Two Days Later

"Hey, how is it going?" Mulder asked, glad that he'd grabbed the phone on its first ring. Christian was sleeping, and he hadn't gone down easily. He'd been droolly as well as cranky and Mulder thought he felt a tooth about to erupt in the baby's upper jaw.

He was still thinking about this, and wondering if Scully would have advice about baby Tylenol when she asked, "Mulder, did you potty train my daughter?"

"Yes?" he hesitantly replied, kneading the tail of his shirt as he spoke into the phone. Until that moment he had neither thought that Grace might continue to use the potty once she was over her bug nor had he thought about how Scully might feel about his taking over the task. Now he wondered if he had stepped on her toes.

To his utter shock she squealed happily, "Bless you! I was worried that she'd still be in diapers in kindergarten."

"Oh." Mulder was confused by this confession, and from her tone it was definitely a confession, not a joke - did she really think that Grace would still be untrained in a year and a half? His mother told him that boys were harder to train and Scully had never mentioned any trouble training Tommy...but then he considered that Grace was more headstrong than her easy-going sibling. A lot more.

"I shouldn't be too surprised given that my mom keeps says that Missy almost drove her to a nervous breakdown before she was dry all day. Missy's preschool threatened to kick her out over it," Scully confided. "I really lucked out that her preschool is one of the few in the area that doesn't require kids to be dry all day, but all the kindergartens do.

"You know, Tommy only took a week to train just after I got them and that gave me the false impression that I was good at toilet training..."

As he listened to her talk about how nice it was that he had taken an active role in potty training their daughter, he was overwhelmed with the urge to ask her to marry him.

This impulse had him blinking in confusion – where had it come from? Grace, he thought. Even if every one of his fears about his son came to pass, he would still be her father. It wasn't like when Emily died had been for Scully: the loss of his son, if it came to that, didn't mean his entire identity as a parent was going to be amputated.

This thought gave him pause. Unless their older members of their own families suffered similar tragedies, men didn't have too many role models about how to carry on after losing a part of their families. Instead books and action movies meant to appeal to guys were full off men who sought revenge after their wife and/or child were murdered, not characters who were filled with grief for one child taken far too early by disease, but still had to be there for those who survived.

We'd get through it, he realized. It would hurt so very much, but we would have each other to lean on. Scully wouldn't let him go though it alone, even if he insisted that he wanted to. No more than he had let her shut him out and suffer alone after being diagnosed with cancer.

I can't ask her to marry me over the phone. The realization made him sad but it would be best to wait. At least until they were face to face.

"Mulder?" she sounded concerned, and he noticed that it had been quite a while since he'd said anything.

"Sorry, wool gathering," he said sheepishly. "What were you saying?"

"I said that I'm glad that the kids are good for you."

He chuckled. "You say that like they aren't usually well behaved."

"Well, they aren't always. Ask my brother. He had a hell of a time when he looked after them the last time we visited him and Tara."

"He probably wonders if they're both mine," he suggested with a smirk he was glad she couldn't see.

"You know, I think he does," she laughed. "I can't wait to see how he reacts to meeting Christian this summer. The baby looks so much like you that I'm sure he'll have some clever remarks about it."

"This summer?" Mulder asked, surprised that she was thinking about introducing his son to her brother.

"Oh, didn't I tell you? Mom has talked him into bringing Tara and Mattie here to spend the week of July 4th at her house. We're already invited to her cookout."

"That's nice," he said vaguely. His eyes had cut towards the door to the baby's room.

"I wonder how long it will take with Christian," Scully said next, apropos of nothing, or so he thought.

"What will?"

"I wonder how long it'll take you to potty train him," she said patiently.

"Oh. I don't know." The familiar sick lurch to his stomach came back as it always did when he tried to give serious thought to his son's future, despite his realization that he could survive the worst, if he had to. On some level he realized that if he told his therapist or the psychiatrist about his anxiety around Christian, which he wouldn't because telling anything even approaching the truth would get him recommitted, he would be told that this too was part of his own personal brand of PTSD. It made perfect sense, but he wondered if adjusting his anti-anxiety medications would help nearly as much as would undoubtably be suggested to him even if he managed to impart a quarter-truth.

"Well, we'll have to see," she was saying when he next really heard her, and he hoped they wouldn't see too soon. Then there was a commotion on the other end of the line, and Scully apologized, "Sorry, I've got to go. Tommy says that there's a delivery person at the door who needs to me to sign for a package."

"Talk to you later, then."

"Thanks again for potty training Grace," Scully exclaimed hurriedly. "Love you."

"Love you too."

As the call disconnected, Mulder listened to hear if the baby was stirring yet. He wasn't, but Dempsey sauntered through then, letting his tail brush Mulder's legs as he passed him.

Mulder bent down and gave the tom's head a good scratch. "Scully's making plans like Christian is going to be okay. Guess I should too, huh?" It could happen - in the weeks since he got the boy he hadn't done too much more rapid growing, had he? He was too afraid to actually measure him, though.

The cat said nothing, but Mulder would swear that his eyes said 'of course you should, dummy.'


Exactly ten days after Mulder visited Danny, his phone rang.

Unaware that Mulder had caller ID, Danny identified himself. "Mulder, it's Danny. Are you sitting down?"

"No," Mulder replied, torn between being amused and being alarmed.

"You should be sitting down," Danny said gravely.

He pulled out a kitchen chair noisily enough that Danny must have heard it over the phone, and then perched on it. "I'm sitting. What is all of this about?"

"I ran the samples again. And there was the same outcome-" Danny said, apparently forgetting that he hadn't actually told Mulder what the problem had been. He seemed to remember this because he added, "It came back as only one set of data."

"Then there must be something wrong with your machine," Mulder said impatiently.

He heard a sound like cloth rubbing transmit over the phone and realized it must be Danny shaking his head with the phone pressed up against his shoulder. "I compared the sample I took from the baby to Scully's – she'd asked me to compare hers to another sample once but called it off the next day before I could, saying she didn't need it anymore –" Danny said, probably not realizing that the other sample had undoubtedly belonged to Emily. "And they showed as quite different, so it's not the machine."

Staring at the window nearby, he wondered if Danny realized that he'd just ruled Scully out as the baby's mother. On a logical level he knew that it was next to impossible that she could be, but it was still hard to get confirmation of that. "So what are you trying to say?" he asked impatiently when Danny made a nervous noise that forced his thoughts away from that disappointment.

"The baby has your DNA."

"We know that," Mulder sighed.

"Mulder, you don't understand..." Danny sounded frustrated, Mulder noted absently. "The baby has only your DNA. He only inherited one set of parental DNA. Yours."

"You mean mine and DNA you can't identify," Mulder said heavily. Of course Danny's machine wasn't calibrated to identify alien DNA. It might not even be calibrated to identify non-human terrestrial mammal DNA.

"No, Mulder," Danny replied. "I mean his DNA and yours are an exact match 100% through."

Outside a squirrel climbed a tree, knocking a clump of snow to the ground. Mulder watched it transfixed until Danny said his name, sounding concerned. Tearing his eyes from the arboreal rodent, Mulder gathered his thoughts with effort. "How could he have ended up with only one set of parental DNA?" he asked, mostly of himself. Trying to work through the puzzle aloud, he went on. "If he only has my DNA, you're saying he..."

"Is a clone," Danny helpfully supplied. "Someone cloned you. Unless you think it's possible that your parents had your identical twin frozen in time like Ted Williams' frozen head."

Mulder startled. "Ted Williams is dead?"

"Oh, right, that happened while you were gone," Danny muttered. "His head was removed and cryogenically frozen. Some idiots think he'll be brought back someday. But did you hear the rest of what I said?"

"That the baby is my clone," Mulder repeated slowly.

"I'm sorry?" Danny offered, sounding uncertain.

Mulder began to laugh and he got the sense that he had made Danny uncomfortable. Forcing himself to pull it together, he stopped laughing and said, "You don't understand, Danny. This is wonderful news."

"You're happy that some mad scientist cloned you?" Danny asked doubtfully. "I can't figure out how that could be something you're happy about."

"I never would have asked someone to clone me-" Or at least he believed that to be the case. Although perhaps if it was the only way that he and Scully could have experienced parenthood and someone offered... "But it's far, far better than the alternative."

"What's the alternative?"

"Do you really want to know?" Mulder asked, barely holding in another laugh.

"No," Danny blurted out. "Oh, what the hell. Tell me."

"I was worried that he was only half human. My half."

"And the other half?"

The question surprised him, but maybe Danny was too confused to be mentally agile enough to have readily guessed. "I was gone for three years after being abducted by aliens," he reminded him. "So... Yeah."

"You were worried that he was half little green man," Danny concluded. He said it a little less doubtfully than most people would, probably due to his familiarity with the work Mulder had done over the years with Diana and then Scully.

"Gray," he corrected automatically. "But yes. I was terrified that we were going to discover that half of his DNA was of alien origin."

"Why would that be so bad?" Danny asked, which threw him at first. But it became more clear when Danny went on. "He's not green or gray. No bug eyes, oversize noggin, or long spindly limbs and extremities. He looks like he'd fit in, but you still worried. Were you worried that he'd end up with spooky powers or something?"

"Danny," Mulder said slowly. The idea that the baby might be able to do mine control or read thoughts had never crossed his. "Dana's oldest child had some alien DNA. Remember?"

"The little girl who died? Oh," Danny said heavily as soon as he caught on.

"Emily only had a small amount of alien DNA and she was barely three when she died. I was afraid that my son would die even sooner." Much sooner, he didn't say.

"But he's not actually your son," Danny remarked cheerfully. "He's your clone."

"Whose son is he?" Mulder demanded to know. "My parents'?"

"Well no," Danny said reluctantly. "I suppose not."

"Exactly."

"In a way," Danny began, "you're both his mother and father."

"I don't think he could be any more my child than that," Mulder reasoned. His mind it already rejected the idea that the baby was his identical twin. That might be true in some sense, but it wasn't something that would make sense to anyone, even, or perhaps especially, him. "It will be easier on him if we all get used to calling him my son right now. There will be fewer questions and that will be better for everyone, especially him."

"Yeah, I guess. 'How did you end up being a clone?' would be a lot less comfortable a playground question than having people remark that he looks just like his dad." Danny chuckled. "People will probably say that he's a chip off the old block, and they'll never know how true that is."

For a moment Mulder considered Chip as a nickname, but he rejected it. He'd known a couple of Chips growing up, and he'd always dislike the moniker. Besides, people might assume he was named after Scully's younger brother, and he didn't want to add envy to the reason that Bill Scully resented him.

"Hopefully most of the gossip will be about me, not him. Or at least not overheard by him."

"Why would people gossip about you?" Danny asked. Because he was a good friend he didn't frame it as additional gossip, but they both knew that there was some already.

"Danny, I was gone for three years. People who knew us both saw Scully in the interim, they know she was never pregnant. So suddenly I have a baby? They'll know it's not Scully's. They'll figure I screwed around on her while I was gone." He could already imagine people whispering about how something must to happen to the mother for him to have gotten custody. And that Scully was a saint for taking in the child of the dead woman who had messed around with her boyfriend while he was supposedly missing.

"Geez, Mulder, I doubt anyone will say anything like that. Not if they saw what rough shape you were in when you escaped from the gulag," Danny said, referencing the fact that the story they'd fed to Skinner's doctor had been so readily accepted by the M.D. that it had become everyone's go to explanation for where he had been for three years. When you said the phrase "political prisoner," people didn't tend to ask too many uncomfortable questions.

"Then maybe they'll think I was sure I was going to die when I cheated on her, not out horn dogging." Even though Danny couldn't see him, he shrugged.

"Well, they might," Danny conceded. "But it's a lot more sympathetic an error in judgment during a life or death situation than chasing showgirls in Vegas."

"Ha!" Mulder said sourly. "I suppose so."

"A lot of people will feel so bad that they'll never bring it up to you," Danny added. There was no mention of such measured restraint in private, though, Mulder noted. "There's your little gray lining."

"Nah," Mulder tested out how he felt about being cloned. It really was a lot better than the alternative. But more than that... "The baby is a little gray lining."

"You really sound like you believe that." Danny's voice held a note of admiration. "You're honestly glad that your abduction nightmare resulted in you being saddled with a kid."

"It's my fault that Scully can't have another child." Mulder spoke over Danny's reflexive insistence that what had happened to destroy Scully's fertility wasn't his fault. "And now I have a baby we can raise together with the two kids she already has. It's not as good as giving her a child that also is biologically hers, but it's something."

"Mulder." Danny's sigh was audible and Mulder figured he deserved it. "You've said that her daughter is yours too, and her son isn't. Right?"

"Yes..." He warily wondered where Danny was going with that question. "Grace is mine biologically, but we don't know who Tommy's biological father is." And he didn't know if they ever would - so far Scully seemed uninterested in trying to find out.

"Well, I guess yours is going to be one of those real 'Yours, Mine, and Ours' situations. Though in most cases the' ours' is the youngest. That's really like you both, though, always finding a way to be different."

"Thanks?"

"The people in that movie seemed to have a pretty great life. Hopefully you, Scully, and all three kids will too."

Under his breath Mulder repeated the thought that was bouncing around his head. "They cloned me. I didn't have an alien baby, they cloned me." If his son wasn't at all alien, Danny was right: his whole life had to be considered now. If he wasn't half gray, he'd have a life. Hopefully a long healthy one. There was no need to keep him at arm's length because he was no more likely to die tragically young than any other baby boy.

At length he remembered Danny's comment. "I'll have to discuss that with Scully." He had so much to tell her now.

"Well, best of luck to you and Christian. Christian, huh? Glad you didn't go with Fox Junior," Danny joked.

"Funny. That would seriously undermine efforts to convince people that he is not my double. People believing he looks just like me is okay, but figuring out that he is me, biologically speaking, isn't."

"He's not really you," Danny said, suddenly serious. "He'll grow up to be his own man one day."

"I know." There was a knock on the door. "Someone's knocking, so I better go see who it is. Talk to you soon."

"Bye. Best of luck with... All of it, really."

"Thanks."

Mulder put the phone back as he walked towards the door. It didn't surprise him at all to find Scully on the other side, standing there as if his thoughts had summoned her. She offered him a tentative smile. "I don't have class this afternoon, so I was hoping to take you out for lunch."

"That would be great, but sit, please. I have news. Not the sort of thing I want overheard by other lunch goers."

The apprehension on her face made him feel bad. "Okay..." she said uneasily.

He sat across from her and smiled, hoping it was a reassuring one. "It's not anything bad, I promise."

"Oh. What is it?"

At least she looked a little less alarmed. He made a mental note to figure out better ways to introduce topics when the news wasn't devastating. Apparently there had been so much bad news in his life lately that she made the automatic assumption that all of his news would be.

"I just spoke to Danny at length," he explained. "I asked him to run Christian's DNA against mine. He ran the samples twice, and there was the same outcome: the two samples were identical."

For a moment she looked puzzled, but then she stared at him. "They cloned you?"

He wondered if she caught on sooner because she was slightly distanced from the situation compared to him. He watched her face as he nodded, glad to see no feelings of horror on it. "I don't know why, but yes. He has no alien DNA. And no DNA at all that isn't mine."

There hadn't been time for him to spend much anticipating her reaction, but her jumping out of her chair and rushing to hug him hadn't been on the short list of possibilities he'd come up with. "You must be so relieved, Mulder. I'm so relieved too."

He smiled, and moved his head enough to get her hair out of his eyes and off his mouth. "I am relieved," he assured her. "That I no longer need to worry that anything related to having alien DNA will happen to him." Like being found dead in his crib, he didn't say. Or morphing into something grotesque as he aged. Or any of the equally terrible fates he'd imagined in his nightmares.

The look she gave him was filled with warmth. "It really must be a huge relief, knowing that you can now just look ahead to him having a normal future."

"Sure, as normal a future as a kid cloned by alien technology can have," he said, half-joking.

"Mulder..."

"The only thing it doesn't explain is why he's growing so fast," Mulder said, sharing the only concern he still had after Danny's revelation.

"Some kids are just bigger than others." Scully didn't seem to be nearly as bothered as he was. "And we're talking about him being the size of a kid a handful of months older than he is. It's not like people would mistake him for a two-year-old or anything."

"They probably wouldn't think he was one," Mulder said quickly.

"Exactly. It's not as though he's walking yet or speaking."

"He babbles, though," Mulder said worriedly.

"And my brother said his first word at seven months," she remarked calmly.

"What was that?" he asked, expecting her to say mama or dada. Which hardly counted since they were the easiest noises for babies to make.

"Mine."

"Oh, that figures," he laughed.

She laughed too.

"Could you wait here for a minute?" he asked just then.

She looked a bit puzzled by the abrupt request, but nodded. "Of course."

Feeling butterflies in his stomach, Mulder forced himself to make a quick dash into his bedroom, though he realized that Scully was probably waiting for him to bring Christian out to her. Instead he opened his sock drawer and rummaged through it for something he hadn't seen since shortly after he moved into the apartment.

Eventually his questing fingers brushed against his prize - a small velvet flocked box. He pulled the box open, and flipped the top. The ring inside it wasn't any worse for wear, despite having languished in storage with all his other belongings for the three years he was missing, and then tossed into the drawer.

For the longest time he worried that there would never be a good time to give it to her, and at least once a week he kicked himself for not having asked her to marry him when he'd impulsively bought the thing back three weeks before he returned to Belfour. But now...

Now was perfect.


Before he lost his nerve, he walked back out into the living room where she waited. "There's something I want to show you."

She looked at his hands, and he wondered if she thought he'd printed the DNA results. Not seeing anything, she asked, "What?"

Mulder dropped to his knee before her, and pulled the ring box out of his pocket. "I spent a very long time wishing that I'd not decided to wait for the mythical right moment before...before. So I'm not going to wait again and let another chance pass me by." He didn't dare glance at her face before he flicked the box open. The hinge made a tiny creak. "Dana Scully, will you do me the immense honor of agreeing to be my wife?"

"Oh, Mulder," she said, so softly he barely heard her. He started to look up when she threw her arms around him. "Of course I will."

"Thank God. I didn't have anything rehearsed for the possibility that you'd say no." He said, laughing into her shoulder.

She pulled away to help him to his feet, and looked amused. "Was this rehearsed?"

"Ah, no. I kind of threw away the original script when I was blinded by the light."

Scully titled her head. "You've really had this since before you were taken?"

"I really did."

"We hadn't been dating very long-"

Mulder smirked at her. "Not officially, no. Though I'd guess we'd been having what all the magazines around the hospital referred to as 'an emotional affair'."

"Oh Mulder, how bored were you to read Cosmo?" she asked, laughing hard enough to cause her eyes to tear. Her arms found their way around him again.

"Pretty bored," he agreed before becoming more serious. "I've known for years that you were the one for me, Scully. I just hoped that I was the one for you too."

"You are, Mulder. You are." She tightened their embrace. "You must know that."

"Well..." He blushed faintly. "I had a hopeful suspicion."

Scully took a moment to admire the ring in its box before he took it from her and slipped it onto her finger. She held it up, letting the light catch it. "You know that we're going to have to tell everyone eventually, don't you?"

"No, I was thinking we could marry in complete secrecy and not let on until the next time one of us faced a life or death situation and the other had to confess in order to be allowed to make medical decisions," Mulder deadpanned. "Of course I know we'll have to tell everyone, and probably pretty soon. But there are two people we should tell first."

"Who?" she asked. She nodded enthusiastically when he explained.