Real

Prompt: #051 Illusive

Notes: Written for 100situations. Thanks to franny122004 for the beta! Spoilers for "Small Potatoes".

Scully sat in her apartment in the dark, her mind clouded by thoughts about a certain FBI criminal profiler, who just happened to be her work partner, Fox Mulder. She had been thinking a lot about him and the Edward Van Blundht incident lately, and today was no exception.

She could remember every miniscule piece of information about that day. It was so vivid in her mind, as if it was only yesterday that it had happened. In actual fact, it had been several weeks. Despite trying to convince herself that 'the incident', as she had begun to refer to it, didn't mean a damn thing, she couldn't shake the thoughts from her head, no matter how hard she tried.

Basically, 'Mulder' had come to her apartment, after the case was finalised, and had brought a bottle of wine for them to share. They had sat together on her couch and had spent hours on end drinking and talking about anything and everything. After awhile, a silence had fallen – not uncomfortable, but not exactly comfortable, either. That's when it happened.

She had been staring, transfixed, at Mulder and he at her. There was so much emotion in his eyes; so much passion and desire and it was all directed at her. When he began to move in, she didn't try to stop him. She didn't want to. Slowly, his face edged closer and closer, centimetre by torturous centimetre, and then…BANG!

A sharp clap of thunder sounded loudly behind them, startling both of them from their romantically inclined reveries. She had spun towards the door, which was barely still attached to its frame, a little breathless from the near kiss. If she had been a little breathless then, when she saw who was at the door, she was gone. It was Mulder.

Now, she knew better. The man whom she had almost kissed was Blundht. Somehow, he'd been able to defy nature and had physically transformed himself to look like Mulder. What had Scully mystified was that he had actually managed to convince her that he was her partner. She'd been none the wiser of the change: until the real Mulder had busted in on them in their almost kiss, of course.

What had her baffled even more than that was the feelings she'd been having ever since. She was feeling things about Mulder that she'd never have expected, or allowed, herself to feel; things that would lose her her badge or put her on suspension if anyone at the FBI found out and reported it.

It was all an illusion though. It had to be. Blundht had come on to her in the form of Mulder and she, having had no romantic relationships of any kind for quite some time, had been helpless to his advances. If it weren't for the real Mulder, she didn't know how far she'd have let it go.

She had expected the feelings to dissolve back into friendship when things had settled down, but they hadn't. She still felt as strongly about her partner as she had when she'd almost kissed his copy. If it was all just an illusion like she believed it to be, why did it feel so real?