By Sarah Segretti
mrsblome@aol.com
 

Rating: PG (two bad words, one inside a "South Park" reference)
Summary: A minivan, some classic rock and a trunk full of baby gear. All is not
as it appears.
Category: VRA
Spoilers: Requiem
Feedback: mrsblome@aol.com
Website: http://members.aol.com/mrsblome
Archive: Gossamer, Spookys okay, everyone else ask first.
Disclaimer: Not mine. Everything in this story is fictional, especially the
real things.
Author's note: I know these roads. I've taken liberties.

Belmont, Ohio, 3:36 P.M.
By Sarah Segretti
September 2000
 

Georgetown
August 2001

Mulder peered into the overstuffed rear of the minivan, the palm of his hand
resting against the edge of the open gate above his head. The military didn't
pack like this for Normandy, he thought. Who knew someone this small would need
all this stuff?

"Ready?" he called, closing the hatch with a whoosh and a muffled slam.

"I think so." Scully backed out of the van, glanced inside one more time, then
slid the side door closed. She looked around the alley where they'd parked for
easy loading, and Mulder followed her gaze. Nothing unusual, just the standard
battered dumpsters, mutated weeds and cracked concrete you'd find in any DC
alleyway, even one in Georgetown. He could hear a garbage truck making pickups
nearby, and the stop-and-go hum of the morning rush out on Wisconsin Avenue.
Nothing unusual at all.

Scully was taking it all in with eyes that glittered a little in the morning
sun. Given the right context, Mulder thought, even rotting infrastructure can
look ideal. Scully's mood, so easily apparent on her face, threatened to
overwhelm him, and he closed his eyes for a second.

A squawk sounded from inside the van, snapping them both out of their reveries.
"Well, somebody's ready," Scully said dryly.

Mulder hitched up his still-loose jeans. "Then let's go." He started for the
driver's side, only to find Scully heading the same way.

"I can drive, Scully," he told her quietly. "I want to drive."

She regarded him with her doctor's gaze, then relented. "Okay. But you tell me
if you get tired."

"Immediately." But he knew he wouldn't have to. For the first time in more than
a year, he felt alive.

* * *

His car had died while he was gone, from lack of use. Scully had kept a roof
over his head, his credit rating intact and his fish alive, but she'd forgotten
about his car. Well, she'd had other things on her mind. He could understand
that.

Besides, it had been fun to watch her mouth drop open in horror when he pulled
up in front of her building in a 1998 tan Dodge Caravan. He'd called in advance
to tell her to meet him outside.

"A minivan?" was all she could say, the baby balanced on one hip, as he got
out.

Mulder was sure she was having a Falls at Arcadia flashback at that moment, and
grinned. "It was that or an SUV, and I know how you feel about those." He
leaned against the van. The effort of negotiating the deal had exhausted him,
but he was glad he'd done it -- glad he'd done something on his own. It had
been too long.

"A minivan?"

"Gets pretty good gas mileage for what it is, V8 engine, plenty of cargo space,
and at least 12 cupholders by my count."

"Cupholders." She gave him the same look he usually got for coming up with
lunatic theories that linked vampires, aliens and Janet Reno's deputy assistant
attorney general.

The baby seemed to have the same expression on his face as his mother. Man,
heredity was spooky. Mulder nodded. "Twelve of them."

Scully processed this for a moment, then cocked an eyebrow at him. "The newer
models have more. Plus dual control temperature settings, built-in car seats
and rear cargo organizers."

Trust Scully to be armed with data on any topic, no matter how obscure or
distasteful. Mulder smiled meaningfully. "Ah, but George Hale had just enough
cash for this one." He patted the side of the van, pleased with himself. Scully
hugged the baby a little tighter. Mulder wasn't sure she was aware she was
doing it.

"A minivan," she finally repeated, and handed over the baby so that she could
check it out.

* * *

Key Bridge to the GW Parkway to a blessedly brief stint on the Beltway to 270.
On the road again. Mulder hummed to himself as the tech companies and townhouse
developments rushed past in a blur. The morning's bright sun was fading into a
hazy summer glare. Out of deference to Scully, and because the baby seemed to
like it, he left the classical music station on.

Gaithersburg, his mind interjected as an exit sign passed by. Emgen. Been
there, got the monkey pee.

His attention turned back to the radio. Usually he didn't mind Scully's music;
he wasn't that much of a philistine. But this piece he knew mostly because the
station played it constantly. He glanced in the rearview mirror as an
interesting idea occurred to him. "Hey, Scully."

She'd started the trip in the back seat, hoping to keep the baby amused. He
could see her dangling plastic, primary-colored keys where the baby could play
with them, but she was staring out the window at the retreating exurbs instead
of into the car seat. Mulder couldn't see the baby -- he was still small enough
that he had to ride backwards. "What, Mulder?"

"Have you ever considered that 'Scheherazade' might be the 'Freebird' of the
classical music format?"

For a brief second, she didn't answer, and he held his breath. Then he heard
her snicker softly. "I like to think of it as the 'How Soon is Now,' frankly."

"You're dating yourself, Scully. The Smiths are *so* '80s."

She ignored him, as he expected. The familiar pattern was comforting, even if
she did seem to be going through the motions. "It's a more interesting work
than you give it credit for."

"I didn't say it was bad, just overplayed." Mulder paused and honked at a
motorcycle that was drifting into his lane. "Besides, 'How Soon is Now' was
once the 'Freebird' of the alternative music format."

"Mulder."

He glanced in the mirror again. Despite the scolding tone in her voice, her
gaze was affectionate. The baby's hands were visible over the top of the car
seat, batting at the keys Scully still held. The magnitude of the miracle in
the back seat hit him, as it did every so often -- my family, I have a family
again.

Scully sighed, and the sound chased the feeling away. "Go ahead and change the
station, if you want," she said.

"Thank you, Jesus." Mulder hit the scan button immediately, and hoped for
something upbeat.

* * *

They drove into the mountains of the Maryland panhandle (zombies, Mulder
thought, and absently scratched the old scars on his arm) with the bright haze
turning to full overcast. He wasn't tired, he really wasn't, but the baby was
hungry, so they stopped. He staggered a little when he hopped out of the van.

"Mulder!" Scully exclaimed from inside the van, where she was unbuckling the
baby. And then she clapped a hand over her mouth.

"I'm okay. Just sat for too long." He looked around. The parking lot was
amazingly empty for a Bob Evans at midday. "It's okay," he added. "Let me have
Cartman."

She plucked the baby out of the car seat, handing him over. "Please don't call
him that."

"Well, look at him." Mulder took the baby and turned him around to face Scully,
holding the wiggling boy under his armpits. "He looks like an inflatable doll,
and he weighs a ton. Look at that round face."

The baby protested, and Mulder gathered him back into a more comfortable hug.
"Yeah, I'd complain, too," Scully said to her son, who was now bumping his face
desperately into his father's chest. "Let's eat."

"Hey, Scully?" Mulder said, and pitched his voice higher, Cartman-like. "This
baby smells like ass."

For the first time all morning, Scully smiled faintly. "Good thing you remember
how to fix that."

"Darn those ineffective memory wipes," Mulder said, but he felt a little of his
good mood slip away.

* * *

He remembered staring into the beady eyes of the bounty hunter, feeling his
will drain away in the light.

He remembered waking in a hospital room to see familiar blue eyes in a
startlingly round face, and the brilliant smile that illuminated it shortly
after.

Between those moments, he remembered nothing.

He'd been surprised to find that he was grateful.

What frightened him more was the possibility that old memories had been stolen
in the process of making him forget the new ones. So he had Scully grill him on
the details of old cases. He chanted along with "Plan 9 From Outer Space" and
"Star Wars" and old "Star Trek" episodes. He pored over the single photo album
that had survived his mother's still inexplicable barbecue of the family
pictures. He walked the streets of his neighborhood once he learned to walk
again, searching out the familiar among the renovated row houses and changing
storefronts.

He sang along with the radio.

Finding a decent station in the hills of West Virginia (lots and lots of files,
his mind supplied) was no mean trick. He reached around Scully's water bottle,
parked neatly in Cupholder #2, and punched the "tune" button again. There. The
digital numbers froze on a frequency, and mid-80s Prince came bubbling out of
the van's elaborate sound system, a gift from the Gunmen.

"Raspberry beret!" Mulder thought he had a pretty fair falsetto, for a
baritone. "The kind you buy in a second-hand store!"

Scully, riding shotgun again while the baby slept, groaned. "The guys would rip
those speakers out if they knew how they were being abused."

"Raspberry beret!" he sang directly to her. "And if it was warm, she wouldn't
wear much more!"

She shook her head, and bent over the open atlas in her lap. "Northbound 79 is
coming up, oh Artist. You'll want to pay attention to the road."

He remembered every mangled, murdered note she'd croaked at him in a Florida
swamp, grinned, and changed lanes for the exit.

* * *

The Olympics. The start of the NBA season. Another goddamn World Series. A
presidential election. Well, he didn't mind missing that, although he'd been
shocked to learn who was president now. That news, though, didn't compare to
the stunning sight of Scully, seven months pregnant. Oh, if he had missed that
... He couldn't even begin to imagine the havoc he would have wreaked on
whoever, whatever was responsible for his disappearance.

He had questions for her once his unused voice returned. She had no answers,
but one. To his great surprise, Scully had not had one single prenatal test
done. "Not even an ultrasound?" he'd croaked at her, furious. When she hit him
with a barrage of data showing that ultrasounds were unnecessary in a normal
pregnancy, which she seemed to be having, he found himself feeling sorry for
her obstetrician.

"I didn't want to know," she'd said, apologetically, after the baby was born.
"I wanted to believe it was yours. And what could I have done if it wasn't?"

He knew what he would have suggested, but that was irrelevant now. Benjamin Fox
Mulder was a hybrid of nothing but his parents: his mother's eyes and nose over
his father's mouth, his round head covered with sparse dark hair Mulder liked
to think was a gift from Samantha. The roly-poly body was apparently a Scully
trait; he and Sam had been scrawny, gangly babies.

And the kid could sleep. Heaven knew where the child of insomniacs had
inherited that ability. "It's been three hours," he said to Scully. "Doesn't he
need to eat?"

Scully pressed the tops of her breasts experimentally. "I'm not too full. We'll
be okay for a while. Let him sleep. Besides, there's nowhere to stop."

That much was true. They were in an odd no-man's-land where it wasn't clear if
you were in Ohio or Pennsylvania or West Virginia. Mulder was pretty sure they
were in West Virginia, even if the radio station was from Pittsburgh --

/Leonard Betts/

He pushed that memory away, although he was happy to have kept even the bad
ones, and turned his attention back to the road, the radio. The music seemed to
be getting even older; he remembered this one from the blur that was high
school.

"...but you're trying, you're trying now..."

Scully shifted in her seat. "Could you just lip sync for a while? I'd like to
take a nap, too."

He hesitated, wondering, feeling her emotions again, but decided she really was
just tired. "No problem."

"That saxophone always made me so sad," Scully said sleepily, her voice gone
girlish. "Missy thought it was romantic, but I never ..." She paused. "Could
you change the station?"

Mulder swallowed. He'd been right about her mood the first time. "Sure," he
said.

"Wake me up when we get somewhere I can feed Benjy."

* * *

I-470 picking up 70 again, and an unexpected thing happened. Mulder drove under
the sign that marked the West Virginia-Ohio border, and the landscape ...
relaxed. The craggy Appalachians melted away into small, soft foothills. The
highway widened from two lanes on a side to three. Even the median strip
suddenly grew wide enough to build a small townhouse development on.

Space. Elbow room. He realized he'd only ever lived on islands: the Vineyard,
England and that unnatural, isolated place known as Inside The Beltway. And he
hadn't known how hemmed in he'd felt until he wasn't any more. Hemmed in by
what, though? The job? The knowledge that came with it? His own emotional
walls? The memories? No, but maybe ... the reminders, the dark shadows that
haunted the interrupted life they were trying to rebuild. He turned to Scully,
to talk out his theory, to see if she felt it too, but she was still dozing.

Well, maybe she wouldn't feel that way. She'd lived in more places by the time
she was eight than he had his whole life. And she's lived in one place for the
last eight years, he couldn't help but remind himself. That was important to
her.

A motion in the rearview mirror caught his eye -- Benjy's little hands,
appearing and disappearing behind the top edge of his car seat. Awake and
stretching. An exit sign magically appeared: Belmont, Ohio, 1 mile. Gas food
lodging.

Excellent, Mulder thought, and pushed the gloomy thoughts away.

* * *

All day, the weather forecast, no matter what state they'd been in, had been
classic August: hazy, hot and humid with a chance of late afternoon
thundershowers. As they walked out of their second Bob Evans of the day, Mulder
could tell the latter was about to come due somewhere. The air was thick and
liquid in the eerie yellow-white light, the sun a flat coin behind the haze. He
raised his arms over his head for a good stretch and an unexpected yawn that
fortunately Scully didn't see. God, this light was creepy. The air was too
still. He'd be driving in a storm before long.

Scully was already in the van when he climbed in; she'd rigged some kind of
scaffolding over the baby that had toys dangling from it for him to play with.
She was staring out the windshield at the strip mall across the access road --
Mulder couldn't tell if she was actually seeing anything or not. She'd been
even more quiet than she'd been all day as she nursed Benjy and he'd mainlined
some apple pie and coffee. She was still quiet.

Somehow he knew it was best for him to stay quiet for a while, too.

Mulder maneuvered the van out of the maze of access roads linking the various
fast-food restaurants with the strip malls, and glanced at the dashboard clock
as he waited at a stop sign. 3:36. They were making good time, as far as he
could tell, what with stopping every couple of hours for baby-related matters.

Not that they had any particular place to be at any particular time, but he
liked to keep track of their progress.

"...chance of late afternoon thundershowers." The deejay's voice cut into his
thoughts. "That's the weather from Classic Rock 107.3, hits from the 70s, 80s
and 90s. Now here's Johnny Nash." And a very familiar old song burbled out of
the speakers:

"...I can see clearly now, the rain is gone..."

Mulder lunged for the volume control, forgetting his vow of silence. "Scully!
Sing backup!"

He was watching the road, but he could see her head turn towards him, and he
could almost hear that eyebrow go up. No matter. He remembered this song from
junior high, hearing it in the dark days after Samantha had vanished. The
knowledge in the singer's voice had always caught his attention. He'd overcome
something huge; underneath the bouncy Caribbean rhythm was a man singing his
way out of the depths of darkness and loss. It had struck a chord with Mulder
then. It struck one now.

"Gone are the dark clouds that had me blind," he sang, failing to even get
within hailing distance of Nash's much higher voice. "It's gonna be a bright
--"

He pointed at Scully as the backup singers echoed, "Bright." She just stared at
him.

"Bright," he sang, and pointed at her again.

"Bright," Scully said flatly, and Mulder smiled.

"Sunshiny day!" he finished, and tapped his fingers on the steering wheel as he
waited for the next verse. Scully put her elbow on the armrest in the door, the
pad of her thumb pressed against her lips. Mulder sang on.

"I think I can make it now, the pain is gone." He heard Scully inhale. Out of
the corner of his eye, he saw her turn her head quickly to look out the window.

"All of the bad feelings have disappeared...." Thumbs hooked under the steering
wheel at 11 and 1, he gestured out the windshield with his fingers, keeping
watch on Scully in his peripheral vision. "Here is that rainbow I've been
praying for..."

In reality, it was an orange road sign promising construction and a single lane
of traffic half a mile ahead, but he was on a roll.

"It's gonna be a bright --"

Scully covered her mouth with one hand and her shoulders rose. Mulder
recognized the posture -- he saw it so rarely that it was burned into his
memory -- and he felt his own fragile facade begin to slip.

"Bright, sunshiny day," he finished, his voice trailing away.

Scully's hand moved to cover her entire face, fingertips pressing hard against
her forehead. The song still chugged along -- "Look all around, there's nothing
but blue skies..." but Mulder stopped singing. He wanted to turn off the radio,
but that felt inadequate. Instead, he reached over the wide space between their
seats and put a hand on Scully's knee as she sniffled and gulped quietly.
Eventually, she put a hand on his.

"Do we know where we're going yet, Mulder?" she asked, her voice still thick
with tears.

He had to admit it. "No."

Scully sighed. "I don't know that I can get used to calling you George."

Mulder said nothing. He hadn't called her Katie -- the name she'd chosen --
once since they'd left Georgetown.

"But this is the right thing to do." She said it as a statement, but he heard
the unspoken question. He glanced into the rearview mirror. The red butterfly
dangling from Scully's baby scaffolding spun around the bar like a gymnast to
the accompaniment of little baby noises.

"I hope so," he said. "I hope so."

-30-
 
 

The song list:
"Scheherazade," by Rimsky-Korsakov
"Freebird," by Lynyrd Skynyrd
"How Soon is Now," by The Smiths
"Raspberry Beret," by Prince
"Baker Street," by Gerry Rafferty
"I Can See Clearly Now," by Johnny Nash

Music curator: Mr. Segretti. Other research assistance from amazon.com,
getlyrics.com, Napster and Washington's Only Classic Rock Station, 94.7 FM.

Beta Band: Haphazard Method, EPurSeMouve, and Barbara D. on fluegelhorn