These Words
Scully watched him for a long moment. How beautiful he was when he slept, off in his own little dream world. She wondered what was in that world. Was there extraterrestrials? Or... normal things? Surely not, considering who his father is, Scully thought with some amusement. Poor baby probably dreams about conspiracies. Would he, somehow, someday, dream of normal things?
How she longed to know in her coldest nights alone. Now they could only get lonelier. She'd had a good future ahead of her nine years before... all this. Now, she had no choice but to give up her baby for adoption and Mulder was gone. All she would have then was the FBI. There was no way of knowing if Mulder was dead or alive, well or ill.
She looked down at William. Did babies really dream at all? Surely they did. They would often awaken in fear of something, something in their nightmares that adults probably didn't understand. This was something Scully knew she would never understand those things. She wished that Mulder were with her, to help her raise their child. He might understand William's dreams and his unearthly abilities.
Mulder, she missed him so much. Some days, William was all she had to live for now that Mulder was gone.
She sighed and stepped away from the crib. Would William ever know the world of his father? The world that the FBI had pushed her into? And the world Mulder had kept her in.
But, she wasn't quite sure where it had truly begun. And now, after nine years where she and her partner had created such a powerful bond that she hadn't been sure how she was going to live on when Mulder was first abducted, and again when he had been forced to go into hiding. It might have been the FBI who had pushed her to the X-files, but if it hadn't been for Mulder, she never would have stayed. And she just wasn't sure why. But she was sure of it.
She sat down and turned on the TV. It was on the sci-fi channel. She didn't remember watching that channel recently, and sometimes it made her sad, but she decided to watch it anyway, mostly out of the laziness in her that didn't even want to grab the remote and change the channel. On the screen, there was a man, tall and dark.
"Do you believe in the existence of extraterrestrial life?"
The man's voice became Mulder's, and Scully closed her eyes. In her mind, she went back in time to the first moment where she had entered the X-files office. One of the first things she saw was the poster.
On it, there was a UFO hanging in the sky, and below it there were these words:
I WANT TO BELIEVE