From: Gwinne <gwinne@yahoo.com>
Date: Mon, 30 Apr 2001 18:10:10 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: xfc: NEW: Not-Quite Daughter by Gwinne
Source: xfc

Title: Not-Quite Daughter
Author: Gwinne
E-mail: gwinne@yahoo.com
Archive: Ephemeral, Gossamer, Spookys; otherwise ask
Rating: PG-13
Keywords: MSR; Emily
Spoilers: through "Empedocles"
Disclaimer: Nope, not mine.


NOT-QUITE DAUGHTER

She's not surprised to see Emily bouncing at the foot of
her bed, asking if she can have pancakes for breakfast. 
"Can I, Mommy, please?"

Before she can wake enough to say, "stop jumping," she
realizes the only thing bouncing is the baby, using her
ribcage as a springboard.  And she's alone in her mahogany
bed.  That fateful Christmas at Bill's, when Tara was ready
to burst out of her blue dress, she asked Mom whether boys
or girls kick harder.  Tough little girl, Scully says to
this child who, she vows, will never wear pink lace or play
with a Barbie doll.

And in this long year when anything seems possible--visions
in Buddhist temples and miraculous conceptions and lovers
coming back from the dead--an apparition of a not-quite
daughter is hardly fodder for concern.

* * *

It's just her in the office this morning, and she decides
the filing cabinets could stand a little organizing before
she goes on maternity leave and the next generation does
irrevocable damage to what little logic there is.  Doggett
made a mess of things early that fall while she was too
preoccupied with morning sickness and prenatal checkups to
guard Mulder's carefully cultivated system, where Donnie
Pfaster and the Flukeman exist side by side.

After that bloody, confusing mess of a case that Doggett
eventually dubbed "the Butt genie," she looked everywhere
for the Pusher file.  The parallel, she insisted, was
clear: a killer who tricked the eye into believing he was a
harmless child and a killer who wrote "pass" on a nametag
to gain admittance to the Hoover building.  And she knew,
with the same certainty that Mulder used to describe "the
whammy," where the folder was supposed to be.  Or, at least
she did BD.  Before Doggett.  When he finally showed up to
work, cocky and sarcastic, she made sure he'd never
misplace another file. 

Now that Mulder's breathing and walking again, she doesn't
hesitate to do what she's wanted to do for so long--impose
any amount of order--so when he calls and says, "hey,
Scully," and asks her to find something about psychokinesis
or black magic or whatever he's into this week, she'll know
exactly where to look.  

After three hours she has a backache and the beginnings of
a database, cases cross-listed and easily obtainable by
keyword rather than case number.  Fluky and assorted ooky
things, ghosts, apparitions, ESP.  

"Doesn't nesting ordinarily involve large quantities of
baked goods and doll-sized undershirts?" Mulder says,
appearing from nowhere and gesturing to the stacks of file
folders threatening to tumble from every surface and heaped
on the floor at her feet.  In her third trimester lethargy,
reviewing old reports is much more pleasurable than putting
them back.

"What are you doing here, Mulder?"

"Well, seeing as it's lunchtime, I thought I'd take my best
girl for a hamburger."  He shrugs, the collar of his
leather jacket bunching at the ears.

"Best girl?"

"Partner.  Soul mate.  One in five billion.  You get the
drift."  He bends over and picks up a file, flips through
it absently, then tosses it on the stack on her desk.

"Yeah, give me a minute."  She makes a few last notes on
the yellow legal pad, too aware of Mulder up against her
back.  His hands are on her shoulders, kneading gently. 
She doesn't know whether to be touched or infuriated.  One
minute he's the sarcastic flirt she was first partnered
with and the next he's the doting lover she remembers from
the spring.  Her own mood swings are bad enough.

"I missed you last night."

He can't keep doing this to her.  "Mulder," she chastises,
"we had an agreement."  She's not sure if she's referring
to the rule about no touching in the office or the decision
to stay in separate apartments on work nights or both.  In
this post-resurrection world, none of the old rules seem to
apply.

* * *

"What do you know about the spirits of dead children
haunting their families?" she asks, setting down her heavy
glass.  This is comfortable and familiar, asking him the
wildest question she can think of while they drink
milkshakes and wait for their food.  She missed this
routine more than she missed sex.  

Mulder wipes a smear of chocolate from her mouth, and she
can't help but smile when he licks his finger.  "You mean
like that Charlie Holvey case?"  

"Sort of."

"This for something you and Dogboy are working on?"  He
stiffens a bit, and she wants to tell him that he shouldn't
be threatened.  How could a working relationship of less
than six months even compare to a partnership of eight
years?  Only to Kersh, with his doctored statistics, do she
and John Doggett make a noteworthy team.  There's no number
big enough to quantify how much she loves Mulder, how much
she grieved for him while he was gone.  Why can't he see
that?

"No."  She says it carefully, letting him hold the weight
of that single syllable.

"So it's a personal inquiry then?"  His words are measured,
and she thinks, not for the first time, how much their
conversations resemble chess, every word strategized.

"Yes."  Slowly, she exhales.  She can't bring herself to
look at him right now, so she examines the saltshaker like
evidence at a crime scene.

"About Emily." 

Now she pretends to be transfixed by a catsup smudge. 
"Yes."

"Wanna fill me in?  It's hard to banter when you limit your
replies to yes and no."  

Scully hears the frustration in his voice.  After eight
years as partners and several months as lovers, they still
aren't good at this type of conversation, when they can't
hide behind disciplinary jargon and empty rhetoric.  This
is her life they are talking about.  No, she corrects
herself, their life.

"I woke up about 5:00 this morning and Emily was jumping on
my bed asking for pancakes.  Now, it's widely reported in
medical literature that pregnant women often experience
nightmares and strange dreams.  Stress, combined with
hormones and irregular sleep patterns go along way for
accounting for what I saw. . ."

Mulder chuckles and lays his right hand over hers.  "Talk
to me, Scully."

Deep breath, she tells herself, put those childbirth
classes to good use.  "I'm just trying to figure this all
out, Mulder.  Where she fits in.  What kind of picture this
kid is going to draw in kindergarten when they ask her to
draw her family.  I mean, does she have a big sister?  Is
she an only child?  What do I tell her about her
grandparents, for that matter?"  She hears her voice
getting louder, more agitated.  She realizes, with a
glaring certainty, that this was the question she wanted to
ask all along.

"Not to mention her father."

"I didn't mean for us to get into that now, but, well,
yes."

* * *

That first morning home, missing a molly and nearly six
months of his life, he said he didn't know where he fit in.
She wasn't sure either.  During her worst bouts of nausea
and melancholy, she believed--in the way that Mulder so
often believed, without evidence or reason--that he'd come
home and they'd buy a house and raise the baby together. 
Shivering beside Skinner at Mulder's funeral, she started
thinking about what she'd tell her child about her father,
how she'd be a good single mother. 

"There are support groups, Dana," her mother said, "for
women like you."  

"Career women whose partners aid in miraculous conceptions
and then disappear off the face of the planet?"  

"No, groups of single mothers.  I know someone from church.
You could talk to her."

She hadn't chosen to be single, but that day when Mulder
agreed to donate sperm, she knew she was choosing to raise
a child alone.  How could PTA meetings compete with lights
in the sky?  By the time they became lovers, almost a year
later, she'd given up on the idea of a baby.  When Mulder
finally reminded her, spooned against her backside in an
Oregon motel, he spoke of all that had been taken away from
her, not from them.  The distinction was crucial.  And now
that he's back, neither one of them knows what kind of
family they will hobble together, a mom, a dad, one
controlling grandmother, and a crazy godfather for each day
of the work week. 

It took almost a full week for them to discuss how she got
pregnant in the first place; for once, Langly's
tactlessness paid off.  After the Gunmen took their laptops
and left, they sat wordlessly at her kitchen table.  Scully
watched as Mulder drew patterns in the condensation on his
iced tea glass.  When he finally looked up, she saw the
same uncertainty as the moment, almost two years before,
when she asked him to help her conceive.  "Well, Scully,
inquiring minds want to know.  What was involved in a
certain blessed event?"

Keep it light, Dana, she told herself.  "To the best of my
knowledge, it was either Caddyshack and Shiner Bock or
Steel Magnolias and merlot."

"You're saying that we did this."  But you're sterile, she
heard him say, like the teenager who protested, but Dad, we
only did it once.

"Unless Eddie van Blundt escaped from prison and
impersonated you again, yes."  She knew she was hiding, as
he often did, behind the almost impenetrable facade of
wisecracks.  She just wanted to make it easier for them
both.

"How?"  

With that single word, she knew he never really wanted a
baby, just got caught up in her hormonal excitement and the
risks of the unknown.

"Didn't your dad explain the birds and the bees?  Can't you
just be happy, Mulder?  This is the one thing I'd rather
not question."  For a man who literally came back from the
dead, he was having an awfully hard time confronting the
everyday miracle of parenthood.  When he opened his eyes
for the first time in that hospital bed, she wanted to
believe this was something he would accept on simple faith.

"I am happy, Scully.  I know how much this baby means to
you.  I'm just. . ."

"Just what?"

"Trying to catch up."

"I see."  It's too much too soon.  She'd rather they not
talk about this than have him destroy every fantasy she
created while he was gone.

"Scully, when you asked me to father your child, what were
you really asking?"

"Just that.  For you to be the father of my child."  Why
does it matter?  That child was supposed to be hers; this
child was theirs, created, as her mother once explained to
her, out of the love shared between a man and a woman.  And
for a single heart-wrenching moment, she wondered how much
he remembered from last spring. 

"In what way?  In the way that you were Emily's mother?"  

She felt his words like a blow to the head.  He was the one
who winced.

* * *

"When I was a baby, did I live in your tummy too?" Emily's
face is pressed against her abdomen, thumb in her rosebud
mouth.

"When you were very little."

"Like Thumb-a-blina?"  It takes her a moment to get the
reference, that nursery school story about little girl who
lived in a thimble.  She'll need to relearn the logic of a
child.

"No, sweetie, even smaller than Thumbalina."

"Why did you let me go?"  Emily coils around her belly and
squeezes.  Pain slices through her like a gunshot.

* * *

When she opens her eyes, there's a fetal monitor strapped
to her abdomen and a nurse checking an IV.  "Get some rest,
honey, the doctor will be in to see you soon."  She's
grateful for the baby's rhythmic kicks.  The kid has
Mulder's sense of timing, she thinks, that uncanny knack of
his for showing up just as Eddie van Blundt leans in to
kiss her, just as Donnie Pfaster prepares her last bath,
just as her uterus threatens to split in two.

"Nurse," she calls with someone else's voice, "my partner?"
but the door is already closed.  She watches her baby's
heart rate rise and fall, and she reminds herself that she
loves this man who brings her a family keepsake but can't
bring himself to tell the nurse that he's her family. 
"Partner" is such a perfect and inadequate word to describe
him.

* * *

She blinks a few times to clear the sleep from her eyes. 
"Mulder?" she says into the shadows by the window.  "What
are you doing?"

He's shifting restlessly from foot to foot, arms pretzeled
across his chest.  He's on edge, and she can't be the
strong one right now.  "Sorry," he says softly.  "I didn't
mean to wake you."

"What time is it?"  Her head feels thick from the
medication, and it's hard to breathe, even with the nasal
canula.  

"Just after three."

"Mulder?" she asks again.  "What are you still doing here?"

He doesn't answer, but moves across the room and sits on
the edge of her bed.  "When they first brought you in here,
the nurse wouldn't let me stay with you."  He pauses and
smoothes back her hair.  "Because I'm not your husband." 
He touches one finger to the center of her chest.  "You're
my everything, Scully.  You're all I have."  

She hears the catch in his voice and holds her breath.  

"But I don't know how to be a family."

Well, there it is.  She pictures a white crib collapsing
and a baby falling to the ground.  "A family isn't
something you are, Mulder, it's something you work towards,
become a part of."

For only the second time, he spreads his fingers across her
belly like a basketball.  In the light coming from under
the door, she wants to see the same wonder in his eyes as
she did earlier that day, when she told him she was going
to be okay.  Instead, she sees something more apprehensive
than his panic face.

"This baby needs a father, Scully."

"Yes, she does."

"But I don't know if I can be the kind of father she
needs."  She hates when he gets this way, self-pitying and
morose, but it's nice to know the old Mulder is in there,
behind all his insecure jokes about the Pizza Man.

"You're the father she has."

* * *

She puts her blue pajamas back on and lets him tuck her
into bed, on her left side with more pillows than she knew
she owned.  He rubs the satiny material at her shoulder,
and she almost stops breathing when he slips a finger into
the open collar to caress her shoulder blade.  The last
time he touched her like this they were standing in his
doorway, Skinner waiting for a taxi out front.  Don't
worry, Scully, he said, just a quick trip to the forest. 

"I'll be in the other room," he says softly and drops a
kiss just above her right eyebrow.  "You'll call me if you
need anything?"  This is the man she loves, with the list
from her doctor in his pocket, what to do in case of
bleeding or cramps.  He missed out on sonograms in 3-D and
the thrill of a first kick, but he's back to play the hero
when everything threatens to fall apart.  Yes, he assured
the doctor, I'll stay with her.  Yes, I'll make sure she
rests. 

They still have living quarters, his funeral, and a birth
plan to discuss.  And she's not sure she'll ever know what
to say about Emily.  Somehow, though, she feels more secure
than she has in months.

"Mulder," she says in this new, sleepy half-voice, "stay."

* * *

She sees the scene clearly.  She's sitting on the couch
with the little girl pressed up against her.  A thick photo
album rests on her belly, and she swears the baby is trying
to kick it off.

"Do you know who this is?" she asks the little girl,
pointing at the pre-schooler in a party dress.

"Me!" the girl shrieks.

"No," she says and points to a different girl in a
different party dress, blowing out candles on a birthday
cake.  "This is you.  This girl's name is Emily.  She was
your big sister.  And this," she places the child's hand
against the baby's roving foot, "is your little sister."

* * *

She puts the doll back in its box.  She imagines the woman
who will never be her mother-in-law rolling over in her
grave.  Only to her son, the sentimental bachelor, do
family heirlooms and greasy pizza belong on the same table.

"There's a file folder in my top dresser drawer.  Will you
get it?"  

He looks at her quizzically.  "You ran out of room at the
office so you started the X-Files annex in your underwear
drawer?"

She laughs softly and puts both hands on her belly.  She'll
keep them there permanently if it means she can hold this
baby in her body for another seven weeks.

"Save me some pizza, will you?"  She can tell he's learning
to enjoy this part of her pregnancy already.  It's an
X-File, Scully.  A man comes back from the dead and his
tofu-eating partner remembers how to appreciate red meat. 
He didn't say it, but she saw sheer joy in his face when
she said she'd die if she didn't have a cheeseburger NOW,
Mulder.

He hands her the folder and tucks an afghan around
her--she's never quite warmed up from the chill of early
pregnancy and autumn in Oregon--before he sits back down on
the couch.  

"This," she says in the most official voice she can muster,
"is the result of an amniocentesis.  My second, actually." 
She hasn't told him yet about the first, running for her
life and that of a laboring woman, and she knows it will be
a while before she can admit that mistake.  "We'll need to
do some more tests when the baby is born, of course, but
every indication is that this child is perfectly normal." 
He lets out a long breath.  

"And this," she pulls out the fuzzy gray and white image
from her sonogram, taken a day after Mulder's funeral, "is
our daughter, Mulder."


FIN


Acknowledgments: This is for J, due two weeks ago.  And for
anyone confused by Mulder's recent behavior.  Heartfelt
thanks to alanna, for brilliant beta, even under the
influence of drugs. <g>

feedback gleefully accepted at gwinne@yahoo.com