Joy and Sorrow
For all of the comfortable and rational ideas that Scully had about the world that Mulder destroyed, for all of the sacred, doctrinal canons of science that she had finally admitted were not so sacred or canonical, for all the ways in which Scully had been forced to admit that the world did not fit into her neatly labeled and well categorized boxes, at her heart Scully always would be a skeptic, clinging to her desire and need for hard, testable, reproducible proof. The natural scientist in her would always be that way, could never see the fuzziness of Mulder more social scientist brain, could not acceptable outlying variables and impossibilities blithely. No matter how much she knew the world didn't work that neatly, there was that part of her who would always believed that it did.
Which was why when the slim, boyish looking doctor, with large, black plastic glasses too large for his thin nose to hold up stood in her hospital room and cheerfully announced to her the results of her blood work, she couldn't believe him.
"You're results are mistaken." There was no amazement, no confusion, only the dull, aching hurt, mixed with a hint of betrayal, that nestled in her heart. A simple but cruel mix up, certainly, one woman's papers mixed with her own.
"I'm not." The boy doctor, named Elliot Goldman, grinned under a mop of unruly, brown curls, adding to the absurdity of this situation. He barely looked old enough to have graduated medical school, to know what he was talking about, and he dared to come in and tell her the impossible.
"You have to be, I can't..."
"I ran the test three times." He waved the results in their manila folder in front of her. "I wanted to be thorough, you have a history of cancer, and of course with your symptoms there's the obvious fears. But, there was no indication of anything, nothing in your blood work that would suggest your cancers return. However, the blood work did tell us something else."
Goldman held out the folder to her. He knew she was a doctor, she'd said as much when he walked in the first time and rattled off her entire medical history to him, including her cancer and her infertility treatments. Still, she stared at it for a long moment, half afraid to look. What if it was the horrible mistake she thought it all was. Could she handle that disappointment.
But then, what if it wasn't?
She snapped the folder from his hand, almost angrily laying it open across the scratchy, acrylic blanket covering her thin, hospital gown. She scanned the results with a physician's eye, as if she was looking at some other woman's results, looking for the inaccuracies, the details that might tell her this was a hoax at worst, a careless oversight at best.
There weren't any. And the blood work was conclusive. Scully stared at the black ink on the white paper, her fingers trembling as her heart flipped, caught between abject joy and utter confusion. It was true, completely true.
She was pregnant.
"How?" She couldn't turn her eyes from the results on the page. "I don't understand, I can't..."
"It happens," Goldman replied, leaning against the bed casually. "I've seen couples who were told they could never have kids, then five years later, bam, she's pregnant. Sometimes it's as simple as hormones changing. You get older, your body begins producing things differently. With you, I'd say it was the therapy you were on for your IVF. It triggered something that just set everything in motion at the right time."
"But...I don't understand. My ovaries were harvested." She pulled her gaze up to his, realizing in doing so her eyes were glazed with tears. "I wasn't supposed to be able to."
For all that he was impossibly young, he also was compassionate. She could see that as he took her hand, still holding the results, and squeezed gently. "The human body is an amazingly regenerative thing. And you haven't exactly led a sedentary life. Who knows how these things work. You and I both spent long years and a lot of money in medical school, and in the end, sometimes we both had to admit there were things that even we couldn't understand, even with all of our science."
But a child? Against all hope and possibility? She held out the paperwork to him, wiping at her eyes as she tried to even wrap her head around it. Pregnant. She was having a baby.
This changed...everything.
"Look, I know this is a lot to take," Goldman began carefully, gathering the folder and shooting her a firm of a look as an adult who still looked like he was twelve could manage. "You are dehydrated from the last few days, I'm asking you stay here for observation, get your fluids up, and I'll write a prescription for a morning sickness medication for you. That should help, at least for a few weeks till things settle."
Morning sickness? Lord, how could she have missed the signs? The fatigue, the nausea, the mood swings, and she thought it was cancer. Flushing in embarrassment, she nodded as he shot her another reassuring smile and left her to her own stunned silence. She was having a baby.
Mulder's baby...
Stunned surprise melted into pleased disbelief as she considered what this meant. They had tried a year ago and failed with the scientific method. One year later, the good, old fashioned way, and she was pregnant with his child. So much for the wonders of modern medicine! What would he say? Would he be pleased?
Had they gotten him back from Oregon?
Despite the joy of sudden and unexplained happiness, the memory of what exactly landed her there. She had discovered it wasn't the fact that Ray, Teresa, and Billy were all abductees that was the common thread that wound them together in their sudden disappearance, it was the encephalitis they had all experienced, the same condition that Mulder had suffered from. Frohike had pieced it together even as the world faded to black, and it was he who had assured her as she was loaded into the ambulance complaining loudly that he would work to get Mulder back before anything happened. That had been hours before, Mulder should have landed in Portland by now, perhaps was already in Bellefleur, and there had been no word from anyone on whether or not they were able to stop him.
Please, dear Lord, she prayed, wishing she still had her cross to clutch, let him come home safely to me...to us.
As if silently including the new, still forming life inside her womb in that prayer, she rested her hand on her still flat abdomen, screwing her eyes shut like she did as a child and prayed kneeling at her bedside beside Melissa. The earnest, fearful, terrified prayer of a woman who shouldn't be pregnant but suddenly was who had no idea what her future was and if the man she loved would even be able to stay with her.
Hail Mary, full of grace, The Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou amongst women....
The knock on her door sounded, jarring her out of a sleep she hadn't realized that she had fallen into. Curled on her side, she blinked in the thin sunlight from outside to see the worried and quizzical looks of Langley and Byers peeking around the corner of her doorway.
"Hey," she called, stretching muscles, cramped from curling in on themselves wrong. "How did they let you up here?"
"The hospital called," Byers offered helpfully. He was still in the same suit he had worn the day before, Langley in the same jeans and t-shirt. "I gave them my number as a point of contact."
"He may have told them he was your husband," Langley clarified with a smirk, earning a glare from the other. "Besides, they'd buy that more than they would buy me saying it."
"Or Frohike, he was willing to argue the point," Byers grinned.
"I bet he was." Scully rolled her eyes, sitting up. "Where is he?"
"On the phone, trying to reach Mulder or Skinner."
"You haven't found them yet?" Alarms rang as Scully looked to the clock on the bedside table. Seven in the morning already, which would be four in Oregon. They should have been there by now, at least well within cell phone range.
"Couldn't get either of them to answer. Likely had their cells off for the flight." Langley nestled at the corner of her bed, despite Byers disapproving frown as he took the lone chair in the room. "We poured over the data Krycek gave us. There's something out there, and chances are they found it and Mulder's been too busy to bother checking in. You know how he is, like a kid in a candy store."
"Like as not, if they're in the woods, cell signal isn't great anyway, and if there is a vessel there, it's disrupting whatever signal they do have," Byers added.
They both sounded so confident and blaise about this. But Scully wasn't an idiot. She could see the tension, the worry, the effort to cover apprehension with reasonable explanation. And she had a good idea that it was because of the fact that she was sitting in a hospital as they spoke.
"The doctor did a complete battery of tests on me," she offered, tossing it in the conversation to see where it landed. Both men tensed, assuring smiles tightening somewhat, but not faltering all together. No, neither let it slip. They had gotten good at this over the long years, trying to protect her. But she could see the worry, and at least decided to take some pity on them.
"Well it's not cancer."
Langley's shoulders slumped by half an inch as he released a breath she doubted he knew he was holding.
Byers didn't look so assured, however. "Did they check for anything more abnormal, more...out of this world?"
“There was nothing abnormal about anything,” she assured them both, wondering how to even break the truth to them. She wanted to hold it, still, for Mulder first, but the worry from both of them made her realize they would assume the worst until she cleared it with them.
“You said you were sick in Oregon, the incident in the woods, you said they didn’t want you…”
“I’m perfectly healthy,” Scully replied, a small smile finally pulling at her mouth, her truth begging to be let out. “Everything is normal, I’m just...pregnant.”
On the long list of alien viruses, brain infections, and invading, germinating life forms, clearly a perfectly normal, human pregnancy was not high on the list of possible conditions either Langley or Byers would have suspected. And until a few hours before, neither would Scully.
“Pregnant, as in...you’re knocked up?” Langley’s face scrunched behind his thick frames, as if human procreation baffled him.
Byers was hardly any better. “And you’re sure it’s...normal?”
Scully’s mouth twitched, but she did manage to contain the snort and eye roll that normally would follow such pronouncements from the Lone Gunmen. “When a man and a woman initiate sexual reproduction….”
“Guh, I know how babies are made,” Langley held up hands in protect. “It’s just...I thought you couldn’t...you know, percolate them.”
“You make her sound like a coffee pot,” Byers muttered in mild disgust. “Scully, he’s right, you said you couldn’t.”
“I don’t know!” She threw up her hands helplessly, wishing desperately her science wasn’t failing her. “It’s insane, I wasn’t supposed to be able to, but…”
She trailed off. What could she say? She didn’t know, didn’t understand.
“Damn,” Langley breathed reverently. “Mulder’s got super sperm.”
Eyes wide and cheeks ablaze, Scully stared at the man sitting on the end of her bed, torn between abject and utter embarrassment in that moment and awe that Langley even knew. Her mouth worked, but no words could come out as she glanced at Byers mildly horrified and apologetic expression, and realized in that moment he knew too.
“How...I mean, why do you think…”
Byers shrugged. “Come on, Scully, we aren’t exactly idiots...well, most of us.” He glared at Langley, who seemed to wonder what the problem was. Before either of them could humiliate her further, however, Scully noticed Frohike’s short figure come into the door.
And she knew in that moment what had happened.
“Hey, Frohike, Scully’s not dying, she’s just pregnant,” Langley offered gleefully, as if he had anything to do with the joyous happenstance. It took him a moment to catch that his friend wasn’t as excited as he was. “What’s wrong?”
“Did you get a hold of Mulder,” Byers was up in a moment, fearfully glancing back at Scully.
“I got Skinner.” Frohike replied, clearing his throat, his pug-ish face grim as he regarded the cell phone in his gloved hand. “They found the sight, just were Ratboy said it was. He said everything was fine, but…”
Scully felt the bottom fall out of her world.
“Dana!” Tears thickened Frohike’s gruff voice, welling behind his Coke-bottle lenses. “I’m sorry, we tried.”
Outside, golden light filtered through white blinds. People moved, the world moved on. But in that tiny room at George Washington Memorial, with Frohike, Byers, and Langley, her word stopped. Everything came to pinpoint focus, the sound of the air through the vents, the mechanical white noise of the IV machine by her bed, the murmur of voices down the hall, and in the midst of it all, her own heartbeat, steady in her chest, as its rhythm pumping not just for her, but a tiny, pinpoint of life in her womb, even as it it cracked and threatened to shatter. The moment of her greatest joy, her dearest held desire finally fulfilled, was now also the moment of her greatest sorrow.
The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away, indeed.
“We have to find him,” she whispered, wet eyes flickering to Frohike’s anguished face. “I can’t...we can’t let them have him. I can’t let him disappear like Samantha. There’s too much for him here. And I need him. We need him.”
She didn’t need to clarify the we. They all knew.
“Well get him back, Dana.” Frohike didn’t sound as confident as his words, but he glanced between his two compatriots. “Let’s go see what we can turn up before Skinner gets here.”
With murmurs of agreement and admonishments to Scully to rest, they shuffled out, Langley even uncharacteristically stopping to hug her before leaving her to her room and to her thoughts. Leaning into her pillow, she laid her hands across her abdomen, eyes focused on the sunlight outside.
“We will find him,” she whispered out loud to a child who couldn’t hear her. “I will find him for us, I promise.”