Gift for: Dryad
Title: Fallax Nix
Author: sharo_8760
Rating: G
Genre: Mystery, a bit fluffy later on
Summary: Mulder and Scully are on their way home but a snowstorm
A/N: Goodness, this story took a turn somewhere I hadn't thought of before and soon it was clear that it would be too long to write in the time being. So Dryad, your gift will have another part and I will make sure to email you the link once I get it done. (It'll be on my fanfiction.net account which is on the same name as I'm here, and I'll put a link here, too.) Merry Xmas!
Fallax Nix
It won’t stop snowing, she realized gloomily. Not in time for the plane, anyway.
‘It’s too late. Let’s just get rooms at the hotel,’ she said to Mulder.
‘Are you sure, Scully?’ Mulder knew how much Scully had wanted to go home for Christmas to her family. She’d been panicking since two pm when the snowing had begun.
Scully sighed. ‘It’s okay, I might still get there by Boxing Day.’
Mulder offered her an apologetic smile and chose a left for the airport hotel instead of the terminal. He pulled up in front of a big, generic Best Western, took a good look at it and changed his mind.
‘Scully, I know you’ve had enough of me and I have had enough of nights in motels and cheap hotels,’ he said, waving off Scully’s dispassionate denial of her being tired of him. ‘I’m gonna get you home for Christmas and I’ll do it, even if I have to carry you myself.’
Scully turned to Mulder, taken aback by his sudden gumption. ‘Really, Mulder, it’s alright, we’ll stay here and wait for the storm to clear and -’
‘No. We’ll drive. It’s just two states, it shouldn’t take that long. Less than ten hours.’
‘Ten hours! Mulder, that’s ten hours we could sleep and then get home in ninety minutes by plane,’ she protested. But she was too tired and pretty sure she wouldn’t bother fighting him much. And she knew him and how damn stubborn he could be.
Mulder glanced at the hotel again, the ten stories and the hundreds of windows, about half of which were dark.
‘You heard the report,’ he insisted, ‘they said it might go on well into tomorrow. I know you’re tired but I’m really not and I don’t mind driving.’
Scully sighed. ‘Fine.’
She wondered herself why she’d given up so easily, pulled her coat on tighter around herself and shifted for a better sleeping position. She could almost feel her neck hurting already. Mulder looked at her with a soft smile and turned on the engine of the car.
***
Scully woke up after what seemed like two hours and was disappointed to find only 40 minutes had passed. She turned around, moved her legs and arms in a desperate struggle against physics for a comfortable position. After a few minutes she was forced to acknowledge the fact that it just wasn’t going to happen so she sat up and rubbed the sleep off her eyes.
‘Sleep well?’ Mulder asked with a grin. Scully only replied by looking at him with her reddish eyes and grunting.
‘Apparently I’m not tired enough to sleep,’ she said after a brief silence. ‘So you might as well keep me company.’
Mulder smiled. ‘Sure. Do you wanna play a game?’
‘A game?’
‘Truth or truth. I ask you two yes or no questions and you reply to one of them without telling me which one your answer is for.’
Scully scoffed. ‘Thanks for the offer, Mulder, but I’m not sixteen so I’m gonna have to say no.’
‘Oh come on, Scully. Can’t you just let go for a moment?’ He was a bit snappy now. Scully noticed.
‘Well excuse me but you were the one who wanted to spend a ten-hour drive with me. Sorry for not being entertaining enough.’
‘Scully, I - I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it like that.’
A long silence fell over them. Scully looked outside to an endless forest. The snowing was getting worse by the minute. She wondered if Mulder would be able to drive the whole way or if they’d just end up in another motel, one of those hundreds seemingly identical ones.
The road was long and barely even curved. The scenery was blurred by the insane dance of the snowflakes that were rebelling against gravity. Mulder drove a bit too fast in regard to the weather. Scully didn’t bother to care either.
Not until the crash.
In Mulder’s mind the word ‘crash’ was quite strong for what had happened. Nobody was hurt, no metal had been crunched. The car had just simply slid off the road and ended up buried in the thick snow. They’d both had a good scare out of it but nothing worse.
Scully wasn’t too pleased. The moment she stepped out of the car she was met by an icy wind and aggressive snowflakes.
‘Looks like we’ve gotta walk,’ Mulder chuckled in disbelief.
Scully cringed. ‘Sure does.’
Mulder pulled out his cell phone and called the rental company. They said he shouldn’t have been driving, he said the bureau will cover all the costs. And then they walked.
After only a few minutes they reached an intersection and saw a sign advertising a countryside hotel a mile away. Mulder decided to go to the hotel and call a cab. Scully decided to get a room and sleep. But neither of them wanted to argue their sides in the middle of a storm.
***
The hotel was a very scenic, beautiful old building. It must have been a home of someone quite wealthy back in the day and renovated to a cosy old England style. It looked nothing like the usual motels but Mulder noted that rather than their motel, it reminded him of the Bates family home. Scully really didn’t care.
They were met by a a man in his sixties who was dressed in an old-fashioned bow tie, a sickly yellow button down shirt, beige dress pants and a brown cardigan. He looked like a British gentleman who owned a mansion and smoked a pipe in the evenings.
‘Hello, sir, ma’am,’ he said in a friendly voice and tossed the newspaper he’d been reading on the table. ‘A room for two? We have just the right thing for a young couple like you!’
Scully opened her mouth to correct the man but Mulder beat her to it.
‘Thank you, but we’d actually like to just make a phone call. We’re in a hurry to get home for Christmas.’
The man shook his head sadly. ‘I’m afraid the phone lines are dead, sir. Gone quite a while ago. And not a taxi driver in the state would drive you anywhere in this weather. We are not prepared, you see, sir, for the snow.’
‘We’d just like a room, then,’ Scully said quickly. ‘Two rooms, to be precise.’
‘Ah, it is refreshing indeed to see some good, traditional values in young couples these days! Not married then, yet?’ The man was smiling now, with nostalgia in his eyes.
‘Oh no, no, my wife is just being silly! One room, obviously.’
The man glanced at Scully who just managed to force a smile. She hoped for Mulder’s benefit that he had a very good reason for this.
‘Excellent, excellent. And your name, sir?’
‘Petrie. Rob Petrie.’
As she listened to Mulder spelling the name and making some small talk with the man, Scully was turned away from the reception desk so that she could roll her eyes freely. Not the Petries again... But then, in the middle of the eye-roll, something caught her attention. It was a painting, a pretty portrait of an older woman with magnificent diamond jewellery and a fur cape on her shoulders. But something about it was off, and Scully couldn’t quite out her finger on it.
‘Here you go, sir, room 204. Breakfast is served here in the restaurant from 7.30 until 10’, she heard the man say.
‘Thank you, mister...’ Mulder trailed off.
‘Rochester,’ he replied, ‘Alistair Rochester.’
‘Mister Rochester,’ Mulder said. ‘Oh, and my wife is called Laura.’
Scully turned around and smiled tensely.
***
They found their room in the second floor. It was a grand, luxuriously furnished room with a view that might have been nice if it weren’t blocked by the snowstorm. The carpet was plush and comfy, Scully noted, good for Mulder to sleep on. She sat down on the bed.
‘Please tell me you have a plan,’ she insisted while taking her shoes off and lifting her feet on the bed as well.
Mulder grinned. ‘Did you not see this place? The house, that man, the vibe... It’s got Edgar Allan Poe written all over it.’
Scully had already lain down but sat up right away. ‘Oh, come on. You’ve got to have something else than a vibe.’
Mulder shrugged. ‘Well, there was the fact that that man was reading an article in the newspaper about a missing person case that was about himself.’
He chuckled as Scully’s eyes widened. ‘What do you mean, about himself?’
‘It said that nobody had seen Alistair Rochester in weeks and had his picture on it. I don’t think he noticed that I saw the paper.’
‘Mulder,’ Scully replied with a deep sigh. ‘It was probably an old newspaper. Maybe that was his father or a twin brother. You were mistaken, it’s ok. Can’t we just sleep now?’
Huffing, Mulder turned away and pulled the door open. ‘Stay here and sleep for all I care. I’m going to investigate.’
Scully rolled her eyes again and got up to change into her pajamas. She would sleep. She’d be up bright and early tomorrow, ready to fly home for Christmas.
***
As she was being pulled out of the bed Scully could just see it was 3.30am. She blinked her eyes groggily and realized Mulder was trying to wake her up. He was still fully dressed and apparently hadn’t had a blink of sleep yet.
‘Come on, Scully, we’ve got to go,’ he whispered hastily and pulled back the covers keeping her warm. She fought, and lost. Mulder wrapped her in her coat, grabbed her below the neck and the knees and lifted her up. He started to the door but it opened before he reached it.
Mulder came into the room. Scully looked at the man holding her again and it definitely was Mulder, but so was this new man who’d come in. Neither or the men seemed to pay any attention to each other. Scully looked back and saw herself sleeping in the bed.
And then she did something she’d never done before.
She fainted.
A/N: Part two will be posted in approximately two weeks.
Author: sharo_8760
Rating: G
Genre: Mystery, a bit fluffy later on
Summary: Mulder and Scully are on their way home but a snowstorm
A/N: Goodness, this story took a turn somewhere I hadn't thought of before and soon it was clear that it would be too long to write in the time being. So Dryad, your gift will have another part and I will make sure to email you the link once I get it done. (It'll be on my fanfiction.net account which is on the same name as I'm here, and I'll put a link here, too.) Merry Xmas!
Fallax Nix
It won’t stop snowing, she realized gloomily. Not in time for the plane, anyway.
‘It’s too late. Let’s just get rooms at the hotel,’ she said to Mulder.
‘Are you sure, Scully?’ Mulder knew how much Scully had wanted to go home for Christmas to her family. She’d been panicking since two pm when the snowing had begun.
Scully sighed. ‘It’s okay, I might still get there by Boxing Day.’
Mulder offered her an apologetic smile and chose a left for the airport hotel instead of the terminal. He pulled up in front of a big, generic Best Western, took a good look at it and changed his mind.
‘Scully, I know you’ve had enough of me and I have had enough of nights in motels and cheap hotels,’ he said, waving off Scully’s dispassionate denial of her being tired of him. ‘I’m gonna get you home for Christmas and I’ll do it, even if I have to carry you myself.’
Scully turned to Mulder, taken aback by his sudden gumption. ‘Really, Mulder, it’s alright, we’ll stay here and wait for the storm to clear and -’
‘No. We’ll drive. It’s just two states, it shouldn’t take that long. Less than ten hours.’
‘Ten hours! Mulder, that’s ten hours we could sleep and then get home in ninety minutes by plane,’ she protested. But she was too tired and pretty sure she wouldn’t bother fighting him much. And she knew him and how damn stubborn he could be.
Mulder glanced at the hotel again, the ten stories and the hundreds of windows, about half of which were dark.
‘You heard the report,’ he insisted, ‘they said it might go on well into tomorrow. I know you’re tired but I’m really not and I don’t mind driving.’
Scully sighed. ‘Fine.’
She wondered herself why she’d given up so easily, pulled her coat on tighter around herself and shifted for a better sleeping position. She could almost feel her neck hurting already. Mulder looked at her with a soft smile and turned on the engine of the car.
***
Scully woke up after what seemed like two hours and was disappointed to find only 40 minutes had passed. She turned around, moved her legs and arms in a desperate struggle against physics for a comfortable position. After a few minutes she was forced to acknowledge the fact that it just wasn’t going to happen so she sat up and rubbed the sleep off her eyes.
‘Sleep well?’ Mulder asked with a grin. Scully only replied by looking at him with her reddish eyes and grunting.
‘Apparently I’m not tired enough to sleep,’ she said after a brief silence. ‘So you might as well keep me company.’
Mulder smiled. ‘Sure. Do you wanna play a game?’
‘A game?’
‘Truth or truth. I ask you two yes or no questions and you reply to one of them without telling me which one your answer is for.’
Scully scoffed. ‘Thanks for the offer, Mulder, but I’m not sixteen so I’m gonna have to say no.’
‘Oh come on, Scully. Can’t you just let go for a moment?’ He was a bit snappy now. Scully noticed.
‘Well excuse me but you were the one who wanted to spend a ten-hour drive with me. Sorry for not being entertaining enough.’
‘Scully, I - I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it like that.’
A long silence fell over them. Scully looked outside to an endless forest. The snowing was getting worse by the minute. She wondered if Mulder would be able to drive the whole way or if they’d just end up in another motel, one of those hundreds seemingly identical ones.
The road was long and barely even curved. The scenery was blurred by the insane dance of the snowflakes that were rebelling against gravity. Mulder drove a bit too fast in regard to the weather. Scully didn’t bother to care either.
Not until the crash.
In Mulder’s mind the word ‘crash’ was quite strong for what had happened. Nobody was hurt, no metal had been crunched. The car had just simply slid off the road and ended up buried in the thick snow. They’d both had a good scare out of it but nothing worse.
Scully wasn’t too pleased. The moment she stepped out of the car she was met by an icy wind and aggressive snowflakes.
‘Looks like we’ve gotta walk,’ Mulder chuckled in disbelief.
Scully cringed. ‘Sure does.’
Mulder pulled out his cell phone and called the rental company. They said he shouldn’t have been driving, he said the bureau will cover all the costs. And then they walked.
After only a few minutes they reached an intersection and saw a sign advertising a countryside hotel a mile away. Mulder decided to go to the hotel and call a cab. Scully decided to get a room and sleep. But neither of them wanted to argue their sides in the middle of a storm.
***
The hotel was a very scenic, beautiful old building. It must have been a home of someone quite wealthy back in the day and renovated to a cosy old England style. It looked nothing like the usual motels but Mulder noted that rather than their motel, it reminded him of the Bates family home. Scully really didn’t care.
They were met by a a man in his sixties who was dressed in an old-fashioned bow tie, a sickly yellow button down shirt, beige dress pants and a brown cardigan. He looked like a British gentleman who owned a mansion and smoked a pipe in the evenings.
‘Hello, sir, ma’am,’ he said in a friendly voice and tossed the newspaper he’d been reading on the table. ‘A room for two? We have just the right thing for a young couple like you!’
Scully opened her mouth to correct the man but Mulder beat her to it.
‘Thank you, but we’d actually like to just make a phone call. We’re in a hurry to get home for Christmas.’
The man shook his head sadly. ‘I’m afraid the phone lines are dead, sir. Gone quite a while ago. And not a taxi driver in the state would drive you anywhere in this weather. We are not prepared, you see, sir, for the snow.’
‘We’d just like a room, then,’ Scully said quickly. ‘Two rooms, to be precise.’
‘Ah, it is refreshing indeed to see some good, traditional values in young couples these days! Not married then, yet?’ The man was smiling now, with nostalgia in his eyes.
‘Oh no, no, my wife is just being silly! One room, obviously.’
The man glanced at Scully who just managed to force a smile. She hoped for Mulder’s benefit that he had a very good reason for this.
‘Excellent, excellent. And your name, sir?’
‘Petrie. Rob Petrie.’
As she listened to Mulder spelling the name and making some small talk with the man, Scully was turned away from the reception desk so that she could roll her eyes freely. Not the Petries again... But then, in the middle of the eye-roll, something caught her attention. It was a painting, a pretty portrait of an older woman with magnificent diamond jewellery and a fur cape on her shoulders. But something about it was off, and Scully couldn’t quite out her finger on it.
‘Here you go, sir, room 204. Breakfast is served here in the restaurant from 7.30 until 10’, she heard the man say.
‘Thank you, mister...’ Mulder trailed off.
‘Rochester,’ he replied, ‘Alistair Rochester.’
‘Mister Rochester,’ Mulder said. ‘Oh, and my wife is called Laura.’
Scully turned around and smiled tensely.
***
They found their room in the second floor. It was a grand, luxuriously furnished room with a view that might have been nice if it weren’t blocked by the snowstorm. The carpet was plush and comfy, Scully noted, good for Mulder to sleep on. She sat down on the bed.
‘Please tell me you have a plan,’ she insisted while taking her shoes off and lifting her feet on the bed as well.
Mulder grinned. ‘Did you not see this place? The house, that man, the vibe... It’s got Edgar Allan Poe written all over it.’
Scully had already lain down but sat up right away. ‘Oh, come on. You’ve got to have something else than a vibe.’
Mulder shrugged. ‘Well, there was the fact that that man was reading an article in the newspaper about a missing person case that was about himself.’
He chuckled as Scully’s eyes widened. ‘What do you mean, about himself?’
‘It said that nobody had seen Alistair Rochester in weeks and had his picture on it. I don’t think he noticed that I saw the paper.’
‘Mulder,’ Scully replied with a deep sigh. ‘It was probably an old newspaper. Maybe that was his father or a twin brother. You were mistaken, it’s ok. Can’t we just sleep now?’
Huffing, Mulder turned away and pulled the door open. ‘Stay here and sleep for all I care. I’m going to investigate.’
Scully rolled her eyes again and got up to change into her pajamas. She would sleep. She’d be up bright and early tomorrow, ready to fly home for Christmas.
***
As she was being pulled out of the bed Scully could just see it was 3.30am. She blinked her eyes groggily and realized Mulder was trying to wake her up. He was still fully dressed and apparently hadn’t had a blink of sleep yet.
‘Come on, Scully, we’ve got to go,’ he whispered hastily and pulled back the covers keeping her warm. She fought, and lost. Mulder wrapped her in her coat, grabbed her below the neck and the knees and lifted her up. He started to the door but it opened before he reached it.
Mulder came into the room. Scully looked at the man holding her again and it definitely was Mulder, but so was this new man who’d come in. Neither or the men seemed to pay any attention to each other. Scully looked back and saw herself sleeping in the bed.
And then she did something she’d never done before.
She fainted.
A/N: Part two will be posted in approximately two weeks.