TITLE: Falling Upward AUTHOR: Kate Rickman E-MAIL: kate.rickman@mindspring.com URL: http://kate.rickman.home.mindspring.com ARCHIVE: Sure, anywhere, thanks CLASSIFICATION: MSR, mid-ep RATING: PG SPOILERS: Through *Existence* SUMMARY: There are many doors in life. Going through some is easy; getting through others takes more courage. AUTHOR'S NOTE: I couldn't feel comfortable with the remarkable closure we'd been offered until I had established, for myself, what "really" happened in detail after Scully gave birth. I'm sure there's a lot of mid- and post-ep stories out there; thanks for taking the time to read mine. *** "Mulder!" The helicopter thundered overhead, its blades washing dust into the air with each beat. Mulder stumbled through the chaos on the ground, sensing Scully was near, looking for her. Around him, car engines revved and growled. Tires crunched a retreat on gravel as they bumped over rough ground. Mulder caromed off the hood of one car and into another, slipping across the smooth fender, dodging a bumper that came his way. Tree limbs slapped against each other and the wind. Despite the noise and confusion, Mulder heard - or maybe he only sensed - the sound of his name over the sound of hers as he screamed it into the night. "Sculleee!" "Mulder!" Grit caught between his teeth. Dust swirled into his eyes. He struggled to make sense of the abstract shadows thrown by bobbing headlights - cars, people, buildings - all shrouded in dust, seared white by the searchlight as it flicked back and forth through the chaos on the ground. There. A collection of shapes suggested Monica Reyes superimposed on a dark rectangle. He stumbled toward it, dodging the herd of cars nosing away from the old buildings. "How is she?" he screamed at the figure. Reyes. Her light hand on Mulder's arm stopped him as he moved to enter the building. He felt no tension in it, no grief; only relief and a light trembling. "She's inside. She needs to get to the hospital." Hospital the baby it's time I made it thank God, his thoughts tumbled wildly. The fear that had burned through his belly, the spasm that had twisted his heart so tightly it could only flutter instead of beat, now turned to warmth in his cold limbs. He shouldered his way past Reyes into a dark, quiet place filled with the intermittent flicker of candlelight. His eyes strained to adjust. Candles, thick and small, tall and stubby, sprouted from window sills and tabletops, even the floor, their small golden flames twisting, bleeding a waxy scent into the air. Church. It smelled like church, the few times he'd gone with Scully. "Scully?" Where was she? It's time to go. He searched the gloom. Found her. His heart contracted and froze, a small knot, icy cold in his chest. Scully lay propped against the iron headboard of an old day bed, slumped into a pile of bedding gathered across her lap. Her face glistened in the candlelight. Her beautiful red hair curled, matted and wet, against her scalp. Her eyes were closed, her neck bent, her chin rested weakly on her chest. "Scully," her name escaped on a gasp as Mulder sank to his knees, reaching out with numb fingers. She stirred. Her eyelashes fluttered against flushed cheeks. An odd, animal sound rose from the wadded bedding. He put a name to it. Baby. Lights exploded behind his eyes, momentarily blinding him. He blinked as the whimpering turned into the full-lunged cry of a human infant. Scully. Through a shower of purple spots, he saw the corner of her lips turn upward; mingled with the baby's wail he heard his name, whispered. A tiny pink hand, fingers curled, waved in the air between them. Mulder followed the hand to where it disappeared in the tangle of bloody sheets. Blood. Air exploded from his chest. So much blood! Is this normal? Panic strangled the breath in his throat. A great weight pressed into his chest as a light touch found his shoulder. He looked up. Scully, smiling. Relief. He remembered to fill his lungs. He found his hand suspended in midair. Tracing Scully's damp cheekbone with one finger, he brushed wet strands off her forehead and into her hair with fingertips that tingled strangely. He reminded himself to exhale as Scully smiled against his hand; he followed her gaze down to where the tiny, squalling infant lay in her arms. Baby. Pink and distinctly human, its face twisted and red, the infant dragged air into its damp lungs and expelled it in a long, indignant wail. The raw end of a clipped umbilical cord bobbled against linen, its thin stalk adorned with what appeared to be a shoelace, knotted then tied in a neat bow around its base. Blood. Streaks of the stuff A large, soaked area glistened darkly in the candlelight. Deep red against white. Too much blood. Scully needs to get to the hospital, he remembered Reyes' warning. Reyes was right. He gathered Scully, the baby, and the bundle of sheets against his chest. They weighed nothing compared to the adrenaline rush that powered his arms. He spun, off balance, through the candles, dragging soaked linens through the flames, knocking some candles over, extinguishing others. He lunged, blind to everything but the pale rectangle of moonlight streaming through the door. Hospital. Outside, shrouded with a thin veil of dust, the helicopter sat lightly on its skids, resting in moonlight and darkness, its blades idly churning the air overhead. Waiting. Choking on the fine mist, Mulder tucked his head down and bolted across the empty road. Hospital. He fumbled his way into the helicopter only vaguely aware of the pilot and Reyes guiding him, helping them. Lifting Scully and the baby, he barely noticed the familiar scent of his Mother's perfume over the tang of aviation fuel. A crystalline flash at the edge of his vision recalled Melissa Scully and the crystal she wore tucked against her throat. As the jet engine wound through the octaves and the aircraft trembled, Samantha's girlish voice seemed to fill his ear, calming him. They crowded the rear compartment - Mulder, his mother, his sister, Scully, her sister, and the baby - with Mulder holding Scully and the baby in a tangle of arms, legs, and sheets. With a final shudder, the tiny craft popped into the air, tilted, then clawed its way through the bright starlight. *** "Mr. Mulder." He rose through densely layered darkness, fumbling toward the sound of his name, rubbing his eyes and blinking against the brutal glare of neon light. Legs clad in green scrubs blocked his vision like two mossy logs, one piled atop the other. Mulder peeled his face from the naugahyde and sat up, massaging the stinging creases that furrowed his cheek. An older man, white-haired with stubble on his chin, looked down at him. He carried a clipboard in one hand and a dangling surgical mask in the other. "Your...er," the doctor consulted the chart, searching for the proper relationship, "uh...Miz Scully is going to be just fine." Mulder struggled for air as relief crashed over and around him. He pushed against the couch and swam to his feet. "There was some tearing..." the doctor continued in measured Southern tones. Tearing! A searing pain tore through him; he bent and grasped his lower belly. "...that took a few stitches." Mulder fought to reconcile tearing, stitches, and the doctor's smiling face. He couldn't. The pain in his belly settled lower and burned there. "Son, are you OK?" the doctor's voice came from somewhere over his head. "The baby?" Mulder croaked at the black and white tiles beneath his feet. "He's fine." He! A son. Mulder's knees threatened to deposit him in a heap on the linoleum. "Scully?" "She's fine. Exhausted...sore...but just fine." Fine. Now there's a relative concept. He was certain the doctor hadn't factored the action of alien replicants into his prognosis. With a fatherly hand, the older man guided him a short distance down the hall, leaving him outside an open doorway. Mulder grimaced his thanks, watching the doctor move away before glancing inside. Tinny announcements for Doctor This and Nurse That ricocheted along the glossy walls, sliding off impossibly clean cream paint, rolling past him into the sterile brightness. Somewhere, an alarm sounded. It suddenly stilled. Mulder shuffled up to the threshold and peered inside. Scully lay swaddled by dimmed lighting, her head nestled in the softness of a deep pillow, her eyes closed, her fingers unfurled in sleep. A natural flush colored her cheeks. At the bedside stood a tiny bassinet. He strained against the silence and heard nothing from either mother or child. Mulder rolled his shoulders, stiff muscles and joints crackling loudly in his ears. He worried a bit of loose paint with one fingernail. He scuffed his shoes on the linoleum outside the room. He leaned against the door frame, watching Scully sleep. 1992. Maryland, Eastern Shore. Wind whipped across the open door, through the rectangle of painfully blue sky that filled the cargo bay with cold light. Mulder could hardly hear the blood pounding through his veins for he hiss of the wind and the low-pitched drumming of the plane's engines. Air caught and dragged at the trailing edge of the door. Near the door, clad neck to ankle in bright orange nylon, stood Reggie Perdue, his supervisor, his mentor, his friend. Reggie, an ex-Ranger who did two tours in 'Nam, along with his Ranger buddy Seth Perelman, liked to jump out of planes for fun. Regularly. Clears what ails you, Reggie claimed. Most of Mulder thought they were nuts. About ten percent of him saw the point to it. Today Reggie had stuffed Mulder's willing ten percent into a old jump suit and onto the airplane, forcing his misgivings to come along for the ride. A heavy mass of harness and parachute pinned Mulder to the safety of a long bench running down the far side of the fuselage. He listened idly as Reggie and Seth discussed weather, equipment, and conditions at the drop zone, their voices crackling over the radio in his helmet. He pulled the borrowed goggles over his eyes and adjusted them against his face, seeing the world orangely through them. "Mulder!' Reggie motioned with his free hand. "Let's do it!" Yeah, yeah. Mulder swayed to his feet, found his balance, then stood with both shoes planted on the safety of the deck, gloved fingers of one hand twined through the rope mesh above his head. He moved hand over hand, trading one grip for the next, sliding his feet, never losing full contact with the deck. A foot from the door he stopped, welding both hands to a rail near the opening. The wind battered his face now, icy cold against skin already chilled with nervous anticipation. Far below, tiny fields dotted the darker woods; a web of thin gray roads snaked from the Chesapeake Bay, glittering in the West, to the Atlantic Ocean, behind him to the East. They flew north along the middle of the peninsula. "Ready?" Reggie's voice boomed in his ear. Good question. Mulder studied the altimeter on his wrist, watching the black needle bobble just above the numeral ten. He peered cautiously past the tips of his shoes. There can't possibly be 10,000 feet between me and that tiny cluster of pale boxes; he worked geometry against the flat image in his brain to raise a small town from it. The jump suit whipped painfully around his legs. "Ready when you are," Seth urged Mulder forward with the words. Ready? Mulder felt a light pull from either side of his harness: Reggie and Seth, ready to follow him out. He thought of Samantha, the cold wall that was his father, and the blank wall that was his mother. He considered the numb spot that should have throbbed with pain or regret or recrimination for his failed marriage, but didn't. Demons he couldn't name pecked at him from all sides. He stared into the soft arms of the wind, visualized falling into its embrace, imagined flying away from it all under the warm eye of the sun. "Ready," he called, filling his lungs with cold air in place of the words. He shuddered. "One!" he inched up to the opening, looking for the will to throw himself at the sky. "Two!" The wind sucked at him, pulling, wanting. Just do it, Mulder. Do it. "Whatthehell...THREE!" Mulder cursed beneath his breath, stepped into air, and tumbled away from his words, the plane shrinking into the crystal clarity of the sun. "Doctor Morse, please call extension 3566. Doctor Morse, extension 3566 please." Mulder blinked rapidly, clearing the bright memory from his eyes. The linoleum rolled a bit then steadied beneath his feet. Solid ground. Fussing, baby grumbling, came from the bassinet. The story he'd heard from Reyes had been chilling. And incomplete. She'd joined him in the waiting room, staying just long enough to fill in the blanks with things he needed to know. Scary things. But for this moment, this one perfect moment, that reality existed safely outside this delicate bubble that held only him and Scully and her son. His son. Correction: their son. Mulder finally allowed himself think it, to close the distance between himself and this tiny being, a gap he'd held open since his return, a gap filled with his insecurities and fear, Scully's fear and the uncertainties. Baby sounds, imperative now, finally pulled Mulder over the threshold. Watching Scully sleep, he padded across the room, paused, then peered cautiously over the edge of the bassinet. Their son - Justin, Alan, Adam - punched the air with tiny fists, blinking against the light. "You terrify me, you know," he whispered, reaching beneath the bundle, a bare handful, lifting it from the bassinet. Squirming, nearly weightless in Mulder's hands, the baby -Joshua, Michael, Nicholas - puckered his face, his toothless mouth working randomly in air, searching. Tiny eyes, deep Scully-blue, flicked open and drilled a hole straight into Mulder's soul; all the cold leaked out and warmth spread through his chest instead. "Whatever did I do in my life to deserve a gift like you?" Mulder asked, gently kissing his - Alex's, Edward's, Charles' - little head. He was softer against Mulder's lips than anything he had touched before and he smelled funny - good funny - a combination of soap and milk and baby, Mulder guessed. The baby - Mark, Robert, Paul - gurgled in response, hiccoughed, then made fixin-to-cry sounds. Uh-oh. "Hey there, hey," he cautioned the infant - Tyler, Andrew, Stephen - shifting him to the crook of one arm, rocking him back and forth the way Samantha had made him rock her dolls to sleep. Funny how things circle together in life, Mulder smiled at the memory. Whimpering swelled to a tiny wail. Uh-oh. This rocking thing obviously doesn't work as well with babies of the human variety. What to do now? Elmer and Baby Sue had never done this with their plastic lips. "Hey." Scully. Hoarse, tired. Their son - Jonathan, Matthew, William - hearing his mother's voice, drew a long shuddering breath and shrieked, failing his arms. "I think he's calling your name," reluctantly, desperately, with relief and with regret, Mulder transferred the tiny infant - David, James, Brent - to the waiting cradle of Scully's arms. "Hi sweetie," she whispered to the tiny face, dropping the front of her hospital gown with one hand, releasing a creamy breast. "I think I have something you want," she lifted a red nipple, swollen, milky-ended, to the baby's lips. Both Scully and the baby - Justin, Alan, Adam - fumbled a bit, then connected. Scully's breath caught, a trail of goose bumps rose and fell across the back of her neck as the baby pulled reflexively at her breast. Mulder's knees bent and he sat, suddenly, on the edge of the bed. Scully and the baby - Scott, Peter, Daniel - hardly noticed the bobble, they were so absorbed in each other. With all our awkward fumbling, how did we find this place, Mulder mused. He'd sensed the depth of feeling in Scully, closely held, shuttered against him and everyone else in her life. He'd mined it patiently, slowly, not wanting a sudden move on his part to spook her away. It was better having what little she could offer than having nothing of Scully at all. On the other hand, what kind of encouragement had he offered her to drop those shields? His erratic behavior, his self-indulgent disregard for Scully and everyone else in his life while blindly pursuing the answers he needed to tie up loose ends reaching back to his childhood? Was this child - Philip, Ethan, Patrick - the magic bullet that would suddenly heal their wounds and set everything right? Of course not. But he was a powerful reason to try. And the reason to succeed. Scully's lips curled upward as their tiny son - Eric, Sean, Fox...hold it, NOT Fox...oh, ugh...let's try...hmmm...Walter? No, we don't want to start any more rumors. How about...Christopher. Yes, Christopher. Eric, Sean, Christopher - burped, then continued to suckle. Mulder relaxed into the picture, leaning back with one hand across Scully's legs, watching them. Letting himself love them. Thinking, for the first time, that he could really pull this off. His tired mind wandered again. Godfrey, Alfred, Henry. Gerald, Sherman, Edgar. Sterling, Murray, Herman. Larry, Moe, Curly. Melvin...Frohike would love it. Mulder snorted. "What's so funny?" Did I laugh out loud? He rubbed gritty eyes with a dirty hand. "Sorry. Sleep deprivation." "You're a mess, Mulder." In more ways than one. He struggled to reconcile the love, his fear, simple breathtaking awe, the weight of responsibility, an unfamiliar sense of joy. He looked down and for the first time saw the blood, the birth gore, streaks of dirt, and globs of grease - where did the grease come from, he wondered--he could account for the rest of it - smeared across his T-shirt and jeans. "I'm a mess," his voice misted with emotion, a great, happy, jumbled, mess that burst out of him as laughter instead. "How do you feel?" "Ummm," she nuzzled the soft bundle in her arms, smiling into the fine down of his hair. "Good. Strange. But good. How you do feel?" she looked into Mulder's tired eyes. "Scared. Strange. But good," he agreed. Scared to death, he added to himself. It was much easier stepping into nothing at 10,000 feet. He remembered the thrill of free fall, hurtling toward land, toward oblivion, only a twitch of his wrist and a thin nylon panel between him and the end of him. He remembered thinking the end could be that simple. No twitch. No nylon. No Mulder. "Mulder," Scully raised her free arm to him. "Join us." He dove into the safety of that half circle, buried his face against the side of her neck, and breathed deeply of her scent. Her breath tickled his scalp. The baby made soft suckling sounds somewhere near his ear. Scully's breath slipped in and out, in and out. He surrendered to the rhythms, drifting in their safety. He thought of the journey. Meeting Scully. The slow turn-around of his life. Mistakes. Forgiveness. More mistakes. And now this. His hand twitched on the thin coverlet, crept up, until his fingers twined with hers where she held the baby against her breast. He remembered the burst of the chute, the sudden tug, jerking, rising. Falling upward, he had soared back toward the sun. *** END Once again, thanks for reading. I'm a bit rusty, having not been able to write for the entirety of Season Eight. The whole bizarre story line resolved, I now have a few ideas to explore.