Archive of Our Own ^beta

You’ve had a long day.

The world shifted that day in Oregon, and it hasn’t been stationary since.

You’re sick of men breathing down your neck and maybe it’s years of working with Mulder, but you really don’t know who to trust anymore.

-

The search for Mulder fades rather than ends. The weekly updates from the Gunmen become a non-event. The official channels have filed it away in a wasteland of filing cabinets and forgotten pages; a case that’s lost in a papertrail somewhere. And your own denial begins to wear thin around the edges.

Sometime in the past few weeks, without your consent or notice, life went on and swept you along with it. Doggett assumed Mulder’s position, you finally got your desk and you have a second antenatal appointment next week.

You feel like an automated answering service. Hi, you’ve reached Dana Scully, a vacant look and a standard response and a please leave a message after the tone.

Looking at the calendar gives you the strange sensation of missing time. You mark the square one month to the day with an x.

-

After, you analyse.

(That’s what there is now, before and after. And after, after you have these endless hours in the darkness when sleep refuses you and so, you analyse.)

Your hand rests on your flat stomach where cells silently divide inside you. 6 weeks. Somewhere beneath your palm a tiny heart is beating double time and the first rush of blood through a growing circulatory system nourishes a genderless form. And (you can’t help the thought, can’t help hoping it happened the good old fashioned way without visits from cigarette smoking men and alien conspiracies), the heritable affliction of his nose is beginning to develop. In a few weeks it will be your worst kept secret but for now you turn your analysis elsewhere, try to believe the story you told your mother about your as yet unexplained fertility.

For now you think of him, his secrets and intricacies, idiosyncrasies and a passing cliché, whether you ever really knew him at all. It comes as a surprise at first, but upon reflection you wonder why that is. After all, if there were two people in the world who would discover that after so many years they were complete strangers it would be you and Mulder. You deny it of course, but privately you do wonder: you would say you knew him better than anyone, the truth of which couldn’t be disputed, but maybe it’s not saying much.

-

You never admitted anything (and it always felt like an admission of guilt with him). You wonder if he ever knew and how much he took on faith. That was always the thing with Mulder, he wanted to believe, and that was the thing with you, forever the sceptic.

You tested though, and you wonder if he ever just knew without hearing you say it.

-

Of late you are collecting platitudes; mostly they’re all that is offered to you. Clichés like time heals all wounds and everything happens for a reason and when it’s your time, it’s your time. Platitudes and awkward silences, when their bearers catch sight of your growing stomach and consider saying more – more clichés, you think, about bundles of joy or the most rewarding experience of your life.

Congratulations sounds out of place though, so they settle for pitying looks.

-

You want to tell him things. Not big things, although sometimes you wonder what you would have said, if he’d come back from the woods in Oregon. But mostly you just catch yourself making conversation with empty rooms, pretending he can hear, imagining what he would say.

It’s silly.

You make sure no one catches you at it.

-

There are too many ghosts here, of you and him before. They catch you out at little moments; remind you of what you’ve lost. You don’t like it. The unfamiliar is comforting these days.

Two weeks into your second trimester you find a new apartment. More space for the baby, you tell your mother.

-

Doggett’s apartment has wooden floors. He wets the bottom of your glass with scotch and watches as you bury your nose in it. The scent reminds you of your father. You coat your lips in it and lick it off slowly, so slowly that most of the ethanol evaporates into the atmosphere before it reaches your tongue. You’re beginning to feel that that’s what happened to Mulder: he floated away, dispersed into atomic dust. In some ways it is fitting: you can’t imagine him growing old.

Mulder was never about subtleties in many ways, and all about nuances in others.

It takes you an hour to get through a bare fraction of an inch.

You like it that he lets you be, staring out his window into the blackness of the DC night. He doesn’t hover.

-

You never wanted to be one of those tragedies: it was like a light went outside her and she was never the same again. You know you won’t be; you feel like you’ll always have another piece of glass to pick out of your insides. But no one will ever know, because you’re getting good at grief.

-

You let yourself drown, just a little. It’s a struggle to swim, so you give up momentarily. Not enough to really sink, that’s not in your nature, but for the Labor Day long weekend, you give your mother the baby and spend the whole of Saturday resenting the itch of your new sheets and the light in your new apartment. Above the hum of air-conditioning, there is nothing. The silence is the loudest sound you’ve ever heard.

Two am on Sunday morning you let yourself into his apartment; the musty smell of an unused space greets you but there are hints still, of the old scents. Dust hangs in the air. The goldfish are dead. It is less quiet here and you welcome the intrusion of the outside world, it keeps you grounded, as though you too might disappear suddenly and never come back without the cars in the street or the neighbour’s dog scurrying loudly next door.

You sit in the middle of the floor in the dark, the blinds creating slits of white light from the streetlight outside. After a while you reach for his basketball and throw it against the wall a few times, to make you feel more at home. Thump-thump, thump-thump, thump-thump is all you manage before the rhythm is drowned by your own sobs.

The ball bounces once, twice, then rolls away into the darkness.

You bury your face in your knees.

-

Progress is slow and so change is surprising.

Doggett makes a joke on your way back into DC. It’s not really funny, but you catch him staring at you sideways and you both laugh.

-

One day the baby looks at you, puts his hands in his mouth and smacks his gums before saying, “Scuh.”

You smile. Maybe you should be worried that your own son calls you by your second name, maybe it’s just baby talk, but you rock him against your hip and trace the outline of his nose. It reminds you of Mulder.