I wrote this story in reply to DanaMldr's Fanfic Challenge.
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Title: Brainwashed
Author: rikkiLYNN ( cloosfam@nidlink.com )
Rating: PG
Classification: Story, Angst, A little Mulder-Other-Romance, A little
Mulder-Scully-Romance
Description: A past disaster separates Mulder and Scully.
Mulder becomes involved with Diana Fowley, and when Scully learns of their
engagement she decides to take action.

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Brainwashed
by rikkiLYNN


~One year in the future~

Special Agent Dana Scully stood at the door of her apartment.
Professionally balancing all the packages she had been holding in her left
hand, she used her right to retreive
her keys from her pocket.
Jamming the clinking keys into the door, she twisted the door handle and
opened
the door with a side-push of her hips.

For a moment, she just stood looking around her apartment.
Then she let her hands drop and didn't even blink as her packages crashed to
the floor.
Her slumped shoulders and half-open eyelids were a dead-givaway to the fact
that
she was utterly exhausted.
With one hand on her coffee table, and the other reaching to the floor, she
snached up her mail
and collapsed on her soft, cream colored couch.

She sighed heavily after finding no personal mail in the first three
letters.
The fourth, however, was heavier than the others and had an intricate border
around it's edge.
She turned it over curiously for a few seconds before peeling it open.

"YOU ARE INVITED" Was printed in golden text cursive on the front of the
card.
She lifted an eyebrow curiously not breaking eye contact with the card.
Slowly, she lifted the cover of the card only to be greeted with more gold
lettering.

"Please attend...event...wedding..." She mumbled outloud while scanning over
the words.
She stopped reading for a minute and looked up.
Figuring she might get some kind of amusement at guessing who was getting
married
she smiled considering the possibilitys.

"Maybe it's..." She tapped a thoughtful finger on the card in her lap.
She looked around her apartment thinking she might find a clue there.
Spotting a file on her table, she tossed around the idea of the assistant
director getting married,
then threw the idea out almost as quickly as it had sprung to her mind.
Seeing a flower on her dinner tabele Frohike had recently sent her brought
the Lone Gunmen to her mind.
Since 'The Incident' as she reffered to it, she had kept steady contact with
them.
She discarded the idea of Frohike or Langly getting married immeadiatly for
a reason she couldn't
think of. The only one left was Byers.
"Who would Byers marry?" Scully cocked her head to one side and bit her lip.
Her attempts to figure out Byers's match was futile so she decided to look
at the card.

Her eyes darted over and past the rest of the formal address right to the
name of the bride and groom.
What she saw there nearly brought her into shock.

Mr. Fox William Mulder
Ms. Diana Fowley

Mouth slightly agape, she stared at the text for an additional two minutes.
She dazedly thought she was halucinating even though the scientific part of
her reminded her that
halucination was NOT a symptom of exhaustion.

Mulder was going to marry Diana Fowley.

~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~

"Mulder." Came his professional reply to her much debated call.
His voice was a refreshing noise to her ears. She remembered how familiar it
used
to sound and noted how unfamiliar it sounded now.

"Mulder, it's me." She said through her now suprisingly tight throat once
she remembered
how to speak. That phrase had once been something she'd said so often she
didn't even
realize it was almost to the point of over-use.
She had almost lost herself in hearing his voice for the first time in ...
how long had it been?

"Scully?" He half-whispered half-said.
He sounded suprised to hear her. The tone of his voice was disbelieving and
shaky.
She didn't blame him though - being that it had been almost a year since
they had last
heard from one another.

"Mulder, I..." Her ability to say what she wanted to was lost as soon as the
muffled giggles
in the background of Mulder's breathing came through the reciever.

Only one name came to mind.
Fowley.

"...I got a letter in the mail today." She blurted out quickly as if the
words would
sting her throat if they were kept in to long. At this point Scully had no
doubt that
they would've.

"Uh huh..." Mulder's distracted reply was on the verge of sounding
frightened.
Or worried.

"Who's on the phone, Fox?"

Scully recognized the voice immeadiatly. It *was* her.
She could feel her chest tightening when she heard Mulder's reply.

"It's Scully..." His voice wavered on the first sylabol of her name.
He sounded afraid now. For a second, Scully couldn't for the life of her
figure
out what was frightening him, until she heard Diana's responce.

"WHAT?" Diana for some reason sounded suddenly enraged.
"What does *she* want?" Diana growled through her teeth.
Well, Scully thought to herself, I see relations between her and I haven't
changed.
This thought brought a wicked smile to her lips.

"What's up, Scully?" Mulder asked her, obviously trying to sound more
relaxed and failing
miserably.

"I need you to come to Georgetown as soon as possible, Mulder."
She asked masking the fact that she had closed the sentence with a single
tear sliding
down her cheek.

"But I-" Mulder stuttered.

"I can't answer any questions right now, Mulder. Dispite all that has
happened, I need you
to trust me right now. If for no other reason, do this for the sake of what
we *had*."
She was really crying now.

"Okay." He whispered having sensed her distress.
He closed his eyes and mentally dug through files of his past. He remembered
what he and Scully
used to have. Unconditional trust and a friendship that was better than any
he had experienced
before of afterhand.

"Thank you." She whispered wiping away one of the seemingly hundreds of
tears pouring
from her blue eyes.

Both Mulder and Scully lingered on the line for several moments simply
letting the fact
that they had made contact sink in.
Then they both hung up the phone.

"Fox," Diana seductivly hissed running a hand over her bare shoulder.

"I have to go, Diana." He informed her without making eye contact.
He got up out of their bed and dressed himself in silence.
Suddenly his fiance's anger exploded.

"You better not be going to see whats-her-name...that, that-"
Diana warned, tripping over the words deciding what obscenity would best fit
Mulder's ex-partner.

"Diana," Mulder who was now fully dressed leaned in close to her.
"I love only you," He kissed her forehead convincingly. "You know that don't
you?"
She leaned forward and kissed him fully than broke away and whispered,
"Of course I do, darling. You hurry back, OK?" She flashed him a sweet smile
baring none of her
unrealistically white buck teeth.

He smiled back and her and nodded slowly.
Than he left their bedroom and headed towards the apartment door, ready to
face a woman
he hadn't seen in almost a year.

~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ *
~ * ~


It had been a few hours since the phonecall.
Since then, Scully had recomposed herself and cleaned up her house a bit.

"What can I say to him?" She asked herself shaking her head.

It seemed unrealistic, all of this.
If a fortune teller had told her a year ago that this would happen, she
would have
walked out laughing until she passed out. Back then, as complicated as life
was,
Scully knew she could always count on Mulder to come through for her.
But now things were different. The night after 'The Incident' Scully knew
that
the trust that they had had for each other was gone. It pained her knowing
that their
partnership wouldn't work anymore, but she had to admit she was looking
forward to a more
normal life.
Her life afterwards, however, was anything but normal.
The first few months that went by she tried to convince herself that what
happened was a
good thing, but eventually she began to recognize a feeling of emptiness.
Mulder was a part of her that could never be replaced.

The knocking at her door interupted her introspection and she jumped
slightly at the sound.
Standing up slowly, she whispered a silent prayer that this would go
smoothly and began
the trek to her door. Each step was heavy and loud in her head, but was
quiet as a pin droping
compared to the beating of her heart.

Resting her hand on the cool door handle she twisted it and pulled the door
slightly open.
It was supposed to make it look as though she was checking to see who it was
but both Mulder
and herself knew that she knew very well who it was.

"Hey." He said quietly after Scully had pulled the door all the way open.
His eyes were downcast and his posture was less-than-perfect.

"Hi." She answered looking up into his sad hazel eyes.
In them she saw whisperings of their past together. She saw their sad
moments, their intimate
relationship, and lastly she was remainants of 'The Incident'.

"You can come in, Mulder." When he heard her call him 'Mulder' again it was
heaven to his ears.
Since that awful happening a year ago he had insisted that people call him
by his first name
for fear that hearing 'Mulder' would remind him of a life he wanted badly to
forget.
Seeing Scully and hearing her voice again only made him miss that life more
and more.

"Mulder...about what happened-" She started to say once they had both taken
a seat
accross from one another in Scully's living room. He could see the unwanted
tears welling up in her
eyes magnifying her blue irises. He could almost feel the sadness behind her
words.
The raw emotion he was not used to seeing her express stung him and he felt
that there was
no cure for his newly found pain except being able to hold her again.

Getting up and walking around her coffee table he went to her and offered
his embrace.
She closed her eyes and let herself be brought into his arms.
They held each other for endless moments. Scully sobbing into Mulder's
shoulder, Mulder
trying to hush her tears and kissing her hair.

"Scully," As soon as her name was out of his mouth, he mentally noted how
good it felt to
address her once again. "I've been thinking about what happened..." They
were still in their
embrace. Scully couldn't let go of him. It was as if he would float away,
hopelessly gone and out of her sight
if she loosened her hold on him.

"I can't live this way." She felt a smile forming behind her tears. He would
never know what those
five words meant to her after all that had happened.
"We need to resolve this so we can go back to what we have been doing
without this guilt."
She could hear a faint shattering sound as her heart broke into an infinate
number of peices.
Each word he said breaking it over and over again.
"Even though what happened was *all your fault* I just-" His words were cut
off abruptly when
Scully shoved herself out of his arms.
"How could you look my in the eyes and *SAY* that to me?!" Scully countered
aparently severely
wounded.

"Scully, you shot my mother." He informed her matter-of-factly.
Her mouth dropped to the floor with an audible click. She looked at Mulder
as if he
were telling her aliens had landed and were taking over the planet.
"How could you *dare* even say-" She suddenly lost ability to speak.

"*YOU* shot *MY* mother, Mulder." She pointed an acusing finger his way.
"Don't you remembering visiting her in the hospital? Don't you remember?"
Mulder shook his head dumbly.
"My God, Mulder," Scully cried taken aback at his rudeness.
"You shot *my mother*. You shot her *point* * blank* because you thought
she was lying about Samantha. You thought she was involved with the
conspiracy
surounding your sister and you *shot* her." Mulder just stared at Scully as
if
she were mad.
"Mom *died* the next day in Saint Alphonsus Hospital in the intense care
unit."

Mulder shook his head.
"Diana warned me you would try to blame me for what you did, Scully." His
glare cut through
her. His words peircing the air between them and hitting her like a blow to
the head.

"Mulder," Scully said with an unsteady voice.
"Come here." Scully took his arm and sat him down on her couch.
She placed her cordless phone in his hand.
"Mulder," He looked questioningly into her eyes as she said his name.
"I want you to dial your mom's number, *right now*."

She saw him swallow hard.
"Is this some kind of *SICK JOKE*, Scully?" His eyes burned.
She calmly sat down next to him and took hold of his arm.

"Mulder," She addressed him curtly. "After the incident that separated us,
you *quit* the FBI.
Do you remember that?" She asked him incredulously.
He nodded soundlessly. He obviously couldn't see where she was going with
this.
"Good. Now, you see this gun, Mulder?" She pulled back her white shirt
revealing her shiny black
gun tucked into her pants. He nodded again.
"I *didn't* quit." An unsettled quiet took the place of the next few
seconds.
"And I swear to any God that is watching right now, that I *will* shoot you
if you don't dial your mother's
number *RIGHT NOW*." She said the last two words through her teeth.

Mulder looked fearfully at the grey phone in his hand.
The talk button gleamed with it's red light staring him down menacingly.
Shaking fingers dialed his mother's number.

Scully could hear the ringing through the reciever.
So could Mulder. They both waited.

"Hello?" An old woman's voice said suddenly.

Mulder looked over at Scully with wide eyes, then shoved the phone in her
direction.

"May I speak to Mrs. Mulder?" Scully said curtly, enunciating each word with
a preciseness only
english teachers use.
Scully quickly pushed the phone to Mulder's ear so that he could hear the
words that followed
her request.
Mulder bit his bottom lip and closed his eyes.

"This is her."

"Mom?" Mulder's voice was like that of a little boy and his eyes were
clouded with emotion.

"FOX!?" She yelled into the reciever.
He froze. He couldn't think of one word to say.

"A young woman from...from the FBI told me, Fox honey, she told me that you,
she told me you were dead."
The old woman began to cry. Mulder looked horified.
"Mom, was this woman's name *Diana Fowley*?" He asked her looking as if the
puzzle peices were suddenly
coming together.

"Yes Fox, how did you know?" Mrs. Mulder asked with fear quite evident in
her voice.
"I'm going to call you back later, mom." He finished.

"Alright, Fox." She was still crying a little.

"I love you, mom." Mulder whispered risking more than Scully was aware of.
A long pause followed his latest statement.

"I love you too, Fox." Then the old woman immeadiatly hung up the phone
and cried until she fell asleep several hours later.

"Oh, Scully." Mulder turned to her and wrapped her in his arms.
"It's OK Mulder, so much has happened."

Then Mulder began to cry, as did Scully, and they held each other for
comfort.
Words couldn't express what either of them was feeling at that moment.
Scully had a strong feeling that their friendship and partnership was slowly
repairing
itself as each minute went by.
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THE END