla, by pulling on a flag lying underneath them, upended four-hundred pounds of show props all precariously stacked, right down onto the victim’s head.

When Rimes said he had come here on Sasha’s behalf, because she had to stay behind with Orla - that wasn’t the full truth, clearly.

Not that Rimes is exactly happy to testify for Blackquill, either. The story is dragged out of him: he was up in the staff room around 10:10 am, roughly the time that DePlume saw Orla with the captain’s body, when he heard a crashing and peered into the room to see the props had all fallen, after they had been cleaned up neatly the prior night. “Just to clarify,” Phoenix says, already certain that Rimes is lying about the timing of this, but he wants to get the most information he can from this fake story if it might help him figure out why Rimes is lying. “You heard the sound, couldn’t go in the room because you need a security key for that” - Rimes nods - “but peeked in and couldn’t see the victim” - Rimes nods a second time - “but could see the props?”

Rimes nods a third time. “Yeah. The rest of the stuff mighta been blocking my view of the captain, but I could see a bunch of those gold coins lying all about everywhere.”

And the current running theory is that the gold coins, via bag, are the murder weapon. Phoenix has staked the case for a human culprit on those coins. “I suppose it fits as a certain tragic thematic,” Blackquill says. Phoenix braces himself for tasteless remarks. “With the pirate theme that the victim pursued for his aquarium, and consider how many pirates lost their lives in pursuit of gold. Perhaps it’s faery gold; I’ve heard that unfailingly claims lives. Or perhaps the orca wished to be compensated for her labor, and saw fit to take the matter between her own teeth.”

There it goes. There’s the cruel biting words, the nasty chuckle, Blackquill laughing with himself when no one else is. “We all deserve to be properly paid for our work, do we not? And I myself shall have a fine meal tonight.”

Several questions arise, none relevant to the case: how exactly is Blackquill paid? He’s a prisoner on death row; money isn’t exactly an issue, or worth anything, to him. Maybe he’s compensated with better food than standard prison fare. Maybe that’s what he means. Maybe it’s that and not the alarming, outlandish, prospect Phoenix can’t shake, not when Blackquill wears that cloying smirk across his face, the one that suggests he knows something more than he’s letting on, and he took the time at the beginning of the trial saying that he wanted to “carry out the sentence” - read: kill, because if Orla was guilty she’s going to be put down.

So, well, knowing Maya for as long as he has, there’s no way for him to discount the possibility that Blackquill, talking about dinner, means that he wants to kill and eat an orca.

(He’s tried for a while to figure out what it is that drives Maya’s appetite. Does she just think human food tastes better? Isn’t it supposed to be the other way around, that faery food tastes so exquisite that after having it, anything else is ashes in a human’s mouth? Is that even true? Something else to ask Thalassa. But for Maya, he’s not ever figured out whether it was just a trait she was born with, an insatiable void within that she’s driven to fill, or a way that she revels in the human world, that to get food here it’s a simple price of money, with no debt incurred, no complex magically binding rules of hospitality. Eating plastic packaging, though - the Gavins’ hellhound does the same, swallowed a whole takeout container that Phoenix offered it as a gesture of “please don’t kill me” - he’s got even less an idea.)

If this, though - this with Blackquill right here, the insinuation that might say more about Phoenix than Blackquill, about what he’s dealt with on a regular basis and how every place he turns these past two days he sees it - if this could be how he gets the answer to the “is he human or fae” question, so help him—

(If it’s anything for Blackquill, if he’s anything like Maya, then this is a thing about dominance, about being the one at the top of the food chain. About having any ounce of control over someone’s life, even if his own is out of his hands, and he on death row. Hey, is that analytical psychology? Everything that Athena refers to as “analytical psychology” means Phoenix doesn’t have a clue what it’s actually supposed to be.)

“Good to clear that up, Mr Rimes, thank you,” Phoenix says. Blackquill’s grin widens. He knows Phoenix is deliberately, consciously ignoring him. He knows that he’s gotten under his skin.

(Hell, he’s been there for months already, but more in the way of a faint itch, and now he’s plainly a knife jammed through Phoenix’s chest. Isn’t stabbing someone a way of getting under their skin, both literally and metaphorically? And he wouldn’t put it past Blackquill to stab him, literally. With magic, sure, but still.)

“Now,” Phoenix continues. “The trouble is, Mr Rimes, that there’s no way you could’ve been in the staff room at that time. Is there not a certain young woman whose acquaintance you made yesterday, in the food prep room, at this same time that you claim to have been in the staff room?”

Another thing to bring up with Edgeworth, in terms of legal reform: maybe some sort of public service announcements about the consequences of perjury? Make some informative posters to put up at bus stops and subway stations. That couldn’t hurt.

“Sasha’s under enough stress now, y’know? I didn’t want her to have to come in and testify. Figured if anyone should have to go up on the stand, it shoulda been me.”

“That’s a very…” Phoenix pinches the bridge of his nose. Very noble? Very stupid? Why not both? “Very kindly meant, thing to do, Mr Rimes, but that’s still perjury.”

“Yeah,” Athena says. “It seems like a lot of trouble to go to just so that Sasha didn’t have to come in and say yeah, she heard a noise. And now she’s got to come in anyway, and you’re in trouble too now. Why would you go to that extent?”

Why indeed.

He tells them. The calendar they thought was his, the one Pearl accidentally picked up, the one that tells them that the victim met with someone at the pool - that wasn’t his. He thinks it’s Sasha’s. He worried suspicion would fall on Sasha.

And now Phoenix is worried by that prospect, too.

He didn’t miss this part of being a lawyer, not at all. Damn all of it.

Rimes leaves to return to the aquarium, take over orca-sitting while Sasha has to testify, and that leaves Phoenix and Athena to pace around the lobby like fish swimming circles in a tank for the rest of the recess. Just waiting, helplessly, to know what horrible new revelation will come next.

Sasha’s testimony is about the same as Rimes’, except for the part where it’s actually true. Orla kicked up a fuss, DePlume started screaming, which of these happened first she doesn’t remember, because finding your boss dead in an orca tank doesn’t help one maintain a firm, linear thought process to exactly recall it later. No surprises there. Lacking any other strategy, Phoenix nitpicks and nitpicks at her testimony until even she is annoyed with it, even though he’s the lawyer she came to for help and she knew from the start that he cross-examined a parrot so she should expect that this is the strategy and the strategy is bluffing and bullshitting.

But it gets them places. It gets them information about the way the props fell over the victim, that Orla couldn’t have dragged him into the pool after they fell because that would’ve disturbed the scarf that landed on top of his body, the way that once again Phoenix’s entire theory is wrong and he’s got to dispute his own suggestion that he built this case on, the bloody coin as the murder weapon. It’s not. He disproves his own bluff that got the case to trial in the first place.

His real argument, his unwavering stance, is simply that Orla was not the killer, and against everything new they pull from Sasha, that holds true. The victim most likely fell to his death in the drained orca pool. Orla was manipulated, using one of the new tricks she’s learning, to grab the victim’s body and bring him back up to the surface. Sasha and Rimes get her to demonstrate, on the video phone, with a practice dummy. Blackquill’s case about a killer whale is losing ground, fast; Orla’s too endearing. “The whole gallery loves her!” Athena says brightly, and her voice and stance both turn smug as she adds, “And Prosecutor Blackquill’s shut right up!”

Planning a counterattack is well within the realm of possibility for why he’s silent. He might also be convincing himself that whale meat would taste nasty anyway. Or Phoenix might be terribly uncharitable, and Blackquill never intended to eat the orca. He never said it outright. He just had a look about him that didn’t seem innocent, if he’s ever seemed innocent, which Phoenix does not believe he has. Probably shouldn’t say that about a sort-of client, but here they are.

Also here they are, with the judge agreeing, ordering an investigation be done of the bottom of the orca pool, and Blackquill still sullenly silent, the trial inexorably rolling to its final conclusion, a verdict, Orla saved—

“Prosecutor Blackquill!” Fulbright makes a loud reappearance, waving a manilla envelope with one hand and with the other trying to extract a paper from the envelope, and he isn’t really doing either with any dignity. “The thing you ordered has come in.”

“Hmph.” Blackquill doesn’t raise his arm to accept the paper - finally extracted from the envelope - Fulbright offers him. He doesn’t move in any way, doesn’t make a sound or an indication of a command, and Taka alights from his shoulder, snatching the page from Fulbright, talons piercing through it, and circling up to the judge. “If you would read that out to the court, Your Baldness.”

“Ah - and what is this, exactly?” The judge slowly pulls the sheet lose, care made to avoid his hands getting close to Taka’s talons, but also to not rip the paper even further.

“An updated autopsy report,” Blackquill replies.

“God damn it!” Phoenix should not say that so loudly, and saying it out loud at any volume is too loud with Athena around, especially when he’s been over Courtroom Manners 101 with her and had the lesson basically boil down to don’t challenge the prosecution to a fistfight by the dumpsters in the back lot and don’t curse on the record. But the words escape from him anyway, like air knocked from his lungs when the prosecution roundhouse-kicked him straight in the gut. “Why now? Just when it’s going good for us—”

“During the recess, a particular thought occurred to me,” Blackquill says. He’s the one ignoring Phoenix, now, though there’s nothing smug about it, only chilly disdainful professionalism. “I asked the body to be reexamined, bearing in mind what had been nagging at me. Now.” He jerks his head to the side, directed at the judge.

“Very well.” The judge casts one last cautious glance at Taka before he allows his attention to turn to the paper. “Let’s see here… The cause of death, blunt force trauma, shown to be consistent with - with a fall? A fall of around sixty feet? But the orca pool is sixty-five feet deep! This report backs up the defense’s claims!”

Blackquill nods once.

“What?” Phoenix’s yelp is even louder this time, never mind that this is good news. It’s good news. It’s solid evidence in favor of his claim and his client. Why does it feel like someone still has a foot on his chest?

“The orca could not possibly be involved with what happened with an empty pool,” the judge says. “This autopsy report proves her complete innocence!”

“Yes,” Blackquill says, at length. Even it being his autopsy report, it takes him several seconds to finally acquise. “I suppose it does.”

Taka spreads its wings and flaps back to Blackquill’s shoulder.

“Then we did it!” Athena bounces again, her excitement bubbling over into obvious physical expression, just as her every other emotion refuses to be contained. “Prosecutor Blackquill can’t even object! He isn’t even trying! You’ve done it, Boss! You saved Orla!”

His agreement with her, they’ve done it, Orla’s safe, emerges as a sticky click from the back of his throat. Words don’t come, and another choked attempt at response is lost against the clack of the judge’s gavel. “This court finds the defendant, Ora Shipley” - right, Phoenix had entirely forgotten that Orla’s “legal” name is something different than what she’s called - “not guilty!”

An expected Objection! doesn’t follow, not from Blackquill, not from a different witness, not anyone. Beside him, Athena woops and throws her hands in the air, extended a bit toward Sasha, who pumps her fist in the air in return. “Phoenix! Athena! Thank you both so much!” She springs out from behind the witness stand and calls over to the video phone, “Hey, Marlon! Give Orla some celebratory snacks!”

“Sure thing! Congrats, Sasha!” Orla on screen is pelted by a hail of fish, catching only about half of them, like someone flung a whole bucket at her. He probably did, in fact.

The judge clears his throat, taps his gavel once. “That concludes today’s—” He taps the gavel again, raises his voice a little more. “Today’s proceedings!” Court’s never going to be officially dismissed at this rate, with the hubbub; Athena’s leaning over the bench now, grinning, saying something to Sasha, and Orla chattering loudly. She’s so caught up in the fervor, but Phoenix still waits for the other shoe to drop, always is waiting for that, and he still concentrates enough that he hears, over the sound of her and Sasha’s laughter, a low, throaty chuckle drift across the courtroom.

Then Blackquill slams his palm on the bench, and the courtroom goes quiet enough to listen to the rattle of the chain echo into silence. Athena, basically lying sprawled across the bench , pushes herself up. Sasha has frozen.

For a moment, Blackquill doesn’t move, his eyes fixed down on his hand on the bench. Then he raises his eyes up, his face alight with smug triumph. “My sincerest thanks, Wright-dono.”

“Huh?” There’s no way this goes that’s good, is there? Maybe Blackquill could surprise him, like the updated autopsy report surprised him, or maybe he’s going to have to ask Athena how many languages she knows and how to say oh fuck in all of them. (She knows German, right? He could pull double time with that, between swearing in court, and driving a few people he knows up the wall.)

“For your work in drawing out the truth.”

If Blackquill had a personal stake in wanting to know the truth behind this case, that would be one thing, but—

“Now, Fool Bright. Arrest this woman.”

“Certainly!” Fulbright throws up a jaunty salute with two fingers. He and Blackquill are the only ones moving, like they’re the only ones alive, everyone else turned to stone, unable to do anything but wait. “Sasha Buckler, you are under arrest for the murder of Jack Shipley!”

“What?” Sasha springs backwards, knocking into the bench and grabbing onto the edge of it to hold herself up.

“No! I don’t believe it!” Athena smacks both of her palms down on the bench, pushing herself up entirely off of her feet, suspending herself in an attempt to be taller.

The shoe dropped. “For what reason—”

Blackquill cuts him off before he finishes asking the question. “Come now. You must have had some idea in your sorry sad head that this would be the outcome. The drained pool in the orca room accessible only by key card - the orca being framed with its show commands. Who else had access and ability to be on the scene and properly manipulate the orca? She and the victim are the only two who participate in the training and commanding of the orca, and her security card, last night, had the last recorded usage until the body was discovered yesterday morning.”

“Yesterday, we requested security card logs from the company that handles them,” Fulbright says. “Apparently, the aquarium employees don’t know the card usage is tracked. Come along now, Ms Buckler. It’s time we have a nice long chat down at the station.”

Card usage records, think Phoenix think; he’s run up against this kind of thing at least once before. What are all his theories and bluffs to get around that? If employees didn’t know that their ins and outs were recorded, someone who had their own card would probably use it, but a culprit who didn’t have a card would still have to steal it, even if they didn’t know they could frame someone that way.

Objecting at this point won’t stop what’s in motion. Fulbright takes Sasha by the upper arm, escorting her away, and she follows in a dazed trace. But Phoenix is not going to not object, if he sees any way to, and Sasha is his client about as much as Orla is, and Athena is indignant and seething beside him. “Why would Ms Buckler have come to us for help with Orla’s case if she intended to frame Orla?” he demands. “Why wouldn’t she just let Orla be blamed and escape the scrutiny?”

Blackquill snorts. “She’s quite the performer, acting the part of such a worried girl concerned for the life of her friend. Perhaps she thought to even better sell her concern this way, knowing all the while with a witness, the margins of victory were quite slim for you. I of course suspected her from the start. That the orca may have been a malicious killer, or may have been a pawn and victim herself of someone so heartless as to place the blame upon the unwitting - I considered both possibilities.”

Phoenix should have figured something was up, that he had another culprit ready to blame, when the update to the autopsy report arrived. If Blackquill ordered the body reexamined for - what, exactly? The differing patterns of blunt force trauma for being slammed by an orca against glass versus falling a long distance? Squish versus splat? - then did he expect that the defense was going to find that angle? If he wanted the examiners to specifically consider falling, then that meant he realized Orla was innocent. And if she was innocent, then he could just switch targets. He was waiting for this since they put Sasha on the stand.

He had unwitting pawns of his own.

“I really must thank you again.” Blackquill is undeniably enjoying rubbing salt into the wound. “I surely could not have done this without your assistance. After all, you were the one who put the witness so at ease as to bring forth the information about the orca’s lifesaver trick.”

This is not the kind of defense-prosecution collaboration that Phoenix signed up for.

“Wait - wait!” Sasha wakes to the reality of her situation, snaps out of the confused daze the accusation put her in, and starts dragging her feet, not slowing hers and Fulbright’s trajectory out of the courtroom in any way, but succeeding at making a horrible squealing noise of her shoes on the polished courtroom floor. “I didn’t kill the captain! I would never do anything that would hurt Orla! I - oof!” Fulbright seems about two seconds from lifting her off the ground and simply hauling her from the courtroom that way. “Please! Phoenix! Athena! I—”

Her voice fades and a door slams.

“Sasha—” Athena has her feet back solidly on the ground, her hands still pressed against the bench, fingers curled under her palms to form trembling fists. She doesn’t speak again, doesn’t move again. Even once the judge has adjourned the court - this is Orla’s trial, after all, and she is resoundingly innocent - she remains still, her eyes fixed blankly out into space. Phoenix has to tap her on the shoulder to get her moving, and even then, when she does, she walks with the same slow cadence that Sasha did as she tried to figure out what was happening. Widget is still lit up, displaying its sad purple-bluish face, but Athena might as well have shut herself off.

“What a horrible end to a trial,” Trucy says, shaking her head. They’re already in the lobby waiting, she and Apollo and Pearl, all serious and solemn and surprisingly quiet. “It was going so good! I was so excited for you both! And then—!”

“She didn’t do it!” Athena blurts. Widget snaps to red. “I believe that with my whole heart, I know it, Sasha didn’t do it! Her voice and her heart were both saying the exact same thing, that she didn’t! And no one listened!” Her anger teeters on the edge of tears. “The whole court should’ve listened and no one - no one—”

“Well, obviously you listened,” Apollo says. He looks pretty uncomfortable with her distress, drawing himself back, his arms tightly folded together, but as he speaks, Athena’s body snaps up straight, her head level again, eyes wide, like she was just doused in cold water to finally wake her.

“I - Boss!” She spins around to face Phoenix. “Boss, we have to defend Sasha! We have to get to the detention center to see her, right now! Right now!”

“The police aren’t even going to be back at the detention center yet,” Phoenix says. “They do have to drive there, you know. It’s not like it’s - wormholes or anything.” He deliberately goes for a word far from fae connotations, far from something that will give Pearl, Athena, or Trucy any ideas. “We’ll go back to the office and regroup, figure out how we approach today’s investigation at the aquarium, and we’ll go there—”

“But you’re going to be defending Sasha too, right, Boss?” Athena demands. “If you’re not, then - then I - and—” She looks to Apollo and Trucy, her words all tangled up, but the intent clear: she’ll do it with or without him.

“Of course I will be,” Phoenix says. “But the police will be interrogating her for a while, probably, so we should do some investigating first, so we’re not just waiting around at the detention center, and so we can have something actually helpful to tell her, because…” He drags a hand through his hair. It’s the way this always goes, the up-and-down trajectory where after every crescendo there’s a further place to fall, and if he ever proves innocence in one matter for certain, something else waits in the wings to tell him he lost a different round he didn’t know he was playing.

“Because what, Daddy?” Trucy asks. “You think she’s going to want a different lawyer? You proved Orla didn’t do it! She sounded really grateful to you and Athena! Of course she’d want you as her lawyer!”

“I should’ve seen this coming,” Phoenix says. That’s the trouble: Blackquill said he must surely have had some idea of how this would end, and he did, and he pushed it away, and it caught up to him. “And figured out - some way around it, asked Sasha what her alibi was and what she was doing because if we were proving a human culprit then of course the prosecution could turn it around to—”

“But how could you have seen that coming?” Athena glares at him like he’s a lying witness on the stand, and she, ready to tear him apart verbally and physically. “That Prosecutor Blackquill would - ugh! Prosecutor Blackquill.” She says his name like a curse, the tone that Maya always used on Edgeworth’s name at the beginning. (Then he stopped being such a pain in the ass and became their friend and she stopped using his name at all.)

“How could you have even thought to ask Ms Buckler those questions?” Trucy says. “Like ‘hey you were the only one to use the security key in the past 12 hours right’? Or ‘did you leak any of your top-secret orca whistle patterns to anyone else’ or ‘how do we break into police files to get the full security camera footage’ or—”

“I get it, Truce,” Phoenix says. She squints doubtfully at him. “No, I do, really. But the thing is—”

She rolls her eyes and turns silently to Apollo, the obvious sentiment conveyed that this further objection is him further not actually getting it, and Apollo snorts, and Phoenix’s heart clenches up with a vice around it that they’ve only had a year and not a lifetime to perfect their silent, condescending, sibling communication and they don’t even know that’s what this is. It’s the same way Edgeworth and Franziska can cast the briefest glance at each other but convey three levels of disdain and mockery and coordinate a savage teardown of whatever sorry fool has earned their ire—

Where was his original thought going?

“The thing is - this happens all the time, to me, with my cases. Where everything I do to prove my client innocent just further pushes them, or someone else they love, closer to drowning. Just makes it worse.” Edgeworth’s new confession, an accusation against Ema. A last accusation against Maya, her own mother. Phoenix’s own badge because he tried too hard to save someone with it. Just the highlight reel. “And it’s kind of horribly crushing every time. I didn’t want you to have to go through that, Athena.” Look how badly it affected her. She asked him something like that back when they first met, didn’t she: what happens if no one listens to you? And here it went, and hurt her badly.

All four of the kids stare at him, unblinking, confused. “But then you would’ve had to defend and investigate all on your own!” Athena protests. “And - and then you’d have no one to share the crushing despair with!”

“I don’t want to share that,” Phoenix interrupts. “I’m pretty sure I’m cursed.” And like the other ways he’s cursed, he’s afraid that sooner or later it will take one of his kids as victim. Less horrible than Death catching up to them, of course, but still. He’s put them all through enough.

Pearl studies him intently, chewing at her thumbnail again. She concentrates hard enough that her glamour starts slipping from her eyes, turning them red. “I don’t see anything,” she says. “I mean, Misfortune could do it, but you only got that when you stopped being a lawyer.”

Apollo recoils. He knows exactly where that one came from.

“But your win record is still kickass!” Athena punches her fist into her opposite palm. “So even if it happens you still pull it off! And I want to learn how to do that! From Apollo and from you, too!” In his logical, detached brain, he can keep a good distance from her, and then when she’s staring him in the face reminding him of why he became a lawyer and the good things he’s done - it’s that much harder. “C’mon, if we’re going to the office we’d better go now! We’ve got investigation to do!”

“You know,” Pearl says as they head for Athena’s car, “you sure do know a lot about orcas. And I didn’t get to learn much about Orla at the aquarium, unfortunately, and I know she’s not the point of contention in court anymore—”

“Do you want me to tell you more orca facts?” Athena interrupts. As though she honestly needs the excuse that Pearl was going to offer her, of teaching them things they can use in court to defend Orla. Pearl nods.

On the drive back to the office, Phoenix gets the other front seat, and Apollo, Trucy, and Pearl squish themselves into the back. Athena chatters animatedly to the rearview mirror the whole time.

“Was there something you wanted to say to me, Athena? Or show me? That’s a very large book you have, there.”

“...Junie brought it to me from the school library. Since I haven’t been able to go in lately.”

“She did? That’s very kind of her. And what is it - An Encyclopedia of Marine Mammals. Very nice.”

“Mhm. I’m nearly done reading it.”

“You’re reading the whole thing? Cover to cover?”

“Don’t you do that with books? Um… being a lawyer is a lot of reading, isn’t it? You should read it all. To make sure that you don’t catch an innocent person by mistake.”

“I do, don’t worry. I wouldn’t want any person sent to the gallows for something they didn’t do.”

“Then why don’t you read whole books?”

“I don’t read entire encyclopedias. You know, a lot of libraries don’t let you take them home with you at all. You just look up what you want to know while you’re there.”

“But I want to know everything that’s in this encyclopedia.”

“Well, then I suppose you know better than I and I shouldn’t be telling you what to do, I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay. Do you want to hear something I’ve learned so far? Um, since you’re always taking time to, to teach me what you’re learning.”

“I’ve heard it said, and found it myself to be true, that by teaching something you learn it better yourself, too. It helps us both that way. It’s very efficient. Go ahead, tell me something about marine mammals.”

“I’ll try and find something you wouldn’t already know.”

“I’m a law and psychology student, not a marine biologist. I don’t know anything. How about you tell me about - penguins?”

“Birds aren’t mammals, silly! But I can tell you about orcas. They’re black and white like you and penguins are, too! They’re the largest member of the dolphin family - they’re not whales at all!”

“Killer whales aren’t whales?”

“Nope! And the ‘killer’ part, is because sailors would observe them hunting and killing baleen whales, and they were first known as ‘whale killers’ and then that got flipped, somehow. And now people tend to think of them as vicious killers, but they aren’t! Wild orcas have never killed a human! They’re just strong and hungry.”

“That they gained that reputation is unfortunate but not surprising. Humans have that tendency to fear what they don’t understand, and to not bother understanding so much of the world around them. To presume that their impressions of the world constitute its one objective truth.”

“...”

“I’m sorry. The cases I’ve been studying lately have me pondering this sort of matter quite a bit, lately. This and worse.”

“Do you want to talk about those? That might make you feel better?”

“...how about you explain to me what a ‘baleen whale’ is.”

“They don’t have teeth - they’re the ones like humpback and blue whales that have, like, bristles in their mouth that they filter in plankton through. That’s what baleen is! It looks sort of like my hairbrush over there.”

“Speaking of, you certainly don’t look like you brushed your hair at all today.”

“No? I… Mom’s been busy all day working, and I was busy reading so I didn’t think I…”

“How about I go get it and fix your hair so that you look presentable, and you tell me more about orcas.”

“I look fine!”

“You look like it was arranged by nesting birds looking to make a comfortable place to raise their young.”

“Pbbbbft! Oh, but did you know that orcas are one of the only species of mammal besides humans and other primates that undergo menopause? Female orcas who can no longer have babies stick around to help raise other babies and take charge of the group. Different populations of orca tend to live in different-sized pods but for most of them, the babies even once grown up don’t leave on their own and instead they’ll stay with their moms for their whole lives—”

#roddy fanfics #fic: the witches of los angeles

8 notes · View notes

snickerl · 7 years

Text

Blutendes Herz II

XF fan fiction

Same scenario like in Blutendes Herz (Bleeding Heart) - Mulder has to face another man in Scully’s life - different plot.

Part I can be read here.

You wipe your palms on your thighs and stare at the numbers at the apartment door: three - seven - nine. It’s your first time here and you’re suddenly not so sure anymore that this is such a good idea. You thought it was a splendid idea about an hour ago when you left your house, climbed into your car and drove over here. You still thought it was a very good idea fifteen minutes ago when you started looking for a parking space, cursing the constant lack of it in the downtown area. You kept thinking it was a solid idea ten seconds ago when you knocked.

And now?

Now you’re convinced that this is one of the worst ideas you’ve ever had, but now it’s too late. Even if you started running down the hallway this very second, she’d notice it was you. You hear her footsteps approaching the door on the other side and in a blink of an eye the door will open and she will be able to see who knocked. All you can do is take a deep breath and try to stay calm.

She won’t tear your head off, will she?

The door swings open and the woman you haven’t seen in almost a year is standing in front of you, looking flummoxed as if she was seeing a ghost. Well, maybe you are a ghost.

“Mulder?”

“Uhm, yes. Hello, Scully,” you mumble self-consciously, staring at your feet.

“What are you doing here?”

The consternation in her voice hurts you a bit.

“I…uh, I was in the neighborhood and thought I’d bring you this.”

You hand her the little paper bag which has been clutched in your hands. It’s crumpled and damp from your sweaty palms. You know now that it’s so silly but a few hours ago it seemed to be the perfect pretext for you to drop by here.

She takes the bag from you, peeks inside, and frowns. “My shower gel and shampoo?”

“You forgot them when you…when you…uh,” you stammer helplessly.

What have you been thinking? That she wouldn’t survive without her shower gel and shampoo? That she hadn’t known what to do without them all those months? That she wouldn’t be perfectly able to walk into the next Walmart and get a new set? Actually, you notice she did fine without them because a scent of coconut and peach reaches your nose. Oh, how you love that smell! It’s unmistakably a mixture of Dove Coconut & Cream and Herbal Essences Peach Blossom. When you missed her so badly that you were hardly able to cope with her absence, you would take a sniff at those started bottles in the shower, the ones you never removed just in case she returned.

“And you thought I was so much in need of them just now?”

“They’re your favorites. At least, they used to be.”

“They still are,” she sighs and with a slight smile she eventually asks you, “do you want to come in?”

“Thank you,” you say before you take tentative steps inside her apartment, the place she fled to after she’d left you. You look around. It reminds you of her place in Georgetown all those years back. Same decorating style, same ambiance. You feel beamed two decades back to the beginning of your partnership when invading her private space felt awkward.

“Nice place,” you hear yourself say. ‘I hate it’ you want to add but you swallow the words.

“Thank you.”

She doesn’t know how to handle the situation just like you, you realize.

“Am I coming amiss?”

Of course, you are. You came here unannounced, what did you expect? That she would fall into your arms whispering a relieved 'finally’ into your ear as if she’s only been waiting for you to show up?

“No, I…uh, I was just getting ready for…uhm… Well, don’t bother,” she mumbles, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear.

Oh boy, is she tensed-up and nervous. This is definitely inconvenient for her. She was getting ready for something. For what? A shift at the hospital? A ride to the grocery store? A meeting with her mom?

“Something important? Do you want me to leave?” you feel obliged to ask and pray she’ll say no.

“No…uhm, you can stay. There’s still some time before I have to…” She inhales deeply to steady her voice before she looks at you, asking with her exhale, “tea?”

You nod. She doesn’t want to tell you where she’s supposed to go, that much is clear. But why?

You don’t know what to say so you look around while she fills the kettle and puts it on the stove. The way the apartment is decorated is so Scully, from the antique wooden furniture, the comfortable couch with the thick pillows, the plushy rugs, the floral patterns of the drapes and the candles everywhere. What stings is that you don’t recognize anything from your house, not a single item. No crystal vase, no picture frame, not even one of those dust catchers she found at one of the many flea markets she dragged you to. There’s nothing here that would remind her of her life at the house you finally settled down in after years of running from the devil. You have to acknowledge that there’s nothing here to remind her of her life with you.

And then you notice it. There’s a huge bouquet of red roses residing in the middle of the coffee table in front of the couch, and suddenly everything makes sense.

The coconut'n'peach smell on her comes from the shower she had just taken. Her hair is nicely blown-dry and her makeup is immaculate. She wears the pearl earrings her parents gave her for her graduation from med school. She’s still barefoot, in sweat pants and t-shirt, but there’s a black cocktail dress draped over the sofa’s backrest waiting to be slipped on and a polished pair of stiletto heels is standing next to it. Even if you weren’t a highly skilled profiler, solving this riddle wouldn’t be too difficult. She was getting ready for a date.

“You’re seeing someone,” you state.

She sucks in a sharp breath. A look in her face is enough for you to understand you’re right.

“A doctor?”

“Mulder,” she moans instead of an answer.

“Tell me, Scully, I can handle it,” you insist but you’re not really convinced of what you just said.

“Sit down, Mulder. Here’s your tea,” she tells you handing you a steaming mug.

You let yourself fall onto the couch. It’s nice and comfortable but you feel as if you’re sitting on a bed of nails. You stare at the flowers. Three dozen, you count. Three dozen of long-stemmed red roses. How cliché!

You never bought her roses. You always thought she didn’t attach much value to such token gestures of romance. You drove through half of the city to get bee pollen for her, you billed more than one motel room to your private credit card to accommodate her in a nicer surrounding than the usual fleabags the FBI was paying for, you donated sperm for her to become pregnant at a time she was still just your co-worker, but you never brought home flowers, let alone red roses.

You can’t tear your eyes away from the flowers with their deep red petals exuding a scent almost overshadowing Scully’s. They look perfect, like from a Valentine’s Day ad in a flower shop window. They practically scream at you how much the person who gave them to her adores her.

“So, tell me about this new guy in your life.”

You feel like a masochist asking for corporal punishment. You know what you’re about to hear is going to hurt like hell. She also seems to be aware of what her words are going to do to you. She’s hesitant, reluctant even to tell you, but you won’t be convinced to let go. You’re going to pry until you know the complete truth, no matter how painful it will be. You know it, and she knows it.

She inhales deeply, chews her bottom lip and eventually sighs in surrender. “His name his Mark. He’s a real estate agent. We had dinner a few times.”

“Dinner…I see.”

Her eyes follow yours which are going back to the roses again, and she obviously decides it’s useless to go on beating around the bush. The bouquet speaks for itself.

“Okay, Mulder, if you really need to know, here you go: yes, Mark and I are dating.”

Mark and I. Three three innocent words, actually, but the combination of them coming out of her mouth does something to you. You swallow. You knew there was a man in her life from the moment you noticed those roses, but having her say it feels like she’s stabbing a knife into your heart and twisting it. You don’t understand why you’re so baffled since you’ve been expecting it.

Your Scully is dating someone. God, she hasn’t dated in ages. The transition of your relationship from one of platonic fellow agents to passionate lovers had come along without a single date and throughout the seven years prior, she had had exactly three dates. Yes, you were counting them, you sorry son of a bitch.

“For how long?” you ask although you know it’s none of your business. You have no right to interrogate her about a life you’re no longer a part of. You’re surprised she even answers.

“Just three months.”

That’s apparently what the three dozen are for.

“How did you meet him?”

When you imagined what she was doing in this new life of hers, her life apart from you, you somehow expected her to be working day and night. She’d always buried herself with work to distract herself when something in her private life went wrong. You pictured her eating, sleeping and working, having dinner with her mother once in a while at most or going to Sunday Mass. Socializing, with men, outside the hospital was outside your imagination. Where the hell did she meet a real estate agent? Maybe this Mark was a patient who developed a crush on the pretty lady doctor who relieved him from the pain of his hernia.

“I was looking for an apartment and he was the real estate agent at the other side of the desk. He showed me a few properties, including this one here, and after I signed the lease he invited me to dinner. That’s it.”

“A first date?”

“It was just dinner, Mulder. Do you really believe I jumped into another man’s arms two weeks after I moved out?”

“But now you’re dating. Officially.”

“If you want to call it that, yes.”

There’s an awkward silence spreading in the room. Funny, back then, the silence between the two of you was never awkward. Even if it was an angry silence, it was just angry, not awkward.

Your contemplations are interrupted by a knock at the door. Three short knocks followed by a longer pause and then another two knocks. Like a Morse code. You have an idea who it might be, and so does she. You see her suck in her breath. She tries to suppress a moan but it slips out of her throat anyway.

She thinks you can’t handle meeting him, fears you’re going to make a scene. She didn’t want the two of you to meet for sure, but you almost burst out of curiosity. What kind of man has been able to conquer Dana Scully’s heart? Is he a bit like you or a completely different person? You don’t know what would bother you more.

Your eyes follow her on her way to the door. She seems to move in slow motion clearly dreading the encounter of the former and the current man in her life. When she’s in front of the door, her shoulders rise and fall with one last deep breath, then she turns the knob and opens the door.

“Hi there,” she’s greeted cheerfully.

He can’t see you because Scully is standing in the way, and despite her tiny body your slouched figure on the sofa is completely hidden by her.

“What’s taken you so long?” you hear the man ask. His voice is deep and strong, tinted by a slight accent you can’t quite figure out. “Am I too early? Why aren’t you dressed, baby? I thought I was to pick you up at 6:30.”

Baby? She lets him call her baby?

You called her that once, a few days after your first passionate night together, and she wholeheartedly laughed you in the face. 'Seriously, Mulder?’ she said to you, 'you really think you’re in a position now to use this idiotic word about me just because you made me come last night?’ You never called her that again. It remained to be Mulder and Scully between you no matter what your relationship consisted of - partnership, friendship, romance, something resembling a marriage and consequently a divorce. She had dozens of different ways to pronounce your name and only from the sound of it you could tell whether she was amused, scared, annoyed, mad, horny, disappointed, worried, content, or experiencing one of a million more sentiments.

She leaves his questions unanswered, ushers him in instead. He walks into the living room without any hesitancy or awkwardness, much more self-confident than you earlier. He feels comfortable here, steers directly to the spot where you’re sitting at the coffee table, the table his red roses are decking so prominently. When he sees you, he stops in his tracks.

“Oh,” he utters in surprise, “I didn’t know you had a visitor, Dana.”

“Yeah, well, that’s why I’m running late,” she says.

He makes a step forward and stretches his hand out for you to shake. “Mark Finlay,” he introduces himself without any discomfort or rejection in his voice.

Mark. What a nicely normal name, you think. Not peculiar like yours, one people furrow their brows at.

“My name’s Mulder, Fox Mulder.”

“Nice to meet you, Fox. Are you a friend of Dana’s?” No brow-furrowing whatsoever from him.

“I go by Mulder, actually, and yes, Scully and I used to be friends, although I can’t really say if we still are.”

“Mulder…” she sighs.

“Mulder and Scully,” Mark repeats with some surprise, letting your names roll off his tongue. “You call each other by your last names? That’s weird.”

“We used to be partners when we were with the FBI. It’s not so weird there,” you hear her telling him only half the truth.

“I see. How long haven’t you seen each other?”

“Eleven months, two weeks, and five days,” you hear yourself say, unable to tell what made you. Scully moans and now Mark does furrow his brows.

As soon as the words have tumbled out of your mouth you know it was a mistake. You made yourself vulnerable to him, and what’s even worse, you put Scully into a compromising position. It doesn’t take a genius to put two and two together to figure out that Mulder and Scully were more than just co-workers, and Mark is able to do the math.

“Uh, what was that, man?” he asks, his voice not so gentle anymore. You can’t blame him.

“Mark,” Scully starts, looking at her…at her…her what? Boyfriend? Lover? Partner? “Mulder and I worked together but we were also a couple for fifteen years. We separated-”

“You moved out,” you cut in and correct her, worsening the situation even more.

“-I moved out about a year ago. That’s why I came to your agency. I needed a place to stay.”

“Oh, so the long-term relationship you told me about, the one you were having troubles leaving behind you, that’s him,” he concludes, tilting his head in your direction.

Scully nods silently.

“And today is the first time you see each other after eleven months-”

“-two weeks, five days, and,” you look at your watch, “eight hours.”

“Yes,” she confirms again, probably not your precise time specification though. Actually, she shoots you a warning look. You’d even be able to tell the seconds - forty-five, forty-six, forty-seven - but you already overdid it, so you keep the seconds to yourself while they pass stoically. Fifty-two, fifty-three, fifty-four, fifty-five.

“I see.”

You’re an Oxford graduate with a degree in psychology, you have no problems following this man’s train of thought. He takes a closer look at you to assess you and your intentions, trying to evaluate whether you are a threat to him or not. Obviously, Scully hasn’t told him anything about your relationship other than that it was difficult for her to get over the failure of it. He’s as curious of you as you are of him. He asks himself what kind of man she had fallen for before and he questions your presence here.

“Ah, well, I guess you have a lot to talk about then. Do you want me to leave you alone?” As neither of you tells him to stay, he clumsily turns to Scully. “I’ll call you tomorrow, honey,” he says, “maybe we can meet for lunch?”

Your insides tie a knot when you hear him use another affectionate nickname for her. The credit he’s giving you impresses you, though, or maybe he knows Scully already well enough to trust her. If manners weren’t so damn useless right now, you would offer to leave. You are the intruder here, not him. He had a date with her, you came unannounced, but you want to talk to her so badly and you fear you will never get another chance, so you let him go through with it. You gladly notice that she nods at him.

“It was nice meeting you, Fox…uh, M-mulder,” he says, looking at you with an intense stare that makes absolutely clear he’s leaving only for the moment and not for you to take her back.

“Yeah,” is all you reply. He’s a nice guy, no question about it, but you wished you would’ve never had to make his acquaintance.

Scully walks him to the door. You’re polite enough to give them some privacy and turn your back to them, although the suspense is killing you. You’d like to watch them interact, it’d give your psychologist’s mind more information about the quality of their relationship and level of intimacy, but you also have manners. They don’t keep you from straining your ears though to eavesdrop on their whispered words.

“I’m so sorry, Mark. He came here totally unexpected. I was just getting ready when he knocked at the door.”

“It’s alright, love. That is, if you want me to throw him out, I’ll gladly do so.”

“No, we do actually have to talk. Life hasn’t exactly been good to him, to neither of us. He’s been to dark, depressing places and I’m glad he’s made the first step out of his shell. It’s just that the timing’s not perfect.”

“You sound very compassionate, Dana. Do I have to be worried?”

“No, there’s no need for you to worry about anything.”

“But you still care a lot for him, don’t you? Although you left him.”

“If you knew what Mulder and I have been through, you’d understand. You have to trust me, Mark. I need to sort a few things out with him. I want…I need us to be friends.”

“Wow, I can’t imagine wanting to be friends with my ex. I’m a bit anxious about leaving you alone with him, to be honest.”

“You wouldn’t be if you knew all the circumstances.”

“Enlighten me!”

“Not now, Mark. I will. One day. I promise, but it’s very complicated and parts of our history together are very sad. I can’t do this in passing, and certainly not whispering to you while Mulder’s sitting in my living-room.”

“Alright, I content myself until you’re ready to confide in me, if…you promise to wear that breath-taking black dress I spied on your couch when you do.”

You can hear the sly grin in his voice and the smacking sound of a kiss shortly thereafter.

“Call me when it gets out of hand or ugly. I can be here quickly if he dares to lay a hand on you.”

You catch a soft chuckle from Scully. “That won’t happen, Mark. Ever. Mulder might seem a bit deranged to you but he’s a good person. He’d rather cut his hand off than hurt me.”

The way she defends you makes you warm all over.

You can’t blame him, though. He’s about to leave the woman he loves alone with a man who makes the impression of, to put it mildly, not being totally clear in his head. Your meticulous timekeeping of the moment Scully moved out didn’t exactly help him to trust in your intentions. You can’t decide whether his leaving astonishes you in a good or in a bad way, whether he’s an idiot quitting the field for another man or someone who deserves admiration for the trust he has in her. If you were in his shoes, you’d most certainly take yourself by the scruff of your neck and throw yourself out. Maybe he’s just not such a pathetic alpha male like you are.

There’s another smacking sound and you hear him hum delightfully.

“Mark,” she whispers somewhat out of breath. God, did he kiss her that hard? The cinema in your head makes you dig your fingertips into your palms with so much force your nails leave deep dents in them.

“Love you, baby.”

Your self-control is put to a severe test. 'This baby belongs to me,’ you want to yell at him. At least you’re spared to ear-witness her say the same to him as she answers him with only as much as an non-committal 'uh huh’ before she closes the door, probably out of consideration for you. You hear her take a deep inhale before she steps back into your field of vision.

“I’m terribly sorry, Scully. I didn’t mean to ruin your evening.”

Honestly, you’re glad the guy is gone.

“You’re not ruining my evening, Mulder.”

“What were you guys up to?”

“A vernissage. Mark has a friend who is an artist with an exhibition at Monroe Gallery. Well, I guess we can do it anytime, save the free champagne.”

She smirks at you and you actually do feel bad that you confounded her plans. You know that she likes the fine arts, that she enjoys going to classical concerts, galleries, and book readings. You’ve never taken her, it’s not your cup of tea. It’s his, apparently.

“I didn’t come here to mess up your evening plans, Scully. I should’ve been one leaving, not your…” No, you can’t bring yourself to pronounce the word.

“Well, Mulder, what did you come here for?”

“I…”

“Yes?”

You might as well say it. “I needed to see you, Scully. It’s been a year, for Christ’s sake. I missed you, that’s all.”

She closes her eyes, pinches the bridge of her nose and swallows hard before she speaks. “I missed you too, Mulder.”

“Seriously?”

She looks at you, her eyes pleading with you. “Tell me you know why I left, that it wasn’t because I didn’t care for you anymore.”

“I kinda figured that out together with my therapist. Took me a while though.”

“You’re seeing a therapist?”

“Yes. Twice a week.”

“That’s good, Mulder. That’s very good. Are you getting better?”

The honest concern in her voice makes your stomach flip.

“I am. You were right with everything you said, Scully. The shrink, the medication, the getting more sleep and eating healthier food. I even started running again. I haven’t turned the corner yet, but I’m getting there.”

She spares you a triumphant 'I told you so’. Actually, there’s nothing resembling triumph or smugness in her eyes, no 'I knew it’ or 'you should’ve listened to me’ on her face, instead tears are pooling in her eyes mirroring a heavy sadness you can’t make anything of.

“What? Aren’t you happy for me?”

“I’m very happy for you, Mulder. I was so worried. You didn’t answer my calls, you never handed in the prescriptions I sent you. I feared you’d sink deeper and deeper into this depression up to the point you’d…” she trails off but you know where she was going with this.

You won’t tell her that you’ve actually been at this point she’s unable to speak out. You remember that night you didn’t see any fair reason to go on. You had no job, no family, your Scully was gone. You didn’t have a life, all you had was this house she’d left to you and a miserable existence that caused you far more pain than anything else. The gun in your hand felt like the ultimate solution to your suffering, the cold, hard steel against your hot skin soothing in a way. You thought that if you ate a bullet, it would relieve you, would lift all the burden off your shoulders and give you final peace. Then a brief moment of sanity came over you and in front of your mind’s eye you saw how Scully would take the news when some blunt police detective called her as your next of kin. You asked yourself how much more pain you wanted to cause her and suddenly the road you had to take was crystal clear. You secured the hammer, put the gun on the coffee table in front of you and stared at it for hours. This lonesome night marked the beginning of your healing process.

“So, then why are you crying?” you ask while brushing a tear off her cheek with your thumb, thrilled that she lets you.

“I’m crying because I had to leave you for you to admit to yourself that you needed treatment. My being there couldn’t do it, only my absence. Why, Mulder? It used to be just the other way around all those years. We used to give each other strength, not paralyze each other.”

“I’m still trying to find the answer to this phenomenon, Scully. The shrink is not letting me off the hook with this, I can tell you. What I have already figured out though is that you are the sole reason I’m still here. Your absence left a hole so vast in me that I couldn’t ignore the pain any longer. Believe me, I had tried many ways to numb it, none had worked. One day I decided to give it a shot and called the number you’d written down for me. It was still stuck to the fridge.”

“Imagine where we could be if you had called Doctor Summers the day I gave you her number. We could still be together.”

How often have you asked this what-if question yourself? Hundreds of times? Thousands? You’ve learned from said Doctor Summers that what-if questions are not only useless but counterproductive. They keep you from accepting what is and from changing what’s in your power to change. The past can’t be influenced anymore, only the future, and that’s what you’re determined to do. You want to build your future life, and you want her to be in it.

“We could work on getting back together. That is…if you want us back together.”

She looks at you with a mixture of astonishment and incomprehension.

“What?” you ask. “Would it be so out of the realms of possibility?”

“I’m in a relationship with a very gentle man who has been very patient with me. I can’t drop him like a hot potato.”

No, of course, she can’t. She’s far too decent and kind to treat another person like this. She hadn’t jumped into this new thing light-heartedly, she really likes this very gentle, patient man. She’s gotten involved with him for his sake, not to get over you.

Nausea makes itself felt, you have problems swallowing because of the lump forming in your throat. Has it taken you too long? Have you lost her to another man because you didn’t get your act together fast enough? Does she not only like him but has she fallen in love with him? Scully doesn’t fall in love easily - head over heels and love at first sight are not her concepts really - but when Scully loves, she loves unrestrictedly and unconditionally. You were at the receiving end of her love and she defended it against everyone who dared to question it; her peers, her superiors, her brother. You won’t stand a chance against Mark if she loves him, so you have to ask.

“You can’t drop him or you don’t want to?”

“Both. Mulder! You can’t just come here, tell me you want us back together, and expect me to leave everything and everyone behind and follow you home.”

“So…it’s over. Between us, I mean.”

You wince.

“That’s not what I said.”

You gasp.

“Then what did you say, Scully?”

“I like Mark, and I enjoy being with him.”

She likes him - okay. She enjoys being with him - this you need to be clarified.

“Are you sleeping with him?”

You look into two crystal blue eyes so boring through you they make you shiver. Of course, you know you overstepped the mark. It’s absolutely none of your business, but you need to know, so you insist regardless.

“Are you?”

You tilt your head and peek at the roses on the table, pursing your lips and arching your eyebrows. She follows your line of sight, still clearly pissed off by your question. She keeps her eyes on the flowers for a long moment, then sighs audibly.

“Okay, Mulder, if you feel like you want to know…not that I owe you any explanation…but yes, Mark and I have sex.”

Now that you know you wished you hadn’t asked. You give a short, bitter chuckle.

“What? Are you expecting me to live in isolation just like you?”

“Maybe.”

“I wasn’t looking for this, Mulder, believe me. But you know what? It’s nice to be paid attention to. You didn’t even look at me anymore. You took for granted that I was there but you didn’t notice me anymore, let alone reciprocate in any way.”

“And he looks,” you state, unable to keep that disparaging ring out of your voice.

“Yes, he does. He looks at me, notices me, realizes I’m there. He’s made me feel like a desirable woman again.” She holds your gaze for a moment and you see more pain in her eyes than you’re able to deal with. “You have no idea what I’m talking about, do you?”

“I didn’t make you feel like a desirable woman?” The question leaves a bitter aftertaste on your tongue.

“Oh, you did, Mulder,” she breathes, and you see the sweet memory flicker in her eyes for a brief moment. “God, you made me feel so alive at a time I didn’t want to live. After William was gone, I feared I’d never be able to feel anything again, that I had become completely numb inside. It was the intensity of your love and passion that gave me the strength to love you back and to go on living, but your passion eroded over time. Not your love, I was always sure of your love for me, but I didn’t feel your passion anymore. In the end, your world had shrunk to this little room full of dusty files, blurred photographs, and yellowed newspaper clippings. I could step into this room but I couldn’t enter your world. You didn’t let me in, neither did you come into my world anymore. You’d drifted away from me so much, I didn’t know how to reach out to you. We’d lost our connection.”

Her voice has become very quiet, the last words were a mere whisper. It speaks for the suffering all of this caused her. You don’t have anything to say to this. You bite the inside of your cheek until you taste blood.

“I missed our physicality, Mulder, and you didn’t even realize it. In the end, I craved it so much, it ached. It’s a good feeling to be again touched and kissed. I enjoy being looked at, being told I’m beautiful and wanted.”

Every word feels like a slap in your face. You deserve it, there’s no doubt about it. You didn’t give her what she needed, so living with you had become unbearable for her. You drove her away from you and finally out of the house. It’s all your fault.

This insight doesn’t come as a surprise to you. You’ve already figured all of this out together with Doctor Summers. She’d put her finger right in the wound and poked at the raw flesh until you were honest with yourself. It was a difficult step you refused to take for quite a while, but after having walked down that road you started getting better. It had been the first step forward of many and there are still hundreds more for you to make. If you want to heal completely, you have to run a marathon.

“I’m in the process of becoming the person I used to be, Scully. I can make up for the way I made you feel, I promise I will. You’ll be treasured and desired like never before. I’ll do whatever you want me to do…meditate, eat bee pollen, burn every single X-File in the filing cabinet. You name it, I’ll do it. Just give me a chance to prove how much I’ve returned to my former self in the past year, to the person you once loved. Please!”

God, you’re pathetic, begging for her affection like this. But what else can you do? You’re desperate and scared to death that you’ve irretrievably lost her. Not to cancer, the aliens or any dark forces but to another man who happened to be there for her at a time you could only deal with your own issues and with nobody else’s, not even hers.

Oh, how you hate this fucking depression!

She sees what’s going on in your head. She’s always been able to read you like a book, your separation hasn’t changed that. Your plea has touched her. Tears are brimming in her eyes.

“Don’t do this for me, Mulder. I can’t be the sole reason for you to be willing to heal. It’s too much of a burden. You have to do it for your own sake, because you want to get better. And by the way…” She cups your face with a hand and caresses your cheek gently with her thumb, “I’ve never stopped loving you, even when this damned depression had turned you into someone I didn’t recognize anymore.”

You’re paralyzed. You forget to breathe. “You still love me?” you finally croak.

“Of course, Mulder,” she tells you with a smile, “that will never change. But we can’t be together unless you have this illness completely under control. I couldn’t help you back then and I can’t do it right now. I see your progress, but you’re far away from being through, and you know it yourself. I’m more than willing to support you as your friend and physician, but I can’t be more than that. Not now.”

“But…one day?”

“If you expect me to give you a guarantee, I can’t. There are no guarantees when it comes to personal relationships. I once thought ours was indestructible, but it wasn’t. I can’t foresee our future, Mulder, all I know is that you will always be a part of my life. As my best friend, my partner in crime, my son’s father. You’re the one and only person who knows every scarred side of my soul. Maybe…maybe one day you can be my perfect other again. It’s not impossible, but it depends on so many factors that I don’t dare to predict let alone promise anything. I don’t know how far Mark and I will go. What I do know is that I’m humbly happy as it is right now and that I want to give this a try. Can you live with that?”

Can you?

“No promises, Mulder, only chances.”

You have to let this sink in for a moment before you’re able to answer, but then you know exactly where it leaves you.

“When has the fact that I didn’t know where the road ahead would lead me to ever stopped me, Scully?”

The corners of her mouth rise into one of those lovely smiles that make the bridge of her nose crease and you’re thrilled because this smile is genuine, and it’s meant for you, and the best thing is, you have elicited it from her. You haven’t done this in a very long time. After having made her sad for you don’t know how long, you eventually made her feel good again, you made her smile. If that isn’t a valid first step. There might be a million steps more for you to take, but you’re willing to face every single one. Uphill, downhill, through the desert or the Antarctic, you might do a step or two backward at times, but you will keep going. And you will be your former self again. Maybe you’ll end up with a reformed version of Fox William Mulder even, freed of some of the traumas of your past that had pushed you to the dark place of complete hopelessness you’d been in a few months ago.

“You know me, Scully. The smaller the chance, the more unlikely the theory, the more determined I am to show you I was right.”

“Yes…yes, I know you do, and I rely on it.”

You lock your eyes with hers in one of those looks you used to give each other in another life, before the loss of a child and the impediments of an existence in seclusion had taken their toll on your relationship. You connected gazing at each other like this at a time you were each other’s touchstones, and maybe this means that you still are.

All has been said, that’s why you stand up and move in the direction of the door. When you reach it, you desperately try to think of something else to talk about - the weather, the last book you read, medical research - it doesn’t matter, something, anything, just to have a reason to stay. You turn around and find her right behind you, her delicate hand already reaching for the door knob. It seems you’ve missed your chance to prolong your being here, but then she catches you off-guard when she leans in. For a split-second you think she’s going to kiss you on the lips which she isn’t doing, of course, she’s in a relationship with another man, but she kisses you on the forehead.

The nerve endings start shooting electrical sparks through your body the moment her soft lips make contact with your skin. The forehead kiss has lost nothing of its magic, you realize. It’s as intimate an act as ever. You shared a lot of those before you turned your relationship from one of co-workers into one of lovers. More than once, you wanted to travel from her forehead to her lips but never dared. Once you almost did it, but then a bee carrying a deadly virus came in the way. You can’t explain why today of all days you feel bold enough to make the journey, but before you’re able to rethink, your lips are on hers and the familiar, much longed for sensation is your undoing.

You cannot do anything against it, your body acts on its own. Your hands go into her hair, your body presses her small frame against the front door she wanted to usher you out of mere seconds ago, and your tongue slides over her lips. You’ve ceased thinking, you’re acting on pure instinct and the sensation is too overwhelming for you to be able to stop. You hear Scully moan quietly. Her knees buckle and bump into your shins. When you feel her tongue caressing yours and her body melting into yours, all you want to do is carry her into the bedroom and devour her.

From the depths of your conscience, various memories make it to the surface with a vengeance: how soft her naked skin feels, how her warmth used to envelop you, how you became one when you were buried deep inside her. You’ve lost your grip on the world around you, of time and space. You plunge head-on into the sensation the moment offers you, although there’s this voice at the back of your head telling you that this is not right. It’s yelling at you that overwhelming her with your yearning for her is not fair. You’re playing her off against her emotions, taking advantage of the soft spot she still has for you.

Not fair!

The voice is demanding of you to stop, to stop it right now before she lets you carry the matter too far and compromise her. It’s the most difficult thing you had to do ever, but you grab her shoulders to push your bodies apart and pull back, your mouth leaving hers with a loud smack. Her head falls back and bangs against the door. She’s panting with her eyes closed. Her hair is disheveled, her cheeks rosy and her lips swollen. She looks so alluring that it takes all your willpower not to crush your lips right back onto hers.

Both of you are gasping for air, Scully with her back leaned against the door, you frozen into a pillar of salt. You can’t believe what you just did. You wronged the women who offered you her friendship overpowering her with your frenzied, base lusts. You stare at her, guilt-stricken and self-conscious. In the not so unlikely case that she throws you out of her apartment and tells you that she doesn’t want to see you ever again, you couldn’t complain.

It takes her a while to recompose herself and to get her breathing back under control. You startle when her eyes suddenly jump open and two pools of blue transfix you. “God, Mulder,” she breathes and you hear shock and disbelief in her voice.

“I’m sorry, Scully, so sorry. I’m beyond sorry. I shouldn’t have done that. Please, forgive me. You have to forgive me,” you beg.

She takes another deep inhale without taking her eyes off of you. You can’t read from her face. There’s no way for you to predict how she’s going to react. When she starts to speak, you hold your breath.

“And I thought I would have to go to bed unkissed tonight after Mark had left,” she says with a deadpan expression.

“I’m such an asshole, Scully. I don’t know what had gotten into me.”

Her left eyebrow shoots up. “You don’t know why you kissed me?”

“Of course I do, but I’m not sure you want to hear it.”

Another moment of silence occurs, the unspoken words billowing between you before she speaks again. “Mulder, don’t look at me like you’ve been told you can’t have ice cream for breakfast.”

“Are you mad?”

“No, I’m not mad. I didn’t exactly fight back, did I? It was…nice. I’ve almost forgotten what a great kisser you are, but…” she licks her lips, “…this doesn’t change anything of what I said earlier.”

“I listened to what you said, Scully, and I understood. I’m not going to get this wrong, but I will live off it for a long time. The memory will keep me going. The notion of being allowed to kiss you like this again some day in the future will push me further.”

“Mulder-”

“No promises,” you interrupt her, “only chances, I know. That’s enough for me. For now.”

Her lips rise into a tight-lipped smile. “You never cease to amaze me, Mulder.”

“I should jolly well hope so!”

She shakes her head and chuckles. “What I would’ve missed if I hadn’t accepted that assignment to work with one Fox Spooky Mulder all those years ago.”

“You would’ve been spared quite a bit, Scully.”

“But I would’ve missed so much more. Mulder…I regret nothing.”

She keeps telling you this, using different words like 'I’d do it all over again’ or 'I wouldn’t have wanted another life’, but always meaning that she’s happy with how everything has turned out. Despite her reassuring you, sometimes you have problems believing it, picturing the life she could have had as a mother to a bunch of beautiful children and a wife to a nice guy. To someone like Mark.

Mark.

Time for you to quit the field. Leaving you alone with her, Mark had demonstrated a certain amount of trust in you, a trust you bitterly betrayed. He’s most certainly waiting for her to call him to let him know everything is alright.

Will she tell him about the kiss? Probably not as it isn’t the beginning of something, it’s no threat to their relationship. You tasted a bit of what your past relationship consisted of when times were good and being together was all that was important. Maybe - maybe - you’ve also tasted some of your future, you don’t know. You hope, but you can’t be sure.

You’re willing to let her try a normal life. A life with a well-situated, good-looking real estate agent who asks her for dates, who brings her flowers and calls her by her first name. You face the risk of losing her to that mundane kind of life, to a life without monsters and conspiracies where the darkness retreats with every sunrise and doesn’t linger on for the entire day, darkening the sky with its heavy, gray clouds. With that risk you have to live, it’s the only chance you have to win her back.

“What if you put that beautiful black dress on and I gave you a ride to the art gallery you told me about? Call Mark and tell him you’re going to meet him there. The night is still young, you can still have a glass of free champagne.”

She tilts her head and squints one eye suspiciously. “Mulder, are you serious?”

“I materialise in front of your door out of thin air with the lame excuse of bringing you two half empty bottles of shampoo and shower gel, I chase your spiffy date away, I yammer about how tough my life is without you, and as if this wasn’t enough, I pin you to the door mounting some kind of kissing attack on you…I’d say I owe you one.”

You meant every word you said and are therefore veritably flabbergasted that your admission is obviously amusing her. A grin tugs at the corners of her mouth she desperately tries to suppress, in vain. Eventually, she chuckles.

“And I told Mark you’d never lay a hand on me.”

“Yeah, well, a slight misconception from your side. I would cut my hand off, though, rather than hurt you.”

She gasps. “You heard us?”

“It was impossible not to hear you. I didn’t hurt you, did I?”

“No, you didn’t.”

“Good, good. So…uh, what about that lift to the gallery?”

“Thanks for offering, but no. I’d rather spend the rest of the evening alone. I need to contemplate a few things.”

“Okay. Fine. Uhm…are we good?”

“Sure, Mulder, we’re good.”

“Great. Would you mind if I ever dropped by again? I’d even issue a pre-warning.”

She emits another amused chuckle. “I’d appreciate an announcement, but don’t call it a warning. I don’t need to be warned of you. Just let me know when you’re on your way over so I can get dressed and have the tea ready when you get here.”

“You could also drive out to the house. There’s still some of the organic green tea in the pantry, the one you like so much.”

“I’d like that.”

“Me too,” you reply shyly.

Like it? You’d be thrilled to entertain her. You might even bake an apple pie for her following her mother’s recipe which Maggie wrote down some years ago for you on the inside of one of the few cookbooks you had.

“Bye, Mulder. Thanks for stopping by. Despite the…uh…unexpected circumstances, it was good to see you. I’m glad we found a common ground again.”

She turns around to open the door, exposing her reverse side and the special spot you’ve touched a million times at the small of her back. Your hand goes there as if remote-controlled. You could swear you feel her shudder and it feels so familiar for a moment, but this time you come to your senses in time. Everything is different now, so you remove your hand and give her shoulder a friendly squeeze when you walk past her through the door into the hallway.

“Bye, Scully. Thanks for everything.”

“Take care, Mulder.”

You exchange one last look, then she closes the door and her face is replaced by the numbers you stared at two hours ago: three - seven - nine. You look at your watch and set it to stopwatch mode. The timer tells you it’s been eleven months, two weeks, five days, ten hours, fourteen minutes and twenty-five seconds since she left. You press the little button again to reset, it says 0:00:00 now. You press it again and the time starts running.

#xf fanfic #poor mulder #scully #mark finlay #i never wanted to write an installment

28 notes · View notes