Chapter Text
For Scully, it began not long after Christian Fearon lived, after she found hope again. Mulder kissed her in their driveway... Don’t give up ... and she didn’t. She wouldn’t. They carried on, knowing the darkness would always find them, daring it to try.
She felt Mulder’s freedom the same way he did: wrapped around them like a cozy blanket. He now breathed the air of a truly free man, and although Scully had accepted this reprieve, filled her lungs with that very air, it was still his air, not theirs together. She couldn’t help but continue to feel a hole in her heart, the gaping wound that had been weeping ever since she’d given up William.
That was when her visions began: a terrible premonition of death and destruction, alien colonization, a global pandemic. And an eleven-year-old boy with hazel eyes and shaggy brown hair at the center of it all.
Eleven . She couldn’t ignore the implications of his age in the visions. But she’d never believed in the 2012 alien colonization date, not really. Maybe she’d simply preferred denial. For years she’d considered telling Mulder so: that the thing he’d devoted every waking hour to since he’d learned it was, she suspected, a waste of his time. But she never did. He’d heard it all before, his entire life, in fact. It would never deter him. Her father had been gone for a long time but her Ahab was still here; it was Mulder, through and through, as long as she’d known him.
Now, however, her son was coming to her every night, telling her this was all indeed very real. Somehow against all the odds, they had remained connected after all these years: mother and son. While she’d tried her hardest to forget him he was now insisting she remember.
Don’t give up.
She and Mulder had been adrift in a raging sea of their own making: the deafening silence they’d carried between them about William. It had always been difficult for the two of them to discuss any of it. For so long she’d feared that loss would inevitably pull them under, and rather than brave the riptide, she’d simply tried her best to keep them both afloat.
Things were different now, very different. The visions weren’t receding into the distance, they’d been coming on stronger and more frequently. The riptide was now a whirlpool, and it was only a matter of time before they would drown. Christian Fearon’s survival, however, had reaffirmed her faith in herself and her decisions. She couldn’t ignore the connection between her young patient and the reintroduction of her son into her world.
She knew she had to say something to Mulder about the visions. She had no choice.
This time, she believed.
“What do you see, Scully?” he asked her. They lay in bed, facing each other in the dark.
“I see… William.”
He was silent, absorbing the enormity of this moment: the moment they would finally discuss their long-lost son. Not in passing, not as a perfunctory gesture. But a real discussion.
She sighed. “Mulder, I never told you before… but this isn’t the first time I’ve experienced something like this.”
He looked at her curiously, a thousand of her own arguments against such a possibility surely racing to the forefront of his mind. “What do you mean?”
“When you were taken from me, back when I was pregnant,” she explained. “I had visions like this… of you. I saw the experiments they did on you. I could... almost feel your suffering.”
He inhaled sharply, his face etched with the discomfort of long-buried trauma. But he listened.
“I was certain at the time William was doing it, sending me those visions. Even from the womb.”
His disquiet became amusement. Raising an eyebrow with a slight smile, “You, Scully?”
She closed her eyes. “I had nothing else to hold onto, Mulder. He was all I had left of you at the time. I wanted so badly to believe it.”
He nodded, listening.
“I think… that maybe we’ve always had this connection, William and me,” she revealed. “It happened with Emily too. Somehow she found a way to contact me, do you remember? These children, Mulder…” she trailed off, unable to explain that which she did not understand, unable to even claim them as her own with her words.
“Why do you think the visions are happening now?” Mulder asked.
She wished she knew. “I don’t know,” she answered honestly.
After a few moments of loaded silence, Mulder spoke again.
“Is he… happy?”
She felt it then, the tightening in her gut that always pulled her heart in two directions. One: that she missed her son dreadfully and would have done absolutely anything to keep him with her, and two: that she loved him so deeply she would have done absolutely anything to keep him safe. But despite her conflicting emotions, there was one truth she could feel for certain whenever she communicated with him.
“He is,” she answered. “He has a good life.”
Mulder took her hand and kissed it in the darkness. “Tell me, Scully,” he said. “Please… tell me.”
She knew exactly what he was asking her, what he wanted to know, and she sighed heavily, placing her hand against his heart.
“He looks like you,” she said quietly. “Exactly like you.” She swore she could feel his heart stop in his chest.
He nodded, his eyes brimming with tears, and that was all it took. The dam broke, the floodgates opened. She wept into his chest as he cradled her against him, stroking her hair. The years-long embargo on all of the topics left undiscussed between them was no more, and while at first their tears were of sadness, they morphed into tears of relief.
Fox Mulder and Dana Scully were reborn.
She hadn’t realized until that very moment that the trust they’d built over the years had been slowly eroding. Had she never experienced these visions, what might she’ve held in? What might they have kept from one another?
How might they have ended?
Had William, the loss of whom had once threatened their resilience, actually saved them from certain doom?
They spoke of what the visions meant, how they were likely connected to Mulder's colonization date. That she was seeing these things for a reason. That William was in danger, and that the very planet could be depending upon them.
They lay quiet for a moment, both absorbing everything, all of it. Mulder held her close, and she wrapped herself around him. The wound on her heart might always be there, but Mulder was the salve. It felt like the two of them against the world, as it always had been, but never before had she felt so powerful. This was their call, their truth, and they had to answer it.
Tonight, they were finally breathing together.
“Scully…” he whispered into her ear. “Are you ready for this?”
She didn’t know there was a choice.