FIC: Five Times Cassandra Scully-Mulder Dressed Up for Halloween (Caseyverse, PG-13, gen w/ships)
Title: Five Times Cassandra Scully-Mulder Got Dressed Up for Halloween
Author: Amal Nahurriyeh,
amalnahurriyeh
Summary: She cleans up good.
Pairings: Mulder/Scully; Casey/Hot Girl At Party; Casey/Monica
Rating: PG-13 (implied sexytimes, strong language)
Angst Level: Low to none.
Warnings: None.
Universe: Mulder-containing.
Timeline/Spoilers: occurs from 2009-2037.
A/N: Written for spookyhalloween. Thanks to memories_child for coming up with the idea!
This has like twelve thousand weirdo references in it, so if you don't get something, ask.
My Spanish in this has not been betaed. Neither has the English, except by my wife, but I'm marginally more competent at that, as is she. Let me know if you see things, and I'll try to remember to change them.
Since I know I picked up new readers, heads up: Casey/Monica is a ship with a massive age differential, and it's talked about in the fic.
Oh, and if you're curious about the outfits (though liberties have been taken, obviously):
Part One
Part Two, with alterations as described
Part Three
Part Four
Part Five
October 2009 - Age 14 Weeks
Mulder was not convinced this was a good idea.
Scully was only two weeks back to work, and he had to resist, with every instinct in his body, showing up to carry her out of the hospital and transport her back home where she could sleep as much as she wanted and never be exposed to germs and also hold the baby every so often because his arms were tired. Instead, she was staying late to finish up charting nearly every night, and running the damn pediatrics Halloween party again. "This one year," he said at three AM, "delegate."
"Nobody else will do it," she said, fumbling in the dark for the catch of her bra. "Go put her back down." She was asleep, he was pretty sure, before he had both hands on Sadie.
Not only was she doing the thing, she was insisting they come. "People want to meet Sadie," she said; some rational part of him thought that was new-parent egotism, but then again, he had a fairly rabid case of that himself. But it was a hospital. A hospital ward full of sick children, which was both depressing and, he couldn't resist pointing out repeatedly, infectious. In the end, she'd won him over through refusing to hear his arguments, mostly by falling asleep during them.
They were actually on the way to the hospital when he realized Sadie needed a costume. Fuck, why hadn't that occurred to him a week ago? Luckily, he remembered before the exit that lead to the Babies R Us, so he had options. At least he hoped he would. They weren't going to have removed the costumes for Christmas dresses yet, right? He still had eight hours of Halloween left.
The costume racks were depleted, but still there. "We are having some luck, here," he said conversationally to Sadie, who lay against his shoulder. Idly, she swung her little fist around and punched him in the collarbone. "Maybe they'll have boxer costumes," he said. "You show promise in that department."
"Kkkk," she said.
"Exactly."
Sizing was the first problem: not only was she not yet four months old, but she was little, and so many of the buntings and other costumes were just built for chunkier babies. "When you can't find any clothes that fit you, remember to complain to your mother," he said, ruffling through the racks. "What the fuck is this?" he said, pulling out what appeared to be some sort of harem outfit in size 2T. A passing mother pushing a Bugaboo gave him a horrified look, but he was too distracted to really process it. "You are never, ever wearing anything like this," he said, holding it up for Sadie to see. "Ever. Until you are out of my damn house. And I don't ever want to meet the guy who asks you to wear it. Are we clear?"
Her ability to focus stopped at about eighteen inches, and she was staring at his chin, anyway, but he chose to interpret the look on her face as one of obvious acquiescence.
The only baseball uniforms they had were for the Nationals, and he wasn't that cruel. A pumpkin costume in her size, but Will had been a pumpkin, he remembered that from the photo album he'd never been formally told existed, and he wanted to make sure they confined the flashbacks to home, if at all possible. Disney Princess Ballerina costumes of various sorts, but he'd lose all masculine credibility if he were seen purchasing such a thing, plus they were awful.
Aha. Sitting there at the end of the rack was his solution. He checked the tag. Half-off, too. "We have a winner," he said to Sadie. She threw her head back, looked up at him, and then careened, forehead first, into his shoulder blade. "Ow," he said. "Come on, baby. We've got a party to get to."
After poking his head into the nursing/changing room to make sure he wasn't about to be yelled at, he changed her into the just-bought costume and pulled off the tags. On the walk to the car, and the rest of the drive to the hospital, he felt reasonably proud of himself for dealing with this crisis with aplomb. Scully had better be impressed.
As he walked up to the ward, Wendy came out of the doors, dressed as a cowgirl and carrying four empty cupcake boxes. "Hi, Mr. Mulder!" she said, perkily.
Normally he liked Wendy, but normally nobody puked on him. "Hope we didn't miss it."
"Nope. Dr. Scully's going to be glad to see you. Hiya, cutie," she said, tickling Sadie's feet.
"Ah GAAAAAAAAH fft," Sadie said.
"Aren't you so smart," Wendy said. "OK, I'll be back with the rest of the candy in a few." She dashed down the hall, boots clicking, lasso swinging against her leg.
Mulder pushed open the door and scanned the room. It was actually cute; Scully did a good job at this sort of thing, when she wanted to, and anyway probably 50% of it was Wendy. And there Scully was in the middle of it, still in her lab coat and suit, but wearing a pair of bat deelyboppers which bounced every time she moved, dropping candy into the bucket of a bald six-year-old in a wheelchair wearing one of those pointy princess hat things.
She glanced up and saw them, and started to smile, and then stopped. "Wave to Mama," he said to Sadie, and jiggled her hand.
Scully came over to them. "What took you so long?"
"We had to stop for a costume," he said.
She reached out and relieved him of Sadie. "Did the other one not fit?"
"What other one?"
"The giraffe one."
"What?"
"The giraffe costume I bought her. Mulder, I told you about it when I bought it, remember? Last Friday?"
"No, you didn't."
She adjusted Sadie's mask. "Yes, I did. In the kitchen. Your eyes were open, so don't try saying you were asleep. And I put it right next to the changing table this morning. You couldn't have missed it, Mulder, it's a giant giraffe costume. With a tail."
"There was no such thing on the changing table." Except now that he thought about it, there was something beige there that he hadn't paid any attention to.
"Mulder." She sighed and looked down at Sadie. "Batman? Really?"
"I had limited options."
"Na na na!" Sadie yelled.
"See, she even knows her song," Mulder said.
Scully fought her smile for a moment, and then gave in. "Come on. I think Wendy bought the Costco out of Three Musketeers bars."
"Excellent," he said, and followed them towards the candy.
October 2016 - Age 7
You can only spend so long going thirty miles an hour on 95 before you go insane. Mulder managed not to tell the driver of the third car to cut him off in the past two hours what he thought of him, in the interest of not having Sadie ask for clear definitions of each of the individual concepts expressed. He'd learned that lesson several times already. Most of them on 95.
The post-Grammy's-house energy crash had passed, and she was now kicking the back of Scully's seat with a fierce sort of determination. Scully had been trying, vainly, to interest her in a game of I Spy, but at a certain point, there was nothing left to spy that was not another car. He glanced over, and Scully gave him the universal sign for "Your turn, co-parent. I'm out."
"Have you thought about what you want to be for Halloween?" he asked, hoping this would start some sort of long conversation.
"Yeah, I decided already," Sadie said, full of confidence.
"So, what?"
"I'm going to be a princess dinosaur astronaut." She kept kicking.
They were going slowly enough that he could spare a hand to reach out and grab her feet. He made an elaborate show of tickling her ankles, and she giggled and stopped kicking. "What, like a princess for school and a dinosaur for trick-or-treating?"
"No. A princess dinosaur astronaut, all day." He glanced in the rearview mirror, watched her trace her fingers against the glass of the window.
"That's a lot of costume," he said. "Maybe you should try just being one thing."
"Why should I be one thing?" she said. "That's boring."
"But where are we going to get a princess dinosaur astronaut costume?" he asked.
"You'll find one," she said. "Mama, let's play the math game again."
Scully leaned over the backseat and fished around for the box of 24 cards. "Are you sure you don't want to be something simpler?"
"Mama," Sadie said. And you couldn't argue with that.
***
The dinosaur part was easy: they went to Target and located a size 5T full-body dinosaur costume in the boys' Halloween section. After that, it got complicated. Sadie found an astronaut helmet, but vetoed the existing color scheme, and the idea of an orange jumpsuit. "Dinosaurs have scales," she said. "They don't need to wear protective equipment." Scully decided that explaining explosive decompression in Target was a very, very bad idea, so she skipped that part, and followed her daughter to the arts and crafts section, where she picked out the right color pink to spray paint the helmet.
It took three coats to cover up all the existing markings on the helmet. Scully and Mulder sat on the porch steps, waiting for paint to dry, and for it to be time to pick her up at school. "Do you think it's sufficiently 'princess'?" Scully asked, examining the day-glo pink helmet on the milk crate, blue painter's tape covering the visor.
"She'll tell us if it's not," Mulder said.
"True."
It was not sufficiently 'princess.' Sadie rummaged through her dress-up and crafts boxes, and emerged with a tiara that had been stepped on and could be cannibalized for parts, three tubes of glitter glue, and some stick-on plastic jewels. It took a little while, and Scully burned herself twice with the hot glue gun, but in the end, it was deemed acceptable.
After six drafts, Sadie was satisfied with her rendition of a plausible DINOSAUR NASA logo, complete with a T-Rex riding a comet and a portrayal of Saturn with dinosaur-like spikes along its rings. Mulder did studious internet research until he developed a method for reproducing her drawing on cloth. (Scanning to iron-on paper to transfer to a yard of burlap; not that hard, and he only ruined one of them in the process.) He burned himself three times with the hot glue gun, and singed the costume in several places, while attaching the logos to the back of the helmet and the front of the costume, but, in the end, it was done, and that's about all you can expect.
Sadie examined herself in the mirror as she tried it on. "Maybe I need to be a ballerina too," she hedged.
"No," Mulder said. "There is a limit to how many nouns you can be at once."
She didn't look like she wanted to take that for an answer, but he wasn't budging.
When Scully dropped her off at school Halloween morning, she wished she had a camera to capture the teacher's expression. "Well, Sadie," she said. "That's very...creative."
"I know," Sadie said, walking straight past her into the classroom, long green tail sweeping the floor behind her.
The picture Mulder took of Sadie that evening on the front steps, holding her plastic pumpkin in one hand and her light saber in the other, was the background on both of their phones for quite a while.
October 2019 - Age 10
Scully was poking at her schedule for November. She wasn't going to bother with Geneva this time, they could handle it without her--but the Nairobi division really needed some guidance, and she wouldn't mind the chance to talk with Kwame again, see where they were going with the new projects. Isabel was heading down there tomorrow, so she couldn't share the plane with her, but she could always fly commercial. Maybe she could leave the fifth. She started writing the email to Wendy about whether or not it could be done, and realized that Halloween was still blank. "Sadie," she called out, not bothering to move.
"What?" Sadie yelled from her room.
"Please come here," she said. She did not care that her daughter was trying, very hard, to be thirteen; they were going to speak to each other without yelling like civilized people. Or at least she was.
There was much stomping while the six feet between Sadie's room and Scully's office were traversed. "What?"
"Do you have plans for tomorrow night yet?"
"Yeah, we were just going to go into town. They're doing the haunted house at the rec center again."
"Who's we?" Most of Sadie's friends were known quantities, but there was a new girl from soccer who seemed woefully under-supervised and had a much meaner kick than any ten year old should.
"Will."
She turned around. "Will? As in, your brother?" Sadie just rolled her eyes. "When is your brother coming down?"
Sadie checked her watch. "Um, he'll be at the Richmond train station in two hours."
"Were either of you planning on mentioning this to us?"
She shrugged. "You've got two hours. It doesn't take that long to get to the station."
Scully ran her hand over her eyes. "Okay," she said. "Go tell your father."
Sadie huffed all the way down the stairs.
***
He was lonely, Scully guessed, as she moved the inflatable mattress into Sadie's room. Moving to Philadelphia had to be scary; sure, he'd spent a week or two every year with them, but, frankly, Othma was only barely bigger than Kaycee, and he'd never really had to deal with the ruthless anomie of a major city before. He loved his classes, he liked his roommate, and he was settling in just fine, but he was a six hour flight from his other parents and a six hour train ride from them, alone in the big city.
Which explained why an eighteen-year-old boy had decided to spend Halloween with his baby sister. Not that Will didn't love Sadie; he loved her as if he'd known her all his life, though the fact that they could communicate telepathically probably made things run a little more smoothly in that department. (If anyone ever asked her, which they wouldn't, she'd tell them to never, ever have telepathic children, particularly if neither of the parents could hear them. Mulder frequently knew that they were talking, but couldn't follow them, and all she ever had were suspicions and, frequently, a dull headache.) But she was pretty sure most of his friends were going to be spending this evening drinking themselves into oblivion and trying to pick up girls wearing little more than glitter.
When she thought about it that way, she was glad he was coming.
***
"Are you ready?" Sadie yelled down the stairs.
Mulder paused the TV and reached for the camera. "Let's see it."
In unison, Will and Sadie descended the stairs. Mulder laughed out loud, and Scully couldn't help but grin at the sight of her two children, dressed in identical black suits, white shirts, skinny black ties, and black sunglasses, holding large plastic ray guns. "Does it work?" Will asked.
"I find myself vaguely worried I'm about to get mindwiped," Mulder said. "Again."
"I'm sure, Mr. Mulder, you'd never compromise our interests in this matter," Will deadpanned.
"Yeah, that's creepy," she said, and wondered if Mulder was also thinking just how much Will sounded like his grandfather at that moment.
"Hold still," Mulder said, and raised the camera. They posed back to back, guns pointed up. The flash blinded them all briefly, and then Mulder nodded. "Got it."
"Do you think they'll take away our guns at the haunted house?" Sadie asked, opening her coat to holster her gun.
"Is that my holster?" Scully asked.
"Oh, yeah. Can we borrow your holsters? I left the guns in the box."
"Sadie!"
"What? You keep them in condition four in the case anyway."
Scully didn't have any good idea how to answer that.
"Do you have your phones?" Mulder asked.
"Yes," the children answered in unison.
He held out the car keys. "Home by ten, don't eat anything with a razor blade in it, try not to get abducted by aliens."
"We'll do our best." Will took the keys, and kissed first Mulder, and then her. Sadie rolled her eyes from over by the door. Scully was certain the series of glances exchanged between them signaled a conversation she couldn't hear, but didn't bother to ask.
Outside, she heard their car roar to life and pull away.
Will had her home by 9:45. They'd won third prize in the costume contest - group division. When he left back for Philly, the ribbon and prize photo of them was clipped to the fridge.
October 2029 - Age 20
"Do you think I can go as someone whose personal statement isn't done yet and who's taking the GREs on Thursday?" Casey said, unwrapping a mini Twix.
"You can go as someone who is more interested in articulating her relationship to the subfields of sociolinguistics than getting laid," Allie offered, as she pulled up her fishnet stockings.
"The difference is I don't need to work at getting laid," Casey said, arching an eyebrow over at her. "It just kinda happens."
"How is that shit still working?" Allie arranged her pointy hat on her head. "Do I look like a witch?"
"I mean, you look like a cartoon witch drawn by people who don't know anything about Wiccan practice. Oh, shit, Wicca, that's it." Casey sprinted out of Allie's room and into hers across the hall.
Allie followed her. "Wicca what?"
Casey ripped off her t-shirt, not caring that the door was still open; if there was anyone in Batten House who hadn't seen her tits yet, they were more than welcome. Especially what's her name, Natasha, the second year. Yeah, definitely her. She dug a white bra out of her top drawer, and then pulled on a ribbed tank top. "Do you think anyone has like a plastic axe or cross-bow or something I could borrow?"
"I think Ntozake bought a couple of options for her grim reaper outfit."
Casey checked herself in the mirror again, and dug around on her dresser top for a dark lipstick. "My hair's a little short, and my tattoo's a little big, but it'll do."
"You're confusing me."
She turned around, stuck her hands in her pockets, and slouched. "Faith Lehane. Bad Slayer."
"Is this another TV show thing?"
"Not my fault you're a philistine," Casey said, breezing past her. "Can you lock my door?" She stomped down the stairs to go raid Ntozake's weapons stash.
***
The Rainbow Alliance Halloween Party had been in full swing for three hours, which meant they were out of Malibu and Kahlua but most of the tequila was still there. Casey sipped her amaretto sour and rested her arm somewhere in the vicinity of Natasha's shoulder on the back of the couch. "So how did you get into Buffy?" Natasha asked.
"It was my dad, actually," she said with a smile. "He watched it with me when I was a kid."
"Your dad was into Buffy?"
"No, actually," she said, rotating her drink slowly with her wrist to distribute the melted ice better. "I think he found it on some internet list of 'empowering television to watch with your daughter.'" Natasha giggled; she was pretty when she laughed. Well, she was pretty all the time, but Casey liked to make pretty girls laugh. And other things.
"So did he like it?"
"Yeah, actually. He liked the supernatural stuff, but mostly because he thought they got it all wrong. And the kung fu was right up his alley. When all the sexing started in the later seasons he would, like, cover my face with his hands--" She pantomimed this with her non-drink holding hand on Natasha, who burst out laughing and leaned in to her a little. "Which I told him was absurd, but anyway. I think he was pretty into it by the end."
Natasha's hand landed on her knee. "Your dad sound likes a good guy," she said.
"Yeah," she said, with a little shrug. "He's okay." She leaned in a little closer. "So, what about you?"
***
She climbed the stairs back to her room the next morning, just as Allie was coming out of her room to head to the showers. "You're terrible, Case," she said, her flip-flops thwacking on the floor.
"I think I figured out what to say in my statement," Casey said.
"Terr-i-buuuuul," Allie said.
Casey closed her door, already thinking in Punjabi.
October 2037 - Age 28
Monica laid out the marigolds. She'd gotten red chrysanthemums, too. Raúl hadn't been such a fan of marigolds. "Compré los tamalitos de María. Recuede, ¿que los vende acerca del parque?" She shifted through the bag. "Y no había pan de muertos en nuestro panería, debía ir hasta San Ángel."
"Hey," said a quiet voice behind her.
She glanced back, smiling. God, it still shocked her how well Casey cleaned up. She was wearing that grey suit, the one that looked like sharkskin, with the black tie and the white shirt. She wore her hair down these days, most of the time; she thought it made her look more professorial. "Hey there," Monica said. "You're earlier than I expected."
Casey made a little gesture back towards the road. "You want me to come back in a little bit?"
"No, it's fine. We didn't have much to say." She gestured next to her, on the other side of Raoul's headstone. "Did you bring the tequila?"
She pulled it out from under her arm and shook it gently. "Guy at the liquor store was impressed. Said I must really want to be kind to the ghosts."
Monica laid out the pastelitos next to the bread. "What did you say?"
Casey smiled as she sat down on the grass. "That it was for my aunt's husband."
Monica rolled her eyes and started trying to do something attractive with the calaveras. Casey had been milking the "aunt" thing every since she arrived in DF. She called her it in public, usually, because she knew pointing out their age difference drove Monica crazy but she couldn't correct her in front of other people, because, what, she was going to say, "No, I'm not her aunt. I mean, I worked with her parents thirty-five years ago and have known her since she was born, but actually, I'm her pseudo-sugar mama, except that she's got her own damn trust fund so it's not money she needs, if you follow my drift"? No, she didn't think so. Trust Mulder's daughter to be irreparably warped about something like this.
They sat in silence for a long moment while Monica arranged things. She glanced over again, examined the suit, tried not to ogle. "Did you teach today?" she asked.
"Hmm? No, no." That Casey had come to Mexico was still a shock, most days. Monica had been making excuses to come to New York for a while, extending her stays a little longer, getting a bigger suite at the Plaza than was strictly necessary, but, still, when she got the email where Casey casually mentioned that her post-doc was running out and she'd seen there were openings in UNAM's linguistics department and did she know anybody, she had been downright taken aback. Of course, the linguistics department chair had served on the curriculum committee with Raúll; she gave her a call, and now she was sitting next to Doctora Cassandra Scully-Mulder, Assistant Professor of Historical and Computational Linguistics, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, who was technically borrowing her guest bedroom while she looked for an apartment, and who hadn't looked at the real estate listings once in four months.
Casey poked around the pastelitos, probably looking for the guava ones. Monica smacked her hand, and she retreated, sighing. "No, one of the PhD students wanted me to come look at his data. He's working on slang in the border region up around Texas, and wanted a native English speaker for context. Honestly, you write one article on early 21st century American dialectology, and everybody thinks you're an expert."
Monica took a moment to process that out of linguist into normal-person. "Early 21st century? Were you working back in Stark?"
Casey snorted and grabbed a corner of the bread, tore it off. "What did you think I was doing, translating?"
"You wrote a paper?"
"It may possibly have won some awards." Casey chewed on the bread. "Mmm, this is good."
"Am I ever going to get to look at your CV?"
"God, no. That would be creepy."
Monica smiled, half against her will. "So, what's with the outfit?" When she'd left for the day, Casey had still been in pajamas, sitting at the living room desk with the galleys of her book and a full press of coffee, muttering about transcription and how if a press couldn't handle IPA they had no business publishing in linguistics. She hadn't thought through who she expected to show up tonight to set up the ofrendas, but it hadn't been Doctora Scully-Mulder in all her swank.
Casey looked down at her suit and seemed a little embarrassed. "The suit? I mean, it's for this." Monica didn't get it, and shook her head. Casey shrugged. "It's your husband."
"Casey Scully-Mulder, the great honorer of the institution of marriage," Monica snarked.
"I can respect other people's ethical commitments without holding them myself," she said, crossing her arms. "And, I don't know. I guess I just think that, if something matters enough for you to make a serious vow to it, it deserves to be honored. Anyway," she glanced over at the tombstone, "I wanted to make a good impression."
"Well then," Monica said. "Raúl, this is Casey. Casey, Raúl."
"Encantada," Casey said seriously to the tomb. "Raúl, can I snag a tamelito? I skipped lunch."
"You know, they're not supposed to fill you up after he eats them," Monica handed her one.
"I'll take my chances," Casey said, unwrapping it. As she ate, she reached across the grave and took Monica's hand. "So, Mónica," she said quietly. "Tell me about your husband."
Monica leaned her cheek against the stone. "He would have liked you, I think."
Casey smiled. "Good," she said.
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Author: Amal Nahurriyeh,
amalnahurriyeh
Summary: She cleans up good.
Pairings: Mulder/Scully; Casey/Hot Girl At Party; Casey/Monica
Rating: PG-13 (implied sexytimes, strong language)
Angst Level: Low to none.
Warnings: None.
Universe: Mulder-containing.
Timeline/Spoilers: occurs from 2009-2037.
A/N: Written for spookyhalloween. Thanks to memories_child for coming up with the idea!
This has like twelve thousand weirdo references in it, so if you don't get something, ask.
My Spanish in this has not been betaed. Neither has the English, except by my wife, but I'm marginally more competent at that, as is she. Let me know if you see things, and I'll try to remember to change them.
Since I know I picked up new readers, heads up: Casey/Monica is a ship with a massive age differential, and it's talked about in the fic.
Oh, and if you're curious about the outfits (though liberties have been taken, obviously):
Part One
Part Two, with alterations as described
Part Three
Part Four
Part Five
October 2009 - Age 14 Weeks
Mulder was not convinced this was a good idea.
Scully was only two weeks back to work, and he had to resist, with every instinct in his body, showing up to carry her out of the hospital and transport her back home where she could sleep as much as she wanted and never be exposed to germs and also hold the baby every so often because his arms were tired. Instead, she was staying late to finish up charting nearly every night, and running the damn pediatrics Halloween party again. "This one year," he said at three AM, "delegate."
"Nobody else will do it," she said, fumbling in the dark for the catch of her bra. "Go put her back down." She was asleep, he was pretty sure, before he had both hands on Sadie.
Not only was she doing the thing, she was insisting they come. "People want to meet Sadie," she said; some rational part of him thought that was new-parent egotism, but then again, he had a fairly rabid case of that himself. But it was a hospital. A hospital ward full of sick children, which was both depressing and, he couldn't resist pointing out repeatedly, infectious. In the end, she'd won him over through refusing to hear his arguments, mostly by falling asleep during them.
They were actually on the way to the hospital when he realized Sadie needed a costume. Fuck, why hadn't that occurred to him a week ago? Luckily, he remembered before the exit that lead to the Babies R Us, so he had options. At least he hoped he would. They weren't going to have removed the costumes for Christmas dresses yet, right? He still had eight hours of Halloween left.
The costume racks were depleted, but still there. "We are having some luck, here," he said conversationally to Sadie, who lay against his shoulder. Idly, she swung her little fist around and punched him in the collarbone. "Maybe they'll have boxer costumes," he said. "You show promise in that department."
"Kkkk," she said.
"Exactly."
Sizing was the first problem: not only was she not yet four months old, but she was little, and so many of the buntings and other costumes were just built for chunkier babies. "When you can't find any clothes that fit you, remember to complain to your mother," he said, ruffling through the racks. "What the fuck is this?" he said, pulling out what appeared to be some sort of harem outfit in size 2T. A passing mother pushing a Bugaboo gave him a horrified look, but he was too distracted to really process it. "You are never, ever wearing anything like this," he said, holding it up for Sadie to see. "Ever. Until you are out of my damn house. And I don't ever want to meet the guy who asks you to wear it. Are we clear?"
Her ability to focus stopped at about eighteen inches, and she was staring at his chin, anyway, but he chose to interpret the look on her face as one of obvious acquiescence.
The only baseball uniforms they had were for the Nationals, and he wasn't that cruel. A pumpkin costume in her size, but Will had been a pumpkin, he remembered that from the photo album he'd never been formally told existed, and he wanted to make sure they confined the flashbacks to home, if at all possible. Disney Princess Ballerina costumes of various sorts, but he'd lose all masculine credibility if he were seen purchasing such a thing, plus they were awful.
Aha. Sitting there at the end of the rack was his solution. He checked the tag. Half-off, too. "We have a winner," he said to Sadie. She threw her head back, looked up at him, and then careened, forehead first, into his shoulder blade. "Ow," he said. "Come on, baby. We've got a party to get to."
After poking his head into the nursing/changing room to make sure he wasn't about to be yelled at, he changed her into the just-bought costume and pulled off the tags. On the walk to the car, and the rest of the drive to the hospital, he felt reasonably proud of himself for dealing with this crisis with aplomb. Scully had better be impressed.
As he walked up to the ward, Wendy came out of the doors, dressed as a cowgirl and carrying four empty cupcake boxes. "Hi, Mr. Mulder!" she said, perkily.
Normally he liked Wendy, but normally nobody puked on him. "Hope we didn't miss it."
"Nope. Dr. Scully's going to be glad to see you. Hiya, cutie," she said, tickling Sadie's feet.
"Ah GAAAAAAAAH fft," Sadie said.
"Aren't you so smart," Wendy said. "OK, I'll be back with the rest of the candy in a few." She dashed down the hall, boots clicking, lasso swinging against her leg.
Mulder pushed open the door and scanned the room. It was actually cute; Scully did a good job at this sort of thing, when she wanted to, and anyway probably 50% of it was Wendy. And there Scully was in the middle of it, still in her lab coat and suit, but wearing a pair of bat deelyboppers which bounced every time she moved, dropping candy into the bucket of a bald six-year-old in a wheelchair wearing one of those pointy princess hat things.
She glanced up and saw them, and started to smile, and then stopped. "Wave to Mama," he said to Sadie, and jiggled her hand.
Scully came over to them. "What took you so long?"
"We had to stop for a costume," he said.
She reached out and relieved him of Sadie. "Did the other one not fit?"
"What other one?"
"The giraffe one."
"What?"
"The giraffe costume I bought her. Mulder, I told you about it when I bought it, remember? Last Friday?"
"No, you didn't."
She adjusted Sadie's mask. "Yes, I did. In the kitchen. Your eyes were open, so don't try saying you were asleep. And I put it right next to the changing table this morning. You couldn't have missed it, Mulder, it's a giant giraffe costume. With a tail."
"There was no such thing on the changing table." Except now that he thought about it, there was something beige there that he hadn't paid any attention to.
"Mulder." She sighed and looked down at Sadie. "Batman? Really?"
"I had limited options."
"Na na na!" Sadie yelled.
"See, she even knows her song," Mulder said.
Scully fought her smile for a moment, and then gave in. "Come on. I think Wendy bought the Costco out of Three Musketeers bars."
"Excellent," he said, and followed them towards the candy.
October 2016 - Age 7
You can only spend so long going thirty miles an hour on 95 before you go insane. Mulder managed not to tell the driver of the third car to cut him off in the past two hours what he thought of him, in the interest of not having Sadie ask for clear definitions of each of the individual concepts expressed. He'd learned that lesson several times already. Most of them on 95.
The post-Grammy's-house energy crash had passed, and she was now kicking the back of Scully's seat with a fierce sort of determination. Scully had been trying, vainly, to interest her in a game of I Spy, but at a certain point, there was nothing left to spy that was not another car. He glanced over, and Scully gave him the universal sign for "Your turn, co-parent. I'm out."
"Have you thought about what you want to be for Halloween?" he asked, hoping this would start some sort of long conversation.
"Yeah, I decided already," Sadie said, full of confidence.
"So, what?"
"I'm going to be a princess dinosaur astronaut." She kept kicking.
They were going slowly enough that he could spare a hand to reach out and grab her feet. He made an elaborate show of tickling her ankles, and she giggled and stopped kicking. "What, like a princess for school and a dinosaur for trick-or-treating?"
"No. A princess dinosaur astronaut, all day." He glanced in the rearview mirror, watched her trace her fingers against the glass of the window.
"That's a lot of costume," he said. "Maybe you should try just being one thing."
"Why should I be one thing?" she said. "That's boring."
"But where are we going to get a princess dinosaur astronaut costume?" he asked.
"You'll find one," she said. "Mama, let's play the math game again."
Scully leaned over the backseat and fished around for the box of 24 cards. "Are you sure you don't want to be something simpler?"
"Mama," Sadie said. And you couldn't argue with that.
***
The dinosaur part was easy: they went to Target and located a size 5T full-body dinosaur costume in the boys' Halloween section. After that, it got complicated. Sadie found an astronaut helmet, but vetoed the existing color scheme, and the idea of an orange jumpsuit. "Dinosaurs have scales," she said. "They don't need to wear protective equipment." Scully decided that explaining explosive decompression in Target was a very, very bad idea, so she skipped that part, and followed her daughter to the arts and crafts section, where she picked out the right color pink to spray paint the helmet.
It took three coats to cover up all the existing markings on the helmet. Scully and Mulder sat on the porch steps, waiting for paint to dry, and for it to be time to pick her up at school. "Do you think it's sufficiently 'princess'?" Scully asked, examining the day-glo pink helmet on the milk crate, blue painter's tape covering the visor.
"She'll tell us if it's not," Mulder said.
"True."
It was not sufficiently 'princess.' Sadie rummaged through her dress-up and crafts boxes, and emerged with a tiara that had been stepped on and could be cannibalized for parts, three tubes of glitter glue, and some stick-on plastic jewels. It took a little while, and Scully burned herself twice with the hot glue gun, but in the end, it was deemed acceptable.
After six drafts, Sadie was satisfied with her rendition of a plausible DINOSAUR NASA logo, complete with a T-Rex riding a comet and a portrayal of Saturn with dinosaur-like spikes along its rings. Mulder did studious internet research until he developed a method for reproducing her drawing on cloth. (Scanning to iron-on paper to transfer to a yard of burlap; not that hard, and he only ruined one of them in the process.) He burned himself three times with the hot glue gun, and singed the costume in several places, while attaching the logos to the back of the helmet and the front of the costume, but, in the end, it was done, and that's about all you can expect.
Sadie examined herself in the mirror as she tried it on. "Maybe I need to be a ballerina too," she hedged.
"No," Mulder said. "There is a limit to how many nouns you can be at once."
She didn't look like she wanted to take that for an answer, but he wasn't budging.
When Scully dropped her off at school Halloween morning, she wished she had a camera to capture the teacher's expression. "Well, Sadie," she said. "That's very...creative."
"I know," Sadie said, walking straight past her into the classroom, long green tail sweeping the floor behind her.
The picture Mulder took of Sadie that evening on the front steps, holding her plastic pumpkin in one hand and her light saber in the other, was the background on both of their phones for quite a while.
October 2019 - Age 10
Scully was poking at her schedule for November. She wasn't going to bother with Geneva this time, they could handle it without her--but the Nairobi division really needed some guidance, and she wouldn't mind the chance to talk with Kwame again, see where they were going with the new projects. Isabel was heading down there tomorrow, so she couldn't share the plane with her, but she could always fly commercial. Maybe she could leave the fifth. She started writing the email to Wendy about whether or not it could be done, and realized that Halloween was still blank. "Sadie," she called out, not bothering to move.
"What?" Sadie yelled from her room.
"Please come here," she said. She did not care that her daughter was trying, very hard, to be thirteen; they were going to speak to each other without yelling like civilized people. Or at least she was.
There was much stomping while the six feet between Sadie's room and Scully's office were traversed. "What?"
"Do you have plans for tomorrow night yet?"
"Yeah, we were just going to go into town. They're doing the haunted house at the rec center again."
"Who's we?" Most of Sadie's friends were known quantities, but there was a new girl from soccer who seemed woefully under-supervised and had a much meaner kick than any ten year old should.
"Will."
She turned around. "Will? As in, your brother?" Sadie just rolled her eyes. "When is your brother coming down?"
Sadie checked her watch. "Um, he'll be at the Richmond train station in two hours."
"Were either of you planning on mentioning this to us?"
She shrugged. "You've got two hours. It doesn't take that long to get to the station."
Scully ran her hand over her eyes. "Okay," she said. "Go tell your father."
Sadie huffed all the way down the stairs.
***
He was lonely, Scully guessed, as she moved the inflatable mattress into Sadie's room. Moving to Philadelphia had to be scary; sure, he'd spent a week or two every year with them, but, frankly, Othma was only barely bigger than Kaycee, and he'd never really had to deal with the ruthless anomie of a major city before. He loved his classes, he liked his roommate, and he was settling in just fine, but he was a six hour flight from his other parents and a six hour train ride from them, alone in the big city.
Which explained why an eighteen-year-old boy had decided to spend Halloween with his baby sister. Not that Will didn't love Sadie; he loved her as if he'd known her all his life, though the fact that they could communicate telepathically probably made things run a little more smoothly in that department. (If anyone ever asked her, which they wouldn't, she'd tell them to never, ever have telepathic children, particularly if neither of the parents could hear them. Mulder frequently knew that they were talking, but couldn't follow them, and all she ever had were suspicions and, frequently, a dull headache.) But she was pretty sure most of his friends were going to be spending this evening drinking themselves into oblivion and trying to pick up girls wearing little more than glitter.
When she thought about it that way, she was glad he was coming.
***
"Are you ready?" Sadie yelled down the stairs.
Mulder paused the TV and reached for the camera. "Let's see it."
In unison, Will and Sadie descended the stairs. Mulder laughed out loud, and Scully couldn't help but grin at the sight of her two children, dressed in identical black suits, white shirts, skinny black ties, and black sunglasses, holding large plastic ray guns. "Does it work?" Will asked.
"I find myself vaguely worried I'm about to get mindwiped," Mulder said. "Again."
"I'm sure, Mr. Mulder, you'd never compromise our interests in this matter," Will deadpanned.
"Yeah, that's creepy," she said, and wondered if Mulder was also thinking just how much Will sounded like his grandfather at that moment.
"Hold still," Mulder said, and raised the camera. They posed back to back, guns pointed up. The flash blinded them all briefly, and then Mulder nodded. "Got it."
"Do you think they'll take away our guns at the haunted house?" Sadie asked, opening her coat to holster her gun.
"Is that my holster?" Scully asked.
"Oh, yeah. Can we borrow your holsters? I left the guns in the box."
"Sadie!"
"What? You keep them in condition four in the case anyway."
Scully didn't have any good idea how to answer that.
"Do you have your phones?" Mulder asked.
"Yes," the children answered in unison.
He held out the car keys. "Home by ten, don't eat anything with a razor blade in it, try not to get abducted by aliens."
"We'll do our best." Will took the keys, and kissed first Mulder, and then her. Sadie rolled her eyes from over by the door. Scully was certain the series of glances exchanged between them signaled a conversation she couldn't hear, but didn't bother to ask.
Outside, she heard their car roar to life and pull away.
Will had her home by 9:45. They'd won third prize in the costume contest - group division. When he left back for Philly, the ribbon and prize photo of them was clipped to the fridge.
October 2029 - Age 20
"Do you think I can go as someone whose personal statement isn't done yet and who's taking the GREs on Thursday?" Casey said, unwrapping a mini Twix.
"You can go as someone who is more interested in articulating her relationship to the subfields of sociolinguistics than getting laid," Allie offered, as she pulled up her fishnet stockings.
"The difference is I don't need to work at getting laid," Casey said, arching an eyebrow over at her. "It just kinda happens."
"How is that shit still working?" Allie arranged her pointy hat on her head. "Do I look like a witch?"
"I mean, you look like a cartoon witch drawn by people who don't know anything about Wiccan practice. Oh, shit, Wicca, that's it." Casey sprinted out of Allie's room and into hers across the hall.
Allie followed her. "Wicca what?"
Casey ripped off her t-shirt, not caring that the door was still open; if there was anyone in Batten House who hadn't seen her tits yet, they were more than welcome. Especially what's her name, Natasha, the second year. Yeah, definitely her. She dug a white bra out of her top drawer, and then pulled on a ribbed tank top. "Do you think anyone has like a plastic axe or cross-bow or something I could borrow?"
"I think Ntozake bought a couple of options for her grim reaper outfit."
Casey checked herself in the mirror again, and dug around on her dresser top for a dark lipstick. "My hair's a little short, and my tattoo's a little big, but it'll do."
"You're confusing me."
She turned around, stuck her hands in her pockets, and slouched. "Faith Lehane. Bad Slayer."
"Is this another TV show thing?"
"Not my fault you're a philistine," Casey said, breezing past her. "Can you lock my door?" She stomped down the stairs to go raid Ntozake's weapons stash.
***
The Rainbow Alliance Halloween Party had been in full swing for three hours, which meant they were out of Malibu and Kahlua but most of the tequila was still there. Casey sipped her amaretto sour and rested her arm somewhere in the vicinity of Natasha's shoulder on the back of the couch. "So how did you get into Buffy?" Natasha asked.
"It was my dad, actually," she said with a smile. "He watched it with me when I was a kid."
"Your dad was into Buffy?"
"No, actually," she said, rotating her drink slowly with her wrist to distribute the melted ice better. "I think he found it on some internet list of 'empowering television to watch with your daughter.'" Natasha giggled; she was pretty when she laughed. Well, she was pretty all the time, but Casey liked to make pretty girls laugh. And other things.
"So did he like it?"
"Yeah, actually. He liked the supernatural stuff, but mostly because he thought they got it all wrong. And the kung fu was right up his alley. When all the sexing started in the later seasons he would, like, cover my face with his hands--" She pantomimed this with her non-drink holding hand on Natasha, who burst out laughing and leaned in to her a little. "Which I told him was absurd, but anyway. I think he was pretty into it by the end."
Natasha's hand landed on her knee. "Your dad sound likes a good guy," she said.
"Yeah," she said, with a little shrug. "He's okay." She leaned in a little closer. "So, what about you?"
***
She climbed the stairs back to her room the next morning, just as Allie was coming out of her room to head to the showers. "You're terrible, Case," she said, her flip-flops thwacking on the floor.
"I think I figured out what to say in my statement," Casey said.
"Terr-i-buuuuul," Allie said.
Casey closed her door, already thinking in Punjabi.
October 2037 - Age 28
Monica laid out the marigolds. She'd gotten red chrysanthemums, too. Raúl hadn't been such a fan of marigolds. "Compré los tamalitos de María. Recuede, ¿que los vende acerca del parque?" She shifted through the bag. "Y no había pan de muertos en nuestro panería, debía ir hasta San Ángel."
"Hey," said a quiet voice behind her.
She glanced back, smiling. God, it still shocked her how well Casey cleaned up. She was wearing that grey suit, the one that looked like sharkskin, with the black tie and the white shirt. She wore her hair down these days, most of the time; she thought it made her look more professorial. "Hey there," Monica said. "You're earlier than I expected."
Casey made a little gesture back towards the road. "You want me to come back in a little bit?"
"No, it's fine. We didn't have much to say." She gestured next to her, on the other side of Raoul's headstone. "Did you bring the tequila?"
She pulled it out from under her arm and shook it gently. "Guy at the liquor store was impressed. Said I must really want to be kind to the ghosts."
Monica laid out the pastelitos next to the bread. "What did you say?"
Casey smiled as she sat down on the grass. "That it was for my aunt's husband."
Monica rolled her eyes and started trying to do something attractive with the calaveras. Casey had been milking the "aunt" thing every since she arrived in DF. She called her it in public, usually, because she knew pointing out their age difference drove Monica crazy but she couldn't correct her in front of other people, because, what, she was going to say, "No, I'm not her aunt. I mean, I worked with her parents thirty-five years ago and have known her since she was born, but actually, I'm her pseudo-sugar mama, except that she's got her own damn trust fund so it's not money she needs, if you follow my drift"? No, she didn't think so. Trust Mulder's daughter to be irreparably warped about something like this.
They sat in silence for a long moment while Monica arranged things. She glanced over again, examined the suit, tried not to ogle. "Did you teach today?" she asked.
"Hmm? No, no." That Casey had come to Mexico was still a shock, most days. Monica had been making excuses to come to New York for a while, extending her stays a little longer, getting a bigger suite at the Plaza than was strictly necessary, but, still, when she got the email where Casey casually mentioned that her post-doc was running out and she'd seen there were openings in UNAM's linguistics department and did she know anybody, she had been downright taken aback. Of course, the linguistics department chair had served on the curriculum committee with Raúll; she gave her a call, and now she was sitting next to Doctora Cassandra Scully-Mulder, Assistant Professor of Historical and Computational Linguistics, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, who was technically borrowing her guest bedroom while she looked for an apartment, and who hadn't looked at the real estate listings once in four months.
Casey poked around the pastelitos, probably looking for the guava ones. Monica smacked her hand, and she retreated, sighing. "No, one of the PhD students wanted me to come look at his data. He's working on slang in the border region up around Texas, and wanted a native English speaker for context. Honestly, you write one article on early 21st century American dialectology, and everybody thinks you're an expert."
Monica took a moment to process that out of linguist into normal-person. "Early 21st century? Were you working back in Stark?"
Casey snorted and grabbed a corner of the bread, tore it off. "What did you think I was doing, translating?"
"You wrote a paper?"
"It may possibly have won some awards." Casey chewed on the bread. "Mmm, this is good."
"Am I ever going to get to look at your CV?"
"God, no. That would be creepy."
Monica smiled, half against her will. "So, what's with the outfit?" When she'd left for the day, Casey had still been in pajamas, sitting at the living room desk with the galleys of her book and a full press of coffee, muttering about transcription and how if a press couldn't handle IPA they had no business publishing in linguistics. She hadn't thought through who she expected to show up tonight to set up the ofrendas, but it hadn't been Doctora Scully-Mulder in all her swank.
Casey looked down at her suit and seemed a little embarrassed. "The suit? I mean, it's for this." Monica didn't get it, and shook her head. Casey shrugged. "It's your husband."
"Casey Scully-Mulder, the great honorer of the institution of marriage," Monica snarked.
"I can respect other people's ethical commitments without holding them myself," she said, crossing her arms. "And, I don't know. I guess I just think that, if something matters enough for you to make a serious vow to it, it deserves to be honored. Anyway," she glanced over at the tombstone, "I wanted to make a good impression."
"Well then," Monica said. "Raúl, this is Casey. Casey, Raúl."
"Encantada," Casey said seriously to the tomb. "Raúl, can I snag a tamelito? I skipped lunch."
"You know, they're not supposed to fill you up after he eats them," Monica handed her one.
"I'll take my chances," Casey said, unwrapping it. As she ate, she reached across the grave and took Monica's hand. "So, Mónica," she said quietly. "Tell me about your husband."
Monica leaned her cheek against the stone. "He would have liked you, I think."
Casey smiled. "Good," she said.
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