***************
Shadows of Winter
Part III
By Jaime Lyn
****************

We encounter a bit of 'R' in this section and an edge of 'NC-17.'  Not
full blown NC-17, though.  You have to wait for that. Heh.  ;-)

---

Silence and darkness smothered the house, and Mulder felt like
breaking something heavy to shatter the monotony.  He needed to prove
that his life was still his, and he could still do what he wanted, and
that despite a global conspiracy out to get him, nobody could take
away his freedom to piss and moan and argue with his hard-headed
partner.  He was part of this outfit, wasn't he?  His opinion still
mattered, didn't it?

A steady stream of light escaped from the end of the hall and Mulder
followed it.  He paused at the door to the bedroom and peeked inside;
a nightlight shaped like an Oyster shell had been plugged in, and the
carpet alit in ribbons of light.

"I just thought you would want to know, I was ah, I was looking out
the living room window." Mulder stood in the bedroom doorway, leaning
against the frame, his legs crossed right over left. "And I think the
Carvers just got back from Hawaii.  They're standing out there talking
to the cops and the tow-truck guy. No knocks on the door yet, though,
so I'm thinking that's a good sign. Nobody in here but us chickens,
you get my meaning?"

"Good, that's good," murmured Scully, her back to the doorway, her
knees cushioned beneath her.  She sat on the floor amongst a
conglomeration of gray couch pillows, her arms folded on the edge of
the mattress in un-spoken prayer.  Her shoulders were rounded, her
hair spilling about her neck in soft, red waves that seemed much
darker by nightlight.  She wasn't enraged with him, at least, he
didn't think she was, but he wasn't entirely sure she was happy with
him, either.   Mulder himself wasn't exactly getting ready to throw
any parties in Scully's honor.

The baby, all night-scented and soft skin and dream-kissed cheeks, lay
asleep in the center of the bed, fenced in on all sides like a
bumper-secured bowling lane.  Scully must have gone and dug up some
old pillows out of the closet.  His arms lay flat on the sheets, his
red sweater crunched up like an accordion.  His delicate chest rose
and fell evenly, almost rhythmic; it was the breathing that made him
real.

"Mind if I sit?" asked Mulder.  "It's like the crypt from an Indiana
Jones movie down there."

Scully waved a hand to the empty space beside her, but otherwise said
nothing.  Her cheek snuggled into the mattress, and she gazed sideways
at William.  Mulder nodded to himself and crept forward, wondering how
long this would continue on: Scully's unwavering bedside vigil.  This
animosity between them over what to do about the baby.

"How is he?" Mulder asked, bending his knees until he slid down the
base of the bed and landed on his backside.

"He seems alright," Scully whispered, turning.   Her skin was amber
soft in the void between darkness and light, tomorrow and yesterday.
"A little scared, but I can't say I blame him.  Not that - we're all
scared, but he's just a baby.  He doesn't understand what happened in
that car or what's happening now, and he doesn't - He can't possibly
remember who we are."    She shook her head at herself, brushed away
moisture from her cheek.  "Mulder, I... I know you mean well and I
understand you - maybe better than you do - but its different this
time."

Mulder reached across the comforter for her hand.  "Its a shitty
situation," he said.  "And I feel the same way you do.  Really.  And
I've been downstairs for two hours thinking about it, struggling to
figure out which is the lesser of the two evils.  And the only
conclusion I've come to is that it really fucking blows to have no
idea what to do."
 
Scully forced a smile.   "I know," she said.  "But lets say, maybe
for right now, just right now, that we can pretend this is safe?"  She
gazed at him with pleading, blue eyes.  "He's here. He's ours. 
Whatever happens tomorrow, he's ours right now."  She turned, touched
the tips of her fingers to the baby's flushed, round cheek.  "I just
wish I could make this better for him.  Maybe if he wasn't so
frightened - if he knew who we were."

"Hey, we're lucky we even know who we are," Mulder joked. "I think
I've actually lost track."

"Oh."  Scully reddened, took a deep breath, closing her eyes.  "Oh my
God. I was just standing there holding William and then I looked at
you and I saw you looking at him, and I realized that he needed to
connect with you - " She paused.  "That is, with 'you' you and not -"

"It's okay."  Mulder waved her off, tickling the inside of her hand
with his thumb. He knew what she meant, and he understood why she
wanted to apologize for the indiscretion, but at this point, it made
no difference.

"What's done is done.  I'm not even sure it matters anymore."  He
gazed about the room as if expecting someone with a gun or a knife or
just a lot of green, acidic blood, to pop out of the shadows and prove
his point, because at least that would put a face to an invisible
enemy.

Scully yawned, watching him with an indecipherable look.  

"Besides," he waved his hand in circles between them.  "I kind of
missed us."

"I missed us, too."    

"Not that we were never still us..." He frowned at his logic.  

"No, of course not."    

Mulder tilted his head to one side, trying to understand himself.  It
was much too late for heavy philosophy.  The blanketing warmth of the
late hour pressed tightly to them, and silence came dancing in the air
above their heads.

Scully's voice finally cracked the darkness.  "I just keep
thinking..." She frowned as if trying to gather her thoughts.  "I keep
thinking that we could run forever, you know?  If we really had to? 
Just go from place to place without identities or even a destination
in mind, and wander, live for ourselves, moment by moment.  Or we
could go buy some boat in the middle of the ocean where there'd be no
chance of intrusion - "

"Criminal, I get seasick when I take a bath."

Scully smiled, and her eyelids drifted shut.  "But William complicates
the equation."

"So what do you propose?"

"I don't know."

Mulder nodded, breathing oxygen into his aching lungs.  They were
talking in circles, repeating the same worries, the same fears, going
around and around again and again, and if they didn't stop soon, he
was going to get dizzy and throw up.

"Are you ever afraid, Criminal?"

Scully frowned at the change of subject.  

"Afraid of what?"

He shrugged.  "I don't know. Dying, not dying, never knowing - all of
it.  Everything."

She tilted her head, considering.  She seemed to think about it for an
interminable amount of time before answering, "I used to be, yes."

Mulder tilted his head to one side. "You used to be?"

With her free hand, Scully patted his knee.  "There was a time, back
when I had my cancer, that I used to think to myself, there isn't
anything.  No God.  No higher purpose.  Nothing.  And then I'd
think... what happens to me, then?  What happens when my body goes out
on me?  My organs would shut down I suppose, and then I would die, and
nothing would come from that.  The world would just go black one day,
and I would die.  The thought terrified me."

Mulder let his hand roam to her leg, and then her hip; Whatever
happened, he wanted to be near her.  He couldn't fathom not being near
her.  He nodded her on, "And then?"

"And then I came close to death - so close to it - and I felt
this...tugging.  Kind of the way I used to feel when I went to sunday
school as a girl, and I imagined that God was in the sun, keeping
everything warm. I felt that my sister was close to me, and my father,
and I - I felt as if they were telling me not to be afraid."  Her eyes
glazed in silent memory, and she took a breath.  "So now I think
that...Much as death seems a certain, biological end, I don't believe
I have anything to fear from it.  Perhaps this life is not the only
life.  Maybe there's something more.  Something better, waiting where
we can't see it."

Mulder smiled, eyeing her cross.  "How very religious of you, Agent
Scully."

"It's honest," Scully countered, her whisper secure and haughty.  "I
can't vouch for it, or validate it, but I believe in it.  In something
greater than myself." She squeezed his hand a second time.  "Letting
go of logic in order to make a sociopoetic leap... isn't that the kind
of nonsense you're always blathering about?"

"Blathering?" Mulder scrunched his nose in distaste, leaning down to
press a kiss to her fingertips.  Her skin was warm.
  
Scully raised an eyebrow, watching his mouth move across the plane of
her knuckles. "I believe there is usually a good amount of blathering
involved, yes."

Mulder released a melodramatic groan.

"So let me get this straight."  He pulled back to a seated position,
leaving her knuckles pink and wet, and eyebrowed her.  "You won't
believe in Big-Blue, but you'll believe in an invisible afterlife that
collects all the dead people."

Scully rolled her tongue in her cheek. "If I told you I believed in
Big-Blue, would you quit blathering about death?"

"If I quit teasing you about the afterlife, would you quit using the
word blathering?"

"I don't know.  Now what are you blathering about?"  

Scully smiled a wide, adoring smile at him, her cheek muscles
stretching attractively until her entire face alit with all the things
she must have felt, but never said.  Mulder sat, amused by this
unexpected playfulness, and gazed at her until the smile faded into an
exhale.

"So you think..."  Mulder found himself stumbling over what he wanted
to say next.  "So you think - heaven, angels, the whole nine yards -
that's what saves us?  That it's God who has the final say?"

"Could be," she said. "I don't know if I believe it's necessarily
'God.'  But for me it's not even about God anymore. It's...It's
wanting to defy the unknown.  After years of searching and sacrificing
for it, needing to take back control of my life and just...live.  Just
be. I'd rather die having really lived, and not live waiting for the
sky to fall."

"Okay, so what then - you want to go skydiving and jump naked into
European fountains?"

Scully took a breath, her lips twitching in revolt against a smile,
and she extended her free arm in explanation.  "It's like this."  She
paused for a moment, stilled in contemplation, and went on, "Maybe we
die tomorrow or maybe it never ends for us, or maybe the world really
is doomed and nothing else means anything.  No matter the outcome, I'd
rather be here with you and my son than running from invisible men
until I'm blue, or - or waiting for you and the truth at the foot of a
mountain somewhere, wondering if anybody's hurt my child because I
made a terrible mistake."

Mulder pursed his lips, understanding.  "So then - you really believe
we could protect him?"

"Yes."  

He exhaled about a year's worth of misfortune, unsure of whether he
himself could believe so blindly.  When in the world had Scully turned
into him and he into Scully?

"Well, I don't know how I feel about that," he said honestly.  In his
mind he kept replaying the conversation from the stairs.

"I can't tell you what to feel, P.I," she answered. Her eyes searched
him with quiet askance, her arms pillowing her cheek.  She blinked,
took a breath, and whispered, "Do you love him?"

Mulder stilled. "What?"

"Do you love him, Mulder?"

Mulder glanced over at the bumpered-in baby, so susceptible to any
type of mundane or paranormal danger that the human brain couldn't
even comprehend every possibility:

There were supersoldiers and alien hybrids, corrupt murderers within
the FBI mainframe and pissed off CIA operatives with consortium
contacts.

There were sharp objects in the kitchen and household poisons under
the sink.

There was a hairdryer in the bathroom that the baby could knock into
the bathtub and get electrocuted by.

And then the electrical outlets... a fuse in the bedroom could short
out and the entire house could catch on fire, burning them all to ash.

Towering stairs, guns, knives, small ingestible parts, plastic bags,
beds that were too high -

For the first time since William was born, Mulder felt the first pangs
of fatherhood.  He wasn't just afraid of the unknown, he was afraid of
everything.

"Yes," he said, gazing from Scully to the baby.  "Yes, I do."  

Scully smiled in half-measure, her thumb pressing gently over his
thumb.  "Okay then.  Do you love me?"

Taken aback by her bluntness, Mulder frowned, but was unable to speak.

Scully looked away as if utterly embarrassed by asking such a
question, and her cheeks pinkened below her eyelashes.  Mulder gazed
down at their intertwined fingers and turned her palm over.  With
careful concentration, he ran his index finger along each indentation
in her skin, up across the outlines of her fingernails and back to her
wrist.  He traced her hand over and over, brushing, caressing, marking
her as his, until he was sure he'd reached every crevice and
imperfection. Then he looked back up into her eyes to see if she
understood him.

She had.  

"Do you trust me?" she breathed.  

Mulder tilted her chin with his thumb, studying her.  "You know I do."

"About this?"

"About everything."

Scully nodded. She tugged their hands to her lap, entwining her
fingers throughout his and raising the mesh of them together so that
their hands were eyelevel.  "So then we have this," she whispered,
pressing his knuckles to her lips.  She tilted her head towards the
sleeping baby.  "And we have that."  Her eyes opened and closed in
lazy, measured rhythm.  "It may not be the secret of the Universe, but
it's something.  Mulder, Scully, and William two points, Everyone else
a-million, but we have time to catch up."

Mulder shrugged, grinning.  Her presence made his ears ring and his
hands sweat.  "Oh, I don't know."  He leaned in closer to her, heart
thrumming.  "I think you're skimming on the point scale."  He wanted
to touch her and he felt as if it had been ages since he had.  She
smiled at him mischievously, unmoving, teasing, waiting for his next
move.

"For instance," he said, his chin tilting sideways, "I'd say the sex
alone earns us a good twenty points."  She chuckled in short, breathy
exhalations, and he added, "Per orgasm, per encounter."

That, for whatever reason, flushed her cheeks a bright scarlet-red,
but left her undeterred, with that ever-present raised eyebrow.

"So if you think about it," he finished, "We're at least
half-a-million points ahead of the curve."

"Are we now?"

"Mm hmm."  

And he bent down in agonizing slow-motion, nudging her cheek with his
nose. Unmoving and silent, she seemed to close her eyes only at the
last possible second, her watchful gaze trailing his movements as if
unsure of herself, or of him, or of anything she ever wanted.

Her lashes fluttered shut over the side of his face, her lips tickling
his jaw.  His mouth edged over hers in reverent delight, kissing her
first with tender licks and presses, and then with harder, more
insistent pressure, while she pressed back, her palm at his chest,
fingers over his heart.  Her neck tipped to allow him a better angle,
and he caught the base of her head in his hands.  She was soft and
warm, and she tasted like a dozen unspoken truths and promises.

His fingers played with the buttons on her shirt, flicking at them
until a few finally came undone, and the silk parted to reveal pale,
freckled skin above her breastbone.  She was so warm, and tasted so
good, and somehow she was everything at once - or more than
everything, if there was a word for more than everything - and he
couldn't let go, couldn't stop touching, couldn't ever be without her,
without this, not ever.

His mouth trailed a wet line down her neck, and then to the opening of
her blouse, and her fingers found the top of his head, massaging,
pressing, skirting through the dark strands.  Her eyes were closed,
her head tilted back, her spine arched.  She was incredible.

The wisp of a moan escaped her through a heavy breath, and he touched
his palm over one breast, smoothing his fingers over the outline of a
nipple through the silk, as he kissed his way back up to her mouth.

He undid some more buttons and pushed open her shirt, and realized
suddenly that beautiful women wore black lace bras for evil, nefarious
purposes.

Scully shifted in his arms, lolled her head back, and then forward,
her eyes foggy.  "Oh..." She exhaled darkly.  "Mulder?"

Needed her, needed this, only this, only her, only... only now,  he
needed it now.  Yes, he definitely needed it now. Some parts of him
downright hurt.

Her hands gripping his shoulders, her eyes closed, her mouth opened,
she pushed out breaths like she was drowning, and he trailed his mouth
down across her chin, up over her cheek, up to her earlobe, up over
the soft flesh.  Her hair was thick and soft behind her ear and
dizzying with, what was that smell?  Coconut?

"Mulder?"

But enough of the ear, he wanted her mouth again.  And he wanted her
naked.

"Mulder," she bit more forcefully, and then she pushed hard at his
chest, panting as if she might hyperventilate or burst into flame.

"Scully?"  Mulder frowned, clouded to the point of pain with arousal,
and trying like hell to focus.

Her hands were braced on the floor on either side of her and her head
was tilted towards her chest, her ribcage  heaving quickly and
heavily.  Too heavily.  Much too heavily.  Mulder's eyes widened in
horror.  Something was definitely beyond wrong with his partner.  She
was going to pass out if she kept breathing like that.

"Scully, what is it?  Talk to me - tell me what's wrong."  His hands
moved helplessly over her, trying to calm her, to still her, to do
anything, but her breathing didn't slow.  His arousal died in a hard
moment, and he realized with a bite of frustration that she was the
one with the medical training and he was the one with the psychology
degree, and at the very most, this meant he could help her work
through anger management over her weird breathing.  Or give her a
Band-aid.

"What's wrong?" he whispered, lifting her hair out of her face with
his thumbs.

"I don't know... what's wrong," she gasped, her shoulders angled
towards her chest in a painful looking hunch. Between breaths she
heaved, "I just...I feel...dizzy...need to stop...for a minute..."

"Dizzy?"  Mulder leaned forward to search her face, and he pressed his
palm to her forehead, feeling for fever.  "God, you're shaking,
Scully.  Are you sick?"

Her head lifted slightly then, the space between breaths growing more
and more even, and she blinked cautiously, looking for her bearings
and finding some of them still missing.  She reached for Mulder with
one hand and he took the hint, grasping her arm, steadying her as she
blew out a few test breaths through her mouth, inhaled through her
nose.  She looked up at him, into him, and nodded.  "Yeah, I'm okay,"
she whispered.  "I'm sorry, I just... I got a little dizzy for a
minute."

A little dizzy? That was a little dizzy?  Mulder was positive he'd
seen steadier looking drunks.  "Not exactly the kind of ticker tape
parade you want to throw a guy," he joked, hoping to God she got the
meaning behind the unspoken question.

"Seriously, I'm okay."  She shook her head as if trying to get out the
cobwebs.  "Just a bit of vertigo.  It's just been a stressful day and
I wasn't...wasn't feeling great earlier and I haven't eaten all that
much today.  It's nothing."  She gazed up at him with stark apology in
her eyes, and, as if to reassure him, leaned in and slanted her mouth
over his.  The resulting kiss was deep and powerful, but short, and
when she pulled away, Mulder searched her expression for anything she
might not be telling him.  It was damn hard to read her and worry
about her when all he wanted was to fuck her.

"Are you sure?" he asked.  "Do you - do you need something to eat?  A
glass of water?  Some, um, ice or - or a cold compress or asprin?  I
think there are Band-aids somewhere..."

Scully shook her head, an amused smile stretching the corners of her
lips.  "Everything I need is right here in this room," she whispered,
and then she tugged on him with one hand until he followed her down to
the floor.

---
   

In his lifetime, Fox Mulder had faced and conquered the crown-royalty
of all monstrosities; murderers, vampires, mutated animals, mutated
humans, aliens, alien-human hybrids, conspirators hell-bent on taking
over the world, and a particularly nasty bunch of FBI auditors.  Any
of which would have sent a normal man screaming and running for the
hills with his nether regions shrunken into unmentionable size.  But
Fox Mulder, he was a man's man, an unafraid, purpose-filled man, and
Fox Mulder never backed down from an injury, a monster, or a
challenge.  Nothing would break him; nothing had or ever could.

Until his partner set a squirming child at his feet, slipped on her
overcoat, and announced that she had a midday shift at the hospital
and would be leaving Mulder to entertain their son for the day.

And Fox Mulder, man's man, abduction survivor, went almost catatonic
with panic.  He froze in mid-step, his mouth open, his hand
white-knuckled around a glass of orange juice, and found he had
forgotten how to form complete sentences without his voice cracking.

"Good grief," Scully muttered, kissing the top of the baby's head, and
then the top of Mulder's head, before she crossed the living room for
the front door.  "Do you need some smelling salts, Mulder?"

Mulder blinked.  Not only was he terrified of his own son, he was also
operating on an hour's worth of sleep.  Plus, the house was still
freezing from lack of electricity the night before.

"I don't think - "  Mulder looked down and found William sitting on
the tile under his feet, gazing up the length of his father's legs as
if considering the urge to scream. "I don't think he likes me, Lily."

Scully paused in the foyer, rummaging through coats on the side-rack,
turning over magazines and opening drawers, flipping through some
extra memo-pads and pens and slips of paper. She shut the drawer and
patted down her overcoat, frowning.   "He doesn't even know you."

Mulder made a face.  "He doesn't know you and he likes you."

Distracted, Scully bent down to search beneath the end table by the
door, and her arm disappeared under the bottom shelf. "That's because
when I pick him up, I don't hold him like I'm about to pull the pin
and throw the grenade.  He's not a biological toxin, he's a child,
Paul -" She paused and glanced up.  "Have you seen my car keys?"

Mulder sighed.  "Second drawer on the left."

"Thank you."  

She pulled open the drawer, fiddled under a few items, and extracted a
tiny gold keyring. "You know,  you might want to take this afternoon
as an opportunity.  I think your son is about as stubborn as you are,
but you won't make any headway if you act like you're afraid of him. 
Why don't you just play with him?"

"We um, we don't have any toys," was all Mulder could think of to say.

"Then why don't you get out your baseball volumes and read him the box
scores?"  Scully shot him a lopsided grin.  "At least that way you
could put him to sleep all afternoon."

"Funny," he muttered.    

William crawled into the living room and tugged at Scully's pant hem,
extending his short arms and wriggling his oatmeal-sticky fingers in
'baby-up-speak.' The plea was stark in his big blue eyes.   With an
exhale of defeat, Scully scooped up William and rocked him in her
arms, whispering to him that she would be back soon.  She stroked his
soft brown hair with the tips of her fingers and tickled his ear.
Apparently, Dana Scully, former FBI Agent and forensic pathologist,
was just as good a parent as she was a medical doctor. And Mulder
found the ease with which she slipped into motherhood something of a
wonder, if not the slightest bit infuriating.

While Scully had garnered nothing but clingy affection from William,
Mulder had only incited tears and shrieks of horror any time he
stepped within three feet of William's personal space.  The lack of
any headway he'd made as far as bonding went was appalling.

With a sigh, Mulder stood in the kitchen doorway like the picture of
rumpled sleep, glass of orange juice still untouched in one hand,
wrinkled sweatpants lodged in odd places. Behind every movement either
of them made with the baby, there were a hundred unsteady variables
pushing at their heels. William was either safe here or he wasn't safe
here, just as the three of them either would end up dead or they
wouldn't.  Mulder couldn't help but feel as if he'd been playing poker
with the wrong in-crowd, and now his debts had mounted and it was
payback time.

"I'm emailing Agent Doggett this afternoon," Mulder said.  He didn't
say why, and he hoped Scully wouldn't ask him.

But her expression darkened, and her hold on the baby tightened, and
Mulder knew immediately what she was thinking.

"Just be careful about it," she answered, pressing her lips to
William's ear.  She gazed up at Mulder, and her resolute blue eyes
communicated all that she refused to say: Despite whatever love she
felt, if Mulder requested special care or protection from Agent
Doggett, if he tried going against her wishes concerning William, she
would make sure he lived to regret it.

"I know what I'm doing," said Mulder, feeling suddenly as chilled as
his glass of orange juice.  "I can handle the situation.  I can handle
an afternoon alone with a baby."

Scully pursed her lips, switching the baby to her opposite hip.  "I
never suggested you couldn't."

A long silence crept up upon them, and Mulder stared into the swirls
of his juice.  Many unspoken problems still laid between them like a
puddle of gasoline waiting for a match.

Scully cleared her throat.  "Are you going to drink that or just stand
there with it?"  She motioned with two fingers to Mulder's orange
juice.

Mulder shrugged.  "I don't know.   You didn't drink yours.  You also
passed on the coffee.  You sure you're feeling alright?"

Scully softened slightly, but her shoulders didn't relax.  "I'm fine,"
she said, not offering much else.

Mulder finally took a sip of his juice and the taste was bitter, with
bits of pulp sticking to his teeth and lodging in the crevices between
his gums.

While the previous evening had been ethereal and lazy, and while
they'd spent the bulk of it lying naked, pressing and sating and
kissing each other into blessed, pristine ignorance, Mulder was still
unable to get the image of Scully's sudden spell out of his mind. 
Every time he closed his eyes there she was, hyperventilating with
panic, trembling with vertigo.  He'd meant to question her about it,
but was unable to find the right moment.  Between her using William as
a buffer to avoid interrogation, and the excuse that she was getting
ready for work, Scully had grown quite skilled at not letting a free
moment slip.

Scully rubbed William's back, her cheek pressed to his pale forehead. 
"Maybe I should just stay home with him. With both of you."

And now she was changing the subject again.

William pressed his small palms to Scully's cheeks, giggling his
delight at her texture, and Scully smiled a toothy grin, tickling the
baby's chin with her index finger.   "He needs some new clothes and
another bag of diapers - I don't think the one I picked up this
morning's going to make it through the day.  And I think -"

Mulder just stood there with his orange juice in hand and a blank
stare on his face.  "You can't just play hooky, Dr. Selden," he said.

Scully nodded despite herself; she knew Mulder was right, and Mulder
knew Mulder was right, but William, on the other hand, he was a hard
temptation to resist, with his little button nose and his big blue
eyes, and - Mulder wasn't the least bit conceited about this - his
father's infamous, 'Scully, do this because you love me' smile.  If
Mulder hadn't already been annoyed over Scully's pick-and-choose
method of disconnecting from him, he might have found her inability to
resist second-generation-Mulder-charm quite amusing.

"I'll see you both when I get home then," Scully finally said - loud
enough for both William and Mulder to hear - and she set the baby on
the floor beside the couch, eyeing Mulder with a thin cross between
love and mistrust.  "I'm taking that green toxin to the lab to be
analyzed - I'll do it at lunch and call you with the results.
Just...Don't go anywhere with him."  Pulling on her gloves, she added,
as an afterthought, "I know you hate the cold. It's ah, supposed to be
miserable out there today anyway."

But their gazes caught and held, and Mulder understood her real
meaning with stinging accuracy; Don't you dare take my child out of
this house, Mulder.

"We'll be okay," he said, forcing neutrality into his voice.  

"Good," she said.

And then she was out the door, and nothing more could be said.   

--

Four hours, six glasses of orange juice, three children's programs,
three Advil later, and there Mulder sat, bone-tired and cross legged
on his living room carpet, making paper airplanes out of the sports'
section with a one and a half year old.

Since neither he nor Scully had any toys lying around, and since
William seemed to be rather content with wailing and shrieking his
displeasure over Scully's absence, Mulder had tried everything he
could think of to amuse the child or, at the very least, preoccupy
him.  Nothing, however, had worked until he'd unearthed last week's
newspaper and begun compulsively folding the local sections into paper
fans; William was fussy as hell, but he seemed thoroughly enraptured
by crumpling paper.

Not that William smiled for Mulder the way he had for Scully, despite
a newfound common interest in crushing the personal ads. At this
non-development, Mulder had first been resigned, and then annoyed, and
now he careened wildly towards frustration.  Fox Mulder seemed to have
a singular genius for being unable to bond with the one person left in
the world still genetically related to him.

"Hey, check this out - " Mulder wiggled a paper swan at William,
pulling on its base to make the wings flap.  "You like birds?  We
could give this one to Mommy."

William took the swan from Mulder as if he expected Mulder's fist to
close in on him like a sea anemone upon a crab.  Mulder grinned at the
improvement - William not being afraid to touch him, that is - and set
to work on another swan.  William turned the first swan over, examined
it carefully, and set it on the floor. Then he pounded the swan with
his fist until the swan looked as if it had gotten caught swimming in
between the Titanic and the iceberg.

Mulder sighed.  "Everyone's a critic," he said, ripping another page
out of the newspaper.  With a yawn, he glanced at his watch:
five-twenty-two.  He shivered and tried shaking off his unease; the
house was still not warm enough for his liking, and he'd have to turn
up the heat or clean out the air vents or...something.

Scully called him every hour on the hour, and she emailed him every
half hour, and while she insisted to no end that she trusted him but
distrusted everyone else, Mulder couldn't help but think that Scully
didn't actually trust him at all. Or - that is, she trusted him with
her life, but not with the child she had raised from birth.

And that knowledge stabbed at Mulder harder than any gunshot or knife
wound he'd ever received.

Maybe Scully was terrified he would make good on his argument to call
Skinner, just completely disregard her wishes, and give William away
during the break between his lunch and his afternoon snack.  Not that
Mulder would ever do such a thing without her expressed consent, but
the fact that Scully actually considered he might sent a sliver of
anger up the base of his spine.  If Scully didn't trust him enough to
accept her judgment, and if he couldn't trust her to be honest with
him...

Well, then perhaps the real motivation behind William's return to them
was simply a psychological ploy: confuse he and Scully into such a
state of un-trust that they killed one another.

"Ow!"

William reached over and repeatedly jabbed the tip of a Classified-Ad
paper airplane into Mulder's knee, and Mulder yelped as the edges dug
into his skin.  William jumped in surprise, obviously unprepared for
such a reaction, and he skittered away towards the couch on his hands
and knees, his tiny nose scrunched as if he wanted to wail at the
heavens again.  Again, for the fiftieth time in one afternoon.

Cursing silently to himself for erasing hours of father-son progress
in the span it took to inhale, Mulder tried on a wary smile.  "Hey,"
said, still testing out this never-before-used 'Daddy voice' of his. 
"Hey, no more - none of that, okay?  It's not a big deal, Will.  Look
-" He grabbed one of the airplanes and jabbed it into his other knee,
wincing at the sharpness of the airplane's tip.  "See?  I do it, too. 
Daddy's just a big... a big dumb airplane man.  Look -" He jabbed the
airplane down again and tossed the crumpled leftovers into the air,
arms akimbo.

William, seemingly unconvinced by any of these antics, sat huddled by
the couch, eyebrow raised, thumb in his mouth.

Mulder sighed.  "Yeah, your mother wouldn't buy it, either."  

Pushing down onto his hands, Mulder crawled closer to the child, all
the while making goofy faces to try and distract the baby from his
encroachment.  William watched Mulder with wary blue-violet eyes, his
thumb securely stuffed in his mouth, his free hand wrapped around the
first hand.   He looked for all the world like Scully, after being
forced to sit through one of Mulder's paranormal slideshow-fests.  The
lack of confidence was stunning.

Finally, Mulder's backside hit the couch, and, unable to go any
farther, he sidled up next to his son.  Both little Mulder and big
Mulder gazed at one another with uncertainty.  If William had no idea
what to make of this weird, goofy guy claiming to be his father, then
the weird goofy guy had less of an idea what to make of William. 
William didn't utter a sound, but he didn't look reassured either, and
he didn't take his eyes off Mulder, as if waiting for the other shoe
to drop.

"Okay, kiddo, here's the deal," said Mulder, "I'm going to pick you up
again and take you into the office upstairs so I can check my email,
so that your mother's head doesn't explode, but I need you to not cry
this time. I know I'm not Mommy and you're intent on reminding me of
this fact over and over, but I think I've exceeded my dosage of Advil
for the day."

William blinked, his tiny mouth squeezed around his thumb.  On the one
hand, silence wasn't the best answer, but on the other, it wasn't a
high pitched scream.

"Okay," said Mulder, nodding to himself.  There wasn't any reason why
he couldn't do this without scarring or injuring both of them.

William froze in mid-thumb-suck as Mulder reached out with nervous
hands and touched William's back, and then his side, trying to figure
out the best angle to hold the kid.  He certainly couldn't throw
William over his shoulder in a fireman's grip, or hold the kid like a
dirty towel, but every time he tried picking William up any other way,
screaming erupted as if Mulder was poking him with dinner forks.

William's lower lip jutted in a pout, just a slight waver that
stretched all the way to his eyes.  In a moment of panic, Mulder
reached under William's arms and quickly pulled the child up, settling
him onto the side of his hip as he'd seen Scully do earlier. William
seemed to like that position whenever she held him that way, and
Mulder supposed it didn't seem all that uncomfortable or impossible to
execute.

"You doing okay?" Mulder asked, practically on the verge of crying
himself. "You ah, you like the weather up here?" When there was no
protest from his son, Mulder breathed a sigh of relief. "See?  Look
how good I am at this."

William, thumb still stuffed in his mouth, cocked his head to one side
and examined Mulder like an agent examining a suspect.  Mulder cocked
his head to the other side and did the same.  The tentative look on
the child's face still seemed to indicate unshed tears, and Mulder
realized that lack of shrieking did not necessarily translate into
winning the war.

Frowning, Mulder glanced about the room for a distraction.  Four Advil
would definitely be pushing the envelope of decency, and he refused to
call Scully.  There were no toys lying around, no dolls or games or
shiny objects, nothing but crumpled newspaper and -

"Aha!"  Quite pleased with his own brilliance, Mulder bent at the
knees and scooped up a framed photo from the coffee table.

It was a Polariod picture of he and Scully from a rest stop somewhere
in the Pacific Northwest.   Mulder had been sucking on a ketchup
drenched french fry, and Scully rummaging around through the miniature
backpack she occasionally carried in those days.  Mulder bent over to
whisper something in her ear, and whatever he'd said must have made
her laugh, because Scully's head was tilted towards his in suspended
amusement.  It was one of the only pictures he and Scully had ever
taken together, mostly because it had been completely unexpected; a
young girl somehow snuck up behind them and froze the moment on kodak
paper.

"Look," said Mulder, holding up the picture for William to see. 
"Who's this lady?  I think you know her."

William blinked a few times, glanced back up at Mulder, and seemed to
consider this peace offering.  Mulder held his breath; negotiating
peaceful coexistence with his son was like negotiating a peace treaty
between two children fighting over the same animal cracker.

Curious, William patted the cool glass over the photo, examining the
texture of the frame.  His heart-shaped mouth screwed up on one side,
and then his tiny brows furrowed, and finally, he giggled for the
first time all afternoon.

"Yeah."  Mulder smiled.  "Pretty cool, huh?"

Seemingly delighted by his new discovery, William clasped his hands
together, and the musical vibration of the child's giggle carried like
fresh air to Mulder.  The secret moment between father and son warmed
the still frozen places inside Mulder's muscles, and both little
Mulder and big Mulder laughed as they shared in the one thing they
undisputably had in common: uncensored adoration for Dana Katherine
Scully.

"Let's say we take Mommy upstairs," Mulder offered, gripping William
from underneath with one hand, and keeping both the child's body and
the photo secure with the other.

William gurgled at this, and Mulder translated drooling as a 'yes.'  

***************
Shadows of Winter
Part IV
By Jaime Lyn
***************

This part settles into PG land for awhile.  You know what they say,
though? Smut comes to those who wait.  (Or maybe that's just me.)


---


While Scully had set up a makeshift office downstairs, fully equipped
with a desk, a computer, a printer, and a set of resource volumes that
could put the surgeon general to shame, Mulder had never been able to
make the neat little space "his." For one thing, Scully seemed to have
a secret affinity for girly office supplies, like pastel-colored
post-it notes and purple gel pens - these items littered the drawers -
and for another, her files and paperwork and medical journals often
took up so much room that Mulder felt claustrophobic even sitting in
her swivel-chair.

So Mulder had commandeered the spare room upstairs and set up camp,
justifying to Scully that separating their work space would be
beneficial for both of them.  First off, Mulder was often miserly and
comfortably set in his odd ways; he was piggish with his work area and
protective of his files.  And Scully, organized, color-coded,
alphabetized file cabinet that she was, would go and sweep up his
post-it-note numbering system with the Dust-buster whenever she sat
down to check her email.  And as a matter of fact, she'd vacuumed up
his notes so frequently that, after two weeks of sharing an office
space with her, Mulder had been forced to hide the dust-buster
someplace covert that he was sure Scully wouldn't ever look: the
broiler.

Besides that, Scully was his partner and she deserved her own space. 
After eight years of never owning her own desk in the basement office,
Scully now not only claimed ownership to an antique wooden-work desk,
but an entire corner of the room that fairly dripped with her
presence.  A desk, a bookshelf, a corkboard, a game of miniature
battleship - she even had the better stapler.

Mulder's office, however, was not so well-equipped.  His desk was a
long white shelf stacked on a set of milk-crates, and his desk chair
was a feeble metal folding chair from the garage.  The computer was
brand new, and the printer lay on the floor amidst a puddle of wires. 
A box of office supplies sat in one corner, (made a rather nice table,
actually) and there was a hot-chocolate stain on the rug from where
Scully had come up behind him and made breakfast of his neck while he
was trying to figure out how to work his new modem.  Needless to say,
the burn on his foot was healing quite nicely.

"So, Tater-Tot." Mulder set William down on the carpet and extended
his arms in a grand sweep of the room.  "What do you think of Daddy's
private practice so far?  I know it's not much to look at right now,
but you have to imagine actual furniture, and some pictures of weird
crap and - and less boxes.  Oh, and some resolve stain remover to
clean up the chocolate."

William, still clutching the framed photo of his mother to his chest,
gazed at Mulder with a cross between confusion and dismissal. 
Certainly, his son and he had made a bit of headway in the bonding
department, but that didn't mean by default that William bought every
word spewing forth from Mulder's mouth.  Truth be told, Mulder didn't
even buy every word coming out of his own mouth.

Realistically, Mulder had to wonder whether he and Scully would even
be living here long enough for him to acquire new office furniture.
And whether, in a struggle to do what was right, William would once
again be sacrificed to adoptive care.  They couldn't, after all, run
towards the setting sun forever, live out of motels and backwater
towns, at the same time raising a child off a diet of stale pizza and
gunpowder residue.

Mulder powered up his new computer and leaned back in his desk chair. 
Wobbly metal legs protested his audacity to exert pressure.  William
crawled closer to Mulder's feet, dragging the picture frame across the
ground.  Grabbing Mulder's calf, William pulled himself to half-crouch
on unsteady legs and bobbed up and down as if trying to jump.

Mulder grinned and wondered whether his jaw might crack from
stretching too far. An unfamiliar wash of pride flitted over him, and
he had the strange urge to reach for a camera and document this moment
even though he hadn't owned a camera in years.

"Hey Tater-Tot," he said in awe, brushing the light skin of William's
cheek.  "You can stand up, can you?  I had no idea. Why didn't you say
something sooner?  We could have gone for a spin around the living
room."

Mulder's brush turned into a light tweak of the baby's nose, and
William gurgled something unintelligible and smacked Mulder's knees.
"What's that?" asked Mulder, unable to keep the idiotic grin off his
face.  "What is it? What do you need?  Cheeseburger with fries?  I'm
afraid we might have to wait for Mommy."

William oustretched his arms and wriggled his fingers, giving Mulder
that big-blue-eyed 'pick-me-up' look he had earlier given Scully. 
Mulder's eyes widened.  "You - you want up?  You want me to pick you
up?"

William waved his hands impatiently, seemingly annoyed Mulder was so
slow in understanding this.

All the air escaped from Mulder's lungs, and he could do nothing but
nod his agreement.  Pick the baby up - yes, he could do that. He could
pick the baby up. Because... because William wanted Mulder to pick him
up.  William actually wanted Mulder to pick him up.  William wanted
his daddy.  He - Jesus - he wanted his daddy.  Mulder was William's
daddy.  Mulder was somebody's daddy.  Good God, someone had let Mulder
become someone's daddy?

Just as he had done before, Mulder reached under William's armpits and
scooped him up.  He deposited the baby onto his lap and settled him on
one knee.   William squirmed onto the other knee to get better
leverage, fisting the folds of Mulder's t-shirt, and then he cuddled
into Mulder's chest and yawned with his nose in Mulder's ribcage.
Five-thirty obviously meant nap-time in baby speak, and who was Mulder
to argue with this?  William had actually decided to use his father as
a bed and Mulder, being said-father, was so stunned beyond
intelligible language by this that he could only sit and hope his
breathing wasn't too loud or discomfiting.  Mulder was positive that
any sudden movements would somehow break the moment in half and
shatter in desperate shrieks for Scully.

But William remained curled into Mulder's chest, tiny and soft like a
kitten, and Scully remained gone, and Mulder was still breathing. 
Somehow, he hadn't stopped breathing.  The room hadn't exploded and
nobody's head had popped off, and this had to be a good sign.

The computer dinged that Mulder had mail, and Mulder shook his head,
freeing himself of the strange ticklings of fatherhood - the feeling
that at any moment, a sleeping bag made of cement would drop on his
head.
 
The first few emails in his inbox were junk, and he quickly deleted
all of them.  The next email was from runawayfridge@yahoo.com, and the
subject header read "Information Regarding Inquiry."  Swallowing,
Mulder clicked on the link, knowing full well who the email was from. 
While Special Agent John Doggett frequently changed the contacting
address Mulder could reach him at, as did Mulder - for his safety and
Mulder's as well - Doggett usually chose something easily recognizable
from past cases.  The disappearing fridge from Doggett's last X-File
had become a frequent source of amusement for both of them.

There was no flowery introduction in this email, and it started with a
simple statement: "I pulled some strings and got the information you
asked for."

Mulder took a breath and read on.  

"The gunmen had a friend I'm not sure you knew of - Jimmy - who's
something of a fellow traveler.  Jimmy didn't tell me how he did it,
but he managed to get into the sealed records database for the
Georgetown clerk of court.  According to these records, the baby was
given to a couple by the last name of Van De Kamp on May 19th, 2002. 
There was a phone number and an out of state address.  All would seem
to check out with this, except that when I called the couple and
questioned them, they told me that social services returned the day
after the adoption papers were signed to take the child back.  The
social workers apologized for the inconvenience and explained to Mr.
and Mrs. Van De Kamp that they had been given the wrong baby - that
the baby had an incurable condition and would therefore require
extensive care.  The Van De Kamps protested, but were unable to deter
social services.  They were then given another child - a girl by the
name of Moira - and the first baby was taken away. As of this morning,
baby Moira is still living with the Van De Kamps, but their first
adopted child has apparently disappeared from state record."  And at
the bottom was another note, this one much more emotionally fervent: 
"Monica and I have discussed this, and we promise you we'll find him. 
Just send us the word, and we'll do whatever it takes.  J.D."

Frowning, Mulder sat back in his chair, trying to consider this.  So
the couple who had crashed into the tree in front of his house weren't
William's adoptive parents, after all.  The real adoptive parents were
still alive, still none the wiser about William's whereabouts, and the
state of Maryland was definitely not the culprit.

And things got stranger and stranger.    

This couldn't have been the work of supersoldiers; The Van De Kamps
were still alive.  It wasn't supersoldier style to let everyone
standing in the way of what they wanted live.  It also wasn't their
style to enlist the help of unnecessary humans to cart a baby across
the country. And the couple who had gotten their heads bashed in by
the windshield were most definitely human.

Turning over the files in his mental cabinet, Mulder recalled Scully
telling him of the alien-worship cults that had surfaced around the
time of William's birth.  These cults zeroed in on the impending
colonization of the planet, and the myth of "a special child being
born to save humanity."   As a result, these cults had centered their
sights on Mulder's and Scully's only son, and had even tried to kidnap
him once, convinced as they were that William would be the savior of
the human race.

But while most of them had died not long after William's abduction, in
a bonfire of burnt flesh and unidentifiable rubble - according to
Scully, Mulder had no doubt some cult-members still lived somewhere.
It wasn't beyond the realm of possibility for the cult to resurrect
itself.  Perhaps the surviving members had disguised themselves as
social workers to take William for their own bizarre agendas.

But if that was true, then who was baby Moira and where had she come
from?  Was she another baby born under questionable circumstances? And
just how the couple in the car managed to find their way out to
Canada, right to Mulder's very doorstep, was a mystery. If this was
all part of some sort of master plan, Mulder was at a loss to
understand its purpose.

With an exhausted sigh, Mulder rubbed with his free hand over
William's powder-scented back.  It seemed to him that the danger would
never be over, and that William would never be safe.  If anybody could
get to him anywhere, as Scully seemed to claim they could, then where
could he and Scully possibly take William to keep him safe?
 
The little white arrow on the computer screen hovered over the reply
button, and Mulder clicked on it, utterly confused as to how he should
respond to this.  He'd promised Scully he wouldn't reveal to anyone -
not even Agent Doggett, Agent Reyes, or A.D Skinner - or perhaps
especially not to those people, that William had been returned to
them.  But how else could Mulder answer Doggett's fervent reply
without leading them off on a wild-goose-chase?  Lies were unfair but
the truth was even more so.  Mulder squinted his eyes and gazed at the
keyboard.

His mind drifted, and he recalled, in a haze of dark exhaustion, the
time that he and Scully had put down a suspect named Donnie Pfaster, a
fetishist with an inclination towards hair and fingernails.  Donnie
Pfaster was a sweater-vest devil, a study of ordinary evil, and he had
come after Scully with a vengeance.  Angry with having lost her one
time over, Pfaster tried a second time to kill Scully in her own home.
 Scully, in Pfaster's mind, was the 'one who got away.'  She was the
one who'd sent him to jail, who'd kept him from his severed, rotted
remains, from his skulking and murdering and bathtub-drowning in the
fogged cold of night.

Mulder recalled how Scully agonized over shooting Pfaster in the end -
Mulder claimed self-defense, and Scully insisted that they both knew
the truth.  She shot him because she wanted to, because she needed to,
because some unfocused rage within her had ordered her to do it, and
not because her actions had been justified by some carefully written
code of FBI protocol.  They debated it that night on his couch, her
with a throw blanket tucked under her knees and he with a steaming mug
of tea in his hands; Was Scully's pull of the trigger divine
intervention, or was the silent tickling of revenge, however
justified, a calling card left by subtle demons?  Or perhaps Scully
had just snapped, and any other symbolism they fished for was merely
justification for temporary insanity.

Neither of them would ever know.  

Scully believed that God existed, and that all things in the Universe
somehow fell within this rubric of an endless, divinely created
tapestry. Mulder, however, wasn't so sure.  At the very least, he
wanted to believe in something, in some higher power watching over
him, leading him somewhere, leading him to do the right thing, but he
didn't feel he had the strength to believe anything else as blindly as
he'd believed in The X-Files.  And look what that had gotten him after
years of childlike faith.

Finally coming to a decision, Mulder typed out the simple phrase,
"Don't look any further," and hit the 'send' button. It wasn't
necessarily the truth, but it wasn't a lie either.

The next email was postmarked from LSelden@Universitymedical.com, and
Mulder's heart calmed just at the sight of it.  LSelden - Lily Selden.
His wife.  She had that slow, molasses-like comforting effect on him,
sort of like coming home -

Mulder frowned as he realized that he hadn't called or thought of her
as his wife since William was returned to them, as if William's return
marked an invisible line of demarcation separating this life from the
one previous.

Life now versus life before.  Which would emerge victorious?

For four months Dana Scully had been Lily Selden, wife of Paul Selden,
and now in the span of one day she had gone back to being Dana Scully
again, partner of Fox Mulder.  And he was again Fox Mulder, not Paul
Selden, and he had absolutely no idea what any of that meant.  They
shared a bed, ate dinner together when possible, argued over the
remote, left dirty towels on the floor of the bathroom. They'd gone
from close friends to married in under sixty seconds, and neither of
them had any idea how to live in the gray areas.

Mulder clicked on the email, whose subject line read 'Results are in,'
and shook his head.  Too much thinking about his relationship with
Scully was bound to give him a migraine.

"I just performed the analysis work-up on your evidence," read the
first line.  Then: "The substance is, for the most part, not composed
of any known organic material.  Not a surprise.  The only recognizable
compound I was able to extract was an excess amount of iron magnetite,
but from my understanding, this is the same material that, in large
quantities, is lethal to the type of being we're dealing with.  The
presence of iron, in this case, would seem to indicate either
inadvertent poisoning or some sort of mutation.  In short, this is not
the same type of material we've previously come into contact with. 
Could it have degenerated into a more primal form?  Perhaps that
explains the displacement of oil.  Don't email back.  I'd prefer we
talk about this in person."

Mulder scrolled down to the second paragraph, and read on, "I
accidentally got lost on the way to exam room two and found myself in
the morgue. Cause of death on the deceased couple in the car has been
listed as reckless driving.  Toxicology report indicates inebriation
high above the legal limit.  What do you make of this? - Me.  P.S - I
hope both of you are getting along alright.  I'll be home soon, but
I'll call first.  Don't burn the house down."

Mulder paused over the keyboard, considering this newest batch of
unexpected unpleasantness.

So the green goo that they'd found in those cans had been some sort of
alien fluid.

Well.  

Mulder had automatically assumed the substance was alien blood, but
that didn't make the idea gospel.  And the fact that there was a high
amount of iron concentration in the substance pointed more towards
self-destruction of the creature than towards escape.  Scully had once
before insinuated these creatures knew what killed them, and they knew
to stay away from it.

Mulder narrowed his eyes, and the words on the screen swam across the
white email background.   The most obvious assumption had, of course,
been that these beings - these supersoldiers or hybrids or whatever
they were - had come looking for he and Scully for the intent purpose
of murdering them.  Then again, his experience investigating the
paranormal had long ago taught Mulder things were rarely what they
first seemed to be.  So what then? Was it possible that whatever had
been poking around in Jake Walker's garage was not looking for revenge
at all, but instead looking to save itself?  Could it have been dying?
Something about the stolen oil seemed to indicate -

A sharp, loud ringing disrupted Mulder's thoughts, and his muscles
spasmed in a quick, violent shudder.  The jump of his legs
inadvertently startled the baby, who, jolted from sleep, raked his
fingers unhappily across Mulder's chest, gurgled, coughed, tilted back
his head, and let out a long, hard wail that could have doubled as an
air-raid siren.

 "Shit!" Mulder hissed, stomping his foot in frustration - 

Which only incited louder wails from the baby, and flailing hands.  

Mulder gazed helplessly from his crying son to the phone and then back
to his son, unsure of what the correct protocol in this situation was.
 He had one of two options: It could be Scully trying to get through
to the house, in which case he should definitely reach for the phone
and put the baby down. But if it turned out to be a telemarketer and
not Scully, then putting the baby down and getting the phone would
only end up erasing a good amount of parent-child-bonding.

The phone rang a second time.  The baby shrieked louder.  Baby, phone,
baby, phone...

Just as with driving cross-country on a case, chances were great that
Mulder would choose the wrong path and end up sputtering out of gas in
Son-Hates-Me-Againsville. He felt suddenly like a teenager babysitting
for the first time, and he imagined himself in a ridiculous t-shirt
with the words 'What Would Scully Do?' embroidered on the front.

"Oh hell."  

In the end, he held the screaming baby to his chest with one hand and
reached for the phone with the other...

Only to find it not there.  Of course.  

Where had the portable phone been last?  Mulder frowned, trying to
think over the ringing and the screaming and the baby's fists smacking
him in the ribs.

"Bedroom," said Mulder, and he desperately tried righting the angry
baby as he exited the office and headed off towards the bedroom. 
William pounded Mulder's chest like an excited gorilla-cub and he
wailed even harder than he pounded.  Advil number four, it seemed, was
not that far off.

To quell William's panic, Mulder could only wince and press a quick
kiss to the top of his son's head, holding the baby to his chest as he
rushed towards the bedroom like a linebacker making for the end-zone. 
The last thing he needed was Scully thinking that he'd actually burned
the house down.

Mulder entered the bedroom on the fourth ring and paused in the
doorway, catching his breath and rocking William  as the answering
machine got to the ringing first: too late now, Mulder mused. He
pressed his lips to William's temple - just as he'd seen Scully do it
- and tried a calming technique of his own making.

"Come on, Tater-Tot. Why don't we try and be friends again, okay?  I
know I'm not real good at this yet, but I'm getting better, don't you
think?"

The answering machine beeped, and William's cries died down into
unhappy sniffles.  Sniffles were at least better than shrieks of
bloody murder, and Mulder took a deep breath, swearing off Advil. 
"There," he said, and he craned back slightly to gaze into his son's
wary, tired face.  "You know, you're a lot like your mother when she
wakes up in the morning.  She's just as grumpy, but you're a much
better screamer."  Mulder grinned, about to say something else, when a
woman's voice floated to him from the answering machine.

"Paul Selden?  This is Dr. Kathy Carmichael from University Medical -
I'm a colleague of your wife's.   I'm not sure if you have a cell
phone, but this is the number on your wife's contact sheet so I hope
you're just busy and not out for the afternoon. Ah, I just wanted to
inform you that your wife had a bit of an episode this afternoon - "

Mulder's eyes went wide with fear and he rushed towards the dresser,
William bouncing none-too-happily against his hip.  Swallowing back
the taste of a late lunch, he reached for the cordless phone and
jabbed the talk button.  "This is Paul," he said breathlessly, his
voice pounding like a hammer in his ears.  "Lily's husband.  What
happened?  Where is she?  Did you take her anywhere?"

"Mr. Selden," the doctor said, "Before you grow alarmed, let me say
that Lily's just fine."

Mulder blinked in slow motion; time must have stopped without telling
him.  He knew he should have pressed harder about Scully's dizziness. 
He knew something wasn't okay.  Why was this idiot doctor saying
everything was fine when everything was so obviously not fine?

"Just tell me about Lily," he said, unsure of what else to say.  "Is
she alright?  What happened?  Just tell me what happened."

The doctor took a breath.  She sounded so annoyingly calm Mulder
wanted to strangle her.

"Like I said, Lily's just fine," the doctor said.  "She had a bit of a
fainting spell a little while ago, that's all, and a few of us
suggested that she lie down and take it easy.  We wanted to run some
blood workup on her just to make sure nothing was wrong, but she
refused.  She asked for her husband.  Perhaps you could talk to her
and convince her - "

"I'm on my way," Mulder said, only half-hearing, and he hung up the
phone.

His pulse thready, Mulder ran cool lips along William's forehead to
try and calm himself. Skin like Scully's skin, eyes a color so similar
to hers.  He couldn't look at this child and not think of Dana Scully.
 His Scully.  His partner, his wife, the mother of his child -

Like a lightning bolt to his chest, Mulder realized what Scully saw
every time she gazed at this baby, and why she so desperately wanted
to cling to that truth.

William was a living incarnation of the two of them: two wandering
spirits fused by passion in a burst of light, driven by hope from
opposite ends of the Universe.  William was their compass in the dead
of night, the glow of a lighthouse guiding them to the passageway
beneath rocky cliffs, urging them forward. Keep looking, keep
fighting, keep searching - together.  William's existence proved they
could do it.  Loving William wasn't just about love; loving him went
so much deeper than anything love could define.

William was truth's end; he was wherever the light moved.

"Guess we're taking a little trip," Mulder told William, his voice
shaky.  "Mommy's not feeling well, but she's going to be alright."  He
kissed the baby again, willing this to be true.  "Mommy's going to be
just fine.  We'll go pay her a visit and kidnap her and bring her
home.  Then we're all going to sit and have dinner.  Just the three of
us.  I promise."

--

The hospital waiting room was empty, and its white walls were awash
with ribbons of purple and scarlet urging the evening's entrance
through horizontal blinds. In the far corner, a TV perched on a high
shelf, and flashes of blue interspersed with the sunset: the local
meteorologist was predicting a doozy of a storm to roll through during
the late hours of tonight and on into tomorrow.  Outside, swirls of
freezing air smelled like rain, but rain wasn't the problem at this
latitude.

Mulder held William suspended on one hip as he bypassed several
couches and approached the nurses' station. William flitted with his
hood until he finally shoved it off his head, and as a victory meal,
he pushed both shoe-string hood-ties into his mouth.

William had, ironically enough, enjoyed the car-ride to the hospital,
despite Mulder's interspersed cursing at Canadian drivers and at the
state of the highways when people thought it was going to snow;
traffic slowed to an excruciating halt in order to anticipate the
first flake falling.  And of course, roads were only blocked when he
had to get to Scully.  That was the nature and inherent cruelty of
Murphy's Law.  What should have been a fifteen minute drive had taken
half an hour, even with Mulder's use of bureau tactical maneuvers to
try and manhandle his way through a rush hour mess of automobiles.

All he could think about was Scully.  

He needed to see for himself that she was alright.  If, for no other
reason, than to blast her about keeping the status of her health to
herself.  While honesty was something both of them had always valued,
Mulder assumed that, at the very least, seeing her naked on a daily
basis now meant he had a right to the really important details.

"Well, well, well," said the nurse at the front desk.  "If it isn't
'Guilty as Charged.' "  She pressed her chin into her palm and slid
the triage clipboard down into her lap.  "And 'Guilty as Charged
Junior.' " A lock of black, corkscrew-curled hair skipped over her
arm.  Her glasses had sloped down the tip of her nose, the corners of
her lips turned up, and one black eyebrow raised in question.  She
still wasn't the most hospitable of nurses, but at least today she
looked less likely to kill somebody than she had the day before.

"Lily Selden," said Mulder, swallowing back what felt like several
vital organs.  He juggled William closer to his chest; the nurse's
stapler was way too shiny and appealing for its own good.

The nurse winked at William, who curled like a rolly-bug into Mulder's
neck.  How nice it was that his son trusted Mulder only marginally
more than the scary nurse.  Real progress there.  Or else it would
have been - might have been - if only the hospital hadn't called at
the worst possible moment.  Mulder wondered briefly how much time had
passed between Scully emailing him and Scully fainting.  How long had
the hospital waited before calling him?

And then he forced out a few shaky breaths of air, unable to think
about it any further.

"Three doors down on your right," said the nurse, and her voice had
the hoarse pitch of a practiced smoker.   "Look for the staff lounge. 
She's lying down in there."

Mulder nodded his thanks and took off down the hallway, so zealous he
nearly tripped over his own shoelaces and slammed headfirst into a
'caution, wet floor' sign.  He groaned and righted himself, and
William giggled at the unexpected ride; that would certainly be
something, wouldn't it?  All three of them laid up in the hospital.

Heading further down the hallway, Mulder coughed. That disinfectant
hospital stench always did him in.  The odor of bleach reminded him of
formaldehyde, like the kind of liquid his science teachers had used to
preserve frog carcasses for dissection in the ninth grade. He'd only
tried dissection once, and unfortunately was the only kid in the
classroom without a partner to help him out.  He opened the lid of the
jar, coughed, turned to his immediate left, and puked all over his
shoes.  That was the first and last dissection he'd ever performed. 
In hindsight, it was a wonder he could even stand in Scully's exam
rooms when she had a body on the table.  Thank God his partner's
delicate features and soft voice were a good enough distraction.

The nameplate above the third door read "Staff only" and Mulder turned
the knob, pushing it open.  He breathed a stomach-gurgling sigh of
relief at the odor of freshly brewed coffee. Coffee was better than
formaldehyde.  Heck, burnt hair was better than formaldehyde.

In the middle of the room stood a wooden table, and a set of
wood-and-metal chairs that had the ambiance of dorm-room furniture. 
Along the wall perpendicular to the door was a set of scratched, blue
lockers. Along the other was a set of candy machines and a half
counter set into the stucco.  A sink hollowed out the counter, and
next to the sink, a coffee maker bubbled new coffee and a dirty
microwave waited for food.

The wall parallel to the door supported a light blue couch, and on
that couch sat Dana Scully, her ivory hands folded in her lap.  
Mulder's breath caught at the sight of her, as his breath often did. 
Her shoulder length red waves had been pushed out of her face with a
blue surgical cap, and her eyes focused on the TV, on the same
meteorologist from the waiting room who predicted severe
precipitation.  She gazed at her hands every few seconds, picking at
some invisible skin around her cuticles.  Realization that she was,
indeed, just fine, flitted through Mulder's veins, and he allowed
himself to begin breathing normally again.

William caught sight of Scully almost immediately, and he squirmed in
Mulder's arms to get to her.  He made several impatient "uh-uh" noises
and wriggled his fingers towards the woman who had, just this morning,
fed him spoonfuls of oatmeal while trying to make him laugh by
crossing her eyes.  Mulder had to agree with his son on this one; that
Scully was a nice, nice lady.

Upon William's gurgling, Scully turned towards the door.  Her eyes met
Mulder's face and then William's, and her lips broke out into a warm,
dazzling smile - and then, almost as soon as the smile appeared, it
dissolved into a thin line of alarm.  She gazed about the lounge as if
expecting fellow doctors to pop out from under the table with machetes
and black claws.

"What are you doing here?" she asked, her gaze squared on William. 

Mulder dragged a chair from the center of the room and set it beside
the couch.

"Deep regression hypnosis," said Mulder.  "What does it look like?" 
He passed the squirming child along to Scully, who captured him in a
loose embrace and pressed a kiss to his forehead.  "I'm imagining back
to a past life as a bullfrog.  If I start hopping around the room,
it's not my fault."

Scullys eyebrow rose.  William turned sideways in her grip and began
rubbing the hairs on her arms, thoroughly enraptured.

"You know," said Mulder.  "That kid's going to give you rug burn."

"He shouldn't be here," Scully whispered, as if the baby could somehow
turn invisible.  "You shouldn't be here with him.  If somebody sees -
"

"I know." Mulder rubbed an itch at the corner of his eye.  "But its
fine. Trust me.  Nobody saw me bring the kid in but old man winter and
one angry looking nurse at the front desk."  He tried to keep the
impatience and hurt out of his tone; the situation with William kept
coming back to a matter of trust, and the lack of it on Scully's part
was alarming.

"Even still."  She shifted to accommodate the baby, and William's head
tilted back as he waved hello to the ceiling.

"What would you prefer I do, then?  Lock him in a closet?"

"Why?  You could have just stayed home this afternoon."  The skin at
the bridge of her nose pinched.  "Why are you here, anyway?"

Mulder rubbed the back of his neck and felt as if his muscles had
frozen solid.  "Are you kidding me?"

"No, I'm not.  Why are you here?"

"You mean you don't remember?"  Mulder's eyebrows rose.  "The doctor
didn't mention any lapses of disorientation. Maybe we should just get
you home, discuss this later."

"No, we'll discuss this now.  Why are you here?"

Mulder gestured an open palm towards her.  "You fainted," he said.  

The frown turned into a look of intense disbelief. Scully's cheeks
flushed the color of plum.  "Well... yes... I know that, but how do
you know that?"

"Because you asked for me." 

Scully frowned.  "I asked for you?"

"Yes."

"And they called you?"

"Yes."

"But I didn't - I never asked for you."

"Yes, you did."  Mulder tapped her knuckles with his index finger,
concerned.  "You asked one of the doctors for your husband.  Maybe you
mumbled it and don't remember, but someone heard you.  And if memory
serves, 'your husband' would be me - unless you've got some other
husbands stashed away in one of those lockers..."  Mulder frowned.
"You don't, do you?"

"No, one is enough.  Believe me."  Scully's lips rested atop the
baby's soft, downy head. "Look, I'm sorry you felt the need to rush
down here.  I'm fine.  Really."

"No, seriously." Mulder traced his fingers over hers, settling his
hand into the warmth of her skin. "You going to tell me, lady, or do I
have to beat it out of you?"

Scully opened her palm and allowed his fingers to trace her lines. 
"Mysterious evening beatings," she mused, echoing an earlier exchange
in what seemed an attempt at leavening.  "A man after my own heart."

Mulder shook his head.  He gazed up at the television, where the
meteorologist had transformed into the anchor. The screen flipped
angles again, and a list of provisions appeared for those unaccustomed
to handling blizzards.  Flashlights, bottled water, batteries, radios,
space heaters - keep away from flammable objects, safety first -
canned goods, matches, candles... Mulder ran a mental checklist of
their own provisions in his mind, trying hard not to picture Scully
sprawled on the floor of their bathroom, nose dripping with blood. 
Hefty federal training and a good medical background had seen to it
that Dana Scully never went down.  Never.  The only time Mulder could
recall her ever blacking out was when -

"I'm not exactly sure what's wrong," said Scully.  Mulder turned to
her, and her gaze skirted the floor.  "I wasn't feeling well the other
day, but I, ah, I didn't think much of it.  I haven't been really
hungry lately, so I guess I haven't eaten - not properly, at any rate,
and I thought, maybe I just malnourished myself.  And then last night
I didn't - I thought, maybe because of William and having skipped
dinner and all the stress..." She took a breath.  "I had a muffin when
I came in this morning, but I couldn't keep it down. Maybe it is
stress, or maybe... I don't know. Maybe it's something else."

Mulder's face whitened. His heartbeat strained like a bowling ball
stressing against his ribs.  "You don't think it's -"

"No."  Scully squeezed his fingertips.  "I know what you're thinking
of, but that's not it.  I haven't had any problems or nosebleeds since
the chip..."  She cleared her throat.  "Since the chip."

Mulder nodded slowly.  "You think it's the stomach flu?"  

"I -"  Scully paused, her cheeks that same pink.  There was a strange,
nervous tugging at the corners of her lips that Mulder couldn't
decipher.  "I think it might...might be something else."

"Well, whatever you think it might be - "  He gestured around the
room.  "You've got all this medical equipment just lying around here
at your disposal.  You might as well get things checked out."

Scully ran her fingers in circles through William's baby-fine hair,
seemingly fascinated with straightening each light brown strand.  She
was avoiding direct eye-contact with him and he had no idea why.  
"You know why I didn't want anyone checking things out," she
whispered.

"I know," he agreed, releasing her free hand back into her lap.  "But
you're a doctor, Criminal.  You understand why these things are
important and you can probably do them yourself."  At Scully's non
reply, Mulder continued, "Look.  At the very least, I need you to be
of some use to me, right?  And if you're puking and passing out all
over the place there's no way I can take care of both you and the
Tater-Tot."

"The Tater-Tot?"   Scully's eyebrow shot up.  

"Yeah."  Mulder pressed a palm to William's back and brushed his
fingers over the soft, downy coat.  "You wouldn't understand,
Criminal.  See - me and the Tater had a thing going this afternoon.
Real manly man, father-son stuff.  He's almost ready to kill his first
wild animal."

"Really."

Mulder touched William's cheek and grinned.  "Yeah, well...I wouldn't
want to bore you with the logistics of male-bonding, and neither does
the Tater.  Right, Tater?"

William turned his head and smiled up at his father.  

"Exactly," said Mulder.

"Shit," answered William, clapping his hands together in delight.  

Scully's eyes widened.  Mulder blanched. 

"Shit," William repeated, utterly amused with himself.

Mulder's face flushed red and when he opened his mouth to explain
himself, nothing came out but a squeak.  He waited patiently for the
trapdoor beneath the chair to open up and suck him through.  Of
course, his son's first word couldn't be Mommy or Daddy, or even UFO. 
It had to be shit.  'Shit' was right.

With an amused crinkle between her eyes, Scully shifted her son around
in her lap so that he faced her, and she touched an index finger to
the dimple in his tiny chin.  "Excuse me, young man?" she said,
glancing at Mulder out of her peripheral vision.  "What did you just
say?"

William giggled drooly bubbles from the side of his mouth, and
repeated the word, "shit."  He flapped his arms against Scully's chest
and kept going.  "Shit, shit, shit, shit."

Scully blinked at her son and nodded.  "Male bonding indeed," she
said, gazing back up at Mulder.

Mulder shrugged, smiling a lopsided grin.  

"Unbelievable, P.I."  There was a glint of mischief in her sea-blue
eyes.  "I leave you alone with him for one afternoon.  One afternoon,
dear husband.  You couldn't have held off with the moral corruption?"

"Oh, come on.  There's always room for moral corruption."  

The sound of a throat clearing interrupted the moment, and Mulder
turned to see a light-haired nurse standing in the doorway to the
lounge.

"Dr. Selden?" the woman asked, clipboard in hand.  

Scully straightened at the sound of her pseudonym, jutted her chin,
and tightened her grip on the baby.  She looked embarrassed at having
been caught so off guard, so unprofessional. Suddenly, she was the
epitome of Special Agent Dana Scully, not Mrs. Lily Seden, and she
shielded the baby with her upper arms - as if she considered anything
with legs a threat. It was Mulder-Paranoia run amok in Dana Scully,
and Mulder could only be thankful that their guns were locked in a
drawer by the bed.

"Yes, Amy?"  

"There's someone outside to see you."  The nurse named Amy gestured
towards the hallway.

Scully and Mulder exchanged glances, both communicating with their
eyes a degree of suspicion: They had no friends, no family, nobody who
knew them out here besides Scully's coworkers.  The only person they'd
actually met since moving to Canada was Jake Walker, and Mulder
couldn't recall giving Jake access to Scully's work address.

Scully's eyes narrowed, and she turned towards the nurse in the
doorway.  "Did this person happen to mention a name?"

The nurse named Amy nodded, and she glanced at her clipboard, tapping
out a mindless rhythm with her fingers.  "She said her name was
Marita.  She said specifically that you would know who she was."

Mulder's breath caught, and he turned to Scully, who seemed unable to
speak.  Amy shifted her weight in the doorway, tap-tapping her
fingernails away on the clipboard.

"What did she look like?" asked Mulder.  He ground his knuckles into
the wooden chair, tenuously clawing at the hope that his partner
somehow had a patient whose mother's sister's aunt just so happened to
be named Marita.

Amy squinted and scratched the side of her neck.  "Ah... Not too tall,
blonde, nice suit..."

Oxygen drained from the air, leaving emptiness in its wake; Mulder
felt like a space-shuttle astronaut in the first six minutes of
flight.

Scully's hands trembled around the baby's middle, but otherwise she
gave no indication of faltering.  "Can you give us a minute, Amy?" she
said, her voice a key higher than normal.

Amy nodded and turned in the doorway, shutting the door behind her.  

A panicked, sick feeling came over Mulder, numbing all else but
thoughts of his family.  His family - he needed to protect his wife
and child.   Above all else, he needed to keep them safe.

Recalling the missing oil, and the green inorganic ooze, and the
letter from Agent Doggett, he reached over and grasped Scully's upper
elbows. "Look at me," he said, forcing a steadiness in his voice that
he didn't quite feel. Scully's gaze met his, but her pupils darted,
searching, nervous.  "I want you to go get your car right now and take
William home."  Scully's brows converged in the center above her nose,
but before she could protest, Mulder continued, "If this is who we
think it is, then we don't know what she wants.  If she wants William,
then we have to get him out of here.  You fainted this afternoon and
we don't know why, and if something were to happen I don't want to
risk -"

"No."

Mulder gritted his teeth.  "Damn it, Criminal.  You need to listen - "

"No."  Scully touched his cheek.  "You need to listen. I told you once
already, you're not leaving me behind.  I won't stand at the base of
some mountain waiting for you."

"I'm not leaving you behind.   I'm trying to do the right thing.  This
isn't a hypothetical situation anymore.  This is real. It's not - "

"It is exactly - " Mulder's gaze darted, unable to focus clearly on
anything, and Scully tilted a finger beneath his chin to pull him
back.  "Look at me, Mulder.  It is exactly what I was talking about. 
We do this together or we don't do it.  I'm not going anywhere without
you.  I made that mistake once and I'll be damned if I make it again. 
If that woman out there is Marita Covarrubias then we will face her
together.  This hospital is a public place - if she's going to pull
something it won't be here.  I can tell Amy that we'll meet her in the
cafeteria."

Mulder sighed, and Scully's finger fell back to her lap.  "Are you
sure?" he asked.

"Yes."  Her eyes glinted, her chin resting on William's head.  "We're
facing this together. Whatever this is, I'm ready for it."
  
*************
Shadows of Winter
Part V
by Jaime Lyn 
*************

Another PG section.  Welcome to mytharc land.  

---

The hospital cafeteria was wasn't exactly a dead-of-night ghost town,
but it wasn't the hubbub of the town square, either.  Corner tables
and side booths were dotted with mingling diners wearing visitors'
badges, and hospital personnel sporting dangling ID lanyards.  The
servers and janitorial staff behind the counter stood in a cluster
around an old, black and white Zenith, loudly debating whether or not
the predicted storm would bring in as much snowfall as the news
suggested.  Apparently, when nothing-much was the norm, the buzz was
always the weather.

Scully had forgone her lab coat in favor of walking the halls in her
pantsuit, but her ID badge still hung around her neck as a bold
proclamation of the professional she would forever be.  The baby
fidgeted on her hip, grabbing at anything that darted out towards him:
the corners of walls and the edges of opened doors, the bars from food
carts and the ID badges of other doctors.  He babbled incessantly to
passers-by in the language of Gobbledygook, and occasionally he
interspersed a "shit" or two when he especially liked someone.  If
Mulder hadn't been so on edge about why they were going to the
cafeteria, Scully's stuttered explanations about their child's newly
established grasp of English swear-words would probably have amused
Mulder to no end.

As it went, Mulder had no concrete explanations for Scully, or for
himself, on why their Universe had suddenly been turned on its head. 
They'd been living in Canada without incident for four months now, and
had managed to maintain anonymity ever since Mulder's break out of
jail back in May. Nobody - not even Skinner, Doggett, or Reyes, knew
of their whereabouts.  But now with William returned, and Marita
somehow in town, and evidence that pointed towards alien involvement,
perhaps their false sense of anonymity had been just that: false,
fabricated; it was the lie that he and Scully chose to believe.

These men in power, the men who continued to propagate a plan to
colonize the planet, they certainly had demonstrated a proficiency in
keeping tabs on whoever pleased them.  If their technology was still
being utilized, then someone still had an agenda.  But Mulder had
assumed most of the original conspirators had died, or if they weren't
already dead, they'd at least gone into hiding across the globe;
grains of sand were always harder to mobilize when scattered over a
stadium sized surface.

But even the alien threat had diminished considerably since William's
adoption and Mulder's trial, and ever since New Mexico Mulder had
thought they were safe.  Relatively safe, that is.  The human threat
was still a threat, but it was considerably easier to deal with. 
Humans had frailties - they were expendable.  Supersoldiers
essentially had no frailties, and they had a sickening adeptness at
smoking out what they wanted, when they wanted it.

And then there was this newest development: Marita Covarrubias,
Mulder's former contact, and a Special Representative to the United
Nations.  While Marita had never presented herself as a threat, nor
had she stood specifically on either side of the fence, she was a
hard-assed mercenary as much as Alex Krycek had been.  She worked for
nobody but herself.  Her duplicity was wrapped in a prettier package,
but it existed, nonetheless. If Marita was here to warn him and
Scully, then she was here for her own reasons.  And if it was William
she had come to claim, she wasn't going to get him.  Not so long as
Mulder moved and breathed.

"Paul - " 

Mulder paused as Scully pressed a hand to his back. He turned to her
and caught a glimpse of another woman standing to her left, smiling
and shaking hands with William.  The unfamiliar brunette had a
hospital ID lanyard hanging from her neck and an uneaten green apple
in her free hand; William seemed to be fascinated with taking the
apple from her.

"What is it?"

"Dr. Carmichael," Scully answered, nodding to the brown-haired woman
at her side.   "Kathy Carmichael.  She's a colleague of mine.  Kathy,
this is my husband, Paul."

"We've met," said Kathy, pushing a long, dark strand of hair back over
her ear.  She extended a hand to Mulder, and Mulder shook it.  "Well,
not officially."  Dr. Carmichael waved a hand in explanation.  "Your
husband hung up on me."

"He does that," said Scully.

Mulder pursed his lips and shrugged, distracted.  He hadn't meant to
be rude on the phone, and he certainly didn't mean to be now, but
there were other concerns.  If Scully was stalling for time by
striking up conversation with her colleagues, then she was only
putting off the inevitable.

"Kathy's going to watch William for a little while," Scully explained,
handing off the child to her co-worker.  Her hands lingered on
William's back for a moment, her blue eyes stark with concern.  She
brushed the back of William's head and her lower lip quivered as she
kissed his tiny fingers.

Mulder watched the exchange with a degree of apprehension, unsure that
he wanted anyone other than Scully touching his child.  If he'd wanted
before to give William back to his adoptive parents, he now wanted
nothing more than to lock the baby in a room with Scully and board up
the door with steel bars.

"We'll hang out here for a little while," said Kathy, smiling and
brushing noses with William, who squealed with excitement.  "You two
go do whatever it is you need to do."

Scully nodded at Kathy, and then steeled her gaze with Mulder.  

"Oh, and Lily?"

At the sound of her name, Scully turned one last time to her
colleague, who bounced William on her hip.  "Do me a favor?  Eat
something, okay?  Before you leave for the day?  Have some toast or
orange juice. You're in the cafeteria, you might as well.  Your
glucose levels can't be great."

Scully nodded almost imperceptibly, her breathing hard, long, and
deep, her nostrils flared, her eyes clouded with concentration. 
Mulder recognized this exercise; Scully was trying to regain her
composure.  She wasn't going to pass out again, but she just might
burst into tears.

"She'll eat something," said Mulder, and he touched the top of
William's head with his palm.  "If it was me, she'd never let me get
away with it."

"I can imagine," said Kathy, and she settled the baby more firmly onto
her hip. In response, William scooped up the doctor's laminated ID
badge and stuffed it into his mouth. "Okay then.  We'll be right over
there." She chucked a thumb in the direction of a nearby booth.

Scully forced a smile that seemed dangerously close to tearful
resignation.  "Thank you," she said, trailing her fingers down
William's back.   Kathy nodded and turned, making her way towards the
booth.

Mulder touched Scully's arm as she watched them go.  "Good call," he
said.

Scully took a breath, pivoting on her heels.  "Let's just get this
over with."

Mulder nodded.  Both turned and searched the wooden sea of tables and
hard-backed plastic chairs.

At a table in the center of the cafeteria sat the woman they'd come to
see; it was indeed Marita Covarrubias, her blonde hair pulled back in
a tight bun, her blue eyes straight ahead, her hands folded on the
table.  She tilted her chin in silent acknowledgement of Mulder and
Scully's presence, and then nodded to the two chairs set in front of
her. On the table beside her was a black bag, and next to the bag, a
black overcoat.

"Well, well," she said, her face expressionless as they approached.
"If it isn't Agents Eighty-Six and Ninety-Nine. I thought for a minute
that I might have the wrong hospital."

Scully sat to the left of Mulder, and both exchanged silent glances.  

"I see my parcel made it to you safe and sound.  That's good."  Marita
tilted her chin towards the back booth, where Kathy Carmichael sat
entertaining William.

"Your parcel," said Scully, and her ice-blue eyes refused to give away
her hand.  "So this was your doing?"

"Let's just say I had a vested interest in his safety, yes."  Marita
re-directed her gaze at Mulder.  "I believe in returning a courtesy."

Scully's eyes narrowed, and a tinge of something unrecognizable rested
in the glint of her sapphire irises.  "What do you mean, returning a
courtesy?"

"I mean exactly what I said.  Agent Mulder saved my life and I'm
returning the courtesy."  Marita seemed to work her jaw before
choosing her next words. "There are numerous examples I could give
you, Agent Scully, but I'll choose the most obvious.  When he was on
trial for murder, Agent Mulder could have used my knowledge of the
alien plot to his advantage.  That he didn't act selfishly is a
testament to his good character.  He chose my life over his, which is
a show of faith other associates would never have afforded me.  Like I
said, I believe in returning a courtesy."

Mulder avoided Scully's glance in his direction, his eyes focused on
Marita, and then on the table.  Fuzzy details were starting to twist
into focus now, and if this situation hadn't already been bad enough,
then it was about to get a whole lot worse.

Somehow, he had the distinct feeling that the 'courtesy' Marita
claimed she was repaying had nothing to do with the trial, and
everything to do with her stay with him in a double-wide trailer in
the middle of Southern New Mexico.

"You stole our son from his foster parents," said Mulder, cringing. 
"You were the one who orchestrated the baby switch, and it was your
people who crashed into the tree out front, wasn't it?  Let's not kid
ourselves and pretend that you did this purely to repay a courtesy. 
You knew something, something you still won't say."

Scully frowned and turned to him.  "Mulder?"

Mulder and Marita just stared at each other, searching the silence for
answers.

"Mulder?" Scully repeated, touching his elbow with one finger. 
"What's this about a baby switch?"

And like a rubber band, Mulder snapped back to her.  

"I got an email from Agent Doggett this afternoon," Mulder explained. 
"William Mulder was given up for adoption on May 13th, 2002. On May
19th, he was taken to a home in the mid-west and given to a couple by
the name of Van De Kamp.  He was returned to social services a day
later, and another baby was given to the Van De Kamps in his place,
although the state currently has no record of this exchange.  Nor do
they have any federal records of the baby who took William's place.  A
child around the same age, by the name of Moira."

Scully was silent, her mouth half opened, her pupils darting as if
trying to process this.  At both womens silence, Mulder leaned
forward so that his knuckles were mere centimeters from Marita's. "Who
is baby Moira?" he demanded in a low voice.  "And don't bullshit me
that you don't know, because I think we both know that you do."

Scully's gaze darted from Mulder to Marita.  Marita gazed at her
hands, for a moment unwilling to look up, and her hard facade crumbled
just slightly, as if Mulder had swung a jackhammer right into the
brick wall of her one weakness.

"Moira was my child," Marita finally admitted, raising a gaze as hard
as stone.  If there was a chip in the wall now, she made damn sure no
one could see it.

"I didn't plan to have her, I couldn't take care of her, and turning
her over to someone else was preferable to leaving her on the side of
the road.  There is no place in my life for a child, Agent Mulder, and
there never will be.  Her parentage and origin really aren't any of
your concern or your business, but she's safe where she is.  She's not
like William was. For awhile I thought she might be..."  Marita
paused, jutted her chin in defiance. "But she's not. And now she's
gone and it doesn't matter any longer.  Your son didn't belong in
adoptive care any more than my daughter belonged in mine."

"You had a child," Scully said, her eyes dangerous.  

"Yes."

"And you gave that child up.  Switched it with mine."

"Yes."

"Why?"

Marita's eyes narrowed.  "I told you why."  

"Oh, right.  I forgot.  Repaying a courtesy."  Scully's voice was
laced with bitterness. "So, what then? You're saying you
single-handedly 'fixed' things?  You righted my wrong?"

"I gave Agent Mulder his son back," Marita snapped.  

Scully visibly bristled.  Her fist clenched beneath the table. He
reached over and squeezed her knee, reminded her he was there, right
there beside her.

"You have no way of knowing whether what you did put my son in even
more danger," Scully said, although her voice seemed to soften a hair.
 Regardless of circumstances, Scully still understood what it meant to
give up a child, and she was too good hearted to not consider that
information.

"Your son is in no greater danger now than he was nine months ago,"
Marita argued.

Scully's leg muscles tensed beneath his fingertips.  "Tell me how you
seem to have more information on the subject than I do."

Again, Marita focused on Mulder, and her gaze was so absolute it
seemed to disinclude Scully entirely. Mulder shifted at the unwavering
attention, unsure of where to rest his hands or how to keep his legs
from trembling.  There were some strange waves radiating from the
former representative of the UN, and he wasn't sure he liked the
direction of the tide.

 If Scully picked up on any of what Mulder did, her gaze never wavered
an inch.

"As you know, Jeffrey Spender admitted he had an axe to grind with his
father.  He was determined to put an end to his father's work, just as
his father had tried to put an end to him.  During one of the
experiments - experiments orchestrated not by supersoldiers, but by
scientists working within our own government - Jeffrey was able to get
his hands on a concentrated form of iron magnetite.  It was originally
derived as a vaccine for counteracting the effects of
molecular-reconfigured water. Chloramine water.  The same water Agent
Scully was exposed to in the early months of her pregnancy. In large
doses, this form of magnetite is lethal to anything with alien DNA."

"We know all of this," Scully asserted.  

Marita turned, and finally acknowledged his partner's existence at the
table.  "Yes, most of it you do," she agreed.  "But what you don't
know is that Jeffrey Spender withheld valuable information from you
regarding the side-effects of the vaccine."

Mulder's breathing shallowed.  Scully shifted uncomfortably.   

"Side effects," said Mulder, darting his gaze to the booth in the back
of the cafeteria.  Kathy Carmichael caught him staring and held one of
William's tiny hands up in a wave.  Mulder waved back, forcing a
smile, and turned to Marita.

"What side effects?" Scully demanded.  

"Unless it was never made clear to you," Marita continued, "Your son
is not the result of a government experiment.  Nor was he, as far as
anyone can tell, a direct result of exposure to chloramine water,
either.  Obviously, Agent Scully was less than infertile, since she
became pregnant by her own means.  And whatever dormant genetic makeup
lies in yours and Agent Scully's DNA, it transferred to your son, and
his abilities - his ties to alien life - to all alien life on this
planet - were derived from that end.  I'm sure you know how to work a
pun-nit square, Agent Scully, and that you know how active and
recessive genes combine."

Scully remained silent, but the fist in her lap clenched and
unclenched.

Marita went on, talking solely to Mulder.  "Recessive genes in one of
the chromosomal pairs caused a normally dormant trait to surface; a
fifth base pair containing trace properties of iron. It's what's
otherwise known as 'branched DNA' - not dissimilar to what occurred
with Agent Scully's DNA following her abduction. "

Scully squinted, her eyes focused on the wall above Marita's head. 
"The implication, then, is that Mulder and I somehow have altered
biology, that we were tampered with at the cellular level, and this
has affected our very makeup, mutated our genomes in a manner similar
to what might occur following exposure to high levels of radiation. 
And you're saying we passed this cellular mutation down in our
chromosomes - to William."

Mulder turned to Scully, feeling suddenly left behind.  "Fifth base
pair?"

Scully afforded him a sideways glance. "All human DNA is made up of
four base pairs," she explained, touching an index finger to her
bottom lip: a familiar nervous habit.  "Adenine and Thiamine, Cytosine
and Guanine.  All four nucleotides can be broken down at the molecular
level into nitrogen, oxygen, carbon, and hydrogen. Not one of these
nucleotides, however, contains iron, and a fifth base pair has never
been known to occur naturally.   The presence of an additional pair
would upset the very structure of DNA.  It would prevent pair bonding
with Deoxyribose - the backbone sugar.  It would be, at the very
least, a biological abomination.  It could never survive past
conception."

"In a normal human being, no," agreed Marita.  "But in an evolved
human, yes."

"An evolved human," echoed Scully, jutting her chin. If her jaw were
screwed on any tighter, Mulder was positive it would break off the
bottom of her face.  "So you're saying that my son is one of these -
these evolved humans.  That he has branched DNA."

"When he was born, yes, he did."  

Mulder rubbed his temple, trying to process this.  "But he doesn't
anymore."

"No."  

Scully pursed her lips.  "How is what you're saying even possible?"

Marita turned to Agent Mulder once again, and again, Mulder felt that
indecipherable prickling, that there was a subtext going on here he
wasn't picking up on.

"When Jeffrey Spender injected your son with a pure form of magnetite,
he in essence destroyed William's fifth base pair by overloading it
with iron.  It's a junk sequence - inactive in modern humans because
we don't require any of its inherent characteristics, but intrinsic
for alien survival. In William, the broken strands were interpreted by
his immune system as little more than biological waste.  The protein
sequence then began to exit his system en masse, in the form of a
toxin - the same type of toxin that exited Agent Scully's system
following her abduction and return. Except with William's advanced
biological makeup, it's not just poison; it's a means of destruction,
Agent Mulder.  For them. "

"Them," echoed Mulder.  "You mean the supersoldiers."

"I mean all of them."

Scully's brow furrowed, and she exchanged a quick glance with Mulder. 

"If this is true," Scully said, and her voice crouched to a whisper. 
"Then why didn't Jeffrey Spender tell me?  Why would he keep that kind
of information from me when he explained everything else?"

Mulder nodded in agreement.  

And for the first time since they'd sat down, Marita actually smiled,
her pink lips urging up a dimple in her left cheek. With her fair skin
and blue eyes, perfectly formed lips and light blonde hair, she would
have been beautiful once - to somebody else, in some life long
forgotten.  But too much had been done to her, too many atrocities had
hardened her spirit, made her cold.  And her heart wasn't and never
would be like Scully's.  Marita Covarrubias was lovely, indeed, but
she was little more than a pretty shell for a lonely soul.  She was
beauty's broken potential - the personification of an empty shore that
never saw visitors.

"Did it never occur to you," said Marita, focusing her cold eyes
directly on Scully, "That Jeffrey Spender's motivations were not all
that they appeared?"

 "Then why don't you tell me what his real motivations were?"

"Gladly."

Mulder glanced from one woman to the other, and it appeared as if he
had been completely excluded from this part of the conversation. 
Whereas before Marita had directed her comments solely at him, as if
Scully was little more than window dressing, she now gazed at Scully
in totality, in unspoken showdown.

"Jeffrey Spender was the forgotten son, Agent Scully.  For years he
wondered about the father he never met, only to discover in the end
the man he'd sought was little more than a monster, and a coward. A
man who had abandoned Jeffrey and his mother for aliens and power and
corruption...and the arms of another woman. I'm sure you've met her -
Teena Mulder?"

Mulder's teeth sunk down into his bottom lip at the sound of his
mother's name, deceased now, lost to this hideous truth.

"But you already know this," Marita said, her voice like poisoned
honey.  "Jeffrey never suspected. And when his mother was abducted one
final time, Jeffrey realized that not only was he the forgotten son in
his father's eyes, he was the forgotten son in his mother's as well. 
Agent Mulder was the man Cassandra Spender sought upon her return from
the ship.  Agent Mulder was the one she confided in.  And in the end,
Agent Mulder couldn't even save her.  The experiments performed on
Jeffrey Spender following his shooting were merely the final straws in
a long series of last straws.  His hatred for his family ran much
deeper than his hatred for The Cancerman."

"So Spender was jealous," said Scully, and this time it was her hand
on Mulder's knee, offering comfort.  She squeezed him tight, and
continued, "And he hated me because of my connection to Mulder."

"It wasn't about you, Agent Scully.  It was never about you."  

"Then he came to me seeking revenge." Scully's fingers pressed over
Mulder's lower leg in hard, warm circles. Faster, harder, more
insistent.  "That's what you're saying."

Marita's silence was frightening.  In her eyes was contempt - not for
Mulder, but for the woman on the other side of the table.

"And you played right into his hand, didn't you, Agent Scully?" 

Scully swallowed.  "Meaning what?" 

Mulder's chest deflated in painful slowness, and he felt as if someone
had punched him directly in the ribs. Suddenly, Jeffrey Spender's
motives all made sense - why he would go to Scully, why he would
conceal his identity, why he would inject William with iron magnetite
and then imply William would never be safe.  He hadn't done it to save
William - he had done it to hurt Mulder.  Spender must have agreed to
testify at the trial only because he believed Mulder would die anyway.

"He knew you would give William up for adoption," whispered Mulder,
his eyes glazed, unfocused.  He saw it all in his head, every
despicable image, word, and motivation.  He felt the anguish, the
hatred behind such an act, and it nearly made him sick.  He turned to
Scully, and felt incredibly guilty.  "He knew that if he twisted the
truth enough, if he made it sound like nothing you could do would keep
William safe, that you would give him up.  That you would sever all
ties for the sake of the baby.  Then I would never know my son.  He
wanted to destroy the project, but he wanted to destroy me just as
badly.  He thought never knowing my own child would destroy me - same
as he believes it destroyed my real father."

Scully's eyes watered at this, as if she couldn't take any more
revelation for one afternoon, and she swallowed, turning her gaze to
the table.  The hand on his leg slid to his knee, and then back up and
over the outside of his thigh, before it released to her lap.

"So they're dying," managed Mulder, redirecting the subject and his
focus to Marita.  His brain flicked with sudden understanding, and he
replayed the old headline from the newspaper article he'd left in the
bedroom: Four U.S CIA Operatives Missing in the Latest String of U.S
Government Disappearances.

"My God," he said.  "All the men in power who aren't human - they're
not just disappearing.  They're dying.  The hybrids, the supersoldiers
- just one massive, going-out-of-business sale. Is this what you're
trying to tell me?"

"Yes."

"And that's how you knew it was safe - that they wouldn't come after
William," added Scully, as if air had just been re-inflated into her. 
 "Because they're afraid of him now, of his biology."

"For the most part."  Marita nudged her chin in the general direction
of the baby.  "The aliens are de-evolving, reverting to their most
primitive forms.  The toxin released from William's bloodstream has
been killing them slowly, but it has been killing them.  It's been
months now. Soon, anything on this planet with alien properties will
die, or it will be sucked back into the Earth in a primitive form."

Scully glanced up and touched Mulder's arm.  "Oh my God, Mulder."  A
light seemed to sparkle in her eyes.  "I think I see the connection -
the missing oil..." Her fingers tickled his elbow.  "Whatever broke
into that garage, it was inorganic, unidentifiable except for a scant
concentration of iron magnetite.  The substance that killed the cat
was a byproduct of this material.  It had to be."  She seemed amazed
at her own logic. "Mulder... what we found must have been residue. 
The decomposition stage of what once must have been an entity looking
for a viable host."

"But it wasn't trying to kill us; it was trying to get away, trying to
survive," Mulder finished for her.  "It was looking for a means to an
end."

Marita nodded.  "Oil's disappearing all over the globe.  I'm thinking
the prices of petroleum are going to skyrocket in the coming months."

Scully's mouth opened, and she took a few deep breaths.  Her fingers
tightened over Mulder's arm.  "Then that means William - he's safe.
It's over."  She seemed to be willing herself to this, and her eyes
were pleading.  "It's all over."

"Not yet."  Marita's gaze returned to Mulder, and Scully disappeared
from the table again.

"There is still the human threat, and there are those out there who
have discovered what I've done, returning William to you.  They'll
come to kill me, and then to kill him - to kill both of you.  In their
eyes, you've destroyed their one hope for the second coming.  Whereas
once they revered William and his abilities, now the situation has
changed.  William is useless to them without his abilities.  Granted,
there aren't many of them left, but they do have a leader, and they
have a weapon - the last living supersoldier."  For the first time
since the conversation began, Marita touched the black bag on the
table, running her fingers along the creases.  "Perhaps you know him? 
Knowle Rhorer?"

Mulder swallowed.  Knowle Rhorer. Of course, it had to be Knowle
Rhorer.  It couldn't be anyone besides Knowle Rhorer.  A headache
gripped him, and he felt as if there would be no end to this upside
down Universe. Stuck forever in a time warp, Mulder would never get
away from the battle long enough to sit by the fire with his partner
and his son, and just be normal.  Drink hot chocolate, read a book,
decorate a Christmas tree.  He'd never before understood what Scully
meant by wanting to stop the endless drive to get out of the car, but
he did now.

"Knowle Rhorer wants to destroy William before William can destroy
him," Mulder explained, turning to Scully.  "But with other resources
either dead or dying, he'll have to use the members of this cult to
get to us, and then he'll kill all of us - us and whoever helped him."

Scully nodded, and this time a tear did escape from the corners of
both red-rimmed eyes.  She paid the moisture no mind and turned a
pained gaze toward Marita.  "How can we stop them?"

Marita nodded towards the unopened black bag.  "Destroy Knowle Rhorer
and you destroy the movement."

Mulder shook his head, confused.  "I'm not following now - how the
hell am I supposed to kill something that won't die?  And how will
destroying him keep these sects or cults or whatever the hell they are
- how will it keep anyone from coming after William, or after Scully
and I?"

"First of all, Knowle Rhorer isn't an identity, it's a prototype,"
Marita explained, her hard blue eyes softening when she focused on
Mulder.  "Half alien, half government created, there were at least
twenty Knowle Rhorers patrolling the experiments last year.  Now there
is only one.  And he's dying.  The hybrids, the bounty hunters, the
clones " theyre all dead. But supersoldiers were able to sustain the
most amount of iron in their biology, and now Knowle Rhorer is the
last.

"As for human involvement, the cults have been around for years, since
Roswell in '47.  They've always stayed away from you, from your work,
because they were afraid of you.  And then your son was born, and the
myth they'd for years held as little more than biblical miracle came
true.  The true savior was born, and you had become some sort of
heretic.  Your opposition to the project became widely known, and they
considered you dangerous.  The problem was that they were no longer
afraid of you."

Marita finally passed the black bag along to the center of the table,
and into Mulder's fingers.  The bag was soft, and velvet, and Mulder
crumpled it in his hands, turning to Scully for confirmation.  Scully
nodded at him to open it, communicating with her eyes that there would
be further discussion later, and Mulder followed her silent
instruction.

Inside was a syringe, and a tiny glass vial filled with amber liquid.

"Make them afraid again, Agent Mulder.  It's the only way to stop
them."

For a moment, Marita's expressionless mask fell, and there was
something else swimming behind her cold, blue eyes.  If Mulder didn't
know better, he'd say it was suspiciously close to what he saw in
Scully's eyes right after having kissed her.

"It's for Agent Scully," Marita added, dipping her gaze in what seemed
an attempt at regaining her composure.  "If the time ever comes for
her to need it again."

"Need what again?"  Mulder frowned - sure that he'd missed something
important.  Marita remained silent, and when he turned a questioning
glace towards Scully, her focus averted and her cheeks warmed.  A deep
thudding erupted in Mulder's stomach; So Scully was hiding something
from him.  Something important.

"How do you know all of this?" Scully asked, her nostrils flared, her
eyes watery. "Why should we believe you?"

"You're right," said Marita, and she pushed back in her chair and rose
to her feet.  "You have no reason to believe me.  I shouldn't know any
of this.  About Spender, about the project.  Unless I was there. 
Unless I saw what they did.  Unless I overheard what was said.  And
like I already told you, I'm simply repaying a courtesy."

"And how did you know how to find us?" 

Marita smiled a second time, but there was little mirth in her
expression.  She pulled her coat over her shoulders and yanked a
folded piece of paper out of her pocket.  The creases were stiff,
almost torn, as if she'd gazed at the paper for a good long while
before re-folding it and un-folding it and refolding it again.

She tossed the paper onto the table and shrugged. 

"I intercepted an email to Assistant Director Skinner and found out
which way you'd likely be headed.  I had no exact coordinates, but I
had operatives head up this way in search of you.  A few of them
weren't so bright, and they skidded off the road after a night at the
bar.  That they ended up on your street is not my doing.  I came to
the hospital to look... to find out where they'd taken William, and I
came across this - " She gestured to the paper.  "I read between the
lines and took a wild guess."

Mulder unfolded the paper and dropped it to the table for Scully to
read with him:  "Starting up Private Investigative Practice and
looking for available help.  If you have any special skills, medical,
law enforcement or otherwise, and have a strong desire to seek the
truth, email Paul Selden at PIseek1@yahoo.com."

Scully turned to him with a raised eyebrow.  "I don't believe it," she
said, a note of incredulity in her voice.  "This is your flier?  Then
Marita really couldn't have known...  And the crash, you finding us -
it was a coincidence..."

"Sometimes, coincidences happen for a reason, Agent Scully, but that
doesn't make them contrived," Marita answered, and she cast one last,
long look at Mulder.  Their gazes held and something sharp passed from
her to him.
 
"Understood," said Mulder.  

And just like that, the connection disappeared.  

"Like I said - " Maritas gaze flitted over Scully's head, across the
room to where William sat with Kathy in a tiny booth.  She sighed, and
straightened her coat over her shoulders.  "Just repaying a courtesy."

----

************
Shadows of Winter 
Part 6 
By Jaime Lyn 
**************

Rated PG-13, for your pleasure.  

----


The house was dim and cool, and dusted with the scent of early
evening.

"Scully?"

Mulder flipped on the hall light and dropped his keys on the entryway
table.  The living room lamp cast a soft glow that painted the floor
at his feet, tickling the edges of the carpet.  Scully had gotten at
least six car lengths ahead of him on the freeway, and he'd lost sight
of her car just as the first flakes dripped from the sky.  He'd
thought for sure she had made it home first, but the fireplace wasn't
lit, and lighting the fireplace was generally the first thing Scully
did whenever she walked into the house.  If there was no fire going,
something had to be bothering her.

"I'm in here," came her voice.

 Or maybe he was just overreacting to nothing.  It had been known to
happen.

Mulder stuffed his hands into his pockets and headed into the living
room.  His arms were freezing, goose-bumps raising the flesh beneath
his shirt and overcoat.  He'd thought that perhaps he turned up the
heat high before he left, but in hindsight he should have just stuffed
a space-heater down his pants.

William sat on the floor beside the couch, pounding a small, under
stuffed, blue bunny into the carpet.  The bunny had fur missing from
one ear and its stomach was clumpy, lopsided; this was the same bunny
Mulder had accidentally pulled from Scully's bag in the middle of the
southwest.  She must have been fishing through the closets, rooting
through their old clothes and worn shoes and unused bath products -
re-surfacing memories they'd long ago stuffed under a shelf and locked
behind a heavy wooden door.

Scully was silent, perched on the couch with her hands folded in her
lap.  The blue surgical cap had been removed, and her red hair spilled
onto her shoulders in waves.  She gazed with hypnotic silence into the
empty fireplace, her face expressionless, her head tilted to one side.
 She looked like the model for a still-life, a study of beauty trapped
by the weight of the universe.

Mulder sat on the floor beside the baby, flicking at
little-blue-bunny's ears with his thumb and forefinger.  Seemingly
pleased to have a new playmate, even if it wasn't Scully, William held
up the bunny for Mulder to see and gurgled a few words of
gobbledygook.  He pounded the bunny into Mulder's kneecaps and flapped
his free arm, bouncing up and down on his padded bottom.

Venturing, Mulder touched Scully's knee with his fingertips.  She
didn't move.

"Hey," he whispered, nudging her.  "What are you thinking?"  

She'd been quiet for awhile now - ever since leaving the hospital,
actually.

After Marita had slipped from the cafeteria, neither he nor Scully
knew what to say. Scully rose from her chair and retrieved William
from Dr. Carmichael, politely thanked the other woman for her trouble.
 Then she turned to Mulder and suggested that they head home, the
whites of her eyes a shade of light plum. Mulder suggested Scully have
some juice or a piece of fruit or a sandwich first - if she was
malnourished, she needed to eat before she got behind the wheel of a
car.

Either too tired or too stricken to argue, Scully dutifully got
herself an apple, ate it with the baby on her lap, tossed the core
into the garbage, and headed for the door, trancelike.  "I just need
to pick up some baby supplies out of my locker," she mumbled, "and
stuff them in the trunk.  Leave the car seat by the rear exit and I'll
meet you at home."  She didn't offer any insight into her thoughts,
nor did she let him take the baby off her hands.  She clutched William
to her chest like a blanket.  She barely even afforded Mulder a second
glance before she took off down the hallway with the baby on her hip,
and left him standing outside the doorway to the cafeteria.  Alone.

"Scully?"  He scratched the center of her knee. 

"Hm?"  Scully blinked, but her eyes didn't waver from their focus on
the darkened fireplace.

"You with me?"

Scully nodded, worrying her fingers in her lap.  "Did I ever tell
you...What Agent Doggett said to me when we first met?"

Brows furrowed, Mulder leaned into the couch.  "No," he said, flicking
again at blue-bunny's ears.  "You never told me."

Finally, Scully met his gaze. "It was a week after you had gone
missing -" She stammered, picked at her cuticles.  "And Agent Doggett
was sitting next to me on the couch outside the Deputy Director's
office.  He didn't know me and I didn't know him. I didn't want to
know anyone.  He said that he'd heard these rumors -about you, about
people you had spoken to and things you had done - none of which I
believed.  He said you didn't trust me.  That you never trusted me.
Looking back, I think he was just trying to gauge my reaction at being
provoked. I was live wire at the time; I wasn't someone you wanted to
know."

Mulder was silent, unsure of where she was going with this.  While
Mulder had known Scully for the better part of nine and a half years,
he still often puzzled over the way her mind worked.  Her cogs and
wheels didn't turn the way his did, and that had always made her
something of an enigma.  Sometimes, what came out of her mouth was so
far removed from what he thought she might actually be thinking, that
he himself had to wonder whether he knew her at all.

She sighed.  "I was angry - at myself, at circumstances, at everyone. 
Because as far as I was concerned, everyone was a liar.  Everyone but
you.  I knew you, and I knew the work, and I knew that despite my not
knowing where you were, you would come back to me.  Because... because
it was me.  And because you always came back.  And then Agent Doggett
said, 'Maybe you don't know Agent Mulder as well as you think you do,'
and it made me terrified to think - "  There were no tears in her
eyes, and when she spoke, her voice was thready, dark.  "Maybe I
don't."

"Scully - " Worried that she might be having some sort of anxiety
attack, Mulder rose to his feet and sunk down on the couch beside her.
 "Scully, I don't see where you're going with this, but I always
thought you knew - or you need to know - I trust you.  I've never
trusted anyone but you."

"I do know that."  She shook her head at some invisible evil.  "But
there are other things I don't know about you. There were months we
spent apart, and I can't say that I knew you then because I didn't
know you then.  You were gone.  I don't know where you went or what
you did. "She touched a palm to his cheek.  "I can't ever know what it
was like for you.  You cry out in your sleep and I don't know how to
help you.  You look at William and I think you want to connect with
him, but something's holding you back. There's something you need that
I can't give you."

Mulder took a breath, felt a sudden, inexplicable paranoia Scully was
about to say she wanted to leave him.  He searched her eyes and took
her hand in his, held it up to his lips.  Her mouth twitched, dimpled
her cheeks; a struggle against letting go of whatever it was that
haunted her.

"What I need is you," he insisted.  

She shook her head. "I'm part of it, but I'm not all of it.  You need
the hunt, the chase, The X-Files.  I can't give those things back to
you.  I can't even be your wife without first being your partner, and
at this point, I don't know which identity is mine.  I don't know who
we are."

Mulder frowned. "We are who we are, Scully."

That was a stupid answer and they both knew it.

Acceptance of almost-domestication had crept up on them slowly, like
trickling honey through a strainer.  But Mr. and Mrs. Blissfully
Ignorant weren't really who they were, and both of them knew it.
Beneath a thick skin of love so intense the edges blinded reality,
there were silences and unspoken nightmares.  There were desperate
whispers in the dark and scathing orgasms with their eyes closed.  The
truth was difficult and unforgiving, and neither of them cared to dip
their toes into the pool of post-traumatic stress.  The months they'd
spent apart were forbidden, shadowed memories.

"But what does that mean?" she asked.  "What does any of this mean? 
We haven't moved forward at all.  We've only avoided... everything."

Mulder clasped her palm to his chest and pressed her fingers between
both of his hands; whatever she wanted to hear, whatever she needed to
hear, he wanted to say it.  He just didn't know how, or even if he
could. Perhaps that made him more selfish than he cared to admit.

"I still, I don't - " He sighed, frustrated, and gazed at her trapped
hand above his ribcage.  "I don't understand what you're trying to say
to me."

"I think you do know," she said.  "If we're going to get through this,
I need to know the truth."

"About what?"

"About everything." Scully broke eye contact with him and took a
breath as if she'd been kicked in the stomach.  "About all the things
you think but never say.  I need to know what happened during those
months we spent apart."  She blew out a slow, long breath, and their
eyes met again.  "Marita Covarrubias is in love with you, Mulder."

All the color drained from Mulder's cheeks.  His stomach dropped into
his feet.  "Scully, that's not - "

"She's in love with you," Scully insisted.  "It wasn't the trial she
was repaying you for, because the dates don't match up.  She brought
William back to you - not to me, to you.  And I think you know why she
would do that.  I think you know.  And I need to know, too.  I need
the truth.  All of it."

"Criminal -" He felt sick, and tried to push the dark images from the
New Mexico desert from his mind. "I don't see what this has to do with
anything - "

"It has to do with everything."  This time her voice hardened, and she
looked him square in the eyes: no secrets, not this time.  "Did you
sleep with her, Mulder?"

 "What?"   Tendrils of dread closed around his lungs.

"Did you sleep with her?"  

He didn't quite know what to make of such an accusation; not that it
was technically an accusation.  Technically, it was just a question,
but it was a question laced with accusation like a warm broth laced
with arsenic.

 It occurred to Mulder suddenly that he had become that guy - that guy
from the sitcom whose wife asked him whether or not he thought she was
fat, and he had to figure out the best way to answer her without
getting his head bashed in.  Any abrupt movement to the right or left
would mean certain catastrophe, and at the same time, he couldn't
stand still.  If he was a TV character, the credits would roll and he
would see his name in lights: Fox Mulder starring as the
clumsy-mouthed husband.

The ludicrousness built, and Mulder began to laugh - softly at first,
and then harder, nervous, like a manic-schizophrenic at a funeral.

"Mulder?"  Scully's tone was high-pitched, annoyed.  "Oh Jesus,
Mulder, hysteria isn't exactly what I was asking you for.  Please tell
me you didn't - "

"Of course I didn't," he choked, and at this point he was laughing so
hard he almost couldn't breathe.  Scully regarded him as if trying to
see him through a stinging cloud of smoke.  She pulled her hand back
into her lap.

"How is this funny, Mulder?"  She sounded genuinely distressed.  "How
is it even remotely funny?  Do you think I'm crazy? That I was
imagining the way that woman - "

"Being on the receiving end doesn't make the act reciprocated,
Scully."

"Excuse me?"

Mulder's laughter faded to a soft chuckle and he brushed moisture from
his cheek, amazed at his ability to laugh at himself.   "I would never
have slept with her, or with anyone, because she wasn't you.  Jesus,
Scully, I spent years not sleeping with women because they weren't
you."

At that, Scully's lips parted even though she seemed not to know what
to say.  Mulder shook his head.

"Yes, I was... lonely," he explained.  "And when you're lonely and you
talk to yourself in the middle of the desert, you get a lot of fucked
up, crazy-ass answers.  And when another person finally answers back,
it's like an ice-cream man in the middle of August.  But I wasn't that
lonely."

Scully's cheeks reddened, and she nodded, looking down at her hands;
"I'm sorry."

And Mulder realized that the truth was much uglier when coated in a
lie.

He sighed.  "Well, no, that's not entirely true."  

Her gaze snapped to his.  

"Which - what - what - which part?"  She stammered, pushing a thin
strand of hair back behind her ear, fingers shaking.  "What are you -
are you -did you lie - is - what -"

"The truth.  The unabridged version, 2.0.  Is that what you want?"

She fell silent.  

"It was right after I tried to return home. I had no way of contacting
you and I'd been..."  He paused, and at her blank expression, started
over.  "The gunmen had been wiring money to an anonymous account for
weeks, but the money never lasted long.  I was essentially lost. 
After I jumped off the train and hid out in that quarry, I had to
hitch part of the way out west, and to be honest, I had no idea what
the hell I was doing.  I didn't know where to even start looking for
clues, for information, for anything useful that might save me - might
bring me back to you.  I think I passed out near a rest stop - right
outside a phone booth.  I was toying with the idea of calling you and
begging you... I wanted to hear your voice.  But it was goddamned hot
and I dropped before I even dialed.  That's where Gibson found me.  I
don't know how.  It was either ESP or a goddamned lucky miracle.  I
stayed with him after that, in a trailer in southern New Mexico.  And
like I said, it was lonely.  And hot.  Fucking unbearable."

"But you weren't alone."  Scully's face was virtually expressionless.

"No.  Gibson was out there with me."

"That's not what I meant."  Scully swallowed.  "She went out there, to
New Mexico, didn't she?"

Mulder nodded. "I was outside, building this campfire that I really
didn't need to build - lack of better things to do out in the desert,
what can I say?  And I saw this woman approaching with a baby.  And -
" He closed his eyes, recalling the spill of scarlet sunset, the dark
outline of a woman's figure walking towards him, backlit by a
blinding, setting sun.

"For a minute, I thought it was you.  I had this wild fantasy that
lasted all of five seconds, where you had quit the FBI and taken the
baby and come after me. You know something?  I'd searched for truths
before - for my sister, for my parents.  And I'd wanted those truths
so badly that I could taste them, and I didn't think anything could be
more painful than not finding them."  He opened his eyes and gazed at
her, touched her knuckles.  "But I was wrong.  The most painful truth
was when Marita walked up to me and I realized she wasn't you. I felt
like I'd been shot.  But worse than that.  I felt like - "

"You'd been shot over and over," she finished.  

She smiled and turned her hand palm-up, squeezed his fingers.  "When I
watched your train sail through the platform, I had just been witness
to a shoot-out.  One of the supersoldiers was involved; he killed a
man who had promised to help me find you.   I - I stood over his body
- this man who had died trying to uncover the truth, and I knew he
wasn't you, but at the same time I knew he could have been.  So
easily.  And if something ever happened to you, I would never know
about it, and I could never protect you.  And then my son would never
know his father."  She swallowed, shrugged as if brushing the memory
from her shoulders.   "It was like being shot.  Repeatedly shot. 
Except I couldn't lie down and die and there wasn't anything I could
do to get away from that kind of pain."

Mulder leaned back against the couch.  This was more than Scully had
ever before revealed to him about her time spent alone, and he reveled
in listening to her speak.  Her voice was an anchor, a safety net. 
For a moment he wondered how much he could reveal to her without
breaking down, and how far he could push before she finally gave up
what she was asking of him; the whole truth.  No secrets.

"Then you know," he said.  "You know what I'm talking about."

Scully nodded, silent.  

"Well, that was the feeling, at seeing this woman, knowing who she
wasn't .  It was like being shot.  And then Marita, she... She looked
desperate.  She was dirty and emaciated.  She was carrying a baby but
she had no clothing for it, no diapers.  She said she needed a place
to sleep and she needed food for the baby, and I saw something in her
that mirrored something in me... and so I helped her, because I knew
that's what you would have done.  And she ate with me, and she slept
in the trailer, and she told me all sorts of things about the men in
power, and the experiments.  She didn't tell me the baby was hers, but
I had my theories."  He sighed, and considered ending it there.

But ending a story with a half-truth wasn't fair to anyone.  

"She mentioned a place called Mount Weather. She said experiments had
been performed there, but she refused to elaborate.  I didn't press
the issue and it took me another month to figure out how to find the
place, but the important thing was her trust in me - she gave me a
jumping off point.  And besides that, she was someone else to talk to
- someone who couldn't read minds, and who wasn't sixteen.  The second
night of her... her stay...she fell asleep on the cot next to mine. 
The baby was on the floor."

Mulder paused, and Scully remained silent.  Her thumb worked over the
top of his hand, kneading him on with soft but persistent pressure. 
He took a deep breath.  "I watched her sleep and I listened to her cry
out - she sounded so angry.  I wanted to help her but I couldn't.  I
didn't know how. And then I imagined she was you - I spent a long time
imagining she was you.  I thought that if I helped her, I would
somehow be helping you."

His voice cut off, and he realized he was dangerously close to tears. 
"You want the truth, Scully?"

Scully nodded, but the nod was slight, like a twitch of her neck.

"For the first time since being with you, I felt a kinship in someone.
Marita was looking for answers, and when we sat around the campfire
exchanging information, I realized she was looking for the same truth
I was.  She talked about William, and the project, and something about
a summer she spent in California when she was eight - her father was
gunned down.  She fell asleep when the fire died and I...I wanted to
sleep with her.  I thought if I closed my eyes and imagined she was
you, and that the baby at the foot of the bed was really William..." 
He swallowed, but Scully's grip remained firm, steady on his hand.  "I
didn't sleep with her, Scully. I promise you, I didn't.  But I wanted
to."

Scully's gaze darted away, and Mulder reached forward with his free
hand and tilted her chin to his.  He was afraid that if she didn't
look him in the eyes right away, she would never be able to again.  
"In the end, she wasn't Dana Scully.  She was Marita Covarrubias.  It
didn't make a goddamn bit of difference who she was, because the
important thing is that she could never have been you."

When Mulder released her chin, Scully turned away from him.  She
seemed to be fascinated with her hands, with the exact texture of her
fingernails.  Her lips opened and closed in a soft 'O' shape and she
breathed deeply.  She had the delicate stature of lily, wilted from
lack of sunlight but unwilling to die.

Mulder shifted uncomfortably.  He didn't know what was left to say.  
He wasn't exactly sure where the line of fidelity left him.  It had
been over ten years since Mulder had been involved in a romantic
relationship with another person, and despite any romantic
inclinations towards Scully - feelings that had driven him for more
years than he cared to admit - he had never before felt guilty about
wanting to sleep with other women.  And he felt damned fucking guilty
now.

During the course of their partnership, Mulder had found a good amount
of women sexually attractive.  He only slept with perhaps one or two
of those women, but since he and Scully had done little more than
dance around the big white boulder of their emotions, there was never
a reason to feel guilty about being sexual with someone else.  He'd
done it, and he was sure Scully had as well.  But as the years passed
and the work took over, and as Mulder found that other women faded
from view, the desire for passionate encounters diminished almost
entirely.  Passion meant work, not love, and sexual desire was as good
as porn, and porn seemed to coincide nicely with his left hand.

But now Mulder was married.  Real married, fake married, potay-toh -
potah-toh.  He loved Dana Scully and official documentation seemed
little more than window decoration.  This was his wife, his partner,
his lover, his pain in the ass, for now or twenty years from now. 
Scully, Lily, whoever she was, she was his wife.  Long ago he chose to
bake this particular cake with her and no matter how he tried to slice
it, the flavor was still chocolate.

"Lily," he said, his voice hoarse.  "It wasn't... I - "

Her face went completely white.  

Mulder paused.   "Are you all right?"

No answer.  Scully's eyes widened and she shoved a hand into his
chest, pushing him down so hard he bounced back up like a punching
bag.  Mulder sputtered for purchase while Scully climbed the armrest
and vaulted the back of the couch like a gymnast, running from him,
her palm cupped over her mouth.

Mulder froze in horror.  At his feet, William giggled at his mother's
silly behavior; blue-bunny pounded at Mulder's ankles.  Air left
Mulder's lungs in a low whoosh; his mouth went dry.  He had finally
gone and done it.  He had made Scully sick at the sight of him.

"Scully?"

Nothing.  

Nervousness etched grooves in Mulder's forehead until a needle could
have played 'Twist and Shout' in his skin.  Mulder bent from the couch
and hoisted the Tater-Tot and the blue bunny up on one hip.  William
pressed the bunny into Mulder's chest, seemingly unconcerned about
having his playtime interrupted by an inconvenient marital spat - one
that would not have been all that dissimilar to a professional spat,
had Scully not gotten violently ill at the sound of Mulder's voice.

Then again, his voice had probably made her ill more often than she
let on.

Mulder crept into the kitchen, baby suspended on his left side. 
Against the sounds of silence floated a stifled gag, and then another
gag, and then a strangled cough, and then yet another gag.  The carpet
darkened in shadow at the foot of the kitchen; a star of illumination
dripped in golden rays from a nightlight plugged into the outlet above
the sink.  The crown of Scully's dark head silhouetted against faint,
reddish-yellow ribbons, and her elbows jutted in slanted pieces of
darkness out from either side of the basin; she looked as if she was
trying to keep herself from getting sucked into the garbage disposal.

One last cough and Scully heaved violently, pulling air into her lungs
as if oxygen might somehow disappear into the emptiness, into the
black hole left by a tilted universe.  Another second and she switched
on the faucet, cupping her fingers and forcing water into her mouth. 
Her back arched with each gulp.

When Scully finally turned off the faucet, Mulder could've sworn a
good hundred or so years had passed.

The emotional mess was partly his rendering - a chalk outline of
disaster with his initials emboldened in the lower right hand corner.
While Scully had been alone and fighting for his return, while she'd
been forced to make agonizing decisions over the future of their only
child, he'd been standing over a cot in New Mexico, fantasizing in
splendid, pornographic Technicolor.  Scully had merely asked him
whether he'd physically slept with Marita. A simple yes or no would
have sufficed.

Scully turned to him slowly, her hand still hovering near her mouth,
fingers trembling - poised for another attack. Her cheeks were
flushed, her forehead beaded with perspiration.  Her lip quivered, and
her eyes were hard to read in flickering darkness.

"I need you to tell me what this is all about," he croaked, because he
didn't know what else to say.  "Tell me right now."

She shook her head, eyes tightly closed.  "I... I can't."  

Mulder gripped William closer, nervous.  "Yes, you can.  I showed you
mine, now you show me yours.  That's how this works."

"Is it?"

That was a dig, and Mulder winced.  He steeled his gaze, managed,
"Lily."

"Paul - "

"Don't."  His eyes watered, stung.  "I want the truth from you.  I
deserve that much."

Her knuckles grazed her nose, trembling.  "What is it you want me to
say?" Her head shook.  "When this kind of thing happens to you, when
you're told it can never medically happen but it does, it's supposed
to be a joyous occasion, a miracle.  It's not supposed to be like
this." She banged her fist on the counter.  "Damn it!"

Mulder was stone silent.  

"I'm a strong person," she continued, opening her fist and pressing a
palm to her cheek.  "But I can't do this again.  You'd send William
away to save him, but what will you do to save me?  You want the
truth? The truth is painful, Mulder.   If you thought... if you wanted
to - You can't send all of us away to save us.  You can call for
reinforcements, you can board us up in the basement and run in the
other direction waving a big red flag, but the truth is going to eat
us alive no matter what you do. "

Mulder was sure that he'd been struck on the side of the head - he
even raised a hand to his temple to check for a concussion.  Suddenly,
he felt dumber than he had ever before felt in his life.  He hadnt
considered the possibility because the idea was, at its core,
impossible, ludicrous.  William was a miracle.

He should have known better. 

"You're pregnant," he said.  

It wasn't a question.   

"How long have you known?"  His head buzzed; he thought he might
faint.

Scully sucked in a breath, and her chin tucked in towards her neck. 
She leaned back against the counter, not speaking, not moving.  Her
silence was enough to finish him off.  Mulder was sure if he hadnt
been holding a small child he would have thrown something at her.

"This whole time," he said, answering his own question.  "You knew
this whole time and you didn't say anything to me.  That's why... When
we found William, that's why you were so upset.  You knew."  He bent
to a crouch and set William down on the tile at his feet.  Blood
rushed to his face and he felt so hot he thought his head might
spontaneously combust.  "You knew.  You knew, goddamn it.  How long
have you known?  How long have you been lying to me?"

Scully breathed slowly.  "Don't make it into something it's not, P.I. 
I wasn't lying - "

"No, not much."  He ran fingers through his hair, wishing he could
pull every strand out by the root.  "I asked you, Scully.  I asked you
repeatedly if you thought you were sick, and you lied to me.  I
started thinking the worst " about the chip, about your cancer.  God,
why would you keep this from me? Because you didn't trust me?  Because
you thought I would cart you off to Washington with Skinner?  Do you
really think so little of me?"

"No!"  Her eyes widened.  "Good grief, that's not at all - "

Mulder flashed back to that morning, and then to the night before, and
to the night before that.  Fuzzy details he'd previously ignored
swirled into focus.  He replayed each nuance over in his head like a
tape recorder.  "Jesus Christ, I must be dumber than paste. You've
been avoiding coffee for almost a week now.  Is this why?  Is it?"

"Mulder - "

"Is it?" he demanded.  

Scully pressed a hand to her forehead.  "Yes."  

"Why?"  Anger bubbled in his chest until his stomach could no longer
contain the heat.  His limbs hummed with the pressure.  In a minute he
would have to put his head between his knees in order to breathe.

"Because I didn't want to believe it," she said, her voice unsteady. 
"We'd been careful about that sort of thing, and I didn't even think
it was even possible. But then I remembered that first night here in
the house and I, I didn't know how to explain it to you, or to myself,
and I thought you would insist that I... that... I - "

"That you should abort it."  He shook his head and took up pacing,
because pacing was preferable to smashing dishes.  "But now you're,
what?  Three?  Four months along?  Is that why you waited?  So you
wouldn't be able to get an abortion?"

"No!  Jesus, Mulder, it's not that I didn't trust you - "

Unable to control himself any longer, Mulder advanced on her until
their noses were inches apart.  "I can't believe you, Scully.  I
really can't.  After that lecture you just gave me on the couch about
there being no secrets between us. You not trusting me is exactly what
this is about."  He jabbed a finger into her sternum, his voice a
hiss.  "You couldn't trust me to tell me you were worried about being
pregnant.  You couldn't trust that I would honor your judgment.  And
when William came back, you couldn't trust I would, that I would - " 
When he could no longer bear to look her in the eyes, he turned,
grunted an ungraceful, "fuck,"  and stopped only when a wall blocked
his movement any further.

"Don't do this," she said.  "I trust you.  I trust you with my life."

He turned on her.  "But that's all you trust me with."  

"No."  She stifled a breath. "No, that's not it at all." 

"But you didn't think anything of lying to me?"

"I didn't lie!"  She banged a palm on the counter.  "God damn it,
Mulder.  You act like a melodramatic little girl sometimes, you know
that?  I never lied to you.  I took a home pregnancy test a few days
ago.  I suspected before that, but I wasn't sure.  Yes, I was afraid
that you'd want me to give up the child, and if you did, you'd
probably be right, but that's not why I didn't tell you."

"Why then?"  When he ran out of pacing room he paused at the garage
door, turned in a circle.  "Why?"

"It doesn't matter anymore."

"The hell it doesn't."

"Well, I don't think - "

"Tell me!"  

Scully rubbed the heels of her palms into her eyes as if trying to
push her eyeballs back into her skull.  "You weren't there," was what
she said, her fingers crooked like hooks into her eyebrows.

Mulder shut up.  He bunched his hands into fists, stuffed them into
his pockets for lack of better places to stuff them.

She waved an arm, breathing hard and heavy.  "You weren't there when I
was sick, or when I had uterine complications, or when I started
bleeding, or when I had to go it alone.  You don't know what it's
like, how terrifying it is. I wasn't allowed to be happy - there was
no room for happiness.  You were gone, everyone else wanted a piece of
my child, and it was the most alone I had ever felt in my life. 
Goddamn it, you weren't there, Mulder.  You weren't fucking there!"

Mulder remained silent.  His fingers tensed.  She'd been wanting to
say this for months, had been dying from holding it back, and he was
going to have to listen.  Listening was all that was left. If it
destroyed him to hear this, if it made him want to climb the walls, he
was going to let her speak.  He had to.

"There was an emptiness," she went on, the words too quick, without
pause.  "I didn't want to feel it.  I had a baby to carry. I had work
to do.  I had a life to live, do you understand that?  A life that had
to keep going.   But suddenly your truth was my truth and your office
was my office and you weren't there and I never wanted the truth that
way.  I loved you so much that I hated you, I hated everything your
absence made me feel, and I couldn't even... I couldn't even look at
your nameplate.  I couldn't even think about it.  I didn't know what I
was supposed to feel, but I knew what I wasn't supposed to feel, and I
beat myself up for feeling it anyway.  And then you came back and you
left again, and it was my fault as much as it was yours, and I had to
- I had to - "

She paused, darted her gaze at the ceiling, and then at the floor, and
then directly at him.  She spread her arms in a grand show of
proclamation.  "Fox Mulder goes off again in search of his truth, and
everyone pities poor Dana Scully.  She's not even directly involved
with his quest - she's the unfortunate byproduct of an association
with the savior of the world.  Not even my child was about me - it was
all about you.  Everything about my pregnancy and my child was about
you and you weren't even there with me."

William sat on the floor between them now, his legs folded
Indian-style, blue-bunny clutched to his chest.  His head darted back
and forth, his big blue eyes wide, his brows bunched above his nose. 
Scully sniffled but did not break down.  Shaking her head, she bent at
the knees to pick up her child, cradling him to her chest, kissing the
top of his head.

"William is the only part of this quest that truly belongs to me," she
said, rubbing her lips along the baby's forehead.  "Even you - you
don't belong to me.  You belong to your truth.  Well this -" She
bounced William gently.  "This is what's mine. He's not exactly aliens
or tractor beams, but he's mine.  And giving him away was the most
painful thing I've ever known.  I risked losing you, I risked losing
myself, but I did it anyway.  I've had to live with that.  For months
I had to live with it.  I have a second chance now, Mulder."

He shook his head.  They were going in circles.  "Scully, you did what
you did. What does any of it have to do with your pregnancy?  With why
you couldn't tell me?"

"It's the same," she whispered. "Don't you see?  It's the same as it
was."

Mulder cocked his head to one side, utterly baffled.  "What?"

"It's happening again."  

He shook his head.  "It's not.  I'm here."

"For how much longer?"  Her voice broke. "Until that cult comes to
kill William, or to take you away?  Until Knowle Rhorer shows up at
our doorstep?"

He sighed.  "Scully."

"No.  Don't patronize me. I didn't want to believe it because knowing
the truth would kill me.  And now I don't know what to do."

Mulder rubbed his forehead. He didn't know what to say or how to fix
this, and it was hard to see the forest through the trees when the
underbrush was littered with thorns of ill-conceived logic.  She
didn't understand him and he didn't understand her.  It wasnt the
first time theyd crossed wires and he was fairly sure it wouldnt be
the last.

"Do you want me to say it in Mandarin?  In German?  I'm not going
anywhere.  Goddamn it, Scully, this isn't the same as it was.  Is that
why you didn't tell me?  Because you were afraid of the past?  That's
a fucking weak excuse.  It really is."

A tear decorated the line of freckles below Scully's left eye, and
Scully rubbed the inside crease of her palm against the drop so hard
she pulled skin.  The baby bunched her shirt in his little fingers,
clung to her.

"I wanted to tell you, Mulder.  And you're right, I should have.  But
then we found evidence of alien residue in that garage, and I thought
we had been found, and I didn't know how to tell you.  How could I
tell you?  I was so terrified that the second I told you, everything
would come down on my head."

Mulder crept closer, shook his disagreement at her.  He was going to
scream.  He was going to lose his mind.  "That's not why, and you know
it."

Scully's chin jutted.  "It is."  

"No."  Mulder glared at her.  "You were afraid that I would make you
give it up. I wouldn't understand your desire to keep a baby, despite
a world of reasons not to raise one.  Because I wasn't there the first
time to really get it.  Isn't that right? You wanted to wait until I
bonded with William.  You thought that maybe if I connected with my
son, then I would understand. Because you think I don't understand
now."

Scully's watery eyes were pink, her lids puffed from the weight of her
tears.  "You arrogant son of a bitch.  How dare you profile what you
think my motives should be."  Her glare was dark, her eyes almost
black.  "If you think you know everything then that's your business. 
But what I told you is the truth.  If you don't trust me - "

Mulder pressed a hand to her forearm, squeezed. "You don't trust me."

When Scully didn't answer him or back down, his temper boiled over
into his lungs, and then bubbled up out of his mouth. "You think I
wouldn't understand?  I understand. You think I don't know?  I know. 
I wasn't the one who gave him up in the first place, was I?"

With a look of disgust so intense it could have burned through the
back of his head, Scully yanked her arm clear of him.  She yanked it
back so hard her elbow banged the counter.  The only indication she
gave of even feeling the sting was a slight wavering of her eyes. 
Mulder held her gaze, and Scully held her ground.  William buried his
face in her chest, whimpering.  Mulder was positive that if she
werent holding the baby, she would have thrown the first punch.  And
he would have hit her back.  They would have pummeled each other until
the house came down around their ears.

"You're the one who asked me to go," he hissed. "You're the one who
made that choice."

Her nostrils flared, and he saw that he'd hit home.  "I may have asked
you to leave but I didn't force you to go.  You left because you
wanted to."

"Why?"  His voice was low, his head pounding.  "Why in the hell would
I want to go?"

"We both know why.  And its the same reason why you want to stay,
now."

And thus, the gloves came off.  He took a painful, ragged breath. 
"How dare you," he bit out.   "You have no idea what leaving you did
to me.  I needed you, damn it. I still need you."

Scully took a breath, her cheeks red, her brows raised in question.
She looked as if someone had just bumped her in the head with the
microwave door.
 
"Im taking the baby upstairs," she mumbled. "He needs to be put down
for a nap." Her face was the color of a fire extinguisher.

"Good," Mulder mumbled back.  "That's good. Put him down, then."

"Fine."

"Fine."

And the end of the discussion was reached: no goodbyes, no concluding
words, no apologies, no second chances.  Just like always.  And both
turned and walked in opposite directions, he to his corner and she to
hers, silence blanketing them in a smothering grip -

Just like always.  

---------
Still More to Come