Title: Sacrificed Futures Author: Nerys (ki-nerys@SWBell.net) Summary: response to the June COX challenge (see the description of the challenge following the story). Mulder has returned a year after his abduction in 'Requiem' to find that Scully has given birth to a child. The decision that she makes changes both of their lives. Rating: R (a bit o' bad language here and there) Legal Disclaimer: Chris Carter, 1013, and Fox own all. I don't own jack-the care and feeding of him got to be too costly and I returned him to the clone factory in exchange for the Quequeg clone. Note-house training a clone dog--NOT for the meek! Category: Mulder POV, touch o'angst, touch o'MSR Spoilers: Requiem, Requiem, Requiem!! Archive: Sure, just keep all headers attached and let me know if you would, please. Feedback: Much appreciated and to the above addy. Flames? Sure! Smoke if ya got 'em! *************************************************************************** You know, it's strange. I've spent my life wanting to see, wanting to believe, wanting to know, and when it was finally before me, when I found myself surrounded and irradiated by the truth, all I wanted was the blissful peace of ignorance. I found so much truth that I cannot sort it out in my head. Images, memories, feelings, it's all swimming around the gray matter like a school of starving piranha, consuming me, devouring me, taking my sanity and stripping it down to its barest bones. I have come home now, after a year of my willing abduction. I found myself lost in the tearful embrace of my partner, of the better half of my soul, and all I could think was 'too much for too long'. How could I explain to her what I had seen? How could I try to put it into words when I could not put it into thought? I couldn't. I can't. Not now, not yet. She'll wait. With that patient, concerned silence. She will wait as she always has. Scully will not push me to offer my truth. And yet, even as she held me weeping, murmuring in that way that she does, even in my current state I could see that there was more. Scully has come to a truth of her own and I could see that she wanted to tell me, to show me. I sensed her trepidation and that sparked a fear within me that was all too familiar. After my years of searching, I just didn't want any more revelations. No more truth, thank you. No more doors opened or lights turned on. No more lives changed. Not one more life changed. I should have persisted in the pursuit of my ignorance. I should have held out for another hour, for another minute. Anything, just to keep the peace that we had found upon my return. If I could go back and prolong the moment before she told me, I would. Instantly. My shock was ugly and my guilt now for what she has done, what she has done for me, is the most overwhelming burden that I have ever had hung around my neck. You see, Scully had a child. I know, I know. Scully cannot have had a child. It was not medically possible. And yet, she has. While I spent my year learning more than I ever wanted to know about aliens and life beyond this terrestrial sphere, Scully carried a child and gave birth to it while I was gone. My first question, as I am sure is yours, is how? Not who or what, though those are logical questions. But how? The conception, as I suspected, was not a natural one and nor could it have been. Some time in the last year, Scully was taken, again, and this child, this life was put within her. The adage goes that you should not look a gift horse in the mouth, but it is not within Scully's nature or my own to blindly accept something like this as a divine miracle. What she's been through, what we've both seen has made us too cynical and too wise for such blind faith. Though Scully wouldn't like my saying it, God has a sense of humor, my friend. And, in my experience, it's a twisted one. Though, I don't think we can attribute what I've been calling 'Scully's miracle' to the all mighty. No, I think we can credit this to the smoking glory of CGB Spender. The smoking man. The cancer man. The man who has spent his life trying to dictate what the world will become and what futures we are all to have. The man who took part of my mind from me and put it within his own apparently felt the need to give something back. Though to me or to Scully, I am not certain. Now, don't get excited. The baby is not mine. Or not entirely mine. Shit, we're not even certain if the child is entirely human. Scully, being Scully, has had the full range of medical tests run on her child since the moment she found out she was pregnant. What do we know from those tests? That it is predominately human and predominately Scully's child, and that the child does have some of my genes. However, DNA testing has shown some rather unusual, though where Scully and I are concerned, not unexpected results. The baby's DNA is a triple helix. Human DNA for the most part, tightly coiled around a strand of genes that cannot be readily identified. Though there are a host of doctors and geneticists greedily slobbering over trying to do so. Spender Sr. took away Scully's ability to have children and in its place he put a child conceived in a lab with DNA that I am certain is not of this Earth. Though he would call it his gift, I cannot help but think of it as his final attempt at controlling one more life, one more future. He had to leave his mark. Samantha wasn't enough. I wasn't enough. His own son wasn't enough. He had to have Scully too. If he wasn't already dead, believe me he would find himself starring down the barrel of my gun. And this time, I would not hesitate to pull the damned trigger. Still, for all of its unknown origin, for all of its remarkable DNA, Scully's baby is a healthy child. A girl that she named Mary Margaret. Sounds Catholic, doesn't it? Sister Mary Margaret, the only child of my personal saint, Scully. She didn't find the humor in that as I did. Though after the last year, I'll take my humor where I can find it. Frohike still dresses funny, Skinner's still easy to jibe, and Scully's child has a name that I find amusing. Okay, so I'm a bastard. That's not a new revelation either, my friend. What was I saying? Oh, yes. Scully's baby, is, for all intents and purposes, a healthy one. No green fizz oozing up when you take blood, no sicknesses other than your average infant variety. She is, thank you God, a normal child. The fear, the doubt is that she will not always be so. That at some future stage in her development that she will alter, that her abnormal DNA will come into dominance and change Sister Mary Margaret into something that is more alien than human. That fear is already eating steadily away at Scully and I find it gnawing on me as well. As if being a parent wasn't fearful enough, Scully now has the fear of her child's 'other' heritage kicking in. And worse still, is the fear that she will be taken like so many little girls before her. She cannot sleep nights. She will awaken at the slightest sound and check to see if the baby is still there. I cannot imagine what that feels like. Though, if my mother were still alive, I think she could identify readily with Scully's anxiety in that department. How many nights did I wake up to find my mother in my room? After Samantha was taken, several, hundreds even. Even in my late teens, it was not unusual to wake up in the middle of the night to find my mother sitting on my bed, just making sure that I was still there. I don't question her bitterness where my father was concerned. Not any longer. Scully's fear for her child is natural. Now, in addition to that fear, is sadness and loss. It is that look that I see now in her eyes that causes me so much grief. Scully is going to send Mary to live with her brother, Bill. You may remember him. He's one of my biggest fans. I was angry at her. Livid, even. Not that she could just give up the only child that she would ever have, but why she was doing it. The first reason I suppose I can accept. Put simply, little Sister Mary Margaret is safer out of our hands. Scully is not a bad mother, don't misunderstand me. In fact, I don't think I have ever seen her so perfect, so Scully, as she was when she sat there with that tiny infant in her arms. For all that she has sacrificed, for all that she has given up, Dana Scully is a natural at the mothering business. That shouldn't surprise you. It doesn't me. She has more compassion, more love inside of her, than most people can ever hope to achieve. No, she is, even for the short time I'd seen her at it, a wonderful mother. But, as Scully rather vehemently pointed out, the child can never hope to have a normal life here. The doctors and scientists have hounded Scully and her baby both since the first abnormal test result. They want to study. The want to explore. They want to understand. Fuck the life of the child. Fuck her future. This is science, boys and girls. They would not relent and Scully felt that the only hope she had was to send her daughter away where no one had heard of the miracle baby and her funky DNA. The scientists, you see, have not gone public with what they had found. I'd like to think that it was because they found my Scully too formidable a force to screw with, but it is more likely because they would be quite gleefully laughed out of the scientific community. For all of its reality and truth, the discovery of a child with non-human genes is just a little too much of the National Enquirer for the staunch stoicism of the scientific mind. So, that was reason number one for sending the baby to live with her brother. And asshole that he may be, Bill Scully and his less offensive wife are sound choices to care for Mary. Say what you will about the man, but he's a bulldog where his family is concerned. I know. I have the teeth marks in my ass to prove it. He won't let one curious bystander within a mile of that baby. You can count on it. When Scully told me of her very reasonable and logical choice for sending Mary to live with Brother Bill, I should have just shut up and accepted her wishes in this matter. I should have let it drop. I wouldn't feel like I do now if I had. But, for all of my seeming disregard for her sensibilities, for all of the times I have left her wondering and worrying, as I did for the entire year I was gone, I have always had Scully's happiness and best interests at heart. I could see the anguish in her face. It was so apparent in the way her eyes darkened to an unfathomable blue depth as tears fell from them, from the way her lip trembled when she told me, from the way she pushed me away when I thought to comfort her. Though she thought this was the best for Mary, she didn't like it. It was killing her. So, I thought to wave my magic Mulder wand and offer a happier solution. What she said in response almost killed me. I told her to go. To take the baby to Bill and stay there to raise her daughter. Sounds pretty reasonable, after all, doesn't it? Why cause yourself this pain when you can just avoid doing so? Her answer? Because she could not, would not leave me. Not now. Not after a year of being taken to a place that humans thought only existed in dreams and Star Trek. And that was were our argument began. She said that we had work to do. Now, more than ever and that we could not just give up and leave the human race to its own devices when alien colonization via viral infection faces us all. We've had that argument before, she and I. Not so long ago really. Then I thought to protect her from my own hollow causes and send her off to lead a happy life. And I was trying to do the same for both her and her daughter this time. She was angry and yelling. Scully said that I was a selfish, vain ass. I don't think I could argue that point, though I did try. How could I, she asked, think that this was still my own personal quest? What did I think she had been fighting for all of those years? Was I really so egotistical that I really thought that all of this had to do solely with me? That was when I started yelling back. She didn't understand what I'd seen. It changed everything. Everything. Better that she let it go, let me go, and try to live her life with her daughter while she can. Scully replied that it meant nothing to live in blind, false happiness knowing that the world could end without skipping a beat. She owed more to the world, to the universe to just let it all go and so, she said, did I. I never denied that it was my fate to continue on with this quiet battle, I just didn't want her or her daughter to become yet another victim of the war. That was when she shut me up, and rather effectively too. Her daughter, as she pointed out, was not entirely human. What would happen to her if we didn't keep trying to understand and stop what was surely coming? What future do alien and human hybrids have in the post colonization world? You've seen the answer to that as well as I have. There is no future. When the tide comes to drown us all, mankind will not tolerate a bastard child in their midst. And even should she evade the tender ministrations of man's wrath, the aliens don't seem to tolerate a mixing of genes either. She would die just as soon as man found her out or some alien bounty hunter tracked her down. The only choice, the only way to save her, to give her a future, Scully said, was to prevent colonization from happening. She was right. Damn her fucking logic all to hell, Scully was right. And I knew it. But that doesn't change the fact that she's sending her child away to stay with me. To be by my side and join me in this hopeless, futile war. How can we hope to win? How can we, the two of us, hope to stop what men like CGB Spender have spent a lifetime putting into action? And worse, how can she do this to me? I know, that *is* selfish and megalomaniacal. But I have such a responsibility now. To Scully, to her daughter, to the entire fucking world. I cannot give up and I cannot fail. Before, it was all about me. It was my truth to find and my quest to undertake. But now Scully is in this with me to the bitter end. I cannot fail her. No matter how much fear I have now after my abduction, I cannot fail her. My darkest nightmares were realized during my time away. I have seen what these people, what these aliens are capable of. Despite the beauty that can create, despite the technological and biological advances that I have seen them show off, the future that they would have for mankind is more terrible than anything I had ever conceived. If only my father and the smoking man had seen what I have, they would have spent their days trying to stop this, even as they spent sleepless nights jumping at shadows and wetting the bed. It is not a pleasant future before us. And all that stands between it is Scully, myself, and whomever else will help us. So, though we will fight and probably die without the world knowing the wiser, I want someone, *you*, to know what we have given up, what Scully has given up. I want you to know how terrible it is to see such a strong person cry and how helpless it feels when you realize that you cannot take away her pain and that, in all the ways that count, you are the reason for it. I want you to know that I will take care of Scully, even as she takes care of me, and that despite the gulf that has risen so large between us, that we will never be without one another. Even now when I don't think I can bear the guilt that she has unintentionally laid upon me, even as she looks out the window watching the 747 take her daughter and her mother far away from our destructive lives, even now as aliens plot our futures with the same casual disregard that you'd give to an ant on your door, even now, we will never let each other go. We are all that we have, she and I. Each other, our sacrificed futures, and this hopeless war. We are still, despite our emotional separation, more thoroughly joined than any two people have been. Lovers know nothing of the sort of bond between Scully and I. Even if she pushes me away for the next ten years and tells me that she's 'fine, Mulder, just fine', what we share is more incredible, even as it is more painful, than any pair of lovers will ever know. She is my life. She is my conscience, and my soul. And everything that I have, everything that I do from this moment on is for her. Not for you, not for the world, not even for little Sister Mary Margaret. But for her. End COX June Challenge: Requiem challenge B--Requiem also showed us that Mulder has been abducted. Assume he is not found until at least a year later. He returns to find Scully has had this baby. How does his return, and Scully's new motherhood, affect their lives? Is the baby his? How does he react if it is not? There is only one catch here: you may *not* write sappy lovefic where they are just happy as clams, get married, and raise little David William Foxy in wedded bliss. We want something new and unique, not a clone of the 10,000 babyfics which already exist out there in the world.