Work Text:
December 1993
Mulder is off visiting his mother for Hanukkah and it’s quiet in the office. Scully uses the downtime to familiarize herself with some of his older cases. She’s tempted to reorganize the files but she assumes they’re arranged by a logic only Mulder understands. She, however, cannot decode it. It’s not alphabetical, geographical, or thematic but she’s never seen him struggle to find anything so she leaves them be. The filing cabinets smell like old books, stale coffee, and him.
She’s still a little surprised she didn’t find out Mulder was Jewish until nearly a year into their partnership. Granted, he doesn’t wear a symbol of his faith around his neck like she does and he explained that he’s Jewish more in heritage than in practice. Besides, he told her, he was really leaving town to avoid having his paycheck docked for failing to take any vacation time in the past four years. The year-end deadline just happened to coincide with the holiday so he thought he’d make his mother happy and spend it with her.
Their partnership is odd like that. It’s so intimate at times while, in many ways, he still feels like a stranger. She trusts him with her life, but knows so few details about his past or who he is when they’re off the clock. When she told her sister about her new partner, Missy grilled her: Is he good looking? (Conventionally, sure, you could say that). Does he have a girlfriend? (If he does, she must have the patience of a saint). Would you hook up with him? (That one just got a conversation-ending eyebrow raise).
The office is sepulchral without their usual verbal volley of theories and retorts. Free of his frenetic energy, the space feels like it’s lost its electric charge. It’s like walking into a room knowing the party has already dispersed. His scent has fully permeated the air, warm and musky, as if it’s a skin he’s recently shed. Sitting in his chair, she feels like a child playing pretend. His warmth is long gone from the fabric but it still holds his shape.
It’s her office, too, but it doesn’t feel like it. She has no desk, no name plate, no personal items of her own to pair with his old awards, family photos, and news clippings. It’s as if this is his life and she’s just passing through. Part of her wants to make her mark, to leave something of herself in their basement lair, but she also fears doing so would forever bind her to this place. During her first case on the X-Files she felt like a visitor in a strange land, but each day finds her tip-toeing closer and closer into Mulder’s world—if not his life.
She’s reading a case file from 1991 about a boy in Tennessee who Mulder believed was possessed by the spirit of his great-great grandfather when she notices a second signature alongside Mulder’s in the case report: Diana Fowley. Next to Mulder’s staccato, detached scrawl, Fowley’s signature is all sensuous curves, looping letters smoothly linked together. Scully locates a few other files from the same year and sees the same name.
It doesn’t shock her that Mulder had a partner before her. It’s standard FBI protocol for all field agents to have one. But she is surprised that he never mentioned her before. Was Diana sent to debunk Mulder’s work like she was? Or was she a fellow believer? Did she make the basement her home as well?
Scully’s curiosity gets the better of her and she picks up the phone.
“Holly? Hi, it’s Dana Scully. Agent Mulder is out and I had a question about an old case of his so I was hoping I could speak to his previous partner. Her name is Diana Fowley. Do you think you could find her extension for me?”
“Sure, Dana, no problem,” Holly says on the other end of the line.
Scully hears Holly clacking at the keys on her computer over the phone. She immediately feels embarrassed. Would she be snooping around like this if Mulder’s old partner was a man?
“Hi Dana,” Holly says finally. “It looks like Agent Fowley is currently stationed in Berlin in the counterterrorism unit. Do you want me to connect you to her office?”
“No, that’s fine,” Scully demurs. “It’s after working hours on her time. I’ll probably figure this out on my own anyway. Thank you, though.”
“Anytime,” Holly says and hangs up the phone.
Counterterrorism? It doesn’t seem like a natural stepping stone after working on the X-Files. Scully tries to resume her work but that name keeps appearing and taunting her.
She’s flipping through a file for a case on a murderous Loch Ness-esque monster spotted in Lake Erie when she sees a photo paper-clipped to a crime scene report.
In the photo, Mulder is walking around the shores of a marshy lake with a tall, brunette woman a few paces ahead of him. Scully can’t deny the woman is pretty. She has strong features and wears a fitted skirt suit that clings to her feminine frame. Her dark hair is perfectly in place, the way Scully wishes hers looked out on assignment when it instead typically devolved into a halo of frizz. She looks like a woman—while Scully sometimes feels like a girl playing dress-up in the boxy pantsuits she bought, believing they’d make her look more professional. Instead of acting as sartorial armor, though, she fears her outfits just make her look small and sexless.
Then, she sees it. On Mulder’s left ring finger there’s a gold band, shining in the sunlight. And on Diana’s: a matching one.
It’s possible Diana had a husband at home, but Mulder? It doesn’t make any sense. Scully reviewed his personnel files when she was first assigned to work with him and he’s never been married.
After an hour of struggling to focus on work and pacing around the office she decides to take her research to some more unofficial channels.
****
“Agent Scully, what a pleasant surprise,” Frohike says as he welcomes her into the Lone Gunmen HQ, bolting the door shut behind her.
“To what do we owe the pleasure?” Byers chimes in.
“Yeah,” adds Langly. “Didn’t expect to see you while Mulder’s out of town.”
“Who is Diana Fowley?” she blurts out. She spent the drive over concocting a plausible backstory for her question but once she arrives, she’s too anxious for answers.
The three men look at each other silently for a moment and Scully’s heartbeat accelerates.
“She was Mulder’s chickadee when he just got out of the Academy,” Frohike says, looking down and avoiding eye contact with her. “Good-looking.”
“She was there when he discovered the X-Files. She has a background in para-science,” says Langly.
“But she got a legat appointment abroad and they split up,” says Byers.
“Were they married?” She asks.
“Not officially,” says Frohike. “But Diana was a little ... possessive of Mulder. She made him wear a ring.”
“It was actually kind of romantic,” Byers says.
“Oh come on, man,” Langly snipes. “He was totally whipped.”
“It was complicated,” Frohike says, splitting the difference.
Scully bites her bottom lip. “I need to go. I’d appreciate if you didn’t tell Mulder about this.”
“Your secret’s safe with us, Agent Scully. I’ll walk you to your car,” says Frohike, standing to meet her.
“That’s totally unnecessary,” she says.
“You can never be too careful,” he replies.
Scully wants to protest that she’s carrying a gun and is inarguably in better fighting shape than this short, balding man, but she just smiles and nods.
She’s about to unlock her car when Frohike says, “Listen Scully, no matter what you hear about Diana I want you to know you have nothing to worry about.”
“Excuse me?” She asks, taken aback.
“Even if you and Mulder don’t have that type of relationship, I can assure you we’re all much happier to see him with you than Diana. There was a lot of passion there, but also a lot of mind-fuckery. I don’t think she always had his best interests at heart.”
“Frohike, that’s alright, my curiosity was purely professional,” she says.
“Sure,” Frohike nods. “But trust me, I can tell from the way he talks about you that you two have a good thing going whether that’s just as partners or something…more. It’s a lot more significant than a fake gold ring, anyway.”
She looks at him quizzically.
“What? We obviously analyzed it. Had to make sure it wasn’t a device she was using to track our boy. Didn’t find anything nefarious, but didn’t find any real gold, either. Totally hollow inside, just like the woman who gave it to him.”
“Thank you, Frohike,” she says.
“Get home safe.”
In the rearview mirror, Scully sees Frohike waiting at the door to the Gunmen’s heavily protected fortress as one of the other two lets him in. Then she watches as his small form disappears inside and the door shuts behind him. She smiles to herself as she drives away.