Wanted more of a fluffy chapter, then saw a few 'imagine your otp arguing about X' things on Tumblr and turned that into this chapter. The characterization I have in this chapter goes back to things we learned in If I Can Leave Off Burying The White.


"That doesn't look like work."

Vega jumped, turning from her laptop to look at her husband, who was leaning against the doorframe to their study, smiling. "I'll get to it," she said. "My homepage had a link to this great JFK assassination documentary."

"Are you pro-conspiracy?" Wylie folded his arms. "Or pro solo mission?"

"Well, I definitely think Oswald had people working with him," Vega said. "Whether or not there was a second shooter is a whole other story. Like, John Wilkes Booth was the only person that actually shot at Lincoln, but there were at least four others involved in the plot, Atzerodt, Herold, Powell, and John Surratt. The mom might have been in on it too; she did hang for it."

"The JFK thing, it is certainly one of those questions that will last the test of time," Wylie said. "Like in fiction, the whole Ross and Rachel thing. When he thought they were on a break."

"What do you mean 'when he thought'?"

"Well, I mean, he slept with that woman and tried to justify it...wait," Wylie trailed off. "You think they were on a break?"

"Of course they were on a break!" Vega said. "What the hell else does 'a break from us' mean? If you're supposed to stay faithful to each other, you're still together. And you can't just be like, 'we are broken up for all intents and purposes other than sex, you can't do that with anyone else.' That's not how it works. I get why she was upset, but like, that crap the next season about how her and her mom apparently talked extensively about how Ross was a cheater?"

"Okay, maybe Ross didn't cheat on her," Wylie said. "But it's kinda crummy of someone to sleep with someone else just hours after you break up."

"He was devastated. He wasn't looking to date her. It was just rebound. That's a thing that happens."

"I can't imagine just sleeping with someone I don't have feelings for."

As soon as the words were out of his mouth, he wondered if they were a bad decision. He knew Vega had had her share of casual hookups prior to going to West Point, and he knew it was her and a guy nearly getting caught fooling around in a classroom that had made her turn away from any sort of intimate relationship to focus on school and work, mostly to not disappoint her father. What Wylie had never done had been her lifestyle, and she'd taken a lot of unfair criticism about it from her peers, from what he understood.

But she just shrugged. "It's still not cheating. And I can't imagine swinging from a rope over a river like Tarzan but that doesn't mean others don't do it."

Wylie felt a smirk starting to overpower him, and she raised an eyebrow. "Are you amused by my example or are you picturing me doing that?"

"The latter," he said, eyeing her playfully. "It's kinda hot."

She rolled her eyes, smacking his chest playfully. "Remember when we debated for a half an hour on whether or not the cub we saw at the end of The Lion King was Kiara or not?"

"Clearly a different cub!" Wylie said. "Just look at the fact that..."

"Hmmm, my stomach's growling," Vega said, standing on her tiptoes and kissing his cheek. "The baby must be hungry, I'm going down the street."

"The baby doesn't want those greasy burgers." Wylie said.

"At least I'm craving cheap food."

"I'll come," Wylie said. "I don't trust you driving when you're hungry. You get aggressive."

"I am not aggressive."

"You crashed two government cars in your first three months at the FBI."

"To solve a case!"

"And the day after Mimi was born you knocked off two mailboxes because you were too impatient to wait for the cat to get out of the center of the road."

"Would you have rather I hit the cat?"

Her grin made him grin. "Just...please let me drive."

She rolled her eyes, still smiling. "Whatever."

Wylie grabbed the keys and followed her out, deciding that, for the moment, he was going to focus on how happy she was, and let that make him happy too, instead of wondering why.