Into The Wind

Author: Keren Ziv
Spoilers: William
Disclaimer: I don't own anything at all, not even a pair of pants that I don't share with my little sister.

Author's Note: I really, really, really didn't like what happened, while at the same time I liked it. The ep was okay, the acting was good, but the idea was great. As my dear friend Jaci said when she found out that David not only directed but helped write, "Poor Tea."

Dana Scully lay in bed all day afterwards, just staring at the wall or the ceiling, depending on if she was on her back or on her left side. She refused to look out the window; refused to see the sunlight filter in through open curtains. Instead, the blinds were closed and the curtains securely drawn. There was to be no breaking her darkness. The prison she was in constructed of and dealt mainly in pain; her pain at losing her child.

It was her destiny, to be childless. She realized that now. First, without ever really knowing her, she had lost her daughter, Emily, to Death and all that came with him. And now her son, whom she had carried in her body and whom she had loved for what was, to Dana, forever, was lost too. Only this time Dana Scully was not watching him die. She was giving him life. She was placing him in the arms of another woman another mother.

It would be better for William, better for everyone involved, to try to send him toward some semblance of a normal life. She knew nothing about the couple that was taking her child except the fact that they lived in a large house in the country someplace in the middle of nowhere and that they desperately wanted a child. Dana knew it was for the best, even as her heart tore and her tears smudged her signature. Doggett and Reyes had been there, hovering uncomfortably in the background, unsure of what task they had to complete in this unfamiliar situation.

She'd stopped crying, then, when her ink and tears had dried on the paper. She had dried up; there were no more tears to weep. In her chest, where she supposed her tears were made, there was a sort of emptiness, a hollowness that couldn't be explained and yet was so obviously missing.

When her mother came that night and stood in the doorway, silent, blocking the light, Dana could not prevent the tears from coming once again to her eyes and falling down her pale cheeks. They had built up all day and night, waiting for the hole that the little Dutch child could not plug to appear. Mrs. Scully crossed the distance between her daughter and herself and enveloped Dana in her arms. Letting their tears mingle, the two mothers grieved for their children.

Dana lifted her head and turned so that she was facing her mother. "Mom," she said after a few moments of intense silence, "I was so afraid for him. I didn't want him to get hurt. I wanted to save William, Mom. He can't help being what he was, what he is. He can't help it." Her voice quivered with emotion and Dana had to pause to collect herself. "He's so tiny and vulnerable and perfect and I just need to protect him. And this was the best way that I could protect him." She looked at her mother with a new passion burning in her tear-stained eyes. "I hope . . . I hope he never finds out. I want to spare him the pain. I don't want him to wonder why he was given up. I don't want him to think I didn't want him." Dana buried her head in her mother's shoulder. "Oh, Mama, I want him."

Mrs. Scully held her daughter all the more closer to her and began to pray. She spoke the first words that came to her mind, whispering them softly into the darkness that covered them, both figuratively and literally. "Angel of God, my guardian dear, to whom God's love . . ." She continued the Prayer to the Guardian Angel , the words spoken giving forth ten unspoken ones, but all with the same purpose, the same wish . . . keep William safe. When Mrs. Scully finished, Dana and her mother spoke together the last word: "Amen."

"I used to say that one when I was a child," Dana said, her voice calm. "When I was scared, that's when I said it. Whenever I slept in a new room, I would repeat it to myself. Whenever I had to take the trash to the curb. It was always there. I knew, I just knew it, that the prayer summoned my own personal guardian angel. I called her Willow." Dana's face contorted as she spoke again. "Will." She opened her eyes very wide indeed, but no tears came down. "This is the first time in . . .years, maybe, that I've thought about her."

"She's still there, Dana." The voice was calming, if thick from tears. Dana titled her head under her mother's chin. "She'll always be there. She's watching over you and she's been doing that since you were born and will continue to do so until the day you die. How could you have survived life in this crazy world for as long as you have without her, Dana? We've all got them." Mrs. Scully smiled softly. "Mine," she said, "is named Harold. He used to hug me when I was frightened as a child."

Dana gave a rumbling sound that may have been a chuckle; it was difficult to discern because of the sobs that periodically wracked her body in giant shudders. "I like to think, Mom, that we are assigned one angel at birth and that angel will always be with us, forever and ever. And, sometimes, I like to think that maybe Melissa is William's angel. Or even Emily." She stood suddenly, looking down at the rumpled suit that she'd put on two mornings ago. "I need to shower," she said briskly. Dana walked out of the room and didn't turn back to face her mother.

Assistance Director Skinner stood as Agent Dana Scully entered his office. He watched her with concern etched as deeply as the age lines on his face, studying her for a moment, silently appraising whatever had changed her so drastically in the past forty-eight hours. Her eyes looked to have sunken into her face, her skin was a deathly white, and she didn't look to be a woman who had ever smiled much in her life, contrary to the laugh lines that were beginning to appear gracefully from use. An air of great sadness hung about her.

"Agent Scully," he said after a moment, sitting down in his chair and motioning for her to do the same. As she sat Agents Reyes and Doggett silently filed into the room and stood on either side and slightly behind Scully. AD Skinner allowed himself to give voice to his worry. "What's wrong, Scully? You look horrible." It sounded brash and unfeeling as soon as he spoke the words, and he regretted them deeply. It was, however, too late to recall them. They had been cast, however unthought, into the abyss.

Tears filled Scully's eyes as she spoke quietly to Skinner. Her voice seemed to tremble slightly, but she didn't falter completely as she said to him, "William . . . died . . . almost two days ago." She looked down at the floor and blinked several times, her face twisting itself into shapes of hurt. Almost as one, Doggett and Reyes each placed a hand on Scully's shoulder. The familiarity, the comfort, in that gesture caused Skinner to pause and be thankful his agents could form such close bonds with one another.

"Agent Scully, I am truly sorry at the loss of your brother and I will of course give you all the time off you need . . ." Skinner said, uncertain as to how he should proceed with this. Scully sucked in a deep breath and choked on it, as if there was suddenly a shortage of oxygen in the room. She looked up at Skinner, and there on her face tears began to make rivers and streams. "Agent Scully?" the AD said, perplexed.

"Not Bill," Scully said in a sob. Skinner's heart stopped beating for a moment and thoughts flew past him to quickly for him to make sense of any of it. The only feelings he could catch from the speeding words and emotions were shock and disbelief. He waited only seconds later, though it felt like an eternity had passed for him, for her to say what he knew was next. "My son."

Assistance Director Skinner had nothing to say to that. What is there to say to a woman who has lost her child? The words that he could say she would hear, a million times over, tomorrow and the days after tomorrow from people just as scared of saying the wrong thing as he was. So he said the only thing that he could think of at the moment. "I'm so sorry, Dana." He stopped, questioning how to say it delicately. "The shot that . . ."

Scully looked down at her hands clasped tightly in her lap and shook her head softly. The tilt of her head caused her tears to fall from her nose onto her fingers and thumbs. She took a long, deep breath. "It was SIDS," she said quietly. She turned her head away from her hands and looked instead at the papers on Skinner's desk. "He'd moved in the night and . . ." Scully didn't finish; she didn't need to. "I found him when I went to check on him about five in the morning."

Skinner stood up and went, impulsively, to Scully's side, offering her comfort by draping his arm over her shoulder. Scully continued speaking as he did his small ministrations for her soul. "I'm having a small memorial service Tuesday morning on a boat where we'll be scattering his ashes." She handed him a small slip of paper with the information for the services on it. Scully didn't need to add that she had cremated the body so that it wouldn't be taken later on, so that her son would be safe from harm; for even in sanctity of death there was danger. It was something that Skinner understood.

Scully stood heavily, uncertain on her feet for a few moments. Skinner helped steady her. "I am truly sorry, Dana," he said once again. "I wish there was something more I could do." He watched as she looked at him with those eyes of hers; the eyes that seemed so empty and void of any real emotion other than overwhelming grief.

Scully turned from Skinner and faced the door. Her voice echoed oddly in the room when she spoke. "There's nothing you can do, but thank you, sir." She bowed her head slightly, as if in prayer, and stayed that way for a number of moments. Once she lifted it, she began her walk out of the door, Reyes and Doggett following silently behind her. They had said nothing during the entire meeting.

Dana Scully stood on the boat overlooking the small bay with an impersonal air to her gaze. The eyes that swept the small waves crushing against the large stones and boulders across the way were large and darker than normal. Seaweed was being trailed up the sand in left in soggy green lumps all along the shore. The dock where a mass of people would soon be was empty with less than an hour until he service to go.

Behind her, she could hear Reyes speaking quietly with the priest, asking him questions about the service and the ceremony that he would be performing later on. He, in turn, was quietly answering them with a tone in his Irish-accented voice that Dana knew, from her years as a member of Father Edward's church, that the father was getting impatient. He knew what he was doing; he had done it many times beforehand. He was an old, grandfatherly type of priest, the sort that Dana liked the best. Not that she didn't enjoy seeing the enthusiasm of the younger fathers, like Father Alfred, but it wasn't appropriate for today. It wasn't what she wanted for her child's memorial service.

She watched the seagulls swoop in seemingly from mansions in the clouds and dive close to the water's surface to retrieve some bread that had been bobbing on the water, getting soggier as the moments went by. The family in the personal craft that had tossed the bread into the water squealed with delight, the youngest of the children screaming in his high, toddler voice, "Mama, look! Mama!" Mama . . .

. . . the bird was sitting on the water, out far enough that gentle lapping of the waves as they were against the boat here were bringing the gull up and down in a motion so reminiscent of a roller coaster that it was slightly dizzying to look at. The gull continued to sit contentedly on the ocean, occasionally stretching out a wing to preen himself. Above him, his brethren called out their song for the wind to catch and carry away with it to another place that could be quite different from the small, sad little bay that it originated it.

Dana heard Reyes approach her from behind. She steadied herself for the agent's words; could hear how their sounds, the constants and vowels, would warp in the wind; could heard the very phrases that would be chosen by the young woman.

"Are you certain that you want to continue with this?" Reyes asked softly. Dana paused in her reply. This wasn't the question. There was no answer ready. Even in their most private moments since the meeting with Skinner, when Reyes had helped Dana get a death certificate drawn up, when they had picked out a simple urn and the material to fill it with, not even then had they stopped playing the game that Dana had created.

Don't make me end it. Don't make me cry out in front of everyone all around and the spies of my enemies that I gave up my beautiful little baby boy because I can't or else I would have given him up in vain and I might as well have kept William here with me on this boat to watch the birds and laugh at them and I would have protected him as best as I could as his mother his own true mother who love him. Dana turned to the other agent.

"I have to, Monica," Dana said, her throat sounding rough from crying, though goodness knows that it was actually rough from whispering William's name over and over again. "I have to do it. Otherwise people will ask question. What should I do, pretend that he isn't gone? Or should I not openly grieve for him? If I don't do this . . . I swear, I keep hearing him in his room, laughing and playing. I bought baby food yesterday. I . . . I keep seeing him in my rearview mirror. And I can't keep doing this."

She turned back in the direction of the seagull, but he was gone now, lost as one in an innumerable mess in the sky. It saddened her to see the place empty. She felt Reyes's arms go around her shoulders, felt the tears of the younger agents on her face and in her hair, and she knew that Monica was not crying for a child given to others, she was crying for a child dead too early. If Reyes could fool herself when she knew the truth, how difficult would it be to have others weep similar tears?

Dana saw a group of people slowly making their way down the steps and through the sand to the small area on the dock where they would gather to wait to board the boat. She knew them to be her guests by several sights: her mother, leaning heavily on the arm of Walter of Skinner; Agent Doggett; her brothers, one of the few times they were all collectively on one coast at the same time; Mrs. Mulder; Dana's sister-in-law, Tara, and her own child.

Dana closed her eyes for the briefest of moments at the sight of the last two women in the procession. Mrs. Mulder, her face so tightly drawn, her eyes so filled with hurt that you knew the present hurt was only covering other, more well-known hurts that lurked and hid in the recess of her soul. And Tara, with her child still there. Tara, who could have as many more children as she wanted and who would never look at her child with fear of what might be searching for him. Mrs. Mulder had learned to live with pain and Tara would never have to. Dana envied them both.

She turned and went down below, taking refuge in the small, dark place full of shadows. It stank of fish and too many summers out on the sea and Dana had to rush to the head to retch up what little breakfast she had been able to eat. She didn't hear anyone come in after her, for which she was grateful for as she washed her face and rinsed her mouth.

Dana looked down at her watch when she heard the creaking of the floorboards beneath a human weight. They would be setting off in a few minutes; it would be prudent if she were out on deck to make certain that all her guests were accounted for. Her mother or Monica would take care of it, of course, but Dana suddenly needed something to do.

Walking on deck, she was amazed at the overcast skies which, only twenty minutes or so again, had been bright blue, and utterly too cheerful. Now there was a thickness in the air that smelled of rain and the clouds above looked angry and sad, as if something totally not to their liking was commencing. Dana liked this look better; it seemed to fit with her melancholy mood.

Everyone on the boat accounted for, the captain down in the front began moving them out to sea, where it was legal to let the ashes of a loved one dance in the wind and the waves. Dana walked away from the crowds towards the back of the boat. Casting her eyes upward, she warily watched the flag being tossed about in the strengthening winds. Ever the practical Dr. Scully, Dana made a note to make certain that she didn't toss the ashes against the wind.

Someone stood behind her. She didn't want to talk. Hadn't everyone caught on to that when she'd gone back here? Why had this one person followed her? She kept her back toward the person, hoping desperately it wasn't the father to offer prayers, because there was one place that she wanted to shove prayers and that was –

"Dana." Oh God, she would know that voices anywhere. She closed her eyes. There was no one there, she was merely imagining a presence, something to comfort her on a day when she didn't wish to be comforted. She clenched the rail of the boat and stared into the dark waters below. "Dana," he said, reaching out to touch her.

She jumped at the touch and turned around. In front of her stood Fox Mulder. When she saw him, Dana couldn't help but begin to cry. The tears flowed freely and she allowed herself to fall into his open hug, all the while thinking, Why? Why? Why did I ever think that Mulder's X-Files were a worthwhile project? They sent me down there to destroy him, so why didn't I ruin it and then race back upstairs, away from the basement, away from Spooky Mulder? Why did I have to fall in love with him.

"How . . ." Mulder couldn't seem to get his voice to work and suddenly Dana could see the atrocity of the entire thing. She closed her eyes and breathed deeply of the smell that was Mulder, the smell that was Old Spice and cheeseburgers. She pictured a small safety deposit box, in another name, where there were several papers declaring that a young, teenage mother had given up her child, William.

"It was . . ." How to say this to him? It was his child; it was her child; it was their baby and they didn't have him. Dana broke herself away from Mulder's embrace and pulled backed, looking him in the eye. "It was SIDS."

She reached up and touched the tears on his cheek, got them on her fingertips, and pulled back, amazed. I got him to weep false tears. I got him to mourn for the wrong reasons. I deceived Fox Mulder. I withheld information about his living, breathing, happy son. How can I love him when I have done that to him?

Walking slowly toward the front of the boat, Mulder and Dana listened quietly to the memorial service. And when it came time to scatter the ashes that they had gathered hastily, Dana Scully used the tears of Fox Mulder to test the wind.

Only after everything was finished could Dana say that she had truly lost her son. Oddly enough, it made her feel better, to sever the ties that had bound her to him. By severing those ties, she knew that there was less chance of his getting hurt. And she was protecting him from not only evil men, but also his father. She only hoped that they both would forgive her.