By Sabine
emilyss@mindspring.com
 
 

Date: Wed, 7 Jun 2000
CATEGORY: A, UST, post-"Requiem"
RATING: R, for protection.
ARCHIVE: Gossamer, Xemplary, Spookys okay. Everyone else okay too. Tell,
don't ask.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: Thanks to YV for Machete! Beta, August and everything
after. This is for L.B., M.S., S.E.P. and J/A.

"We've inherited hope--
the gift of forgetting.
You'll see how we give
birth among the ruins.

Yeti, we've got Shakespeare there.
Yeti, we play solitaire
and violin. At nightfall
we turn lights on, Yeti.

Up here it's neither moon nor earth.
Tears freeze.
Oh Yeti, semi-moonman,
turn back, think again!"
-- Wislawa Szymborska
from "Notes from a Nonexistent Himalayan Expedition"

+ + + + + + +

"Will she know?"

"She won't know."

"She'll blame herself. It will kill her."

"It's up to you, Mr. Mulder."

Mulder rubbed his eyes and tried to ignore the voices in his head, clicks
and beats and distraction. He took a deep breath.

"Okay," he said, pressing his fingers to his brow. "I don't guess I have
much choice."

"Very well," the voice said, with words.

He hadn't known there'd be so much blood.

+ + + + + + +

Maggie sat at the kitchen table, tracing patterns in spilled salt on its
surface and watching her daughter do the dishes.

"You'll do fine, Dana," Maggie said for what must have been the thousandth
time that evening. "You'll make a great mother."

Scully turned around, her hands soapy and her fingers pruned from the warm
water. She looked at her mother and let out a breath through her nose.
"Clock's ticking and I'm already tired, mom."

"I told you to let me take care of the dishes."

"And I told you I wanted to do it myself." Scully twisted her mouth into a
smile. "If I can't be eight months pregnant and do dishes at the same time,
I can't be a mother and an FBI agent at the same time."

Maggie chuckled. "Yeah, but if you can't be pregnant and *I* can't do the
dishes at the same time, how do you expect me to be a mother and a
GRANDMOTHER at the same time?"

"You do fine with Tara and Matthew," Scully said blandly, wondering when
she'd stopped thinking of her nephew as Bill's son and started thinking of
him as the child of Bill's Teutonic wife. Probably when her back started
hurting and she'd seen the last sonograms of her own baby daughter and had
clapped shut the fourth book describing, in great detail, the agony of labor
pains. Three weeks away. She'd agreed to an epidural and an episiotomy and
her OB-GYN, Sparkle Yoshi, had booked the good room.

Scully leaned forward, slid out one of the chairs and lowered herself into
it, palms splayed on the table like steadying suction-cups.

For the first six months she'd thought of herself as an abandoned wife. For
the last two she'd thought of herself as a single mother.

She hardly ever thought of Mulder anymore.

+ + + + + + +

It had taken him almost five years to learn The Game, and another two to
climb his way up in the ranks until he was champion of his wing. They were
in the semifinals now, and nightly he was pit against the other wings' best
players, challenging each other for food and chits and hours spent under the
glo-bulb.

Amazing how much of a luxury light can be when there isn't much of it, and
up here there was light in exactly two rooms per wing, for exactly two hours
every day. Each of the prisoners was given fifteen minutes weekly, and
Mulder had accrued over an hour in the last several games he'd won.

He'd planned to use it all at once. One of the guys - he wasn't human, but
he wasn't Calfang or Z'rok or any of the other races Mulder was familiar
with either - had brought a book, and even though he couldn't read the words
Mulder liked to look at the illustrations, strange alien etchings cut in
brown and black on thick parchment that felt like dried flesh. He'd let
Mulder borrow it in exchange for a couple boxes of water, and Mulder was
looking forward to his hour alone in the light with the pictures, the only
shapes he'd seen in weeks or months or maybe years.

The glo-bulb was switched on by one of the Faceless Voices, and Mulder
settled into the chair and spread the book on his knees.

His hands were pale. He remembered color, remembered how back home he'd used
to tan and freckle, but his skin was white now, and clammy like the flesh on
his calf had been when they'd taken off the cast after he'd broken his leg
in high school. "Color" was something he remembered vaguely as a word if not
a concept, something lost and left behind like "love" or "speeding ticket"
or "top-40 countdown."

There were only men in Mulder's wing. At least, he assumed so, not being
able to see them and only able to discern from what their voices sounded
like rattling telepathically in his brain. But they'd talked about their
wives and their mates; they'd shared their names and their stories and they
painted each other mental portraits of their homes. They'd all arrived here
at the same time, with no information, no goals, no hope. They'd fought at
first and men had died. Then someone had introduced The Game and they seemed
to forget why they'd wanted to kill one another. Or why they'd ever thought
they could try to leave. They were here for some ambiguous "forever," and,
as people tend to do, they adjusted. And resigned.

Two of Mulder's roommates weren't human; the other was from southern Turkey,
Tarsus, where he'd worked on a boat transporting tobacco. He spoke often -
thought often - of his wife and his daughters and Mulder found himself
missing the man's family as much as he missed anyone he'd left back home.

It was all so long ago, anyway. Seven years now, or so they told him.

He'd gotten used to his thoughts not being his own and after the first few
months of headaches from the telepathic traffic he'd found he liked the
company.

None of the men knew what they were doing here, how long they'd be there or
what was expected of them, and after a while, they stopped caring. They were
fed on schedule, exercised on schedule, talked to on schedule by the
Faceless Voices who told them it was time to go to bed.

Aside from that, they were left alone, and it wasn't so bad.

Seven years in the dark.

Emil stopped asking why Mulder never thought about Scully anymore.

At first it had been because he didn't want to share her; he wanted to hold
onto those memories for himself. But soon they started peeling apart,
flaking away in layers in his brain, their partnership, her rare laugh, the
click of her heels on linoleum, the way she said his name. "Mulder, it's
me." Her face disappeared before her voice did. The heartache went last.

Mulder, with shock, realized he'd been in the light room for several minutes
and hadn't even opened his eyes.

+ + + + + + +

She was trying so damned hard not to scream, so instead she was sweating.

Sparkle giggled behind her paper mask and took Scully's hand. "It's okay,
Dana. You're doing great. You are almost there. Just another centimeter,
maybe two, okay? Even with the episiotomy you are still pretty tiny, you
know." Sparkle giggled again.

The good room had mock bookshelves with mock books on them, and mock vases,
or possibly real vases, with mock flowers. The wallpaper was mock Devonshire
and the bedspread was mock-seersucker, covered with a layer of paperplastic
with a hole cut out. A male nurse slipped ice chips on Scully's tongue and
they melted and evaporated before she could swallow them.

She grunted.

"Have you decided on a name yet, Dana?" Sparkle asked in her Japanese
staccato.

Dana nodded, trying to remember her breathing.

"Mom..." Breath. "Wanted..." Breath. "Melissa..." Breath. "I think."

"That was your sister?"

Scully nodded. Hee hee hee hee hoo hoo hoo. Hee hee hee hee. Hoo. Hoo. Hoo.

"Don't worry," Sparkle said, peering down over her mint-green mask. "Your
mom is on her way. She will be here in plenty of time. Now, did you and the
father ever discuss names for the baby?"

Scully knew the doctor was just trying to distract her, and it was working,
and she appreciated it. She breathed, digging her nails into the sheet to
keep from clawing at her face, trying to scrape off the prickly sweat.

"No," she said. "He..." Breath. "Didn't..." Breath. "Know..." Breath.
"Remember?"

Sparkle nodded. Then she picked up the paperplastic sheet and peered at
Scully's cervix. When she looked up, her eyes shone. "Really close now," she
said. "Your mom had better hurry."

"I want to name her Elizabeth," Scully said rapidly, gesturing for the nurse
to feed her some more ice. He obliged. "Beth. It's a good name. And it
doesn't..." Breath. "Mean..." Breath. "Anything."

Hee hee hee hee. Hoo. Hoo. Hoo.

"Elizabeth Scully," Sparkle repeated. "Is a good name. Yes."

Where the hell was mom?

+ + + + + + +

Bets were being placed.

Someone thought-sent him a series of clicks and he used them to navigate
across the room, forward three, left two, down a little and he found the
stool and the cool sphere and the little lightweight pyramids.

::Ten minutes on East Wing, waterbox and two times dinner.::

Someone threw their bet into the collective consciousness. East Wing: that
was Mulder.

::Doubled:: came an unfamiliar thought-voice from the North Wing, betting on
his champion. Mulder smirked in the dark.

He couldn't lose. Back home he'd had gifts for criminal profiling,
investigative law, a knack for the uncanny. Up here he could work magic with
some thought power, a metallic sphere and a handful of plastic-esque
pyramids. He was always outstanding in his field.

"I want to bet on myself," Mulder's opponent was thinking. It was a deeper
thought, louder somehow, more direct, and directed at Mulder. Something was
familiar about it...

The man was SPEAKING.

Mulder hadn't heard a human voice in years, and even when he'd first arrived
the din had been foreign, alien voices and Emil's Turkish all slowly
replaced by the universal language of thought.

But his opponent was speaking. In ENGLISH. And his voice sounded FAMILIAR.

It couldn't be, though. It must just be the sound of another human after all
this time, but there were traces of an accent, foreign, not American, but
English, native...

::You know him?:: someone thought at Mulder. Emil.

::Do I?:: Mulder thought back at no one and everyone.

"Yes, Mr. Mulder," the voice said. "You can speak to me. No one else in here
speaks English. They won't be able to understand us if we speak."

Mulder remembered light, blinding light, yellow like his eyelids under the
glo-bulb, and a sound, an explosion, he was thrown to the ground, he
remembered the mossy smell of rain on macadam and Scully! He had to save
her, she was dying, she was somewhere, and there was a SYRINGE and ALIENS!
Scully.

::Syringe?:: Someone thought, trying to place the image.

::Car explosion?::

::Scully.:: That was Emil, kindly, and Mulder appreciated the gesture.

"Scully," Mulder said aloud. He marveled at how well his tongue remembered
the route it had to take around his mouth to make those sounds.

"Very good," the man with the accent said. "Now do you remember me?"

This man had helped him. Something about doubt tugged at Mulder but he
didn't remember why. This man was human, familiar, Scully. Mulder swallowed
hard.

"Yes," he said, trying to remember how not to project his thoughts. It had
been so long, a lifetime. Forever. "I thought you were dead."

"That was the general idea," the man chuckled. "I heard you were here. How
are you faring?"

Pain thrummed in Mulder's temples and he tried to shush the thought-voices
so he could remember this man, remember why he didn't trust him, remember
why his first instinct was to lie. All around him people were gossiping,
cheering, placing bets on the game. Mulder's palm sweat around the fistful
of pyramids.

He couldn't think of a single reason to lie. "I'm holding up fine," he spoke
slowly. "Where are we? Do you know what this place is?"

"Yes," said the man. "And I'll tell you, too. There are many things I have
to tell you. I still have contact with the world back home, you know. I can
help you."

"Help me get home?" Mulder's voice was loud, tremulous, frightening even to
him.

The man chuckled again. "No," he said. "You can't leave. You think you've
been up here seven years, but it feels like a lifetime, doesn't it?"

"Yes," Mulder said. "I can't really...remember what home looks like. Or
feels like."

"Or Agent Scully," the man murmured. "You've forgotten her too."

"I've never forgotten her," Mulder whispered.

"It's all right, Mulder," the man said. "This place does that. It's your
home now. It's your life now. And she's moved on too."

"Good," Mulder said, not sure if he meant it. Scully. Was she married now?
Was she still with the X-Files? With the FBI? Was she a doctor in Maine
living in a house on stilts with an adopted Korean daughter named Hye-jung
Moon and a Rottweiler named Nellie?

"You've only been gone nine months," the man said. "Up here time works
differently."

Nine months!

::What nine months?:: Emil asked. Mulder shushed him.

Nine months. Yet she'd moved on. Hell, she could have a BABY in nine months.

"And she is," the man said. "Right now."

Mulder couldn't breathe. "She can't," he choked. "Those bastards left her
sterile."

"Sterile except for their own purposes," the man lilted. "They needed her.
Just like they needed you. For this child."

Just like they needed him for this child.

::Mulder?::

::I'll explain later, Emil. It's okay.::

::Okay.:: Emil sounded dubious.

"It's mine?" Mulder asked.

"Technically speaking, yes. It is. Your own baby daughter."

"Tell me," Mulder said.

"I'll tell you everything," the man said. Mulder could hear the clatter of
the pyramids being dropped and the sound of the steely sphere rolling
against the course playing board. "Only if you win."

"And if you win?"

"If I win, I'll tell you everything anyway. But you will agree to help me.
And the project."

This all sounded too familiar, too many memories of souls sold and lives
bargained for the shady dealings of men who went without names.

But nine months had passed. And Scully was having a baby.

And Mulder was locked away in the dark with a brotherhood of blighted and
bereft men and no reason to doubt.

"Deal," Mulder said.

+ + + + + + +

"Time for your epidural!" Sparkle cooed, rolling Scully over to slip the IV
in. "You're doing SO well, Dana! You're a real trooper."

"I'm so proud of you," Maggie said, her fingers gathered like ropes in
Scully's clutched hand. Scully looked up at her mother through spiky shocks
of sweaty hair.

"Thanks, Mom," Scully whispered, her voice cracking.

"PUSH!" Sparkle cheered, and Scully's knees trembled and her thighs
slackened as the epidural anaesthetic leaked through her muscles.

This wasn't how she'd imagined this moment, back in her youth when she'd had
the luxury of imagining it. There had always been a husband, some
wavy-haired genius who didn't mind getting amniotic fluid on his Dockers
standing next to the bed with a shit-eating grin saying "I love you, Dana; I
love you."

Nine months ago when she'd heard she was pregnant a paternity test assured
her it was Mulder, but no one could assure her that Mulder would come back.

He always had, come back from death, come back from the grocery store, the
motor pool, the brink of insanity. Always left again, but always come back.
She'd assumed he would this time too.

She'd talked to him, in her head at first, and then out loud when no one was
listening and she wanted to remember the sound of his name. "Mulder, it's
me," she'd say, praying that somewhere he was listening.

But months spelled months and Autumn made Winter and there was work to be
done and a life to maintain. And she'd forgotten about him, pushed him aside
the way she'd pushed aside Dad and Missy, cast in iron as good memories and
nothing more.

And now she would bring him into this world again, a part of him anyway, and
years from now when Elizabeth said, "tell me who my daddy was?" Scully
wasn't confident she'd know what to say.

"He was a good man..." she'd begin.

"PUSH!" Sparkle rallied on.

+ + + + + + +

Mulder was winning by a landslide and waterboxes were already changing
hands. He wondered if the other man had thrown the game.

The man thought a series of clicks but Mulder had anticipated that move and
he thought back with a common defense and two more pyramids clattered to his
lap. The steel ball rolled toward him and he caught it.

"My game," he said.

"Well played," the man purred. "You're a worthy competitor."

"Seven years of practice with just about nothing else to do," Mulder agreed,
getting used to speaking out loud again. The thought-voices in the
background had faded and he was just about able to tune them out entirely
and his head felt hollow and lonely.

"A deal's a deal," Mulder said.

"Yes sir," the man said. "Come with me."

He thought-sent Mulder a series of clicks and Mulder traced them with his
mind and his feet, following the man down the corridor.

"They pretend to trust me, but they don't, really," the man said. "That's
why I had us play that ridiculous game."

"You let me win."

"Do you know why you're here, Agent Mulder?"

Mulder thought ::no:: instinctively, before saying the world aloud.

"You've only seen but a tiny fraction of this station you're on. The wing
you're in, there are thousands like it, labyrinthed, for miles and miles and
miles. Millions. Billions and billions of men."

Mulder shivered.

"All of you are here for the same reason, from six different worlds in a
corner of the galaxy. You are the breeding fathers of a generation of aliens
who will establish a foothold on those worlds for the race that brought you
here."

"What can I do about that now?"

The man laughed again, a sickening sound. "Nothing," he said. "The project
is too huge and too efficient to be stopped by one man. Which is why they've
looked the other way when I told them I wanted to make this offer to you. I
had to set up the game as an excuse - can't make it look like we at the top
are pushovers, you know."

"What offer?" Mulder tried to shout but he couldn't remember how to control
the volume of his voice, and it came out like crying.

The man opened the door to a light room and Mulder blinked, his pupils
dilating.

The man looked just as he remembered.

A monitor flicked on, displaying a ruddy landscape of skyscrapers and pointy
rocks that didn't look like Earth. Some thought-clicks and a fade to white,
static swam across the screen.

"Are you certain you're ready for this?"

::Yes:: Mulder thought. He breathed through his nose and let it out, slowly.

+ + + + + + +

"Breathe!" Sparkle chirped, and from the side of the bed, Maggie coached.

Hee hee hee hee HOO HOO HOO.

"Oh, you are so close!" Sparkle said. "Push, Dana!"

The nurse offered ice chips and Scully slapped him away.

"MULDER..." she moaned.

+ + + + + + +

Crying was so unfamiliar to him that when the tears slid down his face he
thought he was broken or bleeding or dead.

He watched Scully on the monitor, tiny and hideous and purple and sweating
and hollering out for him. Her mother was beside her, tears in her eyes;
some doctors and nurses stood around her smiling and telling her to PUSH and
BREATHE and MAKE A CHILD.

And despite it all, Scully was smiling. She glittered like the fucking sun.

Seven years or nine months or seven years and nine months, it didn't matter.
It was her, his last lost everything, the fleshy shell of feminine magic
mixing DNA to make the child that was his. His! And hers, together,
partnership living on and somehow it was okay, then, that Mulder was left up
here forever in the dark.

"Why are you showing me this?" Mulder demanded.

"I wanted you to make an informed decision."

"What decision?"

The man sighed. He keyed in a command sequence on one of the computer panels
and flipped a metal cover up to expose a switch.

"Each of the babies is coded with a sequence of alphanumerics through a
nano-implant in its spine. The device is so small that no doctor would find
it even if she were looking for it, but this code enables the command staff
up here to control the fleet of children, once they're older, to whatever
ends they see fit."

"An alien army," Mulder murmured.

"They will age at six times the rate of human children. By age four they'll
start to want to leave home, to seek out others like them. They'll rebel,
turn against and possibly kill their parents if necessary. Once they've
joined their local camps they will be trained by remote, and within a year a
tribe of five year old children will be ambulatory half-breed killing
machines."

"No," Mulder said. ::No. No. Scully.::

"Flip the switch," the man said. "You'll disable the child right now. Agent
Scully will never have to face the infant, or face her own part in this
armageddon."

"Disable. You mean kill."

"Yes," the man said, locking eyes with Mulder. "They will believe the child
was stillborn."

"What kind of choice is that?"

"What do you think will be better, in the long run? For Scully to bear a
daughter who will grow up to turn against not just her mother, but all of
humanity? Or for this child to be stopped before she is started?"

Stop the child.

Mulder felt his chest tighten. "Will she know?"

"She won't know."

"She'll blame herself. It will kill her."

"It's up to you, Mr. Mulder."

Mulder wondered why the man was helping him, and then stopped wondering. He
had forgotten how not to trust, and he didn't think he needed to remember.

Outside, the men were being rallied for their meal, chattering and gossiping
and picking fights. Mulder rubbed his eyes and tried to ignore the voices in
his head, clicks and beats and distraction. He took a deep breath.

"Okay," he said, pressing his fingers to his brow. "I don't guess I have
much choice."

"Very well," said the man. "Flip the switch."

Mulder kept his eyes on the screen, watching Scully laugh and smile and
holler and push. The doctor cheered.

Without looking away from Scully's sweaty, tiny, perfect, human face, Mulder
flipped the switch.

+ + + + + + +

"I've got a head!" Sparkle shouted. "Keep pushing, Dana!"

Scully pushed, and even with the epidural she felt like her body was being
wrested apart.

A moment, and then, "Dr. Koontz, come here." The second doctor crossed from
the monitor to Dr. Yoshi's side.

Sparkle's face had gone white and she spoke with urgency now. "You must
push, Dana. There is something wrong. You must hurry, so we can save the
baby."

Save the baby. Scully pushed again, her stomach in knots, her bowels
churning, her nails tearing at her mother who was crying, she was crying and
Scully was crying and Mulder wasn't here, damn him, wasn't here to help her
through this and she pushed and the baby was out and Scully covered her face
with her hands.

She already knew what the doctor would say.

+ + + + + + +

Mulder couldn't take his eyes away from the screen, even when the man who
had brought him here turned to leave.

Scully cradled the body of her infant daughter in her arms, red-black
seeping through the towel and staining the mock-designer sheets.

They'd left her alone, the doctors, and even her mother had left, to give
her a moment with the child before they took it away from her for the last
time.

Mulder reached out a hand to touch the screen, tried to brush away a spike
of hair from Scully's forehead but there were years between them, lightyears
and miles.

::Scully:: he thought, like it was the only word that mattered.

She would survive, she would get past this, but she would not forget it. And
the last bits of him that remained with her died with the child heavy and
red-brown in her arms.

::Scully. Always.::

He hadn't known there'd be so much blood.

THE END

feedback welcomed at emilyss@mindspring.com
 
 
 

__
Crazy people can be very persuasive.