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Mulder had thought their evening was going relatively smoothly until he got the ketchup out.
Sure, the mini frankfurters he had boiling away on his stove were not exactly the fine cuisine you might expect a guy to roll out when he had a beautiful woman over for dinner, but this was Scully. His Scully. She knew him. She had been putting up with him for years, and she understood that he would always choose Two Minute Noodles and pizza over fine dining.
Scully hadn’t turned up her nose when he served her microwave macaroni and cheese, or even the pizza pockets they had eaten the previous weekend. She would shake her head at him, lift her eyebrows, and make the occasional scurvy joke, but she kept coming back so he must have been doing something right.
He hoped he was doing something right.
They had been fifteen minutes into Mars Attacks!, slouched shoulder to shoulder on his couch when the microwave timer dinged. Mulder had extracted himself from the warm press of Scully’s side to fetch their dinner like the dutiful host he was, not even stopping to pause the film. He quickly strained the frankfurters and dumped them into a scuffed plastic bowl.
Scully made an amused humming noise when he placed them on the coffee table in front of her with a flourish of his wrist.
“Hors d'oeuvres, madam?” he said as he handed her a sandwich plate.
She grinned up at him.
“Oh Mulder, you really know how to make a girl feel special,” she said in a drawl. “Is there a main course too?”
“Uhh, no,” Mulder admitted.
Scully’s eyes slid towards the ceiling.
“We could benefit from a vegetable. Maybe even something green,” she suggested.
But she reached out for a frankfurter and placed it on her plate.
“Mold is green,” Mulder told her with a shrug, “and I think I’ve got some of that on a loaf of bread in the pantry somewhere.”
Scully shook her head.
“You know Mulder, if our cigarette smoking man really wanted you dead he could probably just leave you to your own devices and wait for you to starve,” she said.
“Ooh,” said Mulder as he stepped back into the kitchen and stuck his head into his fridge, “watch out Scully. You keep giving me lip like that and I might not fetch you our one serving of vegetables.”
Abandoning any pretence of watching the film, Scully poked her head up over the back of the couch.
“Mulder, you better not be getting out the ketchup and calling it a health food,” she yelled out to him.
Mulder grinned down at the bottle of ketchup he had just pulled out of his fridge. He took it back to the living room and flopped down on the couch at Scully’s side.
“You know me too well,” he told her, dropping the ketchup into her lap.
Scully stared down at the ketchup bottle with more confused revulsion than she had shown the disgusting yellow sentient slime mold they had encountered the previous month.
Mulder gawked at her, his heart dropping into his stomach. Scully had never seemed to genuinely mind his more eccentric dining choices, but perhaps this was the evening he had taken it too far.
He watched with apprehension as a deep divot formed between her eyebrows.
“Mulder,” she said slowly, “what’s wrong with your ketchup?”
Mulder snatched the bottle out of her lap and glared down at it. He turned it over in his fingertips looking for a fatal flaw, shook it, and sniffed it. It was clean, dry, and cool, and smelt of tomato and preservatives. The container had a slightly narrower snout than he was used to, but otherwise it seemed to be an utterly ordinary ketchup bottle.
“It, uhh, it seems fine to me Scully,” he said, holding it out like an offering.
One of Scully’s eyebrows climbed up her forehead.
“Mul-der,” she said warningly.
She didn’t take the bottle from him.
He felt slightly pathetic, hovering over a half empty ketchup bottle chewing on his lip, but he didn’t lower his arms.
“What?” he demanded, “What’s wrong with it?”
Scully blinked at him and tilted her head.
“Mulder, it’s green,” she told him, drawing out every syllable.
Mulder gaped at her, and then at the ketchup.
“Why would it be green?” he demanded, slightly panicked.
Scully put her hand up to her mouth.
“Oh my god, Mulder, I forgot that you’re red-green colourblind.”
Her eyes started to twinkle.
Mulder held the bottle right up to his face and squinted at the label. In a small novelty font under the branding it said: ‘ Fun green colour - great for kids! ’
His panic was receding as he could hear Scully beside him trying to muffle her giggles with her fist.
He threw the bottle haphazardly towards his coffee table, feeling betrayed by his ketchup and the universe at large. It bounced off and rolled under the couch.
Mulder watched out of the corner of his eye as Scully curled into the corner of the couch, still giggling. Her eyes were folding up under the force of her smile. She tucked her toes beneath his thigh and wriggled them reassuringly.
He groaned theatrically and slumped against the cushions.
“I’ve got to start wearing my glasses to the shops,” he told Scully, pinching the bridge of his nose with his fingers.
She prodded his leg with her foot until he looked up at her.
“It’s not exactly what I had in mind when I asked for a green vegetable, but I guess it’ll have to do for tonight,” she said.
When he met her eyes they were bright and warm.
Scully bent down and fished the ketchup bottle out from somewhere on the floor without removing her toes from beneath Mulder’s thigh. She squirted some on the corner of the plate, wincing slightly at the sight of it.
“That’s my Scully,” he told her indulgently, grabbing a handful of frankfurters and shoving them into his mouth, “too stalwart to be frightened away by my hideous choice of ketchup.”
His words were slightly muffled around his mouthful.
Scully smiled down at her plate.
“Mulder, since I haven’t run screaming at your frankly alarming table manners yet, I doubt there’s anything you could do to get rid of me,” she said softly.
Mulder was vaguely aware of a shrink ray being deployed on his television, but the room narrowed down to the press of Scully’s feet against his leg and the steady tingle of warmth that bloomed out from his heart. There was a promise in her voice.
He let his eyes fall shut to better preserve the moment in his mind, and swore to himself that he would pick up a real tomato for her next time he went to the shops.