Fandom:The X-Files, Fringe
Characters: Anita Budahas (The X-Files), Dr. Anderson (Fringe)
Summary: A brush with the extraordinary leads to a new life. Or, What happens to minor characters when they intersect with X/Fringe events.
Notes: Gabrielle Rose played Anita Budahas in "Deep Throat" (1993) on The X-Files and Dr. Anderson in "Olivia" (2010, alt'verse) and "Nothing as it Seems" (2012) on Fringe.
When it began—her husband's skin rash, his personality alterations—Anita Budahas tried to stay strong. She understood what "top secret" meant, she'd accepted that secrecy as a factor in their marriage. She knew that Robert couldn't talk about what happened to him on the base, and she trusted that his military commanders would look out for his interests. She trusted them to keep him and her family safe.
Her faith failed when soldiers invaded her house and took Robert away. It broke entirely after four months of silence in response to her increasingly desperate pleas for answers, for any word that her husband was all right. That Bob was still alive.
Anita was at the end of her endurance by the time she filed a kidnapping report with the FBI. She'd be ostracized for that, she knew. Good military wives didn't talk. Good military wives didn't involve others in their problems. Good military wives never, ever called on outside agencies to meddle in base business.
But her husband was gone and she was alone with her fear. If the military wouldn't protect her family, she needed to find someone who would.
It wasn't until years later that she learned the FBI agents who'd come to help her had done so on their own initiative, following their own agendas. It didn't matter, then or afterward. Agents Mulder and Scully said they'd look into it and not 24 hours later, Bob came home.
He came back wrong.
Anita couldn't explain it. Not to herself, not to the agents she called back in a blind panic. The man sitting on the couch looked like Robert, talked like him, smelled like him. But it wasn't him. He couldn't remember details about his work, but that was the least of it. She felt the wrongness instinctually, experiencing a deep sense of revulsion when he tried to touch her.
She knew she was right when the jeep pulled up at the curb just after the agents left. That creep Mossinger from Airbase Security told her she needed to go along. To behave as if nothing had changed. National Security, he said. For the safety of her and her family, he added, and she didn't need a codebook to know what that meant.
She agreed for the sake of the kids more than anything. Josh and Leslie loved their father, they'd never understand if she tried to take them away. So she held on until they graduated high school, and in the meantime, she went back to school herself. Anita had always been interested in psychology; she'd gotten her B.A. and enjoyed a brief career in social work before retiring to become a full-time wife and mother. Now she had a renewed personal interest in trying to understand what happened to Bob.
It took too many years for her to understand that his experiences lay far beyond the realm of psychology. By then she'd earned her Master's degree and Psy.D. In the long meantime, she and Robert reached a cordial if distant equilibrium. They lived in the same house, but Anita had privately considered herself widowed since his return.
Once the kids went off to college, she asked for and received a no fuss, no argument divorce. Robert didn't seem to care. She remembered loving him, once, and she was sure he'd loved her. But that man was long gone. What remained was a walking, talking shell of a human being.
Anita went back to her maiden name for her practice, specializing in working with law enforcement through various employee assistance programs. Two federal agents had been the only ones to believe her when she said something was wrong with her husband; it wasn't their fault things turned out the way they did.
Even while she was still accruing clinical hours toward her doctorate, she found, with regret, almost too-lucrative employment in the wake of September 2001. When the FBI began a dedicated hiring drive in 2009 to expand its professional resources, Dr. Anderson applied for a position as an employee assistance counselor without hesitation.
Maybe someone found her particular history in a file somewhere, because after a short stint in Chicago she was contacted by an Agent Broyles, who was looking for a clinical psychologist to work in the Boston FBI office. In addition to the usual counseling work with the agents there, she would also be called upon to provide her services to a newly formed, extremely high-stress small task force. The task force's concerns were highly classified, and she already had all the necessary security clearances. Would she be interested?
She couldn't pack up her life quickly enough.
Anita learned, very quickly, that her brush with an unexplainable event was a more useful qualification for contact with Fringe Division than any official degree. She never really came to believe everything she heard in the course of sessions, but she didn't have to. She was there to provide a neutral ear for agents who couldn't talk with anyone else about their experiences, and to help them find a way to cope with the constant upheaval of their beliefs and understanding of the world.
She spoke most often with Agent Farnsworth, who mainly needed to express her sense of isolation and her frustration with the work and its secrets. Agent Broyles made the occasional appointment when an event rattled his seemingly unshakable demeanor. Dr. Anderson tried to arrange regular meetings with Agent Dunham, but the field agent always had a convenient excuse for missing any sessions that weren't compulsory.
She couldn't avoid them forever. In 2012, Agent Dunham began experiencing memory loss and dissociation resulting from—Anita had to check the brief twice—the intrusion of a previous timeline's memories. Dr. Anderson had the responsibility of evaluating Fringe's lead agent and assessing her fitness for duty.
In her years of practice, Anita had rarely met anyone more emotionally and temperamentally fit for her duty than Olivia Dunham. But if Dunham was forgetting the events and experiences that made her so effective in the field, she couldn't be allowed to remain on active duty.
As she prepared for the session, Dr. Anderson reflected on the chain of events that had brought her here. She didn't believe in fate, but there had to be a reason she'd ended up working with the spiritual successor to the X-Files.
Maybe this was why she was here: the prospect of assisting Agent Dunham in making sense of her life, even if Olivia didn't believe her situation warranted intervention. Nearly twenty years ago, Agents Mulder and Scully tried to find answers to Anita's impossible situation. Out of respect for their efforts, Anita could do no less.
That was why, despite her evaluation that forty percent of Agent Dunham's memories were missing or altered, Dr. Anderson eventually signed off on the order allowing Olivia to return to active duty. No one could remain unaffected by the things Fringe Division investigated. If Olivia chose to continue her critical work despite the personal cost—and there was no hard evidence that her ability to do so was affected in any way—Anita wasn't going to keep her from it.
Her life had been touched by two agents who challenged all conventional protocols and procedures in their drive to help those affected by unexplained phenomena. Those cases, those people, were still out there. As long as fringe events continued to appear, the world needed Olivia Dunham on the job.
Fringe 4x16, "Nothing as it Seems":
BROYLES: Doctor Anderson sent over her report. Forty percent of all the information you provided about your life is incorrect, which, as far as the Tenth Floor is concerned, means you are not the agent they licensed.
BROYLES: I've been on the phone with the Tenth Floor for the past hour. What we've decided is this... if you're sixty percent of the Olivia I knew, you're still better than ninety percent of the agents I've ever worked with. And a Fringe Division with an Olivia Dunham is better than a Fringe Division without her.