what_wings_dare | 🅧 Please explain to me the scientific nature of 'the whammy'

He couldn't pull away now. The creature inside her - your son, your son, your son - has a hold on him; it might not be physical, but it keeps his hand splayed flat on her, palm resting against the hard shape of torso or leg or head. He doesn't know what he's feeling, only that he's feeling it, and that's alive, and that it's his.

With effort, he looks up at her again, and he can't bring himself to do anything about the tears that have made paths down his cheeks. He's never been ashamed of crying in front of Scully, and he's not about to start now. "Who knows?"

Everyone knows about the baby, at this point; it's unavoidable. But the baby's origins, its unwitting father, is something else. Has she told people? How much of a secret is he?

Finally, the flood of tears is starting to dry; her face crumples uncertainly, a graceless map of too many emotions, too long spent trying to deny them. Things she couldn't have faced on her own, but had no one else to help her carry.

The baby stirs and shifts, indistinct but unquestionably present. Someday she'll tell him how she tried to keep him present-- playing old, saved voicemails so the baby could hear the echo of his father; telling stories late at night when she couldn't sleep. But for now this is enough. It's everything.

"I expect a lot have guessed. No one's dared to ask."

"Not even -" The end of the sentence could go any number of ways. She's not at the center of some kind of HR crisis, at least; it sounds like the Bureau couldn't care less, provided she doesn't make it a problem for them.

He tries again, pulling her closer in a one-armed hug. He's not letting go of the baby, or the beginnings of the baby; his hand's restless on her stomach, though, shifting between resting flat and his palm lifting unconsciously, until only his fingertips are touching her. Some instinctive part of him is ready to dribble. I'm going to buy you a basketball. And a ball and glove for catch. A football, a baseball bat, a tennis racket - we're going to try out everything, just to see what you like. I'm going to teach you to swim. We'll go running - "What does your mother think of all of this?"

Mrs. Scully must know; he remembers a look she gave him, years ago now, when Scully was comatose and the doctors didn't have much hope, even if Melissa swore up and down she could feel her soul in there. She's a smart woman, Scully's mother, and she saw it even then. When her daughter came home, partnerless and pregnant, she must have guessed how half of it happened.

Which makes her smarter than me. But it leaves him uncertain still, wondering whether he's going to be welcomed back with open arms or an accusatory glare. He couldn't blame anyone for the latter.

She falls against him heavily, with all the weight of her long waiting. There's something miserable about it, but in an oddly satisfying way. All these months she hasn't been able to grieve the way she needed to, because the only person who could have handled her in that state was the man she lost.

"I'm sure Skinner knows. And John must have guessed." Mulder, his territorial mistrust aside, knows how hard it is to keep secrets in their basement office.

She threads her hand into his to keep it close. Tomorrow she'll pull out the imaging and dig up a stethoscope to hear the tiny heartbeat; for now she just wants him close to her.

"My mom misses you. She knows-- I mean. I told her about the IVF. After, when it didn't work, and I think she knew..." she shakes her head a little. "When I told her I was pregnant-- I didn't have to say it."

She'd seen the understanding, the mingled joy and horror, on her mother's face.

Putting the memory aside, she presses her cheek against his arm.

"Since--" she pauses, starts over. "We haven't talked about it since the funeral. But I know she'll be so glad to see you."

"Skinner would," he agrees. He's known both of them too long not to be aware on some level. Hell, even Kersh has probably figured it out, if only because of Bureau gossip, and the same for the elusive John Doggett. (Agent Doggett is no longer a focus of speculation and resentment, now that he and Scully have absolutely, positively never fallen into bed together, but that just means speculation and resentment will have to wait until they've met.)

Maggie Scully, on the other hand, felt like a less predictable reaction. He always feels like the tagalong neighbor kid when he sees her; it's impossible not to default to calling her Mrs. Scully and hoping vaguely that he'll be invited to dinner rather than sent home. She's never been anything but kind to him, welcoming even when her own son would have rather seen him out of the picture, but that doesn't mean she'd appreciate his knocking Scully up and disappearing into the night.

But it soothes something in him, to know he's not persona non grata in the Scully family. (The part of the Scully family that matters to him, anyway. Who knows what Bill thinks, and more importantly, who cares? And it's not like he has more than a passing familiarity with Charlie Scully's existence.) He doesn't have anyone to offer this kid, only stories of people who died long before his conception. Scully's family will have to be everything to him - and it'll be easier, better, if they're still willing to be something to Mulder, too.

"Call her tomorrow," he says quietly, before he can change his mind. "I don't know how soon they're going to let me back at the files, even with an unbelievably good bill of health. So if you want to do...I don't know, baby stuff..."

Do they have to buy things for it? Does he have to sign paperwork? Under better circumstances, he would have had time to figure this out.

Neither Skinner nor Doggett need to listen to gossip; both of them have spent time enough with her. And John is working on the x- files, which is by nature working in Mulder's shadow. You learn something about a man that way. He's an investigator; and her desperation and her grief and the ever-more-obvious pregnancy are easy enough to piece together.

"We'll call together. I know you're eager to get back to work, but even with a clean bill of health, you'll need time to adjust." That's not much of an argument. With a slight frown, she amends it. "I need time. There's plenty to stay busy with here."

She lifts their joined hands slightly to pat her stomach. She's not above using this distraction to get her way.

She's not wrong, much as he hates to admit it. Nothing slows Mulder down, from forced vacations to minor illnesses to eight-month alien abductions - but a baby throws a wrench into all of this. He still isn't sure just where he fits into Scully's life now, what his role is from here. Is he allowed to be his son's doting father? Can they have the same casual-serious thing as before? How far can they take this before it means risking the ire of the FBI?

He's studying her hands, one twined up with his, the other directing his attention back to the star of this conversation. They suddenly have everything, and he still knows nothing. "What do we do now?"

"Right now? We decide if we want something else on TV, and I eat soup until he decides we're done with it, and we worry about everything else tomorrow." It goes without saying, as far as she's concerned, that she's not leaving. Finally-- for the first time since the hospital-- she's not worried about him turning her away.

"Mom will probably want to see us." Which won't be a bad thing, probably, but will be A Lot for everyone involved. Maybe Mulder will actually want to rest afterward.

She squeezes his hand.

"I was thinking of calling him William."

She looks up, trying to gauge his reaction to the name.

"Well," he says, a little weakly, "the good news is, we have plenty of soup."

The rest still feels like a mystery, a difficult one. They have two apartments, two last names, two separate lives - even if they're as twisted up together as their hands right now, there's still a certain degree of separation. And it's not solely on his end of things; Scully's the one who had the occasional habit of disappearing in the middle of the night, leaving him to wake up alone.

He wants answers, the same insistent way he always does, but Scully seems comfortable with the ambiguity at the moment. He's ready to press for more, right up until she changes the subject to one that catches him up short.

"After your father," he says after a moment, because after me sounds so irrepressibly sad. She'd expected to raise this child alone, hanging the only respectable moniker he has on it as a memorial.

There's a lot to untangle-- more than they can figure out tonight, or tomorrow. It's not quite right to say she isn't worried. Some of it hinges on whether they can get him reinstated, on whether he can work with Agent Doggett while she's on maternity leave, whether they can picture a life less on a knife's edge.

And Scully hates not having control-- but right now, she's resolved not to care about anything for at least the next twenty-four hours.

"After his father." she insists. And, yes, hers. And Mulder's, she supposes, but maybe it's better not to mention that. "You'd have hated if I went with Fox, I figured."

The thought of it gives her body more gravity, drawing him into a new orbit around her. Not only his son, but his son, named for him. He's too much an iconoclast to allow himself to put stock in the idea of having a Junior running around, but there's something about it that makes him feel like he's been sucker-punched. But in a good way? He's pretty sure it's in a good way, right about now.

"You're right," he murmurs, a smile spreading over his face. "But I wouldn't have hated it nearly as much as he would. We're not going to call him Bill, are we? We already have three between us."

"Definitely a William, not a Bill." Her brother and everyone else can assume it's family tradition if they want. It felt-- it still feels-- like the right way to honor everything that makes him up. If he'd hated it, she would have reconsidered-- but it would be difficult, at this point. She's gotten comfortable with it.

"I know this is-- well, there's no way you could have been ready for any of it. But maybe this least of all," she murmurs. "I wanted so badly to be able to tell you-- when you were gone. I never thought it would be-- well, like this."

He laughs a little, self-conscious. "You didn't think I'd be dumb enough to assume Agent Doggett knocked you up."

Not that there was a good way for any of this to go. Welcome back, I'm about to have your baby was destined to be a shock no matter how it was presented to him. Imagine if she'd stayed away, with some idea of waiting until he'd healed - he'd have been half out of his mind, demanding to see her. Instead, he simply got the wrong impression, stunningly so.

She squeezes his hand again-- much too hard, overcome as she is by a rush of affection so intense it needs an outlet. There's a silly little part of her still indignant over that assumption-- but it's outweighed by how glad she is to be able to be annoyed at him over something so meaningless, to have him here to roll her eyes out.

"I really didn't," she says fondly.

A moment like this - when she's exasperated, but fondly so - feels so much like before the abduction that he could nearly start crying again. He doesn't, instead pressing a kiss to the top of her head. And because he's terminally incapable of leaving things alone, he asks, "So. Are you thinking about marriage?"

Maybe he won't cry, but it's within the realm of possibility that she might. (That's maybe the worst part of being pregnant; she can't control her feelings as well as she used to. There are unpleasant physical parts, but most of it, truth be told, she relishes; it's something that shouldn't have been possible, and she tries not to complain about a single second.)

"Mulder!" She's half exasperated and a little terrified and overwhelmingly, distractingly, hopelessly in love with him. The part of her that improbably wants to tear him away from dusty files and play house in some suburb where the sun shines and the monsters are imaginary is much louder than usual. Not a fair circumstance at all.

Should they be thinking about it? Is she supposed to take this as the world's worst proposal?

"I'm not sure you can legally marry anyone until your paperwork's fixed," she points out, which is definitely not her stalling. Nope, not a bit.

"What does that matter, Scully?" He'd like to think that this isn't the actual proposal, simply the recon mission. Does she want to be married? Should he be thinking about asking? He still has his mother's rings someplace in his bedroom, but that doesn't mean she's looking to get that quite entangled.

(She could be. She's been clinging to him like he might fade away if she doesn't keep hold of him. They both know she loves him, and vice versa, but she's independent. She's been planning motherhood as a personal project. She might say yes, but she might say no, and he'd like to be sure.)

His gaze is soft on her, a little sad. "If you're interested, you don't care about the paperwork. If you aren't, the paperwork's irrelevant."

He... has a point.

Enough of a point that, carefully, she moves; she lets go of his hand, she moves her whole body so she can face him. It's not so easy, right now, to turn, and it's essential that if they're talking about this, they talk face to face.

It's the kind of conversation she's not very good at having; they both know she loves him, but it's much harder to say that than to live it. But this is different, both more and less complicated; it's about them but not only about them. What's best for William? How can they balance their needs, and his needs, and the devouring needs of their work?

"The paperwork doesn't matter," she concedes, reaching up to touch his cheek-- the familiar bit of stubble, the faint scarring still there from his captivity. "I've been your widow for months."

Mulder tucks a leg under him as he turns to face her, too. Neither of them need to say why it is they need to see each other head-on. They just know: this can't be left to sideways glances and euphemism.

"I know," he murmurs, his cheek tilting slightly towards her fingertips. Instinctively, he reaches for her other hand; after so many months of pain, made more incomprehensible the longer he's back, he wants the comfort of her touch. "And - I'm sorry."

The one thing he's willing to apologize for is the thing he's pretty sure he couldn't have done anything about. But he hates the thought that she's been alone throughout this ordeal, carrying a child unlikely to know its father. Scully's had to be strong, stronger than he's ever asked her to be.

Of course, that sorrow doesn't actually give them an answer, only a place to start. "What do you want to do?"

He's more than welcome to her hand, and the rest of her. That much she thinks he knows by now, even if he has his moments of doubt-- doubt enough to think she'd take up with the first stranger she met.

"I don't know," she sighs, her fingers skimming up to brush away a strand of his hair, but not straying from his face. "I'm not sure wanting is the right question. Is it that easy-- could we just walk away, get married, get a dog?"

There's a wry note to the question; of course they can't. It wouldn't suit either of them, not after everything they've seen and done together.

"I've gotten everything that matters, and more. Am I being greedy if I say I want to--" Her breath stutters; it feels momentous to say this kind of thing aloud. Impossible. "To be a family?"

"I don't know." Is that greedy? Is it merely human? Mulder squeezes her hand, letting himself be petted and doted on. She's going to stay the night - another thing that, at this point, doesn't need discussion - and he's relieved, because he's not sure he's ready to be alone. (Between her breathing and the TV, it won't be too quiet. He's not convinced he'll be able to sleep, but it won't be for lack of sound.) And he asks himself if things could be that easy. Exactly the way Scully's always wanted, getting off the road and doing something else with their lives.

Again, he says, "I don't know," but this time, he chases it with, "I've solved the mysteries that mattered most to me. I've experienced some of the most extreme possibilities out there."

But he doesn't feel done, something he'd bet isn't the answer she'd like to hear. The compulsion to keep going, to seek more even when it might only cause them both heartache, is hard to refuse. The fate of the world still hangs in the balance. Can they really raise a child knowing that an invasion might be coming? "We'd have to leave it behind, Scully. All of it. Is that even possible?"

She just shrugs, her mouth twisting up. I don't know, but they've both said it already. Again, traitorously, her eyes sting with tears.

"I don't think-- I was going to take some time, but I don't think I would have quit." Even when his mystery had been solved, neatly wrapped up and buried six feet under, it felt like chasing secrets forever was the best way to honor him. Maybe someday she'd be able to explain it to their child.

"But how can we keep going, either? Both of us constantly in danger..." She sighs. "I don't know. We can't keep pretending there's nothing between us. Not with him."

"No," he agrees, looking down at her body. At him, the closest he can get right now. She must have those little black-and-white ultrasound pictures somewhere; sometime when he's actually in the mood to leave his apartment, maybe he'll ask. What does he look like? Is he the right size, the right shape? "I'm not going to tell you what to do, or try and be some kind of male chauvinist pig - do people still call them that? Feels like I haven't heard anyone say it since 1979. But - I know how much you've wanted this."

Which isn't really what he's trying to say, but it's getting close. Mulder tries to think of how to ask it without sounding like he's trying to push her toward the kitchen to make him a sandwich. "If you didn't have to work, would you still want to?"

It's hard to picture her dropping the Bureau in favor of being someone's full-time mother, but she has the chance, and they both know she's unlikely to get another. Maybe she could start wearing those weird jumpers that moms seem to acquire, the ones made out of denim with little embroidered animals and flowers on them. He'd be miserable without her, of course - Agent Doggett's still an unknown quantity, and the reality is that Scully's always more likely to get along with people than Mulder is, so her opinion of him doesn't help much - but he has to consider the possibility that the next chapter of Scully's life doesn't revolve around a basement office full of porn.

"I didn't really plan to stop when--" should she say we or I? When they'd tried. They'd never gotten far enough for the awkward talk about logistics, doing in vitro. "I would have taken some time, of course."

A few months. Maybe a year, she could have imagined that, and then her mother could have helped, and she'd had a folder of research on daycares and programs and pre- kindergartens. All of it long discarded.

And Mulder would have kept working-- maybe with a new partner, maybe just waiting. Maybe he would have found a better fit. That's always been a danger, but no matter what happened, they would have stayed close.

"We never had to talk about it then-- what you would have wanted. I think I was afraid to ask-- that maybe you wouldn't want anything at all."

Needless to say, it's different now. William may not have been planned, but he was the outcome of a sea change in their relationship; a product of particular evolution.

"I don't know if they'd let us work together, if we married. Even if we don't-- I can't imagine no one would guess you're his father. But I hate the idea of giving everything up."

"I wasn't sure what I was allowed to want," he admits, not quite meeting her eyes. It's obvious in retrospect, he's sure, that he'd been in love with her long before ever attempt a kiss. If things had happened the way they'd hoped, rescuing her eggs and implanting them with the help of science, he'd have wanted that child, too. But he hadn't had any real claim on the kid. No real claim on Scully, either.

Not that he does now, exactly - claim is simultaneously caveman and aspirational - but there's more room to talk about it.

"If you leave my name off the birth certificate, that'll get us a little further." It's no great loss, he reasons; he knows the truth, and he's not about to get bent out of shape by some incomplete record-keeping on the part of the Social Security Administration. When William's old enough, he'll know, and that's what matters. "Skinner'll go to bat for us, not that it'll matter much with Kersh on the scene. And I'll play the distantly appreciative coworker -" this with a tease of a smile - "if it keeps you on the X-files."

[ n a m e ; ]	Dana Katherine Scully
[ c a n o n ; ]	The X-Files
[ g a m e ; ]	spicy times in noctiumrp

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