From: Annette Gisby Date: Tue, 28 Mar 2000 09:50:52 GMT Subject: NEW: HUNTING FOX by Annette Gisby TITLE: Hunting Fox AUTHOR: Annette Gisby EMAIL: annette.gisby@which.net or penguin2@cableinet.co.uk CATEGORY: Vignette, M/S UST DISCLAIMER: Just for fun, I think you all know who owns them by now! ARCHIVE: spooky's, ephemeral, gossamer, anywhere else who asks. HUNTING FOX Mulder is late and I watch the clock as the hands move slowly towards eleven. I worry that something has happened to him. Why hasn't he called if he was going to be this late? Is something preventing him? When he does finally arrive, I can tell just by looking at him that he hasn't slept at all. His eyes are red-rimmed and bloodshot, his hair a lank mess on top of his head. He's wearing the same clothes he had on yesterday, the suit crumpled and stained. He's discarded his tie somewhere and I wonder if he's left it with a woman. I'm sitting on my chair and I swivel it round to face him. "Mulder? What is it? What's wrong?" "Scully. I'm sorry! I'm so sorry!" He rushes over to me and puts his head in my lap, seeking some comfort from me. I stroke his hair and the nape of his neck absently, remembering all the times I've done this for him. The comfort of a mother's touch, but I'm not his mother and this isn't the sort of comfort I want to give him. He sobs against me and I leave him to cry it out. He'll tell me when he's ready what is wrong, although my mind makes up some scenarios of its own. What is he sorry about? What could he possibly have done that he thinks would upset me? "It's Diana." It takes me a moment to realise that the voice is Mulder's and not in my head. "What?" My hands cease their ministrations and grip the arm of the chair. He looks up at me with his hazel eyes, looking so innocent, and then he does it. Tells me the news that I had never wanted to hear. "It's Diana," he says again, as if I hadn't heard him the first time. I can always hear her name, even if I don't want to. "She's pregnant. There's a good chance it's mine." I push him away from me and stand up, feeling sick and faint. There's a stone in my chest where my heart used to be and I can hardly believe he's done this to me, to us. I feel so betrayed and berate myself for feeling this way. It's not as if we are even a couple, but at times it felt like it. But then she comes along, Diana, the huntress. And she has been hunting him, hasn't she? Hunting him until she finally traps him in the oldest way of all. A baby. That's something I can never compete with and she knows it. Her and her cigarette smoking friend. I can't believe Mulder hasn't seen through her. I never trusted her. When she turned up, Mulder would take her word over mine without a thought. It was as though our six years together didn't matter any more. Show a man a pretty face and a set of long legs and he does his thinking with the organ between his legs, not the one between his ears. I want to scratch her perfect face. I want to pluck out her eyes. I want to yank every hair from her head so that she's left bald and unattractive. I don't want to kill her, I want to torture her and make her suffer like I'm suffering. Killing would be too easy. My bones ache and I feel hot and cold at the same time, as if I'm coming down with something. Everything is swirling around me and Mulder is decidedly fuzzy round the edges. I want to go home. I need to go home. I can't stay here and see him, knowing that he's been with her. That he's slept with her. That he prefers her. I walk to the door and he looks shocked. "Scully? Where are you going?" "I'm going home, Mulder. I can't deal with this now." "Can I call you?" "If you must." I almost run to the elevators and inside, once they've stopped, is Diana. She smiles smugly at me, the glow of triumph in her eyes. Triumphant that she could give Mulder something I never can. A child. She has the glow that only pregnant women seem to have. Something I will never get to experience and it's like a knife in my womb, twisting and hurting. It will never stop hurting. "Is Fox in?" she asks me. "Mulder is in his office," I say pointedly. I never get to call him Fox, another mark against me. Wasn't I good enough to call him by his given name? What does Diana have that I don't? Is it the legs, the bust? Is it the fact that she agrees with him on his more outrageous theories? That she was there at the beginning of the X-Files? But she wasn't there at the end, was she? She wasn't there when our office razed to the ground. She wasn't the one who held Mulder in her arms, who was there to comfort him after another nightmare. She wasn't the one he rescued from Antarctica. It dawns on me, then. She wasn't the one he loved. I was. His voice echoes round my head. So the child may not be Mulder's. I turn and follow Diana down the hall, following the waft of smoke. Diana doesn't smoke, but she spends a lot of time with someone who does. I open the door to the office, half expecting to find them in an amorous clinch. But my fears are unfounded, they are as far away as they could get in such a small office. Mulder by the far wall, her by the desk. "The baby isn't Mulder's, is it?" I ask her. "Of course it's Mulder's. Who else would it be?" "A paternity test would prove it, once the baby's born." "I don't need it proved!" she splutters. "Well, I do. I don't trust you, I never have and I wouldn't put it past you to pretend that Mulder's the father. A good way to split us up, don't you think? Are you even pregnant at all?" "Of course I am!" Oh, I'm enjoying this. Watching her squirm like a worm on a hook, but I have my claws in her now and I won't let go. "A simple blood test would prove that. Mulder, can you hand me a syringe?" Oh, bless the day Mulder decided to have a small lab in his office. Mulder hands me the packaged syringe and I make a great show of unwrapping it and testing it. Just as I'm about to ask her to roll up her sleeve, she breaks down. "Stop! You don't need to do that. I'm not pregnant," she whispers. "Speak up, I don't think I quite heard that." "I said I'm not pregnant. It was all a ploy, like you said. To get you two to split up, to split up the x-files. Fox, I'm sorry." "Don't speak to me. Don't speak to me ever again," Mulder walks out the door and I follow, turning to see her slumped over the desk, defeated and humiliated. It doesn't make me feel as good as I thought it would. "I'm a fool, Scully," says Mulder as we walk down the corridor together. "I should never have trusted her. I thought she was the same as when I first met her. But she isn't. How come I didn't know she was one of them?" I reach out and take his hand. "When it come to love, Mulder, we're all fools." I'm hoping to be a bit more foolish in future. END feedback appreciated at annette.gisby@which.net check out my x-files fanficiton at http://homepages.which.net/~annette.gisby/index.htm