Celebration
by A. Leigh-Anne Childe
Rating: none. M/Sk
slash. Pure joy overwhelmed me. I think that's my excuse for this happy
handful of fluff. Basically, I was zapped out of bed by some unknown force,
shot bolt upright, drove to the office, ran to my computer and wrote this
between the hours of midnight and five a.m. today. Which may explain a
lot. WARNING: This story is 100% angst-free!! Read at your own risk!
*****
I am sitting on the porch of the house I have finally made my own. That I've made my home. I've trimmed back the bushes, painted the slats, bought a bird feeder. Life is good--right? Actually, yes. Life is good. I didn't expect it to be; four years ago this would have been no more than an odd night's dream, born perhaps of the peculiarly inspiring chemistry of pizza, the scraps of which would have dissipated on my waking.
Dream, not pizza.
I have him here. Strange to say, I want him here. Random night, four years ago, plus a handful of days. That's when it began. Some case involving us both had just run its course, and brought us together in the aftermath; we shared a companionable disgruntlement at its outcome--injustice had been served, we were both laden with dissatisfaction, self-doubts, and resentment of bureaucratic machinations. By chance, we ended up together, feet planted on the brass rail at one of those law-enforcement watering holes favored by bureau personnel, news hounds, congressional aides, and a fringe of watchful, more anonymous persons whose face you saw too often for coincidence but whose name you never quite caught.
We drank beer after beer until we were swaying--he more noticeably than I. He was eating peanuts at a mad pace, peanut after peanut. He shelled them with a nimble-fingered expertise that didn't fully catch my eye then, but has since come to fascinate me. Despite his relentless chewing, he was light on his heels that night--hadn't had dinner but was knocking back the Heinekens like there was no tomorrow, as if seven a.m. was not going to catch up with him and find him on his knees kissing porcelain. I was also drinking scotch, neat, but I have a good bit more weight on me, and I'd had a late lunch.
He wasn't that bad off, though, as I discovered when I tried to put him in a taxi. Once the cold night air hit he was disarmingly lucid--well, lucid as he can ever be. It's not a word you'd apply to him without qualification: 'remarkably lucid, for someone so delusional' you might say. He turned stubborn and crabby when I forbade him to drive. Yadda yadda, natter natter, Jesus Christ, Mulder, do you ever shut up. Even the memory of him keeping me pinned to the sidewalk with his loquacious and blissfully self-absorbed muttering as our breaths turned to frost makes gooseflesh break out along my body, and to cut a long story short I ended up driving him to his apartment, though Alexandria wasn't on my way.
What happens happens. I've passed the halfway mark of a luckier man's span, notched my belt for things I'd rather forget, and not much surprises me. We got there, I went up with him, I've still no idea why. I stood in the living room, I listened to him yammer on in friendly fashion as he moved in and out of the room, to kitchen and back, I automatically accepted the beer he handed me, and I drank most of it before I even realized I'd done so. Half an hour later and two more beers, we were deep in a semi-drunken gripe session about the bureau, pulling out and dusting off our oldest grudges for compare, and trying to top each other with snide assessments and anecdotes about witless cripples we had known--incompetent profilers and unscrupulous administrators and others of that ilk.
Half an hour after that I was comforting him clumsily as he berated himself over some perceived failure--not to take his angst lightly, but to this day I have no idea if he was agonizing over someone's death or bitching and moaning about how he never requisitioned Scully a proper desk. To tell the truth, it was probably some blurry combination of both, along with a host of other vague regrets and unnerving apologies ("I just want you to know I'm really sorry about not typing out my reports double-spaced, sir"). Fine, Mulder. Don't worry about it.
Vague reassurances? Brusque words, gently meant? I have no idea what I said to him; all I recall is a feeling of intense anger. Anger not at him, but at something larger--anger toward everything that battered us both. Paperwork. The powers that be. Life. The law of gravity. It was mute anger; the kind that grips the chest and throat; the kind of anger you can't let out. No matter what words drizzle from your lips, you are not saying what you burn to say, because if once you started speaking you would scream out a sound and fury signifying nothing. And that is what you don't do, after a certain point in your life, when rage becomes a dense and tiresome maturity that wears upon your bones.
Unless you're Mulder. He rages. He rages still.
But that night he wasn't angry. Tired, rather. Drunk and a bit teary, in a way I might have found annoying had I been totally sober myself. But I wasn't, so I rubbed his shoulderblades and half an hour later blinked to find myself lying next to Fox Mulder in his own bed, while he lay sleeping, naked and sated. Of the sex all I can recall is that it was very good, with perhaps a few more veries tacked on at various points. It truly was a classical blitz of beer and desire that neither of us remembered fully. No details, just a boozy mutual warmth which left us with requisite hangovers and a sense of dazed dismay that sparked zippily between us the next morning when we both pulled ourselves back upright with the fuzzy Neanderthal grunts of creatures forcing themselves to assume more-or-less human levels of consciousness.
Puzzlement must have been our chief, shared reaction. I walked around for the next few days wearing a small bemused frown that intensified whenever I ran into him. He wore the same, and so for an interval of indeterminate time we bounced those frowns between us, neither of us quite certain what the hell he'd done, or why. We were mirror images of sheepish uncertainty, in fact; and it's a wonder we ever said another word to each other. He'd already moved back into the VCU at that point; and I was my own busy man. Top dog--or no more than a few dogs down. We didn't have to see much of each other. Didn't have to.
Yes, well. Look at him. Take a good look, if you haven't lately. He's getting older; as I am, as we all are. But Christ, he's aging well. Not an extra inch on the gut, and a pair of soul-revealing eyes that blaze at a fierce immeasurable wattage, so bright you keep waiting for the heart-jolting snap of burn-out. And it never comes. It hasn't yet.
It took time, though, for me to realize what I wanted. I don't know how long it took him. He says he knew right away, and he's an honest man. But he's also kind--much more so than I knew--and romantic--though less so than you'd suspect. We sniffed each other like cat and dog, each of us doubtful of the other's domesticity, each of us contemplating our previous history. Hmm. And with good reason. I mean, some doubts were history, but this was different terrain. Goodbye Consortium, hello gay condominium? No.
No, we didn't jump right into the deep end together. He disappeared for a few weeks on a new case; I attended a slate of Congressional hearings on some matter I now forget--oh, the Space Needle bombing investigation. Funny what takes precedence in memory. And then he came back and we met up in some hallway somewhere and stared at one another, and he wore a little crooked smile and I wore my de rigueur frown. And then, to my eternal surprise, I asked him out to dinner.
Dinner, dinner, a friendly fuck. And so it went. Not romantic? Tough. That is how it went. We quickly set a pattern, which is what two men with grindingly busy schedules tend to do. Racquetball, a screw--I think we're typical men, Mulder and I. Whatever chaos we pursue in our lives, we like to know that we can rely on certain familiar routines. We got together Wednesdays and--after a few months--weekends. But Wednesday nights came first. We actually chose the day, with deliberation, in part for its innocuous quality. Funny to think of that now, the two of us lurking at the edges of one another's lives, looking surreptitiously over our shoulders, expecting spies with minicams and waiting for the threats to unveil themselves. The darkly shadowed period of our lives was over, but we didn't fully grasp that then. We were still dazed, still watching the skies and cringing a bit whenever the phone rang unexpectedly.
And so there he was. But it wasn't a snap. He didn't materialize out of thin air and fill up the void I'd carved in my life. I can, if I concentrate, recall the flavor of those first several months. The gradually encroaching tide of Mulder. I smile when I say that; it's a small smile, but mine own. I knew the man. I knew the man. Knew his tics, his neckties, the aggravating stance he liked to take when rebelling against some mandate he refused to accept. His faces--the many faces of Mulder. Pissy. Dryly amused. Exasperated. Tender. Mulder looking at Dana Scully. Mulder looking at his boss--at me. Aggrieved. Bewildered. Tired.
I'd followed Mulder through the whirlwind he'd reaped; by his side, I'd ridden it out. Yes, I'd done that. And it had carried us farther than we'd expected and dropped us hard. And there we were, a couple of men lying blinking and stunned on the hard ground of mid-life, tossed suddenly from their ride and needing to find another. At the time we began seeing each other, we were both still in the bureau, finding new things to do, resuming a more mundane style of work. But it was that sane, good dullness that saved us, I think. Scully was--still is--in L.A., directing the organization of the new west-coast forensic lab, saving herself in her own way. . . .
We fixed dinners together, oh-so-casually. We talked, we watched each other mess with things in the kitchen, Mulder studying me as I cut carrots, as if this told him something meaningful about my inner man, me watching Mulder fill up ice cube trays and trying to decide the implications of his movements--is he overly careful, is he too sloppy, is this a man who secretly craves an automatic ice-maker, am I insane.
Dinners with Mulder. He drank water. Tap water. Ice if he remembered, if he bothered. This bothered me at first--that he didn't seem to have a preference. About ice cubes, about croutons on his salad, about salad dressings. Who doesn't have a preference for salad dressing, damn it? Mulder didn't, not then. He'd trained himself out of it. I was patient. I trained myself not to mock him. It was quickly borne in on me that though he was not self-effacing, he was. . .indifferent. To himself, to his needs and wants. He bought eighty-dollar shirts and kept them neatly dry-cleaned; he had his car washed regularly, his hair cut, his shoes shined. But if you offered him a choice of muffins he shrugged and wanted to know which kind you were having. I tend to think this is something his father did to him; these things usually are. We still haven't talked about it, not like that, and we might never do so. There are things Mulder--Fox--does not speak of, or can't quite yet.
Dinners, evenings. . .I still had my apartment. He would come to my place, never vice versa. You have to ask? I think not. He wore his suit at first, followed me more or less straight from the Hoover buildings on Wednesday nights. Always brought his briefcase in. At first. He'd shuck off his jacket, looking unreasonably shy. Those first days, weeks, months. A fistful of firsts. The first time he laughed out loud in my kitchen. The first time he opened a drawer in my presence, just to see what was inside. ("Fishing lures?") Two firsts in one: the first time we had sex before dinner and outside the bedroom, because we simply couldn't wait another minute before unwrapping each other and screwing our aching bodies frantically together. The first time we both fell asleep afterwards and he 'accidentally' slept over.
I got used to him. He grew on me, as they say. Like ivy, and then in time like a wondrously relentless and thorough kudzu. Hmm. But I tend to think of it in another way. You know there are two types of men in this world, right? Men who like cats and men who don't. A man loves or loathes the feline animal, is my experience, and it's purely genetic happenstance which preference a man is born with. I say love, but love is a tricky thing. You grow accustomed to a cat by degrees; you feed it; it colonizes your favorite chair; and then one day it takes off and your house is bereft in a way you don't quite notice at first, but which subtly gets under your skin and depresses you--until it returns--and then there it is, this furred, tenacious ensnarement of your ankles, whining for attention, cause for a rush of absurd relief you didn't know you could feel, and to your horror you are making small clucking noises and dribbling chicken into its bowl as a treat.
Mulder is indisputably a cat, in ways both obvious and beyond count. But of course I'd never had any opportunity before to notice his feline nature; a cat is not a public animal. I'd seen Mulder in offices, conference rooms, police stations; I'd never had him settled in my own personal territory. Like a quiet incursion, he came. On little cat feet? Yeah, right. I wouldn't go so far. But he was quiet, immensely so. For a time it unnerved me. I thought it was moodiness; I thought it was evidence of his doubts. It was a medley of easy talk and silences, and he gave the proper punctuation of smiles--and they were real smiles. But even so it was a time--one month, two?--before I relaxed and understood he was more than one man, and that the vox populi, the oracle whose passionate rants I'd listened to for more than half a dozen years, was capable of an unexpected serenity when planted in front of the hearth.
By the hearth--I can still picture him there--a real place, in front of the starkly minimalist fireplace of my old apartment. Stretched out in front of the fire, in his rolled up shirt-sleeves and his dark trousers, he looked like the elegant refuse of a shipwreck who'd found his way to me. I'd come out of the kitchen from doing dishes (or from abandoning them for the night) and he'd be lying there on the rug, staring at the fire, bemused by the flames, fixated on thoughts he didn't share with me. God knows what he was thinking.
Or I'd come out and find him wandering around, absorbed and curious, going through my bookshelves, sliding out weighty tomes, the detritus of my brief legal career, hefting volumes of law and letting them fall open, pinning the odd scrap of statute as if it were a Bible verse, as if he were searching for wisdom. He always wore that face. That face. Not earnest, exactly, but ever hopeful--and yet capable, thank god, of transmuting to humor with mercurial swiftness.
He poked and pried, investigating my apartment and my life as thoroughly as if he were profiling me. I didn't mind. It fascinated me to watch him. He examined it all with complete unselfconsciousness, everything, all the junk and furniture of my spartan existence. He opened closet doors--don't go there--and studied my collection of overcoats. He inspected my flatware, counted my towels, assessed my soapdish--but not in the manner of one or two women of my acquaintance, prospective girlfriends as they styled themselves, who during their visits always seemed to be giving my bachelor situation the once-over and taking notes with an eye for what required change.
Mulder didn't demand alterations, then or now--he never has had much interest in the style of our living room drapes or in the cut of my suits. I can live with that. God, let me tell you: I can live with that.
Those were just the early days. It got better. He grew on me, as I said. He started staying weekends; he left his dopp kit in the bathroom--shaving gear, comb, aftershave. Sweaters and jeans began turning up in my laundry: Mulder skins, shed and left behind. It might surprise you--oh, hell, what do I care--it might, it might not surprise you to know that I liked his leavings, these droppings and bits of debris. I more often than once found myself inhaling his scent from a piece of cloth, trying to discern his lingering shades. Light ghostly cologne, the faint earthy musk of his person, minglings of soap and sweat. It made me hard. I jerked off once or twice with his briefs, shocking myself with the act, unable to stop.
He ate sunflower seeds and the sonofabitch left their shells everywhere. Small piles of them on the table-tops, on magazines (as if they were paper plates), on desks and even on the polished oak surface of the bookshelves. In my apartment, on less than two months' acquaintance--to hell with our history--he left his squirrelly, messy litter everywhere the whim took him. It pissed me off, and then, one day, as I was sweeping a cluster of them off a shelf onto my hand and cursing under my breath and vowing to say something to him as soon as I saw him, I was struck by the fact that he wasn't there. He was in Seattle, living out of a suitcase and supervising the excavation of a mass grave. He wouldn't be back for weeks, most likely.
I never said anything. I wanted him. I wanted him back, wanted him with me, wanted him scattering his husks and shedding his fur all over my apartment. I wanted a little mess in my life--again. That's one of the things I'd missed after Sharon left, the signs of another human presence; but right about then, just sliding into synch with Mulder, was the first time I'd realized it. You don't know what you're missing, not right away. Sometimes you don't even notice when you have it again. Learning and relearning--thank god the lessons sometimes take.
What exactly happened, how it happened--well, it just happened. Time passed, we negotiated our intimacy, we surprised ourselves with our wanting. I bought this house, and then I signed over the deed to him. Half, yes, of course. And it was an uphill battle to make him take that much. Stubborn bastard. But I have my methods, you know. I won that battle, and several others. Not the ones you'd expect, perhaps, and his wins equal mine. . .or, yes. . .his wins are mine, mine his. The lines have blurred and it pleases me.
And here we are, the house in the suburbs, the dog, the bread-maker. We both wear wedding rings. But they don't ask and we don't tell. The times they are a changin', if slowly. Too slowly for his liking; too quickly, sometimes, for mine. It's a hell of a life. No--I mean--it's a hell of a life. A hell of a damn fine life, one I didn't expect to live. Mulder has many lives-- nine lives?--and seems less surprised by all this, though I don't think he's any less happy than me. He looks happy, much happier than he looked four years ago, or five or six.
Doctor Fox Mulder, professor of forensic psychology, is a man who rides the changes. He goes with the flow, you know? A man on the graveside of forty has no right to look so good, but I'm grateful for his good genes, I have to admit. And I like the earring; I put up only the most shallow show of a protest on the issue. Secretly I grinned to myself and admired the tiny loop of gold. Now he's talking nipple ring, but that's a far different matter and an idea I intend to spank out of him. He looks so damn good though, he might eventually win me over--his choice, anyway. If a forty-one year old man wants to look like a. . .oh never mind.
Forty-one. Body like a well-kept hustler's, slim and fine. Close- cropped hair with the barest flicker of silver amidst the wood-curl thickness. Eyes that gleam green and grey with changing moods but with undiminished light. . .I go inside and he's there, curled up on the couch, legs loosely pretzeled, a book in his lap. He's wearing his glasses, a slightly stronger prescription than last year, but of a smaller, more oblong design than his last pair. I look at him. I like to look at him. How could anyone not?
He doesn't see me. He's reading with a small intent frown, utterly absorbed though the television is rattling inanely in the corner, though the nearby sound of someone's mower is buzzing through the open window. The dog is at his feet: she meets my eyes and then follows my gaze to him, adoringly. Stupid to feel this happy just to look at him? Stupid, no. It is too sweet a life. How could I be anything but happy?
Stupid question, that.