Chapter Text
November.
“I’m pregnant,” she says to the back of his head as he hastily stuffs a clean suit still in its Zips bag into his battered Delsey. He picks a pair of worn jeans off the slat-backed chair by the dresser and is bringing them to his nose to determine the mileage left in them when her words finally penetrate. He turns round and she is standing in the doorway, so still she might not even be breathing. The first thing he thinks is that she doesn’t look pregnant; that in her severe black suit and her towering fuck-me shoes, she looks just the same as she always has.
Only he hasn’t ever seen that hopeful gleam in her eye before, the sparkle that says beneath her rigid exterior she is jumping for joy.
Maybe he misheard. “What?”
She rubs her thumbnails along the pads of her fingers, one of her few nervous tics. She repeats her previous statement and his stomach lurches in shock. Suddenly he wishes he hadn’t eaten that foot-long meatball sub with extra jalapenos for dinner. He’s thirty-seven years old, but he feels like a sixteen-year-old kid who just realized the rubber had split. Or a thirty-year-old whose wife of three months had informed him over breakfast that she was moving to Europe - right before she handed him an envelope containing divorce papers and an invoice from Planned Parenthood.
“How?”
“I don’t know,” she says, her eyes suddenly wet. A faint smile lifts the corners of her beautiful mouth. “This wasn’t supposed to be possible.”
No shit, he thinks; but even as moronic as he is, he wouldn’t dare say it. His mouth flaps like a gasping fish and she fills the gap, her voice half an octave higher than usual.
“I saw my doctor this morning. She, uh, she says it’s about eight weeks… she did an ultrasound.”
Tuning out as she babbles nervously, his mind scrolls back, trying to remember what they were doing two months ago. Other than the obvious. She’s been so busy these past few months, it isn’t hard to isolate the time they’ve spent together, and he flashes on a memory of stroking into her with his jeans around his ankles as she sat on the edge of the tallboy in Charlie’s guest bedroom, his thumb wedged in her mouth as she shattered around him.
He sinks down on the unmade bed with his skanky Levi’s clenched between his fists and she is there beside him, her perfume wafting over him like a brume. She puts a cool hand against his neck. “Mulder? Are you alright?”
“Yeah,” he says, in a voice that sounds like he’s underwater. “This is just a bit of a surprise.”
She huffs a laugh and rubs his neck, jostling the bed as she moves. His stomach rolls and he ignore the urge to retch.
“I know. I didn’t mean to tell you quite like that.” He dares to glance at her sideways and then wishes he hadn’t. The burn of her hopeful gaze is hot on his face. “I couldn’t let you go away without knowing.”
“Yeah,” he says again, and she looks at him expectantly, the hope in her eyes turning fearful.
“Do you…? Are you…?” she stutters uncertainly.
“It’s just a lot to take in, Scully.”
She looks devastated but tries to hide it. “No, of course. I’m sorry,” she concedes, and he wonders if he could feel like a bigger asshole.
“I know we need to talk about this,” he admits as he blinks on dry, sticky eyes, and pulls himself to his feet, “But I need to catch this flight.” He can’t quite bring himself to meet her gaze but as he stuffs his jeans in his suitcase and dumps the contents of his underwear drawer on top of them, he can see her out of the corner of his eye, sitting statue-still in her tailored Ralph Lauren on the edge of his unmade bed.
“Mulder,” she says in that soft, Sidamoan smooth voice of hers, “This is something I didn’t think I would ever have…. It’s a miracle. And just because it isn’t planned…” He makes the mistake of looking at her and realizes that yes, in fact, he could feel like a bigger asshole. A tear spills over onto her lush cheek, and the delicate cords of her neck are over tightened with anxiousness. “I can’t give this up.” The unverbalized 'please don't ask me to' is deafening in the late afternoon hush of his apartment.
He nods dumbly, meeting her gaze but knowing from the helpless look on her face that she can’t see past the black wall of his shuttered eyes. She looks a little afraid of what she might find, and hell, so is he.
“You’re going to miss your flight,” she says at last, standing and smoothing a hand over the front of her skirt uncomfortably. “I’ll let you finish packing.”
“I’ll call you,” he promises, and she fixes him with a sharp look, like she questions the truth of his words, but just nods softly as she mouths ‘ok’ like she can no longer trust her voice, and eases past him out into the gloomy hallway. She doesn’t stop to kiss him or offer a ‘goodbye’, and after a brief shuffle as she dons her heavy overcoat, the quiet snick of the door signals her departure.
He lets out the breath he had been holding, and his lungs burn right along with his eyes and his heart.
He stomps the fifteen feet from his bedroom to the kitchen and snaps open the decrepit Smeg, the six-pack of Shiner-Bock in the door clinking like a badly harmonized percussion group. He twists the top off one and feels the cold liquid fizz down his aching throat and he wonders what the fuck is wrong with him that makes him behave this way, after everything.
Marzipan light from the cracked refrigerator slices across the kitchen table and Mulder squints at something on the dusty surface; a piece of paper, curling at the edges from over-handling. Letting the refrigerator door swing shut, he shuffles across the scuffed floor, wiping his beer-dampened mouth with the back of his hand and peers down at the murky black ink slurred across the paper’s satin surface like a Rorschach print. Sinking heavily into one of the wooden chairs, he reaches for the sonogram picture. It seems warm in his ice-cold hand, like Scully’s body heat has yet to dissipate from the smooth thermal paper. His eyes flick over the 6 by 4, soaking in the details, and his stomach yaws.
Her baby.
Their baby.
Fuck.