#I have a headache and my sinuses are going nuts. It feels like someone stuck suction cups on my eyes and is pulling

[girlscience]

I feel like actual hot garbage today. I got the goobies from my family and I am increasingly pretty sure I have altitude sickness. I am so mad.

[fruitcoops]

Sometimes I forget that Leo is 19 and can’t drink in the states. I think he would get away with stealing drinks from the boys or having someone on the team order for him in public for a while but once the season’s started and people are actively watching the games, the bartenders and wait staff start to figure out who he is and catch him being sneaky

I only write drunkenness on a case-to-case basis because it squicks me out sometimes, but something about this ask really stuck with me. To @lalalasocks, I hope your sinuses feel better! Have some outside perspective of Coops to soothe the soul <3 SW credit goes to @lumosinlove!

TW for a drunken rookie (no explicit alcohol)

“Pots and I are going to take it up the left,” Sirius said, never taking his eyes off his whiteboard as he drew out the lines of the play. iPads were generally the more conventional tool, but he had a thing for tradition and Sirius Black’s flair for the dramatic never ceased to amaze. “Knutty?”

Leo nodded and leaned forward, swiping a drop of sweat off his temple with a glance toward the game as Talker flew past. “I’ll be in for the rest of the period as soon as Coach calls it.”

“Bien.” He tapped Remus’ shoulder pad with the end of his pen and marked a path up the other side. “Loops, the puck is coming to you fast, so you need to keep eyes on us. Once you get it, turn on the jets and get it in. Good?”

“Good,” Remus confirmed, bumping fists with James. Leo watched them with no small amount of surprise—even though Remus had only been a player for six months, their line was rock-solid. James was the powerhouse while Remus flashed down the ice; Sirius counterbalanced them both in the middle. He was grateful he wasn’t the one to see them coming at him on plays.

“1, 6, 7, 12!” Coach barked. Leo clenched his teeth around his mouthguard and got ready to hop the boards. A swish of skates, a bump of Kasey’s shoulder, and it was game time.

-----------

“I love you,” Leo hiccupped, plopping himself down in Logan’s lap and tangling a hand in his dark curls. He went to kiss his cheek, then frowned. “Oh.”

“Hi,” Sirius laughed with a gentle pat his side. “Good night so far, Knutty?”

Leo made a face. “Where’s my Canadian?”

“I have no idea.”

His lip slid out even further into a pout. “He told me I could sit on his lap,” he whined plaintively, resting his head in the crook of Sirius’ shoulder with a heavy sigh. The bar was warm—a little too warm, actually—but it felt nice to be sitting on something soft rather than feeling the sticky floor under his sneakers. And there was one more reason he needed to find Logan, one other highly important thing… “An’ I gotta give him a kiss.”

“Do you want to go look for him?”

Leo made a noncommittal noise and swung his leg under the table absently, letting the alcohol in his system lift all his post-game tiredness away. His head hurt a little from being awake so long. “How ‘bout I stay here and wait?”

“I think it’s about time to get you home.”

Leo sighed again, picking at a string on the knee of his ripped jeans. “Am I squishing you?”

“Non.”

“Mmkay.” A bright square of light half blinded him and he squinted. “Who’re you texting?”

“Finn.”

“Why?”

“So that he can pick you up and get you home before you fall asleep on me,” Sirius said, quite amused for some reason. “Comfy, rookie?”

He shifted even closer into the warmth and closed his eyes. Usually he got horny when he drank, but that feeling had already passed and a nap was sounding awful nice. “I like it when you call me that. Hate when other people do it, but it’s different with you.”

Sirius gave his upper arm a light squeeze. “Glad to hear it.”

“Used to drive me nuts,” he snorted. “Those first couple’a weeks on the team were rough.”

“…why?”

“Cause I had a huge crush on you.”

Cozy silence fell between them until Sirius moved to look at him. Leo blinked sleepily. “You what?”

“Well, Kasey was my first crush, right? I had his jersey an’ his poster an’ he’s fucking hot, but you’re the captain.” Sirius was so nice to him. Not everyone would have let a 6’4” hockey player sit on their lap and wait for their boyfriends. At the moment, though, Sirius looked a bit like Leo had thrown ice water in his face. “And obviouslyFinn and Logan are my boys and I love them so much and they were sopretty when I met them but, y’know, it’s the thrill of the captain vibe.”

“Am I interrupting something?” a new voice asked through poorly-suppressed laughter.

Leo turned his head to look up with a smile. “Hey, Loops, how’re you?”

“Pretty good.” Remus shared a look with Sirius, grinning, before taking the seat next to them. “You two look…content.”

“Oh, fuck off,” Sirius said immediately, though Leo felt his chest hitch with a laugh; he tapped Leo lightly on the elbow a moment later. “Finn’s heading over, d’accord?”

“But I just got here,” he mumbled.

“You’re in my spot,” Remus teased, sliding a glass over. “Drink up, bud.”

Leo narrowed his eyes. “What is it?”

“Water.”

He thought for a second—he wasn’t thirsty, but his mouth was getting dry—and yawned, sitting up enough to stretch before grabbing it. In two gulps, it was gone. “Aw.”

Remus bit his lip and passed a different glass over. “You can have mine too, it’s okay.”

“How are both of you so nice?” he asked, looking between them in something like distress. The music was getting too loud, but they were both watching him intently. “It’s not even fair, man. Can’t you just be an asshole for once so the rest of us don’t look bad?”

Sirius shook his head and pressed the water cup into his hand. “Been there, done that. Do not recommend. Besides, the designated drivers don’t get to be mean.”

Leo felt a little better once the water was gone; he blinked slowly, scanning the crowds for any signs of Finn’s hair or Logan’s ass. Both were identifying features he would never get tired of. “Loops?”

“Yeah?”

“Why is your hair soft?”

“I—” He tilted his head to the side in confusion. “Have you ever touched my hair?”

He leaned back against Sirius, stretching his legs out until his knees popped. “No, but it looks soft. Like Finn’s, if Finn was blonder and had curls. Fluffy.”

“It’s very fluffy,” Sirius confirmed, pulling him up a little more.

“Hey!” Leo protested. “Watch the hands, your boyfriend is right there!”

Sirius rolled his eyes with a huff. “I was making sure you didn’t slide off the bench.”

“Sure,” Leo said with a suspicious glare. “Just ‘cause I won MVP for this game—”

“Okay,” Sirius groaned, standing and detangling his limbs to transfer Leo’s weight onto Remus. “I’m going to go get your boyfriends from wherever they got distracted, and then you’re going to go home and sleep so you’re not dying at practice tomorrow. Oui?”

He disappeared into the mass of people without giving Leo time to respond, wiping his hands on the thighs of his jeans as he craned his neck to see over people’s heads. “Rude,” Leo sulked, cuddling up into Remus’ side instead.

“I know, right?” He took a sip of something lemony and Leo pulled a face. “What?”

“Aren’t you DD?”

“Last I checked, DD’s are allowed to drink lemonade,” he laughed, patting the top of his head. “That was an awesome save in the third, by the way. You could’ve got the hat from that one alone.”

“Which one?” Leo yawned again, licking his lips to rid them of the stickiness he could feel forming.

“The splits one.”

“Mmm, yeah, that was pretty badass.” More people darkened his periphery and he scooted over to make room. “Hey, mes amours.”

“I hear you were bothering our dear captain?” Finn asked, kissing his cheek with a grin. There was no alcohol on his breath, only the mint from the peppermint candies he always stole from the little container by the bar. “Come on, baby, time to go.”

“But Loops and I were talking,” he whined, though it only took a small tug on Finn’s part to get him to snuggle up into his soft shirt. “He was telling me how good I did in the game.”

A warm hand stroked his hair out of his eyes; warmer lips brushed his forehead, and he felt Logan’s hand on his knee. “Bedtime, love,” he said in a quiet voice, almost too soft for Leo to hear over the noisy bar. “Wanna be in the middle?”

Leo looked up in hope. “Really?”

“Ouais. C’mon, Knutty, up you go.”

He wobbled a little as he stood, but got his feet under him within a few moments with the help of Finn’s arm around his waist and waved off everyone else’s offered help. “Gonna be fine for practice,” he promised, patting Sirius’ hand with a nod. “Totally fine, don’t worry. Go—hic—go grind on your boyfriend, ‘kay? You both need it.”

“Sweet Jesus,” Sirius muttered. “I pity your head in the morning.”

“I’m fine,” Leo scoffed. He was already sleepy—there was no way he would have a headache, not after he had two whole glasses of water. “G’night.”

“Drive safe,” Sirius and Remus chorused as Logan fit himself under Leo’s other arm to kiss his neck twice, sending butterflies through his stomach. The outside world was nice and quiet; Leo barely got himself buckled into his seat before dozing off with his head against the cool passenger window.

[leiascully]

Ummm....I'm a little late. But can you maybe write a little ficlet about Mulder and Scully getting assigned to the Dallas terrorist task force? A post ep for The End, but pre-FTF? Maybe a little snippet of the plane ride out there? What were they thinking? What'd they talk about? Did Diana come up at all?

Anything for you, doll!

She still smells smoke when her hair falls across her face.  It’s not real; Scully knows that.  She’s washed her hair several times in the days since the fire, with the lemon shampoo that covers even the lingering reek of formaldehyde.  She hasn’t been down to the office in days, though her finger slips automatically to the lowest button in the elevator before rising again.  It isn’t real, but she smells it nonetheless.  Mulder would understand - he probably catches the whiff of burned paper when he strips off his undershirt at night - but she can’t tell him.  Diana lingers between them like stale cigarette smoke; the choices Mulder made on the Gibson Praise case muddle the air between their temporary desks.  Scully can’t decide if the taint of nicotine or the slightly cloying smell of charred manila folders would be more appropriate.  

In the absence of the X-Files, they have been reassigned, as if the powers that be could repurpose them.  As if they hadn’t been forged in the basement long before the flames licked around the edges of their evidence.  Some swords can’t be beaten into ploughshares, not again.  How far did the higher-ups sift through their history before they hit on the terrorist task force as an appropriate venue?  Does someone, somewhere, in some smoke-hazy office, know that something’s going to happen, or is it just the general paranoia that undergirds American society?  Like the trees that turned out to be one enormous organism, like the fungi that interlace for acres underground, different threads of bigotry are woven through their society, the pretty pattern spoiled and snarled underneath.  Her life too has become irretrievably tangled, or at least her mother thinks so.  In ways, Scully is grateful that her mother can’t see the ugliness of all the other choices in her life.  Maggie Scully can still appreciate a landscape or a tapestry without imagining the brutish scurrying underneath.

Mulder is moody and standoffish, as if he has a right.  “They’re wasting our time, Scully,” he says as they deposit their bags at the airline desk.  

“Just consider you’re going back to your roots,” she tells him.  “Profiling used to be your thing.”

“Physics used to be yours,” he says.  “You using your degree, Doctor Scully?”

“Every time we get on a plane,” she says, gazing steadily up at him.  

“I guess that would make flying more fraught,” he says.  “You could always take something and pass out on my shoulder.  I’ll even let you drool on me.”  A peace offering, she sees in his eyes, but it doesn’t mean much when he doesn’t understand what he did to vex her.  The game was afoot.  Of course the dog didn’t bark in the night time.  Mulder had spent dark hours with Diana, years’ worth if the Lone Gunmen were to be trusted, and somehow that made all the years since they’d spent watching each other’s backs something he either trusted so much or valued so little that he was willing to abandon it.  

“I’ll consider it,” she says.  At least on a plane, strapped and wedged into his seat, he can’t ditch her in media res.  Unless aliens hijack them, she supposes, in which case, she’ll try to document the process so that she can present their findings to the world without looking foolish.  

They find their seats, window and middle, not an exit row.  Scully puts her newly issued coat in the aisle seat, folded so that the bright yellow FBI doesn’t show.  She’s been approached at airports for everything from directions to reports of pickpocketing.  She doesn’t want to spend the flight peered at and interrogated.  Fortunately, the door closes without anyone in the seat.  Mulder hands her his jacket as well.  She piles them together and weighs them down with the buckle of the seat belt.

“You’re mad at me,” he says as the flight attendant approaches with beverages.  Scully is lost in the relative merits of ginger ale (fizzy, too sweet, may give her a headache) versus coffee (caffeinated, acrid, may give her heartburn).  

“I’m not mad,” she says absently.

“Something’s wrong,” he says.  “Throw me a line here, Scully.  My profiling skills are rusty.”

“I’m frustrated,” she says and he groans quietly.

“You’re frustrated,” he repeats.  “That’s a mom thing to say.”

Grief flickers through her and she can see that he regrets his choice of words.  He bumps his shoulder gently against hers.  “Hey.  I didn’t mean it that way.”

“You were there for me through everything with Emily,” she says, looking him straight in the eye for what feels like the first time in months.  “You’ve been there for me through some of the most difficult moments in my life.  Sometimes lately it still feels like you shut me out of those same moments in your own life.”

He shifts in his seat.  “It’s not personal, Scully.”

“It’s not personal,” she says.  “Exactly.”

“What do you want me to do?” he asks, defensive.  “Cry on your shoulder?”

“You could have told me about your history with Diana,” she says.  “I went to see her in the hospital.  She’s expected to make a full recovery.”

“That’s not personal,” he says, avoiding her eyes.  “It’s the past.”

“The past doesn’t leave us, Mulder,” she says.  “Otherwise regression hypnosis wouldn’t be profitable or theraputic.”

He sighs.  “I don’t know what to say about it,” he tells her.  “I don’t know why I still trust her, but I owed her the benefit of the doubt.”

And not me?  She doesn’t ask the question, but it still drifts up between them, soundless as smoke.

“She’s important to me,” he says.  “She believes in the X-Files.  I believe in her commitment to the truth.  Sometimes we’ve all done things in the course of our investigations that seemed incongruous.”

Scully inclines her head in acknowledgement.  The drinks cart rattles closer.  Club soda, she decides.  Maybe the stinging freshness of the bubbles will clear the memory of smoke from her sinuses and the taste of Mulder’s mealymouthed half-apology from the back of her throat.  The flight attendant thinks they’re married.  Neither of them says anything as they accept their cups of ice and bags of peanuts.

“I didn’t know you wanted to be part of my misery,” Mulder says as Scully tips the last of her honey-roasted peanuts into her palm.  A small indulgence to offset her distaste for flying.

“Mulder, I couldn’t escape being part of your misery if I wanted to,” she says.  She crumples the empty bag onto her tray and licks the nuts out of her palm.  With her clean hand, she touches his forearm where he’s rolled up the sleeve of his dress shirt.  He gets hot on airplanes.  She can feel how cool her fingers are against his skin.  “For the record, I don’t want to.”

“Here I am, stuck in the middle with you,” he says blithely.  

“Some days, I feel stuck,” she says.  “Some days, I feel like Bonnie and Clyde.”

“I can’t recommend robbing banks, Scully,” he says.  “It’s not as much fun as it looks.  But I’m sure we can make our own fun in Dallas.”

“There’s fun in Dallas?” she asks skeptically.

“You’ll see,” he says with confidence.  “Don’t we always find a way?”

“Frequently the wrong way,” she says.

“I took the way less traveled by,” he tells her.  “It’s made all the difference.”

“I know it has,” she says, and leans back against the headrest.  The last of her club soda is fizzing in her plastic cup.  It sounds almost aggressive, the way the ice amplifies the popping of the bubbles.  But it tastes clean and fresh when she raises it to her lips.  All she can smell is the crispness of ice, a microclimate that will vanish, inevitably, as the water shifts states into a tepid liquid she won’t want to drink.  The only constant is change.  The ice doesn’t lose itself; the water retains the memory of what it was, and becomes ice when the conditions are met.  That’s comforting.  She’s heard the murmurs of ice queen around the bullpen before, but ice has structure and clarity that smoke doesn’t.  Ice remembers.  It can hold the evidence inside it of thousands of years, preserving a perfect record of how things used to be.  She becomes aware that she’s gazing into her cup and sets it down.  She hasn’t been sleeping well.  Her dreams are all hazy at the edges.

“You’re looking sleepy there, partner,” Mulder says in what he seems to believe is a Texas accent.  It’s no better than it was when they were chasing vampires in Cheney.  He pats his shoulder.  “I’m here if you need me.”

She lets herself lean against him.  For a moment, he tenses, but then his muscles ease under her head.  When she takes a deep breath, he smells like soap and heat.  

“We’re not going to a cowboy bar,” she tells him.

“You say that now, Scully.”  His arm rises and falls gently under her ear as he breathes.  “I bet you’ll be boot scoot boogieing with the rest of the Texans in no time.”

“I didn’t bring my cowboy boots,” she says.

“There’s your first mistake,” he tells her.  “You’ve got the wrong attitude about this trip.  I’ll show you.”

“I’m sure you will,” she says, yawning, and the rest of whatever he says fades into the steady hum of the engines.