Disclaimer: No Infringement intended. I don't own the characters. I'm just borrowing them for a moment. I'm not making any money and I don't have any so don't sue me.

A/N: This is my take on the missing scenes from Arcadia. By my estimation, in the episode, Mulder and Scully spent at least ten days in the house. (Give or take a few) This episode falls in line with my other two stories: What's normal to me and Trust & the Fowl and contains my original characters: Nester and Driscoll introduced in the first.

I rated this story M … because later chapters will get kinda dicey.

Definitely not the Cleaver's

Monday

Mulder looked at his watch and made a mental note of the time, 5:59 pm, exactly one minute to the 6 o'clock move in deadline. He stood in the doorway next to Scully with his hand in the small of her back and watched his new neighbors' wave good bye. As the moving truck pulled away, Scully retreated into the interior of the house. Mulder shut the door and followed her in.

"Oh, yea, nothing weird going on around here," he commented as he locked the door and walked into the living room. "Ooo wait, you didn't let me carry you over the threshold." Mulder looked around the room searching for Scully. Man this place is a mess, he thought as he caught sight of her in the corner by the fireplace. She walked toward him with a mischievous grin on her face.

"You ready?" Scully slipped out of her coat and threw it over a box behind her.

Am I ready? Babe you're making my dick hard. "Yeah, lets get it on, honey," Mulder answered with a sly smile.

"All right then," Scully replied and handed him a set of latex gloves. She looked at him with arched eyebrows and smirked slightly.

Oh, that's how we're going to play it? Mulder thought as he looked at the gloves. This is going to be one long assignment.

An hour later, Mulder walked through the kitchen and turned the water on at the faucet. He looked into the cabinets absent-mindedly for a glass before remembering that they hadn't unpacked anything yet. Crap, he thought as he looked around at the boxes. He hesitated for a moment, shrugged his shoulders and leaned over to suck down the water as it ran from the faucet. When he was finished, he climbed up on the kitchen counter and leaned back against the cabinets. He was sweating and his pink Izod shirt was dirty from his search under the house in the crawl space. He picked up the case file and started paging through the reports again. The local police department had no forensic evidence from the house or the missing home owners, the Kline's. By the time the police were tipped off about the case, someone had very effectively 'cleaned' the place. They weren't kidding either, Mulder thought as he read through the missing person report again.

"Did you find anything?" Scully asked as she came down the stairs.

"No, Laura, not even cobwebs," Mulder replied as he looked up from the file.

"Rob and Laurie Petries?" Scully questioned him. "Mulder if we ever go under cover again I get to choose the names." She arched her eyebrows at him.

"Don't blame me, I didn't pick our names," Mulder said as he set the file to the side and closed his eyes.

"Who did?"

"Skinner I guess. It was part of the real estate deal to purchase the house." He opened one eye and looked at her. She was staring at him in disbelief. "The realtor that had the listing is exclusive to the home owner association, so the San Diego police had a third party investor purchase the house under a false name."

"And the investor picked Rob and Laura Petries?"

Mulder shrugged. "I didn't ask any questions. I'm just trying to figure out what we're doing on this case. This is our first catch since we've been reassigned to the X files. But it's not an X file."

"Sure it is. It's unsolved. What do you want, aliens, tractor beams?" Scully stared at him trying to read his thoughts.

Mulder was quiet as he looked down at his hands. He turned his head to her. "Wow! I get it, you just want to play house again like we did in Galena," he winked at her. "Woman, get over here and make me a samwich," he joked with her mocking Homer Simpson.

Scully rolled her eyes but didn't respond as the doorbell rang in the background. She pulled her latex gloves off and threw them at Mulder's head as she walked over to answer the door.

"Did I not make myself clear?" Mulder joked again. He felt his stomach growl and watched her walk away from him. "No, seriously Scully … I'm starving!" he called to her as she walked toward the door. "We don't have any food."

"Eat the welcome basket," she called as she neared the door.

Mulder could hear Scully laughing as she answered the door. He listened to her conversation with Mike and rolled under the cabinet on the breakfast bar to the hallway by the stair, where the welcome basket was resting on a chair. He tore the plastic wrap off and eyed the contents carefully. I'm not eating that, he thought as he eavesdropped on the conversation. Not without running a lab analysis on it first, it's probably poisoned.

As he stood there, he scanned around the living room and the ceiling when something on the ceiling fan caught his eye. "What the?" he mumbled to himself and walked across the room and stared up at the fan. "Is that?" He walked over to the "china" box on the breakfast bar, fished out an evidence bag and another latex glove and then walked back to the living room.

Mulder looked for something to stand on spotted the coffee table hidden under a box. He uncovered it and pulled it over directly under the fan and climbed up on it. As he was inspecting the fan blade, he heard the front door shut behind him and the dishes clink together as Scully walked down the hallway with the box in her arms.

"Mulder, why does everybody run…"

"The name is Rob," he interrupted her.

"What are you doing?" she asked as she set the box on the floor.

"We'll it looks like whoever cleaned this place missed a spot," Mulder commented as he scraped the blood off the fan blade and put it in an evidence bag. He stepped down from the coffee table and handed the bag to Scully. "Does this look like blood to you?"

Scully stared at the bag and held it up to the light. "Yeah, but how did it get up there?"

"Good question," Mulder replied as he took the bag out of her hand. "Maybe I'll have an answer for you after we get something to eat." He walked back into the kitchen and slid the evidence bag into the file folder.

"Mulder, is that all you can think about?" Scully asked as she followed him into the kitchen. "Look at all the unpacking we have to do."

"Yeah … exactly where did all this crap come from? It didn't look like that much at the furniture store," Mulder asked as he looked around the living room at the boxes again.

"It's four rooms of furniture Mulder, Living, dining and two bedrooms with all accessories. The place has to look like we are living here…which means we have to unpack it," Scully remarked and then bit her lip.

"I thought the movers were going to help out with that," Mulder muttered as he leaned against the counter. Whew, that's going to be a lot of work for just the two of us and on an empty stomach? he thought as looked over at her. She had a guilty look on her face.

"That was before the neighbors informed me it was a violation of the CC&R's if the truck was parked on the driveway after 6 pm," she remarked slowly. "So I, ummm … told them to leave."

"You told them to leave?" Mulder questioned her. Of course he knew that they had left, since he watched them drive down the street. He just hadn't put two and two together to understand that she had sent them away. "Did you consult me on that?"

Scully stammered trying to justify her actions. "Mulder, you watched the truck pull out of the driveway. You could have stopped them." She stared at him for a second and watched him wrinkle his forehead quizzically. She started laughing nervously. Oh, shit! He's pissed, she thought as his stomach protested loudly from his hunger. He's not kidding about being hungry either. "Okay, what about a truce? I'll go out for food, if you'll start putting things away."

Mulder arched his eyebrows at her. "That is not a truce, Dr. Scully," he mused. "That means I do all the dirty work while you sneak out the back door." He backed her into the breakfast bar as he spoke and he was surprised that she let him. When she couldn't move anymore, he rested his arms on the countertop, on either side of her body, so she was pinned within his embrace. "How about we go get dinner and snoop around the neighborhood together," he whispered into her ear.

His hot breath on her neck sent a shudder down her spine. It had been weeks since they were intimate in Galena and despite they had seen each other nearly every day, she missed the warmth and the love they shared. Scully never had doubted Mulder's love for her and she knew he would always have her back. It was the whole Diana fiasco that had messed everything up between them. Mulder was right when he said her attack on Diana was personal. Scully was jealous of Diana and threatened by the encroachment on her territory… specifically Mulder and Cassandra Spender. Since their fight in the loft that night, neither of them had broached "the fowl" topic again, they had just gone about their lives … sans the intimacy …. like nothing had ever happened. But now … now she would be forced to deal with her emotional side, the urges she felt for him as his close proximity to her sent tingles up her spine.

"Scully?"

She looked up into his eyes as his voice pulled her out of her thoughts. "Yeah, Mulder," she stammered. "Dinner and snooping sounds good." She put her hands on his chest and pushed him back firmly. "But you'll need to change first. You stink."

TBC