Title:  Dream Life
Author:  Gwinne
Classification: MSR
Rating: PG-13
Spoilers: lots o' bitty ones; post-ep for "Requiem"
Distribution:  Gossamer, Xemplary, Spookys ok; otherwise please ask
Disclaimer:  Not mine, just borrowing them.

Author's Note:  Once upon a time, this started as a Scullyfic improv. 
You can still hear echoes of the elements, listed at end.  

Confession:  Because I'm overly anxious about things like plagiarism 
and have a terrible memory, I have this terrible habit of finding 
influences/similarities between my work and the work of author's I 
like *after* I've written something.  Alas, Jess Mabe's "Bittersweet" 
has a similar nickname for the Sculder baby, and Jean Robinson's
"When Old Friends Meet" is likewise obsessed with dolls.  Blame it on 
Stephen King.




DREAM LIFE

As a child, she had dreams about dolls.  In the northwest corner of 
their shared room, she and Melissa had a whole family of plastic and 
cloth children, asleep in a miniature crib.  Missy adored playing 
house--feeding the dolls their fake formula and putting throw pillows 
under her clothes to pretend she was pregnant--but, even as a tiny 
girl, Dana knew it was just a game.  So while Missy changed imaginary 
diapers, Dana shot BB guns and got into crab apple fights with the 
boys.  Until she started having the dreams:  nightmares of plastic 
babydolls wielding knives and handpuppets trying to strangle her while 
she slept.  Even then, she understood the symbolism.  After that, she 
made sure to play with them every day, even for a few minutes, and the 
dreams stopped.

They started up again after Mulder disappeared.  She dreamed of dolls 
almost as often as she dreamed of her abduction.  She told herself, 
rationally, it had to do with fear of this new-found domesticity, with 
this shift that she was making from the boy's club of the FBI to 
Tupperware parties and diaper bags.  When she woke screaming and 
Mulder held her, she couldn't explain it, feeling as ridiculous as 
when she'd been on that "case" in Maine with the doll she nuked in the 
microwave.

Tonight when she woke gasping she left Mulder wrapped in sage-colored 
down and shuffled into the kitchen.  She sat at the table, sipping 
warm milk and stroking her belly absentmindedly, lulled by the gentle 
undulations of her child's movement.  

"Scully?"  Rubbing his eyes, Mulder sat heavily in the chair beside 
her.  "You ok?"  She nodded and took another sip of milk.

"The guppy awake?"

She nodded again, a soft smile on her lips at "guppy," the nickname 
she'd given their baby while he'd been gone and she took care of the 
fish, the Scully fish and the Mulder fish and the tiny guppy swimming 
in the tank.  Their family in miniature.

Between the baby kicking and the need to pee, it had gotten hard for 
her to fall asleep and the nightmares woke her up, while Mulder slept 
surprisingly well, spooned up behind her with his left hand on her big 
belly.  Six weeks to go.  This was her dream life and it was scaring 
her senseless.

* * *

She didn't know what to do with herself all day while Mulder was at 
work.  Take it easy, the doctor said, high blood pressure, the doctor 
said, pre-term labor, the doctor said, Dana, you need to relax.

What she needed was to get out of the house.  She pulled on her 
biggest trenchcoat, grabbed her oldest copy of Moby Dick, and headed 
for the coffeeshop not far from the apartment.  She'd always walked 
past it but never allowed herself the indulgence of whiling away the 
afternoon with a book and a hot drink.  It was filled with students 
studying for exams and poets diligently writing in their notebooks.  
She watched people come and go for a while and then settled in to 
read, turning pages between sips of hot chocolate.  

"This seat taken?"  

She knew the voice before she looked up.  "Daniel... you're looking 
well."

"And you are positively radiant."

"Vitamins."  She smiled softly and cleared her throat.  "Please, sit."

"So...how's the FBI?"

"Fine.  How's Maggie?"

"Maggie is...Maggie.  She's a painter who refuses to commercialize her 
work so she doesn't make any money and she refuses to accept help from 
me.  She's living in this rat-trap of an apartment that is literally 
overrun by cats.  It's a wonder she hasn't been evicted."

"But she's living her dream.  She has spirit, Daniel, and courage."

"And how about you, Dana?  Are you living your dream?"

"Yes, Daniel, I am.  I finally am."

* * *

Funny how accidental run-ins with an ex-lover seemed to give her a 
sense of perspective these days.  In the bedroom with a basket of 
clean laundry, Scully wrestled with an obstinate fitted sheet and 
contemplated her conversation with Daniel, about fate and the paths a 
person's life can take.  He was softer and less intense than he had 
been that day in the hospital, when he confessed, all too easily, 
"you're all I live for."  Daniel from the coffeeshop was the Daniel 
she fell in love with years ago, talking about the Hippocratic oath in 
the crisp October air.  They'd all changed and somehow they remained 
the same.  Somehow Maggie the girl in paint-splattered t-shirts had 
become Maggie the struggling artist and cat lady, while she hunted 
aliens and mutants in every conceivable part of the world, from a 
spaceship in Antarctica to a sewer system infested with rats.  All 
that was about to change.  She felt it in the loosening of her joints, 
in the weight of her breasts, in the shimmy of her waterbound baby 
girl.  

"Whatever," she murmured, giving up.  "Folding sheets is a man's job, 
anyway."  She curled up next to a tangle of sheets and waited for 
Mulder to come home.

* * *

"So how was your day, dear?" Mulder was leaning over her, smirking in 
typical his parody of this domestic life.  It was like living with Rob 
Petrie all over again, only this time they shared more than 
toothpaste.

She exhaled slowly.  This was all so new, Mulder coming home from work 
and waking her with a kiss, joining her on the bed with a pile of 
sheets.  "Fine."

"I see."

"Mulder, don't be like that."

"Like what?"

"Don't get huffy just because I use an adjective you find 
distasteful."

"I don't find it distasteful, I find it uncommunicative and I thought 
we were beyond that."  He paused.  "I don't want to fight with you, 
Scully, so would you please tell me what I did to piss you off?"

"It's nothing, Mulder.  I'm sorry.  Just lie down with me for a 
minute?"

He set the basket of laundry on the floor and took his place on the 
queen-sized bed.  Ordinarily they both preferred facing away from each 
other, his body fitted against her rounded back, but tonight he needed 
to see her face.  Her eyes were bright and wet, the way they got when 
she tried overly hard not to cry.  He ran his thumbs over her 
cheekbones and kissed her forehead.  Then she buried her face in his 
blue dress shirt and sobbed.

"Scully?  Sweetheart please talk to me."

A sniffle turned into a snort.  "Sweetheart?  In almost eight years 
you've never once used any term of endearment on me or anyone else.  
Get a girl pregnant and that gives you a right to call her sweetheart, 
is that how it goes, Agent Mulder?"

"Something like that, yeah."

She wiped the wet skin under her eyes with her fingertips.  "I'm 
sorry.  Blame it on hormones or lack of sleep or a conversation with a 
certain cardio-thoracic surgeon that I really didn't want to have."

"You saw Daniel today?"

"Yeah.  It wasn't bad, actually, just unexpected, but it made me think 
a lot about the path my life has taken.  The path our lives have 
taken."

"You're not happy?"

"Did I say I wasn't happy?  I'm ecstatic, Mulder.  I mean, my god, 
we're having a baby and we're not too bad at this cohabitation thing. 
 But it's like I turned my head and someone pressed fast forward on 
the remote control.  I mean, it hasn't even been a year since our 
first kiss. . . "  Suddenly he was kissing her again, tender and 
passionate all at once.  Like him.

"What was that for?" she said huskily, when their mouths separated.

"Just wanted to let you know how happy I am, honey-bunch."

"God I love you, poopy-head."

* * *

They held hands on the way to the restaurant.  She detailed her 
rendezvous with Daniel between his snide comments about bureaucracy 
and afternoon meetings at the bureau.

"Daniel asked me a question today, Mulder, and the answer was so 
obvious I didn't need to think about it."

"What did he ask?"

"He asked me if I was living my dream.  I know he wanted me to say 
that I wasn't, that my dream life revolved around him, or even that I 
was, that murdering psychopathic dolls and moth-men was my lifelong 
ambition. . . But I said yes, Mulder, because I have you and this 
baby.  It is a dream life because I desired it so deeply and never 
thought I could have it."

He rubbed his thumb over the thin leather of her gloved hand and 
waited.  If she had more to say, she would say it.

She sighed deeply.  There it was.  "I guess I'm afraid, Mulder, that 
I'm going to wake up and this dream life will disappear.  What makes 
this any more substantial than you imagining you lived in a house with 
Diana and a refrigerator perpetually filled with sunflower seeds?"

"The seeds in the fridge should have been a big tip off, huh?"

"What you found out, though, was that your dream life, living with 
Samantha in reach, was really a nightmare set in a posh neighborhood."

"You're saying what if what you thought you wanted turns out to be the 
opposite?  What if you can't stand changing diapers and taking the kid 
to endless ballet recitals and spelling bees and going to McDonalds 
instead of the Phoenix Dumpling on a Friday night?  What if you 
remember the real reason we never shared hotel rooms on the road and 
ship me off to the Gunmen as a punishment for leaving the toilet seat 
up one too many times?"

"No, Mulder, I'm saying what if I'm not good at it.  What if I do 
something wrong and the dream turns into a nightmare?"

Realization hit, the way it did when they were on a case and he was 
listening under her words, not to them, his ears attentive and his 
mind somewhere else.  "The dream about the dolls. . . you think that's 
about you being a bad mother?"

They stood next to the doorway to the restaurant, letting customers 
enter in their winter coats.  He pulled her into his arms, tucking her 
head under his chin.  "The thing is Scully," he whispered into her 
wind-blown hair, "there was one thing missing in the dream.  The dolls 
didn't have a dad."

* * *

Taking her to dinner was better than any dream.  It gave them an 
excuse to get out of the cramped apartment when she'd been resting 
most of the day on the couch, and it gave them time to connect with 
each other in the way they'd just started to when she got pregnant and 
he got abducted.  He loved watching her eyes widen when she saw a 
pasta dish with artichokes and then linger on the list of 
desserts--tiramisu and creme brulee and a rich espresso cheesecake.  
He'd cherished mealtimes most of all since he'd been back, for it was 
then that he saw the old Scully, the one he fell in love with over a 
dribble of barbecue sauce on her chin.  And it was then that he fully 
understood how much she was giving up to give him this child.  Every 
day she craved something new, and he teased her mercilessly about it.

"I don't know how you can even think about eating mushrooms after that 
run-in with the giant fungal organism."  In truth, he wasn't sure he 
could stomach it.

"Well," she folded her hands and looked up from her menu, "to put it 
in the simplest terms, I'm perfectly capable of distinguishing between 
your garden variety mushroom and yellow, hallucinogenic slime.  Aren't 
you?"

"Funny, Scully.  I really didn't need to be reminded of that little 
field trip to North Carolina."

"So, Agent Mulder, are you trying to tell me that you haven't eaten a 
single *fungal organism* in over a year?"

"No."

"Not on a pizza?"

"No."

"In hot and sour soup?"

"No."  

"On a hamburger?  Fried and dipped in bleu cheese dressing?"

"No, Scully, would you drop it already?  I would not eat them in a 
bowl, I would not eat them on a roll."

"Why are you talking like Dr. Seuss?"

He reached across the table and took her hand.  "You know what, 
Scully?  It's really good to be home."

* * *

Climbing into bed, she wrestled with pillows, tucking one under her 
head, one between her knees, one under the "maternal bulge"--that's 
what one of those silly books that Byers kept buying called it--while 
Mulder stood by and watched.  Once she was settled, he slid behind her 
and pulled the clean top sheet and comforter over them.  Nocturnal 
like her father, Guppy tested her fins in her amniotic sea.  

"Pipe down in there," Mulder said, running his hand over the length of 
Scully's stomach.  "The old folks need their sleep."

"How'd you do that?  She never listens to me." Scully grumbled, her 
face smashed into the pillow.

"Daddy magic.  Goodnight, Laura."

"Night, Rob."

For long minutes, Mulder listened to Scully's breathing deepen and 
slow.  Then, like a girl at a slumber party, she started giggling.  "I 
would not eat them with a fox, I would not eat them from a box."

"Or wearing socks."

She stifled a giggle and burrowed into the covers.  "Goodnight, 
Mulder."

"Sweet dreams, sweetheart."


FIN


This started as a Scullyfic challenge to rewrite the hated "Teso dos 
Bichos," hence the elements:  Rats in a toilet, hallucinogenic goop, a 
room full of ill-tempered cats, Scully attacked by a handpuppet, 
Seuss-like dialogue.  I'll admit to being a little lax.  I promise to 
do better next time.

Thanks to everyone who encouraged me to get Mulder home and finish 
this up.  Is this what you wanted?  Feedback cherished at 
gwinne@yahoo.com