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freckleslikestars · 2 years ago

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Broken Dreams

Jackson comes back to check on his mother

@xfilesbingo prompt: there's someone in the house

MSR/Post Revival/Teen and Up

2934 words, read here on AO3

She never used to be such a light sleeper. One of her father’s wisdoms was that you catch sleep when you can get it, and you never take it for granted. Obviously, in a large household in a small house, she’d learnt to sleep through pretty much anything. During her residency as a med student, she trained herself to wake to pagers, and with the FBI she learnt to wake when the phone rang, but the sleep between was always deep and heavy.

That changed when William was born. Everyone told her to sleep whenever he did, even if it was just a couple of hours in the middle of the day, but it seemed impossible. A constant, lingering paranoia leached into every moment she was away from him. She was constantly on edge, waiting for the other shoe to drop, waiting for the next kidnapper to sneak in through the window, waiting for the next attempt on his life.

When her son was gone, she oscillated between dark, dream-plagued stretches of torpor that pinned her down and left her feeling empty and nights where sleep would not come, and she was left listlessly roaming the corridors and parking lots of various motels until dawn peaked over the horizon, and she’d drop down onto the bed next to Mulder and watch as he dragged himself out of a sleep that left him no more refreshed than she.

When they settled into Farrs Corner, and she started at the hospital, sleep swept over her each night, usually heavy and dreamless and a result of the exhaustion brought on by long hours surrounded by dying children. It wasn’t until a few years later, around the time Mulder was declared a free man, that the dreams started. They varied in tone – sometimes light-hearted and fantastical, sometimes gore and horror filled, and very occasionally just about the humdrum of daily life – but they always followed the same little boy, his reddish-brown hair and impish smile so familiar to her that she recognised him in an instant. She didn’t always have them, and there seemed no pattern as to when her mind conjured her son’s life, no matter how hard she tried to find one. And try to find one, she did: but try as she might, she could never figure out what triggered them, and she could never figure out a way to stop them. She started dreaming of their days on the X Files, too: back in the day when they were younger and spryer, and her partner felt like he had a purpose in life. Whole cases from their past would play out in her mind as she slept, and she’d wake feeling troubled by events that had happened over a decade ago.

When she left, sleep once more became elusive. For the first thirty-odd years of her life, she’d lived in houses and apartments and motels in suburbia and midtown and along highways. The sounds of traffic had lulled her to sleep more effective than any artificial white noise. But then they’d lived out in the country, and they’d been so far away from anyone or anything, and the only sounds on their property at night were those of nature, and she’d grown used to it. So to suddenly, in her sharp bungalow, be surrounded by traffic and the sounds of humanity ticking along through the night was just one more stark divide that separated her life with him from her life without. And she was grateful for it, or at least that’s what she told herself and her mother, because it was a reminder that she was still moving, she hadn’t let her depression grind her to a halt, and she hadn’t let Mulder grind her to a halt. She was still alive, and she was going to keep going, keep growing. But the sounds of traffic that had once soothed her now kept her awake, kept her listening out because she couldn’t hear anything unusual over the sounds of humanity as she could over the sounds of nature back home.

It was just when she’d been starting to sleep marginally better in the shiny bright house that was the exact opposite of everywhere she’d ever called home when he welcomed her back into his arms, into his – no, their – bed. And, for a while at least, she slept like a log. The occasional dream from William – no, Jackson, he preferred Jackson – usually just letting her know she was okay, occasionally showing her something he’d seen or found on his travels, but nothing as gruesome or traumatic as she expected from him.

And then there was a whole new reason to sleep lightly. The rolling life inside of her felt, much like its father, that night-time was not, in fact, for sleeping, but for fidgeting. The first few months of the pregnancy had sedated her, exhausting her and smothering her, not even Jackson having the power to penetrate the darkness that overcame her most nights, but then, with the second trimester, she’d had a burst of energy that seemed to carry her through. She’d lay at night, unable to sleep as little tumbles of movement roiled through her abdomen, a sensation she never in a million years thought she’d feel again. And whilst sometimes her mind would be plagued with anxieties about the future, mostly, she just cradled the tentative hope that had started glowing within her again, following the little movements with a finger as a soft smile warmed her face.

It was on one such night when she heard it. One of the benefits to living out in the middle of nowhere was that you got used to the routine sounds pretty quickly. After about a month, you stopped startling at the screams of foxes and the cries of deer. You stopped noticing the harmony of insects, birds, and frogs that undulated throughout the night. Which, of course, made it easier to identify the noises that didn’t belong.

If Mulder hadn’t been curled up behind her, one arm under her head whilst the other coiled protectively around her belly as his warm breath stirred the hairs at the back of her neck, she’d have sworn he’d just gone out to sit on the porch because no matter how many times she’d oiled the screen door, it still always seemed to squeak, and she’d definitely just heard it. She held her breath, tensing as she strained to hear anything else at all from downstairs. She hadn’t heard the creak of the second step of the porch, which everyone but her and Mulder stepped on without a second thought, but then, perhaps, she hadn’t really been paying attention. She was now, though. A muffled thump echoed its way up the stairs, and her heart rate spiked, panic washing over her. Trying not to make a sound, silently begging the old bedsprings not to groan, she twisted to face Mulder and carefully jostled him awake, pressing her hand against his mouth when he flickered his eyes open and went to grumble a protest. Her eyes flashed, and she shook her head, ‘there’s someone in the house,’ soft as a feather, she whispered, barely loud enough for him to hear.

‘Friend or foe?’ he breathed into her ear, and she shrugged, cringing when the bedspring beneath her shoulder complained loudly. Another jarring sound from downstairs, vaguely hollow and ringing, had them each reaching for their weapons, Scully the little Bernardelli 60 that her father had given her when she joined the bureau and Mulder his PPK, both of them tucked into the top drawer of their nightstands, and slipping carefully out of bed, conscious of each and every squeaky floorboard as they made their way side by side to the stairs.

It was dark as pitch throughout the house, the crescent moon not bright enough to filter through the slats of the blinds, and they strained their eyes to try and see through the blackness as they crept silently down the stairs, weapons raised. As they stepped off the bottom step in sync, Mulder reached out and flicked the lamp on the side table on, bathing the room in a warm yellow and startling their intruder into spinning around on the spot to face them. His hands flew up above his head, half a slice of bread clutched in one, as his eyes widened.

‘Don’t shoot.’

They both maintained a steady aim on him, but Scully’s shoulders relaxed a millimetre, ‘Jackson?’

He swallowed the mouthful of bread that he’d tucked into the pocket of his cheek and smiled weakly, ‘hi.’

‘Hey, kid. You’re gonna have to prove it’s you. Sorry,’ Mulder’s voice was soft with regret. It wasn’t every day the son you thought you’d lost multiple times comes home, but they’d been fooled before.’

‘Uh, how do I do that?’

‘Show me something,’ Scully whispered, ‘show me something that will make me know it’s you.’

All was silent for a minute, then two, until Scully gasped, dropping her gun to her side and hurrying over to him, sitting him down at the kitchen table and running her hands through his hair, checking him over for injuries. At the relaxation of Scully’s guard, Mulder dropped his and made his way, slightly more cautiously, to join them in the kitchen. After her thorough check that he wasn’t injured, she sat in the chair next to him and took his hand, a move that, if he was uncomfortable with, he made an effort to hide it.

‘Why are you here? Why in the middle of the night?’

He studied her face, the laughter lines that carved out from the corners of her eyes and the roundness of her cheeks that hadn’t been there the last time he’d seen her, ‘I was worried about you. You haven’t been sleeping, and I was worried. And-‘ he hesitated, looked away from them both.

‘What?’

‘I felt a...presence following you in the last few weeks. I couldn’t tell what it was; I’d never felt anything like it. I...you had a dream once about a worm thing – a parasite – in your spine, and I was worried it was something like that,’ his eyes flicked down to the curve of her stomach, ‘I guess I know you’re okay now.’ A complexity of emotions creased his face and he stood abruptly.

‘Jackson?’

‘I should go. I didn’t... I didn’t mean to disturb you. I should go,’ he pulled at the lobe of his ear.

‘Jackson.’

‘She...I was wrong. I thought you were in danger, but now I’m here, now I’m close, she feels warm, like you. So, uh, I’ll just be on my way.’

‘Wait-‘

He shook his head, walked halfway through the living room, and then turned on his heel to look back at them. He hesitated for half a second before blurting out the thing that had clearly been bothering him, ‘don’t give up on her, will you?’

And then he was gone, and they were left sat at the worn kitchen table. ‘What the fuck just happened?’ she gasped, feeling like she’d had the wind knocked out of her. ‘Seriously, what the fuck just happened?’

Wasting not a second more, Mulder went crashing through the house, letting the front door slam behind him as he thundered down the porch steps, ‘Jackson? Jackson!’ He could see the kid jogging up the driveway, and he groaned, not wanting to run over the gravel but seeing no other choice. He wasn’t as young as his son, but he still went for a morning run every day, and it was clearly paying off because, after a short sprint, he reached out and wrapped his arm around Jackson’s upper arm, ‘hey, stop.’

‘Get off me.’

‘Only if you come back inside.’

‘What if I don’t want to?’

Mulder sighed, ‘you can’t just turn up in the middle of the night and leave again within ten minutes. That’s not how this thing works.’

‘What thing?’

‘The parent/son thing. I know we don’t really have much claim to being your parents, but I don’t think you understand just how wanted you are, and you never will if you don’t sit down and listen to us, okay? We’re not...we don’t have any expectations, we just want to open a channel of communication, and I really think that since you’re here; since you came to check she was okay, that part of you wants that, too.’

‘I-‘

‘Plus, you’ve faked your death not once but twice now, right in front of her, and that’s done almost as much damage as giving you up did, so now you both have things to apologise for.’

‘I don’t think I’m ready.’

Mulder gave a sympathetic smile, ‘I get that. The problem is, you could wait forever, putting off what needs to be done because you don’t feel ready. Just sit and have a cup of tea with us, and we can talk as much or as little as you like. But I think we’d both like the chance to explain.’

~~~

She was slumped over the kitchen table sobbing when she heard two sets of footsteps on the porch, and it took all of her willpower to sit herself up and get her eyes wiped and sniffles under control in the five seconds it took for the door to be opened and the two tall frames to traipse into the house. Whilst Mulder walked over to put the kettle on to boil, he hesitantly folded his lanky limbs back into the chair he’d been sitting on.

‘It wasn’t for lack of love,’ she whispered, ‘I prayed for you every single day, and I loved you more than you can ever know. But it wasn’t safe, and I couldn’t find any other way to save you. It wasn’t you I was giving up on; it was myself.’

‘I don’t really know how to do this.’

She smiled and reached out to cover his hand with her own, then thought better of it and pressed her palms together in her lap, ‘That’s okay, I don’t really know how to do this either.’ Three mugs of tea were placed on the table, and Mulder joined them.

‘Oh, uh...sorry I faked my death. Twice.’

‘It’s okay. I understand why you did it.’

He fiddled with his mug of tea, cupping the heat within his palms, ‘can-‘ he cleared his throat, ‘can I ask why you haven’t had another kid until now?’

She hummed and nodded, watching his face in profile as his brow creased and uncreased – his face was so very readable. ‘I’m infertile. We tried for a long time to have you, and then we stopped trying, and then you came along. You were my miracle. My impossible little miracle. And then, after...’

‘We both had a lot of guilt,’ Mulder finished for her, taking her hand in his own and pressing a kiss to the back of it, ‘and, of course, the whole infertile thing. We tried again around ’09, but it was too much for us both.’

‘Is that why you broke up?’

‘How do you know about that?’ he asked.

‘I, uh...I didn’t know who you were, but it started feeling painful when she thought about you.’

‘Hm. It wasn’t entirely why we broke up, but I think it contributed.’

‘You do?’ Mulder looked over at her.

‘Yeah. Neither of us was well, and we were both in denial about it, and I think that was the main reason, but I think there were other things that contributed.’

‘Huh. You never said.’

‘Never seemed like the right time to bring it up,’ she shrugged.

‘That still doesn’t explain why and how you’re now having a kid.’

‘Well...we weren’t actually trying.’

‘We weren’t technically together – I knew we’d make it in the end, but your Mom isn’t so great on blind faith.’

‘Pssh, you didn’t know. You thought it was going to be a one-time thing.’

‘Two-time, don’t forget. Three if you count the morning after.’

Jackson gagged, ‘oh, dude, I did not need to know that.’

‘Anyway, you may have thought that, but I knew,’ Mulder murmured.

‘Either way, we were...less cautious than we should have been. Which is a lesson to you, Jackson. Protection is-‘

‘I’m seventeen. I’ve had the talk. I really don’t want to hear it from someone I don’t really know very well, sorry.’

‘Okay,’ she smirked as he blushed and shifted under her gaze. ‘Honestly, though, we don’t know how or why I conceived again. Miracle two-point-oh.’

‘Miracle two: electric boogaloo.’

Scully sniggered, ‘miracle two: this time, it’s personal.’

‘Oh, my god, you guys are so lame,’ Jackson groaned, unable to stop the smile that had started tugging at the corner of his mouth.

‘You’ll get used to it,’ Mulder said, patting him on the shoulder as he stood up, ‘I’ll get the couch made up for you.’

‘Wait, what?’

‘Kid, it’s three AM; if you think your mother’s gonna let you leave at this time of night, you’ve got another thing coming.’

She waited until Mulder was out of earshot, ‘if you really don’t feel comfortable staying, I don’t mind. Mulder might, but it’s up to you. I...I would like it, though, if you stayed. Had breakfast with us tomorrow, talked some more. I don’t know about you, but I’d really like to get to know you.’

He bobbed his head in a vague nod and shrugged, ‘I can’t make any promises, but I think I’d like that, too.’

Tagging @today-in-fic

#got a column in my bingo do a little happy dance #my writing #msr #xf fanfic #txf #the x files #x files #post revival #xf bingo

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