AN: Welcome to Seasons: Seventh! As with previous seasons, I am starting further afield than the season opener, as I closed The Sixth Extinction in Seasons: Sixth. This series starts with Per Manum, (technically a Season 8 episode), and will shift to Hungry. As with all my stories, I do not own X-files, Scully, Mulder, or anyone else, they are the property of Chris Carter, Ten Thirteen Productions, and Fox Television.

A singular choice could change an entire worldview.

Dana Scully made a singular choice more than six years ago. A forensic pathologist for the FBI eager to get her feet wet in fieldwork, she had been assigned briefly to work with one of the FBI's more eccentric agents. Fox Mulder believed in conspiracies and chased aliens, the unsolved and the paranormal was his domain, far from her field of hard, medical science. They had sent her there to watch him, to hold him accountable. He had thought she was a spy. In a way she was. She was supposed to report on his work. She could have walked into that first case in Bellefleur, Oregon and recorded everything he did, turned it into the higher authorities, and walked back to Quantico and her autopsy lab. She could have left Mulder and his X-files, his conspiracies, and his aliens. Instead, she stayed.

For good and for ill that had made all the difference in Scully's life, she certainly didn't imagine herself here when she walked out of the Academy. She had joined this magical, mystery tour as a doubting Thomas, a skeptic who pointed out that Mulder's photos of UFO's were doctored, that his alien experts dubious, and his sources untrustworthy. With boyish faith and enthusiasm he grabbed her hand and drug her with him down the road of the unknown, through swamps and deserts, Florida to Alaska, finally from Africa to the Antarctic. Through it all Mulder had begged his erstwhile partner to see, to behold the truth he knew in his very being.

She finally saw…she finally understood. She know knew Mulder's truth and believed, at least in part, that there was more to this universe than even her science could possibly understand before. Scully now knew what Mulder always had, that the truth was indeed out there, and it was much, much bigger and more incomprehensible than she had ever dreamed. It frightened her. It excited her. But she had to believe it, because Mulder did.

He believed that anything was possible. Who was she, Dana Scully, to question it?

"And these ova belong to you?"

Dr. Parenti was a kindly looking doctor, but Scully supposed in his profession he would have to be. He came highly recommended as one of the top fertility doctors in the Washington DC area, having worked with patients ranging from the highest government officials to average couples just trying to have a baby. Whatever their economic or social standing, the feeling was always the same for those who graced Dr. Parenti's office, the nervous hope of those who have tried every other option afforded them and have come up empty. They came here looking for a miracle.

At least that was what Scully was looking for.

"Yes," she smiled firmly at the gentleman, watching him as he tapped a ballpoint pen lazily against her paperwork. "The story is…complex."

She didn't really want to have to explain to this stranger the truth. How because of her involvement with the X-files and Mulder she had been kidnapped five years ago, subjected to the cruelest of tests, her ova harvested for experiments that she still didn't understand. If it hadn't been for her discovery of one of those experiments, her daughter Emily, Scully would never have known the truth of why her ova were taken, nor would Mulder have discovered the small vial she planned to give Dr. Parenti's for his inspection.

Her reticence in explaining all this to the doctor sitting across from her hardly seemed to faze him. "And you are unsure what condition the ova are in?"

"They were found in a facility, frozen. As I did not authorize their taking and it was years after the fact when they were discovered, I'm not sure if they are even viable." Scully knew the story sounded insane, it would to anyone who hadn't lived through what she did. She had no better explanation for any of this. She had considered simply lying and saying that she had the ova taken before her cancer treatment; to preserve them in case she wanted to have children in the future. But that wouldn't explain her fear and worry about what condition the ova were in.

Whether Dr. Parenti found the story outlandish or not, he simply shrugged, gazing at Scully frankly across his large, wooden desk. "So tell me honestly, Dana, why do you want to have a baby?"

The question wasn't unexpected. In fact she would have expected it from any fertility doctor. But still, it gave Scully pause. How did she answer this? It should be straightforward; she wanted a baby, how simple was that? But it was oh, so much more complex, so fraught with everything she had gone through, everything she had experienced, not the least of which was the trials of the last few weeks, particularly of her partner's strange reaction to an artifact that came from an alien ship she had seen with her own eyes off the Ivory Coast.

She turned her eyes from the twisted tangle of her own fingers in her lap and met the doctor's kindly expression. "Dr. Parenti, I have given years of my life…everything to my work. My job is not an easy one, and yet I've stayed with it because I believed in it, believed that the work I was doing there was right. I don't regret my choice to stay there, because it was necessary. But in doing so I've lost…much. And I have gained more than I ever hoped for."

Her entire world had been turned upside down, every truth she had clung to her entire life had been questioned, from her understanding of where humanity came from, to her own belief in God. She had journeyed down this road with Mulder, kicking and screaming most of the way. But now they had come around the corner, near the bend in the road. And she was beginning to see something akin to an end. How many more truths were really left out there for the two of them to discover on this particular path?

Perhaps it was time for another one.

"The truth is," she continued softly. "I have reached a point in my life where I realize what I've given up for my work. And I want to shift my focus. It's time to think less about my career and more about other things…home and a family for example."

She was sure this was a theme that was familiar enough to the fertility doctor sitting across from her. How many other young, female professionals, devoted to their work, had approached him for this very thing. Like them, she wanted the chance to be a mother that circumstance had denied her. She wanted the chance that others had taken from her. And she prayed this doctor would agree to give her the miracle she had now considered for a long time.

Parenti considered her for long moments. Scully resisted the urge to squirm. The worst he could say was that he couldn't help her, to go look for someone else. And she could, she knew that. But it had taken her so long to even get this far, nearly two years. A fragile part of Scully's hope knew it would be crushed by a rejection, enough so she might put this off again for God knows how long.

She held her breath and waited.

"Ms. Scully," the doctor finally drawled, nodding heavily to himself. "Under normal circumstances I would usually advise against this course. Call me old fashioned, but I tend to prefer working with couples, people who have already tried under normal circumstances to have children. But…given your story, your inability to have children, the unusual find of your ova…I can't say I understand what happened to you. But I can at least look into the situation."

Joy! It was the first good thing to happen to her in so long and Scully's head reeled. She felt the words tripping off her tongue almost without thought. "Thank you, doctor, you have no idea what this would mean…"

"I can't guarantee anything, mind you," he warned, smiling despite the words. "It may turn out that after I examine what you brought to me that the samples are not viable."

"I understand." And she did. She half expected that to be the case anyway. But he had given her something infinitely more precious than reassurances at the moment. He had given her hope. "I will have the samples delivered to you then?"

"To the lab I work with, yes," he nodded, reaching for a script pad on his desk and scratching across it in the heavy, spidery writing that many doctors seemed to prefer. "Here's the address. If you can have them sent over, I can take a look and call you within a week with whatever I find, good or bad."

With trembling fingers Scully reached for the paper held out to her. "Thank you," she managed in a voice considerably steadier than she felt inside. "Please…you have my contact information, if there is anything else you need…"

"I will have my office get in touch with you," he assured her with a fatherly smile. "We'll see what we can do about getting you that baby, Ms. Scully."

A baby…her baby. She was really doing this? Even as she shook the hand of the doctor and managed to step somewhat confidently out of his office and into the waiting area she nearly had to pinch herself. She couldn't believe she had even gone this far. To take this step, to follow through with what had been an idyll thought since the moment Mulder told her he had placed her ova in storage should she ever want to pursue it.

Because if Mulder's aliens could be true, so could the idea of her being a mother.

As she stepped from the high end, medical office building and into the late, September afternoon, the light already turning the reddening leaves fire-like in the waning light. It spoke to change, the letting go of the old, and walking into something else, the unknown. She took a deep breath of air and the peculiar autumnal scent of decaying leaves and cool breeze, tinged here and there by wood smoke.

A singular moment could change everything…and Scully was about to change her entire life.