Opening Door Does Not Alter Time

By: Marguerite
Marguerite@operamail.com


Date: Mon, 22 Jan 2001
Keywords: NONE. Read at your own risk.
Summary: A conversation in a laundromat. It's fluff. Well,
fluff and fold. <g>
Spoilers: Pilot, although this takes place somewhere in S7.
Feedback: Please! <Marguerite@operamail.com>
Archive: Please link directly at
http://dreamwater.org/marguerite/opening.html and let me know
where it ends up.

Thanks to Barbara D. and jordan for their wonderful beta
services!

Disclaimer: Don't own them, not making any money, please don't
sue.

***

Rain splattered the windows, turning weeks-old dust into dim
silver streaks. An occasional passing car splashed gritty mud
up onto the sidewalks but otherwise the city was calm and
still.  After all, what kind of nutcase would be out at this
ridiculous hour of the night in the middle of a thunderstorm,
especially at a dingy laundromat?

Mulder shifted uncomfortably in a hard plastic chair that
seemed to have been designed for the express purpose of
bruising his ass.  Adding to his discomfort were the scratchy
hospital-issue scrubs that served in place of his well-loved
jeans and sweater. Those were currently making sudsy rounds
along with Scully's clothing, all for the bargain price of
seventy-five cents. Plus a dollar for the little packet of
laundry detergent.

He had put the coins into the slots without a word of
complaint. It was all his fault, anyway, so why argue over
splitting the cost of getting their clothing freed of mud? Oh,
and blood, some his, some hers, that was all over everything.

What a mess. In more ways than one.

Scully's slight sigh was almost drowned out by the swishing
noises of the washing machine. The armless chairs allowed her
to place her head on Mulder's shoulder, and once in a while he
would shrug, twist, or make some other movement to keep her
from falling asleep. God, he hated to do that.  The doctor had
been adamant that Scully be made to stay awake because of the
concussion she had sustained.

He sneaked a look at his partner. She was frowning at his
latest attempt to keep her from dozing off. Typical of Scully,
she had hidden from him the fact that she'd taken a nasty hit
on the back of the head until she was certain that he was not
seriously injured. "I'm fine," she had assured him. The fact
that he hadn't realized she was lying about that, again, was
something he chalked up to the pain of the four-inch-long
gashes running down each of his shins. He had only realized
that she'd been hurt when the emergency room physician
declared that he'd seen worse wounds than Mulder's and he'd
get them cleaned and stitched up.  Scully had taken that as
her cue to sink to her knees, grabbing a very surprised
paramedic in a rather personal location in an attempt to break
her fall.

In the ensuing pandemonium, Mulder discovered that losing a
lot of blood could make him light-headed. He knew this because
when he tried to get up he managed only to pitch forward and
whack his forehead on the IV stand. For some odd reason it
made him happy to hear Scully laughing at him from her vantage
point on the floor.

She hadn't laughed earlier, while they were chasing their
suspect through a rain-slicked alleyway. The boy may not have
had supernatural strength but it certainly felt like it when
he rolled the trash can toward them. Mulder was hit in the
shins and had lurched forward like a trained seal, or perhaps
a badly trained one. Scully had leaned over to try to catch
him, and that was when the trash can bounced off a dumpster,
flew up into the air, and fell back to earth - after hitting
Scully squarely on the back of the head.

The kid got away.

Because of the chase, they had just spent two hours in the
emergency room in this decrepit backwater town in Oklahoma.
Ordinarily they could have just gone back to their motel and
changed clothes, but this trip had been doomed from the start.
Their luggage, clearly marked for travel from Washington, D.C.
to Norman, Oklahoma, had become an X File of its own and were,
inexplicably, en route to Rio de Janeiro.

"Do we get their frequent flyer miles?" Scully had asked the
toothy blonde at the customer service desk.

That was the last time that they had both laughed. After an
hour-long drive and a grueling interview with an unusually
uncooperative witness, they found themselves running through
the alley in pursuit of a kid who claimed to be able to alter
government websites using psychic powers. Twenty minutes after
that, they were in the hospital. And now, a mere four hours
since their arrival, they were sore, stitched up, and sitting
in a laundromat wearing borrowed scrubs. At this point their
objective seemed to be getting clean enough to head back to
the FBI with nothing to show for their trip but another
workers' comp claim.

The word "screwed" kept ricocheting around in Mulder's head.

Scully shifted around again and he took the liberty of putting
one arm around her shoulders. Mulder had always enjoyed the
warm, compact feel of her body against his on those rare
occasions when she would allow  such contact. "How's your
head, Scully?" he asked.

"Exploding. And I'm sleepy, but you keep waking me up."

"You know what the doctor..."

She opened one blue eye. "I AM the doctor."

"The doctor who didn't look cute in maroon scrubs, then. HE
said to keep you awake for twelve hours." He ran the back of
his knuckles across Scully's warm temple. "Maybe I should tell
you a story."

Scully snorted. "I'm supposed to be staying awake, Mulder."

She was alert, then. Good. Mulder stretched his legs as far
out as he could, wincing at the sharp pull of sixteen stitches
across each shin.

"You should keep them elevated," Scully commented with a
languid hand gesture.

"I'd be happy to, but the fine furniture in this excellent
establishment seems to be bolted to the floor."

"Adapt and improve, Mulder." Scully tugged at Mulder's legs.
"Put 'em up here," she said as she stood up to allow him
access to all four of the connected chairs.

Mulder twisted around and lay flat, groaning in pleasure as
blood flowed upward from his legs and rejoined the rest of his
circulatory system. Scully surprised him by sitting
tailor-fashion on the floor and putting her head at the curve
of his waist, her folded arms cushioning her cheek.

So near and yet so far.

"About that story, Mulder," Scully murmured drowsily.

"Story. Yeah." Pleased, he tightened his grip around her and
found that the ache in his back was lessening. "When we first
got the house on Quonochontaug we didn't have a washer or
dryer, much less a housekeeper, so Mom made us go with her to
the laundromat."

"How exciting."

"Nah, Scully, I've always liked laundromats."

"Great place to pick up women?"

He winced at the sarcasm in her tone. "No. I just like the
warmth. The clean smell." His voice changed to a rough
whisper. "Remembering my mom and my sister, warm and
laughing."

Scully nestled against him, her lips grazing the his forearm.
"I'm sorry."

"It's okay." He let his nerve endings register the feel of her
mouth on his flesh before continuing. "Anyway, when I was
eight and Samantha was four, I taught her to read. She picked
it up incredibly fast and started devoured everything, Scully
 wasn't ever happy unless she had a book in her hand and was
reading out loud to someone, usually me. One day we'd gotten
filthy playing on the beach so Mom hauled us to the laundromat
to show us how much trouble we were. Samantha was running
around, reading the names and ingredients of all the
detergents, and the other moms thought that was the cutest
thing they'd ever seen. I was laughing my ass off because Sam
had been reading things like Grimm's Fairy Tales for a year,
but she always loved to work a crowd."

"I can see that happening," Scully said in a soft, soothing
voice.

"The women thought it was a lot less cute when Samantha ran
out of labels and started announcing the sizes of their
clothes."

They both laughed.

"So Mom told me to keep my sister with me and out of trouble.
I was looking for something else for her to read and I turned
my back for a second, and when I looked again she was gone."

"Did she run out of the laundromat?"

"That's what I figured, so I went out the door and called her
name. No sign of her. Mom was talking to one of our neighbors
and didn't notice, so I started looking behind the washers,
under the seats, everywhere, and I was just starting to panic
when I heard someone calling my name from inside one of the
dryers.

"It was Samantha. She was just sitting there, waving at me and
smiling. I checked to make sure Mom didn't see and then I
hauled her out and asked her what she was doing."

"Trying to do somersaults?"

"Nothing that simple. Turns out she'd read the sign by the
coin slot and wanted to check it out for herself." He pointed
to the old dryer in front of them and waited for Scully to
turn around and read the tattered sticker.

"Opening door does not alter time." She snorted. "Mulder, are
you suggesting that your sister actually thought..."

"...that dryers were cleverly disguised time machines? That's
exactly what she thought. She was madder than hell when I
pulled her out because she was convinced she could go back in
time. She told me she wanted to visit Snow White and warn her
about the apple."

"That's adorable," Scully murmured, pressing her lips against
Mulder's arm in what he was fairly sure was an actual kiss.
"And I bet you never let her forget it, either."

"Not for the next four years, anyway. After that..." He let the
words trail off, feeling a heaviness in his chest and throat
that told him to stop talking before he embarrassed himself.

"I'm sorry, Mulder."

"It's okay. I'm the one who brought it up, remember?"

"Mmm." She snuggled down beside him, her slow breaths warming
his skin.

"Scully, you're not falling asleep, are you?"

"Just keep talking to me, Mulder. I'm fine."

"Yeah, that's what you said to the ER clerk when you signed
yourself out against medical advice."

"It wasn't AMA. I'm a doctor."

"You're a doctor who signed the blank marked 'patient' as
'Dana K. Patient, M.D.,'" Mulder reminded her, trying not to
let himself sound smug. "Ow!" he added when Scully's knuckles
rapped against his ribs.

"Okay, I wasn't fine then but I'm fine now." She turned her
head to smile at him.

Of course, the washer chose that moment to finish its cycle.
Mulder, groaning in disappointment and pain, got up and put
their clothes in the dryer.

"Don't forget the Bounce," Scully slurred from her seat on the
floor.

He put more coins in the vending machine and extracted a
packet of fabric softener. The  single sheet went in with
their clothes and Mulder started the dryer, then sat down,
finding his reward in having Scully curl up beside him and put
her head in his lap.

"Just don't take our stuff out, ever," she said, her voice
muffled against his thigh.

"How come?"

"Because I don't want to alter time just now." With that, she
yawned and fell asleep as he stroked her hair. He thought
about waking her but decided to let her rest for a while as he
watched the whirling of their clothes against the glass, blues
and greens and blacks leaving their own silvery trails against
the window.

Please, he half-prayed, if there's someone up there, could You
just let it go on like this for a little while longer? I'll
put up with aliens and conspiracies and whatever else gets
thrown at me, just for a few more moments like this one.

Don't alter this time.


End


Author's note: JadedCat actually signed herself out of an ER
as "Jaded Patient." She didn't believe it until I showed her
the form. She gave me permission to use the incident in a
story as long as I didn't mention her name...uh oh...