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There are three children Scully feels she can claim as her own.
Mulder hovered in the periphery of some, & was rooted from the beginning in the centre of others.
She's aware not even
she
is a constant, a common denominator - the world would choose to chew her up & spit her out & away from them in places, and she'd try her best to trudge the weary way back - bruised, bewildered. But driven.
The day after they - all three of them - turn their backs to that hospital, she awakes to a strange dawn. The sun pauses on its way up her cheek & leaves her with the strangest sense, that time has stopped.
The air's stillness unsettles something dormant in her chest. The cool light washes her skin.
Electric terror - like she has never felt - sears through her. Every part of her is sharp & bolting upright, legs fuzzing with the cold morning.
Her footsteps, static as pinpricks, race along the carpet to the little side room; the makeshift bed on the uncovered floorboards, to the even more makeshift belonging it’s trying to replicate.
They’ll be more solid in a few months. They will.
But they can’t know this now. They won’t know it till they get there, and even so, when they are confident enough to clothe the walls in paint & patterns, and the hanging of picture frames seems to tighten their triple orbit, Scully will always feel that strange instinct, that twists her neck - has her looking over their shoulders, for something that could shake them up and apart again.
The mop of hair is still on the pillow. Scully stops, to breathe softly through the half-open doorway. But her chest is rattling with shadowy terror. No substance. But there’s something flitting around her head that’s casting it - what is it? What
is
it?
Her eyes search the room for a hint. Nothing.
She hears footsteps calmer than hers padding down the hallway.
What is it?
She rubs at her forehead, eyes closed.
There are footsteps stopping behind her.
And-
There!
A toxic-waste green flashes on her eyelids, and she almost surges forward with the clarity of it- her neck, she had to check her neck! She had to-
There’s breath rustling her hair.
Emily!
Her neck-
Mulder’s hand is firm on her back.
“Scully? What’s wrong?”
Why was she up? Why were they in the doorway like this, and what had her heart blaring like a muffled alarm - like a far far away alarm? Like an alarm through a wall - a someone-else’s warning.
She blinks.
Nothing.
She blinks again-
“I- I’m not sure. I thought-”
He was frowning - he would be frowning, she knew. But she wasn’t looking at him - her eyes were locked in place. Emily was still and bundled up and safe.
So what was there to see she wasn’t seeing? What had she been thinking?
“C’mon, it’s too early.”
And it is.
Quietly bewildered, she lets him lead her back towards sleep, and never sees the piercing green of a horrible mistake again.
It happens again when William is born. Mulder, blessedly (she breathes exhausted thankfulness to a God she didn't know she still believed in, over the unusual regularity of public transport) had walked through the door as she was crowning & she'd never hit such a solid wall of relief in her life. His hand is clammy in the heat of hers - the doctor in her wants to say
'feverish'
- and the part of her brain not swirling with pain notes a grittiness to it - a hurried coating of hand sanitizer against dirt. With people buzzing round her like a swarm (the Mulder that lives in her brain makes a joke, here, about that making her their queen), she sees the appeal of a home birth.
Too late.
It's dawn, again, that catches her unawares - just a snatch of a moment, as her bleary eyes find themselves expecting candlelight, & dark, close ceilings.
The sterile white above her is a greeting, like vinegar on a paper cut. She's struck with the odd sensation that she ought to go back to sleep, so she could wake back up in the right place. As if
this isn’t
the right place.
And she remembers this feeling, like there’s something beyond, that won’t show itself. Like there’s something she
should
remember.
He puts his grimy hand in hers, though, and visions of dark & pain & candlelight (why would there be candlelight?) are seared away and burned up in an antiseptic fire; tugged from her mind, rushed away from her on a breath of air - on a gurney.
Her head is swampy and fuzzy and all things unclear, and any strange second-hand terror is diluted and subdued in the amongst the multitude tired aches that seem to be in her very bones. She wonders why, a moment before, it had felt suspiciously like loss.
Words and sounds and images are impossibly heavy, clumping in a foggy mass, and her body is too weary to hold on to any of it.
But with a new soul fresh, pink, and swaddled, against the rolled up fabric of his free arm's shirt sleeve, she lets it all fall away and over her under the infinitely heavier curtain of sleep.
By the time they all get home, and her mother opens their beautiful, simple front door, hand against Emily's giddy little head, Scully has forgotten.
She has the strangest feeling that the scalpel is heavy, as she lies staring at the ceiling. Child number 3. Pregnancy number 2. Typical, natural pregnancy number 1. She’s numb, scared and waiting. It's strange, not feeling the contractions as she knows they must still be coming & going.
There’s the good old medical fluster around her, again. It’s still strange being on the other side of it. And by this time it’s been long enough to make her vaguely nostalgic. For all that they had been - all that they had traded for this.
She can feel a greater backlog of anxiety from the doctors than the last time, and tries to ignore it. She isn’t
that
old. She’d been through worse.
Of course, they had no idea about all that.
Something in her gut is mangling her thoughts. One in particular keeps trying to block her airways:
‘what are we doing? We can’t trust these people. We’ve given them everything - they know who we are, they have our names, they have us right here, and numb and vulnerable, and- why are we here? We should run’.
The nurse nearest her head leans in and whispers to her.
“Not long now, Dana.”
It’s still cycling round her head -
‘should’ve given them fake names. Should’ve-’
But the woman is smiling and her hand is soft.
And somehow that’s enough to hand her back her clarity.
It had her feeling nomadic and desperate, yes, but it’s different this time.
There are no flashes. Her eyes drift open and closed and closer and further from sleep, and she wonders what she’ll see when she opens them.
There’s that half-memory, again, again, of what she had seen in the years before - all reconstruction, all flawed recall.
But, in surreal anti-climax, there’s his face, and his voice, and the friendly scent of properly-cleaned equipment.
And, almost as strange as the flashes themselves, nothing more.
Maybe, just maybe, there was never any danger with this one. Maybe this was always meant to be. A last mercy to the universe’s two favourite punching bags.
Maybe they’d fought enough they were finally being left alone. She prays so.
Over the years, in the rare silent patches where her house and her head were all quiet and still, she’d tried to wrestle what she’d seen from her subconscious. Always unsuccessfully. But in the way of an invisible acquaintance dining at your table. Who knows what they really look like, but the chair is raked back and the cutlery is shuffled and Scully finds herself resolved to be content at the knowledge that
something
is there.
She’s done chasing boogeymen.
The monsters are dead and the dark is gutted and hollowed of its terrors.
They both know well enough that this doesn’t always matter- they have laid, side-by-side, in the memory of it all, with their hearts in their throats.
And then in each other’s. Self-sacrifice or self-preservation - call it what you like - they have given themselves up to the other, time and again, when the fear rattles around their brains with no monster to latch onto.
No it doesn’t always matter, that there’s nothing left to run from.
But there are two figures stood in the doorway - there are two old children stood in the doorway - with their blond and their dark hair, and that 9-month old concern still staining both their eyes. She doesn’t miss how it fades at the sight of her, the little squirming creature in her arms.
She smiles at the wordless awe on both her babies’ faces.
And it sure as anything matters now.