Character: Dana Scully
Fandom: The X-Files
Rating: PG-13
Prompt: Frohike: So Mulder, where's your little partner?
Mulder: She couldn't come. She was afraid of her love for you. (Fox Mulder-X-files) 42 on scifi_muses on LiveJournal
Setting: X-files: Fight The Future

AN: We all know the Diana argument. I'm falling down on one side of it for my stories, but really I don't know if my mind is made up on it. But it's an interesting plot point.

Just as the stickiness of summer was fading at home, in Phoenix, Arizona it seemed to be only getting worse. Scully eyed the baleful, white sun overhead and flicked the rental cars air conditioner vent more fully towards her. This year seemed to be filled with the wonders of the American Southwest, a place she had frequented only once or twice before with Mulder. So far their travels had turned up alien burial grounds, bee colonies on the Mexican border, and now a mysterious death that sounded suspiciously like the claims Mulder was making about the facility in Antarctica. How he found out about the case and why it ended up in his possession, he had yet to admit to.

"Why did I let myself get talked into this again?" The heat made her snappish, and she vaguely longed for the cold, dreariness of New Zealand again.

"Because I would have come by myself, and you have this misguided notion that if I am allowed to do anything by myself, horrible things will happen." Mulder cracked open a sunflower seed with his teeth, eyes glued to the rush hour traffic that surrounded them on their way from the airport.

"Misguided notion, Mulder, it's a proven fact. Should I bring up now or later how many military brigs and hospital emergency rooms I've drug you out of when you decide to do anything yourself?"

"Thus when you ask, 'why did I let myself get talked into this?', you now have your answer." He had been in an equally foul mood all day. Scully attributed it to the news from Skinner that morning. Mulder had been so certain things would go back to what they once had been, that he could make everyone listen to reason, especially with Scully's science to back him up. But it had failed him when he needed it most, and now his work lay in the hands of others.

Specifically Diana Fowley.

"Do you want to talk about it?" She quietly watched at the car ahead of them it's blazing, dusty Arizona license plate faded by the harsh, desert light.

"Talk about what?" Mulder was a horrible liar, particularly with her. She sighed, patiently plucking at her slacks.

"About Diana Fowley taking over the X-files?" She felt him wince ever so slightly beside her. Otherwise his expression remained carefully neutral as he picked at the bag of sunflower seeds in the console between them, popping another in his mouth.

"It's not like she wouldn't be good at it," Mulder shrugged, pretending at casualness Scully knew he didn't feel.

"Really?" Scully didn't buy his acceptance for a second. "Because frankly I would think it would feel like a knife right between the ribs…if it were me."

The seed shell crunched under his jaw so hard, Scully imagined he had nothing but bits of pulp left.

"Diana had the one thing I didn't, an unimpeachable record and people who believe her. Why in the hell shouldn't they want her to have them?"

"Funny, she didn't seem eager to ask you on board to work with her?" Scully remembered all to well the speculative glances, the knowing looks. "I thought that she would, given your history."

Her words earned a dry chuckle from Mulder and a shake of his dark head. "Our history…that is precisely why Diana wouldn't ask me on board. Our history would make it far too…complicated."

Their history, the sticking point for Scully. Diana Fowley and Mulder did have a past, thought Scully only knew about it in vague details. Something about a previous relationship, she suspected it was once intense and that it ended badly in some fashion. Her gut churned as she thought of the way she had caught the pair, holding hands, Mulder with the sort of tender, unguarded look on his face that said she had once meant something more than just "old friend" to him.

Taking a deep breath, Scully decided to venture into the waters she had been too cowardly to swim in till now. "So what is that history?"

Mulder paused, silent for long moments. When he spoke again, he was unusually evasive. "It was a long time ago."

"And yet, it still seems to be relevant somehow." Scully pressed, not to be shaken off by his vague attempts to get out of explaining. "Frohike had mentioned that you two had been involved before."

"Frohike would put it that way." Mulder snorted, amused inexplicably by the explanation she gave. "He tries too hard to protect you."

"Protect me from what?" Now Scully had to know. What in the world was so secret that Frohike couldn't give her the straight story?

"Diana is my ex-wife."

His words fell with a thud somewhere in the bottom of Scully's stomach.

Did he just say…wife?

Wildly her thoughts spun through Mulder's personnel records, the ones she had reviewed the moment she was assigned to work with him. One father, one mother, no wife, no children, single…alone. That had been the Mulder she had known for five years, a man driven to a life without attachments by the work he was so passionate about. Scully tried to fit the word "wife" with Diana Fowley's face attached to it into the puzzle that was the man she worked with, and it didn't mesh.

"What?" It was all she could manage in the sudden silence of the car.

"When I say, 'wife', it was for five minutes, but in the legal sense, yeah." Mulder shifted uneasily in his seat. "I hadn't thought about it or her, frankly, until she showed back up last spring, as if she hadn't been out of my life for eight years."

Out of his life. She had been his wife, how could she just slip so completely out of mind for the man with eidetic memory that he neglected to even mention her? "I'm…I wouldn't have guessed," she managed weakly.

"I didn't like talking about it," he returned, somewhat contrite as traffic plugged slowly ahead. "Diana was more an embarrassment for a long time, a moment of romantic folly that I can't say I was particularly prone to before then, and can honestly say I don't see myself pursuing in the future."

What was that supposed to mean? "I just…I guess I didn't ever see you as being married."

"I didn't see you as being the type to hook up with an older, married man either, but I suppose we both have made mistakes."

He was snapping out because he was uncomfortable, unfairly so. "That was unnecessary, Mulder, bringing up Daniel. I didn't mean my statement as an insult, only…you had always said you weren't the marrying type."

"After Diana, I was convinced I wasn't." He sighed deeply, from a place well within himself he obviously didn't frequently explore. "We met on the first case I ever worked on for the FBI, the Monty Props one."

"Monty Props…that was your first profile, it was what made you a superstar with the Bureau." She had read his treatment in the Academy, everyone had. She had considered Mulder a genius even then, though already the rumors had begun to circulate about him and his interests. Had Diana really started that long ago?

"She was the profiler on the case, but was getting nowhere. They asked me on as a consultant. I came in, destroyed her profile, came up with the monograph you know about, and they caught the bastard." He chuckled darkly. "She was pretty pissed off at me."

"I bet," Scully murmured, thinking of just how brilliant and annoying the young, cocky Fox Mulder likely was. He was bad enough now, and that was with ten years of age and wisdom behind him.

"Diana had experience profiling and a good track record with VCU. She's a brilliant psychologist, don't get me wrong, she was always interested in the limits the human mind could be pushed. But behavioral science, sometimes she wasn't as good at. Profiling takes a certain ability to feel what others feel, to think as others do. It takes a certain…empathy Diana has always struggled with."

Lack of empathy that was a polite way of putting it, "So you two didn't hit it off at first."

"Not especially," the memory pulled a ghost of a smile on Mulder's mouth. "I thought she was attractive enough, older than me, but the type I usually like."

Scully's mood curdled as she remembered a long ago conversation with Tom Colton just what Mulder's type was. Tall, leggy, brunettes with wits, charm, and brains to spare just like Phoebe Green…and Diana Fowley. Attractive enough, but devastatingly intelligent, and just as keen minded as he was. They were the type of women who not only aroused her partner in the most obvious of ways, but stimulated his intellect as well.

They were usually not the type of women who told Fox Mulder he was wrong, or made him look like an idiot in front of an OPR panel.

"But Diana was in the FBI for a career. I sort of fell into it, my skills fast tracked me to VCU right out of the Academy; by that time she had moved to anti-terrorism. She seemed to be committed to her work, and I was the FBI's rising star, hitting home runs with one serial killer after the other."

Scully knew all about Mulder's history as a profiler, his meteoric rise followed by the swift burn out that had led him down the path of the X-files. There were many who regretted that his talents were wasted chasing down aliens rather than serial killers. But it didn't explain how Diana Fowley and he ended up together, and as much as it pained her to admit it, she was curious. "How did you two reconnect?"

"She found me. I suppose despite old grudges, she was impressed with my work, everyone was at the time, and she would come over to ask my opinions on profiles she worked up for the cases that came across her desk. At first it was strictly professional, a shared talent and perspective on investigation. We found we had some similar side interests in some of the possibilities of the human mind and the things it could do. Diana was working in parapsychology at the time, partially as an outgrowth of her work in counter-terrorism, but also because of her own personal interest. She asked me to assist her in some of her studies. Given my out of the box thinking, she felt I would be someone would empathize with the work."

Someone who believed in Mulder's theories and didn't argue with them, wasn't that what Diana had implied? She ad Mulder had more than history together, they had a similar passion for the work, and a shared belief in what was possible, unhampered by science and reason…the very science that had caused Scully to fail Mulder before the OPR board. Scully, the partner who always questioned his every move, his every footstep, he said it kept him honest. But did he always appreciate it?

"It sounds as if you two grew very close quickly." Scully found herself just barely able to not choke on the words, swallowing hard after she said them.

"It was easy," Mulder replied simply. "I'm a paranoid man, Scully, and I won't deny there have been moments over the years where I wondered about how Diana Fowley ended up in my life, and why, and if it wasn't on purpose. It seemed so damned…perfect. Even Jerry, my partner at the time, found it disturbing. He warned me away from her. I assumed he was jealous because Diana had turned him down cold when he'd asked her out. But I never gave Jerry enough credit for being perceptive in his own right. I think he sensed it too, something was just too…right."

"As if you were be set up for a fall?"

"As if I was being set up, period. The truth was, Scully, she was ideal. And I fell hard. She was all the great things about Phoebe Green, with none of the insanity, it was instant simpatico. I think I fell in love with her as much because she was so easy to be with as anything else, it wasn't a fight, it was just the perfect match of interest, personality…everything."

Even in speaking of it now, years later, there was a tinge of bittersweet regret that tugged at Scully painfully. Obviously there was still something there within Mulder that longed for that easiness once again, for that simple connection of someone who accepted him without reservation, without question, someone who didn't hold him back.

"Diana was the first person I ever spoke to about Samantha. I hadn't spoken of her in years. I had put inquiries out every once in a while after joining the FBI, but the pain was sealed over for the most part, ignored as I chased after one bad guy lurking in the darkness after the other. It was burning me out long before I admitted it, and Diana suggested that my obsession could have something to do with me trying to atone for my sister's disappearance years before. That my efforts to find these men, to bring them to justice, were a way for me to find the people who had taken Samantha and find the peace I never did as a child. She sent me to Dr. Werber; hoping that perhaps by reliving that night in my childhood I would be able to come to grips with it, perhaps begin to deal with it in healthy ways. Neither of us had any idea what that visit would reveal, or what it would open up."

"Diana was the one who sent you to Dr. Werber? Not to an FBI therapist?" Strange, Scully mused. That would have been Scully's first suggestion, and yet Diana went to a hypnotherapist who specialized in alien abductions. Why him specifically?

"She was also the one who found my sister's FBI file." Mulder's fingers tightened briefly around the steering wheel. "Since my father worked at State and it was a child abduction the FBI was automatically called in. When nothing could be found, they dumped it in the X-files. Arthur Dales was gone by then, and so the case got shuffled into the basement. Diana had to slog through a pile of red tape to even find it. That's how we happened upon all the rest, the cases that no one wanted, people who experienced alien abduction, psychic murders, sightings of strange creatures. Pile and piles of cases from decades of work, all of them unexplained with some feature of them that was strange, different. They were all jammed in old filing cabinets and storage boxes; no one had paid attention to them for years. It was a treasure trove of stories just like mine, some of them even stranger. I thought Diana and I had hit the mother load, a whole group of cold cases all relating to the type of work she and I had been dabbling in for years."

"So she was the one who helped you start the X-files?" Scully didn't want to mention to Mulder she already knew that, that Frohike had told her as much the night she had confronted Mulder's three, closest friends on the truth behind Diana Fowley and who she was.

"More or less. Diana thought it would be a nice side project for me, a way for me to work out my demons in a healthier fashion than burning myself out on more serial killers. I think assumed, like everyone else did, it would be a momentary diversion for me, something I could do till I felt up to taking on real work again, a side interest, nothing more."

"I take it she wasn't thrilled with the idea of you taking on the X-files full time then?" And suddenly the cracks that had driven Mulder and Diana Fowley apart started to appear in the story. Scully had wondered why she had been able to walk away so easily, to pick up and go to Germany, leaving a broken-hearted Mulder behind. Perhaps this had something to do with it?

"To be honest the bloom was long off the rose by then, though neither of us wanted to admit it. We were both becoming more and more engrossed in our work, I had the X-files, Diana was looking for better opportunities to climb up the FBI ladder. We'd been together for years by then, and it was comfortable, familiar. But she did worry about my new obsession. She felt it was holding me back; that I was throwing away my career on what she had thought would be a diversion, nothing more. Truth was I had never given a shit about my career, not in the same way she had. But I think Diana had always envisioned that the two of us together could gain enough prestige and clout that we could perhaps do some real work in our interests, perhaps get the FBI to take us a bit more seriously."

Scully watched as he sucked his bottom lip between his teeth, working it softly, one of his signs of agitation. Obviously the memories were still painful to him, even years later. "We had been fighting, not seriously, but certainly disagreeing on how we saw the future. I think I proposed to her mostly to show her I was serious about her, that she meant more to me than the FBI or the X-files. I thought that maybe getting married would make it all better somehow."

It was a story not unfamiliar to Scully, one she had heard from friends and colleagues many times over the years. "I'm surprised she agreed to it."

"I think in her own way she thought the same thing. It was spontaneous, really, I asked her on a Friday, and we got married on Saturday. We found some Justice of the Peace in Virginia who was willing to perform the ceremony on his back deck. Neither of our families were there, we just did it. We were back in the office Monday morning as if nothing different had happened."

Married….Scully still couldn't wrap her head around the idea. Mulder married…to Diana Fowley. "How did it end then?"

This was the part that obviously hurt the most for him. He was pensive for long moments before saying anything, gaze squinting against the harsh, desert sun. "It sort of ended the same way it began. She came home one night eight weeks later and announced she had a chance at a promotion. The Wall was just coming down, the FBI was beefing up the West Berlin branch, and it was a great opportunity. I think she expected me to be excited about it, to want to join her there. I had just put in the paperwork to request that the X-files be opened up as a special division under me, and was ready to fight Blevins tooth and nail for it. I wasn't exactly thrilled with the idea of picking up and going to Germany. We argued…she left. I figured we would work it out somehow, that's what couples do. Imagine my surprise when at the end of the week her things were packed and she left me a note, stating she was going to Berlin to check things out."

Not even a conversation or a note goodbye? Scully blinked dumbly for several long moments, stunned at the cold exactness of it. This was a woman who had been in a relationship with Mulder for years, who simply left without even a word of farewell or an attempt at being reasonable about it. Had her career meant so much to her?

"Diana's lawyers were actually rather gracious, given the fact we were married so briefly, they told the courts in Virginia that she had committed fraud in not telling me her plans to take a job overseas before we had married, and thus had the marriage annulled. She thought it would be kinder that way, I guess, legally making it that it didn't even exist. Maybe she thought I would get over it faster that way, move on, I don't know."

Oh Mulder, Scully sighed, her heart aching for him even as it stung at the secret he had kept from her for so long. And truth be told, she didn't blame him. As painful as Daniel and his perfidy had been for her, Diana had been much more harsh for him. He had loved her enough to marry her, to want to make a life with her, and she had walked away from it without a second glance.

"She didn't deserve you, Mulder." She hadn't meant to say that, but she meant it, with all the ferocity in her being. How could Diana Fowley spend years with him only to turn her back when opportunity proved too enticing?

"In all fairness, Scully, I wasn't exactly the world's greatest husband either. Has to be a record, eight weeks to prove I sucked as a life partner. She wanted a great many things out of me I wasn't able to give. And perhaps Berlin was really just the excuse she needed to break it off because she hadn't found a way before then."

"It doesn't make it right," Scully insisted stubbornly, resentment building in her mind against the woman who had waltzed into their lives and now taken their work away from them. "I have to admit it's ironic that she complained about you and the X-files, and now she has come back from Berlin to take them over."

"Yeah, I thought that was interesting too," he admitted slowly. "It wasn't that she wasn't interested in them, only that she had bigger ambitions in life. But it does make you wonder, what has happened between then and now that makes her take a risk on something that could set her career back a step or two at this late stage of the game."

Why indeed, Scully wondered. Diana Fowley and her timely involvement in all of this was strangely serendipitous, a confluence of perfectly timed events that under normal circumstances Mulder's intuition would call suspicious. She noted he seemed to think nothing of it now. And yet, Scully's gut instinct, which she almost never listened to, was screaming at her loud and clear. Something was wrong here. But what it was, she had yet to put together. And she doubted that Mulder was objective enough to even begin thinking along those lines.

"So now you know the sad tale of Fox Mulder's broken heart," Mulder cut in, sounding almost ashamed of his story. "Look, I know I was an ass when you met me. I think I gave you a bad impression of women and me. Before Diana, I was no monk, but…when you came on to the X-files, I wasn't in the best of places."

"Really, I don't think I noticed." Her attempt at sarcasm at least earned a smile out of him.

"I think at the time I just wanted to prove that someone would still want me, even if I was rapidly turning into Spooky Mulder, alien hunter. And picking up a pretty secretary from Kansas who had just started working in the newly elected congressman's office seemed a hell of a lot less painful than falling in love with someone again."

That was a sentiment that Scully could understand well. She remembered those painful months and years after Daniel's betrayal. She had thrown herself into her pathology work, and later into the FBI. Tom Colton was the first person she allowed herself to date after Daniel, and looking back that had been mostly because it was a shallow relationship, something that her heart didn't need to commit to. It wasn't till Jack later that she felt ready to tackle affairs of the heart again. But then, she hadn't been married to Daniel, and he hadn't walked away from her.

They had both been stupid regarding affairs of the heart, she supposed. Who hadn't in this world?

"So," she broke the quiet between them finally. "Does Diana explain your disturbing propensity for porn? Because I have to admit, Mulder, that impresses even me."

He obviously hadn't expected her to bring that up. Despite the almost childish delight he took in trying to shock her with it, her casual mention of his collection caused him to flush nervously as traffic finally began to pick up the pace around them. "The porn thing has nothing to do with Diana."

"Really," she teased, biting back the grin that was fighting to loose itself. "Because I bet a psychological case could be made that says otherwise."

To her surprise, he snorted at her conjecture. "Except my horrified mother would argue with you as she was the one who found my girlie mags hidden in my mattress when I was fifteen. No, the porn thing existed well before Diana. I told you, it's not even really about the sex."

"Right," she smirked. That's what Bill and Charlie had said when she had given them crap about their magazines too.

"Do you know what it's like to have a brain that never stops?" Mulder was serious as he glanced sideways at her, half in amusement, half in irritation. "I have a memory that never forgets and a lifetime full of things I'd rather not have to live over and over again. Not to mention the other strange things my brain likes to do, like analyze every situation ad nauseum, or study the things people say and how they react so I can understand how they tick. I can't sleep because my brain never stops, it's why I'm an insomniac."

"And porn makes your brain shut up for a while?" Her eyebrows arched dubiously, though she recalled him mentioning this before. Still, it seemed a convenient excuse.

"If you were a man, Scully, you'd get what I mean when I say porn makes my brain shut down for a while. If I didn't have porn and sports, I wouldn't survive."

"You and about ninety percent of all males in the United States," she quipped. "In that, I guess, you are just a normal guy."

"A normal guy who chases after aliens."

"Yes, who chases after aliens." She frowned as they sped through the flow of cars filing out into the Phoenix suburbs. "Is that what you are hoping to find in this house, Mulder? An alien to prove your theory?"

All the humor fled the car as she said that, replaced now by a suddenly studious glower on her partner's face. "I'm hoping to find the truth, Scully. I'm hoping you'll start believing what happened to you, that you'll accept what I know is happening."

Scully said nothing as he sped off onto an exit into a dusty but well built, housing division. So this was what the trip was about? Proving him right, to force her to accept his theory, to show her that her science was wrong. The idea of that felt raw, so fresh on the heels of his story regarding Diana. Would she have believed him implicitly if he told her? Did she believe him now?

"The house is up here, on the left," Mulder murmured, pulling across the street from a pleasant looking house, quietly nestled between desert rocks and potted cacti. A car remained parked in the driveway, looking normal and incongruous next to the yellow police tape that still crossed the door.

Surprisingly no police car waited out front for them. "Have you told the locals we were coming?"

"Nope," Mulder responded glibly, turning off the car.

"No….Mulder!"

"Scully, do you want the answers to what happened to you in Antarctica, or are you content with hoping that Diana and the boy wonder can find out what is going on? Frankly, I'm not willing to take that chance." He opened his door, clambering out of the rental car. "You coming?"

"Yeah," she breathed, rushing to follow behind him, the parting shot regarding Diana Fowley burning uncomfortably.