All Temperature Cheer

Fox Mulder looked up as the bell over the Laundromat door chimed in its cheery yet somehow suspicious manner, and was surprised to see his immediate superior, Walter Skinner, manhandling a duffel bag through the doorway.

He glanced down at his own bag of dirty clothes, open but not yet emptied, then looked back up at Skinner. Their eyes met, and Skinner gave him a curt nod, looking almost as embarrassed as Mulder felt. For some reason, having his boss in the same space as him while he was washing clothes felt oddly intimate, so much so that he felt a flush rising up in his cheeks.

His clothing forgotten for a moment, Mulder watched with growing unease as Skinner moved down the aisle of washing machines, looking for an empty one. Somehow fate had conspired to have every matron with a box of Tide and an agenda descend on this Laundromat on this particular Saturday evening, and Mulder saw that the only empty washer was—naturally—the one next to him.

Skinner almost looked like he might just walk out, and a part of Mulder rejoiced at that (the part of him, he suspected, that remembered just one too many lectures on policy and procedure), while a larger and far less analyzed part of him felt keenly disappointed at the prospect.

With an exasperated sigh, Skinner dropped his bag of clothes onto the table directly across from the machine next to Mulder’s. He gave the younger man an unreadable look, sweeping his gaze from the top of Mulder’s head (making Mulder suddenly yearn for a comb) down his jeans and sweatshirt-clad body to his scuffed trainers, and then back up to meet his eyes. Mulder might have felt more offended by the casual appraisal had he not been doing the exact same thing, and his visual tour of Skinner’s boot-clad feet, muscular denim-clad legs and t-shirt clad torso came to an abrupt end as eyes met eyes.

“Mulder,” Skinner acknowledged.

“Sir.”

An uncomfortable silence, and then Skinner turned to his laundry bag and unceremoniously dumped its contents onto the table and began to sort out darks and lights.

Since it seemed that there was going to be no more to their conversation than that, Mulder gave a large mental shrug and a smaller physical one, and dumped his own bag of dirty clothes. Something from the depths of the bag gave off a slightly fishy and completely offensive odor as it was released from its canvas prison.

“God, Mulder, what is that?” Skinner groaned, and then looked almost surprised at himself for speaking.

Mulder felt himself wanting to blush again, and gave Skinner a self-conscious shrug as he found the offending garment. He let Skinner see the peculiar stain on the front of the white t-shirt before throwing it into the washing machine.

“Alligator drool,” he explained.

Skinner couldn’t bring himself to ask for further explanation. Instead, he turned back to his own clothes, pulled a white dress shirt from a pile of dark socks and towels, and was about to put it in the machine when he saw that Mulder was staring at it, his look somewhere between curiosity and accusation. Skinner looked down at the shirt in his hand and noticed, as Mulder had, the rust colored drips on the front of it.

“Blue plate special, last Tuesday,” he admitted.

Mulder nodded as if somehow this explained something vitally important about Skinner to him, and they both reached into their respective piles of clothes for the next item. Without conscious thought, they displayed their shirts.

“Black oil,” said Mulder, dropping the stained garment into the machine.

“Printer ink,” Skinner said, in a tone that suggested he was willing to give Mulder that round.

The next items were revealed, and it felt like a contest of sorts now. Mulder realized he was somehow enjoying this exchange with Skinner, and he found himself almost smiling as he flourished a pair of white socks with green and brown spots on them.

“Graveyard dirt,” he proclaimed.

“New shoes,” Skinner countered, tossing his own stained socks into the washer.

Both men picked up the pace, and now Mulder could see that Skinner was almost smiling too.

More shirts:

“Bile.”

“Pen exploded”

More socks:

“Digitalis, with a side of diet cola.”

“Mud.”

And still more shirts:

“Iodine, from a regenerating head.”

“Scotch, from a bottle.”

That one made Mulder snort laughter, and it felt strange. He sobered, and then saw the twinkle in Skinner’s dark eyes, and something deep inside him suddenly throbbed with a desire to surface.

Mulder found another t-shirt.

“Monkey pee,” he declared. For some reason this earned him his first skeptical look since this odd contest had started. “Okay,” he conceded, “Purity Control.”

This seemed to satisfy Skinner, as he displayed his own white shirt, this one lightly pinstriped. 

“Coffee.” He knew how weak his response was. “Black,” he added, as if that somehow gave it more weight.

Not much more remained but the dark clothes now, Mulder noticed, and he wondered what would happen when they got to his jeans, which sported a variety of stains, from blood to microscopic bug guts, and then he was pulling up the last few light items. He looked at them in his hand, and then turned to Skinner, horrified, only to find Skinner staring at him with the same stunned expression.

Neither man spoke for a long, long moment.

Neither man could help but notice that the remaining items were towels and underwear. Boxers for Mulder, briefs for Skinner. 

Neither man thought the stiffness of those items came from starch.

Mulder opened his mouth, closed it with a nearly audible snap, and wished fervently that the floor would open up and swallow him whole.

Skinner’s eyes kept darting back and forth between the items in Mulder’s hands and the nearly identical ones in his own, and he wondered if Mulder’s aliens could somehow show up now and make this time ‘missing’.

Neither man moved.

Eyes met eyes again, and the external stain war became an internal affair. 

Mulder thought to himself, ‘well, he thinks I’m nuts already’.

He held out the towels and the shorts, made sure Skinner had a good look at them, and said, with a mix of trepidation and defiance, “you,” and threw them into the washer.

Another long moment passed, and Mulder fussed with detergent, blushing furiously and wondering if he’d just tossed his career, or possibly his life, in with the dirty laundry. He spilled more powder than he got in the machine, but finally the silence got to him and he risked a glance back at Skinner.

The older man was still staring at him, still holding his own self-soiled garments, and there was a small frown on his face. But it wasn’t the look of an angry man, or a disgusted man. It was almost frightened. 

Mulder kept staring.

Skinner cleared his throat.

“You,” he finally replied with a quick almost disinterested glance at the clothes. When they were safely hidden in the depths of the washer, he pierced Mulder with those dark, dark eyes, daring him to comment.

Instead, Mulder turned on his washer, and gave Skinner time to do the same. 

When he heard the water start to run, and the machine began to gently agitate away the evidence, Mulder took a deep breath and gave Skinner a small smile. He got one in return, took just a second to appreciate the twist of Skinner’s mouth, and said,

“I-I-We should probably talk, sir. Maybe over a cup of coffee?”

“I’d like that,” said Skinner. And then he added, "Let's try not to spill anything..."

The End