Title: Iditarod
Author: Justin Glasser
Feedback: Lay it on me, baby. Julan777@aol.com
Classification: V/UST Sc/Other kind of, in a way, briefly
Rating: G. Mulder asks about talking dirty, but no one actually *does*.
Spoilers: None really, unless you count a very very vague allusion to Never Again
Archive: Okay to Gossamer, Ephemeral, and the Spookys. Everyone else, please ask first.
Summary: Um, they made me write this. Seriously, just a day in the life of Dana Scully.
Disclaimer: No permission has been granted, no money has been made, and no infringement is intended.
Dedication: To the lovely ladies on Scullyfic who made this story what it is: Marguerite, Quin, Jongoturan, Jordan (who I will *never* forgive), and especially Snark, for the title. Author's notes at the end.
***
Iditarod
by Justin Glasser
***
It seemed like a good idea at the time.
She was standing in the cooking aisle of the Borders, even though she hated chain stores and tried to avoid them whenever possible, looking at two cookbooks and trying to decide if Martha Stewart or Julia Childs would be more insulting to Tara, who had announced, joyfully over Christmas dinner, that since there was another baby on the way, she'd better start learning to cook. Dana--who had once thought Tara was nice enough, but that was before she got to know her--had smiled. The cookbook would be a belated gift. Just to say she was thinking of her sister-in-law, but not to say what she thought of her sister-in-law, and Dana was contemplating the wonderful fake smile she would give when Tara unwrapped it when the man's voice interrupted.
"You cook?" he asked.
She looked at him. Tall. Blond. Blue eyes, expensive coat, nice shoulders, no wedding ring. Cute. She looked at his book. Champions of the Iditarod.
"You race?"
He smiled. She had succeeded, then. Men sometimes saw her witty and cute performance as arrogant and bitchy. More so, in the last couple of years, but she suspected that was Mulder wearing off on her.
"Just a hobby."
"Well," she said. "I don't even have that excuse. This," she waved the Julia Childs, "is a gift."
"You don't cook?"
"You don't race."
"If I offered to take you to dinner, would you offer to buy me a dog sled team?"
She smiled. He was cute. "Dana Scully."
He took her hand, shook it firmly, but not like he was trying to prove anything. "Bob Wiesel."
And that was that. She gave him her cell number, figuring it was easy enough to change it if he was some sort of psycho, accepted his invitation to dinner that night at one of the medium priced restaurants in town, and headed back to the office where she found Mulder awash in both a case and a sea of coffee.
"What the hell happened here?" she asked, hanging up her coat.
Mulder looked up from his position in the middle of the coffee sea. "I, um." He sighed. "No filter."
"What?"
"I forgot the filter." He was standing on his tiptoes, the way people did when they walked through puddles, and he had a wad a paper towels in each hand.
"You were reading the Davidson file," she said. He nodded.
"Mulder, honestly. I'm calling the janitor."
"That's sanitation engineer to you, missy."
She looked at him, phone to her ear. "You're pretty sassy for someone up to his ankles in arabica."
"What's in the bag, babe?" he asked, after she had hung up.
"Cookbook for Tara."
"You like her about as much as Bill likes me."
"I could like her twice as much as Bill likes you and still buy her a cookbook. Did you get the report done?"
He waved his right hand, and she saw that he wasn't holding paper towels, but printer paper, crunched up into a ball. She reached for them, making Mulder lean far over the coffee to drop them into her hand.
"I'm assuming you wanted me to go over this before we hand it in?" He always did. She was the reporter, the one who Skinner expected to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Whether she did or not was no longer a concern for Mulder. She knew he spent a good portion of the first year of their partnership reading and re-reading her stuff, looking for the tell-tale sign that she was "spying" on him and reporting back to the master, but she wasn't, and eventually Mulder had come to see that, and let her write the reports. It was generally easier that way. Mulder would write his version, using some truly spectacular language, and then she would take them and make them something the A.D. could read. Something that fit into the more . . . official worldview of the FBI.
She sat down at the desk (carefully skirting the inching puddle of coffee) and called up the file. The janitor came with a mop bucket, saying hello to them both, rescued Mulder's shoes from imminent destruction, and left, smiling secretly at her. Mulder sat down again in the other chair, reclining backwards, the Davidson file open in his hands. She typed, read, typed. The clock ticked.
"You're amazing, Mulder," she said, after a while.
"It took you this long to figure that out?"
"This." She pointed to the computer screen. "This is amazing."
"I am still agreeing with you, Scully."
"Do you realize, Mulder, that you used 'penetratingly' here twice? And 'understatedly' to describe the way our suspect dressed."
"Ahh, irony. Now I get it."
"Mulder, what did you do while you went to school?"
"I . . . you don't want me to answer that, do you, Scully?"
"Mulder, I just want you to understand that there are adverbs and then there are words that you add -ly to in order to brutalize the English language."
"I love it when you talk dirty."
She looked at him. After a moment, he smirked and went back to the file, long hands spread over the manila folder in a fan shape. At five o'clock, after the report had been re-printed and sent to Skinner, and she had gotten a good chunk of the research out of the way on Mulder's hunch that Mr. Davidson was not, in fact, a lycanthrope, but instead a good old fashioned psycho (an astonishingly realistic perspective that Scully wanted to encourage as much as possible), she got up and put on her coat.
"I'm calling it a night, Mulder."
"Mmm," he said, hardly looking up. "Hot date?"
"Depends on your definition of hot. A date, anyway."
He did look up now, and she could see the thousand responses forming in his head. He didn't say any of them, though, which she thought was to his credit.
"Well," he said, finally. "Let's be careful out there."
She smiled.
"See you later, Mulder."
And that was that. She had driven herself to the restaurant and Bob was already there, with flowers-daisies, a very un-psychotic type of flower, unlike, say, the dozen red roses men always used to make a statement-and a lovely glass of chardonnay on the table. And he was not only cute, but single, never-married, and owned his own small sporting goods chain, and the Iditarod was, in fact, a hobby and not some weird obsession involving dogs and cold weather, and he read widely and was just finishing up War and Peace (because it had been left out of his high school education, he said, and she thought that it had been left out of *everyone's* high school education, but didn't say that) and the latest Stephen King, and he was interested in politics, but not overly interested, and when she told him what she did for a living, he grinned and said "I knew there was something about you I liked. I love a woman who can take care of herself," and Bob Wiesel was, in short, perfect.
And while he was talking about who he thought he was going to vote for in the upcoming Presidential election (he thought maybe Gore, because he didn't want to mess with a good thing, although he was generally more of a fiscal conservative), she thought abruptly of her first summer at camp and her teddy bear, Co-co.
She had been seven, and finally old enough to go away to camp at the St. Elizabeth's Sleep-away Bible Camp with Melissa and Bill. Bill had loved St. Elizabeth's Sleep-away: he had been a camp aide (Missy said that meant that he was a spy who told on other kids) and Missy had been excited about going because Brian McAllister was going and she *loved* him, she said, and Dana had been excited about going because it would be her first summer there, away from home, and she could come back and tell Charlie all the cool things that she had done and he would have to listen to her sing all the camp songs with Missy and Bill and be jealous like she had been last year.
She'd packed her suitcases herself, and was so excited about the whole idea and that first night, as she was getting ready for bed, she realized that she had not forgotten her pajamas, or her toothbrush. She had forgotten Co-co. Right at that very moment, her beloved bear had been sitting on the edge of her bed, his brown corduroy nose worn down from where she used to suck on it when she was a baby, his green button eyes looking out the door of her room, waiting for her to come back and get him. She had almost cried. There were other girls in the cabin, though, including Sarah DeVries, who Dana thought might have been what Missy called a "rhymes-with-witch" and no Scully would cry in front of other girls, especially "rhymes-with-witches." So she hadn't.
Instead, she'd gone to bed by herself that night, and laid in the darkness of the big tent with seven other seven-year-olds listening to them breathe all around her. At first, she had thought she might cry when it got dark and no one could see her, but when it did get dark, although she'd still missed Co-co and felt the empty spot in her arms where he'd usually slept, she'd also felt excited, like she was taking step toward something adult, and powerful. Something bigger than herself. She had liked it.
She liked this, too, sitting across from blond, handsome, rich Bob Wiesel, who didn't talk about aliens, or werewolves or liver sucking mutants . . . and, abruptly, she realized the error in her logic. *Here,* in this restaurant, was the unknown, *here* was unexplored territory, *here* was her chance to chart some uncharted ground. Bob was the Yukon, and he seemed to want her to run all over him, to leave her mark. But, somehow, being with him didn't feel like running the Iditarod, or sleeping alone at camp for the first time. He felt like her childhood bedroom, the familiar darkness, her teddy bear safe in her arms.
She thought of Mulder, standing in a puddle of coffee, saying "I love it when you talk dirty."
And when Bob got up to use the restroom before the dessert course came, she pulled her cell phone out of her purse and pressed "1" on her speed dial.
"Mulder," she said. "What do you know about dog sledding?"
***end***
Better late than never, my mother always says. So here, two days late, is my improv. My elements were: Scully scolding Mulder for using too many adverbs in his report
to Skinner, from the lovely miss Marguerite, who has been the victim of my
"LOSE THE ADVERB" rant too many times. Jogonturan (whose name is
*impossible* to spell) gave me a coffee make with no filter. Quin, my wife-to-be, wanted me to write
Scully going on a date with someone besides Mulder. Snark wins the "one of these things is not like the
others" award for the Iditarod Dog Sled Race (and I thank her for that, as
it became more important than she knows), and Jordan proves that you should
never let you older sister talk to you on-line friends by including my own
childhood friend, a teddy bear named Co-co.
Just be grateful she didn't ask for a full moon.