Three Wishes
AN: I have to admit getting distracted by the Ninth Doctor. With the angst in my life, he was speaking to me a lot of late, so I finished out series, (check out of you are a Whovian), and now it is back to my beloved Scully. She shall have angst enough for a while to keep me going.
“Mulder, you can’t be serious.”
“As a heartbeat, Scully.” Mulder’s stupid grin spread across his face. Scully resisted the urge to slap it off. Instead, she chose to glare over his shoulder at the woman, dressed in black, currently studying her options at the Starbucks menu.
“Mulder, she’s not a suspect in...whatever it is that’s been going on. She’s free to do whatever she wants.”
“And she wants to go with whoever unrolled the rug,” he replied, leaning back into the vinyl seats at the Lambert-St. Louis airport, nonchalantly cracking a seed between his teeth and completely impervious to the death glare from his partner sitting across from him. “You think the it will be okay in baggage?”
“I think the rug will be fine. You, I’m not so sure,” Scully snapped hotly, glancing at the woman, who clearly was taking her time choosing what sort of venti, mocha, cafe, kakaka she wanted to drink. That, or she was wisely giving the two FBI agents space as Scully vented all over her partner. “What are you going to do with her? We can’t put her up at a hotel, Skinner would never approve of it without going through official channels.”
“I thought she could bunk at my place. I’m the one with the rug.”
Scully met his wide, eyed expression with a look so withering, even he finally cottoned on.
“Scully, it’s not like…”
“Mulder, let’s ignore what it is and isn’t like. Let’s really look at what you are proposing here.” Her legs and arms crossed tightly as she began to tick off facts carefully. “One, we have a man who claims to have been cursed into having his mouth removed. Two, we have an idiot of a former employee who ends up with a yacht in his yard. Three, that employee ends up invisible and dead. Four, he then walks off by his own power to his trailer park, where he and his handicapped brother are found dead in an explosion. Five, the only common denominator in all of this is a woman you claim is a genie, wrapped up in a rug.”
Mulder blinked slowly, nodding his head as he crunched on another sunflower seed.
“You summed it up nicely there, Scully, maybe you should write the report.”
“This is all insanity,” she burst out angrily, earning the attention of several of the sleepy-eyed passengers waiting for flights around her, and a passing glance from the woman in question in the distance. Clearing her throat, she lowered her voice in a hiss. “Mulder, this is ridiculous and you know it. Genies? Magic lamps?”
“Carpets, Scully. She uses a rather nice oriental area rug.”
“I don’t care if it’s a fuzzy, pink bath mat, Mulder. This is all a fairy tale.”
“So, you can believe a man, perfectly normal except for a really serious pot addiction, can just make himself invisible spontaneously?”
Scully stung under Mulder’s smirk, the raw wound of embarrassment and humiliation still open and painful. And he was pouring salt into it. “I don’t know what I saw, Mulder. For all I know, maybe I was making it up.”
Miserably she slumped into her seat, realizing that no matter what she said, this was an argument she wasn’t going to win, no matter how reasonable she tried to sound. “Mulder, I’ve gone along with you on all manner of crazy quests. Monsters in lakes, alien autopsies, I’ve spent hours hanging out with the Lone Gunmen. I’ve put up with a lot.”
Mulder watched her, green eyes narrowing over a disbelieving snort. “Scully, you are seriously upset I’m bringing Jenn with us?”
“Gee, Mulder, why would I be upset that you are bringing a tall, beautiful, exotic looking brunette supposedly from France home with you,” she groused petulantly. Her annoyance seemed to serve to only amuse him further.
“You are jealous of the genie!”
She winced as he barked in laughter at her, her face glowing as she cut her eyes up at him. “I am simply disturbed that you would so willingly buy into all of this!”
“Scully, we’ve been partners for how long again?”
“Long enough for me to know that you at least use a shred more common sense when you go through your crazy schemes.”
“Not much more, no.” He was hopelessly amused by this entire scenario. And something about that deeply offended Scully. “I just have to say, Dana, green is such a lovely color on you.”
He dropped his voice to a purr, her given name rumbling in that soft, sexy way of his, causing her spine to tingle and her stomach to turn to goo. Normally, it would have been a turn on, that teasing, but in the middle of an airport in the Midwest with another woman he was planning on taking home standing nearby, it only added gasoline to the flames. “Don’t think you can seduce your way out of this one, Mulder.”
“I can’t find your jealousy attractive?”
“Not unless you want a bullet in your foot, no,” she snapped, watching as Jenn finally made her choice, wondering why it took anyone twenty minutes to order coffee.
“Oooh, BDSM, now there’s something different.”
Her stony gaze could have cut glass, but it only served to make Mulder snicker.
“If you ever...every want to to find that or anything else in the bedroom ever again, Fox Mulder, you will resolve this and quickly,” she murmured, her voice low and burning. “I don’t care if you have to wish for world peace and a million sparkly unicorns, I’m not playing into your Barbara Eden fantasys.”
That sobered him quickly enough.
“Scully, three wishes and I’m done.”
“I mean it, Mulder,” she warned, as behind him the black-clad figure of Jenn, complete with her sunglasses, wandered over.
“You know, you could have made you three wishes by now and have been done with it. Didn’t need to pay extra to bring me along.”
Mulder cleared his throat and glanced at Scully guiltily. Scully’s response to simply smile at Jenn sweetly.
“Oh, that’s all right. It gives Mulder some time to ponder what he’d like to do with those three wishes.”
The venom in her words wasn’t lost on either of them. Mulder cringed. Jenn cleared her throat.
“Good,” said the woman, patting Mulder on the shoulder. “That way you won’t choose unwisely. In theory.”
“You clearly haven’t known Fox Mulder long enough,” Scully intoned, deciding to busy herself with a medical journal in her bag. “If there is a way to make an unwise decision, he will find it.”
It was going to be a very long flight back to Washington.