I asked Twitter for some drabble prompts as well, and they showed up:
He kept glancing down at her hands over the rental’s center console. Fleeting looks from his pensive face, punctuated by the occasional rattle from the car’s inadequate cooling system. Finally she looked down herself, feeling self-conscious and fidgety.
She raised her hands an inch, palms up, a silent what ?
“Your nails,” he explained, “I’ve never seen them red before.”
Bright red. Bikini Atoll Road red, the small glass bottle waved in her face by a cheerful woman named Lahn. It had been an impulsive choice, decided in a rare moment of indulgence, sitting next to Ellen in a Georgetown nail salon, two mimosas fizzing through her system. It had been the first warm day of spring and the color reminded her of Missy, her adolescent fingers budding up through Madonna lace gloves. It was technically too bright and against Bureau grooming standards, but it was a policy no-one enforced.
“Sam always wanted red nails,” he went on. “Begged my mom to let her paint them. Mom always said no. Sam would cry about it. I thought it was stupid at the time. Now I wish Mom had just let her.”
There was a vulnerable tilt to his head, she thought, a barely perceptible mist in his eye. Tentatively she reached out and placed her hand on his shoulder, his dress shirt warm and felty under her fingers. Eyes steadfast on the road ahead, he sighed quietly, maybe happily, like a dog who’d rested his chin on your knee.
She couldn’t relate to Mulder’s childhood; to summer houses and shouting matches, to parents who drank scotch angrily in separate rooms. To an empty girl’s bedroom, frozen in time. The Scully’s had been loud and affectionate; neighborhood kids always breezing through the house, the Eagles playing on a tinny radio in the garage, a freezer full of ice-pops for anyone who wandered in.
Mulder, she thought to herself, had been trained to crave a love that he thought he didn’t deserve. She let her hand fall.
Ten pairs of latex gloves later, the red started to chip and fade. She never choose the color again.
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