He wonders about beginnings and endings -beyond atoms and biological conception, beyond explosions and death. There's something about the unfathomable that leaves him paralyzed on park benches, eyes burning because he forgets to blink. He's heard talk of a 'God particle'. A man of open mind, he looks out for it in newspapers, in overheard conversations. What started it all? What sparked the ultimate beginning?
Mulder used to think that he and Scully were as divided as oil and water, but now he's having trouble deciphering where she stops and he begins. Smashed together and pulled apart like a kneaded eraser, they'd known a life of being torn and thrown to opposite ends of countries. States between them like a patchwork quilt.
And now.
Every day reminds her of the feeling she gets when she misses a step on a staircase. She's constantly shocked to see him here, with her. Surprised at the way he seems to have adjusted to this strange, new life. This life on the run, driving across state borders, together again. Scully watches him from the corner of her eye while she drives. He looks out the window or worries his hands, and she doesn't know what to do or say. They'd always been better at telepathy. In the back seat, Will makes a small noise in his sleep, and Scully sees Mulder tense slightly beside her. He's thrown again by this new addition to their constellation. Does he know what it was like to go through life without her Castor?
On scrap of paper she'd found in a drawer in his desk, Scully had written,
TRUTH IS NOT WHAT WE'RE TOLD
She had no idea where the words had come from. Mulder's truth is Out There, and she would search for it in his absence. Beside these words, she wrote,
THE TRUTH IS WHAT WE SEE
She finds the paper in the bottom of her suitcase, the corners softened by time, when they finally stop at a motel for the night.
Always torn between being a rationalist or empiricist, Scully surprises herself with this undeniably empirical statement. Not wanting to relive any second of the time without him, she stuffs the paper back among her socks and underwear as Mulder comes out of the bathroom, freshly showered.
"Might want to let it cool down in there before you take yours," he suggests, ruffling his hair. The moment is startlingly intimate, and they are both aware of its awkwardness. Domesticity does not suit them.
And now.
Paying for one room is strange. He can feel Scully beside him, how she moves ever so slightly side-to-side with the baby on one hip, her lips on his downy head. This is how she comforts herself, now. Even if everything else is new and uncomfortable, at least she can hold her baby and feel safe.
"There you go! Have a nice stay, and let us know if you need anything!" Mulder takes two sets of keys from the cheery girl and slips them into his pocket, nodding in thanks. To this girl, Susie, they are a family on the road. A new mother, a new father, and their little son who plays with his mother's hair and blows spit bubbles.
Mulder brings their bags in, followed by the portable crib Scully had thought to buy after one night of Will sleeping in his carseat. It's a light brown color, and Mulder thinks it would fit in perfectly with the rest of Scully's furniture at home.
And then he corrects himself, because home for them is on the road, now. From New Mexico to Wyoming, and onwards. Or maybe home is when he's with her. He'd never thought of it that way before, but he knows immediately that it is true.
"Take him for a minute," Scully says, depositing Will into his clumsy arms and rolling up the sleeves of her navy cardigan, working the folded crib into a standing position and unpacking the soft sheet and insulation in case the baby rolls in his sleep. It had taken months before she'd been able to move him out of her room and into the nursery in her apartment. Irrationally, Scully had thought that if she couldn't hear the baby breathing in the same room as her, she would be completely alone in the world. And so, selfishly, she had kept him close for her sake more than his.
And now.
Growing up in a home full of people, her fierce independence as an adult had come as a surprise. The first time Scully had her own bedroom room and no roommates was when she moved to her apartment in Georgetown to join to F.B.I. And she had basked in it. The quiet and the feel of air stagnant unless she moved through it.
After five months, she has Mulder back and, although it feels strange, she can imagine nothing better than being able to hear him breathe in the next bed as she falls asleep, knowing he is alive and well, and in the same room as her.
He's been putting on an act for Scully's sake -pretending that this is easy for him, when it's anything but. Here they are, Scully setting up their son's crib, turning down the beds for the night, quietly ordering a pizza on the room's phone. A year and a half ago they'd been running from state to state in business casual, badges worn inside coats, solving unexplained phenomena and joking about UFOs. And now. Here they are, a couple on the road, normal people doing normal things and leading a normal life. On the surface, maybe.
It is not known to the outside world that they are running from the government, that Mulder is a fugitive. Fleeing from men that smoke and men with badges. It is not known that they have never said good night to each other like this, in a paid-for room with two beds. He has known his son for three days, while she has known him for four months. It is not known that Scully is on high alert day in and day out, running on an average of five hours of sleep.
Scully says that if they're lucky they'll cross into Idaho tomorrow afternoon. These are the things they look forward to now. Running over borders, one state at a time. She's got a coffee stained map of the States folded up in the glove compartment, and studies it daily, looking for the shortest route while Mulder takes his shift at driving. Beside the map is the wad of cash they'd withdrawn, enough to get them across the country and started somewhere else. They feel like criminals, unfolding the rubber-banded swirl of hundreds and slipping one free. Then again, to a degree, they are.
Mulder is awkward with the baby. He hasn't acquired the comfortability of parenting an infant that sets in around two months after they're born. Scully had picked it up without even noticing, but sees Mulder's jealousy as she plucks Will from his arms easily and holds him with one hand on her hip while she slips off her shoes and takes out her earrings, humming something tuneless and purposefully avoiding Mulder's eyes. He heads to the bathroom. To shower, she presumes. Driving has the habit of making her feel grimy, too.
While he's in there, the water hissing, Scully lays down with Will beside her, looking into his eyes while he bats at her nose and kicks his little legs excitedly. She feels guilty for keeping him cooped up in the back of the car all day, watching the blurry world go by as she and Mulder stay mostly silent in the front seat, trying to find themselves in each other.
"I told you a lot about him," Scully tells Will. He looks at her, fascinated, and there is a wisdom in his serious gaze that Scully recognizes as something she'd always noted in Mulder. Behind the inappropriate humor, behind the ever-present eagerness to discover the truth, there had always been that wisdom in him. And she sees it especially now, when they're diluted to their simplest selves. "Do you remember?"
Will coos and reaches for her face, and Scully sits up, scooting to the head of the bed and scooping her son up, unbuttoning the first few buttons of her white blouse to slip his head inside and let him nurse. The baby latches on immediately and rests one hand on her breast, and Scully hopes he's not too hungry because she isn't ready for Mulder to see her like this. So soft and loving with her son, it is too intimate a moment to share with him yet.
Mulder leaves the bathroom with one towel around his waist and another ruffling his hair. Coming back into the motel room, he sees her there; sitting on the bed with Will in her arms, saying things to the baby that he can't hear. Scully looks up and there is a moment of understanding between them. This is what it looks like when I love our son. This is who I was without you.
He looks at her there, and finds himself trying to imagine a world without her in it. The thought terrifies him. It seems she is his world, now. This small, fierce woman who saved him.
Apparently caught, Scully flushes and stands, going to change Will's diaper and escape Mulder's gaze. Our son, Mulder turns this over in his head. Of course he's their son. And never more than now, with his mother's nose and father's coloring. His earnestness and her practicality.
Scully comes back to the bed and lays Will down again, his little yellow bunny tucked beside him. Two pillows on each side, and then she steps back and looks over her work, then up at Mulder. He's still standing in a towel, water dripping down his chest.
"Can you stay with him while I…"
Mulder nods. "Yeah, of course. Go on, we'll be fine." Scully only hesitates for a second, then turns from them and into the bathroom, which is thick with steam and the scent of hotel soap. And yet it smells like Mulder at the same time. She wonders why that is, and how she knows this.
The baby is starting to drift off to sleep. His eyes blinking heavily and breath slowing to a steady in and out. Mulder suddenly recalls his mother rocking Samantha to sleep when she was an infant, and wonders if babies should be held as they go to sleep, if the comfort of someone's arms is the catalyst for a good night's rest. Gingerly, he picks Will up and into the cradle of his arms, feeling the solid weight of his son and realizing for the first time, really, that this baby is a whole other person. A person that he helped create.
Sometimes, he thinks about his own parents, and finds it strange that he lives in a world in which those who gave him life no longer exist. Death in itself is inevitable, but its reality is sharp and unforgiving. Mulder looks down at his son, who is looking up at him curiously.
"Don't worry, bud," he says. "We're not going anywhere."
Suddenly, Will bursts into tears, his face contorting, red. Mulder's heart stops beating as he tries to figure out what to do. He's seen Scully do something magical that seems to comfort the baby, some little saying or song he can't remember, so the baby continues to wail while Mulder tries to soothe him, until the door of the bathroom bursts open and Scully rushes out in a white towel, hair like dark kelp on her neck.
"What happened?" she asks, and Mulder detects the smallest hint of accusation in her voice.
He shakes his head as she sits down on the bed and holds her arms open for the baby, who lunges for her the second she comes into view. And Mulder watches, feeling like a failure, as all that it takes for Will to calm is several soft kisses from his mother with his head buried in her neck.
"I don't know. He just started crying. I didn't do anything," Mulder explains, and sees Scully's eyes soften.
"I'll be right back," she says, bringing the baby with her into the bathroom and shrugging, one-handed, into the complimentary robe. Sitting on the closed lid of the toilet she runs a comb through her hair while Will nurses, his eyelids fluttering closed.
Scully has never felt so unlike herself than she does in this moment. She makes a soft sound, the beginning of tears, but does not cry. Will opens his eyes and scratches at the skin between her breasts, studying her. Here is your son. There is your best friend. Everything in your life is in this one cheap motel room, and yet you are sad.
She hears Mulder opening the door outside, and is immediately frightened. Will senses this sudden fear and whimpers, pulling away from her. When Scully realizes it's only the pizza being delivered and paid for, she relaxes and brings the baby back to her breast. Motherhood has made her more of a lioness than a soft, gentle rabbit. She has the power to kill anyone who threatens her family, and will prove it if necessary.
When she leaves the bathroom with Will against one shoulder, his face buried in her neck again and peeking out at this rugged stranger, Mulder stands from the bed. Kissing her son's soft head goodnight, she tucks him into the crib and stands back up, looking up at Mulder. "He was hungry, that's all." This is harder for him than she thought, Scully realizes -instant fatherhood. "You didn't do anything wrong."
"Pizza's here," Mulder announces quietly, mindful of the sleeping baby.
Scully's getting in her pajamas, and Mulder thinks he shouldn't look, so he turns away. But he can see her reflected in the window as she pulls a grey shirt over her head and tucks her hair behind her ears, looking more like a teenage girl at a sleepover than a woman running from the government, accompanied by a fugitive and her four and a half month old baby.
They eat quietly on what he assumes will be his bed. She likes to sleep near the baby, but with her scooted all the way to the other side of the room like that, practically next to the crib, Mulder feels terribly alone. Is it possible, he wonders, to miss someone even when you're in the same room?
This feels relatively more normal -eating together. After all, isn't that what they've been doing for years now? Breakfast. Lunch. Takeout. Sunflower seeds. Scully's raisins. Although now instead of crime scene photos to discuss they have routes to go over, predicting the time it'll take until they cross over into Canada.
"I'm sorry," Scully chuffs a laugh. "This is all so strange."
Mulder tips his head. "What?"
"This," Scully gestures to the pizza between them. "Us. This room. This whole thing."
He nods. "Think it's an X-File?" he quips, and Scully takes another bite of pizza before setting it down, apparently finished.
"You get the tickets, I'll get the dossier," Scully says, rather unlike herself.
A long moment passes as her initial laugh dilutes in the room like air freshener and a car's headlights shine in as it backs out of the lot. "I wonder if it will ever feel normal again," Mulder says, and Scully doesn't respond. They let his words rest in their hearts as they clean up their dinner, the whole room smelling like pizza, and Scully washes her hands before tucking into her bed. Saying Goodnight the day before had been uncomfortable, so they say nothing as they climb into their respective beds.
Scully dreams about jellyfish and hospitals.
He dreams of fire and wailing babies.
In college she'd read the words "At sunrise everything is luminous but not clear," and had always wanted to know them physically. Although she finds she cannot know them physically, but only in her heart. Her heart? A fickle thing. Metaphysics, as well as the comfort of science, tells her that feelings are neither in the heart nor the mind which, furthermore, must then be separate from the brain. The soul, then? If such a thing exists. Mulder had told her about souls. She hadn't wanted to believe.
She believed.
Scully opens her eyes at her baby's cry the next morning and gathers him up. While he whimpers and reaches for her, she quickly changes his diaper on the bed and picks him up again, blinking into consciousness and noting the dawn breaking the horizon line outside. Will roots around for her breast and is finally rewarded when she pulls up her t-shirt, thinking it hadn't been the wisest decision, but she'd been too tired to think last night. She walks around while her baby nurses, stroking his silky leg and loving the unconscious way he rests his tiny hand on her chest, eyes closed.
Scully tickles the soft pad of Will's foot and watches as he opens his eyes to look up, blinking steadily and making contended noises against her. From his eyes she looks to Mulder, who's still sleeping, unaware of her softly rocking their son in her arms while he nurses, her shirt pulled up to expose the curve of her breast. She feels this moment as luminous. Bright, shining. And yet it is not clear. It is still blurred around the edges -her whole life as it is, now.
I wonder if it will ever feel normal again
That much isn't clear. She doesn't think it ever will be.
They do not cross into Idaho the next afternoon. One flat tire, lunch, and two twenty minute stops to comfort a screaming baby later, and they're one hundred miles away but too tired to do any more driving.
"What?" Mulder asks, seeing her shake slightly. He unbuckles Will from his carseat and lifts him out and into his arms so the baby's head is tucked under his chin.
"Cold," Scully says, going around to the back to open the trunk and get their bags. "Tired."
This room is darker than the others. Dark wallpaper, dark duvet covers, navy carpeting. Both he and Scully are dead on their feet. She loses two inches when she slips off her shoes and immediately turns down the bed after unpacking a pair of pajamas. William, however, had been sleeping in the car, and is now wide awake and trying to stick his fingers into Mulder's ear and scratch along his cheek.
"We're gonna have to trim this kid's nails," Mulder calls to Scully. She's in the bathroom doing whatever girls do that boy's don't when getting ready to sleep. He kicks off his own shoes and sits down on the bed closest to the window with the baby, laying him down and propping himself up on his elbows so they can be eye to eye, nose to nose. Will giggles and kicks, reaching up to Mulder's face; they've easier with each other, now.
Mulder strokes his son's cheek and Will's mouth opens in a toothless smile, grabbing one of Mulder's fingers and shaking it with a strong grip.
"I'm too tired to stay up and eat," Scully calls back to them a few minutes later. Mulder watches as Will's eyes immediately blink to find his mother's voice. "We can just have a big breakfast." He can still hear the way she tries to make everything sound professional, instead of personal. They've been sharing a room for a week, they have a baby together, and they've known each other for almost a decade; yet now they falter in how to behave with each other. Is that why she's still wearing business casual, while he's already adopted jeans and t-shirts?
"What are you thinking about?" Mulder asks Will, who yawns widely and sighs. "Me too."
Scully almost cries when she sees Mulder awkwardly getting the baby ready for bed. She wonders how he knows how to change a diaper, when he's never changed Will before. He talks to his son, and finally picks him up and hands him off to Scully. She looks at him in a way he doesn't recognize. She's humbled by him. Proud, even.
She kisses the baby's head and turns away from Mulder, unbuttoning the first three buttons of her pajama top, a gap just wide enough to slip Will close to her and offer him a breast. Scully gently pries his chubby, strong fingers away from her cross and gives him her index finger to hold onto instead. His grip soon goes slack as he drifts off, and soon he's asleep in the crib, a few fingers jammed into his mouth that Scully has to pull out.
When she turns around, Mulder is under the covers in his own bed, apparently sleeping. Strange, she thinks. She feels vulnerable being the only one awake in this darkness.
She'd wanted to tell Mulder something but is glad now that she hadn't gotten the chance. She won't ever tell him, now. But she wants to remember the words, so she says them aloud in the black night, to no one.
"For once in my life I feel happy, but I don't like the kind of happiness that it is. I don't believe in it, Mulder. I'm afraid of it. I believe only that it will crack open sooner or later and terrible things will come flying out."
Scully closes her eyes and settles to go to sleep. She hears the rustle of sheets in the bed across the room, and knows at once that Mulder had heard her confession. She wonders if he feels the same.
A/N: There are a couple of subtle allusions in this piece. Can you find them? Anyway, thanks for reading! Please review!