Chapter Text
It hurts very much at first, then a little, then not at all.
That’s a lie, she tells herself one morning as she checks the OR board and tries to ignore the throbbing in her lower back. She could never not miss him. Her hands rub tiny circles above the backs of her hipbones, push up the bottom of her scrub top to press harder, to unconsciously trace the Ouroboros. She misses him dully, achingly, in the way that she misses her bed after back-to-back surgeries.
He and her bed are not synonymous anymore.
He is a sprawling sleeper anyway, she thinks, and throws her styrofoam coffee cup in the trashcan as she heads back to her office.
X
She is happy. She could have gone to Hopkins or Franklin Square, but in the end she’d decided to stay in DC. Mom’s getting old, she’d told herself as she signed her letter of resignation at Our Lady and put her things in a box and started at GW the next day.
She is happy. She likes her staff, her patients. She likes her office. They’d given her a large, brightly-lit corner office to call her own. He’d come to visit several times, proving that there was no place he didn’t mark with the memory and the smell of him, as equally inescapable and elusive as the truth he so desperately sought.
Seeks, she corrects herself. He is still looking for something. It’s she who is done.
She is happy. Mostly.
X
She is lying on the couch in her office when her phone buzzes beside her head. The vibration rattles her skull, her eye sockets, her nasal cavity, and she thinks distantly of radiation, of the disease she survived, of the fear that sometimes still grips her alone in her bed.
She answers. “Scully.”
“Hey.” It’s only 7am but he sounds alert. She doubts he’s slept. “Something came through to my encrypted email address last night.”
“I didn’t know you still had it.”
“You know me, I have a hard time letting things go.”
She grimaces and props herself up on one elbow. “What was in the message?”
“I’ve got Keegan and Caroline working on it now. Whoever sent it ran it through one of those scramblers, a new one. I’m not as well-versed, but it’ll be done soon.”
“You keep those kids working round the clock.”
“Ain’t no rest for the wicked, Scully.”
She smiles at that. Almost.
“How are you?” he asks, his voice pitching low. She thinks she hears him walk into another room.
“Hungry. Tired.” She rises and fishes a granola bar out of the top drawer of her desk. “I was in surgery all night and I have another one this afternoon.”
“What time will you be done?”
The smile tugs at the corner of her mouth again. “8, maybe.”
“Well it is Thursday…” he says, and she can see him pacing the floor of the living room, scratching the back of his head and slurping from a mug of coffee.
“It is Thursday,” she agrees, feeling the color rise in her face. She remembers two Thursdays ago, bent over the vanity in the bathroom as Thursday turned into Friday, her day off.
“Well if nothing comes up, let me know.”
“Okay,” she says, relishing their easy back and forth. Her voice is warm when she says, “Talk to you soon.”
She slides back down onto the couch, massaging her eyes with the heels of her palms. They haven’t found it necessary to define the time they’ve been spending together recently. For now she is comfortable with the way she sometimes spends the night, the way he sometimes texts her naughty things at work, the way she smiles more.
Scully only realizes she’s fallen asleep when her phone buzzes against her leg.
“Yeah?” she answers. She pulls her phone back and glances at the time--less than an hour has passed.
“It’s me. Um. We decoded the email.”
“And?”
“You’re gonna want to come take a look.”
“Mulder, I’m at work.”
“I don’t think this is something you should hear over the phone.”
X
The gravel crunches under her tires when she pulls up. Other than hers and Mulder’s there is only one other car in the driveway, a nondescript dark green sedan with an Apache flag bumper sticker in the center of the back window. As she parks, she sees a dark head of hair at the front door, backpack slung over her shoulder.
“Hi Caroline,” Scully calls as she gets out of her car.
The girl looks up, nods her head. Caroline has always had a peaceful sort of beauty, but today her normally calm face is clouded with confusion.
Scully meets her on the porch. “He have you guys working all night?”
“It’s whatever.” Caroline shrugs one shoulder and puts her hair behind her ear.
“It doesn’t look like whatever,” Scully says knowingly.
“He’s in there,” Caroline says vaguely, and slinks down the stairs to her car.
Scully’s heart thuds in her ears, but she gives a tiny rap on the door before pushing it all the way open. “It’s me,” she calls quietly.
“Study,” he calls back from down the hall.
She is struck with an uncomfortable sense of deja vu, the nights and mornings she came home, only to find him in the same spot she’d left him, his face sickly white from the glow of the computer screen. He’s been better lately. Taking on some assistants has really helped. But she seems to have inherited her mother’s propensity for worrying.
“What’s this email all about?” she asks, standing in the doorway.
His hair is ruffled and she has to resist the urge to lay a kiss on the top of his head.
Mulder, a day or two’s worth of salt and pepper scruff at his jawline, hands her a printout, symbols and characters jumbled up on a page with no apparent form or structure.
“The original message?” she asks.
“And the translation,” he says, handing her another page. The decoded text is only a few paragraphs long and she begins reading aloud.
“Dear Mr. Mulder, I have been reading your website for several months now--” She smiles and looks up. “Is this fanmail, Mulder?”
He does not laugh. “Scully.”
His seriousness makes her more nervous than before. She clears her throat and continues reading. “I have been reading your website for several months now and I think you can help me. You might be the only person who can, because it sounds like you have experienced some of the things that are happening to me. My name is W--”
Her mouth is dry suddenly, her lips move but no sound comes out. She looks at Mulder. He looks at the floor.
“My name is Will Van de Kamp,” she continues. “For the past two years, some stuff has happened to me that I can't explain. I've always kind of wondered if I was different.”
She puts a hand over her mouth and sits in the armchair in the corner, reading the rest silently to herself.
I know I was adopted before I was a year old. For a while I thought my dreams were about that, but lately they seem more real and it's harder to wake up. Basically I’m standing in a field and a group of people start walking toward me. They look like people but then they get closer and I realize they're aliens. Tall and skinny with weird-shaped heads. They tell me it's time to come home and that I need to go with them.
On your website you talk about your abduction sometimes, so my question is did this happen to you before you were abducted? Do you know any abductees who have experienced dreams like mine? Also have any of them seen things that no one else can see? Can you help me please?
Sincerely,
Will
PS- I used a scrambler in case I am being monitored. If you’re able to decode this you’ll know how to email me back.
“Is it real?” Scully tries to steady her hand but the printout flaps querulously.
“It appears to be,” he answers, still looking at the floor.
“What do you mean appears? Is this sort of thing easy to fake?”
“Not from what the staff told me. This is one of the newer encryption programs.” She hears the pride in his voice, the unsaid pleasure he takes in the fact that their son is a computer geek.
She manages a chuckle. “The staff? Can’t you call them something different?”
“Interns is too degrading. Plus, I pay them.”
She looks back at the email, worries her thumb along her bottom lip. “Mulder, this is…”
“I know.” He leans back in his desk chair. There is a long silence. “I know.”
She almost hesitates to ask it, but knows she has to. “And you don't think he knows you're his--”
Mulder shakes his head, averts his eyes. “There’s no paper trail. No record to connect me to him in any way.”
She has to remember, like always, that he lost a child too. She thinks distantly of cliches that don’t quite fit: how there’s no word for parents who lose a child, Hemingway’s six-word tragedy. What do you call a woman like her? A monster, a wicked voice in the back of her head hisses, and she shivers.
“Mulder…” She says it slowly, wetting her lips to buy time. “If this is really him… is this even legal? When I gave--I told the adoption service that he wasn’t to have any contact. That I didn’t want that for him.”
“He has no idea he's making contact. He’s just a kid seeking my advice as an expert on unexplainable phenomena.”
She feels tears prick the back of her eyes. “Goddamn it.”
He scoots his feet along the carpet, rolling towards her in his office chair until he takes her hands in his.
“What do we do now?” she asks, watching him trace unreadable symbols into her palm.
“I sent the staff home,” says Mulder softly.
She looks up to make sure she hasn’t misunderstood. “I should go.”
She doesn’t.
X
She can’t be with him anymore, but being without him seems even more impossible. She thinks of all the codependent words she uses to describe their symbiosis to her therapist, and how none of them seem true when she’s with him.
He rests his hand across her clavicle, stroking her throat with his thumb. “When you think about him, what does he look like?”
She almost laughs at the cruelty of his question. “Tall. Taller than me already.”
“That’s not too hard.”
She shoves him. “He does something active. Soccer, maybe. Something that involves a lot of running. His legs are long.”
“That he got from you.” He slides a hand down the front of her thigh and she can’t contain a shiver, even though she knows he’s mocking her. “They just let you leave the hospital?”
“No, they pushed my surgery. Having trouble getting the parents to consent.” She twists her torso to look over her shoulder at the clock. “I should get back though.”
He rolls away, lets her sit up and find her blouse. “You know what they say. Time and tide wait for no head of pediatric surgery.”
“I’m not familiar with that one.”
He smirks and she kisses him, leans over him with her blouse half-on and he pulls her down on top of him. When her phone buzzes loudly and skitters across the bedside table she lets out a frustrated groan.
“Leave it.”
“I can’t.” She gasps as his hand roughly palms her breast and he places a playful bite at the juncture of her neck and shoulder. “It’s work. It’s--”
Her brow furrows when she sees the familiar but unexpected name on the screen. “I’m sorry, I have to--” She dismounts and accepts the call. “Dana Scully.”
“Dana, it’s Tad O’Malley.”
She’s already annoyed. “I know.”
“So you didn’t delete my number?”
She scoffs but can’t help a smile. He’d always been optimistically and presumptuously self-assured, not unlike someone else she knows.
“What do you want, Tad?”
Tad?, Mulder mouths, and she swats him away.
“Got a tip this morning, sounds like something that used to be up your alley.”
“I don’t like the way he’s talking about your alley,” Mulder grumbles against her shoulder.
Scully smacks his arm. “Jesus Christ.”
“What?” O’Malley’s voice says on the other end of the phone.
“Nothing. Used to be…” She pushes her hair out of her face, behind her ear. She feels a headache forming right behind her eyes. “What are you talking about?”
“Got a tip this morning from some kid out west. Claims his friend’s had contact with an alien race and thinks it’d make an interesting story.”
She bites her tongue to keep from screaming, counts to three. “It would, Tad. It would make a very interesting story, but that’s all it is. A story.” She throws Mulder a playful glance as she expounds. “Science fiction.”
“I don’t know, this one’s got a ring of truth to it.”
Scully lets out a frustrated puff of air, cradles the phone between her shoulder and ear as she buttons up her blouse. “I have to go.”
“Will you just look at the stuff this kid sent?”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“Dana, I know this used to be your whole life. Don’t pretend you’re not the slightest bit interested.”
She turns to look over her shoulder at Mulder, who’s feigning disinterest and has suddenly become fascinated by his bedroom ceiling. “Who else have you told?” she sighs.
“No one, but we have to move fast. If NBC--”
Scully clears her throat. “Outside your office. Half an hour. Don’t be late, I have a surgery this afternoon.” The lie slips easily from her mouth.
“Thanks. Oh, and Dana?”
“What?” she snaps.
“Roll Mulder over and tell him to come along too.” The line goes dead.
She clicks her tongue in disgust. “Bastard.”
“I didn’t know you and Tad were still talking,” Mulder says casually. He’s picked up his own phone and is scrolling mindlessly through his Twitter feed.
“We’re not,” she says adamantly, pulling on her underwear and then her skirt. “Come on.”
“The illustrious Tad O’Malley wants little old me to come along?” He scoops his t-shirt from the floor and pulls it over his head.
“You are neither little nor old and you know it. Apparently William’s--” She stops herself. It’s the first time she’s said his name in she doesn’t know how long. She’s never felt anything quite like it before. “One of his so-called friends called the goddamn media.”
“Well he’s clearly an excellent judge of character,” Mulder grumbles as he pulls his jeans back on and shuffles to the closet to look for a jacket. “He gets that from you, you know.”
It is the sort of thing he would have said in the old days, but suddenly nothing is funny anymore. She must be showing it on her face because he says quietly, “Sorry. That was uncalled for.”
She pulls on her suit jacket. “Let’s just get this over with, okay?”
In this moment, she is mostly unhappy.