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She shouldn’t have had that second cup of tea in the afternoon. Scully crawls out of her unusually comfortable motel bed, her eyes barely open, and makes her way to the bathroom to relieve her bladder. She checks the time in passing, seeing that it’s just after 4 am, meaning she’ll get less than two more hours of sleep if she falls back asleep right away.
After using the bathroom, she notices that the connecting door to Mulder’s room is half open. One of them must have forgotten to close it last night. That makes her smile. She glimpses at Mulder, just wanting to know he’s asleep, and not caught up in a nightmare. Once she’s convinced he’s fine, she gets back into her own bed, closing her eyes. Before sleep takes her again, she hears rustling from Mulder’s room and lifts her head.
“Hm, no,” she hears Mulder mumble. “Don’t… no.” She sits up in bed again, ready to run in there and wake him from a nightmare. It wouldn’t be the first time. She only catches shreds of what he’s saying, his voice a mere mumble.
“I… no… want… I… want… Diana.”
Just like that, Scully is wide awake. Diana. She is certain that’s what he said. Diana. He wants Diana. Her stomach twists and tears shoot to her eyes. She lies back down, pulling the comforter over her ears. She doesn’t want to hear another word from the other room. He’s not having a nightmare at all. He’s dreaming about Diana. Probably doing god knows what with her in his dreams. Scully presses her eyes closed, just like she used to when she was a teenager and she didn’t want anyone to see her cry. The other room falls quiet again, but Scully can’t fall back asleep. Every time she closes her eyes, she sees Mulder and Diana, smiling at each other, with herself in the background, forgotten and discarded.
The next morning, Mulder is chipper. No wonder, Scully thinks bitterly, drinking her coffee. After all, he didn’t wake up in the middle of the night. No, he slept perfectly fine, dreaming about his ex-partner. Or, Scully thinks as she watches Mulder smear a bagel with a smile on his face, she might no longer be an ex. The thought hits her like a bucket of cold water. Mulder owes her no explanation. He and Diana could have rekindled their relationship at any time during the last few months. Scully knows he’s been to visit Diana while she recovered from getting shot. She takes another sip from her coffee, her stomach revolting from the bitterness she tastes.
“You’re quiet today, Scully,” Mulder says, regarding her with a concerned look.
“I didn’t sleep well,” she says. That, after all, is not a lie. Mulder nods as if he knows what she’s talking about.
“We should wrap this case up today and then you can sleep in your own bed again.” The smile he gives her is so disarming that she has to swallow hard. The lump in her throat remains. She smiles back quickly, hoping he won’t catch her mood, or see her eyes fill with tears. She’s not at all thinking about her bed and sleeping in it. Her thoughts are caught up on Mulder wanting to go home to share his bed with someone who isn’t Scully. Diana. Her mind replays the moment from last night and Mulder’s mumbling. She can’t blame him for what he dreams about, but she can’t deny that it stings nevertheless.
Weeks pass and the invisible wound festers, itching from time to time. Mulder is oblivious to her contemplative moods, and ditches her to explore the Queen Anne, risking his life in the Bermuda Triangle. Her anger over his stupidity evaporates as soon as she sees him in his hospital bed, alive and breathing. She wants to hold him, stay with him, and make sure nothing else happens. But it’s not her place. When he tells her he loves her, after giving her a recount of the most fantastical story about her doppelgänger in the 1930s, she convinces herself that he’s delusional. That he just mistook her presence for Diana’s and that those words were not meant for her. Scully doesn’t doubt that he loves her. Like a friend. After all, she’s not the one he’s dreaming about.
He calls her up in the middle of the night not long after the Bermuda Triangle disaster to bring her to Nevada with him to meet yet another source who promises top-secret information. It’s the first time she wonders if this is worth it. Is this what she wants her life to be? Should she be thankful that he brought her instead of Diana? Someone who would appreciate this journey, sharing his belief that this time, this is it. He lives his own life separate from hers, but if Scully were to have a private life, with a man who isn’t Mulder, how would she explain that her partner just calls her up in the middle of the night sometimes, expecting her to drop everything and meet him? How would she explain that up until now, she never questioned it, and even got a kick out of it? The worst is that every time Scully imagines herself with someone, whether it’s in steamy dreams, on her weekly grocery trips, or lounging on the couch on a lazy Sunday, the face she sees next to hers is Mulder’s.
“Don't you ever just want to stop? Get out of the damn car? Settle down and live something approaching a normal life?” With Diana. She leaves that last part out, watching him for his reaction.
“This is a normal life,” he says.
And maybe, Scully thinks, it is. For him, anyway. Maybe even for Diana. But not for Scully.
*
Kroner, Kansas brings about it the most perfect storm. After that cow incident – and Scully still can’t quite grasp that a cow crashed through the roof of Mulder’s room – she and Mulder are forced to share a room. It’s bad enough that everyone here thinks they’re a couple. She wants to tell them that nothing could be further from the truth. That her partner has someone else waiting for him back home.
“Um, I think I should tell you something,” Mulder says later when they’re getting ready for bed. She doesn’t know how he did it, but there’s a cot in here, cramping the little room. Scully asked for one earlier and was told they didn’t have any spare beds. But of course, Mulder used his charm to get one. He probably explained that Scully isn’t his girlfriend and that his actual girlfriend would mind.
His expression gives him away. This is the moment she will remember for months, if not years, to come. Mulder is going to admit that he and Diana are back together. She steels herself, sits upright, and wills the tension in her jaw not to get out of control.
“Okay,” she says hoping she sounds calm.
“For the last few months, um, this is difficult to say.” He starts pacing the room, running a hand through his hair from time to time. “The last few months,” he begins again and Scully presses her fingernails into the skin of her palms, making it sting, lessening the emotional pain Mulder is going to inflict any second now.
“Mulder, just say it,” she pleads with him.
“Well, okay. These last few months I’ve been having dreams and um, apparently I sometimes talk in my sleep, too.” He colors and Scully blanches. There’s only one person who could have told him that he talks in his sleep.
“That is all?” She asks. He nods, uncertain.
“I wanted you to know considering we’re sharing the room. In case I end up screaming your name.”
“I doubt you’ll be screaming my name,” Scully mumbles but Mulder hears her.
“I wasn’t completely honest, Scully,” he says. “The dream… it involves… well, you. It’s always the same and I… um, I wasn’t kidding when I said I might end up screaming your name.”
“But,” Scully says, confused. “I heard you,” she goes on. “How long have you been having this dream?” It can’t be. It was Diana’s name she heard, not hers. There’s a whole world between Diana and Scully.
“It started sometime after we got back from Antarctica,” he says. The timing fits. He would have been having the dream when they had adjoining motel rooms. “But what do you mean your heard me?”
“One of our first cases back,” she says. “I went to use the bathroom and you were dreaming. I didn’t know whether it was a bad dream so I- it sounded like a good dream and you, um, you didn’t say my name.”
“But I did say a name.” Mulder sits down next to her on the bed and even though there’s enough space for the two of them, their thighs press together. She can smell his shower gel, his shampoo and his minty-fresh breath. It’s awfully distracting at a moment like this.
“You did.”
“Please tell me it wasn’t Skinner,” he jokes.
“It wasn’t.”
“Then what? Come on, Scully. If this case is teaching us anything it’s to be honest with each other. Unless you want me to make it rain broken hearts too?”
“You can’t control the weather, Mulder. Neither can Holman.”
“Eh, we’ll see. Now please just tell me what I said.”
“Diana,” Scully says, moving away from Mulder in need of some space.
“Diana?” He asks, sounding surprised. “That… that makes no sense. Are you sure you-”
“I know what I heard, Mulder.”
“I’m not sure you do,” he says softly. “Here’s what I’ve been dreaming. We’re back in Antarctica but I’m too late. I can’t find you. I’m being captured by CSM and his cronies and they keep asking me what I want. I say your name. Over and over again and they punish me for it. They show me pictures of women and they all look the same. You’re never one of them. I ask for you again, one last time, and that’s when… that’s when CSM says… um, I’d rather not say.” Mulder’s voice is thick with emotion and no matter what has happened in these last few weeks, Scully is by his side in an instant, hugging him to her.
“I had no idea, Mulder,” she says, cradling his head against her middle.
“I didn’t want you to know,” he says, his voice muffled. “So you see, Diana has no part in this.”
“Mulder,” she says with a sigh. “Maybe it was a different dream.”
“Don’t remember any dreams about Diana.”
“We don’t remember all our dreams.”
“Why are you so convinced I said Diana?” He asks, looking up at her.
“Scully and Diana don’t sound at all alike,” she says.
“Are you sure, Dana?” And that’s when it hits her. Diana and Dana. Their names separated by one simple letter.
“You- you never call me Dana.”
“In my dreams I do. Sometimes,” he adds with a smile.
“You’ve been saying my name,” Scully repeats, going through every moment with Mulder in those last couple of months. His I love you. Him calling her up to go with her. Him asking her to help her on a case. She hasn’t been his second choice. She’s not his consolation prize.
“I haven’t even seen or heard from Diana,” Mulder says. “No wait, she left a message the other day. I forgot to get back to her.” Scully feels like kissing him. The tension inside her bursts and she grins at him, unable to stop herself.
“I’m glad my nightmare is making you happy, Scully.”
“It doesn’t,” she assures him, touching his head. “I’m just glad that you-” she’s not ready to explain to him why this has been bothering her so much. The idea of Mulder and Diana is a deep wound in her soul and she needs it to heal first before she can let Mulder in on her own secret. “I’m just glad you told me. Do you want me to wake you up if you have the dream?” She’s still touching his hair, running her fingers through the softness.
“With you near, it probably won’t happen. It’s, um, worse when you’re not around. My neighbor has been complaining.” So that’s how he found out. Again, she has to stop herself from grabbing him and kissing him silly. “
Don’t wake me if you hear me scream your name in pleasure.” He winks at her and Scully playfully swats him. Everything is going to be okay.