Existence (Part Three)
It occurs to Mulder, when the nurse comes to tell Agent Reyes she has a phone call, that there’s someone he should probably call, too. He sits up slowly, eases the sleeping baby from his chest to the crook of his arm, and carefully stands. There’s a pay phone at the end of the hall, and he makes his way over to it, hoping there’s still money left on the phone card he hasn’t used in over a year.
It rings all the way through to the answering machine, but the recorded message cuts off abruptly with a breathless, “Hello?”
“Oh, uh, hi, Mrs. Scully,” he stammers, thrown. “I’m sorry to call at this hour, but I thought you’d want to know--”
“Fox?! Where’s Dana, is she all right? I haven’t been able to reach her, and her doctor hasn’t seen her, and nobody will tell me where she is or if she’s alive, or--”
“She’s okay,” he says quickly, cursing himself for not even thinking about how upset she would be when Scully disappeared without warning. “She’s okay, and the baby’s okay, and I’m sorry you were worried, but everything’s--”
“Worried?” Her voice cracks, and when she speaks again, it is with a near sob. “Do you have any idea what I have been through these past three days? How terrifying it is to… to not know where your pregnant daughter is or if she’s even… if she…”
He looks at the floor, shame burning through him, as Mrs. Scully loses her composure on the other end of the line. Every hitching breath and muffled sob cuts like broken glass, and he bears them all, letting the impact of it hit him square in the chest.
He deserves this. All of it.
It doesn’t matter that he was trying to protect Scully, that he thought she would be safest if even he didn’t know where she was going. It doesn’t even matter whether he was right or wrong about that. What matters is that he didn’t even consider Margaret Scully’s feelings, that she didn’t enter into the equation at all, as far as he was concerned. He owes her more than that. After everything that has happened, from the moment her daughter walked into his office eight years ago, he owes her so much more.
“I’m sorry,” he whispers.
“You should be.” Her voice is thick, angry. “I know I’m supposed to tell you that it’s okay. I’m supposed to just quietly accept this life Dana has chosen, accept the dangers and the risks because she has accepted them. But it is not okay! How many times, Fox? How many times is she going to disappear, or get sick, or have people trying to hurt her? How many times am I going to have to wonder where she is or if she’s ever coming home? Or if I’m going to have to bury her like we buried you?”
“I don’t… I don’t know.”
“No. Of course you don’t. And to be honest, Fox, I don’t know how much more of this I can take.”
He has no answer to that. Mrs. Scully sighs into the receiver.
“Can you at least tell me where my daughter is now? And why you’re the one calling me instead of her?”
“She’s… resting,” he hedges, turning his gaze to the baby. He can’t help the soft smile that comes to his face, and a warmth blooms in his chest that has nothing to do with guilt or shame. “I was, um… I was calling to tell you that your grandson’s been born.”
She gasps. “Oh! Oh, but that’s… But I asked Dr. Speake to call me right away if Dana came to the hospital! I’ll be right there, just--”
“We’re not at Washington Memorial,” Mulder says quickly.
“You’re not? But… well, then where?”
He winces as he answers, “Blairsville, Georgia.”
“Georgia,” she breathes. “But that’s impossible. I don’t understand, Fox. She was supposed to be on maternity leave. No work, no travel, certainly no flying--”
“This wasn’t about work.” At least not directly. “I thought… there was a chance someone wanted to hurt her, and I… I couldn’t let that happen.”
“So you took her to Georgia? And couldn’t take five minutes to let me know she was going away?”
He squeezes his eyes closed. This is not how this phone call was supposed to go. He was supposed to deliver the happy news about the baby and reassure Mrs. Scully that everything was okay. Instead, here they are. And none of it is her fault. It is entirely his own shortsightedness that got them here.
“I’m sorry. I really am.”
“I know you are, Fox. You’re always sorry. But I can’t think of a time that’s ever actually changed anything.”
He’s stunned into silence, the wind figuratively knocked right out of him. She’s not wrong, and it’s not as though he hasn’t told himself the same damned thing, any one of the billion times he’s wallowed in shame and self-flagellation. Somehow, though, it hits that much harder, coming from her.
“Please ask Dana to call me when she can,” she says after a bit. “I would appreciate someone letting me know when she is coming home. Goodbye, Fox.”
“I--”
But she’s already hung up.
***
Monica doesn’t see Mulder and the baby at first, when she returns to the waiting area, and wonders if they’ve been let in to see Dana. She starts to try and find someone to ask, but then she spots him at the end of the hall, baby in one arm, phone to his ear, shoulders hunched. He’s too far away to hear what he’s saying, but his posture alone speaks volumes. Whoever he’s talking to, it’s not going well.
Looking away, she goes back to the chair she was sitting in before and wearily lowers herself into it. What I wouldn’t give for a cigarette right about now. Of all the reasons to want to quit, it’s the inconvenience of the habit that’s always been the most powerful motivator. Yes, she should want to quit because it’s terrible for her, and it’s not as if that isn’t a factor. It’s just… whenever she’s in a situation where she can’t stop for a smoke, it’s usually already stressful enough without throwing cravings into the mix. Being free of those cravings would be liberating, has been liberating, each time she’s managed to “quit” in the past.
“Probably time to try again,” she mutters aloud, rubbing her forehead.
She looks up again at the sound of footsteps down the hall and sees Mulder coming back toward her, his face ashen. Before she can ask him what’s wrong, though, the door at the end of the hall opens, and a nurse walks toward them.
“Mr. Mulder? Ms. Reyes? I’m pleased to tell you that Ms. Scully is waking up. You can come see her if you’d like, but only for a few minutes. She still needs a lot of rest.”
“That’s wonderful news,” Monica says, standing.
She turns her head to glance at Mulder, but instead of the relief she expected to see and feel from him, his jaw muscle bulges, and an anxious energy is rolling off of him in waves. They follow the nurse together in silence, and it is not until the door opens to Dana’s room and they can see her for themselves that he relaxes. He practically floats the last few steps to her bedside, while Monica hangs back at the doorway. Though clearly exhausted, Dana immediately brightens at the sight of him and the baby, and though Monica can only see Mulder’s back, she has no doubt there is a matching smile on his face.
When Mulder leans down to kiss Dana on the forehead, their son cradled between them, Monica eases back into the hallway to give them some privacy. There will be time for her to talk to Dana later; for now, Monica is just so glad to see that she’s all right.
***
“You’re really here,” she croaks, her own voice sounding foreign to her ears. “I was afraid maybe I’d dreamed it.”
Mulder eases himself onto the edge of the bed, beside her hip. “I’m really here.”
He slowly places the sleeping baby, all wrapped in new blankets, on the bed next to her, and her eyes fill with tears. He is still really here, too. They didn’t take him.
“Oh, Mulder, I was so scared…” she whispers, too choked up to say more than that.
“Shh,” he says, his fingertips grazing her forehead. “Everything’s okay. You’re safe, and he’s safe, and I’m not gonna let anything happen to either of you.”
A shadow flits across his expression; he has to know as well as she does that this isn’t a thing he can promise. There were just so many of them, and all like Billy Miles. If they’d wanted to hurt her, to take the baby, there wouldn’t have been a single thing Mulder or anyone else could have done to stop them.
She squeezes her eyes shut, shaking her head, and instantly she’s back in that room, Monica yelling at her to push, and all of them there, watching, waiting…
“Okay,” someone says, and she opens her eyes with a gasp as a hand touches her shoulder. Dimly, she realizes the ECG monitor is beeping like crazy, and the nurse has come to stand beside the bed, across from Mulder. “Take a deep breath, sugar. Easy does it. Sir, I’m going to have to ask you to step outside and--”
“No,” Scully says, shaking her head again. “No, please… please let him stay. I just need… I need…”
She feels Mulder take her hand in his, lets the familiar slide of his thumb across her knuckles ground her. That simple gesture, just one of many in the compendium of physical shorthand they have developed over the years, conveys without words that he is here, with her, in this moment. It’s support and concern and love, all communicated silently but no less earnestly for it.
Tucked between them, his head resting against her upper arm and his body snugly nestled against her side, is their son. The miracle she never expected to have and was terrified she wouldn’t get to keep. It is still a little hard to believe that he is finally here, whole and healthy and human. She spent so many months afraid, despite the tests and all of the attempts to reassure herself that he was normal, and some part of her never really relaxed enough to truly believe that she could have this. For that matter, she still keeps thinking she is going to wake up to discover the last couple of months never happened, that Mulder is still dead and buried in North Carolina, lost to her forever. It hardly seems possible she could be granted two things so extraordinarily miraculous and be permitted to keep them both, but maybe… just maybe…
Gradually, her heart stops racing.
“All right.” The nurse gives a wary nod, then turns to Mulder. “Y’all can visit a little while longer, but then she needs to rest some more. I’ll come back when it’s time.” Looking back at Scully, she adds, “But if you need anything before then, just press that call button. Okay?”
“Thank you,” Scully says.
When they’re alone, Mulder brings her knuckles briefly to his lips, then releases her hand to let it rest on the baby. She watches for a while as the small chest rises and falls under her palm, and when she looks back up at Mulder’s face, she sees him gazing at her with such a look of wonder that she can’t help smiling back at him.
“The, uh, the doctors were asking me about his name,” he says softly. “I didn’t know what to tell them. I never, um… I never asked if you had one picked out or…”
Right. That.
When Mulder was missing, she put off a lot of things, hoping against hope that he would be returned and they would have a chance do those things together. When he was “dead,” she was really only existing day by day; even something as seemingly simple as thinking about potential baby names was more forward-looking than she could manage. Since he’s been back, things were so shaky at first, and then he didn’t even want to know the baby’s sex, and so it’s really only been in the last week or two that she’s felt like she could even consider bringing up the subject of names with him.
And somehow, because their lives are the way they are, she just never quite got around to it. That’s not to say she hasn’t thought about names at all, but she is definitely nowhere near having chosen one for certain.
“No, I… I suppose I thought we’d have time to talk about it. Together. Then everything happened so fast in the last few days, and…” She shrugs, trying not to slip back into thinking too deeply about the last few days. “I don’t know. What do you think?”
“Me?” He looks surprised, like it never occurred to him he might have a say in this. “I don’t know. I was… gone… for so much of your pregnancy, and… I guess I just assumed you would’ve already had something in mind.”
“Nothing definite, no,” she says, shaking her head.
“Well, my father’s family had a tradition of always naming children after someone else. Of course, that’s how you end up saddled with a name like Fox, so I’m not sure I actually endorse the practice.”
She smiles. “So there’s another Fox Mulder somewhere in your family tree?”
“No, actually. But my grandmother’s maiden name was Fuchs, which is--”
“German for ‘fox,’” she says along with him, nodding in recognition.
“Yeah.” He chuckles. “Could’ve been worse, I guess.” Looking down, he reaches to touch the baby's cheek with one finger. “Still. Let's do this kid a favor and not name him after his old man, all right? I like him too much already to do that to him.”
“Mulder…”
“And not… not Sam,” he adds quietly. “There’s too much weight there, and I just… not Sam, okay?”
She reaches for his hand again, and he takes it, giving her fingers a little squeeze. “Okay.”
As legacy names go, there is one obvious answer. It’s one she thought about, briefly, when she was starting the IVF process over a year ago. One she could brush off as an homage to her father, if Mulder had decided he wanted nothing to do with anything past the sperm donation, but which would still (at least in her mind) acknowledge his contribution.
Of course, it might also be too obvious a choice, which is enough to make her question whether it is the right one.
“I think,” he says after a while, “it should be your decision. And I also think there’s no need to rush and decide right now. Hang out with him for a few days, see what feels right.”
It’s not what she wanted -- the burden of making this decision all on her own -- but she’s suddenly too tired again to argue, and she supposes Mulder is right that there’s no rush. So she nods and covers a yawn with her free hand. As if on cue, there’s a light tap on the door, and the nurse comes back into the room, along with a doctor.
“How are you feeling, Ms. Scully?”
“I’m okay,” says through another yawn.
Mulder leans forward to press a kiss against her forehead. “You rest. The little man and I will be right outside.”
“Actually,” the doctor says, “we’re going to go ahead and move you out of recovery and over into the L&D wing. We’ll get you all set up in a family room together. How does that sound?”
Family. The word gives her a happy, swoopy feeling in her stomach, and from the way Mulder is beaming down at her, he must be feeling the same way. She squeezes his hand.
“That sounds great.”
