My love for the X-Files has been reawakened (for yet another round!) so I am writing again. This is set in Series 6 onwards. In terms of their relationship, read it as you will. More most likely to follow.

Fox Mulder: A profile

He had always been a tactile creature, even from the beginning.

Mulder was by nature free with his affection, his emotions and his attention. It was his responsibility, he felt, to put everyone at ease- to create connection.

Further still, he learned early in his adolescence that by diminishing these psychological boundaries he would be free to explore the inner landscapes of the human condition, an introspective objective that once given the proper forum - his basement and its labyrinth of files - would splay out from the psychology of the individual to the untapped mysteries of the universal.

With the exception of most dear Melissa, Scully had never met somebody, even on that first case, so at ease with bridging physical distance.

There was a dark sensuality he exuded. Hazy and at times intoxicating, he emitted it unknowingly (although not always, she felt) and as naturally as a star shares light.

Sex was nothing foreign to him, of that Scully was certain. She [wrongly, tellingly] imagined numerous frissons in sun-lit Upstate cabins during his high school summers and multiple hot and hurried nights at Oxford; women drunk on Proust, red wine and the unadulterated focus of a man who breathed passion and unravelled people like yarn. She was confident his aptitude, care and imagination as a lover would be unrivalled.

In contrast, Scully would smile to think of the monastic life Mulder now lived, small soft-core perversions his only erotic outlet. His mission had relegated all other pursuits nothing short of redundant and although he had taken lovers, she had not known him, in the 6 years they had spent side by side, to pursue a significant other. At least not in the widely understood definition of that term. Perhaps they really were just scared of the possibilities. Of what could be lost. And gained.

He had always been attracted to strong, commanding and alluring women, but his affection was often misplaced. The sparring he was originally attracted to usually heralded oppressive, dishonest or domineering characteristics that made him withdraw or grow jaded. A gentle and caring heart pumped healthily in his chest, wounded, but hopeful for reciprocity from all he met. Scully found it perplexing that somebody as moral could understand the motivations of the most twisted of souls. That he could maintain such emotional distance from the dark, while simultaneously inviting it into him, like ash and smoke...

Mulder ran almost daily, often rising before the sun, to keep his heath peaked and his multi-lineal mind recalibrated. She respected how he trained and valued his body, but also understood his need to exercise his frustrations. This burning of excess energy ensured the tale tell signs of his high-functioning mind were only noticeable to those who knew where to look. The compulsive popping of seeds; the emphatic tailoring of pencils, the occasional bobbing of his thigh as he waited for the opportunity to see, understand, be understood and be seen.

When they began, Scully had on occasion felt as if she wasn't truly there. That when he crossed the boundaries into her personal space, leant towards her with a fierce sense of intensity and even possession, that she was a mere mirror to the whirring of his investigative mind. It seemed he was informing rather than consulting.

She could akin it to playing a sort of infuriating catch up, not due to intellectual inferiority, but because the rapidity and lack of order to his process was a dance she had to learn fast for them to prosper.

She'd catch his focus while she could, hold his high-flying ideas down, like tent pegs, rooting him in science and provide validity and qualification. Scully did everything she could to keep him, them, the X-Files, going. She wanted to arm him with the artillery that would win his private crusade, to prove his theories, even if she couldn't quite let herself agree.

If Mulder wanted to move forward, it had become Scully's responsibility to anchor them in legitimacy as they went. She felt defensive and protective. She wanted to afford Mulder's work- their work- with the kind of respectability denied to him for so long by their short-sighted, feather-capped peers. What others thought was important to neither of them, yet the honour and reputation of the other was held most sacred.

So often would he leave her behind, not just theoretically but literally as well. There, abandoned to explore the recesses of her own psychological palace, Scully would uncover her truth: the scientific key they needed to unlock whatever seemingly impenetrable door they faced.

There she would find him. Waiting. Unable to move forward without her knowledge - and her presence. It was only in the hallowed merging of their opposing skills could they as individuals, and their finely tuned partnership, succeed.

She thinks now she must have fallen for him first. Somewhere in the easy silences of days-long road trips and the hush of hurried corridor conversations. Between the warm touches of his hand against her own and the siren-call of his deep honeyed voice in her ear. Because his own faith, so different from her own, had lit a path she felt destined to follow.

The women of his past, so different from herself, paired with his rousing demeanour made Scully turn her eye from the possibility his affection was deeper than mere emotional availability or loyalty.

He made small flirtatious asides, but she rebuffed them wittily or often, with nothing at all.

He followed her across continents, but he was her partner.

He exposed his raw and unapologetic passion, but he bowed only at the alter of his work.

He loved her. But she did not see. Because Scully never could believe.