Belltown (X-Files)
They landed at SeaTac at 4:56 -- by 4:59, the mist that had fogged out the late-evening view of the Seattle skyline from their cheap seats just behind the left wing had morphed into a soaking downpour, rivers streaming down the edges of sidewalks.
From her vantage point under a too-narrow awning, Scully could see Mulder running through the Lariat parking lot holding a tattered copy of The Economist over his head as he dashed around looking for their car. She'd stopped feeling bad about letting him take one for the partnership when she realized he asked knee-jerk, automatic, perfunctory -- her answer didn't matter one way or the other. Maybe it was something about boys who grew up in Massachusetts; maybe it was Teena Mulder. Scully had gotten into fist-fights with her brothers over who had to be on the shitty side of the umbrella before.
Mulder pulled around with a red 2000 Ford Escort, a car whose dependability rivaled its supreme ugliness, and she dumped their bags in the back before climbing into the front passenger seat, rubbing water off of her cheek, her neck.
"You know, Mulder," she said, "we didn't have to take this case. We could have taken something else. Or vacation."
"What," he said, feigning shock. "And miss this beauty?"
The road out of the airport complex was marred with abandoned lightrail construction -- cement pillars and crumbled asphalt framing the highway as cars crept away at an unsteady, jolting five miles an hour -- the red cast of tailights growing more intense as the sky darkened.
They played the "It's left, Mulder," versus "I think that exit was actually on the right side, Scully," game until they ended up asking for directions at a liquor store in a strip mall, and Scully barely resisted the urge not to veto Mulder's attempt to buy a handle of Jack on his company card.
They end up in a Holiday Inn, on the third floor in a discouraged-looking part of downtown Seattle, and she just had time to take off her heels and stare out at the Space Needle before Mulder knocked on her door.
"It's barely six," she said, cocking an eyebrow at him.
"I'm aging, Scully, I'm weak with hunger," he whined.
She toed on her shoes again, grabbed her coat. "If we end up in a Denny's, Mulder," she warned, "I swear, I will hurt you."
*
Mulder had once told her that the BSU had a whole series of really tasteless jokes about the rain and Seattle's reputation as an incubator for future serial killers, but then he'd refused to tell her what the jokes were. It was the kind of odd chivalry-not-chivalry that she found mostly worthy of eye-rolls, and sometimes charming. That time, she'd said that at Quantico there was a whole series of really tasteless jokes about pornstar triplets who'd been brought down to autopsy still attached.
"That sounds like an X-File, Scully," he'd said, serious.
"I shouldn't tell you, too raunchy for your delicate ears," she'd teased, and he'd smirked, abashed, at that -- admitted he was wrong. He still hadn't told her the jokes, but since she'd never gotten around to making up a corresponding backstory for her own, either, it'd worked out for the best.