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Her name was Vega Margaret Grace Scully.
They named her after the second brightest star in the sky, partly because they didn't find Sirius a fitting name for a girl, and partly because Scully thought it was never good for a person to be deemed the brightest even before starting out. Vega also meant ‘the falling eagle’ in Arabic which one of them—no names mentioned—thought was really cool.She truly was their tiny star, their guiding light in all darkness. An impossible little light. But if anyone were to have an impossible child, it would be them. Technically, they already had two impossible children between them, so why not a third? He didn’t mind not carrying on his family name.
‘I will gladly be the last Mulder,’ he often said. ‘My family was a bunch of assholes I don’t want to either remember or honor. And besides, what if she becomes FBI? You'd never be able to handle two Mulders.’She argued that if their daughter did become an agent, he’d have to deal with two Scullys, but he always coyly replied that no, if so, she’d have to deal with him calling her Dana which inevitably led to her addressing him as Fox for the next two hours.Most often, they called her Vey.
Vey was sharp-witted and bold like her dad and strong-willed and truth-speaking like her mom. And of course, her intellect was stunning. What else could it have been? By the age of four, she’d taught herself reading and writing – and a fair amount of Spanish, Chinese and Hebrew – from YouTube kids. By the time she was six, she was asking questions that stopped both her parents in their tracks. She mused about negative numbers, the concept of a never-ending universe, and the mechanics of the cogwheels in a bike’s pedals. Both of them enjoyed answering her questions, often learning something themselves in the process, too.Vey was almost born in her mother’s laboratory. The hum of Bunsen burners had been her first lullaby as Scully and her colleagues worked long days and nights, trying to find a cure for women who had lost their – or never had – any ova. By pregnancy week 40, they had made a breakthrough in their research, and Scully refused to go on parental leave, stubbornly claiming she was fine—that the stomach aches were just from some bad shrimp she’d had the day before. It wasn’t until her water broke that she realized what was going on.Her birthday was October 31st. Of course it was. Mulder had nearly toppled over when he realized the clock had passed midnight and the child wasn’t fully out yet – if he ever believed the stars were aligning for him, this was the moment.
“Can we call her Spooky? Please?” he’d whispered in Scully’s ear. “I’ve never loved you more!”
Scully, who was in labor, had punched his face. Sometimes Mulder brought Vega along to work. She’d sit in a corner of the classroom while he rambled about various psychos, murders, and the occasional ghost. The students and deans all mused about how Professor Mulder dragged around a little copy of himself—Vey was the spitting image of her father, with her dark, straight hair and puppy hazel eyes and as the little copy got older, she could navigate the halls of Yale like her own backyard, especially the library.
When Mulder got bored with students asking the same stupid questions over and over again, and Scully wanted a break from the stem cells, they’d escape to their little cabin in Quonochontaug. The three of them would spend hours walking along the shore, tossing stones into the ocean, and watching the tides pull them away.One evening at the beach, as the sky blazed orange and purple, she was frustrated with a project that just wasn’t working out—she’d thought through every detail, yet still couldn’t piece it all together. He tossed in a somewhat out-there counter-theory, just for the fun of the argument, going in circles, trying to work her up even more, nudging her, telling her that not everything always had to work out.She kept complaining and he kept mocking her complaints and they kept walking, talking and when the darkness fell, Vega stopped at the water’s edge to watch the stars and planets swirl and twinkle in the night sky. She craned her neck back further to take in the entire Milky Way and asked as if speaking straight into the universe:
“Mom, Dad. If something is impossible but it still happens, is science wrong or is the impossible just waiting for us to understand it better?”Scully turned to give Mulder a long look. A little smile tugged at the corner of her mouth.
“Well, that worked out great.”
Mulder put his arm around her, gave her a little squeeze, kissed her forehead, ruffled Vega’s hair.
“It did, Scully. It sure did.”