Chapter Text
I try to feel joy but can’t conjure it up.I feel like an empty husk of a person rather than an expectant mother. As I watch the rise and fall of Mulder’s chest all I can think about are the things we’ve lost. We haven’t talked about what a baby would mean or how either of us felt about it. Not talking about things is a long-held practice of ours, not easily given up. It was easier for us to go back to our home and shed silent tears as we moved together in an old familiar way. The doctor in me says sex is a bad idea even at this stage in a high-risk pregnancy but the need for him was too strong. Our mutual loss brought us together in hushed grief, the only sounds marking the loss of our son being the sound of flesh on flesh and stifled sobs.
Getting out of bed I find the stolen photos of William- Jackson- from the Van De Kamp’s ruined home. I trace my little boy’s face and let the tears fall again. In his baseball uniform, he looked proud and so so much like his father that it causes a physical pain in my chest.
This new baby is not real to me; I just want my son. My poor abandoned baby with the recklessness that could only have come from Mulder and his same pain-filled eyes.
I should have jumped in after him, I should have fought for him, kept him close to me and raised him. But instead, I failed him on every level.
A wave of nausea comes over me and I feel a strange tingling of resentment toward this new being taking up residence in my body.
When I am leaning over the toilet dry heaving I begin to wonder where it all went wrong. I wonder when I could have stopped this out of control train headed toward disaster.
Perhaps the day I gave William up? But no, so much led to that day and that decision. Maybe I can go back further to the cursed day I met Fox Mulder but as I walk back into our bedroom and look at his face, so fucking dear to me, I know that day wasn’t a mistake.
Bellefleur, Oregon. On our second trip to the cursed small town I had been pregnant, days later Mulder was gone and I was alone.
If I could just have stopped him from leaving then he would have been there with me when I learned of our son. I try to imagine what that moment would have been like but it’s too perfect and pure for this world full of pain.
If only. If only I could go back.