Archive of Our Own ^beta

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1. Scully hides the symptoms for weeks. She’s newly moved back into the house, with boxes still clustered in the hall or the dustiest part of the living room, and she can’t bear the idea that they found their way back to each other too late.

2. Mulder finds out one night when he gets up and finds Scully with a bloody nose, leaning over the sink with a Kleenex clutched to her nose. It’s such a shock that he actually goes weak in the knees, collapses to the ground. The two of them hold each other on the bathroom rug all night, faces wet with tears, shaking and shaking.

3. Mulder insists on taking her to the doctor the next morning when he finds out that she’s already been in chemo for a week and a half. “I’m not going to let this thing beat me,” she says, the same thing she said in a hospital hallway years ago. “I don’t want to leave you. And… I want to live to see our son again.” He wraps himself around her, kisses the top of her head, unable to express the rush of gratefulness that fills him.

4. Mulder drives her to chemo every week, sits with her and holds her hand and reads to her from books they found on a list online. Every time he kisses her feels like it might be the last. Scully just shuts her eyes and listens. One day, Mulder’s voice falters in the middle of Shutter Island, and he says, “Scully,” in a gut-punched voice. She opens her eyes and sees their son, his face pale and apologetic, standing across the room. Scully puts out the IV before stumbling across the room to hug him.

5. Jackson is with them for two weeks before he offers. Mulder goes into town to get food, and Scully is in bed watching TV when he comes into the room, giving her a questioning look. Understanding instantly, Scully nods.

He sits on the edge of the bed, offers, “I’ve never tried this on a real person before,” anxiously.

Scully smiles, just a little. “It’s okay,” she whispers.

He places his hand on her forehead and screws his eyes shut in concentration. Nothing happens for several minutes, but then she feels something give way, behind her eyes. Like a sense of loss pain.

She gasps, as Jackson goes limp before her–not unconscious, but definitely worn out. She wraps her arms around him on instinct, rocks her baby back and forth, and he hugs her back with a relievedness she can tell is him being grateful he was able to save at least one parent.

When Mulder finds them like that, Scully already looking healthier, he bursts into tears.

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1. In the moment when Mulder asks Krycek to protect Scully, he sees fear flash across her eyes. The most vulnerability he’s seen in her since he came back from the dead. She shakes her head, just a little, and he understands. He pulls Krycek onto the elevator as he and Scully get off. When they get down to the parking garage, he tells Doggett and Reyes that he is taking her in a stern voice. Doggett tries to argue, but Reyes just gets out of the car and hands him the directions written on a napkin. Mulder’s heart is pounding so hard he thinks it might break his ribs, but the grateful look in Scully’s eyes is worth it all. 

2. Neither of them are very impressed by the abandoned Democrat Hot Spring. Scully wants to go somewhere else, but Mulder reluctantly insists that this is the safest place. “It’s gonna be okay,” he says, rubbing one shoulder as they enter a building. “I’ll take care of you both.”

Scully fully rolls her eyes, her face irritable, but he can feel the way her muscles relax when he says this. He kisses her shoulder blade as he helps her inside. 

3. Mulder cleans in the way Reyes would’ve, refusing to let Scully help every time she offers. It’s a little clumsier than he would’ve been, but he tries hard and Scully is genuinely touched. He tries to get things for her and she waves him off and tries to do it herself before finally giving in. They sit on the sheet-covered bed together, feeling the baby kick. All they can do is wait. 

4. When Scully goes into labor, wearing one of Mulder’s shirts, when the people start coming, Mulder is frantic, terrified, trying to shield Scully and deliver the baby all at once. Scully pleads with him not to let them take the baby and he promises he won’t, he won’t, he’d die before he’d let that happen. He delivers the baby, following the instructions that Scully gave him earlier, he wraps the baby up and passes him to Scully, bent over them both to protect them. He scoops up his gun and aims it, shouting the threats he’d been biting back before. The baby cries behind him. But the people don’t get any closer, don’t take the baby; they leave, filing out of the building one by one. 

5. The paramedics in the nearest town get a frantic call from a man shouting something about his baby and Scully needing help, full of spotty reception, but Doggett and Reyes get there first. They find Scully half-conscious and fiercely protective, a hand cupped over the baby’s head to shield him. And Mulder, on the bed beside them, his eyes full of fear and anger and love all at once somehow and his arms wrapped around the both of them. 

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1. Scully doesn’t leave her job on the X-Files. She takes leave for several months to get Emily adjusted, but she doesn’t quit; she feels like she can’t, in the wake of what happened to the Sims. She wants to be ready if or when they come for Emily. (And she doesn’t want to leave Mulder.) Mulder, simultaneously grateful and terrified, repays her by taking only cases that are easily driveable to, and always has Scully home in plenty of time to pick Emily up from after-school daycare. 

2. After Mulder has known–and bonded–with Emily for a year or more, Scully changes him to Emily’s guardian if anything should happen to her. When Mulder asks why, she starts with, “Because you’re the best equipped to protect her,” and ends with, “Because you’re the closest thing she has to a father.” They are both crying. 

3. Emily loves to be read to, by either Mulder or Scully, but she likes to watch movies or TV with Mulder specifically. She climbs in Scully’s–later their-bed after having a nightmare. She asks Scully questions about everything, from science to history to why the sky is blue, and Scully always gives her a full answer that she doesn’t always understand, but she’s always listening. She wants to invite Mulder over every day before he and Scully are dating, and wants him to stay over every night after they finally do. (They finally just move in together to avoid the hassle.)

4. The first time Emily calls Scully Mommy instead of Dana, she cries. The first time she calls Mulder Dad, he has already been her father for years. It stuns him more than anything, so that all he can do is hug her in surprise. (He cries later.)

5. They fly back from San Diego together by accident, the first time, and it’s before they’ve actually discussed the fact that Scully isn’t leaving the X-Files, so it’s largely awkward, Mulder avoiding them in an attempt to give Scully space to bond with Emily. But they’re all accidentally seated together on the plane. Emily is absorbed in coloring. Scully tries to make conversation, but she can’t find anything to talk about; Mulder largely just reads. Scully is in the bathroom when the plane hits turbulence, shaking hard, and Emily is scared. On instinct alone, Mulder comforts her, asking her about her drawings and making silly faces until Scully returns. (This is the first time the three of them almost–not quite, but almost–not like a family.)

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1. It happens after the ordeal with Jack Willis. Mulder is worried, hovering over her and holding back at the same time, like he isn’t sure whether or not he should touch her. Scully is furious and exhausted and confused and still a little bit afraid. She keeps returning to Jack’s corpse in the corner, genuine fear punctuating every part of her being.

When Mulder drops her off at home, all she can hear is his voice shouting her first name. She bites her lower lip. Invites him up for a beer. 

2. She doesn’t figure it out until nearly two months. Until she’s actively missed two periods. She’s a doctor, she knows the symptoms, but she still convinces herself that she can’t possibly be pregnant until she’s sitting on top of her closed toilet, holding the positive test in her hand. Her initial reaction is: Shit. It’s not that she doesn’t want kids, doesn’t want this baby, but a baby was never part of her plan at this stage in life. And Mulder… They’ve been in something of a relationship for the past couple of months, something they don’t dare actually acknowledge, but he definitely hasn’t signed on for this. She doesn’t know what the hell she’s going to do. She sits with the positive test in her hand for a long time. 

3. She doesn’t tell Mulder until the X-Files are already closed. She doesn’t know how the hell she can. It’s been a few days since he called to tell her, and she knows she has to do it. She knows she does. So she takes a cab over to his apartment, knocks on the door, sits him down and explains it to him in a calm voice that cannot possibly be hers. She has never felt this calm about this.

His mouth gapes a little bit when she’s finished, like he isn’t sure what to say. And then he says, very audibly, “Shit.“ 

4. "It’s not… I don’t want you to think I don’t care about you, Scully,” he adds as she starts to get up.

“You don’t have to feel bad, Mulder, I had the exact same reaction,” she says.

“No, it’s not… I don’t want you to think I’m… I do care about you, Scully. You’re my best friend. And a… a kid… Jesus.” He rubs a hand over his face, overwhelmed. “I just… I never expected this. I was always afraid that… if I ever had a kid… it’d just be something else they could use against me.”

Scully does stand now, so calm it almost scares her. She says, “You don’t have to be involved, Mulder. I mean that genuinely. We don’t work together anymore, this isn’t your life…” She can’t say she wouldn’t miss him, ridiculously so, but she also can’t say that she WOULD miss him out loud. “You can walk away,” she adds. “I promise I won’t hold it against you.”

He shakes his head so immediately it surprises her, if only because of the shocked, uncertain look on his face.

“Or you can stay involved.” She extends her hand, takes his and squeezes it. “Think about it, okay?” she offers. “Take some time.”

5. Since they don’t work together, she doesn’t see him for the next several weeks. Doesn’t have any idea what his answer is. But she emails him the date of her next ultrasound, just in case he’s decided that he does.

(She has no idea whether she does or she doesn’t, she never thought she’d be making these decisions so fucking soon and she certainly never considered making them with Mulder. But she already misses Mulder, seeing him in the office every day, sparring with him and flirting with him, and being out in the field with him. She misses it all.)

She doesn’t hear from him, and she assumes that is his answer. But he shows up at the appointment while she’s waiting for the doctor, nervous as hell, looking like he’s about to faint.

“This man said he was the father?” the nurse who showed him back asks skeptically. Scully nods.

As soon as the door is closed, Mulder says, “Hi,” and it’s almost a question.

She smiles a little. “Hi.”

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1. Scully somehow hears Mulder calling for her in the desert and manages to somehow get into the ship and get him out. He and Doggett seems equally stunned at the whole thing; Mulder had never really expected her to hear him. 

2. Scully is horrified at the level of torture inflicted on Mulder in such a short amount of time. She can’t stop touching him: his forehead, his hair. She’s hesitant because of his wounds, but he grasps for her hand and grips it with a shocking strength. She doesn’t let go, and she doesn’t leave his side the entire time. 

3. The brain disease is gone, and Scully cries when she finds out, still half in shock from learning about it just a few days earlier. Mulder is beyond apologetic, but she waves him off, just beyond relieved that he is okay, that she’s saved him.

4. They go back to his apartment after he’s made a full recovery. Mulder finds the shirt crumpled up on his bed and can’t find the words to ask Scully about it. He wraps his arms around her and holds her in his bedroom.

5. She tells him about the pregnancy as soon as he’s well enough, as soon as she knows he’s going to live. He is astonished, confused, delighted. He kisses her face eagerly, crushes her to him, and she finds herself laughing wildly, the happiest she’s felt about the baby so far. 

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1. They meet because they’re partnered on a project for their Intro to Folklore class. Scully vehemently disagrees with everything Mulder vehemently believes, and they initially can’t stop arguing over everything. Which leads to them getting kicked out of the library. Mulder finally admits that he believes in everything he does because of his sister, and Scully doesn’t necessarily believe him, but she’s sympathetic enough to go and apologize. Which leads to them becoming study partners (“Because we might be the only two people at this university who’s intellects are matched,” says Mulder, and Scully rolls her eyes and mumbles something about him being full of himself but she secretly agrees), which leads to them becoming best friends. 

2. They go monster hunting together. It’s mostly an accident the first time (they’re both at a party, and Scully catches Mulder sneaking up into the attic because he SWEARS this house is haunted), and Mulder keeps asking, and Scully keeps rolling her eyes and saying that she’s only coming so he doesn’t end up getting arrested or killed, but she keeps coming. 

3. The first time they kiss, it’s because of a game of Truth or Dare at the Gunmen’s apartment.  

4. Their first summer apart, Scully goes home for the summer and Mulder stays in the Gunmen’s apartment, to his great chagrin. They talk on the phone almost every night (to the merciless teasing of Melissa on one end and Frohike and Langly on the other) until Scully finally just gives up and comes back a few weeks early, moving into the Gunmen’s apartment with them. “Next year,” she tells Mulder, “we’re getting our own place.”

5. They first discover the FBI together, sitting on Mulder’s bed with Scully’s legs in his lap. (Mulder’s room is their favorite, since his roommate left halfway through the year.) They’d both attended the meeting by the FBI recruiter and found themselves fascinated. “You’d be a good FBI agent,” Mulder says. “Like… cutting people up and stuff. And being badass.”

Scully rolls her eyes, although she’s noting her interest in pathology. “Your psychology degree would be useful,” she says. “You could be a profiler.”

“Too bad they don’t have a monster hunting unit,” Mulder says, playing with her hair. “Hey, we could be partners.”

“I don’t think it works that way, Mulder,” she says with amusement.

“Yeah,” says Mulder, “but I’d only want you as my partner.”

(They don’t decide anything right away, but the thought is always there.)

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1. It happens in the middle of a chase: Mulder’s pursuing the suspect, and he rounds a corner and finds the suspect holding him at gunpoint. He tries to negotiate, but the suspect doesn’t seem very interested in that, and he’s sure he’s going to die until Scully is suddenly in front of him, pushing him out of the way as the gun goes off. 

2. He’s at her side at a second, his hand pressed over the wound, his face filled with worry. “You’re going to be okay,” he says softly, his hand touching her face, her hair, before he remembers and fumbles for his phone.

“The suspect is getting away,” she insists, coughing wetly, but he shakes his head.

“I’m not leaving you,” he whispers. Tucks his phone between his ear and his shoulder and peels off his jacket. He covers her with it the way she did when he was shot, years and years ago. He stays with her on the pavement, breathing harshly and frantically, tears welling in his eyes, until the ambulance comes. He kisses her forehead, all of her fingers. He holds her hand. 

3. Somewhere in the haze between passing out and waking up, she thinks she can hear him fighting with the nurses, shouting. “I have to see her!” he roars. “Just let me see her, I have to see if she’s all right.” She hears the nurse’s softer, reassuring response, and then she doesn’t hear much of anything at all, but she thinks Mulder eventually shows up, sitting down by her side, taking her hand in both of his warm ones. “I’m here, Scully,” he whispers. “I’m here.”

4. When she wakes up, Mulder is right there, dozing in the chair, black circles under his eyes and his clothes rumpled. She’s thinking she’ll just let him sleep, but he must hear the heart monitor speed up because he sits up like lightning, his eyes wide. “Scully?” he whispers and she nods, the effort to speak too much. She reaches up with one shaky hand and touches the side of his face.

He looks like he wants to argue, but he doesn’t, reaches up to cover her hand with his. “You saved my life, Scully,” he whispers, and he sounds exhausted, sad, relieved. “Why the hell would you take a bullet for me?”

A smile spreads involuntarily across her face. “Mulder, you’re an idiot,” she rasps, and he laughs so hard that he cries. 

5. Her mother has a large hand in her recovery, but then again, so does Mulder. He takes her home, he tries and fails to cook, he rents movies and watches with her in her bedroom while she’s in bed and he’s sitting in a chair on the side. At one point, Scully takes his hand and tugs at it. “Come on, Mulder, that chair can’t be comfortable,” she says sternly. “Get up here.”

He looks stricken for a moment, like he isn’t sure what to do. “I… I don’t want to strain your wound,” he says. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

She shakes her head impatiently and pulls at his hand again. “Come on,” she says. “I’m cold. It’s the least you can do for me, after I saved your life.”

Mulder still seems conflicted–and maybe a little hurt–for a split second. And then he grins. Climbs up on the bed beside her.

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1. When Modell knocks out the camera, when he invades Scully’s mind and forces her to walk into the hospital room, she doesn’t understand what’s happening. She thinks she’s been drugged, knocked unconscious, is dreaming. She tries to fight it the entire time, but all she can do is stumble. She tries to bargain with him, but all she can do is make small grunting sounds. When Mulder bursts into the room, his eyes wide and furious, panic fills her mind as she remembers Frank Burst, the cop who set himself on fire. 

2. Mulder tries to fight Modell. He shouts at him, tries to come forward and physically overpower him, but Modell easily has the power, picks up the gun in the center of the table and points it right at Scully, who is sitting stone still in her seat, breathing hard as she tries to regain power. “Come on, Mulder,” Modell says cheerfully. “This is a game. Don’t you want to see if you can win?”

3. Scully fights harder than Mulder does to try and avoid shooting Modell. Her nostrils flaring, her hand spasms desperately around the gun, fearing they’ll all go up in flames. But Modell’s too strong, and she pulls the trigger. When he says, “Your turn,” Scully thinks this is it, that he’s rigged it somehow so she’s going to shoot herself in front of Mulder. He’s marked Mulder as his enemy, and this is the way to get to him, she knows it. 

“No,” Mulder says, his voice full of horror. Scully tries to fight again, every muscle in her arm tightening, but her hand rises anyway, lifting the gun. Mulder’s hand flies out and closes around her wrist. “Scully, no,” he says, sounding horribly betrayed. “You can fight this, Scully, you don’t have to…" 

She tries to tell him that she doesn’t want to, tries to ask for his help, but her lips are frozen, she can’t speak. She lifts the gun to her temple, but her hands are shaking. She doesn’t want to die. She whimpers, just a little. 

"Goddamnit, Modell!” Mulder snaps, his hand hard around her wrist like a cuff. His fingers are tense, and he’s practically quivering with fear. “Don’t do this to her. Don’t fucking do this. It’s me you want. Let her go, and you… you can do whatever you want with me." 

Scully shakes her head, or at least she tries to; she moves her chin a little and the muzzle of the gun butts up against her temple. Mulder yanks her hand away, the gun rocking so hard she thinks it’s going to fire, and Modell’s hand flies out and grabs Mulder’s, his brow furrowed in concentration, coated with sweat. Scully’s hand shakes and shakes. 

"Don’t do this,” Mulder says, his voice vulnerable and soft. “Let her go.”

Modell just smiles, and Scully is filled with an entirely new kind of terror. “You want to go first, Mulder? Okay. You can go first.”

4. A new instruction springs up like wildfire in Scully’s mind and she fights against this one with a new ferocity, determined, so determined… But her stiff muscles don’t listen. And she is swiveling her hand around, moving the gun in Mulder’s grip awkwardly so it is pointed right at him. 

Mulder’s eyes widen, genuinely speechless. He is wearing a vest, but the muzzle is angled to where it will hit just above, in his neck or his head, and Scully shakes her head again. She feels so stiff, everything in her straining, and she manages a small word, a strained, “No.”

“C'mon, Scully, this should be easy for you,” Modell says casually. “You’ve shot him before, I read it in your files.”

This isn’t happening, this isn’t fucking happening, he’s drugged her or she’s asleep or something, because she cannot shoot Mulder, not again… “I’m not…” she chokes out. “I can’t…”

“Sure, you can. They’d probably give you a medal for it. Spooky Mulder, off the streets.” Modell smirks. “You know he’ll never believe you, right? He’ll never take you seriously.”

Scully’s fingers twitch, ghosting over the trigger, and she whimpers again, a furious grunt.

“Scully, it’s okay,” Mulder says softly, and she suddenly sees it in his eyes: he’d rather her shoot him than herself. “It’s okay.”

She shakes her head again, a tear leaking from her eyes. Her eyes jerk convulsively, looking for a way out, and land on a fire alarm on the back wall. She tries to move, but the chair only rocks. Her arm is so fucking stiff. “No,” she says again, from somewhere deep in her chest. 

“I’m gonna kill you, Modell,” Mulder growls. “Scully, it’s okay. You can’t… you can’t feel guilty when…”

He really thinks she’s going to shoot him, and she’s starting to believe it herself. Her finger is curled hard over the trigger. “No,” she says insistently. “Mulder…" 

"Go on, Scully,” Modell says boredly. “It’s him or you, and Mulder’s made his choice. Unless you’d like it to be Scully’s turn…”

“Run,” Scully bites out, and Mulder shakes his head. She stares at him hard, meaningfully, and she doesn’t have much strength left. “Fire… go…” she gasps, and oh god, she’s going to shoot her partner again. And this time, she’s going to kill him. 

And then, miraculously, Mulder follows her line of sight. He takes off at a run towards the alarm just as Scully’s finger closes over the trigger and she hears the empty click. It’s an empty, and she almost sobs with relief as the shrill blare fills the room.

5. Scully doesn’t shoot Modell. She lunges across the room, gun dropping from her hand, and shoves him to the ground. She hits him until she can’t hit him anymore, until Modell invades her mind again, somehow, and she goes limp. He shoves her off of her, instructs her silently to get the gun underneath the shrill sound, and then she hears the gunfire. Mulder is holding it, standing over them, and Modell collapses to the ground. 

Scully folds in on herself as she is freed once again, gasping in relief. She doesn’t look at Mulder. She hugs herself on the floor until Mulder is crouching beside her, pulling her into his lap. “I shot at you,” she chokes out, and she’s crying, sobbing the way she did after Pfaster. Mulder’s arms are wrapped around her and he’s rocking her back and forth, and God, either of them could be dead right now, either of them. “I could’ve killed you, Mulder, I could’ve…”

“It’s okay, it’s okay,” he whispers into her hair, and he’s just as frantic, his heart fluttering like a bird under her ear. “It was an empty, he didn’t want me dead, he wanted to hurt me… he knew I wouldn’t be shot… Jesus, Scully, you could’ve died.” And his own tears are falling in her hair. 

The SWAT team finds the two of them like that: clutching at each other, rocking together on the hospital floor. 

6. Later, she finds him standing over Modell in a hospital bed, his face stony. She whispers, “I say we don’t let him take up another minute of our time,” and is stunned to feel his hand curling around hers. They walk out together, hand in hand, and Scully is terrified he won’t forgive her, that she shouldn’t be forgiven, but he assures her then, assures her later that night, will assure her years later when Modell came back: it’s not her fault. He’s choked with his own guilt, truly believing it’s his fault because he agreed to let Scully go and he should’ve known that Modell would use Scully to get to him, and the bullet was in the third chamber so she would’ve been shot, and… It will take them time to heal from this ordeal, but they will.

For now, they hold hands. 

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1. Both of the kids are a little more than surprised when they hear about it. Mulder and Scully both tell William, who is still living at home, but Emily actually finds out FROM William, when she calls him to check on him and he more or less blurts, “Did Mom and Dad tell you that they’re having a baby?” Emily thinks he’s kidding until her mom calls her later that night. 

2. Mulder, William, and Emily all end up becoming jointly and fiercely protective of Scully. With the aftermath of William’s encounter with the smoker and near death experience, everyone is a little on edge. Scully alternately rolls her eyes or shoos them away, but she’s secretly a little touched. 

3. William and Emily are actually the ones to suggest the name Lily. Mulder and Scully find out that it’s a girl early, when Emily’s visiting for a few days, and the kids take it as their cue to very seriously argue names. (“Who said that you two could name this kid?” Mulder jokes. “The genuises who decided this family needed ANOTHER William,” Will shoots back.) Lily is the first name they both agree on. They nickname the baby Lils when she’s still three months away from being born.

4. Emily and William can both hear the baby, in the same quiet way they’ve always been able to hear each other and their mother, in the way William can hear their father. They use it to check in, to make sure the baby is okay.

5. The whole family is there when the baby is born. Emily flies down from college as soon as Will calls her. William refuses to leave the delivery room, despite his parents’ encouragement, determined to be there for his mother if anything goes wrong. (Nothing does. The baby is born happy and healthy, with an entire family who love her and are ready to protect her from anything. Everything goes just the way they had hoped.)

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1. She’s definitely subtle about it. “I’m his partner,” she says to Skinner like he’s an idiot. “You honestly think they wouldn’t use me against him?” She’s thinking of every single story she heard after her abduction of how furious Mulder was, how hard he fought to get her back safely. (He was a terrifying legend at the hospital.) This seems to push Skinner towards the edge of agreeing, but he’s still indecisive until Scully adds, “People are probably looking for me, too.” And that’s what decides it. 

2. They almost send them to separate locations, but Mulder, still a little bit in shock from the fact that Scully’s fighting so hard to go with him, says that he’ll refuse to go if they can’t go together, and Scully backs him on it. The exhausted agents sigh and begin forming a married couple identity that is hopefully fullproof. 

3. “Not that I’m complaining,” Mulder whispers as they ride to their new location in the back of an inconspicuous van, “but why’d you…” He falters, finishes awkwardly, “I just thought you’d… jump at the chance to live like a normal person for a little while.”

Scully makes a face at him from where she sits beside him. “You need someone to watch your back,” she says simply, to cover up the fact that Mulder is already such an ingrained part of her life that she wouldn’t know HOW to let him. 

4. Under their new lives, their new names, they create a complex backstory, growing more elaborate and weird as they go on in an attempt to make each other laugh. They’ve been married four years, they might want kids someday but they haven’t decided yet, they don’t have a pet because they can’t agree on whether to get a dog or a cat, it’s their greatest wish to live by the ocean. They met at a party. (“That’s not very romantic,” Mulder teases when Scully says it, “or very complicated.” Scully shrugs. “I guess I just like the real story better,” she says, kissing his stubbly cheek.) The neighbors never ask, but they like having the answers anyway. 

5. Eventually, the danger grows closer, and one of their neighbors is attacked, and Mulder and Scully throw themselves into finding who the hell is coming after them. (It’s certainly more challenging than investigating the gremlin that may or may not live in the basement of their apartment building.) It’s the usual game of danger-running-near death, but they win the game, as usual. The danger is gone, and they can go back home. It’s hard to get back to normal life, after nearly a year of living as a suburban married couple, but they work it out. They navigate it together.

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1. Mulder’s a spy for the British. Originally American, but he ended up joining up at the beginning of the war, after a stint at Oxford University. He’s lived in England long enough to be able to fake an English accent proficiently, and he has no desire to go back home after the disappearance of his sister that essentially tore the family apart, a disappearance he suspects may actually be linked with the war. Whatever the case, he certainly loathes the enemy enough to want to fight back.

2. Scully’s infiltrated the earliest incarnation of the Syndicate, entirely on accident; her job as a nurse has involved run-ins with men who all smell of smoke, who offer her a job. It starts with random house-calls that are increasingly suspicious and ends with a dangerous request. They’re sending someone to meet with a contact overseas, on business he won’t disclose over enemy lines. They ask her to pretend to be his wife–“To stand there and look pretty and don’t ask questions,” the men say with wolf-like smiles.

Scully agrees, only because she is sure she’s stumbled onto some sort of enemy spies in America. With her father and brother’s positions in the Navy, she’s sure she can get the information to the people who’d need it. She’s been collecting information on them all along, filing it away in her mind. She buys a small revolver and packs it in her bag.

3. An incident on the ship–an argument, someone with suspicions similar to Scully’s and a full-on fight in the bar–leaves Scully’s false husband dead. Determined not to give up on the opportunity, Scully goes through his cabin with a freedom she hadn’t known previously, discovers that the contact has no idea who HIS contact is. As soon as they reach land, she makes contact herself, determined to get the information she needs to bring down this organization. And she runs right into Mulder in the midst of her communication with enemy lines.

4. Neither of them trust each other, but Mulder’s American accent throws Scully off guard. She insists that she is loyal to the Allies, loyal to America, that she’s here in an attempt to bring down a network of enemy spies. She gives only her last name, since her father is a general in the Navy and she thinks that must assure her loyalty. Mulder very nearly arrests her, but something in her eyes throws him off, halfway convinces him that she is telling the truth.

He ends up taking her to his rattly little apartment while he considers what to do. Scully sees the picture of his sister pinned up over his desk, and is stunned. “I know her,” she says in astonishment. “I’ve seen her in the… facilities of this network I’ve infiltrated. I think they’re keeping her there.”

Mulder turns to her in shock, his mouth hanging open.

“She’s your sister?” He nods. “I can get her out,” Scully adds. “If I make them trust me, I could get her out.”

5. They warily decide to trust each other–cautiously, out of necessity. Scully offers him the information that her contact gives her, in addition to information about his sister. Mulder insists on coming along, to make sure that she’s telling the truth. To find his sister. (“I’ve been looking for her forever,” he says. “And you… you’ve met her? She’s alive?” Scully nods. “I’ll get her out,” she says. “If you help me, I’ll help you find her.”) So an alliance is formed: unlikely partners, deciding to make their way across war-torn Europe together. 

They don’t mean to fall in love, but they do.

Chapter Text

1. It happens after One Son. She’s hurt and angry and convinced that Mulder doesn’t need her. They get offered the X-Files and she chooses to resign. When Mulder protests, devastated at the idea of losing her partnership, all she can say is, “You told me I was making it personal, Mulder. And this is about as impersonal as I can make it.”’

2. Mulder calls her, writes letters, asks to take her to dinner so that they can talk about this (please, please, can we talk about this). Scully ignores it. She might’ve been willing to hear him out, before, but then she heard that his new partner was fucking Diana Fowley. She’s settling into her new stint at Georgetown Memorial.

She doesn’t hear anything about Mulder until she’s turning on the news and seeing that he’s arrested a serial killer who looks remarkably like the stranger she kept running into, who claimed, once, to be Mulder’s neighbor and asked why she never came over anymore. A chill rolls up her spine, and she shuts off the TV and doesn’t call him.

3. She doesn’t see Mulder at all until an admitting nurse offhandedly mentions that he’s been admitted. Panic rolls through her, and she follows the nurse’s directions until she finds him in the psychiatric unit, pacing around a room full of cameras with Skinner and Diana outside.

Diana looks surprised to see her, says, “He… he was asking for you,” in a slightly cowed voice. On camera, Mulder screams her name.

Scully demands to know what’s wrong with him, what happened, and no one can tell her. She pushes past people until she’s inside the room, crouching beside him. He stares at her with wide, desperate eyes not unlike that of an animal, and she finds herself forgetting why she was ever mad at him. “I’m here, Mulder,” she whispers. “I’m here.”

4. She takes over his case, advocates and fights for him. He can’t speak to her, but she can sense that he hears her, every word she is saying. Skinner makes a bargain for a few minutes of lucidity, and one of the first things he says is a desperate, “I’m sorry,” turned towards Scully, his eyes full of regret. She gets penalized for her involvement, they put security on his room, but he still disappears, taken suddenly from his room.

Certain Fowley is involved, Scully pursues her relentlessly to no avail. Or so she thinks; she eventually finds a key card, shoved under the door to her office. She follows the trail it leaves and finds Mulder, weak with bandages wrapped around his head, spread-eagle on a cold table. “Mulder, help me,” she whispers, determined to get him out of there, and he comes to life, rasps, “You help me,” as he wraps his arms around her neck.

As she’s holding him there, she realizes he’s rasping her name again, whispering, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” and she shakes her head firmly. “You don’t need to be sorry,” she says. “You’re alive. That’s what matters.”

5. She oversees his recovery, even if it means sacrificing any future prospects at Georgetown Memorial. It’s not as if she’s not familiar with career sacrifices. She hovers by Mulder’s side, holds his hand, even though she feels almost like she has no right. She left him, she abandoned him, and look where it got him. When he wakes up, he smiles at her like she is the sun.

He tells her a story of a brain surgery-induced vision of a life with Diana and his sister living down the street and children he’ll probably never have. “But… that’s not what I want,” he says, squeezing her hand. His eyes are dark and sincere, warm. “I don’t think that’s what I ever wanted.”

It’s as much of an apology as she’ll accept, and the most of an apology she’ll offer is her lips brushing over his bruised knuckles. It is enough.

When he asks her to dinner two weeks later, she accepts.

Chapter Text

1. Jackson comes back into their lives a few months after the entire ordeal. He comes to ask for favors, for money, because he knows that they love him and they will give it to him. He stays because of the baby (who he is determined will have a different life than he did, who he can hear moving inside Scully), because he is always fed and clothed and warm with Mulder and Scully, because he accidentally finds himself liking then. 

2. Mulder and Scully aren’t sure how to react to the baby at first–they’re too terrified that everything will go wrong, that they’ll lose someone else. But the pregnancy goes well, few complications, the baby healthy.

Mulder is overjoyed the first time the baby kicks, and Scully almost cried. Mulder talks to her stomach, tells the baby stories and sings to it in his scratchy voice, tries to goad Scully into singing. They decorate the baby’s room together, and Jackson offers to help. They discuss names, future schools (although Scully calls that a little premature), what they think the baby will be like. They’re excited in a way they haven’t allowed themselves to be in years. 

3. The baby is born with few complications. It’s a girl.

Scully insists that Mulder goes with the baby, to protect her, her eyes full of worry, and he follows the nurses the entire time, cuts the cord, gives the baby skin-to-skin at the nurse’s direction. Scully cries the first time she holds the baby, when she comes to hours later. Jackson shows up later, sheepish and apologetic and murmuring things to the baby in his mind.

They name her Lily, if only because it’s a name Jackson suggested. (When they asked why, he shrugged and said, “I just like that name.” And so that is the name they pick.)

4. Lily, in Mulder-Scully family tradition, is insanely smart. She’s constantly at a reading level a couple of grades higher throughout elementary school, asks her mother questions about everything and begs to go into work with her. She’s brave, too, stupidly so, in that she doesn’t panic when she wanders away into the forest and is lost for hours, but also in that she talks Jackson into letting her watch The Exorcist at seven and loves it. She rarely gets scared to sleep alone past the age of four, but sometimes she’ll come and climb in bed with Mulder and Scully if she sensed they’re scared or sad. She’s fiercely independent, hates it when her parents get overprotective, but she’s also fiercely empathetic. She listens to stories of her aunts and grandparents and sister she’ll never meet with understanding reflected in her eyes. She plays with Daggoo throughout the stages of middle age. She and her mother bond over dogs, coercing Mulder into getting one or two more in the eighteen years she lives at home. She has wild, dark hair that everyone except Mulder dreads brushing. She looks like Maggie, like Samantha, like Emily and Jackson. She climbs into her father’s lap and begs for stories as a child. She talks nonstop, her bright blue eyes flashing excitedly, making up wild stories that put a 32-year-old Mulder to shame. She loves her brother in a hero-worship type of way. Every time he comes home to visit between the ages of three and nine, Lily goes running up the driveway to meet them.

5. Jackson stays close with them for the rest of his life. As he matures, it gets easier to talk about the hard stuff, everything that happened to the three of them. He doesn’t forget his first parents or the life he spent with them, but he’s willing to build a new future with the parents he never knew. He comes home for Thanksgiving and Christmas and a couple weeks in summer, he drives around the country with Lily and his parents whenever they go on a road trip, he teaches Lily the ends and outs of the inexplicable powers they share. And the four of them, they are a family.

Chapter Text

1. Mulder kisses her in that hallway in Allentown Pennsylvania. They never talk about it, but they both think about it for hours after. 

2. Scully is the one to make the next move. They’re in a town on a dead-end case that they don’t solve, and it’s entirely too late to go back home, so they set up shop in the hotel bar. It tastes too much like Philadelphia, like Ed Jerse and a fresh wound at the small of her back, and Mulder keeps looking at her with sad eyes, and she can’t stand it.

She kisses him in the cracked leather booth, her hands on his face and her mouth branding him like her own version of a tattoo. He gasps a little and lifts her until she is sitting on his lap, the hard wooden table bearing into her back. 

3. They start to spend more time together, in the ways they never had before: a movie night at home, or dinner together. He is sweet, overly eager, treads delicately around the subject of her impending death. He surprises her with a Snowball and a sparkler on her birthday. He’s always kissing her when people aren’t looking, pressed up against the walls of their office. He makes her laugh like she isn’t dying.

4. He says that he loves her the third or fourth time, his face buried hotly in her neck. She thinks she could say it back, that she feels the same way, but she doesn’t want to. Doesn’t want to leave him with this burden when she dies. Hot tears well in her eyes. She wraps his arms around his neck and says nothing. 

She holds him on the floor of his summer home, later at his house while he cries quietly into his pillows. He apologizes again and again in a voice filled with self-hatred that she knows comes from almost shooting her.

On the night before he fakes his death, he says, “I can’t lose you,” in a rough voice, and this is what breaks her.

She hisses, “And I don’t want to leave,” in a fierce voice, and she can feel the tears falling. Nothing to hold back now.

Mulder looks horribly regretful and apologetic; he cups her cheek with a warm hand, whispers, “Oh, Scully,” and nothing else. There’s nothing else to say. 

5. She finds out that she is going to live a few day later, and the relief is absolutely unspeakable.

After her family, the assorted cast of visitors, leave, Mulder returns, his eyes sly and shy and happy and teasing all at once. “I missed you,” he says, crawling into bed beside her at her permission.

“Oh, yeah?” she says casually, and wants to laugh at the absurdity of it. She is alive, her heart is beating, and she is not going to die any time soon. “Well, you’ll never have to miss me again.”

He buries his head in her shoulder and she rests her cheek against the top. Whispers, “I love you,” in a voice so soft she thinks maybe he doesn’t hear.

The scrape of his lips over her throat, under her jaw, across her cheek tells her that he did.

Chapter Text

1. She gives up on the sweater. She instead pulls the STONEHENGE ROCKS!!! t-shirt that Mulder brought her off of his dresser and slips it on.

2. She tidies up his room first, just a little, to keep up images. Puts the dirty clothes in the hamper she bought for him a few months ago (the sticky note she put on it said Happy Valentine’s Day), picks up the lamp from where they knocked it over, straightens the comforter over top of him.

3. She climbs into bed slowly, like she really thinks she might change her mind. Mulder is sleeping sweetly, one leg thrown out haphazardly, his hands folded on top of his chest, and this is what does her in. 

4. She wraps herself around him, her bare legs against his, her chin against his shoulder. 

5. He wakes slowly, extracts an arm out from her embrace to play lazily with her hair. “Hey,” he says. “Where did you go?”

“Nowhere,” she says, grinning. “I’m right here.”

Chapter Text

1. They don’t make it far. Scully can barely hold him up, and he’s mostly unconscious, mumbling things about Diana and Samantha and thinking she was dead. Maybe they never had a chance in the first place. They’re found by Diana, a cool look in her eyes and a gun in her hands. 

2. Scully is determined not to break. “I’d assumed you disappeared,” she says in a voice that is entirely more calm than she feels. Her arm around Mulder’s ribcage is barely keeping him up. 

Diana swallows evenly before coming forward and helping to support Mulder’s other side; Scully wants to stop her, but she hardly can from the relief in her sore muscles as a result of sharing the weight. “They want you dead, too,” Diana says evenly. “Both of you. You weren’t supposed to find him. They’ll kill us all if you take him home." 

"And where I am supposed to take him?” Scully snaps. “He needs a hospital, or he might die." 

Mulder mumbles something about her being a traitor, and Diana looks uncomfortable. "He’ll definitely die if you stay,” she says. They’re moving faster now, balancing Mulder between them. “I know you don’t trust me,” Diana adds. “But you don’t have much of a choice. They’ll bury you both; they’ve had enough." 

Scully doesn’t want to trust her. But Diana is right, she doesn’t have a choice. They took Mulder before, and she won’t risk them taking him again. She takes Mulder out to Diana’s car. 

3. She sits with Mulder in the backseat, tending to his wounds using an admittedly well put-together First Aid kit that Diana had in the glove compartment. He’s unconscious again, thankfully, sleeping sprawled across the seat with the center seatbelt wrapped around him in case they crash. Diana drives silently and carefully, silent in the front seat. Scully still doesn’t trust her. She feels the lump of her gun underneath her shirt; Diana hadn’t taken it away, but she still feels halfway like a prisoner.

Diana drives for hours and hours, until Scully can’t keep her eyes open anymore. She pulls Mulder’s head in her lap in an attempt to soften any blows that might come to his wounds, and then she shuts her eyes. She sleeps restlessly, jolting awake every time the car hits a bump. Diana just drives and drives. The fifth time she wakes up, it’s because Diana is shaking her awake. "We’re stopping at a hotel,” she whispers. “We need to get Fox inside.”

“Where are we?” Scully whispers, extracting herself gently out from under Mulder and helping Diana lift him out of the car. He groans, limp as a rag doll, but he doesn’t wake up. 

“Maine,” says Diana grimly. “We’ll cross the border tomorrow.”

The hotel room is shitty, inconspicuous, but it has two beds. They deposit Mulder on one of them, and Scully busies herself with checking his vitals, changing his bandages. She has no way to guage his brain activity without running some kind of test, but it looks like the wounds themselves are healing fine. Behind her, she hears Diana pushing the desk against the door. 

She doesn’t look at Diana right away, so it’s a surprise when she hears the other woman saying, “He’s in love with you.” Scully bites down on her lower lip hard and doesn’t answer. She’s figured it out, more or less, but it’s still a surprise to hear it out loud. 

“I care about him, too,” Diana adds. “Like you do. And he cares about you. So I had to get you both to safety, if I could.” Her voice is grim, like she’s not enjoying her decision to bring Scully along. 

“You care about yourself,” Scully says, maybe too harshly. (Since she did save their life, supposedly. She feels the weight of her gun and she holds onto it.)

“I do,” Diana says admittedly. “That’s why I came with you." 

Scully strokes Mulder’s forehead and is relieved to find that his fever is abating. She sighs with relief, forgetting herself for a moment and brushing her lips over his temple. 

The sound of a refrigerator opening behind her. Want a drink?” Diana asks, and she finds that she does. 

4. Mulder wakes up hours or days later to the shock of his life: Diana and Scully sitting together on a hotel bedspread. Scully’s hair is dark and Diana’s is light, cut to above her shoulders. They’re both drinking out of a bottle of hotel champagne, Scully’s glass half full and Diana’s all the way. “What the hell?” he says, and winces at the pain that shoots through his head. He’d thought them both dead, at one point or another. He thinks he might’ve married Diana, but that makes no sense. 

Scully turns, and she looks like a weight has been lifted off her shoulders. “Mulder, oh my god,” she says, rushing to his side. The glass lands on the hotel carpet, champagne soaking into the carpet. She sits on the bed beside him, her fingers in his hair. 

“Hi, Fox,” Diana says neutrally. He can’t read the look on her face. She stays sitting on the bed. 

“How do you feel?” Scully whispers, her hand on the side of his face. 

He blinks blearily; he feels like he’s been asleep forever. “What the hell is going on here?” he asks. 

Diana smiles then, a wolf’s smile. The way she used to smile at him years ago. “We’re escaping.”

5. They leave a couple of days later, when Mulder can easily walk on his own. Scully insists on driving, her eyes flashing, and Diana agrees, climbing into the back seat alone. “I have contacts who can get us over the border,” she says coolly. “More contacts in Europe who can help us disappear. Whatever happens next is up to you.”

(Someone had shown up at their door last night, a nondescript man with a gun. Mulder and Scully had been asleep. Diana had shot him before he could get over the threshold. She’d taken the body away in the car while Mulder and Scully stood in stunned silence, and there were no bloodstains in the car when she returned. That, if anything, convinced them that the threat is real.)

Mulder turns in his seat to face her, genuinely confused. His memories of Diana are mixed with betrayal and suburban bliss, the children they didn’t have. “Why are you doing this, Di?” he asks, more familiar than he should, but Scully doesn’t say a word about it. “After everything… what do you get out of making us disappear?”

Scully says nothing, but he can tell she’s thinking the same thing. 

“Honestly, Fox?” Diana’s staring out the window, jaw clenched. “I don’t know why. I really don’t.”

They drive in silence for a moment. Mulder looks at Scully and Scully looks at Mulder, and they can tell that neither of them know why they are doing this, either. 

“I know where to find your sister,” Diana says suddenly, surprising them both. When Mulder looks back at her, she looks genuinely, genuinely sorry. For everything. “I know how to find the answers you want. Both of you. I can find it all.”

Mulder looks at Scully again, a question in his eyes. Scully looks at the road. “All right,” she says. 

They drive, the three of them, towards an uncertain future.

Chapter Text

1. They’re taking a break. Not a break-up—Scully is very clear about that—but a break. They’d had a fight, a bad one, a couple of weeks ago, and Scully had called from her shift at the hospital the next day and told him in a quiet voice that she was going to stay at her mother’s for a little while. Just a couple weeks, that was all. Mulder had been hurt, incredibly so, but he’d told himself that it’d be okay, it was just for a little while, she’d come back and he’d apologize again and again. But then he gets the call from the hospital.

He finds Scully unconscious, pale with a spot of blood at the corner of his mouth. He takes her hand and it is cold in his. Her doctor tells him that she’s had a seizure, shows him the monitor of her brain. It’s almost like a one-sided communication, but Mulder has no idea who it could possibly be. He excuses himself to go and sit with her, knotting her fingers with his.

When she wakes up, she is panicked, fumbling up with one hand to cup his cheek. She tells him he has to go and find the Smoking Man, who he thought for sure was dead. She tells him that she has seen how it begins, the apocalypse in 2012, but it’s nothing like the way they expected; it’s a plague. She tells him that he is dying, her voice breaking, and that she can’t save him without stem cells from their son.

Mulder isn’t sure that he believes it, any of it (as much as he wants to), until he hears that. Their son, who will be nine next year. Their son, who continues to haunt him every goddamn day. “William?” he whispers in horror, and she nods.

“We need to find him,” she whispers.

2. They’re reinstated at the FBI. Scully isn’t sure how the hell it happens, but it does. Skinner sticks his neck out for them, and somehow, it works. It’s a little strange being back, after all these years, but they get used to it, fall into the rhythm of working at the FBI. Mulder manages to hack into the system and cleanse his records of his trial and conviction, to Scully’s surprise. They for anything that sounds like it’d be related to William, any strange cases involving an eight-year-old boy. Mulder contacts all his old conspirator friends to ask if they’ve heard anything. Scully notes every detail of the visions she’s having, the brief glimpses of a small boy clutching his head in pain.

Something comes up, eventually, months later: reports of a kid being committed to a hospital after an accident with an exploding sliding glass door at a birthday party, with witnesses claiming the boy had done it just by looking at it. The kid’s name is Jackson Van de Kamp, and he’s eight years old. The right age, the right last name given to them by Jeffrey Spender. To top it all off, Scully has had a dream the night before they get the call: of a dark, unfamiliar house, an unfamiliar presence in the room, and glass all over the floor.

It seems like more than enough to convince them, and the two of them call the Van de Kamps to arrange a meeting. They drive to Norfolk, Virginia together, anxious anticipation building in the both of their stomaches. “I feel like I’m about to fall off a cliff,” Scully confesses as they pull into town.

But when they reach the Van de Kamps’ house, no one answers the door, despite the car still in the driveway. Eventually, Scully starts to get spooked, and they both kick down the door, figuring they can explain it as cautious if everyone is all right. But they find the adult Van de Kamps dead in the living room, blood splattered across the rug, and Scully’s stomach drops out from under her. She races upstairs as fast as she can, despite Mulder’s pleas for her to wait, terrified that she’s too late the way she’s always been too late.

The relief that washes over her when she hears the wimpering from the closet in the bedroom that has to belong to Jackson is tremendous. She whips open the closet door and finds a dark-haired boy curled into a protective ball, unharmed, bandaged cuts up his arms and legs, crying into his knees. “Jackson?” she whispers softly.

The boy looks up at her, and Scully knows immediately that he’s their son, he has to be their son. His eyes are the same deep brown as Mulder’s. He stares at her in fear for a moment before something like recognition flashes across his eyes, and Scully wants to cry. “Are you…” he whispers in a soft voice. “Are you the lady who I see in my dreams?”

Scully kneels down to meet his level, reaches out gently to touch his shoulder. This boy is familiar, familiar in a way that has no other explanation. “I think so,” she murmurs.

The boy–Jackson–sniffles, wiping his nose with the back of his hand. She can hear pounding footsteps, and then the breathless gasp of Mulder from the doorway. “A-are you gonna protect me?” he asks. “They killed my mom and dad, but I don’t wanna die.”

Scully feels tears welling in her eyes; she rubs a hand up and down Jackson’s skinny shoulder. “Of course, sweetie,” she says. “Of course we’re gonna protect you.”

3. Scully calls the murders in after they’ve coaxed Jackson (“Jack,” he says in a small voice, and they both nod) out of the closet. Mulder wraps Jack in his coat and carries him downstairs even though he’s a little too big for that at a lanky eight, covers his eyes with his hand so he doesn’t have to see the only parents he’s ever known dead. They clear things with the police and they take Jack to the hospital to check him out. Scully runs his DNA against theirs while Mulder sits beside him, trying to comfort him with funny stories that don’t make Jack laugh, but do make him seem to relax some. They make sure he’s fine and make sure he’s theirs before they take him to a hotel. Jack trusts them in a way that is both a scared child and an unexplainable knowledge of who Scully is; he clings to them both the whole time. They tuck him into bed in a hotel and encourage him to get some sleep, leaving the TV on all night.

In the morning, the state is there, and they take Jack away despite his protests that he wants to stay with them. (Scully is surprised by his vehemence, despite only knowing them for a few hours, but the connection between them is undeniable. He told her over breakfast that he’s been seeing her all his life, that he thinks she’s kind of cool. “Like Princess Leia or something,” he said.) Apparently, the Van de Kamps had no immediate relatives, so Jackson Van de Kamp is given over to foster care.

Mulder and Scully protest as best they can, bring up their DNA results, but of course there are the questions of how they managed to find him in conjunction with the Van de Kamps’ murder, why their biological son wasn’t living with them in the first place and why they suddenly want him back. They exchange a silent look before Mulder protests that his son was given up for adoption without his consent. This baffles the court agents enough to reconsider their case, and Scully thanks the Lord that they somehow managed to get Mulder’s conviction off his record. But it’s a long process, with nothing guaranteed, and the best they can do for the time being is visitation rights. Mulder and Scully grasp onto it with everything they have.

They are given monthly supervised visits, which turns to biweekly, which turns to weekly and unsupervised. It helps that Jack slowly grows attached to them in a form outside of scared child. He still misses his parents, still talks about them constantly and calls them “Dana” and “Mulder,” but otherwise, he seems to genuinely like them. Mulder has the ability to make him burst into snickers and bonds with him over baseball and Bigfoot stories. Scully bonds with him over his straight A report cards of the past, his interest in science and space and even history. He shows an interest in Malcolm X, so she buys him a biography apt to his reading level, and he hugs her in delight when she shows it to him and Scully almost cries. The custody battle rages on even as they leap through every single hoop, and she is constantly terrified that they won’t get custody, but this seems to be enough. To be hugged by her son, who she once thought she’d never see again. She loves watching Jack and Mulder together, loves to see him have the opportunity to be the father he almost didn’t get to be.

4. A morning nearly nine months after the Van de Kamps died, Scully finds herself nauseous, leaning over the toilet and retching. Crouched on the bathroom floor, she calculates back and realizes that she’s missed a couple of periods. With everything that’s been going on, she hadn’t even realized.

In a sudden panic, she digs into the closet and finds the box of pregnancy tests she bought the last time she had a scare. They haven’t expired yet, and she immediately takes three, lying them out on the bathroom counter. They all three are positive.

Scully collapses on the closed toilet seat, a combination of fear and eagerness washing over her. She can’t help but be happy about this, just a little, in a way she hasn’t been able to be since losing William, but at the same time, she has no idea what this’ll mean for them, their custody battle or the upcoming apocalypse. She doesn’t know how to tell Mulder.

Her phone rings, suddenly, an unfamiliar number. She answers to find Monica Reyes on the other end. Her instinct is not to trust her, but her instincts are weakened when Monica swears that she is on their side, she did it to protect them, protect the world, that she can help them find their son.

Any accusatory words she’d wanted to say freeze in her mouth, caught somewhere behind her teeth. “We already found him,” she whispers–likely a bad idea, but she has to know, she has to know if her baby is in danger. “What… what do you mean by…”

“You don’t know,” says Monica, and her voice is deeply apologetic.

From somewhere downstairs, she hears Mulder call her name nervously, his voice full of a fear that tells her he has just found out, and she wants to throw up.

“Tell me what I have to do,” she snaps.

5. They find Jack in a sprawling estate in Spartanburg, South Carolina. They hear him before they see him: they’ve taken out the guards, overpowered them or simply cold cocked them, but they haven’t found Jack or the smoker when they hear Jack’s voice, tiny but furious. “You KILLED my PARENTS,” he says in a sharp roar. And then they hear the sound of sliding, stumbling footsteps as the old nicotine-stenched man goes sliding down the hall. As he regains his footing, he gives the hall a sharp look, and Scully hears a yelp, like the sound following a sting.

“Leave him alone!” Mulder shouts.

The smoker turns, and they don’t realize he’s got a gun on them until it’s too late. “Fox. Dana,” he says pleasantly. “I thought I’d have a while longer before you’d show up.”

Mulder is breathing with a fury that Scully can feel in the air; he steps in front of her, the butt of the gun he’s hidden under his sweater poking into her ribs. “What the fuck did you do to my son,” he growls.

“Nothing more than some telepathic discipline. The boy has to know his place. Drop the guns, please.”

They drop their guns, Scully sliding her hand under his sweater to close her hand over the butt of the gun. The smoker cocks his own. “I’m sorry to do this to you, Fox,” he says. “It’s never something I thought would be necessary. But I’m afraid the boy is just too impor–”

Scully yanks the gun out and shoots the smoker before he can go any further. There is something cathartic in pulling the trigger, in watching him fall and thinking, You hurt my husband and my son, you fucking bastard. Mulder gasps a little in relief as the smoker hits the floor.

Scully doesn’t think. She just calls, “Jack?” and is beyond relieved to hear him call back, “Dana?”

They push past the smoker’s corpse and into the hallway, following it until they find their son, too small in an oversized sweatshirt and fear in his eyes. “Oh, honey,” Scully says softy. “Are you okay?”

“You came for me?” he asks smally.

Mulder speaks this time, his voice husky with emotion. “Of course, buddy,” he says. “Of course we did.”

Jack runs to them then, his eyes wet and his feet pounding the linoleum, and throws his arms around them both. They hug him back, tears dripping from Scully’s eyes. She presses her lips to her son’s tousled hair and whispers, “It’s okay, it’s over now. We’ve got you, it’s okay.”

“We love you, buddy,” Mulder says in that same husky voice, and Scully wants to cry harder, thinking of the fact that they have their son back, that Mulder is going to be a father to his son, and that they are going to have another baby to take care of. They’re going to have a baby.

She honestly doesn’t know if they’ve saved the world by killing the smoker. But they’ve saved their son. That feels like enough.

Chapter Text

there’s a bookstore that scully likes to get coffee at which starts featuring the lone gunmen magazine. mulder ends up going there with the gunmen to see the magazines several times and keeps running into scully, who finds it very hard not to comment on their conversations about monsters and aliens and conspiracies when they’re sitting one table over

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they’re on a task force for a major case, a series of serial abductions. the task force is so enormous that they’ve never gotten the chance to talk, but they made eye contact before heading into the massive warehouse where they suspected the victims were being held. inside, mulder was almost immediately shot, the bullet hitting him between the ribs. dana, feeling years of residency and medical training snap into place, abandoned the the chase to attend to mulder. their first conversation took place with her trying to stifle the flow of blood, reassuring him that he’d be okay.

afterwards, she keeps coming back to the hospital to check on him. he asks for updates on the case. she prods him for information on the unit he apparently heads, on his absurd theories that the kids were abducted by aliens. they end up talking for hours almost every day.

Chapter Text

set directly after fight the future, before the clusterfuck that is the beginning happens. in the aftermath of antarctica and the bee, mulder is nervous to approach the subject, halfway because he is afraid that scully isn’t interested (she didn’t actually say she was, even if the bee was the reason she pulled away, and he can’t bear the idea of losing her, her friendship, completely because he carried it to the next level), and halfway because he’s afraid to carry the whole thing further. (if they would use her against him once, they would do it again. and he can risk a lot of things, but he can never risk her, and it just seems like taking things to the next level would guarantee the risk.) scully is privately confused and hurt, wondering why mulder hasn’t brought up the scenario in the hall, wondering whether or not it was all a tactic to keep her from leaving, or if he really meant all those things he said. neither will say a word about it to the other.

there’s a kidnapping case, and since mulder and scully’s status on the x files is still in question, kersh recommends them for the task force. but the case is more complicated than anticipated, the perpetrators much bigger than they believed (maybe the mob, maybe something more powerful), and they’re given a false tip, they’re blindsided in an abandoned building miles from dc. the victim is rescued and taken into protective custody, but mulder and scully don’t make it out. they’re taken as leverage, in an attempt to make a trade with the fbi.

the criminals put them in a small basement room, with nothing to pick the lock and nothing to fight their way out. it’s a shitty situation, mulder tells her, but at least they’re together. and they’ll get out eventually; they always do.

ofcourse, all that time alone in the room, worried and planning and leaning on each other for support, there’s plenty of time to accidentally fall into discussion about what happened in that hallway. there’s entirely too much to say.

Chapter Text

mulder’s semi-babysitting for his sister, who is headed on a business trip to denver. he’s taking a break from the vcu after a particularly difficult case that lasted months, and anyway, his niece has always been able to make her smile. he likes to support them when he can, and so, babysitting. three days into the stay, his niece has a dance recital, one that he nearly forgets about. he’s rushing and frantic and not wanting to let her or samantha down (after their somewhat painful childhood, he doesn’t like to let her down), and he’s a few minutes late when he notices a floral shop next door to the studio.

dana’s been staying with melissa after her decision to leave med school for the fbi, absently looking for apartments and avoiding her parents’ disapproval and the ex she’d rather not see. melissa’s moonlighting as a florist, since her girlfriend owns the floral shop they happen to live above. (she thinks it’s a little silly, but not totally unexpected for missy.) she’s trying to fill time before her courses at quantico start, working on an article she’s been researching at the back of the shop, when melissa ducks out for lunch, asking her to watch the door. not five minutes later, a frantic man enters who seems as clueless about flowers as she is.

dana points mulder towards the roses, a little helplessly, and he thanks her a thousand times. his niece loves them. she wants to see the store afterwards, and mulder is honestly looking for an excuse to thank her again, and so they go back to the store after the recital.

he and dana talk for so long, standing almost behind a shelf of daises (since missy and her girlfriend have returned), that his niece has to remind him about dinner.

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it happens in vegas, of course, and it happens because of langly and melissa. mulder’s on a trip with the gunmen, following up on some tip they’d gotten, and melissa and dana are on a vacation together. it’s directly following mulder’s breakup with diana, and he’s been moping around the hotel room the entire time; dana is in the midst of stressing over a big test for medical school, and has refused to leave the hotel room so that she can study to the point of driving melissa crazy. they’re all staying in the same hotel.

it turns out that langly and melissa knew each other in college, through a friend of a friend, and she ends up having a drink with the gunmen at the hotel bar. the conversation turns to mulder and dana, eventually, and they decide to set the two of them up (frohike and langly say to cheer mulder up, melissa says to distract dana).

somehow they convince the two of them to meet, although they’re both a little less than happy. despite that, there’s the slightest spark between the two of them, but dana’s stress and mulder’s grief eventually transforms into drinking. a lot of drinking.

they wake up the next morning with a crumpled wedding license between the two of them.

the fact of their apparent marriage baffles the both of them. aside from the fact that they barely know each other, mulder can’t understand why he’d marry anyone else barely a month after his fiance left him, and scully can’t believe that she’d do anything so reckless and senseless. she’s embarrassed out of her mind. she can’t imagine what her mother will think.

despite the shitty situation, they’re both very understanding about the whole situation. they agree to have an annulment and forget the whole thing. luckily, they live nearby, which makes the process easier. they meet often with a judge to discuss the proceedings, trying to make the process efficient.

but the spark that they felt before they got drunk that first night never quite goes away. they fall into conversation at the end of most meetings, standing in the hallway of the courthouse for much longer than seems reasonable, talking and talking. they’re both very intrigued by the other’s job; mulder asks about the medical cases she comes across, pressing to see if she’s ever encountered anything unusual, and dana openly expresses her opinions on the unusual cases that mulder solves–always skeptical, sometimes dismissive, but always, always interested. they discover, accidentally, that they have quite a bit in common. they make each other laugh so hard that the other people in the courthouse begin to stare. they’re surprised at how much they hit it off, how much they like this unexpected spouse of theirs.

the day the annulment is finalized, mulder asks dana to dinner. “c'mon, let me treat you,” he says. “it’s the least i can do for my ex-wife.”

(and of course, she accepts.)

Chapter Text

jackson van de kamp had heard about the UFOs in the nevada desert. the people who appear, wandering around in the desert in strange clothes, ranting about another time. he believes the stories, wholeheartedly. but he hasn’t gone to find his birth parents. he’s gone to save his real parents: to go back, somehow, and warn them before they die. that’s why he wanted to go back.

he didn’t expect to run into a man, a stranger who seems to know him very well, and apparently is hell bent on revenge for the death of his brother, a henchman sent after jackson the year before. he didn’t expect the UFO to take them both. he didn’t expect the man to almost kill him. and he didn’t expect to be rescued by his birth parents, left behind in virginia–he has no idea what they’re doing here. or why they look so young. or why dana isn’t pregnant anymore, or why neither of them recognize him.

jackson van de kamp had wanted to go back in time–to save his parents, he’d thought just before the light blinded him and the man grabbed him by the wrist. but he hadn’t meant this. hadn’t meant mulder and dana. hadn’t meant to go back to fall of 2000 and end up right where they were. he’s bleeding from a cut on his arm (courtesy of the vengeful brother) while dana tries to doctor him, and denying that he’s a time traveler (mulder’s theory), and arguing with them incessantly, all the while wondering how the hell he could’ve ended up here. why his hope to save his parents landed him in this year, this time. fall of 2000.

Chapter Text

dana is is several years out of med school, a neurosurgeon with a growing reputation who travels frequently for conferences. mulder still heads the x-files, working them alone after diana leaves for europe. he travels even more, and is stunned by the regularity of his run-ins with the redhead who spends the plane rides doing research and typing furiously, muttering about medical things that he won’t pretend to understand.

she notices him, too, to the point where she begins saying hello when they end up in the airport together or meet on a connecting flight. it takes four more brief conversations for him to ask her name, and he calls her dr. scully instead of dana in a teasing tone the next time he sees her. she calls him agent mulder, and then just mulder, in a slightly exasperated tone when he leaves his seat to ask her questions about what she’s working on, or her opinion on some ridiculous creature he’s apparently chasing. (she doesn’t think his job is real.)

they’re seated adjacent at one point, and mulder keeps leaning over the seat to talk to her to the point where the man sitting beside scully offers to switch seats. the next flight, they actually are seated beside each other, and they talk the entire time. scully doesn’t open her laptop even once. (she grabs for his hand during turbulence and neither of them bring it up after.)

despite this connection, scully always refuses to give mulder her number. she just got out of a serious relationship, she tells him, and she wants to focus on work, and she doesn’t have time… we could be friends, mulder tells her with a sly grin, and she says, how could that happen when we’re both out of town all the time? they never discuss the fact that they live within 30 minutes of each other. they never meet outside of endless, endless flights.

and then they meet again in an airport in tulsa. she’s arriving, he’s leaving, and she knows as soon as she sees him, slumped in a chair with a hand to his side that something is off. he doesn’t notice her until she’s right on top of him, and even then, his smile is muted, his face is pale. i’m okay, doc, he says, and when she gives him a look, he clarifies: got stabbed. doctor cleared me to come home, but i think i ripped some stitches. i’m okay.

mulder, she says immediately, and her voice sounds like the chiding he’s heard on every plane ride. but when she sits down beside him, he can see the worry in her eyes. you need to get this checked out.

don’t you have a conference to get to? he asks. but she doesn’t. and she doesn’t go. she checks his stitches in the bathroom, and then she drives him to the hospital, and she doesn’t go to the conference.

(in the emergency room, she hands him a folded up paper with seven numbers scrawled on it. for emergencies, she clarifies when he gives her a look. she sits beside him in the plastic chairs and holds his hand.)

Chapter Text

new york city in the 1850s. dana scully is an immigrant from ireland, raising her daughter, emily, alone in the wake of her husband’s death on the journey over. she has a job in a factory that takes up most of her time, but she serves as something of a makeshift doctor for the people in her building, having picked up some skills from her deceased husband, who was also a doctor. she lives in the same overcrowded apartment building as fox mulder, a school teacher. they exchange words every now and then in the hallway, during their comings and goings. mulder makes friends with emily, as he has with most of the children in the building. he eventually offers to begin tutoring emily in his spare time, which dana instantly agrees to–she can’t afford a higher up school, and finding schools that will take on a young girl, much less an irish catholic girl, is very difficult.

emily adores mr. mulder and his lessons, and tells her mother so after almost every one. dana gets off of her shifts late and comes by mulder’s small apartment to retrieve emily, often staying to talk to him longer than is probably appropriate.

one night nearly a year after emily begins her lessons, there is a brawl in a nearby bar where one of dana’s neighbors is injured. she comes at the request of his wife, a friend of hers, to patch up his wounds, but the men he was arguing with return to finish the job. in the struggle, dana moves to protect her friend and the children. they’re able to escape without harm, but the ringleader of the gang is badly injured by way of a kitchen knife in dana’s hand. her blood runs cold when she hears one of the men identify him as a police officer, when she hears them swear they’ll be back. she flees as fast as she can.

in desperation, she wakes emily and takes her to mulder’s apartment, hoping wildly she can ask for his help in finding somewhere to hide her. she hates to leave her daughter, but she doesn’t know what else to do; if she doesn’t fall prey to violence and revenge, she could be arrested. if the man dies, they could claim murder. and she doesn’t want her daughter to fall prey to this. she can’t risk it.

mulder immediately agrees to help, but refuses to leave dana behind. he finds he can’t. he’s as much in love with his whip-smart, quietly beautiful neighbor as he is with her daughter. “i will not leave you here to suffer the consequences of something that was not your fault,” he says. “i’ll take you away from here, the both of you. i’ll find you somewhere safe.”

dana, exhausted and fearful, agrees. she trusts mulder, her daughter’s tutor and the man she realizes has gradually become her friend. he says he has somewhere they can go, far away from the city, and they can decide what to do from there.

they leave the apartment building that night, mulder carrying a sleepy emily, wrapped in his overcoat, and scully clutching a bag of things, her hair covered and her head down. they go to a friend’s for the night. they’ll be on the train the next morning.

it isn’t until they’re settled, emily tucked into bed, that mulder suggests perhaps they should be married. just for the journey, he says. just a formality. they both know it’s incredibly improper for two single people to travel together, and a marriage would allow them to stay in close quarters, for protection if nothing else. he can find a preacher to do the job quick. dana says yes because she knows he is right. there will be too many questions if they aren’t married.

(she’s shocked at how easy it is to say yes. before, in ireland, the match had been made by her parents, and the choice had not been hers. she had dreaded it horribly. but this is different, she already knows it. and she would be much more willing to wear mr. fox mulder’s ring than the ring of any other man.)

they find a preacher who won’t ask questions before the morning train, leaving emily asleep with mulder’s friend. just before the ceremony, mulder takes her hand and whispers, i promise you i will be a gentleman, ms. scully. this marriage is for the safety of you and your daughter. it doesn’t have to mean a thing.

but of course, it does.

Chapter Text

they decide to send her undercover when she’s 29 years old. send her into a nest of criminals, responsible for a string of robberies up and down the east coast. they recruit people young, often right out of college, and everyone they have caught have connections to this group. they are unsure what the money is connected to. hence sending dana scully in.

they send her with a false identity, instructing her to show interest. they set up her first robbery so that she can prove her worth. she’s met by a grizzled man who stinks of cigarettes, who gives her a wolf smile and looks as if he sees right through her. but he doesn’t say a word. she thinks she is in the clear until she is told that her activity for the first two months will be monitored by another member of the organization, someone who “knows what he is doing.” “we have to make sure we can trust you,” the man says with that same wolf smile.

scully is angry enough at this prospect, but her anger only grows when she’s introduced her handler, one fox mulder. as in fox mulder the profiler, who left the bureau four years ago abruptly. scully has read his profiles, and has always sort of admired him and his work, but she’s infuriated to see him here, infuriated to see that he left the bureau for this, and infuriated that she’s going to be watched by him. she doesn’t know how the hell she’s going to be able to get intel and report back without getting caught. one of the first things she tells him is that she doesn’t need a babysitter and he doesn’t trust him, stupidly; she’s wincing internally even as she says it. but he replies, coolly, that he doesn’t trust her, either, and that’s that. they’re left with a lengthy, tenacious silence.

they begin to pull off jobs together. it’s the only work she’s allowed to do, as a low level worker. mulder makes the plans, and she helps him pull it off. they stay distant, professional, but they work surprisingly well together. for two FBI agents (former FBI agents, she corrects; he’s a criminal now, and he can’t even know that she is an FBI agent), they make shockingly good thieves. she offers suggestions every now and then to help the jobs go along better, and he actually listens. he loosens up around her enough to crack the occasional joke. they’re not exactly friends, but they find a common companionship. it becomes easier to be around him.

on one job that goes awry, they almost have a run-in with the cops. mulder disappears in the midst of the job, and scully is left to run, ducking into the dark streets. she’s thinking that she’ll definitely be caught, and wondering how the hell she managed to blow the job so fast, when someone takes her by the wrist and yanks her behind a dumpster. it’s mulder. he lets go of her wrist gently and holds his finger to his lips as police cars speed by, the blue and red sirens dancing off of the walls of the alley.

they crouch there until the streets are mostly silent. as they stand, scully whispers, “thank you.” “no problem, partner,” he whispers in return.

they begin to form something of a friendship. a distant one, but it’s still there. they start going for drinks after jobs, lingering after meetings with the higher-ups to talk. she tells him the vaguest details about her life as possible–he still doesn’t even know her real name. he tells her that he lost his father several years ago. he doesn’t talk about the fbi, but he talks about his sister who he’s fallen out of touch with, his fiance who left a couple years ago. it’s hard to talk to him without getting too personal, without forgetting herself, but she finds a way. she keeps finding herself absently liking him, she has to catch herself.

but still, she thinks she has him fooled until she finds him waiting outside her hotel room one night. “mulder, what are you doing here?” she asks.

“i know you’re undercover, trying to bring us down,” he says. before she can vehemently, desperately deny it, he adds, “and i want to help you.”

she lets him in, cautiously, and the whole story comes out. his father lost his job years ago, working with the government, accused of corruption. the man with the cigarettes was a friend to him; he introduced him to this group, which has been operating under the radar for years. (when she finally learns their ultimate goal, she can’t believe it: apparently they’re building up resources in an attempt to take down the government. apparently there’s a number of other corrupt government workers who work for this group.) several years ago, his father tried to back out for reasons mulder didn’t disclose, and they took his younger sister, still in college, to keep his father under their thumb. they don’t know where she is or what’s happened to her. mulder’s father tried to comply, but he had too many questions about where his daughter was. so they killed him.

mulder left the FBI after they refused to send him undercover with this group. claimed that he was too close to this, that they couldn’t base assignments on personal interest. so he joined on his own.

“i need to find my sister,” he tells scully. “but i’m starting to think the only way to do that is to bring them down. they… they need to be stopped, scully. it’s so much worse than a few robberies or minor crimes like that.” he looks down at the bedspread they’re sitting on, awkward and sheepish. “i… i’ll understand if you don’t believe me. and i won’t tell them who you are. but i’m begging you, please… please let me help you. please.”

scully barely even has to think about it. she reaches out to touch his hand. she tells him, “you can help me.”

Chapter Text

a couple days before thanksgiving, 1998, mulder and scully find themselves on a case. a series of missing couples in a hotel chain scattered across america has caught mulder’s attention, particularly the claims of supposed demon worship by the staff of one of the hotels where two couples disappeared abruptly. they go to the hotel where the most recent disappearance took place in order to covertly investigate and find that the hotel is out of rooms, aside from one, which they immediately take.

on the first night there, they find a couple waiting in their room after dark. two perfectly nice people, dressed like tourists, who believe that mulder and scully themselves are tourists. mulder thinks of a lie quickly and tells them that they’re engaged and have come here to spend their first thanksgiving together. the couple believes it.

it becomes clear quickly that the couple themselves are not dangerous, but are brainwashed recruits for an apparent cult that travels around america on a charter bus under the guise of tourism. suspecting that the cult is behind the missing couples, mulder and scully keep up their ruse, and agree to go with the couple on their “bus trip.”

the trip is very vague, giving off the impression of being a normal, cheesy tour that’s just a little bit off. there’s initially no sign of the missing couple (that they can recognize), and the “tour guides” give no hi t as to what’s going on. it’s difficult to investigate with all of the people around, particularly with the couple who recruited them, who haven’t left their side since the hotel. they’re telling them inane details about the tour group, and asking them questions about how they met, what their relationship is like, when they’ll be getting married. mulder weaves a tale so romantic and corny scully can hardly believe it–and incredibly easy, like he’s been thinking about it a lot–so their story continues to hold up. but scully has barely been saying anything. so when they start to ask about the wedding, scully finally speaks. “we just want something simple,” she says. “small. fairly private. we’re not very elaborate people.”

“we’re not,” mulder adds, taking her hand. “if we could, we would get married tomorrow.”

but their words backfire on them. when the bus finally stops (at the same hotel chain where the disappearances have been occurring), the so-called guides tell them that they’re free for the day as long as they return by 9 o'clock to the hotel ballroom. mulder and scully are so distracted by this, trying to figure out what the hell will be happening there, that they absently agree to sightseeing with the recruitment couple. and this is when the wife begins to suggest that they get married today.

they offer up feeble arguments, but the couple won’t budge. after all, they say, the state has no waiting period. they did say that they wanted it to be small. and fox did say that he would marry you tomorrow, well why not today?

their arguments are no good. protesting too much feels like it would blow their cover; they did say they wanted something small. somehow, they end up at the courthouse, signing a marriage license, the couple right at their side, beaming. they could give false names, but they gave the couple their real ones, stupidly. they can’t think of a single way to illegitimatize this marriage without blowing their cover. scully even tries to ask them to keep the ceremony private, because she and mulder want this moment to be their own, but the husband just cheerfully says, “nonsense! you’ll need a witness!”

they find themselves in front of a judge–hand in hand to keep their cover. “a thanksgiving wedding!” the judge says happily. “how nice!”

Chapter Text

scully is a doctor at our lady of sorrows hospital, and mulder is the security guard. frustrated by the unsolved case of his sister’s disappearance when they were children, he’d attempted to join the police force in hopes of finding other missing children. but he failed the test at the academy, lost in and frustrated by his grief. and so here he is, a security guard. he tells himself that he is still protecting people, in a way, but it doesn’t always help his frustration.

the work isn’t all bad, though. he works the night shifts, and finds himself running into scully a lot in the hospital cafeteria, usually on a coffee run. they sit down sometimes to share a cup on break, scully yawning and pretending she isn’t. she’s still getting used to late shifts, she tells him one time. the caffeine helps. they bond over complaining about the horrendous coffee. she’s good company, mulder thinks, and he makes sure to buy her a cup the next time he sees her.

they gradually become friends, the doctor and the security guard. they pass each other in the hall and exchange smiles, continue to share breaks in the cafeteria. sometimes they have breakfast together, both habitually sleepy and yawning. they recommend books to each other and then discuss over shitty scrambled eggs–scully jokes that it’s like the book club she’s never joined. they ask questions about each other’s work; mulder tells her about his failed police exam, and she tells him about how she almost joined the FBI, but backed out last minute, balking under parental disapproval. she tells stories of med school, patients she’s had a good experience with and patients she’s lost. (her voice always gets hushed when she talks about that.) in turn, he tells her the story of his lost sister, how he remembers nothing but her small voice calling his name.

this routine goes on for three years, their little friendship. they keep reading each other’s books, they discuss elements of their personal life. scully’s references to her boyfriend ethan fade away until she finally tells mulder that he’s moved out. they exchange dysfunctional holiday stories and awkward parent encounters. mulder invites her a few times to come play poker with his friends, in their crappy little covert hovel, and she actually takes him up on it. they transition into spending some time together: getting breakfast somewhere besides the crappy cafeteria, or meeting at each other’s places between shifts to watch a movie or have a beer. three years it goes on, until mulder finally gets up the courage to kiss her. and she kisses him back.

three years and four months, and they’re happy together, in what he supposes is s relationship. he brings her flowers to work to drive her crazy, and takes her to breakfast or dinner, and leaves her dorky little notes in her locker. she gives him a key and lets him crash at her place after late nights, because her place is closer, leaves him coffee and candy bars or snack cakes in his dinky little office, writes him notes on the back of his notes to her. it’s three years and four months, and she’s showing up at his apartment in one of his sweaters, her hair out of its standard doctor braid and her face freckly and worried. she’s telling him, i think i’m pregnant.

and it’s soon, but in a way, it’s not soon at all. it’s always been her. always. he kisses her, he tells her it’s a good thing she’s a doctor and the two of them practically live inside the hospital. he wants to be there with her for every moment of what comes next.