Work Text:
December 2012
Dana Scully has endurance. She was never the fastest kid in gym class but she’d often win running races because she knew how to pace herself. The others would sprint and burn out in the first 50 meters, while her short legs carried her past them and through the finish line. She considered running a marathon with some friends during med school but her demanding schedule didn’t leave time for adequate training, and Dana Scully doesn’t half-ass anything.
In college, her pre-med cohort dwindled over the years as her peers faltered in the face of organic chemistry and advanced biology labs but she worked hard and persevered. She wasn’t always a good shot but she spent hours practicing aiming at cans with her father until her arms ached from holding the weight of her BB gun and her vision started to blur. It paid off when she stunned her misogynistic instructor at Quantico with her spot-on accuracy in the firing range.
Her colleagues at the Bureau, and probably even Mulder himself, didn’t expect her to last long on the X-Files. It was supposed to be a stepping stone to bigger things, an amusing anecdote in her otherwise storied career. Her father instilled in her a repugnance for giving up and an intractable sense of loyalty, but that doesn’t fully explain why she kept chasing monsters in the dark. She’s outlasted the X-Files and almost two decades later she’s still by Mulder’s side.
It’s the last night of Hanukkah and six days until the end of the world.
She doesn’t fully share Mulder’s belief that colonizing aliens will invade the planet in less than a week, and she isn’t sure he’s fully convinced either. She knows they will be together, though, when it does (or doesn’t) happen.
They spent their early days on the run chasing leads, trying to uncover the plan for colonization, and doing anything they could to fight it. But the trail has long gone cold. It’s been years since they pursued even a dead end or red herring, and she can tell Mulder’s heart isn’t in it anymore. They live small and quiet lives now. They have each other, but not their son and not the answers they spent years searching for. He cracks jokes that it wouldn’t be the worst thing if all of humanity perishes in a fiery invasion or becomes slaves to an extraterrestrial master race in a matter of days. She suspects they aren’t jokes.
It’s Sunday and she’s barely seen him all day. He burrows away in his office most of the time now. He doesn’t tell her what he’s working on and she doesn’t ask. Back when they first became lovers, a lazy Sunday without any work was such a rarity that they’d spend nearly the entire day in bed exploring each other’s bodies. She can still remember every freckle on his skin but she can’t remember the last time they made love, or the last time he made her laugh. Still, she endures.
“Six days to go,” she hears his baritone from behind her and she turns to face him. She’s at the kitchen table reviewing her surgery schedule for the week ahead and doesn’t hear him approaching.
“Should we escape to Acapulco now so I can at least go out with a tan?” she deadpans.
“You don’t tan, Scully,” he says, sliding into a chair facing her. “You burn. We both know that.”
She shrugs. “How do you want to ride out our final days then?”
“I want to find our son. Apologize to him for not being able to save the world.”
She grimaces. It’s as if he’s jabbing his finger into an open wound in her flesh, a wound that will never heal.
“I’d like that, too,” she says quietly, looking down at her notes now and away from him. “But it’s not going to happen.”
“I have a lead.”
Her breath catches in her throat. They’ve gone down this road before and it never ends well.
“It can’t be him,” she says.
“I think this time it is,” he says, leaning toward her from across the table. He speaks with an urgency she hasn’t heard from him in years. For a moment, they’re back in the basement and he’s trying to convince her there’s a swamp monster in St. Augustine or a lizard man in Louisville. The stakes are higher now and the possibilities even more remote.
“There’s a boy in Wyoming. The birth and adoption dates line up,” he continues.
She shakes her head. “That doesn’t mean anything.”
“I’d agree with you if it weren’t for the video.”
“What video?”
“Come,” he says, leading her from the kitchen to his office.
Of course, she follows him. She doesn’t always believe him but she’ll always follow him. That hasn’t changed.
He taps on the keyboard to wake up his computer. The browser is opened to a YouTube video. On the screen, a cluster of kids face away from the camera in what looks like a school playground. The title reads MY BOY CAN MOVE SH!T WITH HIS MIND.
Before she can object, Mulder clicks play. In the video, the circle of kids opens up to reveal a tall, red-headed boy with blue eyes and a nose he hasn’t grown into yet. He’s holding a toy model of the Millenium Falcon.
“Do it, Jackson. I’m filming now,” a prepubescent voice calls from out of the frame.
“You can’t post this,” Jackson says. “My parents will kill me.”
“I won’t, I swear,” the off-camera voice lies.
“Fine,” Jackson says.
He extends his arms out with the spaceship in his hands. Then, he squeezes his eyes shut, furrows his brow, and the Millenium Falcon begins to levitate. It’s slow and shaky at first, but then it rises higher and higher until it’s roughly 8 feet in the air. The crowd of boys erupt in shrieks and Holy shits!
“Damn, this is gonna get like a million views,” says the filming boy.
Suddenly, Jacken opens his eyes and the ship crashes at his feet with a thud. “You said you weren’t going to post!” He yells and lunges at the camera. The video ends.
“I had some hackers look into the IP address that the video was posted from,” Mulder says. “It’s from a school in a small town in northern Wyoming. I was also able to get enrollment records from the school. There’s only one Jackson. Jackson Van De Kamp. Date of birth: May 20, 2001. I did a little more digging and found out he was adopted, in a sealed adoption, on April 28 of the following year.”
“When did you find this?” she asks, still staring at the screen.
“About a month ago. It popped up on some of the parapsychology channels I still monitor. I wanted to wait until I had all the information before I told you.”
“How many times have you watched it?”
“Hundreds,” he says. “It’s him. Look at him. It has to be.”
“Play it again,” she says.
They watch the video a second time, then a third, then again and again. She asks him to pause on the clearest images of William’s face and she touches the screen, caressing the pixels of his cheek with her fingertip. She knows in her bones it’s their son. Even if the dates didn’t match and he wasn’t demonstrating telekinesis in a viral video, she would know it’s him.
“We can get a flight now and be there by morning,” he says.
“And then what?”
That’s the part of the plan they’ve never discussed. She knows Mulder has never stopped looking for William. They were once in the car right outside the home of a family with a four-year-old adopted boy in rural Pennsylvania before getting a call from a source that it was a trap. They flew to Utah once to identify the body of an adopted, runaway eight-year-old in a morgue. In the storm of emotions that comes every time they’ve gotten close, she always feels a low rumble of relief. Relief that she won’t have to explain herself to him. Relief that she won’t have to tear a family apart.
“We can watch him,” Mulder says. “Make sure he’s safe. I’m sure there’s a local hospital that could use an experienced pediatric surgeon. And there’s nothing I’m doing here that I can’t do there.”
“You want to move to Wyoming?” She arches her eyebrows.
“Wouldn’t you?” he asks. “If it’s really him.”
“What about colonization?”
“Even more reason,” he says resolutely. “I’d need to see him one last time before it all goes to shit. Even if it’s just a glance from across the street. I’d trade everything for that and I know you would, too.”
He’s right. If the world is ending, Scully needs her son to know she never gave up on him, that she isn’t a quitter.
“Book the flight.”