This will be used to post random snippets from Another Man's Child that no longer fit in with the main story. Random ideas have popped into both mine and DearPearlie's head about my story, but the time has passed to post them in the full story, mainly because Ashley is now too old and is all grown up. So please humor us as we post in here from time to time.

This particular chapter was written by DearPearlie, and inspired by a couple of photos from Pinterest, and I have to say that it's one of my most favorite chapters ever. It's adorable, and I have to thank DearPearlie so much for writing it. I love your take on the Sculders, and I love your writing, and I love you!

Contains spoilers for Ascension and Duane Barry. It also contains angst and scenes that will melt your heart.

"Mulder."

Dead to the world on the couch of his apartment, Mulder shifted his arm to cover his face. His unconscious self was trying to squeeze every last minute of sleep he could out of the night. His conscious self was quickly roused though, when he felt a tiny body climb up to sit on his abdomen.

"Mulder," his missing partner's daughter called to him, louder this time. Blinking slowly, she came into focus, looking bright-eyed and bushy-tailed despite what Mulder instinctively knew was an early hour.

He was getting more and more used to having a kid around. In the two and a half months that Scully had been missing, Ashley had stayed at his place six times. Three were born of necessity – there were just some nights that Maggie needed to rely on Mulder to watch the little girl, and he was happy to do it. One time happened on accident. After crying for her mom for hours before bed one night, Maggie had to call Mulder for backup. That led to him packing the five-year-old up into the back seat of his car and driving around aimlessly, babbling about nothing and singing along to the radio with Ashley until she fell asleep. At the end of their journey Mulder was exhausted, and since they were closer to his house than Maggie's, he decided to let Ashley sleep at his place and take her back in the morning. Then of course had come the time when Maggie needed Mulder to take Ashley for the weekend after her sister had been released from hospital, when Ashley had wet the bed and cried for her mom and fallen asleep with Mulder on the sofa.

This time however, Ashley had planned their sleepover herself. She just got it in her little head one day that she would spend the upcoming weekend with Mulder. A few days later, her plan was executed, and Mulder was relegated to the couch.

"A few more minutes," he mumbled, putting his arm back over his face.

"No, Mulder, I'm hungry," she protested.

"Go get a snack, then. You know where the fridge is."

"I want peanut butter," she informed him.

"Peanut butter?" Mulder asked, peeking out at her through hooded eyes.

Ashley nodded emphatically.

"What on Earth made you want peanut butter at…" Mulder turned to check his desk clock, "7:30 in the morning?"

"I'm just hungry for peanut butter," Ashley shrugged.

"Okay, okay," Mulder surrendered, not able to deny Ashley anything. Effortlessly lifting the little girl off his chest, he kept her in his arms as he walked into the kitchen. Even though she was the one that woke them both up that day, she lay her head against his shoulder in a show of fatigue. Mulder felt a surge of protectiveness wash over him. Despite all of the shitty things she'd been through, she was still trusting and innocent enough to let him carry her around. He sincerely hoped she would stay that way her whole life.

"Peanut butter peanut butter peanut butter," Mulder murmured quietly while searching the cupboards for the creamy snack. He set out to make her a peanut butter sandwich, but he could hear his partner's voice in his head telling him she needed something more than just peanut butter and bread for breakfast. He missed her more than ever in that moment.

"I've got some bananas. Do you want a peanut butter banana sandwich?" he asked the girl, setting her onto the counter.

"Yeah!" she said enthusiastically, just because Mulder had suggested it. He let her help him, getting her to open bags and even letting her sneak a fingerful of peanut butter when she thought he wasn't looking.

"You know who loved peanut butter banana sandwiches?" Mulder asked, concentrating very hard on getting the majority of peanut butter off the knife and onto the bread.

"Who?" Ashley inquired.

"Elvis," Mulder dropped his voice and stuck out his bottom lip in an effort to imitate the rock star. Ashley was unimpressed.

"Who's Elvis?" she asked.

"The King! Only the greatest rock n' roll musician ever!" Mulder moved his face until he was inches away from the youngster's, trying to get her excited about a musical legend.

Ashley wasn't having it, and raised her eyebrow in disbelief at his actions.

"God," Mulder almost gasped as all of the air left his lungs, "You look just like your mom when you do that."

The sad look that passed over Ashley's face was enough to make Mulder regret saying that statement out loud. But then, she went and said, "I miss my mommy, Mulder," and broke his heart into a million pieces.

"I know you do Ash. I miss her too." He hated how many times he'd said that exact sentence to her.

"It's not fair. I don't have a mommy or a daddy."

What do you say to that? Mulder tried desperately to offer something up to her, but nothing could make up for the fact that after all this time, Scully was still missing. And every day, her prospects were looking more and more grim. Mulder knew that mostly everyone who knew Scully was missing believed her to be dead, but for the sake of her family and especially the tiny little being who sat in front of him, he had to do everything he could to find her. He had to act as if she were still alive and waiting for him. There was no other option.

"You have a Mulder, baby girl. A Mulder who will make you peanut butter and banana sandwiches and sing you Elvis."

"But I don't know who Elvis is!" Ashley whined, starting to pull on the sleeve of her Tigger pajamas with her teeth. Mulder gently coaxed her arm away from her mouth and thought of an idea.

"Hang on there, let me go find something," he said, lifting her down off the counter and setting her firmly on the floor. She watched him with her mother's eyebrow as he scrambled around his apartment looking for what he hoped would cheer her up. Finally, he found it on his desk. Grabbing his aviator shades, he took the treasure and popped it into the tape deck of the small stereo sitting in his kitchen windowsill.

"You ain't nothin' but a hound dog!" he sang to the confused five-year-old, amping up his Elvis impersonation by adding the sunglasses and dancing. As the music played along in the background, Mulder's dance moves got crazier and crazier in an attempt to get Ashley to smile. He was sure that any moment now, his downstairs neighbors were going to come up and make sure there wasn't a murder going on in his place. He never had any reason to dance before Ashley.

"You ain't never caught a rabbit and you ain't no friend of mine!" Mulder started stomping his feat in time with the music, getting closer and closer to Ashley as he did so, and she squealed in anticipation. Finally, a smile broke out over her face, and she let Mulder swing her into his arms. They danced the rest of the song in that manner, only pausing briefly so that Ashley could take the sunglasses off of Mulder's face and wear them for herself.

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Mulder tried not to wince every time he watched Ashley scrunch her face up in pain. He was sure this would be the last time Ashley asked him to brush her hair.

"What did you say you wanted it in? A horsey-what?" Mulder asked her, unsure of how to get her hair to do what she wanted.

"A ponytail," she reminded him in annoyance.

"And what is that?" Ashley stared at him dumbfounded, wondering how anyone could go their whole life without knowing what a ponytail was.

"You just… you make it all go up! And then you wrap the hair tie around it so it stays."

He did what he thought she was instructing him to do, but when Ash looked at herself in his bathroom mirror, he knew he hadn't gotten it right.

"No Mulder," she said plainly, ripping out the hair tie and handing it back to him, "try it again."

He tried again.

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"Okay Ash, it's a beautiful day outside. The sun is shining, the birds are singing, what do you say we skip on over to the park and chase a few ducks?" Mulder asked, coming out of his bathroom freshly showered and shaven. It hadn't taken him more than fifteen minutes to do both, but it was already eerily quiet in the rest of his apartment.

"Ash?" he asked, peeking into his bedroom and discovering the girl wasn't there. Just as he was making his way out to the living room though, he almost ran into the mini Scully.

"Can we watch this movie?" she asked innocently, holding out one of his porn tapes with a busty blond in a nurse's outfit on the front cover. Mulder had to hold in a shriek.

"Uh, no. No no no, it's not movie day today. We're getting far away from this house," he tried to keep cool, snatching the video from Ashley before she could take a better look at the outside. Thankfully, she didn't seem to mind the suggestion.

"Do I have to wear a jacket?"

"Uh, yeah. Go get your jacket on kiddo," Mulder stammered. Ashley skipped off, and he made a bee-line for his desk. Sure enough, the bottom drawer was open, evidence of Ashley rooting through it. Mulder kept porn stashed in various places around his apartment, he was not proud to admit, but the bottom drawer of his desk was where he kept most of the videos. He sighed in relief knowing that the one Ashley had picked up sported one of the tamer covers, but shuddered to think of what she could have seen. He threw the tape back in the drawer, and then searched through another to find the key. Without a second thought, he locked it up. Only later would he recognize the symbolic nature of that action in regards to Ashley's role in his life.

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"You have to let go Ash," Mulder tried to coax the child without getting up from the park bench. He didn't want the little girl to know it, but he'd twisted his ankle playing tag with her.

"No! It's too high!" she said in a panic from the monkey bars. She'd gotten to the second rung and realized that she wasn't strong enough to make it to the third. But the ground seemed so far away, and Ashley couldn't muster up the courage to let herself fall.

"So you're just going to hang there all day? Even after it gets dark?"

"Mulderrrrrr," she cried, kicking her legs uselessly. Despite the pain, he was beside her in seconds.

"I've got ya," he let her know as he wrapped his arms around her knees. Only then did Ashley let go, and she wrapped her arms around Mulder's neck like they were in the middle of a hurricane.

"I'm sorry," she said solemnly once her feet were back on solid ground.

"You don't have to be sorry. The monkey bars are the toughest thing on the playground."

"I was trying to be brave."

"You were very brave. You were very brave for having the courage to go up there in the first place."

"Really?"

"Absolutely. Brave means you do something even though you know it's scary."

"Do you get scared Mulder?"

He thought about recent scares. Of course there were the obvious ones: Scully being found dead, Scully never being found at all, never learning the truth about his sister's disappearance, being robbed or mugged when he was leaving work late. But then there were some that surprised him. He thought back to a time when Scully had first started on the X-Files with him – not long after he met Ashley. There had been a babysitting emergency and the little girl had gotten dropped off at the Hoover building around lunchtime. Scully couldn't leave right away but Ashley had claimed she was starving, and since it was a nice day, Mulder told them he'd treat them to a hot dog from a vendor cart near the National Mall. As they were walking there, Ashley had gotten a little too enthusiastic about one of her stories and stepped off the sidewalk into the street. She ended up between two parking places and had never been in any danger, but both Mulder and her mom had lunged forward, grabbing her and pulling her back onto the sidewalk before Scully launched into a small lecture about the importance of watching where she was going. As he remembered it, Mulder felt his heart rate increase. They'd gotten lucky that time, but the thoughts of all that could have happened to Ashley that day made him want to put her in a bubble for the rest of her life.

"Yeah. More than you might realize."

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"I don't want to go back to Grandma's," Ashley said for the eightieth time as they pulled up outside of Maggie's house that afternoon.

"Hey, don't talk like that. You miss your grandma and you know it," Mulder reminded her as he found a place to park.

"I miss you more," she said quietly, though Mulder heard it. Before long, they had parked and unloaded and were on their way up to Maggie's front steps. Mulder chuckled to himself to think of what his colleagues in the VCU would say if they saw him that Sunday, little pink suitcase in one hand and little pink girl in the other. Ashley knocked.

"Hello!" Maggie exclaimed when she opened the door. Mulder felt a pang of jealousy. Not only was Maggie a wonderful woman whose maternal instincts put his own mother's to shame, but she got Ashley permanently during their difficult time, and Mulder was just a visitor.

"Hi Grandma," Ashley greeted her, still not letting go of Mulder's hand as she was ushered into the house.

"Hi sweetheart. Did you have fun with Fox?" Ashley scrunched up her face in confusion before she remembered that Fox was Mulder's first name. She didn't like it.

"Yeah, we had a lot of fun," Mulder answered before Ash could correct her own grandmother. "Why don't you fill her in on some of the stuff we did?"

"Well, last night, Mulder made popcorn and we watched Aristocats. He fell asleep before the movie was over, but I got him to wake up and we played a game of Go-Fish before he told me I had to go to bed. Then he read me Dr. Seuss. But it wasn't the Green Eggs and Ham book and it wasn't The Cat in the Hat, so I don't remember which one it was. Then this morning we made peanut butter and banana sandwiches and danced like the King. Then we went to the park and played. Then we went to the toy store and Mulder got me a new Barbie. Then we went back to his house and watched TV. And then we had to come back here." Ashley said the last part a little dejectedly, so Mulder jumped in before he thought Maggie would notice.

"Yup. We had a lot of fun together."

"I want to stay with Mulder all the time," Ashley decided to inform them. Thankfully, Maggie didn't seem hurt by her statement.

"This weekend was a treat, honey. Fox has to work during the week at the FBI."

"To find my mommy?"

Both adult swallowed a bit harder at that question. Neither of them could muster more than a nod.

"But I had a lot of fun with you Ash, and I promise that we'll get to do this again very soon, okay?" Mulder kneeled down to the youngster's level. Her mood dropped because she knew these were part of his goodbye words.

"Okay," she said in a small voice, walking into his open arms and planting herself there. Mulder hugged her for a long time.

"Be good for Grandma please."

"I will. I love you Mulder."

"Love you too Tigger."

The scary feeling was back. He said his goodbyes to Maggie and walked out of her home that night, wondering how he became so deeply and thoroughly entrenched in the feelings of his ex-partner's little girl. And how he ever went through life before that.