#god when did I get such strong feelings about wasps I was normal five minutes ago

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

Very funny but unfair to wasps. :( I don't want giants wrecking my home either. They are just living (and some species of them are more chill than others).

[h0ldthiscat]

Rain Check

Written for the XF Missing Scene Challenge. Read it on AO3. Many thanks to @scienceandmysticism for wise counsel and superb feedback. u got me fam

Their footsteps scuff across the parking lot, nearly empty even though it’s only half past four. The Bureau isn’t the only government office where people like to duck out early on Fridays, Scully thinks. With the drive they have ahead of them in rush hour traffic, she’ll be lucky if she gets home before seven.

“Rain check?” Mulder asks as they head to the car. They’d taken his since they were only going into Maryland.

Scully sniffs and looks up from the case file they’d received inside from the Carroll County Police. “What?”

“Couple weeks ago, I decided to stay in New Jersey and you had to drive all the way back to DC by yourself.” He scratches his head. “You know, you drove up there to bail me out of jail?”

Scully finds herself trying to suppress a smile. “Yeah, I remember, Mulder.”

“I owe you a car ride in Friday night traffic. Can this be my rain check?”

“Sure,” she says absently, flipping back and forth between two police reports in the file.

It’s nearing rush hour and the November sky is growing dusky pink around the edges, making the clouds almost glow. They’ll be driving directly into the sun heading down the parkway, she thinks grumpily.

The heat in Mulder’s car dries her eyes out, so she flips the blower down. At least the floorboard is warm. It’s colder than she thought it would be today. She hasn’t pulled her warmest coat out of the bureau yet, but might have to soon. It’s supposed to frost tonight. Her mother called her this morning to remind her to leave her taps dripping tonight so the pipes don’t freeze.

God, when did she become so dull? Somewhere between med school and the Academy she’s become the kind of adult she’d always rolled her eyes at as a child: the kind who has strong opinions on the five day forecast and the quickest route to get to work.

“Penny for your thoughts,” Mulder says from the driver’s seat. He cracks something between his teeth.

“What is that?” she asks.

“Sunflower seeds, want one?” He pulls a bag from the cup holder on his door.

“No thanks.”

“Suit yourself.” Mulder flips on the radio with a flourish of his long fingers and fiddles around for a moment until he settles on something Scully hasn’t heard before. She tries to peek at the file in her lap again but starts to get a headache.

“I’ll up the ante and offer you a nickel,” Mulder says after a few minutes. He flicks on the headlights.

“Hm?”

“I offered you a penny for your thoughts but you weren’t biting, so I’ll up it to a nickel if you spill the beans.” His normally monotone voice slips into a caricature of an old New York cop and he talks out the side of his mouth.

Scully cracks a smile. “See here, sonny,” she plays along, “I ain’t tellin’ nothin’ to nobody!”

Mulder laughs out loud, a raucous boom that makes her jump and then giggle at her own silliness. She doesn’t know if she’s heard him laugh like this before. They’ve only been working together for two months, but time spent with Mulder feels a bit like dog years. When she leaves the office at the end of the day she feels as if she’s worked a whole week, filled her brain with more monsters and cryptids than she’d even known existed. And then she goes home to her little apartment, makes a filling but bland meal, takes a shower, goes to sleep, and does the whole thing again the next day and the next.

“I was just thinking,” she admits finally, “about how boring I’ve become.”

“Are you joking?” Mulder asks. He merges into a lane of cars following signs for 32 East. “What about all those dates and birthday parties you’re expected at?”

Scully smirks and bites the inside of her cheek. “Work is--difficult to talk about with people.”

“I get that.” Mulder nods. He’s drumming out something on the steering wheel. It takes Scully a moment to realize he’s playing along with the song on the radio, another one she hasn’t heard. He continues, “I come from a long line of WASPs, though, so I’m used to it.”

Scully smiles. “Me too. Although--is there a word for WASPs who are Catholic?”

“Irish?” Mulder tries, pointing at her hair.

“Mostly German, actually.” Scully feathers a hand through her hair, suddenly self-conscious.

“Oh ho ho. The redheaded genes snuck through somehow?”

Mulder, she has noticed, is the kind of person who doesn’t back down when he’s made someone uncomfortable. It is maddening. It is refreshing.

“Well it’s a recessive trait--” She stops herself. This isn’t a presentation, Dana. Nobody wants to see your scrap paper with Punnett Squares. But when she looks at Mulder she sees he’s studying her intently, listening. He’s just as big of a geek, she supposes. Just about different things.

“Nevermind,” she says anyway.

“No, seriously. What is it, something like two percent of the human population?” He cracks another seed. “I’m dying to know how the Scully clan managed to pass down one of the rarest traits in the Human Genome.”

He’s genuine, which is so unusual in Washington, or anywhere, really. It still catches her off guard. She takes a breath, then says, “That’s just it, neither my mother nor my father have red hair, so both of them must carry the recessive gene.”

He gives a nod of remembrance “Are you the only one with red hair in your family? Does your brother--you have a brother, right, Scully?”

She nods. “I have two. And a sister.”

“That’s almost half a baseball team.”

“Trust me, I’ve heard all the shortstop jokes you can think of,” she jokes, and Mulder laughs again, big and booming.

“Where do you fall in the lineup?” he asks her.

“Third.” She ticks off her fingers. “Bill, Missy, me, and Charlie.”

“All redheads?”

“Just the girls.”

“Christmas photos must have been a nightmare.”

Scully laughs and says ominously, “We do not speak of such things.” This time when he pops another sunflower seed in his mouth she holds out her hand and he gives her a few.

After she cracks the first one she asks, “What about you? It’s just you and your si--”

Instantly, Scully starts to sweat. When she speaks her words are garbled around the shell in her mouth. “Sorry, I just meant--you don’t have any other--God, sorry.”

Mulder smiles. “It’s okay, Scully, really.” He cracks a seed. “Yeah, it was just me and Samantha.”

The car falls silent. Scully recognizes the song on the radio this time. She is about to ask who sings it when Mulder says, “Neither of us are redheads though.”

Scully stammers, “What?”

“Me and Samantha,” he clarifies. “Neither of us are redheads.”

“Oh.” She manages a nervous titter when she realizes he’s making a joke. It’s kind of him, after her clumsy faux pas. He’s a very kind person, she decides. It would be so easy for him to be hard and cynical but somehow he’s the opposite.

“I was, however, one of those babies who was born blonde and then grew up to have dark hair,” he continues.

“I’d be interested to see the statistics about redheaded babies who mysteriously grow up to blend in with the other 98% of the population,” Scully says, raising her eyebrows. “Sounds like an x-file to me.”

“There’s actually a creature called a changeling mentioned in the folklore of many ancient cultures, although the Celts are usually credited with its creation,” Mulder says excitedly. “Parents believed a baby prone to sickness or colic must actually be a changeling, brought by the fairies and--”

“Switched with the real baby when no one was looking,” Scully finishes.

“Someone’s brushed up on their cryptids.” He seems proud.

“We used to tell Charlie he was a changeling,” she explains. “My aunt was a big storyteller, she unknowingly gave us a lot of fodder for harmless torture amongst siblings.”

“I always wanted a big family. As a kid,” he amends. “Both my parents were only children.”

“The grass is always greener,” she offers. “I’ve got more cousins than I can count, and now they’ve all got kids. It’s a lot to keep up with.”

“Nieces and nephews?”

“Nope, but Bill just got married, so he and his wife will probably start trying soon.”

They fall into a comfortable silence and Scully tries not to focus on the mile markers alongside the road. They blur and smear, green beacons guiding them to the parkway as they coast through the beginning of traffic. Left to her own devices Scully can’t help but think of the impending holidays; three weeks until Thanksgiving, seven until Christmas, eight until New Years… she feels nauseous all of sudden and rolls down her window.

“I can turn down the heat,” Mulder offers, fiddling with something. His car is surprisingly neat, the dashboard free of dust, the floorboards clean save for a scattering of seed shells. His fingers pause a moment over the temperature knob, as if it’s been so long since he’s driven his own car that he has to reacquaint himself with its functions.

Scully waves a hand at him before he can make an adjustment. “No, it’s fine, I’m just feeling a little sick, that’s all.”

“We can pull off here and get something to eat.”

Scully lifts her hand to stop him, but then looks ahead at the oncoming sea of brake lights headed for the parkway and acquiesces. Mulder pulls into the parking lot of a 7-11 and declares, “It’s been years since I’ve had a footlong weiner.”

Coming from anyone else she would have tsked her disapproval, but there is something so non-threatening about the way Mulder says it that she almost giggles. A young girl with dark eyeliner whose nametag says Ashlynn rings them up for two hot dogs and two Diet Cokes. Outside, the wind whips Scully’s hair into her mouth as she struggles to open the mustard packet on the back of Mulder’s car. After an aggressive tug the slippery plastic finally gives way, her thumb slips, and she squirts mustard on the sleeve of her coat.

“Awww,” Mulder sympathizes through a mouthful of hot dog.

Scully swears and dabs at the blob with a napkin, hoping that it won’t stain. She’d just gotten this coat, too. They eat their hot dogs in silence, trying not to chew with their mouths open. Scully feels her headache slowly dissipating. Things become clearer around the edges. It is one of those acute Maryland evenings right before winter, with air just cold enough to remind you you’re alive, but this beats another night on her couch. Tomorrow she will go for a run, wake up as early as she can and make herself keep going until every breath is sharp as glass and her legs feel like jello.

“There’s something I want you to have,” Mulder says suddenly, fishing through his pocket next to her.

“Oh?”

“You gave me yours ages ago and I finally got around to returning the favor.” He pulls out an angular brass key and places it in the palm of her hand. “Apartment 42. It’s down at the end.”

“Oh, thank you.” It’s heavier than she expects, which is strange. All house keys weigh the same, she thinks. She pulls out her own keys and jams her nail in between the cheap metal rings, trying to make space for the surprisingly thick addition.

“Technically you didn’t give yours to me so much as I found it,” Mulder says. He takes a sip of his soda.

“Sitting on the desk,” she remembers. “That was my spare.”

“Well it’s lucky I’m a nosy bastard and scooped it up.”

Lucky indeed. Scully shivers at the thought of Tooms in her house, snaking along the floor. To somehow not be safe even with all your windows and doors locked was unnerving to say the least. She’d slept at a friend’s for two nights after that. She’d never told Mulder. She’d never really thanked him, either.

“Thank you,” she says, then takes a sip of her Diet Coke. “For stealing my spare key and for coming that night. I don’t, ah, I don’t know what I would have--”

“You would have been fine,” Mulder assures her, but she doesn’t believe him. She believes that he believes himself, though, and that is sort of reassuring. She burrows further into the popped collar of her coat. Mulder doesn’t look cold at all. He doesn’t have gloves or a hat. She tries to picture Mulder in a hat and chuckles.

“What?” he asks.

“Just picturing you in one of those-- sheepskin hats with the ear flaps.” She mimes pulling the ear flaps down and tying them under her chin.

Mulder laughs. “Just ball caps for me, that’s all that’ll fit on this noggin.”

“Too many cases in there,” Scully says. In a gesture of unprecedented familiarity, she tousles his hair. She can’t quite reach the top of his head, of course, but she gets the side nice and messy. The pad of her thumb accidentally grazes his earlobe on the way down.

“Probably,” he agrees good-naturedly, shrugging a shoulder and flattening his hair back down. Scully fears for a moment that she has grossly overstepped the line, and then he says, “Should we get back?”

It’s not a statement, we should get back, the awkward conversation-ender. It’s a question. He genuinely wants her opinion. On this and, seemingly, all things.

“You’re a good partner, Mulder,” she says quietly. Her eyes water, stinging from the wind. Before she can stop herself, she adopts that goofy voice again, the old school New York copper. “Ya got gumption and spirit, kid.”

“So do you,” Mulder replies, completely serious. And then in the next instant he is playing along, miming a cigar and grumbling, “We gotta make like a banana and split.”

They hurry to get into the car, cheeks raw, lips pebbly and dry. The 7-11 drinks barely squeeze into Mulder’s cupholders. The bases fit, but the cups lean out at an angle, too wide at the top to sit evenly. This town ain’t big enough for the both of us, Scully thinks. She pictures herself and Mulder in denim and horsehide, two no-nonsense sheriffs keeping a small prairie town in line, protecting its inhabitants from dust devils and flesh-eating locusts. Her hair is long and she has a braid. She thinks about growing it out as the car picks up speed and the parkway stretches out before them, a black ribbon dotted with red and yellow lights.