Title: Submerged Author: Jssangel (Jssangel@aol.com) Rated: R? for sexual situations Classification: S/MSR/UST Spoilers: Everything up to Requiem. Post Ep for Requiem. Summary: Where do babies come from? A possibility which addresses a loose end from an earlier season that CC is apparently going to ignore. (I know that the medical gymnastics implied herein couldn't happen in 5 months. I have mentally set Requiem in early October and sort of stretched the season out over those months to make it a tiny bit more realistic.) Authors notes: This is my first post - actually my first completed story. I have all these bits of things sitting on my hard drive, inspired not just by the show but also by the wonderful fanfic that I have spent the last few years reading. I am dedicating this to DashaK - who will be shocked, as she doesn't know me from Eve - but whose stories (including her Requiem post-ep) always inspire, and whose casually kind "keep plugging away at it" in response to my fan letter stuck in my head and convinced me to try. Clearly, I do not own Mulder, Scully, or the X-files. Equally clearly, I would love feedback. **************************************************************** ********** I am sitting in my bathtub naked, the water starting to fill in the blank space around me. Usually I don't climb in until the faucet has churned up a cloud of bubbles and I can step though the scented mist to sink into the water surrounded by luxury. However, I think I read once that bubble bath is bad for pregnant women, that somehow it can flow inside your body and hurt the fetus. So I sit, shivering against the cold porcelain as clear hot water surges up around me, watching the pale skin of my feet change color as they are submerged, and contemplating my highly unscientific fear of vanilla bubble-bath. I am a doctor, I should know what is dangerous and what is not. In all probability the only risk presented by vanilla bubble bath is the production of a baby born craving cookies. The water has gathered across the bottom of the tub now, my backside is surrounded by a steaming puddle. The water laps at my skin and tickles me with soft fingers. I think about Mulder's long elegant fingers, how they would feel caressing my thighs, running over my ass and between my legs. I can't restrain a snort of derision at the image of Romance Novel Mulder, no doubt mumbling poetry or effusive compliments or avowals of eternal love into my shell-like ear as he gently caresses me. The water has thundered up to my bellybutton now and I think of the inverted mirror of bellybuttons, mine connecting me to my mother, hers to her mother, and my little one's to me. Is that what I am going to call him now? Little one? Him? God! Her? There needs to be a new pronoun invented for unborn babies and for God. I can see the lower half of my body submerged and flushing under the water as it climbs towards my breasts. Now there's a much more realistic picture of Mulder; an inexorable tide of heat, always climbing towards my breasts! The water hits my nipples and the sensation bounces from them to my belly-button and back. Weirdly erotic. In the steamy heat of the bathroom they don't pucker so much as they expand - pinkish brown and fat, waiting to be noticed. I think about the look on Mulder's face when I caught him looking down at them, instead of at my face, as we sat on his couch weeks ago, talking about wishes. He accumulated all this information about pregnancy and hormones and their effect on the body at some point. He can spout medical statistics for hours and has a knack for painting pictures with his facts, holding up our holy grail of conception and turning it backwards and forwards with his words. The sound of his oddly flat monotone went slightly rough as he described how a pregnant woman's breasts swell and fill out as her body gets ready to feed its young, scraping over my nipples and sending a twang between my legs. The answering twang tightened my breasts, and my nipples hardened under his gaze. He went on looking down as though he could stare through my shirt and see straight through to my skin, and there was this breathless pause as I wondered if he would get past that infinitesimal move towards me, which is never more than a millimeter, and always sends heated molecules of air rushing at me to collide with my skin. He looked as though he would give his right arm to get to my breasts, and for a moment I though about ripping off my top and letting him have at it. I didn't. Yet another missed opportunity between us. I am such a bitch. "Fairly happy". Huh. The water is now up to my shoulders and lapping dangerously at the edge of the tub. I consider just letting it run on and on, out and over the edges to make a lake out of my pristine bathroom floor, letting it fill up my apartment and wash though it. I imagine that the microscopic particles of glass, that I am sure still dust my floor after that nauseating encounter with Donnie Pfaster, will be swept off in the tidal wave pouring from my tub, and will scour my apartment clean. They will scrape the bloodstains off the floor, and the dust out of the corners, and the memories of Mulder out the upholstery, like some catastrophic version of those weird carpet cleaner commercials where a giant shadowy fish springs up to confront the woman with the vacuum cleaner. Abruptly I reach forward to the faucet and wrench the water flow off. The sudden silence is not forgiving to my shuddering breath as I try to pretend that I am not on the ragged edge of sobbing or maybe laughing. It turns out that another one of Mulder's colorfully recounted Fun Facts About Fatherhood, concerning the wild emotional swings of expectant mothers, is right on the money. Fatherhood. My mind swings away from that subject. Too complicated. I pick up a sponge. I pour the factory recommended quarter sized dollop of soap onto it and absently begin working up a lather. I don't know how I've convinced myself that strawberry soap is safer than vanilla bubble bath, but I have. Vitamin C is good for unborn babies. I start rubbing the soap over my shoulders and suds drop off and into the bath where they float around like little islands or puffs of clouds. They butt up against me as waves ripple across the bath with the movement of my breath. The movement of the water sooths me, the steam calms me, and I begin to breathe more easily. My mind skips backwards to the first time I took a bath after that splintering encounter with a madman. Alien abduction aside, I always assumed that if I was ever naked with Mulder it would be an event. I was right, it was an event. He came to my apartment and found me lying on the bathroom floor, shaking, my cooling bath water mocking me and my scented candles guttering out. He crooned soft nonsense at me while I tried to pull myself together, and let some of the cooled water out of the tub, filling it back up with hot. The whole time I just sat numbly on the floor, embarrassed that he had seen me cry, but uncertain of how to get rid of him, so that I could pretend it hadn't happened. When the tub was full again he pulled me to my feet and stood me in front of it. "I'm fine, Mulder. Thank you for warming up the water". He stood behind me, just breathing against my back. What the hell. Only one candle was lit anymore, and that one sputtered to itself in the corner. I reached up, untied my robe, and dropped it to the floor, intending to get into the tub right away. I got as far as submerging one leg, and then the shakes hit. All my battered muscles seized up, and more tears just started falling out of my face, beyond my control. I heard a whisper of movement behind me, and thought, "Good he's leaving me in peace." But I didn't really believe that for more than a second. The whisper turned into a thunk as Mulder kicked his shoes off, and dropped his pants to the floor to join his shirt. I imagined that I could see his reflection, slowly stripping, in the blank face of the tile in front of me. Something odd happened to that sense that prickles the back of your neck, I could feel warmth radiating off of his long lean body towards my naked back and I wanted to scream at him to step forward to complete the circuit between us, finally, and have done with it. Then he did step forward, and I almost screamed for real as the shock of his hands on my bare waist guiding me forward shot through my body. There wasn't a lot of space left in my imagination to worry about psychotic killers - to obsess about Donnie Pfaster, or even send a brief acknowledgement in the direction of Eugene Tooms. I couldn't spare the energy for that when Mulder's lean length was behind me, and we were both somehow standing in the tub, as if it were some bizarrely warm wading pool, and his breath was puffing against my ear in little gasps. I knew the moment he let his eyes rest on my tattoo, because his hand left my waist abruptly to hover over the spot in my back so accustomed to his touch when clothed. "Scully". Just a breath on my name, almost a moan, and then he was kneeling behind me with a splash, and I am so little and he is so big that his mouth was just at the level of the small of my back. I stood trembling but still, until his mouth brushed against me; skin on skin, in that intimate place, in this intimate room. I struggled not to arch back into him, struggled not present my suddenly dripping core to him, struggled not to beg him to move his mouth down, away from the ring of my tattoo, where he had grown bolder, licking and then biting the skin, his hands growing more demanding as they pulled me back towards him. My legs parted involuntarily, and I could smell myself, smell my shaking anticipation of his mouth between my legs, and then I slipped. He caught me, but not before a tidal wave was pushed out of the tub, onto the floor, and over that last sputtering candle. I hadn't gotten the chance to turn around, I hadn't been able to catch even a glimpse of his golden skin. The tangle of arms and legs, and the breath of slightly hysterical laughter somehow combined to make sitting naked in a tub with Mulder in the dark perfectly normal. And if our slippery bodies surged together for a moment, if I had to restrain the urge to drive backwards and impale myself when I felt the brush of his rock hard cock against the back of my thighs, it was nothing compared to the comfort of his warm chest behind me, his strong hands running a sponge dripping with strawberry scented soap over my skin, making it ok again, making everything ok again, giving me back the haven of my little bathroom, and my sudsy tub with his strength and his laughter and his scent. We emerged from the tub later, eyes shyly averted, skin tingling in the innocuous places that had been touched so thoroughly, and burning in the more intimate ones that had been neglected. I looked at the soggy shadow that his pile of cloths on the floor had become, and thought to myself, "This is it. He has nothing to wear. Once we leave the bathroom and he is still naked, or only in a towel, then it will happen. Now! Now! Tonight." But it didn't. Somehow he managed to escape me in a pair of old sweatpants, and a shirt that might have belonged to my father. Stupid stupid me, I didn't fight him, didn't beg him to stay, just slid my heated body between the covers and smugly thought about all the time we had stretching out ahead of us, especially if this time it worked, if there was a baby. That was the third egg. The fourth was hanging suspended in my uterus as I explored the mystery that Daniel had become. By then I was starting to get really anxious. If it didn't work this time, there were only two left. Only two. Mulder wanted me to go to England with him. I thought he was crazy. What if something happened? What if some sudden shift in altitude, some unexpected turbulence, dislodged this jewel from my body? He wasn't taking things seriously enough. I spent the weekend rushing around worried and anxious and stressed out. Suddenly Daniel was my responsibility again, and his daughter... By the time I finally got the sense to stop long enough to take a breath into my lungs it was probably already too late. Number four had failed. I had failed to attract the fertilized egg with the warm nest of my womb. I had been sure it was going to work. I had even thought about telling Daniel that I was unavailable, because I was pregnant with another man's child, which was a little bit true, but somewhat misleading. I thought Mulder was going to kiss me that night, the night he got back from England. I sat on his couch with my eyes closed, feeling his breath against my face, aware that he was moving closer, that his eyes were on my lips and his hand was in my hair. The image behind my eyelids of his cock wedging me open, violently, the way his words couldn't, scorched through my body as our breath mingled, and for a moment the aphrodisiac dizziness of air that someone else's mouth has stolen the oxygen from, hung in front of me like a promise. And then he went to bed. And there was no kiss. We've walked this awkward line ever since he told me about the eggs. I think it must have been a New Years resolution, like calling your mother more often, or flossing your teeth twice a day. "I resolve to admit to the stolen reproductive tissue in my possession." He picked a perfect time to do it, the middle of the night, when I was rocked by a zombie assault, sleep deprived, relieved that Armageddon had not arrived, and still trying to measure the reality of his kiss. A day later I was furious with him, as he had known I would be. He nobly presented himself for punishment, showing up at my door on Saturday morning with a hang dog expression and a pile of legal papers. After I had finished telling him how fine I was, and how he need have nothing to do with the eggs past this point, he finally made me sit down and read the papers that he carried. Six chances. Six. All of them already fertilized with his sperm. He blushed when he told me about it, and tried to mumble his way though the explanation. However, I am a doctor, and I can read, and eventually I deciphered the information that out of the thirty six eggs that they had salvaged from his carelessly carried test-tube, he had had half frozen unfertilized and half frozen after adding a shot of Mulder sperm. I could acknowledge that he had done right. None of the unfertilized eggs had survived. None. And only six of the others had made it Of course, if he hadn't waited TWO AND HALF YEARS to tell me about this little treasure trove, perhaps I would have had more options. But then he started hypnotizing me with his magical voice, painting the image of a little Mulder/Scully person being planted in my body. Painting the image of a part of him being planted in my body. I got over-heated and emotional, and I thought I knew why he had waited until after the kiss to tell me. He wanted us to be together, to be the parents of a child that we had made together. Somehow it just never came up. Things changed between us, we changed, but we kept dancing back from that final step. Finally, curled on that bed in Oregon, where it all began, I knew what those dizzy spells meant. I knew in my heart that the last egg was gone, that it hadn't worked, and all our praying and trying and hoping through that bizarre and sexy and emotional and violent year had been for nothing. "Now you want to quit, Mulder?", I thought, "When its too late, when everything that can be taken has been taken?". Oops, not everything, Dana, you forgot that they never took him. The bath water is cold now, and I suppose that I am clean. I let the tub drain, watching the earlier process of submersion reverse itself, leaving my body naked and trembling in the warm hard curve of the tub. I imagine her (him? Baby!) swimming in the amniotic sea of my womb, still submerged in the warm bath of my body, with only my small frame, my skin and bones standing between him and the threatening world outside. Alien invasion, abduction, vanilla bubble bath... My hand covers the soft curve of my abdomen for a moment before I stand. The last egg is still there, turning into a person inside of me end.