She is restless.
By day she focuses on cases and by night, if she is lucky enough and they are on the road, she counts her blessings and not so subtly works to keep Mulder close when she goes to sleep: in the next room, the next bed — or even better, right next to her.
Having him near usually keeps the nightmares at bay, feeling his skin next to hers, his warmth, it reminds her subconscious mind that he is here, that he is safe. I she wakes up, she can focus on his breathing or reach out to test his solid presence and go back to sleep.
Other nights, most nights, she's not able to sleep at all. She doesn't even attempt to fall asleep because the visions take all of her attention and drain her in a way that turns her into a shell of herself. Having Mulder there with her would only consume them both instead of just one of them. She can't do that to him on top of everything else.
She won't.
She calls it visions to herself but the truth is that it's only one tale retold too many times. It's like watching the same horror movie over and over again. It always start with the same silhouette of a man hidden behind smoke. She can't see his face but she knows that he's half-smiling, she has seen that evil face too many times not to know that.
"I'm the creator," he says, and Scully would like not to believe him but she knows it's the truth. After Emily, after the experiments conducted on her — on Mulder, too — she knows it's the truth. His truth, anyway.
She feels William's hurt, feels how his insides contract painfully with the awareness that his birth was carefully planned for a purpose, that his mere existence serves the purposes of evil forces. He resents this origine and his supposed destiny with such an intensity than it leaves Scully trembling more often than not.
Scully hurts too, but she is older and wiser. She has seen too much, lived too much to believe that there's only one color of the truth, only one destiny, only one side of every story.
Devil's in the details. She thinks God is too. Experiment or not, evil conceptual creator or not, William's still their son, their once-in-a-lifetime miracle.
The visions are filled with desperation and suffering, people dying on the streets consumed by illness and desperation but it's the ending what makes her blood run cold every time, her heart almost stop. Mulder dying in front of her eyes.
Over and over and over again.
That is a future that she can't reconcile herself with, it's an unacceptable outcome.
So she makes herself breathe, remembers that none of it has happened yet and reconstructs the pieces that the vision turns her into. Her heart, broken in a million tiny pieces every night can barely stand it, and yet another night comes and it breaks all over again, hurting just as much.
One night, out of the blue, there's a thought there that she knows isn't hers. A distant voice that comes from somewhere unknown says that they should stop, that they have to stop, that forsaking him is the only way to save Mulder.
That day she goes into work but she can't concentrate, not really; the echo of the voice is there, insistent, like a ghost that refuses to go away until been properly avenged.
"Are you okay?" Mulder looks at her with worried eyes, the same kind of eyes that have been looking at her for the better part of her life whenever something wasn't entirely right.
"Yes. I just didn't sleep much last night. Bad dream." And tries for a tired smile.
"Okay. Why don't you come over tonight?" he says with a kind face that she knows it's reserved only for her. "I can draw you a bath and I'll make dinner while you relax. That vegetarian lasagna you like so much. Maybe a back massage afterwards"
He takes a step and runs his fingers casually through her hair, putting a lock behind her ear like she used to wear it when she was younger, when they both were. There are lines around his eyes that weren't there back then, but she has watched as they gradually appeared on his face and she doesn't resent them. Age has been on their side because she still loves him so, so very much. And he loves her too, despite everything, even leaving their house and and a domestic life together, he has not given up on them.
Mulder doesn't give up.
That's what the voice doesn't understand. Mulder. Doesn't. Give up. It's a universal truth if there ever was one. He didn't give up on her when her own mother did, or on his sister when nobody else would believe him. He never gave up the search, or them. It scares her to death because she knows that even telling him that it would lead to his certain death, he would still try his hardest to find and protect their son. He will never give up on William either.
She feels like she could cry now, with his fingers tracing imaginary patterns behind her ear and so much earnest care in his eyes, looking closely at her. She swallows her fears and dares her voice to be steady when she speaks.
"If you had made that offer when we were younger you'd have gotten into my pants way, way sooner."
Mulder snorts and smiles like a giant, lanky dork. "No, I would have not. I'm not even sure you liked me much half of the time back then, Scully."
She crosses her arms over her chest and rises her chin to look at him as squarely in the eye as possible. "Believe me Mulder, I liked you exactly that much."
She goes with him that night but doesn't take the offered bath, instead she puts on yoga pants and helps him chop vegetables while they both drink wine. There is jazz music on the background and Mulder makes terrible dad jokes that makes her laugh out loud, filling the dark corners of the house. They have dinner under dimmed lights and make love on the master bedroom upstairs.
She stares at the ceiling, trying to discern patterns on the paint while Mulder breathes evenly into her hair, his arms loosely wrapped around her body. He has asked her a handful of times over the years if she has ever regretted the choices that led her to this life, like metaphorical checkpoints, imaginary milestones. Do you regret it yet? How about now, ten years later? Do you still not regret it, Scully? The implication always being that she would come to regret her life at some point, to regret choosing him over anything else. Over everything else.
She never has.
She doesn't think it's possible that she ever will.
"If there was anything about your past that you could change, what would it be?" She knows that he is not really sleeping, just resting his eyes, because he has been a mayor insomniac and light sleeper for as long as she has known him. Still she doesn't raise her voice above a whisper, just in case.
"Whatever I did to make you leave me."
Mulder doesn't sugarcoat things for her. The earnestness in his voice is like a stab in the chest. He doesn't open his eyes. They could both pretend that he's not fully awake for his answer if the circumstances were different.
"You were severely depressed and I couldn't keep witnessing how you slipped away," her voice breaks. She remembers how desperate and full of love she was when she made that choice. "At the time, I thought that leaving was the only thing that maybe could make you reach for help."
"It did," he says and she breathes out relieved. "But still."
The vision doesn't come that night but the the voice does.
Make him understand, it says.
Reason and emotion are two powerful things, and when pressed to choose, Mulder has always gone with the later. She can make him understand but she can't make him choose himself over William. She knows she can't.
He has shaped the last seventeen years of his existence focussing on making whatever it took to ensure their son was safe even if that meant never meeting him in the flesh, and now that William is the one on the run, chased by the same kind of shadows he has been fighting against his whole life, it's an impossible request to ask Mulder to stop trying to help him.
The last twenty five years flash through her mind, feeling after feeling coloring her memories with an intensity that is heartbreaking.
She has to save him.
She must.
Scully hugs him in the dark and breathes in his familiar scent.
A couple of nights later, the vision comes back as it always does and she watches Mulder die in front of her as she always does.
A tear of sadness and frustration runs down her cheek. She feels like it is a shared tear.
What if it wasn't me?, the voice asks in her head, and she doesn't understand what he's asking at first.
Then the images in her head begin. They have a different coloring, a different texture than the vision, like old homemade movies from her childhood. There's Monica Reyes saying that William is nothing more than an experiment with a quiet, cold voice that has nothing to do with the woman who helped her to give birth, that sang whale songs in an attempt to calm her down. The image shatters and then there is the Cigarette Smoking Man, his eyes bright and hungry for power, saying that he's the creator, the idea behind the facts, the father of William in every sense that counts for him, even if he's not the biological one. Then the image steadies on Mulder. A close up. He's quiet and sad as the world crashes down and crumbles around him but he's alive.
He's alive.
She thinks I love you, I love you, I love you both, with all the intensity she is able to, and hopes that the messages reaches William loud and clear. Wherever he might be.
She makes a choice, an impossible one. She will lie to Mulder when the time comes, and she will break a part of his soul telling him that William is not his, not hers, not theirs, but she will save him and he will be alive to resent her later for that lie. Not a white lie.
The next day she throws up her breakfast.
Mulder frowns.
Whenever she has a nosebleed or throws up without apparent cause, he frowns. It's the echo of his fears and hers, and they both live with that. It's not the heaviest charge of their shared baggage.
"I'm fine, Mulder," she says. The words are terribly worn out but she hopes that the sincerity of her tone reaches its target.
"Okay." He goes away leaving the bathroom door open only to come back with a deeper frown on his forehead ten seconds later.
"You would tell me, right? If there was something wrong?"
Scully wants to throw up again but her stomach is empty.
"I don't lie to you, Mulder." Not yet, anyway.
"Right."
Mulder sees things sometimes, things that aren't really there. He told her that a long time ago under shared sheets, while outside a snowstorm paralyzed the town they were staying at the moment. He feels things sometimes too, like intuition turned a couple of notches up, but his trust on her is stronger than either of those things.
The next morning she also throws up. It's the guilt for what she is going to do eating her from the inside out. Probably. Still, she manages to hold her stomach until they are in the Hoover Building and he won't follow her to the bathroom.
He is waiting for her when she comes back, thought.
"You look pale," he observes, with his arms crossed over his chest.
She rolls her eyes. "Aren't you charming today."
Mulder doesn't buy it, keeps looking a her with inquisitive eyes, so she takes a step and uncrosses his arms so she can reach for his hands. She caresses his knuckles with her thumbs.
"There is nothing wrong with me," she says. She can be completely sincere about that much, at least. "I promise."
She throws up for the third day in a row and she's the one that starts to worry. And then a fourth. Not the fifth, but the sixth and seventh befuddle her with the similarities she finds in her memories, not the cancer ones, then ones when she was—
She goes to the pharmacy and feels utterly ridiculous buying the test. Ridiculous. She is fifty-four years old and biology was never in her favor to begin with. When the tests comes back positive she goes out again and buys four more for good measure. She dismisses the bewildered look on the woman who sells them to her.
This is impossible, she thinks, looking at her reflection in the bathroom, the five positive test decorating her sink like a grotesque joke.
She thinks, or remembers, or envisions the Cigarette Smoking Man looking intently at her immobile self, lying unconscious on a strange bed as someone does something to her chip. Reprograms it, she figures.
"Now she will fulfill her destiny and I will have the key for the future of mankind at my disposal."
She despises that man so much that she even feels nauseated by his speaking patterns.
iI also can do that. From here/i, says the voice of William in her head and she grabs the sink until her knuckles are white. iI did it for you both/i.
She feels angry and frustrated, like she imagines the parent of a seventeen year old should feel most of the time for very different reasons. 'You have disposed of my uterus without permission' doesn't have the same ring as 'you took the family car without previously asking for it'.
"Someone needs to learn a lesson about affirmative consent and body autonomy," she murmurs harsly, but there is also a soft hope within herself that she can't completely deny, because God, a baby.
He will have a real son now. He will stop looking for me this way, insists the voice, and Scully is so, so mad about the chosen words that she hits the sink with her left hand. This is not a game, dammit, you can't replace a person with another new one.
She doesn't have time to do much else, not much time to process anything, for that matter. Monica Reyes calls and everything is set in motion despite her feelings, but she plays her part, God forgive her.
She runs around in the old factory like a mouse trapped in a cruel labyrinth. Hears the shots and a crash, loud and metallic as the sound echoes on the rusted walls and prays to God that she has not made the biggest mistake of her life, a terrible, terrible miscalculation somewhere.
"He's gone," Mulder says to her, beside the water. "He's gone, Scully."
He is breaking in front of her eyes and she tells herself that she will tell him the truth, someday, when she knows that he's safe, that William is still alive and theirs, and not such a conflicted, bad boy as he made Mulder believe with his tricks. That he gave them this baby in a misguided attempt to make them move on. That William and her did it all to save humanity, and him.
Mostly him.
For now, Scully hugs him as hard as she can in the cold night, and hopes that he can find comfort in her love, in her presence by his side in every bit of the shaky path ahead. It's going to be hard. Has it ever really been any other way?
But she still wouldn't change anything and she's never going away again. It's them, Mulder and Scully, Scully and Mulder, fighting the odds together into the future.
As it has always been.