November 15, 1997
Washington, D.C.
She manages to step out of the doctor's office and into the hallway without anyone noticing that she has learned the life Dana Scully had envisioned for herself will never fully come true. In a daze, she presses the button that will bring an elevator to get her out of here, out of this building in which her dreams were shattered. Her legs don't stand quite firm on her four-inch black pumps, her hands feel sweaty against the black pencil skirt over her thighs and her mind feels blank. The only thought that comes to her is that she will never hear the joyful first cry of a baby born out of her.
She is barren.
It was supposed to be a routine appointment, just a follow-up to get the results on her Pap smear and transvaginal ultrasound after her cancer went into remission. On her last appointment, her doctor had told her he saw no reason for her to have been diagnosed as infertile during her cancer treatment, since her hormonal levels looked okay and her reproductive system was pristine. Considering her last Pap smear had been after her abduction and she hadn't done the ultrasound back then, Dr. Parenti had suggested the additional exams to double-check. She got her hopes up, unable to deny that she should be granted positive news after her ordeal. It was only supposed to be a check-up. And then she confirmed that for some unexplainable reason she was unable to ovulate, unable to bring a child into this world.
She is barren.
As the elevator doors open and she steps into the vacant car, she fingers the cross hanging on her neck and stares at herself in the mirror. Her G-woman armor, completed by the black suit jacket buttoned over her white silk blouse primly tucked into her skirt and the long, elegant black trench coat laid on her shoulders, feels oddly appropriate right now. She is mourning that which she will never be allowed to have; that she will never be able to offer to any significant other.
She is barren.
How can she still have faith in God after every bad thing that she has seen in the world? Not only in the world, but everything that she's gone through in the past five years alone? Her father's death, her abduction, her sister's murder, her cancer… and now this. How can she believe in God's justice when she has always tried to do good and ended up feeling like she is perpetually being punished by Him? She is aware she has made some choices in the past her family wouldn't condone, still if she tallies all those bad things in the punishment category of her life it feels unfair to her. Kind of overkill.
The elevator reaches the ground floor and she makes her escape, grateful to being unbothered during the elevator ride or on her way out.
She took a cab to the doctor's in order to eat the salad she bought on her way out of the Bureau, trying to spend as little of her lunch hour to compensate for having a two-o'clock in Adams Morgan. Now, she should take a cab back to the office, but the weather is surprisingly comforting for this time in November, the cool wind making her feel something even if there is a void in her, and she still wants to mull over her infertility, so she decides to walk for a while. It makes no sense to her now to hurry back, not when something of this magnitude has been dropped on her like an atomic bomb.
She is barren.
Almost an hour later, she realizes she walked the entire way back to the FBI, all of those two plus miles, and she sighs. She's been repeating over and over to herself the hard facts, and though she has grown accustomed to the idea of never being able to create a life with half of her biological material, it still hurts nevertheless.
So, she makes her way into the building mechanically, past the security checkpoint where the amicable guard tries to make regular small talk with her but she's just not her usual self, and not giving it much thought steps in onto an elevator on its way up and not down to the basement. She ends up going all the way up to the sixth floor, dropping some curious agents along the ride, before making her way down, with a few additional stops, back to the basement. Once she reaches the office, she notices Mulder is not on his desk and can't even bring herself to speculate to his whereabouts. She just aimlessly sheds her coat and hangs it by the door and makes her way to his desk to try and focus on her work.
She notices the genetic results she needs for their five o'clock meeting with Skinner have still not been delivered, so she decides to go up to the lab, even if she cannot take her mind out of her latest medical news. She is so preoccupied she doesn't even notice when the elevator car reaches the fourth floor – past the second floor she was supposed to go to – and the doors open to reveal Mulder just standing there, in relieved surprise.
"There you are, I've been looking all over for you," he greets her, getting on the elevator with her and letting the doors close again.
"Hi," she manages, distractedly. "I'm sorry. I had a doctor's appointment and, um, I don't know, I guess time just got away from me," she finishes, looking abashed.
She is not exactly meeting his eyes, he notices, which makes him half concerned, half nervous. "Is anything the matter?"
"Nothing, no," she tries to appease him immediately. "I just, uh, I went for a walk."
He tries for a nonchalant murmur and adds non-threateningly, albeit uneasily, "Then what's wrong?"
She sighs, knowing there is no point in hiding this from him. She may have kept the cards close to her chest in the past, but she refuses to keep him out after her remission. "I'm," she tries on her tongue. "I'm sorry I haven't told you. I don't know why I haven't," she admits, mostly to herself, before adding "I mean, you were always there for me during my illness but..."
The words don't come so easily when she needs to say them out loud to someone else, even if that someone is Mulder. She is having a hard time trying to understand why she still feels the need to hide from him after all he has done for her, after all they have been through together.
Anxious about the number of possibilities of what could be wrong with her but trying to neutralize the fear on his appearance as much as possible, he leans into her and, after a beat, he speaks quietly, with the softest of smiles, "Don't make me guess."
She fixes her gaze on nothing in particular and lets the words out, "I was left unable to conceive with whatever test that they did on me," she ventures a look at him, frozen by her side, and continues for the hardest of admissions, "and I am not ready to accept that I will never have children."
I am barren.
The elevator reaches the basement floor and Mulder is still looking at his feet. He's battling an internal fight with himself as he walks out, knowing that he cannot keep this from her, even if he rationalized why he hadn't said anything before, even if he made himself believe he wasn't only acting cowardly but also protecting her from further pain. He knows he needs to say something now. So, he turns back to the elevator and faces her. "Scully, there's, um, there's something I haven't told you either and I hope you… forgive me and understand why I would have kept it from you."
Of all the ways she expected him to react to her news, this wasn't it. She is wary, she realizes. "What?"
Now he is the one who needs to stare at nothing to start speaking. "During my investigation into your illness, I found out the reason why you were left barren." He meets her eyes, then closes his to gather strength to get through with what he knows he should, must tell her. "Your ova were taken from you and stored in a government lab." His eyes are anchored to hers by the time he finishes, doing his best to offer his apologies and support all at once.
"What?" She asks, but now her tone is one of shock, which is also evidenced by her trembling lips and emotional look in her eyes. The elevator doors begin to close, but she puts her hands up to stop them. "You found them?"
"I," he falters, "I took them directly to a specialist who would tell me if they were okay."
She stands there shell-shocked. "I don't believe this," she manages. She is so disturbed she fails to notice how his voice lowered on that last part, how he couldn't meet her eyes again.
He tries to defend himself immediately, to make her understand how this was breaking his heart as well. "Scully, you were deathly ill, and I," he shrugs and looks straight into her eyes as he continues, "I couldn't bear to give you another piece of bad news."
Her shock seems to deflate a little as his words sink in. "Is that what it was, it was bad news?"
He lightly nods, a pout on his lips as if it was hurting him to admit this as much as it would hurt her to hear it. "Well, the doctor said that… the ova weren't viable."
Her emotions change again and this time she turns her hurt into determination. She presses the button on the elevator that will take her upstairs – to where, Mulder doesn't know – and declares, "I want a second opinion."
Her words sound more like denial than purposefulness to him and he reaches out with both hands to keep the doors from closing, to try and reason with her, to offer comfort or anything he could do to make her not go through this. What could she do right now, they had a meeting in less than an hour, she didn't know where the ova were, and even if she did, would she just drive around with them in the backseat…? She's being irrational, he grasps. But as they look at each other and she stares at him with a steely "Well?" imprinted on her face, he knows this is not the time to press her. He needs to respect her decisions and give her time to get through this.
He thinks he can do that. He can talk to Skinner and reschedule the meeting, give her time to cool off. And then he will be there for her if and when she asks for his help – when she needs information, if she needs help to make arrangements to transfer her ova to her doctor's lab, when she is ready to accept the unfortunate, irreparable truth of her infertility.
So, reluctantly, he lets the doors close.
A month goes by, and she still hasn't broached the subject of her ova to him again ever since she called him the Saturday following their elevator conversation and he told her about the medical facility where he stored the material. He had tried to talk to her then, but she had just asked for the name of lab and hung up on him with a formal "thank you". She hadn't even asked him why he was still storing her eggs if he had been told they were not viable – and he had no answer for her on that other than he had been hoping at some point they would prove science wrong.
He checks in regularly with the Gunmen, but no one has checked the vial out nor requested an additional analysis so far. He had expected her to go there immediately on the Monday following their call, but she had spent the entire day at Quantico slicing and dicing as he called it, and then they had spent the rest of that week still focused on work and ignoring the elephant in the room.
It feels weird to him that she's been avoiding this matter this long. Even if they had to go out of state for three cases, he would have expected her to try and deal with this head on, but instead she seems… static. In any case, he doesn't want to push her.
He just keeps paying the fees to store the material in the lab – which he is sure she isn't even aware of – for as long as she needs him to.
Author's Notes:
Ever since Per Manum originally aired, I've been wracking my brain to make sense of the elevator scene in which Mulder tells Scully about her ova being harvested and stored in a government lab - because I clearly remembered that she was surprised by this information in Emily, back in Season 5. So in my mind, in order for this to work, that specific flashback should be to a moment after her cancer went into remission (because she mentions that Mulder was there for her during her illness) and before she tries to adopt Emily - and even so, it would still make no sense for her to be surprised by this information during the adoption hearing. So I've accepted this as, unfortunately, sloppy writing on the show and decided to tweak it a little bit with this fanfic. In any case, I kept the dialogues that would fit - and of course, any characters and dialogues used in the X-Files are not mine whatsoever.