Title: Curves of Dawn
Author: MissAnnThropic
E-Mail: miss_annthropic@yahoo.com
Summary: Mulder studies Scully while she sleeps.
Disclaimer: I own nasing! Really, I don't. All you see here (that you recognize, anyway) is the creation of someone else. I take no credit.



I never would have called myself a romantic type of guy... I mean, I've never had much of an example to go by when I was a kid. The sweetest thing my dad ever did for my mom that I can remember was letting her take whatever she wanted during the divorce. Later, when I was older and started up relationships with women of my personal choice, they were never the kind of women that liked the mushy type of guy. Phoebe was the English equivalent of an American biker bitch... one of those brute types that would just as soon deck me for pulling something cute on them like the 'gushy' guys do. Diana... she was no better... she just didn't have a British accent. She had a little more tolerance for it, but that didn't mean I was comfortable with it.

I have to admit always feeling a little romantically challenged most of my life. Not in that I couldn't date women... not THAT kind of romantically challenged, but that I never had that 'touch' for women's hearts. That doesn't mean looks... someone can be cute and still not have a heart's-cute... THAT would be me. I just didn't get it... I'd see guys do some of the nicest, sweetest things, and I would be completely befuddled. It made no sense to me... reading Greek was more sensical than any of that behavior.

I've tried to figure it out... I swear I have. When I was younger and dating Phoebe in England, she would read those trashy romance novels with the 'hero hunks' who could apparently look into the woman's soul and see their every desire... or something like that, whatever. All I know is that I would read some of it when she wasn't looking, just trying to get a clue, and it made absolutely no sense to me. What on god's green earth would ever possess a man to do ANY of that?

More so than the books, though, I think the things that I was most confused about were the little things Phoebe would tell me that the romance novels didn't elaborate on, the TRULY meaningful things that rarely even the novel characters shared together. I think Phoebe liked having that kind of power over me, that type of superiority... that she was able to teach me things that I didn't know... that she was such an expert in something that I did not understand in the least, that she surpassed me so completely in comprehension that I had no choice but to look at her for absolute guidance. She seemed to pity me (while enjoying her condensation of me), and in doing so she did share a few honest, heart-felt conversations with me about life and love through a woman's eyes. It was in these rare sympathetic moments that she revealed what she said women found the most romantic in men.

I had just stared at her, knowing that clouded and glazed look of confusion was on my face at every word she said. A man just wanting to hold a woman, watch her sleep, to listen to her breathe?! What were all those men, mindless, brain-washed drones?! I was not a novice to sex (okay, no need to dwell on past mistakes), and not ONCE had it occurred to me to even THINK of doing any of those things... much less enjoy them had I tried.

So I had all but conceded that I was just not a romantic guy... with no capacity for it whatsoever. I was the antithesis of what it was women sought, which I suppose was kind of fitting. I felt awkward around women, even the ones I was intimate with. It was like we were two completely different species, and though we could get along and engage in physical activities, we were not really two specie meant to get along. I guess I have to admit to a kind of animalistic view of women sexually I'd had at that time... that its nothing more than a primal act, and trying to glorify it with all that gushy lovey-dovey stuff was, to me, an utter waste of time. Phoebe's outlook on love in the flesh only supported MY views of physical human relationships, so I figured it was all ideology in women's minds which they did not actually practice or expect men to.

After Phoebe there was Diana Fowley... I couldn't have found a woman more like Phoebe on the inside had I tried. Diana was kinder, gentler... but in the end we still had this power-struggle between us. I wished only to hold my own, independent of my female partner, and she sought to bend me to her will. Diana wanted to own me... the way a strong corporate woman of modern America owned a doting and docile house husband. Let me stress that if there were ever a type to be a house husband, I am NOT he. I could barely stand to stay home no matter where that is at the time, even when I had someone to go home to as it was.

Regardless of the fighting and gridlock she and I lived in constantly, we stayed together for quite a long time... at least by my standards. I didn't know that wasn't what everyone's relationships were like, so I figured I must have it just as good as the next person.

I guess I should have suspected that we'd had a colder relationship than most when, at our final parting, I'd not felt the gripping agony of knowing I was going to miss her, because in the back of my mind I knew I wouldn't. I thought I might miss the idea of her, but I did not think back on any aspects of HER as a person and know I'd miss them when we were apart. Actually, I remember treating it much like I were bidding farewell to a business acquaintance. Hell, as I think back on it, we may have even shaken hands.

Old habits die hard, as do ideas on life... I have proven such a cliche to myself with exemplary entirety. For years my outlooks and thoughts on love and romance were the same as they had been with Phoebe and Diana.

But, if I were to choose another cliche to describe myself now, it would have to be a perversion of 'can't teach an old dog new tricks', because I have proven that you can.

I lay here in the morning, beside yet another woman that has passed into my life. Only this one, I have no intention letting pass out as all those before her have done.

It's dawn, the first rays of morning light are filtering through my bedroom window, casting light upon her figure as I lay on my side with head propped up with my hand... watching her.

I'm watching her, and all she is doing is sleeping.

The woman I'm talking about, of course, is Dana Scully. Never have I known a love like this before in my entire life... never had I even thought I was capable of it. Yes, I said love. I don't even know if I have ever in earnest used that word before, but now I can say it with all my heart, because for the first time in my life I know that I love... love in the true sense of the word.

I lie next to her, looking at her as I have never gazed upon another creature before... looking upon her with an overwhelming knowledge that I would, without doubt or hesitation, lay down my life for this woman. I've heard of love so selfless before, but just thought it had been yet another exaggeration in the interest of fashion and literature ideology... now I know how untrue that is... how real that kind of love is. In a second I would die for her, and if I was able I would do it all over again.

In a sense, I am overpowered once again by the woman in my life... but this is a kind of domination I would not give up for anything... I would fight tooth and nail to keep it, to the contrary. Call it a drug if you want, because it is. I don't know if I could live without it knowing now what it was like to have it, and never before had I considered the agony in the old saying 'tis better to have loved and lost'... who would be so cruel as to even speak of such horrors?

Look at me... talking about lost love and for the first time in my life seeing it as not only a tragedy, but a catastrophe. To lose Scully would be the death of me, and if it wasn't literally I knew I would wish it had been. I didn't know I was so incomplete before I met her... now I am so whole. Regardless of the outward appearance I have about the injustice of my work and my tragic past, I am content.

I watch her sleep, listening to the music in the soft sighing of her breath, and my world is as full and whole as I have ever wished it to be. She is lying next to me, in my bed... a place which I dread to see her leave, even just for the day. How crazy is that, but at this moment all I really want to do is stay here in bed with her forever... never stepping foot out of it.

Her breathing is the most wonderful sound in the world. It's different than her daily breathing... this is so much more hypnotic, like an incantation hexing me into a lolled stupor. I could listen to her sleep all day... I wish I could (though I wouldn't get ANY work done)... when I'm alone at night I think about what she sounds like, and sometimes it's all I can do to get to sleep.

I much prefer it when she is here with me. I don't think I could ever sum up in words what it feels like to wake up and hear her next to me... that gentle sigh of sleep near me. I seriously quiver at the thought... its actual presence sending an upheaval through my body, twisting and turning inside out all it touches (which reaches down to the very smallest veins), and through it all I love it. And I love her.

I gaze down upon her figure now, understanding why the Greeks had had such an obsession with the human, particularly woman, form. Sure, I'd appreciated it before, ogled over it as all heterosexual men do... but I'd not seen it as an almost holy sight before. I do now, though; at least I do with Scully. I look upon her body every day with not only adoration, but with reverence. It was the curves of a woman that no doubt inspired artists and writers since the beginning of time to break from being mediocre to being something exceptional... phenomenal, for never before or since has nature created anything so beautiful... it rivals the heavens in glory, and when it comes to Scully, I'd say the heavens come in a distant second.

Scully is lying on her stomach next to me, head turned away from me on the pillow so that I see a most invigorating mass of hair but not her face (though I don't need to be looking upon it to see it in startlingly beautiful clarity... I often wonder if her image could have possibly been imprinted into the strands of my DNA). Her body is bare... as prone as mine, and rather than making me uncomfortable, I am at peace with all around me. With everyone else I'd ever been with, the idea of being naked in the light with them really bothered me... I was always out of bed with at least boxers on before she could wake and see me. I've never wanted a woman to examine all of me... not like I let Scully do. Scully can look all she wants, and anything she likes she knows is hers... she need only ask.

The sheets of my bed rest right over the rise of her buttocks, covering her legs but leaving all above it bare. For someone so short, Scully has the most amazing back... something about being nude I suppose that seems to make all of her skin just go on and on in an endless plain of tantalizing perfection.

Starting at her hair, which I resist with all my will power the urge to reach up and run my fingers through, my eyes travel down her body. Her shoulders are soft, smooth and supple (I swear, Scully has the softest skin, though she claims the same of me... guess we're both just a couple of softies), her creamy skin glowing almost a golden yellow in the early dawn light from the window. Scully has a mole on her left side, a few freckles near the back of her neck... her skin isn't flawless, but you'd be hard pressed to get me to find any fault in it.

My eyes move down her upper back, the gentle moving of her ribcage stirring her form as she breathes... muscles faintly moving underneath as her body pulls in air and pushes it out to make that intoxicating song of a sleeping woman. The shallow valley in the center of her back over her spine rising to gentle curves as they moved to wrap around her upper torso, the side of her left breast visible as a sudden sharply rounded piece of flesh. Best not go there... if I get into the FRONT of her I'd be here all day.

Her middle back sweeping down in the most tantalizing dip, that valley down her back smoothing out as it moved to meet the flatter area of her lower back... the small of her back beckoning me even more so unclothed as it did with them. Even in the office I have to indulge myself with a touch there. I think its the one place I never even THOUGHT of as being sexy on Phoebe or Diana... something I wanted to be just for Scully.

The flesh around Scully's middle back is softer... looser as it fleshed out at that point for the dipping curves of her waist. That I will always concede to women (had even when it was Phoebe and Diana), women DO have curves. I don't know that a single line on their body is straight or angular as they are on men. They are a continually flowing smooth line... smoothing over their bodies like the gentle swaying of a tide.

My eyes finally reach her lower back, distracted from her skin there by the tattoo to the left of her spine. The red, green, and black auroborus... an insidious serpent devouring itself tail-first on the most kind-hearted and gentle creature I know.

I'm not a tattoo man... I don't get turned on by the idea of a woman with one, I mean. It never bothered me, but I was never gung-ho about it, either. I would have thought, on Scully, that I would rather dislike the idea. Even before I admitted to myself that I was in love with her I knew I thought of her differently than any other woman. When I found out she'd gone and gotten a tattoo during my trek to Graceland... I was angry. In the back of my mind, I was wondering how she could think to mar skin like hers with such a permanent, unnatural blemish?

For a long time I had secretly hated it, without ever having seen it. I just imagined that ugly snake scarring the flesh of an insanely gorgeous woman in her own right, and I was bitter against it up until the day I first saw it.

The first morning after... the morning following our first night together as lovers, I had watched Scully get up out of bed to go take a shower and had finally gotten to look at the tattoo. I wanted to hate it, but I didn't dislike it as much as I thought I would. I saw in it, encompassed in ink and dye, a period in her life... one I knew I understood and had seen her through. It was a testament to our past, a reminder not to forsake the future, and I guess above all else a warning to me that Scully had it in her... that she could find herself in as dark a place as I could be.

I got to where I appreciated it... grateful of the reminder it served for me to treat Scully as she deserves (within my meager means, that is). I do the best I can, for I am no where near worthy of her.

After a short time, I got to love it. I think it was the fact that it was hers and mine. Ed Jerse had seen it, but aside from him no one, not even Scully's family, had seen it. I had, though... I saw it all the time... I knew it so intimately I could draw it from memory in detail... right down to the snake's markings of color. I know it even better than she does, since she can't see much of her own back. I know I'm her choice when I remember that she's let me see her tattoo. I know she's devoted herself to me by showing it to me without hesitation, and she knows I'm hers for knowing it.

Everything Phoebe had weakly confessed to me so long ago now makes sense... explicit sense... so much sense that I can't believe my ignorance before. I want to wrap up in Scully and cuddle with her until my dying day, there is little I enjoy more than watching her sleep, and no composer in history with any so-called musical masterpiece has ever been able to have the effect her simple breathing has on me. I think back to those trashy novels I read where men were doing what I had thought then to be insanely excessive things for women, and now I scoff 'that's ALL they're willing to do?! I'd do that and tenfold for Scully.' I can understand now how men for centuries were inspired to create great things in the name of women. I look at Scully lying next to me, and it makes me wish I had a poet's words, a painters hands, a sculptor's touch... ANYTHING that might express to her just how beautiful I think she is.

As I follow her curving body in the morning light, I fully understand for the first time what it really is we're fighting for in our work. All justice comes down to this... allowing everyone their chance to have what I have now as I lay prone next to my partner. The love I have for her at a time like this... that is what the human spirit is all about; without this, humanity would be nothing... not worth the paper it was printed on.

As the sun rises higher behind me, casting a brighter light into the room while moving the shaft of light down Scully's side toward me, I can no longer resist a touch... I've seemingly held back from touching her for an eternity in some parched desert. I can stand it no longer... I HAVE to drink.

I bring up my right hand and reach to her, my fingers touching her lower back... index and middle finger making soft circles as I trace the ever coiling snake on her skin.

I see her skin react with goose bumps, and some unexplainable but present nonetheless change in her sleeping symphony tells me she had awakened under my touch. She doesn't let on, though, faking sleep as she lets me move my hands gently over her lower back.

I smile at this... oh the games we play.

Knowing she's awake, I stop the circular action of my hand, dropping it to her body so that the flat palm of my hand claims its rightful spot on the small of her back, feeling the heat and texture of her exposed skin like I never had in the office when I touched her there so fleetingly. She takes in a quick, stuttered breath at the contact. Never has anything been so warming than seeing her react so to my slightest touch.

I shift closer to her on the bed, bringing my body flush up against her... feeling the length and entirety of her bare skin even if I could not see it. There's a perfection in the way our bodies fit together. We're highly contrasting different sizes, but we fit together... like pieces in a puzzle... it just works out perfectly. When I have her small body tucked against me as it is now... there is absolutely nothing I wouldn't do for her. She would need only say the word, and I would even give up the search for my sister. What makes me love her even more is knowing that she would never do so... she knows what that means to me and therefore it has meaning for her.

Apparently Scully feels a similar content with the universe and other-worldly excitement I do when we're cuddled up like this, because her casual exhale becomes a gentle, pleasurable grumble. I feel a reciprocating one of my own rumble in my throat, but I confine it to my chest... causing a kind of earthquake-like rumble I know she feels... her body shivers faintly in response. It's like we're doing a dance... a ballet of attempting to impersonate the greatest forces of the earth, copying each other's planetary forces with our bodies.

Scully shifts back against me, turning on to her side so that her back is against my chest in a classic spooning position. She reaches back, pulling my hand that had rested on her back around to her front, bringing it up to her head and snuggling her face against it... the back of my hand flush with her soft cheek and lips, my arm flush with her tender breasts.

I tug her tighter to me, dropping my face to her hair and breathing deeply of her scent. Never could I describe Scully's unique smell, but I could pick it out of a crowd of a thousand people. Smelling her so strongly as I just did and again my body rumbles and a sound escapes my throat in what she calls my tiger-growl. Tiger-growl... I suppose that's to go along with that kitten-purr she does sometimes.

Scully sucks in a long, deep breath... letting it out through tensed vocal cords. THERE is it... the kitten-purr, in response to my own feline imitation I suppose.

I know what love is now, and I understand romance now. More than that, I know that I can be just as romantic as the next guy... I might even hazard to guess a little more so.

What would Scully say if I told her every day I was plagued with the powerful desire to drop down to one knee before her?

Every day... maybe one day I'll get up the courage to do it. Until then, I'm content to exist in what we have now... symphonies in sleep and curves at dawn.



END