Title: PTSD Doesn't Quite Cover It

Rating: K+ (Wait – you really fell for that? Ha ha totally kidding: M)

Summary: When the monsters are in his head, she's the only one who can chase them away.

Disclaimer: Remember the last two seasons? Yeah. Clearly I own nothing.

Dedication: To Mulder's Woman, who wanted someone to write about Mulder's mental illness, and more smut. Not necessarily in that order.

It's all too loud.

People don't murmur or mumble the way you would expect. Their thoughts scream, shouting at him in a barrage that beats at the linings of his skull like a thousand hammers. So many thoughts… some are in the form of words, broken up sentences and phrases. Others are flashes of light and color, images like imprints of feet in the sand, negatives in a darkroom. But there are many… so many… it's too much, and a small, detached part of him manages to remain objective – almost like a third party observer – and notes that it's overload for his brain.

He can't handle this. His blood feels like it's thickening and boiling and rushing all at once. Everything is loud, so very loud, and he can't fucking concentrate on anything because nobody is fucking shutting up!

He knows things, things he doesn't want to know, haunted echoes whispering fiercely in his ear, their shouts bouncing around inside his head. It feels like his very body is cracking, overcome with it all and he doesn't want to know this, this isn't right, this isn't… they're feeding him knowledge, don't you see it, they're feeding it to him now, and he can't tell what's right and what's wrong, true and false are all mingled and mixing… And he can't control it… it won't stop it won't stop it won't stop…

Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.

That's a lie if there ever was one.

The truth consumes you, swallows you up and fills you until you can't even think properly, can't feel anything except for this horrible, endless, awful truth. It's burning him, can't you see it's burning him from the inside out and it's all around in every part of him and it won't stop it's not ever stopping but he still can't help but beg and plead and cry for it to stop stop stop stop stop…

He wakes up drenched in sweat, heart beating like it's trying to burst out of his chest, the sheets twisted around his legs and in his fists. There's a hand on his shoulder, holding him gently, like someone was just shaking him awake.

Oh, wait. Someone was.

He looks up and meets her eyes; those clear, blazing eyes that hold keen warmth only he can see.

"Was I screaming?" He asks. He does, sometimes. Shouts, yells, cries out all manner of things.

Scully shakes her head, the red locks so straight during the day having become wild and tangled in the night. "Not this time."

There's something that doesn't add up about that. "How'd you know to wake me up?"

He's treated to one of her patented eye-rolls. "I can tell. It's in your body language or something and it wakes me up."

He feels guilty for having disturbed her slumber, but now that she's awake…

Those demons still haunt the corners of his mind, hissing like vipers, coiling around his thoughts and heightening his fears. He can't recall the details of all that he saw and heard during his period of insanity, but the impressions remain. He mentally shrinks away from them but they follow, staining his mind like ink on paper. They leave him alone during the day and sometimes they grant him a reprieve but at least once a week he finds himself ready to bang his head against the wall until he's bloody to get the voices out.

Nothing gets them to leave, except for the one thing that totally eclipses his consciousness, the one thing that so consumes his senses and his mind that there's no room for anything else, be it fears or joys.

And it's the woman lying next to him.

She's probably tried to analyze or rationalize his unique coping mechanism, but whether she's come to a satisfyingly logical conclusion or not, she still lets him do this. He strips her carefully, running his hands softly over the skin that he exposes. He kisses her neck, her cheeks, her forehead, the press of lips soft as he reminds himself that she is real and the nightmares are not. Not anymore, anyway. Everything else around him might be a lie, but she's always been real. Even his hallucinations of her have been real in a way. She's always there, fierce and strong and unmoving, dragging him out of the darkness and showing him the way.

She lies back down, spread out underneath him, her face holding nothing but a kind of love and understanding that he hasn't seen anyone else in his entire life give him and if he weren't stupidly in love with her already that would do it for him. He's gotten his heart stomped on more times than he can count, whether it was by family members, friends or lovers, but she's never hurt him like that. Even when she was clearly jealous or angry she's never stooped to petty games or sullen silence. She's supported him and been there for him, and now she's doing it again.

He starts at her ankles. He noses the skin, as soft and thin as wet paper, his tongue tracing the bones that lie just underneath the thin layer of flesh. Her foot twitches but she lies still. He nuzzles his cheek against her leg, loving the difference between her soft skin and his overnight stubble. He kisses as slowly as he can, tasting every inch of her, trying to see if there's a subtle difference between the feel of her skin on her upper thighs as compared to her knees or her calves. He senses her dig her fingers into the sheets and the corners of his mouth twitch upwards as he scrapes his teeth along the skin just above her knee. He runs his lips along the skin, switching from closed to openmouthed kisses, pressing his tongue along the inside of her thighs. He feels her skin jump, can almost hear the blood rushing and nerves zinging as they receive his ministrations.

Her scent hits him now, dark and thick, making his head swirl, and a part of him wants to dive right in, taste when now he can only anticipate. But there's darkness at the corners of his vision yet, shadows where there should be light. He skips upwards, mouthing just above where she wants him (her hands clutch more tightly at the sheets) and alternately licking and kissing his way to her navel. He dips his tongue into her bellybutton, tastes the drop of sweat that's pooled there, and she instinctively bucks her hips upwards. He does it again, just to chuckle at her reaction.

Any other time and she'd have his head for it, but right now he can pretty much get away with murder. Nightmares are his get-out-of-jail-free card.

He places his hands on her hipbones (and makes a mental note to go back to those later) to hold her still as he carefully brushes his mouth along the underside of her breasts. She trembles with the effort of trying not to move, and he feels that warrants some kind of reward. She always was more patient than he deserves.

He takes as much of her breast into his mouth as he can, and she makes a sound that sends a pulse of heat to his groin before she shuts her lips and holds the rest of it back. She hates admitting how he gets to her.

He pulls away with a slight noise of suction before reattaching himself to the other breast, just the nipple this time, kissing around it before pulling it gently in with his teeth. He's kneading the other one with his hand because hey, he's a multitasker and prides himself on being thorough. Scully's breathing heavily through her nose because she still refuses to open her mouth, her lips pressed together so tightly that they're almost white. This is going to reveal how stupidly male he is but her breasts are fucking amazing. Maybe it was the whole having a kid thing, or maybe it's because he didn't get to touch her, never mind make love to her, for a year while he was abducted and then another fucking year while he was running ragged all over the country. He doesn't particularly care. What matters is that he can touch her, taste her, drive her to the point of insanity and then tip her over the edge.

She's making keening little noises in the back of her throat that her lips are determinedly muffling, and her hips are fighting the force of his hands. He detaches himself from her breasts with difficulty, knowing that if he doesn't stop now he's just going to dive in and he doesn't want that. Not at the moment. He needs to map her out, to reacquaint himself with every little cell in her body.

He moves upwards again, this time outlining her collarbone with his tongue, biting at the soft skin and licking away the sting. He plants tiny kisses up her shoulder, sucking at the juncture where it meets her neck, adding a hint of teeth to ensure the rise of blood to the surface. He can finally claim her as his, and he wants the world to see it. She pretends not to like the bruises but he doesn't see her covering them up with makeup the way he knows she could.

He spends a lot of time on her neck, sucking at the pulse points and trailing tiny kisses up and down and up and down. When he finally brushes his lips along the line of her jaw she's panting, her mouth open but her throat closed tight against any traitorous sounds that threaten to escape.

It doesn't matter, really. He knows he can get her to scream before he's through with her.

He kisses the corner of her mouth and feels her skin vibrate beneath his lips as she struggles not to turn her head and consume his mouth with her own. She's voracious, his Scully, in a way that nobody at the Bureau would ever guess (or will ever in a million years know). But she's holding back now, holding back so that he can let go. Drowning in her leaves room for nothing else, no monsters made in his own mind, and although she's never said he figures she must have some inner monsters of her own because she understands so perfectly.

(Of course, there was the week after Pfafster… and he thinks maybe he does know what her monsters are.)

He's at war with himself, craving her, wanting to take and take and take but knowing it'll be over too fast and like an addict he'll only be left with emptiness and craving more. To slake his hunger he allows himself a little indulgence, and claims her mouth with ferocity. She responds at once, her tongue sliding against his and raking across the roof of his mouth, twisting and entangling as her arms wind around him.

And then he surprises her, breaking away (oh, it's so hard to break away) and sliding down her body, latching onto her center and sucking.

Startled, she gives a proper cry. He can't help the surge of triumph that momentarily overcomes him. Her hands scrabble wildly for a moment before one buries itself in his hair and the other tangles itself in the bedding. Her nails scratch lightly against his scalp as she holds on, sending a shiver dancing down his spine.

He keeps at it, lapping and sucking, even adding a light scrape of teeth now and then. When he shifts position and slips a finger inside of her, he's rewarded with another little cry, and the fingers in his hair tighten and tug. He adds another finger, and then another, and soon she's tugging warningly instead of instinctively and he can feel her walls start to convulse and flutter around him. He doesn't stop the way she expects him to, the way he usually does (oh, he's a tease all right, he loves to leave her hanging). He speeds up instead, working her for all he's worth, and she comes with a scream and his first name. He hates his first name, unless she's shouting it like this. Hell, his name could be Maurice or Tiberius and he'd love it when she screamed it, splayed out under him.

He gives her a minute to recover, turning his attention to those hipbones he neglected earlier. The shape is soft and feminine, but he can still feel the bone underneath the skin and he follows it with his tongue, nipping right where the tip juts out to the side. She gives a little sigh and her hands move down to his shoulders, gently trying to pull him upwards.

He follows her silent plea, crawling back up so that they're nose to nose. He's so hard he's pretty sure he could pound nails if you asked him to, but he doesn't have to say anything. He can't, actually, once she gets her warm, lithe hand on him. He chokes on his own saliva and strangles himself on a groan as she works him for a moment, her movements languid and assured. He can feel her shift beneath him, spreading her legs wider, letting them fall apart enough to guide him into position and let him in and God, what did he do to deserve this? What deed, what action, what sacrifice earned him this woman welcoming him into her heart and her mind and her body?

He kisses her nose, her cheekbones, her forehead, her jaw, her eyelids – everywhere that he can reach. He feels frantic but she's doing the same, her lips crushing against his skin again and again, and he knows she's unraveling as quickly as he is. He groans her first name into her ear as he sucks the lobe into his mouth and she moans at that, her legs coming up to wrap around him, her inner walls tightening her hold on him and he can't help but thrust harder at that.

Her hands are in his hair and he's got his tongue in her warm, wet, perfect mouth, tasting cinnamon and toothpaste and that unnamable taste that belongs to her and her alone. He's bottoming out inside of her with every other thrust and his heart is threatening to give out on him with how fast its beating, his breath coming in through his nose which might be short-circuiting his brain from lack of oxygen but he doesn't give a damn because he is not going to stop kissing her, not for anything.

And then she tears her mouth away from his, forcing his head down towards her neck so that she can place her mouth by his ear (he contents himself with kissing all over the base of her throat) and whispers his name and an impossible truth – her love for him – and he is completely, utterly, irrevocably undone.

All that he receives are flashes, impressions – her skin, her heaving chest, a hoarse cry, red hair and eyes slamming shut – before he sees nothing, nothing at all, because his climax has hit and he feels like he's in the middle of a bright, colorless light, everything and nothing washing through him, so many emotions that they all meld together and he's almost numb with pleasure. It's walking on the razor edge of painful but a part of him never wants it to stop. In fact, the only thing that doesn't make him miss the carnal euphoria when it dissipates is that it's replaced with the bliss of seeing her.

She's limp and content beneath him, her skin glistening with a sheen of sweat that belongs to both of them, her hair in utter disarray and her eyelids heavy over dark, gleaming opals, green and blue and gold all at once.

When they get their breath back and can stand to be touched without their raw nerves objecting, he pulls her to him and curls himself around her, wanting her as close to him as possible.

"What happened?" She asks. Her voice is soft and warm, and she's not asking so much as offering, letting him know that if he wants to tell her, she'll listen.

He tries to think about what his nightmares held, but even as he reaches for them they vanish like wisps of mist before the glory of the morning sun. "I can't remember." He confesses. She's completely chased the nightmares away.

"Okay." She replies, understanding. He wonders if she knows how much she means to him, how she keeps him anchored in sanity and light, how she stops him from drifting or sinking into madness and dark, unfathomable places. He wonders if he'll ever find the words to tell her.

But until he can find those words, until he can think of a way to explain the magnitude of what she is to him, he'll settle for the more conventional form of devotion.

"I love you." He whispers into her skin.

He feels her smile into his shoulder. "I love you too." The words are a sleepy, barely coherent murmur.

This time when he sleeps, it's nothing but soft, velvety darkness and the vague impression of arms encircling him, holding him, keeping him safe.

I hope that this was a satisfying answer to your prayers, Mulder's Woman! I certainly hope that the rest of you readers enjoyed it, too. Reviews are as loved as a Scully/Mulder kiss scene (and hopefully not as few)!