Character: Dana Scully
Fandom: The X-files
Rating: PG
Word Count: (54
Prompt: Harvey Dent: Heh heh heh. Any psychotic ex-boyfriends I should be aware of? Wk 29
Setting: First Season Episode: "Fire"
AN: I don't own them.
It wasn't that she didn't find Fox Mulder attractive…heaven knows you'd have to be deaf, blind, and perhaps a slight bit brain damaged not to notice.
Scully, if you ever got her to admit such things, conceded that even she had been attracted to her partner when first she met him. His tall, dark, brooding looks aside, he was devastating intelligence and possessed a deadly wit, and with the sort of cocky charm that often hid the wounded soul he so rarely let anyone see. She had witnessed him turn many a woman into goo with just a crooked smile and a gentlemanly gesture. And it was most often displayed when he was trying to get away with something he knew was either vaguely illegal or had the high probability of ending with him locked up somewhere.
Mulder was the sort of man that her mother, sister, and best girl friends would all kick Scully for not falling all over. She could very easily point out to all of them that none of them knew him like Scully did, both in his good moments and his many bad moments. No one else had to take weekends to travel and bail Mulder out of yet another jail, to stand in front of yet another review board and answer for his unorthodox behavior, or put up with his propensity for ditching her whenever it was most convenient for him. After one had gotten done explaining to their bosses one more time that Mulder wasn't insane for his latest, half-baked theory, pulling some strange bit of science from somewhere to save some face for them both, the attraction lost a great deal of its luster. The boyish charm started to wear very thin, the cutting wit became grating, and in the end really Scully would rather just go home to a good book, some ice cream, and ignore any phone number with Mulder's ID on it.
She had decided long ago there was a line she would never, ever cross with him. She had of course crossed that line with others, and perhaps those previous experiences had taught her to know better in the future. She had set a very firm spot in her life that Mulder occupied…that of her work partner. Perhaps a friendly work partner, one she would give the key to her apartment and occasionally bring coffee, but a work partner none-the-less. She never allowed him to cross that line in her mind, shutting her imagination to every possibility that might exist as to why he kept his magazines in his lower desk drawer.
Mulder's love life…or lack thereof…was a non-entity in Scully's way of thinking. Mulder was just Mulder, obsessed, intense, driven. No matter how much she teased him, Mulder had no life other than the X-files.
Certainly he had no life that included someone like Phoebe Green in it. Especially not a Phoebe Green who felt so intimate and close that she could stand there in a public parking lot and kiss him in a way that said that they were much more than just old friends from Oxford. By the way she groped him as she pulled him close, Scully suspected that they had once been very, very, very good friends indeed.
"About Phoebe," Mulder muttered as he started the car, ignoring the tall brunette who waved with a smile reminiscent of the cat who had just caught the bird in its nest. "Our relationship is…complicated."
"Clearly," Scully didn't know if she should allow the laugh that was bubbling deep in her throat to escape or not. There was something hysterically funny about the dumbfounded look on Mulder's face, the nervous way he had scurried from Phoebe's embrace while trying to maintain some sense of dignity, brushing at his dark, suit coat as if she had somehow begrimed it with her well-manicured fingers. If she were to giggle at him in this delicate moment, she had a feeling she would bruise an ego that was already quivering in the face of Inspector Green and her Scotland Yard hello.
"An ex-girlfriend," Scully kept her tone casual and light, forcing the smile playing on her lips to stay firmly away.
Mulder grimaced so painfully it was hard to tell if her words struck home or not. Perhaps she was a woman who had played with younger Mulder's teenaged emotions. After all, he was a young man, a long way from home, in a foreign country. She could imagine a sensitive young Fox falling prey to the sophisticated charms of a woman like that.
"I'll tell you about it some other time." She thought she could hear his teeth grinding themselves together as his jaw tried to pop a tendon through his ear.
"It can't be that bad," she piped cheerfully. He glared by way of response, scowling blackly at the red sedan in front of them that seemed determined to move ten miles below the posted speed limit in the middle of lunchtime traffic.
"Whatever Phoebe is here for, I can guarantee it's nothing as simple as a small favor," he finally ground out, tapping long fingers along the steering wheel. "It wouldn't be nearly as amusing to her otherwise."
"What's to say she isn't here paying a visit to an old friend and getting you to help out a bit on the side," Scully offered in the interest of fairness. Not that she was particularly interested in being fair to this mysterious woman who had just frightened her to death, but she at least granted that she didn't know the her well enough to scorn her just yet.
"With Phoebe, nothing is ever that simple," he muttered with the certainty of a doomed man.
