by Punk Maneuverability
punkm@teleport.com
 

Originally posted:  30. October 2000

Distribution:  Please do not forward or archive without author's
permission.

Disclaimer:  They never write, they never call...Fox Mulder and
Dana Scully belong to Chris Carter, 10-13 Productions and Fox.
I'm not making any money here, folks.

Rating:  G - no gratuitous swearing, nudity, or violence, damn.
Classification:  S, R
Keywords:  Mulder/Scully UST

Summary:  It's Halloween.  Mulder and Scully decide to dress up.

Punk Notes:  Sab helped.  Virginia cheered me on.  And, a long
long time ago, Lucy asked for a story with no angst in it.  So this is
for her.

Feedback would be swell:  p...@teleport.com
 

*
Other Night
A Halloween Story by Punk Maneuverability
*

It's Halloween!  It's Halloween!
The moon is full and bright
And we shall see what can't be seen
On any other night...
           -Jack Prelutsky
* * *

Mulder was watching her.

His eyes had been on her since the moment she stepped through the
office door.  He'd watched as she took off her coat, as she dropped
her pen, as she ate her lunch, a lunch that remained only half-eaten,
as she had been unwilling to peel and eat an orange under his
strange scrutiny.

Now she typed a report, trying to ignore how his gaze catalogued
and recorded her, his concentration so intense she felt he must
know every word beneath her fingers.

She stopped to delete a mistake, and while she tapped at the
backspace key, a pencil ricocheted off the ceiling and into her lap.
Looking up, she found Mulder staring at her with heavy eyes.  He
was leaning back in his chair, a bundle of sharpened pencils in one
hand.  They resembled tiny yellow arrows, and she watched as he
placed them in the quiver of his pencil cup and then leaned back
even further, putting his feet up on his desk blotter.  She frowned at
him.

Lacing his fingers behind his head, he crossed his legs at the ankle,
his slacks riding up to expose black socks with smiling orange
jack-o'-lanterns on them.  She glanced at his socks, then at the
straining mechanism of his chair.  One day he was going to fall
backwards and crack his head open on the concrete floor, spilling
his crazy brains all over the place.

"You dropped your pencil," Scully said, picking it up from her lap
and putting it in her desk drawer.  The desk was ancient, possibly an
artifact from the days of J. Edgar himself.  Scully had found it
shoved in the corner of the janitor's closet and had accidentally
inherited the wooden hulk after asking if anyone was using it.
Mulder hadn't said a word about it, possibly still wary from the last
time she'd brought the subject up.

Only the day before, he'd had a run-in with one of the corners of the
new desk, and while he hadn't managed to stifle his vicious curse,
he'd said nothing about their cramped working quarters, only limped
away to suffer in not-quite silence behind his own desk.  She'd been
impressed by his resolve.  It appeared he was learning.

She gave the top drawer an extra shove, but the warped runners
prevented it from closing all the way.  The pencil made a hollow
noise as it rolled to the back of the empty drawer and hit against the
side.  Now that she finally had a desk, she'd have to find something
to put in it.  Turning back to her laptop, Scully tried to remember
what she had been doing before Mulder had launched a pencil at
her.

"It's Halloween," Mulder announced, as if she could have somehow
missed the wave of candy corn and fake spiders that had been
steadily taking over every office in the building.

She nodded, unimpressed.

"Are you doing anything tonight, Scully?"  Mulder asked her this on
occasion, and it always gave her the impression he was measuring
his lack of a social life against her own.  She was unsure what her
answers meant to him, but there was usually no visible change in
him upon hearing her reply.

"No," she told him, and for once he seemed cheered by her
response.

"Would you have dinner with me?" he asked.

"Dinner?" she repeated, feeling like the word had a different
meaning now, one she'd never understood before.

"Yeah, you know, dinner?  It comes on a plate--"

She interrupted him before he grew too cocky.  "Will you change
your socks?"

He stopped abruptly and focused on his exposed socks.  "You don't
like my socks?"

She smiled at him, suddenly seduced by his weirdness.  "I'll have
dinner with you, Mulder.  Pick you up at seven?"

He straightened, taking his feet down from his desk.  He seemed
disoriented, like he had just woken up and was unsure of where he
was.

"Is that okay, Mulder?" she prodded him.

"Sure, that's fine," he said.  He sat for a moment longer, staring at
the space behind her, then started shuffling through the papers on
his desk.

Scully returned to her report.  Mulder was no longer watching her,
and for the rest of the day he would only sneak glances at her when
he thought she wasn't looking.

* * *

A date on Halloween.  It seemed appropriate.  A night of lies and
masks, kids begging at the doors of strangers, free candy, bad
surprises, a night where nothing was real and everything would be
back to normal in the morning.

The moon had a dark skin of fog over its eye, and the streets were
crawling with little nightmares.  Her car passed through the night
slowly, more like a ship than any automobile.  She did not want any
of the nightmares to throw themselves across her windshield, to
jump in front of her tires.

Halloween was a time to sweep the demons from the township, to
scare them with faces usually kept hidden: witch, goblin, spook.  A
Teletubby waddled by, its disturbingly plump stomach fitted with a
patch of grey reflective material.  Scully found she could only look
at it so long before becoming uncomfortable with its childlike
androgyny.

Mulder's apartment building was normally dark and hidden, but now
the fake cobwebs strung across the entranceway made it look
completely abandoned, the mailboxes dusty and forgotten, the
wilted flowerbeds trampled by curious, ghost-hunting teenagers.

The fourth-floor hallway was deserted, but some of the apartments
had cardboard decorations on their doors.  Mulder's only had a sad
dented look from too many people kicking it in and making
themselves at home.  The brass 42 was dull and unpolished, but at
least both numbers were there.  Mulder had always been boyishly
proud of his apartment number, as if something bigger than fate,
Douglas Adams himself perhaps, had decreed all the big answers to
be behind his door.

She tapped at apartment 42, knowing nothing but Mulder was
there.  She would find no answers behind his door.  No mysteries of
the universe would be solved tonight.  Still, she smoothed her black
dress and glanced down at her heels to make sure they weren't
overly scuffed.

Mulder's door creaked open in a suitably spooky way, and Scully
wondered if he'd bought the noise at the hardware store.
Something in a little metal can that promised to creak up hinges in a
jiffy.

Mulder was wearing a suit, tie, and dress shirt that she'd all seen
before, but never in this combination.  Dark suit, dark shirt, and a
blood maroon tie he was still struggling to knot.  He looked like he
needed a martini and a haughty smile.  Instead he had a somber
frown, as if he were on his way to a funeral, not a date, as if this
were something she'd talked him into and not his idea at all.

"Scully!" he yelped, face cracking into a nervous smile she'd never
seen on him either.

"I won't ask who you were expecting," she said stiffly, pushing past
him into his apartment.

"I wasn't--" he started, stopped, started again.  "This is weird."  It
sounded like an apology.

"It was *your* idea," Scully said, settling down on his couch,
crossing her legs, implying all his ideas were weird.  There was an
empty beer bottle on the coffee table.

Mulder came to stand before her.  "But you said yes," he accused.

Scully shrugged.  As far as she was concerned, this was all his
doing.  She was merely an innocent bystander caught up in his
whirlwind.  But not so innocent perhaps.  Curious too, Mulder's
favorite deadly sin.

"Still weird though?" Mulder offered, trying to excuse his behavior.

The fog had made her hair curl.  She smoothed it down.  "Not
weird, Mulder.  Normal."

Belief and disbelief twisted across his face, wonder and fear.  He
was looking at her as if he'd never quite allowed himself to believe
in her existence until that moment.

She had been speaking in a general way.  She'd never tell him how it
felt to be going out on a date with him.  She wasn't sure herself.
"This is what people do, Mulder."

He was still stunned.  "Go out with their partners?"

"Sure.  Date coworkers.  Break up.  Call in sick.  Get fired.  Quit.
It happens.  Very normal."

"But not normal for us," Mulder insisted.

Scully uncrossed her legs and stood up.  One electric inch of air
separated them.  "You asked me out to dinner, Mulder.  It's
Halloween.  I'm all dressed up."

Mulder tilted his head.  "So you're saying we should pretend...?"

"Pretend?" she echoed.  She played at innocence well.  She reached
up to straighten his tie.

"Or are we not pretending?"  His hands followed hers; hers slid
away.

"I thought we were going out to dinner," she said.

So close to her own face, he looked smug, though it could have
been surprise again.

"Trick or treat," he said.

She smiled.  "I haven't decided yet."

He blinked, then stuttered.  "And, and what are you dressed as, little
girl?"

She was already walking toward the door.  "Your date."

The look on his face was either fear or elation.  On Mulder, it was
hard to tell.

* * *

The clouds had cleared away, and the moon was full and bright;
Scully was too.

She walked Mulder to his door.  He was sleepy with dinner and the
mousse pie they'd shared, and his gait had slowed.  It was late, but
the coffee she'd drunk was making her eyes wide and her heart race.
She felt electric.

Mulder's smile was slow and lazy, and she stepped closer to him,
thinking he deserved a good-night kiss, maybe a soft press of lips to
his cheek, something friendly to keep away the goblins.

She smiled back and lifted up onto her tiptoes.  He was too tall, and
even her heels brought her nowhere near his height.  She wobbled a
bit, and Mulder steadied her with a hand on her hip.

"Thanks for dinner," she said, poised on her toes, ready to fly off on
a cardboard broomstick.  This was happiness, she realized.  She
thought she should somehow memorize this moment, so that next
time it would be easier for her to recognize.

Mulder was still smiling so she stretched through the last inches that
separated them and brought her smile to his.  It was a friendly kiss,
a warm good-night kiss, but there was a moment when it almost
became something different.

Her hands moved up to anchor herself at his arms, and they stood
there together, close to midnight, at the edge of Halloween.  Still
smiling, she backed away and his fingers trailed across her hip like a
cobweb, clingy, delicate.  She would feel his touch there for the rest
of the night, and in the morning, she would roll over in bed, almost
surprised to find he wasn't there with her.

* * * * *

Thanks - Lock the door on your way out
Punk M
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