Over the Carpet By Luperkal (luperkal@home.com) Summary - cleaning as a team project, and the end of a seventeen day silence. Category - S, A, MSR Rating - PG (language) Spoilers - none. In my mind this takes place before Millennium, but it could fit in pretty much anywhere. Disclaimer - not mine. Do you care? Archive anywhere, just please let me know. Author's notes at end. ***** I hate vacuuming. I can hear my mother's voice in my head, over the mechanical roar of the sweeper. "I don't think anybody particularly likes vacuuming, dear, but you still have to do it." Not only is it mindless and loud, the carpet never really looks all that much cleaner when you're done. Still have to do it, though. After years of microbiology classes and their up-close-and-personal looks at dust mites, it does seem more logical to me. Still hate it, though. The vacuum must have drowned out the sound of his knocking, because I give a most undignified shriek when I feel his hand close around my shoulder. My sigh of relief when I realize it's only Mulder mingles with the turning-off moan of the vacuum. "What are you doing here?" He doesn't look outwardly hurt, but I know he is inside. His half-smile has that strained look to it. I also know that he forgives me, by that soft, sympathetic look in his eyes. This makes me unreasonably irritated. How dare he indulge my mood? How dare he think that he knows what I'm feeling? "I just wanted to see how you were doing." He glances at the vacuum. "What exactly are you doing, Scully?" "I'm cleaning the house." I can feel the corners of my mouth turn down as I say it. I turn away from him and turn the vacuum on again, a not-so-subtle diversion tactic. I'm hurting him, and it makes me feel bitter inside. And a little triumphant, too. It's an odd mix of emotions, and I want them all to go away and leave me in peace. He has to yell to be heard over the vacuum. "Couldn't the realtor have done that?" I don't turn around, and I purposefully don't raise my voice, knowing he won't be able to hear me. So in actuality, I'm not ignoring him. "Yes." Of course the realtor could have done this. But Mom left the house to me. I feel oddly proud that she still thought me responsible enough to leave this job for me, and I'm not going to let her down. I've always hated vacuuming, but I always did it when she asked me to. I vacuum away from him, watching the old green Hoover move over the mauve carpet and listening to the pop and tingle noises as particles of dust and dirt get sucked up. When I see his off-white Nikes directly in my path, I look up and give him my best glare. He doesn't move, so I turn the vacuum off yet again. "Look Mulder, I appreciate your concern, but I'm fine." He puts his hands on my shoulders, and his thumbs begin to lightly massage my clavicle bones. I wonder why it is that touchy-feely Mulder only comes out to play in times of crisis. In his best sympathetic voice he says, "I want to help." "You want to help me clean my mother's house?" I know perfectly well that's not what he means, but I want to see how he'll respond. "Yes. I do." He stops rubbing at me and pulls the vacuum away from me. He tries to lift the whole thing up by the handle, and of course the head of the vacuum comes down on his Nikes. He stands there with the vacuum on his toes for a long moment, with a look of pure cartoon shock on his face. Even when the vacuum topples over and he starts cursing in pain, I can't stop smirking. I return the vacuum to its upright position and turn it around so Mulder's on the correct side. "Knock yourself out." God, I really hope he doesn't take that literally. He's looking at the vacuum like it came from another planet. I think he's about to actually kneel down for a closer inspection when I intervene. "Mulder, have you ever vacuumed before?" At least he has the good sense to look sheepish. "Yes. It's just been a few years." I roll my eyes and move to stand beside him, clasping my hand over his and moving it into position on the handle. "Do not vacuum over the cord, do not vacuum over your feet, and do not attempt to vacuum backwards." I feel like I'm channeling my mother, as I speak her words verbatim with my hand on her vacuum. I'm even matching her tones and inflections. I can feel my chest get tight. Mulder nods. "How do you turn it on?" I resist the urge to say "you're a bright boy Mulder, you figure it out," and I flip the switch instead. Partly because he's being nice (even if I'd rather he just took the hint and left) and partly because I don't want to take the risk of vacuum cleaner implosion. I plop down on the couch and observe. Mulder was definitely not born to clean. I hadn't realized, but it actually is possible to vacuum badly, a fact which Mulder seems intent on proving. He pushes the vacuum in little half steps, which don't require any actual movement of his legs and cover roughly three inches of carpet. Occasionally he'll take a quick five foot lunge, in which he pushes the vacuum as far as he can and then runs to catch up. Worst of all, he keeps alternating directions. Half step left, quick lunge forward. Half step right, half step forward. He's imprinting Rorschach patterns on my mother's mauve carpet. I get up from the couch and snatch the vacuum out of his hands. I look away from him before his startled look turns into something else, and concentrate on vacuuming in nice, even, straight lines. "Jesus Mulder, can't you even vacuum right?" I yell as loud as I can even though my throat feels like it's coated with sandpaper, and even though I know I'm not being fair. "You just screw everything up." I want him to hold me. I want to lean my head on his shoulder and cry, and feel his strong arms wrapped tightly around me. I just can't seem to stop myself from pushing him away. It's hard to concentrate on straight lines of mauve when everything's blurred from the goddamn tears in my eyes. *~*~*~* I know she's crying, even though she's trying her best to keep it from me. My ears seem to be hyper-sensitive to the sound of her held-back sobs. I hear them like gun shots over the vacuum. There's an easy way out of this situation. I could walk out the door right now, while her back is turned, and the next time I see her we could pretend that this never happened. But I know she's crying. If I slip out now, wipe this whole mess under the metaphorical carpet, I'll always know that I left her here crying. Alone. So I'm not leaving. Now I just need to figure out what to do next. If I go over to her, try to rub her tears away, she'll either punch me in the jaw or kick me out of her mother's house. So how to stop Scully from running (well, vacuuming) away from me and let me help her through this? "Mulder, what the hell are you doing?" Okay, so pulling the plug from the wall socket doesn't exactly rank up there with Edison, but she's looking at me now. Looking at me like she wants to kill me through intense glaring, but looking at me. "I know you can do this without me, Scully." She shrugs and glances meaningfully to the vacuum, as if to say 'your point being?' "But you shouldn't have to. Let me do this with you." She takes a deep breath, and I see that the tears are now falling freely, soundlessly, cleansingly down her face. "Well, if you really want to help...." Success. "Yes." "But you're not touching the vacuum." I think I see a flash of teeth before she dips her head to brush off the tears. I hold my hands up in mock surrender. "Fair enough." She pulls the vacuum cord in, and wraps it around the back of the handle. "We can scrub the kitchen floor. I don't think even you can mess that up." Her words are harsh, but her tone is gentle. Teasing me a bit, but lovingly. It's a small victory. I'll take it. "Sounds great. Point me at the mop and bucket." She disappears into a small room off the side of the kitchen. A laundry room, I think. She comes back out a moment later. "There's just one mop." She tosses me a battered wash rag. "Sorry. You do this side of the kitchen." She points to the area on the right, which is really just a small alcove. She walks to her side, which is the kitchen, proper. I sit hunched over on the floor and scrub away like some modern-day Cinderella. I guess the masculine form would be Cinderellus. Less thinking, more scrubbing. When she speaks again, her tone is still teasing, but she sounds almost weary of it. "I was wrong. You can mess this up. You're supposed to be cleaning the floor, Mulder, not pushing the dirt around." Of course, her side of the kitchen already gleams from her military straight mop strokes. I want to tell her that I could do better if I had a mop instead of a wash rag with pink daisies on it, but that's not going to help. Besides, she might take it as a challenge, and I probably couldn't do any better with the mop. "Scully, we both know this isn't about cleaning." She mops harder, taking our her aggression on the innocent kitchen floor. "Come on...you said you'd let me help." She won't look at me again, which has to be a bad sign. "Then keep scrubbing." I'm in this deep, I might as well keep trying. "She lived a good life. And she died peacefully." Scully stops peeling the tile off the floor with her mop and makes her not-gonna-cry noise. "I know it hurts, and I know you weren't ready for her to go. But you have to deal with it, or you won't be able to move on. And you have to move on, so you can take your memories of her with you." She actually snorts. Not exactly the reaction I was expecting. Or hoping for. What reaction was I hoping for? "Did you get hit on the head recently, Mulder? Where is this coming from?" She's clasping the mop handle too hard. Her clenched knuckles look garishly white. I look at her, really look at her for the first time since I got here. She's a little sloppy. It's subtle, I can see why I missed it until now. She's just a little softer, a little sadder. Her hair isn't perfectly arranged. Her nails aren't polished with that clear stuff she usually uses. There's no mascara on her eyelashes, and it makes her eyes look twice as blue. She must have figured out that I don't know what to say, which is a relief. I was probably going to blurt out something pretty stupid if she didn't jump in soon. "Your sister disappeared when you were twelve years old. When did you move on? Your father was murdered four years ago. When did you deal with it?" She stops abruptly, and her mouth hangs open for a quick beat. She ducks her head, but not before I see the flush beginning to creep across her face. *~*~*~* I went too far. I know I went too far. But Mulder has to know that he's the same as me. We don't deal with pain, at least not in a healthy way. We fight with our last dying breath to keep it inside us. We let it knock around our internal organs, scrape our bones, poison our blood. And then we pretend we don't even notice it anymore, and we keep going. "Do as I say, not as I do, Scully?" He's doing a very good job keeping his expression neutral. I know that I'm not, so I start mopping again. "Tell me what you're feeling." I can think of a hundred flippant responses for that, but I'm getting the sense that Mulder's not going to let this go. I'm just delaying the inevitable. "I feel alone." I don't bother to whisper it. He'll just make me repeat it if he can't hear it. "Oh, Scully..." He pushes himself up off the floor and walks towards me, dropping his wash rag halfway between us with a wet plop. He's going to hug me. I know it, but I don't quite know how I feel about it. Too late, we're hugging. Actually, I'm not really hugging, I'm being hugged. By a man with very cold, very wet hands. It feels like someone's holding a sponge to my back. I sink into him a little bit, anyway. "You are not alone. You have your brothers, and your nieces and nephews. And you have me." He puts his soap-slick hands on my jawbone and pulls my face up towards his. I have a sick feeling of deja-vu in my stomach. "What do you want me to say, Mulder? Do you want me to cry and tell you all my favorite memories of my Mom? Do you want me to tell you how much I miss her?" He's not looking me in the eyes. He's looking at my lips, and suddenly I get it. "Or do you want me to kiss you...is that what this is all about?" He lets go of my face and steps backwards, as if the fire I feel in my gut is burning him. "What did you think was going to happen tonight? Did you have a whole little hurt-comfort scenario worked out? Or did you just think that you could kiss me and make it all better?" Mulder's still backing up. I see his foot hit the wash rag, but it's too late to say anything. Well, I guess I could say something, but it won't do any good. What would I say, anyway? 'Look out, Mulder, your foot's on a wash rag and you're about to fall down?' Too late, his foot has slid out from under him and he's fallen flat on his back. He's just laying there, and he doesn't even look surprised. He looks rather resigned, actually, as if this is exactly where he's supposed to be right now. I walk over to see if he's all right, and I get the 'see, now look what you made me do' expression. I ignore him and slide my hands under his head, feeling around for bumps. I don't think he hit the floor hard enough for a concussion. I'm leaving dirty water in his hair. Serves him right, my face is still all sticky from his aborted kiss attempt. He pushes my hands away gently, and slowly sits up. "Jesus Scully...that's not it at all! I just don't want you to feel alone. I have no ulterior motives, I swear. Yes, I wanted you to kiss me, and yes, I still want to kiss you, but that's a completely separate issue...which I just stuck in the middle of the other issue...ah, dammit...." He rests his forehead on his fists, the calling card of Defeatist Mulder. "Look, I know you're upset, and if you want to take it out on me, that's fine. But the funeral was last week, and we still haven't talked about this. I don't just want to pretend that this didn't happen." The soapy water from my mop has made little splotches of deepest black on his considerably black T-shirt. I take his hand in mine and we help each other stand up. "Why now." Technically it's a question, but I ask it blandly. I don't bother to crane my neck up to look at him, so I address my non-question to one of the splotches on his shirt. "I don't understand...your mother died, Scully. Would next year be a better time for you to talk about it?" He's losing patience with me. It was bound to happen sooner or later. "No, Mulder. I mean why now, as in why not when my father died, or when your father died, or when Melissa died, or when Emily died. What makes this different?" "Can you honestly say that your feelings for me haven't changed since...since the last time this happened to one of us?" My God, he almost sounds afraid. "You mean because we had sex?" The word hangs out there in the space between us, like some tacky lawn ornament you want to ignore but just can't. One of those plastic pink flamingos, maybe. "It meant a lot to me. I thought it meant as much to you, but maybe I was wrong. It changed me, Scully." "Having sex with me changed you into a person who doesn't understand the concept of personal space?" I want to add to that 'clearly I need to change my technique,' but I think I've already caused enough irreparable damage for one day. I hate hurting him like this. I'm hurting enough for both of us. *~*~*~* I'm starting to wonder about my subconscious. I had no conscious desire to discuss this tonight, but I'm starting to think that the urge has been building up in my subconscious for the past seventeen days. I wanted to talk about it the day after, of course, but she clearly didn't, and I resigned myself to waiting. After the first week I had my conscious mind convinced that it wasn't bothering me. But now the conversation has finally begun, and I feel like a choking victim who's just been given the Heimlich. I can breathe deeply, and I want to gulp at the sweet, sweet air. Of course, each breathe hurts like hell because Scully's just snapped a few of my ribs in the process. "Do you...do you regret it? You never told me, Scully." It happened so fast, with hardly any words. It happened so randomly. There was no tragedy, and no great revelation. We just looked at each other, we both saw something, and we acted on it. At least, I thought we both saw something. Could I really have been that wrong? "No, Mulder. I don't regret what happened." Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you. "Then why don't you want to talk about it?" I know I'm pushing my luck. Hell, I snapped my luck ten minutes go, now I'm pushing my last shred of hope. But now that the magical hour has finally arrived I can't seem to give it up. I've had seventeen days to deal with Scully walking out on me in the middle of the night, and I've accumulated a lot of unanswered questions. "Would you please pick an angle of interrogation and stick with it, Mulder?" Is this the conversation that I really wanted? The long overdue sex discussion? Shit. I've got to stop beating myself up, there's no way I could have known that she'd bring this up. I came over to help her through a tough time. "I'm sorry, you just threw me for a bit of a loop there. I really didn't think we were having this conversation tonight." Hell, I was beginning to think that we were never having this conversation. And all of the sudden, I get it. She did this on purpose, as a diversion. A lovely theory, only slightly marred by the fact that I was the one who indirectly started the conversation. I didn't mean for her to go along this path, and she knew it. "Scully, what's happening to us?" She lets go of her mop, and I wince at the series of angry noises as it slaps against and rebounds off the hard (and very clean) floor. The mop leaves imprints in the coating of half-dried soapy water. When I look up, she's staring at me. I can't remember the last time I've seen her look like this. She looks fierce. She looks like a warrior. Her voice is clear and steady. "We're falling apart." How can she sound so calm about that? How can she sounds so goddamn sure about that? I hope my voice doesn't start to shake. "I don't want to fall apart. I don't want to lose you." I see her shudder a little, and I know she remembers. I whispered that in her ear seventeen days ago, while she lay pressed up against my back with my arm wrapped around her stomach and my hand winding slowly through her hair. I counted her eyelashes in the dim light, and whispered it in her ear over and over again. "Do you want to help me clean the bathroom?" She's being diversionary again, which is technically a step backwards. But she's inviting me to stay. I'd do anything right now to stay with her. Even scrub toilets. "Sure." She picks up the mop and puts it back in the laundry room, and then empties the bucket of soapy water into the sink. She snatches up my wash rag and looks sort of wistfully at my half of the kitchen floor. We walk to the blue and white bathroom, and I stand awaiting further instruction. She hands me a spray bottle with those little scrubbing bubble cartoon characters on it. I've seen the commercial - they work hard, so I don't have to. I like this concept. She points to the white porcelain bathtub. "Spray it all over the tub, and on the ledge, okay?" She takes her bottle of Windex and starts spraying the mirror. Blue drops of the stuff roll down it like chemical tears. I sink to my knees on the blue shag bathmat and start spraying the farthest side of the tub. "When you're done spraying, turn on the hot water and rinse it off." The scrubbing bubbles look a lot less strong on the white porcelain than they do on the bottle. I take the shower head down from its hook and turn the hot water knob on all the way. The handle thrums violently in my hands and I see the steam that's starting to form. I annihilate the puny bubbles, scorching them off the gleaming white tub. When I get to the ledge of the tub, drops of the water bounce back at me and hit my jeans. I can feel the heat as the jeans cling to my skin. *~*~*~* Mulder must have the water on as hot as it can go. The mirror is steaming over, which is making it difficult to judge how much I need to scrub. The chemicals are making my nose tingle, and I have to periodically sniff to keep it from driving me nuts. Windex and Clorox each have their own smell, and the combination is something like au de hospital. Random strings of thought are cluttering my head, and it's too much to process. Mom, Mom's gone, and Mulder, Mulder wants to know why you left him alone and how wrong is it to worry about that now when Mom's gone? And why did I leave him? It wasn't bad sex. It was pretty damn good sex. It was just so strange...we were sitting on his couch, sitting just a little closer than we usually do. Our knees were touching, and Mulder kept fiddling with his hands like he didn't know what to do with them. Then he touched my face, and his fingers were trembling. It was like I could feel his heartbeat through his fingertips pressed against my skin. I reached my hand up to cover his. Not to pull him away, but to calm him, steady him. Our faces were already so close, neither of us had to move very far until our lips were touching, and it was just like our knees touching, just contact. Then his hands were gripping my face and our tongues were sliding past each other's and it was something entirely different. I'd always thought that when the time came, it would be a gradual progression. We'd talk it through, repeatedly. Talk about the consequences, talk about what we were feeling. We didn't take the time to walk to the bedroom, much less talk. "I don't know why, Mulder." He's startled by my sudden comment, and he jerks the shower head. Water sluices down the white tile wall. "I mean I don't know why I left. I think...I think I just panicked. We hadn't talked at all about it, and I didn't know what you were feeling. And then you were whispering about losing me, and...and I just wanted to go home and be alone." He turns the water off, and the shower head writhes for a bit and then lies still. "Sure. That makes sense." I don't think that came out right. "I'm sorry, Mulder, I didn't mean it like that. Listen, I do not regret what happened. And I'm sorry I left. I didn't mean it as abandonment. I just...I just needed some time. Some space to breathe in." My back is still turned, but I can see his face in the mirror. He has this look of childlike wonderment. "I take your breath away?" I can't help smiling, just a little bit. "Always." Mulder comes up behind me. Slowly, like he's afraid that I'll flinch, he puts his hands on my shoulders and rubs his chin against my hair. I look at us in the mirror, and my skin seems so pale next to his and he seems so tall. "I've been alone for a long time, Scully. I want to be together." He starts massaging my shoulders, and I let myself lean back into him. "I worry about that. I worry about you needing me too much." I let my eyes close; I don't really want to see the look on his face right now. "When you say you don't want to lose me...things end, Mulder. People change, people move on, people die." I hear him suck in his breath sharply, and then I feel the exhalation across my scalp. "I know that. But we're both here, now. Is it wrong to want to hang on to this time, to this feeling?" I open my eyes, and I see a tear I didn't know was welling there roll down my face. "I'm not sure. This particular feeling is rather painful, don't you think?" I sound a bit hysterical, like I might burst out laughing. Or crying. "It hurts. But I feel alive with it. It's like something's opened up inside of me." He's talking so openly to me. After all this time, after all this silence, he's telling me everything. "Scully...." He spins me around to face him. "What do you want?" What do I want? That's easy. I want my mother back. I want everyone I've ever lost back. I want the strength to stop pretending that I don't feel what I feel for Mulder. "I want everything." I rise up on my tiptoes and kiss him before I can think too much about it. It's quick and chaste, not like last time. There's no fire and no lust in it, just warmth. When we pull apart, I feel like something inside me is melting. *~*~*~* She always pulls away first, and I think that's one of the major differences between us. She's always leaving. She'd probably laugh if I told her that, and bring up one of my infamous ditching episodes. But outside of work, we go through a bit of role reversal. She always leaves, and I always run after her. Maybe I do need her too much. She's letting me hold onto her now, though. She's letting me stand here with my hands on her shoulders and her back pressed up against the bathroom cabinets. I'm physically trapping her, and I wasn't even aware of it until now. I let go of her. Not because I want to, I want to hold onto her forever so she can never leave me. I let her go because if I hold on for too long, I'll end up pushing her away. She doesn't leave. "Mulder, when I said I felt alone...I didn't mean it in the way that you think. My mom was the last person left who knew all of me. She knew the part of me from before the X-Files, and she understood me in the context of my entire life." She drops her head and stares somewhere in the vicinity of my sneakers. My toes still tingle inside them from dropping the vacuum. "I don't want to be alone, either. I want you to know me that well. I want you to know all of me. Including all the parts of me I've been trying so hard to keep from you for so long." I think I know what opened inside of me. It's the sky, and I'm flying in it with every inch of my body. "I'd love to." I can see my face in the mirror, and my expression could be the textbook illustration for 'idiotic grin.' "Mulder, when you say you don't want to lose me does that mean that you love me?" She says the sentence in one long breath, so the words blur together at the edges. "When I say hello to you it means that I love you." She reaches out to me, and wraps her arms around my back. "And I love you. But I want...I need you to love me unconditionally, Mulder. I need to know that you're here for me now not because we had sex, but because you're willing to love me as a friend." I lean back a little so I can kiss her forehead. "I love you as a friend." I kiss her cheek. "I love you like a brother." I kiss the tip of her nose, and she grins a bit. "I love you every way I know how." I'm crying, and it feels wonderful. My tears are falling on the top of her head. I pull back a bit, and I see that she's crying too. She lifts her head up to kiss me again, and I taste the mix of our tears. ***** Author's Notes This is a departure for me - an attempt at a more standardized method of story-telling. This is also my first (non-standard, I know) MSR. I blame shippery-dippery!wen and Caz. Special note for wen - the great songfic challenge is off and running. Didja catch the At My Most Beautiful and Letting Go lyrics? I even threw in a reference to Lose Your Way. Speaking of wen and Caz, I owe them and Kelley Walters great thanks and lots of baked goods for their gracious and wonderful beta reading skills. I love ya, guys. And look, Kelley, I ditched the vacuum-tubes! Oh, and I promise not to hold you hostage next time, wen. Feedback would be lovely - luperkal@home.com My other stories, plus links and recommendations are here - http://luperkal.simplenet.com Gorgeous graphics courtesy of wen, of course.