From: ephemeral@ephemeralfic.org Date: 23 May 2007 10:00:22 -0000 Subject: Profiling Mulder by Athene Source: direct Reply To: athene1121@hotmail.com Title: Profiling Mulder Author: Athene Email: athene1121@hotmail.com Distribution: Gossamer; all others please ask Rating: PG Category: Vignette, R Keywords: Mulder/Scully romance Spoilers: anything before Per Manum Summary: He is a chameleon; a dynamic bundle of contradictions, a sleepy, lazy-eyed heat-seeking missile in bed at night, dark and brooding, just waiting for the right time to pounce on his prey. Me. Profiling Mulder By Athene There's never been anyone in my life quite like Mulder, and thank God for that. He is a chameleon, a dynamic bundle of contradictions: a little boy with wide eyes and wonder in every pore. A sad man with the weight of the future of mankind on his heart and his shoulders. A cool, professional agent, competent and perceptive about a person's actions, his motivations, and his guilt. A fashion plate; a gorgeous, remote man with the enticing mixture of leather and fine wool and mint toothpaste and some whispery cologne all wrapped up in a billowing wool overcoat and a lock of dark brown hair curling over one hazel eye. A sleepy, lazy-eyed heat-seeking missile in bed at night, dark and brooding, and just waiting for the right time to pounce on his prey. Me. God, I love my life. When I was at Quantico, the only thing other agents or students envied about me was my brain. And my self control. It certainly wasn't my Penney's wardrobe. I was an uptight poker-faced girl, rigid in my incredulity and smugly superior in my backing of science. After all, I was a medical doctor. Recruited out of my internship as a pathologist. The FBI asked for me, not the opposite. When I saw Mulder for the first time, I had been at the Academy for five weeks. I'd already heard about him, in his capacity as a former profiler at the ISU. There's this perception that he was the poster boy of idiocy, with a derogatory poem scrawled in lipstick on the wall of every bathroom at the FBI, but that's really not the case. Sure, there were raised eyebrows and head-shaking when anyone talked about the X-Files, but the main topic of discussion was his effortless and dead-on use of psychological behavioral models to analyze the characteristics of a criminal, a crime, or a victim, and assisting the investigating authorities in narrowing down the field of suspects. Take Monty Propps, for instance. Or even Luther Lee Boggs. Really, the work he did was amazing. On average, 17% of the time, an ISU analyst can come up with a profile that's going to exclude innocent suspects and nail down the perp. In Mulder's case, his success rate was well over 50%. Not the mythic percentage you thought? Well, he's a fantastic profiler, but he's not superhuman, and in the end, an analyst is only as good as the material he's given. Analysts from the ISU rarely leave Quantico for field work, so they rely on the investigation team and the crime scene photographs for a lot of their conclusions. Mulder did travel more than most of the ISU profilers, probably because he wanted to get out of the way of that jackass Patterson. He seemed to have more than his share of pedophile murders or serial killers. Probably because he was so good at it; it wasn't so good for him. The lecture that evening was on the behavioral analysis and typical crime scene presentations of the Disorganized Offender. None of the flyers mentioned who the speaker was, and I only found out in class that morning when our Investigative Methods instructor dropped his name. There was a little titter of laughter at the time, but the lecture hall was standing room only at 6:30 for a 7:00 start time. I got there a little early to finish a paper for the next day, and managed to get a seat in the third row, to the left of the podium. By 7:00 the energy in the room was palpable, and his entry was anticlimactic in its simplicity. No tie, and a blue turtleneck with a neutral blazer. It fit him well, but the color combinations were regrettable. He apparently hadn't entered his Armani stage. He walked directly into the room, no notes in his hand, stepped up to the podium, introduced himself as Fox Mulder in a silky-rough baritone, flipped down the lights, turned on the slide projector, and started talking. When he finally snapped the lights on, I was startled to see that it was nearly 9:00. I had not heard the usual rustling or whispering or fidgeting as sore bottoms and tired brains shifted around, anxious for a lecture to end. His nearly expressionless discussion of some of the most heinous perpetrators I had ever encountered in class was deeply disturbing to me. He opened the lecture up for questions, and the response was instantaneous. At 9:40, the SAC came in and called a halt to the session. Mulder offered to stick around afterwards to answer more questions up front, and he was quickly surrounded. I wish I could say that his eyes met mine and fireworks shot off. I wish he'd felt the magnetic energy of my presence, and would have been drawn to me like a moth to a flame. The fact is, he's not a Harlequin hero, I am no romance novel babe, and he probably spared me no glance or even a second thought. For all my scientific knowledge, I was tongue-tied. And I knew better than to start my career in the FBI off with a pass at an experienced agent. I didn't see Mulder again for several months. He passed me once, in the hallway outside the morgue at Quantico, about 4 months before I was assigned to his department. He didn't meet my eyes, he didn't stop, awestruck at my intelligence, or tell me that my adept autopsy had clinched for him a profile that had eluded him for months. Nothing in our preliminaries would have ever led me, or Mulder, or anyone else to predict the magnitude of our effectiveness as partners in the X-Files. Sure, there were mutant circus freaks from time to time, but every case we investigated was a crime, one that had been unsolved, and we put a vast number of them on the "solved" list over our years together. When I broke it off with Daniel, and when I left Ethan, I never expected to find a lover like Mulder. On the surface, we just looked too disparate, too polar to get along. And the fact that we are together now, and will be for the rest of our lives, is an X-File I will always savor. End