rivkat | Eight Crazy Nights, night four (cont.)

for

hulamoth

Mulder going undercover as a male escort?

“He’ll do,” SAC Walker said, the moment Mulder walked into the room.

“He’ll do what?” Scully asked. She’d been first into the room, but the other agents’ eyes were all on Mulder.

“Agent Mulder, Agent Scully,” Skinner said, nodding at each of them in turn, “SAC Walker needs to borrow an agent for a particular assignment.”

Scully blinked. “Corruption?” Scully could always be trusted to know specialties.

“There’s an ongoing investigation into a certain congressman,” Skinner continued. “Exchanging legislative favors for … certain other favors.”

Mulder and Scully did what they always did: shut out the rest of the room and held a conversation purely by means of stares, like Morse code without the dots and dashes. Skinner hadn’t figured out many of the translations, but he was pretty confident that Scully warned Mulder not to piss Skinner off and Mulder pointed out that she was basically asking him not to be taller than she was. A harder task than that, maybe. Legs could be amputated.

“Just to be clear,” Scully said (and Skinner wished he’d been able to figure out how they decided which one of them was going to speak), “Mulder is going to be masquerading as a male prostitute.”

Nobody looked at her, but one of Walker’s people sniggered. Skinner frowned at him and the man turned red.

But no one in Public Corruption could truly understand Mulder’s ability to get himself into trouble. They wouldn’t look after him properly, which was how Skinner ended up in the surveillance van, wedged next to Scully, listening in as Mulder introduced himself to Congressman Sawyer.

“Tell me about yourself,” the congressman instructed. They heard the sounds of glass clinking.

“Thanks,” Mulder said, presumably accepting a drink. “Well, I have a PhD in English from Yale—”

Sawyer made a ‘hunh’ sound. “So how did you end up—here?”

“I have a PhD in English from Yale,” Mulder repeated dryly. He really was good at his job, Skinner thought. It was easy to forget, with all the property damage and threats from other agencies. But that line had come out perfectly, self-deprecating and just practiced enough to make Sawyer think that it was Mulder’s standard story for his clients.

Sawyer laughed on cue. “And what brought you to me?”

“Some friends of yours have a special request,” Mulder said. Skinner could imagine him, standing there in one of the suits that were too nice for an agent—family money, the scuttlebutt was—but just nice enough for another type of professional. Smiling with that little superior twist of his lips: yes, I am taller and smarter and better-looking than you will ever be, but I could do what you say if you figure out how to make me.

In the house, there were footsteps, Sawyer moving away. “Well, we can get to all that.”

“And do you have a special request?” Mulder asked, teasing as he never was in real life—except that Skinner was watching Scully’s face, and her lips were just slightly curved, as if she were thinking of other times Mulder had sounded that playful.

“Mmm,” Sawyer said, distantly. “I’ll have to see what I can think of.”

Mulder didn’t respond. And then he didn’t say anything, even though there were sounds right near the microphone, bodies moving.

“Sir, I suspect the congressman has drugged—”

Skinner waved her on, pushing the back door of the van open and pounding towards the congressman’s house right on her heels. He pulled his gun as Scully kicked the front door open, yelling.

He should have warned Walker, he thought while Scully was handcuffing Sawyer, her knee still in his back from where she’d knocked him off of Mulder. Mulder might have been physically perfect for the assignment, and he hadn’t even deviated from the script. But Mulder was a lightning rod, a strange attractor, a joker even when the rules of the game banned wild cards. Maybe that was why he so often ignored orders; when procedure always failed on him, what reason was there to respect it?

Scully was checking on Mulder now, her hands slipping over his wrists, prying his eyelids open to check his pupils. “Drugged, but not in danger,” was her verdict. “The ambulance is on its way. Sir, may I respectfully request—”

“I understand, Agent Scully.” Damned if she hadn’t made almost every word of that last half-sentence sound like a lie. “I’ll speak to SAC Walker about the failure of intelligence here. If he knew that the congressman had this habit, I guarantee there will be consequences.”

She didn’t look at him, but the drop in temperature told him that she was not quite a believer in his ability to punish threats to Mulder. Sometimes he couldn’t, that was true enough, though mostly because Mulder kept biting off more than Godzilla could chew. But this, he could take care of.

He thought of telling her so, but, like much else in their world, it was probably best left unsaid.

for

cellia

Sam/Dean (other additional pairings cool), The Lady, or the Tiger? (note: reads perfectly well as gen, I think)

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Dean complained. “No fuckin’ way would it be the tiger.”

Dean was staring out at the road like he expected the cops to zoom up at any moment. Sam paused to gather his thoughts. “It’s a question of human nature. Not everybody would be willing to know their lover was out there, married to some other woman, maybe happier than he’d been before.” Or maybe the lover himself would rather be dead than the alternative, but Sam bit down on that addition.

Dean frowned, clearly not in agreement. Sometimes, Sam thought, Dean had less in common with people than with the things they hunted. At least supernatural baddies had comprehensible, single-track motives, even if sometimes it took a little digging (literal or not) to figure out exactly what they were.

“I like the cat that’s not dead and not not dead better,” Dean said at last. “Seein’ as how neither of those choices is crazy.”

“Since when do you know about Schroedinger’s cat?”

Dean humphed and smacked the steering wheel. “Read about it in Popular Mechanics, asswipe.”

Sam sighed and shifted in his seat. Just another thing about his brother that he’d never really know. “So would you open the box, then? Collapse the states, maybe kill the cat?”

Dean chewed on his lower lip, actually considering the question, which was kind of amazing even if they were both bored out of their skulls by the eight millionth mile of highway. “Yeah, I would. That’s no kind of life, in the box. Open it up, at least you know. You?”

Cut out the possibility, fix the facts, make a decision and move on. Once, he would reflexively have chosen the option Dean rejected, out of a mix of rebelliousness and a genuine sense that Dean wanted exactly the opposite out of life than he did. There were also times in his life that he would have tried to do whatever Dean would have done. Now, he tried to reason it out for himself. Refuse to open the box, and there was always a chance for the cat. Opening was also closing, irrevocable, while waiting could always be reversed.

Unless the cat starved, or went black-eyed while you waited.

“Yeah,” he agreed.

Hamlet was never a hunter.

for

jackycomelately

More No Such AU? Could be holiday related as in how does SpyLex! celebrate the holidays and what would they buy each other? Note: Didn’t make it to eight gifts, sorry.

Krypton didn’t have a winter solstice festival, as far as Lex knew, but Clark loved the holidays anyway. He covered his back wall in Christmas cards. If he’d had a fireplace in his apartment he would have hung stockings by the chimney with care. As it was, Lex had been unable to deny him a full-fledged tree in Lex’s apartment. Unlike most people in Metropolis, Lex had ceilings high enough for a real tree. Even the prospect of finding pine needles wedged in the furniture for years to come couldn’t compete with Clark’s pleading expression. Clark never asked for anything, except when he asked for all of Lex.

Lex hadn’t enjoyed the holidays since his mother’s death—trite but true. Christmas meant chilly lectures, uncomfortable LuthorCorp parties where half the attendees assumed he was in chemo, and presents so insultingly inappropriate that he’d actually burned a couple of years’ worth prior to opening them when he’d been in his teens. Clark’s unabashed sentimentality, as always, made him nervous.

Clark was so committed, though, that Lex decided to compromise.

So they got a tree, by which Lex meant that Lex followed Clark around the lot until Clark’s face lit up like a nuclear power plant had just gone on line, and then Lex paid for that tree. Clark got it inside the apartment somehow and hung the ornaments his mother had sent him—one for every year away from home, plus one that Clark had made when he was five; that one was misshapen and covered with more glue than glitter, but Lex put it right in the center so that it was the first thing he saw when he came home.

Clark made popcorn strings and levitated to string them, ignoring Lex’s point that this was possibly the silliest use of superpowers in the history of Earth.

Lex added expensive purple decorations, because a trust fund had to be good for something, and threw in a few cleverly disguised grenades and some streamers of icicles that could, in a pinch, be used to stab assailants, because it was his tree too.

“What are these?” Clark asked on Christmas morning, looking at the three packages that had appeared on Lex’s dining room table.

“Open them and see,” Lex said. He’d thought about lead-lined wrapping paper, but production would be somewhat toxic and Clark wasn’t the kind to peek in any event.

Sure enough, Clark weighed each one in his hand, but he didn’t scrunch his eyebrows up the way he would to see through things. Lex would never tell him, but using his broad-spectrum vision always made Clark look like a not-very-bright man trying very hard to figure out a complicated piece of furniture from Ikea.

Clark opened the heaviest one first. “It’s Gilgamesh and Enkidu,” Lex said, pointing to one side of the little gold statuette and then the other. He’d retrieved it from the private collection of a German financier with ties to a bioterrorist group. He was fairly sure that it had been looted from Iraq, but it wasn’t in any museum catalogues.

Lex didn’t pay much attention to provenance. It was genuine, and that was enough for him.

“Hunh,” Clark said, put the statuette carefully down on the table, and reached for the next box.

This time, he tilted his head at Lex and waited for an explanation for the blobby, murky thing in the box. “Resin from the Boswellia tree,” Lex told him. “They grow in environments so harsh that the trees sometimes seem to grow directly out of solid rock. There are storms so violent that the trees have incredibly deep roots; it’s what lets them hang on. The resin is collected by scraping the bark and letting the resin bleed out and harden into tears.” He could smell it from six feet away, spicy and dense. “The ancients considered it more valuable than gold.”

When Clark looked up from the final box, he was even more bemused. The reddish-brown substance was more attractive, but it smelled more bitter than the frankincense; the two mixed in the dry air of the apartment, like a breath rattling out of history. “Lex,” he said, “is this--?”

“Psalm 45 mentions myrrh as a kingly fragrance,” he said lightly. “I thought it was appropriate.”

“I’m no one’s king,” Clark said, watchful.

“Not an earthly king, to be sure,” Lex agreed. “But you were my savior. And I’m not the only one.”

Clark’s eyes shone, green as the ocean, green as the Amazon. “Yes,” he said. “You are.”

for

meret

SPN Dean/Pamela

Dean had never done it with a blind girl before, for obvious reasons. He guessed she remembered him from before she’d summoned Castiel. Out of a sense of fairness, he’d kept the lights off once he’d seen enough of Pam’s place to navigate.

Sam had declined her renewed invitation, which was a damn shame for Sam but a win for Dean, and he planned to tell Sam the same.

He was lying beside her, running his fingers idly over her hip and thinking about maybe stopping for some food before he went back to the motel, when she spoke.

“I still see you, Dean.”

He didn’t clench his hand, but he did stop moving. “What d’you mean?”

“That brand Castiel put on you, it keeps you inside, but it doesn’t hide you. I saw you the whole time.”

Dean swallowed and tried to remember exactly where his clothes were. Not that he could cover up, not really, but he had to keep moving forward.

“Oh, darlin’,” she said, and turned her head to kiss his sweaty forehead. “You aren’t near as ugly as you think you are.”