Chapter 14: Tests

The following morning Scully awoke as per usual to head into the hospital to start her day. Mulder slept soundly as she busied herself with making her coffee, and preparing her self to be presentable and professional. She had gotten used to the day to day routine that the hospital had given to her life and though she had taken the job under the pretext of primarily being a doctor of pediatric care, she had also taken on a lesser roll as researcher. Lucky for her, she now had all that she would need to continue her research and genetic analysis that was now plaguing her mind. She pulled from the freezer the vile of William's blood, as well as a sample that Mulder had given her, and with her coffee and her brief case she set out for the hospital.

Scully arrived at St. Mary's before the sun had fully risen and made her way directly to the lab-she wanted to get a head start on the DNA tests so that she may have some answers before the day was out. She wouldn't be starting her rounds until nine in the morning and so she had plenty of time to run her own blood and that of Mulder's against the sample she had taken from William. She also planned to run a few other tests that would take a little longer than the paternity and maternity tests that she had planned to give Mulder as the proof he wanted. As far as Scully was concerned, she believed that the young man as indeed her son and she saw the resemblances ever more clearly as she had gone through photos from her families past. The resemblance between William and her brothers, in their younger days was uncanny, and Scully smiled as the calmness of knowing came over her. But for Mulder, the truth needed to be more tangible and specific. He needed to see the paper, the undoubted proof that he and William were biologically connected. Until that time, Mulder would go on believing that the young man was a liar and just digging into a family history to get what he wanted.

As she set about her work she stopped to draw her own blood, something she hadn't had to do in a long time. She wrapped a tourniquet around her arm, to make the vein more visible and punctured her skin with a syringe to draw her own blood. As she watched the vile fill with the bright red liquid she began to speculate on some of the information William had given her. What was really going on among all those tiny cells? What had been done to them in all her time with the X-files and all the tests that had taken place on her body? There had been so many strange and unexplainable things that she had been exposed to, how had they affected her blood on such a biochemical level? She had never thought to test her own biological material, it had been done by so many before her, but now the questions had been raised and she would run her own blood through the multitudes of tests that she had run on the other samples she had gathered. Mulder's would also fall pray to her tests and as such, and because he had not stated otherwise, Scully was ready to run all of the tests on the family blood she had before her. When the vile attached to her arm was filled she removed it, along with the syringe and tourniquet from her arm and continued on with her work.

By seven in the morning Scully had started all of the tests, and was ready to carry on her day. She left the chemicals and proteins to do their work as she found her way into her office. Her patient files were neatly stacked on one corner of the desk and her iMac dozed waiting to be booted up and put to use. The day would prove to be one of regular routines: patient visits, tests, and condolences, but for now Scully's mind was preoccupied with thoughts of the son she had lost years ago. She wondered for a moment, as she sipped her now cold coffee and watched as the sun moved across the sleepy world, what things in her life would have been like had she kept the baby. Would she have been able to stop what had happened to William and give him a childhood? Or was he destined for the lost time that he had suffered to save the human race? Billions of people lived in the world and to think that one man, a young man, could save the world was a bit of a stretch for Scully, but if there were answers in his blood she was determined to find them.

Scully went about her business, busying herself with new patients and up-coming surgeries as the morning faded away from her and her mind wandered away from the tasks at hand. Soon the answers to some of her questions would be visible in the chemistry that she preformed, but for now she had to be the doctor that her new life had dictated, and other patients and their illnesses had to come before her questions.