From: ephemeral@ephemeralfic.org Date: Sat, 23 Aug 2008 03:40:57 -0500 (CDT) Subject: Truth and Unbroken Records by Scully82 Source: direct Reply To: Dramafiend@aol.com Title: Truth and Unbroken Records Author: Scully82 Rating: PG Classification: MSR Spoilers: Post-Existence/alternate universe Summary: What if DD hadn't left for season 9? Disclaimer: These characters do not belong to me. They are the creations, and therefore the Property of Chris Carter, Gillian Anderson, David Duchovny, et al. *** "The Truth we both know," he had said, holding me, holding our child. Our child. These two words play in my mind like a fragment of a song on repeat; like the part of a record that sticks when the rest is long broken. Our child, our child, our child. It is memorable in its very strangeness, musical in its improbability. It is small, but insistent, clunky, but miraculous. It is its unlikely survival above the deep grooves of static that makes it sing. It is the melody to our long- rehearsed harmony; it is the loveliest phrase of the most loved song on our record of all records. There is nothing broken about it: it is the purest, truest tone we have ever known. Our child, our son, sleeps soundly in the cradle beside us, and his soft breath is the music I thought I'd never hear. Add to it the gentle snores of the man who sleeps, finally, beside me, and there exists the most exquisite symphony to which I have ever had the pleasure of listening. Before he was my lover, before he was even my friend, Mulder, my Mulder, told me to believe. Now, at last, I believe. Now, at last, I can sleep without dread of the darkness and wake without fear of the light. *** When the sun seeps through the bedroom window on our son's second day of existence, Mulder wakes and kisses my ear. He cradles me with his body, the firm, musty substance of him, and rests his chin on my shoulder, fixing his eyes on our child. "It is amazing," he whispers, "That love can create such a perfect, beautiful thing." "It shouldn't be possible," I agree, "But it is." "It is the most extreme of extreme possibilities," he says, his voice warm, reverent, smiling, "Our love is an X-File." "The most improbable, amazing thing," I correct, "Is that it isn't." His laugh in my ear is warm and low, and we both fall back to sleep, then, dreaming of anything but spaceships and rain. *** The sun is high in the sky when William finally rouses us, or rather, me. My eyelids are still heavy with sleep when the light paints them pink and wakes them, and me, to the new day. I blink, and the image I see makes me vow never to blink again: Mulder and William, father and son. Mulder stands in the sunlight, his broad shoulders stable, symmetrical, his arms strong, tan, and healthy. He holds William in front of him, one sturdy, gentle hand on his soft scalp, the other underneath the smooth curve of his body. He has wrapped William, his son, in the soft, yellow blanket that once belonged to him. It was another family keepsake, along with the fragile doll, that he'd salvaged from among his mother's belongings. I wish that there had been more to save; wish that Teena Mulder, in her haste to forget the pain, had not thrown away so much of the love. Mulder grew up without much of a mother, or a father, from what I can tell. His mother was on a quest to hide the truth, his father, to expose it. His sister, the constant, the touchstone, was gone before he understood the truest of truths. He loved too much, my Mulder, because he had never been loved at all. I like to think that his name, the one he still cringes to hear, was the product of love, not indifference. I like to imagine that his mother and father, young and naive and only in search of love (the simplest, and deepest, of quests), had strolled, one day, into the Massachusetts woods and had seen a fox: a gentle, sleeping, baby fox that they had wanted, earnestly, to protect from hunters, as they would protect a beloved puppy, as they would protect their only son. My Mulder, always the protector more than the protected, IS a fox: strong and beautiful and vulnerable all at once. I can see in the way that he cradles his son that our child will never be unprotected, will not feel, for a moment, unloved. I step from our bed slowly and quietly, my blue, silk robe soft against my skin, and I wrap one arm around Mulder's waist; the other, alongside the stronger arm that supports our son's head. I hold both my loves as they will be held always. There will be no more Fox hunt; no more Dana or William hunt, either; no more desperate search for the Truth, because the Truth we know already. The Truth we all three know. We hold our child up to the sunlight and give ourselves fully to the bright, human world. My mother brings breakfast, right after William has finished his own from my heavy, swollen breasts. There is the dual relief of the emptying and the filling, the giving and the receiving: mother's milk for mom's blueberry muffins. Mulder would find something obscene in this trade-off, so I leave it unspoken. In our brave, new world there is no room for darkness, even silly, not-really darkness: there is room only for light. *** Walter Skinner visits us on the third day that we have lived above ground, forever out of the file- filled basement. He brings gifts for William: a blue-ribboned teddy bear, a rattle, a shiny, rubber, ridiculous duck. There is nothing to remind us of aliens, nothing to suggest that there may still be a time and a place for pain. In his eyes, dark and cloudy, we see that he still fears the possibilities, but the Truth we both know. John Doggett arrives and holds a hushed, kitchen conference with Skinner, with Mulder, while, safe in the living room, I hold my son. Mulder returns; the men who want only to love and protect us say their goodbyes. "They want me to leave, Scully," he says, his voice painful and low. "They think you're not safe here." "There are truths to uncover before they uncover us." "Anything that is not Our Truth, Mulder, is NOT the truth." "I will not believe their lies," he says slowly, surely, "But I will keep our truth safe from them." "WE will," I correct him. "Let Doggett and Reyes and Skinner uncover the lies: we have fought our battles, Mulder. Our son, our love, is our reward." He looks uncertain, plagued by the remnants of ancient gloom, but I continue: "There will be new truths to discover; truths we won't have to fight." "They told me I need to go somewhere where I'll be safe. And I will. But I will not go without you and William. I won't, Scully. Never again." We pack and, in the pink, hopeful dawn, we begin again. *** We live, two days and, still, six years later, in a nondescript house in a wide, sunny field. There is snow in the winter and long, hearty grass in the summer; there are brilliant, crunchy leaves in the autumn and green, supple buds in the spring. We are Dana, the mother and doctor, and Fox, the teacher and dad. William hears more about mutants and werewolves and blood-sucking goats than I'd like, but he learns, too, about stars and planets and non-lethal fireflies; about baseball and Elvis and goldfish and hope. At night, after dinner, I continue his education. There are lessons on science and lessons on love: he learns to open, and know, his own heart just as surely as he is able to dissect and identify the parts of a frog. He reads about Starbuck and Ahab and learns to believe. We mourn the parts of our lives we have lost and the parts of life our son has never known: our true names, spoken to the world; the happy, bumpy cadence of a yellow, giggle-filled school bus; the friends we all three have lost to their own worldly, and alien, quests. We live our truth cautiously, but there is always room for risk, for providence, for faith. There are a few friends, other home-schooled children, for William: friends who will not spread his name in this world or others. There are visits, too, from my mother and Skinner and, yes, even Bill; there are jaunts to The Vineyard and trips to the beach. There are miracles daily, and the biggest of these causes nausea and headaches and concerned- Mulder looks aplenty. Its biggest effect, though, is sunlight, is music, is Truth: she is his sister, our daughter, Samantha Melissa. They are Our Children. Our children, our children, our children, our children. The record is anything but broken; the music is clear and in tune and has all its parts. *** THE END. Thanks for reading!