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Mulder carefully places his belongings back on his desk. His picture of Samantha. His alien mug that he should really rinse out. The rest will have to come later. He has to ask Scully, too, what she wants on the desk and in their office.
Their office. It’s theirs again; they’re back where they belong.
He’s wanted to talk to Jeffrey Spender and thank him, but the man seems to have vanished. Not just from the building, but everywhere. Maybe he needs some time to gather his thoughts, lick his wounds. That’s something Mulder can understand.
A soft knock sounds at the half-open door, and Mulder swivels in his chair, hoping Scully has come to pay him a visit. He has to overplay his disappointment when he sees Diana instead.
“Happy to be back?” she asks him with a smile he can’t decipher. Once upon a time, he thought he knew her. What Scully said to him at the Gunmen’s, even if he didn’t find anything incriminating at Diana’s apartment, has put up his shields. Because it’s Scully. If he trusts anyone implicitly, it’s her. She hasn’t – and wouldn’t – betray him. Something he can’t say indefinitely of Diana.
“Yeah.” There’s nothing more to say between them. Diana, however, seems to see things in a different light. She walks towards him in a way he recognizes. Seven or eight years ago, he would have met her halfway. Now, something inside him recoils.
“You know,” she says, sitting on the corner of his desk, “it doesn’t have to be this way.”
“What way?”
“Us not working together. Who says Agent Scully has to work on the X-Files? She was happy, wasn’t she?”
“Agent Scully is my partner,” he says through gritted teeth.
“So? I was your partner before she showed up. I know you’re something like friends, but-”
“Not something like friends, Diana. Scully and I are friends. We’re partners, we’re-” He cuts himself off. He’s not going to have a conversation about this with Diana when he hasn’t even had it with Scully. They need to have it. For once, they need to talk to each other and not hide.
“You’re what? You’re not lovers,” Diana states matter-of-factly.
“It’s rather complicated,” he says.
“It was never complicated between us.” Her words make him laugh. Ironically, it’s the truth. It was never complicated. At first, things were easy. Then, they ended. Just like that. Now he knows why it was never complicated; the emotions were just never there. It was easy and comfortable. That’s all it ever was.
“Diana, I’m not going to do this.” The kiss she initiated just before they left for El Rico Air Base crosses his mind. How wrong it had felt to him, how cold. “I don’t want to do this. We’re friends, aren’t we?” He’s asking her as much as he’s asking himself.
“Friends.” She spits the word out. “I want to be more than friends, Fox. We can be so much more.” When Diana takes his tie between his fingers, he puts his hand over hers. Now he sees it. What Scully has been trying to say to him, why she hasn’t trusted Diana since the second she met her. It’s as clear as day all of a sudden. Mulder never needed to find any evidence in Diana’s apartment. It’s all here in her actions, in her own refusal to listen to him.
And somewhere inside his chest, there’s a crack.
Once, Diana was on his side. Or so he thought. Once, Diana was his friend. But was she ever? When he looks at her now, when he tries to find the same woman who helped him discover the X-Files all those years ago, he can’t see her anymore. Diana Fowley is someone he no longer knows.
“I love her, Diana.” The words fall easily from his mouth. Diana is not the person he wants to say them to, and she’s not the one who deserves to hear them. Her mask falls; for a moment, her lips curl downwards and her eyebrows knit together. Her fingers fall away, and she licks her lips - and her wounded pride - before she straightens her skirt and gets up.
“Well,” she says when she reaches the door, throwing him a look over her shoulder, “I wish you two luck. You will need it.”