From: JAugust965@aol.com
Date: Sun, 13 Jan 2002 22:48:12 EST
Subject: Finis by Joelle Augustine
Source: direct

Title: Finis 
Author: Joelle Augustine
Email address: mizjoely@aol.com 
Rating: G 
Category: V, MSR
Spoilers: En Ami, 9th Season
Keywords - Mulder/Scully married
Archive: You can take it with you but just tell me first! 
Summary: OK, so we know they had sex...but how did Scully
conceive?
Disclaimer: Property of Chris Carter & Co., not mine except through
emotional investment.

FINIS

The letter arrived six days after the quiet wedding ceremony, no return
address, no postage, slipped quietly under the apartment door to be
discovered by Dana Scully when she arose after returning her son to
bed after feeding him. 

She stared at it for a long moment before reaching trembling fingers to
pluck it from the floor. Anonymous missives had been passed to her
before, some helpful, some dangerous, all belonging to the life she and
her husband had deliberately walked away from months after the birth
of their son, after the danger was believed over and they were able to
finally, finally be together. To be a family.

This letter could change all that.

She knew that, and therefore hesitated to open it. Part of her wanted to
shove it into the garbage can and forget about it, ignore it and pray it
wasn't the harbinger of yet another conspiracy against her family, but
the other part of her, the part that had been honed to hyper-awareness
after nine years with the X-Files, insisted she open it.

She slit it open with a pen knife, glancing worriedly at the bedroom
door. If this heralded some new intrusion into their life, a disruption of
the domestic tranquility they'd fallen into only recently, then her
husband needed to know about it. But the name on it said "Dana
Scully" and no other, so she opened it, reasoning that she could always
share it with him later, if necessary. A small voice whispered that of
course it would be necessary, but she ignored it as best she could.

Later, of course, he scolded her for her recklessness, reminding her it
could have been a letter bomb or poisoned, but she shut him up by
telling him that she'd followed her instincts, and since she was
unscathed, it meant those instincts had proven solid.
But that was later. For now, there was the letter.

And that was, indeed, all the plain brown envelope held. Several
sheets of paper, closely and neatly written. By hand. Not typed, not
processed on a computer, but written in blue ink on a sheet of paper
torn from a notebook. "My dear Dana" it began.

"My dear Dana,

     "I call you that knowing that you would prefer I address you as
Agent Scully, but illness and contemplation of my own mortality
permit me to address you in a more familiar fashion. Yes, cigarette
smoking has finally accomplished what you and Mulder and so many
others have failed to do: it has brought me to acknowledge that I, like
every other mortal being, must someday die.

     "From that paragraph, you know who this letter is from, but I
promise you; discarding it now will leave the final mystery of your life
unsolved."

She stopped reading there, clutching the letter tightly to her breast as
she struggled suddenly for breath. She'd been holding it carefully by
the edges in case a need for fingerprints arose, but now it was balled in
her fist, edges sticking between her tightly clenched fingers as if it
sought escape from the imprisonment of her hands. Again her eyes
sought the bedroom door, only to be drawn unwillingly back to the
letter.
Reluctantly, half-fearful and half-furious, she continued.

     "Thus I urge you to continue, to hear me out, as it were. Then you
can decide what to do with the knowledge I give you, freely and
without cost.

     "If you are reading this, a unique combination of events has
occurred, the first being my death, at which I am quite certain you will
shed no tears, and the second being the successful birth of your first
child.

     "I say first with confidence, since I know that there may be others.
May be, not will be; `may be' as in it will ultimately be your choice,
not one that is forced on you.

     "Just as the birth of this child was not because of something that
was forced on you. Rather, it was a gift. My gift to you."

Another ragged breath, but she forced her eyes to return to the words
although the bile threatened to rise in her throat and her stomach roiled
in protest at the implication of those words. Was he daring to claim
that he was-but no, she couldn't bring herself to finish the thought. Not
without reading the rest.

     "You remember a certain computer disk that my associates and I
sought, and how we used you to bring down one we viewed as a
threat." 

She remembered, all right, and that memory still brought bitterness
and the tang of defeat with it. 

     "You awoke one morning, disoriented, concerned to find yourself
in night clothes and me in the room. I tried to convince you that you
had merely fallen so deeply asleep that you didn't wake as I carried
you to your room, undressed you, put your pajamas on you, and then
left.  You reluctantly made a show of believing me, but you always
suspected that something else had occurred; I could see it in your eyes.
As time passed and nothing seemed to come of it, you let it go, or at
least you never spoke of it to me.

     "Of course you were right. No one sleeps so deeply in the presence
of a mortal enemy that they fail to awaken under those circumstances.
I gave you something to keep you asleep while a medical team
performed a procedure on you. Not to remove anything, as had been
done to you in the past, or to destroy or injure you; quite the contrary.

     "I returned something to you. I know Agent Mulder found your
ova; he was meant to find them. But what he didn't know was that they
had been sterilized before he was allowed to take them. They were
never meant to be anything more than a tantalizing clue, a distraction
when we needed him distracted. If you attempted to have them
fertilized, then you know by now that was a futile effort.

     "And yet you have given birth; the fact that you are reading this
letter proves that beyond the shadow of a doubt. Now you begin to
suspect what I have done to you, for you. And you wonder why.

     "It's very simple, Dana. I have grown.quite fond of you over the
years, as I have become equally fond of Mulder. Strange, I still can't
bring myself to call him Fox. Can you? Your mother does, she acts as
if it is perfectly normal to call the man by his first name. Do the two of
you still refer to each other as Scully and Mulder?

     "I ask only because I presume that the father of your child is Fox
William Mulder. I suppose I could be wrong, but I am rarely wrong
when it comes to reading people. And of course, I will never know the
answer, since I am dead. Whether it is the cancer or some other means
that will strike me down, I don't know; I don't pretend to see the future
quite that clearly. But I do know that my time on this earth is quite
limited, and in my final hours I feel the need to confess.

     "Not to repent; no, I still believe that what I did was in the best
interest of mankind, no matter what the personal cost to either myself
or Mulder. Or you. But I am glad that I was able to return one thing to
you, something you never even knew you would miss until suddenly it
was taken from you. And because of that one thing, I can go to my
death easy in my conscience.

     "Implanting the eggs was easy for the group of doctors I had at my
disposal, although they warned me that over half might not be viable.
That was more than you had before the procedure, so I was content. As
you should be content. Nor should you wrack your brains trying to
discover how such a procedure could have been performed in such a
short period of time with no accompanying physical discomfort
afterwards; suffice it to say that the surgical techniques used were
not...standard in the medical community. Allow yourself to accept
'extreme possibility' as the answer and leave it at that.

     "That is all the explanation you will receive, and by now I am
beyond your reach, so no matter how much Mulder storms and swears
he will obtain answers, he will once again be forestalled. Again, I offer
no apologies, tender no repentance. I merely hope that you can be
grateful to me for this one thing, and that you love your child-or
children-as much as you love their father."

It was unsigned; when she finished reading, Scully felt the papers slip
from her nerveless fingers, heard the whisper of sound they made as
they brushed against the hardwood floor and settled there, still
somewhat crumpled.

"Scully?"

At the sound of his voice she jumped a little. "Mulder." She felt her
breath catch; they still called each other that, even six days after the
wedding. Frightening that an old enemy knew them so well.

"What's wrong?" He'd seen the whiteness of her face; she watched his
eyes flick to the papers lying so innocently on the floor, the brown
envelope bearing only her name sitting on the edge of the small end
table, the still-open pen knife perched next to it. "What happened?"

"Our miracle," she said simply, and reached out for him. He folded her
into his embrace, puzzled, torn by the need to comfort her and the
need to find out why she required comforting.

She picked up the letter and handed it to him without speaking, after a
few moments spent in his arms, silently thanking God that she'd read
the letter and not thrown it out. Because there had always been a
nagging doubt in the back of her mind, a worry about her baby's true
parentage that hadn't been eased by the events of the first six months
of his life. Finally, those doubts and fears could be laid to rest.

She'd never expected to find a reason to be grateful to him, their oldest
and deadliest foe. Just as she'd never expected to find happiness and
fulfillment in marriage and motherhood. Especially not with the man
who was currently going red in the face, but still reading the letter that
had been anonymously deposited in their new home this morning. But
she had found the latter, and so she supposed she must accept the
former.

Her husband deliberately crumpled the pages and just as deliberately
dropped them back to the floor before bringing his eyes to meet hers.
"Do you believe this?"

Scully nodded. "It makes perfect sense. Oh, I question his altruism, I'm
sure he had an ulterior motive, but doubt him?" She shook her head.
"Not at all. I believe that letter is the first truthful thing he's willingl
y
told us."

Mulder nodded, frowning abstractedly until she reached up and forced
his face down to hers for a lingering kiss. When their lips parted, they
held each other closely as they finished the conversation. "Mulder,
once I accepted that you had to be William's father, that our night
together had resulted in his conception, then I had to accept that
somehow my eggs had been re-implanted. Or that the doctors had been
wrong and that not all of my eggs had been harvested. One of those
possibilities had to be true." Scully put aside the concept of
immaculate conception; it remained unspoken between them even
after all this time, and now could be laid to rest along with other, less
pleasant alternatives.

"Which meant at some point you underwent a medical procedure, at
least if it were the former and not the latter," Mulder concluded.

Scully nodded again. "For once, the logical and plausible scientific
explanations were the ones that matched the facts." A smile broke out
over her face. "For once, I was right."
Mulder pulled her closer and kissed the top of her head. "Scully, you
have always been right," he murmured into her hair. "Right for me."

She laughed gently. "You are so lucky that I am still in post-marital
bliss, mister, or that chauvinistic comment would be shoved back
down your throat." She pressed her fingers to his lips when he seemed
about to protest. "I accept the compliment and ignore the implication
that I am not right in the other sense. I'm 95% sure you didn't mean it
that way."

"We need to know who delivered this." Mulder returned reluctantly to
the matter at hand.  As one their gazes turned to the crumpled piece of
paper on the floor. "It's too late for fingerprints, at least on the paper.
Maybe on the envelope..."

"No."

Mulder looked at her in surprise. "But Scully, don't you want to know
who delivered this? Shouldn't we try to find out if it's true, that he's
dead?"

"No, and no," she replied firmly. "I don't care who delivered it,
whether it be a legitimate messenger service or little green men in
UFOs. Nor do I care if he's dead or alive. I am willing to feel grateful
for what he claims to have done for me, for us, but that is the last
emotion I ever want to spend on him."

Mulder blinked at the passionate conviction in her voice, and
reconsidered his own knee-jerk reaction. Did he want to know the
answer to those last questions, or was it merely habit? The "super
soldiers" were no longer an issue, and the original conspiracy was as
dead as their enemy claimed to be. The aliens were either coming or
they weren't, and nothing he personally had done over the last 10 years
had done more than delay that possible coming. Nothing he personally
did now would likely affect the outcome if the aliens defeated their
non-human enemies, and there were always Reyes and Doggett to help
in the fight against that possible future if it came down to it.

The only future he was worried about, he realized in wonder, was the
one contained in this apartment. The one with him, Scully, and their
son.

For once, he decided, the truth could wait. Forever, if necessary.

There were other priorities in his life now.