A/N: This fic was written because I shamelessly love the Fake Married trope no matter how many times it's done, and I really like The X-Files episode "Arcadia". This takes place vaguely in season 2 after 2x16. I hope you guys enjoy!

Is our love just a part time?/Sometimes I think that it's more, have I lost sight?/So unsafe

Is this temporary love I crave?/Will we ever get enough to take/From the memory, it was a phase/Is this temporary love?"

-Temporary Love, The Brinks

It was never a good sign when she woke up late and wasn't in time for work. The last time that had happened, she'd had a criminal suddenly tossed into her life that had made her existence much more complicated than she ever though it could be. So as she stood in the elevator, fingers picking at the cuffs of her shirt, she couldn't help but shake the feeling that when the doors whined open, she would be met with something that was about to upset the apple cart once again.

As the elevator shuddered to a stop she heard the muffled hum of voices already engaged in fervent discussion. She ran the edge of her finger over a groove in the fabric of her shirt. If she had been a more optimistic person, perhaps she would've tried to tell herself that the discussion could've been over any number of things that would have little affect on her life. But optimistic wasn't something that she particularly ever had had been, and she figured it was simply best to plunge forward and face whatever mess was waiting for her.

The doors slid open.

"Ah, look! There she is now. Please settle a little disagreement that I'm having with your illustrious team-would you be entirely opposed to the idea of going under cover and pretending to be my wife so that we can avert what would be a completely disastrous theft?" Red had his hands clasped together and was giving an infuriatingly calm little smile.

For a moment, she didn't react. By now, Liz was so acclimated to his ludicrous comments that she didn't even react to half of them, so when he suggested that she pretend to be married to him, half of her mind simply ignored it. The other half firmly screamed no no no. The two parts of her mind quickly came to an agreement over how she felt about his statement.

"Yeah, I would be opposed to that idea. Why is this even a discussion?" She wasn't about to grin and play-act her way through another false marriage. She'd already had one of those, and one was enough to last her an entire life-time.

Before Red could launch into an explanation that would no doubt exasperate her further, Cooper moved around him to stand near her. "It wouldn't be a discussion if we didn't feel it was necessary. There are rumors that a notorious, retired thief known as Snapper is going to steal an expensive piece of artwork. But they're only rumors right now, and we need more solid evidence to know if it's true or not."

Seemingly unable to let someone else take the reigns of the explanation, Red firmly grabbed the reigns away from Cooper. "Yes, you see, his thievery would have been rather harmless if not for his nasty little habits in the past of selling his merchandise to rather unsavory sorts of people-particularly powerful drug cartels and the like who further went on to sell the merchandise again,which greatly funded their actions. So while he hasn't directly gone out of his way to harm others, his thieving has had very negative, wide reaching consequences."

"I don't see how any of this relates to your suggestion of an undercover marriage." She crossed her arms, fingers tight against her elbows. She knew she'd interrupted him and it was perhaps childish to continue reiterating her distaste for the idea, but she didn't care.

"If you exercise a bit of patience, you'll find out. No good comes from rushing to the conclusion of a story." He narrowed his eyes. "You see, dear old Snapper-though he's blandly known by his given name Beecher Williams now-has decided to retire to the paradisaical hell known as suburbia. As Cooper said, there are rumors he's about to enter the thieving game once again, and considering the price of the art he supposedly wants to steal, it would be disastrous if the price tag went to fund the sorts of people he's had as clients in the past."

"So you think that if we move into a house in his neighborhood we can get the evidence we need to know whether the scheme is real or not?" The idea was ludicrous, but objectively, she supposed that it made sense. If Beecher had been quiet and careful for so long, he wouldn't be about to blow his cover. But suburbia was full of gossip, and if neighbors trusted each other, they let slip all sorts of things they might not tell anyone else.

"Exactly so." He raised his eyebrows and flicked her a small smile of pride over her correct connection to his logic. "There's a lovely little semi-furnished home for sale in their neighborhood already. Not quite my taste, but you'd probably like it."

She glanced away, hesitating at giving any sort of answer. This case wasn't any more dangerous than what she'd faced before. In fact, the potential peril was small, and if she had been able to survive multiple car wrecks and being strung up to be gutted by a serial killer, then she could certainly be able to make it in suburbia. Still, there was something much different about those situations compared to this. Those had been battles of emotion and strength, and she'd made it through at the end, though her psyche had not been fully unscathed. This scenario would be a battle of emotion, of existing in the same quarters as Red for an extended period of time. Boundaries would inevitably crossed.

She inhaled, raising her eyes back up to the man she might potentially be sharing a house with.

"What do you say, Agent Keen?" He took a step toward her. And then another and another until he was only several inches away from her. His breath stirred a strand of hair that had fallen against her cheek. "Will you marry me?"

She swallowed. If she said no, she was being selfish. If she went through with the sham, she would potentially avert millions of dollars falling into the wrong hands and ruining countless lives.

"Fine."

It was like watching an alternate reality come to life with the flick of a magical keystroke. Over the course of the day, Aram had been busily setting up a fake paper trail for the aliases she and Red had chosen. Part of the trick of undercover work was becoming someone that you weren't, but making your fake story have enough of the truth in it that sounded convincing, so she'd simply suggested that her alias be a psychotherapist. Her training and studies in criminal psychology would be enough that she could make a convincing psychotherapist.

Red's alias was a import and export businessman. She'd shot him a non-committal glare, but he'd simply shrugged and said it was closer to the truth than her alias' career.

Liz still wasn't exactly happy with the arrangement, but now for more complicated reasons than she'd felt initially. When the false marriage had simply been an idea that she had the opportunity to agree to or reject at will, her only issue had been with being forced into reliving memories of her time with Tom. That was still a factor, and it probably still would be during the entire undercover mission, but as she saw the paper trail unfold, she found herself wishing that at least part of the cover story was true.

Cathleen Moore, her alias, was a psychotherapist who had graduated from the University of Michigan with a master's degree and had met her husband Noah on a whirl-wind post-graduation trip to Paris. (Of course, the suggestion of Paris had been Red's idea.) She'd fell madly in love with him and married him quickly during the trip, and now they had been happily married for three years as she was working on building up her clientele.

It wasn't the being married to Red that she wanted. She didn't even like the University of Michigan. But the thought of being married to someone loving and devoted-the idea of being with someone with no pretenses or lies made something inside of her heart twist. Cathleen Moore was a happy woman with a life that wasn't without its problems, but whose existence was uncomplicated and normal. She worried about bills and forgetting to go grocery shopping, and she wished that she could find a job sooner. She also kissed her husband and stayed home with him on weekends and watched reruns of The West Wing, and on special days they'd go out to eat.

Cathleen Moore's trust wasn't irreparably fractured by a marriage of two years that had been a lie. She didn't float from motel to motel, looking over her shoulder to see whether some new criminal threat was following her.

The fake paper trail wasn't the end of it.

If she was going to pretend to be passionately in love, it would only make sense if Noah and Cathleen had pictures of them together to put up in their home. Liz had simply suggested that they could doctor images of her and Red together, but with a sympathetic grimace, Aram had informed that them taking real photos together would be better. It would take less time and wouldn't be found to be fake upon closer inspection.

So that was why she was now in a park that could passably improvise for a park in France with some named photographer Jade Daughtry that Red had predictably found. She's simply wonderful. She's taken some of the best blackmail photographs that I've needed. She really has an eye for color and composition, he'd said, and then delightedly informed Liz that her day job was as a wedding and engagement photographer.

"No, no, this isn't right at all." Jade let out a huff and pushed up her thick glasses, a hand on her hip. "Your arm is out of the frame. You can't cut limbs off at the joints in pictures like this. You need to move more to the right." She twirled a finger.

They hadn't even taken the first picture yet, and Liz had been ordered as if she was a completely incompetent actor that couldn't follow stage directions. She shifted her arms under the blouse that Red had presented her with for her to wear in the photos. Regrettably, she found it beautiful, but she would never have any use for it.

She scooted to the right as per Jade's instructions, keeping her eyes averted from Red, doing her best to smile as if it was the happiest day of her life. His hand slipped around her waist and leaned in closer to her.

"Perhaps look a bit less stiff. At the moment, your smile looks like you've just eaten the worst sea food in your life," he said, his voice vibrating in her rib cage.

She bit back a sharp comment. If she didn't argue as much as she normally would, this would be over all the more quickly. Her lips twitched as she tried to relax them, her shoulders slumping down with them.

It wasn't just the strangeness of the situation that made her feel stiff-it was the contact with Red. For all his penchant for verbosity, the second most common way he expressed how he felt was through physical contact. A hand against the back to steer her away, a tug at the elbow to try to get her to back down from a fight that she wasn't going to win, arms around her as she wept and collapsed beneath the weight of all that she had done.

She was no stranger to his touches, but this-it was different. Staged or not, there was a stark contrast between a comforting embrace and them sitting together beneath a tree with her arms wrapped around his neck as a photographer told her to lean her head against his.

As she wordlessly followed Jade's instructions, the photo session blurred together into dozens of camera flashes stabbing her eyes and the strange, spiced scent of Red and the warm touch of his hands against her. She never fully relaxed during the session, but she allowed herself to try to lapse into Cathleen's mindset. It was good practice, Liz told herself. If she tried to think like the imaginary woman she was supposed to be, the mission would be easier.

If she was Cathleen in that moment, she would've been grinning and elated to be capturing such precious, intimate images with the husband that she adored and had married in the spur of the moment while they were dizzy with love and the infected with the particular brand of madness that afflicted those that visited Paris. And so, by the end, as she stood behind him and wrapped her arms around his waist, stood on her toes and leaned her chin against his shoulder, the smile she had plastered on her face was almost real.

When she and Red walked over to Jade to look through the photographs, she felt stricken. Whatever stiffness and strangeness she'd felt during the session didn't radiate through the photos. If she had been an outside observer, she would've been convinced that the photos were simply of a loving couple that couldn't keep their hands off each other. In the images, Liz smiled and laughed and her eyes sparkled in a way that they hadn't in a long time. And the way Red looked at her-he watched her as if she was the only thing that mattered in the world.

She hadn't been paying much attention to his face in the moment since she'd been too focused on staying in character as Cathleen, but as she passed her eyes over his expressions in the photos, she could almost believe that what he felt was real.

"These will suffice," he said, glancing over to Liz to see if she agreed. His tone sounded strange and almost a bit hoarse.

"Yeah." She shrugged, feigning nonchalance.

"So...you want me to print all of them?" Jade raised an eyebrow, her dyed red hair falling over one shoulder.

He pursed his lips as if he was thinking and then said, "Yes. It will be easier to select the ones that we prefer that way."

"All right." She threw her hands up. "As long as I'm getting paid, we're golden."

"You will be. Thank you Jade, as always, you are an absolute sorceress with that camera," he said with a smile, his voice back to its typical smooth control.

She got her own copies of the pictures to go through the next day in order to choose the ones she preferred. She sat cross-legged in the middle of the floor, fanning the photos out in front of her like a deck of playing cards.

Fingers tapping against the floor, she pressed her lips together and picked up the last picture. It was the one that they had taken when she'd felt the most comfortable, when she'd wrapped her arms around his waist and grinned at him, for all the world looking like a besotted newly wed.

In it, his head ways tilted to look at her where she stood behind him, his face only inches away from her smiling mouth. His eyes were lowered as he drank her in, the sunlight dusting his eyelashes golden.

Something inside of her ached.