AUTHOR: Amanda Wilde

EMAIL: maybe_a@rocketmail.com

CATEGORY: V, MSR, H

RATING: The mildest PG. I think.

SPOILERS: Not a one (Except for *Author's Notes* --Travelers, US5) Shipper safe, noromo friendly. Honest.

DISCLAIMER: Scully loves Mulder, and Mulder loves Scully. Uncle Chris says so, and he owns 'em, so who am I to argue?

ARCHIVE: Anywhere with my name & addy.

THANKS TO: The World's Greatest Free-Style Beta Squad: Shalimar, Ebonbird, Euphrosyne, and Spot the WonderDog

AUTHOR'S NOTES: Enough with the RingAngst!

DEDICATION: This is for everyone who read my first story, **Anniversary Waltz** (plug, plug, plug) and kindly suggested I lighten up.  Light enough for ya, kiddies?????

SUMMARY: The woods are lovely, dark, and deep. . .

No moon tonight, or none he could see. Too dark to make out the hand in front of his face, or separate the factual from the fanciful. Scully was there, and real, of course, but he knew that only by touch.

The night creatures were stirring now, the forest coming to nocturnal life: owls and skunks, nighthawks and mice, bats and moths.

Hunters and prey.

If he tipped his head slightly, his cheek would just touch her hair. So he did.

It was soft and silky, surprising considering the chemical cocktail she regularly subjected it to in order to keep it red. Or what he understood was red, because most days, but not all days, he was stone-cold colour blind.

Her hair smelled good, too. Actually, all of her smelled good. But then, except for that time with the cockroaches, she always smelled good. Maybe too good.

Maybe this good smell was more than he deserved, was made for others, not for him. Maybe he could sit and mope about that for awhile. . .

Scully, it seemed, had been reading his thoughts and decided a shift in the point of view was in order. No moping about anything, she silently told him, using the unspoken communication which many thought was the result of their mutual love, affection, respect, and the joined-at-the-karmic-hip thing, but which, she often suspected, was the result of writers not quite knowing what to write and telling the two of them to look meaningfully at one another until they could work in another commercial. . .

But now, no. It was clear: they really were one soul. And working hard on one flesh, if she had anything to say about it.

She turned and faced him fully: want, need, desire, and longing were written plainly there for him to read. For all the good it did her, because, as mentioned just sentences ago, it was really dark and neither one of them had their glasses anyway, so reading of any sort, except Braille, was strictly out of the question.

Mulder shifted beside her, slowly, carefully, and Scully first felt, then heard, the warm smack of his mouth on her skin. First on her neck, then slowly along her jaw, across her cheek, and she was dizzy with happiness, drunk with lust, alive with need, and uncomfortable with this sitting position, but sometimes one had to compromise. . .

Had she only known that all it took to get Mulder's undivided sexual attention was to ply him with oatmeal chocolate chip granola bars and tell him he had no life. Geez . . Hindsight is always twenty/twenty, she mused as Mulder gnawed at the downy skin just below her ear and murmured, "We really should be thinking about the case, Scully."

"I am," she assured him, tilting her head to give that wonderful mouth of his better access to her throat. "I'm thinking about nothing but. . the. .oh god. . case."

"Good," he whispered into her ear as his tongue found her earlobe and she pretty much decided she was going to lose her mind. "It's important that we . .. keep. . . we. . . keep. . . "

"Keep?" she asked, as stars burst on her eyelids and her voice became both low and ragged, surely a testament to Mulder's considerable skill.

"Keep. . ." he repeated, nuzzling his way across her jaw and over her chin and down her alabaster throat. "Keep. . . something. Wait.. .It'll. . .come back to me," he pledged before his tongue dipped into the silken hollow at the base of her throat.

Eternity passed.

"Oh yeah," he muttered between nips at her right earlobe, "we. . . have. . . to . . . keep. . .focused."

She was awash in sensation, lost in the feeling of his soft lips on her inflamed skin, and startled by the sudden sound of a nylon zipper sighing open. The cool night air weaving its way through her thin, white, completely impractical cotton T-shirt made her realize the zipper was hers.

"F-focused?" she whimpered.

"Focused," he echoed, his lips working their magical way back to the marble column of her neck. She felt the first brush of his mouth against hers like a jolt of electricity. . .

. . . or better yet, lightning. Yes, a bolt of lightning, straight from the Gods of Old Olympus, that made its way from her heated lips straight to her aching groin.

Or was that just a charley horse?

Whatever, it felt pretty damned good. And when his tongue probed forward, entreating, seeking knowledge of the sweet mysteries of her mouth, it felt pretty damned better.

Sex always did that to her, she thought idly, as Mulder explored the depths of her mouth with his skilled, demanding, agile tongue. She became flushed, sure; her pupils dilated, as expected; and she found herself molten with desire and weak with need, same as everyone else. But inexplicably, along with her inhibitions, fears -- and often, actual undergarments -- her grasp of grammar, tenuous at the best of times, flew right out the window.

Then she felt his hand move slowly from her shoulder to her bicep, slip gradually to her elbow, then languidly across the front of the navy and yellow Goretex and nylon jacket, over the zippered, double stitched, waterproof passport pocket, over the manufacture's bold-type name, which escaped her at that moment, across the embroidered logo, showing four stylized maple leaves, one yellow, one red, one green and one blue, suggesting not only the four seasons, (*A fine band, even if Frankie Vallee's pants were always too tight and made his voice do. . that,* as Mulder would no doubt have said with a wry grin and eyebrow waggle, had his tongue not been otherwise engaged somewhere in the vicinity of her tonsils) but also bringing to mind the four primary colours, even though there were technically only three, those being red, blue, and yellow, unless you were a cathode ray tube, in which case it was red, blue, and cyan, sort of like green, only yellower, but close enough, as they say, for government work. . .

Mulder tore his mouth forcefully from hers. "Scully!?!" There was a raw edge to this utterance, something ragged and jagged and roughhewn and notched and serrated and craggy and a whole thesaurus full of things she had never heard in his voice before.

"Yes?" It came out of her passion-bruised and lust-swollen lips like a question, but there was no asking in it: Her *yes* was just that:

Yes, Mulder, I want you. Yes, Mulder, I want you now. Yes, Mulder, right here. Yes, Mulder, I'm serious. And No, Mulder, I didn't stop to think about mosquitoes or chigger bites, contraceptives or prophylactics, the likelihood of getting dirt in all kinds of places I don't really want it or finding pine needles in locales I'd rather not have to consider, but I'm a doctor and can write my own antibiotics prescriptions and none of that fits with the *Yes* anyway, and. . .

"Scully!?!" louder this time, more demanding, derailing her train of thought. "Do you think you could stay on topic, here?"

"What? Oh. Sure. Sorry," and she curled her hand around the base of his skull and dragged him back into a fathoms-deep kiss, drowning in the liquid pleasure of it, of him, of Mulder, her Mulder.

Well, *this* Mulder, at least, cloning being what it was and all.

Their tongues tangled, and she thought back, trying to remember where her thoughts had gone off course. . . it seemed to have something to do with cyan and government work and, oh right, she realized as she moaned her pleasure and sucked on his tongue with renewed vigor, here we are. . .

. . .she felt his hand inch its slow way across the front of her jacket and she wondered if it was ever going to find its target or if she'd have to stop and draw him a road map or lend him her GPS unit or something, when she felt his knuckles brush softly across her really ridiculously thin, impractical, white T-shirt and the straining, heated, pebbled, roseate peak beneath it, and she leaned forward, groaning, just for a change of pace, though it sounded a lot like her moaning, truth be known, and pressed her breast into his welcoming hand. . .

And suddenly, he was everywhere: his lips warm and wet on hers, his tongue swirling across her palate and against her teeth and over that thing on the inside of her cheek that she'd learned the name of in medical school, something Latin, probably, and his hands kneading her firm, some might say, pert breasts, his mind enfolding hers, his slavering jaws tugging at her ankle. . .

"Oh God, Scully!" Mulder yelped unexpectedly, more pain than pleasure. "Quit biting my ribs!"

"Quit doing *what*?" she asked, feeling a stronger yank at her leg.

That's when they heard the growling, and saw the full moon rise triumphantly overhead, and felt the eyes of the hungry pack upon them. . .

end

Why? I don't know. . . how about, *Don't be dark*?
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