December 25, 2013

When Will came downstairs the next morning, he was surprised to see that there were stockings hung from the mantle of the fireplace. They bulged, obviously filled. One of them say "Will" in a metallic embroidery. The other two lacked names.

He was captivated by the sight of the stockings, so he didn't realize that David was sitting on the floor by the tree until he said, "Merry Christmas, Will." It seemed as though he'd been looking for something amongst the packages. His hands were empty, so he probably hadn't found it.

"Merry Christmas," Will said back, on autopilot. He didn't really expect that it'd be all that merry but you said it back regardless, like saying you're good when asked how you are.

David stood and gestured towards the stockings. "Go ahead and take yours. I'm going to go see what's keeping Maddie."

"Okay, thanks." Will watched him go before pulling his stocking off the hook it was held on. They must have put them out before they went to bed because they hadn't been there the night before. That was kind of a shame because the holders were kind of fancy, each designed to look like a large glittering snowflake.

He sat in the armchair, stocking on his lap, thinking about the other Christmas mornings over the past few years. Not last year, he was careful not to stir up that memory, but the others before that since he realized that Santa didn't really come to everyone's houses. His parents had never had stockings, and they'd always insisted that Santa had filled his. Somehow it had still come as a surprise the following year when his parents didn't remind him to put out his stocking. He hadn't, and they hadn't either. It had almost made him wish that he hadn't confessed that he didn't believe any more.

But now he had a stocking again, and it hadn't been filled by Santa or his parents. Instead it had been filled by people who barely knew him, and most of its contents showed that. He didn't hate any of the things inside it, not the candy, baseball cards, or other assorted trinkets, but none of them were things that he really liked either. Not like when "Santa" took care to realize that his favorite candies were fruit flavored, not chocolate, and "Santa" had known that he liked Pokémon, not baseball.

Still, he was grateful that they'd tried to make an effort. So, this in mind, he tried to summon up a lot more enthusiasm before they came back, which would be important because a few of the presents under the tree were labelled "Will" in what was probably Maddie's neat script.

"Hey," a sleepy voice called from the stairs. Will turned and saw Maddie in her robe. David was still wearing his pajamas too, which amused Will on some level. His parents had never cared if he'd spent all of Christmas morning in his, but they'd always gotten dressed and had coffee before they'd done anything else, 365 days of the year.

"Merry Christmas," Will called back, pleased when she smiled. For once he felt like he'd done the right thing.

"Since we're all too old for Santa, is breakfast first okay?"

"Sure," Will replied with a shrug. Nothing he wanted most was going to be under the tree, so he wasn't bursting with eagerness.

"I hope you like cheese danish..."

It only took them a few minutes to eat, and Will enjoyed it because the danish was good and no one expected him to talk. He could see out the windows and noted that it was snowing lightly. This reminded him that it was a darn good thing that the power was back because a white Christmas with no heat might have been really dangerous to people otherwise.

"Shall we?" David asked after he gathered their plates, forks, and juice glasses and put them in the dishwasher.

Will didn't bother to reply, he just followed them back to the living room.

The next half hour passed with polite appreciation. Maddie and David gave each other a bunch of things that Will wasn't interested in but could see were typical things adults enjoyed. And they gave him a bunch of things too, clothes in his exact sizes, a teddy bear half his size that Maddie said she hoped he wasn't too old for, and a few things that were generically fun for boys ages 10-13. In a way it wasn't hard to shop for a boy who had nothing, Will figured, but on the other hand no one had ever asked him what he wanted so they didn't have the joy of knowing that they'd bought just the right thing.

Once all the gifts were unwrapped, David suggested that they get dressed and have some hot chocolate. Will had figured that they'd watch more movies after that, so he was a little surprised to see them sitting by the fire with mugs a few minutes later. When they both turned their heads to look at him, something lurched in his stomach but he walked back to them anyway, rather than run away like he wanted to.

David looked as awkward as Will felt, and had trouble meeting his eyes. Still, he gamely began to speak to Will. "Hey, so we've been thinking, you've been here for Thanksgiving and now Christmas. It's been nice, right?"

"Right," Will cautiously agreed. It had been nice, more or less, that much was true. He of course knew where the conversation was going to go, and was already frantically trying to think of what to say when the big question arose.

"That's good. Maddie and I have both really enjoyed having you here," David told him. He was beginning to look more confident. "We...we were wondering what you thought of the idea of coming to live with us. I mean, we'd like to tell Mrs. Ogden that we want to adopt you."

Will stared at them, now at a loss for words. All the things he might have said, things he thought he would, fell away. "I can't replace him," he said tightly, surprising himself.

David and Maddie looked disappointed and confused. He supposed that they were expecting a "yes, I want to live with you" or "no, I don't want to be your kid" rather than what he'd actually said.

They exchanged a look, apparently wondering if the other understood, before Maddie finally spoke up and said, "Who?"

"Your son," Will said with a sigh. "I know you lost a little boy. I saw his picture, even if you won't talk about him. I'm...I'm not him. I can't be him."

"Yes you can," David blurted out. He looked shocked by his own words, and like he wanted to take them back.

"No, I can't," Will said, wanting to leave the room. His feet wouldn't go, though. "You can't just replace one kid with another one. I'm sure you miss him a lot, and I'm not even going to ask you how he died, but I can't just be him for you. I'm me."

"Will, you don't understand..." David said before trailing off.

"I guess I don't." Without realizing it, he pulled the stuffed bear into his lap and hid half his face behind it.

Maddie offered him a fragile smile. "Will... we have a lot to talk about."

"Like what?" he asked feeling guarded. He didn't like her tone. It made him feel like there was going to be quite a lot said soon that was going to be even more upsetting. Maybe they were going to tell him that he didn't have a say after all. Things went that way a lot when you were a kid.

David sighed and looked away. "That photo you saw? You're right. That is our son. But he didn't die. Will, the baby in that photo is you."

All at once Will felt dizzy and confused. "No," he stammered. "My biological parents' names are Dana and Fox. They're probably dead now, like my mom and dad." Will hadn't supposed to have ever learned the names of his biological parents, but the adoption agency had only been a mile from Mrs. Ogden's house and after the invasion finished up...no one had time to notice an orphan breaking into an abandoned building.

"Those are our real names," David said quietly. "Fox Mulder and Dana Scully."

"No," Will said, shaking his head. "You lie. You're lying." But even as he said it, he realized on some level that they shouldn't know the last names too. It wasn't something they could simply guess at.

"We're not lying," Maddie told him. Her expression was unreadable. "We're you're biological parents."

"Why didn't you come find me months ago?" Will yelled. All of his resentment came bubbling up at once. "My parents were murdered in March. I was alone. And you just… Did what? You didn't find me." He had difficulty keeping in the angry tears that were threatening to leak out. He wasn't sad. And the fact that he was on the verge of tears made him even angrier. He didn't want to be mistaken for sad, not when he was furious.

David, or maybe he should refer to him as Fox, gave him a long look. "We couldn't look for you while the invasion was going on. There was more at stake-"

Outraged, Will asked, "What could be more important than your kid?"

Dana's lips thinned. "Everyone's children. We had to fight for everyone, not just you, no matter how badly we wanted to drop everything and look for you in December of last year. We had to trust that your parents would continue to keep you safe...I'm sorry that they couldn't."

"Not as sorry as I was," Will snapped. He did wonder, though, how his parents would have reacted if these people had shown up the night that the ships came and told them that they were going to take him back. Not well, he supposed.

Feeling slightly less angry, he realized that they probably hadn't known that his parents had died until long after it had happened.

"We looked for you as soon as we could this fall," Dana told him. "Your house was empty... a neighbor told us that you'd been taken away, but had no idea where."

"As soon as you could. What were you doing before then?" Will demanded to know. "If you didn't start looking for me until after my parents got killed you had to be doing something all those months before the invasion was over."

"We led the resistance," the man who claimed to be his father said. "As desperately as we wanted to find you, we had to find a way to make them leave, so you could be safe. So everyone could be safe."

"You led…?" he started to say, finally feeling uncertain that he deserved to maintain his righteous indignation.

"Your mother and I separated to keep you safe, just after you were born. And just after she had to give you away I found out that the invasion was going to happen. We tried desperately to keep it from happening, but it did. And where we had failed in that, we succeeded in stopping it."

"That was eight months ago," Will said mulishly. "And you didn't begin looking for me until the fall. You admitted that. So what were you doing between March and when you finally decided to come look for me?"

"Helping to get things restarted," Dana said evenly. The look on her face said that she was refusing to feel guilty. "If you were still alive, at least we knew that the grays would no longer be a threat to you. But cold and starvation could be. And not just you, of course. But to everyone. Once the infrastructure was working again, we were free to find you. And it took us a long time. We didn't know where you were until five weeks ago."

"But you said you lived here for seven years," Will said petulantly.

She shrugged. "Obviously, that wasn't true."

"But why lie?"

His father looked at him. "Are you aware that people helped them?" he asked abruptly.

Will shook his head. He hadn't heard anything about human beings helping the invaders.

It almost seemed beyond comprehension that anyone would, but then he thought about how greedy some people were. There probably were people who would eagerly help if they thought that it would gain them something. Even if it cost almost everybody else.

"Well, there were people who did help them. And we had to be sure that the woman who'd taken you in wasn't one of them."

"You were worried that Mrs. Ogden was working with the aliens?" Will asked, aghast.

"They didn't all get away," Dana explained. "And since they didn't, we worried that they might go looking for you."

Will mulled this over for a moment. "To punish you?"

They shrugged.

"Mrs. Ogden doesn't work for the aliens," he insisted.

"No, we don't think she does," Dana agreed. "But you have to understand that we needed to be sure, and that's taken time."

"And then there's you," Fox added.

"Me?"

"We wanted to get to know you a little before we told you everything. Obviously this morning hasn't gone as smoothly as we might have liked, but how would you have felt if we showed up the day we figured out where you were and announced that we were your real parents and you had to go with us right that minute?" he asked.

Had to? Will thought, wondering if they would now insist that he had to stay. For all his protests, he really couldn't see why he wouldn't be made to stay with them, now. If they were really his parents, he did belong with them. Will already had accepted this as a forgone conclusion, but it didn't mean that he couldn't still get some answers from them before giving in.

"I guess I would have freaked out," he admitted.

"Exactly. We wanted to give you the chance to get used to the idea of us before we threw all of that at you. Hopefully, as un-fun as this conversation is now, it's less scary than that would have been." David gave him a wry look. "I hope you'll forgive a bit of well-intentioned deception designed to make things easier on you."

"I'll think about it."

"Okay."

Will waited to be peppered with more questions, but they didn't say anything and he realized that they were giving him time to think. So he did.

What was the alternative to living with them? Will wondered. Would Mrs. Ogden keep him? Would he want to stay even if she did?

Looking out the window, watching the snow fall, he realized that his biggest fear would have been for them to try to make him into someone he wasn't. But he really was the person that they'd been missing all along. There was no other boy that left a hole in their hearts - it was him. He wasn't a replacement, they just wanted to reclaim what they had lost. He couldn't, but they could. Or maybe he could too, not his parents, but he'd lost Fox and Dana too, in a way. It sounded like they hadn't ever wanted to give him away, so he no longer had to worry about why they didn't think he was good enough. He'd been good enough for four people to love, and that had to mean something.

Turning to them, he said, "I have a question."

"What's that?" Dana asked, looking as wary as he must have several minutes earlier.

"When I live here do I have to call you mom and dad?"

In spite of himself, he couldn't help but grin when they looked shocked, and then joyful. It didn't come as a surprise when Dana threw her arms around him. "You can call us anything you want, Will."

"Good."

Fox babbled something about getting his things from Mrs. Ogden the next day, but Will didn't really listen. Nothing could bring his parents back, but he realized now that he was still here and could still have a real life of his own again. He didn't have to dwell on the past, not when he had two people who wanted to help him make a future. Things were still far from all right, but he could feel that they were on the verge of getting better if he let them. Hugging Dana back, and Fox too when he joined in, he decided to let things get better. A future was the best gift any of them were going to get.

From the outside of the house, to anyone glancing through their window they would have looked like they were just an average family celebrating Christmas. That was a good start.

The End

A/N: so...what did you think?