*

Dawn

*

The obliquely moving stripe of light by which Alex measured the morning was halfway across the tabletop before Mulder banged in, dripping, breathless. He wore only his most faded pair of jeans and had a heathenish glow that stripped years away from his flesh and renewed him from his bare feet on up to his wet, disheveled head. His slim torso, the elegant chest and muscled arms, might have been those of a man half his age. Truant and caught wet-handed, damp with the evidence of his swim, he tried to appear nonchalant, but looked only pleased. He dumped his sneakers and windbreaker in a heap by the screen door and padded to the refrigerator while one half of his audience looked on in disgust, and the other half chewed bacon meditatively.

He drank from the orange juice carton, as usual, but his innate grace gilded the offence with a forgivable charm. He piled a plate with cooled eggs and bacon as his the other two men in the kitchen watched with variant degrees of interest. Mulder, sitting down at the table, met both their cool gazes in turn and finally had the additional grace to look sheepish.

"I'm sorry. I didn't want to wake anyone."

"You're such a bullshit artist," Skinner said, obviously attempting to speak without inflection, but unable to hide his irritability--and more, a deeper anger he always felt when Mulder acted carelessly. "You left the radio on so we'd think you were down here," he accused.

Mulder ducked his head, took a bite of egg, and then grinned as he chewed.

An open glower broke the surface of Skinner's stony facade. "That Huck Finn act isn't cutting any ice with me right at the moment--Fox."

Mulder laughed. Alex sipped coffee and watched the other two wordlessly, but with eyes that gleamed brightly behind his half-waked lids.

"Did you hear that, Walter?" At the other man's wary look, Mulder said, "You wanted to call me *Mulder*, didn't you? I bet you just had a hot-and-heavy flashback to the good old days when you could call me on the carpet and really lay in."

Skinner's eyes narrowed. "Mulder, I can *still* really lay in," he said silkily.

Mulder's face, wildly open and bright, did not dim a notch--was cheeky, smirky, challenging, all in one. He was always pushing just a bit further than anyone expected--and no one expected it because it was for no good reason, just for the fun of it. Second nature to him to goad, tease, dance on the edge between provoking annoyance or helpless delight in those who fell within the focus of his attention. His passion.

He was laughing again, riding his swimmer's high. Skinner felt a moment of sheer, helpless fury, and then achingly let it go. It could not be helped. Mulder would tempt the currents, always. But there were countermeasures available, punitive if not reformatory. He glanced at Alex, and they exchanged a quick connective look that went unseen by Mulder as he chewed.

"You know the undertow is dangerous," Skinner said, leaning back in his chair and pushing his plate away. Leonine and faintly menacing, he contemplated his prey. "I think it's pretty clear that a corrective application of discipline is called for."

Mulder picked up his orange juice to sip as his eyes flicked into Skinner with a dry but piercing insolence. He assessed him, sipped, then turned a measuring study on Alex. He was smirking again as he set his glass down. "Don't expect me to pull it back out for you, just because you two didn't get to poke the pie this morning."

With the usual abruptness that made his voice sound all the more husky and unexpected, Alex said, "Who says we didn't."

There was a small spill of silence. Mulder, put off, gave them both his most expressionless scrutiny, and then all whim and breezy vigor eased from his face. He looked as if he had come at last home. "God--you--" He tried for words, found none, and lapsed briefly back into humor. "How long has this been going on!?" But the joke was simply the gloss of an inexpressible happiness. His eyes caressed them both, and both men felt their bodies tingle to life under than unashamed, unselfconscious adoration.

It ended up in bed, their arrival there achieved by slow, separate degrees over the course of perhaps half an hour--dishes, trips to the shower, wanderings up and down the stairs, and then in and out of the master bedroom. And then they were all tumbled back into the sheets. Lazy Sunday. Sense of deferral--the next day, Monday, would start up the week again and bring the usual return to mundane schedules of class, meetings, the small day and shopping trips of their complexified, semi-retired lives.

A while into it. Mulder sitting up, legs bent in a display of enviously limber muscle and showing off their crux of jutting bloom, his attentively erect cock. He was stretching a little, just to catch his breath, and a breeze swept in off the ocean, lifting the two sheer white curtains with a broad billow, and tousling his drying hair. His eyelids seemed infused to the brim, laden with their flush of arousal, his lips more so, swollen, bitten to ripeness. He was touching himself lazily. His lovers sprawled, loosely twined, both watching him. A sight as casual as a drink of water, so familiar there seems no taste on the tongue, and yet it flooded the body.

"I want to watch you--" He could not seem to speak clearly. His tongue, even, had thickened with lust, love. "Let me see what you did. Show me." His strokes grew more emphatic, and he visibly forced his touch to gentle so that he would not arrive too soon. His lips held themselves in parted heaviness, and his breath was erratic.

Skinner's hand moved slowly across Alex's body, a tactile memory recalled. Alex, in synch with him, rolled to one side, facing the windows. Skinner bent and pressed a kiss to the nape of his neck, then sucked there, hard. Heard Mulder's taut gasp, a high cry of astonishment, need. Could not see but could nearly feel the movement of his hand as he stroked his cock harder, lifting it upright. He touched Alex again, again, heard Alex's own ragged breath raise into a rhythm of quiet desperation. Skinner touched his fingers to nipples that stiffened delicately, exquisitely, under his rub. Already Alex was rubbing back against him, in a way that was new and fragile. So incredible that this could come to them--Skinner amazed himself with his own hardness, the wild surge of a passion that had come late. Late but deeper than he could have believed possible. Maddening, the lust to drive himself there. Alex gripping a pillow, fingers digging, back taking on a slicker sheen of sweat--when Skinner least would have expected it, the other man moaned--literally moaned. A new sound.

They were both stricken with it. Skinner could feel it. Could not forget Mulder, never that, but the need to dig himself deep into Alex now was so powerful a force he thought it might rip the heart from his chest. When he thrust in Alex bucked and screamed his pleasure--and then forced his face into a pillow. Skinner roughly knocked it away, thrust again. Alex flung his head back, knocked Skinner in the face--Skinner roared softly in pain and disbelief, lost the rhythm for a moment, and then it simply resurged like a wave cresting higher, pushed by a lover's force. He rocked, he pleaded, he crooned in a way he would never now regret, and bit Alex's ear and demanded him, and said his name over in a litany of lust. "Alex, Alex--oh god, baby--" As if from a great distance he heard Mulder's stifled sob of ecstasy, but it slid from his comprehension, he was too deep. "Alex, ah Christ! Alex--!"

Alex bucked back against him hard, and his arm shot out to find the pillow that had escaped him, sought wildly and ineffectually on the sheets and finally clenched there, seizing the fabric into rucked, violent folds. "Oh--fuck--no--Jesus-- Oh God, *yes*--you fuh--oh god, *yes*, Walter fucking Christ yes--" And then simply--"Please, God! God!" And then his ecstasy, unmistakable when Alex came, his high sharp cries of passion, of raw unmixed feelings that one rarely heard issue from him at any other time. High sounds, like laughter--pure as joy.

And Mulder--surely that splash as hot as a coin of sun on Walter's hip was the spill of his lover's pleasure, tossed to him from across the spare few feet of bed between them.

It was Mulder's pleasure. And as he slumped down and laid his cheek across one of Skinner's legs, and twined his arm with one of Alex's, and rode his breath back into a semblance of reason, he thought it had been a long time coming, but worth it, the drive, his long obsession, his endless effortful flirting, cajoling, prodding, forcing, challenging, confronting, seducing--all of it, all of it, worth it and the truth had been right there, damn it, and he'd been right all along.

He made a mental note to rub it in, and smiled.

*

Good morningggggggggggg.